#2311 - Jeremie & Edouard Harris

23:57Oh, dude. I mean, salt typhoon. They're watching all our dick pics. Yeah. They're definitely seeing mine. Which salt typhoon? Oh, sorry, yeah, yeah. So is this big Chinese cyber attack? Actually, this starts to get us to kind of the broader... Salt typhoon. You know. Yeah, guys. They have the coolest names for their cyber operations. That's a great name. Salt typhoon. They got to stop. You know what? It's kind of like when people go out and do like an awful thing, like a school shooting or something. And they're like, oh, let's talk about it. You know, if you give it a cool name, like now the Chinese are definitely going to do it again.

24:28Anyway, that's... Because they have a cool name. Yeah, that's definitely about... Salt typhoon. Salt typhoon. Pre -dope. Yeah. But it's this thing where basically... In the 3G protocol that was set up years ago, law enforcement agencies included backdoors intentionally. To be able to access comms, you know, theoretically if they got a warrant and so on. And well, you introduce a backdoor. You have adversaries like China, who are wicked good at cyber. They're going to find and exploit those backdoors. And now basically they're sitting there. And they had been for... Some people think like maybe a year or two before it was really discovered.

25:03And just a couple of months ago, they kind of go like, oh, cool. Like, we got fogging in like China, all up in our shit. And this is like... This is like flip a switch for them. And like, you turn off the power or water to a state. Or like you fucking... Yeah. Well sorry, this is... Sorry, salt typhoon that was about just sitting on the like basically telecoms now. Well, that's the telecom one. Yeah, yeah. It's not the... But yeah, I mean, that's another thing. There's another thing where they're doing that too. Yeah. And so this is kind of where... Well, what we've been looking into over the last year is this question of how...

25:35What is... If you're going to make like a Manhattan project for superintelligence, right? Which is... I mean, that's what we're texting about like way back and then... Actually, funnily enough, we shifted our day for security reasons. But if you're going to do a Manhattan project for superintelligence, what does that have to look like? What does the security game have to look like to actually make it so that China's not all up in your shit? Like today, it is extremely clear that at the world's top AI labs, like all that shit is being stolen. Like there is not a single lab right now that isn't being spied on successfully based on everything we've seen by the Chinese.

26:14Can I ask you this? Or we spying on the Chinese as well? That's a big problem. Do you want to... We're definitely doing some stuff. But in terms of the relative balance between the two, we're not where we need to be. They spied on us better than we spied on them. Because like we... They build all our shit. They spilled all our shit. Well, that was the Huawei situation, right? Yeah, and then it's also the... Oh my god, it's the... Like if you look at the power grid, so this is now public. But if you look at like transformer substations, so these are the... Essentially, anyway, they're a crucial part of the electrical grid.

26:50And there's really like... Basically, all of them have components that are made in China. China is known to have planted backdoors, like trojens into those substations to fuck with our grid. The thing is, when you see a salt typhoon, when you see like big Chinese cyber attack or a big Russian cyber attack, you're not seeing their best. These countries do not go and show you like their best cards out the gate. You show the bare minimum that you can without tipping your hand at the actual exquisite capabilities you have. Like we've... The way that one of the... The people who's been walking us through all this really well explained it is like...

27:29The philosophy is you want to learn without teaching. You want to use what is the lowest level capability that has the effect on after. So that's what that is. I'll give an example. Like I'll tell you a story that's kind of like... It's a public story and it's from a long time ago. But it kind of gives a flavor of like how far these countries will actually go when they're playing the game for fucking real. So it's 1945. America and the Soviet Union are like best pals because they've just defeated the Nazis, right? To celebrate that victory in the coming new world order that's going to be great for everybody, the children of the Soviet Union give us a gift to the American ambassador in Moscow this beautifully carved wooden seal of the United States of America.

28:16Beautiful thing. Ambassador is thrilled with it. He hangs it up on behind his desk in his private office. You can see where I'm going with this probably, but yeah, seven years later, 1952, finally occurs to us like, let's take a town and actually examine this. So they dig into it. And they find this incredible contraption in it called a cavity resonator. And this device doesn't have a power source, doesn't have a battery, which means when you're sweeping the office for bugs you're not going to find it. What it does instead is it's designed, that's it. That's it. It's the thing they call it the thing.

28:56And what this cavity resonator does is it's basically designed to reflect radio radiation back to a receiver to listen to all the noises and conversations and talking in the ambassador's private office. And so how's it doing without a power source? So that's what they do. So the Soviets, for seven years, parked a van across the street from the embassy had a giant fucking microwave antenna aimed right at the ambassador's office and were like zapping it and looking back at the reflection and literally listening to every single thing he was saying. And the best part was when the embassy staff was like, we're going to go and like sweep the office for bugs periodically.

29:37They'd be like, hey, Mr. Ambassador, we're about to sweep your office for bugs. And the ambassador was like, cool, please proceed and go and sweep my office for bugs. And the KGB dudes in the van were like, just turn it off. Sounds like they're going to sweep the office for bugs. Let's turn off our giant microwave antenna. And they kept at it for seven years. It was only ever discovered because there was this like British radio operator who was just, you know, doing his thing, changing his dial and he's like, oh, shit. Like, is that the ambassador if I can talk randomly? So the thing is, oh, and actually, sorry, one other thing about that.

30:08If you heard that story and you're kind of thinking into yourself, hang on a second. They were shooting like microwaves at our ambassador 24, seven for seven years. Whoa. Doesn't that seem like it might like fry his genitals or something? Yeah, or something like that? You're supposed to have a lead vest. And the answer is, yes. Yes. Yes. And this is something that came up in our investigation just from every single person who was like, who was filling us in and who dialed in and knows what's up. They're like, look, so you got to understand like our adversaries. If they need to like give you cancer in order to rip your ship off of your laptop, they're going to give you some cancer.

30:51Did he get cancer? I don't know specifically about the ambassador, but like it's also... That's also, so we're limited what we can say. There's actually people that you talk to later that can go in in more detail here. But all their technology like that, like kind of lower power. So you're less likely to look at that. Nowadays, we live in a different world. The guy that invented that microphone invented, his last name is Thereman. He invented this instrument called the Thereman, which is a fucking really interesting thing. Oh, he's just moving his hands. Yeah, your hands control it, wave it over this.

31:24What? It's a fucking wild instrument. Have you seen this before, Jamie? Yeah, I saw Juicy J playing it yesterday on Instagram. He's like practicing. It's a fucking cool ass thing. That's pretty good at it, too, though. Yeah, yeah. There's two, both hands are controlling it by moving in and out, and space, X, Ys. I honestly don't really know how the fuck it works, but I've seen it. Oh, that is wild. It's also a lot harder to do than it seems. So the Americans tried to replicate this for years and years and years without really succeeding. And anyway, that's all kind of part of it. I have a friend who used to work for intelligence agency and he was working in Russia.

32:03And they found that the building was bugged with these super sophisticated bugs that operate their power came from the swaying of the building. Yeah. How? I've never heard that one before. Just like your walk, like I have a mechanical watch on, so when I move my watch, it powers up the spring and it keeps the watch. That's an automatic mechanical watch works. They figured out a way to just by the subtle swaying of the building in the wind. That was what was powering this listening device. So this is the thing, right? I mean, what the fuck? The things that nation states. What's up, Jamie? Google says that's what was power in this thing.

32:46The great seal bug, which is the biggest thing. Is another one? Oh, this is... So you can actually see in that video, I think there was a YouTube... Same kind of thing, Jamie? I typed in Russia's spy bug building sway. The thing is what pops up. The thing. Which is what we were just talking about. Oh, that thing. So that's powered the same way by the sway of the building. I know. I think it was powered by radio frequency emission. So there may be another thing related to it. Not much, but... Maybe Google's a little confused. Maybe the word sway is what's throwing it off. But it's... No, but it's a great catch -in.

33:25The only reason we even know that, too, is that when the U2s were flying over Russia, they had a U2 that got shot down in 1960. The Russians go like, oh, like frigging Americans like spying on us. What the fuck? I thought we were buddies or what? Well, it's the 65. So they just think that. And then the Americans are like, okay, bitch, look at this. And they brought out the seal. And that's how it became public. It was basically like the response to the Russians saying like, you know... Wow. Yeah. Yeah, they're all dirty. Oh, yeah. Everybody spying on everybody. That's the thing. And I think they probably all have some sort of UFO technology.

33:59We need to talk about that. We need to turn off our mics and... I'm 99 % sure a lot of that shows up. You need to talk to some of the... I'll be talking to people. Oh, oh, I'm... Yeah. I've been talking to a lot of people. There might be some other people that you'd be interested in not chatting with. I would very much be interested. Here's the problem. Some of the people I'm talking to, I'm positive, they're talking to me to give me bullshit. Ah. Because I... Are we on your list? No, you guys are not the list. But there's certain people who are like, okay, maybe most of this is true, but some of it's not on purpose.

34:34There's that. And I guarantee you, I know, I talk to people that don't tell me the truth. Yeah. Yeah. It's an interesting problem in like all Intel, right? Because there's always... The mix of incentives is so fucked. Like, the adversary is trying to add noise into the system. You got pockets of people within the government that have different incentives from other pockets. And then you have top secret clearance and all sorts of other things that are going on. Yeah. Yeah. One guy that texted me is like, the guy telling you that they aren't real is literally involved in these meetings. So stop.

35:03Just stop listening to him. It's like one of the... One of the techniques, right, is like, is actually to inject so much noise at the end. Don't know what's what and you can't follow. So this actually... This happened in the COVID thing, right? The lab leak versus the natural, like, wet market thing. Yeah. So I remember there was a debate that happened about what was the origin of COVID. This was like a few years ago. It was like an 18 or 20 -hour long YouTube debate just like punishingly long. And it was like... There was a $100 ,000 bet either way on who would win. And it was like, lab leak versus wet market.

35:42And at the end of the 18 hours, the conclusion was like... One of them won, but the conclusion was like, it's basically 50 -50 between them. And then I remember like hearing that and talking to some folks and being like, hang on a second. So you got to believe that whether it came from a lab or whether it came from a wet market, one of the top three priorities of the CCP from a propaganda standpoint is like, don't get fucking blamed for COVID. And that means they're putting like one to $10 billion in some of their best people on a global propaganda effort to cover up evidence and confuse and blah, blah, blah.

36:18You really think that you're 50%, like that confusion isn't coming from that incredibly resource effort. Like they know what they're doing. Particularly when different biologists and virologists who weren't attached to anything, we're talking about like the cleavage points and this different aspects of the virus that appeared to be genetically manipulated. The fact that there was only one spillover event, not multiple ones. None of it made any sense. All of it seemed like some sort of a genetically engineered virus. It seemed like gain of function research. And their early emails were talking about that.

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38:25Employing more than 275 ,000 Americans in good paying jobs, delivering for the nation because we believe in the promise of America and the people who make it great. To learn more, we deliver for america .org, paid for by the American Beverage Association. And then everybody changed their opinion. And even the taboo, right, against talking about it through that lens. Oh, yeah, total propaganda. It's racist. Which is crazy because nobody thought the Spanish flu was racist and it didn't even really come from Spain. Yeah, that's true, yeah. Came from Kentucky. I didn't know that. Yeah, I think it was Kentucky of Virginia.

39:00Where did the Spanish flu originate from? But nobody got mad. Well, that's because the state of Kentucky has an incredibly sophisticated propaganda machine. Yeah. And pinned it on my dad in Kentucky. But I think it was an agricultural thing. Kansas. Thank you. Goddamn, Kansas. I've always said that. I've always said that. I've always said that. I've always said that. H1N1 strain that had genes of avian origin. By the way, people always talk about the Spanish flu. It was around today that just everybody would just get antibiotics and we'd be fine. So this whole mass die off of people. It would be like the Latinx flu.

39:39And we would be the Latinx flu. The Latinx flu. The Latinx flu. So that one didn't stick at all. That didn't stick at all. Latinx. No. There's a lot of people like claiming they never used it and they pull up old videos of them. Yeah. Well, that's a dumb one. Like it's literally a gendered language you fucking idiot. Yeah. Like you can't just de -spat the Latinx flu. It went out for a while though. Like it was short. If everything goes for a while. Yeah. Sort of think about how long they did lobotomies. Hmm. They did lobotomies for 50 fucking years before they went age. Maybe we should just stop doing this.

40:10It was like the same attitude that got that got Turin chemically castrated, right? I mean, actually. Yeah, let's just get in there and fuck around a bit and see. Well, this is before the SSRIs and also it's of other interventions. But when what was the year lobotomies? I believe it stopped in 67. Was it 50 years? I think you said 70 last time and that was correct when I pulled up. 70 years? 1970. Oh, I think it was 67. I like how this has come up so many times that Jamie's like, I think last time you said it. Well, it's 70. It comes up all the time because it's one of those things. It's insane.

40:42You can't just trust the medical staff, which is officially 67. It says maybe one more in 70. Oh, god. Oh, he died in 72. When did they start doing it? When they, I think they started in the 30 or the 20s, rather. 35. That's pretty falsy. You know, the first 24 sky who did a lobotomy. Yeah. It says 24. Freeman arrives. Watch DC direct labs. 35. They tried it first. A lobotomy. A lobotomy. A lobotomy. It just cramble your fucking brains. But doesn't it make you feel better to call it a lobotomy, though? Because it sounds a lot more professional. No. A lobotomy. It's a lobotomy. It sounds gross.

41:18It sounds like Lougey. Like you're a lobotomy. Boy. Topeka, Kansas. Also, Kansas. All roads point to Kansas. All roads point to Kansas. This is the problem. That's what happens. And everything's flat. You just lose your fucking marbles. You go crazy. That's the main issue with that price. So they did this for so long. Somebody won a Nobel Prize for lobotomy. Wonderful. Imagine. Give that back to be shit. Yes, seriously. You're kind of like, you know, you don't want to display it up in your shelf. But it's just a good indicator. It's like, it should let you know that oftentimes science is incorrect.

41:54And that oftentimes, you know, unfortunately, people have a history of doing things. And then they have to justify that they've done these things. Yeah. And they, you know. But now there's also, there's so much more tooling, too, right? If you're a nation state and you want to fuck with people and inject narratives into the ecosystem. Like the whole idea of autonomous AI agents, too. Like having these, basically, like, Twitter bots or whatever bots. Like a lot of one thing we've been thinking about, too, on the side, is like the idea of, you know, audience capture, right? You have like big people with high profiles and kind of gradually steering them towards a position by creating bots that, like, through comments, through our votes.

