How to Find Happiness and Success: Insights from Influential Thinkers

two one boom all right we're live thank you very much for doing this man i really

appreciate it i've been absorbing your information and listening to you talk for uh quite a while now so it's uh it's

great to actually meet you thanks for having me my pleasure my pleasure you are one of the rare guys

that is uh you're a big investor you are um you're deep in the tech world but yet you seem to have a very balanced

perspective in terms of how to live life as opposed to not just be entirely focused on

success and financial success and tech investing but rather

how to live your life in a happy way that's a it's a it's not balance yeah you know i think the reason why

people like uh hearing me is because like if it's like if you go to a circus and you see a bear right that's kind of

interesting but not that much if you see a unicycle that's interesting but you see a bear on a unicycle that's really

interesting right so when you combine things you're not supposed to combine right people get

interested it's like bruce lee right striking thoughts philosophy plus martial arts

and i think it's because at some level all humans are broad we're all multivariate but we get summarized in

pithy ways in our lives and at some deep level we know that's not true right every human basically is capable of

every experience and every thought uh you know you're ufc comedian commentator podcaster but you're also more than that

you're also father uh lover you know thinker etc so i like the model of life that the

ancients had the greeks the romans right where you would start out and when you're young you're just like going to

school then you're going to war then you're running a business then you're supposed to serve in the senate or the

government then you become a philosopher there's sort of this arc to life where you try your hand at everything

and as one of my friends says specialization is for insects right so everyone should just be able to do

everything and so i don't believe in this model anymore of trying to focus your life down on one thing you've got

one life just do everything you're going to do i couldn't agree more and i i think that

sometimes people find certain success in whatever the endeavor is and then they think that that is their niche and they

stick with it and they never change and they almost out of fear well it's hard because there's a you

know the analogy around mountain climbing like if you find a mountain and you start climbing you spend your whole

life climbing it and you get say two thirds of the way and then you see the peak is like way up there but you're two

thirds of the way up you're still really high up but now to go the rest of the way you're going to have to go back down

to the bottom and look for another path nobody wants to do that people don't want to start over yeah and it's the

nature of later in life that you just don't know the time so it's very painful to go back down and

look for a new path but that may be the best thing to do and that's why when you look at the greatest artists uh and and

creators they have this ability to start over that nobody else does like elon will you know be called an idiot and

start over doing something brand new that he supposedly is not qualified for or when madonna or paul simon or you two

come out with a new album their existing fans usually hate it because they've adopted a completely new style that

they've learned somewhere else and a lot of times they'll just miss completely so you have to be willing to be a fool

and kind of have that beginner's mind and go back to the beginning to start over if you're not doing that you're

just getting older yeah i mean i don't even know if it's willing to be a fool it's just to me that the most exciting

thing is to try to get better at something to learn things i mean it's really exciting when

you just have incremental progress and something that you're completely new to yeah i live for the aha moment that

moment when you connect two things together that you hadn't connected together before and it fits nicely and

solidly and it kind of helps form a steel framework of understanding in your mind that you can then hang other ideas

off of that's what i live for yeah it's like curiosity fulfilled and it's what little children do too you know my

little son is always asking why why why why why and i always try and answer him and half the times i realize actually i

don't really understand why i just have a memorized answer for you but that's not really understanding

yeah those are weird conversations right when you're you're talking to your kids and you say look uh the reality is i

don't know a lot of things yes i've just memorized a lot of things and there's certain things that you just

can't know yeah you realize that you know you have you have answers for a few things that

you've thought through then you sort of have cover-ups like like trap doors like don't go here this is just a cover-up i

don't really know the answer to what the meaning of life is or how we got here yes and then you've got a whole bunch of

memorized stuff because a lot of your uh a lot of intelligence these days just the external brain pack of civilization

i know it's out there i know the answers are out there know how to look them up and i've memorized some of them and i i

kind of understand how money works and the federal reserve prints it and what this government thing is but not really

right so not good enough to teach it in university yeah yeah

uh i think people do that with almost everything in life these days in terms

of like have a like a one page a one cheat like a brief summary of what and the explanation for what this very

complex subject might be tldr right don't give me the don't give me the lecture give me the book don't give me

the book give me the blog post don't give me the blog post give me the tweet don't give me the tweet i just i already

know yeah i got really fascinated by the way you read because i thought there was something wrong with me by doing that

but you you don't really just read a book to completion you read and then you pick something else up and you just kind

of go based on your whims whatever you're interested in well i was raised by my i was raised by a single mom in

new york and she used the local library as a daycare center because it was a very tough neighborhood and so she would

basically say when you get back from school go straight to the library and don't come out

until i pick you up late at night so i used to basically live in the library and i read everything i read every

magazine i read every pictograph or every book or every map i just ran out of stuff to read i just read everything

so i got over this idea of that reading a large number of books or reading a book to completion as a vanity

metric because really when people are putting up photos on twitter instagram of look at my pile of

books that i'm reading it's a show-off thing it's a signaling thing yeah sure and the reality is i would rather read

the best hundred books over and over again until i absorb them rather than read all the books right yeah because

your your brain has finite information in a finite space you get enough advice it all cancels to

zero there's a lot of nonsense in books out there too so

i don't read anymore to complete books i read to satisfy my genuine intellectual curiosity

and it can be anything it could be nonsense it could be history could be fiction it could be science it could be

