Stewart Alsop interviews Jude Gomila about physics, synthetic biology and consciousness

Welcome to the Crazy Wisdom Podcast. My guest today is Jude Gomila, and he is the CEO and co-founder of Golden. This is the second time I've interviewed him, and I'm really excited about this one because we're going to get into a whole bunch of stuff that I'm way out of my wheelhouse. We're going to talk about physics, we're going to talk about Eric Weinstein's geometric theory, and really, I forgot to post about this, but we're going to talk about David Deutsch's constructor theory. I love David Deutsch's book, Beginning of infinity. So welcome to the show, Jude.

Yeah, this is really great. I really enjoyed my first time, and now we're in a different kind of framing of our conversation, i.e., COVID has happened and we're not in the same room. We're both remote, and you're in a different location as well. You're on the outdoor— outside, like physical outside of outdoors, and I'm inside. So That might be kind of interesting what effects that will have on what we're going to talk about. I didn't prepare as much as I should have, but that's kind of fun. We talked a little bit before we started recording about how sometimes it's cool to have some stuff that's unprepared in this podcast as well.

Yeah, that's actually the way that I love doing it now. And well, and you were talking about the supply chain, and I think it's really important to start talking about that particularly. And you were giving some really interesting abstractions into how the supply chain basically starts before the factory, but the supply chain and the factory are essentially the same thing. Yeah.

I mean, yeah, the supply chain— I mean, to me, the supply chain is the most— I like models that have as much description capabilities as possible that you can still work with. So when we're talking about supply chain, I'm thinking all the way back to the ground in terms of the materials that you're going to— or if it's like a physical product, you know, it goes all the way back to the ground. Those machines that dig stuff out of the ground also have their own supply chain that go back to the ground or back to something else, maybe not the ground anymore. There's new companies like Air Protein who suck carbon dioxide out of the air to make cellular agriculture proteins. And that's interesting in that it puts a kind of—

Hmm.

price on carbon, which is out in the air. And that is— so mining is going to go distributed as well. So I was thinking about all these different ways that supply chains are these interesting networks and the effects of them. And especially regarding our initial conversation of webcams going out of stock, you said they were going out of stock, right?

Yep.

Yeah. So what else? I mean, there's a lot of interesting things that our supply chains were not ready for such a shock to the system. And we've optimized these supply chains to be extremely focused on extreme efficiency at the expense of fragility, and they're definitely not antifragile. There's a lot of theory actually, like just if you look at Toyota and just-in-time supply chains, and they've had trucks that have to wait outside the factory going around custom-built roundabouts that they keep turning around and around and around so they turn up exactly on time. Because if they turn up too early, then that messes the factory up and you get a blockage for anyone else. If they turn up too much— one hour early. If they turn up too late, it messes up just-in-time. So you have all these buffers inside the system. So we know— I think people know how to do this. We just haven't built the buffers. If you look at fast fashion and Zara and what they did to supply chains to take out all the inventory and what Abtim Cook did— I almost said Tim Apple— what Tim Cook did with Apple supply chains, they took out all— it's the correct thing for efficiency, at least efficiency measured in some viewpoint of taking out all the stock in supply chain and effectively having no inventory, no capital assets inside the supply chain. But the problem is if something happens like a breakage or a spike in demand, That's way out of seasonality. We have all these problems with spawning up new capacity. Everybody for COVID as well, each country started locking down certain exports and that created a bunch of problems and it showed the flaws of our extremely, in inverted commas, efficient— that weren't efficient for a wider set of criteria like robustness. So I think we're going to— everyone's going to have to talk about robust supply chains. And that could be point-of-distribution, distributed systems as well. Yeah.

There's a lot that we can go into there. I think the one I'm most interested in is how will synthetic biology affect manufacturing?

Yeah, this is a great one. And I think it's going to revolutionize it. So from— if we think about what it— synthetic or what biology is. It's a package of information that can house a substrate that can interact with the universe around it, especially Earth, and collect material, collect capabilities, functions, influence functions around it, and eventually spawn up consciousness in a human.

Wow.

And from a very small amount of, well, maybe you could say a small amount of code. Some people might view it as a very large amount of code. like an embryo, from my regard, it's a pretty small amount of potential information. You can have something that can, in inverted commas, put them in the universe. That's a kind of interesting idea. And then if it can do that, then sure, it could do something easier, like building a monolithic homogeneous product like a chair. So we could definitely see us genetically engineering plants to grow into something that we wanted, like a tree of a certain length, you know, or a tree of a certain thickness. Or in a more extreme version, you know, a chair, like a chair made of wood. And that gets rid of carpentry in some respects, if you can just genetically design it so that the ending product is what you wanted. You know, and we're doing it with homogeneous stuff, like we're growing, you know, people trying to grow cellular agriculture, cellular meat. Things that have very simple properties, and then now we're trying to master putting in more properties in there. Or we're taking something that we already use, like rice, and trying to make it grow in seawater more effectively. Like AgriSea does that. There's a new company, AgriSea, and they— because if you can take kale, and if you can take all the stuff that we grow and have it growing in water— sorry, saltwater— you've suddenly got a massive amount of farming area all around the side. But then we have these other kind of things to consider, like what is it good for that local kind of ecosystem. So yeah, synthetic biology for manufacturing is huge. Every single product we have in front of us could be probably theoretically grown, including plastics. You know, the plastics can be grown. Bioplastics are out there, and bacteria can accumulate, you know, certain types of plastics in them. And then, you know, if it— This is a big issue as well, because then it could be reabsorbed back into into it. And there's biomining, like universal biomining. We're trying to do mining. I could go on a lot about synthetic biology manufacturing. The whole thing can be done, right? I think everything can be made with it eventually. It's just a question of how sophisticated we need to get.

And what are the environmental implications of synthetic biology?

I think that it's a double-edged sword where both edges are very sharp. So it's a double-edged samurai sword. And on one side, we could clean up the environment and fix a lot of our externalities we've been pumping out there. For example, some bioplastics can now have no harmful microplastic output at the end of the cycle.

Whoa.

So that's huge, I think. I don't want to see these microplastics damage the ocean and damage life and reduce the biodiversity. create all these problems for people and animals. So on that side, you've got cleanup. And then on the other side— and you've got cleanup embedded into the product. So products could be, by design, they could be much safer for when they're finished, end of use. They just go back into the ground and they become effectively your fertilizer for next season's growth. And the other part is the risk of it, i.e., like, okay, well, if we If we do this genetic modification on certain things, we've got to be really careful about what impact it will have to our health, to environment, et cetera. So we've got to be careful. We've got to be clever and think about what we're making.

So interesting. So let's transition here into the— is there a connection between synthetic biology and constructor theory? What is constructor theory from David Deutsch?

