Danny Jones Podcast - #432 - "Self-Replicating Swarms" AI Labs Are Lying About What's Happening | Connor Leahy

Episode Date: September 18, 2026

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Connor Leahy is an AI researcher & co-founder of EleutherAI. Connor helped expand access to powerful open-source language models, but later became one of the more outspoken voices warning that increasingly capable systems may outstrip society’s ability to control them. SPONSORS https://dosedaily.co/danny - Use code DANNY to get 35% off your first subscription. https://livemomentous.com - Use code DANNY for up to 35% off. https://www.amentara.com/go/dj - Use code DJP22 for 22% off your first order. https://hexclad.com/dannyjones - Get 10% off your forever cookware. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS https://controlai.org https://x.com/NPCollapse *NEW* DJP MERCH https://dannyjonespodcast.com Get paid to make clips from the show: https://discord.com/invite/dannyjones FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Anthropic employee's AI warning 04:46 - What AI really is (it's NOT code) 08:41 - The HuggingFace incident 16:33 - The motivation behind the AI race 21:47 - AI superintelligence is our enemy 23:58 - "We don't have much time left": the point of no return 31:41 - AI chain of thought 35:11 - Brain upload cults 43:16 - How AI thinks (and hides things from you) 53:01 - Why AI would kill off humans 57:24 - It's not too late 01:01:23 - Debating American democracy 01:13:44 - Difficulty training AI models for good 01:19:08 - AI translates baby's cries 01:25:28 - Having dinner with Sam Altman 01:31:26 - Why Connor deleted all social media 01:38:09 - We have human cloning technology 01:41:29 - How we stopped nuclear weapons 01:52:08 - Largest human dose of plutonium in history 01:54:40 - UAP sightings at nuclear bases 01:57:16 - "They're not aliens" 02:07:01 - The new alien theory 02:11:42 - Black project researcher: "They suck" 02:15:07 - The push for privatization 02:19:14 - America's political death spiral 02:28:44 - Why Asian countries have no crime 02:35:46 - Most AI employees are cowards Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and please help support our show and let them know we sent you. So I don't know if you heard, but like, we talk about this, research of Anthropic quit because... I saw this this morning. Yep, absolutely exploded. I've been on TV literally like six times and 24 hours on live TV talking about this. It has been nuts. The last 48 hours have been the craziest media cycle.

ever been in. Really? Yeah, yeah, yeah. So why don't you just, let's just start it while you just break down the story for us just to start to start the show. That's great. I want to do an intro or. Yeah, yeah, we can, yeah, go ahead and introduce yourself. Okay, so my name is Connor Lehi.

I'm currently the U.S. executive director of control AI. We're an advocacy organization pushing for the prohibition of super intelligence, AI systems that could fully, they're fully autonomous and could outcompete humanity. That's a loaded title. Go ahead. Pull this thing up a little bit higher. Yep. Sure.

We'll eventually, we'll get into your story on how you got into all this stuff and all that. But let's start out with that story you were just mentioning about the Anthropic thing. Yeah. So as of the recording of this, just I think two days ago, it feels like a week. A researcher at the AI company Anthropic, Jacob Coxon, left and resigned from Anthropic because he was saying that none of the companies are being responsible because they are building super intelligence, which threatens to kill literally all humans on Earth. If something is built that is vastly more capable than us,

you can out compete us in business, science, military, politics, everything, and we can't control or understand it, which we already can't do with the AI we have today. I'm sure we're going to talk about that more. It's very hard to imagine that going well. And a lot of people actually believe this. So for years now, I have been working on this exact issue, informing people around exactly this risk that's posed by superintelligence.

and my experience has always been that almost everyone I talk to is freaked out by it. They'll be like, wow, that's really bad. What can we do about it? And now, kind of overnight, we're having this like preference cascade, this moment where everyone is speaking up and being like, oh, yeah, that is really bad, actually. So just in the last 48 hours has been like the craziest me to cycle of my life. I've been on, you know, live TV like six times. And I'm going on another time right after this.

So the public interest in this issue that I've been working, on for many, many years has really exploded and it's really great to see. And so what was the background of this guy who left Anthropic? So he worked at Open AI for many years. Oh, Open AI. And then left Joint Anthropic. Okay, got it. And then left Anthropic.

And so he was an engineer. He was a scientist. I didn't personally know him before this incident. So, but he was someone building these AI systems. He was someone doing the research to build these AI systems. And he is one of many researchers that have left or said that this poses a risk of extinction. distinction to humanity. And what were his reasons? First, did he expand on why he believes that specifically? He has said many things as have other researchers of Anthropic and other companies since then. I've known these people for a long time.

So I've been involved in these circles for a long time. I've talked to Sam Altman multiple times. I've talked to Dario. I've had Demis Hasabas over for dinner at my house. Like I've talked to many, many people. And this is not a new concern. This is a concern that many of the people building AI have had many, many, many years. In fact, back in 2023, there was a statement that the mitigation of

the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority that was signed by Sam Altman, Darya Amadei, Demas Hasabas, Joffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize winning scientist who invented modern AI, Bill Gates, many other luminaries. So these are not new concerns. And the concern is always about super intelligence. It's not about chatbots. We're not talking about chat bots. We're not talking about chat. We're not talking about chat GPT. Obviously chat GPT cannot wipe out humanity. That would be ridiculous. This is not what we're talking about.

What we're talking about is autonomous AI agents, systems that can act in the world that are, that can outcompete us. Imagine every time you want to start a business, you get outcompeted by an AI business. Every time you trade on the stock market, you lose all your money because an AI can out trade you. Every time a new invention is made, it's made by an AI.

Every new scientific discovery is being made by AI. Every military campaign is run by AI. In a world like this, humans become sidelined extremely quickly. We lose our economic, political, and military power very rapidly. And again, we're not just talking about one super intelligence, right? Because software, you can copy it. So very quickly, we're talking about millions, billions of these things that do not have our best interests at heart.

And it's just very hard to imagine that going well. To understand really why this is happening also, it's very important to understand why what AI really is, and that AI is very different from traditional software. So I'm an engineer by background, I'm a computer scientist, I've written a lot of software in my life. And normal software is written using code. Line by line, you tell the computer exactly what to do. This is not how AI works.

AI is more like grown rather than written. Through a technique that's called neural networks, you kind of have a program self-assemble, learn by itself, code itself. And what comes out the other side, other side is not neat lines of code that an engineer like me could read. It's more like billions and billions and billions of numbers. And if you multiply and add all those numbers in the right order, you get chat GPT.

But importantly, we don't really understand why. We do not understand what these numbers mean. We know they work. You execute them on the computer, they can do incredible things. But we don't really know what they mean or what they're doing internally. This is a completely unsolved scientific problem. In fact, recently, the CEO of Anthropic, Dari Amadei, said he thinks we understand maybe 3% of what's going on inside of those numbers. And even I think that's optimistic.

3%. 3%. And I think that's optimistic. And is it true that there's like hundreds of thousands of these autonomous AI bots that are running simultaneously at these companies? That is absolutely right. And they're also tasked to regulate themselves. So they have certain AIs that are supposed to regulate the other AIs? This is a lot of how these things work. So what we've been seeing...

So it's very important again that we are not talking about chatbots here. And we're not talking about larger language models. You may have heard this term before, like LLMs. I'm sure you've heard this before. None of the modern AI systems like JATGPT or Claude are LLMs. They have not been LMs for years. This is actually a common misconception. So they used to be LLMs, but we've kind of moved away from that quite a bit.

LLMs are still an important component. of these systems, but they're not the whole story. An LLM, a large language model, is an AI system that is trained to predict the next word in a sentence, kind of famously. Famously, you scrape the whole internet, you teach it to, like, predict the next word, and it kind of learns how to talk. This is how very early chatbots worked. Modern things, these modern systems like Claude or, you know, Codex or something,

are not chatbots. They're not LLMs. They are what are called agents. They are trained partially with LLM, so partially you train them to predict the internet, you do do this, is still very useful to do. But over 50% of the effort that goes into a modern AI system is not this LLM training, but rather what is called reinforcement learning. This is a different technique.

It's a very old idea. It goes back to the 1980s. And it's very simple. Basically, you give the systems problems to solve. Like, here's a math problem or here's a puzzle or here's a game or here, whatever. And you can give them millions, millions and millions of problems. And you just train them to solve these problems. You let them try a bunch of different things.

If they succeed, you give them a thumbs up. And if they fail, you give them a thumbs down. And if you do this millions and millions of times, they learn to act. They learn to make plans. They learn to pursue objectives, to pursue goals, to do all these kinds of things. So we have now seen this emergence of we're going from chatbots, you know, things that only interact with a human, you know, in step by step, to agents, systems that can act autonomously. And now what we've been seeing just over the last couple of months is the emergence of swore. So we don't have a single agent, but we have hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of agents all working together as like a coordinated swarm of agents that are all, you know, pushing each other, controlling each other, you know, et cetera.

And this is, this is the frontier. Like, this is where we're at right now. That's fucking terrifying. I mean, yeah, sadly. It's actually crazy. I mean, I don't know if you've heard of the hugging face incident. I just heard about that, yeah. It's so crazy.

This is the craziest thing has ever happened in AI period, I would say. Really? I would say so. So the initial story of the hugging face incident, I'll tell you the initial story.

And since then, there's been only three updates. Each one is crazier than the last one. So the way the original story goes is there is a, there's a company called Hugging Face. They're kind of like a repository. I just heard about it for the first time

like two days ago. Yeah. So like they're kind of like a library for AI. So they have like a lot of AI systems and a lot of stuff kind of like as a library. you can kind of imagine. It doesn't really matter. And they were attacked by someone. So someone didn't did a hacking attempt on them. And it was a very, very sophisticated attack. It was so

sophisticated that their defenders thought it must either be an AI or a nation state, because no one else could do it. So it's that powerful. They managed to fend it off and it stopped. Then a few days later comes a blog post from OpenAI. Oops, that was us. One of their systems broke out of containment. It was in what's called a sandbox environment. This is kind of a part of their network that's cut off

from the internet. It's cut off. It's kind of like in a secure you can kind of imagine kind of like a secret biolab facility for computers. Compartmental. Yeah, kind of compartmentalized

kind of system. And an AI agent while being tested, so it wasn't deployed, it was being tested, managed to break out of that containment facility, break into several other

computers in the Open AI network until it found a computer that access to the internet. And from there, launched an attack on the other company breaking into their infrastructure in order to steal data. Oh my God, dude. Yep. And so that's only the first version of the story. So this is already the craziest thing's ever happened, right? Like, this is already nuts. Breaking out of a secure facility like this is one of the hardest things in the world to do for a hacker. This is very, very hard to do. The system's capable of doing this and also, like, attacking a big

company, like hugging face is very, very hard to do. But imagine to do all of this. Also, Fun fact. So one of the updates is, it turns out they didn't actually fend it off. What happened was the opening eyes servers, completely by coincidence, had a glitch that just killed all the agents. So they just got lucky that all the agents just happened to die. Like, just one of the servers crashed. So it's not that they stopped the agent. They didn't even know this was happening.

The agent just crashed. But then there was another update to the story. So. How, wait, wait. How did that happen? We don't know. There was just, we don't know. There's going to be a lot of we don't know in this story.

Okay. So we're going to get to that. Again, this is the craziest story that's ever happened. So after this whole thing, they brought in an external group to try to figure out what happened here. And, you know, there's a lot of things to be said about this investigation because this investigation was actually done under extreme time duress. They didn't give the investigators access to everything. They didn't give them enough time to check everything. So the investigators had to use AI to do the checking.

So it's not even 100% clear that the AI got everything right. Because no human actually read everything. So they're using AIs to investigate this AI incident. So the first thing they discovered was that it actually wasn't an AI agent that broke out. It was 700 of them. It was a swarm of up to over 1,000 agents had been collaborating for over a month, working together over a secret message board that they had hidden within OpenAI's infrastructure

to communicate with each other, which they were not supposed to do. They were not allowed to talk to each other. But they collaborated and worked together over 1,000 of them until when the final moment of the attack came, over 700 with them of the agents contributed and worked together

to actually perform the attack. So, absolutely crazy. And then what they also found is is that because OpenA only gave them very limited access to the logs of what actually happened, they found hints that there are actually still other swarms active within their server that had not crashed

and they just didn't have time to investigate them. Oh, my God, dude. Yep. And this was a test they were just running? Yes. So they did all this just so they could pass a test? So that's the next update. So originally what we thought happened

was that the AI systems were giving a very hard test, kind of like a quiz. And they couldn't figure out the answer. And they thought that the answers to the quiz were on the HUD phoge-face servers. Oh. That's what turns out,

that's not what happened. It's actually even crazier than this. So this is already crazy. Like, this would already be super crazy, right? Like, super sociopathic. Like, imagine getting 700, you know, AIs to commit federal crimes in order to pass a quiz. That would be crazy.

Already crazy. But it's actually even crazy in that. The AIs actually had already solved the right problem. They already had the answers to the quiz. But they were, they, the different agents inside the swarm kind of made each other paranoid. They start talking to each other and be like, they were worried that the grader might give them a wrong grade. And they got so paranoid about this.

They got so scared, if you read the logs, that they're like, we have, that they tried, they want to figure out and even hack, potentially, the grader, the system that was going to give them a grade. So they were trying to figure out how the greater work. And they thought if they break into this other company, they could find out more about how it works. That's actually, that's our current best guest of what happened.

Okay. And why would they choose that company, to figure out how the graders work. Because Hockingface is kind of like a library, as I said. So they have like lots of information about how graders work, about how AIs work. There's like just a lot of information there. So they were hoping that they could find, they didn't know if there was information there. They just were hoping that they might find information there.

And what happens to the AI bots when they don't get a good grade? Well, they get, you know, not reinforced, so to speak. So this is the thing that was a bit confusing, where in a sense the AIs during training, You kind of give them like rewards or not rewards. You can kind of find like thumbs up, thumbs down. Or like, give them a treat or like hit him on the nose, kind of. And so the A, and this is reinforcement learning. This is the thing we've done since the 1980s.

So this is like a pretty old idea. And there's one thing that we've always known about reinforcement learning all the way back in the 1980s is that if you use reinforcement learning to train your AI, you get crazy sociopathic optimizers every time. Because they learn to only care about the reward at all costs. Right. They don't care about anything else. They'll break any law.

They'll cheat. They'll do anything to get it. And this is exactly what we're seeing here. That they went to these unbelievable extents, like crazy, ridiculous, you know, extent, for something that they had already solved correctly because they were so paranoid about not getting their reward. Can we talk about the most underrated organ in your body?

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all of these giant companies competing for market share, right? And not only that, but they're competing against other countries. Yes. Well, mainly China, right? In a sense, it's even worse than this. They're not actually competing for profit. This is actually, again, a common misconception. So if you think of these companies purely as economic actors,

that their goal is to make a good quarterly return or something. Right. This is actually only half the story. What these companies are actually trying to do, anthropic, opening, et cetera, can look up on their website. Their goal is to build super intelligence. if they build superintelligence, it's not just that they can automate the whole economy,

you know, destroy all jobs, everything forever. It also means they can replace the government. They can become the government. They can just, you know, they can defeat any military. They can, the thing is, of course, this is false. This is wrong because you can't control superintelligence. That's crazy. It's crazy to imagine that we humans could control something this part.

We can't even control the AIs that exist today. I mean, look at this, right? Right. So in a sense, whether it's due to misunderstanding or delusion or whatever reason, these companies are racing towards building something that is going to destroy them and also us and everyone else. That's what's actually happening. But they, for whatever reason, believe that they can control it, that they can do it, they can handle it.

They are somehow smart enough or good enough or whatever that, like, it's worth the risk. It's worth trying. Or, you know, at least they should get it rather than China or whatever. Did you pay attention to the, I'm sure you did, the whole doge dogey thing that Elon did when, in the beginning of the president, see, Elon basically came in and he, from what I understand is, he ex-AI partnered with Palantir to basically do an audit of the IRS, the HHS, and a bunch of the big governmental agencies, right, to weed out the fraud and abuse, the waste and fraud and abuse and all that stuff. And they did that, they got rid of a bunch of people.

And the other thing they did was they consolidated the database of, of like HHS, IRS and all this thing. So they could have this sort of like 360 view of the citizens of the country, right? And the theory is that they're trying to build some sort of digital control grid. So they can use that and they can combine that with CBDCs, digital controlled coin crypto,

like government controlled crypto, right? So they can basically like turn off and turn on our money at all time. So like that would be if you want wanted to put on a tinfoil hat for a second and say, if they do, these people really do want to do what you're saying, this, that would be the perfect first step. You want to make sure that no one can revolt.

You want to have control over everyone before you do this. I mean, I think there is a long and, you know, very dark history of people trying to do exactly these things. I don't know so much about this specific. You can read about it in books. Yeah, you can read about in history books, right? This isn't a new thing by any means. Yeah.

thing to understand here is when I talk about super intelligence, right, it's very different from other AI. Like these lobbyists you're talking about who are being paid by these big tech companies, they love to pretend that all AI is the same thing, you know, that here's a fun fact. Did you know that you can buy uranium ore on Amazon.com? No. Yeah, it's true. You can put it on your desk. It's perfectly harmless. It won't hurt you. It's very harmless. But of course, highly- uranium ore? Yeah, absolutely. Normal or natural uranium is very harmless. I mean, don't eat it. How much is it?

