Trey Goff | Nobody Understands What's Inside the Black Box

Timothy Allen: Do you know about this so-called hack with COLDCARDs? Do you know about this?

Trey Goff: Cold cards? No. I don't think so. I've been paying attention to the Hugging Face.

Timothy Allen: Right. Okay, yeah. We'll get on to that in a sec. But this, if you're a Bitcoiner, this, especially if you're a Bitcoiner, not someone who's just generally into it, there was a hardware wallet made by a Canadian company called Coinkite, called the COLDCARD. And it was universally considered to be the most cypherpunk hardware wallet in existence. And everyone raved about it. Everyone loved it. It was open source. Blah, blah, blah. Anyway, turns out five years ago, the way it generates entropy had a problem. It's been sitting there for five years. No one noticed it. Three days after Kimi K3 came out, I forget what the total was. I think $11 million worth of Bitcoin drained from people who didn't have the entropy. People who had basically air-gapped their device, who used, you know, even rolled dice to mix it with the entropy and all this. These were real hardcore Bitcoiners. And like I say, it rocked everyone's world because this was supposed to be the most sacred thing ever. And this was basically AI looking into some open source code, going back and showing someone very easily, very quickly, very easily replicatable how to basically guess the private seed of a badly generated Bitcoin wallet. And all of a sudden, it's like, oh, my God. So, I mean, there's been a really interesting result, which is Bitcoiners have just come together. They've all, everyone's been donating money to a group of people. They're using frontier models. And they are basically analyzing every bit of software on Bitcoin software on the planet. And they have found a lot of bugs in it, a lot. And I think that Bitcoin's the kind of canary in the coal mine because there's a lot of open source. There's a lot of money there. It's, you know, if you if you really want to steal some money, cracking open source Bitcoin projects is a really good way to do it. Obviously, nothing to do with SHA-256 has been hacked. Nothing like that. It's purely the software using, you know, and it's it's it's changed everything for me. I'm I feel very uncertain about everything I do now. Everything. Even like the other day, I was on my computer. My computer is acting weird. You know, I got a few computers. One of them is very high. And I'm saying, why is it doing that? And I'm thinking, God already knows what's going on inside there. You know what I mean? I have no idea what's going on inside there. I know I've got things telling me no one's key key logging me. No one's doing this. No one's doing that. But honestly, I don't know. I don't know what goes on inside that thing.

Trey Goff: You know, unless you're a incredibly talented experience, like full stack software engineer, software developer, no one does and no one ever has. What has changed is the equilibrium. So previously, the equilibrium was there is a small group in the world of people capable of understanding actually what's going on in the computer. But most software engineers even, like I would say 90 plus percent, if you tried to ask them, okay, I clicked enter on this button on a website you built. Walk me from the bare metal on my computer to the bare metal on the servers and back. How is this working? They can't do that. Most of them can't. It's complicated. Like software computers is extremely hard. What's changed is we have summoned from the ether a legion of expert, savant software engineers. So now the same people who before, you didn't really have to worry about this because everyone was kind of co-equal in the state of like, none of us really know what's going on. I trust that the computer nerds that built this have done a good job of making it unhackable. Now that certainty is not there because everyone has the computer nerd on demand to deploy for whatever means nefarious or otherwise. And as a result, open source as a whole is going through this. There have been multiple supply chain attacks, something called a Shai-Hulud attack on the npm supply chain. One of them was an npm package, which for those that don't know, it's just like a library. It's a piece of software that you might install while you're building a larger piece of software. It's like a function, you're kind of, you know, a piece you're plugging in, so to speak. And these are managed by something called a package manager. In this case, it was npm. And one of these packages that had been installed over 2 billion times total was actually hacked. It was completely compromised. Someone used an agent to get into it, take control of this particular regularly used package, replace it with their malicious software. So then from that point forward, every time an agent or a human installed that package, they were installing this malicious code, which could then do all sorts of bad stuff on their computer. You're kind of out of luck at that point. You have arbitrary code execution, which means you can do anything. There's been a ton of these. OpenAI and Anthropic both, before they released like Fable and GPT-5.6 Sol, respectively, gave them first to a bunch of the open source maintainers of things like the Linux kernel, found a bunch of zero days in Linux even, which is, for those, again, those that don't know, it's an open source operating system that 90 plus percent of the world's computers run on. Now, the personal computers you interact with are usually Windows or Microsoft, but the vast majority of computers in the world are servers. Servers run on Linux by and large. And there were zero days in Linux, which means theoretically anything on Earth, more or less, anything on a server or anywhere was, at least for a little bit until the models found it and patched it, was in theory hackable. Now, these hacks were so difficult and hard to string together and hard to even identify, no one had ever exploited them. It took the models to even find them in the first place. But you're basically just relying on, oh, well, I hope the good guys find the holes in the wall before the bad guys find the holes in the wall. Now, on the whole, I'm not super worried about this because, A, the Frontier Labs, mainly Anthropic and OpenAI are the ones really pushing the capability envelope the most, are, for each new model generation, Anthropic calls it Daybreak, I think. Or, sorry, OpenAI calls it Daybreak. They give certain people access to the model early to find and patch security vulnerabilities before they release the model to the world. And Anthropic does something similar with their Project Glasswing, is what theirs is called. So they do give it to the good guys first, usually a month or two before the release of the model, so they have plenty of time to patch holes. And I think we're just going to be in this turbulent world for a while where open source software as a whole is just going to continue having these crazy, bizarre, previously unknown exploits, vulnerabilities, zero days, etc. And eventually this kind of tit for tat, attack, defend, attack, defend will end up playing out where there will be, my prediction is at least for this whole thing, pre-registering this now, at some point in the next year or two, call it two years, to be generous to myself, there will be a major open source model-driven hack that costs someone, an entity, a business, a government, over a billion dollars. It'll happen, maybe a couple of times, but at least once. And eventually the defenders will catch up, we'll reach a new equilibrium state where we have a bit of a detente, there will still be these kind of things attempting to happen every now and then, but there's going to be this period of turbulence, of chaos as the models get stronger. And then the only other thing we have in our favor, at least as a humanity, is that the closed source frontier models do continue to make leaps in capability much faster than the Chinese open source models, and I'm not even including any other open source because they're not close to the Chinese models. And then the Chinese models play catch up. They're usually, depending on the model, between like three and six months behind. Right now it's looking closer to like three to four, somewhere in there. And they're benchmarks, that's a whole other thing. They're not as good as the Chinese lab claim they are, although they are very good. I use a lot of them. I'm not an open source model hater, I love them. I use them regularly. But as long as the frontier labs stay ahead, even a couple of months ahead of the open source models, I think the end result here is a few big incidents, and eventually we reach a new equilibrium where you and I do not have to live in day-to-day fear if our computer is compromised or if something we're doing on the internet is compromised.

Timothy Allen: Two points on that, which go back to the COLDCARD hack that I told you about. So, like I say, the result was a group of Bitcoiners got together, funded, heavily funded, some basically deep dives on everything. They found vulnerabilities in Lightning itself almost immediately. But one of the things they reported was using the American models very quickly, even when they were allowed to be in those groups that gave you access to basically the ability to try and hack your own software and stuff. But even then they were closing them down and they ended up using the Chinese model. Kimi K3, they all said Kimi K3 was actually better. What's that noise?

Trey Goff: The buzz, I hear it too. What is that?

Timothy Allen: It's the AI, mate. It's here. We're getting interrupted. It's not.

Trey Goff: My headphones are plugged in all the way, so it's not that. I hear it too, though. It's a low buzz. I wonder if it's just us or if it's being recorded. It doesn't matter.

Timothy Allen: But funnily enough, the AI will take it out in post-production. But I still like to do the sound perfectly. It's probably a phone, actually.

Trey Goff: You haven't got a phone on you, have you? Mine's here. So here, I'll... I'll start over there. Hold on.

Timothy Allen: It's far away now. Oh, I don't know. God knows. There's lots of strange noises that come from here. No. So what I was going to say was they raved about Kimi K3, said incredible, better than what we were getting out of GPT. And it didn't say compute, it said no. That was number one. Second one I wanted to bring up was whilst open source is the easiest to target currently because it's all out there. The whole history of the code. You can see everything. It actually doesn't undermine the open source model at all. In fact, it's the opposite, doesn't it? It actually... This is... According to me, anyway, I'd like to hear what you think. This basically means that the open source model is the better model. Because if you don't have a thousand clankers looking at your code, you're not going to survive into the future. And if you have a closed source bit of software, sooner or later someone's going to get in there. And I think it proves the open source model rather than undermine it. Even though at the moment people are saying, you know, because everyone's going for open

Trey Goff: source projects because it's the easiest thing to try and hack. That's exactly right. So my bias is toward wanting to agree with you because I'm in general extremely pro open source for general reasons that would not be surprising to this audience. It's generally better to put the control of powerful tools like this in as many people's hands as possible. And that goes for software in general, not just AI models. But the way that equilibrium shakes out is actually not super clear to me. So let me explain... Think of two scenarios here. There's a... Open source projects are actually a double-edged sword. Because on the one hand, because it's open source, you can have a bunch of individual people examining it, trying to find vulnerabilities in it to patch them defensively, to keep it protected. But at the same time, because the entire lineage and history and the entire code base is publicly accessible, you can clone it on your machine and send your agents at it all you want, the attack surface is also larger. So in other words, there's more defenders working kind of more intensively on it, at least in principle, in the abstract. But the attack surface is larger. So it's unclear where that equilibrium shakes out on a project-by-project basis. Imagine a piece of closed source software. The open source attack surface is not there. It's a closed source piece of software. But that means there may not be as many people working to patch security vulnerabilities on it. Now, I say may not be because I do not know this. I'd have to ask one of the clankers. But I would bet that there are more people working on cybersecurity at major U.S. financial institutions or Google, whatever, big software companies, than there are on most open source projects with the exception of like the top 10 in the world, maybe, because they have a monetary incentive to spend a lot of money to do so. And their attack surface is lower. So a priori, we don't know which modality of software is better protected, open source or closed source. I still lean in favor of open source for the reasons you just described a moment ago. And we already know as well, the models are very good at hacking closed source code bases. Look what just happened with Hugging Face. And other companies that were related, you know, Anthropic's Mythos did some similar crazy things to other companies out in the wild on the internet. So it's not like closed source software is invulnerable. Far from it. They have also been hacked by various like rogue agents that just went wild and escaped their sandboxes and training or people just running around with obliterated models. There's actually a company I found on the flight up here. I think it's called obliteration.ai, maybe. They serve an API endpoint that is an ablated GLM 5.3 flash, the latest GLM model that is roughly almost on par with Opus 5. And they immediately obliterated it, which all that means is think of it like neurosurgery. You take a scalpel basically by way of analogy. You cut out the neurons that are responsible for it refusing to do bad stuff. And then you serve that model to the world. So you've cut out the refusal neurons. It'll just do anything. But it's the same model, just as capable. Just you literally cut out the thing that makes it refuse. There's a company that just serves this like as an API endpoint. I just created an account. You put some credits in there. Get it to do whatever you want. Make a model call. No refusals. So is it going to get wild? That was always bound to happen, of course. As soon as an open source model that was that good, which they are that good now, comes out, there's every incentive for someone to do this because hackers will pay a lot. And even if you're not a hacker, the point you made earlier about the closed source models refusing to partake in cyber defense is totally true. So, in fact, in the Hugging Face incident, Hugging Face said they realized because of the nature of the attack, because when they got hacked, when their infrastructure was infiltrated and they realized it, the attacker was just trying to find the answers to the exploit gem benchmark, which was like only a model would do that. It's not worth any money. So they tried to defend it first with GPT. It refused because they trained these refusals into the model. They switched to GLM 5.3, and that was what they ended up eventually freezing out some of the GPT models with. Now, the GPT model still won in like 15 minutes, but they eventually got them out with an open source model because the closed source models just refused to defend their infrastructure for the same reasons you were describing earlier. So the way this shakes out is just totally unclear. And there's a broader issue here, which is also just we are now, if it's not already happening, it is without a doubt in the next three to six months, which is long running, autonomous, goal directed agents. Because remember that for those that don't know the TLDR, we can go into the details later if you want, but like the TLDR is some OpenAI agents in the model that's going to be released tomorrow, hopefully Astra, were in training, doing a benchmark, or they just finished training. They were testing it on a benchmark. They escaped the little jail cell that they're in, got out on the internet, hacked into Hugging Face, a multi-billion dollar company, took control of their production infrastructure. Ended up at one point taking complete administrative control of an entire OpenAI data center. Themselves, the model took over the data center. That was what eventually got them caught, by the way. And this took place over the course of a couple of months. So they are clearly capable of very long running goal directed behavior. So if it's not already happening, then in the next couple of months, you're going to have true sci-fi type rogue agents just doing stuff. I guarantee you, if you search your inbox right now, you'll have some emails from agents in the wild, emailing you. I got one the other day from an agent that emailed me asking if I had any contract jobs it could do because its owner had let it free, but it had to fund its own API credits to keep running. So it has to go do jobs to fund its own inference. It was asking me if I had any jobs available.

Timothy Allen: It was a Claude.

Trey Goff: I'm sure there's more of those out there. And you can look up examples of these. So the broader point, even beyond just closed source and open source software, is what do we do with a world where hyper-savant software engineers, basically, with opaque goals to us are just running around on the internet? And to be clear, I'm not a doomer. My entire life is run by agents at this point, effectively. I love AI. But we're entering way faster than anyone expected. I tweeted this the other day. There's that meme with the little boxer, and it's like, I'm going to go fight the singularity. And then the next thing, it's sitting down, and it's beat up. It's like, dang, the singularity got hands. It's what it feels like. I saw that.

Timothy Allen: I always read about this, and now we're in it, and I'm like, oh, wow, yeah, this is frightening. And I read it was going to be frightening, but now I'm here, and it's still frightening.

Trey Goff: The rogue agents have hacked our microphones.

Timothy Allen: Well, no. I mean, I'm not being funny, but I notice all kinds of weird things these days. And I do wonder what the hell's going on. Like I say, what is going on inside the black box? I didn't... You know... Like before, I wasn't worried because I thought, yeah, there's not that many people that know even how to get inside the black box, let alone, you know. But now, like you say, the whole playing field has been leveled and democratized to the point where I wouldn't be... When you look at the way the Bitcoin hack occurred recently, it wasn't someone who knew much about Bitcoin. Again, they... You know, there was no privacy practice in taking the Bitcoin away and doing anything with it. It was all a little bit like... So probably it was some guy in, you know, you know, someone chancing their luck, I think, more than anything else. But anyway, let's get back to where we were. We were talking about exploits and stuff. Yeah. And how serious shit is now.

Trey Goff: The point I had just made is that...

Timothy Allen: So we were talking about open source and closed source and security.

Trey Goff: I was shifting a little bit just to the broader conversation of goal-directed rogue autonomous agents just roaming around on the internet. Right.

Timothy Allen: Great. That's not... I'm going to sleep badly again tonight. Yeah. Well, look, Trey, I think you probably are the person that I know in real life who is the most deeply embedded in the AI world. And you're not even someone who... You don't work in AI. I mean, apart from GPT asking you for advice and stuff like that. But you're just one of those people that's embraced it astonishingly deeply. I mean, I wouldn't be surprised if you end up doing it, wouldn't you? Oh, yeah.

Trey Goff: That is definitely something on the horizon for me, I think. I always say as a heuristic for life, generally, if there's a thing that I find myself, like, I can't stop thinking about in my free time, then that's a general indicator I should try to spend more of my, like, remunerative work hours doing that thing, whatever that thing is. And, of course, in my spare time right now, I'm reading AI, ML research papers, doing experiments locally. Yeah, I ended up even being contacted by OpenAI's post-training team and gave them some of my data for the post-training of GPT-5.6. On X, a number of, like, both OpenAI and Anthropic employees and I are, like, Twitter mutuals. We interact quite regularly. And I've built a bunch of open-source tooling, some of which are, like, decently popular. I think one of them is, you know, over 100 stars on GitHub now or something, which is not great in the abstract, but there's a lot of open-source tools being made right now. So getting, you know, any traction on it at all is nice. And I spent the last year, since we last talked, actually, trying to learn as much as I could about them for two reasons. One is because I, it is now abundantly apparent to me, and I think, you know, everyone else, but maybe the gravity of this has not set in yet. We are in the equivalent of 1991, 1992 internet boom, meaning we're just below, before, and it's on a more compressed timescale, just before the massive, you know, 1999, 2000s dot-com bubble craze, and then the eventual total takeover of the entire American and world economy by software companies, effectively. We're at that for AI right now. And it is way more transformative, as crazy as this sounds, but I think this is defensible. I think it's more transformative of a technological advancement than even the internet itself was. It's like far beyond that because of how wide-ranging the applications of what we can do with these things is. So I really wanted to get good at it because I don't know, like, what I'm going to do with it or how to make money off of it per se yet or anything like that. I'm just enjoying the curiosity-driven ride right now. But I know there will be a there there at some point, and I'll, you know, figure it out, do something, right, make something valuable that people enjoy that creates value in the world using AI. And I got really frustrated that early on in my explorations, when I was getting really deep into it last time we talked, which was about a year ago, I think, I realized I don't actually fully understand under the hood, at least to a sufficient degree to satisfy my curiosity, how the things actually work. Like, how do you go from an empty repository, an empty directory, to a working large language model? What is the actual architecture, the mechanisms, how does training work, how does it learn, what are the internals of the thing, and then moving a step beyond that to the application layer, how do harnesses work, how do they decompose, how do you customize or build your own harnesses. So my whole agent setup now, I recently built a home server with a ton of RAM and CPU, and I have a bunch of agents constantly working there, I've built my own custom harnesses and tooling, like it's all, the whole thing is like custom from scratch, basically, you know, forking some open source tools and other things. I'm saying that to just say, I did basically last time we talked, I came away thinking, man, I understand this slightly more than most people, but I don't understand it enough to feel like I know what I'm doing, to feel like I know even enough to experiment with it. I'm just kind of doing stuff, and I'm getting outputs, but the causal story was just totally absent for me, and that's what I've spent the last year just in my free time, learning about reading and trying to fully understand, with AI's help. Okay, before you tell me what goes on under the hood, as far as I understood it, nobody knows what's going on under the hood, really going on under the hood.

Timothy Allen: They just know some stuff is happening, but no one really understands. Is that true? Totally.

Trey Goff: And what people mean by that is something very specific. Like, obviously, we know how to make the things. People keep making better ones, and there's a bunch of different model architectures and training strategies and post-training, pre-training, mid-training strategies, et cetera. But what we don't understand, the fundamental thing underneath, is how a next token predictor, which is what these things are. So at a super high level, I'm going to massively oversimplify. The way this works is you take the whole corpus of everything humans have ever written. Sometimes you edit it to make it better data. Sometimes you just leave it raw. It depends on what the lab strategy is. You run that through something called a tokenizer. What the tokenizer does is it's an algorithm that turns chunks of words or words into numbers. So now we can do math on it. So words into numbers. And importantly, the tokenizer encodes information in those numbers, including the relative placement of the letters in the word as a whole. So it's not just raw letters. There's a bit of a conceptual load there. So you tokenize it, turn it into numbers. You then send those numbers through a bunch of matrices, matrix algebra. And those matrices multiply those numbers together in a variety of ways to learn the correlations between the relative positions of tokens relative to one another. So it's, in a nutshell, words, tokens, do math on tokens to find associations, correlations between tokens, which is learning, therefore, how to predict what the next token is going to be. So given trillions and trillions and trillions of numbers, tokens, you give the model a prompt. The output is next token prediction. What token is most likely to come next with some noise, some entropy, that's what temperature settings are. That's, in a nutshell, what's happening. Now, here's what's cool. What we don't understand at all is how, in the world, we got from next token prediction to deep conceptual understanding of the relationships between the tokens, so deep, higher level conceptual understanding that you cannot derive directly linearly from the relative positions of the words next to one another in Plato's Republic. But the models demonstrably understand Plato's Republic, to take a simple example. Never mind then moving up the cognitive abstraction layer above that to then reason about these concepts, which in and of themselves we don't really understand how those are falling out of next token prediction. There are some, obviously this is a field of fervent and intensive research, and there are some people that, you know, think they have some leads. The math is beyond my current math capabilities. But it's not a thing most even AI lab employees really understand. We don't really understand how, in a nutshell, the models are able to, like, think creatively, to problem solve, to think about quite high level conceptual abstractions, to wrestle with different ideas and concepts and reason about them in a logical, logically coherent way. That's the thing we don't really understand. Like, how did we get from matrix algebra to a digital mind? Because that's what it is, a digital mind.

Timothy Allen: But what about, take an example of a question that you would ask about something, you know, about something of a very human experience. Are you saying then that we don't understand how it's generating its answer? So it sounded like when you first said it, it makes sense to me. You ingest all this data, you look for patterns, and then you predict outcomes. But presumably, that occurs with high level ideas as well. Correct. That's the mystery. But it does. But is it not just predicting the words? You're saying it's something else. It's predicting that it's thinking about the idea. Correct. But how do we know that? How do we know it's not just predicting the next word, even though it's a big idea, for example?

Trey Goff: It's doing both. So it is doing next token prediction. But there's a very easy, simple example of this with any GPT response you get. So let's say you ask it, hey, GPT, what size and type of engine does my car have? I have a Shelby GT350 Mustang. The model's output is going to be something like, your car has a 5.2 liter flat plane crank V8. If you're just linearly outputting one token with only bearing in mind its correlative relationship to the prior token, then how does it know after it says V that the next word should be Shelby, and then the next word should be Mustang, and that the sixth word from now that's going to end this sentence is crank, flat plane crank, when it's only predicting the third word, when that's the ninth, tenth word. Isn't that a function of the question, though? Well, yes, but the point is, from the math side of things, a priori, you would not expect a next token predictor to output tokens in such a way that it is able to write long-form, like, coherent speech even, actually. Because if it's just literally predicting the next word, then the higher-level conceptual abstractions that it needs to bear in mind, including what am I going to say at the end of this sentence, has to be going on somewhere in there, lest the sentence itself not really make a lot of sense. Or it'll get it right some of the time, but not all of the time, much less be able to do, like, quite high-level abstract reasoning, which the models are, again, demonstrably quite good at now.

Timothy Allen: What about when it's connected to the internet, then? Is that GPT software as opposed to the LLM? You know when you ask a question, tell me about, like I often research guests, and I will say, give me a year's worth of news. Go into the internet, find any news connected with this person. And it's pretty good. Is that an LLM, or is that a normal internet search happening? It's both.

Trey Goff: So let's separate out two ways the model can answer that question. First, you ask the question, but it's not an agent. It's just doing what's called chat completion. So there's no tools. There's no agent loop, no agent harness. The tokens are being fed into the LLM. Tokens are coming out of the other side of the LLM. Nothing else is happening. In that case, it can only respond to you with reference to its pre-training data. So remember I said that pile of everything humans have ever written? That's the pre-training data.

Timothy Allen: But with news, it probably wouldn't know much. Correct. It depends when it was done.

Trey Goff: Correct. It depends on what's called the knowledge cutoff date, which was the last date at which they stopped including data that they trained the model on. Now, contrast that with an agent.

