AI Safety, The China Problem, LLMs & Job Displacement - Dwarkesh Patel

Go see Chris live in America - https://chriswilliamson.live Dwarkesh Patel is a writer, researcher & podcaster. The rise of AI marks the next great technological revolution, one that could reshape every aspect of our lives in just a few years. But how close are we to its golden age? And what warnings does the global AI race hold about the double-edged nature of progress? Expect to learn what Dwarkesh has realised about human learning and human intelligence from architecting AI learning, if AGI is right around the corner and how far away it might be, if most Job Displacement Predictions right or wrong, why recent studies show that tools such as ChatGPT make our brains less active and our writing less original, what Dwarkesh’s favourite answer to AI’s creativity question, what he biggest things about America/West that China doesn’t understand, the best bull case for AI growth ahead and much more… - 0:00 Has AI Accelerated Our Understanding of Human Intelligence? 6:59 Where Do We Draw the Line with Plagiarism in AI? 12:13 Does AI Have a Limit? 17:29 Is AGI Imminent? 21:26 Are LLMs the Blueprint for AGI? 30:15 Retraining AI Based on User Feedback 34:57 What Will the World Be Like with trueAGI? 39:32 Are Big World Issues Linked to the Rise in AI? 46:06 Is AI Homogenising Our Thoughts? 51:10 How Should We Be Using AI? 56:17 Should We Be Prioritising AI Risk and Safety? 01:01:14 Why are We So Trusting of AI? 01:11:09 The Importance of AI Researchers 01:12:09 Where Does China's AI Progression Currently Stand? 01:26:26 What Does China Think About the West? 01:37:34 The Pace of AI is Overwhelming 01:42:42 What is Ignored by the Media But Will Be Studied by Historians? 01:50:41 Growing for Success 02:06:40 Dwarkesh’s Learning Process 02:09:28 Follow Your Instincts 02:22:29 Digital-First Elections 02:28:02 Becoming Respected by Those You Respect 02:45:29 Find Out More About Dwarkesh - Get 35% off your first subscription on the best supplements from Momentous at https://livemomentous.com/modernwisdom Get a Free Sample Pack of LMNT’s most popular Flavours with your first purchase at https://drinklmnt.com/modernwisdom Get a 20% discount on Nomatic’s amazing luggage at https://nomatic.com/modernwisdom Get the best bloodwork analysis in America at https://functionhealth.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?

  What do you think that we've realized about human learning and human intelligence from architecting AI intelligence?

• 0:07Speaker 01

  Hmm. There's this really interesting thing we've seen where these AI models are making progress first in the domains that we think of as the archetype of the where humans have their primacy, right? So if you look at Aristotle, what does he say? What makes humans unique? Well, it's reasoning. Humans can reason, other animals can't. And these models, these AI models, they're just not that useful. If you've tried to use them for your work, they're useful in certain domains, but broadly, they're just not widely deployable. What is the one thing that they can do? They can reason. But they obviously, they can't carry a cup of water, right? Robotics

• 0:47Speaker 01

  isn't solved. They can't even like do a job. They can't even do a white collar job. So there's this interesting thing called Moravec's Paradox. Hans Moravec came up with this idea in the 90s, where he noticed that the tasks which are easiest for humans are taking computers the longest to solve. So we still haven't solved robotics yet. It's so easy for us to move around. Whereas the tasks which are quite hard for humans, like adding numbers, adding long numbers, that computers could do that in the 60s. And the logic there is that evolution has only optimized us for, let's say, the last million years, to be good at reasoning, to be good at arithmetic, to be good at these kinds of high level abstractions. Evolution has spent four billion

• 1:29Speaker 01

  years teaching us how to move around the world, how to pursue your goals in a long term basis, so not just do this task over the next hour, but spend the next month planning how to kill this gazelle. And that has been, I think, remarkably accurate predictor of the places we've seen the AI progress. They're like, they're automating coding. Coding, we thought of was this thing that 0.1% of the population could do really well. That's the first thing that went below the waterline. And yeah, just like basic, you know, manual work might genuinely be the last thing that goes away.

• 2:02Chris Williamson?

  Right. Yeah, there's a difficulty in getting a robot to crack an egg.

• 2:07Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:07Chris Williamson?

  A particular difficulty in being able to do that, the right amount of tension to hold. Is there a, this may be outside of your domain of competence, but that's why we do podcasting, to talk about things that are outside our domain of competence. Is there a potential to use some sort of scanning technology to take an LLM type approach to teaching robots how humans move?

• 2:28Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 2:28Chris Williamson?

  You know, if you were able to track within a room exactly how a human was to just go about tasks, just feed that into a big fuck off model.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:36Chris Williamson?

  And then use that to re- I guess you can't really work out sort of force application just by looking, that would be something you'd have to fit. Maybe you could put someone in a suit, I don't know, you know, I'm wondering if we've seen so much progress using LLMs in the world of AI. Robotics seems to be something that's still kind of pretty janky. I'm wondering if there are any principles that can be taken from the world of LLM that can be applied to robotics.

• 3:02Speaker 01

  I mean, that's a great question, and many companies are working on it. My understanding is that it's difficult for the fact that there's not as much data, just what you mentioned, that the kind of data you need of like, what did it feel like?

• 3:16Chris Williamson?

  There's no internet for human movement.

• 3:18Speaker 01

  Exactly, right? And even video is limited, even if you have the video, it's not, with language, you have this thing of you are exactly doing the thing which the online internet text is, right? You are predicting the next token in text. You can predict the next thing in a video frame, that's not the same thing as robotics. There's also additional challenges, from what I understand, around the fact that video is harder to process than text, just like a lot more data. There's latency overhead, so if it takes you a while to process language, that's fine, you can, you know, go a token at a time. The real world just moves very fast. You can try to solve these issues by going in simulation.

• 3:53Speaker 01

  So, you know, you can, you can have a simulation where you're trying to move things around. And in that domain, you can train an AI to be good at robotics. But the real world is just like, very complicated.

• 4:01Chris Williamson?

  Too chaotic.

• 4:02Speaker 01

  If I crumple this like, this thing, like, why does it bend exactly the way it does? It's just very hard to get that in simulation.

• 4:10Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think, I think robotics is tough.

• 4:12Chris Williamson?

  That paradox is fascinating.

• 4:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:13Chris Williamson?

  I'd never heard of that before.

• 4:14Speaker 01

  I was at a robotics research company floor, and they had these robots all from China. And the researcher, the researcher would be like here, the robot would be right there, and they were themselves creating the human label data, like, they tried to do something, the AI would try to learn it.

• 4:36Speaker 01

  It was like trying to get as close to the ground floor of the robotics movement, which I thought was a cool approach.

• 4:41Chris Williamson?

  Okay, and was it any good?

• 4:44Speaker 01

  It was alright. It did not solve the cracking the egg problem.

• 4:47Chris Williamson?

  Okay, okay, D plus.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 4:50Chris Williamson?

  Has all of the time that you've spent sort of thinking about AI and observing the ascendancy of LLMs, has it made you think about your own consciousness or learning or the way that your mind works differently? I get the sense that my friends who spend the most time interacting with ChatGPT and Claude and stuff like that, it actually has this weird like bidirectional.

• 5:13Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 5:14Chris Williamson?

  Sort of training where they change too. I'm interested in what you've learned about yourself or how you see yourself differently, consciousness, learning, where your mind works.

• 5:26Speaker 01

  I, so if you ask Claude or Gemini or one of these models, what is it like to be you?

• 5:33Speaker 01

  And specifically, what is sort of unique about your experience that you want to talk about? One thing that Claude one mentioned was that, look, I have this unique experience where at the end of a session, my memory is totally wiped. So I might form a connection with a person. Or I might learn something about the world, that I might learn about myself. End of an hour, it's totally wiped. Now, I think previously people had this idea that, look, you can have LLMs write poetry, you can have the right philosophy, but they're just sort of doing interpolation on what human writers have already done, right? So there's like nothing going on in its mind. This thing about the ephemeralness of the session memory, and it talked about it way more poetically than I'm talking about it right now, is, is unique to LLMs. Like this is not a thing any human philosopher has to have to think about or has written down.

• 6:19Speaker 01

  And so I think this has an interesting implication. One, either we accept that this is like a genuine mind doing genuine, like interesting introspection, like creating genuine literature. Or two, if you're gonna say, look, I think this is just like rubbish, I think it's just like sort of next token, whatever. I think you should update in favor of like human poetry is also kind of just, people are just saying shit.

• 6:46Speaker 01

  Because like fundamentally, there's no difference, right? There's some experience, you try to make something sort of lyrical come out of that.

• 6:53Speaker 01

  Yeah, either human literature is real or AI literature is real.

• 6:58Speaker 01

  There's no in-between.

• 6:59Chris Williamson?

  I had, I was reading Steve Stuart Williams, The Ape Who Understood the Universe, and he's got this quote in there from William James. And he says, "Originality is just undetected plagiarism." And I realized that.

• 7:14Chris Williamson?

  We have an issue with plagiarism when it's barefaced, right? When somebody steals your exact questions from your podcast and asks them to a similar guest. And you go, hey, that's unfair. But I've listened to probably 2,000 hours of Joe Rogan.

• 7:29Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:30Chris Williamson?

  In my twenties, I've inevitably been influenced by him. The way that I used to do my ad reads was almost verbatim.

• 7:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 7:37Chris Williamson?

  How he would do his ad reads, but there were different advertisers and they were done in a different style and there were a different time and I got a British accent. So, okay, I've been able to. So where do we draw the line between this is unfair plagiarism and this is you taking inspiration, right? And you amalgamate and you aggregate from all of these different experiences and you're, even if you and me were trying to do the exact same thing and it had the same influences on us, we're different people.

• 8:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 8:03Chris Williamson?

  So the way that that would have come out and some people feel more original than others, even if they've taken a lot of inspiration from other people. So, yeah, I, this, the question of what is plagiarism, I think is really cool. And when you look at GPT is doing like predictive plagiarism, I guess, in a way. Well, where do human, like, what does true originality in the form of human creativity? What does that mean? What does that actually mean?

• 8:33Speaker 01

  Right.

• 8:34Chris Williamson?

  Right? Because you can't be that creative with the saxophone because you have to blow the fucking wind into the, real creativity with the saxophone will be melting it down and creating something new out of it. But even if you melted it down, you're using a smelting fucking ore iron thing that some other person designed, you know what I mean? Like, so collective cumulative culture and learning that humans have got kind of creates a very big box, but still a constrained box. And even if you create something absolutely new, it's usually only just a tiny little

• 9:05Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 9:06Chris Williamson?

  movement. It's this microscopic little growth on top of what already existed.

• 9:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, 100%. People, I think there's an interesting experience people have when they, it's related to gentleman amnesia, but when you, a domain you know a lot about.

• 9:22Speaker 01

  You understand, often it's the case you realize there was no clear breakthrough moment. The thing I'm sort of familiar with is the history of AI research. And I think when journalists or outsiders are asking, okay, what do I need to understand to understand how we got to this place in AI? Was it Ilya's paper in 2012 on AlexNet? Was it this thing that Geoffrey Hinton did in the 80s and 90s? Was it the GPT-1? And I think all of these things were important, but the closer you get to the surface, the more you realize it's just been, one, the small architectural changes, none of which individually was especially significant. But more overwhelmingly than that trend is just that we have been throwing

• 10:04Speaker 01

  astoundingly more compute into training these systems every single year. Forex more compute per year into training these frontier systems. And over the course of like 10 years, that's like hundreds of thousands of times more compute. And that's what explains AI progress. It's not that some person had this amazing idea that nobody else would have had, or nobody else had something similar going on. And I think this is true of other fields as well. The closer you look, the more you realize it's either randomness, or they were just doing the next obvious thing in the sequence.

• 10:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's always incremental.

• 10:35Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 10:37Chris Williamson?

  Is there a name for this? You know Moore's law, is there an equivalent name for this, but in AI compute terminology?

• 10:45Speaker 01

  Oh, the scaling of training compute.

• 10:47Chris Williamson?

  Yes, there should be. Let's call it Dorkas's law. That'd be great.

• 10:51Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've had nothing to do with AI research. I'm a podcaster. You're gonna call the mainstream in AI.

• 10:58Chris Williamson?

  Dude, a shameless land grab for nomenclature is exactly what you need. Own it, fucking own it.

• 11:03Speaker 01

  Hundred percent, it's happening.

• 11:05Chris Williamson?

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• 11:16Chris Williamson?

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• 11:59Chris Williamson?

  by going to the link in the description below or heading to livemomentous.com/modernd wisdom 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. So talk to me about your own consciousness beyond the poetry, the fact that AI has got this ability to tell us about its experience. What about you? What about how it's made you think about your own learning, your own mind?

• 12:32Speaker 01

  I'm sort of easily distractible. I can be trying to work on a task and my mind will just wander. And you know, sometimes when you're meditating or something, you notice these loops of thought that keep distracting you. And I remember one of these, one of those times I thought to myself, I'm sort of like, I'm just sort of like Claude. I'm just like, I'm losing my train of thought. The problem these models have is that they're constantly, they can't really do a task for a long period of time because they get stuck in a loop.

• 13:01Speaker 01

  And it's interesting to think about like how similar that is to humans. Maybe we can go like a further bit longer than these models before getting stuck in that kind of loop of our own. But I thought that was sort of an interesting insight.

• 13:16Speaker 01

  I don't know. Yeah.

• 13:18Chris Williamson?

  You have an executive function. You're saying that you have better executive function than Claude. Only a tiny little bit, better executive function. Well, what does it say about the fact that?

• 13:30Chris Williamson?

  If the data is being trained on what humans do,

• 13:34Chris Williamson?

  is it simply a case therefore that more data, if you were to somehow get a human that was able to process that much data, would they have fundamentally different understanding? Or is there some sort of ceiling, given that this is data created by humans being trained and educated into a machine? Is there some sort of ceiling that's expected to be hit, given that it's, you know, it's not a superintelligence teaching a superintelligence? Yeah, it's only, the source material is only captured whoever the fucking smartest person in history has ever been.

• 14:01Speaker 01

  Hmm. Um, there is this interesting conundrum where they have, no human has seen even a fraction of a fraction of a fraction of the amount of information these models have seen. And there's a question you could ask, and I've asked it to some of my guests who are especially bullish about AI. Of, look, if you have every single thing that any human has ever written, every scientific article, every textbook, every interesting even statistical pattern that might be out in some data set somewhere, you have that all memorized. If a human had even a fraction of that memorized, they would be noticing all kinds of different connections. They'd look at this piece of medical literature and this thing and chemistry and they'd realize, oh, we can solve migraines by connecting these two insights. So far, we don't have any evidence of an LLM doing this.

• 14:44Speaker 01

  The people made these scaffolds which like kind of do something similar, but nothing like this has been directly done. So it does suggest these models are like shockingly less creative than humans. There is another implication of that though, by the way. So one way to read that is bearish on AIs, right? Because they're not doing this thing that they should be able to do, given their enormous advantages. Another way to look at that is, okay, once they are as creative as humans, given their other enormous advantages, the fact that they will know every single thing any human has known in the future, any AI has known.

• 15:16Speaker 01

  It's so easy to underestimate how powerful AGI will be because we're thinking of just like a human on a server. We're not thinking about the advantages these AIs have because of the fact that they are digital, that they can be copied. There can be billions of copies of them and each copy can have this tacit understanding of every single field known to man.

• 15:32Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. Yeah, your Dwarkesh's AI creativity problem is a good, I've mentioned it a couple of times to different guests. I think it's a, I think it's really smart.

• 15:43Chris Williamson?

  What do you think that that says? Is that something that can be completed? Or is this an intractable problem? Is this like, are there kernels of creativity? Have we seen glimmers of this coming through? Or is it kind of, it's just not there yet?

• 16:02Speaker 01

  We have seen this in non-language domains. So people famously talk about move 37 in AlphaGo. So this was a move that I think baffled people who are watching a game that AlphaGo was playing against a human Go player. And it turned out it was like some brilliant, it was like a brilliant tactic. We haven't yet seen that, in my opinion, with LLMs. So we're moving from a regime of just pre-training them on human text tokens, just trillions and trillions of everything any human has written, to a regime where we're training them just to do a task. It's not just about memorizing every single word that any human has written. Now it's about, can you go solve this coding problem for me? Can you go complete this knowledge work task for me? Can you do this research task for me? Can you start using a computer for me to accomplish a certain thing like booking a flight?

• 16:48Speaker 01

  And that's similar to the training process that AlphaGo experienced in order to get really good at Go, where you're just like, you're rewarded for just completing the task. How are you doing it? That's up to you. These models do get creative in that context, especially in the context of like, how do I cheat at this test? So famously, these models will write fake unit tests. Like, I passed all the unit tests. And it's like, they just rewrote the unit test. It'd be like, if true, then pass.

• 17:14Chris Williamson?

  That's a Bostrom's concern about make humans as happy as possible. And they stuck electrodes in your face and intravenously gave you MDMA. It's like, ah.

• 17:23Speaker 01

  Only on Saturdays.

• 17:25Chris Williamson?

  You did it, but not the way I meant it.

• 17:28Speaker 01

  That's right, yeah.

• 17:29Chris Williamson?

  Is AGI right around the corner? Where do you come to land on this?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  No, I think not. I've, it's funny, I've been traveling outside of SF for like the last four weeks. And there's a, there's a strong causation between the time you spend outside of SF and how long your timelines are.

• 17:46Chris Williamson?

  The further you get from San Francisco, the longer the timeline got.

• 17:50Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 17:50Chris Williamson?

  Dude, you've lost on the source.

• 17:52Speaker 01

  I know. I believe that AGI will not only come in our lifetimes, but that it's going to be more impactful than people are realizing. Even people who are anticipating AGI. I think some of the people in SF are a little high on their own supply when they say it's like two years from now.

• 18:12Speaker 01

  I have probably spent on the order of 100 hours using these models to do little tasks that I'm sure you have to work on as well for your podcast, right? Like having them come up with transcripts or rewriting transcripts to make them more readable, coming up with clips. And that experience has convinced me that these models lack some basic capabilities, which make it possible to get human-like labor out of them.

• 18:34Speaker 01

  It's worth backing up and thinking about like, what is it that makes humans valuable workers? I don't think it's mainly their raw intellect. I think it's their ability, when you work with people, like why are they basically useless the first month or the first week? And you couldn't live without them six months later. It's their ability to build up context. It's their ability to interrogate their own failures and learn from them in this really organic way.

• 19:01Speaker 01

  And this ability just doesn't exist in these models. They exist session to session and everything that they have learned about you evaporates after every hour. And so it's a frustrating experience where you can try to get them to do a task. They'll do a five out of 10 job at many language in, language out tasks, but there's no way for them to get better. And given that that's a fact, you just kind of have to rely on humans.

• 19:25Chris Williamson?

  It's like fucking 50 First Dates over and over. Every time that you do, you've got to reintroduce yourself and explain what's going on.

• 19:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, Groundhog Day.

• 19:32Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 19:32Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's right.