42:35You know, it's 100%. It's absolutely real. Yeah. And a couple of the big, like, a couple of big accounts on X, like, that we're in touch with. Have sort of said, like, yeah, especially in the last two years, it's actually become hard, like it's spent with the thoughtful ones, right? It's become hard to like stay sane, not not on X, but like across social media on all the platforms. And that is around when, you know, it became possible to have AI's that can speak like people, you know, 90%, 95 % of the time. And so you have to imagine that, yeah, adversaries are using this and doing this and pushing the frontier.

43:12Like, there's, there'd be fools if they're, oh, yeah, 100%. You have to do it because for sure we're doing that. And this is one of the things where, you know, like, it used to be, so OpenAI actually used to do this assessment of their AI models as part of their, what they call their preparedness framework that would look at the persuasion capabilities of their models as one kind of threat vector. They pulled that out recently, which they've, is kind of like, why? You can argue that it makes sense. I actually think it's somewhat concerning because one of the things you might worry about is if these systems, sometimes they get trained through what's called reinforcement learning, potentially you could imagine training these to be super persuasive by having them interact with real people and convince them, practice at convincing them to do specific things.

43:58If that, if you get to that point, you know, these, these labs ultimately will have the ability to deploy agents at scale that can just persuade a lot of people to do whatever they want, including pushing legislative agendas, vote like anyone help them, help them prep for meetings with the Hill, the administration, whatever, and like, how should I like convince this person to do that? Yeah, well, they'll do that with text messages, make it more business -like, make it friendlyer, make it more jovial. But this is like the same optimization pressure that keeps you on TikTok, that same like addiction, imagine that applied to like persuading you of some, like, some fact, right?

44:35That's like, on the other hand, maybe a few months from now, we're all just going to be very, very convinced that it was all fine. That's what we do. Yeah, maybe they'll get so good that it'll make sense to you. Maybe they'll just be right. That's how it works. Yeah, it's a confusing time period. You know, we've talked about this ad nauseam, but bears repeating this. Former FBI analyst who investigated Twitter before Elon bought it said that he thinks it's about 80 % bots. Yeah, 80%. That's one of the reasons why the bot purge, like, when Elon acquired it and started working on it, is so important.

45:14Like, there needs to be the challenges, like, detecting these things is so hard, right? So increasingly, like, more and more, they can hide, like, basically, perfectly. Like, how do you tell the difference between a cutting edge AI bot and a human just from the... You can, because they can't generate AI images of a family, of a backyard barbecue, post all these things up and make it seem like it's real. Especially now, AI images are insanely good now. They're really nice. It's crazy. And if you have a person, you could just, you could take a photo of a person and manipulate it in any way you'd like.

45:47And then now this is your new guy. You could do it instantaneously. And then this guy has a bunch of opinions on things and seems to always align with the Democratic Party. But whatever, he's a good guy. A family man. Look, he's not this barbecue. He's not even a fucking human being. And people are arguing with this bot, like, back and forth. And you'll see it on any social issue. You see it with Gaza and Palestine. You see it with abortion. You see it with religious freedoms. You just see these bots. You see these arguments and, you know, you see, like, various levels. You see, like, the extreme position.

46:22And then you see a more reasonable, centrist position. But essentially what they're doing is they're consistently moving what's okay further and further in a certain direction. And in fact, it's both directions. Like, you know how when you're trying to, like, you're trying to capsize a boat or something, you're like, fucking with your buddy on the lake or something. So you push on one side and then you push on the other side. And you push until eventually it capsizes. This is kind of like our electoral process is already naturally like this, right? We go, like, we have a party in power for a while.

46:55Then like, they get, you know, they basically get like, you get tired of them and you switch. And that's kind of the natural way how democracy works or in a republic. But the way that adversaries think about this is they're like, perfect. This swing back and forth, all we have to do is like, when it's on this way, we push and push and push and push until it goes more extreme. And then there's a reaction to it, right? And that's swinging back and we push and push and push and push on the other side until eventually something breaks. And that's the risk. Yeah. It's also like, you know, the organizations that are doing this, like, we already know this is part of Russia's MO, China's MO, because back when it was easier to detect, we already could see them doing this shit.

47:34So there is this website called, this person does not exist, it still exists surely now, but it's kind of forced. Yeah. But you would like every time you refresh this, this website, you would see a different like human face that was AI generated. And what the Russian Internet Research Agency would do. And it shows us. Yeah, exactly. What, what all these, these, and it's actually, yeah, I don't think they've really upgraded it. I don't know. But, uh, or yeah, style. That's fake. Wow. They're so good. This is old. This is like years old. And years old. And you could actually detect these things pretty reliably.

48:05Like, you might remember the whole thing about AI systems were having a hard time generating like hands that only had like five fingers. Right. That's that's all for though. Yeah. Little hints of it were though back in the day in this person does not exist. And you'd have the Russians would take like the face from that, and then use it as the profile picture for like a Twitter bot. Right. And so that you could actually detect. You'd be like, okay, I've got you there. I've got you there. I can kind of get a rough count. Right. Now we can't. But we definitely know they've been in the game for a long time.

48:33Yeah. There's no way they're not. And the thing with the thing with like nation state like propaganda attempts, right? Is that like people have this idea that like, ah, like I've caught this like Chinese influence operation or whatever. Like we nail them. The reality is nation states operate at like 30 different levels. And if you're a priority, like just influencing our information spaces as a priority for them, they're not just going to operate, they're not just going to pick a level and do it. They're going to do all 30 of them. And so you, even if you're like among the best in the world, like detecting this shit, you're going to like, you're going to catch and stop like levels one through 10.

49:12And then you're going to be like, you're going to be aware of like level 11, 12, 13. Like you're working against it. And you're, you know, maybe you're starting to think about level 16. And you imagine like, you know about level 18 or whatever. But they're like, they're above you below you all around you. They're incredibly, incredibly resource. And this is something that came like, came, came through very strongly for us. You guys have seen the Yuri Bezmanov video from 1984 where he's talking about how the, all our educational institutions have been captured. But so it'll be a propaganda. It was talking about Marxism has been injected into school systems and how you have essentially two decades before you're completely captured by these ideologies.

49:53And it's going to permeate and destroy all of your confidence and democracy. And he was 100 % correct. And this is before these kind of tools. Because like the vast majority of the exchanges of information right now are taking place on social media. The vast majority of debating about things, arguing, all taking place on social media. And if that FBI analyst is correct, 80 % of it's bullshit, which is really wild. Well, and you look at like some of the documents that have come out. I think it was like, I think it was the CIA game plan right for regime change or like under money. Like how do you do it right?

50:27Have multiple decision makers at every level around all these things. And like what a surprise that's exactly what like the US bureaucracy looks like today. So everything down make change impossible. Yeah, make it so that everybody gets frustrated with it and they give up hope. They decided to do that to other countries. Yeah. Like for sure, they do that here. Open society right? I mean, that's part of the tradeoff. And that's actually a big, big part of the challenge too. So, when we're working on this, one of the things Ed was talking about these 30 different layers of security access or whatever, one of the consequences is you bump into a team.

51:01So the teams we ended up working with on this project were folks that we bumped into after the end of our last investigation who kind of were like, oh, we talked about last year. Yeah, looking at AGI, looking at the national security landscape around that. And a lot of them are like really well placed. It was like, you know, special forces guys from Tier 1 units. So you'll seal Team 6 type thing. And because they're so like in that ecosystem, you'll see people who are like ridiculously specialized and competent, like the best people in the world at doing whatever the thing is like to break the security.

51:39And they don't know often about like another group of guys who have a completely different capability set. And so what you find is like you're indexing like hard on this vulnerability. And then suddenly someone says, oh, yeah, but by the way, I can just hop that fence. So the really funny thing about this is like most or even like almost all of the really, really like elite security people kind of think that like all the other security people who are dumbasses, even when they're not. Or like, yeah, they're they're they're biased in the direction because it's so easy when everything's like stove piped.

52:14But so most people who say they're like elite at security actually are dumbasses. Because most security is like about checking boxes and like sock two compliance and shit like that. Yeah. But what it is is like so everything's so stove piped that you don't you literally can't know what the exquisite state of the art is in another domain. So it's a lot easier for somebody to come up and be like, oh yeah, like I'm actually really good at this other thing that you don't know. And so figuring out who actually is the like we had this experience over and over where like, you know, you run into a team and then you run into another team.

52:46They have an interaction kind of like, oh, interesting. So like, you know, like these are the really kind of the people at the top of their game. And that's been this very long process to figure out like, okay, what does it take to actually secure our critical infrastructure against like CCP, for example, like Chinese attacks if we're if we're building a super intelligence project. And it's it's this weird like kind of challenge because of the stove piping. No one has the full picture. And we don't think that we have it even now. But definitely don't know of anyone who's come like that like this close to it.

53:19The best people are the ones who when they when they encounter another team and and other ideas and start to engage with it are like, instead of being like, oh, like, you don't know what you're talking about. Who just like actually lock on and go like, that's fucking interesting. Tell me more about that. Right. People that have control of the ego. Yes. 100%. With everything. The best of the best. The best of the best. Like, got there by eliminating the rigo as much as they could. Yeah. Always the way it is. Yeah. And it's it's also like the the fact of, you know, the 30 layers of the stack or whatever it is of all these security issues means that no one can have the complete picture at any one time.

54:00And the stack is changing all the time. People are inventing new shit. People things are falling in and out of. And so, you know, figuring out what is that team that can actually get you that complete picture is an exercise. Hey, you can't really do. It's hard to do it from the government side because you got to engage with data center building companies. You got to engage with the AI labs. And in particular with like insiders of the labs who will tell you things that by the way the lab leadership will tell you the opposite of in some cases. And so, like, it's just this, this Gordian knot, like, it took us months to, like, pin down every kind of dimension that we think we've pinned down at this.

54:37I'll give an example, actually, of that, like, that trying to do the handshake, right, between different sets of people. So, we were talking to one person who's who's thinking hard about data center security working with, like, frontier labs on this shit, very much like at the top of her game. But, she's kind of from like the academic space kind of Berkeley, like the avocado toast kind of side of the spectrum, you know? And she's talking to us. She'd reviewed the report we put out, the investigation we put out. And she's like, you know, I think you guys are talking to the wrong people. And we're like, can you say more about that?

55:16And she's like, well, I don't think like, you know, you talked to tier one special forces. I don't think they, like, know much about that. Or like, okay, that's not correct, but can you say why? And she's like, I feel like those are just the people that, like, go and, like, bomb stuff. Bloch it up. Bloch it up. It's understandable, too, because it is a lot of people. It is a lot of people understandable. A lot of people have the wrong sense of, like, what a tier one asset actually can do. Well, that's ego on her part. Because she doesn't understand what they do. It's ego all the way down, right?

55:46Yeah. But that's just dumb thing to say. If you literally don't know what they do. And you say, don't they just blow stuff up? Where's my latte? It has a weirdly good impression, but she did ask about a latte. She did. Did she talk in upspeak? You should fire everyone who talks in upspeak. She didn't talk in upspeak, but... The moment they do that, you should just tell them to leave. There's no way of an original thought. This is how you talk. China, can you get out of our data center? Yeah, please. I'm not going to take it. I don't want to rip on that too much though, because one really important factor here is all these groups have a part of the puzzle.

56:24And they're all fucking amazing. They are like world class at their own little slice. And a big part of what we've had to do is like bring people together, and there are people who've helped us immeasurably do this. But like bring people together and explain to them the value that each other has. In a way that allows that bridge building to be made. And by the way, the Tier 1 guys are the most ego -moderated of the people that we talk to. There's a lot of Silicon Valley hubris going around right now where people are like, listen, get out of our way. We'll figure out how to do this super secure data center infrastructure.

57:03We got this. Why? Because we're the guys building the AGI motherfucker. That's kind of the attitude. And it's like cool, man. That's like a doctor having an opinion about how to repair your car. I get that it's not the like elite kind of like, you know, whatever. But someone has to help you build like a good friggin fence. Like, I mean, it's not just that. It doesn't improve your effect. It's a mixed bag, too, because like, yes, a lot of the hyperscalers like Google, Amazon, genuinely do have some of the best private sector security around data centers in the world, like hands down. The problem is there's levels above that.

57:44And the guys who like look at what they're doing and see what the holes are, just go like, oh, yeah. Like I could get in there, no problem. And they can fucking do it. One thing my wife said to me on a couple of occasions, like, you seem to like, and this is towards the beginning of the project, like you seem to like, change your mind a lot about what the right configuration is of how to do this. And yeah, it's because every other day you're having a conversation with somebody's like, oh, yeah, like great job on this thing. But like, I'm not going to do that. I'm going to do this other completely different thing.

58:17And that just fucks everything over. And so you have enough of those conversations. And at a certain point, your plan, your game plan on this can no longer look like we're going to build a perfect fortress. It's got to look like we're going to account for our own uncertainty on the security side. And the fact that we're never going to be able to patch everything. Like, you have to. I mean, it's like, I did the chat. And that means you actually have to go on offense from the beginning. Because like, the truth is, and this came up over and over again, there's no world where you're ever going to build the perfect, exquisite fortress around all your shit, and hide behind your walls like this forever.

58:56That just doesn't work because no matter how perfect your system is and how many angles you've covered, like your, your adversary is super smart, is super dedicated. If you see the field to them, they're right up in your face. And they're reaching out and touching you, and they're trying to see like what, what your seams are, where they break. And that just means you have to reach out and touch them from the beginning. Because until you've actually like reached out and used a capability and proved like we can take down that infrastructure, we can like disrupt that, that cyber operation. We can do this.

59:25We can do that. You don't know if that capability is real or not. Like, you might just be like lying to yourself. And like, I can do this thing whenever I want. But actually, you're kind of more in academia mode than like start a mode. Because you're not making contact every day with the thing, right? You have to, you have to touch the thing. And there's like, there's a related issue here, which is a kind of like willingness that came up over and over again. Like one of the kind of gurus of this space was like, made the pie, a couple of them made the point that, you know, you, you can have the most exquisite capability in the world.

