Rabbit Hole: Who Will Survive The AI Era? (cats, mostly) - #1105

Summary

Modern Wisdom Podcast Episode #1105

"Rabbit Hole: Who Will Survive The AI Era? (cats, mostly)"

Host: Chris Williamson
Date: June 1, 2026
Guests: Tim, George, Jared

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Episode Overview

This episode is a sprawling, freewheeling conversation featuring Chris Williamson and friends (Tim, George, Jared), exploring the coming age of artificial intelligence and what it means for human flourishing, memory, purpose, and even the fate of cats. Mixed with playful banter and deep dives into memory, language, culture, and technology, the group investigates how humans might adapt (or struggle) for meaning in a world of endless abundance, and how both our tools and our minds might be having unintended consequences on our lives.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Messaging, Memory, and the Evolution of Language

• WhatsApp vs SMS: The group opens with a lighthearted debate on why Americans don’t use WhatsApp, linking it to the history of prepaid texting in the UK and the rise of "leet speak" to save costs.
• Language Shapes Thought: Tim shares stories from growing up in Long Island, observing how place influences one's perception of normality and wealth divides. The conversation pivots to etymology—how words like “soon” have shifted meaning over generations, reflecting changing cultural attitudes (“Soon used to mean now… but because so many people kept saying ‘I’ll do that soon’ and didn’t, we created the word ‘now’ to replace it.” — George, 07:13).

2. Multilingualism, Immersion, and Learning

• Language Immersion: Tim recounts his experience learning Japanese as a teenage exchange student, emphasizing total immersion as superior to classroom learning.
  • “You could do a year in six weeks, no problem.”—Tim, explaining the Michel Thomas method (09:57).
• Child vs. Adult Language Acquisition: Adults can learn languages quicker than kids due to advanced conceptual frameworks, but typically don’t due to lack of forced immersion (11:00).

3. How Our Minds Work: Memory, Forgetting, and Subjectivity

• Visual vs. Verbal Thinking: The panel reflects on aphantasia, eidetic memory, and how people differ in internal visualization.
  • “There are tremendous advantages to forgetting... not being as selective is almost counter-evolutionary past a certain point.” — Tim, on memory (18:50).
• AI & Forgetting: Jared raises the question of how (or if) artificial intelligence should forget irrelevant “memories,” comparing it to the human mind (22:28).
• AI Hallucinations & Human Memory: Drawing parallels between AI “hallucinations” and human fabrication of memory, showing both invent details and forget information in ways that shape our narratives (36:32).
• Case Studies: Stories range from the British “acquired savant syndrome” (23:39) to the role of forgetting in sports performance (“If you’re a great athlete, you gotta learn how to forget”—Jared, 24:47).

4. Cultural Attitudes: Time, Meaning, and Resistance

• Punctuality by Country: Playful debate about “the latest nationality” and cultural norms of lateness (13:32).
• Purpose, Meaning, and Scarcity: The group digs into how abundance can erode meaning (“What happens to human purpose when AI removes scarcity?” — Tim quoting Paki McCormick, 54:00).
• The Role of Resistance: Is meaning only found in struggle? “Is it possible to have meaning without resistance? There are very few things that are meaningful and also totally frictionless.” — Chris, 80:09.

5. Technology & Human Interaction

• Ambient AI & Hardware Futures: Jared describes “Sky,” an AI-powered contextual home screen (37:27), and speculates on the future of device interfaces—AirPods with cameras, ambient computing, fewer screens, and the slow disappearance of the ‘app’ as we know it (47:00; 129:40).
• Photos, Screens, and Selfhood: Tim and Chris discuss whether less ability to record life (photos, video) might actually make us happier (45:00).
• The Mirror & Self-Reflection: Quoting philosophers, the group wonders if too much self-reflection (mirrors, screens) paradoxically increases self-criticism (“Man was never meant to have a mirror—self-reflection like that is detrimental in some ways.”—Jared, 50:17).

6. Artificial Intelligence: The Rabbit Hole

• AI Hallucinations: Mirroring human tendencies, AI’s fabrications are natural extensions of how our brains work (36:32).
• Meaning in the Post-Scarcity Era: Drawing from Joseph Campbell and Viktor Frankl, the main challenge in a solved world isn’t survival, but meaning (56:24).
  • “More people today have the means to live but no meaning to live for.” — Tim quoting Viktor Frankl, 56:59.

7. Memory, Neuromodulation, and Techno-Therapy

• Neuromodulation as Mental Health Tool: Tim discusses breakthroughs like TMS (transcranial magnetic stimulation), how it can radically alter anxiety and depression with fewer side effects than drugs (97:50), and the sequencing needed for optimal effect.
  • “I got three to four months of going from say an eight or nine out of generalized anxiety... to like a zero or a one.” — Tim, 98:37.
• Personal Experiences: Both Tim and Chris share personal mental health interventions, biometrics, and observations (106:15).

8. Societal Comparison & Cultural Identity

• UK vs. US Metrics: Chris ruffles feathers with a comparison of UK vs US statistics—Americans bristle at the UK’s ‘wins’ in life expectancy, homicide rate, etc., but lag in GDP per capita (87:11).
• “The UK is a wonderful country to be poor in and a horrible one to be rich in. America’s a great country to be rich in and a horrible one to be poor in.” — Chris, 89:59.

9. Religion, Secularity, and Comforting Delusions

• Religion vs. Secular Meaning: Tim channels debates between Sam Harris and Jordan Peterson, asking if collective meaning is possible without religion (69:33; 70:04). Chris raises whether “comforting delusions” (i.e., religion) are rational if they result in more happiness (72:07).
• Atheism’s Problem: “Atheism’s not cool at the moment... it feels really sterile... when you think about it, it just doesn’t seem very nice.” — Chris, 73:33.

10. The Coming Wave: AI Hardware, Dating, and Self-Improvement

• Dating Apps & AI: The group jokes about the explosion of AI avatars in the dating world, and the absurd monopoly in online matchmaking (81:32; 83:08).
• Beauty, AI, and Looksmaxing: New AI services (like “Coves”) promise surgical-style facial improvement advice just from your photo, spurring discussion about self-image and digital self-optimization (140:01).

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “I would say that there's typically an English interface, but when I was in Japan for a year and then came back to the U.S., it took me about a month to get back to speaking English normally.” — Tim, on language immersion (12:03)
• “If you can't go out a few standard deviations towards hypernmesia... it can make it really hard to let go of grievances... the email you sent, whatever. There are tremendous advantages to forgetting.” — Tim, 18:50
• “How do you make an AI forget things?” — Jared, 22:28
• “Humans hallucinate as well. Almost all the features of AI today exist in humans in some way, shape, or form.” — Jared, 36:32
• “Survival for what? Ever more people today have the means to live but no meaning to live for.” — Viktor Frankl, quoted by Tim, 56:59
• “If you're a great athlete, you gotta learn how to forget.” — Jared, 24:47
• “Is it possible to have meaning without resistance?” — Chris, 80:09

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• WhatsApp vs SMS & Linguistics: 00:00–07:33
• Language Learning & Immersion: 08:04–11:40
• Aphantasia & Memory: 16:10–18:50
• AI Forgetting & Human Memory: 22:22–23:39
• Hallucination in AI & Humans: 36:32–37:26
• Future Devices & Ambient AI: 37:27–41:00, 129:40–133:57
• Neuromodulation/TMS & Mental Health: 97:25–113:16
• Religion, Atheism, and Meaning: 70:04–74:03
• UK vs. US Quality-of-Life Metrics: 87:11–91:30
• AI in Dating & Looksmaxing: 81:32, 140:01–141:46

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Memorable Moments

• Tim’s story about a vivid visual memory making it hard to let go of slights (18:50).
• The comically awkward Ashley Cole football team photo serving as a meme for social group outcasts (143:57).
• The elevator encounter with the Xbox CEO after a viral call-out tweet (20:21).
• Philosophical musings about whether a future AI “post-abundance” world will breed meaninglessness (54:00–80:09).
• The group’s playful roast of each others’ optimism, memory abilities, and online antics throughout.

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Conclusion

This episode is an energetic, deeply engaging exploration of humanity’s future with AI—from language change, forgetting, and the search for meaning, to the potential of neuromodulation and the coming wave of intelligent interfaces. It mixes philosophy, psychology, and tech with the Modern Wisdom crew's trademark wit and skepticism, all the while reflecting on what it means to live well in a rapidly changing (and possibly cat-dominated) era.

For more:

• Tim’s work: tim.blog
• Jared’s app: "Sky" – info in episode
• George’s book recommendations: highagency.com/book

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"Survival for what? Ever more people today have the means to live but no meaning to live for."
— Viktor Frankl, as quoted on Modern Wisdom (56:59)

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For the full impact of the humor, depth, and side tangents, listen to the episode in its entirety.

Transcript

[Chris Williamson]

British supremacy in messaging services. We need to try and get Everybody to use WhatsApp, this superior messaging system, and Americans refuse to use it. You don't think we was talking about

[George]

this earlier as to why Americans don't use WhatsApp? More. One of the theories is that America had free SMS before anybody else, so us Brits had to pay. How much did it used to be for a text back in the day? 15p, maybe 15p.

[Chris Williamson]

10p. 10p.

[George]

That would ramp up very fast.

[Chris Williamson]

But that was why people used to use leet speak. Right? That was. Why was there like ly. Because you were trying to snap everything to under 160 characters.

[George]

Yeah, I once, when I was 14 years old, had my first ever girlfriend and we would text, and we would text and we would text.

[Chris Williamson]

You fucking bankrupted yourself.

[George]

My dad's. My dad comes down one day and you know when you have like a four that you'd stack in a printer, he just drops that. So from the phone bill, and I'd racked up about £800.

[Chris Williamson]

Itemized bill text messages.

[George]

Yes. So I then sent her, that's a

[Chris Williamson]

lot of sexting at 14.

[George]

I then sent her one final text, which was, can't do texts anymore. Let's do calls. So we did calls all the time next month. So I had to pay off about 1200, 1300 pounds of debt to my father.

[Tim]

Still paying it off.

[Chris Williamson]

Payment plan. Dad, you're cock blocking me. So that's how 114. I'm trying to get my cred up. But yeah, WhatsApp's a superior. Tim uses WhatsApp. Tim's good on WhatsApp.

[Tim]

I mean, look, I use every new inbox. That is slowly eroding the sanity of everybody who's listening to this.

[Jared]

Did you guys see the Nikita beard tweet? A long time ago. It feels like he said something like every time I use WhatsApp, it feels like I landed in a third world country.

[Chris Williamson]

You're allowed to say that.

[Jared]

Okay, fair enough.

[Chris Williamson]

You're allowed to say that.

[Jared]

No, I'm really.

[Chris Williamson]

We race swapped.

[Tim]

I grew up on Long Island. I think I'm allowed to say it too.

[Chris Williamson]

Re race swapped Sean for you.

[Jared]

Fair enough. That's the primary reason I think I'm sitting in the same spot.

[Chris Williamson]

That's correct. Yeah, yeah, yeah. People are like, sean lost weight and the being's gone.

[Jared]

This is the designated seed for the minority.

[Chris Williamson]

You grew up on Long Island. I didn't know that. Why? Oh, yeah.

[Tim]

Way out by Montauk, back when there Were potato farms.

[Chris Williamson]

That explains a lot.

[Tim]

That has changed. Now there are nightclubs that make all the locals crazy, but yes.

[Chris Williamson]

So is that beyond the Hamptons?

[Tim]

Yeah. Montauk is the end of the line. So if you take Long Island Railroad out from New York City, it will end in Montauk. And it was. It was perfectly fine place to grow up. I didn't realize how strange it was until I got older.

[Chris Williamson]

Why is it strange?

[Tim]

Well, when you're growing up, what is around you is normal because even a reference point. But you're growing up in a location where you have a barbell of income and wealth distribution. Right? So you've got all of the. Let's just say the broad Hamptons that people know, which would have like the $100 million homes on the beach and all these famous directors and financiers and little white shorts playing tennis. And then you have, on the other hand, like, affordable housing. When I was growing up, like crack epidemic in certain parts. So I didn't realize how much was missing from the middle of the whole thing.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay. Have you ever seen Mickey Mantle's questionnaire answer on the 50th anniversary of the Yankees Stadium?

[Tim]

I feel like this is the kind of question my dad would ask me. He's like, do you know Henry Rubenstein from 1839? I'm like, no, of course I don't.

[Chris Williamson]

Mickey Mantle describes in basically a yearbook for the Yankees stadium. It's the 50th anniversary of Yankees Stadium happening. Mickey Mandel, everybody has asked, tell us what your most outstanding experience at Yankee Stadium was. And this was sold for $242,000 not long ago. A few years ago, he said, I consider the following my outstanding experience at Yankee Stadium. It's like a questionnaire. He goes, I got a blowjob under the right field bleachers by the Yankee bullpen. And then below that, it says, this event occurred on or about. Brackets. Give as much detail as you can. It says it was about the third or fourth inning. I had pulled a groin and couldn't walk at the time. She was a very nice girl and asked me what to do with the cum after I came in her mouth. I said, don't ask me. I'm no cocksucker. Signed Mickey Mantle, the All American boy. And that was sold about five years ago for $242,000.

[George]

Wow. Speaking of on chain or off chain?

[Tim]

Speaking of hedge fund managers, sure. That's in the guest bathroom of some hedge fund manager's third home.

[Chris Williamson]

It's a bargain.

[Tim]

You don't think that's a bargain in Montauk or thereabouts.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I don't know, man. I mean, like, baseball's got a lot of superstition, but that feels like it's taking it to an extreme.

[Jared]

There's like, a baseball player that had never washed his helmet or cleaned it or did anything for his entire career, literally.

[Chris Williamson]

The.

[Jared]

The helmet look. I think it's Craig Biggio, if I'm not mistaken. But the helmet was just. And he believed in that so much that it had to be that way. Never changed.

[Chris Williamson]

Seeing the guys walk out and they go, right glove, left glove, tap, tap on the foot. It goes from being preference to routine to superstition to ritual to basically something sacred. It's essentially a rain dance that every.

[Jared]

Or mental illness.

[Chris Williamson]

I think those two crossover to all

[Tim]

of my mental illness as a rain dance. From now on,

[Chris Williamson]

I'm gonna take these suckers off. That's enough fucking POV porn. Which actually was the reason that we wore these when we had Bonnie Blue on the podcast, so we could put POV in the title of the episode.

[Jared]

Has she done one of those with po with these?

[Chris Williamson]

I'm sure if you go dark enough and deep enough into the onlyfans rabbit hole, you can find whatever you need.

[George]

Let me take my toothpick out of my mouth before I address the table. One of the things that I've been fascinated with for a while. I know you have as well, Christopher. I don't know about you two gentlemen, but etymologies of everything. So I was trying to rank my favorite etymologies or history of certain parts of language. One of them is not English, but it's Malaysian. And in Malayan culture, they use double rather than plural. So rather than tables, they will use table table, which is one of my favorite things.

[Chris Williamson]

What if it's three?

[George]

So it doesn't scale? So it doesn't go.

[Chris Williamson]

That would be a nightmare if you're a table factory maker.

[George]

The same way we just use plural. We'll say tables, where you could say four tables. They would say, I assume the number, then table, table, which is such a more fun way of saying things.

[Tim]

It's the same in Indonesian also.

[George]

Yes.

[Tim]

Like orang hutan, man of the forest. Orang. Orang is men. Right. Man. Men.

[Chris Williamson]

Man of the men. That's something different.

[Tim]

Well, not a man of the man. I think that's something here. Biopic.

[Chris Williamson]

But it's.

[Tim]

It's so much better than a lot of heavy Ed.

[George]

One of my favorite ones, though, is the Word soon. So the word soon I will be there soon was the Anglo Saxon word for now. But because so many people kept saying, I'll do that soon and didn't do it then, we then created the word now to replace it. And soon is what it is today,

[Chris Williamson]

it soon got shifted down in terms

[George]

of how urgent it means generation by generation. What's interesting now, now has that effect where if somebody says, I'll do that now, you don't really take them literally unless they say instantly, I'll do that immediately now. So it's interesting that you're seeing this drifting of now now occur as well.

[Chris Williamson]

I wonder if literally is the same as that, because when people say literally, they don't mean literally. I literally couldn't believe it.

[George]

Exactly.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, no, you could believe it.

[George]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

Which is the entire point.

[George]

My friend Alessio, he's Italian and he talks about how he has a different personality when he's speaking in Italian. The Swedish writer Henrik Carlson, a friend of mine, he talks about how he can access different thoughts in Swedish rather than English.

[Chris Williamson]

You speak multiple languages?

[Jared]

Yeah.

[George]

What's Japanese, Tim?

[Tim]

Like a lot more polite curses Less than Long Island, Tim.

[Jared]

Are you totally fluid in Japanese?

[Tim]

Yeah, I can speak Japanese.

[George]

Amazing.

[Chris Williamson]

What's the story of learning that?

[Tim]

My first international trip, real international trip, off of Long island out of the US was to Japan as an exchange student at 15. For a year, I went from east coast to Tokyo and it took me about three weeks just to accept that I was in Japan because I couldn't believe it. That's how that happened. And it just stuck. I was there for a year. I went to a Japanese school. All of my classes in Japanese. I misunderstood what I was told before getting there, which was, you're going to have Japanese lessons. And I was like, oh, great. Like Japanese language lessons. And they're like, here's your class schedule. And I was like, I can't read any of this. And they're like, physics, world history. I'm like, wait, what?

