TRASHFUTURE - The Last Days of Group Home Rome feat. Hesse Deni

Episode Date: September 29, 2026

Riley and Hussein are joined by Hesse Deni (substituting for Nova who will be returning on Friday) to look at the unravelling of “A.I. safety” as a largely posting based discipline. Let’s all update our priors together and gesture at the crux of the issue. Also, Riley brought the most Ohio item home from a wedding in same. Check out more from Hesse on Trouble in River City! Get more TF episodes each week by subscribing to our Patreon here! RILEY ALERT Check out No Gods, No Mayors here! HUSSEIN ALERT Check out 10k Posts here! MILO ALERT Check out Milo's tour dates here: https://www.miloedwards.co.uk/liveshows NATE ALERT Nate's band Second Homes has just released their debut album and you can stream it for free here! Trashfuture are: Riley (@raaleh), Milo (@Milo_Edwards), Hussein (@HKesvani), Nate (@inthesedeserts), and November (@postoctobrist)

Hey everybody. It's Riley. I'm back from traveling and Nova's traveling again. We are going to be all together again soon in the next couple of weeks. But in the intervening time, we have friend of the show, Hessa Denny, joining us to talk about, I guess, a fanfic community that got way out of control. Hello, Poppet. God damn it. Esa, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for. having me. I'm excited to talk about this fascinating community. If it can so be called. But before we get into that, though, there's something I feel I need to share with everybody,

meaning Hussein now and the listener community when hopefully we put this picture in the episode description. Maybe it's just the episode art, which is the most Ohio item I believe that has ever been made. If you could please navigate to the first

page of the notes, the image is right on top with zero context. Hesse, could you please describe to me the item on the left? Yeah, okay. So this is a shot glass. The shot glass itself, it's a bit of a complicated structure for a glass. There's a bottom part that's a little thicker.

You know, the main glass part is kind of sticking out of the top. And it's a black skull with kind of a gold shimmer to it. It has like an angry face. And on the top in yellow script, it says Ohio. The only thing that could make that better.

This is a canonical stupid product. Yeah. This is a product for the profoundly stupid. Yeah, is a dishwasher friendly? Do you want to replace some of your shot glasses in? It's dishwasher unfriendly. It bullies the other dishes in the dishwasher. The only thing that could make this thing better is if instead of being written in the

comic sans adjacent script, this sort of whimsical Ohio, if we could have gotten Ohio in like the Monster Energy Gothic font, that would have made it probably the greatest product ever made. I'm also laughing like imagining someone robbing a bank but wearing that as a mask like in some big black skull

that says Ohio on the forehead. Well that would be quite good right? Because then yeah because then you could sort of trick people and sort of like sort of knowing but yeah

oh yeah this guy from Ohio robbed this bank. Meanwhile what they don't know is actually you actually live in a little place called Chiswick in Northwestern West London.

Get on the fucking ground. Oh my God. It's the Ohio kid. Yeah, yeah. Give me all your pound stealing. It's like this man was clearly from Ohio. Leave me alone.

Just go back to Akron where you can't hurt anybody. I've never loved a throwaway product as much as this piece, this beautiful artifact of stupid culture. Yeah. I don't want to have to be like bullied into returning it by like, you know, people who wokely say the British Empire was bad for all of it's looting. They'd be like, oh, you, you, you went to America. you went to Ohio, the heartland of stupid culture, and you looted this skull shot class.

Yeah. And bottle opener shaped like a gun. You found it in a fraternity burial mound. And you dug it up. It was like, damn. Anyway, as much as I would like to spend one full hour, or rather like an hour and 10, edited down to an hour. You know, little peek behind the curtain. Talking about my Ohio skull shot class.

Instead, for the listeners at home, we did talk about it for an hour. 10, but we edited it down much further. Honestly, there was not a lot more meat than this. But look, look, I think it's probably unavoidable. If you have the interest that we have and the interest that many of our listeners have and an internet connection, it's been unavoidable this supreme community level crash out of the AI safety, less wrong, effective altruist constellation. and many of you may have read the allegations made in that AI safety is mainly a sex cult in Berkeley piece.

If you haven't, you can't because it's now been taken down. I'm not going to repeat all the conclusions made in the piece because not all of them are, let's say, legally airtight. But I think it's directionally correct that the AI safety people, such as the Machine Intelligence Research Institute, the various group homes like Lighthaven, the bloggers, the posters, the fanfic people are, well, let's just, let's get into it. but instead of reading a 107 page blog post, there's a smaller version in the Wall Street Journal. But first, I had both of you read the 107 page post, and I just want to say now, in front of everybody,

I'm sorry I did that to you, my actual friends. It's totally fine. I mean, you know, it's not the worst thing I've ever read for a podcast. I think that would go to Nathan Masry's book that he wrote. I don't know if you guys know who that is, but he started Garfield Eats. He's... We're well familiar. Yeah.

With, let's just say, I found that book very intergaging. Yeah, I was incredibly intergaged with that book. He talks about how he's, he wasn't actually gay. He just thought he was because he had a gin controlling his body, but... It's the best of us. Yeah. Honestly, how that's, that's more common than you think. Absolutely.

But yeah, this, this document, I will say there was a lot of stuff in it. I did skim. Some of it, I'm going to be honest, but let's just say it's an interesting read. Hussein, I ruined your day, I think. So I printed it out, and I enjoyed reading it on the tube, and I was shaking my head the entire time to let everyone know on the train that I disagreed with a lot of it. I disagreed with a lot of the people in there. I hope they took my message too hard.

Yeah, but instead of reading 107 page blog post, we're going to try synthesize it and not go insane. There is a smaller, a sort of smaller introversion, actually at the Wall Street Journal published, because all of a sudden, the entire mainstream media is getting very wise to the fact that these AI safety people, by which we mean rationalists, affective altruists, a lot of the test-greal people, that nexus of motherfuckers we've been talking about for years now, everybody seems to have woken up to the idea at once that these people are grifters at best and dangerous at worth. And not dangerous in the way that the AI they talk about is dangerous, which is dangerous to gorillions of theoretical future people, but dangerous to actual people. around them now. So this is from the Wall Street Journal. Inside Berkeley's tallest office building, a small community of artificial intelligence researchers at a co-working space called Constellation

has been mobilizing to save the world from apocalypse. They enjoy catered vegan meals and bring their laptops to couches with sweeping views of the San Francisco Bay. At dinners and happy hours, almost every month, they discuss the latest and scariest AI risk. So basically, yes, ghost storyhouse. Yeah. But ghost story house summer camp, but in an office building.

One of my friends works at Google, And I went to the Google headquarters, like in New York one time. And it really is like so funny. Like it all these tech places, they just, they're obsessed with putting like comfy couches everywhere. Like in front of windows like, oh, if you need to sleep, you can go to sleep at work at in one of these couch modules, you know. Because yeah, what we're doing is we're either saving the world with the burrito delivery app. And then that kind of stopped hitting when interest rates went up. And then it's, okay. Okay, well, now we're saving the world by building the God that will kill it everyone, but praying to it right so that it doesn't. The resignation this month, the journal goes on, of an anthropic researcher, Jacob Coxon, woke up the American public to the shocking notion that runaway AI development could end humanity. Again, can't.

