Episode 3062 CWSA 01⧸04⧸26
Episode Stats
Length
1 hour and 3 minutes
Words per Minute
131.08324
Summary
In this episode of the TechCrunch podcast, I talk about a mind-blowing thought that has blown my mind, and it might blow your mind too. I also talk about some of my favorite moments from the past week.
Transcript
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all right sound is now turned on as it turns out that when i lean i got it i got it
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that was a terrible way to start when i lean my phone against the screen which i
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do before the show it sometimes hits the microphone button off the only button
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that you wouldn't want to turn off all right does everybody see me everybody hear me sound is back
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it's back i was just teasing you although you couldn't hear it that i've got a mind-blowing
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thought today that i've never seen i've never heard but it blew my mind and it might blow your
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mind too so wait for that but first how many of you would like to do a simultaneous sip
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there's a time yeah let's do that um because i know why you're here you're here for the simultaneous
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sip all you need is a copper mugger glass of tankers chalice inside the canteen jugger flask
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a vessel of any kind fill it with your favorite liquid i like coffee and join me now for the
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parallel pleasure of the dopamine here today the thing that makes everything better
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oh extraordinary so so good well speaking of mind blown uh some of you know but if you didn't know
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yesterday owen gregorian held a spaces event that's the audio that's the uh the audio feature with an axe
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where people can volunteer to talk and so audio only and the topic was despite the fact that venezuela
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had just been taken over um the topic was about me so he owen generously did a entire spaces uh that
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lasted and here's here's the amazing part it lasted six and a half hours uh and people wondered scott
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did you actually listen to that yes i did now i couldn't listen to it all live i was dipping in
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and out because i had people coming in and out and nurses and a bunch of medical stuff so uh but
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after it was done and i had you know some serious pieces of uh of my own time um i listened to the
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whole thing and i was blown away um people saying very nice things there were tears there were compliments
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but i wanted to especially call out some people i'm really proud of and that's the people who were
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terrified about public speaking and here's the key they did it anyway they did it anyway
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now i hope i may have been part of your journey to realize that embarrassment or freedom from
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embarrassment is a superpower and i saw a number of people mention that as a superpower
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and i will tell you i was watching people who have obviously acquired that superpower
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do things that they were clearly uncomfortable with and it all worked out it all worked out
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so to those of you who were frightened but did it anyway here's to you second sip
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and if you were concerned about reciprocity uh another thing i talk about a lot uh boy did you pay it off
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wow well anyway um owen is planning on a another different topic uh he's going to follow after the
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show he'll do another spaces and by the way owen was amazing if if you want to hear somebody be a good
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host if you want to see how it's done listen to it listen to owen just amazing anyway he'll do a second
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one after the show uh but this one will be more about not about me it'll be about venezuela i think
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probably some other things will come up but the venezuela will be at the top of the top of mind
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all right all right i'm going to start by blowing your mind now here's my challenge that's a pretty
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big claim right and i'm going to add a thought to the universe that as far as i know has never been
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there before it goes like this oh i should also warn you the topic i'm about to talk about a lot of you
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do not like but i'm going to convert to the people who don't like it the topic i'm about to introduce
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i'm going to make you like it so that's my second challenge you're going to like something you didn't
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like before ready all right so as i've been telling you ai may have reached some kind of plateau in how
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well you can train it with just brute force and giving it more training material and i was reading
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in some publication let's see in tech crunch that this is the year that maybe ai people figure out
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that they've reached some kind of a plateau and they can't get much better just by adding more training
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material and more more data center so the response to that which is already happening is some startups
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trying to create virtual digital worlds that look and act like our world so that an ai can live in it
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and learn to operate the way human would and also learn general intelligence the way a human would
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now that necessarily means that these digital worlds will include characters based on humans because if
