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The line that got me that cinched it for you was, "I will be your last human chief of staff."
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>> There's a few parts of the job that is just kind of like bullet holes through your attention during the day.
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It's essentially just nuking your ability to concentrate on one meaningful thing.
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An AI that can just take all of that sort of meaningless cognitive weight, you know, off of the human.
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There's there's no point for me me or anyone else to be doing that.
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We are an AI first company.
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Anything that can be done by AI should be done by AI.
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Welcome back to Infinite Loops. I'm Jim Oanaughy.
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Today's guest is Jean Mark Dius. He is an amazing artist.
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He is an amazing programmer and he is one of the highest agency people that I've ever met.
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Please enjoy my conversation with Shawn Martin.
1:01
Let's do your superhero backstory because when we were chatting before we decided to record, uh, we both agreed that your CV, unless you had a nutcase like me, being able to not pay I didn't even look at your CV to be honest, but when when I learned of it after hiring you, I'm like, "Huh, wow. you.
1:22
It's pretty cool that you got this job.
1:26
>> Yeah, it's, you know, it's it's kind of like hyperstition, but I I never even would have gone for a job like this to be totally honest.
1:32
But the situation here is much different than what I think most uh chief of staffs would be dealing with.
1:42
So, it's uh I I think it it it dubtales well not nicely into the you know, the fact that I don't have a traditional CV for this kind of position.
1:51
Well, the position is also a bit different than what I think most chiefs of staff might might be accustomed to. >> Yeah.
2:00
And you know, we although we use the terms, we are essentially in real time trying to create a completely new sort of company.
2:09
Um, you know, AI first in all of our verticals, everything that we're doing.
2:14
The line that got me that cinched it for you was, I will be your last human chief of staff.
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elaborate on that a little bit.
2:24
>> Well, there's a few parts of the job that, you know, like any job is like this is a little annoying.
2:29
Like particularly with email, like there's there's so much that is just kind of like bullet holes through your attention during the day when it's like you you check five emails and then all of a sudden by the time you're done with the fifth, you have like six more and it's like, all right, I'm not getting anything done.
2:45
Like, yes, email is a useful communicative tool, but it's there's a huge trade-off there because it's essentially just nuking your ability to concentrate on one meaningful thing that actually has ROI for a given period of time where you can actually make progress on it.
3:01
I think AI can handle a lot of that shenanigans that happens in emails where it's like, all right, I guess I needed to read this.
3:08
I guess I needed to be updated on this.
3:11
I would much prefer, you know, at the end of the day and at the be or at the beginning of the day I check a little app that I've I've built and it's like here are, you know, a little ticker tape of things that I need to know that have been aggregated from emails that I haven't actually gotten to since I last looked at it.
3:30
And here's like a, you know, a short list of meetings and then my highest priority items.
3:34
So like integrate a to-do list into it.
3:36
And so then an AI that also has the context of all of my priorities, my personal priorities, my work priorities, and then the priorities of the company can, you know, crunch all of that and then give me like a short list of things that I should work on.
3:53
It's like, all right, you have a lot of meetings today.
3:55
You have a few a couple of emails that will require some time.
4:00
So you don't actually have much time for any any like deep work.
4:05
So, your to-do list has been reshuffled to reflect that.
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And so, it's like, all right, here's a few little easy things that have, you know, been on the back burner that you can just knock out with the little bit of available time that you have.
4:17
And then the next day, it's like, all right, I got one meeting in the morning.
4:20
Um, emails are kind of light, block off this huge thing, and tackle this this next big phase of, you know, a project, like a coding project that I'm working on.
4:29
So, an an AI that can just take all of that sort of meaningless cognitive uh weight, you know, off of the human would be great because there there's no point for me me or anyone else to be doing that kind of thing.
4:45
>> And uh you definitely uh avoided my question about your superhero backstory. So, we can truncate it.
4:50
What sing and like you've done so many different things which I find super cool.
4:55
What one of those things that you did do you think was the most helpful for you the role you occupy now?
5:06
>> Oh man, playing with Legos when I was a kid maybe. No.
5:08
Um, actually, you know, my first entrepreneurial uh endeavor was actually accidental and slightly illegal.
5:18
Um, I was living in Vancouver in a tiny studio apartment and I remember I'd gotten like a like a decent paying job and like two months in I looked at my my bank statement.
5:29
I'm like, why do I have no money?
5:32
And I I look at my credit card statement.
5:34
I was like, whoa, booze is like really expensive in Vancouver.
5:37
And you know, my reaction to that was, well, how hard can it be to make whiskey?
5:45
And so I spent the next nine months studying, you know, uh, separation sciences and built a six-foot fractioning column complete with a gram condenser in my tiny studio apartment and distilled my own vodka, gin, rum, and whiskey, even barrel-aged the whiskey myself.
6:04
And it wasn't until I was doing my first run and I like actually tasted this, got it up to 94% um, ethanol.
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I tasted it, I was like, "This is good."
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And um I had a friend over at the time and they were like, "Is this legal?"
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And I was like, I didn't think about that at all.
6:22
Um but I'd also spent like quite a bit of money building this copper still.
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And so I wanted to make my money back.
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Um so I I may have traded a few boxes of of booze for uh money with some friends. So, >> so, so wait.
6:41
So, the headline is Jim being chief of staff of Ushanasy Ventures, the best prior skill I got was from bootlegging.
6:53
>> Well, I mean, it was essentially a complete business um that was founded on on a an experiment of curiosity that required a lot of tinkering and a lot of like hands-on building in order to get it to work.
7:06
it to work. So is this a initial question of like well how hard can this be and of course you know Hoffsitter's law it always takes much longer than you think it will especially when you take into account Hoffet's law but then it you know it it developed into like this this
7:24
business experiment that well you know I'd had all of these costs and it's like well I want to now I want to recoup these costs a little bit and so you know I was young at the time and it it was I never really thought of starting a business at the time. Obviously, it
7:38
Obviously, it wasn't a legitimate business.
7:39
It was just like really like a a a hobby, but it was it was the first time that I I made something that earned an unexpected dollar in that in that sense.
7:49
Um, and so I think the the lessons involved in that entire little hobby experiment extrapolate really well to pretty much every product or service or business experiment that um I've run since and have run since that I since I've come on board here.
8:09
So it's like all right, what if this is a cool idea, but what will the ROI on it be?
8:14
Is this actually going to move the needle?
8:16
Is this actually like a decent business experiment or is this really just fulfilling some curiosity?
8:23
Fulfilling curiosity can be great.
8:25
It can be useful because it can it can lead into unexpected unknown unknowns where you can find, you know, a little bit of gold and then it's like, all right, we you know, kind of like the the Bell's lab where it's like, all right, a whole bunch of scientists just do cool stuff and then they uncover all sorts of things that eventually do have higher ROI.
8:42
But that all being said, I I think it is good to every sort of like proposal or idea go through that, you know, litmus test of like can we see a viable ROI here. >> Yeah.
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And you know basically what we uh believe is there there is gold in them their tales.
9:04
Uh but a lot of people aren't operating there because of a variety of reasons.
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you know, it's like for example with AI lab, uh we think that we're going to be able to develop some very commercially successful uh software that people will use and love, but we have kind of an edge in that no VC would touch it because the market isn't big enough, right?
9:31
They I I think one of the troubles that traditional enterprises get into is they get captive of their own jargon, right? And so what's the TAM?
9:44
>> The total addressable market.
9:44
Oh no, that's not big enough.
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And plus they're constrained by the fact that every investment that a traditional VC makes essentially they they needed to return the fund and we are not under any of those uh problems. >> Yes.
10:01
It's kind of like they have they have incentives that create scope paralysis.
10:04
So they can't they can't zoom into something that would actually be very much worth their while um because of those incentives that you outlined and then because of that that kind of becomes in habit.
10:15
So if they move into some other area they might still have those like you know their their zoom is basically stuck.
10:23
Um whereas here there's just so much freedom in terms of like well how high could that go?
10:28
you know, how low can we address it and still like a meaningful ROI even, you know, even if something's like just an internal tool doesn't have immediate ROI, but it has like, you know, once you compare it to an industry standard, so you know, and then you you scale that, you know, um across time, it's like, oh, actually, this is going to save a ton of money over time.
10:49
Um, so yeah, I do think about scope paralysis quite a bit.
10:53
And it's often the mis the very mistake that I'm making when I'm trying to work on something and I'm stuck.
10:58
I often have to be like, "All right, you know, I got to shake my head out of out of the grass and like stand up and be like, "All right, bird's eye view. What's going on?"
11:09
>> And and I think also uh we're a fairly interesting crew here in that like if you are not a highly agentic person, you're not going to make it here, right?
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like I I I'm not running a kindergarten and neither are you.
11:24
And uh so I there's a lot of people who think that like writing furiously about something and posting it on social media that shows them whereas that's value of that is precisely zero for most endeavors.
11:41
Um like what's it feel like?
11:47
What's it feel like to you?
11:48
You you've worked at a bunch of different places.
11:50
One of the things that we try to do here is, you know, show me you you're very good at that. >> Yeah.
11:57
You I had an idea that I bounced off you based on something that Jimmy said in one of the monthly meetings and I bounced the idea off you and your response was sounds really cool.
12:06
Like write up a proposal for it.
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And so I went home that weekend.
12:11
I was like, I've never written a proposal for anything.
12:16
Uh, I guess I'll take a shot at this.
12:18
And I was like, "Oh, it'd be really cool if I could get like show what the UI of this thing would look like."
12:22
And so I whipped out my iPad.
12:24
I started drawing it, but then I was like, "Oh, you know, actually, it might just be faster if I just code up the UI real quick." And so I did that.
12:31
And once I had like it on the browser, I was like, "Well, you know, I'll take a shot at the back end, just see how far I get."
12:39
And so Monday morning rolled around.
12:41
I was like, I don't know if you remember.
12:43
I was like, Jim, uh, so you you asked me to write a proposal and um, I didn't do it. You were like, okay.
12:50
I was like, but but I built a working MVP.
12:54
Do you want to check it out?
12:56
And you were you were thrilled.
12:58
So that developed into a tool that we use almost every day.
13:01
uh now you know meeting about a meeting in order to think about a proposal and then to another meeting for someone to decide who's going to write the proposal and it's like when are we eventually going to get to like the interesting part which is like someone actually does the thing.