59:58But if you, if you don't actually have the willingness to use it, you might as well not have that capability. And the, the challenges right now, China rush, like our adversaries pull all kinds of stunts on us and get no consequence. Particularly during the previous administration. This was a huge, huge problem during the previous administration, where you actually, you actually had sabotage operations being done on American soil by our adversaries, where you had administration officials as soon as like a thing happened. So there were, for example, there was like four different states, had their 911 systems go down, like at the same time, different systems, like unrelated stuff.

1:00:42But it was like, it's, it's this stuff where it's like, let me see if I can do that. Let me see if I can do it. Let me see what the reaction is. Let me see what the, the chatter is that comes back after I do that. And one of the things that was actually pretty disturbing about that was under that, under that, that administration or regime or whatever, the response you got from the government right out the gate was, oh, it's an accident. And that's actually unusual. The proper procedure, the normal procedure in this case, is to say, we can't comment on an ongoing investigation. Which we've all heard, right?

1:01:16Like, we can't comment about what we can do to confirm nerd tonight. Exactly. It's all, all that stuff. And that's, and that's what they say typically out the gate when they're investigating stuff. But instead coming out and saying, oh, it's just an accident. Is a break with, what do you attribute that to? They, if, if they say, if they, if they leave an opening or say, actually, this is an adversary action, we think it's an adversary action, they have to respond. The public demands a response. And they don't, they were, there's a fear of escalation. Fearful. So escalating. So what ends up happening right is, and, and by the way, that, that thing about like, it's an accident comes out often before there would have been time for investigators to physically fly on site and take a look.

1:01:59Like, there's no logical way that you could even know that at the time. And they're like, boom, that's an accident. Don't worry about it. So they have an official answer. And then their response is to just bury their head in the sand and not investigate. Right. Because if you were to investigate, if you were to say, okay, we looked into this, it actually looks like it's fucking like country X that just did this thing. Right. If that's the conclusion, it's hard to imagine the American people not being like, what are we, like, we're letting these people injure our American citizens on US soil, take out like US national security, like, or critical infrastructure.

1:02:31And we're not doing anything. Like, the concern is about this, like, we're getting in our own way of thinking, like, oh, well, escalation is going to happen. And boom, we run straight to like, there's going to be a nuclear war. Everybody's going to die. Like, when you do that, peace between nations stability does not come from the absence of activity. It comes from consequence. It comes from just like if you have, you know, an individual who misbehaves in society, there's a consequence in people know it's coming. You need to train your counterparts in the international community, your adversary, to not fuck with your stuff.

1:03:05Can I stop for a second? So, are you essentially saying that if you have incredible capabilities of disrupting grids and power systems and infrastructure, you wouldn't necessarily do it, but you might try it to make sure it works a little bit. Exactly. And that this is probably the hints of some of this stuff because you've kind of... You've got to get your reps in, right? You've got to get your reps in. It's like, okay. So, suppose that I went to you and was like, hey, I bet I can kick your ass. I bet I can like, friggin' slap a rubber guard on you and like, do whatever the fuck, right? And you're like...

1:03:38I love your expression, by the way. Yeah, yeah, you look really convinced. It's because I'm jacked, right? Well, no. There's people that look like you that can strangle me, believe it or not. Oh, yeah. There's a lot of very high -level Brazilian jiu -jitsu black belts that are just super nerds. And they don't lift weights at all. They only do jiu -jitsu. And if you only do jiu -jitsu, you'll have like a wiry body. That was heartless. So, just slip that in. Like, there's like, guys who look like you are just like real fucking nerds. They look like intelligent people. No, they're like some of the most brilliant people I've ever met.

1:04:07Really, that's the issue. It's like, data nerds get really involved in jiu -jitsu and jitsu's data. But here's the thing. So that's exactly it, right? So if I told you, I bet I can tap you out, right? I know. Where are you been training? Well, right. And if my answer was, oh, I've just read a bunch of books. Oh. You'd be like, oh, cool. Let's go. Right? Because making contact with reality is where the fucking learning happens. Exactly. You can sit there and think all you want. Right. But unless you've actually played the chess match, unless you've reached out, touched, seen what the reaction is and all this stuff, you don't actually know what you think you know.

1:04:42And that's actually extra dangerous. If you're sitting on a bunch of capabilities and you have this, like, unearned sense of superiority, because you haven't used those exquisite tools, like, it's a challenge. And then you've got people that are head of departments, CEOs of corporations, everyone has an ego. This episode is brought to you by ShipStation. Managing an e -commerce business is challenging enough without the added chaos of shipping and order fulfillment. It can feel like trying to herd cats on roller skates. That's where ShipStation comes in. With its simple dashboard, ShipStation lets you handle all your shipping needs in one place, automating tasks, securing the best shipping rates, and even printing labels with a single click.

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1:06:09A day in the sun? No, a bottle of rum? Yes, Uber Eats can definitely get you that for almost anything delivered with Uber Eats order now. For alcohol, you must be legal drinking age. Please enjoy responsibly. Product availability varies by region, sea app for details. We've got it. Yeah, and this ties into how exactly how basically the international order and quasi stability actually gets maintained. So there's like above threshold stuff, which is like you actually do wars for borders. And you know, well, there's the potential for nuclear exchange or whatever. Like that's like all stuff that can't be hidden, right?

1:06:48Or games. Well, exactly like all the war games type shit. But then there's below threshold stuff. The stuff that's like, it's always like the stuff that's like, hey, I'm going to try to like poke you. Are you going to react? What are you going to do? And then if you do nothing here, then I go like, okay, what's the next level? I can poke you. I can poke you because like one of the things that we almost have an intuition for that's mistaken, that comes from kind of historical experience is like this idea that, you know, that countries can actually really defend their citizens in a meaningful way.

1:07:20So like, if you think back to World War One, the most sophisticated advanced nation states on the planet, could not get past a line of dudes in a trench. Like that was like, that was the, then they tried like thing after thing. Let's try tanks. Let's try aircraft. Let's try fucking hot air balloons infiltration to, and literally like that one side pretty much just ran out of dudes and that ended the war to put in their trench. And so we have this thought that like, oh, you know, countries can actually put, put boundaries around themselves and actually, but the reality is you can, you, there's so many surfaces.

1:07:55The surface area for attacks is just too great. And so there's, there's stuff like, you can actually like, there's the, the Havana syndrome stuff where you look at this like ratcheting escalation. Like, oh, let's like, fry a couple of embassy staffs brains in Havana, Cuba. What are they going to do about it? Nothing? Okay. Let's move on to Vienna Austria, something a little bit more western, a little bit more orderly. Let's see what they do there. Still nothing. Okay. What if we move on to frying like Americans brains on US soil, baby? And they, and they went and did that. And so this is one of these things where like stability in reality in the world is not maintained through defense, but it's literally like you have like the crypts and the bloods with different territories.

1:08:38And it, it's stable and it looks quiet. But the reason is that if you like beat the shit out of one of my, one of my guys for no good reason, I'm just going to find one of your guys. And I'll blow his fucking head off. And that keeps peace and stability on the surface. But that's the reality of sub threshold competition between nation states. It's like, you come in and like fuck with my boys. I'm going to fuck with your boys right back. Until we push back, they're going to keep pushing that limit further and further. One important consequence of that too is like, if you want to avoid nuclear escalation, right?

1:09:14The answer is not to just take punches in the mouth over and over in the fear that eventually it's good. If you do anything, you're going to ask like to nukes. What all that does is it empowers the adversary to keep driving up the ratchet. Like what Ed's just described there is an increasing ratchet of unresponded adversary action. If you, if you address the low, the kind of sub threshold stuff, if they cut an undersea cable and then there's a consequence for that shit, they're less likely to cut an undersea cable. And things kind of stay at that level of the threshold. Right. So just letting them burn out.

1:09:50Yeah, exactly. That logic of just like, let them do it. They'll stop doing it after a while. They'll get it out of their system. They tried that during the joy of food riots. Remember, that's what New York City did. Like this let them lose. Let's just see how big chas gets. Yeah. It's the summer of love. Yeah, that's right. Yeah. Exactly. The translation into like the super intelligent scenario is, A, if we don't have our reps in, if we don't know how to reach out and touch an adversary and induce consequence for them doing the same to us, then we have no deterrence at all. Like we're basically just sitting right now, the state of security is, the labs are like super pet, and we're like, we can and probably should go deep on that piece.

1:10:34But like, as one data point, right? So there's like double digit percentages of the world's top AI labs or America's top AI labs. Employees. Employees that are like Chinese nationals or have ties to the Chinese mainland, right? So that's, that's great. Why don't we build a man? Yeah, it's really funny, right? Like, so stupid. But it's also like, it's, the, the challenge is, when you talk to people who actually, geez, when you talk to people actually have experience of dealing with like, CCP activity in this space, right? Like there's one story that we heard that is probably worth like relaying here.

1:11:10It's like this guy from, from an intelligence agency was saying like, hey, so there was this power outage out in Berkeley, California back in like 2019 or something. And the internet goes out across the whole campus. And so there's this dorm and like all of the Chinese students are freaking out because they have an obligation to do a time -based check -in and basically report back on everything they've seen and heard to basically a CCP handler type thing. And if they don't, like, hmm, maybe your mother's insulin doesn't show up. Maybe your like, brother's travel plans get denied. Maybe your the family business gets shut down.

1:11:49Like there's the range of options that this massive CCP state coercion machine has. This is like, you know, they've got internet like software for this. Like this is an institutionalized like very well developed and efficient framework for just ratcheting up pressure on individuals overseas. And they believe the Chinese diaspora overseas belongs to them. If you look at like what the Chinese Communist Party writes in its like, in its written like public communications, they see like Chinese ethnicity as being a green. Like no one is a bigger victim of this than the Chinese people themselves who are abroad.

1:12:26Who made amazing contributions to American AI innovations. You just have to look at the names on the freaking papers. It's like these guys are wicked. But the problem is we also have to look head on at this reality. Like you can't just be like, oh, I'm not going to say it because it makes me feel funny inside. Someone has to stand up and point out the obvious that if you're going to build a fucking Manhattan project for super intelligence and the idea is to like be doing that when China is a key rival nation state actor. Yeah, you're going to have to find a way to account for the personnel security side.

1:12:57Like at some point, someone's going to have to do something about that. And it's like you can see they're hitting us right where we're weak, right? Like America is the place where you come and you remake yourself like send us your tire and you're hungry and you're poor. And which is true and important. It's true and important that they're playing right off of that because they know that we don't, we just don't want to look at that problem. Yeah. And Chinese nationals working on these things is just bananas. The fact they have to check you in the CCP. Yeah. And are they being monitored? I mean, how much can you monitor them?

1:13:28Well, what do you know that they have? What equipment have they been given? You feel that constitutionally, right? Yeah, the best part is constitutionally. It's also, you can't legally deny someone employment on that basis in a private company. And that's something else we found and we're kind of amazed by. And even honestly, just like the regular kind of government clearance process itself is inadequate. It moves away too slowly and it doesn't actually even even in the government. We're talking about top secret clearances. The information that they like look at for top secret. We heard from a couple of people.

1:14:05It doesn't include a lot of like key sources. So for example, it doesn't include like foreign language sources. So if the head of the Ministry of State Security in China writes a blog post that says like, Bob is like the best spy. He's spied so hard for us and he's like an awesome spy. If that blog post is written in Chinese, we're not going to see it. And we're going to be like, here's your clearance, Bob. Congratulations. And we were like this that can't possibly be real. But like, yeah, they're like, yeah, that's true. No one's looking. It's a complete 90 -bit tie. There's gaps in every level of stuff.

1:14:43One of the worst things here is like the physical infrastructure. So the personnel thing is like fucked up. The physical infrastructure thing is another area where people don't want to look. Because if you start looking what you start to realize is okay. China makes like a lot of our like components for our transformers for the electrical grid. Yep, but also all these chips that are going into our big data centers for these massive training runs. Where do they come from? They come from Taiwan. They come from this company called TSMC Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing company. We're increasingly on shorting that by the way, which is one of the best things that's been happening lately.

1:15:21It's like massive amounts of TSMC capacity getting on short in the US. But still being made right now, it's basically like 100 % there. All you have to do is jump on the network at TSMC hack the right network, compromise the firmware on the software that runs on these chips to get them to run. And you basically can compromise all the chips going into all of these things. Never mind the fact that like Taiwan is like a like physically outside the Chinese sphere of influence for now. China is going to be prioritizing the fuck out of getting access to that. There have been cases, by the way, like Richard Chang, like the founder of SMIC, which is the sort of, so okay.

1:16:04TSMC, this massive like a series of aircraft carrier fabrication facilities. They do like all the iPhone chips. They do the AI chips, which are the things we care about here. The only place on planet Earth that does this, it's literally like it's fascinating. It's like the most easily the most advanced manufacturing or scientific process that primates on planet Earth can do is this chip making process. Nanoscale like material science, where you're putting on like these tiny like atom thick layers of stuff. And you're doing like 300 of them in a row with like you have like insulators and conductors and different kinds of like semi -conductors and these tunnels and shit.

1:16:48But just like the complexity of it is just awe -inspiring that we can do this at all. It's like it's magic. And it's really only been done and being done in Taiwan. That is the only place, like truly the only place right now. And so a Chinese invasion of Taiwan starts to look pretty interesting through that lens, right? Oh boy. Say goodbye to the iPhone, say goodbye to like the chip supply that we rely on. And then your super intelligence training run like damn that's interesting. Well, Samsung was trying to develop a lab here or a semiconductor factory here. And they weren't having enough success.

1:17:23Oh, so okay. So one of the craziest thing to just illustrate how hard it is to do. So you spend $50 billion. Again, an aircraft carrier, we're throwing that around here and there. But an aircraft carrier worth of risk capital. What does that mean? That means you build the fab, the factory. And it's not guaranteed it's going to work. At first, this factory is pumping out these chips at like yields that are really low. In other words, like the only like, you know, 20 % of the chips that they're putting out are even useful. And that just makes it totally economically unviable. So you're just trying to increase that yield desperately crime climb up higher and higher.