[Chris Williamson]

My lessons are going to be in Japanese. I'm not going to have lessons about it.

[Tim]

So that will especially. I was lucky because this was pre smartphone, Internet, not much to speak of. So I could not coming back to WhatsApp. Right. I couldn't procrastinate or avoid learning Japanese by constantly communicating with anyone in English.

[Chris Williamson]

There was no escape. There was total emotion.

[Tim]

There was no escape.

[Chris Williamson]

That seems to be. I get it. People go and do university courses in Spanish and stuff. And it's not just the language. Sometimes they're learning about the history and the culture and other stuff like that. But if you're trying to learn a language, and I did in school, we have to do at least one language in our GCSes, typically the 11-16s in the UK and I did Spanish and apart from the most basic stuff that I've probably remembered because I've gone back out to the country, I basically learned nothing. It would be. If you just wanted people to learn a language, doing a six week immersion would what, teach you? Maybe the same as a year of weekly classes.

[Tim]

You could do a year in six weeks, no problem. There's, there's a method called the Michelle Thomas method. And Michelle Thomas, male, was Holocaust survivor, then became an intelligence officer, ended up speaking five or six different languages and developed a method of getting people up to basic conversational fluency in a week, in a rush, in a weekend, in terms of giving them the scaffolding of the grammar and so forth. It's a lot like learning some type of very fine motor skill. If you wanted to learn how to play tennis. It's like if you're playing once a month, you're never going to learn tennis even once a week. You're just not getting the density of practice and the reinforcement for you to go from the like unconscious incompetence to conscious competence to et cetera, et cetera. Right. You're just not getting the proper density. So languages, I think you can learn languages a lot faster as an adult than you can as a kid actually.

[Chris Williamson]

Why?

[Tim]

Because you already have the base layer of labeling and concepts and so on and different types of abstraction in the form of, let's just say grammar or a, a subjunctive, let's say if you had a million dollars, what would you do? Or like a hypothetical that is counterfactual, these types of things. I can explain that to you. You can't explain that to a three year old. When's the last time you Talked to a 3 year old? They're not actually very good at speaking a given language. The reason that people mistakenly believe that kids learn faster is because the kids have no choice. The kids have no mortgage, the kids have no job.

[Chris Williamson]

It' they're forced into immersion.

[Tim]

You have no choice.

[George]

Have you heard Nassim Taleb's description of how to learn a language? So the best way to learn Russian is to go into a Russian jail.

[Tim]

I mean that's a harsh, a harsh

[Chris Williamson]

trick is word life or death scenario.

[Tim]

You have to really want to learn

[George]

Russian, but you will, you Will learn. Do you think? Can you think in Japanese, Tim? Yeah.

[Tim]

I would say that there's typically an English interface, but when I was in Japan for a year and then came back to the U.S. it took me about a month to get back to speaking English normally. I remember the first few days when my mom would come in and wake me up and I would just start speaking to her in Japanese. In this daze. And it took a while to get back to things. The sun is pretty funny, the etymology of that. And it makes me wonder if the. Much like let's say Eskimos and snow, right. Or Hawaiians and water or whatever, that it depends on the historical punctuality of a culture.

[Chris Williamson]

You're going to say that the Italians have got five words for soon.

[Tim]

Well, I think it probably is something like that.

[Jared]

Right.

[Tim]

Because in Japan, it's like, now is now. There is no second, third, fourth way to say it, unless you're maybe being really polite. Because the honorifics in Japanese, it's like 12 languages in one. If you really want to be sophisticated with it. But I don't know if they do it in the uk, but in South Africa they have now then. They have now now, just like in. In certain places in. In Latin America, they have, like, aura, like now and then they have aorita. Like aura is kind of like now. But man, like, when you get around to it. Right? Or when I get around to it. And then like, ahorita is like, hey, asshole, now.

[Chris Williamson]

Actually made it now. What. What do you think's the latest nationality on the planet?

[Jared]

Hmm.

[George]

Brazil.

[Tim]

The latest.

[Chris Williamson]

If you were to. I'm going to organize a dinner with somebody and I can pick a bunch of different nationalities. Which one's going to arrive on average last.

[George]

Like the. Got. Like the Olympics, but in reverse.

[Jared]

Have you ever heard of Indian Standard Time? I'm not even sure it's actually real because it's one hour later than it's actually supposed to start. So. Turns out a long time ago people would go to the movies.

[George]

Yeah.

[Jared]

And you know, the movie doesn't start on time, which is absolutely hilarious. You're. Everybody just expects. And then the whole term Indian Standard Time came about, which is absolutely hilarious. But it's typically referred to as one hour past something is after the actual time.

[Tim]

So I've heard Brazilians refer to Brazilian time also. But what is the. What is the least punctual

[Chris Williamson]

anywhere that's got good. I think you can talk about culture and people and stuff like that. But what's more interesting is to just talk about what is the lifestyle of that particular ecosystem. So if you're going to go Spain, Italy, you know, Portugal, they're just. You've got wonderful weather, late nights throughout the summer, everyone's smoking, having a red wine like you've been to Palmer Mallorca or wherever. And you see people outside sat on wrought iron chairs having a pre dinner cigarette at 10:30pm at night. These are old people. They're not going out. Oh, this isn't the beginning of them going out to go and party and head to the club afterward. Not going stk for a, you know, nighttime party brunch. So I would say maybe some of the Mediterranean places like that. I guess as I think further afield. I don't know much about India, but perhaps Nev is there.

[Jared]

Neither do I, but it is genealogically you do.

[Tim]

Tim, you know a lot about Denmark. I'm like, I don't know.

[George]

I wonder. This is, this is really hippie crack shit. But this is what we're here for now.

[Tim]

Now we're getting.

[George]

Now we're getting that. Yeah, I wonder. It's like that Safir war hypotheses of

[Tim]

how much lost me. That didn't sound hippie friendly.

[Chris Williamson]

He'll get that.

[George]

The idea is that it's the Wittgenstein quote of like the limits of my world are the limits of my language. And we think that we shape language, but language shapes us. And it feels immediately like so trivial, so esoteric to have the conversation. Every kind of dismisses language as it's almost like neuro linguistic programming, that we shouldn't take it seriously, but how much the words that we use. So I wonder obviously England, Australia, America, Canada, New Zealand, South Africa share this English ancestry. But how much then that they have the same language keeps the culture similar as well. Versus if you fork the language, do you change?

[Chris Williamson]

I don't know, man. If you go and meet a South African, you compare them to a Scottish person, they're quite different.

[George]

True. Both angry.

[Chris Williamson]

Both very angry. So there you go.

[George]

And we had this at my birthday.

[Chris Williamson]

I was in the middle of nowhere.

[George]

I didn't realize the spectrum exists when it comes to how people think. Think as well. So we had my friend Billy and my friend Cameron. And Billy can't think visually at all. So he can only think in words. Yes, Cameron can't think in words at all. She can only think visually.

[Chris Williamson]

And he's seen this. There's a test that you can do like imagine an apple in your mind. What level of detail can you see the apple at.

[George]

Could you pull that up, Jared?

[Tim]

The apple visual test, the lack of it. I think it's called Aphantasia.

[Chris Williamson]

Yes. Yeah, Aphantasia.

[George]

How do you guys think? Do you. Can you. Do you think more in words? Do you think more in vision?

[Chris Williamson]

Imagine an apple in your mind. What level of detail can you see the apple with?

[Jared]

You know, when growing up, there was like this whole. People with like very. The visual memories or whatever, they would just like look at something and then effectively recite, you know, eidetic. 50 words.

[Tim]

Eidetic is what people think of as photographic.

[Jared]

The photographic stunt.

[George]

So Billy, for example, would be number five.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah. He could. He would just think the word apple.

[Jared]

Yeah, fascinating.

[Chris Williamson]

And then the. Cameron could see the apple. But if you asked her to create that, to see the word apple in her mind, she couldn't do it at all.

[George]

I asked her how does she count in her head? And she said it's stairs.

[Chris Williamson]

She literally visualises stairs. Exhausting nightmare.

[Tim]

I mean, I would. I'm about 10 out that direction. Like I have super hyper visual memory. Like, I can remember almost every floor plan of every restaurant I've ever been in.

[George]

What's the most, like.

[Tim]

I mean, I'm not. I'm not trying to store that.

[George]

So 10, 10 where we went for dinner the other evening, can you remember the table? What was on the table?

[Tim]

I don't remember the name of the number of the table, but it's like the server door was directly to our left. Right. We were effectively the last booth at the edge. The bar was to my right, Nero was to my left here. Right. You were here sort of at my, like 2 o'. Clock. So we ordered way too much edamame.

[Chris Williamson]

No, no, we ordered the right amount of edamame, which is too much edamame. She's the only amount of edamame.

[Tim]

That's it depends on how many gallons of oil you like on your edamame.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, it's true. I think salt into edamame, when you start to try and spice up edamame, too much ruins it.

[Tim]

But here's what I would say just to quickly put something to this. I don't want people to feel badly if they can't go out a few standard deviations towards like the hyper. Like hypernisia.

[George]

Right.

[Tim]

The opposite of amnesia. Because when you have. My dad has this as well, really exaggerated development of certain types of memory. It can make it really hard to let go of grievances. Wow. Slights against you. The email that you sent that, ended up whatever it is. Right. Like, there is an advantage. There are some tremendous advantages to forgetting. And so when you. When you're not as selective, you could argue it's almost counter evolutionary past a certain point to have an overly developed memory. I would say.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Jared]

I think I can recall, like, one of the things that I was talking to somebody about was that I have vivid face recognition, like, almost like. Like the face ID type situation. And I can remember faces that I've seen only one time, 15 years ago. Problem is, this becomes socially awkward. Oftentimes you meet somebody, there's a massive asymmetry. Right. You're like, I know everything about you because we met once and this was 10 years ago. But you can't really bring that up.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay. You freak.

[Jared]

Yeah, it's like. It's very creepy.

[Tim]

You sound like a stalker.

[Chris Williamson]

Exactly.

[Jared]

But I did not research them similarly with quotes and visuals. I think I personally have a very, very vivid, like, visual element, and I can probably look at something once, and then 10 years later, if you quiz me, I would probably get about 90% of that. Correct.

[Tim]

Yeah. That's wild.

[Chris Williamson]

Do you want to tell the story?

[Jared]

But the forgetting part is crazy.

[Chris Williamson]

Do you want to tell the story about the first elevator we ever got into together?

[Jared]

Oh, my God, yes. I actually. I think there was a new appointment of an Xbox CEO, and she was like, some. I made a tweet about it. I was like, wait, she doesn't really have any experience with gaming. And then Chris and I were in an elevator, and turns out she was there.

[Tim]

Well, you're leaving out one critical footnote. That tweet was not seen by two people.

[Jared]

It was seen by one.

[Chris Williamson]

Millions of people saw you call out the Xbox CEO we get into.

[Jared]

I was just simply remarking about culture and the way that people frame this because it's a unique development.

[Chris Williamson]

But I put my foot in it. I put my foot in it.

[Jared]

Yeah, that was hilarious.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm trying to big up my friend who recognizes the Xbox CEO and goes, hey, you're the CEO of Xbox who's some unassuming lady dressed real nice, had maybe a partner or security or something with her. I'm like, you identify correctly. And she sort of sheepishly is like, yeah, yeah, I am. That's me. And I think you introduced me.

[Jared]

She was very nervous about it a little.

[George]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

She was sheepish about it, which was quite.

[Jared]

She was the actual CEO. I was like, wait, that person's usually just, like, so into it or whatever.

[Chris Williamson]

And I said, well, you should signal on X you must. He's a fantastic writer, tech and all the rest of this stuff. There is a 100% chance that she saw your tweet and immediately as soon as I said that the fucking atmosphere in the elevator went frosty as hell.

[Jared]

It was. Look, I nothing against her personally, but

[Chris Williamson]

I tried to do something nice for a friend.

[George]

Came back to. Came back to bite you?

[Jared]

No. And that. That has happened multiple times. I think going back to Tim's point about the forgetting part, I think about this a lot, which is what a great feature of. Of the mind in some sense. Like the forgetting part. Like I think about AI memory. You know, today it's so easy to build like tell AI to extract some fact and try to remember it and we store it somewhere and then you basically use it for some other thing. It's very common. People are doing it. How do you forget. How does like an AI forget things?

[Chris Williamson]

Like what is no pruning.

[Jared]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And like of salience.

[Jared]

How do you think about the world with respect to, you know, building sort of artificial memory constraints just like the human mind. And the forgetting part is such an essential element. Like that is no longer relevant or that is not important at the moment. The AI systems don't really know that. And so when you pass in a bunch of these memories into context, which is what a lot of these companies do, turns out you get a lot of noise. Yes. And it tries to make these connections.

[Chris Williamson]

That's what it's like to remind him. There you go.

[Tim]

Well, if people want a real exaggerated case of not forgetting, there's an old book called the Mind of a Mnemonist, like Mnemonic device the Mind of a Nemonist by AJ Luria, which is effectively an extended case study of someone who never forgets. And there are other ways to look at it. I think there's a doc called Brain man about Daniel Dennett. I think I'm getting that right. And the atheist N. You know what the Dennett. I might be mixing it up with the philosopher who passed away, but it's something very close to that. I told people can look up Bremen, British.

[Chris Williamson]

I taught George yesterday about savant syndrome. Know what this is? So there was a famous case of a guy called Thomas McHugh, British guy. So in his early years he was in a youth prison, was a bit of a disruptor, kind of a hooligan type guy. And he's in his 50s, early 50s. And on the bathroom he shits himself so aggressively that he causes an aneury. Like a blood explosion in his brain. And then as he's on the floor, he's terrified that someone's going to find him with his pants around his ankles. So he tries to pull his pants up and causes another one to go off completely. Like pops both sides of his brain. Wakes up in the hospital a few days later and turns into a obsessive painter who can only speak in rhyme and paints between three or six or nine paintings at any one time. Paints for 19 hours a day and couldn't bear to think about suffering. So it sort of sweeped the steps in front of him as he was like some Buddhist guy, just had a total come to art moment. But yeah, shat himself so aggressively that he had acquired savant syndrome.

[Jared]

I think if you're a great athlete, for example, you gotta, you gotta learn how to forget. You guys know about yips, like in baseball and other places. So it turns out, you know, it's like, typically, you know, you make an error or you do something egregiously wrong in sports. Everybody's watching, right? And then you sort of have this phantom reaction or whatever. And then that continuously happens and yips isn't, isn't continuing, is like somebody throwing that ball. And you know, there's some famous players that have dealt with this problem and turns out, you know, you gotta forget. Yeah, you gotta forget.

[Tim]

It's like a conditioned hesitancy or flinch

[Jared]

or getting in your own involuntary potential reaction. But I'm not quite sure how, how it relates to, you know, the memory aspect of it. But ultimately, when you're, when you're a great athlete, you watch a game tape afterwards, you're like, okay, I process it and then you have to discard that. You learn from it and you move on. Did you guys see the Marc Andreessen stuff about retard maxing?

[Chris Williamson]

Yep.

[Jared]

That I think component wise, I asked Huberman, how many times does that word

[Chris Williamson]

goes in Huberman if he's personally threatened by the retard maxing movement.

[Jared]

What are you saying?

[Chris Williamson]

I think he is thinking partially. His entire career has been built on anti retard max.

[Jared]

And there's a lot of these people who have like, you know, they, they, they have a set of context. I don't know why I refer to everything like this, but. And then they, they sort of keep it around. But it's super valuable to discard some of that stuff because ultimately none of that really matters, I think. Sam Harris, all this stuff.

[George]

No, go, go, go.

[Jared]

No, I think it was, it was just really interesting. The present matters the most. People tend to focus on the future, a lot more anxiety, the worries or whatever, and then they marry that with the past. And I think this is one of the things I personally am like, how do I live in the moment, think about what matters, and focus on a

[Chris Williamson]

few things whilst learning from my experience.

[Jared]

Exactly. But you learn from it, but you don't dwell on it. You don't ruminate on it. You don't. I think people. I had to move neighborhoods from a breakup because every time I walked around, I can Viv. I could vividly feel the moments that occurred in that place. From a coffee shop to, I don't know, like a flower shop, a dog

[Chris Williamson]

that you regularly see.

[Jared]

I walk in a restaurant, I'm like. I sat there, you know, this person was next to me. I knew exactly what we talked about. I knew exactly how that moment ended. And I could replay that every single time I took another step, Dude.

[Chris Williamson]

One of the best stories I've heard about this is from Alain de Botton, and he's describing being in Paris. And it's a early summer day, beautiful weather outside, a little cloudy, a little bit of sun, and it's sort of late afternoon, classic European fashion. This French couple are sat around a small table, wrought iron chairs, and they've got a couple of espressos. And they're just so deeply in love. Young couple, sort of maybe mid-20s, something like that. He's got this line. He says, I looked at them and realized that this beautiful memory would be one of the greatest sources of pain to one of these people if the relationship ever ended. And it's strange that this thing that at the time is really, really wonderful actually becomes the thing that's kind of the. I'm never going to Paris again. I'm fucking moving to Rome or whatever it is, because I need to totally change my context. And that's also the same when it comes to phones, right? I tried to stop using my phone, and this still kind of works. I. I just changed the pocket that I put it in because I realized that for an entire decade I'd had my phone in my right pocket. And like a speed shooter withdrawing his firearm, I would just put, mindlessly put my hand in my pocket the number of times that I pulled my wallet out. When I changed it to look at my wallet, it's just habitual. It's just this obsessive sort of routine.