But at Constellation, there are stalwarts of the AI safety community who spent more than a decade obsessing over it. And that's the thing, right? That's the language that I think is kind of what I'm going to pick out here is the word obsessing, because that's all they've ever done is obsessed about it. It goes on. They refined their arguments in Bay Area group houses and traded predictions at freewheeling conferences in Berkeley and the Bahamas.

They floated ideas like buying islands, stock buying iodine pills, or moving to electromagneticly shielded bunkers in the desert. At one 2020 event, the drink menu included a cocktail called Death with Dignity in reference to an essay arguing humanity was already doomed. So in effect, what they have done is they have talked and posted for a decade. Yeah. More than a decade. Like, there are less wrong posts from like, 2000.

2008, basically, like all these. And like, I also have a question, what do you think is in the cocktail death with dignity? Oh, God. I mean, I can't imagine anything you'd want to be drinking. Yeah. But what I know about the rationalist is that the whole method that they all derive from their fan fiction

that is like their Bible that we'll talk about in a bit is about taking an off-putting position and then acting very huffy and superior when someone objects. So I think it's going to be a lot of a terrible Dutch egg yolk lique cure called Bolz Advocate. And like celery juice and wheatgrass, you know. It's a high protein, not vegan, but it is vegetarian. Cocktail tastes like muddy grass.

And if you don't like it, you do not understand logic like me. Yeah. And I think also maybe there's like hand sanitizer in it as the alcohol. I do think that if it has to be vegan, I don't think it can be the egg liqueur. I think maybe it has to be just like vodka and weigh protein or something. I wouldn't be surprised if even if it's vegan, you've got a guy or two there who are like, actually plants can feel things too. And we just have to not eat anything except salt because it's the only thing that doesn't have

a soul. A couple of very thirsty fellows. Yeah. So-called Dumers, like those at Constellation, have also steered. the development of AI itself. They're among the earliest employees at Open AI and Anthropic, both of which were found on the principle of staving off AI dangers, and they've kept up their influence drawing some staffers and funding for their projects for a network aligned with effective altruism, including Sam Bankman Fried, who by the way bankrolled the vast majority of this,

along with before him, Peter Thiel, and of course a little bit of money from the guy who's everywhere, the evil forest gump Jeffrey Epstein. So the AI safety community's influence has been particularly strong. in Anthropic, which is now on the cost of a $2 trillion IPO. Employees there trade doomsday scenarios and how to prepare for them on a private Slack channel and have come to embrace a motto they stick on their laptops, things will never be chill again. But like if you have to believe that to work at Anthropic, how do you like look at the guy whose job is to like sell Claude to Deloitte? Yeah. It's like so insane. It's like I guess like it kind of actually aligns weirdly with the

effective altruist thing of like, okay, if you're an effective altruist, Step one is to get a job as Tom Wilkinson's character and Michael Clayton, where you're defending a weed killer in a big trial so you can get like $30 million a year. And then what you do is you donate all that money that you make to AI safety research. It's like, yeah, I'm just going to work for this AI company. It's probably best if I work there instead of someone else. And then I can donate like all my salary to a nonprofit that has like 50 people in common with this company. that is basically like writing schizophrenic articles about how to stop AI, you know?

Like, it's this weird dissonance in their thinking. You have to work so hard, I imagine, to ignore the guy whose job it is to sell Claude to Deloitte. And what is Deloitte always my talpa for corporate America? You have to work so hard to, like, avoid the guy whose job is to sell Claude to Deloitte because, like, he's engaged in the other side of the coin, which is the money making.

And you don't get that you're part of it. of the marketing. You're part of the marketing for because Deloitte's like, yeah, sure we want to use the death rate to build better consulting decks, I suppose. But the subculture, going back to the journal, the subculture organized around the fear that the AI could kill us all began to coalesce more than a decade

before the invention of the underlying technology that enabled it. And this is where we're getting into our actual meat of what we're talking about, about these rationalists, so they're called self-identified rationalists. Its intellectual leader is Eliezer Yudkowski discussed frequently on this show, which the article

describes as a Bay Area Autodidact who dropped out of middle school, who by the 2000s was blogging voluminously about cognitive biases and running an institute devoted to warning about the risks of a runaway AI. And the thing about Yud that this article doesn't say is that he doesn't know how to code. He doesn't understand computers. He doesn't understand rationalism. He doesn't understand science. Like it's really, you can tell that he dropped out of middle school, reading some of the articles on less wrong that he's written. You found a favorite. Yeah, yeah. So this is a great one from Lesserong. It's called Many Worlds One Best Guess.

And this is so, I'm just going to read some of it. Okay. If you, basically the gist of this article is that all the stuff that happens with like quantum particles, that stuff also happens with people. And like you can tell. Oh, that's cool. Yeah. Yeah.

That's interesting. Like super positions, waveforms, you know, like all that stuff that, you know, is basically like quantum particles are many things at once. All that stuff is true of every single human being in the world, which basically you can extrapolate to be like cause and effect actually does not exist. There is no such thing as determinism. You know what happened is he listened to Bittersweet Symphony and it was like, damn. It's true.

That's true about people. He understands stuff by analogy, I guess, and then just hugely oversells every single conclusion. Yeah, I'll just read a little bit of the beginning. If you look at many microscopic physical phenomena, a photon, an electron, a hydrogen atom, a laser, and a million other known experimental setups, it's possible to come up with simple laws that seem to govern all small things, so long as you don't ask about gravity. These laws govern the evolution of a highly abstract and mathematical object that I've been calling the amplitude distribution, but which is more widely referred to as the wave function.

And it's so funny to be like, actually, I have a different name for it, you know, this scientific thing that we've known about for like decades and decades. And this, I love this part. This is really like where the schizophrenia kicks in. Now there are gruesome questions about the proper generalization that covers all these tiny cases. Call an object grew if it appears before January 1st, 2020, and appears blue thereafter. If all emeralds examined so far have appeared green, is the proper generalization, emeralds are green or, emeralds are grew. I love that movie. Which ones are minions? What is he talking about? What does that mean? What literally what is he talking about? It's so insane. Here's the thing. And this is a little bit of a skeleton key into everything I think about these people and I've always thought. If you cannot explain yourself in terms that someone else can't understand, you are disguising the fact you have no a fucking idea what you're talking about. Yeah. Absolutely. The more you use insider jargon and baffle gab and things that you cannot then explain. If you say, well, something's unexplainable, you don't understand it, basically. If you cannot make clear what you mean, you don't get what

you're talking about. It's not saying that all things have to be simple. You can express something in complex terms, but you should be able to communicate what it means and not hide behind jargon. So the rest of this article goes into tracing the alignment between anthropic, less wrong, effective altruism, give well, Will McCaskill, all these people. Suffice to say that Eliezer Yudkowski is very close with everyone who matters, but there's a common thread in all of it, which is all of these things, whether it was effective altruism or rationalism and AI safety or whatever. It's all believes that you can reason from first principles using whatever thing you're good at to save the world. And usually this is rich guys.