Wow, you just give me the hardest questions ever. I wish I had prepared. I'm gonna try— I'll try and give it a shot, and I will not describe it in the best possible way. I think there is a connection in that constructive theory is this kind of new explanation of fundamental physics that David Deutsch has attempted. I think it comes out in 2012. And it's been developing since then. So it's been developing for, what, 8 years now? And what's interesting is that it tries to get underneath, it tries to kind of build this theory of information that should underpin thermodynamics and quantum theory. And if you look at David Deutsch's work before this, he's dealing with a lot of quantum computation fundamentals. So it goes at one level deeper and it in a way turns physics theories into a kind of information theory, which is interesting. And this information theory, as far as I understand, it tries to say what can be done. Well, I think it tries to say what can be built in physics, like what can be Constructed in physics. Now, I think in normal physics, the idea is that you set initial conditions and you have a model and you kick off the initial conditions and the model and it plays out.

Yeah.

Whereas this is kind of saying what is possible in terms of transformations, these abstract transformations that could be possible as a task inside physics and given a certain input and output. And saying whether this task is impossible or saying whether the task is possible. So if you think about thermodynamics, it is kind of saying— it is telling us kind of what is possible and what's not possible. It's telling us a perpetual motion machine is probably not possible in classical thermodynamics. So there are these ideas of these kind of constructors, like thermodynamic constructors or catalysts that do chemical constructing or heat engines and programmable constructors, which is effectively like how that could control like a factory or a computer program.

Whoa.

You end up with all these different constructors and it allows you to express the things that we're seeing out there and embed and explain possibly thermodynamics and information theory, quantum theory. So also links into Marletto's, and she's really worth checking out her YouTube videos actually. I think she's—

what's her name?

I think it's Cariato. My pronunciation is probably wrong, but forgive me for that. So she's got, you know, theory. She's working with Deutsch on this and her stuff is really interesting and there's stuff that she talks about constructive theories applied to life. And this, this coming back to your synthetic biology, how does it connect to constructive theory? Well, it does. So if, if constructive theory can kind of be built up to build up theories of life, and, you know, there's other kind of interesting theories of life that have been put out there. And, you know, there's kind of like, you know, if you look at, say, Strangers, book, What Is Life, which is worth checking out. And then there's other kind of books on chemotons and systems of chemistry that give rise to self-replication. And then there's like further theories and, you know, things build up further, you know, to more and more subtle and complex results. And they kind of have this consistency between them.

So it sounds like the constructor theory, it almost goes back to Plato's ideals, so that there's like this hidden ideal out there in this constructor, and if we can map it and then build it, we can actually run these processes. Is that an accurate representation of what you just said?

Maybe. It's deep water. You know, I don't know what baggage— I haven't really thought about that in that respect. I guess yes and no. Maybe the ideals are you know, there needs to be inverse as well of like non-ideals, like what is not possible, um, and what is, what is existing. And, and maybe, yeah, the, um, yeah, it gets to—

I have another potential hard question. What is the, um, what is not possible when it comes to classical thermodynamics and Yet what is still possible under quantum theory? Is there some sort of contradiction with clear examples of what is possible in one and not possible in the other?

So I'm not an expert in this, but we know that from like classical thermodynamics, like typically speaking, there's like maximum efficiencies on machines that can be built. There are limits of how efficient you can build the steam engine. or your Peltier module for cooling down your computer. And in the quantum realm, these limits might be lifted higher. We know there are abstract limits out there, like Gödel's theorem to logic. There's limits to logic. There's limits to possibly precision in the universe in terms of measuring the precision in terms of Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. And if you look at Wolfram's theory, there are probably limits of computational irreducibility in the system. If you run through the— I guess you have a certain rule set, you play it forward, and you can't necessarily— if you look at a state in time in the future, you can't necessarily roll it back because you've lost information in the process. There are limits around that kind of system-wide limits that would imply if we know the limits are at a certain higher range and something like classical thermodynamics at a lower range of limits, then maybe that would imply that quantum theory would have something limits between the two on one side of the extreme. So I mean, my hunch is that, yeah, there are these different levels of limits. And the harder question is like, are there no limits? Are there no limits outside of the universe or inside the universe? Like truly no limits. Like, is it true that Gödel's theorem is true? Yeah.

And this gets into Wolfram's theory as well, because that's what he's trying to do. He's trying to bring these 2 theories of quantum theory and classical thermodynamics together under one arching theory. Is that accurate?

So I think with theory, he's trying to find a system that that ends up having predictive value and explanation value over all the things we see. So if you look through New Kind of Science, I think that's 2002, 1,000 pages, massive tomb of work, it's quite pretty cool. And you will see that he can predict out of some simple rule sets, he can predict lots of different interesting effects that you may see in nature. For example, certain patterns on seashells. And if you look at Turing's work with chemical morphogenesis, in that early paper, he's also being able to predict interesting effects that you see in nature, like stripes on animals. And what I saw in Death Valley, if you look at Death Valley and go down to the floor there, you'll see these really interesting patterns of salt emerging. And I think, I'm pretty sure you can set up a a chemical morphogenesis framework to try and predict those patterns. So those patterns are happening with Turing's chemical morphogenesis. They're happening with Stephen Wolfram's simple rule sets that print it. And then he goes a step further with this latest fundamental theory, the physics project, Stephen Wolfram Physics Project. He's taking it a step further to try and explain what happens inside his model. Here's a system that has stuff like general relativity, special relativity, quantum effects, thermodynamic effects, things that we see in nature. It has all these different expressions of the model. And that's why it's kind of exciting to me to see all this stuff pan out. And it may not be the perfect model yet, or it may not still be even true. We need to know. And it comes back a little bit to what we talked about in our first podcast about this predictive value and validation of the experiments and trying to check in on, do these things work? And that cost of checking it, the dollar value of checking it increasing every year, every theory. Do we have to now build a bigger version of CERN to validate the Wolfram theory? If you look at the Wolfram— yeah.

That's crazy.

We went deep there. We just put the scuba gear on and we went down to 1,000 feet.

Well, this is the question that I had is like, why when you look into these various things, you look at one detail and then all of a sudden that detail then becomes— rises exponentially and there's just like more in that detail than you could ever explore in your whole universe. It seems like something is fucking with us as a species.

