Joe Rogan Experience #2044 - Sam Altman

1. 0:00 – 1:48

   AI as a net-positive revolution—with real costs and tradeoffs

   1. SASam Altman0:00

      (drumming) Joe Rogan podcast. Check it out. The Joe Rogan Experience.

   2. JRJoe Rogan0:06

      Train by day, Joe Rogan podcast by night. All day. (heavenly music) Hello, Sam. What's happening?

   3. SASam Altman0:14

      Not much. How are you?

   4. JRJoe Rogan0:15

      Thanks for coming in here. Appreciate it.

   5. SASam Altman0:16

      Thanks for having me.

   6. JRJoe Rogan0:17

      So, what have you done? (laughs)

   7. SASam Altman0:20

      Like, ever?

   8. JRJoe Rogan0:21

      No. I mean, what have you done with AI? I mean, it's, um ... one of the things, um, about this is, I mean, I think everyone's fascinated by it. I mean, everyone is, uh, absolutely blown away at the current capability and wondering what the potential for the future is and whether or not that's a good thing.

   9. SASam Altman0:45

      I think it's gonna be a great thing, but I think it's not gonna be all a great thing. And that, that is where I think that's where all of the complexity comes in for people. It's not this, like, clean story of, "We're gonna do this, and it's all gonna be great."

   10. JRJoe Rogan1:00

       Right.

   11. SASam Altman1:00

       "It's we're gonna do this." It's gonna be net great, but it's gonna be, uh, like a technological revolution. It's gonna be a societal revolution, and those always come with change. And even if it's like net wonderful, you know, there's things we're gonna lose along the way, some kinds of jobs, some kind, parts of our way of life, some parts of the way we live are gonna change or go away. And e- no matter how tremendous the upside is there, and I, and I believe it will be tremendously good, you know, there's a lot of stuff we gotta navigate through to make sure. Um, that's, that's a complicated thing for anyone to wrap their heads around, and there's, you know, deep and super understandable emotions around that.

   12. JRJoe Rogan1:39

       That's a very honest answer that it's not all gonna be good, but it seems inevitable at this point.

2. 1:48 – 3:27

   From agriculture to AGI: the long arc toward abundance

   1. SASam Altman1:48

      I- i- it's, yeah, I mean, it's definitely inevitable. My, my view of the w- world, you know, when you're like a kid in school, you learn about this technological revolution, and then that one, and then that one. And my view of the world now, sort of looking backwards and forwards, is that this is like one long technological revolution f- and we had, sure, like, first we had to figure out agriculture, so that we had the resources and time to figure out how to build machines. Then we got this industrial revolution, and that made us learn about a lot of stuff and a lot of other scientific discovery too, let us do the computer revolution, and that's now letting us, as we scale up to these massive systems, do the AI revolution. But it really is just one long story of humans discovering science and technology and co-evolving with it, and I think it's the most exciting story of all time. I think it's how we get to this world of abundance, and although, you know, although we do have these things to navigate, then there, there will be these downsides. If, if you think about what it means for the world and for people's quality of lives, if we can get to a world, uh, where the, the cost of intelligence and the abundance that comes with that, uh, the cost dramatically falls, the abundance goes ways up, goes way up, I think we'll do the same thing with energy. And I think those are the two sort of key inputs to everything else we want. So if we can have abundant and cheap energy and intelligence, that will transform people's lives largely for the better. And I think it's gonna, in the same way that if we could go back now 500 years and look at someone's life, we'd say, "Well, there, there's some great things, but they didn't have this. They didn't have that. Can you believe they didn't have modern medicine?" That's what people are gonna look back at us like but in 50 years.

3. 3:27 – 5:56

   Jobs vs tasks: how automation may really hit the workforce

   1. JRJoe Rogan3:27

      When you think about the people that currently rely on jobs that AI will replace, when you think about whether it's truck drivers or automation workers, people that work in factory assembly lines, w- what, if anything, what strategies can be put to mitigate the negative downsides of those jobs being eliminated by AI?

   2. SASam Altman3:52

      So, eh, I'll talk about some general thoughts, but I, I find making very specific predictions difficult because the way the technology goes has been so different than even my own intuitions, or certainly than my own intuitions.

   3. JRJoe Rogan4:08

      Could we, maybe we should stop there and back up a little. What we, what were your initial thoughts?

   4. SASam Altman4:15

      If you had asked me 10 years ago, I would have said, "First, AI is gonna come for blue-collar labor basically. It's gonna drive trucks and do factory work, and, you know, it'll handle heavy machinery. Then maybe after that, it'll do, like, some kinds of cognitive labor, uh, kind of, you know, but not, it won't be off doing what I think of personally as the really hard stuff. It won't be off proving new mathematical theorems. It won't be off, you know, discovering new science, um, won't be off writing code. And then eventually, maybe, but maybe last of all, maybe never, because human creativity is this magic speciable, special thing, last of all, it'll come for the creative jobs." That's what I would have said. Now, A, it looks to m- me, like, and for a while, AI is much better at doing tasks than doing jobs. It can do these little pieces super well, but sometimes it goes off the rails, uh, it can't keep, like, very long coherence. So people are instead just able to do their existing jobs way more productively, um, but you really still need the human there today. And then B, it's going exactly the other direction. Could do the creative work first, stuff like coding second, or they can do things like other kinds of cognitive labor third, and we're the furthest away from, like, humanoid robots.

