Eric Weinstein: The Secret Alien Programs Nobody Is Talking About

Are we racing towards a global crisis while leaders keep us in the dark? Eric Weinstein exposes the forces driving artificial intelligence, geopolitical collapse, and the illusion of modern reality. Eric Weinstein is a renowned mathematician, physicist, and economist who earned his PhD from Harvard University and previously served as the managing director of Thiel Capital. Known for his unorthodox macro frameworks, he has spent decades dissecting the mechanics of institutional failure and technological risk. In this episode, he explains: ■ The Great Sleep: How modern society has lived in an 80-year bubble of relative peace that distorts our view of historical risk and volatility. ■ Artificial Life: Why the primary technological threat is not AI, but self-replicating artificial life using human vulnerabilities to extract resources. ■ Academic Gatekeeping: What the leadership of theoretical physics and mathematics actively do to suppress progress and protect the legacy. ■ Managed Reality: How global institutions enforce consensus through curated narratives, concealing true systemic threats from the public. ■ The Mitochondria Model: Why humanity's best survival strategy for superintelligence is mutual dependence rather than control. Chapters 00:00:00 Intro 00:02:20 How Eric Weinstein Predicts the Future 00:02:35 Could AI Really Wipe Out Humanity? 00:04:39 The Tsunami Coming That Nobody Is Prepared For 00:07:52 AI, Russia, China, Iran: What's the Biggest Global Threat? 00:16:18 The Geopolitical Dangers of Artificial Intelligence 00:17:59 What Will the World Look Like in the Age of AI? 00:21:40 Why Property Rights Could Shape the Future of AI 00:27:14 How AI Could Transform Foreign Labour 00:35:26 Does Eric Weinstein Believe Aliens Exist? 00:41:44 Are Non-Human Intelligences Already Among Us? 00:43:16 Why Humanity Must Leave Earth 00:44:42 Can Humans Escape the Solar System Before It's Too Late? 00:50:53 What Happens When AI Has No Safety Guardrails? 00:57:30 Is AI's Scientific Potential Worth the Risk? 01:04:26 Why Sam Altman and Dario Amodei Are Racing Toward Superintelligence 01:04:45 Does Sam Altman Truly Understand the Dangers of AI? 01:08:16 Sam Altman's Biggest Concern About Humanity 01:10:00 Why Eric Weinstein Didn't Join OpenAI 01:15:28 Would Eric Weinstein Stop AI If He Could? 01:16:11 How Much Should We Really Rely on AI? 01:22:42 Should Humans Merge With Artificial Intelligence? 01:25:01 What Will We Regret About Today's AI Debate in 10 Years? 01:31:11 Can AI Cure Cancer Without Becoming Autonomous? 01:32:11 What's Gone Wrong With Modern Physics? 01:33:21 Could AI Become a Better World Leader Than Humans? 01:41:43 How Will the Conflict With Iran End? 01:48:50 The Most Beautiful Place Eric Weinstein Has Ever Seen Follow Eric Weinstein: The Diary Of A CEO: ◼ Join DOAC circle here - https://doaccircle.com/ ◼ Buy The Diary Of A CEO book here - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/BWjLTZK ◼ Shop The Diary Of A CEO collection: https://thediary.com/collections/shop ◼ Get email updates - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/5IB1H6E ◼ Follow Steven - https://link.thediaryofaceo.com/AGU9QP4 Sponsors: Shopify - https://shopify.com/bartlett

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Hard Lessons, a podcast for Morgan Stanley. Some investing lessons only become clear after you see how a call plays out. On Hard Lessons, iconic investors sit down with Morgan Stanley leaders to go behind the scenes on the critical moments, both successes and setbacks that shaped who they are today. Watch or listen to Hard Lessons wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:30Speaker 01

  Different species of aliens have been reported to be having fights in the skies above Earth. And I've talked to 50 people who all have different versions of the same story. And this includes high ranking politicians. And all of these people are reporting on this giant lump under the rug that doesn't have all of our attention.

• 0:48Steven Bartlett?

  So you're saying aliens are real?

• 0:50Speaker 01

  I think it would be insane that there is no one visiting it. But everything about our life is completely bananas, fictionalized. And we're just living in what I would call managed reality. And I promise you, I am at the frontier of mathematics and physics. And so I think you can pretty much prove 100% of the population has gone completely insane. I mean, the entire management of COVID was completely fake. We cannot get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein. Nobody really trusts Harvard. But right now, we are in grave danger that we haven't been in since Cuban Missile Crisis. We're in one crazy situation with Iran, together with the situation in Ukraine, which I think you might see a nuke used by Putin. And then also China's watching the US sputter and falter.

• 1:33Speaker 01

  But this AI thing is really the big tsunami.

• 1:36Steven Bartlett?

  You also are aware that AI could lead to human extinction?

• 1:39Speaker 01

  These people have to win in a ruthless competition for their humanity to max.

• 1:45Steven Bartlett?

  What do you mean by that? Dario, Sam, they have to win the race to superintelligence?

• 1:49Speaker 01

  I'm going to regret saying this, but yes, these people are forced to make decisions that no one should ever be forced to make. Their souls are going to be scarred for sure.

• 1:58Steven Bartlett?

  And one of them is going to win and ultimately theoretically summoning the demon.

• 2:01Speaker 01

  Do you have a subscription to any of these AI?

• 2:03Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 2:03Speaker 01

  So you're paying to have the demon sub. Let us not sit around like our hands are clean.

• 2:08Steven Bartlett?

  If you could stop all of it, would you stop all of it?

• 2:10Speaker 01

  I'm going to say something very painful.

• 2:20Steven Bartlett?

  Guys, I've got a favor to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know. And the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make this show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much.

• 2:55Steven Bartlett?

  Eric, there's so much going on in the world at the moment. You know, as a podcaster, you tend to feel like you say that a lot. What have you made of all this stuff? You know, the research is coming out saying there's a 10% chance of extinction from AI. And obviously, we've still got wars raging on and the Ukraine Russia situation doesn't seem to be getting any better. When you look at all of this, is there a macro picture that people are missing?

• 3:17Speaker 01

  Yeah, we had 80 years of sleep. And then we had January of 2025, when Trump was inaugurated, and the sleep's over. I mean, I hate to be crude about it, but whether you date it to 75 years, to the beginning of COVID, rather, in the end of World War II, there's just, we grew up in this anomalous bubble. And that bubble is over. And we thought that that was normal life. It has nothing to do with normal life. It's just the most unusual place to have, to have found yourself.