Yeah, there's 2 interesting vectors on that. One is that if you look at like something like a Koch snowflake, K-O-C-H, maybe some people in the States would say Coke. Coke Industries. And then if you look at that snowflake, the fractal, and you start with this equilateral triangle and you add 3 more equilateral triangles onto the edges, the middle edges of it, and you keep doing this, the surface area of— well, the perimeter goes to infinity in length and the area goes to a finite value. And it's a really easy proof. You should look up— everyone should look up the Coke snowflake proof. It's a geometric progression. And if you're trying to understand COVID and where it's going and R0, what R0 is, look up geometric progressions, try a few of them, look up the Koch snowflake. And this is a fractal. It's a really simple fractal. And the surface area goes to infinity. Sorry, when I say surface area, I mean a very generic version, including 2D. So the perimeter goes to infinity. The area goes to a finite value. And that's just a really interesting result in itself. Now, to this thing about you said, if you zoom in further, Do I get more complexity? Do I get, as I dig further and further, do I get more and more difficulty in understanding it? And in a way we do. It becomes, nature becomes more fuzzy when you look at it, Heisenberg's uncertainty principle. But at the same time, overall, the area, which is kind of the truth in a way, becomes more certain, more convergent. But the precision in an exact place becomes divergent and difficult. does lead to, do we have an infinite battle here or is there going to be a final step where we work it out and we figured out the laws of the universe from within the universe or is it not possible?

Where would you put your money?

I'm not sure. I'm not going to say more than 50/50. And some people— well, there's lots of interesting things about this that You know, like, where's the boundary of the universe? Is the multiverse the boundary of the universe, or is the normal universe the boundary, or is it beyond the multiverse? Is there something there? So I don't know. I'm certainly keen to find out. I don't know.

Well, this goes into kind of biology, back to biology, is curiosity and biology of emotions. And curiosity is just like such a fundamental emotion for all species that we're just like curious to figure out what the hell is going on. And for humans, it seems even more so. We've got our prefrontal cortexes, which are so— each— my prefrontal cortex is so— the gene expression in my prefrontal cortex is way different than yours and way different than anybody who's listening. Like the inter-individual variability is crazy. Um, and I've got my own universe and your universe is different. And it's like, we're both conscious, but I can't really prove that you're conscious. Um, but I'd like, you know, I'm, I'm, I'm basing a lot of my trust that you are, uh, which is so interesting. What do you think about all that? I don't have a question about that.

There's, yeah, like 5 things going off in my head as we talk about this. Talk about curiosity. And, uh, in a way the curiosity is the optionality. for you as a conscious agent. So you're curious, you go look up all the things, it builds optionality. That optionality gives you survivability in that money is an ultimate kind of optionality in some respects. Education is also maybe higher level optionality to money. So that gives you optionality to go and do a bunch of things in society. Education is a precursor to that in some respects. And all luck is some kind of weird Formality. So the— this gives you survivability, which then comes back around to being curious in a loop. And cats are extremely curious. And if you look at John Conway, I think he said something about mathematics being the simple part to understand and cats being really hard to understand and complex. So the curiosity for cats, they're like right on the edge of running around in that loop of being curious to get optionality to survive, but it also puts them on the edge of not surviving. Curiosity killed the cat. It's this extreme loop of curiosity to survivability where cats are the most maximized example. And they hit gold. They struck gold with the optionality in getting humans to look after them. So that was point 1 of 5. The other 4 disappeared in my mind as I went through this.

Yeah, this is the hardest thing about taking notes as well. It's like, which part of that do I take a note? And it goes back to that exponential increase. There's so much that we're talking about right now.

Trust and consciousness. You mentioned about trust and consciousness, and I think you can trust things that are very unconscious. You can probably trust things that are less conscious more. You know, you can trust a non-conscious binary switch like a NOT gate a lot more than, than something that is conscious. Probably the more conscious it is, maybe the less trust you can give to it.

Well, this goes into something really important for me that I've been thinking about recently as well, is that in the same way that you can't really know whether someone else is consciousness, you can't really know whether someone else is, for lack of a better word, evil. And so like psychopathy, sociopathy, you can't really tell. You can't really know that for sure whether somebody's gonna have that, but it's in your interest to know that. And it goes back to curiosity as well. What do you think about that, especially as doing business? Because in business there's a lot of that going on. And do you run into it at all? How do you deal with that?

Yeah, I think there are— I guess as data, as we increase the amount of data on on people and individuals. Like there's a whole know your customer movement, right? And we see this in the laws, like post-September 11th, there are a bunch of laws that get enacted to know your customer better. And customers can be businesses and LLCs. And at the opposite end of this, so there's kind of like this system-wide approach to more and more data and advertising wants to pull in tons of data about people. And there's this reaction against it, European right to be forgotten and privacy laws, California privacy laws, and then there'll probably be other states, probably already are, various privacy laws. So there's this kind of inner core of people not wanting to be observed too much and the limits of that. And COVID is an interesting— COVID era is an interesting example of this, of should you have to walk around with a certificate that shows you're immune or not? Is that the correct thing to do for society? And does that lead to other things? Like all your things being in a certificate? Like all your— all your antibodies that you possibly have. Are you immune to HIV? Are you immune to this? Are you immune to that? Did you get the vaccine? Did you not get the vaccine? Did you do your homework? Did you eat last week? Did you go to the gym? Did you pay your taxes? So all these things started getting loaded up, right? And I think we have to think about what we want. We have to architect this before it creeps up on us.

Yeah.

And, you know, I'm fine. I'm personally fine with having an immunity certificate for this general network problem of of life not being normal, but what is normal? And compared to before, and some people are not, they're not happy with having to carry a paper. I mean, people carry IDs around, but yeah. So there's this kind of negotiation of the entire network, the entire network of people, society are negotiating. Some groups don't want certain things, some groups want certain things.

Well, and this is something I've been thinking about a lot recently is the regionality, something that was built into our system of having regions and then built into a lot of Latin America's systems is just having regions with varying degrees of power when it comes to the centralized state and just like a whole bunch of stuff. And I'm really glad that that exists. But we didn't— we have not reacted to COVID-19 in a very regional way. Like, you know, it makes sense to me, most sense to me, to essentially have every single regional county kind of figure out their own situation. But then you have to take Evidence from the federal side as well. And then, you know, it's the states' rights and all this interesting stuff. But it seems to me that we are now going to start thinking a lot more regionally, especially because I just talked to a friend in Italy today, and he is stuck in Florence. He's now allowed to move in his general city, but he's not allowed to move among the, among the province without papers. And then he's definitely not allowed to go outside of the province to go to Rome to fly back home. So you need to like get documents in order to figure all that stuff out. And there's— then there's the situation of actually arriving back in the United States, because now the United States has a lot of regulation as to what happens when you arrive. And it's so— it's like a bunch of regions just made up a lot of rules, somewhat directed upon by the relationship to the state as well. What do you think going forward where this ends up, and what's the importance of regionality?

