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--- recorded: April 2026, drive across Bay Area source: otter.ai export, "david jacob vision convo speakers: Jacob Cole, David, Dana (brief) title: Transcript (cleaned) type: source visibility: public --- # Transcript — Vision Conversation between Jacob and David > **Cleanup note:** GPS turn-by-turn prompts and isolated street names from Google Maps voice navigation have been stripped for readability. The byte-for-byte original is preserved at [transcript-original.txt](transcript-original.txt). > > Otter.ai's speaker attribution is unreliable. "Speaker 2" is almost always Jacob; "Unknown Speaker" alternates between David and Jacob and is sometimes split mid-sentence. The wiki pages summarize content, not the speaker tags. --- Unknown Speaker 0:00 Oh, nice. I met one of the casual Yeah, Unknown Speaker 0:05 I got the x ai hack as well. Oh, cool. I was there too. Oh, really, yeah. Oh, nice. Speaker 2 0:11 It's a good hack. Yeah. Have you met Eden Chan, who was the CO organizer. Eden, he's like, MPs, Unknown Speaker 0:21 then at the next one, Yeah, Unknown Speaker 0:26 he's a really great human. I love that guy. Yeah, I met the Greg Yang, one of the co founders, yeah, but I didn't even realize it was him. I thought he was just like some random guy. I I'm assuming I could have done a lot better with networking. Speaker 2 0:51 Yeah, that's so funny Unknown Speaker 0:57 Speaker 2 1:03 I like Jacob, are you going to the Oh, when's that? I Unknown Speaker 1:08 think, not sure the exact Unknown Speaker 1:13 They just opened applications Unknown Speaker 1:19 like in half a mile. it's an entire like chatbot that probes into like your deep like who you are and like what you build, like what you want Speaker 2 1:33 to build. Oh, great, dude, can you can you text me that I'm actually gonna see Boris Cherney in a couple weeks. He's a Unknown Speaker 1:49 thunder of, yeah, exactly. I'm I hope I took the right exit. Let's see okay. Speaker 2 2:19 So yeah, you're screwed. Yeah, I mean lots of pieces, but I think the key ingredients are continue for two miles. So I've been building a lot of creative projects since I was kid and I started Lego Mindstorms. Got the same Oh, amazing, yeah, it was like the biggest leg of Oh, cool. And you did robotics in middle school. Yeah, awesome. And, yeah, I went to bed every night thinking about cool, creative bot ideas that I wanted to build. And I always dreamed of being an inventor when I grew up as a kid. And yeah, I really like making inventions, and so I'm not right. My kid self was pretty on point in a lot of ways, yeah and yeah. When I was in high school, I started getting really bad issues. I got into programming. I did a bunch of programming projects during middle school. I started doing professional web development in middle school, and, like, built a bunch of startups, websites and stuff, and I in high school, taught a lot of my friends how to program and hired them. And so I hired like 19 people in high school, Unknown Speaker 3:50 and then Speaker 2 3:58 when I was in junior year of high school, I ended up getting really bad repetitive strain injury issues from typing and writing a lot and that became really difficult to do. A lot of stuff is super stressful. I got really into yoga, Qigong and meditation, and really, really helped. We didn't entirely fix the problem, so I just been designing, like, voice recognition systems. And fortunately, I got into MIT and a few other schools I was excited about, and I decided to go to MIT, and, yeah, I worked on voice recognition interfaces for a couple years, and it was all about, how can you build a hands free interface with like the lowest friction possible to capture your thoughts, because I had like extra friction. But it turns out that I built 600 feet interface onto South UI paradigms that are just better for everybody, not just better for Unknown Speaker 4:56 continue on. south for 21 Speaker 2 4:58 miles. And so that was a piece of the origin story of my software as design. Additionally, I spent a lot of my time at MIT hosting intellectual salons and interesting gatherings of interesting people, because I couldn't code as much as I naturally would. And so I ended up connecting a lot of people who should meet each other, and I calculated the people who I introduced raised over 200 million in venture capital together. Yeah. And so I got really good at, like, systematically connecting people and connecting with people. I started building all these schemes to do it automatically. And one of these schemes was this Knowledge Graph system, and I found an early customer for it, which was Silicon Valley Bank. And they need to do the same kind of market intelligence that I'm doing, except on people, because they host all these events to connect people, and that's how they do business development at the bank. So that's a piece. And then next thing is, so I was like a I spent a year studying abroad at Oxford, and I met a really amazing TA, actually, who is like a quantum computing PhD student. He's like, way smarter than me, and he also thought knowledge graphs were really important for augmenting his work on physics, and so he really encouraged me to work on this, and we started an open source project together, and then I ended up realizing that I got some really good research advisors, like Tim Berners Lee, the creator of the web, on this project. And because he's a professor at MIT and Oxford, actually, and so he ended up being a little bit helpful. And we really saw there's a big vision here. And so I then decided to take my last year off and start a company, and then ended up getting a little bit of angel funding for that, and then we scrambled a little bit. We got some more progress, and then we raised some VC funding, and now we're shipping an enterprise product. Speaker 2 7:27 And so the high level parts of the mission, though, that's like, sort of tactically what happened. But I haven't captured the high level parts, the sort of philosophical angles. Unknown Speaker 7:41 So the philosophical angles are the Speaker 2 8:10 I was asking some very deep questions about my life, when I was having these hand problems because I couldn't do as much as I wanted to do, and so I was like, Okay, if I were to die, what would I be the most sad? I was not going to go bring me into the world. And I realized a lot of it was my ideas. So I took my big list of ideas and I made it public. And what happened was unexpected, which is tons of people started contributing. And I met all kinds of people, like Anton osika, oh yeah, yeah, lovable, yeah. He, like, just found my document on the internet. This is just before lovable. And he like, reached out to me and says, thought this was so cool. And then we got all these, like, influential people, like all over MIT and stuff, sharing these their ideas. I was like, wow, I think there's like, a like thing to be done here for the world about sharing ideas, and I feel it very acutely. Speaker 2 9:18 And so I also thought about like government, and the question is, what is government actually trying to do, or What's it supposed to be doing? Because people just complain about government all the time. I realized that it's really the job is to turn society into utopia. How do we make society into a paradise? And what does that break down into? Well, you can make concrete progress bars on human needs being met and human goals being met. You can kind of map out human goals and human needs in a structured way so that you can see any action that people are doing, bring society forward or bring society backwards. Then, once we agree on what we're trying to do, and I think the strategies is where we disagree, we almost all agree on the basic needs, some disagreement on prioritization, but we don't disagree on most things. Is what I think as a society. So I started building the world issue tracker project and the world progress bar project. And so you could see progress bars towards human goals. And so what I realized is we need to have this kind of vision. We need to have an idea bank for society. We need to have a map of human goals for society, and progress bars towards those goals. And then this solves the problem of the existential crisis of what what do I do with myself? What do I do with my life? How do I live a meaningful life? And meaningful is complex. I mean, it implies impactful. How do I actually benefit the world in a coordinated way? It also implies, how do I live a life full of meaning? And the biggest thing for living a life full of meaning is knowing what things mean, having enough space in your mind to actually think about things. And that's part of what I get a lot from contemplative practice, is I can see the full ripples of every thought more deeply, non superficially. So every time that an impulse comes into my mind, I want to honor that impulse and cluster it with every other impulse so coherently I see it as at one point, I was in a ton of pain and I wasn't depressed, per se, because my self image wasn't impacted, but my other aspects of my life were impacted. I was finding it really hard to keep a sentence straight or hold a thought, and whenever I saw a spark of motivation, I had to write it down or I'd lose it. And what I realized is these sparks of like deep intrinsic motivation, are really treasures, and they're not actually hard to come by, but they're still treasures. And so if I could look at all of the open sparks inside everybody's head, I use the phrase open gestalts, that's a collective, then we can do do justice, honor, those sparks strike at the roots of them instead of the branches. Work as a body, a humanity wide body, to meet the needs of the humanity wide organism. We are moving one way and another part of us moves the other way. We're fragmented. Unknown Speaker 13:06 So that's the thesis so many questions. This is Unknown Speaker 13:15 like hands down, singleness and she Unknown Speaker 13:22 stands. Wow. So clearly, at least right now, the world is a very divine place. We have people going to Unknown Speaker 13:41 war. Yes, we have, like 80, 90% of high schoolers and like children is being addicted to social media brainwashing their brains like exactly it's jeopardizing their human brain system. Unknown Speaker 13:59 And this is a huge one of the issues in the issue tracker, continue, please. Yeah, and honestly, like, I think that's the single biggest problem, at least from my personal experience where, like, there's so much, like, Unknown Speaker 14:20 free, cheap sources of pleasure, and the most destructive part is that not only is it freely available, but you don't have to exert any effort to Get it. So if you can get a very high source Unknown Speaker 14:44 of dopamine without doing anything. Why would you ever do? Why would you ever exert more Unknown Speaker 14:54 effort to chase something that