[Jared]

You guys know about this phantom vibrations. So it turns out people have their phone on their pocket, right? And I went to A meditation retreat and no phones, just meditation. And I felt vibrations. I didn't even have my phone in my pocket.

[George]

Jeffrey, vibrator.

[Jared]

Two of them.

[George]

There we go.

[Chris Williamson]

That might have been my dildo.

[Jared]

But no, like, we don't call that

[George]

a meditation retreat where I'm from.

[Jared]

Fair enough. What does Bonnie Blue call it?

[George]

Yeah, yeah, yeah. True Tuesday.

[Jared]

It was really interesting. And it turns out I googled it. Turns out that's actually a real thing. People feel phantom vibrations from their phone. You can go check it out. And I was like, wow, your body is so tuned to this over every time you get a notification, every time you get whatever. And most people have their phone on silent now. So the vibration is really like a

[Chris Williamson]

thing with the happy Pavlovian. Lee programmed yourself pretty much to expect this thing.

[Jared]

So like this, this sort of device is now a potential part of your, the way that you sort of feel and understand the world. In this case, kind of like a, a touch type sense. But it was remarkable. And I, I went down the rabbit hole and I looked at it and I was like, wow, this is not just me. Yep. There's so many individuals, it, like you said, if you, if I move my phone in my other pocket, the other one will completely vibrate.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, my wallet's going to be vibrating. Yeah, exactly.

[Jared]

I mean, for some people that might be.

[Chris Williamson]

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[George]

To play, to play devil's advocate on the whole, the ability to remember everything being a bad idea. I think a lot of these conversations, rather than a light switch, it's more dimmer and different people, different occasions. It will be good and bad for. Because a lot of people look at us being able to remember everything now, very similar to when writing came along. So before writing we couldn't store any information down. So that completely changed us. But I always think of. So do you guys know I've forgotten the name of Grenfell Tower in the uk? Have you heard about what Grenfell Tower is? So it's kind of. It's one of the biggest tragedies that's ever happened in the uk, where a council estate which will be the equivalent of your projects was poorly designed, set on fire.

[Chris Williamson]

Can you get a photo of it up? Loads of people, Grenfell Tower, loads of

[George]

people burned alive in it. And it was a huge government inquiry. How are we going to fix it, what we're going to change about it? And what was the crazy thing about the day was that as this building was on fire, kind of like 9, 11, a baby was picked up on the news, was dropped from the top floor.

[Chris Williamson]

Look at that.

[George]

So a baby was picked up from the top floor and dropped and somebody caught it. And it was this kind of miracle in this amazing like horrific day that happened. And it got reported everywhere. There was about five different eyewitnesses. And about six months later, after the emotion of the event settled down, a few physicists started looking at it and going, well, hold on, that baby at a hundreds of feet in the air, if we just ran the math here, it would just disintegrate on the catch. And as soon as they started to inquire, like the eyewitness testimony, it was a completely hallucinated memory. So on the one hand, the ability to store memories will mean that we can't let go of certain things, but it may also mean that we let go of complete fictions that we're telling ourselves that never happened or that we

[Chris Williamson]

would invent them as well. Right? Because if you're Tim, your recollection of the flames is, you know, in 4K, but the mirage of a baby being thrown out, you know, the terminal velocity of a cat is non fatal.

[George]

What do you mean?

[Chris Williamson]

I can't Say it any other way. There's only one. If I drop a cat from any distance.

[George]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

The speed that it reaches when it hits the ground, it's exactly the same on average is non fatal.

[George]

So it doesn't die.

[Tim]

I'm gonna.

[George]

Surely not.

[Tim]

I'm gonna just raise an eyebrow.

[Chris Williamson]

Ask ChatGPT. A cat's terminal velocity depends on its size, body position. Yeah, whatever. Estimated terminal velocity is about 60 miles an hour. Some studies and veterinary analysis place it between. Okay, so see, look, see. Depends on posture. So if you've got a cat around

[Tim]

five to seven stories. Yeah, okay. I mean, that's higher up than I would expect.

[Chris Williamson]

Some cats survive because they reach terminal velocity, stop accelerating, relax, and then orient themselves for impact. And look, I'm not. Look, it's. It's trying to caveat. Like, basically, am I okay to throw a cat out of a window? That's what chatgpt thinks I'm doing.

[Tim]

Now this is one of those cases when somebody's like, you know, when people die, they release DMT from their brains. And I'm like, how would you know that though? Like, who, which families consented to have some scientists be like, I know this is a hard moment, but let me like tap your grandma's brain.

[Chris Williamson]

And this is like the terminal velocity of a cat.

[Tim]

No, but I'm saying injuries often increase up to around five to seven stories.

[Chris Williamson]

Like, I just want beyond seven stories

[Tim]

where like Sierra Leone, they're like, okay, let's take these 40 cats and drop them.

[Chris Williamson]

You just put it into one of Those T shirts. 5, 10, 15 T shirt firers that they said. Yeah, yeah. T shirt cannon that they've got.

[Tim]

Speaking of hallucinating, I just want to fact check myself. Daniel Tamet, T A M M E T. Perilously close.

[George]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

All right, what'd you bring to the table?

[Jared]

Hallucinating is really a fascinating subject. So people talk about AI hallucinations.

[Tim]

Now we're in my.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, sorry, sorry, hold on. This is. We're still going. The highest reliably documented fall survived by a cat is generally believed to be 32 stories. Sabrina in New York City, 1987. She fell from the 32nd floor of a skyscraper. Survived with a chipped tooth, collapsed lung, and minor chest injuries. After treatment, she reportedly recovered fully. Dude telling you, terminal velocity of a cat, non fatal.

[Jared]

They're able to slow themselves down. Right, Effectively. Like a parachute. Ish.

[Tim]

I mean, I mean, they're not flying squirrels.

[Jared]

Wow, this is remarkable.

[Chris Williamson]

What did I get you with the other day? It was when we were talking about the fact that if a man doesn't have a girlfriend, the way that he behaves between 7pm and 11pm at night can only be destructive. And I told a friend about this and unless there's the Internet, well, even with the Internet, it's still destructive, right? Cause you're just embedding bad habits and doom scrolling and it's all bullshit self destructive.

[Jared]

I suppose.

[Chris Williamson]

However, lesson I asked a friend about this and he said, yeah, so my buddy was single and I'm in a relationship and apparently at like 8:30pm at night he would just receive photos of his friend headstanding. Just like selfies of him doing head stunts.

[Tim]

What could go wrong?

[Chris Williamson]

All right, Nirav, what have you brought? Come on, give me some, give me some.

[Jared]

Hallucination thing is really fascinating. People have this debate on AI hallucinations and there's a bunch of these topics that have written. Andre Karpathy has written a bunch of this stuff and turns out humans hallucinate as well. Almost all the features of AI today that exist, they exist in humans in some way, shape or form. And people are often really baffled by it. Right. They hate the hallucinations.

[Chris Williamson]

I think.

[Jared]

I think of them as more of like just a replication of the human mind and how it works. And turns out people hallucinate memories all the time. People manipulate memories. In fact, if you look at things in the past, you're effectively removing. You remember often fond memories or really painful stuff. The middle kind of fades away oftentimes. I'm curious to get your thoughts on this, Tim. About like, I think about this a lot because for our product we have to like make sure these things are low and context is there.

[Chris Williamson]

Do you want to explain what you do?

[Jared]

We're building kind of, you know, today the iPhone is kind of a, when you look at it, when you go for a glance, people always tap on apps and then you have to go and pull whatever you need to know. We're kind of building a layer on, on devices that is kind of glanceable information directly on your home screen that's entirely processed by AI. What you might want to know right now or things might be important to you. And the idea of intelligence today as it exists, it's much more. I'm going to go ask it a question. Create this giant prompt, do all this stuff and you know, basically you have to do the heavy lifting where we try to do the heavy lifting for you by making that presentation layer directly on your home screen that sort of understands what's Happening already in the background and surfaces it when you need to know it. So it's kind of an agentic home screen for your iPhone. Turns out the iPhone home screen hasn't changed in 20 years. You're roughly using the same device, the same thing.

[Chris Williamson]

Widgets, I guess.

[Jared]

Yeah, that's kind of. They're underutilized. I think we use them in a creative way and so like, you know, we're not going to go. We're like two people, three people. So we can't really build a device, we can't really invest hardcore. So we have to operate in the application layer and utilize all the things that are affordances that the OS exposes to us as developers. So creatively we sort of build this experience and we're a few weeks old. Pretty awesome. But it's been so much fun to be able to think about the way that ambient AI will really work. Imagine you go into a room, there's a screen, has presence detection, knows who you are, what you might want to see or know or do. If you wake up in the morning, these are the things that will kind of light up over time. And so like this stuff might be in your life persistently, if you want to. With your permission.

[Chris Williamson]

Have you thought about what to call it? It feels like sort of context dependent.

[George]

Ambient something. Ambient AI is good.

[Chris Williamson]

Ambient AI is good.

[George]

Jordi as well. AI.

[Chris Williamson]

Ambient AI, AI.

[Jared]

We need to. But I think. I don't know if the terminology's there. It turns out all the terminology that exists in the past.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Jared]

You know, the hashtags of Twitter and whatnot invented by their users and people were like, oh, we should call it

[Chris Williamson]

that bottom up, not top down.

[Jared]

Yeah, exactly.

[Chris Williamson]

We're still waiting for a fucking name for this series on the podcast.

[George]

Do you think the future user interfaces are the glasses that everybody predicts? Because my. I was thinking the other day, as somebody who has zero experience in designing hardware or products, that the. I think the future's probably the AirPod case where you put the AirPods in. And I heard, I saw a tweet the other day that Apple have just patented cameras at the edge of the AirPods so it could feasibly pick up the visual information here. And then with this little box that you have, you could be speaking to this device. You could even have like a little.

[Chris Williamson]

That would be your signal receiver, right?

[George]

Yeah. So we're not always on these screens. We just had the little AirPod case, ears in and then the box here.

[Chris Williamson]

One of the problems you have with the hardware is that you need some processing power that's outside of it. That was the hardcore. I mean you had an Apple Vision Pro before you sent it back.

[George]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

And you need. If you're going to have something on your face or something that's wearable, you need to think about ergonomics and weight and that means you need to send the processing off to a different. A different location. I don't know. I mean you're right that VR is really not delivered. I think there's always. It's going to. The next thing we're going to wait for. The more it'll be comfortable. The slim line down. Whatever you think. Yeah.

[Tim]

How long until what? What would be a good, not quite Turing test.

[Chris Williamson]

It's not the right example. The sort of level of penetration that we've seen with. Now we're talking with AI or with like pick any sort of normal device but AI, AI podcast. Yeah. Depth of penetration, new series. Very shallow. Very shallow. Why like that? I don't know, like half a billion or a billion users of either one product or a category of products that has something to do with that.

[Tim]

That type of mass adoption is. Is a high bar. But I would say getting to the point where people actually enjoy, let's just call it thousands of people spending hours a day using some type of lightweight VR AI. Strongly AI native system. Three years, maybe less.

[Chris Williamson]

I've seen some shit that's made by Meta that blew my fucking mind to their next. After the next set of glasses. And that was like absolutely wild to be able to see that. They're still clunky and dorky, right. But over the time that they're building this out to get it down to the form factor that you need. But I mean these things, wherever those things are, like they're really good. The best thing about those, not an ad, best thing about those is the fact that you can take a photo or a video without using your phone. You know there's that famous video. Was it the Chandelyse on New year's Eve? Maybe 2023. And I swear it's just this street of people and all you can see the entire thing is just phone screens from behind, right. Looking at the thing you're supposed to be looking at. So dystopian. Just phone screens.

[Jared]

Ridiculous.

[George]

Well, I went, have you heard about me at the Louvre? Have I told you this story? So I had these on at the Louvre in Paris, being a sophisticated individual that I am. So I had these on and everybody

[Tim]

was just looking at people's feet under The. Under the bathroom stalls.

[Chris Williamson]

George collects bathroom. George collects feet. So that's.

[Tim]

You can. You can.

[George]

You can buy them.

[Jared]

It's no longer permit. You can't really have eye contact with people in the Western culture because it's like a whatever. So people are always looking down on their feet.

[Chris Williamson]

And that's why. That's where George comes in. Here it is.

[George]

So I had this experience at the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. So everybody was there with their phones taking a photo, but I had these glasses on. But the problem is because the Mona Lisa's so small and I'm so far back, my girlfriend now has a photo of me. So there's loads of people taking a photo of the Mona Lisa. And then there's me with my glasses in the air. I'll get the photo out again. It's horrific. It's horrific.

[Chris Williamson]

It is nice, though, to be able to record something without taking yourself out of the moment. And I think just that, you know, oh, I don't like the battery life or this thing or they're still a little bit clunky or I don't usually wear glasses or whatever. Like, I get it, I get it, I get it. But the opportunity to be able to just take a photo or a video without having to feel like, oh, I'm back on this screen that I hate. I'm back in this digital environment that kind of just compresses my memory down into one time of me being on this screen. Most people don't realize how much being dehydrated impacts their performance, which is why for the last five years, I've started pretty much every morning with Element. Element is a tasty electrolyte drink mix with everything that you need and nothing that you don't. This orange salt in a cold glass of water is like a sweet, salty, orangey nectar. And I really tell the difference when I take it versus when I don't. It plays a critical role in reducing muscle cramps and fatigue, helps to optimize brain health and regulate your appetite while also curbing cravings. Best of all, there are no questions asked refund policy with an unlimited duration, so you can buy it and try it for as long as you want. And if you don't like it for any reason, they'll just give you your money back. Plus, they offer free shipping in the US Right now, you can get a free sample pack of Element's most popular flavors with your first purchase by going to the link in the description below by heading to drinklmnt.com ModernWisdom that's drinklmnt.com

[Tim]

Modernwisdom do you think you would feel better or worse after six months of not being able to take photos or video of anything other than like, okay, you need to take a photo.

[Chris Williamson]

It's just gonna be very difficult to do.

[Tim]

A business card or a scan for like business purpose is fine for me.

[Chris Williamson]

Taking photos doesn't get in the way of my life anywhere near as much as just the ambient pinging and navigating of the digital device itself. The photos I'm in and out. I have seen some marathon photo sessions being taken at sunset. I went to somewhere on Long Island, I can't quite remember where. There was a beautiful sunset happening over a Lake and 15, 16, 17 year old skull group. It was like it was a endurance sport of photo taking. I'm like, okay, that's something else. Like that's kind of almost pathological. But for me it's. I don't know. What about you? Do you think it would make a marked difference to your life if you couldn't take photos or videos for six months?

[Tim]

I think it's a useful thought exercise. I would suspect it'd be better. I mean I have not had any

[Chris Williamson]

says the amount of photographic memory.

[George]

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Damn. Perfect.

[Tim]

I can train people to have better visual memory.

[George]

Okay, can we do it?

[Tim]

What was that?

[George]

Can you.

[Tim]

It's not like, you know, it's not like a Nose Perlman Like 60 second bang, you know, it's not one of those.

[George]

But what's the like, what's the Pareto like? Basics to get better at a visual memory start producing.

[Tim]

So I would have people get a book like Drawing with the right side of the Brain, which is a bit of a misnomer in the way that it's lateralizes things hemispherically. But if you practice, for instance, this is one tool in the toolkit. Practice drawing. And for instance, if I had a flower and a vase on this table, which would be not the most compelling way to get someone to draw, but we're all practicing drawing. What you would notice with most people is that they look at the flower, they go down to draw it and they start drawing their mental concept of a flower. They're not actually referring to the thing in front of them. And then there are different tricks you could use. For instance, if even right now as we sit in Austin, Texas, bright outside, could have you look at a tree or a bush around here, sit down. I'd be like, okay, draw that. But I want you to Only start with the black parts. And you'd be like, but it's a bright day, it's a green thing. I'm like, look again. And you'd be like, oh shit, there are actually black parts. Okay, we'll start with that. And as you start to do that, or depending on where you are, it's like when most people walk through say, I mean in Austin, it's easy because it's like cedar tree, juniper, ash, oak, like that's it. I mean, I'm being a little facetious, but there's not as much tree diversity as in other places. But if all you see is quote unquote trees, it's like, okay, well let me just teach you. It's also subject dependent. The six most common trees in upstate New York, Austin, wherever it might be. And all of a sudden instead of just seeing trees, you start to differentiate. So all of those, it's partially visual acuity dependent, it's partially attentionally dependent, so that you're referencing something as opposed to referring to your concept of tree table person, whatever it might be. And then there's kind of a label dependency, right? How fine tuned or fine sliced is your ability within a given domain, right. So if you were doing like live gesture drawing, which I think is a great way to practice drawing, and there are a number of places around Austin and a lot of places where you can do live gesture drawing, you'd have, you know, a model in the front of the room. It's not always going to be a hot naked chick, I hate to break it to you guys, sometimes it's going to be like obese naked dude, but that's fine. And they would start with say five minute poses, or they might start with like one minute poses, typically that start with like very short poses. So you can't over analyze or intellectualize what you are doing. You have to keep your hand moving. And then they would go to longer and longer held poses. And you'd be shocked how much your visual memory improves if you do that. And you are not constantly self interrupting. So for me, I mean I don't have any social media on this phone. I haven't for a couple of years. I do not think I've sacrificed one iota of quote unquote being informed at all. Um, I don't have vibrate on, I do not have ring on, which can produce some funny like death spirals of people trying to like call one another. But neither person has the phone ringing. But I also think, you know, there's, there's Some data to suggest that if people have fewer mirrors in their homes, they are generally self report as being happier. This is a mirror, right? This is the black mirror. So I just, I feel like that the less you look at this thing. Haven't run a study on this, but I would bet a healthy chunk of change. I just think the less you interact with this, the better, especially given how prevalent fake feeds are. It's just like the machine is an illusion.

