🎙️ Innovation, Technology, and Human Connection with Jonathan Hillis
David speaks with Jonathan Hillis, founder of Cabin, a place for creators to gather together to work on exciting projects 'IRL'. Prior to founding Cabin, he was Director of Product, Shoppers, and Marketplace at Instacart, where, during the pandemic, he grew their workforce of shoppers fivefold.
They talked about:
💻 How the pandemic shaped the future of technology
🏡 The founding story of Cabin
🤖 AI centralisation vs. Crypto decentralisation
🔧 Balancing techno-optimist ambition with societal norms
🚧 The limitations of digital progress
🤝 The value of physical interaction in a digital world
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📄 Show notes:
[00:00] Introduction
[03:30] The rise of remote work and the fall of NFTs
[05:26] How COVID shaped Instacart’s growth and sparked the birth of Cabin
[07:36] The evolution of Cabin from digital nomads to urban networks
[10:07] Pandemic-era theories were early but not wrong
[12:10] Why not all pandemic-era trends were misguided
[14:27] Pandemic influence on the future of tech
[18:59] Why companies and talent return to San Francisco
[21:18] Balancing AI centralisation with crypto decentralisation
[24:25] The tension between visionary tech and current realities
[25:40] Why physical space still matters
[29:05] Technology can enhance, not replace, local life
[31:51] The importance of human presence in a tech-driven era
🗣 Mentioned in the show:
COVID | https://theknowledge.io/issue7/
Blockchain | https://www.blockchain.com/about
Crypto | https://theknowledge.io/what-is-cryptocurrency/
NFT | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-fungible_token
Cabin | https://www.cabin.city/
Instacart | https://www.instacart.com/help/section/how-instacart-works
Web3 | https://hbr.org/2022/05/what-is-web3
DAO | https://www.investopedia.com/tech/what-dao/
Uber | https://www.uber.com/gb/en/about/
DoorDash | https://about.doordash.com/en-us/company
Airbnb | https://www.airbnb.co.uk/help/article/2503
Peter Thiel | https://theknowledge.io/daniellestrachman-1/
a16z | https://a16z.com/about/
How to live forever | https://time.com/6315607/bryan-johnsons-quest-for-immortality/
Bryan Johnson | https://www.youtube.com/BryanJohnson
iCloud | https://support.apple.com/en-gb/guide/icloud/welcome/icloud
Stewart Brand | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stewart_Brand
Liron Shapira | https://theknowledge.io/lironshapira/
Robin Hanson | https://theknowledge.io/robinhanson/
The Age of Em | https://amzn.to/3zeqUyR
👤 Connect with Jonathan:
Twitter: https://x.com/JonathanHillis
Website: https://jonhillis.com/
Cabin: https://www.cabin.city/
👨🏾💻 About David Elikwu:
David Elikwu FRSA is a serial entrepreneur, strategist, and writer. David is the founder of The Knowledge, a platform helping people think deeper and work smarter.
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📜 Full transcript:
Jon Hillis: Humans have gotten very good at technology and technology essentially makes us like, gods in some ways, it gives us a lot more control over the world than we had before. And that's a double edged sword in any mythology, there's good gods and there's bad gods. And there's good uses of technology and bad uses of technology. And once you open Pandora's box, you got to deal with all of them.
And so I think the, we better get good at it, really means we better get good at emulating nature in the ways that have allowed nature to become resilient and have longevity over time.
This week, I'm sharing part of my conversation with Jon Hillis, who is the founder of Cabin, which is a really interesting concept. It's a networked city, which is a collection of neighborhoods that exist in real life that are connected digitally. So it's a really interesting blend of the digital and physical and that's going to be a recurring theme in this conversation.
So before Jon founded Cabin he was a product director at Instacart. During the pandemic he was able to grow their workforce of shoppers 5x. So he has a really interesting product sensitivity. And that will feed into our conversation as well.
Jon and I had such a fun time that we actually did multiple recordings. So in this part, you're going to hear Jon and I talking about a few things. I think the core theme is really this idea that there is a role that technologists have of pushing society into the future but there is also the constraints of the physical world, and the needs of the physical world, and there is this balance of the requirements of both digital and physical, and so we think about what this idea is of the role of technology. Where should it push us? What is the role and the importance of maintaining physical spaces? What is the distinction of having physical spaces and simultaneously, what is the role of cities and the role of community? What is the extent to which some of this can be moved online?
