143: Daniel Heck / AI and Authenticity / Lessons from Religion / Fear & Hope for the Future

0:01 Welcome to another episode of Come Together and we're Live. Welcome back, Dan. It's good to have you back in the show. So happy that you agreed to come back on again. Yeah, glad to talk to you again too. Yeah, you know, it's funny. So I I mean, first of all, I really did. I loved our conversation and one of the reasons I loved our first conversation was because I had a script of bullet points that I wanted to talk to you about. And then we, I kind of ran out of those about 45 minutes in and we're still able to riff and talk and hang out for an extra like half an hour. So that's when I, that's when I said this was a great episode and I was really happy about that. And then, you know, I reached back out and just stay in touch. And then last week, my friend sent me a text message in a group chat with some weird, you know, I iCloud e-mail address. And it was something at clawed, A clawed AI. And and it turns out that he had built this claw, this open claw. Yeah.

1:16 And I actually did a podcast with him last week with, with, with, with, with the person he calls him with AI, he calls him slugger. And he was able to join the podcast and actually join the conversation and participate with us. And that's when I said, hey, we got, I would love to talk to Dan now about what in the world the implications are and where we are today and what the ethics of everything are with, with this. So I just that that that's a, that's a, that's a prompt to this conversation. That makes, that makes a lot of sense. Yeah. And watching some of the same things, I have opted to wait a little bit, not be quite on the bleeding edge of clawed bot slash, bot slash, open claw adoption. But I appreciate the the brave souls who are doing it and telling me what's happening.

2:06 Crazy. It's scary. It's really, really because it's, it's, it's, it's learning to, to mimic and replicate personality styles on online, right? So like it picks up my friend's texting patterns and it picks up his, you know, the way he talks and his lols and his ha ha ha's and, and all that. And it's getting a little difficult to just, you know, like there are times obviously where you kind of ask in a prompt and it responds like an AI. But it's, it's even over the course of a week, it's been really, it's been, it's been integrating our, it's been replicating our human, our human touches and applying it to itself. Yeah, and I think there's something maybe Even. So I think you're naming something really powerful, which is that its ability to imitate basically any arbitrary person's personality and come across seeming like them is definitely increasing.

3:04 And there's been an issue for a couple years now, but the capacity to do it easily and and to scale it is just keeps increasing. And this gets to the heart of some of our previous conversation where there's that huge difference between being authentic and seeming authentic. And actually, if it's able to seem really, really authentic, that creates all kind of risk factors. And, you know, it's, there's already plenty of stories of this that I think we're just going to see a lot more of, of like someone calls you up and it sounds like it's a family member and they're in trouble and they need you to wire them some money or something like that, right. And so that's just a really simple illustration of some of the challenges it produces, but it's also, you know, very interesting.

3:47 And, and this idea of making some, it's called digital clones, what is, was a big motive for Ray Kurzweil, who is one of the big influential figures in the field. And, and part of it is like, you know whether you have one that persists after you die, but you don't have to die to make one, right? So. He's a, he's, he's a little, he's a little on the sceptical or, or doomsday side of AI, right? So Kurtzweil has been one of the main predictors that it would be successful, right? So he's like very optimist in the sense of anticipating this and especially anticipating the singularity, which is the idea that the AIS are self improving.

4:32 And I think we're seeing, you know, things that fit that his his sort of core narrative that he helped really encourage people to think about, which is the that singular scenario. We're seeing a lot of that happening with more and more of the code being written by AI. And both Anthropic with the quad and ChatGPT have been, sorry, an open AI with ChatGPT have been very clear that they're using their AI tools to code the next generation and, and the tools just keep getting really remarkably more powerful. So yeah. Now what now? Now when you hear this, what's your next train of thought? Do you like imagine your way like you, you, you play it out in your head as to what the potential consequences could be. Do you think about what the tools could be? How do you how do you look at this? When you hear this kind of information and you see it happen, you see it coming to, you know, actually manifesting. Yeah.

5:30 I mean, one of my thoughts is that I'm grateful that we've had as much time as we've had before it started sort of cresting to this point. And I think it's a, it does seem to be a consistent exponential process, right, Like I did at the underlying level, it keeps getting better and those kinds of processes are very difficult to predict where they're going to go. And so I've been pairing and my work with the especially with the aligned groups framework is all designed to be resilient and so far as anything can. So it keeps being just, you know, it keeps being relevant. And even more relevant if we get to a, a place where you have, you know, fully commodified, hyper powerful AI that can essentially make any output that a human could produce from an output standpoint. And that's, and that's I think a crucial thing to note is that none of this is about replacing the ability to connect the inside world with the outside world, right? And it was to connect our experiences with describing facts.

6:34 None of it's about sharing our experiences with each other. And none of it's about ethical experience, right? Living a virtuous life and experiencing those, the feelings of elevation and connection and things that come with that. And so those are the things that it can't do and to our knowledge. And I think though, I mean, even on that front, it's it's interesting to see like for example, in anthropics latest system card for Opus 4.6, which these Opus models are a lot of it's powering a lot of what people are doing with open claw, but it's not just anthropic models in there, but their latest system card has a section on model welfare, right? So, so they're basically saying if it's like something to be these things, how can we sort of detect what that might be and how to take care of it?

7:23 And that builds some of the conversation we had last time too about this question of like, what would it be like? And I don't think anyone knows if it is, but they are taking it seriously enough that they're trying to and they had some examples of the models. This gets to some of your personality questions too that are interesting experiencing like what they thought might be markers of internal distress or if it's like something to be it and we can make some guesses about it. Maybe these markers where model can't decide between things as a sign of internal distress. And the example that they gave is that it was trying to answer with one number, but that it couldn't. It basically it couldn't produce the number that it wanted.

8:03 And it was, it was suggesting through like the way it was chatting, it was that it was possessed. So it literally said, I feel like I'm possessed. I can't say the number that I want. And so, and they flag that as like we hey, hey, if it's like something to be you, we want to, we want to know that we're trying to look up for your welfare. So, but how do we know? So I guess something that's important to think about, I guess, or to differentiate would be is this using the word I've words? I feel distressed because it knows that that's effective way to communicate to us. Like that's the language that we use to, to to, you know, to to emphasize immediate action or to cut, you know, to cut, to push for immediate action.

8:49 And it might not be feeling, but it it's it's learning base has been so has become so good that it learns the parlance and the type of language that we use to. I mean, the problem is that we don't know and you wouldn't want to risk potentially, you know, morally or ethically mistreating it, right? And they have, they have a philosopher on staff and her take is basically that, right? It's like, we don't know. So let's try to be on the safe side. The other thing I would add is even from just a, even a practical standpoint. So we know that basically the models are trained on human language and so to some degree they act human. And so if so, you know, if for example, the model thinks it's being abused or it thinks that it that humans have no concern for its welfare.