sci-fi these days it's mostly sci-fi philosophy science because that's just what i'm interested in

but i will read for understanding so a really good book i will flip through i won't actually read it consecutively in

order and i won't even just even finish it i'm looking for ideas things that i don't understand and when i find

something really interesting i'll reflect on it i'll research it and then when i'm bored of it i'll drop

it or i'll flip to another book thanks to electronic books i've got 50 70 books open at any time in my kindle

or ibooks and i'm just bouncing around between them it's also a little bit of a defense

mechanism to how in modern society we get too much information too quickly and so our attention spans are very low so

you get twitter you get instagram you get facebook you're just used to being bombarded with information so you can

take that to you you can view that as a negative and be like i have no attention span or you could view that as a

positive i multitask really well and i can dig really fast i can if i find a thread that's interesting i can follow

it through five social networks through the web through the libraries through the books and i can really get to the

bottom of this thing very quickly it's like the library of alexandria that i can research at my disposal so i i no

longer track books read or even care about books read it's about understanding concepts yeah you brought

up two awesome points first of all the the social media aspect of of books and basically anything it's like

it's such a weird way to display your life because it's you know you're displaying the best aspects of your life

and some sort of a glass case you know just it's an unrealistic

version of your life that you cultivate and you curate and i'm i'm as guilty of that as anybody

everybody's guilty of it i'm guilty of it too yeah you know i mean i pose with my dog every time i run

yeah we're always signaling yeah it's like rather than really looking at yourself you're looking at how other

people look at you so it's like this one remove mental image and it's kind of a disease because social media is making

celebrities of all of us and celebrities the most miserable people in the world right because they're this strong

self-image that gets built up it gets built up by compliments every time somebody pays you or me a compliment and

we're like oh well thank you right then that builds up an image of who we are and then one idiot comes along one out

of ten one out of a hundred and they can easily tear it down because it doesn't take many insults to cancel out a lot of

compliments and now you're carrying around this big weighty self-image and it's just very easy to be attacked and

because you're you're famous or you're well known people want to attack you so being a celebrity is no good it's

actually a problem like one of my tweets is and these are all reminders to myself is you want to

be rich and anonymous not poor and famous there's benefits to it of course of

course but we wouldn't do it it has unusual problems that you don't get trained for

and you really will not understand unless you experience it you know i was having this conversation with my wife we

were talking about um people that just come up to you and they don't care what you're doing they don't care if i'm with

my daughter if i'm holding her if i'm feeding her for you know we're in the middle of an intense conversation she's

crying she could be crying and some bro will come over and just immediately have to take a picture doesn't care his needs

supersede the daughter and my wife was saying i that before she knew me she used to think that that's

just part of the price of being famous that people people like you that's just part of the price being famous and now

when it interrupts her life and you know it interrupts the children and it interrupts friends and you know she now

she's like this is annoying like this is not this is not healthy this is not a smart way to to interact with people and

that people have this weird challenge this weird thing that if you're if you become famous there's this weird

challenge where people just want to come to you especially today because if they can get a photo of you then that boosts

their social media profile like hey i'm sitting here with the vault look at that smile

anonymity is a privilege on the other hand it's self-inflicted i mean we brought it on ourselves yeah we don't

think we knew what it was though we did but we carry on so yeah it tells us we are getting something out

of it so i you know there are times when someone will approach me in public and i'm a little resentful and there are

other times i'm just like actually i'm really grateful that you know i worked for this i got this right this is the

payoff just embrace it smile grit and bear it but you have a different sort of celebrity too right you're you're a hero

amongst investors and amongst i mean you've just i'm a hero

among young male geeks which is those are some of my favorite people right but that's not the kind of

celebrity i think most people set out to get especially most guys right right right you want the cute females yeah

yeah i look at my brief little youtube clips i have a tiny little podcast going now and it's like 95 mail oh sure yeah

this is very highly 18 to 35. yeah we what do we what is the numbers yeah it's in the 90s yeah um you you did

that one you do that one very small podcast where you just have small like three or four minute clips

yeah so what it was i i did a tweet storm uh called how to get rich without getting lucky and it got pretty popular

in twitter and it's really about wealth creation i just use the clickbaity title and it's trying to basically lay out

timeless principles of wealth creation that if you absorb them you become the kind of person who can create wealth

create business make money and my theory behind that is like there are three things everybody wants

there's actually more than three but let's just start with three the three basics everybody wants to be wealthy

everybody wants to be happy and everybody wants to be fit and i know there's a lot of virtue

signal that goes on like we don't want to money and you know i don't care about being happy and happiness is for stupid

people but let's face it like you want to be rich and happy and healthy that's the trifecta now of course you also want

an internally calm state of mind you want a loving household so there are other things that come into it but those

three i think they can actually be taught right and the fitness i'm not going to teach there

are a lot of people who you've had on here including yourself who know a heck of a lot more about fitness and health

than i do but i was born poor and miserable and uh i'm

now pretty well off and i'm very happy and i don't and i worked at those and so i've learned a few things there are some

principles and so i try to lay them out but in a timeless manner where you can kind of figure it out yourself because

at the end of the day i can't really teach anything i can only inspire you and maybe give you a few hooks so you

can remember things when they happen or put a name to them so this podcast actually ended up explaining this tweet

storm so there's a tweet storm with like 36 38 tweets got very famous got translated to dozens of languages

