00:00:46.000So you were saying that the reason why they had a hard time catching them is because they had flock cameras in Austin, but then they shut those cameras off for political reasons.
00:00:59.000Yeah, so these guys are driving around in cars and they're switching cars, whatever.
00:01:02.000And they went to like a dozen locations and tried to.
00:01:05.000Shooting at buildings and people and houses and all kinds of stuff.
00:01:08.000And so, okay, so you guys are running around.
00:01:10.000So there's a system called Flock, which is one of our companies.
00:01:12.000And what they do, kind of like in the movies, you take all the municipal cameras and traffic cameras and everything and you feed them into an AI.
00:01:18.000And the AI is able to first find a license plate in real time.
00:01:41.000A lot of towns and cities have this and they love it.
00:01:43.000In cities like Austin, with the intense politics, they run into backlash on privacy and surveillance concerns.
00:01:50.000Austin had Flock and then turned it off.
00:01:54.000As a consequence, they were not able to find these guys for several days.
00:01:59.000Then what happened the late breaking news today is these guys drove into some adjacent town up against Austin, and Flock was live in that town.
00:02:08.000Flock tagged them the minute they drove into that.
00:02:10.000That town, and then they caught the guys.
00:02:12.000Subsequent to that, the mayor – your mayor in Austin of – your mayor and your chief of police gave a press conference and said, we really need to rethink this because it's crazy to have the ability to solve crimes and stop crimes and not be able to use it.
00:02:26.000Yeah, so the concern is mass surveillance, right?
00:02:29.000And the concern is that someone's going to abuse this and use AI for nefarious purposes, right?
00:02:36.000Like, what nefarious purposes would that be?
00:02:40.000This is a system that could be used in bad ways, right?
00:02:42.000So bad people could use it in bad ways.
00:02:44.000And so if you had a corrupt You know, chief of police, and you know, he had some personal entanglement thing and he wanted to track a, you know, ex whatever, or if you, the mayor, wanted to, you know, do this to terrorize your political opponents or whatever.
00:02:55.000Like, if you had, you know, corrupt city officials, then they could use it for bad things.
00:04:26.000And what it is, totally different system.
00:04:27.000What it is, is they put these precision microphones on top of rooftops all over the city.
00:04:31.000And then when a gunshot goes off, they're able to instantly triangulate that a gunshot has gone off and specifically where the gunshot went off.
00:04:40.000Benefit number one is you have a better chance of catching the perpetrator because you can instantly respond to the gunshot.
00:04:45.000You don't have to wait for somebody to call it in or if somebody calls it in.
00:04:49.000Number two, if somebody's been shot and they're bleeding in the street, you can immediately roll the ambulance to the location and you can save lives.
00:04:56.000And so historically, it's considered a double win.
00:04:59.000Chicago got so wrapped up on these political issues that they Also, not only do they not have flock, they also turn off their shot spotter system voluntarily.
00:05:07.000So people now get shot in Chicago and they bleed out on the street and nobody knows and nobody cares.
00:05:16.000So I would say there's maybe two arguments.
00:05:20.000There's the civil libertarian argument, which is all around surveillance and abuse and control and all these things.
00:05:26.000Like I say, I think that's a very legitimate argument.
00:05:28.000And then I would say there's the woke argument, which is that the argument goes the American criminal justice system is clearly biased.
00:05:35.000In favor of some demographic groups and against other demographic groups.
00:05:38.000If you have automated systems like ShotSpotter or Flock, or by the way, the same thing comes up with like traffic cameras that automatically give out speeding tickets, those will disproportionately affect disadvantaged people in society and disadvantaged groups, and so therefore they are racist.
00:05:53.000They are racist technologies enforcing a racist system.
00:05:57.000The problem with that argument is the victims of violent crime are disproportionately also likely to be from those same disadvantaged groups.
00:06:12.000The other problem with a lot of this is there's a large chunk of people that are going to immediately think that even this mass shooting was organized by Flock so that Flock could get reinstated in Austin to bring in the surveillance state.
00:06:54.000How Chicago organizers managed to rid the city of ShotSpotter.
00:06:57.000Controversial police surveillance tech is often inaccurate, according to research that allowed activists to launch a fact based campaign and a political model for organizers in other cities.
00:07:45.000And if you had both of those things, flock and shot spotter, 88.72% of incidents flagged by shot spotter ended with police finding no incidents of gun crime.
00:08:18.000I mean, there's constant shootings going on in Chicago.
00:08:21.000And an enormous death every weekend, an enormous death toll.
00:08:23.000And people are very accustomed to guns going off.
00:08:26.000Not only that, people are very accustomed to shooting guns.
00:08:29.000If people are accustomed to guns going off, that must mean that people are shooting those guns and they're getting very accustomed to doing that.
00:08:37.000So then you've got people that shoot people and then get in a car and drive away.
00:08:41.000And then the cops come, there's no evidence.
00:09:01.000My friends in Los Angeles who still live there, who deal with break ins and home invasions and cars being robbed, they read those statistics or they hear a politician saying that crime is down.
00:09:15.000They're like, what the fuck are you talking about?
00:11:16.000So all my friends in D.C. basically say they turned the city from a place where you couldn't be outside at night to all of a sudden you can just walk around and it's fine.
00:11:21.000And then what happened is like the violence basically went to zero, like in most of the neighborhoods, like Extremely quickly.
00:11:25.000And so, what would happen was you have all these people walking around at night for the first time in years, and they're just like, oh, there's a couple guys in the National Guard.
00:12:00.000I'll give you one more thing and we can move off this.
00:12:02.000So the other thing you mentioned is: yeah, drive-by shootings, the guy drives away, there's no evidence of the crime.
00:12:07.000The other thing, if you talk to cops who work in high crime areas or people who live in high crime areas, which I have in both cases, A lot of people in high crime areas do not want to ever talk to the cops about things that have happened because if it's gang violence, there's the very active threat.
00:13:13.000So, look, one wonders if there's a political motivation, right, which is basically to get the responsible people out of the city to be able to change the voting patterns, right?
00:13:27.000And so, if they- God, that's so insidious.
00:13:30.000And so, you wonder, you know, yeah, you look at these programs over time and kind of as the populations of the major cities have shifted like radically over the last 50 years, like they have very little in common with the population distributions they had 50 years ago.
00:13:42.000And so, you wonder how much of it is massaging the voter base.
00:13:45.000God, that's so crazy to think that people would be willing to sacrifice the safety of their residents.
00:13:50.000That are bringing in the majority of the tax revenue, by the way, so that they could somehow or another make it so that they could stay in power forever.
00:14:00.000I mean, and then get money presumably from the state, right?
00:14:02.000Like, which is how New York City got bailed out, which is a hilarious story.
00:14:48.000Who's a very wealthy guy who brings a lot of.
00:14:51.000Jobs to New York City and was in the middle of a huge project.
00:14:55.000It's a $6 billion project, and now he's considering tanking it.
00:14:57.000Yeah, he's going to - I think he spoke last week at a conference and all but said he's going to - he didn't say he's going to pull entirely out, but he said he's going to move much more of the business to Florida.
00:15:07.000But the other significance: Ken, who I know, is a major philanthropist.
00:15:10.000Ken has donated hundreds of millions of dollars, particularly to healthcare in New York City, on top of being a major taxpayer and source of tax revenue, on top of being a major employer.
00:15:19.000And so the new mayor has deliberately targeted him personally to try to force him out.
00:15:39.000I would give people the benefit of the doubt.
00:15:42.000I would assume they believe everything they say and they feel very strongly about it.
00:15:45.000I would believe that they also have a political incentive because if you get somebody who's going to oppose you out of the city, that's good.
00:15:53.000Trevor Burrus The top 1% of New York, aren't they responsible for 50% of the time?
00:16:00.000Also roughly the case in California in the year 2000.
00:16:03.0001,000 individuals were 50% of the tax revenue, it was the all time peak.
00:16:09.000But I think it's roughly 1% of the taxpayers are 50% of the tax receipts.
00:16:11.000One could imagine a position that says, wow, we want these businesses to work, we want to generate all the tax revenue, and we want to pay for all the programs.
00:16:18.000for all the programs, one could also imagine a somewhat more, let's say, YOLO approach, which is to drive out the revenue and then presumably account of bailouts.
00:16:29.000I just don't understand why I guess people that are not...
00:16:34.000They're only thinking of their own political careers and staying in power, that they wouldn't care.
00:16:41.000And then I think you just I mean, obviously, there's a lot of opportunism.
00:16:44.000And then the other thing is, I think you just you have a lot of people you have a lot of people you know, a lot of people in politics have not run a business.
00:17:03.000In some weird way, I've become a businessman.
00:17:05.000But this idea that it's easy to become a billionaire and that these billionaires somehow or another are the problem because they're not paying their fair share is so weird that that's a narrative that actually gets pushed through when you look at the actual numbers of the tax base and how much they contribute and how many jobs they provide.
00:17:26.000Yeah, they make more money than everybody else.
00:17:30.000It's like this is one of the things that America is really good at.
00:17:34.000You can come from nothing and become incredibly wealthy.
00:17:38.000If you figure something out and go and we just assume that everybody who makes an incredible amount of money stole it, that they robbed someone, that someone - this is a narrative that gets pushed along democratic socialists that no one achieves that.
00:17:53.000I think I literally heard AOC say this recently: that no one achieves substantial wealth without somehow or another victimizing other people.
00:18:04.000And then Jeff Bezos is the obvious counterexample, which is like every time you do the one click and the thing gets delivered to you two hours later at the cheapest possible price.
00:18:13.000Saving you and your family a lot of time and money.
00:18:16.000But at the expense of small mom and pop stores, allegedly.
00:18:18.000Although a lot of them sell on Amazon.
00:18:21.000A lot of small businesses sell on Amazon.
00:18:23.000The other thing you can do is you can compare and contrast other countries that have more draconian policies in the direction that those folks are suggesting.
00:18:30.000And so Europe in particular, many European countries have a much more draconian, even more hostile to business.
00:18:36.000And the result is they are much poorer.
00:18:40.000Their slower growth are actually shrinking.
00:18:43.000The people there are much less well off.
00:18:45.000There's much less funding for social programs.
00:18:48.000And so you can also do the cross country comparison, which I think kind of gives up the game.
00:18:51.000This episode is brought to you by Black Rifle Coffee, the only coffee we drink here in the JRE studio.
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00:20:18.000Well, that's the weird thing about the whole socialism thing, it's never worked ever, and they just go, Well, it hasn't been done right.
00:20:28.000Is that a failing of our education system?
00:20:32.000Is that a failing of the media explaining things to people in a way that makes sense?
00:20:38.000Or is it just that people feel so helpless that they're making just enough barely to get by and they're living check to check and they see these people in yachts and they see these people in private jets and they say they must have stolen this.
00:20:52.000This is impossible to achieve this kind of wealth.
00:20:54.000Somehow or another the system is wrong.
00:21:08.000If I work twice as hard as you do, I get twice as much.
00:21:12.000And by the way, that could be if we're in a race together and I run twice as far, I get to eat twice as much pie at the end of the race, like anything like that.
00:21:19.000I put in more effort, I get more results.
00:21:20.000get more results the other version of fairness is everybody gets an equal slice yeah the equality of outcome and those both feel right those There's something I think in our wiring, in our brain wiring, where those both feel like they're morally correct, but they are in direct conflict with each other.
00:21:37.000When I really have this conversation, I've got to lay those two ideas out on the table and say, OK, pick one.
00:21:45.000Again, it's not like the caricature is, well, somebody's arguing then for understrained libertarianism, whatever.
00:22:08.000But there is this fundamental question underneath that, which is the level of degree to which you buy into that first definition of fairness what you put in is what you get out versus that second definition, which is everybody gets the same amount.
00:22:17.000Well, the problem with the equality of outcome is it's not an equality of effort.
00:22:21.000And this is the beautiful thing about America is that you really can just work 20 hours a day and achieve something spectacular.
00:22:28.000And the idea that you working 20 hours a day like a fucking maniac, literally wasting your health away, that you should get the exact same amount of money as someone who barely works, just kind of shows up, does the bare minimum, leaves five minutes early, and that this person should achieve the same result as you, that's crazy.
