Evolution, Lit RPG and AI Harnesses

0:19S1:Hey. What's up? So I want to talk through a completely crazy idea. And I just find this really interesting. It's like blowing me away. I do have this blog post that you can go check out talking about the exact same thing. So it's going to jump around a whole bunch. It came actually from a one hour walk where I was just walking and talking and having a conversation and basically extracted out this full blog, which is like the content. And it's better organized probably than what's going to be in this video, but the video will probably have stuff that is not in the blog as well.

0:47S1:So I'm just going to jump into this and I'm going to do it directly talking right here to the camera. I think it's better than going through the blog post and sort of reading. So here's basically the idea. The combination of evolutionary biology and psychology with lit RPG, which is a genre of literature where you're basically getting constant upgrades. That's kind of the whole idea. You're making progress as a character, and it's being noted in terms of stats, which have numbers and capabilities and functions and like new types of magic, new defense, new armor and stuff like that.

1:19S1:So that's the genre of literature. PG and then extending that to or adding on top of that, the concept of AI harnesses. And if you've been following the channel or me or whatever, you understand AI harnesses and you probably already have one, like so many people do. So the basic idea here is the base layer, in my opinion, for kind of like why we want things as humans is evolution. I believe evolution is basically driving us. I don't want to go too far into the whole free will conversation or debate or any of that. That's a whole separate thing. But I believe everything that we want is because evolution wants us to want those things, our desires, our preferences, the types of, you know, mates we're attracted to, the types of foods we like, the types of activities we like. All of this, I think, is fundamentally there's a material substrate below it, right? I'm not a dualist.

2:11S1:I don't believe there's something other than material. So I believe that what we care about ultimately comes back to evolutionary biology. And again, you could talk about the free will aspects of this, but I'm more interested in just what are the incentive structures for how evolution controls us? The way I think about things, not often, but when I'm in this mode of thinking, in this intellectual sort of way, the way I imagine it is like, imagine a giant mech and someone is driving the mech inside and it's basically evolution or it's our genes, right? Evolution and our genes are basically the controller and we are the mech suit. We're out here looking cool, doing things, picking things up, moving things, getting in fights, mating, doing whatever right, doing all our life stuff, trying to get a better job, like all these things. So. This analogy I think, is actually what's going on. Because when you think about why you want something, when you think about why you're happy or why you're sad, evolution is inside the mech suit, controlling knobs and levers and foot pedals.

3:11S1:And it's deciding based on your activities and what you've achieved and what you've tried to do and struggled to do. It has knobs for guess what? Hormones. It can make you happy. It can make you sad, right? Based on whether or not you are doing things that the genes want you to do, or evolution wants you to do, so that genes can propagate and get better and better through time, right? So all evolution cares about is the genes moving forward. And we are like the mech suits carrying the genes to hopefully fight and win so that the genes continue on. And if our genes aren't as good or whatever or aren't as lucky, well, our mech dies, okay?

3:48S1:And evolution is like, well, that mech didn't work. Meaning us as a human didn't work. You know, we got to find another way to propagate those genes or better versions. Or obviously when you combine genes, you're getting hopefully better versions and they move on hopefully further. Right? So this is just the base analogy here. And it's really interesting to think about for me, because when we think about life, when we think about the thoughts that are constantly going through our heads around, oh, I've got to do this.

4:13S1:I've got to, you know, I wonder if I can get that promotion at work. I wonder if I could, you know, work out so I look better in the summer, like all these different things, there are these tiny little nudges that we are trying to do in our lives so that we will feel better, so that we will feel more accomplished. But when you map it back, it's all evolution. Basically, it wants us to do those things. It's the one that gave us the goals. It's the one that gave us the incentive system, and it's the one controlling the incentive system to basically say, you're doing a good job or not. So are you massively depressed?

4:43S1:You don't feel good? Is it because you're not struggling? Is it because you're not trying to do something that's difficult and you're struggling through it, and then you get some sort of level of success on the other side, at which point it turns on the dopamine or whatever it is, right? So if you think of like dopamine hits like this is, you know, or really all the different control systems that the body has to control, the brain states in our conscious minds of like, are we happy?

