Chapter 1: Why is the future going to be epic?
You've said the future is going to be epic. You're really optimistic about it when a lot of people are pretty worried. How come?
I think people have had a tendency to be worried about the future because humans are programmed to be that way. We always were worried about some predator coming around the corner and eating us. Like, we're tuned to survive, right? So we're tuned to always—there's always some existential threat to humanity. This goes back to kind of biblical eras thousands of years ago. Yeah.
Chapter 2: What historical existential threats have shaped our fears?
It was the great flood that was about to come. There was the plague. The plague is going to wipe us all out. There's starvation. The late 19th century population was outstripping food supply. And there was this big belief that we were going to run out of food.
And there was this kind of rush to and the primary reason was all the world's fertilizer actually came from these guano fields off of the South American coast. So these giant islands covered in poop. and the clipper ships would go down. They'd get all this poop, and they'd bring it back to Europe, and they'd use it as fertilizer to farm.
If you don't have fertilizer, you get less yield, less calories. So the islands were kind of diminishing, and there was this big call to action. We're going to run out of fertilizer. The world's going to starve. We're going to die. And then there was this invention called the Haber-Bosch process, where they figured out how to take nitrogen from the atmosphere, compress it, and make fertilizer.
Boom. Suddenly, population skyrocketed. Every generation has these existential threats, climate change, COVID. There's always, and now it's AI. I think fundamentally AI is one of these most kind of like mind numbing, sort of unbelievable to understand kind of technologies.
And when these kind of things happen that we don't fully grok, that seems so overwhelming, like a plague, like running out of food, like COVID, we have a tendency to be very existential about it. Now, you compare that to the facts on the ground. The facts on the ground, people are living longer, they're living healthier, they're living better lives across the board, across populations.
And people can argue all day long about relative Hey, some people in America have gotten really far ahead. They're doing really well. The rest of us feel left behind.
But if you look at some of the metrics of like, hey, everyone has a home, everyone has a car, like everyone has some of these things that we take for granted today that we didn't have 100 years ago that were really things to struggle to get. Now, separate to that, there is an extraordinary compounding effect happening in technology generally.
Digitization of the physical world and then our ability to kind of make predictions about the future and engineer a different future because of the tools that we call AI today, but it's really a long history of these sorts of tools. where we take data and we use that to better understand the world and then say, hey, we could do this or we could do this.
We could make this molecule to solve this cancer. We could do this thing. And suddenly it turns out we're right. We could build this machine that could get us to the moon. Oh, yeah, we're right. We could do that. Like all of these fundamental tools start to compound.
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Chapter 3: How has technology historically transformed society?
I don't know, like this will allow anyone to stand up a small data center and run a bunch of AI stuff. So you don't really need big $100 billion data center. So I think there's a lot that's changing very quickly. And every step of the way, it's happening so fast. People just have all these reasons to have concern.
But I'm pretty optimistic as history being a predictor here that the diffusion of these technologies will unlock value for every human on Earth. And it's really just a function of at what point and at what point of value.
I've heard you talking about the moon a lot. What's happening with the moon?
The moon, I think. So one of the things that I think AI unlocks is the ability to do really complex projects. People think about AI as like, hey, I'm going to replace labor, like the accountant's job is going to go away. And we're all kind of swirling our heads around what are we going to do with the accountant's jobs going away.
And, you know, we could use the automobile and the horse buggy driver analogy. Yeah. People were worried about the horse buggy jobs going away and who's going to breed the horses, who's going to take care of the horses, all the horse stables are going to go away.
And then when the car came around, there was auto mechanics and there was the highway system and then motels popped up and then gas stations popped up and then coffee houses popped up on the highways and new towns emerged on the highways because you could get to them. And suddenly the automobile unlocked industries we didn't contemplate, right?
It's several degrees away, several steps away from the initial problem that you're thinking about, which is the horse companies dying and the horse jobs going away. So I think that's kind of like an important thing to note. And before I get to the moon, I'll just say this one point. I think physical AI or robotics is really going to be an unlock for people.