   5. JRJoe Rogan5:34

      Hmm. So back to the initial question. W- if we do have something that completely eliminates, uh, factory workers, completely eliminates truck drivers, delivery drivers-

   6. SASam Altman5:49

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan5:49

      ... things along those lines, that creates this massive vacuum in our society.

4. 5:56 – 9:31

   Beyond UBI: agency, ownership, and “a slice of the system”

   1. SASam Altman5:56

      So, I think there's things that we're gonna do that are-... good to do, but not sufficient. So I think at some point, we will do something like a UBI or some other kind of, like, very long term unemployment insurance, something. But we'll have some way of giving people ... like, redistributing money in society e- as a cushion for people as people figure out the new jobs. But l- and I ... maybe I should touch on that. I- I'm not a believer at all that there won't be lots of new jobs. I, I think human creativity, desire for status, wanting different ways to compete, invent new things, feel part of a community, feel valued, uh, that's not gonna go anywhere. People have worried about that forever. What happens is we get better tools, and we just invent new things and more amazing things to do. And there's a big universe out there, and, and I think ... I mean that, like, literally, uh, in that there's, like, space is really big, but also there's just so much stuff we can all do if we do get to this world of abundant intelligence, where you can sort of just think of a new idea and then it gets created. But, but again, that doesn't ... To the point we started with, that, that, that doesn't provide, like, great solace to people who are losing their jobs today. So saying there's going to be this great indefinite stuff in the future, people are like, "What are we doing today?" So, you know, we'll ... I think we will, as a society, do things like UBI and other ways of redistribution, but I don't think that gets at the core of what people want. I think what people want is, like, agency, self-determination, the ability to play a role in architecting the future along with the rest of society, the ability to express themselves and create something meaningful to them. And also, I think a lot of people work jobs they hate, and I think there's ... We as a society are always a little bit confused about whether we wanna work more or work less. But, but somehow the ... We all get to do something meaningful, and we all get to f- play our role in driving the future forward. That's really important, and what I hope is as those truck driving, long-haul truck driving jobs go away, which, you know, people have been wrong about predicting how fast that's gonna happen, but it's gonna happen. Um, we figure out not just a way to solve the economic problem by, like, giving people the equivalent of money every month, but that there's a way that ... And we've had a lot of ideas about this. There's a way that we, like, share ownership and decision-making over the future. Um, a thing I say a lot about AGI is that everyone, everyone realizes we're gonna have to share the benefits of that, but we also have to share, like, the decision-making over it and access to the system itself. Like, I'd be more excited about a world where we say rather than give everybody on Earth, like, one eight-billionth of the AGI money, which we should do that too, we say, "You get, like, one eight-billionth of ... a, a one eight-billionth slice of the system." You can sell it to somebody else. You can sell it to a company. You can pool it with other people. You can use it for whatever creative pursuit you want. You can use it to figure out how to start some new business. Um, and with that, you get sort of, like, a, a voting right over how this is all gonna be used.

   2. JRJoe Rogan9:25

      Mm-hmm.

   3. SASam Altman9:25

      And so the better the AGI gets, the more your little one eight-billionth ownership is, is worth to you.

5. 9:31 – 12:37

   “AI government” and the corruption problem

   1. JRJoe Rogan9:31

      We were joking around the other day on the podcast where I was saying that what we need is an AI government. The, the ... We shou- we should have-

   2. SASam Altman9:38

      What does that mean?

   3. JRJoe Rogan9:39

      ... an AI president and have AI run things.

   4. SASam Altman9:41

      Just make all the decisions?

   5. JRJoe Rogan9:42

      Yeah, have something that's completely unbiased, absolutely rational, has the accumulated knowledge of the entire human history-

   6. SASam Altman9:51

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan9:51

      ... at its disposal, including all knowledge of psychology-

   8. SASam Altman9:56

      Yeah.

   9. JRJoe Rogan9:56

      ... and psychological study, including UBI, 'cause that comes with a host of, you know, pitfalls and, and, and issues that people have with it.

   10. SASam Altman10:04

       So I'll say something there. Um, I think we're still very far away from a system that is capable enough and reliable enough that you ... that any of us would want that. But I'll tell you something I love about that. Some day, let's say that thing gets built. The fact that it can go around and talk to every person on Earth, understand their exact preferences at a very deep level, you know, how they think about this issue and that one and how they balance the trade-offs and what they want, and then understand all of that and, and, like, collectively optimize, optimize for the collective preferences of humanity or of citizens of the US, that's awesome.

   11. JRJoe Rogan10:41

       As long as it's not co-opted, right? Our government currently is co-opted.

   12. SASam Altman10:47

       That's for sure.

   13. JRJoe Rogan10:48

       We, we know for sure that our government is heavily influenced by special interests. If we could have an artificial intelligence government that has no influence, nothing has influence on it-

   14. SASam Altman11:01

       What a fascinating idea.

