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We're entering this exponential trajectory and our antiquated minds cannot possibly keep up unless we change the stories, change the programming, and change the hardware.
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Introducing elements into complex systems is a tricky bit of business, and he advocates that we do so slowly, carefully, and reversibly.
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Technology doesn't slow down for anybody.
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Our operating systems are basically emotional.
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The one emotion that rules them all is fear.
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We evolved to be coordinating social creatures primarily because it's an evolutionary advantage for survival. Upgrading human OS. That ain't easy.
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And one of the most critical pieces is removing as much of the negative storytelling as you can because it's everywhere.
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But there's too much information.
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In order for one creature to carry it on, absorb it all, pass it all on.
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Change the system, change the incentives, and voila, guess what happens?
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People change their behavior.
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If we can't get the right stories out there, then we can't change the trajectory and we'll end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, hello everyone.
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It's Jim O'Shaughnessy, with yet another Infinite Loops.
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I often talk about Prometheans being among us with all of the changes that are occurring.
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And I think I have one such Promethean as my guest today.
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Sam McRoberts is the author of ‘The Grand Redesign’ in which he makes a very compelling case for our need as a species.
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We humans, need to rapidly develop our outdated hardware and software to keep pace with, and discover new things through harnessing tech change and changing our own software.
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And the way to do that is through stories.
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We seem to run on that as our fuel. Sam, welcome.
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Sam McRoberts: Thanks, Jim.
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Appreciate you having me. And you nailed it. That's it.
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Change the stories, change the world.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: Well, you had me at that line alone.
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I think you and I are really simpatico on a ton of stuff.
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And as I was reading your book, I'm just saying to anyone within earshot, "This is an upgrade manual for human OS. This is it right here." So let's dive right in.
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First off, why'd you write this?
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Did you write it to provide a user manual for upgrading human OS?
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Sam McRoberts: So as I say at the end of the book, I put this to paper or digital paper, but really, the whole thing kind of popped into my head fully formed.
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I didn't have to sit down and work through an outline.
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I didn't have to do a bunch of research.
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The whole idea just kind of slid in there.
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I was like, "Oh, well that's pretty good."
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And then I sat down and over the course of maybe 15 or 20 hours, banged it out.
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And so I guess I kind of wrote it, but the underlying purpose and the feeling, the overwhelming feeling that I had is just that things need to change.
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We're entering this exponential trajectory and our antiquated minds cannot possibly keep up unless we change the stories, change the programming and change the hardware.
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We're not going to make it.
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And so this seemed to be a great way to do three things.
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The first being, to very simply and clearly make people aware of a lot of the stuff that operates behind the scenes that most never even realize is going on.
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The second, to a really cold, hard look at the scope of our current technology and where we're aiming and where we could end up.
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And lastly, specifically a handful of points and stories and mechanisms to try and harness some of these problems to be benefits until we can fix and upgrade the issues. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
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And we are incredibly aligned in our beliefs that this is really not optional. This is required. Sam McRoberts: Yes.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I love the vehicle that you use, the Watcher, and as you were talking about how it just hit you, I thought of course of Nikola Tesla who said he didn't invent anything, it all came to him from the Watcher, maybe. Right?
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And by the way, if you're familiar with the biographies of many scientists, inventors, et cetera, what is a very common theme is exactly that.
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That, "Oh, I saw the DNA helix in a dream." And- Sam McRoberts: Yes.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: I think that there is so much more, and we could talk an hour about whether consciousness is actually external and we really are receivers and broadcasters.
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But I don't want to do that because this book is so great and you actually create a guide, a user's guide for what we need to do.
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So I want to jump right into that.
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But I first want to ask about the Watcher.
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I want you to explain to our audience the concept of the Watcher.
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And I have a question that I'd like you to address as you do that.
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Is the Watcher an unreliable narrator?
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Sam McRoberts: Interesting.
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So the Watcher in a nutshell would be perhaps one of the oldest members of a civilization from the far distant past.
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Consider it one of the earliest civilizations to rise and attain a post scarcity trans, their based programming society.
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And having reached that post scarcity space is left to find and pursue whatever their authentic interests are.
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In the case of this watcher and a number of other similar folks, they go around the universe looking for intelligent life and observing.
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They want to see what's going on.
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They want to see their stories.
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They want to try their foods, they want to experience their evolution and chronicle all of it because to them, it seems like such a waste that any of this creativity should be lost.
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But for a number of reasons, they can't interfere.
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They're not comfortable interfering.
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They've had problems interfering in the past.
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And so they have rules and constraints they watch only, they don't interfere.
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And this particular watcher is getting really tired of non-interference.
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He's found a culture that he's particularly attached to and doesn't want them to fizzle out and sees that this culture is at a key inflection point and decides, "Fuck it, I'm going to interfere."
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: I love it.
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Sam McRoberts: And whether or not it's an unreliable narrator, I don't know.
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Reliable from what point of view?
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I mean it thinks it's reliable, he/she, whatever it is.
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But it has an agenda, so maybe not perfectly.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: So yeah, that's why I ask, right?
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Because Joe Norman, who's a complexity scientist, argues that introducing elements into complex systems is a tricky bit of business.
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And he advocates that we do so slowly, carefully, and reversibly.
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I think it's the last one that he really underlines.
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What are your thoughts on that?
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Sam McRoberts: I think maybe that would be in an ideal scenario, but that's just not the way things typically pan up.
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I mean, technology doesn't slow down for anybody.
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Every now and then you might be able to get a little bit of a break or a buffer in there, but usually not.
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Usually it's rolling forward as fast as people can come up with ideas and try them.
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And it's one of those things that fortunately or unfortunately maybe a bit of both compounds.
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So the faster it goes and the more ideas and the more people there are having ideas and trying things, the more this corpus of experience and thought builds up and gains momentum.
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Like a snowball rolling down a hill and picking up more matter as it goes, it just gets bigger and faster.
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And so I think it might be nice sometimes if we could slow things down.
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I mean, the pain comes in large part from the speed, but I don't think that's realistic. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
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And you make the point in the book that essentially for me echoing Jed McKenna, that we humans our operating systems are basically emotional.
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And Jed would say that the one emotion that rules them all is fear.
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And that if you decide to look at the history of humanity through a lens, you could add a lot of clarity if you looked at it through people making, societies making fear-based decisions.
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It leads to the precautionary principle.
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It leads us to believe that what we know now is true and real, where I think we both know that that's a load of bullshit.
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Because if we went back to just even 500 years ago and we were able to isolate the most intelligent human on the planet or a group, if you want to make it a bigger thing, the top decile of the smartest people on the planet, almost everything that they believed to be true was not true, right? Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
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I mean, your map, all maps are flawed.
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No map is the territory and there be dragons at your edges, no matter how far out you push those edges- Jim O’Shaughnessy: Truly, Korzybski, the map is not the territory, fabulous illustration that really makes the case.
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Let's talk about, first off, I love social iOS.
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And so explain it for our listeners and viewers and then kind of go down the list because I think they're all really important.
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The whole idea of in-group versus out-group, what stokes that?
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How can we ameliorate that situation?
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Status games I had Will Storr on Infinite Loops and what a wonderful guy.
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Sam McRoberts: Brilliant.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: And yeah, total brilliant.
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But his assessment at the end of the day is there's no escaping them, man.
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There is no work around because they are just so in our base code that you got to learn to live with them.
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But then also mimetic behavior, mimetic contagion, and then bring in emotions.