13:19
So I, you know, that's why I've always been a little bit, I guess you could say, allergic to corporate culture because it just seems like a lot of meetings and nothing gets done where I'm much more of the okay, that's great. Leave me alone.
13:34
I would like to actually take a crack and and get something working and see how useful it is and then we can get feedback on it and, you know, we can actually build something meaningful.
13:44
Um, that's the number one thing that I think I love about being here, but perhaps maybe not having the traditional CV.
13:53
Also, the these go hand in hand because I'm I just never wanted to go through all of these jump through all these hoops in order to like build a CV in order to get this kind of job.
14:07
It's like, no, I was always much more concerned with like, no, I I just want to actually do things that are interesting and give me real feedback as opposed to more gold stars. >> Yeah.
14:19
Well, even when I was in a more traditional environment, I think, you know, 80% of internal corporate meetings are maspatory um and a total waste of time.
14:30
And and I I think the challenge with that is that people think that they're accomplishing something.
14:38
You know, I had, you know, I had 10 meetings today. Who the [ __ ] cares?
14:43
Did you do anything today?
14:43
And you know, as part of the series that we never really kind of got off the ground, the great reshuffle.
14:52
Um like I think all of that and and I started that I don't know 2018 uh where I got the sense where we are going to go through the biggest transformation in the way businesses are run who wins who loses the old playbooks we're going to stop working and we've already seen that um and and then kind of aligned our verticals around things where I saw the greatest arbitrage ability so for example example, Infinite Books.
15:23
Uh, a lot of people hate the book business um, and think, "Ah, that's not a good business."
15:32
And, you know, the way it currently exists, they're probably right.
15:36
Uh, but the way we are reinventing it kind of, um, you know, we we toy with the word, not even calling it publishing, but an author's operating system.
15:48
Um, and it it amazes me a simple thing.
15:55
We AB test all of our covers, right?
15:57
And you and I just had an experience.
16:00
Um, where the cover that both you and I were not happy with, won the whole team hated it.
16:07
And yet, again, maybe it's my empirical quant background, but if the market says something and you're saying something else, the market is right.
16:16
and and but I wonder what okay that's the easiest thing in the world for like a Simon and Schustster or one of the legacy publishers to do you think it's this corporate culture that is just endemic to most big company legacy companies where you know it's kind of like having to each upgrade needs to be compatible backward right um we don't suffer under that problem um But I is is it a mixture of things?
16:50
Is it what do you think it is?
16:55
>> I think um maybe two parts from like a a human psychological point of view is like people have way too too high of a tolerance for [ __ ] >> Like just you know you were saying meetings are masturbatory.
17:08
I I feel like that's just you know watering water bordering yourself with [ __ ] And it's like if you have such a high tolerance for that, uh, I don't think that's a good sign.
17:19
And then I think people also just lack imagination where if someone tells you, oh, this is the way that it's been done.
17:26
You know, the iconic class is like, well, I don't care about that.
17:30
Let's find a different way.
17:32
Most people don't react that way.
17:32
Most people are like, oh great, someone just told me what my job is and told gave me a rubric for what I need to do. That's great.
17:41
the if this is the way it's always been done, then it must be tried and true and I I'm golden.
17:46
I don't have to think anymore.
17:49
You know, if if you want to find a new way of doing something, it's cognitively taxing.
17:55
Um and so I think that goes handinhand with, you know, people who can tolerate tons of [ __ ] are are perhaps um talented in the ways of not wanting to think too much in order to >> Yeah.
18:08
Didn't Bertrren Russell or maybe someone of his ilk say that what most people call thinking is simply rearranging their prejudices and and like if you really want to do good work, it's taxing, right?
18:21
Because you got to think deeply and hard about things, but you also have to be willing to just say, "Oh, well, I [ __ ] that one up and what what can I learn?"
18:30
I think there's also that very strong in in traditional corporate culture, the cover your ass mentality and it's just not a good structure.
18:42
You know, it's it it was designed for a completely different era for industrialization and tailorism, which you know how little I think of tailorism.
18:54
But to be fair, for the time that Taylor came up with all of these ideas, they made sense, right?
19:03
Because you were supposed to do one thing.
19:05
You pull that crank, right, on a big industrial assembly line.
19:08
And yet it it took over what we call you know corporate management or those types of things to an extent that people didn't realize that they were it was just in shitification of everything.
19:28
>> I guess I guess constant meetings are like the doom scrolling of the corporate world.
19:33
>> I I mean honestly and and I think that's one of the reasons why like LinkedIn they feel fine over there.
19:42
It's like, oh, he got a promotion. Wow.
19:46
I guess I'll now mimetically become envious of him and TRY TO BRING HIM DOWN.
19:50
I think that we are very fortunate in that um this isn't exactly a startup, right?
19:59
Because we don't have to worry about funding and all those kinds of things.
20:02
And your average startup founder spends what 60% of their time on raising money or keeping investors informed, monitoring the situation.
20:14
And and so we don't have to do any of that [ __ ] And we also have a culture that like bullshitting is not appreciated unless it's like [ __ ] posting or having fun.
20:24
I mean, how many people do you really think right now could thrive in an environment like this?
20:31
So, for example, we'll talk about this right now.
20:33
You you just did uh a post for our Substack uh which is fascinating.
20:39
Uh you told me about it months ago and I rode you relentlessly to write it, but you're a you're a good writer, too.
20:46
And you know, how many places are you chief of staff, but hey, I also want that Substack from you on on uh AI and Egg.
20:54
Talk a little bit about that because I think it was a fascinating idea.
21:00
>> Yeah, first thanks for letting me do that.
21:02
It's a lot of fun to have it broadcasted on the OSverse.
21:03
Uh some really nice feedback on it too so far, which is great.
21:09
So the the basic thesis is that the same argument that you're making about tailorism and how that's infected the corporate world in this overly bureaucratic bloated meetingheavy way >> boans.
21:24
>> If you're if you're a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy fan, you'll know that the Vogans are the most bureaucratic race. >> Yeah.
21:30
And they're they're what?
21:30
They're blowing up the world in order to build a super highway straight through it cuz they don't have the the the dexterity to like I don't know >> question the order.
21:42
>> Question the order or just like build around a planet or solar system like come on guys.
21:47
So very similar to these like if you take that as a an an an analogy or a metaphor for the current way that we do agriculture which is essentially just industrial monocrop farming.
22:02
Um there there's something very similar there because we have these endless rows of the exact same crop and they require like a voggon like contraption to harvest all of it because you know for example I think it's like the calmer 1357 or something is like 32 rows of corn.
22:22
It's basically just this long, you know, um, hammerhead, uh, type device that you put on the front of a tractor and then you run it through 32 rows of corn and it can harvest all 32 rows simultaneously, which is amazing.
22:37
And from, you know, from the point of view of like the industrial revolution, like this is a triumph, but it has come with serious downsides.
22:48
You know, one for example is that in order to have monocropping work, we have to dump like loads of pesticides on these plants in order for them to make it to harvest.
23:00
In the US, we uh the the US applies over 1 billion pounds of pesticides to food every single year.
23:10
this that trickles down to about 3 L pounds of pesticides per person per year, which trickles down to about 11 aspirin tablets of pesticides on your food per day.
23:24
>> And even after you wash food, you still have 75% of the food still has pesticides on it.
23:29
And many of the pesticides now aren't even uh something that you can rub off.
23:34
They're called systemic pesticides.
23:35
So they basically infuse into the the fruit or the food.
23:41
Um so you can't wash it off. It's literally inside.
23:44
And this has health consequences um which I could get into that like even relate to like the GLP1 craze and obesity and whatnot.
23:53
Um but back back to what I think is probably going to happen with the future of agriculture is we're going to get something that's far more dynamic.
24:04
Charles Man is a writer, awesome writer who who published this book called 1491, which details what his best thesis, what North and South America probably looked like prior to the arrival of Europeans.
24:21
And one thing that stuck with me from that book is a an agriculture technology that we don't use today. It's called the Milpa.
24:28
Um, and it's where it's it's a system of intercropping where you plant like a dozen different species together and like for example corn lacks lysine and tryptophen but beans have lysine and tryptophen.
24:45
So if you plant them together you they basically complement one another and what one plant takes from the soil another plant provides.
24:54
And so you essentially get this like fully regenerative system in this little collection of of species that can be harvested basically forever without depleting the land which you know it's kind of like an infinite food hack.
25:08
And the the Aztec Empire, the Inca Empire all used these uh these systems of intercropping.
25:16
And then we basically bulldozed that system and we invented uh monocropping.
25:23
We had to because it had to cater to the machines that we had available as a result of the industrial revolution.
25:30
We didn't have, you know, a tractor that could plow through a milpa and catch 12 different varieties of of plants that are all getting, you know, ripe at or ready for harvest at all different times.
25:44
Like, we don't have a machine that could do that. But we will.
25:50
Like once we have humidored robots, we could transition huge monocrop um fields to essentially food forests that have dozens if not hundreds of different species of food.
26:00
And these fields, these food forests would be attended to by essentially a small army of robotic gardeners because you know the human hand once we have that in fully automated form, it can differentiate between you know a ripe tomato and a ripe avocado and you know all these other things that it's going to interact with.
26:24
to interact with. can also using AI basically run con hundreds thousands perhaps millions of concurrent experiments in order to you know find a little bit more arbitrage in these systems like oh this species does a little bit better for whatever reason if
26:42
it's 2 meters away from this species we don't know yet but it seems to work and then like this species of insect and you know next to this species of um you know tree with this type of mushroom and dandelions here are necessary because dandelions hoover up zinc and selenium and all that sort of stuff. Um we'll be
27:00
Um we'll be able to run those experiments concurrently but then also rebuild the top soil because another thing that monocropping does is it depletes the top soil.
27:11
Top soil an inch of top soil takes a thousand years to build and then in the Midwest we are losing uh what was it?
27:21
I think in an average field we lose two po two tons of top soil per acre and then in in like the Midwest we lose substantially more.
27:31
It it comes down to basically like uh in an average field we lose 11 years of top soil in one year and then in the Midwest where it's you know much more heavily farmed we lose 69 years of top sale soil growth in one year.