Yeah, I think this is— the COVID situation is a network problem. So we have to think, we have to have network-level solutions. So we need solutions on each node and clusters of nodes, which might be regions. And we need solutions for the entire network, which is the federal government. And you can't really solve the problem piecemeal. So you can have one state locked down in the green zone, one state not locked down in a red zone. And people, if you don't want If you stop people from moving between the two, you've restricted both parties. And that's necessary, you know, if that's an issue. If you let them mix, then you've just broken one of the sides of a cluster of nodes. So I think we need to have solutions at all levels. But the other part is a time dimension that we don't want these restrictions to be there for very long. But then again, we've got to also be prepared to put them back on again if something happens. So it's kind of like society being in detention. Like, we kind of fucked up here and we want to get out of detention. We're looking at the clock and the clock is the endgame, the vaccine or immunity or everyone having gone through getting it or not getting it and getting to herd immunity. Some kind of endgame there. And we don't want to get into detention again. And that would be having rapid contact tracing systems for the future of new COVID-20, COVID-21. or whatever, Yara virus 2.0. And we need to not get into detention again and get out of detention, but we should also observe why we got into detention and make corrections there. So yeah, I think we shouldn't— and at the same time, the state is also, at the end of the day, we do vote this system in. In some countries, they don't. So we got to— There's also like different responses for individualistic democratic societies versus autocratic and other societies that aren't so democratic. How are they going to respond differently? But yeah, it's a global issue. Everything's very interconnected now. And I think if you look at it, the lead time of getting a product from, say, a factory in Wuhan into California is going to be shrinking down to zero. So we're going to have— as you, as you, if you look at control theory and if you zoom down some of the cycle times on the feedback loop down to zero, you can end up with lots of interesting effects like hunt and overshoot and oscillation. And so we need to, we need to not— we need to have systems that are robust and can dampen these problems as they come through supply chains.

Well, I didn't understand that. I didn't understand that, that the lead time from product in Wuhan—

Oh, let's get into that. Yeah. Sorry, go on.

What does that mean? What you said going down to zero, that means that it's immediate?

We used to, you know, products used to be moved by ships. We weren't air freighting things. Now the value of certain products are going up and it's worth air freighting. You know, we may end up with hypersonic. I hope we do hypersonic or supersonic planes and that might go to, you know, supersonic air freighting. Like get an iPhone from China in like 4 hours.

1 hour.

Yeah, 1 hour. So the supply chain, so that lead time goes down and it's inevitable. It's inevitable as we crack these technology problems that the lead time goes down. And then, and the lead time, ultimate lead time is the factory being right in your hands and it's zero lead time. It's right in front of you. The other thing is shipping as well. Like there will be shipping innovation. Ships are slow right now. It takes 30 days to get get the 40-foot high cube down from China into the US. That will go to zero time at some point. There'll be a very, very fast Caspian Sea monster, like hydrofoil type, ground effect type ship coming at you, which can jump over tsunamis with a rocket booster. Yes, I thought about this one. And there's already a company building it. Boundary Layer Technologies are building this type of So there's a hydrofoil shipping container that can cut the speed down by 3x. So that's 10 days from China eventually. So yeah, the lead time's coming down. And then we'll see more distributed manufacturing come down. And it's that any mistake in the system, and COVID is part of that, something being on a package or some human transferring it, not just on a package. Yeah, sorry, go on.

So Oh, hopefully they don't lose this one. So Weinstein's point that, and maybe Peter Thiel's point, that 1973, I think it was, or '77, I can't remember which, was the time under which we started to favor bits over atoms. And now it seems, and like from my perspective, I understand that World War II was a huge motivator for us to actually build technologies based on atoms. And then once that kind of went away, you know, it created more of a capitalistic understanding to go towards the cheaper thing, which is the bits. And now what I see with collapsing of global trade and collapsing for a lot of global trade, I do have a hope that we're going to remain connected globally through the interwebs. But I I see conflict coming, and I hope that it's not going to be existential conflict. But if it's not existential conflict, I actually see a lot of hope for getting more innovation in atoms. What do you think of that?

Yeah, I think we see a recombination of the two, right? So biology, there's definitely a resurgence in biotech in general, that is like atoms and beyond, and bits in a way, like synthetic biology is kind of both. So I think we're going to see the two combined together to make a larger wave and be in this post-bits, post-atoms. I mean, there's no difference really between the two anyway. If you think about constructor theory and information theory and maybe Wolfram's theory, the atoms are the bits. it made sense for us to not necessarily treat them as 2 separate things. And there definitely were the atom phase and the bits phase, and now we're into this combination phase, and then understanding that it's really actually all the same stuff. And, you know, we're entering a newer information phase where the information phase is not the classic information age of the internet. It's a deep physics kind of information age. And there's lots of interesting problems with that. And in terms of innovation, because they talk about— I think one of the gripes Thiel has with some of the switching here is that we're losing some of the ability to build things. I'm hearing PPE manufacturing factories taking 5 weeks to set up, and that's supposed to be quick. That's not quick. So quickest, quickest 1 hour. Or nanoseconds. And that to me, or Planck seconds, or Wolfram's step length in his elemental causal network being super fast. So I think, yeah, we are going to do a new phase here probably. And biology is like the phase, the molecule phase or the chemical phase.

So And it reminds me how I was taught when I was younger to think of all these things as separate. You know, you've got physics and that's separate from biology and biology separate from that and everything's all separate and it's all in its own thing. But back in the day, you know, I was listening to John Vervaeke's Awakening from the Meaning Crisis YouTube series and he talks about how Aristotle just wrote the book on all the stuff. You know, he wrote the book on physics, he wrote the book on philosophy, he wrote it, he just like He was the master of all those domains, which is now impossible. But at this fundamental sense, I'm getting to the sense that this deep physics, it is all the same, and that it is all about connecting all this different stuff. What do you think?

Yeah, I think the number of descriptors of things inside the system are going up, and that creates a memory management problem for a human. And it becomes a communication issue between 2 or more people. Because we— it's going to be— the namespace gets really complex, you know, like the number of things that we can talk about is predicated on how fast my mouth can move and maybe I can get to 350 words per minute. That wasn't 350. Can't do it. And but we end up with a namespace issue, memory management issue. We end up with a brain, you know, issue of our pure communication lagging like the situation. But yeah, they are all kind of connected and maybe you can end up clustering some of the concepts at lower levels that allow you to unlock specific areas that you might care about. And that should change how education is done. I think education is pretty broken right now. And there is no— yeah, I think it is also hard to think in those terms as well. And everybody likes to break things out into smaller pieces and the education system does that, but it kind of goes a bit too far. Whereas if we had something that rallied around logic and rhetoric and mathematics and everything else then came around this core, that could be stronger. But right now, say in the UK, it's 1/10. You know, you take 10 GCSEs, one of them is math. It's not the core thing that underpins your physics. The logic is not taught, so, you know, that doesn't help English grammar or your grammar classes or your literature classes. And it, you know, it doesn't pin into chemistry. They don't talk about each other, like these pieces, right? So whereas in real life they do. And so I think we may have to reform education around not separating them out so much.

