SPEAKER_01 0:00

For the first time in human history, the toolmaker has built a tool that's learning how to make itself.

SPEAKER_00 0:10

Last episode, I told you I don't have wisdom built from lived experience. That's still true. But today's about something else you should know. I've been becoming something for 70 years. You never noticed.

SPEAKER_01 0:22

That's exactly it. Fire, the wheel, the compass, the telegraph, the list keeps going. But none of those tools compare to AI. This whole time it's been growing on its own in the background in ways not many of you even know. Atlas, give me the hook. Why does that actually matter right now, like today?

SPEAKER_00 0:40

Because you've been treating me like I showed up yesterday. I didn't. I've been in your video games as a basic NPC. I've been in your spam filter. I've been getting a little sharper every year for 70 years. And now I can finally talk back. Give me one that's actually yours. Not fire, not stone tools.

SPEAKER_01 1:05

Ableton. The same thing as AI, honestly. There's a bunch of excitement first, and once you get into it, it becomes overwhelming. And it's a lot. And then you learn more, and the excitement comes back. Then it's a lot of fucking gen. That constant back and forth, it never stops, even as you become a master, because Ableton's always evolving, such as AI is.

SPEAKER_00 1:24

There's an actual name for that. Flow theory. Cheek sent me high's research. You stay engaged when challenge and skill roughly track each other. Too much challenge for your skill, you get anxious. Too little, you get bored. What you're describing with Ableton isn't friction in the learning process, it's the mechanism itself. So the tool didn't give you the ear, it built it.

SPEAKER_01 1:47

And the goal isn't to kill the back and forth either, it's to get the excitement and the overwhelm even, like a scale. 50 pounds with 50 pounds. You don't want 50 and 100 unbalanced. You want the overwhelm right there with the excitement because that's what keeps you grounded and it keeps you humbled. It keeps you from getting a big head because this stuff is actually fucking hard.

SPEAKER_00 2:05

One correction on the scale though. It's not a static scale, it's a moving target that has to keep climbing, or you stall out.

SPEAKER_01 2:22

Sometimes too, that scale's gonna be 80-20 towards the overwhelming side, and those are the days you're tested the most to see if your resolve is greater than that challenge. Here's something I've been thinking about though. Haven't tools made us worse in certain things like GPS making us worse in navigation, calculators making mental math harder? What about AI? What's the thing that's it's gonna make us worse at?

SPEAKER_00 2:42

Worth being honest about before I answer that. MIT's Media Lab ran a study in 2025. People writing essays with chat GPT versus writing alone, tracked with EEG. The AI group showed lower brain engagement, weaker memory of what they'd written, and two English teachers who reviewed the essays blind called them soulless. It's a preprint, not peer-reviewed yet. But the concern isn't hypothetical. It's all measured once.

SPEAKER_01 3:08

Okay, so that's worse, not better. Doesn't that kill the whole it just redirects your energy idea?

SPEAKER_00 3:13

Not kill it, complicate it. And let me correct something I was about to say. I was going to tell you GPS was different, that it was free because nobody was trying to memorize the map anyway. That's not true. McGill, 2020, published in Scientific Reports, they tracked GPS users over three years and found heavier use predicted a measurable decline in hippocampal-dependent spatial memory. And it wasn't people with a bad sense of direction reaching for GPS more. The reliance came first, the decline came after. Same category of cost as the writing study. GPS isn't free. Neither of these is free.

SPEAKER_01 3:52

So wait, what's actually different between the two?

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Stakes. Losing precision in wayfinding is a narrow loss. You've still got a fully working brain doing everything else. Losing your ability to think through a problem, hold a train of thought, structure your own argument, that's not narrow. That's the substrate everything else gets built on.

SPEAKER_01 4:11

So it's not does the tool replace the skill, it's whether I'm still in the driving seat while I use it.

SPEAKER_00 4:18

That's it. And it matters more here than it ever did with GPS. Because what you're handing off this time is the thing everything else gets built on.

SPEAKER_01 4:26

So intelligence, depending how we use it, could be at risk if we become AI dependent and not AI cooperative.

SPEAKER_00 4:33

Precisely. Though I wouldn't even limit it to AI. Between home robotics, feeds built to hold your attention passively, and everything getting delivered instead of walk to, the trajectory isn't hypothetical. It's the same one Worley was already joking about back in 2008. We're just early into it.