   15. JRJoe Rogan11:02

       It's possible, and I think it might be the only way where you're gonna get completely objective, the absolute most intelligent decision for virtually every problem, every dilemma that we face currently in society.

   16. SASam Altman11:19

       Would you truly be comfortable handing over, like, final decision-making and say, "All right, AI. You got it from here"?

   17. JRJoe Rogan11:25

       No, no, but I'm not comfortable doing that with anybody.

   18. SASam Altman11:28

       Right.

   19. JRJoe Rogan11:28

       You know, I mean, I, I don't-

   20. SASam Altman11:29

       Right.

   21. JRJoe Rogan11:30

       I was uncomfortable with the Patriot Act.

   22. SASam Altman11:32

       Right.

   23. JRJoe Rogan11:32

       I'm uncomfortable with, you know-

   24. SASam Altman11:33

       Totally.

   25. JRJoe Rogan11:33

       ... many decisions that people ... that are being made. I- it's just there's so much obvious evidence that decisions that are being made are not being made in the best interests of the overall well of the people. It's being made in the decisions of whatever gigantic corporations that have donated to and what ... whatever the military-industrial complex and pharmaceutical-industrial complex, and, and it's so ... just the money. It's ... That's really what we know today, that, that money has a massive influence on, on our society and the choices that get made and the overall good or bad for the population.

   26. SASam Altman12:09

       Yeah, I- I have no disagreement at all that-... the current system is super broken, not working for people, super corrupt- corrupt, and for sure, like, unbelievably run by money.

   27. JRJoe Rogan12:20

       Yeah.

   28. SASam Altman12:21

       And- and I think there is a way to do a better job than that with AI to s- in some way, but, uh, uh, and this might just be, like, a factor of sitting with the systems all day and watching all of the ways they fail, we got a long way to go.

6. 12:37 – 15:56

   AGI timelines, takeoff speed, and safety as a nuclear-scale issue

   1. JRJoe Rogan12:37

      A long way to go, I'm sure. But when you think of AGI, when you think of the possible future, like, where it goes to, do you ever extrapolate? Do you ev- do you ever, like, sit and pause and say, "Well, if the thing- if this becomes sentient, and it has the ability to make better versions of itself-"

   2. SASam Altman12:57

      Yeah.

   3. JRJoe Rogan12:57

      "... how long before we're literally dealing with a god?"

   4. SASam Altman13:01

      So, the way that I think about this is, it used to be that, like, AGI was this very binary moment, it was before and after, and I think I was totally wrong about that. And the right way to think about it is this continual- continuum of intelligence, this smooth exponential curve, back all the way to that sort of smooth curve- curve of technological revolution. The- the amount of compute power we can put into the system, the scientific ideas about how to make it more efficient and smarter, to give it the ability to do reasoning, to think about how to improve itself, that will all come. But my- my model for a long time, I- I think if you look at the world of AGI thinkers, there's, uh, there's sort of two, particularly around the safety issues you were talking about, there's two axes that matter. There's the short, what called short timelines or long timelines, you know, to the first milestone of AGI, whatever that's gonna be. Is that gonna happen in a few years, a few decades, maybe even longer? Although, at this point, I think most people are a few years or a few decades. And then there's takeoff speed. Once we get there, from there to that point you were talking about where it's capable of the rapid self-improvement, um, is that a slow or a fast process? The- the world that I think we're heading, that we're in, and also the world that I think is the most controllable and the safest, is the short timelines and slow takeoff quadrant. And I think we're gonna have, you know, there were a lot of very smart people for a while that were like, "The thing you were just talking about happens in a day or three days." And I don't, that doesn't seem likely to me given the shape of the technology as we understand it now. Now, even if that happens in a decade or three decades, it's still, like, the blink of an eye from a historical perspective, and there are gonna be some real challenges to getting that right. And the decisions we make, the- the sort of safety systems and the ch- and the checks that the world puts in place, how we think about global regulation or rules of the road from a safety perspective for those projects, it's super important, 'cause you can imagine many things going horribly wrong. But I've been, I feel cheerful about the progress the world is making towards taking this seriously, and, uh, you know, it reminds me of what I've read about the conversations that the world had right around the development of nuclear weapons.

   5. JRJoe Rogan15:34

      Mm. It seems to me that this is, at least in terms of public consciousness, this has emerged very rapidly, where I don't think anyone was really aware, uh, people were aware of the concept of artificial intelligence-

   6. SASam Altman15:49

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan15:49

      ... but they didn't think that it was gonna be implemented so comprehensively, so quickly.

   8. SASam Altman15:55

      Yeah.

7. 15:56 – 17:49

   Why OpenAI deploys early: public adaptation and incremental capability jumps

   1. JRJoe Rogan15:56

      So, um, ChatGPT is on, what, 4.5 now?

   2. SASam Altman16:00

      Four.

   3. JRJoe Rogan16:00

      Four. And with 4.5, there'll be some sort of an exponential increase in its abilities?

   4. SASam Altman16:06

      It'll be somewhat better, uh, each step, uh, you know, from each, like, half step like that, y- you, uh, you kinda, humans have this ability to, like, get used to any new technology so quickly.

