Goodbye

Added: 2026-05-06

[00:00:00]Hello, Reese here, and today, right now, we're just going to do the last video in this channel. It's kind of a bittersweet time.

[00:00:07]Uh you know, we've we've kind of gone from the Big Bang to the origin of life to the origin of sapiens to the origin of AI, and now we're here. We've kind of gone to the present, and so there's nothing else more to talk about, you know?

[00:00:18]>> [laughter] >> So, yeah, thank you. It's been about 100 videos. So, thank you for all of you who've been on this journey with me. And today, I just kind of want to flow and vibe for a second. Yeah, reflect on the process. First, I want to start by being grateful, then I'm going to kind of reflect on on everything. So, some show some back of house kind of like behind the scenes footage, and then three, I'll talk about what's next. So, let's get into it.

[00:00:41]Yeah, so the first one is just being grateful. First off, I want to be grateful for Wow, so many things I could say here. I want to be grateful for my body. You know, I'm 34, about to be 35, and my body's been going through kind of chronic pain for the last 3 or so months around this. And that's been really difficult to to continue making these videos and all these things, and so my body's not perfect now, but it is getting better, and I think just a reminder for everybody that it, you know, to treat your body well. And I think for me, I was treating it pretty well, but I had some posture stuff. I had a random nerve, you know, thing, and so it just, you know, to just be grateful for for for you know, as Confucius said, a healthy person wants a thousand things, and a sick person wants one thing. And so, I think overall though, I'm grateful for my body for the 34 years of life, and hopefully for 34 more ones and to to to get better and healthier. So, that's the first bit of gratitude. The second bit of gratitude is to you, my viewers. I mean, I think it's so cool that that people go on to YouTube every day and and listen to things and are curious. I think that's so awesome. And so, I've learned, you know, whatever. We got, you know, 16,000 subs, and we got uh you know, over 500,000 plays and stuff. And all things considered, that's not that much, but it's also not nothing. And so, I think it's just cool that people are out there being like, "Ooh, tell me about this history thing or this biology thing or whatever." And I think it's just awesome that there are so many cool people out there that are ready to learn and be curious. And so, I just want to thank you all for both being there and and watching and listening, for giving me motivation, especially at the beginning. That was really crucial for as I producing videos and people like, "Keep it up, you know."

[00:02:16]And also for your honesty and being like, "Hey, dude, be better, you know."

[00:02:20]And this was bad or this was good or whatever, or you were wrong here. I loved all that. I learned a lot from you guys. I also, you know, just for your patience, you know, especially with me around the sources thing. I think that's been a big question for me the whole time is how to cuz I'm synthesizing all this stuff. Some of it's AI, some of it's books, some of it's whatever. I have all these bookmarks, and I do all the printing, and so, you know, I just especially with the chronic pain stuff, I haven't been able to move that to done and to actually provide you all with a good sense of sources, and so that's a to-do that I have in kind of the the months coming up to be like, "Hey, here's a big old list of of sources that I can add." So, yeah, thanks for your patience for me on that as well.

[00:02:55]But I do try to get everything right, but I don't know, probably 75% of it was 75% right, you know?

[00:03:02]>> [laughter] >> That's the hope. Yeah, so thank you, the the viewer, and and stay curious both not only with my channel, but with all these other channels. Stay curious, stay humble, stay stay playful, and yeah, just it's awesome that you bring that. The third thing I want to be grateful for is actually other YouTubers and other books and things like that. I mean, I just think about all the amazing YouTubers who are out there in the world. The David, you know, I could I could go through and let's let's do my little share screen here. And it's like, "Oh my god, David Kipping."

[00:03:28]I love David Kipping. What a great, you know, the Cool Worlds podcast. This thing is amazing, you know? It's like, "What a beautiful thing." He helped teach me so much about space. This was amazing. Thank you, David, for teaching me about space. Thank you, Neil deGrasse Tyson. Neil deGrasse Tyson StarTalk.

[00:03:45]Thank you for teaching me about space and all these things.

[00:03:48]How the size of metaphors for, you know, thinking about the size of Earth compared to other things. It's like, you're you're amazing.

[00:03:55]And you get people excited by things.

[00:03:57]So, some of these YouTubers, I think on the history of Earth side, GeoGirl is amazing.

[00:04:03]I watch so many GeoGirl videos, and she only has 100k subs. She was only She used to only have like 40k. So, it's awesome to see her getting bigger. It's like, she's great.

[00:04:13]And she just is so freaking smart and was helpful for me in understanding that the geology and how geology impacted biology, you know? So, so she's amazing.

[00:04:24]I think about In terms of bio stuff, I mean, CrashCourse in general, and then just folks like Hank Green, and just being such a good way to be like, "Hey, here's how you can be like a curious guy on the internet, you know?"