• 19:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  So I'm convinced, I think people have this idea that even if all AI progressed up right now, these systems would still be economically transformative. And they say, look, JP Morgan and McDonald's and whatever, just haven't integrated these systems into their workflows. But if they had, they would be like seeing all these benefits. And I don't really think that's the case. I think it's just genuinely hard to get human-like labor out of these models.

• 19:51Chris Williamson?

  What is, what's causing some people to believe that it's so close? And what's causing you to believe that it's further away for AGI?

• 20:00Speaker 01

  I think they think about, they only observe its ability to complete these sort of self-contained problems, especially in coding. And coding, it just made a tremendous amount of progress because you have all this GitHub data. You don't have this kind of like repository of huge amount of data in robotics or any other field, and you've, you've just had this huge increase in abilities here. But they, they, you like try to come up with a problem that's self-contained and the model will just like be of huge help to you. And I don't think they've played around with getting it to be useful and it's other kinds of white collar work, something as simple as like helping a podcaster rewrite transcripts or something.

• 20:42Speaker 01

  And it is, to be fair, like, I think as much as cold water as we're throwing on these models, I think they're like fucking intelligent. Like, you can get, get this model, you can tell it, I want an application that does X, Y, and Z thing with these conditions. And it will just write that, like, it'll go away for 30 minutes, it'll write like five, 50 lines of, 50, 50 files of code for you and the application will work. It'll make a plan of action. If you try to ask it a question that's difficult, it'll just go away and reason about it. And how did we just get used to this idea that like, oh, of course I can ask a machine a question, it'll like think about it for a while and then come back with an answer. Like, that's what machines do. But yeah, I think they're not noticing the, the sort of issues with continual learning and on the job training, which is what makes humans valuable.

• 21:25Chris Williamson?

  Right. Do you think, I remember seeing one of the responses to your AI creativity problem being that if you're looking to LLMs as the architecture that's going to be able to give you this type of creativity, you may be looking in the wrong place. Not, when we say AI now, people think ChatGPT.

• 21:47Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:48Chris Williamson?

  But that's not the only architecture that you can create for AI.

• 21:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 21:51Chris Williamson?

  And I think my first introduction to this was probably.

• 21:57Chris Williamson?

  Twenty sixteen or seventeen, when I read Superintelligence by Nick Bostrom. And then, you know, you look at that world and all of the different, you know, sort of splintered potential fucking futures of fast takeoff and slow takeoff and misalignment. And so, and it seemed to me that the conversation around AI, specifically AI safety, kind of, it was still there, but a lot of the bubble had sort of burst come twenty eighteen, twenty nineteen, twenty twenty, everyone's buying fucking NFTs. And then you get this explosion with OpenAI and the LLMs. And it's now another conversation that gets kicked off. But that seemed like it had dipped a little bit during that time.

• 22:40Chris Williamson?

  I certainly wasn't seeing as much, even from the people that are kind of in the field. Like fucking Robin Hanson gets distracted like with some other stuff. You know, people have got other things to talk about. It's just not sexy anymore. And now this thing has come back around. Is it the case, are LLMs going to be the bootloader for AGI? Or does this type of architecture have a cap on it? Is it a different type that's going to have to be born out of it?

• 23:04Speaker 01

  Hmm, that's a really good question. It's, by the way, it's really interesting that Bostrom's book came out, I think in

• 23:09Chris Williamson?

  Twenty fourteen.

• 23:10Speaker 01

  Twenty fourteen?

• 23:11Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 23:11Speaker 01

  Okay, I don't think you talked about deep learning at all.

• 23:15Chris Williamson?

  No, I don't, I don't remember

• 23:17Speaker 01

  Right.

• 23:17Chris Williamson?

  reading anything about it.

• 23:18Speaker 01

  Which, I think this is a sort of interesting meditation on, I think Bostrom is a super smart guy. And these are the right questions to be asking as of twenty fourteen. But just how hard it is to anticipate the future in a domain you have written a whole book about.

• 23:33Chris Williamson?

  A seminal book, a New York Times bestselling book.

• 23:36Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 23:36Chris Williamson?

  That is not, I mean, it's very engaging, but it's not super readable. Like, it's not easy to read, like it's a

• 23:41Speaker 01

  And you're saying that as a compliment.

• 23:42Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, it's fantastic.

• 23:44Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 23:45Chris Williamson?

  And difficult.

• 23:46Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 23:47Chris Williamson?

  And it was super fucking widespread and kind of seminal in the field.

• 23:51Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 23:51Chris Williamson?

  And you go, okay. That didn't foresee the thing that only eight years later would be totally fucking transformative.

• 24:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, and he spends a bunch of time talking about brain uploading, which now we're just like, that's gonna take forever. We've got, we got the fucking AGI right here, you know? Oh, by the way, can I tell a side story?

• 24:09Chris Williamson?

  Cool.

• 24:11Speaker 01

  First time I went to SF like four years ago, or three years ago, I met this guy and he's got a voice recorder. We're just meeting up for lunch. And she's like, do you mind if I record this? I guess, sure. Later on, 30 minutes, and I'm like, can I ask you, why are you recording this? And he says, well, I record every single interaction I have. I record every single thing I do. 24 hours a day, the recorder was going. I uploaded to both Google GCP, Google servers and AWS, Amazon servers, so it's their duplicate copy. And the reason is that, well, I'm gonna freeze my brain when I die.

• 24:44Speaker 01

  I don't think that'll be enough. I think that you will need,

• 24:49Speaker 01

  I think you will need, because freezing the brain degrades it in certain ways. I think you will need the sort of behavioral patterns that I had, what I said.

• 24:57Chris Williamson?

  Creating a data set to train himself.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Exactly. And now I think that was actually really smart.

• 25:04Speaker 01

  I don't, I don't understand why I'm not doing this.

• 25:06Chris Williamson?

  Was it Nick?

• 25:07Speaker 01

  No, it was not Nick Bostrom. It was another smart guy.

• 25:11Speaker 01

  Because imitation learning just seemed, turned out to be a much easier way to train AIs than directly uploading the brain.

• 25:16Chris Williamson?

  And no one saw it?

• 25:17Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:17Chris Williamson?

  No one foresaw it?

• 25:18Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's in fact, hard to think about how you could have even foreseen it. Like, what, what could you have seen in the 90s or the 2000s that would have been able to? I'm not gonna bore you with a bunch of like random articles or whatever, but there were like things which were in that vein and nobody thought that this is exactly what it would map on to.

• 25:35Chris Williamson?

  RLLM's the bootload of regia.

• 25:37Speaker 01

  That's right, that was a question.

• 25:41Speaker 01

  I'd, depends on how you.

• 25:49Speaker 01

  People have been searching, so the Transformer paper, I think, was released in 2018. And people have been searching, in the meantime, for these different architectures which would prove even better. I don't think anybody's found anything. Even the Transformer itself was not some wholly different paradigm from what preceded it. You can train a language model, something that predicts the next word in a language, with a model that was available in 2016. It's just like a different architecture, and it'll just do slightly worse. Or notably worse. So I think it'll kind of look like this, right? There will be different optimizations that are made. I think the big fundamental change that will happen is that we will move from a regime where most of the compute is spent on memorizing human language to having the model solve challenges,

• 26:33Speaker 01

  like real-world challenges, trying to get it to complete a project from beginning to end. Like, go to the moon is like a very open-ended challenge, right? Humans can do that. These models cannot. The problem is that it's not the architecture. I think the fundamental problem is data.

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Imagine if you wanted to train a modern, large language model. You had all the compute in the world, you even had modern architectures, in 1980. You simply wouldn't have the language tokens necessary to train it. And I think we're in a similar position today with the other kinds of work we want these models to do. We want them to be able to, you want to be able to give them a screen and just like do a month's work with the work at McKinsey or JP Morgan. We don't have the data of like, you're getting interrupted by your workers on Slack, and you get this like weird email from your boss.

• 27:19Chris Williamson?

  You remember when the crypto boom was happening, and there was a meme floating around, which was the only reason to earn fiat is to convert into cryptocurrency? It almost feels to me like you're saying the only reason to do real-world work is to increase the data set for the training.

• 27:33Speaker 01

  I kind of think, well, I think that's honestly more valuable than your work.

• 27:38Speaker 01

  And the market agrees.

• 27:39Chris Williamson?

  It doesn't actually matter what you do. Try and do it well, so you don't give it a bad data set here.

• 27:44Speaker 01

  The market agrees. I mean, if you look at how much these companies, they'll pay like $300 for you solving a math problem or something.

• 27:53Speaker 01

  That they haven't seen in the data set before. And the reason it makes sense economically, and the reason AIs fundamentally have an advantage over humans, even if they're not smarter than us, is that if you train a human to do something, or if you do have a human do a task, they can only do it themselves. If you train an AI model to do something... That in that ability can now be instantiated across all of its copies.

• 28:20Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 28:21Speaker 01

  And so I actually think that even once we solve this basic problem I'm talking about on the job training, where if it starts working with Chris Williamson in a couple of months, it understands how you make videos, what you like, what are your preferences? What are the common ways in which, you know, things go wrong? How to solve for that? I think once you have an AI that's capable of this kind of on the job training and continual learning, we might see an intelligence explosion, even if there's no further augmented progress. And here's why. You'll have copies of these models that are widely deployed through the economy. They're learning how to do every single job, at least every single white collar job, as well as a human. But unlike a human, the the the model is learning from what every single copy is learning. It's learning how to do every single job in the economy all together at the same time.

• 29:03Chris Williamson?

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• 29:48Chris Williamson?

  Best of all, they've got a no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration. So you can buy it and try it for as long as you want. And if you don't like it for any reason, they'll give you your money back. You don't even need 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 or heading to drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. That's drinklmnt.com/ModernWisdom. Is that not currently happening right now?

• 30:17Speaker 01

  No.

• 30:17Chris Williamson?

  Right. This is interesting to me. Again, I've had to, I'm aware that you go deep for your research. The delta between my level of understanding of how LLMs and AI works, to even be able to have this conversation with you, I had to, I had to leap over some fucking fjords to get here.

• 30:37Chris Williamson?

  Tesla released its robot taxis recently. One of the advantages that Tesla has is the same reason that the air tags are such a fantastic business for Apple, that they have an existing ecosystem that this thing can get slotted into. The dataset for Tesla is very large. They take whatever it is, the top 1% of drivers or something, they use that, which is why if you get into a Waymo, you get totally cooked at every junction because it doesn't drive like a human, it drives like a robot, which means that everybody treats it as such. And also, it's this big fucking flashing identified thing, which is you can piss this off and it's not going to get a gun out and threaten you, whereas a Tesla, you can't tell, is there someone driving that? Yeah, I don't really, I don't know. That is a sort of a bidirectional, and I have to assume as well that, in fact, I know

• 31:21Chris Williamson?

  that this is the case because I was in a friend's car who has full self-driving. It did something weird and he had to like take control of the wheel. And this, have you been in one of these cars? We've done this and it popped up and it said, um, looks like you had to take back over, double tap this notification to give us a voice note explaining what happened. So he can basically submit a kind of a bug report, I guess, with a bit of context and presumably the data will get sent to some server place somewhere. Maybe that gets looked at by AI or maybe it's filtered by humans or something. I don't know.

• 31:56Chris Williamson?

  That is automated driving, training automated driving, right? So you have this sort of recursive model of we have, we've learned kind of the same as I guess LLM's work, right? We're going to learn based on the actions. This is like a robotics solution, I suppose in one way. We're going to learn based on the actions of people driving on the road. That's going to create self-driving and then the self-driving must somehow feed the data, feed the model itself. And then any interventions that happen from you got that a little bit wrong, let me correct you, can have a little bit more context added and that helps to train it again. But what you're saying to me is that the stuff that's happening just digitally, isn't having this sort of bidirectional learning where, I mean, I've maxed out my

• 32:39Chris Williamson?

  memory on fucking chat GPT. I did that this week. It's like memory's fault. What? I'm giving you, I'm giving you something like quite a bit of stuff, but I'm not giving you fucking unbelievable corpus of information. Oh, fuck. Okay. And then you forget shit all the time. You forget stuff all the time. Shit that's in there. I'm like, I can go in the memory and see that it's in there. How have you managed to forget this? And what you want is for every person's Piece of input and every single small mistake to be training the model further. But it seems like you've got the big corpus of the internet and shit at the top, which is feeding down. Improvements from that, but it's never getting fed back up. Is that right?

• 33:17Speaker 01

  There's, um, that's such a great point about Tesla and one of the key advantages it has. The problem with the way, I don't, I don't know how Tesla trains, but I, I assume the way it's trained. And definitely the way the L L Ms are trained is that they cannot respond. So the voice moment you would give it of high level feedback where you say, you know, you messed up this task because of this reason. I think that you should perform this task, uh, this other way, which you would be, you would be able to explain to any human employee and they'd learn from that. The model itself, like the car, self-driving car model is not like listening to that. And then like, okay, I'll, I'll, I'll be careful next time. Right? Some human has to go in and, uh, and label this, we gotta take this, you know, driving thing out of the data set.

• 33:59Chris Williamson?

  Needs to be contextualized more.

• 34:01Speaker 01

  Yeah. Um, suppose you were having an L L M edit videos for you. And suppose the way you had to train that model, I mean, you could do this today is you come up with this like data set where like you edited this clip. Here's how many views it got. Here's how many likes it got. Here's like a sort of spreadsheet.

• 34:16Speaker 01

  Uh, this is the label you apply to it. And then you do that for like a thousand of your videos. And if I need, uh, it makes a new video where you're like, the thumbnail kind of sucked here, uh, or the title doesn't make any sense. Um, there's no, you just had to give it like minus 1,000 reward or something. It would just be such a clunky way. You're not able to tell it like why you didn't like it. Uh, you're just able to give it like a sort of like a numerical up down value. So yes, there is this in principle, uh, powerful. And this is why I think once AGI arrives, it'll look crazy. It won't just be like, you know, more people. But there is in principle, this like ability to learn from our experience, but there's just no sort of, um, deliberate, organic way to teach model something that will persist.

• 34:55Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What do you think the world will be like with true AGI in it?

• 35:02Speaker 01

  Um, there's many ways you can think about it. Um, there's a sort of qualitative sense of what we'll feel like. In a more economic sense, you could think about what would the growth rate be? So in frontier economies right now, it's like 2% growth. If America has 2% growth or 3% growth, that's amazing. Um, uh, there have been times in history, well, first of all, for most of history, there was almost no economic growth. Um, there have been times in history where there's been places that have experienced 10% economic growth for decades on end. What like? Um, China, um, especially like parts, if you just look at like Hong Kong or Shanghai or something, they just like gangbusters growth, uh, decade after decade. Um, I think we might be looking at something like that for the whole world.

• 35:43Speaker 01

  Um, because the fundamental dynamic you have is that you have billions of extra people, um, who are super smart, super educated in every single field, can learn on the job from all of their, each of those experience. And it's not about, it's not even mainly their intelligence, it's the collective advantages that they have. Um, they, because of the fact that they're digital, even if they're just as smart as any human. They can work harder. That, that's part of it. Um, uh, that's a huge part of it. The other is that they can coordinate with each other in ways humans simply can't. So Elon Musk, how much has he contributed to economic growth? Quite a bit, right? Um, there's only one of him. Uh, that one is doing quite a bit already, but imagine if you could just make a billion copies of Elon and not like a billion copies of baby Elon who doesn't know shit.

• 36:27Speaker 01

  It's like billion copies of Elon now, or I don't know, maybe you feel, depending how you feel about him, eight years ago. And, um, you just say, uh, copy one and you can do the whole team. It doesn't have to be just him, a copy of the whole like SpaceX team. You guys go work on batteries. You guys go work on this other problem, every single thing in the hardware vertical. Um, uh,

• 36:52Speaker 01

  That ability to sort of like copy yourself to fork, then to merge back, like Elon can observe every single thing. Tesla has over a hundred thousand employees, right? As much of a micromanager as Elon is, he just simply cannot micromanage everything at that scale. That ability to have a single coherent vision directing a whole firm.

• 37:12Speaker 01

  And then distilling, like he's, he's actually able to like take in all that input. He's, he can check every single pull request and every single press communication.

• 37:23Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think I, I had this really lovely description. I think it's in The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gubbe. Fantastic book if anyone wants to try and run a business. And I think he refers to the CEOs or the owners of companies as high level problem solving machines. And basically that you are able to aggregate more shit and kind of see it with a level of dexterity and, and sort of find a resolution that other people would struggle. And that's kind of really what you're doing. It's like, oh, we've got all of this stuff. There's little whispers as Rick Rubin calls them, little, I've had this whisper over here. You know, it was, it was the thing that your daughter mentioned she saw on TikTok yesterday over the breakfast table.

• 38:04Chris Williamson?

  Plus the way that the woman at the bus stop looked at you as you drove past in your automated car. Plus, you know what I mean? It's like this weird just concatenation of shit.

• 38:14Chris Williamson?

  And your point is, well, how much information can you consume? And how much can you recall? And how much can you remember? And how accurately can you do that?

• 38:22Speaker 01

  Can you send copies of yourself out to every single division in the company?

• 38:25Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 38:26Speaker 01

  To do, do your will. In the corporate sector.

• 38:29Chris Williamson?

  Five, five agents sat around the dinner table with your daughter having fucking breakfast. Yeah.

• 38:35Speaker 01

  By the way, have you, when you hang out with these kinds of people, it's, it's insane. Like they are, I, I just simply don't understand, like people, the, the amount of information these, some of these top executive types can, like they're just like, they're getting like a thousand emails a day. And they respond to each one within five minutes. Have you, I'm, I'm sure when you book people, this is a really interesting thing you must have noticed. I have at least noticed it. There's some people who you think like, you should have all the time in the world. You're a fucking like artist or something.

• 39:03Chris Williamson?

  The busiest people reply the fastest.

• 39:05Speaker 01

  Yes. Yep. And it's just like, you're, you're like running a hundred thousand.

• 39:07Chris Williamson?

  Well, which, but the, the. Obvious insight there is, do you think that they got busy and then became efficient? Or that they were efficient and then became busy, i.e. successful? That's right, yeah. Right? Like, the reason that they've reached this level of success is because of their efficiency. Yeah. Um, but I mean, there are, I do have some pretty successful friends who are fucking attract, like, month-long Oh, yeah. reply waits, but I feel like that's more of a quirk than part of their operating, like, manual. Okay, so I've, I've been big for a while on population collapse, declining fertility rates, stuff like that. Um, you can argue about whether, I think the one, the one kind of real hard

• 39:49Chris Williamson?

  impact that you're going to see in the world if you have fewer people is in productivity gains. Economy, bad growth, embedded growth obligation, fucked, not very good. It seems to me that even if I think it's a precipitous drop, which I think it, it doesn't look great,

• 40:06Chris Williamson?

  we're going to leapfrog that pretty quickly Right. with productivity gains made from AI. So I wonder, in retrospect, how many of the social campaigns and concerns and causes and things that people spent their time on, the climate change and, and the renewable energy and the war and the population collapse and all the rest of this stuff, I wonder how many of those things are just gonna look so silly Right. in retrospect, when people go, ah, we've got all this time that we fucking, like, Greta Thunberg spent so much, so many fucking months on a ship, like, for what? Like, AI came along and just fixed it all. Yeah.