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you want the ai to be a uh intelligent like a human the thinking is that you have to train it in an
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environment in which it experiences the world like a human but because you can't you know unleash a bunch of
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stupid ai's into the real world they'll build an ai virtual world and the characters within it almost
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certainly would have to be programmed to believe they were not characters so they would have to be
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programmed to believe they were original base reality right so i believe this will be the year
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that ai um and these virtual realities will make it really obvious that if we're not if we're not
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already a simulation the odds are tremendously high that we probably are can't know for sure
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no way to know for sure but the odds will be a billion to one trillion to one that we're we're not real
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now so my next question now i'm getting to the good part i haven't got to the good part you're going
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to like it so people say to me but scott what does that imply about a creator you know the obvious
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question is who made the original and i've been saying for years that obviously there was some advanced
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intelligence don't know what it is it might be it might be your version of god it could be just a
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higher civilization but definitely it would have to be an advanced civilization that was smarter than us
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that knew how to create this simulation now you ready for the good part
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is it true or not true that in what we think is our base reality
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we're trying to create in the form of intelligence that would be smarter than us
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smarter than us so this this actually opens up the possibility that we're a simulation created by
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that's what i'm adding it's obvious there's something that was more intelligent than us
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could create a simulation that that fooled us into thinking we're real but since we know we're already
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trying to create an ai that's smarter than us it's entirely possible that we're created by an entity
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that has advanced intelligence but not as smart as us because we've already surpassed it i'll bet nobody
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said that before all right it gets better um so if it's true that the ai experts are going to make these
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various training worlds don't you think there will be lots of them there's not going to be one
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because every every ai startup that wants to create its own little environment will have to do their
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own so very quickly you would have more simulated environments might be two or three or more than
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whatever your base reality is now the other thing people ask me is uh why is this not compatible with
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christianity and i say probably is there's probably nothing i said this incompatible with christianity
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um you know you could imagine god created it it was the base reality and created it all
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and there's nothing to rule that whatsoever and other people will say what does that imply about souls
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well i don't think we know what a soul is so it kind of depends how you define it if you defined it
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one way um you know it probably is real and we have one if you define it some other way
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maybe not so real what about free will well here again it depends how you define it there's a
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definition of free will in which it definitely exists if you just say free will is the ability to make a
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choice if you stop there yeah it definitely exists because we well the ability to make a choice and not
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know why you know not know the the real mechanism of it so that could easily be true that you have free
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will if you define it that way if you defined it another way maybe you wouldn't and then lastly here's
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the part you're gonna like um whenever i talk about this simulation and especially when i talk about
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my own uh impending uh death um many of my christian friends and christian followers say to me scott you
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still have time you should convert to christianity and i usually just let that sit because that's not an
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argument i want to have um i've not been a believer and uh but i also have respect for any christian who
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goes out of their way to try to convert me because how would i believe you believe your own religion
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if you're not trying to convert me so i have great respect for people who care enough that they
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want me to convert uh and then go out of their way to try to convince me so you're going to hear for
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the first time today that it is my plan to convert so i still have time but my understanding is you're
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never too late and on top of that uh any skepticism i have about reality would certainly be instantly
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answered if i wake up in heaven um i do believe that the dominant christian theory is that i was i
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would wake up in heaven if i have a good life yeah i don't necessarily have to you know just state
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something in advance and so to my christian friends yes it's coming so you don't need to talk me into it
