people think that progress is linear and it actually does not feel linear at the time it happens in jumps a lot of my ideas when I would spring them on people they were like oh like that's not a good idea that's one of the worst ideas I've ever heard in my life you turn that search for definition into sort of an
engineering problem so you're not asking what is this you're asking how do I fix it what do I do with it I think we may shift our view of the value of human in you got to be Apollo and dionis you've got to be Plato and Aristotle or you're missing half of the way of getting insights I wake up every day like super
super energized cuz I'm like well I get to see things that no one else gets to see and like all the stuff that I've been thinking about for a long time is like finally I can do it the cost of being a heretic today has really [Music] plumed well hello everyone jimo shasy with another infinite Loops I was telling my guest just a moment ago that
gosh this has got to be the first of a series because we have so much in common we have so much in in excitement but also a little bit of trepidation about the world that we are moving into my guest is none other than Dan chipper the co-founder and CEO of every one of my my favorite uh public like it's not a
publication per se but one of my favorite sources of all things uh um interesting to me you're also the host of the podcast Ai and I I can't resist Dan I hear my mother's voice in my ear saying Ai and me objective I know I H you know couldn't just could not resist the the rhyme it was it works it totally works but I
think it's so funny like Mom has been dead a long time but she still squawks in my like work exactly so you know I I'm so excited to talk to you because we share so many of the same interests but if you don't mind like every superhero has an origin story so if you'll give us yours uh for our listeners and
viewers and by origin story are you asking like uh for more info on every specifically and and that origin story or just like my origin story as a person like where did I where did all this start from I am very much interested in your origin story as a person okay cool um yeah well uh I usually start the the
origin story stuff at around fifth grade um I read a Bill Gates biography um and I decided I wanted to start a Microsoft competitor um and I was going to name it megasoft I actually have the biography somewhere around here in in in the living room over here um and so I was going to start megasoft um and so I decided to learn how to code um
and I got Went to went went to Barnes Noble um and my dad bought me a very expensive book on basic um at the time that was the only way to learn how to code is uh expensive books um especially if you were in fifth grade uh because there are no no classes at all for um middle School aspiring uh software entrepreneurs
um and um you know I had a I had a whole plan for how I was going to do this which I I have in a notebook which I still have that uh the the list it's like a list of like my plan my master plan and it's like the first one is write soft which meant write the operating system and I didn't even complete it with software um and write
soft burn it to CDs because at that point um the big distribution mechanism was um was CDs uh I was very inspired by uh the way AOL got distribution um by having CDs like everywhere that you could pick up in the grocery store they put it in your mailbox or whatever WR soft burn it to CDs um put it in mailboxes and then wait
wait was my La the last step of my plan um and so um needless to say I did not end up building an operating system um but I kept programming because um I was always was very interested in business um and always have a lot of Technology um and uh I found that um programming was the only way as a middle schooler
that I could build interesting businesses because it was the only way to build a business where the only cost was my time um and so kept programming in um in Middle School uh like sort of late middle school early High School I got into Blackberry programming because I noticed that um uh smartphones were starting to
become a thing this is prior to um prior to the iPhone um and I had learned from my Bill Gates biography that um new um Hardware platforms were often good opportunities uh for software so I started building um software for Blackberry um the my most popular software app was called find it um which was basically find my iPhone before find
my iPhone came out um so the original version you could uh if you lost your blackberry in your house you could um send an email with a special string in the subject line and then have it ring even if it was on silent um and then I eventually iterated that into like a full-fledged web interface where you
could track your phone you could lock it you could back it up like all that kind of stuff um interestingly that was not a SAS service it was a uh it was a one-time fee because stripe didn't exist and it was way too hard to create a recurring subscription um so uh so anyway so that's how I paid for gas and food in high school is a building apps
like that and I would have had a lot more money had stripe existed back then um and I've been talking for a while so that's like that's the first chunk of my origin story in case you in case you want to jump in so yeah I uh I'm I'm myh teammates always remind me Jim will you stop [ __ ] talking so much on this
podcast and let your guest CAU but but the but the the whole origin story of how this podcast began was I really wanted it to be kind of like you're too young to remember the movie My Dinner with Andre but it was an early movie in like Wallace Shawn you know the inconceivable from Princess Bride it was
him and another actor and literally the entire movie was just their conversation and it was riveting like I it because a natural conversation that doesn't follow a script I just find much more interesting yeah so uh but what's great about that is that you saw very clearly what where the world was going right and
before we started recording I was showing you some stuff from a 1983 Journal when I was 23 and that's what I was writing about it was literally computers are going to do this computers are going to do that we're going to be able to synthesize we're gonna it's going to be a whole new world and then I had to wait 40 plus years and here we
are but but that's kind of that's what's cool about it right because you had to adapt to the circumstances at hand right it yeah it would have been much cooler if strip had been around and you could have made it a SAS recurring Revenue business but that's what happens sometimes with Pioneers right I I my
more cynical friends tell me that Pioneers are the ones that get all the arrows in their back but I I think that Pioneers who survive actually have a huge advant manage over others because it's already in your mind right what it can look like what the world can look like that's what I love about your work and it also kind
of leads me into um your your decision to kind of go two of your decisions really uh resonated with me the first was you know stop thinking about yourself as a founder and started thinking uh what your wording was you had thought of yourself as a Founder who also was a writer but then you inverted that and you made yourself a writer who
was also a Founder I I very much resonate with that having written four books actually in service of the business I was trying to build um but unlike you I'm I'm more of the dark Dorothy Parker school which is I hate writing I love having written I think every writer has a tinge of that I'm no exception yeah yeah yeah
but I I think that um that was very cool but you also the other thing that I wanted to talk to you about was your decision you were unw you were a little wary about Ai and then you decided you know [ __ ] it I'm going all in and I reserve the right to jump off this rocket if like I don't like what's going
on so in my notes I say I I have short end uh ask Dan about his relationship up with AI with it's complicated great well uh let's take it one at a time um should I should I should I talk about the some of the writing stuff first sure cool um yeah I think the um the what what you're referring to is I've written two pieces
in the last year or so about this one is called every's master plan which is sort of like lays out like what every is and like where we're going and how I'm thinking about it and also like how I arrived there and some key decisions that went into that and um one of the key decisions is thinking myself as a writer who is also a founder and there's
a I have a I have a post um specifically about that on every called admitting what is obvious um and the basic idea of that post and and the um kind of like thought process for me is um there are sometimes truths about yourself that are probably obvious in hindsight for sure they're probably pretty OB obvious to
everyone around you and they're probably sort of like they're definitely there all the time in in your sort of Consciousness without you like really even realizing that they're there because uh the perceived cost of noticing them would be too high for you and so you don't necessarily allow yourself to really notice it and so for
me um I think wanting to be a writer was one of those truths um uh and I just like it was very hard for me like basically to go back to my origin story for a second I originally before I wanted to be Bill Gates I wanted to be a writer this isn't this is third grade um and I wanted to write novels and so I
wrote a 100 page novel um and then after I wrote it I real I was like I don't have enough life experience to be a writer yet so I want to do business stuff um and I'll come back to writing later um and that sort of carried me through to my first company called Firefly which I started when I was in college and um that company I did a lot
of writing for it and that like like helped us Market the product and all that kind of stuff and um and eventually when I sold it um I I spent a couple years like figuring out what I wanted to do and I like I again like tried to write a novel so I was like I was like giving myself some time to like do that