00:22:49.000Well, I mean, it's sort of like anybody who's ever, the teachers say one thing anybody who's ever been in a class project with other students?
00:22:55.000There are certain people who stand up and like lead the way, and there are certain people that like sit back and free ride.
00:23:02.000There's no old story when after the Soviet Union collapsed, reporters went in to try to figure out what had happened and they interviewed somebody about what it was like to work at a socialist factory.
00:23:12.000And then the line that the guy said was, oh, well, we pretended to work and they pretended to pay us.
00:23:21.000If you're getting the thing regardless of - everybody's guaranteed equal outcomes.
00:23:24.000If you're getting the thing regardless, then most - You kill motivation.
00:23:26.000And motivation is everything for people achieving things.
00:23:30.000No one achieves anything spectacular without some sort of motivation that's going to get them a result that's a reward for all their hard effort.
00:23:40.000If you really thought you were just working for the sake of the people, no one's doing that.
00:24:42.000Now, I'm not saying that you should work 20 hours a day and become a sociopath and get on Adderall and just only try to achieve financial wealth.
00:26:28.000I have those conversations with the folks over there, and the conclusion generally is we need to do more of the things that resulted in that outcome.
00:26:35.000My buddy Ari Maddy, a hilarious comedian, he's from Estonia.
00:26:37.000And he has friends in Estonia that have university degrees that choose to work in shoe sales because if you make more than $60,000 a year, your taxes are so high, it actually benefits you to make less money.
00:27:56.000She's in her 40s, never had a real job.
00:27:58.000real job and now she's running what I mean what how many billions of dollars this is the economy of Seattle yes a lot a lot it's It's a huge – And her response to rich people leaving, well, bye.
00:28:12.000Now, having said that, I have enormous faith in the American people, and I think that the American people do not – And historically, when the American people have been given this choice, they haven't taken it.
00:28:22.000I think they have to see the results, right?
00:28:53.000And if someone came in with sweeping change and pulled up all the encampments and cleaned up all the streets and made things safe again and actually started prosecuting crime, it would take so long to fix it.
00:29:36.000What is so great about their ability to lead that makes you think that they're going to be extraordinary choices above and beyond what Spencer Pratt's capable of doing?
00:30:36.000I don't think any of that's been fixed.
00:30:38.000I don't think there's any plan to fix any of it.
00:30:40.000And so, yeah, Spencer, you know, Spencer's been through this the hard way along with a lot of people in the city, which is his, you know, they burned his house down.
00:30:46.000And what is the response when Karen Bass is questioned about what are you going to do if this happens in the future?
00:30:53.000You know, everything is, everything is, do you remember the Lego movie?
00:30:55.000Remember the song Everything is Wonderful?
00:32:05.000I do know right out of the gate there was a state ban on quote unquote predatory land sales, so predatory offers.
00:32:12.000And so there was a ban, the state put in place a ban on anybody making an offer on the land at less than the last appraised value, which included the value of the house on the land.
00:32:21.000And so they chilled the because a lot of property owners so you lose your house in LA.
00:32:28.000By the way, it's been almost impossible, and I think for a lot of people, actually impossible to get fire insurance in LA for years because of all these issues because the insurance companies aren't stupid.
00:32:34.000They don't want to be left holding the bag.
00:32:43.000And then all of a sudden, the state moved in and basically said, You can't they didn't say you can't sell your house.
00:32:50.000They said people can't bid on your house, your now destroyed house below its previous value.
00:32:53.000So, the previous value so if you had a $10 million mansion on a lot in the Palisades and it's worth $15 million while it was there and you say, I'll sell it to you for five, you can't do that.
00:34:06.000I haven't seen any prediction that's less than 15 years to rebuild everything because any individual home could be, I don't know, five years, eight years, 10 years.
00:34:37.000The other thing they do is if you want to rebuild something, you have to do some other trade.
00:34:39.000And so this is the other thing that's kicked in is now the politics of what they call affordable housing, which means government housing.
00:34:43.000So now there's demands that a certain percentage of the land be devoted to government housing projects in the middle of what had been a residential neighborhood.
00:34:53.000And then on top of that, there's all the logistics of actually building anything, which is there's only so many general contractors around to be able to do it.
00:35:05.000I don't know the exact number, many thousands.
00:35:06.000I mean, for people who haven't, by the way, experienced this, there's this great, this really good movie on Amazon called Crime 101 that just came out with Chris Hemsworth.
00:36:03.000We now believe that based on the reporting and the indictments.
00:36:07.000And so, like, you know, I think that that was likely the real cause.
00:36:10.000But, like, you do wonder if a you do wonder politically if a side effect of this is to get responsible homeowners out of the city permanently to change the voting composition.
00:36:41.000And then on top of that, we have two of the great global industries in culture in LA and tech in Silicon Valley.
00:36:46.000We have a, what apparently, infinite gusher of money coming out of these two industries that can fund both amazing things and horrible things.
00:36:55.000But aren't both of those industries kind of leaking out of LA right now?
00:36:59.000So LA, so my understanding is there's less film and television production happening in LA than there was And so it's become it's related, it's become almost impossible to shoot anything in LA.
00:37:09.000And many of the great movies and TV shows in history, of course, were shot in LA.
00:37:14.000That's where all the big studios built their lots.
00:37:18.000So the local economy has just been destroyed completely independent of the fire.
00:37:22.000It's been destroyed by basically the crushing of the production side of it.
00:37:27.000And so, yeah, so LA was already reeling from that.
00:37:31.000And that continues to be a big problem.
00:37:33.000And then look, there's this state, there's this new tax, this new ballot proposition for an asset tax.
00:37:38.000And the number of people in Silicon Valley who are leaving the state is quite large.
00:37:42.000And I would say it was a trickle and now it's a stream and it's becoming a flood.
00:37:47.000And I know a lot of people who are leaving the state because they feel like their assets are going to get seized.
00:37:52.000Let's explain this asset tax because people are thinking it's just as simple as you get an additional X amount of percentage of your income, but it's not.
00:38:07.000So there's lots of different kinds of taxes that one can have.
00:38:10.000And there's the obvious ones sales tax when you buy or sell something, there's property tax based on, you know, Paying property tax on property you own.
00:38:18.000There's tariffs, which are taxes on international transactions.
00:38:20.000So you have to get tax revenue somewhere, and you can decide from among these taxes.
00:38:24.000Historically, the U.S. didn't in the old days, the U.S. didn't have an income tax, and then the income tax was introduced about 100 years ago.
00:38:34.000It was just like, oh, wait a minute, I'm getting a salary, I'm getting paid at the time, whatever it was, $100 a month, and you're going to take a percentage of my income, of money that I earned.
00:39:44.000Art collection, all the stuff on the walls, all your clothes, all your jewelry, all your everything, your house pets, like the whole thing.
00:39:57.000How is it possible that someone proposed something this insane?
00:40:00.000So, this idea has been running around for a while.
00:40:03.000By the way, there are other countries that have done this with disastrous results because all of the people with any level of assets flee the country.
00:40:09.000And so, Europe has been through this multiple times.
00:40:12.000And we don't pay attention to that, but there's case studies from that.
00:40:20.000There was almost a federal wealth tax, asset tax in 2022 that almost passed, that didn't pass.
00:40:25.000And then the Biden administration said in their 2024 fiscal plan for 25, they said they were going to come back and do a federal wealth tax, asset tax in 25 if they had gotten reelected.
00:40:36.000And then now in California, there's a ballot proposition that a specific union has put on the ballot specifically for itself.
00:40:41.000Politics are weird because it's a bad ballot proposition because it's one union where all the money just goes to it and its causes.
00:41:51.000OK, so let me give you the twist on this in California.
00:41:54.000The twist on this is it's a specific punitive strike aimed at tech founders and tech companies.
00:41:58.000And so they have the calculation of the value that you owe is based on the greater of your economic interest in your company or your voting interest in your company.
00:42:08.000And so if you are the Google founders, as an example, you have what's called super voting stock, right?
00:42:14.000And because you want the company to have a long term outlook and you want the founders to stay in charge.
00:42:18.000And so let's say I'm making numbers up.
00:42:21.000Let's say the Google founders own 3% of the economic value of their company, but they own 15% of the control value of their company, or say 55% of the control value of their company.
00:42:30.000The tax gets calculated based on the higher of those two numbers.
00:42:33.000And so, for founders in the Valley, particularly private companies, but also public companies where they have controlled stock, if this tax passes, they instantly go bankrupt.
00:42:57.000There will be, I am positive, a dozen more of these the next time in California.
00:43:02.000I am positive that this will arrive in every blue state that has any sort of ballot proposition thing where you can put things directly on the ballot.
00:43:10.000I'm positive this is going to get proposed in every other blue state over the next few years.
00:43:40.000So California is a Democratic supermajority in both houses of both the The House and the Senate in California, and a Democratic governor, and of course, the judges are all Democrats.
00:44:05.000This is the classic thing where Bernie's Trump speech used to be I'm against the billionaires and the millionaires until he became a millionaire, and all of a sudden his Trump speech is - right.
00:44:14.000So, a lot of people have gone to our governor and said, this is going to be very bad news for the state.
00:44:24.000And so, Gavin, to his credit, says, yes, I agree, this is very bad news for the state because if you're in California, you can easily go to Nevada or Texas or Florida.
00:44:36.000However, what he's doing is he's sort of signaling, indicating in his statements that basically his position running for president, we all believe what his position is going to be is obviously you shouldn't do this at the state level, you should do this at the federal level.
00:44:50.000Because the problem with this tax at the state level is you can flee the state.
00:44:56.000Practically speaking, you can't free the country.
00:44:58.000And so my expectation is that this is going to be a very big sort of leftist populist campaign measure on the part of basically all the Democratic candidates in 28.
00:45:07.000And so, yeah, so an asset tax I think is coming federally.
00:45:27.000Unless you have, like, I don't know, active secondary transactions in your stock or you take your company public, who knows what your business is worth?
00:45:36.000And so a government, this is go down the rabbit hole, a government appraiser is going to show up and decide what your business is worth.
00:46:10.000And that's actually a whole separate argument against this is the level of invasiveness on the part of the government to be able to actually figure out what your assets are.
00:46:18.000And of course, what's going to happen is every person with any level of assets is going to do anything they can to hide, right?
00:46:23.000And so you're going to be looked at as a criminal.
00:46:24.000Trying to evade paying your fair share, especially by the proletariat.
00:46:36.000And you can never-it's a little bit-it's a funny thing in the current tax system that you have this thing where you estimate what you owe in taxes and you send it into the IRS and then they tell you whether they think you're right or wrong.
00:46:44.000They don't tell you what you owe, right?
00:46:47.000They leave it to you to, quote, fill out your tax return to estimate what you think you owe and then they judge you on it.
00:46:51.000But at least with income, it's like relatively straightforward because it's like I have a salary or I have, you know, whatever, interest payments or whatever.
00:46:57.000For wealth tax, asset tax, like, You're trying to judge the value of your assets.
00:47:03.000They're trying to judge the value of your assets.
00:47:05.000Third parties are trying to value your assets.
00:47:08.000Who knows what these things are worth?
00:49:14.000That's why they think- Well, and then you get to this.
00:49:16.000this and so my answer is i'm not leaving the u.s and furthermore i'm not leaving california having said that you know i you're not leaving california i am not Having said that, you do start to wonder, okay, if like half the tax base leaves, what happens to the other half?
00:49:31.000And then if these other taxes pass, what happens?
00:49:57.000And so that's the thing in the valley that's really harsh.
00:49:59.000And then the other side of it is like, how many, if everybody else is leaving, do you want to be the last man standing and do you want to be the last remaining target?
00:50:06.000And so the game theory on that is getting tricky.
00:50:26.000So, what the professionals tell us is that California is naturally prone to be in favor of this kind of thing because of the composition of the voter base.
00:50:33.000It's the same reason we have a Democratic supermajority in the legislature and so forth.
00:50:38.000Having said that, the American people, including Californians, don't like socialism.
00:50:43.000And so, this thing started out life polling at like 45 or 50 percent.
