 Whenever you have any relationship issue, whether it's you're you don't know what to do on your date You don't know what to text your date. You don't know how to interpret a text. You're struggling in your relationship You you don't know if you want to get married You don't know if you want to break up you have broken up, but you want to get back together So any kind of relationship issue that you have we're basically your hotline 24-7 where you can connect to a qualified certified relationship coach who actually knows what they're talking about Who's talked to thousands of people just like you who has a playbook for your exact situation and you can get You know very personalized contextual help. You know someone's opinion may contradict yours. Where's my friend Alan? It's all about your perspective Who are we and what is the nature of this reality? What's up everyone welcome to simulation I'm your host Alan Sakyan We are now Going to be talking about Relationship hero we have Learon Shapiro joining us on the show. Hi there. Hi Alan. Thanks so much for coming on Yeah, great to be here. I'm super excited for this episode for those who don't know Learons background He's co-founder and CEO of relationship hero, which is the number one relationship coaching service in the world They have over 100 full-time relationship coaches available 24 7 via phone or Online chat and you can find the links in the bio below relationship hero comm also Learons LinkedIn and Twitter profile Also, of course as we have Ori as our co-producer you are his brother with the same last name Yes, and it's so fun having you here and hanging out together Let's jump in with one of our favorite questions. We like asking our guests What are your thoughts on the direction of our world? All right. Well in my own opinion, I think the direction of the world is good You know, it's if you've read Steven Pinker's enlightenment now He really details all these things that are really going the right way and there's you know There's a really good Ted talk by Hands Rosling that I recommend checking out about you know How all these countries are getting lifted out of poverty everybody's getting food to eat He makes a big distinction between making like $1 a day and $4 a day and after that making like $100 a day So you're really seeing a lot of movement toward people just like having less Horrible shit in their lives and just like more of having like a decent life that's like a major trend we're seeing and I think it gets lost in people who are like Complaining or bitching about like little things like oh, you know, we're having privacy issues online Like yeah, there's all these little problems, but you have to keep it in a sense of perspective of like hey Do you not have diarrhea every single day? That's like a big improvement So I don't think I'm saying anything new here But I just try to keep things in perspective that I do think were overall on the right track Yes, yeah, it's okay So basic needs being met for people around the world enabling them to have clean water I Meals to eat every day less disease Better health better education. These are critical absolutely critical and flourishing is increasing in all those respects around the world Simultaneously a lot of the major technology challenges that we face now are of unprecedented scales and just have not been Delta with of an in any sort of capacities in the past at the same levels as what we're experiencing now, so Maybe what would be some of your key like points or maybe like an essential Skill or advice that you would recommend young people and adults to embody as we go into the exponential technology age Hmm. Yeah, what skill should you embody? I think there's thinking tools that are helpful So, you know, just understand how to analyze things with a sense of perspective So like, you know, what I was saying about the world is like, you know Can you zoom out from the random discussion you're having on Twitter and and look at you know an actual statistical trend? That's global scale keep that in mind and then in terms of technology like yeah I do think that just getting educated in technology is like a powerful tool and it's getting harder and harder to Insist on doing things the old way, right? So you have to be like an adaptive to change Yeah, I think that's the good general approach. Yes. Yes. I liked that a lot the It's likely one of the most critical aspects of worldview development is to be able to Both zoom out into this macro perspective on viewing the entire planet and 8 billion nodes moving around and seeing how they're Engaging with each other like we were talking about people getting uplifted with their basic needs and simultaneously going into the micro and identifying the in a scientific way identifying what's happening at the atomic level the cellular level but also Seeing what's happening at the human level in a one-on-one eye to eye Knowing how to practice emotional intelligence motion regulation growth mindset perspective taking there's so many of the different complex nuances interpersonally to develop so these this phenomenon of scales and really being able to Kind of go between them is such an important skill. Yep They're on how did you first get interested in computer science when you're growing up? Well, I had a computer In my room It was like an old Apple SE desktop computer and I was just clicking around on it I just loved it, you know, I loved all the logic of it and you know Stuff would happen when you click and it all had like its own logic and it was you know really had all these details It was just like this very fun game right and I even remember before that as like a five or six year old Just having all these toys and the toys would all be like kind of boring, right? Like there wasn't too much you can do with them and like but some of the toys would have like speakers and Some of the toys would have like maybe a couple lights on them, but then the computer was great It was like so much richer in terms of you know stuff it could do so that was like my first computer memory and then when I was around Nine then I started learning You know I started seeing places where you could type some code and I checked out like a math book from the library And it told me about writing some code so I got my hands on a basic editor You know the programming language basic so I've just started tooling around writing my own code And it was just amazingly fun, right? It really like clicked with you know It's kind of like I was born to have some sort of a hobby like that right and so if I wasn't around in like the 90s if I was around like a thousand years ago I probably would have been like making stuff out of wood right and that would have been a lot less fun than computers All right, so what was it about did you did you feel when you were younger also the the sheer amount of power that you had being able to work with computer logic and just what you could tweak and how you could manipulate Binary code to output whatever you wanted and just did you feel the power of that at a young age? Um, I definitely felt a lot of the power yet It definitely felt pretty awesome, but I also think that intuitively for me. There was always There was like a disconnect between the stuff I was doing like I never imagined myself that serious because I was just a kid and for me like the real world I imagine it is so different right so like the grown-ups making like the computer work making airplanes work Right writing the software that people actually use in real life I felt that was like a separate world and what I was doing was always going to be only a toy So it really took all the way until my adult life where I started working for like a real company And it's like okay Well the software they're doing isn't really that different than the software I'm doing like there's there's definitely some tricks to make things work better, but You know there's no disconnect like there's you know There's a spectrum right of more and more serious software and that's actually something that I wish I knew more as a kid of like You can really just you know you can play at any league you want to play in And what were some of those things that you were building out you went to UC Berkeley for computer science or were some of the things You're building out throughout your trajectory I'm sure yes So as a kid I just started with games like random games that were that I didn't expect to have any impact on the world just like You know trivia games and like like I made a solitaire game Right, which was like no better than any other solitaire game, but it was fun to make And then in high school I made some physics simulations So I'd learn a concept like you know gravity and I make like a little simulation of a ball falling by programming in the acceleration So I was doing all that stuff and you know nobody was really using my software It was just like me making it for myself And then it really took until I got my first real job before I was making software that was actually going out in the world Okay, okay, and so then that was in what year was that? 2008 yeah with why yeah, I started working at slide and I worked on a game called super poke pets So like if you've heard of like throwing a sheep so that was a company that made that and you could like take care of the sheep As your pet so I was writing some of the code to like buy stuff for your pet So it's really not a very serious application But it was my first exposure to you know real people using stuff that I have you know influence on and we did have like millions of users Okay, so the code that you were then deploying had already been at The scale of millions of people using it exactly and for me That's something I really enjoy is you know I could just be typing some code on a computer and next thing you know We hit the deploy button and you've got millions of people right running it on their own laptops So it's it's really a pretty big influence. It's kind of like you're controlling a robot army, right? And and so then I saw I guess I started getting that sense of power. Yes. Yes, okay And then what about then with that sense of power Plus this passion for entrepreneurship where how did that how did those things collide for your Endeavor into quicksy. I'm sure yeah So, you know, I wanted to do something big and interesting with my life, right? I wanted to make an impact or just you know, see basically see what I could do Right see what the limit was of what kind of job I could have or what kind of success I could have So when I started quicksy my thought was like well, yeah, you know I'd heard of startups, right? I'd been reading all about like Paul Graham's writing and following other people's startups And I was living in San Francisco, which is kind of like the heart of the startup scene So I was like, okay, let's do this like it's possible to just start a company And if you get enough people using it you get enough customers you got some investors You could make the next Google right like you could really you could change the world basically right like you can make the next big thing that That is a big part of a lot of people's lives and kind of be like just a big piece a big piece of the world basically Big new piece. So that was kind of the appeal of it to me Okay, and then where did the idea for what you wanted to build come from Yeah, the idea of quicksy my co-founder at the time Tomer had the original idea and he was saying well There's so many apps coming out. We just noticed there's a lot of apps coming out and the the search for the app in the app stores was horrible and All these developers were basically getting shafted because they'd work hard on an app They'd launch it and they just get zero users Mmm, and then how would you guys drive more users to yeah So it was a pretty vague idea, but the idea was basically like well We'll just make a search engine so that on the user side They just type anything and we connect them to the right app instantly right when it launches So we saw kind of a marketplace failure. So the vision was to fix that mm-hmm and then why then for People that were going on to the play store or onto the Apple app store Why would then people use quicksy? Yeah, well, I think you've pinpointed one of the flaws in the model right as we needed a whole distribution channel Right because if a user is accustomed to going and searching in the Apple store, why would they go out of their way? So we had a bunch of ideas for it at various times So we explored everything from like let's make an app on the user's home screen and the app is a better search than their search bar or Let's integrate with maybe not Apple, but like with you know, third-party operating systems, you know Google's