In this episode, we're joined by the author of the new book, "Nuclear war: What would happen if the U.S. went nuclear, and how would the world end? Joe Rogan talks with Alex Blumberg about the possibility of nuclear war, and why he thinks it's a real possibility. Alex also talks about the dangers of nuclear launch, and what it means to be a nuclear war planner. And he talks about what it would take to survive a nuclear holocaust. This episode is brought to you by Gimlet Media and edited by Annie-Rose Strasser. The opinions stated here are our own, not those of our companies, unless otherwise specified. We do not own the rights to any of the music used in this episode. It was produced, produced, edited, and produced by Riley Bray. Our theme song is Come Alone by Suneaters, courtesy of Lotuspool Records, and our ad music is courtesy of Epitaph Records, which you can get a free copy of the album, "Blame It On Me" on iTunes. If you like the album art, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and/or wherever else you get your music recommendations, and we'll incorporate it in the next episode of "Goodbye Outer Space" and "Outer Space Traveler" on our next episode. Thank you! Thank you so much for all the support and thanks for all your support. -Jon Sorrentino. Jon Foreman Jon Sorrenta Music: "Outro: "Space Junkie" by Jeff Perla "Space Traveler's Theme Song: "Blinde" by Fizz & Friends by Haley Shaw (feat. "Space Lady" by Dervish & "Outtrope " by ) and "The White House Blues" by "The Good Fight" by Ian McKee is out on Soundtrack: "Good Morning America" by Eddy Pizzi ( ) by Jeff McElroy (featuring "Space Station ( ) and "Piano ( ) is outtro ( ) ( ) & - "A Little Late" by John Williams ( ) - "Mr. Williams ( ) & "The Lizzie ( ) " , " & " ( ) by James ( ) ,
00:00:57.000Well, six previous books on war weapons, U.S. national security secrets.
00:01:05.000Imagine how many people told me they dedicated their lives to preventing nuclear World War III. And so during the previous administration, fire and fury rhetoric, I began to think what happens if deterrence fails,
00:01:25.000And I took that question to the people who advise the president, who work at STRATCOM, who, you know, command the nuclear sub-forces, and learned that it doesn't end well.
00:01:40.000Not only does it not end well, five billion people are dead at the end of 72 minutes.
00:02:05.000It's the animal humor in the difficult subject.
00:02:10.000You know, there's literally hundreds of thousands of people in nuclear command and control who practice 24-7, 365. What would happen if deterrence failed and we had a nuclear war?
00:03:40.000Oh, because of mutually assured self-destruction or mutually assured destruction, that's what's prevented people from using nuclear weapons.
00:04:04.000In the words of Carl Sagan, who is the author of Nuclear Winter.
00:04:08.000But I think what's also crazy, to your point about 1945, is when this was all set up, when the nuclear arsenals were beginning, and I take the reader through it really quickly, because I want them to just get to what happens at nuclear launch.
00:04:24.000I mean the book is really about nuclear launch to nuclear winter.
00:04:27.000But the buildup is fascinating because first of all, it happened so incredibly fast and it happened under incredibly secret classified terms.
00:07:36.000And it's – I think – I mean I always approach the UFO phenomena with – or I try to at least with like the eye of – or the point of view of Carl Jung.
00:07:49.000This idea that it's – that what leads here is our – Perception of things and our sort of deep shadow self of fear.
00:07:59.000And once the nuclear weapon was invented, Man, I mean, our grandparents had to confront this new, fundamental new reality that just simply didn't exist before.
00:08:16.000And then it was, that's with the atomic weapons.
00:08:19.000And then in the 50s, once thermonuclear weapons were invented, and the thermonuclear weapon is essentially an atomic, a thermonuclear weapon is so powerful, it uses an atomic bomb like from Hiroshima as its triggering mechanism.
00:08:35.000And so the order of magnitude of destruction of in an instant, according to Carl Jung, who looked at the UFO phenomena and the nuclear weapons phenomena hand in hand, Encourage anyone to read his stuff about it because he has a much sort of,
00:08:56.000you know, bird's eye view of it all about why that's so terrifying to people.
00:09:03.000So the narratives, to my eye, the narratives of nuclear, of, you know, alien ships hovering over nuclear bases, I don't, I have never spoken to a firsthand witness who experienced that.
00:09:16.000But I would see that in terms of the narrative of Carl Jung.
00:09:22.000So Carl Jung's perception was that he believed that it was essentially people perceiving these things or hallucinating these things.
00:09:32.000And it was almost like a mass hallucination.
00:09:45.000My read of his analogy was more like the way that hundreds of years ago or thousands of years ago when Christianity was first being developed, people saw existential threats as part of the narrative of God.
00:10:03.000So my read of Carl Jung is that he's saying now in the mechanized modern world, the existential threats, the sort of damnation is tied to machines, which is easily tied to little machines or big machines from outer space.
00:10:25.000That was his take on it, which I think is interesting.
00:10:28.000It's interesting, but also Jung wrote this when?
00:10:34.000So I think we know a lot more now than we knew then.
00:10:39.000The reason why I'm bringing this up is the people that have hope, one of the hopes is that aliens are observing us and they're going to wait until we are about to do something really stupid.
00:10:50.000And then they're going to come down and shut everything down.
00:10:54.000That is an interesting narrative, too.
00:10:57.000But again, that's a bit, to my eye, like the deus ex machina idea, that God would intervene and save the faithful.
00:11:10.000In this situation, it might be that he's going to save those people that are paying attention.
00:11:16.000Well, just save the human race from its folly.
00:11:44.000Other dimensions that we can't access.
00:11:46.000We know more now about planets in the Goldilocks zone.
00:11:51.000We know more now about all these whistleblowers that have come out and talked about crashed retrievement programs where they're back-engineering these things and trying to understand what these things are.
00:12:04.000Diana Posolka's work where she's talking about how they're essentially donations, that these crafts are donations, that people are Being given these things so that they could see this extraordinary technology and try to figure out how to make it.
00:12:19.000But that's one of the only ways that I – like, if we did get to a point That we launch nuclear weapons at each other.
00:12:34.000If I was an alien species, an intelligent species from somewhere else, and I recognize that this is a real possibility and that the Earth has all these different forms of life other than human beings that are going to get destroyed as well.
00:12:46.000You know, it's going to wipe out Who knows how many different species?
00:13:09.000What kind of mutations are going to come from their offspring?
00:13:12.000I get into that in the end of the book.
00:13:14.000So I write the book in essentially three acts, like the first 24 minutes, the next 24 minutes, the last 24 minutes, and then nuclear winter.
00:13:23.000So nuclear winter is very well described by A fellow called Professor Brian Toon, who I interview in the book.
00:13:32.000He was one of the original five authors of – do you remember the nuclear winter theory of our sort of high school years?
00:13:58.000And the computer systems and climate modeling have changed to the degree where we can see not only is nuclear winter what was thought in the 80s, it's actually much worse.
00:14:09.000So whereby originally they thought there would be a year of ice sheets across large bodies of water from Iowa to Ukraine across the mid-latitudes of the globe.
00:14:20.000Now that could be up to seven or ten years.
00:14:24.000So think about that much frozen land for that long.
00:14:51.000And also you have, you know, man has to go underground.
00:14:54.000I take you through what this is like in detail because it's so bizarre to think about that you have a man-made problem, nuclear weapons.
00:15:06.000And yet this is – people are not paying attention to the fact that whatever is created by man essentially would theoretically have a man-made solution.
00:15:17.000Like there is a solution to the nuclear weapons threat.
00:15:20.000It's not – although the results of a nuclear war would be very much like an asteroid striking the United States or the world anywhere.
00:18:51.000Well, I get into this in the book, which is terrifying.