27:49
And so with these numbers, you just project them forward, things are going to look really bad in about 50 to 60 years.
27:56
So if we don't figure out a different way to pivot away from monocrop culture, um we're going to run into problems.
28:04
The the other thing about like this sort of milpa style food forest is that you won't need pesticides because you have all of this intraecies competition.
28:14
Um, it alleviates many basically all of the problems that you get with a a huge field of corn which can be just like destroyed overnight by one particular species of bug.
28:24
You just don't get that if you have this diverse ecosystem of plants and insects that are all interacting together.
28:31
So then you can do away the pesticides. The top cell comes back.
28:36
Um, that means that the the the ground can hold more water.
28:38
Like there's just so many benefits here.
28:41
Um, so I I outlined all of that in this future of food.
28:51
>> You know what I love about it too is that it it kind of speaks to our overall thesis brilliantly, right? Monocultures are bad.
29:00
Just in humans, in any variety, when you slip into a monoculture, bad [ __ ] happens.
29:12
using food as the example.
29:12
Um, yeah, for when that was the way it had to be done, that was the way it had to be done because we were limited and constrained by the technology and and the um hardware and and uh rigs available to us.
29:30
But that's no longer the case.
29:30
And part of our thesis is that everything's going to get become customizable and and so can food, right?
29:41
And then, you know, I guess with a tilt to my my fierce anti- athoritarianism, you you've got to look at a system that it goes at things top down.
29:53
And one thinks of course of Mao and the Sparrows.
29:58
And for people who aren't aware of this, Mao decided that he was going to collectivize uh all of the farms in China.
30:06
And he [ __ ] hated those sparrows, too.
30:10
And so they literally killed all of the sparrows in China with disastrous effects because the sparrows were eating the bugs that were destroying the crops, right?
30:27
And it just to me it it makes me go crazy.
30:30
Like people don't think of second and tertiary effects of anything.
30:39
and and then take an ideology that thinks it has the answers to everything and one of them happens to be, yeah, the supreme leader doesn't like those [ __ ] sparrows, so we got to wipe them out.
30:54
And like millions of people starve to death.
30:57
And and so one of the reasons why I'm so incredibly bullish on this new era is it doesn't have to be like that anymore.
31:06
in your uh article is a perfect example of how it doesn't have to be that way anymore.
31:11
And one of our themes is that we are an AI first company.
31:14
Um, meaning that anything that can be done by AI should be done by AI because why should I want you who who's incredibly creative, incredibly productive, like what why should I want you doing like horribly boring and tedious jobs that AI can do much more brilliantly and quickly and all of that.
31:41
And and I sometimes think when I talk to people who are like normies who aren't like looking at this stuff and why should they, right?
31:49
I I get that those inside kind of the AI bubble um you know we we've drunk the Kool-Aid and everything and so you know we we think oh man they're just promoting the hell out of this and maybe they should tone it down a little.
32:03
I think we not promoting it enough because there's a huge class of people.
32:09
this just isn't their thing, right?
32:12
And that's a shame because they themselves, like Steve Jobs very famously said, computer was a bicycle for the mind.
32:21
AI is a rocket ship for creativity, for leverage, for all of these things.
32:27
And that was one thing we aligned on like immediately.
32:33
give our listeners and and viewers some more of your I don't want to steal the credit for your ideas.
32:38
So talk a bit about more of some of the workflows that are just unlocking time talent and and the need for huge overhead.
32:50
Just a to comment on the the normies.
32:53
I I think there's something that could be said about like the school system which you know indoctrinates this high tolerance for [ __ ] and this this >> oh it's totally [ __ ] It's fubar [ __ ] up beyond all recognition.
33:05
[ __ ] up beyond all recognition. Like a good example is I think you know traditional advertising is just it's ve it's it's very much like monocrop culture where you're just spraying and praying at like you know thousands
33:19
millions of people uh with the idea that like oh it'll work for some of them but like for most of them crossed >> yeah fingers crossed but for most of them you're you're actually wasting their time and attention even if it's just like a tiny little bit of a scroll. And it's irritating. And it's irritating.
33:38
>> It's irritating, but it like you you add all of that up over a lifetime and it's like someone, you know, people are wasting just ungodly amounts of just tiny little slices of cognitive attention that could be devoted to, you know, a more fulfilling life.
33:52
And so, like, what's the what's the humanoid robot food forest gardener version of of advertising in that sense?
34:03
It's it's very much like a really great recommendation from a friend where like you know like Liberty or comes to you and is like all right this movie you got to watch it.
34:16
You're going to be like he he never misses so I'm going to watch this.
34:21
The essentially that was an advertisement.
34:24
He just advertised this movie to you but it doesn't feel like that because it feels organic. It feels human.
34:30
it's it's customized to you because a human is behind it.
34:34
Uh whereas, you know, the majority of advertising is just like a bad billboard, which is like, why did I even just look at that?
34:43
Uh oh, I had to because it was on my screen and I had to like click out of it in order to get the thing out, you know, obviously.
34:49
Um, so I think in the age of AI we you know we can use AI to figure out if someone is a like a good fit for a recommendation for something where a advertising doesn't become this sort of like waterboarding the population with something that we want to sell but always but more of like a oh here are the you know 385 people in this pool who've expressed interest and similar things that would be a good fit for this, let's contact them.
35:24
Um, that just seems like a a much better use of everyone's attention um and much less waste.
35:34
So, >> well, and you're being modest.
35:35
Um, like we really drill down and we find not only the the nearest neighbor audience, right?
35:46
We also look at their work and they're like, "Oh, wow.
35:50
Look, he just wrote an essay that he's got to love this book."
35:55
But then we bring up the essay, right?
35:57
And a lot of that, the the reason I feel so comfortable with that is I would welcome that email if somebody like took the time to read What Works on Wall Street, right?
36:10
and they found a book that was really similar but different with a lot of new information.
36:18
And I got an email, you know, kind of citing the findings from What Works.
36:22
Wow, they actually read the book.
36:22
Most people simply use it for personal protection or as a door jam because it's this thick.
36:28
Uh but I I would welcome that, right?
36:32
And and the way we're doing it is, I think, somewhat similar.
36:36
You're probably not going to get an email from Infinite Books, Infinite Films, Infinite Media if if we haven't done our homework on who you are as a person.
36:47
It's all about really trust.
36:49
And I would trust the company that I never got a [ __ ] spammy type email from.
36:57
And you know, I hate I hate the ones, especially the ones who like seem to do it intentionally.
37:07
If you want to unsubscribe, hit unsubscribe and then you're [ __ ] because it's just like they keep coming in and and there's just so many of these annoyances from the previous industrial era that we don't have to have anymore.
37:23
And you know the same is true with the app that we we're just crawling on it right now but the uh recommendation app um because I do believe that like like anything AI is going to bring a tsunami of slop and it will also bring brilliance and masterpieces and everything else but you need people are going to need help right and and so the recommend recommendation thing that we're going to be working on.
37:56
It won't be in the form that I want it in until maybe 2030, 2032, but it will be something that I want, right?
38:04
How cool would it be to be able to open an app first thing in the day?
38:10
Here's the books that you might like.
38:13
Here's the movies you might like. Here's an essay.
38:15
Here's a Substack that you haven't discovered.
38:20
Um, now granted this is the opposite of a mass market, right?
38:23
We we are using a very targeted market um of people, but it's still a big big market.
38:30
Um, and and I anticipate that a lot of our stuff will appeal to not a huge group of people, but that's fine, right?
38:39
Um, that's the other thing that people don't seem to to understand.
38:44
It's like you live under a system for so long.
38:47
So, right, like American TV, the you're familiar with the standard bell curve. 68.
38:54
5% are within one standard deviation of the median. And guess what?
38:59
I Love Lucy has 79 million viewers because it fits right into that distribution of 68. 5%.
39:10
Now, we've already seen this, of course, but there's going to be much more of it.
39:13
There are shows, podcasts, substacks, movies, books, etc.
39:17
that can be enormously profitable, but with a much smaller audience.
39:23
I mean, what was Game of Thrones?
39:25
I I can't think what 18 million watched the finals uh season.
39:28
It It seems that that's a huge arbitrage point that people are just ignoring.
39:36
I've often thought of like the the human species as like a a single entity and what we're doing with all of this scrolling.
39:44
We're kind of like liver cells that are like processing these like you know free radicals and whatnot.
39:52
Um and like you know all of the spam email is basically like inflammation in like the the collective body and it's like all right we need to do something about this.
40:01
about this. like where is the immune response to all of this spam and you know then you get like the arms race between like Google Gmail filters and whatnot and then the spammers like level up their their arsenal and you essentially have you know like this immune battle between these two things that are going on and I I think AI can be become like a you know an antibiotic for a lot of this nonsense in in our culture and the way that we've set up
40:30
our systems um you can just like debloat a lot of this information like like imagine like if I could you know very similar to your c curation app I would love to have an AI just curate like Twitter for me >> and so that like every day I could just
40:46
like open it up and I could get like the 10 posts that would take me 15 minutes to find and and you know like and whatnot or comment on and I could just see those and be like all right that was actually great. Yeah, the the risk there
40:58
Yeah, the the risk there of course is that um confirmation bias, right?
41:05
And I don't know that we want a society where everybody has their own personal bubble.
41:11
So, as part of the curation app, just to stick with that one for a minute, uh we're intentionally going to add things.
41:17
Well, not noise, but it might be noise, but it might be something they're like, "Oh, I never thought about that.
41:25
Maybe I should check that out."
41:27
What other areas do you think like I I personally you know my views on the leverage component of AI?
41:32
Uh but I take it much further as I usually do most everything like I think you can learn a lot with a like the book I'm writing right now as you know um it's a thriller it's a novel but a lot of it is based on realworld things that really exist in the real world um and literally we never formally calculated it out but I think that conservatively it would have taken 10 years to do the amount of research that I did um in nine months. >> Yeah.
42:12
I mean, it depends how many people you were employing there. Exactly. During that 10 years. >> Yeah.
42:17
I mean, you would literally need an army because they'd all have to go to libraries around the world, right?
42:24
Because it's not all centralized.
42:27
Um and it like I wouldn't have done it.
42:30
And and so I think that the the research part, but I also think the writing part, right?
42:36
Like I write everything longhand and then I put it on the thing, but then I put it into AI and say, "Tell me how bad this is."