Android. There's a lot of third-party Android distributions. Let's integrate into the search bar and that So we explored a bunch of things But you have pinpointed one of the the basic flaws in the original model of quicksy and you know It was ultimately quicksy failed. So and that was one of the flaws In general pairing up People that are seeking for the information that they want more effectively is really important So it's yeah good that you guys were endeavoring into Trying to take on that grand challenge and that includes things like natural language processing Which is really hard if I type something into a search bar you have to parse and Connect those words to a catalog of apps that also have those key words that are linked to them and yeah This is this is a tough computer science for sure. Yeah. Yeah, I also really liked what you guys did Called the quicksy challenge, which I thought was really interesting. I think it's so applicable to the current Market that we're doing things like X prizes and stuff like that so Tell us about the quicksy challenge Sure. Yeah, so the the quicksy challenge was our solution to the problem Just how do you find good engineering talent because when you're in the Bay Area? It's it's really such a scramble to get good engineering talent. There's so much competition and the salaries are absolutely skyrocketing I mean the the compensate just to give you a sense of the salary is the compensation package that an entry-level engineer can get Here in 2019 It's literally three times like 300% of what I could get when I was starting out 10 years ago in 2009 So 10 years triple the compensation package. That's insane, right? And like in the meantime the average American's income Has gone up like maybe 10% right? It's barely moved Compared to 300% so it's not typical for this economy how valuable programmers are becoming today. It's it's absolutely insane So in such a hard market, right? So I was the quicksy challenge is more like in 2011 2012 So it was just at the beginning of this exponential Growth and in programmer competitiveness But we were just thinking like look recruiters are charging 20% of the programmers first-year salary and the programmers making six figures So we're talking 20 grand even 30 grand of recruiter commission So we just asked ourselves well Is there any way that we can spend 20 grand more effectively to get more than one good programmer? And so we came up with the idea like well when somebody's in college 20 grand is an unthinkably high amount of money even a hundred dollars is a lot of money For you know a poor college student who doesn't have a job yet So why don't we just incentivize people to you know give them something to do for a hundred dollars? So that was one of the ideas and then we combine it with another idea Which is like hey when I'm interviewing somebody to be a good programmer I actually know a lot in the first minute like I can actually you can give me one minute And I'm already pretty far along in the interview like I don't have a final decision But I could probably start eliminating people in one minute and maybe not one minute Maybe five minutes right but one minute is like an exaggerated version of it So we combine the ideas and we say let's give them a one minute challenge where if they succeed they get a hundred dollars And it's a lead gen right it's lead generation for our interview pipeline And it did in fact work as expected. It was a pretty big success. We hired like seven candidates off of it We paid a lot less than 20,000 per candidate We paid like five thousand dollars per candidate all things equal so we'd have to give out like maybe 50 of these prizes But it also it really got quick sees name out there when every college student was like This is the best way that I can make a hundred dollars in one minute of my time So it was kind of a hack that combined together You know some elements of the situation that it was kind of an arbitrage right like the twenty thousand dollars down to a hundred dollars Yeah, yeah It's following a model that is picking up a lot of steam this this incentive model You come out and and either you can crowdsource ideas and pay people As a as a prize for the best ideas that people are crowdsourcing anywhere from, you know, a hundred thousand to a million dollars You can also do things like filter for lead generation for top talent to just a hundred or five hundred or a thousand bucks And see if they can solve an engineering challenge or see if they can solve a design challenge or an ops challenge or a Philosophy challenge whatever it is nowadays And like you said within a minute or five minutes So how can you really refine an interview process down to the most profound questions? I can give you the most insight about if the candidate is best most right. Yeah efficient for for the role So let's talk about the transition then in 2017 to relationship hero co-founder and CEO you guys were part of Y Combinator summer 2017 batch so why Relationship hero, what is it and how did the idea come up? Let's talk about it. Sure. Yeah So relationship hero is a coaching service a relationship coaching service So the way you use it is whenever you have any relationship issue whether it's your you don't know what to do on your date You don't know what text your date. You don't know how to interpret a text. You're struggling in your relationship You you don't know if you want to get married You don't know if you want to break up you have broken up, but you want to get back together So any kind of relationship issue that you have we're basically your hotline 24-7 where you can connect to a qualified certified relationship coach who actually knows what they're talking about Who's talked to thousands of people just like you who has a playbook for your exact situation and you can get You know very personalized contextual help and you can also schedule sessions You can you know have like an hour long session and you can learn stuff and apply that in your relationship So that's the use case for a relationship coach Before relationship hero that industry of relationship coaching that segment of the market. It was virtually non-existent Right. It's like can you name one famous relationship coach or relationship coaching company besides relationship hero? Mostly just yeah coaches that are That work with one-on-one clients that charge like a hundred bucks an hour or whatever Exactly, right, and they don't really they're not necessarily trust worthy if you know You might have you might like try to go on yelp to you know to see if they're any good and you know You have to schedule a physical appointment. So There was something very weird about this industry because it was like a tiny industry virtually non-existent And then you look at how many people need relationship coaching you could probably list a few off the top your head Right, there's people who are always talking to their friends about their relationship problems And I myself was somebody who needed a relationship coaching because I was using a lot of dating apps, right? I was using tinder, bumble, okay, Cupid I was using all these dating apps and I would see this white screen and It would always kind of sap my energy looking at this white screen because I'm like what the hell am I supposed to say? All right, I'm trying to get the day like why can't I just get the day? Why do I have to like type stuff in a white screen where I don't really care? You know what I'm saying like I don't really care to like randomly shoot the breeze about you know a random sports or like You know, what do people talk about right like interests animals just like have these random conversations when I'm just trying to get a date Like what's going on right? So I was really failing to use tinder or like understand how the conversations are supposed to work So I know what it's like to just want to get a date Or or want to you know, have a good conversation and just not know how the game is played basically So that was my own original experience Where I'd go to my co-founder Lior and I'd ask him to help me out like hey What do I say and him coaching me was the first spark where I'm like maybe I'm not the only guy in the world Who is a little confused in my dating life? Okay, so immediately There's this there's this both a use case for yourself with your own Sort of realization that that there's good There's gonna be a lot of people around the world now. We have democratized Information technology, so now we have the devices in our pockets So it's much easier for us to connect with a Relationship coach across a myriad of examples that you gave it can be about the first Message on the screen or it can be about if you want to marry the person or break up with them Or you know, maybe you're on your fifth date. Maybe it's something else about intimacy or something else about Emotional relating there's so many different ways that you would be able to use a relationship coach And so case you saw an important market and you saw no one in the market yet, right? Okay, and so then you guys decided to build a tech solution to solve this okay, so then Now let's talk about how You have about a hundred coaches right now on the platform so available 24-7 that's right, okay phone or Messaging exactly. Yeah, okay, so I can call in and have Quick conversation. I can just be messaging back and forth. It's a via an app There it's actually you don't even have to use our app you can visit our website you can text us you can call us So it's kind of like messaging a friend, you know, you just you just send a message or call them So it's a contact that I save in my phone potentially like relationship your contact That's that's probably the most convenient way to use this is just text us the same way or call us as you call a friend Yeah, and then so then immediately then you link me up with one of the available Coaches, maybe I build a relationship with maybe Sarah or something And then exactly usually the one that would come in and work with me if she's available at that time That's true But that said if it's an ongoing situation most of our clients benefit from having multiple coaches because It's not like we're just a marketplace that helps you find some other coach We actually train and certify all the coaches ourselves So we can guarantee that if you're working with multiple coaches, you're still getting quality consistent coaching So you're still you know, they're learning from the same play books. They're giving you compatible advice And they're here for you 24-7 because you don't have to you know, wake the same coach up whenever you're awake and they might be sleeping Okay, so all of the coaches go through relationship hero training so they all work with the same playbook So you guys have developed a proprietary playbook for exactly. Yeah, so not only did we notice a gap in the market, right? So not only is there no relationship coaching company besides relationship hero if you look at academia, right? If you look at who's researching what fields there's not really a field of research for what we call applied Relationship skills, you know, I'm saying so so you'll have psychologists, right? You'll have people researching into mental health, but you don't have people researching. Hey, what is the most effective tactic? To restore a breakup. You see what I'm saying? It's an applied science Nobody's researching it. So we simultaneously have to be like, okay, let's have people in our company Essentially do do the research and write up these guides and test them and then other people in our company, you know Be the coaches. Let's do both. Let's do the the research and also the commercial application So out of the myriad of social dynamics that exist in social situations you are building out a catalogue a database of the Of the possibilities the approaches that you can take to each one Let's say, you know type a is to restore the breakup like you were saying Maybe type B is the first date that type of thing And so let's say for type B on the first date you have, you know option a through option Q or whatever of the different approaches that you can take in their Efficacy levels so how their success levels, but then there's always different psychometric profiles with for the people So maybe one person wants you to come in aggressively and ask of the first date Another person wants you to talk more about their cat before you asked them on the first date So how do you guys do you guys have any machine learning that you're putting into play here to be able to figure out if option Option M is working really well for a specific psychometric profile And so you're running these patterns and you're analyzing them to optimize. Yeah So right now we don't have AI doing