0:00:08 Taking creatine can increase muscle and strength, but also improve brain health and performance in sleep-deprived, high-stress states.
0:00:14 But there’s some new research coming out showing its ability to slow, prevent things like…
0:00:14 Wow.
0:00:21 Jeff Cavalier is the physical therapist and strength coach trusted by the NFL, MLB, WWE, and even Sylvester Stallone.
0:00:25 He’s built a global reputation for science-based training that delivers.
0:00:26 What do people want?
0:00:32 When we poll our followers, I found that for men, they want their six-pack abs, getting bigger arms, develop their chest.
0:00:35 And for women, they want to have better legs and well-developed backsides.
0:00:37 So we’ll get into those exercises.
0:00:40 But the biggest problem most people have is the struggle to get started.
0:00:45 And in doing so, become paralyzed by an activity and say, I’m not going to do anything at all.
0:00:51 I get emotional, but it’s sad when people don’t ever find that drive and motivation.
0:00:56 Because the detrimental effects that prolonged sitting can have on your body, they call it the new smoking.
0:00:59 Like, if I take away your health, you’re done.
0:01:04 So finding the drive to get yourself on track with pursuing optimal health is everything.
0:01:09 So if I was one of those people struggling to get the full roll day, where would you start with me?
0:01:10 I would start with…
0:01:11 And I’m not done yet.
0:01:12 Lower belly fat.
0:01:13 How do I get rid of that?
0:01:15 Calories in, calories out.
0:01:15 What’s your work?
0:01:19 You say that there are five key exercises to maximize your longevity and quality of life.
0:01:20 Can you show me these workouts?
0:01:21 Sure.
0:01:23 And then why did you bring the skeleton with you with the bow tie?
0:01:24 This is Raymond.
0:01:29 And I use him to show one of the most fascinating areas of training that has yet to be uncovered.
0:01:36 I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and
0:01:41 our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven’t yet hit the
0:01:43 follow button or the subscribe button, wherever you’re listening to this.
0:01:45 I would like to make a deal with you.
0:01:49 If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from
0:01:52 now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better.
0:01:55 I can’t tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button.
0:01:59 The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you
0:02:01 want to see and continue to doing this thing we love.
0:02:04 If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you’re listening
0:02:06 to this, that would mean the world to me.
0:02:08 That is the only favor I will ever ask you.
0:02:09 Thank you so much for your time.
0:02:22 Jeff, you’re very much known as the king and the OG of online fitness, training, advice,
0:02:23 support.
0:02:29 In terms of the mission that you’re on in particular and how your perspective differs from other
0:02:35 people out there in the market, what is it that you think makes your perspective different,
0:02:39 unique and more important potentially than a lot of the perspectives out there as it relates
0:02:45 to how to, how to, how to build up our muscles, how to have a strong, healthy body and how
0:02:46 to prolong our health span.
0:02:55 Everybody that for the most part that’s out there trying to put information out, they should
0:02:55 have a level.
0:02:59 There’s a level of respect I have for everyone doing that because they’re all trying to help
0:03:01 people get better or improve themselves.
0:03:09 I think where I was really heavily focused was on a more comprehensive, more multifaceted
0:03:14 way to do that because my background wasn’t just in, let’s say, strength training or in
0:03:19 aesthetic appeal of, of training, but also as a physical therapist and having a physical
0:03:27 therapy background, I understood the importance of not sacrificing the body in the process of trying
0:03:29 to aesthetically improve the body.
0:03:35 So I believe that when people understand the why and they do become empowered to sort
0:03:39 of, you know, make this their own journey, the benefits are so far reaching.
0:03:44 It’s, it’s not just the gym or the aesthetic appeal that you improve.
0:03:49 It’s your, it’s so many facets of life that improve because fitness improves.
0:03:53 Like mental health is directly related to people’s physical health.
0:03:57 If you feel, if you look better and feel better about yourself, your mental health improves
0:03:57 too.
0:04:04 Like every element of life is improved, I think with improved levels of fitness and health.
0:04:11 So my why has always been to just use my platform to try to get people to understand that even
0:04:13 the smallest investments, it doesn’t have to be every bit I do.
0:04:18 And I try to stress that in all my videos, especially when we start to talk about nutrition, like you
0:04:25 don’t have to eat the way I do to get as lean as I am to still benefit from being lean.
0:04:29 You could be, you could have body fat levels much higher and still see the immense benefits
0:04:31 in terms of overall health.
0:04:36 So you don’t have to do it exactly how I do it, but take the information and apply it to
0:04:36 yourself.
0:04:39 That to me is the most rewarding part of it.
0:04:42 Because if I can show you how to do it, it’s the whole thing, teach a man to fish, right?
0:04:44 If I could do that, then I think I’ve done something right.
0:04:48 I say all the time, I could take everything away from you.
0:04:49 I could take all your money.
0:04:50 I could take houses.
0:04:51 I could take everything away.
0:04:56 I could take even relationships away because we could always find another relationship potentially.
0:04:59 If I take away your health, you’re done.
0:05:01 Health is everything.
0:05:02 And what did you study?
0:05:04 So a few things.
0:05:07 Physio neurobiology was my initial degree.
0:05:12 And I became a physical therapist, which required another three years.
0:05:15 And you became a certified strength and conditioning specialist as well?
0:05:21 Most of the jobs that were in professional sports would require some certification in that
0:05:21 regard.
0:05:26 So you’d have to have a college degree, but then you’d also have to have a certification.
0:05:29 And in this case, it was the National Strength and Conditioning Association.
0:05:34 And over the last 25 years since you got that certification, who have you worked with?
0:05:35 Who have you helped?
0:05:36 And how many people?
0:05:41 The most important thing that came from that certification was that it qualified me to
0:05:42 work for the Mets.
0:05:45 What’s the Mets for you when that doesn’t matter?
0:05:48 So the Mets are the New York Mets professional baseball team.
0:05:50 So I worked with some of the best baseball players in the world.
0:05:53 I had a chance to work with some of the greatest football players in the world.
0:05:55 It’s wrestlers.
0:05:56 I was a big wrestling fan growing up.
0:05:59 I have a lot of wrestlers that come through.
0:06:05 And that’s a cool thing because wrestling, though some people may not like the storyboarding
0:06:09 of wrestling, athletically, they’re some of the most gifted athletes in the world.
0:06:15 I mean, the travel schedule, the amount of days that they wrestle every week, the rigors that
0:06:19 they put their body through, whatever you want to say, the outcome might be determined,
0:06:22 but the bumps and bruises are not fake.
0:06:26 And they also have to have that aesthetic appeal too.
0:06:30 So it’s this combination of athletic and aesthetic that always appealed to me.
0:06:33 When I look at someone like you and I see these bulging muscles and I see how lean you
0:06:38 are, it’s very easy to fall into the trap of thinking, well, you were just born with extreme
0:06:41 motivation and that’s why you are the way that you are.
0:06:47 Well, I think motivation is extremely overrated, right?
0:06:51 Because like motivation isn’t what produces the results.
0:06:55 It might get you to the show and get you to actually show up at the gym.
0:06:59 initiate the work, but only discipline keeps you there.
0:07:03 And being disciplined is the number one asset somebody can have.
0:07:06 Now, discipline comes with finding success.
0:07:12 So at an early age, if you can, or an early training age, if you can experience some success
0:07:18 early, you do become motivated, again, self-motivated to continue on down that path.
0:07:21 So my genetics were never great.
0:07:27 I didn’t, if my mom was five foot tall, my dad’s five foot nine, five foot eight, 160
0:07:28 pounds, not a lot of muscle.
0:07:30 I definitely have surpassed my dad in muscle.
0:07:34 But like, I didn’t come from this genetically gifted pool of cavaliers.
0:07:35 There’s no, there’s no way.
0:07:42 But I did have this desire to do something in terms of training and taking my body as far
0:07:43 as I could.
0:07:49 But I really found the discipline through the fact that I liked it.
0:07:51 And I found that this was feeding me in other ways.
0:07:54 It was, it was making me feel fulfilled.
0:07:56 So it was easier for me to stick to it.
0:08:01 You must deal with so many people that are struggling that come to you and they say, listen, I’ve got
0:08:02 these big goals.
0:08:02 I’m overweight.
0:08:03 I don’t feel good.
0:08:06 I’ve got diabetes here, cardiovascular problem here, inflammation here.
0:08:09 And they say to you that they want to change.
0:08:11 You know, you can see it in their face.
0:08:15 They’re desperate, but they don’t change for whatever reason.
0:08:19 We live in an age now where you have access to the internet.
0:08:21 You have so much access to information.
0:08:25 Use it in whatever way you can to get started on your journey.
0:08:26 Because the earlier you start, the better.
0:08:32 But it’s, it’s, it is quite sad when people don’t ever find that spark in trying to play catch
0:08:34 up, it’s no lie to it.
0:08:37 You’re not going to, it’s going to be harder as you get older, starting or initiating a training
0:08:44 program in your forties and fifties, though way better than not starting one is much more
0:08:48 difficult than if you had started in your teens and twenties, you know, to develop that habit,
0:08:49 to maintain that habit.
0:08:56 It’s very difficult to initiate that the older that you get, but I do think that it’s possible.
0:09:01 So my best advice to people who have that struggle to get started.
0:09:06 is to figure out ways that you can eliminate thinking, right?
0:09:10 Because the longer you think, the more likely you are to not be able to do it.
0:09:14 You know, the thing that stops most people, there’s that saying, the start is what stops
0:09:15 most people, right?
0:09:19 But at the same token, it’s not the obstacle that’s in your way.
0:09:23 It’s the fact that the path of least resistance is more inviting.
0:09:27 So you wind up saying, well, I don’t know, you know, I could just sit on the couch and watch
0:09:27 this.
0:09:28 I’m not going to go to the gym.
0:09:32 And believe me, there’s even nights now for me where I’ll be with one of my sons who will
0:09:37 be in his room, putting on the bed, might fall asleep in there, you know, and wake up
0:09:38 and it’s late at night.
0:09:41 I don’t even think I let my dogs out.
0:09:42 I go right outside.
0:09:43 I walk.
0:09:46 Sometimes I’m literally half asleep as I’m walking, but I know if I can get to the gym,
0:09:52 get in there, turn on the music and kind of put the lights on and do one warm up set, I’ll
0:09:53 be good.
0:10:00 And if I even sat down for a second, I might find that path of least resistance to be a
0:10:02 lot more inviting and that couch to be a lot more comfortable.
0:10:07 And then once it becomes something that you enjoy, because for the most part, I think you
0:10:08 probably enjoy it now, right?
0:10:09 The process.
0:10:13 It becomes a lot easier to make that automatic step, but there’s still going to be days, you
0:10:17 know, maybe a long day of shooting, you know, and you’re going to be like, maybe not today.
0:10:23 But if you stop the negotiation with yourself and you just go and make that first action, that’s
0:10:24 all it usually takes to get you through the door.
0:10:27 And you realize that, you know, what you’re, what you were set out to do.
0:10:30 When you think about all the many millions of people that have watched your videos, I mean,
0:10:34 it’s actually billions of people that have watched your videos and consumed your content.
0:10:37 You must hear a lot of different types of spark.
0:10:44 When I say spark, I mean the moment in someone’s life where they, something happened and it stuck.
0:10:45 It finally stuck.
0:10:47 What are the kind of things that you hear?
0:10:49 Oh man, they’re life-changing like that.
0:10:52 It is, it’s part of the why that keeps me going.
0:10:54 You know, hearing some of these stories.
0:10:58 I had a live event a few years ago, first one that we ever had.
0:11:00 So I was, I was a rookie.
0:11:05 I didn’t know how it was going to go, but part of that event was a competition that we ran.
0:11:10 So anyway, we had, we had a guy who was in his late fifties, first one to do the competition.
0:11:12 So he, he drew number one.
0:11:12 Okay.
0:11:17 So he goes and the first thing we had was a 300 yard shuttle, which is just a 50 yard distance.
0:11:22 So they had to run to the cone and back as a hundred yards back and forth again and back
0:11:22 and forth again.
0:11:24 It was extremely hot that day.
0:11:26 It was like 95 degrees.
0:11:30 Cause of course I ran the event in July and it was like, okay, this is not going to work
0:11:30 out so well.
0:11:34 So anyway, he goes out, he comes back on the last run.
0:11:38 He, uh, he starts to windmill his arms.
0:11:39 He’s, he’s losing his balance forward.
0:11:41 And I’m like, oh no.
0:11:45 And he crashes down, wipes out, scrapes up his knee, blood all over the place.
0:11:46 Okay.
0:11:48 Next kid comes up.
0:11:49 He, he’s up now.
0:11:51 He goes by the second station.
0:11:52 He’s overheated.
0:11:53 He tried so hard.
0:11:57 He has to stand out the rest of the competition because he overheated from, I was ready to,
0:11:59 to put a stop to the games.
0:12:02 Cause I said, we just weren’t prepared for this heat in this first time.
0:12:04 And anyway, we continued.
0:12:10 So the fourth drill up for the man that I talked about in the beginning was a sled push.
0:12:17 And we had put 225 pounds on the sled, but that sled was on the pavement out in the parking
0:12:20 lot from this gym that we, that we hosted it at.
0:12:25 And the friction of the, of the sled on the ground was not really something that was accounted
0:12:25 for.
0:12:27 It made it even more difficult.
0:12:30 Well, again, he’s got that bloodied up knee.
0:12:31 He’s, he’s pushing it.
0:12:33 He gets it to the end, struggling.
0:12:38 And now he has to pick up at the end, a hundred pound kettlebell and walk it back.
0:12:40 He goes down there.
0:12:44 He grabs the kettlebell after a long, you know, multiple attempt to get the sled down
0:12:44 there.
0:12:48 And I finally run down there and I said, uh, his name is Craig.
0:12:50 I said, Craig, dude, you don’t have to do this.
0:12:50 You’re good.
0:12:51 You’re good.
0:12:51 It’s okay.
0:12:53 And he’s like, no, he says, I’m going to do it.
0:12:56 And I starts walking and he’s crossing the legs over each other.
0:12:57 It looks like he’s going to go down again.
0:12:59 And I put my arm around him.
0:13:01 I said, man, listen, you don’t have to do this.
0:13:03 He says, I get goosebumps.
0:13:06 He goes, Jeff, I have to do this.
0:13:10 He goes, I was diagnosed with MS, you know, four years ago and I can’t feel my
0:13:10 feet.
0:13:12 I got to do this.
0:13:18 And it’s that kind of drive and, and motivation.
0:13:20 And you never know.
0:13:21 Cause you don’t know who the, what they’re dealing with.
0:13:26 You know, I get emotional, but it’s, it’s like, that’s the kind of stuff that gets me
0:13:26 going.
0:13:33 And we had another guy who competed at our event and he was doing a pushup portion of
0:13:34 the competition.
0:13:34 It’s the second year.
0:13:38 And he was doing his pushups.
0:13:40 He wasn’t going all the way down.
0:13:44 So got down to like, I don’t know, two, three inches away from his chest.
0:13:46 So I go over to him.
0:13:50 I’m like, um, Hey dude, just still a little bit lower chest down.
0:13:56 He says, I can’t because I have a port in my chest and I have stage four cancer and I can’t
0:13:57 get all the way down because of the port.
0:14:00 He wound up dying two months after the competition.
0:14:06 So when you realize that people do this for reasons that you don’t like, it’s not just to
0:14:08 go to the gym to get a six pack.
0:14:12 It’s going there to, for reasons we’ll never know.
0:14:19 And I think that those, those kinds of, um, moments are more than touching to me, as you can
0:14:24 tell, but like they’re, they’re, they’re just, they show the power of will.
0:14:32 And that is something that we’ll never be able to quantify within that as well.
0:14:37 I was thinking about how that guy who wouldn’t put that a hundred pound kettlebell down for him.
0:14:45 It, it was actually about a story he wanted to tell to himself.
0:14:54 It’s something that he wanted to do for reasons that are much more about one’s identity and
0:14:57 one’s self story, as we call it.
0:15:01 And, uh, on that particular point, it’s one of the things that I often think about with
0:15:06 fitness and working out is if I can be the guy that grabs the keys that day when I don’t
0:15:12 feel like it, then how that permeates through the rest of my life and how I show up in the
0:15:16 rest of my life when there’s things I don’t want to do and how that then shapes me over
0:15:21 time into somebody who is able to have the difficult conversation, is able to confront
0:15:21 the thing.
0:15:23 I think it’s like really understated.
0:15:25 I actually was reading this.
0:15:27 Um, I think Andrew Huberman told me this.
0:15:31 He said that they’ve neuroscience has found a part of the brain, which is associated with
0:15:32 doing hard things.
0:15:32 Yes.
0:15:33 I saw that.
0:15:36 And I think he said basically that that part of the brain, and I’ll put this up on the
0:15:39 screen, grows the more hard things that you do.
0:15:43 So you basically build the muscle of being able to do hard things.
0:15:46 And the minute I learned that, I went, oh, this makes a lot of sense because the more I
0:15:50 was able to make the workout stick and the health and fitness stick, and now my diet is
0:15:54 like, as we sit here now, is extremely disciplined.
0:15:58 I’ve like changed as a person in other areas of my life.
0:16:02 Like I’ve got more organized with like my, my possessions and.
0:16:04 Well, you realize what you’re capable of too, right?
0:16:06 Because I think we undersell our capabilities.
0:16:13 And I think that in reference to those two men that I just talked about, like when you’re
0:16:18 staring at the face of something that seems to be much more dire than, again, what level
0:16:24 of fitness you have, you realize that there’s a much deeper well that you can tap into to
0:16:25 do things that you don’t want to do.
0:16:34 And I think the people that are lucky enough, like yourself, to have found that, have found
0:16:41 the keys to the kingdom to be able to, you know, take themselves to another level of awareness
0:16:46 and self-awareness that does 100%, like you said, play out in other areas of your life.
0:16:52 You know, when you can do the difficult thing, it’s still not an automatic that you’re gonna
0:16:56 be able to have that difficult conversation with somebody, you know, but you know that you
0:17:00 have the capacity to do things that you didn’t really think you could.
0:17:03 And it gives you that confidence to actually go and carry those out.
0:17:08 Interesting thing on that, that study that Andrew Huberman was talking about was that
0:17:13 if you start to like the thing that you actually didn’t like in the beginning, then it no longer
0:17:16 challenges that area of the brain, that area of the brain starts to shrink again.
0:17:17 Oh, really?
0:17:22 So it has to kind of, which is cool, because it means that you need to continue to seek
0:17:22 challenge.
0:17:26 I was thinking a lot about this over Christmas and New Year’s, I sat down with one of my best
0:17:31 friends and said to him, I said, what exercise and what thing do you dislike the most?
0:17:33 And we basically made a list of them.
0:17:34 And then we started doing those things.
0:17:35 That’s cool.
0:17:39 It was actually running and it was leg day and squatting.
0:17:39 Yeah.
0:17:42 It also made me, because when I asked him why he didn’t do those things, the list of reasons
0:17:50 he gave were things like, my legs aren’t, insert excuse, my brain, insert excuse.
0:17:54 And we both came to realize together that that was just a bunch of bullshit that we had like
0:17:56 made our identities and it was now limiting us.
0:17:59 Are there things like that in your life that you just…
0:18:00 Oh, gosh.
0:18:01 You avoid?
0:18:08 Conditioning, running, I try to address those things and do them knowing that I should do
0:18:11 more of them, but there’s always more to do.
0:18:15 One of the things you must have figured out from all the content you’ve produced across
0:18:18 all these channels is really like the essence of what people want.
0:18:23 And I, you know, because you’ll see from the views and the engagement and these things,
0:18:27 you’ll build this sort of mental pattern of, okay, people are really interested in this.
0:18:32 So if you had to summarize for me the essence of what you think people are looking for, and
0:18:35 when I say the essence, I mean like the why, why, why, why, why, why, the very bottom of that.
0:18:36 What are those things?
0:18:42 Oh, I think, I think insecurity is definitely a factor.
0:18:47 I think a feeling of wanting to be accepted is part of that.
0:18:51 I think a feeling of wanting to be more capable, right?
0:18:55 Because I think a lot of men carry insecurities of how capable they are.
0:19:00 You know, if the moment arose that they needed to, let’s say, protect their family or do something
0:19:04 that was physically needed to be done, how capable would you actually be?
0:19:08 And I think a lot of us feel insecure in our preparedness that way.
0:19:10 So I think that’s a driver.
0:19:13 I heard this quote many years ago.
0:19:17 It says, change happens when the pain of staying the same becomes greater than the pain of making
0:19:17 a change.
0:19:22 And I was thinking if you were my trainer and I was one of those stubborn people who
0:19:26 were struggling to get the ball rolling, where would you start with me?
0:19:28 Like, what would you do if I was super stubborn?
0:19:29 I tried for three years.
0:19:30 I’d never made it stick.
0:19:35 But, but clearly there was health consequences playing out in my body.
0:19:37 Where would you start with me to get me going?
0:19:38 Probably the conversation.
0:19:41 You know, I would, I would start with always with the conversation.
0:19:46 I think it is important to see if you can understand the why for somebody, because if
0:19:50 you, if you ask this question, this is an interesting exercise to do.
0:19:52 But if you ask the question of like, why do you want to get in shape?
0:19:56 You might say, I’m too fat right now.
0:20:02 And I would say to you, well, what would it mean to you to not be as fat as you think you
0:20:02 are?
0:20:06 Well, I, it would be better because I’d have a six pack.
0:20:09 What would be important if I’m having a six pack?
0:20:12 Well, I would like how I looked in the mirror more.
0:20:15 Why would it be important for you to like who you’re looking at in the mirror?
0:20:20 Because I don’t feel like I’m enough right now because I’m letting myself down because
0:20:22 I know that I’m not doing the things I need to do.
0:20:26 Why is it important to not let yourself down, right?
0:20:31 So when you start to ask the question, multiple, keep digging, you find the why very quickly.
0:20:35 And a lot of times it comes from pain from childhood.
0:20:38 It comes from pain of, of letting others down.
0:20:44 It comes from a feeling of inadequacy that you developed either because it was, you know,
0:20:49 drilled into from your parents or, or others, or because you just never lacked the self-confidence
0:20:51 to actually feel better about yourself.
0:20:58 I always say that most people who are lifelong gym goers, they all have some level of pain
0:21:01 in their life that caused them to seek this out.
0:21:03 Cause it’s the one thing they can control.
0:21:06 It’s the one area where it’s like, I can, I don’t have to listen to anybody.
0:21:09 I have to do what I have to do for myself and I’m in control of my body.
0:21:13 And I think that a lot of times people, or it’s an escape, you know, where you benefit
0:21:15 from the endorphins that are released through exercise.
0:21:19 And it’s your escape for doing something to make yourself feel better.
0:21:24 But a lot of times people get into fitness as an escape from some of that pain.
0:21:28 So if, if, if I had, you would come to me in the very beginning, I would have started with
0:21:31 that conversation and tried to find out why is it that you can’t stick with this?
0:21:32 You’ve tried and you stopped.
0:21:39 And I think that people need to understand that and finding the why to get yourself on
0:21:43 track with pursuing optimal health is everything.
0:21:44 What about the very top then?
0:21:48 Like, how does it manifest like the title of the video or the thing?
0:21:53 I mean, the top is, uh, abs, biceps, chest, and, uh, and, you know, low back pain.
0:21:57 I mean, I, people actually come to me for one of two things.
0:22:01 Again, I think it’s having the two, the two hats of physical therapist and, uh, strength
0:22:02 and conditioning coach.
0:22:06 I think people come to me to fix something or to improve the look of something.
0:22:14 So we have lots and lots and lots of views, obviously based around fixing issues, um, low
0:22:22 back pain, postural issues, knee pain, shoulder pain, and how it disrupts their ability to carry
0:22:24 on in life or through their fitness pursuits.
0:22:29 Then there’s the other side of it where people, of course, they want their six pack abs and
0:22:32 then they want their arms and they want their chest.
0:22:38 And I, I highlight those because the fact is that is where people are most interested because
0:22:43 it’s, you know, it’s, it’s the, it’s the beach muscles, but that’s, it’s a fact of life.
0:22:45 People want to improve those areas.
0:22:53 What I try to do when I, when I bring people in through that track is to also make them aware
0:22:54 that it’s okay.
0:22:54 This is cool.
0:22:56 You want your abs.
0:22:56 That’s good.
0:22:59 You know, but obviously this can require a healthier eating plan.
0:23:05 So I know I can have a much broader impact on their overall health and life.
0:23:09 If I can get them to eat much healthier than they are right now.
0:23:14 So I always feel that you can come in for whatever your top level interest might be.
0:23:20 But my mission and goal is to make sure that you understand there’s more to it than that.
0:23:24 I’ve kind of broken everything you’ve said into three sections, which is people want to
0:23:25 look good.
0:23:28 They want to perform and whatever that might be.
0:23:30 And they also want to be able to do it for a long time.
0:23:31 They want to live long.
0:23:31 Yeah.
0:23:38 So if we start with looking good as a top line category, what are the things that you
0:23:40 think are the subcategories of looking good?
0:23:43 The amount of fat that someone carries.
0:23:44 So how lean they are.
0:23:45 Yeah.
0:23:51 The aesthetic development of their muscles, what their bodies are shaped like.
0:23:54 Because, you know, you could lose weight, but as you’ve described before, skinny fat isn’t
0:23:55 really an attractive look.
0:24:00 So I think they want to develop their muscles in specific ways.
0:24:04 What is the difference you see between what men say they want versus what women say they
0:24:05 want?
0:24:07 What do men come to you and say that they want to?
0:24:11 You know, as a trainer of athletes, it’s sacrilegious to me, but they really discuss anything in the
0:24:12 lower body, right?
0:24:16 They’re not talking about, I just want really big legs or I want to have, you know, strong,
0:24:17 developed glutes.
0:24:19 I mean, it’s just not really high on the list.
0:24:23 So pretty much everything’s going to focus on, you know, from the waist up in terms of the
0:24:26 aesthetic desire, bigger neck for men.
0:24:29 For women, it’s the opposite, right?
0:24:32 For women, they focus first and foremost below the waist.
0:24:34 They want to have better legs.
0:24:35 They want to have stronger legs.
0:24:37 They want to have well-developed backsides.
0:24:43 They want to, like, and there’s probably, I mean, a cultural importance upon that.
0:24:49 You know, people are, you know, men are being judged aesthetically on their upper bodies more
0:24:50 than women are.
0:24:52 And women are being judged more aesthetically on their lower bodies.
0:24:58 So we’re feeding into those desires, especially, you know, one scroll through Instagram and you’re
0:25:00 just reinforcing everything I just talked about.
0:25:02 In that category as well of looking good, nutrition?
0:25:06 Most importantly, the level of body fat that you carry is going to be impacted by nutrition.
0:25:08 So let’s start with fat and lean.
0:25:15 If I want to be lean like you and I want to have low body fat, where does one begin?
0:25:23 What happened with me and what I always advise people to do is start just by looking at globally
0:25:29 from 30,000 foot view, what do you know you’re doing, like, not well right now?
0:25:31 Like, are you drinking excessively?
0:25:36 Do you end every night with, you know, a pint of ice cream?
0:25:39 Like, you know that you’re doing some things wrong.
0:25:43 So you make one pass at the obvious stuff.
0:25:48 And you just do it for a couple weeks, you know, and you see how you progress.
0:25:53 And what will normally happen is, it’s usually those are the most offending, the biggest offenders
0:25:56 when it comes to nutrition, that you will notice some quick weight loss when you stop it.
0:25:59 What do you think are some of the offenders that we don’t realize are offenders?
0:26:02 I’ve had so many in my life, even like ketchup.
0:26:05 And yeah, I thought white rice was great.
0:26:06 Yeah.
0:26:09 I mean, white rice is actually, there’s a place for carbohydrates in people’s and people’s
0:26:10 diets, I believe.
0:26:15 But you have to have a healthy respect for them because they’re the most likely to be
0:26:15 overeaten.
0:26:19 Like the desire to eat five steaks is not there for most of us.
0:26:24 Like you’re, but you could pound a whole plate full of rice and then some or pasta and then
0:26:29 some because they’re, they’re, they are much more chemically pleasing to the body.
0:26:38 So I think people need to be cautious of overconsumption of carbohydrates and they’re not aware of portion
0:26:43 sizes really impacting them because they’ll say, no, I had, I had rice and, and, and pasta.
0:26:47 And, and I would say I have rice and pasta too every day, but like, I probably don’t eat as
0:26:49 much as that person does.
0:26:53 So portion sizes, when it comes to that is one of the areas people do not have a good awareness
0:26:56 about the kind of hidden offenders.
0:27:01 I mean, there’s sugar in a lot of things that is used just to make these things more
0:27:04 appealing, especially, you know, like yogurts, right?
0:27:08 People will have, you know, fruit on the bottom of yogurt, but it’s like loaded with sugar.
0:27:11 Or my first experience was oatmeal.
0:27:15 I was reading the bodybuilding magazines in my teens that every bodybuilder ate oatmeal in
0:27:16 the morning.
0:27:21 So of course I was buying Quaker oats, but I was buying those little packets and they have
0:27:22 brown sugar in the bottom.
0:27:24 And it’s like, they were loaded with sugar.
0:27:28 They were not the equivalent of Quaker oats from a, from a, like a canister.
0:27:35 And so here I’m thinking I’m doing something right, but I’m not because there was more sugar
0:27:39 in that than there was in a, in a, a bag or in a bowl of tricks cereal.
0:27:42 What do you look for in the, on the package?
0:27:43 I always look for sugar and fat.
0:27:44 That’s what I look for.
0:27:53 So dietary fat, there are nine calories per gram of fat versus four calories per gram of
0:27:54 protein or carbohydrate.
0:27:57 There are much more calorie dense foods.
0:28:04 So when you have fats on your plate in any way, shape or form, calorically, the, that dish
0:28:05 is going to increase pretty quickly.
0:28:08 So you have to be mindful of them.
0:28:13 If you, if you want to lose weight and achieve a hypocaloric state to get there, you’re going
0:28:16 to have to take in fewer calories than you’re, than you’re, than you’re burning.
0:28:21 That’s why I would look at fat content, but sugar is just really not necessary.
0:28:25 It’s just one of those things that our bodies do not need.
0:28:32 Um, tends to be, uh, too inviting to the point where people have a hard time stopping eating
0:28:33 sugar.
0:28:38 So I think that’s one of the fastest ways to, um, to get yourself on track is to, is to try
0:28:40 to minimize the sugar content in a food.
0:28:45 And then I look for protein because I think that protein has a lot of benefits in terms of
0:28:52 improving that ratio of fat to lean muscle and also for its ability to satiate you.
0:28:56 So if you’re eating a higher protein food, you’re likely going to find yourself feeling
0:29:00 satisfied and full faster than if it’s just a carbohydrate based meal.
0:29:05 So those are the three things that I look at every time I turn a label around protein, sugar
0:29:06 and fats.
0:29:07 And what does your diet look like?
0:29:13 I eat, uh, breakfast in the morning and I have usually, again, I’ll give you typical meals.
0:29:14 I have, uh, oatmeal.
0:29:19 I’ve been put like some pumpkin in the oatmeal itself, some canned pumpkin, just for some additional,
0:29:21 uh, vitamins and minerals.
0:29:25 Protein shake, um, and some, maybe some egg whites.
0:29:32 So I get good amounts of protein and for lunch, I’ll have like a grilled chicken wrap.
0:29:34 Again, I’m trying to prioritize protein at every single meal.
0:29:38 And I’ll try to have a Greek yogurt that has limited sugar in it.
0:29:45 Um, then I’ll have a protein shake usually after work, only because I know that when I
0:29:49 get done with work, usually at six o’clock, I come home, the kids are there, they want
0:29:54 to play, I wind up just having something to tie me over, realizing that my dinner is going
0:29:55 to occur later at night after my workout.
0:29:59 What happens though, is that workout occurs at around 10 30 to 11 o’clock at night.
0:30:02 So dinner happens at around midnight for me.
0:30:07 Um, that’s always, again, based around a protein first.
0:30:12 So usually chicken or steak or fish and then fibrous carbohydrates.
0:30:16 So it’s going to be something like, uh, I, I, I like edamame.
0:30:20 It’s, uh, you know, uh, it has good protein, uh, in it.
0:30:25 And I’m not fearful of the soy protein that’s there, especially in that limited amount, broccoli.
0:30:30 And then I have my fire, my starchy carbohydrates, which my favorite of all time is, uh, sweet
0:30:30 potatoes.
0:30:33 So I’ll have sweet potatoes or, or pasta or both.
0:30:36 I’m still shocked that you’re eating dinner at midnight and that what, so what time do
0:30:37 you train?
0:30:42 So I train around 10 30 or 11 until around quarter to 12 or so.
0:30:43 Is that suboptimal?
0:30:48 It’s, it’s only optimal because it’s when I can consistently do it.
0:30:49 Okay.
0:30:55 If I could change that, I would probably work out at 5 PM, you know, but I always find that
0:30:57 there’s still work going on.
0:30:58 People still need me at that point in the day.
0:31:00 Why not the morning?
0:31:02 I have a very difficult time waking up.
0:31:07 I’m one of those people that act like a zombie for probably, uh, 15 minutes before I’m feeling
0:31:09 ready to go.
0:31:10 I’m very much the same.
0:31:11 I probably eat a bit too late.
0:31:13 I train a bit too late, et cetera.
0:31:17 And as I’m listening to you, I’m almost listening to myself.
0:31:22 And I know the rebuttal is that, well, Steven, if you went to bed earlier and you ate earlier,
0:31:24 then you’d wake up and you’d be able to train in the morning.
0:31:26 Well, how do you feel when you wake up?
0:31:29 Do you feel energetic as soon as you wake up or do you feel?
0:31:30 No.
0:31:30 Yeah.
0:31:33 Um, I’m very similar to you.
0:31:33 I wake up late.
0:31:34 Yeah.
0:31:37 And if I wake up late, then I feel fine.