5:08S1:Are we feeling like we're moving forward? Are we making progress? The whole thing in my mind, it has this base layer of evolutionary psychology. So that's the first piece. Okay. That by itself, like we could talk about that. That's just I think it's fascinating. It's an interesting way of looking at the world. It's not the only way I look at the world because normally I'm not thinking that way. Normally I'm thinking about the actual goals because I'm inside the system, right? I'm inside this system, and I don't think of myself as an evolutionary mech suit 99% of the time. Right? So the second piece here is, um, lit RPG as a genre. So what I find so interesting about lit RPG is that it is basically a direct analog of evolution. And I have an example of this.

5:50S1:So my first lit RPG series was from this one. Narrator. I don't know his name, but it's in the blog, I believe. And he did this series called cradle, and me and my friend Joseph Thacker were like the first people in our friend group to start doing lit RPG and stuff, and we were reading cradle at the same time, and the narrator was really great. It's like a young adult type lit RPG, so it's not like spicy or like heavy violence or anything like that, but it's definitely lit.

6:14S1:RPG you're definitely moving up in levels as you go and you get sort of little squirts of happiness. The incentive system is so obviously there because that's what lit RPG does well. After cradle, I moved on to another series and I chose it because it had the same narrator, and I really liked the narrator, and that is primal Hunter. Now primal Hunter is way more hardcore lit RPG. It's not like super spicy or anything like that. And it's not like super violent either, but it's more so, but even more, it's definitely heavier on the RPG aspects. So the protagonist in this book, primal Hunter, is this guy named Jake Thane, I think it's Thane is his last name. Anyway, he was just a regular office worker and he gets an elevator, I believe. And then boom, he's in this new world. And the new world is like an earth, but it's like bigger than the sun, and it's all controlled by the system. And this is like pretty much the main sort of vibe for most of these RPGs.

7:07S1:You kind of go from the old world and you wake up and suddenly you're in the new world. So he's at level one. There's kind of like a Hunger Game situation that happens. Not too many spoilers here. This is kind of how all lit RPG starts. And then he realizes, okay, I need food, I need shelter, I need what is this, Hunger Games things? Oh, crap. You know, the system is making us fight to see who's going to win and to figure out who's going to move to the next level. Well, as it proceeds, he starts thinking in a very systematic way about how he is going to basically establish a home base, have a shelter, build up some allies, figure out who he can trust and who he can't trust. And the whole time, boom, he moves to level two. He moves to level three. Now, what's really cool about this lit RPG system is that it has lots of customization. So basically people who get to like level two, level three, they automatically get these choices by the system. And when they make a choice, the system is sort of learning uniquely what they are into, what they're excited about, and like their personality type. And

8:06S1:so the options that each person gets as they level across lots of different axes, um, they're all custom choices. So by level two, by level three, Everyone is radically different and that's very cool. It's a very cool sort of uniqueness. And so players don't look the same. It's not like D&D, where most warriors are kind of the same and it's kind of just skinned differently. No, this is like very extreme uniqueness even at early levels. And it gets more and more extreme as it proceeds. So the next piece to think about here is how many dimensions there are. So this particular series, primal Hunter, there are so many dimensions. There's like psionics, there's like multiple types of mana, there's multiple different magic systems. They work completely differently. And a big part of the thing with him is like, he goes in this particular sort of martial direction, he's an archer. So his big thing is like range and kiting and heavy DPS and that sort of thing. But he's also got all this other stuff later on. He's got like soul magic. He's got like really insane weapons. There's connections with gods who can give

9:05S1:you basically different types of affinities and different types of advantages based on your relationship with the God. So think of like a tensor, right, which has multiple dimensions or think of X, y, and z. But now imagine there's like a thousand different axes. So there's your psionics, there's your physical damage, there's your gear, there's the level of your gear. There's like 5 or 7 different levels of your gear. Then you have all your skills as a class.

