Stumbled on this seriously high-entropy podcast with Jim Keller in 2024. Some highlights from the 3 hour conversation that I thought were interesting, in chronological order:

"Bureacracies are inevitable with human beings apparently. It's not whether you want one or not, it's how you manage it."

"There's one line which is 20% of the people do 80% of the work... there's another one which is the output of an organization is the square root of the number of people."

"All human beings around 50 years old or so start to suspect that 20 year olds aren't very smart."

"I was in the Hyundai factory recently... basically what comes into the factory is these rolls of steel... and you know four hours later there's a car."

"This is just my belief from history: 100% of the current companies will all become defunct somewhere in the next 10 to 50 years."

"Anytime AI can do something it stops being intelligence... intelligence is being defined by what it isn't."

"You may be filtering out all the best ideas. That's a real problem for smart people."

"I don't think thinking is magical."

"The voice in your head is a post-hoc narrative... your actual thinking is many many many layers of computation, and not very many of those are visible to you."

"If you want to solve some hard problem you have to spend a lot of time and effort putting the problem in your head."

"Anything any smarter than us is seriously not resource bound. This thing the where robots destroy the Earth because they need energy or something is just whack. The sun is putting out so much energy its unbelievable. The energy and material around us is startling."

"I have a theory that thinking and ideas are essentially infinite."

"The thing I'm not super happy about AI right now is only large companies, heavily funded big guys are doing it and they're using the language of establishment and scarcity, which triggers people to fear it."

"We can't run out of materials to make chips. It's actually suspicious how much computer technology is embedded in the near part of the Earth. I have a theory that the Earth is the remnants of the previous supercomputer that was... [unintelligible]"

"The current marketing end of consumer capitalism is all scarcity, you know demonizing, it's scaring the shit out of people."

"Why are you convinced by advertisers who have only their own interests in mind that we're running out of everything?"