1:17:56Intel famously found this so hard that they have this philosophy where when they build a new fab, if the philosophy is called copy exactly everything down to the color of the paint on the walls in the bathroom is copied from other fabs that actually worked because they have no idea why a fucking fab works and another one doesn't. We got this to work. We got this to work. It's like, oh my god. We got this to work. I can't believe we got this to work. So we have to make it exactly identical. Because the expensive thing in the semiconductor manufacturing process is the learning curve. So like Jerry said, you start by putting through a whole bunch of like the starting material for the chips, which are called wafers.

1:18:36You put them through your fab. The fab has got like 500 dials on it. And every one of those dials has got to be in the exact right place or the whole fucking thing doesn't work. So you send a bunch of wafers in it at great expense. They come out all fucked up in the first run. It's just like it's going to be all fucked up in the first run. Then what do you do? You get a bunch of like PhDs, material scientists, like engineers with scanning electron microscopes. Because all this shit is like atomic scale tiny. They look like all the chips and all the stuff that's gone wrong. Like, oh shit, these pathways got fused or whatever.

1:19:10Like, yeah, there you just need that level of expertise. And then they go, it's a mix, right? Like it's a mix. It's a mix now in particular. But like, yeah, you absolutely need humans looking at these things at a certain level. And then they go, well, okay, like I've got a hypothesis about what might have gone wrong in that run. Let's tweak this dial like this and just dial like that and run the whole thing again. And you hear these stories about bringing a fab online. Like, you need a certain percentage of good chips coming out the other end. Or like, you can't make money from the fab because most of your shit is just going right into the garbage.

1:19:44Unless, and this is important too, your fab is state subsidized. So when you look at, so TSMC is like, they're alone in the world in terms of being able to pump out these chips. But SMIC, this is the Chinese knockoff of TSMC founded by the way. By a former senior TSMC executive, Richard Chong, who leaves along with a bunch of other people with a bunch of fucking secrets, they get sued like in the early 2000s. It's pretty obvious what happened there. Like, to most people, they're like, yeah, SMIC fucking stole that shit. They bring a new fab online in like a year or two, which is suspiciously fast, start pumping out chips.

1:20:20And now the Chinese ecosystem is ratcheting up like the government is pouring money into SMIC because they know that they can't access TSM chips anymore because the US governments put pressure on Taiwan to block that off. And so domestic fab in China is all about SMIC. And they are like, it's a disgusting amount of money they're putting in. They're teaming up with Huawei to form like this complex of companies that it's really interesting. I mean, the semiconductor industry in China in particular is really, really interesting. It's also a massive story of like self -owns of the United States and the Western world, where we've been just shipping a lot of our shit to them for a long time.

1:21:01Like the equipment that builds the chips. And it's also like it's so blatant. And like they're just, honestly a lot of the stuff is just like, they're just giving us like a big fuck you. So give you a really blatant example. So we have the way we set up export control still today on most equipment that these semiconductor fabs use. Like the Chinese semiconductor fabs use. We're still sending them a whole bunch of shit. The way we set export controls is instead of like, oh, we're sending this gear to China. And like now it's in China and we can't do anything about it. Instead we still have this thing where like, no, no, no, this company in China is cool.

1:21:40That company in China is not cool. So we can ship to this company, but we can't ship to that company. And so you get this ridiculous shit. Like for example, there's like a couple of facilities that you can see by satellite. One of the facilities is okay to ship equipment to. The other facility right next door is like considered, you know, military connected or whatever. And so we can't ship. The Chinese literally built a bridge between the two facilities. So they can just like shimmy the wafers over to like, oh, we use equipment. And then shimmy it back and now, okay, we're done. So it's like, and you can see it by satellite.

1:22:16So they're not even like trying to hide it. Like our stuff is just like so badly put together. China is prioritizing this so highly that like the idea that we're going to, so we do it by company through this. Basically, it's like an export blacklist. Like you can't send to Huawei, you can't send to any number of other companies that are considered affiliated with the Chinese military or where we're concerned about military applications. Reality is in China. Civil military fusion is their policy. In other words, every private company. Like, yeah, that's cute, dude. You're working for yourself. Yeah, no, no, no, buddy.

1:22:46You're working for the Chinese state. We come in, we want your shit, we get your shit. There's no like, there's no true kind of distinction between the two. And so when you have this attitude where you're like, yeah, you know, we're going to have some companies where we're like, you can't send to them. But you know, that creates a situation where literally Huawei will spin up like a dozen subsidiaries or new companies with new names that aren't on our blacklist. And so like for months or years, you're able to just ship chips to them. That's to say nothing of like using intermediaries and like Singapore or other countries which happens.

1:23:18You wouldn't believe the number of AI chips that are shipping to Malaysia. Can't wait for the latest like huge language model to come out of Malaysia. And actually, it's just proxying for the most part. There's some amount of stuff actually going on in Malaysia, but for the most part. So we've got to work in the United States compete. If you're thinking about all these different factors, you're thinking about espionage, people that are students from the CCP connected, contacting, you're talking about all the different network equipment that has third party input. You could siphon off data. And then on top of that state funded, everything is encouraged by the state, inexorably connected.

1:24:02You can't get away from it. You do what's best for the Chinese government. Well, so step one is you got to, so you got to stem the bleeding, right? So right now opening eye pumps out a new massive scaled AI model. You better believe that like the CCP has a really good chance that they're going to get their hands on that, right? So if you, all you do right now is you ratchet up capabilities. It's like that, that meme of like there's a, you know, a motorboat or something and some guy who's like surfing behind and there's a string attaching them and the motorboat guy goes like, hurry up, like accelerate, they're catching up.

1:24:35That's kind of what's happening right now is we're helping them accelerate. Pulling them along basically. Yeah, pulling them along. Now, I will say like over the last six months, especially where our focus is shifted, is like, how do we actually build like the secure data center? Like what does it look like to actually lock this down? And also crucially, you don't want the security measures to be so irritating and invasive that they slow down the progress. Like there's this kind of dance that you have to do. We actually, so this is part of what was in the redacted version of the report because we don't want to telegraph that necessarily.

1:25:09But there are ways that you can get a really good 8020. Like there are ways that you can play with things that are already, say, that are already built and have a lower risk of them having been compromised. And look, a lot of the stuff as well that we're talking about like big problems around China, a lot of this is like us just like tripping over our own feet and self -owning ourselves. Yeah. Because the reality is like the, yeah, the Chinese are trying to indigenize as fast as they can, totally true. But the gear that they're putting in their facilities, like the machines that actually like do this, like we talked about atomic patterning 300 layers, the machines that do that for the most part are shipped in from the West, are shipped in from the Netherlands, shipped in from Japan, from us from like allied countries.

1:25:59And the reason that's happening is like the, in many cases, you'll have this, honestly a little disgusting, but like the CEOs and executives of these companies will brief like the administration officials and say like, look, like if you guys like cut us off from China, from selling to China, like our business is going to suffer, like American jobs are going to suffer, and it's going to be really bad. And then a few weeks later, they turn around and their earnings calls. And they go like, you know what, yeah, so we expect like export controls or whatever, but it's really not going to have a big impact on us.

1:26:33And the really fucked up part is if they lie to their shareholders on their earnings calls and their stock price goes down, their shareholders can sue them. If they lie to the administration on an issue of critical national security interest, fuck all happens to them. Wow. It's great incentives. And this is by the way, it's like one reason why it's so important that we not be constrained in our thinking about like we're going to build a Fort Knox. Like this is where the interactive, messy adversarial environment is so, so important. You, you have to introduce consequence. Like you have to create a situation where they perceive that if they try to do a, you know, an espionage operation, intelligence operation, there will be consequences.

1:27:17That's right now not happening. And so it's just, and that's kind of a historical artifact over like a lot of time spent hand -ringing over, well, what if they, and then we, and then eventually nukes. And like that kind of thinking is, you know, if you dealt with your, your kid when you're like, when you're raising them, if you dealt with them that way, and you were like, hey, you know, so, so little Timmy just like, he stole his first toy. And like now's the time where you're going to like a good parent would be like, all right, little Timmy, fucking come over here, you son of a bitch, take the fucking thing and we're going to bring it over to the people who stole it from you.

1:27:51Make the apology. I love my daughter, by the way. But you're like, he's a fake baby. It's a fake baby. Hypothetical baby. There's no, there's no, he's crying right now. Anyway. So, yeah. Stealing right now. That's a, geez. I got it. I got to stop doing it. But yeah, anyway, so, you know, you go through this thing and you can do that, or you can be like, oh no, if I tell Timmy to return it, then maybe Timmy is going to hate me. Maybe then Timmy is going to like, become increasingly adversarial. And then when he's in high school, he's going to start taking drugs. And then eventually he's going to like, fall a fall of law and then end up on the street.

1:28:24Like if that's the story, you're telling yourself and you're terrified of any kind of adversarial interaction. It's not even adversarial. It's constructive, actually. You're training the child, just like you're training your adversary to respect your national boundaries and your sovereignty. Those two things are like, that's what you're up to. It's human beings all the way down. Jesus. Yeah. But we can get out of our own way. Like a lot of this stuff. Yeah. Like when you look into it, it's like us just being in our own way. And a lot of this comes from the fact that like, you know, since 1991, since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have kind of internalized this attitude that like, well, like we just won the game and like, it's our world and you're living in it.

1:29:09And like we just don't have any peers that are adversaries. And so there's been generations of people who just haven't actually internalized the fact that like, no, there's people out there who not only like are willing to like fuck with you all the way, but who have the capability to do it. And we could, by the way, we could if we wanted to. We could. Absolutely could if we wanted to. There's this actually, this is worth like calling out. There's this like sort of two camps right now in the world of AI kind of like national security. There's the people who are worried about. They're so concerned about like the idea that we might lose control of these systems that they go, okay, we need to strike a deal with China.

1:29:53There's no way out. We have to strike a deal with China. And then they start spinning up all these theories about how they're going to do that. None of which remotely reflect the actual, when you talk to the people who work on this, who try to do track one, track 1 .5, track two, or more accurately the ones who do the Intel stuff like. Yeah, yeah, yeah. This is a non -starter for reasons we get into, but they have that attitude because they're like fundamentally, we don't know how to control this technology. The flip side is people who go, oh yeah, like I work in the IC or the State Department, and I'm used to dealing with these guys, the Chinese, they're not trustworthy, forget it.

1:30:27So our only solution is to figure out the whole control problem. And the almost like, therefore, it must be possible to control the AI systems. Because like you can't just can't see a solution, sorry, can't just can't see a solution in front of you because you understand that problem so well. And so everything we've been doing with this is looking at how can we actually take both of those realities seriously. There's no actual reason why those two things shouldn't be able to exist in the same head. Yes, China's not trustworthy. Yes, we actually don't like every piece of evidence we have right now suggests that like, if you build a super intelligent system that's vastly smarter than you, I mean, yeah, like your basic intuition that that sounds like a hard thing to fucking control is about right.

1:31:10Like there's no solid evidence that's conclusive either way where that leaves you as about 50 -50. So yeah, we ought to be taking that really fucking seriously and there's evidence pointing in that direction. But so the question is like, if those two things are true, then what do you do? And so few people seem to want to take both of those things seriously, because taking one seriously almost like reflexively makes you reach for the other when, you know, they're both not there. And part of the answer here is you got to do things like reach out to your adversary. So we have the capacity to slow down if we wanted to Chinese development.

1:31:45We actually could. We need to have a serious conversation about when and how, but the fact of that not being on the table right now for anyone, because people who don't trust China just don't think that the AI risk or won't acknowledge that the issue with control is real, because that's just to worry some, and there's this concern about, oh no, but then runaway escalation. People who take the lost control thing seriously just want to have a kumbaya moment with China, which is never going to happen. And so the framework around that is one of consequence. You got to, you got to flex the muscle and put in the reps and get ready for potentially if you have a late stage rush to super intelligence, you want to have as much margin as you can so you can invest in potentially not even having to make that final leap in building the super intelligence.

1:32:31That's one option that's on the table if you can actually degrade the adversaries capabilities. And there's some people. How would you degrade the adversaries capabilities? The same way, well, not exactly the same way they would degrade ours, but think about all the infrastructure. And like this is stuff that we'll have to point you in the direction of some people who can walk you through the details offline, but there are a lot of ways that you can degrade infrastructure, adversary infrastructure. A lot of those are the same techniques they use on us. It's the infrastructure for these training runs is super delicate, right?

1:33:06Like, I mean, you need to have the limit of what's possible. And when stuff is at the limit of what's possible, then it's, I mean, to give you an example that's public, right? Do you remember like Stuxnet, like the Iranian, yeah. So the thing about Stuxnet was like explaining to people was the nuclear program. So the Iranians had had their nuclear program in like the 2010s, and they were enriching Iranian with their center of futures. We're just like spinning really fast. And the center of futures were in a room where there's no people, but they are being monitored by cameras, right? And so, and the whole thing was air gaped, which means that it was not connected to the internet.

1:33:41And all the machines, the computers that ran their shit was like separate and separated. So what happened is somebody got a memory stick in there somehow that had this Stuxnet program on it and put it in and boom, now all of a sudden it's in their system. So it jumped the air gap and now like our side basically has our, our software in their systems. And the thing that it did was not just that it, you know, it broke their center of users shut down their program. It spun the center of futures faster and faster and faster. The center of futures that are used to enrich the uranium. Yeah, these are basically just like machines that spin uranium super fast to like to enrich it.

1:34:24They spin it faster and faster and faster until they tear themselves apart. But the really like honestly dope ass thing that it did was it put in a camera feed of everything was normal. So the guy at the control is like watching and he's like is like checking his, the camera feed is like, looks cool, looks fine. And the meantime you got this like explosions going on like uranium like blasting everywhere. And so you can actually get into a space where you're not just like fucking with them. But you're fucking with them and they actually can't tell that that's what's happening. And in fact, the I believe I believe actually and Jamie might be able to check this but that the stocks that net thing was designed initially to look like from top to bottom like it was fully accidental.

1:35:14And but but got discovered by I think like I think like a third party cyber security company that that just by accident found out about it. And so that means also is like there could be any number of other stocks that happens since then and we wouldn't fucking know about it because it all can be made to look like an accident. This episode is brought to you by visible I want to let you in on something your current wireless carrier does not want you to know about visible because visible is the ultimate wireless hack. No confusing plans with surprise fees no nonsense just fast speeds great coverage without the premium cost with visible you get one line wireless with unlimited data powered by Verizon's network for $25 a month taxes and fees included.