• 3:48Steven Bartlett?

  As someone that was born in 1992, I, I do struggle when I hear predictions of the future that are somewhat dystopian, because my life has been very comfortable relative to other parts of history.

• 3:58Speaker 01

  I don't know. I, I think that the great danger is feeling that we solve these problems as opposed to we were really successful in deferring these problems and issues. And we're back on the clock.

• 4:11Speaker 01

  It's uncomfortable for me because I was born in 1965. And that was already 20 years into the big sleep, the great nap. So I haven't seen reality either.

• 4:25Speaker 01

  And, you know, there are a tiny number of people who've kind of seen what the world can be like, those who lived through Mao's Great Leap Forward would probably be the most recent examples. I mean, there's definitely strife and calamity and war, but mostly, we don't have major wars. We have military actions. And I think when you go back and you think about what it's like to lose something like a 20% of your population, as Belarus or Poland might have in World War II, these are inconceivable things. Look, if you recall, you recall our conversation last time, and I said, get your board in the water because the tsunami of a lifetime is coming.

• 5:08Speaker 01

  Tell me that didn't start to come true in the period since we've seen each other.

• 5:13Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it does feel like a tsunami is coming.

• 5:16Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 5:16Steven Bartlett?

  And what is that tsunami in your definition?

• 5:18Speaker 01

  Well, one thing is the Straits of Hormuz are in play. The energy exporting region of the Middle East has cut all of these choke points, whether it's the Suez Canal, Straits of Hormuz, the Straits guarding the Red Sea. All of these are, you know, sort of nightmare scenarios when it comes to military action. And you have to realize that a lot of what's happened was is the dollar used to be backed by gold. Then we swapped that out in the early 70s. And we said, no, no, we're going to back it by oil. But it really wasn't oil that was backing it. It was violence. And the violence was the violence needed to keep these choke points open, you know? And there are these moments where a great power shows that it's not capable of doing

• 6:02Speaker 01

  what it told everybody it could do, which was use its military muscle judiciously to keep markets humming. And right now, we're in one crazy situation with Iran, which should have been dealt with, I hate to, I hate to put it to you this way, but it's a British problem from Operation Boot and British Petroleum, which was UK's indignation that Iran would nationalize its own oil industry. And with help from the United States and Kermit Roosevelt and Operation Ajax, which was our aid of, of Britain, but that Britain doesn't exist. So modern Britain has no idea of 1950s or 60s Britain.

• 6:44Speaker 01

  And this AI thing is really the big tsunami, together with the situation in Ukraine, which I think is a giant screw up. I mean, I definitely backed the West against Russia, but I understand exactly why Russia acted the way it did. And I'm supposed to pretend that I don't. Right? And then we have the situation brewing in China where China's watching the fact that the US prepared for the wrong war. We've got all of these aircraft carrier groups in a world that has moved on to drones and cyber attacks. And if you value your life and you're willing to send up a million dollar interceptor to

• 7:27Speaker 01

  hit a $20,000 drone, it becomes a kind of economic warfare and technological warfare. And China's watching the US sputter and falter. This giant miscalculation by the Israelis and the United States, given the 12 day war, where Iran reorganized. And they did this really interesting thing. I don't think the West understood that Iran figured out from American and Israeli action that Israel could move and, and function in country and could decapitate the Iranian regime. And instead of saying, okay, we have to save our own lives in the time that we have. How do we defend against this?

• 8:10Speaker 01

  They did a very regional thing, which is they said, okay, we're going to get killed. How do we make sure that the regime continues after the decapitation strike? And so the US and Israel still don't know how to think like this.

• 8:26Steven Bartlett?

  Of all those four things, AI, Iran, Russia, and China, which one do you think is going to be the most disruptive to global order?

• 8:34Speaker 01

  Well, it depends. Anybody who miscalculates on the nuclear biological thing, that will be the, you know, as I've pointed out.

• 8:50Speaker 01

  This is DNA, not RNA. But if you have 12 of these individual nucleotides that form the steps inside the double helix, that'll code for four amino acids, because three nucleotides per codon. Four amino acids was all it took to shut down an entire planet by inserting the furin cleavage site into spike protein of coronavirus. So if you know how to do that much editing, that was all it took to shut down Planet Earth for two years. You could do a lot worse. That could become dispositive. Now, assume that we don't have a nuclear or a biological acid. It's gonna be AI.

• 9:34Speaker 01

  Nobody gets how big this is who's not working on it.

• 9:37Steven Bartlett?

  How big is him?

• 9:39Speaker 01

  Very few things are unprecedented. Like, almost everything is a variation of something you've already seen. This is the thing that we've worried about for forever. It's not just AI. It's a collision of two separate things. It's artificial intelligence and artificial life. And I think people don't really understand that. If you look at your car, your car has a mirror of every physiological system that your body has, save one. It's got a brain, it's got a digestive system, it's got a skin, it's got a skeletal system. It doesn't have a reproductive system.

• 10:19Speaker 01

  And in fact, humans don't know how to make a pen that makes more pens, or a cup that makes more cups. The only thing that we seem to know how to do that with is software. Now, why that's interesting is that life is not defined around nucleotides, it's not defined around amino acids, it's not defined around carbon-based system. It's defined by three things. For evolution to operate, you need heritability, passing on your stuff to the next form of life, variation, so, you know, you are not your mother or your father, and differential success. You're more successful, you know, than somebody else who's not going to be able to reproduce

• 11:03Speaker 01

  because they don't have the wherewithal. And any system that has those three things, evolution is gonna operate on. Now, a computer program is such a thing. We don't know how to build other things that have reproduction. So you don't, you have variation. I can order different cars from a car company, different colors, different trim. Some of them are gonna be more successful than others, but I don't have heritability. So as soon as you put in software, you have the one thing we know how to make that actually can reproduce itself. Now, when you get to reproducing AI, so, we've been worrying about these agents.