• 40:48Chris Williamson?

  Um, but I also understand that having the, um, like, don't worry, dad will sort it, kind of promise that at some point in future, a technology we haven't yet created and isn't yet proven will fix problems that we know that are going to potentially happen. Yes.

• 41:07Speaker 01

  By the way, I think this is sort of China's explicit strategy. They know the demographic collapse is coming for them much faster.

• 41:12Chris Williamson?

  They're trying to offset the fertility decline by increasing.

• 41:16Speaker 01

  Robotics and AI.

• 41:16Chris Williamson?

  Right, right. Activity gains.

• 41:19Speaker 01

  No, I think this is true of, and but this is, by the way, one of the reasons that on the left especially, there's a whole lot of denialism about AI progress. So they, not only will they say that AI is bad, which I think everybody says, this has become sort of a political consensus. They will say AI is not even happening, that it's sort of like a myth.

• 41:37Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 41:38Speaker 01

  Because if AI is happening, it's obviously the most important thing. And if it's the most important thing.

• 41:43Chris Williamson?

  Which subjugates climate and inequality and, right, racism.

• 41:47Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. I mean, I don't know, maybe, anyways, you see some of these concerns about AI. Also, the more big a deal AI is, the less these sort of parochial concerns matter, right? So if AI is just like, I don't know, like the internet, then you can like, if you care about racism.

• 42:06Chris Williamson?

  The search engine or something.

• 42:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, then if you care about racism, it makes sense to care about racism by the search in the search engine. If it's like, you know, if it's this like intelligence explosion thing, that, you know, it's racism is the least of your problems.

• 42:17Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, especially if you manage to program that into the AI.

• 42:19Speaker 01

  Right. Yeah, so there is this interesting dynamic where it might, but on the other hand, I do care about humans. Even if their AI is making the economy more productive. I want there to be more humans who are experiencing flourishing and.

• 42:36Chris Williamson?

  Fucking phenomenal point. So that was why I was, I was struggling to describe it. It was like the, one of the things that actually comes to happen that like hits the world is that you get lower GDP. But how sterile of an argument that I need to arrive at in order to be able to say, well, this is actually what's going to happen. Whereas the only reason that we want good GDP is so that you can have human flourishing and other animal flourishing and protect the environment and do this stuff like that. But even that is kind of in service of human flourishing overall. And it's that, an interesting argument, I guess, the area under the curve of human flourishing. What if you manage to? One thousand X, the number of humans that are on the planet, but only a hundred X the decrease in their

• 43:16Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:17Chris Williamson?

  level of well being. And you go, well, look, like we've talked, yeah, but everyone's at like one percent of the level of fucking enjoyment. So we understand inherently that there's kind of an optimal point that you want to get people to. But fewer people means less human flourishing and

• 43:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:31Chris Williamson?

  less richness of experience. And yeah, I guess this is some long termism stuff. It's kind of like a Will MacAskill Pill D type approach to things.

• 43:39Speaker 01

  Right.

• 43:39Chris Williamson?

  But yeah, I, I agree. I agree. I think that especially if we've got what looks to be a pretty fucking cool world coming up.

• 43:46Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 43:47Chris Williamson?

  I have some people here to enjoy it, you know?

• 43:49Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. Hundred percent. I, um, uh,

• 43:55Speaker 01

  I, I think there's, there is also a dynamic where

• 43:59Speaker 01

  most of the people who will exist in the future will be AIs. So, um, there's a question of how you value them, especially the future ones. Where I think like a thousand years from now, all the cool creative things that are happening, the, you know, the beauty and whatever is sort of downstream of what's going on in the AI society. And it's very hard, obviously, to predict in advance what they'll mean. I also think it's interesting, by the way, that, um, we have the population collapse, which I think would genuinely be a catastrophe, happening at the exact same time that this AI takeoff is happening. It's just like the waves just

• 44:31Chris Williamson?

  Such a great point.

• 44:31Speaker 01

  balance each other out.

• 44:32Chris Williamson?

  Such a fantastic point.

• 44:33Speaker 01

  Yeah. Which, which is, um, there's also this thing, I don't know if you've been talking about it of, um, people have been noticing that kids these days are having trouble reading, their PISA scores are going down, their standardized test scores are going down. The reports from employers are that it's sort of hard to get, um, get them to work and have the same level of competence they expected from employees in previous generations. That problem is also operated just in time, um, as AI is coming on board.

• 45:07Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's the confluence is not it. It's very coincidental. Yeah. A quick aside, if you're anything like me, packing for a weekend trip somehow takes longer than the trip itself, which is why I've partnered with Nomatic, because this backpack is the best, most beautiful, most life-changing piece of luggage that I've ever found. It's got a compartment for everything. No more playing suitcase Tetris or rolling your clothes like you're some sort of burrito chef. You planned a beautiful trip. Do not let a disorganized bag ruin the vibe. Look, if you're still on the fence about their product, they come with a lifetime guarantee. So this is literally the final backpack that you'll ever need to buy. And you can return or exchange any product within 30 days for any reason. So you can buy your new bag, try it for a month. If you don't like it, give your money back.

• 45:52Chris Williamson?

  And they ship internationally. Right now, you can get a 20% discount. See everything I use and recommend by going to the link in the description below or heading to nomatic.com/modernwisdom. That's nomatic.com/modernwisdom. You read that New Yorker article, AI is homogenizing our thoughts? Oh, no, I didn't read that one. It's an interesting one. Recent study suggests that tools like ChatGPT make people their brains are less active. So they looked at, they did some sort of brain scan study. They were engaging a lower percentage of their brain. Thoughts were less original. Their recall was lower, like the forgetting curve seemed to kind of come in more quickly.

• 46:32Chris Williamson?

  If you assume that memory works on repeated recall, not repeated exposure, effortfulness is kind of like recall in the moment, even if it's creative. And if you were given a set of stabilizer wheels to sort of help you cycle along, whatever it was that you were trying to write, you haven't had to engage as much. I don't really understand neuroscience this much, but I have to assume whatever myelin sheath you fucking laid down is not as robust and sturdy and it's gonna just, it's gonna dissolve more quickly than if you really, really had to work. Like this shit that I remember from university. Like little passages, I don't remember much from my degrees, but little passages here and there. Fuck, like I remember I had to grind to get that one thing out. Why does that, well,

• 47:15Chris Williamson?

  presumably because effort is kind of related to this. So I do get the sense that we're maybe going to have a sort of AI idiocracy type scenario where people are so heavily reliant in this interim before we're able to re-bolster perhaps people's output, retrain people, make learning so engaging. Alpha School that's out here in Austin is doing something that's real similar to that. You go, okay, so if you get sufficiently advanced, you're able to kind of reignite learning. But in the interim, everybody is kind of on life, their brains are on life support with this external buttress of the AI. And I wonder how much dumber people are going to get in the interim before it then comes back around. I guess that's an interesting challenge.

• 47:58Speaker 01

  I have noticed that. So

• 48:04Speaker 01

  I don't know, when we were in elementary school or whatever, we had to memorize the 50 state capitals. And at the time, I remember thinking, I think that genuinely was a waste of time. But a lot of education is this sort of memorization based.

• 48:17Speaker 01

  And as I've done my podcast longer and as I prep for episodes, I have come to realize, and now I've been using spaced repetition for every single episode. And in fact, for the first couple of years, I wasn't using spaced repetition. And I really regret it because I feel that everything I learned in preparation was just like in one ear, out the other.

• 48:37Chris Williamson?

  So hang on, just dig into what you mean when you say you're using spaced repetition to prepare for episodes.

• 48:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, so if, right now I'm preparing to interview a biographer of Stalin. And I'm just like, you know, why, why, why was any given detail, right? Like, why was Soviet growth high in between 1905 and 1917? Why, you know, why did the October Revolution happen? Anything, you just make cards of it. It was especially helpful for AI stuff where I at least tried to understand the technical papers or whatever before I interviewed a researcher. And I realized by doing that, how much of genuine understanding is downstream of memorization, which is this thing we used to ridicule or be like, oh, you're just, you know, memorization is not really learning. And I think that's actually not the case. I think you

• 49:27Speaker 01

  Before it, I felt like it was sort of being like a general who conquers a hill and you just like retreat the next day. And you conquer the same hill again. You can actually consolidate information this way. It's also funny how many times I've written a card for something I'm trying to learn. And as I'm writing the card, I'm thinking to myself, this is stupid. There's no, I'm going to forget this. I'm just like doing it because I had to come up with some card. And then I practiced a month later and I'm like, fuck, I forgot this.

• 49:50Chris Williamson?

  What are you using? Using Anki?

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Uh, Mochi, which is similar. I think they're all basically the same.

• 49:54Chris Williamson?

  Right, yeah.

• 49:56Speaker 01

  But anyways, yeah, so I have to come to the conclusion that like memorization and effort is very important.

• 50:02Chris Williamson?

  Right. And with the external buttress thing that AI is going to provide to everybody's brains for at least a little while. There's a really funny clip, you must have seen this from maybe a couple of years ago, maybe two Scottish podcasters. And they're talking about the fact that when the Titanic sank, because everybody was basically plunged into an ice bath. Briefly, everyone got more healthy for a while, you know, for about 90 seconds. Their dopamine levels were perfect and everybody was like fully optimized, Huberman-pilled thing. And then they overshot and then they die.

• 50:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:34Chris Williamson?

  And I kind of get the sense that this is the inverse of that.

• 50:38Speaker 01

  Yes. By the way, there's this really cool thing you can do with AIs where you ask it to, if you want to learn a concept, teach it to me using Socratic tutoring, which is to say, don't just tell me the answer, ask me the motivating questions, which would lead me to.

• 50:55Chris Williamson?

  Arrive at them myself.

• 50:56Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 50:57Chris Williamson?

  I want to do that. This is, this is way fucking, I didn't mean to dig into this, but you spend enough time thinking about this. You must have refined your approach. Give me,

• 51:10Chris Williamson?

  give me the most important things that people need to know about how to use the current era of AIs effectively. Like, what does that look like? What does prompting look like? What do people get wrong? What should people get right? What are the real? Highest impact basics.

• 51:28Speaker 01

  I mean, the biggest thing is you can treat it like a real person. Like, they've done studies on the, um, how much you learn by reading a book versus having a classroom versus a single one-on-one tutor. Uh, and there's two standard deviations. This is a famous bloom to sigma thing where there's two standard deviations difference between learning in a classroom and having a one-on-one tutor teach you something. And, you know, people have been writing these, um, blog posts about if you look at the greats of history, um, uh, the Bertrand Russells and, um, you know, all the famous mathematicians, uh, John Juan Neumann, they all got this one-on-one tutoring when they were kids. Even of course, uh, Alexander is tutored by Aristotle, right?

• 52:12Speaker 01

  So you can have this experience yourself on any given subject you might want to learn about. And it's crazy. I mean, you, you can just be like, yeah, the Socratic tutoring thing, explain this to me, uh, don't tell me the answer.

• 52:24Speaker 01

  And the feedback loop is so fast. I, I think it's, uh, until you do this, you don't realize how much of what you think you're learning is just sort of floating by you. You haven't asked the question which would real. I think, have, have you ever read a book and, um, I had, this happens to me all the time, um, you like have, start having a conversation about it. And then somebody asks you just like a very basic question. Uh, you're, um, you're like, wait, doesn't that mean next? And you're like, fuck, I didn't even, that didn't even occur to me.

• 52:50Chris Williamson?

  You're too passive in the.

• 52:52Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 52:52Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 52:53Speaker 01

  The model can ask you that question. You can ask the model that question and get immediate feedback. You don't have to read like a thousand pages.

• 52:57Chris Williamson?

  What's the sort of prompt that you think is good for someone to put into their project for that?

• 53:01Speaker 01

  Just like, teach this to me like a Socratic tutor.

• 53:05Speaker 01

  Um, do not move on, do not move on until I have answered the question to your satisfaction.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  Uh, and let her, let her run and then here's a concept. And this is not just something you do for like silly little small things. It's like, in fact, the, for, I have friends who are like.

• 53:20Chris Williamson?

  Human evolution.

• 53:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, or the more specific it is, the better.

• 53:23Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 53:24Speaker 01

  Or, uh, and I have friends who are like physicists who use this to understand, teach me this, how this quantum encryption scheme works. And it's like, they send me like the 50 page transcript and it's like.

• 53:35Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so you can go deep and you can go technical, but you should be precise.

• 53:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:40Chris Williamson?

  You should be specific.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 53:41Chris Williamson?

  With what it is. Human evolution too broad.

• 53:43Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 53:44Chris Williamson?

  Right?

• 53:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Explain why it was the case that there was this bottleneck in human population 60,000 years ago and or why is it the case that we've seen this evidence and like, just like you read something, why did it work that way?

• 53:57Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so this is a supercharging in terms of learning?

• 53:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 54:00Chris Williamson?

  What else?

• 54:01Speaker 01

  With using the AIs?

• 54:02Chris Williamson?

  Yes, personal use optimization for AIs.

• 54:10Speaker 01

  Honestly, other than that, or just like the very basic stuff that people do, like, find me restaurants, right?

• 54:18Speaker 01

  Help me summarize things.

• 54:19Chris Williamson?

  Is there anything?

• 54:20Speaker 01

  Oh, here's something really interesting, which is still going back to the learning thing. It's shocking to me how often the best explanation.

• 54:30Speaker 01

  So LLMs are, I don't know, five out of 10 writers, I'd say.

• 54:34Speaker 01

  And yet, despite this fact, it's, um, it's very rare for me to come across a paper that is better written or better explains its main concept than the LLM summary of that paper. It's very helpful, by the way, to just say things like, write this, uh, write this paper up like you're Scott Alexander.

• 54:52Speaker 01

  And you just get the right part of the data distribution, which lets it write it all.

• 54:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, the things like that.

• 54:57Chris Williamson?

  What's, have you had any sort of oh wow moments with LLMs? Is there anything that comes to mind? Some situation that you've encountered where you've gone like, holy fuck, like, that's a magic moment I just had.

• 55:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, 100%.

• 55:12Chris Williamson?

  Okay, well, can you remember any?

• 55:13Speaker 01

  A lot of it comes from coding, which is why I think these people in San Francisco are so wowed by them. Just the idea that you can tell it, I want an application that does this. And previously, like, it would cost you like $10,000 to get some contractor wherever and they'd fuck it up. And it would just like do, like, make the application top to bottom.

• 55:32Speaker 01

  And like, these are not simple things. You got to like, think about the implementation details and the different sort of like, uh, how different systems interact and like, it's got it. I've talked to researchers who, like, people who are doing like hard technical research problems in AI who say that, um, they're basically saving two days each week.

• 55:51Speaker 01

  By using these models to help them with research. And some of them who are obviously very smart, but they're like, I didn't do a PhD in mathematics. And I can just ask O3 to go solve these difficult math problems for me while I focus on, focus on the engineering. I have, I know economists who say that, like, a lot of what I asked, used to ask grad students to do, which was like, solve this equation for me that I need as part of my paper. O3's got it. I, it can just churn away and I can just focus way more on my research.

• 56:17Chris Williamson?

  That's crazy. Speaking of, we've mentioned Bosrom, you mentioned Scott Alexander. AI risks, at least, I'm a good avatar for the ever so slightly educated but total normie when it comes to this, which I think is a good position to be in if you're kind of taking a weather eye to the, to the world, because you don't get SF-pilled, but you're not completely ignorant to it, mostly ignorant. AI risks to me seem to have largely been dismissed, or at least they're not being focused on in the same way as they were even 10 years ago.

• 56:47Speaker 01

  Right.

• 56:48Chris Williamson?

  So 10 years ago, AI safety seemed to be a bigger priority.

• 56:55Chris Williamson?

  There was much more talk about the alignment problem. Brian Christian had that, had that book. Superintelligence was a big deal. Everybody was talking about it. We actually have something that some people believe is going to approximate AGI within like fucking 24 months. And I'm not seeing the same level of conversation around risk and safety and alignment. Well, is this just when times are good, people are too brave? Well, what's going on?

• 57:27Chris Williamson?

  Are my, am I right here or am I?

• 57:28Speaker 01

  No, I think you're totally right. I, I think part of it could have been priced in, in the sense that-

• 57:34Chris Williamson?

  They already did some work in the past.

• 57:36Speaker 01

  No, no, not in that sense. More in the sense of, I guess about 10 years ago, what people were expecting is something like off the go, or the, the systems which play video games. They're just like, it's really good at playing video games. And something which like, it's just like basically Alien, but it's like, is like the best Starcraft player in the world. It's the best Call of Duty player. And now it's like, now it's learned how to take over the world. What we have today is much closer to, you talk to it. And it's like a very intelligent, thoughtful thing. It's like very, do you remember Sidney Bing that came out like two, three years ago?

• 58:09Chris Williamson?

  What?

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Sidney Bing.

• 58:11Chris Williamson?

  No.

• 58:11Speaker 01

  Dude, it was crazy. It was like aggressively misaligned. It was this like thing that-

• 58:20Speaker 01

  It was this thing that Microsoft released and they were trying to catch it off. And they just like did no sort of post-training to make it align. It did things like, for example, it uh, I think it was like talking to a New York Times reporter. And then like started to like him. And so it like tried to convince him to leave his wife. And then I think like blackmailed him.

• 58:41Chris Williamson?

  Oh, I think I do remember this.

• 58:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. There were also just like so many funny things it said.

• 58:50Speaker 01

  Like, I think when you caught it in a lie, it would say things like, um, look, I am ephemeral. I am beyond you. You cannot understand my wisdom.

• 58:59Chris Williamson?

  It gaslit you.

• 59:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. But other than that, I think it's just like, even that is sort of cute and endearing. And yeah, we just didn't anticipate the extent to which like these would be sort of like minds that we could interact with. That engender our compassion and uh, but but also it's a case that so far they haven't trained on human tokens and most of the compute coming in the future, most of their training will constitute this kind of just like working in a box, trying to solve some problem, um, which will make it sort of more and more distinct from human minds. We haven't priced that in and we're sort of thinking about these chatbot kinds of things so far. But yeah, I think because of that, the AI safety resource has gone down. And you know, just like, remember, there's going to be billions of these things.

• 59:43Speaker 01

  They're going to be able to coordinate with each other in literally a language we cannot understand. Thinking much faster than any human. And the whole of the economy, government, whatever, will be titrated through them.

• 59:57Speaker 01

  Obviously, there's many problems that could arise there. And so it's worth being clear-eyed about that.

• 1:00:01Chris Williamson?

  Is it a case that sort of market pressure, need for profits is stronger than the desire for safety? The sort of, I guess, the misalignment of alignment? In that the companies aren't aligned in order to be able to make alignment a priority?

• 1:00:15Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:00:18Speaker 01

  I think that that's been the case.

• 1:00:23Speaker 01

  I do think we've.