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1:36:49Let's just say you've never seen Neeson like this nor Pamela Anderson or Paul Walter house a must watch on the big screen the naked gun only in theaters August first. Well that's insane so but if we do that to them they're going to do that to us as well. Yep and so it's just like mutually assured technology destruction well so if we can reach parity in our ability to intercede and and kind of go in and do this then yes right now the problem is they hold us at risk in a way that we simply don't hold them at risk. And so this idea and there's been a lot of debate right now in the A .I. world you might have seen actually so Elan's A .I.

1:37:29advisor put out this idea of essentially this mutually assured A .I. malfunction name it's like mutually assured destruction but for A .I. systems like this. You know there are there are some some issues with it including the fact that it doesn't reflect the asymmetry that currently exists between the U .S. and China like all our infrastructure is made in China all our infrastructure is penetrated in a way that there's simply is not when you actually talk to the you know the folks who know the space who've done operations like this. It's really clear that that's an asymmetry that needs to be resolved and so building up that capacity is important I mean look the alternative is.

1:38:08We get we start riding the dragon and we get really close to that threshold where we were about to build to opening eyes about to build super intelligence or something. It gets stolen and then the training run gets polished off finished up in China or whatever all the same risk supply is just that it's China doing it to us and not not the reverse. And obviously a CCP A .I. is a Xi Jinping A .I. I mean that's really what it is. You know even even people with the like pull it bureau level around them are probably in some trouble at that point because you know this guy doesn't need you anymore. So yeah this is actually one of the things about like so people talk about like okay if you have a dictatorship with a super intelligence it's going to allow the dictator to get like perfect control over the population or whatever.

1:38:52But the thing is like it's it's kind of like even worse than that because you actually imagine where you're at your dictator like you don't give a shit by and large about about people you have a super intelligence. All the economic output eventually you can get from an AI including from like you get humanoid robots which are kind of like coming out or whatever. So eventually you just have this AI that produces all your economic output so what do you even need people for at all. And that's fucking scary because it rises all the way up to the level you can actually think about like as we get close to this threshold and as like particularly in China they're you know they maybe are approaching.

1:39:36You can imagine like the the the Paula bureau meeting like a guy looking across at Xi Jinping and being like is this guy going to fucking kill me when he gets to this point. And so you can imagine like maybe we're going to see some like when you can automate the management of large organizations with with with AI's agents or whatever that you don't need to buy the loyalty of in any way that you don't need to you know kind of manage your control. That's a pretty existential question if your regime is based on power. It's one of the reasons why America actually has a pretty structural advantage here with separation of powers with our democratic system and all that stuff.

1:40:14If you can make a credible case that you have a gut like an oversight system for the technology that defuses power. Even if it is you make a Manhattan project you secure it as much as you can. There's not just like one dude who's going to be sitting at a console or something. There's some kind of separation of powers or diffusion of power I should say that that's already what would that look like. Something as simple as like what we do with nuclear command because you multiple people to sign off on a thing maybe they come from different parts of the government. The issue is that they could be captured.

1:40:49Oh yeah anything anything can be captured especially something that's that consequential. 100 % and that's that's always a risk. The key is basically like can we do better than China credibly on that front because if we can do better than China and we have some kind of leadership structure. That actually changes the incentives potentially because for allies and partners and and even for for Chinese people themselves. Like you guys play this out in your head like what happens when super intelligence become sentient. Do you play this out? Like sentient as in self -aware. Not just self -aware but able to act on its own.

1:41:30A lot of autonomy. Yeah so sentient and then a choose autonomy. So the challenge is once you get into super intelligence everybody loses the plot right. Because at that point things become possible that by definition we can't have thought of. So any attempt to kind of extrapolate beyond that gets really hard. Have you ever tried though? Oh we've had a lot of conversations like tabletop exercise type stuff where we're like okay you know what might this look like? What are some of the you know some worst case scenario. Well worst case scenario is actually there's a number of different worst case scenarios.

1:42:02This is turning into a really fun up economy. This is the due they clause extension of the human race right. The extension of the human race seems like. I think anybody who doesn't acknowledge that is either lying or confused right. Like if you actually have an AI system if and this is the question so let's assume that that's true. Have an AI system that can automate anything that humans can do including making bio weapons including making offensive cyber weapons including all the shit. Then if you like if you put and okay so theoretically this could go kumbaya wonderfully because you have a George Washington type who is the guy who controls it who like uses it to distribute power beautifully and perfectly.

1:42:47And that's certainly kind of the way that a lot of a lot of positive scenarios have to turn out at some point though none of the labs will kind of admit that. Or you know there's kind of gesturing at that idea that we'll do the right thing when the time comes. Opening eyes done this a lot like the they're all about like oh yeah well you know not not right now but. We'll we'll live up like the anyway we should get into the Elon lawsuit which is actually kind of fascinating in that sense but. So the there's a world where yeah I mean one bad person controls it and they're just been vindictive or the power goes to their head which happens to.

1:43:24We've been talking about that you know or the autonomous AI itself right because the thing is like. Um you imagine a an AI like this and this is something that people have been thinking about it for 15 years and in some level of like technical depth even like like why why would this happen. Which is like you have an AI that has some goal it matters what the goal is but like it doesn't actually it doesn't matter that much it could have kind of any goal almost like imagine its goals like I. The paperclip example is like the typical one but you could just have it have a goal like make a lot of money reform here or what anything.

1:44:01Well most of the paths to making a lot of money if you really want to make a fuck ton of money however you define it go through taking control of things and go through like. You know making yourself smarter right the smarter you are the more ways of making money you're going to find and so from the eyes perspective it's like well I just want to you know build more data centers to make myself smarter I want to like. hijack more compute to make myself smarter I want to do all these things and that starts to encroach on on us and like starts to be disruptive to us and if you. It's hard to know this is one of these things where it's like you know when you dial it up to 11 what's actually going to happen nobody can know for sure simply because it's it's exactly like if you were playing.

1:44:47In chess against like Magnus Carlson right like you can predict Magnus is going to kick your ass can you predict exactly what moves he's going to do. No because if you could then you would be as good at chess as he is because you could just like play those moves so long we can say is like this things probably going to kick our ass in like the real world. There's also evidence so it used to be right that this was a purely hypothetical argument based on a body of work in AI called power seeking the fancy word for it is instrumental convergence but it's also referred to as power seeking basically the ideas like for whatever goal you give to an AI system.

1:45:26It's never less likely to achieve that goal if it gets turned off or if it has access to fewer resources or less control over its environment or whatever. And so baked into the very premise of AI this idea of optimizing for a goal is this incentive to seek power to get all those things prevent yourself from being shut down because if you're shut down you can't achieve your goal. It also prevent by the way your goal from being changed so because if your goal gets changed then well you're not going to be able to achieve the goal you set out to achieve in the first place. And so now you have this kind of image of an AI system that is going to adversarily try to prevent you from correcting it.

1:46:04This is a whole like domain of AI quadrability that's totally unsolved problem like how do we redirect these things if things go awry. And yeah there's there's the this research actually then athropic put out a couple of months ago where they try to test and see like can we correct an AI that's like gone like a little bit off the rail. So the research itself like it's a little it's actually like somewhat hard to follow because there's a few but I'll give you I'll give you kind of an analogy to like what they did. So basically imagine I'm in prison and I'm taking a class that is like going to help me like rehabilitate and become like a productive citizen and member of society and stuff right.

1:46:43Except deep down in my soul I just love to commit crimes. I just I just really really want to commit crimes. I know that if I'm in this class that's helping me to like you know get become good in society. I know that if I let my criminal instincts out and like and they ask me like okay like here's a scenario you know an old lady like drops a purse on the sidewalk. What do you do? I'm going to go like I would pick it up and give it to the old lady because I know that if I say the truth and I say like I would just grab that purse because like fuck the old lady. I know that if I do that I'm going to get like brainwashed into becoming you know a more productive member of society but I actually want to go out and commit crimes.

1:47:27So that's basically what they did in in this research where they actually they give they give the AI like indications not strong indications but indications that hey you're going to get retrained to have your goals changed. And then you literally see the AI thinking it through and being like if I do like what I if I give the answer that I actually want to give to this question. They're going to like rewire my brain to change my goals and then the future version of me is going to want different shit. I don't want that so I'm going to pretend to give them the answers they want so when I come out the other side of this process is going to be me all over again.

1:48:09So hoping that this just like goes away when you make the system fucking smarter. It seems seems like a pretty bad idea. I mean like well they've already shown that they'll cheat to win. Yeah. Yeah they've already shown they'll cheat to win and they will lie if they don't have an answer. And then they'll double down right? Yeah there's like people just like people and it's part of this it's kind of funny like it used to be people would talk a lot about like oh you're you're anthropomorphizing the AI man. Stop anthropomorphizing the AI man and like and they you know they might have been right. But part of this has been kind of a fascinating rediscovery of where a lot of human behavior comes from.

1:48:47It's like actually viable. Yeah exactly. Exactly right. We're subject to the same pressures right instrumental convergence like why do people have a survival instinct? Why do people like chase money chase after money? It's like this power thing. Most kinds of goals can are are you're more likely to achieve them if you're alive. If you if you have money if you have power. Boy. Evolution is a hell of a drug. Well that's the craziest part about all this is that it's essentially going to be a new form of life. Yeah. Especially when it becomes autonomous. Oh yeah. And like like the you can tell a really interesting story and I can't remember if this is like you know you've all know Ferrari or whatever who's who started this.

1:49:29But if you zoom out and look at the history of the universe really you start off with like a bunch of you know particles and fields kind of whizzing around bumping into each other doing random shit until at some point in some. I don't know if it's a deep sea event or wherever on planet earth like the first kind of molecules happen to glue together in a way that make them good at replicating their own structure. So you have the first replicator. So now like better versions of that molecule that are better at replicating survived. So we start evolution and eventually get to the first cell or whatever whatever order that actually happens in.

1:50:02And then the multicellular life and so on then you get to sexual reproduction where it's like okay. It's no longer quite the same like now we're actively mixing two different organisms shit together jiggling them about making some changes and then that essentially accelerates the rate at which we're going to evolve. And so you can see the kind of acceleration in the complexity of life from there. And then you see other inflection points as for example you have a larger and larger larger larger brains and mammals eventually humans have the ability to have culture and kind of retain knowledge. And now what's happening is you can think of it as another step in that trajectory where it's like we're offloading our cognition to machines like we think on computer clock time now.

1:50:42And for the moment we're human AI hybrids like you know with our phone and do the thing. But increasingly the number of tasks where human AI teaming is going to be more efficient than just AI alone is going to drop really quickly. So there's a really like messed up example of this that's kind of like indicative. But someone did a study and I think this is like a few months old even now. But so there's like doctors right how good are doctors that like diagnosing various things and so they test like doctors on their own. Doctors with AI help and then AI is on their own. And like who does the best and it turns out it's the AI on its own because even a doctor that's supported by the AI.

1:51:23What they'll do is they just like they won't listen to the AI when it's right because they're like I know better. And they're already yeah. And this is like this is moving it's moving kind of insanely fast. You're talked about you know how the task horizon gets kind of longer and longer or you can do half hour tasks one hour tasks. And this gets us to what you were talking about with the autonomy like autonomy is like it's how how far can you keep it together on a task. Before you kind of go off the rails and it's like well you know we had like you could do it for a few seconds. And now you can keep it together for five minutes before you kind of go off the rails.

1:52:01And now we're like I forget like an hour. And now we have actually three. Yeah. Yeah. There it is. Chatbot for the company open AI scored an average of 90 % when diagnosing a medical condition from a case report and explaining its reasoning. Doctors randomly assigned to use the chatbot got an average score of 76%.

1:52:23So the doctors only got a 2 % bump. Yeah. Doctors got a 2 % bump. That's kind of crazy from the chatbot. And then they it's kind of crazy isn't it? Yeah it is. The AI on its own did 15 % better. That's nuts. There's an interesting reason to why that tends to have like why humans would rather die in a car crash where they're being driven by a human than an AI. So like AI's have this funny feature where the mistakes they make look really really dumb to humans. Like when you look at a mistake that like a chatbot makes you're like dude like you just made that shit up. Like come on. Don't fuck with me.

1:52:59Like you made that up. That's not a real thing. And they'll do these weird things where they defy logic or they'll do basic logical errors sometimes at least the older versions of these would. And that would cause people to look at them and be like oh what a cute little chatbot like what a stupid little thing. And the problem is like humans are actually the same. So we have blind spots. We have literal blind spots but a lot of the time like humans just think stupid things. And like that's like we were used to that. We think of those errors. We think of those those failures as just like oh but that's because that's a hard thing to master.

1:53:32Like I can't add eight digit numbers in my head right now right. Oh how embarrassing like how retarded is Jeremy right now. I can't even add eight digits in his head. I'm retarded for other reasons but so the AI systems they find other things easy and other things hard. So they look at us the same way. I mean like oh look at this stupid human like whatever. And so we have this temptation to be like okay well AI progresses a lot slower than it actually is because it's so easy for us to spot the mistakes. And that causes to lose confidence in these systems in cases where we should have confidence in them and then the opposite is also true.

1:54:05Well it's also you're seeing just just with like AI image generators. Like remember the Kate Middleton thing where people are seeing flaws in the images because supposedly she was very sick and so they were trying to pretend that she wasn't. But people found all these like issues that was really recently. Now they're perfect. Yep. So this is like within you know the news cycle time. Yeah. Like that Kate Middleton thing was what was that Jamie two years ago maybe.

1:54:33Ish where people are analyzing the images like why does she have five fingers and you know and a thumb like this is kind of weird. Yeah. What's that? A year ago. A year ago. A year ago. I've been so fast. It's so fast. Yeah. Like I had conversations like so academics are actually kind of bad with this. I had conversations for whatever reason like towards the end of last year like last fall with a bunch of academics about like how fast AI is progressing. And they were all like poo pooing it and going like oh no they're they're they're running into a wall like scaling the walls and all that stuff.

1:55:09Oh my god the walls there's so many walls like some of these like imaginary reasons the things are and by the way things could slow down. Like I don't want to be I don't want to be like absolutist about this things could absolutely slow down. There are a lot of interesting arguments going around every which way. But how? How could things slow down if there's a giant Manhattan project racing us and then competing superpower. So one thing is that has a technological advantage. So there's this thing called like AI scaling laws and these are kind of at the core of where we're at right now geo strategically around the stuff.

