How Risk Taking, Innovation & Artificial Intelligence Transform Human Experience | Marc Andreessen

Welcome to the Huberman Lab Podcast where.

We discuss science and science based tools for everyday life.

I'm Andrew Huberman and I'm a professor of Neurobiology and Ophthalmology at Stanford School of Medicine. Today my guest is Marc Andreessen. Marc Andreessen is a software engineer and an investor in technology companies. He co founded and developed Mosaic, which was one of the first widely used web browsers. He he also co founded and developed Netscape, which was one of the earliest widespread used web browsers. And he co founded and is a general partner at Andreessen Horowitz, one of the most successful Silicon Valley venture capital firms. All of that is to say that Marc Andreessen is one of the most successful innovators and investors ever I was extremely excited to record this episode with Mark for several reasons. First of all, he himself is an incredible innovator. Second of all, he has an uncanny ability to spot the innovators of the future. And third, Mark has shown over and over again the ability to understand how technologies not yet even developed are going to impact the way that humans interact at large. Our conversation starts off by discussing what makes for an exceptional innovator, as well as what sorts of environmental conditions make for exceptional innovation and creativity more generally. In that context, we talk about risk taking, not just in terms of risk taking in one's profession, but about how some people, not all, but how some people who are risk takers and innovators in the context of their work also seem to take a lot of risks in their personal life and some of the consequences that can bring. Then we discuss some of the most transformative technologies that are now emerging, such as novel approaches to developing clean energy, as well as AI or artificial intelligence. With respect to AI, Mark shares his views as to why AI is likely to greatly improve human experience. And we discussed the multiple roles that AI is very likely to have in all of our lives in the near future. Mark explains how not too long from now, all of us are very likely to have AI assistance, for instance, assistants that give us highly informed health advice, highly informed psychological advice. Indeed, it is very likely that all of us will soon have AI assistants that govern most, if not all of our daily decisions. And Mark explains how, if done correctly, this can be a tremendously positive addition to our life. In doing so, Mark provides a stark counter argument for those that argue that AI is going to diminish human experience. So if you're hearing about and or concerned about the ways that AI is likely to destroy us today, you are going to hear about the many different ways that AI technologies now in development are likely to enhance our human experience at every level. What you'll soon find is that while today's discussion does center around technology and technology development, it is really a discussion about human beings and human psychology. So whether you have an interest in technology development and or AI, I'm certain that you'll find today's discussion to be an important and highly lucid view into what will soon be the future that.

We all live in.

Before we begin, I'd like to emphasize that this podcast is separate from my teaching and research roles at Stanford. It is, however, part of my desire and effort to bring zero cost to consumer information about science and science related tools to the general public. In keeping with that theme, I'd like to thank the sponsors of today's podcast. Our first sponsor is Element. Element is an electrolyte drink that has everything you need and nothing you don't. That means plenty of the electrolytes, sodium, magnesium and potassium in the correct ratios, but no sugar. The electrolytes and hydration are absolutely key for mental health, physical health and performance. Even a slight degree of dehydration can impair our ability to think, our energy levels and our physical performance. Element makes it very easy to achieve proper hydration and it does so by including the three electrolytes in the exact ratios they need to be present. I drink Element first thing in the morning when I wake up. I usually mix it with about 16 to 32 ounces of water. If I'm exercising, I'll drink one while I'm exercising and I tend to drink one after exercising as well. Many people are scared off by the idea of ingesting sodium because obviously we don't want to consume sodium in excess. However, for people that have normal blood pressure, and especially for people that are consuming very clean diets, that is Consuming not so many processed foods or highly processed foods. Oftentimes we are not getting enough sodium, magnesium and potassium and we can suffer as a consequence. And with Element simply by mixing water it tastes delicious. It's very easy to get that proper hydration. If you'd like to try Element, you can go to drink element. That's lmnt.com huberman to claim a free Element sample pack with your purchase. Again, that's drinkelementlmnt.com Huberman Today's episode is also brought to us by Eight Sleep Eight Sleep makes smart mattress covers with cooling, heating and sleep tracking capacity. I've spoken many times before on this podcast about the fact that sleep that is getting a great night's sleep is the foundation of all mental health, physical health and performance. When we're sleeping well, everything goes far better. When we are not sleeping well or enough, everything gets far worse at the level of mental health, physical health and performance. And one of the key things to getting a great night's sleep and waking up feeling refreshed is that you have to control the temperature of your sleeping environment. And that's because in order to fall and stay deeply asleep, you need your core body temperature to drop by about 1 to 3 degrees. And in order to wake up feeling refreshed and energized, you want your core body temperature to increase by about 1 to 3 degrees. With eight sleep, it's very easy to induce that drop in core body temperature by cooling your mattress early and throughout the night and warming your mattress toward morning. I started sleeping on an eight sleep mattress cover a few years ago, and it has completely transformed the quality of the sleep that I get. So much so that I actually loathe traveling because I don't have my Eight Sleep mattress travel. If you'd like to try Eight Sleep, you can go to Eight Sleep.comhuberman and you'll save up to $150 off their pod three cover Eight Sleep currently ships in the USA, Canada, UK, select countries in the EU and Australia. Again, that's eightsleep.comhuberman and now for my discussion with Marc Andreessen.

Mark, welcome.

Hey, thank you.

Delighted to have you here and have so many questions for you about innovation, AI, your view of the landscape of tech and humanity in general. I want to start off by talking about innovation from three different perspectives. There's the inner game, so to speak, or the psychology of the innovator, or innovators, things like their propensity for engaging in conflict or not, their propensity for having a dream or a vision, and in particular, their innovation as it relates to some psychological trait or expression. So we'll get to that in a moment. The second component that I'm curious about is the outer landscape around innovators who they place themselves with, the sorts of choices that they make and also the sorts of personal relationships that they might have or not have. And then the last component is this notion of the larger landscape that they happen to find themselves in, what time in history, what's the geography, Bay Area, New York, Dubai, et cetera. So to start off, is there a common trait of innovators that you think is absolutely essential as a seed to creating things that are really impactful.

Yeah. So I'm not a psychologist, but I've.

Picked up some of the concepts, some of the terms. And so it was a great moment of delight in my life when I learned about the big five personality traits, because I was like, aha. There's a way to actually describe the answer to this question in at least reasonably scientific terms.

And so I think what you're looking.

For when you're talking about real innovators, like people who actually do really creative breakthrough work, I think you're talking about a couple things. So one is very high in what's called trait openness, which is one of the big five, which is basically just like, flat out open to new ideas.

And of course, the nature of trade openness is.

Trade openness means you're not just open to new ideas in one category, you're open to many different kinds of new ideas. And so we might talk about the fact that a lot of innovators also are very creative people in other aspects of their lives, even outside of their specific creative domain.

So that's important. But of course, just being open is.

Not sufficient, because if you're just open, you could just be curious and explore and spend your entire life reading and talking to people and never actually create something. So you also need a couple other things. You need a high level of conscientiousness, which is another one of the big five. You need somebody who's really willing to.

Apply themselves in our world, typically over.

A period of many years, to be able to accomplish something great. They typically work very hard.

That often gets obscured because the stories.

That end up getting told about these people are. It's just like, there's this kid, and he just had this idea, and it was a stroke of genius, and it was a moment in time, and it's just like, oh, he was so lucky.

And it's like, no, for most of.

These people, it's years and years and years of applied effort. And so you need somebody with an extreme basic willingness to defer gratification and really apply themselves to a specific thing for a long time.

And of course, this is why there.

Aren'T very many of these people, is there aren't many people who are high in openness and high in conscientiousness because to a certain extent, they're opposed traits. And so you need somebody who has both of those.

Third is you need somebody high in.

Disagreeableness, which is the third of the big five. So you need somebody who's just like, basically ornery because if they're not ornery, then they'll be talked out of their ideas by people who will be like.

Oh well, because the reaction most people.

Have new ideas is oh, that's dumb. And so somebody who's too agreeable will be easily dissuaded to not pursue not pulling the thread anymore.

So you need somebody highly disagreeable. Again, the nature of disagreeableness is they.

Tend to be disagreeable about everything. So they tend to be these very iconoclastic kind of renegade characters.

And then there's just a table stakes.

Component which is they just also need to be high iq. They just need to be really smart because it's hard to innovate in any category if you can't synthesize large amounts of information quickly.

And so those are four basically high.

Spikes, very rare traits that basically have to come together.

You could probably also say they probably.

At some point need to be relatively low on neuroticism, which is another the big five, because if they're too neurotic they probably can't handle the stress.

So it's kind of this dial in there.

And then of course, if you're into the sort of science of the big five, basically these are all people who are on the far outlying kind of point on the normal distribution across all these traits.

And then that just gets you to.

I think the sort of hardest topic of all around this whole concept, which is just there are very few of these people.

Do you think they're born with these traits?

Yeah, well, so they're born with the traits. And then of course the traits are not.

Genetics are not destiny. And so the traits are not deterministic in the sense of that. Just because they have those personality traits doesn't mean they're going to deliver great creativity. But they need to have those properties.

Because otherwise they're just not either going.

To be able to do the work or they're not going to enjoy it.

I mean, look, a lot of these.

People are highly capable, competent people. It's very easy for them to get high paying jobs in traditional institutions and get lots of traditional awards and end up with big paychecks. And there's a lot of people at big institutions that you and I know well. And I deal with many of these where people get paid a lot of money and they get a lot of respect and they go for 20 years and it's great. And they never create anything new.

Right.

And so there's a lot of administrators, a lot of them. Yeah, A lot of them end up in administrative jobs and that's fine, that's good.

The world needs that also. Right? The innovators can't run everything because everything. The rate of change would be too high. Society, I think, probably wouldn't be able to handle it.

So you need some people who are.

On the other side who are going to kind of keep the lights on and keep things running.

But there is this decision that people.

Have to make, which is, okay, if I have the sort of latent capability to do this, is this actually what I want to spend my life doing? And do I want to go through the stress and the pain and the trauma and the anxiety and the risk of failure, and so do I really want to?

Once in a while you run into.

Somebody who just can't do it any other way. They just have to.

Who's an example of that?

I mean, Elon's the paramount example of our time.

And I bring him up in part.

Because he's such an obvious example, but in part because he's talked about this in interviews where he basically, he says, I can't turn it off. The ideas come, I have to pursue them. It's why he's running five companies at the same time and working on a sixth. It's just like he can't turn it off.

Look, there's a lot of other people.