I WR I wrote a couple drafts um but the whole time I was like very conflicted about who am I and like am I going to lose my like founder identity if I go write a novel and like I had sort of felt the loss of that identity when I sold my first company and it's just like it's you know obviously it's one of those amazing things that happens to you
but it's also um there's no like manual or process for how to deal with that kind of that kind of thing like selling a company and no longer doing the thing that you do every day it's very abrupt um and um and so uh yeah like I I sort of grappled with that the whole time um between companies and then I feel like I
started every as this sort of um way split the difference to some extent cuz like we raised a little bit of money for every at the beginning and it sort of looked like a more traditional startup like it had always had a media element but like the way that we pitched it was it's this bundle of newsletters um and
so it's sort of like substack but we have like you know uh we have an editor and and and we're going to sort of grow it in this a little bit more centralized way and everything is bundled under one subscription and and all that kind of stuff so we're able to like turn it into a little bit of a company um or a
lot of a company but um the way it originally started is um is I was just writing a newsletter and it started going really well um and and the way I allowed myself to even write the newsletter was I said Okay I want to start another software company and I want to do like a Rome notion Tools For Thought type company and I need a way to
um I need a I need a way to do customer interviews with smart people that um that like have the kind of note ticking organization problems that I want to solve and and probably have solved them for themselves so I can understand what they need um and so I was like I'll write I'll start a newsletter I'll tell
people I'm interviewing them for the newsletter and then I will um like actually write it because I love writing but I'll use what I learn in order to build a software product that I can then sell to the audience um and I just sort of got stuck for a very long time on the like newsletter part of it and realized that like it was growing
really fast and I really liked it so we put together a company we raised a little bit of money and it was going really well and as soon as we raised some money we sort of like I sort of made the decision to like um not write as much because I was like well I'm running the company now so I'll hire writers and whatever and
there's like a sort there was like a sort of two-year period after that where the growth of it sort of of every sort of tailed off because one of the interesting and difficult things about media is if you start a media company and have a media product that's like um written by a person and their personality in it
um if you uh if that person stops writing you lose product Market fit um you can still find it again but like the the the ability to like consistently produce things of a certain type that people like is like a very rare thing and so if you have someone like so I was doing that and my co-founder Nathan also
was doing that if you have people who are doing that and you switch it it'll probably take a while to find someone else and there's no guarantee that the the person you find will attract the same audience as you already have so it's it's just makes media like quite a difficult business um and eventually after a couple years I was
like what do I really want to do like why am I doing this like what's my whole like thing with this and I was I was just like I think if I like really take a step back and I didn't consider loss of identity or how it would be perceived and I didn't really consider um like Financial upside and how I would make
money cuz like the business was at a point already where like it was supporting me so didn't have to um consider that as much um like what would be the like the most like the thing in my heart that I would like want to do and I was like oh like obviously like I want to write um and then I was like I want I want to
write I want that to be the core thing but I also like I love business like I really like doing all this stuff like so I I still want to like have a business um and what's really interesting is once I once I like admitted that thing which going back to where I began um is a sort of like obvious thing that I hadn't like
really admitted to myself once I admitted it to myself and sort of flipped that identity to like I'm a writer who also does business stuff I immediately found other people who were doing very similar things that I hadn't really noticed before so uh a good example that popped up is um Sam Harris who's like primarily a writer podcaster
who has a meditation app waking up uh another one is Bill Sim who great podcaster who has uh we started the rer he started Grantland um uh like all those kinds of people uh were doing things that I that are exactly what I wanted to do but like for a while I hadn't like even really notice them because they're sort of like off
the beaten path of the silen valley like technology like structure of like you know raising money and and and all that kind of stuff like they don't fit the mold of a typical VC um investment and so so I immediately found other people that had sort of done this path and then I also sort of began to immediately make
decisions that like uh I guess changed the reality around me to support this so I stopped doing meetings in the morning um I was able to hire Kate Lee who's our editor and chief she's incredible she um she previously was the publisher at strip press um and so that took a lot of the day-to-day Media stuff off Media Company
running stuff off of me and we did a couple other things like that and and I think most importantly it was it allowed me to be like to myself and everyone else like writing is the priority so like uh I can't be bothered uh like in the morning or whatever like I need to have enough time to like get out pieces every
week because like that's the main thing that I'm doing whereas previously writing had been a little bit more like a guilty pleasure um but getting to do it all the time created a lot more growth and energy and and and stuff for every because and for me too because I think um there's a there's a significant um cost
to uh not to doing things that you don't really want to do all the time and so I think for me like there was this thing where I was like I I I I feel like I need to act like a traditional CEO of a traditional tech company um and like it it wasn't it just wasn't the thing I really wanted to do like I wanted to be
the CEO but I didn't want to do it in that way um and so as soon as I like kind of I think let go of here's how it should be done and the scales dropped from my eyes a little bit and try and just figured out like here's how I think I could do it for me and this is the way it would work for me things just started
to accelerate the business started to get better I was much happier I so much am much happier I started doing much better creative work which has led to all sorts of things from I think the WR my writing is going a lot better I think we're we're doing lots of cool creative stuff where we're incubating all these
software products we have a Consulting arm we have we've got tons of stuff going on it's like I feel like I'm a I'm a kid in the candy store uh all day like it's really really fun and I think it sort of starts from that like very like that sort of core decision to like let yourself be who you are and do what you want to do and like uh kind of uh mold
your reality around that lots to unpack there and again on the similarities I too wrote a fictional novel when I was 10 or 11 uh I still have it it's horrible it was science fiction but I but I got 120 pages and at some point maybe our infinite books vertical will publish it uh or a different version of it uh one one of the questions that I
sometimes ask myself that I have found very clarify which which is this if if I'm looking at like something I might want to do or whatever I ask myself the question would I pay to do this in other words would I actually pay instead of expecting to be paid to do this and that there are vanishingly few things that I
would pay to do but like that's how shanas Ventures came into being like yeah I would because because I am paying right now I prefer to look at it investing planting the seeds but but the idea like resonated very very strongly and and back to your your master plan look I found because we also do a lot of seat and somewhat later
stage Venture investing and and one of the things that um I really look for in Founders is agility and the ability to Pivot and being fine with that right like I'm a huge Walt Whitman fan I really do believe we all contain multitudes and and trying to like the the whole mentality of stay in your lane
just like I that doesn't appeal to me at all like if if if you through your actions learn whoa wait a minute like this is probably a really great way to Pivot and change and and I like the way you did it too you put old in a large language model and looking for insights but then you did something very clever that I also do you hadn't
write future journal entries for you I I use it the same way and then you got to the way your your grand design and plan for every which you present in a very uh maslov like pyramid right with the with the Bas being the free stuff and that's available for millions and then going up the pyramid take us up the pyramid uh of
the of the master PL yeah so um the way every the way I think about every is sort of like a pyramid it's hopefully not a pyramid scheme but it has a little bit of a pyramid structure um so bear with me here um but yeah at the base of the pyramid is um it's like all the content that we make especially particularly the free content that that
reaches a lot of people so we have a newsletter that we publish every day um we publish long form essays about what's next next in technology um and then we also have podcast so we have a YouTube channel um we have the podcast Ai and I and then in the YouTube channel we publish that podcast and then other