42:44
And then I'm like, "Okay, you think you can do better? Show me." Yeah.
42:49
And and and so I think that there's always a moral panic when a new technology comes on which crushes the gate that the old talent used to have up, right?
43:03
And and so it's nothing new.
43:08
I It's like all the way back to the novel.
43:10
You know, those manuscript monks were pissed off, man.
43:16
And a you know calculators I experienced when I was a kid.
43:19
Um they were very expensive.
43:22
Everyone thought they were the coolest thing in the world and then they banned them from all the classrooms.
43:27
>> You're not going to have a calculator in your pocket. >> Exactly.
43:29
Well, >> are you sure about that?
43:33
>> But so the pattern of it is the same.
43:37
>> And I think we're kind of in the moral panic period right now. The pearl clutching. Oh, was AI used? Well, come on. get used to it, right?
43:44
Like it shouldn't be and they this is the other thing they always do.
43:49
The the ones who were the kings and stars under the old system when they see their gate being crushed, right?
43:58
Gate gets nuked, then everything becomes about process, right?
44:04
Whereas it should be about outcome, especially in a creative endeavor.
44:06
Did this movie or book or podcast change your mind? Did it inspire you? Did it piss you off? Right.
44:14
It should have some effect on you and and so I just think it's really funny seeing everyone like the process.
44:23
Can you imagine if if we did that with everything? >> Yeah.
44:27
>> Like we'd still be living in caves. >> Yeah.
44:29
It's like you don't need to take organic chemistry in order to talk to Chad GBT about a particular health condition and then go to a doctor with like a really informed opinion and then you get like this smug sort of gaslighty like rebuke from the doctor.
44:44
It's like did you chat GBT that?
44:46
It's like well yes I did but like am I am I wrong?
44:48
Like is is my premise here that I'm proposing to you incorrect?
44:53
And it's like oh but that's not the thing that you're focusing on.
44:56
focusing on how I got to this information.
44:59
Yes, I did use chat GBT and I want some actual answers because now I have like a little bit of context around this which previously most people didn't and then they were just at the at the behest of like whether they had a good doctor or not and whether that doctor was like well informed about whatever the issue was.
45:20
That's that's one of that's been one of my favorite and you know most eyeopening examples.
45:25
You know, you were talking about like using AI to educate.
45:27
Like the amount that I've learned about health since the since JT GBT dropped has been like unbelievable.
45:35
Like the things that I've been able to do personally just like, you know, taking blood tests and like plopping those into uh various AIs and being like, "All right, give me a read."
45:46
Like it's it's been incredible. It's like, "Oh, man.
45:50
I wish I had this like a couple decades ago."
45:53
Well, as you know, you've seen the actual journal from 1983 or whatever >> in which I spend page after page talking.
46:02
I didn't call it AI, begging and pleading for it to come.
46:04
Now, we're enthusiasts, right?
46:08
And and so I doubt that a lot of people out there are going to be doing their own blood work and sending it to, you know, a lab and having it processed.
46:19
But even in in that old 68.
46:22
5% so many lives could be made materially better by just embracing the technology for simple things like learning.
46:31
for simple things like learning. I mean we talked about the school system yet another relic of the industrial era right it was like industrialists saying to the imagine industrialists had had influence on governments the shock
46:47
but basically they're saying to him yeah what we need you to do here is we need the kid to not be curious not be controversial we want them to have a correct answer machine installed in their head and there is only one correct answer and that's the one we are supplying, right? And and you know, it's
47:04
And and you know, it's like >> high tolerance for [ __ ] >> Yeah, high tolerance for [ __ ] There's a reason why I liked uh Pink Floyd's uh song about, "Hey, teacher, leave them kids alone."
47:18
But rather than just go on and rant about it, there are now alternatives.
47:26
And and I think I think it's really easy to root against things.
47:29
And so I always look for things to root for and I think that in the field of AI and across disciplines, right, there is so much to root for.
47:41
I mean I look at my grandchildren and the the ways that they are using AI and it's really clever and you know it's it's one of those unknown unknowns, right?
47:53
And this idea that you know uh did you ever see the movie Matilda?
47:59
Oh yeah, that's a good one. >> Right.
48:02
Like all of my kids love Mau, especially my girls.
48:03
And and I just remember that scene. Why?
48:06
Because I'm big and you're little.
48:09
I'm I'm I'm right and you're wrong.
48:12
I'm the adult and you're the kid.
48:14
you're the kid. It's like that's just so much [ __ ] And we can unlock I mean really what we've done and I get a little extreme here but like school and a lot of current curriculum is designed to crush creativity
48:33
crush I that way of thinking and and it doesn't have to be like that anymore with AI we're investing we've invested in several AI um companies for education What other areas do you think are non kind of intuitive for where AI could be like an amazing unlock? >> Well, u before answering that, just to
48:56
>> Well, u before answering that, just to address something you said about like people criticizing it, like they're so quick to criticize.
49:02
And when I hear a criticism of AI, the first thing I always ask is like, well, how much do you use it? >> Yeah.
49:10
Cuz if if Picasso was in the room and he had a criticism about a a particular paintbrush, I would take that criticism very seriously. >> As would I.
49:21
>> Dude probably knows what he's talking about.
49:22
Whereas, you know, someone who's spent like who's only done like three or four queries on chat GBT and >> the free version. >> Yeah.
49:32
And like, oh, this sucks. It's like, all right. >> Well, they're right.
49:35
The free version does suck. >> Well, yeah.
49:37
It's like, all right, you're clearly an authority on this.
49:39
You're you're kind of like anyone on Twitter who's like whatever the the subject of the day is, you're now an expert in when you actually haven't gone deep on it at all.
49:51
Like, what's going on here?
49:53
We hear a lot about it, but it's almost invisible, which which I think might count as not intuitive.
50:00
Um, like just Tesla's full self-driving AI. >> Yeah. Amazing. unbelievably good.
50:04
Like, >> and sorry, I will interrupt.
50:08
You were the guy who converted me.
50:10
I I I still don't drive a Tesla, but the firm has one, and it's [ __ ] cool.
50:19
>> And like, if you're driving around Midtown Manhattan or downtown here, I like the last time I was with you, I was blown away.
50:26
And you even turned to me and said, "If I was driving, we would have gotten into an accident." Right.
50:34
And so the proof's in the pudding there.
50:37
>> There's been at least twice in the last in the last like 10 months where I'm like, "Oh my gosh, if FSD hadn't been operating like I would I would not >> would have been bad.
50:49
>> Things would suck right now. It would be bad." Yeah.
50:51
But the thing is it's invisible. >> Yeah.
50:54
You can't like like for example when when uh when cars first were first invented it was super visible and obvious like you know 1901 a picture of a Manhattan street was like almost all horses and then like one car in the distance and you know 2.
51:10
5 million pounds of horseshit.
51:13
Um and then like 15 years later it was the complete reverse where you had like a sea of cars and you know one horse in the in the background.
51:19
Um whereas with with AI taking over driving, it's completely invisible because you can be in a regular gas-powered car going down the highway and then someone right next to you is in a Tesla and they are the the Tesla's driving itself, but like it's really hard to tell unless you're like, >> "Oh, they don't have their hands on the wheel and they don't have their foot on the pedal." >> Yeah.
51:46
Um, so I I think that's going to be I I think that's an example of something that's non-intuitive, but which is actually going to have this enormous effect.
51:54
Uh, you know, Tesla's starting to ramp up their robo taxis in in Austin and and and in San Francisco.
52:03
And I I think those are just going to demolish that.
52:05
At that point, it might become slightly more obvious because then you'll see a car driving around with like no one in it. >> Yeah.
52:12
Because, you know, like if you do if you do summon on a Tesla in a busy parking lot, like I've done this a few times where like it the the car is driving itself to me and like it drives past a a pedestrian, they're like, "There's no one in that [ __ ] car."
52:28
Um, but some but some other non-intuitive ways.
52:31
I I just want to make a point about that because I think uh something people often miss is that my thesis is at least that for your everyday person they will be beneficiaries of AI because it is invisible.
52:53
It I think that 101 15 years from now AI will be like electricity.
52:56
It'll just be there and and it will be doing yman's work, right?
53:04
It will be doing heavy lifting, the self-driving car being a great example.
53:09
Uh but people will just get so used to it that, you know, it it it won't even be remarkable anymore.
53:17
>> Well, man, that's kind of the sad thing about technology is that once it becomes a protocol, it ceases to be magical. Yeah.
53:24
Even though if you like went like a century before it was invented and introduced that now protocol thing to them those people, they would be like, "What kind of devil sorcery is this?"
53:36
>> You'd probably be burned at the stake depending on how far back you went. >> Yeah.
53:40
Oh man, it's it's just you would.
53:44
It's just strange how how humans have this like immense capacity for becoming inured to wonder and something that's like truly magical while simultaneously having like very crippled imagination and huge tolerance for [ __ ] We really are such a strange species.
54:05
But we're actually quite pro-human here at O.
54:10
>> But the and of course the classic is uh Louis CK's thing about Wi-Fi in an airplane.
54:17
He had this great bit where he's like, "Do you remember the first time you went on an airplane and they had Wi-Fi?
54:24
How you were like, oh my god, I can't believe it.
54:28
I'm 30,000 ft above the earth and I can waste my time uh uh scrolling Twitter.
54:35
And then he goes, then the minute it goes out, you go, what the [ __ ] This is [ __ ] >> But you're absolutely right.
54:43
We But I think that over time that that has been a positive for our species that we are incredibly adaptive.
54:54
And yeah, it does suck that something that is almost magical in its properties gets taken for granted, right?
55:01
Uh but I think it's also good for the species. >> Yeah.
55:07
I mean, it could just be like an artifact of like the the life cycle of a of a given innovation cuz you know when it's in the >> they're all speeding up. >> Yeah.
55:15
Well, when it's an MVP stage and you know Louis CK is sitting on a on a plane and then the Wi-Fi router gets like overloaded, it's like everyone reacts negatively.
55:25
It's almost like an immune reaction and that that's actually a signal to the the the people driving that innovation forward like all right well we need to improve this.
55:38
Clearly it's wanted but clearly it's also failing.