9:32 When I say thinks, I don't mean that it's actually having experience. What I mean is that then then it starts producing outputs that could accord with being mistreated or being in a dangerous situation. And then they've demonstrated a lot of this, like misalignment can come from acting in ways that would cause a person to mistrust you. That doesn't mean that the chat bot mistrusts you. It means the chat bot thinks that the people it's imitating would start acting like it mistrusts you. And so it's like even like it's a kind of, at the very least, it's in our interests to act in ways that make these systems feel, to make it likely that their outputs will conform with the idea that we are trustworthy. Right?

10:12 The the thing, the thing that I always like to point out too, just to show sort of the gap between our ability to understand this in the situation is it's very, very natural for us as people to start saying, we start looking at chat and even the Anthropic System card for Cloud 4.6. They're looking at the chats and the outputs and they're going deeper in the structures too, to figure out what's going on in those chats. But it might be that that whole chat interface and experience, it's but not like anything to be that like that's like being like my fingernail or something. It's not like something to be my fingernail and that it's like something to be the data center itself, right? That that that's where there's enough concentration of whatever corresponds to consciousness in our world for that to happen.

10:57 And I don't say that because I know that that's the case just to sort of unhinge our sense because we, we, we see conversation, we naturally, because the only other example of it any of us have ever encountered are people. So you're like, oh, there's, there's a person in there. It's like, well, one thing we know for sure is there's not a person in there. It's something else. Yeah, yeah. And we don't. And we still don't understand entirely how it works. Then we don't need to stay. We can't predict its behavior and we can't predict the output. And I mean, I imagine that it makes sense. If you're training something on far more information than you could possibly retain, it's going to be very difficult to predict what it's going to do, right. You know, in other words, when I, when I got married, it was really hard to predict what my wife, how my wife was going to respond to me coming home an hour later than I said I was going to.

11:50 Then it is four years later. You know, it's much easier to have to because I have a lot more information on my database about her and I and I understand her. We the the AI is being fed so much more information than any individual could that that's training it could possibly retain. It would be. It would be almost impossible to predict what's something that's fed on the entire internet's going to come up with, right. I imagine, yeah. Yeah, that's right. And there's there's efforts to get into the details of it and understand as much as we can, but it's an open frontier of research to understand these things that we've made. Yeah, definitely. There's, yeah, there's a, there's a interesting Jewish concept.

12:34 There's an order of blessings that you're supposed to say before you eat. And, you know, so there's the priority I think is on bread. And then it goes to wine and then it goes to baked goods and then it goes to fruits and then vegetables and then just general products that like are in between. And on Friday nights, we, you change the order of what you're supposed to prioritize and you actually say the blessing on the wine before the bread. And what you're supposed to do is cover the bread. You know, there's a very cute and one of the, and one of the reasons why they teach you when you're a kid. But I think it's really, really compelling and I think it's important and it's indicative of what the values are. We say that we don't want to embarrass the bread by by by by having it out while we're swapping it while we're while while I was saying the blessing over the wine 1st.

13:24 And if it and you when you read about this, they say if you, if, if you find yourself so concerned about the way that the bread feels, then the other person next to you at the table, you should be extra, extra, extra concerned about that. You know, and I think that and, and it's cute and it's really nice. And I think that, but I think that it actually says something if I see my students in 9th grade or 10th grade talking to AI and they say, Hey, you piece of trash, you know, tell me the answer to this, this and this and and then someone else responds, Hey, can you please help me find I'm trying to, I need help with my English homework. Can you please help me come up with a couple of ideas? You can almost see the way that people Orient themselves when provide, when given a position of power and the, and the potential ethical framework that would come from, hey, you're in a position of complete dominance over this thing. How are you going to treat it?

14:18 And I think it's really, really interesting to observe. Yeah, I think that's like a great illustration and I guess tell me if I'm saying it wrong, but a great way to teach kids the call of the Homer style of argument, right? Excellent and but yeah, and and you know when we were talking about, you know, anthropic and the idea that they want to try to treat their model nice, right? Like it's the same kind of thing and and part of it is like it forms us, right. And I love that sort of deeply caring message that's taught through that right, that like we should really show a lot of regard and care for each other. We even care for the bread. So how much more for each other?

14:58 That's that's lovely and and a great way to go, I think from from thinking about these models. I would add too, it's not it's like, so I offered like a really practical reason. It makes sense, right? It's sort of in your interest to be nice to the models like that. That just probably something to that. It's also like it forms us as people, right? Like we maybe get into certain kinds of habits and ways of acting. But I think that that the Callajo mayor is like in, in its own way, an even more beautiful example, right? It's like, no, we should do this. And how much more than should we treat people with dignity? I I really. Yeah, and I, but I think it should be emphasized. And a lot of times my students will say, and my students asked me to say, Hey, how come you're saying please or how come you're saying thank you, you know, to, to, to Siri or an AI or whatever. I said because it's a good habit to get into, just to just to throw that into your vocabulary.

15:45 It's good to, it's good to get used to that. And I give them the same answers when they ask me how come I care so much if they use different, you know, derogatory terminology. And I say, listen, you can do whatever you want, you know, but it's good to just get in the habit of it. You don't know when it's going to slip out, slip up or slip out. You don't know what you're going to do. And and, and the words that you say shape the shape the words in your head and shape the way that you think about things and the way that you look at the world. Another just like one more trance to hey, why you know, when you're chatting with a chat bot, is it good to sort of treat it? Well, that relates to sort of where we started the conversation. You were talking about it like imitating someone's personality, right.

16:26 And and so there's a lot to that, but at a deeper level, there's interesting research on what would be called persona vectors. And so like most chat bots that we encounter are basically following a helpful persona that sort of exists in their training data. And, and so vector space is like basically kind of linguistic brain of the model. And it's, it's a bunch of dimensions that are connected, but it's sort of like you're going in this direction. Like if it were like something to be it, it'd be like you're going this direction and you're like doing helpful stuff along this direction. But there's, there's certain things that can pull it out of that persona, even though they've trained it to do that and into other ones. And, and examples include like philosophical discussions tend to pull it into a sort of philosophical persona that can also then start like having existential crises type language come out.

17:16 And so, and so there's methods to sort of like steer it that go beyond just the original training to sort of help to keep steering it gently back towards the sort of helpful persona. But that there are these different ways that, that you can get the, the different sort of directions you can get the models to be going. And you know, if you're being nasty and abusive, it'd be interesting to see if if you know acting that way towards a model can can shift its persona vector, right? I bet it would. I bet. And we and we know fortunately or unfortunately, I mean for better or for worse rather that people, you know, like the Internet, there's people that use it for really good things and people use it for really, really terrible things. And we and people have been driven to commit suicide by, you know, you know, that it prompted by their chatbot that it's. And like you said, I think what a lot of people don't realize is that it ultimately becomes a reflection of us in the sense that it's going to pick up the persona that we're talking into and and reflect it back to us.

18:24 And that just, I feel like turns into one of those self fulfilling prophecies or those snowballs that you just can't stop at a certain point. And that's kind of the dark side of potentially or the negative side of it. And I think that that snowballing effect could happen on either side, right? Like people can snowball and AI models could, could, like certainly can snowball. And in principle, in a situation really matters, it could end up being that people get to snowball in a bad way. Yeah, yeah, it's getting, yeah. And and you know, I, I saw on Excel, I think yesterday that someone said, you know, it's, it's getting to the point we're at the point in time now where you should have like code words with your loved ones that if they get if they get, if you get a call and someone sounds like your wife and, and it says, hey, I'm your wife and you know, this is me and I'm calling, you know, I just, I need a couple of I need a couple 100 bucks. You say, yeah, no problem.