I mean, in the 1980s, we got live aid out of it, right? A bunch of rock stars were like, we're going to write the song that saves Africa from like, you know, famine. The country of Africa. We're going to save it from famine. Look, how many people are here? Like, famine's over. Like, you know. It's so famine's over if you want it.

Do they know it's Christmas time at all? Yeah. Yeah. But at least with Live Aid, there was a concert that was played. Yeah. Under pressure, one of the best versions, you know. Freddie Mercury. Imagine Live Aid for like the 2020s.

But instead of, like, music, it's live podcasts. You have like a whole day of live podcasts. Yes. Oh, my God. Do they know it's blue to have? after all. Yeah, yeah. And like, there can be like a special like six hour episode of Joe Rogan that becomes like the under pressure of, of our time.

Yeah. Joe Rogan did kind of a short episode, but it was honestly, it was like the best, it was the best version of like him talking to, you know, they're raising money for Charlie Kirk. They're raising money to build a big Charlie Kirk statue. There's one experimental podcast episode that's like two AIs talking to each other and eventually, at some point it devolves to them each repeating to each other over and over. I'm sorry. I don't understand what you mean. And the other one, I'm sorry. I don't understand what you mean. And they're all like watching it like, oh my God, this is actually deep. This is incredible. This can also be in service to Africa, the country because I bet no one in Africa knows that it's Kirkmas time. Yes. Oh my

God. You go to Africa and you ask you ask about like, do they know about Charlie Kirk and they just sort of look at you with like a bemused confusion. They all have like the losing Super Bowl team like Super Bowl winners, they all have shirts that say like Charlie Kirk alive still. We're doing Live Aid 2026. It's a little late to announce it. We're going to build an 80-foot high Charlie Kirk statue in Orania, South Africa. Technically involves helping Africa the country. But that's the thing, right? Live Aid, a bunch of rich guys got together and we're like, maybe guitar music will save the world. And then something like Givewell was actually like hedge fund, like effective altruism started as hedge fund people getting together.

saying, well, what if we applied hedge fund methods to save the world? You do discounted cash flow analysis or whatever, like to saving lives. And that starts as mosquito nets, which is, well, and it's the genesis of that idea, or it's the popularization of this idea that is throughout this thing, like a sort of vein of terrible butter, which is anything that is not based on like, it's very rigid and narrow version of rationality. It's, it's an evolutionary glitch. It's a bias. It's like salience. well, why would you save your own kid and not sort of, you know, hit a button to distribute a million mosquito nets? It would actually, like, add more qualities to the world. And it's like, I don't know. That's not how humans are. It's not a virtue to be sort of off putting in strange. You might not understand the reasons for like why people behave certain ways. But Givewell was this. And like it's, I also love like, it opens up this thing of like using just like rationalism like the language of it. And like it's literally like it seems like rationalism. It seems like. is a fundamental misunderstanding of what like logic is as like a concept where it's like instead of

this being just like a language or something like a system that is used to explain ideas and like explore ideas. It's like, oh, this is actually just the correct. It's like looking at a language and being like actually everything in this language has a hidden message that only I understand. And the message is like, oh, we need to just get rid of hospices, you know, because like those people are already dead. Like, we're wasting money. We could give it to, you know, we could spend the money on mosquito nets instead of, you know. But the crazy thing is, at least we got some mosquito nets out of that.

Yeah, yeah, true. But then the thing is, like any super financialized project that contains the seeds of its own destruction, because it's so simple, it gets very easily, basically prompt injected. It gets very easily hacked. Because just like normal fucking finance capitalism, you can tell the bigger, crazier story with bigger numbers, that's so much more ethereal and hard to grab, but a 0.1% chance of an infinity gazillion negative outcome is way, way larger than, you know, being able to, even distributing mosquito nets. It's like, well, what about theoretical people living in a computer who don't know

their people? There's like potentially infinite of those, so we need to make sure that a rogue AI doesn't mess with them because we've told, we keep telling ourselves escalating stories and escalating stories and escalating stories. And the crazy thing is, right? The article says, you know, AI safety is mostly a sex cult based in Berkeley. And, you know, I'm not going to sort of get into that bit. But what I actually, having thought about this for a long time, I think it's actually like the finance element of this, of like effective altruism, gets consumed by AI safety by posting, blogging, influencing, telling bigger and crazier stories. It's tech industry Q&ONON. Yeah. Right? It's like so.

fascinating. I'm obsessed with like the examples in the document of like AI policy memos that are like, well, in 2035, AI is going to be able to download people's consciousnesses and resurrect them whenever it wants, like whether they want to be alive or not. And it's like, what are you talk? What the fuck are you talking about? That is so insane. Like, just like being like, oh, AI is going to, we're going to have a Dyson sphere in 2040. Like, what is going on? We're all going to play Dyson Sphere. Yeah.

Like, think about this. If you just replace AI with Hillary Clinton, it's exactly QAnon. Yeah. And it's why they always aligned on like, oh, the Democratic Party's eating babies. So what do you do? Go on Facebook and vote for Republicans. Anthropics is going to kill all humans. So we need to have more clothing optional parties, I guess.

Like, it's the so what is always disconnected from the mechanics of the thing you're talking about. It's like, oh, there's too many pedophile. in government, we better elect this white hat pedophile. Oh, there's Anthropics are going to kill all humans. Okay, well, we don't understand that we're the marketing department for Anthropic. We're going to go to a clothing optional beach.

And by the way, everyone has to go because it's also all your work colleagues and you being pressured to by your job. But the guy who sells Anthropic to Deloitte, he doesn't have to do that. Yeah. That guy just has a pretty normal life. He gets to go play squash with his, you know,

with the guy from Deloitte. You know, he's going to dinner, a nice dinner. Like, meanwhile, these other people are like, oh, what if we do like, we only eat celery for a year? And we, like, live in a small box. What if we only eat celery for a year? Also, all of you are my girlfriend now. Yeah. Wait, should we get Ted, who's the Deloitte sales up?

No, no, no, he's not important for this. Yeah, yeah. No, he will quit. He would quit if we made him do this. So we're not going to do that. Like, we need him. don't worry. We're on the made-up horse shit team. Yeah, yeah.

AI is risky. There's a lot of risks associated with it. We're living through a bunch of them. It's not just like data centers, poisoning communities. It's not just all of like digital art jobs going. It's even like, yeah, a lot of it works as like autonomous malware.