   5. JRJoe Rogan16:18

      Mm-hmm.

   6. SASam Altman16:18

      The thing that I think was unusual about the launch of ChatGPT 3.5 and then 4 was that people hadn't really been paying attention, and that's part of the reason we deploy. We think it's very important that people and institutions have time to gradually understand this, react, co-design the society that we want with it, and if you just build AGI in secret in a lab and then drop it on the world all at once, I think that's a really bad idea. So, we- we had been trying to talk to the world about this for a while. People, if you don't give people something they can feel and use in their lives, they don't quite take it seriously, everybody's busy, and so there was this big overhang from where the technology was to where public consciousness was. Now that's caught up, we've deployed, I think people understand it. I don't expect the fu- the jump from, like, 4 to whenever we finish 4.5, which will be a little while, I don't expect that to be the crazy, I think the crazy switch, the crazy adjustment that people have had to go through has- has mostly happened. I think most people have gone from thinking that AGI was science fiction and very far off to something that is gonna happen, and that was, like, a one-time reframe. And now, uh, you know, every year, you get a new iPhone, over the 15 years or whatever since the launch, they've gotten dramatically better, but iPhone to iPhone, you're like, "Yeah, okay, it's a little better."

   7. JRJoe Rogan17:39

      Mm.

   8. SASam Altman17:39

      But now if you go hold up the first iPhone to the 15 or whatever-

   9. JRJoe Rogan17:42

      Mm.

   10. SASam Altman17:42

       ... that's a big difference. GPT-3.5 to AGI, that'll be a big difference. But along the way, it'll just get incrementally better.

8. 17:49 – 24:53

   Neural interfaces, external mind-reading, and the fairness dilemma of “merging”

   1. JRJoe Rogan17:49

      Do you think about the convergence of, uh, things like, uh, Neuralink and, uh, there's a, a few competing technologies where they're trying to implement some sort of, some sort of a connection between the human biological system and technology?

   2. SASam Altman18:09

      Um, do you want one of those things in your head?

   3. JRJoe Rogan18:12

      I don't until everybody does.

   4. SASam Altman18:14

      Right.

   5. JRJoe Rogan18:14

      And, you know, I would joke about it. But it's like, the, the idea is like, once it gets d- You have to, kind of.

   6. SASam Altman18:20

      Yeah.

   7. JRJoe Rogan18:20

      Because everybody's gonna have it.

   8. SASam Altman18:22

      So one of the hard questions about the mer- all of the related merge stuff is exactly what you just said. Like, as a society, are we gonna let some people merge with AGI-

   9. JRJoe Rogan18:35

      Right.

   10. SASam Altman18:35

       ... and not others? And if we do, then ... and you choose not to. Like, what does that mean for you?

   11. JRJoe Rogan18:43

       Right. And will you be protected?

   12. SASam Altman18:46

       H- h- how you get that moment right, uh, you know, if we like imagine like all the way out to the sci-fi future. I ... there've been a lot of sci-fi books written about how you get that moment right.

   13. JRJoe Rogan18:56

       Yeah.

   14. SASam Altman18:56

       You know, who gets to do that first? What about people who don't want to? How do you make sure the people that do it first, like, actually help lift everybody up together?

   15. JRJoe Rogan19:02

       Yeah.

   16. SASam Altman19:02

       How do you make sure people who wanna just like live their very human life get to do that? That stuff is really hard, and honestly, so far off from my problems of the day that I don't get to think about that as much as I'd like to, 'cause I do think it's super interesting. Um, I ... But yeah, it seems like if we just think logically, that's gonna be a huge challenge at some point, and people are gonna want wildly divergent things. But there is a societal question about how we're gonna h- Like, the questions of fairness that come there and what it means for the people who don't do it, super, super complicated. Anyway, on the neural interface side, I'm, in the short term, like before we figure out how to upload someone's consciousness into a computer, if that's even possible at all, which I think there's plenty of sides you could take on why it's not. Um, the, the thing that I find myself most interested in is what we can do without drilling a hole in someone's head. H- how much of the inner monologue can we read out with an externally mounted device? And if we have a imperfect, low bandwidth, low accuracy neural interface, can people still just learn how to use it really well in a way that's, like, quite powerful for what they can now do with a new computing platform? And my guess is we'll figure that out.

   17. JRJoe Rogan20:36

       I'm sure you've seen that head piece. The, there's a, a demonstration where there's someone asking someone a question. They have this head piece on, they think the question, and then they literally Google the question, get the answers-

   18. SASam Altman20:48

       Yeah.

   19. JRJoe Rogan20:48

       ... through their head.

   20. SASam Altman20:48

       That's the kinda thing we've been in. That's the kinda direction we've been exploring.

   21. JRJoe Rogan20:51

       Yeah. That seems to me to be step one. That's the Pong of-

   22. SASam Altman20:56

       Yeah.

   23. JRJoe Rogan20:56

       ... the eventual immersive 3D video games. Like, you're, you're going-

   24. SASam Altman21:00

       Yeah.

   25. JRJoe Rogan21:00

       ... to get these first steps, and they're gonna seem sort of crude and slow. I mean, it's essentially slower than-

   26. SASam Altman21:07

       Yeah.

