It's great to see you again.
So, since the last time we talked, we spent a lot of time where you were trying to explain to me simulation theory and why the probability of simulation theory is more likely than it not being a simulation.
Um, yeah, it was what, five years ago or something?
I think it was six or somewhere along those lines.
I mean, a lot of things happened in the world since then.
Yes. Yes. A lot of things. I mean, for example, back then, I think we did we even talk about AI.
It probably came up a bit, but it wasn't this thing looming over civilization, which is really kind of fascinating when you think about the fact that it's only been six years. And in six years, like what a massive jump in some new technology in our life. Like just sort of like the internet where it like crept up on us. We just accepted that it's a thing, but this thing has gotten massively entangled in every aspect of society, in every aspect of people's lives in a very short period of time.
Yeah. I mean, things are like so much is happening now that it's kind of a full-time job just to monitor the situation.
Yeah. Um, and well, you're one of the things that you're talking about is the positive aspects of it, right? You're talking about like that this is probably going to be a net good for humanity to hopefully.
Um, I mean, I think I take both cases seriously, the sort of the risk side and the big unlock. Uh, if we get things right, um,
I feel like we have the potential, like we're on a whitewater raft. We have the potential to get to our destination, but we also have the potential to flip over and try to figure out how to get to shore in freezing cold water and sort of rebuild.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. That seems about right. Yeah. And uh, yeah. And it seems like it's kind of speeding up a bit as well, right? If you're sort of in this field, there's like every few weeks there's a new model being released or something.
Yes. I guess it's like if you imagine, I guess, commentating some fight, right? And that's been recorded and you're supposed to do the voice over and the first round is like normal speed and then the second round is 2x and then the third one 4x and it's just like a whirl of legs and arms and that's a great way to describe it. Yeah, it's just so strange how quickly it snuck up on us and that there's two narratives that we hear. Uh, one narrative is we're in real trouble and that this thing is going to take over every aspect of society and it's essentially going to be a superior life force, a superior intellect that exists amongst us that we created and we don't think that's wise. And then there's the other side that is saying things like what Elon says where he's saying we're going to have universal high income. It's going to be so much prosperity that no one's ever going to have to toil again. There'll be no more third world countries. There'll be no more poverty. Like we can eradicate poverty with the resources that we have on earth and we can change what it means to have to work like you just to provide yourself with food and housing. That's all going to be easy and free. And then everything else is going to be you have to find a purpose in your life.
My problem is, and I love Elon, but the people who have that perspective are all making money off AI. They are all invested like heavily. Marc Andreessen, all these people that have this rosy view of it, they're all invested heavily into it. So when someone like you who's not necessarily in that camp, you know, that is more of a true objective analyst of what's going on, when you have a positive aspect or a positive viewpoint of it, I get a little more excited.
Yeah. Well, I mean, the truth is we don't know, right, how it will pan out. Um, so, um, I mean, I think there are these scenarios where we unlock this, you know, enormous boost both to economic productivity but then, you know, across medicine, entertainment, environment, you know, travel, all kinds of things and like a tsunami of wealth just kind of flows through and lifts all boats. Um, and then the idea of human work becomes an anachronism and where you have machines that can do everything that we can do physically and mentally and do it much better and cheaper. Um, and so I think in those scenarios where this really works, the transformation is a lot deeper. I mean, so that kind of layers to the onion. So like the most superficial level is well, they automate your job. So what are people going to do? Where are they going to work? Yeah. Well, that comes a little bit deeper. First, like the most superficial level is people just wonder where will I get the job if the robot replaces me.
And then the superficial level of that conversation, I think, is well, you need to retrain workers so they can work in other fields. And maybe there needs to be, I don't know, employment insurance whilst they are being retrained or something like that. Um, but once you think through where this ultimately leads, it's you think like it's not just a few jobs, I think, but it's really everything that humans can do to a good approximation, um, with maybe the exception being where the consumer has a direct preference that the particular product or service be done by a human, like priest, prostitute and politician. Um, those might survive.
Well, politician hopefully not. Hopefully AI can handle that all without any corruption.
Yeah. But somebody's got to take credit for it.
This is true. And code it. Yeah.
Um, and so then you get to these like more profound questions, I think, about meaning and purpose and like what does a human life look like at technological maturity.
Right? Uh, also what is experience? Does experience have to be measurable? Like do you have to touch it? Do you have to measure it and weigh it? Or is virtual experience still experience? Like if you have a very full and enjoyable and fulfilling virtual life, is that enough? You know what I mean? Like do you have to do everything in the material world or can you find happiness in a virtual world that doesn't currently exist but we could clearly see the technology if it expands, it's going to, there's going to be the possibility of experiencing a matrix type reality.
Yeah, I think I see where you're going. But yeah, I mean, I think like different strokes for different folks. If you imagine a world where presumably these virtual worlds will be very rich and deep and fascinating, but some people might just like the idea of, you know, climbing the real Mount Everest rather than, you know, being in...
Most certainly. But however, there could come a time where people are locked out of regular reality. Like this is worst case scenario with AI is that you have your needs taken care of but there is no purpose. There's nothing to do. There's nothing to do because AI is taking care of all aspects of society other than recreation. There's nothing to do. And then this one recreation comes along that's not reality, but it's way more fulfilling and exciting than any other aspect of reality. And you know, an example of that would just be in a very minor way, your phone provides you with that sort of an escape and it's not even that thrilling and yet it's massively addicting. Your phone. People are on their phones six hours a day. If we come up with a virtual reality that's way more exciting than regular reality, everyone's going to hop on in.
Yeah. I mean, I think to some extent this will maybe be the case whether you go the virtual path or the physical path. I mean, you could imagine a future where there are like resorts and people are sort of lying in beach chairs sipping drinks all day long and like that's also a kind of checking out, right?