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i am now convinced that the risk reward is completely smart if it turns out that there's nothing there
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i've lost nothing but i've respected your wishes and i like doing that if it turns out there is something
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there and the christian model is the closest to it i win so with your permission
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i promise you that i will i will convert but i probably won't spend much time in that phase
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so don't expect it to happen today okay but the argument made argument accepted
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all right let's talk about the news is your mind blowing it
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did i blow any minds i will find out about that later i saw a post by chamath uh palahapatiya
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whose name i have trouble pronouncing and he was pointing out that back in september there was a
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it was a bipartisan unanimous bill in the california legislature to require more reporting on the cost and
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income data for the homeless so the idea is that both every single democrat and every single republican
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in california um agreed how rare is that can you think of any other any other time that every democrat
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and every republican in california agreed and they agreed to do this more rigorous testing uh or
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rigorous auditing i guess or or checking on the expenses and this is obviously based on all the
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alleged fraud and then as chamath points out uh governor newsom uh vetoed it now his reason for
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vetoing is that he believed that there were already existing laws that would cover it now are we
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supposed to believe and by this by the way this is back in september he vetoed it um are we supposed to
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believe that that newsom was the only democrat who knew that the laws already existed and nobody talked
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to him they went through all that work you know the democrats went through all that work
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to be behind this 100 percent and that he vetoes it and chamath asked the the obvious question why
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now i saw post response to this from a post on x called problem problematically non-compliant
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and uh in this post he said this is the evolution of a dilbert filter complexity laundering
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so this is based on something that may be inspired in terms of the thinking he said gavin's pretending
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other complex bills that nobody will understand much less enforce already accomplish the same thing
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how many times have i told you that uh fraud always hides its complexity so here both the democrats and
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republicans tried to come up with this you know way to control expenses that would be easy to understand
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but gavin newsom hid behind the complexity of the other things he thought would do the job
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this is a case of it looks exactly like what it is like you don't have to wonder why he did it they did it
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obviously to cover somebody's tracks well i think we're in a phase of you know civilization where the
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smart assumption is that he's doing this to cover some kind of fraud don't know don't know for sure
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and the reason i don't know is that hiding things behind complexity works it works really well
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yeah can you predict the fraud you can well here's a
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story non-story so mayor momdani the so-called communist mayor of new york
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city he said he called trump to file a complaint about the arrest of maduro
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who would do that so he called trump and he said he quote i registered my opposition
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i made it clear we left it at that now is that just performative is that purely theater and is it
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purely for the purpose of making it look like you know he can fight back against trump there was no
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value in that whatsoever i'm kind of surprised uh that trump took the call but so you watch on one hand
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you watch trump pull off this amazing military slash legal um operation which was probably fair well not
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probably it was very hard to pull off and everybody in the world's impressed but you got this one
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communist mayor who wants to register his opposition i made it clear you did nothing
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all right there's two quotes of the day uh i'm going to call them my court of the day
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one from eric weinstein and he posted on x this made me laugh this morning he said i've never been entirely
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isn't that a great way to put it i've never been sure if international law actually existed
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well my observation is that whoever has the power gets what they want so yeah on some theatrical
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performative level there's something like international law but anybody who can ignore it does
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ignore it this is a really an international law it's a funny question and then i thought that was
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going to be the court of the day but i saw one by bad hombre also an x and uh bad hombre posted this
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has kamala set up a bail fund for maduro yet now those are just good comments so i love i love a war
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that no americans get killed and it generates a bunch of good memes and funny quotes these are two of my