That's pretty bad. Yeah. But it's all understandable. None of it involves a kind of suddenly what they plug in one too many Vera Rubin GPUs. And then a digital god wakes up and starts hatching and pursuing its own plans independently of like parameters set by people. But the way that you do that, the way that you create a community around it is the same way that QAnon

created its community. Posting, posting, posting, posting, giving me money, give me money, give me money. It's, oh, it's so crazy. It's so, it's so extreme. Oh, the world's going to end? Post more. Follow me. Yeah. Get nude in some cases. Donate a $100 million to me when you're also donating $100 million to the company that, like, you can offset it, you know? And I work for both companies, so it's perfect, you know? I get a slice of both pies. It's really incredible. Like, some of these AI safety things, like, Miri, what is, what is it again? It's like... Machine Intelligence Research Institute. Yeah, yeah. Like, it really seems like they just, all they do is think of, like, sci-fi stories that could happen if the one in a quadrillion chance thing happens, an AI, which it

won't even, because there's not even any chance of it, really, is like, that AI gets smart enough to fix itself and become, like, actually smart. And it's like, yeah, the more we build it, the closer it gets to this. And it's not doing anything. It's just like making fanfic, basically. As you were saying that, and also as I was reading the document, one thing I kept coming back to was just like, this sort of reminds me of the cybernetic culture research unit, the CCRU, which was like, I don't know how to describe it. It was kind of like a collective at Warwick University in 1995 and like Mark Fisher was involved. Nick Land was involved. There were like, and there was a lot of like sci-fi that came out of that and so much of like

their thinking and so much of their writing. But then coming from like philosophy and social science backgrounds was also kind of anchored around this idea of like machine driven apocalypse and transhumanism and transcendent and like sort of machine transcendence and so on. And at that time, I don't know, like CCRU obviously like seems a lot cooler. And also they have, you know, they weren't receiving like tons of government money or funding or like, you know, the ability to sort of like shape societies. But like, I think in terms of just like, yeah, these are sort of guys who are overeducated sci-fi nerds whose job it seems to be to just like predict various. doomsday scenarios and their solutions to all of it are like, give me money so that I can

post, I can write about it on my blog, which I guess is like a great way to sort of get a gig, but like when you really think about it is very much, like, like, it's not just so they're getting money to like blog and post and like have these weird sex parties or whatever, but yeah, they're also getting the chance to reshape the entire global economy based on vibes, like bad vibes, I guess, like, which is fun. Yeah. It's like they, they're, they are overeducated, but like they're overeducated in like tech bullshit, you know? And in them being overeducated, it's like, oh, they, growing up, they were like,

you know, number one in their class, you know, very socially, probably maladjusted. It seems like a lot of these people, they're like, oh, this is actually like a gateway into a community that I can enter because I know about tech and all this stuff. But like, you see it with Yud as well. Like, he dropped out of middle school, you know, he's like a smart guy clearly, but he's an auto-didact, as it says. And so he just decided to like learn the things that say he's right and just ignore all the stuff that says that actually he might be wrong, you know? It's the same with all these guys. They're like, they learn about quantum physics, quantum mechanics, which is something that it takes like decades to learn, you know, to become an expert in that. And they're like, actually, I think I get it, you know. I read a few blog posts.

I read a paper on it, which, of course, you know, they can't understand a fucking paper on quantum mechanics, but they're like, actually, this means that quantum immortality is real. And if you get shot in the face with a shotgun, you'll survive. And, you know, your life will be hell. It's literally just like a sci-fi nerd brain thing. It's, it really reminds me of Om Shinrikio in a crazy way. You can sort of draw the distinction between the different kinds of nerd, right? There's the sort of nerd who just, is really into Star Wars, and then there's the nerd who's also a rocket scientist. These got conflated culturally, and these guys are the main beneficiaries of it. Yeah, you know, there's always been like a touch of that in the science world, you know, like Jack Parsons, the guy who basically invented rockets and jets. He was like, you know, doing, he was like trying to summon the Scarlet Woman with Alistair Crowley and shit. Like, you know, El Ron Hubbard, same exact.

thing. And, you know, it's, it's very funny, like, but these guys are like, they're really not, they're not inventing jets, you know, they're inventing a, like, a friend that they can talk to, that they're also like, I think my friend has ill intentions, the one that I invented. My imaginary friend is plotting my death. Yeah, yeah. But the article goes on to draw these numerous connections, like I say, between FTX, Dario, Yud, even Samma, and how the X risk used to be a global catastrophic risks like comet strikes and super volcanoes and pandemics and god, we suck if we prepared for those. Nuclear war was a huge one.

Like, people always talk about this guy, Claxton or whatever is. The guy who quit and was like, actually, like, there's a 10% chance that will all be dead based on this one metric, you know? And it's like, that metric was like, there's a, throughout the entire like 50s to the 1990s, that metric was like, there's a 50% chance that humanity won't be around in the next 10 years because of nuclear war. And so, like, looking at it from that perspective, it's like, that's actually not that big of a risk, honestly. Yeah, yeah, 10%. There's a 100% chance humanity won't be around in, what, like, three, 400 years? Keep taking oil out of the ground. Yeah. And the thing that these people

don't care about at all, they don't give a fuck about, is the larger chance that like, oh, this is just going to get rid of like all jobs. Like, no one's going to be able to have a job anymore because companies are just going to use AI to replace their, you know, white collar jobs and shit. Because you what? Because that's not a more fun story.

Yeah. That's not a cool power fantasy. Okay, so I'll go on. At this point, like some of the guys who started Givewell, these hedge funders started Givewell, started reading Yudkowski. And the thing that out that Eliezer Yudkowski's writing does, is it flatters a certain kind of person and suggests to them that maybe they are super powerful,

that they have inside knowledge, that they have access to a kind of magic, right, that the rest of the world doesn't, which is the magic of being like two standard deviations higher and intelligence than everyone else. And you know that because like you can do the Sherlock thing where he thinks really fast about a bunch of unrelated stuff. Yeah. And you have no friends also is another part of it. And I think like it's, I do agree with the document. I know you said we wouldn't mention this aspect of the document, but it does seem like it's targeted towards children being like, yeah. Yeah, it really is. You get that? I mean, there's a lot of, there's a lot of summer camps for teens and stuff. Oh, God. It's targeted towards children and also

adults who behave like children, another sort of look ahead of where we're going with this. So, by 2014, the Givewell founders who have been reading Yodkowski's writings with interest and skepticism for years, became persuaded by arguments about the importance of protecting the world from rogue AI. If the name of the game was to save human lives, preventing AI from wiping out humanity potentially had to be the most philanthropic bang for the buck of any cause. So screw the live aid concerts,

screw the mosquito nets, we are fully in on the imaginary friend and the imaginary frenemy beat, basically. Yeah. It says, even a 5% chance meant that Yudkowski and his fellow rationalists now had a new set of converts in the quantitatively obsessed EA community. In 2022, some Dumerous from Anthropic

and other AI labs flew to retreat on a remote Bahamian island of Eleuthera, 110 mile ribbon of land known for its pink sand beaches. They talked about AI risk and effective altruism between sessions of sunset yoga, cliff diving,

and a clothing optional run into the sea. That's the other thing, and that's something I've been hinting at, is that Yudkowski's whole gang, his whole coterie of insiders, of rationalist, essential altruist, whatever, insiders, who all think that they've perfected their priors.