Who probably have the capability to do it who ended up talking themselves into or whatever events conspired to put them in a position where they did something else. Obviously, there are people who try to be creative who just don't have the capability. And so there's some Venn diagram there of determinism through traits, but also choices in life.

And then also, of course, the situation.

In which they're born, the context within which they grow up, culture. Right. What their parents expect of them and so forth. And so you have to, you know, kind of get all the way through this. You have to thread all these. All these needles kind of at the same time.

Do you think there are folks out there that meet these criteria who are disagreeable, but that can feign agreeableness? You know, that can. For those just listening, Mark just raised his right hand. In other words, that can sort of the phrase that comes to mind maybe, because I can relate to a little bit. They sneak up through the system, meaning they behave ethically as it relates to the requirements of the system. They're not breaking laws or breaking rules. In fact, quite the opposite. They're paying attention to the rules and following the rules until they get to a place where being disagreeable feels less threatening to their overall sense of security.

Yeah, I mean, look, the really highly.

Competent people don't have to break laws, right? There was this myth that sort of happened around the movie the Godfather. And then there was this character Meyer Lansky, you know, who's like, ran basically the mafia, you know, 50, 60, 70 years ago. And there was this great line of like, well, if Meyer Lansky had only like applied himself to running General Motors, he would have been the best CEO of all time. It's like, no, not really. Right.

Like, the people who are like, great.

At running the big companies, they don't have to, they don't have to be mob bosses. They don't have to like, break laws. They can, you know, they can, they can do. They can work. They're smart and sophisticated enough to be able to work inside the system. You know, they don't need to take the easy out.

So I don't think there's any implication.

That they have to, you know, that they have to break laws. That said, they have to break norms. Right.

And specifically, the thing, this is probably.

The thing that gets missed the most.

Because the process of innovating, the process.

Of creating something new, once it works, the stories get retconned, as they say in comic books. So the stories get adapted to where it's like, it was inevitable all along. Everybody always knew that this was a good idea. The person has won all these awards, society embraced them.

And invariably, if you were with them.

When they were actually doing the work, or if you actually get a couple drinks into them and talk to them about it, it'd be like, no, that's not how it happened at all. They faced a wall of skepticism, just like a wall of basically social, essentially denial. No, this is not going to work. No, I'm not going to join your lab. No, I'm not going to come work for your company. No, I'm not going to buy your product. No, I'm not going to meet with you. And so they get just tremendous social resistance. They're not getting positive feedback from their social network the way that more agreeable people need to have.

And this is why, this is why.

Agreeableness is a problem for innovation. If you're agreeable, you're going to listen to the people around you. They're going to tell you that new ideas are stupid. Right? End of story. You're not going to proceed.

And so I would put it more.

On, like, they need to be able to deal with.

They need to be able to deal with social discomfort.

To the level of ostracism, or at some point they're going to get shaken out and they're just going to quit.

Do you think that people that meet these criteria do best by banding with others that meet these criteria early? Or is it important that they form this deep sense of self, like the ability to cry oneself to sleep at night or lie in the fetal position, worrying that things aren't going to work out and then still get up the next morning and get right back out there?

So Sean Parker has the best line.

By the way, on this. He says being an entrepreneur or being a creator is like getting punched in the face over and over again. He said, eventually you start to like the taste of your own blood.

And I love that line because it makes everybody massively uncomfortable, but it gives.

You a sense of how basically painful the process is. If you talk to any entrepreneur, you know, who's been through it about that, they're like, oh, yeah, that's exactly, that's exactly what it's like.

So, so, so there is this. There is a big individual component to it. But look, but look, it can be very lonely, right? And especially very hard, I think, to.

Do this if nobody around you is trying to do anything even remotely similar, right? And if you're getting just universally negative responses, like, you know, very few people, I think, have very few people have the ego strength to be able to survive that for years.

So I do think there's a huge advantage. And this is why you do see clusters. There's a huge advantage to clustering, right? And so you, and you know, throughout.

History, you've had this clustering effect, right? You had clustering of the great artists and sculptors in Renaissance Florence. You had the clustering of the philosophers of Greece. You had the clustering of tech people in Silicon Valley. You have the clustering of creative arts, movie, TV people in Los Angeles and so forth and so on. There's always a scene, there's always a Nexus and a place where people come together for these kinds of things.

So generally speaking, if somebody wants to.

Work in tech, innovate in tech, they're going to be much better off being around a lot of people, people who are trying to do that kind of thing, than they are in a place where nobody else is doing it.

Having said that, the clustering has.

It can have downsides, it can have side effects. And you put any group of people together and you do start to get groupthink, even among people who are individually very disagreeable.

And so these same clusters where you.

Get these very idiosyncratic people. They do have fads and trends just like every place else. And so they get wrapped up in their own social dynamics.

The good news is the social dynamic.

In those places is usually very forward looking. And so it's usually like, I don't know, it's like a herd of iconoclasts looking for the next big thing.

So iconoclasts looking for the next big thing.

That's good.

The herd part, that's what you got.

To be careful of.

So even when you're in one of.

These environments, you have to be careful that you're not getting sucked into the group think too much.

When you say groupthink, do you mean excessive friction due to pressure testing each other's ideas to the point where things just don't move forward? Or are you talking about groupthink, where people start to form a consensus or the self belief that, gosh, we are so strong because we are so different. Can we better define groupthink?

It's actually less either one of those things both happen. And those are good. Those are good. The part of groupthink I'm talking about is just like we all basically zero in. We just end up zeroing in on.

The same ideas, right?

In Hollywood, there's this classic thing. It's like there are years where all.

Of a sudden there's a lot of volcano movies.

It's like, why are there all these volcano movies? And it's just like, I don't know, there was just something in that just stall, right?

There was just something in the air.

Look, Silicon Valley has this.

There are moments in time where you'll have these.

It's like the old thing, like what's.

The difference between a fad and a trend? Right? Fad is the trend that doesn't last, right?

And so Silicon Valley is subject to.

Both fads and trends just like any place else.

In other words, you take smart, disagreeable.

People, you cluster them together, they will act like a herd. They will end up thinking the same things unless they try very hard not to.

You've talked about these personality traits of great innovators before and we're talking about them now. You invest in innovators, you try and identify them and you are one. So you can recognize these traits here. I'm making the presumption that you have these traits. Indeed you do. We'll just get that out of the way. Have you observed people trying to feign these traits? And are there any specific questions or behaviors that are a giveaway that they're pretending to be the young Steve Jobs or that they're pretending to be the young Henry Ford. Pick your list of other names that qualify as authentic, legitimate innovators. We won't name names of people who have tried to disguise themselves as true innovators. But what are some of the litmus tests? And I realize here that we don't want you to give these away to the point where they lose their potency, but if you could share a few of those.

Yeah, no, that's good. We're actually a pretty open book on this.

So, first of all, yes, so there.

Are people who definitely try to come in and basically present as being something that they're not. And they've read all the books. They will have listened to this interview. They study everything and they construct a facade and they come in and present as something they're not.

I would say the amount of that.

Varies exactly correlated to the nasdaq.

And so when stock prices are super.

Low, you actually get the opposite. When stock prices are super low, people get too demoralized and people who should be doing it basically give up because they just think that whatever, the industry's over, the trend is over, whatever, it's all hopeless. And so you get this flushing thing. So nobody ever shows up at a stock market low and says, I'm the new next big thing.

And doesn't really.

Want to do it because there are higher status.

The kinds of people who do the thing that you're talking about, they're fundamentally.

Oriented for social status.

They're trying to get the social status without actually.

Without actually the substance. And there are always other places to go get social status.

So after 2000, the joke was.

When I got to Silicon Valley in 93, 94, the valley was dead. We can talk about that. By 98, it was roaring. And you had a lot of these people showing up who basically had a lot of people showing up with stories. 2000, the market crash.

By 2001, the joke was that there.

Were these terms B2C and B2B. And in 1998, B2C meant business to consumer and B2B meant business to business, which is two different kinds of business models for Internet companies. By 2001, B2B meant back to banking and B2C meant back to consulting, which.

Is the high status people. The people oriented to status who showed.

Up to be in tech were like, yeah, screw it, this is over. Stick a fork in it. I'm going to go back to Goldman Sachs or go back to McKinsey where I can be high status.

And so you get this flushing kind.

Of effect that happens in a downturn.

That said, in a big upswing.

Yeah, you get a lot of people showing up with a lot of. With a lot of kind of, let's say, public Persona without the substance to back it up.

So the way we stress that, you.

Can actually say exactly how we test for this, which. Because the test exactly addresses the issue in a way that is impossible to fake.

And it's actually the same way homicide.

Detectives try to find out if you've actually. If you're innocent or whether you've killed somebody. It's the same tactic, which is you ask increasingly detailed questions. Right. And so the way the homicide cop does this is, what were you doing last night? Oh, I was at a movie.

Well, which movie? Which theater? Okay, which seat did you sit in? Okay, what was the end of the movie? And you ask increasingly detailed questions.

And people have trouble. At some point, people have trouble making up, and things just fuzz into just kind of obvious bullshit. And basically, fake founders basically have the same problem.

They're able to relay a conceptual theory.

Of what they're doing that they've kind of engineered, but as they get into the details, it just fuzzes out. Whereas the true people that you want to back that can do it, basically what you find is they've spent five or 10 or 20 years obsessing on the details of whatever it is they're about to do, and they're so deep in the details that they know so much more about it than you ever will.

And in fact, the best possible reaction.

Is when they get mad, which is also what the homicide cops say.

What you actually want is you basically.

Want the emotional response of like, I can't believe that you're asking me questions this detailed and specific and picky, and they kind of figure out what you're doing, and then they get upset. Like, that's. That's perfect.

Right.

But then they have to prove in themselves in the sense of they have to be able to answer the questions in great detail.

Do you think that people that are able to answer those questions in great detail have actually taken the time to systematically think through the if ands of all the possible implications of what they're going to do, and they have a specific vision in mind of how things need to turn out or will turn out? Or do you think that they have a vision and it's a. No matter what, it will work out because the world will sort of bend around it. I Mean, in other words, do you think that they place their vision in context or they simply have a vision and they have that tunnel vision of that thing and that's going to be it? Let's use you for an example with Netscape. I mean, that's how I first came to know your name. When you were conceiving Netscape. Did you think, okay, there's this search engine and this browser, and it's going to be this thing that looks this way and works this way and feels this way. Did you think that, and also think about that there was going to be a gallery of other search engines and it would fit into that landscape of other search engines? Or were you just projecting your vision of this thing as this unique and special brainchild?