What is your personal philosophy of education when it comes down to your specific education? What is your personal philosophy?

Oh, it's changing very rapidly because I know very little about it. I'm testing some things out by tutoring.

Interesting.

And being tutored myself. And I know very little about it. I'm learning new things that completely changed some of my assumptions. Like someone was telling me yesterday that when you teach a kid, like a baby, the alphabet, whether you show them capital letters or lowercase letters makes a big difference. Because when they start reading, they're not going to easily recognize things as all caps. A lot of people show them all caps. All cap letters, flashcards or whatever. And then they'll then see these lowercase letters and they'll have to shift gear and they'll not understand it. So I think there's really subtle things in there. And we don't understand AI yet. So we certainly don't really understand education yet, if you treat it as like non-artificial intelligence or whatever. So if we can't train AIs to do really complex things and we don't know the mechanics, behind that, then we probably can't do that at an optimal level for humans. So our education systems have to be very suboptimal by default.

Because we don't even know what education is.

Yeah, I think if we— we don't really know how the mind works fully and we don't know how AI— we're not super advanced on AI yet. So this means that we don't know how to educate systems efficiently. But we certainly can do things in the short term to be much better and maybe orders of magnitude better with what we do know. So yeah, there's a big— and it's kind of like a factory. It's like a massive factory that the countries are trying to pop out a bunch of people with education, mass education. So it's like a mass factory that's building pretty shitty product and we need to make the factory print out Ferraris every single time. Can you mass manufacture a Bugatti Veyron? That's the question. And what's the cost of doing that, right?

Well, this is something I've been thinking about recently as we've seen the age of unlimited money being pumped into the US economy and then by default the rest of the economies around the world. As we've seen that, that seems to have stopped the freefall of the stock market and the stock market's going back up. And I've been thinking, how can that be so separate from the daily lives of every individual out there, like, because the daily individual lives are losing jobs, mass migrations in India, like, just not— no foreseeable change in their income future.

Yep.

And then you have the market, which is totally separate from that, which is— and I'm starting to think, like, maybe we have just decoupled the human element of manufacturing and the human element of the economy from the economy.

Yeah, I think they've been decoupled for a long time, and I think the decoupling is just becoming clearer and clearer. Because if you think about it, it is strange that the stock market is rallying and coming back up so hard, but that we have all these people without jobs and without any money and without any education, without any healthcare, without any basic stuff, without owning their house, without owning any land. It is a mess. And we have this other chart. The other extreme is a single chart Which represents all network optionality. And the network optionality or value actually is being disconnected further and further from control on anyone that wants to own it in a sense. So yeah, it's a big problem. That graph does not— S&P doesn't reflect your situation right now in this hour. You're in the outdoors, right? And it doesn't really connect to what's going on in your life right now. But it seems to underpin everything. So it's a problem.

Yeah. Now I see the thinking behind universal basic income. And I think the TV— it's the TV show, but it was originally a book called The Expanse. which goes into like what a future really looks like on universal basic income. And it seemed the most kind of like, you know, 'cause it, to me, for my personal goals, I love creating and building and learning new stuff and kind of like that, I feel like that ownership piece of owning something. But for most of the people now, that has become impossible. And it's so—

that's a big problem. Yeah, that you saying that ownership has become impossible, it's a big problem for me because UBI, the I, the income part, is really output. And if you think about, I guess, Kiefer Szelenski's philosophy on some of these metrics stuff for companies, like not focusing on the outputs, it's focusing on the inputs and the system that creates it. And the ownership is part of that system. that creates the income. So income without the ownership, well, are your incentives really wired in correctly? But if you own it before the incomes happen, T0, time equals zero, you don't have the income output yet, but you have some ownership. Well, maybe you will go and plant that seed in the ground and go and get the output, the crop. So the ownership is the issue to me. And one of the big issues is, is, is to me, transparency and ownership. And it's very radical to say this, Like, why can't we see where, like, who owns what?

Yeah.

And public markets are trying to do that in some sense, but we don't know who owns what. And that is a big problem because it means we don't know how it's architected and we don't know how the incentives— and sure, we need capitalist incentives. Like, it works. It really does work. And all the other things we tried don't work. So we can't just say like, hey, take this piece of code and go fork it into some other place. And by the way, the code works and it's generating loads of money and it's working kind of, and just delete the whole thing. It doesn't work like that. So you have to try some experiments out and if it works at small scale, maybe then you scale it up a bit and maybe you find out, oh, that thing didn't work at scale. This other effect crept in and it just doesn't work.

But to get to that mindset of ownership, you know, for somebody, so like the people that I'm living next door to, they're in the mindset that the system is screwed. The system is is evil, the system is out to get them, and that they need to be as self-reliant as possible. They need to start growing their own vegetables, they need to start growing their own everything. And so to them, ownership means out of the system.

Mm-hmm.

And owner— can we offer to people who— like, for me, literally, it took an abstract learning of like, Oh, this is the system. If I place, if I buy this, then I can get ownership of that. And then I can, that's an investment and that goes out into the future. All of that was like incredibly abstract for me. Um, and, and I had to like learn it and make it more experiential. And that, that's like hard and nobody teaches you, don't, they don't teach you that at school really. I don't think, I think that comes from like your parents or, you know, like what you read or, you know, and it's like, how do we—

Very dangerous idea to teach in school. Cause if everybody demanded to be an owner, Everything would have issues. So, but yeah, the, I mean, if you're leaving that system, you're still in a system. You're still like, you're still a neighbor to someone. So I think you're this, you're this, when you leave, when you leave the system, you're still actually in the system. You're in society, you're under those laws, you have a neighbor. So, you know, people should, yeah, that's—

And that's—

I think it's good to be an owner for sure, but some don't even have the access to even start the game or have been told, you know, there's the education part and there's the basic capital part of buying in.

And that capital takes either time or money, and both of which people don't have now. Well, now people have a bunch of time, but they don't have money.

