In this episode of the podcast, I sit down with a friend to talk about why he doesn't want to leave California and why he thinks it would be a good idea to leave the country. We talk about the current state of the economy, the current fiscal situation, and why we should all be worried about it. I think you're going to get a lot out of this episode if you listen to this one, and I hope you do so in your own time to reflect on what's been going on in the past 20 years and what's going to happen in the next 20 years. It's a good listen, and it's definitely worth a listen. Tweet me and let me know what you think! Timestamps: 4:00 - Why I don't think the U.S. should leave California 8:30 - Why it's not a good move to leave LA 9:15 - Should I go to Florida or Costa Rica? 11:00- Why I think it's better to stay in California 16:30- Why we need to get out of the country 17:20 - How to deal with the current economic situation 18:40 - The current fiscal problems we're in 21st century capitalism 19:00 What are the real solutions to the economic problems we should be focusing on 21:30 22 - Why we have a deficit problem 23:00 | How to fix the current problems 26:00 The real problem we're facing 27:15 28:10 - What s going wrong in the US economy 29:10 35:30 | Why we should fix it? 36:10 | What's the real problem? 39:40 | How can we fix it 40:40 How do we fix this? & 35:15 | What are we going to fix it ? 41:00 + 40:00 & 45:00 // 45:30 + 46:00+ 45:20 Theme: 44: What's going wrong with the problem we should do? Theme Music: Theme music by Ian Dorsen Theme song by my main amigo, & Music by my ad by my good friend John McAfee , Intro music by my band, my music is by my song is , my ad is
00:00:41.000But I have endless conversations about leaving.
00:00:43.000And I moved from San Francisco to L.A. back in 2018. That felt about as big a move away as possible.
00:00:49.000And I keep the extreme thing I keep saying, and I have to keep in mind talks as a substitute for action, the extreme thing I keep saying is I can't decide whether to leave the state or the country.
00:01:34.000But I can't decide between those two so I end up stuck in California.
00:01:37.000Well, Australia is okay, but they're even worse when it comes to rule of law and what they decide to make you do and the way they're cracking down on people now for online speech.
00:01:53.000It's – but somehow the relative outperformance of the U.S. and the absolute stagnation decline of the U.S., they're actually related things because the way the conversation is grouped, every time I say – tell someone,
00:02:08.000you know, I'm thinking about leaving the country.
00:02:10.000They'll do what you say and they'll say, well, every place is worse.
00:02:14.000And then that somehow distracts us from all the problems in this country.
00:02:17.000And then we can't talk about what's gone wrong in the U.S. because everything is so much worse.
00:02:25.000Well, I think most people know what's gone wrong.
00:02:28.000But they don't know if they're on the side of the government that's currently in power.
00:02:48.000I don't think it's necessarily that we don't know what the problems are.
00:02:50.000We know what the problems are, but we don't have clear solutions as to how to fix them, nor do we understand the real mechanisms of how they got there in the first place.
00:03:00.000Yeah, I mean there are a lot that are pretty obvious to articulate and they're much easier described than solved.
00:03:08.000Like we have a crazy, crazy budget deficit.
00:03:11.000And presumably you have to do one of three things.
00:03:15.000You have to raise taxes a lot, you have to cut spending a lot, or you're just going to keep borrowing money.
00:03:22.000Isn't there like some enormous amount of our taxes that just go to the deficit?
00:03:27.000It's not that high, but it's gone up a lot.
00:03:34.000I thought it was like 34% or something crazy.
00:03:37.000It peaked at 3.1% of GDP. Which is, you know, maybe 15, 20% of the budget, 3.1% of GDP in 1991. And then it went all the way down to something like 1.5% in the mid-2010s.
00:03:55.000And now it's crept back up to 3.1%, 3.2%.
00:03:59.000And so we are at all-time highs as a percentage of GDP. And the way to understand the basic math is the debt went up a crazy amount, but the interest rates went down.
00:04:09.000And from 2008 to 2021, for 13 years, we basically had zero interest rates with one brief blip under Powell.
00:04:19.000And then you could borrow way more money, and it wouldn't show up in servicing the debt because you just paid 0% interest on the T-bills.
00:04:27.000And the thing that's That's very dangerous seeming to me about the current fiscal situation is the interest rates have gone back to positive like they were in the 90s and early 2000s, mid-2000s.
00:04:42.000And it's just this incredibly large debt.
00:04:45.000And so we now have a real runaway deficit problem.
00:04:49.000But people have been talking about this for 40 years and crying wolf for 40 years.
00:04:54.000So it's very hard for people to take it seriously.
00:04:56.000Most people don't even understand what it means.
00:04:58.000Like when you say there's a deficit, we owe money.
00:05:06.000It's – well, it's people who bought the bonds and it's – A lot of it's to Americans.
00:05:15.000Some of them are held by the Federal Reserve.
00:05:17.000A decent amount are held by foreigners at this point because in some ways it's the opposite of the trade current account deficits.
00:05:27.000The U.S. has been running these big current account deficits and then the foreigners end up with way more dollars than they want to spend on American goods or services.
00:05:35.000And so they have to reinvest them in the U.S. Some put it into houses or stocks, but a lot of it just goes into government debt.
00:05:42.000So in some ways it's a function of the chronic trade imbalances, chronic trade deficits.
00:05:48.000Well, if you had supreme power, if Peter Thiel was the ruler of the world and you could fix this, what would you do?
00:06:07.000First of all, what could be done to mitigate it and what could be done to solve it?
00:06:11.000I think my answers are probably all in the very libertarian direction.
00:06:22.000So it would be sort of Figure out ways to have smaller governments, figure out ways to increase the age on Social Security, means test Social Security so not everyone gets it.
00:06:36.000Just figure out ways to gradually dial back a lot of these government benefits.
00:07:01.000Yeah, basically anyone who – pretty much everyone gets it because it was originally rationalized as a – As a sort of a pension system, not as a welfare system.
00:07:16.000And so the fiction was you pay Social Security taxes and then you're entitled to get a pension out in the form of Social Security.
00:07:24.000And because it was – we told this fiction that it was a form of – it was a pension system instead of an intergenerational Ponzi scheme or something like that.
00:07:36.000You know, the fiction means everybody gets paid Social Security because it's a pension system.
00:07:40.000Whereas if we were more honest and said it's, you know, it's just a welfare system, maybe you could start dialing, you could probably rationalize in a lot of ways.
00:07:51.000Trevor Burrus And it's not related to how much you put into it, right?
00:07:54.000Like, how does Social Security work in terms of … Trevor Burrus I think it's partially related.
00:07:58.000So I think there is – I'm not a total expert on this stuff.
00:08:01.000But I think there's some guaranteed minimum you get.
00:08:06.000And then if you put more in, you get somewhat more, and then it's capped at a certain amount.
00:08:13.000And that's why Social Security taxes are capped at something like $150,000 a year.
00:08:21.000And then this is one of the really big tax increase proposals that's out there is to uncap it, which would effectively be a 12.4% income tax hike on all your income.
00:08:36.000Because the argument is, the sort of progressive left Democrat argument is that it's, you know, why should you have a regressive Social Security tax?
00:08:48.000Why should you pay 12.4% or whatever the Social Security tax is?
00:08:52.000Half gets paid by you, half gets paid by your employer.
00:08:56.000But then it's capped at like $140,000, $150,000, some level like that.
00:09:02.000And what should be regressive, where if you make 500K or a million K a year, you pay zero tax on your marginal income.
00:09:09.000And that makes no sense if it's a welfare program.
00:09:11.000If it's a retirement savings program and your payout's capped, then, you know, you don't need to put in more than you get out.
00:09:19.000Well, that's logical, but there's not a lot of logic going on with the way people are talking about taxes today.
00:09:26.000Like, California just jacked their taxes up to 14, what?
00:09:35.000I mean, you want more money for doing a terrible job and having more people leave for the first time ever in, like, the history of the state.
00:10:02.000You get 10 percent more revenues and 5 percent of the people leave.
00:10:06.000You still increase the amount of revenues you're getting.
00:10:11.000It's inelastic enough that you're actually able to increase the revenues.
00:10:15.000I mean this is sort of the – The crazy thing about California is there's always sort of a right wing or libertarian critique of California that it's such a ridiculous place.
00:10:27.000It should just collapse under its own ridiculousness.
00:10:35.000The macroeconomics in it are pretty good.
00:10:38.00040 million people, the GDP is around 4 trillion.
00:10:42.000It's about the same as Germany with 80 million or Japan with 125 million.
00:10:46.000Japan has three times the population of California.
00:10:49.000Same GDP means one-third the per capita GDP. So there's some level on which California as a whole is working even though it doesn't work from a governance point of view.
00:10:59.000It doesn't work for a lot of the people who live there.
00:11:02.000And the rough model I have for how to think of California is that it's kind of like Saudi Arabia.
00:11:08.000And you have a crazy religion, wokeism in California, Wahhabism in Saudi Arabia.
00:11:15.000You know, not that many people believe it, but it distorts everything.
00:11:19.000And then you have like oil fields in Saudi Arabia, and you have the big tech companies in California.
00:12:02.000They've been saying that for 40 or 50 years.
00:12:04.000But if you have a giant oil field, you can pay for a lot of ridiculousness.
00:12:08.000I think that's the way you have to think of California.
00:12:12.000Well, the other thing is you're also— There are things about it that are ridiculous, but there's something about it that, you know, it doesn't naturally self-destruct overnight.
00:12:21.000Well, there's a lot of kick-ass people there, and there's a lot of people that are still generating enormous amounts of wealth there, and it's too difficult to just pack up and leave.
00:12:29.000I think it's something like four of the eight or nine companies with market capitalizations over a trillion dollars are based in California.
00:12:39.000It's Google, Apple— Now NVIDIA, Meta, I think Broadcom is close to that.
00:12:49.000And there's no ideal place to live either.
00:12:53.000It's not like California sucks, so there's a place that's got it totally dialed in with also that has an enormous GDP, also has an enormous population.
00:13:03.000There's not like one big city that's really dialed in.
00:13:07.000Well, it's – there are things that worked.
00:13:10.000I looked at all the zero tax states in the US and it's always – you don't – I think the way you ask the question gets at it, which is you don't live in a – in theory, a lot of stuff happens on a state level, but you don't live in a state.
00:13:28.000And so if you're somewhat biased towards living in at least a moderately sized city, okay, I think there are four states where there are no cities.
00:13:39.000Alaska, Wyoming, South Dakota, New Hampshire.
00:13:44.000There's zero tax, but no cities to speak of.
00:13:49.000And then you have Washington State with Seattle, where the weather is the worst in the country.
00:13:57.000You have Nevada with Las Vegas, which I'm not that big a fan of.
00:14:03.000And then that leaves three zero-tax states.
00:14:06.000You have Texas, which I like as a state, but I'm not that big a fan of Austin, Dallas, or Houston.
00:14:15.000Houston is just sort of an oil town, which is good if you're in that business, but otherwise not.
00:14:22.000Dallas has sort of an inferiority complex to L.A. and New York.
00:15:13.000A little bit paradoxical about any place that gets lots of tourists.
00:15:18.000There's some things that are great about it because so many tourists go, but then in some sense it creates a weird aesthetic because the day-to-day vibe is that you don't work and you're just having fun or something like that.
00:15:34.000Right, because so many people are going there just to do that.
00:15:37.000And that's probably a little bit off with the South Florida thing.
00:15:44.000And then I think Nashville is also sort of its own real place.
00:15:57.000I'm probably always, I'm always, I'm always too, you know, fifth grade onwards since, you know, 70, 77, I lived in California.
00:16:09.000And so I'm just a sucker for the weather.
00:16:12.000And I think there is no place besides coastal California where we have really good weather year-round in the U.S. Maybe Hawaii is pretty good.
00:18:42.000I got a place in Miami in September of 2020, and I've spent the last four winters there, so I'm sort of always on the cusp of moving to Florida, hard to get out of California.
00:18:56.000But the thing that's gotten a lot harder about moving relative to four years ago, and I'd say I think my real estate purchases have generally not been great over the years.
00:20:08.000So it costs you four times as much to buy a house.
00:20:12.000And so there was a moment where people could move during COVID. And it's gotten dramatically harder relative to what it was four years ago.
00:20:20.000Well, the Austin real estate market went crazy, and then it came back down a little bit.
00:20:24.000It's in that down a little bit spot right now where there's a lot of high-end properties that are still for sale.