[George]

Most of it.

[Jared]

Did you guys see that quote where I think this philosopher. I forgot the name, but it was like man was never meant to have a mirror. Self reflection like that is detrimental in some ways.

[Chris Williamson]

We wouldn't have known what we looked like until. Jared, can you find out? But when mirrors were invented, you would know with water.

[Tim]

You would know with water.

[Jared]

Yeah. You would go to the pond, for example, and look at your like Achilles, their. Their nature or Narcissus. This is why like if you look at animals, they're for a variety of reasons, obviously with intelligence, whatever, but they're often very baffled by their.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[Jared]

Presence in the mirror. And now we're looking at ourselves more often than ever before. The selfie camera has effectively changed the dynamics of everything.

[Chris Williamson]

During COVID there was something called zoom face. There was a marked increase in people getting cosmetic surgery because they were seeing themselves more because they were spending so many hours.

[Jared]

And now there's. There's AI filters on Google Meet and

[Chris Williamson]

Zoom that want skin smoothing. For my interview.

[Jared]

Exactly. You would add makeup or whatever. And going back to your point about the photographic memory thing, did you guys ever play that game, which I don't

[Tim]

have to be clear. No. I know people who can do this and then 10 minutes later read it back to you from memory. That is photographic memory. I don't have that.

[Jared]

You know that game you used to play as a kid when somebody would draw on your back and you would have to figure out what they drew?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jared]

It was actually a really interesting skill building game because then you would have to effectively imagine different senses coming together so you feel what somebody's drawing, whether it's a flower or a mountain or a sun or whatever.

[Chris Williamson]

Always a penis.

[Jared]

And if you're. Exactly, of course, always.

[Tim]

Also a good podcast name.

[Chris Williamson]

Always a penis.

[Jared]

That game was remarkable.

[Tim]

All roads lead to penis, maybe.

[Chris Williamson]

Pretty much.

[Tim]

I know you like the Roman Empire.

[George]

What's. I was just double checking then because about the history of the mirror.

[Tim]

Can I say how much I live how you say double? I can't even say it.

[Chris Williamson]

Double.

[Tim]

That's God adds like at least seven Irish.

[George]

I'm from. I'm from Rochdale originally, Tim. And whenever you're in the uk, it's a big tourist scene. You'd love it. I'll take you there. You love it. You love it.

[Chris Williamson]

The mirror.

[George]

So the mirror that we had, the creature of the mirror. But I, as part of AI, coming bigger and bigger. I've been going down like old revolutions. So the industrial revolution and the Guttenberg printing press revolution. So Guttenberg, when he was creating the printing press, he was originally trying to create, I think, a mirror machine and accidentally, or ended up morphing into what became the printing press.

[Tim]

What the hell is a mirror machine?

[Chris Williamson]

So it makes mirrors.

[George]

Yeah. So there you go. So around.

[Tim]

I don't know how you get from that to the print.

[George]

14. 38 to 14.

[Tim]

Grind sand to make mirrors.

[George]

39. Gutenberg was in Strasbourg running a partnership to mass produce pilgrim mirrors. Small polished metal badges that pilgrims pinned to their hats to catch holy rays radiating from relics, then carried home to benefit relatives.

[Tim]

I like that idea.

[Chris Williamson]

It's like a capacitor for religious goodwill.

[George]

So his capital was running out. To appease investors, Guttenberg said he would share a secret with them. Art and adventure research that was the basis for his yet to be built printing press.

[Tim]

That's cool.

[Jared]

Wow.

[Chris Williamson]

Nice. All right, Tim, you must have some heaters. What have you brought from home? Show me something.

[Tim]

Yeah, I've got something. This is an article. I've got a bunch of stuff, but I'm going to take kind of a slight left turn. It's related to a lot of the stuff we're talking about. But this caught my attention. It's an article called Riding the leopard by Paki McCormick. And it was sent to me. I had never read anything of his. And this was sent to me a few days ago by someone adjacent to one of the top AI technologists out there, which is part of what makes it interesting. So I'll just. I'll. I'll read a couple of sections here and then I want to get your sense and thoughts on things. So what a week to get to talk to a room of technology people. This is a transcribed talk. That pack you gave Sierra just raised 15 billion anthropic, crossed a 44 billion run rate and launched a new company with some huge funds that have 1.5 billion to deploy. Blah, blah, blah. OpenAI did the same thing, but with 4 billion. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. This billion, that, billion him. All of which raises an important question. Who gives a shit? I mean that why do we care? And then it goes down. And he says. Last night a woman who reads my newsletter reached out over substack DM she sends. She'd been diagnosed with stage four cancer. She's now in remission. She'd been confronted with the question we've all been facing. What happens to human purpose when AI removes scarcity? Or in her case the need to be productive to answer it. This is the interesting part, right? She analyzed more than 200 sci fi books. Across all of these books, by far the most common thing left to solve for post Scarcity is meaning. 59% of books were about the search for meaning. Identity was next at 17%. And then it goes on and there are questions. If new technology is so great, why are so many people unhappy? Right? If we have means our ancestors couldn't have dreamed of, why is there a meaning crisis? And then it's quotes Holocaust survivor Viktor Frankl who wrote the truth is that as the struggle for survival has subsided the question has emerged. Survival for what Ever more people today have the means to live but no meaning to live for. And ultimately in the piece he ends up talking about he really goes out there. Well I would bet that dear Pack he has done a fair amount of drugs but. And that's meant as a compliment Packy, if you hear this but we get into non duality. We get into differentiation as moral obligation. But I want to explain the origin of the name of the piece Riding the Leopard and it's from Joseph Campbell and effectively he's talking about the hero's journey. And I'll read two parts and then I'll stop. But the goal of the hero trip down to the jewel point is to find those levels in the psyche that open, open, open and finally open to the mystery of yourself being Buddha consciousness or the Christ. That's the journey. It's all about finding that still point in your mind where commitment drops away. The separateness apparent in the world is secondary. Beyond that world of opp is an unseen but experience, unity and identity in us all. All right, then this is the sort of wellspring of the name of the piece. You must return with the bliss and integrate it. The return is seeing the radiance everywhere. All right. The goal is to live with godlike composure on the full rush of energy like Dionysus riding the leopard without being torn to pieces. And it goes on. It's worth reading. It does get a little squirrely later on. But what I'm curious about is how you guys think about if you do solving for meaning. Because I tend to skew. I wouldn't say dystopian, but hyper vigilant and have a lot of concern for the next five, ten years, not just with AI, but with the reaction to AI, Right. So it's one thing if AI, quote unquote takes jobs, but if everyone fears it is going to take jobs, there are consequences of that in and of itself.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Tim]

But I'm wondering how you guys think about or solve for meaning. And I'll just add one more thing, which is actually, no, I'll save it. I'll park that for, for, for maybe injecting a little later. But how do you guys think about it?

[Jared]

You know, one thing that comes to mind, this is the weirdest thing, by the way, which is I like aviation. And there's. This is all going to connect, which is, you know, turns out airplanes crash only because there's multiple systems that go wrong, whatever. And, and the reason why that came to mind, Tim, was that a captain has a decision to make when something bad happens. How much do you communicate what happened to the passengers? Like, what do you say? Do you do. You're like, hey, you know, we've lost hydraulics, we've lost stuff. You know, multiple systems are wrong, whatever. Completely transparent. You freak people out. Do you not share enough information? People are like, oh, what's going on? Why is it turbulent? How does that marry to AI? The people who are building these systems, how much do they communicate? What they think are things that might change about the future, things that might have a turbulent nature to them. And that is a delicate art, which is, you know, you see Dario going on pods and saying stuff like, software engineering solved. Software will be free. Once that happens, you get these ripple effects, whatnot. All this stuff happens. And there's other people who are much more optimistic about the world, which is like, hey, you know what? Every revolution has created jobs. Certainly it has eliminated them, but we've progressed. And so it's really fascinating. I think this is an interesting environment where people are like, how much do you even as a, a lot of researchers in San Francisco, for example, really believe that we've solved almost every problem, roughly that. That. That the dominoes will fall very quickly from here on out. If you have AI self correcting, self researching, you get to AGI what happens?

[Tim]

How do you solve personally? How do you think about meaning if you do. This is not a, this is not like a prejudgment either. I'm like, what you don't think about meaning you know, you cr.

[Jared]

I tend not to. I'm not a planner too much, you know, I. I think planning is. Is good in some sense, but also kind of detrimental. It occupies bandwidth that would otherwise be more useful for now. I think people tend to live in the future a little bit more than they tend. They. They should.

[Tim]

Are you religious?

[Jared]

What was that?

[Tim]

Are any of you religious? No.

[Jared]

No, I'd say I'm spiritual, but not necessarily, you know, organized religion or whatnot.

[Chris Williamson]

Welcome to Wall Street. What was that? Welcome to Austin.

[Jared]

You know, I think we all do

[George]

a bit of Scientology every now and again, right?

[Chris Williamson]

Do a bit of Scientology. You make it sound like weed. Yeah, come on, come on, come on. We do a bit of Scientology.

[Jared]

Did you guys see what Brian Johnson posted yesterday? It was like prayer. He's talking about prayer. He's like, I've been trying to pray more and I don't know what prayer means and. Or I don't know what prayer is.

[Chris Williamson]

If Brian goes full circle and ends up being a Mormon again, that is going to be.

[Jared]

There was a quote, tweet exactly like this. He's like, turns out the answer to everything is just Jesus Christ.

[Chris Williamson]

Honestly, dude, or longevity or whatever.

[Tim]

There was a funny comment. I mean, I think that's an interesting one coming from Brian. I would actually love to talk to him about that more than a lot of the biohacking, given his history.

[Chris Williamson]

Brian's a sweetie.

[Tim]

I mean, there was a. I like Brian. There was a. There was a comment, though. They said. Wait, let me get this straight. Brian left Mormonism. Now he's telling us we can't drink alcohol, we can't drink caffeine. I thought that was pretty good, but old habits. So what is. What is this? And again, I don't want to belabor this, but I actually really want to know from you guys how you think if you think about it.

[George]

I guess there's two. There's a few different parts. As I'm saying.

[Tim]

I know a lot of uber successful people who can logic and debate their way through the labyrinth of intellectuals around them who have lots of money, who are ready to fucking jump off a cliff. Like that stuff doesn't.

[Chris Williamson]

And do you think that that would be stopped if they had more meaning? Meaning you think the reason that they would jump off a cliff is because of their lack of meaning?

[Tim]

I think that that is one large contributor. And there's a difference. Like there, yes, there's a loneliness epidemic, but solving for loneliness doesn't solve for meaning.

[George]

Totally. This is. There's Quite a lot of strands I'm gonna like, unpack.

[Tim]

Yeah.

[George]

Chess is an interesting one, right, that the AI can beat chess, any human being at chess, but human beings still play chess. Magnus Carlsen seems to have a very enjoyable time playing chess

[Tim]

and.

[Chris Williamson]

Go on.

[George]

Well, there's an interesting anecdote there that this idea that, oh, it's going to take away everything, therefore humans won't have any purpose. Yeah. It's seemingly better than everybody at chess, yet chess is still popular and people are still doing it. The big thing for me, and the

[Tim]

question I'm asking is not whether AI will remove meaning, it's more like, forget about. We could strip AI out of it completely. I'm just curious how you guys think about it if you do.

[George]

So I think we discussed it when I've been in this chair before, but the idea of the precautionary principle. So the precautionary principle is human beings have a very, very, very, very good time at forecasting problems, but we have a very, very difficult time at forecasting the solutions that will come. Because by definition, if we had the solution, therefore there'd be no problem.

[Chris Williamson]

Problem.

[George]

But you have all these billions of human beings that end up working on this problem. My inevitable thing is, and this is where I feel it's a bit of a strawman argument. If this AI is so intelligent that it's replaced us all and it's this super God, you'll probably figure out how to get us meaning, you know what I mean? Argument is a little bit logically.

[Chris Williamson]

George believes that benevolence comes along with.

[Tim]

Yeah, I wouldn't make that last statement myself. I know some people like the sort of extremes of techno optimism would say that. But you know, the point that Packy makes in his piece too, he's like, most of the arguments tend to at some point land on like, we're going to cure cancer. And it's like. Well, at this point, like, he sees like, there are 8.3 roughly billion people on the planet who are not going to die of cancer, at least not in the near term. And a lot of them are miserable. So it's like, it doesn't. It might solve for certain biotech and health tech, medical problems.

[George]

Let us understand the brain and then figure out why these people are miserable. This is what I mean around. I'm not even suggesting this is going to be the case. There's just things that we can't even forecast.

[Chris Williamson]

I mean, you've done a wonderful Bernie Sanders job of two or three times now. Not Answering the question, how do you personally think about meaning?

[George]

I've said Scientology, but you didn't want to listen.

[Chris Williamson]

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[Jared]

do you guys, do you guys think this is an active process in people's minds? Yeah, like, do people really, like, think about it in that realm? Or is it just a byproduct of existence in some sense?

[Tim]

I think we're a natural byproduct of existence. I, I, look, I, I would just say maybe, maybe you see this, maybe you don't. I mean, you guys all interact on the interwebs. The degree of like, apathy and nihilism and foreboding that I think is adjacent or overlapping with a creeping dread of meaninglessness in my audience over the last five years is fucking terrifying.

[Chris Williamson]

And do you think that AI is contributing to that?

[Tim]

I think that technology, and look, I'm not saying technology is a bad thing. Like, ever since we were our ancestors used some stick to fish out a termite mound. It's like, like, I bet on technology. It's, you know, I've lived in the Bay area for almost 20 years, still very actively involved with different types of technology. But I do think that there is the equivalent of digital poison. And a lot of us are drip feeding it every day. So it's not necessarily AI. I think AI, like money, power, alcohol, psychedelics is an, it's an amplifier, it's an accelerant.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, certainly most people's relationship to technology now is negative. I don't know many people perhaps, except you who have a above 80% positive interaction with technology. I was on the treadmill in the gym the other day and I was looking at doing a little bit of boom scrolling on my phone and I had a screen in front of me here and then I had five screens here and then another five screens there and then there's a video wall that's got an advert here. And I'm like, dude, I'm supposed to be in the gym and I'm trying to listen to a podcast. I'm trying to listen to a funny podcast. It's just a safe space hang. I'm not supposed to be thinking and I'm supposed to be tuned into this. And every single different screen had subtitles on, some of them had adverts on. This one's my 600 pound life, that one's the news from New York City, this one's that. And I'm like, dude, I can't. It's even. I have to actively avoid screens now, even if I choose to go screen free. So yeah, I think most people's relationship to technology is proto negative. So when they think about if this gets more, that is more of the negative and it's already removed it for me a bit. I had a really interesting conversation with Nick Bostrom. So he did his second book, which is kind of like a spiritual sequel to Superintelligence. What if things go wrong? And then the next one was, what if things go right? What are the problems of a solved world? And he had this really interesting example where he said, basically everything that we value in other humans can be refined down to the fact that you need to negotiate with a world that is scarce. Why do I like motivation in someone else? Why do I like discipline? Why do I like the ability to tell the truth? Why do I like prudence? Why do I like good judgment? Because you need those things to be able to navigate through a world which is going to apply pressure to you, you. And if you remove that, so many of the traits that we look for in other people, they may not be. That creates a strange weightlessness with all of the different values that we've tended to prefer for all of human history because we've been negotiating with a world that's pushed up against us and if we move that out of the way, then what does that mean? So, yeah, I think, dude, I think the meaninglessness thing is great. George is infuriatingly optimistic, which means that these conversations with him are always, if AI is that smart, why won't it be benevolent enough to fix our problems? That's kind of, I guess, your.

[Tim]

I'm not saying if there had never been. If the transformer had never made the leap to The, I guess, GPT 3 or 4, the sort of social media and digital environment in and of itself, just with more of a linear growth rate as opposed to more exponential, still would be a problem.

[Chris Williamson]

Right? It's just over.

[Tim]

So we, like the AI conversation is just. It sucks up all the oxygen in the room. Do you know what I mean? So it's like we can strip that out as a thought exercise, right? I mean, I'm curious how you would answer it if, if. And I mean, look, this is something I've been thinking about a lot because my audience, but also for me, for like my family. And I've thought a lot about these debates that Jordan Peterson and Sam Harris have had where Sam.

[Chris Williamson]

First one was a fucking car crash.

[Tim]

Well, yeah, I mean, look, they've had car crashes. But one of the takeaways for me was like, can any meaningful critical mass of humans from like first principles develop a moral and value code for themselves that is secular, that is in any way gratifying, grounding supportive in times of great duress? I feel like Sam would be more on that side of things. And then Jordan's like, it's not going to happen. Right? Like, that is why people need religion, because you have this out of the box certainty. And in a world of seemingly increasing incomprehensibility, right, where there is this inability to separate fact from fiction, people need some type of foothold of certainty. And so, I mean, I think religion, I mean, it's, it's. I don't have, I don't have to think it. It's already happening, but it's like huge

[Chris Williamson]

resurgence in religion with Latin mass as well, which is Latin mass is one of the, if not the most ascendant attended religious services. And it's a, a service that's entirely done in a language that nobody in the audience speaks. And I wonder whether what, what that's doing is it's almost bypassing people's ability to scrutinize it. While that's obviously not true. Well, you know, I realize it's Maybe

[Tim]

they don't want to scrutinize it.