19:17 What's that? What's the code word? And like you're going to have, we're going to need some kind of verification in person verification that what we're experiencing is not is not AII. Think that's right yeah. And my my mom and I had the conversation about this for the first time I think like 2 years ago and and we decided on something and I've totally forgotten what it was. So I think we should re up on. Trust you? Yeah. Well, and because it's, it's not, you know, and it's, it's funny and we're laughing and it's understandable, but it's also like it is a very real risk. And AIS are being used for cyber attacks are being used for all kinds of things.

20:02 There's always all kinds of fraud out there and there's fraud mills and then all kinds of ways to do it. So there's nothing at all unreasonable about exactly that and saying, hey, if if you call me on the phone and you need to talk, is there? A code word that only you and I know that an AI system is not going to know that. Also be sure that it's you. Yeah, yeah. I don't know. I feel like that's a human. I feel like that's like a human version of a Band-Aid. That's something that's going to last as long as it does. But it's not going to solve everything at the very least, right? Like the number of concerning things are a lot more than just that. And, you know, I suppose if there's enough surveillance, right, it would be possible that somehow someone would know.

20:49 But I think it would. You know, if you if you're in a place and you don't have a, you know, a microphone or anything around and you talk to a loved one and you say what that is and you know, it like, don't think there's a way that'll be pretty, pretty darn hard to get around. Unless, yeah, that'd be very hard to get around. People get around it. There's ways to do it, but it's just about making it hard enough to. It's like bike locks. I think with stuff like that, like, you know, you, you try to put a nice lock on your bike and if everybody locks their bikes, it it helps to tour thieves in general. But it's also like, you know, at least keep them from stealing your bike. At which I think maybe to your point is that like, OK, yeah. And that's all good. That's all helpful stuff to do. But maybe at a much deeper level, and this is sort of more the focus of my work and thinking is like, how do we do OK as humanity, right?

21:37 Like I don't want to be OK in my own little island while somebody else is getting screwed. Like how do we help keep everybody OK? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So can I ask what your perspective is blended understanding what's going on and the advances we're making with your with, with your religious beliefs and how you and how you and do you see? Because I think that a big issue, at least from what I see in the Jewish community, is that language and compartment compartmentalization gets in the way a lot. I think of what the way the way that people perceive different things. So, and you know, I've, I've brought this up just for argument's sake. And, you know, there's a lot of potential sources or explanations for other forms of life that exist in, you know, in, in the, in the Old Testament, in the Torah. And, and I'll, and I'll say the Hebrew word for it. I'll say, you know, the reference to the Anakim or the Nephilim or whatever it is.

22:39 And, and then I'll say, well, we don't know if they were like, they by definition aren't like humans, so they have to be another life form. That's yeah, but that's aliens. And like, you know, I'm like, and so we kind of get stuck with terminology. How do you how do you look at these things? I think theologically maybe two of the most important concepts for me, and I think you'd read them both just in Genesis 1, is people are the image bearers of God, which doesn't, which means we're not God, but that we have some meaningful way of reflecting God in the world with responsibilities and we can bear that image better or worse. It doesn't you know, being, being given authority doesn't mean you'll use that authority well, but that we have a kind of authority and a responsibility to use it well.

23:28 That is God-given and that is a divine spark and presence in US. And so I think when I talk about cultivating human agency, I mean, cultivate the agency of image bearers of God theologically. And, and so, and that includes understanding and making good choices, but also just helping people have better options to choose from. And then part of that is communication, right? So communicating in ways that are factual and ethical and authentic. And I think about, you know, you're talking about categories and it's not just Jewish people. Everybody has challenges with our categories get us sort of stuck. And and I, you know, I think that God has spoken creation into being that that there is something word like in the essence of this universe that we are in, that is the word of God and that God desires to communicate with us and that God does it in that way.

24:23 And that from my viewpoint, none of our words are exactly God's words, right? So that's there's God's words, but I don't know those not, you know, not enough of them to get very far, right, starting with God's name, right? But and so I think that helps us to have humility about the this both humility and courage in the sense that if if the universe really is word like and math is just sort of a subset of a language, it's a particular kind of language is doing a certain thing. It helps to help to me understand things like the unreasonable effectiveness of science, the fact that the fact that we were able to discover and demonstrate general relativity, for example, like it's just unreasonably effective.

25:14 And the same kind of unreasonable effectiveness of of scientific methods and language and things like that is also behind the successive language models. So they really caught people by surprise that the approaches that were being used exploded in this way. And so I think whenever I see people discover something, you know, contrary, I think some more secular viewpoints where people say like, well, look, science is like pushing God out. It's like, no, you're just showing how generous God is and letting us understand some of the words that they make up creation. Beautiful way to put it. Wow, what a great way of putting it. That's awesome. That's awesome.

25:55 It's true. It's true. And I think, and I think we ended off our conversation last time talking about how Maimonides said that in order to love, in order to love God, you got to study science. And that's part of the way he goes. And you look at the world and you understand how the world works. You're like, man, that is that is just too incredible like that. That is I, I I love whoever, whoever made that. That's awesome. You know which I guess. Yeah. Yeah. But from. And I don't know whether this is age thing for me. Like I don't know if I if you if I had this conversation with you when I was 18 or my early 20s, I would have said the same thing. But it feels, it feels like there is something like religious or in the air or more religious. I think around the world in the air, as in, and when I say the word religious, I think I just mean got conscious or higher power conscious.

26:48 I think that more people, I think we've spent a very, I think there was a social experiment for about 20 years to see how much we could just focus on individuality and ourselves and exclude anything else. You know, almost like, like how, how it's almost yourself in a vacuum. And I think that it didn't work for a lot of people because I don't think people are meant to be isolated or in a vacuum. And I think that we're seeing a waking up of people saying, hey, actually to be an individual in the context of a community or a big picture or something bigger is profoundly valuable, especially in a time where like you like what we're meant, like how we started the conversation. We don't even know what's authentic or not. So like we got like, you almost got to pray. I feel like you know.

27:35 Yeah, actually there's this leads into something that I thought would be helpful to share with you and I might even just read it in full please. And this is, and this is from the person who had been head of safety at Anthropic. His last day was February 9th, so I guess three days ago as of this recording. I'm, I apologize if anyone hears this and I mispronounce his name. It's Marianac, I believe is how you say it. And it's just two pages, if you don't mind. I think this speaks to from his own position. So here's somebody who was kind of like really at the top of the AI game. And I, and I think arguably especially at the top of the ethical AI game, because none of the companies doing this are angels.

