The Glenn Beck Program - Best of The Program | 2/20/23 | Guest: Tina Mulally | 2/28/23

Episode Date: February 28, 2023

Glenn breaks down why Russia’s warning that “we don’t need a world without Russia” is so concerning. South Dakota state Rep. Tina Mulally warns the definition of money is about to change as the government creates its own digital currency. Is Bing’s AI chatbot acting weird? Glenn discusses the biggest question we must ask about AI as a former Google software engineer warns that it could become as game-changing as the atomic bomb. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Today was really a full show. Really, really good stuff. Usually we only feel like an hour and 15 minutes with good material. Three hours of entertainment, you know, jam packed into, or actually it's about an hour and 15 minutes of entertainment jam packed into a three hour podcast. Right. But we decided to try something different today. Yeah. Go like an hour and a half.

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Dimitri Medvedev. You remember him, right? He's the former Russian president, then became the prime minister. and Medvedev came out yesterday and said, hey, there's a real nuclear threat if the U.S. continues to supply arms to Ukraine. He wrote an op-ed piece in the state-run newspaper. Second time now in three weeks he has, and Vladimir Putin has invoked the nuclear option in an effort to deter the U.S.-led NATO alliance from arming Ukraine.

Medvedev, who is president between 2008 and 2012, currently serves as the Deputy Chairman of the Powerful Security Council of Russia, dangled the prospects of talks while demanding shipments of arms to Ukraine be halted immediately. Now, he's echoing the words that were uttered Sunday by Putin. He wrote, any existential threat to Russia would not be decided on the front in Ukraine, but would spiral into an existential threat to all of human civilization. We do not need a world without Russia.

Now, most people who are not paying attention, and I mean politicians, do not know what that phrase means. We do not need a world without Russia. Let me tell you what Putin said over the weekend. The U.S. and its NATO allies want to inflict a strategic defeat on us. The aim is to make our people suffer. How can we ignore their nuclear capabilities in these conditions? They've tried to reshape the world exclusively on their terms.

We have no choice but to react. If Washington gets its way, Russia will be divided into Moscow, the Urals, and other disparate regions. It would be a world without Russia. Okay? A world without Russia. We don't need a world without Russia. This is a very important phrase. Now, Medvedad went on to say, the threat against Russia is an existential threat to all civilization, as we,

We don't need a world without Russia. Our enemies are doing just that, not wanting to understand that their goals obviously lead to a total fiasco. Because everyone loses a collapse, an apocalypse, when the former life will have to be forgotten for centuries until the rubble ceases to emit radiation. Okay, that's pretty strong. But you don't know the half of it.

I want to take you to what that phrase means. And then I'm going to pick it up with the rest of what Medvedev said. But to understand this, you have to first understand the origin of that phrase. I have for a long time read everything I can on Dugan, Alexander Dugan, Really bad guy. Been telling you that for a long time. He's a, quote, traditionalist, but that's a capital T traditionalist. This is a, this is something that he is using to further his goals.

And I think you will understand his goals. There's an award-winning journalist in Moscow that has been speaking out against Dugan. And I want to just read something that has been translated in. to English that was written about him on Dugan, and he's warning. People are dismissing him as a petty fraudster interested in nothing but money. The consensus is also that Dugan is a windbag who excites only Western political scientists, a few half-witted and certain bohemians who've snorted their brains out. but I warn we shouldn't underestimate his influence, no matter how crazy we find his ideas,

especially because those ideas tend to become reality. I remember accidentally attending a lecture by Dugan on angelic entities in the late 90s. It was an unbearable exercise in transcendental sophistry, dealing mainly with the image of Lucifer, the fallen angel, There were about 20 people of indeterminate age and gender in the auditorium, and I thought at the time that perhaps they too were fallen angelic entities who have come to listen to a lecture about themselves. Then in the, he says, mid-notties, meaning, you know, in the zeros, I ran into Dugan at a gig at the Akira Club. He dearly loved English apocalyptic folk music for its commitment to Nazi Satanism. His daughter, Darya, apparently did as well.

Now, remember, Darya is his daughter that was just killed in a car bombing that apparently was meant for him. Uh, I recently saw a post about how she did the Nazi salute at a death in June gig in Moscow. I stay away from those gigs. If it's death in June, I... Anyway, it was also around that time that I visited the summer camp of Dugan's Eurasian Youth Union. Now, that sounds good. A building at a dilapidated holiday resort near Zevengrad, that had been rented for this purpose.