[Chris Williamson]

That's the point. That's what I think, that what they're doing is they're purposefully going, oh, maybe it's just that it feels more archaic, it's more steeped in history, et cetera, et cetera. Maybe the music's better, I don't know. But, yeah, I definitely get the sense that. That people are going to scrabble around to try and reverse from first principles. How do I make myself feel good? But there is an interesting question, which is, if what we're bothered about is human flourishing, humans feeling good, why not have a comforting delusion? Let's say that it's delusion. I'm not saying that it is, but why not have a comforting delusion? Like, if the outcomes of religious people are more happiness, more meaning, they live longer, they've got better community, they've got better health, they've got da da, da,

[Tim]

da da, suddenly seems very rational instead of irrational.

[Chris Williamson]

So this was what I learned from Alex o'. Connor, and it is Richard Dawkins speaking to Ayaan Hirsi Ali on stage. And Ayaan was supposed to be the fifth horseman of the atheist apocalypse, but she couldn't make the meeting that day. And then Ayaan is on stage talking to Richard and the audience is sort of half her fans and half Richard's. And she said, I wanted to take my own life not long ago. I was really low and religion found me, Jesus found me, Christianity found me, God found me. And after the lowest moment that I had, I'm really, really happy to say that my mental health's in a better place and I'm religious and, you know, you get the sort of smattering of kind of like empathetic applause around the room. And Alex told me that Richard's almost immediate response was, yes, yes, but do you really think that Jesus moved the stone out of the way on the third day of Aramaea? And what you see is a guy who is playing a game of optimizing for rationality whilst ignoring effectiveness. And you go, how can you say that it's anything but a positive when this person's life essentially was saved by this thing? And I. It makes me. And this is one of the reasons I think that atheism's not cool at the moment, that it feels in a world that's increasingly bereft of meaning, it feels like really sterile and quite judgmental and quite harsh. And it makes me, when I think about It. I'm like, I don't. It just doesn't seem very nice to me. And I'm aware. Removing comforting delusions. Why should you allow someone to indulge in their silly fantasy? But I'm like, bro, I think we're getting toward the stage where comforting delusions are allowed. Because if not so, maybe it is. Maybe it is Mormonism all along.

[Jared]

Do you guys. Intellectuals oftentimes get in this territory where they try to use proof by counterexample, so they'll try to find one counterexample in something that you're saying and then effectively void the whole thing. It's a very common thing because this is what you do in. In a math setting or anything. And they. They tend to do that in kind of a religious setting as well. And it's like, that's not applicable here. Just because X, Y, X is not true doesn't mean. Invalidates the rest of it. And this is why people tend to like, you know, I think Richard Dawkins is like, religion is a pick and choose kind of buffet. You know, you can go pick and believe in something.

[Chris Williamson]

He also did say that AI is sentient.

[Jared]

Sentient with Claude. Right.

[George]

Claudia, how old's Richard, though, now?

[Chris Williamson]

17, 60s, 70s.

[George]

I think as soon as anybody gets over 65, you've got to give them

[Chris Williamson]

a little bit of leeway.

[George]

Public breathing. Breathing room, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Why?

[George]

Have you been around anybody over 65?

[Chris Williamson]

Richard Dawkins?

[George]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, I was on stage with him. He said that he would consider trying psychedelics. I managed to get him to admit to that. That was fun. But. Yeah.

[Jared]

What'd you guys think of that? The Richard Dawkins play? I mean, if anybody would go around and figure out if there is sentience associated with AI, maybe Richard Dawkins might be an okay person to go and figure that out. I don't know. I don't know how much you guys, but I'm curious to get your thoughts on what he discovered or how he discovered it.

[Tim]

Oh, it's way above my pay grade. I have no idea. I would need people to define sentience and also, like, there, whenever we get into sentience consciousness, I'm like, let's just make. Before we argue about what God does or doesn't, like, let's define God similarly. Right. I would just want to make sure I understand those terms because once you get into like, integrated information theory and all this stuff, it's very easy to like, get into these weeds. And then you're like 30 pages into reading this. And I Don't think anyone quite defined what the fuck they mean by so.

[George]

I don't know.

[Tim]

I don't actually know the context, but I certainly have no strong position.

[Chris Williamson]

Same thing's kind of true with meaning, though. You know, I've read Baumeister's paper on meaning, meaning happiness. That kind of legendary one from 2010, I think it is. And hey, they're good a the toothpaste.

[Tim]

I mean, they're very tasty. I don't know what's in them.

[Chris Williamson]

Slav, 15 milligrams of caffeine and some tasty shit.

[George]

Sorry if I'm completely off here. What? But part of me thinks that.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, again, I hate to see optimism.

[George]

I hate to sound like I'm doing an affiliate link for the beginning of infinity, which I am. I'll post it in the link. But problems are infinite. So even now is a great example. So AI, which is. First off, we're having this hypothetical conversation about this hypothetical thing, which I think think could happen, but it's completely hypothetical. But assuming that hypothetical is true, we first have the problem of, well, if this AI is so smart, why can't it fix this? Because those two things seem paradoxical.

[Chris Williamson]

We would need to want to fix it.

[George]

Yeah. Which again, which is a different question. But if it is so smart, why can't it fix it? Is the first point. The second point is, even now, are we not having quite a meaningful conversation about this problem? Is this not an example where this hypothetical AI solved everything, yet it hasn't solved meaning, and we're now constantly talking about how we're going to get more meaning for human beings?

[Chris Williamson]

I don't think that the problem isn't necessarily that meaning would be impossible to access, but that if you make meaning harder to access, you end up with some pretty gnarly outcomes. In the same way as it's not impossible to eat healthily, but it is harder to not be fat in a calorie dense, high processed food environment. And if you make it a meaning oasis, it's sparser to get to meaning, then it makes life harder for everybody to find that.

[Jared]

Can I ask a dumb question?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. Is it how to open your toothpicks? I was watching you send him here.

[Tim]

Back to the. Back to the factory. Let's talk to this co pack.

[Jared]

Oh my God. Amazing. I want. I have another dumb question, which is how do most people or normal people think about meaning? Like, well, how do they define it? What is the underlying element of it?

[Tim]

I mean, the way that, like, I don't Know, if I'm normal, I'm probably pretty abnormal. But, I mean, I do think that that, like, meaning may be the wrong term to use because you can apply it to defining a term you could apply it to. Was this conversation meaningless or meaningful? Well, yeah, we talked about a bunch of stuff that we is mutually intelligible. So, like, yeah, sure, by definition it's meaningful, but I think we could say purpose. Like people feeling they have a purpose. Right. There is a point to what they're doing or their life in general. Right. Is sort of how I would think. I just. I just. The. I mean, that's. That's if. If I had to put in a placeholder, that's what I would sort of.

[Jared]

Western society always attributes. You know, when you go to a party, what do you do, Tim? What do you do? Like, you know, this is a canonical question that people ask.

[Tim]

It's like, oh, what do I do?

[Jared]

What do you do?

[Chris Williamson]

Like, what do you do at a party? What do you do when you're at home?

[Tim]

Yeah, you know, the cocktail party question.

[Jared]

The cocktail party question. I tend to try to not ask this question anymore, but I used to, and it's always funny.

[Tim]

Heroin on the dark web is usually.

[Jared]

There you go. I mean, that would be a good.

[George]

Just a code run.

[Jared]

Amazing. Gracom.

[Tim]

They're like, ah, okay.

[Chris Williamson]

It's better than saying podcast.

[Tim]

But like, that is pretty similar, actually. It's a job.

[Jared]

The attribute of Western society to a certain extent, with all the focus on productivity and looking at your calendar and managing your time and, you know, sort of going from meeting to meeting to meeting and then having a full schedule and organizing, you know, a meetup one month later with your friends and putting it on the calendar. It's so, like, fascinating because effectively, a lot of people treat it as allocating time, and if they allocate time, that's what kind of we're people are trying to do. And oftentimes going back to this, the reason why I asked what you do is a lot of the meaning elements for individuals is tied to their craft, their job, their sort of livelihood.

[Chris Williamson]

Is it possible to have meaning without resistance? Because I was thinking about the chess example that you were talking about. But part of the reason that the game of chess is meaningful is that you're meeting resistance, even if the resistance is of another player and not the best player in the world, that would be a computer. But part of that requires some sort of friction in the system. There's very few things that I can think of that are Meaningful that are also totally frictionless or just. There is no challenge in it.

[Jared]

Going back to this. Think about relationships. We made access to relationships kind of less friction than ever. You get a catalog of individuals, browse through, find the next person, onto the next.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow.

[Jared]

I mean, you've created sort of an abundant layer on what was previously scarce.

[George]

Then you have Grindr, which is Post abundance.

[Chris Williamson]

Post abundance, yeah.

[George]

There you go.

[Jared]

Have you guys heard about Sniffies?

[George]

Yeah. No, no, no.

[Chris Williamson]

What's Sniffies?

[Jared]

It's like a new gay sex anonymous sex app.

[George]

Okay. How are they innovating on Grindr?

[Chris Williamson]

Tell us what went wrong.

[Jared]

Well, this is what I know because I have some friends.

[Chris Williamson]

What were they serving? What were they serving that the Grind up app wasn't?

[George]

How do you spell that, by the way?

[Jared]

S. It's exactly what you.

[George]

I've got to end this podcast.

[Tim]

Match Group just both phones ping. Hold on.

[Jared]

Match Group just put in $100 million into the app and it's growing like crazy.

[George]

People don't talk about the. I used to have this thing that if. One of the reasons why it was never discussed in Parliament or never discussed in Congress was. Who owns pornhub? What's the name? Name of the company? Is it mindgeek?

[Chris Williamson]

Canadian.

[George]

Mindgeek had. Whilst the Congress was talking about the monopoly that Google had the. That meta had. Mindgeek had the most absurd monopoly of the pornography industry, which you'd argue there's a free market solution that OnlyFans came along and good old OnlyFans fixing the market, democratizing porn. Another example is the dating apps. If you look at who owns all the dating apps, I'm pretty sure Match. I'm pretty sure they own Match, Tinder, Hinge.

[Jared]

I don't know if they know pretty much everything. No, no. Bumble's public.

[George]

Okay, so Bumble's separate.

[Chris Williamson]

Raya, maybe Raya is separate, too.

[Jared]

Match Group owns everything except for Raya and Bumble.

[George]

But it's crazy that they're allowed such a monopoly on what is now modern dating. And nobody discusses it because it's sort of icky.

[Jared]

It's hard to define. The market's so difficult to define.

[Tim]

In some sense, those apps are also really struggling. There's been a massive downturn on all those apps.

[Chris Williamson]

Whitney Wolf Heard's been saying recently that Bumble is going to have my AI avatar date your AI avatar and then it'll feed that back up, up.

[Jared]

Did you see there was an interview she just did, like last week or whatever, and she's like this is the end of the swipe era and Bumble's introducing this sort of AI matchmaker or whatever.

[Chris Williamson]

Jared, you ever considered that you might have a drinking problem? I don't consider a lot, Chris. Well, you drank an entire case of Athletic Brewing Company last night. But they're non alcoholic and that's not a problem.

[George]

Sorry man, I, I just kept chugging weight for the regret to creep in. Never happened.

[Chris Williamson]

See, most people like Jared don't want to change what they drink. They just don't want the next day to be a complete write off. And that is why I'm such a huge fan of Athletic Brewing Company. They make the best NA brews on the planet. You can find Athletic Brewing Company's best selling lineup at grocery or liquor stores near you. Or best option, get a full variety pack of four flavors shipped direct to your door right now. Get 15% off your first online order by going to the link in the description below or heading to athletic. Athleticbrewing.com ModernWisdom using the code ModernWisdom at checkout, that's athleticbrewing.com ModernWiry at ModernWisdom a checkout near beer Terms and conditions apply. Athletic Brewing Company fit for all times.

[George]

Bottoms up.

[Jared]

But going back to your point Chris, which was the idea, the capitalism removes friction, right? Like the idea is that. But you have this invisible layer in society sort of that is fixing supply and demand such that there's this equilibrium at all times. And turns out that reduces friction because accessibility. I mean doordash you can like I can get an Amazon delivery in 15, 30 minutes or whatever.

[Chris Williamson]

You got a fancy dress outfit in less than an hour yesterday.

[George]

Yeah, because that's what I do on a Sunday.

[Chris Williamson]

You needed a cost costume. Needed a costume.

[Jared]

Some of these new apps, I mean it was remarkable.

[Tim]

I need a furry with a cape

[Chris Williamson]

and then went straight onto Whistler or whatever. It's.

[Jared]

Yeah, I was in, I was in, I was in like a Carmel and I didn't have a bathing suit because people were going in the pool or whatever. It was like, oh, I can just DoorDash it in 30 minutes and somebody will bring me a bathing suit because I didn't have a. And that's, that's remarkable. And I think going back to this, it's like, yeah, obviously I think it reduces this value of things when the friction goes down.

[George]

I do think a great example is Winston Churchill. I posted this the other day. Churchill's biography is so good. You go, Jesus Christ did this.

[Chris Williamson]

The big.

[George]

I think it's Andrew Roberts Churchill biography. First off, Jared, could you pull that up? How many times Winston Churchill nearly died. He outbeats a cat. Like the number of. I think he almost drowns. He gets.

[Chris Williamson]

What's the terminal velocity of Winston Churchill?

[George]

Yeah, he gets ran over. But Churchill used to. And famously a sufferer of depression, as he called it. A black dog. He used to plant. Sorry. He used to lay 200 bricks per day for a significant period of his life, just to keep himself busy.

[Tim]

What was he building with those 200 bricks?

[George]

Apparently he wasn't actually that good. So the stories that the actual players came in afterwards, but he would always do. Yeah, you can have a look. So here we go. Like. Yeah. Battlefield dangers in Cuba, India, Sudan and South Africa. Escaped from. Yeah, he was escaped from the Boer prisoner of war camp. Frontline combat in World War I. Got hit by a car.

[Tim]

Believed he was preserved for a purpose. Felt he was walking with destiny.

[George]

Well, Winston Churchill famously said, when he was, I believe, a teenager, that I will save Western civilization, which is up there with John D. Rockefeller saying, I will become the richest man ever to exist. Called their shots. But for every Churchill, for every Rockefeller, there's a thousand.

[Chris Williamson]

Massive survival.

[George]

We're in Newcastle right now.

[Chris Williamson]

All right, so I got in trouble, speaking of the uk, I got in trouble for comparing the UK to where it would rank if it was a state. And I thought that this was a relatively innocuous thing to say because me and George have both shit on the UK quite a bit. You know, you're allowed to. You're allowed to. As immigrants, having moved from your own country, you're allowed to sort of cast a spur. Well, this is why I left, so to speak. We were the second in the world in millionaire exits not long ago. Second only to China, who's got, you know, like 30 times the population or something. So I decided to post this chart. And this chart explains if the UK was a state where it would rank on the list. Here it is. If the UK were a US state, where would it rank among 50 states? So life expectancy, first. Lowest. Homicide rate first. Lowest. Gun deaths first. Lowest. Prisoner population first. Healthcare coverage first. Paid maternity leave first.

[Tim]

A lot of high numbers.

[Chris Williamson]

Statutory paid holiday first. Years in education first. Lowest. Road deaths first. Lowest. Drug deaths second. Minimum wage third. Pupil performance first. Fifth. Environmental performance fifth. Human Development Index ninth. Lowest. Obesity, 10th. And GDP per capita, 51st.

[Tim]

What do you attribute that to?

[Chris Williamson]

Well, I mean, the 51st. The fact that it's 51st, the fact that the US just absolutely rules when it comes to capitalism, you guys are like Floyd Mayweather.

[Tim]

Would most countries. I know that the UK is not Europe, you know, Brexit is Brexit. But like, would. Would other. Would countries in Western Europe also look like this in terms of GDP per capita? Probably, right?

[Chris Williamson]

I would guess so. I mean, what people on the Internet got mad at me for is, well, these are stupid things to judge. Obviously. You've got the lowest gun deaths because you cucks gave up your guns. The paid maternity leave doesn't matter when this thing, the statutory paid holiday is pointless because the level of productivity. The road deaths are because you don't have big enough roads or something. The drug deaths don't matter because you've got no cool drugs. The minimum, like, there was basically an American excuse for every single one of these, even the lowest obesity. And I was like, it was just surprising to me. Cause for the most part, British people are very prepared to laugh at Britain, very prepared to point. And we've very British thing. I've done episodes. I've done entire episodes on this is what's wrong and this is what's wrong and this is what's wrong and this is what's wrong. But as soon as you begin to compare the US to the UK and in some areas, because the whole joke here is that there's lots of things that we're ranking better than the US in, apart from one of the most important things, which is how much fucking money we make. And yeah, they're selective, but.

[George]

Sing it.

[Chris Williamson]

Huh?

[George]

You can sing it if you want.

[Chris Williamson]

Sing what?

[George]

God save our gracious king God.

[Chris Williamson]

Right, so I just got into a lot of. And I was surprised. I thought that Americans would be able to take this with a bit more humility.