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So I've just given you maybe a 20-minute spot.
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Sam McRoberts: You're going to have to re-cue me up on each one, I couldn't remember the exact order to save my soul, but the social OS- Jim O’Shaughnessy: Okay. So, yeah. Social OS.
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Sam McRoberts: Social OS, let's start there with the overarching view.
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I mean, we evolved to be coordinating social creatures primarily because it's an evolutionary advantage for survival.
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It's also one of those things where there's too much information in order for one creature to carry it on, absorb it all, pass it all on...
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You can't do it one-to-one, you need many-to-many.
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So we evolved to work together to gain better resources, defend ourselves, mate, control our environments.
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And so we have these deeply rooted social components.
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I mean, one of those would be the in-group versus out-group bias.
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When you're living in an incredibly scarce environment, resources are limited, your survival is tenuous.
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You want to hang on to whatever you find and keep it for you.
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You don't know when you're going to find more food or a safer place to live or better hunting grounds.
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You don't want to share those things.
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And anybody who comes along is a threat to the resources for your group.
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And so we've developed this wiring for us, our group.
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And them, anybody else who might want stuff that our group has and needs to survive.
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And again, we mentioned the antiquated wiring.
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This is wiring that's been in place for 50,000 plus years at least, probably far, far longer, and hasn't really changed in at least the last 50,000 years.
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And so we're operating on the programming that fit really well in caves and savannas and doesn't work quite as well in such massive, massive groups as we find ourselves now.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: Totally agree.
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And you hit the idea about scarcity driving it, and we're moving into hopefully a more abundant age.
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Certainly when you can make digital goods that have zero cost of- Sam McRoberts: Yes.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: Reproducing that alone, you need to think through the implications of that if you want to understand how society is going to evolve.
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And- Sam McRoberts: The implications are huge.
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I mean, Star Trek is really kind of the archetype for that post scarcity world.
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And it showcases a lot of the pros and some of the cons.
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But it glazes a lot over the transition period from scarcity to non-scarcity.
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It's just like, "Ah, there's a big war.
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The eugenics war, there's a lot of fallout.
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We went through a bunch of changes, now look at us, we're awesome."
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Bit of the hand wavy-ism or whatever they call it in Sci-Fi.
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But really, it's that transition period that's rough because you have to move from the economic engine of consumption, which is what we have now to one where there's no incentive whatsoever for consumption and there's no marginal cost to create, energy is free or effectively limitless.
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The entire system breaks. And it's not easy.
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You can't just flip a switch and make it happen.
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There's too many moving pieces and way too much momentum.
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And so that I think is probably one of the biggest challenges out of all of this, is that transition period, which is where we find ourselves.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I agree and that's why I'm so taken with the book because it's a guide, as I said at the opening to upgrading human OS.
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And that isn't easy as one who has tried many, many times to at least upgrade my own human OS, you find yourself... It's hard, first.
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Second, you've got to document it because your brain is designed to make you forget things it doesn't want to remember.
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You have in the book that basically, everything happens in the subconscious and then it gives directions to the conscious, which I tend to believe. Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
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I mean your favorite, the Robert Anton Wilson's Thinker and Prover. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
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Sam McRoberts: Thinker thinks, prover proves.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yep, yep. Exactly.
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And it takes those instructions quite literally.
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And so if you can understand that and grok it and use it, it's like magic really.
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Because all of a sudden a world that looked like it was filled with trouble and strife looks like, "Hey, the future's so bright, I got to wear shades."
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But it also is hard and- Sam McRoberts: Super.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: So one of my questions is, and you do it in the book, that's why I'm setting you up for the answer here.
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How are we going to get a significant enough minority of people kind of trailblazing here?
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Sam McRoberts: I think there's a lot of components to that.
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I mean, the first and most important component is just the stories.
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We have a tremendous number of stories flying around.
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Books, movies, music, media, social media.
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There's tons of stories, competing stories, conflicting stories, stories of all types.
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And there's a sequence of things that we would need to do to reverse this negative trajectory.
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And as we talked about the social OS, there's a lot of components to that, that are deeply rooted and hardwired, but can be overcome through story.
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So I think one of the most critical pieces is removing as much of the negative storytelling as you can.
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Because it's everywhere, I mean, that's how these ad driven media companies make their money.
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They want to piss you off, they want to irritate you.
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They want you to feel strong emotions because those get eyeballs on ads and it's an awful set of incentives.
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So it's up to you to recognize what's happening, recognize how you're being manipulated and start calling your diet, so to speak, your information diet.
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So for me, I try and tear out absolutely everything that's based around negativity.
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If it's not optimistic and hopeful, I generally avoid it because I want to look at the future with hope and optimism.
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And I think there's a lot of people that I observe who have realized that and have made changes.
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People who've gotten off social media entirely or who've carefully curated their information diet.
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I feel like that's swelling because there's been such a massive depression and anxiety stemming from this influx of negative stories that people are starting to see it and wake up.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: I agree.
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And I think that I always equated the negative story tsunami with...
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It's also happens to be appealing to that Jed McKenna base emotion of fear.
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Fear of the new, especially.
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Novel fears, novel dangers are things that, if we go to Claude Shannon, he would say, "That's information."
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And so the information immediately gets our attention, you know how our brains work, right?
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And if I'm looking around my environment here and everything's the same, my brain essentially stops being interested. It's just like, "Okay." Sam McRoberts: Yes.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: It's identical. So I wonder how...
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Obviously, it's one that aligns perfectly with my mission at O'Shaughnessy Ventures.
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We had a competition for Infinite Loops to write positive, optimistic stories about the future.
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And I found- Sam McRoberts: White Mirror, I love it. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
18:15
And I found this guy, Tinkered Thinking, and he's amazing.
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And I want to make a ton of his stories into movies, when I get the AI capability in Infinite Films, I'd like to make this into an AI movie. Is there enough...
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The thing from ‘Arrested Development’, "There are dozens of us, dozens."
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And I wonder is dozens enough, right?
18:39
Sam McRoberts: I don't know.
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I mean, if you poke around in the spiritual space, you'll constantly come across this idea of someday, eventually, somehow we will reach this tsunami of awareness.
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There'll be this mass awakening.
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I don't know if that's the case.
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I mean, if you look at the history of humanity, it's much more been a very small subset of people dragging everybody else along, kicking and screaming and burning them at the stake.
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There's no mass awakening. So I don't know.
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I don't know if we're going to actually pull it off, but I see tons of these outliers, these heretics out there poking at the edges, figuring things out.
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Creating new technology, pushing things forward, and still dragging people, kicking and screaming.
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I mean, the latest being artists and writers pissed off at AI, there will always be people upset as things roll forward, but there's so many positive things on the other side, it's just reframing it.
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It's helping them to see that.
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So I think, those who are on the leading edge, one of the best things they can do is try and work to reframe that.
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Like, "Hey, this isn't trying to steal work from you.
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This is trying to augment your abilities.
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This isn't trying to make you obsolete, this is trying to make you exceptional."
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And those are the stories though.
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You need to better stories, better framing.
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And one of my favorite things, and yet biggest beefs is dystopian Sci-Fi.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: Mm-hmm.
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Sam McRoberts: I love it.
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I love it and I hate it because...
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Oh, what was the Ezra Klein article that just came out? It was like... I forget the title.
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I just shared it earlier today too.
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It was something along the lines of, ‘The Dystopia We're Expecting Is Preventing Us From Having The Utopia We Deserve’, or something to that effect.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: I think.