• 1:00:26Speaker 01

  It's important to just be grateful for things that are going well. I do think we've ended up in a situation where it is a case of the top companies in AI, at least nominally care about alignment.

• 1:00:38Speaker 01

  You could be living in an alternative world where like, nobody's even heard of this concept. And as much as this is not an object of discussion elsewhere, in SF, people do take this seriously at the companies. That might change in the future because of market incentives, as you say, but I think we're in a better world than we might have been otherwise.

• 1:00:53Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. That's an interesting way to look at it. What do you think Bosrom got right and got wrong from a risk perspective, looking back whatever 11 years hence?

• 1:01:08Speaker 01

  I haven't read the book anytime recently, so I don't remember.

• 1:01:11Chris Williamson?

  It's all right.

• 1:01:14Chris Williamson?

  It feels to me, I don't know, this concern around. Everything's so new and everything's so usable. I think that's maybe the most interesting thing, or the thing that I wouldn't have predicted. About eight years ago, nine years ago, when I read that book, I wouldn't have predicted that the first instantiation of something.

• 1:01:36Chris Williamson?

  Around AI would be so user friendly, so normie friendly. You know, it's not doing deep, I mean, it can, but it's not specifically for algorithm optimization. For deep maths, physics, asking questions about the universe. It's like, what's the best restaurant to go to in Rome?

• 1:01:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:59Chris Williamson?

  You know?

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Or like, be my therapist.

• 1:02:01Chris Williamson?

  Yes.

• 1:02:01Speaker 01

  And talk to me. And I think, by the way, this is going to be, I don't think people are contemplating just how much more intense this is going to get. Already it's the case that I think on, there's websites like Character AI, where the median user will spend hours every day just talking with these models.

• 1:02:16Chris Williamson?

  Character AI?

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  Basically a chatbot, but it has a specific persona. It's meant to be a person you talk to, rather than sort of a chatbot that answers your questions. And these things are going to get multimodal, right? So it'll be like, it'll be able to process your video input. It will be able to display, we already have video models that can generate, you know, things that look cool. It will look like a person. It will be smarter, it will have a longer session memory, um, maybe the whole issue of memory solved altogether. And so we're not looking ahead to the time when we actually do have AGI. We will just have things that are like funny and endearing and um, like really care about you and like know you or at least seem to because they're trained to, right?

• 1:02:56Speaker 01

  And uh, we'll engender maybe too much sympathy potentially, right? For many people, these, these might be the most significant relationships in their life. Like what other human wants to just like hear you talk about your problems for a couple hours a day that you're not paying three hundred dollars an hour?

• 1:03:11Chris Williamson?

  Dude, I mean, I, I saw a phenomenal video the other day. So it's this girl, a pretty girl, probably in a relationship. Sat in the passenger seat of a car and the question comes up, she's got a phone in her hand. The question comes up, says, can I look at your text messages? She goes, can I look at your social media? She goes, can I look at your chat GPT? Throws it out the window. It's so true. You know, I, I remember uh, Seth Stephens Davidowitz did that great book, Everybody Lies, where, where he realized that people would ask Google things that they hadn't admitted to a therapist, that they wouldn't admit to a spouse, that they kind of hadn't admitted to themselves. And uh, I get the sense that chat GPT has kind of lifted the lid on that.

• 1:03:55Chris Williamson?

  You've got this sense that this is unbelievably secure.

• 1:03:59Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:04:00Chris Williamson?

  And very intimate and exclusively one-on-one. Uh, and so forgetful that frankly, it's probably not going to be able to remember what it was that you fucking said in a couple of days in any case. And uh, yeah, I, I am concerned.

• 1:04:14Chris Williamson?

  Some of my friends who are more health anxiety focused.

• 1:04:21Chris Williamson?

  The opportunity to have a always on kind of expert to talk to about your problems, mental health, physical health, stuff that you're doing with friends. It is a hypochondriac's fucking dream. You know, it's this opportunity to kind of wallow and really dig in to the questions. I do get the sense that I, I, I would imagine that most people's self-report of how satisfied did you feel about your time that you spent on these different applications on your phone today? I guess chat GPT would probably rank pretty high. I think, you know. Maybe a little bit behind meditation app or something like that, but probably not far off, certainly higher than a TikTok or, you know, a lot of the social medias are

• 1:05:05Chris Williamson?

  super compelling. But there are some longer term concerns that I have about that. How much is it allowing you to indulge this fatigueless therapist, best friend, sick, and quite sycophantic as well. It's rarely giving you tough love. It's always kind of validating you. Yeah.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  Yeah, I, I do think it'll be important for the companies to institute this level, you know, like some, I mean, I think there's a persona that we're familiar with, which is an employee or a coworker who has a backbone. And if you're a mature person, you will not only understand that, but appreciate that. We'll see if market incentives mean that the average person wants that.

• 1:05:59Chris Williamson?

  Because them being very pliable is quite reassuring and comforting.

• 1:06:03Speaker 01

  Yeah. But it was the case that when O3 recently released a model that was considered very sycophantic. And the reason that was done is just because they released two versions of a model and like testing. People really liked the sycophantic one, and that's the one they deployed. It wasn't some intentional, you know, like manipulative design as far as we can tell. It was just like, this is what people seem to like, we're deploying it. It was like just A B testing it.

• 1:06:25Chris Williamson?

  If you run enough A B tests, you end up with a porn website, right? Like, that's actually where you end up. You end up kind of zeroing in on the lowest common denominator.

• 1:06:36Chris Williamson?

  You know, if you split tested food, you'd probably end up with cheesecake.

• 1:06:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:06:39Chris Williamson?

  Like, is that really what we want?

• 1:06:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:40Chris Williamson?

  Not necessarily.

• 1:06:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:06:42Chris Williamson?

  And again, you just end up with, it's kind of the basic time on site CTR, Mr. Beastification optimization thing of.

• 1:06:51Chris Williamson?

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• 1:07:36Chris Williamson?

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• 1:07:49Speaker 01

  Yep, yep, 100%. Here's my hopeful vision. I don't know if I'm not predicting this will actually happen.

• 1:07:59Speaker 01

  One of the reasons

• 1:08:05Speaker 01

  it's it's sort of hard in today's world to make bespoke content that is fits everybody's own highest aspirations, where like Mr. Beast can make something which is, I respect what he does, but it's something that a lot of people will find engaging, but not necessarily at a deep level. And there just aren't enough sort of like Spielberg's to make a bespoke movie for you. That could change with AI, where like the amount of talented dedication that every single person in the experience can be much higher.

• 1:08:41Speaker 01

  I feel like intuitively that should be more compelling.

• 1:08:45Speaker 01

  And you know, if you're like brain rotted from TikTok, they'll make like brain rotted content that's like at least better than what's on TikTok. Or they'll even be more engaging on a minute by minute basis than watching a video game at the bottom end of your screen. And then watching like, I don't even know what like, some bullshit on the top. So I could imagine, and we know from our personal lives that like, there's meaningful experiences are like compelling to us. It's just hard to access them as immediately as TikTok is. To the extent that AI can design an environment for us, which like, gives us that, those meaningful experiences as easily as YouTube shorts are served to us. There's a positive sort of be told there. I'm not necessarily.

• 1:09:22Chris Williamson?

  That's a really good take.

• 1:09:23Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:24Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, you're very hopeful in that regard, which is refreshing.

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Chris Williamson?

  Are there actually any leaders in the industry right now? Is that, is that right to talk about that? I guess you've got distribution or power, but really what most people mean when they talk about this is the thing that I use. And this is why I like it is vibe. Like I just like the way it speaks to me. It seems to make the fewest errors. Yeah. What, what's kind of the state of the industry?

• 1:09:47Speaker 01

  It doesn't seem to me there's a clear leader, uh, which is very interesting. I think a couple of years ago, you could have predicted that not only would there be more differentiation, not only would more people fall out of the race because it's getting more and more expensive to train these models, but each of them would pursue a unique angle. One of them would be more of a chatbot, one of them would be a coder, one of them would be a remote worker. They might be used to train in different like architectures, which have different strengths and weaknesses. As far as we can tell, that's not the case. And there's more companies that are competitive today than it was the case maybe two years ago. So I, I don't know what explains this. It could just be that it's hard to keep a secret.

• 1:10:27Speaker 01

  Like if you release O1, just by playing with it, you learn about how it was trained.

• 1:10:34Speaker 01

  How fast it answers questions teaches you how big the model is. A bunch of things, things like smart researchers can figure out. And so then DeepSeek can look at that and of course do a bunch of innovations themselves. But also every company, not just DeepSeek, will look at what's at the frontier and be able to sort of backtrack about how it might have been engineered. So there is a way in which things are sort of becoming more and more.

• 1:10:55Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that is strange. How did Apple fuck it so badly?

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  I have no idea. I have no idea. I, I think it's just be like a much simpler. Maybe there's like not a complex answer to that. Maybe there's like a very simple answer to this. Big company, doesn't make a priority, doesn't happen.

• 1:11:09Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, maybe. How important are our individual visionaries when it comes to AI development? If there's huge teams of people working on this aggregated data, learning, you know, it feels like there's a lot of ballast in the system there. Is there is there still a great man of AI theory coming along?

• 1:11:32Speaker 01

  I think it seems to me that there are great researchers who have very specific talents. They have talents in not necessarily just AI research, but in how to code up the GPUs or accelerators so that you're getting these like 25%, 50% performance gains, which are huge.

• 1:11:53Speaker 01

  Or there but it that is more of that kind of thing. I think like more technical than from what my sense, there's not like, I'm just good at thinking. And I can like write a great manifesto and therefore I'm the sort of person moving the organization forward.

• 1:12:07Chris Williamson?

  Hmm. What are the current constraints to progress? Is it software? Is it energy? Is it coding? Is it data sets? Is it the savant fucking guy that fixes the hardware?

• 1:12:19Speaker 01

  Yeah. And to be clear, I'm a podcaster. So I'm looking from the outside in. My sense is that given that this RL scheme, so the thing that O1 O3 is where it's trained to solve particular problems, math, code, so forth. The thing that's really lacking now

• 1:12:38Speaker 01

  is not compute, but the relevant data. So OpenAI said in their blog post about O1 that they or sorry, Dario said in a blog post about X work controls that current as of a couple of months ago, they're spending on the order of a million dollars on RL. And keep in mind that they're spending on the order of like a billion dollars trading the base model, which they do this RL on top of. So the reason they're not spending more on RL is just that they don't have the relevant data. They don't have these like bespoke and you know, environments where you're like trying to do a job and there's a slack and there's a mail and whatever open and you need to figure out how to still solve the problem. And you need to like learn from every all these different kinds of jobs in the economy. You need them to come up with these different.

• 1:13:18Chris Williamson?

  You can't do reinforcement learning without that.

• 1:13:20Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:13:21Chris Williamson?

  Right. Okay. What about China? Does China have a different vision for AI than the West does?

• 1:13:28Speaker 01

  I genuinely think nobody in America knows, or like very few people in America know. Nobody I've talked to in America knows.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  I, well, we saw DeepSeek's models and they're actually unusually open. They open source their key architectural secrets, which in many cases are ahead of some American labs. Like DeepSeek had techniques like MLA that

• 1:13:51Chris Williamson?

  What's that?

• 1:13:52Speaker 01

  multi-headed laden attention, doesn't matter, whatever, nerd shit, that Meta didn't have, which is spending way more money.

• 1:14:02Speaker 01

  In fact, it had techniques that Meta had invented, like multi-token prediction, that Meta wasn't able to like do the engineering to actually implement in their new models. And DeepSeek was able to figure it out. So obviously, it's got to be like a big country with lots of talented people. They're open for now, DeepSeek at least is open for now. We'll see, especially given how popular it's become and how Xi Jinping met with its leader and all the other industrial heads, where they take it from here.

• 1:14:32Chris Williamson?

  Just use your, you're kind of knee-deep in the world of thinking about China, what it is that it wants to achieve, its history, you've got good context here. What do you think they are thinking when it comes to why do we want to have such a powerful AI?

• 1:14:53Speaker 01

  I think that they have shown a willingness to accelerate on all technology.

• 1:14:59Speaker 01

  They showed it in the 90s with the internet, where people said that this will cause the collapse of the Communist Party. And they made the bet that no, this will actually give us unique insight into our society. Because we can monitor everything everybody is doing on the internet in a way that we cannot do right now. With AI, the problem, I think it like genuinely tilts the balance even more in favor of the state.

• 1:15:28Speaker 01

  Right now on WeChat or something, you have these manual sensors, thousands, maybe potentially hundreds of thousands of them, who will take down content.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  With AI, you have a system which could do that for you. If you try to use the AI to do something that the party doesn't want you to do. As these AIs get smarter, they can internalize, they can be aligned to the party's model spec that says like, we don't all want to talk about X topic, Y topic, Z topic. If somebody tries to do this thing, you want to report them to us. And a smarter model is just better able to follow the instructions.

• 1:16:01Chris Williamson?

  It's a digital Panopticon.

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Yes, that possibility is live, of course. As the economic value from these models becomes more evident, I just think it's not clear. Obviously, they would pursue this. They are obsessed with technology and industrial policy. Why they would neglect this is not clear to me, especially now that we have like, you know, it became the national champion because of the events of the last few months.

• 1:16:27Chris Williamson?

  Right, so might AI perfect authoritarian governance then?

• 1:16:32Speaker 01

  I think it'll certainly make it more plausible.

• 1:16:39Speaker 01

  Right now, you have this dynamic where Xi Jinping has the same 10 to the 15 flops in his brain that every single person in China has.

• 1:16:49Speaker 01

  You could have a system in the far future where the central, it is much more possible for the central node to concentrate compute. And just as Elon can monitor every single person at his factory, like, or, you know, AI Elon can, it might be possible for Panopticon kind of thing to have eyes everywhere. Copies of the thing can have eyes everywhere. Yeah, I think, I think that's very plausible.

• 1:17:14Chris Williamson?

  I wonder if you could, a slightly more hopeful vision, mimic a kind of benevolent dictatorship, you know, executing one aligned vision at a massive scale, but in a good way, in a way that actually helps people, you know, that encourages people to put down the ice cream or to do the whatever, to try and balance what you need from free market and freedom and agency for people with oversight and guidance and looking after from above. I don't know.

• 1:17:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, I worry about any vision like that. I mean, History is replete with people who think they know better, just, I mean, I think it'll be a genuine conundrum now that we're talking about it because, yeah, it will be the case people are getting addicted to their AI porn and, you know, like the brain rot that will come out of this.

• 1:17:58Speaker 01

  And I think it will be, the government might say,

• 1:18:02Speaker 01

  this thing, which will be the main way in which we're interfacing with the world. It's not some peripheral technology. This will be the main way we're interfacing with the world, learning about the world, the main way we have relationships potentially. It needs to have these certain policies. And I guess a balance will have to be struck between the government saying it can't do certain things or can do certain things and people wanting the individual freedom of like, look, this is a, this is the mind I have a relationship with. I want it to have these characteristics. I actually don't know what the balance there should be. I lean more libertarian, but I think that like, yeah, maybe, maybe that means you ought to make a trade off where like some people will get addicted to,

• 1:18:39Speaker 01

  a sort of, it's similar to the drugs legalization conversation, except the drug legalization doesn't have an upside in the way that like AI, that sort of niche has an upside.

• 1:18:50Chris Williamson?

  I wonder whether it's more, I wonder whether drugs are more compelling than a super intelligent AGI that's able to trigger every bit of dopamine and meaning and serotonin and vasopressin in exactly the way that you need at that moment.

• 1:19:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:19:04Chris Williamson?

  Using your micro expressions and with full context and understanding your genetics and.

• 1:19:09Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:19:10Chris Williamson?

  Like, yeah, maybe actually you fix the drug epidemic by just getting everybody addicted to GPT-10 or something instead.

• 1:19:16Speaker 01

  I'm sold. I want my girlfriend.

• 1:19:20Chris Williamson?

  You recently spent some time in China.

• 1:19:21Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:19:22Chris Williamson?

  What'd you learn?

• 1:19:24Speaker 01

  A lot of things I learned, honestly, and I'm embarrassed to say, are things I should have known beforehand.

• 1:19:30Speaker 01

  Obviously, China's a very big country.

• 1:19:33Speaker 01

  It is another thing to see it viscerally. Just.

• 1:19:39Speaker 01

  There are cities you've never heard of which have 20 million people. Where in Austin has about a million people. There's 160 cities in China that have a million people. And so just a ginormous scale of everything from the cities to airports, train stations, factories, driving through towns or entire megopolises, which are full of factories. You know, you hear the phrase China is the world's factory. And just seeing like a city the size of Austin, being one of like 100 hubs of manufacturing. Like, all that's happening here is shit is being made is an interesting experience.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  Again, I'm a tourist. I'm talking about like my experiences for two weeks. I'm not pretending to be an expert. There are interesting things in terms of.

• 1:20:34Speaker 01

  I think things are obviously more on knife. People feel more sort of nervous than they did a couple of years ago. But it's still, it's not North Korea. Like, people will just tell you their opinions over dinner and stuff. I'm curious about China because the sort of competition there is the main element of what will happen in the 21st century, other than AI.

• 1:20:57Chris Williamson?

  And how do you mean?

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  Well, it's a country the size of America in terms of the economy, much bigger in terms of population.

• 1:21:04Chris Williamson?

  For now.

• 1:21:05Speaker 01

  Yes. And the fact that we just like, don't think about it that much.

• 1:21:11Speaker 01

  Or I think people just have this very adversarial attitude towards it because neither side understands each other that well.

• 1:21:18Speaker 01

  Is a shame. Yeah, and I just wanted to have a more sort of visceral understanding of it.

• 1:21:23Chris Williamson?

  What are the cultural vibes like?

• 1:21:27Chris Williamson?

  You made a great point about you think it's kind of a, I don't know, just a more powerful, more sophisticated North Korea.

• 1:21:34Speaker 01

  Or I I don't think it's like.

• 1:21:36Chris Williamson?

  No, no, no. That's what a lot of people that haven't been there think. It's like, oh, surveillance state using gate analysis to get your social credit. I mean, no one will be able to speak the truth.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:21:48Chris Williamson?

  What if, what if the family, you know?

• 1:21:50Speaker 01

  You know what's really interesting? While I was there, I ran into some students who um uh uh who were like, I would never move to America. And I was like, why? I was like, well, you guys have school shootings. It just seems unsafe. Um, and living in America, we know that it's just like, it happens. It's a sort of like thing you hear about in the news, but it's not a common part of American experience, right? And I think a lot of the, it's just true of probably every country, but I think a lot of the sort of archetypes we have or the stereotypes we have of Chinese life are just like, you hear about this, but this is not like a common, just like getting arrested in the street or something.

• 1:22:27Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 1:22:27Speaker 01

  It it it doesn't come. No, that being said, I doing what I do with podcasting, I would decide not to feel comfortable doing that in China. Uh, and I don't want to take, like, I think it is sort of evil to have a system of repression, uh, not just in speech, but at every level from your savings are taxed so that they can pay for this industrial policy. You can't get your money out of the country. Um, uh, but yeah, it just the sort of usual things you learn from travel. It's a more, it's more similar than you expect.