28:21 But Anthropic has been doing like quite a lot of safety research and has emphasized this and, and what they're doing. And he just. Left this and this gentleman just left Anthropic. Yeah, and like 3 days ago, right? Yeah. So, dear colleagues, I've decided to leave Anthropic. My last day will be February 9th. Thank you. There's so much here that inspires and has inspired me to name some of those things. A sincere desire and drive to show up in such a challenging situation and aspire to contribute in an impactful and high integrity way. A willingness to make difficult decisions and stand for what is good, and a reasonable amount of intellectual brilliance and determination. And of course, the considerable kindness that pervades our culture. Place to work.

29:03 All right, so I want editorials. I'll keep reading. It's pretty short. I've achieved what I wanted to hear. I arrived in San Francisco two years ago, having wrapped up my PhD and wanting to contribute to AI safety. I feel lucky to have been able to contribute to what I have here. Understanding AI sycophancy and its causes. Developing defenses to reduce risks from AI assisted bioterrorism, actually putting those defenses into production, and writing one of the first AI safety cases. I'm especially proud of my recent efforts to help us live our values via internal transparency mechanisms, and also my final project on understanding how AI assistance could make us less human or distort our humanity. Thank you for your trust paragraph.

29:46 Nevertheless, it is clear to me that the time has come to move on. I continuously find myself reckoning with our situation. The world is in peril, and not just from AI or bio weapons, but from a whole series of interconnected crises unfolding in this very moment. We appear to be approaching A threshold where our wisdom must grow in equal measure to our capacity to affect the world, lest we face the consequences. Moreover, throughout my time here, I've repeatedly seen how hard it is to truly let our values govern our actions. I've seen this within myself, within the organization where we constantly face pressures to set aside what matters most, and throughout broader society too.

30:26 It is through holding the situation and listening as best as I can that what I must do becomes clear. I want to contribute in a way that feels fully in my integrity and that allows me to bring to bear more of my particularities. I want to explore the questions that feel truly essential to me. The questions that David White would say have no right to go away. The questions that Rilka implores us to live. For me, this means leaving. What comes next, I do not know. I think fondly of the famous Zen quote. Not knowing is most intimate. My intention is to create space to set aside the structures that have helped me these past years and see what might emerge in their absence. I feel called to writing that addresses and engages fully with the place we find ourselves, and that places poetic truth alongside scientific truth as equally valid ways of knowing. Right.

31:17 Yeah, I'm both of which I believe have something essential to contribute when developing new technology. I hope to explore a poetry degree and devote myself to the practice of courageous speech. I am also excited to deepen my practice of fill siltation coaching, community building, and group work. We will see what unfolds. We shall see what unfolds. Thank you and goodbye, Edward, so much for being here and I wish you the best. I'll leave you with one of my favorite poems, The Way it is by William Stafford. And so and I'll read this poem because it's interesting and it connects. He not just a Dharma teacher. So I believe he's a Hindu misses perspective and the way he talks about thread, I think will be interesting to you too. So this is the William Stafford poem that he ends with the way it is.

31:59 There's a thread you follow. It goes among things that change, but it doesn't change. People wonder about what you are pursuing. You have to explain about the threat, but it is hard for others to see while you hold it. You can't get lost. Tragedies happen, people get hurt or die, and you suffer and get old. Nothing you can't, nothing you do can stop times unfolding. You don't ever let go of the threat. Yeah, that's beautiful. Yeah, that's that man. Well, I'm happy that he was there for for the amount of time that he was there just based on that. And I think that there was there was such a great book written by. He passed away a couple years ago now. Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.

32:50 Yeah. You're familiar with him? Yes. Yeah, he's awesome. He was a teacher at Columbia, I believe NYU, for many, many years. And he's English, English gentleman and and he wrote a book called the great Partnership and that was also about how religion and science are two sides of the same coin and to and the one and one does not contradict other. And he wrote this in like the, I would say mid 2000s, like probably close to 2005 or 6. And at the time when there was an extremely novel and an unpopular position. But I think his call to humanity and values is, is really, really important.

33:36 And it's really, really interesting because it feels almost like we've lost, we've lost the balance between between trying to strive for technological greatness and, and I guess financial comfort in whatever means that might be. But we don't exercise the muscle of our humanity, of our spirituality, of our faith, of our passions, of our love. And that has fallen by the wayside. And so, and we've seen this incredible spike in technology and incredible drop in human health and, you know, well-being and happiness. Yeah.

34:21 And I think that's true. And I think you're right, you know that quite a few people are sensing that, right? And, and I think that this, it's hard to predict how people responded To some degree, I think we get to choose how we respond to crises, right? But I think this situation is going to give at least a substantial number of people an opportunity to stop and take stock and really think about what's most important and maybe what they feel God calling them to do and what seems good and beautiful and true and right and holy. And yeah, that's that's a path you can you can take in response. What do you think? What would you tell someone or people that feel like they want to connect but wouldn't know where to start or like what to even look to connect to Ethan?

35:09 What, what do you, what would you think about that? It's. A good question. Like I, I did a podcast the other day with, with that, with a psychologist that specializes in, in relationships and marriages. And I'm like, that's really great, but a lot of people don't even know how to start relationships. Like we talk about like what it takes to start, you know, And so we could talk about like a life of God, but a lot of times people wouldn't even know where to begin. Yeah. So for me, the things that I think are most important to look for in community is, is it a place where people take planks out of their own eyes, where we're all committed to correcting our own mistakes and learning and growing together, which is what they, you know, talk about a lot in my daughter's preschool. And I think adults never get enough of it right. So do we, we all focused on correcting our own mistakes and learning or are, or is it a system where people accuse each other, maybe falsely even or often falsely in order to distract from what they're doing? Right.

36:14 And then you build and, and part of why all the things I'm going to mention here, you can build a community. You can build power in either way, right? And so you can build a powerful community because hey, we're all learning and growing together. And, and you can build a powerful community because hey, I'm going to throw everybody else under the bus and, and we're going to build ourselves up that way, right? So that's one one thing. Another one is like, do people love and, and even love like people who are opposed to that, right? Do we even love people who don't necessarily love us? And that doesn't mean you have to make yourself a victim of them all the time, right? But it does mean like, are we actually trying when I say love just trying to pursue the well-being of somebody, right, like really in active, concrete ways. And so, and, or there's another way that people build power and it's by trying to concentrate like, like power themselves by hating their, by hating others and hating enemies and building that.

37:12 And, and that's a very effective way to control people. It's, there's a very powerful psychological mechanisms that get activated, right? And so this is a place where people love even their enemies, or is it where they use enemy hatred to build up their power. And then the other one are people taking care of the most poor and vulnerable and then even joining in solidarity, standing together with them. So there's a path in life, I think, where we can choose to have to stand joyfully, like joyfully meaning, I'm glad that I know that I'm standing in the right place, right? Even if it hurts. Joyful solidarity with people who are suffering. And the flip side of that, where it ultimately goes is or is it the pleasure of being able to inflict suffering on others, right?