0:31:40 But if you try and wake me up at seven o’clock, the chances are that I went to bed maybe at
0:31:41 midnight or 1 AM.
0:31:44 So there’s not enough sleep taking place there.
0:31:47 But having worn this whoop for a while, who are a sponsor, I’m an investor in the company,
0:31:48 hashtag ADAT, hashtag ASA.
0:31:54 One of the things I came to learn was that when I eat close to the time I go to sleep,
0:31:56 my body isn’t actually asleep.
0:31:59 Because I could see my resting heart rate so high through the night.
0:32:01 So my body’s actually just working on the food.
0:32:04 So it’s not restoring my body.
0:32:09 So one of my goals for this year is to try and not eat after 9 PM.
0:32:19 I think it’s a good goal in terms of establishing a more regular sleep or time to go to bed.
0:32:23 Because the number one thing I think people need to understand is that when it comes to sleep,
0:32:27 the routine of sleep is what’s most important, I believe.
0:32:39 Even in cases of lower sleep totals, there’s actually 27% of people report sleeping less than
0:32:42 six hours a night and 20% of people sleep four to five hours.
0:32:50 I actually fall into the category of sleeping probably five to six hours most nights because
0:32:53 I get to bed late and I get up around seven o’clock each morning.
0:32:54 Do you sleep track?
0:32:55 I don’t sleep track.
0:32:56 I did for a while.
0:32:57 I don’t sleep track.
0:33:03 I actually, I’ve tracked my cortisol levels and my levels of cortisol have actually improved
0:33:07 even as my sleep time, my total sleep time has diminished.
0:33:14 Now there is, and I hold onto this as a possibility, but I haven’t tested myself.
0:33:19 There are two genes that are actually responsible for short sleeper syndrome.
0:33:26 In other words, where you can get away with less sleep because it optimizes gene expression
0:33:31 for wakefulness and brainstem activity that allows you to wake up easier.
0:33:37 And the downside to that is that only one to 3% of the population has that.
0:33:42 So unless I got really lucky in terms of that, then I might be, you know, playing a game that
0:33:43 I ultimately can’t win.
0:33:50 But I think that there is a possibility that some people can operate better on lower sleep
0:33:50 totals than others.
0:33:57 On this point of being lean, one of the things people are most obsessed with getting rid of
0:34:00 is lower belly fat.
0:34:04 This stubborn belly fat that occurs right there on our little mannequin here.
0:34:07 You don’t have a pouch.
0:34:08 That’s what we call it.
0:34:09 Me and my friends, we call it a pouch.
0:34:13 We can be, you know, very lean elsewhere, but still have a little bit of a pouch there.
0:34:18 Some people think doing sit-ups is the way to get rid of that stubborn belly fat.
0:34:19 What is the answer in your view?
0:34:22 It’s the level of strictness of nutrition.
0:34:27 And when I mean the level of strictness, it’s not just in the foods that you choose, but the
0:34:30 consistency with which you choose them.
0:34:35 So how long can you sustain this really clean diet?
0:34:39 And I hate the word clean diet because usually when people say they eat clean, it’s actually
0:34:42 the first thing, it’s a red flag, but they don’t.
0:34:49 But I think it comes from having a sustained ability to eat in a very restricted way.
0:34:55 When men put on body fat, that is the first place to go on and the last place to come off.
0:35:00 And one of the biggest areas for that, you mentioned that I don’t have one, but I mean, as ridiculous
0:35:06 as this is going to sound, when I start to see a little bit of fat on my body, it’s right
0:35:06 there.
0:35:09 And it’s because that is the absolute first place to go on.
0:35:13 It’s the shamefulness of how your body does this.
0:35:17 And what it does to us is that it kind of works in this top-down approach.
0:35:23 Like you lose fat first from here and then it kind of goes down and the last place is here.
0:35:24 So it works in this top-down approach.
0:35:28 Well, by the time you get all the way down there, you’ve lost the fat in your face.
0:35:29 You’ve lost the fat in your neck.
0:35:33 So sometimes I look at myself in the mirror, I’m like, man, you’re gone.
0:35:36 And I hate the way that my face gets sort of caved in.
0:35:43 But it’s sometimes the price that you pay in terms of maintaining a lean physique, especially
0:35:46 naturally, because that’s how your body starts to lose fat.
0:35:48 And especially as you age, you start to lose collagen and skin thickness.
0:35:50 So it looks even more of a challenge.
0:35:58 But this top-down approach is sometimes good because it allows you to start to see like
0:36:00 the upper row abs underneath the chest.
0:36:03 Or so when you start to get into better shape, you might have noticed this yourself.
0:36:07 You start to see like, okay, my lower chest isn’t as saggy anymore.
0:36:09 It’s actually starting to take some shape.
0:36:13 Well, what’s cool is that’s actually that little spark of motivation that like, I want to keep
0:36:14 going.
0:36:15 I can see the top ab.
0:36:15 Right.
0:36:16 I can see the top ab.
0:36:16 There it is.
0:36:17 I can see.
0:36:18 I have them.
0:36:19 You know, I actually have them.
0:36:20 You know, I got a two-pack, but I have them.
0:36:23 Well, you continue down that path.
0:36:25 Sometimes you sharpen up the diet a little bit more.
0:36:30 Sometimes you take one extra night of, you know, socializing or drinking out of the schedule
0:36:35 and you start to see it, you know, go even lower and you start to get that second row
0:36:36 of abs.
0:36:40 Then it becomes a question of how motivated you are to actually just continue.
0:36:45 And what level of sacrifice is required or is worth it to you to continue?
0:36:50 And that’s the caveat that I always say, I mentioned early on, like, is it that important
0:36:50 to you?
0:36:57 Because I could tell you that at 10, 11, 12% body fat, you’re going to look amazing and
0:37:00 you’re going to look better than 98% of all men.
0:37:07 So whether you had that little tiny, you know, area of fat around your waist, you’re still going
0:37:11 to have your abs, you’re still going to have defined shoulders and arms and, you know,
0:37:13 some veins popping out in other places.
0:37:19 Like, is that, is that good enough so that you experience the health benefits you already
0:37:21 would, you’d be there.
0:37:25 Aesthetically, you’re probably really happy with where you are now compared to where you
0:37:25 came from.
0:37:31 And you still get to live a life that’s not as filled with sacrifice to get there.
0:37:36 And that’s the battle people have to, have to, um, wage and ask themselves what is, how
0:37:37 worth it is it to me?
0:37:40 Is the game of weight loss basically calories in calories out?
0:37:43 I just need to have less calories than I burn.
0:37:44 Yes and no.
0:37:50 So to lose weight, you’re going to need to be in a calorie deficit.
0:37:55 Um, but if you took that approach and just ate whatever you wanted to, let’s just say
0:38:01 eat Twinkies in a deficit, you’re not going to get the same outcome because the type of
0:38:06 weight lost is going to vary depending upon what you ingest.
0:38:11 So if you don’t ingest enough protein, you’re just eating Twinkies, you might lose weight,
0:38:13 but you’re also going to lose muscle in the, in the, in the process.
0:38:20 So if you want to deter the loss of muscle and, and maximize the retention of muscle, and
0:38:24 maybe again, even slightly build in that deficit, then you’re going to want to prioritize
0:38:25 protein.
0:38:30 So it’s not just the calories in calories out that will get you to lose the weight.
0:38:33 But when you ultimately, I think people aren’t just talking about weight loss.
0:38:37 They really want to make sure that they’re maximizing lean muscle at the same time that
0:38:38 they’re losing weight.
0:38:42 If they want to look a certain way, function a certain way, it’s, it’s going to matter.
0:38:45 What are the big misconceptions we have about abs?
0:38:49 To get rid of the body fat by doing those crunches and stuff like that doesn’t work.
0:38:52 You know, um, I think that’s probably the biggest misconception.
0:38:53 I always remember Laszlo.
0:38:57 Laszlo was a, was a guy who worked on my house as a contractor.
0:39:01 When we were building it, he would come up to me because he was like the typical male,
0:39:02 right?
0:39:03 He was in pretty decent shape.
0:39:05 He worked every day active.
0:39:07 He’s like, I got to get in shape, man.
0:39:10 And I was like, well, you know, how many days a week do you train?
0:39:11 He said, well, I don’t really train.
0:39:13 I just, you know, do a couple of pushups and stuff.
0:39:15 I said, well, you’re gonna have to probably train.
0:39:16 What do you do for your nutrition?
0:39:18 I kind of eat what I want.
0:39:19 And I was like, all right.
0:39:21 But he wasn’t really overweight, you know, but he’s the typical.
0:39:25 And he goes, just tell me what I could, I just want to know what I can do for this.
0:39:26 What’s a good exercise I could do for this?
0:39:27 For his belly fat.
0:39:28 For the belly fat.
0:39:29 It’s just pointing at his stomach.
0:39:34 And it’s like, there’s still that belief that there’s just an exercise or two that you
0:39:36 need to do for that.
0:39:38 That’s not how, that’s not how it is.
0:39:42 Abs are not going to be gotten through just the exercise.
0:39:44 It’s always about nutrition.
0:39:48 It’s always about nutrition determines body fat levels above everything else.
0:39:54 Now, when you get lean enough, if you’re not doing any type of ab training, you’ll probably
0:39:58 have less defined abs because you won’t have the development of that muscle.
0:40:01 There’s nothing different about the abdominals and the biceps or the quads.
0:40:04 There’s still muscles that can be developed.
0:40:09 And because of the anatomy of the abs, there’s that line down the middle in the tacks, right?
0:40:13 That’s just caused by a suturing down of something called linea alba.
0:40:14 It’s just a tendinous sheath.
0:40:20 When you develop the muscles themselves through either crunches or resistance training, right?
0:40:22 Even weighted ab work is helpful in this case.
0:40:25 The muscles are just growing, just like a bicep would grow.
0:40:30 And as they grow, you can’t change the suturing down of the tendinous sheath.
0:40:33 So they’re sort of growing out more prominently from that area.
0:40:35 So you get more visible abs.
0:40:41 But that’s the only way to really do that is through training to hypertrophy the abs.
0:40:46 But you’re not going to get there if you don’t first attack the body fat that’s over them.
0:40:47 And it’s only going to come from nutrition.
0:40:53 You know, sometimes you see older bodybuilders, like former bodybuilders, and they kind of look
0:40:54 a bit bloated.
0:40:55 What is that?
0:40:59 And that’s usually the anabolic steroid use that causes that or growth hormone.
0:41:05 That doesn’t generally come from natural occurrences where your belly gets so bloated like that.
0:41:11 I mean, sometimes if you have different types of hernias, you can get hernias actually within
0:41:15 the abdomen, not just in the inguinal, you know, in the groin area.
0:41:21 That could cause some of that distension in the abs, but not that global bloating that you
0:41:21 get there.
0:41:27 That’s really usually a telltale sign of like growth hormone use, something that they’ve abused
0:41:35 that causes the organs underneath to actually grow and cause distension, pushing out of the
0:41:35 belly.
0:41:37 That’s the organs growing.
0:41:37 Yeah.
0:41:37 Yeah.
0:41:41 It’s actually, this is a pretty disturbing visual when you think about it, but it’s not a, it’s
0:41:43 certainly not a healthy thing to have.
0:41:50 And, uh, you know, there’s always a lot of repercussions to, um, going down that path.
0:41:53 You know, they might look short-term the way they want to look.
0:41:59 And I would argue that even in those cases, you know, the, the, the, the large, super large
0:42:04 Mr. Olympia look, I don’t even know if that was ever aesthetically appealing to me or even
0:42:09 a lot of people, but, um, it, it definitely leaves behind a lot of, a lot of damage.
0:42:13 And people do that at a variety of different ages.
0:42:17 Now, I think even people that aren’t training to be bodybuilders, I can think of several people
0:42:23 that I’m aware of who have started taking like TRT and growth hormones pretty much.
0:42:28 very young and I’m actually seeing a little bit of that same body shape.
0:42:30 I don’t even know what it is, but yeah.
0:42:38 I mean, I think it look at TRT is becoming such a prevalent path for people.
0:42:40 I don’t like that.
0:42:41 That’s the prevalent path.
0:42:44 I don’t want to come across as somebody who is anti TRT.
0:42:49 Because I’ve been, I’ve been reminded of that and that on some of the videos I’ve made about
0:42:53 it, that look, Jeff, there’s a lot of cases where people have extremely bottomed out testosterone
0:42:57 levels and there’s nothing medically that can be done other than replace the testosterone
0:42:58 that’s not being made.
0:43:00 I completely appreciate that.
0:43:09 But as you’ve noted, the rise in interest in TRT is coming from a lot of the documentation
0:43:17 of people talking about their use of it and how it’s physically changing them.
0:43:21 And they’re doing it at a rate, like it’s, it’s becoming option one.
0:43:29 Like what about maximizing your natural potential first, you know, before declaring yourself as
0:43:34 low testosterone, even at levels like of 400 and 500, and then going and using testosterone.
0:43:37 Like you’re going to be on that for the rest of your life.
0:43:42 If you pursue that path, you know, once you decide to replace your body’s own natural testosterone
0:43:45 level with exogenous testosterone, you’re going to have to rely on that for the rest of your
0:43:50 life. Now, some people can get off of that and then try to restore their body’s ability to produce
0:43:55 testosterone, but that’s not a given. So be prepared that once you go down that path, that’s
0:43:57 when you’re going to have to be on for the rest of your life.
0:43:58 Have you ever taken TRT?
0:43:59 No, no.
0:44:00 Would you ever?
0:44:08 If it’s proven down the road that it’s something that could be beneficial and safe, I want to say,
0:44:13 I want to, I’m aching to say a hundred percent safe because that’s what I want. Then maybe I would
0:44:20 if I felt like I was really suffering from, you know, the, the, the loss or the change that my body was
0:44:24 going through. Cause I don’t want to just let myself get old. I want to try to do what I can,
0:44:29 but up till now, the journey for me has been completely natural and to do it in a way that
0:44:35 it feels most rewarding because I haven’t had to do anything. So I feel like I’m most inspired by my
0:44:37 ability to keep going and I’m, I’m going to be 50 this year.
0:44:43 What about let’s do living long then? Um, when we think about longevity and what it’s going to
0:44:52 take for me to be live a long time, but be strong into my later years, where, what areas do I need
0:44:57 to focus on training and staying strong? And where do I need to invest my energy in time?
0:45:01 So this is where I think when I say, if you want to look like an athlete, you got to train like an
0:45:07 athlete. Cause like the hallmark of their training is that it’s multifaceted. So you can’t just have
0:45:13 one element developed and be a great athlete. Even if you look at someone as one dimensional,
0:45:16 I’m not doing this, saying this to put them down, but one dimensional as an arm wrestler,
0:45:23 right? They can have grip strength and forearm strength and rotator cuff strength, you know,
0:45:30 to be able to actually turn somebody over. But if they have poor nutrition, poor sleep,
0:45:36 poor recovery, they’re likely going to lose, especially because your neurological output and
0:45:44 grip is directly correlated to your ability to recover. If you don’t have more than one element
0:45:51 developed, you’re not going to be your best. So when people are looking, the general population
0:45:57 is looking to become healthier and feel better, it’s not going to be one thing. First and foremost,
0:46:06 I believe that getting on a training plan that prioritizes the building of muscle. So hypertrophy
0:46:12 and strength building is going to be really important because we are going to, again, like I talked about
0:46:18 before, you’re going to naturally lose strength every passing decade, you know, up to eight to 10% per
0:46:24 decade as you as you as you pass the age of 50. So you need to make sure that you are doing something to
0:46:31 stave that off. You can dramatically slow that down by engaging in strength training and engaging in regular
0:46:40 weight training with the purpose of trying to build muscle. But you have to do that. The brain ages. So having
0:46:49 challenges to your balance, having challenges to your ability to maintain muscle recruitment, because
0:46:54 that’s, again, neurologically, your neurons start to fire at a slower pace. You need to train these
0:47:00 things. Reactivity, reaction skills, again, balance drills. These are all little parts of things that
0:47:05 people can do. I always remember seeing this old man. He was in a, he had an obstacle course he built. I don’t
0:47:10 know if you ever saw this, but it was a video. He was like 89 years old and he made this obstacle course and he
0:47:17 used to add every week or so, he’d add one more obstacle to his course and he built it in his backyard. And it was like a
0:47:23 balance beam and then a net that he had to climb and all these things. He used to run the obstacle course once a day.
0:47:32 And he said that he would try to find new ways to challenge his body so that he would keep his brain
0:47:38 guessing as to what’s next. And again, whether or not he was finding this thing to be something he didn’t
0:47:43 want to do, maybe it was also feeding into his increases because he was doing the things he hated
0:47:51 to do. But the idea was he maintained his fitness by being completely multifaceted and by incorporating some
0:47:56 of these balance and reaction type drills into his approach because it is important.
0:48:03 The fall risk increases exponentially as you get older. A lot of it has to do with something we’ll
0:48:10 talk about with the thoracic spine and losing mobility there. But like you need to factor those
0:48:17 types of things in. Flexibility and mobility feed into that. Like you can’t, I always talk about there’s
0:48:21 a pyramid, right? If you look at the old nutrition pyramid, there’s a bottom which is supposed to be
0:48:26 represent the, like all the things you’re supposed to work on. And then it kind of fine tunes and works
0:48:30 its way up. At the bottom of the pyramid, most would say is strength, right? You got to, you got to
0:48:34 maintain your strength. And then above that, you got to maintain your, your muscle mass, like the
0:48:40 amount of lean muscle you carry. And above that, your ability to perform because of those two attributes.
0:48:45 So to be able to actually do things. And if it was an athlete, it would be like their skill work
0:48:49 would be at the very, very top. So could you, if you’re a baseball player, you know, how well do you
0:48:52 swing the bat? You know, how well do you feel the ground ball? Like it’s that top level skill work
0:48:53 that comes up here.
0:48:54 It’s cardiovascular in there.
0:48:58 Cardiovascular is in there as well, as well. Yep. Your, your condition would be right.
0:49:04 You know, depending upon who you talk to in terms of longevity and performance and the sport you play,
0:49:11 it’s going to fall right above or below strength. Now I would argue that there’s a few things underneath
0:49:15 the whole thing. It’s just like a tree. You see the tree above the ground, but you don’t see the roots
0:49:19 and the, and the pyramid sits on the ground, but what’s underneath the pyramid, the roots,
0:49:27 your stability, your flexibility, your mobility. Because if I took the strongest person, they could
0:49:32 squat 600 pounds, but now I’m going to put you on a stability ball and tell you to do the same thing.
0:49:36 You’re not doing it. I just took away your amazing strength because I took away your stability.
0:49:42 And if you can’t obtain certain positions of your body because you lack the mobility or you lack the
0:49:47 flexibility, then I’ve also taken away and I’ve weakened the strength that you have. It’s there.
0:49:52 Your strength is there, but it can’t be expressed because I took away the stability. So the real root
0:49:59 of longevity and fitness is really in your ability to maintain mobility, flexibility, and stability.
0:50:06 Flexibility is the muscle length and the ability to change the length of the muscle. Mobility is the
0:50:12 joint excursions, the ability to move your joints in their full range of motion. So it’s a muscle or
0:50:16 joint thing. It’s still the same concept, but they’re working on different elements.
0:50:20 Do you think people realize that that’s so important and do you think they enjoy it?
0:50:24 No, I think people hate it. And I think that, I mean, some people like it. If you’re into the
0:50:30 practice of yoga, Pilates, you will likely gain a quick appreciation for how much better you feel
0:50:36 when you do those types of exercises that will improve mobility and flexibility. But for the
0:50:40 average gym goer, no, it’s either going to get relegated to the last thing they do before they
0:50:48 leave the gym or not at all. And I think that that’s going to have a big impact on how well they feel.
0:50:55 I think that when they talk about the fountain of youth, stretching and mobility is probably the
0:51:01 thing that makes people feel the best. I’ve heard that people say that, and I agree to almost a full
0:51:09 extent, but I think that if you are just limber and loose, but you lack the strength, you are never
0:51:15 going to be as functionally capable as you can. Actually, I have this band to sort of show that.
0:51:22 Like if somebody was just completely flexible, right? And you were trying to shoot this band across the
0:51:27 table, I don’t have a lot of tension to be able to generate to, to get any kind of force to do that.
0:51:36 On the contrary, if somebody was, um, strong, right, maybe even muscle bound, I don’t have any flexibility
0:51:42 here to again, really create much of a elastic output here or to get a lot of force generation.
0:51:50 But if I were to take this band and sort of get that optimal amount of flexibility, but also the
0:51:56 strength in this case, the muscles, the tension, I could shoot that band a lot further with a lot more
0:52:02 force and a lot more ease. Our goal should be not just athletes should be striving for this, but our goal
0:52:09 should be to have the right amount of muscular tension and force capability with the flexibility and
0:52:15 mobility because that’s only at that point that you actually can express probably the best performance
0:52:20 possible. How much work have I got to put in to become more flexible and to improve my mobility?
0:52:29 Not much. It just has to be consistent. So, I mean, I think if you were to devote even five to 10 minutes
0:52:33 a day of stretching the areas that are tight. And again, this is very individual. Like one thing that I
0:52:39 always stressed, even when I was in baseball, every player from me got an individual program and it was
0:52:44 based off of a comprehensive assessment. So, I would go through the assessment of each player and you
0:52:51 would find that either based on position and the demands of that position, body type, you would find
0:52:58 certain requirements of a program that needed to be in place to maintain optimal health. You would get
0:53:03 tight in certain areas. You would have things that would need to be strengthened more than others. People
0:53:11 have to be willing to A, seek out where these deficits are and B, to actually pursue a program
0:53:17 that would work on those deficits. And then when you have that, again, the comprehensive list doesn’t
0:53:22 have to be an hour a day of doing those things. You prioritize that list and you focus on five to 10
0:53:26 minutes of extra work with it. It’s funny. I make a lot of videos on, hey, do this every morning,
0:53:30 do that every morning, do this every morning. But it’s only appropriate to the people that have
0:53:34 the deficits that I highlight in the video. People think they have to combine all of those things into
0:53:39 a whole separate career in order to be able to pull them off. That’s not necessary. You can,
0:53:42 you find the ones that have the biggest impact, but I don’t think that having, you know,
0:53:49 doing stretching requires long duration of these things. It just simply requires consistency of them.
0:53:53 You, you say that there are five key exercises you need to be able to maximize your longevity
0:53:58 and quality of life that kind of dovetail into this. The single leg Romanian deadlift,
0:54:03 the squat and reach, the sumo stance hold, the posterior chain pushup, and hip abductions.
0:54:10 Can you show me these workouts? Sure. As you can see from the space, I mean,
0:54:14 you don’t need a whole lot of room to be able to do these exercises. They’re incredibly accessible.
0:54:18 They’re actually scalable with a low barrier of entry. So no matter what level of ability you bring to
0:54:23 these exercises, you’re going to be able to do them. All right. So the first exercise up here is
0:54:28 pretty simple, but it does demand some balance and it also will teach us a very critical
0:54:33 biomechanical requirement, which is a hip hinge. So it’s called the single leg RDL. What you want to do
0:54:39 is you want to hinge, pretending that there’s a drawer behind you that’s open. You’re going to close it with
0:54:45 your butt. Then you reach forward, but at the same time, you kick back the opposite leg and engage the glute on
0:54:50 that side, lifting it up to create a bit of a counterbalance. So your goal is to see if you
0:54:57 can get even up to 10 without losing your balance or having that other foot have to contact the ground.
0:55:04 Next exercise is something that we call a squat and reach. And what we do is we get down to the ground
0:55:11 like this down to a squatting position and we anchor our elbows into the sides of our knees. Okay. And
0:55:19 then from here, we post up on one hand, reach up and rotate and follow it with your head as you go up as
0:55:24 high as you can to the sky. Now, the goal here is to try to hold this position for up to 60 seconds.
0:55:30 That is what is lost when we get into these chronic positions like this, right? With our
0:55:35 devices at our computers, we get to this rounded thoracic spine, this upper portion of the spine.
0:55:41 Doing this will give us the mobility that we’re lacking. So the next thing is something we call a
0:55:46 sumo squat stance. It’s a squat stance hold. And it’s based off of something called the horse stance,
0:55:52 which again, we work on getting hip mobility and hip stability, right? And again, we’re going to
0:55:59 still work on the hip and all three planes. So what we do is we get down feet wide and squat down into
0:56:05 this position here. Now, the beginner version of this is to simply keep your elbows on your thighs
0:56:10 for a little bit of support. But what I want to see as tall of a chest as I can get the same way that
0:56:16 we just did through that rotation to maintain that area of the spine, that thoracic spine and getting
0:56:21 extended because we know that when that spine is extended, the shoulders will go with it and the
0:56:27 posture will get away from this position and more to this open upright position. If we don’t do it in
0:56:32 that beginner format, then what we’re going to do is cross the hands over. Okay. Get in that down position,
0:56:44 reach up and out. Okay. That is a 30 second hold up to a 60 second hold, depending upon how far you can
0:56:49 take it. The next thing we do is we’ve got to work on that upper body a little bit. So the upper body,
0:56:56 you should still be able to do the exercise that is oftentimes the benchmark for upper body strength,
0:57:02 which is the pushup. But we can do it in a way where we get bigger benefits both front and back side.
0:57:08 So we call this a posterior chain pushup. For a pushup, you want those hands underneath the shoulders.
0:57:13 Okay. I’ll demonstrate one, then we’ll do it together. You want to be able to push up all the way to full
0:57:20 extension. You also want to have tightness through your quads and glutes. So you squeeze your butt
0:57:26 together. You straighten your knees out by contracting your quads and then you get a good firm holding
0:57:32 plank position here. Now, when you go down, normally people would stop here or they wouldn’t come up all
0:57:36 the way. You go all the way down to the ground. At this point, you slide your hands out in front of you,
0:57:43 point your toes, keep those quads contracted, squeezed tight, and then lift up into what we call a
0:57:49 superman. Right from here, you’re going to train all the muscles in your posterior chain from the back
0:57:56 of your heels, all the way up to the tip of your fingers, right? Come down, slide it back, come up
0:58:04 into that good firm pushup. Don’t lose any of that stability. Come down, slide up and lift. The final thing
0:58:10 is something that looks so darn simple, but it actually has a lot of functional carryover.
0:58:17 We’re talking about just a side lying hip abduction. Okay. And what we do is we get in this position here,
0:58:23 we position our toe down in front of us. You want to basically point your toe down into the ground.
0:58:31 Okay. From there, you’re going to slide your leg back behind you. Okay. As far as you can take it and then
0:58:37 lift up. And right when you do that final lift, you’re going to feel a contraction right here in
0:58:43 the glutes. In particular, in the glute medius. That’s the muscle that’s controlling that rotational
0:58:48 element of your hip joint and the stability and the strength that’s needed to propel your body,
0:58:53 even on a regular walk, without your hips dropping down side to side. You don’t want to let that happen
0:58:58 to you. You want to be able to hold this position for 30 to 60 seconds. Some of the mistakes people make
0:59:03 is in order to feel like they’re getting a lift, they’ll just rotate their body to let the hip
0:59:08 flexor do the lifting. Remember, we don’t need the hip flexor to do the lifting. We want the glute medius
0:59:13 to do lifting. So you need to make sure that you’re rotated forward the entire time. And that’s it.
0:59:17 There’s the five essentials. Quick, simple, and incredibly effective. No fancy equipment,
0:59:23 no gym required, just a little bit of space and consistency. Now back to the Diary of a CEO studio.
0:59:29 This one change has transformed how my team and I move, train and think about our bodies. When Dr.
0:59:34 Daniel Lieberman came on the Diary of a CEO, he explained how modern shoes, with their cushioning
0:59:39 and support, are making our feet weaker and less capable of doing what nature intended them to do.
0:59:45 We’ve lost the natural strength and mobility in our feet, and this is leading to issues like back pain
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0:59:55 and he told me that they were exactly the type of shoe that would help me restore natural foot
0:59:58 movement and rebuild my strength. But I think it was plantar fasciitis that I had, where suddenly my
1:00:03 feet started hurting all the time. And after that, I decided to start strengthening my own foot by using
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1:00:28 And what is the context there with those workouts? Why do you choose those workouts? And what do these
1:00:32 kind of signal? Are you saying that if I’m able to do those, then there’s a probability that I have
1:00:38 the strength and flexibility conducive with longevity? Yeah, those are good standard exercises that will
1:00:48 measure at a high level how much of a deficit you’ve acquired over the years from not doing them. So you
1:00:54 should maintain the ability to do those exercises because they’re going to reflect the global
1:01:00 approach at least to working on flexibility in your groin or working on the strength in your hip
1:01:06 abductors. Because the hip abductors, if you look at most leg exercises, the squat, the deadlift, they’re
1:01:11 occurring in the sagittal plane, which is this front to back plane. One of my favorite exercises of all
1:01:17 time is the lunge, right? I love the exercise, but it’s still occurring front to back in this plane here.
1:01:24 Getting exercises that work the other two planes, and mostly through rotation, but working this frontal
1:01:33 plane, this side to side, is really important to producing a complete person, right? With complete
1:01:39 levels of strength. And because they’re not the primary exercises that do that, like that side-lying hip
1:01:45 raise that I showed you, is not one of the big exercises that are most important that are going to
1:01:49 be up on your list. You’re going to do your squats first, and you’re going to maybe never do those.
1:01:54 But it doesn’t mean that that muscle didn’t matter, right? Those muscles are there for a reason,
1:02:01 and they need to be developed. I remember so many times taking some of the most powerful baseball
1:02:08 players, the leading home run hitters, and then testing their hip internal or external rotation
1:02:13 strength. And it being incredibly weak, like incredibly weak. And you say to yourself,
1:02:20 how is that even possible? Because it was never actually directly trained. And does it have a
1:02:24 carryover? Obviously, they’re doing really, really well in terms of their performance on the field.
1:02:29 I still think it would have a carryover to improve performance on the field. But more importantly,
1:02:34 one of the players in question actually wound up having a lot of knee pain throughout his career.
1:02:40 And there are missed games because of knee pain. What could his career stats have looked like? They’re
1:02:44 already Hall of Fame worthy. But what could his career stats have looked like if he didn’t miss all
1:02:49 those games? So they may not have improved performance directly, but they could have kept
1:02:56 them healthier and having other issues be avoided by doing them. So I think that these types of smaller
1:03:02 movements are really revealing of what might be going on underneath. And the nice thing about those is that
1:03:08 anybody can do them. Like it doesn’t require a gym, doesn’t require an elaborate setup. They’re really
1:03:11 good assessment tools for people who just want to see where they stand.
1:03:14 Why did you bring the skeleton with you with the bowtie?
1:03:21 The bowtie, I mean, he came dressed even more than I did. I have my t-shirt. But this is Raymond. So
1:03:27 X-Ray is his full name. And then Raymond became his short name. So I broke him out,
1:03:35 God, probably in 2011 or 12. And he became a fan favorite pretty quickly. But I think people like
1:03:41 the visual. And for me, he’s not the most mobile guy. He’s lost his lower arm. He doesn’t have
1:03:45 another arm on this side. And he doesn’t really move that well. But what it is important is he’s
1:03:50 also lost his legs. He’s lost his legs. I got a leg over there if we need it. But the spine. See,
1:04:00 for me, again, I focus a lot on the ability to function in space. And rotation is probably the
1:04:04 area of biggest deficit. It’s what we lose the most. And the reason for that is because
1:04:10 the area of the spine that’s most responsible for functional rotation of the torso is going to be here
1:04:13 in the thoracic spine. So what that is, is anybody that wants to measure on themselves,
1:04:17 it’s right at the bottom of the neck. So at the base of the neck, the height of the shoulders,
1:04:22 and it runs down just to below the rib cage. So right where the rib cage ends is where the
1:04:28 thoracic spine ends. It has so many far-reaching implications because it shares its range of motion
1:04:34 between two different directions. So its ability to go front to back, again,
1:04:38 he can bend forward and back. We can slump forward, we can go back, right? You want to have ideally
1:04:44 about 40 degrees of flexion in that area and about 25 degrees of extension through that area. And just
1:04:49 us sitting here alone, you know, we probably tended to get a little bit of this posture while we were
1:04:52 getting comfortable and talking. We kind of get a little bit rounded out.
1:04:59 When you use up motion in this direction, and imagine what that looks like when people are
1:05:05 on their phones or at a desk all day, you’re going to start to lose the motion and into extension,
1:05:11 you’re going to get too flexed. Well, every time you lose a degree into flexion, you actually lose a
1:05:17 direct degree into rotation. So you’re, because you’re sharing that motion. The motion is only
1:05:22 available in a combined way. So if you want to take up motion in this direction, there’s gonna be less
1:05:28 motion available here. If I have a thing, if you’ll let me grab this and put this over your back.
1:05:35 over my back. Yeah. Just like this, right? Yeah. Now allow yourself to slump forward.
1:05:41 Pretend you’re on that phone, right? Get there. Now just turn from the shoulders in one direction,
1:05:47 slumped over. Okay. Now take a peek down the barrel of that thing, you know, behind you and see where
1:05:52 your point is. How about how far rotated you are? Yeah. All right, cool. Now come back, reset yourself.
1:05:56 Now take back that mobility that you lost through your thoracic spine.
1:06:01 I’m getting cramp in my back. There’s your rotator cuff. So get yourself up right now.
1:06:06 Nice posture. Act like I’m, I’m watching, right? So get there. Now go ahead and rotate again in that
1:06:12 direction. How much more did you get? Yeah, I got another like, it’s like 20%. Right. Yeah. So
1:06:19 maintaining thoracic extension maintains your ability to rotate. The ability to rotate in space
1:06:25 is one of the most important functional requirements we have. When you’re, when you’re falling as you get older,
1:06:30 you’re likely reaching spontaneously to grab something to regain control before you crash
1:06:36 down and maybe break a hip. Functionally as an athlete, your ability to perform is all about
1:06:41 rotation. You know, you don’t usually just move in one plane like this. If you’re a football player,
1:06:49 American or not, you’re rotating all the time. You generate force as a soccer player, you know,
1:06:56 by kicking across your body, right? By throwing a baseball, it’s all about rotation. You need to hold
1:07:04 on to rotation. But what we lose is the ability to extend at our spine. By the age of between 50 and 60,
1:07:10 people will have lost 25 to 35% of their ability, their mobility in this area.