is in the short term, less dopamine? Yeah, yes, Speaker 2 15:06 my friend gave a talk. He calls the wu wei disclosure. You've heard of the Chinese term, I don't know the terms, but wu wei no non effort, non action, non force. So Taoist term, you know the term, yeah, I've translated into Chinese. And so his wu wei disclosure, as he calls it, dopamine to calories ratio. It takes a calorie if it takes more calories to do it, but gives more dopamine. That's a higher gradient to climb. But things in general are, you move downhill when you're not paying attention. And his thesis is, when you sit up and meditate, you have low dopamine and moderate calories versus like lying down. And therefore, if you meditate for an hour, then, since there's no dopamine, the dopamine the curve is very favorable towards action, empowerment, whereas if you've been kind of lying in your bed and scrolling Instagram, that is low calories and high dopamine, and so therefore the marginal cost to do something is going to be heavier. So it's easier to do something, to take any action, after you've tweaked that ratio, is his thesis. And so that's his thesis is we want to go from a world of engagement algorithms that keep you on your phone to empowerment algorithms which empower you to get up and do something. So I made a secret open source project that filters my x in Google News Feed and do other feeds, conceivably too. And it filters it per a very fast local LLM, so it removes the low vibration stuff, only high vibes I was just by putting a thing today where would just go on with my regular day browsing the internet, and then, just by keyboard shortcut, I can say, Okay, this website is unproductive, and then it will I categorize that website as unproductive and pull all of its metadata to train an underlying model on what unproductive looks like, what productive looks like, and then you can pretty much just do this For like any website, and at a certain point, like you don't even need to train ahead anymore, it just it's so intuitive that it just predicts which websites are productive and unproductive for you. And the key is, like for unproductive websites, it just instantly Speaker 2 18:38 closes them. As soon as you open an unproductive website, it just closes the tab and Well, dude, I would love to collaborate with you on something like this. I really like that. And Harrison, by the way, made his own app called pause, and it's a break app, but he'd be you guys are just drinking the same water, man, you it. He's like also absolute beast at knowing every best tool to use for every task. So the Unknown Speaker 19:18 vision that I'm kind of interpreting from you, interpreting from you is we kind of have this Unknown Speaker 19:25 open source repository of, like, all of the world's biggest problems and our biggest schools, all derived from first principles. So you can see through a very clear chain of logic, Unknown Speaker 19:41 this is the problem. Here are all the variables and factors involved. Exactly. It's a giant graph. It's a big graph database, effectively, yeah. Speaker 2 19:48 And then you know, if someone reads this and they disagree, they can contribute their own. They can say, like, oh, exactly, this chain is wrong. This is what, yeah. And you can make arbitrary meta comments on whatever you want. Is that like? Is that the vision? Yeah, exactly, exactly. And you can have a debate graph of human, human debate as well. On top of that. Go put important question right now is there's a lot of smart people out there, and a percentage of that smart people, like a good chunk of all the most intelligent people, right? Are just kind of like allocated to, like Unknown Speaker 20:51 finance, like fun creating a small sliver of that is like into building your startup and your own startup, and then another sliver of that is like building an actual vision that is net Unknown Speaker 21:07 positive for society, and not just, you know, trying to make as much money as possible. Yes, so let's say you have 100,000 of the most intelligent humans on the planet, and they each come from different personal experiences. They each come from different backgrounds, and therefore they each have the first principles their way to a different Unknown Speaker 21:36 vision they see in the world. Yes, what vision? What vision? After 100 years, actually gets built? Speaker 2 21:45 Well, so I made a website. It's got two parts, but the part is called Vision charter. Unknown Speaker 21:51 And the point is, I want to there are police, remember database of all the visions that people have for the world. For the world. So you've already thought about this. Yes, and I want to see which visions you want to use my taste to curate and decide which ones I like. And we can use our collective taste. But I'm a philosopher kings kind of guy at some level where I think people with really good taste the world would be best if people with actually good taste have the power to exert that taste. And I don't know if I have the best taste, but I've got good taste, I think so maybe I can nominate a better taste person. I i also think like Unknown Speaker 22:59 pondering these ideas and like this kind of self probing Unknown Speaker 23:06 How can you ponder philosophy when you're stuck in a third world country, and the only way to put food on the table is by working 16 Unknown Speaker 23:26 hours Right exactly. Take exit 21 then you'll take a slight ride onto the . But the problem could very well become Unknown Speaker 23:41 slight, right onto the , then Speaker 2 23:53 Yes, by the way, one of the reasons I'm really optimistic about AI is I think I've noticed it affects my social media behavior, because now I build stuff instead of scrolling as much, because the dopamine loops are so accessible with AI. What do you mean? Unknown Speaker 24:13 Like more dopamine from building things. Yes. And and that form of dopamine Speaker 2 24:26 is actually possible. And, like, the friction level to build stuff is so decreased, like, I don't have to be ready to, like, go super hardcore intellectual activity all the time. I can provide Cole when I'm fried and still be pretty good. Sure Unknown Speaker 24:53 you've used like whisper phone before, yeah, extensively, yeah, yeah. Have Yeah, I would say, like, at least right now, I think that is other than maybe, like, the frontier labs. Unknown Speaker 25:09 Maybe that's probably one of the top competitors for, like, basketball. It's Speaker 2 25:17 pretty good. I'd say it's not that much better than any of the alternatives, though. Like Willow Yeah, willows a lot like faster, but yeah, I guess whispers more alternative. I don't know. Speaker 2 25:32 I think it's fine. I think I think their product is pretty replaceable. I so where do you think you would be if you did not have your hands or fingers Speaker 2 26:09 problems, I think I would have built something a lot faster. I may have missed the like really deep meditation detour as deeply as I have been on it, Speaker 2 26:28 and that would be sad if I did. It's not clear to me that that would have been the case. Maybe my life would have just been fine and it would have been just the same thing, but easier. So if you're 17 again, right, what exactly would you be doing my hand issues, I'd probably be handling them differently. And then I got some other injuries, which are like a pretty serious impediment. I have a bunch of ligament injuries in my body, and they probably are all connected to some anomalous connective tissue that my body may have, and my connective tissue is like, not quite as sturdy as some people and when I developed this RSI issue, I would have gone whole hog and seen top tier acupuncturist, body worker, Physical Therapist, cupping therapy and started practicing Qigong. Decreased my course load in high school to take care of it and taking it super seriously, I would have also started training preventatively around all kinds of connective tissue conditions and like really seriously doing that. Yeah, I I can remember being pretty much pain free, and what that was like. Speaker 2 28:20 And it's great, have you? I think it's from might have been Confucius for now zoom, but it's like a healthy man wants 1000 Speaker 2 28:42 things. I Right. And so avoiding those injuries would have been on there. Now, injury free, I still would get deeply into Qigong, especially holding my arms up in a circle. And we'll certainly get to do this at some point. But it's really, really special to unlock the energy practices, both for embodiment and philosophy. It's what I was looking for for a long time. I would have also seriously studied iyengar yoga earlier, which I started later. Either one of the best places to study in the world is in Mountain View. Yeah, it's called the California yoga center. It's a very famous yoga studio. I love it. I go frequently. And my dad's first teacher teaches there. My dad's a yoga teacher and a sleep scientist. Unknown Speaker 29:42 So Speaker 2 29:48 yeah, studying yoga and studying Qigong really well, especially the right types. And it's important to get the right types, in each case, to get to profound states. It's just like, when you have a need for it, it's so obvious, and your body will just think, will just feel like, Oh, I can't believe I was operating with this much congestion here or there, and my mind was so congested, I can't believe it, I wasn't aware of it. So, yeah, doing that would have been a big thing that's like the main thing for my particular life. I was doing enough intellectual stuff, I think, building this thing that I'm trying to build that came to me in a couple years later, so finding that idea more deeply sooner would have been not a bad thing. Have you taken linear algebra? I would have paid more attention in linear algebra is the other thing. That's what I was doing when I was 17. But I took, like, a class at our high school, and it wasn't as rigorous as I wanted. And I think my linear algebra intuition is still not as deep as I want it to be. Yeah, that was the thing that I was like, very, almost like a self crisis about where it's like, I'm spending all of my time, just like, grinding the startup. But I was reading this article. Of, like a crypto company, but the guy, the guys, Unknown Speaker 31:54 there's And then in like Unknown Speaker 32:07 a year, he grinded to, like, international physics. Olivia nice yusuco, and Unknown Speaker 32:18 then, did you train any of that? I was wondering, like, Am I missing some something for the rest of my life, if I don't train for this, like right now, and I still have, you know, when my brain is still not Speaker 2 32:34 fully developed? Well, the important thing is, is, I think these concepts are foundational, and it's important to grasp the key concepts and have them permeate the rest of the way you think about things. Yeah, so that's the way I think about that. Is it needs