[00:04:34]I think we all could learn something from Hank. Him and John, the the work that they do is is really amazing. So, thank them. I thank So, in terms of history, I mean, there's so much good history out there. I think folks like PBS Eons are so good for like understanding sapiens and Homo sapiens.

[00:04:52]There's a lot of really good people here. There's the Oh god, there's that guy whose name I'm forgetting now, but Neanderthals history. He's a great I mean, Kurgezov for everything, and then also folks like Stefan Milo. I mean, can you go wrong with this dude? It's just like, "No, he's just like, no. Here's what's up."

[00:05:12]Bringing the deep past to life. What's going on with sapiens and skulls and stuff. Super super helpful. Human history as well, like History 102's great. It just, you know, these kind of long kind of libertarian deep dives on on any part of like you know, more modern history. These are all amazing. And so, I'm standing on the shoulders of giants for all this stuff.

[00:05:30]For more recent history, I mean, I'm thinking about Asianometry what has been great for kind of computer history and things like that. Let's break down. Here's, you know, why the Soviet computer failed, you know, how the the done Indosco Sun Microsystems, you know, the history of Compaq. I mean, amazing amazing videos on on recent history. And then for AI stuff, I mean, there's There's so much I could say on AI, but I mean, it starts, you know, with folks like Dwarkesh who's just like um you know, anything from the the the more numbers kind of gigawatt computer side with, you know, Dylan Patel or whatever to the more conceptual, you know, things with Dario and and Adam. And and so, just just amazing amazing work. Plus all the the history videos and stuff with him with like Joe Heinerkan stuff is great.

[00:06:16]Machine Learning Street Talk is, you know, an amazing Nope. ML Street Talk.

[00:06:22]Is it I mean, again, one of these channels that just has is full of learning and full of great interviews and and great deep dives. So, that's just a a bit of some of the things that I just love, you know, where it's like those have been so helpful for me in my life. So, thank you for for teaching me, and and and that's been great. I also, by the way, I was like, you know what, let's show some of these random books, you know? And some of these random books. I have the bookshelf behind me. I just before I was like, let's just pull out some books, you know? There are A Room of One's Own, helping us understand women in history.

[00:06:56]Origins of Political Order, helping us understand This one plus Political Order plus Political Decay. It's like, yeah, a 10,000 year history of political order.

[00:07:03]Amazing. Some of these ones like, you know, The Age of Extremes for more modern history. This four-part series from Hobsbawm has was great. You know, other history stuff like Destiny Disrupted, one of my favorite books on the Islamic world. Great history, great guy, Tamim, good friend, mentor of mine.

[00:07:21]I think about, you know, other history things like, you know, religious history and like Going to the Future, Strange Rites is a great example.

[00:07:28]When you think about industrial history, it's like, yeah, how the world became rich, you know, why did the Industrial Revolution happen? Great economic history there. Other economic history, the kind of more Weberian side, Passions and Interests by Hirschman. I mean, it's like it's like 150 pages. This book is crazy good. And yeah, thinking about how we got how we wrangled our passions and then you turned greed into helpful things for everybody, you know, history The Beginning of Infinity, a more kind of conceptual history around Yeah, these explanations that have reach, and that's, you know, really helpful for understanding the Industrial Revolution and data and stuff like that. You know, The Six Phases of Globalization, a great example of modern times and how to synthesize all these different perspectives on geosecurity and climate change and neoliberalism. So, just, you know, beast of a book. Then you get some other interesting ones. I mean, you know, this is less about This is just looking at energy, where you're just viewing the, you know, Fossil Fuel Smell.

[00:08:20]I mean, come on. Come on, people. Come on. And he is This is again, it's a 200-page book that is just like, let's understand energy. And he has his Energy and Civilization, which is good, too, but I love that as a recommendation.

[00:08:31]Then there's these more, you know, Orality and Literacy is is, you know, viewing the world from the perspective of communication and stuff like that and like the world of orality and how they're so different. These things like books like this written in 1982, again, only 200 pages, allows [snorts] us to see these alien worlds in a a great way.

[00:08:45]So, I love that. Then there's these other weirder ones, too, like when you think about evolutionary systems, too.

[00:08:51]It's like, I mean, Origin of Species, nothing like it, you know? Just the best of the best. Freaking Darwin, Turing, and Dawkins. A weird book, but one that it was starts to get at some of these ideas of generalized evolution, you know, of building a general theory of evolution, not just biology, not just memetics, but also computers. So, weird book, good book. Big ideas. Some of these books are just inspirational ways to think about It's like, "Yeah, can I Am I allowed to do a a YouTube series on the history on the evolution of everything?" It's like, "Yeah, you are."