1:07:14 You see it as well. You see it when people get older, they look stiff and they kind of look robotic.
1:07:18 My grandmother, God bless your soul, she lived at 97 years old.
1:07:18 Wow.
1:07:23 But at that age, she was literally a right angle. She was literally, she had a walker,
1:07:29 she was completely bent over at that walker, could hardly get herself back up. She had lost all of her
1:07:34 extensions. So she could not rotate at all. And again, functionally, it’s the most important
1:07:39 movement you can make, I think, is to be able to rotate through your torso to be able to do things.
1:07:45 So I think that people need to focus on, again, you go back to that whole concept of like,
1:07:51 what do you need to focus on? Well, I could tell you some great exercises to do to maintain your strength,
1:07:57 but if in the process of getting a really strong squat, you’ve also lost thoracic rotation, I can’t
1:08:04 deem you to be a really healthy individual because you’ve given up one of the most important things that you need to maintain.
1:08:10 Because I thought that aging and then basically turning into that right angle was just inevitable.
1:08:14 Because you see it in so many older people, they often are like bent over. And you kind of think,
1:08:15 well, why don’t they just stand up?
1:08:23 Yeah. Well, it’s impossible because you’re losing that fight to gravity, right? Gravity is going to win
1:08:29 ultimately, but it doesn’t have to win completely. So the more that you work on maintaining your ability
1:08:36 to extend through the thoracic spine, then you don’t develop those downstream adaptations that
1:08:42 happen from always being there. So what happens once you get in this position, you lose flexibility
1:08:47 through other joints. Again, if you get in that position again, actually turn a little bit,
1:08:53 try to raise your arm up as high as you can from that position. Okay, now just straighten yourself out,
1:09:00 go up tall, now raise your arm up again. Like, why? Because you’ve literally mechanically blocked your shoulder
1:09:08 because your shoulder blade has to be able to rotate around your rib cage as you raise your arm up overhead.
1:09:13 A great percentage of ability to move your arm over your head is not just the ball and socket
1:09:18 that’s over here to get your arm up there. It’s the fact that your shoulder blade has to rotate with it
1:09:23 to allow it to go up there. I could actually block your overhead mobility if I went behind you right now
1:09:26 and just held your shoulder blade. If I held your shoulder blade in place, you wouldn’t be able to
1:09:31 raise your arm up maybe more than here because it has to rotate in order to be able to get to the top.
1:09:39 So when you realize that this epicenter of dysfunction can have these far-reaching benefits
1:09:43 where all of a sudden a perfectly healthy shoulder can’t move up overhead, and then what happens then?
1:09:48 If you can’t move your arm up overhead, right? And I say, Stephen, get your arm up over your head.
1:09:51 You’re like, I can’t. No, get your arm up over your head. You’d go like this.
1:09:57 You’d lean your body back because your arm can’t get any higher, so you’re going to lean your body
1:10:02 back. Well, what are you leaning from? Your low back. So now all of a sudden you’re asking an area
1:10:07 of your spine that’s supposed to be stable, right? The low back, the lumbar spine is supposed to be a
1:10:13 stable area of your body. You’re asking it to now become a mobile area of your body, and you’re asking for
1:10:18 motion that is not naturally inclined to want to give you because this area didn’t give it to you,
1:10:22 right? The upper thoracic area didn’t give it to you. So now what does that happen? Now you’re asking
1:10:27 that to do too much. The muscles can become spasmed. You can damage the joints in your low back. Now you’re
1:10:32 causing a problem somewhere else. So this area has all these far-reaching benefits. Another thing that can
1:10:37 happen too is when you’re down like this, I mentioned that this area of the spine we talk about is actually
1:10:45 connected to the ribs. If you’re in this compressed position where you’re rounded forward, hunched over,
1:10:50 you actually don’t even get good lung inflation. It’s like trying to inflate a balloon inside of a
1:10:58 box that won’t open. You can’t get the lungs to inflate properly. Lack of properly operating lungs
1:11:02 are going to cause you to be more fatigued throughout the day, and it causes you to feel
1:11:11 less rested at night. So this area has so many up and down ramifications that you need to really focus on it.
1:11:18 And it’s one of those things, again, if you were to ask me how many people do I think directly work on
1:11:25 this area? 10% at most. What have I got to be doing that at my age? So I’m 30, in my early 30s now.
1:11:30 What have I got to be doing now to make sure that when I get older, I’m not hunched over and I am,
1:11:35 I do have that full range of mobility. Yeah. There’s a few things like, again, anytime you try to approach
1:11:42 any of these dysfunctions, we talk about the mobility, flexibility part being the foundation
1:11:46 of that. But then there’s also a strength component, because you can free up the mobility
1:11:49 and flexibility, but can you maintain it? The strength is just going to help you to maintain it.
1:11:56 From a mobility, flexibility standpoint, you can simply go up against a wall, right? And what you’re
1:12:01 supposed to do there is put the back of your head against the wall, your upper back against the wall,
1:12:05 and your butt against the wall. So you’re going as flat as you can, and you put your arms back up
1:12:10 against the wall themselves. So the back of your forearms is all up against the wall. Now, one of the
1:12:15 requirements to be able to get there is going to have good mobility or flexibility through your
1:12:18 rotator cuff muscles, because your rotator cuff, as it gets tight, wants to internally rotate your arms.
1:12:23 Can you get them back this way? Can you get your elbows forward with your arms? You’re doing a
1:12:28 pretty good job, but you can see, I can see some deficits there. So can I get in that position when I’m
1:12:34 there? Can I then raise them up against that wall flat? And as I do, the only way I’m going to be
1:12:38 able to do that is to maintain that thoracic extension, because what’s going to happen is,
1:12:42 if you lose that, as soon as you try to raise your arms up, it’s just going to fold you forward from
1:12:48 the wall, and you’re not going to be able to get up there. You can do stretches where you take that
1:12:55 dowel that we had there, you would lay on the ground face down, dowels over your back like that.
1:12:59 You spread your legs. So you look kind of like a, like a, maybe an X with your hands
1:13:04 out here and your legs spread. And all you do is you rotate around. So you’re trying to basically
1:13:09 rotate up towards the ceiling. That dowel is going to travel back behind you. And you’re pretty much
1:13:14 isolating the rotation through the low, through that mid back, through that thoracic spine. So you’re
1:13:18 getting rotation and extension, because it’s causing you to do this and lean backwards.
1:13:23 There’s another exercise I have that’s called the bridge and reach over. And the bridge and reach
1:13:28 over is you push up through, you’re on your back, you do a regular bridge, like a glute bridge.
1:13:34 But then as you get to the top, you reach across your body and try to touch behind you
1:13:39 over the opposite shoulder. So again, what are you getting there? You’re getting extension through that
1:13:46 spine and the rotation together to see if you can combine those movements. And again, take back
1:13:52 that range of motion that’s being shared between those two functions. These are all things that
1:13:56 anybody can do, like anybody can do them. And maybe you won’t do them well in the beginning because you
1:14:01 are restricted. But these are the types of things that improve as you do them. And again, don’t,
1:14:06 don’t look for perfection right away. But the nice thing about these drills is they don’t have to be
1:14:12 done for more than a few weeks consistently to actually start to see the benefits and to feel
1:14:14 what happens when you start to become less restricted here.
1:14:17 So if I just did five or 10 minutes a day of some of these drills,
1:14:19 you think the net impact over time would be pretty profound?
1:14:23 Very, very. I think that again, I think people don’t realize
1:14:32 the minimal time investment that’s required. It just needs to be done each day, right? Those
1:14:36 little deposits have to be made each day and they pay off in big dividends if you do.
1:14:42 And is it important for me to train for a long time or for a more intense, but shorter period?
1:14:43 Or how do you think about that?
1:14:47 Yeah. So I always say you can train long or you can train hard, but you can’t do both.
1:14:55 Right. And I think that especially as you get older, I think you need to minimize
1:15:00 the rotations on the tire, right? How many tire rotations are you getting? Because even if I just
1:15:07 raise my arm up overhead and I just do it a thousand times a day, I’m still moving my arm up in that
1:15:13 position. And every time I move it up, even on here in this limited capacity to move here with this guy,
1:15:20 like you’re still getting some of that rubbing and grinding in that joint. And if you have any
1:15:25 degenerative changes, if you’ve occurred, if you’ve acquired any type of bone spur in your shoulder,
1:15:30 and this is rubbing up against that each time, it’s like taking a rope and rubbing it over and back
1:15:34 over sort of a sharp edge, right? Eventually it just starts to fray and fray and fray.
1:15:42 I’d rather you trade that in the repetitions for the intensity because the tension delivered to the
1:15:48 muscle with the higher level of weight they’re using or the intensity of the technique that you’re
1:15:56 using is going to have bigger benefits in a faster way than just accumulating a lot of high repetitions.
1:16:00 Now that’s not to say that you can’t actually benefit from high repetitions and develop muscle.
1:16:06 You can. They’ve actually shown recently that anywhere between five and 30 repetitions
1:16:10 taken close to or all the way to failure can stimulate muscle growth.
1:16:17 The absolute load is sometimes not even as important as long as the effort is there. But I
1:16:23 believe that as you get older, you’ve got to kind of spare some of those repetitions because it has
1:16:28 that same effect that just wearing down those tires would have. Ultimately, you’re gonna have to change
1:16:32 the tires. And we might be able to change these tires as easily.
1:16:37 What about the importance of form when we’re training? It’s one of the things you’re known for
1:16:41 is emphasizing that form really matters. And there might be another school of thought that says,
1:16:44 listen, it hurts, so it must be doing something.
1:16:44 Yeah.
1:16:48 People think that a lot. They think, well, listen, my muscles are hurting, so clearly it worked.
1:16:54 Form is very important because I think doing things in proper form do two things. Number one,
1:16:59 it keeps you safe. Most likely, if you can do something in good form, then you’re in command
1:17:02 of the weight that you’re lifting. And therefore, it’s likely going to
1:17:07 do what it’s supposed to do with the least detrimental effect from doing it.
1:17:15 In terms of the leeway that you have, I think that depends upon the goal that you’re trying
1:17:22 to achieve. So if you’re trying to achieve muscle growth, I’m a big believer that muscle growth is
1:17:27 not given, it is taken. And you need to force yourself, you need to force your body to make
1:17:32 a change. Because your body wants to stay in a state of homeostasis. It wants to stay the same.
1:17:41 And getting it to deliver new muscle tissue to your body is metabolically demanding, or it’s creating
1:17:45 more tissue that’s going to require a higher metabolic demand. It doesn’t want to do that.
1:17:51 Again, homeostasis states that it wants to keep you the same. You have to take that. And the only way to
1:17:57 take that is to put forth an effort and intensity that is above and beyond what your body is able to do
1:18:05 right now. That’s why I am a big believer in performing our sets to failure. Not because I think that absolute
1:18:11 failure is 100% necessary, but it’s the only objective endpoint for you and I to speak the same language
1:18:16 here. Because if you go to the point where you cannot lift the weight again in good form, then I’m pretty
1:18:21 comfortable in saying, well, Steven, you went to failure. Good. So I know you went far enough. If you stop at
1:18:27 an estimated one or two reps shy, which is what research would say is okay, passable, same result
1:18:33 potentially, how do I know it’s really one or two reps? I don’t. I don’t. Because I think if there’s a gun to
1:18:38 your head, you might say, oh, I could do two more. Well, now it wasn’t one to two, it was four. And four is
1:18:46 completely not as effective, if not at all, compared to the one to two in reserve. So when you do these
1:18:53 exercises, to this degree of effort, there’s going to be a little bending of form. Now, I’m not saying that the form
1:18:58 should break down, you might find an abbreviated range of motion, you might find a little bit more momentum
1:19:05 involved. That’s all okay for me, as long as it’s still controlled. If the exercise you’re doing no longer
1:19:09 resembles what you were doing in the beginning, then you’re not doing it right. Your form has broken
1:19:13 down to a point where I don’t think you’re getting the benefits of that. You might not even actually be
1:19:17 training the muscles you were trying to train. You might have shifted the focus where you started
1:19:20 the exercise, it was supposed to be for your chest, but by the time you’re done, it’s for everything but
1:19:23 your chest, because you’re just trying to move your body through space. That’s not effective
1:19:28 if you’re trying to build muscle. You want to direct the tension into the muscles you’re trying to build.
1:19:33 And sometimes form can become a little bit lax in that pursuit, but not to the point where you’re
1:19:38 actually taking it off of the muscles again. This is just jumping a bit backwards, but a
1:19:45 conversation I had with one of my friends the other day was about nerd neck. And is there a consequence
1:19:50 to the fact that we all walk around now staring downwards? Like for this whole conversation,
1:19:53 I’ll be looking up at you, but most of the time I’m also staring downwards at my notes and stuff.
1:19:58 And if I’m not here, then I’m on my phone and I’m staring downwards. And we spend most of our lives
1:20:02 now staring downwards. And I just wondered if you, how you think about that.
1:20:06 I mean, it’s good. It’s good. It’s a good, um, it is a good connection back to what we talked about,
1:20:11 because I believe that still comes from that epicenter of dysfunction, which is that thoracic
1:20:17 spine. Because when you go like this, right, you’re actually internally rotating the arms too. So this,
1:20:22 this is internal rotation of the shoulders. If I go that way, right, that’s the external rotation.
1:20:25 If I do it the way we were just doing it up against the wall, that’s external rotation.
1:20:29 More difficult when you’re higher than when you’re lower. But when you’re in this position,
1:20:33 once you do this, what tends to follow is that spine tends to follow you in that direction.
1:20:40 When you start to round here, nerd neck is more of a consequence of what’s happening back there.
1:20:41 Because when you’re here, what do you got to do?
1:20:43 – Yeah. – Got to look up, right?
1:20:49 Because our eyes always want to see in front of us. So it’s not that your neck is necessarily
1:20:53 being pulled in that direction. Or the fact that you’re looking down. It’s the fact that your body’s
1:21:00 following that. And when it follows, the adaptation is, well, okay, now I’ve developed these tightnesses
1:21:06 this way. And I’ve lost that mobility into extension of my back. What do I do to compensate? I got to look
1:21:12 up. So now I’m walking around looking like this. And that’s that sort of nerd neck. I think nerd neck is less
1:21:19 of something you have to treat from a neck situation and more of something you have to treat from that back mobility.
1:21:24 You’ve made a lot of videos that pertain to injuries, common injuries that we get when we’re working
1:21:28 out and training. What are the most common, but avoidable injuries? And how do I avoid them? Because
1:21:32 I care a lot about this now that I’m getting older. In fact, as we sit here, as I said to you, I’ve
1:21:36 pulled some like ligaments in my ankle and I was at the physio yesterday and I’ve been on crutches and
1:21:43 I’ve got this big boot I have to wear. And it’s not until you get injured that you realize how
1:21:49 imperative it was for you to avoid this. Yeah. Because it puts you, for me, it’s completely
1:21:54 changes my whole, it changes my whole life. Not only can I like just move through a space normally,
1:22:00 but then I can’t train. I’m going to get weaker. It’s going to have an impact on my metabolic health.
1:22:05 It’s going to therefore have an impact potentially on my sleep, my cognition and everything downstream.
1:22:09 So I go, okay, I should actually have an injury prevention program. So what are the most
1:22:15 commonly occurring injuries? And what advice would you give me to avoid them?
1:22:19 Let’s see. So first of all, I take personal offense to you calling yourself old at 32.
1:22:25 I don’t know what that makes me, but I feel like a, uh, the crypt keeper, but you just start to like,
1:22:29 you do though. When I was a kid playing soccer, I could play for three, four hours. I didn’t stretch
1:22:35 and I was fine. These days I, I have a hundred percent injury rate if I don’t stretch and if I don’t
1:22:38 warm up and if I don’t really, really think about it, a hundred percent injury rate. I’m like,
1:22:42 I’m on my way downhill, you know? Well, I mean, you’re certainly going in the wrong direction,
1:22:53 but I think when it comes to injury, preparation does go a long way towards helping someone to avoid
1:22:58 it. It doesn’t, it’s not completely avoidable. I actually tore my bicep in this arm, but when it
1:23:05 comes to the more common ones, I think you can look to the joints that are either built to be mobile,
1:23:11 that aren’t being controlled or built to be stable that are being asked to do too many things. So
1:23:16 what is that? If you look at your shoulder, right? It’s a ball. And again, we can look at that. It’s a
1:23:20 ball and socket, right? It’s got the ball inside the socket. It’s supposed to be able to move in all
1:23:25 kinds of directions. We can move it all everywhere. If you look at the leg, right? We don’t have the other
1:23:30 part of the hip, but we have the ball from the ball and socket. It’s meant to be able to go in
1:23:38 all directions. When those joints, the shoulder and the hip are uncontrolled, meaning you’re lacking
1:23:43 strength in the muscles that control the movement of that joint, that’s when you actually wind up having
1:23:49 issues. So what are the muscles that control that? Well, we talked about one of those smaller exercises
1:23:57 before the glute medius. That muscle controls motion of the hip in that frontal plane. So
1:24:03 not just in this front to back, squat, lunge, deadlift direction, but this frontal side to side plane.
1:24:09 It controls the movements of the hips this way. If you don’t train them, they’re not going to magically
1:24:14 get strong. Like they have a function. And if you’re not challenging that function, then you’re not
1:24:20 strengthening that muscle. It seems like a lot. It is a lot. It is a lot. But I mean, you could acquire
1:24:24 the strength you need there with one exercise. You know, the function is hip abduction. So you could do
1:24:32 some of the side-lying hip lifting or leg lifting. You could do something more challenging where you perform
1:24:38 a lunge. But interestingly, all you have to do is weight on one side. So if I were to say, all right,
1:24:41 Stephen, what do you normally do? What do you normally do for lunges? How much weight do you
1:24:44 hold in your hands when you do a regular lunge? Or do you not do lunges?
1:24:48 I don’t do many lunges. You gotta do lunges. So let’s say you’re doing like a Bulgarian split
1:24:51 squat. Another one of my favorite exercises where you put one leg back on the bench.
1:24:57 I would say, hold the weight in one hand. So now if you’re doing a lunge and I put a 50 or 60 pound
1:25:03 dumbbell in your hand on one side, and then you go and you lunge out, that weight, you know,
1:25:08 you’re in the split position now with one leg out in front, the weight on this side totally wants to
1:25:15 pull you in that direction. You have to pull back on this side through the muscles on the outside of
1:25:20 the opposite hip to keep you in this position. And I can say, I’m going to make this even harder. Go
1:25:27 slow, go really slow. So now you’re stepping out. You’re on one leg as you’re stepping. So now you’re
1:25:31 on one leg and you’re being pulled here. Now you land, the leg drops down or the, you know,
1:25:35 the dumbbell wants to drop you down. You stay up there. I make you hold it for even a second
1:25:39 or two in the bottom position because your body is just aching to want to move in that direction.
1:25:47 I’ve just trained your hip abduction strength in this frontal plane on an exercise that’s truly a
1:25:53 sagittal plane exercise front to back. So I have ways that I can actually trick you into getting these
1:25:57 things accomplished at the same time you’re training something else. So it’s not always an extra thing that
1:26:02 you have to do. You can actually do this in a way that, you know, is sort of part of what you do.
1:26:06 So what do you do then? If I was saying to you, I want to have a comprehensive workout and you’re
1:26:10 designing my seven day workout plan, what would you give me to do?
1:26:19 One of the best ways to train is with an upper lower split or with a push pull leg split. And again,
1:26:24 if you were to do a push pull legs, I would, I would then have to have you include your shoulders along with your
1:26:29 your chest and triceps there, right? Because it’s your only shot in that week to do your shoulder work.
1:26:32 And again, as a pushing muscle, it would go on the same day.
1:26:34 So Monday, what do I do Monday?
1:26:42 So you could do push there, right? But my one caveat to a push pull legs is that it, it tends to be a lot,
1:26:49 right? Like you’re, you’re doing shoulders, chest, triceps. Some people don’t like that amount of,
1:26:51 of, of volume, right?
1:26:53 What’s push when you say push. So it doesn’t know.
1:26:57 Yeah. So push is just the muscles who share a similar function of pushing.
1:27:02 So if you look at a bench press is pushing the weight away from you is the concentric action
1:27:05 that you’re doing. If I looked at the lat pull down, I’m pulling the weight towards me.
1:27:10 That’s the concentric part of it. If I’m doing a bicep curl, I’m pulling it towards me.
1:27:16 Triceps, shoulders, chest, everything is pushing. I’m pushing away this way, pushing away that way.
1:27:21 Push up. I’m pushing away from the ground. Tricep push downs. It’s in the name itself.
1:27:26 I’m pushing down through a tricep push down. I’m doing tricep, you know, lying extensions.
1:27:32 I’m pushing the weight away. They would all go on a similar day. Again, I like the, the function of
1:27:37 that because it’s optimal recovery. So why that’s, why that’s good, if you could tolerate, you know,
1:27:41 I’m asking, you know, if, if that’s okay for you to do that, because you have, you’re not
1:27:46 naturally adding shoulders in. If you were okay with adding shoulders in, then you would do your
1:27:53 push workout. And then what I would do is know that I’m getting enough recovery in between workouts,
1:27:58 because I could give you a day off in terms of weight training on Tuesday, come back and do
1:28:00 Wednesday legs, right?
1:28:03 Right. So, so Monday I’m just doing push upper body.
1:28:05 Yeah. It’s yeah. Just push upper body.
1:28:07 Okay. Tuesday, you’re going to give me the day off.
1:28:08 Tuesday, you get the day off.
1:28:09 Yeah.
1:28:11 I’m going to give you two variations of this.
1:28:11 Okay.
1:28:15 And when I say day off, we could, we, we, if you were with me, you’d be doing conditioning.
1:28:18 All right. So we’ll get into that, but that’s, but it would be, yeah, it’s not a day off.
1:28:22 No, you give me seven days. I’ll take, I’ll take a ball seven, even if I’m just doing
1:28:28 ab work on some, but you, you then on Wednesday would come back and do your, your leg workout.
1:28:30 Yeah. And what leg workout am I doing on Wednesday?
1:28:33 So it’s going to be front anterior posterior. So I’m going to train your hamstrings,
1:28:38 your glutes and your quads. Everything will get done together. Thursday, you’d have another day off.
1:28:38 Okay.
1:28:45 Again, likely not a day off some conditioning. And then the Friday could be your, your pull workout.
1:28:50 Now, what’s nice about that is if you are somebody that doesn’t recover as well as others,
1:28:57 and this is not everybody, but that gives you a really good amount of recovery between those
1:29:03 workouts. If you could tolerate more than that, the first step I would do is add a total body
1:29:09 workout one more time. So I could come back on Saturday and add a total body workout. It would
1:29:14 just be a little bit light on the pole. Cause you just did that, right? You did the day before.
1:29:20 So you, my whole body on Saturday. You could do it. You know, when I mean like I would pick very big
1:29:25 compound movements that are representative of including as many muscles as possible at one time.
1:29:32 And I can shy off a little bit back off a little bit off of the pole that you were doing because I
1:29:37 realized that you just did certain exercises the day before. So I would, if I trained you on,
1:29:42 and this gets a little nuanced, but if I trained you on Friday and a pole workout, remember I have
1:29:47 different planes of motion I can move in. So if you were doing vertical pulling stuff like a pull up or
1:29:52 a pull down, I could stress more horizontal pulling exercises, like a seated row or bent
1:29:57 over row. Right. So I could shift the focus a little bit. And then Sunday, Sunday, I break.
1:30:01 Yeah, I definitely, I mean, I, I definitely don’t advocate seven days a week of full training.
1:30:04 Where would I be doing my cardiovascular work in this, in this particular week?
1:30:09 So in that, in that scenario, I’d have you do your conditioning work on Tuesdays and Thursdays.
1:30:14 I thought I had a break. And if you were gonna, if you had, you know, your goals were more aligned
1:30:20 with fat loss and overall conditioning, and you feel like you’re, you know, not as healthy as you
1:30:25 could be there, I would probably take advantage of that Saturday to do that. But if your priority was
1:30:29 the training side of it, getting stronger, building more muscle, then I would take advantage of that
1:30:34 Saturday as my, my flex day to do training. And you don’t put the cardio on the same day as the
1:30:39 upper body legs workouts. It could be, but if your priority again is to build muscle,
1:30:43 muscle, then prioritize muscle building, put that first, do your cardio conditioning work
1:30:47 at the end of that workout. Something might suffer. And the thing that usually comes second
1:30:52 is what suffers. If we think just about Monday, which we had down as the push days, that’s me doing
1:31:02 like chest and is it triceps and shoulders? How many, if I’m training for one hour, how many reps are
1:31:08 you trying to do per muscle and how many like sets? So set count, you know, if you can get in, and again,
1:31:13 this is a little bit determined by, um, whether you’re going to train on that Saturday. So if
1:31:18 you’re going to come back and train total body on Saturday, then I, I know I have an opportunity to
1:31:22 maybe do a bench again on Saturday or a variation bench and incline bench. So I don’t have to get all
1:31:29 all of my chest volume in, in that first day. But typically you’re looking for around anywhere between
1:31:35 nine and 16 sets or so for that muscle group across the week. So if you were going to do,
1:31:43 let’s say the one workout for chest and you’re doing say three, uh, sets per exercise, you’re in that range
1:31:48 of around, uh, three exercises, right. For chest. Now you don’t have to have that. The volume doesn’t
1:31:52 need to be as high for triceps because you’re obviously training your triceps while you’re
1:31:58 doing bench press. So you could put one direct tricep exercise in. If it was me, I would put
1:32:02 something that my favorite exercise for triceps is the lion tricep extension, where I lay on my back on
1:32:06 the bench and I do the, you know, they, some people call them skull crushers or nose breakers.
1:32:13 If we just take bicep for, as an example, how often do I need to train and how intense do I need to
1:32:19 train the bicep for it to grow? And conversely, if I just left my bicep alone, how long would it take
1:32:25 for me to lose the muscle? Yeah. Interesting. So, um, I think this is one of the most fascinating areas
1:32:32 of training that has yet to be uncovered. Um, I actually discussed this with, with Andrew Huberman
1:32:38 at one point. It’s like, it’s very interesting. So from person to person, we know that there are
1:32:46 different recovery rates between the people from person to person. We know that there are different
1:32:54 recovery rates between muscles. Like you might do the same bicep workout I do and need more time to
1:33:01 recover than I would. What’s interesting is from the individual themselves, certain muscle groups
1:33:09 require more or less frequency to recover from. So I might find that I could train my biceps every
1:33:15 three days, but I could never train my back every three days, or I could never train my chest every
1:33:21 three days. It’s just so intricate because every muscle is going to be different for every person. And
1:33:28 even at a holistic one level, you’re just not going to find the same recovery rate across the board for
1:33:33 every muscle in your body. So I, a lot of times I think people should rely on a little bit of training
1:33:40 intuition to say, Hey, like, am I increasing my weights? Is my strength going up on the lift?
1:33:46 Am I feeling excited to train that muscle when I go to train it? If I am, then I’m probably recovering well.
1:33:52 And you can experiment with like hitting it again more frequently. I think in the big picture,
1:33:56 the more frequently that you can stimulate a muscle, the better the results are going to be.
1:34:01 You have this, um, contraption on the desk in front of us.
1:34:04 This, this thing here.
1:34:05 Yeah.
1:34:11 Look, so many people talk to me about this device and it’s, it’s quite strange how important people
1:34:16 say that this device is and what it tells us. I was doing some reading beforehand. It’s a grip
1:34:21 strength reader monitor. And there’s some really crazy stats that I found. There was a 2015
1:34:27 Lancet study across 17 countries that found for every five kilogram decrease in grip strength,
1:34:33 it was associated with a 16% high risk of death, a 17% high risk of heart disease,
1:34:37 and a 7% high risk of stroke. And a 2018 study in the Journal of Alzheimer’s disease found that
1:34:43 people with low grip strength had a 68% high risk of developing Alzheimer’s. There was another,
1:34:49 another study that linked it to other cardiovascular and blood issues. And another study that shows that
1:34:54 older adults in the lowest third of grip strength were 2.5 times more likely to fall and be
1:35:01 hospitalized with their injuries. And one study found that grip strength predicted upper body
1:35:06 strength by 70%. And lastly, adults over 65 with weak grip strength were 2.1 times more likely to become
1:35:13 dependent in daily activities within three years. That was in the Journal of Gerontology.
1:35:16 grip strength. Pretty important, huh?
1:35:28 Um, a lot of that research has been determined to be more, uh, correlative than causative, but
1:35:36 the fact is that maintaining your grip strength is very important. So what I mean by the correlative
1:35:41 causative thing is that what they find is that people that maintain their grip strength throughout life
1:35:46 are probably doing so because they’re regularly engaging in physical activity. Uh, likely there
1:35:52 are lifting weights, they’re holding heavy weights, they’re having to, um, manipulate their body in
1:35:58 space if they’re doing calisthenic exercises. So there’s a level of activity that remains in
1:36:05 their grip that probably keeps their level of strength at a higher level. So you’re selecting out people that
1:36:09 are just generally maintaining their fitness, in which case they’re probably maintaining higher
1:36:11 levels of health and lower issues as they age.
1:36:17 So it’s not the, the strength in which we can grip that matters necessarily, but the thing that matters
1:36:21 is upstream from that and downstream is our ability to grip. So it’s just one, it’s almost like a,
1:36:24 a symptom of something upstream, which is positive.
1:36:29 Right. Or lacking, right? Or lacking, you’re not, you’re not doing enough of, um, that being said,
1:36:39 you can actually directly relate or measure your ability to recover from exercise, um, based upon
1:36:43 having a baseline understanding of what your grip strength is and then monitoring what that is over the,
1:36:48 over, you know, weeks or months of training. So if you were to measure your grip strength with a tool
1:36:54 like this in the morning, five mornings in a row and average it out in a, at a time where you feel
1:36:58 like you’re feeling energetic and good, that will give you a good baseline of what your grip strength
1:37:04 is. What’s a good grip strength. So most men would be somewhere between a hundred, I’ll talk in pounds,
1:37:13 a hundred and 120 pounds. So if you look at that, that’s around 46 kilos to 54 kilos. Um, if you,
1:37:19 you want to give a shot, see where you stack up. So to do this now, there’s some rules here. Yeah.
1:37:23 Don’t go like this, you know, keep it in here. Don’t touch your arms to the table at all. Keep it
1:37:28 at 90 degrees like that. Yep. And then you’re just going to squeeze, you know, one good effort as hard
1:37:36 as you can. All right, don’t blow out now. All right, let’s see. Oh gosh, my head nearly exploded.
1:37:43 130. So you’re, you’re above average. So doing well on grip strength. So now what you would
1:37:46 do is, and you would test both sides. You could average out the size. Sometimes you’re going to
1:37:51 have one, obviously one side stronger than the other. You would then have a good baseline.
1:37:54 If you were feeling like you weren’t sure if you recovered or not, you would test this in the
1:37:58 morning. Can I try this side as well? Yeah, go ahead. Yeah. This is my, so this is my weaker.
1:38:04 All right, here we go. My weaker hand. All right. You got to beat it though now. Oh gosh,
1:38:13 it’s a bit slippery. I think you did. Did I beat it? Oh my God. Wow. 160. No, you’re joking. 160.
1:38:19 What the? 160. So you probably, if you did the other side again, give it another shot. If you did
1:38:23 the other side again. You think I’d beat it? No, no, you’re not going to beat, you’re going to beat
1:38:26 your old performance, but you’re not going to beat, you’re not going to beat the, the left side.
1:38:31 Are you left-handed? I’m right-handed. So that was strange.
1:38:40 All right, let’s see what you got. 150 now. See, I had my prediction is right. So a lot of times,
1:38:45 it takes a little accommodation to the stress of doing that. What’s your grip strength?
1:38:50 I don’t know. I haven’t tested in a while. See, now you’re going to show me. Left and right. All
1:38:53 right, let’s see. I’m going to ask some of my team members if they want to give it a shot. All right,
1:39:03 here we go. Wow. A lot of crushing there. Wow. 130 on that side. And your left side? All right,
1:39:07 let’s see. Anyone else want to do it, Bertie? You want to give it a shot? Try to do it with all
1:39:17 the popping. That was my bicep that popped, by the way. 110. Okay, so you’re right-handed.
1:39:24 So it was 130, right? 130 versus 110 on this side. So I fall in the range of average, but not,
1:39:29 not superhuman for sure. But you want to try? But you’re most certainly way stronger than me.
1:39:36 Not at grip strength. But you’re stronger than me at bicep curls, bench press, everything else.
1:39:42 Yeah, I mean, this is again underscoring why some of these things need to be trained individually.
1:39:44 Okay. All right, so now hold it like this.
1:39:49 Yep. And then you just get one hand, right? You squeeze as hard as you can for kind of a short
1:39:58 burst. All right. There you go. Let’s take a look. Wow. 100. Now, women’s average grip strength is 60
1:40:03 to 80 pounds. So you’re actually much stronger than the average woman.
1:40:10 I started my first business at 12 years old. And I started more businesses at 14, 15, 16, 17,
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1:41:08 shopify.com/bartlett. This has never been done before. A newsletter that is ran by 100 of the world’s top
1:41:13 CEOs. All the time, people say to me, they say, “Can you mentor me? Can you get this person to mentor
1:41:18 me? How do I find a mentor?” So here is what we’re going to do. You’re going to send me a question. And
1:41:24 the most popular question you send me, I’m going to text it to 100 CEOs, some of which are the top
1:41:30 CEOs in the world running $100 billion companies. And then I’m going to reply to you via email with
1:41:35 how they answered that question. You might say, “How do you hold on to a relationship when you’re
1:41:40 building a startup? What is the most important thing if I’ve got an idea and don’t know where to start?”