At the beginning, we talk about the evolution of Web3, and this very interesting time we had during the pandemic period where everyone was hyped up on crypto and NFTs and blockchain. And we tried to make a distinction between which of these are lasting and concrete ideas, and which of these might have just been ephemeral trends that might have been short lived.
We also talk about the story of how Cabin started, the impetus that Jon is putting behind it, and how that community is starting to grow, but like I say, broadly, the conversation was a lot more about the role of blockchain in societies, the role of Web3 and crypto and some of these different ideas and how that balances with the ways that we engage with each other in real life, and the ideas that should be lasting, the ideas that should bring people together, and what the future of human interaction will look like.
So it was a really engaging conversation, this part by itself is incredible. You should definitely listen to it.
Now, you can get the full show notes, the transcript, and read my newsletter at theknowledge.io and you can find Jon online on Twitter @JonathanHillis. You can also find him through his website at jonhillis.com and check out cabin at cabin.city. And I'd highly recommend checking it out, reading through some of their, core documents there, it's really, really interesting project.
So if you love this episode. Please do share it with a friend and don't forget to leave a review wherever you listen to podcasts, because it helps us tremendously to find other listeners, just like you.
David Elikwu: So, where I wanted to start was, I think we were talking a little bit earlier, and I was mentioning the fact that we've been through an interesting past few years. We had the whole COVID pandemic period.
I think blockchain had been on the rise, probably in popular consciousness, I think from around, I'd say 2015 or so, because I was working in corporate law at the time. That's the time when we started having some of these briefing sessions talking about, okay, you know, specializing in finance. And so we're talking about okay, what's going to start changing as blockchain becomes a bit more popular? How might we need to prepare for, you know, blockchain, crypto, et cetera, things like that.
And what I found is during this pandemic period, 2020 to 2022 or so, we've had an interesting bifurcation of outcomes from some of the projects and types of things that became popular during that period.
So on one hand you had, okay. All these smart people that are incredibly smart are suddenly changing their profile pictures to laser eyes and they're telling me that the future of technology is going to be these cartoon monkeys and things like that. And then on the other hand, you have a lot of interesting projects where, okay, first of all, people are moving remote. People are working from home. And coming out of that period, you've seen that, okay, actually the paradigm shifts that people had, regular people just going to work people that might not even necessarily know too much about blockchain or things like that. Once they've tasted remote life, they actually want to keep it and then it becomes interesting how okay, some of these ideas blockchain etc. can become useful rails for how we do things online when you have companies that are predominantly remote and they've always been remote. But then meanwhile on the other side of it you have some of these, you know crypto based projects, which are also based on the blockchain, which have had very different outcomes.
Crypto is done okay, but the NFTs aren't really are kind of a thing of the past in terms of their prevalence in popular consciousness right now.
So I was interested to hear from you why you think we've had such different outcomes from those things?
Jon Hillis: Yeah, it's a great question. And Cabin, which is the project I work on was born during this era that you're describing during the pandemic era. At the time in early 2020, I was working at Instacart. The grocery delivery service. And I was leading the product teams responsible for the shopper side of the platform, the people who shop and deliver groceries on behalf of instacart customers. And so suddenly in, you know March of 2020, we saw just insane demand to emerge as, you know, Instacart became an essential service and we, for a little while became the, the largest, higher in the American economy. We, my, my teams were, were onboarding hundreds of thousands of new Instacart shoppers during that period.
And I think there was this belief at the time that this was probably some sort of paradigm shift where we were going to see essentially most people exposed to online grocery and that was going to have these long term ramifications once that many people were exposed to it.
And what actually ended up happening over the next couple of years was that there was a reversion to the mean. And this same thing happened in a lot of industries where COVID was a big jolt to the system. But things were surprisingly resilient and surprisingly reverted back to pre pandemic behavior after a couple years.
And you see this with the trend line and in, you know, online grocery delivery, but you also see it in a lot of other places where we're essentially back on the trend line that we were on before the pandemic.
Now, I ended up helping instacart through that, that early pandemic phase and then left to go, start cabin. And cabin was born in early 2021 out of all of the trends that you're talking about. And there was this incredible set of tailwinds that were driving remote work, and crypto, and people wanting to be out in nature and outside of cities, and be more nomadic, also to figure out after this like, period of isolation during the pandemic how to be around other people again.