to be these ideas need to be foundational for you. And it's like you get a few opportunities to expand your horizon. I think also, to some extent, literature, poetry and artistic development have a lot like I did English and computer science, and so if you haven't, like, gotten the ability to write tasteful literature and stuff like, really getting that talent developed, it's worth developing to be able to write really beautifully and like a classical literature person, And that takes some cultivation, or do an art form, just something that's an art form, and you have to have that Yin aspect of absolute detail, esthetic alignment is so important. And then, yeah, spiritual development is the last thing, which is like, I didn't even know what that meant, really, but sort of are bigger fish to fry than what's in front of you, really, and it's questions of existence itself. So Unknown Speaker 33:58 use the left three lanes to Speaker 2 34:02 deeply mastering a contemplative, meditative practice of some sort, I think, is very important. And that's like one of those things that's going to short circuit and save you a lot of time studying and the light Or I'm not going to call it that. I'm just going to call it, ultimately, not important. That Speaker 2 34:27 is very non obvious. Yeah, I think the biggest thing is, is a lot of people are truth maxing, and that's not bad, and you need to be honest about the truth of what you really want, and being able to even look at that and gain some degree of clarity on that takes contemplative depth and to know who and what you really are. The greatest mystery is that the universe exists, that we exist, that we are born, who and where we are, Unknown Speaker 35:15 the condition of existence. And that's getting into the nature of mind. Unknown Speaker 35:37 Who are you? Where does the self end and the other begin? Speaker 2 35:47 There is a certain way in which it's impossible for us to be separate from the absolute divine mystery of creation. Speaker 2 36:12 They say that you are sort of God, having a human experience, not with a religious sense of God, but The Absolute divine vastness Speaker 2 36:36 that's magic is realizing this whole situation is made of spirit. How do you define spirit and divinity? Speaker 2 36:54 Psychophysical reality? We think that, oh, the universe is made of atoms. But tautologically, if you're clear with yourself at the next light turn left, matter and feeling are not different. Matter and qualia are not intrinsically separate. It cannot be that inanimate gives rise to the somethingness of things. It's it's a category error. So therefore something of spirit, of what makes us perceive of the observer needs to be present in every what we call atom, but we're already restricted by this thought of a framework Unknown Speaker 37:59 We think that stuff is made of atoms, but the Buddhists make a clear distinction between knowing and inference or imputation. Like atoms are a story, a good story. However, they're not the thing itself. They're a story about the thing. And the thing is experiential. Turn right into , a continuum. You could think of the world, even from a physics standpoint, as one really big quantum wave function. There's only one object in the world, there's one wave function. And does Unknown Speaker 38:49 this wave end? Speaker 2 38:56 In the sense of death, the condition of somethingness is tautologically eternal. An individual shape may change. I Speaker 2 39:23 They say that ego in indigenous cultures both the sense of an individual identity and ego and conceptual thought alike. Are tools that can be picked up and put down. What if we put down the slicing of our stories for a moment, what we're doing habitually? If the story that, oh, I'm here and you're there, this is this that is that label, label Speaker 2 40:16 we put get rid of conceptual thought. We get rid of we let it go at least, don't activate that things can just be, in their own essence, Unknown Speaker 40:27 their whole, the wholeness of this place, the wholeness. Unknown Speaker 40:36 Unknown Speaker 41:14 You are the universe speaking you. I think Unknown Speaker 41:36 right now surface level understanding, how can I develop Unknown Speaker 41:48 in 1000 feet, acquiring that the deepest level Unknown Speaker 41:57 of understanding of everything you miss it The Speaker 2 42:15 View, getting the view right, meaning the basic model of the world is important, and what is the basic a Unknown Speaker 42:29 piece of it was expressed by what I just said, Speaker 2 42:37 There's many ways to enter this state of consciousness where it's like, yeah, this is actually, actual clarity and everything else was kind of a lot of bullshit before then, remembering ego and conceptual thought are tools that can be picked up and put down Speaker 2 43:17 there's already spaciousness is a gateway into spaciousness there and the continuum, the shared ocean of being thoughts are just on the surface. So you're going deep into the deeper layers of your brain, the verbal centers are like the chop of the waves on the surface very late in the origin of this of everything else is just this one ocean doing something you get before that you're Just the whole ocean moving as a seething wholeness. I Speaker 2 44:05 what really opens me is unhooking the nervous system, Unknown Speaker 44:14 a meditation of disconnecting, unhooking from thoughts of the past, present and future. For some time, Speaker 2 44:27 notice if the attention is being hooked, Unknown Speaker 44:32 and if it is, you can let it go. And when you let it go for a while, everything starts to settle like a Clear Lake Unknown Speaker 44:50 an old forest. It's nice to do it in an old forest. When I meditate, Speaker 2 45:03 downloads on the view start to come. Speaker 2 45:19 In a certain sense, we are an example. In a certain sense, we are all one nervous system, just desynchronized. From a systems standpoint, there's not like this is my nervous system, this is your nervous system. It's just one system, one dynamical system that's behaving Unknown Speaker 45:42 just as areas of our own brain can be out of sync. Areas of two brains out of sync, and the collective brains can do that. Speaker 2 45:54 When I'm really on the wavelength, on the vibe of a tree, maybe my nervous system is more synced up with the trees, whatever system Unknown Speaker 46:11 the pace of an old forest, an old ecosystem, an Old Master Unknown Speaker 46:20 in 600 feet, Speaker 2 46:23 We're you're part of my nervous system right now. Unknown Speaker 46:28 When I'm in the presence of an old master, I'm part of their nervous system, and vice versa as well. Speaker 2 46:32 Sure I'm part of their nervous system and vice versa as well. This would be my second favorite book of all time. I've got another book, which I put the first six pages on my website. I'll give you the e book for it. It's called religiousness in yoga, and it displays the view of why most of the world problems happen. And I've already linked to you my website and NVC and this, yeah, this is two entry points into this. Then lastly, doing Qigong. And my favorite one is just hold your arms like this for seven minutes and see what happens. And it's quite challenging, and it might wake you up a little bit before bed. So I might not want to do the whole time right now, but you go here, you do here. Soft, soft the hands. I've got a wrist injury, so I'm only going to do one hand properly, Unknown Speaker 47:26 hands at the eyebrow level. Speaker 2 47:58 On tip of the roof of the mouth. Speaker 2 48:50 Many more positions, but that there's a lot of mileage you can get with those two seven minutes, you will be in a totally different state if you have blockage there, especially that blockage accumulates, yeah, and I have a lot of chest tension. It's emotional tension, idea tension, and you kind of want to go through a Qigong system so you have a clean bill of health. Bill of health. Energetically, it's like, what is blocking you from doing this system? If you can't do it, it's a concern. So you're doing like, entire audit of, like, entire body, energy, emotional system, everything, and that's the most important thing in general, is having a systematic practice that has that capacity to check all the parts of you that can be stuck. They say that emotions are tied to the body. In Chinese medicine and Taoist philosophy, they call the acupuncture points gates or apertures, and they say it's where the light enters, and if some of your eyes are closed to the world, you're missing dimensions of reality. So that's why we're trying to open these gates, and that's equally important to the external success stuff. So a huge fraction of human at life, I hope, will be around these cultivation and energy, cultivation, releasing, opening practices where we fully awaken ourselves, and especially ones that do it with great efficiency. Speaker 2 50:40 That audit the body, that audit your problems in life, I find that a lot of pieces of meditation don't really have that view cleanly enough, expressed, even if it's implicit and you have to faff around for a long time, you figure that out. Oh, that's what I'm doing. But I like that this Qigong doesn't mess around. Unknown Speaker 51:03 It's like you're gonna know if you've got something. Speaker 2 51:07 I anger yoga too. I anger yoga too. Unknown Speaker 51:14 Yeah, my original use case for meditation. Unknown Speaker 51:20 Or meditation may continue. Unknown Speaker 51:25 Yeah, so you are supposed to be doing a single thing, which is nothing and over time, naturally, your mind wanders, and the skill you're training is the ability to snap back to that original singular focus that's like my original understanding of like and purpose of like meditation, at least in the practical sense. Speaker 2 52:08 So I think that's true. However, I prefer a different framing on it, or one of the different framings is you are getting in touch with energy not your own, in that you're being moved by a power that is not your conscious mind, whenever you're moved away from the focus point, And that's wonderful, because that's the gateway to wu wei in the rest of your life. If you can make conscious how to channel the river of that force that is moving you away, then you're like, Well, this is an energy source that is free. I don't have to do anything. Unknown Speaker 53:02 So you're saying wandering is effortless, Speaker 2 53:05 yeah. And then you That's power and effort. And when you something happens without you, that's power you can channel. And so when you train the skill of snapping back, what you're doing is you're learning how to guide that river of power, like a wizard channeling currents of the world, and you're thinking, guiding those currents into the direction of your will, Again, Speaker 2 53:36 that's more fun than like gym exercise. Yeah. Also you can see it as like the