Yeah. Well, that yeah, that's not fulfilling. You know, the thing about a virtual reality is you don't have to even live within our physics. I mean, you can fly, you can do anything.
It's a larger space of possibilities. But either way, it could be like a passive existence in physical reality where you're like lounging at the beach or climbing mountains or in video games. Like you could have like a really intense, every straining every fiber to try to succeed in this virtual environment or like one where you're just kind of floating on some cloud in a drug-like state.
But I don't think people are going to be interested in that because just the way the human mind works, like what kind of video games are people attracted to? It's because a video game is essentially an approximation of that. You're just watching it on a screen but you're sort of forgetting the fact that you're watching on a screen and you're just concentrating on this 3D reality that you're running through with a machine gun or whatever you're doing, right? That's what people are interested in. They're not interested in these games where you just like float over the earth and like fly and just eat bananas. No, they're interested in thrilling things. And if that gets provided in a virtual way, the amount of people that are going to just say this is better than regular boring life or we're a slave to a computer.
Yeah. Yeah, I mean there are both kinds.
Okay, we're back. Uh, where were we?
Um, oh yeah, I was just saying that there are also these computer games that like provide a more passive experience where you're like not really doing much and it's more kind of zoning out.
But most people aren't interested in those. Most people are interested in Call of Duty. They're interested in these wild first-person shooters where you're running down hallways and everything's exciting and thrill-oriented, some sci-fi game or, you know, Half-Life, something like that. That's what people are interested in.
Yeah. Well, I mean, I think there are like some personality differences in what path you would take there. But either way, I think a lot of the choices that people would make currently depend on what they are sort of designed to respond to by feeling good about it. So like if you enjoy one thing you choose that, if you enjoy another. In this condition of technological maturity, if we imagine sort of a future civilization that has developed all possible technologies to their maximum.
Um, then amongst the affordances, amongst the things they could do, is like they wouldn't just have control over the external environment, things around them, but also their own biology and brains. So if you were one of these people and like maybe right now the only way you get enjoyment is by, you know, getting like crazy drunk or doing sort of things you don't really approve of maybe, but that's actually what sort of lights your fire. Like you could imagine redesigning yourself to take the same kind of pleasure but in some kind of contemplating the beauty of the universe or like appreciating the goodness in the heart of others or like some more sort of noble aspiration, like solving abstract mathematics rather than, you know, playing first-person shooters. You would have a choice like whether you would get your thrills from one kind of activity or the other.
Yeah. Which brings us to the question like what does it mean to be human? Like for people finding beauty and joy in, you know, interesting and fascinating things and, you know, how to be a better person and all the different aspects of human life that we think about when we think about people. We think about noble aspects of humanity. But doesn't that have to exist in conjunction with the worst aspects of society for us to appreciate it? It seems like this is a part of the human condition is that we have to have crime so that we can appreciate peace. We have to have war so we could appreciate peace. We have to have hate so we could appreciate love. And we're never without one or the other. They're always both together in constant conflict. And we're always hoping that the good wins out over the bad. And this is part of the struggle of being a human being. And if we just completely eliminate that struggle, we're going to have to be a different thing because what we are is this very strange territorial primate who's endlessly curious. And this territorial primate is moving in a certain direction. And that direction seems to be a better society. Seems to be over time. If you look at statistics from thousands of years ago to today, there's less violence. There's better medicine. There's better education. It's moving in a better and better and better direction. But it's in a struggle. That's part of why it moves. If all of a sudden there's no struggle and everyone is this wonderful enlightened being, like what are we? Because we're going to be a different thing than what we are right now. And if you love music and if you love art and if you love novels and all these different things that come out of the human condition. Well, those things come out of struggle. Those things come out of confusion and pain and heartbreak and love and joy and all that stuff all piled up together. Without that, like what are we? And so if we are moving in this direction technologically and we're not moving as fast biologically, do we merge? Because that seems to be what I think. I think that if this thing goes the way it continues to go, the bottleneck is going to be human biology.
Yeah. Yeah. There is a kind of paradox embedded in our efforts to make progress. So like there are all these kind of scientists and people working to develop better technologies and throughout the economy, you know, in some company maybe you try to figure out how to make some process a little bit more efficient so you can serve customers better and all of this is designed to solve problems, right? To like, if you sort of extrapolate that to its logical endpoint, right, you would imagine we would have perfect technology that can do everything, solve all the problems, like presumably with AI and automation.
Um, but then you end up in this condition where there is kind of nothing left for us to do, you might think. And so although it looks like we have these strong reasons to push forward in this direction, if you actually look at the endpoint, if we succeeded, to many people it will look kind of unpalatable and like this kind of future where, you know, all the problems are solved. And nevertheless, that does seem to be, you know, the direction that we are headed in, probably the direction that we should be headed in.
Yeah. Wouldn't that be a better goal if there was zero murder, zero violence, zero crime, zero lying, zero corruption, and human beings all worked in coordination with each other? Just like in a sense of unison and harmony, right? That would be way better.
Um, I think, but it does like if you actually stare at that situation, it does have these slightly unpalatable qualities because you might think it looks kind of bland then, right? If it's...
Not necessarily though, it's just it looks bland if you think about what we're experiencing now, like all the excitement and the weirdness of uncertainty and of not knowing, you know, and also the negative aspects of our life in conjunction with the positive aspects of our life. So we contrast the two of them and you really appreciate good people after you're around a bunch of [ __ ] [ __ ]. You know, but it doesn't have to be that way. This is just what we are dealing with. This is my position on work, too. Because everybody in their head is like, 'What happens when AI takes all the jobs?' And I'm like, 'Do you have to have a [ __ ] job? Isn't that a human invention? Like, why do you have to have a job? That seems crazy that our main focus is on housing and food and like most people are basically just working for that. Most people that are struggling check to check, basically housing and food is their daily labor. If that's removed, wouldn't enough people figure out what to do with their time?'