[George]

I do tend to think the Americans also.

[Chris Williamson]

Humility just.

[George]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

But yeah, lowest drug deaths is. I mean, like, why do you think

[Jared]

America will be lowest obesity at some point very soon with the advent of GLPs?

[Chris Williamson]

And they're going to be someone. I saw this thing the other day that Retatrutide is going to be one of the most successful drugs in history, for sure. One of the most widely used drugs.

[George]

Scott Galloway has the idea. He says it's the best. America's the best place to earn money and Europe's the best place to spend money.

[Chris Williamson]

Well, the UK is a wonderful country to be poor in and a horrible country to be rich in, and America's a great country to be rich in and a horrible country to be poor

[Jared]

in, which is kind of interesting. If the if the value of the dollar goes up, it's American productivity, GDP or whatever goes up, then it's. Americans will go and spend it to Europe. Right. And get the best value for the bang for the bucker, if you will.

[George]

Yeah, I mean, I, I do think the UK is, is. Is the greatest. The country of all time. I do think that's like a fact. But America's. America's going through its golden age right now.

[Chris Williamson]

Just. We're living on borrowed time, mate. You know my position on this. I think that we're living on borrowed time. And this is seen nowhere more clearly than the arrests. Countries with the most arrests for posting on social media in 2023. United Kingdom, 12,183, coming in at nearly double second place, which was Belarus with 6,205 and Russia is down with 400. China with 1500. Might be some reporting problems in a couple of those countries. But that number, which is from the Times, it was a Times Ministry.

[Jared]

What a great.

[Tim]

Social enforcement isn't returning there to be part of.

[Chris Williamson]

Dude. 12,000 arrests for posting on social media in 2023. And that number's from the Times with Freedom House stats. So that's legit. 12,183. And that was one of the most common. How many people, like, where would you rank if it was the number of people that have been. And I'm like, also first, actually.

[George]

So, yeah, we have made some mistakes over the years. Alan Turing.

[Jared]

Yeah.

[George]

Oscar Wilde.

[Chris Williamson]

Not good. We don't treat our gays well. No, we haven't.

[George]

Alan Carr's pretty good.

[Chris Williamson]

Alan Carr's treated well. Yeah. Douglas Murray treated relatively well.

[Jared]

Yeah.

[George]

I had this because I find now that every time you bring up some negative about the uk, I've got to bring up something positive to counteract it. Like the angel and the devil. The northeast and the northwest west, which is. I was back home in London, Central London, and I was walking around these beautiful buildings in London, and I used to live in a house that's older than America. And some of the architecture that exists in the uk, like New York, has some quite. Like the New York City Library is beautiful. It feels like you guys have stolen that from us. And even the Statue of Liberty is from France.

[Tim]

Right.

[George]

But like a lot of the architecture in the U.S. my friend summarized it great, which is everything looks like the back entrance. So even the front looks like what would be the back entrance. And I feel as a Brit being in America, like, my parents have the most beautiful place in the world, and I'm around this mess of a house where the people are just. It's a lot more functional right now. But the UK is. The architecture is done it. You don't make buildings like that.

[Chris Williamson]

We're really grasping at fucking straws though when we're talking about the art center.

[George]

Big Ben. Big Ben.

[Chris Williamson]

Big Ben's good. Big Ben's good.

[George]

That's the difference between the US and the UK is that it feels that everything in the US has, or a lot of things in the US I shall fix, has a functional name. So I was like, why is it called Joshua Tree? It's like, oh, it's because it has a lot of Joshua Trees. Or like you have Temp Street. I go, why is it Temp Street? Cause it's next to 9th street and before 11th Street. Whereas big Ben. Nobody really knows why it's called Big Ben. We think it was after some bloke called Ben. But it's not actually been the Bell file.

[Chris Williamson]

Right. The big Big Ben is the. It's not the actual clock, it's the bell that's inside of it, I think.

[George]

Have a look. Because I remember I went down, I couldn't find it out.

[Tim]

Yeah.

[Jared]

It's remarkable how if you think about it in the grander scheme of things, young. How young America is. It's like, what is it like a teenager maybe less or something with respect to civilization or modern civilization. And turns out everything's kind of. Whereas if you were to create a blank slate of a country and now use the best of whatever exists and

[Chris Williamson]

maybe try to figure out what Dubai's done. Right. In a way that you think about Dubai from an infrastructure standpoint, it's just totally artificial. Yeah, it's absolutely. Just plowed its way through the desert and said, how do we want to have our roads? How do we want to have our downtown? I know that there's lots of road accidents that you said, I wasn't aware of this. But if you're driving in Dubai, you can be doing 70 miles an hour and looking at Google Maps and you're three minutes from your destination, which is in the middle of a built up area. You're just like pounding it. And then you peel off on this perfectly modern designed flyover and then you're deposited outside of the fountains at the bottom of the burj or whatever. So that's kind of interesting.

[Jared]

Whereas if you drive in London, it will take you like 30 minutes.

[Chris Williamson]

London's okay, but I mean, once you've been to la, everything feels totally fucking unbelievable.

[Tim]

Well, I mean, you and I have chatted about this before, but I'm just increasingly bullish on neuromodulation. And there was a piece in the New York Times, could at home, brain stimulation reduce psychiatry's reliance on SSRIs. And I think part of the framing challenge around, and just to define terms here. So brain stimulation in this particular case, I believe in that New York Times piece is referring to something called TDCS, where you can basically use. I think it's TDCS, where you can basically Use a 9 volt battery. It's a headset that you can wear at home. And it's intended to treat depressive disorder. And then you have other types of neuromodulation. And I use that term because you might not be stimulating, you might not be exciting something, you might be inhibiting something. So that would include tms, which I've spent a lot of time with. So transcranial magnetic stimulations. You're using magnets with different targets depending on what you're trying to do. And I think those are just. It's the very, very. It's the model T of what's coming with neuromodulation. And I think there's going to be a lot of acceleration in the next two years. I think it's going to move a lot faster than people expect.

[Chris Williamson]

How does it work?

[Tim]

Well, so for instance, you might have. In, say, my case. Right. So what I figured out, took me my whole life to figure it out, but a few years ago, is that even though I had kind of been diagnosed and diagnosed myself prior to that as someone with some type of depressive disorder, I think that. But it was a combination of a few things. Number one was Lyme disease, which is very much multiple times verified, real Lyme disease, not chronic fatigue masquerading as Lyme disease from Long island, which is. If you look at the CDC map, the center for Disease Control, it is like bullseye. Is the bullseye outbreak, pun intended, because you sometimes get a rash, it looks like a bullseye. But I think that, that a lot of psychiatric conditions are downstream of acute infections that then led to chronic neuroinflammation. That's taking us a little further afield from the point I was gonna make, which is you can use these magnetic pulses in the case of something like accelerated tms. And in my case, I realized that it was actually anxiety and rumination. So a combination. The DSM constantly changes in terms of how you would diagnose these things. Psychiatry is kind of where surgery was like 300 years ago, I would say, say.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Tim]

It's very early days, but if I do an F. Fmri, right. So you're getting this imaging of the brain. You identify targets for, say, anxiety, like anxiosomatic target. You can inhibit or excite, depending on what you're trying to do. A target with these magnetic pulses, intermittent theta bursts is what it's called. And it just feels like a light tapping on your head.

[Jared]

Head.

[Tim]

That's it. It's very tolerable. And in my case, you might do, for instance, in the latest round of what I've done, take something. It's a drug. So you take a neuroplasticity agent beforehand. And there are a lot of things that can increase neuroplasticity, but in this case, it's a somewhat antiquated, maybe antibiotic called D cycloserine. So you stick it in your mouth, you let it dissolve for an hour before the stems, and then you're doing three minutes on the hour or maybe even every half hour for 10 stems, and that's it. And I got three to four months of going from, say, a eight or nine out of like generalized anxiety and just OCD rumination to like a zero or a one.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow.

[Tim]

Different people. I mean, those are two different lived experiences. And.

[Chris Williamson]

And after three or four months, it

[Tim]

starts to creep back in. And then you can go get, say, a booster of some TYP type. And I know people with depression specifically, there's a lot more data on depression of different types who basically similarly got taken from like, I can't move. I'm at home. Some people are cutting. And they go from like, again, this. I'm not a doctor, I'm not giving medical advice. And these are anecdotes. But there are also published studies that people can look into. There's a great scientist named Jonathan Downer, unfortunate name for someone looking up with someone in depression, but amazing scientist. D O W N A R. People can look him up. I think he's at the University of Toronto, know. And you see durability in some people, including the. The son of a friend of mine, 18 months. So instead of three to four months, you get like 18 months. And so you compare, you start to wonder. It's like, all right, if we look at, let's just say, SSRIs, which are miraculous for some people, but the general chemical imbalance theory of. Of depression or anxiety is pretty much thoroughly debunked at this point.

[Chris Williamson]

Right.

[Tim]

You're not depressed because you have low serotonin levels. By and large. And when you take pharmaceuticals, I'm sure It's true with GLP1s, I don't think there's a very rarely a biological free lunch. But let's put that aside. With psychiatric medications, typically you have off target effects, right? They're going to be side effects, they could be sexual dysfunction, they could be whatever, they're weight gain. There are a million different options and, and often they stop working or people don't need them anymore and then there's no plan for deprescribing and off ramping these people so they just stay on forever. Right. So the idea that you could use electricity is super, super, super interesting and I think I'm hopeful that it will displace a lot of the blunt instrument approach to using over prescription. We'll see. I mean it's going to take a lot of tech innovation which in this case AI Go team. AI is going to accelerate things a lot. Certainly already seeing it like a personal level.

[George]

What's it like going from, did you say a nine to a one?

[Tim]

Yeah, like an eight or nine to a one. What's that like as like a felt insomnia gone, right. Like Instead of taking 30 to 60 minutes to fall asleep, like lay down, five minutes later I'm asleep without any sleep medication. I mean that alone is, it's impossible to overstate the effect that has on your daily life every day, right? Easier to get over just kind of the scrapes and bruises of life, right. Little issues. You basically for me it was like I find it very useful. Like if I'm using the toolkit of stoicism or mindfulness or whatever, like it's a fucking struggle, right? It's not native to my constitution, but after this like oh wow, suddenly I can meditate for 20 minutes and I feel like I've been doing it for years as opposed to constantly like slapping my monkey mind on the wrist, right. So really tremendous. And I, I, I what we will see is that you can also use it. I this is not that controversial. But for performance enhancement, right, like you can, I believe you can affect like handedness, trait hypnotizability like you can. And it's not risk free but compared to a lot of the medications that you might give people for these conditions, the risk profile is pretty good.

[Chris Williamson]

It's interesting that you can have an intervention that makes other interventions more effective. So if you can do some sort of TMS thing and that makes your trait hypnotizability more, that means that you've now opened up the world of hypnotism.

[Tim]

Yeah, you're. You're. Exactly. So you're choosing the right domino to tip over first, right?

[Chris Williamson]

And I mean, it's not the time to get into a porn habit. Then straight after this. God God damn it. I just locked this in. I mean, it brings Whistler or Tickler or whatever it's called.

[Tim]

Also a good podcast.

[George]

This podcast is sponsored by Tickler.

[Tim]

When I sit down for a good wank on pornhub with my athletic brew brewing company.

[George]

Do you want a man to come around in two minutes?

[Tim]

Man on man. Life and times, Chris. It a lot. I mean, a lot of what I think about is just sequencing, right? Like there's a lot of stuff out there off the rack that works kind of. Right. But if you, if you figure out the right sequence, like you can suddenly. It's true with language acquisition too. Like where most of the mistakes are made, I think is in the sequencing. And you just fix the sequencing. You shuffle things a little bit, you put the right domino in front and it makes a huge difference. And also this is true with psychedelics in the sense that Gould Dolan, who's at UC Berkeley, she used to be at Hopkins, but her sort of framework of reopening critical windows with the use of psychedelics is very interesting. So. And underground facilitators have known this for a long time. But it's like the two or three weeks after a psychedelic, which in this case would include mdma, although that's a longer conversation. You have the ability, and this could extend to, say, stroke patients who are trying to relearn motor control or speaking things that you. But typically is limited to a very short, relatively short window as a child, right? You can basically reopen the malleability to develop those things using these drugs in the subsequent two to three weeks. So for instance, if you've just done a bunch of psychedelics, maybe a very bad time to suddenly do a bunch of overdosing on porn and sort of instilling habits that you would otherwise maybe come and go, but in this case could really stick. Like your play DOH is has been warmed up in the microwave. So you want to be careful about those two or three weeks afterwards. I think that could also apply to TMS potentially.

[Chris Williamson]

I did a two sided SGB at the start of this year and the same thing is true for that. It's like, hey man, you've got a window here where your nervous system is unusually absorbent, so treat it with appropriate care. That was wild though, that SGB that I had.

[Tim]

You should explain what that is.

[Chris Williamson]

Maybe stellate ganglion blood block. So there is a bundle of nerves on both sides of your neck that are essentially running to the rest of your nervous system. And you can get an ultrasound guided anesthetic injection that goes into it and it essentially shakes the etch of sketch of your nervous system. A way to think about it, it is a relatively hard reset and you do one side and then you do another. You can't do them both together because it actually makes half of your face and half of your throat go to sleep. So if you were to do both, I think that you might die, but you certainly wouldn't be able to swallow. You can't do much stuff.

[Tim]

Sounds problematic.

[Chris Williamson]

You end up with one side of your eye is sort of eyelids half closed and speaking's a little bit difficult. Anyway, I did one side one day, one side on the other with Matt Cook at Bioreset who's kind of the number one in America for this. And it was fascinating, really, really fascinating experience.

[Tim]

Would you do it again?

[Chris Williamson]

I would, yes.

[Tim]

What were the benefits?

[Chris Williamson]

It was an interesting slate clean of some nervous system buildup. So just agitations, that sort of ambient buzzing that you often have rumination reduced. It was very interesting. But I think the thing that's always fascinating to me because you've got a felt sense of how this thing impacted you, you and because our felt sense is so subject to did I sleep well? Am I in a good place with this person? Have I got the, you know, how's business going? What's happening in my life? But when you see it in data too and because I track everything with whoop. It was a 30% increase in HRV.

[Tim]

I was going to ask you about

[Chris Williamson]

HRV, 30% increase in HRV overnight. And that held for, I mean I'm what, three, four months now after it started to tickle back down now, now. But that held for a long time. And resting heart rate also did the same, not quite as much, but it was basically a 30% change in HRV. And that stuck about for a while. And they do this, it's a one stop shop for PTSD in soldiers. It's really aggressive intervention for guys that are super, super, super struggling. It just gives you a little bit more room to breathe. And I was interested in it and I trust Matt, the guy that did it. So I was like, okay, you mentioned before risks with the TMS type stuff. What are some of the risks?

[Tim]

Generally very low. I mean, I would say that again, not a PhD or doctor don't play one on the Internet. So do your homework, talk to your professionals. But my understanding is that I can give you my personal example. Right. Occasionally, in the case with my target, with my brain, after the treatment, you can have what's almost like a rebound exaggeration of symptoms for a short period of time, which is pretty unpleasant. Where you might have insomnia for a few days, which I did. I've had that twice.

[Chris Williamson]

You've done this twice?

[Tim]

No, I've done it probably five or six times, and it has not worked 100% of the time, which is very frustrating. It's part of the reason why. And I'm supporting a nascent brain stimulation lab here at UT Austin. Getting involved with a couple of the companies because I want to. I actually know these machines, and I've talked to the technicians and I've talked to the scientists, and I'm like, I can actually be very, I think, helpful here. So I'm hoping to figure out how you can make that much more reliable. It's also just pure self interest. Right. I want to be able to use this, and I also want to figure out how to get durability out further. Right. Instead of three to four months, it's like, look, if it's one day every quarter, like, and it goes from a nine to a one, fantastic. But if only it works once out of every four shots, then that sucks. Yeah, in a lot of respects. So some of the side effects, the insomnia that I mentioned, in very, very rare cases, people will get temporary tinnitus. They'll get, like a ringing. These are. These are all pretty uncommon. And I should say that the using this for generalized anxiety disorder, ocd, et cetera, is very much tip of the spear stuff. So the sample size is not very large. With the depression, there's much more data, and you can go on PubMed or elsewhere. Consensus app is another decent option if you want, like, an AI interface. And look at the published papers, they're right there for you. If you are the, like, smacking down your sympathetic nervous system. Okay, this is the perfect place to talk about this on a Pod Large podcast. After my first effective TMS treatment, the first one that worked, I could not ejaculate for, like, two weeks. And I lost it.

[George]

You can imagine.

[Tim]

I'm just like. I'm like, is this a good news, bad news situation? Like, yeah, good news, you're not as anxious. Bad news, you're never going to ejaculate again. I was like, what the the doctor's like, yeah, we've never seen that before. I was like, oh, fantastic. But eventually, mechanistically, he was like, it could be a dosing problem where we're basically. We dialed down the volume on your sympathetic nervous system too much because, like

[Chris Williamson]

a sympathetic to get erect. Sympathetic to come.

[Tim]

Yeah, they say point and shoot. Parasympathetic sympathetic.

[George]

Damn.

[Tim]

Yeah. And I was like, okay, well, maybe we try a lower dose. Which I think is part of the reason why it didn't work for me, because I try. I was like, hey, if that was at the time, that was five days. And I was like, I really didn't enjoy those two weeks. So let's try.