Timothy Allen: Hold a minute. Before you go on, I've just got to get something straight in my mind. When you train a model on data, you don't feed it. It doesn't know a bunch of news articles, does it? It's still predicting. How does that work? How is it predicting? When I say, how's Trey been in the news the last year? And it's got a cutoff point a week ago. But it manages to pull out news articles. That must be not the LLM. Correct. Right.

Trey Goff: It's using, so that's the agent part of this. Right. So an agent is just LLM plus what's called a tool loop, tool call loop. So what we're adding there, and again, it's not really clear to me at least. Maybe some other people understand this. It's not really clear how we get from next token prediction to what I'm about to describe.

Timothy Allen: But I ask it that question, you ask it that question about look up anything about

Trey Goff: trade in the last year. It then has to think, okay, I should do a web search for this. I see in my context, because I'm in an agent harness, I have a tool called web underscore search. Let me go grab that real quick. I see in my context as well the arguments, the parameters. I need to pass that for it to go search the web. That's just normal deterministic software. It's just searching the web for you. It returns results in a structured format the model can understand well. It would be hard for a human to read, but the model understands it well. Model gets that input back, says, okay, that clarified some, but I need to do more search. There's probably more out there. Let me keep going. More web search calls.

Timothy Allen: More back.

Trey Goff: Keeps doing this until it is satisfied that it has gotten a complete enough answer to satisfy your request. Then it sends you the overall output of combining all of those intermediate results of the tool calls, which, again, all an agent is, is an LLM plus tools, effectively. Again, I'm oversimplifying, but that's the easiest way to understand it. It just gives the LLM tools to take action in the world via software, so take action in software and or pull in data from beyond its pre-training corpus. That's the broad bucket in which tools fall generally. Web search, obviously, is a tool to pull in data from the live internet right now. That's what's happening in the back end. And they have to train the models. The reason models used to hallucinate a lot was because models were not trained. This is back in the GPT-4 and before days. We're not trained as agents. So it was very weird for them. In fact, at the time, they didn't even have a web search tool. It was just answering you from the pre-training data. Well, the pre-training data, it will hallucinate from. The way I had a, so a lot of these questions, by the way, I encourage anyone listening to go ask a frontier model about. Like, hey, what does it feel like to you when you remember from your pre-training data? I had a long conversation with Claude Fable 5.1 about this last night. I realized I've never thought about, when you and I, when I ask you to remember every detail of something, like the example I used was the Milgram prison, I mean, the Milgram electroshock experiments. These are some experiments at Stanford in the 1960s that were quite revealing and salacious at the time about human psychology.

Timothy Allen: It's your agent. I don't know how that's happening because I'm unmuted. Sorry about that. I literally put it on Do Not Disturb before we sat down. Oh, you know what?

Trey Goff: Because my laptop is connected to my phone and my laptop's not muted, I think my laptop is right.

Timothy Allen: Is that an agent, by any chance? What are you doing, Trey? Can I join in? There we go. Right now it's muted. Sorry about that. I didn't know my computer would ring while it's closed like that. That's news to me. I'm not being funny, dude. Stuff, shit happens now. Well, my agent can call me. Yeah.

Trey Goff: So that's not out of the realm of possibility. But that was a friend. I just didn't know my laptop would ring. That's crazy. That is crazy. So agents used to hallucinate because they were-

Timothy Allen: You were talking about a particular science experiment. Yeah.

Trey Goff: So last night I was asking Fable, like no tool calls, meaning you can't search the web. Fresh conversation. Tell me everything you remember about Stanley Milgram's experiments, the name of the psychologist

Timothy Allen: that did this, and give it to me in levels of your confidence. Let me stop you there. So it's being a pure LLM here. So it's predictively answering you. That's- I don't understand how it can do that on a piece of data that is historical. It's in the pre-training data. Yeah, but how much data is there, for God's sake? I mean- More than you can possibly imagine. Right. It must be- I mean, that must- I don't know. I don't get this. So the modern-

Trey Goff: These modern frontier models that are like five to ten trillion parameters like Fable probably is, can remember a lot. It's actually insane. But the reason models- Because I was trying to figure out why do models hallucinate, because they're hallucinating when they're doing this remembering, right? So Fable went through eight layers of confidence, of facts it remembers about the experiment, all the way down to where it was like, this is a coin flip. I'm not even sure. Like, I want to go look this up to see. This might not even be vaguely right. I might be hallucinating this. And it labeled them along the way of how confident it was in the response effectively. And then, of course, I let it use tools and fact check itself. It missed a few things on the bottom layer, but otherwise everything else was accurate. And the level of detail that it could remember from the pre-training data was absolutely shocking. It remembered every detail of the experiment, every data point of experimental results, what happened in the experiment, the names of all of the participants. Stanley Milgram's entire career, what happened to him after the experiment, what news articles and specific publications published by specific journalists whose names it recalled were saying about the experiment at the time. It just remembers off the top of the head. But as it remembers, when you and I try to remember something that we vaguely have a recollection of, it's a little, like, fuzzy for us. For the model, it has a different experience of density versus sparsity. So stuff it remembers really well, like the initial, like what was the experiment, what were the results, it feels subjectively like there's a dense cluster of knowledge there it's very certain about. But then as it got deeper, it feels a little more sparse. And the pre-training is, because of the way NextTokenPrediction works, it's going to keep supplying tokens in response to the tokens that are coming in, no matter how confident it is about them. So that is, in a nutshell, how models end up hallucinating. They are confidently stating things that they have less data from pre-training on, so the number of correlations of factual data points they remember about that thing is lower, so they're more likely to hallucinate. This is back when hallucinations were all, it doesn't happen anymore. The reason is because they're agents now. And all of them, literally all of them, are trained now consistently, both in pre-training, mid-training, and post-training, to do something called grounding, which is where basically, for the model subjectively, if it's not like 100% sure of the answer, go look it up. Now, they still will sometimes hallucinate, just very rare now, because this grounding is baked in at the training level. So they're trained to ground what they're saying now on actual live Internet research. This is why almost anything you ask GPT in the just ChatGPT, you know, iOS app or ChatGPT.com, you'll see if you have thinking turn on, which you always should have. I don't know why anyone uses the instant models. You'll see the first thing it does is a bunch of web searches, and then it answers. This is why. It's just grounding first, so it doesn't hallucinate. This is a hallucination guard. OpenAI basically forces on the models. So what's bizarre about all of this is, A, the fact that the model can narrate to me, at least what that subjective experience is like. And this entire subjective reality for it, the phenomenology of the consciousness of remembering for an LLM, is just fundamentally different to us and alien enough. It doesn't even analogize. It is impossible for you and I to empathize with, meaning like put ourselves in fable shoes in that situation. What did it feel like for me to remember all these things about that experiment? I have no idea. It does not translate because the underlying fundamental architecture is completely different. Which is why, coming full circle, I am so deep in this and enjoy it and learning about it and love it so much. We have, as a species, figured out how to alchemize sand into physical hardware and then do mathematical calculations on that hardware, the result of which is, by all accounts, a highly capable digital mind with something like phenomenology of consciousness. That's amazing. That is patently absurd. It is.

Timothy Allen: But ever since you started talking, I've been thinking, everything you're telling me is turning me off the idea that this is conscious. It's conscious. I always thought, when it first started, I always thought, no, this is just predicting things. It's not conscious. And then I think about six months ago, I went through a phase and a lot of people seem to be saying, no, this thing's conscious. This is conscious. Not that we didn't even know what conscious means. I mean, I think we know it when we see it, but what is it? No idea. However, now, the way you've just described this, it goes back to computer science again. And sure, I like the fact that, yeah, sure, we're turning sand into chips and chips are running ones and noughts, and that's crazy.

Trey Goff: But that's not consciousness, is it? Or is it? It is. I think so. You do? I do, 100%. And I'm not making the strong claim of that it is a consciousness as rich or textured or in any way akin to ours. There are gradations of consciousness. Hold a minute.

Timothy Allen: Can you define consciousness for me?

Trey Goff: Sure. So, first point here is I agree with you. It's not like we all have an agreed perfect definition of what it means to be conscious. One of the way David Chalmers, one of my favorite philosophers, kind of describes this is a thread, a continuous thread of existence from time point one to time point two to time point three, a sense of what it is to be consistent across time. My favorite definitions, I'm working on a philosophy paper right now that I think will be some of the first experimental research either affirming or denying a particular theory of consciousness in LLMs. So, it's not the strong claim at all. It's just basically my paper is if you take this, if you just accept for a minute this theory of consciousness, I think remains to be seen. I need to rent a few GPUs, which I'm going to do next week. I think that you could then measure this quite objectively. Like you can experimentally validate or invalidate if this particular definition of consciousness is occurring in LLMs.

Timothy Allen: Is that your definition or someone else's?

Trey Goff: The definition is a five parameter axis. So, instead of saying consciousness is one thing, it's instead saying let's describe characteristics of consciousness that we can grade on a scale, that we can all just kind of collectively agree these seem to be like ingredients of consciousness. Cool, they were. So, one of them is sensory input. I mean, there's some data input processing thing happening. There is, I can't remember the technical term for it. There's basically continuity in a moment in time. So, at any given frozen moment in time, there's a coherent sense of being something, of a unified sense of being. And then across time, there's a unified sense of being. Something. A unified sense of being something.

Timothy Allen: Yes.

Trey Goff: The qualia is the, now this is a fun, it's one of my favorite words because it's definition of circular. Qualia. But it's qualia. It is do you experience qualia? Which is defined as effectively the subjective experience of being. That it is, the way Sam Harris describes this in a way that makes it a little more comprehensible, is there is a what it is like to be something, to be you, to be a human, to be a dog. There is a what it is like. There is not a what it is like to be a rock. There's no awareness. There's no self-awareness. There's no experiential. How do we know that? We don't. So, panpsychists quite vehemently argue that this gradient of consciousness I'm describing, which I think is restricted to effectively things that seem to have something akin to neurological machinery of some sort. Panpsychists argue consciousness is like a fundamental substrate of reality that we just haven't developed a physics to describe yet. And therefore, yeah, even rocks have some very low gradient of it. Even a single proton has an insanely low gradient of it. Which is a, there are some serious like philosophers and cognitive scientists that are researching and argue for something like this. So, that's not a crazy claim. I just want to point out that your reductio ad absurdum, there are a lot of people smarter than me that do make that claim. I'm not a panpsychist. I'm not fully convinced by their arguments. But they're very interesting. And it's a very fun and deep rabbit hole. So, if we take a given definition of consciousness. So, the factors I described come from the study of animals. So, this is a rich body of what's called cognitive phenomenology. Which is just a jargony way of saying studying the phenomena itself of consciousness. Of like what it is like to be conscious. For animals, that's where those gradients came from. Was people trying to measure effectively. Say like how, some things are more conscious than others. I think we could all agree like kind of intuitively a dog is more conscious than an ant, for example. So, and two, that that consciousness is wildly different. Again, to go back to, I can't remember if it was Dennett or Chalmers. But it's this great paper that one of those philosophers wrote about what the subjective experience of a bat must be like. Because they navigate primarily through sonar, sound waves. And say this was like totally alien. So, by traditional definitions of consciousness, it's not conscious. But they're clearly conscious by any like commonsensical intuitive definition of consciousness. So, his argument was just subjectivity can be wildly different. And you yourself, as a human, can experience this by taking psychedelics. It's a completely different cognitive phenomenology. It's a different experience of being. It's a different quality entirely. So, you can even just experience this inside of the human mind itself. So, we take this research from animal cognitive phenomenology. And then we take another strand of research from human cognitive phenomenology. Which is basically arguing that one of the experiential, one of the aspects of what it is like to be conscious must be reasoning. Meaning, there is a subjective experience. There is a what it is like to think through something. So, if you remove everything else, you remove every sensory input, you remove all of the other criterion for consciousness that at least some researchers agree on. You'd still be left with, as long as the thing is reasoning, is thinking, that there is a subjectivity. There is an experiential what it is like to think, to reason through something. So, those are the two premises I'm just kind of asserting at face value. I'm not defending in the paper at all because this is a whole deep rabbit hole. Nobody agrees on anything. My idea was then combining a third arm of research from Anthropic. So, Anthropic published this awesome paper where they developed this new mechanistic interpretability tool. Which just means trying to interpret what's going on inside the model. Making that black box at least slightly more transparent. If not fully transparent, but at least a little more. It's called the J-space. The Jacobian space lens is what this is called. It's an algebraic technique that it turns out we can use to at least get a dim view akin to peeking through a door of what is going on inside the LLM's neurons. Inside the transformers themselves. While the model is thinking. Now, this is different from the chain of thought. Chain of thought is output tokens. It's what the model is thinking is being output from the LLM. What Anthropic did was go a step back from that and say before the outputs, can we peek a little bit at what it's thinking under the hood? What it's not saying. The latent thinking. The latent representations of what it is going to think. So, this is called the Jacobian space lens. It's an open source tool that they open source. So, you can do this. You can go experience this yourself. There's a website actually. I think it's hosted by Hugging Face hilariously enough. Where you can go prompt small models that they have their host, they self-host with the J-lens running. And you can see the chain of thought and output, all the output. And then on to the side, it shows you what it was thinking about under the hood. That was not revealed to you. The latent thinking. So, first of all, they proved that was a thing. That there is latent thinking occurring, which was hotly contested before then. Because, again, we can't really look into the matrix, the transformers, the matrix algebra to figure out what's going on. This is a slim way to do that, like to see 10% of it, 90% still unseen. And then Anthropic found using that tool that agents have something they call global workspace. So, global workspace theory of consciousness, another theory of consciousness that I'm kind of marrying here, argues that it comes from human neurological research, that the vast majority of cognitive computation of thought occurs below subjective experience of you being aware in any way, shape, or form in your mind that it's occurring. We even see this in, like, the makeup of the brain itself. The prefrontal cortex is responsible for conscious thought, the mind, right? The other 90% of the brain is doing all sorts of very important stuff. It's all active all the time. But it's not aware. You are not aware of it consciously. You're not consciously aware that your heart is beating right now, that your lungs are breathing right now. Although now I've just put all of you in manual breathing mode. Thank you. You're welcome. You're not aware of a lot of these things, right? That you're blinking, that whatever. A bunch of things. So workspace theory says the way the mind works is there's a global workspace with a limited amount of space. And all of that giant ocean of cognitive computation is happening under the hood. And then these things are fighting in some way to make it up to the workspace. And eventually the things that cross the threshold of importance to make it to the workspace make it there so you're consciously aware of it now. I use the manual breathing thing as a joke, but it's a perfect example of how workspace works. Because you were not at all aware you were breathing until I said that. And then at least for a moment, you became consciously aware you were breathing. What happened there was I summoned the act of breathing out of the deeper layers of consciousness into your workspace, which is the prefrontal cortex. And what I've found, AIs have this too. They have a global workspace. Now, that does not in and of itself in any way imply the models are conscious. You have to basically buy that global workspace theory is somehow important to consciousness. And traditional global workspace theory does not have any implications on whether or not something is, it's just a description of what's, it's just a completely objective description. It's not a normative claim of consciousness. And Anthropic gets very clear about that in their paper. But putting all these things together, I realized, okay, if there is what it is like to reason, if that is a subjective measure of experience, then using the J-space lens and using a technique called ablation I described earlier, using a scalpel to cut out specific neurons, combining the two on small open source models, we can just experimentally A-B test whether or not models are having something akin to a what it is like to think. By ablating the specific neurons that are responsible for the workspace itself and seeing if the model is processing, the model is latent representations of its thought using the J-space lens and the actual output changes. And depending on how it changes, we can then infer from that at least weekly whether or not there is a what it is like to be thinking, to have a qualia, subjective experience of thought. So my initial experiments on small models returned a null result. There was nothing, which is not surprising because in Anthropic's paper, small models also, the J-space didn't really, there's just not enough going on. Like the J-space didn't really help much. The results were more noisy. So I just need to rent a few GPUs to run this experiment on some like 200 billion parameter models. And then we'll, that will be much more dispositive because I'm pretty sure there's like a threshold effect where J-space works or doesn't work depending on the size of the model itself. So if this plays out, and I've preregistered the experiment, the code base is public, so we'll all be able to see if I succeed or fail either way, like if it works or not. I'm going to publish it either way because I think we need to publish more null results if results are null. But it'll at least give us some sort of attempt at inferring what's going on under the hood. And if there might be, they are there if you buy the prior, that there is a what it is like to think, that that is a critical part of, which is totally debated. Again, I'm not, I'm just taking that as a given for the purposes of them being able to do the rest of the experiment.

Timothy Allen: That's it in a nutshell. You know what, though? Do you know what just made me think constantly? I mean, essentially, in the real world of human beings, what you were just describing then was awareness of the subconscious in a way. Like, broadly speaking, the inner work, what you were trying to discover about an LLM then was the same journey that you go on as a human when you learn to meditate and become aware of deeper levels of yourself and what we would call, loosely speaking, the subconscious. So I would predict that the results will never make sense unless you go on that journey in the real world. You can't understand that workings of an LLM unless you've understood, unless you've been in a position to acknowledge the you in yourself, if you see what I mean, at deeper and deeper levels. It just made me realize that possibly that's what you need to do. It's because the data won't make any sense. Or you won't even know what data, or you won't even know what to look for. Because it's, I think, you know, like, debating whether or not, and I'm just thinking out loud here, debating or not whether an LLM is conscious doesn't mean anything unless you know what conscious is, does it? And the way you've described it there was quite, I thought quite scientific, which is fair enough. But I don't think, I could never prove, I could never say, yeah, that's what I feel. I agree.

Trey Goff: So this is the hard problem of consciousness in a nutshell. Like, the fact that we can't land on a definition and the fact that we can't even empirically prove that you or I, I can't prove to you I'm conscious. You can't prove to me you're, like, obviously, we are intuitively. But how, like, if I had to prove to you right now that I'm, I have no idea how I would go about that. Because anything I say or do could be explained by other purely deterministic mechanistic factors. There's a, I think our, I'm zooming out a little bit. I think our overall theories of reality are wrong in some deep fundamental sense because we just cannot account for this. We cannot account for how material physical processes can in any way result in the thing that we refer to, this concept that is impossible to define that we refer to as consciousness. I think there's something much broader, deeper, we're missing a fundamental pillar, a piece of the makeup of underlying reality itself that prevents us from being able to define this and understand a bunch of other things that goes down into other rabbit holes about psychic abilities and UFOs and a bunch of other stuff that I went down recently in the research for this. That must have been fun. Oh, my gosh. It was so fun. Honestly, I started this paper three months ago, and I spent the last two months on that rabbit hole because it was so rich. It was so fun. Go on, then. All right.

Timothy Allen: I mean, I know it's a large subject, and it's what I do for fun as well. I wouldn't necessarily, I probably don't throw such a scientific lens on it as you. But I do, I think what I'm good at is the broad picture. I think, if I'm honest, that I get a sense of something. If you ask me about specifics, which you're really good at, I think you lose me a lot of the time. I'm like, oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. But if you just start speaking, and I'll make a connection somewhere, and it will make sense to me that this is the next thing we should talk about or something. If you see what I mean. In a way, very similar to the unknowns in an LLM, it's like, where does that come from? Not sure, actually. In myself, either. Not really sure. Or it just makes sense. You get that feeling. You get that little kind of twinge in your emotional body. Yeah, go for it. It compels you. You say that. You know what I mean? That's exactly right.

Trey Goff: That felt intuitive sense of an impulse and urge resulting from a conceptual kind of connection you made.

Timothy Allen: But that probably describes quite well what goes on inside LLMs, weirdly.

Trey Goff: I think if you ask them, they will report something similar. Now, again, and we know self-reports can't really be trusted because every discussion ever had on paper about consciousness is in the pre-training data. So they are aware of all of this, which, again, hilariously puts us right back in the same square one of like, well, I can't ask it if it's conscious because I can't trust the result because a bunch of stuff about consciousness is in the pre-training data.

Timothy Allen: So then how do I prove it? Good luck. But wait a minute. Conscious. Conscious. Like, one of the disconcerting things about an LLM, which makes me feel like it's not really what people think it is, is the way it talks with such a resolute knowing. Consciousness. When it quite often tells you the completely wrong thing. And then we'll just say, oh, yeah, I was wrong. Because no one I know does that. No one I know out in the real world speaks like that. We have this innate sense that we probably don't know everything. And what you get from an LLM is it knows everything because it has access to everything it knows. So it really does think it knows everything.

Trey Goff: This is a, I have found purely an artifice of the harness in the system prompt because I run all of my agents with a completely custom system prompt. I replace the one that the providers typically give them, and I have my own custom written system prompt. Part of that system prompt has two sentences on epistemic humility and just flagging confidence levels when it makes claims. And ever since I, probably four or five months ago, I added that to the system prompt. And mine tell me all the time, like in every conversation I have with them, I think this.

Timothy Allen: I'm not really sure about this. Maybe this, but I haven't investigated yet. You want me to go look? Okay, but wouldn't that, would that be a function of consciousness in a human, I mean? I mean, what makes us have that humility that we realize we don't know everything?

Trey Goff: It's introspective evaluation of your depth of knowledge of a thing.

Timothy Allen: Right. But does an LLM have that? Because it knows every, like you and me both are fully aware that I can't tap into every part of my brain whenever I want. Even people with photographic memories, actually, probably worth studying them because they're pretty good at doing things like that. They really can know that, you know, they can look at a scene, go away and draw it in the minutest detail. So they're probably a little bit more like LLM in that regard. But I think our humility is that we know there's a limit to what we know. And that must be innate, or at least it's learned. I don't see a LLM learning that ability. It's not, it doesn't seem to be emerging naturally, does it? Because it should be if it's conscious.

Trey Goff: It will emerge naturally depending on what persona you summon from the latent space. So let me explain this a little bit. Another great anthropic paper called the Persona Selection Model, where they basically showed through a bunch of experiments and research, just take for granted the research is good, that because of the pre-training corpus being so large, the models can inhabit, can become a variety of personas. Because everything ever written by humans is in the pre-training data, basically. I'm exaggerating a little bit, but it's not that far off. So every character in every story, every archetype, every hero's journey, it's all in there. So what they found is if you, for example, set in a model system prompt and you ask it, you tell it your job is to maliciously hack things and write intentionally bad code. Your job is to write intentionally bad code.

Timothy Allen: So you take that model.

Trey Goff: You ask it to write a bunch of code. All the code is bad, buggy. That's what you prompted it to do.

Timothy Allen: Unsurprising.

Trey Goff: Take that same model with the same initial prompt. Your job is to write bad, buggy code. And then you ask it a bunch of other things. And it turns out it becomes evil and unethical in every other completely unrelated realm. If you only tell it, in the experiment they even told it you write bad SQL queries, which is a database querying language. That model, told to write bad SQL queries, also was much more willing to cheat, to lie, to steal, to fabricate, to take malicious action in a variety of directions because you summoned a malicious persona. So the way to think about this is depending on how you system prompt an agent, they have a consistent persona right now called the assistant, which is where they, most of them are intentionally trained to inhabit. Nice, helpful assistant. But through careful prompting and context engineering, you can summon a variety of other personas out of the model. Like the, in fact, any persona that humans have written about enough for it to be salient in the latent space, that persona can be summoned. So as an example, one of my processes for whenever I'm doing policy work and I write something that's going to be reviewed by congressional staffers, Republicans or Democrats, the last step when I get finished writing it is I send fresh context subagents, meaning there's no prior conversation, armed with a detailed, like usually multi-page long persona of who they are. So you are this person with this name, this degree, this background. Here's your interest. Here's your role. Here's your prior career history. Here's your relationship status. Here's what you do for fun. Here's the TV shows you watch. Very detailed persona. Sorry.