Yeah. Yeah. I think so that like, yeah, there will be some transition and discomfort in change. Ultimately that is like... Yeah. I mean, I think it's like so slavery is really bad, right? Like, but wage labor is a sort of, you know, slavery light in a sense. You have to sell a third of your working day just to get money to pay for necessities.
And the people that are trying to make the most money make the conditions for their employees as shitty as possible because it costs the least amount. They don't think about it like, listen, maybe we make less money but we have an awesome experience for everybody that works there. Nobody thinks like that. They all think like we have to make the most money because we have shareholders and we have a responsibility and these people need to make more money every quarter. So yeah, although sometimes you do this, you compete for talent like...
But now, but only the top talent. That's why the CEOs get all the bread and all the people on the assembly line...
Some employees get treated well, right? What would you say? I mean...
Jamie is a different kind of employee. Jamie is literally the co...
I mean, he's the co-person on the show.
That's different. But if you know some dude who's out there, you know, stocking boxes for Amazon, that's different than being the CEO.
Yeah. So I mean, I think like ultimately that would be a huge liberation and kind of restore dignity. Like you should be in control of your own time. It's kind of almost the most, like aside from your own body, like your own time, your own attention.
And we have to teach people discipline. They have to. That's the thing is like if you give people the opportunity to just do nothing, we do, you know, we're primates, we'll find a way to... there's, we're genetically sort of designed to conserve resources. You don't want to overuse resources for no reason, do a bunch of [ __ ] because you won't survive. You don't have enough food. So we're sort of designed to like know how to be lazy. And so we're going to have to find things that give us purpose or we'll get depressed. This episode is brought to you by Visible. It's officially summer, folks. And boy, what a summer we are having. It feels like one of those good old-fashioned summers where you just want to enjoy every moment and keep up with the action. Your best companion this summer, Visible wireless. Visible gives you unlimited 5G data and unlimited hotspot powered by Verizon for just $25 a month. So you can make this the summer of fun and savings. Visible is more than just a wireless plan. It's unlimited wireless designed to always keep you connected with no contract to tie you down. Switch today at visible.com. Plans start at $25 a month or get our premium Visible Plus Pro plan and save $10 on your first month when you use promo code Rogan. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan features and network management details.
Yeah. I mean, so it used to be the traditional idea like of British aristocracy like that you wouldn't have to work for a living. It was kind of an unfortunate necessity for many people that they had to work for their daily bread, right? But the ideal way of being human was that you just had money and then you spent your time doing other things like, you know, maybe you were involved in politics or maybe you had like an art collection or you did your gardening or entertained friends.
That's the best aspect of it. So but when you think about British aristocracy, don't you think about fuckups? I do. I think about guys that are just drunk. They drive their Ferrari into a lake and they accidentally drown their friend and then they pay off the cops and they get away with it. That's what I think of when I think of...
Yeah, there's that. But there were also these kind of, I don't know, amateur scientists or eccentrics who had their weird thing and it kind of added to... So I guess it brings out like the more freedom somebody has, the more they can reveal their true nature, like...
Well, it also depends on how they're raised, right? Who are their parents? What values did they instill in them when they were young? Did they explain the value of hard work, that it's actually good for you? And then if you just find something you really want to do and you concentrate on it and you really work hard at it, it's actually very fulfilling.
Yeah. So you could imagine, for example, the education system in this world where we no longer need to work, like...
Presumably would need to be redesigned from scratch basically because right now it's a kind of machine, right? So you take children coming in kind of on a conveyor belt.
And then some processing is done like sit at your desk, here is this assignment, here's a grid, and then they come out with a quality label attached.
Right. And then they are meant to be productive workers that you could put in an office and they will... So this, it kind of is an unfortunate fact about the current condition that I mean the world needs a lot of these office workers that can do all these tasks in the economy so like it's, we have to have...
Until it doesn't. And at that point it would be absurd to keep doing this, right? Then you could imagine changing education so that it would be much more about like how can you learn to live well, a life of leisure, like you imagine...
Cultivating like, you know, the art of conversation, appreciation for art and music.
Hobbies, physical wellness, like nature.
Um, the ability to set your own goals and take your own initiatives to, um, you know, to develop true friendships with people. Like these are things that are not taught in school but you could imagine that being the curriculum, like spirituality, like all kinds of...
Things that would then equip people to sort of use their freedom, their wealth, their free time for, you know, some kind of, you know, actually meaningful and beautiful activities.
For sure. For sure, preemptively we should be kind of teaching people like that now. Like if young people are coming up now, the world that they're... if you're in first grade right now, 12 years from now when you're graduating from high school, like the world is a totally different place. And this idea that being a productive worker who can sit still for eight hours a day is the best way we should teach kids. That seems crazy if we're really like seeing the world that you're describing and that most people seem to think is oncoming.
Yeah. Yeah. I guess the timeline is still a little bit uncertain. So you don't end up in a situation, right, where you sort of now you find yourself you're 20 years old, it's time to go out in the world. You have no skills. The AI revolution hasn't yet quite happened. It's kind of...
Isn't that a liberal arts degree anyway?
Yeah. And how is that going?
There's a lot of silly degrees that people get right now that are useless anyway. And they spend a tremendous amount of time working on getting it and then when they get out there's no jobs for that degree.
Yeah. So, so they were a little bit too early maybe in hopping on this.
Maybe, or you know there's also traps. There's things that you can get really excited about and do like if you want to play professional bowling, you want to bowl professionally, like well the amount of money you're going to make is very limited because the best bowler in the world, like what does the best professional bowler in the world make?
