The Exchanges

Q a friend of my name, Danny, who, who, who had this model that he created using AI. It's called this model does not exist. I actually posted about it on Twitter. It went viral. It, you know, had over a million impressions. What sort of framework do you have for thinking about how do you create something that gets a lot of buzz and, as you call it, internet karma?

A Okay, yeah. I guess there's two ways. One way is, like, you're gonna do this at scale versus you want to just do one cool thing. So you want to do one cool thing. The best recommendation I have there is, like, go look at all the other cool things people are doing, and then just, like, every time you see a cool thing, like, go look at this model does not exist. Um, Like, open up a Google Doc right now and, like, set a timer for, like, 30 minutes and just try to come up with ideas that are similar to that but a little different. So instead of saying, this model does not exist, um, delete the word model and then just, like, try inserting other words into it to come up with ideas for, like, this blank does not exist. And so you can start with, like, a list of English words or, like, the most common English words or, like, different industries or something. So, like, search for, like, a list of, like, business types or something and then just, like, insert those in and then generate, like, set a goal of generating a thousand ideas. Um, for like, this blank does not exist, and like of those thousand, probably like 900 of them will be like garbage, and like maybe 90 of them will be like mostly garbage, and nine of them will be like maybe not garbage, and one of them will be fucking awesome. And it'll just be so obviously a good idea. So, so I would, I would do something like that, and…

AI assessment note: “try to come up with ideas that are similar to that but a little different”

Q And are you taking notes when you're consuming content? Oh yeah. When you're listening to podcasts, are you like, do you have a notebook open? Walk us through how you get the most out of your content.

A Yeah, so the way I think about it, first of all, is like, there's basically three levels to, like, um, super learning. Level one is basically increasing your speed. That's the lowest hanging fruit thing most people can do, because it's actually really, really easy. Most people are not reading nearly as fast as they could, and it doesn't take that much work. Um, the second level is increasing how much you comprehend. Um, this isn't retention, this is just comprehending. Even, like, for example, in this podcast, like, there's people listening to this right now, and they're spacing in and out. And, um, I measure this quite a bit, and the average person is actually only listening to about 10% of all of the actual sentences. In a given podcast or book that they're reading. 10%. That's a staggeringly low percentage of comprehension. It doesn't feel that way, though, because your brain, just like when you, when you see your vision, like you look from left to right, and people think that they're looking at the whole thing, but actually there's things called saccades, where you basically take a mental snapshot there, take a snapshot there, and you guess what's in the middle. The same thing happens with reading, where, um, you pick up, like, a few words here and there, and you just kind of guess what the people were saying on the podcast or in the book. Uh, but anyway, basically, so, so …

AI assessment note: “the way I think about it, first of all, is like, there's basically three levels”

Q a audacious goal. And I also like that you put it on Twitter as a public goal. And I think more of us should do that. But like, why go wide instead of going really deep? Why study everything when you could just be the world's smartest AI person or the world's smartest crypto person or the world's smartest product designer? Why are you thinking about, you know, going diverse?

A Uh, because I like it. It's fun. Uh, I'm following my curiosity. Uh, basically, like, five years ago, I exited my business, and I had a, like, tough divorce, and it forced me to, like, kind of step back and reevaluate my life, and I ended up just moving to San Francisco with my two brothers, and then we did that for, like, a year, and then I had this really powerful DMT trip, because I was about to jump back into the grind and, like, get back into, like, making money, uh, and then I had this, this feeling of, like, why am I doing this? What is the point? Uh, I already have enough money. I'm financially stable. I don't need more. I would like more. I, my, my life plan earlier on was like, I want to be a billionaire and then I want to be like Bill Gates where I give it all away and I have the biggest impact. But I, I realized, okay, what am I doing? So we ended up just like girding all our shit, throwing it in backpacks and just traveling the world. It's what we've been doing for the past five years. And I'm just interested in everything. I'm just curious about everything. I want to know how everything works. And I find that the more that I read right now, I average reading about two books a day equivalent of content. And, uh, the more that I read, the more curious I am about how the world works. The more questions are, the more things I find interesting, the more that I read. So…

AI assessment note: “because I like it. It's fun. Uh, I'm following my curiosity.”

Q Yeah. What, what, what's on your mind these days? You know, you started in the community space, you, you moved into like viral news. I'm seeing tweets about web three and AI now. What's exciting to you and what's on your mind?

A So, um, a couple things. So I mostly look for, so I, I have a, I've made some different life design choices where like instead of just starting a normal business and getting back in the grind and raising venture capital and trying to get to, you know, a bill and dollar exit, um, I now just look for intervention points where I can like, I can just, I can, I can with the equivalent of like lifting my pinky, I can find some sort of like thousand X leverage point. And so I basically look for those kinds of things. So for example, uh, in the early days of COVID, I was, I was obsessed with COVID back in December of Uh, because I, I'd studied previously enough epidemiology to be pretty freaked out, and I was like, okay, about one in four people seem to be dying from this thing, and it's not going to be contained, uh, in China. It's going to spread on the entire world, so, I mean, it's possible that one in four people are going to die from this thing. It's possible that, like, literally hundreds of millions or billions of people are going to die. That's a really big deal, and people aren't taking it nearly seriously enough, and so how can I help with that? So I went full-time for a few months, and I found, uh, there was this one best practice from prior pandemics, um, Called social distancing. Of course, not a surprising thing now, but I was like, okay, that's like probably a good idea…

AI assessment note: “I now just look for intervention points where I can... find some sort of like thousand X leverage point.”

Q at all the different, um, All the different people in the crowd and you just see them mouthing the words. You know, like mouthing the words to the song, you know, Say It Ain't So, let's say, which is one of their hit songs. When everyone is saying a different version of Say It Ain't So, then where is the culture? And then how do we bond as, like, society?

A Yeah, that's gonna be one of the big questions, because I, I see increasingly, like, the metaverse is already here. Most people look around us. Like, I, I think we're already, I think we're already mid-singularity right now. Um, and I think the fact that people aren't updating more on AI is, like, proof that they'll never update on new technology. It'll always just be, like, the way the world is. Like, They moved the goalposts that quickly. So I think we're mid-singularity right now. I think we're also, I think the metaverse is already here. I think people just have, they, they're picturing like something that's like too literally three-dimensional to like grasp the idea that like we already spend all of our time plugged into the metaverse. We just call it the internet instead. Um, and the word metaverse has now become like, well, you have to have like goggles on and it has to be like fully immersive, but like in your brain, it's already immersive when you're like scrolling TikTok, right? So we're already getting more and more atomized in a certain way because of that. And, and so, like, basically, like, one, one possible world is that everybody's basically living in their own server, essentially. Like, if you go to a music festival right now, and, uh, you don't have any friends there, then, you know, there's a bunch of other humans that are there, but you're kind of having you…

AI assessment note: “I can see a world where, like, we have some shared reference streams”