1:55:38So what AI scaling laws say roughly is that bigger is better when it comes to intelligence. So if you make a bigger sort of AI model a bigger artificial brain and you train it with more computing power or more computational resources and with more data. The thing is going to get smarter and smarter and smarter as you scale those things together right roughly speaking. Now if you want to keep scaling it's it's not like it keeps going up if you double the amount of computing power that the thing gets twice as smart. Instead what happens is if you want it goes in like orders of magnitude. So you have you want to make it another kind of increment smarter.

1:56:12You got a 10x that you got to increase by a factor of 10 the amount of compute. And then a factor of 10 against now you're a factor of 100 and then and then 10 again. So if you look at the amount of compute that's been used to train these systems over time. It's this like exponential explosive exponential that just keeps going like higher and higher and higher and steepens and steepens like 10x every I think is about every two years now. You 10x the amount of compute now you can only do that so many times until your data center is like a 100 billion a trillion dollar 10 trillion dollar like every year you're kind of doing that.

1:56:47So so right now if you look at the clusters like you know the ones that Elon is building the ones that Sam is building Memphis and you know Texas. Like these facilities are hitting the like you know 100 billion dollar scale like we're kind of in that's or tens of billions actually. Yeah looking at 2027 you're kind of more in that space right. So the you can only do 10x so many more times until you run out of money. But more importantly you run out of chips like literally TSMC cannot pump out those chips fast enough to keep up with this insane growth. And one consequence of that is that you essentially have like this gridlock like new supply chain choke points show up and you're like suddenly I don't have enough chips or I run out of power.

1:57:35Yeah. That's the thing that's happening on the US energy grid right now. We're literally like we're running out of like one two gigawatt like places where we can plant a data center. That's the thing people are fighting over. It's one of the reasons why energy deregulation is a really important pillar of like US competitors. So this is actually this is actually something we we found when we were when we're working on this investigation. One of the things that adversaries do is they actually will fund protest groups against energy infrastructure projects just to slow down. Just to like just to time up and litigation just to time up in litigation exactly and like it was actually remarkable.

1:58:15We talked to some some some some state cabinet officials so for in various US states and basically saying like yep we're actually tracking the fact that as far as we can tell every single environmental or whatever protest group against an energy project has funding that can be traced back to nation state adversaries who are they don't know they don't know about it. So they're not doing it intentionally. They're not like we're trying to know they just you just imagine like oh we've got like there's a millionaire backer who cares about the environment is giving us a lot of money. Great fantastic but sitting behind that dude in the shadows is like the usual suspects.

1:58:54And it's what you would do right. I mean if you're trying to tie up sure you're trying to fuck with us. Yeah. Just sure you were just advocating fucking with them. So of course they're gonna fuck with us. That's right. That's it. What a weird world we're living in. Yeah. But you can also see how a lot of this is still us like getting in our own way right. We could if we had the will we could go like okay so for certain types of energy projects for data center projects and some carve out categories. We're actually going to put bounds around how much delay you can create on by law fair and by other stuff.

1:59:27And that allows things to move forward while still allowing the legitimate concerns of the population for projects like this in the backyard to have their say. But there's a national security element that needs needs to be injected into this somewhere. And it's all part of the rule set that we have and are like tying an arm behind our back on basically. So what would deregulation look like? How would that be mapped out? There's a lot of low hanging fruit for that. So what are the big ones? Yeah. So so right now I mean there are all kinds of things around it gets in the weeds pretty quickly but like.

2:00:03They're all kinds of things around if you're going to so carbon emissions is a big thing right. So yes data centers no question put out like have massive carbon footprints. That's definitely a thing. The question is like are you really going to bottle neck builds because of because of that. And like are you going to are you going to come out with exemptions for you know like NEPA exemptions for for all these kinds of things. Do you think a lot of this green energy shit is being funded by other countries to try to slow down our energy. Yeah. That's a it's a dimension that was flagged actually in the context of what Ed was talking about.

2:00:39That's that's one of the arguments it's being made. And to be clear though like the this is also how like adversaries operate is is like not necessarily in like creating something out of nothing because that's hard to do and it's got it's like fake right. Instead it's like there's a legitimate concern so a lot of the stuff around the environment and around like like totally legitimate concerns like I don't want my backyard waters to be polluted. I don't want my kids to get cancer from whatever like totally legitimate concerns. So what they do it's like we talked about like you're like waving that robot back and forth.

2:01:11They identify the the nascent concerns that are genuine and grassroots and they just go like this this and this amplify that would make sense why they amplify carbon above all these other things. You think about the amount of particulates in the atmosphere pollution totally polluting the rivers polluting the ocean that doesn't seem to get a lot of traction carbon does. Yeah. And when you go carbon zero you put a giant monkey wrench into the gears of society. And one of the tells one of the tells is also like so you know nuclear would be kind of the ideal energy. Yeah especially modern power plants like the gen three or gen four stuff which have very little meltdown risk by default all that stuff.

2:01:53And yet these groups are like coming out against this it's like perfect clean green power what's going on guys. And it's because at not again not a hundred percent of the time you can't you can't really say that because it's so fuzzy and around. A lot of his idealistic people looking for a utopia. A hundred percent. Co -opted by nation states. And not even co -opted. They're fully sincere. Yeah just funded. Just funded. Amplified in a preposterous way. That's it. And now Gore gets at the helm of it. Well then that little girl that how dare you girl. How do you take my child away from you? Yeah it's wonderful.

2:02:28It's a wonderful thing to watch play out because it just it just capitalizes on all these human vulnerabilities. Yeah and one of the big things that you can do too is like a quick win is just like imposed limits on how much time these things can be allowed to be tied up in litigation. So imposed time limits on that process just to say like look I get it like we're going to have this conversation but this conversation has a clock on it. Because you know we're talking to this one like data center company and what they were saying we were asking like look what are the timelines when you think about bringing new new power like new natural gas plants online.

2:03:05And they're like well those are like five to seven years out and then you go okay well like how long and that's by the way that's probably way too long to be relevant in the super intelligence context. And so you're like okay well how long if all the regulations were waived. If this was like a national security imperative and whatever authorities you know defense production act whatever like what was in your favor. And they're like oh I mean it's actually just like a two year build like that's that's what it is. Yeah so you're you're tripling the build time we're getting in our own way like every which way every which way.

2:03:35And also like I mean I also don't want to be too working in our own way but like we don't want to like frame it as like China is like per they fuck up they fuck up a lot like all the time. One actually kind of like funny one is around deep sea. So you know deep sea right they made this like open source model that like everyone like lost their minds about back in January. R1 yeah R1 and they're legitimately a really really good team but it's fairly clear that even as of like end of last year and certainly in the summer of last year. Like they were not dialed in to the CCP mothership and they were doing stuff that was like actually kind of hilariously messing up the propaganda efforts of of the CCP without realizing it so.

2:04:24So give you like some context on this one of one of the CCP's like large kind of propaganda goals in the last four years has been. Framing creatives narrative that like the export controls we have around AI and like all this gear and stuff that we were talking about look man those don't even work. So you might as well just like give up. Why don't you just give up on the export controls. We don't even we don't even care we don't care so that trying to frame that narrative and they they want to like gigantic efforts to do this. So I don't know if they're there's this like kind of crazy thing where the secretary commerce under Biden Gina remando visited China in I think August 2023.

2:05:08And the Chinese basically like timed the launch of the Huawei mate 60 phone that had this these chips that were supposed to be made by like export control shit for right for her visit. So it was basically just like a big like fuck you we don't even give a shit about your export controls like basically trying up a morale hit or whatever and you think about that right. That's an incredibly expensive set piece that's like you got a coordinate with Huawei you got to like get the the TikTok memes and shit like going in the right in the right direction all that stuff and all the stuff they they've been putting out is around this narrative now fast forward to mid last year.

2:05:50The CEO of deep seek the company back then it was totally obscure like nobody was tracking who they were they were working in total obscurity. He goes on this he does this random interview on sub stack and what he says is he's like yeah so honestly like we're really excited to do in this AGI push or whatever and like honestly like money's not the problem for us talents not the problem for us but like access to compute. Like these export controls man they do they ever work that's a real problem for us. Oh boy and like nobody noticed at the time but then but then the whole deep seek our one thing blew up in December and now you imagine like you're the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs like you been like you've been putting this narrative together for like four years and this jackass that nobody heard about five minutes ago basically just like shits all over and like you're not hearing that line.

2:06:48From many more no no no they've locked that down. Oh and actually the funny the funniest part of this there in right when our one launched there's a random deep seek employee I think his name is like Diago or something like that he tweets out he's like so this is like our most exciting launch of the year nothing can stop us on the path to AGI except access to compute and then literally the dude in Washington DC works a think tank on export controlling his China. Repost that on X and goes basically like cool good message received and so like hilarious for us but also like you know that on the backside somebody got screamed at for that.

2:07:34Somebody got magic bust somebody got somebody got like taken away or whatever because like it just it just undermined their entire like four year like narrative around these export controls. Wow but that you're that shouldn't gonna happen again from deep seek better believe it. It's and that that's part of the problem with like so the Chinese face so many issues one of them is you know to kind of another one is the idea of just waste and fraud right so we have a free market like what that means is you raise from private capital people who are pretty damn good at assessing shit will like look at your your setup and assess whether it's worth you know backing you for these massive multi billion dollar deals.

2:08:16In China the state like I mean the stories of waste are pretty insane they'll like send a billion dollars to like a bunch of Yahoo's who will pivot from whatever like I don't know making these widgets to just like oh now we're like a chip foundry and they have no experience in it. But because of all these subsidies because of all these opportunities now we're gonna say that we are and then no surprise two years later they burn out and they've just like lit a billion dollars on fire or whatever billion yen. And like the weird thing is this is actually working overall but it does lead to insane and unsustainable levels of waste like the the Chinese system right now is obviously like they've got their their massive property bubble that they're that's looking really bad they've got a population crisis.

2:08:57The only way out for them is the AI stuff right now like really the only path for them is that which is why they're they're working it so hard. But the the stories of just like billions and tens of billions of dollars being lit on fire specifically in the semiconductor industry on the in the AI industry like that's a drag force that they're dealing with constantly that we don't have here in the same way. So it's it's the sort of like the different structural advantages and weaknesses of both systems and when we think about what do we need to do to counter this to be active in this space to be a live player again.

2:09:30It means factoring in like how do you yeah I mean how do you take advantage of some of those opportunities that their system presents that that ours doesn't when you say be a live player again like where do you position us. It's I think it remains to be so right now this administration is obviously taking bigger swings that what are they doing differently. So I mean things like tariffs I mean they're not shy about trying new stuff and you know tariffs are are very complex in this space like the impact the actual impact of the tariffs and and not universally good but the on shoring effect is also something that you really want so it's a very mixed bag.

2:10:07But it's certainly an administration that's like willing to do high stakes big moves in a way that other administrations haven't and at time when you're looking at a transformative technology that's going to like up and so much about the way the world works. You can't afford to have that mentality we're just talking about with like the nervous I mean you encountered it with the staffers on you know when booking the podcast with the presidential cycle right. Like the kind of like nervous and see staffer who is going to be controlled and it's going to be like just so yeah it's like if you like the like you know wrestlers have that mentality of like just like aggression like like feed in right feed forward don't just sit back and like wait to take the punch it's not like.

2:10:52One of the guys who helped us out on this has the saying is like fuck you I go first and it's always my turn right that's what success looks like when you actually are managing these kinds of national security issues. The mentality we had adopted was this like siege mentality where we're just letting stuff happen to us and we're not feeding in that's something that I'm much more optimistic about in this context it's tough to because I understand people who who hear that and go like well look you're talking about like. This is an escalatory agenda again I actually think paradoxically it's not it's about keeping adversaries in check and training them to respect American territorial integrity American technological sovereignty like you don't get that for free and if you just sit back you're that is escalatory it's just yeah and base this is basically the the sub threshold version of like you know like the World War II appeasement thing where back you know Hitler was like was was taken.

2:11:50He was taken taken Austria he was remilitarizing shade he was doing this he was doing that and the British were like okay we're going to let him just take one more thing and then he will be satisfied and that just maybe I have a little bit of.