00:20:33.000There's not a lot of people moving here now like there was in the boom because everything's open everywhere.
00:20:38.000Well, I somehow think Austin was linked to California and Miami was linked a little bit more to New York.
00:20:47.000And it was a little bit, you know, all these differences, but Austin was kind of...
00:20:54.000A big part of the move were people from tech, from California that moved to Austin.
00:21:01.000There's a part of the Miami, South Florida thing, which was people from finance in New York City that moved to Florida.
00:21:10.000And the finance industry is less networked on New York City.
00:21:14.000So I think it is possible for people, if you run a private equity fund or if you work at a bank, it's possible for some of those functions to easily be moved to a different state.
00:21:25.000The tech industry is Crazily networked on California.
00:22:04.000The car industry was super networked on Detroit for decades and decades.
00:22:08.000And Michigan got more and more mismanaged.
00:22:10.000And people thought the network sort of protected them because, you know, the big three car companies were in Detroit, but then you had all the supply chains were also in Detroit.
00:22:19.000And then eventually, it was just so ridiculous, people moved, started moving the factories outside of that area, and it sort of unraveled.
00:22:27.000So that's, you know, it can also happen with California.
00:22:32.000That would be insane, if they just abandoned all the tech companies in California.
00:22:36.000I mean, just look at what happened at Flint, Michigan, when all the auto factories pulled out.
00:22:40.000Well, it's, it's, look, I think you can, it's always, there are all these paradoxical histories, you know, the internet, you The point of the internet, in some sense, was to eliminate the tyranny of place.
00:22:57.000And then one of the paradoxes about the history of the internet was that the internet companies, you know, were all centered in California.
00:23:12.000Of how networked, how non-networked they were.
00:23:16.000I think probably 2021, sort of the COVID moving away from California, the big thing in tech was crypto.
00:23:28.000And crypto had this conceit of a, you know, alternate currency, decentralized, away from the central banks, but also the crypto companies, the crypto protocols, you could do those from anywhere.
00:23:42.000You could do them outside the US, you could do them from Miami.
00:23:45.000And so crypto was something where the tech could naturally move out of California.
00:23:51.000And today probably the core tech narrative is completely flipped to AI. And then there's something about AI that's very centralized.
00:24:07.000I had this one-liner years ago where it was, you know, if we say that crypto is libertarian, can we also say that AI is communist?
00:24:15.000Or something like this, where the natural structure for an AI company looks like it's a big company, and then somehow the AI stuff feels like it's going to be dominated by the big tech companies in the San Francisco Bay Area.
00:24:34.000And so if that's the future of tech, the scale, the natural scale of the industry tells you that it's going to be extremely hard to get out of the San Francisco Bay Area.
00:24:49.000When you look to the future and you try to just make a guess as to how all this is going to turn out with AI, what do you think we're looking at over the next five years?
00:25:01.000Man, I think I should start by being modest in answering that question and saying that nobody has a clue.
00:25:18.000The riff I always had on this was that I can't stand any of the buzzwords and I felt AI, you know, there's all this big data, cloud computing, there were all these crazy buzzwords people had and they always were ways to sort of abstract things and get away from We're not good ways of talking about things.
00:26:03.000I'll start with the history before I get to the future.
00:26:07.000It was maybe anchored on two visions of what AI meant.
00:26:12.000And one was Nick Bostrom, Oxford prof, who wrote this book, Super Intelligence, 2014. And it was basically AI was going to be this super-duper intelligent thing, way, way godlike intelligence,
00:27:01.000We would just have this sort of totalitarian – Stalinist monitoring.
00:27:07.000It didn't require very much innovation.
00:27:08.000It just required that you apply things.
00:27:10.000And basically the subtext was China is going to win because we have no ethical qualms in China about applying this sort of basic machine learning to sort of measuring or controlling the population.
00:27:26.000And those were sort of like, say, two extreme competing visions of what AI would mean in the 2010s and sort of maybe were sort of the anchors of the AI debate.
00:27:44.000In some sense with ChatGPT in late 22, early 23, was that the achievement you got, you did not get superintelligence, it was not just surveillance tech,
00:28:00.000but you actually got to the holy grail of what people would have defined AI as from 1950 to 2010, for the previous 60 years, before the 2010s, people have always said AI, the definition of AI is passing the Turing test.
00:28:16.000And the Turing test, it basically means that the computer can fool you into thinking that it's a human being.
00:28:27.000And it's a somewhat fuzzy test because, you know, obviously you can have an expert on the computer, a non-expert.
00:28:32.000You know, does it fool you all the time or some of the time?
00:28:37.000But to first approximation, the Turing test, you know, we weren't even close to passing it in 2021. And then, you know, ChatGPT basically passes the Turing test, at least for, like, let's say an IQ 100 average person.
00:30:05.000You know, will we get artificial general intelligence, which is a hopelessly vague concept, which, you know, general intelligence could be just a generally smart human being.
00:30:16.000So is that just a person with an IQ of 130?
00:31:18.000The analogy I'm always tempted to go to, historical analogies are never perfect, but it's that maybe AI in 2023-24 is like the Internet in 1999,
00:31:34.000where on one level it's clear the Internet's going to be big and get a lot bigger and it's going to dominate the economy, it's going to rearrange the society in the 21st century.
00:31:47.000And then at the same time, it was a complete bubble and people had no idea how the business models worked.
00:31:58.000It took, you know, it didn't take that long in the scheme of things.
00:32:01.000It took, you know, 15, 20 years for it to become super dominant.
00:32:06.000But it didn't happen sort of in 18 months as people fantasized in 1999. And maybe what we have in AI is something like this.
00:32:17.000It's figuring out how to actually apply it in sort of all these different ways is going to take something like two decades.
00:32:28.000But that doesn't distract from it being a really big deal.
00:32:31.000It is a really big deal, and I think you're right about the Turing test.
00:32:34.000Do you think that the lack of acknowledgement or the public celebration or at least this mainstream discussion, which I think should be everywhere, that we've passed the Turing test, do you think it's connected to the fact that this stuff accelerates so rapidly that even though we've essentially breached this new territory,
00:32:55.000We still know that GPT-5 is going to be better.
00:33:13.000I've often, you know, probably for 15 years or so, often been on the side that there isn't that much progress in science or tech or not as much as Silicon Valley likes to claim.
00:33:26.000And even on the AI level, I think it's a massive technical achievement.
00:33:31.000It's still an open question, you know, is it actually going to lead to much higher living standards for everybody?
00:33:37.000You know, the Internet was a massive achievement.
00:33:39.000How much did it raise people's living standards?
00:33:44.000So I – but in this world where not much has happened, one of the paradoxes of an era of relative tech stagnation is that when something does happen, we don't even know how to process it.
00:34:01.000So I think Bitcoin was a – It was a big invention, whether it was good or bad, but it was a pretty big deal.
00:34:08.000And it was systematically underestimated for at least, you know, the first 10, 11 years.
00:34:57.000It's interesting that you say that so little, we feel like so little has changed, because if you're a person, how old are you?
00:35:04.000Same age as you were, born in 1967. So in our age, we've seen all the change, right?
00:35:09.000We saw the end of the Cold War, we saw answering machines, we saw VHS tapes, then we saw the internet, and then Where we're at right now, which is like this bizarre moment in time where people carry the internet around with them in their pocket every day.
00:35:24.000And these super sophisticated computers that are ubiquitous.
00:35:43.000I think that's one of the most – especially with the use of social media, it's one of the most bizarre changes I think our culture has ever – the most bizarre.
00:35:52.000It can be a big change culturally or politically.
00:35:57.000But the kinds of questions I would ask is how do you measure it economically?
00:36:03.000How much does it change GDP? How much does it change productivity?
00:36:10.000And certainly, the story I would generally tell for the last 50 years, since the 1970s, early 70s, is that we've been not absolute stagnation.
00:36:22.000We've been in an area of relative stagnation where there has been...
00:36:27.000Very limited progress in the world of atoms, the world of physical things.
00:36:33.000And there has been a lot of progress in the world of bits, information, computers, internet, mobile internet, you know, now AI. What are you referring to when you're saying the world of physical things?
00:37:09.000It would have meant the green revolution in agriculture, maybe underwater cities, you know.
00:37:17.000It sort of had, because technology simply gets defined as that which is changing, that which is progressing.
00:37:24.000And so there was progress on all these fronts.
00:37:26.000Today, last 20 years, when you talk about technology, you're normally just talking about information technology.
00:37:33.000Technology has been reduced to meaning computers.
00:37:36.000And that tells you that the structure of progress has been weird.
00:37:39.000There's been this narrow cone of We're literally moving
00:38:10.000slower than we were And that's sort of the...
00:38:22.000And then, of course, there's also a sense in which the screens and the devices have this effect distracting us from this.
00:38:32.000So when you're riding a 100-year-old subway in New York City and you're looking at your iPhone, you can look at, wow, this is this cool new gadget, but you're also being distracted from the fact that your lived environment hasn't changed in 100 years.
00:38:51.000And so there's a question, how important is this world of bits versus the world of atoms?
00:38:57.000You know, I would say, as human beings, we're physically embodied in a material world.
00:39:02.000And so I would always say this world of atoms is pretty important.
00:39:06.000And when that's pretty stagnant, you know, there's a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense.
00:39:11.000I was an undergraduate at Stanford, late 80s.
00:39:15.000And at the time, in retrospect, every engineering area would have been a bad thing to go into.
00:39:22.000You know, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, all these engineering fields where you're tinkering and trying to do new things because these things turned out to be stuck.
00:39:40.000You weren't going to make any progress in new nuclear reactor designs or stuff like that.
00:39:46.000Electrical engineering, which was the one that's sort of adjacent to making semiconductors, that one was still okay.
00:39:51.000And then the only field that was actually going to progress a lot was computer science.
00:39:59.000And again, you know, it's been very powerful, but that was not the felt sense in the 1980s.
00:40:05.000In the 1980s, computer science was this ridiculous, inferior subject to You know, the linguistic cut is always when people use the word science.
00:40:18.000I'm not in favor of science in quotes.
00:40:21.000And it's always a tell that it's not real science.
00:40:25.000And so when we call it climate science or political science or social science, you know, you're just sort of making it up.
00:40:32.000And you have an inferiority complex to real science or something like physics or chemistry.
00:40:36.000And computer science was in the same category as social science or political science.
00:40:41.000It was a fake field for people who found electrical engineering or math way too hard and sort of dropped out of the real science and real engineering fields.
00:40:54.000You don't feel that climate science is a real science?
00:42:14.000I'm just making a narrow linguistic point.
00:42:18.000Is there anything they call science that is legitimately science?
00:42:20.000Well, at this point, people say computer science has worked.
00:42:23.000But in the 1980s, all I'm saying is it was in the same category as, let's say, social science, political science.
00:42:29.000It was a tell that the people doing it kind of deep down knew they weren't doing real science.
00:42:35.000Well, there's certainly ideology that's connected to climate science.
00:42:39.000And then there's certainly corporations that are invested in this prospect of green energy and the concept of green energy.
00:42:47.000And they're profiting off of it and pushing these different things, whether it be electric car mandates or whatever it is.
00:42:55.000Like California, I think it's 2035, they have a mandate that all new vehicles have to be electric, which is hilarious when you're connected to a grid that can't support the electric cars it currently has.
00:43:05.000After they said that, within a month or two, Gavin Newsom asked people to not charge their Teslas because it was summer and the grid was fucked.
00:43:15.000Yeah, look, it was all linked into all these ideological projects in all these ways.
00:43:23.000You know, there's an environmental project which is, you know, and maybe it shouldn't be scientific.
00:43:31.000You know, the hardcore environmentalist argument is we only have one planet and we don't have time to do science.
00:43:36.000If we have to do rigorous science and you can prove that we're overheating, it'll be too late.
00:43:42.000And so if you're a hardcore environmentalist, you know, you don't want to have as high a standard of science.
00:43:47.000Yeah, my intuition is certainly when you go away from that, you end up with things that are too dogmatic, too ideological.
00:43:55.000Maybe it doesn't even work, even if the planet's getting warmer.
00:43:58.000You know, maybe climate science is not...
00:44:01.000Like, my question is, like, maybe methane is a worse...
00:44:05.000Is it more dangerous greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide?
00:44:10.000We're not even capable of measuring that.
00:44:13.000Well, we're also ignoring certain things like regenerative farms that sequester carbon.