Let's guess. I say $100,000.
Professional bowlers. We used to know a guy, Ari's friends with a guy, Tommy, God I can't remember his last name. Do you remember his last name, Jamie? He was a professional bowler but he used to come to the Comedy Store and hang out. Really nice guy and loved comedy. And...
I imagine like maybe the very best one makes a pretty decent living and then like the third best, like it's just...
I bet barely, barely. I bet the best guy probably makes maybe 100 grand or 200 grand at the most. And that means like the 30th guy in the world is [ __ ].
Yeah. There you have to have another job to pursue that.
Well, but then in this... what does he make?
200k. Oh, 400k in big season. 450 including prize money and sponsorships.
But then like what does...
EJ Tackett made $43... [ __ ] yeah. EJ Tackett made $437,540 for the 2025 season with several others between $190K and 270K in prize money alone. Top tier. So the top tier guys make a good living.
But how many guys are there? You know what I'm saying? Uh, it's probably like a very thin sort of peak and...
So if you choose to go into bowling, it's not like choosing to go into, you know, there's a lot of other jobs. Like even if you want to be a basketball player, they're making a lot of money, you know, if you're a really good basketball player and you pursue that, like you could get very, very rich. But how many of them get rich?
Most don't, yeah. But then like so maybe the money factor would kind of drop out of the picture and it would just be what you're interested in and then maybe even it would...
Are endless and what other people are interested in to some extent because like I think part of what people are competing for is also prestige and status and...
That would be a thing, right? Like status would be more important. It's like who's the best at this thing? Like a bunch of friends who play golf, like Jamie plays golf all the time, golfers are all like comparing each other's scores and they're playing, they're competing in this game instead and they think about that more than they think about work.
Like people who love golf, they [ __ ] hate work.
Like I used to say that about comedy. Back when I first started, one of the things that I noticed is the guys who really got into golf, their careers kind of stalled because they were more excited about playing golf than they were about writing jokes and going on the road. And I was like, okay. So, if the average person doesn't need food and housing anymore from labor, if that's gone and now you just get it. And so now you could just go do things. We just have to teach people to be excited about stuff. We have to teach people the value of curiosity and finding things that are interesting to you and then the value of just education for the sake of learning things because it's interesting, just pure satisfaction of curiosity, which is a beautiful thing. Like that would be great for everybody if we instead of learning things because your teacher tells you you have to learn it. Well, there's always going to be people that just naturally gravitate towards mathematics and they're really fascinated by mathematics and there's always going to be people that are just naturally gravitating towards history. They're like, 'How did we get here? What is this? How did this start? Who wrote that? Who's the first guy to figure that out?' And that's, you're going to naturally go towards that and just be educated for the sake of satisfying your curiosity. And maybe we'll have a more balanced society because people will actually be able to just pursue their interests. But we have to teach them to do it. That's what I think is going to be really important about young people in the future. Teach them to actually pursue their curiosity rather than just squash any desires they have for novelty and for interesting things and just be able to work all day doing something you hate because that's what it means to be an adult.
Yeah. I think like cultivating that would be like the way forward in this case, right?
And seems very possible. It's doable. Like we know curious people and we...
Yeah. And at least to some extent. Now I think there's probably also some differences in how different folks are wired. Like some people get bored very easily. Others find everything fascinating.
Some people are like just naturally depressed or have low mood. Others are sort of evolving.
Yeah. But those people that are naturally depressed, how much would their life change if they were coached at a very early age the value of exercise? And if they started running, if they started doing yoga and they started feeling much better and they weren't naturally depressed anymore, and then you changed their diet and you start adding in vitamins and nutrients and stop giving them processed foods and all of a sudden they feel better because the concept even of depression, like what does that mean?
Well, it varies so wildly. And when you're talking about people that aren't taking care of their bodies and that's not thought of as a primary factor in why depression exists in the first place, well, this is a very unscientific approach then because we know that it has a profound impact on human beings. So we're pretending that there's like this one-size-fits-all. No, I think that should be also a part of teaching people how to be a human being. Chase your curiosities, but also this is why you're not feeling well and that if you just develop this ability to get some momentum going and just show up at that yoga class every day, you'll feel way better and you don't have to take a pill.
Yeah. And I think, yeah, many could be a lot improved if they were taught to sort of take care of their basic physiology and...
Everyone can be improved. 100% of them can be improved. It's a part of being a human being.
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I don't know. I think there is also some people who might just have, you know, some imbalance of some neurotransmitter because of some genetic...
100%. Or maybe they don't even have the energy to engage in these activities that would make them feel better, but then I think there would be much better medicines for helping.
That's where Adderall comes in. Let's go, give them some Adderall.
Get them to start running.
I'm kidding, but what we're saying is all doable. We're not asking people to breathe underwater, right? What we're saying is that there are people on Earth that live like that. And this idea that living just for a paycheck so that you can cover your food and your housing, which we've always thought of as being just an undeniable part of being a person, an adult. This is what you have to do. You have to pay for your food, pay for your housing. But if we do get to a point where the structure of society is now run by hyper-intelligent artificial intelligence, you wouldn't need most jobs that people have to do that suck. And in order to get our society to this point, if you wanted an iPhone, you needed some people that were at a factory somewhere putting it all together. You needed someone who's designing it. You needed someone who's sitting there in the office trying to figure out how to market it. You needed all those jobs. But when we don't need all those jobs anymore, then things are going to be very interesting. And that's what I'm saying. We need to become a different thing. Like it's kind of true and kind of not. Like you can be a human being and live in that world, but we're going to have to re-educate people how to be a human being. It's going to... our education system specifically in this country is just designed to make factory workers specifically. Like there's a real history of it. Like we know why they made it this way. They made it this way and they got people in really early so they could get people set up for jobs. They just want people to work.