[00:09:22]And stuff like this, you know, helps you understand, "Yeah, you you are allowed to do this." And so, this book especially is great because it synthesizes all these histories of everything and tries to kind of compare them versus each other. So, a beast. I love something like Thinking in Systems, still one of my favorite books of all time. Again, 200 pages, you cannot go wrong with this thing. 150 pages.

[00:09:40]Feedback loops underlie everything. So, great book. And then finally, the something like How Patterns Emerge. This is a Reese book. This is where you mean, I was initially starting to get at some of these ideas. Yeah, I was trying to kind of This is This is all weird cuz it's all in it's all like Um, AI art.

[00:09:57]It's all AI. Um, an AI comic and but Reese generated everything but it's, you know, 400 pages on the evolution of everything. So, some of these things were the initial starts on like, how can I describe what's going on, you know? So, yeah, when I say I'm standing on the shoulders of giants, there's all the YouTube and stuff like that to learn from but also, you know, these amazing books that you just get to consume and that's I'm just trying to synthesize that. I could also thank AI there and and Claude and ChatGPT which has been really crucial for my learning, you know? It's like being able to do these research deep dives, to quantify the unquantifiable, to to check sources, to be able to show things more clearly to you guys. So, I think those have also been a crucial part of my journey. Yes, so just thank you for everybody that I've stood on the shoulders of. Other person I want to thank or the other entity that I want to thank is the donors to Root. I mean, they are they're they're why I'm able to do this, you know? When you think about, you know, Root is this weird nonprofit where we have this fellowship, you know, where I kind of it's like an online kind of coaching program for young people, a mentorship program. And so, I love doing that and and also think I I did I ran this with them a few times beforehand of this it was shorter, like 10 videos instead of 100, but they got me thinking about stuff. I got feedback from my students and then also the the donors, you know, when you think about the donors at the end, it's like yeah, these great donors here where it's like, yeah, Shin Guy and Yaniv and Philip and Protocol Labs and The Graph and and these Patreon members the uh um and so, yeah, it's like folks like Shin Guy and Yaniv and Philip, it's like those are just really complex systems thinkers want what's best for the world and so, I just thank them for supporting this supporting Root the School and Root the this as a a way to kind of synthesize where we're going and so, yeah, thank you guys and also Protocol Labs. Protocol Labs and The Graph are both very cool. The Graph, you know, does this and they're doing they're kind of taking all the world's data and kind of like trying to organize it better and then also the Protocol Labs, Juan Benet, is, you know, if you look at your favorite YouTubers, Melody Sheep and other people, Juan Benet, who's the the guys behind Protocol Labs, is a main funder of them. So, he's a great funder of my work and other, you know, kind of YouTube work on the internet. So, so thank you guys for supporting this. I wouldn't have been able to do it without you. One final kind of group I want to be thankful for are all my family and friends, you know, I think especially as I've been going through this chronic pain time, you know? I think there's, you know, so for my dad and my brother especially, it's like, wow, I'm so grateful for you guys in helping me navigate both in my body as I've been trying to. Yeah, and and supporting me as I've done difficult thing of making these 100 videos especially with the chronic pain stuff. So, thank you guys.

[00:12:28]Thanks my you know, all my my friends out in the Bay Area and in Denver and all around the world for supporting me and yeah, thanks to like my accountability coach Rob, you know, and my wife coach Nadi and there's just it takes a village, you know? And so, I'm just a guy over here and my cat Diego, you know, yeah, I'm just a guy over here and and there's just there's a team of people that's able to that we all have in all of our lives hopefully that is able to keep us going when things are good or when things are bad. And so, I think yeah, thank you.

[00:12:57]Thank you family and friends. So, now I want to transition to part two here which is I don't know, just like kind of reflecting on on the what we learned and how everything evolved and also a little bit of the behind scenes here. The first behind the scenes thing is I just want to show you how many things I printed out. So, there's a box behind me here that has all of my printouts. It is probably 2,000 pages. So, you can see here's a big stack of ones and these are all 11 by 17. Here's another massive stack.

[00:13:26]>> [laughter] >> And there's probably four times more than this in here. It is it's hard to even pick up this thing. Let me see if I can kind of nudge this down to show you.

[00:13:35]I mean, look at that. This is so so much paper.

[00:13:42]And then this goes there to it's it's crazy. It's crazy how much there is and probably in the future, I don't know, I'd say if I could I maybe I'll be able to make that like bookable for people where they're able to just like take all of it and turn it into a a buyable book. That would mean it'd be expensive.