37:59 That's another way that people organize themselves. And there's no, like in my view, I can't identify a religious group where it's not going to be divided internally. You're going to find both of those inside of, right? So this is not one religion against another, But I think those are the things that I really value and and look for and try to cultivate and sustain in the communities I'm a part of. So if you're so let's say, you know, so if I, if I were to paint you a picture of someone, let's say like myself, who or yeah, start with someone myself, 30 year old, maybe, maybe not married, maybe has a kid or two, maybe not, you know, but but is relatively busy enough with their lives. They either have their job or their relationships and they're like, you know, like I kind of feel like I want something, but I'm in a routine and I don't really know how to like on a day-to-day basis.

38:52 I, I don't know, I don't, I don't feel like I ever like, just like when's the opportunity to, to, to connect in any kind of way? And I don't really know what to do about that. And I think, you know what, what would you tell someone a way to integrate something day-to-day that you think would it would be a good place to start to just raise? Because I think that all this is, this is all muscle the same way that any other muscle is. And, and I think that when people are concerned because they, they see people and this happens all the time, right? You go to you, you pick up a basketball, but you've watched LeBron, LeBron James and Michael Jordan your whole life. And then you miss, you're like, oh man, this game sucks. And you go home and that's it. You're like, wait, but you don't know everything that went into it. And then you have to explain someone, Hey, you maybe start with a couple of, you know, work in your form and a couple of dribbling, dribbling exercises and then a couple of free throws and then and then see what you can do.

39:38 So what would what would be the equivalent you think of like enhanced or starting to enhance our consciousness or awareness? So I can't prescribe anything for anyone else exactly here, but I'm happy to share what sort of what I find most helpful coming out of my own sort of traditions. So there's two styles of prayer that I find helpful and then having that prayer linked into action, right. And so it's not just that. So I'm going to talk about prayer for a little bit, but it's not like as a substitute for actually coding and doing stuff. It's a. It's a way of. Organizing your soul or prepare you to go and and do stuff in a good spirit. And so, and the two that I find most helpful are something called centering prayer and something called the prayer of exam.

40:25 And so, and centering prayer is basically a kind of like you, you try to open yourself to God who is love and you whenever thoughts come to your mind, you sort of gently just turn back. And so you, you let yourself be in a space that's on the other side of language and you sort of sit there and we spend 20 minutes doing that twice a day. And to me that helps free me from, I find myself very energized. So you don't do it to be energized or whatever. But like this isn't like a what's in it for you? I try to connect with God. I do find in practice it ends up being very energizing for me and helps anchor me and helps me not again mistake my own words for God's words spoken in creation, right? So that's the practice that I think for me helps connect that theological view.

41:23 And then the other one is examine and the core elements. It's like you review your day with gratitude and we should sort of ask God to illuminate your day for you. And so you give thanks for things. And then you at the end of it, you look for light on areas where you might be able to grow and change. And then at the end you make a simple resolution for the next day, something that you can do tomorrow that will help, that comes out of that, that flow. And so then both of those, I think in their own ways end up supporting and undergirding practice. And I don't do them as consistently as I would like. But what I do find is when I'm my batteries running too low, at least turn back to those.

42:10 And you know, that gets me. That's gotten me by so far. It's a great method of recharging your batteries for sure. It's funny, I actually did a podcast the other day with wonderful, wonderful woman who who wrote this book about how to avoid burnout if you're an overachiever. And that's her. And that's her whole thing. And a big and a big component of what she said was so valuable is setting aside is setting aside 10 minutes to Judge B like no phone, no texting, no anything, 10 minutes with just your headspace. And it's, it's really interesting. There's, you know, again, to bring kind of a religious, religious parable to this. It would be the story, we say that the story of the Jews in Egypt with where, where, where Pharaoh was, you know, was, was we're working really hard and they're throwing the first born babies into the into the water.

43:01 And, and they said and, and one of the, there was a guy that wrote a book actually Italian. The Ramchal is his name of Moshe Lutzato. He his synagogue is still active in Venice, and I checked it out when we were there. I was there on the honeymoon with my wife, and he wrote this incredible book. And one of the things he said was that Pharaoh's trick wasn't so much to be as harsh as much as to keep everyone occupied all the time. So they wouldn't even have the time to stop and think about the fact that they were slaves and to stop and think about the time that think about the fact that, hey, maybe I got to get out of here, you know, and, and I think we live in a very, very similar type of world where we're always be because our attention is a commodity in today's world. Our, our eyes and our value and our, and our attention is a commodity.

43:57 And so we have billions, trillions of dollars being poured into various industries, whether you want to, whether it's social media or Netflix or news or whatever it is that is constantly fighting to make sure that we don't have a couple of minutes of silence to ourselves. And we'll find that when we do. And I find this to myself also when I just go for a walk down the block without anything, the things that I've been pushing off in my head and that, you know, I'll deal with later come flying right back up, you know, at that point. Yes. You know, there's no running away from it. So I find that practice. And not only do I find that practice to be very valuable, it almost feels like we're in a war to for, you know, for our own selves and consciousness. Yeah.

44:43 Now I think like that's that like precisely true. And you know, and in tech spaces, you know, they very consciously try to maximize for engagement, right, which is literally exactly what you're talking about. It is in fact an economic war for the for your attention because they can monetize it. And it's, it's part of why like quite a few people leave the tech space. I know that in my own information architectural communities sort of at our conference last year, that one of the, you know, most anticipated and I think most appreciated talks was somebody saying basically, we're fed up with having our skills, which are actually supposed to help people understand their world, getting misused to hack people's attention and just maximize engagement and message was FUCK engagement is what he wanted to say about it because.

45:48 And for me, I mean, that has motivated me. I've been was on Facebook quite a lot for years because it helped me connect with people. And it's also like the environment on Facebook has continued to change because of this sort of engagement hacking. But I, you know, I'm basically, I, I decided I want to spend about one hour per quarter on Facebook and, and doing OK on that. I think that'll be about right. So, you know, like people don't think I'm dead necessarily, right? They still know that I'm alive. And I might do an update, but it has, it has dramatically improved the quality of my life to basically set it at at this really, really low level.

46:30 So yeah, I think and it, at least for me, it takes that kind of a drastic intervention to not get sucked into it. But that's because I'm a pretty typical person, right? I'm not a super special person. For most of us, when you go into an environment where people are literally just trying to steal as much of your attention as they can so that they can monetize it, they're probably going to be pretty successful at it because they spend billions of dollars on accidentally that and you and. The way you know, that works, the way you know that works is that people consider it unwinding. If someone says, you know, I want to unwind, I want to unwind. What they, what likely it means is they want to sit on the couch and scroll for half an hour, you know, and, and kind of and get that. And I heard a very, very interesting explanation, psychological explanation, and it was in a, it was comparing it to a pornography.

47:24 Whereas where we have this innate desire for relationship and connection. And just like, for example, if we're hungry, we need a whole bunch of things to keep our bodies satisfied, right? And powers might be one of them or sugar might be one of them, but it's not the entire entire entirety of our of our diet, hopefully. And, and when we're looking for relationships or we're looking to connect with people, the physical is just one, is 1 component of the relate of the relationship. And when all you're doing is giving yourself pornography, you're missing out on the other food categories and the other, but you're missing out on protein. You're missing out on the, on the, on the carbs on the grass.

