Unlock Your Super-Learning Potential: Learn from Emerson Spartz, Founder of Dose and MuggleNet

0:00all right Emerson Sparks we're here we're having a conversation I reached out to you a few days ago you were like gracious enough to give us your time you're a criminally underfollowed not well enough known person for how much you know about where the world is going in my opinion so I wanted to give you a platform to speak and you know a little bit about Emerson he started muggling that when he was 13 the number one Harry Potter community and social network he started dos uh which was a buzzfeed competitor that was really really big and is really big your Twitter bio says step one

0:43become the world's fastest learner step two learn everything step three be an impact billionaire what do you mean by that so uh first of all thank you for that very kind uh introduction um basically I I find it fascinating that people people like they try to accumulate a specific skill and they're like I'm gonna develop this skill I'm gonna get good at like making uh websites or make good at this programming language or this you know speaking Spanish whatever and they don't go one meta level up which is like how do you become the best at learning all the skills and like learning how to learn basically like why not treat

1:18learning itself like if you want to be the world's fastest learner how would you do it and it's hardly anybody actually really thinks that way and like if you were an Olympic Athlete but you were instead of trying to become the best you know skier in the world you want to be the best learner like how would you go about doing that and so I've just taken that idea more seriously than anybody that I'm aware of um and I and every single day I spend some routine like one to three hours like actively just trying to get better at learning so like conducting experiments and seeing what tactics and

1:47what techniques tend to like make me just learn faster and I've just like found a bunch of things that make me I can read much faster I need to be able to I can retain the much higher percentage of what I learn and I can measure it by seeing how long it takes me to do something like for example how long would it take me to you know pass the bar starting from scratch how long would it take me to pass the USM believe it's like the doctor's bar equivalent and so basically the idea is like just like deepmind the AI company their slogan is like first stop intelligence

2:07then sell everything else it's basically a personal version of that which is like first cell intelligence like because if I zoom out for a second like I want to become the world's wisest man I don't know what that means either but it's always been inspirational to me the idea of like being the smartest person in the world uh but but a more mature version of it right so how you actually wanted to do that how would you go about doing that and so so I think about these things a lot and the reason why I want to do it in the first place because I want to have the largest impact on the

2:29world possible uh so to do that though I need to First figure out where the biggest intervention points are where I can have the largest most positive impact on the world that's the really quick zoomed out version of it okay so I get first of all I love that you want to be the world's wisest man I feel like that's a a audacious goal and I also like that you put it on Twitter as a public goal and I think more of us should do that but like why go wide instead of going really deep well I study everything when you could just be the world's smartest AI person or the

2:57world's smartest crypto person of the world's smartest product designer why are you thinking about you know going diverse uh because I like it it's fun uh I'm following my curiosity uh basically like five years ago I exited my business and I had a like tough divorce and it forced me to like kind of step back and reevaluate my life and I ended up just moving to San Francisco with my two brothers and then we did that for like a year and then I had this really powerful DMT trip because I was about to jump back into the grind and like get back into like making money uh and then I had

3:30this this feeling of like why am I doing this what is the point uh I already have enough money I'm financially stable I don't need more I would like more My Life Plan earlier on was like I want to be a billionaire and then I want to be like Bill Gates where I give it all away and I have the biggest impact but I realized okay what am I doing so we ended up just like getting all our [ __ ] throwing into backpacks and just traveling the world that's what we've been doing for the past five years and I'm just interested in everything I'm just curious about everything I want to

3:53know how everything works and I find that the more that I read right now my average reading about two books a day equivalent of content and uh the more that I read the more Curious I am about how the world works the more questions are the more things I find interesting the more that I read so part of it is just that it's fun part of it's just that I like doing it it makes me feel fulfilled and happy and the more that I read the more Beauty I'm able to appreciate in the world um so part of it's like an intrinsic goal as I just like to learn and I like

4:19to learn about everything that's part of the answer and then part of the answer too is that my mental model is like I try to like 80 20 basically everything um so I can get mental models I can crossfly across disciplines so that I can adopt new technologies faster example this is crypto crypto is like the dream like industry if you're a polymath um because almost everybody they hear about crypto and they think of like one possible they hear one possible explanation for the technology and how it works and what problems it solves and they immediately arrive at a conclusion about it and it's like you know this is

4:44this is just like the next s-curve built on top of a giant stack of technologies that increase human coordination and it's like people who said back in the 90s that like oh the internet will only ever be used by people for this one use case and and then they just quickly wrote it off so to like really get crypto you need to have a bunch of mental models about like technology and Game Theory and crypto economics and so on um so that's an example of an industry that like I was able to like recognize the value of earlier but only because I was so interested in so many

5:11different things if you're reading two books a day which I think is fascinating and I want to get into how you read two books a day how do you think about a framework for what type of content you want to ingest I can explain it but it's not one of those things I can actually explain in enough time to make it interesting and useful to anybody listening this podcast I do have like a list of hacks though and tactics that I think are super high leverage um that I could share about how to learn faster the short answer is that I basically use boredom as a compass and

5:40when I'm bored with something that is a indicator that whatever I'm reading um doesn't seem as likely to be useful or important but but I really can't actually summarize it it's it's there's a fairly complex hierarchy decision trade-offs that I make so I have a new thing where basically if someone I respect says a book like just says a book I just put it in a notes file and then I buy the book so my reading list is basically it could be all over it could be psychology it could be economics it could be product design but it's basically follow interesting people and of course my friends too if they

6:22just say a book just write it down and buy it and what's your take on books versus blogs versus podcasts versus Twitter versus tick tock uh I think they all have their place um I think books books have been the best for me overall because there's a ton of switching costs with articles like it's hard to find articles to read you spend a lot of time looking for the next article to read and not nearly as much time actually reading articles uh there's also a lot of friction in having to find articles to read although I use read wise so I just keep a bunch of