sparks of your vitality, they can go into the external world, and it's good to do that sometimes, and it's also good to not let the energy escape and let it become fully yours, instead of controlled by something that's not entirely you. They're putting the energies under your control of sparks, and it's like you're taking taking those sparks, which are wild, and now they're all unifying and becoming part of you. Unknown Speaker 54:15 And you're saying these random, wandering thoughts are individual sparks, Speaker 2 54:19 and the sparks of consciousness itself, of sparks of spirit, as it were, whatever this is from a neurological standpoint, it's a consensus of neurological activity so powerful it's capable of moving you. And we can do is you can take that harmony and make that harmony even bigger in the mind, to become a greater consensus, to something higher, to strike at the root of a problem, instead of the branches, to enter into a deeper annealing cycle of The mind, where you are in a lower energy state overall. So jumping at surface, things moving with depth and power. And this is why I like putting my sparks into a knowledge graph. It's like, ooh, here's a spark here, here's a spark here, Spark here. Okay, I can graph them. Cluster, cluster. This is power. It's a flame. I like that in my plan level, planning level, as well as my immediate presence level. It sort of like has a longer term horizon impact than just meditating. Sometimes the whole plan I can execute on. That's a more profound plan, a deeper plan. Unknown Speaker 55:43 Do you ever envision a world where instead, if it's voice first, it's as soon as you think it gets recorded and stored? Could be very interesting. Unknown Speaker 56:02 But the counter argument to that is actually articulating your thoughts Unknown Speaker 56:11 into words Unknown Speaker 56:14 requires a certain level. Hey, Dana nice is here. Yeah, we're Speaker 2 56:25 philosophizing. You're welcome to join Unknown Speaker 56:29 amazing, but happy to hear Speaker 2 56:34 say again, happy you're here. Yeah, same. We just got back from from Berkeley. This guy's blowing my mind. Unknown Speaker 56:41 Yeah, very cool. You've been out like, three days, yeah, I've been in Berkeley for the entire three days. Yeah, yeah, Speaker 2 56:54 it's been a project. We should have House meeting tomorrow and not forget the trash this week, right? Okay, yeah. But what do you mean by that? Because, you know, there's taking the cans out to Unknown Speaker 57:04 the street. Is every Monday night. Okay, okay, yeah, okay, have fun, yeah. Are you gonna be here tomorrow? Speaker 2 57:13 Probably gonna be dude. Come, hang out anytime. Come Cole work. Maybe come Cole work with Harrison and me. Yeah, Unknown Speaker 57:21 yeah. Harrison lives in San Mateo, so very close. Yeah? I just, I think there's like 20 minutes for me, Speaker 2 57:29 yeah, yeah, you come. Are you gonna be co working at the house at all tomorrow, this week? Probably I have a bunch of calls. Yeah, that's okay. We'll see. When it hard to hard to co work. But yeah, how was you have a good week? Yeah? Yeah. Unknown Speaker 57:41 Give a good weekend. Yeah, yeah. I think, I mean, I was mostly working, I think I'm still, oh, by the way, one really important question, there's a bunch of bikes out there. Speaker 2 57:52 Yes, right. They're mostly up for grabs, really, yeah, just text the house and see who, who actually has a bike dedicated to them. But all the other bikes are totally up for grabs, and I'm mostly functional, okay? And we have extra locks somewhere too, and light, very nice. Okay, that would be helpful, yeah. And by the way, if you bike to Stanford, it's just cut through the golf course. It's less than eight minutes. That's crazy. Okay, see, it's not, not on Google Maps, though, is Unknown Speaker 58:17 this that the Stanford golf course has nothing to do with Stanford University. No, Speaker 2 58:21 like, it's, it's on their property, interesting. So if you go through Stanford golf course, though, no, I mean, it's walking path. It's a totally legit path. So it's not, no one's gonna even question you just not on Google Maps. Unknown Speaker 58:37 Cool. Thank you. Have a good night, guys. Yeah, we, we should have, like, a house then, or something. Let's do it. Well, let's get dinner all tomorrow, if we can. Unknown Speaker 58:45 Yeah, have a house meeting if we can. Yeah, good night. Unknown Speaker 58:56 Yeah. So, I guess the counter argument to that is channeling all these sparse thoughts into actual words helps you clean up the mental processes of what is actually coming out. Speaker 2 59:18 Yeah, I think it's a mixed bag. There's some level of pressure that is nice to apply to congeal it, but it's also nice to be as expansive as possible. So if I could dream into a box, I think that would probably have some value. Yeah, yeah. Also nice if I have to etch it on a stone tablet. And like, it's not merely that I have to say it or into words, but it's like, I gotta really decide what I have to say. It's also valuable, but both sides are valuable, yeah, both the discriminating and the expansive. Maybe there's Unknown Speaker 59:54 something that we are not consciously aware of. That is like intrinsic value of just the raw thought without any processing. Where, if you collect all those with a powerful enough LLM or some kind of model, if you have a dream cap, and just like dream all the archetypes go into pure form Speaker 2 1:00:24 expression of the intrinsic value function, the the gradient, the magnetic gradient, shape that we're trying to fall into but only approximate normally. That would require neuralink, maybe not. They have this new cap that can read your thoughts, not invasively, Unknown Speaker 1:00:49 because that's something you'd be interested in pursuing. Unknown Speaker 1:00:52 Yeah, I'd definitely try one. Yeah, Unknown Speaker 1:01:16 your idea about sparks, even when you first mentioned it, it sounded very, very adjacent to Naval Rafa Khan's idea of as soon as inspiration strikes, you go pursue it. Well, Speaker 2 1:01:40 I think that you, as soon as inspiration tracks, you add it to your idea bank of graph of inspiration, and then you have a persistent source of inspiration at any time that you can dive into. So you're operating at an even higher level of like naval star investor, my company. Unknown Speaker 1:01:59 Oh, really, yeah, oh, wow. That is incredible. Unknown Speaker 1:02:15 Think there's certain individuals that if you listen to them speak for just five minutes, you can tell that their ideas and their frameworks are just so high quality you've never seen it before. There are a couple people like that, but there are also, Unknown Speaker 1:02:50 I think, more people than we perceive, because Unknown Speaker 1:02:59 I would, I would attribute like you're at least greater than, or equal to Naval Ravikant level of you know, foundational thinking, but people Like the average, average person doesn't know about you, Unknown Speaker 1:03:20 which? Speaker 2 1:03:27 But I think you also solve that problem yourself of making this open source, this open source, like contribution and like, right? Well, what I'm planning to do is take this exact conversation and add it to a database of open conversations on wiki hub or something, yeah, and they talk about stages of development in different frameworks. And this is another powerful view, I think, and a few that are popular are integral theory. I think it's adjacent to something. There's a guy named Ken Wilber who's also popular, and it says that there's these different stages of society. And I don't remember whose framework says this, but it's like, there's the red there's the tribal stage. There's the like social do gooder stage. There's the sort of like collective mind cyborg states, almost like psychic, Creative Collective stage, when you're past the social justice issues and now you're creating as a collective and different cultures are at different stages, and they have different ethics and different things and to people at different stages, sometimes pretty illegible to look to see the behavior, especially at the stages above you, there's a framework I like a lot, is Keegan's theory of adult development, and what we talk about is in child development, like Jean Piaget says, you know, a certain stage of child development, people develop the thought that there's other people theory of mind, yeah, but there's similar stages of adult development that are just as profound, but not everybody goes through them. And at one level, your real goal is to contribute to the community collective, but to someone who's still operating at the individualistic level, they might mistrust the actions of someone who claims to be acting for reasons that are totally inscrutable to them. For instance, caring about someone who's outside of your tribe is a bit after caring people who are in your tribe, and it's like, Yes, I care about people, but I really don't give a shit about people who are not part of my tribe or whatever, like they can suffer whatever. It doesn't bother me. Maybe it's even good, because then my tribe is stronger, and then you get to another point where you're just like, Whoa. You're in this like cosmic Brotherhood as children of creation against light. You're our Consciousness, Light against darkness. And you see how deeply we could all be on the same team. And you have this empathy immediately for everybody being the light, being the lamp of consciousness in this dark universe together. So we see that, and we see our nature in every body. We see the once we see our own nature that is curious and innocent and kind, distinguishing clearly between conditioning and what is our original nature. Another good model, and I've dropped a lot of frameworks on you here, but another good one is in Chinese medicine. They see in Taoism, they see the mind as having an infinitely upward quality. And when you sleep, how does it go down so you can sleep? Well, there's the pericardium channel, the protector of the heart, which kind of goes up and grabs it, and it's like, oh, pull down. But we shouldn't be confused. The mind is still buoyant. But it's that it has something to hold it there when we can clearly detect the qualities of the different aspects internal to us that are acting and say, Oh, the mind part is infinitely buoyant, and there's something else that holds it down. You can start to see the inner society, the inner dialog, the inner inside out, kind of discussion group happening at all times with what's counterbalancing in your inner ecosystem, and channel it more effectively. Like the mind itself is buoyant, our true nature is always trying to be there, and we're rest of ourselves needs to relax like the skin of a snake and sort of slough off. And then the meristem, the fresh part of ourselves, can can blossom outward, and when we are in