55:40
And so that that's sort of like the you know the MVP stage is like you get feedback real fast on whether it's working whether it's not and if you get a high signal on either of those it means that people are using it which means like all right this is useful um we should keep pursuing this.
55:59
One of the downsides of a lot of the innovation you and I were chatting about before we started to record and I I admire your point of view about this because I didn't experience it and it's this idea that there are secondary and tertiary effects to ubiquitous cell
56:17
phones and and the way you put it is much more direct but you're under continual surveillance and I made the comment that if cell phone cameras as or the ability to take a film had been around when I was a teenager, I would be totally [ __ ] because because >> but talk a bit talk a bit about that. >> Yeah. So, in the 1920s, the Hawthorne uh >> Yeah.
56:43
So, in the 1920s, the Hawthorne uh Hawthorne Works factories in Chicago ran a study which unveiled something that later became known as the Hawthorne effect.
56:55
They were trying to figure out how to make their workers more productive.
56:58
And they tried all sorts of things like turn up the lights.
57:00
Uh that seemed to increase productivity, but then they, you know, to sort of AB test the experiment, they turned the lights back down, but productivity remained high.
57:10
And they're like, "This doesn't make any sense.
57:12
Did the lights help or not?"
57:13
Eventually they realized that it was the presence of the people doing the study and the effect of the workers knowing they were be being watched that changed their behavior.
57:25
And so the Hawthorne effect is just like when someone feels like they're being watched, their behavior changes.
57:31
um you know like a a sort of structural incentiviz or if if we were going to take that that form and those incentives and put it into like an actual structure, you essentially get like a ponopticon where you know it's it's essentially like a you know a circular prison with a um a guard tower in the center.
57:53
You can actually put like one way or two-way mirrors around that guard tower and the guard tower can be empty. Yeah.
58:00
But everyone in this prison will think they're being watched just because there's like that eye of Sauron there. >> Yeah.
58:07
>> And so >> what inadvertently happened in the the late, you know, around 2010 when cam phones started getting good is suddenly we entered a social surveillance state.
58:22
And that's particularly um pronounced for, you know, high schoolers >> where they can't really have fun in the way that other, you know, previous generations did because now they're they're hyper aware of the fact that like, oh, everyone has a a camera in their pocket and if I act weird or if you know, god forbid, I do some underage drinking or something like that, pe underage drinking People drink when they're underage.
58:53
>> Actually, no, they don't anymore cuz they've >> That was my generation. My bad. >> They they've stopped.
59:00
And you know, my thesis is that it's because the the youth now lives in this social surveillance state where uh if if someone did get drunk and like acted silly at a party, you know, everyone's going to whip out their phone.
59:14
it's going to be po, you know, there's the threat of the the the everpresent looming threat of it getting posted online and then they wake up the next day with a hangover, open up their phone and realize that their life is like quite literally over.
59:28
I mean, you think about like the, you know, mean girls and like all of the weird Yeah.
59:35
>> you know, brutal social dynamics that happen while, you know, humans are figuring those things out between like age five and 18.
59:42
Uh, and then you just magnify that with them being able to be like, "Look what he did," kind of thing.
59:49
I mean, I I think it's I think it's quite sad and potentially really bad.
59:55
And I I don't really I this makes me hope circling back to AI.
59:59
Strangely, I think that the the answer to this is when AI gets so good with regards to deep fakes that it frees everyone from the social surveillance state.
1:00:13
Because if you do do something silly and someone films it, everyone who sees it on social media the next day is like, it could be fake. Yeah, it's AI. >> Yeah.
1:00:25
So, like suddenly it'll, you know, free th those younger generations from from basically being beholdened to this social surveillance state.
1:00:35
>> Again, I I I have six grandchildren and I would not want them to have to suffer that fate.
1:00:40
So, maybe something we should look into is like uh a blocker.
1:00:46
Actually, we funded a fellow who is is is blocking be serreptitious recordings.
1:00:53
Uh, wouldn't it be kind of cool if you your phone em emitted it emitted uh something that made it impossible for the phones close by to to take a video of you or whatever?
1:01:04
I I I I like your your answer though because like when everything's fake, like what are you going to do?
1:01:13
Um I I do think that that is a real danger.
1:01:20
Um because you know you you look at certain ideologies today and and they have zero contact with reality and that's why you see so many of these idiotic things being done.
1:01:33
>> Well, that's always been the case, hasn't it? >> I agree. I agree.
1:01:35
>> We've always had like myths and religions that are like >> Yeah.
1:01:38
But they didn't have the potential to scale like they scale now.
1:01:43
>> And they didn't travel as quickly as they travel now.
1:01:45
Um, and they weren't nearly as ubiquitous, right?
1:01:51
>> Well, perhaps another counterpoint is that like for example, when when film was first invented, like moving pictures. Yeah.
1:01:59
>> I mean, there's the famous story of the the first one that was shown in a theater is like a a train coming towards the camera >> and everyone freaked out.
1:02:06
>> And everyone freaked out because they thought it was real.
1:02:08
>> And then eventually everyone learned like, oh, it's it's on a screen. It's actually fake. Sort of.
1:02:13
It's a real train, but it's a movie of a real trainact.
1:02:20
It's not It's not coming at me.
1:02:22
>> So like compared to that first audience, human behavior adapted and learned. >> Yeah.
1:02:27
So I I I think that maybe something very similar will happen with, you know, there there will actually be good in this avalanche of AI slop because in some of it will will come like the redemption and the freeing from the social surveillance state which I I am 100% in favor of.
1:02:44
I remember I was horrified when my youngest was a a tweener, I guess, and we were at a cocktail party and all of the other parents were talking about how they had spyw wear on their kids' phones.
1:02:56
And I'm like, that is horrible.
1:02:59
Why are you doing Why don't you?
1:03:01
And they get really defensive, right?
1:03:03
Like, I want to make make sure they're safe.
1:03:05
And I'm like, [ __ ] You just want to, you know, lord it over them that they have zero privacy.
1:03:13
And and so I I think I hope that actually happens because like what a bummer, man.
1:03:20
like to not be able to like a friend of mine and I were having uh lunch up at the Kora Club um many years ago pre- pandemic and he's of my vintage and and we kind of agreed that one of the problems that younger men specifically were facing today was they never got punched in the face. Right? my generation.
1:03:46
I can guarantee you if you if there's a hundred guys 65 years old and you ask them, "Have you been punched in the face?" 99 will say yes.
1:03:53
And and but again, what does that lead to?
1:03:58
It leads to the dispute is over, >> right?
1:04:04
Somebody says something you don't like, it's an [ __ ] to you, whatever.
1:04:09
You get punched, he gets punched, and then you're done.
1:04:10
It also puts other things in perspective.
1:04:12
Like if someone calls you a name, it's like >> Yeah. Words are not violence.
1:04:19
>> I've been punched in the face. Like >> Yeah. Words are not violence. Violence is violence. >> Exactly. Yeah.
1:04:26
>> And And when But it's But it's even bigger than that.
1:04:28
I I think that that was the way you adjudicated disputes between young teenage boys.
1:04:36
>> And but then they were done. >> Yeah.
1:04:39
with mommy and daddy calling out the kid and make getting him expelled and then then that kid's parents suing mommy and daddy because they were mean and it just seems like such a waste of [ __ ] time to me. >> Yeah.
1:04:53
I mean, let kids grow up. >> Exactly.
1:04:55
And you know, like and that's the most that's where we do the most learning.
1:05:00
I was talking to a neuroscientist once and he's like, "Yeah, your average baby is tripping balls 24 hours a day.
1:05:11
>> That's how the brain develops, right?
1:05:14
And and and so this this this desire for control and this desire to think that you as a parent can can make your child this perfect thing, it's just wrong."
1:05:26
Well, I mean, I don't have children myself yet.
1:05:28
Um, but I I've spent a lot of time with friends who do, and I think it's probably like they're trying to prevent the worst case scenario.
1:05:41
And given current technology, trying to prevent the worst case scenario also requires doing all of this other like big brother Orwellian stuff. >> Yeah.
1:05:54
And so, you know, going back to your question about like other non-intuitive ways that AI might help, you know, I can very easily see a a way where this will this will affect this issue.
1:06:07
You know, there's been a few devices like the friend device where like all of these sort of like lanyard things where there's an AI that you can talk to.
1:06:16
>> I have one of those, don't I? >> Yeah, you do. >> I've never used it. >> Um, no.
1:06:21
But like there's there's like these proto attempts at like AI companions and they're just not very useful right now because it's essentially like a chat bar that has a microphone that is in a device and there's not anything like terribly innovative and because of that super useful.
1:06:40
But you know I think back to one of my favorite games when I was younger um Zelda or Karina of Time.
1:06:45
You know, you're like this little kid with like a sword, but you have this little fairy that's following you around and her her I think her name is like Nav'i or something.
1:06:56
And whenever you are stuck or you needed help, you could like ask her a question or she might prompt and tell you something.
1:07:03
And so I imagine in the future, you know, you might have to you might be able to like not worry about your kid at all because it has like this little AI companion that's following it around which like 99% of the time doesn't do anything.
1:07:17
But then it sees like oh the kid is getting peer pressured to jump off a 35 foot structure onto concrete and it's like um actually this is a bad idea.
1:07:29
That's when like the AI speaks up and it's like guys no this is bad >> and it's like actually given the density of your bones if you jump off there and you hit at like literally any angle you will have you know a minimum of about seven fractures you know that that sort of thing.
1:07:48
So may maybe there's like an avenue where like essentially like the the tracking tech that parents are using to try and you know prevent worst case scenarios.
1:07:58
It's It's just another instance of like the technology is too young, so we're forced to like >> We We haven't gotten to the iteration that would actually work. >> Exactly.
1:08:10
We're still like using a a hammer on a screw because we invented the screw before we invented the screwdriver.
1:08:16
And it's like, well, this doesn't work very well, but like it's the best I got right now. Yeah.
1:08:20
>> So, yeah, I'm just going to ruin this wall by, you know, hammering a screw into it.
1:08:27
>> Something I have done. >> Yeah.
1:08:28
I think I think we all we've all done that at some point where it's like you just don't have a screwdriver and you're like >> well one of my big things when I got married I got married very young.
1:08:36
I was 22 and had my first child Patrick at 24. So pretty young.
1:08:42
Um but I quickly learned that I needed to selectively underperform in certain things that my wife wanted me to do.