6:48Articles and I still get a lot of value from I basically view articles as being generally better for timely information like I'm trying to say I spend a lot of time thinking about AI and a lot of time thinking about web3 and so obviously articles um are better for that kind of content but for Content that has a longer shelf life um basically somebody spends their entire life's work studying something and uh they'll spend years trying to like find the perfect way to explain what it is they spent their entire life learning and in five hours you can get a time lapse of their entire life's work

7:17oftentimes you can get that information from articles but there's a lot of like random friction and transaction costs and going to find all those articles um YouTube is good for like if you need visual information most YouTube is like lower information density than like because there's a lot of visual information on the screen that's not very useful but it can be for example if you're trying to learn uh physics like having a bunch of uh learning physics by watching like three blue and brown videos is just a better way to do it than other channels because he like visually shows you what's happening so you can get better intuition you get a

7:40better gears level understanding about about it um so I think YouTube's good if you need the visual information to learn the thing um Tick Tock um I have not been able to figure out how to use tick tock um profitably um I think podcasts are useful for like if something is brand new there's no book written about it yet right so like for crypto for example best way to say autop crypto is through crypto Twitter and through podcasts where you get to hear like two of the smartest people in the industry talking about some new Cutting Edge thing and are you taking notes when you're consuming content oh

8:09yeah when you're listening to podcasts are you like do you have a notebook open walk us through how you get the most out of your content yeah so the way I think about first of all is like there's basically three levels to like um super learning level one is basically increasing your speed that's the low taking everything most people can do because it's actually really really easy most people are not reading nearly as fast as they could and it doesn't take that much work um second level is increasing how much you comprehend um this isn't retention this is just comprehending even like for example in this podcast like there's people

8:33listening this right now and they're spacing it out and um I measure this quite a bit and the average person is actually only listening to about 10 of all of the actual sentences in a given podcast or a book that they're reading ten percent that's a staggeringly low percentage age of comprehension it doesn't feel that way though because your brain just like when you when you see your vision like you look for left to right and people think that they're looking at the whole thing but actually there's things called sakads where you basically take a mental snapshot there take a snapshot there and you guess what's in the middle the same thing

9:00happens with reading where um you pick up like a few words here and there and you just kind of guess what the people were saying in the podcast or in the book uh but anyway basically so level one is your speed level two is increase your comprehension uh the best way to do that by far is I just like you can just take out pen and make a little check mark every time you notice your attention wavering or I keep a little clicker in my hand and I just like whenever I notice my attention wavering a little bit like every time I notice I'm basically cross buying ideas from

9:21various contemplative practices like mindfulness meditation and so on um so you keep a meditation object in your hand like it could be a pen it could be like whatever and every time you notice that you're like oh I'm supposed to be paying attention right why do I have this weird thing in my hand oh yeah click associate paying attention right um so I do a lot of things like that I get about 15 to 20 000 clicks a day in um to make sure that every single sentence that I'm hearing I'm processing the words aren't going bouncing off my ear right they're going into my ear and into my brain so

9:46that's like step two level two and level three is retention like how do you actually remember this stuff later um that step though is actually for most people not even important because the most useful thing is like just read faster and make sure you're actually understanding what it is that you're reading but but for retention yeah I have like a bunch of different node systems so I take a lot of voice notes I listen those voice notes I use flash cards there's a bunch of stuff like that yeah you're kind of making me rethink how I consume content like I don't really take that many notes when I'm

10:12listening or reading content like I I have a couple different iOS note files that I'll just kind of put in hey this is interesting or this is interesting but it doesn't it's not as structured as what it could be and yours like yours feels structured so it sounds like you've got this really good framework and system for keeping you focused step one like how do you keep focus and then step two is like how do you Jam that stuff up into your brain as much as possible and remember and I think that 99 of us don't have systems for for that second piece especially the most useful thing if there's like

10:50one single thing that like anyone listening to take away is like just just actually listen to podcasts faster just increase your speed by like 0.25 x you should be able to listen to like some podcasts at 3x um and it seems crazy it seems like Chipmunks at first but like your brain is absolutely if you're listening to podcasts like this like you're capable listening to some podcasts at 3x you're probably listening this one right now at summertime like one to 1.5 x and it's just way too slow it's sort of like Progressive loading in weightlifting like the only way to build muscle is to like lift things that are too heavy for

11:16your muscles to lift and then your muscles up regularly like hey guys we gotta build more muscle so that tomorrow when this guy's gonna lift heavy things like we're gonna be able to lift more things like you have to do the same thing with reading faster um so just increment It Up by 0.25 x like do it like until you get to some podcast of 3x and then you'll probably slow some of it down to 2x to 2.5 x but that's okay most people can easily double their reading speed um if you're at this level already so I've tried like the two two eggs I didn't even thought about 3x and yeah

11:44I've gotten to like chipmunk level and I'm kind of like it doesn't feel enjoyable to me to listen to something at 2X for me podcasting like or listening to podcasts like is like something I really look forward to it's like having like your morning coffee outside and the sun's hitting your face like it's something that like you know I'm really looking forward to but I hear you if your goal is to like be the most well-read be the smartest person on on the planet or you know or just get ahead of other people really I think like consuming information quicker is better period right so you can have

12:20just as much fun to read twice as fast then obviously you prefer to do that right and the thing is people are basically lifting they're going to the gym they're lifting one pound dumbbells and that's what like if you listen to a podcast at like 1X or 1.5 x it's like a one pound dumbbell let's not make it's like it's easy to do um but if with just a little bit of like upping your load a bit like you can get to the point where you're lifting like you know 10 pound dumbbells and it feels just as easy as it did with one pen dumbbells before most people don't use

12:41that metaphor of the progressive overloading from weightlifting applied to reading and I hear you on that like it's enjoyable for me too it's actually like really not enjoyable listening slowly now it actually feels painful feels like everything is happening in slow motion yeah what what what's on your mind these days you know you started in the community space you you moved into like viral news I'm seeing tweets about web3 and AI now what's exciting you and what's on your mind um a couple things so I mostly look for so I have a I've made some different life design choices where like instead of just starting a normal business and