touch with that, a lot of healing can happen, both emotionally and physically. Speaker 2 1:08:19 And so when you meet people, detecting what stage of their and by the way, at various stages, you need to go through an existential crisis where your framework of life breaks down. And it's not only your rational frameworks that may break down to create a paradigm shift, but your motivational frameworks, like you're really motivated by this. But wait, this isn't motivating me. What the heck? What gives or what do I really want? The Taoists say, do whatever you want. What do you what should I do? Do whatever you want. But then you're like, Oh, what do I want? And you're like, Oh, what do I want? Oh, man, deep stuff. Yeah. Speaker 2 1:09:03 So we're toying with sort of psychoactive concepts, where staring this all in the face, it's almost dizzying. You like, Okay, I gotta go lie down. Yeah, I remember I was like, eight years old, and I was like, I asked the question, why does the universe exist? To myself, I was like, Oh man, I gotta go lay down. I shouldn't think about that for a while. It's like, too much. I can't do it. I can't deal it that much reality here. So I didn't think about that question for a long time. It was painful to think about, we have to go through that pain at some point when you're ready for it, not to. You don't need to dose at all. You don't need to do the high dose immediately of conscious reality and some tweaking of the paradigms is a little bit important, though, sooner than later, Unknown Speaker 1:10:08 do you believe there isn't a ground truth, correct paradigm Across all stages, but more so there's a correct paradigm for each stage. Oh, that Unknown Speaker 1:10:28 sounds reasonable. Unknown Speaker 1:10:31 Which, which one do you believe is? Yeah, Speaker 2 1:10:36 it sounds like there's a correct paradigm for each stage, for each stage. Yeah, the view evolves, and even the sense of what is right and wrong at each stage can change. A great example of why this is the case is in a lot of Taoist and Buddhist practices, they encourage you for at least a phase of it to be vegetarian. And while it's a nice thing to do, the big thing is, is if you're attached to eating meat, that's yet another attachment that you haven't let go of, Speaker 2 1:11:21 and you really have to get past that attachment, or it's going to be tugging you away from being able to freely operate as your true nature, like all attachments do, and it's a sign that you can't you haven't let go of an attachment if you can't Do it for an extensive period of time, really let go of that attachment and not snap back. Unknown Speaker 1:11:49 So that's almost the inverse of, you know, the snapping back concept of earlier, earlier conversation. Yeah, Speaker 2 1:11:57 you got to really get beyond the attachment to whatever, and and there's a sort of self grasping inside that where it's like, Oh, I'm so desperate to my own life. I can't be well unless I am eating meat and killing animals. And then you're rationalizing, you know, I'm justifying killing all these things. And what else can you justify with that logic and so on and so forth. And, you know, it's a nice thing to go down and, yeah, you're even clinging on to life too hard. If you're like, Oh, if you're, if you're clinging on to this body and this life too hard, it's also a problem. So therefore, like, it may not even align with health to a certain extent, but does align with full liberation of your soul. Now, at some level, if you get too attached to being vegetarian, then you're also too attached, and you can't do that either. That's also attachment and obscuration, and the Tao isn't able to speak clearly through you, because it's there. The energy practice of the Qigong that's so powerful is it really starts to feel like there's this river of spirit going through and it's wanting something, and you can just kind of follow what it's wanting, which is, you could call it your more integrated self. Let's just say for now, it's the river of your deeper self, the quiet voice of what it would feel like to have all Your subconscious energies integrated. Speaker 2 1:13:40 Now yet another paradigm to drop on you, because I can just drop all the paradigms on you today. You can unpack them for years. It's a super conscious but let's focus on what I just said for a second before I mentioned that it's like all the subconscious energies. How good can it feel to have all that power reintegrated? That's what you get moving with no internal resistance, no internal conflict, lining up all the energies, all the confused energies inside you. Unknown Speaker 1:14:20 So in practicality, does that look like you know what you want to do, and there's no distance between your thoughts and your actions? Speaker 2 1:14:34 Yeah, there is no conflict, no dissonance. The Buddha is often translated as saying life is suffering, but the original word, I think, was life is dukkha, which can mean cognitive dissonance. And so it's like living in an individual form, you'll always have some degree of cognitive dissonance until you're fully enlightened. Speaker 2 1:15:05 You're always going to go through life being a little bit less distant, a little bit dissonant, a little bit numb, until you really get the whole enchilada of the cosmos. It so his hypothesis is you'll never be satisfied at the deepest level. You might be happier than you could possibly imagine, materially, but also if you haven't grokked the absolute divine nature of reality, which is total magic, total creation, purity everything, Unknown Speaker 1:15:48 one with everything, Speaker 2 1:15:51 not separate from one with all atoms in the universe, there's going to be some degree of dissonance, because that's what we all want. We all have that high of an aspiration. Speaker 2 1:16:09 They say rainbow body is our natural state. The Tibetan Buddhists have a legend at least which you can interpret metaphorically or literally, that when you really cultivate to a high level, Unknown Speaker 1:16:25 your body Speaker 2 1:16:28 transforms into rainbow light and you vanish, leaving only your hair and nails, kind of like Yoda in Star Wars. Speaker 2 1:16:43 Now on one level, you can say, Oh, this is a metaphor for ego vanishing, and you're just merged so completely with the stream. That's the experience you have. And then, if everything is really spirit matter, Speaker 2 1:17:14 there's not really that distance between the gross material world and the experiential world. And I've done some time researching paranormal phenomena, psychic phenomena and so on. The evidence is pretty compelling, passes all the statistical tests that there are slight but extremely hard to explain psychic phenomena, things like telepathy, telekinesis, distance healing, that don't make any sense in a paradigm that we have right now. So instead of just laughing off all the psychic woo woo stuff, I think it's worth paying a little bit of attention, even if there's a lot of BS and wishful thinking. Unknown Speaker 1:18:05 But even if it weren't true, Speaker 2 1:18:09 my point holds that this is the experience of non dukkha, this dissolving into lightness. We want to become lighter and lighter until we become enlightened, lighter every day, I want to feel less dukkha, less dissonance, more lightness, more therapy, more psychological trauma processing, more conflict resolution, more paradigm shifting, more clarity. Get to a place we're finally clear, and that takes us into the last point, which is super conscious state. But any comments first? Unknown Speaker 1:18:57 So for the average person, their subconscious, just due to the nature of modern society, and pulling yourself in 20 different directions is very, very scattered, so through certain practices, you can combine all these subconsciouss into one, and that is a much stronger engine and horsepower for whatever you're doing, and you also know on top of that that what you're doing is, single handedly, the best thing that you can be doing, Speaker 2 1:19:50 more or less that's totally on point. And one of the nice corollaries you may have noticed of that is the collective set of subconscious sparks. You don't have to just regard this as an individual's project. It's really pretty silly. In the Zulu tribes, they don't even see if someone has psychological problem. It's not their individual problem. They think it's the whole system's problem. There's no one has individual problems in theirs, in their culture, it's all their stuff. It's just all one space, a thin shell of an individual. There's not really a sense of individualism in many indigenous societies, just collective problems all to look at together. Do Unknown Speaker 1:20:40 so it begins with the self, where you first have to unite. Your subconscious is together. First your own subconscious sparks together. You say, like and then you look at the entire tribe, you look at the scope of humanity, and then you unite all of exactly individual people towards, you know, some sort of mutually agreed upon goal for humanity, which is very, very difficult, But you believe it is possible. Speaker 2 1:21:21 We're a collective body and a collective mind that's utterly schizophrenic right now, having seizures, pulling in different directions, and we still are operating one collective body, so a little like an octopus, it's got a bunch of tentacles, and there's a little bit of parallelism that can happen. But imagine this octopus is trying to pick up a mollusk and eat it. You got to coordinate the tentacles, and it's way better than all the tentacles fending for themselves. This is almost like the social contract of civilization versus anarchy. It's like so much more efficient to become. You know that famous cartoon where there's like a big fish chasing a little fish, and then there's like 20 little fish forming the shape of like a big fish and chasing the big fish. That's what we need to be as a species, yeah, on a species wide scale, yeah. And what we are right now is there's a really old cartoon called cat dog, and it's like a cat on one side and dog on the other side, and they're pulling each other in opposite directions at all times. So we want to be the fish, not the cat talk. Yeah, Speaker 2 1:22:49 it's just so obvious. Whether or not we're cooperating with each other, we are cooperating. We're operating in the same space. We can either we've got we can do it the dumb way or the smart way, and do it blindly or with consciousness, but we are always co operating. Hmm? Unknown Speaker 1:23:25 So I think if you were to execute on this, my initial approach would be, Unknown Speaker 1:23:40 first, you have to make people aware of this, and then the second step is you have to modify or Unknown Speaker 1:23:55 manipulate the conditions and environment of each individual such that they have the liberty to reflect and ponder these deep thoughts and intricacies