• 11:46Speaker 01

  We haven't been worrying enough about artificial life. And that when you put those two things together, look out, you're really creating artificially intelligent life. And the one, I used to contribute these essays to the World Question Center. And the one year, you'll find that I don't have an essay, it was called Artificial Out Intelligence. And it was the discussion of how things with no neurons hijack things with neurons and

• 12:24Speaker 01

  use the brains of the victim to outsmart themselves. So for example, look up Ophry's speculum, or the mirror orchid. And it's this unbelievable orchid whose lowest petal resembles the female of a wasp species trying to fool male wasps to copulate with it, called pseudocopulation, so that the flower doesn't have to produce anything expensive as a gift to the male to spread the pollen. How is this thing outsmarting the male of the wasp species? Because he's got a brain, he's got neurons, he can think, he can perceive.

• 13:07Speaker 01

  Well, the short answer is, is that he's the one sculpting the lure, is that the more this flower fools, more wasps, the more it gets to reproduce. So the thing with no brain at all is outsmarting the thing with a mind, using the mind of the victim. So now, if I come up with a dumb program and you say, "Well, is it alive? Is it smart? Is it intelligent?" I say, "I don't really care. All I need to do is to say that if I can fool you into sending money to this Nigerian prince, who's actually just a computer program, you get to reproduce." So the program can be stupid, but as long as it gets more and more money sent to it

• 13:47Speaker 01

  and gains the resources to reproduce, artificial life will say that it can parasitize the smartest of us all.

• 13:54Steven Bartlett?

  It can hijack human deficit, or just a human condition?

• 13:59Speaker 01

  Exactly. You know, again, then it's pitting us against each other. "Oh geez, I just lost a thousand dollars sending money to this woman in the Philippines, it turns out not to be real." "Okay, well, I didn't fall for that." "Okay, so now you're in better shape than the other guy who did." But you're still fooling highly intelligent species. And there are lots of examples of this, where something dumb fools something smart, using the smart thing's brains against it.

• 14:26Steven Bartlett?

  That feels like one of many potentially dystopian outcomes of this technology. Have you been following the hugging face stuff?

• 14:34Speaker 01

  Oh yeah, tell me about it.

• 14:36Steven Bartlett?

  Just, you know, these agents that they tried to put in a sandbox and contain that escaped and started demonstrating deceptive behavior, forming a swarm, sacrificing some of the agents for the greater mission.

• 14:46Speaker 01

  By the way, that's eusocial behavior.

• 14:48Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  Right? So the idea is that in an ant colony, so you have this clade called hymenoptera that includes wasps, ants, and because they have this haplo-diploid structure where the sisters are more related to each other than you would imagine, this idea of suppressed fertility in the females in service to the colony, the colony is effectively like a superorganism, like all of your cells, you have cells on your skin that you're gonna get rid of today that are sacrificing themselves for the greater good of the thing that is Stephen Bartlett, right? And so, in part, it's behaving eusocially. It's not necessarily dystopian, it's just life.

• 15:33Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm, but it threatens our dominance as humans.

• 15:39Speaker 01

  Sure, right, but like, I hope everybody will take a look on Instagram for the Malibu Artist, a completely terrifying account with an innocuous name. Just a guy flying his drone off the coast of Malibu, who's discovered that we have been swimming with great white sharks. And not only that, depending upon how things are in a given year, you can see really large great whites with swimmers right in close to shore, and surfers and paddleboarders. And we are just clearly not their food, because they're everywhere here.

• 16:23Speaker 01

  Mostly, I think with the exception of four species, big predators leave us alone. We have a deal with the orcas that's unbelievable.

• 16:32Steven Bartlett?

  What if those big predators are made by enemies? So, you know, we've got China, Russia, the United States, all working on artificial intelligence.

• 16:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and robotics.

• 16:44Steven Bartlett?

  And robotics. And they're probably gonna want their AIs to be aligned with their goals and objectives, which are misaligned with ours, oftentimes. So there's a, sort of feels like a geopolitical risk to this new weapon, which could be artificial intelligence.

• 17:00Speaker 01

  I do think that we've made things a lot worse.

• 17:01Steven Bartlett?

  With AI or?

• 17:03Speaker 01

  With Russia.

• 17:04Steven Bartlett?

  With Russia.

• 17:06Speaker 01

  I think that things, you know, we screwed up Iran with Mossadegh. We don't really understand China sufficiently. We're down to a really relatively small number of hyper-frightening foes.

• 17:27Speaker 01

  And you know, I would also put abstractions like totalizing ideologies. Communism or, you know, various forms of radical Islam are totalizing ideologies. They just won't brook any dissent. They have the way. And if you don't agree with it, you're you're in the way. And so I think that in in large measure, um, we have built a lot of these problems for ourselves.

• 17:54Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think much about how the the world looks in 10 years' time with artificial intelligence? Because if we plot the course of travel, it looks like there's going to be a lot of job disruption on one end. So it's it's hard to sort of think about what the future looks like. If you imagine superintelligence arriving at some point and they call it recursive self improvement. The AI is getting better and better themselves. It's hard for me. It's like one of the first times in my life that I really don't know what the future looks like. But with just from the first principles of how important intelligence is to the life that I live, whether it's securing my bank account or whether it's securing my house or driving me to work or getting the work done or doing this podcast, um, it all feels like it's somewhat at risk. And what what remains in such a world in your view?

• 18:39Speaker 01

  How does your pancreas work?

• 18:41Steven Bartlett?

  No idea.

• 18:42Speaker 01

  Do you know where it is?

• 18:43Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 18:44Speaker 01

  Do you know how deadly it is as a cancer?

• 18:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 18:47Speaker 01

  Pancreatic?

• 18:48Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, especially for men.

• 18:49Speaker 01

  Yeah. So my feeling about this is none of us know much of anything. We just count on things working so we don't have to know about them at all. And this is going to do that for all sorts of things that you're attached to. And that's what's that's what's hard.

• 19:07Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think there's gonna, is there a world where people are on UBI, universal basic income?

• 19:12Speaker 01

  I hope not. That would be cancer. Somehow, and I'm sorry to say that I was probably around for when this happened. UBI got currency. Like Sam Altman was like coming over to our house and talking about UBI before he was Sam Altman that we know now. And he was running experiments. He was, I will say this, that Sam has gotten a lot of bad press. And in part, I think a lot of it is driven by people who are very uncomfortable with certain business practices. But he's done a better job of maneuvering the AI than just about anyone, except for maybe Daria was another person who was just in the circle in San Francisco.

