Transcript
00:00:00British supremacy in messaging services. We need to try and get everybody to use WhatsApp.
00:00:05The superior messaging system and Americans refuse to use it. Do you know what I think?
00:00:09We were talking about this earlier as to why Americans don't use WhatsApp more.
00:00:14One of the theories is that America had free SMS before anybody else. So,
00:00:21us Brits had to pay. How much did it used to be for a text back in the day?
00:00:2415p maybe?
00:00:2515p.
00:00:2610p, 10p.
00:00:27That would ramp up very fast.
00:00:28But that was why people used to use Leetspeak, right? That was why you
00:00:31was there, like L-Y, because you're trying to snap everything to under 160 characters.
00:00:36Yeah. I once, when I was 14 years old, had my first ever girlfriend and we would text
00:00:42and we would text and we would text.
00:00:44You fucking bankrupted yourself.
00:00:46Well, my dad's obviously, my dad comes down one day and you know when you have like A4 that
00:00:52you'd stack in a printer. He just drops that on the phone bill and had wrapped up about 800 pounds.
00:00:58It's an itemized bill.
00:00:59Text messages, yes.
00:01:00Wow.
00:01:00So I then sent her one-
00:01:01That's a lot of sexting at 14.
00:01:03Yeah.
00:01:03I then sent her one final text, which was,
00:01:05"Can't do texts anymore. Let's do calls."
00:01:07So we did calls all the time. Next month.
00:01:11So I had to pay off about 1200, 1300 pounds of debt to my father.
00:01:15Still paying it off.
00:01:16Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:01:17Payment plan.
00:01:18Dad, you're cock blocking me.
00:01:20So that's how WhatsApp.
00:01:21I'm 14. I'm trying to get, I'm trying to get my cred up.
00:01:24But yeah, I just, WhatsApp's a super, Tim uses WhatsApp.
00:01:26Tim's good on WhatsApp.
00:01:27I mean, look, I use every new inbox that is slowly eroding the sanity of everybody who's listening to us.
00:01:32Do you guys see the Nikita Beard tweet a long time ago?
00:01:37It feels like, um, he said something like, um, every time I use WhatsApp,
00:01:41it feels like I landed in a third world country.
00:01:44You're allowed to say that.
00:01:45Okay, fair enough.
00:01:46You're allowed to say that.
00:01:47But no, I'm really-
00:01:48We race swapped Sean.
00:01:48I grew up on Long Island.
00:01:49I think I'm allowed to say it too.
00:01:50We race swapped Sean for you.
00:01:52Fair enough.
00:01:53That's the primary reason.
00:01:54I think I'm sitting in the same spot too.
00:01:55That's correct.
00:01:55Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:01:56People are like, Sean, he's lost weight and the beard's gone.
00:01:59This is the designated seat for the minority.
00:02:03You grew up on Long Island.
00:02:04Mm-hmm.
00:02:04I didn't know that.
00:02:05Where?
00:02:06Oh yeah, way out by Montauk.
00:02:08Back when there were potato farms.
00:02:10That explains a lot.
00:02:10That has changed.
00:02:11Now there are nightclubs that make all the locals crazy.
00:02:13But yes.
00:02:14So is that beyond the Hamptons?
00:02:16Yeah, Montauk is the end of the line.
00:02:18So if you take Long Island Railroad out from New York City, it will end in Montauk.
00:02:24And it was a perfectly fine place to grow up.
00:02:28I didn't realize how strange it was until I got older.
00:02:30Why is it strange?
00:02:31Well, when you're growing up, what is around you is normal because even a reference point.
00:02:36But you're growing up in a location where you have a barbell of income and wealth distribution,
00:02:43right?
00:02:44So you've got all of the, let's just say the broad Hamptons that people know,
00:02:49which would have like the $100 million homes on the beach and all these famous directors and
00:02:54financiers and little white shorts playing tennis.
00:02:58And then you have, on the other hand, like affordable housing.
00:03:00When I was growing up, like crack epidemic in certain parts.
00:03:04So I didn't realize how much was missing from the middle of the whole thing.
00:03:07Okay.
00:03:08Have you ever seen Mickey Mantle's questionnaire answer
00:03:12on the 50th anniversary of the Yankees stadium?
00:03:16I feel like this is the kind of question my dad would ask me.
00:03:18He's like, do you know Henry Rubenstein from 1839?
00:03:22I'm like, no, of course I don't.
00:03:23Mickey Mantle describes in basically a yearbook for the Yankees stadium.
00:03:28It's the 50th anniversary of Yankees stadium happening.
00:03:31Mickey Mantle, everybody's asked, tell us what your most outstanding experience
00:03:37at Yankees stadium was.
00:03:38And this was sold for $242,000, not long ago, a few years ago.
00:03:44He said, I consider the following my outstanding experience at Yankees stadium.
00:03:48It's like a questionnaire.
00:03:49He goes, I got a blow job under the right field bleachers by the Yankee bullpen.
00:03:54And then below that it says, this event occurred on or about brackets,
00:03:58give as much detail as you can.
00:04:00He says, it was about the third or fourth inning.
00:04:03I had pulled a groin and couldn't walk at the time.
00:04:05She was a very nice girl and asked me what to do with the cum after I came in her mouth.
00:04:11I said, don't ask me.
00:04:12I'm no cocksucker.
00:04:14Signed Mickey Mantle, the all American boy.
00:04:17And that was sold about five years ago for $242,000.
00:04:21Speaking of hedge fund managers, I'm sure that's in the guest bathroom of some hedge fund managers,
00:04:28third home.
00:04:29It's a bargain.
00:04:30You don't think that's a bargain in Montauk or thereabouts?
00:04:33Yeah.
00:04:33I don't know, man.
00:04:34I mean, like baseball has got a lot of superstition, but that feels like it's taking it to an extreme.
00:04:39There's like a baseball player that had never washed his helmet or cleaned it or did anything for
00:04:44his entire career.
00:04:46Literally the helmet look, I think it's Craig Biggio if I'm not mistaken, but the helmet was just,
00:04:51and he believed in that so much that it had to be that way, never changed.
00:04:56You've seen the guys walk out and they go right glove, left glove, tap, tap on the foot.
00:05:01But it goes from being preference to routine, to superstition, to ritual, to basically something
00:05:08sacred.
00:05:08It's essentially a rain dance that every-
00:05:10Or a mental illness.
00:05:12I think those two cross over quite a bit.
00:05:14I'm going to refer to all of my mental illness as a rain dance from now on.
00:05:20I'm going to take these suckers off.
00:05:21That's enough fucking POV porn, which actually was the reason that we wore these when we had
00:05:26Bonnie Blue on the podcast, so we could put POV in the title of the episode.
00:05:29Has she done one of those with POV with these?
00:05:31I'm sure if you go dark enough and deep enough into the OnlyFans rabbit hole,
00:05:36you can find whatever you need.
00:05:38Let me take my toothpick out of my mouth before I address the table.
00:05:42One of the things that I've been fascinated with for a while, I know you have as well,
00:05:46Christopher, I don't know about you two gentlemen, but etymologies of everything.
00:05:52So I was trying to rank my favorite etymologies or history of certain parts of language.
00:05:58One of them is not English, but it's Malaysian.
00:06:02And in Malayan culture, they use double rather than plural.
00:06:06So rather than tables, they will use table, table, which is one of my favorite things.
00:06:10What is this three?
00:06:11So it doesn't scale.
00:06:13So it doesn't go.
00:06:14That would be a nightmare if you're a table factory maker.
00:06:17The same way we just use plural, we'll say tables.
00:06:20We could say four tables.
00:06:22Right.
00:06:22They would say, I assume the number then table, table.
00:06:26Wow.
00:06:27Such a more fun way of saying things.
00:06:29It's the same in Indonesian also.
00:06:31Yes.
00:06:31Like Orang Hutan, man of the forest.
00:06:33Orang Orang is men, right?
00:06:35Man, men.
00:06:36Man of the men.
00:06:37That's something different.
00:06:37That's something different.
00:06:38Well, no, the man of the man.
00:06:40I think that's your biopic.
00:06:43But it's so much better than-
00:06:48A lot of heavy editing.
00:06:52One of my favorite ones though, is the word soon.
00:06:56So the word soon, I will be there soon, was the Anglo-Saxon word for now.
00:07:02But because so many people kept saying, I'll do that soon and didn't do it then,
00:07:08we then created the word now to replace it.
00:07:11And soon is what it is today.
00:07:13It soon got shifted down in terms of how urgent it means.
00:07:16Generation by generation.
00:07:18What's interesting, now has that effect.
00:07:21Where if somebody says, I'll do that now.
00:07:23You don't really take them literally unless they say, I'll do that immediately now.
00:07:29So it's interesting that you're seeing this drifting of now occur as well.
00:07:33I wonder if literally is the same as that.
00:07:36Because when people say literally, they don't mean literally.
00:07:39I literally couldn't believe it.
00:07:40Exactly.
00:07:40Yeah.
00:07:41Well, no, you could believe it.
00:07:43Yes.
00:07:43Which is the entire point.
00:07:45My friend, Alessio, he's Italian.
00:07:48And he talks about how he has a different personality when he's speaking in Italian.
00:07:53The Swedish writer, Henrik Karlsson, a friend of mine,
00:07:56he talks about how he can access different thoughts in Swedish rather than English.
00:08:00You speak multiple languages.
00:08:04Yeah.
00:08:04What's Japanese Tim like?
00:08:07A lot more polite.
00:08:08Yeah.
00:08:08Curse is less than Long Island Tim.
00:08:10Are you totally fluid in Japanese?
00:08:12Yeah, I can speak Japanese.
00:08:13Amazing.
00:08:13What's the story of learning that?
00:08:16My first international trip, real international trip off of Long Island out of the US was to Japan as an exchange student at 15 for a year.
00:08:25I went from east coast to Tokyo and it took me about three weeks just to accept that I was in Japan because I couldn't believe it.
00:08:35That's how that happened.
00:08:36And it just stuck.
00:08:37I was there for a year.
00:08:37I went to a Japanese school, all of my classes in Japanese.
00:08:41I misunderstood what I was told before getting there, which was you're going to have Japanese lessons.
00:08:48And I was like, oh, great.
00:08:49Like Japanese language lessons.
00:08:51And they're like, here's your class schedule.
00:08:54And I was like, I can't read any of this.
00:08:55And they're like physics, world history.
00:08:58I'm like, wait, what?
00:08:59My lessons are going to be in Japanese.
00:09:00I'm not going to have lessons.
00:09:01Wow.
00:09:03So that will, especially, I was lucky because this was pre-smartphone, internet, not much to speak of.
00:09:10So I could not, coming back to WhatsApp, right?
00:09:13I couldn't procrastinate or avoid learning Japanese by constantly communicating with anyone in English.
00:09:19There was no escape.
00:09:19There was total immersion.
00:09:21There was no escape.
00:09:21That seems to be, I get it.
00:09:23People go and do university courses in Spanish and stuff.
00:09:27And it's not just the language.
00:09:28Sometimes they're learning about the history and the culture and other stuff like that.
00:09:31But if you're trying to learn a language,
00:09:32And I did in school.
00:09:35We have to do at least one language in our GCSEs, typically, the 11 to 16s in the UK.
00:09:41And I did Spanish.
00:09:42And apart from the most basic stuff that I've probably remembered because I've gone back out to the country,
00:09:47I basically learned nothing.
00:09:48It would be, if you just wanted people to learn a language, doing a six-week immersion would,
00:09:53what, teach you maybe the same as a year of weekly classes?
00:09:56You could do a year and six weeks, no problem.
00:09:58There's a method called the Michelle Thomas method.
00:10:04And Michelle Thomas, male, was a Holocaust survivor, then became an intelligence officer,
00:10:12ended up speaking five or six different languages, and developed a method of getting people up to basic conversational fluency in a week.
00:10:23In a rush, in a weekend, in terms of giving them the scaffolding of the grammar and so forth.
00:10:29But it's a lot like learning some type of very fine motor skill.
00:10:33If you wanted to learn how to play tennis, if you're playing once a month, you're never going to learn tennis.
00:10:39Even once a week, you're just not getting the density of practice and the reinforcement
00:10:44for you to go from the unconscious incompetence to conscious competence, etc., etc.
00:10:51You're just not getting the proper density.
00:10:54So languages, I think you can learn languages a lot faster as an adult than you can as a kid, actually.
00:10:58Why?
00:10:59Because you already have the base layer of labeling and concepts and so on.
00:11:08And different types of abstraction in the form of, let's just say, grammar or a subjunctive,
00:11:16let's say, if you had a million dollars, what would you do?
00:11:18Or like a hypothetical that is counterfactual.
00:11:21These types of things.
00:11:22I can explain that to you.
00:11:23You can't explain that to a three-year-old.
00:11:24When's the last time you talked to a three-year-old?
00:11:26They're not actually very good at speaking a given language.
00:11:30The reason that people mistakenly believe that kids learn faster is because the kids have no choice.
00:11:37The kids have no mortgage.
00:11:38The kids have no job.
00:11:40Yeah.
00:11:40It's just like, you have no choice.
00:11:42Have you heard Nassim Taleb's description of how to learn language?
00:11:47He said, "The best way to learn Russian is to go into a Russian jail."
00:11:52I mean, that's a harsh trade.
00:11:53That's a harsh trade.
00:11:54Quickest work.
00:11:55Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:11:56Life or death scenario.
00:11:57You have to really want to learn Russian.
00:11:58But you will, you will not.
00:12:00Do you think, can you think in Japanese, Tim?
00:12:03Yeah, I would say that there's typically an English interface.
00:12:08But when I was in Japan for a year and then came back to the US,
00:12:12it took me about a month to get back to speaking English.
00:12:16You know, I'm like, I remember the first few days when my mom would come in and wake me up,
00:12:21and I would just start speaking to her in Japanese in this days.
00:12:25And it took a while to get back to things.
00:12:28The soon is pretty funny, the etymology of that.
00:12:31And it makes me wonder if much like, let's say, Eskimos in snow, right,
00:12:37or Hawaiians in water or whatever, that it depends on the historical punctuality of a culture.
00:12:45You're going to say that the Italians have got five words for soon.
00:12:47Well, I think it probably is something like that, right?
00:12:50Because in Japan, it's like, now is now.
00:12:51There is no second, third, fourth way to say it, unless you're maybe being really polite.
00:12:56Because the honorifics in Japanese, it's like 12 languages in one, if you really want to be
00:13:01sophisticated with it.
00:13:02But I don't know if they do it in the UK, but in South Africa, they have now.
00:13:08Then they have now, now.
00:13:10Just like in certain places in Latin America, they have like,
00:13:15ahora, like now, and then they have ahorita.
00:13:17Like, ahora is kind of like now, but when you get around to it, right?
00:13:22Or when I get around to it.
00:13:23And then like, ahorita is like, hey, asshole.
00:13:26Now, I actually mean it, yeah.
00:13:28What do you think is the latest nationality on the planet?
00:13:33Brazil?
00:13:34The latest.
00:13:35The latest.
00:13:36The least punctual.
00:13:37I'm going to organize a dinner with somebody and I can pick
00:13:40a bunch of different nationalities.
00:13:41Which one's going to arrive on average last?
00:13:44I feel like they got like the Olympics, but in reverse.
00:13:46Have you ever heard of Indian standard time?
00:13:51I'm not even sure.
00:13:52It's actually real, because it's one hour later than it's actually supposed to start.
00:13:56So it turns out a long time ago, people would go to the movies.
00:13:59Yeah.
00:13:59And, you know, the movie doesn't start on time, which is absolutely hilarious.
00:14:03You're like, everybody just expects.
00:14:05And then the whole term Indian standard time came about, which is absolutely hilarious.
00:14:09But it's typically referred to as one hour.
00:14:11Past something is starting.
00:14:12After the actual time.
00:14:13So I've heard Brazilians refer to Brazilian time also.
00:14:16Well, what is the least punctual?
00:14:20Anywhere that's got good.
00:14:21I think you can talk about culture and people and stuff like that.
00:14:25But what's more interesting is to just talk about what is the lifestyle
00:14:28of that particular ecosystem.
00:14:30So if you're going to go Spain, Italy, you know, Portugal, they're just,
00:14:35you've got wonderful weather, late nights throughout the summer.
00:14:39Everyone's smoking, having a red wine.
00:14:40But you've been to Palma, Mallorca or wherever.
00:14:43And you see people outside sat on wrought iron chairs, having a pre-dinner cigarette at 10:30
00:14:48PM at night.
00:14:48And these are old people.
00:14:50They're not going out.
00:14:50Oh, this isn't the beginning of them going out to go and party and head to the club afterward.
00:14:54They're not going STK for a, you know, nighttime party brunch.
00:14:57So I would say maybe some of the Mediterranean-y places like that.
00:15:01I guess as I think further afield, I don't know much about India, but perhaps there are others.
00:15:06Neither do I, but it is genealogically you do.
00:15:11Tim, you know a lot about Denmark.
00:15:12I'm like, I don't know, I don't know.
00:15:14I wonder, this is really hippie crack shit, but this is what we're here for.
00:15:19Oh, now we're getting the new one.
00:15:20Now we're getting that, yeah.
00:15:21I wonder, it's like that Saffir warp hypothesis of how much-
00:15:25Oh, you lost me.
00:15:26That didn't sound hippie friendly.
00:15:28He'll get that.
00:15:29The idea is that, um, it's the Wittgenstein quote of like,
00:15:32the limits of my world are the limits of my language.
00:15:34And we think that we shape language, but language shapes us.
00:15:38And it feels immediately like so trivial, so esoteric to have the conversation.
00:15:43Everybody kind of dismisses languages.
00:15:45It's almost like neuro-linguistic programming that we shouldn't take it seriously.
00:15:49But how much the words that we use.
00:15:51So I wonder, um, obviously, uh, England, Australia, America, Canada,
00:15:56New Zealand, South Africa share this English ancestry,
00:15:59but how much then that they have the same language keeps the culture similar as well.
00:16:04Versus if you fork the language, do you change?
00:16:05I don't know, man.
00:16:06If you go and meet a South African and you compare them to a Scottish person,
00:16:09they're quite different.
00:16:10So it's true.
00:16:11I'm both angry.
00:16:12Both very angry.
00:16:13So there you go.
00:16:14And we had this at my birthday.
00:16:16I was in the middle of nowhere.
00:16:17I didn't realize the spectrum exists when it comes to how people think as well.
00:16:20So we had my friend Billy and my friend Cameron.
00:16:24And Billy can't think, uh, visually at all.
00:16:29So he can only think in words.
00:16:31Yes.
00:16:31Cameron can't think in words at all.
00:16:34She can only think visually.
00:16:35Mm-hmm.
00:16:36You see, there's a test that you can do.
00:16:38Imagine an apple in your mind.
00:16:40What level of detail can you see the apple at?
00:16:42Could you pull that up, Jared?
00:16:43The apple visual test.
00:16:45The lack of it.
00:16:46I think it's called aphantasia.
00:16:48Yes.
00:16:48Yeah, yeah.
00:16:49Aphantasia.
00:16:49How do you guys think?
00:16:50Do you, can you, do you think more in words?
00:16:52Do you think more in visuals?
00:16:53Imagine an apple in your mind.
00:16:54What level of detail can you see the apple with?
00:16:57You know, when growing up, there was like this whole, um, people with like very, um,
00:17:01the visual memories or whatever, they would just like look at something and then effectively
00:17:05recite, you know, 50, 50 words.
00:17:08Eidetic is what people think of as photographic.
00:17:11Yeah.
00:17:11The photographic stand.
00:17:12So Billy, for example, would be number five.
00:17:15Yeah.
00:17:15Hmm.
00:17:16Yeah.
00:17:16He could, he would just think the word apple.