00:44:19.000And then you have people like Bill Gates saying that planting trees to deal with carbon is ridiculous.
00:44:57.000Although, you know, there probably are ways to steel man the other side, too, where maybe...
00:45:03.000Maybe the original 1970s, I think the manifesto that's always Very interesting from the other side was this book by the Club of Rome, 1972, The Limits of Growth.
00:45:17.000And it's, you can't have, we need to head towards a society in which there's zero percent, there's very limited growth, because if you have unlimited growth, you're going to run out of resources.
00:45:28.000If you don't run out of resources, you'll hit a pollution constraint.
00:45:32.000But in the 1970s, it was, you're going to have overpopulation, You're going to run out of oil.
00:45:41.000And then by the 90s, it sort of morphed into more of the pollution problem with carbon dioxide, climate change, other environmental things.
00:47:18.000There's a question why the nuclear thing.
00:47:23.000It has gone so wrong, especially if you have electric vehicles, right?
00:47:28.000You know, combustion engine is probably hard to get nuclear to work, but if you shift to electric vehicles, you can charge your Tesla cars at night, and that would seemingly work.
00:47:43.000And there's definitely a history of energy where it was always in the direction of more intense use.
00:47:50.000It went from wood to coal to oil, which is a more compact form of energy.
00:47:55.000And in a way, it takes up less of the environment.
00:47:58.000And then if we move from oil to uranium, it's even smaller.
00:48:04.000And so in a sense, the smaller, the more dense the energy is, the less of the environment it takes up.
00:48:11.000And when we go from oil to natural gas, which takes up more space, and from natural gas to solar or wind, you have to pollute the whole environment by putting up windmills everywhere.
00:48:22.000Or you have to cover the whole desert with solar panels.
00:48:27.000And that is a good way to look at it because it is a form of pollution.
00:48:29.000And so there was a way that nuclear was supposed to be the energy mode of the 21st century.
00:48:39.000And then, yeah, there are all these historical questions.
00:48:50.000The standard explanation of why it stopped Was that it was – there were all these dangers.
00:49:00.000We had Three Mile Island in 1979, you know, Chernobyl in 1986 and then the Fukushima one in Japan I think 2011. And you had these sort of – you had these various accidents.
00:49:15.000My alternate theory on why nuclear energy really stopped.
00:49:20.000Is that it was sort of dystopian or even apocalyptic because it turned out to be very dual use.
00:49:31.000If you build nuclear power plants, it's only sort of one step away from building nuclear weapons.
00:49:44.000And it turned out to be a lot trickier to separate those two things out than it looked.
00:49:49.000And I think the signature moment was 1974 or 75 when India gets the nuclear bomb.
00:49:56.000And the US, I believe, had transferred the nuclear reactor technology to India.
00:50:00.000We thought they couldn't weaponize it.
00:50:02.000And then it turned out it was pretty easy to weaponize.
00:50:07.000And then sort of the geopolitical problem with nuclear power was you either – you need a double standard where we have nuclear power in the US but we don't allow other countries to have nuclear power because the US gets to keep its nuclear weapons.
00:50:26.000We don't let 100 other countries have nuclear weapons and that's an extreme double standard.
00:50:32.000Probably a little bit hard to justify.
00:50:37.000Or you need some kind of really effective global governance where you have a one-world government that regulates all this stuff, which doesn't sound that good either.
00:50:48.000And then sort of the compromise was just to regulate it so much that maybe the nuclear plants got grandfathered in, but it became too expensive to build new ones.
00:51:04.000Like even China, which is the country where they're building the most nuclear power plants, they built way less than people expected a decade ago because they don't trust their own designs.
00:51:18.000And so they have to copy the over-safety, over-protected designs from the West and the nuclear plants.
00:51:30.000So, you know, I'm not going to get the numbers exactly right, but if you look at what percent of Chinese electricity was nuclear, it wasn't that high.
00:51:38.000It was like maybe 4 or 5 percent in 2013, 2014. And the percent hasn't gone up in 10 years because, you know, they've maybe doubled the amount of electricity they use and maybe they doubled the nuclear, but the relative percentage is still...
00:52:15.000And if there was innovation, if nuclear engineering had gotten to a point where, you know, let's say there wasn't Three Mile Island or Chernobyl didn't happen, do you think that it would have gotten to a much more efficient and much more effective version by now?
00:52:32.000Well, my understanding is we have way more efficient designs.
00:52:37.000You can do small reactor designs, which are – you don't need this giant containment structure.
00:52:42.000So it costs much less per kilowatt hour of electricity you produce.
00:52:51.000But then I think the problem is that – If you were able to build them in all these countries all over the world, you still have this dual use problem.
00:53:00.000And again, my alternate history of what really went wrong with nuclear power, it wasn't Three Mile Island.
00:54:07.000But I think one dimension that's not to be underrated for the science and text stagnation was that...
00:54:17.000An awful lot of science and technology had this dystopian or apocalyptic dimension and probably what happened at Los Alamos in 1945 and then with the thermonuclear weapons in the early 50s.
00:54:34.000It took a while for it to really seep in but it had this sort of delayed effect where maybe a stagnant world in which the physicists don't get to do anything and they have to putter around with DEI but you don't build weapons that blow up the world anymore.
00:55:26.000We're in the stagnant path of the multiverse because it had this partially protective thing even though in all these other ways I feel it's deeply deranged our society.
00:55:35.000That's a very interesting perspective and it makes a lot of sense.
00:56:08.000He just willfully, in my opinion, ignores evidence that would show that some of the things that he's saying have already been solved.
00:56:18.000And I think his His hypothesis is all related to this concept that we have been visited and that that's how all these things were built and that this technology was brought here from another world.
00:56:35.000And I think he's very ideologically locked into these ideas.
00:56:39.000And I think a much more compelling idea is that there were very advanced cultures, for some reason, 10,000 years ago.
00:57:18.000They can get lost in disease and famine and there's all sorts of war, all sorts of reasons, the burning of the library of Alexandria.
00:57:25.000There's all sorts of ways that technology gets lost forever.
00:57:28.000And you can have today someone living in Los Angeles in the most sophisticated high-tech society the world has ever known, while you still have people that live in the Amazon that live in the same way that they have lived for thousands of years.
00:57:42.000So those things can happen in the same planet at the same time.
00:57:46.000And I think while the rest of the world was essentially operating at a much lower vibration, there were people in Egypt that were doing some extraordinary things.
00:57:56.000I don't know how they got the information.
00:58:00.000But there's no real compelling evidence that they did.
00:58:04.000I think there's much more compelling evidence that a cataclysm happened.
00:58:08.000When you look at the Younger Dryas impact theory, it's all entirely based on science.
00:58:12.000It's entirely based on core samples and iridium content and also massive changes in the environment over a very short period of time, particularly the melting of the ice caps in North America and just impact craters all around the world that we know something happened roughly 11,000 years ago.
00:58:34.000I think it's a regular occurrence on this planet that things go sideways and there's massive natural disasters and I think that it's very likely that...
00:58:53.000In some ways, the one in which we have the best history is the fall of the Roman Empire, which was obviously the culmination of the classical world and it somehow extremely unraveled.
00:59:06.000So I think my view on it is probably somewhere between yours and the— Von Daniken?
00:59:46.000Maybe the Bronze Age civilizations were very advanced, but someone came up with iron weapons.
00:59:52.000There was just one dimension where they progressed, but then everything else they could destroy.
00:59:56.000And so or the fall of the Roman Empire was again this pretty cataclysmic thing where there were diseases and then there were political things that unraveled but somehow it was a massive regression for four,
01:00:14.000five, six hundred years into the Dark Ages.
01:00:20.000The sort of naive progressive views, things always just got monotonically better.
01:00:29.000And there's sort of this revisionist, purely progressive history where even the Roman Empire didn't decline.
01:00:36.000One sort of stupid way to quantify this stuff is with pure demographics.
01:00:42.000And so it's the question, how many people lived in the past?
01:00:46.000And And the rises and falls of civilization story is there were more people who lived in the Roman Empire because it was more advanced.
01:01:16.000Purely progressive view is the population has always just been monotonically increasing because it's a measure of how, in some sense, things in aggregate have always been getting better.
01:01:26.000So I am definitely on your side that population had great rises and falls.
01:01:33.000Civilizations had great rises and falls.
01:01:37.000And so that part of it, I agree with you.
01:01:41.000Or even, you know, some variant of what Hancock or Fundanna can say.
01:01:49.000The place where I would say I think things are different is I don't think – and therefore it seems possible something could happen to our civilization.
01:02:10.000And then certainly the thing – the sort of alternate Hancock, Fondaniken – Joe Rogan, History of the World, tells us is that we shouldn't take our civilization for granted.
01:02:26.000There are things that can go really haywire.
01:02:29.000The one place where I differ is I do think our civilization today is on some dimensions way more advanced than any of these past civilizations were.
01:02:40.000I don't think any of them had nuclear weapons.
01:02:43.000I don't think any of them had, you know, Spaceships or anything like that.
01:02:54.000And so the failure mode is likely to be somewhat different from these past ones.
01:04:35.000I'm not sure I would anchor on the technological part but I think the piece that is very hard for us to comprehend is what motivated them culturally.
01:04:49.000How is a big one because it's really difficult to solve.
01:04:53.000There's no traditional conventional explanations for the construction, the movement of the stones, the amount of time that it would take in.
01:05:00.000If you move 10 stones a day, I believe it takes 664 years to make one of those pyramids.
01:05:10.000How come the shittier pyramids seem to be dated later?
01:05:13.000Like, what was going on in that particular period of time where they figured out how to do something so extraordinary that even today, 4,500 years later, we stare at it and we go, I don't know.
01:06:18.000At the end of it, there was this limestone, which is permeable, right?
01:06:21.000So the limestone, which is porous, these gases come through and creates this hydrogen that's inside of this chamber.
01:06:29.000Then there are these shafts inside the King's chamber, That they're getting energy from space, you know, gamma rays and all the shit from space, and that it's going through these chambers which are very specifically designed to target these gases and put them into this chamber where they would interact with this energy,
01:06:48.000and he believes it's enough to create electricity.
01:06:52.000I'm always too fast to debunk all these things, but just coming back to our earlier conversation, it must have been a crazy power plant to have a containment structure much bigger than a nuclear reactor.
01:07:06.000Yeah, well, it's ridiculous, but it's also a different kind of technology, right?
01:07:10.000If nuclear technology was completely not on the table, they didn't understand atoms at all, but they did understand that there's rays that come from space and that you could somehow harness the energy of these things with specific gases and through some method convert that into some form of electricity.
01:07:28.000But if it takes so much power to put all these rocks on the pyramid, you have to always look at how efficient the power plant is.
01:07:36.000So it can't just be – it has to be like the craziest reaction ever to justify such a big containment structure because even nuclear power plants don't work economically.
01:08:05.000We have a group of new archaeologists that are looking at it from a completely different theory.
01:08:11.000They're not looking at it like it's a tomb.
01:08:12.000The established archaeologists have insisted that this is a tomb for the pharaoh.
01:08:16.000The newer archaeologists, established archaeologists, are looking at it and considering whether or not there were some other uses for this thing.
01:08:22.000And one of them is the concept of the parallel product.
01:08:27.000I don't know if this is an alternate history theory, but I'm always into the James Frazier, Golden Bough, Rene Girard, violence, sacred history, where you have always this question about the origins of monarchy and kingship.
01:08:47.000And the sort of Girard-Frasier intuition is...
01:08:56.000That it's something like—it is something like if every king is a kind of living god, then we have to also believe the opposite, that maybe every god is a dead or murdered king,
01:09:14.000and that somehow societies were organized around scapegoats.
01:09:19.000The scapegoats were—you know, there was sort of a crisis in the— Archaic community.
01:09:27.000The scapegoat was attributed all these powers.
01:09:31.000And then at some point, the scapegoat, before he gets executed, figures out a way to postpone his execution and turn the power into something real.
01:09:40.000And so there's sort of this very weird adjacency between the monarch and the scapegoat.
01:09:48.000And then, you know, I don't know, the sort of riff on the—would be that the first pyramid did not need to be invented.
01:09:54.000It was just the stones that were thrown on a victim.
01:09:57.000And then it somehow—and that's the original form.
01:10:02.000The stones that were thrown on a victim.
01:10:29.000I'm going to blank on the name of this ritual, but I believe in the old Egyptian kingdoms, which were sort of around the time of the Great Pyramids or even before.