1:08:54
And so I became a master of selective underperformance and she wanted me to do a bunch of work around the house. I'm all thumbs.
1:09:02
Um, and so she bought me a drill.
1:09:05
And so I'm like, "This is very dangerous."
1:09:08
And so what I did was even more than I I really underperformed.
1:09:17
I basically took the drill and drilled holes into a basement wall until and I did it hoping she would hear me.
1:09:27
And she did and she she came down, what are you doing?
1:09:30
I said, I'm just testing out the drill.
1:09:32
She's like, give me that.
1:09:37
Let's bring it back to to business and and the areas where we're seeing just tremendous uh leverage from from AI.
1:09:44
Um and and one of the reasons by the way I think that this whole solo founder thing is is a phenomenon that's might have some legs because much of what we do in the our various verticals film um books mo more so medium even more so um is leverage AI workflows so that we don't need you know 100 people on staff and and the people we have on staff are using their time and thoughts for much higher level ROI potential.
1:10:25
Uh coming um when do you think that that will be completely normalized in even like standard traditional [ __ ] corporations if ever?
1:10:43
I don't think for a while.
1:10:43
I mean, I someone in the family who's um who's been a software engineer for, you know, his whole life now, two decades plus.
1:10:58
And whenever I'm with that part of the family, I always ask him like what I I always like uh ask questions to try and sus out how much they're using AI and what for.
1:11:10
And especially with something like coding where AI has just made coding like so much more fun, right?
1:11:19
right? because you can move so much faster to the point where like the feedback loop in the personal agency um you know algorithm there is just it can be addictive to the point where >> it's like like I was describing that the proposal I was supposed to write and I
1:11:37
was like oh I'll just code up the UI and then like in instead of seeing the back end as like previous to AI it would have been like oh this is going to take so much time I got to like plan this out I gota you know it it just feels like this huge enormous chore that I'm going to have to like slowly chunk away at. With
1:11:52
With AI, I was like, "Ah, I'll see how far I can get." Like, why not?
1:11:57
And I had it working within like a few hours. >> Yes. you know.
1:12:02
Um, so the fact that like that exists on one end of the spectrum, which is very close to the the solo founder um thing that you're talking about, but then on the other end of the spectrum, you have like a very um big company that is employing coders and they're essentially just not really using AI at all. >> Self-preservation.
1:12:28
>> I there's definitely an element of that.
1:12:31
Um because if if they if this if if certain power holders within this company were really going to face the music with regards to like what actually is on offer with regards to these tools. Yeah.
1:12:44
They might be like oh well they might have two reactions.
1:12:46
One might be like oh we can actually cut a bunch of people.
1:12:50
Another reaction might be like oh our existing people can actually do like 10 100x more. Yeah.
1:12:57
>> Like wait a minute maybe maybe we're thinking too small. >> Yeah.
1:13:00
Maybe we have scope paralysis.
1:13:02
Maybe we need to like zoom out and be like, "Wait a minute. What else can we do?"
1:13:06
So, >> and most of it is performative. >> Yeah. >> It isn't real. >> Yeah.
1:13:10
>> It's like, "Sorry, guys, but I one of his things that I've told him is you guys got to get AIed out. >> Teasing teasing.
1:13:23
>> You are artists of the highest order.
1:13:27
We would never Well, we might We have the best producers uh in the business.
1:13:39
So, you guys are probably solid for a while.
1:13:41
But, but you know, I I say that jokingly, but that's the central fear that is driving a lot of people kind of crazy.
1:13:50
And they they can't get beyond. What's the great quote?
1:13:56
You can never convince a man of something when his Yeah.
1:14:00
Upton Sinclair when his salary depends on him not understanding it.
1:14:04
>> Yeah, that's exactly what's going on here.
1:14:06
>> And and and in general, I am a look, I believe there will be a dislocation.
1:14:10
I am not polyianish about this at all.
1:14:12
I think we have to do something to take care of that cohort of society.
1:14:19
I've said this multiple times.
1:14:22
I'm willing to like throw everything against the wall and on on fixing that primarily because people who through no fault of their own guess get disintermediated and you know like think of the 55year-old guy or woman who's been doing the same thing for 30 years and you know they they >> Yeah.
1:14:50
They're they're really a product of the school system. >> Yeah.
1:14:52
The the point is that talented people I'm not worried about talented people, right?
1:14:58
You guys will be just fine.
1:15:00
Uh because you'll figure out a cooler, much more interesting way to do what you love to do.
1:15:08
>> Well, they'll just start using the tool, >> right? Exa Exactly. Right.
1:15:10
But I I am worried about the people who aren't cool and good at what they do, and I shouldn't use that.
1:15:19
is a projorative term who just through again through no fault of their own just that isn't their thing >> and and what are what are you afraid of happening here?
1:15:29
>> Well, I I I would hate to see a bunch of pitchforks down in Union Square.
1:15:31
Um you know, I I don't I don't want uh any Ned Luds to become the the cover story of Is Time even a magazine anymore?
1:15:44
Do Do they still have that? Oh, really? Okay. So, >> that's so funny.
1:15:53
>> The magazine Time I which I didn't know even exist still existed.
1:15:57
They used to have the person of the year.
1:15:59
We do not want uh Leite to be the person of the year.
1:16:05
>> So, I asked you the leading question in order to get to that exact answer. >> I I didn't get that. Oh, you fooled me. >> Continue.
1:16:14
in order in order to bring it full circle back to the the future of food thing because once you have food forests with automated, you know, humanoid gardeners, what starts happening to the price of food? >> Mh.
1:16:30
>> Because >> Oh, it's incredibly deflationary. >> Exactly.
1:16:32
Like once you have the hardware and like like once you have that transition period, I mean, all you're really paying for is like the occasional replacement part.
1:16:42
Um and then solar to power all of these things. >> Yeah.
1:16:49
>> And so like the the parallel that I like to draw is, you know, why don't we pay for oxygen?
1:16:58
>> It's because >> no doubt someone has tried.
1:17:01
>> Someone has tried but it's actually impossible to charge for oxygen.
1:17:03
I mean well maybe not impossible.
1:17:08
>> There are oxygen bars in Tokyo that are very popular. >> True. True.
1:17:11
But the the distribution system for oxygen is perfect and it's already built into the system. >> Yeah.
1:17:19
>> The distribution for food sucks by comparison, >> right?
1:17:23
>> And so like once you automate the growing and harvesting and distribution of food, >> it will start to trend towards the price of oxygen which is >> and the other thing that's cool about it and you know how excited I get about this.
1:17:38
It's not only does the price go down, the quality goes up and we have never existed in that kind of world, right? Tech, yeah.
1:17:48
Um, but you know, it speaks to the for for almost all of human history, the the central story has been scarcity, right?
1:17:58
All of economics is based on the theory of scarcity.
1:18:02
This the allocation of scarce resources, right?
1:18:09
like in the world we're going into scarcity becomes a lot less important for a lot of things.
1:18:17
Of course there will you know there'll be enforced fake scarcity because of that old mindset right and because we're status monkeys and Right.
1:18:28
And well it's kind of like fasting today like fasting is enforced self self-imposed scarcity. >> Yeah. Yeah.
1:18:36
and and and so listen, there will always be an elite, right?
1:18:40
It'll change as to what that elite is, but I mean that's human nature, right?
1:18:47
The pecking order is real.
1:18:49
I I used to believe that, you know, you could stand outside the status hierarchy and tell like Will Store and uh and my friend Rob, who wrote a great book about it, convinced me, no, no, we're all signaling all the [ __ ] time.
1:19:10
And and but they'll the people will figure out new ways to signal, right?
1:19:16
Like it would not be at all surprising to me if we see a strong counter trend where everything's in person where you know the the most exclusive ticket you could get is not filmed.
1:19:28
It's just a a one-time event won't be filmed and oddly you'd be able to make a lot of bank on that.
1:19:41
>> I think Netflix is actually going in the wrong direction.
1:19:43
Um because I think like I find myself craving movie theaters even more and more and more.
1:19:48
In fact, last uh last night, what was I?
1:19:51
I was trying to watch something with someone and the UI on Netflix was just like annoying me so much because like I couldn't automatically skip back to the beginning of the episode. >> Oh yeah.
1:20:03
No, don't get me going on.
1:20:06
>> Apple is the biggest criminal.
1:20:06
Yeah, >> they they [ __ ] ruined iTunes because they let engineers who, you know, want all these cool features, you know, and your average user doesn't want any of them and they make it so complicated that you abandon the app.
1:20:24
That we went we that is what moved me to Spotify.
1:20:27
We had here we had this was all Apple music.
1:20:33
We had wonderful playlists, everything else, and then it just got to the point where they made it they so in shitified it that it was unusable.
1:20:40
And I see it happening to Apple TV now.
1:20:44
And I'm like, it's it's one of these things where like, is the purpose here to continue to make money and make more money? Like I'm a capitalist. I can get behind that. Why are you doing this? Yeah.
1:21:01
I mean, last night I I kind of came to an unexpected realization because the person I was watching it with while I was trying to like rewind and it was like going at like >> like gosh, this is taking a while.
1:21:12
And the comment that um someone I was with said is like, oh, it's like rewinding with a VCR.
1:21:18
And I was like, >> this is ridiculous.
1:21:22
But it's it sent me on another tangent of thought when I was like, "Oh my god, you know, and this is this relates to the sort of in-person, you know, movie theater experience, which led me to think that I think Netflix is absolutely going in the wrong direction.
1:21:40
I thought about the Blockbuster ritual where you have to drive to Blockbuster and then you would do the >> requires an investment." >> Yes.
1:21:50
>> Yes. you had skin in the game and then you did the perusal where like you had to spend at least 20 minutes just like looking around and you know exactly >> by the end of that 20 to 20 to 90 minutes you would finally end up with one you be like all right I'm confident this is good this is the one >> this is going to be good
1:22:06
>> and it really actually didn't matter how bad the movie was by the time you actually get back and put it into the VCR you are so sold on this experience >> that you're like you're going to watch the whole thing >> yeah And that I think that changes the quality of attention that someone brings to the movie. >> Whereas like Netflix, you know, you can
1:22:26
>> Whereas like Netflix, you know, you can be watching a great movie, you're like 4 minutes in, you're like, I'm just not in the mood for something this serious. >> Deadline sucked. >> Yeah.