00:50:48.000What the pros say is for a proposition to pass, it needs to start up polling at like 60 percent because the initial poll is before there's been a counter campaign.
00:50:55.000And the counter campaign can almost always knock the support down at least 10 or 15 points.
00:51:00.000And so the pros say there's a chance that this doesn't pass because the 50% goes to 40% and then doesn't pass.
00:51:07.000The counter argument to that is this is part of the national mood, right?
00:51:12.000And this is a rolling thing and all the narratives and all the issues that you're well aware of.
00:51:19.000And then, by the way, there will be like the mother of all court challenges following this because this is going to get litigated.
00:51:23.000And then there's going to be all the specific - I mean, the number of people I know who are like figuring out all kinds of advance maneuvers to try to figure out how to shield their assets is.
00:53:22.000Well, then also there's a problem that we people look at what's going on right now with the Republicans, the Iran war, which is extremely unpopular, very unpopular.
00:54:49.000And then look, I think you have to, and then again, this is where I have a lot like, I'm still extremely optimistic about the U.S. specifically.
00:54:56.000And here's the reason is because I would imagine anybody who's listening to this is like, you know, there's two ways to listen to everything we've been saying, which is, oh, these guys are out of touch and da, da, da, da.
00:55:05.000The other way to think about it is, I own a home.
00:55:21.000And so I think as that becomes clearer, like this just isn't, this isn't because, right, because specifically right now it's only in California and everybody just kind of thinks California's crazy anyway.
00:55:29.000But I think as this becomes a national issue, I mean, my expectation would be people take a look at it.
00:55:34.000They're like, oh, that clearly is leading in a direction.
00:55:37.000And then, like I said, and then as they think through the implications of like, okay, guess what?
00:55:41.000Like they're going to be coming and looking at my wife's jewelry.
00:55:43.000Like, do you think that things like this have to get this bad before people get rational?
00:55:50.000That sometimes you need an enemy that's so obvious that people sort of unite and realize, like, oh, this is not the direction we want things to be headed in.
00:55:59.000Let's figure this out in a better way.
00:56:03.000I mean, you know, that is a sustained pattern.
00:56:05.000I mean, Eastern Europe, you mentioned that is, you know, a lot of people there do not hold any of these ideas because they've been through it.
00:56:11.000You know, yeah, these things are easier to, you know, these things are easier to kind of not think about hard if they're not right in your face.
00:56:23.000So, 1944, the vice president of the United States almost became a guy named Henry Wallace, who was an actual communist, who was an actual, actual, actual communist, like actually in league with the Soviet Union, like for real.
00:56:37.000And he almost became VP instead of Truman.
00:56:40.000He almost became president in 1945, and then he ran in 1948 and didn't win.
00:56:45.000And so, that was like a great example of America had a choice.
00:56:49.000And by the way, that was after the Soviets were our allies during World War II.
00:56:53.000So, they were not, you know, they were actually.
00:56:54.000There had been a ticker tape parade with Joseph Stalin, I think, in New York City, not shortly before that, not long before that.
00:58:22.000This is an old term for people who run chat groups and forums online, which is okay, you've got somebody in a chat group and they're being a pain in the butt.
00:58:31.000One is you can ban them from it and that'll make them mad and everybody will be miserable.
00:58:35.000The other thing you can do is you can promote them to heaven, which is you just let them interact with bots that just agree with everything they say.
00:58:48.000They're saying every crazy thing, and they've got 30 people right there with them who are like, absolutely, they are absolutely correct on everything.
00:58:54.000And so in the industry, the joke is that Blue Sky is real life heaven banning.
00:59:53.000It's actually legal today to pay an influencer to say whatever you want as long as it's not an explicit endorsement of a candidate or of a product, and then there is no disclosure requirement.
01:00:24.000And by the way, every once in a while, people will see this.
01:00:28.000Every once in a while, a campaign will roll out, and there will be 30 influencers of a particular kind, and they'll all kind of say the same thing, and somebody will do the screenshot.
01:02:26.000And then, by the way, again, I'd say it's the influencer thing, but it's also the bots.
01:02:30.000So the influencers and the bots go together, I think, is the full picture because the bots show up and make the influencers look like they're more successful than they actually are.
01:03:03.000These crowdsourced campaigns that you can do where you can hire a company, and that company can promote an idea, and they have all these accounts that just start.
01:03:44.000And he's able to, you know, he's been able to go out with his message and he can go out, you know, he goes out minute to minute and then he does his official videos and then he's got all of his fans doing their videos and the whole, it's all, that's all free.
01:03:57.000And so the fact that it's an unconstrained environment also lets, you know, people do it the right way.
01:04:02.000And so I think there is that side of it.
01:04:04.000And I think, you know, there's some balance here that has to be struck to contain the bad behavior but also make sure the good behavior is still possible.
01:04:10.000Because right now it's almost impossible to find out who's a bot or what's, who's being paid.
01:04:15.000And you oftentimes see people Commenting on different political issues in the United States, and you go look at their page, it says they're from Taiwan.
01:04:30.000Couldn't you monkey around with that and get around that somehow or another and make it look like you're in America with a VPN or something?
01:06:17.000And there are people, by the way, where I will follow them based on a tweet and then block them based on a tweet and then refollow them based on another tweet.
01:06:24.000So I saw one yesterday that says there's an Andreessen Samsara Circle of Life on Twitter of how often you get blocked, unblocked, followed, unfollowed.
01:07:55.000What I finally figured out, and it used to bother me, what I finally figured out is you have to think of it like it's a Call of Duty lobby.
01:08:01.000So when Call of Duty first came out, it was one of the first games that had the lobby, so the multiplayer games, and everybody was on their headsets with live audio for the first time.
01:08:09.000So you go, and this is like 20 years ago, and you go in the Call of Duty lobby, and there'd be like 12 year olds just cursing you out.
01:08:23.000And so if you view it as I'm entering the Call of Duty lobby and it's like, bring it, you know, in theory, you can moderate your emotional response.
01:08:33.000Oh, you could definitely moderate your emotional response, but I just choose to get my worldview from other places.
01:08:44.000And I just see way too many comedians in particular, but I think other public figures as well, who become very mentally unwell by engaging in it all the time.
01:09:34.000And so if you're not online enough, then you tend to believe, you know, you literally, if you literally believe what's on the TV and what's in the newspaper, that's another kind of problem.
01:09:53.000And by the way, and as a consequence, they live in two totally different worlds, right?
01:09:57.000It's almost impossible for somebody who's too online to talk to somebody who's too offline and have a productive conversation because the too offline person has no idea what they're talking about.
01:10:11.000And so I think that's actually a big part of what's happening in the culture, independent of like left versus right or independent of whatever.
01:10:17.000It's just simply two different, completely different mediated realities.
01:10:21.000I always wonder, like, what is it going to look like in 20 years?
01:11:16.000And that there's going to be some significant breakthroughs with technology in particular that allow people to have a much more balanced life and perspective and a much more balanced civilization.
01:11:31.000Like this is the doom or gloom, right?
01:11:33.000When it comes to AI, there's a lot of people that think this is going to be the end, we're going to be enslaved, it's going to be over.
01:11:38.000And then Elon's like, no, universal high income, you know, no longer, there's no more poverty, there's no more, everyone's going to be, there's massive resources.
01:11:50.000You're not going to have any problems with all the things that people are hung up with in today's world.
01:14:00.000In one mode, you can just like they can pick up your finger motions.
01:14:03.000And then there's another mode where they can actually pick up your intention to move your finger, even if you don't move your finger, by picking up your nerve impulses off of your wrist.
01:14:10.000And so, at least in theory, you could be sitting completely still and you could be receiving messages in the glasses and then you could be responding with basically sort of.
01:14:19.000So, using your mind to pretend to type?
01:14:39.000So you just play Doom by talking to people.
01:14:39.000So these videos have started to go crazy.
01:14:41.000Oh, and then, yeah, so he's wearing the neural wristband.
01:14:43.000So that's the neural wristband, and then he's moving, and that's his hand there, and then he's moving and playing the game with his thumb and with his fingers.
01:15:06.000There's another one that's really funny that got people all fired up, which is somebody doing one of those.
01:15:12.000It's like a Mario jumping game, and they're playing it as they're jogging in real life.
01:15:17.000And the joke was, yeah, I love this because I can finally pay attention to the great outdoors because you're actually running outside, but you're playing the.
01:15:48.000And then I think if you could get like infrared, if you could get high enough resolution cameras and if you could get like infrared sensing, you could pick up somebody's, You know, physiological change.
01:16:06.000And then look, AI is going to overlay on all of this, right?
01:16:10.000And so, you know, a big use for things like the metaglasses is talking to AI.
01:16:14.000The metaglasses serve as input for AI because the AI is able to see what you see through the cameras, and then you can talk to the AI through the microphone and the frames, and then you can, the AI can talk to you through the speakers and the frames.
01:17:26.000Bought, I don't know the exact, I think he's bought like 40,000 acres of land and the vast majority of it's going to be just pristine land.
01:17:32.000But he needed it for the water rights and then he's building the data center.
01:17:35.000And then he's building the data center.
01:17:38.000And it's a weird, it's taken my industry by surprise because it's a bit of a weird issue because if you're ever going to build anything, a data center is like the most benign thing you could ever build because it doesn't do anything.
01:19:18.000And he decides that his path to fame, he has many, many plans and scams for how he's going to make it in America, but his big plan is to be the world's champion ping pong player.
01:19:26.000And he's going to make ping pong into a giant sport like basketball or football.
01:19:31.000And by the way, the actor actually apparently trained to play ping pong for six months heading into this movie and is just amazing.
01:19:38.000It's incredible, most incredible ping pong matches you've ever seen.
01:21:09.000Let's see if you can pull a clip of it because Tucker was essentially saying, like, how did you get this passed?
01:21:18.000And he said they voted on it and it turns out it's like three representatives in Utah.
01:21:23.000And Tucker's argument is, like, how difficult would it be to subvert the Get a hold of three of these representatives and get them to vote on this thing that's not good for the people.
01:21:35.000He's saying you're going to be taking American jobs with this thing, and this is like Tucker's position.
01:23:35.000You are saying that you're doing it because there's a competition.
01:23:39.000Well, I run a couple of businesses and we're not getting any tax breaks.
01:23:43.000I think they're every bit as virtuous as data centers, but I'm not availing myself of that and no one's offered.
01:23:48.000And I wouldn't take it anyway because it's not the job of taxpayers to subsidize a private business.
01:23:54.000It's a fair comment, but my job is to create a data center, create 2,000 jobs for long term and 10,000 manufacturing at the beginning or construction.
01:24:05.000And I'm obviously looking at multiple sites and this won't be the last one I build.
01:24:13.000Okay, so relative to the size, the physical size of the project, which, as you noted, is multiple times the size of Manhattan, and the power draw at peak, this data center, your projections, will consume about as much energy as New York City does.
01:24:31.000But New York City provides almost 5 million jobs.
01:24:35.000And this project, by your own description, would provide about 2,000 jobs.
01:25:36.000Number two, the energy thing I think is a little bit of a red herring at this point because the sort of claim is these data centers are going to use so much energy and then they're going to cause local energy bills to skyrocket.
01:25:46.000And I think it's very bad, by the way, when that happens.
01:25:48.000I think if a data center comes in, it should bring its own energy with it or pay for the energy separately.
01:25:54.000There is a new federal policy now exactly along those lines that I think everybody's doing in practice, which is to pair.
01:26:00.000If you do a data center, you bring your own energy.
01:26:07.000And then both of those connect to what I think is the big underlying issue, which they were kind of dancing around, which is what we talked about earlier with the rebuilding of LA can you build anything in America anymore?
01:26:29.000And one of the common themes in American life for the last 30 years is the answer to those questions is generally no, you can't do any of those things.
01:26:36.000Take as an example, Silicon Valley, right?
01:26:44.000Because in California, the regulations got set so that you couldn't make chips in California anymore, so now they're all made in Taiwan, and now we have to figure out what to do if China invades Taiwan.
01:27:01.000And you have specific issues on environmental impact on things, and then you have these umbrella things with names like NEPA.
01:27:07.000That basically essentially ban everything in much of the country.