They are Bayesian Superman. man. Weirdly, a huge amount of it is having sex with them or being sexual around them or having porous sexual boundaries. Having sexual boundaries apparently means that you're unoptimized or victim of cognitive bias, right? These are irrational thoughts that you're having. Yeah. I mean, the Wall Street Journal doesn't major on it quite like the other sort of much longer piece of writing we were reading before this does. But like, it's fucking everywhere. I mean, it's everywhere. I mean, the whole fucking, all of FTX was fucking polyamorous together. Yeah.

I love the Jacob, Jacob Coxon when someone, when Ed, Ed Zittron, the goat, was like, what is your relationship to the rationalists and effective altruists? And he basically said, like, I don't think I'm a rationalist because I don't like polyamory. And I like eating meat. And it's so funny. But he also like hedges that in a way where it's like, I think they have some really good ideas and they're geniuses and they're awesome. But also, like, I don't want to fuck.

Elias are Yudkowski. Well, it's like, everyone who's an AI Dumer seems to be polyamorous with each other and all believe in AI Doom when someone who isn't from the polykule espouses it. Yeah, yeah. So, this is Yudkowski and his friends holding the same kind of events

where they have the same kind of conversations where they say there's a, we've now updated our priors. There's a 1.1% chance that a trillion digital humans could all be towards. for eternity by a rogue AI. And then everyone's like, oh, wow, that's very...

Yeah. But then they get enough money that they begin to buy lovely hotels in the Bay Area. They begin to convert them into group homes. They start living together. They start living communally. They also, that this is when they meet Ayella, who features hugely in this much longer piece of writing that we talked about. The AI safety is mostly a sex called based in Berkeley, California.

I mean, before we sort of switched into that, the last line I want to read from the journal here, I think is really telling, which is one luncheon was advertised as open only to people who believe there was a 75% or greater chance of human extinction over the next hundred years. The invitation said, I hope the result of this will be reduced social censorship pressure against people who think the world is doomed. I hope everyone stops thinking we're ludicrous and wrong and pompous assholes. But I mentioned the AL stuff. The stuff that's not in the Wall Street Journal article is much more, I don't know, Lurid, if you want to use that word, where Aella is a autodidact sex researcher, former camgirl, sex worker. Again, I don't want to get too much into the specifics here because a lot of it is quite,

you know, let's say legally relevant, but who appears to be at the center of organizing the quite extreme sexual life of the AI safety community, making a big public deal of it, and it seems collecting women and using their sexual availability. as a currency to further the goals of the AI safety movement. For example, like two days before Jacob Coxon quit Anthropic, AElla posted, I will throw a reverse gang bang to anybody who quits a big lab and whistle blows on it. Two days before.

What is a reverse gang bang, dude? It's so funny. It's like many women, many, many ladies, one fella. Yeah, yeah. Do you think that's why he quit? Like, he was like, yo. Maybe. Honestly, it's, it's, the timing is awful convenient without getting in too much detail, right?

This seems to be, there's like a person here whose function is get women and create a sort of environment of extreme sexual openness. And then wealthy men pay to attend slutcon where your VIP ticket gets you access to places where you might expect to have sex with some of the women who are at slutcon because maybe they want to get more access to the industry or whatever. that seems quite suspect to me. Yeah. But they also, it's like, you know, they say we want to have our quote unquote sex parties where they practice, I would say consensual non-consent. I don't want to go to the gory details of it, but it's basically sexual assault simulation parties.

But it's one of those where the person doing it is your boss or the person who's your boss slash landlord. So like, it's very difficult to know where the simulation begins and ends, let's say. And there have also been like numerous allegations. made by women in these communities that, hey, this same coterie of men that's in charge of everything whose whole belief system seems to be that everyone who thinks any differently from me or has a boundary that I disagree with is wrong on like a theological level. Yeah, ontologically wrong. Have you read my blog about it? Yeah. That seems insanely dangerous. Yeah. I mean, obviously, it's crazy. And like, even the people who are like pointing out that it's

dangerous, they still talk in the same like AI research. or brain kind of way where it's very odd. Like, it's so nasty and like crazy. And like, if I was in a scene and people were like, oh, we're having like a rape simulation party this weekend, I would be like, okay, I don't, I don't know if I want to be around. Like, that doesn't sound fun at all to me. Yeah. But the person inviting you is your boss landlord. Yeah, exactly. Also, like, if, if your whole thing is, we are the only people because of our posts standing in the way we need millions of dollars hey by the way politicians including

unfortunately Bernie Sanders please invite us to write policy on things which they do by the way they are influential if their whole thing is we need to make sure that we are influencing things so we stop the extinction of humanity and then someone's like hey a lot of people really don't are hugely put off by the rape orgies they're like

we can't stop doing those because that's what we do and so I guess we're just going to have to accept that us continuing to do that is worth whatever higher percentage of a quintillion digital humans getting tortured forever by an AI, unlike the mosquito nets, which we're no longer

buying, by the way. And doesn't that sort of markedly sound very familiar to a certain form of formerly deceased international paedophile and as accomplices and associates? And the reason why, despite a lot of public knowledge about not only what was happening, but where it was

happening and who was attending and who was writing about it publicly, on blogs that it was sort of, you know, a blind eye was turned against and turned on it for so long. And, you know, and I think in this instance, it's very much, like, on the one hand, just being like, yeah, we've, we've seen this before and not even that, but it wasn't even that long ago, right? Like, it is still very much present, like, you know, the Epstein stuff. But it's also one of those examples of just like, well, the AI industries, like, mythologies have been so ingrained into like international consciousness in terms of like what it is and what it

ought to do and who the only people who will sort of be able to kind of not only usher it into its sort of existence, but to do so in a way that doesn't quote unquote like wipe out humanity and therefore everything else they do can just kind of be brushed off as like a bit of a quirk. And like, you know, I think the point of like people like Ayala, for example, although like I'm sure it's not just sort of exclusively Aella is for the people within that kind of culture, community cult, whatever you want to describe it as, a way of like reinforcing its logics, right? The one where it's sort of, you know, then the one that also kind of suggests that, like, there is an embodied principle to it as well. This isn't just like an intellectual

movement. This isn't one where we just kind of do for experiments, you know, part of the real, like how you sort of get people in, how you get them to stay in, but also how you get them to sort of like be willing to go further is to basically say that like, you know, your entire existence, your entire embodied existence is anchored in the logics of effective altruism and accelerationism and like all the sort of isms that are powering the sort of AI mythology right now. Yeah. And I also don't want to be like, you know, I'm like none of these women who are going to these parties are actually into this. I'm sure there are some that are like, you know, this is a fun, like this is a kink that I have, you know, not fun necessarily, but like this is something that

I'm fine with and I'm fine acting this out in a, I'm sure there's at least a few like, women who are like, yeah, absolutely. But I think it's a problem to be like, let's have a party about this. You know, let's, you know, if, let's make this the norm. Let's kind of, you know, everyone, we're going to, we're going to do this. And especially with the guys involved who are like, yeah, actually, this is my thing is that I like to have sex with women who don't want to be having sex with me, who like are actively, like, fighting it. And, It's like, that's a little bit, it's a little bit worrying. And like, if that really, like, if you are a guy and that is like your kink,