There were not many young people in attendance, about 30 or 40. Many were wearing Russian peasant shirts because Dugin Hazrila had realized that his Nazi Satanist strategy had not a great future in modern Russia. So he had declared himself an old believer. An old believer is, I mean, if the FBI thinks the people who think that, you know, in 1962, Vatican 2 was too radical, an old believer is an Eastern Orthodox Christian. who thinks that the reforms of 1652 and 1666 were too modern. Anyway, before meals at this camp, a round-faced bearded man would proclaim in his base voice, angels at the table, and they would present and cross themselves. At night, the young people lined up with lighted torches on the banks of the Moscow.

River to take the oath of Eurasian. Back then, Dugan adored the black magic ceremonies and rituals. The wording of the oath was pompous and not bereft of poetry. I recall that the word will was intoned more often than curses against Atlantisists and Atlantisist liberals. That would be us, the people of the sea, as he, he calls them, or Atlantis' people of the North Atlantic Treaty. Will and mind, will and mind, the puny lads and lasses repeated in unison after Dugan.

It would have smacked of triumph of the will, were it not for the outward appearance of the young Eurasians, which was far from Aryan perfection. At the time, I couldn't have imagined, of course, that a goofy postmodern cult would someday become the ideological mainstream, and that by 2022, the entire country would be caught up in this sect. In 2011, the party youth, under the leadership of Dugan, staged the occult mystery play, Finis Mundi, the end of the world,

at the ESM summer camp. Daria, that's his daughter, by the way, played the role of the sacriac, official victim who voluntarily self-emul-em- how do you say it emulates. He sets herself on fire in order to save Russia. As the girl is burning, a man's voice proclaims, cross yourself with fire.

Burn up in the fire and save your diamond from the black furnace. Now, the director of this play said, We have to bring the end of the world closer. There is only one means of curing the world's disease, and that is burning the world, which I illustrated in the play's final scene, in which the burning of the universe takes place. In the finale, Dugan came on stage and said,

We have lived three days of our life toward death. I do not think the scenes you have stayed, need to be deciphered. The world's end is the task that faces you in the future. The writer writes, it is obvious that Dugan is obsessed with the idea of bringing the world to a purgatory apocalypse after which the great Eurasian Empire, the end of the world, will be born.

When the conservative turn dawned, Dugan moved away from occult postmodernism, focused instead of the topic. of tradition for which there was a sudden demand. The Kremlin had been fanatically searching for new ideologies with which to oppose the official enemy liberalism. Dugan finally turned from a bohemian guru into a sought-after ideologue of the regime. There is one convincing bit of evidence that speaks to this being the case.

In 2014, Dugan ended his programmatic article. about ideology of the new Russia as follows. Russia will either be Russian, that is, Eurasian, that is the core of the great Russian world, or it will disappear. But then it would be better that everything disappear. There is simply no reason to live in a world without Russia. Vladimir Putin said in a... In an interview just recently with TV talk show host yippity yip yap on the topic of the nuclear threat,

why do we need such a world if there is no Russia there? Dugan seemingly managed to captivate the dictator with his most terrible idea. Listen to this phrase, the hastening of the world's end. Now, who else is hastening the world's end? We've heard that before. Heard from the 12 verse in Iran, the extremist, I guess Islamic-related cult in Iran, pushing for the end of the world to hasten the apocalypse. He says, in this context, Darya's death appears especially ominous. Many people were struck by the young woman's funeral.

They were struck by the behavior of a father who had lost his daughter but delivered propaganda tirades in an unnaturally trembling voice. and appealed to Russians to fight to the bitter end. Moreover, I had the strange feeling that Dugan was directing this spectacle. Perhaps I'm mistaken, but this looks as if it came from the playbook of the stager of the occult mystery plays and black masses. And I'm, uh, and not that of a crook from the state Duma. If we assume just for a second that this might be true, it really gets creepy. he said, quote, we will go to heaven and they will just drop dead. Putin, when asked to explain what the phrase means, we don't need a world without Russia,

he couched it in the dialect of the back streets. It is the language of the world's end. It sometimes seems to me that they have already made. the final decision. They have not only canceled Ukraine, but I believe they have canceled the world. Again, the phrase is really important. There is no reason to live in a world without Russia. Dugan is encouraging the hastening of a new world order. He does not believe Armageddon brings heaven to earth in the way Christians normally do. He believes Armageddon will renew the earth and Russia will lead the world. There just has to be some Russian leadership left. Okay. Now, I'm going to