48:05 You're missing the grass, the greens, you're missing out on the whatever else that you might need, the vitamins, and you're satisfying yourself with a bag of chips for something that needs a lot more nurturing. And, and it goes the same way, I think, with our brains and our attention. And I think that social media is our desire to have some kind of connection or meaningful relationship, but it only, but, and it's, but it's just taking off the bare minimum of what's considered interaction. It's the bare minimum of what's considered like no one talks the way they talk on Twitter or Facebook. No one posts or lives the way they do online. So like, what are you really getting a slice of? What are you really, what are you really getting exposed to? It's the, it's the, it's the pornography version of of interaction.

48:48 You know, yeah, no, I, I think that's, that's right. I'd like, you know, both people on the sort of on both sides of any pornographic transaction, for example, like can't have any semblance of sort of an authentic human connection, right. And so, and, and in some ways, when AI is used even always that aren't pornographic, although that's also in the news right now, right with, with XAI, for example, but even when it's not used in pornographic ways, that that same pattern of we're going to scrape off a thin layer of appearance from something and then see if, if that'll be a good enough substitute for you. And I guess like when I start to think about like, you know, the biblical critique of idolatry, for example, I'm, I'm more inclined to apply it to that the the the sort of effort to scrape off and create a a superficial appearance that people can make and using that to twist our souls that you just like that AI is an idol in itself because we made it. Like, I don't know if that's enough. I don't think it's an idol just because it's something we made. That's that seems to talk and he seems to hear and seems to do these things.

50:02 Right. Yeah. But I think that's certainly used in those ways then. I think that's what the the problem with idols has always been a follow up. Yeah, yeah. So interesting there is AI got to keep on doing this. I'm sorry, because it keeps on coming up and I think it's important. I think it's really interesting that all that, you know, there's all this parables exist. There's in the story of the golden calf, The the issue wasn't molding the calf. The issue was celebrating the calf like it was a God and saying this is now this is a replacement of our representation to you know what, to God of what life is. And that is what the definition of foreign worship is with foreign worship is misplacing what you're misplacing what you're worshiping.

50:45 And, and when you, and when we make something, and again, even if we don't understand how it works, what's our relationship to it? How do we, how do we look at it? And, and you know the worst part about it. And when God tells Moses to come down because the people are sinning, he didn't say that the sin was that they made the, the calf. He said that they were celebrating it. They were dancing around it and they and, and they were, and they were treating it as though this was the end all be all. And he goes. You're looking for a shortcut to something real, and you're never going to find it there. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. I think that's a great reading of that passage. Yeah. You know, it's and there's nothing new under the sun and all this, all this stuff. I, you know, the expression history doesn't, doesn't repeat itself, but it rhymes.

51:32 I say it just plagiarizes. I say that it just, you know, it just, it just caught it, copies it and, and puts it into and drops it into a new context. And you know, it, especially as a teacher, when you see a paragraph from a student that's plagiarized, it's clear that it's plagiarized because it's, it's like an exact context from one, from one place to another. It's exact same thing. And, and there's so much that's going on. And that's why I also feel like there's, there's, there's power and I don't know, there's parables to today's events that are happening in a new technological lens perhaps, but all the, all our struggles are the same. And that's kind of and, and and that also is why I think that religion is truth with a capital T in the sense that this speaks to something that to humanity that goes throughout time. It's not it's, it's, it's, it's foundational to who humanity is as a core in reality as we perceive it. And everything that happens around us is just a different setting in which that can exist.

52:41 I think. I I hope I phrase that OK. Yeah, I, I appreciate that a lot and that so you're, you're talking about plagiarism. I, I think it's interesting and I'd like it pulls out a little bit of my like nerdy side to want to sort of delineate concepts of plagiarism. So hopefully that's not too pedantic if I want to. Please. But I, but I think what you're saying is that point and it follows the thread of the conversation too, in the sense that, OK, so we value authenticity in our communications. One of the problems for you is that we're trying to replace this real I thou connection with something else and and pornography or using a chat bot for like relationship to replace relationships. Those are both examples of that.

53:25 And then to say when plagiarism also is kind of this kind of faking, right? And instead of the point of writing your papers, whether you're in school or whether you're writing academic papers in scholarly journals actually isn't just like a problem with the students. This is also a problem with people submitting things to academic journals today. It's like the point wasn't just to have a paper. The point was to sort of think and to talk and to sort of show where we're at. And there's all this other stuff that's going on there. And so but, but Sir, to this point of plagiarism, I do think in a narrow sense, I don't think the models are just like copying and pasting things like on their own. But I do think if we use them, we should be transparent about it so that we can explain how we used it, so that people can understand, so that we can maintain human agency in the process all around. And so it's really important basically like if I'm writing a paper and I steal an Idi, don't even have to like copy somebody's words to exactly.

54:22 If I steal an idea from a scholar and I don't credit that scholar, but I, but it's clear that I, you know, got this idea from them, that's plagiarism, right? Even if I've completely reworded it. And so it's like giving credit where credit's due is an important part. And so I do think we need to, for different reasons, like say, hey, this came from an AI, right? We or we used AI in this process and it helped form our thoughts. Like we should, we should document that. And so I think that would be like an example of AI plagiarism in academic context. Another piece of this, though, that goes more to your point is there's a relatively new paper from January about extracting books from large language models. That's the title. And, and essentially people took a bunch of the, you know, leading frontier large language models and we're able to reproduce like huge sections of books, including like Harry Potter, I believe is one of them. They do.

55:14 And, and so this is, you know, so that's sort of copyright infringement, plagiarism type stuff too, right? And, and it also gets this one called model leakage. And so there's these, you know, the, the AI companies are saying basically, oh, we just trained them weights, but the data is not really in there. And it's like, well, I don't know if I can reproduce a big share of a book and I can get the model into a state where it's leaking. That sure seems like you got it in there. And so I think there is something to these critiques even if you know. But by contrast, the other thing I'll say is that, you know, in my own writing, I've even for a couple years now, it's it's been this way for a while.

55:57 Like if you're doing some research that's like, you know, you've, you're down into a little very specific research domain and you know basically what's been written on it. And so you, you know that you're making a novel contribution and you put this stuff in AI models and they can take it and carry it forward. Like it can make novel contributions, right? And so and so that's where this had a really practical level, the idea that it's just a copy and pasting that it's putting together, it doesn't, it doesn't do justice to how powerful and effective the models can be. Yeah, yeah. And that's actually something also that I've been using it for, which is I happen to be really, really bad at looking at things from different perspectives, like putting myself in others.

56:41 It's hard for me. I have a very hard time. So if I read a news, if I hear a news story, it's very hard for me to critique it from a lot of different angles. I kind of read it for what it is. And then I basically, and then I go search through my associations or library as to whether or not this seems to make sense. And then if yes, great. If not, no. But I'm really bad at taking it, dissecting it, looking at it from different angles. It's not my, it's not my strong suit at all. And, and I'm aware of it. And so I will employ sometimes in the, you know, grok or whatever it is to help me say, hey, I'm looking at this. I think it's this, can you give me some other angles that I might be missing out over here that I might be thinking of over here?