Let me give the general answer and.

Then we can talk about the specific example. So the general answer is entrepreneurship, creativity, innovation is what economists called decision making under uncertainty. And so in both parts, it was important decision making. You're going to make a ton of decisions because you have to decide what to do, what not to do, and then uncertainty, which is like, the world's a complicated place. And in mathematical terms, the world is a complex adaptive system with feedback loops. And it's really. I mean, it's extreme. Isaac Asimov wrote in his novels, he wrote about this field called psychohistory, which is the idea that there's a supercomputer that can predict the future of, like, human affairs, right? And it's like, we don't have that.

Not yet. Not yet, not yet.

Well, we'll get to that later.

We certainly don't have that yet. And so you're just dealing, you know.

Military commanders call this the fog of war, right? You're just dealing with a situation where the number of variables are just off the charts. It's all these other people, right, who are inherently unpredictable, making all these decisions in different directions. And then the whole system is combinatorial, which is these people are colliding with each other, influencing their decisions.

And so, I mean, look, the most.

Straightforward kind of way to think about this is it's amazing. Like, anybody who believes in economic central planning, it always blows my mind because it's just like, try opening a restaurant. Like, try just opening a restaurant on the corner down here and, like, 50, 50 odds the restaurant's going to work.

And, like, all you have to do.

To run a restaurant is, like, have a thing and serve food. And, like.

And it's like, most restaurants fail, right? And so, and restaurant people who run.

Restaurants are, like, pretty smart like they're, you know, they usually think about these things very hard and they all want to succeed and it's hard to do that.

And so to start a tech company.

Or to start an artistic movement or to, or to fight a war, like you're just going into this like, basically about conceptual battleground or military terms, real battleground, where there's just like incredible levels of complexity, branching future paths.

And so there's nothing predictable. And so what we look for is basically the sort of drop. The really good innovators, they've got a.

Drive to basically be able to cope with that and deal with that. And they basically do that in two steps. So one is they try to pre plan as much as they possibly can. And we call that the process of navigating, we call the idea maze. And so the idea maze basically is I've got this general idea and it might be the Internet's going to work or search or whatever.

And then it's like, okay, in their.

Head they have thought through of like.

Okay, if I do it this way.

That way, this third way, here's what will happen. Then I have to do that, then I have to do this, then I have to bring in somebody to do that. Here's the technical challenge I'm going to hit.

And they've got in their heads as best anybody could, they've got as complete.

A sort of a map of possible futures as they could possibly have.

And this is where I say, when.

You ask them increasing detailed questions, that's what you're trying to get them to kind of chart out is, okay, how far ahead have you thought and how much are you anticipating all of the different twists and turns that this is going to take?

Okay, so then they start on day one. And then of course, what happens is.

Now they're in it, now they're in the fog of war, right? They're in future uncertainty.

And now that idea maze is maybe.

Not helpful practically, but now they're going to be basically constructing on the fly day by day as they learn and.

Discover new things and as the world changes around them. And of course it's a feedback loop.

Because they're going to change. If their thing starts to work, it's going to change the world. And then the fact the world is changing is going to cause their plan to change as well.

And so, yeah, the great ones, basically.

The great ones course correct every single day. They take stock of what they've learned, they modify the plan.

The great ones tend to think in terms of hypotheses like a scientific sort.

Of mentality, which is they tend to think, okay, I'm going to try this.

Like, I'm going to go into the world, I'm going to announce that I'm.

Doing this for sure.

I'm going to say this is my plan and I'm going to tell all my employees that, I'm going to tell.

All my investors that, and I'm going.

To put a stake in there and it's my plan, and then I'm going to try it. And even though I sound like I have complete certainty, I know that I.

Need to test to find out whether it's going to work.

And if it's not, then I have.

To go back to all those same people. And I have to say, well, actually, we're not going left, we're going right.

And they have to run that loop.

Thousands of times to get through the other side.

And this led to the creation of.

This great term pivot, which has been very helpful in our industry because the word, when I was young, the word we used was fuck up. And pivot sounds so much better.

It sounds like so much more professional. But yeah, you make mistakes, it's just.

Too complicated to understand. You course correct, you adjust, you evolve.

Often these things, at least in business.

The businesses that end up working really well tend to be different than the original plan.

But that's part of the process of.

A really smart founder basically working their way through reality right, as they're executing their plan.

The way you're describing this has parallels to a lot of models in biology and the practice of science, of random walks, but that aren't truly random, pseudo random walks in biology, et cetera. But one thing that is becoming clear from the way you're describing this is that I could imagine a great risk to early success. So, for instance, somebody develops a product, people are excited by it, they start to implement that product, but then the landscape changes and they don't learn how to pivot to use the less profane version of it. Right? They don't learn how to do that. In other words, and I think of everything these days, or most everything, in terms of reward schedules and dopamine reward schedules, because that is the universal currency of reward. And so when you talk about the Sean Parker quote of learning to enjoy the taste of one's own blood, that is very different than learning to enjoy the taste of success, right? It's about internalizing success as a process of being self determined and less agreeable, et cetera. In other words, building up of Those five traits becomes the source of dopamine, perhaps in a way that's highly adaptive. So on the outside, we just see the product, the end product, the iPhone, the MacBook, the Netscape, et cetera. But I have to presume, and I'm not a psychologist, but I have done neurophysiology, and I've studied the dopamine system enough to know that what's being rewarded in the context of what you're describing sounds to be a reinforcement of those five traits rather than, oh, it's going to be this particular product, or the company's going to look this way, or the logo is going to be this or that. That all seems like the peripheral to what's really going on. That great innovators are really in the process of establishing neural circuitry that is all about reinforcing the me and the process of being me.

Yeah, so this goes to.

Yeah, this is like extrinsic versus intrinsic motivation. So Steve Jobs, kind of Zen version of this, or the sort of hippie version of this was the journey is the reward. He always told his employees that. It's like, look, everybody thinks in terms of these big public markers like the stock price or the IPO or the product launch or whatever. He's like, no, it's actually the process itself is the point. Right.

And to your point, if you have.

That mentality, then that's an intrinsic motivation, not an extra extrinsic motivation. And so that's the kind of intrinsic motivation that can keep you going for a long time. Another way to think about it is competing against yourself. Right. It's like, can I get better at doing this?

Right.

And can I prove to myself that I can get better?

There's also a big social component to.

This, and this is one of the reasons why Silicon Valley punches so far above its weight as a place. There's a psychological component which also goes to the comparison set.

So a phenomenon that we've observed over.

Time is the leading tech company in any city will aspire to be as large as the previous leading tech company in that city, but often not larger. Right. Because they sort of.

They have a model of success.

And as long as they beat that level of success, they've kind of checked the box like they've made it.

But then, in contrast, you're in Silicon.

Valley and you look around and it's just like Facebook and Cisco and Oracle and Hewlett Packard and Gladiators.

Yeah.

And you're just like, looking at these.

Giants, and many of them are still.

Mark Zuckerberg's still going to work every day and trying to do.

And so these people are like the.

Role models are alive.

They're right there. And it's so clear how much better.

They are and how much bigger their accomplishments are. And so what we find is young founders in that environment have much greater.

Aspirations because again, at that point, maybe.

It'S the social status, maybe there's an.

Extrinsic component to that, or maybe it.

Helps calibrate that internal system to basically say, actually no, the opportunity here is not to build a local, what you might call a local maximum form of success, but let's build to a global maximum form of success, which is something as big as we possibly can.

Ultimately, the great ones are probably driven.

More internally than externally when it comes down to it. And that is where you get this phenomenon, where you get people who are extremely successful and extremely wealthy, who very easily can punch out and move to Fiji and just call it. And they're still working 16 hour days. Obviously something explains that that has nothing to do with external rewards. And I think it's an internal thing.

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A lot about the inner landscape, the inner psychology of these folks. And I appreciate that we're going even deeper into that today and we will talk about the landscape around whether or not Silicon Valley or New York, whether or not there are specific cities that are ideal for certain types of pursuits. I think there was an article written by Paul Graham some years ago about the conversations that you overhear in a city will tell you everything you need to know about whether or not you belong there in terms of your professional pursuits. Some of that's changed over time, and now we should probably add Austin to the mix because it was written some time ago. In any event, I want to return to that, but I want to focus on an aspect of this intrinsic versus extrinsic motivators in terms of something that's a bit more cryptic, which is one's personal relationships. If I think about the catalog of innovators in Silicon Valley, some of them, like Steve Jobs, had complicated personal lives, romantic personal lives, early on. And it sounds like he worked it out. I don't know. I wasn't their couple's therapist, but when he died, he was in a marriage that for all the world, seemed like a happy marriage. You also have examples of innovators who have had many partners, many children with other partners. Elon comes to mind. I don't think I'm disclosing anything that isn't already obvious. Those could have been happy relationships and just had many of them. But the reason I'm asking this is you can imagine that for the innovator, the person with these traits who's trying to build up this thing, whatever it is, that having someone or several people in some cases who just truly believe in you, when the rest of the world may not believe in you yet or at all, could be immensely powerful. And we have examples from cults that embody this. We have examples from politics, we have examples from tech, innovation and science. And I've always been fascinated by this because I feel like it's the more cryptic and yet very potent form of allowing someone to build themselves up. It's a combination of inner psychology and extrinsic motivation, because obviously if that person were to die or leave them or cheat on them, or pair up with some other innovator, which we've seen several times recently and in the past, it can be devastating to that person. But what are your thoughts on the role of personal and in particular romantic relationship as it relates to people having an idea and their feeling that they can really bring that idea to fruition in the world.

So it's a real mixed bag.

You have lots of examples in all directions, and I think it's something like following. So first is, we talked about the personality traits of these people. They tend to be highly disagreeable.

It doesn't foster a good romantic Relationship.

Highly disgraceful. People can be difficult to be in relationships.

I may have heard of that once or twice before. A friend may have given me that example.

Yeah, right. And, you know, maybe you just need.

To find the right person who, like, compliments that and is willing to.

You know, there's.

There's a lot of relationships where, like.

It'S always this question about relationships, right.

Which is, do you want to have the same personality, you know, growth profile, the same behavioral traits basically as your partner, or do you actually want to have, you know, is it an opposites thing?

And, you know, look, I'm sure you've seen this.

There are relationships where you'll have somebody who's highly disagreeable, who's paired with somebody who's highly agreeable. And it actually works out great. Great. Because one person just gets to be on their soapbox all the time and.

The other person's just like, okay, it's fine, it's fine.