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Yeah, I think that's the title. Yeah, I read it. It was a good piece.
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Sam McRoberts: And it falls back to Kyla’s vibecession thing.
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There are a lot of self-fulfilling prophecies, and I think if we can't get the right stories out there, then we can't change the trajectory and we'll end up with a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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We'll end up with dystopia just because everybody was expecting it and nobody took steps to create anything better or resisted the steps to make things better because they thought it was impossible, pie in the sky.
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Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I feel quite passionately about that and agree wholeheartedly, but I also think...
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I know I'm probably wrong or I'm at least missing something, what I'm up against here, right, because it seems the default is that, right? I'm the same as you.
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I love science fiction and I've read a ton of it.
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I have done a bunch of science fiction treatments.
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For example, when I was reading your stuff and the Watcher, I had this treatment where the most advanced civilization in the world gets pinged by various civilizations when they're ready to get this incredible...
21:34
And in the version of the thing, it's a spacecraft, but they finally ping somebody on Earth.
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Earth reaches a position where someone sends the signal out to this civilization and they show up and they don't have bodies.
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They're pure energy, but they have to take on the thing.
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And basically the story is that, yeah, we are in a multiverse.
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Yeah, they're all pushed together.
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This crap lets you go anywhere in the multiverse, but also anywhere in the time in the multiverse.
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And the original picture of Earth is just Earth.
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And so the human goes and looks at some others and it's like, it's so many versions of that world because people have been going around and changing it and changing it and changing it.
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And I never did much with it because as I reread it, I'm like, "This kind of is a dystopia in a way, and I don't want that to happen."
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And so people get all obsessed with their own lives.
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And so they look at Jim one through Jim 10,000, and they're like... But they learn.
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So they learn because they're looking at versions of themselves, multiplied by zero.
22:58
But it's hard to come up with a good hook for science fiction in particular that doesn't have terminators and doesn't have aliens that want to eat and kill us.
23:12
It's why horror is so appealing, right?
23:15
Sam McRoberts: Well, again, if you look back at our evolution, our evolution has always been zero-sum conflict based.
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And so our stories that we told around the campfires that we used to teach and indoctrinate were zero-sum conflict based stories.
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And so the stories that appeal most to us naturally are those that have some form of conflict that are zero-sum, which is what a dystopian Sci-Fi is.
23:40
Utopian Sci-Fi is boring.
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Everybody lived happily ever after, the end. There is no story arc.
23:45
It doesn't follow any of the prescribed patterns, and that's why.
23:48
That's why it's hard to make it stick, I think.
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And somehow, somehow we are going to have to get beyond that. I think there are ways.
23:55
And again, I mean, Star Trek.
23:56
I think Star Trek did an enormous amount of good for a lot of nerds who went on to reshape a lot of aspects of the world because it gave them ideas and made them hopeful, they want to see something like that.
24:08
Wouldn't it be great to have a nonzero-sum game to play for once and have tried in various ways to make that happen?
24:14
And I think we're progressing there.
24:16
We're getting some of the pieces, it's just never as fast as we'd like it to be.
24:20
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And that's one of the mandates of O'Shaughnessy Ventures.
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We won't look at anything that is not what we perceive as a positive sum, win-win game.
24:33
We don't care how great it is.
24:36
I did a Spaces last night, and I talked about like, if somebody came to me with a payday lending scheme that was 10X better than the current ones, I would say no, because I think they're predatory.
24:49
I think that they're basically...
24:52
You could make the other argument.
24:53
I have friends who disagree vehemently with me and say, "These people don't have banks, they need the ability to..."
25:00
And I'm like, "Yeah, right.
25:01
But charging them usurious interest rates on their paycheck I think is not an optimal way to do that."
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And so what's interesting is it really focuses...
25:14
We've been doing it for months now, and it really focuses the mind.
25:19
There are a lot of pitches that just go out because they're based on zero-sum conflicts and, "We're going to kill them.
25:27
We're going to destroy the competition."
25:29
No- Sam McRoberts: And you have such a huge advantage being your own LP that you can set this. Sure.
25:36
I mean, a return is great, but at the same time, the return you're looking for is a better future, which is the best return for everybody, which is amazing.
25:44
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly.
25:46
And selfishly, it's the best return for me and my grandchildren and my great-grandchildren.
25:51
And why would not want that to happen?
25:53
Sam McRoberts: And at the end of the book, as part of the sequence of things that I included in there to kind of reshape things like that's one of it.
26:01
The idea of the pay it forward, like pledge plus lotto.
26:07
There's this idea in there of an open pledge that anybody can sign it committing to do something good for a stranger every day, something kind.
26:14
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, I love that.
26:15
Sam McRoberts: No strings attached.
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You commit to doing this, you commit publicly.
26:19
And then the counter to it would be kind of how Warren Buffett's fund, "I'll give away at least half my wealth before I die or all of it after I die."
26:28
Or something to that effect.
26:29
I'm blanking on the name of it, but something like that to back it so that every day there's a payout equivalent to the GDP, one year's GDP, in each country to people participating at random.
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So every day you pick one person from each country and you pay them out this amount.
26:46
And all you have to do to be eligible for that is to commit to sign this pledge publicly.
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You don't have to prove that you're being good, but we like to live up to our ideals.
26:56
If we commit to something, our brain is going to try and make us hold tight to it.
26:59
But you hit all of the angles, with that set of things.
27:03
You get the people who genuinely want to be altruistic.
27:06
You get the people who want to be seen to be altruistic.
27:09
You get the people who want a reward out of it.
27:11
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.
27:12
Sam McRoberts: You hit all your bases.
27:14
And the reason behind being good is completely irrelevant, more good, makes the world better. So I don't care.
27:20
I don't care what your motivations are, I just care that you try each day to do something good for somebody.
27:24
The world will be a better place.
27:25
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I loved that idea because I hate the nags and the scolds and, "You have to do this for the planet, or you have to do this for whatever." And, "Fuck you, man."
27:42
I mean, I love the aspect of, "You just got to sign the pledge.
27:48
And because the prover takes over." Right?
27:52
And one of the things that I found through research is sometimes changing your physical environment actually changes you.
28:01
And it's really interesting, that's why I'm a big fan of travel and taking different landing spots.
28:10
It sometimes changes your behavior.
28:12
But what I love about your thing is it's like Bucky Fuller said, "Changing human nature is really almost impossible, but changing the underlying system, that's pretty easy." So- Sam McRoberts: Yes.
28:27
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So change the system, change the incentives, and voilà, guess what happens?
28:33
People change their behavior.
28:34
Sam McRoberts: Incentives are one of my absolute most favorite topics.
28:38
I think I first started really honing in on them when I heard about the ‘Cobra Effect’.
28:42
The story of the Indian government wanted to get rid of a proliferation of cobras.
28:46
They were a danger to people.
28:47
So they started paying a reward every time somebody brought in a dead cobra.
28:51
And so people turned around and started breeding cobras and they figured out what was going on.
28:56
So they stopped the system, and then they turned all the cobras loose, and there were more cobras in the wild than there were when they first started the system.
29:03
And that really latched into my mind.
29:05
I was like, "Holy shit, I'd never really thought about incentives that way."
29:11
And so I started really digging into that.
29:13
But yes, you change the incentives sometimes even in very, very simple ways.
29:17
And as long as you understand what makes people tick, it's very easy to determine how those incentives are going to play out. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
29:24
And it will take, I think a group of...