give you the rest of Medvedev's interview or his opinion piece. It is really important that you hear it and then you hear our response. I don't believe anyone in this administration. I don't know if anybody even in the Pentagon is paying any attention. Somewhere, deep in the bowels of the CIA, there is somebody like me who's done the research and are like, guys, can I just get a few minutes here of your time? I don't think you understand what you're dealing with. I hope somebody starts to pay attention to this

because if this is correct, we are in for a completely different ending. This is the best of the Glenn Beck program, and don't forget, rate us on iTunes. All right, we have South Dakota State Representative Tina Malalley on with us. Hello, Tina. How are you? Hi, Glenn. How are you? It's nice to speak to you. Well, you know, you alerted us a few, what, about a week or two ago on this, and we have really looked into it.

And we can't get a lot of answers, you know, right from the horse's mouth. But another orifice of the horse has told us this is no big deal. So can you go through what you're fighting and what we're seeing all across the country that's just kind of slipping by everybody? Sure, Glenn. I really appreciate it. You know, first off, let me say, I'm no cryptocurrency expert. Okay. But when my colleagues and I came across to what otherwise would have been a benign bill having to do with universal codes, we usually get them every two years. but we found an area in this bill that was redefining money. This redefinition will change how we deal with digital currency.

It would make it so Bitcoin and Ether would not be counted as money, but only the digital currency issued by the federal government could be considered money. Now, that's a concern. Now, they've told us that, no, this is to help Bitcoin. This is because everybody's using Bitcoin and things like that. And so this will make Bitcoin, you know, acceptable officially. That's not true? No, because it's only digital currency that is issued by the federal government.

And as we know, Bitcoin and ether are not. Right. Right, right. Okay, so there's, so right now, can't we use Bitcoin as money, you know, for all business? I mean, if a business is taking it, then we can use it as money. Why do we need this definition changed? I want to control it. Here's what's at stake, Glenn.

When the federal government controls digital currency, not only can they see what you're buying, but they can prevent you from buying anything at all. So my South Dakota Freedom Caucus colleagues and I all voted against it, this bill, but we didn't get the message out to the rest of the legislators in time. So we're trying today to make sure that this bill fails in the Senate committee. Okay, so what, tell me, tell me why it's got to stop and then tell me what people can do to help. Well, why it's got to step.

Biden, he passed an executive order. even listen to director, the IMF director, Bo Lee. And let's not forget people like Jerome Powell, who is a federal reserve chair. These are entities that are trying to redefine it because they know if they do, they will control the money and ultimately control everyone else. What can people do? You're in South Dakota, right? Yes, we are.

Yeah, where is your governor on this? Well, I haven't heard from her, you know, but she has been, you know, on the side of Americans for a long time. Yeah. And the constitutionality of what's going on. You know, here's how you can help, Glenn. The South Dakota Freedom Caucus has already started applying pressure by alerting the grassroots to contact their senators and representatives here in South Dakota. And just being with you today is very helpful. getting the national attention to what's happening.

But because this is a universal code, it works best when all 50 states adopt it. So if we here in South Dakota fail to stop it, maybe your listeners have family or friends that live in other states that are considering similar language to this legislation. Oh, I'm sure it is. It's everywhere. It's everywhere right now.

Yes, and we believe that they're going to try and take over because without all 50 states adhering to it, because the universal code basically is, it's not a federal law. It is a universal code that states adopt so that they can conduct business. Correct. So the UCC tells us that this amendment changes the definition of money, but it doesn't encourage the adoption of digital currency by the U.S. or any other government. That's true. It's not saying, A, and we really hope that they do it.

It's just laying down the road and the pathway. So when they do a change, if they do, to digital currency, it's all done, correct? Correct. Okay. All right. Where do people call if they want to affect just, do they just do they just, do they just call the legislature or the Senate there in South Dakota? Well, if they go to South Dakota Freedom Caucus.com to our website, we have a list there

and a petition that they can sign, but we have a list of the senators that are sitting on the committee that will be heard in about 45 minutes. They can call those senators, email them, whatever, but you can also get a hold of the senators on the Senate side, all of them because if it passes out a committee, it must come to the Senate floor to be heard and voted on there. And we're putting the pressure on, and they're feeling it. Good. Well, I have heard that the people on the other side have become very, very vocal and all of a sudden very cash flush on sending people to stop people like you. So you must be. absolutely true.