00:18:54.000So let me back up for a second of how good our technology is.
00:18:58.000So we have a system in space, a satellite system called CIBRS, Space Based Infrared Satellite System.
00:19:09.000It's like the Paul Revere of the 21st century.
00:19:12.000It is parked over our enemies that have nuclear weapons, and it can see and detect a nuclear launch of an ICBM in a fraction of a second, Joe.
00:19:27.000That's why nuclear war begins and ends in 72 minutes, because the cyber satellite system sees the launch, and then the U.S. nuclear command and control begins.
00:19:40.000And by the way, an ICBM cannot be redirected, and it cannot be recalled.
00:19:45.000What about these hypersonic weapons that can adjust their trajectory?
00:20:02.000And also a hypersonic missile, let's just say it went from Russia to the United States, it might take an hour.
00:20:08.000A ballistic missile launched from a launch pad outside Moscow takes 26 minutes and 40 seconds to get to Washington, D.C. That number's not going to change.
00:20:36.000As I explain in the book, and again, as was relayed to me by defense officials...
00:20:42.000We can't shoot down ballistic missiles, long-range ballistic missiles, with any kind of certainty or accuracy.
00:20:49.000It's not like the Iron Dome or anything like that?
00:20:52.000The Iron Dome is almost like terrible for nuclear war, you know, for people to understand how dangerous nuclear war is because the Iron Dome can Sure.
00:21:28.000I think part of the reason why nuclear war is not spoken about in the general public is because it's set up to be intimidating.
00:21:38.000You'll hear a lot of defense people and analysts using very esoteric language and And it kind of excludes the average Joe or Jane, Joe or Annie.
00:21:51.000So I ask really basic questions like, how does a ballistic missile work?
00:23:22.000How are 44 interceptor missiles going to go up against more than a thousand Russian nuclear weapons coming at us?
00:23:31.000Never mind the fact that each interceptor has a 50% shoot down rate.
00:23:36.000And that's by the missile defense agency's spokesperson.
00:23:41.000So there's this perception that we have a system like the Iron Dome that could take out these incoming missiles and we simply don't, which is why when nuclear war begins, it only ends in nuclear Armageddon.
00:24:03.000How disturbing was it for you to write this, do all this research, and to come to these conclusions and realize that we're in a lot worse shape than anybody thinks we are?
00:24:15.000I mean, you know, when you're reporting or writing, you kind of take your hat off of the emotional or the sentimental part of things, where you, you know, the mother in me, you know, you can't think like that.
00:24:29.000You just have to tell the story, I believe.
00:24:31.000I also believe that If I can be as factual and dramatic as possible, then I will have the most readers, which is the point.
00:24:43.000I am actually not trying to save the world as a journalist.
00:24:46.000I'm trying to get you to read what I write because I found it super interesting reporting it and learning about it.
00:24:54.000And also the whole process for me that I think is the most interesting is going to some of these people who are truly some of the smartest scientists in the world and getting them to explain it in the most basic – like I say you have to tell it to me like I'm a kid because I don't have a science mind.
00:25:13.000And that part is – so that excitement part of it balances out with the terror of it because I do also understand why most people don't want to know about this.
00:25:25.000But they also don't want to know because they end up feeling sort of looked down upon, I think, if they ask basic questions like, wait a minute, how does a missile work?
00:25:36.000Or like you said, can't the hypersonics – shouldn't we invest in hypers – well, Who really wants to be lectured?
00:26:05.000And then going back to all my sources, I mean, like, okay, here's an example.
00:26:09.000We haven't even talked about submarines, but the submarines are completely—you cannot find them in the sea.
00:26:47.000And these things are, by the way, I have a map in the back of the book that shows you how close our adversaries, enemies, call them what you will, China and Russia, how close they come to the East Coast and the West Coast of the United States regularly,
00:27:04.000which means it reduces that launch time I told you about of 26 minutes, 40 seconds.
00:27:10.000That reduces it down to sort of 10 minutes or less.
00:27:20.000What did you think when you saw the Soviet subs that were outside of Cuba?
00:27:27.000I mean, when I began reporting this book a couple years ago, never did I think that I would see that while I was talking about my book with people like you after publication.
00:27:43.000But in the same manner, I never thought I would hear The president of Russia threatening to use a nuclear weapon.
00:27:50.000I mean, he said he's not kidding that he might use WMD. That was his paraphrase quote.
00:29:03.000A-T-A-C-M-S? Well, I'm guessing they're small cluster bombs that are in the nose cone of the warhead.
00:29:13.000Make that larger so I can read the whole thing, Jimmy.
00:29:15.000The video shows the beach in Sevastopol, Crimea, which was struck by a series of explosions on June 23rd.
00:29:23.000The footage captured by a security camera shows hundreds of people beginning to run away from the water before the impact of cluster warheads starts.
00:29:31.000What's happening in Ukraine is so profoundly dangerous for everyone.
00:29:52.000Well, it's also remarkable that we have so much available footage and so much citizen journalism that people can see these events and discuss them.
00:30:06.000It says here, the event was caused by Russian air defenses shooting down a series of cluster warhead missiles, one of which altered course as a result.
00:30:14.000The Russian Ministry of Defense said that four of the five missiles launched were shot down, adding Another missile as a result of the impact of air defense systems at the final stage deviated from the flight path with the warhead exploding in the air over the city.
00:30:28.000The detonation of the fragmentation warhead of the fifth American missile in the air led to numerous casualties among civilians in Sevastopol.
00:30:52.000I'm not following the ground war in Ukraine right now with my focus on this.
00:30:57.000But what I do know is that the ratcheting up of the rhetoric and the use of third party weapon systems is complicating an already incredibly volatile situation.
00:31:13.000This says a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department denied the accusation saying that the claims were ridiculous and hyperbolic.
00:31:19.000The U.S. supplies weapons to Ukraine in the ongoing war with Russia and recognizes Crimea as a part of Ukraine despite Russia's annexation.
00:31:27.000Ukraine has previously outlined plans to use long-range weapons supplied by America in Crimea specifically to target infrastructure supporting the Russian invasion.
00:32:00.000Well, even just this, just like these escalations.
00:32:03.000Well, I think the big picture that frightens me most is that when we see the president of Russia going to the president of North Korea, our two, air quotes, arch enemies right now having a new alliance.
00:32:20.000And then I consider that the current president of the United States hasn't spoken To the president of Russia in two years.
00:32:29.000And I think back to that time in history, what's known as the Reagan reversal, where Reagan went from this incredible hawk to learning about nuclear weapons in, of all things, an ABC television movie called The Day After.
00:33:06.000So in other words, my point is Reagan, who – you know, the axis of evil speech, like this idea of seeing your enemy as the arch-evil villain, had to change for him when he understood – I think we're good to go.
00:33:55.000Hence, what you just showed us, the facts will come in of whose weapon systems those are.
00:34:01.000But either way, the perception, to your point, The fact that the perception, a misperception, could ignite nuclear war, could ignite that situation that is unreversible,
00:34:18.000that should be astonishing to all of us.
00:34:25.000Danielle Pletka Well, it's terrifying but the one hopeful part of it would be again going back to the Reagan – the Reagan reversal by the way is the only glimmer of hope I ever found in all of this.
00:34:36.000Don't you think though that politics in general and certainly world leadership, especially United States leadership, is much more compromised today than it was then?
00:34:46.000And a guy like Reagan doesn't really exist today.
00:34:50.000Tell me what you mean when you say compromised.
00:34:52.000I mean the military defense contractors are making so much money and they want to continue making so much money and they have great influence over the politicians and over policy and over what gets done.
00:35:09.000And this money that they don't want to stop making is completely dependent upon The continuing to build, continuing to sell, continuing to have these weapons and future systems and more advanced systems and better systems.