People think it's like the companies, the corporations will have all the robots and the corporations will replace all the people. But why can't everyone have a robot? Meaning, why can't someone put a robot in their garage? And this robot can do anything. It works 24 hours a day. That robot's now your employee. And you can say to the robot in the garage, hey, I want to make a bicycle shop.
I want to make custom bicycles that are really cool. They're like Chrome, and people can kind of tweak them online and make all these different versions of bicycles. And then the robot will build the bicycle. So you can stand up a Shopify store or an Etsy store or whatever, sell bicycles, and your robot will make them for you. You don't even have to know how to make bicycles.
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Chapter 4: What opportunities does AI present for the future?
It'll run the robot bike shop in your garage. It'll make bikes. It'll package them up and ship them out for you. When you think about it in that context, which is that this diffusion of technology enables everyone to get value from it. So everyone will have a robot. Everyone will be able to have a small business.
It's like imagine back in the day, 20, 30 years ago, if you told people, hey, everyone can have an Etsy store. Now all of the knitting you're doing at home, you can sell and you can make 50 grand a year. No one would have believed you. But now you can do that.
Have you seen these arm farms in India?
No.
Jared, pull up that video I sent you about robots needing a human body. Inside the race to train AI robots how to act human in the real world, I traveled to southern India to document the rise of AI arm farms where young engineers strap GoPros to their foreheads and fold laundry or pack boxes to teach humanoid robots how to do chores. So people are getting paid to do normal shit. Here it is.
And then the robot learns.
Yeah. So this is the same thing that happened with Tesla's full self-drive. Right. That they take the best... I mean, this doesn't strike me as the best folding I've ever seen. But they take the best drivers on Tesla and they use that to train the model on...
It would be a good hack to mess with the robots and fold incorrectly over and over again.
Just downstream, loads of people with creased t-shirts.
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Chapter 5: What are the implications of gene editing on human embryos?
Because I swear that there was a third one. So after all of that, I mean, I might eat humble pie here and I've completely misremembered it. You can also edit yourself out. I'll own my failures. I'll own my failures here. I've said worse things on the internet.
But yeah, I swear that not only did he do this thing and he couldn't believe it and it's the first time this has ever happened and it's so... And there was two of them. And there was a fucking third one. I swear that there was a third one. Come on, Jared, prove me right here, brother.
This is like a- Three babies.
Well, there were three babies.
A third gene-edited baby was later confirmed through court documents.
Fucking yes. Well, I'm not celebrating the thing. I'm not celebrating the thing. I'm not celebrating the thing. I'm celebrating- You're not a dystopian.
I'm celebrating that I'm right. Pro gene-editing babies.
And he edited the embryos using CRISPR-Cas9 to make them resistant to HIV. Exactly. Exactly.
So the HIV resistant allele, which is the genetic trait, is a known trait. So he just made a couple of changes, confirmed that nothing else was changed, took that forward. So should we give children or should we give embryos these enhancements where we're not introducing new DNA? We're basically saying, hey, randomly, you could have gotten this trait and you didn't.
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Chapter 6: Should we enhance embryos with genetic traits?
Should I make every embryo superhuman? Should I have a bunch of kids where I got one that's really good at sports, one that's really good at music, one that's really good at podcasting? I mean, you pick your poison.
Well, sometimes you can put all three into one person.
There you go. And the super superhero.
Yeah, and the British accent. I don't think that's genetic.
Yeah. Okay, so that might be a line that many people are going to say, hey, I don't want to cross into that. And you could debate that philosophically. Why would you not want that? If you're willing to do the other things, it's a spectrum. Why are you going that far? And there's a lot of philosophical discourse around this. Now, the final one. The final one is transgenic.
And this is where you put a gene or a trait into the human that it doesn't naturally have, that the human would not have been born with, no matter how many sperm or how many egg combinations you put together, you would not have come up with this gene. Regardless of who the parents were? Correct. For example, being able to see infrared. Right. Okay. And so this is where you make X-Men, right?