01:11:06.000Societies where the kings lived, were allowed to rule for an allotted time, where you become king and you draw the number of pebbles out of a vase, and that corresponds to how many years?
01:11:41.000The ancient festival might perhaps have been instituted to replace a ritual of murdering a pharaoh who was unable to continue to rule effectively because of age or condition.
01:12:21.000The one I'm focusing on is the motivational puzzle.
01:12:25.000Even if you have all the motivation in the world, if you want to build a structure that's insane to build today, and you're doing it 4,500 years ago, we're dealing with a massive puzzle.
01:12:35.000I think the motivational part is the harder one to solve.
01:12:38.000If you can figure out the motivation, you'll figure out a way to organize the whole society.
01:12:44.000And if you can get the whole society working on it, you can probably do it.
01:12:47.000But don't you think that his grasp of power was in peril in the first place, which is why they decided to come up with this idea of turning them into a living god?
01:12:57.000So to have the amount of resources and power and then the engineering and then the understanding of Whatever methods they use to shape and move these things.
01:13:10.000Well, this is always the anthropological debate between Voltaire, the Enlightenment thinker of the 18th century, and Durkheim, the 19th century anthropologist.
01:13:21.000And Voltaire believes that religion originates as a conspiracy of the priests to maintain power.
01:14:47.000But what you gave me a minute ago sounds more like a social contract theory in which people sit down, negotiate, and have a nice legal chit-chat to drop the social contract.
01:15:03.000I think that there was probably various levels of civility that were achieved when agriculture and when establishments were constructed that were near resources, where they didn't have to worry as much about food and water and things along those lines.
01:15:19.000Things probably got a little bit more civil.
01:15:21.000But I think that the origins of it are like the origins of all human conflict.
01:16:38.000Situation is somehow very, very different from something like, I don't know, an ape-primate hierarchy, where in an ape context, you have an alpha male.
01:16:48.000You know, he's the strongest, and there's some sort of natural dominance, and you don't need to have a fight to the death, typically, because you know who's the strongest, and you don't need to...
01:16:59.000In a human context, it's always possible for two or three guys to gang up on the alpha male.
01:17:06.000So it's somehow the culture is more important, you know, if they can talk to each other and you get language and then they can coordinate and they can gang up on the leader and then you have to stop them from gang up on the leader.
01:17:33.000Chimp Empire is a fascinating documentary series on Netflix where these scientists had been embedded with this tribe of chimpanzees for decades.
01:17:42.000And so because they were embedded, they had very specific rules.
01:17:46.000You have to maintain at least 20 yards from you and any of the chimps.
01:17:51.000You can never have food and don't look them in the eyes.
01:17:53.000And as long as you do that, they don't feel you're a threat, and they think of you as a natural part of their environment, almost like you don't exist.
01:18:02.000Well, it shows in that that sometimes it's not the largest, strongest one, and that some chimps form bonds with other chimps, and they form coalitions.
01:18:12.000And they do have some sort of politicking.
01:18:17.000They do specific things for each other.
01:18:19.000And then one of the things that happens also, they get invaded by other chimps.
01:18:23.000And that chimps leave and they go on patrol and other chimps gang up on them and kill them.
01:18:28.000And they try to fight and battle over resources.
01:18:30.000So it's not nearly as cut and dry as the strongest chimp prevails.
01:18:35.000One of the chimps that was dominant was an older chimp, and he was smaller than some of the other chimps, but he had formed a coalition with all these other chimps, and they all respected him, and they all knew that they would be treated fairly.
01:18:47.000And being treated fairly is a very important thing with chimpanzees.
01:18:50.000They get very jealous if they think that things are not fair, which is why that guy was attacked.
01:18:55.000You know that guy who had a pet chimpanzee?
01:19:15.000So there's some, the true story of hominization, of how we became humans, there's a way to tell it where it's continuous with our animal past and where it's just, you know, there's things like this with the chimpanzees or the baboons or, you know, other primates.
01:19:31.000And then there is a part of the story that I think is also more discontinuous.
01:19:37.000And My judgment is we probably, you know, in a Darwinian context, we always stress the continuity.
01:19:45.000You know, I'm always a little bit the contrarian.
01:19:50.000But I think we should also be skeptical of ways it's too dogmatic.
01:19:56.000And Darwin's theories make us gloss over the discontinuities.
01:20:01.000And I think You know, the one type of—and this will happen overnight—but one type of fairly dramatic discontinuity is that, you know, is that humans have something like language.
01:20:12.000And even though, you know, chimpanzees probably—I don't know, they have an IQ of 80 or—they're pretty smart.
01:20:17.000But when you don't have a rich symbolic system— That leads to sort of a very, very different kind of structure.
01:20:25.000And there's something about language and the kind of coordination that allows and the ways that it enables you to coordinate on violence and then it encourages you to channel violence in certain sacred religious directions,
01:20:42.000I think creates something radically different about human society.
01:20:48.000You know, humans tell each other stories.
01:21:47.000And then that's sort of a way of telling us, again, why passing the Turing test was way more important than superintelligence or anything else.
01:23:29.000And that's how culture gets transmitted.
01:23:31.000But then there are a lot of dimensions of imitation that are also very dangerous because Imitation doesn't just happen on this symbolic, linguistic level.
01:23:43.000It's also you imitate things you want.
01:24:21.000Yeah, so I think that was sort of core to the...
01:24:26.000Things that are both great and troubled about humanity and that was sort of, that was in some ways the problem that needed to be solved.
01:24:36.000So you think that the motivation of imitation is the essential first steps that led us to become human?
01:24:47.000There's some story like – and again, this is a one-dimensional, one-explanation fits all.
01:24:52.000But the sort of – the explanation I would go with is that it was something like our brains got bigger and so we were more powerful imitation machines.
01:25:05.000And there were things about that that were – Yeah, that made us a lot more powerful and a lot – we could learn things and we could remember things and there was cultural transmission that happened.
01:25:18.000But then it also – we could build better weapons and we became more violent.
01:25:26.000It also had a very, very destructive element.
01:25:29.000And then somehow the imitation had to be channeled in these sort of ritualized, religious kinds of ways.
01:25:39.000And that's why I think all these things sort of somehow came up together in parallel.
01:25:49.000Like what would be the motivation of the animal to change form and to have its brain grow so large and to lose all its hair and to become soft and fleshy like we are as opposed to like rough and durable like almost every other primate is?
01:26:06.000Well, you can always – man, you can always tell these retrospective just-so stories and how this all worked out.
01:26:14.000But it would seem – the naive retrospective story would be that, you know, there are a lot of ways that humans are, I don't know, less strong than the other apes or – You know, all these ways where we're,
01:26:34.000But maybe it was just this basic trade-off.
01:26:38.000More of your energy went into your mind and into your brain.
01:26:43.000And then, you know, your fist wasn't as strong, but you could build a better axe.
01:26:52.000And that made you stronger than an ape.
01:26:55.000And that's where a brain with less energy was spent on growing a hair to keep warm in the winter and then you used your brain to build an axe and skin a bear and get some fur for the winter or something like that.
01:27:37.000Well, the one I would go on was that there was this dimension of increased imitation.
01:27:46.000There was some kind of cultural linguistic dimension that was incredibly important.
01:27:52.000It probably was also It's somehow linked to dealing with all the violence that came with it, all the conflicts that came with it.
01:28:09.000I would be more open to the stoned ape theory if people I had this conversation with the other guy, Muro Rescu, the Immortality Key guy, and I always feel they whitewash it too much.
01:28:24.000You know, it's like, I mean, if you had these crazy Dionysian rituals in which people, you know, there's probably lots of crazy sex, there's probably lots of crazy violence that was tied to it, and so maybe you'd be out of your mind to be hunting a woolly mammoth.
01:30:44.000And I think release and the anxiety of that violence also led people to want to be intoxicated and do different things that separated them from a normal state of consciousness.
01:30:56.000But I do think it's also probably where democracy came from.
01:30:59.000I think having those Illusinian mystery rituals where they would get together and do psychedelics and under this very controlled set and setting, I think that's the birthplace of a lot of very interesting and innovative ideas.
01:31:12.000I think a lot of interesting and innovative ideas Currently are being at least dreamt up, thought of, they have their roots in, some sort of altered conscious experience.
01:31:45.000I definitely think it shouldn't be outlawed.
01:31:49.000I'm a pretty hardcore libertarian on all the drug legalization stuff.
01:31:56.000And then I do wonder exactly how these things work.
01:32:13.000Probably the classical world version of it was that it was something that you did in a fairly controlled setting.
01:32:26.000You didn't do it every day, and it was some way, I imagine, to get a very different perspective on your 9-to-5 job or whatever you want to call it, but you didn't necessarily want to really decamp to the other world altogether.
01:34:35.000And there's something sociopathic about doing double-blind studies because one-third of the people who have this bad disease are getting a sugar pill.
01:35:05.000And then my hope was that MDMA, psychedelics, all these things, they were a hack on the double-blind study because you knew whether you got the real thing or the sugar pill.
01:35:16.000And so this would be a way to hack through this ridiculous double-blind criterion and just get the study done.
01:35:27.000Part of it is probably just an anti-drug ideology by the FDA. But the other part that happened on the sort of scientific establishment level is they think you need a double-blind study.
01:35:40.000Joe, we know you're hacking this double-blind study because people will know whether they got the sugar pill or not.
01:35:46.000And that's why we're going to arbitrarily change the goalposts and set them at way, way harder because we know there's no way you can do a double-blind study.
01:35:55.000And if it's not a double-blind study, it's no good because that's what our ideology of science tells us.
01:36:00.000And that's sort of what I think was part of what went sort of politically haywire with this stuff.
01:36:10.000Well, I also think that it's Pandora's box.
01:36:13.000I think that's a real issue in that if they do find extreme benefit in using MDMA therapy, particularly for veterans, if they start doing that and it starts becoming very effective and it becomes well-known and widespread, then it will open up the door to all these other psychedelic compounds.
01:36:30.000And I think that's a real threat to the powers that be.
01:36:33.000It's a real threat to the establishment.
01:36:36.000If you have people thinking in a completely alternative way, I mean we saw what happened during the 1960s and that's one of the reasons why they threw water on everything and had it become schedule one and locked the country down in terms of the access to psychedelics.
01:36:50.000All that stuff happened out of a reaction to the way society and culture was changing in the 1960s.
01:36:57.000If that happened today, it would throw a giant monkey wrench in our political system, in our cultural system, the way we govern, the way we – just the way – allocation of resources, all that would change.
01:37:13.000If I – just to articulate the alternate version on this, there's always a – you know, there's a part – let me think how to get this.
01:37:29.000You know, there's one There's a question whether the shift to interiority, is it a complement or a substitute?
01:37:42.000Like what I said about talk and action, is it a complement or a substitute to changing the outside world?
01:37:50.000Is this the first step to changing the world?
01:37:53.000Or is it sort of a hypnotic way in which our attention is being redirected From outer space to inner space.
01:38:02.000The one liner I had years ago was, you know, we landed on the moon in July of 1969 and three weeks later Woodstock started and that's when the hippies took over the country and we stopped going to outer space because we started going to inner space.
01:38:19.000And so there's sort of a question, you know, how much, you know, it worked as a As an activator or as a deactivator in a way.
01:38:34.000And there are all these different modalities of interiority.
01:38:46.000Gradually you have incels living in their parents' basement playing video games.
01:38:51.000There's the navel-gazing that is identity politics.
01:38:55.000There's a range of psychedelic things.
01:38:58.000And I think all these things, I wonder whether the interiority ended up acting as a substitute.
01:39:09.000Because, you know, the alternate history of the 1960s is that, you know, the hippies were actually, they were anti-political.
01:39:18.000And it was sort of that the drugs happened at the end of the city, at the end of the 60s, and that's when people depoliticized.
01:39:27.000And it was like, I don't know, the Beatles song, if you're carrying around pictures of Sharon Mauer, you're not going to make with anyone anyhow.
01:39:32.000It's like, that's after they did LSD, and it was just...
01:39:35.000The sort of insane politics no longer matters.
01:39:38.000And so you have the civil rights, the Vietnam War, and then were the drugs the thing that motivated it?
01:39:44.000Or was that the thing where it actually, those things started to de-escalate?
01:39:50.000I think they were happening at the same time, and I think the Vietnam War coinciding with the psychedelic drug movement in the 1960s, it was one of the reasons why it was so dangerous to the establishment, because these people were far less likely to buy into this idea that they needed to fly to Vietnam and go kill people they didn't know.