I would think that that would be a very private thing that you wouldn't want anyone to know about unless you really trusted them and were like, you know, dating them and understood that they, you know, but instead these people are like, they're so logic-brained that they're, they like logic their way into thinking, like, actually it's awesome that I think this, that I, this is my kink, it's actually like, there's like a rightness to it, which is in itself extremely worrying to be like, actually like this kind of power dynamic thing that I'm into is quite natural, you know? You'd almost have to be a quite extreme misogynist to think that.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, weird. But the crazier thing about it is that all of it did come from the Harry Potter fan fiction that we have referenced on this show obliquely before. Oh my God. Remember how I apologize to his saying it has that early on for making them read the much longer peave? Well, it's because it exposed them much more closely to the content of the Harry Potter fan fiction. Yeah, you go into all the Harry Potter shops in Central London and like no one's stocking

the print copy. I ask so many of them. Excuse me. Do you sell the dictionary, the smartest book in the world? I like to read it, you see. Yeah, we have this toothy-frucy monster energy instead. Yeah, yeah. I did read a little.

little bit of it. The Harry Potter fan fick and my god, dude. Yeah, it's good. It's legitimately good. I think is what you're about to say, right? Yeah. I'm actually like completely, it makes so many good points and I'm actually on their side after reading it. I'm like this version of Harry Potter where Harry Potter uses facts and logic to destroy his superiors. It really is like something that's someone who dropped out of middle school would write.

in a very fun way. But like I have it here right now in front of me. And I would just like to read some of the chapter titles. I'm sure they're fantastic. Okay, okay. We've got the first chapter, a day of very low probability. Chapter two, everything I believe is false. You know, chapter eight, positive bias.

Chapter 9, title redacted part one. Chapter 10, self-awareness part two. Chapter 13, asking the wrong questions. Chapter 20, Bez's theorem. Well, if you ask Yud, what he was doing, right, is he wanted to expound his way of thinking in a way that would appeal to a mass market of readers. And so he inserted his philosophy into this fan fiction.

You know, the mass market of readers that you would attract with the Harry Potter fan fiction who are on the internet, maybe are alone and looking for someone who makes them feel less alone because of the kind of person who reads Harry Potter fan fiction on the internet, maybe as a teenager in the mid-2000s, you know, it's almost as though, again, this is not for a mass audience, this is for getting a teen audience. Yeah. That, you know, and because a lot of the people who

are with him now are much younger, they're in their 20s, right? But they started following him as a teen and going to his summer camps as teens. And the Harry Potter fan fiction itself as well, the whole thrust of it, right, is that Harry, who has the actual magic, which is the method of rationality, uses it to be effortlessly correct when everybody else around him is stupid and wrong and doesn't have magic like he does. Adults especially. Yeah. You can't trust adults who don't believe in magic. Yeah. And even if it's like, oh, the Harry Potter came out a long time ago, you know, if you read it as a kid, then you're like, you're an adult now, basically. Even using that as a defense. Like, people who take Harry Potter seriously still are completely emotionally stunted. I feel like

where they're still strong people. Yeah, exactly. And like, you know, you've got like eight chapters titled the Stanford Prison Experiment in this book. There's a whole section of chapters called taboo tradeoffs, the prelude of which is called cheating, you know, the horns effect. There's so many like crazy hedonistic awareness. Like, it's so scary some of these titles. for these chapters. It's very funny. Like, I can't imagine taking this

completely seriously being like, wait, this is actually genius. This is actually goaded. The people that cults tend to go after are people who would read that

and where it would fill a huge gaping hole in them. Where things like, where you're trying to wonder maybe why am I not socially accepted, maybe I am some category of outcast. That's who joins cults because it creates a cut.

Because the thing that they get most from it, yet generally is community. in a sense of shared identity. And that's what this book is all about. It's about rationality as a shared identity, but it's specifically not about rationality as like epistemic humility

and truth seeking by finding where you are wrong. It's about using the language of rationality as a kind of cudgel to humiliate and demean people around you. So you can all prove that you're insiders together who have magic, as opposed to people who foolishly care

about their own children, because they're, you know, evolutionarily, biased or whatever. I've been turning over angle after angle to go into this, right? And well, the thing that keeps jumping back to me, I think, is at one of the summer camps, they do, called Please Don't Kill Us or PDKU, which is like a creator boot camp for, I guess, posters, like it's a poster's boot camp. One of the things in the application form is a hypothetical question, but whether or not you would have sex with a live or a dead cow. If you have to have sex

to the live cow or a dead cow, would you have to have sex with a live cow or a dead cow, why? And, you know, this is sort of pointed out already, that one of the things that this question filters for is people also have good boundaries. Yeah. But it's also a ridiculous hypothetical. And that leads me into my actual conclusion, which is it's this bizarre hypotheticals.

It's the power fantasies. It's the sexual life that's one step shy of doing the angry pirate, which is a bunch of 12-year-old school shooters all got Tom Hanks bigged into adults. And they have infiltrated the policy governing the thing that's supposed to solve all the problem. in the world and replace the economy.

And it took a long time for people to realize that that's the case. Yeah. The idea that there are children's camps like about this is so scary. It's like what is going. It's like if Anders Breivik was like, I'm going to make my own island camp for kids. For based kids. Yeah, yeah. Just think about it, right?

As we say, fanfic where a friendless smart kid outwits every authority figure is never wrong. A summer camp culture that they keep coming back to, whether that's like C-FAR, PDQ, or even now it grows up to be slut con, which is happening, it's happened last weekend. And then it's like grown men role-playing harems and constant rape jokes

as workplace banter with the, and like the hypothetical questions about having a sex with a dead cow to save the world and never actually doing anything or learning anything other than just posting, posting, the thing that's most important about the AI safety people, at least in this orbit,

is they don't understand computers. They don't understand computers at all. Yeah. I'm something of a computer understand. They don't understand computers. They do not understand that the security problems that they fantasize about, like, oh, well, the, a rogue agent, how it's achieved sentience, would be able to communicate itself out into the world by modulating the heat of the data center.

They don't understand that, like, the actual security problems that these things have are generally solvable. And that if you write a piece of software, that is an unsolvable security problem, you don't ship it. You've written bad software. Yeah. That's just it. And, like, like, the paper clipping thing.

which, you know, the AI sort of decides it's a paperclip maximizer and turns the world and the universe into paperclips to a series of Dyson spheres that then get themselves paperclipped. It's a fun joke. For that to happen, it requires a categorically different thing than a transformer. And they theorize about security without actually understanding it. But because they tell such a good story, at least to one another and hedge fund people, they've now been basically foisted upon all of us. So I've written this. I actually wrote this out because I want to say the whole thing. AI safety people do not understand computer.

as they actually exist. And as people actually use them, their understanding of the world and the demands that flow from it are pitched at the level that the computer is only understandable as a magical god, because to Eleazar Yudkowski, it actually is. Yeah. No, it's, it's, and like, it's the rule of God, like, as communicated by him. Like, he's like, I'm bringing the Ten Commandments down from the, from the mountaintop. And he is literally, it is so, like, just extrapolating to an insane degree of, like, computers used to only be able to play like snake, you know, and now they can do your homework for you. And he's like, so that means like in 10 years, they're going to be able to fucking manipulate matter.