29:25
Back to the dozens of us, dozens of us, right? I think that it's got...
29:27
And you have it in your thing, the whole idea of mimetic behavior, we can latch onto that because at least in my mind...
29:31
By the way, I am not a somebody who's like, "Yes, this is the answer to everything." Right? No, it's not.
29:40
But it is a piece and it is something interesting that you can figure out how to reconfigure if you're trying to do what you're advocating here. The great reset.
29:53
Sam McRoberts: So this actually circles back perfectly to the social OS piece and status games. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
30:00
Sam McRoberts: So I actually think the optimal way to get anything to spread is to get the highest status people to spread it. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
30:06
Sam McRoberts: I mean, this is exactly the type of story that the wealthy and powerful and influential, if we could get them to read and understand and commit to making this a thing, so many other people would fall in line just because of status games.
30:19
They want to be seen to be doing the things that those in high status are doing.
30:23
They want to be a part of their tribe.
30:24
And so fine, that would work. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
30:29
And I think that's kind of an edge case with Buffett's whole pledge thing.
30:34
The problem that I have with that is, it's pretty clear that it's being taken over by vogons.
30:44
And the administration of it is troubling to me.
30:51
Sam McRoberts: I guess, where there's money, there's parasites.
30:54
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Always. Always.
30:56
And you're never going to escape that, I don't think.
30:58
Even if we did everything in your book, we're going to still have a parasite problem.
31:03
And that brings us to like people who like, "Well, you're a wild-eyed optimist and there are going to be problems."
31:11
Of course, there are going to be problems.
31:13
Let's hope they're much better problems and then we'll solve those too. Sam McRoberts: Yes. Yeah.
31:19
I mean am optimistic, but I am also a very realistic skeptic and I know how people are and I know how slow some things can be to change.
31:29
But I am thinking of this in terms of dominoes.
31:32
I'm trying to figure out what are the dominoes that actually lead to the optimal pattern in the end.
31:37
And we can change our stories and counteract or work with instead of against some of our ingrained pieces, which is really just to buy us time to actually be able to take over our hardware.
31:49
And we're getting a lot closer to that on numerous fronts.
31:51
I mean, I realistically think within the next decade or two, we'll be able to change a great deal about our human biology.
32:00
Change our minds, change the way we think, have more control over emotions, have more control over the algorithms and wiring that we're running.
32:08
I really think a lot of that is not terribly far out.
32:10
We just need to buy some time to not fuck ourselves over until we get there.
32:14
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, I agree.
32:18
Which brings me to one of my favorite topics, which is how do we break the Shannon Limit? How do we...
32:25
Listen, I could fill a library with cognitive biased literature, right?
32:30
And yet we've known about...
32:32
When I did my first company in 1980, whatever, seven.
32:38
It wasn't called behavioral finance, I found a book about psychology called ‘Psychotherapy, Something Built on Myth’, and it basically listed what were then just called plain old cognitive biases.
32:49
And that was the paper I wrote for the company and everything else.
32:53
Okay, flash forward 30 years, and we've got Danny Kahneman as a celebrity, and Annie Duke is making her bones writing about all this stuff.
33:02
And numerous friends of mine are starting companies to, "This is how we're going to do it."
33:08
And I think Thaler and somebody else launched a fund, a behavioral finance fund.
33:14
And yet fuck it, if any of it changes, right? How do we reprogram?
33:19
Like if you take Timothy Leary seriously, you would say, "You reprogram by becoming a meta programmer and using psychedelics and allowing the person to reprint themself, to get rid of the imprinting that they had no control over that happened when they were a kid."
33:37
But are there other ideas that you have for breaking through the Shannon Limit, reprogramming these cognitive biases that are mental mirages, right.
33:48
You know there's no water there, but you still run to get a drink. Sam McRoberts: Yes.
33:52
I think part of it is that a lot of those things are set to run automatically in environments of scarcity.
33:59
And so this couples back to the whole progressing towards, hopefully, a post scarcity future.
34:05
Anything that we can do to raise somebody's baseline on Maslow's hierarchy of needs gives their brain the bandwidth to actually act on some of the things they may already know.
34:16
I think the average person probably knows a lot of their issues and recognizes maybe subconsciously or without the actual language to describe it, what some of these biases are.
34:26
But they just don't have any fucking bandwidth to deal with it.
34:28
They have too many other things on their plate.
34:30
They're scrambling to pay rent and put food on the table and deal with the stress of work and the crazy political environment and all these other things.
34:37
They're not in a good position to act on knowledge, which is why we need to do both.
34:42
We need to equip people with the knowledge so that they can see what's running, but then also help them to get to a place where they can act on that knowledge because they're no longer struggling to keep their head above water. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
34:54
And one of the ways I frame it is they are distracted to end.
35:02
It's like if I was an evil genius trying to get people to comply with my will, I would fucking have bread and circuses and distractions and phony debates, and I would be 24 hour news.
35:16
I don't care what team you're rooting for, they're all the same, as far as I'm concerned.
35:21
They feel compelled and entitled that they should be able to control your life. And the prototype is... Read history, man.
35:33
It's like they're all the same.
35:35
Sam McRoberts: If somebody wants to be in power, they probably shouldn't be there.
35:39
It's very simple like they- Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly. Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
35:43
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I had an idea, again, for these fictional treatments that I might actually be able to get a chance to turn them all into movies. How cool would that be? Sam McRoberts: Amazing.
35:51
Jim O’Shaughnessy: But basically, the treatment was Washington became so out of touch and so ignorant of the state of tech, like what we see today, right?
36:05
We have people thinking that they should be able to regulate artificial intelligence, who have zero understanding of artificial intelligence and a bunch of other things too.
36:16
And so in the story, what happened was Americans being a kind of roll-up-your-sleeve people, decided, "Let's fuck this."
36:25
They built a wall around Washington DC and convinced all the pols within that they were doing it to protect them from all the horrible terrorists who wanted to kill them.
36:36
And so what the real dodge was, was that they ignored them completely, and they made sure that within the walls, everybody had...
36:45
This was written a long time ago, so it was pre-social media, but everyone had their own reporter who would issue a blipo second update on what that politician was saying we should do.
36:57
And the whole thing opens in a field in Iowa where a group of people who have been chosen at random from the National Lottery, a little bit like your thing, right, have to go.
37:09
And everyone is really bummed out because this particular gathering they're going to pick...
37:18
Randomly, select the person who's going to get the nuclear football, right, because- Sam McRoberts: Interesting.
37:23
Jim O’Shaughnessy: We've got to keep the appearances up and somebody's got to have that.
37:29
But everything is done by a random selection process.
37:34
And then everything is adjudicated through jury systems where people who are also randomly selected.
37:42
Sam McRoberts: So I like this, and I thought about this exact sort of thing. I think I'd do a twist.
37:46
So the idea of instead of people who run for positions of power, I do think it should be as a service instead.
37:54
I don't think it should be random.
37:55
I think, it should be basically put up to a suggestion system, and it should be domain specific.
38:03
So we feel like we need a law for this thing.
38:06
Who are the experts on this topic?
38:08
And those people are floated up based on asking people around that space, until you get a pool of candidates.
38:15
You draw from that as a jury and as a term of service, you come together to help put together a law.
38:20
That way you ensure that the people making that specific law understand the information and the topic well.
38:27
And they have no game to play.
38:30
They're not seeking power.