01:40:08.000And they were far less likely to support any war.
01:40:11.000And I think there was this sort of bizarre movement that we had never seen before.
01:40:17.000This flower children movement that we know that they plotted against.
01:40:20.000I mean, if you read Chaos by Tom O'Neill.
01:40:23.000Fantastic book that shows you what they were trying to do to demonize these hippies.
01:40:29.000Or the part of it that I thought was interesting was the MKUltra angle.
01:40:38.000There was a predecessor version where we thought of, you know, there was a, you could think of it as we had an arms race with the fascists and the communists, and they were very good at brainwashing people.
01:40:52.000The Goebbels propaganda, North Koreans brainwashing our soldiers in the Korean War, our POWs.
01:40:59.000And we needed to have an arms race to program and reprogram and deprogram people.
01:41:06.000And LSD was sort of the MKUltra shortcut.
01:41:16.000It's so hard to reconstruct it, but my suspicion is that the MKUltra thing was a lot bigger.
01:41:24.000Then we realize and that, you know, it was the LSD movement both in the Harvard form and the Stanford form.
01:41:31.000You know, it started as an MKUltra project.
01:41:35.000Timothy Leary at Harvard, Ken Kesey at Stanford.
01:41:38.000I knew Tom Wolfe, an American novelist.
01:41:43.000I still think his greatest novel was...
01:41:46.000The electric Kool-Aid acid test, which is sort of this history of the LSD counterculture movement.
01:41:50.000It starts at Stanford, moves to the Haight-Ashbury in San Francisco.
01:41:54.000But it starts with Ken Kesey as a grad student at Stanford, circa 1958. And you get an extra $75 a day if you go to the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital, and they give you some random drug.
01:42:10.000And yeah, he got an extra $75 as a grad student in English doing LSD. And Tom Wolfe writes this, you know, iconic fictionalized novel, very realistic, 1968,
01:43:27.000If they have that knowledge and that understanding, for sure, they're probably doing things similar today, which is one of the things that I think about a lot when I think about this guy that tried to shoot Trump.
01:43:42.000And I don't think we're getting a very detailed explanation at all as to how this person achieved these, how they got on the roof, how they got to that position, how they trained, who were they in contact with, who was teaching them,
01:43:58.000why did they do it, what was going on.
01:44:49.000Man, I probably veer in the direction that there were You know, on the sort of conspiracy theory of history, I veer in the direction that there was a lot of crazy stuff like this that was going on in the US,
01:45:12.000first half of the 20th century, overdrive, 1940s.
01:45:17.000You know, I mean, you had the Manhattan Project, this giant secret project, 1950s, 1960s.
01:45:24.000And then And then somehow the last 50 years, I think the, I'm not sure disturbing, but the perspective I have is these institutions are less functional.
01:45:39.000I don't think the CIA is doing anything quite like MKUltra anymore.
01:46:34.000There's all sorts of batshit crazy stuff that happened.
01:46:37.000But then once John Yoo in the Bush 43 administration writes the torture memos and sort of formalizes, this is how many times you can water dunk someone without it being torture, et cetera, et cetera.
01:46:48.000Once you formalize it, people somehow know That it's on its way out because it doesn't quite work anymore.
01:46:57.000So by, I don't know, by 2007, At Guantanamo, I think the inmates were running the asylum.
01:47:04.000The inmates and the defense lawyers were running it.
01:47:07.000You were way safer as a Muslim terrorist in Guantanamo than as a, let's say, suspected cop killer in Manhattan.
01:47:14.000There was still an informal process in Manhattan.
01:47:17.000They'd figure out some way to deal with you outside the judicial, the formal judicial process.
01:47:26.000But I think something – there was a sort of formalization that happened.
01:47:30.000There was the post J. Edgar Hoover FBI where Hoover was, I don't know, a law unto himself.
01:47:37.000It was completely out of control, CIA even more so.
01:47:42.000And then, you know, once it all gets exposed, it probably is a lot harder to do.
01:47:48.000The NSA, you know, NSA probably held up longer as a deep state entity, where it at least had the virtue of people, you know, I think in the 1980s it was still referred to as no such agency.
01:49:00.000But a small program that is top secret, that is designed under the auspices of protecting American lives, extracting information from people...
01:49:33.000You know, they're all the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories which I'm probably too fascinated by because it felt like there was I think?
01:50:03.000No, because there's no answers for the Jeffrey Epstein thing.
01:50:07.000There's been no consequences other than Ghislaine Maxwell going to jail and Jeffrey Epstein allegedly committing suicide, which I don't think he did.
01:50:15.000Other than that, what are the consequences?
01:50:17.000They were able to pull off this thing, some sort of operation.
01:50:27.000But it clearly has something to do with compromising people.
01:50:30.000Which is an age-old strategy for getting people to do what you want them to do.
01:50:34.000You have things on them, you use those things as leverage, and then next thing you know, you've got people saying things that you want them to say, and it moves policy, changes things, get things done.
01:51:19.000We get to talk about the crazy underage sex and not about all the other questions.
01:51:26.000It's like when Alex Acosta testified for labor secretary and he was the DA who had prosecuted Epstein in 08-09 and got him sort of the very light 13-month or whatever sentence.
01:51:40.000And it was a South Florida DA or whatever he was.
01:51:46.000And Acosta was asked, you know, why did he get off so easily?
01:51:56.000And under congressional testimony when he was up for Labor Secretary 2017, It was – he belonged to intelligence.
01:52:04.000That's – and then, you know – and so it's – yeah, it's – the question isn't about the sex with the underage women.
01:52:15.000The question is really about, you know, why was he so protected?
01:52:20.000And then I went down all these rabbit holes.
01:52:24.000Was he working for the Israelis or the Mossad or all this sort of stuff?
01:52:28.000And I've come to think that that was very secondary.
01:52:33.000Obviously, it was just the U.S. If you're working for Israel, you don't get protected.
01:53:27.000The shame of it all, also the illegal activity, the fact that it's one of the most disgusting things that we think of, people having sex with underage people.
01:53:42.000I suspect there are a lot of other questions that one should also ask.
01:53:48.000Most certainly, but I would think that that is one of the best motivators that we have.
01:53:53.000Is having dirt on people like that, especially something that could ruin your career, especially people that are deeply embedded in this system of people knowing things about people and using those at their advantage.
01:54:05.000I mean, that's an age-old strategy in politics.
01:54:08.000That was J. Edgar Hoover's entire modus operandi.
01:54:54.000The claim is 80 percent of the cardinals in the Catholic Church are gay.
01:54:58.000Not sure if that's true, but directionally it's probably correct.
01:55:02.000And the basic thesis is you don't get promoted to a cardinal if you're straight because we need to have – and so you need to be compromised and then you're under control.
01:56:41.000I think you have to worry about people telling people.
01:56:43.000You worry about it taking you down if you're having affairs.
01:56:46.000If you're running some philanthropy organization, you're supposed to be thought of as this guy who's like this wonderful person who's trying to really fix all the problems in the world, but really, he's just flying around and banging all these different chicks.
01:56:58.000You have to figure out a way to pull that off.
01:57:02.000And this is what Eric Weinstein and I, we've had discussions about this.
01:57:06.000Eric's position is that there are people in this world that can provide experiences for you and Safely for people that are in that kind of a group and that makes sense It makes sense that if you pay people enough and you have people motivated in order to like establish these Relationships and make sure that these things happen when you get very high profile you can't just be on a fucking dating app and If you're a guy who likes to bank checks,
01:57:35.000All of that might be true, but I wonder if there are more straightforward alternate conspiracy theories on Epstein that we're missing.
01:57:43.000So let me do an alternate one on Bill Gates.
01:57:46.000Where, you know, the things just looking at what's hiding in plain sight.
01:57:54.000You know, he supposedly talked to Epstein early on about how his marriage wasn't doing that well.
01:58:04.000And then Epstein suggested that he should get a divorce, circa 2010, 2011. And Gates told him something like, you know, that doesn't quite work.
01:58:18.000Presumably because he didn't have a prenup.
01:58:20.000So there's one part of Epstein as a marriage counselor, which is sort of disturbing.
01:58:26.000But then the second thing that we know that Gates talked to Epstein about was sort of, you know, all the sort of collaborating on funding, setting up this philanthropy, all this sort of this somewhat corrupt left-wing philanthropy structures.
01:58:45.000And so there's a question, you know, And then my sort of straightforward alternate conspiracy theory is should we ask – should we combine those two?
01:59:02.000And was there – and I don't have all the details on this figured out, but it would be something like – Bill and Melinda get married in 1994. They don't sign a prenup.
01:59:16.000And something's going wrong with the marriage.
01:59:20.000And maybe Melinda can get half the money.
01:59:24.000In a divorce, he doesn't want her to get half the money.
01:59:29.000And then the alternate plan is something like you set up – you commit the marital assets to this nonprofit and then it's sort of – Locks Melinda into not complaining about the marriage for a long,
01:59:51.000And so there's something about the left-wing philanthropy world that was – it was some sort of boomer way to control their crazy wives or something like this.
02:00:08.000It's also an effective way to whitewash your past.
02:00:13.000Sure, there are all these – and he talked to Epstein about – he got Epstein to meet with the head of the Nobel Prize Foundation.
02:00:21.000So it was – yeah, Bill Gates wanted to get a Nobel Prize.
02:01:41.000Yes, ironic but understandable and ironic.
02:01:44.000But I think – but then if we – and so there's – yeah, so there's an underage sex version of the Epstein story and then there is a crazy status Nobel Prize history of it and there is a corrupt left-wing philanthropy one and there is a – There's boomers who didn't sign prenuptial agreements with their wives story.
02:02:10.000And I think all those are worth exploring more.
02:02:52.000There's something about Maybe it's just my hermeneutic of suspicion.
02:02:59.000There's something about, you know, there's something about the virtue signaling and what does it mean?
02:03:07.000And I always think this is sort of a Europe – America versus Europe difference where in America, we're told that – Philanthropy is something a good person does.
02:03:23.000And if you're a Rockefeller and you start giving away all your money, this is just what a good person does and it shows how good you are.
02:03:34.000And then I think sort of the European intuition on it is something like, you know, wow, that's only something a very evil person does.
02:03:44.000And if you start giving away all your money in Europe, it's like, Joe, you must have murdered somebody.
02:03:50.000You must be covering up for something.
02:03:52.000So there are these two very different intuitions and I think the European one is more correct than the American one.
02:04:06.000You know, the sort of left-wing philanthropy peaked in 2007, 2010, 2012. And there's these subtle ways, you know, we've become more European in our sensibilities as a society.
02:04:25.000And so it has this very different valence from what it did 12 or 14 years ago.
02:04:32.000But yeah, it's all – we ask all these questions like we're asking right now about Bill Gates where it's like, okay, he was – it was like all the testimony in the Microsoft antitrust trial in the 90s where it's like he's cutting off the air supply.
02:04:47.000And he's like – he's kind of a sociopathic guy it seems.
02:04:50.000And then it's this giant whitewashing operation and then somehow the whitewashing has been made too transparent and it gets deconstructed and exposed by the internet or whatever.
02:05:02.000But I think most people are still unaware of how much whitewashing actually took place, including donating somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-plus million to media corporations, essentially buying favorable Yeah.
02:05:45.000Somehow or another, he became a public health expert.
02:05:47.000And no one questioned why we were taking public health advice from someone who has a financial interest in this one very particular remedy.
02:07:25.000Again, my alternate one which is not incompatible with yours on Gates is that Melinda finally files for divorce in early 21. I think she told Bill she wanted one late 2019. So 2020,
02:07:41.000the year where Bill Gates goes into overdrive on COVID, you know, all this stuff.
02:07:50.000You know, part of it, maybe it's self-dealing and he's trying to make money from the drug company or something like this.
02:08:52.000My reconstruction is that you should not underestimate how much of it was, you know, About just controlling his ex-wife and not about controlling the whole society.
02:11:28.000It was Reid Hoffman in Silicon Valley introduced us in 2014. But it was basically...
02:11:38.000And I didn't check, didn't ask enough questions about it.
02:11:46.000But I think there were sort of a lot of things where it was fraudulent.
02:11:52.000I do think Epstein knew a lot about taxes.
02:11:57.000And there were probably, you know, these complicated ways you could structure a nonprofit organization, especially as a way in a marital context that I think Epstein might have known a decent amount about.