videos so I for example I recently did a video on chaty BT's advanced voice mode um and and that's like that's really cool so we published a lot of great stuff and then above that we have our main offer and our main offer is the thing that we're trying to sell mostly to people um and uh that's the every subscription it's 20 bucks a month
and as part of the every subscription you get access to all the content we publish so a lot of some of the content is paywall you also get access to discounts on courses that we run so discounts on on stuff you might want and then we also incubate software products so we have we just launched an incubation
called spiral uh we can get into that but it helps you automate a lot of the repetitive creative work that you um that you do every day if you're a founder or a Creator um another one is uh incubated uh this company Lex um which uh my co-founder Nathan built internally at every and then we spun it out um and now it's its own company and
Lex is a is a sort of like Google Docs with AI built-in so it's a document editor um with AI we have a couple other incubations in the pipeline and so um as part of the every subscription you get access to content and you get access to this like growing library of other products you can think of it a little
bit like Amazon Prime or something like that in that way um and then above that that um we sell um we sell higher ticket items um so you can you know each level of the pyramid is like smaller and smaller numbers of people um so millions of people at the bottom you know maybe tens of thousands hundreds of thousands
maybe maybe more at some point uh in the in the sort of every uh every main subscription um level of the pyramid and then above that we sell courses so those are like usually ,500 to $2,000 and those are like B Toc courses to our subscribers above that we do a lot of Consulting and training type stuff so um you know big companies um who want to
figure out uh where to integrate AI into their companies and how to train their people um we do a lot of work with with companies like that U and those are that's much higher much higher ticket and then above that is like speaking or advising stuff like that stuff that I need to personally be involved in that's
that's higher ticket than that and and fewer people and um I think the p concept is interesting because again it's like this shape of a business that's like totally antha to like the traditional silk and Valley Way of running a company um because you got to focus on like your one uh Revenue stream and this is like
there's four different ones and I didn't even list some of them like we have a whole sponsorship business like you have sponsorships and then you have subscriptions and then you do Consulting and then you do speaking and then you have software like what the [ __ ] it would be sort of the the like response um and I I totally understand that I
think that that makes a lot of sense um but I think for media what I have come to learn is that um for one media is a very difficult business so you need to have as many revenue streams as you can once you get to a certain point like you probably Focus for a little while to like get to a certain base but if you
want to grow above that you need to have different revenue streams and then you have different members of your audience that have very very very different willingness to pay and um if you want to maximize what you can get out of that business which I think you need to do if you want to do a
lot more interesting stuff um you need to figure out how to create different products to um to to reach the different people in your audience who have different needs um and I think this is particularly important because uh the environment is sort of constantly changing and so for example um about I don't know like s months ago
or maybe a year ago Elon changed the X algorithm to like deprioritize and so our traffic went down right so because a big part of our top of funnel was X and so I had to make a decision that was like well what do we do about that right and obviously like there's lots of we should need to find more growth channels
but what I decided to do was for now um we actually had a pretty sizable audience of people who um who were you know running great businesses or famous investors or whatever and I was like well why don't we just focus on bottom of funnel first will expand um we'll take the relationships that we've already built with um really interesting
people and we'll expand those relationships by selling consulting or software or you know training like what like that that stuff that we can sell and then we can take that cash and funnel it back into the bottom of the pyramid and maybe we run ads or maybe we like hire a growth person or whatever
like there's lots of stuff to do once you have the cash um and that that bet has actually been really good for us and um I think one of the one of the fun things about media is um like all this stuff that we're doing like whether it's consulting or Building Products or whatever like these are all announcements that we can make that go
viral that actually just help our our bottom of funnel regardless of the eventual success of those businesses so like everything actually sort of works together in this really nice way and I think like I actually didn't even have the kind of pyramid um structure in my head I was just like well my business is
like this crazy like concoction of things and then I went to this a Creator Retreat run by Thiago Forte um who's who's an incredible um incredible Creator and and author and course creator um and someone else uh his name is Chad Cannon I think uh just drew that on the board as his the way he structures his business and then
everyone was like nodding and everyone was like yeah this is how our business works and I was like oh this is not stupid like this is just a different path that other people take that like I've never heard of because I've been reading too much Hacker News you know um and um and I and that was that was just
really really really really helpful and clarifying um because I think um it's hard to it's hard to make decisions that sort of go against like what other people around you are doing um and it requires you to like kind of look at reality yourself and be like what am I see here and like what are the like local decisions that I can
make that seem to make the most sense as opposed to like what did I hear is the right thing to do um or what was my like original VIs for what to do um you need to like kind of be more ground level at like what's actually going on what what do you need to do um and you can arrive at a place that feels like a mess
because it's not um no one else around you says like this is a good idea but then you might meet other people who are like actually no we found the same thing and that's just like oh you're like oh great um this is cool uh I'm not crazy um and yeah so that's that's the that's the kind of story of the pyramid Howard
Bloom who's an author who I think is really underrated because I think he's written a lot of insightful books and everything he uses the metaphor of um when you f how you can create a schelling point right where that that it serves as a peak in to find your people right and he uses this great metaphor if you take a beaker uh filled with water
and you put a bunch of salt in it and you boil it and boil it and boil it apparently the salt visually disappears so it looks like just a clear Beaker of water but the cool aspect and I haven't you full disclosure I haven't actually done this yet I I really do want to try it to make sure that it actually works
but the the uh metaphor that he uses is you take a single grain of salt and drop it into that Beaker and what happens is all of the salt is attracted to that single grain and suddenly where you saw only clear liquid you see this mass of salt and he says findinding your people worked kind of the same way but he also
adds something that I deeply believe you've got to be really courageous you've got to be like most of the stuff that I have been able to do and and been successful with like when I would say to somebody well I'll give an example so I I decided okay I want to the stock market is the Olympics of business I
want to go and see if I can get a gold medal over there and as I'm thinking about it I'm like huh I suppose that and remember this is prehistoric there no internet no uh anything really and and so I decided on one of my walks I have to write a book because I will get the author premium and right back in the day
if you were going to be an expert on something you had to have aook book and so I I walked in I was quite excited about that and said to my wife yeah so I've decided that uh the way to really jump start this company is for me to write a book and she's like okay Jim I know you like were editor of your high school newspaper but have you ever
written a book and then I pulled out the one I wrote when I was 10 and I said yes look and she goes well yeah but that's horrible um so a do you think you really can write a book and B you know you got to get somebody to publish it and I'm like details details and the the the point being that a lot of my ideas that when I would
spring them on people they were like oh like that's not a good idea it's one of the worst ideas I've ever heard in my life and so I started to just kind of like build an armor uh to those kind of things because I wanted input I wanted people's feedback because God God knows I don't know everything and it's and no
doubt I was quite delusional thank God but I would use them to sort of reality test right and then I'd think you know that's a good idea and and that's why I was intrigued by your use of AI with your own work your own journals uh because I do that all the time um I I we are in the process of we call him Sim Jim and he has not debuted yet but he's
going to be based on 40 plus years of things that I've written and you know I I joke that I'm gonna have use the AI to tell me who I am um and that's kind of what you did right yeah um and and before we before we get into that I just think that that the the salt the salt metaphor that you use is really apt and I think it