00:17:18Yeah.
00:17:18Fascinating.
00:17:19And then the, uh, Cameron could see the apple.
00:17:23But if you asked her to create that, to see the word, the word apple in her mind,
00:17:30she couldn't do it at all.
00:17:30I asked her, how does she count in her head?
00:17:32And she said, it's stairs.
00:17:34She literally visualizes stairs.
00:17:36Sounds exhausting.
00:17:36It's a fucking nightmare.
00:17:37I mean, I would, I'm about 10 out that direction.
00:17:40Like I have a super hyper visual memory.
00:17:43Like I can remember almost every floor plan of every restaurant I've ever been in.
00:17:46What's the most, like, yeah, no, I mean, I'm not, I'm not trying to store that.
00:17:52So 10, 10, where we went for dinner the other evening.
00:17:55Can you remember the table?
00:17:57Yeah.
00:17:57What was on the table?
00:17:58I don't remember the name of the number of the table, but it's like
00:18:02this, the server door was directed to our left.
00:18:05Right.
00:18:05We were effectively the last booth at the edge.
00:18:08The bar was to my right.
00:18:12Nero was to my left here.
00:18:14Right.
00:18:14You were here, uh, sort of at my, like two o'clock.
00:18:18So we ordered way too much edamame.
00:18:22No, no, no.
00:18:23We ordered the right amount of edamame, which is too much edamame.
00:18:26It's just the only amount of edamame that's appropriate.
00:18:28I mean, it depends on how many gallons of oil you like on your edamame.
00:18:30Ah, it's true.
00:18:32I think salted edamame, when you start to try and spice up edamame too much, it ruins it.
00:18:37But here's what I would say, just to quickly put something to this.
00:18:40I don't want people to feel badly if they can't go out a few standard deviations towards like
00:18:47the hyper, uh, like hypernesia, right.
00:18:50The opposite of amnesia, because, uh, when you have, my dad has this as well,
00:18:56really exaggerated development of certain types of memory, it can make it really hard to let go
00:19:02of grievances.
00:19:03Wow.
00:19:03Slights against you.
00:19:06The email that you sent that ended up, whatever it is, right?
00:19:11Like there, there, there, there is an advantage.
00:19:15There are some tremendous advantages to forgetting.
00:19:18And so when you, when you're not as selective, you could argue it's almost counter evolutionary
00:19:23past a certain point to have an overly developed memory, I would say.
00:19:27Yeah.
00:19:27I think I, I can recall like one of the things that I was talking to somebody about was that
00:19:34I have vivid, um, face recognition, like almost like, uh, like the face ID type situation.
00:19:41And I can remember faces that I've seen only.
00:19:44One time 15 years ago.
00:19:47Problem is this becomes socially awkward.
00:19:49Oftentimes you meet some massive asymmetry, right?
00:19:52And you're like, I, I know everything about you because we'd met once and this was 10 years ago,
00:19:58but you can't really bring that up.
00:19:59Okay.
00:20:00You freak.
00:20:00Yeah.
00:20:01It's like, it's, it's, it's very creepy.
00:20:02You sound like a stalker.
00:20:03Do you want to?
00:20:04Exactly.
00:20:04But I did not research them similarly with quotes and visuals.
00:20:07I think I personally have a very, very vivid, like visual element and I can probably look at
00:20:13something once and then 10 years later, if you quiz me, I would probably get about 90% of that.
00:20:19Correct.
00:20:19That's wild.
00:20:20Do you want to tell the story?
00:20:21But the forgetting part is crazy.
00:20:22Do you want to tell the story about the first elevator we ever got into together?
00:20:26Oh my God.
00:20:26Yes.
00:20:28I actually, I think there was a new appointment of an Xbox CEO and she was like some, I made a
00:20:35tweet about it.
00:20:36I was like, wait, she doesn't really have any experience with gaming.
00:20:39And, and then Chris and I were in an elevator and turns out she was there.
00:20:44Well, you're leaving out one critical footnote.
00:20:47That tweet was not seen by two people.
00:20:49It was, it was.
00:20:50Millions, millions of people.
00:20:52So you call out the Xbox CEO.
00:20:57I was, I was just simply remarking about culture and the way that like people frame
00:21:02this because like, it's a unique development.
00:21:04But I put my foot in it.
00:21:05I put my foot in it.
00:21:06Yeah.
00:21:07That was hilarious.
00:21:08I'm trying to big up my friend who recognizes the Xbox CEO.
00:21:11It goes, hey, you're the CEO of Xbox.
00:21:13There's some unassuming lady dressed real nice, had maybe a partner or security or something with
00:21:17her.
00:21:18I'm like, you identify correctly.
00:21:20And she sort of sheepishly is like, yeah, yeah, I am.
00:21:23That's me.
00:21:24And I think you introduced yourself.
00:21:25She was very nervous about it.
00:21:26A little, yes, she was sheepish about it, which was quite charming.
00:21:28And she was the actual CEO.
00:21:29I was like, wait, that person's usually just like so into it or whatever.
00:21:33And I said, well, you should, you, you, it is signal on, on X.
00:21:38You, you must, he's a fantastic writer and tech and all the rest of this stuff.
00:21:41There is a 100% chance that she saw your tweet.
00:21:44And immediately, as soon as I said that the fucking atmosphere in the elevator went frosty as hell.
00:21:49It was, um, look, I, I, nothing against her personally, but.
00:21:54I tried to do something nice for a friend.
00:21:55The superpower came back to, uh, came back to bite you.
00:21:57No.
00:21:57And that, that has happened multiple times.
00:21:59I think going back to Tim's point about the forgetting part, I think about this a lot,
00:22:02which is what a great feature of, of the mind in some sense, like the forgetting part.
00:22:08Like I think about AI memory, you know, today it's so easy to build.
00:22:13Like tell AI to extract some fact and try to remember it and restore it somewhere.
00:22:18And then you basically use it for some other thing.
00:22:21It's very common.
00:22:22People are doing it.
00:22:24How do you forget AI?
00:22:25How does like an AI forget memories things?
00:22:28Like what is no pruning?
00:22:29Yeah.
00:22:30And then like.
00:22:30Of salience.
00:22:31How do you think about the world with respect to.
00:22:34You know, building sort of artificial memory constraints, just like the human mind.
00:22:37And the forgetting part is such an essential element.
00:22:40Like that is no longer relevant or that is not important at the moment.
00:22:46The AI systems don't really know that.
00:22:49And so when you pass in a bunch of these memories into context, which is what a lot of these companies
00:22:54do, turns out you get a lot of noise.
00:22:57Yes.
00:22:58And it tries to make these connections.
00:23:00That's what it's like to be Tim.
00:23:02There you go.
00:23:02Well, if people want a real exaggerated case of not forgetting, there's an old book
00:23:08called The Mind of a Nemanist, like mnemonic device, The Mind of a Nemanist by A.J. Luria,
00:23:14which is effectively an extended case study of someone who never forgets.
00:23:19And there are other ways to look at it.
00:23:22I think there's a doc called Brain Man about Daniel Dennett.
00:23:24I think I'm getting that right.
00:23:25Yeah.
00:23:26And, uh,
00:23:27The atheist.
00:23:28No, uh, you know what?
00:23:31The Dennett, I might be mixing it up with the philosopher who passed away, but it's something
00:23:35very close to that, but people can look up Brain Man.
00:23:38I taught George yesterday about savant syndrome.
00:23:41Mm-hmm.
00:23:41You know what this is?
00:23:42Mm-hmm.
00:23:43So, uh, there was a famous case of a guy called Thomas McHugh, a British guy.
00:23:47So, in his early years, he was in a youth prison, uh, was a bit of a disruptor, kind
00:23:53of a hooligan type guy.
00:23:55And, uh, he's in his 50s, early 50s, and on the bathroom, he shits himself so aggressively
00:24:02that he causes, uh, an anurate, like a blood explosion in his brain.
00:24:06And then as he's on the floor, he's terrified that someone's going to find him with his pants
00:24:11around his ankles.
00:24:11So he tries to pull his pants up and causes another one to go off.
00:24:14God.
00:24:14Oh God.
00:24:15Completely like pops both sides of his brain, wakes up in the hospital a few days later and
00:24:21turns into a obsessive painter who can only speak in rhyme and paints between three or six or nine
00:24:29paintings at any one time paints for 19 hours a day and couldn't, uh, bear to think about suffering.
00:24:35So it sort of sweep the steps in front of him as he was like some Buddhist guy just had a total
00:24:41come to art moment.
00:24:43Uh, but yeah, shat himself so aggressively that he had acquired savant syndrome.
00:24:46I think if you're a great athlete, for example, you gotta, you gotta learn how to forget.
00:24:52You guys know about yips like in baseball and other places.
00:24:55So it turns out, you know, it's like typically, you know,
00:24:59you make an error or you, you do something egregiously wrong in sports.
00:25:04Everybody's watching.
00:25:05Right.
00:25:06And then you're, you're sort of have this phantom reaction or whatever.
00:25:10And then that continuously happens.
00:25:11And yips is, is, is, is like somebody throwing that ball.
00:25:15And, you know, there's some famous players that have dealt with this problem.
00:25:18And turns out, you know, you gotta forget.
00:25:22Yeah.
00:25:23You gotta forget.
00:25:23I see.
00:25:23So it's like a conditioned hesitancy or a flinch or a flinch.
00:25:26Getting in your own.
00:25:27Involuntary potential reaction.
00:25:29But I'm not quite sure how, how it relates to, you know, the, the memory aspect of it.
00:25:35But ultimately, when you're, when you're a great athlete, you watch a game tape afterwards.
00:25:41You're like, okay, I, I process it.
00:25:42And then you have to discard that.
00:25:44You learn from it and you move on.
00:25:46Do you guys see the Mark Andreessen stuff about.
00:25:48Retard maxing.
00:25:49Retard maxing.
00:25:50Yep.
00:25:51That, I think component wise.
00:25:53I asked, I asked, I asked, I asked that word.
00:25:57I asked Huberman if he's personally threatened by the retard maxing movement.
00:26:00And what did he say?
00:26:01I think he is.
00:26:02I think he partially is.
00:26:04His entire career has been built on anti retard maxing.
00:26:07And there's a lot of these people who have like, you know, they, they, they have a set of context.
00:26:12I don't know why I refer to everything like this, but, um, and then they, they sort of keep it
00:26:17around, but it's super valuable to discard some of that stuff because ultimately none of that really
00:26:22matters.
00:26:23I think Sam Harris, all this stuff.
00:26:24Go, go, go, go.
00:26:25No, I think it was, it was just really interesting.
00:26:28The present matters the most people tend to focus on the future a lot more.
00:26:35Anxiety, the worries or whatever.
00:26:37And then they marry that with the past.
00:26:38And I think this is, this is one of the things I personally am like, how do I live in the moment?
00:26:44Think about what matters and focus on a few things.
00:26:47Whilst learning from my experience.
00:26:49Exactly.
00:26:49But you learn from it, but you don't dwell on it.
00:26:52You don't ruminate on it.
00:26:53You don't.
00:26:54I think people, I had to, I had to move neighborhoods from a breakup because every time I walked around,
00:27:02I could vividly feel the moments that occurred in that place from a coffee shop to,
00:27:10I don't know, like a flower shop, a dog, a dog that you regularly see.
00:27:15I walk into a restaurant.
00:27:16I'm like, I sat there, you know, this person was next to me.
00:27:21I knew exactly what we talked about.
00:27:23I knew exactly how that moment ended.
00:27:26And I could replay that every single time I took another step.
00:27:29Dude, one of the best stories I've heard about this is from Alain de Botton.
00:27:33And he's describing being in Paris.
00:27:35And it's a early summer day, beautiful weather outside, a little cloudy, a little bit of sun.
00:27:41And it's sort of late afternoon, classic European fashion.
00:27:44This French couple are sat around a small table, wrought iron chairs, and they've got a couple of espressos.
00:27:49And they're just so deeply in love.
00:27:51Young couple, sort of maybe mid-twenties, something like that.
00:27:54He's got this line.
00:27:55He says, "I looked at them and realized that this beautiful memory would be one of the greatest sources of pain to one of these people if the relationship ever ended."
00:28:04And it's strange that this thing that at the time is really, really wonderful actually becomes the thing that's kind of the, "I'm never going to Paris again, so I'm fucking moving to Rome," or whatever it is, because I need to totally change my context.
00:28:18And that's also the same when it comes to phones, right?
00:28:22I tried to stop using my phone, and this still kind of works.
00:28:25I just changed the pocket that I put it in.
00:28:28Because I realized that for an entire decade, I'd had my phone in my right pocket.
00:28:31And like a speed shooter withdrawing his firearm, I would just mindlessly put my hand in my pocket.
00:28:37The number of times that I pulled my wallet out when I changed it to look at my wallet, it's just habitual.
00:28:44It's just this obsessive sort of routine.
00:28:45You guys know about this phantom vibrations?
00:28:47So it turns out people have their phone in their pocket, right?
00:28:50And I went to a meditation retreat.
00:28:53And no phones, just meditation.
00:28:59And I felt vibrations.
00:29:01I didn't even have my phone in my pocket.
00:29:03Do you have a vibrator?
00:29:06Two of them.
00:29:06There we go, there we go.
00:29:07That might have been my dildo.
00:29:10We don't call that a meditation retreat where I'm from.
00:29:11Fair enough.
00:29:13What does Bonnie Blue call it?
00:29:14Yeah, yeah, yeah, true.
00:29:16Tuesday.
00:29:17It was really interesting.
00:29:18And it turns out, I Googled it.
00:29:19It turns out that's actually a real thing.
00:29:21People feel phantom vibrations from their phone.
00:29:23You can go check it out.
00:29:24And I was like, wow, your body is so tuned to this over, every time you get a notification,
00:29:31every time you get whatever.
00:29:32And most people have their phone on silent now.
00:29:34So the vibration is really like a thing with the haptics.
00:29:37You Pavlovianly programmed yourself to expect this thing to happen.
00:29:41So like this sort of device is now a potential part of the way that you sort of feel and understand
00:29:49the world.
00:29:49In this case, kind of like a touch type sense.
00:29:52But it was remarkable.
00:29:53And I went down the rabbit hole and I looked at it and I was like, wow, this is not just me.
00:29:58There's so many individuals.
00:30:01Like you said, if I move my phone in the other pocket, the other one will completely vibrate.
00:30:06Yeah, all the time.
00:30:06My wallet's going to be vibrating.
00:30:08Yeah, exactly.
00:30:08I mean, for some people that might be a feature.
00:30:10Again, true.
00:30:10Wow.
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00:31:28To play devil's advocate on the whole, the ability to remember everything being a bad idea.
00:31:35I think a lot of these conversations, rather than a light switch, it's more dimmer and different people,
00:31:41different occasions it will be good and bad for.
00:31:45Because a lot of people look at us being able to remember everything now, very similar to when writing
00:31:50came along.
00:31:50So before writing, we couldn't store any information down.
00:31:53So that completely changed us.
00:31:55But I always think of…
00:31:56So do you guys know…
00:31:59I've forgotten the name of Grenfell Tower in the UK.
00:32:02Have you heard about what Grenfell Tower is?
00:32:04So it's one of the biggest tragedies that's ever happened in the UK, where a council estate,
00:32:11which will be the equivalent of your projects, was poorly designed, set on fire.
00:32:17Can you get a photo of it up?
00:32:18Loads of people burned alive in it.
00:32:22And it was a huge government inquiry.
00:32:23How are we going to fix it?
00:32:24What are we going to change about it?
00:32:26And what was the crazy thing about the day was that as this building was on fire,
00:32:30kind of like 9/11, a baby was picked up on the news, was dropped from the top floor.
00:32:36Look at that.
00:32:37So a baby was picked up from the top floor and dropped, and somebody caught it.
00:32:41And it was this kind of miracle in this horrific day that happened.
00:32:46And it got reported everywhere.
00:32:47There was about five different eyewitnesses.
00:32:50And about six months later, after the emotion of the event settled down,
00:32:53a few physicists started looking at it and going, "Well, hold on.
00:32:58That baby had hundreds of feet in the air.
00:33:00If we just ran the maps here, it would just disintegrate on the catch."
00:33:05And as soon as they started to inquire at the eyewitness testimony,
00:33:08it was a completely hallucinated memory.
00:33:11So on the one hand, the ability to store memories will mean that we can't let go of certain things,
00:33:16but it may also mean that we let go of complete fictions that we're telling ourselves that never happened.
00:33:22Or that we would invent them as well, right?
00:33:24Because if you're Tim, your recollection of the flames is, you know, in 4K.
00:33:30Yes.
00:33:30But the mirage of a baby being thrown out.
00:33:33You know the terminal velocity of a cat is non-fatal.
00:33:36What do you mean?
00:33:38I can't say it any other way.
00:33:39There's only one...
00:33:44If I drop a cat from any distance, the speed that it reaches when it hits the ground,
00:33:51on average, is non-fatal.
00:33:53So it doesn't die.
00:33:54I'm going to just raise an eyebrow.
00:33:57Ask ChatGPT, "A cat's terminal velocity depends on its size, body position."
00:34:00Yeah, whatever.
00:34:01Estimated terminal velocity is about 60 miles an hour.
00:34:03Some studies in veterinary analysis place it between...
00:34:06Okay, so see, look.
00:34:07See, depends on posture.
00:34:09So if you've got a cat...
00:34:09Around five to seven stories.
00:34:11Yeah, okay.
00:34:11I mean, that's higher up than I would expect.
00:34:13Some cats survive because they reach terminal velocity, stop accelerating, relax,
00:34:17and then orient themselves for impact.
00:34:20Look, it's trying to caveat, like basically,
00:34:23am I okay to throw a cat out of a window?
00:34:25That's what ChatGPT thinks I'm doing.
00:34:27Now, this is one of those cases when somebody's like,
00:34:29"You know, when people die, they release DMT from their brains."
00:34:32And I'm like, "How would you know that though?"
00:34:34Like, who...
00:34:36Which families consented to have some scientists be like,
00:34:39"I know this is a hard moment, but let me like tap your grandma's brain."
00:34:43And this is like...
00:34:44Your terminal velocity of a cat's not fatal.
00:34:45No, but I'm saying injuries often increase up to around five to seven stories.
00:34:50Like, I just want to know...
00:34:50But beyond seven stories, do you know what I mean?
00:34:51...where in like Sierra Leone they're like,
00:34:53"Okay, let's take these 40 cats and drop them from..."
00:34:56You just put it into one of those t-shirts...
00:34:57Five, 10, 15 stories.
00:34:58...t-shirt firers that they set...
00:35:00Yeah, yeah, t-shirt cannon that they've got in.
00:35:01What's the highest the cat's fat?
00:35:04Speaking of hallucinating, I just want to fact check myself.
00:35:06Daniel Tammet, T-A-M-M-E-T.
00:35:09There you go, perilously close.
00:35:10All right, what did you bring to the table?
00:35:11Hallucinating is a really fascinating subject.
00:35:13So people talk about AI hallucinations.
00:35:14There's an hour in my zone.
00:35:15Oh, sorry, sorry, hold on, we're still going.
00:35:18The highest reliably documented fall survived by a cat is generally believed to be 32 stories.
00:35:23Sabrina in New York City, 1987, she fell from the 32nd floor of a skyscraper,
00:35:27survived with a chipped tooth, collapsed lung, and minor chest injuries.
00:35:31After treatment, she reportedly recovered fully.
00:35:33Dude, I'm telling you, terminal velocity of a cat, non-fatal.
00:35:36They're able to slow themselves down, right, effectively?
00:35:40Like a parachute-ish.
00:35:41I mean, they're not flying squirrels.
00:35:46Wow.
00:35:47This is remarkable.
00:35:49What did I get you with the other day?