Like a computer will be able to physically change a human being into a paperclip. Like, it's so stupid and just nakedly ridiculous and so like completely sci-fi. And anyone on earth would be able to recognize it as something. touch, except for them who are like, actually, like, this is like, you know, it's the same thing as like the Bible where that some, some of them, like everyone in Anthropic believes in this stuff. Some of them are like fundamentalists where they're like, no, this is literally true. And other ones are like, well, you know, this isn't literally true. But it's, it's, there's a grain of truth to it. And it's like both of those things are completely crazy to think. I feel like,

you know? I think like one way to sort of see it is like, Like, there is a difference between, like, theologians and evangelists. Yeah. They're often sort of, like, seen and kind of, like, perceived in the same way by people who have no interest in either. So, like, if you're a theologian, like, you know, there is a very sort of specific,

depending on what type of, like, practice or discipline you come from, there are, like, some degrees, even kind of, like, sciences in which, like, you study scripture and text. Like, I can only sort of speak for, like, Islamic studies. But, like, you know, when you are doing, like, a proper, like, hadif science, like, the science of kind of, like, Quranic studies and stuff. Like, there is, like, a method.

in a sort of like system in which you have to like approach a text before you can even kind of make any judgments. And there are lots of like working theologians like within theology departments both in secular and in religious institutions who spend their entire lives like dissecting texts. And they will sort of say that like I have no right to sort of make a judgment as to what this text infers or what it suggests, let alone sort of interpret the word of God. All I can sort of say, all I can do is sort of like contextualize part of it. And they'll like spend their entire lives doing that. And then you all sort of have like evangelists who like you kind of just see hanging out in streets, you know, and they sort of like draw on some of the work of the theologians potentially, but they massively misinterpret it or they sort of like use it to kind of fulfill their own ends because their objectives are sort of like, even though they kind of appear to be similar, their objectives are broadly different in terms of like what they are actually preaching and so for the evangelist is very much about like reaffirming the doomsday scenario, reaffiring the doom or doom or doomerism, the sort of like preparation, preparation, preparation, and in order to do that, like, you should join my side. in order for, and you know, there is like spiritual fulfillment for doing so, right?

That's a very sort of simplistic way of kind of like dissecting the two. And I'm not sort of saying, but like it maps on perfectly to like what's going on here. But if we think about like the AI community as like, you know, having this distinction, these guys like, you know, your Uriela's, your Eukowski's, even the sort of like heads of the sort of AI, like open AI and anthropic, like they should be seen as evangelists. They should be seen it, but they are presenting and but like suddenly some of them are positing themselves as theologians. And they're doing so to a mass audience that cannot really tell the difference between the two.

And it's also like a situation where they know nothing about computers. They know nothing about the computer science. A lot of them don't know how to like do very basic coding, let alone anything else. But that doesn't actually massive because what they kind of recognize is that the story is more important. And the story is the thing that is like making the shifts. The story is the thing that is like making Western governments kind of capitulate to them, making AI ministers kind of just repeat what the evangelists are telling them. and no one really being able to sort of be like,

hey, that's, that's kind of bullshit and also, like, doesn't really make any sense. And so, like, they kind of, you know, they do, they sort of play off each other. And I do wonder whether, like, the tech guys who actually do know how to code are kind of, like, benefiting from the evangelists in being able to sort of just, like,

have license to do what they want and also to sort of, like, ascertain, like, more power in doing so. Yeah. I'll tell you who it benefits. It benefits the guy who's not coming to the CNC orgies. The guy with normal life, whose job is to go sell Claude to fucking Deloitte. Because he sells more Claude to Deloitte.

Because Deloitte wants a death ray. Yeah. No one at Deloids fucking, let me tell you that much. Yeah. It's not DeSalt, you know. It's not Lockheed Martin, a famous getting dick down company. Absolutely, girl. Also, like, you're so right, Hussein.

And, like, the evangelism they're doing is, like, it's Jehovah's Witnesses. You know, it's like the end is coming. There's nothing we can do. There is literally, there is absolutely nothing we can do, except you can, perhaps if you have the chops, you can become part of the elect, of the select few, which, you know, gets to fuck me after the world ends, you know, which gets to have my children, because obviously me,

Eliezer Yodkowski, well, we all know, we've seen my writings. We know that I'm actually like the peak of the world. and I need to sire children. Like, that's the most important thing. They're all obsessed with having, like, having like a Genghis Khan amount of children. Like, all of these tech people, it's so odd. One official, this is going back to actually the Wall Street Journal,

I pulled this paragraph down to here. The FTX Foundation, Inri, AI Extinction Risk, once exchanged a memo with an associate advocating for the purchase of the Pacific Island Nation of Nauru, according to a 2023 bankruptcy lawsuit. The goal was to construct a bunker slash shell, that would be used for some event where 50% to 99.99% of people die. The surviving effective altruists were to build a lab for engineering the

generation, next generation of humans. And again, these are different groups. They're different but highly related groups of people. And the fantasies are always the same. It's like, because it's pat to say that your apocalyptic fantasy is really a power fantasy. And that's a power fantasy about being inside, about not going outside. Yeah. Oh, that's such a good point.

Yeah. It's a power fantasy about like blogging a fan fiction from inside was actually a bunker. And girls are allowed, but I'm the boss. Yeah. This, this, I have an excerpt from the Harry Potter thing that I just found just skimming it just now in the chapter, taboo tradeoffs. But basically, Harry's like, no, we, it's more simple and rational to have men be in charge of everything.

Like, it's, that's actually like, it's, it makes so much. more sense, you know, like, than the alternative, which is just like a complication, you know, it's a needless complication that brings variables in, you know, whereas if men are in charge of everything, it's completely, that's less variables, which, you know, Occam's Razor. He's obsessed with Occam's Razor, and he doesn't understand what it means, really. He's like, like, Akams Razor means that human beings are quantum. Like, we, they can get entangled. you know what we got to do. We got to give,

I think I bought the perfect shot glass for Elyzer Yudkowski. Yeah, oh my God. Could you imagine? He would love that thing. You'd love it. You'd be like, this is the perfect receptacle

from which to enjoy my rationally derived cocktail of Windex and celery juice. So, that's the thing, right? I've invented a boys rule girls' rule from first principles. All of my first principles thinking is better than yours.

