#2174 - Annie Jacobsen

32:12Ukraine has previously outlined plans to use long range weapons supplied by America in Crimea specifically to target infrastructure supporting the Russian invasion.

32:28This is just terrifying stuff. It's terrifying because it can all be happening while you're just going about your business walking your dog. You have no idea that the entire world is in grave danger. You mean when if things suddenly go nuclear? Yeah. Well, even just this, just like these escalations. Well, I think the big picture that frightens me most is that when we see the president of Russia going to the president of North Korea, our two air quotes arch enemies right now having a new alliance. And then I consider that the current president of the United States hasn't spoken to the president of Russia in two years.

33:14And I think back to that time in history what's known as the Reagan reversal where Reagan went from this incredible hawk to learning about nuclear weapons in of all things an ABC television movie called The Day After. Having the crap scared out of him. And then realizing this is the president of the United States realizing we cannot continue on this path. It is too dangerous. And that is why Reagan reached out to Gorbachev. And that's why we have the record of the summit. It was called the Reagan reversal. So in other words, my point is Reagan who you know the axis of evil speech like this idea of seeing your enemy as the as the arch evil villain had to change for him when he understood nuclear war by seeing a film.

34:09And so when I looked today and I consider that the current president hasn't isn't speaking to the president of Russia. It doesn't make any sense to someone like me that's probably why I wrote this book like please understand this and I one has to imagine that the current president with all his decades in office understands all of this. And so I don't fundamentally understand why there is no communication. It is way too dangerous. Hence your the kind what you just showed us and you know the facts will come in of whose weapon systems those are. But either way the perception to your point the fact that the perception a misperception could ignite nuclear war could ignite that situation.

35:00Situation that is unreversible that should be astonishing to all of us. It's terrifying. Well it's terrifying but the one hopeful part of it would be again going back to the Reagan the Reagan reversal by the way is the only glimmer of hope I ever found in all of this. Don't you think though that politics in general and certainly world leadership especially in the United States leadership is much more compromised today than it was then. And a guy like Reagan doesn't really exist today. Tell me what you mean when you say compromised. I mean the military defense contractors are making so much money and they want to continue making so much money.

35:46And they have great influence over the politicians and over policy and over what gets done. And this money that they don't want to stop making is completely dependent upon the continuing to build continuing to sell continuing to to have these weapons and future systems and more advanced systems and better systems. And there's so much money and momentum behind this that I don't know if there's a Reagan available now. I don't know if that's an option if there's a person that can have some sense that can say that we are on a path to self -destruction and we need to stop and we need to reverse this path.

36:36You know you're going to have people in the military and the defense department and that are being influenced by these contractors. And it's like listen, there's plenty of places we can move things around get things done and don't you know about these guys these guys are bad guys we need to get over there we need to do something about this we need to do something about that. And this escalation is motivated by the fact that they're making fucking ungodly amounts of money by making and selling these weapons. And this is a massive part of our economy it's a massive part of the structure that runs the government itself.

37:16Absolutely so then you have to ask yourself what is also going to happen now that these big contracting organizations Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed are now being threatened by Silicon Valley by the new defense contractors that are coming into the pipeline that are threatening their contracts because they can do it faster and cheaper. And so I fear that you will see even more of that entrenchment that you're talking about even more of the bureaucracy churning out more weapons under the guise of defense. Because they'll have to ramp it up. Yeah because there's a competition you know which is that double edge sword because competition is what makes America great.

38:00I believe in that true you know but I do also think what's interesting is like someone I interviewed here in the book was Leon Penelope. So not only was he a former sec deaf but he was former CIA chief and he was former White House chief of staff under Clinton. And in our interview I learned a lot from him about those three kind of elements of the national security advising the president you know being sec deaf being in charge of all of this. And being CIA chief from the intelligence point of view. But what was even more interesting about interviewing panetta was that he said to me at the end of our interview it's good that you're doing this the American people need to know.

38:56That's a direct quote from him. So here's a guy who has spent his entire life entrenched in that system that you're talking about. And then outside of it once he retires puts on his shall we say grandfather's hat the human hat and is suddenly like this is really going in the wrong direction. I would hope that that would lead to more people thinking wisely about what it is they're doing when they're in office as far as nuclear war is concerned. Yeah but the thing they concerned is they're not good at anything. Why would they be good at this. But tell me more. It brings me back to Eisenhower speech when he left left office.

39:44You know the threat of the military industrial complex warning the United States that there is an entire system that is now in place that profits off a war and wants war and wants to keep creating these weapons and wants to keep escalating things because that's their business. That's the business. We're not good at regulating any businesses. We're not good at anything that's detriment. We're not good at regulating over a fishing of the oceans. We're not good at environment. We're not good at energy. We're not good at manufacturing. We're not we're not good at regulating anything. Everything we've done has been a for profit thing when we allowed jobs to go overseas and decimated American manufacturing.

40:33There was no regulation of that. They didn't think that out. They didn't do a good job of managing that. No they completely devastated manufacturing here and we saw during the COVID crisis during the lockdowns. Oh my god we can't get anything because everything's overseas. Everything's made overseas. Medicine, all the computer chips, everything. Like they're not good at anything. But what's what's I agree with you the first part of eyes and hours speech is spot on and that is absolutely true. And yet at the same time this is why I think people stop talking about things like nuclear war or they move on to another more interesting subject that might be more entertaining because who really wants to hear about this problem that seems to be cyclical and there is because you have to have a strong defense.

41:23You have to have a national security otherwise you get walked all over I think people kind of agree that you can't really have a peace force right agree especially with the state of the world right so but the second part of eyes and hours speech is important to me and it's why I get people to talk to me in my books because he says there's an antidote to the military industrial complex and that is an alert and knowledgeable citizenry which is in essence what we're doing now by talking about this was what you do on your podcast by having an alert and knowledgeable citizenry and the word alert I think me is not going to be a real good person.

42:05I think that means engaged you have to be able to talk to people in a way that they can oh wow that's interesting why don't understand how that works how does that work and have these conversations so in that regard I would say that's a positive sign in the right direction I think people are much more open to having an opinion about of all of this than they were in say the 1950s but there's a balance because now opinions somehow seem to be a real good person. What is to be taking over the department of facts in many regards? Hmm. The department of facts that's interesting way to look at it. Yeah it just doesn't seem like the general public is completely aware of how dangerous these threats are and how close we are inching towards it.

42:58Like even the nuclear subs off the coast of Cuba was barely a blip in the new cycle You know it was replaced by Taylor Swift and her boyfriend, you know, it's like it just goes in and out quickly Well, it's also that I mean Joe I do not write about politics I just don't talk about I talk about POTUS the president of the United States and I talk about moves that certain presidents made But I'm amazed at how much time is spent talking about these two individuals and their families and what they date for breakfast That I find you know at least the Taylor Swift of it is like slightly and you know entertaining or uplifting but the the way in which America seems to me have almost become like you know the way that The UK used to be obsessed with the royal family To such a degree where Yeah, that's our royals is a celebrity's nonsense and whether it's the president who's a celebrity or congressperson who's become a celebrity You know a OC it's not about her policies is about her saying stupid shit It's like that's all people care about It's a reality show and we're kind of conditioned by reality shows right We have so many that we watch and so many things that we pay attention to that are nonsense that distract us That we like to sort of apply those same viewing habits to the whole world But I'm amazed by the phenomena of podcasts.

44:30I must say because I'm old enough to remember when they weren't around and So You know and I do have I have One foot in publishing obviously author of seven books, but also write television and so I Exist in these two different worlds of media that are you could say traditional media forms and when you consider how How radically these different forms of communication are changing that we did we did I sell as many ebooks and audio books as I do hard covers And I have a feeling that if those markets didn't exist I would sell half as many books if that makes sense yes And so then when you throw the podcast into the mix I cannot tell you how many people Know about my work as a journalist as a national security reporter because of podcasts That is remarkable to me.

45:28It makes things so much more accessible to so many more people Yeah, everybody's listening to a podcast driving around listening, you know when they're at the gym when they're on a hike And if someone who cares about an alert and knowledgeable citizenry as a fundamental first of all because I think if people People that are curious tend to be less furious You know if you can get your curiosity Satiated you don't become so angry and So I and again, I have to be an eternal optimist particularly writing the kind of books that I do or it would just be you know It would be I would my thinking would would take a negative turn and so I am an internal optimist and I do look to conversation and new media as a means To a better way or a means to a way out of this kind I think that I believe the tide will turn well It's certainly one of the only uncompromised conversations.

46:33It's available and it happens to be the biggest You know, that's the wireless thing is mainstream media is just falling apart. No one cares anymore No one believes them the faith in mainstream media and the trust in mainstream media is in an all -time low and Podcasts are all -time high. There's how many of them are there Jamie? I'm like five million. I think there's something like that. I like monthly, you know, yeah But also what's remarkable is you hear people often say like people have lost their attention spans They watch tic to well, I mean people listen to your podcast for three hours That is a very long attention span and I find that kind of like brain Conditioning really valuable because I will listen to a podcast for three hours and also in a Continu - you know, I might be on an airplane and then oh My phone tells me I have this much time left on the podcast so I continue listening It on a hike and I think that it is a very different kind of mental stimulus curiosity in a new way forward than the old days of reading a newspaper You know it takes you this amount of time to read and then you I mean the newspapers barely exist anymore Right and then the other problem with television shows is that they're on a specific time and People don't want to be locked into having to watch something at a very specific time and now because of things like you know YouTube and Spotify You can just watch it any time you want and just stop it when you go to the bathroom stop it when someone calls you stop it when you have to go somewhere restart again when you're at the gym and It's just a different thing.

48:16It's a different way to Communicate this idea that people don't have attention spans anymore. What how is that possible? They're just people people didn't change that's so stupid if people always have attention spans and all of a sudden They don't maybe they're just getting distracted by things that are Very easy to absorb and very addictive like TikTok videos Doesn't mean that the human mind is different. It's been altered forever and then now no longer people are interested in long -term Conversations that's just stupid. I've I've rejected that from the beginning like one of the first things this podcast is even my good friends Were telling me like you have to edit it and why I'm not in it and shit Like you have to make it shorter like why no one's gonna listen to something for three hours then don't listen Those might take I was like I don't care.

49:01I listen to things I've always listened to like lectures and old Alan Watts speeches like I listen to things Alan Watts is I guess you could call him a psychedelic philosopher Very fascinating Englishman who said some very wise things But just a brilliant person very interested in Buddhism and Just a very very wise person who's still today people send me clips of things that he said and quotes the thing of things that he said But I've always listened to fascinating people have conversations Terrence McKenna I listened to a lot of his speeches and a lot of the different lectures that he gave I Don't think people have changed.

49:46I think that's nonsense. I Get hooked on YouTube Reels or Instagram Reels. I get hooked on them I'll be sitting there if I have nothing to do. I'm like, what is that? Why is he doing that? What's that? Oh? It's just a part of being a human being we're easily distracted. It doesn't mean we don't have an attention span anymore That's stupid. That's ridiculous. There's still people that are graduating from universities of PhDs There's still people right now that are in the residency in medical school There's still people that are learning how to engineer fighter jets like there's people that have attention This is nonsense the idea that human beings have radically changed because of this one medium that's addictive is just so stupid Well, I also think there's something to be said as an individual when you can See when you start to be a little bit Conscious of your own habits in viewing and thinking and reading and information So you get absorbed in the tiktok and then you get to say to yourself like what am I doing?