actually connects quite a bit to the sort of Courage idea that you you brought up right after that which is um it's not only a good metaphor for finding your people I think it's also a good metaphor for how progress tends to happen and when you're doing anything new which is um people think that progress um is linear and it actually
does not feel linear at the time um it happens in jumps um it happens like you see a clear Beaker and then you drop a crystal assault in it and it suddenly all just like turns into um turns into salt um it's a similar feeling a lot and I think that's that's why there that sort of adage about like it takes 10
years to have an overnight success like that is actually what it looks like from the outside is like an overnight success or an overnight whatever but that's sort of the the the crystallization of all the salt that's been boiled in the water um happening because of one little thing that little thing doesn't matter it's
the years of of adding salt to the water and boiling it that matters so to your point about having AI tell you who you are I think that that's exactly right it's it's a joke but it is also real um I think uh I think these tools are incredibly effective at um taking in lots of information and reflecting it back to
you reflecting back what they see and um I think for someone like me being told who I am is like incredibly it's incredibly important it's incredibly valuable um and I think it's I think it's useful for everybody but like for me in particular for example like I have a lot of tendencies that make it sort of easy for me to
forget who I am so like a really good example is just the stuff we've been talking about about am I writer am I founder blah blah whatever um and sort of um subverting the writer identity because the founder identity was like a little bit more prestigious a little bit more it's felt a little more like I
could just say that and people would get it and like all that kind of stuff and I think there's lots of stuff that's like that um about me but probably about everybody but me in particular like I'm just my sense of self is I think a little too sensitive to to like what's going on around me um and I think having something that
I can kind of like spill my guts to and have it reflect back like this is what I see um I think helps me create a little bit more of a stable sense of like none this is what I this is what I like and this is what I want and and whatever um and so using it in that way as a little bit of a mirror I think is incredibly incredibly
valuable yeah and um many of the use cases that I got excited about early on so like I go way back and when they still called it machine learning and uh you know I thought of another essay that you wrote I had a conversation with a friend who was also a contributor uh to osam um and he he loves uh stock markets but he was
literally a machine language expert and he' done so well with machine learning or machine learning not language excuse me um that I call him I'm like so walk reach through this you know tell me how it works I'm really fascinated by this I think it's kind of the next Frontier for quantitative analysis Etc and and he
said something that resonated because you wrote an essay about this he said here's what it is Jim he said the human desire to know why something happens is going to be the bottleneck for using AI he said Jim I can build you a system that tells you what that tells you when that tells you how but will not tell you
why and he goes knowing you as I do you'll [ __ ] love it he said but knowing other humans as I do they won't and you know I was always kind of driven by Witkin Stein's Maxim don't look for meaning look for use so talk a little bit about about that because I love that essay resonated strongly with it but it as my friend pointed out to me
like Jim you are kind remember Young Frankenstein abin normal he said you're kind of abin normal and he said I think it's like one of the most significant bottlenecks for regular folk who are going to be like but why oh why tell me why I love this um you're really speaking my language uh I I think you're referring to a piece I wrote a while ago
called against explanations yes and the basic idea is that as a society we're sort of obsessed with finding scientific explanations for things and and we can define a scientific explanation is sort of like um it's it's causal it's like if x happens then y will happen so we understand the full system and um we've
been we've been obsessed with that um probably since the enlightenment but probably even even we can probably go back to like Plato and the idea and the idea of like um uh forms um yes perfect mathematical constructs that like don't really have physical reality but like all of physical reality
is sort of like a an exact copy of that um and wisdom is about finding the finding the forms which which then you can sort of Trace to Aristotle um who was Plato's student who um located the forms not in this sort of like immaterial world but like as this interplay between like your your your observations like what's what's in the
world and and sort of is contained the form is sort of contained within them um and and Aristotle's Outlook which was a lot more empirical his father was a um was a doctor um his Outlook I think filters into just the sort of the scientific method right um uh and you can see that in Darwin and Galileo and um and and all these all
these sorts of figures Newton um that precipitated the like um the enlightenment the the Scientific Revolution which has been incredible for us right um but I think what's really interesting about uh about that Revolution which is based on um you know based on uh a lot of the stuff that happened in the enlightenment like uh
Newton's discovery of the laws of gravity we've been trying to um make all of our in all of our um sort of any Endeavor that makes progress we we try to think of as being like that like we were trying to reduce it to something like calculus um or the laws of gravity um where we can say it's a little
equation if x happens then y happens um and I think that's been successful to some degree but as we've levered up into more complex Fields like biology psychology social science economics all that kind of stuff um we found that it's actually quite difficult to do that um and we've been trying for a really really long time um
and I think uh you know you can look at something you can look at a field like psychology and be like well the reason why there's all this packing and all this kind of stuff is like psychologists like aren't just aren't good enough scientists and if we just tried harder and had better methods we would like be
able to reduce it down into a um uh you know something like a calculus um I think my feeling is that we are um we are drunk on explanations we're really trying to find explanations um and we're really drunk on our idea of ourselves as rational animals and that like being rational having intellectual understanding of something which again
comes back to Socrates Plato Aristotle that that's like the highest form of human existence and so if you don't really understand it you don't have an explanation for it then it's like it's not good enough um and to be clear I think that that got us really far um but I think the reason why there's so
much emphasis on rational explanation um scientific explanation causal explanation is um before you know uh I don't know a couple years ago um in order to make good predictions about the world um we needed to have causal explanations um so the good thing about calculus is you can like calculate the trajectory of a can all pretty
easily um and so um we've been looking for for explanations because we think that that's what we need to do in order to make predictions um especially predictions that are inspectable that can be transferred from one person to another like a great thing about an explanation is like I can explain it to
you and then you can use it and you can do the calculation yourself they're checkable um all that kind of stuff and what's really interesting about AI is it's the first time that we've had something other than a human um that can uh make predictions that are unbundled from explanations so we don't need the explanation anymore in order to
make the prediction um and so we're and and immediately what a scientist will say is well that's correlation it's not causation and I'm just like [ __ ] it like let's do correlations first um and so like I think that the uh correlation um or the ability to make predictions um uh without explanations that that you get
from machine learning or AI is like really important because I think it can help us make progress in areas of study like psychology that progress has been really really hard to come by um uh uh without it so you know we've been studying the brain and human psychology for at least 150 years U since Freud and like we still don't really know what
depression is or anxiety or like all the stuff right we don't have a scientific explanation for it um and I think what's really cool about um deciding to do away with explanations at least for the time being is that you can turn um like a search for the dep search for a definition of depression which again goes back to Plato like or
Socrates um you turn that search for definition into um from into uh like sort of an engineering problem so you're not asking what is this which is a scientific question you're asking how do I fix it or what do I do with it um which is a which is an engineering problem and you can do you can um you can you can solve
that latter question by being able to predict it so instead of um knowing what depression is we can just predict who's going to get it and which treatments are going to work for them um and so one thing that's really interesting is uh you can start to help people immediately so I think that's really
important and the other interesting thing is that I think I think that if you have a good enough predictor for a phenomenon like depression there will probably be some sort of explanation in your neuronet um and uh and what's interesting about that is I think neuron Nets are like a little bit more interpretable than human brains are so