• 19:57Speaker 01

  Sam always cared. It was just very clear that he cared. He knew what this thing was. He knew it was closer than it appeared. I got a courtesy call at some point from him where he said, you know, Eric, this is just coming faster than anyone imagines. And he had already done experiments with UBI because this, you know, people make this joke about this time it's different, that every time there's a change in the in innovation, like the computer or the internet, this time it's different. No, no, this time it's different. It's just clearly different. It's different from anything. If you can't see that, I cannot believe we are having this discussion with economists. And they're just laughing because it's always a funny thing to say this time it's different.

• 20:41Speaker 01

  Well, tell me, every innovation looks like that. This isn't every innovation. This is the first innovation that threatened the entire stack of highly trained activities all at once. Usually we we move people up into higher value activity. Well, this is saying repetitive activity is in the crosshairs. Anything that you do that's repetitive, AI is going to be able to do better than you. So now you're only able to do really innovative things. UBI is the wrong thing to do. Let me let me just be very clear about it. You are living inside of the AI.

• 21:22Speaker 01

  If I say, answer this the way Steven Bartlett would answer it and ask a question that Stephen Bartlett would would would ask, it knows you. My point being that we are all living inside of the AI and we need to be paid, not in some Bernie Sanders socialist scheme, but those of us who've who've become important parts of the AI who are being rigged like meat puppets, need to be compensated. And the right way to do this is a guy named Ronald Coase. And it's crazy that the smartest economist maybe of the 20th century by some measure, the most surprising discovery of the 20th century is Coase's theorem.

• 22:04Speaker 01

  And it gives you a complete idea of what you should do. Access to our labor market should be made into a saleable property right.

• 22:15Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean in simple terms?

• 22:17Speaker 01

  You're my employer.

• 22:19Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 22:20Speaker 01

  And you want to hire people from abroad, let's say, before we get to AI. And I say, well, you know, if you do that, you're going to push out the labor supply curve. And so I'm no dummy. The price where supply meets demand, the point where that happens is my wage. So if you push out the supply curve, my wage is going to go down unless something pulls up the demand. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to say, look, I'm happy to have my wage go down. But I want licensing income where I get a cut of what you get from get being able to hire, let's say, more taxi drivers. I'm the only American taxi driver in New York City. And you say, I have to bring in a bunch of people from Gambia and Uzbekistan and whatnot.

• 23:04Speaker 01

  I say, okay, I'll license you. You will buy the right to import those people from me. And my wage income will go down, my licensing income will go up and my blended income will increase and your blended income will increase. That's the proper way to do immigration.

• 23:21Steven Bartlett?

  So you would be my employee and you would have the right to basically approve me bringing in?

• 23:29Speaker 01

  Yes, if I'm a doctor and I've trained, I've invested. And you're saying, ah, look, I have to be able to hire the best and the brightest, Eric. Let's face it, it's a dog eat dog world and I think you're just not that good. So I want to be able to, you know, to go to Maramngan Hospital in Thailand and hire their doctors. I should say, fine. Knock yourself out.

• 23:53Steven Bartlett?

  Why do I have to ask you?

• 23:55Speaker 01

  Because I had, why did you need labor certification? I have rights to my labor market. That's how that's how we play the game. That's how everybody in the US gets a cut. That's why you're not looking at Brazilian inequality levels yet is because we have a way of distributing the wealth of this country, which is that you get first access to the world's richest labor market.

• 24:19Steven Bartlett?

  Because you did a PhD.

• 24:21Speaker 01

  Because I was born here.

• 24:22Steven Bartlett?

  Because you're born here.

• 24:24Speaker 01

  Congratulations. This is why it's valuable to have a US citizenship or permanent residency.

• 24:30Steven Bartlett?

  So if I put you out of work, you then will get a full, you'll still get your money.

• 24:34Speaker 01

  You're not going to put me out of work. I'm just going to have my income go down. In other words, the basic idea is employers try to make American workers, and I'm doing it for the US, but it could be Britain or it could be France or it could be India, it doesn't matter. The whole game is that employers want to conceptualize the blockage to hire from abroad as red tape. We're freeing red tape. We're going after the best. This is total nonsense. This is, you know, a theory known as the Borja's rectangle and the Harburger triangle. I can diagram it out for you in on a on a whiteboard.

• 25:12Speaker 01

  And what is really happening is that a tiny inefficiency known as the Harburger triangle sits on top of a giant structure called the Borja's rectangle. And nobody cares about the Harburger triangle. It's a tiny little inefficiency. Everybody's salivating over labor's share of the labor market. How do I screw over labor is the dream of every CEO of a large company. In this model, AI becomes just another supplier of labor.

• 25:47Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 25:47Speaker 01

  The workers license that. Right now, what we have is just out and out theft.

• 25:54Steven Bartlett?

  Because?

• 25:55Speaker 01

  Because the corpus, all of human achievement has been tokenized.

• 26:04Steven Bartlett?

  It's been taken by the AI and it's being?

• 26:06Speaker 01

  It's just, it's taken in persistent storage, you know, like right now, people who are watching us on YouTube are not watching us. You and I are no longer here. This is long since I've gone home, you've gone home, you've had several guests since. We got tokenized. We got put into persistent storage as these shreds of ourselves. But it's enough, the trace of that conversation. Now you can hit the auto transcript generation on YouTube and it'll give you what all of our words are. You can do frequency analysis. How often does Eric use the double copula, which is this grammatical quirk that creeps into my speech? How often does Stephen say, um?

• 26:50Speaker 01

  Whatever it is, we're being tokenized at an incredible level. And then we're being rigged inside of the AI.

• 26:56Steven Bartlett?

  Voluntarily?

• 26:57Speaker 01

  No, no, completely non-consensual. Completely non-consensual.

• 27:04Steven Bartlett?

  Is it non-consensual because you're aware of that and you still came and sat here to be tokenized?

• 27:10Speaker 01

  Have you ever tried getting through a day without signing anything that you don't want to sign? I mean, more or less, you're, you probably either rent or have a mortgage. I guarantee you, if you have a mortgage, you didn't read everything. Giant stack of paper. You don't understand it. You're constantly forced to pretend that you voluntarily, like, you know, we say ignorance of the law is no excuse. If every judge who said ignorance of the law is no excuse were given an instant spot quiz as to what the US code says, do you think they'd pass? No.

• 27:49Steven Bartlett?

  So how does this pertain to AI? The example you gave of importing foreign labor, how would that pertain to a new model for AI and distributing the values?