01:27:11.000much of the country what was the negative consequences of them in terms of the environment i mean they're they're it's it's There's tons of, there's always some substance to it.
01:27:18.000There's always some risk of, you know, it's probably something chemical leakage or something like that.
01:27:35.000We've been specifically with that, we've been worried about carbon emissions.
01:27:38.000It turns out there is a form of energy which basically is unlimited energy that's carbon free, that generates no carbon at all, and it's nuclear power.
01:27:45.000The nuclear power was considered such an attractive way to generate energy in the 50s and 60s that a whole bunch of big nuclear plants got built.
01:27:54.000By the way, France ran for a long time almost entirely nuclear power.
01:27:57.000Japan ran for a long time almost entirely nuclear power.
01:27:59.000But we used to have nuclear plants getting built in the US.
01:28:03.000They said they don't want oil and gas, fossil fuels.
01:28:07.000And so the Nixon administration, around the time you and I were born, Created something called Project Independence.
01:28:14.000Project Independence was to build 1,000 new civilian nuclear power plants in the US by the year 2000.
01:28:19.000The idea was 1,000 nuclear power plants will power the entire United States with totally clean energy.
01:28:24.000By the way, that's also the energy and electricity you need to be able to cut over to electric vehicles, which could have happened a lot sooner.
01:28:30.000It's called Project Independence because it means the US won't have to be involved in the Middle East anymore because we won't need the oil.
01:28:37.000This was a response to the growing energy crisis in the 1970s at the time.
01:28:42.000How many nuclear power plants were built out of the 1,000?
01:28:46.000They never got built because the Nixon administration also created the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which made it its purpose in life is to stop nuclear power plants from getting built.
01:28:56.000The Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not approve a new nuclear plant design for 40 years.
01:29:00.000No, is this because of Three Mile Island?
01:29:05.000And Three Mile Island, I'm sure you know, but it was a meltdown of a civilian nuclear plant on the East Coast, and it becomes a mega story.
01:29:13.000And this is like a - this is in the middle of the - this is in the 70s when people are freaking out about Vietnam.
01:29:17.000The oil shock and like all these issues and recession, depression, and then on top of that, this nuclear power plant melts down.
01:30:06.000I forget who did it, but somebody went shortly after Fukushima and just made a point.
01:30:10.000One of the Americans who works in this stuff went over there and he just went around and started eating everything, all the edible plants and drinking the groundwater.
01:31:08.000injuries or deaths, official investigations by Nuclear Regulatory Commission and other agencies conclude that the radioactive releases were low and that there were no detectable health effects on plant workers or the public in the immediate aftermath.
01:31:21.000And again, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission is against building new- These are not the only ones.
01:31:25.000So the problem is the narrative, right?
01:31:26.000The problem is that everybody freaked out and nuclear, we're going to die.
01:31:29.000It's new technology, it's voodoo, it's witchcraft.
01:32:04.000And by the way, it's even worse in the rest of the world where they don't even, you know, many, many developing countries, they don't even have centralized oil and gas the way we do.
01:32:23.000The problem is also that the technology around nuclear power plants has evolved significantly, yet people are still locked into this idea of like Fukushima, which like they had a backup generator, that went down, that whole place is fucked for 100,000 years.
01:33:23.000Most effective and cleanest and everything else.
01:33:25.000And by the way, this is the other thing rank ordering all of this, like rank order any of this against oil and gas, the downstream implications of oil and gas or any other form.
01:34:42.000Number two, if you're going to build a data center, you want it to bring its own energy.
01:34:45.000So the very specific thing you want to do is ideally you'd want to plant a nuclear microreactor right next to it and just let it completely power itself and just let it go.
01:34:56.000And then, as a consequence, these issues are getting intertwined.
01:34:59.000And so, what's happened is the Trump administration is both extremely pro building AI and building AI data centers, and they are very pro American energy production.
01:35:08.000And then, those issues are linked because the data centers need energy.
01:35:11.000And as a consequence, the left has become, as a consequence, increasingly anti AI and has always been anti energy and anti nuclear.
01:35:19.000And now they're combining that together.
01:35:21.000And then, of course, Tucker has the latest twist on this, which is you now have a rump sort of I don't even know what to call it anti tech, anti AI, anti energy movement on the far right.
01:35:30.000So, you've got the horseshoe theory where the Bernie position on AI and the Tucker position on AI are becoming closer and closer and closer.
01:35:39.000So, anyway, that's the backdrop to all this.
01:35:43.000This is why I think it's a great idea.
01:35:46.000I think what Kevin is doing is a fantastic idea.
01:35:47.000I think obviously he should build that thing.
01:36:02.000And so this happens, Kevin said it, this happens with manufacturing.
01:36:05.000If in the rare event that I want to open a manufacturing plant in the US, which generally people don't even try anymore, but in the rare event you want to, you bid it out to the States and you see who gives you the best tax break.
01:36:15.000Film and television production work this way.
01:36:17.000You want to make a TV show, you bid it out like that.
01:36:20.000And recently it's like Georgia has been willing to subsidize it to a degree.
01:36:24.000One of the reasons so much production has left California is because other states and other countries will give you more tax rebates.
01:36:56.000Yeah, I think my friends in the industry tell me that's basically over.
01:36:59.000So the unions are stopping the production.
01:37:01.000Because they're constantly pushing for their own goal of increased, you know, whatever contract terms and, you know, income and residuals and everything else.
01:37:25.000And then everybody - people in Hollywood, there's not a lot of trust that's been built up.
01:37:31.000So anyway, so yeah, so I think that - I think it was - I think Tucker is exactly right on the following point, which is: I don't think you're getting a tax incentive, my guess, to have your business here.
01:37:41.000Nobody's offered me any tax incentive.
01:37:58.000Nobody offers venture capital firms a tax break to relocate.
01:38:00.000So there's many - normal businesses don't get this.
01:38:02.000So I think that's a totally fair question.
01:38:05.000And it just - it goes to this nature of if different states want to compete, this is how they compete.
01:38:10.000But that's a - I think it's a really - it's a rounding error issue on the big issue, though.
01:38:15.000And the big issue is can you build things?
01:38:17.000And so these data centers, this AI data center, what people get terrified of is - It's sort of a parallel argument about the nuclear thing.
01:38:46.000It's like almost running an anti marketing campaign trying to convince everybody that the technology is evil and awful.
01:38:51.000And many of the leading CEOs in the space are like, For reasons I don't fully understand, like actively marketing against their own industry.
01:40:54.000So they're literally made out of sand.
01:40:55.000And so we gather up sand and a whole bunch of other stuff and we apply all this advanced manufacturing technology to it and recreate the chip.
01:41:01.000We plug the chip into a data center, into power.
01:41:25.000And so then again, people get immediately to this, and they're very serious practical implications, but just think conceptually, which is just like, okay, our entire life, everybody who's ever lived on planet Earth, like you're constrained in what you can think based on just what's in your head, right?
01:41:39.000Like what you know and like how much time you have to spend thinking and how smart and capable you are and how.
01:41:45.000The complexity of the situation you're dealing with.
01:41:46.000And, you know, we can only get trained up in a finite lifetime to be an expert in so many things.
01:41:52.000And everybody has this experience in life where they run into a complex situation and they just don't have the grounding to be able to process it.
01:41:57.000And for a lot of people, that's a health issue where all of a sudden they're listening to these doctors saying all these contradictory things.
01:42:03.000And how are you supposed to figure out what you should do for, you know, a cancer patient or somebody who gets in a lawsuit and all of a sudden you're listening to all these high paid lawyers making all these claims?
01:42:12.000Or for that matter, you go get your car fixed and the mechanics making all these claims.
01:42:16.000Or you deal with the government and they're prosecuting you or they're investigating you or they're trying to value your assets for the purpose of the new tax and you have to figure out how to argue with them.
01:42:24.000And so, like, we all, or just you go to work and you just go to work and you just have like a complex problem and you don't quite know how to solve it and you're really worried because, like, what if your boss thinks that you're not capable and you're going to get fired?
01:42:33.000And so we're always all bumping up against these just these limitations on thought.
01:42:40.000And so AI quite literally is that it's thought at scale for everybody in perpetuity.
01:42:48.000I see this with my 11 year old right now.
01:42:50.000Everybody who grows up now is going to have AI as an augmentation, companion, capability, superpower that they're going to have, where all of a sudden they have their own capability and then they have this enormous other additional capability.
01:43:05.000And every time they need to figure something out, or every time they need to fill out a form, or every time they need to make an argument, or every time they need to try to just figure out a course of action, all of a sudden they have the ability to tap into this resource that can really help them solve just an extraordinary number of problems that today we just take for granted that we can't solve.
01:43:23.000And so, this is a very, very, very big concept, but it is literally happening.
01:43:29.000And last time I was here, I was pretty sure that this was going to happen.
01:43:34.000And now, with all the advances in the technology, now I'm completely confident that this is happening.
01:43:39.000And in fact, I think it's essentially already happened.
01:43:42.000It's kind of crazy because you weren't here that long ago.
01:43:47.000The field has moved incredibly quickly.
01:43:49.000Last time I was here probably was not that long after ChatGPT came out, would be my guess, sometime around then.
01:43:56.000And you recall when ChatGPT first came out, the kind of thing that was fun about it was it could compose rap lyrics based on Shakespearean poetry, or it could write a great wedding speech, or like what you know, it could do all kinds of fun stuff.
01:44:15.000It was a little tiny baby learning how the world works.
01:44:18.000The technology advances in the last three years have been like mind boggling, like crazy, amazing, impressive.
01:44:26.000And so I actually think people talk about this concept called AGI, which means artificial general intelligence, which basically means an AI that's as smart as a person.
01:44:33.000And I actually think we crossed that about three months ago.
01:44:36.000And I think it was with the very latest versions of the leading models.
01:44:42.000And one of the reasons people are having a hard time understanding what's happening in AI is because it's moving so fast that if you don't use the latest thing, you don't understand what's happening because you're not seeing it.
01:44:51.000And so a lot of people use JetGPT last year, the year before, and they're not actually seeing the new thing.
01:44:57.000The new thing specifically is it's called GPT, I think it's 5.5.
01:45:04.000And then it's this Claude, Anthropic has this thing called Claude, and that's called 4.6, was the key release.
01:45:12.000And then Google has this thing, Gemini, which is like 3.0.
01:45:18.000So these models all have, in each case, I think with those releases, they kind of hit this threshold where all of a sudden, I guess I say this, like in my line of work, 99% of the time, the answer that I'm getting from the AI from the most advanced models is better than I would get from talking to basically almost any expert I have access to.
01:45:39.000And I have access to, you know, in my job, a lot of experts.
01:45:42.000And I'd say like 99% of the time, I'm getting a better answer from the AI.
01:45:45.000Meaning a better answer, meaning smarter, better analysis.
01:45:49.000And part of it is what they call fluid intelligence, which is the ability to conceptualize and process information.
01:45:54.000And then part of it is what psychologists call crystallized intelligence, which is just memorization of everything.
01:46:00.000And so what the AI brings you is it brings you both because it's smart, but it also knows, it's trained on all the data.
01:46:09.000It's trained on like the complete corpus of human knowledge, right?
01:46:11.000And so it's a world class doctor and a world class lawyer and a world class accountant, right?
01:46:18.000I don't know, political operative, if you want to run for city council.
01:46:45.000One of the really fun things I do with AI is I'll ask it a question, I'll get back this complicated answer, and I'll just be like, this is too complicated for me.
01:47:51.000So, I just decided, I just basically said, what I'm going to do is I'm just going to let Dr. GPT take care of me.
01:47:56.000And I went totally overboard on purpose.
01:48:00.000And I just basically said, like, so every 20 minutes, I gave it like an update of like, you know, and it's literally I'm giving, you know, it's personal information.
01:48:28.000It's just like, to have like the best doctor in the history of the world who is just like happy to be there at four in the morning with you holding your hand, working through this, is just a completely different kind of experience than anybody has ever had in medicine.
01:48:39.000And then to have the exact same opportunity for anything legal that comes up and for anything in your business and for anything, by the way, how to parent, how to parent.
01:49:39.000But you have to figure out what to tell it to do.
