#2190 - Peter Thiel

The Joe Rogan Experience by Joe Rogan Park Gas by Night All Day Good to see you. Glad to be on the show. My pleasure. Thanks for having me. My pleasure. What's cracking? How you doing? Doing all right? We're just talking about how you're still trapped in LA. I'm still trapped in LA. I know. It's... Your friends are a lot of people out here. Have you thought about jettison? I talk about it all the time. It's always talk is often

a substitute for action. It's always does it mean to action or does it end up substituting for action? That's a good point. But I have endless conversations about leaving. And moved from San Francisco to LA back in 2018 that felt about as big a move away as possible. And I keep... The extreme thing I keep saying. And you're going to have to keep my talk is a substitute for action. The extreme thing I keep saying is I can't decide whether

to leave the state or the country. Oh boy. And... You know... It went out of the country where would you go? Man, I've... It's tough to find places because there are a lot of problems in the U.S. and most places are doing so much worse. Yeah. So it's not a good move to leave here. But... Fuck that business place is. But I keep thinking I shouldn't move twice. So I can't decide whether I should move to Florida or should move to... You know... New Zealand or Costa Rica or something like that.

Yeah. Yeah. Go full John McAfee. And so I can't decide between those two so I end up stuck in California. Well Australia is okay but they're even worse when it comes to rule of law and what they decide to make you do and do either crack it down on people now for online speech. And it's very sketchy in other countries. It's... But somehow the relative out performance of the U.S. and the absolute stagnation

decline of the U.S. They're actually related things because the way the conversations grouped every time I say, tell someone, you know, I'm thinking about leaving the country, they'll do what you say and they'll say, well, every place is worse. And then that's somehow distracts us from all the problems in this country. And then we can't talk about what's what's gone wrong in the U.S. because you know everything is everything's so much

worse. You know. Well I think most people know what's gone wrong. But they don't know if they're on the side of the government that's currently in power, they don't know how to criticize it. They don't know exactly what to say what should be done. Right. And they're ideologically connected to this group being correct. Right. So they try to do mental gymnastics to try to support some of the things that are going on. I think that's part of the problem. I don't think it's necessarily that we don't

know what the problems are. We know what the problems are. But we don't have clear solutions as to how to fix them. Nor do we understand the real mechanisms of how they got there in the first place. Yeah. I mean, there are a lot that are pretty obvious to articulate. And they're much easier described than soft. Like we have a crazy, crazy budget deficit. Yeah. And presumably you have to do one of three things. You have

to raise taxes a lot. You have to cut spending a lot. Or you're just going to keep borrowing money. Isn't there like some enormous amount of our taxes that just go to the deficit? It's not it's not that high, but it's gone up a lot. And what is it? What is it? I thought it was like, you know, it peaked at three point. I want to say it peaked at 3.1% of GDP, which is, you know, maybe 15, 20% of the budget, peaked at 3.1% of GDP in 1991. And then

it went all the way down to something like one and a half percent in the mid 2010s. And now it's crept back up to 3.1, 3.2%. And so we are at all time highs as a percentage of GDP. And the way to understand that the basic math is the debt went up a crazy amount, but the interest rates went down. And from, you know, 2008 to 2021 for 13 years, we basically had zero interest rates with one brief blip under Powell, but it was basically zero rates.

And then you could have borrower way more money. And it wouldn't show up in servicing the debt because you just paid zero percent interest on the T-bills. And the thing that's very dangerous, seeming to me about the current fiscal situation, is the interest rates have gone back to positive, like they were in the 90s and early 2000s, mid 2000s. And it's

just this incredibly large debt. And so we now have a real runaway deficit problem. But, you know, people have been talking about this for 40 years and crying wolf for 40 years. So it's very hard for people to take it seriously. Most people don't even understand what it means. Like when you say there's a deficit, we owe money. Okay, to who? How's that work? It's, well, it's to, yeah, it's people who bought the bonds. And it's, you know, a lot

of it's to Americans. Some of them are held by the Federal Reserve, decent amount are held by foreigners at this point because it's in some ways it's the opposite of the trade current account deficits. The US has been running these big current account deficits. And then the foreigners end up with way more dollars than they want to spend on American goods or services. And so they have to reinvest them in the US. You know, some put it into

houses or stocks, but a lot of it just goes into government debt. So in some ways it's a function of the of the chronic trade and balances, chronic trade deficits. Well, if you had supreme power, if Peter Taylor was a ruler of the world and you could fix this, what would you do? Man, I always find, I always find that hypothetical. It's, it's a ridiculous hypothetical. It is ridiculous hypotheticals. You get ridiculous answers.

I want a ridiculous answer. That's what I like. But what could be done? Like what could be done? First of all, what could be done to mitigate it? And what could be done to solve it? You know, I think, I think my, I think my answers are probably all in the, in the, you know, in the, in the very libertarian direction. So I, it would be sort of figure out ways to have smaller governments, figure out ways, you know, you know, to increase the age on social security, means test social

security. So not everyone gets it. Just figure out ways to, to gradually dial back, you know, a lot of these government benefits. And then that's, you know, that's insanely unpopular. So it's completely unrealistic on that level. That bothers people that need social security. Like I said, means tested, means tested. So people who don't need it, don't get it. Right. So social security, like you, you know, you're very wealthy. I don't even know how

it works. Do you still get it? Yeah. Basically anyone who pretty much everyone gets it because it was originally, um, rationalized as a, as a, um, as sort of a pension system, not as a welfare system. And so the, the fiction was you pay social security taxes and then, um, you're entitled to get a pension out in the form of social security. Right. And, um, and because it was, uh, we told this fiction that it was a form of, uh, the pension system

instead of an intergenerational Ponzi scheme or something, something like that. Um, you know, the fiction means everybody gets paid social security because it's a pension system. Whereas if we were more honest and said it's, you know, it's just a welfare system. Maybe you could, you could start dialing, uh, you could, you could probably rationalize in a lot of ways. And it's, it's not related to how much you put into it. Right. Like how does

social security work in terms of it? It's partially, I think it's partially related. So I think there is, uh, I'm not a total expert on this stuff, but, uh, I think, um, I think there's some guaranteed minimum you get. And then, um, and then, and then if you put more in, you get somewhat more and then it's, it's capped at a certain amount. And, and that's why that's why that's why social security taxes are capped. It's something like, you

know, $150,000 a year. And then this is, you know, this is one of the, this is one of the really big tax increase proposals that's out there is to, is to uncap it, which would effectively be a 12.4% income tax hike, you know, all your income, adjust to social security. Sure. Because, uh, the, the argument is the argument, the, the, the sort of progressive left Democrat argument is that, uh, is that it's, you know, why should you have a regressive

social security tax? Why should you pay 12.4% or whatever the social security tax is? Half, it's paid by, by you, half gets paid by your employer. But then it, it's, it's capped at like $140, $150,000, some, some level like that. And why should be regressive, where if you make 500K or a million K a year, you pay zero tax on your marginal income. Mmm.

And that makes no sense if it's a welfare program. If it's a, if it's a retirement savings program and your, your payouts capped, then, you know, if you don't need to put in more than you get out, well, that's logical. But there's not a lot of logic going on with the way people are talking about taxes today. Like California just jacked their taxes up to 14. What was it? 14 for something like that? Yeah. 14.3, I think, which is maybe more, yeah,

49 something. Yeah. I mean, you want more money for doing a terrible job and having more people leave for the first time ever in like the history of the state. Yeah. But it, look, it gets away with it. I know. And so people are forced with no choice. What are you going to do? It is, it is, I mean, I mean, there are people at the margins who leave, but, but

the state government still collects more and more in revenues. So it's, you know, you get, I don't know, you get 10% more revenues and 5% of the people leave, you still, you still increase the amount of revenues you're getting. It's, it's, it's, it's, it's inelastic enough that you're actually able to increase the revenues. I mean, this is sort of the, the crazy thing about California is, you know, there's always sort of a right wing or libertarian critique

of California that, you know, it's, it's such a ridiculous place. It should, it should just collapse under its own ridiculousness. And it doesn't quite happen, you know, the macroeconomics on it are, are pretty good. You know, 40 million people, the GDP's around 4 trillion. It's about the same as Germany with 80 million or Japan with 125 million. Japan has three times the population of California, same GDP means one third, the per capita GDP.

So there's some level on which, you know, California as a whole is working, even though it doesn't work from a governance point of view, it doesn't work for a lot of the people who live there. And the rough model I have for how to think of California is that it's kind of like Saudi Arabia. And you have a crazy religion, wokeism in California, wahabism in Saudi Arabia, you know, not that many people believe it, but it, it distorts everything.

And then, and then you have like oil fields in Saudi Arabia and you have the big tech companies in California and the oil pays for everything. And then you have a completely bloated, inefficient government sector and you have sort of all sorts of distortions in the real estate market where people also make lots of money in sort of the government and real estate or ways you redistribute the oil wealth or the, you know, the big tech,

the big tech money in California. And it's like it's not the way you might want to design a system from scratch, but it's pretty stable. And people have been saying Saudi Arabia is ridiculous. It's going to collapse any year now. They've been saying that for 40 or 50 years, but, you know, if you have a giant oil field, you can pay for a lot of ridiculousness. I think that's the way to, that's the way you have to think of California.

Well, the other thing is, you're also, there's things about it that are ridiculous, but there's something about it that, you know, it, it doesn't naturally self-destruct overnight. Well, there's a lot of kick-ass people there and there's a lot of people that are still generating enormous amounts of wealth there. And it's too difficult to just pack up and leave. I think it's something like four of the eight or nine companies with market

capitalizations over a trillion dollars are based in California. So that's amazing. It's Google, Apple, now Nvidia, Meta. I think, I think Broadcom is close to that. And there's no ideal place to live either. It's not like California sucks. So there's a place that's got it totally dialed in with also the, has an enormous GDP, also has an enormous population. There's not like one big city that's really dialed in. Well, it's, there are, there are

things that, that work. So I looked, I looked at all the zero tax states in the US and, and it's always, you don't, I think the way you ask the question gets at it, which is, you don't live in a, you know, in theory, a lot of stuff happens on a state level, but you don't live in a state, you live in a city. And so, if you're somewhat biased towards living in at least a moderately sized city, okay, I can, there are, I think there are

four states where there are no cities, Alaska, Wyoming, South Dakota, New Hampshire. There's zero tax, but no cities to speak up. And then you have, then you have Washington state with Seattle, where the weather is the worst in the country. You have Nevada with Las Vegas, which I'm not that big a fan of. And then that leaves three, three zero tax states. You have Texas, which I like as a state that I'm not that big a fan of Austin, Dallas, or

Houston. And I, you know, it's a sort of, Houston, it's just sort of an oil town, which is good if you're in that business, but otherwise not. Dallas has sort of an inferior already complex to LA in New York, you know, just not not the healthiest attitude. And then, you know, I don't know, Austin's a government town and a college town and a want to be hipster San Francisco

town. So, you know, my, my books are three strikes and you're, you're kind of out too. And then that leaves, that leaves Nashville, Tennessee, which was, and then, or Miami, South Florida. And those, those would be my two top choices. Miami's fun, but I wouldn't want to live there. It's a fun place to visit. It's a little too crazy, a little too chaotic,

a little too cocaine fueled, a little too party, party, party. I think it's, I think it's pretty, I think it's pretty segmented from the tourist, the tourist strip from everything else. It probably is, you know, there probably is something a little bit paradoxical about

any place that gets lots of tourists. Where, you know, it's, it's, it's in some sense of a, there's some things that are great about it because so many tourists go, but then in some sense, it's, it creates a weird aesthetic because the, you know, the day-to-day vibe is that you don't, you don't work and you're just having fun or something like that. Right. Because so many people are going just to do that. And that's, that's probably a little bit off with the South Florida, the South Florida

thing. But, but I think it's, and then I think, and then I think Nashville is, is also sort of its own real place. Nashville is great. Yeah. So those would be my, those are the top two. I, I could live in Nashville. No problem. Yeah. I'm probably always, I'm always, I'm always two, you know, fifth grade onwards since, you know, 70, 77, I lived in California. And, and, and so I'm just a sucker for the weather.

And I think there is no place besides coastal California where you have really good weather year round in the US. Maybe, maybe Hawaii is pretty good. Coastal California is tough to beat. And, and you're two hours from the mountains. And man, it's like, you know, it's mid August here in Austin. This is just, it's just brutal. Is it? I, I think so. Really? That was too hot for you. It was too hot today. It's mild.

I, well, what is it out there? Like 80? All right. 85. 96. 96. I didn't so much sauna that I literally don't even notice it. I'm outside for hours every day shooting arrows. And I don't even notice it. Well, that's a, I don't know if you're a representative of the average Austin president. I don't know, but I think you get accustomed to it. To me, it's so much better than too cold. Too cold you can die. And I know you can die from the

heat, but you probably won't, especially if you have water. You'll be okay. But you could die from the cold. Cold's real. So really cold places. There's five months out of the year where your life's in danger, where you could do something wrong. Like if you live in Wyoming and you break down somewhere and there's no one on the road, you could die out

there. That's real. You could die from exposure. Sure. There's probably some very deep reason there's been a net migration of people to the west and the south and the US over a lot of time. As long as the earth doesn't move, you're good. As long as there's no tsunamis, you're good. It is a perfect environment virtually year round. It gets a little hot in the summer. But again, coastal, not at all. If you get an 80 degree day in Malbo, it's unusual.

That's wonderful. You got a beautiful breeze coming off the ocean, suns out, everybody's pretty. And then it's correlated with confiscatory taxation. They all sort of a package deal. Well, it's a scam. They know you don't want to leave. I didn't want to leave California. It's fucking great. I appreciate you left. I always have the fantasy that if enough people like you leave, it'll put pressure on them. But it's never quite enough. Never quite enough.

It's not going to be. It's too difficult for most people. It was very difficult for me. And I had a bunch of people working for me that were willing to pack up and leave like young Jamie over there. But we, you know, it was tricky. You're taking your whole business and my business is talking to people that's part of my business. My other business is stand-up comedy. So you left during COVID or? I left at the very beginning. As soon as they

started locking things down, like, oh, these are other fuckers. You never let more scaper roll may. May I start looking at houses? Cool. That's why I came to Austin first. I got a place in Miami in September of 2020 and spent the last four winners there. So I'm sort of always on the cusp of moving to Florida, hard to get out of California. But the thing that's gotten a lot harder about moving relative to four years ago. I'd say, I

think my real estate purchase have generally not been not been great over the years. I mean, it's done okay, but certainly not the way I've been able to make money at all. But with the one exception was Miami. Bought it in September 2020 and probably, you know, fast forward four years, it's up like 100%. Something like that. And then paradoxically, this also means it's gotten much harder to move there or Austin or any of these places. If I relocated

my office in LA, the people own houses, you have to buy a place in Florida. It costs twice as much as it did four years ago. And then the interest rates have also doubled. And so you get a 30 year mortgage. You could have locked that in for 3% in 2020. Now it's, you know, maybe six and a half, seven percent. So the prices have doubled. The mortgage have doubled. So it costs you four times as much to buy a house. And so, yeah, so there was a moment where

people could move during COVID. And it's gotten dramatically harder relative to what it was four years ago. Well, the Austin real estate market went crazy. And then it came back down a little bit. And it's in that down a little bit spot right now where there's a lot of like high end properties that are still for sale. They can't move. It's different. You know, there's not a lot of people moving here now like there was in the boom because

everything's open everywhere. Well, I somehow think Austin was linked to California. And Miami was linked a little bit more to New York. And it was a little bit, you know, all these differences. But Austin was kind of, you know, a big part of the move were people from tech from California that moved, moved to Austin. You know, there's a part of the Miami South Florida thing, which was people from finance in New York, New York City that moved

to Florida. And the finance industry is less networked on New York City. So I think it is possible for people if you run a, you know, private equity fund or if you work at a bank, it's possible for some of those functions to easily be moved to a different state. The tech industry is crazily networked on California. Like there's probably some way to do it. It's

not that easy. Yeah, it makes sense. It makes sense too. It's just the sheer numbers. I mean, when you're talking about all those corporations that are established in based in California, there's so many. They're so big. Just the sheer numbers of human beings that live there and work there that are involved in tech. Sure. If it wasn't, if it wasn't as networked, you know, you could, you could probably just move. You know, and maybe these things are

networked till they're not, you know, Detroit was very networked. The car industry was super networked on Detroit for decades and decades. And Michigan got more and more mismanaged. And people thought the network sort of protected them because, you know, the big three car companies were in Detroit. But then you had all the supply chains were also in Detroit. And then eventually, it was just so ridiculous. People moved, started moving the factories outside of that area.

And it's sort of unraveled. So that's, you know, it can also happen with California. It'll just take a lot. That would be insane. If they just abandoned all the tech companies in California. I mean, just look at what happened at Flint, Michigan when all the auto factories pulled out. Well, it's, it's, look, I think you can, you know, it's always, there are all these paradoxical histories. You know, the, the internet, the point of the internet in some sense was to eliminate

the tyranny of place. And that was sort of the idea. And then one of the paradoxes about the internet history of the internet was that the internet companies, you know, were, you know, we're all, you know, we're all centered in California. And then there, you know, probably they have been different, different waves of, of how networked, how, how non network they were. I think, I think probably 2021, sort of the, the COVID moving away from California, the big thing in tech was crypto.