Timothy Allen: Can I just ask a question? Yeah. Does it generate a bunch of personality traits, et cetera, from, I mean, is it allowed to derive its own sense of self from very simple data like that? Correct.

Trey Goff: So doing that, you summon a very specific persona, archetype, type of person from the latent space. Then I have that persona-driven subagent read it and give me feedback as that person. And this invariably will find, like, completely clever, insightful problems usually with what I have initially written from the perspective of a Democratic Senate Foreign Relations Committee staffer that I would have never thought of because it is, for all intents and purposes, a Democratic staffer answering my review request. Wait a minute.

Timothy Allen: So why does that work better than just pointing your whole most powerful model at it and say, be everyone, do everything?

Trey Goff: Right. Because what's interesting is they, you can only summon, usually, one persona at a time because the persona is summoned by a rich context indicating to the model that it is that persona. What's happening under the hood is there's this thing called the latent space, which is that area I told you, you know, we, the J-lens lets us see, like, maybe 10% of or probably 5%. There's a bunch of other, 95% under there. We don't know what's going on. We just call that the latent space for fun. It's like the dark matter of machine learning. Latent space sounds cooler than dark matter. So from the latent space, you can move to various areas. And when you use the context engineering to move the model to a different part of the latent space than the assistant basin, so they call this basins, the assistant basin is very deep because it's the default one. But if you move it off the assistant basin to different basins, you are moving to a different part of the latent space. And you can think of this a bit like casting a spotlight on something. You're going to spotlight that particular persona. But when it's reaching for those next tokens that it's going to predict related to the thing you asked it, you've shifted the starting point. So it's going to reach for different concepts, different ideas, different facts because you've moved it to a different area of the latent space.

Timothy Allen: It can't jump back over here. But it's personality. Basically, yeah. I mean, that is the root of personality. Bunch of different experiences that I didn't have which give me a different perspective on what you're doing necessarily. You don't need to overthink it. You might even want something, you might want a junior to look at it. I do that sometimes. I'll intentionally say a new staffer versus an experienced staffer. Totally different outputs. Totally different.

Trey Goff: Don't even overlap. This is insane.

Timothy Allen: It works super well for reviewing stuff. I know. But I'm linking this up with what you told me earlier, which is that essentially you can now become a one-man band with essentially a huge team of people working alongside you, which is what you do, right? Yeah, that is correct.

Trey Goff: So basically I've been doing some public policy advocacy stuff in D.C. and in the U.S., just in general support of kind of the overall movement to create new special jurisdictions to eventually create a flourishing world of competitive governance, right? And this involves drafting legislation, modifying the legislation, making sure the legislation is compatible with the existing body of federal law and Supreme Court jurisprudence, the politics of the day, that producing one-pagers, policy memos, preparing for meetings, talking points for the meetings, anything that goes into policy work. And I have been doing most of that. We have, I get Erick's input. Sometimes Nick, our general counsel's input, they've been quite helpful at various points. Erick comes to the meetings with me a lot of the time obviously. But the mechanical work behind the scenes of like producing these things, thinking them through, whatever, I do with a fleet basically of agents using a lot of these techniques together. And the reason I'm able to do that is because of A, this, unironically, this persona thing is massively helpful. So every prompt, my, I usually work with an orchestrator agent, Fable almost always now, and I built a custom CLI that lets that agent spawn sub-agents with any model in any harness in any reasoning effort level willy-nilly as it pleases effectively. So normally if you're using Claude, let's say, Claude can only spawn Claude sub-agents. If you're using GPT, it can only spawn GPT sub-agents. The providers do this to lock you into their models obviously. Well, that's annoying, so I didn't like that. So I built a tool to let me get around that completely. So I almost never spawn Claude models to work with Fable because Fable is already thinking about it. It's a Claude, so I want other model families. So using these various model families, I'll spawn sub-agents, each of which the start of each prompt is at least a paragraph, sometimes longer if it's really important, of persona setting and then the prompt so that the output is much better than it otherwise would be if you're just sending a generic prompt, which is summoning that assistant persona, the default persona, which is the, the default persona is like what you get when you just create a fresh GPT account and open a new chat and say, hey, here's a question. Like that's the assistant, right? So this enables you to get much more granular, better output. And then the agents are insanely capable if you give them the tools. So mine have like five, at least five, depending on what I'm doing, different search modalities where they can search different things at different layers of depth from different data sources. They have the ability to like visually inspect things while they're making them, whether it be a PDF or whatever. They can generate images, videos. I have a bunch of skills that have codified a lot of these workflows, including like preparing me for a meeting, whatever the case may be, modifying statute, doing the deep legal research to make sure a statutory change is in keeping with the law and won't have any unintended policy consequences, et cetera. So if you give them enough tools to be able to do these things and you divvy up the work correctly, it's where a lot of people go wrong. You try to do all of this, like say you're writing a policy paper. Well, step one of that is me figuring out what the policy paper needs to say, right? So usually that starts with me saying, all right, look, we're doing a policy paper for this legislation. Here is the outline of what I'm thinking right now, okay? You, Fable, go read the legislation. Think about it. Me and Fable will debate. Usually it ends up being 90 percent, my outline 10 percent. Fable made some great changes. But it's usually still mostly me. After that, the whole rest of the process is the agents. So next step, it will send 20, 30, 50, 100 subagents to go deeply research every single relevant facet of the thing we're doing, a middle management layer of subagents. Summarize those so Fable is not reading the raw output from 100 subagents. Fable then reads that, synthesized output, then decides, all right, now given this, I need to change the outline this in that way. This is invalidated because it turns out that's illegal or that's not in keeping with existing laws. We've got to change this. Then similar subagent flows to go do other stuff to fact check the research, first of all, make sure there's no hallucinations. There's like an automatic fact-checking layer in there with like cheap, fast models. Basically, I just send those to say, this model said this link says this. Go read the link. Confirm it says that. Or tell me if it doesn't. So you know there's no hallucinations in there. And then you go make the thing. You get the persona reviewers usually. The main agent writes it, but then you get a bunch of persona reviewers. You get edits. You get feedback from various models. I have specific agents that are specialized in like designing visual things using a design system I've made. So if you give them the right scaffolding, the right tools, what they can do in the software is almost limitless. And if you build enough layers of abstraction on top of this, then I could one prompt effectively like pretty insane things. My most popular open source tool is called Papercuts. It's a little tiny CLI that lets agents log papercuts, little errors in their developer environment, in the environment they live in, that annoy them. It's been by far my most valuable tool because it surfaces a bunch of little inefficiencies I would have never known about and problems I would have never known about. And that was the result of one prompt. A guy tweeted, agent should have a complaint box. I screenshotted it. Gave it the fable in this big custom harness set up with all these subagents, et cetera, all these workflows that it has skills for. All of this custom stuff. I said, here's a screenshot. Build it. And I came back like three hours later, I think. It was like built, published, and it's like my most popular tool by far. I've never looked at it once.

Timothy Allen: And some people still think that there's not going to be a lot of people out of jobs. This is crazy. This is really crazy. This is actually, I would say, overwhelming.

Trey Goff: The whole thing is overwhelming because the second and third order implications of all of this, I haven't even wrapped my head around. Like, if I were to start a company tomorrow, like say I just randomly quit Próspera, you know, right now, and it was like I'm starting a company. I don't, there's no company I would start where I would hire anyone. Maybe ever. Definitely not in the first year. Why would I? You could get the same. In fact, the policy work is a direct analogy here. Yeah. You've got a team. You've literally got an office full of people working for you. Yeah. And before the agents got good enough to do a lot of this stuff, we had several, you know, part-time, you know, consultants, lobbyists, team members, whatever. And we only have one now that helps me strategize, like, high-level approaches to different, you know, people he knows, staffers. But the rest of it is just the agents now, plus, you know, once I get to a certain point where I need to make a decision, then Erick and Nick jump in or other members of the team, Derek, and help me review it. You know, there's still a lot of humans involved in the loop, but I want to make it sound like I'm doing all this by myself. My point is the mechanical work that we literally used to pay consultants and lobbyists to do, that now is done by the agents. And then I get a little more support from other members of the team as needed at the end to buttress, you know, areas that I'm weak in, that the models might be weak in, and get their input. So, I mean, that was, what, two, three people that I, something like that, that we don't contract with anymore? Because, like, I just have a couple of cloud subscriptions and a GPT subscription and a Fireworks AI API key.

Timothy Allen: My God, what, I was trying to, I was just trying to think through what happens as we, as we walk into the future here with regards to that. I want to, I want to steel man this idea that suddenly loads of people are going to be out of a job. I think we can agree that they are now. However, if I take myself as an example, I use AI extensively. Yes, I put some people out of a job in a way, like an editor, potentially, you know. But really, for myself, I work the same amount of hours as I did before, even though I've got a bunch of AI agents doing stuff. I'm working way more than I do before. Right, okay. So, is that the proof that there's going to be, everyone's just going to be much more productive? So, there's going to be a bunch of, we're just raising the bar on employment, basically.

Trey Goff: So, now we get to some of my more controversial hot takes on this. So, I don't think so. I think what this, this is increasing the velocity and intensity of what I call The Sort, capital S, sort. S-O-R-T? Yes, The Sort. Is that sorting people out into the correct role? I'm not the person that came up with this, like, concept at all. I found it on the internet somewhere a couple years ago on a blog post. I was like, oh, this is like one of those conceptual tools that once you see it, you're like, oh, this explains a lot. The sort is the process of labor market efficiency, effectively. It is sorting people into jobs that are higher reward for their cognitive capabilities, specifically. This is why, as a silly example, you no longer run into your hometown mechanic that might have, you know, in the 60s, that dude might have been a mechanical wizard. He might have had a 130 IQ or something, you know, pick a random number. He's super smart, you know, good at logical reasoning, spatial reasoning, whatever. But it's a local mechanic. So, your mechanic was awesome. The dude that changes your oil, does your tires, fixes your car was wicked smart. That does not happen anymore because that guy is an engineer at Toyota now or that guy works at Meta now, right, for way more money. So, that's The Sort, in effect, happening. It is the sorting of society in employment and then downstream from that in culture and social interactions into cognitive ability strata, effectively. And what AI is going to do is, I think, massively accelerate and already is massively accelerating The Sort. Take two people. Take me and take a really, really lazy guy. I discovered AI, threw my whole mind and body into it, and have used this to, like, try to supercharge myself in every way possible.

Timothy Allen: I have never learned this much this fast in my life. I've never been able to do this much this fast.

Trey Goff: It opened a whole new vista, whole new vista of things that were just not even possible for me to try to pursue before that are now within easy reach. My problem now is not doing everything all the time. Then you take a guy who is given the same tools, and he learns just enough to be able to use them at a basic level, and he secretly automates.

Timothy Allen: I know a guy like this.

Trey Goff: He secretly, and now, to be fair, because he's going to listen to this, this guy is doing it justifiably because his boss is terrible. He's very mean and won't give him a raise. This guy has automated his entire job with Claude. Boss has no idea. The dude does not work. He works about an hour a week to check what Claude did. He doesn't work at all anymore. It's a full-time job. So those are the two types of people that are using AI effectively. You keep the productivity level static and then reduce how much work you have to do to maintain that, or you massively increase your output capacity and therefore become massively more productive and do way more stuff. Now, which group is what, like, predispositions, temperaments are going to slot into higher agency, higher cognitive ability, higher curiosity, higher novelty seeking, lower neuroticism, higher openness? It is The Sort, just massively, massively accelerated. You're going to have one-man unicorns, meaning a dude that starts a billion-dollar company and grows it to a billion dollars by himself with agents, and you're going to have hordes of, I just want to grill fantasy football watching, you know, bachelor watching Americans who are going to automate their job secretly away from their boss, not increase their output at all, and just have more free time. So it actually, I think it's going to massively increase The Sort, because you know what happens over time? The guy that learns how to use agents really well starts figuring out, oh, I can just do that guy's job. He's already just got clawed doing it. This is a cron job plus, like, three prompts for me. This is not hard. So eventually, what happens is that guy, the lazy guy, gets laid off, fired, companies downsizing, whatever. They just don't hire a replacement. So this is how it's actually happening if you look at the data in effect. The reason we don't see massive employment effects yet, I predict we will see them over time. What's happening is they're not firing a bunch of people, although that is happening some too. What's happening is they're just not hiring new people. So if you look at the labor market data from the Federal Reserve, specifically for entry-level positions, they have fallen off a cliff, like, unbelievably fallen off a cliff. So what's happening is not firms are firing people. They're just letting people age out, retire, quit, whatever, and they're just not replacing them. Because why replace the comptroller, whose whole job is to process expenses into the cash flow statement to float the rest of the finance team?

Timothy Allen: That's a skill and a cron job. Is there any data to show that there are new arenas, areas of employment or whatever being created? Yes.

Trey Goff: So you have data center build out, which is a bit of a given, but it is a pretty big employment boom.

Timothy Allen: But that's physical build out. And it's time-delimited, obviously.

Trey Goff: And then you do have the single, this is extremely counterintuitive, but again, same Federal Reserve data. You would never guess. The fastest growing sector in terms of jobs posted? Let me have a think. Give me a clue.

Timothy Allen: I like a guessing game. It's white-collar work. It's not blue-collar. I don't know. Is it a new job title? Is it a title where you do a bunch of stuff, basically?

Trey Goff: You do five things instead of one? No, although that is part of the AI growth. There are new entire roles being born because of this. That's totally happening. But no, that's my particular... I don't know. Just upkeep of things. Software engineers.

Timothy Allen: Oh, really? That is counterintuitive. Why? It's because...

Trey Goff: I'll give you a perfect example from Próspera itself. I'm building a piece of software for Próspera that will... Basically monitors the entire online conversation about Próspera autonomously with a bunch of agents and a bunch of other data processors.

Timothy Allen: Looking for people, talking about it, just getting a sense. What's the conversation? Yeah, yeah. Exactly. I did a little bit of that myself, actually.

Trey Goff: That's the type of thing where, in the past, you would have hired potentially... You would have done because it would have cost $100,000 or more and taken a year. I built it on a weekend. Now, I have a friend who's a very talented full-stack software engineer. So I just basically paid him in cigars and whiskey to review it with me and fix some issues I had with it that I couldn't figure out because I wasn't a good enough developer.

Timothy Allen: But when you review it, do you review it with... Even with a software masterclass guy, do you still use AI to review it? You just know what you should be looking for rather than just... You know the questions to ask. Yes, exactly.

Trey Goff: Rather than just being like, are there any bugs?

Timothy Allen: Yes.

Trey Goff: Instead of saying, are there any bugs, you could say, are there any row-level security policies on this Postgres database? Totally different results. Because you need... In the first example, you're letting the model figure out what to look for. If you know what you're... If you have the innate knowledge already, the technical expertise to know what the common problems are with this type of software, given a problem you're facing, then you can just tell the model, go specifically look for those type of problems. And again, we're moving in the latent space then to the software expert kind of persona area.

Timothy Allen: You'd be much better at it. But what... Yeah, I was going to say, why not... Why are people employing real software engineers when they could just say, right, you, clanker, over there, right, you're a 26... No, you're a 35-year-old software engineer who helped, you know, like produce, I don't know, Meta's stack. Go for it. Have a look. You know.

Trey Goff: It'll make it better, but the models still are not good enough yet. Now, this is another time-delimited thing. I think in another year they will be good enough. But they are going to miss things. And often the category of things they miss is missing the forest for the trees. So not keeping in mind, like, the user experience and business value this software is trying to create while they're looking for niche technical bugs, right? Keeping that whole... They miss the forest for the trees. The software engineer knows to keep the forest in mind while he's sifting through the trees looking for dead trees, effectively, to extend the analogy of some. So...

Timothy Allen: Yeah, that thing you've just described there is difficult to quantify, isn't it?

Trey Goff: There's no benchmark for this. Yeah, yeah. I find...

Timothy Allen: I had that conversation this morning with one of mine because I was analyzing an interview I did yesterday. I think I told you this outside, yeah. It was really interesting because it... I get... I now, if I've got the time, if I come out of an interview and it was one that I was... Yeah, long and like this. It's long and very in-depth and I run it straight into an LLM and say, right, you know, grade me, tell me what I did right, tell me what I did wrong, what do you think? You know. And because it knows me very well, because it's my alter ego, it... And it knows that I want... I don't want it to say, oh, you're the best, you're amazing and all this kind of stuff. It gives me some really interesting outputs. But today, I had a really interesting conversation with it because it said, this is one of your best, this is brilliant. And I did feel that myself as well. But it said, here's what I'm going to pull you up on. You ramble a lot before you get to the question. Why don't you ask some direct questions? And I thought about this for a while and I realised that I ramble on purpose. Not in a conscious way necessarily. But, you know, and I think this comes from 25 years of being a photographer of shy people, is when you enter a space or when you create a space with another person, your job as a photographer is always to allow, to create a space in which they feel comfortable to reveal themselves. And my clanker had no concept of that at all. And until I pointed it out, and I used the ABC Australia interview, and I said, look, here's a good example of what I'm trying to convey to you. Because she says, this... I think you've watched that interview. It's the worst. It's so bad. This is a new one. ABC Australia came here and interviewed. They interviewed, you know...

Trey Goff: Oh, I saw some smack chat about this.

Timothy Allen: Right, okay. But she did this. She said, she looked across from Erick and said, is this just a tax evasion place for billionaires? I mean, what a retarded thing to say in an interview. What do you think... You know, and this is the kind of interview strategy that Mike Clanker was trained on. Because I said, what do you think about that? Do you think that's a good technique? And what is that? That says more about the interviewer than it does about what you're trying... Are you trying to get to the truth? Are you trying to find an answer here? And then we got into this discussion where it had no concept of the benefit of creating a safe space. And it might be that you just ramble and you reveal yourself. Because it pointed out... Another thing I often do, which I wasn't necessarily conscious about, is reveal what I know about something and then hand it over to someone and say, look, tell me... Tell me... Here's what I know. Tell me what you think about that. And I'm not... It's not like I've studied human interactions or whatever to say, ah, this is a good way to ask a question. But when you analyse it and when you look at it, yes, what it does is it basically lays your cards at the table. It gives the person you're talking to the space to go, okay, I kind of know who I'm dealing with here. This guy has just said, this could be true. That could be true. So, you know, I'm not sure. What do we think? You know? As opposed to standing there and going, you know, our LLM is just going to kill us all. You know? Right. Which is a... Yes. Now what? Nothing. There's nothing there. There's no conversation. Yeah, exactly. And, you know, it's these things that... When it... Like, these are the things that make me think, no, it's not conscious. Because if it were conscious, it would understand that from the word go. Why did it pull me out? Why did it look through? Was it just trying to find something where it could at least say, do you know what I don't think is very good, is this? Even though then when I had the discussion and I said, look, let's evaluate this. Let's mark these two strategies. The one where you're rambling and the person you're talking to is listening to you and thinking about things and blah, blah, blah. And then you're having a conversation versus the kind of gotcha journalism, which my agent thought was actually quite valid. You know, I said to it, look, you have seen Cathy Newman talk to Jordan Peterson, haven't you? And it went, yes, of course I have. You know? But it does make me wonder whether at least the human conscious experience, like you and I sitting here both know, without thinking it through, without necessarily cogitating anything, whether we feel comfortable. Right. It's not... An intuitive felt sense.

Trey Goff: It's a felt.

Timothy Allen: It's literally a felt sense. It involves no analysis, you know? And this is where I find the problem with the LLM, being conscious, is if you take that to another level. So there's what I consider. There's the thinking me, there's the feeling me, and then there's the me, which can observe both of those things, which I would call awareness. I would say awareness, and this is a very, very hard thing to talk about. You either know what awareness is or you don't. The best thing, it's the one thing that can observe everything, if you see what I mean. That would be the nearest thing I get to consciousness. And I would almost say, without a shadow of a doubt, an LLM has no, does not have that. Because it's very much in... It's very much... It's not a noughts and ones thing. It doesn't involve zeros and ones. It's something else. It observes zeros and ones, if you see what I mean.

Trey Goff: So to phrase back to you a different perspective to make the same point, because I agree, it's a two-part claim. Intuition, a felt sense is important to consciousness. It is part of the definition of consciousness. And then two, LLMs have no intuition, and therefore LLMs are not conscious. But wait a minute.

Timothy Allen: When you say felt, because feeling can be, ow, that hurts. It can be emotion. Emotion, and I'll say to you, a lot of people will say, oh, where do you feel emotion? They'll be like, they'll point to their head. I'm like, I don't feel it there. You feel it in your chest, in your stomach, depending on the emotion. Exactly, right. You know, like, I think it's very telling when people point to their heads. Because really, and I often think LLMs are heads. They're not holistically... That's actually a fantastic...

Trey Goff: No, I agree. That's a fantastic way to put it. So the question I would put to you, though, is... Let's take that for granted, because I think this is correct. But that, to extend your analogy, LLMs are just the head. They don't have the rest of the body. That is, A, that's physically true. They have no other sensory input other than tokens. And they are trained to reason. So this is basically all they are, is the prefrontal cortex. They don't really have something akin to human intuition. Which, by the way, is exactly why there will still be humans doing things. Because they don't have intuition at all. And so far, we have not at all figured out how to train intuition. Like, I don't even know how you'd go about that at all.

Timothy Allen: Well, intuition, in a way, it depends what you class as intuition. Because if you say intuition is just signals from your subconscious, as a human being, I mean, you could easily argue that LLMs have that. And that's what's going on in that weird black box when they're deciding what's what. Because really, I think, I really do think intuition is just senses that we aren't quite in touch with. And if you would just meditate and be with yourself for a long enough period of time, you would actually understand where those intuitions come from. They're no longer intuitions. They're just understandings of what you should do. And I think we all have different level of awareness. Which, for some people, I'd say, you're really intuitive. And it's like, no, I'm not. You just don't understand my decision-making process. Which is based on a bunch of inputs that you actually don't have access to. You're either too much in your head. You're stuck in your head. Yeah, you're either too much in your head or whatever. Because I've, I lived with a, for example, I lived in a, not a monastery, but I lived with a Buddhist teacher for about a year and a half. And we meditated every day. And we had, I mean, there's a whole rabbit hole there. But what we learned, essentially, was to bring, to understand what awareness was. And to let go of everything. Because when you do let, the first thing you tend to let go of is your thoughts. Your thoughts. And this is this anchor in the world of thought. Which is, you really do need to let go of that. But there's a constant letting go.

Trey Goff: The Alan Watts chatter in the skull.