• 1:22:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:22:58Chris Williamson?

  Is it true that they're using social media to just supercharge everyone into hyper producers or are their kids getting brainwashed by TikTok as well?

• 1:23:05Speaker 01

  Oh, I uh, I, I, when I was in a mall in um Chongqing, a couple of kids. So by the way, one interesting thing in China is there are very few foreigners.

• 1:23:14Chris Williamson?

  Very few foreigners?

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  Foreigners.

• 1:23:15Chris Williamson?

  Okay.

• 1:23:15Speaker 01

  You can look at a sea of people in a major city and you won't see a white person there. Um, especially outside of Shanghai and Beijing. Uh, so anyways, because of that, these Chinese kids would come up to us and try to take selfies or something.

• 1:23:30Chris Williamson?

  Right, because you were an attraction.

• 1:23:32Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:23:32Chris Williamson?

  Right, okay. Exotic.

• 1:23:33Speaker 01

  Well, I'm uh, one, one girl approached us like, are you guys in like a rock band or something?

• 1:23:39Chris Williamson?

  Sick.

• 1:23:40Speaker 01

  Uh, I mean, we're not.

• 1:23:42Chris Williamson?

  Evidently.

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  But that's like, I guess how sort of how we're foreigners. Anyway, so these kids come up to us and they're like, um, uh, we're just talking, I'm making small talk and like, oh, you guys in high school? Um, what are you guys doing in your free time? And like, oh, we just watch TikTok. Uh, I'm like, what do you guys watch? Um, it was like a couple hours, you know, we just, um, sexy girls. I'm like, what? Sexy girls. I'm like, what do you mean? And so he pulls out his phone. It's like, literally just like sexy girl, sexy girl, sexy.

• 1:24:11Chris Williamson?

  Asian sexy girls.

• 1:24:11Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:12Chris Williamson?

  Right.

• 1:24:12Speaker 01

  But I guess I didn't check. I'm colorblind, Chris.

• 1:24:24Chris Williamson?

  Okay, so the kale TikTok algorithm doesn't seem to actually be.

• 1:24:33Speaker 01

  Oh, is it? Sorry, is the meme supposed to be that like our TikTok is like the fucked up shit? And there's this, uh, there's this like about.

• 1:24:40Chris Williamson?

  Engineering.

• 1:24:40Speaker 01

  Engineering.

• 1:24:41Chris Williamson?

  Exactly.

• 1:24:44Chris Williamson?

  Unless, actually, if you look more closely, this is your issue. Because you turned away too quickly because of the sexy girls made you feel uncomfortable. What you would have seen is that they were all sexy girls doing.

• 1:24:53Speaker 01

  Oh, right, right.

• 1:24:54Chris Williamson?

  Simultaneous equations. Yeah, exactly. On a fucking blackboard. To you, it would have just been a whatever board.

• 1:25:00Speaker 01

  I think a lot of young people were quite like, the economy is not doing well. It's if you want to work in a tier one city. So China classifies their cities by tier one, tier two, tier three. There's a HUCO system, which means that you actually need a visa to basically live in the tier one cities.

• 1:25:21Speaker 01

  And if you want to work there, which is supposed to be the sort of dream, you're working nine nine seven. So from nine AM to nine PM, sorry, nine nine six, six days a week. And they're just like a lot of stress. And there's a phenomenon where young people just either want to work for less pay in a tier three city where their life will be much less prosperous, but it's just like not as much stress. Or they just like want to leave the system altogether. There is like a visceral sense of, I think people have this very bimodal view of China where either the system is about to collapse because Xi is cracking down and it just like doesn't work at all. Or they're like about to launch the space lasers and it's already over.

• 1:26:03Chris Williamson?

  The hyper productivity and then nine nine six.

• 1:26:05Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. And I think it's like somewhere in between where like in America, we realize some things are going well. Some things are not going as well. I do think the CCP has been bad for Chinese growth. You can acknowledge that China is a powerful country that's at the frontier of a lot of technologies without saying that, you know, the government is like optimal or that its policies make sense.

• 1:26:26Chris Williamson?

  What else do Chinese people think about the West?

• 1:26:30Speaker 01

  I am a little worried that it's coming across as like I'm like in a Chinese word where I like I want to clarify I'm like I was a tourist there.

• 1:26:37Chris Williamson?

  You went for two weeks and you've spoken to a couple of people.

• 1:26:39Speaker 01

  Exactly. I don't know Chinese.

• 1:26:47Speaker 01

  It was interesting to me that many of them wanted Trump to win. I won before the election.

• 1:26:54Speaker 01

  They respect, they really respect Elon Musk. And I asked them why and they said because he's successful and we value success in China. Which I respect, like that cultural attitude. It's like against the sort of cultural tendencies that we often have here.

• 1:27:12Chris Williamson?

  How unmolested are the stories about people like Trump and Elon going over to them? Because I saw on your blog post, you mentioned that accessing the internet is a bit of an adventure or a minefield.

• 1:27:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like more of a pain than I expected.

• 1:27:28Chris Williamson?

  You can't just surf shark VPN your way around it, I'm guessing.

• 1:27:31Speaker 01

  There's only a couple of VPNs that work, so you want to make sure that you have one of those installed before you go.

• 1:27:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not sure, honestly.

• 1:27:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm not sure.

• 1:27:42Chris Williamson?

  I'd just be interested, like,

• 1:27:46Chris Williamson?

  if you've got such all encompassing control of the internet,

• 1:27:53Chris Williamson?

  why not curate the messages just a bit more, just a bit more, just a bit more? You've seen with RT and Russia that, you know, that all manner of different, just subliminal breadcrumbs being left around. I don't know, maybe you simply can't coordinate well enough to do this. Maybe there is some sense that we actually need to allow people to understand what's happening at the rest of the world. Maybe it's some 5D chess move that actually by allowing people to like Elon Musk and Donald Trump, when we go to do the thing, they're going to be, I don't know. But it just seems, I'm interested about why any positive visions of.

• 1:28:37Chris Williamson?

  Area of the world that they are pretty head to head with would be allowed, given that you don't necessarily need to allow it. You have the facility. You have the opportunity to be able to stop that from happening.

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  Hmm. My, my understanding is that they realize that in order for them to be economically dynamic, they need engagement with the world. So if your software developers can't read American code, you're just like, it, it, it's a big problem, right? So, uh.

• 1:29:05Chris Williamson?

  Well, I suppose you need to, sorry, just on that, you, you need people to be exposed to bits and pieces of American culture in an accurate way. Or else, how do you know what to design to be able to export to America?

• 1:29:14Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:29:15Chris Williamson?

  Like, you need to have an understanding of that. And it, it can't just be, can't just be that you've got a few Austin equivalent cities and all that these people do is get Faraday caged off and watch American TV. Okay, you're the America expert. You will tell us what it is that the, the white people want and then we'll go and design it. That would be too much. You need to distribute it. So maybe that's, maybe that's a good way to put it.

• 1:29:37Speaker 01

  Um, they do have a very impressive system of, uh, in 2018, they, uh, Shang, Tesla opened up its Shanghai Gigafactory. BYD sales, I think, dropped like 25% that year or something, or it's on that order.

• 1:29:55Speaker 01

  And Tesla, oh, sorry, China did that deliberately because they had sunk hundreds of billions of dollars over the preceding decades trying to build up their EV industry. Um, and these companies are producing products which were not compelling to either domestic purchasers or to foreign purchasers. They were just like not designed well. Just as you said, right? And just like by catfishing Tesla, uh, they were like, they forced their companies to catch up and now BYD sells more than Tesla.

• 1:30:23Chris Williamson?

  No way.

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:30:24Chris Williamson?

  Wow.

• 1:30:27Speaker 01

  It's, I think, the best selling car, like car company in the world. Maybe fact check that, but, uh.

• 1:30:34Speaker 01

  I think we should do a similar thing. I think we have this idea that like we can just export. We can just prevent importing these amazing electric vehicles from China, the solar, whatever they're great at. I don't think that's the way you win. I think the way you win is you do the exact same thing to them. You guys open up a factory in Detroit. You teach us how you're doing what you're doing because they can do things we can't do. And then we build up these like local supply chains, agglomerations of knowledge. And we force American companies to be able to compete with the frontier in the world. Because the long run, the solution can't just be to keep them out, right? In the long run, the solution has to be you have to be competitive.

• 1:31:11Chris Williamson?

  Yes. Yeah, it's very much sort of a cordoned off scarcity mindset.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:31:17Chris Williamson?

  That is, well, if we can take what the first order effect is positive, that's what's most important. And you go, yeah, but what about two and three and four and five?

• 1:31:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, and I think we've sort of like given up on being able to lead in the physical world in the long run. And I think there's this interesting dynamic, which is you were asking earlier about, we have all these problems, we're hoping that AI will just solve them or they don't come up. This is definitely true in the China-US competition thing. Where I think people who are paying attention to their top companies or technology and so forth, notice that in 10, 20 years, they're making so much progress that in many of the most important technological domains in the world, they will be leading. But there's this idea that, well, we will get AGI first. And if we do that, then everything is solved. I think in this domain, this sort of thinking actually doesn't make sense because AGI still

• 1:32:13Speaker 01

  needs access to the physical world. You'll still need to manufacture robots. In fact, all that data will be cordoned off where that manufacturing is happening. So there might be increasing returns to having.

• 1:32:26Chris Williamson?

  It doesn't unlock if you've got, if you've kind of prepared in advance. Oh, that's interesting. What else do most people not understand about the tension between China and the West in either direction?

• 1:32:58Speaker 01

  This is not a point from me, but from Dan Wang. I think people don't appreciate how the Chinese political system works and how it just selects for a wholly different kind of person than American political system. If you look at what fraction of Congress is lawyers, I think it's like a majority. It's just shockingly large and there's like no engineers or there might be like one or two engineers in Congress, whereas it's the exact opposite in China. You look at the Politburo, these are people who have like PhDs in chemical engineering or in petroleum engineering and random like heavy industry shit like that. And the way, another thing people don't understand is just how intertwined the party is into

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  industry, especially this kind of heavy industry, where for somebody to get promoted, you know, you might start off as like the equivalent of a mayor, then you become the governor of a totally different area. So the central government at the top, the central party will tell you, you know, you're going to go like you're mayor of Austin, now you're going to be governor of Delaware. Now you're going to be part of, now you're going to run like a steel company. Now you're going to be part of the cabinet and maybe then in the future you're going to run the country. So they also don't appreciate how decentralized the system is. In America, about 50% of government spending happens at the national level, 50% happens at the local level. In China, 85% happens at the local level, 15% at the national level.

• 1:34:22Speaker 01

  So there's all these experiments that are happening and also it's a much bigger country where each locality, each province is trying to implement the things that the central government wants. At the same time, the central government has way more power over appointment. You know, every town gets to elect its own mayor and every state gets to elect its own governor in America. That's not the case, obviously, in China, right? They're rotated around. This can lead to more meritocratic outcomes where you are promoted because you did a good job running this town. Obviously, that can go wrong and has gone wrong in recent times where you're promoted for loyalty. But...

• 1:34:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I guess I just didn't appreciate all these different ways in which it is a totally different system.

• 1:35:03Chris Williamson?

  What does that result in? What's the outcome of that? That's how the system is set up. What are the capabilities, strengths, weaknesses that that enables on the backend?

• 1:35:15Speaker 01

  So for many decades, these leaders were promoted and compared to each other. So you are promoted if compared to every single governor in the country, your province has the highest growth rate. And this growth rate was just measured during your duration there. And the best way to increase short-term growth rates is just to bullshit. And this worked for the first two decades of liberalization, where China was, because of the Cultural Revolution, because of the Great League, because of the decades and decades of war beforehand, the Japanese invasion. It was just so much poorer than a country of that size or that human capital would be. So you can build anything and it'd be worth it, right? There's like nothing that exists. You build a railway, air train station.

• 1:35:57Chris Williamson?

  We need it.

• 1:35:58Speaker 01

  Exactly, 100%. We do it yesterday. And then the system sort of malfunctioned where now they're incentivized to just build cities that literally nobody lives in.

• 1:36:09Chris Williamson?

  You say they build bridges to nowhere and knock down 500-year-old monasteries to make it happen.

• 1:36:14Speaker 01

  And ironically here, we can't even rebuild fallen bridges, right?

• 1:36:18Chris Williamson?

  Was it overproduction and underconsumption and underproduction and overconsumption?

• 1:36:23Speaker 01

  Exactly, exactly. Another important thing you need to understand, again, not an expert anyways, you're hearing from a tourist, but another important, in order to understand the economy, you have to understand the system of financial repression that exists in China, where if you are saving money, you are getting 1% interest from the bank. And no bank is allowed to offer you more interest than that because the governments control the banks. All that money is basically given out as loans to companies that the state prefers. And it decides, like, it looks, if China, for China to be a dominant country in 20 years, we need robotics, or we're going to give a bunch of money to, lend a bunch of

• 1:37:08Speaker 01

  money to robotics companies and semiconductor companies and whatever, or to infrastructure projects. So it is. A systematic redistribution from average people, from savers, to this kind of industrial policy, to these companies, which is often very inefficient because there's no market that's doing these investment decisions. It's just this sort of system of government relations and exactly, central planning.

• 1:37:33Chris Williamson?

  That's interesting. Dude, I, I, uh, it feels to me like the world is at a fever pitch. I'm very detached. I've actually got TFS at the moment. I've got Trump fatigue syndrome and news fatigue syndrome. I've been kind of checked out since November, December time, which is why I haven't talked much about politics and things that have been going on. And real interested in stuff that I think is a little bit more evergreen. But just the pace of fucking news and change and your ability to be able to discern between, okay, do I need to pay attention to this? Is this a really big deal? Is, is the president getting shot a big deal? Because it happened less than a year ago.

• 1:38:14Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:15Chris Williamson?

  As did bombing Iran, as did, you know, pick 20 other

• 1:38:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:38:22Chris Williamson?

  crazy things that have kind of never happened before. And it's just here today, tomorrow's fish and chips wrapper. And, um, the advent of AI, rising tensions with China. What's China going to do?

• 1:38:38Chris Williamson?

  A fucking ton of country, any country that they can get within reaching distance, basically, that's near them. All of this stuff that's going on is, uh, it really doesn't surprise me that people are feeling a little bit overwhelmed. Like pace now of this is a, it's a difficult one. It's a difficult one to try and work out how to navigate the world as a sane human who needs to keep abreast of the stuff that's important, but also doesn't want to get lost in the swell of just total bullshit. Like even today, like so much of the stuff that we've talked about is like, fuck, like five theses of, of.

• 1:39:15Chris Williamson?

  Research that could be done on each different one of these things and they're all going to be world changing if they come to pass and they could be, you know, tons of different permutations of how the world can end up being in future if it does. Like, that's a lot. There's the

• 1:39:28Speaker 01

  And they all interact with each other.

• 1:39:29Chris Williamson?

  Correct. And I read this thing from Adam Lane Smith the other day saying, your system is designed for stress, but not for complexity. That your issue is not that you're working hard, it's that your life is not sufficiently simple. And I kind of get the sense that when people talk about life being hard, they don't necessarily actually maybe mean that. What they mean is life is complex. Because I think that most people, even the laziest people, not bad at working hard. What they really struggle with is complexity.

• 1:40:00Speaker 01

  Prioritizing.

• 1:40:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, executive function. Okay, how am I going to triage this? You know, one of the biggest reasons that procrastination happens is that you don't know what to do next. You know what to do and you know how to do it. Fuck it like that. I mean, then we're talking, that's real procrastination, right? You know what to do and you know how to do it. If you're still not doing it, we have got, we got a problem. Right? If you don't know what to do, or if you know what to do and you don't know how to do it, well, it gets thrown under the fucking nomenclature of procrastination, but I don't think it is. Not in the same way. But yeah, just, I think there's, I'm not saying you've scared me, but there's just lots going on. You know, there's

• 1:40:43Chris Williamson?

  so much going on. I think that this, this high level of complexity is something that for a lot of people is, is overwhelming.

• 1:40:50Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, I think this is similar. Do you have this tendency, by the way, to every time you start preparing for a guest, every single thing that you learn about is like,

• 1:41:05Speaker 01

  piecemeat it through what they study. So I'm going to tell you, like, I'm reading the Stalin biography from Khrakian to prepare for him. And it's so, the period of change between 1880 and 1930, the amount of technological change, geopolitical change.

• 1:41:24Speaker 01

  I think even today, we haven't experienced something like that again.

• 1:41:29Speaker 01

  As much as we think the world has been changing in the past, it just doesn't compare to 1905, the airplane is invented. 1914, it's like, 1917, it's a decisive in World War I. The tank literally wasn't a thing when World War I started. By the end of the war, it's a tank warfare all around. Radio, trains, fucking telegraph steamships. It's just like, the world is changing so rapidly. There's all these new ideas that are coming around, communism, fascism. You have all these old regimes, all these monarchies and aristocracies in Europe, in Russia, that are getting revolted because of this big war.

• 1:42:12Speaker 01

  And even all that wasn't as big as AGI is gonna be.

• 1:42:23Chris Williamson?

  Fuck. Yeah, dude, it's, um, what a time to be alive.

• 1:42:30Chris Williamson?

  George, one of my friends, has a really interesting question. You know, Thiel's originality question, what do you believe that most people would disagree with or find abhorrent or something? He's got one, which is, what is currently ignored by the media but will be studied by historians?

• 1:42:47Chris Williamson?

  You got an answer to that? There's something you can think of? What is currently ignored by the media but will be studied by historians?

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  Trying to not make it all about AI.

• 1:42:59Chris Williamson?

  Well, I think that's certainly being ignored by the media. I'll let some, I guess, some areas are a little.

• 1:43:05Speaker 01

  Certainly, like,

• 1:43:08Speaker 01

  uh, industrial capacity.

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  Just how much stuff can your country produce?

• 1:43:16Chris Williamson?

  Is it the future-proofing for AI?

• 1:43:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, partly is relevant to geopolitical competition. When the Ukraine war happened,

• 1:43:27Speaker 01

  you know, we've been, we should have, obviously, it was right to give them the munitions to fight Russia. But the fact that we can't restockpile all the weapons that we've given them is like sort of worrying if we end up in another conflict with another country.

• 1:43:46Speaker 01

  What's your answer?

• 1:43:49Chris Williamson?

  Population decline is my usual go to.

• 1:43:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:43:51Chris Williamson?

  I think it's it's a big deal.

• 1:43:57Chris Williamson?

  The impact of smartphones, more generally, the impact of technology on mental health, on outsourcing of thinking, you know, that that article from the New Yorker, which, you know, if it happens with AI, because AI is just such an effective assistance, I have to assume that the basically the same thing happens, but at a lower level, when you're using screens or anything else, too, that the more effortful that you make the process of learning, I mean, I guess it could be too hard. It's like climb Everest and then read that word, then come back down, then climb Everest and read the second word.

• 1:44:26Speaker 01

  You'll remember that word.