And it was really a magical period for the Internet that, you know, the pandemic era, because everybody was online all the time. And so Internet culture, I think, grew and developed rapidly in a way that has definitely not been seen since then. And, you know, I don't know how long it will take to sort of get back to that level of dense, fast moving internet culture.
There's been a reversion to the mean on, on a lot of that as well. And so cabin was born in that era and our initial phase of growth was in that era. We were you know, initially create a residency program for online creators organized as a DOW which is a on chain organization. And we ended up as the Dow ecosystem grew, we serviced a lot of other DOW's and then when that sort of all fell apart in 2022 as the crypto markets collapse, we pivoted to build for nomads in nature and, and build out this co living network as the first iteration of our network city. And that continued to grow for a while, but ultimately it faced the same reversion to the mean and the same tailwinds of the pandemic era, turning into headwinds.
And as a result, we ended up pivoting again late last year in order to focus more on families and on existing urban areas as people were basically returning to those settings in post pandemic years.
So, you know, I think there was a lot of change but I view it maybe less as a bifurcation of outcomes and more as a set of things that experience very rapid change and transform the way that people were thinking about how they wanted to live their lives that a lot of that has now, you know, gone back and reverted in some way.
But I do think that some of the underlying lessons of that era planted the seeds for much longer term things, and that's what cabin is really all about. The idea of cabin was born in the era where people were leaving San Francisco and looking for the next frontier. And some people thought that was in Miami or Austin or somewhere else. And what we've seen now with AI is that there's a lot of return to San Francisco, but at the end of the day something changed permanently. You now can build something meaningful and lasting outside of San Francisco. And in particular, I think what changed most from our perspective was that you can now build network cities. You can build internet first internet native cities. And that that was an idea that really didn't exist before that pandemic era. And I think will persist long beyond it.
David Elikwu: I really want to dig into everything you've been building on cabin, but I think just from the last part you were saying, it's probably important to investigate some of the the hypotheses so that we can kind of like differentiate, okay Obviously you've had some natural evolution in, in what you're building and how you're building it, but i'm interested to maybe we could start by defining, what do you think is the highest level of abstraction here?
Is it kind of starting with maybe blockchain type stuff or you know, Web3 before we get down to, okay, like network cities and things like that? Only because what I'm particularly interested in or curious about is how a lot of these different theories evolved, particularly during that period, and why some of them might have been wrong, or what people got wrong?
Because people are incredibly bullish about certain theories or certain hypotheses. People were saying the world is going to be exactly like this, the world is going to be exactly like that. And so I think it would be useful to kind of do a little bit of you know, picking among the rubble and figuring out. Okay, what were some of these different hypotheses? Why? Did some of them need to evolve or why did we get some of them wrong in order to kind of get to the point where you're building cabin now and we're saying okay, actually, this is a possible future model for the future that is still viable
Jon Hillis: Yeah. Happy to dive in on, you know, whichever component of that you think would be most interesting. But I don't think that the 2020, 2021 era was wrong. Or that like the big ideas people had were wrong. I think they were mostly just early. And they were extrapolating out the growth curve of that era, which also was an era of a whole lot of money printing. You know, it was the Zerp era. And so zero percent interest rates compress everybody's visions of the future into the present. And so there was a whole lot of extrapolation like Cabin, in the, the long arc will be correct. But perhaps at the time was just a little bit early or there was an acceleration that people thought was going to continue indefinitely that, that ended up reverting to the mean, but, but that doesn't mean that those ideas were wrong.
David Elikwu: Okay, no, you've raised a really good point. So I think from what I'm getting, there's probably like three layers of things that co evolved or intersected around the same time and perhaps the the mistake that I'm making here is a bit like throwing the baby out with the bathwater, where you kind of assume that because of the confluence of the way these different things interacted that okay, all of them must be wrong, but actually it could just be the confluence itself.
So the probably that the three main trends I would categorize are Okay, so on one level you have a global pandemic, right? You have this virus that's affecting everyone. It's driving a lot of people indoors because they have to stay indoors for the virus that ticks up a lot of trends in internet activity which is naturally memetic. And so there's a lot of ideas that can far more easily go viral beyond perhaps what the core builders are building.
Then of course, you have the layer of, okay, there are actually people building things that are actually very interesting projects, very interesting ideas in this space. People are working on blockchain, people are working on Web3 in various forms of output. You have some DAOs, you have different people experimenting with future modes of organization and how, you know, you talked about network cities, how cities and different things can be structured.
