The Jordan Harbinger Show

My ability to remember 80s song lyrics far exceeds my ability to remember why I walked into the kitchen.

Memories are neither false nor true, but constructed in the moment and subject to all of the current moods and biases going on in your brain.

You want to diversify your own set of experiences.

Episodic memory is this ability that we have to remember something that happened once.

Memories are just about the future. They're not about the past.

So there is a book called the art of war.

Yeah, Sun Tzu.

I read that book "Spare" and it's full of scenes where he complains and moans about how hard things were for him and they were hard you know his mom died and the paparazzi were all over him but it makes him seem more human and flawed and that makes people realize how privileged he is he's no longer this sort of ghostly queen character he's like a real person who sees himself as a victim and is complaining there's a scene in the book when he's at eaton college the world's poshest high school looking out the window and he's telling us the reader how lucky everyone outside that window was compared to him well eaten is a beautiful college in a beautiful place but it's surrounded by low-income areas such as slough and stains that's where those just sound like low-income area those have been low-income areas for centuries but given the name right those are unbeautiful names slough was the chosen location of the british office the original sitcom the office because it sounds so dull and boring that's the whole point it does so that was slough and stains that was ali g sasha baron cohen his first character was ali gene he was from stains so again these were places chosen for that they're right outside eaten people are sometimes struggling by the way i don't want to say that everybody in those places is you know it's difficult for them it's just that they're not the same as eaten so people are sometimes struggling to put food on the table for their families and they're being told by the prince that they're lucky compared to him that's like big let them eat cake vibes hearing something like that

He made this whole thing about his privacy being invaded and then he wrote this book impinging upon the privacy of pretty much everyone he ever encountered in great detail at least when it's the press doing it it's like okay harry can shut the door and ideally they're not going to hack his phones which he's saying they did and they might have done but this is like detail about the person he first had sex with and what was going on like only he could know that and like details about his dad doing like handstands he did these weird headstands or handstands just in his underwear in the house and stuff like that and he's supposed to be this elderly statesman and now we're listening we're reading this in harry's book so the impinging upon freed privacy stuff was just mad come on

We had a seizure if you read The Betrayal the second book in Houston and the money was actually we went there for the purposes of picking it up the DEA agent who was there was supposed to have gotten in touch with you would call it a clearinghouse where law enforcement tells each other on the day of or a day before what they're gonna be doing because we don't want to have cops arresting cops and so he didn't go through the clearinghouse our guy shows up to pick up the money and they're ahead of us and they're gonna seize four million dollars that's sitting inside the house but our guys there oh no and we're gonna be suspected undoubtedly and it really wasn't our fault but it sure did appear to be our fault and we wound up getting authorization to turn over a report as though we had somebody on the inside that threw blame in another direction.

He wrote a book about being Born Again, and so Charlie became Born Again.

It's like taking a scab off of an old wound

I mean one with Bryan Cranston The Infiltrator which like you can't really beat that. I mean he's an awesome actor

And I said, I think I would have said something along the lines of it's wonderful to see you, but there's a part of me that wishes you weren't here because we had developed a friendship.

I think it was 109 kilos. They let that walk Wow, that was ridiculous. He's they sold it to drug traffickers from the Middle East

I identified him in the book. They're Chaldeans

That the book in the movie Donnie Brasco is named after Joe and I our families have become good friends

Daniel Lieberman points out in his book, The Story of the Human Body, that the sweetest thing an ancient hunter gatherer could find was probably a piece of fruit about as sweet as a modern day carrot.

I really liked the book. I thought it was so interesting.

And now I'm like oh I should have read the other ones too but I guess I can do that later.

I was like oh it's about diving in history like oh it's not really like I don't usually you know go for this and then I was just like but this is interesting let me just keep doing it.

Then it was over and I was like oh that's I'm done with it.

That's really interesting there's so much cool stuff in there and that's going to be the basis of our conversation today I suppose.

I'm one of those guys who's in this is cliche right but I take the ocean for granted I only see the surface and I'm sort of mildly terrified about what's underneath that part and that's it and I'm just like oh I know we got to take care of it there's so much stuff in there and the animals are amazing.

You write that the search for MH17 that airplane or that airplane crash showed us the bottom of the Indian Ocean in ways that just no one had ever really seen before so tell us about that because that's kind of an interesting point that we spent all this money looking for this airplane and rightfully so there were people on it but then it just maps the ocean floor and it's like well actually the silver lining in this cloud of not finding anything with the plane is look at what we have here and that was surprising.

The other scary element of this is people come back and say, oh yeah, there's sea monsters out there that eat whole boats and stuff like that. And of course ancient sailors believed in monsters. Now we know that either that was apocryphal never happened or it was some kind of giant squid or other animal.

