Guillaume Verdon
speaker
342 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2023
last heard Dec 2023
Guillaume Verdon’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
Well, we're far more efficient at producing heat than, let's say, just a rock with a similar mass as ourselves, right? We acquire free energy, we acquire food, and we're using all this electricity for our operation. And so, the universe wants to produce more entropy and
And by having life go on and grow, it's actually more optimal at producing entropy because it will seek out pockets of free energy and burn it for its sustenance and further growth. And that's sort of the basis of life. And there's Jeremy England at MIT who has this theory that I'm a proponent of that life emerged because of this sort of property.
And to me, this physics is what governs the mesoscales. And so, it's the missing piece between the quantum and the cosmos. It's the middle part, right? Thermodynamics rules the mesoscales. And to me,
both from a point of view of designing or engineering devices that harness that physics and trying to understand the world through the lens of thermodynamics has been sort of a synergy between my two identities over the past year and a half now. And so that's really how the two identities emerged. One was kind of, you know, I'm a decently respected scientist and
I was going towards doing a startup in the space and trying to be a pioneer of a new kind of physics-based AI. And as a dual to that, I was sort of experimenting with philosophical thoughts from a physicist's standpoint. And ultimately, I think that Around that time, it was like late 2021, early 2022, I think there was just a lot of pessimism about the future in general and pessimism about tech.
And that pessimism was sort of virally spreading because it was getting algorithmically amplified and people just felt like the future is going to be worse than the present. And to me, that is a very fundamentally destructive force in the universe, is this sort of doom mindset. Because it is hyperstitious, which means that if you believe it, you're increasing the likelihood of it happening.
And so... felt a responsibility to some extent to make people aware of the trajectory of civilization and the natural tendency of the system to adapt towards its growth. And sort of that actually the laws of physics say that the future is going to be better and grander statistically, and we can make it so.
And if you believe in it, if you believe that the future would be better and you believe you have agency to make it happen, you're actually increasing the likelihood of that better future happening. And so I sort of felt a responsibility to sort of engineer a movement of viral optimism about the future
and build a community of people supporting each other to build and do hard things, do the things that need to be done for us to scale up civilization. Because at least to me, I don't think stagnation or slowing down is actually an option. fundamentally, life and the whole system, our whole civilization wants to grow.
And there's just far more cooperation when the system is growing rather than when it's declining and you have to decide how to split the pie. And so I've balanced both identities so far, but I guess recently the two have been merged more or less without my consent, so. You said a lot of really interesting things there.
Right. So I wrote the manifesto with my co-founder of EAC, an account named Bazelord, still anonymous, luckily, and hopefully forever. So it's Bazet, Buff, Jezzos, and Bazet.
Like Bayes Lord.
That's right.
Yeah.
No.
Yeah.
That'd be amazing. So, originally wrote the manifesto around the same time as I founded this company, and I worked at Google X or just X now or Alphabet X now that there's another X. And there, you know, the baseline is sort of secrecy, right? You can't talk about what you work on even with other Googlers or externally. And so that was kind of deeply ingrained in my way to do things, especially in
in deep tech that, you know, has geopolitical impact. Right. Um, and so I was being secretive about what I was working on. There was no correlation between my company and my main identity publicly, um, And then not only did they correlate that, they also correlated my main identity and this account.
So I think the fact that they had doxed the whole Guillaume complex and the journalists reached out to actually my investors. which is pretty scary. You know, when you're a startup entrepreneur, you don't really have bosses except for your investors, right? And my investors ping me like, hey, this is going to come out. They've figured out everything. What are you going to do, right?
So I think at first they had a first reporter on the Thursday and they didn't have all the pieces together, but then they looked at their notes across the organization and they censor fused. And now they had way too much. And that's when I got worried because they said it was of public interest. And in general... I like how you said sensor fused.
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