I think you say you're right where you know some of those ideas perhaps emerged or were emergent at that time, but not necessarily in correlation with some of those other things.
And then the third part is zero interest rates, right? That was a preceding factor. We already had low interest rates before either of those two things But I guess the combination or conjunction of these three different periods meant that like you say, there's a lot of money printing, there's a lot of perhaps grifting behavior. There's a lot of people searching for alpha, people looking for ways to make money. And so when you have the confluence of these three different things you have a lot of memetic behavior, people having to stay indoors, you have some of these emergent ideas of how we might structure financial systems and economies and countries. And then you also have, okay, there's lots of opportunities to make money, then that can lead to some negative outcomes.
So maybe if we start by define, like, what would you define as some of the, the biggest ideas from that period that were emergent there? And how would you define the way that they evolved during that period?
Jon Hillis: I think those are kind of the right, the right trends that you mentioned. So I think the trends you identified are the right ones. I think how that manifested what came out of that you know, was essentially what I was saying about, just the compression of people's like long term projections of the future being suddenly things that people felt like they could work on now.
What I remember from the pre pandemic era, the couple of years before that I was when I was working at Instacart. San Francisco had kind of started ossifying into bigger company culture. And it felt like all of the best ideas of the smartphone era were kind of playing out. Uber had become a big company, DoorDash and Instacart were becoming big companies, Airbnb was a big company. And so the kind of last era of companies were getting quite large. And as a result, San Francisco was starting to be less of a place for tinkerers and the kind of classic people in their garage, which, which, of course, that's always been there.
But, you know, increasingly you walked around San Francisco and what you saw was former MBAs, consultant types in you know, button down shirts that were working at these big companies and going out to the bars and so much stuff.
It was unclear like where we went next or what the next frontier was. And so what I think the pandemic really did was helped accelerate the opening up of, of new frontiers. And I think, what I see coming out the other side of it is a couple of really clear and exciting trends now. You know, I think a lot of those people got flushed out of the Bay Area and moved to places like Austin and Miami and wherever. And that was kind of the old guard who had helped, build and grow these you know, smartphone based companies. And who I think moved in to SF, but also who started building a new network more completely online on Twitter, on the Internet was young excited builders with big new ideas again.
So I think Peter Thiel was probably about a decade ahead of the times or whatever, when he coined the, we wanted, you know, flying cars and all we got was 240 characters. And now we're actually starting to see the flying cars. You know, we're seeing VTOL companies. We are seeing other hard tech, there's been a big emergence of new hard tech companies, American dynamism, military tech, et cetera. In LA and in SF there's been a whole new frontier of internet native culture, internet native communities that are often using crypto as the rails for organizing themselves there is the entire sort of fully online and on chain financialization through defy, et cetera. And then, of course, there's AI, which was really incubated during that period and is now coming more fully to fruition with consumer products built on top of things like LLM's. And image models. And there's other crazy stuff out there too that's been incubating for a while, but it's starting to come to fruition.
Every exciting things in energy in the cost of solar panels are going way down, batteries are going way down, nuclear, you know, it seems like we might be on the verge of some breakthroughs there.
All of these things are sort of new frontiers that definitely existed, but I think we're flying pretty under the radar during that last era, and I think what the pandemic did was helped open up all of these frontiers, accelerate all of these frontiers and also move them increasingly online.
David Elikwu: Sure, that makes a lot of sense. I think there's another interesting part which perhaps starts to link towards Cabin that you mentioned, which is this idea that, you know, during this period, lots of people did move around. But there's two facets of that that I find interesting or, you know, perhaps warrants a bit more digging into.
One is, I would say, overall, America did a lot better job of that than maybe other countries. And in some senses, this precedes the pandemic specifically. But it's this idea that like you mentioned, you did see a lot of people moving from San Francisco to Austin. You had people trying to move to New York, people moving to Miami and trying to set some of these other places up as, you know, tech hubs of the future.
You even had I think it was A16Z come to London and build a little hub here. And so you did have some of this fracturing where people started to move a bit more globally But what I do find interesting is that even in london as an example apart from maybe I'd say cambridge you have a lot of tech startups. They're usually more kind of biotech type startups, but let's say in the UK as a country and the Europe you'd probably say the same South America. You'd probably say the same. There's much higher concentration in a single city than you get in the U.S. where you actually have multiple cities where it might be possible to build things san francisco might still be a bit of a capital city in a sense for for technology, in terms of what people are building, but I still think that around the rest of the world. It's a lot more concentrated than it is in the US where it's actually quite viable, perhaps to build something in New York or to build something in Austin.