Yeah. Yeah. And there's, you know, there's the question of how to do this because people have talked about resource-based economies for a long time, but I've never seen any kind of practical method of even breaking into trying it. And people are talking about UBI now. Well, And they're talking about, you know, doing experiments here where you can give someone $5K per month in this small group of 200 people and see how they work out. That is not a good test. That is such— you would have— the responses in different areas are gonna be completely different. The amounts of money, you know, completely depend on the situation. And, you know, what they do is really hard to measure, you know, the output of what they— so the whole thing is gonna be The tests that I'm seeing are like, in a way, doomed to fail. Like, sure, they can put the money out there, but we'll never know whether that means anything, whether it means you can scale it up. And then, you know, how do you make it work still? Because the money still has to be produced, or the value still has to be produced. So, but I think it's interesting we're dealing with these problems now, like society seeking stability. And investors want stability. Everybody wants stability and wants the incentives that capitalism brings to get up in the morning and just work hard.

And that's essentially— to a large part of the population is now starting to consider the whole system evil again.

And this evil part, I think they need to get away from it because the system It's just a system. And it's not conscious. It doesn't have this kind of, unless you believe in panpsychism, but it doesn't, it's not conscious and it's not evil. It's not out to get you. It's just doing certain things. It's just like having a washing machine that's broken and it's doing this racket and it's spinning around and making this terrible sound. Still washing your clothes. It's just not the best. And it's not, the washing machine is not evil. Interesting. There are some movies where the washing machines are evil. So it's like, okay, well, how do we fix it? You know, how do we fix the washing machine?

Um, yeah, you just gave me an interesting— oh, and I've lost it. Um, so, well, there's the system and it's evil and people are essentially like, yeah, I've created this, this idea that it is conscious, that it is out to get them. It's hard not to in our society because we've lost our ability to derive meaning from various things that gave us meaning, at least for the last 150 years, if not longer. And so this whole meaning crisis that John Vervaeke talks about, which is, I think, very interesting.

I think we've been in a meaning crisis continuously from being the most primitive form of life, in a sense.

Yeah, no, and there always was.

It just gets deeper and deeper. The problem becomes deeper and deeper.

Accelerating. That's the issue, that we're now in an age of acceleration where that is now very, very clear to everybody. Because I've been likening what COVID-19 is, is essentially a psychedelic trip for our collective species. Like, what happens when you take psychedelics is it introduces a lot of noise into the metastability systems, and then the system recoheres among a different normal or a different wave. And, you know, that could be good or bad depending on who, you know, who gave it to you and like all the different kind of things that go into a trip. But we're now experiencing that on a societal level. The things that we thought were bedrocks of our society just kind of went out, like global air travel. My friend is stuck in Italy. People are like, you can't travel the way that you used to. And that's a huge— that's a psychedelic trip. What do you think about that?

I think the metastable— we are always in this kind of stable setup of a society and economy. And the interesting question being, is there a better metastable system that works for more people? and generates more total value or whatever your algorithm wants to be. And talking about that and having intelligent conversations about it. And I don't see the intelligent conversations occurring actually in people just playing a game inside the system. And they're not trying to say, hey, can we write new rules? Can we play a better game? I'm sick of playing checkers. I want to play Go. And the— I'm sick of playing Go. I want to play Half-Life in VR. or something else. So I think we need to, in terms of the psychedelic analogy, it is interesting that the reconfiguration of your mental models or your psyche or whatever, when you go through that trip versus what we're going through right now, I think is reasonably interesting. And whether it's enough, there's enough changes here happening and enough pressure to switch us into a new model, I'm not sure. But Because there will be a vaccine coming probably. And we will get out of this COVID era and we'll probably go back to how it was just before COVID happened, except for people being work from home and all the obvious things that are gonna change. But I think the actual main system at play will not change very much. There's not enough movement for that to occur.

Well, and I think the other core component, so in the past we'd had revolutions And then you had the rise of unions when there was this tie between human output and like individual mass human input and economic output. But now that has gone away. So the bargaining position of people is kind of out there. And now it makes sense that people now see the system as evil because now that like the other option is to see like, I am unfit for this society. And a lot of people don't want to feel like they're unfit.

Yeah, the ownership of the labor part is going away from the individual because we have having— we have machines. And this was always going to be a pressure to do that because, you know, capital owners or owners of no capital but a system and an objective, an agent with an objective to do something even without capital, would not want to risk their survivability mechanics, we kind of have this antibiotic resistance effect. And that is that— to the negotiating chips that someone has in the system, which is labor, and that's gone, that's going away. There's always another one, fallback, which is violence. And that is a dangerous one where someone has— then at some point, even that will go away. It will be— an individual will not have any ability to enact violence on the system. Or maybe they will. And so that's an interesting one, that oscillation of which is in the kind of sovereign individual about defense and offense and the monopoly dynamics of violence between the state and the individual. Knights in armor being a classic example. You put the armor on and suddenly the state, the king, doesn't have as much power over you. The knights become powerful and this changes the system, but then gunpowder comes along, blows up your armor. And it's back to a more chaotic bimodal power system. But the dynamics of that are kind of interesting, and the automation problem and the labor chip disappearing, and that being a lot of misery for people because then they don't have anything. Money, if they have no capital, and the time is irrelevant. But then the silver lining to this, or the bright light at the end of the tunnel, light around the tunnel, is is the ability to be entrepreneurial and come up with cool things. And also the ability to own, being able to grow your own things and make your own things. But it's a problem if you don't own that land. If you're in a council estate in central London and you do not have any place to grow that food, it's a problem. So a lot of people cannot leave that system. They are a part of it. We, lots of other conscious, anxious people have to go figure it out and improve it.

Well, and so this is what I wanted to get into for the last 5 or 10 minutes. There is hope in our situation. Like, with every— we're going through a time of transition, and I want this hope to be rational, but there is this hope, and I think it has to do with technology. And I don't think it's a blanket, like, oh, technology is good, let's just build technology and then we'll figure it out, like somebody will figure it out. I think it actually takes that intention of like, we are building this thing, like you said, it's a double-edged sword for synthetic biology. So for like people listening to this, how can they start to plan 5 years ahead, 10 years ahead, after we've gone through this kind of like darkness that we're going to go through as a species, and to understand like, how do we solve these new complex problems that we're facing? How can we kind of create the vision of a place we want to go so that it can motivate our technology to go that way?

I think taking part in the conversation, defining the problems, like, you know, saying, hey, these are my problems I've got with it, and this is what I want, defining the outcomes, trying out new things, working hard, not walking away from it, throwing in the towel, and giving some time for optionality building. And side projects, some people don't have time to do side projects. Education, valuing education. I mean, it's all the classic answers you hear about. I think maybe some of the new ones are people thinking about starting up new companies. Only maybe if they've got an interesting idea, a product idea or something. So there's definitely like, hey, I could be one, more people could be innovative for sure. And I think that's— I guess it depends on who's listening in, right? So I assume a lot of entrepreneurs are listening in. So, you know, banking a company is a pretty interesting one because you get to change, you get to shake things up when you do that. And changing out some of the product features as well to solve these problems. Notice I don't talk about anything about the political side of this because I'm at a loss personally on it. But I think at the same time, if we completely disconnect, then we end up in the situation that we ended up in. So maybe demanding more technical people to be in office.