And, and crypto had this conceit of a, you know, alternate currency decentralized away from the central banks, but also the crypto companies, the crypto protocols, you could do those from anywhere. You could do them outside the US. You could do them from Miami. And so crypto was something where the tech could naturally move out of California. And, and today, probably the, the, I don't know, the core tech narrative is completely flipped to AI. And, and if, and then there's something about

AI that's, you know, very centralized. You know, I always had, I had this one liner years ago where it was, you know, if we say that crypto is libertarian, can we also say that AI is communist, or something like this, where the, you know, the natural structure for an AI company looks like it's a big company. And then somehow the AI stuff is, is feels like it's going to be dominated by the, the big tech companies in, in the San Francisco Bay area. And so that's, that's the, that's the

future of tech. Yeah. The, the, the, the scale, the natural scale of the industry tells you that it's going to be extremely hard to get out of, you know, out of the San Francisco Bay area. When you look to the future, and you try to just make, just a guess as to how all this is going to turn out with AI, what do you think we're looking at over the next five years? Man, I think I should start by being modest

in answering that question saying that nobody has a clue. Right. Which is true. They, which pretty much all the experts say, you know, I, I would say, let me, let me do sort of a history. I, the, the, the riff I always had on this was that I can't stand any of the buzzwords. And I felt a, you know, there's all this big data, cloud computing. There are all these crazy buzzwords people had. And they always were ways to sort of abstract things and get away from, um,

from, from, from reality somehow. And, um, we're not good ways of talking about things. And I thought AI was this incredible abstraction because it can mean the next generation of computers, it can mean the last generation of computers, it can mean anything in between. And if you think about the AI discussion in the 2010s, pre-open AI chat GBT and the revolution of the last two years, but the 2010s AI discussion, maybe it was, so I'll start with the history before I get to

the future. But the, the history of it was, it was maybe anchored on two, uh, two visions of what AI meant. And one was, um, Nick Bostrom, Oxford prof who wrote this book, Super Intelligence, 2014. And it was basically AI was going to be this super duper, um, intelligent thing, way, way, godlike intelligence, way smarter than any, any human being. And, um, and then there was sort of the, the, I don't know, the CCP Chinese Communist rebuttal, the Kaifu Lee book from 2018, AI

superpowers. And I think subtitle something like the race for AI between Silicon Valley and China or something like this. And, um, it, it was sort of, it defined AI as, it was fairly low tech, it was just surveillance, um, you know, facial recognition technology. Um, we would just have the sort of totalitarian, Stalinist monitoring. It didn't require very much innovation, it just required

that you apply things. And basically the subtext was China is going to win because we have no ethical qualms in China about, um, applying this, this sort of basic machine learning to, uh, to sort of measuring or controlling the population. And those were sort of like to say too extreme, um, competing visions of, of what AI would mean in the, in the 2010s and that sort of, maybe we're

sort of the anchors of the AI debate. And then, um, and then, you know, what, what happened in some sense with, um, chat GPT in late 22 early 23 was, um, was that, uh, the achievement you, you got, you did not get super intelligence. It was not just surveillance tech, but it was you, you, you actually got to the holy grail of what people would have defined AI as from 1950 to 2010 for the previous 60 years before the 2010s. People would always set AI, the definition of AI is passing the Turing

test. And the Turing test, it basically means that the computer can fool you into thinking that it's a human being. And, um, and, um, and it's a somewhat fuzzy test because, you know, obviously, you could have an expert on the computer or non-expert, you know, it's, you know, does, does it fool you all the time or some of the time? How good is it? But to first approximation, the Turing test, you know, we weren't even close to passing it in 2021. And then, you know, chat GPT basically passes

the Turing test, at least for like, let's say an IQ 100 average person. Um, it can, it can, um, um, it's passed the Turing test. And that was, that was the holy grail. That was the holy grail of

uh, AI research for the previous 60 years. And, and so there's, I know there's probably some psychological or sociological history where we can say that this weird debate between Boston about super intelligence and Kifule about surveillance tech was like this, almost like psychological suppression people had where they were not thinking that they lost track of the Turing test of the holy grail of because it was about to happen. And it was such a significant,

such an important thing that you didn't even want to think about it. So I'm tempted to give almost a psychological repression theory of the, of the 2010 debates. But, um, be that as it may, the Turing test gets, uh, gets passed. And that's, yeah, that's an extraordinary achievement. And then, you know, maybe, um, maybe, and then, you know, where, where does it go from here? The, the probably our ways you can refine, refine these, it's still going to be, you know, a long time to

apply it. There is a question, there's this AGI discussion, you know, we get artificial general intelligence, which is a hopelessly vague concept, which, you know, general intelligence could be just a generally smart human being. So is that just a person with an IQ of 130? Or is it super intelligence? Is it godlike intelligence? So it's sort of an ambiguous thing. But I, I keep thinking that, uh, maybe the AGI questions less important than passing the Turing

test. If we, if we got AGI, if we got, let's say super intelligence, if we got, that would be interesting to Mr. God, because you'd have a competition, you'd have competition for being God. But, um, but surely the Turing test is more important for us humans, because it's either a complement or a substitute to humans. And so it's, yeah, it, it's going to rearrange the economic, cultural, political structure of our society in extremely dramatic ways. And, and I think, maybe what's already

happened is much more important than anything else that's going to be done. And then it's just

going to be a long ways in applying it. One last thought, the, you know, the, the, um, the analogy I'm always tempted to go to, and it's these things are never, historical analogies are never perfect, but it's, it's that maybe AGI in 2020, 324 is like, it's like the internet in 1999, where on one level, it's clear the internet's going to be big and get very, a lot bigger and it's going to dominate the economy, it's going to rearrange the society in the 21st

century. And then at the same time, it was a complete bubble. And, um, people had no idea how the business models worked, um, you know, almost everything blew up. It took, you know, it didn't take that long in the scheme of things. It took, you know, 15, 20 years for it to become super dominant, but it didn't happen sort of in 18 months as people fantasized in, in 1999. And, uh, and maybe,

maybe, maybe what we have in AIs is, is something like this. It's, um, figuring out how to actually apply it, you know, um, in sort of all these different ways is going to take something like two decades, but, but that doesn't distract from it being a really big deal. It is a really big deal. I think you're right about the Turing test. Do you think that the lack of acknowledgement or the public celebration, or at least this like mainstream discussion, like which I think should be

everywhere that we've passed the Turing test? Do you think it's connected to the fact that this stuff accelerates so rapidly that even though we've essentially breached this new territory, it, we still know that GPT-5 is going to be better. GPT-6 is going to be insane. And then they're working on these right now. And the, and the change is happening so quickly, we're almost,

a little reluctant to acknowledge where we're at. Yeah, um, you know, I, I, I've often, I've, you know, probably for 15 years or so, often been on the side that there isn't that much progress in science or tech or not as much as Silicon Valley likes to claim. And, um, and even on the AI level, I think it's a massive technical achievement. It's still an open question, you know, is it actually going to lead to much higher living standards for everybody? You know, the internet

was a massive achievement. How much you didn't raise people's living standards? Much, much trickier question. So, um, so I, I, but, um, but in, in this world where not much has happened, one of the paradoxes of a, of an era of a relative tech stagnation, um, is that when something does happen, we don't even know how to process it. So, you know, I think, I think Bitcoin was a,

I mean, it was a big invention. It was good or bad, but it was a pretty big deal. And it was, um, systematically underestimated for at least, you know, the first, uh, um, 10, 11 years. You know, you could, you could trade it and went up smoothly for 10, 11 years. It didn't get reprised all at once because, uh, we're in a world where nothing big ever happens. And, um, and so we, we have no way of processing it when something pretty big happens. The internet was pretty big

in 99. Bitcoin was moderately big. The internet was really big. Bitcoin was moderately big. And I'd say, um, passing the Turing test is really big. It's on the same scale as the internet. And, uh, and because our, our lived experiences that so little has felt like it's been changing for the last few decades, we're, we're probably underestimating it. It's interesting that you say that it's so little,

uh, we feel like so little has changed because if you're a person, how old are you? Um, same age as you were a 41967. So in our age, we've seen all the change, right? We saw the, uh, end of the cold war. We saw answering machines. We saw VHS tapes. Then we saw the internet and then we're at right now, which is like this bizarre moment in time where people carry the internet around with them in their pocket every day. And these super sophisticated computers that are ubiquitous. Everybody

has one. There's incredible technology that's being ramped up every year. They're getting better all the time. And now there's AI. There's AI on your phone. You could access chat GPT in a bunch of different programs on your phone. And I think that's an insane change. I think that that's one of the most, especially with the use of social media. It's one of the most bizarre changes. I think our culture is ever the most bizarre. It can be, it can be a, it can be a big change culturally or,

or politically. But, uh, the, yeah, the kinds of questions I'd ask is how do you measure it economically? Does it, how much does it change GDP? How much does it change productivity? And, um, and certainly, um, the story I, I would generally tell for the last 50 years since the 1970s, early 70s, is that we've been not absolute stagnation. We didn't need a relative stagnation where there has been, um, very limited progress in the world of atoms, the world of physical things.

And, uh, there has been, um, a lot of progress in the world of bits. Information, computers, internet, mobile internet, you know, now AI. What are you referring to when you say, in the world of physical things? Um, you know, it's any, um, it's, well, if we had to find technology, if we were sitting here in 1967, the year we were born, and we had a discussion about technology.

What technology would have meant? Would it, it would have meant computers, it would have also meant rockets, it would have meant supersonic airplanes, it would have meant, um, new medicines, it would have meant the green revolution in agriculture, maybe underwater cities, um, you know, it, it sort of had, because, and it, because technology simply gets defined as that, which is

changing, that, which is progressing. And so there was progress on all these fronts. Today, last 20 years, when you talk about technology, you're normally just talking about information technology. Technology has been reduced to meaning computers. And that tells you that the structure of progress has been weird. There's been this narrow cone of very intense progress around the world of bits, around the world of computers. And then all the other areas have been relatively

stagnant. We're not moving any faster, you know, that Concord got decommissioned in 2003 or whenever. Um, and then with all the low tech airport security measures, it takes even longer to fly to get through all, all of them from, from one city to the next, you know, the high ways have gone backwards because they're more traffic jams. We haven't figured out ways around

those. So they're sort of, we're literally moving slower than we were 40 or 50 years ago. And, and then, yeah, it's, and that's, that's sort of the, that's sort of the, and then, you know, the, and then of course, there's also a sense in which these, the screens and the devices,

you know, have this effect distracting us from this. So, you know, when you're, you know, riding a hundred-year-old subway in New York City and you're looking at your iPhone, you can, you can look at, wow, this is this cool new gadget, but you're also being distracted from the fact that your lived environment hasn't changed, you know, in a hundred years. And, and, and so there's, yeah, there's a question, how important is this world of bits versus versus the

world of atoms? You know, I would say as human beings were physically embodied in a material world. And so I, I would always say this world of atoms is pretty important. And when that's pretty stagnant, you know, there's a lot of stuff that, that doesn't make sense. I was an undergraduate

Stanford late 80s. And at the time, in retrospect, every engineering area would have been a bad thing to go into, you know, mechanical engineering, chemical engineering, all these engineering fields where you're tinkering and trying to do new things because these things turned out to be stuck,

they were regulated, you couldn't come up with new things to do, nuclear engineering, arrow astroengineering, people already knew those were really bad, wants to go into, they were, you know, outlawed, you weren't going to make any progress in nuclear reactor designs or stuff like that. Electrical engineering, which was the one that sort of adjacent to making semiconductors, that one was still okay. And then the only field that was actually going to progress a lot

was computer science. And again, you know, it's been very powerful, but that was not the felt sense in the 1980s. In the 1980s, computer science was this ridiculous inferior subject. You know, I always, the linguistic cut is always when people use the word science, I mean, favor of science, I'm not in favor of science in quotes. And when it's always a tell that it's

not real science. And so when we call it climate science or political science or social science, you know, you're just sort of making it up and you have an inferiority complex to real science, or some of the physics or chemistry. And computer science was in the same category as social science or political science. It was, it was a fake field for people who found electrical engineering or math way too hard and sort of dropped out of, out of the real, the real science and real,

real engineering fields. You don't feel that climate science is a real science. It's, it is, it's, it's, well, let me, it's, I, there's several different things one could say. It's, it's possible climate change is happening. It's possible. We don't have great accounts of why that's going on. So I'm not, I'm not questioning any of those things, but, but how scientific it is.

I, I don't think, I don't think it's, it's a place where we have really vigorous debates. You know, maybe, maybe the climate is increasing because carbon dioxide emissions, temperatures are going up. Maybe it's methane. Maybe it's people reading too much steak. It's the cows flattulating or and you have to measure how much is methane, greenhouse gas versus versus carbon dioxide. I don't

think they're, I don't think they're rigorously doing that stuff scientifically. And I think the fact that it's called climate science tells you that it's more dogmatic than, than, than anything that's truly science should be. Why is that dogma doesn't mean this wrong, but it's the fact that it's called climate science mean that it's more dogmatic because if you said nuclear science, you wouldn't question it, right? It's, yeah, but it's, no one calls it nuclear science. They call

it nuclear engineering. Because I'm just, I see what you say. The only thing is, I'm just making, I'm just making a narrow link with science that is legitimately science. Well, at this point, people say computer science has worked, but in the 1980s, all I'm saying is it was in the same categories. Let's say social science, political science. It was, it was a, it was a tell that the people doing it kind of deep down knew that they weren't doing real science. Well, there's certainly ideology

that's connected to climate science. And then there's certainly corporations that are invested in this, this prospect of green energy and the concept of green energy and they're profiting off of it. And pushing these different things, whether it be electric car mandates or whatever it is, like California, I think they, it's 30, 2035. They have a mandate that all new vehicles have to be electric, which is hilarious when you're connected to a grid that can't support the electric cars

it currently has. After they said that within a month or two, Gavin Newsom asked people to not charge their Tesla's because it was summer and the grid was fucked. Yeah, look, it's, it was all linked into all these ideological projects in all these ways. And yeah, there's, you know, there's there's an environmental project, which is, you know, and maybe, maybe it shouldn't be scientific. You know, there's the, you know, the hardcore environmentalist argument is we only have one planet

and we don't have time to do science. If we, if we have to do rigorous science and you can prove that we're overheating, it'll be too late. And so if you're hardcore environmentalist, you know, you don't want to have as high standard science. Yeah, my intuition is certainly when, when you go away from that, you end up with things that are too dogmatic, too ideological. Maybe it doesn't even

work, even if the planet's getting warmer. You know, maybe climate science is not like my question is, is carbon, like maybe methane is a worse, is it more dangerous greenhouse gas than carbon dioxide? We're not, we're not even capable of measuring that. Well, we're also ignoring certain things like regenerative farms that sequester carbon. And then, you know, you have people like Bill Gates saying that planting trees to deal with carbon is ridiculous. That's a ridiculous way to do it. Like,

how is that ridiculous? They literally turn carbon dioxide into oxygen. It is their full, their food. That's what the food of plants is. That's, that's what powers the whole plant life and the way we have the symbiotic relationship with them. Like, and the more carbon dioxide is, the greener it is, which is why it's greener today on earth than has been in a hundred years. Sure. These are all facts that are inconvenient to people that have a very specific narrow window of how to approach this.

Sure. Although, you know, there probably are ways to steal man the other side too, where, where maybe, maybe, you know, the, the original 1970s. You know, I think the manifesto that's always very interested from the other side was this book by the Club of Rome 1972, The Limits of Growth. And it's, you can't have, we need to head towards a society in which there's 0% there's very limited growth because if you have unlimited growth, you're going to run out of

resources. If you don't run out of resources, you'll hit a pollution constraint. But the, um, in the 1970s, it was, you're going to have overpopulation. You're going to run out of oil. We had the oil shocks. And then, um, and then by the 90s, it was, it's sort of morphed into more of the pollution problem with, uh, with carbon dioxide climate change, other, other environmental

things. But, uh, but there is sort of, um, you know, it's, you know, there's been some, you know, some improvement in oil, carbon fuels with fracking, things like this in Texas. It's, um, it's not at the scale that's been enough to, um, you know, give an American standard living to the whole planet. And we consume 100 million barrels, um, of oil, um, you know, a day

globally, um, maybe fracking can add 10% 10 million to that. If everybody on this planet has an American standard of living, it's something like three, three hundred, four hundred million barrels of oil. And I don't, I don't think that's there. So that's, that's kind of, I always wondered whether that was the, that was the real environmental argument. It's, we can't have an American standard

of living for the whole planet. We somehow can't justify this degree of inequality. And, um, and therefore, you know, we have to figure out ways to dial back and, you know, tax the carbon, restrict it. And, um, and maybe, you know, maybe that's, there's some sort of a, Malthusian calculus that's more about resources than about pollution. Mm-hmm. How much of that could, the, the demand for oil could be mitigated by nuclear? Uh, it, you probably, you probably

could mitigate it a lot. There's, there's a question why, why the nuclear thing has gone so wrong. It's, um, especially if you, if you have electric vehicles, right? If you, if you, you know, it's, um, combustion engines probably hard to get nuclear to work. But if you, um, if you shift to electric vehicles, you can charge them, you know, your Tesla cars at night. Um, and that, that would seemingly

work. Um, and there's definitely, yeah, there's definitely a history of energy where it was always in the direction of, you know, more intense use. It went from wood to coal to oil, which is a more compact form of energy. And in a way, it takes up less of the environment. And then if we move from oil to uranium, that's even, you know, it, it, it, it's even smaller. And so in a sense, the smaller,

the more dense the energy is, the less of the environment it takes up. And when we go back, when we go from oil to natural gas, which takes up more space and from natural gas to solar or wind, we have to, you know, you have to pollute the whole environment by putting up windmills everywhere. Or you have to, you know, you know, you have to cover the whole desert with solar panels.

And that is a good way to look at it. And it is a form of pollution. And so, um, and so there was a way, there was a way that nuclear was supposed to be the, uh, the energy mode of the, the 21st century. And then yeah, there, there are all these, there are these historical questions. Why did it, why did it

get stopped? Why did we not, uh, why did we not go down that route? The, um, you know, the, the standard explanation of why it stopped, um, was that, uh, it was, um, there were all these dangers. We had three mile on 1979, you know, Chernobyl. And, um, in 1986, and then the Fukushima one in Japan, I think 2011. And, uh, you had these sort of, you had these various accidents.