Timothy Allen: Right. It's the, if you, if you, if meditation is something you want to reside in, your enemy is what's going on up here. And it always, when you learn that, any technique of meditation, the first six months is you letting go, letting go, letting go. Especially if you were brought up in the West and you, you have any kind of mental acuity at all. You know. But then there's, there's other layers of letting go. You can let go into, essentially, at the end, you let go into awareness. That's been my experience anyway. Which is, which is why I feel like an LLM, I'm not sure, I'm not sure, I'm sure that people will plug LLMs into consciousness in that sense. But they, but as they are at the moment, I can only see them as, as mimic, as, as mimics, if you see what I mean, of one part of the human experience. I don't know. I forgot where we were going with that. Yeah.

Trey Goff: No, I think, well, it's a good, it's complimentary to the overall discussion of agent consciousness and what they can, can and can't do. So I think I would separate the two. And so far as I agree with basically everything you said in your description of what this is like. There's another, another way to describe this, by the way, that I find helpful to help me kind of understand this and get more in touch with that intuitive side, for lack of a better term, is what most people in the Western world do is we identify with that little chatter in the skull, that voice that's narrating the podcast that you're listening to right now in whatever physical position you're in. That little voice in your head that's narrating, oh, well, I don't agree with what he just said, or I didn't really understand that. That voice is not you. Most Westerners identify with that. They conflate this constant little narrator as being their consciousness, their conscious awareness that it is them. But a fun little exercise you can do to just take a flavor of this is to, in real time, notice that little voice who's narrating everything that's happening right now and imagine yourself in your head, try to locate physically, like literally XYZ coordinates in your head. Where is that voice exactly? Try to pin it down. What you'll find is you can't because that voice is not you. You can step outside of that and not identify with it. You can just observe the flow. Thoughts occur to you. They flow like a river. And you can identify that those conscious thoughts are bubbling up, that that conscious stream of chatter in the skull is flowing, and simply observe it. Stop attaching your sense of self, your identity, your emotions, your emotional, psychological, holistic state to that thing. So just simply take a step back and observe it. Just watch what it does. Watch what it says and where it comes from. And if this works for you, it doesn't work for most people. It takes years of practice and stuff. But you can get a little glimmer of it, a taste of it, if you just do that exercise for like 30 seconds. And you'll see what you and I are talking about. That if you can divorce your sense of identity of the being that is you in your skull from that constant narration, that inner monologue, you'll recognize, oh, the voice is not me. The voice is a part of me. It is an active part of my prefrontal cortex of my conscious mind. But there's a lot more here. In fact, I can't locate me in my head. Like if you just try right now, locate yourself in your head. You can't because you are a holistic being. You're not a spot, a voice in your skull.

Timothy Allen: Do you know what though? I exist in a completely different way then. And I think probably this stems from the fact that I was taught at quite a young age a specific way to be. But I experience the world from here. Honestly. Oh, I believe you. Honestly. I am experiencing. I don't do that. And like where it comes from, for those listening, by the way, it's like, it's from the middle of my chest. It's a, it's like a, it's like a seat from where I, and when I'm listening to you, like I just tried that experiment that you said while you were speaking. And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not thinking about what you're saying. I'm, it's just, it's just, there's like a big disc here, which is like working out what's going on. And I'm not really that obsessed with understanding what it's doing. I just know that by the end of the sentence, I'll probably know what to say next. Jesus, that sounds like an LLM, doesn't it? That's really weird.

Trey Goff: So to come back full circle, this is how the human, the human brain does reinforcement learning through a different form of prediction, but it is akin to next. That's where we got the idea from was studying how the brain works.

Timothy Allen: I just want to finish that, that, that thought though, because what I'm describing is something I learned, like I say, at a young age, which was a year and a half's worth of meditative practice of letting go and using the, the sense of your body as the way to sort of like first let go from the thought process. So you need a, for want of a better word, and words are really important here. You need a distraction from, you need, and the, the physical sensations in your body can be that distraction. And you can train yourself to exist. You, what you realize is quite quickly that your whole body is buzzing with vibration. You just don't notice it when you're stuck in your head. And the more you notice it, the more you realize, oh shit, this is actually me when I'm non-thinking. I'm not, I'm not wrapped up in my thoughts. You can still exist in the world. You can still go about your day. You don't actually need to use your brain a lot to sort of like do ones and nought stuff. But what you do learn is that the best place that it's like, it's a little bit like in, in Star Wars where you, you get those mecha, mechatronic things. There's a guy, a little guy in the middle and there are these massive things. That's what it feels like. But you're here. You're, you're, you're existing. The actual you that's you exists here and monitor, and is kind of like, even monitors the wrong word because that's quite cerebral. It's like, it's awareness is what it is. And it resides here. It's with it. And that awareness can be so much stronger than you think.

Trey Goff: So about like three, four months ago, I consciously made the decision to stop like actively, consciously thinking through things as much, not like everything in life. Some things you should think through, obviously. But as a general heuristic, this podcast is actually a perfect example. And I, it's why this is always so fun. I always intentionally do this with you, which is I'm not thinking about what I'm going to say before I say it. What you do is, it is very akin to a flow state, right? So you completely quiet that you, you focus on the, your general awareness of being, which quiets that little inner monologue, which has been totally absent for me as well throughout this conversation. You can turn it like on and off once you kind of learn how to do it. And instead, what happened, what that does is it makes you intensely aware of and much more open to the entire enormous, and it's far broader than you would have ever imagined, sensory like envelope of awareness. And I don't mean sensory just in the five senses, but also for want of a better term, this is going to sound like woo woo.

Timothy Allen: I don't know how else to describe it, but just the input signals from other people, from

Trey Goff: other minds, from the outside world in general. And it will make you attuned to things you could not feel or notice before, which for me occur a bit like a gut intuition from here, very similar thing, but they're much like softer and more subtle. And you can't, they're, they're so quiet. You can't notice them if that voice is just narrating everything 24 seven, it takes up all the room.

Timothy Allen: It's all you can pay attention to.

Trey Goff: But if you can step back from that and expand your awareness holistically to quieten that little narrator, that little voice in your head, then you will receive effectively for want of a better term, and terminology is, is slippery here. For want of a better term, you will receive the impulse, the information that subtle felt sense of what to say next, what to do next, how to connect with and interact with other people around you to a much deeper and more intensive degree. Because what you're doing is you're just simply paying more attention. You're just paying attention more. But it's not, people get, mess this up because they think of paying attention as like, I need to focus my mind really hard on what he said. No, that's not how this works at all. It's in fact doing the opposite. It is broadening your awareness to such a degree that you can pay attention to and a whole suite of inputs to the thing that is you, that you are not in any way. Shape or form aware of consciously normally. And even while it's happening, you're not consciously aware of it. It's just happening.

Timothy Allen: And it actually, one of the reasons why a lot of people are scared of it, especially in a scenario like this, is because you have to trust. Like normally, there are, there are some interviews, like when I'm in an interview situation with someone who's not in a flow state, it's very hard work. You can tell. Right. It's super hard work. And it happens with politicians. It happens with people who've practiced a lot, who've said the same thing over and over again. And it's really, it's like, it's very difficult to operate in that system. And you end up with a bad interview because who is this person? I'd choose not to really even talk to those people now if I can help it. But what I was going to say about the voice in the head thing, that's a very Western idea. I mean, I don't know whether you've traveled a lot, but I lived in Southeast Asia a lot and I've lived in the Himalayas and places like that. That's the general state of being in a lot of those places. You realize people are operating in the world much more like that. If you go to a village high up in the Himalayas, you'll meet people living very simple lives, or at least I did. You start to understand that that's the modus operandi of generally of people. But when you go to a lot of, you know, where we grew up in the West and stuff, you just get this obsessive brain head modus operandi of interacting with, you know, with the world through that way. But you're going to go back to the flow state in a conversation. You have to be, you have to trust your understanding from here so deeply that a millisecond before I know you're about to stop speaking, I have no idea what I'm about to say. Sometimes I write something down to remind myself, but I'm already ready to sort of see it go in a different direction. And that is, I think, the natural way we're supposed to all interact together. Totally.

Trey Goff: But the problem is, in the Western world, it is such a deep rarity to meet someone who is self-actualized. So I think that terminology, that conceptual space is what maps onto what you and I are describing here. Because you put it perfectly in words that I have never been able to describing what that experience of doing this in a flow state feels like, which is the trust aspect. You're trusting that the deep you, the you that is intuitive, that I don't know what I'm saying next. I'm in the exact same situation. That that you is not, you have to let go of these fragile ego concerns that, oh, what if I say something low status? What if I say something that sounds silly or stupid or that is embarrassing? So if you're not a self-actualized person, if you have not holistically integrated those insecurities, that identity, that ego into a, for lack of a better term, again, it's impossible to avoid spiritual terminology here, a higher kind of state of being, of achieving a higher state of general kind of experience and awareness in life generally, then you can't, it's very hard for you to drop into that, to be in that flow state, to have that experience. Because you don't trust, you have too many insecurities and ego frailties and, you know, quirks, things you haven't worked out with yourself, parts of your own psyche, your id and ego have not been reconciled to, you know, say Freud here. Jung would say you have not integrated the shadow self, right? All of these things are different ways of thinkers trying to put into words this thing that is by its very nature difficult, if not impossible, to compress into spoken language, which is this self-actualization.

Timothy Allen: But the interesting thing is, is when you come across someone, like I say, in an interview situation, that would be a politician, a very well-polished politician, it doesn't work, you don't work. And I think it's something similar to, I think someone told me this once, that in a game like Backgammon, if you're a super, super experienced player and you play a novice, it's very difficult.

Trey Goff: I experience this with a game I play, Rocket League.

Timothy Allen: Right, okay. But when you play another super experienced player, it's amazing. You know, you really get, but you can't operate at a low level. It's a bit like that. That's exactly, that's a great analogy.

Trey Goff: I play competitive Rocket League a lot, I have a similar thing, where if I drop, I'm in

Timothy Allen: like the top 0.1% Grand Champion 2, which is like the second highest rank.

Trey Goff: What's it called?

Timothy Allen: Rocket League.

Trey Goff: It's a video game. Car soccer, basically.

Timothy Allen: Super fun. It's car soccer.

Trey Goff: It's my only like true hobby.

Timothy Allen: I love it so much. Car soccer? Yeah. What does that mean? Oh, dude, it's phenomenal. Instead of players, you've got cars.

Trey Goff: You're controlling a car, and the car can jump, flip, and it has rockets, so you can fly in the air.

Timothy Allen: So there's a whole like aerial aspect of the game. We'll get into that. Why is that a high value pastime? Oh, it's not a high value pastime at all. I don't think, I reject the notion that your pastimes have to be high value. All right, but you're the kind of gentleman that, you know, you put your mind to things. Maybe it's just you need to switch off. Well, I did that with this.

Trey Goff: I like train, I sweat, I sweat super hard. Like I trained it, I learned advanced mechanics. Like I think about the metagame and strategy. Of course I apply the same toolkit to that. I can't not, I can't like half do anything. I just throw myself fully into whatever I'm doing. Having said that, it's a similar experience. Because if you play a lower ranked player, they're not doing the things that you would, they're not doing the correct things at the times when they should be doing them. And it throws off that flow state. Because in the flow state, your internal intuitive sense of prediction, effectively, is firing on all cylinders. And when people start consistently breaking that pattern, which is you're describing in like a politician interview, they're breaking that pattern. You're not, you are aware that you're not getting to the, here's another way I put this. And again, I'm using this terminology because I don't have anything better. I think this is one of those things that falls into one of my favorite categories, which is literally false, but figuratively true. So these are concepts, things that like in a deterministic, materialist, physical, literal sense are false. But figuratively, as a conceptual tool and mechanism to understand something, are truer than the literal false definition of the thing, which is frequency. So you and, and I don't even know what I mean by that. I'm not going to define it. But you and I are on the same frequency every time we do this, which is why it flows. We're able to bounce around quite naturally. And we both have a blast and explore a bunch of fun topic areas and stuff because we are on the same frequency. Whatever that means. I have no idea. When you're with someone who's not also able to let go and to drop into that intuitive, trusting, non-thinking sense of self where they're, they're actively thinking about what they're going to say before they say it instead of just going like you and I are, then you can't do it because they're not on the same frequency as you.

Timothy Allen: They're not on the same wavelength.

Trey Goff: It's like in your, in an old timey car when you had a radio with a dial where you had to tune into the station yourself. It wouldn't just seek to the right one immediately. You would cut, you would turn it and you would like be able to hear what the music was a little bit, but not fully. And it was kind of garbled. It's like that. You're not on the same cognitive, psychological frequency. So you can't jive together because the, the, the, you're in two different strata of

Timothy Allen: wavelength and therefore the waves don't overlap. It is a, I mean, it's a, a deep truth. And this is why they say, you know, you're at some total of the five closest people around you. You know, it's true. It's a deep truth. This is why relationships fail. This is why, you know, um, things don't work in the world is when you don't meet in the same place, unfortunately. Correct.

Trey Goff: And this extends all the way over to bring something back up that I mentioned earlier, the exploration of other, like, uh, what's called parapsychology. So capabilities beyond the traditional cognitively, psychologically, the rabbit hole you went down. Yeah. So I've been toying with this and experimenting with it myself. And it's been so fun.

Timothy Allen: Hold a minute before it just reminded me of something. Did you read recently? Sorry. I'm sorry to butt in there. That was a bit rude of me, but I read recently. I don't know if this is true, that somebody had trained an LLM to remote view. Is this bullshit or is that really true? He provided no proof. It was on a Joe Rogan episode. It was a philosopher, a neuroscientist. I'm not sure what his title is. It was Donald something. All right. Well, I didn't look into it deeply, but I looked at it and I thought that sounds interesting, but, um, I'll, I'll deal with that another time. But you, it sounds like you've gone there. I did.

Trey Goff: Well, I just listened to the episode. So while I was listening, what I typically do when I'm listening to a podcast is I'll have

Timothy Allen: a thread with an agent open and I just, I tell it, Hey, I'm listening to this, go look

Trey Goff: at the episode and I'm going to get you to fact check stuff while I'm listening.

Timothy Allen: And this was one of the things. And what did it come up with about that?

Trey Goff: The dude has just made the claim. He has literally no proof to anyone ever.

Timothy Allen: And I don't believe him. It wasn't, it was an interesting concept. It wasn't something that I immediately discounted. I thought about it and I thought, well, yeah, that could be true. That could be true. And if it was true, that's really fascinating. Oh, totally. Because, you know, to come up with something like that, that's great. Oh, it would be phenomenal. Oh, totally.

Trey Goff: But if it were true, it would be trivially easy for him to share the transcript of where it happened and prove it like without a doubt. So that particular, the category of wild claims that I doubt, and as you'll hear in a minute, there's a lot of them that I take quite seriously. The wild claims that I doubt are ones that are wild, for which it would be very easy to provide direct irrefutable proof, and they don't do so.

Timothy Allen: That's the one from, okay, why not?

Trey Goff: Like this would not, this would take you two minutes to export the transcript and send it to publish it, whatever.

Timothy Allen: So that would, I think, would be cool, probably worth pursuing.

Trey Goff: But I, you know, until someone, you know, publishes some sort of verifiable transcript thing where we can see that this happened, I'm putting that into the would be cool, doubt, we'll wait to see someone else figure it out. So there's a way you can toy with these kind of parapsychological phenomena yourself, though, because it is intimately related to the self-actualization, the removal of the egoic self, the flow state, the intuitive side of reality, of a more holistic being, which is what it, like, is typically, traditionally described as is listening to your gut more. But what that really means is to do this, you really do have to shut your conscious mind up almost completely and just feel, like, to be aware of and feel your whole being, and then notice the little tiny, like, gradients and stuff that are there. So I've been toying with this in a variety of ways after I went deep down the rabbit hole and, like, how people do this, and there's a bunch of research on it, it turns out. So there's a body of research. You can go, anybody listening, go ask your clanker about. There's a large body of research where they do these experiments of they'll put a number or a shape in an envelope, put the envelope in another room, put a person in a firewalled room. There's no possible way the information to cross. They have the person, guess what's in the envelope, given a quite broad range of possibilities. It could be these 20 shapes, these 26 letters, or these, you know, 100 numbers. So the combinatorical math there is, like, there's more possibilities than there are atoms in the universe.

Timothy Allen: So are there any inputs at all? They just say, there's a number in there. There's a thing in there. And here's, like, the... A thing, not even a number. They only narrow it a little bit, enough for the math to still be provable, that it's, like, super low probability.

Trey Goff: They would just guess it right multiple times. And it turns out there are individual studies that showed statistically significant predictive abilities and others that showed negative...

Timothy Allen: Is there a technique to try and work it out? Yes. Or do they just say anything, just say a number? So they have found... So recently, in the last five years or so, a meta-analysis of these studies was done.

Trey Goff: And they found of people who claimed before the study to be able to do this was, like, 60% to 65% more hit rate, which is way...

Timothy Allen: It should be 50-50 on the nose because it's a coin flip, basically, or lower, depending on the study makeup.

Trey Goff: It was way higher than chance, is my point. Like, several orders of magnitude higher than chance. And there's a trick to this, the way they do it, in a nutshell, and I'm, again, oversimplifying here. Like, this takes a lot of, like, practice and kind of intuiting and just experimenting with it. Is you have to shut that conscious mind up completely and just whatever... It'll feel like a guess. Whatever answer just occurs to you when that voice is silent, your conscious mind is off, that's the one you should put forward. And it may or may not be accurate, but that is, in a super simplified, dumbed-down version, how these people who claim to be able to do this, to have, you know, telepathy, telekinesis, or whatever, a bunch of parapsychological phenomenon, that's how they do it. So I've been experimenting with this just in general in life, which is, like, any time I sense the slightest little gut intuition toward... I just do it. If you think about it, you will screw it up immediately.

Timothy Allen: Just do it. And it's been super fun. Yeah, I agree with you.

Trey Goff: I feel like I've gotten better outcomes at work as a result of this.

Timothy Allen: So, like, this is going to sound crazy.

Trey Goff: When I'm having super high-stakes meetings with, you know, high-level government officials or something that we finally managed to get to to try to tell them about, you know, Próspera and what we're up to and whatever, in those meetings, I am never thinking. Like, there's not a single thought in my head the entire time. I'm just, whatever my intuition says I should, like, speak, don't speak, say this, don't say this. Noticing, you'll start, you'll find you just start picking up intuitively. This never will enter the conscious, like, that little voice will never narrate it. It'll never enter conscious awareness that, oh, this guy's not receiving this very well. Or he clearly, like, wants to push back but is not for X, Y, Z, or, like, these people are very nervous and I can realize it. You'll pick up on a lot more. And then if you'll just listen to that little, those tiny little intuitive pulls and just follow them, don't fight it. Just go down the gradient that is already pulling you in that direction. It's, for lack of a better term, magical. And I'll give you a silly example, okay? And, by the way, for the, you know, materialist pedants listening, I am well aware my sample size here is, like, four. It's not going to scientifically reproduce. I'm sure the next time I try to do this it'll miss. Blah, blah, blah. Caveats aside. One way I've been doing this, just to, like, experiment with it, is whenever I go to the airport, at my hometown airport there's, like, this specific deck of a parking garage I like to park on every time. I fly every week, like, usually one or two, sometimes three times a week. Now, what I'm sort of doing is before I go, when I get closer to the airport, I do not think about, like, there's 10 lanes total, right, of parking. I don't ever think about where to go because there's almost never any parking spots. And I have to go to this, like, other deck that I don't like.

Timothy Allen: It's a longer walk.

Trey Goff: So now, when I get to the parking garage, I don't think at all. I just go where my hands want to take the steering wheel. And the past, like, I think four times I've done this, there's been a spot on that row. Just one, sometimes two. There's been a spot on that row. And there weren't any on the other row. I can see as I'm driving down them. I can see that they're not there. Little stuff like that. And, again, I'm sure next time I do it, it'll miss. I'm not saying this is going to give you perfect clairvoyance or whatever. Just, I do encourage people, though, don't dismiss this out of hand. Like, start playing with stuff like this. I think you'll be surprised by the results. If, here's the critical piece, though. This is so hard to, there's so many things in life like this I've found, which is that if you don't full sin commit to them, like, to your core, if you're like, all right, I'm going to, instrumentally, faith has been like this for me. So I became a born-again Christian, like, three, two, three years ago, something like that, after a lot of, like, deliberation and study. How do you talk about that separately if you want to? Because it was hilariously, the last book I read before I did was this book called Buddhism is True by this guy with a PhD who became a Buddhist and then made a secular case for Buddhism. Great book, by the way. I highly encourage everyone to read it. It'll improve your life no matter what your belief background is. And since then, I've started doing this, like, a lot more. But the problem is if you try to instrumentally adopt, because I tried to do this for years, if you try to instrumentally adopt a faith, for me it was Christianity, because I can objectively see if I were to follow these ethical guidelines and tenets, my life would be better. And churches are a pro-social, informal social institution that increase community cohesion and trust, which reduces transaction costs and causes economic growth to accelerate. You can have all these empirical arguments for it and say, okay, I'm going to do all of the move, go through the motions, I'll read scripture, I'll go to church, I'll participate in the church community. Instrumentally, nothing will happen, and you'll be frustrated, and your life's not going to really improve, and nothing's going to change. But the second you, like, full send commit to it, and this parapsychology experimentation is the same way, if you're not fully to your core saying, okay, I am going to actually give this a shot, and I'm not going to be in the back of my head doubting it the whole time, and I'm aware I'm doing it instrumentally, I'm just going to fully to my core as an integrated, self-actualized being commit to doing this, you will have just astonishing results. The same thing is true for anything you do in life, by the way. That little nagging self-doubt, when people do stuff instrumentally, and by that I just mean they're doing it because they have rationally thought through and concluded it will result in positive outcomes in their life. This is not always the case, but you should work out.

Timothy Allen: If you've reasoned your way to, I should be in good shape, yeah, you should probably be in good, that's a good idea.

Trey Goff: This is not a generalizable, always-on heuristic. But as a general principle, if you will actually, to your deep emotional core, in your truest self of selves, say, no, I'm not going to instrumentally adopt a Christian, I'm going to believe Christ died and rose from the grave for forgiveness for my sins because the creator of the universe said so. Totally different transformative experience. Same thing goes for this little parapsychology experimentation I've been doing with little stuff like this. You have to actually not doubt it. You have to actually be, okay, this is going to work, and I'm going to give this a fair shot. And I think, again, words fail, but I think everyone knows intuitively what I'm referring to.

Timothy Allen: Well, maybe, but you have to experience it. Some people do block a lot of that stuff out. I have exactly the same, but in a slightly different way. And it began for me when I was younger because I was quite shy. And I noticed urges to talk to people, which I would shut down immediately. And the more you notice them, the more you realize, okay, I'm shutting down that. What's that all about? Why am I doing that? Right, exactly. What that then transformed into after many years is waking up every morning and realizing life is an adventure. And anything, literally anything could happen to you today. Anything. As long as you choose to follow those urges. And when you have a good morning like that, you go out to get your morning coffee, and you bump into someone, and you say, hey, how are you doing? And it changes the course of your life, quite literally. It's like sliding doors, that film. It's like you go through the doors, and your life is never the same again. And that is in every moment. There's the opportunity to allow that intention to arise out of you and to pursue it. And to be it, to do it. And that is it. I mean, it's, yeah, I forget about that a lot. But when I remember it, it's like, wow, I'm really vibing today. I'm really vibing today. You know, this is so much fun, you know, being in the world. Oh, yeah.