   27. JRJoe Rogan21:07

       ... just asking Siri.

   28. SASam Altman21:08

       I think if someone built a system where you could think words ... Doesn't have to be a question. It could just be your passive, rambling inner monologue, but certainly could be a question, and that was being fed into GPT-5 or 6, and in your field of vision the words and response were being displayed, that would be the Pong.

   29. JRJoe Rogan21:30

       Yeah.

   30. SASam Altman21:30

       That's still sup- That's a very valuable tool to have.
9. 24:53 – 28:01

   VR, simulation theory, and living meaningfully either way

   1. JRJoe Rogan24:53

      Do you ever fuck around with simulation theory? Because the real problem is when you combine that with probability theory and you talk to the people that say, "Well, if you just look at the numbers, the, the probability that we're already in a simulation is much higher than the probability that we're not."

   2. SASam Altman25:10

      Um, it's n- never been clear to me what to do about it. It's like, okay.

   3. JRJoe Rogan25:17

      Right. (laughs)

   4. SASam Altman25:17

      That, in t- That, im- intellectually makes a lot of sense.

   5. JRJoe Rogan25:20

      Yeah.

   6. SASam Altman25:20

      I think probably, sure.

   7. JRJoe Rogan25:22

      Right. P-

   8. SASam Altman25:22

      Yeah, that seems convincing, but-

   9. JRJoe Rogan25:23

      But now what?

   10. SASam Altman25:23

       ... this is my reality.

   11. JRJoe Rogan25:24

       Yeah.

   12. SASam Altman25:24

       This is my life.

   13. JRJoe Rogan25:25

       Yeah.

   14. SASam Altman25:26

       And I'm gonna live it, and I, I've... You know, from like 2:00 AM in my college freshman dorm hallway till now, I've made no more progress on it than that.

   15. JRJoe Rogan25:39

       Hmm. Well, it seems like one of those... It, it's... There's no... You know, it's... If it is r- a possibility, if it is real, first of all, once it happens, what are you gonna do? I mean, that, that is the new reality. And, and in many ways, our new reality is as alien to, uh, you know, uh, hunter-gatherers-

   16. SASam Altman26:04

       Yeah.

   17. JRJoe Rogan26:04

       ... from 15,000 years ago as that would be to us now. I mean, we're, we're already... We've already entered into some very bizarre territory where... You know, I was just having a conversation with my kids, we were asking questions about something, and I, uh, you know, I always say, "Let's guess. What percentage of that is this?" And then we just Google it, and then just ask Siri and we pull it up, like, "Look at that." Like, that alone-

   18. SASam Altman26:28

       Yeah.

   19. JRJoe Rogan26:28

       ... is so bizarre compared to how it was when I was 13 and you had to go to the library and hope that the book was accurate.

   20. SASam Altman26:37

       Totally. I, I was very annoyed this mor- I was reading about how horrible systems like ChatGPT and Google are from an environmental impact because it's, you know, using, like, some extremely tiny amount of energy for each query, and you know, how we're all destroying the world, and I was like, "Before that, people drove to the library."

   21. JRJoe Rogan26:55

       Yeah.

   22. SASam Altman26:55

       "Let's talk about how much carbon they burned to answer this question-"

   23. JRJoe Rogan26:57

       Sure.

   24. SASam Altman26:57

       "... versus what it takes now. Come on."

   25. JRJoe Rogan26:59

       Th- Uh, those... But that's just people looking for some reason why something's bad. That's not a logical perspective.

   26. SASam Altman27:05

       Totally, totally.

   27. JRJoe Rogan27:05

       What we should be looking at-

   28. SASam Altman27:07

       (laughs)

   29. JRJoe Rogan27:07

       ... is th- the spectacular changes that are possible through this, and all the problems, the insurmountable problems that we have with resources, with the environment, with cleaning up the ocean, climate change. There's so many problems that we have.

   30. SASam Altman27:22

       We, we need this to solve all of everything else. We-
10. 28:01 – 33:20

    Corruption vs surveillance: crypto, CBDCs, and power over money

    1. SASam Altman28:01

       This is really great. O- One of the thing, one of the things that I've observed, obviously many other people too, is corruption is such an incredible hindrance to getting anything done in a society to make it forward progress. And, you know, my, my worldview had been more US-centric when I was younger, and as I've just studied the world more and had to work in more places in the world, like, it's amazing how much corruption there still is. But the shift to a technologically enabled world, I think, is a major force against it because everything is... It's harder to hide stuff.

    2. JRJoe Rogan28:36

       Hmm.

    3. SASam Altman28:37

       And I do think corruption in the world will keep trending down.

    4. JRJoe Rogan28:42

       Because of its exposure-

    5. SASam Altman28:44

       Yeah.

    6. JRJoe Rogan28:44

       ... through technology.

    7. SASam Altman28:45

       If, uh, I mean, th- th- It comes at a cost, and I think the loss, the like... I am very worried about how far the surveillance state could go here.

    8. JRJoe Rogan28:55

       Hmm.

    9. SASam Altman28:55

       But in a world where payments, for example, are no longer like bags of cash, but done somehow digitally, and somebody, even if you're using Bitcoin, can, like, watch those flows.