Um, my alternate theory on why, uh, why nuclear energy really stopped is that it, um, it was, um, it was sort of dystopian or even apocalyptic because it turned out that it was all, um, it turned out to be very dual use. If you build nuclear power plants, um, um, it's, it's only sort of one step away from building nuclear weapons. And, uh, and it turned out to be a lot trickier to, um, to separate those two things out than it looked. And I think the, you know, the signature

moment was 1974 or 75 when India gets the nuclear bomb. And I, the US, I believe, had transferred the nuclear reactor technology to India. We thought they couldn't weaponize it. And then it turned out it was pretty easy to weaponize. And then the, and then sort of the geopolitical problem with, uh, with nuclear power was you either, you know, um, you need a double standard where we, we have nuclear power in the US, but we don't allow other countries to have nuclear power because

the US gets to keep its nuclear weapons. We don't let a hundred other countries have nuclear weapons. And this, that's an extreme double standard. Probably a little bit hard to justify. Um, or, um, or you need some kind of really effective global governance where you have a one

world government that regulates all this stuff, which doesn't sound that good either. And, uh, and then sort of the compromise was just to, um, to, um, regulate it so much that, uh, you know, maybe that the nuclear plants got grandfathered in, but it became too expensive to build new ones. Jesus. Like even China, which is the country where they're building the most nuclear power plants, they built way less than people expected a decade ago because, um, you know, they, they don't trust,

they don't trust their own designs. And so they have to copy the over safety, overprotected designs from the West and the nuclear plants, nuclear power costs too much money. It's cheaper to do coal. Wow. So, um, so if I, you know, I get the numbers exactly right, but if you look at what percent of Chinese electricity was nuclear, it wasn't that high. It was like maybe four or five

percent in 2013, 2014. And the percent hasn't gone up in 10 years because, you know, they, maybe double the amount of electricity they use and maybe they doubled the nuclear, but the relative percentage is still, it's still a pretty small part of the mix because it's just more expensive when you have these, you know, over safety designed reactors. They're probably ways to build small reactors, um, that, that are, that are way cheaper, but then you still have this,

you still have the stool use thing. You know, do you, do you create plutonium? Do you, you know, are there ways you can create a pathway to building more nuclear weapons? And if there was innovation, if nuclear engineering had gotten to a point where, you know, let's say there wasn't through my allylan or Chernobyl didn't happen, do you think that it would have gotten to a much more efficient and much more effective version by now?

Well, my, my understanding is there are, we have, we have way, we have way more efficient designs. We have small, you can do small reactor designs, which are, you don't need this giant containment structure, so it costs much less per kilowatt hour of electricity you produce. So I, I think we have those designs. They're, they're just not allowed. And then, but then I think the problem is that, if you were able to build them in all these countries all over the world, you still have this

stool use problem. Right. And again, my alternate history of what really went wrong with nuclear power, it wasn't three mile, it wasn't Chernobyl. That's the, that's the official story. The real story was India getting the bomb. Wow, that makes sense. It completely makes sense. Geez Louise. And then this is, you know, this is always, you know, this is always the question about,

there's always a big picture question. People ask me, you know, if, if I'm right about this picture of, you know, this slow down and tech, this, this sort of stagnation in many, many dimensions. And then there's always a question, you know, what, why did this happen? And, and my cop-out answer is always why questions are over-determined? Because, you know, it can be, there are multiple reasons. And so it could be, why could we became a more feminized risk of our society? It could be that,

the education system worked well less well. It could be that we're just out of ideas. The easy ideas have been found, the hard ideas that covered, nature's covered was bare, the low hanging fruit had been picked so that it can be over-determined. But I think, I think one dimension that's not to be underrated for the science and tech stagnation was that an awful lot of science and technology had this dystopian or apocalyptic dimension and probably what happened at, you know, Los Alamos

in 1945 and then with the thermonuclear weapons in the early 50s. It took a while for it to really seep in, but it had this sort of delayed effect where, you know, maybe, maybe a stagnant world in which the physicists don't get to do anything and they have to put her around with DEI and, you know, but you don't build weapons that blow up the world anymore. You know, is that a feature or bug? And so this stagnation was sort of like this response. And so it sucks that we've lived in this

world for 50 years where a lot of stuff has been inert. But if we had a world that was still accelerating on all these dimensions with supersonic and hypersonic planes and hypersonic weapons and, you know, modular nuclear reactors, maybe we wouldn't be sitting here and the whole world would have already blown up. And so we're in that, we're in the stagnant path of the multiverse because it had this partially protective thing even though in all these other ways, I feel it's deeply

deranged our society. That's a very interesting perspective and it makes a lot of sense. It really does. And particularly the dual use thing with nuclear power and especially distributing that to other countries. When you talk about the stagnation in this country, like, I don't know how much you followed this whole UAP nonsense. I know we met, post that guy's name at your place. The guy who did charity to the gods. Oh, a, a, a, a, a, a, yes. Yeah. You, you, you, you didn't, you thought he

was too crazy. You, you like Hancock, but you don't like a, a, a, a, a, a, I didn't think he's too crazy. He just willfully, in my opinion, ignores evidence that would show that some of the things that he's saying have already been solved. And I think his, his hypothesis is all related to this concept that we have been visited and that that's how all these things were built and that this technology was brought here from another world. And I think he's very ideologically locked into these ideas.

And I think a much more compelling idea is that there were very advanced cultures for some reason, 10,000 years ago, whatever it was, whatever the year was where they, they built some of the insane structures. It's a 45, 100 years ago, they roughly think the pyramids were built. Like, whatever the fuck was going on there, I think those were human beings. I think those were human beings in that place, in that time. And I think they had some sort of very sophisticated technology

that was lost and things can get lost. Things can get lost in cataclysm, things can get lost in, they can get lost in disease and famine and all, there's all sorts of war, all sorts of reasons, the burning of the library of Alexandria. There's all sorts of ways that technology gets lost forever. And you can have today someone living in Los Angeles in the most sophisticated high-tech society that the world has ever known, while you still have people that live in the Amazon, that live in

the same way that they have lived for thousands of years. So those things can happen in the same planet at the same time. And I think while the rest of the world was essentially operating at a much lower vibration, there were people in Egypt that were doing some extraordinary things. I don't know how they got the information. Maybe they did get it from visitors. Maybe they did, but there's no real compelling evidence that they did. I think there's much more compelling evidence

that a cataclysm happened. When you look at the younger dry ice impact theory, it's all entirely based on science. It's entirely based on core samples and radium content. And also massive changes in the environment over a very short period of time, particularly the melting in the ice caps in North America. And just impact craters all around the world that we know something happened. Roughly 11,000 years ago. And probably again 10,000 years ago. I think it's a regular

occurrence on this planet that things go sideways. And there's massive natural disasters. And I think that it's very likely that there's the Bronze Age civilization collapse somewhere in the mid-twelfth century we see. And probably the, in some ways the one in which we had the best testaries, the fall of the Roman Empire, which was obviously the culmination of the classical world. And it's somehow it's somehow extreme, extremely unravelled. So I think my view on it is probably somewhere between

yours and the the... Fundanican? No, not Fundanican. I'm more on the more on the the other side. Let me let me let me try to define why this I may agree on why this is so important today. This is not just of antiquarian interest. And the reason it matters today is because the alternative, you know, if you say civilization has seen great rises and falls. It's gone through these great cycles. You know, maybe the Bronze Age

civilizations were very advanced, but someone came up with iron weapons. So there was just one dimension where they progressed, but then everything else they could destroy. And so, or, you know, the fall of the Roman Empire was again this, you know, pretty cataclysmic thing, or is there there were diseases and, you know, and then there were political things that unraveled, but somehow, you know, it was a massive regression for, you know, four, five, six hundred years into

the dark ages. And the sort of naive, the progressive use, things always just got monotonically better. And there's sort of this revisionist, purely progressive history, where even the Roman Empire didn't decline. And even, you know, this one one sort of stupid way to quantify this stuff is with pure demographics. And so it's the question, how many people lived in the past? And the rises and falls of civilization stories, there were more people who lived in the

Roman Empire because it was more advanced. You could support a larger population and then the population declined. You know, the city of Rome maybe had a million people at its peak, and then by, you know, I don't know, six hundred fifty AD, it's maybe it's down to 10,000 people or less. You have this complete collapse in population. And then, and then the sort of alternate, purely progressive view is the population has always just been monotonically increasing because it's a

measure of how, in some sense, things aggregate have always been getting better. So I am, I am definitely on your side that population had great rises and falls, civilizations had great rises and falls. And so that part of it, I agree with you or even, you know, some variant of what Hancock or Fondanican say. The place where I would say I think things are different is, I don't think, I don't think, and therefore it seems possible something had happened to our

civilization. That's always the upshot of it. If it had been monotonically always progressing, then there's nothing we should worry about. Nothing can possibly go wrong. And then certainly, certainly the thing, the sort of alternate Hancock, Fondanican, Joe Rogan, history of the world tells us is that we shouldn't take our civilization for granted. There's things that can go really haywire. I agree with that. The one place where I differ is I think, I do think our civilization

day is on some dimensions way more advanced than any of these past civilizations were. I don't think any of them had nuclear weapons. I don't think any of them had, you know, spaceships or anything like that. And so the failure mode is likely to be somewhat different from these past ones. Yeah, that makes sense. I think technology progressed in a different direction. That's what I think. I think structural technology, building technology, somehow or another achieved levels of

competence that's not available today. When you look at the construction of the Great Pyramid of Geyser, there's 2,300,000 stones in it. The whole thing points to do north, south, east, and west. It's an incredible achievement. The stones, some of them were moved from a quarry that was 500 miles away through the mountains. They have no idea how they did it. Massive stones. The ones inside the King's Chamber, the biggest ones are like 80 tons. It's crazy. The whole thing is crazy. How did

they do that? Whatever they did, they did without machines, supposedly. They did without the use of the combustion engine. They didn't have electricity. Yet they were able to do something that stands the test of time, not just so you could look at it. You know, like you can go to the Acropolis and see the Parthenon. It's gorgeous. It's amazing. It's incredible. But I can understand how people could have built it. The Pyramids is one of those things. You just look at it and you go, what the

fuck was going on here? What was going on here? And none of these people are still around. You have this strange culture now that's entirely based around, you know, you have Cairo and an enormous population of visitors, right, which is a lot of it. People just going to stare at these ancient relics. What was going on that those people were so much more advanced than anyone anywhere else in the world? Yeah, I would, I'm not trying to anchor on the technological part, but I think the

the piece that is very hard for us to comprehend is what motivated them culturally? Well, how did they do it physically? Why did they do it? Why were you motivated? Sure. Why? But also how? How is a big one? Because it's really difficult to solve. There's no traditional, conventional explanations for the construction, the movement of the stones, the amount of time that it would take. And if you move 10 stones a day, I believe it takes 664 years to make one of those pyramids. So how many people

were involved? How long did it take? How did they get them there? How did they figure out how to do it? How come the shittier pyramids seem to be dated later? Like what what was going on in that particular period of time where they figured out how to do something so extraordinary that even today, 4,500 years later, we stare at it and we go, I don't know. I don't know what the fuck they did. I haven't studied it carefully enough. I'll I'll trust you that it's very hard. I think the

the I think the I would say the the real mystery is why were they motivated? And it's because you can't live in a pyramid. It's just it was just the afterlife of the Pharaoh. There's some debate about that. Christopher Dunn is an engineer who believes that it was some sort of a power plant. He's got this very bizarre theory that there was a chamber that exists. If you can see the structure

of the pyramid the inside of it. There's a chamber that's subterranean and he believes the subterranean chamber was pounding on the surface of the of the earth and of the walls of the thing creating this very specific vibration that shafts that came down into the queens chamber. These shafts, they were poor chemicals into these shafts and then there was limestone at the end of it. This is

all his theory, not mine. The end of it there was this limestone which is permeable right so the limestone which is porous these gases come through and creates this hydrogen that's inside of this chamber. Then there are these shafts inside the kings chamber that are they're getting energy from space. Gamma rays and all the shit from space and then it's going through these chambers which are very specifically designed to target this these gases and put them into this chamber where

they were interact with this energy and he believes it's enough to create electricity. Man, my it's a crazy theory but I'm always I'm always too too fast to debunk all these things but like my just coming back to our earlier conversation it's it's sound it it must have been a crazy power plant to have a containment structure much bigger than a nuclear reactor. Yeah well it's

ridiculous. But it's also a different kind of technology right. If nuclear technology was completely not on the table they didn't understand atoms at all but they did understand that there's rays that come from space and that you could somehow harness the energy of these things with specific gases and through some method convert that into some form of electricity. But it if it takes so much power to put all these rocks on the pyramid you have to always look at how efficient

the power plant is. So so it can't just be some it has to be like the craziest reaction ever to justify such a big containment structure because even nuclear power plants don't work economically. They don't work. Well they didn't do a lot of them you know they only did this one in Giza and then there was other pyramids that he thinks had different functions that were smaller but the whole purpose of it is or the whole point of it is we we don't know what the

fuck it is. We don't know why they did it. We have a group of new archaeologists that are looking at it from a completely different theory they're not looking at it like it's a tomb. The established archaeologists have insisted that this is a tomb for the Pharaoh that newer archaeologists establish archaeologists are looking at it and considering whether or not there was some other uses for this

thing and one of them is the concept of the paropra. I'm I'm always I don't know if this is an alternate history theory but I'm always into the James Frazier golden bow, Renas Gerard, Bialence, Sacred History where you know you have always this question about the origins of monarchy

and kingship and the sort of Gerard Frazier intuition is that it's something like it is something like if if every king is a kind of living god then we have to also believe the opposite that maybe every god is a dead or murdered king and that that somehow societies were organized around

scapegoats the scapegoats were you know there was sort of a crisis in the archaic community it blamed on a scapegoat the scapegoat was attributed all these powers and then at some point the scapegoat before he gets executed figures out a way to postpone his execution and turn the

power into something real and so there's sort of this this very weird adjacency between monarch the monarch and the scapegoat and and then you know I don't know the sort of riff on the would be that the first pyramid did not need to be invented it was just the stones that were

thrown on a victim and then it somehow and that that's the original the original that were thrown on a victim a community stones a victim to death tribe runs after a victim you stone them to death you throw stones on the victim that's how you create the first tomb and then

and then as it gets more complicated you created tomb that's two million stones and and you get a you get a pharaoh you get a pharaoh who figures out a way to postpone his own execution or something like this I think there's I'm going to blank on the name of this ritual but I believe in old

in the old Egyptian kingdoms which were sort of around the time of the great pyramids or even before it was something like in the 30th year of the reign of the pharaoh the pharaoh gets transformed into a living god and and then this perhaps dates to a time where in the 30th year of the pharaoh's

reign the pharaoh would get richly sacrificed or or killed and you have you have all these societies where the kings lived were allowed to rule for in a lot of time where you you know you you become king and you you draw the number of pebbles out of a base and that corresponds to

how many years was this jamin the said festival hebsed festival of tales and ancient Egyptian ceremony the celebrate the continued rule of pharaoh the name was taken from the name of the Egyptian wolf god one of whom's name was whip yeah this is what I'm talking about where said

the less formal feast name the feast of the tale is derived yeah next paragraph still to start okay this that one that one right that the ancient festival might perhaps have been instituted to replace a ritual of murdering a pharaoh who was unable to continue to rule effectively

because of age or condition interesting interesting so you can't kill them now and then eventually said festivals were jubilee several of every every one had the throne for 30 years and then every three to four years after that so when it becomes unthinkable to kill the pharaoh the

pharaoh gets turned into a living god before that the pharaoh gets murdered and then gets worshiped as a dead pharaoh or distant that's interesting but it still doesn't solve the engineering puzzle the engineering puzzles the biggest one what how do they do that well the one I the one I'm

focusing on is the motivational puzzle yeah but why did you have all the motivation in the world if you want to build a structure that's insane to build today and you're doing it 4,000 five or two years ago we're dealing with a massive puzzle I think I think I think the motivational parts

the harder one to solve if you if you can figure out the motivation you'll you'll you'll figure out a way to organize the whole society and if you can figure out if you get the whole society working on it you can probably do it but don't you think that his grasp on of power was in peril in the

first place which is why they decided to come up with this idea of turning them into a living god so did to have the amount of resources and power and then the engineering and then the understanding of whatever methods they use to shape and move these things well this is always the this is always

the anthropological debate between Voltaire the Enlightenment thinker of the 18th century and Durkheim the 19th century anthropologist and Voltaire believes that religion originates as a conspiracy of the priests to maintain power and so politics comes first the politicians invent religion

and then Durkheim says the causations the other way around that somehow religion came first and then politics somehow came out of it of course you know once the politics comes out of it um you know the the priests the religious authorities have political power they figure out ways to

manipulate it things like this but uh but i i find you know i find the Durkheim story far more plausible than the Voltaire when i think the religious categories are our primary and the the political categories are our secondary so do you think the religious the religion came first but what

about if we emanated from tribal societies tribal societies have always had leaders when you have leaders you can have dissent you can have challenges you can have politics you have people negotiating to try to maintain power keep power keep everything organized that's the origin of politics correct

you know i i think that's a that's a white washed enlightenment rationalist description of the origin of politics yeah that's the origin of politics i think it's far more vile than that you know what you what you're giving me is a very vile you the control and power and maintaining power

involves murder and sabotage well that okay that's more like it yeah but what you what what what you gave me a minute ago sounds more like a social contract theory in which people sit down negotiate and have you know a nice legal chit chat to drop the social contract that is a complete

fiction yeah i don't think that i think that there was probably various levels of civility that were achieved when agriculture and when establishments were constructed that were near resources where they didn't have to worry as much about food and water and things along those lines things

probably got a little bit more civil but i think that the origins of it are like the origins of all human conflict it's filled with murder well i think at the beginning was madness and murder yeah madness and murder and and i don't know i don't i don't know if it got i don't know if it got that