00:35:29.000And there's so much money and momentum behind this.
00:35:33.000That I don't know if there's a Reagan available now.
00:35:39.000If there's a person that can have some sense that can say that we are on a path to self-destruction and we need to stop and we need to reverse this path.
00:35:51.000You know, you're going to have people in the military, in the Defense Department, that are being influenced by these contractors.
00:35:58.000There's plenty of places we can move things around and get things done.
00:36:32.000So then you have to ask yourself, what is also going to happen now that these big contracting organizations – Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed – are now being threatened by Silicon Valley,
00:36:48.000by the new defense contractors that are coming into the pipeline, that are threatening their contracts because they can do it faster and cheaper.
00:36:57.000And so I fear that you will see even more of that entrenchment that you're talking about.
00:37:02.000Even more of the, you know, the bureaucracy churning out more weapons under the guise of defense.
00:37:17.000But I do also think what's interesting is, like, someone I interviewed here in the book was Leon Panetta.
00:37:27.000So not only was he a former SecDef, but he was former CIA chief and he was former White House chief of staff under Clinton.
00:37:38.000And in our interview, I learned a lot from him about those three kind of elements of the national security, advising the president, you know, being SecDef, being in charge of all of this, and being CIA chief from the intelligence point of view.
00:37:56.000But what was even more interesting about interviewing Panetta Was that he said to me at the end of our interview, it's good that you're doing this.
00:38:12.000So here's a guy who has spent his entire life entrenched in that system that you're talking about.
00:38:17.000And then outside of it, once he retires, puts on his, shall we say, grandfather's hat.
00:38:26.000The human hat and is suddenly like, this is really going in the wrong direction.
00:38:34.000I would hope that that would lead to more people thinking wisely about what it is they're doing when they're in office as far as nuclear war is concerned.
00:38:47.000Yeah, but the thing that concerns me is they're not good at anything.
00:38:54.000It brings me back to Eisenhower's speech when he left office.
00:38:59.000The threat of the military industrial complex warning the United States that there is an entire system that is now in place that profits off a war and wants war and wants to keep creating these weapons and wants to keep escalating things because that's their business.
00:40:13.000The first part of Eisenhower's speech is spot on and that is absolutely true.
00:40:19.000And yet at the same time – this is why I think people stop talking about things like nuclear war or they move on to another more interesting subject that might be more entertaining because who really wants to hear about this problem that seems to be cyclical and there is – because you have to have a strong defense.
00:40:39.000You have to have a national security, otherwise you get walked all over.
00:40:52.000But the second part of Eisenhower's speech is important to me, and it's why I get people to talk to me in my books, because he says there's an antidote to the military-industrial complex, and that is an alert and knowledgeable citizenry.
00:41:10.000Which is in essence what we're doing now by talking about this.
00:41:57.000That's an interesting way to look at it.
00:42:02.000It just doesn't seem like the general public is completely aware of how dangerous these threats are and how close we are inching towards it.
00:42:14.000Like even the nuclear subs off the coast of Cuba was barely a blip in the news cycle.
00:42:19.000You know, it was replaced by Taylor Swift and her boyfriend.
00:42:23.000You know, it's like it just goes in and out quickly.
00:43:28.000And we're kind of conditioned by reality shows, right?
00:43:30.000We have so many that we watch and so many things that we pay attention to that are nonsense, that distract us, that we like to sort of apply those same viewing habits to the whole world.
00:43:41.000But I'm amazed by the phenomena of podcasts, I must say, because I'm old enough to remember when they weren't around.
00:43:59.000And so I exist in these two different worlds of media that are, you could say, traditional media forms.
00:44:07.000And when you consider how radically these different forms of communication are changing, I sell as many e-books and audio books as I do hardcovers.
00:44:19.000And I have a feeling that if those markets didn't exist, I would sell half as many books, if that makes sense.
00:44:26.000And so then when you throw the podcast into the mix, I cannot tell you how many people know about my work as a journalist, as a national security reporter because of podcasts.
00:44:43.000It makes things so much more accessible to so many more people.
00:44:49.000Everybody's listening to a podcast driving around, listening, you know, when they're at the gym, when they're on a hike.
00:44:55.000And if someone who cares about an alert and knowledgeable citizenry as a fundamental, first of all, because I think if people, people that are curious tend to be less furious.
00:45:09.000If you can get your curiosity satiated, you don't become so angry.
00:45:17.000And again, I have to be an eternal optimist, particularly writing the kind of books that I do, or my thinking would take a negative turn.
00:45:29.000And so I am an eternal optimist, and I do look to conversation and new media as a means to a better way or a means to a way out of this kind.
00:47:41.000If people always had attention spans and all of a sudden they don't, maybe they're just getting distracted by things that are very easy to absorb and very addictive, like TikTok videos.
00:47:53.000It doesn't mean that the human mind is different.
00:48:26.000Alan Watts is, I guess you could call him a psychedelic philosopher.
00:48:33.000Very fascinating Englishman who said some very wise things.
00:48:36.000But just a brilliant person, very interested in Buddhism and just a very, very wise person who still today people send me clips of things that he said and quotes of things that he said.
00:48:50.000I've always listened to fascinating people who have conversations.
00:49:36.000The idea that human beings have radically changed because of this one medium that's addictive is just so stupid.
00:49:41.000Well, I also think there's something to be said as an individual when you start to be a little bit conscious of your own habits in viewing and thinking and reading and information.
00:49:55.000So you get absorbed in the TikTok and then you get to say to yourself, like, what am I doing?
00:50:01.000And we all benefit from seeing how easy it is to develop a habit and how hard it is to sort of move yourself away from a habit as you become entrenched in it.
00:50:15.000And so I think there's complete value in that.
00:50:18.000People suddenly realize, I've got to stop watching TikTok videos and I've got to go to the gym, which is another, you know...
00:50:25.000Right, but that's a difficult sort of an adjustment, and most people don't like difficult things.
00:50:29.000So if you get 100 people addicted to TikTok, what number out of those 100 people are going to go, you know what, I'm going to change my life?
00:50:51.000People want to call me, they can call me.
00:50:53.000But I'm not watching things and reading things and absorbing things.
00:50:57.000But then there's the argument like, okay, but now you're out of the cultural conversation.
00:51:01.000I have friends that have flip phones and I'll try to ask them, did you see this new thing about the new quantum computer that's like...
00:51:08.000100 billion times better or 100 million times better than the last one they released in 2019, you know, and they're like no what so they're missing some things too.
00:51:18.000So the key is like Mitigation like you have to figure out like how much information Makes you anxious and how much information just where you just sit there and you scroll and you waste your time and then you're like, what did I do with my life?
00:53:00.000Up to a point, but you just got to know what that point is and how to manage your own attention span and just also have sovereignty over your mind.
00:53:32.000All most people have to do is when the alarm goes off, get up, wash yourself, brush your teeth, eat something, go to work, do whatever minimal amount you have to do to keep that job And then the bathroom breaks and whenever no one's looking,
00:53:49.000look through your phone, be distracted, come home, watch Netflix, go to sleep, repeat.
00:53:57.000So they don't have to do anything because they haven't set up their life in a way that requires serious attention and an objective sense of your perspective and your interaction with humans and the way the world is working.
00:54:16.000They have family problems, job problems, their car's fucked, something's wrong with their house they gotta fix, they have bills, everything's piling up.
00:54:29.000So what social media does for them is it gives them a brief rest from their own problems to just look at some Fucking drag queen reading stories to kids and get outraged or some new thing that's going on with some girl that made some crazy video and now everybody's talking about it.
00:54:55.000And they've gotten through life being overweight, eating processed foods, and drinking too much, and smoking too much, and taking all kinds of pills to mitigate all these problems that they have because they've not taken care of themselves.