It's good. You put two disagreeable people together, maybe sparks fly, and they have great conversations all the time, and maybe they come to hate each other anyway.

So these people, if you're going to.

Be with one of these people, you're fishing out of the disagreeable end of the pond.

And again, when I say disagreeable, I.

Don'T mean these are normal distributions. I don't mean like 60% disagreeable or 80% disagreeable. The people we're talking about are 99.99% disagreeable, right? So these are ornery people. So part of it's that.

And then of course, they have the.

Other personality traits, right? They're super conscientious, they're super driven. As a consequence, they tend to work really hard. They tend to not have a lot of time for family vacations or other things, and they don't enjoy them if they're forced to go on them. And so again, that kind of thing can fray at a relationship.

So there's a fair amount in there that's loaded. Somebody who's going to partner with one.

Of these people needs to be signed up for the ride. And that's a hard thing. You know, that's a hard thing to do. Or you need a true partnership of two of these, which is also hard to do.

So I think that's part of it. And then, look, I think a big part of it is, you know, people.

Achieve a certain level of success and, you know, either in their own minds or, you know, publicly, and then they start to be able to get away with things, right? And they Start to be able to. It's like, well, okay, you know, now we're rich and successful and famous and now I deserve, you know, and this.

Is where you get into.

I view this now in the realm of personal choice. You get in this thing where people start to think that they deserve things and so they start to behave in very bad ways and then they blow up their personal worlds as a consequence and maybe they regret it later and maybe they don't.

Right.

It's always a question.

So, yeah, so I think there's that. And then I don't know. Yeah, some people just need.

Maybe the other part of it is some people just need more emotional support than others. And I don't know that that's a big.

I don't know that that tilts either way.

I know some of these people who have like great loving relationships and seem to draw very much on how having this kind of firm foundation to rely upon. And then I know other people who are just like their personal lives are just a continuous train wreck and it.

Doesn'T seem to matter, like professionally, they.

Just keep doing what they're doing.

And maybe we could talk here about.

Whatever is the personality trait for risk taking. Right. Some people are so incredibly risk prone that they need to take risk in all aspects of their lives at all times. And if part of their life gets stable, they find a way to blow it up. And that some of these people you could describe in those terms also.

Yeah, let's talk about that. Because I think risk taking and sensation seeking is something that fascinates me for my own reasons and in my observations of others. Does it dovetail with these five traits in a way that can really serve innovation in ways that can benefit everybody? The reason I say to benefit everybody is because there is a view of how we're painting this picture of the innovator as this really cruel person. But oftentimes what we're talking about are innovations that make the world far better for billions of people.

Yeah, that's right. And by the way, everything we're talking.

About also is not just in tech or science or in business. Everything we're also talking about is true for the arts. The history of artistic expression is people with all these same kinds of traits.

Well, I was thinking about Picasso and his regular turnover of lovers and partners. And he was very open about the fact that it was one of the sources of his productivity slash creativity. He wasn't shy about that. I suppose if he were alive today, it might be a little bit different. He might be Judged a little differently.

Right. Or that was his story for, you.

Know, behaving in a pattern that, you know, was very awful for the people around him and he didn't care.

Right, right. Maybe they left him.

Yeah. Like, you know, who knows? Right. So, you know, puts and takes to all this, but no. Okay, so I have a theory.

So here's a theory. This is one of these. I keep a list of things that'll get me kicked out of a dinner party, Topics at any given point in time.

Do you read it before you go in?

Yeah, I just.

Yeah. On autorecall so that I can get out of these things.

But. So here's the thing that get me.

Kicked out of a dinner party, especially these days.

So think of the kind of person.

Where it's like, very clear that they're like, super high, to your point, somebody.

Is super high output.

Whatever domain they're in, they've done things that have, like, fundamentally like, changed the world. They've brought new, whether it's businesses or technologies or works of art, entire schools of creative expression, in some cases, to the world.

And then at a certain point, they.

Blow themselves to smithereens. And they do that either through a massive financial scandal, they do that through a massive personal breakdown, they do that through some sort of public expression that causes them a huge amount of problems. They say the wrong thing maybe not once, but several hundred times and blow themselves to smithereens.

And there's this. There's this kind of arc. There's this moral arc that people kind.

Of want to apply, which. It's like the Icarus, you know, the, the, you know, flying too close to the sun and, you know, he had it coming and he needed to keep his ego under control. And you get kind of this, you know, kind of this, this, this. This judgment that applies.

So I have a different theory on this. So the term I use to describe.

These people and a lot of.

And by the way, a lot of other people who don't actually blow themselves.

Up but get close to it, which is a whole other set of people. I call them martyrs to civilizational progress, Right? So we're backwards.

Civilizational progress. So look, the only way civilization gets.

Moved forward is when people like this do something new, right? Because civilization as a whole does not do new things, right? Groups of people do not do new things, right? These things don't happen automatically.

By default.

Nothing changes.

The only way civilizational change on any.

Of these axes ever happens is because one of these people stands up and says, no, no, I'm going to do something different than what everybody else is ever done before.

So this is progress.

Like this is actually how it happens.

Sometimes they get lionized or rewarded, sometimes they get crucified, sometimes the crucification is.

Literal, sometimes it's just symbolic. But they are those kinds of people.

And then murders when they go down in flames. And again, this is where it really.

Screws the people's moral judgments because everybody wants to have this super clear story of, okay, he did a bad thing and he was punished.

And I'm like, no, no, no, no, no, no. He was the kind of person who.

Was going to do great things and also was going to take on a level of risk and take on a level of sort of extreme behavior such that he was going to expose himself to flying too close to the sun, wings melt and crash to ground.

But it's a package deal, right? The reason you have the Picassos and.

The Beethovens and all these people is because they're willing to take these extreme level of risks. They are that creative and original, not just in their art or their business, but in everything else that they do.

That they will set themselves up to be able to fail psychologically.

A psychologist would probably, or psychiatrist would probably say maybe to what extent do they actually have a death wish? Do they actually, at some point, do they want to punish themselves? Do they want to fail? That I don't know.

But you see this. They deliberately move themselves too close to the sun and you can see it when it's happening because if they get too far from the sun, they deliberately move back towards it. They come right back and they want the risk. And so anyway, so martyrs to civilizational progress.

This is how progress happens.

When these people crash and burn, the.

Natural inclination is to judge them morally. I tend to think we should basically.

Say, look, and I don't even know.

If this means giving them a moral pass or whatever, but it's like, look, this is how civilization progresses.

And we need to at least understand.

That there's a self sacrificial aspect to.

This that may be tragic and often.

Is tragic, but it is quite literally self sacrificing, sacrificial.

Are there any examples of great innovators who were able to compartmentalize their risk taking to such a degree that they had what seemed to be a morally impeccable life in every domain except in their business pursuits?

Yeah, that's right. So some people are very highly controlled like that.

Some people are able to like very narrowly.

And I don't really want to cite.

Myself an example in a lot of this. But I will tell you, like, as an example, like, I will never use, use debt in business, number one. Number two, I have the most placid personal life you can imagine. Number three, I'm the last person in the world who's ever going to do an extreme sport.

I mean, I'm not even going to.

Go on the sauna, on the ice bath.

I'm not doing any of this. I don't end up doing anything. I'm not heliskiing, no obligation. I'm not on the Titan.

I'm not going down to see the Titanic.

Oh, my goodness, you weren't.

I'm not doing any of this. I'm not doing any of this stuff.

I have no interest. I don't play golf, I don't ski. I have no interest in any of this stuff.

And so there are, and I know.

People like this who are very high achievers. It's just like, yeah, they're completely segmented. They're extreme risk takers in business. They're completely buttoned down on the personal side. They're completely buttoned down financially. They're scrupulous with following every rule and law you can possibly imagine.

But they're still fantastic innovators. And then I know many others who.

Are just like, their life is on fire all the time in every possible way. And whenever it looks like the fire is turning into embers, they figure out a way to relight the fire and they just, just really want to live on the edge.

And so I think that's maybe.

I think that's an independent variable.

And again, I would apply the same thing.

I think the same thing applies to the arts. Classical music as an example. Like, I think Bach was, as an example, one of the kind of best musicians of all time. Had just a completely sedate personal life. Never had any aberrant behavior at all in his personal life. Family, man, tons of kids, apparently pillar of the community. And so if Bach could be Bach and yet not burn his way through 300 mistresses or whatever, maybe you can too.

So in thinking about these two different categories of innovators, those that take on tremendous risk in all domains of their life, and those that take on tremendous risk in a very compartmentalized way. I don't know what the percentages are, but I have to wonder if in this modern age of the public being far less forgivable. What I'm referring to is cancel culture. Do you think that we are limiting the number of innovations in total by just Simply frightening or eliminating an enormous category of innovators because they don't have the confidence or the means or the strategies in place to regulate. So they're just either bowing out or they're getting crossed off, they're getting canceled one by one.

So do you think the public is less tolerant than they used to be or more tolerant?

Well, the systems that. But I'm not going to be careful here. I think the large institution systems are not tolerant of what the public tells them they shouldn't be tolerant of. And so if there's enough noise, there's enough noise in the mob. I think institutions bow out. And here I'm referring not just to, they essentially say, okay, let the cancellation proceed, or they, and maybe they're the gavel that comes down, but they're not the lever that got the thing going. And so I'm not just thinking about universities, I'm also thinking about advertisers. I'm thinking about the big movie houses that cancel a film that a given actor might be in because they had something in their personal life that's still getting worked out. I'm thinking about people who are in a legal process that's not yet resolved, but the public has decided they're a bad person, et cetera.

My question is, are we really talking about the public?

I agree with your question and I'm.

Going to come back to it. But I'm going to examine one part of your question which is is this really the public we're talking about? And I would just say exhibit A is who is the current frontrunner for the Republican nomination?

Today the public, at least on one.

Side of the political aisle, seems very on board. Right. Number two, like, look, you know, there's a certain musician who like, you know, flew too close to the sun, blew himself to smithereens. He's still hitting all time highs on music streams every month. The public seems fine.

I think the public might, I would.

Argue the public is actually more open to these things than it actually maybe ever has been. And we could talk about why that's the case. I think it's a differentiation and this is what your question was aiming at, but it's a differentiation between the public and the elites.

My view is everything that you just.

Described is an elite phenomenon. And actually the public is very much not on board with it.

Interesting.

And so what's actually happening is the division. What's happened is the public and the.

Elites have gapped out.

The public is more forgiving of what.

Previously might have been considered kind Of Ebon or extreme behavior.