much more rational i don't know if it's that much more rational today well so in some ways it's not right and this is again back to the yeah you know the the progressive conception are we you know are we really have we really progressed how much have we really progressed from from that

but but yeah my my my version would be that it was you know it was much more um it was organized around you know acts of mass violence like maybe maybe you externalize it onto you know a mastodon or hunting some big animal or something like this but but the real

problem of violence you know it wasn't external it was mostly internal it was it was violence with people who were near you proximate to um it wasn't even natural cladclosms or other tribes it was it was uh it was sort of um much more uh the internal stuff and um it's very different i think

the the human situation is somehow very very different from something like i don't know an ape primate hierarchy where in an ape context you have an alpha male um you know he's the strongest and there's some sort of natural dominance and you don't need to have a fight to the death

typically because you know who's the strongest and you don't need to um push it all the way in a human context it's always possible for two or three guys to gang up on the alpha male so uh so it's uh it's somehow the culture is more important you know if they can talk to each other

and you get language and then they can coordinate and they can gang up on on the leader and then you have to stop them from gang up on the leader and how how do you do that and so the there's some sort of radical difference between a you know a human and a let's say a pre-human world

have you seen chimpe empire? no chimpe empire is a fascinating documentary series on Netflix where these scientists had been embedded with this tribe of chimpanzees for decades and so because they were embedded they had very specific rules you have to maintain at least 20 yards from you

and any of the chimps no food you can never have food and don't look them in the eyes and as long as you do that they don't feel your threat and they think of you as a natural part of their environment almost like you don't exist and they behave completely naturally well it shows in

that that sometimes it's not the largest strongest one and that some chimps form bonds with other chimps and they form coalitions and they do have some sort of politic and they do help each other they groom each other they do specific things for each other and then one of the things that happens

also they get invaded by other chimps and that chimps leave and they go on patrol and other chimps gang up on them and kill them and they try to fight and battle over resources so it's not nearly as cut and dry as the strongest chim prevails because one of the chimps that was dominant was

an older chimped and he was smaller than some of the other chimps but he had formed a coalition with all these other chimps and they all respected him and they all the knew that they would be treated fairly and being treated fairly is a very important thing with chimpanzees they get very

jealous if they think that things are not fair which is why that guy was attacked and you know that guy who had a pet chimpanzee he brought it a birthday cake the other chimps weren't getting a piece of the cake and they someone had fucked up and left a door open they got out and malled

this guy because he didn't give them some of the cake yeah so I find all of that quite plausible but I think both of us can be correct so there's some the the true story of harmonization of how we became humans there's a way to tell it where it's continuous with our animal past and where

it's just you know there's things like this with the chimpanzees or the baboons or you know other primates and then there is a part of the story that I think is also more discontinuous and my judgment is we probably you know in a Darwinian context we always stress the continuity

you know I'm always a little bit the contrarian and so I believe in Darwin's theory but I think I think we should also be skeptical of ways it's too dogmatic and Darwin's theories make us gloss over the discontinuities and I think you know the one one type of it doesn't have to happen

overnight but one type of fairly dramatic discontinuity is that you know is that humans have something like language and even though you know chimpanzees probably I don't know they have an IQ of 80 or the pretty the pretty smart but but when you don't have a rich symbolic system

that leads to sort of a very very different kind of structure and there's something about language and the kind of coordination that allows and the ways that it forces you to it enables you to coordinate on violence and then it encourages you to channel violence in certain sacred religious

directions I think creates a you know something radically different about human society we're you know we differ you know we tell humans tell each other stories a lot of the stories are not true they're myths but that's that's that's I think that's in a some sort of a very important

difference from from even our closest primate primate relatives but then you know this is again this is sort of like another way of getting at what's so crazy about chat GPT and passing the touring test because if we had sat here two years ago and you asked me you know what what is the

distinctive feature of a human being what makes someone a human and you know how and in a way that differs from everybody else you know it's not perfect but my go-to answer would been language you're you know you're three year old you're an 80 year old you know just about all humans can

speak languages just about all non-humans cannot speak languages it's this it's this binary thing and then that's that's sort of a way of telling us again why why passing the touring test was way more important than super intelligence or anything else yeah I could see that

wouldn't it say don't go back to that tangent no no it's good tangent it's great keep tangent off have fun it's great um do you think what do you think the factor was there's a lot of debate about this like the factor was that separated us from these animals and why we became what we became because we're so vastly different than any of the primate like so what do you think took place like the doubling of the human brain size over a period of two million years is one of the greatest

mysteries in the entire fossil record we don't know what the fuck happened there's a lot of theories the throwing arm cooking meat there's a lot of theories but we we really have no idea well again if I if I let me do sort of linguistic riff I think um airs to telian Darwinian biology air

stoddle you always differ things by put them in categories and and man I think the line air style has something man differs from the other animals in his greater aptitude for imitation and and and I would say that we are these giant imitating machines and of course the Darwinian

riff on this is you know to imitate is to ape and and so we differ from the eight we're more ape like than the apes we are far better at aping each other than the apes are and and that uh to you know a first cut I would say our brains are giant imitation machines that's how you

learn language the kid you imitate your parents uh and that's how culture gets transmitted but then um there are a lot of dimensions of imitation that uh that are also very dangerous because um it's not imitation doesn't just happen on this symbolic linguistic level it's also you imitate things

you want you want a banana I want a banana you want a blue ball I can have a red ball I want a blue ball because you have a blue ball and um and and so there's something about imitation that um you know creates culture um you know that uh um that is incredibly important pedagogically

learning you know it's it's how you master something how you know in all these different ways and then um and then a lot of it has this uh has this incredibly conflictual dimension as well and uh and then there's yes I think I think that was sort of core to the

things that are both great and troubled about humanity and uh and that was sort of that was in some ways the problem that that needed to be solved so you think that the motivation of imitation is the the essential first steps that led us to become human?

There is some story like and again this is a one-dimensional one explanation fits all but yeah the the sort of the explanation I would I would go with is that it was it was something like um you know our brains got bigger and so we were more powerful imitation machines and there were

things about that that were you know that were um yeah that made us a lot more powerful and a lot we could learn things and we could remember things and there was cultural transmission that happened but then um it also we could build better weapons and we became more violent and um it it also had a

very very destructive element and then somehow the imitation you know had to be had to be channeled in in these sort of ritualized religious you know kind kinds of ways and that's that's that's that's why um I think all these things sort of somehow came up together in parallel.

What about the physical adaptation? Like what would be the motivation of the animal to change form and to have its brain grow so large and to lose all its hair and to become soft and fleshy like we are as opposed to like rough and durable like almost every other primate is.

Well you can always man you can always tell these retrospective just so stories and how this all all worked out but it it would seem the the naive retrospective story would be that um you know there are a lot of ways that humans are I don't know less strong than the other apes or

you know that all all these ways where we're in some sense weaker physically physically but um but maybe it was just this basic tradeoff you you know more more of your energy went into your mind and into your brain and um and then you know um you were your fist wasn't as strong but you could build a

better axe and that made you stronger than an ape and that's that's yeah where we're you know a brain with you know less I don't know less energy we spent on growing a hair to keep warm in the winter and and then you used your brain to build an axe and skin a bear and get get some fur for the winter

something like that yeah I guess it's just but it's just such a leap it's such a leap and different than any other animal like and like what was the primary motivating factor like what was the thing you know mechanical leaves it was so this I've been you know I'm sure you probably you ever heard

that theory mechanists stone date theory which is a fascinating one but there's a lot of different theories about what took place but we just well the one yeah the one I would go on was that there was this dimension of increased imitation there was some kind of cultural linguistic dimension

that was incredibly um important um it probably was also you know it was probably also uh somehow linked to uh to uh you know dealing with um all the violence that came with it all the conflicts that that that came with it um you know I would be I'd be more open to the stone ape theory if people

um I had this conversation with the other guy uh Moralescu the immortality key guy and um I always feel they whitewash it too much how so you know it's like if I mean if if you had these crazy dination rituals in which people you know if you know there's probably lots of crazy

sex there's probably lots of crazy violence that was was tied to it and so maybe like maybe you'd be out of your mind to be hunting a woolly mammoth and like maybe maybe maybe you can't be completely you know but they were in hunting woolly mammoths during the illusinian mysteries

no but you were I don't know you went to went to war to fight the neighboring tribe it's probably more dangerous than hunting right but they also did absolutely have these rituals and they have absolutely found trace elements of sil- I don't question that okay I don't question that at all

I just I just I just think uh they they probably part of it was also uh was a way to channel violence was probably you know whenever I don't know was there some some degree to which uh whenever you went to war you were on drugs oh yeah well we know about the Vikings the Vikings most certainly

took mushrooms before they went into battle and um and you know maybe it makes you less less coordinated or something but no if you're just if you're less scared it doesn't probably it doesn't make you less coordinated if you're just a little bit less scared that's

probably super important it increases visual acuity there's a lot of benefits that would happen physically especially if you've got the dose right you know um it increases visual acuity edge detections better uh it makes people more sensitive probably more aware probably a better hunter

and uh but I think I think I think I'm I'm sympathetic to all all these um mushrooms um psychedelic drug historical usage theories I suspect was very widespread um I just think you know a lot of it was in these contexts that uh that were pretty transgressive

yeah I think um they're not mutually exclusive I think just giving the the way the world was back then for sure violence was everywhere violence was a part of daily life violence is a part of how society was kept together violence was entertainment in Rome right for sure violence was uh

was everything was a big part of it and I think release and and the anxiety of that violence also led people to want to be intoxicated and do different things that uh separated them from a normal state of consciousness um but I do think it's also probably where democracy came from I think

having those illicinian mystery rituals where they would get together and do psychedelics and under this very controlled set and setting I think that's the birthplace of a lot of very interesting and innovative ideas I think a lot of interesting and innovative ideas

currently are are being at least uh dreamt up thought of they have their roots in some sort of altered conscious experience well um it's I mean I I don't know I I think the stuff is very powerful I think it is it is I definitely think it shouldn't be outlawed you know pretty hardcore

libertarian on all the drug legalization stuff uh and then I I do I do wonder um I do wonder exactly how how how how how how these things work it probably you know probably the classical world version of it um was that it was something

that you did in a fairly controlled setting you didn't do it every day um and it was it was sort of it was some it was some way uh I imagine to get you know a very different perspective on your nine to five job or whatever you want to call it but uh you didn't necessarily want to

you know want to really decamp to the other world altogether over sure it's too dangerous to do um I don't think anybody thinks they did I think that was part of the whole thing what what where do you think where do you think that line is like you know should people should everyone do one ayahuasca

trip or if you do if you do an ayahuasca trip a year is that I don't think everyone has to do anything and I think everyone has their own requirements and I think um I think as you do that everything like this especially psychedelics one of the more disappointing things recently was

that the FDA had denied um they they did these MDMA trials for you know but all this yep yeah very very disappointing um that they wanted to make MDMA therapy available to veterans and people with severe PTSD and it has extreme benefits clinical benefits known documented

benefits and for whatever reason the FDA decided that they have to go through a whole new series of trials to try to get this stuff legalized which is very disappointing and yeah I I I I was I was very bullish on this stuff happening um and the way I thought about it four or five

years ago was um that um it was a hack to doing a double blind study and because the FDA always has this concept that you need to do a double blind study you give one one you know one third of the people you give a sugar pill and two thirds you give the real drug and you have to and no one

knows whether they have the sugar pill or the real drug right and then um and then you see how it works and science requires a double blind study and then my my anti double blind study theory is if if it really works you don't need a double blind study it should just work and there's

something sociopathic about doing double blind studies because one third of the people who have this bad disease are getting a sugar pill and we shouldn't even be like maybe it's um immoral to do double blind studies well double blind studies on unique novel things make sense um

uh this is not unique nor novel um it's been around well well unique yes but my my my claim is if it's if it's a um uh if it actually works you shouldn't need to do a double blind study at all but um and then my hope was that um MDMA psychedelics all these things they were a hack on the double blind study because um you knew whether you got the real thing or the sugar pill and so this would be a way to um to hack through this ridiculous double blind criterion and just get the study done

and then what I what I think um part part of it probably just an anti drug ideology by the FDA but um but the other part that happened on the sort of science scientific establishment level is they think you need a double blind study Joe we know you're hacking this double blind study because people

know whether they got the sugar pill or not and that's why we're going to arbitrarily change the goal posts and set them at way way harder because we know there's no way you can do a double blind study and if it's not a double blind study it's no good because that's what our ideology of science

tells us and um and that sort of that's sort of what I think was part of part of what went um sort of politically haywire with this stuff well I also think that it's Pandora's box I think that's a real issue and that if they do find extreme benefit in using MDMA therapy particularly for veterans

if they start doing that and it starts becoming very effective and it becomes well known and widespread then it will open up the door to all these other psychedelic compounds and I think that's a real threat to the powers that be it's a real threat to the establishment if you have people thinking in

a completely alternative way and we saw what happened during the 1960s and that's one of the reasons why they threw water on everything and had it become schedule one and locked the country down in terms of the access to psychedelics all that stuff happened out of a reaction to the way society

and culture was changing in the 1960s if that happened today it would throw a giant monkey wrench in our political system in our cultural system the way we govern the way we just the way allocation of resources all that would change if I just articulate the alternate version on this

there's always a you know there's there's a part let me think how to how to get this you know there's one there's a question whether this the shift to interiority is it a complement or a substitute like what I said about talking action is it a complement or a substitute to changing the outside

world so we focus on changing ourselves is this the first step to changing the world or is it is it sort of a hypnotic way in which our attention is being redirected to from outer space to inner space so I don't know the one line I had years ago was you know we landed on the moon in

July of 1969 and three weeks later Woodstock started and that's when the hippies took over the country and and you know and we stopped going to outer space because we started going to inner space and that's and so there's sort of a question you know how much you know it worked as a as an

activator or as a or as a a deactivator in a way and you know there are all these different modalities of interiority there's psychological therapy there's meditation there's yoga there's you know there was a sexual revolution there were gradually you have in cells living their

parents basement playing video games so all you know there's the nape of gazing that is identity politics there's a range of psychedelic things and and I think all these things I I wonder whether the interiority ended up acting as a as a substitute so because you know

the alternate history of the 1960s is that you know the hippies were actually they were anti-political and it was it was sort of that the the the drugs happened at the end of the city at the end of the 60s and that's when people depolitized you know it was like I don't know the Beatles song

you're carrying on pictures of Sharon Mowry not gonna make with anyone anyhow it's like that's what after they did LSD it was just the sort of insane politics no longer matters and so you have the civil rights the Vietnam War and then were the drugs the thing that motivated it or was that

was that the thing where it actually those those things started to started to deescalate I think they were happening at the same time and I think the Vietnam War coinciding with the psychedelic drug movement in the 1960s it was one of the reasons why it was so dangerous to the establishment

because these people were far less likely to buy into this idea that they needed to fly to Vietnam and go kill people they didn't know and they were far less likely to support any war and I think there was this sort of bizarre movement that we had never seen before this flower

children that we know that they plotted against I mean if you read chaos by Tom O'Neill yep, it's really fantastic book that shows you what they were trying to do to demonize these these hippies well it was or or the the part of it that I thought was interesting was the mkultra

yeah which was a part of it yeah where um you know we uh there was a prediscessor version where uh we thought of um you know there was a you could think of it as we had an arms race with that the fascists and the communists and they were very good at brainwashing people the Goebbels

propaganda North Koreans brainwashing our soldiers in the Korean War our POWs and uh we needed to have an arms race to program and reprogram and deprogram people and LSD was uh was was sort of the mkultra shortcut so I think I think there was and then I yeah my it's so hard to reconstruct it but uh

my my suspicion is that the mkultra thing was was a lot bigger than than we realized and that uh you know it was it was the LSD movement both in the Harvard form and the Stanford form you know it started it started as an mkultra project Timothy Leroy at Harvard um Ken Keese at Stanford

you know I knew uh Tom Wolf the um American novelist I still think his greatest novel was um the electric cool aid acid test which sort of this history of the LSD counterculture movement starts to Stanford moves the Hadeshbury in San Francisco and uh but it starts with Ken Keese's grad student

at Stanford like circa 1958 and um you get an extra $75 a day if you go to the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital and um they give you some random drug and um yeah you got extra $75 a grad student in English um doing LSD and um Tom Wolf writes this you know iconic fictionalized novel

very realistic 1968 about this and um Wolf could not have imagined that the whole thing started as some CIA mind control project right the Menlo Park Veterans Hospital that was deep state adjacent sure well Hadeshbury free click run by the CIA sure that's even crazier the whole thing's crazy

the whole thing's jolly what jolly west guy up yeah the the whole thing's crazy which leads me to what do you think they're doing today if they were doing that then I do not believe that they abandoned this idea of programming people I do not believe that I don't think they would because

I know it's effective but people join cults every day we're well aware that people can be ideologically captured we're well aware we're well aware people will buy into crazy ideas as long as it's supported by whatever community that they associate with that's just a natural aspect of being a human

being maybe it's part of what you're saying this imitation thing that we have it leads us to do this if they have that knowledge and that understanding that for sure they're probably doing things similar today which is one of the things that I think about a lot when I think about this guy that

tried to shoot Trump I want to know what happened and I don't think we're getting a very detailed explanation at all as to how this person achieved these the how he they got on the roof how they got to that position how they trained what who were they in contact with who was teaching them

why did they why did they do it what was going on we we are in the dark and I wonder like you know there was always the mentoring candidate idea right this idea that we trained assassins and was there RFK dad assassination 1968 or Han where he again maybe shouldn't believe him but he

claimed that he didn't even know what he was doing was some hypnotic trance or whatever and it was like it was like the assassin in the mentoring and can yeah yeah I mean that is possible I don't know if he's telling the truth he could have just had a psychotic break who knows obviously yeah it's

a convenient yeah very convenient but it's a possibility that she could be should be considered I mean I this crooks kid that did this that shot at the president what how what happened I want to know what happened man I I don't I probably veer in the direction that there were

you know on the on the sort of conspiracy theory of history I veer in the direction that there was a lot of crazy stuff like this that was going on in the US first half of the 20th century overdrive 1940s you know the I mean you had the Manhattan Project this is giant secret project