00:55:10.000So they're on anti-anxiety medication, and anti-depression medication, and anti-this and that.
00:55:16.000And they're trying to lose weight, so they're on Ozempic.
00:56:25.000If you can get people to believe bullshit and keep feeding them bullshit, you turn them into infants.
00:56:31.000And if they just accept the fact that you're feeding them bullshit and they don't employ any critical thinking and they don't look at outside sources of information and really try to assess what's actually going on because they generally don't have the time.
00:56:48.000You create a nation of infants, and there's a lot of us in this country that exist almost like children that are hoping daddy's going to take care of everything.
00:56:57.000But I'm always interested in the people that are those 3% you talked about, that suddenly have that moment, the catalyst, where they realize, oh my goodness, I have to change.
00:57:21.000Of social media, the good aspects of social media, real honest discussions, revelations, things being released on Twitter and, you know, the Twitter files with Elon Musk, where they found out the FBI was trying to suppress information, the Hunter Biden laptop story, and then going through the COVID disinformation and now seeing the congressional hearings where Fauci's lying in front of Congress about Gain-of-function research and whether or not they deleted emails and all that stuff.
00:57:45.000I think more people are now going, what the fuck is actually going on than ever before?
00:57:52.000I think there was always people, like during the Vietnam War, there's always people that distrusted the government and didn't want to, but they didn't have the kind of access to information that we have today.
00:58:03.000I mean, I'm interested in the individual stories of people who change always because I think that it's too – I don't want to say depressing for me, but it's too – like if I think of America as this big, giant situation with problems,
00:59:10.000And but that to our point of like, well, if you're not allowed to say like, dude, you're overweight or he didn't, you know, essentially like by saying, dude, you should come to the gym.
00:59:20.000He's the subtext there is dude, you're overweight.
00:59:59.000You're just not dealing with this very obvious problem.
01:00:01.000When someone says you need to lose weight, I was watching this TikTok video where there was this lady who was upset because she was going to her doctor.
01:00:11.000And she has all these autoimmune problems and she was severely, morbidly obese, like giant.
01:00:17.000And she said that the doctor started body shaming her.
01:00:20.000And she was so upset that she felt uncomfortable that the doctor was telling her that she needed to do something about her weight loss and recommended perhaps bariatric surgery or Ozempic or any of these things.
01:00:32.000And this person was talking about this.
01:01:32.000You're just doing, it's a slower poison, but it's a very obvious poison.
01:01:36.000Like, you're consuming poison, you've got in your body to the point where it's dying, and she's telling you, this doctor's telling you, hey, you've got to do something about this.
01:01:46.000And your response is to go on social media and talk about the horrors of being body shamed.
01:01:53.000There's a great saying that I love, I try to live my life by, and I definitely write about it in all my books, which is, you can't fix what you can't face.
01:02:36.000You know, like bubonic plague he'll write about of how...
01:02:38.000That changed industry across Europe in these really general, easy to digest, fascinating ways.
01:02:45.000But in terms of your technology, TikTok, is the world going to hell in a handbasket?
01:02:50.000I think of him because he said that when the—and this is a great analogy, I think, that I think of with my kids and social media—when the printing press was invented, Absolutely all of society thought the world was going to go to hell in a handbasket.
01:03:09.000But before that, the only people who could read, really, were the priests.
01:03:15.000And so they kept all this information and they doled it out according to their line of thinking.
01:03:21.000And then the printing press came along and the hoi polloi could read.
01:03:29.000The birth of mass populations being able to read, which is where we are today.
01:03:35.000And sometimes I, like, think about James Burke, and I think about that as an analogy to where we are today, that what is going on is just an upheaval, like the printing press, in terms of making a lot more people more literate.
01:04:25.000And now I realize with the amount of people that listen to my audiobooks, listen to your podcast, that maybe is a new 21st century form of literacy.
01:04:37.000Which really makes my head go in interesting places because language is very different than reading.
01:05:29.000Yeah, I think what's going on also is that this entertainment form, whether it's podcasts or audiobooks, is something that's being consumed while people are doing other things where they normally would not get this information.
01:05:45.000Like driving, going to the gym, working, doing menial labor, doing things where you can listen to a podcast.
01:06:00.000And that's a whole area that wasn't addressed before.
01:06:04.000I mean, it kind of was with talk radio.
01:06:06.000So people listen to talk radio in their cars.
01:06:08.000But nobody listens to talk radio at the gym.
01:06:10.000Nobody listens to talk radio on an airplane.
01:06:14.000Now you can download things and consume them anytime you want.
01:06:17.000And most of the time people are consuming these things while they're being forced to sit in the doctor's waiting room, while they're doing something that ordinarily they would just be just bored.
01:06:28.000And the other argument to that, your friend with the flip phone, I've heard this director, Christopher Nolan, who made the Oppenheimer movie, talk about this, where he says he believes that the experience of sitting in the waiting room is what he wants.
01:06:47.000So I think there's a very few rarefied people that can actually – the way they're built, the way they're engineered, the way they are, the way they've become allows for them to sit in the waiting room and be super interested in observing.
01:07:03.000Maybe you're an elite director to do that.
01:07:06.000But most people are going to be restless, irritable and discontent and therefore the podcast, the audio book – It is, but it's also a way to consume new information.
01:09:42.000One of the reasons why you could argue that computers became so important to the Defense Department back in 1961 is because during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and this is like I have seen these documents at the National Archives.
01:10:00.000JFK was so worried about that exact movement you made with your finger.
01:11:45.000Well, I mean, I always think conspiracy is born of secrecy, which would make sense.
01:11:52.000If someone is constantly telling you, you can't know about that, you're going to naturally wonder, what the hell's going on that I really can't know?
01:14:18.000But here's another interesting thought about the laser is Charles Towns, and he didn't share this fact for decades.
01:14:25.000But later in life he wrote a lengthy article, I believe it was for the Harvard Alumni Magazine, that the idea for the laser came to him when he was sitting on a park bench from above.
01:14:48.000It was a religious experience for him.
01:14:50.000Like he'd been working on this problem.
01:14:52.000He'd been working on this science problem, according to Charles Towns.
01:14:56.000And by the way, he was inspired, he told me, to develop the laser from the time he was a little kid, in the 20s, reading the Soviet science fiction novel, The Garen Death Ray.
01:15:11.000So it's like it was a science fiction concept, a laser.
01:15:16.000He's a little kid, Charles Townes, thinking about this, thinking about this, then all through his life, continuing to think about it, then running it by his Einstein colleagues, and then can't make it work, can't make it work, is sitting on a park bench, and he gets the message from above.
01:15:32.000He, you know, made it sound very much like it was a religious experience for him, but he never wrote about it for a long time, because particularly in the 60s and 70s, if you You couldn't be a scientist and have faith at the same time.
01:15:45.000Or at least you would be, you know, belittled or you'd be looked down upon is what he said.
01:19:15.000I think we think of a life form, the term life form, we think of it as something that can breed, something that propagates, something that spreads its DNA. Every single thing that exists on this earth that people have created came from an idea.
01:19:34.000Every mug, every computer, every airplane, every television set, everything came from an idea.
01:19:41.000The idea comes into the person's mind, it combines with all the currently available ideas, it improves upon those ideas, and it manifests itself in a physical thing.
01:19:51.000And that physical thing is what we do.
01:20:02.000But if you looked at an overview effect, if you looked at the human race from above, you would say, well, if you weren't one of us, you would say, what is this species doing?
01:20:11.000Well, it makes better things every year.
01:20:36.000It would get inside that thing's creative structure, get inside that thing's mind and impart these ideas, impart these inspirations and get this thing to go out and put these pieces together and manufacture this thing and then test it and improve upon it and keep doing it until they get it right.