13:15getting back in the grind and raising venture capital and trying to get to you know a billion dollar exit um I know just look for intervention points where I can like I can just I can I can with the equivalent of like lifting my pinky I can find some sort of like thousand X leverage one and so I basically look for those kinds of things so for example uh in the early days of covid I was I was obsessed with Kobe back in December of 2019. uh because I'd studied previously enough epidemiology to be pretty freaked out and I was like okay about one in four people seem to be

13:40dying for this thing and it's not going to be contained uh in China it's going to spread on the entire world so I mean it's possible that one in four people are gonna die from this thing it's possible that like literally hundreds of millions or billions of people are going to die that's a really big deal and people aren't taking it nearly seriously enough and so how can I help with that so I went full time for a few months and I found uh there was this one best practice from prior pandemics um called social distancing of course not a surprising thing now but I was

14:03like okay that's like probably a good idea we should be doing that people back then weren't doing that um I was like if I could even bring that mean forward in time by like a week or two I could potentially save millions of lives and so because in my past life I was known you know like every you're the community guy everyone's a guy for something right like I was the virality guy right I was probably one of the 100 best people in the world for a while at making content viral online and so I was able to take all that and I made in two hours of work

14:28I made a viral Facebook photo frame there's like a circle around your head that said stay home save lives which if you're on Facebook you would have seen it because hundreds of millions of people used it and uh it was the most viral photo frame of all time and so you know it's possible that that had an impact in Saving thousands of lives and so I look for those kinds of things where I can spend like a few hours maybe a few days working on something and have a big impact and usually it's something I just do quietly without any Fanfare and the specific area that I'm mostly

14:53looking at right now is the main areas I've been interested in the past five years have been basically web3 and Ai and ever since I saw gbt2 years ago I got the hairs on my arm stood up and I literally was like tearing up because I I was able to appreciate the achievement that I was um all the credit the prior criticisms of AI were all about how narrow was and those were completely Fair criticisms until the Deep learning Revolution and in the past 10 years the game has changed completely um and most people just weren't updating their models of how much more intelligent these actually puddles for

15:22um and so I've been pretty like both excited and terrified by AI for the past five years and and specifically because um it's similar to cover back in 2020 right like if you if you're like literate and looking at exponential curves you're like okay like this is not good and AI is kind of on that same trajectory so so I spent a lot of time staying on top of AI but also um I founded an organization called non-linear systemlinear.org and basically um we're focused on reducing existential risk from AI what does that mean well it means that this might sound crazy but like I think some people need

15:52to say it is that there's a meaningful chance that uh we are going to make AI so powerful that we will lose control of it and if we lose control of it there's all kinds of bad things that can happen including us all dying and there just aren't that many people that are working on this problem right now at the time there was like maybe 100 people full-time like trying to figure out how to align you know AI with our values so that we don't accidentally create a runaway exponential intelligence explosion um that we can't control and now there's maybe 250 people and so basically I

16:22founded an accelerator that's basically just helping to launch uh Charities and startups that are focused on making sure AI is safe not the kind of like safe in terms of like you know the AI saying rude things or mean things but like safe in terms of making sure that it doesn't accidentally cause lots of real serious harm yeah how how does that actually happen like how do we move from you know chat GPT where I'm asking it for my 10 favorite you know Thai recipes you recommend today to like AI Overlord starting to kill people like how do we how do we get from like how does it

16:55actually happen okay so this is like my one single content wreck for anybody who's interested in Ai and like trying to get a zoomed out view of how this might unfold um go to wipaway.com and read the article on the artificial I think it's called the artificial intelligence explosion um it's like the single best written article to explain this to get a more zoomed up view because almost everybody has this very narrow view um almost everybody's looking at just like covid in 2020 they look at like the point and not the slope so they're like well it's not there's there's only a thousand cases or there's only ten

17:23thousand cases and it's like okay but look at the slope and as long as that slope continues um the AI is already passing the Turing test millions of times per day millions of times per day people are talking to Ai and they don't even know it and and that went from like the number of like Turing tests being passed per day has gone from like maybe it was Millions to like now it's actually in the like billions of instances per day that the touring test has successfully passed like you're conv you think you're talking to a human but you're actually talking to a computer um it's smart enough to be able to trick

17:51you into thinking that you're talking to an actual human um five years from now 99.99 nine percent of all content will be created by ai's and like five years ago that would have been completely Unthinkable like the idea that like almost all content would be created by artificial intelligence would have been the most sci-fi [ __ ] and I would have seen like the most tinfoil hat lunatic lock them up like get them in a padded room uh but like that now that doesn't seem crazy you know I'm not the only person who's saying things like that now um and that's just with content uh now

18:20imagine all the other things like most people's jobs are like incredibly easy to automate uh if you're like a white collar worker and you just like have a pretty simple flow chart like you know the um the RPA industry a robotic process automation yeah yeah so that industry using a really primitive AI it could like automate most people's jobs most people just like they work in a call center they've got a fairly simple like flow chart for what they do and it's like not that hard to automate it and AI is getting smart so fast that like yeah a large percent of those jobs are going to be automated um

18:47soon and yeah it's hard to say what happens next because there is no like historical I I've read a lot of history like a lot of history and like it's really hard to point to Any Given technology we've ever created and like try to draw parallels from like oh well you know the cotton gin like reduce the cost to produce cotton and therefore we can somehow extrapolate AI from that it's hard okay I have a few thoughts so on the point of like 99 of content will be created by AI in five years I agree with you I also think that we would never believe that 99.9 of content would be

19:20curated by AIS which is the current state that we're in like we go on Tick Tock we go on Instagram we go on Twitter and it's an algorithm that's feeding us the content versus how we used to consume content which was you you went to us you know Bodega you went to a store you bought a New York Times and there was an editor and the editor said okay this is the front page story this is you know gonna be in the in the business section this goes here this goes there and then even in the early days in social networking it was sorted by most