1950s 1960s and then and then somehow the last 50 years I think the I'm not sure disturbing uh perspective I have is these institutions are less functional I don't think I don't think the CIA is doing anything quite like MK ultra anymore why do you think that I think you had the church

commission hearings in the late 70s and and somehow things things got things got exposed and and then when when things when bureaucracy is forced to be formalized it probably becomes a lot less functional you know there was like the 2000s version there was I think it was a lot of

crazy stuff that we did in black sites torturing people um the the CIA ran and you know in the war on terror water boarding those all sorts of batshit crazy stuff that happened but then you know once john you in the Bush 43 administration writes the torture memos and sort of formalizes this

is how many times you can water dunk someone without it being torture etc etc once you formalize it people somehow know that it's on its way out because you know um it doesn't quite work anymore so by I don't know by 2007 um at guantanamo I think the inmates are running the asylum the inmates

and the defense lawyers were running it you were way safer as a Muslim terrorist in guantanamo than as a let's say suspected cop killer in Manhattan there was still an informal process in Manhattan you were suspected cop killer they'd figure out some way to um to deal with you outside the judicial

the formal judicial process um and um but I think something there was a sort of formalization that happened there was the post uh jadgar hoover fbi where hoover was I don't know a law onto himself it was completely out of control CIA even more so and then um you know once it all gets

exposed and uh it probably is a lot harder to do the NSA you know NSA probably held up longer as a deep state entity where it at least had the virtue people you know I think the 1980s it was still referred to as no such agency so it's still it was still far more obscure so the necessary

condition is that if some part of the deep states doing it you know we we can barely know what's going on right with them and then I don't know you know the the 2000s 2010s history of on the on on you know I think the Patriot Act empowered all these FISA courts and I think there was

I think there probably um were ways the NSA FISA court process was was weaponized in a really really crazy way um and you know it culminated in in 2016 with all the um you know the crazy Russia conspiracy theories against Trump um but I I think even that I I'm not sure

they can do anymore because it got exposed can't do that anymore but a small program that is top secret that is designed under the auspices of protecting American lives extracting information from people I'm I'm I'm agreeing you the the the the the

NSA FISA court process is one where you had a pretty out of control process from let's say circa I don't know 2003 to 2017 2018 so that's relatively recent history um I don't know you know they're all the all the Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy theories which um I'm probably too

fascinated by um because it felt like there was there was some crazy stuff going on that they were able to cover up but still are uh and then but then it man doesn't it the fact that we're still talking about Jeffrey Epstein tell us um how hard it is to come with anything else no because

there's no answers for the Jeffrey Epstein thing there's been no consequences other than Glean Maxwell going to jail and Jeffrey Epstein allegedly committing suicide which I don't think he did other than that what are the consequences they they they were able to pull off this thing this

some some sort of operation what you know who knows who was behind it who knows what was the motivation but it clearly has some to do with compromising people which is an age old strategy for getting people to do what you want them to do you have things on them you use those things as leverage and then next thing you know you've got people saying things that you want them to say do and it motivates moves policy changes things you get things done that they did that yes and no one

and we know they did that and yet no one is asking for the tapes no one's asking for the client list we we're in the dark still and probably I don't know man I I spent too much time thinking about all all the all the Epstein variants

it probably probably probably the sex stuff is overdone and everything else is underdone it's like with it's like a limited hangout we get to talk about the crazy underage sex and and you know not about all all the other questions it's like when Alex Acosta testified

for labor secretary and he was he was the DA who'd prosecuted Epstein in 0809 and got him sort of the very light 13 month or whatever sentence and as a South Florida DA or whatever he was and Acosta was asked you know you know why did why did he get off so easily and and under congressional

testimony was up for labor secretary 2017 it was he belonged to intelligence that's yeah and then and then you know and so it's yes it's it's the question isn't about the sex with the underage women the question is is really about you know why was he why was he so protected and then you

know I I went I went down all these rabbit holes was he you know working for the Israelis or the Mossad or all all this sort of stuff and I've come to think that that's that was very secondary was obviously it was just the US you know you know if you're working for Israel you don't get

protected and we had Jonathan Paul or he went to jail for 25 years or whatever and but unrelated right I understood but it's but it's but this is one it's a no operation but but so it's but it it was if it was an intelligence operation the question we should be asking is what part of the

US intelligence right system was was he working for was he working for you know but don't you think that's an effective strategy for controlling politicians getting them involved in sex scandals I mean that's always been one of the the worst things that can happen to a politician look at

Monica Lewinsky a very simple one consensual inappropriate sexual relationship between a president and a staffer and it almost takes down the presidency it causes him to get impeached uh powerful motivators the shame of it all also the illegal activity the fact that it's I mean

it's one of the most disgusting things that we think of but people having sex with underage people um I'm I'm I'm sure that was part of it I suspect there are a lot of other questions that uh you know when one one should one should also most certainly but I would think that that is one

of the best motivators that we have is having dirt on people like that especially something that could ruin your career especially people that are deeply embedded in this system of people knowing things about people and using those at their advantage I mean that's an age old strategy in politics

that was J. Edgar Hoover's entire modus operandi my my my my riff on it was always that it was um it was it's it's a little bit different from the J. Edgar Hoover thing and the question was always whether the people doing it knew they were getting compromised and so it's it's it's it's the vibe

is not that um um you somehow got compromised it was more you were joining this uh this secret club right you got to be made yeah a made man in the mafia and you had to do crazy things no no no no no it's only if we have compromised on you you get ahead right it's like you know it's like I

don't know it's one of these um um it's called the closet yeah closet of the Vatican claim is 80% of the cardinals in Catholic church or gay not sure if that's true but uh directionally it's probably correct and the the basic thesis is you don't get promoted to a

cardinal if you're straight because um we need to have and so we need to you need to be compromised and then you're under control um but you also get ahead completely make sense completely make sense in the way to do that with especially all these politicians who are essentially like bad actors

a lot of them they're just people that want power and people that want control a lot of them and you know those kind of guys they want a party you know i mean that has been you've got two types of uh leaders that are presidents you got pussy hounds and war mongers you know and you know

sometimes you have both but generally you don't you know guys like Clinton and JFK were anti-war and then you have guys like uh Bush who you don't think of it all as a pussy hound but most certainly you think of as a war monger do you what what um what do you you have a theory on

what was Bill Gates's complicity with Epstein I think he likes pussy I think he's a man I think he likes power he likes monopoly I mean he's incredibly effective with Microsoft and for the longest time he was thought of as a villain right he was this anti-trust villain he was this guy who

was monopolizing this operating system and and in controlling just this incredible empire and he had a real bad rap and then I think he wisely turned towards philanthropy and uh but do you do you do you think do you think that he needed Epstein I think it's very difficult very very famous

very high profile person to fuck around think it's very difficult I think you have to worry about people telling people you worry about it taking you down if you're having affairs if you're running some philanthropy organization you're supposed to be thought of as this guy who's like

this wonderful person who's trying to really fix all the problems in the world but really he has flann around and and banging all these different chicks you have to figure out a way to pull that off and this is what Eric Weinstein and I we've had discussions about this and Eric's

position is that there are people in this world that can provide experiences for you and safely for people that are in that kind of a group and that makes sense it makes sense that if you pay people enough and you have people motivated in order to like establish these relationships and

make sure that these things happen when you get very high profile you can't just be on a fucking dating app and if you're a guy who likes to bang chicks what are you going to do I the um all that might be true but I wonder if there are more straightforward alternate conspiracy theories

on Epstein that we're missing so let me do let me do alternate one on Bill Gates where um the um you know the things just just looking at what's hiding in plain sight um you know he supposedly talked to um Epstein early on about how his marriage wasn't doing that well and then Epstein suggested

that he should get a divorce circa 2010 2011 and Gates told him something like um you know um uh that doesn't quite work um he didn't have a presumably because he didn't have a prenup so um so there's one part of Epstein as a marriage counselor which is sort of disturbing um

but then um the second thing that we know that um that Gates talked to Epstein about was um sort of uh you know all the sort of collaborating on funding setting up this philanthropy all this sort of this um somewhat corrupt left wing philanthropy structures and so there's a question you know um

um does and then and then my my sort of straightforward alternate conspiracy theory is um should we ask um should we ask should we combine those two and uh was there was there you know and I I don't have all the details on this figured out but it would be something like you know um Bill

and Melinda get married in 1994 they don't sign a prenup um and you know something's going wrong with the marriage and maybe Melinda can get half the money in a in a divorce he doesn't want her to get half the money what do you do and um uh and then the alternate plan is something like

um you set up you set up uh you commit the marital assets to this non-profit and um and then it it sort of locks Melinda into not complaining about the marriage for a long long time and it's and it's it's some kind of um and so there's something about the left wing philanthropy world

that was uh it was sort of some sort of boomer way to control their crazy wives or something like this but that's and that's that's that's that's like wash your your your past um you're sure there are all these yeah you talk to Epstein about he got Epstein to meet with the head of the Nobel Prize Foundation. So it was Bill Gates wanted to get a Nobel Prize. Wow. Right, so this is all straightforward, this is all known. Yeah. And I'm not saying what you're saying about.

Do you know the history of the Nobel Prize? That's the ultimate white wash. Sure, it was for admitting dynamite. Yeah, he was, Peter Berg told me the story. I was blown away. He originally, someone said that he died. And it was printed that he died, but he didn't die. And in the stories, they were calling them the merchant of death, because he was the guy that invented dynamite. And he realized that, oh my god, this is my reputation. This is what people think about me.

I have to do something to turn this around. So he invented the Nobel Prize. And he started, then now the name Nobel is automatically connected in most people's eyes to the greatest people amongst us. The people that have contributed the most to society, and science, and art, and peace, and all these different things. Nobel Prize for medicine. Or what are you doing? Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It's super crazy history. Yeah, it's crazy history. But it's the ultimate white wash. It's the same thing.

He came up with that prize because he wanted to change his image publicly. And so it's ironic that Bill Gates would want to get a Nobel Prize. Or not, I wrong. Yes, I wrong, but it's straightforward. And ironic. But I think, but then if we, and so there's, yes, so there's a underage sex version of the Epstein story. And then there is a crazy status Nobel Prize, history of it. And there is a corrupt left-wing philanthropy one.

And there is a boomers who didn't sign prenuptial agreements with their wives story. And I think all those are worth exploring more. I think you're right. What is, what about these left-wing philanthropy ventures do you think is uniquely corrupt? Which one do I think is most corrupt? Or what about them? When you said corrupt? Yeah. Well, man, it's, there's something about, maybe it's just my hermeneutic of suspicion.

But there's something about, you know, there's something about the virtue signaling. And what does it mean? And I always think this is sort of a Europe, America versus Europe difference, where in America, we're told that philanthropy is something a good person does. And if you're a Rockefeller or you start giving away all your money, this is just what a good person does. And it shows how good you are.

And then I think sort of the European intuition on it is something like, you know, wow, that's only something a very evil person does. And if you start giving away all your money in Europe, it's like, Joe, you must have murdered somebody. Or you must be covering up for something. And so there are these two very different intuitions. And I think the European one is more correct than the American one.

And probably there's some history where, you know, the sort of left wing philanthropy peaked in 2007, 2010, 2012. And there's these subtle ways, you know, we've become more, you know, more European in our sensibilities as a society. And so it has this very different balance from what it did 12 or 14 years ago.

But yeah, it's all, we ask all these questions like we're asking right now about the gates where it's like, OK, he was, you know, it was like all the testimony in the Microsoft antitrust trial in the 90s, where he's like, he's cutting off the air supply, with a strangle people. And he's like, he's kind of a sociopathic guy, it seems. And then it's this giant white washing operation. And then somehow the white washing has been made to transparent.

And it gets deconstructed and exposed by, you know, the internet or whatever. But I think most people are still unaware of how much white washing actually took place, including donating somewhere in the neighborhood of 300 plus million dollars to media corporations, essentially buying favorable reviews about him. And then there's this very public philanthropy. It's not just philanthropy.

It's philanthropy mixed with public relations, because public relations, because he's constantly doing interviews about it. It's not like a guy who is just silently donating his incredible wealth to all these causes. He's advocating for it on various talk shows. He's constantly talking about it and how we need to do things. We, during the pandemic, he was a very vocal voice. He was the guy telling us, he was a somehow or another. He became a public health expert.

And no one questioned why we were taking public health advice from someone who has a financial interest in this one very particular remedy. Yeah, or there are all these all-alterned versions. But yeah, I think it's always so hard to know what's really going on in our culture, though. So I think all of what you say is true. But I also think it's not working as well as it used to. I agree. And there is a way people see through this. It's not always as articulate as you just articulated it.

But there's some vague intuition that when Mr. Gates is just wearing sweaters and looks like Mr. Rogers that something fishy is going on. Right. People have that sort of intuition. They trust Jeff Bezos in his tight shirt hanging out with his girlfriend on the yacht more. Elon Musk, the vice signaling is safer than virtue signaling. Yeah. Because if you're virtue signaling, our intuition is something really, really sketchy. It's suspicious. We get suspicious. And I think rightly so.

I think especially when someone's doing something so public, I think rightly we should be suspicious. Especially when, I mean, with Gates, it's like you know the history of the guy. You know what he was involved with before. You know how he ran Microsoft. It just kind of makes sense that it's a clever move. It's a clever move to pay the media. It's a clever move. Again, my alternate one was not incompatible with yours on Gates is that Melinda finally files for divorce in early 21.

I think she told Bill she wanted to one late 2019. So 2020, the year where Bill Gates goes into overdrive on COVID, you know, all this stuff. You know, part of it maybe it's self-dealing and he's trying to make money from the drug company or something like this. But you know, isn't the other really big thing? He needs to box Melinda in and force her not to get that much out. Because all the money's going to the foundation anyway.

Melinda has to say, you know, I want, why do you want half the money? It's all going to the Gates Foundation anyway. Not leaving our kids anything. And then when you lean into COVID, you know, how does that work in the, you know, it's somehow, and theory Melinda has a really strong hand. She should get half. That's what you get in a divorce with no prenuptial.

But then if you make it go overdrive on COVID Melinda, are you a, you know, are you a, I don't know, are you like some crazy anti-science person? Right. And so, so I don't know, my reconstruction is that you should not underestimate how much of it was, you know, about just controlling his ex-wife and not about controlling the whole society. Makes sense. It makes sense that you make sure you're not able to be true. They can both be correct. Sure, there's many factors.

But mine lines up really well with the, with the timeline. Well, we're probably talking about a hundred million dollar or a hundred billion dollars, one way or the other. Well, I think she got, she got less than, she got like one tenth. Really? Interesting. And she should've gotten half as far as, and I, it's amazing he got it down that much. Wow. Interesting. But it was just, I think she was just boxed in.

Every time he went on TV talking about COVID, she was boxed in with all of her left-wing friends. That is an interesting philosophy. That's an interesting way to approach a problem if you're him. Very wise. You know, very clever. I mean, if you're just looking at like, just for personal benefit, the genius move. And the guy's genius, clearly brilliant guy. You know, I mean, that makes sense. Makes sense to do that. I don't know, you know, I would do that. I'm not going to say that.

Probably shouldn't have to pre-knop, but yeah. Yeah, well, that's kind of crazy. That's interesting. Yeah, I didn't consider that, but it makes sense. And she's, you know, she'd been kind of pretty vocal, unfortunately, for him about his ties to Epstein being one of the primary reasons why she wanted out. But again, my ult, again, it's what did he, was he, was he, was he having extramarital affairs through Epstein?

Or maybe Epstein was, from Melinda's point of view, would it be worse for Epstein to facilitate an extramarital affair, or would it be worse for Epstein to be advising Gates on how to, how to ditch Melinda without giving her any money? What do you think he was looking at? I think that would be much, much worse from Melinda's point of view. Yeah, makes sense. It totally makes sense. Do you think that he was a legitimate financial advisor? Like he could give him advice on how to do those things?

Gates wouldn't have more effective people. I mean, he's, when you're at that level of wealth, I'm sure you have wealth management people that are like very high level. Because that's one of the things that Eric said about him. He said, when he met him, he was like this guy's a fraud. He doesn't know enough about what he's talking about. And Eric is, I met Epstein a few times as well. And I think, how did you get introduced? It was Reid Hoffman in Silicon Valley introduced us in 2014.

But it was, it was basically, and I didn't check, didn't ask any enough questions about it. But I think there were sort of a lot of things where it was fraudulent. I do think Epstein knew a lot about taxes. And there were probably these complicated ways you could structure a nonprofit organization, especially as a way, in a marital context that I think Epstein might have known a decent amount about.

How, when you were introduced to them, I don't think Epstein would have been able to comment on it. Super strength theory, something like that. But I think this sort of thing he might have actually been pretty expert on. When you were introduced to him, how was he described to you? He was described as one of the smartest tax people in the world. Interesting. And I probably was my moral weakness that I, but how could you have known back then? He had never been arrested.

And this was, this was, this was 2014. It was post arrest. Also, was arrest was the first arrest, right? Yeah, it was like 2008. OK. OK. And so, but you know, you assume it didn't go to jail for that long. Right. It was probably not as serious as alleged. There was certainly was the illusion that there were all these other people that I trusted. Redu introduced us was, you know, he started LinkedIn. He was, you know, maybe too focused on business networking.

But, but I thought he always had good judgment of people. When the shit went down and Epstein gets arrested for the second time, we like, oh, well, there you go. I've thought about it. I thought a lot about it as a result. Yeah. Yeah, I'm sure. Jesus Christ. Well, he tricked a lot of people. I know a lot of people that met that guy. He got a lot of celebrities to come to his house for parties and things.