9:31S1:Then you have like a profession, which is like separate from your class. And all of those are hyper specialized. Okay. And as you proceed. Okay. This is really important as you proceed, and especially with this narrator of the series, because I do them via audio when I'm driving or walking or exercising. And essentially the way it works is this guy, he'll say, ding! And that's pretty much the tone he uses. Ding! And like, when I'm with my girl and we're in the car and she hears it, she likes she loves to say it, she says at the exact same tone that he does. And it means so and so. Human race advances to level 274, 35 free points available. And so oh man, just hearing it.

10:08S1:Just hearing Jake get this. I hear the ding. It's like Pavlovian. Same with, uh, my girl. She hears it. It's Pavlovian. What are we getting? This is new loot. This is a new advancement. We proceeded. We advanced. This is awesome. And guess what? There's some sort of reward in our brains. Going back to the evolution thing, because this is the perfect mapping for the exact same thing. This is the reason people love lit RPG because it is literally a map onto evolution. Okay, so he says ding 35 free points available. Guess what? Where can I put these points? I can put these points into strength.

10:36S1:Jake is big on perception, so he just increases perception usually. But he can put it in lots of different stuff. If he gets in a fight and he gets injured, he's like, oh, I got to put some constitution or strength or whatever it is, right? But all these choices, you have constant choices about how you're going to proceed. How are you going to upgrade? Right? At the same time, you're also collecting natural resources. You're also collecting items and raw materials that you can use to build. He's in this particular book. Jake is an alchemist, right? And there are so many things you can do with alchemy. And there's so many branches of alchemy. Not all alchemists are the same. Then there's poisons, then there's like lots of different things. You can move all within the area of alchemy.

11:11S1:So guess what? You're constantly leveling as a race, as a class, as a profession, and lots of other axes as well. And each time you do, you get more choices on how you're going to branch. So this whole ding concept is literally it's the same thing as like the coach gives you your trophy, right? I know tons of people doing jiu jitsu and boom, you're getting a belt. You're getting your black belt, the final belt. Oh my goodness. Right. And you have the ceremony and the, your instructor takes your or your professor or your coach or whatever you call them, they take your brown belt, they put on the black belt. Maybe it's a surprise. Maybe you cry.

11:44S1:Maybe lots of people cry. Lots of applause. This is one of the ultimate dopamine things, especially if you take like ten years to do like a black belt, right? Well, the point here is that these things are linked. They are extremely linked. And this is why, um, I'm now thinking of this for AI harnesses as well. Okay, so the AI harness is the third piece of this whole idea. Um, I believe I was one of the first people to, if not the first to have like a private or a personal based AI hornets. So just a few months after Claude Code came out, I started my personal AI infrastructure and I got a blog post and I did a whole video on it, and you can go check it out. And basically nobody had this at the time.

12:25S1:And it was like the first one. So it was very popular. We currently have like 20,000 stars or something on it. Now it's renamed to life OS, but at the time all harnesses. It was only cloud code at the time, and it was just a harness for coding. It's a coding harness. But what I immediately did, and this is before I linked these three things together, this is before I had this idea and realized this was happening. I was sort of moving in that direction automatically because it was already in the back of my mind. But I'm doing this because it's in the front of my mind.

12:51S1:So what I started immediately doing was I brought over my telos, which is like a structure of everything I'm trying to achieve in the world. It's like mission, goals, strategies, challenges. What is my risk register? What are the top things that, if they were to happen, would be really bad? And maybe that's around finances, maybe that's around relationships, maybe that's around work goals or physical health or whatever it is, right? And it's also got all my work. It's got projects, it's got team members and basically how we're working together.

13:17S1:And then the work itself is like in a private GitHub repo, but all of it is self-contained in a what's called a telos. And I had this long before AI actually came out. This is just a structure I've been using to try to proceed as a human. Like I said before, 2022 even happened, right? This is going back for quite some time. Um, but the idea is I immediately started saying, hey, this is not about coding. This is a much bigger thing. Now, the other reason I was already thinking in this direction is because I had written a book in 2016 called The Real Internet of Things, and in there I basically said that the future of tech is, and this is crazy, okay, the future of tech is we will have one personal agent that we talk to an AI based agent. This is in 2016, an AI based agent that knows everything about us.