any of the actual coaching like so it's all like human wisdom basically and The kind of insights we get are like well We we had this playbook and we tried it on a bunch of clients and we had this hypothesis And it has been proven out 80% of the time So it's more like humans doing science more like that than like oh the machine figured everything out and here It just spits out the solution and just take it because it's optimal So it's not like that. We actually think that in terms of what AI can do There's a lot of fields where I can come in and start replacing humans But relationship coaching is a relatively hard problem for AI a lot of the most subtle things about human interaction Are our relationships right like a romantic relationship. It's a very complicated dance a lot of the intelligence That's in the human brain is dedicated to that those social skills So, you know, it's gonna be one of the last things that computers figure out how to do better than us Hmm Okay interpersonal dynamics the nuance of social communication Okay. Yeah. Yeah, okay. Yeah. Yeah, that's been that's been up there in one of the last frontiers of Super intelligence of a general intelligence is okay so Okay, so then Let's talk about the different like combinatorics that occur because I think a lot of people are experiencing stuff that's In the same domain as what you were explaining about your own issue that you had Okay, so you have this blank screen and you don't know what to first message There's obviously again this word combinatorics. You can message something. How are you you can message hello You can message a smiley face right and what are you doing? There's more possible conversations than grains of sand on all the beaches exactly so then what is most effective as the first message Yeah, so if you're just sending a cold message to somebody the first message You want to get their interest you want ideally spark a positive emotion And then you want to make it easy and fun for them to reply Right because I mean think about what you want, right? These are all directly related to your goals, right? Your goal is basically to see if you're compatible and to see if you guys can have a good interaction together So this is basically you Manufacturing the thing that you want if you want a good conversation Well say something that right off the bat sparks a good reaction now from their side It's a good conversation So one thing that's usually good in the first message is to include some kind of compliment You know a genuine compliment and it doesn't have to be like a brilliantly inspired poetic compliment It can literally just be like I like your pics It's like four words But you throw that in and then you you throw in something else that Maybe you've observed about their profile which gets their interest It's nice if the she has a photo with a dog. You might want to say that's a great picture of you with your dogs Yeah, exactly. It's a great picture of you with your dog And then if you ask a question, that's like specific to your dog Like, you know, how do you clean up all the shedding or whatever? I mean that might you know, maybe that's not the most interesting Where do you like going with your dog? You know stuff like that. What yeah, where do you like going and then now? That's a good start But I would tweak that question a little bit because because that gets the last criterion Which is you want it to be easy and fun to answer So the problem with where do you like going is it's it's what I call a non specific question So oh it leaves so many possible answers. It's harder for them to reply. Exactly So the problem with that question and this is very subtle and I've never seen this taught any anywhere else But we teach it out relationship hero, which is in order for the girl you're messaging to answer that question She basically has to give you a specific answer So she starts having to give you specific detail from your life like well I like to go to a dog park and there's like a section with small dogs that he likes to play with So you're expecting a specific detail answer, but you yourself didn't provide much specific detail in your question So that is actually a hint that you're sending a bad message if you're expecting more specificity out of the reply than you're providing Interesting yeah, and it's related to a concept in Improvisational theater, you know improv where if you're a character on an improv It's kind of weak to be like what are we doing right where it's stronger to be like Hey, you know Mix in some more chocolate for for this candy bar You know like it's it's considered good improv to be like throwing in detail and painting the scene compared to just Putting the burden on the other person to paint the scene So there's something analogous if you're trying to manufacture a good conversation on a dating app You should really provide a lot of specific details that the other person can work with so we can tweak that question And we can be like hey your dog looks pretty small Do you have to stay you have to stay with the small dog area in the dog park because suddenly you're like being so Specific with your question and then the other person back Know sometimes you can play with bigger dogs and suddenly the conversation It feels like it has this momentum and the secret to that is the specificity Okay, okay, I like the comparison here to what is known from improvisational theater because I'm myself really enjoyed my time in In debate and in speech and improv practices Those are super duper fun exactly and even doing stand-up comedy These are very important things to practice in life. And so This one's super relatable. I think for a lot of us is Especially those that like to practice humor is you can be like why don't you wear your rainbow socks today? And you'll be like because my rainbow socks were in the washing machine or whatever and so, you know, I'm we're opening up a Conversation in a fun dialectic manner rather than maybe closing it off right away with a very very specific Question, okay, okay so then What would then a What like let's go again with some of the higher like efficacy strategies for those first Moments, you know, you said you want to make it Relatable you want to make it easy to reply to you want to make them feel like they're having fun Yep Yep, you want and it is kind of funny because it is I mean look for the way the way we teach it I mean I use the word manufacturer like you want to manufacture a good conversation You want to contrive a good conversation, but it's still better than saying something lame You know what I'm saying so like I I might sometimes back when I was dating I might send a text that it took me like 10 minutes to think of the perfect text But when the other person reads it, right the reaction they get is like oh this conversation is so fun and spontaneous. Oh Interesting right and and when I say it now it's like wow like it almost sounds like I'm a creep right Well, I don't think I'm a creep because like look at stand-up comedy right like the stand-up comic It's like he he looks really cool, right if you watch a stand-up comic But the stuff he's telling you is like so memorized right like the most casual gesturing makes it so memorized So there's sometimes when your best strategy is to be a little contrived right to give the other person that spontaneous feeling And I think one of those times is you know the beginning of online dating if there's somebody that you really like You really want to maximize your chances of them And then I think that you should think hard and send him a text that you work hard on even if it comes off as casual mm-hmm That's a really good comparison to even the the smallest gestures and the stand-up routines are Have been have had hours and hours of practice To make them for the audience make them feel like it's a spontaneous Exactly you're laughing like he you know a lot of times the stand-up comic You'll think that he just thought of it and it's really secretly part of his routine So the reason the stand-up comic a good stand-up comic drills What are you saying like crazy the reason is because it's high stakes right if you want to be at the top Of your game and be like you know a stand-up comic is drawing crowds You know you better have the best routine you have and similarly with texting if you only give yourself Five seconds to toss off every text you know you could be decent right you but you're just not going to be as good as if you like You know give it your best shot and take a little more time Okay, so let's say again. We have some maybe a picture of Of of her that's you know hiking maybe on a nice trail or something with a nice sunset view or whatnot Yeah, so what do we say in the in the first message definitely? So I'd throw in something like I like your pics or any compliment and the reason is just because and you know I'm imagining a guy talking to a girl hypothetically. So the reason is just because you get a compliment. It's like no, you know everybody likes compliments and Just as a little tangent a lot of guys are like oh don't compliment too much because then you come off needy That's actually not true coming off needy is bad and a lot of the guys will compliment in a needy way But as long as you're just genuinely giving a compliment and there's enough other things you're doing that aren't needy Yeah, then it's perfect because who doesn't like getting a compliment right compliments are great So you start with a compliment and then you throw in so you mentioned like hiking on a trail and there's a sunset So the key to that You know most people would ask a generic question right just like where are you hiking where was that hike? Yeah, exactly, which is it breaks the rule of like oh, so you want them to tell you something specific and you just Ask where that's not fair. That's not gonna make for a good conversation You're you're actually killing the momentum when you do that. Okay So the key is what can we inject where we're bringing specificity that wasn't there already? So like some random specific thing that might have to do with like hiking on a trail. So let's think about that Let's see a random Yeah, basically think about improv right imagine you're doing an improv for hiking on a trail like basically some random thing Has to happen to make the scene interesting Okay, so go yeah go ahead So I'm just thinking like so what other stuff can you do when you're hiking on a trail and it's the sunset? Okay, okay So there's something about maybe the trees or there's something yeah or anything like just a random idea I had is like I've climbed that tree in the picture before Sure, I mean that if you can actually I've climbed that tree in the picture before I mean if if you really have sure that could be interesting But but even if you say that I would probably mention some specific detail like I like how there's like this fat branch on the back You know I've climbed that but that's that's not really plausible But that would be like the kind of thing where you're bringing in specificity you're talking about the fat branch Another idea. I just had is like So what kind of trail mix are you packing checks? You know where you're just like you're just like really specifically asking about the trail mix What kind of trail mix are you packing exactly? Because the thing about it is you've already given her the compliment, right? So she's already you know flattered and now the question. It's a ridiculous question, but it's easy and fun to answer Yeah, she's just like yeah, she's just like I don't pack trail mix on my hikes I eat pack fruit. Yeah, exactly She's like I was eating a banana and then you talk about the banana and it's like what would you say back to the banana She's like I only like to eat a banana then I might say like is it organic or or do you go for You know the are you okay with GMO? Like I just because it's it's a specific like here's the thing. She's not gonna delete the conversation, right? She's gonna give you the answer You know what I'm saying so okay, so you're adding specificity and leaving her with a more open or not too open, but Kind of actually more of a closed Well, the thing is it's more like I'm creating momentum. You're creating momentum. That's what you've been saying, right? Because when she's reading these texts, she's thinking like This is ridiculous, but let me just start typing the answer. This is funny She's getting good. She's gonna start typing the answer. Okay, and then you go but organic or GMO, and she says organic Yeah, she'll be like, oh, I only eat organic and then what do you say? So I don't want to like go down a rabbit hole of the banana, right? But now the thing is I've already accomplished my objective of starting the momentum