00:35:50It was when we were talking about the fact that if a man doesn't have a girlfriend,
00:35:54the way that he behaves between 7pm and 11pm at night can only be destructive.
00:36:00And I told a friend about this and...
00:36:02Unless there's the internet.
00:36:03Well, even with the internet, it's still destructive, right?
00:36:05Because you're just embedding bad habits and doomscrolling and it's all bullshit.
00:36:08Self-destructive, I suppose.
00:36:10However, I asked a friend about this and he said,
00:36:13"Yeah, so my buddy was single and I'm in a relationship."
00:36:16And apparently at like 8:30pm at night,
00:36:19he would just receive photos of his friend head standing.
00:36:22Just like selfies of him doing headstands.
00:36:27What could go wrong?
00:36:28Yeah.
00:36:29Yeah.
00:36:29All right, Nirav, what have you brought?
00:36:30Come on.
00:36:31Give me some pages.
00:36:31I think the hallucination thing is really fascinating.
00:36:33People have this debate on AI hallucinations
00:36:35and there's a bunch of these topics that are written in.
00:36:37Andruj Karpathy has written a bunch of this stuff.
00:36:40And it turns out, you know, humans hallucinate as well.
00:36:42Almost all the features of AI today that exist, they exist in humans
00:36:48in some way, shape or form.
00:36:50And people are often really baffled by it, right?
00:36:54They hate the hallucinations.
00:36:56I think of them as more of like just a replication of the human mind and how it works.
00:37:00And it turns out people hallucinate memories all the time.
00:37:03People manipulate memories.
00:37:04In fact, if you look at things in the past, you're effectively removing.
00:37:11You remember often fond memories or really painful stuff.
00:37:14The middle kind of fades away oftentimes.
00:37:16I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, Tim, about like, I think about this a lot because
00:37:20for our product, we have to like make sure these things are low and context is there.
00:37:26Do you want to explain what you do?
00:37:27We're building kind of, you know, today the iPhone is kind of, when you look at it, when
00:37:32you go for a glance, people always tap on apps and you have to go and pull whatever you need
00:37:35to know.
00:37:36We're kind of building a layer on devices that is kind of glanceable information directly
00:37:44on your home screen.
00:37:45That's entirely processed by AI.
00:37:47What you might want to know right now, or things might be important to you.
00:37:52And the idea of intelligence today as it exists, it's much more, I'm going to go ask it a question,
00:38:00create this giant prompt, do all this stuff.
00:38:02And, you know, basically you have to do the heavy lifting where we try to do the heavy lifting for
00:38:08you by making that presentation layer directly on your home screen that sort of understands
00:38:13what's happening already in the background and surfaces it when you need to know it.
00:38:17So it's kind of an agentic home screen for your iPhone.
00:38:19It turns out the iPhone home screen hasn't changed in 20 years.
00:38:22You're roughly using the same device, the same thing.
00:38:25Widgets, I guess.
00:38:26Yeah, and they're underutilized.
00:38:28I think we use them in a creative way.
00:38:30Yep.
00:38:30And so, and so like, you know, we're not going to go, we're like two people, three people.
00:38:35So we can't really build a device.
00:38:36We can't really invest hardcore.
00:38:38So we have to operate in the application layer and utilize all the things that are affordances
00:38:43that the OS exposes to us as developers.
00:38:46So, um, creatively we, we sort of, um, build this experience and we're a few weeks old,
00:38:54pretty awesome.
00:38:54But it's been so much fun to be able to think about the way that ambient AI will really work.
00:39:01Imagine you go into a room.
00:39:02There's a screen as presence detection knows who you are, what you might want to see or know or do.
00:39:10If you wake up in the morning, these are the things that will kind of light up over time.
00:39:15And so like this stuff might be in your life.
00:39:18Persistently, if you want to, with your permission.
00:39:21Have you thought about what to call it?
00:39:23It feels like sort of context dependent.
00:39:25Ambient AI is good.
00:39:26Ambient AI is lovely.
00:39:27Good for you.
00:39:28Geordi as well, AI.
00:39:29Ambient AI.
00:39:30AI, AI, AI.
00:39:31We need to have, but I think, I don't know if the terminology is there, you know, it turns out
00:39:35all the terminology that exists in the past, right?
00:39:37You know, the hashtags of Twitter and whatnot are invented by their users.
00:39:41And people are like, oh, we should call it that.
00:39:43Bottom up, not top down.
00:39:44Yeah, exactly.
00:39:44We're still waiting for a fucking name for this series on the podcast.
00:39:47Do you think the future user interfaces are the glasses that everybody predicts?
00:39:51Because my, I was thinking the other day as somebody who has zero experience in designing
00:39:55hardware or products that the, I think the future is probably the AirPod case where you put
00:40:01the AirPods in.
00:40:03And I heard, I saw a tweet the other day that Apple have just patented cameras at the edge
00:40:07of the AirPods.
00:40:08So it could feasibly pick up the visual information here.
00:40:11And then with this little box that you have, it could be, you could be speaking to this device.
00:40:16You could even have like a little.
00:40:17That would be your signal receiver, right?
00:40:18Yeah.
00:40:18So we're not always on these screens.
00:40:20We just have the little AirPod case, ears in, and then the box here.
00:40:23One of the problems you have with the hardware is that you need some
00:40:26processing power that's outside of it.
00:40:27That was the, the hardcore.
00:40:29Um, I mean, you had a Apple vision pro before you send it back.
00:40:32Yes.
00:40:32Um, and you need, if you're going to have something on your face or something that's
00:40:36a wearable, you need to think about ergonomics and weight.
00:40:40And that means you need to send the processing off to a different, a different location.
00:40:45Totally.
00:40:45I don't know.
00:40:45I mean, you're right that VR is really not delivered.
00:40:49I think there's always, it's good to the next thing.
00:40:53We're going to wait for the more, it'd be comfortable, the slim line down or whatever.
00:40:56It'll get there.
00:40:57You think?
00:40:58Yeah.
00:40:58How long?
00:41:00Uh, until what?
00:41:01What would be a good, like, not quite Turing test.
00:41:04It's not the right example.
00:41:04Okay.
00:41:04So like, um, the, the sort of level of penetration that we've seen with.
00:41:08Now we're talking.
00:41:10With AI or with like, pick any, any sort of normal device, but AI, AI would be good.
00:41:16What's the name of your podcast?
00:41:16Yeah.
00:41:17Depth of penetration.
00:41:19New series.
00:41:19Very shallow, very shallow.
00:41:21Um, like that.
00:41:25I don't know, like a half a billion or a billion users of, uh, either one product or a category
00:41:31of products that has something to do with that, that type of mass adoption is, is a high bar,
00:41:36but I would say getting to the point where people actually enjoy, let's just call it
00:41:44thousands of people spending hours a day using some type of late lightweight VR AI,
00:41:52strongly AI native system, three years, maybe less.
00:41:57I've seen some shit that's made by Meta that blew my fucking mind to their next after the next,
00:42:04uh, set of glasses.
00:42:07And that was like absolutely wild to be able to see that it's still, they're still clunky and dorky,
00:42:12right. But they'll over the time that they're building this out to get it down to the form
00:42:16factor that you need. But I mean, these things, wherever those things are like,
00:42:20they're really good. The best thing about those is not an ad. Um, best thing about those is the fact
00:42:24that you can take a photo or a video without using your phone. You know, there's that famous, uh, video,
00:42:29was it? Uh, the chandelier on new year's eve, maybe 2023. And I swear it's just this street of
00:42:36people and all you can see the entire thing is just phone screens from behind, right? Looking at the
00:42:42thing you're supposed to be looking at and it's just phone screens. Well, I would, you heard about
00:42:48me at the Louvre, if I told you this story. Um, so I had these on at the Louvre in Paris, being a
00:42:54sophisticated individual that I am. So I had these on and everybody was just looking at people's feet
00:42:59under the, under the bathroom stalls. George collects, George collects feet. So that's, uh,
00:43:05you can, you can, you can buy them. Um, it's no longer permit. You can't really have eye contact
00:43:10with people in the Western culture. Cause it's like, uh, whatever. So people are always looking
00:43:13down on their feet. And that's why George comes in here. It is. So I had this experience at the
00:43:19Mona Lisa in the Louvre. So everybody was there with their phones, taking a photo, but I had these
00:43:23glasses on, but the problem is because the Mona Lisa is so small and I'm so far back. My girlfriend
00:43:28now has a photo of me. So there's loads of people taking a photo of the Mona Lisa. And then there's
00:43:31me with my glasses in the air. I'll, I'll get the photo. It's horrific. It's horrific.
00:43:39It is nice though, to be able to record something without taking yourself out of the moment.
00:43:42And I think just that, you know, oh, I don't like the battery life or this thing,
00:43:47or they're still a little bit clunky or I don't usually wear glasses or whatever. Like I get it.
00:43:50I get it. I get it. But the opportunity to be able to just take a photo or a video
00:43:55without having to feel like, oh, I'm back on this screen that I hate.
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00:45:01Do you think you would feel better or worse after six months of not being able to take photos or video of anything?
00:45:10Other than like, okay, you need to take a photo of a business card or a scan for business purposes, fine.
00:45:18For me, taking photos doesn't get in the way of my life anywhere near as much as just the ambient
00:45:26pinging and navigating of the digital device itself. The photos, I'm in and out. I have seen
00:45:32some marathon photo sessions being taken at sunset. I went to somewhere on Long Island. I can't quite
00:45:40remember where. There was a beautiful sunset happening over a lake and 15, 16, 17 year old school group.
00:45:50It was like, it was an endurance sport of photo taking. I'm like, okay, that's something else. Like
00:45:58that's kind of almost pathological. But for me, it's, I don't know. What about you? Do you think it would
00:46:02make a marked difference to your life if you couldn't take photos or videos for six months?
00:46:06I think it's a useful thought exercise. I would suspect it'd be better. I mean, I have not had
00:46:11any real photographic memory. I can train people to have better visual memory.
00:46:19Okay. Can we do it? What was that? It's not like an Ose Perlman, like 60 second bang. It's not one
00:46:28of those. What's the Pareto basics to get better at a visual memory? Start producing. So I would have
00:46:36people get a book like Drawing with the Right Side of the Brain, which is a bit of a misnomer in the way
00:46:41that it lateralizes things, you know, hemispherically. But if you practice, for instance,
00:46:48this is one tool in the toolkit, right? Practice drawing. And for instance, right, if I had a
00:46:56flower and a vase on this table, which would be not the most compelling way to get someone to draw,
00:47:00but we're all practicing drawing, what you would notice with most people is that they look at the
00:47:05flower, they go down to draw it, and they start drawing their mental concept of a flower.
00:47:10They're not actually referring to the thing in front of them. And then there are different
00:47:17tricks you could use. For instance, if even right now, as we sit in Austin, Texas, bright outside,
00:47:23could have you look at a tree or a bush around here, sit down, I'd be like, okay, draw that. But I want
00:47:29you to only start with the black parts. And you'd be like, but it's a bright day. It's a green thing. I'm like,
00:47:36look again. And you'd be like, oh, shit, there are actually black parts. Okay, we'll start with that.
00:47:42And as you start to do that, or depending on where you are, it's like,
00:47:47when most people walk through, say, I mean, in Austin, it's easy, because it's like cedar tree,
00:47:52juniper ash, oak, like, that's it. I mean, I'm being a little facetious, but there's not as much tree
00:47:57diversity as in other places. But if all you see is quote unquote trees, it's like, okay,
00:48:03well, let me just teach you. It's also subject dependent, right? Like the six most common trees
00:48:08in upstate New York, Austin, wherever it might be. And all of a sudden, instead of just seeing trees,
00:48:13you start to differentiate, right? So all of those, it's partially visual acuity
00:48:21dependent, it's partially attentionally dependent, so that you're referencing something as opposed to
00:48:26referring to your concept of tree, table, person, whatever it might be. And then there's kind of a
00:48:32label dependency, right? How fine-tuned or fine-sliced is your ability within a given domain, right?
00:48:41So if you were doing like live gesture drawing, which I think is a great way to practice drawing,
00:48:47and there are a number of places around Austin and a lot of places where you can do live gesture
00:48:50drawing, you'd have, you know, a model in front of the room. It's not always going to be a hot,
00:48:53naked chick. I hate to break it to you guys. Sometimes it's going to be like obese, naked dude,
00:48:58but that's fine. And they would start with, say, five-minute poses, or they might start with like
00:49:04one-minute poses, typically that start with like very short poses. So you can't overanalyze or
00:49:10intellectualize what you are doing. You have to keep your hand moving. And then they would go to longer
00:49:15and longer held poses. And you'd be shocked how much your visual memory improves if you do that
00:49:23and you are not constantly self-interrupting. So for me, I mean, I don't have any social media
00:49:29on this phone. I haven't for a couple of years. I do not think I've sacrificed one iota of quote-unquote
00:49:34being informed at all. I don't have vibrate on. I do not have ring on, which can produce some funny
00:49:42like death spirals of people trying to like call one another, but neither person has the phone ringing.
00:49:48But I also think, you know, there's, there's some data to suggest that if people have fewer
00:49:53mirrors in their homes, they are generally self-report as being happier. This is a mirror,
00:49:58right? This is the black mirror. So I just, I feel like that the less you look at this thing,
00:50:04haven't run a study on this, but I would bet a healthy chunk of change.
00:50:09I just think the less you interact with this, the better, especially given how prevalent fake feeds
00:50:13are. It's just like the machine is an illusion. Most of it.
00:50:16Did you guys see that quote where I think this philosopher, I forgot the name, but it was like,
00:50:21man was never meant to have a mirror. Self-reflection like that is, is, is detrimental
00:50:28in some ways, shape or form.
00:50:29We wouldn't have known what we looked like until,
00:50:32Jared, can you find out when mirrors were invented?
00:50:35You would know with water.
00:50:37Yeah. You would go to the pond, for example, and look at your face.
00:50:41Like Achilles.
00:50:41Yeah.
00:50:42They're, they're nature.
00:50:43Or narcissists.
00:50:44This is why like, if you look at animals or for a variety of reasons,
00:50:47obviously with intelligence or whatever, but they're often very baffled by their
00:50:52presence in the mirror. And now we're looking at ourselves more often than ever before.
00:50:57The selfie cameras effectively changed the dynamics of everything.
00:51:01During COVID, there was something called zoom face. There was a marked increase in people getting
00:51:05cosmetic surgery because they were seeing themselves more because they were spending so many hours.
00:51:09Now there's AI filters on Google meet and zoom.
00:51:13I want my skin smoothing for my interview.
00:51:15Exactly. You would add makeup or whatever.
00:51:18Going back to your point about the photographic memory thing.
00:51:20Did you guys ever play that game?
00:51:21Which I don't have to be clear.
00:51:24I know people who can do this and then 10 minutes later, read it back to you from memory.
00:51:31That is photographic memory. I don't have that.
00:51:34You know that game you used to play as a kid when somebody would draw on your back
00:51:37and you'd have to figure out what they drew?
00:51:39Oh yeah.
00:51:39Yeah.
00:51:39It was actually a really interesting skill building game because then you have to effectively imagine
00:51:45different senses coming together.
00:51:46Mm-hmm.
00:51:47So you feel what somebody's drawing, whether it's a flower or a mountain or a sun or whatever.
00:51:52Always a penis.
00:51:53And if you're...
00:51:53Exactly.
00:51:54The first...
00:51:55Always a penis.
00:51:55Also a good podcast name.
00:51:57That game was remarkable.
00:52:02All roads lead to penis, maybe.
00:52:04Yeah, yeah, yeah.
00:52:04Pretty much.
00:52:05I know you like the Roman Empire.
00:52:06Downfall of penis.
00:52:06So what's...
00:52:08I was just double checking then because about the history of the mirror.
00:52:11Can I say how much I live how you say double?
00:52:13I can't even fucking say it.
00:52:14Double.
00:52:15That's...
00:52:15God, it adds like at least seven IQ points.
00:52:17It sounds very Irish.
00:52:18I'm from Rochdale originally, Tim.
00:52:20And whenever you're in the UK, it's a big tourist scene.
00:52:22You'd love it.
00:52:23Oh, I'll take you there.
00:52:25You'd love it.
00:52:25You'd love it.
00:52:26Okay.
00:52:26What is that?
00:52:26The mirror.
00:52:27Uh, so the mirror, um, that we are the creation of the mirror.
00:52:33But I, as part of AI coming bigger and bigger, I've been going down like old revolutions.
00:52:37So the industrial revolution and the Guttenberg printing press revolution.
00:52:41So Guttenberg, when he was creating the printing press, he was originally trying to create,
00:52:45I think, a mirror machine and accidentally or ended up morphing into what became the printing press.
00:52:52Wait, what the hell is a mirror machine that makes mirrors?
00:52:54Yeah.
00:52:55So here you go.
00:52:56So, uh, around...
00:52:58I don't know how you get from that to the printing press.
00:52:591438 to 14...
00:53:00So you grind sand to make mirrors.
00:53:02Yeah.
00:53:0239, Guttenberg was in Strasbourg running a partnership to mass produce pilgrim mirrors,
00:53:07small polished metal badges that pilgrims pinned to their hats to catch holy rays,
00:53:12radiating from relics, then carried home to benefit relatives.
00:53:14That's cool.
00:53:15I like that idea.
00:53:16Um, but it did...
00:53:18It's like a capacitor for religious goodwill.
00:53:21So his capital was running out to appease investors.
00:53:23Guttenberg said he would share a secret with them.
00:53:25Art and adventure.
00:53:26Research that was the basis for his yet to be built printing press.
00:53:30That's cool.
00:53:31Wow.
00:53:31Wow.
00:53:32Nice.
00:53:32All right, Tim, you must have some heaters.
00:53:34What have you brought from home?
00:53:35Show me something.
00:53:35Yeah, I've got something.
00:53:37This is an article.
00:53:40I've got a bunch of stuff, but I'm going to take kind of a slight left turn.
00:53:44It's related to a lot of the stuff we're talking about, but this caught my attention.
00:53:48It's an article called Riding the Leopard by Packy McCormick.
00:53:52And it was, it was, it was sent to me, I had never read anything of his.
00:53:58And this was sent to me a few days ago by, uh, someone adjacent to one of the top AI
00:54:09technologists out there, which is part of what makes it interesting.
00:54:13So I'll just, I'll, I'll read a couple of sections here and then I want to get your sense
00:54:20and thoughts on things.
00:54:22So what do we get to talk to a room of technology people?
00:54:24This is a transcribed talk that Packy did.
00:54:27Sierra just raised at 15 billion.
00:54:29Anthropic crossed a 44 billion run rate and launched a new company with some huge funds that
00:54:33have 1.5 billion to deploy, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:54:35OpenAI did the same thing, but with 4 billion, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:54:38This billion, that billion.
00:54:39All of which raises an important question.
00:54:41Who gives a shit?
00:54:42I mean that.
00:54:43Why do we care?
00:54:44And then it goes down.
00:54:45And he says, last night, a woman who reads my newsletter reached out over Substack DM.
00:54:49She said she'd been diagnosed with stage four cancer.
00:54:52She's now on remission.
00:54:53She'd been confronted with the question we've all been facing.
00:54:55What happens to human purpose when AI removes scarcity?
00:54:59Or in her case, the need to be productive.
00:55:00To answer it, this is the interesting part, right?
00:55:03She analyzed more than 200 sci-fi books.
00:55:05Across all of these books, by far the most common thing left to solve for post-scarcity is meaning.
00:55:1159% of books were about the search for meaning.
00:55:14Identity was next at 17%.
00:55:16And then it goes on.
00:55:20And there are questions.
00:55:23If new technology is so great, why are so many people unhappy?
00:55:28If we have means our ancestors couldn't have dreamed of, why is there a meaning crisis?