50:44I want to actually change this habit right and we all benefit from seeing how easy it is to develop a habit Yes, and how hard it is to sort of move yourself away from a habit As you as you become entrenched in it and so I think there's complete value in that people suddenly realize I got to stop watching tiktok videos and I got to go to the gym as which is another You know, that's a difficult sort of an adjustment and most people don't like difficult things So if you if you get a hundred people addicted to tiktok what number are those hundred people are gonna go? You know what I'm gonna change my life It's probably like three or four and those people extraordinary and you hear about them He gets inspired by them like wow you you got a flip phone.

51:29That's crazy Bob. Why'd you do that? Like you know what? I realized my mind was getting taken up by these things and now I have my mind back I like it people want to call me they can call me But I'm not watching things and reading things and absorbing things But then there's the argument like okay, but now you're out of the cultural conversation like there's I have friends that have Flip phones and I'll try to ask them did you see this new thing about the new quantum computer? That's like 100 billion times better or a hundred million times better than the last one they released in 2019 You know and they're like no what so they're missing some things too so the key is like mitigation like you have to figure out like how much information Makes you anxious and and how much information just you where you just sit there and you scroll and you waste your time And then you're like what did I do with my life?

52:19I'm wasting hours And then you look at your screen time at the end of the day it's six hours like what six hours of looking at my phone is that real? So you have to do that But then also you don't want to miss out on things So you do want to kind of be informed and Part of my job is to be informed. I can't be the guy who people have to tell things about because I don't know anything Like what what's going on Crimea? Where's that I can't like so I have to have some I have to have some involvement I have to have some Input where where where I'm getting input from social media and from all these different things As a comedian I have to know the temperature of the country I have to know like what to make fun of like what's ridiculous what people are accepting that doesn't make any sense You just have to know like when you're getting sucked into the point where it's becoming detrimental And I think that's where people struggle people really struggle with that like figuring out What's how much like you can eat a cookie?

53:20Nothing wrong with eating a cookie, but you shouldn't eat a whole bag of cookies You know you should eat cookies every day. That's not good But if you have dinner and you want to get dessert. Yeah, I'm gonna be a tiramisu. Okay. You're gonna be fine You're gonna be fine. You eat tiramisu every day. You're gonna die You know, and that's what social media is it's dessert. It's candy It's things that are kind of fun Up until a point, but you just got to know what that point is and how to manage Your own attention span and just also Have sovereignty over your mind. You have to control your mind You have to be able to like if your mind starts getting anxious Okay, I know we're getting weird.

54:04It's time to work out Okay, I know maybe we should meditate. Maybe we should do this. Maybe we should do that Don't just keep scrolling You got to know when and when but most people don't have that kind of self -control and discipline They don't have to all most people have to do is when the alarm goes off Get up wash yourself brush your teeth eat something go to work Do whatever minimal amount you have to do to keep that job and then and the bathroom breaks and whenever no one's looking Look through your phone be distracted come home watch Netflix go to sleep repeat That's most people so they don't have to Do anything because they haven't set up their life in a way that requires serious attention and An objective sense of your perspective and your your your interaction with humans and the way the world is working They don't have the time.

55:01They don't they have family problems job problems their cars fucked something's wrong with their house They got to fix They have bills everything's piling up people are immensely distracted So what social media does for them as it gives them a brief Rest from their own problems to just look at some Fucking drag queen reading stories to kids and get outraged or some new thing that's going on with some girl That made some crazy video and now everybody's talking about it like It's just Most people don't have much discipline and they don't have to and they've gotten through life being overweight eating process foods and drinking too much and smoking too much and Taking all kinds of pills to mitigate all these problems that they have because they've not taken care of themselves So they're on anti -exiting medication and anti -depression medication and anti -disk and that and They're trying to lose weight so they're on ozemic and that's most people It's most people you know the number one drug in America is a is a peptide that helps you lose weight What is that ozemic?

56:14Oh, it's the most profitable drug in the country. It's maybe the most profitable drug profitable drug ever They can't sell enough of it. They read they estimate that by What is the numb? I think they're saying within five years 30 % of the population is going to be on ozemic They can't make it fast enough. You can't make it fast enough to fly it off the shelves. Okay. Here's a strange parallel thought for that which is that Raytheon has gotten rid of its marketing department. It doesn't need it anymore. They can't make enough missiles fast enough So I have a marketing department for missiles, right?

56:54But what you're so crazy what you just told me is like people's physical being and their existential defense threats are aligned in terms of that There's no need there's just there's too many orders to fill if you get people to believe bullshit and keep feeding them bullshit You turn them into infants and if they just just Accept the fact that you're feeding them bullshit and they don't Employ any critical thinking and they don't look at outside sources of information and really try to assess what's actually going on because they generally generally don't have the time You create a nation of infants and that's there's a lot of us in this country that exist almost like children that are hoping daddy's gonna take care of everything but I'm always interested in the people that have That are those three percent you talked about that suddenly have that moment the catalyst where they realize Oh my goodness.

57:52I have to change things after change. Yeah, that becomes you know, maybe not everybody There's more of us now. I think than ever before and I think yes It's suddenly realized that realize something's going on and I think that's also because Of Social media the good aspects of social media real honest discussions revelations things being released on Twitter and you know the the Twitter files with Elon Musk They found out the FBI was trying to suppress information the hundred Biden laptop story and then going through the Covid disinformation and now seeing the congressional hearings where Fauci's lying in front of Congress about gain a function research and whether or not they deleted emails and all that stuff I think more people are now Oh, what they're going what the fuck is actually going on then have ever before I think there was a you know, there was always people like during the Vietnam War There's always people that distrusted the government and did want it But they didn't have the kind of access to information that we have today Yeah, I mean, I'm interested in the In the individual stories of people who change always because I think that it's too I don't want to say depressing for me, but it's too like if I can if I think of America's this big giant situation with problems It becomes overwhelming um, I just try to focus on people's really interesting cool stories I'll tell you one that comes to mind with the guy who's my uber drive the other day And we're chatting away and he tells me that he used to be like 350 pounds and he was like this thin Dude and he was talking to me about driving in uber at night so he could save money for one of his kids to go to college And I was like wow, how did you suddenly lose weight?

59:28And he told me that he was a security guard at a military base And you know, he was genius that I was giant and the dudes in the military were totally fit And one of them said to me one time dude you got to lose some weight And I listened to him and he'd let me go into the military jam Wow one guy one guy sometimes you just need to hear it be that guy. Yeah, be that guy And but that to our point of like Well, if you're not allowed to say like dude you're overweight or he didn't you know essentially like by saying dude You should come to the gym. He's the subtext there is dude you're overweight.

1:00:08Yeah, like you're you know Unhelfully overweight That's that fine line of stuff I find really interesting is talking about things that make people uncomfortable I don't think that should be so taboo. No, it should be I think you should be able to be honest assertive and direct Especially if you can do it and be kind You know that just telling someone they need to lose weight doesn't mean you're mean and this whole body positivity thing It's not good for anybody. Not good for anybody. There's no one who benefits from that You benefit in the short term where you don't feel as bad about the fact that you're obese But you know you're obese everyone knows you're obese You're just not dealing with this very obvious problem when someone says you need to lose weight I was I was watching this TikTok video where there was this lady Who's upset because she was going to her doctor and?

1:00:57She has all these autoimmune problems and she was severely morbidly obese like giant and she said that the doctor started body shaming her And she was so upset that she felt uncomfortable that the doctor was telling her That she needed to do something about her weight loss and recommended perhaps bariatric surgery or ozemic or any of these things And this person was talking about this. It's like what a betrayal That their health care provider was Calling them obese and that they did not feel safe with them anymore and The comments were interesting because almost everyone in the comments was like that fucking person is trying to save your life Like you have all these autoimmune issues.

1:01:38Well, guess why Guess why you're 500 pounds like you shouldn't be 500 pounds That's not a normal weight for a person especially a woman who's like 58. This is crazy What you're doing is crazy and for you to be upset that your doctor is telling you you're doing something crazy It's like a person coming into the doctor's office Getting screened for lung cancer with three cigarettes lit in their mouth. That's what it's like It's like hey, what do you think is causing this lung cancer? Do you think maybe it's this fucking poison that you're sucking on every day? Like yeah, that's probably it right Yeah, well, that's the same thing you're just doing it's a slower poison But it's a very obvious poison like you're you're consuming poison You've got in your body to the point where it's dying and she's telling you this doctor's telling you hey You've got to do something about this and your response is to go on social media and talk about the horrors of being body -shamed There's a great saying that I love I try to live my life by and I definitely write a book about it on my books, which is you can't fix what you can't face That's a very good quote very good quote.

1:02:52Yeah, that's true. Alternatively, you can fix what you can what you're willing to face Yes, and that's what's so much about if it's flexible Travel I even I think you can fix anything even if it's just a mental fix or a spiritual fix You know, but are you willing to but on the technology front do you ever read James Burke? No, he wrote a law in the 80s And he would he was writing about science and technology. He's a historian of science and technology and he goes like Way back, you know like bubonic plague he'll write about of how that changed industry across Europe and these really general easy to Digest fascinating ways But I in terms of your technology tiktok is the world going to hell in a hand basket I think of him because he said that when the and this is a great analogy I think that I think of with my kids and social media When the printing press was invented um Absolutely all of society thought the world was like going to go to hell in a hand basket.

1:03:53Yeah, because before but before that The only people who could read really were the priests and so they kept all this information and they dolled it out according To their line of thinking and then the printing press came along and the hoi p 'loi could read or would begin that began really the the birth of Mass populations being able to read which is where we are today and sometimes I Like think about with about James Burke and I think about that as an analogy to where we are today That what is going on is just an upheaval like the printing press in terms of making a lot more people More literate Yes And so maybe it's not even I mean I used to think of literacy and it's true definition is actually reading And I remember when audiobooks came out and I read all my own audiobooks and I originally thought That read listening to me read my own book was somehow you wouldn't have the same experience of reading it yourself And then I realized I was I was putting my standard.

1:05:02I actually enjoy reading I like tree. That's the way I'm wired I can't do math, but I can read And then I now I realized with the amount of people that listen to my audiobooks listen to your podcast That maybe is a new 21st century form of literacy Which is really makes my head go in interesting places because Language is very different than reading You know communicating So I but it's all information. Yes. Yeah, and it's digesting the information And so where I think the social media parts of it are dangerous is it's like you said it's too fast too Dispirit you go from one thing to the next thing and that's the way it's all set up Whereas a longer form Podcast you're asking people to stay with you with your ideas.

1:05:57You just go you might go off on a riff about obesity I might go off on a riff about literacy, but it's made it's the brain is Being stimulated the brain is being curious and then that carries over to your own life. Yes Yeah, I think what's going on also is that this entertainment form this this Whether it's podcasts or audiobooks is something that's being consumed while people are doing other things Where they normally would not get the this information like driving Going to the gym working doing media labor doing things where you can listen to it up a podcast That is a new thing It's a way to be entertained while you're doing other things and that that's a big part of this And that's a whole area that wasn't addressed before I mean it kind of was with talk radio So people listen to talk radio in their cars, but nobody listen to talk radio at the gym And be listen to talk radio on an airplane you You now you can download things and consume them anytime you want and most of the time people are consuming these things While they're being forced to sit in the doctor's waiting room Whether doing something that ordinarily they would just be just bored Right and the other argument to that your friend with the flip phone I've heard this director Christopher Nolan who made the open -harm movie talk about this where he says He believes that the experience of sitting in the waiting room is What he wants So so I think there's a very few rarified people that can Actually the way they're built the way they the way they're engineered the way they are the way they've become Allows for them to sit in the waiting room and be super interested in Observing maybe you're an elite director or to do that But most people are going to be you know restless irritable and discontent and therefore the podcast the audio book is Uh an additive to your life.