38:31
They're doing a term of service and helping to make the world a better place. It's visible. It's short lived.
38:38
Maybe it is or isn't compensated, I don't know, but it should not be a status game. And it is.
38:45
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, I like that idea.
38:46
I would augment it slightly.
38:48
And I would say that we had to try to balance the experts who vehemently disagree with each other. Sam McRoberts: Yes.
38:58
Jim O’Shaughnessy: There need to be experts who maintain one point of view and experts...
39:00
The table stakes being deep domain knowledge, right?
39:01
But you can have one expert who's going to go one way, another go the other way.
39:06
If you put them in a room and you tell them, "You got to come up with a law."
39:14
Through conflict, you're probably going to get the best law.
39:20
If each member of that jury system can agree, "Okay, I'll sign off on that."
39:25
If you can get everyone to sign off on it's probably going to be a pretty good law.
39:31
And then I would add one footnote, I would have sunset provisions in every law. Sam McRoberts: God, yes. Yes.
39:39
Jim O’Shaughnessy: This law- Sam McRoberts: Revisit this after five years, two years, whatever. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Sam McRoberts: Yes.
39:46
Jim O’Shaughnessy: This law has a lifespan of five years, of 10 years, and at which time it will be revisited with the new information.
39:54
Did the law do what we hoped it would do, or did it fuck things up, right? Sam McRoberts: Yes.
40:02
I mean, this is the biggest problem with centralized governments is that the feedback loops suck, they're so awfully slow.
40:10
And yeah, in that scenario, by having a limit on the laws, must be revisited after a certain period of time, maybe ideally by different people than those who set the law in place in the first place.
40:21
That way you have a much shorter, tighter feedback loop.
40:24
And so you can learn and apply learnings as opposed to like, "Well, I'm not going to bring it up.
40:29
I'm up for reelection next term.
40:31
Well, I put it in place back then.
40:33
I can't admit I was wrong, so I'm not going to talk about it."
40:35
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly.
40:36
And the problem is that I see in the deep dive I have done on human OS and its problems is that the political system.
40:38
Say what you will, it is incenting all the wrong kinds of behaviors.
40:44
And it is, it's a power game.
40:47
It's a status game, and it's also a congruity game.
40:53
Even if you're a psychopath, you want to appear, at least, congruent in what you're advocating. But that goes back too.
41:04
So if you know advocated and won like, "There should be prohibition."
41:10
It's going to be hard to change that person's mind to get them to pass the Volstead Act, right.
41:17
So I like your idea about different people.
41:18
I also love the idea that the government rules as a service, that would make the feedback loops much tighter, much more information laden, because we have laws on the books now and you see these pop up from...
41:39
They're always fun to look at, but in Kentucky it's illegal to have sex with a horse or whatever.
41:46
That's probably a good law.
41:48
But you know my point, we have laws on the books that are still technically laws, right? Sam McRoberts: Yes.
41:57
Jim O’Shaughnessy: That were written in 1828, which is the concern.
42:02
Sam McRoberts: All right, so this is one of the things that I would love to turn an AI loose on.
42:06
I would love to train an AI on every codified law in existence.
42:10
I would love to give it the task.
42:12
Find me every single law that contradicts, find me every instance of case law with conflicting results.
42:18
Find me every instance of a law that's no longer relevant.
42:22
Let's clean this up because I mean, a lot of this just built up this cruft over time.
42:27
Nobody has the bandwidth to go back and look at it again.
42:29
But a lot of it, I think was actually...
42:31
Planned obsolescence is the wrong word, but planned complexity because it keeps lawyers in business.
42:39
The more complex the law is, the more they get the bill, the more hours they have to bill. And it's awful.
42:45
And so we need to break down that incentive stack.
42:47
And I think AI would be amazing to help clean up and re-codify that into a smaller set of nice, clean laws.
42:53
Jim O’Shaughnessy: You are clearly reading my mind because one of the things that excites me most about AI is going to be the thing that is hardest to get done, and that is, it is going to attack a lot of deeply entrenched interests.
43:12
And it's not going to be just laws, man.
43:14
It's going to be medical research.
43:16
Sam McRoberts: Everything.
43:17
Jim O’Shaughnessy: It's going to be published, peer reviewed papers.
43:21
I want to set AI loose on everything and- Sam McRoberts: Yes, please.
43:26
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And have it come back and say, "Jim, this is conflicting deeply here in the outcome of..."
43:32
And the thing that's cool about this is not Sci-Fi, we will have the capability with foundational models that are trained on massive data sets.
43:46
And the other thing that they can do that we humans simply can't do, an array of a hundred million different data points on a matrix, easy peasy. Not a problem. Sam McRoberts: Yes.
43:59
Jim O’Shaughnessy: The ability to look into liminal spaces, easy peasy.
44:05
And so my idea is let's start slow.
44:09
So let's start with stories.
44:13
Let's unleash AI on every story that we can get in digital format and let's see what it finds there.
44:21
Then let's set it loose on old research, antiquated...
44:27
The people are dead, right?
44:29
The people who publish those papers are dead, they're gone.
44:34
And therefore we can interrogate the veracity of their published conclusions.
44:40
And then slowly by slowly, if we get the kinds of wins there that I think we will get, then that is another way to build a mimetic contagion, so to speak.
44:55
People will be like, "Well, wait a minute, what about all these laws?" Right.
45:01
And so I haven't landed on a way, and it would be great if you had a way to be able to do this without it almost certainly getting to physical conflict. Sam McRoberts: Yeah. So I mean, a few things.
45:17
One, I agree with trying to drip out some of this slowly.
45:20
I would probably run it in parallel tracks though.
45:22
I'd have my public track and my private track, because I think that there's a lot of things that we need to go faster on, even if we're not making people clearly aware of.
45:30
The upsides are so enormous that delays, I mean, are going to cost lives effectively.
45:37
Any delay in a lot of these things is going to be detrimental to human wellbeing.
45:44
How to avoid the conflict is going to be very hard because it's impossible to please everybody.
45:49
And we're still fear-based.
45:51
But I think the best way, and you're right about starting with stories, I think that is probably the best place to start.
45:57
Because people love media and if you give them more awesome media, they're going to start enjoying it.
46:03
It's almost like a reverse frog in a pot.
46:06
Instead of turning up the heat, you're turning up the awesome.
46:09
And so just over time you don't really realize how much things are shifting.
46:12
It's just enjoyable the whole time.
46:13
Yeah, I think that's a great idea.
46:15
It's just such a complex balance.
46:19
I'll think about it though.
46:21
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Do, because I'm fascinated by it and I certainly want everybody's input because I'm not going to be able to think it up.
46:30
But then as you were speaking, I'm also thinking lives are at danger.
46:36
Well, the problem there is that is also the basic argument of the precautionary principle, right?
46:43
The precautionary principle, in my opinion, of course, we have to take precautions, of course.
46:50
I mean, one of the things that terrifies me about AI is we are going to have autonomous drones that are killing drones.
47:01
And the tech is trivial, trivially easy, that it gives me a... I'll use myself.
47:10
So here's Jim, facial recognition.
47:15
It is programmed to only kill Jim.
47:20
So no collateral damage, no missiles killing children.
47:25
And that's really, really, really bad.
47:27
And- Sam McRoberts: Super bad and super easy and terrifying because facial recognition is okay, but it's still really easy to fuck with. So that's not ideal.
47:34
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so it's on the list of like, I am not a panglossian optimist about anything and certainly not about AI.