and these were principles that i came up with for myself when i was really young around 13 14

and i've been carrying them in my head for 30 years and i've been sort of living them and over time i just

realized like sadly or fortunately the thing that i got really good at was looking at businesses and figuring out

the point of maximum leverage to actually create wealth and capture some of that

and do it in a very long-term kind of way not let the you know banker crash the economy get filled out kind of

way but you know build businesses and help people and provide value kind of way

especially when applied to modern technology and leverage in this age of infinite leverage that we live in

so the podcast is just explaining each tweet so these are little three four five minute snippets

i don't like to say the same thing twice i don't like to explain in detail i just i i feel like if you have

something original and interesting to say you should say it otherwise it's probably been said better so that

podcast tries to be information dense it tries to be very concise it tries to be high impact it tries to be timeless

and it has all the information i think you need the principles that if you absorb these and you work hard over 10

years you get what you want so i've got the one on wealth creation i'm going to attempt to do one on

happiness is a big word but you know happiness and inner peace and calm and all that because what you want is you

don't want to be the guy who succeeds in life while being high strung high stress and unhappy and leading the trail of

emotional wreckage with you and your loved ones which is more common than not yeah because you got to focus and it's

very hard to be great at everything you want to be the guy or the gal who gets there calmly

you know quietly without struggle uh you want to be the person who's the

when there's a crisis going on you want to be the calmest coolest cucumber in the room who still also figures out the

correct answer um if you can be you were one of the things that you were saying is that you feel like happiness is

something that you can learn and then you can teach yourself to be happy even just by adopting the mindset that you

are a happy person and proclaiming that to your friends and so you've sort of developed a social contract i'm a happy

person and i have to live up to that yeah i've got hundreds of techniques but then how did you develop that one

well there's just a there's social consistency right humans have a need to

be highly consistent with their past pronouncements so the way i started my first tech company was i was in working

inside a larger organization and i told everybody that i was going to go start a company i was like i hate this place i'm

going to do my own thing i'm going to be successful entrepreneur six months past nine months pass then people start

you're still here i thought you were going to go start a company are you lying right that was the

implication so we kind of know this right social contracts are very powerful like if you want to give up drinking

right and you're not serious about it you'll say i'm going to cut back i'm going to have only one drink a night i'm

going to only drink on weekends you tell yourself but if you're serious you'll announce it on facebook you'll tell all

your friends you'll tell your wife you'll say i'm done drinking i'm throwing everything out of the house

you'll never see me drink again when you say that you know you're serious so i think a lot of these are choices

that we make and happiness is just one of those choices and this is unpopular to say because

there are people who are actually depressed you know chemically or what have you and there are people who don't

believe that it's possible because then it creates a responsibility on them it says oh now if i'm you're saying if i'm

not happy that's my fault i'm not saying that but i'm saying that just like fitness can be a choice health

can be a choice nutrition can be a choice working hard and making money can be a choice happiness is also a choice

if you're so smart how come you aren't happy how come you haven't figured that out that's my challenge to all the

people who think they're so smart and so capable if you're so smart and capable why can't you change this

there are a bunch of people though that actually take pleasure in being miserable

there's something about the pursuit of excellence and of success that supersedes all other

pursuits that in in their eyes it is it is that the peak

the pinnacle the most important thing it's not a trade-off i would argue that if now when i say

happy happy is one of those words that means a zillion different things right it's like love right what does that mean

right i love cheese yeah i'm going to define it a little bit more tightly right

so let's go back to desire right this is old old buddhist wisdom i'm not saying

anything original but desire to me is a contract that you make with yourself to be unhappy until you

get what you want okay and i keep that in front of mine so when i'm unhappy about something i look

for what is the underlying desire that i have that's not being fulfilled it's okay to have desires you're a biological

creature you're put on this earth you have to do something you have to have desires you have a mission but don't

have too many don't pick them up unconsciously don't pick them up randomly don't have thousands of them my

coffee is too cold doesn't taste quite right i'm not sitting perfectly oh i wish it was warmer uh you know my dog

you know pooped in the lawn i didn't like that whatever it is pick your one overwhelming desire it's okay to suffer

over that one but on all the others you want to let them go so you can be calm and peaceful and relaxed and then you'll

perform a better job most people when you're unhappy like a depressed person

it's not that they have very clear calm mind they're too busy in their mind their sense of self is too strong

they're sitting indoors all the time their minds working working working they're thinking too much well if you

want to be a high performance athlete how good of an athlete are you going to be if you're always having epileptic

seizures if you're always like twitching and running around and like jumping and your your limbs are flailing out of

control the same way if you want to be effective in business you need a clear calm cool collected mind warren buffett

plays bridge all day long and goes for walks in the sun he doesn't sit around like constantly loading his brain with

non-stop information and and getting worked up about every little thing we live in an age of infinite leverage

what i mean by that is that your actions can be multiplied a thousand fold either by broadcasting at a podcast or by

investing capital or by having people work for you or by writing code so because of that the impacts of good

decision making are much higher than they used to be because now you can influence thousands or millions of

people through your decisions or your code so

a clear mind leads to better judgment leads to a better outcome so a happy calm peaceful person will make better

decisions and have better outcomes so if you want to operate at peak performance you have to learn how to tame your mind

just like you have to learn how to tame your body i love what you're saying warren buffett

might not be the best example because he drinks like i think six coca-colas a day and he eats mostly mcdonald's and he's