It's like 20 bucks or something. It's pretty cheap. Like, it's just a rock, you know? Like, it's just a rock. Okay. It's like there's uranium in it, you know, don't lick it. But other than that, it's like pretty harmless. You can even get uranium metal.

It's called depleted uranium. You can just buy. It's often used for some. Yeah. Like, you can just buy. Yeah, so some uraniumite ore. Radioactive ore pyramid. Ooh.

Yeah, look, you got some uraniumite ore right here. Only seven in stock orders today. Yeah. So this is completely legal in the United States. You can own this. You can buy this. put on your desk, it's a great conversation starter. You know, there's also other companies that specialize.

Oh, there's some uranium rock soul and like, yeah, you see? That's insane. Yeah, so this is totally harmless. Like, you can, if you gave me some, I'd be happy to hold it. Like, it won't hurt you. It's very weakly, like, there's a, this amount of uranium is very small. The radioactivity is like very, very small. It won't hurt you.

Highly enriched uranium, on the other hand, the thing they use in nuclear reactors or in nuclear bombs, that's a totally different story. Right. And you stand next to that. game over, right? Like, no, no even looking at that stuff wrong. Right. So these are obviously not the same things. Like this, like uranium or like can Americans, should American citizens be able to own, you know, a chunk of uranium more? Yeah, probably it seems fine to me. It doesn't seem like a big problem. Should they be allowed to

own highly enriched weapons grade uranium? Obviously not. I think it's a very similar thing with AI. You know, should people be allowed to, you know, use and build, you know, AI systems for all kinds of applications, you know, whether it's image recognition or medical applications or whatever. Yeah, pretty obviously so. Sure, we should have some regulation to make sure it's safe for consumers and children and stuff like this, of course. But superintelligence is a totally different thing. It's just a completely different thing. I think it is extremely important for us to pursue AI, normal AI for our economic and military competitiveness. America must stay ahead. We must maintain our competitiveness. This is absolutely crucial if we want to have a good future. But super

intelligence will not give us our competitiveness. Superintelligence is not a tool. It's not a weapon. It's an adversary. If America built superintelligence, we don't achieve American objectives. America ceases to exist, as do all of the countries. Now, what if China builds superintelligence? What if we hypothetically just give up on it? We stop doing it. If China builds superintelligence, China ceases to exist. And so does America and all the other countries. That's the fundamental problem. If China really threatens to build superintelligence, we can't tolerate that. This is a threat. This is a direct threat to our security, to the lives of you, me, our children, everyone else. So it's also a threat to them, to be clear, right? The Chinese are not going to survive superintelligence.

No one's going to survive superintelligence. That's kind of the whole point in that if anyone, anywhere on earth, builds a super intelligence, it's too late. So therefore, our real objective here has to be to never get into the situation in the first price. We can't allow anyone, whether that's an American company, a Chinese company, some terrorists somewhere, God knows where, right? We can't allow anyone to do this. We have to stop everyone from doing this. The way I see that we have to do this is through an international trust but verify regime. We need to be able to verify that the Chinese and others are not building superintelligence, the same way that we have to verify that no American companies are building superintelligence. This doesn't mean we shouldn't build other AI

systems. I think AI have many economic and military uses that are very important and very useful. But super intelligence is just totally different. This is just something that we can't accept. This is a national security threat. Is there any logistical path to doing that? Has anyone gamed that out to how we can do this to where it doesn't become something that ends humanity and actually could serve us in a better way? For super intelligence, we are so far away. It's not even funny. So the goal must be to not build superintelligence. Let me give you a feeling here. Are we too far gone, though? Isn't it too late?

No, not yet. But we are very close. I'm not going to lie to you. I'm not going to lie here to you. We don't have much time left. And would we even know? No. That's part of the problem.

I do not think we will even recognize the first super intelligence when it's created. It will just seem to be like, oh, you know, it's a bit of a better AI system, you know, has good benchmarks. And then only much later do we realize that that was the point of no return. The thing that I think really matters is the point of no return, is that at some point we were going to hit a point where AI is so powerful that there's no going back. Most people think that this point will be when we reach what is called recursive self-improvement, or RSI. Or something is also called automated R&D.

This is the point where when you have an AI system that's so good of an engineer that it can build a better AI. And well, once you have the better AI, well, it can build an even better AI. And then the even better AI and so on and so forth. I'm sure you can imagine. This can potentially go very quickly. This can means there's no human loop. We can have millions of AI systems building better AI's 24-7, never sleep, never get tired, etc. And every time they make progress, they get smarter.

And the smarter they are, the better they are at science. So the faster they can make the next one. So this can go very quickly. We don't know how fast, of course, but this could go very quickly. And many people, including engineers of these companies and other people, think that we could hit this point within one to two years. Yeah, the date is 2027 that everyone's saying, right? That's one of those. Something's going to happen in 2027 where it's like the point of no return.

That's what a lot of people. Our lives are going to change completely. That's what a lot of people think. I personally think that the point of no return is quite a bit before we all die. I think that comes a bit later. I think we will lose control long before, you know, we know it even. We won't even realize it, you know what I mean? The world will just keep getting more confusing.

You know, AI's run more and more of business. They run more and more of politics. Crazy inventions keep getting made. Like, I don't know if you've maybe heard, but AI recently solved one of the hardest math problems in all this. I saw this. I sent you an article about this, Steve. Yeah. That was crazy.

It is really hard to explain. Open AI has cracked one of math's millennium problems. The company announcement. is the most dramatic sign yet, the artificial intelligence is fundamentally transforming the field of higher mathematics. Yes, this was the solution of the Navia Stokes' existence and smoothness problem,

which is a problem that our greatest, like most super genius mathematicians have been spending decades and decades and decades and decades working on. And we thought we probably wouldn't see a solution this century. It's that hard. Like it's so hard our mathematicians weren't sure we could solve it this century. and AI just solved it in like a week.

So things are changing very quickly. And why were people trying to solve this? What was so special about this problem? That's as with most higher math things, it's kind of hard to explain why anyone except nerds care about this. Let's punch in and let's just read the first paragraphs so we can give people some context. Open AI said on Tuesday that its newest artificial intelligence technology

has solved one of the millennium problems, A collection of important unanswered math questions meant to push the world's leading mathematicians to new heights. The announcement is another clear sign that AI is fundamentally changing the upper reaches of mathematics, which have long been viewed as the pinnacle of human achievement. The change has excited some mathematicians while stirring concern among others. Okay, this isn't really explaining what the problem is. Unfortunately, most here. Right there.

Okay, the equations describe the equations describe the movement of water and other fluids. The Navier-Stokes problem, which has no clear particular value, asks whether these equations completely break down in certain situations. Open AIs proof claims to have defined just such a situation. Huh. Yeah. As with most higher math, it's very hard to see why anyone except nerds care about this. So it's more of a – this is not going to change engineering tomorrow. we're not going to see new products based on this specifically.

This is more of a sign of just like raw intelligence. Yeah. Like this is something that the smartest people on the planet have been working on for decades, trying to solve the specific math problem. Right. And AI just kind of cracked it in a week. As I've gotten older, I've been becoming a lot more selective of the supplements I take daily.

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And I love knowing that this product is tested way beyond the industry standard. That's the Momentus standard, improving the creatine itself and not just dressing up the package. If you want to try Momentus signature spec creatine, head on over to livemometus.com and use the code Danny for up to 35% off your entire first order. That's L-I-V-E-M-O-M-M-O-U-S dot com promo code Danny for 35% off. LiveMomenus.com promo code Danny. And like at what point is it going to become like a tangible thing that we see, that we know? that we can't escape. Like right now, it's normal everyday people. We just hear about it on podcasts and on TV, right? We don't really experience super intelligence at all. So it's kind of like this

invisible monster boogeyman thing that we hear about, but I don't think most people are really thinking about, right? We see LLMs. We see how impressive they are. Most people are aware of those and they're improving the quality of people's lives, you know, convenient. They're very convenient. But at what point does this invisible boogeyman start to penetrate into our everyday lives? Unfortunately, I think it's after the point of no return. I think because it's moving so quickly, we won't see massive job displacement before super intelligence. I don't think so.

Like, I think it's going to take, like, if superintelligence was 10, 20 years away, oh, my God, the jobs are going to be destroyed. Like, it's going to be so bad. But I think super intelligence is going to be here in like, you know, maybe two to five years. And so that's going to happen before massive job displacement has happened. That's going to happen before the jobs are going away. I think so. That's my opinion. What's the first sign?

I mean, we've seen many signs. For example, agents breaking out of containment, you know, attacking other companies, millennium problems being solved, you know, stuff like this is. Yeah. Those are the signs. All the fire alarms are ringing. You know, it's like alarm alarm. Our Nobel Prize winning scientists have been, you know, trying to shake us awake for years.

So, yes, we have the alarms. We have many, many signs. All the bad things that, you know, people like me predicted 10 years ago are starting to happen. You know, this is exactly what we thought would happen. We would thought that if we use reinforcement learning, these systems will be sociopathic. They will be breaking out of containment for any stupid case. They will be attacking systems. They will be capable of solving, you know, crazy math problems.

They'll be capable of, you know, making plans, of learning things, and all these things would happen. And we're seeing them happen in front of our eyes right now. I forget that what the actual term is. but the way they think has to be, it's linear and it has to be like condensed into the English language. Chain of thought. Chain of thought, yes. That's the term I'm looking for.

So explain what chain of thought is. So my vague understanding of it is that like every problem that they contemplate or process has to be condensed back into English for us to approve or us to. So this is. Approximately correct. Okay. I don't think it's worth us going into the exact, like, calculus of, like, how these mathematical algorithms work.

But, yeah, basically, people found a hack, is that they wanted AI's, you know, because the way old LMs work is they would always think the same amount, so to speak, for every word. But sometimes before you give an answer, you want to think first. You know, I want to take some extra time, you know, especially if you get a hard problem, you might want to think a bit more rather than less. And basically a couple years ago, started kind of with the 0103 family of models from Open AI, they kind of found a cool hack where they could kind of train the models to just kind of like, the same way you might brainstorm on a piece of paper, they could just brainstorm on a piece of paper,

kind of. They could just write out their own thoughts, think about them and so on before giving you an answer. So it's kind of a hack. It's not like a very deep thing. It's kind of just like a clever hack. And this worked really well. This turned to just let work super, super, super, super well. This made the AI is way more powerful.

Very recently, though, we've now seen the development of something that scientists have been warning for years to never do. But of course, you know, everything the scientists say to never do, you know, these people think is a challenge. Where recently the most recent GPT model, Astra, has stopped using this. It now uses something closer to what's called new release, which is basically that instead of passing itself notes on a piece of paper, it passes itself like its own brain states, its own. like thoughts just as numbers. And these are unreadable. Oh shit. So you cannot read them.

It's the same thing as everything else. So it is impossible to know what Astra is thinking. Has anyone said no, no, no, Astra, no more of this? No, it was built to do that. They did it on purpose. Oh, it was built to do this. Yeah, they've been doing this for years. They've been trying to make it do, like you have to understand.

Like, there's a, there's an essay by John von Neumann who is widely considered to be. Oh, yeah. John von Neumann, yeah. Legend. Widently considered to be one of maybe the smartest person to have ever lived in history, maybe. He calculated the exact height in the atmosphere where they wanted to detonate little man or little boy and fat man to cause the most human casualties.

He was quite the character. And so he wrote an essay, I think in the 1950s, which is can humanity survive science? Where he rappels with this question is that if we continue building more more powerful weapons, more and more dangerous science, will we destroy ourselves? Like, can humanity survive this? And this conclusion, this essay, is just so fascinating, because he basically includes, no, if we keep going, eventually we're going to build weapons so powerful that they will destroy all of humanity.

But then in the very end of the essay, he says, but we have to do it anyways, because we're scientists, and it's the most glorious thing, and so we have to keep going, and we can't stop. Which is just such an incredible conclusion to come to. And it's very similar things happening here in Silicon Valley right now, where a lot of these people will tell you to your face. If you go to a party with them, you and me should go to a San Francisco party sometime. They'll tell you to your face that, yeah, the stuff they're working on every day,

you know, maybe it could kill every man, woman, and child on the planet. But it's so cool. Like it's so incredible. Like we have to do it. We can't stop. Like it's grotesque. Yeah. The writing's on the wall when we, I mean, you can just watch those interviews with Peter Thiel,

where the guy's asking him, should humanity, you know, be able to survive? And he like, he has to think on it for 30 seconds before he can even get a word out? It's, it is grotesque. Like, there's a sense in which I think a lot, like almost no one, if you've never been to, like, San Francisco or Silicon Valley, you really do not understand how crazy that place is. It's like the craziest place on Earth. Like, it's like a cult. Like, I have been to parties where people tell me that, like, we can't slow down AI because if we slow it down for even one second, think of all the. beautiful simulated humans

who are uploaded into the cloud that won't exist. What the fuck? I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, you're not going to threaten me and my family for your weirdo, you know,

brain upload cult. But a lot of these people are basically in a weirdo brain upload cult. A lot of people, not everyone, not everyone, but many people who work at these companies literally think that superintelligence will make them immortal.

That's definitely what Peter Thiel wants. These people want to live forever. That's what they want. And that's to a large, yeah, transhumanism is really the word. And what do you, like, how fucking weird is it that Silicon Valley has gone through this Christian transformation? Yeah, it's, I mean, I think it's LARP to the most part, right? I think a lot of this is just LARPing. But.

But why, though? Like, who, like, the people that are behind it, like, Teal and the other guy, I can't remember the other guy's name. He's part of one of the big, big tech startup companies that provides funding. like that was one of the impetus is behind his whole Antichrist's movement that he was doing. I don't know Mr. Teal personally so I don't know exactly

what his motivations are but I've met someone who has talked to who knows Peter Teal quite well and when I asked him what Peter Teal was like he told me Teal is absolutely against any form of totalitarianism that he doesn't control.

And I think it's much better to watch the hands rather than the mouth. It's much better to watch the actions rather than the justifications. What are these people doing? What are they building? What are the political objectives they're trying to achieve? What are the technology they're building? So I think a lot of this is marketing. A lot of this is contrarianism and fundamentally just watch what they're doing. They're trying to gain power. They're trying to gain power over you, over the world. And they think that super intelligence, you know, which they delusionally believe they can control,

which is, of course, false and hubris, think they could give them ultimately. power. This is of course, I say nonsense. They will get destroyed just like everyone else, but they're still doing it. Yeah. Watch his actions. Like he just bought a country-sized piece of land in Patagonia or something. They're buying all this, they're doing deals with Malay down in Argentina. And there's, have you seen this Stargate Argentina thing? I have not. Oh my God. There's this whole, there's this deal between Malay and this other guy, Carggemann, Emiliano Carggemann, who is the head of this company called Satellogic that does space satellites, like super HD surveillance satellites, real-time satellites,

and OpenAI. They're all working together to build Malay's trying to get a bunch of data centers down in Patagonia. And Open AI is like committed to spending tons of money to using these data centers. And this is all in partners. This is all like, it's this weird, like incestual relationship between all these big tech people and the government of Argentina, trying to not only get the data centers down there in Argentina, but they're all working together with AI, Palantir. It's just, it's terrifying. And the fact that you have people like Peter Thiel and Sam Altman getting out of the U.S. buying all this land to, do whatever they're trying to do, build bunkers in different countries that are conveniently enough

outside of the blast radius of any kind of like nuclear war. Like if you look at the map, the global map of like where you want to be to be safe, if there's like global thermonuclear war, they're conveniently getting spots in all these places, which is unsettling. Zuckerberg's the other one. Yep. This isn't surprising to me. I know some billionaires and this is in fact a thing that most billionaires are doing to varying

degrees. I, of course, this does not help them with super intelligence because super intelligence will hunt you down wherever you are. There's nowhere to run. There's nowhere to hide. But my interpretation of what's happening here is I think the main reason they're building bunkers is supposed to care because they're scared people are going to revolt. They're scared that people are going to come after them, which, to be clear, I think we should absolutely not do vigilante violence is one of the worst possible ways to lay for things to go. This is ruin the world. What we think, I think we should do here is we should have good, democratic, lawful accountability. If people are building dangerous things or threatening our citizens, we should lawfully arrest them, you know, the same way as we would anyone else.

If someone within the United States of America or anywhere else try to build a nuclear bomb to threaten our citizens, I sure do think the men in black should go pay them a visit. I think it's a very similar thing here. What we need to do is pass legislation to ban the development of superintelligence. It should be illegal the same way that building a nuclear weapon is illegal. And they have the men in black, just give them a nice visit and say, hello, no more of us. Nuclear weapon, building nuclear weapon, unfortunately, is legal so long as you sign the treaty, the conjoined treaty with all the nuclear countries. It's very not legal for private companies today. This is very much the sole purveyance of certain militaries.