So that that's one piece of it. But then the other piece that I'm interested in is similarly this reversion to the mean because even while you saw people move around, I think for example, there was a big push, you know, even the mayor of Miami was like, okay, we're trying to get all these tech companies to come here. I think there's quite a few companies that moved to Miami during that period and then ended up moving back to San Francisco. And you have a lot of people that maybe moved to Austin or moved to other places and that ended up moving back. And so there's this idea that cultures are quite sticky and whatever it is, even if, you know, people complain about the neighborhoods, people complain about the safety, the trust, loads of issues could, there might be loads of things that people find wrong in a particular physical space.
But somehow, even though you're building something in a digital space, there is something about the physical space that means people still want to go to that place.
Jon Hillis: Yeah, I think that's definitely right. Both of those things. But I guess, you know, on the part about the distribution of tech hubs even in the U.S. certainly the U.S. has a lot of great places to live if you want to you know, build the future. But there's no doubt that San Francisco is, is still the place. And actually, in my original essay, where I first talked about the idea of network cities, decentralized cities. It was during that pandemic era. And I led off by talking about where, where is the next tech hub? And one option definitely was that San Francisco will come back. And I think to a great extent it did. And I think it probably always will, because like you said, cultures are very sticky and, and cities are very sticky. And San Francisco definitely has a huge advantage. I mean, I think anything in startups or that involves venture capital is going to be a power law distribution. And by the nature of parallel distributions there will always be one one big winner. And that's still still true in the U.S. And there was that reversion to the mean again, the same sort of idea people spread out. And like you said, people have come back.
And SF is so back. I mean, it's so so back. I was at a friend's co working space recently called Solaris. And they had, it was a Saturday morning and they had two events going on, on one side of the space, they had how to build a nuclear weapon or a nuclear power plant. And on the other side of the space, they had you know, how to live forever with Bryan Johnson. And so like, from nuclear energy to longevity, like, it's back and it's happening.
But the biggest part of that trend has definitely been AI. And AI this is another thing where I think Peter Thiel is right. He's talked about AI as a centralizing force and crypto as a decentralizing force. And so the one area where you haven't seen, you know, basically everybody going back to San Francisco is crypto. And I think that's important and notable you know, to some extent, New York City has become the biggest crypto hub. And I think that makes sense, you know, particularly for the more financialized components of crypto, you know, given that New York is the financial capital of the United States. But, you know, there's actually something different that happened in crypto, which is that crypto has this kind of rotating conference circuit and rotating pop up village circuit. And so the center of gravity of the most interesting parts of crypto is actually not in any city. It is a network city. It's actually, I think, one of the first really good examples of a network city where I don't see my crypto friends in San Francisco or in New York or in any other single city, I see them in pop up villages, I see them at conferences, you know, I see them at Eath Denver and at Edges Moralda and at consensus. And these are all in different places and they're ephemeral. But there's this amazing through line between them where the same people are coming to, to these places and it creates a sustaining culture that is actually based online and manifests sort of from the cloud to the earth across the network.
David Elikwu: Okay, I want to ask one more thing, which is still dancing around this idea of cabin, which we'll get to in a second, but I just find really interesting going off what you were saying, which is, there's this idea that there's a bit of a back and forth between you know, look, technologists, the job is to live in the future and to espouse possible worlds that we could live in.
It's to challenge the preconceptions and the notions that we have about how society should be organized and how should things work? You know, what, what should you expect? Oh, it takes you however many months to make this one item of clothing. What if you had a loom? What if you could just, you know, spin things up? What if you could make things a lot faster? And society progresses a tremendous amount because of the willingness of technologists to kind of go against the grain in some of these ways. But I think you also see some ways in which society pushes back and we learn things, you know, technologists might say one thing, Hey, the future should be like this and society might end up saying, actually, at least in the short term, maybe that's not the case.
And I think, there could be a few back and forth like this where, and I'm interested to know where you fall on some of them where, okay, for example, you mentioned Bryan Johnson. There's one that's been in my mind for a minute. You hear a lot of people talking about these longevity movements, and I think it's actually been going for a while predating Bryan Johnson, particularly in San Francisco.