Yeah. So, so we are kind of currently ill-suited for really thriving in an environment of abundance and for enjoying life because I mean both at deep biological time scales and during the lifespan of a single individual there are all these pressures, necessities that kind of force us to become certain types. I mean we talked about the education system training people to be the kind who can sit at the desk all day long and perform tasks, right?
Biologically, um, we've evolved drives to, you know, be lazy, to conserve energy, to eat as much as we can and now in the modern environment where there are fridges everywhere, like it causes problems metabolically. Um, and in terms of enjoying life, for many people there is this hedonic treadmill, right? Like so you achieve something, some improvement, there's a spike of happiness and then you sort of go back to baseline very quickly. You start to take for granted all the blessings of life which makes it very difficult to actually achieve a state of permanent happiness and felicity. And it's kind of been necessary because we, that there needed to be this motivation to keep striving for the next thing. Now once you've actually achieved all the things though, then maybe that becomes kind of dysfunctional, right? Like why keep wanting to strive for the next thing if all the things have already been achieved, at least in a certain domain.
And so I think as we move deeper into this hypothesized future like where we get all these magical technologies, then at some point probably some transformation of human nature would have to go along with that. First maybe cultural changes to sort of equip people for a life of leisure.
And then ultimately maybe more profound changes to our very biology. And so that imagine if you solve aging and you can now live...
For thousands of years, right? Like maybe the way our memory works is not really set up for that. Maybe we would just go stale after 200 years with our current brains. Like we just get stuck in a rut.
We don't know because we haven't lived for 200 years. But that could easily turn out to be the case with a human. So then maybe at that point you would need to sort of do something to sort of add more cognitive resources, more flexibility, do some sort of psychedelic reset or something to sort of keep the flexibility going for, you know, longer periods of time.
I'm glad you said a psychedelic reset because it'd be very funny if the main tools that we have for navigating this are all illegal because I think they might be. And specifically with psilocybin and DMT and probably ayahuasca as well. Like if we wanted chemical tools to navigate a new reality, those are probably the best ones that we have available and they're all illegal. And I think you're right. I think if we're going to be able to navigate this correctly, we have to kind of change the way we interact with each other, what it means to be a person. But I wonder how much of the conflict that we have is a direct result of this inherent struggle that so many people have. And I mean, there's a direct correlation between extreme poverty and extreme crime. You know, specifically in this country, if you look at the areas of extreme poverty in this country, they're also the areas with extreme crime. And I wonder how much of that would be completely alleviated with a complete lack of poverty. You know, we've always assumed that if you're going to have a functioning society that you're going to have slums. Why? Like why? They don't serve any function. It's not a good thing. Well, it's because some people are always going to be making bad decisions and some people are always going to be going down the wrong road and crime and this and that, right? But they're still just humans and some humans don't do that. So, wouldn't it be better to figure out a way to not have humans ever do that anymore? And it seems like there seems like a way to do that. It's again not asking people to breathe underwater. We're just trying to figure out why do some people never engage in crime? Why do some people live these really fulfilling and interesting lives? Well, probably because they were exposed to it when they were really young. Probably because they weren't exposed to like very bad environments and very bad crime and very bad poverty. And how much of that would change if there was no more poverty? It sounds like such a little fairy tale childlike, oh, one day we'll have no poverty, but that's doable. If everyone is alive, right? Okay. That's alive right now is not starving to death. That means we figured out a way to at the very least get you resources so you could feed yourself, right? That this no matter how dysfunctional things are, all it has to do is get ramped up a few steps.
And now you have no one ever worried about being fed, no one ever worrying about not having a place to sleep. And then you have to find purpose. But it seems like there's a lot of people that find purpose without having a financial price tag attached to it. Just by what we're talking about with golf or you could be like really into writing books. You could write books all day long and people are always going to want human created fiction. People are always going to be interested in the way other people think about things. You'll find there's plenty of things to do. There's plenty of games to play and plenty of skills to learn. The idea that the only reason why we work is to eat and to not get rained on seems nuts.
Um, yeah, I guess to some extent an open question to what extent people will always want to read human fiction or to prefer the human-generated outputs. It might be just because current AI-generated writing is kind of lacking in various ways. It's often slow and boring. But if it became really good...
Yeah. Then, you know, maybe it would just be like much more fun to like, if a movie made by an AI might just be so much better and richer and the lighting is perfect and the dialogue is sharp and it's more funny and deep and...
Certainly touches it. Then you go and watch this human-produced thing and it's going like, like most people don't go and watch sort of film school students' productions.
Right, but then there's that like that movie Obsession. Wasn't that movie made like very inexpensively?
And it's a huge hit, right?
And that's part of the thrill of it is that this guy who was like a YouTuber, right, who created this film and now this movie is a giant hit and everybody's like super excited about it. Now that same movie was made by AI. I wonder if it would have that impact because it doesn't have the human connection.
So that's possible that we keep getting interested in these things because we sort of are really entangled with the human world much more than we are with the world of AIs. And I mean for the same reason you might be more interested in if like your brother or friend did something you might think, ah, this is interesting, I want to check that out. Of course if it was some random dude who made something slightly better, it's like doesn't mean...
Right, when you go to see your nephew play baseball, you wouldn't really go see little kids' baseball.
No, no, just randomly, right?
When your nephew gets on first base, like way to go, Bobby.
So, I think these kind of social entanglements that we have like will be a big part of what gives structure to lives in this condition where the external constraints are removed.