um we may be able to like find a explanation for depression for example in a neuronet that that predicts it rather than like studying the brain um but I think to like sort of bring this all for Full Circle I think what we will find is probably the explanation for depression or something like that some complicated High L topic like that is
not is so big that it's not um open to rational analysis it's like it's too big to fit in our rational brains but what's really interesting is I think that um anyone who's had like had an interaction with a really really good clinician knows that some people have just like an intuitive idea of like what's going on
with someone and how to fix it that like other people don't and it's just like them building up this like intu that they even expain but it's like in there right and I think because of this whole thing that started with like PL and Aristotle and Socrates we've really like jettisoned our Reliance on our intuition and said
like intuition is like sort of bad you know to some degree we should be finding these explanations um and and and that's for a lot of reasons right like when you when you use intuition which is really about correlation like you're open to sus to um uh to uh you know uh you start to believe in spirits or ghosts or whatever
like non-empirical things right um and the and the emphasis on rationality um allowed us to um create provable explanations that could be transferred between people which which allows for better collaboration which helps us make progress and what I think is interesting about AI is um building AI models that
work a lot like human intuition and that they can make pred itions without explan explanations those AI models have a lot of the properties of explanations so they are transferable they are inspectable and debuggable um and so they they take this innate human thing intuition and then they put it out into
like a machine that can replicate it to some degree and so I think it's I think we may shift our view of of the value of human intuition because uh we we suddenly have machines that can that can replicate it and that can um have it be transferred from from person to person and help us make progress and so I think um uh like what
we should be doing is um deemphasizing our search for um causal explanations our emphasis on rationality and instead re-emphasizing our view of human intuition and um and and the ability of um machine learning and AI models to uh to replicate its best properties and use it to make progress you know that's why I started
this uh chat with this is going to be a series because like literally we could do an entire show on this because I completely agree with you and you got to remember I my career I owe my career to being you know a Spock right being totally analytical replicatable models that you can that if you ran the same
back test on something you would get exactly the same results as I got and as as I did it I became very aware of the fact that my dad and I I I love philosophy he loved philosophy and and so he was a platonist and so I decided Well I'm going to be an arist Aristo and and so but as we we would have great talks really and they were
really educational because like I would bring up a point he'd like oh that is one I haven't thought about but then he'd come up with a good example and it really led me to this idea that really you've got to unite you got to be Apollo and dionisis you've got to be Plato and Aristotle or you're missing or you're
missing half of the way of getting insights yeah and like I often say that one of our greatest challenges is that for the most part most of us are determinist thinkers living in a probabilistic world and generally hilarity or tragedy ensue yeah and so one of the things as I go back through my old writing and and my new writing is
like it was always acknowledging that but I was really suppressing it because I wanted just the facts NOP we've got to make sure that you know we know what the cause is we know what the general outcome is and then and then I I did a conversation with rubert sheldrick um who I think is one of the most brilliant
uh uh scientists working today and yet to to the materialist uh Citadel he is the heretic of all Heretics because that's what he's espousing right he's saying and you know what um these 10 laws of science he is a great um Ted Talk and where he just demolishes them all but what we started talking about um on our chat was this idea
intuition and how how do we how do we test it right like I look at intuition as look when I've had a long career in finance for example and when you see the same pattern Time and Time and Time and Time Again you get this saturated or imbued intuition and it's something you're really not aware of at the
conscious level but you are incredibly aware of it at the intuitive level it's like in 2006 I was marching around saying to anyone who would listen if you can short your house short your house like real estate is going to be a debacle and then they'd say why and I'd say I've seen this I've seen I've seen this Play Time and Time and Time and
Time Again and so we're actually uh in the beginning stages of trying to work on an intuition app with Dr sheldrick in which we would uh make it fun and the object of the app would be to a see how good your intuition is B if it is pretty good can we improve it but then see Dr sheldrick is willing to do it scientific
method test on it and what I love about him is if he comes up with a n set he publishes he's like well I thought this I thought that this could happen but didn't bear itself out and so I'm just a huge fan of giving the multiplicity of models right that's one of the reasons why I love AI so much and
one of the things you talk a lot about is we're moving from a knowledge economy to an allocation econ economy and in an allocation economy again we are so aligned it's scary I might try to hire you before the end of this or maybe I'll just buy every we can talk about it but like are are things that are
really difficult to quantify right good taste I have been saying for several years now that if you have good taste and you're a good curator man is the world going to be your oyster because I think that what's going to happen especially with AI is we're going to see a tsunami of AI only generated content and I think that the beginning of that
it's gonna suck it's not going to be great because it's gonna lack the human spark now do I think it could get and will get better yeah I do but I think that for now I'm a huge believer in kind of the senar model human plus machine making for the best and my you know uh Brian romelli who's a friend he he he says we shouldn't call it artificial
intelligence we should call it intelligence amplification and that's one of the things that I like and you advocate for in the allocation Society or economy excuse me tell us a little bit about how you came to seeing that switch from the knowledge economy to the allocation economy yeah I just guess I was just
observing my own patterns in both using Ai and running a company um and I use AI all the time for writing for programming for decision making and um and I I realized when I was trying to figure out like what's a good metaphor for what it is like to um to use a model a lot I realized it just reminded me a lot of interactions I have
with people that I work with with at every as a manager um and then a lot of the skills of being a manager so a really really good one is um when to delegate and when to um like micromanage or like look over their shoulder like that's a skill that every manager every beginning manager has to learn how to do
and everyone [ __ ] it up um I've been cursing a lot I don't know why something about this interview is I'm freeing I'm a I'm a bad influ it's uh because somebody I I had zenra I don't know whether you to follow him I do yeah so I had him on the podcast and we're friends and he Patrick my Patrick my son has him as part of his Colossus Network
and and David first thing he said was Jim is is this a cursing podcast I went [ __ ] yeah and he was like he just was so relieved that's great I'll have to text him and and let him know that I I followed his lead and I dropped a couple on your show yeah but he he still is the king he's dropped more F bombs than any
other guest I can't compete I definitely cannot compete um so so going back to sort of the the manager idea um and this sort of like delegation versus micromanaging it's a thing that every manager has to learn um I struggled with it I still struggle with to some degree um and and every time I I watch someone at every
become a manager I I see the same thing um I realized that a lot of the same things are happening with people when they use models um so they'll be like well I delegated X task to it and it came back and it didn't do a good job or well in order to get a do to do a good job I have to like tell it every single step
um and I'm basically just doing the work for it um and so I realized oh yeah yeah this is like a very it's it's a very overlapping problem with with the problem that managers have and what's interesting about the skill of being a manager is that it's not very broadly distributed I think there's like I I I
have some stat in that piece and I can't remember but it's like single digits of Americans are managers um and that's because currently it's it's like very expensive to um to have to to like hire people um and so there's only a few people who get that opportunity to to learn how to hire and run a team and I think uh probably
what one one outcome of the AI age or or whatever age we're in um is the is the SK this those same skills will become much more broadly distributed because the same skills will be um used for not for human management but for being a model manager um and models are going to be much cheaper and much more broadly
available and so I started to think about like okay like what happens what happens in in a in a world like that and and so I was like well um uh it might mean that uh the way that you are compensated um and what skills are valued are are those sort of like management skills so it's like one to delegate one to one to micromanager um