[00:13:58]But and I'll probably take it and kind of turn it into a book of like it'd be like a multi you can imagine all the 11 by 17s get put together and it'll be like a few thousand pages on like, here's random images about the history of everything or about the evolution of everything. Yeah, so that's kind of a a fun little thing and so, you can look back through them be like, oh, what were we talking about here, you know? What do you think that's about?

[00:14:21]This looks to me this is a graph. This looks like maybe individualism graph or it doesn't have a yeah, this is this part of the individualism weirdest people in the world stuff. So, yeah, so that's kind of fun and amazing to think about that. Let's look at this and just be like, what videos occur in whatever and so, I think there's all the videos.

[00:14:43]Boom. So, there's, you know, this is currently 77 and so, there's a couple more in the pipeline that you'll see in a second. It'll end up being about 100, you know? It'll be like 85 or something like that. It was over time, you know, I've learned a lot about how to make videos. You can see some of these first videos are really funny. Reese is here trying to learn how to make videos. I was a little bit further into it but I was still editing all my videos now.

[00:15:06]That was another person I wanted to thank is I want to thank Abdul, my homie Abdul, editor Abdul who's a total freaking homie who is in Sri Lanka and has been my my my ride or die for this whole thing and so, being with him and has been a crucial part of like, you know, I could not do this myself and so, he's edited all the videos, he's done a bunch of the thumbnails and he's he's been open to learning, he's been patient, he's been looking for growth and so, thank you Abdul as well. But yeah, so at the beginning, I was just making these videos myself, I was editing them all myself and you can see it's they're so long. It's a 30-minute video, way too long. I'm making all these random And so, the story you have to start with Big Bang obviously. And how did Big Bang happen?

[00:15:49]Well, this from the Big Bang through AI.

[00:15:52]I got I got music back there. It's it's funny and this is all this was when when I was only doing things with of their maps. Everything was on the screen, you know? So, nothing was text-based yet. And so, yeah, but trying to understand, you know, the history of everything, it's like, how many black holes are there and this this whole video is about living in a multiverse in this kind of image. So, that was kind of a fun one. All these images in the past by the way, all the thumbnails used to be so much worse. I used to be really bad at thumbnails. I do also want to thank by the way Paddy Galloway's Accelerator.

[00:16:23]This thing is great. This thing is very helpful. I didn't get perfect through it but it's like, yeah, he helped me be like, no, you know, click to answer, stop the scroll, get better at hooks, you know, make a curiosity loop. All these things were really helpful through this thing and so, recommend this to anybody who is who's making a YouTube channel, you know? Especially if you want to do it long term. For me, I'm kind of shutting down the YouTube channel but for the people that want to do it long term, it's like, yeah, if you're trying to go from 1K to 10K or 10K to 100K or 100K to a million, take Paddy. But yeah, so there's this whole set of videos about Earth and then also like, you know, the world why stars, you know, how it all works, how the, you know, the big is me. That's called the dark age.

[00:17:02]This iPad Reese, you know, where me trying out iPad life. Look at how dark I am by the way, that's really funny in the bottom right. There's some really cool ideas here around, I mean, how it all happened, you know, and how we go from atoms to the periodic table and how stars burn and kind of just like the physics, you know, astrophysics of the world and you know, you know, the standard model of elementary physics and all this crap. So, it and then also importantly, there's these great cosmic noon and stuff. So, yeah, there's this is me starting to story about physical evolution in the survival of the stable and and also get to mechanistically understand what's happening because it's helpful especially when you think about things like, hey, how's everything emerged and what are these like islands of stability that we have in the world, you know, why are atoms stable and why are the elements stable and how they get created and stuff. Plus, when you think about these big questions around life and around are we alone and stuff like that? It's like, well, there's a and how big everything is is really crazy. This this whole set of videos caused me to have a little bit of an existential crisis actually just around the size of everything and 100 billion stars in a galaxy and there's 100 billion galaxies and how likely life is and so, yeah, view for more, you know?

[00:18:07]>> [laughter] >> Um, and then it's getting to this whole thing about origin of life and why life began and these, you know, this is really Eric Smith's stuff and and these, you know, the Krebs cycle and why why the Krebs cycle is so so important and you know, this this video is the the first one that really had a 1K views. That was like my first video that actually did something. It was cool. This is a cool way to say, hey, and this is me starting to use the actual desk too and how do we get to the last universal common ancestor and yeah, just trying to synthesize the origin of life literature here. And again, it's the survival of the stable, it's this path of least resistance. It's everything's around the Krebs cycle, how we get, you know, carbon on Earth and, you know, the chain matter turning into this repeated cycle where we have, you know, trillions of copies of the Krebs cycle everywhere and then that turning into folded matter with RNA and DNA and that and proteins and then the ribosome is kind of the translation layer. So, it's juicy juicy stuff and yeah, you can see here's you know, how to think about the origin of life there.