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favorites today all right um here's what i keep saying is working which is that trump creates assets
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out of nothing and one of the assets he's creating out of nothing is the idea that um he does what he
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says he'll do if you watch the press conference yesterday you saw rubio he just kept hammering that one
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point we have a president who does what he says he'll do he does what he says he'll do and i thought
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he was maybe maybe hitting that one point too much but uh if rubio is learning persuasion either by
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just association or whatever else from trump he knows that repetition is persuasion so he just repeated
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and repeated and repeated this president does what he says this president does what he says that's
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probably not because rubio is a bad public speaker because he's a good one it's probably because he
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understands the value of repetition and he's watched trump do it a million times a million times so uh and
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then of course other people pick it up you know the conservative independent media the the people who
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comment and stuff like me we pick that up and it's just automatic because we've been persuaded that
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that's an important thing to think about um so thinking about how this created an asset so
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trump has already threatened iran that if they shoot protesters that we would get involved he wasn't
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specific but it suggested that yeah we'd put enough uh maybe military or cia muscle into it that it would
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take out the regime now if trump had not already created this asset the asset that people believe he
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does what he says he's going to do and he's really he's done great on that uh would would ran maybe think
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twice or would ran say ah it's another joe biden he created an asset and nothing that's one of the
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things i always teach you before trump goes into any negotiation it feels like there's this point where
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he always creates that asset if you think about the tariffs for example um he created an asset out of
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nothing it became a tool slash weapon that just didn't exist before you just made it so that's a
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good persuasion i would guess and i hope i'm not wrong about this that china will not attack taiwan as
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long as trump is president now maybe it wouldn't have happened anyway but when when china watches uh
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our military take down the entire country in 10 minutes they're gonna think twice about doing
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something with taiwan that uh trump would you know be violently opposed to so probably
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this is having a big difference now he's also extending this new new york post is reporting that
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that maybe you heard this already he's so he's already threatened colombia and what did he say uh
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oh sorry one of the side effects of whatever i'm doing is i get burpee um so he's talking about
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colombian president uh petro who also has some kind of cartel connections and he says quote uh he has cocaine
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mills talking about the president of colombia he has cocaine mills he has factories where he makes
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cocaine and yeah i think i stick by my first statement he's making cocaine and then he says
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here's the kill shot he says they're sending it to the united states so he does have to wash his ass
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i i tell you often that trump is so good with swearing that he only uses it judiciously but when he does it
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really makes you focus on that thing he said it so instead of instead of saying a boring thing like
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yes you know i hope he cooperates in the future he says he has to wash his ass as soon as you throw ass
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in the sentence people pay attention and i imagine that uh the colombian president is uh practicing his run
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to his safe room yeah they probably got a stopwatch like all right uh president of colombia can you make
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it to the safe room in 37 seconds because unfortunately that's all the time you're gonna have
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and maduro i guess almost made it but he didn't then trump says about mexico um talking about the
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president of mexico sheinbaum he goes we're very friendly with her she's a good woman trump told uh
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i guess fox and friends he said and quote but the cartels are running mexico she's not running mexico
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okay again would mexican presidents be afraid of trump if he had not created this asset of if i say
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i'm coming for you i'm coming for you probably not so now it creates the option at least i don't know
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how this would work but at least the option that we could somehow work with mexico to get past the
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fact that their leader is a cartel plant i know we'll see so i would call this as trump called it the
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donro doctrine he was trying to see if he could make that sticky so instead of the monroe doctrine
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doctrine which basically said the united states will dominate our hemisphere stay out of our hemisphere
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he suggested this should be called the donro doctrine which i kind of like
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now the big surprise to me yesterday about venezuela is that trump says we