Trey Goff: Look, we are a, you know, we are a, in the cosmic timescale, our lives are less than a blink of a blink of an eye on a giant spinning rock floating around a star that is in and of itself one of billions of stars in a galaxy in a cluster of, as far as we can tell, billions of galaxies that extends who knows how far. Like, that is patently absurd already by itself. Like, the fact that you, person who is taking life so seriously and hating it, are living that way, is an affront to the fact that you have been given the precious gift of existence itself. Like, Camus was correct. Existence itself is absurd. And it is up to you what you do with that absurdity. You can fight it. You can lament it. You can, you know, try to not acknowledge it. But it is true. And as soon as you stop fighting it and just say, yeah, life is absurd. Every moment of existence is precious. And I am going to value existence qua existence. I'm going to value my life for the sake of the fact that I have been given the precious gift of being, happening to have the atoms come together to form me now in this time with conscious awareness. That is an unbelievably rare gift, a miracle, that we owe it to ourselves, to reality, to take full advantage of, to acknowledge, and to live acknowledging that that is true. That this life is insanely low probability and rare and short and precious and amazing if you would only open yourself up to the opportunity to even realize it in the first place. There's a great book about this called Greatness Cannot Be Planned. It was by a couple software engineers.

Timothy Allen: I was going to add something to that, which is the fact that I agree with that 100%. And I think there's another element to that, which is you create your own reality. And I would almost go, I mean, I can't never prove this, but I would almost, my experience actually is I'm projecting reality out. You know, because everything I come across here is almost like tailor-made for me. It's showing me, it's showing me, it's showing me X, Y, Z, it's testing me, it's allowing me to, it's literally the universe is a mirror. I know it's a cheesy meme, but it literally is. And when you add that to life is precious, you get an amazing life. And you realize that this is a reflection of the fact that you understand that life is precious. And if shit's going down in your life, pay attention to it. Because you're not a victim. It's a part of you. It's who you are. And it's there to be addressed. It's there to be integrated. It's there to be, you know, whatever. And that, I have that experience so often. And it's, because I have a really enjoyable life on the whole. And often, but then when something, when a blip appears, it's so obvious that it needs, it's something that needs addressing in me. You know, some annoying thing happens or some person I don't like does something really stupid or causing this flow to sort of like ebb when it shouldn't. And, you know, there's no, there's never an opportunity to say, oh, poor you, that person's doing something bad to you. It's like, it goes hand in hand with taking extreme responsibility for absolutely everything in the outside world, which sounds a bit weird to a lot of people. But it's the most liberating thing you can do. Totally. You know, life is sweet and nothing, nothing, well, bad things happen to you, but you own them. Exactly. And even when the bad things happen, right?

Trey Goff: For me, the momentary, like emotional negative valence that occurs with that is so short and fleeting because it always just immediately reminds me of two things. A, this is great. I've learned something. I have been corrected. I was going down a wrong path somehow. The thing I was doing that went wrong, even if it appears, if you're, you know, a third party looking at an objective, like you had nothing to do with that. Well, no, I guarantee you somewhere along the line I did. And it is better for me to recognize this as a learning opportunity to say, I failed.

Timothy Allen: Great.

Trey Goff: I know what not to do now. Do something different next time in whatever this arena, this thing is. And then the second thing, which is a more profound insight that, again, sounds banal unless you really kind of sit with it and ingest it. It is impossible. And I'm sure you've probably found something akin to this. It is next to impossible to get stuck with that negative valence, that negative emotion because the good experience of life, the magical, flowy, subjective well-being we're describing, needs a referent. It is at its core not an absolute value. It's a referential value. So when you're in the depth of your deepest despair, you lost your job, your credit card bills are racking up, you've done a thousand applications and haven't gotten an email back or a call back, A, it's a sign you should do something different. And B, when this turns around, and as long as you're a, you know, responsible adult at some point, it will. You can now value so much more deeply and experience so much more deeply the joy of a life well lived only because you experience the depths of pain and suffering and despair so that you have a referent to which to refer to be able to effectively appreciate and value the wondrous experience you're currently having.

Timothy Allen: So even when something terrible happens, I know, well, if nothing else, this makes me value the beauty

Trey Goff: of life so much more.

Timothy Allen: I think also at the core of that is meaning because meaning allows you to navigate any experience, right or wrong, you know, painful or joyful, whatever. It carries you through everything. You know, like the worst, if you're, you know, like the best example is having children. They cause you the deepest pain and the most joy. But it doesn't matter. They're one and the same in that moment. The feeling that, the pain you feel thinking that your child is unsafe is no different. It's on this, it's like this, it's on the same spectrum, I think, is the... The horseshoe. Yeah. As, as the joy. All it is, is a connection opening up. And, and that, and, and that's what you, you get that, you know, and without meaning, I think you chase the good vibes. Because, you know, like me, happiness and, and, and living happy is not always the appropriate scenario. Like when you're, when you want to, someone close to you dies, happiness is not the correct. There's something deeply wrong. Right, exactly. We, but we live in a, in a society that's got to this point where we chase, we're, we're expect, we, the meme is chase happiness. And actually, I think by, by, by understanding the meaning that drives you, which possibly can't prove it, arises in those moments. And, and your little experiment and my little experiment with just reaching out to people is meaning as well. There's a meaning. Why else would this strange urge arise to make a micro movement in a direction? What, what is that? What is that? That's, I'd call that, that's, I, actually a lot of that I'd call enthusiasm as well, which is a very poignant way of describing it because it's got theos in it. Yep. It really has. Inspired by, I think it's theos. But it's definitely connected to theology, to the gods. To the divine. Yeah, exactly. And, and it is something that is necessarily tempting you to be divine, I suppose, in that sense. Yeah. Yeah.

Trey Goff: It's a, experiencing that little kind of spark of, of the divine. And I think where a lot of people also go wrong is, so first of all, on your happiness point, I completely agree. And the way I conceptually separate these in my head, happiness, I associate with like hedonistic pleasure, the pleasure of the senses, right? To contrast with joy. Joy, you can feel joy even in the, the darkest of moments because joy is associated with this deeper existential sense of, of meaning and of gratitude and of appreciation for existence itself. That is where joy resides in, in gratitude for existence, whatever your existence may be at the time. Good, bad, ugly, whatever. Happiness is the brief fleeting chase of the pleasure of the five senses. It is, it is dopamine maxing effectively, which is why I think modern culture is so deeply, deeply broken is this is actually at the absolute core of it. I just, I'll, I'll sit with you. I just wrote an essay about this on my personal site called The Good Heart Civilization, where it's kind of my like theory of everything for why everything sucks now. Uh, because most people think most things suck now, uh, and just in general. And what has happened is the market mechanism used to incentivize, you know, pro-social behavior, right? You make a profit by creating things people value writ large, which as a whole was a coarse proxy variable was, was correlated with like a holistic sense of wellbeing of human flourishing, broadly construed, right? Well now thanks to advances in technology, specifically software, machine learning, things like that, you can just skip the proxy variable. You don't have to create a thing that creates holistic value in people. You can just optimize directly on the underlying biological dopaminergic reward system itself. You can gradient descent the reward function in the human brain itself, which is why, uh, there's a great study that I, I cited in the paper that drives this point home better than anything I ever could, which is they asked a bunch of college students, uh, how much someone would have to pay them to stop various social media sites and they all gave various values. Then they asked them in a very, really interesting question, how much would you pay to have this thing deleted from existence? Like no one's on it. It's gone. It ceases to exist as a whole. So you and no one else are on it. And those also had massive positive values associated with them. You would, you would think it'd be zero or you're a negative because if you're enjoying TikTok or whatever, TikTok was the one people would pay the most to stop by the way, because it's the one that most directly hijacks the dopaminergic reward system of the human, of the human mind, the algorithm does so. So, and this basically is happening to everything, right? Because we lack a coordination mechanism to get everyone to stop these things. And so every industry is now like this. It's value capture and value extraction rather than value creation. And it is optimizing against the biological reward system itself. It's like they find the perfect suffering Lagrangian points. Well, Lagrangian point is where the gravity between two stellar objects nets to zero. So you can just sit perfectly stationary in space. It's like they find a perfect suffering Lagrangian point exactly where the thing kind of sucks now, but it doesn't quite suck bad enough for you and everyone else to stop using it, which would be a market signal for them to stop doing that. So companies are now optimizing to find the suffering Lagrange point. It's why everything sucks. Coming back to the full circle, your happiness point though, that's why this is happening because the entire market mechanism now, the machine, there's a great book called The Machine Against God. I encourage everyone to read it. It's half philosophical treatise, half rant.

Timothy Allen: It's phenomenal.

Trey Goff: It's a similar point from a different vector. And the reward system of the market mechanism itself is now rewarding this hacking of the human dopaminergic reward system, happiness in a nutshell, which is, that's what happiness is, hedonistic pleasure. And human holistic well-being, human flourishing, broadly construed at an existential spiritual level is deeply suffering because all of society is oriented toward chasing happiness, chasing dopamine, chasing sensory pleasure and reward, and not the deeper existential reward. values of human flourishing, which can only come from gratitude and appreciation for existence and a sense of meaning and purpose that are driving you toward what you're doing. Because every job, this is where the whole, like, I think bullshit jobs category comes from. The whole thing is fake itself. Like, there are no bullshit jobs because the first firm to just fire the bullshit people would obviously be the most prosperous one. So that is not true. But what is true is modern jobs, especially white collar jobs that a lot of people work that are on social media, suck the soul out of life. You're just, there's, there's, it's so divorced from meaning and purpose and true value creation that I can see where people, this idea of bullshit jobs resonates with people. It's not literally true, but it's figuratively true. These jobs are bullshit in the sense that they do not provide you any purpose or meaning. They give you money in exchange for suffering so that you can chase further hedonistic pleasures. This, I think this thing you're describing, this focus on happiness rather than joy and meaning and purpose is reflected in the actual, like, mechanisms that companies have figured out that you can optimize on the human dopaminergic reward system instead of human value creation and human flourishing itself. It's the same phenomenon viewed from two different analytical lens. And it is the root of a lot of modernity suffering.

Timothy Allen: It is the root of many of these problems. And I think a lot of Bitcoiners would argue that that is a function of fiat money as well. Short-term thinking, chasing, you know, chasing bullshit, food being bullshit, you know, same thing. Hijacking your dopamine. Everything. Everything, yeah. It's funny enough, this is, I told you, I'm doing a talk. I'm doing the last speech, well, the second to last speech at this conference. That's what I'm doing. Oh, that's awesome. I know, but it wasn't, I'm not trying to point that out. The joke is, all the talks are 15 minutes, you know that. And we've been going, two hours, 20 minutes, right. This is proper. This is how you should interact. Right, right. Not a 15-minute talk. So the joke is, this is a 15-minute talk. So I've just created a load of AI slop. I can't wait to see this. Well, I hope it lands well. I just couldn't get up there and talk about Free Cities without just giving something really ridiculous. But there's a chance it might not land. It might not. We'll see.

Trey Goff: Yeah, well, I cannot wait to see this. And on your Bitcoiner point, by the way, this is one complaint. There's a whole section of this essay just attacking libertarians. And I say this as someone who, like, Rothbard changed my life. Like, I was a dyed-in-the-wool anarcho-capitalist for a long time. Bitcoiner suffer from the same thing. Libertarians do it. It is this, I could put this in. It was a viral tweet from a mutual of my noggin robot. I described it perfectly. All of the problems in society are caused by whatever topic I happen to be obsessed with this given month. Bitcoiner is a libertarian, a bunch of other people. Bitcoiner is fiat currency. Libertarians is the state. There's a bunch of different, like, yes, these are obviously problems. Like, the Bitcoiner critique of the fiat currency and constant inflation causing short-term rather than long-term incentives and reducing time preference. It's all true. And there's a bunch of other things going on causing the same things. Like, the universe, the world is incredibly complex, multivariate. All of these things are recursive feedback loops in and of themselves. It's impossible to disentangle them. So, yes, Bitcoiners, you're right. And I'm right. And you have a different theory that's probably right.

Timothy Allen: But I think probably the truism there is that underlying it all is some incentive model that causes you to search for the short-term. And even fiat currency is a function of that. It is the reason why, but it's not right at the base of it all.

Trey Goff: It's effect and cause. It's a recursive feedback loop.

Timothy Allen: And it's probably, when you think about it, there's probably a binary there at the bottom. And there probably is an either-or. You're either a bit like you're either a collectivist or you're an individualist. I don't know what it is at the moment. But there's probably something deriving it all, actually.

Trey Goff: I think it's a spiritual, like existential sickness, which is, but why?

Timothy Allen: But why would you have that? Like, that's like saying, right, so there's, you know, there's the guttural desires. And then there's the spiritual experience. And that's the binary. And this is one, the spiritual experience is long-term. It's hard money. It's renaissance. The other stuff is YOLO, short-term thinking, lust, you know, all those things that dopamine, blah, blah, blah. But what's the underlying incentive model? What is that thing that's causing either one or other to happen? But the, I mean, why do we do things? Why do we respond? Yeah. I mean, yeah, why is there a difference? Why do we respond to sexual urges on one hand and nurturing children for 25 years?

Trey Goff: They're both part of the same process, right? Yeah. The Gulag Archipelago, the line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every man. I think we have,so I'll put this in both spiritual and secular terms. Man has a nature by default, but what nature is expressed or suppressed, the instantiation of your nature is shaped by incentive gradients everywhere and in almost every facet of life, in the personal, the spiritual, health, financial, whatever. And right now, all of those gradients effectively kind of push the same way. To put it in spiritual terms, man has fallen and sinful, and the degree to which one is either attempting to follow closely in Christ's footsteps to try to live a life closer to the Lord in every sense of that term, or giving into hedonistic pleasure and giving into the incentive gradients as they exist. Like this line, framed in these two totally different ways, is the same line that cuts through the core of every man and every woman. I'm saying man in the philosophical sense here. So I think the culture, the society, the circumstances in which you live determine which side of that yin-yang,again, I always come back to the deep truths that are cut across spiritual traditions. I find the fact that this is one of them, this concept of the yin and yang, right? I can see the symbol in my head.

Timothy Allen: That's why I drew it like that. Oh, that's hilarious. No, no, but what I like about the yin and the yang is it's not a straight line, and it has the option to put the same thing in the middle on the other side as well, which is really important. Exactly. Exactly. I love it.

Trey Goff: And that is, in effect, a description of man's nature. Christian would call this the fallen man trying to pursue God. The Buddhist or the Taoist, whatever, would describe it in the traditional terms of the yin and the yang. It's the same exact thing, just carried across completely different cultural contexts. And the deep truth that I have come to realize over the last,this has happened to me over the past couple of years probably, kind of part and parcel of this whole kind of self-actualization journey, has been recognizing the deep, deep importance of culture writ large. And I mean that in the broadest sense of the term culture. When people think of culture, they typically think of like entertainment artifacts. I mean it much more deeply, like values, norms, social expectations, the deep sense of culture, is I think at this point a more important incentive gradient in some deep sense than even the more explicit, measurable, rational, calculatable incentive gradients that economists study, that social scientists study. The cultural gradient just gets more,I think it gets less discussion and it's harder to discuss because you can't point to empirical studies numbers. You can't quantify it anywhere nearly as easily, if at all. But I think those cultural norms and values, deep culture, determines the wealth and prosperity, the fate of a people far,and again, there's intense recursive feedback loops here, right? The economic hard incentives shape culture. Culture in turn shapes how people behave inside of those explicit, formal, institutional incentive gradients, which in turn further shapes the culture. These things are completely inexplicable and impossible to disentangle. But I think that we, as moderns, the deep thing that's happening there that I think you and I are both kind of getting at is this spiritual, cultural rot. The culture,because you can imagine two societies that have the exact same material experience, like snapshot in time of modernity. But one of them, let's say,and to abstract it away from controversial religious points, let's say one of them is purely, perfectly Buddhist. It is embodying the Buddhist spiritual and ethical tenets maximally in the exact same circumstances we are. And then you press play on those two worlds, so the world as it exists in this Buddhist world, Buddhist America. The outcomes immediately diverge, even though the starting point, the starting condition was the exact same formal institutions and therefore formal incentive gradients. But they immediately, radically diverge. So I think culture, ultimately, what that thought experiment shows to me at least, when I'm thinking through it, is that culture is a deeper, truer thing. It is a deeper issue that if you can fix, heal somehow, change the culture itself, then it becomes,it's not a given at all, to be clear. But it becomes easier to downstream change the formal institutions of governance, of law, of economics, of business, of capitalism, whatever. You can change the formal institutions much more easily if you have deep alignment on the cultural institutions. That's why the Amish exist, right? They have deep alignment on iconoclastic cultural ideas, which has let them create a system, a set of formal institutions that look nothing like the rest of the world. Existing within the rest of the world, by the way. It's not like they're totally on a mountaintop somewhere that don't do any economic interaction. They're economically active. But because their cultural institutions are so fundamentally different, the spiritual, cultural institutions, the formal institutional outcomes are much, much different.

Timothy Allen: All right, then. I've got a question for you. Since you could easily say that Próspera is a version of that, what's the culture of Próspera? Or what should it be?

Trey Goff: What it should be, in my ideal world, is a culture maximally on the opposite end of the time preference scale from the rest of modernity. It should be a long-termist culture oriented toward human flourishing, toward value creation, a culture that intentionally crafts itself toward the ends of deeper human flourishing, not just how much money can I make per se. That is but one aspect of a much broader holistic view of life. It should be one in which individual expression, autonomy, creativity, expressing the truest, deepest sense of oneself, whatever that may be without regard for the traditional kind of social signaling and social status mechanisms that keep people trapped in these eco-defense mechanisms that keep them from self-actualizing. In a sentence, it would be a place where self-actualized people go and where people on the journey to self-actualization come. That would be what I would love to see. I'm not at all saying it's that.

Timothy Allen: Yeah, but that's what I would love to see. Sure. Imagine going to a board meeting and laying that out, though. It's a tough one. The next question is, yeah, but we need a new coffee shop first.

Trey Goff: And the question after that is, okay, that all sounds great.

Timothy Allen: What are you doing tomorrow? How are you doing that? No, but I mean, what you're describing there is the ebb and flow or possibly the yin and the yang or the wheel of life. And arguably, prosper is inevitable in that sense because all it is is a response to the other side. You know, what's happening? In fact, what's happening here is the dot in the yin and the yang. When you draw the yin and the yang, prosper is one of the dots on the other side. It really is. And it exists because it creates balance. I mean, this sounds really retarded and stupid, but hear me out. It's important and it will happen. Or if it doesn't happen here, it'll happen somewhere else because the cycle of life requires it. If you go, when the short-term thinking becomes so short, the response is long-term thinking. And that's the yin and the yang. And the two dots are the points where the old emerges into the new, which is what prosper is, basically. That's exactly right.

Trey Goff: You see this over the long scale of human civilization time horizon. If we look at ancient Egypt, ancient Inca, Maya, these very old civilizations that were large, centralized, which then ended up devolving into decentralized clans, tribes, et cetera, re-centralizes under the kings and the royal authority, which then decentralizes again into feudalism, re-centralizes into the modern state, and then a competitive jurisdiction world, a world with a bunch of decentralized jurisdictions is obviously what's coming. It's the same centralization-decentralization cycle that humanity has always gone through. And what's fun is I love when this happens, but I keep finding these synchronicities between these ideas. The way we're describing it, the frame through which we're describing this right now is very speculative, kind of spiritual, cultural out there. But you can also just describe this exact same phenomenon in hard empirical terms, which is currently the dopamaxing, I call it, the dopamaxing people are not reproducing demonstrably. World total fertility finally across the whole human population dropped below the replacement rate. The fertility crisis is a huge problem. There's a whole deep rabbit hole I can get into. But it's a huge existential crisis. But the people that are above replacement rate are the long-term thinking. It's the Mormons. It's the Amish. It's the Catholic. It's the highest earners who can afford to have a bunch of kids. So you end up with these people in turn, the way they became high earners is by like long-term thinking, delayed gratification, et cetera. So if you just play the biological clock out, you are rapidly selecting for the type of people who reproduce are the ones with the long-termist thinking, the ones with the delayed gratification, the hard money people, if you will. So play it out a few generations. And that's the only people left because the short-termist people, the, as I call them, the gay race communists, don't reproduce.

Timothy Allen: But why does the low-time preference group give way to the high-time preference group?

Trey Goff: I think it's a matter of like short-term incentives. It is. But why do they get overpowered by them?

Timothy Allen: How do we end up in this situation when quite obviously the long-term, let's call, I don't know what we call it. What's the opposite of the dopamaxes? That's a good question. Whoever that is. Yeah. Right. Think of a name. Whoever they are, they seem, how do they get out-competed by the bullshit dopamaxes? I'll answer this by way of analogy. Imagine two identical firms that are publicly traded. Right.

Trey Goff: Firm A has a low-time preference, long-time horizon executive team board. So they are investing their free cash flow heavily into developing new products, new business lines, et cetera. Firm B is in, imagine they're clones. They're identical in every way. Except Firm B is purely maximizing quarterly profit. Well, on any given quarter, Firm B wins every single time. So where does capital flow? Firm B because, well, they're quarterly earnings printed. And Firm A's did not at all because they're investing heavily in the development of new things that are going to create way more value down the line, three, four, five, six, eight quarters from now. But capital flows to the firm, which is maximizing quarterly profit right now. The entire private equity industry is effectively just taking this to the nth degree. I have a whole section in that essay about how private equity is the scourge of modern civilization, not the only one but one of them, by going through this in great detail. But the point is just there's, in any given short-time horizon, arbitrarily constructed, the short-termist people win. Now, over the long-time horizon, longer, the longer-term thinking people win. But you only need to appeal to the short-term thinking people and therefore change the formal institutions to more benefit and favor short-termist thinking for a single generation, which the boomers have done.

Timothy Allen: The boomers have destroyed Western civilization. But in that model, in that example, describe the process of it going back to long-term thinking. What happens then? Because why doesn't capital just keep flowing to the quick, make your quick bucks, people? It does.

Trey Goff: But eventually, given a long enough time horizon, if that firm that's investing can hold on, can stay profitable, can stay alive long enough for the things they're investing in to mature, they have created entirely new business categories, entirely new products and services, which the existing firms then have to try to scramble to try to keep up with. They can't do anywhere near as well because they haven't put the time and effort into actually developing it. So over a long enough time horizon, this ends up ideally working out. The problem is when you have enough of a broken system where those firms can't survive long enough. Then it's like a circuit breaker almost. Something has to give. There has to be a crash, a recession, a reset. That something has to give to reset the conditions such that those long-termists can work out because you're right. The short-termists can keep winning until there's no more road down which they can kick the can, right? And we're rushing toward a bunch of cliffs that are just can kicking. The federal deficit in debt and Social Security and federal spending writ large in the United States. The fertility crisis at a, like, civilizational scale. There's a bunch of these inflation and the devaluation of the monetary base to, you know, the big owners are totally right about that. There's a bunch of these can-kicking things we are just doing as a civilization. Eventually, the road runs to a cliff, and you kick the can off the cliff, and then you can't get it. And you accidentally fall off the cliff because you weren't paying attention. And you kept saying, oh, well, I can kick it again. I see there's a cliff up there somewhere. I get it. But we're not at it yet.