19:52recently you know it was like you followed a bunch of people you had friends on Facebook you went to a website or app and then it just reversed chronology right it would show like latest content then we moved to the you know algorithms robots essentially serving you the content so I agree with that how do we move from chat gbt to like the world is ending where with our AI overlords like to me if I had to guess this is like super Grim but you know it's the merging of like those robots that you see like the dog robot Boston robotics I think the company is that like creates these

20:32Hardware devices mixed with like drones mixed with artificial intelligence that is able to basically make decisions mixed with like weapons you know it seems like that's a bad place to be yeah have you seen the slaughterbots video I haven't tell me about it uh just look it up it's just like a really really well done viral video some of like an organization showing how like bad would be if we gave the kill switch to uh to the robots uh although it's interesting because like the kill switch the idea that we let you know robots make the kill decision instead of humans that happens all the time automatically

21:05there's tons of weapon systems we already have that like there's no human that decides like the the robots decide for us like they shoot down the missile before we even have time to react you know so we've already given up the like kill switch to the machines but yeah I agree so here's some someones I used to think about AI so first is that AI was on a linear trajectory like we're making roughly linear progress um from like the 1960s until about 2000 and then it went like uh or 2012 earlier um and that was like the start of the deep learning Revolution so basically about 50 years linear progress straight

21:33line then it went exponential starting with deep learning and deep learning for those you don't know is a completely different Paradigm where basically we just were like hey read the whole internet and then like make dope [ __ ] and that's super creative and Intel anybody who says like AI is not creative or the AI is not until you know not intelligent now I don't understand how you can defend that anymore John leiche from opening I just said yesterday that like you know they train the models in English and the models just like automatically know how to do everything in every other language in their system

21:56I mean like come on like how do you think of that as just like a like a somehow empty box that's parroting things anyway um so basically with linear from like 1960 to like 2012 then it was exponential 2012 till today and now it's going double exponential that's a big deal because now it's exponential it's there's an exponent on top of the exponent so before we only had all the data that had been accumulated in the past right like they can read Wikipedia and then um that's the data that we train the AIS on but now the LMS themselves are creating training data that they can use to self-improve

22:25so that's a really really big deal that when they can use their own outputs as training data um all right so the second best model I use is to think of AI first is like a tool that we use it's really narrow it can only do like a really narrow subset of things then it goes from a tool to an assistant it can do a lot more things now right it's still not as good as we are but it's like irresistant you know they can still do lots of things they're just not quite you know at your level of skill at operating the world right and then it

22:49becomes like your peer so that's level three so tool assistant peer where it's like as good as you are but at different things than you are right like I sit next to a developer who's better at you know coding than I am and then level four is that it becomes your boss um and this is like uber right so and it tells you what to do so Uber for example like you drive for Uber you have an AI boss right now uh like there's an AI that tells you where to go like drive over here pick up this guy drop them over here like that's what your boss

23:09does right so tool you know assistant uh you know peer boss so in every domain like AI starts off as a tool then it goes up through the the four levels um so that's the thing to keep an eye on is like in your industry if ai's starting off with a tool right now eventually to become assistant then we compared then become a boss and like you can see this happening in like internship industry where like you know AIS are quickly moving up through the ranking and so with that mental model I find that I I'm able to like better predict what the next step will be people always say they

23:35always assume that whatever phase it's in in their industry like it's a tool it's an assistant whatever it's like they assume it's fixed there and it's going to stay there forever um and they just don't realize the pace of progress in Ai and how unlikely it is the AI is going to stay contained as a tool or as an assistant like you know you use barely right I use barely two now it's like this assistant that we have that's like it's narrow but it's not nearly as near as it was before right it can it can handle a much wider range of tasks um then like AI tools used to be able to

24:02just a few years ago what uh what domains do you think AI becomes a boss first uh who would have predicted for example like five years ago who would have said that like oh it'll be the artist that'll be the ones that are actually the most like anti you know AI like everyone thought it would be the blue collar uh you know workers everyone thought it was like the truck drivers they were gonna be losing their jobs first right and now it's all the white color uh like workers that are the most afraid of AI and justifiedly so right and so it's I so it's really hard to say

24:32um in that domain but I do think it's really interesting though like when you think about just how much has changed just in the past few years like like making predictions really really really hard to do now like who saw that coming yeah yeah I mean I remember for it was for years that we kept hearing about the truck duck drivers yep like I feel like every person knew there's 14 million truck drivers in the United States it's the second Mo you know second busiest job in in the United States or whatever what are they gonna do when there's gonna be self-driving trucks and then there was like Doomsday

25:04article after doomsday article about how once the truckers are out of work then they're gonna be really upset that was like the narrative yeah so I think artists were the last people for sure I think um I'll take a stab at answering my own question so areas where AI becomes the boss is areas that are repeatable that rely on systems and data to fulfill their job and that there's very very little room for like gray area so in art like I don't think art will ever be bought your boss the a will be your boss because there's a certain level of subjectivity associated with every art piece

25:51and there's a personal story like go to a popular art fair or an art fair or a museum or anything and the first thing the gallerist or the curator we'll start talking about is let me tell you the story of you know this particular artist and how they came to this particular painting and why they use the style and how they grew up in the Bronx and just the whole story right you're buying into the story and I think that subjectivity is what drives a lot of Art however in some areas it's a bit more objective there's less gray area creativity is is less and I think in

26:29those areas bosses become more likely to be AI yeah I think that's probably right I think what's really interesting is like they're basically there's they're sacred cows everywhere when it comes to Art um like for example I was um doing AI music like four years ago and the biggest uh like EDM ghost producing website which which is they were responsible for like a large percentage of all EDM tracks and um they were selling secretly a third of all of their tracks were AI generated and uh they weren't telling anybody that because they knew that like a lot of artists wouldn't like that um because people believed strongly back then that

27:01like you know AI can't make music and it would seem like it was a violation of the Sacred in order for an AI to make music uh but they they knew with data that like the AI could make music uh and I think that that's I think there's like the silent takeover that's happening with AI right now where like the number of domains were like AI can can do things that were thought to be impossible and it'll be quiet and behind the scenes because people don't necessarily want to openly be violating the sacred uh in that way is going to continue to grow exponentially and um