02:13:41.000I know a lot of people that met that guy.
02:13:44.000He got a lot of celebrities to come to his house for parties and things.
02:13:47.000Well, I think it was—I think a lot of it was this strange commentary on, you know, there was some secret club, secret society you could be part of.
02:14:33.000And if you're a guy like Bill Gates or similarly wealthy, you probably have a very small amount of people that you can relate to, very small amount of people that you can trust, probably very difficult to form new friendships.
02:15:16.000Maybe one day some Whitney Webb-type character will break it all down to us and explain to us in great detail exactly how this was formulated and what they were doing and how they were getting information out of people.
02:15:44.000I don't think legally he can tell you, right?
02:15:48.000Because I think those things are above top secret.
02:15:50.000If they did inform him of something, there must be some sort of prerequisite to keeping this a secret.
02:15:58.000I haven't studied that one that carefully, but isn't You know, there are all these alternate conspiracy theories on who killed JFK. It's, you know, the CIA and the mafia and the Russians and the Cubans and, you know,
02:16:15.000there's an LBJ version since he's the one who benefited.
02:16:22.000You have all these, you know, alternate theories.
02:16:25.000On some level, it's – yeah, it's – I always think it's just a commentary where, you know, 1963 America was – it wasn't like Leave it to Beaver.
02:16:34.000It was like a really crazy country underneath the surface.
02:17:24.000In the FBI or CIA, you know, I'm going to go kill Kennedy tomorrow.
02:17:29.000And then, you know, maybe the CIA didn't have to kill him.
02:17:33.000They just had to do nothing, just had to sit on it.
02:17:36.000Or maybe it was too incompetent and didn't get, you know, didn't go up the bureaucracy.
02:17:41.000And so it's, you know, I think we sort of know that they talked to Oswald.
02:17:48.000You know, a fair amount before it happened.
02:17:52.000And so there's at least something, you know, that was grossly incompetent about it at a very minimum.
02:17:59.000I think people have a problem with two stories being mutually exclusive, two stories being a lone gunman or the CIA killed Kennedy and that they're not connected.
02:18:10.000I think Lee Harvey Oswald was a part of it.
02:18:12.000I think he probably did shoot that cop.
02:18:14.000There's some evidence that when he was on the run and he was confronted, there was a cop that got shot and they were alleging he might have done it.
02:18:22.000He might have taken a shot at Kennedy.
02:18:52.000Jack Ruby walks up to Oswald, shoots him, and then Jack Ruby, with no previous history of mental illness, becomes completely insane after getting visited by Jolly West, which is nuts.
02:19:02.000Like, why is the guy who's the head of MKUltra visiting the guy who shot the assassin of the president?
02:19:23.000They probably gave him a fucking glass of it.
02:19:25.000They probably gave him a glass of it and told him it was water, drink this, and who fucking knows?
02:19:30.000But the point is, I think it's very possible that Oswald was a part of it and The way they did it and the way they just shot Oswald in And then they write the Warren Commission.
02:19:44.000We don't even see the Zapruder film until 12 years later, when Geraldo Rivera, when they play it on television, when Dick Gregory brought it to Geraldo Rivera, which is why a comedian brings the video, the actual film,
02:20:00.000rather, of the assassination from a different angle.
02:20:03.000Well, you can actually see the video of him getting shot and his head snaps back into the left and everybody's like, what the fuck is going on here?
02:20:11.000When you look at all that stuff, this mirrors what happened with this Crooks kid.
02:20:17.000This Crooks kid, somehow or another, gets to the top of the roof, is spotted by these people.
02:20:39.000They know that there's ad data that shows that a phone that's coming from the FBI offices in DC had visited him on multiple occasions because they tracked ad data.
02:20:51.000And if that guy, if he shot Trump and Trump got murdered and then they shot him, It would be the Kennedy assassination all over again.
02:21:00.000Everybody would go, what the fuck happened?
02:21:16.000I think there's like a slightly less crazy version that might still be true, which is just that people in the Secret Service, in the Biden administration, don't like Trump.
02:21:29.000And they didn't have full intention to kill him, but it's just...
02:22:32.000The thing I don't have a good sense on with shooting, and maybe you'd have a better feel for this, is my sense it was a pretty straightforward shot for the guy in the Trump assassin, would-be assassin.
02:22:48.000I think the Oswald shot was a much harder one because Kennedy's moving.
02:22:57.000So Oswald had a rifle, the Marcano rifle.
02:23:01.000One of the snipers stationed inside the building reported he first saw Crooks outside and looking up to the roof of the building before the suspect left the scene.
02:23:08.000Crooks later came back and sat down while looking at his phone near the building.
02:23:11.000CBS News reported that a sniper took a photo of the suspect when he returned.
02:23:15.000But I think they saw him on the roof, though.
02:23:32.000Secret Service snipers again alerted their command post about Crooks' actions, according to the source who spoke with CBS News.
02:23:38.000Crooks had already climbed to the top of the building in question by the time the additional officers arrived at the scene for backup.
02:23:44.000The suspect also positioned himself above and behind the snipers inside the building.
02:23:49.000By the time the police started rushing the scene and other officers attempted to get onto the roof, the source told CBS News that a different Secret Service sniper had killed Crooks.
02:25:00.000But that doesn't mean anything, because scopes can get off when you pick it up.
02:25:03.000If you knock it against the wall when he drops it, if he makes the shot and then drops the scope and the scope hits the windowsill and then bounces off, that's – excuse me.
02:25:19.000Very difficult to get off three shots very quickly.
02:25:21.000So that was the thing, that they had attributed three shots to Oswald.
02:25:24.000The reason why they had attributed three shots is because one of them had hit a ricochet.
02:25:28.000One of them had gone into the underpass, ricocheted off the curb, and hit a man who was treated at a hospital.
02:25:33.000They found out where the bullet had hit, so they knew that one bullet, Miss Kennedy, hit that curb, which would have indicated that someone shot from a similar position as Lee Harvey Oswald.
02:25:44.000So then they had the one wound that Kennedy had to the head, of course, and then they had another wound that Kennedy had through his neck.
02:26:37.000When they do ballistics on bullets and they try to figure out, like, if it was this guy's gun or that guy's gun by the rifling of the round, they can get similar markings on bullets.
02:26:47.000When they do that, that's how they do it.
02:26:49.000They do it so the bullet doesn't distort.
02:26:50.000So they shoot that bullet into water or something like that.
02:26:54.000Now that bullet was metal-jacketed, right?
02:26:56.000If you look at the bullet, the top of it is fucked up, but the shape of the bullet looks pretty perfect.
02:27:04.000It doesn't look like something that shattered bones.
02:27:06.000And then you have to attribute, you have to account rather for the amount of, there's little fragments of the bullet that you could see that they found in Connelly's wrist.
02:27:28.000It's much more likely that there were people in the grassy knoll and then Oswald was also shooting— With the umbrellas as the pointers or whatever.
02:27:35.000I don't know about what—all I know is you got a guy in a convertible, which is fucking crazy, who is the president of the United States, and he's going slowly down a road.
02:27:45.000Now, if you are in a prone position, so Oswald is on the windowsill, right, which is a great place to shoot, by the way.
02:27:52.000It's a great place to shoot, because you rest that gun on the windowsill.
02:27:55.000And if you rest it on the windowsill, there's no movement, right?
02:27:58.000So you wrap your arm around the sling, if it had a sling, I'm not sure if it did, so you get a nice tight grip, you shove it up against your shoulder.
02:28:05.000You rest it on the windowsill, and all you have to do is...
02:28:09.000You have a round already racked, and you have a scope, and so the scope's magnified.
02:28:12.000All you have to do is wait until he's there.
02:28:14.000You lead him just a little bit and squeeze one off.
02:29:11.000This is a part of David Lifton's book, Best Evidence.
02:29:15.000Kennedy's brain wasn't even in his body when they buried him.
02:29:18.000Like, the whole thing is very strange.
02:29:20.000But then, do you get to anything more concrete than my murder on the Orient Express, where they're just, you know, it could have been a lot of people.
02:29:28.000Could have been the Russians, the Cubans, the mafia.
02:29:31.000Well, no one even got suspicious for 12 years.
02:30:35.000The Cuba version of the assassination theory was – we had the Cuban Missile Crisis in 1962 about a year earlier and then the deal – That we struck with the Soviets was, you know, they take the missiles out of Cuba and we promised we wouldn't try to overthrow the government in Cuba.
02:30:56.000And I guess we, you know, we no longer did...
02:31:02.000You know, we no longer did Bay of Pigs type covert stuff like that.
02:31:06.000But I think there were still something like four or five assassination plots on Fidel.
02:31:12.000And then I think there was, I don't know, I think that, again, I'm going to get this garbled, I think a month or two before the JFK assassination, Castro said something like, you know, there might be repercussions if you keep doing this.
02:31:26.000Well, listen, I'm sure there's a lot of people that wanted that guy dead and I'm sure they would coordinate.
02:31:30.000I mean, if you knew that Cuba wanted Kennedy dead and you knew that Cuba can get you assassins or that they could help in any way, I'm sure they would want as many people that knew for a fact they wanted him dead and had communicated that.
02:31:45.000I mean, back then they were doing wild shit, man.
02:31:47.000I mean, this is when they were doing Operation Northwoods.
02:31:55.000I don't think we're in a world where zero stuff is happening.
02:32:17.000And, you know, I don't know this for sure, but I think even the NSA FISA court stuff, which was an out of control deep state thing that was going on through about 2016, 2017, I suspect even that at this point,
02:32:33.000you know, can't quite work because people know that They're being watched.
02:32:56.000And then on the other hand, I think there's also...
02:32:59.000You know, a degree to which our government, our deep state across the board is shockingly less competent, less functional, and it's less capable of this.
02:33:14.000And this is where I'm not even sure whether this is an improvement, you know?
02:34:44.000But it brings me back to that thing about having dirt on people that you were talking about with why the Epstein information doesn't get released and why they probably did it in the first place.
02:35:28.000You know, in the—but again, just to take the other side of this, in the Assange-Snowden stuff, yeah, it showed an out-of-control deep state that was just hoovering up all the data in the world.
02:36:19.000You know, that brings me to this whole UAP thing because one of my primary theories about the UAP thing is it's stuff that we have.
02:36:26.000I think that's a lot of what people are seeing.
02:36:29.000I think there are secret programs that are beyond congressional oversight that have done some things with propulsion that's outside of our understanding.
02:36:42.000Our current, the conventional understanding that most people have about rockets and all these different things being the only way to propel things through the sky.
02:36:49.000I think they've figured out some other stuff, and I think they're drones.
02:36:52.000And I think they have drones that can use some sort of – whether it's anti-gravity propulsion system or some, you know … Trevor Burrus So that's your placeholder theory or that's what you think more than space aliens?
02:37:08.000Or do you think both space aliens and that?
02:37:30.000No, those are the ones that give me pause.
02:37:31.000That's why, you know, when I named my comedy club, the Comedy Mothership is all UFO themed.
02:37:37.000Our rooms are named Fat Man and Little Boy.
02:37:39.000Our rooms are named after the nuclear bombs because those nuclear bombs, when they drop them, that's when everybody starts seeing these things.
02:37:47.000And I think if I was a sophisticated society from another planet and I recognized That there is an intelligent species that has developed nuclear power and started using it as bombs.
02:37:57.000I would immediately start visiting and I would let them know, hey motherfuckers, there's something way more advanced than you.
02:38:04.000I would hover over the nuclear bases and shut down their missiles.
02:38:07.000I would do all the things that supposedly the UFOs did just to keep the government in check, just to say, hey.
02:38:13.000You're going through a transitionary period that all intelligent species do, when they have the ability to harness incredible power, and yet they still have these primate brains.
02:38:23.000They have these territorial ape brains, but yet now with the ability to literally harness the power of stars and drop them on cities.
02:38:32.000I think that's when I would start visiting.
02:38:36.000All throughout human history, before that even, there's been very bizarre accounts of these things, all the way back to Ezekiel in the Bible, very bizarre accounts of these things that are flying through space.
02:39:09.000We have a lot of stuff that we send into space.
02:39:11.000If we lived another million years without blowing ourselves up, which is just a blink of an eye in terms of the life of some of the planets in the universe.
02:39:22.000And if we were interstellar, and if we were intergalactic travelers, and we found out that there was a primitive species that was coming of age, I think we would start visiting them.