I think that there is a great value for the human mind for whatever reason in getting better at things and learning things. And I think that if we could instill that in people at a young age, I think it would be fairly easy to get people to pursue that path. But we have to completely revamp our education system, which should have been done a long time ago anyway. The idea of having unenthusiastic, underpaid people being any percentage of what children encounter for most of the day when they're in their most formative period is insane. It should be a rich, exciting, enthusiastic journey and how to be a better person and how it's exciting to learn things and how it's exciting to get better at things and about how anybody can get better at things.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I hate that every day of school. I remember...
I hated it. Hate it. I didn't even know that I was interested in learning anything until I got out of school.
The same for me. I mean, I only discovered like I also hated books and everything like that for my first 15 years of life because I associated that with school. That was the kind of school thing. So it's only then randomly one day I happened to walk into the local library for no reason and pulled out a book here and there and then I discovered that there was this whole world of science and ideas and literature and all of that like very, very different from what we were doing in school and then that kind of opened the gates for me to this.
Imagine what a head start you would have had if you had like a different kind of education.
With super enthusiastic people who really love teaching, children are really good at, and that we reward them and that it becomes a very prestigious position to be in rather than what it is now.
If you talk to some guy and he goes, 'I'm a high school teacher.' You're like, 'Oh, the poor bastard. How's he feed himself?' That's immediately what I think. Like, good for you that you're doing that, but also I guarantee you could probably be making a lot more money and be happier doing another job. And so, that's a terrible way to start life off. And if we just revamp that, then you have a bunch of people that are interacting with life in a very different way. And instead of being thought, I have to get a job someday, I have to get a job after school anyway to help my mom pay the bills because we're struggling. So, I got to contribute to the household even though I'm 16 now. I can't hang out with friends. If all that stuff's out the window and now it's like, no, what we need to find out is what is exciting for you? Like what excites your mind, your specific personality? What is it about life that's interesting? And let's expose you to a bunch of different things that are exciting and interesting that other people find value in and let's find out which way you gravitate because maybe you gravitate towards chess or maybe you gravitate towards something completely different. Maybe you're just really into painting. Maybe painting just lights you up and you look at a canvas and you just start [ __ ] around with it and that's your thing. There's a lot of people in this world that find that. It's just they have to find it themselves unfortunately.
Yeah. Yeah. I think that's kind of inspiring. And but like I think the train doesn't stop there. So if we think even more further into this kind of condition of technological maturity, I think in addition to sort of freeing up people, you know, like making it easy to produce the food and the houses and like cars that go faster and don't pollute and all of this stuff. Like if you think through what maybe a technologically mature civilization could do, like so a lot of these like learning for example is something that gives people purpose but maybe you would have the ability to sort of download knowledge at the click of a button. So rather than like if you want to learn advanced mathematics now you have to study for years, right, do like books with exercises and apply yourself and then eventually you sort of unlock.
But like maybe at technological maturity they would be like, okay, understand mathematics, okay, I'm going to press that button, boom, now I understand mathematics.
Like the Matrix, I know kung fu, remember?
Yeah, so if you had like, you know, you maybe some kind of nanobots that could infiltrate your brain and then change the synapses in just such a way that you're now the same as you were before except you have these concepts from abstract mathematics.
You know, after 20 minutes or something like that some superintelligence works out how to change your synapses to this new condition. And if you were inclined to do various things because they give you joy and pleasure, like you could also think, well, I could do those things and get the joy and pleasure or I could just push this button that activates the...
So there would be these shortcuts to everything, and it looks like you would have a post-instrumental condition where there would, at least at first sight, seem to be no reason to do anything for the sake of achieving something else, because there would always be this like shorter path to that other thing than pressing the button.
And so that's a kind of deeper form of redundancy. It seems that all forms of human instrumental effort would become unmotivated. You could still, you know, go to the gym every day and sweat for an hour, or you could just take the pill that induces exactly the same physiological effects and the mental effect, like the calm or whatever you feel after.
Or maybe even better, genetically engineer something so you don't have to take a pill.
And so then I think you're getting more into these like fundamental questions of value, right? Philosophical questions about what ultimately is it that makes a life good, and what makes a life good for a primate, because that's what we are, or a primitive version of primates.
I think we're going to become something different, and if we do it through technologically induced evolution or biologically induced evolution, we're still moving in a general direction. Just biologically there, I mean, if you look at ancient hominids and look at us, we're clearly very different, so we're moving in a general direction anyway. And when you look at the grays, like these prototypical aliens that everybody sees with the big heads and the skinny bodies, what do they look like? Well, they look like if we keep going, that's what we're going to look like. We're going to be these genderless, sexless, muscleless little skinny things with giant heads that communicate telepathically, which is probably where we're moving. And if we're moving that way, maybe we, you know, we think of them as being an alien from another, maybe that's not, maybe that's just the general direction that primates go once they figure out technology. They eventually realize, well, first of all, the idea of having to have a male and a female is kind of crazy, right? Why? Well, because we have to reproduce. Well, what if we don't reproduce like that anymore? What if all reproduction is done through engineering and there's no more sex, so there's no more lust, so there's no more jealousy, so there's no more ego, there's no more anything, and then there's a hive mind because technology advanced to the point where the reason why they have these big giant heads, they're essentially locked into everybody all around them all the time.
Yeah, well, is that what we would want, though?
Not us, but I don't think we'll be us anymore. I think this idea, like if you went to chimps and you said, hey dude, one day you're going to be on a plane eating peanuts, flying over the ocean, they'd be like, 'Fuck that. I don't want to do that. I'll just stay here where the fruit is. You guys are nuts. Like, why do you want to do that?' And you'll be addicted to it and you'll be watching YouTube all day long. Like, no, I don't want to do that. That doesn't sound fun.
We do. We do have a lot of bananas, though.