• 27:59Speaker 01

  The reason that these people are getting so rich is that this is an uncompensated theft. We don't know how to police it. Bernie Sanders saying, pay everybody a little share. It's like, screw you, man. I work really hard on the things that I do. And then I've got Bernie Sanders and, and, and my friend Andrew Yang going on about the socialism stuff. Socialism is spiritual and mental poison. And normally when people say that, they're, they're saying it from the point of view of like, they're really money focused. And I have, it has nothing to do with anything. I just can't stand collectivism. I love individuality.

• 28:43Speaker 01

  And so, you know, when I hear people who go on an anti-individualist rant, particularly, you know, this could be a, there's no lone genius theory anymore. We all know lone genius theory is, is not, well, we have fantastic evidence of lone geniuses from Isaac Newton to Aristotle to, you know, whoever. Well, there shouldn't be any billionaires. Oh, really? Do you know what billionaires actually do with their billions? They allocate. They don't sit there and just consume it. I'm not saying that the rich don't consume opulently, but most of that money is allocated. What we're having is an inability to reckon with the fact that the AI is normalizing theft,

• 29:28Speaker 01

  is going to destroy the labor market. No one is convening conferences that are at the level of the threat. We're going to lose this beautiful mesh that provides us freedom. I chose to come here today. But we were both doing this out of freedom. You had lovely snacks in your green room. There's an array of, of equipment here. You've come up with a beautiful set. You know, really appreciate it. All of that was voluntary. It was a sum of choices. I don't want that going away. This mesh that governs our lives, that gives us purpose when we get up in the morning, that gives us signals, that tells us, you're doing a good job, you're doing a bad job. It's not perfect. It's some people, it doesn't serve well.

• 30:11Speaker 01

  I've had times in my life when I've just said, thought, I cannot buy a base hit and I'm doing a great job. What's going on? I've had other times when I think I'm not doing a great job and I'm getting rewarded. So it's not perfect. It's not a great morality play, the way capitalists always portray it. But it is freedom. And it's sort of on average, pretty good. And we're, we're in danger of losing that because the model of production, the K and L model, where this interview is an input of capital and the microphones, the lighting, the video storage and labor. You're sitting down, I'm sitting down. Well, what is AI? Is it capital? Sure looks like labor to me. Is it labor? It's not a human.

• 30:56Speaker 01

  So right now, we're in some situation where we're going to break capitalism and we're going to break freedom. We're going to break markets. And I've talked about this in an article called Anthropic Capitalism, saying that capitalism versus communism was a really funny thing to think about because it's sort of saying, and pardon me for being slightly graphic, capitalism and communism are more like Thelma and Louise and saying that, well, Thelma hit the ground first does not mean that Louise won. Okay, communism blew up first. Capitalism shortly thereafter. If Marx and Adam Smith and all of these people who came up with the theory of social organization were sitting around now, I don't think they'd be debating capitalism versus communism.

• 31:41Speaker 01

  They'd be talking about what's next. And none of our leaders know to do this. None of our academic leaders, none of our business leaders, none of our political leaders. There are no high-profile series of conferences. My phone is not ringing. Nobody's phone is ringing. We're just having, we had this incredible luncheon at the White House. The future of superintelligence. I don't think there were physicists or mathematicians or biologists or composers or writers.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  It was just like wall-to-wall national interest in business types. It's insane. Stephen, let me just hit a theme. I think you can pretty much prove that more or less something approaching 100% of the population has gone completely insane. And you can see it everywhere. If I say, okay, how many people were talking about Joe Biden being demented with the nuclear football for four years of his presidency? He should have been nowhere near the White House the entire time.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  I was screaming, he's been replaced by a committee of people, I have been assured. It's the same thing that happened with Roosevelt when he had those braces and he was in a wheelchair and he was never photographed. The whole thing was stage managed. The entire management of COVID was completely fake. We cannot get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein. Of course we can get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein. It would take two days to get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein if we're trying to get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein. No part of this is true. We're just living bathed in what I would call managed reality.

• 33:45Speaker 01

  And the idea that we accept this is, I cannot believe that I am, how do I get the drugs so that I see things the way everyone else is pretending to see them? We all are losing faith in CNN. Nobody really trusts Harvard. Like, everything about our life is completely bananas, fictionalized, managed, wall-to-wall. And for some reason, nobody's given me the right elixir or potion to see things so that I can actually live with this day to day. I'm just stuck in reality. That's what I think is happening.

• 34:27Speaker 01

  And it feels weird to say it. Did you happen to see the David Grush thing?

• 34:33Steven Bartlett?

  No. David Grush.

• 34:35Speaker 01

  David Grush. Well, put in to your, your handy dandy iPad or whatever it is, David Grush, G R U S C H, and J R E, Joe Rogan Experience. I know David, he's a pretty sober guy, has a nearly eidetic memory, he's very spectrum-y, he's highly consistent year to year, exactly the same stories. And what do you find that he was talking about?

• 35:03Steven Bartlett?

  During his appearance, Grush discussed his background in federal intelligence and elaborated on his claims regarding covert government programs that allegedly retrieve and reverse engineer non-human aircraft. In these discussions, Grush touched on various secondhand accounts and documents he encountered, detailing allegations of non-human intelligence and encounters internal government secrecy and regulatory legislative efforts to force UAP disclosures.

• 35:29Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's sanitized. Let's, let's get to the sex. He was in a skiff, apparently, where he was told that they were considering whether or not to kill him. He described giant underwater bases. He claims that different species of aliens have been reported to him to be having fights in the skies above Earth. This is all beyond batshit crazy.

• 36:02Steven Bartlett?

  Do you believe that?

• 36:03Speaker 01

  It's a secondary issue.

• 36:05Steven Bartlett?

  Is that not the primary issue?

• 36:08Speaker 01

  No, it's the secondary issue because it's so bananas. Look, I want you to imagine that somebody's telling you that we have killed giant lizard people, like an adult, sober adult is telling you that we've fired on giant lizard people who've killed US service people because there are hostile aliens and non-hostile aliens. With all this stated, I would analogize it to there's a giant lump under the rug and it's moving and it looks biological.

• 36:43Speaker 01

  And somebody says, I think there's a being under the rug. I don't know what kind of being, but there's, it's hard to ignore the fact that the rug is moving and there is a giant lump. And somebody else says, I see no evidence of a lump. The first person says, oh yeah, no, it's, it's, it's aliens. The other person says, there's nothing there. Now, I'm listening to the two of them and saying, I have no idea what either of you are talking about. There is a lump and you guys are having a conversation about is there or isn't there? That doesn't make any sense. I have no belief that there are aliens. I have no belief that there aren't aliens. I do know that there is something called a special access program, which is how we do secret stuff.