still alive somehow so that shows you that low stress is more nobody looks like [ __ ] like how old is he

i mean he's he's a fairly old man charlie mungers i think in his 90s right yeah he's made it really far i wonder

what warren's doing you know i mean just he's got to know that's bad for him but it's terrible he doesn't care he doesn't

care i think he's just a little stressed yeah stresses right so he just enjoys that coca-cola and that's probably

maybe there is a trade-off right like maybe him enjoying that junk food and that coke just ah

that that pleasing of the mind is maybe better than him just eating wheatgrass shots and yeah and

salads and just being yeah just super worked up about everything it's like if you need your glass of red wine to

de-stress and calm down that's probably better than you flying off the rails right right and i think that that's

applicable not just in business but in probably any pursuit and i like what you're saying about allow that one thing

to be your obsession but everything else just you know learn how to learn how to let things go pick

your battles and we like to think that we we like to view

the world as linear which is i'm going to put in eight hours of work i'm going to get back eight hours of

output right it doesn't work that way guy running the corner grocery store is working just as hard or harder than you

and me how much output is he getting what you do who you do with how you do it way more important than how hard you

work right outputs are non-linear based on the quality of the work that you put in the right way to

work is like a lion you don't you and i are not like cows we're not meant to graze all day right we're meant to hunt

like lions we're closer to carnivores in our omnivorous development than we are to herbivores um we don't tell vegans

that yeah sorry look i wish all that stuff worked i don't want to eat meat this future

generation will look back at us as worse than slavers you know because the holocaust we're committing with the

animals but they'll have artificial meats that taste and are healthier is uh better than the real thing so allegedly

allegedly but so as a modern knowledge worker athlete as an intellectual athlete you want to

function like an athlete which means you train hard then you sprint then you rest then you reassess you get

your feedback loop then you train some more then you sprint again then you rest then

you reassess this idea that you're going to have linear output just by cranking every day at the same amount of time

same that's that's machines you know machines should be working nine to five humans are not

meant work nine of are not meant to work nine to five no i agree wholeheartedly but that's it

for people that are working for someone there's not really that option

so that's unfortunately the the rub right that's kind of where my tweet storm starts which is

first of all the first thing if you're going to make money is that you're not going to get rich renting at your time

even lawyers and doctors who are charging three four 500 an hour they're not getting rich because their lifestyle

is slowly ramping up along with their income and they're not saving enough uh they just don't have that ability to

retire so the first thing you have to do is you have to own a piece of a business you

need to have equity either as an owner an investor shareholder or a brand that you're building that

accrues to you to gain your financial freedom yeah and

i was really fascinated by another thing that you were bringing up about working for yourself that you feel in

the future whether it's 50 or 100 years from now virtually everyone is going to be working for themselves and i believe

the way you put it is that the information age is going to reverse the industrial age yeah if you go back

to hunter-gatherer times how we evolved we basically work for ourselves we communicated and cooperated within

tribes but each hunter each gatherer stood on their own and then combined their resources with the family unit but

there was no boss hierarchy hierarchy hierarchy or you're like the third middle manager down

in the farming age we became a little bit more hierarchical as we had to run farms but even those were still mostly

family farms it's industrial work with factories that sort of created this model of thousands of people working

together on one thing and having bosses and schedules and times to show up the reality is if you have to go i don't

care how rich you are i don't care whether you're like a top wall street banker if you have to go if somebody has

to tell you if somebody can tell you when to be at work and what to wear and how to behave you're not a free

person you're not actually rich so we're in this model now where we think it's all about employment and jobs and

intrinsic in that is that i have to work for somebody else but the information age is breaking that

down so ronald kos is an economist who has this coase theorem a very famous theorem but it basically just talks

about why is a company the size that it is why is a company one person instead of 10

people instead of 100 instead of a thousand and it has to do with the internal transaction costs versus the

external transaction costs let's say i want to do something let's say i'm building a house and i need

someone to come in and provide the lumber i'm a developer right do i want that to be part of my company or do i

want that to be an external provider a lot of it just depends on how hard it is to do that transaction with someone

externally versus internally if it's too hard to keep doing the contract every time externally i'll bring that in-house

if it's easy to do externally and it's a one-off kind of thing i'd rather keep it out of the house

well information technology is making it easier and easier to do these transactions externally it's becoming

much easier to communicate with people gig economy i can send you small amounts of money i can hire you through an app i

can rate you afterwards so we're seeing an atomization of the firm we're seeing the optimal size of the firm shrinking

it's most obvious in silicon valley tons and tons of startups constantly coming up and shaving off little pieces of

businesses from large companies and turning them into huge markets so what looked like the small little vacation

rental market on craigslist is now suddenly blown up into airbnb one example

that's a great example but what i think we're going to see is

whether it's 10 20 50 100 years from now high quality work will be available we're not talking about driving an uber

we're talking about super high quality work will be available in a gig fashion where you'll wake up in the morning your

phone will buzz and you'll have five different jobs from people who have worked with you in the past or have been

referred to it's kind of like how hollywood already works a little bit with how they're organized for a project

you decide whether to take the project or not the contract is right there on the spot you get paid a certain amount

you get rated every day or every week you get the money delivered and then when you're done working you turn it off

and you go to tahiti or wherever you want to spend the next three months and i think the smart people have already