00:55:33And then it quotes Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl, who wrote, "The truth is that as the struggle for
00:55:38survival has subsided, the question has emerged: survival for what?
00:55:42Ever more people today have the means to live, but no meaning to live for."
00:55:46And ultimately in the piece, he ends up talking about, he really goes out there.
00:55:51Well, I would bet that dear Packy has done a fair amount of drugs.
00:55:54And that's meant as a compliment, Packy, if you hear this.
00:55:59But we get into non-duality, we get into differentiation as moral obligation.
00:56:03But I want to explain the origin of the name of the piece,
00:56:09"Riding the Leopard," and it's from Joseph Campbell.
00:56:13And effectively, he's talking about the hero's journey, and I'll read two parts and then I'll stop.
00:56:17But the goal of the hero's trip down to the jewel point is to find those levels in the psyche that open,
00:56:22open, open, and finally open to the mystery of yourself being Buddha consciousness or the Christ.
00:56:27That's the journey.
00:56:28It's all about finding that still point in your mind where commitment drops away.
00:56:33The separateness apparent in the world is secondary.
00:56:35Beyond that world of opposites is an unseen but experienced unity and identity in us all."
00:56:40All right.
00:56:40Then this is the wellspring of the name of the piece.
00:56:44"You must return with the bliss and integrate it. The return is seeing the radiance everywhere."
00:56:49All right.
00:56:49"The goal is to live with godlike composure on the full rush of energy,
00:56:53like Dionysus riding the leopard without being torn to pieces."
00:56:57And it goes on.
00:56:58It's worth reading.
00:56:59It does get a little squirrely later on.
00:57:02But what I'm curious about is how you guys think about, if you do, solving for meaning.
00:57:09Because I tend to skew, I wouldn't say dystopian, but hypervigilant and have a lot of concern for the next
00:57:20five, ten years.
00:57:22Not just with AI, but with the reaction to AI.
00:57:25Right?
00:57:26So it's one thing if AI, quote unquote, takes jobs.
00:57:32But if everyone fears it is going to take jobs, there are consequences of that in and of itself.
00:57:36Right?
00:57:38But I'm wondering how you guys think about or solve for meaning.
00:57:41And I'll just add one more thing, which is, um, actually, no, I'll save it.
00:57:47I'll park that for, for, for maybe injecting a little later.
00:57:50But how do you guys think about it?
00:57:51You know, one thing that comes to mind, this is the weirdest thing, by the way, which is, um,
00:57:56I like aviation and there's, this is all going to connect, which is, you know, um,
00:58:03turns out airplanes crash only because there's multiple systems that go wrong, whatever.
00:58:07And, and, um, the reason why that came to mind to him was that, um,
00:58:11a captain has a decision to make when something bad happens.
00:58:14How much do you communicate what happened to the passengers?
00:58:18Like, what do you say?
00:58:19Do you, do you like, Hey, you know, we've lost hydraulics.
00:58:22We've lost stuff, you know, multiple systems are wrong, whatever.
00:58:25Completely transparent.
00:58:26You freak people out.
00:58:28Um, do you not share enough information?
00:58:30People are like, Oh, what's going on?
00:58:31Why is it turbulent?
00:58:34How does that marry to AI?
00:58:36The people who are building these systems, how much do they communicate what they think are
00:58:41things that might change about the future?
00:58:43Things that might have a turbulent nature to them.
00:58:48And that is a delicate art, which is, you know, you see Dario going on pods and saying stuff like
00:58:56software engineering solved, you know, software will be free.
00:59:00Um, once that happens, you know, you get these ripple effects, whatnot, all this stuff happens.
00:59:05And there's other people who are like much more optimistic about the world,
00:59:08which is like, Hey, you know what?
00:59:10Every and every revolution has created jobs.
00:59:14Certainly it has eliminated them, but we've progressed.
00:59:16And so it's really fascinating.
00:59:18I think this is an interesting environment where people are like, how much do you,
00:59:22even as a, a lot of researchers in San Francisco, for example, really believe
00:59:28that we've solved almost every problem, roughly, that, that, that the dominoes will fall
00:59:33very quickly from here on out.
00:59:35If you have AI self-correcting, self-researching, you get to AGI, what happens?
00:59:43How do you solve personally?
00:59:44How do you think about meaning?
00:59:46If you do it, this is not a, this is not like a pre-judgment either.
00:59:49Totally.
00:59:49Like what?
00:59:50You don't think about meaning.
00:59:51You know, you crass capitalists.
00:59:53I tend not to, I'm not a planner too much.
00:59:56You know, I, I think planning is, is good in some sense, but also kind of detrimental.
01:00:02It occupies bandwidth that would otherwise be more useful for now.
01:00:05I think people tend to live in the future a little bit more than they tend to.
01:00:08They, they should.
01:00:10Are you religious?
01:00:11What was that?
01:00:11Are any of you religious?
01:00:14No, no.
01:00:15A little bit.
01:00:15I'd say I'm spiritual, but not necessarily, you know, organized religion or whatnot.
01:00:20I do.
01:00:20Welcome to Austin.
01:00:20What was that?
01:00:21Welcome to Austin.
01:00:22I, you know, I think.
01:00:23We all do a bit of Scientology every now and again, right?
01:00:26Do a bit of Scientology.
01:00:28You make it sound like weed.
01:00:29Yeah.
01:00:29Come on.
01:00:30Come on.
01:00:30Come on.
01:00:31We do a bit of Scientology.
01:00:33Come on.
01:00:33Did you guys see what Brian Johnson posted yesterday?
01:00:34It was like a prayer.
01:00:35He's talking about prayer.
01:00:36He's like, I've been trying to pray more and I don't know what prayer means and, or I don't
01:00:40know what prayer is.
01:00:41If Brian goes full circle and ends up being a moment again, that is going to be.
01:00:44There was a quote tweet exactly like this.
01:00:46He's like, turns out the answer to everything is just Jesus Christ.
01:00:50Honestly, dude, or longevity or whatever.
01:00:52There was a funny comment.
01:00:54I mean, I think Brian, that's an interesting one coming from Brian.
01:00:56I would actually love to talk to him about that more than a lot of the biohacking given
01:01:01his history.
01:01:01Brian's a sweetie.
01:01:02All right.
01:01:02I mean, there was a, I like Brian.
01:01:04There was a comment that they said, wait, let me get this straight.
01:01:08Brian left Mormonism.
01:01:09Now he's telling us we can't drink alcohol.
01:01:11We can't drink caffeine.
01:01:15I thought that was pretty good.
01:01:18Old habits die hard.
01:01:19So what is, what is this?
01:01:21And again, I don't want to belabor this, but I actually really want to know from you
01:01:24guys how you think, if you think about it.
01:01:28I guess there's two, there's a few different parts as I'm saying.
01:01:30I know a lot of uber successful people who can logic and debate their way through the
01:01:36labyrinth of intellectuals around them who have lots of money, who are ready to fucking
01:01:41jump off a cliff.
01:01:42Like that stuff doesn't.
01:01:43And do you think that that would be stopped if they had more meaning?
01:01:46You think the reason that they would jump off a cliff is because of their lack of meaning?
01:01:49I think that that is one large contributor and there's a difference.
01:01:54Like there, yes, there's a loneliness epidemic, but solving for loneliness doesn't solve for
01:01:59meaning.
01:01:59So this is, there's quite a lot of strands I'm going to like unpack.
01:02:08Chess is interesting one, right?
01:02:10That the AI can beat any human being at chess, but human beings still play chess.
01:02:14Magnus Carlsen seems to have a very enjoyable time playing chess.
01:02:21And go on.
01:02:21Well, there's an interesting anecdote there that we, this idea that, oh, it's going to take
01:02:26away everything.
01:02:27It's therefore humans won't have any purpose yet.
01:02:29It's seemingly better than everybody at chess.
01:02:32Yet chess is still popular and people are still doing it.
01:02:36The big thing for me, I mean.
01:02:37And the question I'm asking is not whether AI will remove meaning.
01:02:40It's more like, forget it, but let's, we could strip AI out of it completely.
01:02:43I'm just curious, like how you guys think about it.
01:02:45If you do.
01:02:46So the, I think we discussed it when I've been in this chair before, but the idea of the
01:02:51precautionary principle.
01:02:52So the precautionary principle is human beings have a very, very, very, very good time at
01:02:57forecasting problems, but we have a very, very difficult time of forecasting the solutions that
01:03:03will come because by definition, if we had the solution, therefore there'd be no problem.
01:03:07But you have all these billions of human beings that end up working on this problem.
01:03:11My inevitable thing is, and this is where I feel it's a bit of a straw man argument.
01:03:15If this AI is so intelligent that it's replaced us all, and it's this super God,
01:03:21you'll probably figure out how to get us meaning.
01:03:23You know what I mean?
01:03:24George feels that the argument is a little bit logically-
01:03:26George believes that benevolence comes along with processing power.
01:03:29Yeah.
01:03:29I wouldn't make that last statement myself.
01:03:31I know some people like the sort of extremes of techno-optimism would say that.
01:03:36But you know, the point that Paki makes in his piece too, he's like, most of the arguments tend
01:03:41to at some point land on like, we're going to cure cancer.
01:03:44And it's like, well, at this point, he's like, there are 8.3 roughly billion people on the planet
01:03:50who are not going to die of cancer, at least not in the near term.
01:03:53And a lot of them are miserable.
01:03:55So it's like, it doesn't, it might solve for certain biotech and health tech, medical problems.
01:04:01Could it not let us understand the brain and then figure out why these people are miserable?
01:04:06This is what I mean around, I'm not even suggesting this is going to be the case.
01:04:09There's just things that we can't even forecast.
01:04:12You've done a wonderful Bernie Sanders job of two or three times now,
01:04:16not answering the question of how to personally think about meaning.
01:04:19I've said Scientology, but you didn't want to listen.
01:04:21That's not me, that's Tim.
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01:05:26How do you guys, how do you guys, um, do you guys think this is an active process in people's minds?
01:05:32Like in creation?
01:05:33Yeah, like do people really, like, think about it in that realm?
01:05:37Or is it just a byproduct of existence in some sense?
01:05:41I think we're a natural byproduct of existence.
01:05:43Look, I would just say, maybe you see this, maybe you don't.
01:05:47I mean, you guys all interact on the interwebs.
01:05:50The degree of like apathy and nihilism and foreboding that I think is adjacent or overlapping with
01:05:59a creeping dread of meaninglessness in my audience over the last five years is fucking terrifying.
01:06:06And do you think that AI is contributing to that?
01:06:08I think that technology, and look, I'm not saying technology is a bad thing.
01:06:14Like ever since we were, our ancestors used some stick to fish out, you know, a termite mound.
01:06:19It's like, I bet on technology.
01:06:22It's, you know, I've lived in the Bay Area for almost 20 years,
01:06:25still very actively involved with different types of technology.
01:06:29But I do think that there is the equivalent of digital poison.
01:06:34And a lot of us are drip feeding it every day.
01:06:37So it's not necessarily AI.
01:06:39I think AI, like money, power, alcohol, psychedelics, it's an amplifier.
01:06:45It's an accelerant.
01:06:46Well, certainly most people's relationship to technology now is negative.
01:06:50I don't know many people, perhaps except you,
01:06:52who have a above 80% positive interaction with technology.
01:06:58I was on the treadmill in the gym the other day,
01:07:01and I was looking at doing a little bit of boom scrolling on my phone.
01:07:06And I had a screen in front of me here.
01:07:08And then I had five screens here and then another five screens there.
01:07:13And then there's a video wall that's got an advert here.
01:07:15And I'm like, dude, I'm supposed to be in the gym.
01:07:18And I'm trying to listen to a podcast.
01:07:20I'm trying to listen to a funny podcast.
01:07:21It's just a safe space hang.
01:07:22I'm not supposed to be thinking and I'm supposed to be tuned into this.
01:07:25And every single different screen had subtitles on.
01:07:27Some of them had adverts on this one's my 600 pound life.
01:07:31That one's the news from New York City.
01:07:34This one's that.
01:07:35And I'm like, dude, I can't, it's even, I have to actively avoid screens.
01:07:40Now, even if I choose to go screen free.
01:07:42So yeah, I think most people's relationship to technology is proto negative.
01:07:48So when they think about if this gets more, that is more of the negative.
01:07:53And it's already removed it from me a bit.
01:07:54I had a really interesting conversation with Nick Bostrom.
01:07:57So he did his second book, which is kind of like a spiritual sequel to super intelligence.
01:08:01What if things go wrong?
01:08:03And then the next one was, what if things go right?
01:08:05What are the problems of a solved world?
01:08:07And he had this really interesting example where he said, basically everything that we value in other
01:08:13humans can be refined down to the fact that you need to negotiate with a world that is scarce.
01:08:22Why do I like motivation in someone else?
01:08:24Why do I like discipline?
01:08:24Why do I like the ability to tell the truth?
01:08:26Why do I like prudence?
01:08:27Why do I like good judgment?
01:08:29Because you need those things to be able to navigate through a world which is going to apply pressure to you.
01:08:33And if you remove that, so many of the traits that we look for in other people, that creates a strange weightlessness
01:08:45with all of the different values that we've tended to prefer for all of human history,
01:08:49because we've been negotiating with a world that's pushed up against us.
01:08:51And if we move that out of the way, then what does that mean?
01:08:53So yeah, dude, I think the meaninglessness thing is great.
01:08:57George is infuriatingly optimistic, which means that these conversations with him are always,
01:09:04if AI is that smart, why won't it be benevolent enough to fix our problems?
01:09:07That's kind of, I guess, your…
01:09:09I'm not saying that the…
01:09:10If there had never been, if the transformer had never made the leap to the, I guess, GPT-3 or 4,
01:09:21the sort of social media and digital environment in and of itself,
01:09:27just with more of a linear growth rate as opposed to more exponential, still would be a problem, right?
01:09:33It's just over a long time limit.
01:09:34Like, the AI conversation is just… it sucks up all the fucking oxygen in the room,
01:09:39do you know what I mean?
01:09:40So it's like, we can strip that out as a thought exercise, right?
01:09:45I mean, I'm curious how you would answer it.
01:09:47If… and I mean, look, this is something I've been thinking about a lot because my audience,
01:09:51but also for me, for like my family.
01:09:54And I've thought a lot about these debates that Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris have had.
01:10:01Where Sam's…
01:10:02The first one was a fucking car crash.
01:10:03Well, yeah, I mean, look, they've had car crashes.
01:10:07But one of the takeaways for me was like, can any meaningful critical mass of humans
01:10:15from like first principles develop a moral and value code for themselves that is secular,
01:10:22that is in any way gratifying, grounding, supportive in times of great duress?
01:10:27Like, I feel like Sam would be more on that side of things.
01:10:29And then Jordan's like, it's not going to happen, right?
01:10:32Like that is why people need religion, because you have this out-of-the-box certainty.
01:10:37And in a world of seemingly increasing incomprehensibility, right, where there is this
01:10:49inability to separate fact from fiction, people need some type of foothold of certainty.
01:10:54And so, I mean, I think religion, I mean, it's, I don't have to think it, it's already happening,
01:10:59but it's like huge resurgence in religion.
01:11:01With Latin mass as well, which is, Latin mass is one of the, if not the most ascendant
01:11:09attended religious services. And it's a service that's entirely done in a language that nobody in
01:11:15the audience speaks. And I wonder whether what that's doing is it's almost bypassing people's
01:11:19ability to scrutinize it. Well, that's obviously not true, but I can realize it's science.
01:11:24Yeah, maybe they don't want to scrutinize it.
01:11:25That's the point. That's why I think that what they're doing is they're purposefully going,
01:11:29oh, maybe it's just that it feels more archaic, it's more steeped in history, et cetera, et cetera.
01:11:32Maybe the music's better, I don't know. But yeah, I definitely get the sense that
01:11:39people are going to scrabble around to try and reverse from first principles.
01:11:42Yeah.
01:11:43How do I make myself feel good? But there is an interesting question, which is,
01:11:48if what we're bothered about is human flourishing, humans feeling good,
01:11:54why not have a comforting delusion? Let's say that it's delusion. I'm not saying that it is,
01:11:59but why not have a comforting delusion? Like if the outcomes of religious people are more happiness,
01:12:03more meaning, they live longer, they've got better community, they've got better health,
01:12:06they've got da-da-da-da-da-da-da.
01:12:07Suddenly seems very rational instead of irrational.
01:12:09So this is what I learned from Alex O'Connor, and it is Richard Dawkins speaking to Ayaan Hirsi Ali
01:12:15on stage. And Ayaan was supposed to be the fifth horseman of the atheist apocalypse,
01:12:19but she couldn't make the meeting that day. And then Ayaan is on stage talking to Richard,
01:12:26and the audience is sort of half her fans and half Richard's. And she said,
01:12:31I wanted to take my own life not long ago. I was really low, and religion found me,
01:12:38Jesus found me, Christianity found me, God found me. And after the lowest moment that I had,
01:12:44I'm really, really happy to say that my mental health is in a better place,
01:12:48and I'm religious. And you know, you get the sort of smattering of kind of like empathetic applause
01:12:53around the room. And Alex told me that Richard's almost immediate response was,
01:12:57Yes, but do you really think that Jesus moved the stone out of the way on the third day of Aramea?
01:13:05And what you see is a guy who is playing a game of optimizing for rationality whilst ignoring
01:13:14effectiveness. And you go, how can you say that it's anything but a positive when this
01:13:22person's life essentially was saved by this thing? And it makes me, and this is one of the reasons I
01:13:29think that atheism is not cool at the moment, that it feels in a world that's increasingly bereft of
01:13:35meaning, it feels like really sterile and quite judgmental and quite harsh. And it makes me, when I
01:13:42think about it, I'm like, I don't, it just doesn't seem very nice to me. And I'm aware removing comforting
01:13:48delusions, why should you allow someone to indulge in their silly fantasy? I'm like, bro, I think we're
01:13:55getting toward the stage where comforting delusions are allowed. Because if not, I don't know. So maybe it
01:14:02is, maybe it is Mormonism all along. Do you guys, intellectuals oftentimes get in this territory where
01:14:09they try to use proof by counterexample? So they'll try to find one counterexample in something that
01:14:14you're saying and then effectively void the whole thing. And it's a very common thing because this is
01:14:20what you do in a math setting or anything. And they tend to do that in kind of a religious setting as
01:14:26well. And it's like, that's not applicable here. Just because X, Y, X is not true, doesn't mean
01:14:32invalidates the rest of it. And this is why people tend to like, you know, I think Richard Dawkins is like,
01:14:37religion is a pick and choose kind of buffet. You know, you can, you can go pick and believe in
01:14:41something. He also did say that AI is, uh, sentient with Claudia. How old is Richard though now?
01:14:48Seventies. Seventies. I think as soon as anybody gets over 65, you've got to give them a little bit of
01:14:54leeway, public breathing, breathing room. Yeah. Why?
01:14:58Have you been around anybody over 65? Richard Dawkins.
01:15:01Yeah. Yeah. I was on stage with me. He said that he would consider trying psychedelics.
01:15:06Oh, well, I used to get him to admit to that. That was fun.
01:15:09But yeah, what'd you guys think of that? The Richard Dawkins play? I mean,
01:15:14if anybody would go around and figure out if there is sentience associated with AI,
01:15:18maybe Richard Dawkins might be an okay person to go and figure that out. I don't know. I don't know how
01:15:22much you guys, but I'm curious to get your thoughts on what he discovered or how he discovered it.