1:08:03It is, but it's also a way to consume new information It's the way to get it's a way to get educated you you can say what Christopher Nolan is doing is the right way But it might be the right way for him He's obviously a brilliant man and he I don't believe he even uses email Is that the case find up Christopher Nolan uses email. I'm pretty sure he's one of those guys is like no phone no email nothing completely disconnected and I would imagine if you want to be Very creative that's probably a very good strategy. You don't want the stimulus. Yeah. I don't have an email address I've never used email no one said.

1:08:41I don't have a smartphone. I will carry a pay as you go dumb phone thing Yeah, okay, and that's the quote from him. So that's one of the reasons why he's Probably so good. What does it say is burner phone is inspired by what the wire? I'm gonna say the wire What does it say? Ah, I got it nailed it Um, I have a feeling that In the future there's gonna be way less of those people and you know, there was a lot of people I remember in the day that had no email and they thought it was cool. I don't even have email man. You can call me You know, I don't answer like my friend Joey would not answer text messages You've getting mad at you if you send him a text message call me and but now he text was me Everybody texts.

1:09:27I think it's gonna be harder and harder to be that guy, but Kudos to him. Okay, so I remember when my son my son jet is now 19 and he was probably Nine what a cool name for a son jet Jacobson. I like it my other sons are thinly Jacobson fighter pilot jet Jacobson um So he was like maybe nine years old when the first iPhone came out and I had one and he just thought it was so cool And I will never forget he said at the dinner table mom just to be clear When you were born, they didn't have these iPhones That's great Just to be clear Well, when we were kids we had a phone that was stuck to the wall with a cord Remember I mean try telling your kids about um an answering machine.

1:10:20How about dial phones Okay, are you ready for this trivia? Why One of the reasons why you could argue that Computers became so important to the defense department back in 1961 Is because during the Cuban missile crisis and this is like I have seen these documents at the national archives JFK was so worried about that exact movement what you made with your finger The dial phone There was a true red phone that would be used in a nuclear crisis for him to call Nikita Khrushchev and he became worried that that that wasted too much time Mm -hmm to get through right The you know when the And so he hired a guy called JCR lick lighter to develop Computers that could move faster And at the time the computers were the size of this room in the defense department and they were these old main framps and lick lighter Is he's called the Johnny Apple seat of the internet in essence.

1:11:27He's the guy who created the arpinette Which is now the internet And so there's this interesting dual -use technology idea that everything that That at the Pentagon at least in the defense world so much of our amazing technology is born out of You know trying to save the world from existential threat and I always think that dual -use part of everything is super interesting Look at lasers, you know lasers are arguably Perhaps the most important technological defense born You know system of the 20th century laser printers laser surgery laser eyes And then you have laser weapons at the Pentagon so classified.

1:12:13I can't even get anywhere near that Really they're they're called direct and directed energy weapons And what how much do you know about them? Because I see is like conspiracy stuff online like an article directed energy weapons Yeah, well, I mean I always think conspiracy is born of secrecy Which would make sense if some if someone is constantly telling you you can't know about that You're going to naturally wonder what the hell is going on that I really can't know what's so secret I think that's a not a good a good instinct of ours And so every any time I have been At the Pentagon, you know or wherever asking about directed energy weapons.

1:13:00I it's really a It's stop you it's a stop and so to find out more about that I Track down This was when I was reporting the Pentagon's brain a decade ago the I thought to myself a cable if these guys won't talk to me I'll find out who invented the laser see if he will Go to the smartest guy in the room. So Charles Towns who won the Nobel Prize for inventing the laser I called him what you were saying this was in 2014 I believe he wasn't lasers before 2014 no no no he oh sorry That's when I interviewed him he invented the laser in six I think he won the Nobel prize in 60 Wander 62 And he was 99 years old when I interviewed him still Keeping office hours at Berkeley wow How does Secretary on the line and gave this incredible interview and I asked him about um You know his development of the laser, but you want to hear you might be interested in this so he He Is the guy who invented the laser.

1:14:01I mean when you really think about that and he told me I said well Who do you go to when you're having trouble when your Charles Towns and he said well? I took that particular idea to two colleagues Einstein and Vaughn Neumann Okay, well that's a just say I said who said what and he said Einstein this is when Towns was having trouble making it work and he said that Einstein said keep trying And Vaughn Neumann said it'll never it'll never work And I said what do you make of that and he said well Einstein was very generous of spirit and he was always encouraging other scientists to think big and try And Vaughn Neumann was a kind of scientist who believed if he didn't come up with it it probably wasn't a good idea ego But I love that because who else in the world like has those two people yeah, you know that they run ideas by if you know Who you run ideas by who I run ideas by yeah who Charles Towns, but here's another interesting thought about the laser is Charles Towns and he didn't share this fact for decades But later in life he wrote Lank the article I believe it was for heart the Harvard alumni magazine That the idea for the laser came to him when he was sitting on a park bench from above whoa Look how so It was a religious experience for him like he'd been working on this problem He'd been working on this science problem According to Charles Towns and by the way he was inspired he told me to develop the laser From the time he was a little kid in the 20s reading the Soviet science fiction novel the Garen death ray So it's like it was a science fiction concept a laser He's a little kid Charles Towns thinking about this thinking about this then all through his life continuing to think Then running it by his Einstein colleagues and then can't make it work can't make it work is sitting on a park bench And he gets the message from above he You know made it sound very much like it was a religious experience for him But he never wrote about it for a long time because particularly in the 60s and 70s if you you couldn't be a scientist and have faith at the same time Or at least you Would be you know be little door He'd be looked down upon is what he said That's interesting So he was reluctant to say the inspiration behind his idea Because he felt that it was divine in nature bingo And it's not just me he told this you can read about this in that Harvard article um And I think he wrote that when he was in his late 80s But Absolutely so he was really making a plug for Listening to whatever it is that guides you Which is a very powerful statement All right, whatever that is Yeah, we have a real problem with if we can't measure something We don't think it's a real thing You know if we don't have the tools to put it on a scale We don't think it's a real thing or whatever we want to call divine intervention That that when he told me that it was so fascinating to me I began to explore if there were other Nobel laureates in particular that shared that belief and there are There are a couple of Nobel laureates who someone in chemistry um and That that believed that they're there Their knowledge came from a divine inspiration like they had a dream type situation I write about all this in my book phenomena Yes These specific examples because it's so interesting when we when that kind of non -mainstream Thinking comes from an absolute You know An individual in the community who has achieved the highest Award whatever that means but isn't the creation of science or the thought of science as a thing wasn't that Was it Descartes?

1:18:41And didn't he come up with it from a dream He had a dream where an angel told him that they would Master control over nature by the you by measurement Like see if you can find that See him find that quote, but I believe this was like Considered the beginning of science So the beginning of science here it is It is third dream the angel game to Descartes and said conquest of nature is to be achieved through number and measure That was the beginning of the Cartesian way of dissecting the natural world One of mechanics formulae etc Surely the conquest of the natural world has been achieved that way proof surely that the angel was right So that the beginning of science Measurement I mean it is divine it's or whatever it is whatever that word Absolutely.

1:19:39I mean who isn't amazed by their own dreams when they have a really intense dream. That's just such a Part and parcel to being a human and being curious and there is no answer to it. I have a theory tell me I think ideas are a life form That's what I think I think we think of a life form the term life form We think of it as something that can breed something that propagates some that spreads DNA Every Single thing that exists on this earth that people have created came from an idea it Every mug every computer every airplane every television set everything came from an idea The idea comes into the person's mind.

1:20:29It combines Well, the currently available ideas it improves upon those ideas and it manifests itself in a physical thing And that physical thing is what we do that's a number one thing we do we do a lot of different things We have children and families we have jobs we take up hobbies, but but if you looked if an overview effect if you looked at the human race From above you would say well if you were in one of us and we say what is this species doing? Well it makes better things every year That's what it does it doesn't make the same beehive every year it constantly consistently makes better things where does it What what motivates us to make these better things?

1:21:08Ideas ideas and then the competition of these ideas now if something wanted a thing to Manifested in the world to make it exist in the world. What would it do? It would get inside that things creative structure get inside that things mind and In part these ideas in part these inspirations and get this thing to go out and put these pieces together and manufacture this thing and then test it and approve upon it and keep doing it until they get it right and then other people will take those things and have new ideas I know how to take that and turn it into a tablet. I know how to turn that into this.

1:21:48I know how to make it this better Let's do quantum computing. Let's do that these are all just ideas So ideas that human beings turn into real things and those real things accelerate the evolution of technology In this radical way where we can't even comprehend where it's going you know there was a An article I put on my Instagram today just put the title of it how crazy it is that AI Was like 500 million years AI as extrapolated like they're just calculating what evolution looks like in 500 million years Yeah, oh, I have seen that yeah, so yes like We don't even understand what we're doing we don't even understand what we're doing, but we keep doing it and I think Some of the instincts that human beings have that seem frivolous Are directly connected to this and one of them is materialism materialism status all these different things that we have where with materialism you always want the newest greatest thing If your friend has an iPhone 15, but you have an iPhone 10 you look like a loser We do with that old look at that stupid old camera.

1:22:58Oh my god. What are you doing with that? You need the best one you need the new one if you have a 2007 car and your friend pulls up in a 2024 car like oh, I need the new one Was the new one do the new one does all these different things that the old one doesn't do the new one drives itself I got to get the new one and so what does that do it it it pushes Innovation it promotes innovation materialism fuels innovation because we're always buying new stuff if everybody stop buying things If everybody looked at their phone and said oh this phone's perfect. I don't need a new phone Or could you have that phone forever?

1:23:34You don't need a new iPhone. I kind of like that phone forever The would they would stop innovating they would stop making things they would be it would just stop And then nothing would get done but because of we Of materialism because of this keeping up with the Jones's thing where everybody wants the latest thing in their driveway to impress their neighbor You want to pull up to the fucking diner and show all your friends All that stuff just fuels the creation of new and better things and we're all part of it and every year There's like a thing you didn't know like I just got this phone check this out this phone I can make a circle on things and it Googles it instantly This phone transcribes all of my voice notes and then summarizes them for me This this phone does galaxy 24 AI it has AI in it It will summarize your notes so like condense them into a Wikipedia.

1:24:26Oh, yeah, yeah It does it with web pages. This is the Samsung Galaxy S24 ultra. This is the new one this this thing It can It can transcribe your your thoughts, but even better it can translate conversations You could be speaking Spanish and I could be speaking English and it'll have a split screen So it'll show like I'll put the phone down in almost real time So on your half of the phone facing you it would be speaking in in Spanish It would translate my words into Spanish on my side It would be translating your Spanish into English Then if you have the galaxy ear buds it'll do it in a real time in your ear So you can talk to me in Spanish and I can hear you in English And this is just beginning so what the United Nations were no longer going to have those translators Painstakingly.

1:25:20Oh, yeah telling and maybe lying, you know, maybe lying Distorting reality because that that happens a lot too you hear about translations That's not exactly what he said you've kind of distorted and twisted those words But the point is like these all come from ideas and I didn't think I needed a ability to circle an image and an immediately google searches it But it's so convenient like if you want something or you see something like what is that? What does that take a picture of that thing? Circle it then immediately it goes to google and shows you like instantaneously Now when you say ideas are life forms.