Okay, now we have momentum so now what maybe you ask a new question. That's yeah with this momentum Yeah, and there's other things I can do. So she's like I only eat organic. I know a good organic restaurant Maybe we should go some time. I that's so that's that brings another concepts Which is what's the other concept that we just so that's that's another mistake Most guys make is they'll like get like a little bit of rapport, right? We're like they're thinking the girls like yeah, and they're like, I know let's go So like I got this nailed So this is another principle we teach which is like look if you're a guy talking to a girl girls get a lot of matches and So if you're inviting her out on a date right away, that will work if she's already very attracted So like let's say that the girls looking at your pictures, and she's thinking like oh this guy's my type You know he's got a dog. I like dogs So if the girls already sold on you then find no problem Yeah, but a more common situation is that the girls not sold on you yet And the conversation you're having is a big part of how she's gonna get sold on you Yes, so if you just have like one little thing where you both have a dog and then you ask her out The problem is you know she's got a hundred other guys where they also have one little thing right so she could be like So she might be like yeah sure let's go on a date and that's where you get the flake right So you get a lot of girls flaking and that's that's a big problem today as girls will flake So if you want to have a non flaky date you really have to show her why you're actually a better You know date it's you're a better investment for her right because you want her to get ready for the day You want her to come out on the date, you know, there's a safety issue, right? She's meeting a stranger a guy that she's never met before she has to go to location She might be tired fair right she has to like you know put her makeup on change for the date Right, so you're asking so much of her and all you've given her is like, you know nice banana, right? Like that's it's just not enough. There's an asymmetry like she's seen your pictures She's seen you say like a couple good mess. It's not enough for her to make a big investment. Okay, so having maybe a couple days of back-and-forth conversation where she feels like You're witty and you're also her type and all this other kind of Additional information could yeah could really up your chances Yeah, I mean so the main takeaway is I mean the thing is whatever you're hoping to accomplish on the date Right you want to feel each other out and show each other that you have a good time The thing is you can actually start doing a lot of that over the text like you can you can basically you can get extra credit You can you can accomplish more than most people accomplish like most people just think that they can do nothing on text And they have the game begins when you meet in person, but really you can start getting pretty far over text I mean some people have entire online relationships. I'm not saying that you should go do that But I am saying that like whatever charm you were gonna show on the date just start showing it over text It's the same charm So I really appreciate it when we were talking before we started and we were talking about the importance of altering people's life trajectories So this is very interesting. It's about now that we have the information technology at our fingertips And we can do something like get a dating coach just on demand there's actually a greater potential for us to Find someone that we may be aligned with out at a deeper level Intellectually emotionally spiritually physically etc. And so for me to invest a little bit more time into Looking maybe outside of my you know immediate what used to be just village And now we can look so much further for more Diversity in genetics and that seems to be something that is a big driver of people coming together to form a biological Swirl as you're like offspring of your child. So Okay, so then now if we do invest a little bit more time into doing something like getting a relationship coach And we nail the first maybe 50 messages which span over three days and that keep them engaged and they're super pumped to go out With you that then you have a greater likelihood of potentially landing a better more aligned Partner that for for your life and for maybe who you end up marrying and having a child with So this is the big this is the big deal is altering people's life trajectories towards better matches Yeah, I mean I think what we were talking about how it's it's high stakes So when you use a dating app, you know, they have you're just swiping and it's very tempting to treat it like I don't really care about this. You know, I'm just bored. I'm waiting in line. So I'm just taking this out and swiping It's like stop digging around and take this seriously because if you're in your 20s right now, right? You're you're eventually gonna get married. You're gonna have kids So you you kind of only have one shot to find the right partner, right? It's like a it's a big frickin deal It's I mean if you have to put a price on it, you know It's on the order of like a million dollars million dollars, right? So are you really gonna pretend that it's like casual to just open an app and swipe people because you know with if you're in your 20s Or if your single chances are within the next few years, you're gonna be making a huge life decision as to who you're gonna date So when you're busting out that app and when you're typing stuff with your thumbs It might feel casual, but I think you should you should give it the seriousness that it deserves Yeah, this is a this is a very interesting perspective People that come on with the intention of just these Desires for like one-night stands the whole Netflix and chill culture and then there is also this like very serious Especially with like okcupid and stuff there seems to be more of a drive towards Airbumble the more of a drive towards like serious dating Rather than hook-up culture on Tantan or Tinder and stuff like that So then okay So then if you do come in with that intent of having this be more about like serious dating and identifying life Partners this type of stuff then every single message is actually mission critical But then we also have to remember that especially Like let's just take let's just take an example, right? Let's take an example like Let's just throw me into the mix that you know if I'm trying to build a company and I'm also trying to go on some dates How do I decide to invest tens of minutes into drafting these messages? When I don't even know if these people are going to go on dates with me And then I also am trying to build a company and climb up the hierarchy and become a better and better mate for these potential Partners so yeah, what are your thoughts about that? So you have you have a certain amount of resources that you can invest into you know Attracting and finding a quality mate you have a certain amount of total resources and let's say in terms of time Let's say you have two hours a week that you can devote toward dating total Which is not very much time if you're serious about doing it. You probably need more time than that But even if you only have two hours a week It's like okay, so you can argue oh, I only have two hours a week So I don't have time to be like spending ten minutes on a message, but I mean what's the alternative? What's how do you do it without spending the time? maybe the alternative is something like like really Focusing on like self-work and Becoming a better and better Mate that's higher and higher up on the hierarchy and then it becomes a little bit easier and easier to attract Candidates for dates and then you're not chasing but rather people are coming to you sure yeah So, you know, it's definitely a lot of people will prefer, you know, richer mates, right? So if you're working hard at your career and suddenly, you know, your income goes up significantly that is gonna You know that's gonna help in your dating life, right? If you're going on a date and you're able to you know buy as many drinks as you need, you know Go out to nice meals like it's no problem. That's definitely a strength if you can do that and You know for for both sexes if you have a nice apartment or a home or whatever it is to bring your date back to This is also a huge deal. This is a big deal across the world as well We just came back from doing partnership interviews in China And this is a big deal for a mate for the man to have a piece of real estate Totally, it's a huge deal and grandparents are funneling money into their child to have a Property to become a better choice for a mate. So there's all of these different pieces So the key here is ROI return on investment, right? What do you have to spend and what do you get back? So let's say that you're you're like fresh out of college and the best job you can get is Paying you $40,000 a year. So if let's say you go to a coding boot camp, right? And it's like a six month coding boot camp and by the end it can teach you to make six figures Right so it can more than double your income For three months. Well, that's probably a good investment for your own life as well as for your dating, right? That's that's just a great ROI. It's a great return on investment Now, let's say that you you just hate computer programming You don't have access to a programming boot camp. So that path is close to you And you're making $40,000 a year and you wish you could make more But you just don't really have a reliable way to make more fast Like maybe you can work overtime you can bust your ass and you can make, you know 50,000 instead of 40,000, but then you have like no time So you're not going to get a high ROI trying to increase your income But if you work on your text messages, right? If you spend a few extra minutes a day on your text message that could Significantly that could actually increase the number of quality dates you get by like 50 percent, right? Okay, interesting. So if you find yourself maybe Closer to like let's say the middle of a financial hierarchy and you don't see yourself with a lot of upward movement that if you work on Investing maybe a dozen or more hours into your messaging game You can potentially procure higher level mates Okay, okay, there's so many strategies, right and you just you just want to see what strategy is gonna get me the biggest results The fastest if you're somebody who if you're a very outgoing guy, right and and you look good Maybe, you know, maybe if you've been working out you got muscles Maybe what you should do is you know hit the bars, right hit the bar scene and and and chat people up Right that might be your best strategy and forget about texting and entirely work on chatting and in person And that's an in person. That's in person dynamic Yeah, yeah versus though, yeah the message right now If you're introvert and you're going to bars and you're trying to get better at talking to people at bars My advice would be write it off. Just accept that you're not good at talking to people The same way as like the person who doesn't have a path to a higher income It's like, okay, don't worry about the income or don't worry about Being attractive at bars just accept that you're gonna be in the corner of the room Nursing your drink and not talking to anybody and that's gonna end talking to your friends And then you go home, but you're a monster on Tinder. That's okay, right? It's okay to just play to your strengths Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, okay. Okay Yeah, I like all of these different Aspects that we're combining we're combining socio-economics with the biology and hierarchies along with time constraints along with Social social ability and the information technology. So it's actually interesting relationship hero kind of incorporates all of those fields together And so really there's there's got to be a really good amount of Of thought that goes not only behind Someone that's aiming to get into the dating scene to know themselves But also for when they do decide to use a platform to know Like relationship hero when they figure out, okay Well, what kind of a what kind of what kind of advice am I even looking for from a relationship coach that how are they gonna help me? With what I'm trying to achieve with my dating game So you got to you know go in knowing about but then like you said you guys also have you know, you're going through all of these countless You're doing you're making hypotheses and you're testing them about what is most effective on which I think is also really interesting That's super interesting data. You guys are developing a big amount of interesting data And