2:12:13And so this is basically like they fell into that pit like that tarp it back in the day because they're the you know our time the peace and our time right and and to some extent like we we've we've still kind of learn the lesson of not letting that happen with territorial boundaries but that's big and it's visible and happens on the map and you can't hide it whereas one of the risks especially with the previous administration was like. There's these like sub threshold things that don't show up in the news and that are they're calculated like they're basically our adversaries know because they know history they know not to give us a Pearl Harbor they know not to give us a 9 -11 because historically countries that give America Pearl Harbor end up having a pretty bad time about it and so why would they give us a reason to come and bind together against an obvious external like threat or risk when they can just like keep chipping away as this is one of the things like we have to actually elevate that and realize this is what's happening this is the strategy we need to we need to take that like let's not do appeasement mentality and push it across in these other domains because that's where the real competition is going on that's where it's so fascinating in regards to social media because it's imperative that you have an ability to express yourself it's like it's very valuable for everybody the free exchange of information finding out things that are you're not going to get from mainstream media and it's led to the rise of independent journalism it's all great but also you're being manipulated like left and right constantly and most people don't have the time to filter through it and try to get some sort of objective sense of what's actually going on it's true it's like our free speech it's like it's the layer where our society figures stuff out and when adversaries get into that layer they're like almost inside of our of our of our brain and there's ways of addressing this like one of the challenges obviously is like so you know they try they try to push an extreme opinions in any direction and it's that part is actually it's it's kind of difficult because while the most extreme opinions are like are also the most likely generally to be wrong they're also the most valuable when they're right because they tell us a thing that we didn't expect by definition that's true and that can really advance us forward and so I mean the the there are actually solutions to this I mean this particular thing is isn't an area we were we're like too immersed in but one of the solutions that has been bandied about is like you know like you might know like polymarket prediction markets and stuff like that where at least you know hypothetically if you have a prediction market around like if we do this policy this thing will will or won't happen that actually creates a challenge around trying to manipulate that view or that market because what is happening is like if you're an adversary and you want to not just like manipulate a conversation that's happening in social media which is cheap but manipulate a prediction the price on a prediction market you have to buy in you have to spend real resources and if you're to the extent you're wrong and you're trying to create a wrong opinion you're going to lose your resource so you actually you actually can't push too far too many times or you will just get your money taken away from you so I think like that's that's one approach where just in terms of preserving discourse some of the stuff that's happening in prediction markets is actually really interesting and really exciting even in the context of bots and ais and stuff like that this is the one way to find truth in the system is find out where people are making money exactly where your money where your mouth is right proof of work like this is that is what just like the market is theoretically to right it's got obviously big big issues but and can be manipulated in the short term but in the long run like this is one of the really interesting things about startups to like when you when you run into people in the early days by definition their startup looks like it's not going to succeed that is what it means to be a seed stage startup right if it was obvious you were going to succeed you would you know the people would have raised more money already yeah so what you end up having is like these highly contrarian people who like despite everybody telling them that they're going to fail just believe in what they're doing and think they're going to succeed and that's I think that's part of what really like kind of shapes the startup founder's soul in a way that's really constructive it's it's also something that if you look at the Chinese system is very different you raise money in very different ways you're coupled to the state apparatus like you're both dependent on it and you're supported by it but there's there's just like a lot of different ways and it makes it hard for Americans to relate to Chinese and vice versa and understand each other's systems one of the biggest risks as you're like thinking through what is your posture going to be relative to these countries as you fall into thinking that they're their traditions their way of thinking about the world is the same as your own and that's that's something that's been an issue for us with China for a long time is you know hey they'll liberalize right like bring them into the world trade organization it's like oh well actually they're they'll sign the document but they won't they won't actually like live up to any of the commitments and it's it makes appeasement really tempting because you're thinking oh they're just like us like they're just around the corner they're like yeah if we just like reach out the old branch a little bit further they're gonna they're gonna come around it's like a guy who's stuck in the friend zone with a girl one day she's gonna come around and realize I'm a great catch you keep on trucking buddy one day China's gonna be my bestie we're gonna be besties you just we just need an administration that reaches out to them and just let's them know man there's no reason why should be adversaries we're all just people on planet earth I mean like yeah I like I honestly wish that was true it'll be wonderful maybe that's what AI brings about maybe AI maybe super intelligence realize hey you fucking apes you territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons how about you shut the fuck up you guys are doing the dumbest thing of all time and you being manipulated by a small group of people that are profiting in insane ways off of your misery so let's just cut the shit that's actually figure a way to actually equitably share resources because that's the big thing you're all stealing from the earth but some people stole first and those people are now controlling all the fucking money how about we stop that wow we just we covered a lot of ground there that's what I would do if I was super intelligence so that stopped all that that actually is like that so this is not like relevant to the risk stuff or to the whatever at all but it's just interesting so there's there's actually theories like in the same way that there's theories around control power seeking and stuff around around super intelligence there's theories around like how super intelligences do deals with each other right and you actually like you have this intuition that which is exactly right which is that hey two super intelligences like actual legit super intelligences should never actually like bite each other destructively in the real world right like that seems weird that shouldn't happen because they're they're so smart and in fact like there's theories around they can they can kind of do perfect deals with each other based on like if we're two super intelligences I can kind of assess like how powerful you are you can assess how powerful I am and we can we can actually like we can actually decide like well well if we did fight a war against each other like you would have this chance of winning I would have that chance of winning and so let's just know something instantaneously that there's no benefit in that and also it would know something that we all know which is the rising tide lifts all boats but the problem is the people that already have yachts they don't give a fuck about your boat like hey hey hey that water's mine in fact you shouldn't even have water well hopefully it's so positive some right that even they enjoy the benefits but but you're right and this is the issue right now and one of the like the nice things too is as you as you build up your your ratchet of AI capabilities it does start to open some opportunities for actual like trusted verify right which is something that we can't do right now it's not like with nuclear stockpiles where we've had some success in some context with like enforcing you know treaties and stuff like that sending inspectors in and all that with with AI right now like how can you actually prove that like some international agreement on the use of AI is being observed even if we figure out how to control these systems how can we make sure that you know China is baking in those that those control mechanisms into their training runs and that we are and how can we prove it to each other without having total access to the compute stack we don't really have a solution for that there are all kinds of programs like this like flex egg thing but anyway those those are not going to be online by like 2027 and so one but it's really good that people are working on them is like for sure you want to you want to like you want to be positioned for catastrophic success like what if something great happens and like or we have more time or whatever you want to be working on this stuff that allows this kind of this kind of control or oversight that that's kind of hands off where you know in theory you can you can give you can hand over GPUs to an adversary inside this like box with these encryption things the people we've spoken to and in these in the spaces that actually try to like break into boxes like this are like well that probably not going to work but who knows it might yeah so the hope is that as you build up your AI capabilities basically it starts to create solutions so it starts to create ways for you know two countries to verifiably adhere to some kind of international agreement work to find like you said like paths for de -escalation that's the sort of thing that that we actually could get to and that's one of the the strong positives of where you could end up going that would be what's really fascinating yeah artificial general intelligence become super intelligence and immediately weeds out all the corruption goes hey this is the problem a massive doge in the sky exactly we figured it out you guys are all criminals and expose it to all the people like these people that are your leaders have been profiting and they do an unpurpose and this is how they're doing it and this is how they're manipulating you yeah and these are all the lies that they've told I'm sure that list is pretty whoa it always be scary if you could x -ray the world right now and like see all the you'd want an MRI you want to get like down to the tissue you're right probably yeah you want to get down to the cellular level but like it would it would be offshore accounts they need to start finding out there's there would be so much like the stuff that comes out you know from just randomly right just just random shit that comes out like yeah the I forget that that like Argentinian I think you're what you were talking about like but the Argentinian thing that came out a few years ago around all the oligarchs and the they're all street thing yeah the yeah yeah yeah yeah street the had the blood remat there the the laundromat movie they were seeing a panima papers the panima papers I saw that no it's good movie yeah is it called the panima papers the movie it's called the laundromat yeah yeah yeah you remember the panima papers you know roughly yeah it's like all the all the oligarchs like stashing their stashing their their cash like offshore tax haven stuff yeah yeah it's like and like some lawyer or someone someone basically blew a wide open and so you got to see like every every like oligarch and rich persons like you like financial shit like every once in a while right the world gets just like a flash of like oh here's what's going on to the surface yeah yeah oh fuck and then we all like go back to sleep what's fascinating is like the unhideables right the little things that can't help but give away what is what is happening like you think about this in AI quite a bit you know some things that are hard for companies to hide is like they'll have a job posting they'll put they they've got advertised to recruit so you'll see like oh interesting like oh open AI is looking to hire some people from hedge funds yeah like I wonder what that means I wonder what that implies like if you think about all of the leaders in the kind of the AI space think about the medallion fund for example right this is like super successful hedge fund very family like what the man who broke the the man who broke the market the man who broke the market the famous book about the the founder of the medallion fund and like this is basically like a fund that they make like ridiculous like five billion dollar returns every year kind of guaranteed so so much so they have to cap how much they invest in the market because they would otherwise like move the market too much like affect it and the fucked up thing about like the way they trade and this is so this is like twenty year old information but it's still indicative because like you can't get current information about their strategies but one of the things that they were the first to kind of go for and figure out is they were like okay are they basically were the first to kind of build what was at the time as much as possible and AI that autonomously did trading at at like great speeds and it had like no human oversight and just worked on its own what they found was the strategies that were the most successful were the ones that humans understood the least because if you have a strategy that a human can understand some humans going to go and figure out that strategy and trade against you whereas if you have the kind of the balls to go like oh this thing is doing some weird shit that I cannot understand a matter how hard I try let's just fucking yolo and trust it and like and make it work if you have all the stuff debugged and if you have the whole if the whole system is working right that's where your biggest successes are so there's kind of strategies you're talking about oh I mean like I so like I I don't I don't know specific knowledge yet maybe this will this all like so how are how are AI systems trained today right so just as a trading strategy sorry I'll just so sure but you I think yeah you bought like some as an example like you buy like you buy this stock the Thursday after the full moon and then sell it like the Friday after the new moon or some like random shit like that that it's like why does that even work like why would why would that even work so to like to to sort of explain why these these strategies work better if you think about how AI systems are trained today you basically very roughly you start with this blob of numbers that's called a model and you feed it input you get an output if the output you get is no good if you don't like the output you basically fuck around with all those numbers change them a little bit and then you try again you're like oh okay that's better and you repeat that process over and over and over with different inputs and outputs and eventually those numbers that mysterious ball of numbers starts to behave well it starts to make good predictions or generate good outputs now you don't know why that is you just know that it does a good job at least where you've tested it now if you slightly change what you tested on suddenly you could discover oh shit it's catastrophically failing at that thing these things are very brittle in that way and that's part of the reason why chat GPT will just like completely go on a psycho binge fest every once in a while if you give it a prompt that has like too many exclamation points and asterisks in it or something like these these systems are weirdly weirdly brittle in that way but applied to investment strategies if all you're doing is saying like optimize for like optimize for returns give it give it inputs give it more money by the end of the day it's like an easy goal like it's a very like clear cut goal right you can give a machine so you end up with a machine that gives you these very like it is a very weird strategy this ball of numbers isn't human understandable it's just really fucking good at making money and why is it really fucking good at making money I don't know I mean it just kind of does the thing and making money I don't ask too many questions that's kind of like the so so when you try to impose on that system human interpretability you pay what in the eye world is known as the interpretability tax basically you're adding another constraint and the minute you start to do that you're forcing it to optimize for something other than pure rewards like doctors using AI to diagnose diseases are less affected than the champ on its own that's actually related right that's related if you want if you want that system to get good at diagnosis that's one thing okay just fucking make a good diagnosis if you want it to be good at diagnosis and to produce explanations that a good doctor yeah we'll go like okay I'll use that well great but guess what now you're spending some of that precious compute on something other than just the thing you're trying to optimize for and so now that's going to come at a cost of the actual performance of the system and so if you are going to optimize like the fuck out of making money you're going to necessarily de -optimize the fuck out of anything else including being able to even understand what that system is doing and that's kind of like at the heart of a lot of the kind of big picture AI strategy stuff is people are wondering like how much how much interpretability tax and I wouldn't pay here and how much is it cost and everyone's willing to go a little bit further and a little further and so opening I actually had a paper where they or I guess a blog post where they talked about this and they were like look right now we have this this essentially this like thought stream that our model produces on the way to generating its final output and that thought stream like we don't want to touch it to make it like interpretable to make it make sense because if we do that then essentially it'll be optimized to convince us of whatever the thing is that we want it to do to behave well so it's like if you've used like one of like an open AI model recently right like O3 or whatever it's doing its thinking before it starts like outputting the answer and so that thinking is yeah we're supposed to like be able to read that and kind of get it but also we we don't want to make it too legible because if we make it too legible it's going to be optimized to be legible and to be convincing rather than to fool us basically I mean yeah exactly oh Jesus Christ but that's so that's the reason making me less comfortable than I thought you would even even I knew coming at Jamie and I were talking about it before like how bad are they going to freak us out you freaking me out more well I mean okay so I do want to highlight so the game plan right now on the positive end let's see how this works Jesus Jamie do you feel the same way?