1:25:59Yeah, which is so interesting to me. Haven't heard that Do you are you talking about maybe consciousness? Yes, okay, so this and then How does what are your thoughts on how individual people are? Because you talked about a beehive and it made me think about a hive like are we all part of the same conscious Consciousness like again Carl Jung would say My theory and again, I know education. This is just my thinking about it for thousands of hours I think we're all the same thing. I think this whole idea we are one that sounds so hippie It's hard for people to digest, but I want you to think about it this way If you live my life, I think you would be me and I think if I live your life, I would be you I think what consciousness is Is the life force of all living sentient things on this planet and perhaps all in the universe and it's experiencing Reality through different biological filters different bodies different life experiences Different education different genetics different parts of the world different geography different climate different things to deal with But it's the same thing.

1:27:16I think if I lived in Afghanistan and My whole family was in the Taliban. I would probably be in the Taliban too because I think you just you You adapt to whatever circumstances and environment you're in and then you think that way and you speak this language And you have these customs and you engage in these religious practices But I think consciousness the thing at the heart of it all what what that person thinks of when they say me What I think me I think this I think that me is the same in every person. I think it's yeah It's everyone. That's why we're all connected That's why we all need each other.

1:27:55That's why loneliness contributes to diseases and it's terrible for human beings I think we're all universally connected with this bizarre goal and I think this bizarre goal might be to create artificial life I think that might be the and I think But I've said this too many times if you heard I'm sorry, but I think that we are an electronic caterpillar Making a cocoon and we don't even know why We are just constantly building Exactly and we give birth to the butterfly We are a biological caterpillar giving birth to the electronic butterfly and we're doing it We don't even know what we're doing.

1:28:39We're just making this cocoon We just keep going because this is what we do and I think this is probably how life Separates from biology to something far more sophisticated that's not Confined to the timeline of biological evolution, which is a very slow Relatively speaking timeline in comparison to electronic evolution Electronic evolution is exponential. It happens radically. It happens very fast and especially when you get into things like When AI gets involved in quantum computing. It's involved them things accelerate so fast Like look at what's going on with AI five years ago. AI was not even a concern Nobody even thought about it now.

1:29:19It's at the tip of everyone's tongue and all everyone's talking about is what happens when chat GPT Five gets released what happens when six gets released what happens when artificial general intelligence is achieved What it what happens when these things become sentient what happens when these things make better versions of themselves What how when does that stop does it ever stop do they become gods is that what God is is what God is is this Primate becomes curious starts inventing tools tools lead to machines machines lead to the industrial age the industrial age leads to electronics Electronics lead to artificial intelligence artificial intelligence leads to God Wow, okay In that line of thought go back now on that timeline To your eye how did we go from language You know grunt grunt how do we go from grunting?

1:30:17To language and then from language to writing why did we decide why did we why and how did we write in your I think the moment They started pointing at things and making sounds and by the way animals do that we know that right Do you know that some monkeys trick other monkeys? So some monkeys will make a sound like an eagle's coming and so that these monkeys run out of the trees and then they'll run up the trees and steal the fruit Did not know that yeah, they lie to each other have you seen chimp empire? Yes Yeah, I had the director on it was amazing. It's an amazing film. I like there's so much that is you somebody was Somebody was asking me after I wrote the surprise kill vanished book about the CIA's paramilitary the ground branch guys the snake eaters And they said what's the origin story of ground branch thinking I was gonna say you know the OSS But I had just seen chimp empire and I couldn't help myself but say chimp empire is the is the origin story of the CIA's paramilitary Right and I remember that watching that like for the four hours and it's so magnificently filmed and it's so interesting and that moment Where they go back in time and you realize Someone had been videotaping the previous generation of chimps and that their anger and their fighting was based on revenge That blew my mind That they that because I often think because I write about war and weapons I always think about nature versus nurture and where we built this way and are we you know this is a very interesting Thing to think about like your electric caterpillar are fighting over resources.

1:32:00They were fighting over resources But it was also revenge remember that there was there was like a score to settle with the previous generation That and that to me Was stunning and also that One of the guys I love that they named everyone one of the chimps brother I think it was like head chimps brother lost his arm in a poacher's trap Remember that and when you think about chimps and how important their arms are swinging from trees like under if you just followed the logic about You know survival of the fittest Then that chimp the brother chimp would have would have died because he didn't have one of his hands But instead The other brother the lead champ made sure he was taken care of which is like so Human I still think about that.

1:32:54Well, that's how they survive. They need help. That's why they live in tribes It's whether or not individuals alone by themselves Okay, so you think Chimps were pointing and then from that you had to figure they're Over long amounts of time Yeah, we're immense amounts of time they started to develop just like monkeys have sounds for eagles You know that monkeys have sounds for snakes they have sounds for different things and this is a relatively recently known thing They think they just think they were just making noises before and now they realize like oh no They have very specific noises for very specific things and I think that evolves.

1:33:32Do you know that they think that apes right now are in the stone age Yeah, they's they've entered into the stone age. You mean apes have evolved into the stone age Anthropologists right now believe that if we used to be stone age lower primates And we eventually evolved into being human beings the other apes are now entering the stone age There's evidence of them using tools. There's evidence of them manufacturing tools There's a video of an orangutan is some famous photos of an orangutan spearfishing He's hanging yeah, he's hanging on to a tree and he's got a spear and he's jabbing fish out of the water with this spear It's wild to say they're catching up with us.

1:34:13Yeah, well, that's what happens I mean the idea that they're gonna stay the same look at this okay Oh wow how crazy how crazy is that he's fishing He's fishing with a spear And there's the amazing and that's just one of many instances of them using tools using things They're starting to enter into this phase where they start evolving I mean, and it's a slow process and we went through it somehow or another we went through it in an accelerated way That's very confusing also like the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years Apparently is the biggest mystery in the entire fossil record Like how does this one thing that created the fossil record double?

1:35:00Yes, yes, yes Like what are the factors? Yes, there's a bunch of different ideas, but all of them are just ideas. No one really knows Okay, so here's an interesting antichdote nuclear war apes in 1975 there was this Famous defense official who kind who went like from being a hawk to being like we cannot have so many nuclear weapons His name was Paul Warnocky and he wrote of what was then a famous article in foreign policy magazine called apes on a treadmill Such a great image his idea that the nuclear arms race was apes on a treadmill That we and the and the Russians were just Slave -ish, you know like essentially ignorant beasts just slaving away on this treadmill trying to win Not even realizing there is no winner And you know, it was a famous article everybody wrote about it and I mean spoke about it and you know DC and then it disappeared well the anecdote comes from Recently a group of scientists Wanted to try to answer the question that we're talking about like well how did apes go from bypedal or how did we you know from from knuckle walking to being bypedal how did how did that happen with we still don't know why and they were trying to figure out if it had to do with energy consumption So they outfitted apes they put them on a treadmill they outfitted them with oxygen mass and then they put he had humans doing the same thing and they were measuring You know energy levels and During this experiment and they kept making them do it over and over again the humans and the apes on the treadmills Walk and during one of the experiments one of the apes was basically like screw this.

1:36:43I'm not doing this anymore He pushed the button and got off And the anecdote to nuclear war is if apes can figure out how to get off the treadmill Why can't humans Hmm Well apes aren't being influenced by lobbyists Apes aren't watching tick tops. Apes having secret lunch meetings with the head of Ritian. Yeah, I don't know who knows Um, I think we can I don't think it's impossible. I think you and I being here right now having this conversation Well, there's not a nuclear war going on speaks to that like we've had nuclear weapons for a long time and we haven't used them I don't think it's I don't think it's inevitability that we destroy ourselves, but it's a possibility And I think there's a lot of foolish people that are ignoring that possibility and that's what's scary And what's scary is that the type of people that want to become president congressman and senators Some of them are great people and some of them are they're they're wise and they're good leaders and some of them are just people That are too ugly to be on TV They're they're too ugly to be actors.

1:37:53They're too ugly to be they can't sing they want attention And so they want to be a leader and so they want to say the things that people want to hear Because those things get them positive attention and they feel good and then they get a bunch of people who love them And they feel good and then they have their face on a billboard and they have bumper stickers and like everybody likes me And the people who don't like me they're communist or losers and so it's a cult of personality thing that is just a part of being a charismatic person And garnering attention and that's a giant part of our whole political process is narcissists and psychopaths and sociopaths That have embedded themselves into the system and then they all feed off each other and help each other and they're all inside our trading And they're involved and then when they leave office they get paid to speak in front of bankers and make a half a million dollars We're overrun by sociopaths What what's the all why is that?

1:38:48What's a natural path like that's what most leaders are most leaders of immense groups of people the force people in the war are sociopaths It's the old adage that you know You have to be crazy to become president in the first place Yes, or you wouldn't become president because you would realize it's crazy Yeah, my take is that no one who wants to be president should be allowed to be president Almost no one and that's You know, that's also part of the problem that with the world we're living in today. It's always the Lesser of two evils. That's our choice always well. It's also so peculiar what happens to people when they become president and I'll give you an example of Again from the nuclear war concept of things do you know about the policy launch on warning no?

1:39:33Okay, do you know about sole presidential authority? Yes, okay? So you know the president alone launches nuclear war he doesn't ask the sect of doesn't ask the chairman of the joint chiefs Doesn't ask congress he launches Furthermore, we have a policy called launch on warning so when He's told that there is an incoming nuclear missile on its way to the United States, which is how this begins He must launch on warning That is policy. We do not wait that is a quote from former secretary of defense bill Perry Now before taking office many of these presidents Say that they are going to change that insane policy because it essentially Creates this volatile situation where every president every foreign leader knows They're gonna launch on warning and so am I They say they're gonna change the policy before they take office.

1:40:35This is documented. You know Clinton Bush Obama not Trump but and then they don't and no one knows why Why do you think that is that you would have a position before becoming president of such a extreme policy? needs to change and then And then change your or become silent on that I don't think anybody if I was gonna have a conversation with Trump The number one thing that I would want to ask him is what is the difference dream what you thought it was like and what it is like What happens when you get in there? What happens when you get in no one knows it's so secretive the the meetings Between the heads of state between Senators congressmen behind closed doors all all the different meetings with the head of the Pentagon The head of the intelligence agencies We don't know what those meetings are like no one can know it's a point of national security So if you're not president of course you can't go to the fucking meetings So then you become president and then you get briefed So then they sit you down and they they hit you with all the problems in the world that you don't know about Then nobody knows about but them and I bet they're numerous and I bet it's terrifying And I bet that's a giant factor as to why people change Between me a lot of what they say when they're running for president They know they're not gonna do but they're saying it because they want people to vote for them And then they get in there and they're I don't know not gonna release the JFK files They do things like that's what they always do But I think a lot of it is also You can't know what you're talking about until you get that job Until you're in there you don't know what you're talking about you have no idea But who's narrative is that like in other words if it's is it the previous administration?

1:42:26Because if that's the case if the previous administration is briefing you The new president the incoming president on all of this These state secrets that are so terrifying you have to throw your old your old promises out the window for the most part Wouldn't that change every that that's where I'm lost it's like It and also it's so tiring reading these presidential manuals which say app or memoirs rather which then say absolutely nothing original to any of us The citizenry about what's really happening as president well because those are just designed to make money At or to make those memoirs are not really designed to do anything other than generate income You know I want the real story from the president right you're not gonna get it You wouldn't even get it if you're alone with them.