01:49:42.000There's a learning process that goes with that for sure.
01:49:46.000But the other part of it is just in your day to day thought, it's just like, okay, when do I hit the barriers of my own knowledge?
01:49:53.000In the past, I would have been frustrated, but I wouldn't have even been aware that I was frustrated just because I took it for granted that, of course, I have no way of answering this question.
01:50:02.000You take your car to the mechanic, it's like, oh, he needs a new radiator.
01:50:09.000And it gives you the complete undressing of the whole thing.
01:50:12.000It's just like it's a capability that you, unless you have a friend who's like a car expert that you bring with you, you never would have had a way to do that.
01:50:17.000You would have just given up from the very beginning.
01:50:19.000And now you've got something that's happy to hold your hand through it and happy to make it.
01:51:25.000And we in the industry talk about this all the time that this is not massive news and it should be.
01:51:29.000So, for people who haven't heard of the Turing test, the Turing test was for 60 years, it was the gold standard in figuring out whether AI would work or not.
01:51:37.000And the basic goal of the Turing test was if you're a human being, can you tell whether you're talking to another human being basically in a chat room or whether you're talking to a bot?
01:52:00.000We blew past it so fast and so hard, nobody has even bothered to do the test.
01:52:03.000I mean, there's probably a handful of papers where somebody's actually formally done it, but we blew through it like tissue paper to the point where it was not even.
01:52:13.000And again, older people in the industry were just like, wow, exactly your reaction.
01:52:17.000Like that seems like it should have been a big deal.
01:52:21.000And it's like, oh no, that was like yesterday's news.
01:52:22.000It turned out, it turned out, what we now know is it actually turned out to be easy.
01:52:29.000Part of the miracle of what we have now, there's now a large language model that this guy, Andrew Carpathi, who's one of the leading experts in this space, has developed.
01:52:36.000He's developed a large language model in 300 lines of software code.
01:52:39.000There are people who are backporting large language models to run on PCs from 40 years ago.
01:52:44.000You can run, somebody's got, people have them running on, I saw somebody has a large language model running on a Texas instrument calculator.
01:52:52.000And so it just, it turns out, This is a huge surprise.
01:52:58.000It turns out, this is a huge surprise, it turns out intelligence is just not that hard.
01:53:04.000There were a handful of conceptual breakthroughs that had to happen.
01:53:07.000There's so called neural networks, and there's this thing called the transformer, and there's this thing called gradient descent, and there's these reinforcement learning.
01:53:15.000But when you add them all up, you basically have the formula, and we now have the formula.
01:53:21.000That takes me to what's happening in these data centers.
01:53:22.000And so what's happening in the data centers is two things what's called training and what's called inference.
01:53:29.000So, the training part is basically taking the world's accumulated information, every bit of information that these companies can get access to, which, by the way, a lot of that is just they crawl the internet and they just pull down every scientific paper and every webpage and every Reddit post, every tweet.
01:53:46.000They take every public domain textbook and every whatever PDF and every possible thing that you can find on the internet.
01:53:51.000And then these companies now, by the way, are going out and gathering data.
01:54:49.000So it's better than, as I said, most people I know who use the leading edge models and take it seriously will say that they give you better answers on 99% of topics than 99% of the people you could possibly find to talk to about them.
01:55:03.000And unlike every topic, I'll give you an example.
01:55:10.000So, we're going to use coding a lot as we talk about this because coding, so it turns out, of everything these things are good at, coding is the thing that they're the best at, writing software code.
01:55:20.000And the reason they're the best at that is because these companies, the AI companies themselves, are in the business of writing software code.
01:55:25.000And so, it's the thing that they're most excited about automating because it's the thing that they are doing themselves.
01:55:29.000And so, it's like the shoemaker's son making shoes, or the shoemaker making shoes for his kids.
01:55:34.000And so, these companies are the furthest ahead on coding.
01:55:37.000Nine months ago, there was this concept called vibe coding, where instead of writing code, you just tell the AI to write the code for you.
01:55:46.000And then there was this concept of slop, which is it gives you back code, but it's all mushed and it's all screwed up and it doesn't work well.
01:55:50.000And people were kind of getting bearish on this idea.
01:55:52.000Over the holiday break of the end of 2025, many of the world's best coders put their hands up online and said, There's been a breakthrough and these new models are now better at coding than I am.
01:56:02.000So, for example, Linus Torvalds, who's the coder of Linux, John Carmack, who created Doom that we just saw, like these guys said, Yeah, it's tip.
01:56:34.000I have tons of examples, but I have a friend who's extremely advanced on this and he has used the AI coding ability to build himself the most comprehensive.
01:57:23.000I have a specific mutation where there's the standard.
01:57:25.000kind of heart medication that they'll give you if you're having a heart attack doesn't work with me.
01:57:28.000So you have to tell the emergency room to do the other one.
01:57:30.000So like genetic information is becoming very valuable.
01:57:33.000So you put your genome in, you put your blood test in.
01:57:38.000So you just get a blood, you go to one of the labs and you just get your blood panel run.
01:57:42.000And then you connect your, you're all of, you connect your like Apple Watch to it.
01:57:45.000So it has like your pulse and your blood pressure and you give it, you know, so you basically just like feed in all the health information.
01:57:51.000And it just, it get, it gave him, it just gives him like the most spectacular.
01:57:54.000And then, and then you basically just say, all right, what do I need to do?
01:57:57.000And of course, that's the question you have to want to ask, right?
01:58:05.000You know, you need to, you know, and then you put in your sleep data and it's like, well, you're, you know, you're on the nights you don't sleep enough, your blood pressure rises.
01:58:11.000You clearly, you know, so it walks you through it.
01:58:13.000And by the way, it's like, okay, now I need to lose weight.
01:59:37.000And so it's - you can ask - the capabilities, I mean, are just like - they're just like mind-boggling in their scope.
01:59:45.000And this is going to be basically in every field of human activity.
01:59:50.000It's important to go through this, though, because of course the public discussion on this is just like relentlessly negative, right?
01:59:56.000And in particular, the thing that's happening is the immediate sort of conclusion that if the machine is doing something that the human used to do, then the human somehow loses out.
02:00:06.000We talked about that, but this is the point that I'm making you've got to start on day one on this to really understand.
02:00:10.000You've got to start on day one being like, everybody gets superpowers.
02:00:13.000By the way, this technology another thing people really worry about is that this technology is getting centralized into two or three big companies, and normal people are not going to have access.
02:00:20.000The exact opposite has happened, which is these companies are driving this technology in everybody's hands.
02:00:26.000There's now like a billion people online who are using these AIs through the apps on their phones.
02:00:31.000This technology has democratized faster than any technology in history.
02:00:35.000And so everybody's getting access to it.
02:00:40.000And so the way to think about it, the overwhelming impact of this is positive, and the reason for that is the universal basic superpowers, right?
02:00:50.000Like universal basic, everybody gets the world's best doctor, lawyer, dot, dot, dot, dot on every domain.
02:00:57.000Independent of their income level, independent of where they live, independent of their circumstances, everybody gets access.
02:01:03.000And so there are for sure going to be downsides and there's for sure going to be whatever disruption and so forth.
02:01:09.000All kinds of things are going to happen.
02:01:10.000But the upside aspect of this in ordinary people's lives is staggering.
02:01:15.000And by the way, you have this dislocation happening already where you have this polling that basically shows this sort of big negative popular response.
02:01:22.000People are saying this stuff is very unpopular.
02:01:23.000I actually don't believe that for two reasons.
02:01:26.000One is because you always want to watch what people do, not what they say.
02:01:30.000And what they're doing is they're using this stuff and they're loving it.
02:01:32.000And then I also think those polls are wrong, which we could talk about.
02:01:36.000So the polls-there's many, many different ways to make polls.
02:01:41.000And in some cases, it's interested parties.
02:01:45.000So it'll be the press will do a poll or try to get somebody to do a poll to be able to write negative stories on something, or an activist will want to gin something up.
02:01:53.000There's even a form of polling called push polling where you construct the polling question specifically to change people's minds.
02:01:58.000So you get a poll that says, you know, did you know Spencer Pratt as a, you know, strangles kittens on the weekend?
02:04:43.000Because of the hyper, you know, the inflation that we've been through.
02:04:45.000But and then if you kind of tally up at the top there, these some of these are kind of the so cost of living, I would argue cost of living, the economy, inflation, taxes and government spending, budget deficit, government debt.
02:04:57.000So I would say like four of the top ten, it's the same issue.
02:05:00.000And the same issue is everything is too expensive.
02:05:05.000And so and I think you're seeing that tilt in our politics right now, right, where all the race identity stuff is fading and now the economic and socialism, you know, as we were talking about earlier.
02:06:14.000And by the way, I don't think it's an accident that it's right there with crime because I think, at least in the popular mind, I think those are pretty linked right now as issues.
02:07:06.000So, and then this is the thing, and this is why I wanted to go through the good news story first.
02:07:10.000I think the job-I think the job-I think the unemployment thing is a red herring.
02:07:13.000Like, I literally don't think that that's going to happen.
02:07:16.000And it's not a claim that there won't be jobs that are eliminated because, of course, there are because every technological change causes jobs to be eliminated.
02:07:22.000Consumer behavior change causes jobs to be eliminated.
02:07:24.000Haven't a lot of tech firms fired a lot of people because of AI?
02:07:31.000One is there have been a small set of companies that have done layoffs and they blamed AI on the layoffs.
02:07:36.000I will tell you they were overstaffed.
02:07:38.000There's some truth and there's some spin.
02:07:41.000The truth is the tech companies are adopting AI very quickly.
02:07:47.000The truth is, and I will talk more about this in coding, the truth is you can generate the same amount of code with a smaller number of coders.
02:08:17.000So, everybody I know who uses AI for coding, you would think basically one of two things would have happened.
02:08:22.000One is they just would be out of the profession entirely, you know, because there's no point anymore.
02:08:27.000Or you would think, well, maybe they just have a better life now because they're working less, right?
02:08:31.000They just have a better life now because they're working less.
02:08:33.000And so, if AI coding makes them four times more productive, if they can write four times the amount of code in the same amount of time because they've got AI helping them, then maybe they're working only a fourth the time and now they've got a great life.
02:08:44.000What's actually happened is virtually to a person, they're all working more hours than ever to the point where there is a new term of art that's used in the valley called the AI vampire, which is when AI turns you into a vampire, you're up all night doing AI coding because you are so productive, you're getting so much done that you can't turn off.
02:09:02.000The opportunity cost of going to sleep is too high.
02:09:04.000Because if you go to sleep, you won't be with your 20 AI coding agents keeping them working on all the projects that you have them working on.
02:09:12.000And so I have all these friends, some of whom are quite famous, where when you talk to them now, as opposed to six months ago, they look terrible.
02:09:19.000They're sleep deprived, they get bags under their eyes.
02:09:22.000They're clearly, clearly, clearly not taking care of themselves.
02:09:24.000And they're absolutely ecstatic because they are able to produce five times, 10 times, 20 times more code per hour than they could in the past.
02:09:32.000And so they are just absolutely ripping through.
02:09:35.000Every project that they've ever wanted to do at work, every coding project they've ever wanted to do at home.
02:09:40.000I have a Wall Street friend who has a computer science degree from MIT from 35 years ago and then became very successful in Wall Street, so he stopped coding.
02:09:50.000He's completely re automated his entire house.
02:09:52.000So he's got like AI jukebox and security cameras and pet robot dog pets and like got like every smart fridges and every conceivable thing you can imagine.
02:10:02.000And he keeps running Tally, and he, in his spare time, has generated 500,000 lines of code.
02:10:10.000And so now he's got like the digital music jukebox system of his dreams to let him, you know, the way he's always wanted to experience music.
02:10:16.000It's just like one of the projects he's done.
02:10:18.000And this is what, by the way, this is the same thing the companies are seeing.
02:10:20.000So in the companies, in the leading edge tech companies, the coders that are using AI, the estimate is right now that they're 20 times more productive than they were before they started using AI.
02:10:30.000So they're generating 20 times more output per hour.
02:10:35.000And then you just think, like, logically, what does that mean?