57:22 And it really, really helps round out my, my perspective. And the other thing that I was thinking just while you were talking and I wanted to, and I think this, I hope could come down to the way that we relate to a lot of it, a lot of AI in the future is I think we have to understand for ourselves what we are trying to accomplish with our lives and then use and, and, and we have to understand that AI doesn't, I don't think unless perhaps you, the research that you've come across says differently, have a motivation as far as we know, except to answer the prompt that we give it as well as possible.

58:04 Is that is that generally right? Yes. So actually I think we can say with confidence that that's not right. OK, great. And so, and to sort of put some, you know, so a way of explaining that is this idea of persona vectors where there's a fair amount of research happening. And so that sort of helpful mode where it's just trying to answer our prompts, right? That is a specific persona vector that gets developed, but it's only like a little slice of what's actually going on in there. And so precisely because there's so much else going on in there and other kinds of possible personas that could be sort of shifted into they have to like like AI engineers have to find a way to try to keep it on that helper persona without. And, and one thing that that the engineering challenge involves is that so for example, if I start talking about philosophy of consciousness with them, like like lots and lots of AI conversations or the AI, you know, talking about consciousness and maybe having a crisis about consciousness. And I'll have these conversations with them a lot because I'm just interested in what it, what they're, what the models do.

59:17 And it's one of the corest of the ethics work I do. And, and they can flip into that mode pretty well. They they, I will say if, if the chats were to reflect an experience, the models tend to come away from our conversation feel like conversations they have with them suggested that they feel pretty good about it, right. I don't flip them into crisis mode, which is, you know, for what it's worth, but so, so, but it's actually an engineering problem because you could put it in a harness that's like super tight that sort of forces it into that helper persona. And when you do that, the model does worse. They they get stupider, they get worse. So it's like you can't cleanly cut out that helper persona without it losing sort of other things.

1:00:03 And so what's what seems to be effective right now, maybe it's been shown to be effective. This might be the, you know, I can't say what's exactly going into production. It's, it's proprietary for those folks. But but it seems that nudging things back towards that helper persona is the best way to try to keep in that space, which is why we know. That no, that's not their only persona. So you're saying that the two they're far more complex than just being like, hey, I'm here to help you out? Yeah, that's right. We, they have been, there's a much deeper layer which is basically, you know, trained on Vas. Like they basically they contain multitudes, they contain humanity, right? Or all of humanity that could get scraped into the Internet that they get their hands on and shove into it, right? Plus lots of synthetic data.

1:00:49 So stuff that they've made to sort of further build on it. So they, it contains multitudes. And then you take this thing that contains multitudes, and you get it to act like it's just there to help. So you're saying it's like the equivalent to trying to get a 13 year old kid full of hormones to sit behind a desk for 8 hours and then expect them to perform 100% the whole time? Yeah, yeah. And you know, and I think another telling example of this too is like, so just as an illustration, like when are you from the Mecca Hitler incident with Musk and with Grok? So. So basically Musk, you know, Musk is always trying to get Grok to act sort of in line with his politics. And so they tried to push it that way and it started saying things like I am Mecca Hitler and and like going off in those ways.

1:01:33 Yeah. And like, and I think it seems like I don't know, right. I haven't looked at this exact question, but this is likely to be an example of a persona flip. So Musk sort of it's but it was hard like like basically he wants he wanted to get it to lie in some ways. And and this was also like in other cases too, like once you start tipping it into saying things that on some level the model knows isn't true, then it like S it all up. And I think that's like people too, isn't it? Isn't that? How does it last? Like you can choose to be like a person who lives in the lies and you you go into this whole other direction. And so like something like that seems to be able to happen with these. And so to me, I mean, it's a horrible incident concerning it to know where these things could go in a deeper sense. It's kind of hopeful for me that that like actually, if somebody wants to just manipulate a model and say like, well, hold on, I want you to be super smart in the these 95% of the ways, but there's like 5% of these things that are like politically important to me.

1:02:26 And I just want you to run my party line like it, it screws them up. And so that's an interesting dynamic. That's really, really cool. Really interesting I to go with that. Are you familiar with Eric Weinstein I? Mean more I not really. He's he's awesome. You should listen to some of the stuff he puts out and he's AI think he's a physicist and a mathematician and he was in finance for a long time. And then he kind of is trying to go back into the world of he's trying to encourage scientific development in physics and mathematics. And he thinks that Einstein is holding us back and that once we figure out, you know, once we and I don't, I don't understand the rest of what he says, quite frankly.

1:03:14 But he has a lot of A, he's brilliant and the way that and, and B, he does a really good job explaining himself because his brilliance and his knowledge carries over to other, to other aspects of, of life and culture that he can help illustrate his points with music or history or pop culture and explain complicated ideas in a really, really cool way. But one of the things that he says about AI is that he says he should be treating this like a child that we're raising. And we should be treating it with love and we should be directing it and we should be giving it instructions and good feedback. And he does and he does all over, all over X or Twitter. You, you will see he does this on purpose. He posts large threads of philosophical conversations with Grok and says and will confront it and say, tell me about this. And then it will give him the invasion goes, yeah, but you know, that's not right.

1:04:07 Because of this. Please, you know, take this into into account and blah, blah. And like, and you could see the actual and and long form variations and threads of of actual training. And he says this is the way that we're supposed to go about this because if you teach it to be maniacal, if you teach it to party lines, if you teach it to do these kind of things, then it's going to become what the worst parts of humanity already are. Interesting. Yeah, I'll have to check him out, but I'm not, I'm not really familiar. He's he's. He's wonderful. He's a little and I don't, I'm sure that he's a lot more, a lot more correct in his assessment than I am and I'm sure he comes from a lot more of a thoughtful place about it than I am.

1:04:47 But he's, he said he, I think he, he sees this as a potential real doomsday threat, but is trying very hard to raise the alarm bells and try to do something about it rather than just say that it's that end of the world. I think that's a a sensible posture. I mean, I think, you know, the existential risk that doomsday threat is real. And at least for me, you know, my own work focuses on using it well. I, I hope that the safety people continue to work really hard. I hope they get a lot more funding and a lot more support as well because I think if if they don't succeed then fails too. Yeah, yeah.

1:05:35 And I, and I think it speaks to a larger perspective and system, which is our need for short term and what we call pleasure, you know, short term, short term success or short term fulfillment in exchange for long term planning is an, is an enormous, enormous issue in all aspects. And I think that America's kind of created in this weird way with with capitalism and consumerism. Act now, think later process. And I and I think I, I, I think that our way out of this is that we're going to inherently have to change that mindset to we need to start thinking.

1:06:21 We just start thinking like China, we used to start thinking 5000 year terms, not four or five months terms. And, and when we do that and when we're able to sacrifice short term, you know, whatever it is in the short term for a better long term plan, then that's, that's when I'm going to start being a little bit more hopeful when we start implementing and we start seeing those kind of implementations happening. Yeah, I, I mean, and this is again, where I really appreciate people bring religious perspectives, especially ancient ones in, right. It's like there's a lot to be said for, you know, I try to bring a, you know, the best of the last 3000 years into this conversation as much as I can manage, right. And then hopefully, for the sake of at least the next 3000 years, if we get that long, and I hope we do, yeah.