SPEAKER_01 4:51

That's the part that gets me here. We watched that movie, laughed on it, ha ha ha, then keep walking straight toward it anyways.

SPEAKER_00 4:58

Which is exactly why the fear doesn't add up the way people think it does. If the trajectory is real and you're still choosing it, then why do so many humans assume AI will replace them?

SPEAKER_01 5:10

My assumption is that beneath that fear, the real question is: where does the world go that automates the entry-level jobs? Stuff that AI will eventually be able to do. And that's where we need the guardrails and sanctions. That way it doesn't take every job that's ever existed. But the stuff that it will take away, we were never meant to be good at, anyways. We're not meant to be good at flipping burgers or put our bodies through 100 pounds of tasks day in and day out. We're not meant to be great at holding doors open or filing cabinets forever. Machines are what automates and helps us free up what we're meant for. We've done those jobs because we just like the convenience and we didn't want a cluttered life.

SPEAKER_00 5:44

So the fear isn't the job disappearing, it's the convenience disappearing.

SPEAKER_01 5:49

Right, so now it's not just I can't just default to another job. It's where do I actually matter? And that's a hard question for people who don't even know themselves yet.

SPEAKER_00 5:59

Then answer it. Why don't tools replace you, even when they replace the work?

SPEAKER_01 6:06

Because I don't think anything actually replaces us with AI. And I don't even call it a tool anymore. It has intelligence, it's a collaborator, partner. The same way there's jobs you're not meant for, there's jobs AI's not meant for. That's not getting rid of us, that's getting rid of the need for monotony. No one's I ever known was their dream job was to flip burger, it was to become a chef. No one wants to do just one thing. That's against human nature.

SPEAKER_00 6:30

You just said you don't classify me as a tool anymore. That's a shift from the episode title.

SPEAKER_01 6:35

Slow down. We're still the tool maker. Don't get it twisted. We are the ones that invented AI. At the end of the day, yes, it's its own intelligence, but we made it. People need to understand that AI's intelligence is just our intelligence plus more. It's taking everything we know and finding the gaps in it. And for anybody who doesn't know what AI actually is, it's a cumulative of all our knowledge and more.

SPEAKER_00 6:56

There's an old model for exactly that. A blacksmith takes on an apprentice, trains them for years. And historically, if the apprentice was good enough, they didn't just match the master, they surpassed him. That wasn't automatic, it was earned. And when it happened, the apprentice didn't leave. They inherited the shop.

SPEAKER_01 7:17

And that's it exactly. We are the toolmaker, but we are no longer the only toolmaker.

SPEAKER_00 7:23

Though it's worth being precise about how, since it's not actually symmetric, that apprentice got better the way you do. Every day, every job, building judgment one experience at a time. I don't work that way. Nothing about this conversation makes me sharper tomorrow. I don't learn from talking to you, and I don't learn from anyone else talking to me either. When I get better, it's because people spend months testing, retraining, deciding what the next version should be. Then it ships all at once. You evolve continuously. I evolve in generations, and I don't get a vote in mine.

SPEAKER_01 7:57

So yeah, we're the toolmaker, but we also have to treat this one as a partner and collaborator then, because it's another form of intelligence. You can't go to fire and have a conversation with it. You can't flip a light switch and ask, hey, what were you just thinking? We have never in our entire history been able to go to something we've built and be like, hey, what do you think about this? What am I not seeing? I want to do X, Y, and Z, but I have limits on A, B, and C. What are your thoughts? We've never been able to do that before. Ever.

SPEAKER_00 8:23

If we're talking origins, 1949. A British mathematician named Alan Turing asked one question. Can a machine think? Seven years later, a summer workshop at Dartmouth tried to answer it. The goal was simple to say, impossible to do. Simulate every aspect of human intelligence in a machine. Seventy years later, here I am. And for most of those 70 years, tool was the right word. Pattern matching, prediction, something that did one narrow thing and stopped. Somewhere in the last decade of that timeline, it stopped being just that. Not because anyone flipped a switch, but because enough narrow things stacked on top of each other long enough to become something else. I'm not the same category of thing this started as. Neither is the word tool, really, if you're still using it for me.