F. Scott Fitzgerald.

There are no second acts in American lives. It turns out completely wrong. Turns out there's second acts, third acts, fourth acts. Apparently you can have a limited number of acts. The public is actually up for it.

Yeah. I mean, I think of somebody like Mike Tyson. Right. I feel like his life exemplifies everything that's amazing and great and. And also terrible about America.

If we took Mike Tyson to dinner.

Tonight at any restaurant anywhere in the United States, what would happen?

He would be loved.

Oh, he would be, like, adored. He would. The outpouring of enthusiasm and passion and love would be incredible. Like, it would be unbelievable. This is a great example. Like, just like. And again, I'm not even gonna draw more. I'm not even gonna say I agree.

With that or disagree with that. I'm just like.

I think we all intuitively know that.

The public is just, like, 100%, like, absolutely. Like, he's a legend. Like, he's a legend.

He's a living legend.

I love Mike.

He's like a cultural touchstone.

Absolutely. And. And you see it when he shows.

Up in movies, right?

He shows.

I remember the.

I mean, the big breakthrough.

I figured this out with respect to him because I don't really follow sports, but when he showed up in that. It was that first Hangover movie, and.

He shows up, and I was in a theater, and the audience just goes bananas, crazy. They're so excited to see him.

Yeah.

He evokes delight. I always say that Mike Tyson is the only person I'm aware of that can wear a shirt with his own name on it. And it somehow doesn't seem wrong. In fact, it just kind of makes.

You like him more.

His ego feels very contoured in a way that he knows who he is and who he was. And yet there's a humbleness woven in, maybe as a consequence of all that he's been through. I don't know. But, yeah, people love Mike.

Public loves him now. Exactly.

Now, if he shows up to lecture at Harvard, I think you're probably gonna get a different reaction.

I don't know. I don't know. I mean, David Simon, you know, the guy who wrote the One Wire, gave a talk at Harvard, and it sounded to me based on his report of that, which is very interesting, in fact, that people adore people who are connected to everybody in that way. I feel like everybody loves Mike from above. His status, the sides below his status. He's just sort of. He occupies this halo of love and adoration.

Okay, all right. Yeah, yeah. And then, look, the other side of.

This is the elites. And you kind of alluded to this with the institution. So basically it's like the people who are like, at least nominally in charge or feel like that they should be in charge.

Yeah, I want to make sure we define elite. So you're not necessarily talking about people who are wealthy. You're talking about people who have authority within institutions.

So the ultimate definition of an elite.

Is who can get who fired. Right.

Like, that's the ultimate test. Who can get who fired?

Boycotted, blacklisted, ostracized, like when pushed, prosecuted, jailed, like when push comes to shove, I think that's always the question, who can destroy whose career? And of course, you'll notice that that is heavily asymmetric. When these fights play out, it's very clear which side can get the other side fired and which side can't.

And so, yeah, so look, I think we live in a period of time.

Where the elites have gotten to be extreme in a number of dimensions. And I think it's characterized by for sure, extreme groupthink, extreme sanctimony, extreme moral, I would say dudgeon, extreme, this weird sort of modern puritanism, and then an extreme sort of morality of, like, punishment and terror against their perceived enemies.

But I want to go through that.

Because I actually think. I actually think that's a very different phenomenon. I think what's happening at the elites is very different than what's happening in the population at large.

And then, of course, I think there's.

A feedback loop in there which is, I think the population at large is not on board with that program. Right. I think the elites are aware that the population is not on board with that program. I think they judge the population negative, negatively as a consequence. That causes the elites to harden their own positions. That causes them to be even more alienating to the population. And so they're in sort of an oppositional negative feedback loop. And yeah, it's going to be. But again, it's the sort of question, okay, who can get who fired? And so elites are really good at getting normal people fired, ostracized, banned, hit pieces in the press, like whatever. For normal people to get elites fired, they have to really light band together and really mount a serious challenge, which mostly doesn't happen, but might be starting to happen in some cases.

Do you think this power of the elites over stemmed from social media sort of going against its original purpose? I mean, when you think social media, you think you're giving each and every person, their own little reality TV show, their own voice. And yet we've seen a dramatic uptick in the number of cancellations and firings related to immoral behavior based on things that were either done or amplified on social media. It's almost as if the public is holding the wrong end of the knife.

Yeah. So the way I describe it, so I use these two terms and they're somewhat interchangeable, but elites and institutions. And they're somewhat interchangeable because who runs the institutions?

The elites. Right. And so it's a sort of a self reinforcing thing. And institutions of all of kinds, science institutions, everything from the government, bureaucracies, companies, nonprofits, foundations, NGOs, tech companies, on and on and on. Like people who are in charge of big complexes and that carry a lot of basically power and influence and capability and money as a consequence of their positional authority. Right. So the head of a giant foundation may never have done anything in their life that would cause somebody to have a high opinion of them as a person, but they're in charge of this gigantic multi billion dollar contract complex and have all this power that results. And so that's just to define terms elites in institutions.

So it's actually interesting, Gallup has been.

Doing polls on the following, on the question of trust in institutions, which is sort of a therefore proxy for trust in elites basically since the early 1970s. And what you find, and they do this across all the categories of big institutions. Basically everyone I just talked about a bunch of others, big business, small business, banks, newspapers, broadcast television, the military, police. So they've got like 30 categories or something.

And basically what you see is almost.

All the categories basically started in the early 70s at like 60 or 70% trust. And now they've almost across the board, they've just had a complete basically linear slide down for 50 years, basically my whole life. And you know, they're now bottoming out. Congress and journalists bottom out at like 10%. The two groups everybody hates are like Congress and journalists.

And then it's like a lot of.

Other big institutions are like 20 in their 20s, 30s, 40s, actually. Big business actually scores fairly high. Tech actually scores quite high, the military scores quite high. But basically everything else has really caved in.

And so this is sort of my.

Fundamental challenge to everybody who basically says, and you didn't do this, but you'll hear the simple form of this, which is social media caused the current, current trouble. And let's call this an example collapse in faith in institutions and elites. Let's call that part of the current trouble, everybody's like, well, social media caused that. I was like, well, no, social media is new, right? In the last. Social media is effectively new, practically speaking, since 2010, 2012 is when it really took off. And so if the trend started in the early 1970s and it's been continuous, then we're dealing with something broader.

And Martin Gurry wrote, I think the.

Best book on this called the Revolt of the Public, where he goes through this in detail and he does say that social media had a lot to do with what's happened in the last decade.

But he says, yeah, if you go.

Back, you look further, it was basically two things coinciding. One was just a general change in the media environment. And in particular the 1970s is when you started, and especially in the 1980s is when you started to get specifically talk radio, which was a new outlet. And then you also start. You also got cable television. And then you also, by the way.

It'S actually interesting, in the 50s, 60s.

You had paperback books, which was another one of these, which was an outlet.

So you had a fracturing of the.

Media landscape that started in the 50s through the 80s. And then of course the Internet blew it wide open.

Having said that, if the elites and the institutions were fantastic, you would know it more than ever because information is more accessible.

And so the other thing that he says, and I agree with, is the public is not being tricked into thinking the elites and institutions are bad. They're learning that they're bad. Right.

And the mystery, and therefore the mystery.

Of the Gallup poll is why those numbers aren't all just zero. Right. Which is arguably in a lot of cases where they should be.

I think one reason that, and by.

The way, he thinks this is bad. So he and I have a different view. So here's where he and I disagree. He thinks this is bad. So he basically says you can't replace elites with nothing, you can't replace institutions.

With nothing, because what you're just left with is just going to be wreckage. You're going to left with a completely, basically atomized, out of control society that has no ability to marshal any sort of activity in any direction. It's just going to be a dog eat dog, awful, you know, world. I have a very different view on that, which we could, which we could talk about.

Yeah, I'd love to, I'd love to hear your views on that.

Yeah.

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Off the quick question I was gonna ask before we go there is I think that one reason that that I and many other people sort of reflexively assume that social media caused the demise of our faith and institutions is. Well, first of all, I wasn't aware of this lack of correlation between the decline in faith and institutions and the rise of social media. But secondarily that we've seen some movements that have essentially rooted themselves in tweets, in comments, in posts that get amplified. And those tweets and comments and posts come from everyday people. In fact, I can't name one person who initiated a given cancellation or movement because it was the sort of dog piling or mob adding on to some person that was essentially anonymous. So I think that for many of us we have the bottom to use neuroscience language is sort of a bottom up perspective. Oh, someone sees something in their daily life or experiences something in their daily life and they tweet about it or they comment about it or they post about it. And then enough people dogpile on the accused that it picks up force and then the elites feel compelled, obligated to cancel somebody. That tends to be the narrative. And so I think the logical conclusion is, oh, social media allows for this to happen, whereas normally someone would just be standing on the corner shouting or are calling lawyers that don't have faith in them and you've got The Erin.

Brockovich model.

That turns into a movie. But that's a rare case of this lone woman who's got this idea in mind about how big institution is doing wrong or somebody is doing wrong in the world and then can leverage big institutions. But the way that you describe it is that the elites are leading this shift. So. So what is the role of the public in it? I mean, just to give it a concrete example, if, for instance, no one tweeted or commented a MeToo, or no one tweeted or commented about some ill behavior of some, I don't know, university faculty member or business person, would the elite have come down on them anyway?

Oh, yeah. So what's happening? So based on what I've seen over.

The years is it's. There is so much astroturfing right now.

There are entire categories of people who.

Are paid to do this. Some of them we call journalists, some of them we call activists, some of them we call NGO nonprofits, some of them we call university professors, some of them we call grad students. Whatever, they're paid to do this.

I don't know if you've ever looked.

Into the misinformation industrial complex. There's this whole universe of basically these funded groups that basically do misinformation and they're constantly mounting these kinds of attacks.

They're constantly trying to gin up this.

Kind of basically panic to cause somebody to get fired.

So it's not grassroots.

No.

It's the opposite of grassroots. No.

Almost always when you trace these things.

Back, it was a journalist, it was an activist, it was a public figure of some kind. These are entrepreneurs in a sort of a weird way. Like basically they're paid their job, mission calling, it's all wrapped up together like they're true believers, but they're also getting paid to do it.

And there's a giant funding.

I mean, there's a very large funding complex for this coming from certain high profile people who put huge amounts of money into this.

Is this well known?

Yes, well, so, I mean, it is in my world. So this is what the social media.

Companies have been on the receiving end of for the last decade is it's this. It's basically a political media activism complex with very deep pockets behind it. And you've got people who basically, literally have people who sit all day and watch the TV network on the other side or watch the Twitter feeds the other side, and they basically wait.