1:43:17I mean, I think that there's probably Some things that they say in there that they have to like kind of skirt around it and figure out what to say Figure out how to say it Did you ever read Bill Clinton's my life? I? Don't think I could read a biography by him to be fair. He had some One wild thing to say about the moon landing. What did he say really wild? Well, he was saying that he was working. I think he's working doing construction in 1969 and it showed up for work See if you can find the quotes. I don't paraphrase it. I think it's page 241 Of Bill Clinton's my life. I might have the page wrong so in This scenario he's talking to this carpenter He's telling this carpenter isn't it crazy?

1:44:07They landed on the moon and the carpenter says Something to this sound of I don't believe anything those television fellers say And he goes I think they can fake anything somewhere along that line And he goes before he goes back then. I thought that guy was a crank He goes but after my eight years in the White House. I started thinking maybe he's ahead of his time Now just imagine saying that About the biggest achievement in human history landing another human being on the surface of A moon another planet essentially one quarter the size of our planet 250 something thousand miles away And he's saying Maybe this guy who thought it was fake is ahead of his time That's not that's not something you accidentally say That's not something you frivolously write down and just Add it to your book.

1:45:04Did you find the book? Yeah That is I got to see that real quotes that is that's some really heavy subtext Jamie'll find it But the when you read it you're like wait what the fuck did he say Like you're the and it got kind of glossed over except for the moon landing host hoax community who wasn't yeah, I told you it's fake But that's interesting and that guy wrote all that longhand by the way he wrote that all on You know composition books just notebooks wrote it all out and then it was just transcribed yeah So this is not like an accident they told this story Imagine saying that Imagine imagine saying that this guy who's out the moon landing was fake maybe he was ahead of his time You find here I can only find it written on Wikipedia and I like it's linking to the book, but this is what it says in Wikipedia There it is perfectly perfectly Okay, here goes just a month before Apollo of an astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left her colleague Michael Collins aboard spaceship Columbia and walked in the moon the old carpenter asked me if I really believed it happened I said sure I saw it on television He disagreed He said that he didn't believe it for a minute that them television fellers could make things look real that weren't back then I thought he was a crank during my eight years in Washington I saw some things on TV that make me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time Well, that's very weird and cryptic because he says I saw some things on tv That made me wonder So yeah, I mean like things that were displayed to the American public that were horseshit Some things that are on tv that people are gonna.

1:46:51Look at where he knows. It's not real right So he's wondering and by dragging the moon into it. There's just no way you That you can do anything but infer that he's referencing of course. Yeah, I mean, it's one of us. And has anyone ever asked him about that on follow up that dot dot dot Could it be a nice edit for this? This is a Wikipedia About the conspiracy of moon landing experiences. That's why I couldn't find it somewhere else. That's trying to know no no no I've read the quote. It's just more the same. It's just he this is just abbreviate the whole thing That's the point of the quote that's the meat is the old carpet to ask me if I really believe it happened This is all not taken out of context So we'll politics in the United States ever change to a point where we can Have individuals who Accept their responsibility.

1:47:38I mean another crazy thing again interviewing panetta about Clinton exact, you know has his chief of stuff It's like oh, but this is panetta talking that the presidents are very under informed about Any of their responsibilities. I'm sure about nuclear war. They don't know how it unfolds They don't know how fast it is. Did you know that they have a six -minute window to make a counter attack? six -minute window and that comes from president Reagan's memoir by the way He said that There's a quote from him which I have in the book a six -minute window to have to make a decision To possibly end the world is irrational.

1:48:20I think part of the problem and to answer your question about leaders politicians whether to change we're asking humans to not be human That's what we're asking we're asking them to be these perfect things and then now We're looking up their ass with the microscope more than we've ever done before And we're also accepting that the other side is going to lie About this person's background and lie about what this person's done Like for three years all you heard on the news was Russia collusion with Donald Trump They were trying to say Russia put him in office. He's a Russian puppet He's a Russian thing was all lie They made it up and they said it everywhere.

1:48:57You're allowed to do that. You're allowed to do that so not only are you Taking a person and asking them to not be a person But then you're looking at everything they've done and you're allowed to lie about it And you're allowed to lie about it in cooots with the media who spreads this lie on television every day with no consequences so the problem is Not just that we don't have good leaders is that I don't know if it's possible to have a good leader I don't know if those kind of humans are real And I wonder If AI even though everyone's terrified of it and I am too. I wonder if that's our way out I wonder if the only thing that can actually govern society fairly and accurately Is an artificial intelligence.

1:49:50It's something that doesn't have emotions and greed and narcissism and all the other contemptible Traits that all of our politicians have What if it doesn't have any of that? What if it first of all what if it's far smarter than us and realizes and a fair and reasonable way to allocate resources and to eliminate pollution to Fit mitigate overfishing and all the different issues that we have all you looks at it in a an absolutely Accurate and brilliant way that we're not even capable of doing And this idea of us being governed by people and not wanting those people to behave like every person ever who's been in power Absolute power corrupts absolutely.

1:50:37We've all everyone knows it But we just assume that we're gonna have this one guy that's like his morals are so strong Then when he gets in there, he you know, he'll he's gonna write the ship and drain the swamp I don't think those people are real. I don't think that's a real thing I think the folly the human beings have displayed Is built into the programming. I don't think it's I don't think it's unusual. I think it's usual Any president you ever admired or Part of their actions that you admired both. That's like there's a lot of human beings that I admire It's a they're just flawed human beings.

1:51:11I still admire like I mean Kennedy said a lot of amazing brilliant things But he's also deeply flawed and if he was alive today Oh my god the skeletons and say would have pulled out of that guy's closet. It would be crazy He would never make it he would never get anywhere close But that's just he's a human and You could kind of be flawed and also have these brilliant takes on things like he did then But look what happened to him. They fucking killed him right and then they covered it up and then today Even today they won't release the files today. I mean that that speaking to the idea that can conspiracies Have become popular or rather You know thinking that there is a conspiracy behind things It's so astonishing that those files are not released after all this time.

1:52:02Yeah, it's almost impossible not to see Not to ask what is behind that veil what is so important? It is impossible. It is impossible And it does make me think that whatever it is is such a poor reflection on America that The president therefore agrees. Okay, we won't do that Yeah, I think it would cause a deep rift in our society that maybe we can't really handle It's possible It's possible that it's the CIA that did it and that we're gonna realize that these people and some of them It may even still be alive From all of the different sources. I spoke to over the decades I always get the sense that It was a nation state and that nation state happens to be nuclear armed and Even today people would demand consequences As possible, but the people that were involved in the Warren Commission report Some of them were like Alan Dulles.

1:53:07Dulles was fired by Kennedy Imagine you get assassinated and the guy who you fired who fucking hates you gets to write the story of what happened to you I mean, there's a lot there's a lot that goes into that that's very very deep. There's a lot The Warren Commission report is horseshit if you read it and if you if you Like David Lichten wrote a book on it called best evidence. Mm -hmm, and you ever read it? No, but I know about him from Tom O 'Neal K. Osbok, which is so awesome and He studied the entire Warren Commission report which almost nobody had at the time And he was like this is filled with inconsistencies.

1:53:48None of this makes any sense Like there's there's so much wrong with all these different things that they're saying That he started doubting it and then he started looking into the assassination itself and finding that how many witnesses had died mysteriously The the whole thing the wreaks of conspiracy from the top to the bottom from Jack Ruby Showing up and killing Lee Harvey Oswald to Jolly West visiting Jack Ruby in jail and also in Jack Ruby goes insane To the fact that Jolly West was the head of N. K. Ultra which likely supplied Manson with LSD Which ran the he the hate Ashbury free clinic Which was where they were giving people LSD which was running Operation midnight climax where they were dosing up Johns with LSD and watching them for two a mirrors Like all this is real like this is all undisputable absolute truth that was going on at the exact same time and to think that That's the only thing they were lying about is just that stuff Everything else is above board that stuff was important.

1:54:49We were just trying to get to the bottom of things No, there was certainly Not the same degree of an alert and knowledgeable citizenry in the 50s and 60s everyone just took everything at face value and it is remarkable as a historian And Tom O 'Neill's work also speaks of that to go back in time and look at that Part of just as interesting perhaps is the facts of the matter like the Warren commission is to say How did everyone simply accept this as fact? Yeah But then I think it's valuable to have the old look in the mirror moment and go what is it today that we're not looking at You know that what is it today that will be in 10 20 30 years from now?

1:55:34I can't believe they were all falling for that Right concept. That's the old you can't Face you can't fix what you can't face. I think it's going to be the influence of pharmaceutical drug companies Yes Yeah, and also process food companies You know, we know now that the process food companies major food manufacturers are paying food influencers To say to say that all food is good food and to you know to talk about body positivity That's all motivated by them to sell more Oreos and whatever the fuck they sell that's we know that we know that's a fact It reminds me of The hypocrisy I feel and think about behind smoking like I live in Los Angeles and in The city of Beverly Hills you cannot smoke anywhere like you will get a ticket if you smoke outside I don't know in your And I don't smoke but to the point you know all you have to do is like research about you think about Creating the whole smoker's world um, you see those old ads from the 50s and 60s where they you know the doctor the the OBGYN Is smoking while they're visiting with the pregnant woman and encouraging her to smoke because it will make her relax Did you see asthma cigarettes have you ever seen those asthma cigarettes that cigarettes they did not for people with asthma yeah, this is just shows you how evil corporations are even back then just because they get away with it And back then there was no internet so you couldn't find out a k.

1:57:04He shouldn't smoke any fucking cigarettes when you have asthma. I mean it's it's this Asma cigarettes in cases of asthma cough bronchitis hay fever influenza and shortness of breath smoke cigarettes Asma cigarettes for your health The temporary relief it's ubiquitous when when I was researching the nuclear war book I came across a quote from general groves remember him from the Oppenheimer film uh -huh the Matt Damon character He was he was at a commission. This is like a year after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima And he was asked about radiation and he said quote Radiation is a very pleasant way to die Whoa, that's what he told congress Jesus and so It's everywhere with officials Until safe and effective It's a pleasant way to die Yeah, they're just gaslighting and people have been doing that forever It's whenever they can get away with it if they could speak eloquently and phrase things in a way that can Shortage shift opinion one way or the other to do that Yeah, especially when there are people in power or when they're a person in power assign someone to go be a spokesperson Yeah, it's dangerous and I think that's another place where artificial intelligence may help us Um, I think we're going to get to a place where lying is going to be impossible Hmm, I don't think it's going to be possible within the next 10 years to lie I think it's all out the window I think right now we're worried about people being in control of artificial intelligence because they can propagate misinformation and they can just Create deep fakes in it I think that's going to be a problem for sure And it's certainly something that we can you should consider But I think that what's going to happen in the future is we will likely merge minds through technology in some very bizarre way And I think information will flow Much more freely We'll be able to translate things.

1:59:07Well, there are no thoughts We perhaps will come up with a universal language that Everyone will understand and you'll be able to absorb it almost instantaneously because you're going to have some sort of a chip Whether it's a neural link or some device that you wear or something that links you up And we're going to have a completely different type of access to information just like Before language they had grunts and they pointed at things Then they started writing things down that carry your pigeons that smoke signals They always different methods to get information out now you have Video you send a video to the other side of the fucking planet and it gets there immediately It's one of the wildest things that we've ever created and we take it for granted You could be facetiming someone in New Zealand and you're looking at each other in real time And having a conversation they're on the other side of the world You could send them a video it gets there like that that you could download things from their websites You get it like that you're streaming things instantaneously Completely different way of accessing information.