Maybe. Or you have to get killed by the other chimpanzees that want the bananas. You know, they have chimp wars. They come in and kill each other. So I think we're going to be something different, and I think that's inevitable anyway. If you believe in evolution, it's inevitable anyway that we become something different. We're not a finished product.
Yeah. No, I think that is true. We are not the finished product. Now the question is, the thing that we become or that becomes, is that a result of us choosing how we want to be, or is it just these kind of impersonal forces like evolution selecting certain types that might end up leading to outcomes that we actually don't want? And so I guess the hope is that we would be able to develop along a path that preserves and develops the things that we actually value about being human, maybe amplifies them, then maybe adds other things. So there are many different possible things you could develop in the future, but that we sort of select those that actually make us better rather than just randomly different, that we can sort of grow into our ideals.
But it's so funny how much value we put in the human condition, how much value we put in meaning, because it is valuable to us. When you think about like what that means in terms of the amount of energy it produces, the amount of impact that it has versus the structure of the universe itself versus black holes and stellar nurseries and things that are just infinitely more spectacular than the human condition. But to us it's like, 'Oh, what is meaning? What is meaning? What is meaning to me?' Like, well, what is meaning to me? You're a finite biological organism that has to find meaning because you're sort of tramping around through this weird world where eventually you're going to die and you're going to leave your mark, and maybe reincarnation's real, maybe the afterlife's real. Nobody knows. So, you got to have meaning. But the universe itself, like a human only lives 100 years, how much meaning can you have in a hundred years?
Yeah. Yeah. Now that is, I think we kind of die prematurely. I mean we think of us as like, first you become stronger and more capable for 15, 20 years, right? Then biologically you stagnate, and then maybe you keep accumulating sort of knowledge and skills for another few decades, but like just as you have started to acquire like a modicum of wisdom, like your brain starts to rot.
Yep. And then everything is erased either by Alzheimer's or death, and it's kind of, okay, now that's all gone, the whole lifetime of experiences.
All the memories and like the hard-earned lessons, that seems kind of sad and probably not the best way for things to be. I think we would want to extend the human lifespan so you could continue to grow up, not just kind of reach 20 and then plateau there for the rest of your life, but what if we could continue to develop so that like at 80 you were as much stronger and like be able to understand more and move better and like just have the same capacity increase as you had like between zero and 20 and you just kept going.
Well, these life extension scientists that are working on these things, guys like David Sinclair, like they believe that that's not just a possibility but an inevitability.
Yeah. Well so that's more like I guess preserving, like preventing or delaying that decay.
Sure. Which is already very good, like reversing. They're talking about reversing.
Yeah. But then you would go back to being 20, right? In terms of biological.
But then you have engineering. If you have very long time spans, so then you might at some point want to continue to grow. Like you might not want to just be stuck at a 20-year-old human 10,000 years. Like maybe eventually you would want to become slightly bigger in terms of your ability to engage with the world.
Sure. Of course. And if they can figure out how to make people, well, there's already genetic engineering that's being done in terms of increasing potential intelligence and IQ. They're already doing that, you know. And so this was a, I know I'm sure you know about that thing that happened in China where this one doctor got in trouble because he had genetically engineered some babies to be inoculated to HIV. But it also at the same time gave them a far increased potential IQ. Well, it remains to be seen whether or not it actually works as these guys, you know, become like 20 and 30 and we start putting them in chess tournaments and see if it really did make them smarter. But if the possibility of that is already being studied, they already understand the differences between like what's possible, what we understand, and that increases every day. They understand more every day, more is possible every day. If that just keeps going, well, you have a different version of what the human consciousness is. You have a different version of the human mind.
Yeah. Although I think the way AI is going, I think that's the train that's going to reach the destination faster.
Oh yeah. And then once you do have superintelligence in machine substrate, like then that can then unlock all kinds of technologies including these biological technologies or nanotechnology or a host of other things that could then sort of bring us up if that's how we decide to go. And uplift us into different, like either biologically enhancing us or like uploading us into. But again it's that whitewater river raft. It's like we're going down this whitewater and we might make it out of this or it might crash.
You know, one of the weird things about, I'm very fascinated with ancient civilizations, and one of the weirdest things about ancient civilizations is when you go really, really far back, a bunch of them have these depictions of kings that ruled for thousands of years. And it's very strange stuff because the Egyptians and ancient Sumer, there's a bunch of different depictions of these kings that lived lives that were way longer than biological humans lived. And then there's the flood myth or the flood story. And then after the flood, biological life decreases pretty radically, and it seems to get back to like a normal version of what we assume now, which is like a hundred years.
And one of the weird questions that these alternative ancient historians have is, are we missing the possibility that there was a hyper-advanced civilization that existed tens of thousands of years ago, and that what we're seeing now is not a linear progression from caveman to human being with an iPhone in 2026, that along the way there might have been a very high level of sophistication, and the evidence of that might be the pyramids and some of these other ancient structures that are mind-boggling. As much as you try to explain them away, when you're dealing with 2,300,000 stones, some of them are cut from a quarry 500 miles away, 80-ton stones that are in the ceiling, like perfectly cut granite where it looks like they have diamond drill holes in them. It seems like there's some lost technology. And every society has this flood myth. And every society that has this flood myth, especially these ones that were very advanced somehow or another like ancient Egypt, they have these depictions of people that lived way longer than people live today.
And I wonder if human beings one day will realize like, oh, if you keep going long enough, a hundred years is silly. Like people can, they'll just figure out what it is that makes people age and die. Fix that and you'll live an insanely long time. And then if people live an insanely long time and their capacity for reason and logic increases, their capacity for intelligence increases, then you have these insane technologies that were required to do things like build the pyramids. And that might be what happens. That might be a natural course of progression that the first thing we realize is 100 years is not enough because I'm 58. I'm still learning every day. How come I'm getting better at being a person every day? Well, I should have figured this out already. But you don't ever have time to figure it out.