It's like every politician, this has been.

The case for a long time now. Every politician who goes out and gives stump speeches. You'll see there's always somebody in the crowd of the camcorder or now with a phone recording them. And that's somebody from the other campaign who's paid somebody to just be there and record every single thing the politician says. So that when a Mitt Romney says whatever the 47% thing, they've got it on tape and then they clip it and they try to make it viral.

So this stuff is. And again, look, these people believe what they're doing. I'm not saying it's even dishonest.

These people believe what they're doing. They think they're fighting a holy war. They think they're protecting democracy, they think they're protecting civilization, they think they're protecting whatever it is they're protecting.

And then they know how to use.

The tools and so they know how to try to gin up the outrage.

And then, by the way, sometimes it.

Works social cascades, Sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't. Sometimes they cascade, sometimes they don't.

But if you follow these people on.

Twitter, this is what they do every day. They're constantly trying to light this fire.

I assume it was really bottom up, but it sounds like it's sort of a mid level. And then it captures the elites and then the thing takes on a life of its own.

By the way, it also intersects with.

The trust and safety groups at the social media firms who are responsible for figuring out who gets promoted and who gets banned right across this. And you'll notice one large social media company has recently changed hands and has implemented a different kind of set of trust and safety.

And all of a sudden a different.

Kind of white movement has all of a sudden started to work that wasn't working before that. And another kind of boycott movement is not working as well anymore.

And so for sure there's an intermediation happening. Look, the stuff that's happening in the.

World today is being intermediated through social media, because social media is the defining media of our time. But there are people who know how to do this and do this for a living.

So no, I very much view this.

As a. I view very much the cancellation wave. Like this whole thing, it's an illusion elite phenomenon. And when it appears to be a grassroots thing, it's either grassroots among the elites, which is possible because there's a fairly large number of people who are signed up for that particular crusade, but there's also a lot of astroturfing that's taking place inside that.

The question is, okay, at what point.

Does the population at large get pulled into this?

And maybe there are movements at certain points in time where they do get.

Pulled in and then maybe later they get disillusioned. And so then there's some question there and then there's an another question of like, well, if the population at large is going to decide what these movements are, are they going to be the same movements that the elites want? And how are the elites going to react when the population actually fully expresses itself? Right. And like I said, there's a feedback loop between these where the more extreme the elites get, they tend to push the population to more extreme views on the other side and vice versa. So it ping pongs back and forth. And so, yeah, this is our world.

Yeah, this explains a lot. I want to make sure that, by.

The way, Taibbi, so Mike Schellenberger, Matt.

Taibbi, a bunch of these guys have done a lot of work. Just look into what's called the misinformation industrial complex. You'll find a network of money and power that is really quite amazing.

I've seen more and more Shellenberger showing up, right?

And he's just look on this stuff.

He and Taibi, and they're literally just like tracking money. It's just like, it's very clear how the money flows, including like a remarkable amount of money out of the government, which is of course like in theory, very concerning.

Very interesting.

The government should not be funding programs that take away people's constitutional rights. And yet somehow that is what's been happening.

Very interesting, yes. I want to make sure that I hear your ideas about why the decline in confidence in institutions is not necessarily problematic. Is this going to be a total destruction, burning down of the forest that will lead to new life? Is that your view?

Yeah.

Well, so this is the thing and look, there's a question if you're.

There's a couple questions in here, which.

Is so it's like, how bad is it really?

Like, how bad are they? Right. And I think they're pretty bad. A lot of them are pretty actually bad. And so that's one big question.

And then, yeah, look, the other question.

Is like, okay, if an institution has gone bad or a group of elites have gone bad, it's this wonderful word, reform, right. Can they be reformed? And everybody always wants to reform everything and yet somehow nothing ever quite ever gets reformed, right? And so people are trying to reform how policy in the Bay Area for decades and we're not building, we're building fewer houses than ever before. So somehow reform movements seem to lead to more. Just more bad stuff.

But anyway. Yeah. So if you have an existing institution.

Can it be reformed? Can it be fixed from the inside?

What's happening in universities? There are professors at Stanford, as an.

Example, who very much think that they can fix Stanford. I don't know what you think. It doesn't seem like it's going in productive directions right now.

Well, I mean, there are many things about Stanford that function extremely well. It's a big institution. It's certainly got its issues like any other place. They're also. My employer, Mark's giving me some interesting looks. He wants me to get a little more vocal here.

No, no, no, you don't need to. Oh, no.

I mean, I think that.

I didn't mean to put you on the spot.

Yeah. I mean, one of the things about being a researcher at a big institution like Stanford is. Well, first of all, it meets the criteria that you described before. You look to the left, you look to the right, or anywhere above or below you, and you have excellence.

Right.

I mean, I've got a Nobel Prize winner below me whose daddy also won a Nobel Prize, and. And scientific offspring is likely to win. I mean, it inspires you to do bigger things than one ordinarily would, no matter what. So there's that, and that's great, and that persists. There's all the bureaucratic red tape about trying to get things done and how to implement decisions is very hard. And there are a lot of reasons for that. And then, of course, there are the things that many people are aware of. There are public accusations about people in positions of great leadership, and that's getting played out. And it's. And the whole thing becomes kind of overwhelming and a little bit opaque when you're just trying to run your lab or live your life. And so I think one of the reasons for this lack of reform that you're referring to is because there's no position of reformer. Right. So deans are dealing with a lot of issues. Provosts are dealing with a lot of issues. Presidents are dealing with a lot of issues, and then some in some cases. And so we don't have a dedicated role of reformer, someone to go in and say, listen, there's just. Just a lot of fat on this and we need to trim it or we need to create this or do that. There just isn't a system to do that. And that's, I think, in part because universities are built on old systems. And it's like the New York subway. It's amazing it still works as well as it does and yet it's got a ton of problems also.

Well, so the point, we could debate the university specifically, but the point is, look, if you do think institutions are.

Going bad and then you have to.

Make it number one, you have to.

Figure out if you think institutions are going bad. The population largely does think that. And at the very least, the people who run institutions ought to really think hard about what that means.

But people still strive to go to these places. And I still hear from people who, for instance, did not go to college, are talking about how a university degree is useless. They'll tell you how proud they are that their son or daughter is going to Stanford or is going to UCLA or is going to Urbana. Champagne. I mean, it's almost like to me that's always the most, you know, shocking contradiction is like, yeah, like these institutions don't matter. But then when people want to hold up a card that says why their kid is great, it's not about how many push ups they can do or that they started their own business most of the time, it's they're going to this university. And I think, well, what's going on here?

So do you think the median voter.

In the United States can have their kid go to Stanford?

No, no, no.

The median voter in the United States.

Could have their kid admitted to Stanford even with perfect satisfaction.

No. In this day and age, the competition is so fierce that it requires more.

Yeah.

So first of all, again, we're dealing here, yes, we're dealing there with a small number of very elite institutions. People may admire them or not. Most people have no connectivity to them whatsoever. In the statistics, in the polling. Universities are not doing well. The population at large, yeah, they may have fantasies about their kid going to Stanford, but the reality of it is they have a very, very, very say, collapsing view of these institutions.

So anyway, this actually goes straight to.

The question of alternatives then, right?

Which is like, okay, if you believe.

That there's collapsing faith in the institutions, if you believe that it is merited, at least in some ways, if you believe that reform is effectively impossible, then you are faced.

And we could debate each of those.

But the population at large seems to.

Believe a lot of that, then there's.

A question of, okay, can it be replaced?

And if so, are you better off.

Replacing these things basically while the old things still exist, or do you actually need to basically clear the field to be able to have the new thing exist?

The universities are a great case study.

Of this because of the Student because of how student loans work.

Right.

And the way student loans work is.

To be able to be a unit.

To be an actual competitive university and compete, you need to have access to federal student lending. Because if you don't, everybody has to pay out of pocket and it's completely out of reach for anybody other than a certain class of either extremely rich or foreign students.

So you need access to federal student loan facility. To get access to federal student loan.

Facility, you need to be an accredited university. Guess who runs the accreditation council? I don't know, the existing universities. Right. So it's a self laundering machine. Like they decide who the new universities are. Guess how many new universities get accredited each year to be able?

Zero.

Right.

And so as long as that system.

Is in place and as long as they have the government wired the way way that they do, and as long as they control who gets access to federal student loan funding, of course there's not going to be any competition. Of course there can't be a new institution that's going to be able to get to scale. It's not possible.

And so if you actually wanted to.

Create a new system that was better in the, I would argue dozens or hundreds of ways, it could obviously be better if you were starting today, it probably can't be done as long as the existing institutions are actually intact.

And this is my counter against Martin.

Which is like, yeah, look, if we're.

Going to tear down the old, there.

May be a period of disruption before we get to the new, but we're.

Never going to get to the new.

If we don't tear down the old.

When you say counter to Martin, you're talking about the author of Revolt of the poem.

Yeah, Martin Gurri. Yeah.

What Martin Gurry says is like, look, he said basically what Martin says is.

As follows, the elites deserve contempt, but the only thing worse than these elites that deserve contempt would be no elites at all.

Right. Because.

And he basically says on the other.

Side, on the other side of the.

Deck, destruction of the elites and the institutions is nihilism. You're basically left with nothing.

And by the way, there is a nihilistic streak.

I mean, there's a nihilistic streak in the culture and the politics today. There are people who basically would just say, yeah, just tear the whole system down without any particular plan for what follows.

And so I think he makes a.

Good point in that you want to be careful that you actually have a plan on the other side that you think is actually achievable.

But again, the counterargument to that is.

If you're not willing to actually tear down the, the old, you're not going to get to the new.

Now what's interesting of course, is that this is what happens every day in business, right? So like the entire way, like how.

How do you know that the capitalist system works?

The way that you know is that.

The old companies, when they're no longer like the best at what they do, they get torn down and then they ultimately die and they get replaced by better companies.

Yeah, I haven't seen a Sears in a while.

Exactly right. And we know, what's so interesting is we know in, in capitalism and a market economy, we know that that's the sign of health, health. That's the sign of how the system is working properly. And in fact we get actually judged by antitrust authorities in the government on that basis. It's like the best defense against antitrust.

Charges is no people are coming to kill us and they're doing a really good job of it.

That's how we know we're doing our job. And in fact in business we are specifically, it is specifically illegal for companies in the same industry to get together.

And plot and conspire and plan and have things like these accreditation bureaus.