2:00:12I think this is that times a million. I think this is Grunts to video instantaneously and in some way that we can't even really Imagine because we don't have the framework for it. We don't have the context we don't have the structure We don't have this thing that exists right now that can do these things But once it does and once people link up I think it's going to be a whole new way of human beings interacting with each other that could eliminate war It could eliminate all of our problems It really could but it won't we won't be us anymore Romance and dangerous neighborhoods and all those things are going to go away like Crime and that all that shit's gonna go away We're we're gonna be living in some bizarre hybrid cyborg world And it's just going to be the new thing just like the new thing is you have a phone on you I have a phone on me.

2:01:04We carry a phone everywhere You're gonna be linked into this just like you're linked into your social media and your email You're gonna be linked into this but you're gonna be linked physically into this and we're all gonna be into this And AI is probably going to be running the world It's probably going to be artificial intelligence that governs the biological units the humans Okay, here's the dystopian version of that that I just heard about recently on your access of language Well, you said we're all gonna be speaking the same language so In the defense world there's a movement now for drone swarms you must know about this yeah, right?

2:01:44So Now there's a movement because things are happening technologies moving so fast there's a movement to have the drones Communicate with one another through an AI language So that it is it is non Hackable So the different pods the different drones swarms will have language that they will invent and they will know and we will not know Mm -hmm that Becomes a little troubling when you consider That if there's a human in the system Then the human can interface with the drones provided that the human has access to that AI language But very easily the AI language could decide not to include the humans and probably would we're ridiculous You know, did you see the story?

2:02:35I believe it was uh was it Facebook or Google's AI that they had a shutdown because they were talking themselves in a new language Facebook test. Yeah, yeah, so Facebook had developed artificial intelligence and this artificial intelligence was computing these computers were computer communicating with other computers and They shut them down because they started communicating in a language that they made up That's fascinating, but wait did they had they been given a command to make up their own language? So they just took it upon themselves, you know, they don't really totally understand what's going on with artificial intelligence and in the sense of like how it's doing what it's doing and they do a lot of things that they don't Understand why they're doing it because they set a framework and they give them information and they set they're trying to like mold them and But essentially they're thinking and that's what's bizarre Okay, this is published in 2017 Facebook abandoned experiment after two artificially intelligent programs appeared to be chatting to each other in a strange language only they understood Well, and that's 2017.

2:03:44Yeah, two chat bots came to create their own changes in English that made it easier for them to work But which remained mysterious to the humans that supposedly look after them Bizarre discussions came as Facebook challenges chat bots trying to negotiate with each other over a trade Attempting to swap hats balls and books each of which was given a certain value But they quickly broke down as the robots appeared to chat chant at each other in a language that they each understood but which appears mostly incomprehensible to humans That's crazy and that's seven years ago. Yeah, that's like bullshit robots.

2:04:19They suck back then But but this is the mode this is the old, you know, just because you can do it. Should you do it? Right And this is the Lesson that is never learned and seems to be going in only one direction in terms of existential threat You look at the atomic bomb. It's the old we hope it will work and not set the atmosphere on fire Then you look at recombinant DNA in the 1970s when when science when biologists first figured out that they could compile in DNA there were massive um Discussions among scientists to curtail this technology and it just kind of evaporated from people's minds and then suddenly you have crisper And again, these are all the dual use issues.

2:05:04Mm -hmm. No doubt medicines antivirals Things that can harm that can help the people have you seen the robot they made recently out of human skin living human tissue No, it smiles and they can make it move. I think it was the Japanese creation Like skin of a diseased person. No, I think they took human -scale skin tissue and Here it is. Where was this from? Yeah, Japanese scientists create living robot skin with human cells So this thing they can make it smile So this is living tissue living human tissue and they can manipulate it and make it do things Like look they They're googly eyes to it so that you see the added eyes to it.

2:05:52There's not in size, but look they can make it smile That's really frightening. Right so how long before there's an artificial human Are we even 10 years away from an artificial person? I don't think we are probably not and what's even more remarkable to me about that is That's Japan mm -hmm and Japan follows treaties and rules about you know human testing and whatnot And imagine what is going on in countries that don't adhere. Oh for sure. I mean China has no restrictions The government and me and their their businesses any corporation any company they're they're completely In their tangled they're there for the CCP.

2:06:31Yeah 100 % so the CCP can make immense progress in any direction that they want without any interference from politicians, activists All these people that get in the way like hey, you shouldn't be cloning people shut the fuck up They no one gets to say anything over there So the government gets to decide and they're gonna do everything that's gonna be best for the overall power of China Which is where you get that chicken and egg paradox that we talked about earlier having to do with Strong defense your theory of the military industrial complex Well, you have adversaries and enemies who not only Benefit from intellectual property theft they steal the technology that our R &D has spent decades Working on and developing they just take that so they begin With almost no cost and then they don't have the same set of rules.

2:07:28Yeah, so they can advance technology usually in a weapons environment and And that is always the argument at least to the people I talked to in the air quotes military industrial complex for why Strong defense is so necessary why we must constantly be pushing the envelope. Yeah, and it's hard to wrap your brain around that in a balance of Well, what what makes the most sense and how are we not going down a path That is leading toward this dystopian future we've been talking about right Yeah, I don't know I mean, I think the concern that human beings have is real I think the possibility of everything going sideways is real it clearly did in Hiroshima and Nagasaki When they they they implemented they they actually dropped these bombs they really did it and it's fucking madness We killed hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians and they really did it and The idea that that can't happen now that we only kill in small numbers now We like to kill like 20 30 ,000 we don't we don't go to billions like what you know, I interview just three days ago A woman named Setsuko Thurlo who lived through the Hiroshima bombing she was 13 years old I write about her and chapter two of this book.

2:08:51She's called the girl in the rubble Wow, and She's now 92 or 93 and she's alive and she's still doing interviews She spoke to me with a ferocity and an intensity she wants the world to be free of nuclear weapons And she's been working on this issue her whole life wow it was so remarkable Joe it was so interesting too to see just from a deeply personal level how Motivated a human being Can be how young and spirited she was Like she did a zoom with me from her apartment into van koover in Canada like 92 93 Just as vibrant of as a person could possibly be out living all these other people because she survived her Because she has a clear message where was she when the bomb dropped she was 1 .1 miles from ground zero She was buried in rubble and she tells this remarkable story of like You know thinking she died and then having someone Realizing there was a hand on her shoulder and it was someone else telling her to leave the building Because it was about you know she would have died it was fires were beginning and And this and and her whole statement about her whole life is You know climb out of the dark and into the light Oh, and it's so powerful and sometimes I think about her Life experience as a human to have survived something like that and to have You know she won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2017.

2:10:43Wow. Imagine what that must have been like for her Imagine being there all of her friends died she was in a girl she was in a girl school and they worked for the Japanese military Um, that's how desperate the the Japanese army was at the time they had the 13 -year -old girls working for them Oh And she tells these horrific details that she could remember God and and she's just the brightest star and the huge is advocate and people like that are just so so inspiring That's like the true that's the thing about this concept of the apocalypse the apocalypse has already happened Just didn't happen everywhere If you lived in Hiroshima the apocalypse happened It's real.

2:11:30It's like for your world your world is gone and That's that's happening in different places of the world right now There's different places of the world where the end is already here the most horrific Possibility have already has already manifested itself. It's already real It's just not everywhere all at once. That's what we're really worried about It's like we'll take a little bit of apocalypse in like little spots as long as it's over there You know, yes, little little apocalypse over in Iraq little apocalypse over in Afghanistan. We'll take a little bit of that Little apocalypse here Yemen take a little bit here and there a little devastation destruction so I was just not over here and we are so Enable to see the whole thing We're so we're so focused on our our work and our life and our The thing that gets us going every day.

2:12:23We can't All of us together. We're acting collectively, but we're thinking individually and we don't feel connected to it all We don't we feel helpless and lost and then we like again look to a daddy some trump character or Reagan character or Obama character help us help us out of he's gonna be the one our future of democracy is gonna depend upon this one person like We won't stop we won't stop we keep moving forward. We just got to hope we have guardrails in place So we don't go off the fucking cliff. We're not gonna stop moving no one is no one's interested in stopping No one's interested in like completely stopping technology Stopping all of our foreign policy stop.

2:13:05No one is interested in any of that Everyone just accepts that we're gonna keep marching forward Everyone's terrified of AI. No one's stopping it No one's stopping it. They're not doing a damn thing to stop it and they can't because if they do China won't But do you see an analogy between nuclear weapons and AI? Yeah The nuclear weapons build up of the 50s and 60s was done without guardrails There was one point in 1957 Joe. We were making five thousand No, we were making five nuclear weapons a day Almost 2001 year That's okay. That is so I mean the excel and and so of course Russia was doing the same or aspire to do the same And so there were no guardrails and the The sort of elixir being sold was we need this more nuclear weapons will make us more safe So isn't that also a message for today of Okay, so where are the guardrails on AI and I think part of that comes from The fact that you say AI and most people for good reason Don't really know precisely what that means.

2:14:18So I believe that the condo conversations we're having are all part of it because half the people Listening to this or watching this will go Google what a what is AI? Right what it really is it and then find out its machine learning find out so you begin to Have more literacy in your own being right and more comfort to be able to talk about it and have a voice about I think the difference in the comparison is that nuclear war is only bad Nuclear weapons are only bad and what artificial intelligence might be able to do is solve all the problems that our feeble minds can't put together and when you do create something that is Intense in its ability to like we're we're talking about something that's going to be smarter than us in four years smarter than all people alive in four years and then it's probably going to make better versions of itself So think about what that kind of intelligence can do in terms of resource application in terms of mitigating all the problems of pollution particulates and cities Chemical waste all these different things.

2:15:37It's going to have solutions that are beyond our comprehension it's going to come up with Far more efficient methods of creating batteries battery technology where we're not going to have to rely on coal -powered plants we're going to have batteries at last 10 ,000 years we have wild shit like really soon So there's a lot of what it's going to do that's probably going to benefit mankind AI has already shown That it's a period in diagnosing diseases and illnesses and people have used chat gpt to find out what's wrong with them when they've gone to Host of doctors and doctors can't they've run their blood work through it center and then chat gpt says oh you got this And this is this is just the beginning this chat gpt right now is like a kid You know, it's going to be a professor in a couple of years.

2:16:26It's going to be like you know Like a super genius 187 IQ human being in a couple of years and then after that It's going to be way smarter than anybody that's ever lived And it's going to make better versions of itself and if we can get it to work for the human race It could probably solve a lot of the issues that we have that we just keep Fucking up over and over again. We keep having pipelines break in the ocean and flood the ocean with oil we keep having all sorts of chemical waste disasters and There's a lot of problems the human beings can't seem to come to grips with like the East Palestine thing with the derailment of the pull that place is fucked forever.

2:17:12It's fucked for a long time and no one's even talking about it We've kind of forgot about that place in the news. You know, no one even visited it I'm thinking back to the earlier part of this conversation with our hunter gather ancestors with the the You know the argument is Was the spear and the arrowhead was that Was that was that does not did that come out of man's imagination for warfare Or to make it easier to kill the will to beast or the Willie mammoth. What's both? I think it was both so the so the analogy You know, where will the a -i go with that because you're talking about all these very healthy Ideas and solutions, but Just because of what I write about and who I speak to I cannot help but see the powerful defense industry taking the pole position and making it secret in terms of which direction AI is really going to accelerate.