01:15:26Oh, it's way above my pay grade. I have no idea. I would need people to define sentience and also
01:15:32like there, whenever we get into sentience consciousness, I'm like, let's just make,
01:15:38before we argue about what God does or doesn't like, let's define God similarly. Right. I would
01:15:42just want to make sure I understand those terms because once you get into like integrated information
01:15:47theory and all this stuff, it's very easy to like get into these weeds. And then you're like 30 pages into
01:15:53reading this and I don't think anyone quite defined what the fuck they mean. So I don't know. I don't
01:15:58actually know the context, but I certainly have no strong position. Same thing's kind of true with
01:16:03meaning though. You know, I've read Baumeister's paper on meaning, meaning happiness, that kind of
01:16:08legendary one from 2010, I think it is. And, uh, hey, they're good, eh? I mean, they're very tasty.
01:16:14I don't know what's in them. 15 milligrams of caffeine and some tasty shit. Sorry if I'm completely off
01:16:19here. But part of me thinks that, well, again, I hate to sound like I'm doing an affiliate link for
01:16:26the beginning of infinity, which I am, I'll post it in the link, but problems are infinite. So even now,
01:16:33it's a great example. So AI, which is first off, we're having this hypothetical conversation about
01:16:37this hypothetical thing, which I think could happen, but it's completely hypothetical. But assuming that
01:16:41hypothetical is true, we first have the problem of, well, if this AI is so smart, why can't it fix this?
01:16:47Because those two things seem paradoxical. They would need to want to fix it.
01:16:50Yeah. Which again, um, which is a different question, but if it is so smart, why can't
01:16:54it fix it is the first point. The second point is even now, are we not having quite a meaningful
01:16:59conversation like about this problem? Is this not an example where this hypothetical AI solved
01:17:04everything yet it hasn't solved meaning? And we're now constantly talking about how we're going to get
01:17:08more meaning for human beings. I don't think that the problem is necessarily that meaning would be
01:17:12impossible to access, but if you make meaning harder to access, you end up with some pretty
01:17:17gnarly outcomes in the same way as it's not impossible to eat healthily, but it is harder to not be fat in a
01:17:23calorie dense, high processed food environment. And if you make it a meaning oasis, it's sparser to get to
01:17:33meaning, uh, then it makes life harder for everybody to find that.
01:17:38Can I ask a dumb question?
01:17:39Yeah. Is it how to open the toothpicks?
01:17:41I was, I was watching you to see it.
01:17:44Send them here.
01:17:46Back to the, back to the factory.
01:17:48Here we go.
01:17:48Let's talk to this co-packer.
01:17:49Oh my God. Amazing.
01:17:50I want, I have another dumb question, which is how, how do most people or normal people think
01:17:56about meaning? Like, well, how do they define it? What is the underlying element?
01:17:59I mean, I think, I mean, the way that like, I don't know if I'm normal, I would probably
01:18:03pretty abnormal, but, um, I mean, I, I do think that like meaning may be the wrong term
01:18:09to use because you can apply it to defining a term. You could apply it to, was this conversation
01:18:15meaningless or meaningful? Well, yeah, we talked about a bunch of stuff that we, is mutually
01:18:20intelligible. So like, yeah, sure. By definition it's meaningful, but I think we could say purpose,
01:18:25like people feeling they have a purpose, right? There is a point to what they're doing or their
01:18:32life in general, right? Is sort of how I would think. I just, I just, the, uh, I mean, that's,
01:18:41that's if, if I had to put in a placeholder, that's what I would sort of.
01:18:45Western society always attributes, you know, when you go to a party,
01:18:51what do you do, Tim? What do you do? Like, you know, this is a canonical question that people ask.
01:18:56It's like, oh, what do I do? What do you do? Like what do you do at a party? What do you do?
01:19:02The cocktail party question. The cocktail party question. I tend to try to not ask this question
01:19:07anymore, but I used to, and it's always funny. There you go. I mean, that would be a good,
01:19:15they're like, oh, okay. It's better than saying podcast.
01:19:18Yeah. But like, that is pretty similar, actually. It's a job.
01:19:22The attribute of, uh, of, of Western society to a certain extent, with all the focus on productivity
01:19:28and looking at your calendar and managing your time and, you know, sort of going from meeting to
01:19:33meeting to meeting and then having a full schedule and organizing, you know, a meetup one, one month
01:19:38later with your friends and putting it on the calendar. It's so like fascinating because effectively,
01:19:45a lot of people treat it as allocating time. And if they allocate time, that's what kind of where
01:19:54people are trying to do. And oftentimes it went back to this. The reason why I asked what you do is
01:19:58a lot of the meaning elements for individuals is tied to their craft, their job, their, their sort of
01:20:08livelihood, is it possible to have meaning without resistance? Because I was thinking about the chess
01:20:12example that you were talking about, but part of the reason that the game of chess is meaningful
01:20:17is that you're meeting resistance, even if the resistance is of another player and not the best
01:20:21player in the world that would be a computer. But part of that requires some sort of friction
01:20:28in the system. There's, there's very few things that I can think of that are meaningful,
01:20:32that are also totally frictionless or just there is no challenge in it.
01:20:36Going back to this, it's like, think about relationships. We made access to relationships
01:20:42kind of less friction than ever. You get a catalog of individuals, browse through, find the next
01:20:49person onto the next. Wow. I mean, you've created sort of an abundant layer on what was previously
01:20:57scarce. And then you have Grindr, which is post-abundance. Post-abundance. Yeah, there you go.
01:21:04Have you guys heard about Sniffies? Yeah. No, no, no. What's Sniffies?
01:21:07It's like a new gay sex, anonymous sex app. Okay. How are they innovating on Grindr? What went wrong?
01:21:13Well, this is what I know because I have some friends. What were they serving? What were they
01:21:17serving that the Grindr app wasn't? How do you spell that by the way?
01:21:23I've got to end this podcast. Match Group just put in a hundred million dollars
01:21:30into the app and it's growing like crazy. People don't talk about the... I used to
01:21:34have this thing that if one of the reasons why it was never discussed in parliament or never discussed
01:21:39in congress was who owns Pornhub? What's the name of the company? Is it MindGeek?
01:21:45Yeah, yeah. The Canadian company.
01:21:47MindGeek had... Whilst the congress was talking about the monopoly that Google had, that Meta had,
01:21:52MindGeek had the most absurd monopoly of the pornography industry, which you'd argue there's
01:21:57a free market solution that OnlyFans came along and that good old OnlyFans fixing the market.
01:22:02Democratizing porn.
01:22:03But another example is the dating apps. If you look at who owns all the dating apps,
01:22:08Match.com have got a bunch. I'm pretty sure they own Match, Tinder, Hinge.
01:22:12I don't know if they know... Pretty much everything.
01:22:14No, no. Bumble's public.
01:22:15Bumble's separate. Okay, so Bumble's separate.
01:22:17Raya, maybe.
01:22:18Raya's separate too. Right.
01:22:20Match Group owns everything except for Raya and Bumble, roughly.
01:22:22But it's crazy that they're allowed such a monopoly on what is now modern dating and
01:22:26nobody discusses it because it's sort of icky to discuss.
01:22:28You see, it's hard to define... The market's so difficult to define in some sense.
01:22:32Those apps are also really struggling. There's been a massive downturn on all those apps.
01:22:35You see what Whitney Wolf-Hurd's been saying recently, that Bumble is going to have
01:22:39my AI avatar date your AI avatar and then it will feed that back up. Did you see there was an
01:22:45interview she just did like last week or whatever, and she's like, this is the end of the swipe era,
01:22:50and Bumble's introducing this sort of AI matchmaker or whatever.
01:22:53Jared, have you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem?
01:22:57I don't consider it a lot, Chris.
01:22:59Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Co. last night.
01:23:03But they're non-alcoholic.
01:23:06And that's not a problem?
01:23:08Sorry, man. I just kept chugging away for the regret to creep in. Never happened.
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01:23:54Bottoms up.
01:24:01But going back to your point, Chris, which was the idea, the capitalism removes friction,
01:24:06right? Like, the idea is that you have this invisible layer in society, sort of,
01:24:13that is fixing supply and demand such that there's this equilibrium at all times.
01:24:20And turns out that reduces friction because accessibility, I mean, DoorDash, you can like,
01:24:26I can get an Amazon delivery in 15, 30 minutes or whatever.
01:24:29You got a fancy dress outfit in less than an hour yesterday.
01:24:32Yeah.
01:24:32Yeah, because that's what I do on a Sunday.
01:24:34It's ridiculous.
01:24:34Needed a costume.
01:24:35Needed a costume.
01:24:36Yeah, right.
01:24:36It's one of these new apps.
01:24:37I mean, it was remarkable.
01:24:40I need a furry with a cape.
01:24:42And that went straight on to Whistler or whatever.
01:24:43Yeah, I was in like a Carmel and I didn't have a bathing suit because people were going
01:24:48in the pool or whatever.
01:24:49It was like, oh, I can just DoorDash it in 30 minutes.
01:24:53And somebody will bring me a bathing suit because I didn't have it.
01:24:56And that's remarkable.
01:24:58And I think going back to this, it's like, yeah, obviously,
01:25:00I think it reduces value of things when the friction goes down.
01:25:04I do think a great example is Winston Churchill.
01:25:08I posted this the other day.
01:25:09Churchill's biography is so good.
01:25:11Like you go, Jesus Christ, did this man-
01:25:13Which one?
01:25:14The big, I think it's Andrew Roberts, Churchill biography.
01:25:16First off, Jared, could you pull it up?
01:25:18How many times Winston Churchill nearly died?
01:25:20He out beats a cat, like the number of-
01:25:22I think he almost drowns.
01:25:24He gets-
01:25:24What's the terminal velocity of Winston Churchill?
01:25:26Yeah, he gets ran over.
01:25:29But Churchill used to, and famously a sufferer of depression,
01:25:33as he called it, black dog.
01:25:34He used to plant, sorry, he used to lay 200 bricks per day
01:25:40for a significant period of his life just to keep himself busy.
01:25:43What was he building with those 200 bricks?
01:25:45Apparently, he wasn't actually that good.
01:25:47So the stories that the asphalt players came in afterwards,
01:25:49but he would always do, yeah, you can have a look.
01:25:52So here we go.
01:25:52Like, yeah, he, battlefield dangers in Cuba,
01:25:54India, Sudan, and South Africa.
01:25:56Escaped from, yeah, he escaped from the Boer prisoner of war camp.
01:26:00Frontline combat in World War I.
01:26:01Got hit by a car.
01:26:02Believed he was preserved for a purpose.
01:26:04Yeah.
01:26:04Felt he was walking with destiny.
01:26:06Well, Winston Churchill famously said when he was a,
01:26:09I believe a teenager, that I will save Western civilization.
01:26:13Which is up there with John D. Rockefeller saying,
01:26:15I will become the richest man ever to exist.
01:26:17Called the shots.
01:26:18But for every Churchill, for every Rockefeller,
01:26:19there's a thousand dickheads.
01:26:20Massive survival.
01:26:21You're in Newcastle right now.
01:26:22All right.
01:26:22So I got in trouble, speaking of the UK,
01:26:24I got in trouble for comparing the UK
01:26:26to where it would rank if it was a state.
01:26:29And I thought that this was a relatively innocuous thing to say,
01:26:32because me and George are both shit on the UK quite a bit.
01:26:34You know, you're allowed to.
01:26:36You're allowed to.
01:26:36As immigrants having moved from your own country,
01:26:39you're allowed to sort of cast a spurt.
01:26:40Well, this is why I left, so to speak.
01:26:42We were the second in the world in millionaire exits not long ago.
01:26:45Second only to China, who's got, you know,
01:26:47like 30 times the population or something.
01:26:50So I decided to post this chart.
01:26:53And this chart explains if the UK was a state,
01:26:56where it would rank on the list.
01:26:58Here it is.
01:26:59If the UK were a US state, where would it rank among 50 states?
01:27:02So life expectancy, first.
01:27:04Lowest homicide rate, first.
01:27:05Lowest gun deaths, first.
01:27:07Lowest prisoner population, first.
01:27:09Healthcare coverage, first.
01:27:10Paid maternity leave, first.
01:27:11A lot of high numbers.
01:27:12Statutory paid holiday, first.
01:27:14Years in education, first.
01:27:15Lowest road deaths, first.
01:27:17Lowest drug deaths, second.
01:27:19Minimum wage, third.
01:27:20Pupil performance, fifth.
01:27:22Environmental performance, fifth.
01:27:23Human development index, ninth.
01:27:25Lowest obesity, tenth.
01:27:26And GDP per capita, 51st.
01:27:29What do you attribute that to?
01:27:34The 51st.
01:27:34The fact that it's 51st.
01:27:37The fact that the US just absolutely rules when it comes to capitalism.
01:27:40You guys are like the Floyd Mayweather of capitalism.
01:27:42Would most countries, I know that the UK is not Europe, you know, Brexit is Brexit.
01:27:47But would countries in Western Europe also look like this in terms of GDP per capita?
01:27:54Probably, right?
01:27:55I would guess so.
01:27:56I mean, what people on the internet got mad at me for is, well, these are stupid things to judge.
01:28:02Obviously, you've got the lowest gun deaths because you cucks gave up your guns.
01:28:07The paid maternity leave doesn't matter when this thing.
01:28:10The statutory paid holiday is pointless because the level of productivity.
01:28:16The road deaths are because you don't have big enough roads or something.
01:28:19The drug deaths don't matter because you've got no cool drugs.
01:28:22The minimum, there was basically an American excuse for every single one of these.
01:28:27Even the lowest obesity.
01:28:29And I was like, it was just surprising to me because for the most part, British people are
01:28:33very prepared to laugh at Britain.
01:28:36Very prepared to point.
01:28:37Very British think.
01:28:38I've done entire episodes on this is what's wrong and this is what's wrong and this is what's wrong.
01:28:42And this is what's wrong.
01:28:43But as soon as you begin to compare the US to the UK and in some areas, because the whole
01:28:50joke here is that there's lots of things that we're ranking better than the US in,
01:28:56apart from one of the most important things, which is how much fucking money we make.
01:29:01And yeah, they're selective, but.
01:29:05Sing it.
01:29:05Huh?
01:29:06You can sing it if you want.
01:29:07Sing what?
01:29:08God save our gracious King.
01:29:17Right.
01:29:17So I just got into a lot of shit and I was surprised.
01:29:20I thought that Americans would be able to take this with a bit more humility.
01:29:24I do tend to think the Americans.
01:29:25Also humility first.
01:29:29Yeah.
01:29:30But yeah, lowest drug deaths is, I mean, like Wyoming, imagine.
01:29:34Eating America will be lowest obesity at some point very soon.
01:29:38With the advent of GLPs and.
01:29:42They're going to be, someone, I saw this thing the other day that
01:29:45Red of True Tide is going to be one of the most successful drugs in history.
01:29:48For sure.
01:29:49They're one of the most widely used drugs.
01:29:51Scott Galloway has the idea.
01:29:54He says it's the best.
01:29:55America is the best place to earn money and Europe's the best place to spend money.
01:29:59Yeah.
01:29:59Well, the UK is a wonderful country to be poor in and a horrible country to be rich in.
01:30:04And America is a great country to be rich in and a horrible country to be poor in.
01:30:07Which is kind of interesting.
01:30:08If the, um, the value of the dollar.
01:30:11Goes up.
01:30:12It's like American productivity, GDP or whatever goes up.
01:30:16And it's Americans will go and spend it to Europe.
01:30:18Right.
01:30:19And get the best value for the bang for the buck, or if you will.
01:30:22Yeah.
01:30:23I mean, I do think, uh, the UK is, is, is the greatest country of all time.
01:30:28I do think that's like a fact.
01:30:30Um, but America's America's going through its golden age right now.
01:30:34Just, we're living on borrowed time, mate.
01:30:37You know my position on this.
01:30:38I think that we're living on borrowed time.
01:30:40And this is seen, uh, nowhere more clearly than the arrests.
01:30:44Countries with the most arrests for posting on social media in 2023.
01:30:47United Kingdom, 12,183.
01:30:50Uh, coming in at nearly double second place, which is Belarus with 6,205.
01:30:56Uh, and Russia is down with 400.
01:30:59China with 1,500.
01:31:00Might be some reporting problems in a couple of those countries.
01:31:03But, uh, that number, which is from the times.
01:31:06It was a times.
01:31:06The ministry of social enforcement isn't returning their emails.
01:31:10What a great group to be part of.
01:31:11Dude, 12,000 arrests for posting on social media in 2023.
01:31:17And that number's from the times with Freedom House, uh, stats.
01:31:20So that's legit.
01:31:20Mm-hmm.
01:31:2112,183.
01:31:23And that was one of the most common.
01:31:24How many people, uh, like, where would you rank if it was, uh, the number of people that have been?
01:31:28And I'm like, also first, actually, so.
01:31:30Yeah, we have made some mistakes over the years.
01:31:32Alan Shearing.
01:31:34Yeah.
01:31:35Oscar Wilde.
01:31:36Yeah.
01:31:36Not good.
01:31:37We don't treat our gays well.
01:31:38No.
01:31:39We haven't.
01:31:40Alan Carr's pretty good.
01:31:41Alan Carr's treated well.
01:31:42Yeah.
01:31:43Douglas Murray treated relatively well.
01:31:44Yeah.
01:31:47I had this, because I, I, I find now that every time you bring up some negative about the UK,
01:31:51I've got to bring up something positive to counteract it.
01:31:53Yeah.
01:31:54Um, like the angel and the devil, or the north, the northeast and the northwest.
01:31:58Which is, I was back home, um, in London, central London, and I was walking around these beautiful
01:32:05buildings in London, and I used to live in a house that's older than America, and some of
01:32:12the architecture that exists in the UK, like New York has some quite, like the New York City
01:32:17library is beautiful.
01:32:18It feels like you guys have stolen that from us.
01:32:20And even the, uh, the Statue of Liberty is from France.
01:32:23Right.
01:32:23But like a, a lot of the architecture in the US, my friend summarized it great,
01:32:27which is everything looks like the back entrance.
01:32:30So even the front looks like what would be the back entrance.
01:32:33And I feel as a Brit being in America, like my parents have the most beautiful place in the world.
01:32:41And I'm around this mess of a house where the people are just, it's a lot more functional right
01:32:46now.
01:32:46But the UK has, the architecture is stunning.
01:32:50And you don't make buildings like that anymore.
01:32:51We're really grasping at fucking straws though, when we're talking about the architecture.
01:32:54Big Ben's good.
01:32:57Big Ben's good.
01:32:58That's the difference between the US and the UK is that it feels that everything
01:33:01in the US has, or a lot of things in the US, I shall fix, has a functional name.
01:33:08So I was like, why is it called Joshua Tree?
01:33:10It's like, oh, it's because it has a lot of Joshua trees.
01:33:13Or like you have 10th Street.
01:33:14I go, why is it 10th Street?
01:33:15Because it's next to 9th Street and before 11th Street.
01:33:17Whereas Big Ben, nobody really knows why it's called Big Ben.
01:33:21We think it was after some bloke called Ben,
01:33:24but it's not actually been clarified.
01:33:25It's the bell, right?
01:33:26The big, Big Ben is the, it's not the actual clock.
01:33:29It's the bell that's inside of it, I think.
01:33:31Have a look.
01:33:31Because I remember I went down a big Ben rabbit hole and I couldn't find it out.
01:33:36It's remarkable how, if you think about it in the grander scheme of things,
01:33:40young, how young America is.
01:33:43It's like, what is it?
01:33:44Like a teenager, maybe less or something with respect to civilization or modern civilization.
01:33:50And it turns out everything is kind of, whereas if you were to create a blank slate of a country
01:33:56and now use the best of whatever exists and maybe try to create it.
01:33:58This is kind of what Dubai has done, right?
01:34:00In a way.
01:34:01Like you think about Dubai from an infrastructure standpoint, it's just totally like-
01:34:05Artificial.
01:34:06Yeah.