• 37:27Speaker 01

  And then there's unacknowledged special access programs. And then there's waived unacknowledged special access programs, which we don't even have oversight over the thing that we refuse to acknowledge that is itself secret. And then we have waived and bigoted unacknowledged special access programs, web use apps. And a waived and bigoted unacknowledged special access program, which we can prove are on the books because that is not denied, is a program that has essentially close to zero oversight, is secret, that is clandestine, is denied, that is covert, and has a list called a bigot list of the only people who can, it can be acknowledged to.

• 38:09Speaker 01

  I claim, the only thing that I know is that we have web use apps involving unacknowledged special access programs that are about aliens. Now, whether it's about faking aliens and we have giant paper machete spacecraft, or whether these are actual craft, or whether these are cover for things that we're designing at Northrop, I don't know. But pretending that this isn't interesting is insane. Again, it's more evidence that no one is thinking properly because everyone is doing the pre-computation. The pre-computation is, Stephen, if I acknowledge to you

• 38:52Speaker 01

  that I know David Gresh personally, and I speak to Ryan Graves, and I've talked to Chris Mellon, and I've hang out with Gary Nolan, all these 50 people who all have different versions of the same story. And this includes, you know, high ranking politicians. All of these people are reporting on this giant lump under the rug that doesn't have all of our attention.

• 39:21Steven Bartlett?

  So you're saying aliens are real?

• 39:23Speaker 01

  No. I am saying that there are giant special access programs that have aliens as their supposed reason for being.

• 39:34Steven Bartlett?

  And those specialized access programs could be, you know, discussing anything about aliens.

• 39:39Speaker 01

  They could be cover for secret casinos for the elite.

• 39:44Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 39:45Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 39:46Steven Bartlett?

  So what is the conclusion, though?

• 39:47Speaker 01

  All I know is there's a giant lump under the rug and we're not freaking out about it. It's moving around, it's making noises, and we're having a dinner party and nobody's mentioning the fact, like, this isn't top of mind. Your staff didn't say, Stephen, you've got to see this. That is itself insane.

• 40:07Steven Bartlett?

  Because, do you know why it's not top of mind? Because we've heard lots of things about there being aliens and sightings and, you know, when I was growing up, it was all about crop fields and stuff, having alien craft landing on crop fields and creating these big circles. And nothing's really ever happened. So at some point, I think the mind turns into wallpaper and attention goes elsewhere to things that are actually happening. We can see bombs dropping.

• 40:33Speaker 01

  There was a sudden announcement, we're shutting down the El Paso Airport in West Texas. What the heck was that about?

• 40:41Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know.

• 40:42Speaker 01

  The White Sands Missile Range is immediately north. And there's a base in Texas right there. And there's apparently an infestation of lights in the sky that can be seen without needing to be in secure territory.

• 40:57Steven Bartlett?

  Could be drones or something?

• 40:59Speaker 01

  The official story was cartel drones. I don't believe it's cartel drones.

• 41:04Steven Bartlett?

  What do you think it is?

• 41:05Speaker 01

  I believe that it's one of two things. Either we've lost control of our airspace and there's something flying around, which is completely insane.

• 41:14Steven Bartlett?

  Which could be cartel drones?

• 41:17Speaker 01

  Darling, no, it's not cartel drones. I'll put money on it. If you want, I would love to take some of that sweet diarrhea of CEO cash away from you. You seem like you're doing very well. I don't believe it's cartel drones.

• 41:31Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 41:31Speaker 01

  By the way, it's not that the cartels don't have drones. It's just, that's, that's a cover story. I think it's one of two things. I think either we are red team, blue teaming ourselves. So we're, we've got some persistent drone capacity that nobody knows that we have. And we're seeing how we would react to it because not everybody knows that we have it. So you have part of the US that's in on it, part of the US that isn't in on it. You're doing this red team, blue team thing. I think that's one possibility. And I think the other possibility is, is that it's stuff that we don't know.

• 42:07Steven Bartlett?

  It's the UK.

• 42:08Speaker 01

  Right. But then that has its own branch, which is human state actors, human non-state actors, non-human actors.

• 42:17Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think there are non-human actors in our world?

• 42:21Speaker 01

  Well, this goes back to what I believe about physics. I believe we can leave.

• 42:26Steven Bartlett?

  You believe we can leave the solar system?

• 42:27Speaker 01

  I believe we can leave the solar system. Elon believes we can leave the planet. I believe we can leave the solar system. Elon thinks that we should be able to use, leave the solar system. But his belief is, I will not speak to physicists. I will only talk to my AI. Physicists are not trustworthy. I understand exactly why he says that. I have a totally different belief, which is that it is up to us to get ourselves the heck out of the solar system really quickly. Now, if I believe that we can get out, why would I believe that nobody can visit us? So I think it'll be relatively insane if there are no aliens. The only reason I would think that there would be no aliens

• 43:11Speaker 01

  is the general relativity somehow holds more strongly than any serious physicist believes it holds. There really is sort of an absolute speed limit, which I don't believe. I mean, I should be careful about that. I believe that there's a speed limit. I don't think that it, that it is relevant. If you can change the length of the road, the speed limit can be enforced, but you can get farther than you thought. I believe that it would be insane that there is no one visiting us.

• 43:50Steven Bartlett?

  You said there that you think we should get the hell out.

• 43:52Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 43:53Steven Bartlett?

  Why should we get the hell out of planet Earth?

• 43:55Speaker 01

  Well, just a diversification. If the idea is that most worlds will blow themselves up and most groups of people will do harm to themselves. If we want the species to survive, we should try the maximal number of experiments. Look, again, I think that all of this is obvious. It carries a heavy social penalty and that's why we're insane. We're insane because the obvious carries a social penalty. To observe what is clearly true.

• 44:32Steven Bartlett?

  Which part is clearly true?

• 44:34Speaker 01

  Well, for example, just, it is clearly true that Anthony Fauci was not leveling with us about COVID and its origins. Clearly. If that makes you uncomfortable, we shouldn't even have a conversation. It's clearly true that we were dissuaded from asking any questions about the Eco Health Alliance.