and self introspection. Unknown Speaker 1:24:17 And then you need some kind of system where you can collaborate at scale on a humanity wide, Speaker 2 1:24:35 and now you're thinking like Doug Engelbart. Doug Engelbart, if we get the guiding philosophy section on his Wikipedia page, you're like, oh yeah, this guy is so lit. He's like a saint and a visionary and a technologist. He invented the mouse. He did the mother of all demos. And his greatest vision was intelligence amplification, collective intelligence systems, collective IQ Unknown Speaker 1:25:06 increase, yeah, and this is, this is like, Speaker 2 1:25:14 he paints a very beautiful future. One of our mentors said, who is a mentor, who is colleague of Doug Engelbart, Speaker 2 1:25:30 what we need as a planet to solve these issues, like covid, like climate change, like conflict, is first to build humanity 3.0 and what does this look like? It looks like World of Warcraft meets collective sense making World of Warcraft, and you're getting together to slay a dragon and do a raid, and you're combining your specialized skills. One person is their mage, one person is the tank melee, taking the damage you all need this. I was watching a video of Homo erectus, an animation of them hunting together like a band of like seven or eight, yeah, and imagining what life was like. And they all rolled around as a band, fighting off a hyena, throwing rocks at it, hunting a prey, finding shelter, discovering fire, and all felt very natural to be a band like this. And World of Warcraft, raiding parties are the same, but we can do raiding parties in the video game of the World Quest. The quest of the World Quest, ah, the village is being ravaged by the dragon. Can you go slay it? How about the world is being ravaged by a certain kind of cancer? Can you go slay it? We will be eternally grateful and reward you for this. If you ever complete this quest, says the nobbly old man. And you'd say, Okay, we me and my comrades. We great, dutifully accept this quest, and then we work together. And okay, you're gonna research this. You're gonna research that. How are we gonna do this? Then you solve it. And that is one of the most optimistic visions for the future of work I've ever heard of. And he says, this is how this world's gonna get fixed. He cured his own cancer 30 years ago by building his own knowledge management system and Knowledge Graph. This is mentor of ours, Jack Park, amazing guy. There's Speaker 2 1:27:53 a handful of people who are sort of on this wavelength of seeing this vision for the future already, really clearly, I know a few of them, the prophets of this age, as it were. And I kind of want to get a gathering of us. One of my is my friend Jack j and we all have slightly different angles on it, but they see things more. Sometimes they're just brilliant ways of explaining it, and other things that I don't see, and also other pieces that I didn't see. We're all playing with this. And yeah, I think you meet people who get to a certain stage of internal conflict resolution and self development, and they all get here. They all get start getting some of these different paradigms. And it's not all like linear, because you can have progress in one dimension and not the other dimension, like, you know, have a lot of vision without some of the more contemplative realizations, but they all are together really, and you need to do them evenly. And stuff. Learning and Education is exciting to me, and especially contemplative education, self development. How do we grow people to this paradigm and this consciousness level where we're all vibing at this level? I want more friends. Okay, that's really my situation, and so I just want to get more people up to the same vibes that we're on, where there is a lot of lightness, instead of learned helplessness, where there's the power of collective action. Can accrete incrementally instead of die out like a spark into the void. And that's a whole different thesis on how I accrete collective action. Oh, man, so much there, and then there's more even I know, why do Unknown Speaker 1:29:48 you think the current world is not that vision? What is the root cause? It's not that What is not that vision? Speaker 2 1:30:00 It's the embryo of that vision. It's trying to be that vision. We just need to help it just growing up. We can help it grow up nicely so it's less traumatized. We don't want the global mind to be have too traumatizing of a childhood if we can avoid it. But Speaker 2 1:30:33 I think the end state, all the pieces are there for that end state to emerge. It's just a matter of doing it rocky or not rocky at this point. There might be a few pieces missing, which I'm concerned about. I mean, there's always we nuke ourselves before getting there. That's like, that's like, are we going to make it to adulthood as a planet? Are we're gonna make it to maturity. So the aliens are willing to go talk to us if they're watching, not, not while we're a angsty teenager as a planet, if I were intelligent aliens, I wouldn't talk to us, not till we get our shit figured out. That's, that's my best hypothesis about, like, if there are aliens, why we haven't seen them. Like, this is a shit show. Would you talk to these people? Unknown Speaker 1:31:32 But we can do it. Love the idea of, when aliens visit, they'll never Unknown Speaker 1:31:40 visit for the raw resources they would visit to understand paradigms and deep concepts, stories and culture and taste. Yeah, those are the things that Unknown Speaker 1:31:59 three tons of gold can never equate to great. Speaker 2 1:32:03 I mean, if you've got interstellar spacecraft, you definitely don't need our resources. Yeah, right. We don't have anything to offer you except some good stories, no, maybe a good cup of coffee. Unknown Speaker 1:32:18 Yeah. The interesting thing, if you could abstract this layer further, is if you get different species all on the same wavelength, Speaker 2 1:32:30 I've been thinking of giving orcas llms, because they're really smart, but they don't have hands and so what if you get them like building all kinds of stuff. Get them vibe coding. Give them cloud code. It's because I think we've cracked a lot of orca language lately, which is huge, like trans species communication is now like they have the most advanced language, I think, of any species besides humans. So it's about to get that that's gonna be the orcas are gonna like, bro, Speaker 2 1:33:14 yeah. I mean, I'm sure nobody has given orcas, like, the right tools to vibe code at this point, just because we're barely giving humans these. And so I don't know what they'd want to vibe code, but like, but like, You got to show them it. And I think they would have a freaking field day with this if you gave them the right like effectors or like outcomes. Like, you could have a fish notification system. You could have a it has to be hooked up to real sensors. You could have games. You could have really play lots of games. We Unknown Speaker 1:33:55 just have to offer them something cool enough. Speaker 2 1:34:02 So last thing, because I don't want to lose this thread, is super conscious state, yeah. So what is that? Well, this is not on my radar, remarkably well at all, until more lately, the super conscious state is a psychically charged state that taking those sparks of pleasure, you can elevate yourself too. And really, sparks of motivation or sparks of pleasure are very connected. It's energy. You can get yourself this super highly charged state, and then your consciousness seems to be able to reach out beyond yourself. And then I think these paranormal abilities may become possible they talk about in the legends. And to be in a highly charged state is the goal of certain esoteric types of meditation, which is a lot less, oh, sit and watch your breath, kinds of meditation like Tibetan inner fire you they can make themselves physically hot and melt snow. Kundalini Yoga has some Qigong has plenty. Healing is a group in SF that trains zapping people with healing total, no nonsense, not Wu, not spiritual people just standing Horse Dance, power. Healing Tantra, so many of these, of these groups are finding ways to generate power, generate charge, and to enter a psychically charged state that can quickly break through things psychedelic culture. Same has those and, yeah, I think it's very important to understanding what we're doing as a goal of meditation. And you can go to really like astral travel, all kinds of like, different realms people talk about, I haven't done it really, but, yeah, this is a big piece of what I think people are seeking innately, as our nature, going to our natural state, is seeking these higher states and making the space to cultivate this is the ultimate Luxury, and I want it to be on more people's radar, so much luxury, more than all these fancy external things, to be able to cultivate these inner states of like heart openness and mind openness and stuff the Yogis were on this long ago. Stages. So it's just that many of these things aren't even on the radar, but they could so easily be on the radar, and I think we can make them on the radar again. That's one of the highest leverage things in the world, to have us all be cultivating and training these practices together that give us incredible sparks of love and brightness. That's what that's my vision for the world. In part, we're all empowered to free ourselves and train these things instead of doing the rather pedestrian job of like building utilities. I think that's an answer to Nick bostrom's question that he posed in the book deep utopia of the post instrumentalist world. Post instrumentalism is more than post scarcity when you're beyond the ability to do anything that's actually helpful to the world, because everything is handled so well. And I think cultivation practice is an answer to his question, as well as the liberal arts, as it were, that's one of the many, if not the greatest. Speaker 2 1:37:59 Go on great retreats have awesome meditation teachers with high consciousness all becoming these super organisms as a Sangha, as a group of meditators elevating together. Speaker 2 1:38:17 Get people like Elon Musk and Peter Thiel to have some of those experiences. It's high leverage. I don't know if they've ever had experience like this, and it's really sad. We feel like, oh my god, little kittens, kittens, that's all kittens. Yeah, I guess the pressure for those types of people are just astronomically high. It Speaker 2 1:38:48 doesn't have to be, it doesn't have to be, they can just go and retire and do it. But they got to where they were by being pressure cooked like into diamonds, and they missed the Cole in many cases, not in some I think naval has done his work. Luke Nosek, co founder of PayPal, has but I don't know. Peter Thiel has lots of trauma. Elon Musk seems have lots of trauma. That really is making it hard