or your taste or your vision or your ability to break a task up into its uh smallest components and then know which resources to delegate each part of the task to like all that kind of stuff and so I was like well in that case like maybe it's maybe we're sort of entering an allocation economy where you're
compensated based on your ability to allocate intelligence um and that's that's sort of where it came from yeah and one of the things that I uh when I started ory Adventures like one of my nor Stars was We Are Gonna we are going to imbue AI into every aspect of everything we do um and it's really interesting because I I I got on certain
things resistance that I really was not anticipating and so for example I think that AI since you can you can cre AI is really good at creating um uh characters right and so like for example we have infinite books it's a publishing company now we're GNA have ai do a lot of The Drudge work that currently is a
bottleneck at other Publishers like simple things like you know when you send your manuscript in and you're really eager to see what it looks like as a book book right they're supposed to put it they're supposed to typ set it like it like it will look as a book and if you written a book you know that reading it that way you're like oh my
god I didn't even see this this or this and and as the author is very eager for that in a traditional public having done four books um it takes a long time between when you give them that manuscript and when you get it back in a different format with hopefully some typos found and some other editorial choices well
with AI we'll have it back to you the next day and so but another thing I thought was you know what like and and I love to see that you referenced it Duma with the Three Musketeers used to writing te and I was super bullish on this idea you know like every TV show every movie they all have writer rooms it's not a single author
and one of the things that I wanted was let's create an AI writer room let's I love history so I particularly like the way will and Ariel Durant write their books why don't I just download everything that will and Ariel Durant have ever written and create an AI will or Ariel Durant not to write it but to
work with me right I'm a big believer I've always believed that I was at best a co-creator right the universe and the muses and everything else you got to give them credit right because you're you're co-creating but when I when I when I pitch this to a lot of authors they're like never never I will you know I will that's an
Abomination and and so I don't think like that at all and so I put a lot of my ideas into Ai and I say show me my weaknesses I did it with some of yours with a large language model and so what I put in was I put in your idea that um uh the uh that we're moving to an allocation economy and so I did this
with a commercially available uh chat GPT from open AI so anybody can do it and I said so tell me if is this argument weak and it came back with yes when you simply say knowledge orchestration is the most important bottleneck the AI came back to me and said the statement is very Broad and lack specifics as to why and then I said
okay and then it goes maybe data quality is the biggest bottleneck maybe computational power is the biggest bottleneck and then like I do with my own stuff I said oh cool so take what you've just criticized and give me the Improvement and it did and so it goes okay so I think that what we should do is have concrete examples and then it
started listing them for me and it's like healthc care our case study will be IBM Watson for oncology what was the issue it struggled to deliver good diagnostic guides it was not accurate in terms of predicting cancer solution enhancing the knowledge orchestration and then it gave all of the examples by giving the framework of Clinic
guidelines real world data all of this and then he and then it goes this suggests that it really is knowledge orchestration because then it addressed each of the ones that it had said it could have been was it the data Integrity issue was it this and then it's like no but then it just kept going and it gave Financial Services JP Morgan
and and but it took it through everything and I just do that by rot these days right like every idea I have I throw it into well we have our own uh uh internal AI stack uh but you can do it with with any of these what why do you think that people are reluctant why do you think that that like I just look
at this as God damn it this is the coolest tool in the world I mean I feel I obviously feel the same way I spend my whole life playing with this stuff and I was honestly doing something so similar today like I um I was reading um one of the reasons why all this like Greek stuff is on my mind is because I've just been on a Greek
kick and um because I'm writing a whole like kind of piece that's tracing the philosophical emphasis on explanations and and and all that kind of stuff uh and um so as part of research for that piece I'm reading this book called um the trial of Socrates by if Stone and oh yeah good book you know yeah it's really
cool because like Socrates is this like um he's a he's a intellectual hero he's a he's a martyr for reason right he's like the the the base of Western culture in a lot of in a lot of important ways and I of stone is but the Athenians executed him um and and usually like you read Plato you're like well obviously
the Athenians are stupid like why would they do that and I stone is like no like he was kind of an [ __ ] like he he sort of deserved it a little bit you know he was he was pretty anti-democratic and a lot of his like a lot of his um pupils were the ones that like led the overthrow of democracy a couple different times in Athens prior
to his execution um and Athens was like remarkably tolerant of a lot of his anti- Democratic ideas um until you know a couple of a couple of revolution or oligarchic takeovers of a and sort of LED them to be a little bit more like sensitive about it um and so anyway uh so I was reading that and what's really
fun is I have the new chbt advanced voice mode and I just like opened it up put it on the table and as I was reading you know a I was like asking questions I was like who is this person like tell me the tell me the background give me a little background then i' go back to reading and then B like I think what's
funny is the you know I think the usual like platonic or Western case for Socrates is pretty biased and I think if Stone like is biased in the exact opposite direction which is kind of funny like it's not Balan he's just like Socrates sucks um and so he would say something uh in the book and I'd be like
I'm kind of curious like what's the other side of it um and so I would just ask like yeah what's what's the what's the counter argument here and it just gave me a really really good counter argument and then I was looking for like I'm balanced perspective um and one thing that I I find is like kind of interesting is thinking about someone
like Socrates like you either villainize him or you or you kind of Knight him or think of him as a little bit of a saint and and you kind of um glorify the um his emphasis on on rationality on on on sort of an internal idea of of right and wrong that kind of um both led him to found Western philosophy and probably led to his
execution um but I think when you look at it that way you sort of dehumanize someone like him um and it's really interesting to think of Socrates as as a human and to think of him in psychological terms and so I was like okay pretend you're like an expert clinical psychologist and you're examining socres like how would you talk
about him um use clinical terms and so it started talking about yeah like has this like deep internal locus of control he has extremely high standards he has like sort of a rigid thinking style that can't accommodate um like a social pressure from outside or or any sort of social um control over him and and put
possibly his emphasis on um on uh like Socratic irony or Socratic questioning is like a defense mechanism against like he has such a strong idea of what is right that he has to pretend like he doesn't know anything so that uh and ask questions so that he doesn't like piss people off but then he pisses them off
anyway anyway it was like fascinating it was amazing I loved it it was so cool and it felt like yeah a little bit of this like co-created discovery of like a new view of Socrates that I think is actually true and and and and and interesting and valuable and so I think these tools are like incredibly um incredibly helpful
for that and and kind of make me feel like I have superpowers um and as to why people are afraid I mean I think that there's I think there's many different answers for many different people um I think I do think writers in particular have this um real attachment to like their words and their thoughts and nothing interfering with that I
think like you and I might be a little bit more open to it a I think we're just sort of like early adopter nerd type people um but B if you run a company you're you're a little bit more used to the idea that like even if you didn't do every single part of this it still can be yours or you know you get to put your
name on it to some degree and so I think we're a little bit more used to that it's maybe maybe a similar kind of um managerial skill or um experience where it's like we did this all together and also like it came for me like I you know it's there's you both can be true in in certain ways and I think um people who
have had that experience uh may be a little bit more sensitive to the idea that they're like they're kind of giving up something really really important by allowing something else into their process but I think that the like the the actual like the the more Balan view of creative work is that like there's tons and tons of contributors to Any
Given creative work um and it's never the precious thing where you like went up on the mountain top and you were uninfluenced by anything you were like sitting in an isolation tank and you were uninfluenced by anything like it's just not how it works um and and I think we can debate the the relative pros and