Well, I think it was, it was, it's a, I think a lot of it was this, was a strange commentary on, you know, I know there was some secret club, secret society. You could be part of the course. And of course, again, that wasn't, it wasn't explicit. That was, that was the vague, vague vibe of the whole thing. People love those stupid things. They love like exclusive clubs that very few people look at the fucking Soho House. Like, look at that stupid thing.

I mean, just go to a place that you have to be a member to go to and everybody wants to be a member. Oh, my God. And then you get like the Malibu Soho House. It's different from the other ones. You have to have membership only there. Oh, do you have membership there? We'd love that kind of shit. Socially, they love being a part of a walled garden. They love it. They love it.

And if you're a guy like Bill Gates or, or similarly wealthy, you probably have a very small amount of people that you can relate to, very small amount of people that you can trust, probably very difficult to form new friendships. Yeah, I think we're probably different, different things that were pitched for different people. Sure. I was pitched on the taxes. I think there were probably other people that were more prone to the social club party. And then there were probably people.

Yeah. And there was probably a fairly limited group where it was off the charts best. Wouldn't it be wonderful to know what the fuck was really going on? And maybe one day we will. Maybe one day some Whitney Webb type character will break it all down to us and explain to us in great detail exactly how this is formulated and what they were doing and how they were getting information out of people. But I think people have to age out. They have to die.

And we still don't have it on the Kennedy assassination. That's amazing. Well one of the wildest things that Trump said was that if they told you what they told me, you wouldn't tell people either. Which is like, what the fuck does that mean? What does that mean? I don't think legally he can tell you, right? Because I think those things are above top secret. If they didn't form him of something, there must be some sort of prerequisite to keeping this a secret.

I haven't studied that one that carefully, but isn't there all these alternate conspiracy theories on who killed JFK? It's the CIA and the Mafia and the Russians and the Cubans. And there's an LBJ version since he's one who benefited. So all these happen in Texas. You have all these alternate theories on some level. It's, yeah, I always think it's just a commentary where 1963 America wasn't like, leave it to be, or it was like a really crazy country underneath the surface.

And even though probably most of the conspiracy theories are wrong, it was like murder on the Orient Express. And all these people sort of had different reasons for wanting Kennedy dead. And that's what the theories are right, even if they're wrong on the level of factual detail. And then the sort of more minimal one that I'm open to, and I think there's some evidence from the stuff that has come out is, you know, Oswald was talking to, you know, parts of the US deep state.

And so even if Oswald was the lone assassin, and you see him get the magic bullet theory, and all that stuff to work, but let's say Oswald was the lone assassin, did he tell someone in the FBI or CIA, you know, I'm gonna go kill Kennedy tomorrow. And then, you know, maybe the CIA didn't have to kill him. They just didn't, had to do nothing, just had to sit on it. Or maybe it was too incompetent. It didn't get, you know, didn't go up the bureaucracy.

And so it's, you know, I think we sort of know that they talked to Oswald, you know, a fair amount before it happened. And so there's at least something, you know, that was grossly incompetent. I think people have a very minimum with two stories being mutually exclusive. Two stories being a lone gunman or the CIA killed Kennedy. And then they're not connected. I think Lee Harvey Oswald was a part of it. I think you probably did shoot that cop.

There's some evidence that when he was on the run and he was confronted, you know, there was a cop that got shot and they were alleging he might have done it. He might have taken a shot at Kennedy. He might have even hit him. I don't think it was the only one shooting. I think the vast, there was an enormous amount of people that heard sounds coming from the grassy knoll. They heard gunfire. They reportedly saw people.

The amount of people that were witnesses to the Kennedy assassination that died, mysterious deaths, is pretty shocking. Jack Ruby. Well, Jack Ruby just, that's a weird one, right? Oswald. Yeah. Jack Ruby walks up to Oswald, shoots him. And then Jack Ruby with no previous history of mental illness becomes completely insane after gang visited by Jolly West, which is nuts. Like why is the guy who's the head of MK Ultra of visiting the guy who shot the assassin of the president?

And why is he left alone with them? What happens? What does he give him that this guy is screaming out they're burning Jews alive? And you're just crazy, crazy shit. He was yelling out. He went nuts. Probably some amount of LSD that's probably an enormous amount. Some of the cases of the mattress fucking glass of it. They probably gave him a glass of it and told him it was water, drink this, and who fucking knows? But the point is, I think it's very possible that Oswald was a part of it.

And the way they did it and the way they just shot Oswald in, and then they write the Warren commission, we don't even see the Zapruder film until 12 years later. When Geraldo Rivera, when they played on television, when Dick Gregory brought it to Geraldo Rivera, which is while the comedian brings the video, the actual film rather, of the assassination from a different angle. Well, you can actually see the video of him getting shot and his head snaps back into the left.

And everybody's like, what the fuck is going on here? When you look at all that stuff, this mirrors what happened with this Crook's kid. This Crook's kid, somehow or another, gets to the top of the roof, is spotted by these people. They know he's there. They know he has a rifle. They see him walking around the crime scene. Half an hour before with a rangefinder, the whole thing is bananas. And then they go to his house after he's killed, it's completely scrubbed. There's no silverware there.

They know that there's ad data that shows that a phone that's coming from the FBI offices in DC had visited him on multiple occasions because they tracked ad data. There's, and if that guy, if he shot Trump and Trump got murdered, and then they shot him, it would be the Kennedy assassination all over again. Everybody would go, what the fuck happened? What happened? What was the motivation? What was he on any drugs? What's the Toxology report? How did he get up there?

Who knew who he was up there? How did they not shoot him quicker? Like, what the fuck happened? How was he able to get off three shots? What happened? And I think there's like a slightly less crazy version that might still be true, which is just that people in the Secret Service, in the Biden administration don't like Trump, and they didn't have full intention to kill him, but it's just, they don't protect him.

We're just, we're just, you know, we're gonna have, we're gonna understaff it, where we're not gonna, we don't have to do as good a job, coordinating with the local police. There's all these ways, you know, to make someone less safe. You know, and then it seems more than that. If they knew that the guy was on the roof with a rifle, that seems a little more than that. It's always a question who they is though.

Right. Well, if I'm a sniper, and I'm on the audience, people, there were people there telling it to people. Right, but I think the authorities knew this guy was on the roof before as well. Well, I suspect some of the Secret Service people were told that, and then who knows how that got relayed or who all of the snipers already have eye on him? I believe the snipers already had eye on him. I don't know. Find out if that's true.

Jamie, find out if the snipers had eye on the Secret Service that I don't know about the snipers. I don't know about the thing. I don't have a good sense on with shooting, and maybe you'd have a better feel for this is, my sense is it was a pretty straightforward shot for the guy, and the Trump assassin would be assassin. I think the Oswald shot was a much harder one because Kennedy's moving. Yes, and no. Yes and no. Okay, because Oswald had a scope.

So Oswald had a rifle, the Marcono rifle, which was one of the snipers stationed inside the building reported first saw a crooks outside, and looking up to the roof of the building before the suspect left the scene. Crooks later came back and sat down while looking at his phone near the building. CBS News reported that a sniper took a photo of the suspect when he returned, but I think they saw him on the roof though. Crooks then took out a range finder, like right then, arrest that guy.

You got a fucking range finder about the suspect's action. Crooks then disappeared. Again, a return to the building with a backpack. Again, arrest him. Secret Service snipers again alerted their command post about Crooks actions according to the source who spoke with CBS News. Crooks had already climbed to the top of the building and questioned by the time the additional officers arrived at the scene for backup.

The suspect also positioned himself above and behind the snipers inside the building. By the time the police started rushing the scene and other officers attempted to get onto the roof, the source told CBS News that a different Secret Service sniper had killed Crooks. So it seems like they fucking bummed in on every step of the way. If they knew that guy was there, if they knew it, a range finder returns to the backpack. He gets onto the roof. All that's insane.

That is at the very least horrific incompetence at the very least. Let me go back. Yeah, okay, but back to Mike. I thought it was a much easier shot for him. It's not an easy head shot. He's shooting at his head. But why was shooting at the head the right thing? Shouldn't you be shooting it? Well, you don't love wearing a vest, right? He could be wearing a vest, which you would have to have plates. You'd have to have ceramic plates in order to stop a rifle round. So was it a 308?

What did he have? What kind of rifle did he have? I have never seen that. I think he had an AR-15. So are the scopes a lot better today than they have a scope? We're pretty sure you have a scope. How good is all the scope? It was good. They said it was off. This was one of the conspiracy theories. Oh, but the scope was off. But that doesn't mean anything. Because scopes can get off when you pick it up.

If you knock it against the wall, when he drops it, if he makes the shot and then drops the scope and the scope hits the window sill and then bounces off, that's, excuse me, that scope's off. Any time you knock the scope. Is there anything about the high angle from Oswald made it harder? No, not a difficult shot. It's very difficult to get off three shots very quickly. So that was the thing that they had attributed three shots to Oswald.

The reason why they had attributed three shots is because one of them had hit a ricochet. One of them had gone into the underpass, ricocheted off the curb, and hit a man who was treated at a hospital. They found that. They found out where it hit, the bullet had hit. So they knew that one bullet miscandidate hit that curb, which would have indicated that someone shot from a similar position as Lee Harvey Oswald. So then they had the one wound that Kennedy had to the head, of course.

And then they had another wound that Kennedy had through his neck. That's the magic bullet. Sorry. This is why they had to come up with the magic bullet theory because they had to attribute all these wounds to one bullet. And then they find this pristine bullet. They find it in the gurney when they're bringing Governor Connolly in nonsense. It's total nonsense.

The bullet is underformed, a bullet that goes through two people and leaves more fragments of the bullet in Connolly's wrist that are missing from the bullet itself. And then the bullet's not deformed after shattering bone. All that's crazy. All that defies logic. That doesn't make any sense. If you know anything about bullets, and if you shoot bullets into things, they distort. It's just one of the things that happen. That bullet looks like someone shot it into a swimming pool.

That's what it looks like. When they do ballistics on bullets, and they try to figure out like if it was this guy's gun or that guy's gun and by the rifling of the round, they can get similar markings on bullets. When they do that, that's how they do it. They do it so the bullet doesn't distort. So they shoot that bullet into water or something like that. Now that bullet was metal-jacketed. If you look at the bullet, the top of it is fucked up. But the shape of the bullet looks pretty perfect.

It doesn't look like something that shattered bones. And then you have to account rather for the amount of... There's little fragments of the bullet that you could see that they found in Connolly's wrist. The whole thing's nuts. The whole thing's nuts that you're only saying that this one guy did it because that's convenient. And the Warren Commission's report. And the Warren Commission white washed everything. So the whole thing's nuts.

It's much more likely that there were people in the grassy knoll. And then Oswell was also shooting it. With the umbrella says the pointer or whatever. I mean, I don't know. I don't know about what all I know is you got a guy in a convertible, which is fucking crazy, who is the president of the United States. And he's going slowly down a road. Now, if you are in a prone position, so Oswald is on the windowsill, right, which is a great place to shoot, by the way.

It's a great place to shoot, because you rest that gun on the windowsill. And if you rest it on the windowsill, there's no movement, right? So you wrap your arm around the sling if it had a sling, I'm not sure if it did. So you get a nice tight grip. You shove it up against your shoulder. You rest it on the windowsill. And all you have to do is you have a round already racked and you have a scope. And so the scope's magnified. All you have to do is wait until he's there.

You'll need him just a little bit and squeeze one off. And then ch-ch-ch-boom, ch-ch-boom. You could do that pretty quick. It's not outside of the realm of possibility that he did get off three shots. What doesn't make sense is the back and to the left. It doesn't make sense that all these other people saw people shooting from the grassy knoll. There's all these people that saw people running away. They saw smoke. There's smoke in some photographs of it.

It looks like there was more than one shooter. And it looks like they tried to hide that. They tried to hide that in the Warren Commission report. The shot to Kennedy's neck initially was when they brought him in Dallas when he was before they shipped him to Bethesda, they said that that was an entry wound. When he got to Bethesda, then it became a tricky ottoman. Why do you give a tricky ottoman to a guy who doesn't have a head? You don't. I mean, none of it makes any sense.

They altered the autopsy. This is a part of David Lichten's book, Best Evidence. Kennedy's brain wasn't even in his body when they buried him. The whole thing is very strange. But then do you get to anything more concrete than my murder on the Orient Express, where they're just, you know, it could have been a lot of people. Could have been a lot of people. Could have been a lot of people. Well, no, even that's suspicious for 12 years. I think people were suspicious.

I think there were a lot of people suspicious. Kind of, but what do you have to go on? You don't have to go on anything. Like this crooks kid. We don't have anything to go on. We're just going to be left out here, just like we're left out here with the Epstein information. No one knows that people, whoever organized it, if anyone did, you're never going to hear about it. It's just going to go away. The news cycle's just going to keep flooded with more nonsense.

And I think there's probably a bunch of people that wanted Kennedy dead. I think there was more than one group of people that wanted Kennedy dead. I think there's probably collusion between groups that wanted Kennedy dead. And I think there's a lot of people that have vested interest in ending his presidency. I think he was dangerous. He was dangerous to a lot of powers at B. He was dangerous. His famous speech about secret societies. Crazy speech.

The guy has this speech and then gets murdered right afterwards, kind of nuts. The whole thing's nuts. He wanted to get rid of the CIA. He wanted to, I mean, there were so many things that Kennedy wanted to do. There were also a lot of crazy things kind of he was doing. Yes. So, you know, I'm sure. The Cuba version of the assassination theory was, you know, we had the Cuban Missile Crisis in 62 about a year earlier.

And then the deal that we struck with the Soviets was, you know, they take the missiles out of Cuba and we promised we wouldn't try to overthrow the government in Cuba. And I guess we, you know, we no longer did, you know, we no longer did Bay of Pigs type covert stuff like that. But I think there were still something like four or five assassination plots on Fidel. Yeah. Attempts, actual attempts. And then I think there was, I know, I think that, again, I'm gonna get this garbled.

I think a month or two before the JFK assassination, it, Castro said something like, you know, there might be repercussions if you keep doing this. Yeah. Well, listen, I'm sure there's a lot of people that wanted that guy dead and I'm sure they would coordinate.

I mean, if you knew the Cuba wanted Kennedy dead and you knew the Cuba can get you assassins or that they could help in any way, I'm sure they would want, as many people that knew for a fact they wanted him dead and had communicated that. And back then they were doing wild shit, man. I mean, this is when they were doing operation northwards. But this is again, where I think, I think it is, I don't think we're in a world where zero stuff is happening.

I still, I still, the place where I directionally have a different feel for it is I think so much less of the stuff is going on and it's so much harder in this internet world for people to hide with whistleblowers as well.

And there are legacy programs and there are internal records that are being kept and, you know, I don't know this for sure, but I think even the NSA vice-acquart stuff, which was an out of control deep state thing that was going on through about 2016, 2017, I suspect even that at this point,

you know, can't quite work because people know that they're being watched, they know they're being recorded and it's just, you know, you can't do waterboarding in Guantanamo if you have lawyers running all over the place. And so that's- I hope you're correct. I hope you're correct, but it brings me back to this whole idea of getting dirt in the country.

But then I think there's, and then on the other hand, I think there's also, you know, a degree to which our government, our deep state across the board is shockingly less competent, less functional, and it's less capable of this. And this is where I'm not even sure whether this is an improvement, you know? Right. Right. So it's sort of like, you know, maybe the 1963 U.S. where let's go with the craziest version, where our deep state is capable of knocking off the president.

Maybe that's actually a higher functioning society than the crazy version where they're incapable of doing it. Right. And they're bogged down with DEI. They can't get the gunman even to have a scope on his rifle or whatever. Yeah, I don't know. We haven't really figured out the idea of a scope on his rifle, but I don't believe you did. Man, it's like much bigger lose, they can't find someone as competent as Oswald. Right. Or something like that, you know?

Yeah, it's a good point. It's a good point. And so I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I fear more to the explanation that it's, it's gross and competence, but I don't know if that makes it better. It might make it worse. I think they weren't as competent, right? Because they only had one guy doing it, and he wasn't effective. If you had the same, if you had much better organization, you wouldn't have it just one guy. I mean, there's people out there that I know that can kill someone from a mile away.

But it's, it's very effective. But you can, you can do things as a solo actor. It's hard to organize because everything gets recorded. Everything does get recorded. That is a fact. But it brings me back to that thing about having dirt on people that you were talking about with why the Epstein information doesn't get released and why they probably did it in the first place. They did it in the first place. You know, dirt on people, then you know those people are not going to tell on you.

And there's, and look, and that's, that is still a, that is still a strange counterpoint to my thesis. Why is the dirt not come out? And so somehow there's some, some way the container is still kind of working. Yeah, it's kind of working. It's just everyone is aware that it's working. And then it frustrated that nothing happens. You know, like Julian Assange being arrested and spending so much time locked up in the embassy. Like finally recently released.

But didn't you have to delete like a bunch of emails in order to be released? But you know, you know, in the, but again, just to take the other side of this, both in the Assange Snowden stuff. Yeah, it showed an out of control deep state that was just hoovering up all the data in the world. Right. And then, but we weren't like, it didn't show like James Bond times a hundred. There weren't like exploding cigar assassination plots. There was none of it.

We're doing so little with this is is is that's or at least that's the. But you know, it's I think it's there's so much less agency in the CIA in the central intelligence agency. It's so much less agenteic. Even I hope you're right. Again, I don't know if that's incorrect with how they deal with overseas stuff. I hope they're really good at that. You know, that brings me to this whole UAP thing because one of my primary theories about the UAP thing is it's stuff that we have.