47:44
Look, I am incredibly excited about the good side of what AI can do.
47:51
I honestly believe that it is the tool that, used properly, we can use to literally upgrade society, right?
48:03
And yet, of course, there are all of these bad things that we've got to figure out a solution to.
48:10
Sam McRoberts: Every technology is a double edged sword.
48:14
The upside with AI is that you get to choose the system of rewards and weightings.
48:21
You have control over what it is that is either pumping the brakes or the gas for this AI.
48:29
We don't have that now with ourselves.
48:31
Our brain uses its emotional puppet strings with absolutely no real input from conscious us.
48:38
That's just the way it rolls.
48:40
But with AI, we get to choose precisely what those puppet strings are and when and how they fire. That's amazing.
48:46
So the idea that we're just going to suddenly, accidentally create some super evil, destroy all humans, gray goo AI, I think is total.
48:53
That's the dystopian Sci-Fi programming speaking, I think it's infinitesimal, but I think the upsides are enormous and most of them are mundane.
49:04
I mean, especially right now, AI's really cool and we've made a lot of advances, but the mechanism by which we've made those advances is pretty mundane.
49:13
And there's an enormous possibility space just with mundane AI that will be huge, hugely transformational, we're still a ways out from the stuff that's going to be really mind bending.
49:23
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, I agree.
49:24
And again, I think that I like your metaphor of the reverse frog, right?
49:30
If we can make experiences much more awesome and much less tedious or dull and boring, we're wired to like that, right? Sam McRoberts: Yes.
49:43
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so, it's kind of like I always say, I look for things to root for as opposed to against, because it's easy to root against almost anything. Sam McRoberts: Yes.
49:55
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right.
49:56
"Yeah, but have you thought about..."
49:58
And I've dealt with pessimists in the past who are really smart people, by the way. They're not dumb.
50:05
And they just get caught in this infinite loop of- Sam McRoberts: Of fear?
50:11
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Of fear.
50:12
Alan Watts had a great line, which is, "Worry is an endlessly peeled onion." And that's right.
50:20
If literally you program, you're a prover, so to speak, to find problems, guess what?
50:29
Your life is going to be nothing but problems because it doesn't job very well.
50:34
But I like the extension to the idea, that doesn't have to be built into AI, right?
50:40
The tech nerds call it maximizing the objective function and what the Facebooks of the world maximize the objective function for was revenue for Facebook, right? Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
50:53
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And I understand that they wanted to have a successful company, but- Sam McRoberts: Sure.
50:59
Jim O’Shaughnessy: We can maximize for creativity, we can maximize for human kindness, we can maximize for all these things.
51:07
And it starts also with what's happening in education, that's another one of my things.
51:14
I don't know if people my age are salvageable.
51:19
Some are, but- Sam McRoberts: Some are.
51:22
Jim O’Shaughnessy: But I'm 62, I think I'm relatively tuned in to what's going on, but I'm probably wrong about a lot of stuff.
51:29
And I don't know what my subconscious is telling me, "Oh, Jim, no, no, don't do that."
51:34
But if we go down and just the experience that we've had at Stability AI, we got the remit to educate a third of the African nation, Malawi's children and the early results, man, are mind blowing. They're mind blowing.
51:55
And I was meeting with one of the ambassadors when I was in Florida last week for the Synthesis School, and I didn't even know that they were experimenting with AI and their results are ridiculous, are off the charts.
52:11
The thing that I like about that though is the AI is going to learn you, the child, is the data source. Sam McRoberts: Yes.
52:20
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And the AI is going to continually refine itself until it communicates with that child perfectly in that child's voice that it understands and unlocks.
52:33
"I'm not afraid of math, I thought I was, but the AI has given me the path that I can understand math, I can understand physics, et cetera." Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
52:42
Jim O’Shaughnessy: So- Sam McRoberts: I mean, the current education system is a conveyor belt with no control over speed or number of items.
52:50
And so you end up with like Lucy cramming chocolate into her mouth and every crevice and pocket she has available just to keep up with the pace.
52:58
I mean, I don't know what percentage of kids are doing well at the standard pace, but I'd guess it's not a majority.
53:05
And this is exactly what we need.
53:06
We need the ability to teach at somebody's pace, in their style, with the number of repetitions that they need, the frequency that they need, the connections that they need.
53:17
And it's going to be different for everybody.
53:19
I mean, that'll be amazing.
53:22
The embodied young lady's primer with AI, customized education for everybody on any topic that you're interested in. Like hell yes, please. I'll take two.
53:31
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, exactly. I'll take four.
53:33
And the problem is, again, we are bumping up against a system that maybe when they started this system, it had some reasonable points to it.
53:48
But it is so antiquated and one of the unintended, I hope, unintended consequences of it is we are going to make you a productive, i.
53:58
e, producing member of society.
54:06
And one of the unintended consequences of that is it crushes creativity.
54:11
It crushes open-mindedness.
54:15
If you look at the animal world, how do animals learn things? Playing.
54:20
Sam McRoberts: Our system is optimized for growing GDP, not for human flourishing.
54:23
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly.
54:24
Sam McRoberts: And we need to switch that.
54:26
We need to get off of the one and start playing the other.
54:29
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly.
54:31
So I could see somebody editing this and making me or you sound like firebrand communists, man.
54:43
Like, "We've got to stop optimizing for free markets and we've got to begin optimizing for this."
54:51
That is not the point here.
54:52
The point here is that free markets deliver.
54:57
They have a lot of problems.
54:58
They have a lot of problems, but they do deliver.
55:01
And- Sam McRoberts: They work primarily because they're open, largely transparent, and have fast feedback loops.
55:07
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly. Right.
55:11
And only the free market can produce a Pet Rock, right?
55:15
It has no rational reason for existing.
55:20
But the free market figured it out and they figured, "Oh, and why don't we do Beanie Babies at the same time? Let's delight people."
55:30
And we need to understand, I think...
55:33
Like my degree is in economics, worthless, totally worthless.
55:36
But it's because we thought that we could build this Rube Goldberg machine that would make the most efficient delivery of goods. No, no. No. No.
55:49
It's based on human desire.
55:50
It's like, what is money, but a technology that helps you get what you desire?
55:55
And- Sam McRoberts: People aren't rational.
55:58
So if you try to engineer a rational system, it's not going to work.
56:01
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Not going to work at all.
56:03
So that's why we had all of these blow ups of Keynesian econometric models.
56:10
We've got it figured out.
56:12
Well, it's the great joke about economists and the punchline is, assume we have a can opener.
56:20
In other words, they have these cans they can't open, and the engineer is like, "Well, if we build this, I can open this way."
56:27
And the scientist is, "No, we can do it this way."
56:30
And then the economist just goes, "Let's just assume we have a can opener."
56:34
And so it's really interesting when you look and you take apart economic models about the planted axioms within them, right?
56:45
So the ones that dominated America, at least, for a good 50 years, the econometric models of the Keynesian variety, they literally assumed humans out of the equation.
56:59
Basically, they're like, "Well, yeah..."
57:04
And I used to get in trouble like an economics class because I would always have my hand up and I would, "Have these economists ever actually gone to a marketplace and watched humans behave and how they pick things."
57:16
And like, "That's irrelevant, that fucks with the model." Well, it's a bad model.
57:23
And so, one of the things that we're trying to do and make a tiny dent is the whole fellowships thing, there is so much genius in this world, and now we can find it and we can fund it.