1:41:44 We email it to the CEOs. They email back. We take the five, six top best answers. We email it to
1:41:49 you. I was nervous because I thought the marketing might not match the reality. But then I saw what
1:41:53 the founders were replying with and their willingness to reply. And I thought, actually, this is really
1:42:00 good. And all you’ve got to do is sign up completely free. And can I train my grip strength individually
1:42:04 if I wanted to improve it as an individual thing when I just have to grip? Yeah. I mean,
1:42:09 you know, one of the easiest ways to do it is with those old fashioned little grippers, you know,
1:42:14 that you just squeeze. And they make them in some really, really heavy resistance levels now for
1:42:19 people that have worked on it and actually improved. When I was young, they’re pretty easy
1:42:23 to conquer with a little bit of training. You’d be able to squeeze them because they never really made
1:42:29 the resistance high enough. But now it’s definitely something that you could be challenged by.
1:42:32 The other thing I wanted to talk to you about, which we’ve touched on briefly,
1:42:39 but I think is important to talk about because I don’t think people realize how prevalent it is, is back pain.
1:42:43 I was looking at some stats beforehand, and it says that 80% of people will experience back pain at
1:42:47 some point in their lives. It’s actually the leading cause of disability worldwide. And in the UK,
1:42:54 over 10 million work days are lost every year due to back pain. One in six hospital visits in Britain
1:42:58 are related to back pain. It’s the most common reason for people under 45 to see a doctor.
1:43:04 chronic back pain, which is sort of just enduring back pain, affects about one in five adults in the UK.
1:43:10 And there’s five of us in this room now in total. And so one of us, probabilistically, is going to have
1:43:16 chronic back pain. Is this something one can avoid? I asked this in part because I spoke to some,
1:43:19 I think the anthropologists who go and look at the tribes in Africa,
1:43:22 and they find that back pain just doesn’t exist there. It’s not a thing.
1:43:26 I think the likelihood that you’re going to experience back pain at some point in your life
1:43:33 is, is high. But that recurring back pain, that chronic back pain, I think that’s, that’s entirely
1:43:41 avoidable. Um, 26% of the time, at any one time in the United States, people have, are going to be
1:43:46 dealing with back pain. So kind of with the numbers that you just said there. The other thing I find
1:43:51 interesting is that the second leading cause of trips to the doctor in the United States is back
1:43:57 pain behind respiratory infection. So if you think about how often, especially this time of year,
1:44:01 my own kids have been in at least four or five times, you know, to the doctor for respiratory infection.
1:44:06 It starts to, so an eye opener, like, wow, you know, and this is, and this is something that’s
1:44:13 somewhat preventable. We need to do something about it to prevent it. The problem is that it can come
1:44:19 from so many different causes. You know, we, we talked about before how the limitation in that
1:44:25 thoracic mobility could ask the low back to do more than it could, and therefore cause strain there.
1:44:32 Now, here’s the good part about this. Though 80% of people or 85% will have low back pain in their life,
1:44:40 only 27 to 35% of the time is a disc related. So we’re talking about, you know, if you look back
1:44:46 on this guy again, it’s the, it’s the discs, you know, between the vertebrae, right? The, the vertebral discs
1:44:52 that create that spacing and the cushioning between the, the vertebrae and bar spine. When one of those discs,
1:44:57 actually, this is one of them dislodged itself, but when the disc that sits above and below these two levels
1:45:04 pushes outward or herniates, it could, it could push on any one of these nerves that’s traveling downward.
1:45:09 Anytime you get any touching of this nerve with some other structure, in this case, the disc,
1:45:14 you get the radiating symptoms that go down, whatever dermatome this is. What that means is
1:45:21 this nerve will feed some function of the lower body, or some sensory area of the lower body.
1:45:28 Depending upon where people complain of pain, like, oh, I feel it in my hip, or I feel it in my leg,
1:45:35 around my knee, or, or I feel it down behind my knee, down to my foot. You pretty much know what level of
1:45:41 disc problem they have because it’s representative of the level of herniation. When you press on
1:45:48 something that is at the level of like L5-S1, right, the last lumbar vertebrae in the first
1:45:53 sacral vertebrae, it’s going to give you symptoms like numbness, tingling down near the back of your
1:45:59 calf, underneath your foot. If you get something more around the hip, you know, a lot of times people
1:46:03 complain of hip pain. They think they have, they have a hip issue. It’s actually a back issue that’s
1:46:10 pressing on a nerve that wraps around that area. So that’s an L2-L3 or L3-L4. You get indicators of
1:46:15 where that’s coming from. Again, the good news is, if you don’t have this, this neurological deficit in
1:46:22 your lower body, this tingling, numbness, weakness, it’s mostly muscle in origin. Now, again, even of
1:46:30 the disc related issues, the 27 to 35 percent, 96 percent of those are not operated on. So think about
1:46:36 the impact you can have if we’re saying that pretty much every single instance of low back pain that you
1:46:42 have is going to be able to be addressed through non-operative, strengthening or stretching
1:46:48 intervention. Because a lot of times, as we said, what’s the cause of the dysfunction?
1:46:55 Is it coming from that thoracic spine lack of extension? Cool. Okay. Well, let’s work on it. So
1:47:02 let’s try to restore that thoracic spine extension. Is it coming from a weak glute, right? Having weak
1:47:08 glutes? Because again, the role of the glutes from the bottom up is to extend the hip. In other words,
1:47:14 kick the leg back behind you. If I can’t get my leg back behind me and I’m trying to basically extend
1:47:19 my body by doing that when I step through and get behind me, well, how can I do that? Once again,
1:47:25 I could do it from the low back by over-exaggerating and stepping in where it’s not supposed to. Always
1:47:31 remember the low back is supposed to be the stability center of your spine. It’s supposed
1:47:38 to provide stability. If you’re not getting mobility from your hip or from your thoracic spine up and
1:47:44 above and below, it’s going to ask for it from the next place above it or below it. It’s going to say to
1:47:49 the low back, please help out. Give me the mobility that I lack. So the low back will do it,
1:47:54 but at an expense. And that’s where you get injured. So you got to address hip weaknesses.
1:47:58 You have to address hip mobility issues.
1:48:05 This strikes me as what they call a mismatch disease or a mismatch issue. When they say mismatch
1:48:09 issue, they mean that there’s a way that we’re living our lives these days that is at odds with
1:48:15 how we were supposed to live or how our ancestors lived. And it’s interesting because I’ve interviewed
1:48:21 David Richarlan, who is an anthropologist, but also Daniel Lieberman. They both spent time with
1:48:26 the Hadza tribe in West Africa. And the shocking thing for me is I was assuming that the reason why
1:48:30 we get back issues and the Hadza tribe don’t really get them is because we spend a lot of time like just
1:48:37 sedentary. However, David Richarlan said that the Hadza tribe still spend 10 hours a day
1:48:43 in resting postures, but they maintain a straight J-shaped spine, not the curved S-shaped spine
1:48:50 common in the West. They squat, they walk, they carry loads a lot, and they aren’t in chairs. They’re
1:48:57 doing more active motions. Now, you know, I spend a lot of time sat down, whether it’s at a desk doing
1:49:02 this or whether it’s in an office. I’m wondering from your experience, if you thought it would be
1:49:09 better to have a standing desk or is this? No. No? No, I think standing desks are great. And I hate to
1:49:13 say it because I might actually, I might have to hold myself responsible, but I feel like it would be
1:49:19 beneficial for me too. I think that too much time sitting, right? There’s people that call sitting
1:49:23 the new smoking. Like the, the detrimental effects that sitting can have, prolonged sitting can have
1:49:29 on your body. Especially when you couple it with the fact that when we do go to sleep eight, nine,
1:49:34 ten hours, like how much time do you want to spend in a sort of fixed immobile position in a day?
1:49:38 Like you’re, you’re working all day. There’s a big chunk there, maybe eight hours, nine hours,
1:49:42 ten hours with intermittent breaks that you’re going to the bathroom and getting some water. And then you
1:49:46 got another eight or nine hours at night that you’re doing the same thing. Like your body wasn’t meant
1:49:53 to be that immobile. Like I think the, there’s an actual compression. So when you’re, when you’re,
1:49:59 when your joints are subject to gravity and you’re moving through space, you’re actually getting a
1:50:04 bathing of those joints of the synovial fluid that’s in these joints, like let’s say your knees,
1:50:09 that you’re essentially mobilizing because you’re compressed. And you know, again, with your knee,
1:50:12 you’re weight bearing, and then you’re off of it, you’re weight bearing, you’re off. It’s like squeezing
1:50:18 and bathing that, that joint in the synovial fluid. The outcomes are much better when we don’t allow
1:50:23 that to become stagnant. And when we, when we stimulate that through frequent movement sessions,
1:50:28 being up on your feet at a standing desk is certainly going to take away some of the compression and the
1:50:34 load that we’re getting from the, the chair and probably discourage some of that really bad posture
1:50:39 that comes from sitting and doing this. Standing in that you’re likely going to at least improve your
1:50:43 posture from below. You may not improve your posture so much from above, like we talked about,
1:50:47 but at least from below, you’re going to improve that. But I still think that the inactivity,
1:50:53 just standing alone is not solving for the inactivity. You need to take more frequent breaks. I think people
1:50:58 need to, um, get up and walk around just a little bit, five minutes, every, every, you know, 30 minutes
1:51:03 or so would be ideal. But like, if you’re going to take a phone call, go walk while you’re on the phone.
1:51:07 Like one thing I do is I have my office and I have the gym. And as soon as I know I’m going to be on a
1:51:12 call, I just stand up and I walk around the gym while I’m on my call, just as an excuse to get up and
1:51:16 move. I could easily conduct that phone call from the chair still, but I’m doing the rest of my work
1:51:21 from the chair. Anything you can do, you know, I know they’re cliche, but you know, park a little
1:51:26 further when you’re at a store. So you have to walk a little bit more, but I think it’s the frequency
1:51:32 of the breaks that we’re not taking, which is the main, the main problem. I think that even if you added
1:51:39 up all the time that you’re active in a day and then the time that you’re not active, it’s, if it was the
1:51:44 same exact time of an activity, but I interspersed my activity more regularly throughout the day, you’d have
1:51:48 less negative side effects than you do if you’re just grouping it. I’m going to be inactive from this
1:51:52 period. I’m going to be active from this period because again, of that effect of intermittently
1:51:56 bathing and giving these joints a break and subjecting to that, then to different stresses
1:52:00 than just compression, compression, compression. It’s one of the reasons why I talk all the time about
1:52:07 the benefit you can get from just hanging from a bar, right? To decompress your body, you know,
1:52:13 even just minimally, again, not that much, you know, one arm hang or so, you know, two arm hangs a day
1:52:18 is enough to give your body a bit of a break that you’re not getting right now. And nobody does
1:52:22 that. Nobody, nobody hangs from a bar. What about, let’s talk about supplementation.
1:52:26 I’ve got a bunch of supplements here with me now, and there’s so much said about supplementation,
1:52:30 but if you were to give me some advice and guide me on what supplements you think I should be taking
1:52:34 every day frequently versus the ones that maybe aren’t so important, but also just like the call
1:52:39 outs of, you know, I saw this thing on Twitter going viral the other day where someone had
1:52:47 screenshotted the top creatines on a certain website and then they tested them in a lab and found that a lot of
1:52:52 of them weren’t actually creating in the doses that they’d said and in the form that they were
1:52:57 selling. So I have this, I now have this skepticism around the supplements I’m taking. I’ve got some
1:53:00 supplements here. I’ve got some more on the floor. What supplements do you think we should all be
1:53:06 taking? And explain to me why. For building muscle, the two that rank at the very, very top of the list
1:53:10 are going to be creatine monohydrate or any form of creatine. There’s different forms of creatine,
1:53:17 we can get into those, but creatine and a protein powder. And some people want to argue the necessity
1:53:23 of a protein powder. And I guess if you’re getting enough through your diet, you don’t have to take
1:53:27 it. It’s not a necessity. You’re not getting anything magical from the protein powder that you’re
1:53:32 not getting through your food. It’s just that you’re doing it at a much more economic cost.
1:53:36 If you look at the price of protein these days, I mean, it’s, it’s certainly becoming a little bit
1:53:42 unrealistic to think you’re going to meet your daily goals. And for me, my daily goal is around
1:53:48 at minimum a gram per pound of body weight and upwards of 1.2 grams per pound of body weight,
1:53:55 if you’re active. Creatine has become all the rage recently. I was looking at some Google search data
1:54:02 and it shows just how quickly in search volume creatine is increasing from the early 2020s to 2025.
1:54:08 Now it’s exploding. And it’s been around forever and been in the, in the benefits have been known
1:54:13 forever. Right. So that’s interesting because that’s all related to the neurological benefits
1:54:19 that creatine is showing in terms of depression and, um, degenerative neurological diseases and
1:54:28 and its improvement, its ability to slow prevent things like, uh, MS and Parkinson’s and, you know,
1:54:34 by basically keeping the brain in a more favorable, uh, bioenergetic state, meaning being able to,
1:54:42 to feed the neurons of the brain, um, with the energy that seems to be lacking in some of these degenerative
1:54:43 diseases.
1:54:47 Also the other thing that I think has happened and I did, I did a little test in my office a
1:54:53 couple of, a couple of months back where I asked who in the team took creatine and every hand that
1:54:59 raised was a man. And I asked the women in my office why they didn’t take creatine and the overarching
1:55:03 sort of misconception, which also my girlfriend told me about when we’re in Cape Town a couple of
1:55:05 years ago. And I said, baby, you should take creatine. Everyone on my podcast is talking about it.
1:55:10 Yeah. And she was like, no, it’s going to make me it. I think she, yeah, she sort of as like,
1:55:12 she saw it as a steroid.
1:55:12 Yeah.
1:55:14 She was like, it’s what bodybuilders take.
1:55:17 Well, that’s going to change quickly. Cause I think that you have a lot of people,
1:55:22 highly respected people in the field that are doing the research as we speak in these areas
1:55:29 that we’re talking about. I urged my wife recently to take, to take it. She is chronically
1:55:36 sleep deprived because of my boys, you know, so she has, um, you know, she has a heart,
1:55:42 definitely operating on a higher stress level. Um, it’s been shown to actually improve brain
1:55:50 health and performance in sleep deprived and in stressed high stress states from a depression
1:55:56 standpoint is being shown to be, uh, very effective even when kind of paired up with traditional
1:56:01 approaches to treating depression through, uh, pharmaceuticals. It’s just got a lot of promise.
1:56:05 And the good thing is that there’s really no downside, right? They haven’t really identified
1:56:11 a downside to taking it. Um, there’s a lot of rumors as to what the downsides are. I actually made a video
1:56:15 recently where I talked to them and I kind of addressed head on what they were. Jesse of course
1:56:21 played our concerned parent who had all the questions he asked, but like, there is a big confusion that
1:56:27 people have when it comes to people think it’s a steroid and they think that because the outcomes
1:56:34 of taking creatine are it can increase lean muscle. It can increase strength. Sure. Because the outcomes
1:56:41 are the same as let’s say anabolic steroid use doesn’t mean that the mechanism is the same or the
1:56:46 magnitude of what you’re going to see from them is the same, or even the legality of, of the, of the
1:56:51 supplement itself is the same. We’re talking about two completely different, uh, two different, two,
1:56:55 two different mechanisms completely and two different things that the body are going to react much
1:57:00 differently to. When it’s an anabolic steroid, it’s going into the muscle cell, binding to androgen
1:57:05 receptors that then go into the nucleus of the cell and change gene expression, right? To basically
1:57:09 convert. As I did in that video, I said, you’re taking an iPad and making it a MacBook, right? You’re,
1:57:15 you’re completely changing what it is. Whereas with creatine monohydrate, you’re just talking about
1:57:22 providing a more constant flow of energy to those muscle cells so that they can continue to turn over
1:57:26 faster and continue to operate at higher levels of performance. Well, what happens when that, when
1:57:32 that occurs, you’re able to generate more work in a, in a workout by getting more work done. You’re
1:57:38 creating more of that overload. You’re also getting a secondary benefit of pulling water into the muscle
1:57:43 cell with the creatine because osmotically, when you pull water, uh, anything into the cell,
1:57:47 you’re going to bring along with it water to kind of keep the concentration inside the cell to be the
1:57:53 same. Well, that extra water keeps the muscle cell hydrated. And that’s a great thing. A more
1:57:59 hydrated muscle cell is going to likely grow better longer in the, in the long run, just like a flower
1:58:02 of water would grow better than one without. And there’s lots of different types of creatine,
1:58:07 right? There’s like gummies now, there’s monohydrate, there’s all kinds of creatines.
1:58:12 I was over New Year’s again, I was looking at, um, different types of creatine. So I went to the
1:58:17 shop and it sounds crazy, but I bought like 30 types and I just started researching it. And I
1:58:22 realized that there’s like a better form of creatine. Yeah. Um, and there’s some creatines which aren’t
1:58:27 so good. I eat ones that have many things added to them, um, et cetera. Yeah. I mean, creatine is pretty
1:58:33 simple. I always present it in sort of two forms to people because there’s a, there’s one creatine
1:58:37 creatine monohydrate and then there’s one called creatine hydrochloride. And the only difference
1:58:42 is what it’s bound to. The creatine monohydrate is bound to a H2O molecule and the hydrochloride is
1:58:49 bound to a hydrochloric acid molecule. And so what happens when that’s ingested in your body is that
1:58:53 one’s more absorbable than the other. The hydrochloride is more absorbable than the other.
1:59:00 So you could take lower dosages of that. The creatine monohydrate is usually taking
1:59:03 it at a higher dosage. And now there’s some new research coming out that states that I used to
1:59:07 think that it was just five grams for everybody, but now they’re finding that people that are like
1:59:12 upwards of 200 pounds or more, they might benefit from like eight, nine, 10 grams per day. So bigger
1:59:17 dosages there and people who are at, you know, 120 pounds or so, and maybe some of the females and
1:59:21 female athletes, like they might benefit from even just two to three grams of creatine monohydrate.
1:59:28 Hydrochloride is usually in lower dosages anyway. So comparative dose of five grams of monohydrate
1:59:30 might equal out to two to three grams of hydrochloride.
1:59:34 What’s all this stuff about loading? Because when I was younger, my brother was bodybuilding.
1:59:37 He would, he would tell me that you had to load up. Yeah.
1:59:41 I had to have a huge dosage for a week and then thereafter go back to a low dosage.
1:59:47 It’s just, so your body ultimately reaches a capacity for creatine storage. So if you want to get there
1:59:55 faster, you load, it’s five grams, four to five times a day. So a total dose of 20 to 25 grams in
2:00:00 a day. Some people are going to find that that’s a little bit of an overload for them on their, on their
2:00:04 gut. There is a by-product of creatine breakdown. Creatinine is what it’s called. We get it measured
2:00:10 whenever we get our blood test done. That can sometimes pull along with it, some extra water,
2:00:16 and that can make you feel a little gut discomfort from that. Again, at lower dosages, if you’re using
2:00:20 hydrochloride, you wouldn’t see that breakdown as much. You wouldn’t, you wouldn’t get as much of that
2:00:26 accumulated breakdown of creatinine. So you might get less of that bloating. That’s the only indication
2:00:33 why I would ever suggest hydrochloride is if you are some of that 15% of people that have some sensitivity
2:00:39 to that. And a lot of times getting around the loading phase and not doing it would bypass some
2:00:44 of that discomfort that you feel, that gut discomfort that you feel from taking it. So what happens if you
2:00:51 don’t load? You just ultimately get to the same capacity at a slower pace. So anywhere from 27 to 35
2:00:56 days or so, you’re going to reach that full capacity anyway. If you’re taking it because you want to see
2:01:02 benefits in performance, like power output and performance, let’s say, leading up to an event,
2:01:06 that’s, you know, a competition in four or five days, then you might want to load because you have to kind
2:01:13 of get to those full capacities sooner. But I don’t really see a need to have to load if, again, in the
2:01:19 long run, you take away any of those risks, those gut risks, and then you get to that ultimate level
2:01:24 anyway. And what about the proteins I’ve got here? Are there any particular proteins that are better than
2:01:29 others? I mean, I like to say, since that’s mine, that’s better. But the, you know, the fact is that
2:01:37 anything you can do to prioritize the quality of the protein. So in general, your isolate proteins are
2:01:42 going to be of a higher quality than your concentrate proteins. They’re still protein, but there’s more
2:01:50 on a gram per gram basis. It’s 90% versus 80% by volume. If it’s isolate versus concentrate,
2:01:55 you’re getting more protein per volume. But they’re not all as advertised, are they?
2:02:00 No. No, there’s, I mean, look, I, without, I don’t ever want to disparage other brands or,
2:02:05 you know, I don’t, I’m not in the practice of doing that, but like there are some garbage quality proteins
2:02:11 out there that are on the shelves of oftentimes like the biggest retailers, you know, they, they,
2:02:15 they don’t, they’re, they’re in it to make money. They’re not in it to provide high quality.
2:02:21 And, um, again, you’re still getting protein, but by the time your body absorbs what’s in there,
2:02:24 it’s netting out to less than what it could be.
2:02:25 How do I spot garbage?
2:02:31 Uh, I think the best way to spot garbage would be to like, there’s something called, uh, amino acid
2:02:37 spiking. You like people will, will actually include a lot of, um, glycine in their, in their, uh,
2:02:44 proteins, like specifically adding glycine to it. Cause they can get the label benefit of increasing
2:02:49 protein content, but it’s actually not a complete protein. So you’re not getting the actual quality
2:02:52 that you would be getting from an isolate protein. What are some foods that you would just
2:02:58 absolutely never let go near your mouth? The real ones where if your kids asked, or,
2:03:05 you know, you just say, there’s no way we’re eating that. I really hate the dyes and foods,
2:03:12 the food dyes. I think that’s a really, um, I’m glad that things are being done as we speak to try to
2:03:18 eliminate them from our foods. I don’t know how our industry has gotten away with it for as long as it
2:03:23 has it, you know, in, in Europe, they’ve known about the dangers of food coloring and food dyes
2:03:30 for a decade or more. And we’re still eating these in our foods all the time for what benefit?
2:03:33 So it looks more attractive on a, on a package. Like that’s bullshit.
2:03:38 What about melatonin? I’ve got a little jar of it here that I found. Um, a lot of people are taking
2:03:44 melatonin now, and I’ve got a friend very close to me that’s encouraging me to take melatonin. Do you have
2:03:50 a view on it? My view is I believe it to be safe. I believe it to be, um, helpful, you know, for people
2:03:58 that are having a problem establishing a normal sleep pattern. Um, we actually do, uh, uh, give it to our
2:04:03 children at night because they do have, they do have issues with sleep. Um, but honestly, the,
2:04:09 the thing that people find to be even more helpful to establishing that normal sleep pattern
2:04:15 is that consistency in going to bed and that consistency of waking up. And when you know
2:04:20 you’re on the right track, you generally don’t need, uh, an alarm clock to wake you up. If you’re
2:04:25 doing it right and you’re getting enough sleep, you generally see that your body naturally wakes up
2:04:29 within five to 10 minutes of the same time every morning without an alarm clock.
2:04:31 Have you thought much about how we’re supposed to sleep?
2:04:36 I mean, we talked about lower back, back pains, et cetera. Is there an optimal way to sleep?
2:04:38 Am I meant to sleep on my front, my back, my side?
2:04:43 So again, I think this is individual, you know, and again, there’s a lot of conditions that can
2:04:50 sway somebody in one direction or another, but in general, I think the position that has the less,
2:04:56 the least amount of negative side effects in terms of how you feel upon waking is to be in what we call
2:05:00 the corpse, the corpse position, just laying on your back with your arms sort of at your side or crossed
2:05:05 over your, your belly like this. If you’re able to tolerate even more and kind of up in this position
2:05:09 here with your, with your arms up, just because again, that actually helps a little bit with some
2:05:13 of that internal rotateness, uh, internal rotation tightness that we get in our shoulders that you
2:05:19 were demonstrating up against that, the wall with that position before not as big a deal,
2:05:26 but you have to understand that at what other time really, again, we just talked about being static
2:05:29 throughout the day, but at least you’re getting up to go to the bathroom. At least you’re getting
2:05:34 up to go get a meal. At least you’re getting up to go take a phone call. When else are you pretty
2:05:38 much statically in the same position? I don’t care if you are on your side or on your back or
2:05:44 on your other side or on your stomach, you’re pretty static for seven, eight, nine hours.
2:05:51 There are some effects that can happen to you while sleeping that are significant.
2:05:56 Like there are times people wake up and they feel excruciating amounts of pain. They did something
2:06:00 during the night and they all, I must’ve done something when I slept, right? People say that all
2:06:04 the time because they probably did. They probably did. They either stayed in one position for too long
2:06:10 and weren’t conscious of it, or they positioned themselves over an arm and it kind of, you know,
2:06:14 was in this really strange position for a long period of time because they weren’t conscious of it.
2:06:21 But then there’s the sort of chronic effects of being a certain type of sleeper, like a side sleeper,
2:06:25 especially some that like to sleep in the fetal position. They, they pull their knees up.
2:06:32 The last thing you need is more hip flexion. It’s like sitting, like you’re getting from a chair,
2:06:36 you’re creating your own chair in bed, right? You got another eight, nine hours of being in that
2:06:41 position. Like lengthen them out, you know, get some, get some flexibility or at least, you know,
2:06:47 get some elongation at that joint and those muscles. You know, sleeping with a pillow that is too
2:06:52 fluffy can wreak havoc on your neck. You know, you wake up the next day, most, most of the back pain
2:07:00 sufferers we talked about before. 82%, I believe, of people that, that report sleep disturbance say
2:07:07 it’s from back pain. And what happens, they feel it mostly, 77% of them feel it upon waking. So like,
2:07:10 they’re not feeling it when they’re sleeping, which is even worse because if they did,
2:07:15 they might be able to modify that. They’re feeling it upon waking. And it goes back again,
2:07:20 what we were talking about earlier. You see, it all relates. Like this back pain seems isolated.
2:07:23 And we’re talking about the thoracic spine, that’s back pain. But now I’m talking about
2:07:27 sleeping and that’s back pain. Like all these things relate to each other. That’s why you have
2:07:35 to care about all of it. But being in that position is with that pillow up behind your head causes a lot of
2:07:42 excess flexion of your neck, which can cause issues with the muscles around your neck and with the joints
2:07:47 in your neck over time. So you might like to do that. But I’m telling you, the healthier position
2:07:53 is to sleep with a really flat pillow, a really flat pillow. I myself used to wake up every morning with
2:07:58 some degree of neck stiffness. I switched to a pillow that is pretty much only about one or two inches high,
2:08:03 just enough to support my head. I never have any issues with neck pain again. You’re not abnormally
2:08:08 propping it up. Not to mention if you have any type of sleep apnea issues or breathing issues at night.
2:08:12 The on the back position with the head propped up is going to be worse because you’re closing down
2:08:17 your airway a little bit more. You know, there are some cases where, again, that apnea patient might
2:08:23 want to be on their side. You know, it’s going to be easier for their breathing. But in most cases,
2:08:28 on their back. And also too, interestingly, you know, look, most people have tight calves,
2:08:32 right? Their ankles are, again, we sit all day. We’re not pulling our ankles back towards our head.
2:08:37 We’re not maintaining that mobility in our ankle with our foot moving towards our head. Well,
2:08:41 what happens in a bed? You get in bed, the sheets are kind of tight at the bottom. They’re pulling your
2:08:46 ankles straight down like that, and your feet are pointed the whole night. Further tightening those
2:08:50 calves because they’re just shortening in that position. Especially if you trained your calves that day,
2:08:55 and your muscles repair and regenerate at night, you know, you’re basically repairing them in the
2:08:59 shortened position because your toes are pointed down. I always say, if you’re going to get in bed,
2:09:03 loosen up the sheets at the end of the bed so that you can at least get the ability to move your toes
2:09:08 backwards or they’re freely moving. They’re not being forced into this position. So lots of little
2:09:12 tweaks you can make, and some people think they’re not as important. I think they’re very important given
2:09:16 how long you stay in those positions. Never in any other portion of your day do you spend that much
2:09:20 time in that position. Jeff, what’s the most important thing we haven’t talked about that we
2:09:24 should have talked about as it relates to health, fitness, longevity, and I guess just more broadly,
2:09:34 just living a good life? I think that you don’t want to stress yourself out thinking of all the
2:09:42 things that you need to do because there’s many, and in doing so become paralyzed by an activity and
2:09:46 say I’m not going to do anything at all because I can’t do all of it. I think that’s one of the biggest
2:09:52 things that I see people do is they talk themselves out of it from the very beginning because they think
2:09:55 that the commitment is going to be too much more than what they’re doing right now, too much to ask
2:10:01 and they can’t do it. That’s a mistake. Chip away. We talked about nutrition again. Make that first
2:10:06 pass. Take away the obvious stuff. The stuff you know is just not contributing to a healthier life.
2:10:11 Then make another pass when you’re ready. From a fitness standpoint, get yourself to the gym. Try
2:10:17 to do that first thing we said to take that first action. Get yourself out the door. Get a habit of
2:10:22 doing that over a period of a couple months. You want to start to adopt a more intense training plan or you
2:10:28 want to start to adopt a more intricate training split. Fine. After, don’t worry about it. The most
2:10:34 important thing is to get started and then adopt some of these little things. I’m really noticing
2:10:40 that my thoracic spine is not mobile enough, like Jeff said. I mean, hang from the bar. Do that one
2:10:47 little activity each day. Those are the types of things that will pay big dividends when added up, but
2:10:52 don’t be daunted by the thought that all of them have to be done or you’re not going to be healthy. Any
2:11:00 investment that you make into your body is going to be a good investment that will pay off. Maybe not even
2:11:07 right now, but as you started this with the idea of down the road, like you’re realizing now at 32, it’s going
2:11:15 to matter at 52, 62, 72. And so by doing what you’re doing now, you’re making the right step in the right
2:11:20 direction that can always be intensified as you go. And by the way, your ability to intensify and do
2:11:26 more is going to be so much easier than when you’ve adopted the habit and you actually enjoy what you’re
2:11:31 doing. And rather than making that big departure from what you’re doing now and thinking you’re just
2:11:34 going to all of a sudden start loving all these things, you’re not, and you’re likely going to wind
2:11:39 up making yourself not want to do it. Jeff, thank you for doing what you do because as I said to you
2:11:44 before we started recording, you’ve been the go-to resource for me over the years. And in fact,
2:11:48 whenever I’ve got a challenge, whether it’s like how to build my triceps or how to avoid an injury or
2:11:53 other challenges relating to strength or longevity, all these kinds of things,
2:11:58 I’m always happy when I find your videos because you’re someone that everybody trusts. You’re someone
2:12:03 that presents the information in a really, really clear visual way of, you know, you’re famous for
2:12:08 drawing on your own body, showing how the muscles sort of extend and where the muscles are and the
2:12:13 range of motion. But you’ve helped me for free for a long, long time. Like I think,
2:12:19 I think probably a decade. I think I spent about 10 years as you, you being my sort of personal
2:12:24 trainer. And because this information is free and it’s on YouTube, you would have helped literally
2:12:28 billions of people. I mean, I was looking at your channel. I think you’ve got almost 3 billion views.
2:12:33 It might even be more now just on that one channel alone, but then the clips and everything else and
2:12:37 how that’s inspired other people to become trainers on YouTube. So on behalf of all of those people,
2:12:42 but also on behalf of me, just thank you so much for doing what you do. We have a closing tradition
2:12:45 where the last guest leaves a question for the next guest, not knowing who they’re leaving it for.
2:12:55 And the question that has been left for you is what would you change about you first and secondly?
2:13:03 Now answer why haven’t you? Okay. What would I change about me? And then why have I not? Wow.
2:13:16 Oh man. You know, there’s, there’s, there’s not much and I’m thinking off the top of my head here. So
2:13:24 when I identify something that I want to change about myself, I usually do a pretty damn good job
2:13:31 of putting in place steps to, to make that happen. And there are things that are quite personal about
2:13:36 myself. There are things that from a relationship level, there are things from a, you know,
2:13:43 self-improvement standpoint. Like I always seek to identify areas that I can improve and I do make those
2:13:51 changes. And I take, I take it serious and I make steps to do that. So of the things that I’ve wanted to do,
2:14:02 I think I always wanted to be more adventurous. I think that I’m a bit of a, of a homebody. And I
2:14:09 think that I, I, I might, my wife is a big traveler. And I think that I probably would benefit from being
2:14:15 a little bit more adventurous and taking some vacations to places that I would never ordinarily go
2:14:20 to. If I’m looking for a travel partner or someone that could do that, she more than would be willing to
2:14:28 want to do that with me. So I think perhaps I, I wished I would have changed that. I could certainly
2:14:32 use an excuse and say that the boys keep us very busy and, and there’s a lot of reasons why I haven’t,
2:14:36 but it’s probably not a real good excuse because we do find time to go away, but we seem to go back
2:14:40 to the same places all the time. You’re going to give me two, it says first and secondly.
2:14:46 I wish I could be a little bit less judgmental from time to time. And if anything,
2:14:53 just keep it on the side of opinionated, but be, be open to hearing the opinions of others more.
2:15:00 The reason why I haven’t, I think is more of, of wanting to be heard maybe in a, in a time when
2:15:04 I was a kid of not being, I was a third kid. So I was probably not heard as much as I often thought
2:15:09 I, I, I, I wanted to be. So the opinions come out first as a reflex, but if I could do that,
2:15:14 I, I, I still wish I could, I could get a little better. Thank you. Thank you.
2:15:21 I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio
2:15:27 channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven’t yet hit the follow button or the
2:15:30 subscribe button, wherever you’re listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you.
2:15:35 If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until
2:15:39 forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can’t tell you how much it
2:15:43 helps when you hit that subscribe button, the show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production,
2:15:47 bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to doing this thing we love. If you could do me that
2:15:51 small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you’re listening to this, that would mean the world
2:15:54 to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time.