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meaning his military and uh well we be in the united states let's say uh are going to run venezuela
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but if you recall one of the biggest mistakes in iraq the second iraq war was that we took out the
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entire government and then everything fell apart and so people say if you had left some of the corrupt
00:26:54.560
government in place there would at least be stability and then maybe you could work toward you know a
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better government or something so i don't think that if if it were anybody but trump i don't think that
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they would have the assets going back to prior conversation i don't think they would have the
00:27:14.320
assets to um to run the country uh without using the locals so one of the it looks like the current
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vice president who would have been maduro's vice president the person you could probably trust the least
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uh is going to be under the let's say under threat from the us so rubio and hegseth and uh i think
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raisin kane general kane uh i think they're going to be working with working with the existing corrupt
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um venezuelan government now when i say working with surely that means co-opting meaning it's not an equal
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it's not an equal uh situation that whatever venezuela does they do at the risk of the us sending in more
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military and taking out the vice president now if you were the if you were that new vice president or
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not new but the person running the country at least on paper um wouldn't you assume there would be a
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bad play to just reproduce the maduro um situation because surely you would be taken out because trump
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does what he says he'll do so by now uh there have been some threats
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threats i assume like really really good threats and that maybe even some bribes but it's probably
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the only way that we can get to some kind of a stable pro-american venezuelan government
00:29:00.480
so it seems to me that trump has learned from the iraq experience and i don't know if anybody's
00:29:07.920
tried it exactly like this where we say yeah we're going to work together but really you're going to
00:29:14.320
do what we tell you to do it might work um so i i would say it's the best play we don't know if it'll
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work or how it'll work but i think i think it's the best play now the remaining question i have
00:29:31.120
is do we leave any military assets uh around the government buildings in other words is the vp of
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venezuela already under the gun you know is the is the i guess there's probably some kind of presidential
00:29:49.520
palace or something do we have military presence where the actual physical people of the government
00:29:57.520
work and could we control them if we had removed all of our military even the special special forces
00:30:06.240
etc would we be able to control them so nobody's asked this question yet the the press is not asking
00:30:14.240
the right questions the right question is do we have any physical assets as in special forces
00:30:22.720
that are now the security security security security for the new vice president now remember we'd been told
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that maduro was being protected by cuban um military am i right i'll take a fact check on this if i'm wrong
00:30:42.080
but my understanding is that maduro didn't even trust his own people enough to have them be his security
00:30:49.520
and that he did trust cuba because cuba and venezuela have a symbiotic relationship so could it be that
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the first thing the americans did is say cuban gone cuban gone cuban gone until there was no security
00:31:08.320
and then they said we we are now your security so if you don't do what we want you got no security
00:31:14.880
so i think that might be what's happening but that's speculation well you would not be surprised to
00:31:22.640
hear that there are lefty leaning protests about the venezuelan action in four different states and as
00:31:31.120
wall street apes um posts on x that uh immediately at least the independent journalists figured out that
00:31:41.040
they were all paid and organized by the same entity because they had the same signs different cities
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uh it's obviously organized protests by somebody and then wall street apes also
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um points out who it is so it didn't take long um so apparently the hands-off venezuela protests
00:32:04.960
have been funded uh by a an ngo of course funded by an ngo that hides that hides the uh the badness
00:32:15.600
you you launder through an ngo but it's an ngo called the people's forum which has received over 20
00:32:23.440
million dollars from one billionaire now the billionaire it turns out lives in china
00:32:29.520
right so the money is coming from a pro chinese billionaire do you remember when you would have
00:32:39.120
thought wow i'm surprised a lot of people disagree with this venezuela thing because it worked out so
00:32:44.960
well now we instantly know that it's a fake demonstration and that some billionaire or billionaires
00:32:54.480
are behind it boom so that didn't work and we're in a whole new world people uh again thanks to the
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elon musk the mike bends the uh and the other players who have uncovered how the ngos work we can
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just instantly go to the answer is it real no is it being paid for by a billionaire yes what what
00:33:23.120
country backs the country backs the billionaire in this case china it's like takes 10 seconds but as
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i've said before you know you and i are probably in the bubble where this is easier the average normal
00:33:37.120
person or voter still probably thinks it's real and that's what we got to do we gotta gotta fix that
00:33:44.960
uh you heard me speculating and wondering uh what if there's a real reason behind the uh behind the
00:33:56.720
attack on venezuela so the legal justification is drugs and i do believe that trump is serious about
00:34:05.680
stopping drugs but the real question is is that the only reason and i don't think any of us thinks