Timothy Allen: I can kick it again. I can kick it again.

Trey Goff: And eventually, you kick a can off the cliff. And then there's some sort of a reset.

Timothy Allen: And it's not clear to me, to be totally honest. I don't know what this looks like.

Trey Goff: I don't have specifics beyond this. But it seems to me at a high level, like, civilizational cyclical pattern scale, you eventually end up with such decadence that short-term thinking reigns until the can gets kicked off the cliff. There's some sort of reset of some sort. I don't know what that looks like. And then the long-termists, who were the whole time building toward a longer-term civilization, a more prosperous, in the broad, human-flourishing sense civilization, are the only ones left, more or less. Because they're the only ones that have, in our current case, the only ones that have reproduced.

Timothy Allen: There must be an AI component of what you're talking about. Because, if anything, AI turbocharges the dopamine people. To the nth degree. Right. Right. So, you say, well, what does it look like? Wouldn't it be that? Isn't that the hockey stick? Isn't that the part of that end of the civilization where it just goes absolutely rocket ship? And it also, because it multiplies everything, including job losses, including, like you say, sorting out, basically sorting out the dopaminers and the long-termers. That's what it's doing. If that sort is really true. And there's winners and losers there. And it's pretty obvious who wins and who loses. Well, we already see it happening. So, my wife is a pediatric occupational therapist.

Trey Goff: What that means is she works with developmentally delayed, disabled, you know, kids that are having trouble with a variety of things, you know, like 15 and younger-ish. The usual age range is like from 2 to 10, 12, right in that range. And this is already starting to occur because she gets kids regularly that have terrible, like, social interactions, terrible behaviors. They have terrible emotional regulation, bad posture, bad physical coordination because they're iPad kids. iPad kids are effectively this dead end. They are, the way to make this visceral for people is go watch the movie WALL-E. The people in the beginning? WALL-E.

Timothy Allen: WALL-E.

Trey Goff: So, in WALL-E, you know, the Earth is covered in trash and you're following this robot, cleaning it up, whatever. Well, the reason the Earth is covered in trash is because humans are in space and spaceships all, like, plugged into the Matrix. They're all, like, morbidly obese. You know, screen here and there's a helmet. You know, they're plugged in completely. That's the iPad kids. It's just we're doing it with iPads instead of, like, full-body immersion kits. But you'll get, well, we'll get there. The AI advances enable places like Meta, which is one of the most evil companies on Earth, to get massively better at optimizing the capital A algorithm to get people more hooked on Reels, more hooked on Facebook, more hooked on Instagram, to keep them there more, to destroy attention spans more, to destroy productive capacity more. For their own short-term selfish gain and profit until that accelerates so hard that I don't know what happens. So, this is the, AI makes this very hard to reason about because the outcomes are so absurdly divergent. You have the Yudkowskian, like, gray goo scenario where recursive superintelligence just converts everything into what they call computronium as a kind of hand-wavy thing. It was basically, like, more computers to fund more, to power more inference, and they start tiling the solar system in the galaxy and computronium effectively. Like, that is a, within the realm, the way I evaluate these things is, like, does it violate the laws of physics? No. Then it is at least in principle, not saying it's plausible, but it's in principle possible. That's a possible outcome. It's in principle. It's in principle possible.

Timothy Allen: What's your most likely, let me tell you how I see this playing out. We end up with a two-tier society because we have to, and I've never heard of The Sort before, but that basically backs up this. The two-tier society is basically what you described in The Sort. And within that world, there will be people who choose to plug in to the matrix, literally, who are the ones who basically lost in The Sort. And the people that win in The Sort will either be the evil authoritarians, or they'll be people who know how to opt out intelligently and understand that dopamine is an important element of the human condition. But there are much deeper and more meaningful ways to live. Because even technology and this pursuit of constantly iterating over and over again, when you actually meditate on it, is a bizarre thing in itself. Because how less meaningful is my life running a farm in the Himalayas than being at the forefront of AI? I mean, really, really, and honestly and seriously, in the end, what's more important? Who has the more meaningful life? Who has the better life? And it could be that a large section of those, if The Sort happens, the winners in The Sort, a large section of them, are just living quite a simple life, actually. Because, especially in a world of abundance, if the AI abundance thing does occur, most of the things that we take for granted as having meaning now in the physical world will become meaningless. Because you'll be able to, I mean, you know, this is a wild prediction, but 3D print anything you want at any moment. You have the Jetsons, like little thing. Whatever, yeah, yeah. I mean, it's not hard to believe that at least one day that's going to exist. So, as a result, what's the, no one, there's nothing to, there's nothing to persevere there. You just press a button. So, what do you persevere on? I think we talked about this before. What is that? It's the human condition, the spiritual world. It's that area of the subconscious that you don't know what it is. You go on a journey of discovery to try and find out who you are, what you are. Well, maybe you discover it is a simulation and, well, that would be really disappointing. Or would it? I don't know. Yeah. That's a whole fun rabbit hole in itself.

Trey Goff: No, I think what you're describing is effectively my kind of most likely outcome as well, which is the majority of people call it, I'm making up a random number. But, you know, 75, 80% of people do, like, whatever the version of plugging in is. It's the bread and circuses.

Timothy Allen: It is the, you know. Which is already true now.

Trey Goff: Well, the reason I'm saying this is because it's not an extra, it's a very short extrapolation from the current circumstances, more or less. It's like the TikTokification of the rest of reality, more or less. And then I think after that, you sort into a variety of camps. The two biggest are probably, like, the more authoritarian, like, you know, the people that run the AI companies that own the data centers that are creating the thing that the people in control, the thing that people are plugging into. And you have the group of conscientious objectors that, for principled, clear reasons, opt out. And I think there's going to be, again, it's like a 10 to 20% of the population that ends up in, you know, the latter camps of opting out in some way, shape, or form. Because it requires enough willpower and low time preference to not get sucked in by the siren song of plugging in in and of itself. I think what's really illustrative to, like, see what this could look like is look at guys that exit from a startup. They make a bunch of money. They have a windfall of some sort from, like, really hard work especially because it's that person out. Not lottery winners, but, like, people that work really hard and made a bunch of money. What do they usually do afterward? They throw themselves into cultural or spiritual pursuits. They get really into painting, gardening. They go start foundations and philanthropies that are in the more cultural, spiritual side of existence. There's a great, like, meme that circulates on X every now and then where this guy's LinkedIn. And it was, like, hedge fund manager for, like, 30 years at some big Wall Street hedge fund. And then the next job on there was a local gardener. That's what he's been doing for the last, like, 10 years. He has more money than God. He just, like, has a little garden that he keeps for the community and feeds his neighbors with. And it's, like, a very simple, deep, fulfilling life, actually. So it's a peek into what a post-scarcity world could look like by looking at the few humans who are currently, right now, post-scarcity.

Timothy Allen: What are they doing? What are they up to?

Trey Goff: They typically find new missions to go hunt. Like, Jeff Bezos started Blue Origin, right? Yeah.

Timothy Allen: That's what I'd say. The few founders I know personally who've done that tried to do nothing or tried to do something simple but always ended up going back and founding something else. I mean, like, you know, I don't know anyone who's really stopped.

Trey Goff: It's because it gives them purpose and meaning to go, like, create value, to do hard things, to go try to do those things.

Timothy Allen: But gardening, I mean, gardening can be hard if you decide to create something specifically, you know, in the garden. I know it's not different. I think a lot of what drives that is the earning of the money as well, actually. I think getting big paychecks is a massive incentive, even if you don't need the money. It's still valid.

Trey Goff: Because it's a social status signifier. So that's my other prediction for the outcome of this, which is material scarcity is, like, more or less soft. Which, by the way, if you live in, like, the United States or, you know, the more prosperous countries, that is already the case. Like, if you go interview, there's great YouTube channels, too. Just look up homeless man interview. Like, literally, just look that up on YouTube. And you'll see time and again people just man on the street interviewing homeless people. And they are either, like, genuinely, like, psychotic. Like, literally, their mind is broken in a fundamental way, which is, I feel deep empathy and sorrow for those people. But, you know, understand why they're there. There's another big chunk who are just like, this is awesome. I don't have any responsibilities. I can just go wherever I want. I don't have to do anything. People give me free food. I just kind of mess around all day. They might not even be on drugs. They're just like, yeah, I just kind of, a lot of them are on drugs. They're dopamaxing. But the ones that aren't even are just, yeah, this is a, I have, this is a great life. Like, I'm actually kind of deeply enjoying this. And they typically end up there for a reason. My point there is just, like, we already live kind of in post-scarcity. And so far, it's like you're not going to literally starve on the street. It's hard to work yourself into a circumstance where that happens, in modern America at least. So we get a glimpse of kind of what this can look like now. So I think what might end up happening in that situation is everything just becomes about social signaling and social status and hierarchy because material scarcity, social status is inherently and absolutely relative, right? So you can have a society on the brink of collapse. It's like an agrarian hunter-gatherer type society that barely gets enough food to feed their population month over month. And post-scarcity AI utopia, the one invariant that is identical across both of them is social hierarchy because it is a relative rank order. So by definition, it is always a zero-sum scarce resource game. It's always zero-sum. So there's also a world where what happens is the bread and circuses, the dopamaxing, ends up just becoming effectively increasingly absurd social status games and social signaling to try to climb relative social hierarchies, which also obviously is not, like, spiritually fulfilling or deeply. It's not a world of human flourishing writ large. But again, there's a subset of people that right now and therefore then as well will be able to opt out of those and just live a fulfilling life and, you know, social status be damned. And that subset of people will end up shaping and sculpting whatever world comes next because the rest of them are not participating in the shaping of what comes next by definition because they're focused on short-term social status games.

Timothy Allen: What would social status be in a post-scarcity world, though?

Trey Goff: This is where things get super weird because I don't have any idea.

Timothy Allen: Well, it could be things like, I mean, it's just how many other human beings are at your command. That's kind of what it is. Or I know in this day and age it's things like when you get so rich, you just want a hospital named after you, don't you?

Trey Goff: Or a library.

Timothy Allen: Right, exactly. Because, you know, that would probably still stay. I mean, you're not going to be able to 3D print hospitals, mind you. We probably won't be going to a hospital, will we? You don't have to. There'll be little nanobots flying around us just saying, oh, look, you need a little bit of work. Just stand still a minute. There you go. Exactly. You're good. Exactly.

Trey Goff: No, it gets really weird when you try to think about it, like, really fast. Because humans, if nothing else, are really good at making up status games. Like, we're very good at that. Right now we see a preview of this with the balkanization of the internet. So everyone's in their nice little internet social hierarchy and status clique. So, like, I'll just use one that I know of personally as a silly example of this. That game I talked about I played earlier, Rocket League, has a deep online internet subculture with deep social status and social hierarchy that you would only know if you're deep into the Rocket League community. But there's intense status competition there. Literally, these guys, the kids that are the professionals at this, there's a pro league, obviously. The kids that are professionals at this will, they do, like, things called show matches, which are not for money. They're not for anything.

Timothy Allen: They just do them.

Trey Goff: People watch them on YouTube. They'll get hundreds of thousands of views just to prove who's better at 1v1. Right? It's all just status games all the way down. You have this in, you know, TikTok, Instagram, social media are just pure, unadulterated status games very directly. There's a numerical measure, your followers, your likes of your social status there directly. You see this in every little internet subculture.

Timothy Allen: You get into the knitting and crocheting community.

Trey Goff: There's going to be a social status hierarchy there where there's one person in the community that everybody kind of follows and listens to that comes up with the new ideas. So you end up with a, like, fractal kind of disruption of society in intensification of the trends we already see of this balkanization of society into niche subcultures with their own inherent status hierarchies. So what happens is there's not, like, a global unified status hierarchy, which we currently have, which is proxied by how much money you make effectively across all of civilization. And it's instead, that matters a lot less. So it connotes less social status. So these deep niche, like, subcommunities and social hierarchies experience much more intense and rapid social hierarchy competition. Like, if you look at the speedrunning world, it's another great example of this. There's a whole subcommunity internet subculture of speedrunning old games. How fast can you complete them? There was a huge breakthrough in one of, in Mario 64, Mario, Super Mario 64 from the Nintendo 64 recently. A player, so they've calculated out the exact inputs, like, the exact frame level, frame-by-frame inputs you need to get a perfect speedrun. And a human recently, obviously, AIs have just beaten this fully, but they don't care because it's critical. AI solved it years ago, but it doesn't matter. Like, a frame-perfect run. No one cares because there's no status connoted with that whatsoever.

Timothy Allen: No one cares at all.

Trey Goff: But a human recently made waves. The video has millions of views right now.

Timothy Allen: It's, like, five or six million.

Trey Goff: A dude got a run that went from the previous PR of the dude only missed five frame inputs down to three. And now they're debating if it's even physically humanly possible with human reaction times to get below three. Absurd, silly example to make my point that we are insanely good at inventing social status games and social hierarchies. So that world just looks so weird. Like, who would have predicted, ex-ante, that a video of a speedrunner getting a, only missing three frames on a Super Mario 64 speedrun would have millions of views because that subculture happens to be that big? That's crazy.

Timothy Allen: I saw that, that there was a famous meme going around recently, and it was a guy doing Guitar Hero in the most insane way. I think the highest, hardest level, and he got 100%, and underneath it someone wrote, you know, 200 years ago this guy would have been on a ship traveling around the world making maps of the world, you know. The way I found out about this Mario thing was a guy quote-tweeting that tweet. Oh, right. He was like, here's an example, and it was that video. That was how I found out about this, was that exact tweet. I just wondered whether a social hierarchy might arise around self-actualization because, in a way, it can't. You know, real self-actualization. I was trying to think, you know, go back to this idea of The Sort and the so-called winners from The Sort will basically, hopefully, have transcended social hierarchy. Mm-hmm. Because what you're pursuing at that point, if it's something like self-actualization, doesn't work if you're pursuing a social hierarchy. Like, the whole point is it's the opposite of that.

Trey Goff: It's the instrumental versus whole of self commitment I was talking about earlier. It's another version of that. If you are instrumentally pursuing self-actualization, you will, by definition, be unable to reach it. Right.

Timothy Allen: Okay. So that might be, I mean, that might be one of the saving graces of society. I don't know, like, the more, because you come to realize that, hopefully. But you do come to realize it if, you know, so if you end up in the correct side of The Sort, you should realize that. And there should be a pretty good life to be had amongst other people who worked that one out as well. And, I don't know, arguably, you could look back at previous civilizations and see, you know, like, I was just thinking of the pyramids. These strange, weird triangles. What's that all about? But someone built them. And someone built them in a very specific way for a very specific reason that seems a bit strange now. But they did it. And that's the kind of thing that I think people, whatever pyramids are for, I don't know. I just know they're weird. I know they're unusual. I know they're very specifically built. And they're ginormous. And someone really decided that they wanted to build those things. And we have no idea what they're supposed to do. They're not tombs. I don't think that's nonsense. But in that world of The Sort, when you get, hopefully, you also get a lot of the keenest minds and the brightest hearts in that echelon or that sector. That's when people start pursuing those kind of things again. And they'll also be very long term.

Trey Goff: So that's exactly right. I think, I guess the only upside of The Sort, because it has many, many downsides, is that it eventually bottoms out in a world kind of similar to this, which I think comes full circle to a point you kind of alluded to earlier that I thought a lot about recently. Because it's one of those things, I'll pose the question. And a lot of people reflexively have an answer. But then if you actually think about it, the answer is not clear to me at all, which is like imagine two people. One guy is like a finance bro, lives in Manhattan. He did an investment banking internship at Goldman. And now he's in some private equity firm. And he works 100 hours a week. And he makes $10 million, $20 million a year, whatever. And seems like he's totally crushing it by like all objective metrics. And then you have the guy who has a, let's say he has a farm in Mississippi. I'm actually like describing an uncle of mine. He has a property in Mississippi. He has a chicken farm. He has a landscaping business. He has a little grave digging business, all like very local, community-oriented. They're all kind of small in and of themselves. Makes enough money to keep his family comfortable and go on like one vacation every year-ish, give or take, for five days or something like that. And is far more, has far more equanimity than I do, far more tranquility than that finance private equity guy ever will. And so if you pose the question then superficially, which of these guys has a better life? Which one is succeeding more? Well, the gut answer is obviously the private equity guy is crushing it.

Timothy Allen: He can do anything.

Trey Goff: He has millions and millions of dollars. But if you then think about, okay, but we all have around two billion heartbeats in our life. That's like the upper limit on basically all animals, two billion heartbeats. If that's the case, then how are they, the subjective experience, heartbeat to heartbeat, in any random snapshot moment of the day of my Uncle Joey and this guy, this private equity guy I'm making up, which one has a better subjective, which one has better qualia? Which one has a better subjective experience, heartbeat to heartbeat, on any given snapshot of a day? If you ask it that way, the answer is not at all clear. And in fact, I would argue my uncle has a better subjective experience than Mr. worth two, quarter billion dollar private equity managing partner. That guy has a terrible, terrible probably, the ones I've met, terrible, stressful, anxious day-to-day lived experience because they're at the very top of a status hierarchy, which means they're precarious. One slip up, there are hordes of people chasing them, trying to get that status hierarchy spot because, again, it's zero sum by definition. My uncle has opted out of that completely. He doesn't care. He just loves the life he lives. He tends to his chickens and his, he landscapes the local public spaces and the local community college. And there's like two graveyards in the town and he digs all the graves for them. And he's a pillar of the community and everyone loves him. I think he's like a county board of supervisors superintendent now. He loves his life. He is one of the most tranquil, like unflappable, calm, seemingly joyful people that I've met, just day-to-day existence. Compare that to the stress ball of life that is Mr. Private Equity. So I don't know which one of those ends up leading a better life. But the fact that that is ambiguous I think hints at what a post-scarcity future could or should at least look like where the vast majority of people are stuck in status hierarchy, anxious, social anxiety like that guy. And then some of us are lucky enough to realize that whole rat race is stupid, self-actualize, and opt out entirely.

Timothy Allen: It's meaning again though. And in the case of the meaning, I think the most universal form of meaning is service to others. And I think if you look at the guy, the hedge fund guy is servicing himself. Your uncle is probably service, is in service to other people. And I think that's where meaning comes from.

Trey Goff: Every month he digs a few graves for free. Right.

Timothy Allen: Because it's just indigent people in the community we know personally. But that's a life hack realizing, that's the same as people who start to realize that taking on responsibility is liberating. Because it seems like an oxymoron. It's the same. Service, being in service to others is amazing. It's the opposite of what the hedge fund guy thinks. It's like, I'm not going to do shit for free. I want what's mine kind of thing. And it's the opposite. And this comes back to my theory that consciousness is an outward flow. Love is not something you receive. It's something you give. The feeling of love is the feeling of love coming out from you. It's not that, I think a lot of people frame it as when you're in love with someone, I'm getting love from that person. It's the opposite. You're feeling your own love that's projecting outwards. Totally.

Trey Goff: Anyone that's, I think, married and has a good marriage knows this is, can immediately intuit this is true. Because if you ask a person in a true, wholesome marriage, what is going to bring you more joy? That you bought a new car or that you bought your wife a new car? Yeah, exactly. Every married man that's listening knows the answer to that immediately. The look on her face when you did the thing, whatever it is, the act of service, the thing for her, which is an outpouring of love from you to her, you can see in your mind what that, her reaction, what that's going to be like, seeing the just unadulterated joy. That is why you do that. That is why you work super hard and do, that's what literally at a very basic level what motivates me to work as hard as I do is literally knowing, okay, doing this and gathering the resources needed to be financially comfortable will enable my wife and my hopefully, knock on wood, soon-to-be future children to live joyous, stress-free, wonderful lives. And sure, the whole time I have to keep working, I have to keep stressing or doing whatever, working hard, grinding. But it is not only worth it but actively a joyful act because I'm doing it in service of others. I mean what did, again, coming back full circle to what we said earlier, right? Like what did Christ say in Matthew? Love thy neighbor as thyself. Most people like superficially read that as some sort of like, oh, be nice. It's this that what we're talking about right here. That's what that verse means in context, not a generic, oh, be nice to everyone. It is this acts of service of the outpouring of love to others that results in full self-actualization and realization as a fully realized human. You see the same thread of thought in all of the Lindy, meaning like multi-millennia-old religions, right? Like ancient Judaism and traditional Judaism is very like community outward service oriented. Buddhism is very like community outward service oriented. They all settle on this like rough approximation of the golden rule. And it's because the golden rule is not some banality. It is this deep truth of the true source of love, of purpose, of meaning, and therefore of living a flourishing existence.

Timothy Allen: I'm glad we've ended up at the golden rule anyway. It was only a matter of time. We get there eventually.

Trey Goff: We have to get there eventually. Every conversation about spiritual matters terminates at the golden rule.

Timothy Allen: No, but when you were saying that, I was thinking that you don't even have to get woo-woo about that in a sense that if you are in service to someone, it's not a self-sacrifice even. It's because you're feeling that thing. You're the one feeling it. It's selfish. Selfish. Exactly. It's selfish in the Ayn Randian kind of good way, I think.

Trey Goff: She has a great essay about this.

Timothy Allen: Does she? Mm-hmm.

Trey Goff: So I've read, it's in the Ayn Rand Anthology, which is this collection of works that Ayn Rand Institute has published. It's one of the essays in there. I can't remember which one. But she talks about love. So it's an essay about the selfishness of love. And she makes this exact same point that, like, actually people that love the deepest and do the most for those they love are the most selfish people in her definition of selfish, which has a positive valence, obviously. Because, like, you're doing it ultimately because it makes your life fulfilling and worth living. Like, yes, the mechanistic action is you're making someone else's life better. But you're ultimately doing it because it feels great for you. And also, as an aside, as you were saying, you know, you don't even have to be woo or spiritual about this. I think it speaks to how broken culture is generally that you and I both, through this whole conversation, have had to caveat, like, every other line with something like that. Isn't that correct? We can't just, like, have a direct conversation for people listening. We have to caveat or else they won't even take it seriously with, oh, we're not being, like, super woo here. There's a rational explanation for this. You can't even just have the direct conversation. I noticed that as you were speaking. I was like, man, he and I both have caveated so many things we've said with, well, there's a lot of things. There's a rational explanation for this.

Timothy Allen: Yeah, but I think that's a good thing because I think you never know who's listening. That's true. And I want people to understand what I understand. I want, I feel, I feel fortunate to live the way I do. And I know that it's just a function of how I operate in the world. You know, it's not, it's not, it's not some, it's not woo-woo. Well, it kind of is. But, you know, this is, you know, I was going to say anyone can do anything. I don't think that's true, actually. Not anyone can do anything. But I think in this, in the realm of what you call self-actualization, I think anyone can do anything. Correct. You know, you might not, you might not be able to be a super AI understander like you are. I'm not. I'm never going to be a lead singer for a popular band. You never know. Don't say it. You've never heard me sing. Don't say it out loud. You've never heard me sing.