2:16:19 Thank you.

0:00:05 I think a lot of people don’t realize how massive the positive impact AI is going to have on their life.
0:00:12 Well, I would argue that the idea that this AI disruption doesn’t lead us to human catastrophe is optimistic.
0:00:15 For example, people are going to be unemployed in huge numbers.
0:00:16 You agree with that, don’t you?
0:00:21 Yes. If your job is as routine as it comes, it’s gone in the next couple of years.
0:00:25 But it’s going to create new opportunities for wealth creation.
0:00:31 Let me put it to you this way. We’ve created a new species, and nobody on Earth can predict what’s going to happen.
0:00:37 We are joined by three leading voices to debate the most disruptive shift in human history, the rise of AI.
0:00:40 And they’re answering the questions you’re most cared about.
0:00:43 This technology is going to get so much more powerful.
0:00:48 And yes, we’re going to go through a period of disruption, but at the other end, we’re going to create a fair world.
0:00:51 It’s enabling people to run their businesses, make a lot of money.
0:00:55 And you can solve meaningful problems such as the breakthroughs in global health care and education.
0:00:59 It will be phenomenal, and you can live an incredibly fulfilling existence.
0:01:02 Well, I would just say on that front, this has always been the fantasy of technologists.
0:01:05 To do marvelous things with our spare time, but we end up doom scrolling.
0:01:06 Loneliness epidemic.
0:01:08 Right, falling birth rates.
0:01:12 So the potential for good here is infinite, and the potential for bad is ten times.
0:01:16 For example, there’s war, undetectable beat fakes, and scams.
0:01:20 So people don’t understand how many different ways they are going to be robbed.
0:01:24 Look, I don’t think blaming technology for all of it is the right thing.
0:01:25 All these issues, they’re already here.
0:01:27 They’re all fathers here.
0:01:28 So what are you saying to your children?
0:01:29 Well, first of all…
0:01:36 I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple
0:01:41 and our audio channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven’t yet hit the
0:01:44 follow button or the subscribe button, wherever you’re listening to this.
0:01:45 I would like to make a deal with you.
0:01:49 If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from
0:01:53 now until forever to make the show better and better and better and better.
0:01:56 I can’t tell you how much it helps when you hit that subscribe button.
0:01:59 The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production, bring in all the guests you
0:02:02 want to see, and continue to do this thing we love.
0:02:05 If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you’re listening
0:02:06 to this, that would mean the world to me.
0:02:08 That is the only favor I will ever ask you.
0:02:10 Thank you so much for your time.
0:02:22 The reason why I wanted to have this conversation with all of you is because the subject matter
0:02:29 of AI, but more specifically AI agents, has occupied my free time for several weeks in a row.
0:02:35 And actually, Amjad, when I started using Replit, for me, it was a paradigm shift.
0:02:39 There was two paradigm shifts in a row that happened about a week apart.
0:02:43 ChatGPT released that image generation model where you could create any image.
0:02:46 It was incredibly detailed with text and all those things.
0:02:47 That was a huge paradigm shift.
0:02:52 And then in the same week, I finally gave in to try and figure out what this term AI agent
0:02:53 was that I was hearing all over the internet.
0:02:54 I heard Vibe coding.
0:02:55 I heard AI agent.
0:02:57 I was like, I will give it a shot.
0:03:03 And when I used Replit, 20 minutes in to using Replit, my mind was blown.
0:03:06 And I think that night I stayed up till 3 or 4 a.m. in the morning.
0:03:12 For anyone that doesn’t know, Replit is a piece of software that allows you to create
0:03:16 software and pretty much any software you want.
0:03:22 So someone like me with absolutely no coding skills was able to build a website, build in
0:03:28 Stripe, take payment, integrate AI into my website, add Google login to the front of my website,
0:03:30 and do it within minutes.
0:03:34 I then got the piece of software that I had built with no coding skills, sent it to
0:03:36 my friends, and one of my friends put his credit card in and paid.
0:03:40 So I just launched a SaaS company with no coding skills.
0:03:47 To demonstrate an AI agent in a very simple way, I used an online AI agent called Operator
0:03:50 to order us all some water from a CVS around the corner.
0:03:54 The AI agent did everything end to end, and people will be watching it on the screen.
0:03:58 It put my credit card details in, it picked the water for me, it gave the person a tip,
0:03:59 it put some delivery notes in.
0:04:01 At some point, a guy is going to walk in.
0:04:03 He has not interacted with a human.
0:04:05 He’s interacted with my AI agent.
0:04:09 And I just, the reason I use this as an example is, again, it was a paradigm shift moment
0:04:13 for me when I heard about agents about a month ago, and I went on and I ordered a bottle
0:04:14 of electrolytes.
0:04:18 And when my doorbell rang, I freaked out.
0:04:19 I freaked out.
0:04:21 But Amjad, who are you?
0:04:23 And what are you doing?
0:04:27 So I started programming at a very young age.
0:04:31 You know, I built my first business when I was a teenager.
0:04:34 I used to go to internet cafes and program there.
0:04:38 And I realized that they don’t have software to manage the business.
0:04:39 I was like, oh, why didn’t you create accounts?
0:04:40 Why don’t I have a server?
0:04:43 It took me two years to build that piece of software.
0:04:49 And that sort of embedded in my mind, this idea that, hey, like, you know, there’s a lot
0:04:54 of people in the world with really amazing ideas, especially in the context where they live in,
0:04:57 that allows them to build businesses.
0:05:13 However, the main source of friction between an idea and software, or call it an idea, and wealth creation, is infrastructure, is physical infrastructure, is meaning a computer in front of you.
0:05:16 It is an internet connection.
0:05:20 It is the set of tools and skills that you need to build that.
0:05:27 If we make it so that anyone who has ideas, who wants to solve problems, will be able to do it.
0:05:41 I mean, imagine the kind of world that we could live in where no one can be, anyone who has merit, anyone who can think clearly, anyone who can generate a lot of ideas can generate wealth.
0:05:43 I mean, that’s an amazing world to live in, right?
0:05:44 Anywhere in the world.
0:05:51 So with Replit, the company that I started in 2016, the idea was like, okay, coding is difficult.
0:05:52 How do we solve coding?
0:05:58 And we built every part of the process, the hosting, the code editor.
0:06:02 The only missing thing was the, you know, the AI agent.
0:06:15 And so over the past two years, we’ve been working on this AI agent that you can just, you know, similar, since ChatGPT, you know, this revolution with Gen.AI, and you can just speak your ideas into existence.
0:06:17 I mean, this starts, you know, sounding religious.
0:06:23 Like, this is like the, you know, the gods, you know, the myths that humans have created.
0:06:28 They used to imagine a world where you can be everywhere and anywhere at once.
0:06:32 That’s sort of the internet, and you can also speak your ideas into existence.
0:06:35 And, you know, it’s still early.
0:06:41 I think Replit agent is a fantastic tool, and I think this technology is going to get so much more powerful.
0:06:44 Specifically, what is an AI agent?
0:06:52 I’ve got this graph, actually, here, which I don’t need to pass to any of you to be able to see the growth of AI agents.
0:06:54 But this graph is Google search trend data.
0:06:56 This also resembles our revenue, too.
0:06:58 Oh, okay, right.
0:07:00 The water has arrived.
0:07:00 Hello.
0:07:02 Thank you.
0:07:03 You can come on in.
0:07:04 Can I have a go, please?
0:07:06 Yes, it’s 3951.
0:07:07 Great.
0:07:09 Thank you so much.
0:07:09 Thank you.
0:07:09 Thank you.
0:07:13 This is like a supernatural kind of power.
0:07:15 You conjured water.
0:07:17 I conjured water from my mind.
0:07:17 Yeah.
0:07:19 And it’s shown up here with us.
0:07:20 And it clearly thinks we need a lot.
0:07:21 Yeah.
0:07:26 But just to define the term AI agent for someone that’s never heard the term before.
0:07:27 Yeah.
0:07:27 Yeah.
0:07:32 So I assume most of the audience now are familiar with ChatGPT, right?
0:07:34 You can go in and you can talk to an AI.
0:07:36 It can search the web for you.
0:07:38 It has a limited amount of tools.
0:07:43 Maybe it can call a calculator to do some additional subtraction for you.
0:07:44 But that’s about it.
0:07:46 It’s a request-response style.
0:07:54 Agents are when you give it a request, and they can work indefinitely until they achieve
0:07:57 a goal, or they run into an error and they need your help.
0:08:01 It’s an AI bot that has access to tools.
0:08:07 Those tools are access to a web browser, like Operator, access to a programming environment,
0:08:12 say like Replit, access to credit cards.
0:08:15 The more tools you give the agent, the more powerful it is.
0:08:19 Of course, there’s all these considerations around security and safety and all of that stuff.
0:08:26 But the most important thing is that AI agent will determine when it’s finished executing.
0:08:33 Today, AI agents can run for anywhere between 30 seconds to 30 minutes.
0:08:40 There’s a recent paper that came out that’s showing that every seven months, the number
0:08:43 of minutes that the agent can run for is doubling.
0:08:46 So we’re at like 30 minutes now.
0:08:48 In seven months, we’re going to be at an hour.
0:08:50 Then two hours.
0:08:52 Pretty soon, we’re going to be at days.
0:08:57 And at that point, AI agent is doing labor, is doing kind of human-like labor.
0:09:03 And actually, OpenAI’s new model, O3, beat the expectation.
0:09:09 So it sort of doubled coherence over long-horizon tasks in just three or four months.
0:09:16 So we’re in this massive, and I mean, this looks, this exponential graph, you know, that shows
0:09:18 you the massive trend we’re on.
0:09:22 Brett, give us a little bit of your background.
0:09:25 But also, I saw you writing some notes there.
0:09:28 There was a couple of words used there that I thought were quite interesting, especially
0:09:30 considering what I know about you.
0:09:31 The word God was used a few times.
0:09:36 Well, let me just say, I’m an evolutionary biologist.
0:09:51 One of the things that I believe is true about AI is that this is the first time that we have
0:09:58 built machines that have crossed the threshold from the highly complicated into the truly complex.
0:10:08 And I will say I’m listening to this conversation with a mixture of profound hope and dread,
0:10:18 because it seems to me that it is obvious that the potential good that can come from this technology
0:10:20 is effectively infinite.
0:10:23 But I would say that the harm is probably 10 times.
0:10:25 It’s a bigger infinity.
0:10:32 And the question of how we are going to get to a place where we can leverage the obvious power
0:10:36 that is here to do good and dodge the worst harms, I have no idea.
0:10:38 I know we’re not prepared.
0:10:44 So I hear you talking about agents, and I think that’s marvelous.
0:10:49 We can all use such a thing right away, and the more powerful it is, the better.
0:10:54 The idea of something that can solve problems on your behalf while you’re doing something else
0:10:55 is marvelous.
0:11:04 But of course, that is the precondition for absolute devastation to arise out of a miscommunication.
0:11:05 Right?
0:11:12 To have something acting autonomously to accomplish a goal, you damn well better understand what the
0:11:17 goal really is and how to pull back the reins in the event that it starts accomplishing
0:11:24 something that wasn’t the goal, the potential for abuse is also utterly profound.
0:11:35 You know, you can imagine, just pick your dark mirror fantasy dystopia where something has been
0:11:36 told to hunt you down until you’re dead.
0:11:41 And it sees that as a technical challenge.
0:11:50 So I don’t know quite how to balance a discussion about all of the things that can clearly come
0:11:52 from this that are utterly transcendent.
0:11:59 I mean, I do think it is not inappropriate to be invoking God or biblical metaphors here.
0:12:04 You know, you’re producing water seemingly from thin air.
0:12:06 I believe that does have an exact biblical parallel.
0:12:11 So any case, the power is here.
0:12:16 But so too is the need for cautionary tales, which we don’t have.
0:12:21 That’s the problem is that there is no body of myth that will warn us properly of this tool
0:12:29 because we’ve just crossed a threshold that is similar in its capacity to alter the world as
0:12:31 the invention of writing.
0:12:33 I really think that’s where we are.
0:12:39 We’re talking about something that is going to fundamentally alter what humans are with no
0:12:41 plan.
0:12:45 You know, writing alters the world slowly because the number of people who can do it is tiny at
0:12:51 first and remain so for thousands of years, this is changing things weekly.
0:12:56 And that’s an awful lot of power to just simply have dumped on a system that wasn’t well regulated
0:12:57 to begin with.
0:12:59 Dan.
0:13:01 Yeah, so I’m an entrepreneur.
0:13:04 I’ve been building businesses for the last 20 plus years.
0:13:08 I’m completely well positioned between the two of you here.
0:13:12 The excitement of the opportunity and the terror of what could go on.
0:13:21 There’s this image that I saw of New York City in 1900 and every single vehicle on the street
0:13:21 is a horse and cart.
0:13:28 And then 13 years later, the same photo from the same vantage point and every single vehicle
0:13:29 on the street is a car.
0:13:34 And in 13 years, all the horses had been removed and cars had been put in place.
0:13:41 And if you had have interviewed the horses in 1900 and said, how do you feel about your level
0:13:43 of confidence in the world?
0:13:48 The horses would have said, well, we’ve been part of humanity for, you know, horse in hoof,
0:13:52 hand in hoof for many, many years, for thousands of years.
0:13:54 There’s one horse for every three humans.
0:13:55 Like, how bad could it be?
0:13:57 You know, we’ll always have a special place.
0:14:00 We’ll always be part of society.
0:14:06 And little did the horses realize that that was not the case, that the horses were going to
0:14:09 be put out of business very, very rapidly.
0:14:14 And to reason through analogy, you know, there’s a lot of us who are now sitting there going,
0:14:17 hey, wait a second, does this make me a horse in 1900?
0:14:22 I think a lot of people don’t realize how massive these kind of technologies are going to have
0:14:22 as an impact.
0:14:26 You know, one minute we’re ordering water and that’s cute.
0:14:29 And the next minute, it can run for days.
0:14:33 And in your words, it doesn’t stop until it achieves its goal.
0:14:37 And it comes up with as many different ways as it could possibly come up with to achieve its goal.
0:14:41 And in your words, it better know what that goal is.
0:14:48 I’m thinking a lot, Amjad, as Daniel’s speaking about the vast application of AI agents and where are the bounds.
0:14:55 Because if this thing is going to get incrementally smarter, well, incrementally might be an understatement.
0:14:58 It’s going to get incredibly smart, incredibly quick.
0:15:03 And we’re seeing this AI race where all of these large language models are competing for intelligence with one another.
0:15:10 And if it’s able to traverse the internet and click things and order things and write things and create things,
0:15:14 and all of our lives run off the internet today, what can’t it do?
0:15:15 It’s going to be smarter than me.
0:15:17 No doubt.
0:15:18 It already is.
0:15:21 And it’s going to be able to take actions across the internet,
0:15:24 which is pretty much where most of my professional life operates.
0:15:25 It’s like how I build my businesses.
0:15:29 Even this podcast is an internet product at the end of the day.
0:15:32 Because you can create, we’ve done experiments now,
0:15:34 and I can show the graphs on my phone to make AI podcasts.
0:15:38 And they have, we’ve just managed to get it to have the same retention as the driver’s CEO.
0:15:40 Now, with the image generation model.
0:15:42 Retention as in viewer retention?
0:15:46 The percentage of people that get to one hour is the same now.
0:15:49 So we can make the video, we can publish it, we can script it.
0:15:51 You can synthesize my voice.
0:15:52 Sounds like me.
0:15:55 So what is it going to be able to do?
0:15:59 And can you give me the variety of use cases
0:16:02 that the average person might not have intuitively conceived?
0:16:02 Yeah.
0:16:05 So I tend to be an optimist.
0:16:10 And part of the reason is because I try to understand the limits of the technology.
0:16:13 What can it do is anything that we can,
0:16:16 any sort of set of human data that we can train it on.
0:16:22 What can it not do is anything that humans don’t know what to do,
0:16:24 because we don’t have the training data.
0:16:29 Of course, it’s super smart because it integrates massive amount of knowledge
0:16:31 that you wouldn’t be able to read, right?
0:16:32 It also much faster.
0:16:35 It can run through massive amount of computation
0:16:39 that, you know, your brain, you can’t even comprehend.
0:16:41 Because of all of that, they’re smart.
0:16:43 They can take actions.
0:16:47 But we know the limits of what they can do because we train them.
0:16:50 They’re able to simulate what a human can do.
0:16:54 So the reason you were able to order the water there
0:16:56 is because it was trained NSF data.
0:17:00 That includes clicking on DoorDash and ordering water.
0:17:04 I applaud your optimism, and I like the way you think about these puzzles,
0:17:11 but I think I see you making a mistake that we are about to discover is very commonplace.
0:17:15 So we have several different categories of systems.
0:17:16 We have simple systems.
0:17:19 We have complicated systems.
0:17:21 We have complex systems.
0:17:23 And then we have complex adaptive systems.
0:17:31 To most of us, a highly complicated system appears like a complex system.
0:17:32 We don’t understand the distinction.
0:17:37 Technologists often master highly complicated systems.
0:17:40 And they know, you know, for example, a computer.
0:17:43 It’s a perfectly predictable system inside.
0:17:45 It’s deterministic.
0:17:47 But to most of us, it functions.
0:17:51 It is mysterious enough that it feels like a complex system.
0:17:57 And if you’re in the position of having mastered highly complicated systems,
0:18:00 and you look at complex systems, and you think it’s a natural extension,
0:18:05 you fail to anticipate just how unpredictable they are.
0:18:12 So even if it is true that today there are limits to what these machines can do
0:18:19 based on their training data, I think the problem is to see what’s going to happen,
0:18:23 you really want to start thinking of this as the evolution of a new species
0:18:25 that will continue to evolve.
0:18:30 It will partially be shaped by what we ask it to do, the direction we lead it.
0:18:33 And it will partially be shaped by things we don’t understand.
0:18:37 So how does this computer that we have work?
0:18:41 Well, one of the things that it does is we plug them into each other.
0:18:47 Using language, it’s almost as if you’ve plugged an Ethernet cable in between human minds.
0:18:54 And that means that the cognitive potential exceeds the sum of the individual minds in question.
0:18:57 Your AIs are going to do that.
0:19:02 And that means that our ability to say what they are capable of does not come down to,
0:19:04 well, we didn’t train it on that data.
0:19:10 As they begin to interact, that feedback is going to take them to capabilities we don’t anticipate
0:19:13 and may not even recognize once they become present.
0:19:14 That’s one of my fears.
0:19:19 This is an evolving creature, and it’s not even an animal.
0:19:23 If it were an animal, you could say something about what the limits of that capability are.
0:19:32 But this is a new type of biological creature, and it will become capable of things that we don’t even have names for.
0:19:37 Even if it didn’t do that, even if it just stayed within the boundaries that you’re talking about,
0:19:40 you mentioned about it having median level intelligence.
0:19:46 Well, that by definition means 50% of the people on the planet are less intelligent than AI.
0:19:53 You know, to a degree, it’s almost as if we’ve just invented a new continent of remote workers.
0:19:55 There’s billions of them.
0:19:56 They’ve all got a master’s or a PhD.
0:19:58 They all speak all the languages.
0:20:07 Anything that you could call someone or ask someone over the internet to do, they’re there 24-7 and they’re 25 cents an hour, if that.
0:20:15 So, like, if that really happened, like, if we really did just discover that there were a billion extra people on the planet
0:20:21 who all had PhDs and were happy to work for almost free, that would have a massive disruptive impact on society.
0:20:26 Like, society would have to rethink how everyone lives and works and gets meaning.
0:20:30 So, like, and that’s if it just stays at a median level of intelligence.
0:20:32 Like, it’s pretty profound.
0:20:34 I still think it’s a tool.
0:20:39 It’s this power that is there to be harnessed by entrepreneurs.
0:20:43 You know, I think that the world is going to get disrupted, right?
0:20:51 And, you know, this post-war world that we created where you go through life, you go through 12 years of education,
0:20:56 you get to college, and you just check the boxes, you get a job.
0:20:59 We can already see the fractures of that.
0:21:03 It is, you know, this American dream is perhaps no longer there.
0:21:05 And so, I think the world has already changed.
0:21:08 And so, but, like, what are the opportunities?
0:21:09 Obviously, there are downsides.
0:21:14 The opportunities is for the first time, access to opportunity is equal.
0:21:17 And I do think there’s going to be more inequality.
0:21:24 And the reason for this inequality is because, actually, Steve Jobs, you know, made this analogy.
0:21:32 It’s like the best taxi driver in New York is, like, 20% better than the, you know, the average taxi driver.
0:21:35 The best programmer can be 10x better.
0:21:37 You know, we say the 10x engineer.
0:21:43 Now, the variance will be in the 1,000x, right?
0:21:49 Like, the best entrepreneur that can leverage those agents could be better.
0:21:58 It could be 1,000 times better than someone who doesn’t have the grit, doesn’t have the skill, doesn’t have the ambition, right?
0:21:59 So, that will create a world.
0:22:05 Yes, there’s massive access to opportunity, but there are people who will take, you know.
0:22:08 Seize it and then there’ll be people who don’t.
0:22:11 I imagine it almost like a marathon race.
0:22:13 And AI has two superpowers.
0:22:18 One superpower is to distract people, such as TikTok algorithm.
0:22:18 That’s right.
0:22:21 And the other superpower is to make you hyper-creative.
0:22:23 So, you become a hyper-consumer or a hyper-creator.
0:22:30 And in this marathon race, the vast majority of people have got their shoes tied together because AI is distracting them.
0:22:33 Some people are running traditional race.
0:22:35 Some people have got a bicycle.
0:22:37 And some people have got a Formula 1 vehicle.
0:22:45 And it’s going to be very confronting when the results go on the scoreboard and you say, oh, wait a second.
0:22:48 There’s a few people who finished this marathon in about 30 minutes.
0:22:53 And there’s a lot of us who finished in, like, 18 hours because we had our shoes tied together.
0:23:00 And I can’t understand if we’ve got equal opportunity why there’s so much disparity between how fast, you know.
0:23:07 And, you know, I’m using an analogy but this idea that, you know, someone like a lot of people are going to start earning a million dollars a month.
0:23:11 And a lot of people are going to say, hey, I can’t even get a job for $15 an hour.
0:23:14 There’s going to be this kind of interesting wedge.
0:23:25 Well, but I hear in what both of you are saying a kind of assumption that this will all be done on the up and up.
0:23:30 And I do want to just – I am not a doomer.
0:23:36 I agree that the doomers are likely incorrect, that their fears are misplaced.
0:23:40 But I do think we have a question of a related rates problem.
0:23:48 You know, I said the potential for good here is infinite and the potential for bad is 10 times, right?
0:24:06 And what I mean is there are lots of ways in which this obviously empowers people to do things that they were going to be otherwise stuck in the mundane process of learning to code and then figuring out how to make the code work and bring it to market and all of that.
0:24:09 And this solves a lot of those problems, and that’s obviously a good thing.
0:24:15 Really, what we should want is the wealth creation object as quickly as we can get there.
0:24:28 But the problem is, you know, as much as it – that hyper-creative individual is empowered to make wealth, the person who is interested in stealing may be even more empowered.
0:24:32 And I’m concerned about that at a pretty high level.
0:24:39 The abuse cases may outnumber the use cases, and we don’t have a plan for what to do about that.
0:24:45 Can I give you a quick, like, introduction here, like the optimistic view?
0:24:50 OpenAI invented – the first version of GPT came out in 2019.
0:24:53 2020 was GPT-2.
0:25:01 And so OpenAI, you know, now they get a lot of criticism and lawsuit from Elon Musk that they’re no longer open source, right?
0:25:01 Right.
0:25:02 They used to be.
0:25:20 The reason is, in GPT-2, they said, we are no longer going to open source this technology because it’s going to create opportunities for abuse such as, you know, influencing elections, you know, stealing, you know, grandma’s credit card and so on and so forth.
0:25:27 Wouldn’t you say, Brett, that it is kind of surprising how little abuse we’ve seen so far?
0:25:31 I don’t know how much abuse we’ve seen so far.
0:25:32 I don’t know how any of us do.
0:25:44 And I also – even the example that you suggest where ChatGPT is no longer open source to prevent abuse, I’m taking their word for it that that’s the motivation.
0:26:01 Where as a systems theorist, I would say, well, if you had a technology that was excellent at enhancing your capacity to wield power, then open sourcing it is a failure to capitalize on that.
0:26:15 And that the most remunerative use is to keep it private and then either sell the ability to manipulate elections to people who want to do so or sell the ability to have it kept off the table for people who don’t.
0:26:18 And I would expect that that’s probably what’s going on.
0:26:31 There’s no – if you have a technology as transformative as this, giving it away for free is counterintuitive, which leaves those of us in the public more or less at the mercy of the people who have it.
0:26:36 And I don’t see the reason for comfort there.
0:26:53 We are at the dawn of this radical transformation of humans that by its very nature as a truly complex and emergent innovation, nobody on earth can predict what’s going to happen.
0:26:55 We can – we’re on the event horizon of something.
0:27:02 And the problem is, you know, we can talk about the obvious disruptions, the job disruption, and that’s going to be massive.
0:27:10 And does that lead some group of elites to decide, oh, well, suddenly we have a lot of useless eaters and what are we going to do about that?
0:27:13 Because that conversation tends to lead somewhere very dark very quickly.
0:27:22 But I think that’s just the beginning of the various ways in which this could go wrong without the Doomer scenarios coming into play.
0:27:28 This is an uncontrolled experiment in which all of humanity is downstream.
0:27:38 So I was trying to make the point that OpenAI has been sort of wrong about the sort of how big of a potential for harm it is.
0:27:46 Like, you know, I think we would have heard about it in the news, like the sort of how much harm it’s done.
0:27:48 Maybe, you know, some of it is working in the shadows.
0:27:59 But, like, the few incidents that we’ve heard about where, you know, the cause of LLMs, large language models, the technology that’s powering ChatGPT, has been huge headliners.
0:28:10 Like, New York Times talked about this kid that was, you know, perhaps goaded by some kind of chat software that, you know, helps teenagers to be less lonely into suicide, which is tragic.
0:28:16 And, obviously, these are the kind of safety and abuse issues that we want to worry about.
0:28:19 But these are kind of these isolated incidents.
0:28:23 And we do have open source large language models.
0:28:25 Obviously, the thing that everyone talks about is DeepSeq.
0:28:28 DeepSeq is coming from China.
0:28:30 So what is DeepSeq’s incentive?
0:28:36 You know, perhaps the incentive is to destroy the AI industry in the U.S.
0:28:42 You know, when they released DeepSeq, you know, the market tanked, the market for NVIDIA, the market for AI, and all of that.
0:28:44 But there is an incentive to open source.
0:28:46 Meta is open sourcing LLAMA.
0:28:49 LLAMA is another AI similar to ChatGPT.
0:28:57 The reason they’re open sourcing LLAMA, and Zuckerberg just says that out loud, is basically they don’t want to be beholden to open AI.
0:29:00 They don’t sell AI as a service.
0:29:02 They use it to build products.
0:29:06 And there’s this concept in business called commoditize your complement.
0:29:13 Because you need AI as a technology to run your service, the best strategy to do is to open source it.
0:29:20 So these market forces are going to create conditions that I think are actually beneficial.
0:29:22 So I’ll give you a few examples.
0:29:29 One is, first of all, the AI companies are motivated to create AI that is safe so that they can sell it.
0:29:38 Second, there are security companies investing in AIs that allows them to protect from the sort of malicious acting of AI.
0:29:40 And so you have the free market.
0:29:41 And we’ve always had that, you know.
0:29:50 But generally, as humanity, we’ve been able to leverage the same technology to protect against the sort of abuse.
0:29:53 So I don’t really understand this.
0:30:02 And maybe this is actually, this is the exact discussion that you would expect between somebody at the frontier of the highly complicated, staring at a complex system,
0:30:08 and a biologist who comes from the land of the complex and is looking back at highly complicated systems.
0:30:13 In game theory, we have something called a collective action problem.
0:30:26 And in the market that you’re describing, an individual company has no capacity to hold back the abuses of AI.
0:30:28 The most you can do is not participate in them.
0:30:34 You can’t stop other people from programming LLMs in some dangerous way.
0:30:40 And you can limit your own ability to earn based on your own limitations of what you’re willing to do.
0:30:44 And then effectively what happens is the technology gets invented anyway.
0:30:47 It’s just that the dollars end up in somebody else’s pocket.
0:30:54 So the incentive is not to restrain yourself so that you can at least compete and participate in the market that’s going to be opened.
0:31:02 And so the number of ways in which you can abuse this technology, let’s take a couple.
0:31:18 What is to stop somebody from training LLMs on an individual’s creative output and then creating an LLM that can outcompete that individual,
0:31:23 can effectively not only produce what they would naturally produce over the course of a lifetime,
0:31:28 but can extrapolate from it and can even hybridize it with the insights of other people.
0:31:37 So that effectively those who have the LLM can train it on the creativity of others, not cut them in on the use of that insight.
0:31:46 You can effectively end up putting yourself out of business by putting your creative ideas in the world where they get sucked up as training data for future LLMs.
0:31:50 That is unscrupulous, but it’s effectively guaranteed.
0:31:51 In fact, it’s already happened.
0:31:53 So that’s a problem.
0:32:04 And likewise, what would stop somebody from interacting with an individual and training an LLM to become like a personalized con artist,
0:32:06 something that would play exactly to your blind spots?
0:32:07 Well, that does happen.
0:32:08 That is starting to happen.
0:32:16 People get phone calls and it sounds like their daughter and I’ve lost my phone and I’m borrowing a friend’s phone and all of that sort of stuff.
0:32:20 What’s interesting is that I think you make a really good point.
0:32:23 I worry about the impact on society.
0:32:33 And yet when I look at every single individual who uses AI regularly, it almost has nothing but profoundly positive impact on their life.
0:32:48 I look at people like I was just spending some time with my parents-in-law who are in their 70s and early 80s and they use AI regularly for all sorts of things that they find incredibly valuable and that improves the quality of their life.
0:32:58 I personally did an M&A, a mergers and acquisitions deal where I bought a company last year and the AI was so powerful at helping that process.
0:33:07 The conversations were transcribed and they were turned into letters of intent and then press releases and legal documents.
0:33:17 And we probably shaved $100,000 worth of costs and we sped up the whole process and it was pretty magical to see how it could happen.
0:33:23 With that said, you know, there’s all of these like, well, $100,000 worth of lawyers didn’t get paid, right?
0:33:29 Well, what I want to know, yeah, I can all agree that’s all right.
0:33:42 But if we look back at the invention of the cell phone or the invention of the social media platforms, there would be every reason to have exactly the same perspective, right?
0:33:55 I remember the idea that suddenly the process that used to afflict people where you would just lose touch with most of the people who had been important to you, that was not something that needed to happen anymore.
0:34:04 You could just retain them permanently as a part of a diffuse social grouping that just simply grew and value was added.
0:34:13 There’s no end to how much good that did, but what it did to us was profound and not evident in the first chapter.
0:34:27 Say the same thing about the cell phones and the dopamine traps and the way this has disconnected us from each other, the way it has disconnected us from nature, the way it has altered the very patterns with which we think.
0:34:32 It has altered every classroom.
0:34:40 And those things, I think, are going to turn out to have been sort of minor foreshadowings of the disruption that AI will produce.
0:34:42 So I agree with you.
0:34:46 Today, the amount you can do with AI is a tremendous amount of good.
0:34:47 There’s a little bit of harm.
0:34:48 Maybe that’s something we need to worry about.
0:35:01 But as this develops, as we get to peer over the edge of this cliff that we’re headed to, I think we’re going to discover that we can’t yet detect the nature of the alteration that’s coming.
0:35:11 I just wanted to add some context to that because, Amjad, I saw the interview you did in a newsletter in 2023 where you said, I wouldn’t prepare for AGI in the same way that I wouldn’t prepare for the end of days.
0:35:20 It’s effectively the end of days if the vision of AGI that some of these companies have comes to bear because it’s called a singularity moment because you can’t really predict what happens after that.
0:35:23 And so, like, how would you even prepare for that?
0:35:36 And you want to prepare for the more likely world and that world that you can actually predict is a world where, yes, there’s like a massive improvements of technology and there’s like insane compounding effects of technology and it’s pretty hard to keep up.
0:35:44 From that, it appeared that in 2023, you were saying a similar thing to Brett in terms of we can’t see around the corner here because it is a singularity.
0:35:49 So you also used AGI, Artificial General Intelligence.
0:35:52 It’d be interesting to know what your definition of AGI is so that.
0:35:52 Yeah.
0:36:18 So what I was saying there is, even if I’m wrong, that you can actually create a unbounded, seemingly conscious artificial intelligence that can entirely replace humans and can act autonomously in a way that even humans can’t act and can’t coordinate across different AIs, different data centers to take over the world.
0:36:31 So the definition of AGI is artificial general intelligence, meaning that AI can acquire new skills efficiently in the same way that humans can acquire skills.
0:36:33 Right now, AIs don’t acquire skills efficiently.
0:36:40 You know, they acquire a massive amount of energy and compute, entire data center of compute to acquire these skills.
0:36:46 And I think there’s, again, I think there’s a limit on how general intelligence can get.
0:36:54 I think for most of the time, it will be lagging in terms of what humans are capable of doing.
0:36:59 The singularity is based on this concept of intelligence explosion.
0:37:13 So once you create an AGI, once you create an artificial general intelligence, that intelligence will be able to modify its own source code and create the next version that is much more intelligent.
0:37:19 And the next version creates the next version and the next, you know, for infinity, right?
0:37:20 Within a week.
0:37:21 Within a week.
0:37:23 Perhaps within milliseconds at some point, right?
0:37:28 Because it might invent new computing substrate and all of that.
0:37:30 Perhaps it will use quantum computing.
0:37:39 And so then you have this intelligence explosion in a way that is impossible to predict how the world is going to be.