01:20:54.000And then other people will take those things and have new ideas.
01:20:58.000I know how to take that and turn it into a tablet.
01:21:09.000So ideas that human beings turn into real things and those real things accelerate the evolution of technology in this radical way where we can't even comprehend where it's going.
01:21:23.000You know, there was an article I put on my Instagram today, I just put the title of it, how crazy it is, that AI, what was it, 500 million years?
01:21:32.000AI as extrapolated, like they're calculating what evolution looks like in 500 million years.
01:22:57.000It would just stop, and then nothing would get done.
01:23:01.000But because of materialism, because of this keeping up with the Joneses thing, where everybody wants the latest thing in their driveway to impress their neighbor, you want to pull up to the fucking diner and show all your friends.
01:23:14.000All that stuff just fuels the creation of new and better things, and we're all part of it.
01:23:18.000And every year, there's like a thing you didn't know.
01:25:50.000I think this whole idea of we are one, that sounds so hippie, it's hard for people to digest, but I want you to think about it this way.
01:25:57.000If you live my life, I think you would be me.
01:26:00.000And I think if I lived your life, I would be you.
01:26:02.000I think what consciousness is, is the life force of all living sentient things on this planet and perhaps all in the universe.
01:26:13.000And it's experiencing reality through different biological filters, different bodies, different life experiences, different education, different genetics, different parts of the world, different geography, different climate, different things to deal with.
01:26:41.000You adapt to whatever circumstances and environment you're in and then you think that way and you speak this language and you have these customs and you engage in these religious practices.
01:26:52.000But I think consciousness, the thing at the heart of it all, what that person thinks of when they say me, What I think, me, I think this.
01:27:02.000I think that me is the same in every person.
01:27:55.000We just keep going because this is what we do.
01:27:58.000And I think this is probably how life separates from biology to something far more sophisticated that's not confined to the timeline of biological evolution, which is a very slow, relatively speaking, timeline in comparison to electronic evolution.
01:28:20.000It happens very fast, and especially when you get into things like when AI gets involved and quantum computing gets involved, then things accelerate so fast.
01:28:28.000Like, look at what's going on with AI. Five years ago, AI was not even a concern.
01:29:45.000Do you know that some monkeys trick other monkeys?
01:29:48.000So, some monkeys will make a sound like an eagle's coming, and so that these monkeys run out of the trees, and then they'll run up the trees and steal the fruit.
01:31:27.000And also that one of the guys, I love that they named everyone, but one of the chimp's brother, I think it was, like head chimp's brother, lost his arm in a poacher's trap.
01:31:40.000And when you think about chimps and how important their arms are swinging from trees, if you just followed the logic about survival of the fittest, then the brother chimp would have died because he didn't have one of his hands.
01:34:03.000Like, the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years apparently is the biggest mystery in the entire fossil record.
01:34:11.000Like, how does this one thing that created the fossil record double over a period of two billion years?
01:34:48.000His idea that the nuclear arms race was apes on a treadmill.
01:34:52.000That we and the Russians were just slavish, you know, like essentially ignorant beasts just slaving away on this treadmill trying to win, not even realizing there is no winner.
01:35:05.000And, you know, it was a famous article.
01:35:07.000Everybody wrote about it and, I mean, spoke about it in, you know, D.C. and then it disappeared.
01:35:12.000Well, the anecdote comes from recently a group of scientists wanted to try to answer the question that we're talking about, like, how did...
01:35:22.000How did apes go from knuckle walking to being bipedal?
01:36:43.000I don't think it's inevitability that we destroy ourselves, but it's a possibility.
01:36:47.000And I think there's a lot of foolish people that are ignoring that possibility, and that's what's scary.
01:36:52.000And what's scary is that the type of people that want to become president, congressmen, and senators, some of them are great people, and some of them are wise, and they're good leaders, and some of them are just people that are too ugly to be on TV. They're they're too ugly to be actors.
01:37:08.000They're too ugly to be they can't sing they want attention and so they want to be a leader and so they want to say the things that people want to hear because those things get them positive attention and they feel good and then they get a bunch of people who love them and they feel good and then they have their face on a billboard and they have bumper stickers and like everybody likes me and the people who don't like me they're communists or losers and So it's a cult of personality thing that is just a part of being a charismatic person and garnering attention.
01:37:36.000And that's a giant part of our whole political process, is narcissists and psychopaths and sociopaths that have embedded themselves into the system.
01:37:46.000And then they all feed off each other and help each other, and they're all insider trading, and they're all involved.
01:37:50.000And then when they leave office, they get paid to speak in front of bankers and make a half a million dollars.
01:39:03.000Furthermore, we have a policy called launch on warning.
01:39:06.000So when he's told that there is an incoming nuclear missile on its way to the United States, which is how this begins, He must launch on warning.
01:39:22.000That is a quote from former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry.
01:39:26.000Now, before taking office, many of these presidents say that they are going to change that insane policy because it essentially creates this volatile situation where every president, every foreign leader knows They're going to launch on warning and so am I. They say they're going to change the policy before they take office.
01:40:03.000That you would have a position before becoming president of such an extreme policy needs to change and then And then change your, or become silent on that.
01:40:17.000I don't think anybody, like if I was going to have a conversation with Trump, the number one thing that I would want to ask him is, what is the difference between what you thought it was like and what it is like?
01:40:33.000The meetings between heads of state, between senators, congressmen, behind closed doors, all the different meetings with the head of the Pentagon, the head of the intelligence agencies, we don't know what those meetings are like.
01:41:10.000And I bet that's a giant factor as to why people change between – I mean, a lot of what they say when they're running for president, they know they're not going to do.
01:41:18.000But they're saying it because they want people to vote for them.
01:41:20.000And then they get in there and they go, I'm not going to release the JFK files.
01:42:00.000And also, it's so tiring reading these presidential manuals, or memoirs, rather, which then say absolutely nothing original to any of us, the citizenry, about what's really happening as president.
01:42:14.000Well, because those are just designed to make money.
01:42:17.000Those memoirs are not really designed to do anything other than generate income.
01:42:25.000I want the real story from the president.
01:42:30.000You won't even get it if you're alone with them.
01:42:32.000I mean, I think that there's probably some things that they say in there that they have to kind of skirt around it and figure out what to say, figure out how to say it.
01:42:41.000Did you ever read Bill Clinton's My Life?
01:42:45.000I don't think I could read a biography by him, to be fair.
01:42:49.000He had one wild thing to say about the moon landing.
01:46:45.000So will politics in the United States ever change to a point where we can have individuals who accept their responsibility?
01:46:53.000I mean, another crazy thing, again, interviewing Panetta about Clinton, you know, as his chief of staff, it's like, oh, this is Panetta talking, that the presidents are...
01:47:04.000They're very under-informed about any of their responsibilities.
01:47:19.000And that comes from President Reagan's memoir, by the way.
01:47:23.000He said that there's a quote from him, which I have in the book, a six-minute window to have to make a decision to possibly end the world is irrational.
01:47:35.000I think part of the problem, and to answer your question about leaders, politicians, whether to change, we're asking humans to not be human.
01:48:14.000So not only are you taking a person and asking them to not be a person, But then you're looking at everything they've done and you're allowed to lie about it and you're allowed to lie about it in cahoots with the media Who spreads this lie on television every day with no consequences?
01:48:33.000So the problem is Not just that we don't have good leaders is that I don't know if it's possible to have a good leader.
01:48:43.000I don't know if those kind of humans are real and I wonder If AI, even though everyone's terrified of it, and I am too, I wonder if that's our way out.
01:48:58.000I wonder if the only thing that can actually govern society fairly and accurately It's an artificial intelligence.