to do that for sure, and I can feel when people are speaking out of trauma in their life versus, like, deep integration, I'm just like, Oh, my God, I feel so much compassion for your situation here and Trump too. I mean, it's painful. There are things to respect about him too, and also it's painful to watch his state what he thinks is a Good idea. It's Speaker 2 1:39:59 important that the world have competent executors. It would be nice if they're less traumatized. Yeah, the problem because Unknown Speaker 1:40:15 becomes much more scaled out when these when the most powerful people do not take the time to resolve these traumas, right? And they don't, yeah, God, yeah, unresolved traumas have such a differential impact on humanity as a course, Speaker 2 1:40:43 right? And it's both in the sense of them being a role model and helping people reveal what's on the table as a way to live, like Gandhi did that kind of well, I think. And then it's also in policy decisions which aren't making it easier to create the space to do these things. It's a lack of vision. It's just a lack of vision. And that's what is so fixable, I think. And it's like, unimpressed by the degree of visionariness in people in general. I Unknown Speaker 1:41:26 think it's fixable. Do you think they're too deep in the weeds of execution and pressure? Speaker 2 1:41:32 Yeah, a little bit. And it's also just like, not common to have the background to both be a great politician and have gone on all the right meditation retreats and also be a technologist and have time to do all that. It's just like not that common structurally in our society right now. So I don't blame people. They're just doing the best they can. I It's awesome to see Brian Johnson going through his deep psychedelic phase and having realizations because he's another obviously traumatized person. Yeah, I feel like I'm so lucky that I didn't have those big blockages, and I was given all the right resources early to do these things. Unknown Speaker 1:42:37 There's right now a fracture between, Speaker 2 1:42:40 I would say very serious spiritual practitioners and the rest of society, they're in a bubble. You kind of to find your way into that bubble through a few methods. I found my way into that bubble. My parents are on the edge of that bubble, not even in it, and they're pretty deep by normal standards. I Unknown Speaker 1:43:07 this book would change the world if more people read it. The other Speaker 2 1:43:10 book I linked you at yoga, dot Jacob cole.net, you only need six pages of that one and it'll change. It changed my life. Got paradigm downloads and then clearing the BS from the body, so that your physical components, the emotional components, catch up to the logical ones. Unknown Speaker 1:43:30 Super important. They have a whole blueprint for everything. Yeah, and Speaker 2 1:43:46 you have the potential to really get good at this. I think this whole abiding in whatever this integrated consciousness is, and probably it'll generate more stuff. That are sort of the sets of get diffs on reality from normal paradigm, just like I have the updates, there's a lot of surface area to cover to as it propagates the rest of your life and paradigms that people around you hold sometimes there's merge conflicts. But I think that wiser one can win. Really, most of issues in the world, since we're all one nervous system, are just merge conflicts. I You Speaker 2 1:44:48 have to rebase, yeah, exactly. It's called first principles. Go back in first principles, guys, rebase your ontology. Do hmm, software engineering was surprisingly good metaphor for a lot of spiritual concepts. It's an art that is in touch with reality so it encounters the same problems as reality. That makes a lot of sense. I Speaker 2 1:45:33 is sleeping is also something we can really try to optimize as a society and decreasing chronic stress, chronic pain, these are really good things to optimize. My dad's a sleep scientist as well, so think about sleep a lot. So yeah, creating spaces for people to speed and freaking bliss. Do great restorative yoga, wellness retreat. Turn the world to a big wellness retreat is one of my visions. Like, we're not gonna fight each other if we're on a spa at the spa, yeah, everything looks like a spa. You know, that's this. Take the military budget. Go to Iran and say, look, we've got two options. You can do war with you over the spas, everywhere, for everybody. You can choose the options. Yeah. Unknown Speaker 1:46:28 We just want to all get along, guys. Seems so obvious, but it's so hard in reality. Speaker 2 1:46:39 I mean, challenging political leadership is a different problem. But the question is, what's the marginal cost to produce a mass mutiny? It literally all went into building spas, spa diplomacy. I Unknown Speaker 1:47:05 All the military leadership. Unknown Speaker 1:47:15 I guess there isn't much practical utility for a military if everyone gets along, Unknown Speaker 1:47:24 although I guess you still have to control for edge cases. Unknown Speaker 1:47:28 Yeah, edge cases are nice, Speaker 2 1:47:31 and we've got to get along soon, because marginal cost of building something like a bioweapon or a nuclear weapon only decreases. Yeah. So it's essential. It is existentially essential. As that marginal cost goes down, the doomsday clock moves closer to midnight, Unknown Speaker 1:47:50 because it's much easier to have centralized power, so much leverage. Speaker 2 1:47:57 It's not just that. Then it's also true. Centralized oppression is more possible, but a smaller and smaller insane state actor can build a more and more dangerous terrorist weapon for the whole world with the power of technology, exactly like if you look at number of dollars it takes to wipe out all of humanity, look at that curve go down, and that's what we need to invest in as a grand challenge, as much as another clamp, my opinion. So if you can help me make all this stuff land, that would be really great, because integrating this whole download, it's actually not that hard. It's got different pieces. I need to have an LLM wiki for the vision for IDEA flow in the world that just keeps updating. And I'll put one together tonight. Out of this conversation, we'll keep pushing stuff to it okay, on wiki hub, and then it's a great use of LLM wiki. And then different sub projects, like I built a thing. There's accretive mechanisms for people to achieve something like world suggestion box, university suggestion box I made. I made alumni funder as well. It's like Kickstarter for alumni to fund student projects. And yeah, if it gets enough votes, then the or enough donations, then the project gets kicked off. That's like an accretive mechanism. Kickstarter for pledges, like pledging to become vegetarian for climate reasons, doesn't make any sense unless you have like a million people doing it. Say, Okay, I'll become vegetarian when a million people all pledge, then it also makes it easier to become vegetarian, because you got a support group and a market for new businesses at the tipping point, Kickstarter for boycotts, because boycotts don't make any sense without critical mass, fixing All these issues of learned helplessness, where we think, Oh, I can't do anything. I'm just one person doing this for various ideas, initiatives, things that are important to us. It's very easy to upvote one thing Kickstarter for deciding to actually go vote in your district. If you're in like a hard to tip district, you might not even bother to vote, and it's totally rational of you save the calories. Doesn't matter, but you can have a say. Hey, we got a critical mass. It's worth going to vote. That's all these things are examples of accretive collective action tools, building idea banks, so that people graduating high school or college can think of, hey, what projects did I work on, even, not even graduating high school, like, Hey, I'm trying to get into college. What do I work on? Here's the quest list. Some are learning quests, some are helping quests. Some are research quests. Some are service quests. Choose ones that interest you, which are the most fun for you or most suited to your skills and level optimally discrepant stimuli. There's so many other pieces of this, like having blueprints for personal development, like stuff you should learn by a particular age or stage in your life. If you want to become a fully developed human, here's the roadmap, and you can run it at any speed you want, but you want to have a map of like, let me develop this and that and that and that realization, and have this experience, like a roadmap of these paradigm shifts. So it's more clear that you can get to these higher framework levels. And also, just like, learn life skills at different points. Like, by this point, if you want to speed run adulting, you should learn how to use an air fryer by a certain point. My friend was like, at some point, if you don't learn how to use an air fryer, life is really deprived. Similarly, if you don't learn a few linear algebra concepts, I think your life is really deprived. Projections as Fourier transforms, singular value decomposition. Fourier transforms as projections, singular value decomposition. A lot of these things you don't need to have a intense technical knowledge of, unless you're building projects that's worth doing for you, it probably does make sense to learn the technical details, but there are ways of thinking that are like important for understanding how things like Transformers and embeddings work and intelligence works, at least Speaker 2 1:52:58 it's The number one class for for understanding AI is linear algebra, I think, yeah, learning non violent communication way early is like a huge deal. Save so many problems and give you superpowers as a mediator for other people, he's probably the most famous mediator of the 20th century, and it's a work of total genius, like, his consciousness is unbelievably high. His paradigm is so high it's ridiculous. And you can watch some videos by him, you'll get he's like, living in a different consciousness than most people. It's a state, and you want to be in that state. It's so beautiful, smooth, the sharp edges of the world where they don't exist. Said by three o'clock today, insults and harsh words won't exist because I've given you a technology to take them out of the airwaves. And he puts on a pair of giraffe ears. And he calls it giraffe. Here is because he says giraffe is the language of the heart. Giraffes have a large he has two languages. He says humans speak two languages within whatever their native language is, and it's jackal and giraffe, as he calls it giraffe, because giraffes have the heart, the largest heart of any land animal, and Jackal is because they kind of get it from the throat and the head area. And so when you speak giraffe language, you're in touch with your feelings and what's going on in your