0:37:45 And what I’m saying is, this is sort of like an end of time story.
0:37:47 Like, how would you even prepare for that?
0:37:54 So if that’s coming, like, why would I spend my time preparing for, I think it’s unlikely to happen.
0:37:56 Can’t see around the corner.
0:37:59 Yeah, but I’d rather prepare what I was saying there.
0:38:11 I’d rather prepare for the more likely world in which we have access to tremendous power, but the world is not ending, and humans are still important.
0:38:16 I don’t know why you say more likely.
0:38:19 I mean, I think the structure of your argument is sound.
0:38:24 You would prepare for the world that might happen for which you can prepare.
0:38:29 There’s literally no point in trying to prepare for a world you can’t predict at all.
0:38:34 The only thing you can do is just sort of upgrade your own skills and pay attention.
0:38:50 But if I have one message for the technologists, it’s that your confidence about what this can and cannot do is misplaced because you have, without noticing, stepped into the realm of the truly complex.
0:38:58 In the truly complex, your confidence should drop to near zero that you know what’s going on.
0:38:59 Are these things conscious?
0:39:01 I don’t know.
0:39:02 But will they be?
0:39:07 Highly likely they will become conscious and that we will not have a test to tell us whether that has happened.
0:39:18 Elon Musk predicts that by 2029, we will have AI with us, AGI, that surpasses the combined intelligence of all humans.
0:39:32 And Sam Altman actually wrote a blog three months ago that I read where he said, we are confident now, Sam Altman being the founder of Open Hour, which created ChatGPT, we are confident now that we know how to build AGI as we have traditionally understood it.
0:39:53 When I put these things together, I go back to the central question of what role do humans have in this sort of professional output and GDP creation if it’s smarter than all humans combined, if Elon Musk is correct there, and it’s able to take actions across the internet and continue to learn.
0:39:57 This is like a central question that I’m hoping I can answer today, which is like, where do we go?
0:39:59 Yeah.
0:40:02 I mean, in my vision of the world, we’re in the creative seat.
0:40:11 We’re sitting there where we are controlling swarms of intelligent being to do our job.
0:40:16 You know, the way you run your business, for example, you’re sitting at a computer, you have an hour to work.
0:40:25 And you’re going to launch like a thousand SDR, you know, sales, you know, representative to go like grab as many leads as possible.
0:40:30 And you’re generating a new update on Replit for your website here.
0:40:41 And then on this side, you’re actually, you have an AI that’s crunching data about your existing business to figure out how to improve it.
0:40:44 And then these AIs are kind of somehow all coordinating together.
0:40:48 And I am trying to privilege the human.
0:40:52 Like, this is my mission is to build tools for people.
0:40:55 I’m not building tools for agents.
0:40:56 And agents are a tool.
0:41:05 And so ultimately, not only do I think that humans have a privileged position in the world and in the universe,
0:41:08 we don’t know where consciousness is coming from.
0:41:11 We don’t really have the science to explain it.
0:41:14 I think humans are special.
0:41:19 That’s one side is my belief that humans are special in the world.
0:41:25 And another side, which I understand that the technology today, and I think for the foreseeable future,
0:41:29 is going to be a function of us training data.
0:41:34 So there was this whole idea of like, what if ChatGPT generates pathogens?
0:41:36 Well, have you trained it on pathogens?
0:41:38 They were doing that kind of stuff in Wuhan, no?
0:41:44 I mean, a lot of the biotech companies are essentially using artificial intelligence.
0:41:48 Like, I can think of Abselera, I think it’s Abselera, in Canada.
0:41:56 Their whole business is using AI to create new vaccines, using artificial intelligence and bigger data sets than we’ve never had before.
0:42:00 And I know because I was very close to one of the founders of people involved in Abselera.
0:42:02 So that work is going on anyway.
0:42:07 And if we think about Wuhan, that’s, I mean, it’s quite probably well known now that it came out of a lab and people working in a lab.
0:42:11 And in that scenario, that had a huge impact and shut down the world.
0:42:19 What I’m, the central question I’d love to answer before I throw it back open to the room is, what jobs, because I know that you have this perspective,
0:42:25 what jobs are going to be made redundant in a world where I am sat here as a CEO with a thousand AI agents?
0:42:30 I was thinking of all the names of the people in my company who are currently doing those jobs.
0:42:35 I was thinking about my CFO when you talked about processing business data, my graphic designers, my video editors, et cetera.
0:42:38 So what jobs are going to be impacted?
0:42:39 Yeah, all of those.
0:42:41 So I think-
0:42:41 And what do they do?
0:42:44 You know, maybe this is useful for the audience.
0:42:51 I think if your job is as routine as it comes, your job is gone in the next couple of years.
0:43:05 So meaning if you, in those jobs, for example, quality assurance jobs, data entry jobs, you’re sitting in front of a computer and you’re supposed to click and type things in a certain order.
0:43:12 Operator and those technologies are coming to the market really quickly and those are going to displace a lot of labor.
0:43:13 Accountants?
0:43:14 Accountants.
0:43:14 Lawyers.
0:43:15 Yes.
0:43:23 I mean, I’ve just pulled a ligament in my foot and they did an MRI scan and I had to wait a couple of days for someone to look at the MRI scan and tell me what it meant.
0:43:24 Yeah.
0:43:25 I’m guessing that’s gone.
0:43:26 Yeah.
0:43:31 I think the healthcare ecosystem is hard to predict because of regulation.
0:43:35 And again, there’s so many limiting factors on how this technology can permeate.
0:43:40 It’s the economy because of regulations and people’s willingness to take it.
0:43:47 But, you know, things, unregulated jobs that are purely text in, text out.
0:43:53 If your job, you know, you get a message and you produce some kind of artifact that’s like probably text or images.
0:43:56 That job is at risk.
0:44:01 So just to give you some stats here as well, about 50% of Americans who have a college degree currently use AI.
0:44:06 The stats are significantly lower for Americans without a college degree.
0:44:13 So you can see how a splinter might emerge there and that crack will widen because people like us at this table are all messing around with it.
0:44:17 But my mum and dad in Plymouth in the southwest, rural England, haven’t got it.
0:44:18 Like they just figured out iPhones.
0:44:20 So like I got them an iPhone and now they’re like texting me back.
0:44:22 AI is a million miles away.
0:44:26 And if I start running off with my AGI and my agents, that gap is going to widen.
0:44:30 Women are disproportionately affected by automation, which is what you were talking about there.
0:44:37 With about 80% of working women in an at-risk job compared to just over 50% of men, according to the Harvard Business Review.
0:44:47 And jobs requiring only a high school diploma have an automation risk of 80%, while those requiring a bachelor’s degree have an automation risk of just 20%.
0:44:51 So we can see again how this will cause a sort of inequality.
0:45:00 It’s also a huge risk with business process outsourcing, which is essentially Western countries sending jobs to India, to the Philippines.
0:45:08 Like at the moment, millions of people have been lifted out of poverty through the ability to do those kind of business process outsourcing jobs.
0:45:09 And those are all going to go.
0:45:12 But they’re going to have 1,000 employees.
0:45:17 But also, these people are actually already transitioning to training AIs.
0:45:21 So there’s going to be a massive industry around training AIs.
0:45:22 Until they’re trained.
0:45:24 Well, no.
0:45:26 You have to continuously acquire new skills.
0:45:27 And this is what I’m talking about.
0:45:31 This is, again, if AI is a function of its data, then you need increasingly more data.
0:45:33 And by the way, we ran out of internet data.
0:45:40 I was actually thinking, interestingly, that this might not be great for the United States or the UK, the Western world, because it is going to be a leveler.
0:45:48 When our kid in India doesn’t need a Silicon Valley office and $7 million in investment to throw up a software company, basically.
0:45:48 Yeah.
0:45:54 My belief is that – so I have a more broad definition of AGI and the singularity.
0:46:03 And for me, AGI is do we have artificial general intelligence in terms of, generally speaking, can AI just do stuff that humans used to be able to do?
0:46:05 And we’ve already crossed that point.
0:46:07 We have this general intelligence that we can now all access.
0:46:11 And 800 million people a week are now using ChatGPT.
0:46:14 It’s exploded in the last three months.
0:46:22 And then, to me, a singularity, when the first tractor went out onto a farm, for me, that was a singularity moment.
0:46:26 Because everyone who worked in farming – it used to take 100 people to plough a field.
0:46:32 And now a tractor comes along and two guys with the tractor can now plough the field in just as much time.
0:46:35 And now 98 people out of 100 are completely out of a job.
0:46:39 We also always underestimate a technology.
0:46:47 If it does go on to change history, when you look back through cars, horses, planes, the Wright brothers just thought of a plane as being something the army could use.
0:46:49 We had no idea of the application.
0:46:55 So someone said to me recently, they said, when it does change the world, we underestimate the impact that it will change the world.
0:47:01 And I see people now, with their estimations of AI and AI agents, already incredibly optimistic.
0:47:06 And so if history holds here, we are undershooting the impact it’s going to have.
0:47:12 And I think this is the first time in my life where the industrial revolution analogies seem to fall a little bit short.
0:47:18 Because we’ve never seen intelligence – that’s like you could – I could think of this as a – I’m not an intelligent person on this.
0:47:21 But I could see that as like the disruption of muscles.
0:47:24 Whereas this is the disruption of intelligence.
0:47:35 That’s exactly the thing, is that what makes human beings special is our cognitive capacity and very specifically our ability to plug our minds into each other.
0:47:40 So that the sum is – or the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.
0:47:42 That’s what makes human cognition special.
0:47:55 And what we are doing is we are creating a – something that can technologically surpass it without any of the preconditions that make that a safe process.
0:47:58 So, yes, we’ve revolutionized the world how many different times.
0:47:59 It’s innumerable.
0:48:03 But, you know, we’ve made farming vastly more efficient.
0:48:10 That’s different than taking our core competency as a species and surpassing ourselves with the product of our labor.
0:48:13 I think your question is a good one.
0:48:15 Then what does become –
0:48:16 Well, we only have one thing left.
0:48:20 We have our muscles, which we got rid of in the industrial revolution.
0:48:23 And then we have our intellect, which is this digital revolution.
0:48:25 Now we’re left with emotions and agency.
0:48:33 So we essentially – the agency idea – I think we used to judge people on IQ and now IQ is the big leveler.
0:48:40 And now going forward for the next 10 years, we’re going to look at are you a high agency person or a low agency person?
0:48:44 Do you have the ability to get things done and coordinate agents?
0:48:49 Do you have the ability to start businesses or give orders to digital armies?
0:48:59 You know, and essentially these high agency people are going to thrive in this new world because they have this other thing that’s been bubbling under the surface, which is really interesting.
0:49:06 When you said agency is going to remain as an important thing, we’re sat here talking about AI agents.
0:49:12 And the crazy thing in a world of AI agents that have super intelligence is I can just tell my agent, listen, I’m going on holiday.
0:49:18 Please build me a SaaS company that spots a market opportunity, throw up the website, post it on my social media channel.
0:49:19 I’ll be in Hawaii.
0:49:27 And this new agentic world is stealing that too because now it can take action in the same way that I can browse the internet.
0:49:33 I can call Domino’s Pizza, speak to their agentic agent, organize my pizza to be there before I even wake up.
0:49:40 And in fact, predictability, you know, OpenAI now learns and Sam Altman said that they’ve expanded the memory feature.
0:49:43 So it knows every, it’s knowing more and more and more and more about me.
0:49:45 It’ll almost be able to predict what I want when I want it.
0:49:56 It’ll know Steve’s calendar, he’s arriving at the studio, make sure his cadence is on the side, make sure his iPad has the brief on it, do the brief, do the research for me and everything else.
0:49:58 So I’ll remember Brett’s birthday.
0:49:59 So when I arrive, there’ll be something.
0:50:02 In fact, it’s removing my need for any agency.
0:50:09 And, you know, again, I don’t know how to make this point so that it occurs to people what I’m really suggesting.
0:50:13 But today, maybe it’s not conscious.
0:50:16 But, well, let me put it to you this way.
0:50:22 If you’re conscious, you started out as a child that wasn’t.
0:50:28 And although this may not fully encapsulate it, you are effectively an LLM, right?
0:50:33 You go from an unconscious infant to a highly conscious adult.
0:50:44 And the process by which you do that has a lot to do with being trained effectively on words and other things in an environment in exactly the way that we now train these AIs.
0:50:52 So the idea that we can take consciousness off the table, it won’t be there until we figure out how to program it in and we’re safe because we don’t know how consciousness works.
0:50:54 I take the opposite lesson.
0:50:58 We’ve created the exact thing that will produce that phenomenon.
0:51:03 And then we can have philosophers debate whether it’s real consciousness or it just behaves exactly as if it were.
0:51:05 And the answer is those aren’t different.
0:51:05 Doesn’t matter.
0:51:08 And the same thing is true for agency.
0:51:15 You know, especially if you’ve created an environment in which these AIs are de facto competitors.
0:51:21 What you’re effectively doing is creating an evolutionary environment in which they will evolve to fill whatever niches are there.
0:51:23 And we didn’t spell out the niches.
0:51:31 So I have the sense we have created something that truly is going to function like a new kind of life.
0:51:35 And it’s especially troubling because it speaks our language.
0:51:39 So that leads us to believe it’s more like us than it is.
0:51:41 And it’s actually potentially quite different.
0:51:44 By the way, he’s the optimist here.
0:51:51 Like, he’s so optimistic about LLMs and how they’re going to evolve.
0:51:53 Yes, it’s amazing.
0:51:54 It’s amazing technology.
0:51:58 Like, I think it raised global IQ, right?
0:51:59 Like, 800 million people.
0:52:04 Like, 800 million people are that much more intelligent and emotionally intelligent as well.
0:52:10 Like, I know people who previously were very coarse and they kind of robbed people the wrong way.
0:52:14 They would say things in a not-so-polite way.
0:52:23 And then suddenly they started putting their, you know, what they’re saying through ChatGPT in order to kind of make it kinder and nicer.
0:52:24 And they’re more liked now.
0:52:31 And so not only is it making us more intelligent, but also it allows us to be the best version of ourselves.
0:52:35 And the scenario that you’re talking about, I don’t think, I don’t know what’s wrong with that.
0:52:40 Like, you know, I would want less agency in certain places.
0:52:46 Like, I would want something to help me not, you know, open up a peanut butter jar at night.
0:52:48 Right?
0:52:59 You know, there are places in my life where I need more control and I would rather cede it to some kind of entity that could help me make better choices.
0:53:14 I mean, unfortunately, even if there is some small group of elites that are able to go to Hawaii while something else does the mundane details of their business building.
0:53:25 We are rather soon going to be faced with a world that has billions of people who do not have the skills to leverage AI.
0:53:29 Some of them will be necessary for a time.
0:53:32 You’re going to need plumbers.
0:53:53 But this is also not a long-term solution because not only are there not enough of those jobs, but, of course, we have humanoid robots that, once imbued with AI capacity, will also be able to take, you know, they’ll be able to crawl under your house into the crawl space and fix your plumbing.
0:54:09 So what typically happens when you have a massive economic contraction that arises from the fact that a huge number of people are out of work is that the elites start looking at those people and thinking, well, we don’t really need them anyway.
0:54:20 And so the idea that this AI disruption doesn’t lead us to some very human catastrophe, I think, is overly optimistic and that we need to start preparing right now.
0:54:27 What are the rights of a person who has had whatever it is that they’ve invested in completely erased from the list of needs?
0:54:31 Is that person responsible for not having anticipated AI coming?
0:54:36 And is it their problem that they are now starving and they’re being eyed by others as, you know, a useless eater?
0:54:37 I don’t think so.
0:54:47 How is it different than when the, what’s it called, the looming machine came and the textile workers, you know, the result of the Luddite sort of revolution?
0:54:57 How is it different than any time in history when technology automated a lot of people out of jobs?
0:55:00 I would say scale and speed, that’s how it’s different.
0:55:14 And the scale and speed is going to result in an unprecedented catastrophe because the rate at which people are going to be simultaneously sidelined, not just in one industry but across every industry, is just simply new.
0:55:15 And it also did actually happen.
0:55:33 There was a, for the first 50 years of industrialisation from like late 1700s to early 1800s, you actually, the Charles Dickens novels are essentially people coming from the farms who were displaced, arriving in cities, kids living on the streets.
0:55:39 And the British decided to pick everyone up and send them over to Australia, which is where I came from.
0:55:46 And, you know, there were this, there was this massive issue of displacement.
0:56:00 I think we’re going to go into a high-velocity economy where rather than this long arc of career that lasts 45 years, we’re going to have these very fast careers that last 10 months to 36 months.
0:56:08 And you invent something, you take it to market, you put together a team of five to 10 people who work together, you then get disrupted.
0:56:10 Can I mention a story here?
0:56:15 There’s an entrepreneur that uses Replit in a similar way.
0:56:16 His name is Billy Howell.
0:56:19 You can find him on YouTube, on the internet.
0:56:26 He would go to Upwork and he would find what people are asking for, different requests for certain apps, technologies.
0:56:35 Then he would take what they’re asking for, put it into Replit, make it an application, call them, tell them, I already have your application.
0:56:37 Would you pay $10,000 for it?
0:56:41 And so that’s sort of an arbitrage opportunity that’s there right now.
0:56:42 That’s not arbitrage, it’s theft.
0:56:44 How is it, what is it?
0:56:45 How is it theft?
0:56:53 You have somebody who has an idea that can be brought to market and somebody else is cryptically detecting it and then selling back their own idea to them.
0:56:56 Well, they’re paying them to do that.
0:56:59 They’re saying, I will give you $500 if someone makes this for me.
0:57:00 Right.
0:57:09 But this is what I more or less think is going to happen across the whole economy is that, yes, from this perspective, we can see that everybody is suddenly empowered to build a great business.
0:57:14 Well, what do we think about the folks who are going to be displaced from the top?
0:57:25 What are they going to think about all these people building all of these highly competitive businesses and are they going to find a way to do, you know, what venture capital has done or what record producers have done?
0:57:38 What they’re going to do is they’re going to take their superior position at the top and they are going to take most of the wealth that is produced by all of these people who have these ideas that in a proper market would actually create businesses for them.
0:57:48 I think that with this introduction of AI and AI agents, old value has moved.
0:57:52 And now it’s not going to be the case that the idea itself is the moat.
0:57:55 And it’s not going to be the case that resources are the moat.
0:57:58 So in such a scenario, you still have to figure out distribution.
0:58:00 You still have to have, for example, like an audience.
0:58:11 So if you’re a podcaster now, you have a million followers on Twitter, you’re in a prime position because you now have something that the guy with a great idea with no audience has, you have inbuilt distribution.
0:58:19 So I now think actually much of the game might be moving to like, yeah, it’s still about taste and idea, but also the moat is distribution.
0:58:30 Yeah, and speaking of adaptive systems, one of the adaptations that will happen is people will seek humans and will seek proof of humanity.
0:58:50 Oh, I agree that authenticity is going to become the coin of the realm and anything that can be faked or cheated is going to be devalued and things, you know, spontaneous jazz or, you know, comedy that is interactive enough that it couldn’t possibly have been generated with the aid of AI.
0:58:54 Those things are going to become prioritized, you know, spontaneous oratory rather than speeches.
0:58:57 That answers some of your questions.
0:59:04 No, it answers my question for the tiny number of people who are in a position to do those things.
0:59:09 Steven, you used the word moat, which I think is a really important word for entrepreneurs.
0:59:10 We like have to have a moat.
0:59:13 We think a lot about moats and it’s an industrial age.
0:59:16 A lot of people don’t even know what a moat, what you mean by moat.
0:59:17 It’s just the thing that’s…
0:59:20 I often think about this idea of what are the moats that are left.
0:59:26 So to define how I define a moat, you’ve got a castle and it’s got a, like a small circle of water around it.
0:59:32 And once upon a time, that circle of water defended the castle from attack and you can pull up the drawbridge so nobody can attack you very easily.
0:59:34 It’s a defense from something.
0:59:36 So it’s your, it’s your shield.
0:59:37 It’s your, your defense.
0:59:41 And once upon a time as an entrepreneur, you know, I’ve got a software company in San Francisco called Third Web.
0:59:43 And we raised almost $30 million.
0:59:46 We have a team of 50 great developers.
0:59:52 And much of our moat was, you can’t compete with us because you don’t have the 50 developers and the $30 million in the bank.
0:59:55 How much of that $30 million went to coding?
0:59:56 The vast majority of it.
0:59:57 I mean, what else are we going to do?
0:59:58 What else?
0:59:59 This is a good thing.
1:00:01 I think moats are a bad thing.
1:00:04 Let me make the argument there.
1:00:05 So everyone’s looking for moats.
1:00:11 You know, for example, like one of the more significant moats is network effects.
1:00:21 You know, so you can’t compete with Facebook or Twitter because it, to move people from Facebook or Twitter, you need to, it’s the collective action problem.
1:00:28 You need to move them all at once because if one of them moves, then it’s, the network is not valuable.
1:00:29 They’ll go back.
1:00:30 So you have this chicken and egg problem.
1:00:36 Let’s say that we have a more decentralized way of doing social networks.
1:00:42 That will remove the power of Twitter to kind of censor.
1:00:45 And I think you’re at the other end of censorship, right?
1:00:52 And so part of my optimism about humanity is that generally there’s self-correction.
1:00:54 Democracy is a self-correcting system.
1:00:57 Free markets are largely self-correcting systems.
1:01:01 There are obvious problems with free markets that we can discuss.
1:01:06 But take health, you know, there is obesity epidemic.
1:01:22 This period of time when companies, you know, ran loose kind of making this sugary, salty, fatty kind of snacks and everyone gorged on them and everyone got very, you know, unhealthy.
1:01:24 And now you have Whole Foods everywhere.
1:01:27 Today, people in Silicon Valley, they don’t go to bars at all.
1:01:29 They go to running clubs.
1:01:30 That’s how you meet.
1:01:32 That’s how you go find a date.
1:01:33 You go to running clubs.
1:01:38 And so there was a shift that happened because there was a reaction.
1:01:41 Obviously, cigarettes is another example.
1:01:44 You know, you were talking about phones and our addiction to phones.
1:01:46 And I see a shift right now.
1:01:53 Like, in my friend circle, like, people who are constantly kind of on their phones is already kind of frowned upon.
1:01:57 And they don’t want to hang out with you because you’re constantly staring on your phone.
1:01:58 So there’s always these reactions.
1:02:03 But the problem is you reference self-correction.
1:02:07 And I agree that there’s actually an automatic feature of the universe in which the self-correction happens.
1:02:12 You can’t have a positive feedback that isn’t reined in by some outer negative feedback.
1:02:25 But the corrections, the list of corrections involves things like you point to where people become enlightened and they realize that they’re doing themselves harm with either the sugar that they’re consuming or the dopamine traps on their phone.
1:02:27 And they get better.
1:02:35 But also on the list of corrective patterns are genocide and war and, you know, parasitism.
1:02:41 And the problem is these things are destructive of wealth.
1:02:50 And so you allude to the superior fact of an open market without moats.
1:02:56 Presumably the benefit of that is that more wealth gets created because people aren’t kept from doing things that are productive.
1:02:57 I see that.
1:03:03 But then what is the product of all of this new wealth that is going to be generated by a world empowered by AI?
1:03:12 Does it end up so highly concentrated that you have a tiny number of ultra elites and a huge number of people who are utterly dependent on them?
1:03:14 What becomes of those people?
1:03:21 The learning process, the self-correction process, goes through harm in order to get to that more enlightened solution.
1:03:31 There’s nothing that protects us from the harm phase being so apocalyptically terrible that, you know, we get to the other side of it and we say, well, that was a hell of a correction.
1:03:33 Or maybe there’s nobody there to even say that.
1:03:34 Those are also on the table.
1:03:40 It reminds me of a mousetrap where you see the cheese and we’re going, oh, my God, my grandmother is going to be able to do some research.
1:03:41 And, oh, my God, my life is going to get easier.
1:03:45 So you head closer and closer to the cheese and then snap.
1:03:57 And historically, if we look at all of the last 10,000 years, it’s a very small number of elites who own absolutely everything and a very large number of serfs and peasants who have a subsistence living.
1:04:04 You know, if the elites are too greedy and they freeze out the peasants at too high a level and they try to use brutality.
1:04:05 Pitchforks.
1:04:05 Yeah.
1:04:07 Eventually, it comes back to haunt them.
1:04:13 And so what you get is a recognition that you need a system that does balance these things.
1:04:16 And, you know, the West has the best system that we’ve ever seen.
1:04:19 It’s one in which we agree on a level playing field.
1:04:20 We never achieve it.
1:04:22 But we agree that it’s a desirable thing.
1:04:25 And the closer we get to it, the more wealth we create.
1:04:45 But, again, if AI empowers those with ill intent at a higher rate that it empowers those who are wealth-creating and pro-social, we may be in for a massive regression in how fair the market that the West is.
1:04:48 Is that your top concern versus economic displacement?
1:04:51 I think they’re the same thing.
1:04:53 How are they the same thing?
1:04:57 Because the economic displacement is going to start.
1:05:03 I don’t know how many million people are going to be displaced from their jobs in the U.S.
1:05:08 Suddenly, we’re going to have a question about whether or not we have obligations to them.
1:05:09 You agree with that, don’t you?
1:05:10 Yes.
1:05:12 But, again, it’s no pain, no gain.
1:05:15 I mean, we’re going to go through a period of disruption.
1:05:21 And I think at the other end, the old sort of oppressive systems will be broken.
1:05:24 And we’re going to create perhaps a fair world.
1:05:26 But it’s going to have its own problems.
1:05:29 And what’s the scale of that disruption in your estimation?
1:05:35 It’s hard to say because, you know, there’s this concept of limiting factors.
1:05:38 Like, you know, there is regulation.
1:05:41 There’s the appetite of people today.
1:05:47 For example, the health care system is very resistant to innovation because of regulation, you know?
1:05:48 And that’s a bad thing.
1:06:01 On the regulation point, it’s worth saying that when Trump came into power, he signed in a new law, which is called removing barriers to American leadership in AI, which revokes previous AI policies that were deemed to be restrictive.
1:06:05 And obviously, when you think about where the funding is going in AI, it’s going to two places.
1:06:08 It’s going to America, and it’s basically going to China.
1:06:10 That’s the vast majority of investment.
1:06:15 So with those two in competition, any regulation that restricts AI in any way is actually self-sabotage.
1:06:19 And this is, you know, I live in Europe some of the time.
1:06:30 And it’s already annoying to me that when Sam Altman and OpenAI released the O3 model, this new incredible model, it’s not in Europe because Europe has a regulation which prevents it from coming to Europe.
1:06:34 So we’re now at a competitive disadvantage, which Sam Altman’s spoken about.
1:06:43 And more broadly on this point of disruption, I was quite unnerved when I heard that Sam Altman’s other startup was called WorldCoin.
1:07:01 And WorldCoin was conceived with the goal of facilitating universal basic income, i.e., helping to create a system where people who don’t have money are given money by the government just for being alive to help them cover their basic food and housing needs.
1:07:13 Which suggests to me that the guy that has bought the biggest AI company in the world can see something that a lot of us can’t see, which is there’s going to need to be a system to just hand out money to people because they’re not going to be able to survive otherwise.
1:07:15 I fundamentally disagree with that.
1:07:16 Which part do you disagree with?
1:07:20 I disagree that, first of all, that humans would be happy with UBI.
1:07:29 I think that, you know, a core value of humans, and be curious about the evolutionary reasons, is we want to be useful.
1:07:36 It’s really important to know that a lot of the jobs that are at risk are the most high-status, highly-paid jobs in the world.
1:07:40 Let’s take the highest-paid job in America, which is an anesthesiologist.
1:07:44 This is the highest-paid job.
1:07:45 Highest-paid, salaried job.
1:07:46 Salaried job, yeah.
1:08:02 And the majority of that job is observing a patient, knowing which type of medication would work best with their body, giving them the exact right amount, monitoring the impact of that on the body, and then making slight adjustments.
1:08:06 The right technology and any nurse will be able to do that job.
1:08:23 And you might have one anesthesiologist on site supervising 10, 20, 30, 40 wards, and the technology is, you know, doing the job, but that one person is there just to kind of supervise if something went wrong or if there was an ethical dilemma.
1:08:24 What’s wrong with that?
1:08:26 I mean, if the precision is better with AI.
1:08:35 Oh, no, there’s nothing wrong with that except for the fact that a lot of people, hundreds of thousands of people, have spent their entire life training to be that.
1:08:40 They get an enormous amount of purpose and satisfaction about the fact that that’s their career, that’s their job.
1:08:41 They have mortgages.
1:08:42 They have houses.
1:08:43 They have status.
1:08:44 And that’s about to go away.
1:08:47 Well, if it’s highest-paid jobs, maybe you should start saving.
1:09:14 Well, I mean, but I hear you, but you’re talking about people who have done vital work, highly specialized work, and are therefore not in a great position to pivot based on the invention of a technology that they didn’t see coming because, frankly, I mean, in the abstract, maybe we all saw AI coming somewhere down the road.
1:09:19 But we did not know that it was going to suddenly dawn, and we do have to figure out what to do with those people.
1:09:27 It’s not their fault that they’ve suddenly become obsolete, and it’s inconceivable that people will accept this.
1:09:31 It is fundamentally incompatible with our nature.
1:09:43 We have to have things to strive for, and you can sustain life that way, but you cannot sustain a meaningful existence, and so it’s a short-term plan at best.
1:09:45 Let’s talk about meaning.
1:09:48 On that point of job displacement, this is already happening.
1:10:07 Klarna, CEO, who has been on this podcast before, a great guy, said to, on a blog post that they published on Klarna’s website, saying that they now have AI customer service agents handling 2.3 million chats per month, which is equal to having to hire 700 full-time people to do that.
1:10:14 So they’ve already been able to save on 700 customer service people by having AI agents to do that.
1:10:17 And they actually got rid of those 700 jobs, right?
1:10:19 I don’t have that information in front of me, but I’ll have a look.
1:10:23 I’ll throw it up on screen for anyone that wants context on that.
1:10:24 But that’s already happening.
1:10:26 This isn’t an anesthetologist or something.
1:10:29 And these aren’t high-paid people in every case.
1:10:30 We’ve done something similar, by the way.
1:10:36 Internally, we’ve replaced that function for 70%.
1:10:40 I mean, our company, we’re 65 people.
1:10:46 And we make millions per head.
1:10:49 Are you going to need to hire more people to get up to?
1:10:51 I think so, but we’re hiring slowly.
1:10:58 We’re using customer support AI, and that meant that we need less customer support.
1:11:01 We’re trying to leverage AI as much as possible.
1:11:07 Well, the person in HR at Replit writes software using Replit.
1:11:08 So I’ll give you an example.
1:11:12 She needed org charts software.
1:11:17 And she looked at a bunch of them, got a lot of demos, and they’re all very expensive.
1:11:20 And they’re missing the kind of features that she wants.
1:11:22 For example, she wanted, like, version control.
1:11:25 She wanted to know when something changed and to go back in history.
1:11:30 She went into Replit, and in three days, she got exactly the kind of software that she wants.
1:11:31 And what was the cost?
1:11:34 You know, perhaps $20, you know, something like that, $20, $30.
1:11:36 Once, right?
1:11:39 And how many employees in HR do we need?
1:11:40 Right now, we have two.
1:11:47 If they’re highly levered like that, maybe we do not need a 20 HR team.
1:11:54 On this point of meaning, I’ve heard so many billionaires in AI describe this as the age of abundance.
1:11:58 And I’m not necessarily sure if abundance is always a great thing.
1:12:10 Because, you know, when we look at mental health and we look at why, how people derive their meaning and their purpose in life, much of it is having something to strive towards and some struggle in a meaningful direction to you.
1:12:12 And this is maybe adjacent.
1:12:17 But when there was a study done, I think it was in Australia, where they looked at suicide letters.
1:12:24 And in the suicide letters, the sentiment of men in those suicide letters was they didn’t feel worthy.
1:12:26 They didn’t feel like they were worth it.
1:12:29 They didn’t feel like they were needed by their families.
1:12:33 And this is much of what caused their psychological state.
1:12:44 And I wonder in a world of abundance where we, you know, a lot of these AI billionaires are telling us that we’re going to have so much free time and we’re not going to need to work if there is at all going to be a crisis of meaning, a mental health problem.
1:12:46 I mean, there already is.
1:12:49 And it doesn’t require AI and it’s going to get worse.
1:13:01 I don’t know what to do about it because essentially as human beings, we are built, like all organisms, to find opportunity and figure out how to exploit it.
1:13:02 That’s what we do.
1:13:05 And the world you’re describing is really the opposite of that.
1:13:24 It’s one where you’re effectively having your biological needs at the physiological level satisfied and there isn’t an obvious place for your spare time, if that’s what you end up with, to be utilized in something that, you know, there’s no place to strive.
1:13:40 And I do imagine almost at best what would happen is you have people who are being sustained by a universal basic income and then parasitized, you know, whatever currency they have to spend.
1:13:48 Somebody will be targeting it and they will be targeting it with an AI augmented system that spots their defects of character.
1:13:57 I mean, again, we’re already living in this world, but it will be that much worse when the AI is figuring out, you know, what kind of porn to target you with specifically.
1:14:00 That’s a nightmare scenario.
1:14:15 And I do think it would be worth our time as a species to start considering if we are about to find ourselves in this situation and we find some way of dealing with the basic needs of the large number of people who are going to be sidelined.
1:14:27 What would a world have to look like in order for them to have real meaning, not pseudo meaning, not something that, you know, superficially, you know, a video game is not meaning, even if it feels very meaningful in the moment.
1:14:32 I think that would be a worthy investment for us to figure out how to produce it.
1:14:38 But frankly, I’m not expecting us to either have that conversation or get very far down that road.
1:14:44 I think it’s much more likely that we will squander the wealth dividend that will be produced by AI.
1:14:50 Interestingly, you also see in Western countries that when we get more abundance, we start having less kids.