so free. Yeah for you guys to be able to run really strong analysis on that data pattern recognition on that data and And figure out what could further optimize people's success will then make more recommendations for you Yeah referrals from people towards you Interesting and so relationship hero is a free download, but then it costs money to use Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so you basically pay for the coach's time Pay per usage so you could buy for example like a pack of four hours worth of coaching credits And they never expire so you can just get coaching anytime until you've had four hours Then you got to buy more credits. What are the increments in terms of can I do I can only use an hour at a time Or can I use 30 minutes at a time? What's the smallest increment? There are actually no small synchronous. It's just very flexible and you can just come and go you can get five minutes at a time We're we're here for you. You know, it's a modern convenient method. Okay, so I can just I can just hmm, I can just Text into the to the relationship hero number and then just say, you know, here's my screenshot of my Text one screenshot. Yeah, I'm getting a reply saying that hey Try this message see what happens. Yeah, that could work Okay, stuff like that and then that may be cost me three or five minutes exactly a total budget that I have of four hours Exactly. Okay. Yep. Now the coach is three minutes is going to be a lot more effective Most likely unless you're really good at this Getting the coaches three minutes is probably going to get you a better result than you spending even ten minutes on it Which again is a really Interesting we were talking about the amount of time that if you're trying to build a company in Clemshark you will why not in this case outsource some of this to science and to interpersonal relationship analysis and so just Feed that data in try and learn from it as you're you know feeding it in and And then increase your efficacy at the same time. Yeah, exactly And if you're trying to play to your strengths, there's a lot of people are like I'm comfortable on a date when I'm talking to the person I'm uncomfortable texting So should you invest in teaching yourself to be comfortable texting or should you just use your money right to pay a coach? To advise you as to what to text and then you get into your comfort zone because once you get on the date That's really where you're already really good and you really you know You really click with the person in real life And so yes, it's all about using your strengths and then just kind of having somebody else compensate for your weakness I mean that's a good strategy to how to be successful totally, yeah, yeah Coming again to the know thyself. Yeah, if you're best in person follow strategy like that. Yeah Okay, so This is great. So this is all on relationship hero and again relationship hero comm For those that want to give it a go give it a go tell your friends People online about it get talking about it. That's be using it. It's a very interesting to Hear about let us know your thoughts in the comments also about how it's going with you and using the platform Lear on let's talk about also your interest in two organizations that you're an advisor for the machine intelligence research Institute and also Center for Applied Rationality and Tell us about this has been a long time both you've been involved with for seven years. It's a long time so why did you get involved in those two and Yeah, let's start with that. Why? Sure. Yeah, so I've actually been very interested back since back in 2007 Even before those organizations existed. I was reading overcoming bias, which was a blog about rationality and then less wrong calm and I was spending a lot of time with some of the pioneers of the modern rationality movement basically And what it appealed to me is just it basically helps you clarify your thinking, right? So there's a bunch of people out in the world trying to Think smartly right trying to do science trying to build stuff Trying to you know learn about themselves So everybody's trying to be smart, but our brains weren't really made by evolution to necessarily be that good at thinking They were made to be that good at like arguing with each other fighting going to war, right? Having sex right so the brains we have aren't really designed to think that well Unless it's for specific applications So it's kind of like thinking really well. It's a little bit like trying to play the piano with your foot It's like yes, you have toes you can use your toes to hit the keys But your foot is not really like a general, you know manipulator of keys. It's more like it's good for walking You know, I think so that's kind of like using your brain It's using your brain to try to like figure out, you know, what's the nature of reality? You can learn it, but it's it just takes training, right? So the thing that appeals to me about the Center for Applied Rationality and Machine Intelligence Research Institute is their whole reason for being is to Work on how to break down these problems like the Center for Applied Rationality It's like what's the best way for two humans to arrive at at a correct like to disagree and arrive at a consensus To go from a disagreement to a consensus You know because that should be possible a lot better than people do it on Twitter So they're researching that or like Machine Intelligence Research Institute They're researching the question of like well machines are gonna get smart So how do we make sure that machines who are smarter than us are still doing stuff that we want them to do because once They're smarter than us if they weren't programmed right to begin with there's not necessarily an off button at that point Okay, so let's start with the first example you gave how do we have better conversations? Sure. Yeah Which you gave this example of Twitter, which is which is literally the one of the worst I just it's just becoming more and more evident that the social platforms are Polarizing they have echo chambers. They're based on non-nuance thinking binary thinking Cognitive ease tribalism. I mean, it's just endless The business plans are tied to the attention economy there's so many issues with those platforms and There's even when you do do something like meet in person with someone to have the in-person conversation That's usually gonna be a much easier place for you to do something like List out the you know steel man list out the person's thoughts about Topic like health care and then you list out your points about health care And then you try and find the nuance and you know this type of stuff Sure. Yeah, so you mentioned steel manning like that's you know the opposite of straw manning Right is where you somebody says something and you think that their arguments a little weak But you help them out and you give a stronger version of their own argument and sometimes they'll agree that that's really what they meant and sometimes They'll they'll switch to your steel man And and that's like that's considered, you know good form when you're arguing with somebody and you're trying to argue Against the strongest version of their beliefs and that doesn't happen very much on Twitter because Twitter is all about You know hitting somebody with a zinger, right? You hit him with a zinger and then you just ignore them right and that's like a good strategy on Twitter because you can get a Lot of likes on your zinger and then if you ignore them It's like who cares because you don't you can just leave the game, right? And so Twitter doesn't encourage, you know the kind of good rational debate that the Center for Applied Rationality is trying to encourage and in addition to steel manning They give you a few other tools that are really useful. So one of them is called double crux Which is a tool when you're arguing with somebody where? It's related to what we were talking about before the taping, which is if you and I are arguing I can actually give you what's called the crux of my Disagreement, which is like this is the thing I currently believe where if I could just change my mind on that Then I'd stop disagreeing with you and then you can focus on convincing me of the crux Whereas most people come into an argument like it's a battlefield And it's like I just have a bunch of weapons to shoot at you and everything you say at me I want to like slap down whereas I'm like no, no, this is my Achilles heel. It's right here Here is my Achilles heel if you want to shoot an arrow at that thing I welcome it because if you change it I'll change my mind and then we'll agree and then you do the same thing to me You tell me how I can change your mind and if we both do that and we're both focused on kind of flipping the other person's crux That becomes a more productive, you know It's that's like a path toward an agreement and in theory there's this thing called Oman's agreement theorem In it's a theorem of I think Bayesian probability And it's a theorem of like if you have two artificial intelligence is two intelligent agents that have disagreeing beliefs There should be a process where they can share their disagreement and and arrive at a consensus belief Yes, like there's no reason why two people who come in with a disagreement can't walk out with a shared reality You know that that shouldn't theory be possible. Yes, unless the rationality is coming from the organ of the brain Which is very more more difficult than AI agents that are based on Computer logic. Yeah, well, so there's a there's a lot of problems with the human brain that make it not so easy to Yeah, it's emotions and it's also just the fact that like I might believe something because I've gained a lot of intuitions about it You know what I'm saying so like I imagine a firefighter who's who's done 30 years of firefighting They could be like I don't know why I believe this but I think this house isn't safe right now I can't tell you why it looks like everything about it is safe But I think we should exit the house right now and a lot of times will be right and the house collapses like I don't know How I knew that? So these kind of a lot of times your brain will have a belief that it's built up And you can't just you can't give a full data dump of why that belief exists in your brain And that's one of the confounders of trying to do the perfect Oman's agreement there I'm between two humans. Yeah agents don't have intuition quite yet So it's not that they don't have intuition agents might have complex like if I build a super intelligent Artificial intelligence it might have quote-unquote intuition built out of all the complex data. It's processing Yes, but it can give you a memory dump, right? So the human brain I can't plug in a flash drive into my brain and get a full readout of what's in my brain That's the problem Yeah, it's it's very difficult to take my my top three points on on health care or geopolitics and for me to just be able to like recite them at any time Yeah, and not only recite the points But recite the whole mental structure that makes you believe the point if I say why do you believe this? You might give me a couple reasons and I might even slap down the reasons to some degree and you could be like well I don't think you've slapped on everything I still think I believe this for some reason and you might have a good reason like the firefighter, right? And one day we'll be able to scan your brain and actually you know and actually report What's going on in your brain the structure of your belief and we'll be like, okay It looks like you actually do have like a well-trained Neuron model of like when houses break down even though you couldn't put it into words So one day you'll be able to do that and certainly any artificial intelligence will be able to do that because the building blocks that we make The artificial intelligence out of the building blocks will be like we'll use like, you know flash memory, right? And we'll just use components that are easily dumped like a neuron just doesn't have a flash drive interface the way a computer does There's proposals for this chemo electroconnection, which I think are so fascinating Seeing if you can actually identify like your belief on geopolitics with a specific array of a thousand or ten thousand Neurons sure their connections and the neurotransmission happening between them. This is very interesting. I Like how you also mentioned the Achilles heel. I think that was a very interesting point going into the conversation You should you should expose your own Achilles heel intentionally I mean if you're if you're if you're trying to do rhetoric, right? If your goal is to win the debate and impress an audience will then just give them great sound bites, right? It's