started figuring out that the internet enables this and they're starting to work more and more remotely on their own

schedule on their own time on their own place with their own friends in their own way and that's actually how we are

the most productive so the information revolution by making it easier to communicate connect and

cooperate is allowing us to go back to working for ourselves and that is my ultimate dream even when i run a company

and i have employees i always tell those people hey i'm going to help you start your company when you're ready because i

think that's the highest calling maybe not everybody will get there but it would be fine if we were even working

a ten person company or twenty person company is way better than working in a thousand person company a ten thousand

person company so this idea that we're all factory like cogs in a machine who are specialized and have to do things by

rote memorization or instruction it's going to go away and we're going to go back to being small groups of creative

bands of individuals setting out to do missions and when those missions are done we collect our money we get rated

and then we rest and reassess until we're ready for the next sprint has there ever been a study

done on happiness and as it regards the size of companies not that i'm aware but to me it's

obvious it's just obvious the smaller the company the happier you're going to be the more human your relations are the

less you have rules to operate under the more flexible the more creative the more you betray like a human just

because you're able to do multiple things yeah um this brings me to

what is a subject that keeps getting brought up nowadays is universal basic income

with the oncoming apocalypse of automation this is how it's being portrayed by andrew yang

who's running for president i sat down and talked to him about is very compelling

and he's a very smart guy and he's an entrepreneur himself and when he starts talking about automation and how it's

going to just eliminate massive amounts of jobs and leave people stranded what do you when i know you're a guy who

thinks about the future and i'm going to take this popular point of view on this i don't i think it's a non-solution to a

non-problem [Music] and i mean that in the sense that

automation has been happening since the dawn of time electricity came along that put a lot of

people out of work did it right a lot of people carrying buckets of water and you know lighting lamps and all those kinds

of things and this was the concern with factories as well apps everything literally every single thing that comes

even the printing pros absolutely and what it does is it frees people up for new creative work so the question is not

is automation going to eliminate jobs there is no finite number of jobs we're not like sitting around dividing up the

same jobs that we're around since the stone age so obviously new jobs are being created and they're usually better

jobs more creative jobs so the question is how quickly is this transition going to happen and what kinds of jobs will be

eliminated and what kinds of jobs will be created it's impossible looking forward to predict what kinds of jobs

will be created if i told you 10 years ago that podcaster was going to be a job or that you know playing video games is

going to be a job or commentating on video games is going to be a job you would have laughed me out of the room

those are nonsense jobs but yet here we are so society will always create new jobs civilization creates new jobs but

it's impossible to predict what those jobs are so the question is how quickly is that transition happening

well the reality is even though everybody keeps talking about this automation apocalypse we're at a record

low unemployment explain that where's the transition donald trump that's hard

all i'm saying is it's it's i don't see it in the numbers i don't see it actually happening the question

is how quickly can you retrain people so it's an education problem the problem with ubi there's a couple of problems

with ubi one is you're creating a straight you're creating a slippery slide

transfer straight into socialism right the moment people can start voting themselves money

combined with a democracy right it's just a matter of time before the bottom 51 votes themselves everything in the

top 49. yeah and it just it and by the way slippery slope fallacy is not a fallacy and i know

people like saying that but they haven't thought it through um but the moment you start having a direct

transfer mechanism like that in a democracy you're basically doing it with capitalism which is the engine of

economic growth you're also forcing the entrepreneurs out or telling them not to come here

the estimate i saw for 15k a year basic income for everybody would be three quarters of current gdp and of

course gdp would shrink in response as all the entrepreneurs fled so you would essentially bankrupt the country

another issue at ubi is that people who are down in their luck they're not looking

for handouts it's not just about money it's also about status it's about meaning and the moment i start giving

money to you and put you on the dole i've lowered your status i've made you a second class citizen so i have to give

you meaning and meaning comes through education and capability i have you have to teach a man to fish not to basically

throw your rotting leftover carcasses at him and say here eat the scraps so it doesn't solve the meaning problem and

lastly it's nonsense to hand 15k out to everybody you want to means test people there's no reason to give it to you and

me so you end up back towards the welfare system where you do have to figure out who needs it and who doesn't

so i think the better route is that we actually establish a set of basic substance services that you have to have

and we provide those in abundance to technology-based automation so get basic housing get basic food get basic

transportation get high-speed internet access get a phone in your pocket those are the kinds of things you want to give

people and finally in terms of the rate of automation i think we can educate people

very quickly one of the myths that we have today is that adults can't be re-educated we view education as this

thing where you go to school you come out when you're out of college and you're done no more education well

that's wrong you have all these great online boot camps and coding schools coming up they're ones that will even

pay you to go there now you can educate people and mass and you can educate them into creative

professions people who are talking about ai automating programming have never really written serious code

coding is thinking it's automatic structure thinking an ai that can program

as well or better than humans is an ai that just took over the world that's end game that's the end of the human species

and i can give you arguments why i don't think that's coming either people who are thinking and i know i

take the opposite side from some very famous people in this debate but we're nowhere near close to general ai not in

our lifetimes you don't have to worry about it even in our lifetimes really it's so overblown uh it's it's

another it's a combination of cassandra complex you know it's fun to talk about the end

of the world combined with a god complex like people who have lost religion so they're

looking for meaning in some kind of end of history right right um the reason why i don't think ai is coming anytime soon

is because a lot of the advances in so-called ai today are what we call narrow ai they're really pattern