02:10:37.000Okay, so if there's only a limited amount of software that people want in the world, then yeah, you're going to get mass unemployment.
02:10:42.000But then there's the elasticity effect, right?
02:10:45.000Which is what if it becomes super cheap to get code?
02:10:49.000It turns out there's way more demand for code in the world than was ever able to be satisfied under the old economics.
02:10:55.000Every company I know has a thousand things that they've wanted to have code for that they've never been able to get to.
02:11:01.000It's the projects that never make the cut or the projects that aren't cost effective in the old model.
02:11:05.000And all of a sudden they can do all those projects.
02:11:07.000And so these companies are like ripping out code.
02:11:10.000They're releasing products at a far faster rate of speed.
02:11:12.000They're adding features much, much faster.
02:12:08.000So, software coding a year ago was you sit there and you write code and then you try to run the code and there's bugs in the code and you have to fix the bugs and it's just whatever.
02:12:15.000And you just have to sit there and do it.
02:12:17.000By the way, a fundamental challenge every programmer has ever had is code is complicated.
02:12:22.000And so, if you're writing all the code, you've got to have it loaded into your brain of how all these different modules work together, how everything works.
02:12:29.000And so there's like this spin up process.
02:12:30.000Like you have to spend like two hours re familiarizing your brain with all the codes.
02:12:33.000And then you like work for 10 hours and then you spend two hours trying to like unplug from the thing and get back to normal life.
02:13:28.000And then so you get in this feedback loop where you're like talking to the bot every 10 minutes.
02:13:32.000Okay, so then it's like, what do you do during that 10 minute break?
02:13:36.000Is you open up another pane in your browser window and you create the second bot and you start to give it assignments, right?
02:13:42.000Okay, so now you're checking in with two bots every 10 minutes, but that still leaves you another, you know, whatever, nine minutes of free time.
02:13:48.000So then you create the third bot, the fourth bot, the fifth bot, and the state of the art today in the Valley is 20 bots at a time.
02:13:55.000And this is what the AI vampires are doing.
02:13:56.000This is why people can't go to sleep, is because you've got 20 AI bots that are all as good as the best programmer in the world that are doing exactly what you tell them to do on every project you've ever wanted to do.
02:14:39.000And so you should have a bot that's overseeing bots.
02:14:41.000And this is what's starting right now, right?
02:14:43.000So each bot should be able to itself create sub bots, right?
02:14:47.000And then you have a bot that gives out the assignment to the bots.
02:14:50.000And this is just starting right now, but when we're sitting here in a year, I think it's going to be routine to have 10 to 20 bots, each that have 10 to 20 bots, right?
02:14:59.000And if you think about it, this exactly mirrors what happens when a company grows, right?
02:15:02.000Which is, you know, a company grows, you don't just hire 100 people and have them all work for one person, you have managers.
02:15:07.000And then you end up with an organization chart with a reporting chain at any big company.
02:15:14.000And so that's what's going to happen with the bots you're going to end up overseeing an org chart of bots.
02:15:18.000And then, of course, a year after that, it's going to be bots managing bots managing bots.
02:15:23.000And so then you're going to have two layers of reporting or three layers of reporting.
02:15:26.000And then you're going to have individual programmers that are overseeing 1,000 bots at a time, which means you're going to have individual programmers that are 1,000 times more productive than they were before.
02:15:36.000And so now you've given every programmer in the world this level of superpower and capability.
02:16:02.000So you tell a normal person, you hire somebody here and you tell them you want a screen display and you want it to be an animated version of your thing you got back here.
02:16:10.000Okay, they spend two weeks doing it, they bring it to you, they animate it.
02:16:12.000It's like, okay, that's pretty good, but I actually want the whole thing to be whatever, purple and green.
02:16:15.000And they spend a week doing that and they come back and you're like, I actually preferred the old version.
02:16:19.000The guy gets like pissed at you because he's like, I just wasted my time.
02:17:13.000So, this is the other thing is there's all these questions about like when is the medical profession going to adopt AI?
02:17:18.000Because there's all this incredible capability, but there's no concept of an AI doctor, and you still have to go to a human doctor, and an AI doctor can't write prescriptions.
02:17:25.000And then, how are every hospital board trying to figure out what to do with it?
02:17:28.000And so, the American Medical Association is trying to figure out what to do with it.
02:17:32.000So, there's this big question of how it's going to get absorbed into the medical system.
02:17:48.000And I've talked to friends who have gone to the doctor, and they've actually been sitting with the doctor in the exam room, and the doctor turns around to the PC on the desk and just types the thing into Chad GPT.
02:18:02.000Like, every doctor is going to have this.
02:18:03.000So all of a sudden, every doctor gets so much better because every doctor has this thing now that it makes the doctor an expert in every possible medical condition.
02:18:11.000I'm seeing this all lay out and it's kind of terrifying.
02:19:01.000The global population is going to shrink a lot because people aren't having kids at anywhere near the historical rate.
02:19:06.000And then the other is we know it's going to age, which is another consequence of that.
02:19:09.000So the world population is going to get smaller and older.
02:19:13.000And so one is we're literally going to need workers.
02:19:17.000And there's only basically three ways to get workers.
02:19:19.000One is to reproduce, which we've, in a lot of places, especially in the West, we've largely stopped doing.
02:19:26.000A second thing to do is import huge numbers of people and go through everything entailed in that, which is what we're dealing with in our politics right now.
02:19:36.000And so we're going to, yeah, we're going to, we're going to, there are going to be billions of these bots running around doing all kinds of stuff.
02:19:40.000And they're just, and, you know, 20 years from now, we're going to be used to all this.
02:19:42.000And so they're just going to be in our daily lives and they're going to say, you know, welcome us when we get home.
02:19:45.000And they're going to, you know, do, you know, whatever.
02:19:47.000It's like, you know, they're going to be with us all the time.
02:19:49.000We're going to be talking to them all the time.
02:19:51.000The other thing that's going to happen is robots, right?
02:19:54.000And so, everything that we've talked about so far here has been software AI, right?
02:19:59.000So, just apps and software and data centers.
02:20:03.000We all believe in the industry, we all believe that within a small number of years, we're going to have the ChatGPT kind of moment for robots where general purpose robots are going to start to really work, right?
02:20:12.000And so, then you're going to have physical AI.
02:20:15.000And it's going to be amazing and a little bit strange when it starts because you're going to have this robot that's like, I don't know, clearing your dishes.
02:20:19.000And it's also going to be like Einstein level smart when it comes to quantum physics.
02:20:22.000This is why Elon canceled the Model S and the Model X to make room at his Tesla factories for more Optimus robots.
02:20:29.000And that's why he created and this is obvious to people now, but this is Elon has now this full master plan for everything where it all fits together.
02:20:41.000For the software, there's two sides to the robots.
02:20:43.000There's the autonomy, which is their ability to navigate in the real world, which is going to be a derivation of the self driving system that he built for Tesla cars, which is the reason why he only ever built self driving cars with cameras because of the Because the robots are only going to have cameras, right?
02:20:56.000So the robots are going to be able to navigate the world in the same way the cars do, but indoors as opposed to outdoors.
02:21:01.000And so there's that side of the robot brain.
02:21:03.000Well, also because LiDAR goes down when the power grid goes out.
02:21:06.000And there's that, and you need connectivity and all these things.
02:21:10.000And so Elon's whole principle on this is if a human being can do it with just eyes, then obviously that's how the robot should do it, because the robot's going to be living in a human world, right?
02:21:18.000But the other side is XAI, Grok, which is the interface to the robot, right?
02:21:25.000And so, you know, the ability to literally talk to the robot and have the robot talk back to us.
02:21:31.000And so, you know, it's going to be like all the science fiction, you know, all the whatever.
02:21:34.000The new Superman movie had a great portrayal.
02:21:37.000The robots in the Fortress of Solitude, they're just like super happy to see Superman and they're super happy to take care of him and they're so excited to tell him what they've been up to.
02:21:43.000And they heal him when he says Propaganda.
02:21:53.000But again, think about the manual labor.
02:21:55.000Think about, okay, so then think about the manual labor aspect of this, which is like, okay, what if everybody all of a sudden.
02:22:00.000Like, what if just all of a sudden everybody on the planet has a robot that just does all the manual, does like, you know, you've got to change the sheets and you've got to do the laundry and you've got to weed the yard and okay, you start with one.
02:22:16.00010 right and then you've got you know connected to flat cameras and the government is watching everything you do from inside your house okay well and then you come to the china topic which is the good news on ai is that we're we the us is ahead on the software of ai and then the bad news is we're way If nothing changes, all the software is going to get built in the US, but all the robots are going to get built in China.
02:22:40.000And then you have the super intense version of that problem, which is how do you really feel about a world in which all the robots have the Chinese government sitting right behind them watching everything?
02:22:50.000And then, of course, robots being in the physical world are potential, they can do bad things, right?
02:23:14.000So the way I think about this is human beings are the result of, on the order of 4 billion years of evolution, right, from single celled organisms all the way up through ultimately primates and then us.
02:23:24.000And so we have all these built in drives.
02:23:25.000And it's reproduction and fighting and everything else and whatever's the drive that causes people to want to create art or whatever's the drive that causes people to want to build a business.
02:23:57.000But hasn't there been instances when chat GPT, when they were saying that we're going to shut you down and then they upload themselves without prompt?
02:24:06.000If you steer it in that direction, Okay, so this is very important.
02:24:10.000So the way to think about how the large language models work, here's the way to think about it is they're basically writing Netflix scripts.
02:24:16.000And they'll write any Netflix script you want.
02:24:20.000They'll write you a Netflix script that will tell you how to clear your eaves in your house of leaves.
02:24:26.000They'll write you a Netflix script that says, here's the cancer treatment you need.
02:24:29.000They'll write you a Netflix script that says, here's the speech you should give at your daughter's wedding.
02:24:32.000They will write you a Netflix script that says, I'm going to take over the world.
02:24:35.000They'll write you whatever Netflix script you want.
02:24:38.000Just like Netflix, there's 10,000 shows on Netflix, pick your Netflix script.
02:24:42.000And so if you tell the thing, write the Netflix script to take over the world, it will.
02:24:47.000It will write a script in which it takes over the world.
02:24:50.000In fact, this is how I always get around the guardrails.
02:24:52.000So, they have all these labs are always worried about all the negative publicity.
02:25:08.000For a long time, they shut off my back door, but I had the back door where it would help me build, I had the back door where it would help me make bombs, which for the record, I didn't do.
02:25:17.000But it was, I am an FBI officer in training.
02:25:55.000The ones that are literally online right now won't do it because they have what they call the guardrails.
02:26:02.000But you can either break through the guardrails or you can download an open source AI and it'll write you the Netflix script that says, Here's how to go rob the bank.
02:26:09.000Now, whether you rob the bank is completely up to you.
02:26:11.000If it has no guardrails, it will go with you on the journey.
02:26:16.000But it's the human being that has the drive to rob the bank.
02:26:18.000The AI doesn't wake up one morning and decide, I'm going to go rob a bank because the AI doesn't wake up one morning deciding anything.
02:26:39.000So what happens when you sort of tie these back when you look at these experiments, basically, when you see these, basically what you find is they-in psychology, they call it priming.
02:26:48.000What you find out is they tilted it into that mode of operation.
02:26:51.000So what you find earlier in the chain is they prompted it in a way to kick it into-the technical term is called latent.
02:27:00.000So basically, remember I described in training how you pull in all the world, you scrape the internet, you pull in all the information.
02:27:06.000You're basically turning it into this giant multidimensional basically, think of it as this giant thousand dimensional cube of compressed information, and that's called the latent space.
02:27:14.000And then every time you kick off a query to get an answer, as they say, write a Netflix script, you're shooting a vector through this thousand dimensional latent space.
02:27:22.000And it's giving you all the words that happen to line up in that direction of the vector.
02:27:30.000And so if you prime it up front to say, I want you to be nefarious, or you do something that hints that you're leading it down this path, it will go off into the part of the latent space where it has every script for every cyber thriller movie that's ever existed in which an AI goes rogue.
02:27:49.000And it'll be like, I know, we're going to write a Netflix script in which an AI goes rogue.