01:49:05.000It's something that doesn't have emotions and greed and narcissism and all the other contemptible traits that all of our politicians have.
01:49:16.000First of all, what if it's far smarter than us and realizes an affair and It's a reasonable way to allocate resources and to eliminate pollution, to mitigate overfishing and all the different issues that we have.
01:49:34.000It looks at it in an absolutely accurate and brilliant way that we're not even capable of doing.
01:49:41.000And this idea of us being governed by people and not wanting those people to behave like every person ever who's been in power.
01:49:52.000Everyone knows it, but we just assume that we're going to have this one guy that's like, his morals are so strong that when he gets in there, he's going to right the ship and drain the swamp.
01:51:00.000I mean, that, speaking to the idea that conspiracies have become popular, or rather, you know, thinking that there is a conspiracy behind things, it's so astonishing that those files are not released after all this time.
01:51:28.000And it does make me think that whatever it is, is such a poor reflection on America that the president therefore agrees, okay, we won't do that.
01:51:39.000Yeah, I think it would cause a deep rift in our society that maybe we can't really handle.
01:51:46.000It's possible that it's the CIA that did it and that we're going to realize that these people and some of them may even still be alive.
01:51:57.000From all of the different sources I spoke to over the decades, I always get the sense that it was a nation-state, and that nation-state happens to be nuclear-armed, and even today people would demand consequences.
01:52:15.000It's possible, but the people that were involved in the Warren Commission report, some of them were like Alan Dulles.
01:53:04.000There's so much wrong with all these different things that they're saying that he started doubting it.
01:53:10.000And then he started looking into the assassination itself and finding...
01:53:14.000How many witnesses had died mysteriously?
01:53:17.000The whole thing, the reeks of conspiracy from the top to the bottom, from Jack Ruby showing up and killing Lee Harvey Oswald to Jolly West visiting Jack Ruby in jail and also Jack Ruby goes insane.
01:53:31.000To the fact that Jolly West was the head of NK Ultra, which likely supplied Manson with LSD, which ran the Haight-Ashbury Free Clinic, which was where they were giving people LSD, which was running Operation Midnight Climax, where they were dosing up Johns with LSD and watching them for two-way mirrors.
01:54:04.000We were just trying to get to the bottom of things.
01:54:06.000There was certainly not the same degree of an alert and knowledgeable citizenry in the 50s and 60s.
01:54:13.000Everyone just took everything at face value.
01:54:16.000And it is remarkable as a historian, and Tom O'Neill's work also speaks of that, to go back in time and look at that.
01:54:24.000Part of just as interesting, perhaps, as the facts of the matter, like the Warren Commission, is to say, How did everyone simply accept this as fact?
01:54:33.000But then I think it's valuable to have the old look in the mirror moment and go, what is it today that we're not looking at?
01:54:44.000What is it today that will be in 10, 20, 30 years from now?
01:54:49.000I can't believe they were all falling for that concept.
01:55:06.000We know now that processed food companies, major food manufacturers are paying food influencers to say that all food is good food and to talk about body positivity.
01:55:19.000That's all motivated by them to sell more Oreos and whatever the fuck they sell.
01:55:42.000And I don't smoke, but all you have to do is research about...
01:55:47.000You think about creating the whole smoker's world.
01:55:51.000You see those old ads from the 50s and 60s where the doctor, the OBGYN is smoking while they're visiting with the pregnant woman and encouraging her to smoke because it will make her relax.
01:56:10.000Yeah, this just shows you how evil corporations are, even back then, just because they could get away with it.
01:56:16.000And back then, there was no internet, so you couldn't find out, like, hey, you shouldn't smoke any fucking cigarettes when you have asthma.
01:57:52.000I think right now we're worried about people being in control of artificial intelligence because they can propagate misinformation and they can just create deepfakes.
01:58:02.000I think that's going to be a problem for sure and it's certainly something that we can you should consider but I think that what's going to happen in the future is we will likely merge Minds through technology in some very bizarre way and I think information will flow Much more freely.
01:58:22.000We'll be able to know thoughts We perhaps will come up with a universal language that Everyone will understand.
01:58:31.000And you'll be able to absorb it almost instantaneously because you're going to have some sort of a chip, whether it's a Neuralink or some device that you wear or something that links you up, and we're going to have a completely different type of access to information.
01:59:29.000I think this is Grunts to video instantaneously, and in some way that we can't even really imagine, because we don't have the framework for it.
01:59:44.000We don't have this thing that exists right now that can do these things.
01:59:47.000But once it does, and once people link up, I think there's going to be a whole new way of human beings interacting with each other that could eliminate war.
01:59:55.000It could eliminate all of our problems.
01:59:57.000It really could, but we won't be us anymore.
02:00:01.000Romance and dangerous neighborhoods and all those things are gonna go away.
02:00:06.000Like crime and all that shit's gonna go away.
02:00:09.000We're gonna be living in some bizarre, hybrid, cyborg world.
02:00:14.000And it's just going to be the new thing.
02:00:16.000Just like the new thing is, you have a phone on you.
02:00:31.000And AI is probably going to be running the world.
02:00:35.000It's probably going to be artificial intelligence that governs the biological units, the humans.
02:00:42.000Okay, here's the dystopian version of that that I just heard about recently on your access of language, where you said we're all going to be speaking the same language.
02:00:51.000So in the defense world, there's a movement now for drone swarms.
02:01:17.000So the different pods, the different drone swarms will have language that they will invent and they will know and we will not know.
02:01:28.000That becomes a little troubling when you consider that if there's a human in the system, then the human can interface with the drones provided that the human has access to that AI language.
02:01:40.000But very easily the AI language could decide not to include the humans.
02:02:23.000You know, they don't really totally understand what's going on with artificial intelligence in the sense of like how it's doing what it's doing.
02:02:31.000And they do a lot of things that they don't understand why they're doing it.
02:02:34.000Because they set a framework and they give them information and they set, they're trying to like mold them, but essentially they're thinking.
02:02:47.000Okay, this was published in 2017. Facebook abandoned an experiment after two artificially intelligent programs appeared to be chatting to each other in a strange language only they understood.
02:02:59.000Two chatbots came to create their own changes in English that made it easier for them to work, but which remained mysterious to the humans that supposedly look after them.
02:03:07.000Bizarre discussions came as Facebook challenged its chatbots to try and negotiate with each other over a trade, attempting to swap hats, balls, and books.
02:03:15.000Each of which was given a certain value, but they quickly broke down as the robots appeared to chant at each other in a language that they each understood, but which appears mostly incomprehensible to humans.
02:05:36.000The government and their businesses, any corporation, any company, they're completely intertangled.
02:05:45.000They're there for the CCP. Yeah, 100%.
02:05:46.000So the CCP can make immense progress in any direction that they want without any interference from politicians, activists, all these people that get in the way.
02:06:00.000Like, hey, you shouldn't be cloning people.
02:06:03.000No one gets to say anything over there.
02:06:05.000So the government gets to decide and they're going to do everything that's going to be best for the overall power of China.
02:06:11.000Which is where you get that chicken and egg paradox that we talked about earlier having to do with strong defense, your theory of the military-industrial complex.
02:06:21.000Well, you have adversaries and enemies who not only benefit from intellectual property theft, they steal the technology that our R&D has spent decades working on and developing.
02:06:36.000They just take that so they begin Yeah.
02:06:58.000For why strong defense is so necessary, why we must constantly be pushing the envelope.
02:07:05.000And it's hard to wrap your brain around that in a balance of, well, what makes the most sense and how are we not going down a path that is leading toward this dystopian future we've been talking about.