00:34:13.760
this is the only reason some would say is because of oil um etc but i saw an opinion by cynical publius
00:34:23.760
on x um who i think captured my thinking well no i'm not going to say that it added to my thinking
00:34:33.920
um i don't want to pretend that i had this thought as clearly as cynical publiuses but he said he's
00:34:41.440
monitoring the venezuelan situation and there's so many questions yes um but the strategic reason
00:34:49.040
for bringing down maduro has become abundantly clear um it wasn't abundantly clear until i read
00:34:57.520
the next part of his opinion he said while we ostensibly captured maduro based on legitimate and
00:35:03.920
was sending u.s drug charges from 2020 the real reason for the military operations this morning is
00:35:10.960
that neutralizing maduro's venezuela had become a strategic imperative for the usa meaning that maduro and
00:35:20.560
venezuela were becoming a central hub for all the people we don't like so he was nurturing relationships
00:35:29.200
it says cynical public with russia has blood and ran and uh and was already be going to be part of
00:35:38.000
china's uh belt and road initiative so if you were looking for the one reason that we went after
00:35:45.600
venezuela you would miss it would be one of those missing the forest for the trees the forest is that we
00:35:53.360
can't have somebody who's actively anti-american and actively courting our enemies while also being a
00:36:00.720
presence in our hemisphere you don't need more reason than that that under the don roe doctrine
00:36:08.960
you don't need a better reason to take them venezuela that they've simply become a
00:36:13.840
um something become too important to our enemies to let them you know have free reign um but i've seen
00:36:25.280
in the comments you're you're prompting me but that was the next thing i was going to talk about
00:36:29.600
apparently uh rasmussen poll notices this that trump has posted um he's posting videos of
00:36:39.120
allegations of venezuela being part of uh rigging our election and what rasmussen poll points out is
00:36:49.440
that's not the sort of thing he was doing before and it could be that the bonus on top of the bonus
00:36:57.120
beyond the strategic and oil and everything else is that trump can save the new regime hey new regime
00:37:07.120
here's the deal if you help me prove that venezuela was behind the rigging of our elections you're going
00:37:15.280
to have a much better time of it as america figures out who's in charge and we work with you to you know
00:37:22.000
rebuild venezuela so once again it seems that trump has built an asset that didn't exist so uh if you
00:37:32.640
went back a year trump could not have asked venezuela to help him figure out did uh dominion or anybody
00:37:40.640
else through some kind of uh connection with venezuela did they make any difference to our elections
00:37:48.080
but now having taken control of the government he can say that government you're going to help me find
00:37:55.120
out what happened and they'll probably have to do it because the people who we'd be talking to would
00:38:02.720
not necessarily be guilty like personally guilty but they would know that if they work with them
00:38:09.200
they'd be giving up something that didn't have any value to them anymore which is some knowledge about
00:38:15.040
something may or may not have happened but if they give that up things are going to be a lot better for
00:38:21.200
them nobody else could have done that he created the asset of nothing i mean not nothing he attacked
00:38:30.000
him over over through the country but if this is a signal that trump is going to go hard at the election
00:38:38.800
integrity and he's going to go hard at it through this more control of venezuela that would be quite a 2026
00:38:47.520
wouldn't it that would change everything and i think that's coming
00:38:58.240
i saw a post today on x by fisher king and he said it's striking that in the realm of foreign affairs
00:39:08.000
where potus has real power big things can get done meanwhile domestically we keep running up the debt and
00:39:15.680
everything is broken um that's a good point where trump has the most of let's say the most uh freedom
00:39:27.280
he gets the best results where he has the least freedom because democrats are always on him for
00:39:34.400
domestic stuff it's hard to get anything done and that would work you know no matter who's the president
00:39:40.160
the other team is going to stop you from being effective um so case in point uh apparently unusual
00:39:49.760
whales is reporting that the u.s raid to capture maduro was actually leaked to the washington post and
00:39:56.720
the new york times but both publications decided it would be too risky to publish it
00:40:03.040
um because it would be dangerous for the troops however somebody put very large bets
00:40:12.320
on the day that venezuela would be uh attacked and they placed them on polymarket where i believe
00:40:20.960
i'll take a fact check on this but i believe polymarket allows you legally
00:40:25.600
or another way to say it was there's no reason you couldn't make an insider bet so somebody who had
00:40:34.320
insider knowledge made a shit ton of money by picking the exact day of the attack
00:40:40.800
that probably is related to whoever was leaking as well
00:40:44.080
all right you all know michael schellenberger uh one of the best independent journalists
00:40:55.840
in the country an amazing writer amazing uh does amazing work but he's warning us and i don't think
00:41:04.640
we're watching this closely enough that we're in an absolute free speech crisis
00:41:09.680
so apparently the eu australia and brazil uh had a meeting with stanford recently to coordinate global
00:41:18.560
censorship strategies against americans what what we we know that they had a meeting and that the the
00:41:29.120
deal was they're trying to censor american free speech well the reason this is a big problem
00:41:36.240
is that censoring free speech is probably the beginning of every you know anti-democratic thing
00:41:43.200
you can imagine it's the most authoritarian thing i can imagine because everything bad comes after
00:41:49.360
censoring free speech right if you tried to do something bad but free speech was still in existence
00:41:58.080
there's a good chance you could cash it and get enough people involved to stop it but if you
00:42:04.320
stop free speech in america you could kind of control america and you would have to you know make
00:42:12.400
it look like you're trying to uh do the opposite you'd have to make it look like you're improving free
00:42:18.800
speech by getting rid of the bad parts the bad parts now the bad parts are what the free speech is for
00:42:26.880
the bad parts are the part where people don't like it and often isn't true but if you don't have the
00:42:33.120
freedom to speak uh all bad will happen and as michael schellenberger points out here are the approval
00:42:41.440
ratings of some of these countries involved so macron has macron of france has a 15 15 percent approval
00:42:52.720