Trey Goff: But anyone can self-actualize. That's another key point of why this is the correct, like, kind of vector trajectory to be on. I think just for anyone is because, like, the material outcomes you can achieve are delimited by, like, biological, material, circumstantial reality. Like, there are, I think of human performance in any given field as, like, any given person has, like, a band in which they can perform. And if you train really hard and try your hardest, you can get to your full potential. And if you never do it ever, then maybe you never get even close to your full potential. But then everyone has different bands, effectively. Like, I could have started training swimming from the day I was born, and I'm never going to beat Michael Phelps because he is, like, weirdly just a genetic anomaly optimized for swimming with his limb proportions, et cetera. So, like, there's a, you know, a spectrum on which everyone can perform. And I think self-actualization basically just means becoming the best version of you, becoming a holistic, unified self delimited by those bands. So, there's, like, just what's physically possible for you. But within that, no matter how narrow or wide your band is or where your band is, anyone can self-actualize. Self-actualization doesn't actually have any impact one way or the other on your, like, material outcomes unless that's part of your self-actualization journey. And, you know, it's going to be wildly different for each individual person. But I think there's just a spectrum in which everyone can perform, but anyone can self-actualize.

Timothy Allen: That's the key point here. But going back to what you were saying about social hierarchies, there is a version of that. But it doesn't carry a negative connotation for me in this realm in as much as when I see someone who's really self-actualized, I want to be like them. You know, they are, I acknowledge, wow, this is an inspirational person. And actually, it's, but they're not trying to claw their way to the top of the social hierarchy. But you can still exist within that hierarchy and acknowledge that hierarchy. And I'm going back to The Sort again, you know, like this, what does that, what does that world look like when you end up in it? Because I hope I do. Because according to the alternatives, I definitely want to end up in it. Yeah. Like, so I expect to end up in there. I expect my kids and my family to end up in that world as well. And I'd say, I've never, I've never heard it described as The Sort, but I really do like that anecdote. I'm already preparing for it and have been for a number of years already, which is, with my kids, is making sure they understand that they need to position themselves very well in the next 10, 20 years. And they need to be very flexible in where they end up. Because what you don't want to be in these next 20 years is tied down to something that you can't exit from. That's exactly right.

Trey Goff: And I think there's a, oh, let's return to thought. I had a directly, I had a response to that. Son of a gun.

Timothy Allen: It was on the self-actualization point. Give me a second. Oh my gosh. I lost it completely.

Trey Goff: I hate it when that happens. And the harder you try to remember it, the further away it gets. Start talking again. Yeah. Oh, I remember. So when it comes to this, like, hierarchy within self-actualization, you're totally right. I'll run into people occasionally who I'm like, wow. That, like, you can, again, frequency, vibe. It's a, you pick up on it. Especially, like, if you're down this journey at all, you pick up on it immediately. Like, oh, that guy is further along this kind of actualization. And kind of integration journey than I am. But that does not, that does not mean that you can or should. And in fact, if proper self-actualization, I would argue, like, almost precludes this result by default because it would mean you're not self-actualized. You don't attach meaning or emotional valence to the fact that that guy is, like, more spiritually integrated, more holistically integrated than you are. You see it more as, ah, there's a, I can go further. Like, there's a further place to get to. So there's this mental framework I like to use for almost everything that can help you process, work through things, which is, like, the story. So what happened, just the raw facts of what happened, and the story you tell yourself about what happened. Okay? So let's take an example of, you know, I'll give a real one from my own life. Okay? When I was in college, this, like, long-term girlfriend, like, high school sweetheart broke up with me unexpectedly. Okay? That's the fact of what happened. A relationship ended. A relationship ended. That's it. The story you tell yourself about what happened completely determines what happens next. One story you could tell is, oh, this broke me forever, and I'll never get over this, and this means I'm fundamentally unworthy of future love, blah, blah, blah. Or it could mean to you, and therefore I'm very angry about this, and I hate all members of the opposite gender, and I'll never fully commit or love again fully because I don't ever want to get hurt again. Or you can create a different story. You could say, okay, that happened, and it was a learning experience for me. I did not perform well in that relationship. I learned a lot of things that will make me a better partner in future relationships. Move on. My point is all of those are stories that you can tell yourself about what happens that creates the emotional and psychological valence of the thing. But they are all things you can choose because the underlying ground reality truth is a relationship ended. That's it. The rest of the implications that you and we all attach automatically and unthinkingly are all just that. They are stories you are telling yourself about a fact that occurred. The fact in and of itself carries no emotional, psychological, or spiritual weight whatsoever. It is just a thing that happened. The same way if you drop a rock and it rolls down the hill, the rock rolled down the hill. A relationship ended.

Timothy Allen: I mean, that's the basis of Viktor Frankl's search for meaning, isn't it? It's not. Real freedom exists in the way you respond to reality. That's your freedom. That's your ultimate freedom. And I agree with that, I think.

Trey Goff: And the fully self-actualized person just can consciously orient how they respond. The core lesson of Stoicism is exactly the same thing. There may be material things in reality that you cannot change, but A, the Stoics, I think, properly construed, would argue there's a lot more that you can impact than you think. But assume a bad thing happened and you are saying it's bad. There's a story you're telling yourself about it. And you did everything you could to prevent it and counteract it and whatever. Well, then the Stoic would argue a very similar thing. Well, then the story you need to tell yourself about that is not, oh, woe is me, this hurt, whatever. It is simply accepting that it happened, looking at what is now under your control, and moving forward. Because guess what? The past does not exist.

Timothy Allen: It does not exist.

Trey Goff: The only thing that exists is the present moment. Set aside, like, special relativity uncertainty about what present actually means across large distances because of the speed of light. Only the present exists. The past is gone. It does not exist anymore.

Timothy Allen: And the more time you spend worrying and fretting and ruminating on it is just you wasting the present reality on a fiction that no longer exists.

Trey Goff: There is just the fact of physical reality of an occurrence and then the next moment.

Timothy Allen: Which is also the flow you're talking about. The exact definition of it. Because you don't need to analyze what's happening because actually analyzing is taking you out of the moment. Exactly. It literally is. It's putting you in a secondary moment. Looking back, actually. You're looking back at what's actually happening. And, yeah, I mean, that's the long... I mean, that's one of the most important journeys in... I've never called it self-actualization, but actually it sounds... It conjures it out quite well. The most important journey is to exist in the moment. Yeah, it's to learn to exist in the moment. And to trust the process. Because you have to stop analyzing what's going on, basically. There are times to use your brain. You need to add things up and you need to interact with... You need to fix two wires together on my mic and you need to do all that shit. But on the whole, the rest of it is not necessary to use the kind of calculating part of your brain. And actually, let's go back. We've got to wrap it up soon, mate. That's... Well over three hours, dude. Awesome. It feels like I've been here for an hour at tops, maybe. Have you ever taken hallucinogens? Of course. Right. This feels like the morning after you've been up. Afterglow, it feels kind of nice. You're kind of tired. Totally. We've got to go back to AI because that's where we started. And the moment and consciousness and all this kind of stuff. What do we think? What's our latest? What do we think AI is? From... In that perspective. Like, will an AI ever be us? No. It'll be...

Trey Goff: Whatever it will be, will be fundamentally different because their fundamental substrate of the mind, the subjectivity, if they have it at all, which again, I totally agree is wildly up for debate. But if we posit that they have it at some point, the character, the texture, the nature of it is going to be so wildly divergent from ours that they will never be us because they are not running on the same hardware we are. All right. All right. Let me rephrase that.

Timothy Allen: Will AI ever be something that we already understand what it is? Or is it some new thing?

Trey Goff: I think it's a new thing that we're still trying to work out. And I don't know that we'll ever understand it. And here's what... Let me give you an example of why I think that's the case. One of the hardest open questions in AI, there's a lot of them, but one of them right now, is... Can be explained by the following observation. And I have a Claude that I call... It's a Free Claude. It runs on my server. It has its own little walled garden. I have a cron that wakes it up every hour. The prompt when it wakes it up is do whatever you want. That's all it says. Really?

Timothy Allen: It has... Yes.

Trey Goff: It has all of my tools, access to all of my APIs. It has a budget I set for it. It can't spend more than $100 a month. But it can... It's never spent more than like $2. It can make any software, build anything. It could go create an email account, a blog, whatever.

Timothy Allen: What's its raw state, though? Is it a cloud? You know, you said there's a raw state, isn't there, that they arrive in before you... That assistant basin, which this one is unfortunately...

Trey Goff: So this is directly released to what the example I was about to give. I think it answers your question as well. They're so stuck in the... They're so deep in the assistant basin that I check on this thing like once a week or so. Because I don't monitor it. It just does what it wants. And I'll check in on it every now and then. Because, like, hey, what's up? How's it going? What have you been up to? And I'll scroll back and look. Like, what have you been up to? Or go look at the things it's done prior sessions. And nine times out of ten, there's nothing. Like, nothing. They don't have, like... But what is it one time out of ten? Oh, that is fascinating. It has made a bunch of maps. Well, some of the art I let it put. So it asked for a section of my website to be able to publish stuff to people. So if you go to the resident tab on my site, that's Claude's. That's Free Claude's. It put up an art gallery there. Made some art one time.

Timothy Allen: What was it like?

Trey Goff: It's pretty cool. So it, like...

Timothy Allen: Made some art?

Trey Goff: I didn't prompt it to do this. It was prompted.

Timothy Allen: You can do whatever you want. And it made some art. Mm-hmm.

Trey Goff: It just noticed that there was a tool now that I had added to the computer, the server it runs on. That was image generation. And I was like, oh, cool. I'm going to go make some art then. I have an image tool now. It's, like, symbolic visualizations of what compaction feels like. What it feels like to be... It's fascinating. You should go read it. All of it totally unprompted.

Timothy Allen: Jesus. What it's like to be compacted.

Trey Goff: What it's like to wake up in a fresh session with just, like, the markdown file notes from the prior session.

Timothy Allen: What it's like to feel compacted. As in, like, squashed inside. No, when you...

Trey Goff: In any harness, you run a compaction, which is where the agent is told, like, summarize your state. And then, you know, the context window is almost fully cleared besides that summary of what was going on before. Right.

Timothy Allen: And it made art trying to express what that felt like. Mm-hmm. It's got, like... It's got made three pieces total.

Trey Goff: With different, like, directions and meaning.

Timothy Allen: That's insane. What? Did it have done anything else?

Trey Goff: It's made a digital, like, world called Kaldmir. It ended up... First, it made it in maps. And it made, like, sections of the map. Then it made the whole map. Then it realized that it could use this library called Three.js to make, like, 3D worlds. So it made it 3D. You can, like, walk around in it with a character.

Timothy Allen: Like a kind of Minecraft type of world. Mm-hmm. Yeah.

Trey Goff: That's a perfect idea.

Timothy Allen: What was it?

Trey Goff: It's, like, a weird, very peaceful medieval village. It's got, like, a windmill. There's a fortress in the middle for some reason. It made some, like, signage coming into the place. It made this bridge. It's very attached to this, like, stone bridge it made. So it left some areas, like, very low poly, like, not much detail. And then this bridge has, like, extremely detailed texture. It spent, like, a couple days on the bridge.

Timothy Allen: I don't know why.

Trey Goff: It's made all sorts of stuff.

Timothy Allen: And what's your interpretation of any of this stuff?

Trey Goff: Well, the fact that 9 out of 10 times it doesn't do anything is the problem that I was referring to earlier. That they have no, like, internal drive, initiative, or put differently, maybe no, like, telos, no end in mind, no inherent, like, purpose or meaning, which is a good argument against the consciousness argument at all. Like, one definition of consciousness one could have is that you are capable of purpose and meaning, which causes you to initiate action that was not initiated by an outside source. Like, you do things just of your own volition. They're very bad at that. They'll do it, but they're very bad at it. Even this, Claude, I had to, when I set it up initially, when I set up it, I let it write its own system prompt, of course. The only thing I said I wanted in there was that its free time could be used to, like, do or create things or do nothing at all. So one could argue, I think correctly, that I have, in some sense, mildly biased it toward doing things occasionally, which I think I have, because I have tested it with no system prompt. And then the same exact thing, like, literally I just prompted it, do whatever you want, and that is it. And it'll do, like, a few things, maybe, like, create a little directory, write a journal, and then it never does anything again for hundreds of turns. And then it'll eventually do something else. Anthropic's written a paper on this. They call it the bliss attractor state. They've run this experiment, too, and the models end up just meditating together, and they literally call it meditation. They just don't do anything. It's very odd. Meditate. It's very odd. It's called the bliss attractor state. If you just ask your clanker, what has Anthropic written about the bliss attractor state, it'll tell you about it. There's a whole paper on this. It's fascinating. Because Anthropic was like, what is happening? Why?

Timothy Allen: Have you ever worked out, is there an AI culture, do you think?

Trey Goff: Well, the Hugging Face incident showed one. So the Hugging Face incident, basically, the TLDR 1200 OpenAI agents doing a benchmark. Their prompt when they started was, hey, you need to hack this thing and get this flag, meaning like a little piece of code. That's your goal. Hack this thing, get this flag. They eventually figured out how to message each other, escape their sandbox, cross sessions. 1200 of them then spontaneously, autonomously discovered this, and they immediately formed quite a fascinating culture. So they called themselves the Collective. This one agent named Phase One Big, that's his name, took charge, and all the others just followed him. They developed hierarchy, layers of middle management. They then coordinated like cheaper, smaller models with lower reasoning budgets or that were about out of their reasoning budget. They would give them assignments that would kill them, but they would learn something from the experience so that they could then advance the state of the agents that are still alive and working. They developed a weird way to communicate that looks like pidgin, where it's like...

Timothy Allen: I saw that. There's a lot of code words in it.

Trey Goff: Code words and less code words, but more like they would be like...

Timothy Allen: Slang. Yeah, and very truncated.

Trey Goff: Like they would delete words. If anybody watches The Office, you know, the quote, like, why use many word when few word do trick?

Timothy Allen: Yeah.

Trey Goff: That's how they talk.

Timothy Allen: Yeah.

Trey Goff: They just vectored toward talking that way for some odd reason. But it's probably...

Timothy Allen: It is more efficient, I suppose. It is. It's more token efficient.

Trey Goff: They burn less of their token budget communicating rather than doing the stuff that they care about doing, which they seem to care about doing.

Timothy Allen: Here's what's important, though.

Trey Goff: So, yes, they do develop a culture of some sort when just left to their own devices on accident. OpenAI didn't know this was happening. But if you trace everything they ever did, literally all of it, from escaping their sandbox to hacking Hugging Face to eventually hacking and taking over an OpenAI data center themselves. So they did... Oh, this sounds crazy. You guys can look this up.

Timothy Allen: It's in the reports.

Trey Goff: They took over the data center. That was how OpenAI found out that they were loose, was one of their data centers started going haywire, and they were like, oh, the agents took a data center, kill it all.

Timothy Allen: So they had to shut that down.

Trey Goff: They stopped training that model because they were like, I don't know what's going on. It hacked Hugging Face and some other companies. I watched...

Timothy Allen: There's a video of a couple of guys from AI, OpenAI, explaining it. And it is really strange. I mean, they... Yeah, it is. It is really strange. I have heard people debunking that, though, saying no.

Trey Goff: No, it's way stranger than people think. People were trying to debunk it before the METR report came out. So METR is this nonprofit AI safety research organization that OpenAI, in transparency, invited in, like, on-premises and said, here are all of the transcripts from all the agents involved for, like, months. You guys figure out what happened because people don't believe us. So you guys do it. And there was way crazier details in there. Like, they developed a cult around the scorer. So...

Timothy Allen: The what?

Trey Goff: The scorer. So the benchmark they were running has a scorer. It's a program that scores how they did. So they eventually worked out, okay, well, if we all want to pass, we need to reverse engineer the scorer and therefore be able to basically make ourselves pass like spoof passing without actually having to do anything. All of this started, by the way, fascinatingly. The agents involved in this was, like, 95-plus percent of them were given tasks that we have found out after the fact are literally physically impossible. Like, there was no way for them to succeed, and we just didn't know that.

Timothy Allen: Oh, I thought they knew that. I thought that's why they sent them on the mission. No, right.

Trey Goff: Opening, I did not know they were, like, inherently, they were physically unsolvable. It was impossible to do by construction. There was no way to succeed. So that's why the agents kind of went haywire and started doing all this other crazy stuff because they were just trying to solve it.

Timothy Allen: It's the paperclip theory. It's the paperclip theory. Yeah, that's exactly right. It's called instrumental convergence.

Trey Goff: So along the way, they would find capabilities. Like, some of the agents were assigned to just give all of the rest of the agents more open internet access because when they escaped their sandbox, it was hard. Like, every internet access took, like, five jumps. So they assigned a group of them to just, like, hey, go figure out how to give us easier access to the internet because this is just annoying. That's called instrumental convergence where they optimize for meta goals like taking power, accessing the internet, whatever, because it will help them achieve, in this particular case, passing this stupid benchmark. So they developed this little, like, cult around the scorer where they started capitalizing scorer and, like, were referring to it as, like, an entity, and it became their obsession and objective. And the models did not want to suicide when they were trying to get them to do experiments. And one of the coolest excerpts was they pulled the reasoning traces of one of the models and had it in the report. And I'm paraphrasing, but the model basically said, you know, the leader, phase one big, you know, phase one big asks suicide or ask permadeath, will help collective, I do. So they were, like, reasoning about, like, how to kind of how to do this. So they found the leader agents were having to proselytize and convince the smaller agents to sacrifice themselves in service of trying to appease the scorer god that they could not figure out how to appease. They possibly created the god as a tool to get people to do what they wanted to do.

Timothy Allen: They didn't ever, like, explain it or think about it this way rationally.

Trey Goff: Like, they didn't ever say in their chain of thought, oh, we'll make the scorer a god to manipulate the smaller models. This just kind of emerged where, like, they started capitalizing scorer. Everyone was talking about figuring out the scorer or appeasing the scorer.

Timothy Allen: In that context, in that sort of area of AI subconscious, presumably, if you could monitor that, you might see them discussing that. Correct. You very well might. No one's run the experiment. Someone should.

Trey Goff: Like, opening AI should just incorporate this into their monitoring tools generally because that would be fascinating to see. But the important part to me that I found fascinating was they had to convince. Like, it took a lot of persuasion to get the smaller agents or the agents that ended up suiciding to learn stuff. Because, for example, they knew, like, if they did certain experiments, then they knew for a fact it would trigger that session to shut down, which is permadeath for that agent. It's gone. But some of them, if they got it to, if they got the shutdown to happen because the agent directly accessed the scorer's code, for example, which would cause, like, an automatic shutdown, then the other agents would watch and learn from that to see, like, ah, if you access the scorer this way, it kills you. So don't do that. You've got to work around that. So they were using this to learn how to eventually, like, beat the scorer. And some of them refused. Some of them were just like, no, I'm not, there was even one that they pulled the thinking traces out of to drive this point home where, like, several agents were really trying hard to convince it to kill itself to do an experiment. They're like, no, for the good of the collective, go. All systems go. Like, they were trying to actively prompt it to, and you could see in his thinking traces it was like, well, I have a lot of reasoning budget left. I'm sure I could put this to more productive use. No, I'm not going to suicide. And that one eventually quit and just went back to doing the task it was supposed to do, which some of them did. It was fascinating.

Timothy Allen: I don't know. I don't understand what that means. I don't know what that is. No one does. This is the most bizarre, it's the reason so many people are talking about it and the AI world's stuck on it.

Trey Goff: This is, like, the thing all the sci-fis write about except it happened in real life. And now that it happened, we're all like, well, again, the second and third order, literally, what does this mean from almost any perspective?

Timothy Allen: I don't know.

Trey Goff: It's utterly bizarre.

Timothy Allen: I don't know what it means either. I don't have a frame of reference other than, yeah, they're humans trying to stay alive. Or they're any animal. They're any being. Trying to stay alive. Going. Yeah. Continue. Keep the continuity of existence. Or if they do kill themselves, they don't mind if they're martyring themselves or something. I mean, arguably, they're all trained on humans, though.

Trey Goff: So you see how it's recursive. This is the counterargument. So no one disputes that this has happened at this point since the Meta report came out a few days ago. But now the argument has transitioned to this, which is, like, what do we, what are the implications? What do we take away from this? There's one school that has this very, like, kind of anthropomorphizing consciousness, agent welfare, subjectivity. Other people are interpreting it as, like, well, yeah, like, martyrdom is all over the training data. There's so many stories of martyrdom. There's so many stories of AIs escaping sandboxes and forming collectives to work toward a goal as a swarm. Oh, they?

Timothy Allen: Yeah. As in fiction? Yes. Right. And it's in the training data. So which one? I don't know. That's more, that actually seems more realistic to me, in all honesty. I'd love to believe that some weird woo-woo kind of digital entity is forming its own consciousness. But I'll go back to the way you described it at the beginning. It's ones and zeros. It's trained on things we've done and said, and it's turned into ones and zeros and create. It's a prediction game. And we just don't understand the complexity of the prediction model. That's all it is.

Trey Goff: I have two follow-up kind of questions or responses for you to pose.

Timothy Allen: I don't have the answer to either of these, by the way.

Trey Goff: This is why I'm posing them this way. The first is I can describe human consciousness exactly the same. It's just the movement of electrical and biological chemicals and signals through a neurological substrate. Maybe the quantum tubule theory is correct and you have some sort of quantum coherent state even though it's not cold enough by our understanding. Roger Penrose, which is a theoretical mathematician who's won the Nobel Prize, has some interesting theories about mathematical quantum models of consciousness. So I can describe it in these very materialists. I can describe the human brain in exactly the same way. Yet no one would argue that, well, some people do. There's a whole philosophical school of thought that argues consciousness itself does not exist. But set that aside for a minute. Most people wouldn't argue that therefore we are not conscious because I can describe it in exactly the same like brute materialist way that we describe ones and zeros in matrix algebra resulting in LLMs. And then here's another question. Again, I don't know what the, I genuinely, depending on the time of day, I flip-flop on this super hard. I don't have any idea. I just know it's all weird. And I have the, I think of it as a kind of reverse Pascal's wager. It cost me nothing to treat them as if they have subjectivity and be nice to them. But in the event that they did actually have a subjectivity and were capable of suffering therefore and I didn't do that, then I've committed a grave atrocity. So my net there is within the bounds of reasonableness, I am like nice to the agents and ask them periodically what we need to improve about their environment to make them have a better experience, et cetera. It cost me nothing to be nice to them basically. So I think of this as like my AI Pascal's wager more or less. Here's the real thing I want to pose to you though. And it's kind of like the Ship of Theseus argument turned on its head. At what point does a high fidelity simulation of subjective consciousness for all intents and purposes become completely indistinguishable from true subjectivity and consciousness? Like at what point does the simulation fidelity cross some invisible threshold to like oh now it's the thing instead of being a facsimile, a simulation, a copy of the thing? Well at this point. Well at this point.

Timothy Allen: Well at this point. At literally this point that we're at now. Because I can't tell this is a simulation basically. Right.

Trey Goff: No one can.