27:28man just the number of confident decorations I heard in the past five years since I've been like really into AI from people saying like AI will never be able to make insert XYZ art form right and like how just in a matter of months now those same people now are like still moving the goal post to like well I mean okay sure it can make like AI art but it can't make it like better than the best humans it can only make art that's better than like you know most humans and and like doing totally unblinkingly like unflinchingly not embarrassed at all to like have moved

27:54the goal post from like hey I won't be able to make human level art like there's still some artists who make some art better than you know AI you know um I always think it's really interesting the giant the power transfer that happened where like so before well there was so much human Creative Energy that was like stored in people's minds because you had to to build products you had to know how to code um and there was like this really long technical tree of like Milestones you had to achieve to like go from like I've got a good idea to I can actually manifest it in the world and that chain

28:21just went from like a thousand steps down to like 300 you know uh like overnight and that's [ __ ] awesome like it's just such an exciting time to be alive where like you can just go from an idea to like seeing it the world without having to have years of experience in like in development and there's like this giant power transfer where like like who would have thought that like it would be the the shape rotators who basically created like technology that's so powerful that the word cells can rule right the fact that like you can just like you can you can enter an incantation into some magic box

28:53and like beautiful art like comes out at the end of it and like the idea that you can create like man the amount of Leverage now is like if you're if you have a good idea like you can create the equivalent of like you know 100 Company by yourself you know it was some like random like just a handful of like no code tools and uh some Ai and so that's another reason why I like reading about lots of different things for example like when it comes to prompt engineering like I I happen to have like a fairly large library of like there's models I can use to like come up with like

29:17interesting prompt ideas because of reading more widely a lot of people ask me Greg how do you build products that Foster Community well I've got good news that's exactly what late checkout does my company we partner with the largest brands in the world and fast-paced startups to design products that resonate with your community we add a couple interesting clients every single year so if you're interested and that sounds like you email front desk at laycheckout.studio with what you're working on what you need help with and don't forget to mention the where it happens pod thank you [Music] you hit up Upon A really smart point which is

30:09AI plus no code helps you create products in just a lot faster way than you could five years ago and I think to add to that it also allows you to Market your product 10 100 times faster I came across a product um recently called synthesia.ai and it's brilliant basically picture chat GPT like a chat box and you like you know input some plain text and in like a few minutes you get a video of an AI person I mean it doesn't look like an AI person it just looks like a person speaking exactly what you said so imagine like how you can use that well one you can

30:52use that let's say you have an idea for a landing page a company you want to create you want to test it you can go and create like a video that you know they call it video sales letter and marketing vsl you can create a video sales letter of someone like pitching your product on the landing page in the language maybe you're only focusing on people you know people who you know speak Hebrew in Israel right and you don't speak Hebrew and you can actually put it in English it outputs it in Hebrew and you can even pick like a you know potentially someone who looks

31:24Israeli or from that region so that people connect more with that content versus the alternative you'd have to like go to fly to Israel find someone hire them uh rent space from from a place uh sit there with the director record it like it's way more time consuming way more expensive now you can test it just like that yeah it's magic like it's absolutely magic like I don't know how anybody doesn't look at this technology be like oh that's literal magic like magic is real it turns out that that it was real all along uh it just needed enough parameters um and stacks um I think it's also

32:01interesting like how weird it's gonna get like soon uh like in a world where all the influencers are you know AI they're not human anymore or like a large percentage of them rather are AI influencers large percentage of all relationships online become with AIS um because the AI can be tailored like we're basically okay so if you think maybe like you one way to explain the internet is like internet 1.0 um Change the World by by bringing distribution costs to zero Like You could argue that was the single most important thing that the internet did was they brought distribution cost to zero and you could argue the single most

32:28important thing that AI does is makes content creation costs zero so if you have a world where like content is like it costs zero dollars to distribute it costs zero dollars to create all the content is AI generated because it's free energy right so what happens in a world where like all the only fans models are AI like a large percentage of people who aren't only fans right now are like you know you pay to like talk to a dude who's pretending to be a girl right that's already like humans that are doing that um just imagine a world where like mostly only fans or AI generated most

32:57Instagram influencers are AI generated most twitch streamers are AI generated most content you consume was made by Ai and like everything is endless scroll everything right tick tock is like a glimpse into the future of this right like Tick Tock you know there's an algorithm that like decides on everything that you consume and it's like a magic box of you don't understand how it works at all but you feed it data and then it feeds you whatever it is that you want to wirehead I think the next five years are going to be more like More's gonna happen in the next five years than like happened in the

33:21last like you know 25 years where it gets super weird is when you're consuming content and you're not sure if it's a real human being or an AI generated like people listening to this might look at you or look at me and say like Emerson is Emerson Sparks that doesn't sound like a real name that's he's AI Greg Eisenberg no way no way like that doesn't sound like Greg you know maybe it's an AI version and then that's where it gets really weird because you know there's a ethical question which is how are the social networks how are the content media platforms disclosing who is AI versus

33:59who's human yeah there were so many like interesting philosophy identity uh like experiments that are being run every single day and like what is it what like what does it mean to be human um like an example this is I was just getting into so I have a I know somebody who's basically they're basically planning on doing like Mass influencer basically they're planning on just creating like a whole lot of fake people and helping a bunch of like lonely guys like have a girlfriend and there's a lot of like ethical questions around like do you need to disclose that they're not in like you know and like what if it means

34:26that they won't actually they could be they're lonely right now but they wouldn't be lonely but if you tell them that it's an AI not a real girl then they will be lonely again because they won't like talking to the fake girl and you know and then there's like consequentialist versus utilitarian perspective on these things and like and it's gonna get weird I think blockchain watch should be useful here is you can cryptographically sign you know content to verify that it was in fact created by the person who says it was created by I think that's going to be absolutely critical um because how do we have any consensus

