Amjad Masad: Founder and CEO of Replit, an AI-powered platform that lets anyone build software by prompting from their phone. A Palestinian-Jordanian immigrant, former Facebook engineer, and outspoken commentator on tech, free speech, and the Israel-Palestine conflict.
What this episode covers
Joe Rogan and Amjad Masad range across video games, AI, and personal health before diving into Masad's vision of a future where AI coding tools make millions of people into entrepreneurs rather than putting them on universal basic income. Masad argues current AI is a powerful 'remixing machine' but not truly creative or conscious, drawing on Penrose and Godel to argue humans remain special. They spend a long stretch on censorship, the COVID vaccine, scientific fraud, and the corrupting role of money in media and institutions, with Masad framing Elon's Twitter purchase as pivotal for free speech. The back half turns personal: lifting, jiu-jitsu, back pain, insomnia, the psychosomatic theories of John Sarno, and finally Masad's story of hacking his university to change his grades and getting caught.
Recommended on this episode
Colossus: The Forbidden Project
Joseph Sargent
“Colossus, the Forbidden Project. It's awesome. And that was 1970.”— Amjad Masad
The Three Body Problem
Netflix
“Oh, it's really good. Yeah, it's really good. Yeah, it's excellent show... I binged it. I watched the whole thing of it.”— Joe Rogan
Sputnik
Egor Abramenko
“But Sputnik is one of the best alien movies I've seen in a long time... It's really creepy. Really creepy.”— Joe Rogan
Arrival
Denis Villeneuve
“the Arrival was Oh yeah, Arrival was great too.”— Joe Rogan
Black Mirror
Charlie Brooker
“Black Mirror, of course. Yeah. Black Mirror is awesome sci-fi.”— Joe Rogan
Reverse Hyper
Louie Simmons / Westside Barbell
“the reverse hyper is so good for people that have back problems... This thing will actively strengthen and decompress your spine.”— Joe Rogan
Starting Strength
Mark Rippetoe
“Mark repertoire he's um he wrote this book called Starting Strength and it became like the the main way most most guys at least my age like getting into uh powerlifting.”— Amjad Masad
The Mind Body Prescription
John Sarno
“the thing that like really got me over the hump and this this one was crazy... the mind body prescription... John Sarno.”— Amjad Masad
Also referenced (named, not recommended)
Quake
id Software
“It's Quake is your your favorite game, right? Yeah. Yeah.”— Joe Rogan
Hades 2
Supergiant Games
“I started uh uh playing a video game. It's called Hades. Uh Hades 2. It's like an RPG uh video game.”— Amjad Masad
Whoop
Whoop
“we have this partnership with Whoop... they're building an app so we can start competing on workouts based on Whoop data.”— Amjad Masad
Da Vinci's Brain
Leonard Shlain
“I read a book by Da Vinci. It's called Da Vinci's Brain, I think. Um, Da Vinci is like fascinating.”— Amjad Masad
The Art of Learning
Josh Waitzkin
“I read the Josh Whiteskin book what was it called I forgot you know his book about like I think chess and jiu-jitsu”— Joe Rogan
Big reveals from this episode
- Masad reveals he quit drinking over three months ago, citing how alcohol wrecked his workouts.
- Masad recounts his family being expelled from Haifa in the 1948 Nakba and his father being born a refugee in Syria.
- Reveals Replit's partnership with Saudi Arabia's state company Humain to teach the entire population to build software with AI.
- Masad says he was never vaccinated, calling it hard to do in Silicon Valley.
- Contrarian claim: white-collar jobs will be automated faster than blue-collar ones because there's far more data on desk work.
- Masad built a working AI squat-form-analyzer app on his phone during the car ride to the studio.
- Masad confesses he hacked into his university to change his grades, got caught, and was made to harden the system as punishment.
- Admits he relapsed into gaming during a stressful period, speedrunning Hades 2 to a top-50 world ranking.
Worth remembering
- A study found surgeons who play video games make 37% fewer errors and complete tasks 27% faster.
- Penrose's Godel-based argument: there are truths humans can know but machines cannot prove, suggesting humans aren't just computers.
- Dr. Mary Talley Bowden said vaccinating all patients in her small practice would have earned her an extra $1.5 million.
- The 1960s sugar industry paid scientists roughly $50,000 to blame saturated fat instead of sugar for heart disease.
- A Science magazine investigation found likely doctored images underpinning decades of amyloid-plaque Alzheimer's research.
- Meta effectively paid $15 billion to acquire Scale AI's talent, with Google and OpenAI then dropping the firm.
- Sam Altman said Meta offered OpenAI staff $100 million signing bonuses to defect.
- Mark Rippetoe's 'GOMAD' (gallon of milk a day) is pitched as the most effective way to add mass to young underweight males.
- The brain's 'salience network' gets reinforced like a muscle the more you obsess over pain, making health issues feel worse.