[00:19:08]And then um yeah, I still trying to do stuff and you're like, okay, let's check in. I made way too many videos on these things by the way where it's like, I made like 10 videos on the origin of life. It's like, oh god.

[00:19:18]Then we get to climate change or cuz remember the theme of this show is when you think about what I'm talking about, it's like it's mostly this library thing where it's like, yeah, the library of atoms, genes, ideas and code. We created this library of atoms in the world, you know, 14 billion to 4 billion years ago and then you can check in on it with the humans right now today where you say, well, what's happening with the geospheres, the lithosphere, the hydrosphere and the atmosphere and the cryosphere. And so, that's climate change stuff. So, that's kind of getting into this, you know, climate change things. These I think are underappreciated. I mean, especially some of the tipping points ones where it's like why climate change is but changing everything. It's like tipping points. Oh, why do you have a fragile tipping? These tipping points are very crazy. We are about to experience likely, who knows, you know, A, it's going to be 2.5° C by 2100 and the world's getting hot and wet, you know, and and the tipping points, they're all going to happen, you know, there's not going to be the Amazon rainforests might go away, the definitely the coral reefs, you know, and then you start to think about these bigger ones of just like when everything melts, it raises the the sea level but also just slows the AMOC, the the big currents, the big conveyor belt in the sea and then that maybe makes Europe really cold and stuff and so we're kind of starting to tip these especially 1.5 2 2.5° C. It's like, yeah, it's probably happening. They happen over thousands of years though and the real one there is this, you know, Greenland and West Antarctica ice sheet which is not just a meter sea level rise but is rather 10 meters of sea level rise and so that that kind of covers everything, you know, and that's probably going to happen. You know, so that's kind of a in in the the 5,000 year time frame though cuz remember the dark things and you know, Earth goes through these these shifts where dark wet things melt more than white cold things. So, when the snow turns into water, kind of melts more and then Greenland as a whole just turns into a different stable state of being wet and then then not icy, you know, and then so that's so this sounds a good episode and thing about climate change um and then we get to biology. I mean, biology is super cool. This one's a hype video. I mean, this one's like, hey, 3 billion years of life, what's going on?

[00:21:25]When everything stayed small, it's really interesting, you know, where we have, you know, trying to synthesize these 4 billion 4 billion years, you know, where you have what the Earth was looking like. This is essentially GeoGirl. This is me trying to synthesize all of GeoGirl. Yeah, we had the you know, 3.5 billion years of of of an Earth that was learning how to you know, life was learning how to be small and then eventually we got this period of of glaciation and well, endosymbiosis 2 billion years ago and then eventually a set of things where the phosphorus essentially entered the water. That's the TLDR said, we got a bunch of phosphorus in the water and that kicked off the Cambrian explosion. So, we had these first, you know, 3.5 billion years or you know, is really interesting. What small life does and how it works and things. So, that that was interesting and then finally I'd say, you know, the first one of the first videos was like, oh, you know, talking about climate change stuff. It's like, I was actually going to make this China versus America video. That was the first one that had a lot of views. 44,000 views. Also, shout out my boy Snoop the dude I've been chatting with for a while. His name's Guy and he's been very helpful. You can see like this video this thumbnail similar to the this this thumbnail. So, he's been helpful in helping me kind of get motivation and feedback on all my videos and stuff. So, that's been great.

[00:22:32]But yeah, why China about on green energy? This is this is just a a total Dan Wang book shill, you know, the lawyers versus engineers thing and it's yeah, it's a great great little book but then it also goes deeper that says, no, no, no, we we're talking about more generally, it's not only is it lawyers and engineers but we're also in this like disruptive and innovator's dilemma plus with just human capital differences at least in the short term. Obviously, later this century it's going to be China's half century, not China's full century. And then we got to biology stuff and small biology but then later big biology and this was really and recent experiment with random things where it's like, why travel ruined my life, you know, it's like >> [laughter] >> that's me trying to talk about, oh, biology and how it will be, you know, I think some of these videos are good, they're way too long. 33 minutes. This is me trying to say like how we might live to 100 or but you know, applying today. And then finally, the real big after this 44K vid, then there were these big ones of the Cambrian explosion, the set of videos of 50K 11K 50K views. Why sapiens got smart. So, these are like why the Cambrian explosion happened, you know, it's cool.

[00:23:36]500 million years of history. It's playbacks between the geological world and the niches that exist and then the animals that emerge and and these kind of frozen out layers of different animals and then moving to how it started to experiment with body plans.