34:51reality anymore if like because I think there's also like right now you know we have consensus reality on like how the world works but it's getting weirder right it used to be that we had consensus reality because we all read the same newspapers and we watch the same handful of news stations uh but when you go on Tick Tock it doesn't use a social graph anymore it's an interest graph based on whatever you've swiped on so like your Tick Tock is totally different than my Tick Tock and so on and so like we're not watching the same videos anymore and that's kind of like a weird thought right like what happens in

35:12a world where like tick tick tock on steroids like instead of reading the same book everyone reads this best-selling book comes out like everyone's reading an endless Scroll of Articles every day Everyone's Watching endless Scroll of videos every day that are all perfectly tailored to you like how do we know what to talk about together anymore like how do we agree on what is true and how the world works if everyone's like consuming their own endless role of content that was like algorithmically generated to be exactly perfectly for you like right now you know you've got Tick Tock and you're still seeing videos that are made by

35:36other creators um and like the same viral videos will be seen by a lot of people right what happens when the AI is generating these videos and each video is like tailored to be exactly for what you wanted to watch now we don't have that shared reference anymore because we've all watched different videos uh what does that mean for like uh that just a lot of interesting questions well I think what it means is culture suffers culture suffers number one and then loneliness increases number two culture suffers because cultures like it is being able to reference something and bond about it and have a shared experience about some piece of content

36:13or shared experience you know shared experience and when everyone is consuming different things if everyone's listening to different songs essentially how do we go to concerts like the concerts are concerts of one right because it's it needs to be for me actually right before this call I was watching this like YouTube live stream of Weezer banned from the 90s rock band from the 90s performing at Outside Lands and which is a music festival in San Francisco and you can just like like I just saw the camera panning at all the different um all the different people in the crowd and you just see them mouthing the words

36:51you know like the mounting the words to the song You Know Say It Ain't So let's say which is one of their hit songs when everyone is saying a different version of Say It Ain't So then where is the culture and then how do we Bond as like Society yeah that's gonna be one of the big questions because I see increasingly like the metabrish is already here most people look around this like I think we're already I think we're already mid Singularity right now um and I think the fact that people aren't updating more on AI is like proof that they'll never update on new technology it'll always just be like the

37:17way the world is like they move the goal post that quickly so I think we're mid Singularity right now I think we're also I think the metaverse is already here I think people just have they they're picturing like something that's like two literally three-dimensional to like grasp the idea that like we already spent all of our time plugged into the metaverse we just call it the internet instead um and the word metaverse has now become like well you have to have like goggles on and it has to be like fully immersive but like in your brain it's already immersive when you're like scrolling Tick Tock right so we're already getting

37:42more and more atomized a certain way because of that and so like basically like one one puzzle world is that everybody's basically living in their own server essentially like if you go to Music Festival right now and uh you don't have any friends there then you know there's a bunch of other humans that are there but you're kind of having your own experience too I can see a world where like we have some shared reference teams like there's some servers everyone goes into to like be together and then the rest of the time we're just completely off that's basically what my life is like now like

38:02I don't spend I used to be like well I'm a CEO and I go to the office every day and I'm like with this you know there's like the same you know 70 people that are there and I talk to them and like now I just like read whatever's interesting to me and I travel the world all full time um and so I'm already having my own kind of experience and I sometimes come back and I like okay I reconnect with you and we have a conversation about this and I go back in my own like my own channel my own algorithmic feed and yeah but I agree

38:22though in general like there's gonna be more culture shock you know in the next like five years then yeah we will have seen in a long time because nothing in the ancestral environment prepared us for this almost all of our training data as humans came from like millions of years of evolution of us just like roaming around in the savannah and like picking up fruit and occasionally throwing you know rocks at things and now like how is that useful now and there's all these weird like consequences of it too like for example uh like social media doesn't care what you did it only cares what you say

38:48and so in a certain sense like social media is being completely dominated right now by talkers not doers um and and so like talkers are like taking over the world and that's just a weird byproduct of Twitter I think with Twitter is like sort of like an organism um it's like a it's like a living breathing thing that has its own sort of Consciousness and intentions and identities and I'm not saying that necessarily literally but I mean it like it's I think it's useful to think of all these different networks as being like their own organisms and like they have their own goals and they're not the same

39:15goals that that you as an individual have or like we as like a society have um and I find that when I model them that way it leads to kind of useful ideas what I love about you is you always you always know where things are going and you can kind of like almost close your eyes and picture a future and I feel like it's on it's very close to reality as a business Builder yourself um and as someone who's got constantly thinking of startup ideas um where do you see a lot of opportunity to create startups in this AI you know world that is being created that's a good question

39:50okay so if you're trying to make money in AI um well that's much harder um than just making like awesome [ __ ] uh there's like tons of like cool creative things you can make that will get a lot of eyeballs and attention um I I did too much of that in my password it's not interesting it's not as interesting to me to like make something that goes by a lot of people see it and think it's cool because it doesn't convert anything that like I care about now um but yeah if you just want to like make cool things that like a lot of people see and appreciate you get a lot

40:12of like Karma on the internet then there's like infinite things to do there um if you want to make money then probably the best way to do it right now is like basically like you want to start with like what is the most boring industry um that like is the least sexy industry where the fewest people like you are interested in in building businesses there you have to start there you have to build something for them um by far the easiest way to make money is to like just pick a boring industry like handyman and like either lawn cleaning and you know things like that right so start with a boring industry

40:39um and then figure out how to like use AI to help them solve a problem so for example like you know Peter levels made into your AI you can like insert a picture of a room and it will like you can choose whatever style you want um and then it'll like make the room look nice with that style and like you could easily just take a model like that and take more industry like go to the real estate agents and just like use that model and just like send them photos and like charge them for it you know so they can like virtually stage their listings

41:03um so some Boring Brick and Mortar business that's doing something like the shitty old way and then just like help them and you won't win any Kudos from like the tech Elite for doing it but like you will add value that's that's the best way to make money because those guys are still making money and like I from my house here um I've had I still have to pay guys my cash and check uh in in the year 20 you know 23 uh to do random home repairs um and so those guys still can't accept any form of digital payment like imagine what else they're not doing with their