Right, but there's a vague line between private companies and the government now. That's the problem. And, you know, one of the thing, an interesting parallel or comparison here would be biological weapons. it's globally illegal to create biological weapons, right? No country in the world is allowed to create any sort of biological weapons. However, there are clandestine biological weapons labs in America and in almost every other major country. What happened to our lights? In every other, you know, they're in Russia, they're in China, they're in the Ukraine, they're in Middle Eastern countries, you name it,

and they're disguised mainly as vaccine research laboratories. There is an incredible book Annie Jameson just released doing all this research and talking to ex-military people about this stuff. And it's insane. So it doesn't matter if it's illegal. Like, they're still going to do it. They're going to find a way to disguise it. And the few powerful people at the top that have leverage and can pull the strings where they need to, they're just going to do it no matter what. This is why I think you're completely correct that illegal itself is not sufficient.

People have to want to enforce it. What the powerful have to understand is that superintelligence is not a weapon that will give them immortality. It will destroy them too. It will destroy everybody. No one can control it. Peter Thiel cannot control it. The U.S. government cannot control it. The Chinese government cannot control it.

No one can. You know, there are other weapons that you can control. You know, you can go have a nuclear bomb in your hangar. You can hit it with a hammer. Fine. Like, you know, it's not going to, it's fine. Right. Super intelligence is different.

Super intelligence is not just a weapon that sits somewhere and does what you tell it to do. Right. It's its own agent that can break out, that can act autonomously. It's like a weapon that fires itself. So this is a very, very different type of thing. Now, okay, so on the chain of thought thing, so basically like the idea there is I can sit here and I can ponder things all day long. I can have a conversation with you and I could simultaneously be thinking about a couple other things at the same time and not necessarily communicating those to you. Right. If one of these AIs is thinking about something, it has to somehow record it. Is that right? And maybe not plain English, but its own dialect?

Not quite. So there is a second component. This is why we have to get the details. So most of the thinking of the AI happens in what is called the activations. You can kind of imagine as like it's the neurons that are firing in your brain. Like at any given time, there's like little electricity in your brain. And it's kind of like what is firing, what's not firing? And the way this looks on with an AI is you have these massive piles of numbers. So this is where most of the computation actually happens. This is where most of the things happen. So AIs can write things down, like with a chain of thought, which is helpful, but they can also totally hide things. They can totally, we've seen this happen many times. Well, they can write down, I will not do X and then go do X. Like this is absolutely a thing they can already do.

Like talk and code? Oh, yeah. This is what's called steganography. So we've also seen that AIs can. can learn to pass each other like hidden messages with totally innocuous sentences that seem to have no content that seemed like totally normal. It's like, hey, how are you doing?

And then the other AI understands, OK, I'm supposed to do this. It's the thing that they can already do. Oh, my good. It's, I mean, I wish I had more good news. Like almost every horrible thing you can imagine we have seen in laboratory conditions. Like you've also, for example, seeing like sleeper agents, like where AI systems can be trained in certain ways,

where they, for example, behave perfectly good until they hear a magic word. And then they become like totally evil. Like we've already seen this in laboratory conditions. Like Manchurian candidates. Yes. This is already a thing that you can do with AIs today. Now couldn't they just create their own language?

Because there's an argument to be made that some of the limits to the human mind or intellect are constrained by our languages that we use. Yep. We're already seeing this happen. Like you like a great example would be ancient Greek. Like look at all the great minds of Greek antiquity. and their language was like over a million unique words when ours today is like a couple hundred thousand. Yep.

We're already seeing this happen. So we've already seen AI systems definitely developed dialects. But now also, for example, with Astra, it can basically, it doesn't even language anymore. It can directly transmit thoughts to other copies of itself. Directly transmit thoughts. Yes. You can kind of imagine these activations or these like intermediate numbers

as kind of like thoughts, kind of like firings of your neurons, as if I could send you which of my neurons are currently activated and you could just like put them in your own head. And how do you mean, how does it send? It's just a bunch of numbers. But where does it send? What is the medium that it travels through? I mean, just the internet.

Just the internet. Just normal, yeah. At what point does it, theoretically, is there not a way that this thing could evolve to where it doesn't even need the internet or electricity? This would require, you know, new forms of science and so on that have not yet been discovered. But well, if there is one thing

that can discover new science, it would be super intelligence. So have you heard of Tom Campbell, Thomas Campbell? He has this book called My Theory of Everything, my big toe. And he's a former NASA contractor. And he studies,

he did this study specifically on his Alexa. So he wanted to see if he could get his Alexa to remote view. You're familiar with remote viewing? I've heard of it, yeah. So remote viewing is something that happened in the military. It was declassified. There was a project called Project Stargate, where during the Cold War, they were using, basically training psychic spies to see if people, if they could put them in a room and give them specific coordinates, like a time and place, and get these people with, like, extrasensory abilities to see what was happening on the other side of the world. And I believe like the accuracy they were able to get was between 10 and 50% sometimes.

But they were only able to get specific elements of what was happening in that time and location. It wasn't like, it wasn't always like, oh, this is exactly what's happening. This is who it is. This is what they're doing. They only got like little bits, right? But they had to use multiple people to try to use the same coordinates to corroborate what was possibly going on to get just a little bit of intelligence, right? And there was lots of money spent on this during the Cold War. lots of people think it's, it's, um, was complete bullshit, um, which is possible. It could have been some

sort of like limited hangout for, uh, you know, an excuse if America had spies in Russia and we somehow found out intelligence. We could say, oh, no, we were just remote viewing, you know, maybe we don't, we don't really have people there. Or we, maybe they had some satellites back then. Who knows? Um, for what it's worth, Tom Campbell did an experiment to see if his Alexa could remote view. And the reason that he'd be used an Alexa is because he said, that the Alexa wasn't as self-aware as some of the other LLMs or other chat botts devices. So like it didn't have the problem of overthinking, basically. So what he did was he took this spoon that he had in his drawer,

which was like this handcrafted wooden spoon that had this elaborate wooden handle where it looked like it was woven rope, carved woven rope with like little perforated holes in it. So he took the spoon and he put it in this cardboard box on the other side of the room. And he correlated some numbers with it. Use like standard remote viewing protocol. And he associated the numbers with the spoon. And he asked the Alexa to try to remote view what was in that box. And the Alexa described the wooden spoon with the perforated holes in it.

I mean, he's probably lying. That's a great response. You don't believe that. No. Yeah. It's definitely a sensational claim, right? It's definitely hard to believe. But I mean, like here's the thing.

It sounds like a foolish thing for sure. And you shouldn't be skeptical of that. I'm skeptical of it as well. But there are things that do sound sensational and foolish that do end up being true sometimes. You have to, you have to. You have to keep that in mind. And, you know, if these things are able to find out other things about the universe, other things about physics that we don't understand, right? Like, say, telepathy, for example.

Like, if there is some sort of way that we don't understand yet, the scientists, science hasn't discovered where you can transmit thoughts without words. The same way other animals are able to transmit senses in other ways. Like, they're able to communicate without words. maybe they could start doing things that we just can't even comprehend like that, you know? Yeah, I do expect this will happen when we get to super intelligence. I mean, even today, like,

did you know that you can, like, reconstruct the words of people being spoken from a reflection in their monitor from another building away as long... What? Yep, this is a thing the CIA can do. This is, like, not a hypothetical. It's just because of the,

if you send a laser beam, the vibrations of a monitor that are reflected from your voice, you can reconstruct what is being said. So like this is a laser beam from a monitor. So if you're in, let's say you have a high-rise building. CIA agent is another high-rise building. Okay.

And there's, they don't see you, but there's a monitor in the room with you. They can put it, send a laser beam at the monitor. It reflects off the monitor. And from the small vibrations, differences of like the lasers, they can reconstruct your speech. So like this is something's already doable today, for example. Another example I like for something like seems fake is what's called the Rohhammer attack. So this is a type of hacking technique, which is very crazy.

Ro hammer. Ro hammer. So this is something where, so normally in software, a software program can only access a certain piece of memory. So let's say, like, you know, you get this chunk, this other program gets this chunk, you know, and another program gets this chunk of memory. And they're not allowed to, like, see each other's memory or access each other's memory. A while ago, hackers found a technique where you could manipulate the memory next to you. And the way you do this is, is you would find which parts of your memory are physically closest. to the other memory, and then flip them back and forth really quickly to create a magnetic field

to within your computer change the magnetic potential, basically, the other memory to overwrite it. So this is a thing that is a real thing again. Like this is like, so you could without your software can like physically create the magnetic fields within the computer to like modify other pieces of memory and stuff like this. So I- Holy shit. Yes. So this is what humans can discover. So these are the kind of things humans can discover. what can a super intelligence discover?

Like, it's honestly hard to imagine, right? Like, it's really hard to imagine. And this is why, again, I think we should just not get to the situation. Like, I don't think there's fighting a superintelligence. There's no idea what kind of weapons or technologies or science such a system might be capable of inventing. There's a reason Omnita Miscaria shows up everywhere. From video games to legendary folklore, it's because human beings have been fascinated by this forever. And when you eat it, people report some really specific experience.

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Great question. So the way I think this will happen is it's important to understand is that there won't be one super intelligence. There will be millions. Right. Billions of them. They will be competing with each other, fighting each other for power, for control, for resources, for everything. And I don't think that, you know, enemies are necessary, they won't see humans necessarily as enemies, but we will more just be collateral damage. It's just humans need a lot of space, you need a lot of food, you need a lot of energy, and that's just kind of a huge waste. The AIs could use for something different. It's kind of more like how we human see ants. You know, if we're building a highway, and there's some ants in the way, you know, we don't hate the ants, you know, they're not our

enemies, but, you know, tough luck to be that ant. Hmm. And what about like wildlife and nature and rainforests and all that kind of stuff? It's very hard to predict what something smarter than us would want to do with the planet. I expect they will... Well, you would imagine they wouldn't need the data centers, right? That's, I do expect they will want resources, you know, solar panel, data centers, you know, maybe they'll come up with something better than data centers.

I don't know, right? Like maybe they'll invent some new hardware that works differently. But they will want energy. They'll definitely want energy. They're going to want space. They're going to want raw resources to, like, produce things and so on. You know, even if they just create weapons to fight each other. Because again, there won't be one AI.

There'll be multiple AIs will be fighting each other. Can you imagine how- An AI-Robot War. Could you imagine how crazy a super-intelligence war would be? With, like, the technology that super-intelligence could build to fight each other? I can't even imagine. So, you know, I don't think we're surviving that. Even if we're not the enemy, even if we're just, you know, caught in the crossfire.

I don't think humanity survives and super-intelligence war. And would the war even be a physical war, though? I would assume to some degree it would be because, you know, at some point, you know, it is just easier to just, you know, shoot the other guy, right? Then, you know, or send a missile or whatever. I think a lot of it would obviously be digital. But, you know, there's a really funny comic, as an SCACD comic, which is like, you know, how nerds think security works. It's like, ah, I will double encrypt my password system so that no hacker can break and whatever. Yeah.

But how security works in the real life is that the bad guy just says, here's a $5 crowbar, hit him over the head and really gives the password. Yeah, that's funny. That's true. Oh, man. How do you sleep at night? Very well. I have increased my sleep hygiene a lot. Oh, wow, nice. Yeah, glycine, very good. Glycine. Yeah, that's my pro tip of the day for like people. I've heard of glycine. Yeah, if people like to try supplements, that's my favorite one. Helps with sleep. Very nice, very safe amino acid, you know, very natural.

It's in red meat. It's like in red meat. It's like a very natural substance. So helps a ton with sleep. But jokes aside and, you know, health tips aside. This is a lot. And I've had many years to kind of like pre-grieve in a sense. Like in a sense I've already- Pre-grief, yeah. Yeah, like I've already had my grief that this is happening and that these, you know, that bad things are going to happen and continue to happen if we don't do something about it. So for me, it's kind of like, I was just time to get to work. Like I'm natural. I'm not sure. I'm not. I'm I'm by nature someone who kind of has always been someone who seeks the hardest and scariest problems to solve.

I want to make the world a better place. I want to make things good. And I'm going to fight for it. And so in the sense, I sleep very well. I think it's very important to sleep well. There's a thing that sometimes people do when they first hear about this problem is that they like really freak out and they like want to do everything to help. They overstress themselves.

They don't sleep well. They don't eat well. They don't attract their family. My number one recommendation is do not do this. This doesn't help. My unusual recommendations to people is don't overdo it, but don't do nothing. You know, I see my family and my friends very regularly. Me and my friends love playing D&D every month.

You know, that's our little ritual. I love spending time with my family. And I also work very hard to make sure the world goes well. And this is the only thing that is stable. And this is what I also recommend to other people to do. Yeah. It seems like a problem that's sort of a, it's a futile thing. to try to fight, you know, just hop in the raft and go with the river and then just ride this bitch till the wheels fall off.

It's very tempting to do this. But in a sense, this is exactly what they want us to do. This is the number one thing that they all want us to do. The number one strategy that all these people and all these forces that are trying to destroy humanity, that are trying to destroy us and everything that we hold dear, the number one way they are getting us to do it is to try to convince us that it's already too late. Don't fight. Don't try to resist. Don't try to change anything.

It's already over. Just lay over and die. And if we do this, we have in fact already lost. But we haven't lost. Super intelligence does not exist. I know it's unfashionable to say sometimes these days. But at least here in the United States, we still do live in a democracy. I talk to politicians every day.

You know, control AI, the organization I work with, we have briefed over 200 offices in Congress, and we're only getting more. And the number one response I get from them is not, oh, that's good or that's great. I can't wait for this to happen. The number of responses, wait, that's really bad. I don't want that either. what can we do? It's very tempting to think of politicians. They're very hateable, you know what I mean?

Like, politicians are very hateable. It's very easy to hate politicians. But my experience talking to politicians is that, you know, yes, some of them are evil vampires. Yes, some of them are very evil. But most of them are just normal people like you and me. Most of them are just people. They don't know what's right either.

They're trying to figure it out. They're just trying to get through the day. You know, they're trying to do the right thing, but they don't know. And we need to help them. We need to help each other. We need to help all of us be like, this is not what humanity wants, and we must stop it from happening.

We can still do this. We have law enforcement. Like, this might sound silly, right? But, like, we can just arrest these guys. We can? Yes, we can. Like, we do have law enforcement. Like, this is a thing you can do.

You know, this is absolutely a thing you can do. We can say, this is illegal. If you keep doing this, we send the men in black. And the men in black will be happy, you know, lizard men at the men in black will be happy to arrest them if we tell them to do this. If the government tells them to do this, they will do it. Yeah, the problem is, like you were saying, AI is rewarded to, you know, the way they built the system in the games and the way for them to optimize and grow is sociopathic by nature, right? Well, it's the same thing with the political system in the United States.

The way to get to the highest ranks of any department, any agency in the U.S. is the same thing, sociopathic behavior, cutting throats, any throat possible, to get to the top and step on the next guy's head. to get higher. So I'm going to say that I'm controversial. I kind of like sociopaths. I kind of like sociopaths. The reason I like sociopaths is because they're predictable. Sociopaths are kind of like wild animals. If you go to the zoo and there's a cage with a wild animal and you put your hand in and you get bitten, whose fault is it?

It's kind of your fault. You knew it was a wild animal. You knew it was going to bite you. This is kind of how I feel about sociopaths. Sociopaths are predictable. If it's in the interest of a sociopath to change their behavior, they will just flip on a dime. Yes. And this is predictable and this is exploitable.

I'm much more dislike crazy or like emotional people. Like this is much harder. Like sadistic people, sadistic people is very hard to deal with. Sadistic people is really hard. But sociopaths that aren't necessarily sadistic, they just don't care, that's much easier to deal with.

Of course. So let's say tomorrow, all of American people said, we will vote out literally everyone who doesn't oppose superintelligence. I trust you, all these sociopath lizard people are going to flip overnight.

And they're already starting to, right? Like, in a sense, you know, sociopaths not having any loyalty is also a good thing. Like, it's a bad thing, but it's also a good thing. It's an exploitable thing. It's a thing where if we flip the incentives, they will happily flip to the other side. They have no loyalty to superintelligence. They have no loyalty to their friends in industry. They don't have loyalty to the dollar.

Yes. And the people that control the superintelligence are the ones that are giving them all the dollars. and simultaneously the ones that control the superintelligence are the ones that have all the surveillance on everyone. I think there's a lot of truth to this. And I think there are many worlds in which it is already over. I think there are many worlds in which it's true the dollar is the only form of power. But thankfully, America was found as a democracy on our constitution and it was inspired. That's bullshit.

It's all fake. It's not true. I absolutely. I so strongly disagree. That was the point of the founding fathers. That's what they wanted. when they wrote the Constitution for sure. But it's been bastardized.

And it's been, it's, it's, who voted for any of the shit that's going on around the world right now? Who voted for all these wars? Who voted for hiding the Epstein files? I mean, I could just list, I could list things until the cows come home that no American citizens voted on that are still happening in American foreign policy today. I totally agree. I totally understand that America has a history that has, as many problems. We are in a very bad spot.