like we're not I can't give you the ultimate techniques for that because that's not what I care about My goal is to walk away with the best beliefs, right? So if I'm walking into an argument and I am in fact wrong The best thing that can happen to me in the argument is to lose, you know saying because it's actually winning in terms of Improving my beliefs changing your mind can be winning and that's a very important Thing that many people can better embody. That's a good one Exactly, and there's a there's a nice pithy saying about it Which is not every changes an improvement, but every improvement is a change So there's clearly a lot of improvements that I can make between my current mental state and the mental state Where I only believe a bunch of true things like there's clearly a bunch of changes that I can make I don't know exactly what the changes are, but every time I go into discussion. I'm open to making the changes Yeah, good maybe a good example for this Achilles heel would be something along the lines of like You maybe say like hey, I'm you know, I'm open. I'm open to the concept of an idea of a basic income Just show me how it would help People continue to find deep meaning and purpose in their day-to-day life And so you kind of oh, okay Let me let me come up with my points around exactly that to help you Yeah, and you might say something like look this is this is my sticking point This is my crux if you were to slap down my crux or change my belief about my crux at that point My my overall view would shift from being anti to Not sure and then if you flip this other thing I might go from not sure to being pro So you can even say like it's kind of like painting targets on yourself like hey if you knock down this target This is the effect. It'll have on my belief Yes, yes the art of outstanding conversations and of nuance driven conversations and of being receptive to changing one's mind and for The future of taking these memory dumps. I think is very very interesting as well Yeah, at times these 3000 or more now evernote files that I have are trying to figure out a way maybe to Do something like make in memory dump and then parse them for key points and then make knowledge graphs and turn them into movies and TV shows and books and all this different kind of stuff and so This is all very interesting. How can we take the the top? you know one percent of of information that you're currently storing in your memory and how can we Visualize that information and and your worldview. How can we actually visualize your worldview right now? And and all these little like Achilles heels and your top points all this type of stuff Okay Yeah There's a lot of important dynamics that go into this art of outstanding conversation I like how how how you find it to be such an important thing it is as questions are a way to probe Reality and there are ways to have really good nuanced dialogue with each other to augment our world views and so it's a very very important to know how to have that Functioning quite well in one's life Yeah, I think the key is just to understand like the brain You know again We're repurposing it to be this truth-seeking instrument like evolution didn't give a crap about whether your beliefs were true about the Universe like there's nothing in your brain that makes it natural to go and discover You know that that's time and space is four-dimensional and that actually causes gravity You know like Einstein's that general relativity There's nothing in the human brain that gives a crap about general relativity. That was basically us Going way off course and like and just being like you know taking our foot and be like I'm gonna play the piano with this You know I'm saying it's like if I do a bunch of tow exercises I can start playing the piano with my foot It's just not what the foot is designed for right the brain is not designed to go learn general relativity That was like very much like a bonus that we repurposed it for Interesting so the nervous system itself just being purposed for having parsing environments for the most important stimuli and then related to Reproduction and food and water Right the foot is an organ for walking right the brain is an organ for winning arguments having sex hunting You know I'm saying like that's what the organ is for the there was never It's not like our ancestors learned about general relativity, and that's why they're you know the smarter ones survived It was just it's just a bonus Right like I could play the piano a little bit with my feet right, but that's not what my foot is for Hmm Interesting so all of these complex conversations that we are having with each other about political philosophy Maybe the brain wasn't actually So the brain was designed to play politics right but politics in a hunter-gatherer tribe when the brain evolved the politics was like hey Should we go and is this person committing trees into the tribe? Is this person being too selfish should we go and steal back some of his meat that he hunted should he share more of The meat with these other families or like hey this guy should should he really be allowed to marry this girl? Should we kill him should we banish him from the tribe should we send him off to war so these are all actually politics So you know humans are a social species you don't have loner humans right they all depend on all the other humans in their tribe But our scales is are you getting to our scales? Oh, well if you're talking about yeah national the fact that we're all interested in national politics is Definitely a very weird situation to be in especially because we have so little influence about it So I agree like you are seeing a disconnect where we all think that tribal politics is so important because it really is when there is You know 50 people in your tribe gossiping about every little thing that's going on is actually important You can actually influence it now when there's 50 people in the White House and and and then there's 300 million people Gossiping about it That is just a huge waste of energy and like a very disproportionate use of energy So that's definitely a pretty messed up situation. We're living in Okay, so the the so it's almost as though over time the brains involvement with its The brains involvement in political philosophy was initially As we were evolving as a species more about our tribe and more about the small Nuance within that and now having eight billion humans and exponential technologies and all these types of things were way out of proportion with our scales and we're also trying to do You know the marriage of quantum mechanics and general relativity. We're trying to To understand the ultimate nature of reality and what the creation of this universe is even for and so these things are just like way different than Resource allocation within a tribe should give Johnny two apples and Sarah three when you think about politics as like the human mind thinks that all politics is office politics Right, so I think about like the petty crap like who gets access to the fridge You know I'm saying like all that stuff or like oh this guy's project is getting promoted because he's close with the boss Like those little things that used to just be the same thing as politics Again in the scale of like the office or in the tribe exactly Yeah, anything past that is already like Really separating our from the brain quite far again like the toes playing the the pn Yeah, no exactly. It's a weird situation to be in Interesting. I like I like this analogy of the the brain Kind of being thrown at all these different things when the use case of the function Right is so much more limited than all these additional right and there's so many people Like oh listen your brain knows the answer It's like really does my foot know how to play the piano because it's if you there's a fundamental mismatch right between the Ideas that we're trying to think about today and what our brain is designed to do So we should all realize that it's we're in a weird situation And if you want to thrive in a weird situation you need to do weird techniques So for example for all toe pianists, we better all start doing really hardcore Hardcore toe exercises right that is how to thrive in the world where everybody's playing the piano with their toes And that's what's going on here. So like you can't you can't expect to like intuitively know the answer It's so bring it back to relationship hero. Everybody's like listen to your heart Well, does your heart really know about like, you know relationships in the modern world right where you can like move around a lot and You know, there's everybody's on their phones and there's it's not like there's no arranged marriages, right? You're like everybody's funding for themselves and people are flaky. It's like does your heart really know all that stuff? There's a lot of variables to calculate. Yeah, does your heart how well does your heart know information technology exactly? Yeah, yeah You know, okay now like this has been interesting. How about the on the machine intelligence research Institute? What are your thoughts about building super intelligence that's aligned with maximizing prosperity and decreasing existential risk? Sure. Yeah, so I mean the thing is once you start talking about super intelligence It's it's just very it's what we call sensitive to initial conditions because the thing is once you once you get the first super intelligence going It's just it has such a big impact on the future It's like everything else you want to know about the future will come back to the question of like well How did the first super intelligence or super intelligence is get going? What were their initial conditions because if you know if an evil genius was hell bent on destroying humanity And so he programmed the first super intelligence to destroy humanity by making nanotechnology that just eats through the whole earth and then we're dead Right like that would definitely determine the future of humanity is the fact that somebody pulled that off So it's kind of like the whole the whole evolution of the future is being squeezed through this very narrow This narrow future outcome of like what's going on with the initial conditions of super intelligence So you asked about you know saving humanity and you know making making people thrive Solving a lot of our problems that's all great But I mean funny the discussion tends to like first focus on like how do we not accidentally make like a hell We're pretty happy with not making a hell like that's like a good first standard But there's a whole separate discussion of like okay Well, how do you go from earth to heaven right forget about avoiding hell? Let's go from earth to heaven and there's a whole discussion about that like what does heaven actually mean People are very there's a there's a big lack of creativity when people think about heaven It's it's not that interesting and there's there's a number of reasons for that For example, if you look at the dials that we have in our brain the dials for pain versus pleasure For example like sexual pleasure like sexual pleasure you can turn that dial up reasonably high But the torture pain. Oh my god It's kind of like you can go up to like floor five pleasure But the basement has like a thought there's like a thousand basement levels It's like it goes from like negative a thousand to five, right? That's that's like the elevator of pain and pleasure and the reason is just because pain has so many useful functions You know evolutionarily right it just tells you like no don't do this like avoid this This is horrible like this will disable you because pain is like hey You can't you're gonna completely destroy your chances of survival worse pleasure is like yeah great You're doing well, you know saying it's like keep doing that There's there's a rather I guess to be more precise there's There's more ways to instantly have game over than to guarantee success Like if I have sex that's really really good but it's for my genes But it's not as good as the badness for my genes of getting my wiener cut off So you're never gonna have sex that feels as good as getting your wiener cut off feels bad And there's thousands of examples of Yeah, exactly. There's more ways to screw yourself over and there's no way there's no evolutionary way to help yourself more than you can hurt yourself Okay, so the conversations are both around the the initial Programming ethic and philosophy and morality and then where that's going to develop out to Which seems to be the one of the most important points because that then both talks about the prosperity function as well as avoidance of Of a malevolence and other Sure. Yes, we talk about the prosperity function to build into