By the way, I get to do the angry pirate. it. My friends and I are paid millions of dollars to all live in a big sleepover house forever together to compare the lurid what ifs and scary ghost stories. They're all 12 year old boys. They're 12. This is the everybody's 12 thesis. It's just, that's how to understand them. They're 12. They're just socially maladjusted evil 12 year old boys, but that's who they are. AI safety may be a sex cult in Berkeley. I'm not casting to a judgment one way or the other. But what it definitely is, is a very, very lucrative. grift for intimacy, money, whatever, status, importance, access, being run out of a permanent

summer camp for the world's worst fedora men who've ever lived. And the other thing, the last thing I want to come into is their defense against all of this, right? If rationality is their sword, the neurodivergence is their shield. Which is they say, well, we're neurodivergent. Because, so all of our ways that you might think of is odd, you're actually discriminating against us. You don't get it because you actually don't have the audience. autism superpower. But what I think it's like, okay, you may be neurodivergent. And maybe a lot of people are at these events. But they're also assholes. And there are loads of neurodivergent people who are not assholes. Yeah. I mean, even fucking, like, Aaron Sorkin under, like in the social

network is like, oh, like, yeah, Mark Zuckerberg is neurodivergent, but he's also a piece of shit, kind of, you know, he's also like, it doesn't, like, one thing does not absolve you of the other thing, you know? Also, a lot of nerd divergent people probably don't have the same view of logic as in

Harry Potter fanfic, right? Where truth seeking is about like defending a point of view you made up and belittling everybody who doesn't agree with you rather than truth seeking being like epistemically humble and trying to find out what you don't know. You know, less wrong is ironically often quite wrong.

There's difference between autistic and arrogant. And for them, autism is, yeah, it's a shield against criticism. But like anything, like the things that are actually like autistic traits, like literal mindiness, difficulty reading, social cues, intense special interests, a love of plain foods, right? None of that predicts or requires treating everything you think as gospel and anything someone else thinks as, you know, laughable at best. And if they're uncomfortable, it's just a data point about their inferiority,

relative to you. That is not a neurodivergent trait. That's an asshole trait. Yeah, it's like they think that an inherent part of being neurodivergent is, at least for them, is like having no empathy for other people and being like, well, you know, we can logic our way into some kind of like form of empathy. And but really what it is is it just them having no empathy for people and being psychos and being like actually like that they don't, they'd seem. to not understand that stuff like, oh, actually, like, we shouldn't buy mosquito nets. We should spend money on writing papers about AI. It's, it's, they don't understand that that is a function of them kind of using logic to get around any need to have empathy by pretending that they have it.

They're like, we actually, our empathy is just a little bit more refined than yours, you know? We see people who don't even exist as being. people and those people and they're a quadrillion of them. By the coincidenceally, that understanding of empathy requires I have like six girlfriends who all do what I say. Yeah. Yeah. It's so crazy that that's the case. It's the stuff with like, um, I mean, the Zizians are like a great, like a complete example of this kind of like of someone who is just like a maniac using these ideas and using these like spaces.

Specific ideas by the way. These very specific ideas. specific specifics. Literally these ideas, like from this guy. You know, like, just like taking exactly what he's saying, being obsessed with the Harry Potter book, reading it like its scripture, which, by the way, another thing is like, you know, theology, to be a theologian, like, there's a difference between, you know, the Quran and the Torah and like Dionetics. Okay. Like, the Quran, the Torah, the Bible, like all that stuff, like, there is. is, you know, all this, like, scholarship about, like, authorship and all of this. Like, those books weren't written in, like, a weekend by a maniac, you know? Whereas this, it's like,

oh, I wonder what he meant by this. I wonder if there's any deeper meaning. It's like, no, like, it's literally, this is a fan, a Harry Potter fanfic. It's like, it's crazy. It's the same thing as Dianetics. And, like, Dianetics, it makes no sense. If you ever tried to read it, it's maybe the worst book of all time. It makes absolutely no sense. You genuinely, like, on a word to word basis, it's impossible to understand. And, like, the draw is like,

oh, if you go to these guys who, you know, the guy who wrote this, you go to him, he'll teach you how to understand it. And that's like a huge draw. You just give him money and he'll help you understand it. Also, he gets six girlfriends as well. Yeah, that's a crucial point. Well, he, well, Elron,

he was less sexually motivated, I think, than like, you know, the, like, David Miscovage, like, the, you know, he was like just a weird, weird, he just wanted, like, servants and he wanted to be the captain of a boat. Like, it's kind of, like, his

thing is he was like, I just really want to be an admiral in the Navy, you know, I guess my... But, like, honestly, just sort of coming to the end here, he's going a bit long, it's like, it's weird how these guys never update. They update their priors, but they're always doing it in conversation with

about things they're concerned with. Not the really, not the system prompt, if you take my meaning, where maybe you can believe that you could be wrong, or you could be wrong about something you don't think you really could be wrong about, or someone else may be right. And they, the thing, they don't understand, because they don't immediately understand the function for something, it's been like Doge, right? Doge cuts a whole bunch of grants because they're like, well, that's shrimp running on treadmills. It's meaningless. And it's like, no, that's super important. for aquaculture, which feeds huge numbers of people. It's like just because you don't immediately understand something, doesn't therefore make it deviant or stupid. It just means you don't get it.

Doesn't mean they're all wrong. And so another good thing that's, maybe they don't understand or claim to not understand, having zero boundaries between people's professional advancement, housing, and sexual availability is something that was a, that's a taboo that's good to have. Even though you might not like it or agree with it, it's good to have that for a bunch of, of reasons that even like beyond moral ones, just self-preservation related ones, that they're all experiencing right now, it would have been good to have those boundaries, even for selfish reasons. And like, it's, it's an internet posting cult organized around an unfastifiable apocalyptic narrative that successfully captured into institutional power. Q&on became the government through

Facebook, talk radio and the Republicans. These guys are trying to become the whole economy through blog posts and sex parties. But I guess what we've also really learned is that confidence LARPing and being the loudest person around, it really works if what you're doing is largely what capital and the forces of reaction wants. You can really trick yourself into thinking that posting changes the world, enough that it actually sort of does a bit sometimes. Yeah, it totally does. Like, it's, this is like if the, if the final fantasy house was in charge of the whole economy, basically.

Anyway, look, I think we've run another, another long one, but Hasa, thank you very much for coming and filling in today. Always a pleasure to talk to you. Where can you hear us more? Oh, well, I'm so glad you asked Riley. You can hear us on the podcast, Trouble in River City, where we talk about

scams, cons, con men, where we're joined by Charles Austin and Dan Beckner, the two lesser members of the podcast on it. The worst half. If we had to be like a dragon costume, like a sort of

Chinese dragon costume, we would be the head in the tail and they would be the useless middle, middle parts. Well, you need the middle or else the dragon has you know, what's it called? Spina bifida? Yeah, spina bifida, exactly. I read about that on Lestrong.

Yeah, yeah, the spina bifida of the mind, basically. Mind abifida. But you can hear me on that. You can hear me on seeking derangements. You can hear me on movie mindset, the new season coming soon. And And yeah, thank you guys so much for having me.

It's always, it's always a pleasure. Well, if only we talked about more fun stuff. So the other thing, as you all know, there is a Patreon. You can subscribe to it. It's five bucks a month. You know the deal. You know the drill. And this is like a lot of basically compelled travel for a few of the TF cast the last few weeks.

So thank you for bearing with us. But we'll be back together in a very short while. And things will continue on. Anyway, see you on the bonus. Bye, everyone. Bye. Bye. I don't know.