01:34:06It's absolutely just plowed its way through the desert and said, how do we want to have
01:34:11our roads?
01:34:12How do we want to have our downtown?
01:34:13I know that there's lots of road accidents that you said, I wasn't aware of this, but if you're
01:34:17driving in Dubai, you can be doing 70 miles an hour and looking at Google maps and you're
01:34:22three minutes from your destination, which is in the middle of a built-up area.
01:34:25You're just like pounding it and then you peel off on this perfectly modern designed flyover
01:34:31and then you're deposited outside of the fountains at the bottom of the burge or whatever.
01:34:35So that's kind of interesting.
01:34:36Whereas if you drive in London, it would take you like 30 minutes.
01:34:40London's okay.
01:34:41But I mean, once you've been to LA, everything feels totally fucking unbelievable.
01:34:46Well, I mean, you know, I've chatted about this before, but I'm just increasingly bullish on
01:34:52neuromodulation, brain stimulation. And there was a piece in the New York Times,
01:34:59could at-home brain stimulation reduce psychiatry's reliance on SSRIs? And I think part of the framing
01:35:04challenge around, and just to define terms here. So brain stimulation in this particular case,
01:35:11I believe in that New York Times piece is referring to something called TDCS, where you can basically use,
01:35:16I think it's TDCS, where you can basically use a nine volt battery. It's a headset that you can wear
01:35:20at home and it's intended to treat depressive disorder.
01:35:25And then you have other types of neuromodulation. And I use that term because you might not be
01:35:32stimulating, you might not be exciting something, you might be inhibiting something. So that would include
01:35:39TMS, which I've spent a lot of time with. So transcranial magnetic stimulation. So you're using
01:35:45magnets with different targets, depending on what you're trying to do. And I think those are just,
01:35:52it's the very, very, it's the model T of what's coming with neuromodulation. And I think there's
01:35:59going to be a lot of acceleration in the next two years. I think it's going to move a lot faster than
01:36:06people expect. How does it work? Well, so for instance, you might have
01:36:12in say my case, right? So what I figured out took me my whole life to figure it out. But a few years
01:36:19ago is that even though I had kind of been diagnosed and diagnosed myself prior to that, as someone with
01:36:28some type of depressive disorder, I think that it was a combination of a few things. Number one was
01:36:35Lyme disease, which is like very much multiple times verified real Lyme disease, not like chronic
01:36:41fatigue, masquerading as Lyme disease from Long Island, which is, if you look at the CDC map, the
01:36:46Center for Disease Control, it is like... Bullseye.
01:36:49The is the bullseye outbreak, pun intended, because these sometimes get a rash that looks
01:36:55like a bullseye. But I think that a lot of psychiatric conditions are downstream of acute
01:37:02infections that then led to chronic neuroinflammation. That's taking us a little further afield from the
01:37:07point I was going to make, which is you can use these magnetic pulses in the case of something like
01:37:13accelerated TMS. And in my case, I realized that it was actually anxiety and rumination. So a combination,
01:37:18the DSM constantly changes in terms of how you would diagnose these things. Psychiatry is kind of where
01:37:23surgery was like 300 years ago, I would say, right? It's very early days. But if I do an FMRI, right,
01:37:30so you're getting this imaging of the brain, you identify targets for say, anxiety, like anxiosomatic
01:37:38target, you can inhibit or excite, depending on what you're trying to do, a target with these magnetic
01:37:44pulses, intermittent theta bursts is what it's called. And it just feels like
01:37:49a light tapping on your head. That's it. It's very tolerable. And in my case,
01:37:55you might do, for instance, in the latest round of what I've done,
01:38:00take something, it's a drug. So you take a neuroplasticity agent beforehand. And there are
01:38:05a lot of things that can increase neuroplasticity. But in this case, it's a somewhat antiquated, maybe
01:38:12antibiotic called d-cycloserine. So you stick it in your mouth, you let it dissolve for an hour before
01:38:18the stems, and then you're doing three minutes on the hour, or maybe even every half hour for 10 stems.
01:38:25And that's it. And I got three to four months of going from say, eight or nine out of like
01:38:32generalized anxiety and just OCD rumination to like a zero or a one.
01:38:37-Wow. -Different people. I mean,
01:38:39those are two different lived experiences.
01:38:41-Yeah. And then after three or four months, it starts to creep back in, and then you can go get,
01:38:46say, a booster of some type. And I know people with depression specifically, there's a lot more data
01:38:52on depression of different types who basically similarly got taken from like, I can't move. I'm at
01:38:59home. Some people are cutting and they go from like, again, this, I'm not a doctor. I'm not giving
01:39:04medical advice. And these are anecdotes, but there are also published studies that people can look into.
01:39:09There's a great scientist named Jonathan Downer, unfortunate name for someone working with someone
01:39:14in depression, but amazing scientist, D-O-W-N-A-R. People can look him up.
01:39:18I think he's at the University of Toronto. And you see durability in some people, including the son
01:39:26of a friend of mine, 18 months. So instead of three to four months, you get like 18 months.
01:39:33And so you start to wonder, it's like, all right, if we look at, let's just say SSRIs, which are
01:39:38miraculous for some people, but the general chemical imbalance theory of depression or anxiety is
01:39:48pretty much thoroughly debunked at this point, right? You're not depressed because you have low
01:39:53serotonin levels by and large. And when you take pharmaceuticals, I'm sure it's true as GLP-1s. I
01:40:00don't think there's a very rarely a biological free lunch, but let's put that aside. With
01:40:08psychiatric medications, typically you have off target effects, right? They're going to be side
01:40:11effects. They could be sexual dysfunction. They could be whatever their weight gain. There are a million
01:40:15different options. And often they stop working or people don't need them anymore. And then there's
01:40:22no plan for deprescribing and off ramping these people. So they just stay on forever, right?
01:40:26So the idea that you could use electricity is super, super, super interesting. And
01:40:34I think I'm hopeful that it will displace a lot of the blunt instrument approach to using over
01:40:45prescription. We'll see. I mean, it's going to take a lot of tech innovation, which in this case, AI,
01:40:52team AI is going to accelerate things a lot. I'm certainly already seeing it.
01:40:55At like a personal level, what's it like going from, did you say a nine to a one?
01:41:00Yeah, like an eight or nine to a one.
01:41:02What's that like? Is like a felt experience?
01:41:04Insomnia, gone. Right. Like instead of taking 30 to 60 minutes to fall asleep,
01:41:08like lay down five minutes later, I'm asleep without any sleep medication.
01:41:12I mean, that alone is, it's impossible to overstate the effect that has on your daily life every day.
01:41:20Right. Easier to get over just kind of the scrapes and bruises of life. Right. Little issues. You
01:41:28basically, for me, it was like, I find it very useful. Like if I'm using the toolkit of stoicism or
01:41:36mindfulness or whatever, like it's a fucking struggle, right? It's not native to my constitution.
01:41:43But after this, like, oh, wow, suddenly I can meditate for 20 minutes and I feel like I've been
01:41:47doing it for years as opposed to constantly like slapping my monkey mind on the wrist. Right. So
01:41:55really tremendous. And I, I, I, what we will see is that you can also use it. I, this is not that
01:42:04controversial, but for performance enhancement, right? Like you can, um, I believe you can affect
01:42:10like handedness trait hypnotize ability. Like you can, and it's not risk-free, but compared to a lot
01:42:17of the mechanic, the, the medications that you might get people for in these conditions,
01:42:21the risk profile is pretty good. It's interesting that you can have an intervention
01:42:25that makes other interventions more effective. So if you can do some sort of TMS thing and that makes
01:42:34your trait hypnotize ability more, that means that you've now opened up the world of hypnotism.
01:42:39Yeah, you're, you're exactly. So you're choosing the right domino to tip over first.
01:42:43Yeah.
01:42:44Right. And I mean, it's not the time to get into a porn habit then
01:42:49straight after this. God, God, damn it. I just locked this in a music whistler or tickler
01:42:54or whatever it's called. Yeah. Also a good podcast. Um, this podcast is sponsored by tickler.
01:43:04When I sit down for a good wank on Pornhub with my athletic brew,
01:43:08brewing company, do you want a man to come around in two minutes?
01:43:13Man on man, uh, life and times. Uh, it, a lot of, I mean, a lot of what I think about
01:43:23is just sequencing, right? Like there's a lot of stuff out there off the rack that works kind of,
01:43:28right? But if you figure out the right sequence, like you can suddenly, it's true language acquisition
01:43:34too. Like where most of the mistakes are made, I think is in the sequencing and you just fix the
01:43:38sequencing. You shuffle things a little bit, you put the right domino in front.
01:43:43And it makes a huge difference. So I can, and also this is true with it's like psychedelics
01:43:47in the sense that like Gould Dolan, who's at, you know, uh, UC Berkeley, she used to be at Hopkins,
01:43:53but her sort of framework of reopening critical windows with the use of psychedelics is very
01:44:00interesting. So, and underground facilitators have known this for a long time, but it's like the two
01:44:05or three weeks after a psychedelic, which in this case would include MDMA, although that's a longer
01:44:11conversation, you have the ability, and this could extend to say stroke patients who are trying to
01:44:17relearn motor control or speaking things that typically is limited to a very short, relatively
01:44:23short window as a child, right? You can basically reopen the malleability to develop those things
01:44:29using these drugs in the subsequent two to three weeks. So for instance, if you've just done
01:44:36a bunch of psychedelics, maybe a very bad time to suddenly do a bunch of overdosing on porn and,
01:44:43and sort of instilling habits that you would otherwise maybe come and go, but in this case,
01:44:49which could really stick like your play dough is, has been warmed up in the microwave. So you want
01:44:54to be careful about those two or three weeks afterwards. I think that could also apply to TMS.
01:44:58Well, I did a two-sided SGB at the start of this year, and the same thing is true for that. It's like,
01:45:04hey man, you've got a window here where your nervous system is unusually absorbent, so treat it with
01:45:12appropriate care. That was wild though, that SGB that I had. You should explain what that is maybe.
01:45:16A stellate ganglion block. So there is a bundle of nerves on both sides of your neck
01:45:23that are essentially running to the rest of your nervous system, and you can get an ultrasound guided
01:45:29anesthetic injection that goes into it. And it essentially shakes the etch-a-sketch of your nervous
01:45:35system. The way to think about it, it is a relatively hard reset, and you do one side and then you do another.
01:45:41You can't do them both together because it actually makes half of your face and half of your throat go to sleep.
01:45:46So if you were to do both, I think that you might die. You certainly wouldn't be able to swallow.
01:45:51You can't do much stuff. Sounds problematic.
01:45:53You end up with one side of your eye is sort of eyelids half closed, and speaking is a little bit
01:45:58difficult. Anyway, I did one side one day, one side on the other with Matt Cook at BioReset,
01:46:05who's kind of the number one in America for this. And it was fascinating. Really, really fascinating
01:46:10experience. Would you do it again?
01:46:11I would, yes. What were the benefits?
01:46:15It was an interesting slate clean of some nervous system buildup. So just agitations,
01:46:27the sort of ambient buzzing that you often have, rumination reduced. It was very interesting. But I
01:46:35think the thing that's always fascinating to me, because you've got a felt sense of how this thing impacted
01:46:40you. And because our felt sense is so subject to, did I sleep well? I'm in a good place with this
01:46:47person. Have I got the, you know, how's business going? What's happening in my life? But when you see
01:46:53it in data too, and because I track everything with WHOOP, it was a 30% increase in HRV.
01:46:59I was going to ask you about HRV, yeah.
01:47:01The 30% increase in HRV overnight. And that held for, I mean, what, three, four months now,
01:47:08after it started to tickle back down now. But that held for a long time. And resting heart rate also
01:47:13did the same, not quite as much, but it was basically a 30% change in HRV. And that stuck about for a
01:47:18while. And they do this. It's a one-stop shop for PTSD in soldiers. It's a really aggressive
01:47:26intervention for guys that are like super, super, super struggling. And it just, it just gives you a
01:47:32little bit more room to breathe. And I was, I was interested in it. And I trust Matt, the guy that
01:47:36did it. So I was like, okay. You mentioned before risks with the TMS type stuff. What, what are some of
01:47:43the risks generally very low? I mean, I would say that again, not a, not a PhD or doctor,
01:47:51don't play one on the internet. So do your homework, talk to your professionals. But
01:47:57my understanding is that I can give you my personal example, right? Occasionally in the case with my
01:48:05target, with my brain, after the treatment, you can have what's almost like a rebound exaggeration of
01:48:12symptoms for a short period of time, which is pretty unpleasant where you might have insomnia for a few
01:48:17days, which I did. I've had that twice. And you've done, you've done this twice.
01:48:20No, I've done it probably five or six times. And it's, it's not, it has not worked a hundred
01:48:25percent of the time, which is very frustrating as part of the reason why I'm supporting a nascent
01:48:31brain stimulation lab here at UT Austin. I'm getting involved with a couple of the companies because I want
01:48:37to like, I actually know these machines and I've talked to the technicians and I've talked to the
01:48:41scientists and I'm like, I can actually be very, I think helpful here. So I'm hoping to figure out
01:48:48how you can make that much more reliable. It's also just pure self-interest, right? I want to be able to
01:48:53use this. And I also want to figure out how to get durability out further, right? Instead of three
01:48:58to four months, it's like, look, if it's one day, every quarter, like, and it goes from a nine to a
01:49:02one fantastic, but if only it works once out of every four shots, then that sucks.
01:49:07Yeah. Uh, in, in, in a lot of respects. So some of the side effects, the insomnia that I mentioned,
01:49:13uh, in very, very rare cases, people will get a temporary tinnitus. They'll get like a ringing.
01:49:20Uh, these are, these are all pretty uncommon. Uh, and I should say that the
01:49:27using this for generalized anxiety disorder, OCD, et cetera, is very much tip of the spear stuff.
01:49:34So the sample size is not very large that with the depression, there's much more data
01:49:39and you can go on PubMed or elsewhere. Consensus app is another, uh, decent option option. If you want
01:49:44like an AI interface and look at the published papers, uh, they're right there for you. Um,
01:49:51if you are like smacking down your sympathetic nervous system, okay, this is the perfect place to
01:49:57talk about this on a pod, large podcast. Um, after my first effective TMS treatment,
01:50:04the first one that worked, I could not ejaculate for like two weeks and I
01:50:08fucking lost it. You can imagine. I'm just like, I'm like, is this a good news, bad news situation?
01:50:14Like good news. You're not as anxious. Bad news. You're never going to ejaculate again. I was like,
01:50:18what the fuck? And the doctor was like, yeah, we've never seen that before. I was like, oh,
01:50:20fantastic. Uh, but eventually mechanistically, he was like, it could be a dosing problem where we're
01:50:27basically, we dialed down the volume on your sympathetic nervous system too much.
01:50:31Because it's parasympathetic to get erect sympathetic to come.
01:50:34Yeah. They say point and shoot parasympathetic. Yep. Sympathetic.
01:50:37Damn. Yeah. And I was like, okay, well, maybe we try a lower dose, which I think is part of the
01:50:42reason why it didn't work for me, because I try, I was like, Hey, if that was at the time,
01:50:47that was five days. And I was like, I really didn't enjoy those two weeks. So let's try.
01:50:52How much are you trying to count? Let's try two days. I'm a big fan of ejaculate.
01:50:56Uh, you know. Sounds like we found the tag. Yeah. Yeah. You need to get on Whistler.
01:51:03So I need to get on Tickler. Tickler. Sniffies.
01:51:06Uh, yeah. Uh, my podcast is accepting sponsors, Tickler. Uh, so then I tried two days, nothing.
01:51:13Right. Then I tried three days, uh, a few months later, nothing. Right. And then, uh,
01:51:19eventually got back to five days, still nothing, but then went back to adding the,
01:51:24the decyclopedia in this plasticity agent beforehand, one day, boom. And I was like, okay,
01:51:30now that is when I became much more, it's called the one, it's just called one day protocol.
01:51:35And, uh, Jonathan downer, who I mentioned is one of the, if not the sort of innovator
01:51:39in the space behind that, along with, um, Don Vaughn and some other people. But
01:51:47that one day when that worked, I was like, now this is interesting because currently
01:51:52the insurers are slowly coming around, but all this stuff, a lot of innovation starts with people
01:51:58with money spending way too much money. Right. Right. That's just the way it is. Right. That's
01:52:02true with electric cars. It's true with Uber. It's true with a million different, the early
01:52:08generation iPhones. Right. Didn't even have a copy and paste. Are you fucking kidding me? Right.
01:52:12Uh, these early adopters who have money and they're willing to spend it like the accelerated TMS protocol,
01:52:17some of the early rounds that I did, it's like all in 30 grand out of pocket. I mean, it's expensive.
01:52:24And when it got down to one day, I was like, okay, now it's about reducing sort of unit cost and
01:52:32increasing throughput with these devices because putting aside the out of pocket cost. A lot of
01:52:39people, they cannot take five days off of work. Yep. Do this. Yep. But once you get it to one
01:52:45day now, I'm like, okay, that just went from a very small sort of addressable patient population,
01:52:51a much larger, still too expensive, but let's try to work on getting it down. And that's just TMS,
01:52:57right. You have other things like focused ultrasound that might be interesting for
01:53:03different types of addiction, for instance, where you could actually get enough penetration
01:53:07that you would hit, you could hit the nucleus accumbens and other anatomical structures associated
01:53:11with chemical dependence. And it's like, okay, this is very, very, very interesting.
01:53:16Who's the best company in America for this at the moment?
01:53:18I mean, there are a couple of really good ones. The two older ones that have the most kind of time
01:53:27on the market are Brainsway, which is out of Israel, very good machines. It's a publicly traded
01:53:36company. Full disclosure, I invested in them when they were a public traded company. Magventure has a
01:53:42device as well, which I've used. And then the company that I'm involved with is called Ampa. And they,
01:53:48that is the smallest form factor and the people behind it develop the one day protocol. And
01:53:56I think they're sort of, the trainability of that device, instead of taking weeks, or certainly,
01:54:03instead of taking weeks, let's just say to train a technician properly, you can do it in a few hours.
01:54:08And it's something that fits in the trunk of a car, like a Corolla, as opposed to being the size
01:54:12of a refrigerator. And I think they're really, otherwise it wouldn't be involved, very well
01:54:19positioned to finally scale this treatment to millions of people instead of a hand, like a few
01:54:24thousand. So those, like all three of those are on the market. And the lowest cost would certainly be
01:54:33Ampa, but all these devices, Ampa health. Um, and we'll see, we'll see. I mean, I am, I'll be,
01:54:47I mean, not just because I'm involved, because it took me a long time. I did a
01:54:51fuck ton of due diligence. Um, I don't think a lot of folks don't realize like how much due diligence
01:54:56I do before I put something in my newsletter or whatever. It's like, I guess this is OCD,
01:55:02like harnessed when I am in full throttle.
01:55:04Being used very well. Being friends with you is, is highly useful in situations like this.
01:55:08In the same way, I went to go and get LASIK in the UK, uh, Ali Abdaal, productivity dude,
01:55:14British guy, um, ex is a doctor, right? Was an MD or the equivalent of an MD, GP in the, in the UK.
01:55:21And, um, I knew that he'd got LASIK and I was like, no, one's done more research
01:55:26about who's the best, uh, obstetrician operator in, in all of the UK messaged Ali. And he's like,
01:55:34yeah, I spent three weeks, uh, speaking to all of my friends and doing all of the reviews and looking
01:55:39at the, the particular, the particular machines. I was like, okay, who was that? And he introduced
01:55:43me and it's funny. I mean, this is good. I just get to speed run all of the work that you did.
01:55:47Canary down the mind. I'm the end of the guy in the human centipede, but I'm benefiting.