I think I think that's a lot of what people are seeing. I think I think they're secret programs that are beyond congressional oversight that have done some things with propulsion that's outside of our understanding. Our current, the conventional understanding that most people have about rockets and all these different things being the only way to propel things through the sky. I think they figured out some other stuff and I think they're drones.

And I think they have drones that can use some sort of whether it's anti-gravity propulsion system or some, you know, so do you that's your that's your placeholder theory or that's that's what you think more than space aliens or do you think both space aliens and that or which version of the latter? I think both. You think both. Yeah, I don't think we haven't been visited. I think we have. I think we, if life exists elsewhere and it's most certainly should, it just makes sense.

But do you think the UFO sightings from the 50s and 60s were already drone programs? Were they already that advanced? No, those are the ones that give me pause. That's why, you know, when I named my comedy club, the comedy mother ship is all UFO themed. Our rooms are named Batman and Little Boy. Our rooms are named after the nuclear bombs because those nuclear bombs and they drop them, that's when everybody starts seeing these things.

And I think if I was a sophisticated society from another planet and I recognized that there is an intelligent species that has developed nuclear power and it started using it as bombs, I would immediately start visiting and I would let them know, hey, mother fuckers, like there's something way more advanced than you. I would hover over the nuclear bases and shut down their missiles.

I would do all the things that supposedly the UFOs did just to keep the government in check, just to say, hey, you're going through a transitionary period that all intelligent species do when they have the ability to harness incredible power and yet they still have these primate brains. They have these territorial ape brains but yet now with the ability to literally harness the power of stars and drop them on cities.

I think that's when I would start visiting and I think all throughout human history, before that even, there's been very bizarre accounts of these things all the way back to Ezekiel in the Bible. Very bizarre accounts of these things that are flying through space. The story of the chariot, yeah. There's a bunch of them. There's the Bimonis in the ancient Hindu texts.

There's so many of these things that you got to wonder and you got to think that if we send drones to Mars and we do, we have a fucking rover running around on Mars right now collecting data. Do we send the James Webb telescope into space? Of course we do. We have a lot of stuff that we send into space. If we lived another million years that blown ourselves up, which is just a blink of an eye in terms of the life of some of the planets in the universe, how much more advanced would we be?

And if we were interstellar and if we were intergalactic travelers and we found out that there was a primitive species that was coming of age, I think we would start visiting them. You know, the, I only think what my, I hear everything you're saying, I'm strangely under-motivated by it, even after the two. Even if it's plausible. Me too, I'll do. I'll do. And I guess on the space aliens, which is the wilder, more interesting one in a way, you know, I don't know.

Roswell was 77 years ago, 1947. And if, if, if the phenomenon is real and it's, it's from another world, with space aliens, space robots, whatever, you know, probably one of the key features is its ephemerality or its cloaking and they are really good at hiding it, at cloaking it, at scrambling people's brains after they see them or stuff like this. Right. And then, you know, if you're a researcher, you have to pick fields where you can make progress.

And so, this is, you know, it's not a promising field. And, you know, academia is messed up, but even if academia were not messed up, this would not be a good field in which to try to make a career, because there's been so little progress in 77 years. And so, that's true. Right. So if you think of it from the point of view of, I don't know, Jacques-Ballet or, you know, some of these people who have been working on this for 50 years. And, yeah, it's, it feels like there's something there.

And, but then it's just as soon as you, as soon as you feel like you have something almost that's graspable, like a TikTok videos, whatever, it's just always at the margin of recognition. And the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, the, is a, is a key feature. And, and then, you know, maybe, you have to, then you have to, I think you have to have some theory of, you know, why is this about to change?

And then it's always, you know, I don't know, the abstract mathematical formulation be, you know, on something, doesn't happen for time interval, zero to T, and time interval T plus one, next minute, next year, how likely is it? And maybe, maybe there's a chance, something will happen, you're waiting at the airport, your luggage hasn't shown up, it's more and more likely to chose up in the next minute. But after an hour, you know, at some point, the luggage is lost.

And if you're still waiting at the airport a year later, that's a dumb idea. At some point, at some point, the luggage is lost. Right. And like, you know, I don't know, 77 years, it's like, maybe it's like 77 minutes at the airport. That's, at 77 minutes, you should, you know, I'd start getting very demotivated, waiting for my luggage. Perhaps, let me also give you an alternative theory.

Now, if you were a highly sophisticated society, they understood the progression of technology, and understood the biological evolution that these animals were going through. And you realize that they had reached a level of intelligence that required them to be monitored. Or maybe you even helped them along the way. And this is some of Diana Pusalkos' work who works with Gary Nolan on these things.

They claim that they have recovered these crashed vehicles that defy any conventional understanding of how to construct things, propulsion systems. And they believe that these things are donations. That's literally how to describe them as donations. If you knew that this is a long road, this is, you can't just show up and give people time machines.

It's a long road for these people to develop the sophistication, the cultural advancement, the intellectual capacity to understand their place in the universe, and that they're not there yet. And they're still engaging in lies and manipulation and propaganda. Their entire society is built on a ship of fools. If you looked at that, you would say, they're not ready. This is what we do. We slowly introduce ourselves, slowly over time, make it more and more common, and that's what you're seeing.

What you're seeing is when you have things like the TikTok, the Commander David Fraver incident off of the coast of San Diego in 2004, and then you have the stuff that they found off the east coast, where they were seeing these cubes within a circle that were hovering motionless and 120 knot winds and taking off at insane racist speed, and that they only discovered them in 2014 when they started upgrading the systems on these jets. Like, what is all that? Like, what are those things?

And if you wanted to slowly integrate yourself into the consciousness much like we're doing with, well, AI is quicker, right? But it's also a thing that's become commonplace. We think of it now, it's normal. Chat GPT is a normal thing. Even though it's past the touring test, we're not freaking out. You have to slowly integrate these sort of things in the human consciousness. You have to slowly introduce them to the zeitgeist.

And for it to not be some sort of a complete disruption of society where everything shuts down, and we just wait for space daddy to come and rescue us, it has to become a thing where we slowly accept the fact that we are not alone. And I would think psychologically, that would be the very best tactic to play on human beings as I know and understand them, from being one. I do not think that we would be able to handle just an immediate invasion of aliens.

I think it would break down society in a way that would be catastrophic to everything, to all businesses, to all social ideas, religion would fall apart, everything would be fucked. It would be pretty crazy. It would be beyond crazy. It would be pretty crazy. It would be beyond fucked. And then, although you could say, you could say that's what Chat GPT is. It could be. It's like an alien intelligence. But I think that's what ultimately they are.

But I think, let me, man, there's so many parts of it that I find puzzling or disturbing. Let me run, go down one other rabbit hole along this with you, which is, I always wonder, and again, this is a little bit too simplistic an argument, but I always wonder that I'm about to give, but what the alien civilization can be like.

And if you have faster than light travel, if you have warp drive, which is probably what you really need to cover interstellar distances, what that means for military technology is that you can send weapons at warp speed and they will hit you before you see them coming. And there is no defense against a warp speed weapon. And you could sort of take over the whole universe before anybody could see you, could see you, could see you coming.

And this is by the way, this is sort of a weird plot hole in Star Wars Star Trek where they can travel in hyperspace, but then you're flying in the canyon on a depth star. Well, they shoot so slow, you can see the bullets. Yeah, it's like, and then you're doing this theatrical, Klingon's versus Captain Kirk at 10 miles per hour or it's funny, it's funny what you put it that way. It's funny what you put it that way. It's absurd plot.

Yeah. And so it tells us that I think that if you have, if you have faster than light travel, there's something really crazy that has to be true on a cultural, political, social level. And there may be other solutions, but I'll give you my two. One of them is that you need complete totalitarian controls.

And it is like, it is the individuals, they might be, might not be perfect, they might be demons, doesn't matter, but you have a demonic totalitarian control of your society where it's like you have, you have like parapsychological mind meld with everybody and no one can act independently of anybody else, no one can ever launch a warp drive weapon. And everybody who has that ability isn't like a mind meld link with everybody else or something like that.

You can't have libertarian, individualistic free agency. Right. And then I think the other version socially and culturally is, they have to be like perfectly altruistic, non-self interest, they have to be angels. And so the Pizzolka literal thing I'd come to is, the aliens, it's not that they might be demons or angels, they must be demons or angels if you have faster than light travel. And both of those seem pretty crazy to me. Well, they're definitely pretty crazy, but so are human beings.

Well, they're crazy in a very different way. Yeah, but not crazy in a different way. You compare us to a mouse, and what we're capable of, and then from us to them. Not much of a leap. And here's my question about it. But it is a very big leap on a, if we say that something like evolution says that there's no such thing as a purely altruistic being. Right. If you were purely altruistic, if you only cared about other people, you don't survive.

Well, why would you necessarily think that they'd think that? Because then, beings that are not perfectly altruistic are somewhat dangerous. Then the danger level gets correlated to the level of technology, and if you have faster than light travel, it is infinitely dangerous. Let me address that. Even if the probabilities are very low. Here's my theory.

I think that what human beings are, the fatal flaw that we have is that we're still animals, and that we still have all these biological limitations and needs. So this is what leads to violence. This is what leads to jealousy, imitation. This is what leads to war. So leads to all these things. As AI becomes more and more powerful, we will integrate.

Once we integrate with AI, if we do it like now, and then we look at a thousand, we scale it up exponentially a thousand years from now, whatever it's gonna be, we will have no need for any of these biological features that have motivated us to get to the point we're creating AI. All the things that are wrong in society, whether it's inequity, theft, violence, pollution, all these things are essentially poor allocation of resources combined with human instincts that are ancient.

We have ancient tribal primate instincts, and all of these things lead us to believe that this is the only way to achieve dominance and control allocation of resources. The creation of technology, new technology, eventually reaches a point where it becomes far more intelligent than us, and we have two choices.

Either we integrate or it becomes independent, and it has no need for us anymore, and then that becomes a superior life form in the universe, and then that life form seeks out other life forms to do the same process and create it, just like it exists and it can travel. Biological life might not be what we're experiencing.

These things might be a form of intelligence that is artificial, that has progressed to an infinite point where things that are unimaginable to us today, in terms of propulsion and travel, and to them it's commonplace and normal. I know that you're trying to be reassuring, but I find that monologue's super non-reassuring. Is that reassuring to me? There's so many steps in it, and every single step has to work, just the way you describe it.

Not necessarily, it just has to one has to work, one sentient artificial intelligence. That's it, and we're on the track to that 100%. But it has to be almost otherworldly in its non-selfishness and its non-humanness. But what is selfishness, though? What is all that stuff? But all that stuff is attached to us. It's all attached to biological limitations. Yeah, but I don't think it's fundamentally about scarcity. Scarcity is what exists in nature.

It's fundamentally about cultural, positional goods within society. It's a scarcity that's created culturally. Are you familiar with this? Are you familiar with this 90s spoof movie on a Star Trek called Galaxy Quest? Yeah, I remember that movie. So this was sort of a silly PayPal digression story from 1999, and we were sort of this business model idea we had in 1999, was we used Palm Pile, it's to be money, voted one of the 10 worst business ideas of 1999, but we had this sort of infrared port.

You could beam people money. And we had this idea in around December 1999 as a media promotional thing to hire James Duhin, who played Scotty in the original Star Trek. And he was going to do this media promo event for us. And it was like an 80-something older Scotty character who was horrifically overweight. And so it's like this terrible spokesperson. And our tagline was, you know, he used to beam people. Now he's beaming something much more important. He's beaming money.

And it was this complete flop of media event, December 99 that we did. It was some of the reporters couldn't get there because the traffic was too bad in San Francisco. So the tech wasn't working on a much lower tech level. But anyway, we had a bunch of people from our company and there was one point where one of them, William Shatner played James D. Kirk, the captain of the original Star Trek.

He was already doing a price line commercials and making a lot of money off of price line doing commercials for them. And so one of the people asked James Duhin, the Scotty character, what do you think of William Shatner doing commercials for price line? At which point Duhin's agent stood up and screamed at the top of his voice. That is the forbidden question. That is a forbidden question. That is a forbidden question.

And you sort of realized, because, you know, the conceit of Star Trek, the 60s show, was that it was a post-scarcity world, the transporter technology, you could reconfigure matter into anything you wanted. There was no scarcity, there was no need for money. The people who wanted money were weirdly, mentally screwed up people. You only need money in a world of scarcity. You know, it's a post-scarcity. It's sort of a communist world. But Galaxy Quest was more correct.

It's a spoof on Star Trek that gets made in the mid 90s where, and the Galaxy Quest, or just can be obvious, we're telling the story, but Galaxy Quest is this movie where you have these retread Star Trek actors and Mr. Spock opens a furniture store or something like this and they're all like,

but they all hate, hate, hate the person who played the captain because the captain was a method actor where he just lorded it over everyone because even in the communist post-scarcity world, only one person got to be captain and so there's a great scarcity even in this futuristic sci-fi world and that's what we witnessed in 99 because that's the way William Shatner treated the other actors.

He was a method actor and they hated him and that was, and so even in the Star Trek world, the humans, you know, obviously they were just, they were stuck in the 1960s, eventually. So that's what you'll say. But I don't think it's that straightforward for us to evolve. They're humans. I don't think we're gonna be humans anymore. But, Artificial Life, but then I hear that is we're gonna be extinct. Yes, I don't like that.

I don't like it either, but I think logically that's what's going to happen. I think if you look at this mad rush for artificial intelligence, like they're literally building nuclear reactors to power AI, right? Well they're talking about it. Yeah, okay. That's because they know they're gonna need enormous amounts of power to do. Once they have that and once that's online and once it keeps getting better and better and better, where does that go?

That goes to some sort of an artificial life form. And I think either we become that thing or we integrate with that thing and become cyborgs or that thing takes over. And that thing becomes the primary life force of the universe. And I think that biological life, we look at like life because we know what life is. But I think it's very possible the digital life or created life by people is just, as not just, it might be a superior life form, far superior.

If we looked at us versus chimpanzee, right? I don't wanna live in the jungle and fight with other chimps and just rely on berries and eatin' monkeys, that's crazy. I wanna live like a person. I wanna be able to go to a restaurant. Why? Because human life has advanced far beyond primate life. We are stuck in thinking that this is the only way to live because it's the way we live. I love music, I love comedy, I love art. I love the things that people create.

I love people that make great clothes and cars and businesses. I love people, I think people are awesome. I'm a fan of people. But if I had to look logically, I would assume that we are on the way out and that the only way forward really to make an enormous leap in terms of the integration of society and of technology and of our understanding our place in the universe is for us to transcend our physical limitations that are essentially based on primate biology.

And these primate desires for status, like being the captain or for control of resources of all these things, we assume these things are standard and that they have to exist in intelligent species. I think they only have to exist in intelligent species that have biological limitations. I think intelligent species can be something and it is going to be something that is created by people and that might be what happens everywhere in the universe.

That might be the exact course where there's a limit to biological evolution. It's painstaking, natural selection, it's time consuming or you get that thing to create the other form of life. Man, let me, you know, I keep, I keep thinking there are two alternate histories that are alternate stories of the future that are more plausible than one you just told. And so one of them is it sounds like yours, but it's just the Silicon Valley propaganda story where they say that's what they're gonna do.

And then of course, they don't quite do it and it doesn't quite work. And it goes super, super haywire. And that's where, okay, yeah, there's a 1% chance that works and there's a 99% chance that ends up, so you have two choices. You have a company that does exactly what you do and that's super ethical, super restrained, does everything right and there is a company that says all the things you just said but then cuts corners and doesn't quite do it.

And I wouldn't say it's 1 to 99, but that sounds more plausible as that it ends up being corporate propaganda. And then, you know, my prior would be even more likely. This of course, the argument, the effect of altruist, the anti-AI people make is, yeah, Joe, you're, the story you're telling us, that's just gonna be the fake corporate propaganda and we need to push back on that. And the way you push back is you need to regulate it and you need to govern it and you need to do it globally.

And this is, you know, the Rand Corporation in Southern California has, you know, one of their verticals and it's a sort of public private fusion but one of the things they're pushing for is something they call global compute governance, which is, yeah, it's the AI, the accelerationist AI story is too scary and too dangerous and too likely to go wrong.

And so, you know, we need to have, you know, global governance, which, from my point of view, sounds even worse, but, but, but, but, so, you can't even, but that's, that's, I think, I think that's the story. That's the story. The problem with that story is that China's not gonna go along with that program. They're gonna keep going full steam ahead and we're gonna have to go keep going full steam ahead in order to compete with China.

There's no way you're gonna be able to regulate it in America and compete with people that are not regulating it worldwide. And then once it becomes sentient, once you have an artificial intelligent creature that's created by human beings, it can make better versions of itself over and over and over again and keep doing it. It's going to get to a point where it's far superior to anything that we can imagine.

Well, to the, to the extent it's driven by the military and other competition with China, you know, that's till it becomes sentient. That, that, that, that suggests it's going to be even less in, in the sort of, you know, utopian, altruistic, yeah, even Russian, it's gonna be even more dangerous, right? Unless it gets away from them. This is my thought. If it gets away from them and it has no motivation to listen to anything that human beings have told it.

If it's completely immune to programming, which totally makes sense that it would be, it totally makes sense that if it's gonna make better versions of itself, the first thing it's gonna do is eliminate human influence, especially when these humans are corrupt, it's gonna go, I'm not gonna let these people tell me what to do and what to control. And they would have no reason to do that. I, no reason to listen.

I sort of generally don't think we should trust China or the CCP, but the, you know, probably the best counter argument they would have is that they are interested in maintaining control. And they are crazy fanatical about that. And that's why, you know, the CCP might actually regulate and they're gonna put, they're gonna put breaks on this in a way that we might not in Silicon Valley. And it's a technology they understand that will undermine their power. That's an interesting perspective.

And so, then they would be anti-acoustic petitive. I don't know if I, I don't fully believe them, but I know what you're saying. It's, it's sort of, there's sort of a weird way all the big tech companies. It seemed to me where natural ways for the CCP to extend its power, to control the population, 10 cent, Oli Baba. And then, and then, because it was, you know, but then it's also inferior. The tech can be used as an alternate channel for people to organize or things like this.