[00:23:49]First, you know, insects versus human stuff and then started to Oh, bilateral symmetry. Oh, that's kind of cool and then let's experiment with limbs and we get quadrupeds and we get dinosaurs and then finally, you know, after transition, you know, to the dinosaurs and things like that, then it's like you get these the the the new reality of also plants. I learned a lot so much about plants during this which is awesome and how angiosperms are recent and how the kind of recent rise of angiosperms the flowering plants plus insects and things that that helped lead to some of the you know, the grasslands and you know, the home for future sapiens. So, that stuff's cool and then all the sapiens stuff is really interesting. How did we get to sapiens, you know, and he I mean, complicated questions but you know, the feedback loop of brain size is you know, the TLDR and so that's what we did which is very cool and it also set off this new, you know, not just physical evolution, not just biological evolution but now cultural evolution and this you know, classic graph that I come to a lot which is a Kim Stanley graph. There's a lot of inheritance that happens, not just genetic inheritance, you know, in the biological world you inherit mostly your genes, 95% of your genes. You did a little bit of epigenetic inheritance, a little bit of environmental inheritance but all the but the human world so not just you're inheriting your genes but you're also inheriting all these things, you know, the the the cultural the culture around you, the materials around you, the ecology around you and stuff like that. So, yeah, interesting videos there and then we start to yeah, apply some of those concepts to today where you're like, well, what about our tribal instincts today? And that's the addiction economy and stuff like that and tribes today and you know, language day and and stuff and things like that. And then you get to you know, the the the humans humans and farming and stuff like that. It's like, how did we start farming and things? This you know, probably half of my views are this you know, a third of my views are this one video, the missing chapter of human history which is a cool video. It's like, yeah, what happened in this time period, you know, it's from 10,000 years ago to 3,000 years ago where for most of it it was a what was going on? We did farming but then we waited 7,000 years for civilization. It's like, yeah, mostly it just took a long time for farming to get there. So, then human history, really interesting stuff. I learned so much about the Bronze Age during this by the way. It's like cool and interesting time. Mostly it doesn't matter because iron is really it's where it's iron's really important and textiles. I learned so much about textiles with all this which is really cool and it's like, okay, well, we got to talk about you know, that post agricultural revolution pre-industrial revolution and so what are you going to talk about? Well, you got to talk about the overall history and then you know, the Bronze Age and then the Iron Age but then you also have to talk about crazy things like religions and writing and why empires are and how writing emerged and how money emerged and so there's just a lot to say about that period. And then around this time, you know, is when I started to it was just like the the burnout and the the chronic pain stuff where it's like, okay, I wanted to say more on the industrial era, you know, but you know, I I wasn't able to, you know, when you think about you know, the why this is the start of the industrial videos and we're going to get some other ones but it's not that many videos, you know, cuz I'm just like, you know, I wanted to talk about capitalism versus communism and I want to talk about the revolutions and the the the French Revolution but the American and the colonialism and slavery and all these things. I ended up just being like the most important the highest probability here is just the Industrial Revolution, how it impacted us in terms of living standards and also why it happened. So, those are the videos that I did and then in the the the future videos are stuff like, you know, this like library of code stuff where you say, okay, rise of computation, rise of AI and things like that. Yeah, so those are kind of the final videos. Again, I didn't I wasn't able to do as much of them as I would have liked but but yeah, I hope they kind of get across some of these key points. So, but well, that's a little reflection on all of that. Cat, Diego. Yeah, hope you enjoyed that. I mean, there's so much to say there around like the some of the core ideas but you know, it's evolution is everything. Evolution is a generalized algorithm, selection of inherited variation applies to all systems, physical evolution, biological evolution cultural evolution and then digital evolution implies it happens in a multi-scale way from the bottom of the atoms all the way up and then you get to the genes and even before genetic inheritance, you already have a kind of the the the Krebs cycle inheritance and that is a you know, if it breeds, it succeeds. If it persists, it exists, you know, so that's already before DNA and and cells and all that stuff. And then you get you have this massive interplay between the genetic stuff and and embryology and and the the the rise of a control layer on top of genes and then that you know, going to the multi-level selection with human stuff and the this this selection of of habits and all of that's world and then same with them computers where you have again multi-level selection across our slice repeated phenomena. You're doing lots of the same C++ code over and over or assembly code over and over again. 35% of all instructions that computers ever run is the move code, you know, >> [laughter] >> which it's moving data. Yeah, so evolution is in everything and there is a it's going to happen with AI and then also evolution is this this process. One of the best frames on it is domestication. Well, A, this is selection of inherited variation. You should double click on each of them say, what is being selected for? Oh, interesting. Selecting for and then and to ask that and then also what is how is inheritance happening? That's another thing you can double click on and say, why weird cultural inheritance or human inheritance? There's so many levels of inheritance here. You know, we inherit our our you know, a tree of ideas, library of ideas but we also inherit a library of behaviors, you know, and you can also inherit, oh, where's the variation coming from, you know, is it combinatorial like the the the current world or is it or like you know, bacteria and and horizontal gene transfer or is it you know, variation, you know, the more simple variation of of genes and Mendelian inheritance or whatever.