But it's this idea that, okay, on one hand, it makes a lot of sense. Yes, we should try and prolong human life. We should get rid of sickness. We should do all of these things. But then on the other hand, there's this idea that, hey, you know what? Death spots die, right? Death can be a fantastic thing, okay? You know, you have the elections in the U.S. right now, between like, two people who have taken in turns to be the oldest president in history already. And they are both trying to come back and be president again. Like it's insane to me, right? In fact, it could be a blessing that, Hey, look, if someone gets so old that they are perhaps a bit incompetent, they can just be replaced, you know, there is a natural function, even if they could manage to pull the strings within society to stay elected through our history.
Some of these people they just pass away and they get replaced and that is a forcing function that's built into human DNA in a sense that allows society to move forward. It allows ideas to die there are some people that control the flow of ideas or they have a particular place within society and hey that generation of people they die, new people come in even within a lot of societies now in the UK It's a popular discussion around economics and hey, you know, how is wealth stored predominantly in the UK? It's stored in houses.
And so you have a bit of throttling of productivity, you have a bit of throttling of you know, who's gonna fund technology? And things like, that because a lot of the economy is tied up in houses. But hey, do you know what? A generation of people could move on and a new generation could come in that might invest in different ways. And they get to inherit the houses and they might want to liquidate some of that and they might want to invest in other things. And so actually people dying allows us to do different things. And so that's one example of how hey, there is this thing that exists within the natural world that actually has some purpose so far maybe we get to a point where we obviate some of that purpose, but so far it's kind of worked. It is actually been a, a little bit useful.
And then similarly, when we talk about societies, you know, in loads of different levels. Hey, we've moved information up to the cloud. I used to have all my files on my desktop. Now I don't even know where the files are because I just put it in iCloud and then I can access it on all my devices. It's fantastic, right? We don't need, I don't need the servers. The servers are somewhere they're not in, in my house. Similarly you know, we've talked about this idea. Hey, a varying points. We've said, Hey, everyone should be remote, everything should be digital. It doesn't matter where you are in the world. You should be able to work from anywhere. But simultaneously, there's this forcing function from societies that say, actually, you kind of still want to be here and you can see it when you look at some different maps of cultures today. It's so interesting how people live now in places for completely different reasons that thousands or hundreds of years ago. Hey, there happened to be some coal there. And that's the only reason a city is in a particular place. And now there are a multiplicity of other factors that keep people in that place, even though technically you can work anywhere, right? You're using Starlink right now. People have Wi Fi. You can work anywhere in the world.
But still, simultaneously, people want to go to Silicon Valley. People want to go to San Francisco. People want to come to London or be in these places that, you know, the natural order reason may have long passed, but there is still this gravitational force that brings people to a place. And so the physical world might still have some purpose, even though technologists and the digital world is saying that actually, we might not need that thing anymore.
So I was just interested in how you fall along those kinds of lines.
Jon Hillis: Yeah, I think with any sort of duality like this, you have to hold both truths at the same time. Because there, there are definitely truths on both sides of these things. You know, one thing we found a cabin is that all of the best stuff we do is in person. We're not like trying to build something in the metaverse. We are trying to build real things in the real world because that is the highest bandwidth version of reality that we can be in. And that's the best one. I mean, there's no doubt about that. People want to interact with other people where they actually live. And that's actually the core idea of cabin is this form of localism.
Now, the important part is the network, the Internet provides a new way to access that localism, you know, it provides a way to move where your friends are. It provides a way to meet other people around the world who are doing similar things in their local area. And so, it's not about like uploading your consciousness to the metaverse or something it's about using the tools of the network of the internet in order to make your local life much better.
And similarly with longevity, for instance, I think both sides of what you were saying, I think are true. There's a great Stewart Brand quote that is we are as gods now, and we might as well get good at it. And there's a lot to unpack there, but I think basically the core idea is that humans have gotten very good at technology and you know, technology essentially makes us like, gods in some ways, it gives us a lot more control over the world than we had before. And that's a double edged sword you know, I think in any mythology, there's good gods and there's bad gods. And there's good uses of technology and bad uses of technology. And once you open Pandora's box, you got to deal with all of them.
And so I think the, we better get good at it, really means we better get good at emulating nature in the ways that have allowed nature to become resilient and have longevity over time. And so, I think in the case of living forever you know, natural systems don't do that. And God's sort of do but within some balance, like you need natural processes that allow the recycling of all of the essential elements of the universe. Entropy is like a, it's a fundamental law.