57:38
And who knows what's going to happen. Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
57:42
I mean, statistically, there are tens of millions of actual geniuses all over the world, and we're maybe aware of, what?
57:51
A 10th of a percent of those, if that.
57:52
Tiniest, tiniest percentage.
57:53
Jim O’Shaughnessy: That's- Sam McRoberts: Most of them are- Jim O’Shaughnessy: Right. Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
57:57
Tinkering away in their garages, completely oblivious, focused on their own passion, not trying to go out and monitor...
58:03
Who knows, or rural Africa.
58:05
They never have access to the piece of information they're missing.
58:09
You could have as many variants of that as you want. Yeah, that's amazing.
58:12
Trying to hunt down those people and give them the leg up they need and the resources they need to express their genius is great.
58:20
And I think that's actually the single biggest thing in favor of a post scarcity economy is that it puts everybody in a position to express whatever genius they have. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yes.
58:33
And the thing is, back to...
58:35
I'm a huge fan of history.
58:37
I love Will and Ariel Durant, ‘Lessons of History’ is a great book, I think.
58:42
Sam McRoberts: Great book.
58:43
Jim O’Shaughnessy: But by the same token, we are looking at maybe N equals one.
58:49
And by that I mean we are looking at for, you make the point yourself, for all of human history, our condition has been one of scarcity.
58:59
And therefore that leads to a certain type of behavior.
59:05
Most of it is not optimal, in terms of that behavior.
59:09
And so included in that, I think, that genius probably is, if not normally distributed, distributed in a fashion where you can find it in the tales or whatever.
59:25
But my point is, for all of human history, probably like for every Da Vinci that we know about, there's a million others that we don't know about.
59:37
They didn't know they were geniuses because they were a French peasant and they never left the village, right?
59:43
Sam McRoberts: I mean, they think that something around 110 billion humans have lived most of those now dead.
59:51
And out of all of those, the number that have visibly moved history is maybe 10,000. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
59:59
So let's get to some of your suggested solutions.
1:00:02
I think a lot of them are great, and let's share them with our listeners and viewers. Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
1:00:07
So I talked about a couple of them a little bit earlier, but I'll run through them in order.
1:00:12
So the first is to reduce the flow of negative information into your mind.
1:00:16
Every single source of negative information feeding into your mind is literally poisoning your psyche, whether you're consciously aware of it or not.
1:00:22
So you need to find and excise all of those as much as possible.
1:00:26
I mean, if it were up to me, I would start putting laws in place to restrict misincentivized information sources.
1:00:33
Like you can't frame things this way in order to make money. That's not okay.
1:00:37
You need to be unbiased partisan in how you present your information. That would be ideal.
1:00:42
The second is to increase the volume of positive information.
1:00:46
Look for good stories, go out and find people like Hans Rosling who's covered all of the amazing advances and the benefits to society that we've experienced, so you can reframe your perspective.
1:00:57
The media makes everything look like it's on fire, and we're all dying and going to hell tomorrow.
1:01:01
And the reality is things are better than they've ever been across almost every possible metric all over the world.
1:01:07
So you need to shift that frame by changing your information diet on both points.
1:01:13
The next is ideally to create an incentivized system that gets people to stop seeing everybody around them as others.
1:01:20
Like we're not American or French or Chinese or Russian.
1:01:25
We're not Black or White or Brown. We're humans of Earth.
1:01:28
We're all stuck on this tiny little dot floating through space with an infinite number of things that could wipe us out at any moment.
1:01:36
And we're one, we're one tribe and we need to think of ourselves as one tribe and drop all of this micro tribal bullshit that's separating everybody.
1:01:44
And the easiest way to do that is to start seeing everybody around you as an opportunity to be kind. Everybody.
1:01:51
If you're looking for those chances to be kind to a stranger, now everybody is not an Other.
1:01:56
They are a friend, part of the in-group, because you're not kind to people who aren't part of your in-group.
1:02:02
You have to see them as part of that group in order to put effort into doing things for them.
1:02:07
So that I think would cause a pretty radical shift, if it could be adopted, but the last is, we cannot yet get rid of our us-versus-them wiring entirely.
1:02:17
We may be able to see ourselves as humans of Earth, but we're going to need to shift that tribalism another level out.
1:02:24
And I personally think that the best target for that at the moment is death.
1:02:29
Because all of the scientific research I'm seeing seems to indicate that biological immortality, at least, is not only possible but probable with the advances that we're working on making.
1:02:39
There are already at least half a dozen, maybe a dozen different biologically immortal species on our own planet that we've found and studied and looked into.
1:02:46
This isn't pie in the sky or preposterous, it's just a information problem and we're well underway solving it.
1:02:53
So I think by shifting that, by changing...
1:02:55
Because so much of our fear is rooted in our finiteness, in our, "Our lives are short, we're all going to die.
1:03:02
And so everything is a potential death sentence in some way shape or form."
1:03:06
If we can eliminate the death sentence, if now our time horizon isn't 60 or 70 or 80 years, but 60 or 70 or 80,000 or million.
1:03:16
If we can actually make ourselves biologically immortal and our time horizon shifts, it unlocks an entire new cognitive space and infinite opportunities.
1:03:26
But I think that both terrifies and excites a lot of people.
1:03:31
There's so much baggage, psychological and biological, associated with death.
1:03:38
I think that may be the single hardest piece to get people's minds wrapped around.
1:03:44
And it would be maybe a terrible thing if we accomplished that before we fixed some of these other pieces.
1:03:49
I mean, the last thing we need is a Putin or a Mao in charge for millennia, right?
1:03:54
But I do think that it is a place we should be aiming.
1:03:57
It is the other we should be focused against.
1:04:00
And until then, we really should be seeing ourselves as humans of Earth and try to be optimistic. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:04:07
I love the humans of Earth.
1:04:09
I'm also fascinated by the biological strides being made to at least, if not, make humans immortal, extend their life spans to an extent that would unlock that change of thought.
1:04:25
Sam McRoberts: Next step.
1:04:26
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah, right. Sam McRoberts: Yes. Yeah.
1:04:29
It'll be health span first, lifespan second. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:04:31
Sam McRoberts: But I mean, once you reach that tipping point where your advances in health span and lifespan start outpacing aging maybe 10, 20, 30 years from now, technology's good enough that for every year we live add two, at that point, it's effectively infinite. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah. Which is cool.
1:04:50
But I immediately flash on a series that it was a guilty pleasure of mine called ‘Altered Carbon’, and it envisioned such a thing.
1:05:00
It envisioned that our single body didn't live forever, but they figured out a way to take our consciousness, which of course is a conceit because if it's outside of us, it's not going to help having a stack built in to your...
1:05:14
But let's assume that it is internal and you have the stack in the back that holds you, right?
1:05:21
And then you just change it in different bodies, clones, whatever.
1:05:26
And of course, it's a dystopia because the Meths, the Methuselings, right, who achieved it first.
1:05:36
They have all the money, they have all of the power, they live in the clouds.
1:05:42
And so even something as kind of cool as the idea of expanding health span and lifespan, automatically the story gets told of a conflict with... And it's crazy, right? Sam McRoberts: Yes.
1:05:56
It's the same zero-sum bullshit.
1:05:57
Because if you think about it, if you're at a point technologically where you could extend your lifespan effectively, indefinitely, you have all of this time to do things, learn things, see things, consume things, you're going to need a lot of people to do those.