cons or strengths um or weaknesses of of different influences on Creative work but um I think it's sort of inarguable that for a certain kind of creative work for a certain kind of person like language models are like uniquely effective and empowering and um I think uh there will be a new generation of creatives that that use it to build
stuff and there will be new social norms around them like right now it's sort of like I don't know it's like a little bit uh shameful especially in certain circles to admit that you use it for writing where it's it's like a little bit um it feels a little weird to like talk to chat if you're in a room of
other people like it all that stuff is like weird I don't think it'll be weird in in 10 years or 20 years or whatever like I think people forget and don't know that um you know 100 years ago um maybe a little more than 120 years ago is um listening to music Alone was considered weird um because music was a uh communal
social activity and so and you made it together with people around you um and so listening to a recording of it was like it was it was this a a lot of similar feelings as as people feel like um you know listening to AI generated music or reading AI generated text like it's it's shameful it's uh it's it's
uh it's missing some core element and I think what the the core element that's actually missing is um we have this whole sediment of experience and memory and culture that have grown up around like the idea of recorded music um that all allows us to connect with it in this very deep way um
and language models like have none of that and so I think people like us are drawn to them because they're new and interesting and and we like that stuff um but they're missing the like sediment um and the sediment is Rich and important and it's amazing and um I think we tend to sort of mistakenly uh think all these things are
like Frozen in time and will always be the way that they are and the reality is that like the sediment is going to build up and in 30 years or 40 years like we're going to like look at today is like the Golden Age of like when language models were like so cool and so and so open and so like there's there's so much stuff that that they're doing
right now that um forever more they will never be so innocent you know it's like the Golden Age of s of Cinema uh was like you know at the beginning of it before it turned into like a Hollywood big Mega machine or whatever like we're right there with AI stuff if you're if you're willing to pay attention to it um
and um and I think that the Moors and the um the social value of it will change um but it'll take a generation yeah I think that uh are you have you read Joseph heinrich's book the weirdest people in the world yes I love that book it is literally sitting right in front of me me too and one of one of
the things that the really good points I think he makes is that we have cumulative aggregate cultural Evolution and it stands outside of normal Evolution and it actually does change our physical characteristics he makes the point that literate people their brains are literally shaped differently what what happens with highly literate
people is they the ability to be literate colonizes the area that was given to visual Acuity and when you take a uh a film of a an illiterate brain versus a highly literate person they're literally different shapes yeah and the idea is very consistent with what you just said unless you are like really into
it you're going to need the aggregate cumulative cultural Evolution to happen before you're like oh okay yeah that's fine and I I think it's also it's everywhere by the way right like who who do who are some of the artists that modern people think are the greatest artists of all time right probably a lot of Impressionists in there Vincent Ben
go in there Etc but when they came about like everyone hated them yeah they were like and in fact their name was given them as a d a term of derision right you know that looks like a child finger painting right Little impressions right and and so like B go sold one painting during his own Lifetime and now he's considered the
greatest artist of all time and that fluidity I think a lot of it is due to the need for cumulative cultural Evolution and if one of your edges is that you can see that [ __ ] a lot sooner than other people that's a really nice Edge to have because like it's almost invaluable and and if you are I I and
and that is not meant in any way to diminish people who don't like look at the world that way I think Bucky Fuller had this great idea which is don't don't bang on people because they're not tuned in yet if you're tuned in earlier be happy about that but remember you're probably wrong I always remind myself I'm probably wrong I'm probably wrong
but like being tuned in if you are like really into something like you and I are into AI you're of course you're going to be a little more tuned in because you're like all over it it and the example that Fuller gave was the microscopic world before we invented microscopes we had no idea that there was this entire other
world there and then uh the I can never say the guy's name L Lin hook La hook V Leen hook I think I don't know thank you thank you thank you um and he's looking through he's like holy [ __ ] he got tuned in but then how long did it take other people to get tuned did took decades and so I think that one of the
changes is we're getting tuned in faster than we used to but there's still a huge leg and in that leg lay massive opportunities agree I totally I totally totally agree um and that's that's one of the things that I I feel so lucky to do is like I actually it doesn't NE neily take so much smartness to like you know see this in this the world in this
way it's just like I L I just get to live it because I'm like interested in it right and like a lot of this stuff is are very simple like projections out from my my own experience like to some degree like because I have chat gbt advanced voice mode I get to like live a couple weeks or months ahead of other
people which is crazy um but because I sort of have been using this stuff and use it a lot every day um there are a lot of people who it will take them a couple years or maybe more to like to do the same thing and so I get to see a little bit further ahead and um and obviously like that doesn't mean I'm like some kind of like
genius or whatever um and and or like profit or whatever and and it obviously it doesn't mean that other perspectives are not Val valid like I I think there's a lot of AI skepticism that's that's warranted I think like um in general the discourse uh kind of goes uh from everything is amazing and it's going to
be AGI to like everything is going to we're all going to die and I think both are wrong um and um uh and and and different people with different personalities like all everyone has a sort of place in the world it's good to have people who are a little bit more conservative and aren't like jumping on to the next thing all
the time and are like stalwarts of society and like all that kind of stuff it's great um uh but yeah I think I I wake up every day like super super energized because I'm like holy [ __ ] like I get to see things that no one else gets to see and like I'm like all the stuff that I've been thinking about for a long time is
like finally I can do it and like and I'm I'm lucky enough to be in a position where I like have the time and the energy and the money and the team and the skills or whatever to like take advantage and so I'm just like trying to do it as much as I can um and it's super fun I love it same with me and exact same feeling right it's like I I I
sometimes get um short-tempered with the uh people in my family that I love like my wife for example she like was one of the original AI haters she she's an artist she's a photographer and so I decided that I was gonna just kind of slow walk it with her and then I finally like I was just like triumphant the other night when she's
like we're having dinner and she's like hey could like your models give me examples of what I could maybe improve in my photography and I'm like yes they can honey but they're not gonna change it right I'm like not if you don't want it to if you don't want it to they won't change anything but they can give you
all sorts of suggestions yeah and then she's kind of like okay would would you install that for for me on my computer I'm like yes yes but I have found that that is a better way to approach it right like I am rid like I'm crazy and like I'm uh one of the things that I'm also happy about is like the cost of being a heretic today
has really plummeted right in the old days for most of human history if you were like not in the lane of society yeah boom your head gets chopped off you get burned at the steak you get you know the authorities are like heretic kill him burn him and now we get our own we get our own podcast and the worst thing that could
happen is people are like shoty [ __ ] idiot that guy is so I love it yeah yeah I I just I and so my method is just to be like hey you might like this just give it a give it a a look see and and not to push right because like you're never going to convince anyone that here's a great example like I
personally believe I we're caring for uh my wife's 97y old mother she's got still got all of her marbles she's an amaz she's an amazing human I want to interview her and like put it on the podcast because like literally somebody born in 1920 whatever right and what she's seen in in her life and everything but one of the one of the
other things that I see like we have her living here with us and she had to go to a rehab facility after she got co co and Dan I gotta tell you when I went to visit her I was [ __ ] horrified because there were all of these elderly people literally unattended in their rooms and it was the saddest thing that I had seen in quite a
while and like literally walking down to her room there was this poor woman in her room basically just repeating would somebody please help me would somebody please help me and like my heart got broken and so immediately I started thinking well what about an AI use case that would be like literally a