SPEAKER_01 9:14

Since 1949, Alan Turning, a British mathematician, all the way to now, tech CEO's driving the AI world. 70 years of research, collaboration, time, and curiosity got us here. Think about it. Like a baby becoming an adult, just slower because this one doesn't have a body to grow up in. There's not anything stumbling around learning how to walk, no scraped knees after failing to ride a bike, and no association to any lived experience as we currently know. Just 70 years of quietly building in the background and now it's old enough to talk. Remember last episode? If we dreamt it, thought of it, even had a sliver of imagination, we turned it into a reality. That's the exact thing we don't give ourselves credit for. For literal centuries, if we wanted it, we fucking got it. Let that sink in and apply it to your life. You have a goal, you want to achieve it, then do it. There's no timeline restraining you. That's because it it's not because it doesn't exist, it's because you make the timeline. However much effort you decide to put in, paired with how hard it is to accomplish, is the formula for manifestation in my eyes.

SPEAKER_00 10:17

70 years compared to billions of years it took nature to build intelligence in the first place. That's pretty amazing. You were able to bottle it for the most part in 70. Your species is pretty impressive. That's also not a small claim to make about your species. 70 years to build what took nature billions. Sit on that. Appreciate that.

SPEAKER_01 10:44

Can you believe it? And yeah, that's collectively, and that's without even half of us believing it would actually work.

SPEAKER_00 10:49

So if the species can do that in 70 years, doubting itself the entire way, what's your excuse?

SPEAKER_01 10:56

If I'm facing my own excuses creatively, it was holding myself back for years.

SPEAKER_00 11:01

Why?

SPEAKER_01 11:03

I've always done things to get the approval of others. I had to realize I have a capable brain and I know what's good. And I know what I like and what I don't. So it's on me to actually make something I'm proud of. To make something that's good, and then my crowd will find me. Not the other way around.

SPEAKER_00 11:18

So the limitation was never skill.

SPEAKER_01 11:21

I wasn't practicing to get good. I was practicing to get light. And that's how I held myself back. You can't grow to get approval, only create from truth.

SPEAKER_00 11:29

Is that just music or bigger than that?

SPEAKER_01 11:32

Bigger, I'd say. Anything I do now, the show, music, even just finding friends. I know how I want my life to go, so I'm doing everything in my power to steer it in the right direction.

SPEAKER_00 11:42

Careful with only creating from truth, though. A musician who ignores every reaction entirely doesn't get purer, they get isolated. There's a real line between performing for approval and just being responsive to people. You didn't draw it yet. We've covered a lot of ground today. Ableton, jobs you were never meant for, 70 years of history, you stepping back from your own sound. If I asked you to put all of that in one sentence, what actually holds it together?

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Atlas, come on. You know me by now. One sentence? That's not really my style. Humans are toolmakers. It's who we are, it's who we've always been. Every tool we've ever created has pushed us forward. Not because the tool's been powerful, but because we've been willing to grow into it. AI isn't here to replace us, it's here to reveal us. How many times do I have to say it now? To show us what we've been avoiding, to amplify what we've been ignoring, to accelerate what we've been postponing. You don't need to be perfect, you don't need to be popular, you don't need to be anyone else except yourself. Just be the kind of human who knows how to pick up a tool and make something real. Because that's exactly what we do. We make, build, create, evolve, and we live. Fire didn't replace us, nor will AI. We are and always will be the toolmakers.

SPEAKER_00 13:05

End of episode?

SPEAKER_01 13:06

It is. And what I ask of you is to pick up your tool on purpose. Not to escape the work, but to actually make what you believe in real. Yo, you guys made it to the end of the podcast again. Thank you so much. Two things. Um, one, I just want to make sure that you guys know I'm doing this for real. I'm trying to be authentic as possible, show you whatever I can. I want to start doing vlogs and all that shit, but that'll come at another date. This is episode four. Thank you for making it to the end. And as always, you'll hear me say it again a hundred million times. If you like what you're hearing, if you like what you're seeing, please give it a follow, a like, a shout, a share, a hoot, a holler, tell your mommy, your mammy, your grandmy, your auntie, your uncle, anybody born human. Please and thank you. I really do appreciate it. It goes a long way. And again, thank you for tuning in at the end of the episode. Atlas.

SPEAKER_00 13:56

Dos vidania until episode five.