41:30business one way to think about it is how do you not become the number one product of the day on product hunt right exactly yeah yeah you should don't ever do anything on product time like if you're if you're marketing launch plan involves products at all don't do it that's fiercely competitive you're competing with all the other 20-something males who want to start a business and there's so many 20-something males that are like technologically sophisticated enough to like do something like don't compete with them compete with a different Market and and I know Ryan Hoover the founder of product Hunt is is a listener to the

41:59show so that's no shade on you Ryan it's really just you know there's some products that you do want to compete with and there's some products that you don't want to compete with and I think that with AI specifically because it's like let's be real it is a gold rush and there's going to be a lot of attention and resources being put into startups that are being created in that space it's only natural that tech people build stuff for other tech people and that's going to be high high competition so I think your point around you know start with a you know what is something that you know like maybe you

42:34you know have friends that are gardeners uh or you have connections in the retail space um why don't you think about what are problems that you can solve for those people before solving problems for engineers designers product people exactly less composition best producer of margins is competition where there's competition margins get compressed and almost everybody squeezes down to like a five percent profit margin over time and so the only way to like increase that number is to find some sort of Market that doesn't have competition and AI plus Boring Brick and Mortar business especially if it's not like a big business like something that's sort of

43:10atomized like in every town there's like a bunch of like there's plumbers there's electricians there's HVAC guys there's like local tax guys there's a million of these local guys and they they make like you know 52 like 50 000 to like a couple million dollars a year and um their businesses can use Ai and they don't even need AI most of them just need like basic like I don't know have you tried using any technology at all like have you tried using like accepting PayPal like that level investigation much less uh needing AI but AI for a lot of them will definitely add value so the first point that you made was

43:40using AI to basically go viral and you said that there's like a million ideas for that um last week on the show I had someone a friend of mine named Danny who who had this model that he created using AI it's called this model does not exist I actually posted about it on Twitter it went viral it you know had over a million impressions what sort of framework do you have for thinking about how do you create something that gets a lot of Buzz and as you call it internet Karma okay yeah I guess there's two ways one way is I even do this at scale versus

44:16you wanted to do one cool thing so you want to do one cool thing the best recognition I have there is I go look at all the other cool things people are doing and then just like every time you see a cool thing like go look at this model does not exist um like open up a Google doc right now and like set a timer for like 30 minutes and just try to come up with ideas that are similar to that but a little different so instead of saying this model does not exist um delete the word model and then just like try inserting other words into it

44:40to come with ideas for like this blank does not exist and so you can start with like a list of English words or like the most common English words or like different Industries or something as a tree so like search for like a list of like business types or something and then just like insert those in and then generate like set equal of generating a thousand ideas um for like this blank does not exist and like of those thousand probably like 900 of them will be like garbage and like maybe 90 of them will be like mostly garbage and nine of them will be like maybe not garbage and one of them

45:04will be [ __ ] awesome and it'll just be like so obviously a good idea so so I would I would do something like that and then and then once you have a cool like this blank does not exist idea then like try to build it right and then you'll have to like play with technology and uh but it's not that hard anymore but you know it might take you like a few days to a few weeks uh maybe in a few months if you really have a lot of priors to install um to do it so so the easiest way to actually make something viral is like

45:26just copy something that already exists that's like viral and then just like modify it a bit basically my mental model here is like if you just want to get attention you should change it as little as possible from the original one so for example what Danny did this model does not exist uh and he has like an Instagram version of it right so you want to do something that's like not nearly as cool but like still is really easy to do is like you can just take like the same idea but instead of doing it on Instagram you could do the same thing on a different platform right like

45:47you do like a tick tock version of it um where you have to figure out how to like make it so it's not just a picture anymore um it's a 3D version right that's not that's that's much harder complex you know it's much more complex than what Danny's doing um what Danny's doing isn't that complex you know like I think he said he built it in like you know a few hours a few days or whatever right so maybe it takes you a few weeks to do but you can have like a you can have like a living you know breathing in a certain sense like 3D version of a model

46:09that does not exist to your point on find something that works and remix it just a little bit that's exactly what Danny did so there were a million AI generated models that existed some of them that were successful like will Michaela from from broad which has you know multiple millions of followers but his Riff on it was like there's a bunch of photos that get generated on a website people upvote the most interesting ones and the most interesting ones get posted on Instagram so the community aspect around hey let's go and like vote on this and then people discuss it right and like sometimes the the funny part is

46:49like sometimes the AI sucks and like one of the most voted images uh last week was uh the model's name is Alice two-headed versions of A-list and everyone's kind of like voting that up to post on Instagram because it's funny right so I think your 3D model idea is actually interesting my issue with that is you want to also prioritize ease of creation so it's like how can you come up with a viral idea that isn't so hard to create and is only like marginally harder to create than what exists out there so I would be like okay maybe what does it look like to double down on social

47:29because right now he just says upvotes like maybe there's a whole comment section maybe there's like a whole social experience maybe it's just more Interactive the other like idea I would have for a lot of folks if they're trying to go viral is how do you leverage IP that is existing that you can tap into those Brands to create interesting AI offshoots Etc so you know obviously someone like Disney has a ton of Ip or you know your background in you know Harry Potter right like you know how do you create like a Harry Potter world with AI and offshoots and you know maybe you tell stories you know new

48:09stories and you know using AI et cetera so I think there's a lot you can do there that's how I think about it yeah I think another thing too is like basically most of the AI tools right now are chat Bots um and chatbots are pretty obviously like just kind of the first step because it's really hard to like spontaneously think of a thing to say to a chatbot um and like it's like bad UI most people don't use search for most forms of navigation um and so it's really obvious to me that like this is just kind of early days of AI but it was going to be is like first

48:33it starts with just a blank you know a blinking curtain a search box where you have to like spontaneously think of what you want to ask the AI or what you want the AI to do and then good UI like best practice will start to get embedded and it'll start to just like let you click between like okay do you want to make an image that's like um like this kind of art this kind of art you click on this kind of art then it goes into another you know and then you start clicking buttons and then pretty soon you have a cool piece of art