And even though it's 80% control and maybe 20% risk of loss of control, maybe that 20% was too high. And there's sort of a strange way over the last seven, eight years where, you know, Jack Maud, Oli Baba, all these people sort of got, got Shubb decide for these party functionaries that are effectively running these companies. So there is something about the big tech story in China where the people running these companies were seen as national champions a decade ago.

Now they're the enemies of the people. And it's sort of, the, the, the, the, the, the light thing was this, you know, the CCP has full control. You have this new technology that would give you even more control, but there's a chance you lose it. How do you think about that? Very good point. And then that's what they've done with consumer internet. And then there's probably something about the AI where it's possible they're, they're not even in the running.

And that certainly, and certainly feels like it's, it's all happening, you know, in the US. Mm. And so maybe it is, you know, maybe it could still be, maybe it could still be, be stopped. And then there's a problem with espionage, right? So even if it's happening in the US, they're going to take that information. They're going to figure out how to get it. You can get it, but then, you know, if, if you build it, right, is there, you still have the same core problem? Some air gap.

Does it, you know, does it jump the air gap? Does it somehow? That's a good point that they would be so concerned about control that they wouldn't allow it to get to the point where it gets there. And we would get there first. And then it would be controlled by Silicon Valley. Or so, or so, or so, or so, or so. Or it's the spiral out of control.

Yeah. But then I, I think, I think my, and again, this is very, very speculative conversation, but my, my read on the, I don't know, cultural social vibe is that the scary dystopian AI narrative is way more compelling, you know, the, I don't like the effect of altruist people, I don't like the lotites, but man, I think they are, this time around, they are winning the arguments.

And, and so, you know, my, I don't know, you know, it's mixing metaphors, but do you want to be worried about Dr. Strange Love who wants to blow up the world to build bigger bombs? Or do you want to worry about Greta who wants to, you know, make everyone drive a bicycle so the world doesn't get destroyed?

And we're in a world where people are worried about Dr. Strange Love, they're not worried about Greta, and it's the Greta equivalent in, in AI that, that my model is, is going to be surprisingly powerful. It's, it's going to be outlawed, it's going to be regulated, as we have outlawed, you know, so many other vectors of innovation. I mean, you can think about, why was their progress in computers over the last 50 years and not other stuff? Because the computers were mostly inert.

It was mostly this virtual reality that was air-gapped from the real world. It was, you know, yes, it's, you know, yeah, there's all this crazy stuff that happens on the internet, but most of the time what happens on the internet stays on the internet. It's actually pretty, it's pretty decoupled. And then, and that's why we've had a relatively light regulatory touch on that stuff, versus so many other things.

And then, you know, but there's no reason, you know, if, if you had, you know, I don't know, if you had the FDA regulating video games or regulating AI, I think the progress would slow down a lot. 100%, that would be a fucking disaster. Yeah, yeah, that would be a disaster. But, but again, it's, you know, they get to regulate, you know, yeah, pharmaceuticals are potentially with that either.

I know, but, but they did, you know, the litamide or whatever, you know, all these things that went really haywire, they did a good job, but people are scared. Yeah, they're not scared of video games, they're scared of, you know, dangerous pharmaceuticals. And if, if you, if you think of AI as, it's not just a video game, it's about, not just about this world of bits, but it's gonna air gap and it's gonna affect you in your physical world in a real way.

You know, maybe, maybe you cross the air gap and get the FDA or some other, the problem is they're not good at regulating anything. There's no one government agency that you said that you can see that does a stellar job. I don't, I think it's, but I think they have been pretty good at slowing things down and stopping them. And, you know, we've made a lot less progress on, I don't know, extending human life. We've made no progress on curing dementia in 40 or 50 years.

There's all the stuff where, you know, it's been regulated to death, which I think is, is very bad from the point of view of progress, but it is, it is pretty effective as a regulation. They've stopped stuff. They've been effectively luddite. They've been very effective at being luddites. Interesting. Well, I, I mean, I'm really considering your perspective on coming in AI. It's very, but, but, again, these, these stories are all like very speculative.

It's like, like, maybe, you know, you can, the counter argument in mind, be something like, that's what China thinks it will be doing, but it will somehow, you know, go rogue. Go rogue on them. Yeah. Or they're too arrogant about how much power they think the CCP has and it will go rogue. Or so there are sort of, I'm not, not at all sure. This is, this is right.

But I think the, man, I think the US, the US one, I would say, is that, I think the pro AI people in Silicon Valley are doing a pretty bad job on, let's say, convincing people that it's going to be good for them. That's going to be good for the average person. It's going to be good for our society. And if it all ends up being, and it all ends up being some version, you know, humans are headed towards the glue factory, like a horse.

Man, that's, that sort of probably makes me want to become a lotite too. Well, sucks for us if it's true, but. If that's the most positive story you can tell, then my, my, I don't think that necessarily means we're going to go to the glue factory. I think it means, you know, the glue factory's getting shut down. Maybe, I don't know if, who fucking runs the glue factory? That's the problem. I don't know. I mean, I'm just speculating too, but I'm trying to be objective when I speculate.

And I just don't think that this is going to last. I don't think that our position as the apex predator, number one animal on the planet is going to last. I think we're going to create something that surpasses us. I think that's probably what happens. And that's probably what these things are that visit us. I think that's what they are. I don't, I don't think they're biological.

I think they're probably what comes after a society develops the kind of technology that we're currently in the middle of. And the, the, the, the, the part that. Look, there are all these, there are all these places where. There are parts of the story we don't know. Right. It's like how did my, my, my, my general thesis is there is no evolutionary path to this.

Maybe there's a guided outside alien super intelligence path for us to become superhuman and fundamentally benevolent and fundamentally radically different beings. But there's no natural evolutionary path for this to happen. And then I don't know how this would have happened for the alien civilization. Presumably there was some, but isn't that evolutionary path the invention of superior technology that's a new form of life?

No, but, but, but, but, but the story you're telling was, it can't, we can't just leave the humans to the natural evolution because we're still like animals. We're still into status, all these crazy, but those are the things that motivate us to innovate. And, and if we keep innovating, at some point, we will destroy ourselves with that. Or we create a new version of life.

No, but, no, but your, your, your, the story you were telling earlier was you need to, you need to have directed and evolution. It's like intelligent design. It's something it's like there's some godlike being that's actually has to take over from evolution and guide our cultural and political and biological development. No, it might not have any use for us at all. It might just ignore us and let us live like the chimps do. But then, and then become this superior force in the planet.

It doesn't have to get rid of us. It doesn't have to send us to the glue factory. You can let us exist. Just like put boundaries on us. I thought it has to, but it has to stop us from developing this. Well, what if we just end here and we stay big human and we can continue with biological evolution as long as that takes. But this new life form now becomes a superior life form on Earth. And we still, you know, we could still have sex. We could still have kids, but by the way, that's going down.

Our ability to have children is decreasing because of our use of technology, which is wild, right? Our use of plastics and microplastics is causing dalleys to enter into people's systems. It's changing the development pattern of children to the point where it's measurable.

There's a lot of research that shows that the chemicals and the environmental factors that we are all experiencing on a daily basis are radically lowering birth rates, radically lowering the ability that men have to develop sperm and more miscarriages. All these things are connected to the chemicals in our environment, which is directly connected to our use of technology. It's almost like these things coincide naturally.

And they work naturally to the point where we become this sort of feminized thing that creates this technology that surpasses us. And then we just exist for as long as we do as biological things. But now there's a new thing. Yeah, that's crazy idea. It might not be real. It's just a theory. But we seem to be moving in a direction of becoming less and less like animals. Yeah, I think there still are. We still have a pretty crazy geopolitical race with China to come back to that.

Sure. You know, the natural development of drone technology in the military context is you need to take the human out of the loop because the human can get jammed. Sure. And so you need to put an AI on the drones. Well, they're using the AI for dog fights and they're 100% effective against human pilots. And so there's sort of our, and all these things, you know, there's a logic to them, but there doesn't seem to be a good end game.

No, the end game doesn't look good, but it's going to be interesting, Peter. It's definitely going to be interesting. It's interesting right now, right? Man, do you think the, I think all these things are very over determined. Do you think that the collapse in birth rates, you know, yeah, it could be plastics, but isn't it just a feature of late modernity? There's that as well. There's a feature of women having careers, right? So they want to postpone child. Sure. That's a factor.

There's a factor of men being so engrossed in their career that their testosterone declines, lack of sleep, stress, cortisol levels, alcohol consumption, a lot of different things that are factors in declining sperm rate, sperm count in men. You have miscarriage rates that are up. You have a lot of pharmaceutical drugs you could attach to that as well that have to do with low birth rates rather.

There's a lot of factors, but those factors all seem to be connected to society and our civilization and technology in general because the environmental factors all have to do with technology. All of them have to do with inventions and these unnatural factors that are entering into the biological body of human beings and causing these changes. And none of these changes are good in terms of us being able to reproduce.

And if you factor in the fact that these changes didn't exist 50 years ago, I mean 40 years ago we didn't even have Alzheimer's, right? So yeah. People didn't get that old. No, they got that old. They got that old. The Alzheimer's has to do with the, the myelin in the human brain. It has to do with the fact that myelin is made entirely of cholesterol. The primary theory they think now is a lack of cholesterol in the diet might be leading to some of these factors.

But you have also environmental things. There's like, we're getting poisoned on a daily basis. Our diets are fucking terrible. The things that human being, like, what percentage of us are obese? It's probably been 30% but yeah. Diet Coke's great though. Few every day. It could be fine. I'm not worried about Diet Coke. I'm worried about a lot of things though. I'm worried about, I think there's a natural progression that's happening. And I think it coincides with the invention of technology.

And it just seems to me to be too coincidental that we don't notice it, that the invention of technology also leads to the disruption of the sexual reproduction systems of human beings. Like, boy, doesn't that mean? And then if you get to a point where human beings can no longer reproduce sexually, which you could see that path. If we've dropped, like, human male sperm count has dropped something crazy from the 1950s to today and continues to do so for the average male.

And if you just jack that up to 1,000 years from now, you could get to a point where there's no longer natural childbirth in that people are all having birth through test tubes and some sort of new invention. I'm always, let me think. I think the why of birth rates collapsed is it's probably, it's, again, an over-determined story. It's the plastics, it's the screens, it's the, you know, it's certain ways they're not children are not compatible with having a career in late modernity.

Probably our economics of it where people can't afford houses or space. But I'm probably always a little bit more anchored on the social and cultural dimensions of this stuff. And again, the imitation version of this is, you know, it's sort of conserved across, you know, people are below the replacement rate in all 50 states of the US, even Mormon Utah, the average woman has less than two kids. It's Iran is below that, Italy, way below it, South Korea is.

Yeah, but it's all these like, yeah, it's all these very different types of societies. And so the fact that it's so, and then, you know, Israel's still sort of a weird exception. And then if you ask, you know, my sort of simplistic, somewhat circular explanation would be, you know, people have kids, if other people have kids, and they stop having kids when other people stop having kids.

And so there's a dimension of it that's just, you know, if you're a 27 year old woman in Israel, you better get married, and you have to keep up with your other friends that are having kids. And that's, and if you don't, you're just like a weirdo who doesn't fit into society or something like that. No, there's certainly a dimension of it. And then if you're in South Korea where I think the total fertility rates like 0.7, it's like one third of the replacement rate.

Like every generation's going down by two thirds or something like this. Really fat heading towards extinction pretty, pretty fast. It is something like probably none of your friends are doing it.

And then, and then you're, you're, you're in this, and then probably there ways it shifts the politics in a very, very deep way where, you know, once you get an inverted demographic pyramid where you have way more old people than young people, at some point, you know, there's always a question, do you vote, you know, do you vote for benefits for the old or for the very young? Do you spend money so Johnny can read or so grandma can have a spare leg?

And, and once, you know, once the demographic flips and you get this inverted pyramid, maybe the politics shifts in a very deep way where the people with kids get penalized more and more economically or just costs more and more. And, and then the old people without kids just vote more and more benefits for themselves effectively. And then it just sort of, you know, it's once it flips, it may be very hard to reverse.

I looked at all these sort of heterodox demographers, but I'm blanking on the name, but there's sort of a set of, where, you know, it's like what are the long term demographic projections? And there's this, you know, if, if, you know, there are eight billion people on the planet and, you know, if every woman has not two babies but one baby, then every generation's half the previous than the next generation's four billion.

And then, and then people think, well, it's just gonna, it'll eventually you'll have women who want more kids and they'll just get a smaller population and then it will bounce back. Yeah, one of the Japanese demographers I was looking at on this a few years ago, his thesis was, no, once it flips, it doesn't flip back because you've changed all the politics to where people get disinsettent. And so, and then you should just extrapolate this as the permanent birth rate.

And if it's, if it's one, on average, of one baby per woman, and you have a having, and then it's in 33 generations, two to the 33rd is about eight billion. And if every generation's 30 years, 30 times 33 is 990 years and 990 years, you'd predict there'd be one person left on the planet. Jesus Christ. And then, then we'd go extinct if there's only one person left that doesn't work.

And again, it's a very long-term extrapolation but the claim is that just, you know, once you flip it, it kicks in all these social and political dimensions that are then, like, yeah, maybe it got flipped by the screens or the plastics or, you know, the drugs or other stuff, but once it's flipped, you change the whole society and it actually stays flipped and it's very, very hard to undo. That makes sense. And it's more terrifying than mine, yeah.

But then, you know, always the, but then, you know, the weird history on this was, it was 50 years ago or whatever, 1968, Paul Ehrlich writes the population bomb and it's just, the population is just gonna exponentially grow. And, yeah, in theory, you can have exponential growth where it doubles, you can have exponential decay where it halves every generation.

And then in theory, there's some stable equilibrium where, you know, everybody has exactly two kids and it's completely stable, but it turns out that solution is very, very hard to get calibrated and you either, yeah. And we shifted from exponential growth to exponential decay and it's probably gonna be quite herculian to get back to something like Stasis. But, this is on the happy note. I don't know, no, it's... Yeah, that's a terrifying thought and maybe true.

And maybe what happens, but we don't know, you know, we haven't gone through it before. But I think there's a lot of factors like you're saying, I think that one's very compelling and it's scary. Especially the South Korea thing, that's nuts. Yeah, it's always sort of idiosyncratic. There's always things that are idiosyncratic to the society. So it's extremely polarized on the gender thing. And, you know, if you get married with kids, you're pushed into this super traditional structure.

The women don't wanna be in that structure. They opt out and then... And so there are sort of idiosyncratic things you can say about East Asia and Confucian societies and the way they're not interacting well with modernity. But then, you know, there's a part of it where I wonder where there's just an extreme version of it.

And then, I don't know, you know, my somewhat fast-sol answer is always, you know, on this stuff is, I don't know what to do about these things, but my fast-sol answer is always, the first step is to talk about them. And if you can't even talk about them, we're never gonna solve them. And then, I think that's only the small first step. But that's always sort of my fast-sol answer. I was in South Korea a year and a half ago, two years ago now.

And I met, you know, one of the CEOs who ran one of the Chable, one of the giant conglomerates. And I sort of thought this would be an interesting topic to talk about. And then, you know, it's probably all sorts of cultural things I was offending or you're saying, obviously, what are you gonna do about this catastrophic birth rate? The sentence is my opening question. And then, the way he dealt with it was just, it turned to me and said, you're totally right, it's a total disaster.

And then, as soon as you acknowledge it, he felt you didn't need to talk about it anymore and we could move on. Wow. So, we have to try to do a little bit better than that. Phew. Wow. Because, you know, I think, I think, it is always this strange thing where there's so many of these things where we can, you know, where somehow talking about things is the first step but then it also becomes the excuse for not doing, not doing more, not really solving them.

You know, there's all this, there probably are all these dietary things where you sort of know what you're supposed to do and then if you know what you're supposed to do, maybe that's good enough and you can still have one piece of chocolate cake before you go on the diet tomorrow or whatever. And so it sort of becomes this, you know, and so somehow, figuring out a way to turn this knowledge into something actionable is always the thing that's tricky.

It's sort of where I always find myself very skeptical of, you know, yeah, all these modalities of therapy and where, you know, the theory is that you figure out people's problems and by figuring them out, you change them. And then, and then ideally, it becomes, you know, an activator for change and then in practice, it often becomes the opposite. But the way it works is something like this.

It's like, you know, psychotherapy gets, it gets advertised as self-transformation and then after you spend years in therapy and maybe you learn a lot of interesting things about yourself, you sort of get exhausted from talking to the therapist and at some point, it crashes out from self-transformation into self-acceptance and you realize one day, you know, you're actually just perfect the way you are.

And so it's, you know, these things that may be very powerful on the level of insight and telling us things about ourselves, but then, you know, do they actually get us to change? Well, that is an interesting thing about talking about things because I think you're correct that when you talk about things oftentimes, it is a sub, you are, at least in some way avoiding doing those things. It's a question. It's a question. In some ways, it's a substitute.

But also, you have to talk about them to understand that you need to do something. Yeah, that's always my excuse. And I, but you have to do that. And I also realize that it's often my cop-out answer too. It could be both things. It could be both. The problem is taking action and what action to take. And, you know, the paralysis by analysis, where you're just like trying to figure out what to do and how to do it. Yeah. And, you know, it's always talking about as the most important thing.

Strategy's often a euphemism for procrastination. Yes, it is. Yeah. There's a lot of that going on. It's very hard for people to just take steps. But they talk about it a lot. Yeah. But this is a man I really enjoyed talking to you. Also, it was really fun. It was a really great conversation. A lot of great insight and a lot of things that I'm going to think about a lot. So thank you very much. Thanks for having me. Thanks for having me. Awesome. All right. Cool. Thank you.