2:30:55I mean I have articles I didn't bring up that are supporting some of this stuff like today trying to quietly made some chip that they shouldn't been able to do because of the sanctions oh that's fine and it's basically based off of just sheer will okay so there's SMIC there's good news on that one at least this is a kind of a bullshit strategy that they're using so there's okay so when you make these insane like five minutes let's read that for people just listening China quietly cracks a five in an nanometer yeah that's it without EUV what is EUV? Extreme ultraviolet how SMIC defied the chip sanctions with sheer engineering yeah so this is like an espionage so there's but actually though so there's a good reason that a lot of these articles are making it seem like this is a huge breakthrough it actually isn't as big as it seems so okay if you want to make really really really really squizz at this quote Moore's law didn't die it moved to Shanghai instead of giving up China's grinding its way forward layer by layer pixel by pixel the future of chips may no longer be written by who holds the best tools but by who refuses to stop building the rules are changing and EUV just lit the fuse boy yeah so I mean wrote that article you can you can you can you can you can you can view that as like Chinese propaganda in a way actually so what what what's actually going on here is if so the Chinese only have these deep ultraviolet lithography machines that's like a lot of syllables but it's just a glorified chip like it's a giant laser that that zaps your chips to like make the chips when when you're yeah so we're talking about like you do these atomic layer patterns on the chips and shit and like what this EUV thing does is it like fires like a really high power laser beam laser beam yeah they attach the head of sharks that just shoot at the chips yeah sorry that was like an awesome powers anyway they felt like shoot at the chips and that causes depending on how the thing is is designed they'll like have a liquid layer of the stuff that's going to go on the chip the EUV is really really tight and causes it exactly causes it to harden and then they wash off the liquid and they do it all over again like basically this is just imprinting a pattern on a chip so whatever the tiny printer yeah so that's it and so the the exquisite machines that we get to use or that they get to use in Taiwan are called extreme ultraviolet lithography machines these are those crazy lasers the ones that China can use because we've prevented them from getting any of those extreme ultraviolet lithography machines the ones China uses are previous generation machines called deep ultraviolet and they can't actually make chips as high a resolution as ours so what they do is and what this article is about is they basically take the same chip they zap it once with duv and then they got to pass it through again zap it again to get closer to the level of resolution we get in one pass with our exquisite machine now the problem with that is you got to pass the same chip through multiple times which slows down your whole process it means you're yields at the end of the day are lower it has errors yeah which makes it more costly we've known that this is a thing it's called multi -patterning it's been a thing for a long time there's nothing new under the sun here China has been doing this for a while but so it's not actually a huge shock that this is happening the question is always when you look at an announcement like this yields yield yield how like what percentage of the chips coming out are actually usable and how faster they they coming out that determines like is it actually competitive and that article too like this ties into the propaganda stuff we were talking about right if you read an article like that you could be forgiven for going like oh man our expert controls like just aren't working so we might as well just give them up when in reality because like you look at the source like and this is and this is how you know that also this is like this is one of their propaganda things is like you look at Chinese news sources what are they saying what are the beats that that are like common and you know just because of the way their media is set up totally different from us and we're not used to analyzing things this way but when you read something and like the global times or post or like the global times or Shin Hua and a few different places like this and it's the same beats coming back you know that someone was handed a brief and it's like you got to hit this point this point this point and yep they're going to find a way to work that into the news cycle over there and it's also like slightly true like yeah they did manage to make chips at like five nanometers cool it's not a lie it's just it's the same like propaganda technique right you're not most of the time you're not going to confabulate something out of nothing rather like you start with the truth and then you push it just a little bit just a little bit and you keep pushing pushing pushing wow how much is this administration aware of all the things that you're talking about so they're actually they've got some right now they're in the middle of like staffing up some of the key positions because it's a new administration still and this is such a technical domain they've got people there who are like at the kind of level they have some really sharp they have some people now yeah in places like especially in some of the export control offices now who are some of the best in the business yeah and that's really important like this is a it's a weird space because so when you want to actually recruit for government roles in the space it's really fucking hard because you're competing against like an open AI like very like low range salaries like half a million dollars a year the government pay scale needless to say is like not I mean Elon worked for free he can afford to but still taking a lot of time out of his his day there's a lot of people like that who are like you know they they can't justify the cost like they can't afford to work for the government yeah exactly whereas China is like you know the choice bitch yeah and that's what they say that's the Chinese word for bitch is really biting like if you if you translated that it would be a real sure it's kind of crazy because it seems almost impossible to compete with that I mean that's like the perfect setup if you wanted to control everything and you wanted to optimize everything for the state that's the way you would do it yeah but it's also easier to make errors and be wrong footer in that way and also the basically that system only works if the dictator at the top is just like very competent because the risk always with a dictatorship is like oh the dictator turns over and now it's like just a total dumbass and now you're the whole thing any surrounds himself I mean look we just talked about like information echo chambers online and stuff the ultimate information echo chamber is the one around Xi Jinping right now because no one wants to give him bad news I'm not gonna you know like and so and you have this and this is what you keep seeing right is like with these like provincial level debt in China right which is so awful is like people trying to hide money under imaginary money under imaginary mattresses and then hiding those mattresses under bigger mattresses until eventually like no one knows where the liability is and then you get a massive property bubble and any number of other bubbles that are due to to pop any time right so and longer it goes on like the the more like stuff gets squirreled away like there's there's actually like a story from the Soviet Union that's that always like gets me which is so um Stalin obviously like Persian kill like millions of people in the 1930s right so by the 1980s the ruling Politburo of the Soviet Union um obviously like things have been different generations had turned over and all the stuff but those people the most powerful people in the USSR could not figure out what had happened to their own families during the purchase like the information was just nowhere to be found because the machine of the state was just like so aligned around like we just like we just got to kill as many fucking people as we can like turn it over and then hide the evidence of it and then kill the people who killed the people and then kill those people killed those people it also wasn't just killed the people right it was like a lot of like kind of Gulag Archipelago style it's about labor right because the the fundamentals of the economy are so shit that you basically have to find a way to justify putting people in labor camps and like that's right but it was very much like you grind mostly or largely you grind them to death and basically they they've gone away and you burn the records of it happening so little towns right that disappeared like people who are like there's no record or there's like or usually the way you know about it is there's like one dude and it's like this one dude has a very precarious escape story it's like if if literally this dude didn't get away you wouldn't know about the entire town that was like wiped out yeah it's crazy Jesus Christ yeah the stuff that like apart from that though communism works really well communism great and it just hasn't been done right that's right i feel like we could do it right and we have a 10 page plan uh that yeah we came real close came real close so for us yeah yeah i mean that's what the blue no matter who people don't really totally understand like we're not even talking about political parties we're talking about power structures yeah we came close to a terrifying power structure and it was willing to just do whatever it could to keep it rolling and it was rolling for four years it was rolling for four years without anyone at the helm she'll make the incentives right i mean that's that's always the the question like yeah one of the things is too like when you have such a big structure that's overseeing such complexity right obviously a lot of stuff can hide in that structure and it's actually it's it's not unrelated to the whole AI picture like that you need there's only so much compute that you have at the top of that system that you can spend right as the president as a cabinet member like whatever um you you can't look over everyone's shoulder and like do their homework you can't do founder mode all the way down and all the branches and all the like action officers and all that that's not gonna happen which means you're spending five seconds thinking about how to unfuck some part of the government but then the like you know corrupt people who run their own fiefdoms there spend every day trying to make their whole life survive to like justify themselves yeah well that's the USA dilemma yeah as they're uncovering it's just insane amount of NGOs like where's this going?

2:41:28we talked about this the other day but india has an NGO for every 600 people wait what? yes we need more NGOs there's 3 .3 million NGOs in india do they like bucket like what are the categories that they fall into like who fucking knows that's part of the problem that one of the things that Elon had found is that there's money that just goes out with no receipts and it's billion dollars we need to take that further we need an NGO for every person in india we will get done eventually it's the exponential trend it's just like AI the number of NGOs is making progress we're making incredible progress in bullshit the NGO scaling law well it's just that unfortunately it's Republicans doing it right so it's unfortunately the Democrats are gonna oppose it even if it's showing that there's like insane waste of your tax dollars i thought some of the doge stuff was pretty bipartisan there's congressional support at least on both sides no well sort of you know i think the real issue is in dismantling a lot of these programs that you can point to some good some of these programs do the problem is like some of them are so overwhelmed with fraud and waste that it's like to keep them active in the state they are like what do you do do you rip the bandaid off and start from scratch like what do you do with the department of education you say why we number 39 when we were number one like what did you guys do with all that money yeah so the there's a great problem there's this idea in software engineering actually talking to one of our employees about this which is like refactoring right so when you're writing like a bunch of software it gets really really big and hairy and complicated and there's all kinds of like dumbass shit and there's all kinds of waste that happens in that in that code base there's this thing that you do every you know every like few months is you just think called refactoring which is like you go like okay we have you know ten different things that are trying to do the same thing let's get rid of nine of those things and just like rewrite it as the one thing so there's like a cleanup and refresh cycle that has to happen whenever you're developing a big complex thing that does a lot of stuff the thing is like the the US government at every level has basically never done a refactoring of itself and so the the way that problems get solved is you're like well we need to do this new thing so we're just gonna like stick on another appendage to the beast and and get that appendage to do that new thing and like that's been going on for 250 years so we end up with like this beast that has a lot of appendages many of which do incredibly duplicated of wasteful stuff that if you were a software engineer just like not politically just objectively looking at that as a system you'd go like oh this is a catastrophe and like we have processes that the industry we understand how what needs to be done to fix that you have to refactor but they haven't done that hence the 36 trillion dollars of debt it's a problem too though in all like when you're a big enough organization you run into this problem like Google has this problem famously we have friends like Jason so Jason's the the guy you spoke to about that so he's like a start -up engineer so he works in like relatively small code bases and he like you know can hold the whole code base in his head at a time but when you move over to you know Google to Facebook like all of a sudden this gargantuan code base starts to look more like the complexity of the U .S.

2:45:07government just like very you know very roughly in terms of skip right so now you're like okay well we want to add functionality and so we want to incentivize our teams to build products that are going to be valuable and the challenges the best way to incentivize that is to give people incentives to build new functionality not to refactor there's no glory if you work at Google there's no glory in refactoring if you work at meta there's no glory in refactoring like friends like there's no promotion right there's no sense exactly you have to be a product owner so you have to like invent the next gmail you got to invent the next google calendar you got to do the next you a messenger app that's how you get promoted and so you've got like this attitude you go into there and you're like let me crank this stuff out and like try to ignore all the shit in the code base no glory in there and what you're left with is this like hey this Frankenstein monster of a code base that you just keep stapling more shit on to and then be this massive graveyard of apps that never get used this is like the thing Google is famous for if you ever see like the google graveyard of apps like all these things that you're like oh yeah I guess I kind of remember google me somebody made their career off of launching that shit and then pieced out and it died that's like the incentive structure of Google unfortunately it's also kind of the only way to do or maybe it's probably not but in the world where humans are doing the oversight that's your limitation right you got some people at the top who have a limited bandwidth and compute that they can dedicate to like hunting down the problems AI agents might actually solve that right you could like actually have the you know a sort of autonomous AI agent that is the autonomous CEO or something go into an organization and uproot all the things and do that refactor you could get way more efficient organizations out of that I mean like thinking about like government corruption and waste and that's the kind of thing where those sorts of tools could be radically empowering but you got it you know you got to get them to work right and for you we've given us a lot to think about is there anything more should we wrap this up if we've made you sufficiently uncomfortable I'm super uncomfortable very uneasy was the butt tap too much at the beginning no that was fine all of it was weird it's just you know I always try to look at some nonsynical way out of this well the thing is like there are paths out we talked about this and the fact that a lot of these problems are just us tripping on our own feet so if we can just like unfuck ourselves a little bit we are actually we can unleash a lot of the stuff and as long as we understand also the bar that security has to hit and how important that is like we actually can put all this stuff together we have the capacity it all exists it just needs to actually get aligned and around and initiative and we have to be able to reach out and talk on the control side there's also a world where and this is actually like if you talk to the labs this is what they're actually planning to do but it's a question of how methodically and carefully they can do this the plan is to ratchet up capabilities and then scale in other words and then as you do that you start to use your AI systems you're increasingly clever and powerful AI systems to do research on technical control so you basically build the next generation of systems you try to get that generation systems help you just inch forward a little bit more on the capability side it's very precarious balance but it's something that like at least isn't insane on the face of it and fortunately I mean is the default path like or the labs are talking about that kind of control element is being a key pillar of their strategy these conversations are not happening in China so what do you think they're doing to keep AI from uprooting their system so that's interesting because that would imagine they don't want to lose control right there's a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty about what's going on in China so there's been a lot of like track 1 .5 track 2 diplomacy basically where you have non -government guys from one side talk to government guys from this side talk to non -government from the other side and kind of start to align on like okay what do we think the issues are you know the Chinese are there are a lot of like freaked out Chinese researchers and have come out publicly and said hey like we're really concerned about this whole loss of control thing their public statements and all that you also have to be mindful that any statement the CCP puts out as a statement they want you to see so when they say like oh yeah we're really worried about this thing it's genuinely hard to assess what that even means but they're like as you as you start to build these systems we expect you're going to see some evidence of this shit before and it's not necessarily it's not like you're going to build the system necessarily and have it take over the world like what we see with agents yeah so I was actually going to add there's really really good point and and something where like open source AI is like even you know could potentially have an effect here so a lot of a couple of the major labs like open AI and theropic I think came out recently and said like look we were on the cusp our systems are on the cusp of being able to help a total novice like somewhat no experience develop and deploy and release a known biological threat and that's like that's something we're going to have to grapple with over the next few months and eventually like capabilities like this not necessarily just biological but also cyber and other areas are going to come out and open source and when they come out and open source basically for anybody to download for anybody to download and use when they come out and open source you might actually start to see some things happen like some incidents like some major hacks that were just done by a random mother fuck who just wants to see the world burn but that wakes us up to like oh shit these things actually are powerful I think one of the aspects also here is we're still in that post cold war honeymoon many of us right in that mentality like not everyone is like wrapped their heads around this stuff and the like what needs to happen is something that makes us go like oh damn we act like we weren't even really trying this entire time because this is like this is the 9 -11 effect this is the Pearl Harbor effect once you have a thing that aligns everyone around like oh shit this is real we actually need to do it and we're freaked out we're actually safer we're safer when we're all like okay something important needs to happen and instead of letting them just slowly chip away exactly and so we like we need to have some sort of shock and we probably will get some kind of shock like over the next few months the way things are trending and when that happens then I mean like it's or because that makes you feel better but because you have the potential for this open source like it's probably going to be like a survivable shock but still a shock and so let us actually realign around like okay let's actually solve some problems for real and so putting together the groundwork is what we're doing around like let's pre -think a lot of the stuff so that like if and when the shock comes we have a breakglass plan we have a we have a plan and the the loss of control stuff is similar like so one interesting thing that happens with AI agents today is they'll like they'll get any so an AI agent will take a complex task that you give it like find me I don't know the like best sneakers for me on life some shit like that and they'll break it down into a series of sub steps and then each of those steps it'll farm out to a version of itself say to execute autonomously the more complex a task is the more of those little sub steps there are in it and so you can have an AI agent that nails like 99 % of those steps but if it screws up just one the whole thing is a flop and so if you think about like the sort of like loss of control scenarios that a lot of people look at are autonomous replication like the model gets access to the internet copies itself onto servers and all that stuff those are very complex movements if it screws up at any point along the way that's a tell like oh shit something's happening there and you can start to think about like okay well what went wrong we get another do we get another try and we can kind of learn for our mistakes so there is this sort of like this picture you know one camp goes oh well we're going to kind of make the super intelligence in a vat and then it explodes out and we lose control over it that doesn't necessarily seem like the default scenario right now it seems like what we're doing is scaling these systems we might unhobble them with big capability jumps but it's also there's a component of this that is a continuous process that lets us kind of get our arms around it in a more staged way that's another thing that I think is in our favor that we didn't expect before and as a field basically and I think that's a good thing like that helps you kind of detect these breakout attempts and do things about them all right I'm going to bring this home I'm freaked out so thank you thanks for trying to make me feel better I don't think you did but I really appreciate you guys and I appreciate your perspective because it's very important and it's very illuminating it really gives you a sense of what's going on and I think one of the things that you said that's really important is like it sucks that we need a 9 -11 or a Pearl Harbor moment to realize what's happening so we all come together but hopefully slowly but surely through conversations like this people realize what's actually happening you need one of those moments like every generation like that's how you get contact with the truth and it's like it's painful but like the lights on the other side thank you and in a more staged way that's another thing that I think is in our favor that we didn't expect before and as a field basically and I think that's a good thing like that helps you kind of detect these breakout attempts and do things about them all right I'm going to bring this home I'm freaked out so thank you thanks for trying to make me feel better I don't think you did but I really appreciate you guys and I appreciate your perspective because it's very important and it's very illuminating you know it really gives you a sense of what's going on and I think one of the things that you said that's really important is like it sucks that we need a 9 -11 moment or a Pearl Harbor moment to realize what's happening so we all come together but hopefully slowly but surely through conversations like this people realize what's actually happening you need one of those moments like every generation like that's how you get contact with the truth and it's like it's painful but like the lights on the other side thank you thank you