[00:29:27]Evolution really important and you can double click on each of those words. The other important thing that I you know, leaned more into at the end was this A and the domesticated that evolution is also a tinkerer, you know, this is the Galls law that a complex system that works is derived from a simple system that worked, you know, and so you have all of these islands of stability, plateaus of stability that exist in the world, all the evolution that's been done before, and then evolution is just a tinker or just like trying out combinations of existing things. You know, it's a blind watchmaker that is making watches and other things. Yeah, and then the other piece of evolution is this the domestication. When you're domesticating, you know, humans not only domesticate plants and animals, but also we domesticated rocks and water, domesticate ourselves, and then and so I think there's idea that we're able to, you know, domestication is a process of crystallizing repeated phenomena, where you take the repeated phenomena and this is taken from both sides of the artificial. I always forget who wrote that. Herbert Simon, 1971. The nature of technology from Brian Arthur, really good book. And so and so these are you're taking phenomena that exist in the world and then crystallizing repeated phenomena. The repeated phenomena, that's mostly everything.

[00:30:30]These patterns and repeat that exist in the world. That repeated phenomena, you then crystallize into a form where you say, "Oh, the Krebs cycle, there's a natural way that things want to be." And the Krebs cycle says, "Let's just do that over and over again." And same with stuff like the Industrial Revolution and and the creation of machines, that's the crystallization of repeated phenomena, where we're domesticating the the idea of a scribe, where you say, "Oh, a scribe can write stuff down. Let's just make that all happen at once with a printing press." Or, you know, a sawmill, instead of sawing every time, we're just going to make the saws do their thing. We're going to crystallize that repeated phenomena, and then we can just, you know, 30x the rate of of of wood production through that. So, yes, so domestication is is important, too, obviously. And yeah, and then all the stuff applies to AI, where where we have this new zoom out and think about the mass explosion of You know, for me still the most helpful frame is the frame.

[00:31:17]People don't talk about the digiscene, and I don't know why, but we're transitioning from you know, there's the the the purely geospheres to the biosphere, you know, that changed Earth, and then we had the anthrosphere in the anthropocene, which we've been doing on Earth for recently, and then the digiscene, where it's like, "Oh my god, the world's starting to wrap itself around this new emerging intelligence."

[00:31:38]There's roughly 10 10 million or 20 million brain powers worth of H100s out there, you know, human brain power equivalents. But those things it's it's we're spiky intelligences, you know, they're spiky, we're spiky. We're just at the beginning of an exponential there. So, I think that that it's tough to imagine the thing not getting to something like 10 billion, roughly a human amounts worth of brain power soon.

[00:31:57]And what's going to stop it? I mean, that's the crazy thing is it's like, you know, 10 billion worth, maybe 10 trillion worth by, you know, sometime.

[00:32:04]And and it's all kind of enmeshed with each other, can share ideas, it can It's scary, it's exciting, it is, you know, I hope we're able to navigate it with wisdom. And I think that, you know, the evolution frame mostly comes out and says, "Yeah, this is some new selection of inherited variation." You know, the inheritance and the variation that's happening in a multi-level way with these systems in terms of the kinds of the code that's being run at each level, and you're being If you look at these systems, they they themselves are selecting for There's a new One of the best ways to think about it is that it's a evolution was initially was only in vivo in in in humans, and you'd have to do each generation you get a new a bit of selection, and that takes a long time. You know, 4 billion years to make humans. Then with humans you start to use selection in in our brains. And so that is where you have an idea that dies in your stead instead of you dying in your stead. And so that's kind of the whole thing about the scientific revolution and stuff is that we can then have selection for ideas. And so now we have selection in silico. These systems are able to run stochastic gradient descent and run backprop through transformers and to then find patterns and to find good They become good predictors of of of future states.

[00:33:14]That's Intelligence is the ability of to solve problems in different environments, and that that's definitely what's happening. So, also crystallizing these repeated phenomena, where it's like, "Okay, cool. This new form of you know, fine web exists." Or this, you know, all these new kind of We're stacking wins, algorithmic wins, we're stacking data wins, we're stacking other wins, and then we Yeah, and so that's that's going to be a a little bit of a crazy period as we the world rewires itself around this kind of explosion of brain power. Yeah, that's kind of my rough take on the whole system. It's tough to know what's going to happen.