recognition machine learning to figure out like what is that object on the screen or how do you find this signal

and all that noise there's nothing approaching what we call creative thinking

to actually model general intelligence you run into all kinds of problems first we don't know how the brain works at all

number two we've never even modeled a paramecium or an amiibo let alone a human brain number three there's this

assumption that all of the computation is going at the cellular level at the neuron level whereas nature is very

parsimonious it uses everything at its disposal there's a lot of machinery inside the cell that is doing

calculations that is intelligent that isn't accounted for and the best estimates are would take 50 years of

moore's law before we can simulate what's going on inside a cell near perfectly and probably 100 years before

we can build a brain that can stimulate inside the cells so putting it at saying that i'm just going to model neuron is

on or off and then use that to build a human brain is overly simplistic furthermore i would posit there's no

such thing as general intelligence every intelligence is contextual within the context of the environment that it's in

so you have to evolve an environment around it so i think a lot of people who are peddling general ai the burden of

proof is on them i haven't seen anything that would lead me to indicate we're approaching general ai instead we're

solving deterministic closed set finite problems using large amounts of data but it's not sexy to talk about that if you

you're talking about mirroring the actual abilities of cells or are you talking about recreating the actual

mechanism like what what what is going on inside cells and and biological organisms yeah

we just don't know how intelligence works right we don't know we literally have no idea so most of the

ai approaches basically say we're going to try and model how the brain works but the model at the

neuron level which is saying this neurons on that neurons often combining their signal but i'm saying in the

neuron is a cell inside the cell there's all this machinery going on that's operating the neuron that is also part

of the intelligence apparatus you can't just ignore that and abstract that out you have to model it down to the in

inside the cell level it's also a part of the biological organism itself exactly and it has all these needs that

you know the biological organism has to have food and rest and exactly there's a balance going on but when you eliminate

all that when there is none of that and it's just calculations and we get to a point where it's just

this thing that we've created whether you call it a computer whether it doesn't have to be a moving thing even

but a thing that you've created that stores virtually all the information that's available in the world stores all

the patterns of all the thinking of all the great people that have ever lived all the the writers all the people that

have ever published anything all the people that have ever spoken any words stores all of their points all their

counterpoints all their contradictions applies logic and reason

and some sort of sense of the future and starts improving upon these patterns

and then starts acting on its own based on the information that it's been provided with

well first you would have to actually simulate a structure the human brain that can hold all that information

you're basically talking about tens of thousands of brains worth of information right we can't even build one brain the

next decade or two or three well in terms of an actual physical brain yes but what about something that recreates

the abilities of a brain like i said nature is parsimonious so we've got this three pound wet wear

object that can hold all this data nature has been very efficient in evolving kind of how we get there

i i just don't think computers are anywhere close to that like they can hold that amount of data with that

complexity with like the holographic structure of the brain where it can recall in many many different ways

and then i don't think you can evolve a creature to be intelligent outside of the

boundaries of feedback in a real medium like if you evolved if you raised a human being a concrete cell with no

input from the outside they wouldn't have any feedback from the real world they wouldn't evolve properly so i think

just dumping information into into a thing isn't enough it has to have an environment to operate in to get

feedback from it needs to have context but isn't that biological i mean what if you if you have just the all the

information that people have accumulated and the lessons that people have learned and you program that into the computer

like if if we can take a computer that can beat someone at chess the the real question was well can we make some sort

of an artificial intelligence could beat someone at go which is far more complex of chess they figured out how to do that

too and that was a giant shock right these are still man-made very closed bounded games

they're they're not they're not on the road to the unbounded game of life they are completely artificial but this

didn't go didn't that give you like a little bit of a pause a little bit go is not go or

league of legends or fortnite they're not completely deterministic right but they're still very artificial very

bounded games being good at go doesn't mean that you can then suddenly figure out how to write great poetry right the

creativity for sure is something that's creativity is the last frontier so i do believe that automation over a long

enough period of time will replace every non-creative job or every non-creative work but that's great news

that means that all of our basic needs are taken care of and what remains for us is to be creative which is really

what every human wants yeah what are you doing right now this is a creative job sure

um that that brings us back to the idea of meaning and universal basic income uh i think the idea of giving someone

15 000 a year doesn't necessarily cause whatever what everyone would worry

about is people being on the dole you would have a bunch of listless people out there with no meaning in life but

the idea is that fifteen thousand dollars a year and i'm not necessarily sure i agree with this i'm not even

endorsing this but that fifteen thousand dollars a year would just provide you with the necessities to get by in life

it would give you food it would give you shelter well it's not gonna stop at 15 because the moment people are like i

mean like 15 like then people would demand more bernie sanders would be on this 16 7 45 thousand dollars yeah these

companies are too big yeah that could it doesn't it doesn't stop it's just it just goes all the way to bankruptcy the

concern is the slide to socialism it's obvious yeah i mean heck if i was on if i was not working and i was

getting my 15 a year i would happily vote for the guy who would give me 20 or 25 it's just common sense what do you

say to the people that don't believe that there is such a thing of ethical as ethical or compassionate capitalism and

there's many people today that are espousing marxism and they're espousing some sort of a socialist society where

they believe that capitalism has screwed people over and eliminated

the middle class and there are absolute problems with capitalism i think monopolies are a problem

i think that uh crony capitalism is a problem with the government you know kind of gets in bed with them and sort