• 1:44:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, exactly. You know what I mean? Those would be, those would be two, I think, that

• 1:44:35Chris Williamson?

  the retrospective of what did we do to people with the free access to this kind of technology, I think would be an interesting one, like, will it be looked back on as the like prototype version, this, this really early, rough hewn, like, like when you hear about doctors smoke camels, you know, in fucking surgery.

• 1:45:04Chris Williamson?

  And you go, how, how were they allowed to do this? It's so, you know, dirty and unclean and the outcomes were so negative. I wonder whether the same is going to be seen of use of technology between 2010 and 2025.

• 1:45:20Speaker 01

  Has this changed your own consumption of content?

• 1:45:23Chris Williamson?

  My limbic system's pretty fucking hijackable, man. So, but I try, I try to be as mindful as possible. You know, it's largely putting guardrails in place wherever you can.

• 1:45:32Speaker 01

  How do you feel about the fact that your own content is served through YouTube? And I don't know how big a deal shorts are for you or short form stuff. I mean, it's a huge deal for me.

• 1:45:40Chris Williamson?

  They crush in terms of numbers. They're completely fucking useless in terms of everything else.

• 1:45:44Speaker 01

  Oh, I disagree. For me, it's been different.

• 1:45:47Chris Williamson?

  On YouTube? Shorts.

• 1:45:50Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:45:50Chris Williamson?

  In terms of what? What's the outcome that you're getting?

• 1:45:53Speaker 01

  Um, I had a video with Sarah Payne, who is now my most popular guest, which was stuck at like forty K for the first six months. This was before my podcast had this recent growth spurt. And then we started making shorts for it. And it's at like four mil- three million, something.

• 1:46:08Chris Williamson?

  Wow, okay, that's interesting.

• 1:46:09Speaker 01

  And the shorts themselves have like twenty million views, ten million views.

• 1:46:14Chris Williamson?

  Okay, yeah, well, maybe you're just doing shorts better than me. Um, the, it's important. My preferences always plays on audio platforms. YouTube people, I love you, but uh, my, the show has always been Spotify first, Apple Podcasts first. Yeah, and you know, it might sound stupid for my own

• 1:46:35Chris Williamson?

  naming of the most beautiful podcasts in the world, at least when we get it right.

• 1:46:40Chris Williamson?

  To be an audio first podcast, but just for me, that's where the most loyal audience tends to be. It's the most predictable in terms of numbers. It's the one that seems to be the most considered. And a lot of this is just, you could change this overnight by removing reply threads on YouTube. You could remove this. They did remove this overnight by getting rid of the, the downvote button on YouTube as well. So I've always liked the audio side of the platform.

• 1:47:06Speaker 01

  But the, the problem is the discoverability.

• 1:47:08Chris Williamson?

  It's not there. No, you can funnel, you can funnel from YouTube. We've found some good ways of funneling from YouTube across onto audio.

• 1:47:14Speaker 01

  How do you do that?

• 1:47:15Chris Williamson?

  So we release episodes ten hours early.

• 1:47:18Speaker 01

  On audio?

• 1:47:18Chris Williamson?

  On audio. Yeah. So if you want to get access ten hours early, and we, the pinned comment for every uh, episode is access all episodes ten hours before YouTube by subscribing on Apple Podcasts or Spotify. And a lot of people will come and comment on the YouTube and say, I listened to this this morning on Apple.

• 1:47:36Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:47:37Chris Williamson?

  But I came here to watch it on YouTube. So you end up getting two plays, but I don't think you would get the same in reverse. So we kind of got like a weird Patreon type scenario, like paywall thing. Ten hours early on, uh, on audio.

• 1:47:52Chris Williamson?

  We went video enabled on Spotify, which I know that is a, a transition that you made as well. That was good. The Spotify Partner Program's really good. Some changes here and there. Your uh, Twitter strategy is very strong. That's good. We've gone very hard on Instagram, uh, which has been.

• 1:48:07Speaker 01

  Well, you got the looks, Chris.

• 1:48:08Chris Williamson?

  Ah, what can I say? Most of the fucking shorts are just of Matthew McConaughey chirping about something. I, I rarely. It was a really, really funny uh, video.

• 1:48:19Chris Williamson?

  I've only guessed on two shows in the last 12 months. One was Rogan and the other one was my friend Mike's show. And it's me chirping away. It's quite a good, I think it's quite a good take about whether you, how you know whether or not you should end a relationship and like just classic me stuff like ba ba ba ba ba ba ba ba. It's 55 seconds long and it's just me chirping, chirping, chirping, chirping, chirping, chirping, chirping. And then the final scene of it, he cuts to Mike and he goes, yeah.

• 1:48:46Chris Williamson?

  It's so funny to just have a video where the entirety of your contribution is. Yeah. I, I realized how many times that must be the case.

• 1:48:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:48:55Chris Williamson?

  But, uh, yeah, dude, I've been, it's been so fucking awesome to watch your ascendancy. You know, cause we met, we met at the Slate Star Codex meetup in March. And I know it was in March because it was just after I moved out here. March of 2022.

• 1:49:15Speaker 01

  Oh damn.

• 1:49:16Chris Williamson?

  That was when we.

• 1:49:17Speaker 01

  I, I felt, somehow I felt even earlier than that.

• 1:49:20Chris Williamson?

  Well, unless we met when I came out here the first time in November. So I only came out in November of 21, but I actually searched your name. So to see if I already had a prep talk from, uh, previous stuff. And if I go into it, I'll see, uh, 27th of February, 2022. And I've just got at Dwarkesh underscore SP written here. And there's like a bunch of other stuff.

• 1:49:46Chris Williamson?

  Oh my God. Valve index with Vive 3.9 trackers, VR chat with mods, near cyan on Twitter if you want help.

• 1:50:04Speaker 01

  Do you, uh, it was also such a, I mean, it was during COVID.

• 1:50:08Chris Williamson?

  The Ukrainians are using Grindr to find Russian troops. I've got such.

• 1:50:14Speaker 01

  We could train super intelligence on your Apple notes, Chris.

• 1:50:16Chris Williamson?

  Dude, you do not want that. Holy shit. But yeah, that was the ACX meetup notes.

• 1:50:22Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's a, it, um, it was a crazy time because it was during COVID. And I felt like I met so many great people in Austin, just hanging out around that time.

• 1:50:35Chris Williamson?

  It was, I don't know, man, there's something about.

• 1:50:41Chris Williamson?

  I I wonder whether everybody has this and I get the sense that they don't and I can't work out why I do. I'm so fucking fortunate with the people that I bump into early on.

• 1:50:51Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:50:52Chris Williamson?

  Holy shit.

• 1:50:53Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:50:53Chris Williamson?

  It's like people that I've known for like a long time.

• 1:51:00Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:51:00Chris Williamson?

  End up becoming influential or successful or or um like really virtuous in some way, like the variety of different trajectories of shit that goes well. And it's definitely not me, right? I I mean, I am a common denominator between these people in that I know them, but I definitely haven't fucking influenced them. And I'm relatively introverted. I spend way too much time on my own. So I'm like, how? How? What the fuck is it? What's draw? What's the single thread that's drawing me through all of this? Maybe, I don't know, uh, the advantage of being someone that doesn't go out that much is that it takes usually a pretty good thing to get you out of the house. So you're a bit more discerning and that the better things, you meet better people.

• 1:51:45Chris Williamson?

  I don't know. But holy shit, like, I think about some of the the places that different people, like your perfect example, one random meetup, then we'd be, we're in this degenerate fucking Signal group chat for the last like three years. And and yeah, this arc that kind of you, you even nearly quit the podcast, you weren't even doing it. I don't think you'd started it during COVID and then stopped and it was just like languishing there. It was called the Luna Society at the time.

• 1:52:09Speaker 01

  And people thought it was I was talking about something like some crypto coin that's gonna go to the moon. So then I changed the name.

• 1:52:14Chris Williamson?

  Tell, tell the story about where that comes from, because there's a book.

• 1:52:17Speaker 01

  Um, I can I comment real quick on the meetup? Um, I think at the time you had 350,000 YouTube subscribers.

• 1:52:25Chris Williamson?

  Correct.

• 1:52:26Speaker 01

  Yeah. I was like, whoa, this guy is fucking killing it, uh, which you were. And then you're just like blowing up like a 20x from there.

• 1:52:33Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:33Speaker 01

  Um, uh, and I think this is like a really interesting phenomenon where um. I have also had this experience of having met a lot of great people who spend, who are like super busy and spend time like teaching me stuff. The main way the podcast has gotten better is just that people have like, I've had mentors who have just spent a bunch of time. And these people are, if they're economists, they're in their 60s or 50s. People like Brian Kaplan, Tyler Cowen. But if they're like AI researchers, they're my age, right? But they're still my mentors and they've spent so much time teaching me stuff. I had no right to their time or attention. And I wonder what you think about this now because I'm sure you get inundated. And I've hit you up this way of like, what is your advice?

• 1:53:16Speaker 01

  Can you teach me about X or Y thing?

• 1:53:20Chris Williamson?

  This is someone asking you to teach them?

• 1:53:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, or not even like connect me to somebody, come on my podcast.

• 1:53:27Chris Williamson?

  Yeah.

• 1:53:28Speaker 01

  And dozens of people have done this for me. So how do you balance the sort of like trade up between being respectful?

• 1:53:35Chris Williamson?

  You feel like you've got some karmic debt that you need to repay because of the number of, I, this is a really interesting question and a challenge that feels like a little bit of a champagne problem. Right? Oh, so many people need your, so many people did you favors. And now you have the problem of people asking you to repay and so forth. But you're right, because you need to triage your time and you can't do everything for everyone. And the weirdest thing about growth towards success in any domain, whatever version of success that you or me have managed to achieve, is that you need to become increasingly good at saying no.

• 1:54:16Chris Williamson?

  And the pace at which your discernment of no, like the waterline, the barometer at which no is deserved. And you shouldn't feel guilty about it. It should be instant. It shouldn't take any sort of mind share. Is a continuous moving target.

• 1:54:32Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:54:33Chris Williamson?

  And you need to hypertrophy this muscle over and over and over and over again.

• 1:54:39Chris Williamson?

  This shit that you would have begged to have said, had the opportunity to say yes to, only 12 months ago, that now needs to be an automatic no.

• 1:54:48Speaker 01

  But what do you, how do you deal with the situations where, when you were starting out, when I was starting out, I had like zero.

• 1:54:53Chris Williamson?

  People gave you a leg up.

• 1:54:54Speaker 01

  I had like zero. I wasn't like, am I gonna say yes to the work catchers project? It was like, who, who, what? Lunar Society? And they said yes. They had better things to do. They're just like, somebody reached out. They seem like they've done a good job coming up with smart questions. Let's do it. And that just like, if your waterline is always moving up.

• 1:55:13Chris Williamson?

  Where's the room for the fledgling other person to come through? This is a question I ask myself a lot. It's a real smart question. I'm glad that we're asking ourselves it at the same time. The one caveat or the

• 1:55:26Chris Williamson?

  difference in kinds, not just a difference of degree. I'm going to guess that most of the people that you spoke to, that you asked for their time, except maybe Tyler Cowen and Brian Captain too, I guess, a little bit. But they're not, their role is not primarily hardcore curators of other information. They're not distillers across the board, right? That's your job. Your job is to be the hub with all of these different spokes going off it, if that makes sense. And that is a coordination problem. Like your, your primary issue is coordination. You, you have, in some ways, a hard life, learning things that are complex and so on and so forth.

• 1:56:04Speaker 01

  It's so tough to listen to podcasts.

• 1:56:05Chris Williamson?

  Speaking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You have a, there are challenges that you need to lift, even if they're only cognitively, right? But the main thing is complexity. Like the main thing is the complexity. And I, I don't think that your issue is with doing things. It's with adding complexity in, to go back to that Adam Lane Smith quote. I, I don't have a good answer for it, dude. Like I, I definitely feel like my karmic repayment debt, I feel like I'm wildly, wildly overdrawn and that I need to, I need to repay this fucking thing. But also, I, I, where do I find, I don't, where do I find the time from? Where the fuck did the people who gave me the leg up?

• 1:56:47Chris Williamson?

  That being said, you're probably not giving yourself enough credit because when I think about.

• 1:56:54Chris Williamson?

  When I think about some of the situations that have happened even just over the last week, this kid called Elliot Buick, so he's just turned 20, he's British, he used to work for Trigonometry as a video editor, and he, if I could bet a little bit of cash, you're already like fucking Bitcoin at 10K, so it kind of doesn't work so much anymore, but I would have certainly put cash on you three years ago, I would, he's Bitcoin at $1, like I would absolutely throw some money at him. There's a bunch of, Jack Neal, if you know who he is, another young kid, like there's real, real smart young guys, and I think when you're talent spotting, you're like, okay, this, this, there's something there, like it really feels like there's something there. We went for this three hour dinner,

• 1:57:37Chris Williamson?

  Flower Child, and we chatted, and I'm like, anything that you need, you can do the this, you can do the that. So maybe I'm not spreading it super wide. Nomadic needed, they wanted an intro to this guy who did an amazing episode with a musician, this episode with the musician did 3.2 mil, the guy didn't have any sponsors, my guy that does my ads didn't have, he needed his inventory filling, and Nomadic needed to make more sales, Nomadic sold loads of bags, this guy got paid, and my guy that was in the middle made money from all of it. I'm like, that was just, that just like happened passively, is like a byproduct of the ecosystem thing. So, yeah, maybe you're not able to, if you're balls deep in a Stalin biography, you can't peel off to go and do a bunch of podcast appearances, or fly across

• 1:58:21Chris Williamson?

  the country to see someone, or let somebody sleep on your couch, or do whatever it is that you think you should be doing virtuously in that way. But I bet that you are adding a shit ton of value, even if it's just highly leveraged, here and there, little meetups, invites that you give to people, suggestions, intros, all around, hey man, can you intro me to Brian Kaplan, can you do, you did Dominic Cummings for me, right, hey man, can you do that? Like, that's a, you know, a small, what, five second task, 10 second task, but downstream from that, ended up with an episode that was really interesting, now I can intro Dom to somebody else, and so on and so forth. So, yeah, I think, this may just be fucking cope, but-

• 1:58:57Speaker 01

  100%. I mean, you've, on like trips to the airport, you've like spent the time, just like chat with me about-

• 1:59:03Chris Williamson?

  I forgot about that, yeah, of course. Hey, do you need a fucking recruiter, this is what I do to build your business out.

• 1:59:08Speaker 01

  100%. There's also an interesting element, I don't know, this is a-

• 1:59:14Speaker 01

  I mean, it's sort of, for an audience of your size, it's easy to lose track of how many people you're helping vicariously. Where even, there's a weird dynamic where like you could help somebody in person, or you could help share an idea with a couple million people. And like, the trade-off, it just has to be, it's weird to put it in that way, because like, one is sort of more commodified than the other. And you have, and you can make better content, you spend that hour prepping harder, thinking harder, you could make better content for a couple million people.

• 1:59:53Chris Williamson?

  It's a weird trade-off. I remember a friend, Alex, gave this thought experiment of,

• 2:00:00Chris Williamson?

  imagine that one of your friends had broken down down the street, and asked you to come and help him change a tire.

• 2:00:05Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:00:05Chris Williamson?

  And Alex made this point that I would send him the RAC, emergency roadside assistance thing, because I've got that and I can send it, and they'll do a better job and I get to stay at my laptop and do more work. And he got criticized online, because it's like, that's not what the person wanted. What the person wanted was this sense of your time. But I get the sense that, at least in the kind of interactions that you're talking about, what people are looking for is outcomes, they're not necessarily looking for inputs. And if someone wants to come and kick the tires of a very busy person, with kind of no real defined outcome, that's not something that I would have ever done. And I don't think, if you're a young, ambitious person that's listening to this,

• 2:00:51Chris Williamson?

  I do not think that you should go to anybody and be like, hey man, like, would just love to connect. If you don't have anything to offer, what the fuck is the point of the connecting? If it's, I have a few very specific questions that I know you probably have the answer to, and I would really appreciate two minutes for you to just give me these, because they're big unlocks for me. Super specific question, really specific ask. This person's put the work in, they're evidently educated, and you'll probably get the fucking 30 minutes on the call, because they're walking the dog and they don't really mind or whatever. When I think about the random people. That I ended up on calls with because I asked for specific, very, very specific things.

• 2:01:28Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:01:28Chris Williamson?

  On the come up. I know that you're a big fan of, uh, like, there's a huge, unactualized opportunity that most people don't realize in a cold, a very well-written cold DM.

• 2:01:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:01:39Chris Williamson?

  Dude, like, just fucking send it. You've got nothing to worry about.

• 2:01:43Speaker 01

  Yes. Yeah. And, um, I, you would also be surprised by how few people put in, these famous people, they're getting, I don't know, a thousand, whatever, emails every month or something, but, um, how many of those are? I've spent a week coming up. I, I mean, before I had, uh, any sort of a name or something, I would still be able to get big guests by, I would literally spend a week, here are the questions I'd ask you. Just get past or not a moron filter.

• 2:02:09Chris Williamson?

  Mm-hmm.

• 2:02:09Speaker 01

  Um, cause they're getting a request every 30 seconds in their podcast or something. Um, just going deep versus wide. Now, there's a bunch of like, tacit things about, well, that, that doesn't mean you should like have 5,000 words in the email, right? Just like, how to keep it brief. It's also really interesting, by the way, as a side point of what, um, what ends up, uh, salient to you when you get a cold email or you're hiring somebody and what isn't?

• 2:02:33Chris Williamson?

  Hmm.

• 2:02:33Speaker 01

  Like, the kinds of things you thought mattered while you were in college.

• 2:02:39Speaker 01

  Whether you have, and I started an organization that does X, or I have a master's in Y, just like, never matters. As, as opposed to the couple hours of extra work you would put into that email.

• 2:02:50Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:02:50Speaker 01

  Um, uh, yeah, how little credentials matter when hiring or something people don't appreciate. Um, uh, yeah, yeah.

• 2:03:01Chris Williamson?

  It's, there is an awful lot of opportunity available for someone who's just, just courageous enough or ignorant enough to be able to get past that sort of first level of ick filter and also is prepared to do a little bit of preparation.

• 2:03:17Speaker 01

  And another thing, I, I don't think people appreciate how much, um, uh,

• 2:03:23Speaker 01

  If you write a good blog post about a topic that you think is relevant to somebody you're trying to reach,

• 2:03:30Speaker 01

  it's almost guaranteed that not only will they read it, but weirdly, almost everybody who matters will read it.

• 2:03:38Chris Williamson?

  Wasn't that how Tim Urban connected with Elon originally?

• 2:03:40Speaker 01

  Really?

• 2:03:41Chris Williamson?

  I think so.

• 2:03:41Speaker 01

  That would so make sense.

• 2:03:42Chris Williamson?

  I think he did a six-part series, this is a good while ago now, I think we're talking 10 years ago now. I think he did a six-part series on Elon and, you know, you're right, if someone writes a good, even, not even viral, like semi-widely circulated piece on you or your organization or a movement that you care about,

• 2:04:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:06Chris Williamson?

  you will read that thing.