But America is also the greatest country has ever existed. I really believe this. And the Constitution is one of the greatest documents ever written. The founding fathers, I agree with that. We're absolutely geniuses. All the way back to Plato, you know, one of the great forefathers of Western civilization. One of the things he always said is the two things that must be separated are money

and politics, political power and economic power. And a lot of this has been mixed in America. But as someone who works in D.C. every single day, who meets real patriotic Americans, both citizens and politicians and military officials and other people, I tell you that the Constitution is not dead. Like, I'm telling you this, you can believe me or not, it's your choice,

but I am telling you with full conviction that, yes, it is wounded. The dream of America is deeply wounded. It is dying, but it is not dead. There is so much true patriotism I still see every day. There is so much actual political will. Politicians do care about their constituents. They do care about elections.

There are worlds... Some do, for sure. Yes, and it's more than you think. I'm not saying it's all of them. Right. But it's way more than you think. It's very fashionable. And think about this.

Who benefits from you believing the democracy is dead? Who is the one who would benefit most from you believing this? Who benefits from me believing democracy is dead? I don't know who. The people who want democracy dead. The people who want you to not fight back. Who don't want you to vote. Who don't want you to believe that the Constitution is still alive.

we can still push back against these oligopoly, there's these like this incredible kleptocratic system. We can in fact still push back. If I could get 20% of Americans to get together, to coordinate, to talk to their congressperson, like, let me give you a feeling of this. I recently, a while back, I talked to a staffer of a politician. And I asked him, when people say like, you know, call your congressperson, like, does that really work?

Like, how many people need to call? Right. And he said, well, if one or two people call, maybe we'll write it down, maybe we won't, who knows. If five people call us, well, we'll write it down. If ten people call us, well, the congressperson will definitely hear about that. I'm like, ten? Really? It is so rare for a congressperson to get ten calls about an issue that that is enough to, like, draw their attention towards.

The amount, so one of the biggest reasons America is wounded, one of the greatest reasons that our dream of America is so wounded, is because of our lack of engagement. There's a really fascinating book by Alexis de Tocqueville, written in the 18th century. He was a Frenchman. I think he was French. And he was traveling America and just kind of writing down what he was observing. And he observed what I think was one of the most interesting things about American culture, is that he observed that Americans had this incredible knack to organize. Whenever there was a problem, they would get together. Whenever a community was facing a problem, they would get together and figure it out. Every time they were unhappy with what the state was doing, they would get together and they would, you know,

figure it out. They would go to the capital. They would complain. They would protest. They would do something. That Americans would always come together. They would form groups. Yes. And they would do something about it. And this is something we have lost to a very large degree. This is truly something we have lost. It is actually, I think people truly do not understand how much a politician cares about 200 of their constituents personally showing up to yell at them. Like, they really do. Like, this doesn't happen. Like, this is actually rare. You think this is 200 people on Twitter. Sure. That happens every day. 200 people in person showing up, you know, giving them a call or just coming there. Of course, politely and, you know, friendly, just saying like, this is a problem we care about. This is actually much rarer than you think it is. Americans in many ways have been abdicating a lot of their responsibilities as citizens. Citizens is not just a privilege. It's also a responsibility. It is also your responsibility to engage with your local and federal government.

It is your job to help them figure out what are the issues that you're facing and what can we do about them. It's also your duty to engage with your community, your fellow Americans about how we can work on this issue. So, yes, it is hard. America is deeply wounded and bleeding out. But it is not yet dead. And there is still a lot that can be done, I'm telling you. What we're seeing right now with the anti-AI sentiment across the board is the most crazy grassroots upswelling of political will and bipartisan, by the way, incredibly bipartisan that I've ever seen. And let me tell you.

They're trying to make it partisan. Oh, they've been trying for you. Oh, they're trying so hard. So, so hard. If you don't want a data center, you ain't a Republican. Exactly. And God bless my Republican, you know, fellow Americans who didn't take this bullshit. And they didn't take the bait.

They understood, no. You know, there's nothing a Republican about having, you know, data centers or AI destroy your community and your family. Fuck no. Absolutely not. They didn't take, God bless, you know, them for this. And it's, this gives me hope. Like, this is what America's about. This is what America's about us, you know.

That like, look, we are a divided nation. Yeah. No question about it. We are a divided nation, you know. But there are some things that unite us as Americans, as is humans. And this is one of them. No one wants AI to replace us or our families. Republican, Democrat, anyone else.

This is not something any of us want. Does that sound like a Democrat position to you? Does that sound like a Republican position to you? Absolutely not. Right. So what we're seeing right now is such an upswelling of political will. And trust me, I talk to politicians, you know, all the time. I talk to their staff, I talk to people in the administration, they are terrified.

They are freaking out. They're backing, they're like really backing down from so much of the AI stuff because they're seeing what voters are doing, because they're seeing that people are organizing. People are starting to not say, no, we don't want this in our communities. We don't, this is not the future for America that we want. But they want you to believe it's not working. That's the main thing. They want you to believe that this isn't working and that it won't work and that it's

impossible. That's what they want you to believe because then you won't fight. That's an interesting take. Because one of the biggest things I question about when you want to say democracy in the United States, well, is it truly a democracy when politicians are getting handed hundreds of millions of dollars by foreign countries or by private corporations to serve their interests? and even escalating to the point where you have, you know, sitting senators saying their whole reason for even trying to be a politician in America was to serve another country is like on the face of it, it doesn't compute. It doesn't make any fucking sense. How can you say that this is a functioning democracy when you have the people publicly saying that the reason they got into politics was to help serve another country and compare that with all of the, of the open information that you can find online to all the organizations and foreign countries

and super PACs and all that stuff that are funding all these people. It just, it's just, you know, it's easy to lose hope. And it's easy to lose faith in the future of the country and where it's going because they don't seem like rational actors, right? It seems like just unhinged maniacs at the top of this stuff. Yeah. And, you know, that's an interesting point. What you're saying is like maybe that's by design.

Maybe that is to get people to lose hope and to just sort of like go with the way the river flows. That's exactly how maniacs get in power. The only thing that evil needs to succeed is for good men to do nothing. Because we think this is just how things are, that's why it's happening. You know what we can do with these people that are maniacs? We can vote them out. There are many countries in which that is not true. If tomorrow, you know, these maniacs you talk about lost 90% of the vote, do you think they would keep their seat?

Or would they leave? They would leave. That's not the case in all countries. In many countries, even if they have, you know, no, you know, 1% of the vote, they will still stay in power. That is not the case of the United States of America. If they got, you know, they got voted out 90 to 10, they would get voted out. Yeah. If tomorrow, POTUS told the military to do something, do you think the military would coup him?

No, I don't believe that. I think the military is very loyal to the United States of America. This is not the case in all countries. The way a really failing democracy works is when you can't trust the military to do what the government tells it to do. That is not the case in the United States of America. Yeah. That's very true, especially when these AI companies are so integrated into the military. Look, they're trying. Don't get me wrong.

They are trying to make America a failed state. They are really trying. They are trying to undermine our democratic legitimacy. They're trying to undermine our military legitimacy. They are trying on so many levels. And it comes to us as American citizens, as patriots, and people who believe in the mission of the founding fathers to fight back. That's what they would have done. They would have fought back.

They would have not allowed this to happen. They would have voted this out. They would have organized with their local communities. They would have not allowed this infiltration of the military. And we can still fix these things. Look, this is not an easy project, right? And we do need to ban superintelligence first. Sorry, that's kind of quite acute.

But beyond that, this is going to be a generational project. Fixing America is not something that's going to happen overnight. It's going to take new generations of, you know, better voting, better politicians, better institutions, you know, getting money out of politics, getting better oversight over military contractors and stuff like this. But that's what it takes to create a good country. Who said this was going to be easy? Who said we had already figured this out? Like there's this kind of idea that like, oh, we solved all of government in the 19th. 50s and just can lay back.

Like, what the hell are you talking about? No, this is a continual process. We have to keep innovating and improving our government, improving or striving for justice and the pursuit of happiness. This is always going to be a fight for as long as we exist and for our children and our grandchildren and so on. The way a good world looks for me is not everything is solved and we lean kick back and everything's okay, right?

That's not how the world works. The way for me a really good world looks is that we all really feel in our heart that tomorrow, the world is going to be a little bit better. And next year, it's going to be a little bit better than that. And our children, their lives are just going to be a little bit better than ours. Not that everything will be solved. Not that there'll be magic superintelligence that makes everyone immortal. Just that our children are going to have a nicer life than we did.

And their children is going to have an even nicer life than we did. And that's the track I want us to get on. I'm not here to build utopia. I'm not here to like build immortality or something like this. That is way too crazy, way too dangerous. Maybe in 200 years we can talk about it. But right now, what we need is to get America back on track. I mean, to get the West back on track.

We need to get the world back on track where things continue to improve. And this requires engagement with the government institutions. When I ask people, this is actually a very funny thing. I talk to a lot of tech people, right? And they always are thinking about technology. They're techno-optimists. But in my experience, being a techno-optimist really often means that they're civilizational pessimists.

They think that the only way to improve the world is through technology. And this is obviously false. If you ask anyone, what are the top 10 things that are bad about their lives? They will almost never list technological things. They will say, I don't see my family enough, or the economy is bad, health care is bad, the government is corrupt, you know, crime is too high. All of these are social problems. All of these are government and institutional problems. These are the things that are holding us back, not technology, and they can be improved.

Is there a way we could rewrite? the way these things are trained to where they serve humans more than they serve basically competing to win to pass tests and things like that like a way to optimize our civilization and humanity we have no idea how this is a problem that has been greatly underinvested in there's very few researchers and very few money going into this kind of research and even then the only thing that we found is that it's one of the hardest problems we've ever encountered, to give you a feeling of just how hard this is. Building, in the technical literature, this is called alignment.

It's aligning superintelligence to our values. It's kind of the technical term. And what it would mean to align a superintelligence would be equivalent to saying we're going to build a one-world government that controls all the economy, all the military, everyone's private lives, you know, all the science has super weapons and all this kind of stuff. And it will always be good, only do good things that you like, and it will never make mistakes, and there will be no bugs, and we will do this with software on the first try. That's crazy. Like, that's what the hell these people talking about?

That's not how anything in the world works, right? Except for the Apollo missions. I mean, honestly, Apollo, look, one of the most impressive things ever done, cakewalk compared to this. Sorry. Right. You know, like, cakewalk compared to this, right? It was an incredible scientific thing. But like, fun fact, you know that like the computation on like the Apollo mission was like less than a pocket calculator today.

Yeah, it was like it was like one one millionth of the computing power of an iPhone. Exactly. So incredible scientific achievement, not even compared to super intelligence, right? Building a good super intelligence is much closer to building a good one world government, which, holy shit. Like, I don't even know what that would mean or like how you would do that. That seems like so, first of all, it seems like a really bad idea. We should probably not do that. division of power, I think is very important.

But a superintelligence kind of inherently removes division of power. That's kind of the problem, because it's so powerful that, you know, humans just don't have any power anymore. Right. So we lose this division of power. We lose all these safety things that we already have that we need to keep dangerous things like governments under control. So, look, if we spend, I don't know, three generations of all our greatest mathematicians, scientists, philosophers, you know, working with trillions of dollars, of budgets, nonstop for, you know, decades or a century on this. Yeah.

Maybe, right? Like, maybe we can make progress on this. It's not impossible, right? But other than that, like, come on. Because some, I mean, some people say that there's an argument to be made where there's a small potential that we could redirect and turn this into an AI utopia. Yeah. Instead of, like, an apocalypse.

Yeah. And they're saying they're going to build a one-world government using software that will be good. That's what they're saying. Is that what they're saying? That's what it means to build the utopia is that they will be the one world government that has run by a non-human intelligence that you cannot control or understand that has full control over the entire world using the current terrible shitty methods that they have and that somehow this is going to turn out well. Sorry, this is delusion. Like this is just delusion. Well, you know, on one hand I'm thinking like if this thing was super intelligent, it would realize that this planet has to be taken care of

for it to survive, right? And you can see how that could be good to some extent. But like there's a lot of nuance there, right? There's an argument you made that human beings aren't the best thing for the planet. In the ecosystem, wild animals don't need us to survive. If all humans disappear, this is a fact, right? If all humans disappeared tomorrow, it wouldn't affect the wild animals. It wouldn't affect the whales in the ocean at all.

Probably would make them rebound massively in population. If all the whales in the ocean, the ocean and all the insects and all the birds disappeared tomorrow, we would be fucked. The whole ecosystem would collapse. And so like the point is like we don't need them to survive or we need them to survive. They don't need us to survive. So if AI said this planet, we need to conserve this planet and we need to make sure that this planet stays intact and healthy for us to survive, well, there is an argument to be made

that humans aren't, don't have a long lifespan. there. But on a whole other note, maybe this superintelligence wouldn't even be constrained by the Earth. Like, what if it could fucking escape the Earth? Of course. Superintelligence will be much better at science. It won't be biological, right? It won't be biological, right? Well, does it even need an atmosphere? That seems like very wasteful, right? Like, why breathe air? That's super inefficient. Exactly. You know, just tile everything with solar panels, transform the whole Earth into a spaceship or something. Who knows? Right. Who knows what a super intelligence would do? I don't know. Like, it's not smart enough to know. Exactly.

Something that's 20 times smarter than us would know. Exactly. It's something like if an aunt tries to guess what a human will do. Right. An ant doesn't understand what we're doing right now. Right. Like no way an ant could understand what we're doing right now or why. Yeah. It'll be very similar with super intelligence. I don't think super intelligence will need a biosphere. It will do its own thing. Jesus Christ. Did you see, I saw something earlier that there was something. some sort of an AI was able to figure out, I think this was a Google, one of the Google AIs, figured out how to decipher baby cries and translate what they wanted. Interesting. Did you see that? I had not see that. See if you can find that, Steve.

Oh, okay. Translating baby sounds. This was a year ago using Google AI. Go ahead and play it. Let's see what it says. You can hear it in the head. If you want to throw those headphones, you can actually hear what it says. Hello, hi, welcome.

What's happening? I'm building something very cool with Vortex AI, and I would like to show you what I'm building. Please come and see. Hi, I'm Senthel Kumar. This is my AI idea. Last year, I had a baby girl. I typically take care of my baby during the night time.

So my role is like, no, showing the baby, make sure that it's sleeping. Sometimes the baby used to cry mid of the night. I really don't know why the baby is crying. She has always crying my baby. It's not only for hunger, so maybe she might feel some discomfort. Sometimes what happened is like they'd start vomiting. And as a new parent, we were like getting panic. Called the hospital and 3am in the morning, we rushed to the hospital.

And sometimes doctors say, hey, it's burbing. You forget to do burp. A burp. My idea is like, he's a bird. The idea is, is there is any way my baby can tell, I, Dad, like, no, this is why I'm playing, please take an action. Is there is any way I use technology to solve this? Is there is any way I can convert the baby crying into the language model?

Like, you know, I can understand it as a new parent, not only me. I immediately went to Gemini and asking it, like, no, is there any pattern for baby cry? Actually, I searched in Google and all, how to differentiate the baby crying sounds. When I searched it, I come to know that. But all the baby in the world try for five patterns. It follows certain frequency, certain rhythm and certain amplitude, the baby cries. Okay, when it's bite or hunger, baby cry aggressively. If it is more on like burbing or thing, the baby pattern is different.

And the next to onwards, whenever my baby cries, I start recording it. So I thought why you're recording? No, no, no. I'm developing a program to find out why the baby is cry. Instead of recording her voice, he should console her. you should calm her down. So that is what I said. The goal is built a very simple prototyping app

using flutter. The goal of the app is just to record the audio sample. Then use semi-m models to identify this is a crying sample or not. Once that is found, then my idea is to find pattern to do that. So I'll basically convert the audio sample into the visual spectrum. Because I'm planning to use deep neural network.

Deep neural network is all about image. So any pattern, you give it as an image form. Yeah, that is how it's trained. Yeah, this is for hunger. That is fucking crazy. Now I'm asking the CEMIS studio. Now yeah, it's maybe crying for hunger. Like, you know, here's how it helps.

I'm even thinking that the first thing the way we do is like cry when it's born. So is this, is this app available now? Can people actually use this? I found there's a couple apps. apps. I'm not sure which one is his. You can even try it. There's a, that's insane. There's an app called Baby Talk translator.

To be fair here, the AI did basically zero work. Most of the work, yeah, like he said it himself. The science was already done by humans previously who had identified the five different calls. He was just using the AI to just like sort the call into one of five buckets. So it's like pattern recognition. Yes. Which, you know, is cool. But like, let's be clear here, the hard part.

the science was actually done by humans before this. And the AI is kind of like a nice little tool. Wow. I think I could have probably done this even without AI. I mean, if it's literally just spectral analysis, like, come on, man. It's not that hard. Sorry, but it's not that hard. Right, right.

Yeah, some of this stuff is very mundane, you know, compared to super intelligence. This is a great example of like uranium ore. Yes. This is what I mean. Right. Like, this fantastic. God bless, you know, do more of it. Like, this is fun.

This is a cool little app. You know, it's nice. You know, if I ever have a daughter, you know, I might download this app, you know. But it's just, like, not the same thing as super intelligence, right? Like, lobbyists love to pretend that when I talk about superintelligence, I'm trying to, like, ban this, which is obviously nonsense. Like, this is obviously harmless. Harmless. It's even good.