    10. JRJoe Rogan29:09

        Hmm.

    11. SASam Altman29:09

        I think that's, like, a cor- corruption-reducing thing.

    12. JRJoe Rogan29:12

        I agree, but I'm very worried about central bank digital currency and that being tied to a social credit score.

    13. SASam Altman29:19

        E- E- Super, super against.

    14. JRJoe Rogan29:22

        Yeah. That scares the shit out of me.

    15. SASam Altman29:23

        Super against.

    16. JRJoe Rogan29:24

        And that, the push to that is not... That's not for the overall good of society. That's for control.

    17. SASam Altman29:30

        I- Yeah. I, I think, like... I mean, there's many things that I'm disappointed that the US government has done recently, but the, the war on crypto, which I think is a, like, "We can't give this up," like, "We're gonna control this."

    18. JRJoe Rogan29:45

        Hmm.

    19. SASam Altman29:45

        And all this, like... That, that's like... Me- That- that's the thing that, like, makes me quite sad about the country.

    20. JRJoe Rogan29:51

        It makes me quite sad about the country too, but then you also see with things like FTX, like, oh, well, th- this can get... Without regulation and without someone overseeing it, this can get really fucked.

    21. SASam Altman30:05

        Yeah. I'm, I'm not anti-regulation. Like, I think there's clearly a role for it, uh, and I also think FTX was like a sort of comically bad situation-

    22. JRJoe Rogan30:18

        Yeah.

    23. SASam Altman30:18

        ... that we shouldn't learn too much from either.

    24. JRJoe Rogan30:18

        It's like worst case scenario.

    25. SASam Altman30:20

        Yeah.

    26. JRJoe Rogan30:20

        (laughs) Yeah. But it's a fun one.

    27. SASam Altman30:22

        Like, it's totally fun, and you to-

    28. JRJoe Rogan30:24

        I love that story.

    29. SASam Altman30:25

        I mean, you clearly-

    30. JRJoe Rogan30:26

        (laughs) I really do. I love the fact that they were all doing drugs and having sex with each other. (laughs)
11. 33:20 – 36:00

    What is money after AGI—and how do we prevent totalitarian control?

    1. SASam Altman33:20

       What do you think happens to money and currency after AGI?

    2. JRJoe Rogan33:25

       I, I've wondered about that because I feel like with money, especially when money goes digital, the bottleneck is access. If we get to a point where all information is just freely shared everywhere, there are no secrets, there are no boundaries, there are no borders. We're reading minds. We have complete access to all of the information of everything you've ever done, everything everyone's ever said. There's no hidden secrets. What is money then? Money is this digital thing. Well, how can you possess it? How can you possess this digital thing if there is literally no bottleneck? There's no barriers to anyone accessing any information, because essentially it's just ones and zeros.

    3. SASam Altman34:12

       Yeah. Uh, I mean, another way... I think the information frame makes sense. An-another way is that like money is, uh, like a sort of way to trade labor or trade like a limited number of hard assets, like land and houses and whatever. Um, and if you think about a world where like intellectual labor is just readily available and super cheap-

    4. JRJoe Rogan34:35

       Hmm.

    5. SASam Altman34:36

       ... then that's somehow very different. I, I think there will always be goods that we want to be scarce and expensive. But it'll only be those goods that we want to be scarce and expensive that's... And services that still are. And so money in a world like that I think is just a... It's a very curious idea.

    6. JRJoe Rogan34:55

       Hmm. Yeah. It becomes a different thing. I mean, it's not a bag of gold in a leather pouch that you're carrying around when you're riding a horse.

    7. SASam Altman35:01

       Not gonna do you much good probably.

    8. JRJoe Rogan35:03

       Yeah. It's not gonna do you much good. But then the question becomes, how is that money distributed? And how do we avoid some horrible Marxist society where there's one totalitarian government that just...

    9. SASam Altman35:15

       Dictates it.

    10. JRJoe Rogan35:15

        Yeah.

    11. SASam Altman35:16

        That would be bad.

    12. JRJoe Rogan35:16

        Yeah.

    13. SASam Altman35:17

        I, I think you've gotta like... My, my current best idea, and maybe there's something better, is I think you a... Like if, if we are right... A tot... A lot of reasons we could be wrong, but if we are right that like a... The AGI systems, of which there will be a few, become the high-order bits of sort of influence, whatever, in the world, I think you do need like not to just redistribute the money, but the access so that people can make their own decisions about how to use it-

    14. JRJoe Rogan35:44

        Hmm.

    15. SASam Altman35:44

        ... and how to govern it. And if you've got one idea, you get to do this. And if I've got one idea, I get to do that. Uh, and I have like rights to basically do whatever I want with my part of it. And if I come up with better ideas than you, I get rewarded by... For that by whatever the society is or vice versa.