1:06:14
And people are going to be able to do those things better and better the longer they're around.
1:06:19
I can't think of any realistic incentive not to make that available to everybody, because that technological path is running in parallel, and in places overlapping with energy abundance as well as atomic and subatomic manufacturing.
1:06:36
If you have limitless energy, the ability to build anything you want at the atomic or subatomic scale and longevity, there is no incentive stacked to be zero-sum in any fashion, as many people as you want, all over the world, all over the universe.
1:06:49
It doesn't make a difference.
1:06:50
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:06:51
And it reminds me of the thought experiment that I read about in Darren Brown's book, ‘Happy More or Less’, I think is the title.
1:07:00
Happiness is the subject, and he refers to a thought experiment this guy came up with, which is, so you wake up, you're the only living human on the planet, right?
1:07:13
What are you going to do?
1:07:15
And what I love about it is it speaks to what you just said.
1:07:21
If you wake up and your zero-sum thinking is still there, what are you going to do?
1:07:27
"Okay, I'm going to go get the fanciest clothes and I'm going to drive Lambos everywhere and I'm going to live in a palace." But you know what?
1:07:36
After you do that, you're going to realize, "Well, shit.
1:07:40
That's really inconvenient."
1:07:41
Those Lambos are really temperamental.
1:07:44
I want a conveyance that is reliable, and I don't give a shit what it looks like because I'm not trying to impress anybody.
1:07:52
And am I going to wear really fancy clothes? No.
1:07:56
I'm going to wear comfortable clothes that are durable. Same with food.
1:08:00
Am I going to try to come up with the craziest inventions?
1:08:05
Maybe what would be something I might experiment with, but probably not.
1:08:08
I'm probably going to want to find a nutrition source that is- Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
1:08:13
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Endless. Right? Sam McRoberts: Mm-hmm.
1:08:16
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And you become happy. Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
1:08:18
So many of the targets people are aiming for are status based or mimetic based, and they haven't really thought it through.
1:08:22
They want it because somebody else has it or because they think it'll elevate their status.
1:08:27
I mean, Lamborghini are fun to drive, but as a daily driver, forever. No.
1:08:32
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Same wavelength.
1:08:33
And what I love about it though, is it fits very nicely in with your idea that when we do make these breakthroughs, and what I started our conversation with, the implications of digital replication are profound and they affect everything, right?
1:08:53
And so, I'm going to do a book, and I have a guy who's going to be my editor, he's already on the team, you know him, Vatsal.
1:09:03
And we're going to do a physical book just for fun.
1:09:08
But the electronic book is endless. You want a million? Sure, here's a million. You want 10 million? Okay, no problem. We can do 10 million. What's the extra cost? Zero. Zero is the extra cost. Sam McRoberts: Exactly.
1:09:23
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And so that type of world is really hard to grok because when you start thinking about it...
1:09:30
Like Kevin Kelly, the guy who founded Wired, has a good book about this, and he is like, "Well, what can't be created with zero additional cost?"
1:09:40
Well, things like trust, things like good taste.
1:09:44
The whole idea of curating something that helps people read really cool stuff, and he's got a great list.
1:09:52
But I love the way that it ties in with this notion of happiness. How is it that amid...
1:09:59
As you point out, amid possibly the greatest amount of plenty that humans as a species have ever had?
1:10:11
And by the way, I am not ignoring the slums of Nigeria or Mumbai.
1:10:17
We got a bunch of shit to fix, absolutely.
1:10:21
And let's get to work fixing it, right?
1:10:24
Let's use tech to figure out a way to inoculate against malaria.
1:10:30
These are all obtainable things now, right now. Sam McRoberts: Super.
1:10:35
Jim O’Shaughnessy: And- Sam McRoberts: I mean, we already produced more than enough food to feed everybody, more than enough energy to power everybody if we could just get it where it needed to be.
1:10:43
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly. Exactly.
1:10:46
Well, man, I could talk to you about this endlessly. I'm now, nearing my end.
1:10:51
My nanny, she's going to ultimately put a shock system in my chair, where she could remotely shock me to stop me.
1:10:59
But I could talk about this with you forever.
1:11:01
What are the hopes for the book? I love it. I'll recommend it.
1:11:07
We'll give copies of it away. Sam McRoberts: Yeah.
1:11:10
I wanted to make sure that it's digitally free.
1:11:12
I mean it's- Jim O’Shaughnessy: Which I love, by the way.
1:11:14
Sam McRoberts: In line with the concept, this should be available to anyone everywhere.
1:11:19
It needs to be available in that fashion.
1:11:20
If you want a print book, you can pay for it if that's your jam.
1:11:23
But digital's going to be free forever.
1:11:25
My hopes are just that the right people will find it and read it and embody it and start accelerating that change.
1:11:34
I mean, the higher profile they are, the better so that they can pull other people along with them. But that's it.
1:11:41
I mean, I'm a marketer by trade, but I don't really love marketing books.
1:11:46
It's a weird dichotomy with me.
1:11:48
But when I put something out there, I try and put it in front of people when it's relevant, but I can't shove it down everybody's throat because I feel it takes away the...
1:11:57
I'm blanking on the word, but the serendipity. Jim O’Shaughnessy: Yeah.
1:12:04
Sam McRoberts: If you try and push it out to everybody, yes.
1:12:09
More people will read it, but they may not get it at the right time.
1:12:11
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly.
1:12:12
Sam McRoberts: But if you just put it out there and let it kind of flow naturally, it will get to the right people at the right time.
1:12:16
And so, something about that feels better to me.
1:12:19
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Me too. I love it.
1:12:21
So I for one, have read and loved the book.
1:12:22
I recommend everyone listening. It's free. You have no excuse.
1:12:27
You can download it and read it and think about it and just start thinking about like, "What if we did this?"
1:12:37
I'm sure that there are problems, right, that we haven't uncovered.
1:12:42
That's why I'm such a believer in open source.
1:12:44
It's cognitive diversity, right?
1:12:47
You can't ask somebody to conceive of something they can't conceive of.
1:12:51
Sam McRoberts: There's still plenty of dragons.
1:12:53
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Exactly. Exactly.
1:12:55
Well, this has been a blast as usual.
1:12:57
I'm going to ask you the same question I asked you the last time I had you on, which is, okay, I am making you the emperor of the world. You can't kill anybody.
1:13:07
You can't put anyone in a reeducation camp, but you can incept them with the magic mic.
1:13:14
You're going to speak into it, two things.
1:13:15
It's going to incept the entire population of the world, and everyone is going to wake up the next day and think it was their idea and they're going to start doing it.
1:13:26
What two things are you incepting?
1:13:27
Sam McRoberts: I would say optimism and excitement for the future would be the first and probably most important, just to reframe that.
1:13:35
And then the second would be to start seeing yourself as a human of Earth and to drop all of the other tribes.
1:13:40
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Oh, I love them. Those are great. How can we find you?
1:13:45
Sam McRoberts: On Twitter, Sams_Antics and the book is just at thegrandredesign. com.
1:13:49
Jim O’Shaughnessy: Perfect.
1:13:51
Sam, as always, love talking to you.
1:13:55
Your ideas are infectious, and let's hope we can make it hundreds of us, not dozens of us.
1:14:02
Sam McRoberts: Yes, please.
1:14:03
Jim O’Shaughnessy: I have great hopes that we will. So thanks a lot, man.
1:14:06
Sam McRoberts: Thanks, Jim. Appreciate it.