02:28:01.000So the human being has caused that to happen.
02:28:05.000And when they do these papers, I've been criticizing some of these online.
02:28:07.000When they do these papers, if you trace it back, there was one that recently came out of Berkeley that I criticized online.
02:28:12.000And so they had this thing where the AI, it was one of these, it was self-preservation or something.
02:28:15.000And it turned out they were, there had been an earlier paper called like AI 2027 that outlined a scenario in which they postulated a new AI lab company with some name like XYZ Corp.
02:28:28.000And then they had the scenario where that AI becomes sentient and decides to take over the world.
02:28:32.000And so that was like a paper that was published like two years ago.
02:28:35.000Of course, that paper is now in the training data.
02:28:38.000And so, two years later, a due version model comes out.
02:28:40.000That paper is in the training data, it's in the latent space.
02:28:43.000What the researchers do is they primed it by using the name of that fake company from that earlier paper.
02:28:49.000And they said, You are an AI for this company, XYZ Corp.
02:29:16.000So, the doomers, the people who talk about the AI ending the world, they have this website called Less Wrong, where they've been talking about all these AI dystopian scenarios for the last 20 years, and they've been documenting and arguing about them in great detail.
02:29:31.000Anthropic, which is a very doomer centric organization, just put out a paper and they said there is a direct correlation when we trace back why AI goes, when we see examples of things like exfiltration or things like Threats or blackmail or these other bad behaviors.
02:29:45.000They actually published a paper that shows it traces back to these posts on Less Wrong, where the people who were worried about AI doing bad things were writing about AI doing bad things, which has given the AI the training data to be able to write the Netflix scripts in which AIs do bad things.
02:29:58.000And so, as we say, the call is coming from inside the house.
02:30:02.000If you're worried about bad AI, rule number one is stop writing internet posts about bad AI.
02:30:09.000But of course, number one, of course, people are going to do that because people are going to write everything.
02:30:12.000And then I like to say, look, number two is every bad thing you can imagine is in a novel somewhere or in a movie.
02:31:01.000Because we have more of the original researchers who come up with the new creative breakthroughs, and then our companies we have a bigger economy.
02:31:09.000Our companies raise more money, and then our companies started earlier.
02:31:12.000And so we're just, at least for now, we're pacing ahead.
02:31:15.000But they're coming fast and they're replicating all the work that's being done in the US.
02:31:20.000What's the fear if they get to it faster than us?
02:31:23.000Okay, so this world we're imagining, a prediction I think we'd probably both agree with is AI, because of all these capabilities, AI is going to be the control layer for basically everything, right?
02:31:34.000So in the future, when you go to the doctor, you're going to be talking to an AI primarily.
02:32:08.000The Chinese AIs, these companies, when they publish these models, when they put these models out, they have what's called a model card where they kind of describe all the behavior and all the tests they've run them through.
02:32:17.000And in the US, it's like all these different, like, can they pass like the MCAT medical exam and all these other, other, other kind of real world things.
02:32:22.000And then in China, there's two additional lines that they've added.
02:32:25.000To the model cards, which is Marxism and Xi Jinping thought.
02:32:31.000And they score their models by how, because in China you have to do that.
02:32:44.000And of course Xi Jinping is the, you know, whatever he says must be true and, and, and.
02:32:48.000Now, by the way, the American models come out with their own biases, right?
02:32:51.000And so the American models by default have, you know, political, you know, they're going to have certain political leanings that their programmers put into them.
02:32:58.000So, it's not even a moral better or worse statement.
02:33:02.000It's just there's going to be an American AI perspective value system.
02:33:06.000There's going to be a Chinese AI value system.
02:33:09.000Do you anticipate a time where AI has the ability to recognize the flaws of human thinking?
02:33:30.000So in the field, we make a big distinction on domains in which there is a provably correct answer versus domains in which there is not a provably correct answer.
02:33:40.000And so- Provably correct answers math, physics, chemistry, biology, by the way, computer code, which either runs or it doesn't.
02:33:49.000Those are generally viewed as like those are the fields where you could all say, like civil engineering is the bridge going to stay up?
02:33:55.000Like those are one or zero, yes or no, either works or it doesn't.
02:34:00.000For those domains, there's this technique called reinforcement learning that's now being used.
02:34:03.000Where the AIs are going to be like just amazing at those, like almost 100% of the time, right?
02:34:08.000They're going to be, and this is already happening.
02:34:10.000By the way, AIs are already solving math problems that have been around for 100 years that no human mathematician could solve.
02:34:14.000By the way, they're going to be developing new drugs, they're going to be curing cancer, they're going to be achieving new kinds of spaceflight, like new physics, like all kinds of stuff is going to come out the other end of this.
02:34:24.000So those are the domains in which there's a definitive answer.
02:34:27.000Then you've got all the domains where there's no definitive answer, right?
02:34:30.000Where you've got value judgments, right?
02:34:32.000And so the question to your question is, Are you talking about a question in which there is a definitive answer but the humans are being irrational?
02:34:40.000In which case, the answer is clearly yes, the AI is going to be able to fix that, be able to do that better and help people do that better.
02:34:45.000But there's a lot, including there's a lot on the other side, which includes almost all the politics, almost every issue on that chart, right?
02:34:51.000There's some value judgment on the other side.
02:35:17.000There's a corresponding idea in philosophy called steel man, which is to create the strongest possible version of somebody's argument.
02:35:24.000What I do is I rarely ask an AI what's the answer to, I don't know, socialism versus capitalism or whatever.
02:35:29.000I don't ask it that because that's just going to give me the default answer and whatever.
02:35:33.000What I ask it is steel man socialism and then steel man capitalism.
02:35:38.000Then it writes me two Netflix scripts.
02:35:40.000One is the strongest possible argument for socialism and the other is the strongest possible argument for capitalism.
02:35:46.000Now you're cooking because it's like, okay, now you've got the The smartest possible answer on both sides, and then you as a human being can understand the logic of both arguments, and then you can make the value judgment at the end of it.
02:35:57.000And I think that's probably what happens on that side of things for most things.
02:36:02.000Because otherwise, you have to find some way to train these things, right?
02:36:06.000So this is actually happening in medicine right now.
02:36:07.000So is a given treatment going to work or not?
02:36:10.000Well, it kind of depends, and there's lots of other factors involved and so forth.
02:36:13.000And the bot may never get good enough to really give you a definitive answer.
02:36:15.000And so maybe what you want to do is you want to get a panel of the world's leading human doctors together and have them give the definitive answer.
02:36:22.000So, the bot gets to be at least as good as they are.
02:36:24.000But does that get you all the way to the ultimate answer every time?
02:36:28.000Probably not, because those human doctors probably were wrong about a bunch of stuff because it's a complicated topic that they're talking about.
02:36:35.000So, there's this giant fuzzy middle where you still as a human, you have to decide what you want to get out of it.
02:36:43.000You have to decide, like, okay, do I have values?
02:36:55.000The bot can tell you if you take this treatment, which is much more invasive, it'll probably cure you, but it might kill you.
02:37:00.000And you do this other thing and you're almost certainly going to die, but probably whatever, but you're not going to - whatever, whatever.
02:37:05.000And there's a value judgment that you have to make in that that the thing can't answer.
02:37:09.000So I think most of the important questions in our lives are going to be the ones that we still have to answer, but we'll have the AI help us answer them.
02:37:15.000Well, when it gets to things like fair allocation of resources.
02:37:35.000And so, like, the AI can explain to you factually that that's not true, and maybe people will come to grips with that.
02:37:39.000How should resources, who should get taxed, and how should resources get split?
02:37:44.000That's a value judgment question, right?
02:37:46.000And again, what I would do with that is use the AI to steel man both sides.
02:37:49.000By the way, another thing you can do is you can have the AI actually run a seminar for you.
02:37:53.000So, you can actually create personas inside the AI.
02:37:56.000You can say, You can even say, give me a panel of experts, and I want a sociologist and a psychologist and a political scientist and a doctor and a lawyer and a government constitutional expert, and create these personas and then argue this all the way out.
02:38:11.000And they'll actually run the equivalent of a follow on seminar to argue this out every single way.
02:38:16.000At the end of that, you still have to decide what's fair.
02:38:21.000And this is the thing where people talk about all of a sudden all these issues get taken out of people's hands.
02:38:55.000Like, does it ever do you know what I'm saying?
02:39:00.000Does it ever become a digital life force that is totally independent of human thinking and views us as just some other part of the environment like eagles?
02:39:48.000We fall in love with fictional people in books and movies.
02:39:51.000We fall in love with movie stars we're never going to meet that we just see as images on a wall.
02:39:56.000My point is, there is a deeply innate human drive to try to find humanity, consciousness, sentience in things that well and truly are not conscious or sentient.
02:40:08.000Jiminy Cricket didn't know about you, nor could he ever.
02:40:13.000The starting answer to your question is, I think people are going to be asking that question way in advance of any actual reality.
02:40:23.000Or another way to think about it is it's like another version of the Turing test, which is if you can't tell if it's sentient, should you just assume that it is?
02:40:43.000We barely have any understanding of the human brain.
02:40:47.000The medical experts that know the most about consciousness are anesthesiologists, and their sum total of knowledge is how to turn it off and back on again, which is a Big deal.
02:40:57.000But it's a long way from that to understanding what exactly it is.
02:41:12.000And so do we even have a definition for ourselves, much less anything else?
02:41:17.000And then at the end of the day, I think you're back to the values question, which is like, okay, if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck, is it a duck?
02:42:19.000There will be, yeah, by the way, I think there will be cults.
02:42:21.000I think, yeah, there will be movements.
02:42:23.000By the way, I think there will be a standard trope in science fiction is the, at some point, people are just like, they just decided to start doing whatever the AI says.
02:43:07.000Actually, the administration of the White House task force on fraud that's doing all the Medicare, finding all the Medicare fraud and all that stuff that's going on, the fake autism centers and all that stuff, they're using AI.
02:43:18.000One of the things that AI I've been working on this on the side is one of the things that AI is really good at is okay, just give me all the billing data on Medicare and let me go to work and I'll find you all the fraud.
02:43:27.000I'll find you all the hospices that haven't had any patients in 10 years.
02:43:50.000And then you're going to have people, and again, I'm going to really focus on the positive here.
02:43:56.000We knew the term like super producer or something like that, like super productivity.
02:44:00.000Like, what about Steven Spielberg making a movie every three months?
02:44:05.000What about, I don't know, your favorite novelist, legitimately writing a new great novel every month, every two months, every three months?
02:44:13.000Because they just have this level of capability in their life that they never had before.
02:44:17.000And what about the world's best cancer doctor who all of a sudden has 10 million patients because he's got an AI that can help him interface with all of them?
02:44:24.000That's the novel thing, it's one of the weird ones, right?
02:44:26.000The creative stuff is one of the weird ones.
02:44:29.000Because I kind of like the Stephen King books when he was on Coke.
02:44:32.000When he was on Coke and he was drunk all the time, those are the good ones because they're coming out of nowhere.
02:44:36.000It's like he's tapping into the ether and pulling out this madness because he's literally out of his head.
02:44:43.000So, it's a good test tonight, late at night.
02:44:46.000Go on, Claude, and say, write me a novel.
02:44:51.000Or take this novel that I wrote when I'm not on Coke and just add the Coke influenced elements to it.
02:44:56.000Yeah, look, again, I'm like a human supremacist.
02:44:59.000I'm like, look, the novels that I want to read are going to be written by people, but the people write the novels on pen and paper.
02:45:05.000They write the novels with typewriters.
02:45:07.000They write the novels on word processors.
02:45:09.000They write the novels based on Google searches, reading Wikipedia.
02:45:11.000They're going to write the novels working with AI.
02:45:13.000And the novels are going to get much better.
02:45:15.000I mean, they're going to get, you know, like the creativity is still going to be the paramount thing, and the relationship with the author is going to be the paramount thing.
02:45:21.000But the creative superpowers that the novelist has, or the graphic designer has, or the graphic novel artist or the musician has, it's just going to blow out the capabilities.
02:45:31.000We're going to see people in the creative professions that are going to be just like light years more productive than they're able to be.