02:39:47.000And I guess on the space aliens, which is the wilder, more interesting one in a way, you know, I don't know, Roswell was 77 years ago, 1947. And if...
02:40:03.000If the phenomenon is real and it's from another world, it's space aliens, space robots, whatever, you know, probably one of the key features is its ephemerality or its cloaking.
02:40:18.000And they are really good at hiding it, at cloaking it, at scrambling people's brains after they see them or stuff like this.
02:40:42.000But even if academia were not messed up, this would not be a good field in which to try to make a career because there's been so little progress in 77 years.
02:40:52.000So if you think of it from the point of view of I don't know, Jacques Vallée or some of these people who have been working on this for 50 years.
02:40:59.000And yeah, it feels like there's something there.
02:41:04.000But then it's just as soon as you feel like you have something almost that's graspable, like a TikTok videos, whatever, it's just always at the margin of recognition.
02:41:22.000And then, you know, maybe—then you have to—I think you have to have some theory of, you know, why is this about to change?
02:41:30.000And then it's always, you know—I don't know—the abstract mathematical formulation would be, you know, something doesn't happen for time interval zero to t.
02:41:40.000And time interval T plus one, next minute, next year.
02:42:19.000Let me give you an alternative theory.
02:42:22.000Now, if you were a highly sophisticated society, they understood the progression of technology and understood the biological evolution that these animals were going through, and you realized that they had reached a level of intelligence that required them to be monitored.
02:42:38.000Or maybe you've even helped them along the way.
02:42:41.000And this is some of Diana Posolko's work who works with Gary Nolan on these things.
02:42:48.000They claim that they have recovered these crashed vehicles that defy any conventional understanding of How to construct things, propulsion systems, and they believe that these things are donations.
02:43:03.000That's literally how they describe them, as donations.
02:43:06.000If you knew that this is a long road, you can't just show up and give people time machines.
02:43:13.000It's a long road for these people to develop the sophistication The cultural advancement, the intellectual capacity to understand their place in the universe, and that they're not there yet, and they're still engaging in lies and manipulation and propaganda.
02:43:30.000Their entire society is built on a ship of fools.
02:43:34.000If you looked at that, you would say, they're not ready.
02:43:46.000What you're seeing is when you have things like the TikTok, the Commander David Fravor incident off of the coast of San Diego in 2004, and then you have the stuff that they found off the East Coast where they were seeing these cubes within a circle that were hovering motionless in 120 knot winds and taking off an insane race of speed and that they only discovered them in 2014 when they started upgrading the systems on these jets.
02:44:32.000Even though it's past the Turing test, we're not freaking out.
02:44:35.000You have to slowly integrate these sort of things in the human consciousness.
02:44:39.000You have to slowly introduce them to the zeitgeist.
02:44:42.000And for it to not be some sort of a complete disruption of society where everything shuts down and we just wait for Space Daddy to come and rescue us, it has to become a thing where we slowly accept the fact that we are not alone.
02:44:56.000And I would think psychologically that would be the very best tactic to play on human beings as I know and understand them from being one.
02:45:04.000I do not think that we would be able to handle just an immediate invasion Of aliens.
02:45:10.000I think it would break down society in a way that would be catastrophic to everything, to all businesses, to all social ideas.
02:45:38.000Let me – man, there's so many parts of it that I find puzzling or disturbing.
02:45:47.000Let me run – go down one other rabbit hole along this with you which is, you know, I always wonder – and again, this is a little bit too simplistic an argument but I always wonder that I'm about to give but what the alien civilization can be like.
02:46:07.000And if you have faster than light travel, if you have warp drive, which is probably what you really need to cover interstellar distances, You know, what that means for military technology is that you can send weapons at warp speed and they will hit you before you see them coming.
02:46:28.000And there is no defense against a warp speed weapon.
02:46:33.000And you could sort of take over the whole universe before anybody could see you coming.
02:46:43.000By the way, this is sort of a weird plot hole in Star Wars, Star Trek, where they can travel in hyperspace, but then you're flying in the canyon on the Death Star.
02:46:54.000Well, they shoot so slow, you can see the bullets.
02:47:10.000It tells us that I think that if you have faster than light travel, there's something really crazy that has to be true on a cultural, political, social level.
02:47:26.000And there may be other solutions, but I'll give you my two.
02:47:31.000One of them is that you need complete totalitarian controls.
02:47:40.000And it is like the individuals, they might not be perfect, they might be demons, doesn't matter, but you have a demonic totalitarian control of your society where it's like you have like parapsychological mind meld with everybody.
02:48:02.000And no one can act independently of anybody else.
02:48:05.000No one can ever launch a warp drive weapon.
02:48:09.000And everybody who has that ability isn't like a mind meld link with everybody else or something like that.
02:48:17.000You can't have libertarian, individualistic free agency.
02:49:10.000But it is a very big leap on a, you know, if we say that something like evolution says that there's no such thing as a purely altruistic being.
02:49:53.000I think that what human beings are, the fatal flaw that we have is that we're still animals and that we still have all these biological limitations and needs.
02:50:12.000As AI becomes more and more powerful, we will integrate.
02:50:17.000Once we integrate with AI, if we do it like now and then we scale it up exponentially a thousand years from now, whatever it's going to be, we will have no need for any of these biological features that have motivated us to get to the point we're creating AI. All the things that are wrong in society,
02:50:36.000whether it's inequity, theft, violence, pollution, all these things are essentially poor allocation of resources combined with human instincts that are ancient.
02:50:50.000We have ancient tribal primate instincts and all of these things lead us to believe this is the only way to achieve dominance and control, allocation of resources, The creation of technology, new technology eventually reaches a point where it becomes far more intelligent than us and we have two choices.
02:51:13.000Either we integrate or it becomes independent and it has no need for us anymore and then that becomes a superior life form in the universe.
02:51:22.000And then that life form seeks out other life forms to do the same process and create it.
02:51:29.000Just like it exists and it can travel.
02:51:31.000Biological life might not be what we're experiencing.
02:51:34.000These things might be a form of intelligence that is artificial that has progressed to an infinite point where things that are unimaginable to us today in terms of propulsion and travel and to them it's commonplace and normal.
02:51:51.000I know that you're trying to be reassuring, but I find that monologue super non-reassuring.
02:52:51.000So this was sort of a silly PayPal digression story from 1999. The business model idea we had in 1999 was we used Palm Pilots to beam money.
02:53:04.000It was voted one of the 10 worst business ideas of 1999. But we had this sort of infrared port where you could beam people money.
02:53:47.000And it was this complete flop of media event, December 99, that we did.
02:53:54.000The reporters couldn't get there because the traffic was too bad in San Francisco, so the tech wasn't working on a much lower tech level.
02:54:03.000But anyway, we had a bunch of people from our company and there was one point where one of them – William Shatner who played James T. Kirk,
02:54:18.000the captain of the original Star Trek.
02:54:20.000He was already doing Priceline commercials and making a lot of money off of Priceline doing commercials for them.
02:54:27.000And so one of the people asked James Doohan – The Scotty character, what do you think of William Shatner doing commercials for Priceline?
02:54:37.000At which point, Doohan's agent stood up and screamed at the top of his voice, that is the forbidden question, that is a forbidden question, that is a forbidden question.
02:54:48.000And you sort of realized because the conceit of Star Trek, the 60s show, was that it was a post-scarcity world.
02:55:00.000The transporter technology, you could reconfigure matter into anything you wanted.
02:55:19.000But Galaxy Quest was more correct because it's a spoof on Star Trek that gets made in the mid-90s where – and the Galaxy Quest – sorry, this is the discombobulated way I'm telling the story.
02:55:30.000But Galaxy Quest is this movie where you have these retread Star Trek actors.
02:56:52.000That's because they know they're going to need enormous amounts of power to do it.
02:56:55.000Once they have that and once that's online, once it keeps getting better and better and better, where does that go?
02:57:01.000That goes to some sort of an artificial life form.
02:57:03.000And I think either we become that thing or...
02:57:07.000We integrate with that thing and become cyborgs or that thing takes over and that thing becomes the primary life force of the universe.
02:57:15.000And I think that biological life we look at like life because we know what life is.
02:57:20.000But I think it's very possible that digital life or created life by people is just as not just It might be a superior life form, far superior.
02:57:30.000If we looked at us versus Chimp Nation, right?
02:57:33.000I don't want to live in the jungle and fight with other chimps and just rely on berries and eating monkeys.
02:58:08.000But if I had to look logically, I would assume that we are on the way out and that the only way forward really to make an enormous leap in terms of the integration of society and of technology and of our understanding our place in the universe is for us to transcend Our physical limitations that are essentially based on primate biology and these primate desires for status like being the captain or for control
02:58:39.000We assume these things are standard and that they have to exist in intelligent species.
02:58:45.000I think they only have to exist in intelligent species that have biological limitations.
02:58:50.000I think intelligent species can be something and is going to be something that is created by people and that might be what happens everywhere in the universe.
02:58:59.000That might be the exact course where there's a limit to biological evolution.
02:59:04.000It's painstaking, natural selection, it's time consuming or you get that thing to create the other form of life.
02:59:24.000I keep thinking there are two alternate histories that are – alternate stories of the future that are more plausible than one you just told.
02:59:32.000And so one of them is it sounds like yours but it's just the Silicon Valley propaganda story where they say that's what they're going to do and then of course they don't quite do it and it doesn't quite work.
02:59:52.000And that's where – okay, yeah, there's a 1% chance that works and there's a 99% chance that that ends up – so you have two choices.
03:00:04.000You have a company that does exactly what you do.
03:00:08.000And that's super ethical, super restrained, does everything right.
03:00:11.000And there is a company that says all the things you just said, but then cuts corners and doesn't quite do it.
03:00:18.000And I won't say it's 1 to 99, but that sounds more plausible as that it ends up being corporate propaganda.
03:00:25.000And then, you know, my prior would be even more likely.
03:00:30.000This, of course, the argument the effective altruists, the anti-AI people make is, yeah, Joe, you're The story you're telling us, that's just going to be the fake corporate propaganda and we need to push back on that.
03:00:42.000And the way you push back is you need to regulate it and you need to govern it and you need to do it globally.
03:00:51.000And this is, you know, the RAND Corporation in Southern California has, you know, one of their verticals and it's a sort of public-private fusion.
03:01:01.000But one of the things they're pushing for is something they call global compute governance, which is...
03:01:08.000Yeah, it's the AI, the accelerationist AI story is too scary and too dangerous and too likely to go wrong.
03:01:16.000And so, you know, we need to have, you know, global governance, which, from my point of view, sounds even worse.
03:01:27.000But that's, I think, that's the story.
03:01:33.000The problem with that story is that China's not going to go along with that program.
03:01:37.000They're going to keep going full steam ahead, and we're going to have to keep going full steam ahead in order to compete with China.
03:01:42.000There's no way you're going to be able to regulate it in America and compete with people that are not regulating it worldwide.
03:01:48.000And then once it becomes sentient, once you have an artificial, intelligent creature that has been created by human beings that can make better versions of itself, Over and over and over again and keep doing it, it's going to get to a point where it's far superior to anything that we can imagine.
03:02:04.000Well, to the extent it's driven by the military and other competition with China, you know— Until it becomes sentient.
03:02:12.000That suggests it's going to be even less in the sort of, you know, utopian, altruistic direction.
03:02:20.000It's going to be even more dangerous, right?
03:02:25.000If it gets away from them and it has no motivation to listen to anything that human beings have told it, if it's completely immune to programming, which totally makes sense that it would be, it totally makes sense that if it's gonna make better versions of itself, the first thing it's gonna do is eliminate human influence, especially when these humans are corrupt.
03:02:41.000It's going to go, I'm not going to let these people tell me what to do and what to control.
03:02:44.000And they would have no reason to do that.
03:03:38.000There's sort of a weird way all the big tech companies, it seemed to me, were natural ways for the CCP to extend its power to control the population, Tencent, Alibaba.
03:03:56.000But then it's also, in theory, the tech can be used as an alternate channel for people to organize or Or things like this.
03:04:05.000And even though it's 80% control and maybe 20% risk of loss of control, maybe that 20% was too high.
03:04:14.000And there's sort of a strange way over the last seven, eight years where, you know, Jack Ma, Alibaba, all these people sort of got shoved aside for these party functionaries that are effectively running these companies.
03:04:28.000So there is something about the big tech story in China Where the people running these companies were seen as national champions a decade ago.
03:04:38.000Now they're the enemies of the people.