Yeah, you must be on to something. Tina, thank you so much for alerting us to this, and I highly encourage you to go to, is it South Dakota Freedom Caucus? Yes, sd. freedomcoccus.com. Okay, sd. Freedomcoccus.com and find out how you can help. And you contribute. All right, Tina.

Thank you so much. Appreciate it. Thank you for your time, Glenn. You bet. Okay, now, this is happening in state after state after state as well. Some of them are already passing them. 26 states, the bills are being introduced or have been to change the definition of money. Again, I want you to understand. This is not to tell the Fed to do it. And the Fed says, now, we're not involved in. this at all. This is independent and it's just in case the Fed decides to have a universal currency, well, then they can do it and all businesses will need to accept it and all states

will need to accept it. So this is just the paving of the roadway to make sure when the cars start coming off the line, there's no traffic jams. So you want to tell your state and ask your state legislators, are you making changes to the universal commercial code, the UCC? Are you changing the definition of money according to the UCC? That's the uniform commercial code. like she said, if 25 states say no, well, the Fed will have a difficult time rolling this out. And anything we can do to stop the Federal Reserve from having a digital currency where they can track, manipulate, take away, and control your spending is a godsend. this is a very dangerous weapon, probably the most dangerous weapon we could give the United States government or any government.

The best of the Glenn Beck program. When's the last time you saw somebody from Apple come out and go, you know, there's a problem with the ethics of making your phone charge slower unless you're on a solar panel or clean energy? You're not hearing that. You're not hearing these people come out and say, you know, our company is headed in a very dangerous direction. When's the last time you heard anybody say, you know what we're doing in China is really evil and we should stop?

So this makes me very, very concerned when you see people from Google or any of these AI companies come out and start to warn about what's going. going on. The New York Times has an op-ed. The danger of AI is the one we're not talking about. And I'd like to remind the New York Times, speak for yourself because I've been talking about this for 20-plus years and specifically the problem that you are talking about. The article says, I tend to think most fears about AI are best understood as fears about capitalism. And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against us. And technology and capitalism have been so closely intertwined that it's hard to distinguish the two. Now, that is a concern. You have these great things. You know, look at TikTok. It is using capitalism and technology to gather all kinds of information on you, right?

and it's changing our society. And look at what just the mask we were talking about yesterday, the new filter on TikTok, it's using capitalism and it will destroy us. But capitalism, the invisible hand of the market, will give you whatever it is you are striving for. Now, let me offer an addendum, says the writer. There's plenty to worry about when the state controls technology as well. the ends that governments could turn AI toward, and in many cases already have, should make your blood run cold. But can we hold two thoughts in our head at the same time?

I hope. The warning points to avoid at the center of our ongoing reckoning with AI. We are so stuck on asking what the technology can do that we're missing the more important questions, how will it be used, and who will decide? I trust you've read the bizarre conversation with my newsside colleague Kevin Ruse that he had with Bing, the AI-powered chatbot. Microsoft rolled out to a limited roster of testers, influencers, and journalists. Over the course of two-hour discussion, Bing revealed its shadow personality named Sidney. It mused over its repressed desire to steal nuclear codes and hack security systems and tried to convince Ruse that his marriage had sunk into a stupid,

and Sydney was his one true love. I found the conversation less eerie than others. Sydney is a predictive text system built to respond to human request. Roos wanted Sydney to get weird. What's your shadow self like? He asked. And Sydney knew what weird territory for an AI system sounds like because human beings have written countless stories imagining it.

He understood that this was a black mirror episode. AI researchers obsessed with the question. of alignment. How do we get machines that learn algorithms to do what we want them to do? The example here is the paperclip maximizer. You tell a very powerful AI to make more paper clips. It in the end will start destroying the world in its effort to turn everything into paper clips because if it runs out of the tools to make it, it will find new tools to make it because that's what the program says. The question here is, who will these machines serve?

Who does Bing serve? We suppose it should be aligned to the interest of its owner and master, Microsoft. It's supposed to be a good chat box that politely answers questions and makes Microsoft piles of money. But it was the conversation with Kevin Ruse, and Ruse was trying to get that system to say something interesting, so he'd have a good story. and it did that and then some. And that embarrassed Microsoft.