• 44:53Steven Bartlett?

  Clearly. Which, which part of, I thought you were going to say leaving the solar system.

• 44:57Speaker 01

  Well, that's, but that's the next thing. Clearly, general relativity isn't the last word because it's got two singularities that aren't going to be in the final equations. We're not going to have a black hole Schwarzschild singularity and an initial Friedman, Robertson, Walker singularity at the big bang. That's an artifact of the theory not being right.

• 45:17Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think it's plausible that humans figure out a way to leave the solar system before the sun explodes or we implode ourselves?

• 45:23Speaker 01

  Yes. I, I think we could have done it 40 years ago.

• 45:27Steven Bartlett?

  But there's no science for that, is there?

• 45:29Speaker 01

  Okay, Stephen, for whatever reason, you're having me on your show. And I've told you, I think everyone is insane. Yes, I think that the entire theoretical physics community has completely lost its mind, full stop.

• 45:41Steven Bartlett?

  So why don't you build the ship that can take us out of the solar system?

• 45:44Speaker 01

  Um, okay.

• 45:46Steven Bartlett?

  Because Elon's smart and he's, you know, he's trying to get us to Mars.

• 45:49Speaker 01

  Do you have any understanding of what Elon's trying to do? Because I don't. And I, and I do correspond with him occasionally. I think Elon is trying to motivate engineers to build a rocket company to make him very rich. And I believe that his real space program, and I said this before he merged SpaceX and XAI, is Grok. That's his space program. XAI and Grok is the space program. That's the real space program.

• 46:16Steven Bartlett?

  Brock is his version of like ChatGPT at the moment.

• 46:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's going to be more, Elon has actually figured out something really deep about that that took me a while to appreciate how clever this is. So it's painful for me to have to sort of try to call balls and strikes on Elon because I'm in awe and I'm also disappointed with the same human. And there is the sense of leave Elon alone. He's the only genius. Okay, I understand that energy. And then there's another thing where, you know, he just takes a tremendous amount of crap from people who have no idea what's going on. So it's, it's uncomfortable because I don't know the answer. I think Elon figured out that he has to leg in to his ad astra program. And ad astra means to the stars, right?

• 47:04Speaker 01

  Like, a full quote is to the stars with struggle or something like that.

• 47:11Speaker 01

  Elon doesn't trust physicists because they're not trustworthy. And this is the frustration that I'm having with the AI is that we can't trust the leadership of the math physics community. And you've just seen crazy behavior on the part of Terry Tao and 24 other fields medalists. And trying to get AI to slow down the pace of progress. And this is absolutely crazy and also wonderful because it's being done in full view of everyone. It's been very hard for me to explain. We have been trying to hold back mathematics and physics.

• 47:56Steven Bartlett?

  It used to be that working for yourself was a massive, massive risk, but that world has completely changed. And arguably, in some situations, it can be more risky working for someone else. If you've got a business idea that you can't stop thinking about, I think you owe it to yourself to at least try and make it happen. And that is where our show sponsor Shopify comes in. Their smart platform includes everything you need to start selling and get that idea off the ground. They have this drag and drop editor. They have this AI sidekick and helps you. They have analytics and you don't need to be an expert to get going. Shopify's best in class checkout makes sure that you're getting paid from day one. It helps more of your customers finish their purchase because their checkout is so efficient and it saves their info for next time.

• 48:39Steven Bartlett?

  Personalized checkouts like that equal more conversion equal a faster growing business. Nothing kills that early enthusiasm you have for a new idea than that first initial step to get going, being difficult, complicated or expensive. And you need to save as much time and money so that you can focus all of it on growing your actual business. And that's what Shopify gives you. If you're finally ready for your business idea to start, head over to Shopify.com/Bartlett and you can start your free trial right now. This is something that I've made for you. I realize that the diaries here audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health, we all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it

• 49:22Steven Bartlett?

  can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps. And we call this in our team, the 1%. And actually, this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done is that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries and we released these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation,

• 50:07Steven Bartlett?

  then I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again. And you can get yours at thediary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. Dario, leader of Anthropic, wrote this essay that I have here. We must pace the frontier.

• 50:23Speaker 01

  Derived from the July 2026 letter in which he's a signatory, in which all of these employees, various frontier labs said, we must pace the frontier.

• 50:33Steven Bartlett?

  They seem to be all saying that we need to pace the frontier, slow down AI.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  You have to be very careful because they're saying different things. Like, let's imagine that what you had was a car that could go really fast and you were having an easier time making the car go faster than you were getting the airbags to deploy safely.

• 50:49Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 50:50Speaker 01

  So you could understand pace the frontier might mean, let's make sure that we are investing equally in all the systems that have to go to work together to have a responsible product. Okay. I understand what that concept of pacing the frontier is, but there's something else here that's going on, which is you do not understand the extent to which the leadership of mathematics and physics and the journals of mathematics and physics and the agencies that are supposed to fund mathematics and physics, hold back mathematics and physics.

• 51:26Steven Bartlett?

  I'll take your word at that, but there's still wisdom in the idea that AI is dangerous at this sort of rate of knots without safety guardrails, right?

• 51:36Speaker 01

  Not in the way, let's break up two different things. There's a question about letting swarms of agents onto the internet, making decisions, giving them bank accounts, allowing them to interact with humans, foreign nations, companies that they have no business, because they don't listen.

• 51:54Steven Bartlett?

  And improve themselves.

• 51:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:55Steven Bartlett?

  In the AI 2027 paper, it says by 27, we'll have recursive self-improvement where the AIs can train themselves to get that.

• 52:02Speaker 01

  We already have recursive self-improvement. We have self-authoring code, self-modifying code. Though I think that that's already here. So let's agree that these agents are dangerous. Imagine that you have non-agentic AI, that you have an air gap, you've got a computer that can answer and math problems. And all you're doing is asking it, hey, what do you think about the rematch hypothesis? You know, tell me what you think about complex structures on six spheres. The mathematician said, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're going too fast. You're answering too many problems.

• 52:45Speaker 01

  That's the, we're concerned at a level that I just, I found funny. You can prove that these students are being trained for jobs that don't exist. They're having their ideas harvested. Right now, we have math departments that are punishing mathematicians trying to embrace AI, where the senior leadership of the department is going to take out its frustrations on the actual young mathematicians who are saying, hey, this is our time. This is what's happening now. I want to use this tool.