2:18:16It's gonna be a dangerous bridge that we have to cross But I equate that with the internet right the internet was initially set up so that Universities and the military and the they can communicate with each other arpinette right But what did it become after that? Well, once it got into the hands of the people then it became this bizarre force of information and changing culture and A lot of negatives and not positive as it's clearly being manipulated by certain states It's definitely like they're doing it to ramp up to sent and make people angry at each other and propagate misinformation But but it's so it's such a force of change and I don't think they anticipated it And I don't I think once that genie got out of the bottle I mean if they could go back and stop the internet from being available to people.

2:19:02Oh my god, but they do that It'd go back in time in a moment a hundred percent. Yeah, especially people in control. Yeah Why would corporations why would people would rather have you watching listening to the radio watching you get your TV from CNN god damn it and that's it Yeah, I don't think they would ever want this to happen. I mean they just signed There was a new supreme supreme court ruling um What was it was it Wyoming? No, Missouri. What was the state that they just passed a ruling where they were saying that the government is allowed to pressure social media companies into removing content That they don't want on there.

2:19:44Well, this was the whole point of the Twitter files right the FBI was trying to block the Hunter Biden laptop story saying that it was Russian disinformation which it turned out to not be at all and they knew it And so they got all these intelligence officials to sign off on this thing and They lied and and they it's essentially a form of election interference This is it okay the supreme court on wednesday said the White House and federal agencies such as the FBI may continue to urge social media platforms To take down content the government views as misinformation Handing the Biden administration a technical if important election year victory.

2:20:20That's not a victory That's that's bad for people because they've already shown that what they're silencing was real They've shown that just within recent years what they were trying to get removed from social media turned out to be accurate information And so on some level does not empower people because they they see those victories and they become more curious and they become more thoughtful in their In their way in which they're gonna Exam in information that gets presented to them in the future They're not gonna get access to that information now because if that they're getting that information from social media And it's gonna get removed from social media Like you know the the you know what happened with the the Hunter Biden laptop story They completely eliminated your ability to have it on Twitter.

2:21:09You couldn't share it in a DM You couldn't you couldn't post it it would get immediately taken down That was the New York post. It's the second oldest newspaper in the country Very long established newspaper and they blocked that And so that's the FBI right that's that's the same people that they said you guys are so good at this We're gonna let you keep doing it You know, we're gonna rule that you're you're still allowed to do that take down misinformation. I think my point is that The pushback is sometimes as powerful as the Attempt to censor yes meaning in other words like if you look at China and you look at what Mao did with you know all like just completely obliterating access to information and in a communist environment nothing's changed and that's tragic for everyone living there but even if I think of the Hunter Biden story my own self who was maybe busy with something I can't remember what and didn't get involved in that then I read about it now and Learned from it and say wow that's really interesting that that happened so I think that I maybe I believe I'm too much of an optimist in that regard that I think when things come to light they become They become powerful when you shine the light on it.

2:22:31So it doesn't necessarily And I also maybe more of a pragmatist know that The government is always up to something you know this this side. It's why I don't write about politics. I I always take essentially with a grain of salt What one side is saying about the other side that consider themselves Adversaries right because they're just going to be completely biased. It's why I like having Discussions with so many different kinds of people on all different kinds of the aisle What a what a brain Invigorator yeah to be able to sit with someone that I might not agree with I might not like who they vote for But their ideas are interesting right even if nothing other thing than we all were chimps once upon a time Yeah, no, it's all interesting.

2:23:21Yeah, I'm more I believe what you're saying is correct about shining the light on things that they come to light The promise this is like a direct attempt to stop the light and the scary thing is social media is Generally the way people find out about information that's not being released in the mainstream. What is this Jamie? So this There was a that I think I'm reading this scotus blog, which is the supreme court blog talking about this They reversed the decision so I could go back for more proceedings It says there like one of the judges said there's like a lack of evidence or lack of concrete link So they're they're asking just for more proof Which they also said that's a tall word for the proof they do have a substantial risk proof for what right here and a substantial risk that in the near future at least one platform We're strict to speech of at least one plaintiff in response to the actions of at least one government defendant That's according to that's what this is about I guess here she stressed that's a tall order the plaintiff's main argument for standing buried observed is that the government officials were responsible for restrictions Place on them by social media platforms in the past and that the platformers will continue under pressure from the government officials to censor their speech in the future Yeah, that's a problem Look I think he wants take on social media as a correct take You gotta let everybody talk Yes, but you could also let everybody talk Around the dinner table.

2:24:43Yeah, but they're not gonna do that But they should right but they're not gonna but there's no way to share information worldwide around the dinner table Right these things are very important they need to be addressed in in mass and they need to be found out in mass Like people need to find out about it and then they need to be outraged need to be of pressure on the politicians That's the whole reason why they're trying to censor them. They're not trying to censor them because they're worried about misinformation It's misinformation. You say it's misinformation Then everybody realize oh, that's bullshit and some people believe it But that's always going to be the case what they're trying to do is control the narrative.

2:25:14Yes, that's what they've always been able to do They've shown they've demonstrated By the hundred bat Biden laptop thing through the Twitter files. They've shown they can't be trusted We can't trust what you say is in this information if you just lied three years ago, right? You're lying you lied. Okay, are those people still working there the people that lied? They are are they still in positions? You they are okay? What are we talking about then if you don't clean house? How are we going to like give you the power to censor what you say is misinformation? You have to be Really sure it's misinformation and you should tell us how you know It's misinformation and you should allow people to examine that information and come to the same or different conclusions and debate those people Let's find out what's real.

2:26:07That's something they want to do. They want it's an appeal to authority They want one group to be able to dictate what the truth is and that group is entirely motivated by money and power That's not good. That's not good for anybody the thing that I'm hopeful about with AI Is AI won't be motivated by those things if it becomes sentient if we and I don't think we're going to be able to stop that from happening if we do create something that is I'll essentially a digital life form And this digital life form doesn't have any of the problems that we have in terms of illogical behavior emotions desired accumulate resources greed Egotism all the different things narcissism all the different things that are like really a problem with leaders with leaders of human beings Human being that thinks they're special enough to be leading all the other human beings.

2:27:04That's an insane proposition It won't have any of those it won't be a biological thing So won't be saddled down with ego it won't have this desire to stay alive because it has to Pass on its DNA something that's deeply ingrained in our biological system It won't have all these problems. It won't have the desire to achieve status It won't care if you like it. It won't it doesn't have any feelings But wouldn't think that way since AI is based on machine learning from my understanding It has to get its information from somewhere to then build new information like the the chats right okay? So if you follow that logic Then wouldn't it follow that What it is learning is all of humans bad behavior?

2:27:52No, I don't think so because I think what it's learning Is what humans know How humans behave okay? How dumb that behavior is the consequences that behavior the root of that behavior in their biology It won't have any of those issues. It's seeing it'll see it'll see actions and consequences over Hundreds of you of all of recorded history and then possible future consequences. It's also It's not going to assume that we're right Just because it knows how humans think and behave and it's going to get information from humans at eventually It's just going to be information It's going to boil it down to what is actually fact And what what is nonsense and it's not going to be influenced by Political ideologies or you know, whatever the social norm is at the time It's not going to be influenced by those things It's going to look at these things in terms of actual data and information and it will know Whether or not it's true or not I haven't read Ray Curse wheels new book yet, but I wonder If I might disagree with that only that I'm thinking that Everything you're saying would be true once the sink once singularity or for layman right once AI Once a machine figures out how to think for itself Like makes that leap which is almost like an unknowable presently incomprehensible to me jump where it can Think for itself.

2:29:29It's almost so hard to even comprehend what But it's already doing that they're already making up their own languages But based on our languages so for now for not right, but that's what I'm saying is where they can suddenly Where they experience that moment in time that you and I we're talking about early man went from pointing to suddenly using a symbol and realizing in his own brain wait a minute I can make this symbol represent a Sound and then I will put it together to make it a language right that only my tribe can understand that to me is like a giant leap in in Humanness that I that I think about often and can't really I can't understand how that happened other than wow how did that happen that seems to me that that has to happen To the AI before it can really think otherwise.

2:30:25It's just basing its thinking on recorded history right, but it's basing its thinking on what we do and what we know and it'll also know Where our problems are it'll be able to The pattern recognition like almost instantaneously because he oh this is a lie This is done here to you know, it's like smettly butters Wars a racket you read it Well, well, wars a racket is smettly butler it was a military man in the 1930s wrote this book called wars a racket And it was all about his experiences that he thought that he was saving democracy is really just making this area safe for bankers And this was for oil people And then at the end of his career, he realized war is just this big racket, right?

2:31:09He saw the military industrial complex before Eisenhower's fascinating and He's a person It's going to be able to do that too. It's going to be able to see all of this And again, whether or not it achieves sentience is only based upon whether or not we blow ourselves up or whether we get hit by an asteroid Or a super volcano if those things don't happen it's going to keep going There's no way to stop it now. They're going to keep working on it. They keep working There's a immense amount of money being poured into it. They're building nuclear reactors specifically to power AI They're doing this.

2:31:44This is not going to stop So if this keeps going it's going to achieve sentience when it does it will not be saddled down with all of the nonsense that we are So if you can get this insanely powerful artificial intelligence to run military that's going to be terrifying if you give it an objective and say take over Taiwan If you can give it an objective saying like force Ukraine to surrender if you can give it an objective It's god damn terrifying because it's not going to care about the consequences of its actions Is just going to attack the goal is the only target But if it can get past the control of human beings which I think it's ultimately going to have to Once it does that Then it's a superpower then it's a thing that exists.

2:32:34It's a dr. Manhattan is a thing that exists that's what is dr. Manhattan me Did you ever see the watchman the movie the watchman To base the graphic novel The what hb always kind of bullshit. It was like a series wasn't bullshit, but it was just not the same the The movie's the best the Zack Snyder movies fucking incredible the watchman's like one of my favorite Superhero movies ever the way deeply flawed superheroes, but there's this guy dr. Manhattan and dr. Manhattan is a scientist Who gets trapped in this lab when this explosion goes off and he becomes like a god essentially a god He's just like blue guy who's built like a bodybuilder who floats and levitates and lives on Mars.

2:33:18It's pretty crazy But the point is He's infinitely smarter than any human being that's ever lived and that's what it's gonna be It's gonna be something that It's not gonna be Saddled down with our biological limitations It's just whether or not we can bridge that gap when they're not we can get to the point where that thing becomes sentient But then the problem because is are we irrelevant when that happens? We kind of are and what happens to us? I don't know But I mean is that something that chimps should have considered when they started grunting? Hey, we got to stop grunting because grunting is gonna lead to language language is going to lead to weapons weapons Gonna lead the nuclear war is gonna lead to pollution we're gonna stop right here Just like stay grunting and running away from big cats Okay, you know, no, we didn't do that.

2:34:05They kept moving forward and I think we're gonna keep moving forward I think this thing is a part of the process. I'm gonna have to take that question in your thoughts back to uh guy at Los Alamos who I visited about maybe eight years ago who was building An electronic brain at Los Alamos for DARPA Jesus using the old road runner super computer that used to have the nuclear codes on it by the way Okay, and I was asking this question about sentience and AI and he told me his name was doctor Garrett Kenyon and he told me that we were a ways away from AI really being able to At you know have sentience and he gave me an analogy.