And the capacity to do this historically was like no way impossible. But now in many of these, there arguably could be the capacity to do this. And I'm not arguing for it.
I'm just saying that it's likely that this is gonna be a limit that's gonna get tested at some point here in the near future, where we are gonna have a conversation about how do humans keep up in an era, in a world of super intelligence, and are there certain traits like that that can enable us to either have a better performance against the super intelligence, either super intelligent humans,
Or a relationship with the superintelligence via some mechanism that allows us to connect with the superintelligence or control it better, or what have you, or all the digital AI that's out there. Or other tools or techniques that, or sorry, other phenotypes, physical characteristics that might allow us to better survive on Mars.
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Chapter 7: How does government policy affect California's economy?
I had a great conversation. What was the guy's name? It wasn't Christopher Mason. That was the guy that was talking about space. Who was the dude that I did the episode with last week that we put out? Scott, somebody, the guy about Mars. I had this fucking phenomenal... Scott Solomon. Yeah, Scott Solomon. Unbelievable. Evolutionary biologist who's applied...
evolutionary biology thinking to what we're going to need to do to be able to survive on Mars. Radiation, what happens to bone density? But if you've got the bone density loss, how do women give birth? You're going to have to do every child by cesarean C-section. Over time, if you have C-section, you get narrower hips, you get bigger baby heads.
You almost reverse evolution of where we got through. We need to be underground. If we're underground in Mars, then it means that we're going to be protected naturally by the terrain from the radiation. But if you're underground, what happens to
melanin in the skin and what happens to vitamin d levels and you've got artificial light what happens to what's the psychological profile of these people is that i'm like sat there just a virtual episode and my fucking mind was this is a sleeper episode it was so fucking good yeah such a sleeper episode but um yeah can we engineer it was uh and and so remember like transgenics we use in plants you know what trans to put the word trans at the start of anything yeah sorry six years and it's gonna struggle let me uh same as nuclear
Yeah. Well, I don't want to say GMO people because that's got a worse name. Yeah.
If I say the GMO person, because I used to work at Monsanto, so that gives me my double evil scientist credibility. But there's likely going to be a situation where they're going to discover this. A lot of like the human biology, like we talked about all the genes that are on or off. How do all those proteins work together?
I described 80 years of 10 billion proteins interacting in a place the size of Manhattan, 500 story tall, bumping into each other, doing stuff. That's how we do stuff in a cell for one second. So there's a regulatory network where all these proteins are doing stuff in a way that we can't model. We don't understand today.
Isn't it mad that that just doesn't switch off one day of all of the humans? Yeah, it's just 404s and you sort of blue screen of death yourself for a bit.
Cold temperatures will do that. That's why we can freeze biological tissue and then boot it back up. Because it just stops all that. Because it's actually the thermodynamics. It's the kinetic energy of the proteins. It's random. The proteins are just bouncing around in the cell.
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Chapter 8: What is the future of socialism in America?
And they randomly will bump into stuff and do stuff. It's amazing to think about, like, there's no way that you could think that, that you can realize that and not think that the universe is a simulation. You know, it's just like, it's literally just chaotic ensembles of molecules that randomly do these incredible things that we look at and we're like, I can move my finger. It's like,
It's the craziest shit.
Well, it's the same as when you realize that most of matter is empty space. But if I do this, my hand doesn't pass through the table. Fucking awesome.
Right. And the fact that it's all quantum anyway, which means that it could tunnel through anything at any point in time.
I'm still waiting for that to happen.
Well, here's another fucked up thing to think about. You've heard of like quantum entanglement. So, you know, you can entangle two particles and move them apart, change the state of one and the other one will change instantaneously on the other side of the universe, theoretically.
Yeah.
there's reasons to believe that it might be the case that every particle of a particular type is entangled with every other particle. And I'll just let that settle for a second, because if that were true, then you could theoretically, every time any particle changes anywhere in the universe, it's affecting every other particle in the universe.
kind of like a panpsychism, but for connectivity, like a membrane that everybody is a part of.
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