01:55:52Yeah. You want to be first in the line. I'm at the end, but it gets better
01:55:56progressively as it goes through. Yeah. That's cool, man. I'm glad that it's,
01:56:00I'm glad that it's helped. It's exciting. It's, it's, it is exciting. I mean, and
01:56:04I mean, I think it's, I think it's saying something when, you know, as somebody who's been so active
01:56:09and funding the science related to psychedelics and psychedelic assisted therapy since 2015,
01:56:16that in the last three years, I've done almost, almost no psychedelics. It's been purely focused
01:56:22on the neuromodulation. I think it's that important. Uh, we'll see because a lot for a lot of people
01:56:29like psychedelics are nuclear power for the psyche. Like you just, they are not suitable for all people.
01:56:36Yeah. There are plenty of people I would carve out for exclusion from.
01:56:40Many times you end up with a Chernobyl or a Fukushima.
01:56:43Yeah. Yeah. It's just, it's, it's a lot squirrelier. It is, um, you need to be really
01:56:49careful with that stuff. And it has. As opposed to just not being able to come.
01:56:51It has its place. Yeah.
01:56:53Good. Can I zoom in more on this? Yeah.
01:56:56What was that like at the end of the few weeks?
01:56:59You know, you said, you know, you said you went from a nine to a one. Did you hit a minus seven?
01:57:03No, no, I didn't. I mean, I was, I was, I was, I was pretty, I was pretty.
01:57:08Fukushima.
01:57:09Yeah. I was, I was, uh, understandably concerned.
01:57:15Mm-hmm. Had you have known that it was going to end after two weeks,
01:57:18presumably you would have just been, the fear was this is going to be forever.
01:57:21Yeah, yeah, yeah. Right.
01:57:22Yeah. So now that you couldn't feel the anxiety, but, but, but interesting,
01:57:27interestingly for, for like the, every time it has worked for me, I've had that side effect,
01:57:32but now I know that there's an end point. So I don't freak out and it's fine.
01:57:36Yeah. You just know that you're going to get a couple of really good weeks while
01:57:39you're kind of like a stallion, but babe, I can just, you know, don't worry about me.
01:57:46How do you, um, I had a question for you, you know, on, on the other side of the spectrum,
01:57:49have you seen these devices that stimulate your vagus nerve or whatever?
01:57:52Yeah. I know. I know a lot. Yeah. What are your thoughts on those?
01:57:55Like most of them are bunk. Are they?
01:57:57Yeah. Uh, there, there's a scientist. You might want to have him on at some point.
01:58:01He's incredible. Uh, named Kevin, uh, Tracy. He is the most credible. He wrote a book called
01:58:06the great nerve. He's the most credible publicly, not really, uh, educating scientist, credible,
01:58:18very highly published, uh, scientist who talks about this. Uh, most of the non-invasive vagus nerve
01:58:27stimulators or that are purported to be vagus nerve stimulators don't, don't actually hit it the right
01:58:32way. Um, and they're, there, there's neck based, right. And then there's ear based, uh, the neck
01:58:40TBD, but, uh, there are, they've been cleared FDA cleared for, I think it's either migraines or cluster
01:58:47headaches. Yeah. Some people seem to benefit. I had a friend who tripled his HRV using a neck based
01:58:53device. I think it was either true Vega or it was the prescription equivalent of true Vega and it worked
01:59:00really well for him. Same. This can be proof with you. I've never, I've never used them. I had a
01:59:04friend I was talking to. I suffer from migraines and, um, so I have to carry around medication all the
01:59:10time. And, um, somebody told me about these things and they were like, okay, it has all these benefits
01:59:14of like HRV, you know, increase of HRV, all sorts of stuff. It's a temporary state, if you will, but
01:59:20ultimately. You should use it daily. It's like a few minutes in the morning, a few minutes. Yeah. It's kind of
01:59:25reset the nervous system. That's kind of the marketing terminology that they've been utilizing.
01:59:29Yeah. I mean, really it's what it's doing is it's stimulating the vagus nerve, which is really like
01:59:36two transatlantic cables on either side. It's like a hundred, roughly a hundred thousand fibers on
01:59:41either side. And then it innervates everything just about organs, GI tract, et cetera. And when you
01:59:51stimulate it, you can, um, I guess the right way to put it, activate isn't quite right, but something
02:00:00called the inflammatory reflex. And so it can be applied to things like rheumatoid arthritis,
02:00:06different autoimmune disorders can be applied to something like asthma attacks. Um, it's very,
02:00:12very, very interesting. Um, so it could be worth looking into for you, right? The, the neck-based
02:00:19devices tend to also activate the superficial muscles of the face. So it pulls your face down. It's
02:00:24depends how high you turn it up. Yeah. It depends on how high you turn it up, but it can be
02:00:28a little uncomfortable. The ear-based devices,
02:00:30you say you've used, no, I, somebody recommended me the ear-based device.
02:00:34Most of the ear-based devices are not actually in the right place.
02:00:37Got it.
02:00:38It needs to be very, very, very precise. Um, there's, it's called the Simba Concha.
02:00:43It's going to be hard to see, but it's right here, kind of where this fold is. It's at the bottom of
02:00:47that inside, like right there. Most of the devices being sold on the market, including devices that
02:00:53have lots of fancy names and lots of fancy institutions on the website, they're not in the right place.
02:00:58There's a fucking shit ton of money behind some of those companies.
02:01:00Yeah. Very few fibers make it to the ear. Got it. Um, I've got a couple of things. I had a few
02:01:08things sent to me. I had one that's a handheld device with the two prong, and you can kind of just
02:01:13stick it on like you want to just tase yourself. Yeah. Like that. And then, uh, there's a pair of
02:01:19headphones that have a lug that comes down and sits here. And, um, obviously that one's way,
02:01:26way more convenient, but there's some weird stuff with that. You've got to lubricate the end of the
02:01:31adapter because it needs to be able to have quite a smooth surface to be able to. So you have to
02:01:35change the, again, whistler, uh, you have to change the little heads out on this thing and put that in.
02:01:41I didn't do it consistently enough to be able to say whether or not it was effective.
02:01:45Yeah. I think, I think for, for migraines, it's worth looking into.
02:01:48What's your, uh, uh, migraine manifestation? Do you have aura with it?
02:01:53Oh my God. Yeah.
02:01:54Which one?
02:01:55Um, what do you mean? Which one?
02:01:57Olfactory? Visual?
02:01:58It's visual.
02:01:59Visual.
02:01:59And it'll come on and I can, I, I've had these since I was five years old and people were like,
02:02:04what the fuck is going on? I, I didn't even know. And yeah, you get these auras. It's like almost as,
02:02:09um, you're on like an acid trip and everybody, everything just looks blurry, but moving in, in a weird way.
02:02:16And then, and then after a while, if you don't take medication during that period,
02:02:20um, then it kicks in, then it kicks in.
02:02:22What do you, what do you take? No tech?
02:02:24Uh, sumatriptin.
02:02:25Has one just kicked in?
02:02:26Yep.
02:02:27Oh, fuck.
02:02:28I'm so sorry.
02:02:28It's no, no, it's all good. It's, I don't even know. I think I, I typically track it with,
02:02:32um, it's either lighting, um, it's environmental, like weather changes, weirdly enough,
02:02:38or the last element of it is either I have caffeine or, uh, wine without any food.
02:02:45Right.
02:02:46And it's, it's really fascinating is, you know, they, they ask you to keep a diary
02:02:49of your day and to figure out retro, uh, retroactively what caused it.
02:02:54Yep.
02:02:54There's no other mechanic and it's so people don't know why people don't know for what reason people,
02:03:00some people think it's autoimmune, some people think it's not.
02:03:03And it's a fascinating, um, so I have to carry medication all the time.
02:03:07Yep.
02:03:07And I always recommended this.
02:03:08Yeah.
02:03:08So the, the prescription version of Truvega spelled T R U V A G A is called Gamma core.
02:03:15Got it.
02:03:15G A M M A C R E is FDA cleared in the U S for both acute treatment of migraine pain in adults
02:03:21and prevention of migraine episodic and chronic, uh, few practical points.
02:03:25Real, the effect evidence is real, but modest compared to top tier migraine medications like
02:03:30CGRP inhibitors, uh, appears to work best for.
02:03:33People who treat attacks early migraine with aura patients who want to reduce medication use.
02:03:40Those who can't tolerate triptans and CGRPs.
02:03:43Right.
02:03:43Speaking of those devices, by the way, have you guys seen, there's some companies that are
02:03:47being, um, now that they're sort of reinvention of input into computers.
02:03:52So for example, less keyboards, more voice, more like natural types of interactions with,
02:03:58with technology and devices in general, um, there are these devices that are coming out.
02:04:02One of my friends demoed this to me.
02:04:04I think Apple just acquired a company where you just put sort of a, a small device that listens
02:04:09in this sort of region and, um, without you actually saying anything, it can detect,
02:04:15um, you know, as if you were talking, and roughly it's, it's remarkable.
02:04:22And, and, um, you can imagine a lot of scenarios with this as, as, as technology and the input
02:04:28layers become much more natural, much more, um, conversational.
02:04:32Um, and you know, you don't have these affordances to speak all the time where
02:04:36imagine that device can effectively read what you want to say without you ever having to say it.
02:04:41Yeah.
02:04:42Um, and it lives roughly in this region.
02:04:44Can you tackle any idea why it's sat there to detect?
02:04:49Is it as if you're moving your mouth, but not talking?
02:04:51I'm not sure.
02:04:52Let me, let me, let me just sidebar real quick.
02:04:54Yeah.
02:04:55Um, just because I want to make a safety point.
02:04:58We're talking about the relative safety profile of brain stimulation or neuromodulation with
02:05:04these devices, that does not mean anyone should DIY this stuff.
02:05:08You can the brain, the brain, the brain is incredibly sensitive.
02:05:12If you hit the wrong target, you can fuck yourself up or make your symptoms a lot worse.
02:05:18So do not DIY this.
02:05:20Go to a decent clinic for people who want to explore it.
02:05:23I have no stake in any of these.
02:05:26Acacia clinic in Sunnyvale in California salience, which I think is in Dallas.
02:05:30They may have other locations, uh, Owen Muir, M U I R, who's in New York.
02:05:37There are a couple of clinics that I know have very good reputations,
02:05:40but like work with somebody who knows these devices.
02:05:42No, no, no nine volt battery in a, uh, one of those pads that people use for
02:05:46their, to get to give them an absolute.
02:05:48I was about to go home with a Duracell battery.
02:05:52There's also, it's not, I don't think indicated for migraines.
02:05:55It's pretty, I'm pretty sure it's specific to RA, to rheumatoid arthritis,
02:05:59but set point medical has an implant about the size of a small omega-3 that they,
02:06:05it's like an outpatient procedure in the neck.
02:06:08And then it just stimulates like twice a day, the vagus nerve.
02:06:11No way.
02:06:12Yeah, that was on the front front.
02:06:14It was on the front cover of the New York times.
02:06:17The day that I interviewed Kevin Tracy, who was involved
02:06:19with the development of that device.
02:06:21Yeah.
02:06:22Wow.
02:06:23And so they implant it directly into your neck.
02:06:24Yeah.
02:06:25How'd you recharge it?
02:06:26Induction?
02:06:26Uh, I'm not sure.
02:06:27Exactly.
02:06:28Yeah.
02:06:29I mean, it does get, it does get, it's magnetic charging on your neck, could you imagine?
02:06:36On the device that kind of reads your thoughts.
02:06:39One thing you, you, um, discover as you get more into meditation is just how sometimes your
02:06:44thoughts aren't even you.
02:06:46Like the ultimate example, even if you've not experienced any form of meditation would be
02:06:49like a song that's stuck in your head.
02:06:51Yeah.
02:06:51I wonder how the device would differ between a song that's stuck in your head and something
02:06:56that you actually want it to do.
02:06:58Cause I remember the great meditation technique.
02:07:01I'm just imagining my ruminating, giving a microphone.
02:07:04Yeah.
02:07:04Batch into my ear.
02:07:06It's just like the distinction being that there's sort of this concept of mind reading
02:07:11and or expression of a thought.
02:07:13And the expression of a thought is typically, you know, when you, when you're starting to speak,
02:07:17it roughly, you would have to, it's not purely like a thought reader.
02:07:22In some sense, you would have to have an intent associated with it to going back to your previous
02:07:27point on devices though.
02:07:29My thesis is that the device that you'll probably wear when you interact with AI or whatever,
02:07:33if you want to, has not been invented yet.
02:07:36And it will have this combination of.
02:07:41Input output that is much more, um, less visible.
02:07:46Mm-hmm.
02:07:46Didn't, didn't open AI claim that they were going to have a three products or something?
02:07:50And obviously they've got Johnny Ive and the guy that made the, the iPhone,
02:07:53the original iPhone.
02:07:54And then they bought his company, which was called.
02:07:57IO.
02:07:58Yeah.
02:07:58IO.
02:07:59And then there was this very cool, sexy video of him and Sam in a totally not fake bar somewhere.
02:08:04Right.
02:08:05Having a conversation.
02:08:07Uh, I think it'd be the AirPods.
02:08:09Yeah, they're, they're actually building a phone apparently.
02:08:11Okay.
02:08:12Um, they said three different things.
02:08:13And one of them is something that no one's ever seen before.
02:08:15Yeah.
02:08:16Which makes maybe a lapel thing and a little button or something like that.
02:08:21The airport case makes the most amount of sense because we were already using them.
02:08:25People wear them 24/7.
02:08:26The AirPods, uh, what's that stat around?
02:08:28If the airport was a startup, it'd be like one of the most.
02:08:31Eighth in the world.
02:08:32Oh, really?
02:08:33That's why.
02:08:33I'm just, just that alone.
02:08:35And half that's me contributing to, um, should we talk about that?
02:08:39Yeah, I've, um.
02:08:39We've never spoken about this.
02:08:40I've, uh, let's see if I can pull it up.
02:08:42Going back to your three devices thing, I think there's probably one device that is
02:08:49an affordance that's kind of listening and or.
02:08:51You passed me your, wait, you were a raw dog that took a deer leg.
02:08:55Let's get rid of this free advertising.
02:08:57There's this sort of one device that probably listens to input in some mechanic or, or, or tries
02:09:03to process what you want in possibly a new way that could be like a device that's kind
02:09:08of have a microphone or whatnot.
02:09:09There's another device where it's like a her type situation where he's wearing that earpiece
02:09:13and it's constantly speaking to it.
02:09:15And then maybe that third device is kind of this glanceable world, right?
02:09:19Where you have this phone, um, turns out now, you know, applications are becoming less like
02:09:26people are using ChatGPT or Claude for everything, right?
02:09:28Like you go, I want to set a timer.
02:09:30You can do that in ChatGPT.
02:09:31You don't necessarily need a dedicated app.
02:09:33Maybe you want one or whatnot, but the idea of the app ecosystem being less valuable than
02:09:39it was before giving Elon's big on this, right?
02:09:42He thinks that all apps are going to go away and your phone is just going to create whatever
02:09:46you need, whenever you need it.
02:09:47Roughly.
02:09:48Exactly.
02:09:49And, and I think generally, um, today it's possible to build that type of device without
02:09:56having this ecosystem effect that was necessary in the past.
02:09:59I wonder if that would open up, uh, a hole in the market, because at the moment,
02:10:03the dominance has been Apple pretty tough, despite the fact that Apple have kind of
02:10:07shit the bed a lot, you know, the phones have really started to peter out in terms of the
02:10:13progress, at least from what I noticed as a user, like, yeah, I can zoom in 15 X.
02:10:18I can zoom in 20 X.
02:10:19And at some point it's like, it's a slab of glass and a combination of things.
02:10:23Like what do you do?
02:10:24It's a bit, the screen's brighter or sharper or something, but it's less noticeable.
02:10:29You remember when it was what?
02:10:31The iPhone five to the iPhone 12.
02:10:33And each time it was a noticeable leap forward, almost the same.
02:10:37That's been happening with the AI models.
02:10:39You know, that it seems to have started to at least in terms of noticeable total user experience.
02:10:44For me, it seems.
02:10:45I think iOS gets worse every time I upgrade.
02:10:48The keyboard at the moment just fucking sucks.
02:10:51It's so bad.
02:10:52What I'm.
02:10:52But my, but they do have an incredible war chest.
02:10:57So.
02:10:59What do you think?
02:10:59I don't know.
02:10:59Against a guy with a massive pile of money.
02:11:02Well, I'm just, what they can do is they can buy companies.
02:11:05So I'm wondering, I don't know.
02:11:07Do you have any thoughts on who they should buy?
02:11:09You know, there's, there's a group of people that think that Apple's like the smartest
02:11:14company because they've let the world sort of play itself out.
02:11:17People spending a lot of money and they're just waiting to see where it hits.
02:11:22And then effectively, um, do what they do best, which is never enter the market first.
02:11:28Yeah.
02:11:28But be the best.
02:11:29Yeah.
02:11:29Yeah.
02:11:29It's exactly what happened to cell phones or smartphones.
02:11:33Exactly what happened to kind of AirPods.
02:11:35There's all these some, some wireless do with the iPod to iPod too.
02:11:38Um, yeah.
02:11:39The iPod was the first element of it.
02:11:41Even the computer in some sense.
02:11:42Um, plenty of MP3.
02:11:44And so it's like, they've saved all of this cost for CapEx.
02:11:47Um, never spent anything like.
02:11:49Go forth and split test these products for us.
02:11:51My minions.
02:11:52Yeah, exactly.
02:11:53It's a ton of other companies.
02:11:54They effectively let others do the R and D work to a certain extent and then refine that
02:11:59world potentially.
02:12:00And you know, there's an argument to be made that that is a.
02:12:04You don't need to be first.
02:12:05You just need to be.
02:12:05Right.
02:12:06So you also make what?
02:12:0720 billion per year from Google.
02:12:10For free.
02:12:11Google search for free.
02:12:12So Google keeps going up and up and up.
02:12:14So yeah, they're not gonna.
02:12:17Dabble with touching that.
02:12:20What we haven't discussed is how much revenue you contribute to Apple on an annual basis.
02:12:25I think I'm on my, um, 17th AirPods.
02:12:31Um, a lot.
02:12:32Because they're, because they're a slippery bar of soap.
02:12:35Yeah.
02:12:35Yeah.
02:12:35No, no, it's more.
02:12:36I've had a few stolen.
02:12:38I've, I don't like having things on me as well.
02:12:40So I'll just like leave things to like the amount of times I've left them at Dean's.
02:12:44But one of.
02:12:44Just a gift to the universe over and over again.
02:12:47The most frustrating thing is, Tim, is you can see where they all are.
02:12:51So there's one in particular right now that's in Cameroon.
02:12:56And I can see where his house is, right?
02:12:58So no, no, no, I still.
02:12:59No, because I'm a sad little man that I'm not willing to, I'm not willing to
02:13:03fly into Cameroon to confront the man, but I am willing to press the play sound button.
02:13:07Do it at night while they're sleeping?
02:13:11Yeah.
02:13:11Oh my God.
02:13:12Isn't there, isn't there a single air pod that's in the, uh, uh, like WHO building?
02:13:16Yeah.
02:13:17That was, that was, uh, Katty's AirPods that were in the WHO building.
02:13:20Yeah.
02:13:20Just one air pod was in the single air pod that he was playing this sound through in
02:13:23the WHO building in New York city.
02:13:25There you go.
02:13:26It's just there right now.
02:13:27Oh, he's in Ghana.
02:13:28He's in Ghana.
02:13:28Oh, there we go.
02:13:30Eight minutes ago.
02:13:31Have you guys ever, uh, that's incredible, but what, what a great, I mean,
02:13:36I never leave my house without my AirPods.
02:13:38This is why I think it's such a power user.
02:13:41It's ridiculous.
02:13:41Such a power user.