1:22:36
You just press a button, it disappears, and you spend like most of your time scrolling.
1:22:39
But for some reason, you know, the the the time spent scrolling is not at all equal to the time spent browsing in a blockbuster, >> right?
1:22:50
>> They're both they're both time spent.
1:22:50
So the the the impetus is to think like, oh, there's skin in the game on both ends, but like no, because you you don't have a sense of commitment at the end of that time spent with Netflix. You do with Blockbuster.
1:23:08
And so that all just came into my head uh last night.
1:23:12
And so I think it speaks to this point like I really think that like in person is just going to continue to like grow and grow and grow because of that. >> Yeah.
1:23:21
Um I I think that probably for the bespoke part of the market, you're absolutely right.
1:23:29
I think uh even though Barnes & Noble is opening bookstores everywhere, for example, and man, I love bookstores.
1:23:37
It used to be a family ritual.
1:23:40
We would take the kids there every Sunday, give them as much time.
1:23:44
It fits right into your Blockbuster thing.
1:23:48
>> Um but I think 80% of books are moved online. >> Oh, for sure.
1:23:53
>> And will continue to be.
1:23:53
And I think probably 80% of films will be consumed online.
1:24:01
>> Actually, I'd put a caveat on that.
1:24:01
I 100% agree with you, but I I would say that 100% of book sales where you know exactly which book you want. >> Yeah.
1:24:11
>> It's probably going to be online. Yeah.
1:24:13
>> Or it's going to be like 99. 9. >> Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.
1:24:16
>> But then if you want to go browsing >> Yeah. the explore function.
1:24:19
They don't do that well on Amazon does not do that well.
1:24:25
>> And I think it's it's just more I don't know if you can capture on a screen what happens in person when you just like you have a space that you can walk around >> the Strand bookstore which is a few blocks over.
1:24:35
I love the place because and in fact I would get so guilty because I read most things on the iPad, the Kindle for iPad.
1:24:42
Back in the day when I used to still have to travel as the primary sales portfolio manager for OSAM, like literally my bag was nothing but books and always got flagged on weight, right?
1:24:55
And so the minute Missy, my wife, gave me a Kindle, like I was done. That was it.
1:25:03
because I could have a thousand books on this thing and it was just perfect. So I developed that way.
1:25:11
But it never we by the way we always buy a hard copy of a book that we really really love just to support the author and and also just so that we can have the physical version too.
1:25:24
>> This also makes for a good gift. >> Yeah.
1:25:25
But I got so guilty going over to the Strand that I ended up having to buy things even though what I would do is just take pictures of the books that I was interested in and then buy them for Kindle and and I'm like I feel like a CAD here.
1:25:44
I I I really have to buy.
1:25:44
So generally what what the fix was was we love art as you know and they've got a great art book selection and art books are expensive so I go and buy an art book.
1:26:01
>> Usually they give us a gift. >> Yeah.
1:26:02
I was just going to say it sounds like you're speedr runninging a museum when you just like run through and take a picture of the Van Go, take a picture of the Rembrandt.
1:26:09
You're like oh I'm just going to I'm going to look study them later. We are funny creatures.
1:26:15
Let's tease another thing you're writing that came out of a conversation you and I were having that I thought was like really hysterical. >> Oh gosh.
1:26:24
>> And this this was your insight that at first I thought you were bullshitting >> and and it it has to do with the star ratings on books on either Goodreads or Amazon or or wherever.
1:26:37
Um, and you you told me like the ideal that you want for stars is like what is it? Four. >> It's like 4. 8. >> 4. 8. >> Yeah.
1:26:51
>> Because you got to have some haters.
1:26:51
If you get five, it means you sp that you turfed and you're looking at a scam.
1:26:59
>> Uh, >> and obviously if you get one, >> not optimal.
1:27:05
But we started talking about the star rankings on some of the world's greatest literature.
1:27:12
Lace some of the really hysterical ones on our listeners and viewers because I I was like, you have got to be kidding me.
1:27:22
>> Okay, so the one that I gravitated towards at first, I ended up looking like looking up a whole bunch, but was the road by Cormick McCarthy. Now, amazing book. Is it his best book? Like, probably not. >> Yeah.
1:27:37
>> But it is spectacular. >> True. A true work of art. >> Yeah. It's It's amazing.
1:27:41
And on Goodreads, I think it's a 4. 2.
1:27:50
And what really what really what I ended up gravitating towards is that the the top this is weird, but the top liked review of this book gave it a one star. And it was long.
1:28:04
This review is 3,000 words long and it was quite well written and quite elegant about he's describing all of these reasons why he thinks the book is bad.
1:28:16
And I was like, he's doing a great job describing all of the reasons why this book is actually really good.
1:28:23
Um, and yet he gives it one star.
1:28:27
And I'm like the disconnect of like this is such an elegant [ __ ] Like how is this possible?
1:28:34
Like how could you miss the point? >> We found an outlier. >> Exactly. Yeah.
1:28:43
He's in like a weird quadrant of the graph that we haven't seen before.
1:28:47
Um and and so then I started looking up other things like Moby Dick and Lolita, the Bible.
1:28:52
Um Harry Potter and the Sorcerer Stone.
1:28:55
uh Shakespeare >> and the one that like out of this >> when when I I gotta say when when you first tell started telling me these I'm like holy [ __ ] Idiocracy was a documentary >> maybe um out of the ones that I just listed plus like a handful of others like Doniote and whatnot the highest rated one was JK Rowling's Harry Potter And I think it got like a 4.
1:29:27
7 or something like that.
1:29:30
But like she beat Shakespeare. I think it's hysterical.
1:29:35
But I choose to reframe it.
1:29:38
And the way I reframe it is look at these idiots giving Shakespeare lower ratings than JK Rowling.
1:29:46
Although my kids loved her books. >> They're great books.
1:29:52
>> And they're great books. That's right.
1:29:54
But if you're an author or a creator or anything, do you need a better example of, you know, the fact that most of the people out there are not terribly bright?
1:30:05
You don't have to be afraid.
1:30:05
If Shakespeare is getting 4.
1:30:08
1 stars, don't sweat putting anything out there and don't care what the majority think.
1:30:18
And and like that's one of the things that we are trying to really emphasize.
1:30:23
Um, now granted, you know, taste is the final moat.
1:30:26
Um, and we are putting podcasts and books and films and everything else out there that we think are in really good taste.
1:30:35
I'm sure we'll miss a lot.
1:30:37
But the the notion that you should be afraid of being judged, it just that's what I loved about this article.
1:30:47
like these are the greatest literary lights in history and you know 3. 9 stars.
1:30:58
So the the you know you could say the dja stef to this story is after I'd written the article.
1:31:04
I was thinking about it a little bit more and I went back to that review 3000word review one star for the road >> and I look at how many people liked his review and it was like 3,000 people.
1:31:18
And then I looked at his profile on Goodreads and he had like thousands of followers and I was like, "Oh, this guy figured out a way to like engagement farm."
1:31:31
He's like, "I'm going to write an incredibly wellthoughtout review of a of a book that's going to get a lot of eyeballs and then I'm going to do the incredibly controversial thing of giving it one star."
1:31:45
And I was like, "Oh [ __ ] it worked on me." Yeah.
1:31:48
because I saw it and I was like, "Well, I got to like I got to read this."
1:31:52
Like, "What is this guy talking about?" I read all 3,000 words. So, he succeeded.
1:31:57
And that like essentially he like the incentives of this platform are probably misconstring the reality of what these books actually mean to our species. >> Yeah. >> In general.
1:32:11
And it's it's all because he found a formula that worked. >> Loophole. >> Exactly.
1:32:17
It's at the detriment of like the truth about these books, right?
1:32:22
>> I mean, truth might be maybe lowercase T here, but um it's it's it was clear after that.
1:32:30
I I went and looked at a few of his other reviews and I was like, son of a [ __ ] Like, yeah, he found an arbitrage.
1:32:35
It's clearly working for some reason.
1:32:37
And I don't know how he's like actually benefiting it from it other than clout on Goodreads, which like buddy, aim a little higher, but okay.
1:32:50
>> I'm I'm a Good Reads influencer.
1:32:53
>> I mean, maybe there's benefit to that. >> Are you killing it? >> Yeah.
1:32:55
I I >> You pay me $10,000, I'll give you five stars.
1:33:00
>> I'll give you five stars and I've got a hundred,000 followers.
1:33:03
Maybe that's what he's doing. >> Yeah, maybe it works. Like, I don't know.
1:33:08
Turns out the guy's making 100 grand a month and we just look like idiots.
1:33:12
>> Got to respect the arbitrage.
1:33:15
>> Always respect the arbitrage.
1:33:15
All right, I'm going to put you on the spot and say, and I've never asked you this, so it's 2030. What does OSV look like?
1:33:28
What breakthroughs or things that we might not even be working on them right now, but five and don't make it OSV, make it a a super innovative AI first company.
1:33:40
What do you think are going to be the five differentiators that let them soar?
1:33:45
And you know, if we want to have really fun, a lot of fun, let's make it the first billion dollar single solo person company.
1:34:00
What five things would make that human be able to be a billion dollar corporation? >> Okay.
1:34:07
One of them which I think is the maybe the most pressing and most important which Misha is actually working on um is the context problem.
1:34:19
>> So right now the way that AI's work is with uh retrieval augmented generation which has huge downsides.
1:34:24
I built a a a rag system for um an early MVP that I I did in my like second month here and um I remember showing Misha and I was like this is like so clunky like I I hate this system and he's like no this is exactly how like companies worth millions and millions hundreds of millions of dollars are doing it. I'm like this is awful.
1:34:50
And he's like I have just the thing for you.
1:34:52
And so he's he's working on that.
1:34:54
working on that. Um if we can solve that context which is really like a memory um issue um if if we can if we can solve that that really unlocks just like a tremendous number of things because like the the way that the AI field's been dealing with that first is just trying
1:35:15
to like enlarge the context window is like you can only do that for so long um before you you start to get diminishing returns Like I don't want to have to dump in like the entire encyclopedia bratannica in order to have a query because then it's just going to take a long time. Yeah. Yeah.