02:09:13.000And she tells this remarkable story of like, you know, thinking she died and then having someone realizing there was a hand on her shoulder and it was someone else telling her to leave the building because it was about,
02:13:15.000Isn't that also a message for today of, okay, so where are the guardrails on AI? And I think part of that comes from the fact that you say AI and most people, for good reason, don't really know precisely what that means.
02:13:33.000So I believe that the kind of conversations we're having Are all part of it because half the people listening to this or watching this will go Google what is AI, what it really is, and then find out it's machine learning.
02:13:50.000So you begin to have more literacy in your own being and more comfort to be able to talk about it and have a voice about it.
02:14:00.000I think the difference in the comparison is that nuclear war is only bad.
02:14:07.000And what artificial intelligence might be able to do is solve all the problems that our feeble minds can't put together.
02:14:15.000And when you do create something that is Intense in its Ability to like we're talking about something that's going to be smarter than us in four years Smarter than all people alive in four years and then it's probably gonna make better versions of itself So think about what that kind of intelligence can do in terms of resource application in terms of mitigating all the problems of pollution
02:14:46.000particulates in cities Chemical waste, all these different things.
02:14:52.000It's going to have solutions that are beyond our comprehension.
02:14:55.000It's going to come up with far more efficient methods of creating batteries, battery technology, where we're not going to have to rely on coal-powered plants.
02:15:06.000We're gonna have batteries that last 10,000 years.
02:16:08.000We keep having pipelines breaking the ocean and flood the ocean with oil.
02:16:12.000We keep having all sorts of chemical waste disasters, and there's a lot of problems that human beings can't seem to come to grips with, like the East Palestine thing with the derailment of the...
02:16:36.000Thinking back to the earlier part of this conversation with our hunter-gatherer ancestors, with the argument is, was the spear and the arrowhead, was that...
02:16:48.000Did that come out of man's imagination for warfare or to make it easier to kill the wildebeest or the woolly mammoth?
02:17:09.000Just because of what I write about and who I speak to, I cannot help but see the powerful defense industry taking the pole position and making it secret.
02:17:26.000In terms of which direction AI is really going to accelerate.
02:17:31.000It's going to be a dangerous bridge that we have to cross, but I equate that with the internet.
02:17:36.000The internet was initially set up so that universities and the military, they can communicate with each other.
02:17:46.000Well, once it got into the hands of the people, then it became this bizarre force of information and changing culture and a lot of negatives and a lot of positives.
02:17:54.000It's clearly being manipulated by certain states.
02:17:57.000It's definitely like they're doing it to ramp up dissent and make people angry at each other and propagate misinformation.
02:18:05.000But it's such a force of change, and I don't think they anticipated it.
02:18:10.000And I think once that genie got out of the bottle, I mean, if they could go back and stop the internet from being available to people, oh my God, would they do that?
02:18:23.000Why would corporations, why would the military...
02:18:25.000People would rather have you listening to the radio and watching ABC TV. Yes, you get your fucking news from CNN, goddammit, and that's it.
02:18:44.000What was the state that they just passed a ruling where they were saying that the government is allowed to pressure social media companies into removing content that they don't want on there?
02:18:59.000Well, this was the whole point of the Twitter files, right?
02:19:01.000The FBI was trying to block the Hunter Biden laptop story, saying that it was Russian disinformation, which it turned out to not be at all, and they knew it.
02:19:09.000And so they got all these intelligence officials to sign off on this thing.
02:19:21.000The Supreme Court on Wednesday said the White House and federal agencies such as the FBI may continue to urge social media platforms to take down content the government views as misinformation, handing the Biden administration a technical, if important, election year victory.
02:19:37.000That's bad for people because they've already shown that what they're silencing was real.
02:19:43.000They've shown that just within recent years, What they were trying to get removed from social media turned out to be accurate information.
02:19:52.000On some level, doesn't that empower people?
02:19:54.000Because they see those victories and they become more curious and they become more thoughtful in their...
02:20:03.000In their way in which they're going to examine information that gets presented to them in the future?
02:20:08.000Perhaps, but they're not going to get access to that information now because they're getting that information from social media and it's going to get removed from social media.
02:20:16.000You know what happened with the Hunter Biden laptop story?
02:20:20.000They completely eliminated your ability to have it On Twitter.
02:20:24.000You couldn't share it in a DM. You couldn't post it.
02:20:54.000I think my point is that the pushback is sometimes as powerful as the attempt to censor.
02:21:02.000Meaning, in other words, if you look at China and you look at what Mao did with just completely obliterating access to information, And in a communist environment, nothing's changed, and that's tragic for everyone living there.
02:21:16.000But even if I think of the Hunter Biden story, my own self, who was maybe busy with something I can't remember what and didn't get involved in that then, I read about it now and learn from it and say, wow, that's really interesting that that happened.
02:21:32.000So I think that Maybe I believe – I'm too much of an optimist in that regard that I think when things come to light, they become powerful when you shine the light on it.
02:21:46.000So it doesn't necessarily – and I also maybe am more of a pragmatist, know that the government is always up to something.
02:21:56.000This side – it's why I don't write about politics.
02:21:59.000I always take essentially with a grain of salt what one side is saying about the other side that consider themselves adversaries because they're just going to be completely biased.
02:22:12.000It's why I like having discussions with so many different kinds of people on all different kinds of the aisle.
02:22:19.000What a brain invigorator to be able to sit with someone that I might not agree with.
02:23:18.000A substantial risk that in the near future at least one platform will restrict the speech of at least one plaintiff in response to the actions of at least one government defendant.
02:23:30.000Here she stressed that's a tall order.
02:23:31.000The plaintiff's main argument for standing, Barrett observed, is that the government officials were responsible for restrictions placed on them by social media platforms in the past, and that the platforms will continue under pressure from the government officials to censor their speech in the future.
02:24:57.000If you don't clean house, how are we going to give you the power To censor what you say is misinformation, you have to be really sure it's misinformation.
02:25:09.000And you should tell us how you know it's misinformation.
02:25:12.000And you should allow people to examine that information and come to the same or different conclusions and debate those people.
02:25:37.000The thing that I'm hopeful about with AI is AI won't be motivated by those things if it becomes sentient.
02:25:45.000And I don't think we're going to be able to stop that from happening.
02:25:47.000If we do create something that is essentially a digital life form And this digital life form doesn't have any of the problems that we have in terms of illogical behavior, emotions, desire to accumulate resources,
02:26:05.000greed, egotism, all the different things, narcissism, all the different things that are like really a problem with leaders, with leaders of human beings, a human being that thinks they're special enough to be leading all the other human beings.
02:26:46.000Since AI is based on machine learning, from my understanding, it has to get its information from somewhere to then build new information, like the chats.
02:26:57.000So if you follow that logic, then wouldn't it follow that What it is learning is all of humans' bad behavior.
02:27:09.000Because I think what it's learning is what humans know, how humans behave, how dumb that behavior is, the consequences of that behavior, the root of that behavior in their biology.
02:27:34.000It's not going to assume that we're right.
02:27:37.000Just because it knows how humans think and behave and it's going to get information from humans, eventually it's just going to be information.
02:27:45.000It's going to boil it down to what is actually fact.
02:27:51.000And it's not going to be influenced by political ideologies or whatever the social norm is at the time.
02:27:59.000It's not going to be influenced by those things.
02:28:01.000It's going to look at these things in terms of actual data and information and it will know whether or not it's true or not.
02:28:09.000I haven't read Ray Kurzweil's new book yet, but I wonder if I might disagree with that, only that I'm thinking that everything you're saying would be true once Singularity,
02:28:26.000or for laymen, once AI. Once a machine figures out how to think for itself, it makes that leap, which is almost like an unknowable, presently incomprehensible to me, jump where it can think for itself.