1:14:56 And we’re already seeing this sort of population decline in the Western world, which is kind of scary.
1:14:58 And I think it’s often associated with affluence.
1:15:03 The more money someone makes, the less likely they are to want to have children, the more they try and protect their freedoms.
1:15:07 But also on this point of AI, relationships are hard.
1:15:13 You know, my girlfriend is happy sometimes and not happy other times.
1:15:17 And I have to, like, you know, go through that struggle with her of, like, working on the relationship.
1:15:19 Children are hard.
1:15:28 And if we are optimizing ourselves, and, you know, much of the reason that I sustain the struggle with my girlfriend is, I’m sure, from some evolutionary reason, because I want to reproduce.
1:15:29 And I want to have kin.
1:15:40 But if I didn’t have to deal with the struggle that comes with human relationships, romantic or platonic, there’s going to be a proportion of people that actually choose that outcome.
1:15:44 And I wonder what’s going to happen to birth rates in such a scenario, because we’re already struggling.
1:15:55 We’re already in a situation where we used to be having five children per woman in the 1950s to about two in 2021.
1:15:57 And we’re seeing a decline.
1:16:03 If you look at South Korea, their fertility rate has fallen to 0.72, the lowest recorded globally.
1:16:08 And if this trend continues, the country’s population could half by 2,100.
1:16:13 So, yeah, relationships, connections.
1:16:22 And also, I guess we’ve got to overlay that with the loneliness epidemic, which is they promised us social connection when social media came about.
1:16:25 When we got Wi-Fi connections, the promise was that we would become more connected.
1:16:38 But it’s so clear that because we spend so long alone, isolated, having our needs met by Uber Eats drivers and social media and TikTok and the internet, that we’re investing less in the very difficult thing of, like, going and making a friend.
1:16:40 And, like, going and finding a girlfriend.
1:16:42 Young people are having sex less than ever before.
1:16:51 Everything that is associated with the difficult job of making in-real-life connections seems to be falling away.
1:17:02 I’ll make the case that everything that we’ve discussed here, all the negative things around loneliness, around meaning, they’re already here.
1:17:07 And I don’t think blaming technology for all of it is the right thing.
1:17:17 Like, I think there are a lot of things that happened because of existing human, you know, impulses and motivations.
1:17:25 Well, I wanted to go back to where you started because I do think that this maybe is the fundamental question.
1:17:30 Why is it that we are already living in a world that is not making us happy?
1:17:32 And is that the responsibility of technology?
1:17:34 And I don’t think it’s exactly technology.
1:17:44 Human beings among our gifts are fundamentally technological, whether we’re talking about quantum computing or flintknapping an arrowhead.
1:17:57 What has happened to us that has created the growing, spreading, morphing dystopia is a process that Heather and I in our book,
1:18:00 A Hunter-Gatherer’s Guide to the 21st Century, call hypernovelty.
1:18:10 Hypernovelty is the fact of the rate of change outpacing our capacity to adapt to change.
1:18:17 And we are already well past the threshold here where the world that we are young in is not the world that we are adults in.
1:18:22 And that mismatch is making us sick across multiple different domains.
1:18:31 So the question that I ask is, is the change that you’re talking about going to reduce the rate of change?
1:18:39 In which case, we could build a world that would start meeting human needs, better open opportunities for pursuing meaningful work.
1:18:45 Or is it going to accelerate the rate of change, which is, in my opinion, guaranteed to make us worse off?
1:18:49 So if it was a one-time shift, right, AI is going to dawn.
1:18:51 It’s going to open all sorts of new opportunities.
1:18:53 There’s going to be a tremendous amount of disruption.
1:18:55 But from that, we’ll be able to build a world.
1:18:57 Is that world going to be stable?
1:19:01 Or is it going to be just, you know, one event horizon after the next?
1:19:09 If it’s the latter, then it effectively says what it does to the humans, which is it’s going to dismantle us.
1:19:14 When I look out at society, I go, okay, it’s having a negative impact.
1:19:20 When I look at individual use cases, it’s having a profoundly positive impact, including for me.
1:19:22 It’s having a very positive impact.
1:19:31 So it’s one of these things where I wonder, what is it that we need to teach people at school so that they understand the world that we’re going into?
1:19:46 Because one of the biggest issues that we’re having is that we’re sending kids to school with this blueprint, this template, that they’re going to have this long arc career that no longer exists, that essentially we’re treating them like learning LLMs.
1:19:49 And we’re saying, okay, we’re going to prompt you.
1:19:50 You’re going to give us the right answer.
1:19:56 You’re going to hallucinate it if possible and, you know, and then we go, okay, now go off into the world.
1:19:57 And they go, oh, but wait a second.
1:19:58 I don’t know how money works.
1:19:59 I don’t know how society works.
1:20:01 I don’t know how my brain works.
1:20:04 I don’t know how I’m meant to handle this novelty problem.
1:20:09 I’m not sure how to approach someone in a social situation and ask if they want to go on a date.
1:20:20 So all the important things that actually are the important milestones that people want to be able to hit and that technology can actually have an impact on, we get no use of manual.
1:20:31 So I think one of the biggest things that has to happen is we have to equip young people all through school to actually prepare them for the world that’s coming or the world that’s here.
1:20:37 Well, on the one hand, I think you outlined the problem very well.
1:20:45 Effectively, we have a model of what school is supposed to do that, you know, at best was sort of a match for the 50s or something like that.
1:20:51 And it woefully misses the mark with respect to preparing people for the world they actually face.
1:21:01 If we were going to prepare them, I would argue that the only toolkit worth having at the moment is a highly general toolkit.
1:21:09 The capacity to think on your feet and pivot as things change is the only game in town with respect to our ability to prepare you in advance.
1:21:20 Maybe the other auxiliary component to that would be teaching you what we know, which is frankly not enough, about how to live a healthy life, right?
1:21:34 If we could induce people into the kinds of habits of behavior and consumption of food and then train them to think on their feet, they might have a chance in the world that’s coming.
1:21:40 But the fly in the ointment is we don’t have the teachers to do it.
1:21:41 We don’t have people who know.
1:21:52 And that is the question is could the AI actually be utilized in this manner to actually induce the right habits of mind for people to live in that world?
1:21:55 I spend a lot of time in education technology.
1:22:04 One thing that is, as we say on the internet, a black pill about education in general, education intervention, is there’s a lot of data.
1:22:12 That shows that there are very little interventions you can make in education to generate better outcomes.
1:22:24 And so there’s been a lot of experiment around pedagogy, around how to configure the classroom that have resulted in very marginal improvements.
1:22:34 There’s only one intervention, and this has been reproduced many times, that creates two sigma, two standard deviation positive outcomes in education.
1:22:39 Meaning you’re better than 99% of everyone else.
1:22:42 And that is one-on-one tutoring.
1:22:43 I thought so.
1:22:45 I was going to say smaller classrooms and personalization.
1:22:46 One-on-one tutoring, yeah.
1:22:54 And by the way, if you look, someone also did a survey of all the geniuses, the understanders of the world, and found that they all had one-on-one tutoring.
1:22:58 They all had someone in their lives that took interest in them and tutored them.
1:23:04 So what can create one-on-one tutoring optionally for every child in the world?
1:23:05 AI.
1:23:06 Yeah.
1:23:08 My kids use it, and it’s incredible.
1:23:08 Yeah.
1:23:13 As in, like, they’re interacting, and it’s adapting to their speed.
1:23:13 Yes.
1:23:16 And it’s giving them different analogies to work with.
1:23:25 So, like, you know, my son was learning about division, and it’s asking him to smash glass and how many pieces he smashes it into with this hammer.
1:23:28 And, you know, and it’s saying things like, no, Xander, go for it.
1:23:29 Really smash it.
1:23:31 And he’s loving it, right?
1:23:32 Is that synthesis?
1:23:33 Yeah.
1:23:33 Yeah.
1:23:34 I’m an investor in this guy.
1:23:40 Oh, well, it’s great to watch that simulated one-on-one tutoring because it’s talking to him.
1:23:42 It’s asking him questions.
1:23:43 Brett, you’re an educator.
1:23:47 You spent much of your life teaching people in universities.
1:23:50 How do you receive all of this?
1:23:56 Well, on the one hand, I agree that the closer to one-to-one you get, the better.
1:24:01 But I also personally believe that zero-to-one is best.
1:24:13 And what I mean by that is part of what’s gone wrong with our educational system is that it is done through abstraction.
1:24:22 And effectively, the arbiter of whether you have succeeded or failed in learning the lesson is the person at the front of the room.
1:24:27 And that’s okay if the person at the front of the room is truly insightful.
1:24:32 And it’s terrible if the person at the front of the room is lackluster, which happens a lot.
1:24:40 So what doesn’t work that way is interaction with the physical world in which nobody has to tell you whether you’ve succeeded or failed.
1:24:46 If you’re faced with an engine that doesn’t start, you can’t argue it into starting.
1:24:49 You have to figure out what the thing is that has caused it to fail.
1:24:54 And then there is a great reward when you alter that thing and suddenly it fires up.
1:25:02 So I’m a big fan of being as light-handed as possible and as concrete as possible in teaching.
1:25:09 In other words, when I’ve done it, and not just with students but with my own children, I like to say as little as possible.
1:25:15 And I like to let physical systems tell the person when they’ve succeeded or failed.
1:25:19 And that creates an understanding you can extrapolate from one system to the next.
1:25:23 And you know that you’re not just extrapolating from one person’s misunderstanding.
1:25:26 You’re extrapolating from the way things actually work.
1:25:31 So I don’t know if AI can be leveraged in that context.
1:25:35 My sense is there’s probably a way to do it, but one would have to be deliberate about it.
1:25:38 Especially with robotics and humanoid robots.
1:25:43 Actually, that is the place where you can do this is with robotics.
1:25:48 That, it seems to me, yeah.
1:25:52 Well, robotics will teach you the physical computing part of it.
1:26:07 And then the question is how do you infuse this with AI so that it is, you know, it provokes you out of some eddy where you’re caught and moves you into the ability to solve some next-level problem that you wouldn’t have found on your own.
1:26:11 What do you think should be taught in the classroom with everything that you now know?
1:26:13 Well, you’re all fathers here.
1:26:15 You all have your own children.
1:26:17 So it’s a good question.
1:26:17 Yeah.
1:26:19 How old are your kids?
1:26:19 How old are your kids?
1:26:21 Three and five.
1:26:22 19 and 21.
1:26:24 And six, seven, and 10.
1:26:28 My children are very young, but we already do use AI.
1:26:33 And I sit down with them in front of Repli and we generate ideas and make games.
1:26:37 And I would say, you know, what Brett said about generality is very important.
1:26:40 The ability to pivot and kind of learn skills quickly.
1:26:43 Being generative is very, very important.
1:26:49 Having a, you know, a fast pace of generating ideas and iterating of those ideas.
1:26:53 We sit down in front of ChatGPT and my kid imagines scenario.
1:26:56 Oh, what if, you know, there’s a cat on the moon?
1:26:59 And then, you know, what if the moon is made of cheese?
1:27:01 And what if there’s a mouse inside it?
1:27:07 And so we keep generating these variations of these different ideas.
1:27:11 And I find that, you know, makes them more imaginative and creative.
1:27:17 Rule number one that I tell my kids is stay away from porn at all costs.
1:27:19 I’d rather you have a drug problem than a porn problem.
1:27:20 And I actually mean that.
1:27:25 I think porn is more dangerous to the human being, as bad as a drug problem is.
1:27:35 But when we get to the question of how to confront the world and the things that you’re going to be expected to do in the workplace and all of that,
1:27:48 my point to them is you are facing the dawning of the age of complex systems that you are going to have to interact with.
1:27:54 And in the age of complex systems, you have to understand that you cannot blueprint a solution.
1:28:07 And you have to approach these systems with a upgraded toolkit of humility because the ability of the system to do something you don’t predict is much greater than a highly complicated system.
1:28:15 So you have to anticipate that and be very sensitive to the fact that what you intended to happen is not what’s going to happen.
1:28:24 So you have to monitor the unintended consequences of whatever your action is and that there are really two tools which work, one of which you just mentioned, which is the prototyping.
1:28:26 You prototype things.
1:28:29 You don’t imagine that I know the solution to this and I’m going to build it.
1:28:32 You imagine, I think there’s a solution down there.
1:28:35 I’m going to make a proof of concept and then I’m going to discover what I don’t know.
1:28:38 And I’m going to make the next version, discover what I don’t know.
1:28:42 And eventually you may get to something that actually truly accomplishes the goal.
1:28:44 So prototyping is one thing.
1:28:50 And also, instead of using the blueprint as the metaphor in your mind, navigate.
1:28:52 You can navigate somewhere.
1:29:02 And, you know, the way I think of it is a surfer is in some ways mastering a complex system.
1:29:05 But they’re not doing it by planning their days surfing down the waves.
1:29:06 You can’t do that.
1:29:15 What you can do is you can be expert at absorbing feedback and navigating your way down the wave and that that’s the right approach for a complex system.
1:29:16 Nothing else is going to work.
1:29:23 And so I guess the final piece is general tools always, no specialization.
1:29:28 This is the age of generalists and invest in those tools and they will pay.
1:29:34 So the guiding philosophy for me is to produce high agency generalists.
1:29:41 Ultimately, I want them to be motivated, self-starters, and have a wide general toolkit.
1:29:48 I imagine them very much what you imagine, which is instructing robots, instructing agents, coming up with ideas.
1:30:00 And I imagine them having a very high velocity life where they may be writing a book, organizing a festival, having a podcast, starting a business, and being part of somebody else’s business all at once.
1:30:01 As they are of the ADHD.
1:30:02 Yeah.
1:30:07 So the high agency generalist is the kind of guiding philosophy.
1:30:10 Some of the things that we do is like we do chess.
1:30:11 We do Brazilian jiu-jitsu.
1:30:12 We do dancing.
1:30:19 We do acting classes, playing in nature, entrepreneurship, understanding that you can start a lemonade.
1:30:21 We just did lemonade stands, which was amazing.
1:30:23 We sold lots of lemonade on the street.
1:30:34 So those kind of things and jumping from one thing to the next thing, but also trying to avoid too many screens and forcing them into making stuff from what’s going on around the house.
1:30:44 Some distinctions that we try and give them is the difference between creating and consuming, because I think AI has this superpower of making you a hyper-consumer or a hyper-creator.
1:30:59 And if you don’t understand the distinction between creation and consumption, you end up falling into the consumption trap, whether it be porn or just news or things that feel like you’re productive, but you’re actually just consuming stuff.
1:31:01 Wouldn’t that be the most successful AI?
1:31:04 The one that plays with my dopamine the most?
1:31:11 Yeah, and makes you think that you’re achieving something when you’re actually just consuming something.
1:31:18 So trying to give them the understanding that there is this difference in their life between creation and consumption and to be on the creation side.
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1:32:21 The thing that we, I think, all agree on is that this is inevitable. Do you agree with that, Brett?
1:32:25 I think it’s sad that it is inevitable, but at this point, it is.
1:32:27 And what part of it do you find sad?
1:32:40 We have squandered a long period of productivity and peace in which we could have prepared for this moment.
1:32:54 And our narrow focus on competition has created a fragile world that I’m afraid is not going to survive the disruption that’s coming.
1:32:57 And it didn’t have to be that way. This was foreseeable.
1:33:06 I mean, frankly, the movie 2001, which came out the year before I was born, anticipates some of these problems.
1:33:11 And, you know, we treated it too much like education.
1:33:14 I mean, like entertainment and not enough like education.
1:33:24 So we are now, you know, we’ve had the AI era opened without a discussion about its implications for humanity.
1:33:29 There is now, for game theoretic reasons, no way to slow that pace.
1:33:35 Because as you point out, if we restrain ourselves, we simply put the AI in the hands of our competitors.
1:33:37 That’s not a solution, so I don’t advocate it.
1:33:40 But there’s a lot more preparation we could have done.
1:33:45 We could have recognized that there were a lot of people in jobs that were about to be obliterated.
1:33:54 And we could have thought deeply about what the moral implications were and what the solutions at our disposal might have been.
1:33:59 And having not prepared, it’s going to be a lot more carnage than it needed to be.
1:34:03 Amjad, I heard you say a second ago that what we should be talking about is how we deal with job displacement.
1:34:05 Do you have any theories?
1:34:16 If you were prime minister or president of the world and your job was to deal with job displacement, let’s just say in the United States, how would you go about that?
1:34:34 The first thing I would do is teach people about these systems, whether it’s programs on the TV or outreach or what have you, just trying to get people to understand how chat GPT works, how these algorithms work.
1:34:50 And as the new jobs arrive, I think there’s going to be an opportunity for people to be able to detect that this job requires this set of skills and I have this kind of experience.
1:34:55 And although my experiences are potentially outdated, I can repurpose that experience to do that job.
1:34:56 I’ll give you an example.
1:35:09 A teacher, his name is Adil Khan, you know, he started using at the time GPT-3 and felt like it does amazing work as a tools for teachers or even potentially a teacher itself.
1:35:14 So he learned a little bit of coding and he went on Replit and he built this company.
1:35:19 And just two years later, they’re worth hundreds of millions of dollars.
1:35:23 Obviously, not everyone will be able to create businesses of that scale.
1:35:33 But because you have an experience in a certain domain, you’ll be able to build the next iteration of that user technology.
1:35:42 So even if your job was displaced, you’ll be able to figure out, you know, what potentially comes after that.
1:35:50 So I think people’s expertise that they built, I don’t think they’re all for waste, even if your job went away.
1:35:53 You can never really predict what jobs are coming.
1:36:01 I mean, I think of this crazy situation where I tell my grandfather what is a personal fitness trainer.
1:36:08 And he would, his mind would be blown by this idea that, well, okay, I don’t really want to go to the gym.
1:36:12 So I have to make an appointment and pay someone to go to the gym and meet with me there.
1:36:16 And then he stands there and tells me to lift heavy things that I don’t really want to lift.
1:36:20 And then he counts them and tells me that I’ve done a good job.
1:36:22 And then I put the heavy things down.
1:36:25 And then at the end of that, I feel really good and I pay him a bunch of money.
1:36:28 My grandfather would be like, what on earth have you been scammed?
1:36:33 So we can never predict what this future of jobs would look like.
1:36:41 Even just 20, 30, 40 years apart, the jobs rapidly and convincingly just can morph into something else.
1:36:45 I think it’s very dangerous, the idea that we need to focus on skills.
1:36:47 I think the future is not in skills.
1:36:48 Skills are being replaced.
1:36:54 It’s this idea that the education system has to stop being compartmentalized and has to be a lifelong learning approach.
1:37:02 The Department of Education needs to be seeing people as lifelong learners who are constantly disrupted and need re-education.
1:37:03 Interesting.
1:37:04 That that’s going to be a thing.
1:37:10 The Department of Education needs to start as a kid and go right through to maybe 70.
1:37:13 Does the Department of Education have a role anymore at all?
1:37:14 Depends on your definition of education.
1:37:23 I think if you’re trying to teach kids to remember facts and figures from a history book, then no.
1:37:35 But if it’s about coaching, mentoring, being displaced, finding the next thing, and maybe if it’s AI-driven and all of those kind of things, then it’s a different paradigm shift around what education is and what its purpose is.
1:37:48 And if we see it as a fluid thing where we wave into an opportunity and then wave back into education, spotting a new opportunity and then back here, if we’re learning, rather than skills, but we’re learning tools.
1:37:52 So it’s a tools-based education as opposed to a skills-based education.
1:37:59 The purpose of education for most of human history was about virtue, about becoming a great person who had good judgment and who had good values.
1:38:01 And we don’t really do much of that anymore.
1:38:12 But I think if we essentially said, if we get back to what is, if we ask the question, what is the purpose of education and where does it fit in our lives and what time frame does it go for?
1:38:18 And then we just trust that people are going to come up with weird and wonderful jobs.
1:38:27 You know, this sounds crazy, but also, and this is a weird analogy, my cat is incredibly happy.
1:38:28 How do you know?
1:38:33 Well, it demonstrates all the characteristics of being a happy cat.
1:38:38 And it lives in a world of superintelligence as far as it’s concerned.
1:38:41 So there’s this house and food just magically happens.
1:38:46 It has no idea that there’s this Google calendar that runs a lot of things that happen around it.
1:38:48 The food gets delivered.
1:38:53 Money is magically made by something that is inconceivably more intelligent than the cat.
1:38:59 And yet the cat has evolved to be living this life of purpose and meaning inside the house.
1:39:02 And as far as it’s aware, it’s got a great life.
1:39:08 But you have the power at any moment, if you’re having a bad day, to do something not so pleasant to that cat.
1:39:10 And it can’t really reciprocate that.
1:39:11 Exactly.
1:39:14 But what’s in it for me to hurt the cat?
1:39:18 Because in this analogy…
1:39:21 You might want to move house and the landlord doesn’t allow cats.
1:39:22 So you’ve got a decision to make.
1:39:27 There are things that the cat is highly disrupted by due to no fault of the cat.
1:39:28 I get it.
1:39:44 But as far as cat existence goes and the history of cats, if you were to ask that cat, do you want to trade places with any of the other cats that came before you, it would probably say, I don’t want to take the risk because all the other cats had to fend for themselves in a way that I don’t have to.
1:39:54 It’s very possible that we end up living in a life a lot like the house cat in the sense that from our perspective, we’re extremely…
1:40:01 Like, we’re having very interesting lives and purpose, meaning, and just there’s this massive higher intelligence that’s just running stuff.
1:40:07 And we don’t know how it works, but it doesn’t really matter how it works.
1:40:14 We are the beneficiaries of it and it’s doing important things and we’re enjoying being house cats in its life.
1:40:15 I have a few things to say about this.
1:40:22 One, I’m pretty sure your cat’s not as impressed with your capacity as you are or as you think he is.
1:40:25 I just know cats well enough to be pretty sure of that.
1:40:25 But…
1:40:26 Oh, it looks down on me.
1:40:27 Yeah, you’re right.
1:40:30 I think it’s a fair point that there is an existence.
1:40:32 And actually, you know, pets really do have it.
1:40:35 If they have loving owners, they really do have it pretty great.
1:40:38 And I would also point out that there’s a way in which we already are this way.
1:40:48 Most of us do not understand the process that results in electricity coming out of the walls of our house or the water that comes out of the tap.
1:40:54 And we’re pretty much okay with the fact that somebody takes care of that and we can busy ourselves with whatever it might be.
1:41:06 But the place that I find something troubling in your description is that you say that the nature of what we do is to deal with the fact that jobs are always being upended.
1:41:09 That’s a very new process.
1:41:11 That is the hyper novelty process.
1:41:21 It used to be that it was only very rarely that a population had a circumstance where you didn’t effectively do exactly what your immediate ancestors did, right?
1:41:31 In general, you took what the jobs were, you picked something that was suited to you, and you did that thing.
1:41:32 Intergenerationally.
1:41:45 And the point is we’ve now gotten to the point where even within your lifetime, what is possible to get paid for is going to shift radically in ways that nobody can predict.
1:41:47 And that is a dangerous situation.
1:41:49 Like probably every two years, like two or three years.
1:42:04 And so maybe there’s some model by which we can surf that wave and you can learn a generalist toolkit and, you know, that your survival doesn’t depend on your being able to, you know, switch up every two years and never miss a beat.
1:42:05 Or maybe we can’t.
1:42:27 But I do think it is worth asking the question if the rate of technological change has taken us out of the normal human circumstance of being able to deduce what you might do for a living based on what your ancestors did and put us in a situation where what your ancestors did is going to be perfectly irrelevant no matter what.
1:42:31 But that is effectively a choice that has been made for us.
1:42:43 And we could choose to slow the rate of change so that we would live in some kind of harmony where our developmental environment and our adult environment were a match.
1:42:49 Now, as a biologist, I would argue if we don’t do something like that, this is a matter of time.
1:42:50 How would we change?
1:42:52 How do we slow the rate of change?
1:42:55 Well, I mean, you can be the Amish, right?
1:42:57 You can be the Amish and live in your own communities.
1:43:00 And I would assume some people would want that.
1:43:07 Well, you know, when Heather and I wrote our book, I wanted the first chapter to be, are the Amish right?
1:43:14 And the answer is they can’t be exactly right because they picked an arbitrary moment to step off the escalator.
1:43:19 But are they right that there’s something dangerous about this continuing pattern of technological change?
1:43:20 Clearly they are.
1:43:21 What do the Amish do for anyone that doesn’t know?
1:43:28 The Amish live as if it was, what, 1880?
1:43:29 1850 or something.
1:43:32 So they live in a, they don’t use cars.
1:43:37 They, I think they do have phones, but they do not have electricity.
1:43:52 Basically they, they voluntarily accept a technology, they’re basically a Luddite community and they have turned out to fare surprisingly well against many of the things that have upended modern.
1:43:53 COVID one of them, right?
1:43:54 Yeah, COVID, they did beautifully.
1:43:56 Quite happy people.
1:43:57 Very low autism rates.
1:43:59 They, they have all sorts of advantages.
1:44:01 So anyway, I’m not arguing that we should live like the Amish.
1:44:02 I don’t see that.
1:44:11 But I do think the idea that they had an insight, which was you need to step off that escalator because you’re just going to keep making yourself sicker, is probably right.
1:44:14 Now maybe this is a one-time shift.
1:44:16 We’ve stepped over the event horizon.
1:44:19 We are going to be living in the AI world.
1:44:35 And maybe if we’re careful about it, we can figure out how to turn that landscape of infinite possibility that you’re describing into a place that doesn’t change, that you always have the opportunity to decide what needs to be done.
1:44:41 But that none, that, that living over that event horizon is not an ever-changing process.
1:44:43 It’s just the next frontier.
1:44:56 I do want to also propose or ask the question when we talk about our hyper-changing world, isn’t it harder for older people to learn because of the, the way that the brain works in terms of processing speed and memory flexibility?
1:45:10 So I was wondering if you’re going to get a situation where like my father had, because of his brain and the reduced memory flexibility and processing speed that happens when you’re older, is going to struggle significantly more than my niece who can seem to learn.
1:45:15 And I mean, I mean, my niece knows five languages and she’s seven or something crazy like that.
1:45:15 Five languages.
1:45:17 But I mean, the brain is much more plastic, isn’t it?
1:45:29 So it’s, and that goes back to our evolutionary psychology, which you know much, evolutionary history, which you know much more than I do about of we’re meant to learn our lessons when we’re young, use that information for a lifetime.
1:45:30 But if that information is changing quickly.
1:45:33 Well, that’s, I mean, this is exactly what I’m pointing to.
1:45:40 It is not normal for your developmental environment to fail to prepare you for your adult environment.
1:45:49 The normal thing is as a young person, you take on ever more of the responsibilities of the adult environment.
1:46:01 And then at some point, you know, in a properly functioning culture, there’s a rite of passage, you go into the bush for 10 days, you come back with, you know, a large, you know, game animal.
1:46:05 And now you’re an adult and you take that program that you’ve been building and you activate it.
1:46:10 And, you know, you’re a lot happier person.
1:46:14 You’re a lot more fulfilled if your life has that kind of continuity to it.
1:46:23 And, you know, I’m not against the idea that we have enabled ourselves to do things that can’t be done if that’s the limit.
1:46:26 But we have also harmed ourselves gravely.
1:46:42 And I would like to somehow pry apart our ability to improve our well-being from our self-inflicted wounds that come from this never-ending pace of change.
1:46:45 And I don’t know if it’s possible, but I think it’s a worthy goal.
1:47:03 Something amusing, I don’t know if it’s exactly a counterpoint, but during COVID, especially, and, you know, through the recent technological change, some people have started living closer to the more ancestral environment.
1:47:07 So people whose jobs are online.
1:47:19 Some of my friends, like, went and built communities, like collectives, where they, you know, live and they create farms and they eat and they have, like, an email job.
1:47:23 They do their email jobs for five hours and go out and they all have children.
1:47:25 And it’s a fascinating life.
1:47:29 And there was so much rethinking in Silicon Valley about how we live.
1:47:40 And there’s a bunch of startups that are trying to create cities where they’re like, okay, we know that we’re suffering because our cities are not really walkable.
1:47:44 And there’s so many reasons why we’re suffering.
1:47:45 First, we’re not getting the movement.
1:47:50 Second, there’s a social aspect of walkable city where you’re able to interact with people.
1:47:54 You’ll make friends by just happening to be in the same place as others.
1:47:57 Let’s actually build walkable cities.
1:48:05 And if we want to, you know, transport faster, we’ll have these self-driving cars on the perimeter of the city that are going around.
1:48:16 And I think there are ways in which technology can afford us to live in a way that reverses, I guess, in a more local way.
1:48:18 I like that vision.
1:48:21 But I also am aware that there’s a different vision, right?
1:48:31 You see people in Palo Alto, for example, actually exerting, you know, very strong controls on how much their children are exposed to, you know, to phones.
1:48:32 I live in Palo Alto.
1:48:33 Yeah.
1:48:35 So you see that.
1:48:53 On the other hand, what I am worried about is that the elites of Palo Alto don’t realize that what they’re doing is they’re figuring out how to reduce the harm to their own families as they’re exporting the harm to the world of these technologies that for everybody else are unregulated.
1:49:13 And so the question is, can we bring everybody along if the AI revolution is going to alter our relationship to work and everything else, can we bring everybody along so that at the end of this process, instead of saying, well, you know, it’s a shame that, you know, three billion people were sacrificed to this transition.
1:49:17 But progress is progress, we can really say, well, we figured it out.
1:49:25 And everybody now is living in a style that is closer to their programming and closer to the expectations of their physical bodies.
1:49:31 You know, if that were true, then I would love to be wrong in my fears about what’s coming.
1:49:39 But unfortunately, the market is not going to solve this problem without our being deliberate about forcing it to.
1:49:42 What’s your biggest fear?
1:49:46 Like when you say my fears about what’s coming, what do you, like, what’s the picture that comes in your mind?
1:49:48 Oh, it’s a whole different topic, actually.
1:50:05 My fear coming, stemming from technology and AI is that this is a runaway process and that that runaway process is going to interface very badly with some latent human programs.
1:50:19 That, in effect, the need for workers largely disappears and the people who are at the head of the processes that result in that elimination for the need for workers start talking about useless eaters.
1:50:21 Maybe they come up with a new term this time.
1:50:22 Thin the herd.
1:50:23 Yep.
1:50:25 Or they allow it to be thinned or something.
1:50:31 Brett, I’ve heard you talk about the five key concerns you have or the five key threats you have before.
1:50:32 Could you name those five?
1:50:35 So the first one is the one I worry least about.
1:50:42 I don’t worry zero about it, but I worry least about it, which is the malevolent AI that the doomers are so focused on.
1:50:53 The second one is the idea that, you know, an AI can be misaligned not because it has divergent interest but because it just misunderstands what you’ve asked of these autonomous agents.
1:51:00 You know, the famous example is you ask them to produce as many paperclips as possible and they start liquidating the universe to make paperclips.
1:51:04 And, you know, it’s a sorcerer’s apprentice kind of issue.
1:51:28 The third one I would say is actually all of the remainder of them I would say are guaranteed and the third of them is the derangement of human intellect, that we are already living in a world where it’s very difficult to know what the facts even mean, right?
1:51:43 The facts are so filtered and we are so persuaded by algorithms that it’s, you know, our ability to be confident even in the basic facts, even within our own discipline sometimes is at an all-time low and it’s getting worse.
1:51:55 And that problem takes a giant leap forward at the point that you have the ability to generate undetectable deep fakes, right?
1:52:04 That’s going to alter the world very radically when the fact that you’re looking at videotape of somebody robbing a bank doesn’t mean that they robbed a bank or that a bank was even robbed.
1:52:07 So, anyway, I call this the card.
1:52:08 We deal with this a lot, by the way.
1:52:23 I think every single week, every single week I send to my, I have a chat, people that just are now basically spending, I’d say, 30% of their time dealing with deep fakes of me, doing crypto scams, inviting people to Telegram groups, and then asking them for credit card details.
1:52:27 We had one on X. I think you probably saw it, Dan, didn’t you, of me?
1:52:30 But that someone was running an ad, deep fake ads on X of me.
1:52:34 And it wasn’t just one ad. It was like, they were, it was like swatting flies.
1:52:37 There was 10 of them and I messaged them to X and there was 10 more.
1:52:40 Then the day after there was 10 more. Then the day after there was 10 more.
1:52:41 Then it started happening on Meta.
1:52:48 So, it’s a video of me basically asking you to come to a Telegram group where people are being scammed and audience members of mine are being scammed.
1:52:51 And when I send them to Meta, they thankfully removed them.
1:52:52 But then there’s five more.
1:52:56 So, and I went on LinkedIn yesterday and my DMs are, Steve, by the way, there’s this new scam.
1:53:02 Actually, at this point, I need someone full time just sending this over to Meta.
1:53:04 I’m the same but on a small scale.
1:53:10 Every week, it’s, did you really message me on Facebook asking me for my crypto wallet and blah, blah, blah.
1:53:18 My least favorite one’s when the single mother messages me saying that she just paid 500 pounds of her money and how devastated she is.
1:53:23 And I feel this moral obligation to give her her money back because she’s fallen for some kind of scam.
1:53:23 That was me.
1:53:24 It was my voice.
1:53:26 It was a video of me telling her something.
1:53:28 And I don’t know, I don’t know how you deal with that.
1:53:29 But sorry, do continue.
1:53:31 Well, I mean, that’s actually on the list here.
1:53:37 The massive disruption to the way things function, both because people are going to be unemployed in huge numbers
1:53:45 and because those who are not abiding by our social contract are going to find themselves empowered more than the people who do.
1:53:53 So in this case, not only is this poor woman, you know, now out 500 bucks for whatever the scam was,
1:54:00 but you’ve also been robbed whether or not you pay her back for the thing that she thought she purchased.
1:54:06 Your credibility is being stolen by somebody and you have no capacity to prevent it.
1:54:09 This has happened to me also, and it is profoundly disturbing.