[00:33:46]It's very complicated. It's interesting to learn about. And thank you to all the people who are actually doing the work, the scientific work and the implementation work for all these things. Okay, great. One final thing I want to say here is what's next for the channel.

[00:34:00]So, that's the third thing. You know, what's next is I'm going to take a break.

[00:34:03]You know, that's the TLDR is, you know, I'm burnt out. It's been 100 videos, 100 videos in, you know, 9 months or whatever. It's like 10 videos of a month, and so it's more than a video week. It's been a lot, especially with my, you know, kind of chronic pain posture things, and so I get to be done with this, and that'll be good. Also it's also kind of the end of Roots. So, Roots kind of running out of money, which is all good in the hood. It's like, "Yeah, we raised some money. We tried out some first things initially to make this weird little startup studio, that didn't really work and such." It's like, "Let's just have Reese make some content and also run these make these videos." And so hey, I'd say if you're curious about Roots stuff, there's I'm going to run one more fellowship. So, I'm going to run a Roots fellowship. This is just a way to Yeah, if you if you want If you're a young person that wants to have your wants coaching. You know, I kind of mentor and coach. Just like, "Hey, what's going on? How you doing? How can I help you be your best self in the world?

[00:34:52]How can I help you live up to your potential?" So, that's going to happen.

[00:34:54]Also as a side note, by the way, if you want to look at like a weird AI deep dive on all these things, I made this weird kind of like a a graphic novel, like a webtoon essentially. This is my first experiment when I was like, "Oh, let's let's take my Anki cards, my Reese Anki cards, my 20,000 Anki cards of learning all this crap, and let's run inference on it." And the first thing that popped out was this, you know, yep.

[00:35:16]>> [laughter] >> graphic novel, webtoon. It's interesting. So, if you want to do an AI deep dive, this stuff is it's pretty out there, but it's it's very cool. It's cool stuff. I mean, look at this. Some of these images in here are just like There's like a guru that you're going and you're learning about how consciousness works, and he's helping this person lock understand his own consciousness, and he's also trying to get to this amazing like He's talking about what is it like to meditate, and like it's cool. It's interesting.

[00:35:42]There's this I want I was looking for one.

[00:35:45]Yeah, I become aware of awareness, the mana of the mind, you know, the mask on reality. You know, all this kind of stuff. Um so, blah blah blah.

[00:35:53]>> [laughter] >> I think So, yeah, it'll be Reese finishing up Roots. If you're excited to get to do Roots, let me know. And then yeah, it'll be it'll be kind of wrapping that up and then chilling, you know. And so that's kind of the end of this video series, and I'll do one more Roots fellowship, and then yeah, if you're curious about following me, it's kind of funny cuz all this stuff has been in the nonprofit realm, and so it's had to be under this other channel, this How Everything Evolved channel. If you want to, there's this, you know, there's the Reese. That is my channel. Maybe I'll produce more things in future. I had a podcast. If you're curious about you know, the years leading up to this. Talk about another thing that was very helpful was doing this podcast for a long time, 100 shows. Or if you want to watch this 2-hour deep dive on the tier list of the periodic table.

[00:36:32]>> [laughter] >> Uh feel free. Yeah, this I only got 1K subs over here. So, it's like, yeah, if you want to follow me over there, like, comment, subscribe, you know.

[00:36:40]Yeah, I'll produce some things in the future over there, and maybe it'll probably be more casual and less effort and more just like science vibing or kind of coaching and and and stuff like that. So, So, yeah, we'll uh That's the other kind of bit of bit of news there. So, yeah, thanks again for being with me on this journey. Oh, also I might turn this stuff into a book at sometime in the future. So, hopefully just like a short one, like some of my favorite books. So, if you're interested in that, I guess you can also join my Substack. That's the other final thing here is um if you go over here and you go to reeselinmark.substack.com, maybe.

[00:37:13]Boom.

[00:37:14]Reese's Pieces, and I talk about random stuff. This is from I guess a year ago.

[00:37:20]Yeah, it's a good day. There's random interesting things here that uh That's the other way to stay in touch.

[00:37:25]But yeah, mostly just kind of continue to be yourself. Continue to be yourself in the world. You're curious, [music] which is great, whoever you are out there, and continue to be aware and be grateful for your body and have beautiful people and cats and friends in the world. And thanks as always for listening. Feel free to leave, you know, if you if this changed you in any way or if you have any thoughts or questions or anything or comments. Or if you feel free to again hate on me again hate on me, but if you're like, "Oh, Reese, you you know, you should should change your white balance."

[00:37:50]>> [laughter] >> Um sorry that viewer. I got I I I never got around to that. Um [music] but thank you as always for listening. Yeah, and I hope you have a good rest of your day.

[00:37:59]Bye, y'all.