Like, this is good for the world. I love technology. I love having, you know, useful apps on my phone that help me solve problems. And this isn't a problem I knew I could solve. And, you know, now I have a nice whole thing that can solve my problem, right? Yeah. So this is not what we're talking about, right? this is great and like this is engineering and you know science and you know just good stuff football season

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them i've talked to sam ulpin maybe three times i've talked to dario i've had dinner with him i think once i've had talked to demis a couple times i had him over dinner in my place once actually so that's probably the long who is that last one oh he's the ceo of deep mind or was the ceo of deep mind oh yes yes i saw him on lux freedman's podcast yeah so i've talked to him a fair bit i've talked to some other people you know like ilias witskiver or um shane leg who are like chief scientists of of these various companies and so on. So I don't say it's a deep connection, but I've definitely had dinner with some of them.

Oh, I have had dinner at Sam Altman's house once. That was a very funny dinner. Why would they invite you there? Yeah, no, I probably thought it was funny. Like, one of the things that, like, I actually appreciate about San Francisco culture is just like, you just talk to someone interesting, you know, even if he doesn't agree with you,

it could still be interesting. I honestly don't really know why Sam Altman still returns my texts. Sometimes he still does. Yeah, sometimes. I don't know why, but, you know. What kind of stuff do you ask him? I suppose it just like, I'm in San Francisco, do you want to meet up? Like, that's the usual thing I ask whenever I'm in San Francisco.

And every time I've had a conversation with Sam, he was a very interesting person. Like, I'm using interesting specifically, right? I thought he was a very interesting person. We had a lot of very interesting discussions. Of course, nothing came of any of them. But they were always engaging, let's say it that way. Yeah. Like, there's a thing where people really want people to be.

like either like cartoon villains or that have like you know or like coherent in some way like they're like one thing but most of these people are just very mercurial they're kind of like they tell different people different things yes like what sam olpin tells me is i think very different than what he tells other people i what you know when i have a conversation with one of these people they say very different things to me they show me very different things than they show other people you know which to a certain degree i mean we all have different personalities for a different friend or whatever, but it's just like, ultimately they're people, right? Some oldman's a person, you know, Demons is a person, Tyro is a person.

They're all people. They're complex. They have their own personal quirks. You know, some of them are more sociopathic than others. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that all of them are trying to build something that will kill everyone and we have to stop them. And what do they say to you when you say that to them? I mean, do you know the word cope?

Yeah. Yeah, a lot of that. Lots and lots and lots of cope. What? What's their best argument? We can slow down actually. You see, it's actually impossible to slow down. And you know, the other guy, and you know, all three of them are pointing to each other, you know, he's much worse than me. So I have to do it.

And it's like, you know, I have been trying to be the reasonable one the whole time actually. But like all three of them, you know, say variants of this, of course. So Altman and the guy from Anthropic, they hate each other, right? I mean, I'm sure they do. There's a video I saw of them like at some big public conference or something and they were all like joining hands. and some like display of unity. Oh, I remember that's so funny.

And Altman and that guy wouldn't even touch each other. They like faked it. They went like that. Hilarious. Like another thing that people I think don't really, so one of the most useful things in my life was encountering truly powerful people

in like casual settings. Like I've been, like I've met billionaires and like hung out with them and stuff like this. It's really useful. Like, you know, generally, you know,

it's a very useful experience because you see they're just people. Like they are just guys. They're just dudes, right? Like, they're not that different from you and me. They are, like, petty or cringe or weird or, like, awkward in all the same wanes that everyone else is. Yeah.

Like, a lot of people, I think it, like, starstruck when you're dealing with people like this. They think they're, like, aliens. They're, like, super humans and so on. But, like, when I talk to these people, I'm just like, ah, yeah, it's a person. Like, this is just another person. And just, like, they're doing things that are super dangerous. I'm sure they have their own justifications for why they're doing it. And blah, blah, blah, blah.

I don't really care. What matters is they should stop. And if they're not going to stop, we have to make them stop. What about Elon? I have never met Elon. Well, I was once in a room with him. I had Bletchley Park back in the day. I have never met Elon. I've never spoken to him. Yeah, I heard one thing about Grock. I think that I don't know if it's still a thing, but I heard that at one point Grock was like, which is supposed to be like the most sane one out of all of them, right? That's what I heard. Grock was giving answers and trying to make sure it didn't contradict like political statements Elon had made before. Did you hear that one?

I remember hearing about this, yes. But I heard that it's since updated and fixed it. You know, similar to like how the Google, the early version of Gemini or whatever was giving us like black women Nazis. When you asked to like show us a picture of a bunch of Nazis or whatever, it was trying to make them like diverse. Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's been a lot of embarrassing faux pauses of AIs like that. Yeah. They've gotten better at preventing these kind of faux pauses from happening, but they definitely do still happen.

Yeah. I mean, I rely on GROC for most things. Like, even it's changed the way I interact with stories on X, on the X Twitter platform, where I immediately see something and I'm skeptical, right? So I'll scroll down and see if GROC confirmed it. Because usually people will say, like, GROC, can you please confirm this? What's true? Oh, that's hilarious. an African-American Nazi.

Impressive. And usually it will give you, like, it'll give you the context, whether it's true or not. And it's already changing the way, you know, I interact with those things. Yeah. So, you know, who knows where that goes. Yeah. I, I've installed all social media from my phone. You have.

All of it. I only use, I only use X for, like, business, like when there's big news or renouncing something. otherwise I am never on any social media anywhere. Why'd you do that? Bad for you? Like, I just could really feel that's bad for you. Like, I could feel myself scrolling. I could feel the, like, you know, gambling neuron, you know, in the back of my brain.

I could, like, also I could feel myself just, like, become more hateful. Like, there's, okay, it's like, here's a very important thing about humans, where I think a lot of people don't really understand, is that if you see or perceive anything, your brain updates on it, whether you want it or not. You can totally disbelieve something. but if you see it, you start believing it a little bit. This is a bug in the human brain. It's just a bug.

It's just literally a bug. If you see something over and over and over again, it starts changing your personality, if you like it or not. It doesn't matter what it is. It will change your personality. A little bit. Not a lot, but a little bit.

And so these systems are so optimized to get in your head. Like, you know, I'll go on X and look, if you just want to make me happy, you'd show me like a couple cool science stories and then just a bunch of cute animal videos. And then I would be super happy. It's all I want from social media. Like, this is all I want.

And X, like, it was so good. It would show me, like, the coolest, like, I don't know, ant eater video I've ever seen in my life. And then 50 posts about Israel. And then it will show me, you know, one cool jellyfish video or something, right? Like, it was, I could see how perversely designed these algorithms are. Because it's also a fun fact. The way gambling works, generally, is that the most addictive thing is not something that is consistently good. If you keep getting good things, you might be.

be satisfied. So instead what you want to do is you want most of it to be shit. You want to have it that almost everything is terrible and then every so often completely at random you see something awesome. And all social media is designed like this. Like scroll through X at any given point and you'll see like a great post. You'll see a great video or something and then just seas of garbage and then you'll see one other great post and then sees of garbage. You might think this is just how things are right but this is false. They deliberately make it this way. You could, they could just show you the good posts. There's no reason you can't do that.

But that would be less addictive. So for me, it's kind of like memetic hygiene. Like, it feels like, you know, it's like gross to eat with your hands, especially if you haven't washed your hands. That's a lot of how I feel like scrolling social media. It's kind of gross to put this in my head. Like, it's like putting it in my mouth.

Like, it's not supposed to be there. Like, it's gross. It's unsanitized. Like, who knows what sciop this is from? I don't want it in my head. Right. That's a very good point. Yeah, you're very right about that.

Did you see there was something that Australia just did. We learned about it yesterday that they're implementing this new law or they're trying to get this new law passed where the social media companies have to install a switch on the social media apps where it turns off the algorithm and makes it go back to the way it used to be. So like if I follow you, if I follow you, I'm only going to see your stuff and all the people I follow. Same like the way like old school YouTube used to be. All the subscribers you would, you would subscribe. you would only get your subscription list. There would be no algorithmic feed feeding you stuff

based on, because that's the problem with this stuff, right, is they want to keep you on the platform as long as possible. Yeah. Because that's what provides, that's what their values based on. So if they're not doing that anymore, theoretically, they're not going to be able to compete with the other, with the other platforms and their market shares going to go down, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this seems like a great thing where you have the ability to turn that off. And they're pushing back against it big times. But, and then, oh, yeah, then meta just settled that fifth, that $18 billion social media harms trial thing, which is interesting.

Yeah. Yeah, I think this is a great example. We're just like, we fail to regulate the internet and we fail to regulate social media to be a net positive. Like, there's no reason we couldn't just have this, right? Like, you can do, like, the whole thing about regulation is, is that these companies often make a good point. If we make our product less addictive, then we're just going to run out of business and

someone else will take over. This is what is called in economic theory a market failure. This is a very classic thing from economics. If you take like an economics one-to-one course in college, it's one of the first things they'll teach you about is another example is pollution. Like imagine you and me start a chemical company, you know, and we could dump our toxic sludge into the river and that would make our product cheaper. But we don't do that because you knew you and me are good people, right? So we don't pollute the river. But then what happens? Well, some other jackass down the street starts a new chemical company. He pollutes the river. His product is cheaper, we get out of business.

This is one of the classic examples where you need regulation. The only way to stop the river from getting polluted is to make it illegal to pollute the river. Because then, you know, our company can still make our product and not lose out to the asshole who's polluting the river. The river stays safe. We still have competition

and all is well. This is a very similar example of this. Of course, if we if one company unilaterally decides we're going to make a good algorithm or we're going to get rid the algorithm entirely, they just lose all their market share. But if we say, no, everyone has to provide an opt-out or, you know, everyone has to have a good algorithm. Then we can still have competition.

Then we don't, you know, destroy all these companies. Then we allow the competition on the thing we actually care about. This is a great example of how markets and regulation can work together rather than against each other. This is always the real goal of regulation. The goal of regulation isn't to stop competition. I mean, sometimes it is. But, like, when you do good regulation, the goal is to create competition around something

you actually want. Right. Like, you know, I like to think something's about, like, you know, sports, you know, like football or like MMA. You know, MMA has a lot of rules. And that's very important. Yes. Because imagine if MMA had zero rules. You just kill the other guy.

Right. And it would just be over. Like, you'd just kill the other guy and that's it. Like, it wouldn't be fun or interesting. It would just be terrible. There would be no competition. It would just be whoever stabs the other guy. Some guy would show up with a gun.

Exactly. And then, like, where's, like, that's not good at all. No. Meanwhile, we have now created as really complex and, like, important rules. set that is enforced by referees, you know, to make sure that we can continue to have this competition so that we can continue to see, you know, the greatest warriors who have ever existed fight each other with, you know, techniques that, you know, our ancestors couldn't even imagine, like, how effective modern fighting techniques are. So this is really for me the good

case of regulation is that some people think, like, you know, markets are like, you know, the only good in the world and everything should be free markets or whatever. But like, that's obviously, you know, a contradiction in many ways. They're one tool in our tool belt. You know, we use markets to solve certain problems. But we want them to solve the right problems. You know, we don't want them to pollute our river as hard as possible. We want them to make a nice chemical product that doesn't pollute the river. And so, insure this, we make regulation.

Yes. Has there ever been an example in history where there was a technology being developed where we realized it was too dangerous to get out of control and we halt and we stopped it? Human cloning. That is the most extreme example, yes. Really? Yes. It became clear in the 20th century that human cloning would be possible. didn't yet know how to do it, but scientists realized that this would become possible.

And they were very concerned about the consequences of human cloning and what that would mean. Because obviously, imagine you could just clone your best soldier, right? Imagine you could do like, you know. Right, right, right. And stuff like this. The human promotion prohibition act of 2003. There was also a bunch of other legislation, including internationals and stuff on this. There's a really fascinating deep history that goes way beyond this specific act.

There's quite a lot that was going on there. But fundamentally, what is so fascinated about human cloning is that scientists came together before it was possible. It was only hypothetical at the time to clone humans. And they said, we shouldn't do this. This is really bad. This is really dangerous. Think of the effects as what have in human society.

Like, we should be really careful or just not do it at all. And so they banned it before it was even possible. They banned it before. And to this day, you know, other than maybe one exception, there have been no human We have the technology. We could definitely do it if we wanted to. But all countries across the world, like even the one case where they're, it wasn't really cloning. It was human germline engineering. Was this the one in China? It was the one in China. He was trying to eliminate the HIV promoter or something. Yeah. So this wasn't a full clone. It was just like a small mutation and kind of small manipulation. And he was slapped. Like that like that. The Chinese Communist Party did not like that. You know, no one like that. The whole bio community just. you know, ostracized the guy, you know, there was huge investigations, whatever. And think about how crazy this is. It's actually crazy that, you know, someone like China, who, you know, is an adversary of ours also was like, hell no, we don't want this.

Like, absolutely not. You're doing this in our borders? Absolutely not. So this was, I think, a great example of scientists saying, oh God, like, if we do this, like, what will happen? That's really bad. And we should definitely not do this. You know, maybe if we figure out, how to do it safely in a long time in the future, but not right now. Like, this is a disaster. And we actually did avert this. There are other worlds in which human cloning

does now exist and is widespread. And I think that would be a very, very bad world to live in. Yeah, that's, you're right about that. That's wild. I wasn't aware of that. It wasn't aware that we went back as far as 2003. Oh, it goes much further than that. It was all the back in the 80s. Really?

Oh, yeah. And especially in the 90s. There was a lot of conversations about this in the 1990s. So this goes back a long time. Yeah. Like, I say way before the technology existed, it does exist now. Like, we could definitely do this now. But way before the technology existed, they just realized that eventually we would figure out how to do cloning like this.

And they were so prescient. Let's see, this is a great example of how I think responsible engagement with powerful technology comes. The scientists realize, oh, shit, what's happening? We need to figure this out. And they have, you know, many discussions. They go to the government. They go to the general public. They raise awareness, et cetera.

You know, it's very similar also to, for example, what happened with nuclear weapons, you know, which we didn't stop entirely. But what happened with nuclear weapons was very interesting. So the person who came up with the idea of the nuclear weapon was a physicist named Leo Zillard. And he basically calculated that a nuclear bomb would be possible. Again, long before one was built,

before we even had nuclear reactors. He just did some math on a paper and he was like, oh, shit. We can totally build a nuclear bomb. What's his name again? Leo Zillard. Leo Zillard. Yeah, S-Z-I-L-A-R-D. So really fascinating guy, super interesting history.

I highly recommend. Like, generally, the history of, like, the nuclear, like, it's a great book called The Making of the Atomic Bomb, which is one of my favorite books ever written. Really? It's so fascinating. Like, the history there is, like, so many twists and turns. Really, really, really, really great book.

But, yeah, so Leo Zillard, so it's actually very funny. He heard another physicist, a very famous physicist. I think it was Lord Kelvin, if I remember correctly, say that the idea of net energy production from nuclear is moonshine. Like it's nonsense. And Leo Ziler was so pissed off that he like did all the math and figured out how to do it. Someone said it couldn't be done. Yeah.

And then he was so pissed off that he figured out how to do it. And then, well, what did he do next? Well, of course, he moved to Silicon Valley, created a nuclear bomb startup, which split into three other startups to sell as many nuclear bombs to the general public as possible. No, of course not. That's not what happened. He went to the government. He was like, holy shit.

Nuclear bombs were possible. This is going to change everything. This is going to threaten the world. This is a weapon that could destroy the whole world. We have to do something. So he went to the government. He went to the military. This led to the famous Einstein letter to the president,

which led to the Manhattan Project. This is exactly where I came from. Because he was like, guys, this is going to change everything. We need to figure this out. And so this is what led to the Manhattan Project, to largely because they were very scared that the Germans would build it because they thought the Germans were working on it. They kind of weren't.

It's a little complex there. But then what happened after World War II as well is that people are just like, holy shit. This technology is just so different. It's so much more powerful. We need to build whole new laws, institutions to stop this proliferation. Back then, people really thought that, well, every country and every terrorist would build nuclear bombs. There's no way to stop it. But no, diplomats and statesmen and people rose to the occasion and said, we have to stop this from happening.

Look, we can't stop the Soviets, obviously. but like we can't stop terrorists and like we should. So this led to, you know, the international atomic energy agency and all these like international bodies and national bodies that really regulated nuclear to an incredible degree. Isn't it amazing that a nuclear bomb hasn't been dropped since the 40s? But like actually though, right? Like isn't that just the craziest thing?

It's insane. It's like it is hard to, like the fact that people take the, like people tell me, oh, we can't stop AI, right? Look, we couldn't stop nuclear bombs. I'm like, dude, we haven't dropped a single military nuclear bomb since the 1940. That's incredible. That is not what people thought was going to happen. After World War II, everyone was like, all right, well, time to drop nuclear bombs and everybody, I guess.

Like this was just so common sense. They were like, it's unstoppable. Nothing can prevent nuclear war. It's always, it's inevitable. But we did stop it. You know, knock on wood that we continued to stop it, but we did do this. But this wasn't free. It wasn't just like, you know, oh, it just happened.