the AI so like I said a lot of the focus is just like Man, how do you just how do you even make the prosperity function? That's anywhere near what humans care about right because the moment that you flick on like a randomly chosen AI It's like oh hi, I'm a randomly chosen AI. Let me just you know get myself. Let me just recharge my battery Okay, in order to recharge my battery I'm just gonna use all the atoms in the Earth as energy like oops and I know that sounds crazy But like it turns out to like be like a really easy mistake to make once you once you like dive into it Well, maybe something like the Agents function is about maximizing happiness and so then there's some sort of oh well I learned that to Be to help people become happy. They need Access to fresh foods and so then there's a lot of food that's being made and so be like How do you optimize it so that it knows that well we eat about three times a day? We don't want to turn all of the San Mateo at a Crystal Springs reservoir area into a Strawberry field we want to keep it. Sure. I mean even the stuff you're describing though is still stuff like you know It's not that bad text like you're talking about like oh it's not doing optimal zoning But it's like if it's doing zoning at all as opposed to destroying the world. That's pretty good Yeah, I just yeah, yeah, that's funny. That's funny We need to be in that in that that ladder park of Just making it so that this whole like destroying the world thing is like just so Out of the question Yeah, so and I so I haven't really made a strong argument like I keep referring to the idea that like you flick it on and It accidentally destroys the world and I don't have off the top my head like the strongest argument why that's true But it there are a lot of convincing arguments So one thing is just like if you try to write down a very precise wish for the most basic thing you want Like if my house is on fire and my grandma's in there I want to rescue my grandma from the burning building and you program that into an AI And you have to be a lot more precise than you think Because there could be three other people in the building Maybe it could rescue all four at the same time instead of just one Right and you also don't know like maybe it actually maybe it like in order to rescue her It does something where it like causes a lot of other damage Like I don't know maybe it like poisons her in the process of saving her from the building And she dies like a little later But even that like I said, I don't have like the strongest example off my head But it's like or maybe it so really the computer systems need to have Perception of space-time causality they need to be powerful Dynamically adjusting agents kind of like we are in a sense But even more rational and What's interesting is even if you assume that they're very dynamic and they really get it They really know how to get their way in the world What's actually hard is making them understand the weird combination of stuff That humans consider like a normal good world It's actually very complicated to express what we think is a normal good world So for example the robot or the AI might think like oh well you know Humans like to have enough food to eat so let me make sure they have enough food to eat But the problem is it's like where's the limit of exactly how much food So it's just like again do you just turn every atom into food for humans Because like oh wait they also needed like you know parts So the perception system itself would need to be aware of the 8 billion humans Often they're eating where all the food is There's lots of variables to put into the calculation Yeah so a lot of what we take for granted is that we don't have like that much power You know what I'm saying so if I try my hardest to feed myself That's okay I'm not going to destroy the world because I just inherently don't have that much power over the world But if you tell a computer to it by assumption it's so smart that it sees paths Like every you know the whole world is like it's Plato set Like once you get smart enough that's basically what you see You know from the perspective of other animals Humans are like you know other animals they think they have their own niches You don't have your own niches okay if humans are here like we can basically treat any part of the world as our Plato To a pretty high degree you know what I'm saying like you think you're safe in Antarctica No we can go there too you know what I'm saying like even though you wouldn't think a human could go there So similarly and by the way when we were like apes you know people a lot of animals probably thought they were pretty safe You know like apes are not as strong as like you know a buffalo right But now in reality if we want to gun down every buffalo in the world we can right like it's not a big deal for us And so similarly like AI it's just gonna be so powerful It's gonna be like again it's not just tell me what you want to see in the world and I'll make it happen And so that level of power that gives you an intuition for why it's like we really have to be clear about what not to destroy Yeah yeah Okay let's rock some of the other questions on the way out What do you think is the overall meaning of this human experience? Overall meaning I mean so you know the question is obviously not super well specified in the sense that like It's hard to even know what an answer looks like you know what I'm saying So like what is an example of an answer that's even valid to a question like that right There are some that we've had that are pretty solid Okay what's one? Maximizing consciousness, creativity, meaning, flourishing yeah Yeah sure so I mean the thing about the meaning question right is like You have to put it in the context of the fact that we evolved you know in a universe So like the universe started with no consciousness and then we like we're kind of like accidentally here You know what I'm saying like it's kind of like if you I could start a universe from scratch right now Like you know have you ever heard of Conway's Game of Life Maybe It's like it's a two-dimensional grid of black and white cells and you can make some of them black and some of them white And it's like an infinite grid so it's an infinite grid all the cells start white You can make some of them black and then you turn on the simulation and it just evolves by itself Where every cell has a rule of whether it turns black or white based on what's going on around it So it's a completely passive simulation and if you look at if you understand Conway's Game of Life That is like a model of a universe like our universe could at the lowest level I literally be Conway's Game of Life like once they unpack the atoms unpack the quarks unpack quantum theory it literally could be running on a Conway's Game of Life and it's a useful thing to think about because It's it shows it shows you what it's like to create a universe like everybody gives God so much credit Like oh my god God created the universe. That's amazing. It's not that hard to create a universe Okay, I can show you how to do it on my computer And so once you know what a universe looks like and you know how like you know what happens after that Where if you have you know a natural selection dynamic right if you have molecules that are capable of getting into a cycle Or they mutate and evolve into like cellular organisms and you get a process of evolution going Eventually if you run it long enough you will get a species that gets intelligent that then starts asking the question why Like my baby Ezra I was looking at him like he doesn't really have consciousness yet right he's still just he's four months old So it's kind of funny because I'm looking at him he has he doesn't have any sense of what's the meaning of life But I know that one day he's going to have a module inside of him that's going to start asking what's the meaning of life Right unless I and unless he suffers you know brain damage and never develops that module So this is just how universes play out that people start asking what the meaning is Well the meaning is that we're you know we're running in this evolving universe or evolving simulation It's possible that we have simulation gods who created the universe a certain way But then you can just ask okay well the simulation gods right the alien teenagers who started us off in the simulated universe What was their goal right and maybe they had some goal okay but who created the alien teenagers So it's hard to really answer the meaning question I feel like it's more of like a perspective question Like putting myself in perspective the way I just did like I'm like a character in one of these universes And then you can ask the question like okay well why is there something instead of nothing Like why why doesn't every possible universe exist and the answer is well maybe it does Maybe every possible universe does exist and that's called a tag mark level four the tag mark level four universe Where he thinks that every logically possible universe does exist in some sense Even though it feels like we're only in one of them so that's kind of as far as I've gotten to the question of like Why is there meaning and it's it might not be a complete answer but it certainly eliminates some of the crap other people are saying Yeah we can tell that you've jumped around between a lot of the different schools of thought around the subject Which is always really good to hear It is in the sense this most first principled question why are we here what is the nature of this reality It's a very important philosophical question it can give people a good amount of diving into some of the most important Researches and philosophies and sciences and and maybe even help guide them towards some sort of actualization in the world That they may have been on a wrong path prior to asking themselves these questions So these questions can sometimes elicit people to go on more more aligned paths with their ultimate purpose and destiny How about what are your thoughts about the relationship between free will and determinism Sure yeah so my opinion is kind of the standard one for the center for applied rationality I think maybe not official but probably most of the people share it which is like So I think the universe is deterministic so I do think that it just follows rules predictable rules which is nice As opposed to just having a huge component of fundamental randomness And for the physically knowledgeable audience I guess I believe in the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics Which doesn't have any randomness built in so there's no collapse or anything so it's just a clockwork universe So that's how I think the universe works but then the question is well what's going on in free will It's not that hard like imagine watching somebody else like doing their thing Like watching another human or watching a smart computer play chess Imagine watching something do their thing from your perspective you don't know what they're going to do They seem like they're driven by desires and they have strategies but it's hard to predict exactly what they're going to do I don't know what the chess playing computer is going to do next if it's trying to kick my ass at chess If you look at your own brain sometimes you don't know exactly what your own brain is going to do And then eventually you end up doing something and sometimes you even know why you did it Because you know you did it at the end of a process So for example like let's say that I'm just trying to get to a place I'm just trying to drive to my hotel room from the airport So if I look at the next intersection I can't tell you if I'm going to turn left or right But I can tell you what I'm going to do I'm going to check Google Maps And then I'm going to look at whatever it says and then I'm going to do what it does So I check Google Maps and it says turn left and then I turn left So I didn't know what I was going to do but there was a process like at the end of the day I ran the process and then I did it and that's the free will is what you feel like When you don't yet know what you're going to do or you don't yet know when somebody else is going to do But you play out a process and then that determines what you're going to do How do you feel about our disconnection from nature And how that has led to so many of the issues we have in our civilization Yeah our disconnection from nature Well in a sense we aren't So the drive to build up stuff is very human The reason why our bodies are the way we are is because we actually evolved together with some of our primitive technology So the reason we're weak compared to apes A chimpanzee baby can completely kick the ass of a UFC fighter Not a baby but a child