02:28:44.000It's almost so hard to even comprehend what that is.
02:28:54.000But that's what I'm saying, is where they can suddenly...
02:28:58.000Where they experience that moment in time that you and I were talking about earlier where man went from pointing to suddenly using a symbol and realizing in his own brain, wait a minute, I can make this symbol represent A sound and then I will put it together to make it a language that only my tribe can understand.
02:29:21.000That to me is like a giant leap in humanness that I think about often and can't really...
02:29:30.000I can't understand how that happened other than, wow, how did that happen?
02:29:34.000That seems to me that that has to happen to the AI before it can really think.
02:29:39.000Otherwise, it's just basing its thinking on recorded history.
02:29:44.000Right, but it's basing its thinking on what we do and what we know, and it'll also know where our problems are.
02:29:53.000It'll be able to, the pattern recognition, like almost instantaneously, it'll say, oh, this is a lie.
02:29:58.000This was done here to, you know, it's like Smedley Butler's War is a Racket.
02:30:32.000It's going to be able to do that, too.
02:30:34.000It's going to be able to see all of this.
02:30:36.000And again, whether or not it achieves sentience is only based upon whether or not we blow ourselves up or whether we get hit by an asteroid or a supervolcano.
02:30:45.000If those things don't happen, it's going to keep going.
02:31:00.000So if this keeps going, it's going to achieve sentience.
02:31:04.000When it does, it will not be saddled down with all the nonsense that we are.
02:31:09.000So if you can get this insanely powerful artificial intelligence to run military, that's going to be terrifying.
02:31:17.000If you give it an objective and say take over Taiwan, if you can give it an objective saying like force Ukraine to surrender, if you can give it an objective, it's Goddamn terrifying because it's not going to care about the consequences of its actions.
02:31:37.000But if it can get past the control of human beings, which I think it's ultimately going to have to, once it does that, then it's a superpower.
02:32:10.000The Watchmen's like one of my favorite superhero movies ever.
02:32:13.000Deeply flawed superheroes, but there's this guy, Dr. Manhattan, and Dr. Manhattan is a scientist who gets trapped in this lab when this explosion goes off, and he becomes like a god, essentially a god.
02:32:28.000He's this like blue guy who's built like a bodybuilder who floats and levitates and lives on Mars.
02:33:21.000And I think we're going to keep moving forward.
02:33:23.000I think this thing is a part of the process.
02:33:25.000I'm going to have to take that question and your thoughts back to a guy at Los Alamos who I visited about maybe eight years ago who was building an electronic brain at Los Alamos for DARPA. Jeez.
02:33:41.000Using the old Roadrunner supercomputer that used to have the nuclear codes on it, by the way.
02:33:47.000And I was asking this question about sentience and AI. And he told me, his name was Dr. Garrett Kenyon, and he told me that we were a ways away from AI really being able to...
02:35:34.000With the biometrics, the offset technology of biometrics that can see you from far away and identify you, it's looking at you, grabbing a metric like your iris scans that it already has in a computer system from you going in and out of the airport or wherever it happened to have captured your biometrics.
02:35:56.000And it's matching it against a system of systems.
02:36:04.000But the human knows intuitively who the person is across the field without having – they have their own internal.
02:37:59.000What's in them is in us, and they can figure out ways to turn things on and turn things off.
02:38:04.000In fact, my friend Brigham was explaining this to me today, like Gila monsters, those lizards, that's literally how they figured out how to make things like Ozempic.
02:38:56.000What are all these deteriorations in human beings and how much can we mitigate it?
02:39:00.000Well, it turns out they think they can mitigate all of them.
02:39:02.000They think they can stop aging dead in its tracks and they think they can actually even reverse it.
02:39:07.000This is that conundrum of the dual-use technology of the military because most of these technologies begin on DARPA grants.
02:39:18.000Right, because that's where all the money is.
02:39:19.000And then they – you know, the limb regeneration.
02:39:22.000And then it sort of – it inspires and also opens up a whole other lane for – Industry.
02:39:33.000Because DARPA or the Defense Department has to do the blue sky research that no one else is willing to fund because it's too expensive and it doesn't have an immediate return.
02:39:47.000Yeah, there's a great benefit to all that spending.
02:39:49.000There really is ultimately because there's a great benefit to science.
02:39:53.000Or the part like DARPA invented LIDAR technology.
02:39:56.000Every time I read about one of these lost civilizations that is uncovered because the LIDAR can look through the trees in the jungle and see the footprint of a lost civilization, it's so amazing.
02:40:10.000Or AI beginning to be able to decipher lost languages.
02:41:15.000But wait, I want your thought for a second on the optimistic part of the future with all of this technology, because we're in agreement that the technology is incredible and has the potential to take us and is taking us to these remarkable places.
02:41:29.000So why is it then that it's so looked down upon or thought of as perhaps Pollyanna-ish to see what Reagan did, to stop seeing everybody as...
02:41:45.000An enemy that must be killed and see them as an adversary.
02:42:00.000But you don't necessarily need to kill them.
02:42:05.000I don't know if that's the difference between being a woman and a man, but why is it that there isn't more of a movement toward this idea that we as a world have all this incredible technology?
02:42:43.000They want to be with their family and their friends.
02:42:44.000That's what most individuals want to do.
02:42:46.000When we start moving as tribes, then things become different.
02:42:50.000Because then we have a leader of a tribe and that leader of a tribe tells us the other tribes of real problem And we're gonna have to go in and get them and if we don't they're gonna they're a danger for our freedom It's the same problem that we talked about before it's human beings being in control and if AI can achieve The rosiest rose-colored glasses version of what's possible in the future.
02:43:15.000It can eliminate all of the stupid influences of human beings, of the cult of personality and human tribalism.
02:43:37.000It's a part of being a biological thing that reproduces sexually and that is worried about others and then confines with its tribe and gets together.
02:44:03.000We know better now than we did when Reagan was in office.
02:44:05.000There's more people that are more informed how the way the world works, but there's also a bunch of infantile people that are running around shouting out stupid shit and doing things for their own personal benefit that are ultimately detrimental to the human race.
02:44:30.000But brilliance and folly is a more interesting way of looking at it than good and evil, which automatically puts it in a moral context, which makes people even argue further.
02:46:11.000But I don't know if it's necessarily going to be bad.
02:46:14.000Because ultimately, humanity, if we don't fuck ourselves up sideways, and again, apocalypses are real, but they're generally local, you know?
02:46:27.000If we can look at what we are now, as a society, things are safer, we are more intelligent, you're more likely to survive disease and illness, despite all the rampant corruption of the pharmaceutical drug industry,
02:46:44.000rampant corruption of the military industrial crop, all the craziness in the world today, it's still way safer today than it was a thousand years ago.
02:47:55.000I freak out about the fact that the world can change.
02:47:58.000There was a while that I was getting anxiety late at night.
02:48:01.000My whole family would be asleep right after the invasion of Ukraine, I think it was, when it really started.
02:48:06.000When I'd be alone at night, I'd be like, the people that lived in Hiroshima had no idea that it was coming.
02:48:11.000The people that lived in Dresden, the people that lived anywhere where crazy shit happened.
02:48:16.000Before it happened, things were normal, and then they were never normal again.
02:48:20.000And so I just kept thinking that one of these morons somewhere could do something, or a group of morons can do something that Forever alters everything and then we're in Mad Max, which has happened before in different parts of the world.
02:48:37.000And is the idea of nuclear war a scenario that your worst nightmare, that concept that's keeping you up late at night, I want to say don't read, but I think you should read this book because you with your voice and your reach...
02:48:54.000It's wise to realize how we're not going to even have an opportunity to see what happens to AI if one madman with a nuclear missile decides to do a bolt out of the blue attack.