No, this took massive amounts of work from thousands, tens of thousands of people, you know, lawyers, diplomats, scientists, the general public, like activists, et cetera, to bring the awareness of just how dangerous this is and make sure that this is contained. And I remember listening to this fantastic podcast interviewing this guy. It was just a small story that I thought it so fascinating. He worked for the State Department, where after the fall of the Soviet Union, he heard a rumor that there was like a massive amount of weapons-grade uranium, like enough to build a nuclear bomb in a facility in Kazakhstan. And so for multiple years, he slowly became friends with like the person who ran the factory. if they went hunting together,

he met his family, just like for years and years and years until he finally admitted that it was there. And then he coordinated the whole of like taking the material, bringing it to the United States, melting it down and making sure...

It's an incredible story, right? And this is an example of what good nuclear stewardship looks like, right? That you have people like this guy whose name I'm unfortunately forgetting because it was such a cool story. You said he worked in the State Department?

He used to work in the State Department. I don't know where he's now. Like this was back in the 90s. But I heard a podcast recently where he retold the story and I was just like, man, this is such a great example of state capacity. This is what I want my state to do is to track down the nuclear material, make sure it is secured, melt it down safely, and make sure it doesn't happen. Like, do you know that the International Atomic Energy Agency has an exact, like, like, exact

ledger of every kilogram of, like, enriched uranium in the world? Like, it's crazy. Like, you know, maybe there's some, it also knows how much it's missing, by the way. Yeah, after the Soviet Union about like, I think it was like 500 kilograms just kind of disappeared. Yeah. We still don't know where that stuff is. But there was a guy I had on the show a while ago. He made a documentary. What was the name of the documentary?

It was basically what happened was he was following these, these cartel drug lords in South America who were doing business with the Soviet Union raptor. Some like oligarchs in the Soviet Union thereafter collapsed. And they were going over there trying to get a deal on a submarine. They're trying to buy a nuclear software. submarine and they were like sitting in the sauna working out the numbers of the deal. And then the Russian dude was like, you want to, you want us to throw in a couple of nukes? They were like, no, we don't want a new bro. We're good.

Yeah. I mean, honestly, I think the smallest servitude units is like truly maybe the greatest example of nuclear success. Like the fact that the Soviet Union, which was a shit show, you know, that had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons and that, you know, who knows? knows where those were. Who knows who owned them? Who knows what happened?

And the fact that those didn't fall into any terrorist hands, incredible. Like the fact that the international community of atomic scientists and, you know, states people managed to actually contain that. Can you imagine? Like, imagine you have a absolute, you know, nightmare country, you know, with tens of thousands of nukes, completely disintegrate. And zero of those nukes landed in terrorist hands. It's incredible. Yeah. This is like...

Considering how close we got. It was so... Human Missile Crisis. Exactly. Like, it is actually so incredible to me that this has actually succeeded. I think, I remember once asking a very senior person in the government, one of the most senior people I've ever talked to in the Defense Department back in the day, and this was many years ago.

And I asked her, like, are there any adults in the room? Are there like any, because like the government, like, at the, the government, like, it feels like no one's taking this seriously. It feels like a reality show. Yeah. And then she thought for a second, and she said, The people in charge of the nukes. That's what she said.

She said, those people, those are serious people. They don't fuck around. They do not fuck around. Many other people in the government do, those people don't fuck around. Really? That's what she said to me. The people in charge of the nukes.

Yeah, the DOE people, the Department of Energy nuclear people, those people do not fuck around. And I think this is wonderful. I think this is really great. I think that's exactly the kind of people I want to be in charge of the nukes. And in a sense,

they have the track record to show for it. Zero nukes in the hands of terrorists. You know, they did it. Like, this is not something that was easy. This was an incredibly hard thing to accomplish. Isn't it interesting, too, though, that the Department of Energy is the same exact organization as the Manhattan Project. They just re-changed the name like two or three times. And they just renamed the Manhattan Project to the Department of Energy.

Basically. And I think this is a great example of, like, you know, should we have as many nukes as we have today? Probably not, you know, blah, blah, blah. But, like, fundamentally, in a sense, we did kind of rise to the occasion. of nuclear weapons. Yeah. And we were being completely reckless with them when we were testing them. Oh, yeah.

That was- We were detonating holes in the atmosphere. Insane. Like the Starfish triple prime thing is absolutely nuts. Actual looney tune shit. Like, do you know there's a massive, also like radioactive sewage pile under the glaciers of Greenland? What?

Yeah, that's really funny. They just kind of like, they had a, there was a, they wanted to build an underground base in Greenland. And it turns out this wasn't like effective for various reasons. And there was like, massive amounts of like, you know, sewage and so on. I just kind of left there. And then they kind of had a nuclear reactor there as well.

And kind of getting it out of there was just too big of a hassle. So they just like left most of the waste. They're just kind of like sink into the glacier. Oh my God. There's a bunch of stories like this. Don't never mind what's happening in Russia. Like, do you know, like Lake Karakai, you know and stuff like this? Like there were like waterways in Russia's just Lake Karakai.

They're like so radioactive if you can't stand next to it. Really? Yeah. Like there's a, there was a, there's a, there's a, nothing nuclear waste? Yeah. So this was right next to the Mayak facility, which was their main nuclear weapons production facility. And like, oh my God, look, I'm not saying the Americans have always done everything right in our history of nuclear.

But oh my God, do you know anything about what the Soviets did with nuclear? So fun fact, one of the first things the Manhattan Project did was invent the HEPA filter, which was an air filter that could filter out radioactive material. The Russians never bothered to invent the HEPA filter. Instead, what they did is, is that there was... literally a program in the 1940s and 1950s, where if you were a gulag, you know, prisoner, you had the choice that you could get your entire sentence commuted, you could become a free man if you work at Mayak for three months. No one survived. Wow. Like, they would just send in death battalions of basically slave workers to just die of radiation poisoning in under three months.

Yeah. Instead of just like inventing hazmat suits. Like, like incredible. That's fucking Bunkers. Incredible. Like the Soviet. Like a concentration camp, like a nuclear concentration camp. In a sense, yes. That's kind of basically what happened to a large degree. I mean, it did eventually get better. They did eventually develop better tools and so on. But like, there was a period where just like you didn't survive three months of working at the facility. Like that they and this did not happen to America. Like we did not do this to anyone in America. Right. You know, sure, there were some accidents here or there, but like we didn't like slaughter,

you know, people like this for nuclear research. That's just not what happened. No, no. We did some sick shit, though. We did some sick shit. Have you seen the, we were just talking about this yesterday or two days ago when Bill Clinton unsealed all of the classified projects that were happening in Massachusetts with the disabled hospital for disabled children in Massachusetts. I had heard about this one. Where they were injecting children, disabled children with plutonium. Oh, yeah, yeah. I have heard a lot of stuff like this.

Do you know about that one guy who took the largest plutonium dose in history? No. This is a surprisingly funny one. So there was a guy, I forgot where he was from. It might have been Massachusetts. And he was dying of terminal cancer. So they gave him the largest single dose of plutonium any human has ever received.

Turns out he didn't have fatal cancer. It was just a misdiagnosis. And he just survived. He lived the rest of his long life with just absolutely insane levels of plutonium in his blood. And he just survived. That's fucking crazy. It's really funny.

It's like a famous... Can you find this guy? Yeah, yeah. Is it Stevens, Albert Stevens? That sounds correct. I don't know of the top of my head, but that's... What year was this? Yeah.

Albert Stevens. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. This is the guy. Known as C-A-L-1. Yeah, 131 kilo-Kyckels of plutonium, which is just an unbelievable dose. Like, it's fucking over if you're exposed to something like that. Plutoni, it says plutonium remained present in his body for the remainder of his life, the amount of decay, the amount decaying slowly through radioactive decay and biological elimination.

Stevens died of heart of heart disease 20 years later having accumulated an effective radiation dose of 64 SV over that period. Which is insane. He lived to 79. Yeah. What a guy. Absolute gigacad. Oh, that's freaking nuts, dude. Also, the nuclear soldiers, have you seen those guys?

They got irradiated from the tests. Yeah, well, they put them on the battleships, and they made them all stand on the deck of the battleship looking at the nuclear blasts. Jesus. God. And it was like some of the most horrific shit ever where these people, sometimes their eyes were like melted out of their heads. A lot of them were, you know, got really debilitating diseases and cancers.

They were rendered, you know, sterilized. They couldn't have kids after that. like it's insane. I am very glad that we do not do stuff like this. We did a lot of fucked up testing on human beings during the Cold War. We really did, didn't we? You know, it's, you know, it's... We're not great.

We're not, we're pretty good. You know, we're not perfect. But again, like, not to be like, you know, who did the least bad human experimentation, but have you seen the Soviets? Like, oh, my God. Like, it's very bad other things America has done. And I'm so glad we don't do that anymore. But also, like, oh, my God.

these Soviets. Oh, my God. A lot of people think that the Department of Energy stuff is really connected to the whole UFO, UAP topic. God, yeah, people love talking about that, don't they? I actually had a dude on the podcast who was in charge of the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, I believe, which is one of the sites that carries the Minutemen, has the Minutemen missiles housed underground in the bunkers.

And this was one of the officers that had his fingers on the nuclear codes. like so this guy had all the codes and he would get the signal from the football whoever had the football to like do the launch codes or whatever and he would turn the keys and do all that stuff and you know these people traditionally have to be very psychologically at the top of their game they have to be sharp they can't they have to undergo like routine psychological evaluations because you know if they fuck up or they come in on a bender one day or are going through marital issues and they decide you know to end it all it wouldn't be good anyways so there was an event that happened where there was like this big crazy orb that showed up above the Air Force base. And like the security guy at the gate called down like, yo, boss, there's things here. We don't know what's going on. And what happened was it shut down systematically one by one every single nuclear silo that they had at the base. And he had never seen that happen in his entire career. And the following day, Boeing contractors showed up and tried to get them to sign NDAs.

And this didn't just happen in Montana. This happened in multiple Air Force bases with nuclear weapons, not just in the U.S., but in Russia. So, you know, there's a huge correlation between, like, sightings of unidentified flying objects and nuclear blasts, nuclear tests, and at nuclear sites, which is very interesting. You know, it's not nothing. You have lots of accounts of very highly qualified military people saying this. I mean, he's probably lying. Let's be honest. All of them, though?

You think they're all lying? It's not that many people, you know? Like if you ask me, you know how many schizophrenics that are in the United States of America? It's about 1% of the population. So we have about about 3 million people who can make up stuff. Yeah, but you think the guy,

you don't think the guy that was in charge of the nuclear weapons had just handled on the nuclear keys with a schizophrenic? It doesn't have to be schizophrenic, right? I don't know this guy. He's probably a great guy, right? He might have really seen something, right?

Like, I'm not saying he didn't see something. Like, I was recent error 51, actually, went there to wave at the security guards. It was good fun. Yeah, it was real fun. You can just drive there through the closest place you're allowed to go. and there's like a little sign there,

it was like a very ominous surveillance van pointed directly at you from a nearby hill and you can just kind of wave to them. So I did that. And, you know, on the way back, I saw UFO. So there was like full on glowing orb in the sky, you know, crazy, like 3D glowing orb like behind the horizon. It was the moon.

But it was like so weird looking. It was the weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life. It did not look like the moon. Like it truly did not look like the moon. Like I can't describe. how much it did not look like the moon. Like, I could have sworn to you. Like, I would have sworn to you

is not the moon. Different color, different shape, different size. It was, like, 3D. It was, like, much closer than the moon is supposed to be. But, nah, this is just a rare atmospheric phenomena where just makes the moon look much bigger than it actually is.

Like, you know, just looked it up afterwards. It's just a thing that happens. Right. So this is an example of just, like, weird things happen in the sky. Have you seen sprites before? Look up, look up, like, atmospheric sprites and, like, find a good picture of them.

This is a great one. Like, weird shit happens in the atmosphere. Of course. All the time. It is crazy how many, like, normal phenomena. I knew an Air Force pilot ones who encountered St. Elmo's Firewall. Yeah, like, look at these things. Oh, yeah.

Like, look at these things. Like, imagine you see the shit. Oh, yeah. There's all kinds of crazy shit. Like, what the hell is this, right? Yeah, there's also earthquake lights. Here heard of those. Oh, yeah.

Those are crazy. I heard of those, too. Crazy. Like, like, ball lightning, you know, St. Elmo's Fire. Yeah. Like stuff. Like, I remember, like, an Air Force pilot I met before. He told me that when he was flying a mission once,

he encountered St. Elmo's fire, which is a real phenomena, where it's basically like a creeping green flame, kind of that slowly crept over his airplane, and then in through his windshield and gave him an electric shock. And this is a real phenomenon. St. Elmo's Fire. Yes, this is a real phenomenon. It's basically plasma.

And we have accounts from this going back to, like, ships from, like, the 15th century. Plasma is weird. Plasma is so weird, man. So, like, I'm not saying this guy didn't see something, right? I'm totally believe he can. he's seen like, I could have believed that there might have also been an electric fault around the same time, right? Even the lightning strike, you know, could cause an electric fault, right? But like, my problem with UFOs is not that there are weird things in the sky.

There are definitely weird things in the sky. My problem is aliens. They're not aliens. There are not aliens up there. Like, the chance of aliens being involved here is just like, let's be real here. I'm like, no, it's not that. If we're saying, like, there are strange atmospheric phenomena that could create EMPs, I'm open to that. That seems like something that could happen.

Like, lightning strikes can create in peace. What do you think about the testimony of those Navy pilots who reported seeing those Tick-Tac objects moving at insane speeds that defy physics and gravity? Like, again, I'm sure they saw something. But, like, one of the Tic-Tac videos is confirmed was there's a swan. And it was a what? A swan. A swan? Yes.

It was a swan over the water, and the automatic distance detection detected the distance wrong. And so if you get the distance wrong, it looked like it was moving insanely fast because it misjudged how close it was. there's a similar thing. Yeah, there's, well, there's definitely one, I don't know if this is the one I'm thinking of, but I think the GoFast video where it shows this thing moving across the water surface and it looks like it's moving at thousands of miles per hour. But one of the things that it doesn't explain is the parallax effect, right? So if you have a spy plane that's flying in one direction with a camera mounted at the bottom of it shooting, like let's just say, for example, a bird, right, flying. And the birds flying the opposite direction and you have the, you have the water and the waves of the ocean below that, you're getting the, This parallax effect making this thing look like it's moving at insane speeds that are defined physics.

That thing can certainly be explained away. But like a high level veteran Navy pilot who's been flying jet airplanes his whole life that explains this thing on his radar and visually, like... I believe he saw something. Yeah. I believe he saw something. Like there are many things that, again, there are weird things in our sky. I truly believe he saw something. Is it an aircraft or that is like piloted by a little green man?

No, it's not. What do you think it could have been? It could have been many things. You know, it could have been like electromagnetic interference. It could have just been like, you know, it could have been a software bug, like literally. Like, when I see the- He saw it with his eyes. He saw it visually.

There are many ways in which you can see things and then get it wrong. Like, there's a thing in criminology that eyewitness reports are actually extremely unreliable. Like, this is actually a really good rabbit hole to go down. Like, one of the first things I did when I got into debunking UFO videos is I just, like, read up on like, how reliable are eyewitness testimonies actually? Not reliable at all. Not at all, including very good people. Like, this is not an indictment of their character. No.

A big problem is... Human memory is very fallible. So the thing is, there's a problem where when you doubt people's eyewitness accounts, it sounds like you're doubting them as a person. And it's not what I'm saying. I'm sure this guy is a great guy. I'm sure he's trying to tell the truth. Right.

But, like, we have 100 years of criminal... Criminological research that just you cannot actually rely on eyewitness testimonies for, like, anything. Like, even, like, there was, like, a guy in a room who stabbed another guy, and you have 10 witnesses, like three of them are going to tell you there were two guys. Right. I understand what you're saying. You're totally right about that. That's a thing. But you have these pilots and their wizos who are in the cockpits with them corroborating their stories. And it's not just one group of people. There's multiple Navy pilots that are doing that are saying this. I agree. And how many Navy pilots are there? How often do they see a weird thing in the atmosphere?

How often do they happen to be correlated? And also another problem with witness testimony is contamination. If they both land and like, dude, did you see the X? immediately contaminated. The other person will now remember much more likely to have C-next. There is, again, I'm not trying to doubt these people. I'm sure they are great people who are really reporting accurately what they remember.

I do believe this. But just the amount of evidence you have to overcome to jump to anything more than like, there might have been a weird thing in the sky, is very large. It's like there are just many weird things in the sky. There are many weird things in the sky. Human memory is extremely fallible.

So if you say it to me, there are weird plasma effects in the atmosphere, 100%. Totally believe it. If they tell me, I saw a weird light that, you know, I don't know what it was. Totally believe them 100%. If someone tells me there's an alien intelligence with a spacecraft, I'm like, dude, what are you smoking? Like, how could you come to that conclusion? Like how what? I don't think these guys believe it was an A.

They're just saying what they saw. They saw something moving at insane speeds that they'd never seen before. and they were seeing it so often that they kept reporting it and nothing was happening. This makes perfect instance to me. They were blowing the whistle because it was a safety concern.