what and he's good this guy with a one five approval in his own country is going to come and tell us
00:43:00.320
you know what kind of free speech we have or don't how about germany's mers their leader has a 20 percent
00:43:09.120
approval britain's prime minister 25 percent approval now these are the clowns that are trying to figure
00:43:18.640
out a way to have european pressure on american platforms to the point where the american platforms have
00:43:27.040
to say all right all right you know we'll go out of business if we don't deal with you so we'll have
00:43:32.240
to start censoring our own people and uh that's like the beginning of the end so uh as schellenberger
00:43:44.000
points out accurately uh we are in a free speech crisis because they might be able to pull it off
00:43:51.120
you know i don't know what the response is i think the response is if you have trump as a president he
00:43:58.800
will say um at some point if he hasn't already here's the deal you clowns need to stay away from
00:44:06.080
our free speech and if you don't all bets are off all bets are off because i would consider this one of the
00:44:14.800
biggest um strategic defense issues in the country it's a bigger risk than china attacking us it's a
00:44:23.600
bigger risk than russia attacking us because i don't think they will but this is definitely happening
00:44:31.520
so you know the thing you have to worry about is not the one that sounds worse on paper it's the one
00:44:37.280
that's actually going to happen and it looks like they're coming after us so i would expect
00:44:42.560
at some point trump to use his assets which is he does what he says he'll do to at least postpone
00:44:50.960
this but my god you know and and the the the weapon that the uh these other countries have
00:44:59.600
is that they can find us they can find an american company like x i think they're trying to find x
00:45:06.960
140 million dollars or something so they do have a tool but their tools are the leaders of their
00:45:14.960
countries too in other news that i find fascinating but you don't uh china's got this gigantic effort to
00:45:25.600
try to improve batteries so you china big country so they've got this massive new project
00:45:33.760
is your government backed uh but also some big companies and they're trying to advance um solid
00:45:41.520
state electrolyte batteries now uh i tell you all the time that different laboratories in different
00:45:50.640
countries they're all working on better batteries but imagine if if there was some big breakthrough
00:45:56.800
you ideally from an american company it really changes everything it makes your robot lasts a lot
00:46:04.480
longer makes your car go farther but more importantly think about the national security benefit of getting
00:46:14.000
as many people as we can off the grid and onto batteries so if you have a battery that's good enough and
00:46:21.440
economical enough then every every residential house and every business too could be off the grid
00:46:30.080
at least where the sun shines enough so imagine if we get into some kind of war and the first thing
00:46:38.160
the enemy wants to do is turn off our power if enough residential um entities if enough of them have battery
00:46:47.920
then they can't turn us all off so maybe you don't have a battery but maybe your neighbor does so you
00:46:53.360
don't have to freeze to death you know you can still charge your phone so at some point the economics of
00:47:00.240
batteries are just a major major security issue and then this makes me wonder i i never really hear
00:47:11.040
what tesla is doing with their plans for next generation batteries uh i hear stories about incremental
00:47:18.960
changes but it makes me wonder if tesla and i assume it's true actually what makes me wonder if tesla has
00:47:26.240
some secret project that would leapfrog all these other battery wannabe people because that would be
00:47:34.640
huge speaking of tesla makes me think of elon which makes me think of this story that apparently um
00:47:44.640
that neural link is going to enter mass production in 2026. so apparently the neural link that's the
00:47:51.920
uh i'll loosely say it's a chip that they put in your brain that's not really the right explanation
00:47:58.560
but loosely it will do things like respond it will restore function to people who are disabled in a
00:48:07.600
variety of ways so they might be paralyzed but then they would be unparalyzed they might have vision or
00:48:14.560
hearing problems but that would fix it and i imagine there'd be a whole bunch of things
00:48:20.880
that could be fixed by neural link which apparently they've sort of gotten to the next level of
00:48:25.920
development on but here's my insight what happens when the people who have the neural link chip are not
00:48:36.000
just restored back to as good as the normal i'll say the normies i don't want to insult anybody accidentally
00:48:43.920
um what happens if you've got the chip and you only got it for fixing one problem let's say your
00:48:51.760
problem was hearing so you get the thing and you could hear now that would bring you up to what the
00:48:58.240
sort of the average baseline human can do but once you've got the chip in you what would stop it from
00:49:05.600
adding extra powers why not connect it to ai why not allow you to control things at a distance just by
00:49:14.560
thinking it are we entering a stage where you would rather hire somebody with a chip in your head
00:49:22.240
because they can do everything a normal person can do but a whole bunch of things that normal normal
00:49:29.200
people can't do you know if you were hiring a programmer would you rather have one who has a chip in his head
00:49:36.880
and can just think the code and the code disappears or do you want to stick with somebody who has to type
00:49:43.760
it in run it by ai test it that's a bad example but um it seems to me it's inevitable that the people
00:49:53.920
with the neural link implant would be better better than employees who didn't have it right what what
00:50:05.120
would be the counter argument to that and then do we get to the point where uh and this wouldn't
00:50:11.280
happen right away but a point where people just optionally get a chip because they too want to get
00:50:17.040
the full cyborg power probably won't be legal you know probably there'll be some regulation that says
00:50:26.160
you can only do it if you're trying to fix a problem but eventually eventually it's going to be
00:50:33.040
do you have a chip or do you not have a chip oh i wouldn't even want to marry somebody who didn't
00:50:37.520
have a chip that's coming remember you may have heard me doubt the uh the story that murder is at a
00:50:50.000
20-year low or went down 19 or something so zero edge has an article that uh is likewise as i did
00:51:00.080
questioning whether the real the real thing is bad data so did murder go down because trump did a good
00:51:07.280
job how um or is it the cities were manipulating the data and it's all bad uh i've been saying for some
00:51:18.560
time that all data that's important is fake and murder rates kind of important data so according to the
00:51:27.120