The more you learn about them, the more you realize that this is truly awful.

It's just so clear that they feel emotions. They feel grief.

It makes me feel kind of sick to know that there's this really sensitive group of animals in the ocean that we're literally just throwing our shit into and treating like garbage.

I know we're running a little bit short on time.

You wrote there are some three million shipwrecks.

I would have been off by about 2.9 million if I had to guess how many shipwrecks there were.

I've heard that it's hard to get funding to explore stuff like this, because even if you have funding for archaeology, marine archaeology is kind of like, well, this isn't real archaeology.

I've heard that there are salvage crews from various countries illegally salvaging things like warships. So it's possible.

It's amazing to think that salvagers could get from thousands of feet down a warship. But they do.

But at the same time, I really think it's important to take the first step as like let's look at this magnificence and really revel in it. And isn't this incredibly cool?

I'm still too much of a wimp to dive anytime soon, but I appreciate you taking us on this dive here today on the show. So interesting. This is just fascinating stuff.

I only read one book and you've got a bunch. I'm like, OK, I know what I'm doing next time I get a week off plowing through the rest of your catalog.

We talked about why exploring the ocean is key to stemming climate change, even more important in space exploration that's also covered quite a bit in her book.

The Dictator's Handbook is something I read for the show

I think Alistair Smith who came on the show I think he was the one who talked about dictators want competing factions even if it results in massive inefficiencies

Also in studio today is Stayton Bonner, author of Bobby's biography, who spent something like a decade and a half shadowing Bobby for the book and almost died alongside with him?

And was also in the basement with the leopards chained to the walls.

The book just has tons of stories about you go into a trailer park and then there's a fight in there.

There's like a parking lot where they set this up and really it's like straight out of a movie.

The book Stayton does a very good job of going into detail about how you put your thumbs and someone's mouth to rip their face open.

One is The Connected Child.

She said these books guided her husband and her through their own adoption journeys.

Another is called The Whole Brain Child.

She said these books guided her husband and her through their own adoption journeys.

And then there was another one called No Drama Discipline.

She said these books guided her husband and her through their own adoption journeys.

There is a really good book called "On Killing," it did a study on World War 1, a lot of US soldiers, they were within shoot and range from the enemy, they had the weapon they couldn't squeeze the trigger and kill somebody because they looked like them so, it's easier to fight somebody who doesn't look like you if we tell you the person who doesn't look like you is less human than you and

I'm not gonna say Who Moved My Cheese, I'm gonna go out and find more cheese.

So I found a lot more cheese.

I'm the first actual operative or operator that was a member in the unit that wrote a book about his life and about the unit.

So it was a very hard balance to tell to tell a story and at the same time protect national security.

The book went to DoD in August in 2021 so literally almost three years again this is what it first went for review and it sat with them till 2022 late 2022 is the when we got it and we talked about it.

I wanted people to know like there is an organization then we got approval from DoD just went through all the process it sat with DoD for 13 months the book they took some stuff out they changed some stuff to protect sources and methods.

I recommend Noah Kagan's book it's called Million Dollar Weekend it's a really good read for new business owners people who want to start a business

One is called Unveiling Islam, which I think is an eye-opening book.

I have to say your book really puts AI into I hate saying things like this puts it into perspective, but it really does put it AI into a unique perspective because it's clearly not a book where someone who wants to be relevant is like let me throw some buzzwords. AI is really trending right now. Let's do something on that you've really been immersed in this field and the repercussions of what this is going to bring to us on a global level and a super deep way.

I mean, it's been almost 15 years in the field now thinking about the consequences of AI and trying to build it so that it delivers on the upsides and it's just a surreal time to be alive.

I think it's particularly an issue in the US where there's such a desire to believe that the future is going to be better and the kind of bias towards optimism that I think it leads people to just be afraid of potentially talking about dark outcomes like we have to talk about the potential ways in which things can go wrong so that we can proactively manage them and so we can actually start putting in place checks and balances and limits and not just have a bias towards optimism that leads to us missing the boat when it comes to the consequences that affect everybody.

You've coined this term ACI as separate from AGI tell me a little bit more about that and what maybe the none of his right term road map for that is and what this looks like over the next five years or so.

I proposed that a measure of an ACI an artificial capable intelligence would be one that could go off and make a million dollars with a hundred thousand dollar investment by creating a new product promoting it online creating a website for it marketing it getting it manufactured getting it drop shipped etc etc that to me seems very doable with the next three to five years and I think that would be a much more sort of profound test a modern cheering test if you like though it actually tell us something material about what it means for labor and at the economy.