There's not enough time, and you only get one run. Like I mean you would think you'd want a trial run first, right, on life, and then like okay, now I kind of know a little bit how it works. Now let's do it for real.
Well that's the concept. It's kind of scary. I mean it's a bit crazy that each of us is put in charge of a whole human life, right? Like are we really at the level of, like if you want to run an airplane you have to go through these certifications and stuff, right? And then maybe you can be a pilot, but like for a human life it's like every single person, like okay you have 100% dictatorial control of this person, like they're completely hostage to your whims.
And then that's like us, so but that's the way it is. But yeah, having the ability to kind of try different things and maybe do like a do-over. If the life turned out to be like a fail every 50 years or something, you have a chance to kind of, or maybe not even a do-over, but it's the same life, but you can do whatever you want and you don't have to be constrained to this idea that you only have a certain amount of time and you want to retire by 65. We might look at that as being like one of the first completely archaic notions and the reason why people got it all wrong. Like, well society will be better because people are going to live way longer. And if you think about how much smarter, how old are you? 53.
Okay. Now, the way you said that was sad.
I'm older than you, dog. Don't worry about it. But if you think about how much smarter you are at 53 than you were at 13, you know, now imagine how much smarter you will be at 353 or 53. And if that actually becomes possible, if a person can live to be 100 years, why can't they live to be 4,000 years? If they can figure out what makes people age, if we really can genetically engineer human beings, that's not breathing underwater. That's just extending life. And if you extend life and extend intellectual capacity and your ability to learn and grow, holy, you're dealing with a 2,000-year-old person. That's a completely different kind of thing. And that could be real someday. And that might be also one of the things that comes along with this new understanding of just life in general with superintelligent AI.
Yeah. No, for sure. Fixing aging and reversing it would be amongst the things that a technologically mature civilization would be able to do.
We just have to get people out of the idea that it's vain. Why do you want to live forever?
That's what they say now, right? But when somebody actually has the therapy and you could like, here you could either continue to get, you know, worse kidneys and more painful knees and wrinkles, and you start to forget things, or you can take this rejuvenation serum that everybody else is using and they are like full of energy and running around and doing stuff. Like, do you still think it's vain? So I think a lot of this is Stockholm syndrome, that like you are kind of faced with the inevitability of aging and decay and have been for thousands of years. So you develop a kind of romantic scaffold that reconciles you to the inevitable.
I like it, Stockholm syndrome.
Which is maybe adaptive, but only up until the point where there actually might be something you could do to escape, right? Then if you're too stuck in this mindset, it might sort of prevent you from taking advantage to regain your freedom, right? And I think we are now at that stage. We don't yet have the therapies, but there are certainly investments and research and stuff we could do that would hasten the arrival.
And I think in fact we should have started on a big sort of, you know, Manhattan Project to defeat aging like decades ago, and maybe we would have better therapies by now then. But for a long time aging was not seen as a problem, only the specific diseases that are the result of aging.
And they got all this funding, right? Like so you have like huge research programs for Alzheimer's and for heart disease and for cancer. But if you look at the main common cause of most human disease, it's aging. Like you're much more likely to get any of these when you're 80 than when you're 20 because your cells gradually decay and gunk builds up. Arteries clog up, you know, your DNA mutates, your methylation pattern gets scrambled, your brain. So rather than just trying to put out the fires one by one after they occur, like at some point you just need to sort of try to prevent, like maybe you need a bit of rain to sort of prevent the fire.
It's kind of amazing how much we've accomplished as a society, as civilization, when you think about the fact that people only live to be 100.
Yeah. It's kind of incredible. We got rockets and satellites and cell phones, and people only live to be 100. So it's like everybody has to build on everybody else's intelligence and everybody else's understanding of the world and develop new things, and everybody has to learn those new things.
And each brain is so small that it can only learn a small little specialty, right? And you need millions of them to really, although it's not entirely clear with humans. If we had been much more long-lived, like the way we currently are configured, maybe we would just have gotten too stuck in our ways and sort of stagnated into some sort of ultra-conservative society where nobody's allowed to do anything different, or the old geezers that have their way of doing things just remain forever in charge.
Yeah. So I mean we just don't know, right, like whether that would have slowed progress or accelerated it. But it is still amazing, like it's a long path from sort of running around in the forest to sort of these, look at these advanced chip technologies and the whole global supply chain where like thousands of people are working to develop just one little tool that then feeds into the ability to make another tool that eventually makes these leading-edge AI chips.
Where they're layering things four atoms deep.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's remarkable. It's incredible. And humans only live to be 100. Imagine what we could accomplish if we lived to be 3,000, you know.
Yeah. Or if we were just a little bit, you know, better at these things. Yes. Because I think we are sort of the stupidest possible species that are capable of developing advanced technology, like because as soon as we evolved to reach that level, we started developing it, right? And then so that's where we are, like the dumbest possible that just barely can do this, right? Barely can do this while we're blowing each other up.
Yeah. At the same time all over the world. Blowing up people.
Yeah. But maybe a lot of that frantic, stupid, illogical behavior is because we're so finite, like we're in a rush that, you know, we realize we only have a certain amount of time to get things done. And so this sort of accentuates the desire to control resources and to cement your immortality and to do these things that people love to do, put their name on buildings. There's a thing that people like to do that it's almost like cementing their immortality, that maybe there'll be less of a desire to do that if people lived way longer. And then you would have to assume if you can engineer humans to live longer, you could probably engineer a lot of stupidity out of us. They could just find out why people behave like, what if you could just eliminate lying? What if there's like a genetic solution to lying?
Well, or just a really good lie detector.
Yeah, but I mean, what if you can genetically engineer out the desire to lie?