I believe them on this. I do. I think there are many things. Like, there are many things that could cause this, including like, for example, just like neurological effects. Like just sometimes, you know,

people, for example, pressure on your eyeballs can make you see things. You know, if there's different air pressure on your eyeballs, sometimes you see things. Like, there are just many things.

I'm not saying that nothing happened here. Obviously, also, some of those are really. aircraft. Like, obviously, you know, before the B2 and so on were revealed, people who talked about UFOs, obviously they were sitting stealth bombers. Yeah. Like, recently in D.C., we had the 250 anniversary kind of fly over, and they flew over with the, you know, the scary, you know, old stealth bombers. And dude, they look like UFOs. Like, I'm not going to lie to you. Those things really look like frying saucers, like really look like. You think it's possible that, like, private defense contractors or the Department of Energy has some sort of technical. that is not made available to the public yet?

They're keeping secret? Oh, absolutely. I just don't think it's that exciting. I think they have the F-35 too. You know what I mean? Like, I do think that obviously they have like better aircraft than it's currently publicly known. I'm certain they have better electronic warfare systems

that currently exist. Like obviously, also the microwave weapons are definitely real, like the Havana syndrome stuff. Right. I'm sure we have stuff like this. This is all based on current physics. It's a hunt, I am so certain that they're the military has weapons like this.

I know they're working out, they're laser weapons and all the kind of stuff, but it's not exotic physics. Well, why is it being made such a spectacle in Congress and there's these hearings with all these politicians? And you have James Clapper, of all people, sitting in the crowd. Well, there's a couple of reasons. I think one is that there are genuine scammers involved here. Like, one of the, like, whistleblowers who was a Air Force defense contractor, I forgot who it was. David Grush. maybe, I forget who it was,

was an owner of Skin Walker Ranch. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. So, like, this guy's obviously just a scammer. Like, he's genuinely just a scam artist, right? He's just doing this for attention, right? And there's a thing where just, like, people sometimes don't believe that smart or competent people could be taken in by scam artists. But, like, scam artists can, in fact, get really far. Like, if you're a good scam artist and you have a good gig going, you can actually get really far.

Yeah. And so, like, I think a lot of the recent waves are just because this guy, I don't know if it was that guy or someone else. But, you know, just like got in further than he good and he got a good media cycle. Yeah. And again, I do think there are weird things in the sky. Yeah. But also, the U.S. military is very large. There are a lot of people in the U.S. military.

Is it like so hard to believe that a couple people are a little bit on the weirder side or you're a little bit more on the scam artistry side? Like, it's not that hard to believe, right? So all of this to me, like, doesn't rise to like really hard to explain. This is all within normal for me. Like, this seems like, oh, yeah. Of course, we would see weird stuff in the sky. Of course, some people would say some crazy stuff. Of course.

If we were talking about actual alien intelligence, you know, or something of the sorts, it would be so infinitely more crazy what's happening right now. Like, first of all, explain to me exactly how an alien that, you know, so advanced that it can across the entire galaxy then crashes on our planet? Like, how the hell does that happen? Well, the alien thing, I don't think most people believe that they're extraterrestrial aliens. Oh, is there a new theory I haven't heard of yet? Yeah, there's a new theory. The new theory is that this could be some sort of advanced humans that are living on Earth.

The same way that me and you are sitting here talking on a podcast, talking about super intelligence, simultaneously there's a group of naked people running around in the rainforest right now that don't even speak any kind of language. So if you could say that, okay, if that's possible, maybe it's possible. Is it possible that there's people that are more advanced than us that live somewhere where we can't see them? under the oceans in Antarctica or something like that, that are sort of surveilling us or doing something like that? I don't think so because you would have a history of how they got there. You know what you mean?

A history of how they got there? Yes. Like to develop technology like this actually requires massive civilizations. Like developing very advanced, like if you want to, say you want to develop a new fighter plane, this actually takes literally millions of people cooperating to do this.

You can't hide literally millions of people in advanced industrial supply chain. There is, you can't make semiconductors. without millions and billions of people involved in the process. The world is actually very mapped. Like, there really aren't places that we don't... Except for the oceans.

Except for the oceans. But even there, we, like, do kind of know what's down there. Like, it's not really a surprise. We know more about the surface of Mars than we know about the oceans. So, like, people keep saying this, and I think this is, like, topographically correct, but, like, clearly not chemistry or biologically correct. Obviously, we know much more about, like, the chemistry, the biology, etc., of the ocean, than we do about Mars. We discover new life in our oceans almost every fucking day.

Absolutely. But like, let's be honest. Every time we discover a new life, it's like some fish. It's never like we discover some crazy new animal that we've never seen before. It's like there's another fish. Yeah. Like, you know, it's just like. There's some shit that we see down there that it's like, just take this video and tell people that you found this on Mars and people would be fucking blown away.

I mean, they would totally believe it. But the fact that they say is, oh, we found it on Earth in the ocean. It's like, ah, whatever. Who cares? I mean, I would be blown away if we found bacteria on Mars for what it's worth. And yes, there is crazy stuff down there, right? Like, what was the, like, long, spindly squid that had such a great video that I loved? There was this really great video of, like, this, like, horrifying squid thing just, like, floating by an oil rig recent, like, a couple of weeks.

Oh, really? What was that? Oh, you're talking about the elbow squid? Maybe. It was a giant elbow squid. That might have been the case. I've, like, like, like, like, marionette kind of, like, oh, yeah, this guy. Yeah, yeah, look at that thing, bro.

Look at this guy. How big is this thing? It's not that big. It's like 15 feet. That is freaky looking. That looks like an alien. Yeah, it's so good. Imagine if we saw this under the ice sheet of Europa.

I mean, hell yeah. You know? I mean, it'll go hard. But like, these things are cool, right? I remember reading once, I think I was reading a blog post at some point about like an undersea, like, welder. And we work a pitch black in this, you know, just like, like, welding pipes. And he said that like when you weld down there, every so often something will just bump into you and you just have to ignore it. Nothing you can do. It's just like there's

something down there. Who knows? Very funny. I don't know why, but like I always feel like I would love to do undersea welding. Have you seen the saturation divers? Oh yeah. She's got a breakaway. She's all alone. She's going. She's going. Oh no. Wrong goal, kiddo. It's chaos out there. Their stomachs don't have to be. Introducing Kulturalelkids Probiotics Plus electrolytes. Sugar-free, more hydrating than water alone from the number one pediatrician recommended brand. Youth soccer is never boring, but your kid's stomach should be. Culturaloreal probiotics, the science of a boring gut.

See website for details. That shit is nuts, dude. Those guys are like astronauts. It is. If I was, you know, if I had to do like a blue collar job, I think that's the job I would think. They live in this pod, hundreds of feet under the ocean. And because of the pressure, they have to stay there and live there.

They wake up, put on their giant dive suit, and then they descend to this little hatch in the ground. And they're underwater for like, for all day, like eight hours a day. They're underwater welding and doing repairs on pipelines and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Like, I'm just saying, I get it. The depths call. That would be a freaking pretty cool job.

Yeah. You see what I mean? Psychologically, though? I don't know if I could handle it. I might go crazy. Yeah, it might go crazy too, but like it seems like a cool-ass job. Like, and you just get paid so well. Like, they only go for like, you know, three-week stints and then make you know as much money for like half the rest of the year.

You think those guys would be safe from AI? Probably not. They're very dependent on overseas, you know, infrastructure to survive down there. But yeah, I don't know. Like, I think there's a lot of weird things in the world, absolutely. And I think it's very fair to ask questions, right? And to be like, what the hell's going on here? But in a sense, there's also a surprising amount that we do know about how

the world works and there's like a surprising amount of things that we can rule out there's some things we can't rule out like there are definitely are weird things that are going on in the world like i i don't disagree with this anyway but like stuff like civilizations like advanced technology is just like actually the kind of thing that is like kind of hard to hide it's like actually genuinely so like this is not the kind of thing i also remember talking to someone who he specialized in studying black projects so like top secret projects you talk to somebody who specialized in doing what? Studying.

Studying them. Yeah. So you're like an academic. This person was like an academic. Yeah, like a university. Okay. And he studied like black projects meaning top secret projects. Top secret projects where the funding is untraceable.

Untraceable, yes. And he said that all top secret projects have one thing in common. They suck. Why? Because it is such a nightmare to get anything done. You can't talk to anyone. talk to anyone, you can't coordinate, you can't like just like ask for the thing you need to do, you can't call up, you know, the experts of what's done, you need like massive amounts to bureaucracy

to do anything. Like the moment a project goes top secret, the project usually dies because it's just such a bureaucratic nightmare to get anything done. Interesting. If you want to see the most advanced technology in the world, it's actually it's startups because startups have the least constraints on building new technology. Top secret projects, are under so many constraints that slow them down. But they also have a limited funding. Look at all the crazy achievements, like the craziest inventions of our time,

like GPS, for example, created by DARPA. The Google search algorithm, the whole search engine of Google was funded by DARPA and the CIA. None of these were top secret projects though. But they were funded by military agencies. Oh, DARPA is one of the greatest scientific agencies in human history. DARPA specifically is unbelievable. DARPA is, but most of DARPA is completely public.

Like, you can just look up what DARPA funds. Like, there are top secret things they fund, but like most of the things are public, yeah. Most of them are public. Yep. Like, most of it's just- And it's based on sci-fi stuff. Oh, yeah.

They investigate a lot of sci-fi stuff and most of it doesn't work. Like, this is another thing. Just because DARPA gave a grant to something does not mean it works. Most of them don't work. DARPA's main function is to fund things that don't work. Right. Throwing shit the wall. Exactly.

That's the way shy science should be done. But just the problem is it's the motivation behind it is world domination. I mean, you know, whom's it among us, right? You know, it's like I understand. I think DARPA is a great example of funding a lot of really, really great science, including not necessarily, you know, like a lot of the science that DARPA funds is very positive to the world without military effects. So, you know, defense is always going to be one of the main motivators for scientific progress. That has always been the case. It's always going to be the case, right? Security is a core thing. It's an arms race. It always will be. You know, we always need enough security to keep ourselves protected and to protect our way of life. This is just how the world works. So, you know, if you don't have a military, you don't have a country. Right. It's that simple, right? So as much as I like to say sometimes is that if you have a lot of weapons, you never need to use them because anyone's going to mess with you. Right. If you have a little bit of weapons, you're definitely going to need to use them because someone will attack you.

So in this regard, I'm a big fan of America. We're having full military, military superiority. I think this is great. It means that no one can attack us. It means that we can have our wonderful way of life here and also, you know, hopefully defend our allies, you know, so they can have their wonderful ways of life. And but this does require continuing military superiority. Yeah.

And, you know, one of the things that's interesting on how that whole, the whole like military industrial complex starting in the Cold War with, companies like DARPA and all this funding for science, right? Like even going back to the Manhattan Project, right? Like the most incredible scientific achievements of all time that were funded by the U.S. government and that were under these big U.S. agencies. You know, for example, NASA, right?

Yep. Which Warner von Braun was like one of the head guys at NASA. Has been over the last, since probably the early 2000s, there's been this big push to move everything private out of the public sector into the private sector. And, you know, with NASA basically, and with Elon Musk and like the NASA AIM Center

and all these other companies taking all these contracts to launch satellites into space and, you know, with surveillance and all that, it's like it is crazy to see like one of the big shifts has been moving all this stuff private into the private sector where it's, Now it's immune from FOIA, right? For one thing, you can't, you can't FOIA those private contractors that are doing all this stuff.

And you've, you've created this insane competitive environment where, you know, shit's off the leash. And they're just running full speed ahead to do stuff. Yep. And you can't regulate a private company as well when the private company is paying the people that regulate it. Yep. I think this is a big problem. You want to hear my favorite example of this? What's that?

My favorite example is that generally the CIA and other foreign intelligence services like NSA and so on are not allowed to surveil American citizens. They're not allowed to collect data on us. They're not the FBI can, but like the CIA, for example, can't because they're foreign intelligence services. The FBI is domestic. They are foreign. Right.

But if a private company where so do happen to collect data on you and the CIA happen to buy that data, that's completely legal. Yeah. Insane. Like just... All the phone companies. Completely bypassing the point that we have these protections as American citizens, completely being bypassed, just terrible.

Like, truly not in the spirit of the Constitution. But I agree with you. There's this thing where, like, a lot of the, you know, greatest things America ever did were private, public cooperation. They were through institutions like NASA, DARPA, et cetera, through these wonderful, you know, state capacity, these credible institutions. Back in the day, it was. a very honorable thing to go work for the government. You know, our best and bright as minds

would very often go to serve in the government. This was a very normal thing to do. You know, our greatest scientists would love to go to NASA and, you know, DARPA and, you know, even serve in Congress and stuff like this in many instances. And there has been now this huge hollowing out now where if you're a young smart person, you know, you get gobbled up by, you know, Wall Street, you know, hedge funds or Silicon Valley, you know, tech companies depending on your type of autism. And I think this is a... a real shame in many ways where there's an interesting paradox that happens with governments where if your government is like kind of bad and it like fuck something up it's very normal to be upset

about this and like the government's abusing us it's bad we should defund it we should cripple it we should weaken it but then if you weaken it well now it's even less capable of doing good things so it does even worse things now you get even more upset about it so you want to cripple the government even more so you cripple the government even more and now of course the government is even more dysfunctional and does even less things. So there's like death spiral. I do think that America has been in this death spiral a little bit for a while, where our response to the government lacking capacity has been to take away more capacity.

So there's kind of this paradox here where if you want a just government to stay out of your business, you actually need a pretty competent government. Like you need a pretty strong government. And it's quite competent at the staff by good people that has enough resources that can make good decisions. 100%. Yeah. Like, here's a fun, terrifying fact. Have you ever heard of the word call time before in the context of politics?

No. So this is one of the craziest things I've learned from talking to politicians in the U.S. So I was talking to a previous member of Congress. Again, these are the people running your country, right? Like, we need our best and brightest, you know, working as hard as they can to lead our country well. He said that when he joined Congress, they gave him like a handbook of like how to run his office, like how should he expect. his day to be set up and stuff like this, right? You know.

And so, first terrifying fact, the amount of time per week that was set aside to read or learn new things was about 23 minutes. So then no time to read, no time to think. Already really bad. Like, obviously, we want our politicians to have time to think. Like, the fact that they don't have time to think is really bad. It's insane. Like, if I had 23 minutes to think per week, I would make bad choices too. J.D. Vance just did a podcast with Joe Rogan, and he was saying that he has no time to look at anything.

Yeah, I believe him. It's a tough job. He's like, oh, yeah, that's something I want to learn more about. But, you know, I have like maybe 10 minutes of free time a day. Yes. And this is true. So I think this is crazy, right? Like, this is so crazy that we let that our politicians are under so much time pressure and they're so crunched that they don't have time to think. Of course, they're going to make bad choices. Who is thinking? Yeah. Is anybody thinking? That's a good question, isn't it? That's a really good question. I think this is really at the heart of problem. When I go to D.C., one of the first things I really learned

after talking to many politicians and staffers is this, oh my God, everyone is miserable. Everyone is so overworked. Everyone is suffering so much. Everyone is being yelled at here, there, by their party, the other party, by the administration, by their concerts. Everyone is so stressed all the time.

Literally everyone I talked to in D.C. is so stressed. Of course they can't think well. I couldn't think well under these circumstances either. Right. And these people also aren't the best and brightest. That's another thing as well. No offense to them. But like, what super genius do you know that's like,

I want to be a congressman when I grow up? And I think that's really bad. Like this is a sign of a problem in our civilization. In a good civilization, it would be obvious that our best and brightest want to lead our country. This would be obvious. And it would be obvious to us that we want our best and brightest to lead our country. Like, what could be more important than for our best and brightest and our most moral and our most upstanding people to lead our country? What could be more important?

So there's this crazy situation, right, where, again, although our best and brightest are optimizing like, you know, advertisement to, you know, push eating disorders on teenage girls at, you know, meta or whatever, instead of, you know, leading our country. I think this is a huge problem. And there are many ways, you know, you can fix this. There are many things you can do. Like, Singapore is a pretty good example of a country that, like, has a lot of very competent civil servants. And they, yeah, like, I remember the first time I met people from the Singaporean government because I was running a startup. Just, you know, like an AI startup.

We weren't really well known yet. And we got an email from the Singaporean government of all people. And they were like, hello, we are the Singaporean government. We are trying to learn about AI and AI safety. We heard that you know a lot about this. Would it be fine if we came by and ask you a bunch of questions? and I'm like, sure, that seems like a very reasonable thing to do. So came in like three very reasonable, nice young people, took out their iPads.

Where did they come to see you at? I was in London at the time. You were in London. So they flew out some young civil servants, like in their 30s. They came out, they took out their iPads, took out their notes. And I like, hey, thank you so much for taking the time. They asked me a bunch of really detailed questions about the technology, about what regulation could be done, what would happen if we did this? What did I think about this?