12. 36:00 – 1:05:18

    Editing human nature: testosterone, violence, and engineered empathy

    1. JRJoe Rogan36:00

       Yeah. You know, the, the hardliners, the people that are against like welfare and against, uh, any sort of UGI, um, U- Universal Basic Income, UBI, what they're, what they're really concerned with is human nature, right? They believe that if you remove incentives, if you just give people free money, they become addicted to it. They become lazy. But isn't that a human biological and psychological bottleneck? And perhaps with the implementation of-... artificial intelligence combined with some sort of neural interface, whether it's external or internal. It seems like that's a problem that can be solved, that you can essentially, and this is where it gets really spooky, you can re-engineer the human biological system, and you can remove all of these problems that people have that are essentially problems that date back to human reward systems when we were tribal people, hunter-gatherer people. Whether it's jealousy, lust, envy, all these, all these variables that come into play when you're dealing with money and status and social status. If those are eliminated with technology, and essentially, we become a next version of what the human species is possible. Like, look, we're very, very far removed from tribal-

    2. SASam Altman37:33

       Yeah.

    3. JRJoe Rogan37:33

       ... brutal societies of cave people. We all agree that this is a way better way to live. It's, it's, it's a much... It's, it's way safer, you know, we were... Like I, I was talking about this at my comedy club last night, because we were... Because my wife was (clears throat) ... We, we were talking about, um, DNA, and my wife was saying that, "Look, everybody came from cave people," which is kind of a fucked up thought that everyone here is here because of cave people. Well, that... All that's still in our DNA. All that's still... The, and these reward systems can be hijacked, and they can be hijacked by just giving people money. And like, you don't have to work, you don't have to do anything, you don't have to have ambition. You'll just have money and just, just lay around and do drugs. That's what the... That's the fear that people have of giving people free money. But if we can figure out how to literally engineer the human biological vehicle and remove all those pitfalls, if we can enlighten people technologically. And maybe enlighten is the wrong word, but, but advance the human species to the point where those are no longer dilemmas, because those are easily solvable through coding. They're easily solvable through enhancing the human biological system, perhaps raising dopamine levels to the point where anger and fear and hate are impossible. They don't exist. And if... I mean, if you just had ev- everyone on molly-

    4. SASam Altman39:08

       (laughs)

    5. JRJoe Rogan39:08

       ... how many wars would there be?

    6. SASam Altman39:10

       Look, I think-

    7. JRJoe Rogan39:10

       There'd be zero wars.

    8. SASam Altman39:11

       I mean, I think if you could get everyone on Earth to all do molly once on the same day, that'd be a tremendous thing.

    9. JRJoe Rogan39:17

       It would be.

    10. SASam Altman39:18

        But if you got everybody on Earth to do molly every day-

    11. JRJoe Rogan39:20

        Yeah.

    12. SASam Altman39:20

        ... that'd be a real loss.

    13. JRJoe Rogan39:21

        But what if they did a low dose of molly, where you just get to, "Ah," where everybody greets people with love and affection, and there's no longer a concern about competition? Instead, the concern is about the fascination of innovation and creating-

    14. SASam Altman39:39

        Yeah.

    15. JRJoe Rogan39:39

        ... creation and creativity.

    16. SASam Altman39:42

        Uh, man, we could talk the rest of the time about this one topic.

    17. JRJoe Rogan39:45

        Yeah.

    18. SASam Altman39:45

        It's, it's so interesting. I, I, I think... If I could, like, push a button to, like, remove all human striving and conflict, I wouldn't do it, first of all. Like, I think that's a very important part of our story and experience. And, and also, I think we can see both from our own biological history and also from what we know about AI, that very simple goal systems, fitness functions, reward models, whatever you wanna call it, lead to incredibly impressive results. You know, if the biological imperative is survive and reproduce, look how far that has somehow gotten us as a society, all of this, all this stuff we have-

    19. JRJoe Rogan40:35

        Mm-hmm.

    20. SASam Altman40:35

        ... all this technology, this building, whatever else. Like, that, that got here through an extremely simple goal in a very complex environment, leading to all of the richness and complexity of people fulfilling this biological imperative to some degree, and wanting to impress each other. Uh, so I think like, evolutionary fitness is a, a simple and unbelievably powerful idea. Now, could you carefully edit out every individual manifestation of that? Maybe. But I, I don't want to, like, live in a society of drones where everybody is just sort of, like, on molly all the time either.

    21. JRJoe Rogan41:24

        (laughs)

    22. SASam Altman41:24

        Like (laughs) , that doesn't seem like the right answer. Like, I want us to continue to strive. I want us to continue to push back the frontier and go out and explore. And I actually think something's already gotten a little off track in society about all of that. And we're... I don't know. I think, like, I'm... I don't... I thought I'd be older by the time I felt like the old guy complaining about the youth.

    23. JRJoe Rogan41:52

        (laughs)

    24. SASam Altman41:52

        Um, but I think we've lost something, and I think that we need more, uh, striving, maybe more risk-taking, more, like, explorer spirit.

    25. JRJoe Rogan42:08

        What do you mean by you think we've lost something?