heart. When you speak Jacob, it cuts you off. Your words can be walls and cut you off from what's going on in your feelings in your heart. And so when you put on giraffe ears, you learn to hear what everyone is always saying at all times, which is please or thank you. Please help me meet a need or Thank you, let us celebrate that a need was met. It's Unknown Speaker 1:55:06 everything that people are saying at all times. Speaker 2 1:55:22 This is related to pure vision. The Buddhist talk about pure pure vision, seeing the world is perfect, and seeing it all as sort of sweetness, or seeing it all as really soulful, authentic, authenticity, or love. You could say love. I think soulful authenticity is another way you can say everything that's happening, whether they're being sarcastic or not, it's just walls from what's really going on. Speaker 2 1:56:10 Have $1,000 prize out for whoever makes the best 20 minute video on how to learn nonviolent communication. Speaker 2 1:56:22 I have a healing arts grant also, which is helping people who need access to integrative healing arts but can't afford it. Healing Arts like seeing a good acupuncturist, a good chiropractor, a good career sacral therapist, a good out of network, specialist, healer, to heal what's blocking them. I want to unblock all people's stuckness. I want to unblock people. Have a fund to help people go on a meditation retreat. If they feel like, Oh, I can't, my life is too overwhelming, I'll say, look, we'll have assistants come and take care of your life and help you get on that retreat. That's what I think we should be doing with all this excess human labor that's about to be on the market. Yeah, yeah. Unknown Speaker 1:57:12 One of my initial startup ideas from a couple months ago was Unknown Speaker 1:57:22 Rue rooted in the realization that at the end of the end of the day you're solving you first should solve the biggest problem. And the biggest problem is I often cannot be solved by just software. The biggest problems you have to approach them in many fundamental and creative ways, and they all have to band together in order to fully solve this huge problem. So if you're just optimizing for solving this problem fully and completely, and you aren't limited to software. You aren't limited to hardware either. Sometimes the most effective solution is to Unknown Speaker 1:58:46 have a human expert that is just one or two steps ahead of where you are, five them out, get them to come live with you for 3060, days until that problem is solved. Amazing. And then, yeah, that was, that was the initial idea I had. Love it. And then Speaker 2 1:59:14 I think this is true of like, life change, lifestyle change problems as well. It's like, oh, my problem is I can't figure out how to lose weight. Fly out someone who like was like you, but is one or two steps ahead, and have them live with you and figure out how to tell them change your lifestyle. Yeah, or fly out to the where they are. My friend literally does life coaching, and he just has people stay in his room and live with him for a week and take his lifestyle. And Unknown Speaker 1:59:51 if you go a layer deeper, the next level is it becomes a whole pipeline, and each person that solves this problem. Now, can you dance the next person? Yeah, they can teach the next person. And another addition to that is, let's say you have one you start off with one person who learned how to solve the problem, and you have you start off with another person who has not yet learned to solve the problem. You teach this now it becomes two. Now you get the new one person who the next person who hasn't learned to solve this problem, and now you get them to live with two people that have already solved the problem, and now it's compounding, right? And you have a whole community of people who solve the problem, and now, you know, it just becomes the norm. It's like, this is what you do, instead of just, oh, here's just, like, one person, I'm not sure, like, if he's, like, doing the absolute best thing, but if there's like, 1020 people, and you're just like, the 21st person, like, this is just the norm. This is what you do. This is how you solve the problem. This is how you should live at this current stage of Speaker 2 2:01:17 life. Yes, wow. And you got to tell Harrison about this, because he's super interested in education. I think this is a little bit out of his current paradigm of how he thinks about it, and He'll love it. And so it's totally right. A fun name for this, I thought of could be journeyman, because in the old guild model, there was an apprentice, a journeyman, and a master, and a journeyman is like, on the way in the middle, yeah. And the point is, is it also implies personal development of a journeyman. And then lastly, it's like the journeyman is the mentor for the apprentice. In this case, yes, yes. Do I Unknown Speaker 2:02:04 think, yeah, one very fundamental framework that every human should have, and it scales pretty well, is you should have a plus, equals and a minus, which means which is exactly the same thing you just talked about. You have a mentor, you have someone who you can compound with, and you have someone who you can teach, Speaker 2 2:02:23 yeah. I think it's so valuable. And my mom says that for education, see one do, one teach once her, yeah, her favorite way, exactly. Oh, my God, you and Harrison are going to flip out when you meet each other. It's just nuts that your parents are both educators, kindergarten educators, which makes sense? Yeah, Unknown Speaker 2:02:50 I guess I never considered myself that academically intelligent, but I Unknown Speaker 2:03:06 in hindsight, I think, especially my mother, put so much effort into me and developing I have no idea what she did, but I guess she did something fundamentally right that did not have apparent immediate improvements or, you know, changes, But it's more so underlying, which is very interesting. Speaker 2 2:03:38 Yeah, yeah, guiding you onto good taste and noticing the path of joy in yourself Unknown Speaker 2:04:00 instead of the path of Fear. Unknown Speaker 2:04:14 One interesting study that I read was they put a mouse in a maze, and they put some cheese at the end of the maze, so the mouse was motivated by the aroma of the cheese to complete the maze in order to fulfill that craving. And let's just say, arbitrarily, the mouse completed the maze in 60 seconds, and then in a new scenario, same conditions, same everything. The only thing that changes is that, instead of a cheese at the end of the maze, there is now some kind of foul smell at the start maze. So now the mouse is motivated to complete the maze. The gas far away from that foul smell, and this case, the mouse completed the maze arbitrarily, let's say, in 40 seconds. So this, this, this implies is that running away from something is more powerful. Has a stronger horsepowering engine than running towards something. But the best thing you can do, if you want, if you're optimizing for just time to finish maze, or like efficiency, or, you know, effectiveness, is you do both you have the cheese and the and the foul smell and then, but yeah, that's all contingent on the fact that you Want to optimize for just raw performance versus the happiness of the mouse. Yeah, is there? Do you think there's a balance point where you can maximize both happiness and performance, or do you even think it compounds each other. The more happy you are, the more performance increase. Speaker 2 2:06:46 What the heck does performance even mean, getting to the end of amaze like, who's why are we playing that game? Why is that even a relevant goal for anybody? Unknown Speaker 2:07:02 What is interesting. So now you're questioning whether the mouse should even complete the maze, and why? What's the point of the mouse completing the maze? Speaker 2 2:07:14 Yeah, the there's a there's a funny cartoon of a little guru. There's a mouse in a maze, and there's two mice, and they come up with this guru mouse who's meditating. And Speaker 2 2:07:40 the mice say, he said, the real maze is within so nothing useful, and the Google mouse is sitting there meditating, not trying to get out of the maze. That's who I want to get. What they're drinking. It's like if a mouse just stopped in the middle of the maze, and we're in total bliss and not playing all these stupid human games, like that's the mouse I want to take as my guru. Unknown Speaker 2:08:20 The counter argument to that would be the Unknown Speaker 2:08:26 curiosity of the mouse to know what is outside of the maze, Speaker 2 2:08:32 right? That's great, and that's a great thing to do too. And also, how about the curiosity to know what is within which you can Unknown Speaker 2:08:42 also examine with a lot of granularity. Both are good. Unknown Speaker 2:08:52 Yeah, I think at least right now, people have examined the world Unknown Speaker 2:09:02 to at least a fine degree base, a good baseline degree. But Unknown Speaker 2:09:11 internally, that power is still so untapped, Speaker 2 2:09:14 right? And there have been societies that have done other than that in the past, especially the Himalayan cultures and Indian culture and the Taoist cultures too. Those are the strongest historical records that ancient Chinese ancient Indochina is the hotbed of of this but many cultures, the Amazonian the Ayahuasca shamans, I it. Speaker 2 2:09:47 Though they have less of a scholarly culture covering it, yeah. Would you like to cover it? Yeah, the most interesting tribe is the Kogi tribe. I think for me, they identify certain children as the potential to be shamans, and they raise them in total darkness until they're age eight. Wow. And what this does is it activates the pineal gland in the head to produce far more endogenous DMT. And DMT is taken externally, the most potent psychedelic known to man. And what most many people don't really understand externally is, what are these psychedelic ancient cultures about? What are they even doing? And it's that people can enter these psychic states. They say they can walk in each other's dreams. They can do all these mystical things. And I would put more than 50% chance that some of this is true. It's completely out of paradigm for us, it's what you'd call a superpower. And the cookie tribe is very interesting. So they didn't reveal they revealed themselves to us, and their name for the rest of us of the world, they call it younger brother, and they say younger brother is Unknown Speaker 2:11:20 destroying himself, so we had to reveal ourselves. They're in Colombia, in the mountains, Unknown Speaker 2:11:33 very ancient culture. We should go visit them sometimes. Yeah, do you need to use the bathroom or anything? By the link, Unknown Speaker 2:11:44 fine, fine for now, okay, that's great. Just trying to get this thing into an LLM wiki before I lose the thread. Here. Ah, Transcribed by https://otter.ai