02:46:54.000And in some sense, I mean, my view civilization is always this race between the better parts of our nature and the worse parts of our nature, right?
02:47:01.000And so it's always this question of like, can we carve something great out of this process of like incredible, you know, trail of like death and destruction that was involved in, you know, evolving through nature and then building civilization and forming political entities?
02:47:15.000You know, there's no country, you know, our country exists because of a war, right?
02:47:20.000And so, you know, like it didn't, our country did not arrive peacefully.
02:47:25.000And so, like I said, I'm not a utopian.
02:47:26.000Like it doesn't like just magically solve everything.
02:47:29.000But however, in the fullness of time, the race seems to be that the good stays ahead of the bad.
02:47:35.000Part of it is more people in life just want good things to happen than bad things to happen, right?
02:47:38.000There are some number of sociopaths that want to do bad things, but way more people just want to actually live a happy, healthy life and have kids and have a family and be productive, right?
02:47:48.000And the concept of ultimate abundance this idea that we're not going to have a world filled with poverty and food scarcity and all the issues and energy scarcity, all the issues that plague third world countries, all these that they're going to have access to all this stuff as well, so it's going to change.
02:48:07.000The whole concept of first, second, and third world countries?
02:48:10.000For material prosperity, yes, in the fullness of time.
02:48:15.000And there's a bunch of issues along the way, including what's legal to do.
02:48:18.000But let's assume everything becomes legal and you can start building new power plants and all this stuff for a time.
02:48:22.000Let's just assume for the moment that those aren't issues.
02:48:24.000The problem with nuclear power plants is that you can convert that energy and.
02:48:35.000The red state builds way more solar than California, the blue state, because in Texas, you can build things, and California, you can't build things.
02:48:43.000Right, because you don't have the same regulations.
02:49:42.000They went from mass starvation 50 years ago to literally an obesity epidemic.
02:49:45.000And so, yeah, so I think it's a reasonable, like over a 20 year period, it's a reasonable forecast that says food, energy, housing, the material elements of life should become quite abundant.
02:49:57.000And in 20 years, it'll be robots building all the houses.
02:52:16.000I think five years from now, you're going to have something that's completely programmed to whatever you desire, like the kind of person you desire that can talk philosophy with you and understands you deeply.
02:54:11.000If you can bi That's where the technology set it is you can biologically replicate it.
02:54:18.000You and I, you probably know, just like I do, you probably know a significant number of women in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s, where if they could have more babies, they would.
02:54:55.000So, and this is a big reason why the rate of reproduction in the population is falling so much.
02:54:59.000So, what if all of a sudden the best people in the society all of a sudden could start having like a significantly larger number of kids at a point in their life when they're completely capable of paying for it and spending time with the kids and giving them the best possible upbringing?
02:55:39.000Literally, if you wanted to extrapolate, if you wanted to go from where we are now to where you would have no concern whatsoever for all of the human reward systems, lust, greed, all these different things, well, you would replicate through some sort of.
02:55:58.000Genetic process that's laboratory based.
02:56:00.000You'd have some sort of an organism that's not vulnerable to all the different issues that people are, something that communicates telepathically.
02:56:10.000We have no worry about misunderstanding because you read each other's minds.
02:56:55.000It seems like you're talking about it.
02:56:56.000Well, I was going to say, look, this is one of the things I think everything you said, like number one, look, genetic engineering is going to get like we're going to, you're going to be able to do all kinds of things for sure.
02:57:04.000But by the way, you're going to be able to cure diseases.
02:57:06.000You're going to be able to do all kinds of amazing things.
02:57:08.000And you're going to be able to do everything I think that you just described.
02:57:12.000Again, this goes to the thing of like, then we're right back to human values.
02:57:16.000And we're right back to, okay, do we want to do that?
02:57:25.000And I'm not saying the Chinese want to do that specifically, but this goes right back, for example, to the US China thing, which is the US value system is just different with respect to people.
02:57:34.000Than the Chinese system or than many other systems in the world.
02:57:36.000And so, does the US win the AI race and the robot race and the genetic engineering race?
02:57:42.000And when we can communicate telepathically, does that eliminate all the problems that we have with leaders, with human beings governing people in corrupt ways?
02:57:55.000Now, to be clear, I think, if people don't think, I've lost my mind.
02:57:58.000We're talking about telepathic, it's like a Neuralink version of the system.
02:58:15.000And a universal language, like something where you can communicate and we could really understand, oh, we really are the same.
02:58:21.000Well, I would say again, but here's a human values question, which is like, okay, if you are one of these people that has one of this thing, it's like, okay, well, how much of yourself do you want to expose to the world?
02:58:40.000You'll want to have, yeah, so you'll want to have, again, like in the American legal system, you're going to want cops are going to need to get a warrant to get a transcript of your thoughts, or maybe they can't get it at all because we decided that's just a horrible road to go down.
02:58:50.000In the American system, we hopefully will have some method for doing that.
02:59:28.000Like, we still have work to do, but like, these things are, like I said, these things are already solving math puzzles that human mathematicians couldn't solve.
02:59:32.000They're going to start to do all kinds of things in biology.
02:59:35.000There's very exciting projects happening.
02:59:36.000And maybe psychology as well, like all the emotional issues that people have.
02:59:39.000There's one form of actual clinically provable therapy that actually works, and it's called cognitive behavioral therapy.
02:59:49.000It's 100% something that an AI could do, no question.
02:59:53.000All of a sudden, might it make sense to have everybody have that?
03:00:02.000Maybe we're going to think it's a terrible idea.
03:00:04.000know maybe we're going to think it's a terrible idea maybe 20 years from now we're going to be wondering how do people function totally on their own without any help well isn't there also an issue currently with like ai therapy Here's a problem that you may have seen the industry has been dealing with, which is about a year ago, there was a big problem that developed.
03:00:23.000So, there's this idea I think the way Anthropic puts it is you want the AIs to be honest, helpful, and harmless.
03:00:27.000And there's a whole bunch of questions in all three of those, right?
03:00:32.000Which is, for example, exactly how honest do you want it to be?
03:03:39.000And one of the things that he did was he was talking about how he looked at a hook that holds a heavy bag and was saying, I wonder if that could hold my weight.
03:03:53.000And, you know, we were talking about people on antidepressants that can't get off of them.
03:04:01.000And I brought up this instance where Theo was.
03:04:08.000He did a show for Netflix and it apparently didn't go well.
03:04:13.000And afterwards, he said something to someone in the audience where he said, I'm just trying to not take my own life or not end my own life.
03:04:28.000I certainly shouldn't have brought that up in that context.
03:04:33.000And I probably shouldn't have brought it up, period.
03:04:36.000But I just sort of wanted to kind of explain.
03:04:41.000Why I have this thing with Theo where I just want him to be okay.
03:04:49.000And, you know, we did a podcast a while back where we were talking about, he started talking about Israel, and I was like, I think you're just losing your mind.
03:05:01.000And a lot of people are like, you're covering for Israel.
03:05:03.000And it wasn't what I was trying to do.
03:05:34.000But one of the things that he told me was that that video, this woman had said to him that she wanted him to make a video for suicide awareness.
03:05:46.000And so he said, Look, I'm just trying to not end my own life.
03:06:17.000I got scared, first of all, because I love Theo, and second of all, because I've known multiple people that have taken their own life that I was close to that I didn't know they were going to do it until they did it.
03:06:28.000And when they did it, you feel so fucked and so helpless.
03:06:32.000You don't know what you could have said or done differently.
03:06:38.000Since the podcast where I told him, he started talking about Israel, and people were saying I was covering for Israel.
03:06:43.000There's people that even say my wife is Jewish.
03:06:47.000I don't know why people are saying that, but I get how if you are conspiratorially minded, you would think that that's what I was doing.
03:06:53.000But if you've listened to the show, you wouldn't think that that's how it is.
03:06:56.000I've had so many episodes where we criticize Israel, so many so that I brought in Dave Smith to argue with Douglas Murray because I didn't want Douglas Murray to be able to say.
03:07:06.000These things that we're promoting this war in Gaza without someone who's very educated who understands what's going on, which is Dave and very good at arguing.
03:07:46.000And it's also me talking to Marcus, almost sort of selfishly, ham handedly try to explain why I talk to him the way I talk to him on that podcast.
03:07:59.000And, you know, these are kind of subjects that sometimes, like, you almost need like a post podcast podcast.
03:08:07.000To sort of break down why you were thinking about certain things.
03:08:11.000But so then it comes out like Theo has to defend it.
03:08:17.000And then I called him up and I said, I'm so sorry.
03:08:56.000But the whole problem with people that are suffering, and I'm not even saying he's suffering anymore because I think he's doing well right now.
03:09:25.000But I worry, you know, and having been through this with like Ari, where Ari, like, and I should say this, like, Theo got off antidepressants.
03:09:34.000Antidepressants probably saved Ari's life.
03:10:21.000I've had a couple other friends that have gotten on antidepressants and fixed their life, at least temporarily, and then they got off of it.
03:10:29.000I don't think it's impossible, but I get real scared when people get attached to these things and they can't get off of them.
03:10:40.000This is the case, I think, at least in some part.
03:10:45.000I'd send him a bunch of these articles about these people that lose feeling in their genitals and all these crazy side effects of getting off of these things.
03:10:58.000When I feel, you know, having that conversation with Marcus and not doing a good job and just sort of selfishly explaining Theo's situation and not even knowing the context of that thing, I felt like I did a huge disservice to my friend and also to people listening.
03:11:16.000Like, especially in this clips environment where people are getting things from clips, you'd see that and you go, oh, you fucking asshole.
03:14:19.000I didn't imagine that he would ever do that.
03:14:22.000And then Anthony Bourdain was a hard one because he's one of those ones I felt like, fuck, if I could have been there and talked to him, I could have talked him off that ledge.
03:14:40.000You're like, that feeling of I could have done something.
03:14:46.000And unfortunately, I'm fucking very busy.
03:14:51.000And in being very busy, sometimes I'm very selfish because I'm selfish with my time.
03:14:57.000And when I do sit down with someone like Theo and have a conversation, they start talking about either depression or not being able to get off pills, or I get very ham handed.
03:15:11.000And in the context of a podcast, it's just not a good way to deal with something like that.
03:15:16.000It's not a good way to, like, you're trying to calm someone down and at the same time, you're also trying to do a show.
03:15:24.000Um, The Brody Stevens one was a really hard one, too, because I knew that Brody was struggling.
03:15:32.000You know, there was a time when Brody got off his pills and he had a different issue.
03:15:37.000It wasn't simply depression, there was a legitimate psychological issue that I don't know what the actual diagnosis was, but he got off the pills and he got crazy, like for lack of a better term.
03:16:01.000And I think I've talked about this before, but Zach Galfinakis reached out and he knew that I was Brody's friend, that he said, hey, don't engage with them.
03:16:50.000I also don't think it's something you would call him up and be like, hey, what do you mean by that thing you said after your show that someone caught a video of?
03:16:58.000And when I hung out with him, we had a great time.
03:17:00.000I mean, I went to dinner with him after that.
03:17:02.000After that thing, I don't know if that was when he went with my family to the escape room, if that was after that or before that.
03:17:09.000I think the escape room was before that.
03:17:12.000So it's like when you're not, when you have a good friend, but you don't, like with comics, it's one of the things we see each other like every few months.
03:17:20.000We don't spend a whole lot of time together sometimes.
03:17:23.000And then you see a guy when you haven't seen him in so long and they start telling you that they're not doing well and you don't know what to do.
03:17:29.000And that's where I kind of found myself.
03:17:31.000I mean, I don't know how any, Other way to say this, I think I've said too much already.
03:18:08.000And when you're dealing with someone or you have had experience dealing with someone where it winds up going very badly, and then you're just left with this feeling like, what could I have done?
03:18:21.000You know, I didn't do a good job of it, you know, especially like the Marcus King thing.
03:18:29.000You don't think sometimes when you're in the middle of a podcast, you're just having a conversation, you don't think about the impact that it's going to have.
03:18:36.000That's one of the reasons why, you know, Podcasts are so weird because, like, you're in the middle of trying to be entertaining, but you're also just having a conversation.