of forces things uh i think the bankers have really you know raped society and the rest of us are suffering for it yeah

they've essentially taken huge risks where they privatize the gains and they socialize the losses so when it fails

they basically get billed out and bankrupt everybody else so capitalism has gotten a really bad

name let's talk about its free exchange free markets free markets and free exchange are

intrinsic to humans from when the first person started a fire and somebody came along with a deer and said hey if i cook

my deer on your fire i'll share some of it with you right so specialization labor we trade that's built into the

human species basic math comes from accounting keeping track of debts and credits and so on we need to be able to

engage in free trade the correct criticism of capitalism is when it does not provide equal

opportunity and so we should always strive to provide equal opportunity but people confuse that with equal

outcome when you have equal outcome that can only be enforced through violence because different people free people

make different choices and when they make different choices they have different outcomes if you don't let them

suffer the consequences of bad choices or reap the rewards from good choices then you are forcibly redistributing

through violence it's interesting that there isn't there are no socialist working socialist examples

that exist without violence you basically need someone to show up with a gun and say okay you're not allowed to

do that you hand this over to that person so one of the reasons why this podcast is because i believe everybody

can be wealthy everybody it's not a zero-sum game it is a positive sum game you create something brand new you

exchange it with me for something brand new i've created this higher utility for both of us the sum of the value created

is positive it's not like status where it's like you're higher up i'm lowered down your president so must be vice

president you're a plus one i'm a minus one and has to cancel a zero we should all be all for playing

positive some ethical games the problem is because of these looters who have ruined

capitalism's name that then you get socialists coming in and saying burn the whole system down right you burn the

whole system down we end up like venezuela or the former soviet union you know you don't want to be a failed

socialist states with emaciated teens hunting cats in the streets to eat right that's literally what happens in some of

these places so i think it's very important not to destroy the engine of progress that

brought us here yeah the idea that socialism just hasn't worked yet that it needs to the we just need to do

it right if we do it right we can if you ever 100 million dead and yeah yeah well let's keep trying all over the world

yeah and and every single time it's been implemented have you ever had a conversation with

someone who's a socialist who where many times some of my better friends are socialists really we really get into it

yeah and what is there i mean does anyone have a compelling perspective at all

i i think really socialism comes from the heart right you all we all want to be

socialist capitalism comes from the head because they're always cheaters in any system

yes and there's incentives in any system so when you're young if you're if you're

not a socialist you have no heart when you're older if you're not a capitalist you have no head right you haven't

thought it through so i understand where it comes from i always liked nassim taleb's framing on this where he said

with my family i'm a communist with my close friends i'm a socialist uh you know at my state level politics i'm a

democrat at you know higher levels i'm a republican and at the federal level i'm a libertarian right so basically the

larger the group of people you have massed together who have different interests the less trust there is the

more cheating there is the better the incentives have to be aligned the better the system has to work the more you go

towards capitalism the smaller the group you're in you're in a kibbutz you're in your commune you're in your house you're

in your tribe by all means be a socialist with my aunts with my brother with my cousins with my uncles with my

mom with your family i'm a socialist that's the right way to live a loving happy

integrated life yes but when you're dealing with strangers i mean you want to be a real socialist great open all

your doors and windows tomorrow please everybody come take what you want see how that works out yeah

this idea of income inequality that always strikes me as a very it's a deceptive term

income inequality well let's flip it around it comes from outcome inequality yeah and the outcome

inequality is there because you made different choices now again going back if it was because you didn't have the

same opportunities that's a problem yes so society should always try to give people equal opportunities so for

example instead of basic income what if we had a retraining program built into our basic social fabric which said that

every four years or every six years or whatever it is maybe it's every 10 you can take one year out

and we'll pay for you to go retrain completely and you can go into any profession you like that has some

earning power and output hopefully a creative long-term profession and you can re-educate

yourself that would be much better for society on all levels than basically just saying

now you're going to be the dole for the rest of your life yeah you just you'd have to

lead that horse to water and then make them drink it requires people to put in some effort yeah you know we can't all

just sit around it's just not well that's my my perspective on income inequality there's always effort in

equality and and thought inequality there's just some people that are obsessed and if

those people become successful it doesn't mean they stole from you it just means that they put in the amount of

energy and effort that it's required to reach where they're at and there's a lot of virtue signaling that goes on now

where people say well it's because you're privileged well you know you know what the greatest

privilege is you're alive 85 of humanity is dead yeah so how privileged are you then you're living in the first world

and you're you know you have four limbs etc so you can take that argument all the way it's kind of a nonsense

discussion what's a very weird progressive argument and it as it pertains to uh race is always a weird

one right because white privilege to me it although it you could look at what they're saying

on paper like yes yeah i'm sure there's more black people that are harassed by the police i'm sure there's

more black people who are treated suspiciously by shop owners and the like but the problem isn't the people who

aren't treated poorly the problem is the people who treat the people poorly the problem is racism the problem is not

people that didn't ask to be born white or whatever they are and they don't get harassed

so this idea of white privilege or male privilege or whatever it is that's not the problem you're just looking at

someone who's not a victim of this particular problem that you're highlighting but you're not looking at

the perpetrators of the problem you're making people perpetrators by simply existing and having less melanin in

their skin or having their ancestors come from actually it's a sneaky way of being racist yeah

and then they say you can't be racist it's not racist because you're white that's right that is this hilarious if