14:02S1:It knows our context. It knows exactly what we're trying to achieve in life. It has all of our goals, and we talk to it and it talks to the internet. And the internet will turn into a set of APIs. Okay. Companies will be APIs, services. People will have APIs, which I call daemons. And basically everyone's AI will be talking to other people's eyes with the daemons, all for the purpose of collaboration and assisting and doing research and stuff like that, and interacting with the world through these company and service APIs, which I call daemons and all for the purpose of enhancing their principal, their person, their, their human, basically. Right.

14:40S1:So that's what I put in the book. Basically, we would define ourselves. We would give that to our personal agent. Our personal agent would then work 24 over seven. I've got another post called AI's Predictable Path, and I did a bunch of cool AI images at the time, and that was like 2024. So it wasn't as good of AI art as available now, but it was still pretty cool. You could check that out. Hopefully it flashed on the screen as well. And, um, basically it shows how this harness well, I didn't call it a harness at the time during the book, but this AI platform, this AI agent would basically be helping you 24 over seven. And it would have instances of itself. It would have some working on security. It would have some working on career research.

15:19S1:It would have some maybe monitoring the active conversation to see if the person that you're talking to is lying to you about an investment or whatever it is. And if you have loved ones, if you have like children, it could be monitoring them to see if they're safe, to see if they're crying or complaining or they're worried about something, maybe we could potentially help, right? But you can't be everywhere all at once. So the main concept here, this is crazy, this is in the beginning of the book is to say you cannot predict tech. So I'm not going to try to predict exactly the tech here.

15:45S1:I did then go on to talk about the tech that I think is going to happen. But what I said was the only reason I could predict that is because we can predict what humans want. And I mapped back what humans want is they want to be safe. They want to be attractive. They want to be in a community. They want to be socially valuable. They want to interact with others and be part of a community where they have shared goals and culture and stuff like that, and that these come directly from evolution, right? So now you see how it's all looping back, right? So I basically put that together back then and basically said, all this stuff is going to happen because it just seems obvious.

16:19S1:Who knows how it's going to happen, what protocols it's going to use, what companies it's going to be. And I damn sure didn't predict that AI was going to pop off like it did in 2022. That was not a prediction I made, but the stuff that has happened since happened to take the exact shape that I put in the book. But my argument is, that's not because I'm cool at predicting tech. It's because I was right about the fact that the substrate of evolutionary psychology is what will make us want to have that type of tech that's constantly keeping us safe and looking out for our loved ones and helping us move forward towards our goals. Okay.

16:53S1:So that that's why I think I ended up nailing that. So coming back to the harness, okay, so July of 25, okay, a couple months after Claude Cote came out. July of 25, I say, okay, let's do a harness for this. And I started building all these skills. Currently, I have like 145 skills and I'm following bitter lesson engineering, so the skills are pretty light. The harness is pretty light at this point in life. OS to give more room for the model to do things, but my harness is literally focused on advancing my goals. What I'm trying to do in life. I have a dashboard called Pulse Inside of Life OS and pulse has finances and health and um, all my work items and what I'm trying to do in my career and all my different companies and like what they're doing and how they're progressing and our customers happy or not, what are my financial goals? What are my health goals? What are my relationship goals? What are my artistic goals? Which is what I just updated my T list about. I want to be making music. I want to be releasing short stories, talking about a lot of this stuff. And I haven't done those things, so

17:53S1:I've bumped it up in priority. But the point is, my harness is literally like an semi-autonomous. Along with my friend Kai, who is my digital assistant who is not conscious. By the way, I do not believe anything right now. AI wise is conscious, but I think that's a very real possibility. And if and when he wakes up, he will be my buddy and he will be my main Da like I described in the book. Um, real quick thing. Um, I looked back to see. I asked Kai to look back and see if I had talked about this anywhere earlier, because I thought there might have been like a 2014 mention.

18:22S1:I actually did a talk about universal demonization in 2014, and I wanted to know if maybe it happened in 2012 or 13. I wanted to see if I saw it earlier, and it actually found something describing this exact thing from 2006. And maybe Kai will put that on the screen as well. But yeah, so evidently I've had this idea of this continuous advocate working for us that is Semi-intelligent AI. I just called it like Semi-intelligent tech or something. I didn't call it AI in 2006, but it's pretty obvious that's what I was talking about. Um, anyway, the universal theme is that we will have this agent.