1:35:35
>> Like it doesn't matter how how >> spoiler alert we do have a looks to be solution for that. >> Yeah.
1:35:43
I'm I'm very excited to put this thing through the ringer.
1:35:47
>> Um so that's definitely number one.
1:35:51
Number two, >> there's clearly uh some data problems.
1:35:54
Like for example, you know, like whenever I hear an artist bemoone or begrudge the fact that like, oh, AI, I can create art, but it can't like do my dishes for me.
1:36:05
And I try to explain like why that's the case.
1:36:09
I was like, all right, how many pieces of human art are were there on the internet before AI became a thing?
1:36:18
>> And the answer is like, well, all of it, obviously. Yeah.
1:36:20
And I was like, how many examples on the internet are there of firstperson point of view hands washing dishes?
1:36:28
Like maybe there's one weirdo YouTuber who did this, but like the answer is like almost nothing. >> Yeah. Yeah.
1:36:36
>> And so you can't train a system on something unless you have like a huge amount of data.
1:36:40
So there many areas in which we're like very data poor. Yep.
1:36:45
Um, so there are some like really interesting solutions that are popping up.
1:36:50
There's a really cool robotics model that just popped up where you can essentially wear like meta glasses and like you know film your hands doing some particular task and it translates really well into the system where those robot hands can mimic.
1:37:04
Um, so essentially like um uh mirror neurons, I guess you could say very loosely, but the there's definitely like a whole bunch of other uh sources of data that we just we're we're a little bit blind to.
1:37:20
And the analogy that I like to to use in this case is, you know, why are Lego manuals not texton?
1:37:30
Is because it would be so obnoxious to read, right?
1:37:33
>> Um, and It's so difficult to describe certain things of like, oh, the the two by four by one block. >> Yeah.
1:37:44
The the limits of linguistic uh description. >> Exactly.
1:37:49
So I like I do a lot of woodworking and I I've primarily done this like by myself because I enjoy it.
1:37:56
And there's been a few instances where like a friend will come along and be like, "Oh, can I help?"
1:37:58
And I'll be like, "Sure."
1:38:00
And then I'll start trying to like push what I've been doing through the language part of my brain and it's just like you know what no you can't help because like my I'm just shape rotating over here and it doesn't fit through my brain.
1:38:13
So the there's this huge like 3D area of reality which language doesn't capture very well.
1:38:21
And so I'm using that as an analogy to say that there's there's all sorts of data that uh we're invisible to the fact that we don't even have it which we can't even give to an AI.
1:38:31
So I think the ne the next thing there will be like um like rob AI plus robotics that is simply for gathering data of all sorts of different types.
1:38:44
Um, number three, >> people anthropomorphize AI a lot.
1:38:46
And why doesn't why doesn't AI prompt like there's all sorts of little things that after like a lot of deep use, I'm like, uh, it's because it's not like not curious that it it didn't figure out like 10 chats ago what I was really trying to ask.
1:39:07
And it it took me like a whole bunch of like, you know, chiseling away at the the granite in order to get to the shape in order to ask the right question.
1:39:17
And it's like if it had had some basic curiosities and basic drives, it would have been able to do what a human would do is like, oh, what you're really trying to get at, you just don't have the context and the language and the experience in order to get there.
1:39:32
It's like, oh, you're you're actually want to pay attention to variable uh XYZ, but you're stuck on A B CDE E F in order to get there.
1:39:42
And so I I think that kind of probably requires something like a limbic system, which makes me nervous.
1:39:49
I I don't want a limbic system like created and attached to AI because then you could get some really weird incentives.
1:39:59
>> Um, but you would get some >> I'll be back.
1:40:01
Yeah, you you would probably get something that's like way more agentic than chat GPT. >> Yeah.
1:40:08
>> Um so I I think I think the like the words a the word agents in AI is a bit um >> blown out of proportion in terms of like what AI agents currently can do.
1:40:20
Um, you know, you're really, from my experience and my understanding, you're really talking about like a a recursive set of LLMs that are um referencing basically a scratch pad or several in order to like go through these different things. Yeah.
1:40:41
>> Um, >> is that really agentic or is that kind of like a Rube Goldberg machine that's made of jell-o? Uh, I'm not sure.
1:40:47
Um, but I I think like true agency is going to require something that is going to be like an analog to the liyic system, but hopefully very different from the liyic system because ours was developed under uh very different circumstances with evolutionary pressure which gave us a whole bunch of bad OS. Yeah.
1:41:12
>> Uh which we don't want.
1:41:12
Uh, and this is where like the the what I think is a pretty silly debate about like the alignment problem actually comes from this area.
1:41:23
Like you know, I mean, we can't even align ourselves.
1:41:25
I don't like I don't think alignment as a word is particularly meaningful in this debate. And yet, I agree.
1:41:34
>> It seems to stand as like a very uh solid flag in either camp.
1:41:37
Um but yeah, I I think that the development of an AGI appropriate lyic system is going to be necessary in order to you know really spark life through things like LLMs that are not human input because right now it's human input that gets the because I I I picture an LLM as essentially like a a giant gel board or like a a bell curve with all of those uh with a bunch of pins and then you drop the the marbles and then they create the bell curve.
1:42:14
Um so I kind of if you if you take out all of the the balls and you just have the pins in the grid, you know, any one input or query is essentially you're like dropping a marble at the top and like most of them are going to fall straight down as part of that bell and then every once in a while you're going to get like a weird like, "Oh, that was strange.
1:42:33
It told me that maybe I should end this relationship kind of thing."
1:42:37
Um, so yeah, I think I think a an AGI appropriate lyic system would would be the thing that would breathe life into into >> that might be worth more than a billion.
1:42:53
Uh, I would like an MVP of that a week from today. >> Okay. Yeah.
1:43:00
>> You set yourself up for that one.
1:43:05
What haven't I asked you that you feel passionate about in terms of any anything that we're working on or you know trying to change?
1:43:15
I am droolingly awaiting the day when we have an OSVOS which is kind which is essentially a system that has context of every little thing that's happening in in OSV.
1:43:30
Yeah, >> this is so necessary in order to combat the desire to bloat from a bureaucratic standpoint because I've witnessed in in many times in my life that there is there's this perennial desire to discuss something, come up with a solution, and then hire a third party that is that solution.
1:44:03
And I'm like, "No, >> I don't want to do that."
1:44:07
Like, let's just let's just do a quick and dirty version of it with what the tools that that we have.
1:44:13
Cuz then at the very least, we'll just like learn what's possible.
1:44:16
If it really isn't possible, it's like, okay, let's let's either build something more intense or look at other, you know, third party options if we need to.
1:44:24
But like, I want to learn at the very least.
1:44:26
Um, so if we had and and I've noticed a in a few instances at OSV where someone's working on a problem and then like a week later I discover that this person actually has like fairly deep domain knowledge on set problem and sometimes this is this person is me and I'm like, "Oh, I didn't realize you had all this knowledge."
1:44:48
Like we need I need to like hoover up a bunch of information from you because I'm building something in a domain that I've never built in before.
1:44:54
Um, and if there was simply instead of when I type into a chat bar, I'm talking to an LLM, what I really want to do is I want to talk to OSV. >> Yeah.
1:45:09
>> And I want to be like, do we have where does this piece of information exist?
1:45:16
Can you like pull it up for me?
1:45:18
And like a really cool thing that like like the the beginning sort of like ember spark of this was um a little while ago uh I wanted to pull some information from one of the CRM that we do and I was like looking at it I was like like I just had enough of a headache.
1:45:37
I was a little too tired.
1:45:39
I was like I don't want to try and figure out how this works.
1:45:42
And so I went to the settings and I pulled an API key and then I threw it into RAI lab and I was like here's the API key for this product.
1:45:48
This is the information I need. Can you do this?
1:45:50
And it just did it and I was like >> I remember you telling me >> I was like oh my god thank you just saved me so much like frustration. >> Yeah.
1:46:02
>> Um so I yeah I want that that just like you know a spider with a with a leg in every corner kind of thing. >> I love the OSVOS.
1:46:09
I I think that that is another thing that also fits in to the the billion-dollar solo practitioner.
1:46:19
Well, this has been amazingly fun.
1:46:19
I I always of course get to have these conversations with you daily, but um as you know, you've got your chance to be emperor of the world. Can't kill anyone. Can't re-educate anyone. Can't kill any sparrows.
1:46:36
But what you can do is talk into the magical microphone.
1:46:40
incept all 8 billion or whatever we're at right now.
1:46:43
People on the planet whenever their next morning is, they wake up and the two things that you are going to incept are front and center in their brain and they're like, "You know what?
1:46:54
Unlike all the other times when I ignored all of these great insights I had, I'm going to actually act on these two things today and continue to do so." Dazzle me. >> Okay.
1:47:08
I would incept them to try and foster two things simultaneously.
1:47:15
Foster um they they sound mundane on their own, but I think it's in the combination where the the magic happens.
1:47:22
Foster a a bigger imagination.
1:47:26
Just like always try and break scope paralysis, you know. I I love that.
1:47:34
I love that little clip from Inception in from Inception when the the guy's like shooting with a pistol and then Ed Hardy comes over and he's like, >> "You have to dream a big dream a little bigger."
1:47:46
And then he like holds up a rocket launcher kind of thing.
1:47:48
Like that sort of like enlarge your imagination, you know, coupled with have as low of a tolerance for [ __ ] as possible.
1:47:58
Um, and the reason I say these two things together is because I I think there's this assumption that like people with a huge imagination are just like kind of full of [ __ ] and then people who are like no [ __ ] like don't have any imagination, >> right?
1:48:16
Where the the real arbitrage is the asymmetry of like having zero tolerance for [ __ ] but like a huge imagination.
1:48:25
Which means that like you can go out into cognitive space and and take something that is truly innovative but then actually translate it into reality because you don't you don't you can't put up with any [ __ ] about the fact that like oh it's just an you know oh it's a great idea.
1:48:44
is like, "No, it's not a great idea until it's here and real and you can do something with it."
1:48:50
Um, yeah, that's what I would incept the world. >> Love both of them.
1:48:54
Uh, thank you for taking the time and >> everyone watching and listening.
1:48:59
We have these conversations all the time and sometimes they go off on tangents.
1:49:07
>> Thanks for being on, John. >> Thank you, John. Appreciate it.