scottam's rule that all data that's important is fake i think it's just fake data i just don't think
00:51:34.640
it's real so i'm glad there's at least one entity that agrees that we don't know if that's real
00:51:40.880
all right there's a couple more uh tesla things so apparently tesla's optimist robot and i think this
00:51:55.280
is coming from elon is going to be uh active in law enforcement now the robots would not have weapons
00:52:04.480
and they would not do violence but they would somehow assist human crime fighting so he doesn't
00:52:13.520
say specifically how but he says no guns no tasers you know completely unarmed uh it would focus on
00:52:21.920
humane containment and non-violent intervention designed to de-escalate not dominate uh and it
00:52:31.680
would be ai-powered patrols with zero aggression so it'd be way to sort of control things so do you think
00:52:41.280
that um optimist will be a a guide let's say an assist in avoiding crime i think it would be
00:52:52.720
because if you look at human psychology it seems to me there's a high likelihood that if you put a
00:52:59.200
robot into a dangerous situation that the criminals would say oh that robot is watching us so if the only
00:53:07.760
thing the robot did was say go into the dangerous place and look around that alone probably would
00:53:15.280
decrease the amount of crime so it could be that the robot is more like a uh security camera that can
00:53:23.360
walk right the problem with existing security cameras is that they're in one place um so if you needed
00:53:31.840
the the visibility to be behind the door or something well maybe it can knock down a door and just walk in
00:53:38.560
and start to start taking that video so i do believe that this is a doable thing but um i want to clarify
00:53:47.600
something that i said uh at a prior podcast um i said i didn't think that robots were ready to be like
00:53:58.320
butlers where they can learn any skill and then you just teach them what you want and they can go do it
00:54:04.320
uh and somebody clarified to me i think that's correct that the initial wave of robots will be
00:54:12.320
single purpose and probably factory so the uh the optimists robots that they're going to start building
00:54:21.840
at the scale is not because they're smart enough to do what robots should do if they were you know
00:54:31.680
ideal they're just smart enough to do a single purpose thing such as learning what to do in a
00:54:37.120
specific warehouse or factory and then that would make sense with this idea that the optimist could also
00:54:45.680
be good for security it would be closer to a single purpose than it would be to a general purpose
00:54:54.960
uh then elon says he said this in an ex post that optimists will eliminate poverty
00:55:02.160
and provide universal high income for all now do you think he learned to talk like that from trump
00:55:08.800
right because doesn't that doesn't that sound more like something that trump would say because it
00:55:21.280
feels like an over claim it feels like a salesperson approach uh but it's also optimistic as hell
00:55:29.280
and i think that this is an example of how musk is learning from trump just as rubio is so we're
00:55:38.320
starting to see people pick up the trumpian way of communicating where it doesn't have to be i don't
00:55:46.320
know a hundred percent true it just has to make you feel a certain way and ideally act a certain way
00:55:54.480
that is productive and good for the country and i'm all for it so you know the old me would have said
00:56:02.960
now come on that's too much of a claim eliminate poverty eliminate it really really but now i think
00:56:11.520
it's just a style of communication that's very effective and making me feel right and act right
00:56:18.640
and i'm okay with that it works all right um as i said after the show which is basically now
00:56:31.520
um owen gregorian will be firing up by new spaces and this will be more about the news more about
00:56:39.040
venezuela and uh you should all join if you don't know how to find it uh go to my feed on uh on x
00:56:50.160
i'm pretty sure i reposted it this morning or just do a search for owen gregorian and you'll see it at
00:56:57.440
the top of his x speed you'll see the link to go to the spaces and i remind you that spaces is a
00:57:04.080
feature on x that allows people to speak but not be seen and uh you'll see one of the best hosts
00:57:13.200
you've ever seen um owen gregorian does an amazing job all right people uh let me go back to my first
00:57:23.120
talk about the simulation did i accomplish my goal of blowing your mind yes or no
00:57:33.920
it'll take me a minute for your comments to catch up
00:57:52.720
between you posting the comments and before it shows up here only because there's so many of them
00:57:58.240
what do you think mind's blown yes there we go your comments just caught up absolutely yes yes good
00:58:16.320
yeah i got a few nopes in there more yeses than no this is that's the most you could hope for right
00:58:23.200
well you'll be thinking about that i i think it's hilarious once you realize that we could be created
00:58:32.640
by a less intelligent entity than us and that the that we're the ai and we're already smarter than our
00:58:42.000
creator as was intended to be what lower intelligence you're watching it right now if if we succeed
00:58:55.440
meaning the startups in creating a virtual environment in which the ai learns to be smarter than us
00:59:03.040
and that's the whole point we're not creating we're not trying to create an ai that's dumber than us
00:59:09.200
so if we have the infrastructure which is these virtual worlds then we already see like right now
00:59:20.080
we see that what we think is our base reality will be quickly less intelligent than what the the outcome
00:59:29.200
of the ai research is so you don't have to ask um could it happen it's happening right now
00:59:36.880
it's happening right now it's the whole point the whole point is to build a virtual reality in which
00:59:45.840
the characters within the reality our future ai is smarter than us and whatever this is
00:59:55.200
does that make sense but once you once you grok that not literally grok but understand it it's kind of
01:00:03.680
mind-blowing and mind-blowing and again it does not rule out god it doesn't rule out uh that we're
01:00:10.720
created by a superior intellect doesn't rule that out it's just you know the point of it is a less
01:00:18.560
intelligent entity creating a more intelligent entity
01:00:21.360
god is the author of the simulation can't rule it out yep depends how you um except that it's possible
01:00:36.640
that the god is less smart than us well that would depend how you define god so if you do it in the
01:00:45.600
traditional way then uh there's nothing to prevent the god created the the entire thing cannot be ruled out
01:00:59.040
all right i know that's all you need of that um and i will uh i'm gonna go private with my beloved
01:01:06.480
my beloved local subscribers the rest of you i hope you got something out of this
01:01:13.920
and remember to join owen on spaces all right locals coming at you privately