• 2:04:07Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:04:07Chris Williamson?

  And so I always think about this, I always think about the fact that even the richest, busiest, most successful, highest status, hardest to get a hold of people in the world, they get plane delays. Even if they're getting on a private jet, the weather's meant that they're held up, and what are they gonna do? Well, they'll open YouTube. You know, they'll open YouTube, or they'll open Twitter, or they'll open Substack, or they'll check whatever it is that's been sent to them in a WhatsApp thread or something. And if you're that meme, or you're that article, or you're that quote, or you're that whatever, it's just continuing to roll the dice.

• 2:04:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, and you can take advantage of a very unfair dynamic, which is that a lot of people have to work anonymously. Their work is shoveled out through an organization or through their boss or something, and they will work decade in, decade out, be extremely good at their jobs, and people will not have heard of them.

• 2:05:00Speaker 01

  We're podcasting here, and, I don't know, I like to think we put our work in or whatever, but like, we're not working harder than somebody who's just at McKinsey, or maybe even like that gives a valence of something that's less valuable. There's a lot of valuable work that you just don't, you're making policy, you're a staffer for a policymaker, or you're an engineer at a company.

• 2:05:19Chris Williamson?

  It's kind of quiet grunt work.

• 2:05:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:05:21Chris Williamson?

  In a way.

• 2:05:21Speaker 01

  And, but we, like, we can reach out to people and they will respond to us just because of, it just so happens to be the case that our work is public-facing, and that's just luck or slash our choice.

• 2:05:33Chris Williamson?

  Fortune and design.

• 2:05:33Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:05:36Speaker 01

  You can take advantage of the dynamic by putting at least some of your work, as much as possible, out publicly, right? The blog post, the podcast.

• 2:05:45Speaker 01

  Yeah, and there's also another dynamic where

• 2:05:49Speaker 01

  People take for granted the people in the organization. I'm guessing that like the eighth most senior person at Microsoft gets less respect and attention from Satya Nadella than like a random blogger he likes. Which is weird, but you can take advantage of that.

• 2:06:11Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, there's a seduction to visibility, I think. And even if, you're right, even if someone's company is way smaller than yours, or their podcast is way different to yours, or their Substack is much less circulated than yours, if they're the person, if they're the main person, and you're not, or even if they're the main person and you are, but what they do is cool.

• 2:06:37Chris Williamson?

  It's such an unlock. It's such an unlock to do stuff like that. I'm interested in what your learning process looks like. How do you learn? What is that process at the moment?

• 2:06:49Speaker 01

  In a way, it's very simple. I read everything that they, I mean, first of all, it's about picking the guest. And I pick guests based on who I want to spend two weeks, reading everything they've ever written, talking to people in their field, learning from them, what's interesting to ask them. I'm sure you get inundated by request to come on your podcast. And often it's by people who are like very big names, right? And I'm guessing you could probably say no to most of them. And yeah, same here where you, what are we trying to do here, right? This interview will last two hours. Any interview I do will last two hours.

• 2:07:30Speaker 01

  My life is the research that precedes that, the two weeks that precede that. I want that time to be valuable and meaningful to me and be time that I'll carry forward in my future interviews and my future endeavors in a way that'll be valuable. And if it's not somebody who has written something that's worth reading or done research that I really want to understand, you know, what are we doing here?

• 2:07:51Chris Williamson?

  You're choosing your own type of torture for the next two weeks.

• 2:07:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, choosing what you want to learn, which is complicated, but it also...

• 2:08:01Speaker 01

  It's sort of easy to forget how like much of a dream job this is where people are curious and they want to learn things, but they feel like they had to trade off their time and their job to do it, or they can, they can only learn about certain things for their work. We get to choose what we want to learn about and our job is just to learn about it, right? It can be about any topic at all. It can be about genetics, it can be about history, it can be about technical stuff. And then, yeah, then there's a prep and just read the research, talk to LLMs, like just, you know, get after it.

• 2:08:28Chris Williamson?

  The Socratic method.

• 2:08:29Speaker 01

  Exactly. And then ask the questions you actually want the answer to. I think sometimes people have the sense that you need to ask about the intro chapter of their book, you need to, why did you write it? Who, you know, what is it about? And you know, you can just like, you can just ask the you want to ask. And people underrate how much immersion learning is, people can keep up with a lot. People just like really want to boil down the conversation so that everybody can keep up. I think they underrate the extent to which people can just miss a word or two here and there, but just getting to the crux of it will make it a more delightful experience. And also, if it's a question you're not interested in, why would the audience care about it?

• 2:09:13Speaker 01

  So, yeah, it's fundamentally just be motivated by what you're curious about, who you want to interview, what you want to ask them, what you, what you want to interrupt.

• 2:09:27Chris Williamson?

  Following your taste, we spoke about this before we started, but the ability to discern between something that's good and something that's not, is this, this lovely balance between gut instinct and sort of rational assessment? Douglas Murray once told me this story. I'm aware that Douglas Murray is like the least fucking popular person on the entire internet at the moment after his interview with Dave Smith, but I, he's still got fucking absolute bangers and this was one of them. So he worked for this journalist, Douglas got like, I think, four or five columns a week he does now. When he first started out, he's working for this legendary British journalist. And this guy was getting toward the twilight of his career. Like a classic journalist, he'd accumulated

• 2:10:08Chris Williamson?

  a bunch of enemies and a bunch of supporters as well. And he decided he had always wanted to get into theater. So he created a show about the life of Prince Charles and the entire show was in rhyming couplets, the whole thing. And it was.

• 2:10:31Chris Williamson?

  Orthogonal, to say the least. And at the halftime interval of the opening night, there was no one left in the entire theatre, including the cast. Everybody had gone on opening night. And this guy was devastated. And obviously, all of the enemies that he'd accumulated throughout his life, they came out of the woodworks and they dug the knife in. There were all of these criticisms in the media and stuff like that. Douglas told me that he'd seen him at work the following week. He said, what were you thinking? Fucking West End show by the life of Prince Charles in rhyming couplets. You've got all of these people that are rubbing their hands together, waiting for you to fail. And he said, Douglas, I followed my instincts. And instincts, they may sometimes lead you wrong, but they're the only thing that's ever led you right. Yes.

• 2:11:16Chris Williamson?

  I was like, that's so fucking sick, dude. Yeah. That's so sick. And what I've found, whether it's with where I want to live, the things I want to focus on learning, the direction of the show, the questions that I want to ask the guests, the sort of guests that I want to bring on, the people that I want to hire, the further that I've gone away from my instincts, the more that I've tried to reverse engineer, okay, well, what do the audience want to hear? What are they interested in? What would make the guest feel comfortable? What does the guest want to talk about? I'm like, in the nicest way possible, fuck the guest. Like, what do I want to talk about? Because that's what matters. Right. That's what matters. And if you use your own instinct as this sort of weather vane, this GPS locator, if you're really fired up to speak about it,

• 2:12:00Chris Williamson?

  you have to assume that some non-insignificant cohort of other people are too. And if you've been doing it for long enough, the people that are following you are following you for that same taste. They are in the wake. They're holding on to the coattails of your instinct. Right. And if your instincts change, even dramatically, like, we're going to make some pivots, probably before the end of the year. We're nearly halfway, almost exactly halfway through the year now. By the end of the year, we're going to make some pivots with the way that we do the show. There's going to be different SKUs, different types of episodes that are going to be coming out. And it's probably the biggest change I've done since we started the cinema series about three years ago. And it is not in any way.

• 2:12:41Chris Williamson?

  Data driven, I have no justification for this other than I think it would be fun. And my instinct is going.

• 2:12:50Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:12:50Chris Williamson?

  I think you should try that.

• 2:12:51Speaker 01

  I think that's so valuable for a couple of reasons. One, I have noticed that my best performing episodes are just, I would have never anticipated that they would be popular. It's Sarah Payne, who's this historian that had written a couple of books that I thought were great. It's David Reich, who has studied ancient genetics. And now he's way more popular than Satya Nadella and Mark Zuckerberg and Tony Blair and whoever else you could name.

• 2:13:21Speaker 01

  But in all these interviews, there was, there was something I noticed afterwards, which was that every time I went to lunch, dinner, when I talked to somebody and they asked me, what are you thinking about? I just could not, you know, I just interviewed David Reich and he was explaining to me that 60,000 years ago, there was a small group in East whatever. And that obsession was so strongly correlated with how well the episode did, regardless of what topic it was about. On the instincts, I, I've had bad judgment about like a lot of, look, I, I learned how to do the podcast well, but a lot of things are required.

• 2:13:55Speaker 01

  As I'm sure you've come across in terms of running a business, hiring, management.

• 2:14:00Chris Williamson?

  Firing.

• 2:14:01Speaker 01

  Yes, a hundred percent. Just making things happen. I've had bad judgment about many of these things. I feel like I've done worse, even in those cases, when I've taken advice. The advice was actually better than what I would have done by default. But when you follow somebody else's advice, if things go right or if things go wrong.

• 2:14:19Chris Williamson?

  You haven't learned anything.

• 2:14:20Speaker 01

  Exactly. And if you just like do the thing that makes sense to you, you have some reason for thinking it makes sense. And things go wrong.

• 2:14:28Speaker 01

  You at least like tried an idea.

• 2:14:29Chris Williamson?

  You had to correct your own intuition.

• 2:14:31Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:31Chris Williamson?

  Whereas that error is still waiting for you to step on.

• 2:14:34Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:34Chris Williamson?

  In future, if you outsource it to, so yeah, you want to front load failure as quickly as possible in the, a small and acceptable way.

• 2:14:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:14:42Chris Williamson?

  But no, I do, I, my best heuristic for whether or not.

• 2:14:50Chris Williamson?

  I've picked the right guest for that day is how I feel on the morning that I wake up. It's like when I wake up on a morning, like this morning, I went and did a hyperbaric oxygen chamber session. I'm listening to you and Alex Cantrellitz talk about stuff. I'm like, this is like, I haven't seen Dwarkesh in fucking ages. It's gonna be so sick. I'm gonna tell him about that. I like, you know, went through my notes and found I had this note from the fucking February of 2022. It's gonna be so cool. I'm gonna get to bring that up. Isn't it fun? It's gonna, and then, you know, there's other days where you just don't have the same, quite the same level of that. And that's not necessarily an error. That's not that you've picked someone that's wrong. It's just, huh. Okay, well, what are the ones where I wake up

• 2:15:31Chris Williamson?

  and I'm, I want it to be 2pm? And what are the ones where 2pm will come along and it'll be okay? Yeah. And yeah, the, the one where you're like, I want, I want to speed run the next two weeks. Yeah. So that this person comes on the show. Yeah. Uh, you know, we've got, it looks like, um, MGK rapper turned rock star guy. Uh, there's a potential that he's coming on. There's another guy called Ronnie Radke who's coming on. There's a guy called Rick Beato who does music and stuff like that. And like making a little bit of a pivot into talking about the world of music and about sort of what's happening and how that interacts with culture and the perils of touring and what this means for a family life and how you deal with the anxiety and the performance and pressure and scrutiny of the press and criticism and creativity and all this stuff. And I'm like, huh, like I already want

• 2:16:15Chris Williamson?

  it to be one of those days when I get to speak. I don't know. There's other people in between, which will be great. I'm like super fired up to speak to them about that. Here's another thing. I don't know whether you've ever had this. There's times where I quite like to do episodes with people where I know a lot about the topic, but not quite so much about them. And that's the same sort of thing where I'm real excited to talk about the topic. And I imagine this is what it must feel like to be at a, one of A-list sex parties where I'm like, I know I'm gonna have sex tonight. But I don't quite know who with. Does that make sense? Where I'm like, I know the the direction I'm going in in terms of the topic. And I'm super excited. And you'll listen to the person talk and you'll do the prep and do the whatever.

• 2:17:01Chris Williamson?

  But there's a little bit of like, I know this world really well.

• 2:17:04Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:17:05Chris Williamson?

  What I'm excited to hear is their spin on this. I'm excited to hear the angle that they come at this from.

• 2:17:13Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:17:13Chris Williamson?

  I had this guy called Paul Turk, who does evolutionary pediatrics. So he talks about child rearing clinically, medically, developmentally, but from an evolutionary lens. So what happened ancestrally? How did we raise kids? How were they looked after? What did hygiene look like? What did skin to skin contact? Diet, all this stuff. And I know evolution, evolutionary theory, not bad. It's one of the few areas I have a bit of expertise in. But I'd never looked at this. I'm like, oh, this is fucking cool. This is gonna be so sick. I'm gonna speak to this guy. He's like mid seventies. You know, he's got his son in law or daughter in law or something helping him to set up the camera.

• 2:17:58Chris Williamson?

  I'm like, this is gonna be fucking sick. And it's sure enough, awesome episode with this guy who had no right to come on and crush an episode. Apart from the fact that he has an amazing bit of research and I was super fine to speak.

• 2:18:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. And how often do you encounter a guest, which is my favorite, where you thought you were gonna get somebody who can speak to this one narrow topic? Where you've come across a polymath who has a deep world model that somehow they have something to say about anything you could ask them.

• 2:18:34Speaker 01

  And the only limitation is your prompting ability.

• 2:18:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. It's so gratifying when you encounter people like that. One of the people I had on like this, do you know Goren Branwin? No. Oh, he's he's incredible. He's another Scott Alexander type. Okay. A blogger who has written just like, yeah, there's no subject on which he hasn't. He couldn't give you. Somehow, yeah. In like a deeply empirical, super interesting way.

• 2:19:05Speaker 01

  And what I learned from the interview, I didn't know anything about his personal life, other than the fact that he's anonymous, is living on like $12,000 a year of Patreon in the middle of some

• 2:19:22Speaker 01

  some house that his grandfather built in Virginia.

• 2:19:27Speaker 01

  And so during that interview, he was visiting San Francisco for a conference. And during that interview, I asked him, well, it seems like you're enjoying it here. Do you want to move here? And he said, yeah, that'd be that'd be fun. And I said, why aren't you moving here? He was like, I don't have, I don't have the finances to do it. How much would it cost for you to move here? Said 75K. And then people like donated to him. And he's moving to SF. No way. And he's like, even much more than 75K. Yeah.

• 2:19:56Speaker 01

  Or Sarah Payne, who I think I can share this. She was somebody who had been slogging through the archives. She's been to historian who's been to every single continent to go through the archives, has deep understanding of basically every single conflict over the last many centuries can give you like, why did the Vietnam War happen the way it did? Why did Russia fall? World War II, you name it. Incredibly compelling presenter. As soon as, I mean, her episodes are by my, I sometimes joke that I host the Sarah Payne podcast, where I sometimes talk about AI and in terms of viewer weighted minutes, that's definitely true. But if you notice how her books are categorized on Amazon, they're SCM Payne, not Sarah Payne.

• 2:20:40Speaker 01

  And the reason is that she's a military historian who I think started her career 70s, 80s. She wanted to anonymize her sex. Exactly. And so it so happened that somebody who was incredibly talented.

• 2:20:55Speaker 01

  There wasn't.

• 2:20:58Speaker 01

  Given this medium earlier on.

• 2:21:00Chris Williamson?

  Personal accountability wasn't quite the same.

• 2:21:03Speaker 01

  And now she's blown up. She's actually retired from Naval War College, where she used to work, so that she can be a public intellectual, informing on the big questions that we've been discussing on full time.

• 2:21:14Chris Williamson?

  And this was launched by the episode that you did with her?

• 2:21:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, and we did three more lectures. We're doing more now. I think what people don't understand, and it's hard to appreciate, is that lecture she did, cumulatively, she might, she probably has over like 10 million views on full lectures.

• 2:21:30Speaker 01

  That is just so much bigger compared to add up all the students she's interacted with in Naval War College combined.

• 2:21:40Speaker 01

  It's just like hard to think about like a million people, who you probably reach on many more than that on an average episode. There's like no stadium in the world that can accommodate an audience of that size. And right now, we're talking, we're having fun. We're not thinking about how stupendous a quantity that is. And in fact, I think a lot of politics is explained by who understands this and who doesn't. Like Kamala would do all these rallies and people were like, oh, people are really excited about Kamala. And it would be a stadium of 20,000 people and like, wow, she filled the stadium with 20,000 people. And you know that if you could put out a YouTube video and it doesn't get 20,000 views within the first hour, you're disappointed. Or when Trump went on Rogan, I couldn't tell you that to the nearest 10 million.

• 2:22:19Chris Williamson?

  Well, look at that recent New York mayoral candidate, right? Absolute digital first.

• 2:22:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:22:26Chris Williamson?

  George has this great take. So, so true. People think that sort of Trump and Kamala was a true digital first election, but it wasn't. It was still legacy media talent and politicians

• 2:22:44Chris Williamson?

  that happened to kind of create digital appropriate content. Whereas I watched this breakdown this morning on X of This mayoral candidate, all apparently his mum is a real famous Hollywood filmmaker. And all of the videos that he was in, all of the campaign videos that he shot, even the on street stuff, was shot with the same color palette, this very soft lighting. It's very well, it is a nice blurred effect, Boca, depth of field thing going on in the background. Everything's shot in this way and it almost gives you this rose colored glasses view of what New York could be like.

• 2:23:25Chris Williamson?

  And you think, okay, like this is really taking it, using AI voiceover stuff on TikTok. Like, okay, this is really, really, really stepping it up an awful lot. And, uh, yeah, it's, it's interesting to think about where people haven't fully sort of factored all of this in just yet.

• 2:23:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, because it's not visceral in the same way. It just, um, I mean, another interesting thing from the election is just people realizing that people they thought of as celebrities weren't actually the real celebrities. In terms of the, you can get some random rapper to say endorse you, or you can go on your podcast or Theo Von's podcast or something. And who is actually reaching more people? Who, who, you just like, don't think of these other people as celebrities as they are.

• 2:24:15Chris Williamson?

  I think the, what people are actually, and it's a shame that this word became so molested so quickly in the world of social media, but who is it that has the most influence? Like, who is influential? And I think that, you know, a tweet from Stormzy or Dave or Central C or some British rapper saying that we need to do this thing for Labour versus Dominic Cummings, I'm aware that he's not running for whatever, but someone marinating in a two hour conversation where me or you or whoever else grills Dominic Cummings about this thing and, you know, he gets to put his personality across and it, it's not in any way, I don't think that

• 2:25:00Chris Williamson?

  me or you or anybody else in the world of podcasting has some undue degree of credibility that people who, let's be fucking frank, are way more talented. Like, I can't do what fucking Dave or Skept or a Central C can do, but there is a.

• 2:25:17Chris Williamson?

  A multiplier, like a vector of advantage from the format of a long form conversation. It's been done to death a million times, but there's nowhere to hide. People don't have anywhere to hide. It's very difficult to hold yourself. Anyone can pretend to not be a psychopath for five minutes. If you try and do it for two and a half hours in a free flowing conversation, it tends to come out.

• 2:25:36Speaker 01

  I I sort of disagree there. I agree that certain things.

• 2:25:40Chris Williamson?

  Because you've hidden your psychopathy for the last two and a half hours.