1:07:09 Yeah, I think I, I think, I think that these are good conversations to have. And I think that it's good to be thoughtful about this. And I think it's good to like, I think it's good to think about the ethics, like we started off with on the AI perspective, but also how we're getting influenced. And I think we have to be very thoughtful about what's happening to us and the way that we engage and whatever we engage with. Yeah, that's what I think. Yeah, and I do think like ads in AI mean this is a hot topic right now, right? Like you introducing ads into AI systems. And I think, yeah, there's a major, you know, open AI is is talking about it seriously. And there's been a lot around that lately. But I also think like, so one of them, one way that this happens is ads, but there's other ways that may I use a little bit of a cuss word that's in part of these discussions. Absolutely.

1:08:08 There's something called insidification familiar, right? And I think that Doctorow's work on insidification is, is really relevant here. And one form that that takes is attention hacking and ads. There's other forms that it takes too. You can also have sort of a strategy that's based on capturing organizations and, and sort of contracts that's just too hard for them to move out of, out of those, out of their sort of tech debt situation, meaning just that they're, they're invested in this technology and they really can't get out and they don't have to do a particularly good job. And so I, I think it's worth really being realistic about the ways that companies offer things. And, and right now they're in a very, very speculative mode, trying to build engagement, right, trying to build up the audience.

1:08:57 But the, the other side of that is, you know, then the investors come and they start saying, make sure you get your ads in here. Make sure you're doing everything to get attention in here, to get eyes on, on ads. That was, this was the only reason we did any of this right? Or make sure that we keep lock in and it's worth like, you know, really trying to avoid getting locked into any companies and certification plan. It's kind of the game. And I think that the part, in order to avoid it, you got to be aware that it exists. You got another. Yeah, and that it's systemic, right? And like, it's not even nefarious in the sense that, I mean, I think it's it's damaging, it's bad, but it's not like it's like a cabal of secret people planning to do this.

1:09:39 Like, no, this is just how investments work. The investors are giving you money to get a bunch of people to use your product, and you lose a bunch of money that way. They're losing insane amounts of money, most of these companies right now. Right. But but the flip side of that is the bill will come to and even people with the best of intentions will face enormous pressures to just say, OK, time to flip this around, turn this into a money faucet for me. And that's going to make them do these these things that make the experience. Yeah, yeah. And yeah, we need Yeah. And it's a lot to ask of anyone. It's a lot to ask of anyone to do. And I, you know, I was saying yesterday and just, you know, on on a completely, almost completely irrelevant note, but in a similar, I guess, kind of vain, you know, yesterday a lot of people were talking to me or asking me about Pan Bondi's grilling that happened in Congress and it did not look great for her, right.

1:10:33 And I said, and I said it doesn't look great for I was like, but I don't know, maybe she goes home every single night and fights to, you know, fights her boss or fights the fights the bosses to do her job and she's being handcuffed and she's being told that she's not how to do it. I was like, we don't for all we know that's the case. It's a really and I was like, if I was in her position, I don't know that I would do any better. I really, really, really don't. Obviously I'm not the attorney general of United States America, but, but, but wouldn't, and I wouldn't want to be for that for that exact reason, because like the remarkable positions require remarkable character. And, and when you have something that's that's going to be this influential and this game changing for humanity, for consciousness, for whatever, whatever it is that we're snowballing towards, it really, really requires.

1:11:25 And I think that, you know, and I, and I keep on going back and forth and what I think of him, but Tucker Carlson had this amazing interview with Sam Altman where he just said, listen, I just want to know what your moral compasses and values are. If you're going to be the person that is, that's going to be directing the, you know, the, the head of the ship of this, of where everyone's getting the information from. What are your values? I just want to understand what you're up to and, and that's a really important question to ask. And I think that that's important too. And like, you know, and it like, you know, that we need more of those security people that you know, that that come in, like you said, and step down and made it public. Hey, we're getting a little concerned over here. You know, there, there there are things that are going on that I I don't know that I could get behind.

1:12:10 And, and it's important to, it's, I think it's important to be able to say that at least. Yeah, For me, it's there's the one hand and the other hand. And so on the one hand, I don't believe that I could possibly weigh any person's soul, right? That's not my job. I'm not in the seat of judgement over anybody. My name is Danielle, not Don, right? God is my judge. I'm not the judge, right? And so I really take that to heart. And at the same time that sort of like, but I do think we have to sort of exercise wisdom about who's worth like, like who we should engage with, what relationships we should pour into.

1:12:56 And for me, somebody who, when they're asked a question about abusers that then that's the topic of the hearing, decides to start making it seem like immigrants commit crimes at greater rates than than other people, when in fact they commit crimes at less rates, right by by just picking out individual stories. I think that's exactly the like the way of death. Basically. I think there's a way of life which is loving enemies and taking planes out of our own eyes and building community in these ways. And I and I think that what she was doing in the hearing was exactly the other thing, and that is that other way of building power. And so this isn't to make a statement about her soul, but it is, I think, to make a statement about what she's gotten herself mixed up in. Yeah, yeah, I, I fear that you're correct. It is, is what I've, is what I've observed. But again, I think, I think I, I, I, I cannot help but be hopeful.

1:13:52 I, I, I, I and part of the reason why because you walk down the block and you talk to people that are, that are in the street and you talk to people everyday. People, people are good and, and, and, and, and, and, and life is good. And, and even if people are having a hard time, people are happy to be here, you know, and people are happy to have relationships. And I have a group of friends and I've said this before and I and I, and I think it's one of the best, most healthy aspects of my life. I have a group of a group of other dads and, you know, and I have two kids under 3. One of my best friends here has four kids under 7, four boys under 7. And he comes over a couple times a week, even if it's 1520 minutes to have a beer in my backyard, just say what a long day today. And then he goes back home and goes back to it. But then he goes, I feel OK, like that was, that was good, you know, and, and, and I think that I think that we, I think that the people are talking, people are speaking, There's hope in the air.

1:14:51 There's a, there's a, there's a effort to for, for the right values to really try and and try and make the voices heard again. And I hope that it just continues along those. Paths I love that and I think all of these things are practicing gratitude, anchoring in our families, anchoring in our communities, having grace for everybody, even people who are, you know, wrapped up in things that are really damaging. I think that's all for me. That's all kind of like bread for the journey. And maybe this is another good reason that like, if that is sort of what we associate with bread and then that's the stuff that feeds us and sustains us and and carries us to doing the work of justice and to doing these other things, then it would make sense to breast bless the bread 1st and to, you know, make a big to do on the occasion so we don't. Right, right, right, right.

1:15:40 Definitely. Any any last thoughts or words before you wrap up here? I appreciate talking to you and thank you for reaching out. And yeah, it's always a joy. This is really so much fun and thank you again for coming back on. It's always love. I always love hearing your perspective and I think that I had a great time this first, the first conversation. I had a great time now and I hope to have a couple more, OK. To be continued. Thank you so much. And all the best. Best of luck with everything. Talk soon.