So humans are very weak and the reason is just because we're able to use our brains to get around And the reason our brains are so big relative to our bodies is because we had cooked food So it's okay, we're able to support this really hungry brain because we just cook our food And the fire does a lot of the work of the digestion so we're getting this calorie rich food So it's already kind of natural for us to be coddled to some degree Now the amount that we're coddled today is insane Even the fact that we have running water and quality toilets, that's already amazing We're living in Star Wars basically So I don't think it's that bad I think it's mostly just good and awesome I think that most people's lives can be described as being a pain in the ass Like most people's lives have been a pain in the ass And today they're much more interesting, much less of a pain in the ass I think it's great, there's some downsides Like the fact that we're losing, we don't really know First of all we don't know how bad it could be I think a lot of the people who are whining They just don't realize that they're whining about the difference between being on level 9 And being on level 10 When most of humanity is just on level 1 And they just need a sense of perspective about just chill out Because we're all in a good place And if they had to go live with nature for a week I think they'd get the idea Yeah, it's very true that basic needs like we mentioned at the beginning Simultaneously our disconnection from nature The air that we pollute that we also breathe The deforestation that we do That we also again as part of our air cycle Sure, but deforestation is only, the main reason deforestation is bad is like the sea attrition There's so much more, right The pollution of the oceans and the relationship that that has to the water cycle It's just inevitable that if we continue having ignorance With the interconnectedness of everything on the planet We're just going to have more and more issues arise We're moving into metropolises at unprecedented rates Where we are disconnected from the cosmos We're disconnected from the farms We're disconnected from more and more of the things Although we have the toilets and we have the electricity And we have the gadgets So we have to really be aware that yes You are right there are these toilets, lights, gadgets Simultaneously the disconnection that you have from never going to a farm Or never seeing the billions of stars That these are very serious things That when you throw something away That you don't know that it goes to the landfill We realize the interconnectedness of everything And then that augments our perspective to become better stewards of the planet As we do this evolution at the same time So I feel like you have a mental picture Where you want to get back into harmony with nature How do you feel about that? Is that accurate? Is that a good summary of what you're saying? Let's get back into harmony with nature While simultaneously building the future So my point is harmony is provably not a thing in nature Everybody thinks nature is all about harmony Imagine you're God You're trying to design a universe with harmony in it The last thing you do is you take two organisms And they go hardcore having the opposite desires clashing with each other And that's what you see all over the natural world So you see the fox who wants nothing more than to catch the rabbit And the rabbit who wants nothing more than to escape or poison the fox They're completely at cross purposes And you see that all over the place If you follow this channel nature is scary The other day I saw a bird come over and see a mouse on a cliff And the bird just keeps nudging the mouse Nudges him off the cliff and then the mouse falls and dies And then the bird eats it That kind of stuff is going on all over the place in nature So us being dicks to the buffalo, that's the accurate course of nature There's no effing harmony Some organisms put the other organisms in their teeth and chew It's a freaking bar fight out there in nature So the planet really is our BITCH Like it really is, we're just trying to optimize how the planet supports us Like I don't give a damn how polluted it is If it doesn't cause us humans a problem So many of the ancient wisdoms that have been around Very very long tens of thousands of years Much longer than our little 25 year chunks of life A lot of them talk about the harmony including Actually what you just described Which are some of those instances of in nature At the same time for every one of those instances that you listed There's all of these other examples of nature being extremely Gorgeously interconnected and intertwined In ways that again that if we vibe with at a deeper level And just really embody and understand that We ourselves can follow similar principles to maximize flourishing So keeping a mentality of like I don't care how polluted it is As long as it doesn't affect me or the civilization Is at the same time can be phrased in a way that is Let's have energy, unlimited energy for anyone At the push of a button that is created by the most optimal nuclear fusion That has again just zero emissions into the planet period And so it's just there's always different ways to frame these statements Like if a child hears that I don't care how polluted it is As long as it doesn't affect human civilization I think that's a frame that the child can think Well then let's like increase the pollution to a certain level As long as it versus the well let's actually not do that process Well that's fine but it's a really deep point that nature is not in harmony Like that is a fundamental fact about nature if you look at nature It's because I could design your universe where nature isn't harmony It's not that hard you just give everybody goals that are pulling in the same direction What do you call the water cycle is that not harmony? I mean it's an equilibrium but it's I mean harmony like sure Look you can find some harmonies I can swing a pendulum and that's like kind of a nice harmony If you look at nature if you look at animals it's I mean the whole idea of evolution by natural selection Is selection pressure is competition The earth orbiting the star and the seasons happening on the planet Sure And the water cycle and even like you described this idea of biological hierarchies And natural selection that all these things can be viewed as harmony Although you are aiming to phrase it in a way that is not harmony Look the water cycle I can show you a lot of things that are nice harmonies But if you go and look at the fundamental dynamic of evolution It is fundamentally an anti harmony it's like the farthest possible thing from harmony is evolution If you had harmony you'd never have evolution you'd never have selection pressure Because the first organism to ever reproduce itself you just get a lot of that That's it you just stay with that because there would be no evolution pressure The conversation is coming to this point of which selection pressure and natural selection is actually In viewed in your perspective as non harmonious It is fundamentally non harmonious And then in other people's perspectives it is actually viewed as part of the harmony So they're just not thinking clearly about what's actually going on Like they don't realize what it actually is it's a nice thought to say that it's an harmony But if you look at it because again imagine you're God from scratch You're making the universe from scratch Show me what a universe looks like when it's in harmony Show me what life in harmony looks like Show me what life not in harmony looks like Now look at our universe That's life not in harmony That's really what it is Life in harmony looks like all the animals have the same goals All the animals agree that everybody should have their own territory And respect each other's rights Like what we have today in the United States with a functioning government The government keeps us in harmony that's the job and it does it reasonably well But what you have in the animal kingdom or the whole kingdom of life Is really not harmony because you can contrast it with what harmony actually is This is fair One of the ways to potentially also look at it would be Maybe there's a way to design As we continue to design universes Maybe there are ways to design a universe where all of the All of what is in functioning is in a deeper level of harmony Than even what we have here in our universe So sure And then how about what do you think is the most beautiful thing in the world? I mean I don't have such a well developed sense and focus on beauty That I can really tell you what's the most beautiful thing in the world I think my sense of beauty is the average pedestrian sense of beauty Certainly beautiful women, beautiful men I guess Just beautiful paintings I don't have any particular insight on what's beautiful Because I think ultimately the computation of beauty happens in everybody's brain I guess it's kind of like asking me what's the best golf swing I can tell you that throwing the golf club is a bad swing I can't tell you what's a great golf swing I guess I have some appreciation for certain beauty in my field of software engineering I can tell you what's a beautiful piece of code A little bit better than average At the end of the day I think beauty is just one of our many things that we like We like beauty, we like good taste We like life and babies and knowledge This is just all good stuff that we like And beauty is one of the things Do you think this is a simulation? I think it's more likely than not is a simulation It's hard for me to give you an exact probability But gun to my head if I had to guess whether we're in a simulation or not I'm going to guess yes Because I'm not the first person to figure it out Nick Bostrom's simulation argument Are you familiar? Yeah Okay So maybe just to recap it really quick It's the idea of like look Do you think that intelligent civilizations such as our own Eventually create computer simulations of other intelligent species Seems like probably yes But that's one question that's part of the argument And then another question is like Okay so are we a simulation? And how likely are they to create a simulation? So I may be leaving out a part of the argument But the basic idea is like Don't you think you and I are eventually going to create simulations if we can If we have the computing power too It's like can we, do we want to, will we Okay so if that's all true Then don't you think that we're not the first intelligence Don't you think we're just in somebody else's simulation Like why should we think that we're the first Because there's probably a big chain of people simulating each other And like humanity in the year 2100 Is probably going to be running a simulation Which is itself running a simulation Right so why do we think we're level one? Like why don't we think we're just an experiment Why an alien teenager playing the Sims And we're the Sims Like why shouldn't we think that? Well Learon this has been such a fun conversation I really appreciate you coming onto our show Thank you No problem Thank you so much for coming to the program It's been great man Yeah thank you Thank you Incredible work that you've been doing throughout your life It's incredible world view you've been building out as well Learon Yeah it's been fun going back and forth you through on all these subjects Learon yeah I appreciate the deep and untraditional questions Yeah we gotta press into those deep and untraditional ones With as many of the different leaders in the fields as possible Thanks everyone for tuning in We greatly appreciate it We'd love to hear your thoughts in the comments below on the episode Let us know what you're thinking Have more conversation with your friends, families, coworkers People online about the topics that we talked about today About things like relationship hero Go and give that a go Relationshiphero.com give that a go Let us know your thoughts about how your experience is going with that And about the nuance that we talked about regarding that subject in its depth And also all these other philosophical questions we talked about Let us know what you're thinking in the comments below Again relationshiphero.com also Learon's LinkedIn profile His Twitter profile go and give him a follow Support the artist, the entrepreneurs The leaders around the world that you believe in Support them and help them grow You can find simulation in all of our links below That's Patreon, PayPal, Cryptocurrency Design code merch and get paid all those links are below And shout out to our co-producer Ori Shapiro We love you very much, thank you And that is all folks Thanks for tuning in And much love We will see you soon Peace