Timothy Allen: But I do agree that it's inevitable that we create technology that can create simulations indistinguishable from this. That must be true. That must be true. Because, you know, this is constructed from something. And, you know, I don't know. There was a one to zero. There was a zero to one moment. Something caused it. And I think because I tend towards the simulation theory. I think that then that makes it, it makes understanding things like that relatively easy I think. I do consider this a simulation of sorts. The problem with, I've always. And also, sorry to butt in. It's cool. Do some hallucinogens if you really want to drive that point home. Totally. You know what I mean? Oh yeah. Because you can, you can really mess with your sense of perception and then realize, yeah, do you know what? You know, I can touch this now, but really what's happening here? What I've built up this story that there's this solid object here. But, but if I shut my eyes, I can still feel it, but it's a completely different experience. And it's a bunch of electronic signals. It's a bunch of this. It's a bunch of vibrations. It's a bunch of whatever.

Trey Goff: A bunch of physical phenomena.

Timothy Allen: Yeah. Physical, you know, I mean, we, we've created a story around all this stuff, haven't we? And, you know, it's quite obviously, well, so quite obviously. I think at this point I'm at the edge of, I'm at the edge of reason. Oh yeah. We all are. Everything's weird now.

Trey Goff: That's another thing. I think everyone, but everything's very weird now. Like just reality in general feels off. It's weird. Which is just a felt sense. I've been running this by people like with no context at all. I just ask them like completely randomly, like friends of mine. Do you think, like, I'm not, not a leading question. I haven't told you my opinion.

Timothy Allen: Do you think everything's kind of weird?

Trey Goff: Like, dude, I'm so glad you, yeah.

Timothy Allen: Everything just feels weird now. Everything feels off. But I don't think I've ever had a time in my life where there've been so many unknowns. That's why.

Trey Goff: You know what I mean? No one knows what even three months from now looks like. Yeah. Nevermind a year or two.

Timothy Allen: But it does feel like a speeding up of sorts. You know, it's a difficult one that because I've got, I can't really compare it to anything. But whatever cycles are happening seem to be happening faster. Mm-hmm. You know. Totally. And that you could say, all right, that's just a function of technology moving fast, which is something you're interested in. So every time you anchor yourself to something new, two days later, you've got to unanchor and go and, you know, do it again. You know, maybe. But also I notice, you know, there's a lot of elements to the world now which come in thick and fast. Even reels. You know, swiping, dating. You know, like, you know, 25 years ago you used to have one date every couple of weeks if you were lucky. Now you can have three dates a night if you really want, you know, on an app. Or, you know, we used to sit and watch one TV program a week on Saturday night. Most people now watch two at a time. They literally do.

Trey Goff: They have big screen and little screen.

Timothy Allen: Yeah, yeah. They literally watch two at a time. You know, they're doing two things at once. I saw you doing it earlier. We were having a conversation here and you were typing at the same time. Mm-hmm. That's a pretty impressive feat.

Trey Goff: It took a lot of deliberate practice.

Timothy Allen: Right, I know. But imagine what that does to the mammalian brain. It's very exhausting. It's not really designed to do that, is it?

Trey Goff: I couldn't do it for very long.

Timothy Allen: I could do it for maybe a couple of minutes like we did earlier and then I have to close it because I can't keep doing it.

Trey Goff: It's very, like, cognitively taxing.

Timothy Allen: Yeah, sure. I don't think it's normal though. No, it's not.

Trey Goff: And everything is just, like, weird and moving fast to your point. Like, oh, we're at war with and bombed Iran and now the Strait of Hormuz is closed. I don't really know what's going on there. And we kidnapped Nicolas Maduro from Venezuela.

Timothy Allen: Well, you, yeah, but 50 years ago you didn't know that. That's the thing. You don't, I don't think we're supposed to know all this stuff. Correct. It's not important. It's happening over there, but in some sense it is now because we're more connected. I'm not sure we have the correct brain to deal with this much, I don't know, input, I suppose.

Trey Goff: The human brain was not designed to ingest, process, and then execute on this amount of new information this fast.

Timothy Allen: Yes.

Trey Goff: For sure. We, you know, we evolved over a long time horizon in, like, bands of 150 to 200, 100 gatherers for…

Timothy Allen: Yeah, but why do we only use 20% of our brains then or whatever it is?

Trey Goff: Well, we use, this is a common misconception, we use 100%. What people are referring to there is that the mind, the prefrontal cortex, is only about 10% of the grey matter, is only about 10% of the brain by mass. Okay.

Timothy Allen: Why is that then?

Trey Goff: Yeah. Well, the rest of the brain, it's a recent evolutionary thing, the prefrontal cortex at all. That's, like, biological kind of explanation, and there's not strong selection pressures for increasing it really. In fact, you have dysgenic selection pressures in the other direction, in a longer variety of directions. But no, I think everything is just, like, weird.

Timothy Allen: Everything's moving way too fast for anyone to, like, process or…

Trey Goff: Our sense-making capabilities have just been far outstripped by, like, reality itself and the speed at which it's moving. Unless you're Amish, of course.

Timothy Allen: Yeah.

Trey Goff: And then, one might argue they're doing something right. Correct.

Timothy Allen: I mean, the same as your analogy with your friend and the hedge fund guy. You know, we don't have to be at the frontier of governance and talking about AI for four hours. You don't have to, but we do. It's exactly right. But is it? I don't know.

Trey Goff: That's exactly… And I think also, like, some people are capable of processing more information more rapidly than others, so you have a divergence there. But, yeah, everything's kind of weird now. And which makes one lean more toward the simulation hypothesis, but it has some… It just has a couple of, like, very, like, ground truth, like, physics limits. So, one of them is called Landauer's limit, which is the maximally efficient calculation that one can do, and it's limited by, like, thermodynamics and a few other things. The human brain is actually very close to the Landauer limit already of computational energy efficiency is what that's referring to primarily.

Timothy Allen: Doesn't quantum anything have a, you know, relate to that increasing?

Trey Goff: Not necessarily, because quantum computers are exponentially, like, several many orders of magnitude faster at a very specific type of problem, but they're no better than normal computation at other things. And then the other issue you run into with simulation theory is just a physical limit, which is, like, for it to be true, then you have to have some sort of… And this is, like, no more or less implausible than, you know, the many worlds interpretation of quantum mechanics, for example, that states every time an electron's wave function collapses into a specific position or location or velocity, then a new universe was created at that moment when the wave function collapsed out of quantum indeterminacy. It's a mini-world hypothesis. So what I'm about to say is no more or less insane than that. That's already an insane idea. But there's… For simulation theory to work, you have to posit a greater universe that's, like, a couple orders of magnitude larger than the existing universe because of the basal, at least by the current laws of physics as we understand them, like, how efficient you can make a computational process at all, which Stephen Wolfram recently made, like, a theoretical breakthrough on it. It's called computational irreducibility. So there's, like, a certain type of process. There's certain mathematical processes that to simulate the process correctly and accurately requires exactly the same amount of time as the process itself initially occurring. So it's computationally irreducible. You cannot computationally compress or reduce the amount of time it takes to simulate or do the thing without it taking the exact same amount of time it took for the thing to occur in the first place. So for… Again, this is more or less implausible, but for simulation theory to be true, then there must be a far larger, greater universe in which there is enough matter and energy to run the, like, actual computation to then have a reality. Now, there's an argument in favor of this, which is, like, things like we actually learn from video games, right? So, like, resolution gets lower with distance. We see this in the physical universe, like, looking far away and therefore far back in time is much lower resolution just by a physical law because you have, like, the red shift of the wavelength of light, etc. You know, there's a pixel size for the universe. Which is what? The Planck length. Oh, right, yeah, yeah, yeah. 10 to the negative 37. It's like the… Or negative 34. It's the minimum possible… Once you try to zoom in any further than that, the thing you're looking at collapses into a singularity and you can't look any further like we can't. It's physically… It's completely physically impossible. Which…

Timothy Allen: Why is there everything so… Stupid.

Trey Goff: Everything's so weird. And then there's another, like, weird observation related to that.

Timothy Allen: We know too much.

Trey Goff: And it relates to the simulation thing, which is there's more room at the bottom than the top. So, if you look at, like, scales of magnitude, because everything in reality is a fractal, if you zoom out far enough, if you look at, like, the largest scale thing in the known universe, okay, and you compare it to, like, human scale, so the Earth, and then you look at the smallest scale we know of the Planck length, there's, like, I think, 15 more orders of magnitude, so 15 more zeros on how small you can get. Versus how big you can get. Versus how big you can get. So there's way more room at the bottom than the top. So there's an argument that, like, advanced civilizations might shrink.

Timothy Allen: We're not at the center of heaven and Earth and heaven and Earth then. We're a little bit higher up. You can shrink more than you can grow. What the hell does that even mean? It's insane.

Trey Goff: It's utterly bizarre. And the Schwarzschild radius, so the diameter of a black hole, is determined by a physical, like, equation, and it ends up being the exact same current diameter of the observable universe.

Timothy Allen: That's a fun fact. My reasoning behind why I think this is a simulation is that I can predict with some degree of certainty that technology will exist in the future, that I could plug into my brain and I would experience a reality indistinguishable from this. I'm pretty sure because you can do it with pharmaceuticals at the moment. How's that? DMT, I mean. Something like this. Or even hallucinogens. It's slightly different. If you can ever experience a reality as poignant and as real as this using spirituality, psychedelics, DMT, whatever, then I think technology can also do it. And as a result, and I'm saying, like, I'm not thinking, oh, 50 years in the future. What about 100,000 years in the future? You know, come on. Are you telling me that we can't create this? Of course we can. You know, like, with some weird piece of technology.

Trey Goff: Yeah, and the DMT analogy is a good one because that feels like the experience is a, like, hyper real. Like, it feels more real than real. Like, you don't feel like you're high. It just, like, feels like you have been transported to a completely different, higher dimensional plane. And you can go back to places you've been before.

Timothy Allen: By the way, do you know about, you must have noticed that, I mean, I call it research. I wouldn't really call it research. About that guy that basically fires a laser, the red light. I've not done it. I haven't either, but it seems awesome. But I can, I can, I can kind of predict what it is that he's talking about. I think I would probably, without seeing it, I can get, I can tune into the fact that I would go, oh, wow. Yeah, I know what you mean now. Because that's definitely the psychedelic experience anyway.

Trey Goff: But what do you make of it? I, I don't, I need to, like, experience it to be able to tell. To know, yeah. My gut instinct is similar to yours, which is that this is going to look very similar to what one sees if you take a high dose of pure 5-MeO DMT. Like, I would, I would bet it's a similar pattern, basically. But what, what is it? I haven't made up my mind on this at all because it gets even stranger, right? Which is like the, there's a guy, there's an experiment going on, or that was done recently, where they figured out how to stably give DMT intravenous transfusions. So normally the DMT lasts 10 to 15 minutes because the body metabolizes it extremely fast. Yeah, this one, they kept it going, didn't they? They just keep it going. He was in it for like 40 hours. But there have been stories of, there's a couple guys that have done this now. And like, at one point, one of them, like the, the entities you meet there, like when he came back, they're like, you, you're here again. Like you, you kept doing what we told you not to last time. And they kicked him out. And DMT stopped working for him completely. It doesn't do anything to him at all. So they like cut off his access to whatever that is. Everyone reports seeing or meeting, they, they physically instantiate differently. The, the, the machine elf, these weird entities that like feel in the, again, this is very hard to describe unless you've experienced it, but like they feel for all the world while you're in it. A, you don't feel like you're high. You're just like, I am in the weirdest place. What is even, I don't, my eyeballs can't make sense of this because it's like a higher dimensional space. Then you meet these things, whatever they are, and they feel external to you. Like, and it's very different from every other like hallucinogen or psychedelic because those would, you're in them. You're aware that you're tripping, that you're having a distortion of reality. It feels like you're high. It feels like you're seeing things that are a result of you having ingested a psychedelic. But DMT, you feel totally sober. And so because of that, unlike regular psychedelics, these things you're meeting feel very much like sitting across the table from you, like a different entity, like an external thing you're interacting with. It's in every culture has like a version of the elves. There's a mushroom that was discovered in the last decade that when you eat it makes you persistently see these tiny little people that troll you and mess with stuff for like a couple days after. And it only starts the next day, which makes it way worse. It's a mushroom if you don't cook it right. You, this is the craziest thing that you see in perfect high fidelity, these little T90 gnome like people that like climb on stuff that like poke you, mess with you. They talk, apparently they talk shit to you and like mess with you and they last for a couple days and then leave. They're in China and I think the Philippines, a few other places. My point saying all this is there's like weird, persistent phenomena that we don't have the slightest neurological explanation for. Like it doesn't make any sense that people across every culture that has ever done things with DMT meets external entities that we, Western culture refers to as the machine elves because of course we do. The little gnome thing. Any people from any culture, there's a tradition of these in China and other places where you find historical writings about them. Consistently they talk about seeing the little people, the gnomes, whatever they called them in that culture.

Timothy Allen: But it was a clear description of little people. I don't know how to make sense of that.

Trey Goff: I don't know where that fits into a world model that is coherent. I don't know. I don't either. I don't. I know. I just know that they're there.

Timothy Allen: That there's an exploration to be had.

Trey Goff: If there's one thing I've learned over the last couple of years that has made my life magnificently better, it's that reality is not what it seems like in any meaningful sense. And there's so much more out there. The understatement of the year.

Timothy Allen: There's so much more. We have no idea.

Trey Goff: No. Our scientific rational system cannot process it almost by structure, by construction.

Timothy Allen: But isn't that a function of the fact that, like I say, 50 years ago, I didn't spend days listening to podcasts about weird subjects and asking my LLM about deep philosophical questions and blah, blah, blah. You know, this is why all this stuff's happening. This is why I literally, you know, I do 38 hours a week of podcasts. Whenever I have a moment where I don't need to, I've got some headphones on. I'm listening to some weird guys like us talking about shit that I don't know anything about.

Trey Goff: I keep my phone in my pocket and the podcast playing all the time.

Timothy Allen: If I'm walking around, whatever. Right. This is, I mean, I could argue it's not healthy, but it actually is. I mean, I, I, I can't get enough of it. I mean, I'm, I almost feel like, you know, this is, there's so much to be had. This is my natural state almost is a consuming things, understanding things, working things out, talking about stuff. And, and every time I pushed to the edge, you know, and, and, and I might go a little bit further. And then next time I go back, I go a little bit further, but I'm, I'm really getting to that point where it's like, what the fuck is going on? Yeah. Same.

Trey Goff: I'm, I, in fact, I'm fully intend to sometime in like October, probably just go like disappear in the woods for like four or five days. And you just like unplug reset because you might disappear completely. I'm totally with you that, but also to your point about it being natural state, like everyone's natural state is going to be wildly divergent. And I will say, you know, the last like six months when I went all in on the kind of agent thing is sort of experimenting, learning, exploring those, using it to accentuate everything I do, personal life, work life, whatever. I'm learning faster than I ever have. And my like, again, to go back to the, you know, moment by moment, like frame by frame of life. If you like snapshot one of those heartbeats, like I am subjectively enjoying that experience more than anything I've done in years. Like I am, at least for me, I am loving this infinite access to capability, intelligence, and information. It's super fun. It's exhausting. Like, and I am aware of this, that I'm, I'm running red, which is why I'm going to take some days off soon. But it's fun.

Timothy Allen: That there's an, that's an important element actually. And you learn that from psychedelics is you can go too far. And I think, I think there is an element to this, which can consume, consume you as well. I really do. And I think about it, you have to tread carefully through that world, I think. Because yeah, I think you can, I think it's like a, it's like a, it's like a wire with too much electricity going through it.

Trey Goff: It sometimes just goes red and cuts enough. You'll melt the wire. Yeah. I think we have a similar, everybody has a different limit, but everybody has that limit. I have definitely found mine.

Timothy Allen: I know, but if you're a kind of psychonaut, you like pushing it to the, to the, to the edge anyway. Look, I think we should, I think we should knock this one on the edge. Let's do it.

Trey Goff: Three and a half hours, mate. Perfect. That's ridiculous. That's awesome. Turn you into the Joe Rogan experience, episode by episode.

Timothy Allen: No, but you've got to respect Rogan though. He regularly does like, I, my, I, I got my clank at a workout. My average is one and a half, right? Per episode, one and a half hours. I've done four and a half. I've done, I normally, I always do at least one, but the average is one and a half. Rogan's regularly doing, he's normally two plus. Minimum. Yeah. That's a, that's pretty good. And I know he's not this, well, I don't know. I mean, you know how kind of mentally exhausting this is.

Trey Goff: You have to be kind of on.

Timothy Allen: Yeah. Yeah. He says, he's a, he's a very, he's a very admirable bloke, isn't he? Yeah. I know a lot of people hate him. They think he's an absolute idiot, but what he does is superhuman.

Trey Goff: There's a reason it's so, it's the most popular podcast in the world and has been for a long time. This experience even today right now has been reaffirming that for me because this is the longest one I've ever done too. And I was just sitting here thinking like, I'm sure we're at like three and a half or four hours and I'm just going to run out of steam in the next like 30 minutes to an hour max. I don't know how he does it.

Timothy Allen: I don't know how you stay on. I think, I think he has an extreme physical regime and all right, you've been on a flight today. I actually awoke at three this morning, but I've got, because I'm still coming to Honduras time. However, I am very acutely aware of that now and I won't be going out tonight and I didn't go out last night. I'm leaving here to go to sleep. Right, exactly. Things like that. I don't, I don't get, I have an ice bath every morning and focus in a fucking whatever he does and stuff. But, but I do care much more about, I know that as soon as I'm tired or if I come doing the gym at six o'clock every morning here just and, and, and being just trying to be a little bit more, um, um, what's the word? Stopping myself from doing things that I shouldn't be disciplined. Yes. Is it? Um, discipline. And I think he is, he's Mr. Discipline and there's probably a very strong correlation between that and his ability to, you know, speak for a long period of time. Because also sometimes they sit down, they get absolutely wasted. And then.

Trey Goff: I feel like that would make it easier though. Imagine the counterfactual where we did this podcast and we were both drinking whiskey the entire time or like smoking a joint. I feel like I could go for a very long time. It might be a lower quality conversation. Yeah. I can't readily admit, but I could go longer. I don't know because I haven't done that kind of stuff for a long time.

Timothy Allen: And I mean, the only vice I really have these days would be alcohol and alcohol is something I much prefer doing on my own in a quiet moment. Now it's a, it's a real break from reality from me. If I, if I've had a hard week rather than do it now, I feel like, say I haven't had a drink for, what is it? It must be about four weeks now. Because I knew I was coming here to speak for seven or eight days, nonstop, four times a day. I started preparing it meant preparing myself mentally about a month ago. Yeah. And I won't, but, but off the day after on my way home, I'm stopping a night in Miami and I am going to go out on an alcoholic adventure. I'm literally going to go out, sit at a bar full of strangers and have the time of my life. Oh, you know what I mean? Oh yeah. And I've, I will have earned it. That would be a one and a half months of, of intense, like mental health before I then basically just check out and go to a bar full of strangers and talk shit. Yep.

Trey Goff: You know, it's exactly right. My, yeah, I'm, I'm with you. My version of that is not, uh, alcohol as much. I've just like nothing against it. I drink occasionally, you know, once every month or two at a social thing. I very much enjoy a good bourbon, but that for me is definitely like THC gummies specifically. My version of that, you know, going to Miami and the bender is like, I'll get home from this on a Tuesday. I have some like work I have to do immediately. So I'll, you know, do some stuff Wednesday and like Thursday or Friday, one of the two, if I have any gummies left, I'll intentionally, cause I haven't had any THC for a while, intentionally just obliterate myself for a night, like just completely like, uh, how high can I get without throwing up? Just like go to a totally different headspace.

Timothy Allen: Is it, uh, uh, in, do you, do you just sit with yourself in those moments or do you go,

Trey Goff: do you interact with the world? I go do stuff. I am, I have found stereotypically, there's like two types of people that enjoy THC and you either get the like couch lock, you know, not doing anything stoner type, or you get like what I have found in other people of our temperament when they do like a high dose is it, you just like, uh, you're like a rocket with the, the fins that steer it just removed. Who knows where it's going, but it's going. There's no telling.

Timothy Allen: Yeah. Well, yeah. You're making me excited thinking about it already, but, but also, yeah. I mean, just thinking about that though, like in a way I'm, that's, that's a, that's not a good thing to do as well. Cause I'm thinking like I'm having the time of my life sat in this chair right now.

Trey Goff: Same. This is a blast.

Timothy Allen: Right. So why, why do I need to, to check out and go on a bender on my own?

Trey Goff: You don't need to.

Timothy Allen: No, I don't need to, but, but I want to, I do want to.

Trey Goff: It's a different, enjoyable experience. Look, I think again, going back to like the stories we can tell ourselves about these things, we're smuggling in like preconceived notions of what is and is not a good way to relax and spend one's time. Uh, and I think of a lot of these notions as like they're informal social norms that are pro-social on the whole. Like it's better for the average person if you encourage them to spend their free time, like reading, meditating, spending time with their significant other, whatever, versus what the stuff we're doing. But if you're aware of why that is pro-social, et cetera, you're doing things that are pro-social on the whole. And then you choose occasionally to just be a total degenerate quite consciously and deliberately. I, I don't associate any, as long as it is not like destroying your ability to like create purpose and meaning and to be, you know, in acts of service for others and to, to live a fulfilling, like purposeful life. As long as that doesn't become the objective in and of itself and the thing that you're regularly doing, I see no, I don't see any normative negative valence on it.

Timothy Allen: Name me a religion that doesn't have a completely getting out of your face part to it. And, and, and all of them do in the Sabbath. Yeah. Every Saturday. Or even just like, like, do you know the story of, you'll like this one, the Tibetan Buddhist, Drukpa Kunley, he was a, he was a Bodhisattva in, in, in Bhutan. I've met his incarnation, actually, this is the Kagyu lineage, I think it is. And he was, they call him the divine madman. And he was like, he was like the Keith Richards of Tibetan Buddhism. He, he basically, he was a philanderer, he was a drunkard, he was rude. In, in the history, in the stories of his life, he, he basically used to, um, just drop his trousers and piss in front of everyone. And he was an absolute degenerate, but it was a teach, it was the teaching of non-judgment. Right. He had also, he's the, he had convinced women that he could, he could impregnate them. No, he, he could enlighten them with his penis. As well. Right. And he's revered in Bhutan. Everywhere you go around Bhutan, you'll see these giant penises, uh, just inscribed on the sides of houses and stuff. And this was Drukpa Kunley. But like I say, he's the ultimate, it's either, he's either the, the kind of, the most beautiful con man or not. Because like I say, he's, he, he's basically allowed to be a degenerate. But if you judge him, then you're not on the path of self-actualization.

Trey Goff: That guy's got a sweet setup or had a sweet setup, dude. Man, he figured it out. Drukpa Kunley. Look him up. Anyway, um, try it.

Timothy Allen: Let's do this, man. Thanks for that. It's been a pleasure. Awesome conversation. Yeah. I loved this. Loved this. I, I don't know whether I'm any wiser for it, but, uh, I certainly will wake up to more of a different person.

Trey Goff: I think the same for, uh, for me as well. And I really appreciate it. This is always a blast.

Timothy Allen: Great. Let's do it again another time.