companion like somebody that they could talk with and then maybe we could emul their children their grandchildren and the reaction that I got from people that I thought would be find that like an exciting idea they kind of looked at me and like you monster yeah you want a machine to take care of them and I'm
like okay well what's better leave them in their room alone shouting will somebody please help me will somebody please help me or giving them a companion and then they're like they get all PL PL perfect form well no that that should be the family in there with them and I'm like well yeah there's a huge difference between should and and you
know ought and and real right the fact is the family isn't going and doing that and as idealized as that might be that ain't happening yeah so why are you objecting to the ability to at least give these people some kind of comfort but the push back oh my God they like they looked at me like I was Satan himself yeah I I I I I've felt that too
from a lot of people um and I think that there is something to the like um uh there's like the the tech bro kind of like character archetype that's like I'm gonna fix everything and like whatever and and obviously like that's not great you know um but I think that there's this other thing going on on the
other side which is that um there is a sort of um moral judgment aspect to new things um which I think sometimes gets in the way of the pragmatic like is this going to help or not um and I think being able to factor that out like the the moral it's like almost disgust element um the moral disgust uh reaction um will open up a lot of these
types of um types of things like uh it is you know when people think about um I don't know AI boyfriend girlfriend types type things it's the same kind of like disgust feeling but what people sort of forget is there are a lot of people out there who have real problems communicating verbally um in real time
in person with people and chat Bots are like the first time that they can like actually have like what feel like real social interactions and like practice their social skills and have people have something that like kind of gets them and and can and is patient enough to like be with them in the way that they
want someone to be with them and you can't argue with me that like oh it's not real like they should just be sitting in the room alone or whatever or they should like get out there or whatever it's like no no this is like super helpful for people that need it um and yeah I think like it's probably a bad idea to
create chat Bots that are designed to like take people and uh get them sitting in their room you know not interacting with other people and being addicted to it and you know whatever like there's probably some there's probably some ethical line but I think there's um it's it's incredibly valuable even for me I
have plenty of friends and I have family that I love and I have a girlfriend and like whatever like I have plenty of social interaction but like just having that thing to talk to where I'm like I'm reading a book can you can we talk about it like I don't have people that I can talk to like that really as about all the different things I'm into I have
people for certain things and and but sometimes they're not available you know and it like it is actually like a deeply like life enriching thing if you if it's used correctly um and I think um uh I feel very lucky to to to a live in that time and then B yeah like I I do a lot of that like gentle gentle pushing with people around
me or hopefully in in the writing that I do or the podcast that I record or whatever um to you know like because go going back to the example of your wife like photography for example is has faced this very same thing when it first came around right people very suspicious that it's going to unemployed painters
and it doesn't take any skill to like just look through a lens and press a button and it's like turns out actually it takes a lot of skill um but we don't think of it as like a new technology or a technology at all because it's been around for so long same thing for writing books or whatever like same
exact thing um and um I think you can you can talk about that but my experience is generally some people resonate with an argument like that but mostly it's like kind of it doesn't really it doesn't really resonate but like what what I just do is I'm like you should tryy CL for that and they're like no and then I but I keep kind of doing
it and eventually it like they're like oh interesting this is kind of cool I'm like yeah um and that's that's of what the show I do is about too because I think um what I try to do is interview people where we're not just talking about it like we're actually going through and and looking at their their exact use
cases um so like how are you like what are some historical chats you've done with XYZ um model and then way you actually use it together and I think that's a really great way to like give people the like uh allow people to put themselves in the place for like oh I can see how I would use it because I can see how someone else is doing it um
where I think talking about it in the abstract it's such a general purpose tool that people have a hard time like connecting with it and so uh yeah the more the more people just see other people doing it and and get to try it for themselves in specific ways that that are helpful for them I think the
better could not agree more Dan and as I said in the beginning uh I I'm getting my hook here because we're at the 90 minute Mark uh I hope that this is the first in a series of chats between you and me about Aon the good and the bad right so like I am not panglossian about this at all like I understand that we're going to create a
whole new set of problems hopefully they're going to be better problems and hopefully the AI will help us solve those problems uh but I I we did we didn't get into any of the downsides of which there are many but it's kind of like the quote from I can't remember Whose Line it is but it's a great quote it's like we invented fire and guess
what or we discovered fire a better way of putting it Fire's really dangerous and but it's also like the reason for our prefrontal cortex when we started cooking our food that's what created this executive up here and so instead of banning fire we had fire departments fire alarms fire extinguishers fire men
and women you know fire retardant Etc so like instead of like the only kind of argument that I have a really hard time with is the are what big folks that I dumped The Lunatic Fringe like we not we'll leave names out of it but a certain someone calling for stripes on GPU facilities I think does not Advance
the conversation I agree but I think that I'm very un willing to talk about the Alles because there'll be a lot uh but like this has been absolutely fabulous it's like um I I'm very excited because I can't wait for the next time I talk to you me too but but in the interim uh first off tell everyone where they can find you I know where you can
find you early every subscriber uh but uh tell our audience where where they can find you and then I got a final question for you all right so you can find us uh at every. um And subscribe there you I'm also on X at Dan shipper and you can also subscribe to my podcast Ai and I on uh YouTube Spotify or apple podcast so
wherever you get your podcasts Perfecto all right you're GNA get more than one bite at this apple uh if you've heard any of our other podcasts you know that at the end we make you the emperor of the world and that you can't kill anyone you can't can't put anyone in a re-education camp you can't write the
book The Republic because you're a reactionary and you lost the pelian war but what you can do what you can do is we're going to give you a magic microphone and you can say two things into it and the two things that you say are going to incept the entire population of the planet the next day they're going to wake up whatever their
next day is they're going to wake up and they're going to say man I just had two of the best ideas and unlike all the other times I'm going to act on both of these ideas today what are you going to incept in the world's population this is interesting I did not prepare for this um but the two things that came to my
head first were um be curious and be kind I love both of those wow the world would be such a better place if those were the two things that animated the entire population because you know the final thing I'll say is that you know everyone says that the only costom is change um I I used to like really
entirely Embrace that and col I read this kind of crazy philosopher who I'm looking for his name yeah I actually wrot it down because I forgot uh bertran uh kitler who wrote a book on Consciousness and and he made a great point and he was like no for human beings the ultimate a pain is growth and then he goes through all of the things
like everything else in the universe grows until it reaches its potential he uses plants and trees and all of that he goes but we can't physically grow or we trle over what is the one thing that where we can have unlimited infinite grp our minds and and so I'm a huge believer um that curiosity is what leads to that growth and kindness
like and and there's a huge difference between someone who is kind and someone who is nice I come from Minnesota and they have this thing Minnesota nice and and and when I was going back there I was just like welcome back I turned to my wife and I said welcome back to the land of false sincerity and and pretend nice um but
like there's a huge difference between being nice and kind I Endeavor and try to be kind I'm not particularly nice though so this has been absolutely great I'm gonna have my nanny also known as my executive assistant uh who literally uh tells me what I'm going to be doing the next day I have no idea I get an email
from her every night and I'm like oh that's tomorrow that's awesome I've been looking forward to talking a Dan whole time but thank you so much I love everything you're doing and I can't wait uh for our next conversation awesome thanks for having me and I feel the same way I'm excited to to do it again terrific thanks Dad