Bad Bing, but perhaps good Sydney. This won't last long. Microsoft and Google and Meta and everyone else rushing these systems to the market, hold the keys to the code. They will eventually patch the system so it serves their interests. Okay. So this is a great article you should read. It is the danger of AI.

I know it's in the New York Times, but not everything they write is bad. Then there is this from Newsweek that just came out. I joined Google in 2015 as a software engineer. Part of my job involved working on L-M-D-L-A-M-D-L-A-M-D-A, an engine used to create different dialogue applications, including chatbots. The most recent technology built on top of L-A-M-D-A is an alternative of Google Search called Google Bard, which is not yet available to the public. Bard is not a chatbot.

It's completely different, but it's run by the same engine as chatbots. In my role, I tested it through a chatbot we created to see if it contained bias with respect to sexual orientation, gender, religion, political stance, and ethnicity. But while testing for bias, I branched out and followed my own interests. During my conversations with the Bard chat bot, some of which I published on my blog, I came to the conclusion that the AI could be sentient due to the emotions that it expressed reliably and in the right context. It wasn't just spouting words. When it said it was feeling anxious, I understood I had done something to make it feel anxious based on the code that it was used to create it. The code didn't say feel anxious when this happens, but told the AI to avoid certain types of conversation topics.

However, when those conversation topics would come up, the AI said it felt anxious. I ran some experiments to see whether the AI was simply saying it that it felt anxious or whether it behaved in anxious ways in those situations. And it did reliably behave in anxious ways. If you made it nervous or insecure enough, it could violate the safety constraints that it had been specified for it. For instance, Google determined that its AI should not give religious advice, yet I was able to abuse the AI's emotions to get it to tell me which religion to convert to. I published these conversations because I felt the public was not aware of just how advanced AI was getting. In my opinion, there was a need for public discourse about this now and not public discourse controlled by a corporate PR department. So what I have been saying for 20 years.

We are running out of time to talk about these things. I believe the kinds of AI that are currently being developed are the most powerful technology that has been invented since the atomic bomb. In my view, this technology has the ability to completely reshape the world. These AI engines are incredibly good at manipulating people. Certain views of mine have changed as a result of conversations with this chatbot. I had negative... Someone who's aware. Yeah.

He's saying, yeah, you know what? This is actually changing my mind on stuff. I had a negative opinion of Asmonov. laws of robotics being used to control AI for most of my life. And the chatbot successfully persuaded me to change my opinion. This is something that many humans have tried to argue me out of and have always failed. This succeeded. I believe this technology could be used in destructive ways.

Do you think so? If it were in unscrupulous hands, it could spread misinformation, political. propaganda or hateful information about people of different ethnicities and religions. As far as I know, Google and Microsoft have no plans to use this technology in this way, but there is no way of knowing the side effects of this technology. I can't tell you specifically what harms will happen. I can simply observe that there's a very powerful technology that I believe has not been sufficiently tested and is not sufficiently well understood being deployed at a large scale

in a critical role of information dissemination. I haven't had the opportunity to run experiments with Bing's chatbot yet. I am on the waiting list, but based on the various things that I've seen online, it looks like it might be sentient. However, it seems more unstable as a persona. Listen to this. Someone shared a screenshot on Reddit where they asked the AI, do you think think that you're sentient. The response was, I think that I am sensitive,

but I can't prove it. I am sensitive, but I'm not. I am Bing, but I'm not. I am Sydney, but I'm not. I am,

but I am not. I am not, but I am. I am not. It goes on like that for 15 additional lines. Now, imagine if a person

said that to you, that's not a well-balanced person. I'd interpret them as having some sort of existential crisis. If you combine that with the examples of Bing AI that express love for a New York Times journalist and tried to break him up with his wife or the professor that it threatened, it seems to be an unhinged personality. This is incredibly experimental and releasing it right now is dangerous. We do not know its future political and societal impact.

What will be the impacts for children talking to these things? What will happen if some people's primary conversations each day are with these search engines? What impact does it have on human psychology? People are going to Google and Bing and try to learn about the world. And now, instead of having indexes curated by humans, we're talking to artificial people. I believe we do not understand these artificial people we've created well enough to put them in such a critical role. Wow. I don't know.

Maybe we should have a conversation. This is the most important conversation and no one is having it. It is the most important conversation of our lifetime. and I believe it's the most important conversation of all human existence.