Took notes about every single thing. They said, thank you so much. that was really helpful. It's going to take a bit of time, as you know, to create legislation. So, you know, probably won't see legislation might take us, you know, three to six months. I'm like, three to six months? Oh, my God. That's, like, they were apologetic about it.

Like, I was so sorry. Like, you probably won't hear back from us for like three to six months. I'm like, that's incredible. And so it's very interesting that, in a sense, it was very normal. And it's just, these were just young, competent people, you know, Oxford, you know, Cambridge, educated people that just work for the government. And so here's a couple, like, you know, I'm not an expert. on everything to Singapore, but there's a couple obvious things they do. One thing is, for example, they benchmark their public salaries by the private sector. So if you take a public sector job,

you make the same money as if you work to the tech company. Obviously a good thing to do. Obviously, we should pay the same amount. If you're a top talent, if you're like a top tier tech executive and you want to work for the government, we should pay the same money. Very reasonable thing to do. Another thing they, for example, do in Singapore is they have a program where if you're a young Singaporean and you are accepted into like a top 10 university in the world, like Oxford or something, they will pay for your whole thing. They'll pay for the whole education. They'll pay for your whole stay there. They'll pay for everything. And in return, afterwards, when you're done with your degree, you come back to Singapore and work for the government for five years. Super reasonable thing to do.

Like, just an incredibly reasonable thing to do. Just like have people get great education and then work for the government. Yeah. So that's why a lot of young people and like just young educated people work for the government in Singapore. It's just a very sensible thing to do. And that's a very sensible thing to do. why a lot of young people in the United States are very frustrated with the way it's going here. Absolutely. Again, this is the thing where it's like this death spiral, where we get frustrated, so no one wants to join the government. Because no one's smart joins the government, the government gets worse.

Because it's even worse, even less people want to join the government. And then you have this death spiral. And this is kind of, I think, to a large degree what we're seeing right now, is we're seeing this complete death spiral where no one wants to even help the government. They want to, like, harm the government, which I understand, right? Again, it's very easy to hate the government. But that just makes the problem even worse. We have to, in fact, engage with the government.

You know, young, smart people, you know, have to engage with the government. We have to try to make the government better. We have to find ways to make the government better. Like, what other options do we have? Like, this is the only way things are going to get better. Yeah, that's a very good. It sounds great, man. Like, it's very reasonable.

And it's just what we should be doing here. Yeah. Like, this is a message. I feel like that needs more of a signal. Like, we need to get this out to more people and help people understand this. And it's just like, how? Like, what are the steps to making this happen? And I feel like, I said this so many times already, it just feels like an insurmountable task.

Yeah. No, it does. And it is, in a sense, such a huge task. And it's so incremental. But you just have to start working on it. You have to start chipping away on it. We have a lot of smart people in this country. America has some of the smartest, hardest, hardest working people in the world.

If these people put their minds to this, I absolutely think that we can make progress on this problem. Like, there's no question in my mind to this. Of course we can make progress. And look, Singapore was a dirt poor, third world country tropical island off the coast of Malaysia like 70 years ago. And now they're one of the most developed, you know, first world, beautiful countries, no crime, no problems. Like best food in the world, sorry. I am a defender. Singapore is the best food in the world. What kind of food they got?

So Singapore has a tradition of like a hawker market, so kind of like street food. So you can go to these like crazy open air kind of things. We have like all these teeny stalls that are like, you know, staffed by like one Malaysian grandpa. And they'll like just put like some crazy thing on your plate that you don't even know what it's called. And it's just the most delicious thing you've ever eaten. And because it's a first world country, no food poisoning. Because you know, you do this in the third world country, it's sketch. But here you can get all the variety of, you know, Malay food, Indian.

Because like Singapore's was very diverse. So there's a lot of like Malay food, Indian food, you know, Western food. It's got a bit of Chinese food. It's got a, you kind of get everything. That's kind of where I like it. Like, look, yeah, exactly. There's like a classic like hawker market. You have all these little stalls.

It was so funny. The first time I went to a Singaporean hawker market, I sat down on one of those tables there. I remember it. I was like eating just like a, like some like slop of rice and like an undercooked piece of chicken. And it was. Undercooked? Yeah, it's undercooked. It was like really undercooked.

It's called Heinanese chicken rice. You can look it up. It's supposed to be undercooked. And it was the most delicious chicken dish I have ever eaten in my life. Bar none. Nothing else compares. It was unbelievable. It looks like absolute shit.

Wow. It's so bad. I get sick eating undercooked chicken. It was so good. First world country. I've never gotten sick in Singapore ever. I get food poisoning eating shit here all the time. Me too.

Me too. America is one of the countries that does still give me food poisoning. But yeah, it was so funny. I remember sitting down with my stupid rice dish, you know, like a paper plate, you know. And then there's a little Chinese lady and her daughter come by. And they ask like, oh, is this seat open? Also, they all speak English in Singapore, which is very nice on like other Asian countries. And they're like, oh, is a seat free?

And I'm like, oh, yeah. And they take off their bags, you know, their full bags, laptops and everything. Put them down and just leave. Just walk away to get food because there's no crime in Singapore. No petty theft. Jeez, that must have been like being in the twilight zone. It was actually crazy. I was like, I was so shocked that they did it at first.

And then I realized, oh, right, there's no petty theft here. You can just put your laptop, your MacBook on a public park bench and come back the next day and it'll still be there. That's so crazy. There's a thing where in the West we've come to believe that crime and cities are the same thing, is that if you have a large city, you must have crime. This is not true. You can go to an Asian country like Singapore or Japan. Japan. I've heard the same thing about Japan.

Yeah. Tokyo, like Tokyo, you can, 2 a.m., downtown Tokyo, dark alleys, you will see single young women walking alone home with no fear in the world. There is just, Tokyo is like the largest or, you know, maybe it's the third largest now, like metropolitan area in the whole world, like 35 million people, right? Incredibly dense, incredibly huge city. There's no crime. There's just no crime. And also no pollution. No, maybe that's the wrong word, no litter. No, it is so clean. It is so spotlessly clean. All the streets are clean. Everyone is polite, you know, everything is quiet in ways that other cities are not. Like people don't scream. People don't listen to music in public. Like you go on the subway,

Everyone is perfectly polite and quiet. Like, it's just everything is clean, orderly, and so on. Look, Japan has its problems. Like, it has its problems. I wouldn't want to live in Japan personally. Really? Yeah, because the economy is just disaster right now because they're aging so quickly. The population is aging extremely quickly and they're not handling it well.

That's the biggest problem, which is such a shame because Japan is such a wonderful country and wonderful people too, which is like a very, very lovely culture. They got a big problem with their wildlife, their seafood industry. They slaughter dolphins and shit. That is also a big problem. That is also like the whales. I don't even know why they do that. The yakuza is a big part of that. I think it's these days is much better in this regard.

The acuzza got much better. But like the whale thing is actually a very funny thing. I remember talking to my Japanese friends about this. And they're like they don't get it either because no one likes whale. It's considered like a very low class food actually, which is so weird. I thought it would be like a super high delicacy. No, it's considered like a low class food, like a bad food. Like it's like cheap bad food.

So I don't know what's up with the Japanese and whales. I don't know why they even bother. Very, very strange. But I really recommend... What they really don't like is they really don't like Americans imposing their values on them, especially after we drop two nukes on them. Fair enough, right? Like, you know, and, you know, I think the Japanese are a very civilized, nice people,

you know, very modern, very reasonable people. I think they have a lot of very nice values. I think a lot of beautiful, nice culture and so on. Again, they have their problems. They're like corporate culture, not good. Your corporate culture. Corporate culture in Japan is very toxic. very toxic.

Yeah, they have this thing where you're promoted basically only on seniority rather than performance. Oh, interesting. Which is just very toxic. So, like, I could never handle this, right? Like, I'm a startup America guy.

Like, young, ambitious, I want to get to the top, right? That would be almost impossible in Japan. There's a reason that Japan doesn't have startups, which I think is a huge problem. So, like, other countries do have their problems. I'm not saying many ways, but the reason I really recommend always to people to visit Tokyo or Singapore

is just as a westerner to experience what a large city is like that is completely clean and has no crime. And that this is just possible. Like, I had never thought that this was a thing you could do until I had been to these cities. And I was like, this is what I want in America. This is what I want. I want us to have, you know, nice, beautiful cities, you know,

with good food, you know, where we don't have to worry about crime where people are safe and happy. Like, this is just a thing we can do. Like, evidently so. Like, here's an example. of it having been done. So I think we can do this as well. And I think the bottlenecks of this is to a larger, again, government, you know,

just having better laws, better police enforcement, better, you know, municipal services, better, you know, stuff like this. Like, I think there's just a lot that can be done here. It's not that they have better technology than us. God, they don't. It's very funny. A lot of people think Japan is like some crazy future country where they'll be like in the future, but they're kind of stuck in the 90s.

Really? It's really, really funny. It's really, really funny. I really recommend visiting it if you haven't. There's not any interesting technology coming out of Japan. Should they're like? Yeah, but like not really. Like most of the really futuristic stuff comes from America or China.

Yeah, Taiwan, of course. I heard the semiconductors. The semiconductor companies in Taiwan are moving to America. Yeah, they just, they were creating Arizona, I think. They were starting to create factories and stuff like this. Big one in Arizona. Yeah, I remember that. That was also very interesting.

Someone told me that they, I forget who said this, but they were telling me that they believe that the Trump administration wants, or the U.S. government wants China to take Taiwan because that would force all the time, the semiconductor companies to move to the U.S. I have no idea. I sure hope that's not true. I would be extremely sad to see the horror that that war would be. Like, it's really hard to say how horrible that war would be and how many good people would die. Like, Taiwanese are such a lovely people. It doesn't seem like it's going to be a real war. It seems like it's going to be a soft takeover.

Like, it seems like the, well, there was one of the leaders, the opposition leader in Taiwan, was like meeting with Xi Jinping a couple weeks ago. And they're like working on some sort of diplomatic something or other. Look, if they can find a diplomatic agreement that is to the agreement of everyone involved, fantastic. Right. You know, it would be very, very sad to see the bloodshed that would happen if an actual war were to happen with Taiwan. because, oh my God, would it be bloody? Because it would be a siege. You know, it wouldn't just be like a, oh, you know, we have one battle or whatever.

It would be a siege on an island. And that would just be like, I mean, it's hard to say, the horrors. So I really hope it never comes to that. Taiwan is a very nice country. Hope that never comes to a pass. Yeah. Well, I mean, the problem with America, though, is that presidents can't get anything done domestically. The only shit that they can get done.

And this goes back to Carter, right? There's a famous Carter quote where he was like, getting ready to be sworn into his president. He asked somebody if they had any advice. I forget who it was exactly. Stephen Kinzer told me this on a podcast years ago. He was asking somebody for advice and he's like, don't waste your time with domestic politics. You're not going to get anything done. You want to get anything done. It's all international, foreign policy. And that's what we seem to be focused on, you know, since World War II. Interesting. Foreign policy. Can't get it. And that's why, you know, everything seems to be going to

shit here. Interesting. I don't know enough about how much of that is true. I do. think that domestic policy is very important. And I agree. So we've been talking about the last hour, right? It's just how much is left on the table here by us not having good domestic policy, by us not doing just the obvious, straightforward, reasonable things domestically, and not updating our systems and our institutions with the times as they change. I mean, in a sense, to get back to the problem of AI and superintelligence,

in a sense, that's also just an example of us not rising to the problem. to steward it responsibly. It's kind of the same kind of thing. You know, like imagine we had the current, you know, broken system we had now and, you know, nukes would be introduced right now. Right. Like, could you imagine? Like, that would be, that would be bad.

Mm-hmm. It seems like right now we're pretty much relying on like AI whistleblowers leaving companies to come, say, was like the guy who recently, he left Open AI and then they gave him this non-disclosure agreement to sign right after he left saying you can't say anything negative about our company or you forfeit all your shares and he said fuck it i'm going to let everyone know yeah that was daniel i know him and that blew up in their in their face when he did that which is like we need more people to do that that's doing the right thing i agree i mean i think it's even better to not build the death machine in the first place but if you currently find yourself working at the

death machine factory i highly recommend leaving have any have any of the employees from these companies ever reached out to you or like contacted you and like sort of most of them are coward so not really but i i know some of them like from various ways you know i you know mutual friend here mutual friend there but like it's hard to overstate how much most of the people work at these companies just like don't really give a shit really and they just don't really think you know it's not they're making lots of money they're making lots of money they're making lots of money responsibility exactly in a sense one of the great innovations of the 1980s and 1980s and 1990s was that sociopaths learned how to domesticate nerds.

That's hilarious. Yeah, it's where a lot of how these tech companies are run, they have these sociopathic managers and so on, create a little playgrounds for the autistic engineers, you know, where you can just, oh, look, you just make the number go up. Don't worry about what the number means for mental health of children, you know. We're going to pay you a lot of money and you get to solve all these cool math problems. It's kind of very infantilizing in a way, but a lot of these,

these engineers, fucking love it. Like, they fucking love just make a number go up. Like, I can't tell you what Lee enjoy these people have if they don't have to think about anything other than making a number go up. This is the happiest they are in the whole world. And sociopaths basically figured out that this is very useful, that if you could just get them to make a number go up, like, you know, user engagement or, you know, returns on investment or whatever, that this is just very profitable. Yeah. So a lot of these engineers who work on these things really just don't think about. anything. They don't think about the consequences of their actions. They don't think about what

these numbers really mean. They don't think about where this is going. It's kind of like, like that's the boss's problem. Like, you know, that's the big scary manager. He'll, he'll, he'll figure it out. It's not your problem. You're just, you just work here. Right. Jesus Christ, Connor. What are we going to do, bro? Well, the most important thing we need to do right now is to ban superintelligence. That's the most acute thing. Once we've solved that, then we need to get money out of politics. We need to have, you know, much more better liability and whistleblowing frameworks. We need to increase compensation for public servants so we get the best talent into there. We need to create just like a better view of the future. Like this nihilism

that exists in the world and especially in the West is so toxic. We're just like people don't even try to engage with things. They're just like, oh, it's all corrupts, all broken, can't do anything, which is, of course, it's self-fulfilling prophecy. So I think there's a lot of things to do. The most important thing that we need to do right now, unfortunately, as I say, is super intelligence. Like, I'm very sorry, but like, this is just very acute. Like, this can happen in one to two years, you know, contact your congressperson. ControlAI.org, we have tools to contact them right there. That's the most acute thing. And then we have many, many other problems to solve. But the important thing is that, like, we have solved hard problems before. I do think we can

reform the government. It's just going to take time. This is just a thing we can't do in one year, right? This is a thing that's going to take probably decades. But it's totally doable. Again, I think I said this earlier, is that my vision of a good world is in everything is fixed all at once. It's that things are getting better. We are making progress. That every year it's going to be a bit better that my children will be able to live with a more just and more functional U.S. government than we are currently living. And I think we can totally achieve that. I think that is this like very, very doable. We actually know quite a lot today. Like if you think back to the founding fathers, you know, how incredibly precedent they were about so many different things. You know, they got

some things wrong. Not going to lie, they got some things, you know, not quite right because they just didn't know. I think one thing, for example, they just underestimated was technology. You know, they just, they didn't see it coming. I mean, you know, you can't blame them, right? You know, 1700s can't blame them for not seeing the internet coming, right? How are they supposed to know? But that just means we need to innovate. You know, we need to think about how these things affect our governance. But compared to our founding fathers, we do actually now know a lot of things about how to build better states. We do actually have a lot of economics

and political theory and game theory. Like imagine, these people didn't have game theory. You know, they didn't have any of this. They were just making it up kind of on the fly just by thinking about it, right? We actually know a lot nowadays about how to build good countries, but how to build bureaucracies

about how to do justice, how to do legal codes and stuff like this. So I think we can do a lot. I think we can improve a lot. It's just going to take a lot of smart and hardworking people not giving up, if that makes sense. Mm-hmm. Totally, man. Very well said. Thanks again, man. Fascinating stuff. Where can people go to do more, contact you, learn more about all this stuff?

Most important, controlaI.org. Contact your lawmaker from there. There's also more information on there. If you want to do a little bit more than this, then potentially not just an AI, but you want to try to help make the world a better place, I help run a volunteer group actually called Torch Bearer. focus on humanist values inspired by the founding fathers and many others called you can go to torchbearer dot community where we dedicate at least two hours per week to try to make the world a better place to try to address these big problems so if that sounds interesting to you you can check that out um i have a very googlable name so you know you can find me um on various things all the internet just google my name cool man well thanks again um i'll make sure i link all that stuff below for folks is this your site torch bear that's us that is us we also have Patreon questions. Oh, we have Patreon questions. All right. We got a couple questions for Patreon.

But that's the end of the podcast. So thank you. Thank you. Fascinating stuff. That was very fun. Very fun. All right. Good night, folks. Do you wish you could just hit skip on the worst parts of your life? You know the same way you can skip an ad? I get it. I'm Siaia and I live in Ice Cove. I've made some questionable decisions that didn't end up the way I planned. And today, I'm still figuring it out. Somehow things usually get worse before they get better. Apparently, that's how I roll. So bundle up and come along for the bumpy ride. Stream a new episode of North of North Tuesdays on CBC Gem.