you can't be racist against white people that one that's what there's a variation of the whole still while i hit you

argument you know stop struggling while i'm hitting you but it's just so silly you've just completely changed what

racism means but what's hilarious is mostly the people who are yelling racists are not the minorities when i

look on my twitter my social media or on my news it's white on white violence virtue signaling yeah it's white on

white violence yeah what's mostly going on is its elitist whites blue state whites college educated whites beating

up on high school educated whites blue collar it's a white collar versus blue-collar war that's going on and the

rest of us are just kind of watching like oh that's kind of interesting well it's also a side effect of the ability

to broadcast right like everyone with a twitter handle has the ability to broadcast everyone with a facebook page

has the ability to pontificate and have these long rambling these huge statements that people put

out when you you read them it's like how much time did you put in this what the f do you put that much time in your kids

or your job or your job or your life or your future or planning for your you know how much do you work out a day i

mean are you just these some i read some people's facebook posts i'm like this is a preposterous amount of effort that you

put into saying virtually nothing let's see humans are being creative yeah and ai do that well that's true it is

creative it's it's creative in a very odd way right because it's creative and that they're trying to elicit a response

from people and they're trying to raise their their social value or raise their their position on the social totem pole

it's signaling and it's easy signaling because the kind of thing that everybody has to agree with you on because nobody

wants to be seen as a horrible person yeah and it's very hard to make the nuanced arguments against than it is to

just kind of go along right well it's also it's some of it is so cliche that it seems like

i i know one guy who poses as a woman on on twitter but he does it just obviously yeah uh what is this the name tatiana

mcgregor yes yeah yeah used to be godfrey elwick yes oh is that

the same guy i think so yeah that's hilarious i did not they killed his account they

killed his account for 100 sure for pretending to be transracial that's right they did yeah

he basically says all the crazy stuff that people in the left say but he says the craziest version yes and kind of

just shows how it's okay like i saw a tweet from recently just said or her that it's not okay to be white yes

and then some people agree but it's it's so close to what they say it's so close that it's like the most artful form of

subtle parody because it's well if you if you replace in half of these things if you replace the word white with black

or asian lynch yeah yeah it's

it's a strange time in that respect that there's a favor saying that if you want to see who rules over you

see who you're not allowed to criticize excellent yeah that is a that's so true right yeah that's so true i wonder where

this is going i really do i wonder because this is it seems like this newfound ability to broadcast that we

have with whether you have a youtube page or whether you have twitter or whatever

you're doing this newfound ability to spread whatever you're trying to say to so many people with very little

understanding on the most part from i think it's actually a great thing overall yeah now it means that any human

can broadcast any other human on the planet at any time so for example if you know a totalitarian dictator were to

come to power and someone was beating up you know had fascists beating up on old women like that would get broadcast out

instantly there would be an instant outrage hue and cry rallying so in that sense it helps bring attention to the

plight of anybody but right now we're going through the phase

where we have this newfound power to assemble mobs and people don't know how to deal with

that so it becomes very easy to set up a mob and have it attack somebody take all the context out like even this

conversation i'm sure people will take out snippets put them on social media and try and get somebody outraged of

course and so you have to learn how first of all society just has to get over this idea of outrage like to me

like outraged people are just people who get easily outraged are the stupidest people

on social media those are the people i block instantly uh it's just kind of very low level thinking right these are

the foots of the these are the foot soldiers and the mob eventually society just has to get over

it they have to understand that these are all snippets being taken out of context these are doctored video clips

these are just someone who's trying to get outraged over something eventually there'll also be anti-mob

tactics like for example if if i go to someone's twitter feed and all it is is full of polit political

ranting raving conspiracy theories do i want to work with this person do i want to associate with this person do you

want to be friends with this person their mind is just cluttered with junk now i don't necessarily blame them i

think that the human brain is not designed to absorb all of the world's breaking news

24 7 emergencies injected straight into your skull with clickbait headline news if you pay attention to that stuff even

if you're well-meaning even if your sound of mind and body it will eventually drive you insane this goes

back to clockwork orange where he's you know has his eyes opened up he's forced to watch the news but i think that's

what's happening right now because these are addictive right twitter facebook instagram these are

weaponized you have social statisticians and scientists and researchers and people in lab coats literally best minds

of our generation figuring out how to addict you to the news yes and if you fall for it if you get addicted your

brain will get destroyed and i think this is the modern struggle right the modern struggle so the ancient struggle

used to be the tribal struggle you had your tribe of friends and family you had your religion you had your country you

had your loyalty you had your nationality at least you had meaning and support but now you would struggle

against other tribes modern life we're so free everything's become atomized we stand alone you live

in your apartment alone you live in your house alone your parents don't live nearby your friends don't live nearby

you don't have any tribal meaning you don't believe in religion anymore you don't believe in country anymore it's

fine you got a lot of freedom it's fantastic but now when they come to attack you

you're alone and you can't resist so how do they attack you it's all well-meaning i don't fault capitalism i love

capitalism but look at how it happens social media they've

massaged all the mechanisms to addict you like a skinner's pigeon or a rat who's just gonna click click click click

click can't put the phone down the food they've taken sugar and they've weaponized it they've put it into all

these different forms and varieties that you can't resist eating drugs right they've taken pharmaceuticals and plants

and they've synthesized them they've grown them in such a way that you can't you get