[George]

How much are you trying to.

[Tim]

Let's try two days. I'm a big fan of a Jaguar, you know.

[Jared]

Sounds like we found the title.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, you need to get on Whistler.

[Tim]

So I need to get Tickler.

[Jared]

Tickler Sniffies.

[Tim]

Yeah. My podcast is accepting sponsors. Tickler. So then I tried two days, nothing, right? Then I tried three days, a few months later, nothing, right? And then eventually got back to five days, still nothing. But then went back to adding the D Cyclocerian. This plasticity agent beforehand. One day, boom. And I was like, okay, now that is when I became much more. It's called the one. It's just called One Day Protocol. And Jonathan Downer, who I mentioned is one of the, if not the sort of innovator in the space behind that, along with Don Vaughn and some other people. But that one day when that worked, I was like, now this is interesting because currently the insurers are slowly coming around, but all this stuff, a lot of innovation starts with people with money spending way too much money. That's just the way it is, right? That's true with electric cars. It's true with Uber. It's true with a million different. The early generation iPhones, right? Didn't even copy and paste. Are you fucking kidding me? Right? These early adopters who have money and they're willing to spend it, like the accelerated TMS protocol, some of the early. The rounds that I did, it's like all in, 30 grand out of pocket. I mean, it's expensive. And when it got down to one day, I was like, okay, now it's about reducing sort of unit cost and increasing throughput with these devices. Because putting aside the out of pocket cost, a lot of people, they cannot take five days off of work, do this. But once you get it to one day, now I'm like, okay, that just went from. From A very small sort of addressable patient population to a much larger, still too expensive. But let's try to work on getting it down. And that's just tms, right? You have other things like focused ultrasound that might be interesting for different types of addiction, for instance, where you could actually get enough penetration that you could hit the nucleus accumbens and other anatomical structures associated with chemical dependence. And it's like, okay, this is very, very, very interesting.

[Chris Williamson]

Who's the best company in America for this at point that moment.

[Tim]

I mean there, there are a couple of really good ones. The, the two older ones are that have the most kind of time on the market are Brainway, which is out of Israel, very good machines. It's a, it's a publicly traded company. Full disclosure. I, you know, invested in them when they were a public traded company. Magventure has a device as well which I've used and then the company that I'm involved with is called ampa. And that is the smallest form factor and the people behind it develop the one day protocol. And I think their sort of the trainability of that device instead of taking weeks or certainly instead of taking weeks, let's just say to train a technician properly, you can do it in a few hours. And it's something that fits in the trunk of a car like a Corolla as opposed to being the size of a refrigerator. And, and I think they're really. Otherwise I wouldn't be involved very well positioned to finally scale this treatment to millions of people instead of a hand like a few thousand. So all three of those are on the market and the lowest cost would certainly be ampa. But all these devices, amper, ampa, AMPA Health. And, and we'll see. We'll see. I mean I am, I'll be, I mean not just because I'm involved, because it took me a long time. I did a fuck ton of due diligence. I don't think a lot of folks don't realize like how much due diligence I do before I put something in my newsletter or whatever. It's like, I guess this is ocd, like harnessed when I am in full throttle being used.

[Chris Williamson]

Very well. Being friends with you is, is highly useful in situations like this. In the same way I went to go and get Lasik in the uk. Ali Abdaal, productivity dude, British guy, is a doctor, right? Was an MD or the equivalent of an MD GP in the uk. I knew that he'd got Lasik and I was like, no one's done More research about who's the best obstetrician operator in all of the uk. Messaged Ali and he's like, yeah, I spent three weeks speaking to all of my friends and doing all of the reviews and looking at the particular machines. I was like, okay, who was that? He introduced me. And it's funny. This is good. I just get to speedrun all of the work that you did.

[George]

Canary down the mine.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm the end of the guy in the Human Centipede. But I'm benefiting. Yeah.

[Tim]

You want to be first in line.

[Chris Williamson]

I'm at the end. But it gets better progressively as it goes through. That's cool, man. I'm glad that it's helped. It's exciting.

[Tim]

It is exciting. I mean, and. And I think it's saying something when as somebody who's been so active in funding the science related to psychedelics and psychedelics assisted therapy since 2015, that in the last three years I've done almost no psychedelics. It's been purely focused on the neuromodulation. I think it's that important. We'll see. Because for a lot of people, like, psychedelics are nuclear power for the psyche. Like, you just. They are not suitable for all people. There are plenty of people I would carve out for exclusion from.

[Chris Williamson]

Many times you end up with a Chernobyl or a Fukushima. Yeah.

[Tim]

Yeah. It's just. It's. It's a lot squirrelier. It is. You need to be really careful with that stuff and as opposed to just

[Chris Williamson]

not being able to come.

[Tim]

It has its place.

[George]

Yeah. Can I zoom in more?

[Tim]

This?

[George]

Yeah. What was that like at the end of a few weeks, you know, you said you went from a nine to a one. Did you hit a minus seven?

[Tim]

No. No, I didn't. I mean, I was fantastic for girlfriend. I was pretty. I was pretty. Yeah.

[George]

I was.

[Tim]

I was understandably concerned.

[Chris Williamson]

Had you have known that it was going to end after two weeks, presumably you would have just been. For the fear was, this is going to be forever.

[George]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Jared]

Right.

[Tim]

Okay.

[George]

Yeah.

[Tim]

So now.

[Chris Williamson]

But you couldn't feel the anxiety.

[Tim]

But interestingly, for like the. Every time it has worked for me, I've had that side effect. But now I know that there's an endpoint so I don't freak out and it's fine.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. You just know that you're going to get a couple of really good weeks where you're kind of like a stallion. Babe, I can just, you know, don't worry about me.

[Jared]

How do you. I had a Question for you. You know, on the other side of the spectrum, have you seen these devices that stimulate your vagus nerve or whatever?

[Tim]

Yeah, I know, I know a lot about them.

[Jared]

What are your thoughts on those?

[Tim]

Like most of them are bunk. Are they? Yeah, there. There's a scientist you might want to have him on at some point. He's incredible, named Kevin Tracy. He is the most credible. He wrote a book called the Great Nerve. He's the most credible publicly and not really educated scientist credible, very highly published scientist who talks about this. Most of the non invasive vagus nerve stimulators or that are purported to be vagus nerve steel engines don't actually hit it the right way. And there's neck based and then there's ear based. The neck tbd. But, but there are. They've been cleared. FDA cleared for. I think it's either migraines or cluster headaches. Some people seem to benefit. I had a friend who tripled his HRV using a neck based device. I think it was either Truvega or it was the prescription equivalent of Truvega and it worked really well for him. This can be pretty.

[Jared]

I haven't used them. I had a friend I was talking to. I suffer from migraines and so I have to carry around medication all the time. And somebody told me about these things and they're like, okay. It has all these benefits of like hrv, you know, increase of hrv, all sorts of stuff. It's a temporary state, if you will, but ultimately you should use it daily.

[Tim]

It's like a few minutes in the morning. A few minutes, yeah.

[Jared]

It's kind of reset the nervous system. That's kind of the marketing terminology that they've been utilizing.

[Tim]

Yeah, I mean really, it's. What it's doing is it's stimulating the vagus nerve which is really like two transatlantic cables on either side. It's like a hunting a hundred, roughly 100,000 fibers on either side. And it innervates everything, just about organs, GI tract, et cetera. And when you stimulate it, you can, I guess the right way to put it, activate isn't quite right, but something called the inflammatory reflex. And so it can be applied to things like rheumatoid arthritis, different autoimmune disorders can be applied to something like asthma attacks. It's very, very, very interesting. So it could be worth looking into for you. Right. The neck based devices tend to also activate the superficial muscles of the face. So it pulls your face down.

[Chris Williamson]

It depends how high you turn it up.

[Tim]

Yeah, it depends on how high you turn it up. But it can be a little uncomfortable. The ear based devices, do you say you've used.

[Jared]

No, somebody recommended me. The ear based device.

[Tim]

Most of the ear based devices are not actually in the.

[Jared]

Got it.

[Tim]

It needs to be very, very, very precise. It's called the Simba Concha. It's going to be hard to see. It's right here, kind of where this fold is. It's at the bottom of that inside like right there. Most of the devices being sold on the market, including devices that have lots of fancy names and lots of fancy institutions on the website, they're not in the right place.

[Chris Williamson]

It's a very shit ton of money behind some of those companies.

[Tim]

Yeah. Very few fibers make it it to the ear.

[Chris Williamson]

I've got a couple of things. I had a few things sent to me. I had one that's a handheld device with the two prong and you can kind of just stick it on like you want.

[Tim]

Just tase yourself.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, like that. And then there's a pair of headphones that have a lug that comes down and sits here. And obviously that one's way, way more convenient. But there's some weird stuff with that. You've got to lubricate the end of the adapter because it needs to be able to have quite a smooth surface to be able to. So you have to change the. Again, Whistler. You have to change the little heads out on this thing and put that in. I didn't do it consistently enough to be able to say whether or not it was effective.

[Tim]

Yeah, I think for migraines it's worth looking into.

[Chris Williamson]

What's your migraine manifestation? Do you have aura with it?

[Jared]

Oh my God, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Which one? What?

[Jared]

What do you mean which one?

[Chris Williamson]

Olfactory, visual. It's visual. Visual, visual.

[Jared]

And it'll come on and I can. I. I've had these since I was 5 years old and people are like, what the is going on? I. I didn't even know. And yeah, you get these auras. It's like almost as you're on like an acid trip and every. Everything just looks blurry but moving in in a weird way. And then, and then after a while, if you don't take medication during that

[Chris Williamson]

period, then it kicks in.

[Jared]

Then it kicks in.

[Chris Williamson]

What do you take? Nurtec sumatrip. And as one just kicked in.

[Jared]

Yep.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, sorry, it's.

[Jared]

No, no, it's all good. It's. I don't even know. I mean I typically track it with. It's either lighting. It's environmental like weather changes weirdly enough or the last element of it is either I have caffeine or wine without any food.

[Tim]

Right.

[Jared]

And it's. It's really fascinating is you know they. They ask you to keep a diary of your day and to figure out retroactively what caused it.

[Chris Williamson]

Yep.

[Jared]

There's no other mechanic and it's so people don't know why people don't know for what reason people some people think it's autoimmune, some people think it's not and it's a fascinating so I have to carry medication all the time and I always recommended this.

[Tim]

Yeah so the the prescription version of Truvaga spelled T R U V A G A is called Gamma Core.

[Jared]

Got it.

[Tim]

G A M M A C R E is FDA cleared in the US for both acute treatment of migraine pain in adults and prevention of migraine episodic and chronic. Few practical points. The effect evidence is real but modest compared to top tier migraine medications like CGRP inhibitors appears to work best for people who treat attacks early migraine with aura patients who want to reduce medication use those who can't tolerate triptans and CGRPs.

[Jared]

Right. Speaking of those devices by the way, have you guys seen there's some companies that are being now that there's sort of reinvention of input into computers. So for example less keyboards, more voice, more like natural types of interactions with technology and devices in general. There are these devices that are coming out. One of my friends demoed this to me. I think Apple just acquired a company where you just put sort of a small device that listens in this sort of region and without you actually saying anything, it can detect, you know, as if you were talking.

[George]

Makes sense.

[Jared]

Roughly. It's remarkable. And you can imagine a lot of scenarios with this as technology and the input layers become much more natural, much more conversational and you know, you don't have these affordances to speak all the time where imagine that device can effectively read what you want to say without you ever having to say it.

[Tim]

Yeah.

[Jared]

And it lives roughly in this region. Can detect all these.

[Chris Williamson]

Any idea why it's sat there to detect? Is it as if you're moving your mouth but not talking?

[Tim]

I'm not sure roughly. Let me just sidebar real quick just because I want to make a safety point. We're talking about the relative safety profile of brain stimulation or neuromodulation with these devices. That does not mean anyone should DIY this stuff. You can the brain, the B, the Brain is incredibly sensitive. If you hit the wrong target you can yourself up or make your symptoms a lot worse. So do not DIY this. Go to a decent clinic for people who want to explore it. I have no stake in any of these. Acacia Clinic in Sunnyvale in California. Salience which I think is in Dallas. They may have other locations. Owen Muir M U I R who's in New York. There are a couple of clinics that I know have very good reputations but like work with somebody who knows these places.

[Chris Williamson]

No 9 volt battery and a one of those no pads that people use for their.

[George]

I was about to go home with an endurance.

[Tim]

There's also. It's not, I don't think indicated for migraines. It's. I'm pretty sure it's specific to RA to rheumatoid arthritis. But Set Point Medical has. Has an implant.

[Jared]

Wow.

[Tim]

About the size of a small Omega 3 that they. It's like an outpatient procedure in the neck. And then it just stimulates like twice a day the vagus nerve.

[Chris Williamson]

No way.

[Tim]

Yeah. That was on the front. Front. It was on the front cover of the New York Times the day that I interviewed Kevin Tracy who was involved with the development of that device. Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

Wow.

[Jared]

And so they implant it directly into your neck.

[Tim]

Yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

How do you recharge it in the production?

[Tim]

I'm not sure exactly. Yeah. I mean it does get

[Jared]

magnetic charging.

[George]

Could you imagine a device that kind of reads your thoughts? One thing you. You discover as you get more into meditation is just how sometimes your thoughts aren't even you. Like the ultimate example, even if you've not experienced any form of meditation would be like a song that's stuck in your head.

[Jared]

Yeah.

[George]

I wonder how the device would. Could differ between a song that's stuck in your head and something that you actually want it to do. Because I remember it's a great meditation technique.

[Tim]

I'm just imagining my ruminating given a microphone.

[Jared]

The distinction being that there's sort of this concept of mind reading and. Or expression of a thought. And the expression of a thought is typically, you know, when you. When you're starting to speak roughly, you would have to. To. It's not purely like a thought reader in some sense. You would have to have an intent associated with it. To going back to your previous point on devices though, my thesis is that the device that you'll probably wear when you interact with AI or whatever if you want to, has not been invented yet. And it will have this combination of input output that is much more less visible.

[Chris Williamson]

Didn't OpenAI claim that they were going to have A3 products or something and obviously they've got Jony I've in the guy that made the. The iPhone. The original iPhone. And then they bought his company which was called yeah IO and then there was this very cool sexy video of him and Sam in a totally not fake bar somewhere having a conversation.

[George]

I think It'd be the AirPods.

[Jared]

Yeah. They're actually building a phone apparently.

[Chris Williamson]

Okay. They said three different things and one of them is something that no one's ever seen before which makes maybe a lapel thing, a little button or something like that.

[George]

The airport case makes the most amount of sense because we are already using them. People wear them 247 the AirPods are. What's that stat around? If the airport was a startup it'd be like one of the most valuable.

[Chris Williamson]

It's eighth in the world.

[Tim]

Really.

[Chris Williamson]

That's wise Just that alone and half

[George]

that's me contributing to.

[Chris Williamson]

Should we talk about that? Yeah.

[George]

I.

[Chris Williamson]

We've never spoken to about this.

[George]

I've see if I can pull it up.

[Jared]

Going back to your three devices thing, I think there's probably one device that is an affordance that's kind of listening

[Tim]

and or you ask me your wait, you were a raw dog that took a deer like let's get rid of this free advertising.

[Jared]

There's this sort of one device that probably listens to input in some mechanic or tries to process what you want in possibly a new way. That could be like a device that's kind of have a microphone or whatnot. There's another device where it's like a her type situation where he's wearing that earpiece and constantly speaking to it. And then maybe that third device is kind of this glanceable world right where you have this phone. Turns out now, you know, applications are becoming less like people are using ChatGPT or Claude for everything. Right. Like you go, I want to set a timer. You can do that in chat GPT you don't necessarily need a dedicated app. Maybe you want one or whatnot. But the idea of the app ecosystem being less valuable than it was before,

[Chris Williamson]

given that Elon's big on this. Right. He thinks that all apps are going to go away and your phone is just going to create whatever you need whenever you need it.

[Jared]

Roughly. Exactly. And I think generally today it's possible to build that type of device without having this ecosystem effect that was necessary in the past.

[Chris Williamson]

I wonder if that would open up a hole in the market because at the moment, the dominance has been pretty tough. Despite the fact that Apple have kind of shit the bed a lot. You know, their phones have really started to peter out in terms of the progress, at least from what I notice as a user. Like, yeah, I can zoom in 15x, I can zoom in 20x, and at

[Jared]

some point it's like it's a slab of glass and a combination of things

[Chris Williamson]

like, what do you do innovative. It's a bit. The screen's brighter or sharper or something, but it's less noticeable. You remember when, when it was what, the iPhone 5 to the iPhone 12. And each time it was a noticeable leap forward. Almost the same that's been happening with the AI models. You know, it seems to have started to. At least in terms of noticeable user experience for me, it seems.

[Tim]

I think iOS gets worse every time

[Chris Williamson]

I upgrade the keyboard at the moment. Just fucking sucks, it's so bad.

[Tim]

But they do have an incredible war chest. So what do you think?

[Chris Williamson]

I don't know how to pile of money.

[Tim]

Well, I'm just. What they can do is they can buy companies. So I'm wondering, I don't know, you have any thoughts on who they should buy?

[Jared]

You know, there's. There's a group of people that think that Apple's like the smartest company because they've let the world sort of play itself out. People spending a lot of money and they're just waiting to see where it hits and then effectively do what they do best, which is never enter the market first, but be the best. Yeah, yeah, that's exactly what happened to cell phones or smartphones. Exactly what happened to kind of AirPods. There's all these, some.