And so, yeah, do I think it's a good thing that we're trying to live longer? Yeah, I do. Do I think that there's some pretty fundamental natural laws here that we also need to respect and learn and work with? Yeah, that that as well.
David Elikwu: Okay, fair. So you mentioned that you found a lot of the best work that you've done at Cabin has been in person. The follow up question that I'm interested to know on that for you is, like due to oh, it's a functional or do you just think meat space is sacred and I use that phrase specifically I had a conversation with Liron Shapira and I also had a conversation with Robin Hanson. And when I was talking with their own, it was interesting that okay, on one hand, he's been very anti crypto also partly anti AI or at least, you know, preaching AI safetyism in that, hey, in his view, we're basically creating nuclear warheads and it's about, you know, who has control of these things? What happens if these things become more powerful than us? What happens if the intelligence runs away with itself?
So on one hand, there's this idea that, hey, It feels like there's a part of that that says, Oh, physical space is sacred. But then he's also very bullish on the metaverse and he wants to put on his VR goggles and kind of, hey, that's that's where we should be. And this whole physical bodies thing is a waste of everyone's time, right? Because your body gets sick. Your body gets old. All these bad things happen. We should just do away with that and just live online immediately.
And then simultaneously, I had a conversation with Robin Hanson. And what was very interesting about that is I think there was a bit of a revelation that came to me only after our conversation where, you know, at the time as you might know, Robin Hanson typically is kind of against AI safetyism in a sense where he just doesn't think it's a big deal. He doesn't think it's much of a problem. He doesn't think AI is going to take people's jobs. He doesn't think much of these things are going to affect much of anything. But then I think it was afterwards when I was thinking about it and I was looking back at his book The age of EM is when it kind of clicked that, okay, he's not worried about artificial intelligence taking over us, but then simultaneously he does believe that actually human beings will eventually become substrate independent where your brain will just be on silicon and at that point you're indistinguishable from AI.
So in fact, okay fine, AI might not win because it kills you, AI might win because you become AI. And so again in this sense it's like, it was naturally a little offensive to me because it's like, I think there is something magical or something useful about being human. And I don't necessarily, I'm not in any hurry to become, you know, something on a chip.
But we're kind of at an interesting period where you can actually have these conversations and we're not just talking about sci fi, you know, we can actually have some of these conversations and it means something and it's actually useful. And it becomes a meaningful discussion to say, what's the point of physical space and how important is sharing physical space with other humans and how important is it? Oh that we inhabit these bodies, there might be many lessons that we've learned from history. Oh, our eyes have learned to move like this and to track other humans and a lot of our biology is based around us interacting with other humans, but how long do we need to stick with that convention?
So i'm interested to know I mean first of all, maybe you can share a bit about what you've been building with cabin? But then also, you know, why is this, the physical instantiation useful? Is it just because we want to preserve something sacred about humanity? Or is there some real functionality there that you think will persist long into the future?
Jon Hillis: There's a lot to unpack there. I think that's a great question. I do think, all I can really do is speak from personal experience here and say that most of the sacred experiences I have had have been very physically embodied. They've been sitting around a dinner table with a group of people. They've been out in nature, walking around and admiring the beauty of the natural world. They've been connecting with other humans on a very deep 1 to 1 level where you can look into someone's eyes and make that sort of physical connection. But I've also had, you know, things that I might describe as spiritual experiences that have been mediated by and even entirely online moments of sort of collective consciousness coming together a group of people, you know, on a giant call where you're just there's an energy to it that is greater than the sum of its parts.
I don't know that I like have a fundamental belief that you can only have spiritual experiences one way or the other, or that even one type is more valuable than the other. But I do think there's something fundamental about reality, and that is that it's unmediated. If you lived entirely in a metaverse you are not necessarily in full control of your reality. Your reality is being mediated by a network by computers by AI's by whatever it is, like you are not experiencing base level reality. So something we talk about a cabin is the importance of touching grass of, you know, unplugging getting offline and experiencing layer zero, the actual real world.
Now, could our layer zero just be a simulation in and of itself? And, and there's other layers and it's turtles all the way down. Sure. But as far as we know, and as far as we can perceive I think is something pretty fundamental and important about, about that direct connection and attention in you know, raw, unmediated reality.
David Elikwu: Thank you so much for tuning in. Please do stay tuned for more. Don't forget to rate, review and subscribe. It really helps the podcast and follow me on Twitter feel free to shoot me any thoughts. See you next time.