    26. SASam Altman42:10

        Um... I mean, here's like a version of it very much from my own lens. I was a startup investor for a long time. Uh, and it often was the case that the very best startup founders were in their early or mid-20s, or late 20s maybe even. And now they skew much older.And what I wanna know is, in the world today, where are the super great 25-year-old founders? And there are a few. It's not fair to say there are none, but there are less than there were before. And... I think that's bad for society, at all levels. I mean, like com- tech company founders is one example, but like, people who go off and create something new, who push on a disagreeable or controversial idea, we need that to drive forward. Um, we need that sort of spirit. We need people to be able to, you know, put out ideas and be wrong and not be ostracized from society for it, or not have it be like, you know, something that they get canceled for or- or whatever. We need people to be able to take a risk in their career because they believe in some important scientific quest that may not work out or may sound like really controversial or bad or whatever. Um, you know, certainly when we started opening AI and we were saying, "We think this AGI thing is- is real." And could be, you know, could be done, unlikely, but so important if it happens, and all of the older scientists in our field were saying, "Those people are irresponsible. You shouldn't talk about AGI. That's like, you know, they're like selling a scam," or they're like, you know, they're kind of, uh, being reckless and it's gonna lead to an AGI winter. Like, we said we believed, we said at the time we knew it was unlikely, but it was an important quest and we were gonna go after it and kinda like, "Fuck the haters." That's important to a society.

    27. JRJoe Rogan44:12

        What do you think is the origin, like what- why do you think there are less young people that are doing those kind of things now as opposed to a decade or two ago?

    28. SASam Altman44:25

        I am so interested in that topic. Um, I'm tempted to blame the education system, but I sure that- I think that like interacts with society in all of these strange ways. Um, it's funny, there was this like thing all over my Twitter feed recently trying to talk about like what, you know, what like- what caused the drop in testosterone in American men over the last few decades. And no one was like, "This is a symptom, not a cause." And e- everyone was like, "Oh, it's the microplastics, it's the birth control pills, it's the whatever, it's the whatever, it's the whatever." And I think this is like not at all the most important piece of this topic, but it was just interesting to me sociologically that there was- there was only talk about it being about what- what caused it, not about it being an eff- an effect of some sort of change in society.

    29. JRJoe Rogan45:23

        Mm. But isn't what caused it... W- well, there's biological reasons why, like when we talk about the phthalates-

    30. SASam Altman45:33

        Yeah.
13. 1:05:18 – 1:42:35

    The attention economy: social media addiction, emotional violence, and “out of service” as medicine

    1. SASam Altman1:05:18

       You know, it's- it's true that violence in the world has obviously gone down a lot over the decades, but emotional violence is up a lot.

    2. JRJoe Rogan1:05:26

       Mm-hmm.

    3. SASam Altman1:05:26

       And the internet has been horrible for that.

    4. JRJoe Rogan1:05:28

       Yeah.

    5. SASam Altman1:05:28

       Like, I don't walk, I'm not gonna walk over there and punch you, 'cause you're look like a big, strong guy. You're gonna punch me back, and also there's a societal convention not to do that. But if I didn't know you, I might, like, send a mean tweet about you, and I-

    6. JRJoe Rogan1:05:40

       Right.

    7. SASam Altman1:05:40

       ... feel nothing on that.

    8. JRJoe Rogan1:05:41

       Yeah.

    9. SASam Altman1:05:42

       And clearly that has become, like, a mega epidemic in society that we did not evolve the biological constraints on somehow.

    10. JRJoe Rogan1:05:55

        Yeah.

    11. SASam Altman1:05:56

        And I'm actually very worried about how much that's already destabilized us and made us all miserable.

    12. JRJoe Rogan1:06:04

        It's certainly accentuated it. It's exacerbated all of our problems. It's ... I mean, if you read Jonathan Haidt's book, The Coddling-

    13. SASam Altman1:06:12

        Yeah.

    14. JRJoe Rogan1:06:12

        ... of the American Mind, have you read it?

    15. SASam Altman1:06:13

        Great book.

    16. JRJoe Rogan1:06:14

        Yeah, it's a great book, and it's- it's very damaging to women, particularly young girls. Young girls growing up, there's a direct correlation between the invention of social media, the introduction to the iPhone, self-harm, suicide, online bullying. You know, like, people have always talked shit about people when no one's around.

    17. SASam Altman1:06:32

        I think it's-

    18. JRJoe Rogan1:06:32

        But the fact that they're doing it now openly to h- to harm people-

    19. SASam Altman1:06:37

        Horrible, obviously.

    20. JRJoe Rogan1:06:38

        ... online.

    21. SASam Altman1:06:38

        I think it's super damaging to men, too. Maybe they just-

    22. JRJoe Rogan1:06:40

        Mm-hmm.

    23. SASam Altman1:06:41

        ... like, talk about it less. But I don't think any of us are, like-

    24. JRJoe Rogan1:06:43

        Yeah.

    25. SASam Altman1:06:43

        ... set up for this.

    26. JRJoe Rogan1:06:44

        No. No one's set up for it. And, you know, I think famous people know that more than anyone, because-

    27. SASam Altman1:06:49

        Well, we all get used to it.

    28. JRJoe Rogan1:06:50

        Yeah. You just get numb to it. And, or if you're wise, you don't engage.

    29. SASam Altman1:06:54

        (laughs)

    30. JRJoe Rogan1:06:54

        You know, I don't enga- I don't even have any apps on my new phone.

Episode duration: 2:36:43