1:54:26 And it is only one of a dozen different ways that AI enables those who are absolutely willing to shrink the pie from which we all derive in order to enlarge their slice.
1:54:29 You know, there are innumerable ways that this can happen.
1:54:32 And I think people do not see it coming.
1:54:40 They don’t understand how many different ways they are going to be robbed every bit as surely as if somebody was printing money.
1:54:54 And then the last one is that this just simply accelerates demographic processes that do potentially result in the unleashing of technologies that preexisted AI.
1:55:01 You know, this can easily result in an escalation into wars that turn nuclear.
1:55:10 So anyway, I think that list could probably be augmented at this point now that we’ve, you know, spent a little time in the AI era.
1:55:17 We can begin to put a little more flesh on the bones, both of what is possible in this era and what we should fear.
1:55:21 One of those, you mentioned the truth, you know, the problem of truth.
1:55:29 Would you say, just a thought experiment, someone today, like an average person, college educated, say, person,
1:55:39 are they more propagandized or led astray than someone in Soviet Russia?
1:55:44 Well, I don’t know because I didn’t live in Soviet Russia.
1:55:53 But my understanding from people who did was that there was a wide awareness that the propaganda wasn’t true.
1:55:55 It doesn’t mean they knew what to believe.
1:56:04 But there was a cynicism, which is one of my fears here, is that, you know, you’re really stuck choosing between two bad options.
1:56:09 In a world where you can’t tell what is true, you can either be overly credulous and be a sucker all the time,
1:56:14 or you can become a cynic and you can be paralyzed by the fact that you just don’t believe anything.
1:56:16 But neither of those is a recipe for it.
1:56:24 Do you think Google search first and maybe now ChatGPT has helped people more or less to find truth?
1:56:35 I think that’s not ChatGPT exactly, but all of the various AI engines have briefly enhanced our capacity to know what’s true
1:56:43 because, in fact, they allow us to see through the algorithmic manipulation because the AI is not well policed.
1:56:48 You can get it to recognize patterns that people will swear are not true.
1:56:53 And so, anyway, a lot of us have found it useful in just simply unhooking the gaslighting.
1:56:55 So that’s been very positive.
1:57:04 But I also remember the early days of search, and search used to be a matter of there are some pages out there.
1:57:05 I don’t know where they are.
1:57:11 Here’s a mechanized something that’s looked through this stuff and just point me at the direction of things that contain these words, right,
1:57:17 before the algorithmic manipulation started steering us into believing pure nonsense
1:57:22 because somebody who controlled these things decided it was useful for us to believe those things.
1:57:28 So my guess is, at the moment, AI is enhancing our ability to see more clearly,
1:57:35 but that really depends on some kind of agreement to protect that capacity that I’m not aware of us having.
1:57:43 Angela, you’re implying there that AI will protect us from the AI, i.e., the woman that got scammed in my audience,
1:57:49 the platforms would have a tool built in which would be able to identify shortly that that is not me,
1:57:53 and the ad has been launched by someone in another country potentially.
1:57:59 And then also when she starts being asked for her credit card details in such a way on Telegram 10 minutes later,
1:58:03 the system will be able to understand there that this is probably a scam at that touchpoint too.
1:58:06 And it will also be the defense, not just the offense.
1:58:12 First thing, question, is Meta incentivized to solve this problem?
1:58:13 Yes.
1:58:18 And so Meta is probably actively working on AIs.
1:58:22 And again, it’s going to be a cat and mouse game, like every abuse that happens out there.
1:58:27 So I think that the market will naturally respond to things like that.
1:58:33 In the same way that we install antiviruses, as annoying as they are,
1:58:42 I think we’ll install AIs on our computers that will allow us to at least help us kind of sort the fake from the truth.
1:58:45 Well, but let’s take the example you say.
1:58:47 Is Meta incentivized to solve this problem?
1:58:49 Superficially, it seems that it should be.
1:58:56 But how many times in recent history have we watched a corporation cannibalize its own business
1:59:00 over what at best is the bizarre desires of its shareholders?
1:59:09 Why was X throwing off people with large accounts or Facebook or Google?
1:59:16 It would seem that you would expect, based on the market choosing search engines or social media sites,
1:59:21 you would expect these companies to be absolutely mercenary and say, you know,
1:59:24 if Alex Jones has a big audience, who are we to say?
1:59:25 That’s what I would have expected.
1:59:33 Instead, you had these companies policing the morality of thought,
1:59:38 even though it reduced the size of the population using the platforms.
1:59:43 I have a hard time explaining why that happened, but I have every reason to expect the same thing will happen with AI.
1:59:45 What are you excited about with AI?
1:59:48 What’s your optimistic take?
1:59:52 Because at the start of this conversation, you said that there’s infinite ways that it could improve our lives,
1:59:55 and there’s 10 times more ways that it could hurt our lives.
1:59:58 But let’s investigate some of those ways that it could drastically improve our lives.
2:00:00 There’s a couple of different ways.
2:00:06 One, we have, as we mentioned before, a dearth of competent teachers and professors.
2:00:13 And that is a problem that will take three generations at least to solve
2:00:17 if what we’re going to do is start tomorrow and start educating people in the right way
2:00:19 that would make them competent to stand at the front of a room and educate.
2:00:26 But if we can augment that process, if we can leverage a tool like AI so that, you know,
2:00:32 a small number of competent teachers can maybe reach a larger number of pupils, that’s plausible, I think.
2:00:41 Second thing is we have a tremendous number of problems that are obstacles to us living well on this planet
2:00:47 that AI might be able to manage that human intellect alone cannot, right?
2:00:54 Just in the same way that, you know, compute power can calculate things at a rate that human beings can’t keep up,
2:00:56 and there are certain things you want calculated very well.
2:00:59 There are also some reasoning problems.
2:01:10 You could imagine that instead of having static laws that govern behavior poorly because they get gamed,
2:01:13 that you could have a dynamic interaction.
2:01:19 You could specify an objective of something like a law,
2:01:24 and then you could monitor whether or not a particular intervention successfully moved you in the direction
2:01:28 that you were hoping to go or did something paradoxical, which happens all the time.
2:01:35 And you could have, you could basically have governance that is targeted to navigation and prototyping
2:01:38 rather than to specifying a blueprint for how we are to live.
2:01:39 So we wouldn’t need politicians.
2:01:46 At the moment, we’re stuck with, you know, constitutional protections
2:01:53 that are as good as has been constructed and still inadequate to modern realities.
2:01:59 Dan, what are you excited about with AI from an individual level, but also from a societal level?
2:02:01 Yeah, well, the big ones are healthcare and education.
2:02:07 I mean, it’s ridiculous that you are sitting there in pain having had an MRI,
2:02:12 and there just hasn’t been someone to look at that MRI yet and tell you what to do.
2:02:14 And that could easily be solved.
2:02:20 There’s all sorts of healthcare issues where, and also not only that, throughout the entire world,
2:02:23 there are places that just don’t have general practitioners and they don’t have, you know,
2:02:24 medical advisors.
2:02:28 And, you know, the breakthroughs in global healthcare will be phenomenal.
2:02:33 And the breakthroughs in global education could be transformational on the planet.
2:02:39 I’m excited at an individual level that I think the industrial age created a bunch of jobs
2:02:43 that are very dehumanizing, and we’ve just kind of gotten used to them and put up with them.
2:02:49 The idea that work should be repetitive and, you know, you just repeat the same loop over and over
2:02:54 and over again, and over a 10-year period of time, you might get, you know, graduated up one year
2:02:55 and all that kind of stuff.
2:02:57 I don’t think that’s very human.
2:03:03 The idea that you could be simultaneously writing a book, launching a business, running a team,
2:03:11 launching a festival, having an event, that you could actually be doing this kind of like
2:03:17 mini kingdom work where you’ve got this little, you know, ecosystem around you of fun things
2:03:18 that you’re involved in.
2:03:23 That is actually made possible for a vast majority of people if they embrace these kind of tools.
2:03:31 You can live an incredibly fulfilling and amazing and impactful existence, or I know that I do,
2:03:33 as a result of having these tools in my life.
2:03:37 Like, I’m doing things that I could have only dreamed about as a kid.
2:03:38 And what do you say to entrepreneurs?
2:03:40 I know you work with thousands of entrepreneurs.
2:03:45 What are you telling them in terms of their current businesses or business opportunities that you’re foreseeing?
2:03:52 So I think that small teams have infinite leverage now, and that when you have a team of, say,
2:03:57 five to ten people who share an incredible passion for a meaningful problem in the world,
2:04:01 and they want to see that meaningful problem solved, and they come together in the spirit
2:04:06 of entrepreneurship to solve that problem, that little five to ten person team,
2:04:12 armed with the technology that we now have available, you can have a big impact.
2:04:16 You can make a lot of money, you can have a lot of fun, you can solve meaningful problems in the world,
2:04:22 you can scale solutions, you can probably do more in a three-year window than most people did in a
2:04:23 30-year career.
2:04:30 And then that little band of five to ten people could either go together onto a new meaningful problem,
2:04:34 or they could disband and, you know, work on other meaningful problems with different teams.
2:04:40 In such a world where you have this sort of infinite leverage, but everyone else has access to the same
2:04:46 infinite leverage, what becomes the USP? Going back to this idea of the moat, like, what is the thing of value
2:04:49 when we’ve all got access to $20 infinite leverage?
2:04:54 Well, first of all, the first thing you need to do, you need to understand, is that this moment of time
2:05:00 is the least competitive moment. Like, if you understand how to use these tools,
2:05:05 you can start making money tomorrow. Like, you know, I see countless examples of people
2:05:11 making thousands of dollars with these hustles that I talked about, or building businesses that
2:05:15 generates millions of dollars in the first couple of months of existence. So I would say,
2:05:22 start moving now, start building things. So it’s an unprecedented time of wealth creation.
2:05:29 Clearly, at some point, as the market gets more efficient, as people, more and more people understand
2:05:37 how you use these tools, there’s less potential for, you know, creating these massive businesses
2:05:41 quickly. And we’ve seen this, like, the dawn of the internet or dawn of the web, you know,
2:05:48 was a lot easier to create Facebook than it is now. Then we had mobile. And for three, four,
2:05:54 five years, it was very easy to create massive businesses. And then it became harder. Being just
2:05:59 at the edge of what’s possible is going to be very, very important over the next couple of years. And
2:06:05 that gets me really excited, because the entrepreneurs who are paying attention are going to be having the
2:06:08 most amount of fun, but they’re also going to be able to make a lot of money.
2:06:11 How many applications have been built on Replit to date?
2:06:17 So, you know, I can talk about the millions of things that have been built since we started the company.
2:06:24 But just since September, when we launched Replit Agent, there’s been about three million applications
2:06:32 built purely in natural language, with no coding at all, purely natural language.
2:06:43 And of those, I think 300,000, 400,000 of them were deployed in a real, you know, the site was deployed, and it is having,
2:06:47 people are using it, some kind of business, some kind of internal tool.
2:06:48 I built one last night, by the way.
2:06:49 An internal tool?
2:06:56 I built an application to track how my kids earn pocket money.
2:06:56 Amazing.
2:07:00 So I just told it that I wanted to track the tasks that are happening around the house and
2:07:01 put an assign of value to them.
2:07:05 And I want to be able to, at the end of the week, push a button and get a summary of how
2:07:09 much to pay each child for their pocket money.
2:07:10 We are so screwed.
2:07:16 And within 15 minutes, it had created this application.
2:07:17 And it was amazing.
2:07:21 Like, you could toggle between, like, here’s the place where you have the kids, and here’s
2:07:27 the weekly reports, and here’s the how much per task, and you can tick off the tasks or
2:07:28 remove tasks or add tasks.
2:07:35 So then I now have this application for, which took 15 minutes of just talking about what I
2:07:40 wanted, and now I have an application to run the pocket money situation in the house.
2:07:45 And this is, by the way, it’s something, having run an IT agency years ago, that’s something
2:07:51 that we would have charged 5,000 to 10,000 pounds to create, 5,000 to 10,000 US dollars
2:07:52 to create.
2:07:53 And how much time?
2:07:58 Probably talking something that would have been a three, four-week project.
2:08:04 And we’re at the start of the S-curve now that you’re describing, and it’s already, if it’s
2:08:06 a $20, replet’s roughly $20 a month.
2:08:06 $25.
2:08:10 For the base case, you did one day of usage.
2:08:11 Let’s say it’s a dollar.
2:08:12 Yeah.
2:08:15 It costs you, and it costs you minutes and a dollar now, and we’re at the start of the
2:08:16 S-curve.
2:08:18 And you talk to it like you’re chatting to a developer.
2:08:24 So one of the things that slows down the development process is you have to send the information to
2:08:27 a developer, and they need to understand it, and then they need to create something, and
2:08:28 then come back to you.
2:08:32 This just happens in front of your eyes while you’re watching it, and it’s actually showing
2:08:33 you what’s being built.
2:08:34 It’s really wild.
2:08:40 This one change has transformed how my team and I move, train, and think about our bodies.
2:08:46 When Dr. Daniel Lieberman came on the Diary of Recio, he explained how modern shoes, with
2:08:50 their cushioning and support, are making our feet weaker and less capable of doing what
2:08:51 nature intended them to do.
2:08:56 We’ve lost the natural strength and mobility in our feet, and this is leading to issues
2:08:58 like back pain and knee pain.
2:09:02 I’d already purchased a pair of Viva Barefoot shoes, so I showed them to Daniel Lieberman,
2:09:07 and he told me that they were exactly the type of shoe that would help me restore natural
2:09:08 foot movement and rebuild my strength.
2:09:11 But I think it was plantar fasciitis that I had, where suddenly my feet started hurting
2:09:15 all the time, and after that I decided to start strengthening my own foot by using the Viva
2:09:16 Barefoots.
2:09:18 And research from Liverpool University has backed this up.
2:09:22 They’ve shown that wearing Vivo Barefoot shoes for six months can increase foot strength
2:09:24 by up to 60%.
2:09:31 Visit vivobarefoot.com/doac and use code DIARY20 from my sponsor for 20% off.
2:09:35 A strong body starts with strong feet.
2:09:37 This has never been done before.
2:09:42 A newsletter that is ran by 100 of the world’s top CEOs.
2:09:45 All the time, people say to me, they say, “Can you mentor me?
2:09:47 Can you get this person to mentor me?
2:09:49 How do I find a mentor?”
2:09:50 So here is what we’re going to do.
2:09:55 You’re going to send me a question, and the most popular question you send me, I’m going
2:10:01 to text it to 100 CEOs, some of which are the top CEOs in the world running $100 billion companies,
2:10:06 and then I’m going to reply to you via email with how they answered that question.
2:10:11 You might say, “How do you hold on to a relationship when you’re building a startup?”
2:10:14 “What is the most important thing if I’ve got an idea and don’t know where to start?”
2:10:19 We email it to the CEOs, they email back, we take the five, six top best answers, we email it to you.
2:10:24 I was nervous because I thought the marketing might not match the reality, but then I saw what the founders
2:10:27 were replying with and their willingness to reply, and I thought, “Actually, this is really good.”
2:10:31 And all you’ve got to do is sign up. Completely free.
2:10:35 I don’t think we’ve spent a lot of time talking about autonomous weapons.
2:10:43 This is the thing that really worries me. And the thing that worries people about AI is this idea
2:10:52 is that it is this emergent system, and there’s no one thing behind it. And it can act in a way that’s
2:10:56 unpredictable and not really guided by humans. I also think it’s true of corporations, of governments.
2:11:05 And so I think individual people can often have the best intentions, but the collective can land on
2:11:14 doing things in a way that’s harmful or morally repugnant. And I think we talked about China versus
2:11:22 the US, and that creates a certain race dynamics where they’re both incentivized to cut corners and
2:11:30 potentially do harmful things. And in the world of geopolitics and wars, you know, what really
2:11:35 scares me is autonomous weapons. And why does it scare you?
2:11:48 You know, you can imagine autonomous drones being trained on someone’s face.
2:11:56 And you can send a swarm of drones, and they can be this sort of autonomous killing,
2:12:05 assassination machine. And it can sort of function as a country versus country technology in the world of war,
2:12:13 which is still crazy. But it can also become a tool for governments to subjugate
2:12:22 the citizens. And people think we’re safe in the West. But I think the experience with COVID showed that
2:12:29 the systems even the systems in the West can very quickly become draconian.
2:12:37 Well, apparently, I’ve heard in Iran that they have face recognition cameras that detect whether
2:12:45 women are wearing hijabs in their own cars, and it automatically detains the car if you’re driving
2:12:51 and you’re not wearing a hijab. And if you’re certainly if you’re walking down the street, it just picks that
2:12:58 up and immediately you’re you’re in trouble. You can like it acts as a police officer and a judge
2:13:06 And, you know, a lawmaker, a lawmaker, it’s the judge, jury and executioner essentially. And it’s just happens instantaneously.
2:13:14 It happened in Canada with the truckers sort of protests where they froze their bank account by virtue of just being there.
2:13:15 Just by being in that location.
2:13:21 Yeah. And just to confirm that, Iran has implemented a comprehensive surveillance system to enforce its
2:13:27 mandatory hijab laws utilizing various technologies, one of which is cameras and facial recognition.
2:13:32 So they’ve put cameras in public spaces to identify women who are not adhering to the hijab dress code.
2:13:39 Yeah. And just on that, London has just put those face cam facial recognition systems into London,
2:13:48 and also all throughout Wales. And they’re being rolled out at speed. And like all you would need is a
2:13:53 change of government that wanted to implement something similar and all the base layer technology is already
2:13:57 in there. It gets a little bit worse in Iran because they have this new app called the Nizar app,
2:14:01 where the government has introduced the Nizar mobile application, which allows you
2:14:06 as a citizen to report another citizen who is not wearing their hijab. And it logs their location, the time
2:14:11 when they weren’t wearing it, and the vehicle license plate. With the crowdsourced data,
2:14:17 it can then go after that individual. I would also just point out that I think we’re not being imaginative
2:14:21 enough. I agree with you. I have the same concern about these autonomous weapons, but I also think
2:14:28 this doesn’t have to occur in the context of war or even governmental oppression, that it is perfectly
2:14:36 conceivable that effectively this allows, this drops the price of an undetectable or an
2:14:43 unprosecutable crime. And maybe economic moats return in the form of people taking out their competitors or
2:14:48 anybody who attempts to compete with them using an autonomous drone that can’t be traced back to them,
2:14:53 you know, that follows facial recognition. And, you know, you don’t have to kill very many people
2:14:58 for others to get the message that this is a zone that you shouldn’t mess around in.
2:15:07 So I could imagine, you know, effectively a new high-tech organized crime that protects rackets and
2:15:12 makes tons of money and subjugates people who haven’t done anything wrong.
2:15:18 I had Mustafa Solomon on the podcast in 2023 when all of this stuff started kicking off. And he is the
2:15:22 CEO of Microsoft AI. You’re familiar with Mustafa? Of course.
2:15:25 Yeah. And one of the things he said to me at the time was, “One of my fears is a tiny group
2:15:31 of people who wish to cause harm are going to have access to tools that can instantly destabilize our
2:15:36 world. That’s the challenge. How to stop something that can cause harm or potentially kill. That’s
2:15:41 where we need containment.” And it sounds a little bit like what you’re saying, Amjad, that we will now
2:15:47 have these tools. You were talking in the context of the military, but as Brett said there, even smaller
2:15:52 groups of people that might have been, I don’t know, cartels or gangs can do similar harm. And
2:15:58 at the moment, in terms of autonomous weapons, both the US and China are investing heavily in AI-powered
2:16:03 weapons, autonomous drones and cyber warfare, because they’re scared of the other one getting it first.
2:16:09 And we talked about how much of our lives run on the internet, but cyber weapons and cyber AI agents
2:16:15 that could be deployed to take down China’s X, Y, or Z, or vice versa, are of real concern.
2:16:26 Yeah. I think all of that is a real concern. Unlike Mustafa, I don’t think containment is possible.
2:16:36 Part of the reason why this game theoretic system of competition between the US, China, corporations,
2:16:46 individuals, makes it so that this technology is already out, really hard to put it back in the bag.
2:16:49 I did ask him this question, and I remember the answer because it was such a stark moment for me.
2:16:54 I said to Mustafa, “Do you think it’s possible to contain it?” And he replied, “We must.” So I asked him
2:16:57 again, I said, “Do you think it’s possible to contain it?” And he replied, “We must.” And I asked him
2:16:59 again, I said, “Do you think it’s possible?” And he said, “We must.”
2:17:05 So the problem with that chain of thinking is that it might lead to an oppressive system.
2:17:13 There is one of the, say, doomers or philosophers of AI, which I respect his work. His name is Nick Bostrom.
2:17:26 And he was trying to think of ways in which we can contain AI. And the thing that he came up with is
2:17:32 perhaps more oppressive than something that AI would come up with. It’s like total surveillance state.
2:17:40 You need total surveillance on compute, on people’s computers, on people’s ideas to not invent AI or AGI.
2:17:41 It’s like taking the guns or something.
2:17:48 Right, exactly. I mean, there’s always this problem of containing any sort of technology,
2:17:53 is that you do need oppression and draconian policies to do that.
2:17:57 Are you scared of anything else or concerned about anything else as that relates to AI,
2:17:58 outside of autonomous weapons?
2:18:08 You know, we talked about the birth threat crisis. And I think a more generalized problem there is
2:18:17 creating virtualized environments via VR where everyone is living in their own created universe.
2:18:27 And it’s so enticing. And even create simulates work and simulates struggle such that you don’t really
2:18:33 need to leave this world. And so every one of us will be solipsistic, you know, similar to the matrix.
2:18:33 Ready player one.
2:18:38 Ready player one. Ready player one. We’re all kind of, even worse than a ready player one,
2:18:44 at least that’s a massively networked environment. I’m talking about AI simulating everything
2:18:52 for us. And therefore you’re literally in the matrix, you know, maybe that this is that same thought.
2:18:55 I’ve enjoyed this great simulation.
2:19:00 Yes. And so, I mean, are you familiar with the Fermi’s paradox?
2:19:00 No, I’m not.
2:19:08 So Fermi’s paradox is the question of the professor, his name is Fermi. He asked the question,
2:19:17 if the universe is that vast, then where are the aliens? The fact that humans exist,
2:19:25 you can deduce that other civilizations exist. And if they do exist, then why don’t we see them?
2:19:32 And then that spurred a bunch of Fermi solutions. So there’s, I don’t know, you can find hundreds
2:19:39 of solutions on the internet. One of them is the sort of house cat thought experiments where
2:19:46 actually aliens exist, but they kind of put us in an environment like the Amish in a certain time
2:19:51 and do not expose us to what’s going on out there. So we’re pets. Maybe they’re watching us and kind of
2:19:54 enjoying what we’re doing. Stopping us from hurting ourselves.
2:20:00 Stopping us from hurting ourselves. There’s so many things, but one of the things that I think is
2:20:08 potentially a solution to the Fermi’s paradox and one of the saddest outcomes is that civilizations
2:20:15 progress until they invent technology that will lock us into infinite pleasure and infinite simulation,
2:20:27 such that we don’t have the motivation to go into space to seek out the exploration of potentially other
2:20:36 alien civilizations. And perhaps that is a determined outcome of humanity or like a highly likely outcome
2:20:42 of any species like humanity. We like pleasure. Pleasure and pain is the main motivators. And so if you
2:20:49 create an infinite pleasure machine, does that mean that we’re just at home in our VR environment
2:20:52 with everything taking care for us and literally like the matrix?
2:20:55 And the world, the real world would suck in such a scenario.
2:21:01 Yes, it’d be terrible. I mean, the other simpler explanation of the Fermi paradox is that you generate
2:21:07 sufficient technology that you can end your species. And it’s only a matter of time from that point,
2:21:12 which, you know, we can have that discussion about nuclear weapons. We can have it about AI,
2:21:18 but does some technology, if we stay on that escalator, does some technology that we generate
2:21:19 ultimately…
2:21:22 Whatever allows you to get off the planet allows you to blow up the planet.
2:21:22 There you go.
2:21:25 I want to get everyone’s closing thoughts and closing remarks.
2:21:31 And hopefully in your closing remarks, you can capture something actionable for the individual
2:21:36 that’s listening to this now on their commute to work, or the single mother, or the average person,
2:21:41 who maybe isn’t as technologically advanced as many of us at this table, but is trying to navigate
2:21:46 through this to figure out how to live a good life over the next 10, 20, 30 years.
2:21:46 Yeah.
2:21:48 And take as long as you need.
2:21:53 I think we live in the most interesting time in human history.
2:21:58 So for the single mother that’s listening, for someone who wouldn’t be the stereotype of a tech
2:22:05 bro, don’t assume that you can’t do this stuff. It’s never been more accessible today within your
2:22:10 work. You can be an entrepreneur. You don’t have to take massive risk to go create a business,
2:22:18 quit your job and go create a business. There are countless examples. We have a user who’s a
2:22:25 product manager at a larger real estate business. And he built something that created 10% lift and
2:22:30 conversion rates, which generated millions and millions of dollars of that business. And that
2:22:36 person became a celebrity at that company and became someone who is lifting everyone else up and teaching
2:22:42 them how to use these tools. And obviously that is like a really great for anyone’s career. And you’re
2:22:48 going to get a promotion and your example of building a piece of software for your family,
2:22:55 for your kids to improve and to learn more, to be better kids as an example of being an entrepreneur
2:23:04 in your family. So I really want people to break away from this concept of entrepreneurship being,
2:23:10 I mean, this is your podcast, a diary of a CEO. You started this podcast by talking to CEOs, I assume,
2:23:18 right? And over time, it changed to everyone can be a CEO. Everyone is some kind of CEO in their life.
2:23:29 And so I think that we have unprecedented access to tools for that vision to actually come to reality.
2:23:37 Well, it is obviously a moment of a kind of human face transition, something that I believe will be the
2:23:44 equal of a discovery of farming or writing or electricity.
2:23:53 And the darkness that I think is valid in looking at all of the possible outcomes of this scenario
2:23:59 is actually potentially part of a different story as well. In evolutionary biology, we talk about an
2:24:08 adaptive landscape in which a niche is represented as a peak and a higher niche. A better niche is
2:24:12 represented as a higher peak. But to get from the lower niche to the higher niche, you have to cross
2:24:17 through what we call an adaptive valley. And there’s no guarantee that you make it through the adaptive
2:24:22 valley. And in fact, the drawing that we put on the board, I think, is overly hopeful because it makes
2:24:27 it in two dimensions. It looks like you know exactly where to go to climb that next peak. And in fact,
2:24:35 it’s more like the peaks are islands in an archipelago that is in fog where you can’t figure out what
2:24:40 direction that peak is. And you have to reason out it’s probably that way and you hope not to miss it
2:24:49 by a few degrees. But in any case, that darkness is exactly what you would expect if we were about to
2:24:55 discover a better phase for humans. And I think we should be very deliberate about it this time. I think we
2:25:02 we should think carefully about how it is that we do not allow the combination of this brand new,
2:25:10 extremely powerful technology and market forces to turn this into some new kind of enslavement.
2:25:16 And I don’t think it has to be. I think the potential here does allow us to refactor just about
2:25:23 everything. Maybe we have finally arrived at the place where mundane work doesn’t need to exist anymore,
2:25:29 and the pursuit of meaning can replace it. But that’s not going to happen automatically if we don’t figure
2:25:37 out how to make it happen. And I hope that we can recognize that the peril of this moment is best
2:25:44 utilized if it motivates us to confront that question directly. Each one of us has two parents,
2:25:54 four grandparents, eight great grandparents, 16, 32, 64. You’ve got this long line of ancestors who all
2:26:00 had to meet each other, they all had to survive wars, they all had to survive illness and disease.
2:26:07 Everything had to happen for us. Each individual, all of this stuff had to happen for us to get here.
2:26:11 And if we think about all the people in those thousands and thousands of people,
2:26:16 every single one of them would trade places in a heartbeat if they had the opportunity to be alive
2:26:26 at this particular moment. They would say that their life was a lot of mundane and meaningless work,
2:26:32 it was dangerous. You know, every single one of us has probably got ancestors that were enslaved,
2:26:40 probably got ancestors that died too young, probably got ancestors that worked horrific conditions.
2:26:45 We all have that. And they would all just look at this moment and say, wow,
2:26:50 so are you telling me that you have the ability to solve meaningful problems, to come up with
2:26:56 adventures, to travel the world, to pick the brains of anyone on the planet that you want to pick the
2:27:02 brains of? You can just listen to a podcast, you can just watch a video, you can talk to an AI,
2:27:07 AI. Like, are you telling me that you’re alive at this particular moment? Please make the most of
2:27:13 that. Like, do something with that. You know, you can sit around pontificating about society and how
2:27:20 society might work, but ultimately it all boils down to what you do with this moment. And solving
2:27:27 meaningful problems, being brave, having fun, making your little dent in the universe, you know,
2:27:32 that’s, that’s what it’s all about. And I feel like there’s an obligation to your ancestors to make
2:27:33 the most of the moment.
2:27:40 Thank you so much to everybody for being here. I, I’ve learned a lot and I’ve developed my thinking,
2:27:43 which is much the reason why I wanted to bring this all together, because I know you all have
2:27:47 different experiences, different backgrounds in education, you’re doing different things,
2:27:51 but together it helps me sort of pass through all of these ideas to figure out where I land. And
2:27:58 I, I ask a lot of questions, but I am actually a believer in humans. I’m, I, I, I was thinking about
2:28:03 this the second ago, I was thinking, do I, am I optimistic about humans’ ability to navigate this
2:28:07 just because I have no other choice? Because as you said, the alternative actually isn’t worth thinking
2:28:13 about. And so I do have a optimism towards how I think we’re going to navigate this, in part because
2:28:18 we’re having these kinds of conversations. And we, in history, haven’t always had them at the birth of a
2:28:22 new revolution. When we think about social media and the implications that had, we’re playing catch up
2:28:29 with the, with the downstream consequences. And I am hopeful. Maybe that’s the entrepreneur in me.
2:28:33 I’m excited. Maybe that’s also the entrepreneur in me. But at the same time, to many of the points
2:28:39 Brett’s raised and Amjad’s raised and Dan’s raised, there are serious considerations as we swim from one
2:28:45 island to another. And because of the speed and scale of this transformation that Brett highlights,
2:28:49 and you look at the stats of the growth of this technology and how it’s spreading like wildfire,
2:28:54 and how once I tried Replit, I walked straight out and I told Cozzy immediately, I was like, Cozzy,
2:28:57 try this. And she was on it and she was hooked. And then I called my girlfriend in Bali,
2:29:02 who’s the breathwork practitioner. And I was like, type this into your browser, R-E-P-L-I-T.
2:29:06 And then she’s making these breathwork schedules with all of her clients’ information ahead of the
2:29:11 retreat she’s about to do. It’s spreading like wildfire because we’re internet native.
2:29:15 We were native to this technology. So it’s not a new technology. It’s something on top of something
2:29:19 that’s intuitive to us. So that transition, as Brett describes it, from one peak to the other,
2:29:23 or one island to another, I think is going to be incredibly destabilizing.
2:29:27 And having interviewed so many leaders in this space, from Reid Hoffman, who’s the founder of LinkedIn,
2:29:33 to the CEO of Google, to Mustafa, who I mentioned, they don’t agree on much. But the thing that they
2:29:38 all agree on, and that Sam Altman agrees on, is that the long-term future, the long-term way that
2:29:43 our society functions is radically different. People squabble over the short term. They sometimes even
2:29:49 squabble over the midterm or the timeline, but they all agree that the future is going to look
2:29:53 completely different. Amjad, thank you for doing what you’re doing. We didn’t get to spend a lot
2:29:59 of time on it today, and this is typically what I do here. But your story is incredibly inspiring.
2:30:02 Incredibly inspiring from where you came from, what you’ve done, what you’re building.
2:30:07 And you are democratizing and creating a level of playing field for entrepreneurs in Bangladesh,
2:30:13 to Cape Town, to San Francisco, to be able to turn their ideas into reality. And I do think,
2:30:19 just on the surface of that, such a wonderful thing, that I was born in Botswana in Africa,
2:30:24 and that I could have the same access to turn my imagination into something to change my life,
2:30:27 because of the work that you’re doing at Replit. And I highly recommend everybody go check it out.
2:30:33 You probably won’t sleep that night, because for someone like me, it was so addictive to get to be
2:30:37 able to do that, because it’s been the barrier to creation my whole life. I’ve always had to call
2:30:40 someone to build something. Dan, thank you again so much, because you represent the voice of
2:30:43 entrepreneurs, and you’ve really become a titan as a thought leader for entrepreneurs in the UK.
2:30:48 And in perspective, that balance is incredibly important. So I really, really appreciate you
2:30:52 being here, as always. And you’re a huge fan favorite of our show. And Brett, thank you a
2:30:59 gazillion times over for being a human lens on complicated challenges. And you do it with a
2:31:04 fearlessness that I think is imperative for us finding the truth in these kind of situations where
2:31:10 some of us can run off with optimism. And we can be hurtling towards the mousetrap because we love
2:31:15 cheese. And I think you’re an important counter balance and voice in the world at this time.
2:31:19 So thank all of you for being here. I really, really appreciate it. And we shall see.
2:31:34 I find it incredibly fascinating that when we look at the back end of Spotify and Apple and our audio
2:31:39 channels, the majority of people that watch this podcast haven’t yet hit the follow button or the
2:31:42 subscribe button, wherever you’re listening to this. I would like to make a deal with you.
2:31:47 If you could do me a huge favor and hit that subscribe button, I will work tirelessly from now until
2:31:52 forever to make the show better and better and better and better. I can’t tell you how much it helps when
2:31:55 you hit that subscribe button. The show gets bigger, which means we can expand the production,
2:31:59 bring in all the guests you want to see and continue to doing this thing we love.
2:32:02 If you could do me that small favor and hit the follow button, wherever you’re listening to this,
2:32:19 that would mean the world to me. That is the only favor I will ever ask you. Thank you so much for your time.
2:32:31 Thank you.