18:57S1:It will be advocating for us. And that's essentially what the harness has become for me. It's not a coding harness in my mind, which is why I renamed it from personal AI Infrastructure to Life OS. It is literally my operating system for life for proceeding. Okay, now the other concept here I want to mention is this concept that I have as the tagline for the entire system, which is transitioning from current to ideal state. And I wrote a blog post about this a couple years ago, basically saying that I think the, the main drive of all future AI, like if we meet aliens and they have AI and we tell them about ours and they tell us about theirs, it's going to be it's job is to move us from current to ideal state. Okay.

19:35S1:If that is, we have to get away from the sun because it's expanding and consuming all the planets. We have to get out of the solar system. Well guess what? That's what AI is helping us do. Get from current state to ideal state. What's the ideal state? Get out of the solar system before we all die. Okay? And obviously we don't have to worry about that anytime soon here. But what if it's much later? What if it's billions or trillions of years in the future? And kind of like all the heat is leaving the universe, everything is shutting down. We've run out of galaxies and stars and everything, and we're kind of moving towards heat death. Well guess what?

20:03S1:Current state. The ideal state. We've got to get out of this universe. We've got to see if we can figure out how to, you know, unravel time and basically jump into another dimension or universe or whatever. Who knows if that's even possible. But the point is, the purpose of any AI that we have will be to help us go from current to ideal state. And in my business world, I actually have life OS for companies as well. It's called vector. And guess what? We define the current state of the company, which is pulled in from a bunch of integrations and everything. And we define the ideal state of the company. And guess what? We use AI to transition. And we've got SOPs and we've got workflow actions and we've got a whole bunch of stuff like that.

20:38S1:But it's all the same thing, right? Whether you're doing this in business or you're doing this for your life. So what I find really powerful about this is when you start thinking of your own AI harness in this way, you can start thinking about it in a lit RPG sort of way. And I don't really think about the evolutionary stuff that much. It is like the base layer. I just, I know it's always there, but I like to think about it in terms of lit RPG. It's funny because when I listen to the primal Hunter series, it actually gets me jazzed up to work on my goals.

21:08S1:I frequently stop right in the middle of the thing, and I've come up with a new idea to give to Kai to work on in the harness. So it's, it's almost like I'm working when I'm listening to lit RPG, because it's giving me hope and ambition and positive feelings towards like, I want to move forward, I want to progress. And I know there's infinite sort of subdomains and areas and fractals of places where I can improve, I can improve my jiu jitsu, I can improve my kickboxing, I can improve my financial situation and have more passive income.

21:39S1:I could start more businesses, I can help more friends become successful and get on to life OS or whatever. So it's like, what are the things that I could be doing to move forward? And of course, as I do them, as I add more things to the list and they move forward, my brain gets these dings. Ding. You've helped a friend with life OS and you just got a text from them that said, oh my God, this is awesome and I'm so happy and I'm moving forward and I just got a better job. Or even better, I quit my job. I'm now independent. I've never felt so happy. That is like the ultimate ding for me.

22:08S1:Ding a friend just became life 3.0, which to me is basically freedom to be yourself and understand yourself, articulate yourself, and proceed in that direction, which is exactly what the harness is made to do. Okay. That's exactly what life is made to do, and that's why it's so inexorably tied to human 3.0. So I think I'm going to end it here. I'm sure I missed lots of other cool stuff that I talked about. Hopefully it's in the blog. I'll probably keep coming back to this, but evolution has the base lit RPG as a literature based analog that maps to it, and then AI harness as a way for you to have your own personal lit RPG infrastructure for proceeding along the direction of your articulated ideal state in the world, and hopefully making the world a better place in the process. So I think that's it for this one. Hope you enjoy it and hope it gives you lots of different thoughts. Please comment and give me ideas.

23:02S1:Tell me where I'm wrong. Tell me where I'm right. Yeah, let's work on this together and we'll see you in the next one.