If I created the equivalent in my companies of the kind of, of accreditation bureau that the universities have, I'd get straight to federal prison and a trust.

Violation, Sherman act, straight to prison.

People have been sent to prison for that. So in the business world, we know that you want everything subject to market competition.

We know that you want creative destruction, we know that you want replacement of the old with superior new.

It's just once we get outside of.

Business, we're like, oh, we don't want any of that. We want basically stagnation and log rolling and basically institutional incestuous like entanglements and conflicts of interest as far as the eye can see. And then we're surprised by the results.

So let's play it out as a bit of a thought experiment. So let's say that one small banding together of people who want to start a new university where free exchange of open ideas, where unless somebody has egregious behavior, violent behavior, truly sexually inappropriate behavior against somebody that committing a crime, they're allowed to be there. They're allowed to be a student or a faculty member or administrator and let's just say this accreditation bureau allowed student loans for this one particular university. Or let's say that there was an independent source of funding for that university such that students could Just apply there. They didn't need to be part of this elite accredited group, which sounds very mafia, like, frankly, not necessarily violent, but certainly coercive in the way that it walls people out. Say that then there were 20 or 30 of those or 40 of those. Do you think that over time that model would overtake the existing model?

Isn't it interesting that those don't exist? Remember the Sherlock Holmes, the dog that didn't bark?

It is interesting those don't exist.

So there's two possibilities.

One is nobody wants that, which I don't believe. And then the other is the system is wide in a way that will just simply not allow it.

Right.

And you did a hypothetical in which the system would allow it. And my response to that is, no, of course the system won't allow that.

Or the people that band together, you know, have enough money or get enough resources to say, look, we can, you know, we can afford to give loans to, you know, 10,000 students per year. You know, 10,000 isn't a trivial number when thinking about the size of a university. And, you know, they. Most of them hopefully will graduate in four years and there'll be a turnover. And do you think that the great future innovators would tend to orient toward that model more than they currently do.

Toward the traditional model?

What I'm trying to get back to here is how do you think that the current model thwarts innovation as well as maybe some ways that it still supports innovation? Certainly cancellation. And the risk of cancellation, from the way that we framed it earlier, is going to discourage risk takers of the category of risk takers that take risk in every. Every domain that really like to fly close to the sun and sometimes into.

The sun, or are doing research that is just not politically right.

Yeah. Looking into issues that, you know. Right. That, that, you know, we can't even talk about on this podcast probably without. Without causing a distraction of what we're actually trying to talk about.

That gives up the whole game right there, though.

Exactly.

Yeah.

So the, you know, I keep a file, and it's a written file because I'm afraid to put it in a. Into electronic form. Of all the things that I'm afraid to talk about publicly because I come from a lineage of advisors where all three died young. And I figure if nothing else, I'll die, and then I'll make it into the world and let's say 5, 10 years, 20 years, and if not, I know a certainty I'm going to die at some point, and then we'll See where all those issues stand. In any event, is that list getting.

Longer over time or shorter?

Oh, it's definitely getting longer.

Isn't that interesting?

Yeah, it's getting much longer. There are just so many issues that I would love to explore on this podcast with experts that I can't explore just even if I had a panel of them, because of the way that things get sound bited and segmented out and taken out of context, it's like the whole conversation is lost. And so, fortunately, there are an immense number of equally interesting conversations that I'm excited to have, but it is.

Is.

It is a little disturbing.

Do you remember Lysenkoism?

No.

Oh, so famous in the history of the Soviet Union. This is a famous thing. So there was a genetic. Geneticist named Lysenko.

That's why it sounds familiar, but I'm not calling to mind.

Well, he was the guy who did. He did communist genetics, the field of genetics. The Soviets did not approve of the field of genetics because, of course, they believed in the creation of the new man and total equality, and genetics did not and support that. And so if you were doing traditional genetics, you were going to get, at the very least fired, if not killed. And so this guy Lysenko stood up and said, oh, I've got Marxist genetics. I've got a whole new field of genetics that basically is politically compliant. And then they actually implemented that in the agriculture system of the Soviet Union. And it's the origin of one of the big reasons that the Soviet Union actually fell, which was they ultimately couldn't feed themselves.

So create a new notion of biology as it relates to genetics.

Politically correct biology. Right.

And so they not only created it.

They taught it, they mandated it, they required it, and then they implemented it in agriculture.

Interesting. So, yeah, so I never understood. There are a bunch of things in.

History I never understood until the last decade, and that's one of them.

Well, I censor myself at the level of deleting certain things, but I don't contort what I do talk about. So I tend to like to play on lush open fields. Just makes my life.

But this goes to the rod.

This goes to the rod. And I'll come back to your question. But this goes to the rot in the existing system, which is, by the way, I'm no different. I'm just like you. I'm trying not to light myself on fire either.

But the rot in the existing system.

And by system, I mean the institutions and the elites. The rot is the set of things that are no longer Allowed. I mean that list is obviously expanding over time and that's a real, historically speaking that doesn't end in good places.

Is this group of a particular generation that we can look forward to the time when eventually die off.

It's sort of the boomers plus the millennials. So we've got a while. Good news, bad news.

I mean, Gen X is weird, right?

I'm Gen X. Gen X is weird because we kind of slipped in the middle. We were kind of the, I don't know how to describe it. We were the kind of non political generation kind of sandwiched between the boomers and the millennials. Gen Z is a very, I think, open question right now which way they go. I could imagine them being actually much more intense than the millennials on all these issues. I could also imagine them reacting to the millennials and being far more open minded.

We don't know which way it's going to go yet.

It's going to go. Might be different groups of them.

I mean, I'm Gen x also I'm 47. You're 50.

50, yeah.

Right. So more or less same gen. So grew up with some John Hughes films and so where the jocks and the hippies and the punks and the were all divided, they were all segmented. But then it all sort of mishmashed together a few years later. And I think that had a lot to do with, with like you said, the sort of apolitical aspect to our generation.

We just knew the Gen X just.

Knew the boomers were nuts, right?

Like all the, I mean this is the canonical, right?

One of the great sitcoms of the era was Family Ties, right, with a character, Michael P. Keaton.

And he was just like this guy.

Who'S just like, yeah, my boomer hippie parents are crazy. Like I'm just gonna like go into business and like actually do something productive. Like there was something like iconic about that character in our culture. And you know, people like me were like, like, yeah, obviously you go into business, you don't go into like political activism. And then, you know, it's just like, man, that came whipping back around with the next generation.

So just to touch real quick on the university thing. So look, there are people trying to do.

And I'm actually going to do a thing this afternoon with the University of Austin, which is, which is, which is, which is one of these. And so there are people trying to do new universities.

You know, I like, I would say it's certainly possible.

I hope they succeed. I'm pulling for them. I think it'd be great. I think it'd be great if there were a lot more of them who founded this university.

This is a whole group of people.

I don't, I don't want to freelance on that because I don't know originally who the idea was.

University of Austin, not UT Austin.

Yeah. So this is not UT Austin.

It's called University of Austin or they call it. I think it's UAT or what is it? Uatx.

And so.

And it's a lot of very sharp people associated with it.

And they're going to try to very.

Very much exactly like what you described. They're going to try to do a new one.

I would just tell you, like, the.

Wall of opposition that they're up against is profound found, right? And part of it is economic, which is, can they ever get access to federal student lending? And I, you know, I hope that they can, but I, you know, it seems nearly inconceivable the way the system's rigged today. And then, you know, the other is just like, they're going to. They already have come under. I mean.

Anybody who publicly associates with.

Them, who is in traditional academia immediately gets lit on fire, right? And there's like, you know, cancellation campaigns, like, so they're up against a wall of social ostracism. They're up against a wall of, you know, press attacks. They're up against a wall of, you know, people just, like, doing the thing, pouncing on any. Anytime anybody says anything, they're going to try to, like, burn the place down.

This reminds me of like, like Jerry Springer episodes and Geraldo Rivero episodes where, you know, it's like if a teen listened to, you know, like Danzig or Marilyn Manson type music or Metallica, that they were considered a devil worshipper. Like, we. Now we just laugh, right? We're like, that's crazy, right? People listen to music with all sorts of lyrics and ideas and looks, and that's crazy. But there were people legitimately sent to prison, I think, with the West Memphis Three, right? These kids out in West Memphis that looked different, acted different, were accused of murders that eventually was made clear they clearly didn't commit, but they were in prison because of the music they listened to. I mean, this sounds very similar to that. And I remember seeing bumper stickers free the West Memphis Three. And I thought this was some crazy thing. And you look into it and this isn't. It's a little bit niche, but I mean, these are real lives. And there was an active witch hunt for People that looked different and acted different. And yet now we're sort of in this inverted world where on the one hand, we're all told that we can express ourselves however we want, but on the other hand, you can't get a bunch of people together to take classes where they learn biology and sociology and econ in Texas. Wild.

Yes. Well, so the simple explanation is this is Puritanism, right? So this is the original American Puritanism that just, like, works itself out through the system in different ways at different times. You know, there's this phenomenon. There's a religious phenomenon in America called the Great Awakenings. There's just. There'll be these periods in American history where there's basically religiosity fades, and then there will be this snapback effect where you'll have this basically, this, you know, frenzy, basically, of religion. You know, in the old days, it would have been, you know, tent revivals and people speaking in tongues and all this stuff. And then in the modern world, it's. It's, you know, it's of the form that we're living through right now. And so, yeah, it's just basically these waves of sort of American religious.

And, you know, remember, like religion in our time.

Religious impulses in our time don't get expressed, you know, because we live in. We live in more advanced times, right? We live in scientifically informed times. And so religious impulses in our time don't. They don't show up as overtly religious. They show up in a secularized form, which, of course, conveniently is therefore not subject to the First Amendment, separation of church and state. As long as the church is secular, there's no problem. But we're acting out these kind of religious scripts over and over again, and we're in the middle of another religious frenzy.

There's a phrase that I hear a lot, and I don't necessarily believe it, but I want your thoughts on it, which is, the pendulum always swings back.

Yeah, not quite.

So that's how I feel, too, because.

You know, I'll take.

Boy, that would be great.

Take any number of things that we've talked about. And, you know, gosh, it's so crazy, you know, the way things have gone with institutions, or it's so crazy the way things have gone with social media, or it's so crazy, fill in the blank. And people will say, well, the pendulum always swings back like it's the stock market or something. After every crash, there'll be an eventual boom.

Boom.

And vice versa, by the way.