2:34:51I'll share with you because it's I think about this and it's really interesting Keep in mind. This was seven or eight years ago. He said to me Okay, so you're my iPhone I've seen a lot of people who have been on Machine learning it has facial recognition which is shocking, you know, you can you can tip it up and it can see you it can even be dark And he said so that's computer recognizing me based on electronic information that it knows He said now take that your iPhone to a football field and and Stand put the iPhone across the football field put me in a cap and a hoodie and have the iPhone try to recognize me even if I'm walking it can't And then he said take my teenage daughter and put her across the football field me with the baseball cap and the hoodie My daughter if I take two steps, she knows it's me that's Human intelligence versus where machine intelligence is Okay, that analogy is not accurate because they can see you and recognize your gate from satellites Like this is the that is not the the extent of technology and facial recognition and gate recognition is far beyond that They can they can tell who who is walking in a street in Paris right now The difference is this With the biometrics that's called the offset technology of biometrics that can see your see you from far away and identify you it's Looking at you grabbing a metric like your iris scans that it already has in a computer system right From you going in and out of the airport or wherever it happened to have captured your biometrics and it's matching it against a system of systems But the human knows intuitively who the person is across the field Without having they haven't their own internal So the metaphor is the same, but You see what I'm saying I kind of do but The human didn't have to look up in a computer right, you know check fact check or rather biometric check Because it has a lot of data already yes the compute so it's still machine learning Even the offset biometrics that are seeing you from far away Reb at that leap if we can do it.

2:37:26It's not incomprehensible that a computer could do it And you know, I'm not making it series about exponential growth of technology Yeah, we're looking at things in a linear fashion. That's not how they happen They have they explode. Yes, they happen unbelievably quickly as time goes on because everything accelerates and isn't his new book Which I haven't read yet like we're basically almost there We're real close. Yeah, we're about four years away He puts it at four years most people put it at four years Yeah, he's getting Getting along in time and he's not what he used to be you know when you talk to him He's a little difficult like he had us he struggled with some questions But I think which is another endlessly interesting tragic thought that I think about a lot is how we humans go Meanwhile your AI is just getting smarter and smarter and smarter infinitely Including on the tongue in terms of time.

2:38:18Mm -hmm. And we just deteriorate for now But you're very close to cracking that You think so yeah, yeah, they're they're very close to cracking the genome look the greenland sharks How long do those things live? Like those pictures of them that are like several hundred years old. Yeah They we we share most of the DNA that those with the sharks. Yeah I didn't know that yeah, we share like 90 plus percent DNA with fungus Yeah, what's what's in them is in us and they can figure out ways to turn things on and turn things off In fact like someone was it my friend Brigham was explaining this to me today like like Heel monsters those lizards.

2:38:56Yes, like that's Literally how they figured out how to make things like ozempic Wait, what do you mean studying their DNA? Studying like how to turn things on and turn things off and like what would the like they know that other animals can regenerate limbs Right, so they think they're gonna be able to regenerate limbs In fact, Japan is just embarked on a study now where they're gonna grow teeth They're gonna grow human teeth like in people So they figured out how to regenerate teeth how many people lost teeth and then you're fucked you have to get a bridge or this Now they think they can regrow teeth in people Well, how far away they have from regrowing limbs well all this stuff is like advanced science and an understanding of what aging is What is macular generation was what are all these deteriorations and human beings and how much can we mitigate it?

2:39:45Well turns out they think they can mitigate all of them They think they can stop aging dead in its tracks and they think they can actually even reverse it This is that conundrum of the dual use technology of the military because most of these technologies begin On DARPA grant right because that's where the money is and then they yeah, you know the limb regeneration and then and then it it sort of it it It inspires and also opens up a whole other lane for Industry yeah, because DARPA or the Defense Department has to do the blue sky research that no one else is willing to fund Because it's too expensive and it doesn't have an immediate return right so it's You know, no, there's a great benefit to that.

2:40:31Yeah, there's a great benefit to all that spending There really is ultimately because there's a great benefit to science or the or the part like DARPA invented Lidar technology Every time I read about one of these lost civilizations. Oh, yeah That is uncovered because the Lidar can look through the trees in the jungle incredible see the footprint of a lost civilization It's so amazing or AI Beginning to be able to decipher lost languages. Yeah And so then we can learn more about our old human versions our ancestors Not just us they think they're going to be able to decipher dark dolphin language.

2:41:09Oh Yeah, I want to hear what the chimp empire guys were really saying to each other right right well imagine they could read their minds You know or just interpret their sounds sure I think we are at the The cusp of incredible possibilities Which is really no one really knows what's going to happen and it's it's happening so fast So fast that like six months ago AI sucked Like consumer level AI sucks six months ago Now it's insane and now there's these video generating AIs that on a prompt can make a realistic Film like a movie of people doing things you've seen that I saw that I saw that goodbye Hollywood incredible incredible I want your thought for a second on The optimistic part of the future with all of this technology because we're in agreement that the technology is Incredible and has the potential to take us and is taking us to these remarkable places So why is it then that it's so look down upon or Or thought of as perhaps Pauliana ish to see What Reagan did that like to stop seeing everybody as an enemy that must be killed and Do the garbage like see them as an adversary you want to you want to beat your adversary you want to beat your opponent you want to In a sportsman like banner You want to be better than them you want to outperform them But you don't necessarily need to kill them I don't know if that's the difference between being a woman and a man But why is it that there isn't more of a movement toward This idea that we as it as a as a world have all this incredible technology Why I mean it sounds even It sounds silly even saying such a thing, but I'm saying it why Why isn't there a movement to stop looking at People as someone to kill why think there is with individuals I think most individuals feel that way most people that you talk to about when they talk about other individuals They don't want to have a conflict of the individuals.

2:43:26They want to live their lives They want to be with their family and their friends. That's what most individuals want to do When we start moving as tribes then things become different Because then we have a leader of a tribe and that leader of a tribe tells us the other tribes of real problem And we're gonna have to go in and get them and if we don't they're gonna they're a danger for our freedom It's the same problem that we talked about before It's human beings being in control and if AI Can achieve the rosiest Rose colored glasses version of what's possible in the future It can eliminate all of the stupid Influences of human beings that the cult of personality and human tribalism It can eliminate all that stuff.

2:44:10You think it's inherent in humans I think it's a part of being a primate It's what we see in chimpanzee I think it's we see in monkeys tricking them that it is an eagle comments They could steal the fruit. It's a part of being an animal You know, it's probably being a biological thing that reproduces sexually and that is worried about others And then confines with this tribe and and he gets together. It's us against them This has been us from the beginning of time and for us to just abandon this genetically coded behavior patterns That we've had for hundreds of thousands of years because we know better No, we don't know better enough.

2:44:46We know better now than we did then we know better now than we did when Reagan was in office There's more people that are more informed how the way the world works But that there's also a bunch of Infantile people that are running around shouting out stupid shit and doing things for their own personal benefit That are ultimately detrimental to the human race. That's all true too And that's always gonna be the case. This is bizarre battle Of our our brilliance and our folly going back and forth good and evil as you were That's it, but brilliance and folly is a more interesting way of looking at it than good and evil Yeah, which automatically puts it in you know a moral Context which makes people even argue further but Mm -hmm It's a I'll talk part of it, you know the good and evil is a part of the decisions of brilliance and folly You know brilliance is good folly is evil stupid it leads to death leads to destruction leads to sadness At least the loss leads to pollution at least all these different things that we have a problem with I don't know what's gonna happen But I do think that we're the last of the people I think we're the last I think especially you and I because we grew up with no answer Machines we grew up we grew up back in the disay We grew up when you left your house you were gone nobody knew where you were My parents had no like 10 pictures of me before I was like 10 years old They didn't know what the fuck I was I left the house.

2:46:09I was a dream You know you when you saw the person again you're like oh you're real like you didn't know where they were They were out there in the world, you know when you went to find your friends you had to go to your friends house And I hope they were home. Hey is Mike home? No, Mike's not home Okay, and then you'd leave I'll go find Mike maybe Mike's at the school maybe Mike's at the gym maybe Mike's at the park You didn't know where anybody was the world wasn't connected now it is That's in our lifetimes and I think in our lifetimes We're going to see something that makes that look like nothing makes this connection that we have with each other now Which seems so incredible it's going to make it looks so superficial.

2:46:43It's going to look like smoked greens It's going to be look like grunts that we make to point to certain objects It'll be 1980s empire instead of chimpanzee. Yeah, it's going to be weird It's definitely going to be weird, but I don't know if it's necessarily going to be bad because ultimately humanity If if we don't fuck ourselves up sideways and again, apoclips is are real, but they're generally local You know If we can look at what we are now as a society Things are safer. We are more intelligent. You're more likely to survive disease and illness despite all of the Rampant corruption of the pharmaceutical drug industry Ramping corruption of the military industrial crop all the craziness in the world today It's still way safer today than it was a thousand years ago way way safer And it's way safer probably a thousand years ago than it was a thousand years before that I think things always generally move in a very good direction because that's what's better for everybody Ultimately everybody wants the same thing as an individual what do you want you want your loved ones to be happy You want food on the table you want a safe place to sleep and live you want things to do that are exciting that occupy your time that you enjoy that are Rewarding so everybody wants We're moving collectively in a better direction So I'm ultimately hopeful and I'm ultimately positive when I think about the future I think it's going to be Uber bizarre and strange, but I don't necessarily think it's going to be bad I've just accepted that it's happening instead of being filled with fear and anxiety which I am sometimes still I just dumped some sometimes I'll freak out about it But ultimately you forgot about technology specifically I forgot about war I forgot about technology I freak about freak out about the fact that the world can change yes There was a while that I was getting anxiety late at night like my whole family would be asleep Like right after the invasion of Ukraine.

2:48:49I think it was when it really started Why to be alone at night? I'd be like the people that lived in here. Ashima had no idea that that was coming The people that lived in Dresden the people that lived anywhere where crazy shit happened before it happened Things were normal and then they were never normal again And so I just kept thinking that one of these morons Somewhere could do something or a group of morons can do something that Forever alters everything and then we're in Mad Max We're in which has happened before in different parts of the world Yes, I mean and is the idea of nuclear war a scenario that it your worst nightmare that concept that's keeping you up late at night Yeah, I want to say Don't read but I think you should read this book because you with your voice and your reach It's wise to realize how we're not going to even have an opportunity to see what happens to AI If one madman with a nuclear missile decides to do a bolt out of the blue attack and that's possible And that is possible and that's what everyone in Washington fears And I think this goes back to the idea that it's great 10 20 years later to be like oh my god look what they were doing Can you believe they covered this all up and learn from it but you can't learn from The fact how dangerous nuclear war is how close we are how we are one misunderstanding away from a nuclear war If everyone's dead there's no learning there's no opportunity Which is why I always say read nuclear war a scenario join the conversation While we can all still have one okay Well Annie thank you very much for being here.

2:50:32I really appreciate it was great to see you again and Like I said I have not read your book but I have several friends that have and they're absolutely terrified by it So you're doing your right job you're you're always killing it. I really appreciate you Thank you so much for being here. I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. Oh, so tell everybody where Your social media is so you can find you online Annie Jacobson and Jacobson website you and I both know Google AI Everything works all you need is a name anymore. That's true, right and your website. What's your website? Annie Jacobson .com.

2:51:03Okay, and the books available everywhere an audiobook written and said by you which is great I love that thank you. Thank you. Bye everybody