02:13:42I keep sounding like a broken record here, but I assume the device is a little,
02:13:45little pod thing that we have now headphones in cameras in, but then it's almost,
02:13:49you could have a, like a holographic screen.
02:13:51So people aren't on these glass screens as much, and you can make it big, make it small.
02:13:55That feels inevitable.
02:13:57I mean, there's rumor that the next AirPods, like you said, do have visual the cameras.
02:14:03And that's, that's crazy.
02:14:04If you think about it, you're walking around and there's sort of two spatially aware cameras
02:14:08around you.
02:14:08Well, it's kind of like, uh, what was it?
02:14:11Dark Knight Returns or Dark Knight Rises when they had the cell phones.
02:14:14Oh yeah.
02:14:14They mapped the entire, yeah.
02:14:16I mean, what do you think Apple's going to do with that data?
02:14:19I don't understand how they're going to do the whole Neuralink thing that you mentioned of,
02:14:23they will read your thoughts because of the fact that some thoughts I have,
02:14:28I didn't want to have.
02:14:28It wasn't me.
02:14:29But there's this meditation technique I once sat in, which is, it's a real cool one.
02:14:33So it sounds like you're pretty serious in meditating?
02:14:35Yes.
02:14:35Yeah.
02:14:35Well, um, it was originally to fight off a skin condition and then it ended up fixing-
02:14:39Fixed that with AI.
02:14:40Yeah.
02:14:41A Gemini fixed that.
02:14:42So the story there was-
02:14:43Gemini fixed your syphilis.
02:14:44The syphilis, yeah, the, that's, uh, can't be fixed.
02:14:47AGI is here, man.
02:14:49Sniffer gave me the syphilis.
02:14:50Yeah.
02:14:50No, um, the,
02:14:53I had a, I had subatomic dermatitis for about two years.
02:14:56Okay.
02:14:57Subatomic?
02:14:58Sub-oric dermatitis.
02:14:59Okay.
02:15:00I was like, wait, what?
02:15:00My face, my face would break out like red and I wouldn't want to go outside the house.
02:15:04So I spoke to a few different doctors.
02:15:05A lot of them recommended topical steroid creams.
02:15:09A lot of them said it was because of stress.
02:15:10So I got deep into meditation.
02:15:11I stopped eating like, so, such little sugar that I once flagged, I once got diagnosed with
02:15:16type 1 diabetes, um, which was a complete false diagnosis.
02:15:20Yeah, type 1 is pretty hard.
02:15:22Which is another side story.
02:15:23Yeah.
02:15:23That's genetic.
02:15:24But I won.
02:15:24Then when I was away, no, I tracked my skin for years and nothing would work.
02:15:29Nothing would work.
02:15:30So when I was away on holiday, I just uploaded the file to Gemini and it just.
02:15:34The file.
02:15:35You mean a photo?
02:15:36Yeah.
02:15:36No, all the photos that I have.
02:15:38And it just said, oh, just put Nisrol shampoo on your face.
02:15:41Oh, wow.
02:15:41And it's never, it's never had an issue ever since.
02:15:43So it was fungal?
02:15:44Yes.
02:15:44So the biggest, the biggest recommendation I would give.
02:15:46Nisrol is ketoconazole for people who are wondering.
02:15:48Yeah.
02:15:49This is for dandruff.
02:15:49And I do it once.
02:15:50Say again?
02:15:51This is for dandruff.
02:15:52It's also very effective for topical fungal infections.
02:15:56I did it once every two weeks now and it's completely.
02:15:58Fucking crazy.
02:15:59It's completely gone.
02:16:00So any recommendation at home, like a practical thing would be just upload a photo of yourself
02:16:05to Gemini or ChatGPT and just say, hey, based off what you can see with my skin,
02:16:09recommend me moisturizers, recommend me everything, and it will be better than anything we've done before.
02:16:14What do you use Gemini for versus other models?
02:16:17I, I'm, I'm a, an LLM whore, Tim.
02:16:20Yeah.
02:16:20Like I, I'm shifting.
02:16:22He's like the Andrew Huberman of LLMs.
02:16:25Yeah.
02:16:25I'm shifting each tag.
02:16:26Oh, but to, sorry, I didn't finish the story.
02:16:28So the meditation point there, there's a great question, um, which I ended up learning was
02:16:34asking your mind what thoughts going to come up next.
02:16:37And it's like your mind gets a bit, it's almost this Mexican standoff.
02:16:41And the problem with these devices, I once asked myself that and my mind went quiet for six seconds.
02:16:46And then for whatever reason, there's this former Bayern Munich winger called Iron Robin.
02:16:49And it's just him checking in on the left foot in my head.
02:16:53And it's like, that was that me?
02:16:55Why is that there?
02:16:56So if I have a Neuralink device, it's an interesting one of how does it know what
02:17:00was me versus what's just my monkey mind doing strange behaviors?
02:17:04You know, um, I can't wait to see the first failed demos of, you know what I mean?
02:17:11Like these epic software demo fails.
02:17:13And someone gets up and it's just like twat, twat, twat, twat, twat.
02:17:16It's like, no, no, sorry, sorry.
02:17:17Penis, penis, penis.
02:17:18Especially given that the likelihood of it being Elon to do the first presentation is quite high.
02:17:22A man with a mind that I don't think anybody wants to see broadcast out into public.
02:17:26Did you see that demo of the, uh, cyber truck where he was on stage?
02:17:30Smash the window.
02:17:30And he smashed the window and he was like, wait, that's not supposed to happen.
02:17:33Yeah.
02:17:34Um, the best film I've watched all year.
02:17:36It's a British film.
02:17:37It's probably one of the best like storytelling examples I've ever heard.
02:17:41So people will know it from the Brits award.
02:17:42It was this horrific incident where Michael B. Jordan went on stage and somebody shouted the
02:17:46N word out and it was this huge controversial incident.
02:17:50But what actually happened was it was a guy who has one of the most severe form of Tourette's.
02:17:55Tourette's.
02:17:56And he was, he was the subject of a film.
02:17:57He was subject of a film.
02:17:58So he was at the BAFTA.
02:17:59So the film is called, I swear.
02:18:01And it's incredible because this guy grew up in Scotland, which is like, think about all
02:18:07the stereotypes you have about England.
02:18:09Like the further north you get, the more like harsher it essentially is.
02:18:13Yeah.
02:18:13It's why people from Aberdeen are some of the most like brutal people on the planet.
02:18:17So this man grew up with extreme Tourette's in the seventies, eighties England, when nobody
02:18:23knew what the condition was.
02:18:24So the film's amazing because it's just him like walking to the shops going fat.
02:18:30And he's just getting the shit beaten out of him and he can't explain what it is.
02:18:33So he's constantly getting into fights.
02:18:35There's a scene where he's walking his dog and this is real.
02:18:38So he's walking his dog, um, across the, um, about to go across a busy road and he loves
02:18:43this dog, but there's a car coming and he goes, walk forwards now.
02:18:47And then he has to grab the dog.
02:18:48Oh, he's Tourette's fighting against himself.
02:18:50Yeah.
02:18:51He's fighting against himself.
02:18:52It's so good.
02:18:54It's such a good film.
02:18:55Oh, where can you see it?
02:18:56Um, I, if you just search, I swear.
02:19:00Fuck you.
02:19:01Fuck you.
02:19:03I missed it.
02:19:04Fuck you.
02:19:04From living with Chris, the man's a bit of a boomer and I'll often like give him a
02:19:07recommendation and I'll go, he'll go, where can I see it?
02:19:10And if it's not on Netflix, he can't get it.
02:19:11No, no, no, no, that's not fair.
02:19:15That's not, that's not fair.
02:19:16And that's not true.
02:19:17Come on.
02:19:17But my response is, what can I watch it on?
02:19:20Huh?
02:19:20And I'll just say, Google it.
02:19:21Right.
02:19:22But that's a fair, I feel like this is a little bit like,
02:19:26here's a fantastic new restaurant.
02:19:27Okay.
02:19:27What street's it on.
02:19:28I just want a little bit more information.
02:19:30And the fact that you want me knowing what you know,
02:19:32which is that you might understand what streaming service it's on.
02:19:35Yeah.
02:19:35Saying to me that I have to go and Google it when you could just say it's on Netflix.
02:19:39Yeah.
02:19:40And me and Tim, this side of the table, we just expect a little bit more decorum.
02:19:44This is, you know what I mean?
02:19:45This is why I, this is why I want AGI to come.
02:19:47Because it gives me.
02:19:48I'm so glad you brought this up, Chris.
02:19:50All right.
02:19:51All right.
02:19:51All right.
02:19:51All right.
02:19:51Going back to the photo thing.
02:19:53Do you guys know what people are utilizing chat UBT and whatnot for,
02:19:57when they upload photos of themselves?
02:19:59Looks maxing.
02:20:00Oh, that's interesting.
02:20:02Do you know coves?
02:20:02What are they?
02:20:03What?
02:20:04So they upload a set of photos.
02:20:05There's these apps on the app store too now that kind of do a rapper experience.
02:20:08But the idea is that effectively, you know, you upload photos to, to Gemini or chat UBT and
02:20:14then it suggests things that you might want to do, whether it's your cheekbones with this type
02:20:18of medical procedure, you know, jaw surgery, um, having a symmetric face,
02:20:23even things like hairstyle make a huge difference or a beard or whatever.
02:20:27Skip that section.
02:20:29And roughly, it's, it's really interesting that people are doing this because, um,
02:20:33obviously there's this huge craze of looks, maxing and whatnot.
02:20:37And, um, turns out huge use case for AI.
02:20:40Dude, check out coves.
02:20:41I've just sent this to you, Jared.
02:20:42Um, co, Q O V.
02:20:44Yeah.
02:20:45So look at this.
02:20:46So this is glow up without surgery.
02:20:47Get your personalized facial analysis and transformation plan.
02:20:50Based on 2,000 academic studies.
02:20:51So I know the science team behind it.
02:20:53The science team behind this are absolutely sick.
02:20:56So look at the guy on the right.
02:20:56And then like, you should be able to do a transition.
02:20:59You see how you can get the middle of the guy's face.
02:21:01You should be able to click on it.
02:21:02And yeah, exactly.
02:21:03So move it all the way to the right.
02:21:04He was worried about me and intent.
02:21:06Look at this.
02:21:06And then go to the left.
02:21:08Wow.
02:21:09Got it.
02:21:09So it's like drive by shooting suspect to soap opera star.
02:21:14Exactly.
02:21:15Yeah.
02:21:15Get more career opportunities.
02:21:16Boost your self-confidence.
02:21:17Make a stronger first impression.
02:21:18Improve your dating life.
02:21:19Enhance your quality of life.
02:21:20So basically it's.
02:21:22Go, go.
02:21:22Let me see the one on the left again.
02:21:24Go to the, you just swing it.
02:21:26She's really attractive.
02:21:27Yeah.
02:21:27I feel like that's one of those like Sandra Bullock.
02:21:29Oh, she takes off the glasses and walks out.
02:21:31And she goes.
02:21:32Yeah.
02:21:32You're like, wait.
02:21:33She just put her hair up.
02:21:34That's all she did.
02:21:35Ah, she's shaped her face a bit.
02:21:36Do it again, Jared.
02:21:38Show me.
02:21:38Not that quick.
02:21:39Slow it down.
02:21:39Go really slow.
02:21:40Fucking hell.
02:21:41Uh, what's happened?
02:21:42Really, really slow to that.
02:21:42Slow, slow, slow.
02:21:43You know, this is just IRL Facetune, right?
02:21:46Um.
02:21:46Yeah.
02:21:46Yeah.
02:21:47So if you, there's like Facetune has all of the.
02:21:49Facetune.
02:21:49I don't, do you guys know what Facetune is?
02:21:50I don't know what this is.
02:21:51I learned about it from Freire India a couple of weeks ago.
02:21:53One of the.
02:21:55Most.
02:21:55It came out a long time ago, Israeli company.
02:21:59And.
02:21:59Yes, it is.
02:22:00And it's, it's just a.
02:22:03Easy way of manipulating the way that your face looks and, you know,
02:22:07slims your jawline or whatever.
02:22:08What do you mean easy way?
02:22:10Like as in on a photo, not, not actually.
02:22:13So, so it turns out every Instagram or, or before they post, anytime people post photos,
02:22:17um, they typically went through the same workflows.
02:22:20And Facetune was kind of a, um, you know, just a bunch of tools that you can utilize.
02:22:25And now with AI, um, holy crap.
02:22:28I mean, the possibilities are quite limitless.
02:22:30And so, you know, it can regenerate that photo.
02:22:32And so they're at the bottom.
02:22:33There are all these like AI filters and, um, people use them so, so, so much.
02:22:40And often I heard the story where, uh, one of my friends met somebody from Instagram and,
02:22:47you know, they had a, they had all these photos and.
02:22:51Uh, she looked nothing like her self real life.
02:22:53Let me give you this from Freya.
02:22:54Um, when.
02:22:56From Freya?
02:22:57Freya India is a, a girl, a writer who just released a book called Girls.
02:23:01Yep.
02:23:01The Nordic God.
02:23:02Uh, she does look a little bit like that blonde hair.
02:23:05She's like a, the, what would, what's the female equivalent of the Ubermensch?
02:23:09Uberfroing or whatever it's called?
02:23:10Uberfroing?
02:23:11Yeah.
02:23:11Uh, she's that.
02:23:12Lift.
02:23:12Um, yeah.
02:23:14She, uh, she was telling me that when, uh, groups of young girls are out and they're
02:23:18taking photos at a party, everybody fights to be the one whose phone is used to have
02:23:24the photo taken because that means that they're the one that's in charge of the face tuning.
02:23:28Yep.
02:23:29So that they can work on themselves a little bit more.
02:23:31And I know, I know, I know, I know.
02:23:33It's actually, it's actually a huge social faux pas.
02:23:35If you post a picture where you look good and the other person doesn't in the group.
02:23:41That is stitching you mate up a little bit.
02:23:43You know, there's a famous, uh, English footballer called Ashley Cole.
02:23:46Can you just search Ashley Cole's squad photo and, uh, this, how old is this?
02:23:5110 years?
02:23:51Uh, yeah, it was when he was at Roma.
02:23:54So it's, and he's retired.
02:23:55Do you want to tell the story?
02:23:56Well, it's just, uh, a squad photo.
02:23:59It's, it's one of those, I know it when I see it ideas, I guess.
02:24:02Um, but it's just a football photo of the entire Roma team.
02:24:06And Ashley Cole, who's this Brit is like trying to mingle with these Italians.
02:24:09It's just iconic.
02:24:10Yeah.
02:24:11Top left.
02:24:11Cause he's just awkwardly leaning on the outside.
02:24:15So then he gets memed everywhere.
02:24:16This became one of the biggest memes in the world.
02:24:19For a long time.
02:24:20It's a team.
02:24:20It looks like they're socialistic.
02:24:21What's the headline?
02:24:22Scroll down a little bit.
02:24:26Ashley Cole appears to be an outcast in an incredibly awkward Roma team picture.
02:24:30The amount of times me and Chris have been out with like a group of guys and I'll do the Ashley Cole.
02:24:33Yeah.
02:24:34He just moves off to one side.
02:24:35Ruins it.
02:24:36Absolutely ruins it.
02:24:37All right, boys, let's bring this one into the land.
02:24:39You all rule.
02:24:40Uh, Tim, what have you got coming up?
02:24:41Where should people go to check out your things?
02:24:43Uh, you can find everything at Tim.blog.
02:24:45Uh, I'd say that's probably the easiest.
02:24:47Yeah.
02:24:47Check out the newsletter.
02:24:48It's been going for like 10, 12, 14.
02:24:50God knows how many years.
02:24:51Five or four.
02:24:52What was that one, that most recent article about, uh, uh, self-improvement?
02:24:56What I learned from however many years of self-improvement?
02:25:00Ah, yes.
02:25:01Yeah.
02:25:01That was, it's called the self-help trap.
02:25:03What I learned after 20 years of quote unquote.
02:25:07Yeah.
02:25:07Yeah.
02:25:08Improving myself.
02:25:08That's awesome.
02:25:09That's yeah.
02:25:10That's a long form.
02:25:11That's on the blog, 12, 10, 12 pages, tim.blog slash Friday.
02:25:15Sign up for the newsletter.
02:25:16A lot of the stuff that we're talking about, like go back.
02:25:19If you want some, also another reason to check out neurostimulation,
02:25:22go back and look at the Brainsway stock graph for the last two or three years.
02:25:27Um, so that type of stuff you'll learn about before other people.
02:25:30Heck yeah.
02:25:31Are we not, I'm not a registered investment advisor.
02:25:33Okay.
02:25:34Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
02:25:34You may lose money.
02:25:35Yeah.
02:25:36Um, no, I appreciate you guys having me on.
02:25:38Um, our, our app is called sky, S K Y E, and it's a fun little experience.
02:25:44It's kind of a new way to experience your phone.
02:25:47Um, it's kind of ironic that we're, you know, I talked about that having, you know,
02:25:52we talked about the digital detox or whatever, but our goal is to kind of really make you stop
02:25:59using as much as you would otherwise by surfacing the things that you might care about before such
02:26:05that you don't go into this doom scrolling world or whatever.
02:26:08Uh, imagine something that exists there.
02:26:11Um, it's there when you need it, it's gone when you don't, and we don't really have anything else.
02:26:16So it's a fun little thing.
02:26:17We couple people and, uh, we've got tens of thousands of people on a wait list right now.
02:26:22So we're trying to fulfill that inference is very expensive, but, uh, it's been the time
02:26:26of my life to build this.
02:26:27I'm, I guess I, I love technology so much.
02:26:30Um, and I love interfaces and I love thinking about the world with respect to how the future
02:26:34might be in terms of people interacting with the, with the, with the technology in a, in a meaningful
02:26:40way, not necessarily in a, um, doom scrolling sort of this world that we've kind of built.
02:26:46So I don't know where we'll go with that, but it's been, it's been an incredible time building.
02:26:51Um, and, uh, what a time to be alive as if you're, if you're any type of builder today,
02:26:56it is probably one of the most remarkable times I've ever witnessed.
02:27:00I'm baffled every day.
02:27:02Um, and so it's been so much fun, uh, and, uh, we're just getting started.
02:27:06So I'm, I'm, I'm really excited for that.
02:27:08And at signal on X with two L's S I G N U L L.
02:27:12If you want to see you call out the Xbox CEO a little bit more.
02:27:15That's pretty hilarious.
02:27:16I wonder if she's going to watch this tickler.com/signal.
02:27:19Yeah, yeah, yeah.
02:27:20Sniffies.
02:27:21Sniffies.
02:27:22Sorry.
02:27:22I, I need to take that username from that app.
02:27:24Yeah, yeah.
02:27:24Match, match with me there.
02:27:25Um, my end highagency.com/books.
02:27:29If you want to get a breakdown of all my best books, you told me to do this.
02:27:32There's going to be a book breakdown, a list of a load of different books, but the personal
02:27:36one of, uh, Oblomov, a Russian man from the 18th century who the first 50 pages are
02:27:42about him getting out of bed.
02:27:43So there's, there's more resources like that.
02:27:45Get my best books and articles.
02:27:47That's it.
02:27:47Heck yeah.
02:27:48All right.
02:27:48Let's go.
02:27:48See you next time, everyone.
02:27:50Yo.
02:27:51Cheers, gentlemen.
02:27:52Yes.
02:27:52There we go.
02:27:53Yeah.
02:27:54Good fun.
02:27:55Congratulations.
02:27:56You made it to the end of a full podcast episode.
02:27:58You are not so tick tock brain that you've completely dissolved into nothingness.
02:28:03Why not watch another one?
02:28:05Right.
02:28:07Go on, press it.
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