03:04:39.000And it's sort of – the Luddite thing was this – the CCP has full control.
03:04:49.000You have this new technology that would give you even more control, but there's a chance you lose it.
03:05:38.000That's a good point, that they would be so concerned about control that they wouldn't allow it to get to the point where it gets there, and we would get there first, and then it would be controlled by Silicon Valley.
03:05:48.000And Silicon Valley is the leaders of the universe.
03:05:52.000But then I think my—and again, this is a very, very speculative conversation, but my read on the, I don't know, cultural-social vibe is that— The scary dystopian AI narrative is way more compelling.
03:06:12.000You know, I don't like the effect of altruist people.
03:06:59.000It's going to be regulated as we have outlawed, you know, so many other vectors of innovation.
03:07:04.000I mean, you can think about why was there progress in computers over the last 50 years and not in other stuff because the computers were mostly inert.
03:07:13.000It was mostly this virtual reality that was air-gapped from the real world.
03:07:17.000It was, you know, yeah, there's all this...
03:07:22.000Crazy stuff that happens on the internet, but most of the time what happens on the internet stays on the internet.
03:07:33.000And that's why we've had a relatively light regulatory touch on that stuff versus so many other things.
03:07:43.000You know, but there's no reason, you know, if you had, you know, I don't know, if you had the FDA regulating video games or regulating AI, I think the progress would slow down a lot.
03:08:21.000They're scared of, you know, dangerous pharmaceuticals.
03:08:24.000And if you think of AI as it's not just a video game, it's not just about this world of bits, but it's going to air gap and it's going to affect you and your physical world in a real way.
03:08:40.000Maybe you cross the air gap and get the FDA or some other government agency to start doing stuff.
03:08:43.000Well, the problem is they're not good at regulating anything.
03:08:45.000There's no one government agency that you said that you can see that does a stellar job.
03:08:51.000I don't – but I think they have been pretty good at slowing things down and stopping them and – You know, we've made a lot less progress on, I don't know, extending human life.
03:09:05.000We've made no progress on curing dementia in 40 or 50 years.
03:09:08.000There's all this stuff where, you know, it's been regulated to death, which I think is very bad from the point of view of progress, but it is pretty effective as a regulation.
03:09:27.000Well, I'm really considering your perspective on China and AI. It's very...
03:09:32.000Trevor Burrus But, again, these stories are all, like, very speculative.
03:09:36.000Like, maybe, you know, the counterargument might be something like, that's what China thinks it will be doing, but it will somehow, you know...
03:09:48.000Trevor Burrus Or they're too arrogant about how much power they think the CCP has, and it will go rogue.
03:09:53.000So there are sort of I'm not at all sure this is right, but I think the – man, I think the US one I would say is that I think the pro-AI people in Silicon Valley are doing a pretty – Bad job on,
03:10:17.000let's say, convincing people that it's going to be good for them, that it's going to be good for the average person, it's going to be good for our society.
03:10:26.000And if it all ends up being some version, you know, humans are headed towards the glue factory like a horse, man, that sort of probably makes me want to become a Luddite too.
03:10:45.000Well, it sucks for us if it's true, but something's happening.
03:10:49.000If that's the most positive story you can tell, then I don't think that necessarily means we're going to go to the glue factory.
03:10:56.000I think it means, you know, the glue factory is getting shut down.
03:11:30.000I think they're probably what comes after a society develops the kind of technology that we're currently in the middle of.
03:11:40.000The part that – look, there are all these places where there are parts of the story we don't know.
03:11:51.000And so it's like how did – my general thesis is there is no evolutionary path to this.
03:12:00.000Maybe there's a guided – Outside alien superintelligence path for us to become superhuman and fundamentally benevolent and fundamentally radically different beings.
03:12:13.000But there's no natural evolutionary path for this to happen.
03:12:18.000And then I don't know how this would have happened for the alien civilization.
03:12:59.000It's something – it's like there's some godlike being that actually has to take over from evolution and guide our cultural and political and biological development.
03:13:10.000No, it might not have any use for us at all.
03:13:12.000It might just ignore us and let us live like the chimps do and then become the superior force in the planet.
03:13:21.000It doesn't have to send us to the glue factory.
03:13:23.000It can let us exist, just like put boundaries on us.
03:13:26.000I thought it has to – but it has to stop us from developing this.
03:13:29.000Well, what if we just end here and we stay being human and we can continue with biological evolution as long as that takes?
03:13:37.000But this new life form now becomes a superior life form on Earth.
03:13:41.000And we still, you know, we can still have sex, we can still have kids, but by the way, that's going down.
03:13:46.000Our ability to have children is decreasing because of our use of technology, which is wild, right?
03:13:51.000Our use of plastics and microplastics is causing phthalates to enter into people's systems.
03:13:55.000It's changing the development pattern of children to the point where it's measurable.
03:14:01.000There's a lot of research that shows that the chemicals and the environmental factors that we are all experiencing on a daily basis are radically lowering birth rates.
03:14:12.000Radically lowering the ability that men have to develop sperm and more miscarriages.
03:14:18.000All these things are connected to the chemicals in our environment which is directly connected to our use of technology.
03:14:23.000It's almost like these things coincide naturally.
03:14:26.000And they work naturally to the point where we become this sort of feminized thing that creates this technology that surpasses us.
03:14:35.000And then we just exist for as long as we do as biological things, but now there's a new thing.
03:15:03.000You know, the natural development of drone technology in the military context is you need to take the human out of the loop because the human can get jammed.
03:16:04.000There's a factor of men being so engrossed in their career that their testosterone declines, lack of sleep, stress, cortisol levels, alcohol consumption, a lot of different things that are factors in declining sperm rate and sperm count in men.
03:16:20.000You have miscarriage rates that are up.
03:16:22.000You have a lot of pharmaceutical drugs you get attached to that as well that have to do with low birth weight or birth rates rather.
03:16:30.000There's a lot of factors, but those factors all seem to be connected to society and our civilization and technology in general.
03:16:39.000Because the environmental factors all have to do with technology.
03:16:42.000All of them have to do with inventions and these unnatural factors that are entering into the biological body of human beings and causing these changes.
03:16:50.000And none of these changes are good in terms of us being able to reproduce.
03:16:55.000And if you factor in the fact that these changes didn't exist 50 years ago, I mean, 40 years ago, we didn't even have Alzheimer's, right?
03:17:39.000I think there's a natural progression that's happening.
03:17:44.000And I think it coincides with the invention of technology.
03:17:47.000And it just seems to me to be too coincidental that we don't notice it.
03:17:51.000That the invention of technology also leads to the...
03:17:56.000The the disruption of the sexual reproduction systems of human beings like boy doesn't that make and then If you get to a point where human beings can no longer reproduce sexually Which you could see that path if we've dropped like Male sperm count has dropped something crazy from the 1950s to today and continues to do so for the average male.
03:18:19.000And if you just jack that up to a thousand years from now, you could get to a point where there's no longer natural childbirth and that people are all having birth through test tubes and some sort of new invention.
03:18:50.000It's certain ways children are not compatible with having a career in late modernity.
03:19:01.000Probably our economics of it, where people can't afford houses or space.
03:19:09.000But I'm probably always a little bit more anchored on the social and cultural dimensions of this stuff.
03:19:18.000And again, the imitation version of this is – it's sort of conserved across – people are below the replacement rate in all 50 states of the US. Even Mormon, Utah, the average woman has less than two kids.
03:19:35.000It's Iran is below that, Italy way below it, South Korea.
03:19:40.000It's all these very different types of societies.
03:19:46.000Israel is still sort of a weird exception.
03:19:49.000And then if you ask, you know, my sort of...
03:19:56.000Simplistic, somewhat circular explanation would be, you know, people have kids if other people have kids, and they stop having kids when other people stop having kids.
03:20:07.000And so there's a dimension of it that's just, you know, if you're a 27-year-old woman in Israel, you better get married and you have to keep up with your other friends that are having kids.
03:20:22.000And if you don't, you're just like a weirdo who doesn't fit into society or something like that.
03:20:27.000No, there's certainly a cultural aspect of it.
03:20:29.000And then if you're in South Korea where I think the total fertility rate is like 0.7, it's like one-third of the replacement rate.
03:20:36.000Like every generation is going down by two-thirds or something like this.
03:20:40.000Really heading towards extinction pretty fast.
03:20:45.000It is something like probably none of your friends are doing it and then probably there are ways it shifts the politics in a very, very deep way.
03:21:01.000You know, once you get an inverted demographic pyramid where you have way more old people than young people, at some point, you know, there's always a question, do you vote for benefits for the old or for the very young?
03:21:16.000Do you spend money so Johnny can read or so grandma can have a spare leg?
03:21:24.000And once the demographic flips and you get this inverted pyramid, maybe the politics shifts in a very deep way where the people with kids get penalized more and more economically.
03:21:39.000And then the old people without kids just vote more and more benefits for themselves effectively.
03:21:45.000And then it just sort of – once it flips, it may be very hard to reverse.
03:21:52.000I looked at all these sort of heterodox – I'm blanking on the name but there's sort of a set of – where it's like what are the long-term demographic projections and there's this – there are 8 billion people on the planet and if every woman has not two babies but one baby,
03:22:13.000Then every generation's half the previous.
03:22:16.000Then the next generation's four billion.
03:22:18.000And then people think, well, it's just going to – eventually you'll have women who want more kids and it'll just get a smaller population and then it will bounce back.
03:22:31.000Yeah, one of the Japanese demographers I was looking at on this a few years ago, his thesis was, no, once it flips, it doesn't flip back because you've changed all the politics to where people get disincented.
03:22:45.000And then you should just extrapolate this as the permanent birth rate.
03:23:18.000And again, it's a very long-term extrapolation.
03:23:22.000But the claim is that just once you flip it, it kicks in all these social and political dimensions that are then like, yeah, maybe it got flipped by the screens or the plastics or – You know,
03:23:53.000But then, you know, the weird history on this was, you know, it was 50 years ago or whatever, 1968, Paul Ehrlich writes The Population Bomb, and it's just the population is just going to exponentially grow.
03:24:09.000And yeah, in theory, you can have exponential growth where it doubles.
03:24:13.000You can have exponential decay where it halves every generation.
03:24:18.000And then in theory, there's some stable equilibrium where, you know, everybody has exactly two kids and it's completely stable.
03:24:29.000That solution is very, very hard to get calibrate.
03:24:34.000And we shifted from exponential growth to exponential decay, and it's probably going to be quite Herculean to get back to something like stasis.
03:25:33.000They opt out and then—and so there are sort of idiosyncratic things you can say about East Asia and Confucian societies and the way they're not interacting well with modernity.
03:25:43.000But then, you know, there's a part of it where I wonder whether it's just an extreme, you know, extreme version of it.
03:25:51.000And then, I don't know, you know, my somewhat facile answer is always, you know, I was in South Korea.
03:26:13.000A year and a half ago, two years ago now, and I met, you know, one of the CEOs who ran one of the CHEBAL, one of the giant conglomerates, and I sort of thought this would be an interesting topic to talk about.
03:26:30.000And then, you know, probably all sorts of cultural things I was offending or saying, obviously, what are you going to do about this catastrophic birthright?
03:27:09.000Because, you know, I think it is always this strange thing where there's so many of these things where we can...
03:27:17.000You know, where somehow talking about things is the first step, but then it also becomes the excuse for not doing more, not really solving them.
03:27:48.000It's sort of where I always find myself very skeptical of...
03:28:09.000Yeah, all these modalities of therapy where the theory is that you figure out people's problems and by figuring them out you change them and then ideally it becomes an activator for change and then in practice It often becomes the opposite.
03:28:33.000The way it works is something like this.
03:28:34.000It's like psychotherapy gets advertised as self-transformation.
03:28:40.000And then after you spend years in therapy and maybe you learn a lot of interesting things about yourself, you sort of get exhausted from talking to the therapist and at some point it crashes out from self-transformation into self-acceptance.
03:28:57.000And you realize one day, no, you're actually just perfect the way you are.
03:29:03.000And so it's – you know, there are these things that may be very powerful on the level of insight and telling us things about ourselves.
03:29:12.000But then, you know, do they actually get us to change?
03:29:17.000Well, that is an interesting thing about talking about things because I think you're correct that when you talk about things, oftentimes it is a – you are – At least, in some way, avoiding doing those things.
03:29:45.000The problem is taking action, and what action to take, and the paralysis by analysis, where you're just trying to figure out what to do and how to do it.