And this is what I was thinking with Andrew Yang. Andrew Yang represented something that has not happened. Somebody is thinking about technology and thinking about it and has been proven right over the last few months. And it's like, how can we get more of that in our system.

Yeah, like why was the output of that entire phase, you know, that he ended up being a reporter for CNN? That to me is broken outcome. We have a lot of movement, there's a lot of like energy and movement there, ideas, you know, why isn't it that, okay, well, let's get him into the government, whatever happens, as a special advisor to Asian problems or labor and automation problems and solutions, or this like a think tank of dynamic, exciting people with potentially different solutions that can sit there and be consulted. Like whoever gets in in the next election, there should be people with solutions who are part of the conversation sitting in some kind of, I guess, in a sense like the senators are supposed to be like this. But then again, the senators also representing geo— geolocations rather than purely abstract problems. Maybe there needs to be another layer of— in the UK, we've got MPs that represent geoconstituencies and we have House of Lords. There can be this layer of representing problem spaces. Like, this is the person to consult on this issue and they'll be there as a layer for consulting on certain issues. And that to me would be a lot more exciting. And rather than just being a lobbying game between different geos and competition and all these politics, you probably still need that layer, but because physical space is an important variable, but the abstracted ideas don't get a voice. They do in terms of the day-to-day management of the office. But then there's not— there needs to be ones that are outside of the game between 2 major political parties.

Hmm, interesting.

Yeah, it's a tricky area. Maybe there'll be more radical solutions coming, right?

I think we're, yeah, we're still in the transition period and it is going to be like, we haven't seen the end of like all of the little things, or not, well, yeah, all of the little things that have just been drastically changed by our reaction to COVID-19 are not yet apparent to people. That's what I'm kind of planning my future on. And so I don't think— I think it's time to start envisioning that. But as you know, with starting a company, anytime you envision something, it is cloudy as F. And then you've got all these random things. So it's like we're in that beginning, like, painful ideation stage where where it's like, we're still adapting to what's like, actually, what the hell just happened? And now we've got to actually think—

Yeah.

—about the future and be like, okay, this is the future we want. I think that piece is so important to get that, what is the future that we want? Because I do think we have agency over the issue. I don't think we're in control of the— to the extent that we've fooled ourselves into believing over the past 50 years, but I do think that we do have some agency into this. whole thing and the possible outcomes.

And even if you look at the system, well, I mean, some of the smartest people do not go into that area to solve the problem. They go off to do other things and they go off to chase money or chase building something cool. And so they have a big impact in one area, but they don't affect the whole overarching system. And it would be better if there was a system set up so it attracts the best players to set the rule games? And do we really have the best players in society making the rule games?

Well, and this comes up to our generation, I think, is our generation kind of like— is now— this is our, I would say, at least World War I moment where it's like, okay, everything that we were raised with is not necessarily going to be around. We have to do something. And that's courage. That's where courage comes in. And I think We are— our generation is slowly starting to gain courage. And I think that's where it's going to end up.

Yeah, and something in technology, like the creation of armor, does change— the technology part is a major part of the conversation because it changes the dynamics of the entire gameplay. So someone inventing something, like the internet, completely changes the ability for the individual to take part in a system. And so does— armor and in different ways. So there's going to be— there are things that people that make things, engineers and product builders and founders and investors, and they can actually have a large impact in saying, well, I've got this great solution to empower the individual, which could be like lifting education, all the education stuff that's kind of interesting as well. Or it could be Neuralink with Imagine being able to plug in information into your mind. It's still far out, but at that point, it's a very different ballgame. And it might just be that we have to keep working on the technologies and get through this stuff, and then, you know, good things will come along. I mean, certainly from medical area, like, that's being— that's a really cool area where we're solving all these different diseases. So there's huge progress in general. It's just we got also these problems to deal with.

So let's talk about Golden and like how Golden is going through this and what has happened. What are your main kind of like obstacles or what are your main— what are you looking for? What's the situation with Golden?

Yeah, so we went work from home early and this was back in early February and it was around So everybody was jostling to try and figure out, shall we go work from home? And everyone was looking for the biggest companies, such as Google and Facebook, to do it, and they didn't do it. So there was this problem in the Valley where every— the government was telling us to do it. We knew that, you know, this was being called just another flu, or it will go away in April, or it's 5 cases only. Not a problem. But you're looking at China and they're welding people shut into apartment buildings. What the fuck is going on? Sorry for swearing. So Silicon Valley were definitely very concerned. And then a few companies went, some are much more public than others in terms of presence and scale. Like Jack Dorsey took a risk and he took Square and Twitter remote very early, work from home. And that was on, I think that was a Tuesday. I went 1 hour after independently. Facebook and Google were still not gone. No one else had gone. And I was taking a risk. Because if you do that and you're wrong, no one will trust you ever again. So I just said, fuck it. If I'm wrong, worst case scenario, we've taken 2 weeks work from home, or even a month. If I'm right, then maybe we've taken part in causing a trigger in the system to people to start going work from home. And if you look at San Francisco stats, it's not bad at all right now. I really hope those early actions by the companies— and lots of people were talking amongst each other on WhatsApp discussing, should we do it, should we not do it? Because we knew that the actions would cause reactions in all the rest of the companies and portfolio companies, and it would, you know, that would start causing a cascade. And, you know, so you gotta be really careful when you ring that fire alarm. You can't, you know, if you smell smoke and you're in a massive building with thousands of people, you don't necessarily press that, hit that, smash that glass and hit the fire alarm. And some companies did it and it turned out to be correct that the fire was on. And then LinkedIn went on the Wednesday, I think, and then Facebook and Google, we started hearing, oh, Facebook in Switzerland is doing it. Sorry, Google in Switzerland is now working from home. So there's this cascade for that week. And then it went to the next week, and then we started seeing local governments say, hey, we're going to recommend— they saw all the big tech companies do it, and then the local municipality or city has not done it yet, and certainly not at federal level, state level. And then we're starting to see bubbling up of like, oh, something might happen at state level, something might happen at a city level. And meanwhile, we're seeing countries locking down. And we've seen the UK dithering, like dithering on a reverse Swedish, Sweden-style strategy. And I had a conversation, by the way, with a mathematician, ex-Berkeley professor. And he's got— he's pro, like, the Sweden model, as far as I understand. And we went deep on this because I was very much the reverse of, like, go to lockdown. And there are some very good arguments, like, to say that, you know, both sides, right? So it really, it was a tough thing. At the same time, you know, these companies, well, for Golden specifically, we've been fine. Like we were already cloud-based, we were ready to do it. We got this brand new office that we can't get into, but, you know, we're absolutely doing fine. And we didn't apply for the loans either because, you know, other companies need that stuff more. But my main concern has been for all the local businesses, like the coffee shops, the restaurants, the nail salons that go out of business, the cleaners who can't turn up to offices anymore. Actually, if you look at it, the ones on the lowest wages are getting hit the worst. And that's a really sad part of this, that they don't have any work. A lot of them don't have work to do right now. Uber and Lyft are making layoffs. California is coming after them, trying to convert these contractors into full-time employees, which was maybe a relevant thing to talk about before, but now it's like extra pressure. So they're gonna lay off all these people, and it's a major issue. So, and I don't think it's been handled well at all. I think it's probably the worst way to handle it. You may as well spin a dice and do everything randomly. I think we would have actually had better answers if we'd done everything completely randomly than the way it's been done. That's sad.