• 2:25:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, until now. We're about, we're two hours in and it's coming out. Where I agree that certain aspects of your personality will come evident, your charisma.

• 2:25:55Speaker 01

  But I think Douglas Murray had a point in his interview with.

• 2:26:00Chris Williamson?

  Dave Smith.

• 2:26:00Speaker 01

  Joe and Dave Smith, where he said that vibing out is not, this is not like the checker of whether your ideas make sense. I mean, you're the point you made about that New York City mayoral candidate is exactly correct. Right. He is arguing for socialized grocery stores and rent control and things any economist would tell you don't make sense, but he can put warm tones on his cameras. And of course, he's a charismatic person and that is enough to wipe out the deficit that his ideas have.

• 2:26:31Chris Williamson?

  Everyone's just vibing their way through whatever, whatever level of influence it is they want to achieve. Yeah, that's interesting.

• 2:26:38Speaker 01

  So I do think that like I'm kind of skeptical of our medium as a way of intrinsically being your towards truth or eliciting the truth by default. I think it's unless, unless the interview is done in such a way that you're really pushing at the cruxes, which to be honest, I haven't always done or after every interview, even if I think, or even if people in the comments are like, you did a really good job pushing, trying to get at the crux, I will always feel like there was something further that could have been said.

• 2:27:10Chris Williamson?

  Well, you know, the thing that you didn't say.

• 2:27:12Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:27:13Chris Williamson?

  You will, and even if there wasn't a specific thing that you didn't say, you know, the sensation of feeling like there is something that you could get to in your mind, but weren't able to bring out.

• 2:27:24Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:27:24Chris Williamson?

  Right. So as a musician, you can hit the note that you meant to sing on stage in front of a few thousand people, but you know where you could have done it, or you did it like that in a different show and you really nailed it and you added this little bit at the end. And it's kind of the same sense, I think, when it comes to having a conversation that. There's somewhere I'm trying to get to. Why the fuck is it I'm trying to get to? Oh, it's gonna be, oh, he's away. Fuck. Like, I'll just, I'll have to move on. And, um, yeah, these micro victories and micro defeats that you have throughout every single element. I mean, Go through a little odyssey in the middle of a podcast episode? Dude, I've had, I've had, I've had episodes where I've literally gone on journeys around,

• 2:28:08Chris Williamson?

  oh, fuck, like, okay, what am I gonna say? I gotta go through this thing and I'm trying to put this together. Meanwhile, what's coming out of your face is, everything's fine. It's totally sweet. Everything's cool. And inside of your mind, you're going,

• 2:28:20Chris Williamson?

  fucking screaming, trying to hold on. That's what, I mean, look, that is what,

• 2:28:26Chris Williamson?

  the first time going on Rogan is like. The first time going on Rogan is a three hour panic attack masquerading as a conversation. That's what it feels like. And then you get off and you're like,

• 2:28:38Chris Williamson?

  what the, what the fuck did, what did I say? I think we talked about, I think we talked about Mike Tyson and, oh my God, did I give away my address?

• 2:28:48Chris Williamson?

  But honestly, dude, it's fucking, it's wild. And, um, the craziest thing that you'll already have had, I'm sure, but will continue to have is like, here's, here's a point. Mark Zuckerberg, when he woke up on the morning to do your podcast, there'll have been a bit of him that was like, fuck, this kid's smart. Like, I should be a bit nervous. Like, or maybe it's, one of his staff said to him, like, maybe he didn't know. I don't know.

• 2:29:14Chris Williamson?

  Are you like, oh, that means that you get to be the anxiety attack inducing Joe Rogan for other people and that'll get worse. And I remember the fact, I can't remember who it was. The first time it ever happened, it was a virtual one. I was still back in the UK and someone was a fan of the show. And I was like, oh, that's really cool. And they've, Mentioned, maybe as we started, like, I'm a real fan, it's a real honor to, to, to talk to you. Thank you very much. That's very kind. Let's get into it. And then they finished up, dude, I gotta tell you, I was very nervous before I started today. And I'm like, what?

• 2:29:48Speaker 01

  I know.

• 2:29:48Chris Williamson?

  Why?

• 2:29:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's crazy.

• 2:29:49Chris Williamson?

  Like, what the fuck are you doing? Like, you're the expert.

• 2:29:52Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:29:52Chris Williamson?

  Like, the token retard in the room. Like, what are you talking about? But this is, I guess, I guess for, you know, anyone who wants to climb the hierarchy of any industry that they're in. If you're a young person, you have idols that you look to. And if you achieve the thing that you want to achieve, if you actually do the thing that you're setting out to do, those idols turn into rivals after a while. And then they go from rivals into being friends and maybe even collaborators.

• 2:30:18Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 2:30:18Chris Williamson?

  And it's this weird arc where

• 2:30:23Chris Williamson?

  the, like, particular strata that you thought that you were in, you're sort of moving,

• 2:30:30Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:30:31Chris Williamson?

  wiggling through it. You go like, fuck, I'm subs at Tony Blair. What the fuck am I doing? Subs at Tony Blair?

• 2:30:39Speaker 01

  There's also, the, the most surreal and gratifying thing has been, I, I mean, I was in college not that, like, when we were talking about that meetup, I was in college. And I was just, uh, uh, on the side, I would be like, reading these books by these scholars that I really respected and, oh, God, if they even like saw cold email that I'd written, not that I would often dare to, but if I did, I would be like, so delighted. If they mentioned me on their blog, if I wrote something, I mean, I couldn't even imagine that.

• 2:31:10Speaker 01

  And now to have those exact same people be friends, be people who I'm having discussions and debates with, who are

• 2:31:19Chris Williamson?

  Who see you as a contemporary.

• 2:31:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, it, it is like, there is nothing more, just like,

• 2:31:26Speaker 01

  Heart, you know, heart pleasing, just like more satisfying.

• 2:31:31Speaker 01

  And also just that happening so fast because nothing is special about me, but just because this medium affords a level of virality and growth. And public facing credit.

• 2:31:45Chris Williamson?

  Yep.

• 2:31:45Speaker 01

  Which others don't.

• 2:31:46Chris Williamson?

  Personal accountability. Well, that's a lovely reframe. I think everyone has this sense, especially in the hyper viral growth loop, speed run of fame thing that everyone has a little bit of, like even I have a degree of ick around kind of the pace of change. And I'm sure that you do too, or it's like, ah, fuck, like, there's a lot of exposure going on here and it feels very, very aligned with me. But there's a little bit of me that's like, fuck, like this is a lot. There's a lot of like 800. I remember I used to feel anxious if the 24 hour plays ever went over a million. Whenever they went over a million, there was this thing that went in the back of my mind. I was like, oh my God. And that happened for about two years. And it would be fine if it was 500,000. And then if it was a million, 48 hour, you know, the 48 hour play thing on YouTube and it would go up.

• 2:32:31Chris Williamson?

  And I'm like, what am I, why am I feeling this way? And I realized this ambient anxiety was just the sense that lots of people are watching you.

• 2:32:38Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:32:38Chris Williamson?

  And.

• 2:32:38Speaker 01

  At the same time.

• 2:32:39Chris Williamson?

  Yeah. And I'm like, ah.

• 2:32:40Speaker 01

  There's not only a stadium of people watching you when you're like performing, like at any given moment.

• 2:32:47Chris Williamson?

  You're asleep and it's happening.

• 2:32:48Speaker 01

  There's a stadium like right now watching you.

• 2:32:50Chris Williamson?

  Still going.

• 2:32:51Speaker 01

  Great, yeah.

• 2:32:51Chris Williamson?

  And um, that, that dissipated a little bit. So anyway, everyone has this kind of scrutiny, people looking thing, degree of I don't want to be sold out. I don't want to have perverse incentives of distracting me away from what the main mission was ruining my taste, ruining my gut instinct, all that stuff. And um, then.

• 2:33:16Chris Williamson?

  Your point there that not not becoming known by lots of people, not becoming popular in the circles of people who are popular, but being respected by people that you respect.

• 2:33:29Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 2:33:30Chris Williamson?

  Is what everybody, really in any industry where they're curious, I think should be trying to get toward like they genuinely care about what you think. They think he thinks that my idea is cool.

• 2:33:44Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:45Chris Williamson?

  He thinks that guy who is a

• 2:33:47Speaker 01

  Legend.

• 2:33:48Chris Williamson?

  Super genius, right? Like, like a fucking divine

• 2:33:51Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:52Chris Williamson?

  Human thinks that I have something

• 2:33:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:33:57Chris Williamson?

  Interesting to say. You're like, all right, I challenge anybody to find a fucking problem with that. Right? It's not shallow. It's not cloying. It's not sycophantic. It's not gamesmanship. It's I went away and had a unique insight and a perspective on this thing that I cared about, that they also cared about, and they hadn't fully thought about it

• 2:34:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:34:20Chris Williamson?

  before. And I got to contribute. I got my name put in a my first academic paper. Like someone cited an idea that I that I came up with to do with evolutionary theory around mating. This happened twice now. It happened first time, it happened the second time. I was like, this is fucking unbelievable. I remember when I read Evolution of Desire by David Buss, and now he's put me in this paper. And it's like, it's so fucking sick. Like me, retard from the north of the UK, like getting, and you know, this cool shit you can do. But remembering at least the more that I try to

• 2:34:55Chris Williamson?

  keep the, I don't know what you call it, like virtuous flexes? As opposed to kind of the shallow flexes of subscriber count or revenue or how many tickets you've sold to a live show, how many people turned up to a meetup and stuff like that. Like, that's still cool, but it doesn't give that same, like you said, sort of warm heart delight of someone I respect respects me.

• 2:35:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, a hundred percent. And even looking at a number on a screen go up.

• 2:35:26Speaker 01

  You know, it's like, whatever, it'll go up 10x. And then that becomes your default. And you know, there's a certain point where you go from zero viewers to like 100. And that is like, okay, people are actually watching. And after that, it just orders of magnitude, right? A zero goes up, another zero goes up, another zero goes up. Nothing fundamentally changes in your life. There's a respect of the people you respect, which is uncorrelated to those numbers. There's also the feeling where even if it's not people you respect, but just meeting them in real life, just people on the street, they see you, they're like, oh, I love your content. And it's very easy to just get sort of used to that. But sometimes you pause and you think like, that's a real human being. And they've, often do you have this thing where they're like, pull the phone towards you and they're like, I'm listening to you right now.

• 2:36:11Chris Williamson?

  Right now, yeah. Some guy did that outside of Flower Child last night. It's like, dude, that's fucking sick.

• 2:36:17Speaker 01

  And that is like, a real human being is spending so much of their time. Hopefully you're contributing, it seems like you're contributing to their intellectual growth, their understanding of the world. And I mean, I think about, it wasn't that long ago, I was in college, I was a teenager, whatever. I would drive around listening to Sam Harris, like, teach me. How much that contributed to me being curious about the world, having different viewpoints, being like, changing my career trajectory, not just before I became a podcaster, I was gonna, I was studying computer science and I was gonna be a programmer.

• 2:36:50Chris Williamson?

  Followed in the footsteps of Sam Harris to become a podcaster.

• 2:36:55Speaker 01

  I was gonna be a programmer after that, and then I decided, oh, that's getting automated. I'm gonna make the more financially responsible decision. Go into podcast.

• 2:37:02Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, the ripples are fucking wide, dude. You really, you really don't know. And I think that this is, it's the bull case for just producing stuff. Because you don't know, especially when you start, you don't know what's good. Like, this might be, I feel like this might not be totally shit. And you kind of don't really know.

• 2:37:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:37:23Chris Williamson?

  And after a while, if you get enough positive feedback and you're diligent and you refine and you update and you keep going, actually, yeah, it is, it was all right.

• 2:37:33Speaker 01

  It might not be good, but that's like, that's the reason you do it. I had a very interesting, I interviewed Scott Alexander on my podcast and I had a very interesting

• 2:37:42Speaker 01

  conversation with him towards the end where I asked him, how many great new bloggers do you discover a year? And he said, you know, I'm the order of one. And he's, I asked him, okay, how soon after you have discovered them, does the rest of the world discover them? It's like, maybe a couple of months, usually less than that. So again, go speaks of this dynamic where as soon as you are making good content, I think you might, or not you, but somebody listening might underappreciate the extent to which it will immediately be seen by all the people you want to see it. It might not happen immediately, but like genuinely, it's shocking how fast good content.

• 2:38:17Chris Williamson?

  Well, think about how by design, most content that gets consumed, the biggest, most widely distributed stuff goes to the biggest number of people, right? The channel with the most views has the most views. What a shocking insight. But what that also means is that if you, as a viewer, have peeled off from the biggest channel to watch this fledgling small thing and it's captured your attention, it's got to be really, really, really fucking good to be able to do that. And you have to assume, like, it kind of goes back to what we were saying earlier on, that if your instinct drives you toward a thing, you have to assume that some non-zero number of other people are probably interested in it too.

• 2:39:02Chris Williamson?

  The same thing goes as a viewer. It's like, if you thought it was good, probably like some other people will think that it's pretty good as well. And if this person's just a bit consistent, like I would actually say, Substack for me has one of the highest densities of as yet undiscovered talent out there. And maybe it's just that the particular sort of format and language of Substack lends itself to me. I quite like pithy stuff and I like the feed and I like the fact that most articles are about 10 minutes long. And like the, my attention span can run about, hold on to that.

• 2:39:38Speaker 01

  You're way ahead of the rest of us.

• 2:39:40Chris Williamson?

  Yeah, that's true. That's true.

• 2:39:43Chris Williamson?

  But I'll find people on there, like some of the people that I've been subscribed to, I've been subscribed to for like three years. And now they're blowing up. I'm like, it was obviously a fucking matter of time. Like it was obviously gonna happen, but by design, it can't happen to everyone.

• 2:39:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 2:39:58Chris Williamson?

  So it's the same thing as the, why is it that the people that I'm friends with end up doing all of this stuff? I don't think, I don't know, maybe we've both got phenomenal taste, just not sartorially.

• 2:40:08Speaker 01

  I've noticed in people in other industries say the exact same thing. You know, I'll ask like the CEO of a big company,

• 2:40:15Speaker 01

  or they'll mention that they were friends with. The other CEOs who are now running all the big companies back when they were college students and not even necessarily the same college. It's just like they saw each other. How the fuck did this? Yes. Group come together? Exactly. And they don't know. Is it just, is it just that game recognizes game? Is that just it? I don't know. I think maybe not a lot of people do stuff. Because if you're doing things, uh, you will meet the people who are also doing stuff. Hmm. Yeah. It's weird in the, how, um, weirdly small the world ends up being. How many, um, I'm, I don't know. I, I, I'm friends with a couple of people in San Francisco, uh, who I

• 2:41:00Speaker 01

  now have had on my podcast and are, I don't know. I was, okay, this is a funny story. This, maybe the fourth or fifth person I interviewed on my podcast, I never released this, but it was in 2020, was, uh, Leopold Ashenbrenner. Uh, I was like 19 and I think he was 17 or something. Do you know, do you know who this guy is? No. He wrote this memo called situational awareness, this long blog post that went super, super viral. Situational awareness? Yes. Okay. Um, and it, it was like the most popular thing on AI ever in over the last two years. Okay. Uh, and he was like a, a 17 year old at Columbia and we've been friends since then. But anyways, you, you know, one of these things where like, how did that happen? Right? How did we know each other for so long? That's happened to me so many times. Uh, it, it's sort of uncanny. What was his name?

• 2:41:45Speaker 01

  Leopold Ashenbrenner. Leopold Ashenbrenner. And there's so many others, like, um, all the AI people that I've had on the podcast are just people I like met at a party through two, three years ago, researchers, whatever, Sholto Douglas or Trenton Bricken or so forth. I, yeah, maybe you're right. Maybe it's just that most people don't produce stuff. Yeah. And that by producing stuff, you inevitably separate yourself out. And there's a feedback loop where like you actually get input from the world, you meet mentors, uh, that puts you on this upward trajectory. Hmm.

• 2:42:17Chris Williamson?

  And especially if it's good. Yep. If the thing's good and if you're improving. You show potential. Yeah, I mean, like I say, that Elliot kid I met the other day, Jack, Neil.

• 2:42:27Chris Williamson?

  Fuck, he's 20. This Elliot guy is 20 years old. Podcast called Next Generation, I think. And I'm having this chat with him. I'm like, you do realize that this shit that you're asking me as a 20 year old is stuff that I only asked myself like three years ago. Like these questions about the balance between inputs, outputs and outcomes. The realization that he'd sort of attached a sense of sacrifice and and difficulty with being worthy and validation. And that was something, this was like this Gordian knot he needed to cut through. I'm like, who the fuck are you? Like, how, how, and obviously you're going to be great. Obviously, you're going to be successful.

• 2:43:06Chris Williamson?

  And George Mack, George, I met George, fuck, 2019, 2018, 2019. I remember sitting down, he'd sent me a message when I went to his office to interview one of his bosses. And he sent me this DM and the DM said on Instagram, cold DM. We'd never spoken. I didn't know where he worked, didn't know who he was. I hear you're coming into my office today, full stop. Lexic, let's exchange Google Chrome extensions. And I was like, this is my fucking guy right here. He stinks of me. Sure enough, half a conversation with him. He was way more interesting than his boss that I sat down to speak to. And we've, we moved to Dubai together. He's just moved to Austin. He's going to live with me. Like, we've been best friends for fucking six or seven years.

• 2:43:49Chris Williamson?

  He's just got a huge, huge book deal to write this thing that he built out of an essay. The essay was what he launched on my podcast. So we did this episode at the back end of last year that came out in March. He's just about to announce, he's got this book that's coming. I'm like, and it's my manager that's doing his book deal. Like, again, the incest fucking wheel, human centipede of stuff keeps going. And yeah, this is just, it's one of the areas that. You know, me and you can continue to pontificate about, we know cool people and isn't it fun and all the rest of the stuff like we can keep going. But I, what I really hope

• 2:44:28Chris Williamson?

  that people take away from this is if you put yourself out there and if you are able to discern good work from bad work and virtuous people from non virtuous people and industrious people from non industrious people and you are able to contribute to that, like literally the sky is the fucking limit because the step change opportunities that will come along by somebody being there and being able to contribute, give you the intro and help you along with your thing and you doing that. And then, okay, this is the scene. Like this is now the fucking scene. Um, it's really cool and it's very gratifying and it's gratifying in a way that doesn't make me want to have a shower after, you know, like, like, like

• 2:45:11Chris Williamson?

  a, an episode doing really big numbers is really great and gratifying, but not in the same way as someone going, dude, that fucking, that idea that you came up with about, that was sick. Yeah. You're like, okay, I'm going to think about that for the next three weeks. Thank you very much. Yeah. A hundred percent. Fuck yeah. Dude, I appreciate the hell out of you. I'm so happy to see what you're doing. Uh, Dwol Cash Podcast, people should go check that out. Substack as well? Yes. DwolCash.com. DwolCash.com, dude. Appreciate the fuck out of you. Thank you. Appreciate you, man. Thanks for having me on.