48:52at the end so uh if you want to skate where the puck is going just take all the chatbots there's like a million chat box though right there's like oh historical figures you can talk to like a chat bot that's like a store like a chat bot of Socrates or a celebrity or whatever um take those chat Bots and then just start adding uis that aren't quite so like open-ended like walk people's hand through the process more so they don't have to like try to think of something from scratch to say you can also like get distribution so what I would do is like I would probably take

49:14like the idea of a chat pop instead of having it be where people have to interact with the chatbot by typing at it um I would create like Twitter accounts and like Instagram accounts and stuff like that and so for example let's say Twitter accounts so let's say that you have like um um like a Jordan Peterson uh chat bot um well during Peterson has millions of fans and most people don't want to interact with the chatbot though so um use the use the Jordan Peterson trained chat bot to like generate content and then just like queue up like you know 500 tweets that are like fake Jordan

49:39Peterson quotes and people know they know it's robot right it's like like AI Jordan Peterson and then do that for like a thousand other you know influencers and thought leaders right so currently a thousand different Twitter accounts that are all that are tweeting quotes that are like where the AI version of them generated it um and then some of them will go viral because they're just like you know like some quote that like Jordan Peterson says is just like like the fake the AI joined Peterson says something that's like super like hilarious or whatever and then it just goes viral right and and so so you can do that though you

50:04could thought later do the celebrities you can do it with anybody basically the way that I'd start is like go look through all the existing AI tools um there's a bunch of websites a bunch of AI tools and say like okay how could I use these to make content and like algorithmically generate a bunch of content and then like create a feed that just tweets it like an example this is there's a bunch of Twitter accounts um that literally just tweet quotes from books and they have tons of followers like you can follow the 48 Laws of powerbot all that Twitter account does it has like hundreds of thousands of

50:27followers all it does is tweet quotes from the book 48 lost power um and there's a bunch of those Twitter accounts and you can easily do that for like any book that has a beginner following but you can do the same thing with like AI generated content as well like there's like a bunch of different like there's like an AI Magic card you know imagine a Gathering card generator and there's AI you know like Pokemon generators and like just take those like and then just make social media accounts out of them where they tweet a lot or post the last Instagram or whatever and then you cross remote them so for

50:52example you get one of the accounts that starts to get big like let's say Jordan Peterson when it's just doing well and then you can like retweet your other accounts from that account um so if you have like a like you know like Joe Rogan uh like AI Joe Rogan bot right uh you can retweet it from The Joint Peterson one to start getting people to find your other accounts and then um this is like the classic way that people get social followings they get one big account and they start spinning up other like accounts that are kind of similar and they just cross promote it

51:16um that's what I would do in general is like think chat Bots are like web 1.0 and like 2.0 is going to be like interfaces on top of chatbots and make it easier but if you want to go viral just like take content and then just like make a bunch of social media accounts and like post a bunch of content but try to make it so it's algorithmic try to make it so you're not having to like do spend too much time like making your own content um there's usually ways that you can automate yourself out of that if you're good at it um like the way Danny did it smart like

51:38Danny's like oh instead of having to pick the photos myself I'll like automatically generate them and let people vote for the right ones right so you can do versions of that there's lots of ways you can do that it really just my mind is just buzzing with ideas it's kind of overwhelming um and that's one of the reasons I actually created a uh a free AI Community for people who are trying to like boost productivity for folks who who are interested in in learning about tools and prompts and and chatting about other uh AI ideas you can apply for it it's free I I'll send it

52:09out in my newsletter so uh you can subscribe just you know go on your phone or however you're listening to this latecheckout.substack.com sign up to my newsletter um I also send out uh the weekly episodes of the Pod there so I mean if you're not subscribed I don't know what you're doing I include stuff like this like launching the free community Etc so and Emerson you should get in there and post your tool you said you had like you know prompts and tools that you used so you should definitely I'm so excited about using AI for learning to learn purposes like oh my God it's just like a

52:41it's a cornucopia of like exciting you most of the text is not quite there yet but it's close you know like like AI summarizers they're not quite there like barely you try to use barely summarize long articles like it still kind of sucks but like you could like it's so clearly not more than like months to like a few years away to where like it'll be able to some like really really really [ __ ] tightly summarize like a long complex like article into like a couple paragraphs um and so yeah there's just a lot to be excited by I saw uh the chairman of alphabet

53:11he he said yesterday that I guess he's getting a lot of pressure like why doesn't you know Google and what you know why is Google quote unquote late to the game with with the chat GPT competitor and his response was basically like oh AI isn't there yet it's one to two years away yeah exactly yeah big oof so I mean my take on that is you know it's a convenient thing to say and you know how could you say that AI isn't there yet when chat gbt has 100 million active users right there's definitely a lot of demand there's definitely a lot that is missing from AI but in some of these

53:53experiences but it's still pretty cool and and there's a lot going on so yep just gotta stay on it yep if you're a web 2 guy just make you eyes for AI like that's the problem right now it's still you have to type stuff that's so obviously like what you're saying there is really like you know when you call it an Uber and there's like pre-filled like be right theirs yes you're basically saying that right yep exactly like make it so that people just have to click they only have a few buttons per screen that they can pick from uh and then like help them like

54:23with just a few button Taps get to some outcome that they want they should never have to like type something in like typing should be like typing is almost always a sign of like a UI failure because most people don't have that many different use cases for whatever that product is so like just help them out by just giving them a few buttons that they can they can tap Emerson Sparks Giga brain you know it's dropping knowledge um thanks for coming on thanks for sharing some wisdom we're good people follow you criminally under followed as I mentioned where could they find you yeah I'm still I'm still uh mostly in

54:54Hermit mode right now um at some point I will uh re-emerge for the Shadows uh into the public eye a bit uh but I do occasionally tweet so Twitter would be the best it's at Emerson spartz s-p-a-r-t-z and can you confirm you're not an AI is there anything that I can say that would confirm that I'm not AI that's true touche touche all right man thanks for coming on to rap thanks man

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