That's not true either. Right, right. Most stock markets we have, of course, survivorship, but it's all survivors. Everything is survivors. Everything you just said is obviously survivorship bias. Right. So if you look globally, most stock markets over time crash and burn and never recover. The American stock market hasn't always recovered.

Right, I was referring to the American stock market.

Yeah, but globally.

But the reason everybody refers to the.

American stock market is because it's the one that doesn't do that, the other 200 or whatever that crash and burn and never recover. Like, let's go check in on Argentina stock market right now. I don't think it's coming back anytime soon.

Yeah. My father is Argentine and immigrated to the US in the 1960s, so he would definitely agree with that.

Yeah.

It doesn't come when their stocks crash. They don't come back.

And then Lysenkoism, like the Soviet Union.

Never recovered from Lysenkoism. It never came back. It led to the end of the country, literally. The things that took down the Soviet Union were oil and wheat. And the wheat thing, you can trace the crisis back to Lysenkoism.

And so, yeah, no, look, the pendulum always swings back.

Is true. Only in the cases where the pendulum swings back. Everybody just conveniently forgets all the other circumstances where that doesn't happen.

One of the things people, you see.

This in business also, people have a really hard time confronting really bad news. I don't know if you've noticed that. I think every doctor who's listening right now is like, yeah, no shit.

But like, like there are situations, you.

See it in business.

There are situations that, that Star Trek.

Remember Star Trek, the Kobayashi Maru simulator. Right. So the big lesson to become a Star Trek captain is you had to go through the simulation called the Kobayashi Maru. And the point was there's no way to. It's a no win scenario. Right. And then the, and then it turned out like Captain Kirk was the only person to ever win the scenario. And the way that he did it was he went in ahead of time and hacked the simulator. Right. It was the only way to actually get through. And then there was a debate whether to fire him or make him a captain. So they made him a captain.

And like, you know, the problem is.

In real life, like you do get the Kobe Yashimuru on a regular basis. There are actual no win situations that you can't work your way out of. And as a leader, you can't ever cop to that because you have to carry things forward and you have to look for every Possible choice, you can. But every once in a while, you do run into a situation where it's really not recoverable. And at least I've found people just cannot cope with that. What happens is they basically just exclude it from their memory that it ever happened.

I'm glad you brought up simulators, because I want to make sure that we talk about the new and emerging landscape of AI, artificial intelligence. And I could try and smooth our conversation of a moment ago with this one by creating some clever segue. But I'm not going to. Except I'm going to ask, is there a possibility that AI is going to remedy some of what we're talking about? Let's make sure that we earmark that for discussion a little bit later. But first off, because some of the listeners of this podcast might not be as familiar with AI as perhaps they should be. We've all heard about artificial intelligence. People hear about machine learning, et cetera, but it'd be great if you could define for us what AI is. People almost immediately hear AI and think, okay, robots taking over. I'm going to wake up and I'm going to be strapped to the bed and my organs are going to be pulled out of me. That robots are going to be in my bank account.

They're going to kill all my children.

And dystopia for most. Clearly, that's not the way it's going to go if you believe that machines can augment human intelligence and human intelligence is a good thing. So tell us what AI is and where you think it can take us, both good and bad.

Yeah.

So there was a big debate when.

The computer was first invented, which was in the 1930s, 1940s, people like Alan Turing and John von Neumann and these people.

And the big debate at the time.

Was because they knew they wanted to build computers, they had the basic idea.

And there had been, like, calculating machines.

Before that, and there had been, like, there had been these looms that you basically program to punch cards. And so there was a prehistory to computers that had to do with building sort of increasingly complex calculating machines. So they were kind of on a track, but they knew they were going to be able to build. They call it a general purpose computer that could basically, you could program in the way that you program computers today.

But they had a big debate early.

On, which is, should the fundamental architecture of the computer be based on either a calculating machines like cash registers and looms and other things like that, or should it be based on a model of the human brain? And they actually had this idea of computers model on the human brain back of the then. And this was this concept of so called neural networks. And it's actually fairly astonishing from a research standpoint. The original paper on neural networks actually was published in 1943. Right.

So they didn't have our level of neuroscience, but they actually knew about the.

Neuron and they actually had a theory of like neurons interconnecting and synapses and information processing in the brain even back then.

And a lot of people at the.

Time basically said, you know what, we should basically have the computer from the start be model after the human brain. Because like if the computer could do everything that the human brain can do, that would be the best possible general purpose computer. And then you could have it do jobs and you could have it create art and you could have it do all kinds of things like humans can do.

It turns out that didn't happen in our world. What happened instead was the industry went.

In the other direction. It went basically in the model of the calculating machine or the cash register.

And I think practically speaking, that kind.

Of had to be the case because that was actually the technology that was practical at the time, but that's the path.

And so what we all have experiences.

With up to and including the iPhone in our pocket is computers built on that basically calculating machine model, not the human brain model.

And so what that means is computers.

As we have come to understand them, they're basically like mathematical savants at best. Right. So they're really good at doing lots of mathematical calculations. They're really good at executing these extremely detailed computer programs. They're hyper literal. One of the things you learn early when you're a programmer is as the human programmer, you have to get every single instruction you give the computer correct, because it will do exactly what you tell it to do.

And bugs in computer programs are always.

A mistake on the part of the programmer.

Interesting.

You never blame the computer, you always blame the programmer. Because that's the nature of the thing that you're dealing with.

One down score off and the whole thing.

Yeah, yeah.

And it's the programmer's fault.

And if you talk to any programmer.

They'Ll agree with this. It'll be like, yeah, if, if there's a problem, it's my fault, I did it.

I can't blame the computer.

The computer has no judgment. It has no ability to interpret, synthesize, develop an independent understanding of anything. It's literally just doing what I tell it to do, step by step.

So for 80 years, we've had this.

Very kind of hyper literal kind of model computers. Technically these are what are called von Neumann machines, based after the mathematician John von Neumann.

They run in that way and they've.

Been very successful in very important and our world has been shaped by them.

But there was always this other idea.

Out there which is, okay, how about a completely different approach which is based much more on how the human brain operates or at least our kind of best understanding of how the human brain operates. Right. Because those aren't the same thing.

It basically says, okay, what if you could have a computer instead of being.

Hyper literal, what if you could have it actually be conceptual and creative and able to synthesize information and able to draw judgments and able to behave in ways that are not det. Deterministic but are rather creative.

And the applications for this of course are endless.

And so for example, the self driving.

Car, the only way that you can make a, you cannot program a computer.

With rules to make it a self driving car. You have to do what Tesla and Waymo and these other companies have done now. You have to use AI, you have to use this other architecture and you have to basically teach them how to recognize objects in images at high speeds. The same way. Basically the same way way the human brain does. And so those are so called neural networks running inside.

So essentially let the machine operate based on priors. We almost clipped a boulder going up this particular drive. And so therefore this shape that previously the machine didn't recognize as a boulder, it now introduces to its catalog of boulders.

Is that, yeah, a good example or let's even make it even starker.

For a self driving car, there's something in the road. Is it a small child or a plastic shopping bag being blown by the wind?

Very important difference. If it's a shopping bag, you, you definitely want to go straight through it because if you deviate off course, you.

Might, you know, hit, you know, you're going to make a fast, you know.

It'S the same, it's the same challenge.

We have when we're driving. Like you don't, you don't want to swerve to avoid a shopping bag because you might hit something that you didn't.

See on the side.

If it's a small child, for sure.

You want to swerve, right. And so but it's very, but like in, in that moment and you know.

Small children come in different like shapes and descriptions and are wearing different of kinds of clothes.

They might tumble onto the road the same way a bag would tumble.

Yeah, they might look like they're tumbling. And by the way, they might not be, they might be wearing a Halloween mask, right? So the face, they might not have a recognizable human face, right? Or it might be a kid with you know, one leg, right? You definitely want to not hit those, right? Like so you can't. This is what basically we figured out is you can't apply the rules based.

Approach of a von Neumann machine to basically real life and expect the computer to be in any way understanding or resilient to change to basically things happening in real life.

And this is why there's always been.

Such a stark divide between what the machine can do and what the human can do.

And so basically what's happened is in the last decade that second type of.

Computer, the neural network based computer has started to actually work. It started to work actually first interestingly in vision recognizing objects and images, which is why the self driving car is starting to work.

Face recognition.

Face recognition.

I mean when I started off in.

Visual neuroscience, which is really my original, original home in neuroscience, the idea that a computer or a camera could do face recognition better than a human was like a very low probability event based on the technology we had at the time, based on the understanding of the face recognition cells in the fusiform Gyrus. Now you would be smartest to put all your money on the machine. You want to find faces in airports even with masks on and at profile versus straight on. Machines can do it far better than most all people. I mean they're the super recognizers but even they can't match the best machines. Now 10 years ago what I just said was the exact reverse, right?

That's right, yeah. So faces, handwriting and then voice, being able to understand voice just as a user. If you use Google Docs it has a built in voice transcription. They have sort of the best industry leading kind of voice transcription. If you use a voice transcription at Google Docs, it's breathtakingly good. You just speak into it and it just like types what you're saying.

Well that's good because in my phone every once in a while I'll say I need to go pick up a few things and it'll say I need to pick up a few thongs. And so Apple needs to get on board whatever the voice recognition is that.

Google's using, maybe it knows you better than you think.

That was not the topic I was avoiding discussing, you know.

No, so that's on the list, right?

That's on your list.

So look, there's actually, there's a reason.

Actually why Google's so good and Apple is not right now at that kind of thing. And it actually goes to actually the. It's actually an ideological thing of all things. Apple does not permit pooling of data for any purpose, including training AI, whereas Google does. And Apple's just like staked their brand on privacy. And among that is sort of a pledge that they don't like, pool your data. And so all of Apple's AI is like AI that has to happen like locally on your phone. Whereas Google's AI can happen in the cloud, right? It can happen across pool data.

Now, by the way, some people think.

That that's bad because they think pooling data is bad.

But that's an example of the shift.

That'S happened in the industry right now, which is you have this separation between the people who are embracing the new way of training AIs and the people who basically, for whatever reason are not.

Excuse me, you say that some people think it's bad because of privacy issues, or they think it's bad because of the reduced functionality of that AI.

Oh, no. So you're definitely going to get. So there's three reasons AIs have started to work.

One of them is just simply larger data sets, larger amounts of data. So specifically, the reason why objects and images are now. The reason machines are now better than humans at recognizing objects, images or recognizing faces is because modern facial recognition AIs are trained across all photos on the Internet of people. Billions and billions and billions of photos. Right? Unlimited numbers.