[Tim]

Some wireless dude with the ipod too.

[Jared]

Ipod too? Yeah, the ipod was the first element of it. Even the computer in some sense, plenty

[Tim]

of MP3 before that.

[Jared]

So they've saved all of this cost for capex. Never spent anything like what, go forth

[Chris Williamson]

and split test these products for us my min.

[Jared]

Yeah, exactly.

[Chris Williamson]

A ton of other companies, they effectively

[Jared]

let others do the R and D work to a certain extent and then refine that world potentially. And you know, there's an argument to be made that that is a.

[Chris Williamson]

You don't need to be first, you just need to be.

[George]

They also make what, 20 billion per year from Google for free. Google search for free. So Google keeps going up and up and up. So yeah, they're not going to dabble with touching that.

[Chris Williamson]

Which is why I said what we have to. Haven't discussed is how much revenue you contribute. To Apple on an annual basis.

[George]

I think I'm on my 17th AirPods a lot.

[Tim]

Because they're. Because they're a slippery bar of soap.

[George]

Yeah. Yeah. No, no, it's more. I've had a few stolen. I don't like having things on me as well, so I'll just, like, leave things. So, like, the amount of times I've left them at Dean's, just a gift

[Tim]

to the universe over and over again.

[George]

The most frustrating thing is, is you can see where they all are. So there's one in particular right now that's in Cameroon, and I can see where his house is.

[Jared]

Right.

[Chris Williamson]

So, no.

[George]

No, I still. No, because I'm a sad little man that I'm not willing to. I'm not willing to fly into Cameroon to confront the man, but I am willing to press the Play Sound button.

[Jared]

Oh, my God. Do it at night while they're sleeping.

[George]

Yes.

[Chris Williamson]

Isn't there a single AirPod that's in the, like, who building?

[George]

Yeah, that was Katie's AirPods that were in the WHO building. Yeah, just one AirPod was in the

[Chris Williamson]

single AirPod that he was playing this sound through in the who building in New York City.

[George]

There you go. It's just there right now. Oh, he's in Ghana. He's in Ghana. Oh, there we go. Eight minutes ago.

[Jared]

You guys ever. That's incredible. But what a great. I mean, I never leave my house without my AirPods.

[George]

This is why I think it's such a power user.

[Chris Williamson]

It's ridiculous. Such a power user.

[George]

I keep sounding like a broken record here, but I assume the device is. Is a little pod thing that we have now, Headphones in, cameras in. But then it's almost. You could have a. Like a holographic screen so people aren't on these glass screens as much. And you can make it big, make it small. That feels inevitable.

[Jared]

I mean, there is rumor that the next AirPods, like you said, do have visual. The cameras. And that's crazy if you think about it. You're walking around, there's sort of two spatially aware cameras around you.

[Tim]

Well, it's kind of like, what was it, Dark Knight Returns or Dark Knight Rises, when they had the cell phones.

[George]

Oh, yeah.

[Chris Williamson]

And they mapped the entire setup.

[Jared]

Yeah.

[Tim]

I mean, what do you think Apple's going to do with that daylight?

[George]

I don't understand how they're going to do the whole neuralink thing that you mentioned of. They will read your thoughts. Because of the fact that some thoughts I have, I didn't want to have it wasn't me, but there's this meditation technique I once sat in, which is a real cool one.

[Tim]

So it sounds like you're pretty seriously meditating.

[George]

Yes. Yeah. It was originally to fight off a skin condition, and then it ended up

[Chris Williamson]

fixing that with AI.

[George]

Yeah, Gemini fixed that. So the story there was, gemini, fix your syphilis. The psychiac. That's can't be fixed.

[Jared]

AGI is here, man.

[George]

Sniffer gave me the syphilis.

[Jared]

No.

[George]

I had subatomic dumbritis for about two years. Subatomic, suboric dermatitis. Okay. I was like, on my face. My face would break out, like, red, and I wouldn't want to go outside the house.

[Tim]

House.

[George]

So I spoke to a few different doctors. A lot of them recommended topical steroid creams. A lot of them said it was because of stress. So I got deep into meditation. I stopped eating, like, so such little sugar that I once flagged. I once got diagnosed with type 1 diabetes, which was a complete false diagnosis. Type 1 is pretty hard, which is another side story.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah.

[George]

But I won. Then when I was away. No. I tracked my skin for years, and nothing would work. Nothing would work. So when I was away on holiday, I just uploaded the file to Gemini, and it just.

[Chris Williamson]

The file? You mean a photo?

[George]

Yeah. No, all the photos that I have. And it just said, oh, just put nizoral shampoo on your face.

[Tim]

Oh, wow.

[George]

And it's never. It's never had an issue ever since.

[Tim]

So it was fungal.

[George]

Yes. So the biggest. The biggest recommendation I would give Nisrol

[Tim]

is ketoconazole for people who are wondering,

[Jared]

yeah, this is for dandruff.

[George]

And I do it once.

[Tim]

Say again?

[Jared]

This is for dandruff.

[Tim]

It's also very effective for topical fungal infections.

[George]

I did it once every two weeks now. Now. And it's completely fucking crazy. It's completely gone. So any recommendation at home, like, a practical thing, would be just upload a photo of yourself to Gemini or ChatGPT and just say, hey, based off what you can see of my skin, recommend me moisturizers, recommend me everything. And it'll be better than.

[Chris Williamson]

Do you know anything you've done before?

[Tim]

What do you use Gemini for versus other models?

[George]

I'm an LLM whore. Timisch, I'm shifting.

[Chris Williamson]

He's like the Andrew Huberman of LLM.

[George]

Yeah, I'm shifting each day. Oh. But to. Sorry, I didn't finish the story. So the meditation point there. There's a great question which I ended up learning was asking your mind what thought's gonna come up next. And it's like your mind gets a bit. It's almost this Mexican standoff. And the problem with these devices, I once asked myself that and my mind went quiet for six seconds. And then for whatever reason, there's this former Bayern Munich winger called Iron Robben. And it's just him checking in on the left foot in my head, head. And it's like, that. Was that me?

[Jared]

Why is that there?

[George]

So if I have a neuralink device, it's an interesting one of how does it know what was me versus what's just my monkey mind doing strange behaviors,

[Jared]

you know, I can't wait to see

[Tim]

the first failed demos of. You know what I mean? Like, these epic software demo fails. Someone gets up and it's just like, twat, twat, twat, twat, twat.

[Chris Williamson]

Especially like, no, no, sorry, sorry. Especially given the likelihood of it being elite on to do the first presentation is quite high. A man with a mind that I don't think anybody wants to see broadcast out into public.

[Jared]

Did you see that demo of the cybertruck where he was on and he smashed the window? He's like, wait, that's not supposed to happen.

[George]

The best film I've watched all year. It's a British film. It's probably one of the best storytelling examples I've ever heard. So people will know it from the Brits Award. It was this horrific incident where Michael B. Jordan went on stage and somebody shouted the N word. And it was this huge, controversial incident. But what actually happened was it was a guy who has one of the most severe form of Tourette's.

[Jared]

Tourette's.

[George]

And he was.

[Tim]

He was subject of a film.

[George]

He was subject of a film. So he was at the BAFTAs. So the film is called I Swear. And it's incredible because this guy grew up in Scotland, which is like, think about all the stereotypes you have about England. Like, the further north you get, the more like, harsher essentially is.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. People from Aberdeen are some of the most, like, brutal people on the planet.

[George]

So this man grew up with extreme Tourette's in the 70s 80s England, when nobody knew what the condition was. So the film's amazing because it's just him, like walking to the shops going, fat twat. And he goes, and he's just getting the shit beaten out of him and he can't explain what it is. So he's constantly getting into fights. There's a scene where he's walking his dog. And this is real. So he's walking his Dog across the. About to go across a busy road. And he loves this dog, but there's a car coming and he goes, walk forwards. Now and then he has to grab the doc.

[Tim]

He's Tourette's.

[Chris Williamson]

He's fighting against himself.

[George]

Yeah, he's fighting against himself. It's so good. It's such a good film.

[Tim]

Where can you see it?

[George]

If you just search, I swear.

[Chris Williamson]

Fuck you. Fuck you.

[Tim]

So I missed it.

[George]

Fuck you from living with Chris. The man's a bit of a boomer, and I'll often, like, give him a recommendation and he'll go, where can I see it? And if it's not on Netflix, he can't get it.

[Chris Williamson]

No, no, no. Just Google it. That's not fair.

[George]

That's not fair.

[Chris Williamson]

And that's not true. But my response is, what can I watch it on?

[George]

And I'll just say, google it.

[Chris Williamson]

Right, but that's a fair. I feel like this is a little bit like, here's a fantastic new restaurant. Okay, what street's it on? I just want a little bit more information. And the fact that you want me knowing what you know, which is that you might understand what streaming service it's on, saying to me that I have to go and Google it, when you could just say it's on Netflix. And me and Tim this side of the table, we just expect little bit more decorum. You know what I mean?

[George]

This is why I. This is why I want AGI to come, because it gives me.

[Tim]

So glad you brought this up.

[Chris Williamson]

All right, all right, all right.

[Jared]

Going back to the photo thing. Do you guys know what people are utilizing chat GPT and whatnot for when they upload photos of themselves? Looks maxing.

[Chris Williamson]

Oh, well, that's interesting. Do you know Coves?

[Tim]

What do they. What?

[Jared]

So they upload a set of photos. There's these apps on the App Store too now that kind of do a rapper experience. But the idea is that effectively, you know, you upload photos to Gemini or ChatGPT and then it suggests things that you might want to do, whether it's your cheekbones. With this type of medical procedure, you know, jaw surgery, having a symmetric face, even things like hairstyle make a huge difference or a beard or whatever.

[Tim]

Skip that section.

[Jared]

And roughly, it's really interesting that people are doing this because obviously there's this huge craze of looks maxing and whatnot, and turns out huge use case for AI.

[Chris Williamson]

Dude, check out Coves. I've just sent this to you, Jared. Q O V S. Yeah. So look at this. So this is glow up without surgery. Get your personalized facial analysis and transformation plan. So I know the science team behind it. The science team behind this are absolutely sick. So look at the guy on the right. And then like you should be able to do a transition. You see how you can get the middle of the guy's face? You should be able to click on it and. Yeah, exactly. So move it all the way to the right.

[George]

You was worried about meaning. Tim, look at this.

[Chris Williamson]

And then go to the left. Wow.

[Tim]

Got it. So it's like drive by shooting suspect to soap opera star.

[Chris Williamson]

Exactly, yeah. Get more career opportunities. Boost your self confidence. Make a stronger first impression. Improve your dating life. Enhance your quality of life. So basically it's go, go.

[Tim]

Let me see the one on the left again.

[Chris Williamson]

Go the swing it.

[Jared]

She's really attractive.

[Tim]

I feel like that's one of those like Sandra Bullock. Oh, she takes off the glasses and walks out and she goes.

[Jared]

Yeah. You're like, like wait.

[Tim]

She nerd the supermodel.

[Jared]

That's all she did.

[Chris Williamson]

Ah, she's shaped her face a big. Do it again, Jared. Show me. Not that.

[George]

Slow it down. Go really slow.

[Chris Williamson]

Real time.

[George]

Slow, slow, slow, slow.

[Jared]

You know this is just IRL Facetune, right?

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah, yeah.

[Jared]

So if you. There's like Facetune has all of the Facetune. I don't. Do you guys know what Facetune is?

[Tim]

I don't.

[Chris Williamson]

I learned about it from Frey Reindeer a couple of weeks ago.

[Jared]

One of the most. It came out fair a long time ago Israeli companies company. And it's just a easy way of manipulating the way that your face looks and slims your jawline or whatever gives you habit. As in on a photo. Not actually. So it turns out every Instagram or before they post, anytime people post photos, they typically went through the same workflows and Facetune was kind of a just a bunch of tools that you can utilize. And now with AI, holy crap. I mean the possibilities are quite limitless. And so, you know, it can regenerate that photo. And so at the bottom there are all these like AI filters and people use them so, so, so much. And often I heard this story where one of my friends met somebody from Instagram and you know, they had a. They had all these photos and she looked nothing like herself. Real life.

[Chris Williamson]

Or let me give you this from Freya.

[Tim]

When From Freya.

[Chris Williamson]

Freya India is a girl, a writer

[Tim]

who just released a book called Girls the Nordic God.

[Chris Williamson]

She does look a little bit like that blonde hair. She's like the. What's the female equivalent of the Ubermensch. Uberfroing or whatever it's called?

[Tim]

Uberfroen.

[Chris Williamson]

Yeah. She's. That. Yeah. She was telling me that when groups of young girls are out and they're taking photos at a party, everybody fires to be the one whose phone is used to have the photo taken. Because that means that they're the one that's in charge of the face tuning. Yep. So that they can work on themselves a little bit more. I know, I know.

[Jared]

It's actually a huge social faux pas. If you post a picture where you look good and the other person doesn't,

[Chris Williamson]

in the group that is stitching your mate up a little bit. You know, there's a famous English footballer called Ashley Cole. Can you just search Ashley Cole squad photo. And this. How old's this? Ten years.

[George]

Yeah. When he was at Roma. So it's. And he's retired.

[Chris Williamson]

Do you want to tell a story?

[George]

Was just a squad photo. It's one of those I know it when I see it ideas, I guess. But it's just a football photo of the entire Roma team. And Ashley Cole, who's this Brit, is, like, trying to mingle with these Italians. Just an iconic. Yeah, top left. Cause he's just awkwardly leaning on the outside. So then he gets memed everywhere.

[Chris Williamson]

This became one of the biggest memes in the world for a long time. It's a team. It looks like they're so close to the headline.

[Tim]

Scroll down a little bit.

[George]

Screen outcast.

[Chris Williamson]

Ashley Cole appears to be an outcast in an incredibly awkward Roma team picture.

[George]

The amount of times me and Chris have been out with, like, a group of guys. And I'll do the ashley Cole, like,

[Chris Williamson]

2 yards, moves off to one side. Ruins it. Absolutely ruins it. All right, boys, let's bring this one in to land. You all rule. Tim, what have you got coming up? Where should people go to check out your things?

[Tim]

You can find everything at Tim Blog. I'd say that's probably the easiest. Yeah. Check out the newsletter. It's been going for, like, 10, 12, 14, God knows how many years. Five off Friday.

[Chris Williamson]

What was that one? That most recent article about self improvement. What I learned from however many years of self improvement.

[Tim]

Ah, yes. Yeah, that was. It's called the self help trap. What I learned after 20 years of quote unquote. Yeah. Improving myself.

[Chris Williamson]

That's awesome.

[Tim]

Yeah. That's a long form. That's on the blog. 1012 pages. Tim blog Friday. Sign up for the newsletter. A lot of the stuff that we're talking about like go back if you want some. Also another reason to check out neurostimulation. Go back and look at the brain way stock graph for the last two or three years. So that type of stuff you'll learn about before other people.

[Chris Williamson]

Heck yeah.

[Tim]

Not I'm not a registered investment adviser. Blah blah blah blah.

[Chris Williamson]

Money. Yeah.

[Jared]

No, I appreciate you guys having me on. Our app is called Sky Skye and it's a fun little experience. It's kind of a new way to experience your phone. It's kind of ironic that we're, you know, I talked about that having, you know, we talked about the digital detox or whatever but our goal is to kind of really make you stop using as much as you would otherwise by surfacing the things that you might care about before such that you don't go into the. This doom scrolling world or whatever. Imagine something that exists there. It's there when you need it, it's gone when you don't. And we don't really have anything else. So it's a fun little thing. A couple people and we've got tens of thousands of people on a wait list right now. So we're trying to fulfill that inference is very expensive. But it's been the time of my life to build this. I guess I love technology so much and I love interfaces and I love thinking about the world with respect to how the future might be in terms of people interacting with the, with the, with the technology in a, in a meaningful way. Not necessarily in a doom scrolling sort of this world that we've kind of built. So I don't know where we'll go with that but it's been, it's been an incredible time building and what a time to be alive. As if you're, if you're any type of builder today. It is probably one of the most remarkable times I've ever witnessed. I'm baffled every day and so it's been so much fun and we're just getting started so I'm really excited for that.

[Chris Williamson]

And signal on X with two Ls S I G N U L L if you want to see you call out the Xbox CEO a little bit more.

[Jared]

That's pretty hilarious. I wonder if she's going to watch this tickler.com signal. Sniffies.

[Tim]

Sniffies.

[Jared]

Sorry, I need to take that username from that app.

[George]

Yeah, match with me there. My end highagency dot com book if you want to get a breakdown of all my best books. You've told me to do this there's going to be a book breakdown, a list of a load of different books, but the personal one of Oblomov, a Russian man from the 18th century who the first 50 pages are about him getting out of bed. So there's more resources like that. Get my best books and articles. That's it.

[Chris Williamson]

Heck, yeah. All right, let's go. See you next time, everyone.

[Tim]

Yo.

[Jared]

Cheers, gentlemen. Yes.

[Tim]

There we go.

[George]

Yeah. Good fun.

[Chris Williamson]

If you are looking for new reading suggestions, look no further than the Modern Wisdom reading list. It is 100 books that you should read before you die. The most interesting, life changing and impactful books I've ever read with descriptions about why I like them and links to go and buy them. And you can get it right now for free by going to ChrisWillX.com books that's ChrisWillX.com books.