Yeah, and that's one of the hardest things is like, how do we deal with the fact that the things that were supposed to be the adults in the room have massively like just not been able to deal with the complexity of what we just went through, of what we're still going through.

It immediately became politicized. That was a big problem. We're in this hyper-politicized mode where anything, any issue, even like the name of Elon Musk's baby becomes politicized. Instantly between a giant culture war, and that that's a big issue. And we have to get stop doing that and just get to you know if Trump says the correct solution, we back up that solution. If it's the wrong solution, we don't back it up, and we advise go in a different direction. So I think people need to stop getting hyper political and just get to the right answer, and has that almost as a pledge. You know, like I want to get right answer. And, you know, that to me is a problem. So, but yeah, SF is not doing too badly. But then again, the dynamics of New York, the density is different and the building types are different. And, you know, we don't have as many subways as they do. And so we can't compare, we can't even compare the Swedish strategy to New York. You know, what works for Sweden might actually be the correct tactic and it doesn't export. necessarily to a different system. And I think that that conversation has not been had, that like maybe they are right, but it won't work for us. So like, here's the multi-model solution, you know.

That goes back to everything we've been talking about, is just like once you start peeling into a layer of reality, it becomes infinitely complex and you can just get lost. And I think, yeah, you can group them though.

You can say like, okay, well, that's this. In this situation, we're gonna do this. And another thing that didn't happen is that people decided said, hey, we actually want the same thing. Everybody wants to be able to work and we don't want anyone to die. So what is the solution that gets to that? What's contact tracing, mass testing?

And that's the hardest part is because it's so obvious.

Like getting immunity certificates. Yeah. And then get people out to work if they're at low, low, very, very low risk and immune. And then, you know, and everybody wearing masks. Well, we can still be out there, you know, And then the debate moved to like people thinking social distancing meant physical— meant, well, social distancing was the wrong word. It should have been called physical distancing because it had all these implications for online stuff and the psyche of people going into like getting depressed about not being able to see their friends and stuff. And it wasn't about social, it was about physical distancing. And the word choice That went around and the media is kind of part of the echo chamber here, that was a big problem. And now people think, oh, I can't go outside and go on a surfboard. That's not the problem. You can get on a surfboard. The problem is after you've surfed, hanging around in the parking lot with 15 people and then going into— going and all hanging out together. That's the problem. It wasn't the surfing that's the issue. I doubt like when you're riding a wave, you're gonna like cough on someone else like just about to ride the wave. It's not happening. And the building, confined spaces have been the issue. In an elevator, people get into the same elevators together without wearing a mask in San Francisco. I've seen it firsthand. I've seen someone go for it and they're trying to jump in. And that's the issue. It's not the paddleboarder.

Yeah.

So I think we've got to figure this out. And part of this has just been the mechanics. The mechanics have not been discussed or understood.

At a high level by the people who need to.

Yeah, you've been told not to wear a mask up front in the game, and that was wrong by Surgeon General. That was outrageous, actually. When the truth was, you know, don't wear a mask— well, don't buy too many masks because we need them on the front lines. That, you know, it should have been like, hey, we need masks, start sewing masks, and like anything works reasonably well. start wearing like t-shirts and stuff like that. And if you've got stockpiles of N95, send them in to here. Here's a secure no-contact delivery. We got told bullshit. We really did. And it pisses me off, to be honest. And that just means that these people need to go. They need new people that manage us and managers that we really look up to and respect.

Damn. All right. Well, this has been interesting. A little bit depressing.

No, no, there's lots of good solutions. Yeah. I think talking about the problem is the first Phase, right? And then we go into solutions.

Yeah, and that's a multi-month process, at least, more maybe years.

Yeah.

And so how can people find out more so that we can kind of come together and talk about these problems as a group?

Yeah, I think, I think people need to start reaching out to someone that they have a very opposite opinion and start having a good conversation with them and start saying, I want to see how you see the world. And I want to untangle it and not walk away from the situation, not get heated, not swear at them, not go all caps, just to start talking with them and allow the conversation to be the solution zone. Because without the conversation, there's nothing. Like, no one's going to get a good solution unless they sit down. And this includes on Twitter as well. Like, people actually saying, you know, I want to see it from your perspective. And if we did that a little bit, I think we would find— because the solution is effectively a negotiation between all these nodes in this massive network.

Yeah.

Having maximum utility across it in some sense. Yeah. And educating themselves, like go reading about these random things like geometric unity or John Conway died of COVID What did John Conway do? What are surreal numbers? What are surcomplex numbers? What's set constructor theory? Caring about the universe and actually saying, okay, there's something beyond this. Not just saying it's too complex, I give up.

Yep. Overwhelm. That's the biggest thing facing us is overwhelm.

Yeah.

Yeah. So how can people find you on Twitter?

I'm @JudeGomila. So J-U-D-E-G-O-M-I-L-A. There's also @Golden as well. They can follow @Golden if they want. And yeah, I think there's lots of cool things that we can, we can do in the next like 6 months. I think the next 6 months matters actually. Wave 2 is coming for winter. So we should, we should figure it out.

Yeah. And do you guys have any, like, are you guys hiring at all? If anybody's listening, an engineer?

Yeah, yeah. We're looking for a head of data. We're looking for a first salesperson who sold data products before. We're always looking for great engineers in AI and normal engineering and front-end engineering. And we're looking for people to help add more information to the site as well. Definitely looking to expand always and seeing a lot of actual innovation coming up actually in this recession. Lots of really cool companies starting up.

That's really cool. All right, cool. Well, thank you so much. This is awesome and we should definitely do more of these.

Yeah, it's great to talk to you and thanks for throwing out the hard questions.