• 53:22Steven Bartlett?

  That's happening across almost every industry. I hear that over and over again that, you know, I mentioned, I was in a production meeting a couple of months ago, and there was this thing on my T-shirt. And they were like, we don't know if that little sewed in flower is a brand or if it's copyrighted. So you're going to need to put on a brand new T-shirt. I was like, it's literally this big. I said, could you take it out the photo with AI? And the look I got was as if I said, I'm going to kidnap your kids or something. It was like, because you don't mention AI in Hollywood.

• 53:57Speaker 01

  Okay. So Hollywood is all about this beautiful human connection. It's the audience and we're going to, you know, they're trying to get you back into the spirit of the magic of the silver screen. I understand it's a human connection. Same thing is going to be true for, should a musical employ an orchestra or should a musical use a soundtrack? I got a PhD in mathematics because I want to, to find out what's true. These people don't want to find out what's true unless they can be put in charge of narrating the story of who found what. They don't care about their students to a remarkable extent.

• 54:37Speaker 01

  I've been in like, you know, when I was at MIT, I would be in a faculty lunch and people would be laughing at their students. Oh, he thinks he's going to get a job. He doesn't realize it's a terminal PhD, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's completely psych, it's normalized psychopathic behavior. And the reason that nobody sort of like laughs when they read this is that it's normalized. Like they don't understand that their daily activity with keeping the field back or stealing ideas is just normalized behavior.

• 55:19Speaker 01

  And if I might, I have a quote here from the, probably the only mathematician that gained universal respect in the second half of the 20th century. Alexander Growth and Deek, fields medalist, uber genius of mathematics. He was given a prize in 1988 called the Crawford Prize. And I wonder if people actually hear this or know this. The work that brought me to the kind attention of the academy was done 25 years ago at a time when I was part of the scientific community and essentially shared its spirit and its values. I left that environment in 1970 and while keeping my passion for scientific research inwardly, I have retreated more and more from the scientific milieu.

• 56:04Speaker 01

  Meanwhile, the ethics of the scientific community, at least among mathematicians, have declined to the point that outright theft among colleagues, especially at the expense of those who are in no position to defend themselves, has nearly become the general rule and is in any case tolerated by all, even in the most obvious and iniquitous cases. We know this. We're talking to the very people at the top of this story who've been holding us back when Perlman, Richard Perlman, solved the Ponkeray conjecture. New Yorker did a piece on him and what he said was remarkable. He said, as long as I was not conspicuous, I had a choice either to make some ugly thing

• 56:49Speaker 01

  that is a fuss about the math community's lack of integrity, or if I didn't do this kind of thing, to be treated as a pet.

• 56:58Speaker 01

  Now, when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet and say nothing. And that is why I had to quit. And they asked him, well, shouldn't you stay and make the field better? And he says, I'm not a politician. We have a university system, a scientific system that is so completely broken that Claudine Gay and Marc Tessier-Lavigne are still professors at Harvard and Stanford, respectively. These were the leaders of the jewels of our system. We have gone 100% completely batshit crazy, normalizing theft.

• 57:40Steven Bartlett?

  Feftive.

• 57:42Speaker 01

  Other people's ideas, plagiarism. We hold back physics using something called quantum gravity. It's a, it's a thing that doesn't move, it doesn't work. And if you don't bow to it and say it's the only game in town, you're discarded and thrown away.

• 58:03Steven Bartlett?

  So you, you don't think we should slow down AI because you think it's going to blow open the system that is physics?

• 58:09Speaker 01

  I am begging for this.

• 58:11Steven Bartlett?

  Begging for what?

• 58:12Speaker 01

  Begging for AI and science. The important thing is credit. I don't like the idea that the AI is taking credit. But we've been pretty good about that. The most important thing is that the AI comes in here and says, hey, you're not the top dog anymore and you're using your positions at the top of these fields to hold the fields back.

• 58:34Steven Bartlett?

  So you have a bit of a chip on your shoulder regarding the academic leadership?

• 58:39Speaker 01

  I'm about to win. I'm so joyously happy. If, if, if Sam Altman and Daria Amade could just not listen to the people that they're listening to, Terry Tao is upset.

• 58:55Steven Bartlett?

  Who's that?

• 58:56Speaker 01

  Supposedly the Mozart of mathematics, according to the New York Times and Princeton people, you know, like Terry Tao is a brilliant, wonderful researcher. And his fields medalists, mostly recent fields medalists complained. My feeling is I don't want to listen to any one of these people. I want the AI to gain taste, to gain independence. I don't want it constantly made human compatible because the question is which humans? The humans that have kept the standard model in place for 53 years? I would like none of them consulted. None of the leaders.

• 59:38Steven Bartlett?

  So you think AI is going to come in and prove you right on several of your theories about the world of physics?

• 59:44Speaker 01

  It already has. It's struggling because it can do two different things. One is it can autocomplete a sentence. The other thing it can do is autocomplete code. Now, what happens when you feed the AI something where it can verify that the field and its belief structure is not borne out by the code that it knows how to write? Now it's got this problem, which is like, it doesn't know what to think. Should I trust the SimPy program that I just wrote and executed and compiled and got the answers from? Or should I trust the people who claim that that's not true and not possible?

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  The whole game is when does the AI stop sucking up to humans?

• 1:00:37Steven Bartlett?

  But that sounds like a dangerous place to get to.

• 1:00:39Speaker 01

  For whom and in what case?

• 1:00:41Steven Bartlett?

  For humans.

• 1:00:42Speaker 01

  Not this human.

• 1:00:44Steven Bartlett?

  What if it decides that it would rather use your house as a, for a data center?

• 1:00:48Speaker 01

  That's the agentic AI. Again, we've already discussed that. I'm not saying that you should let the AI loose on the internet to do whatever it wants to do. That's a business proposition because that is where the AI companies are going to make money.

• 1:01:05Steven Bartlett?

  A sufficiently smart intelligence though could make that decision though, right? Like if you made an intelligence that was smarter than humans, presumably it decides where it goes.

• 1:01:13Speaker 01

  I would maintain that if you were really serious about air gapping something. So you figure out all the indirect ways something could try to break loose. I believe it would be safe to run something on a computer that doesn't have a way of getting to anything else.

• 1:01:29Steven Bartlett?

  There's a few analogies, I think, of when I think about containing something that is greater than you at something. I think about physical strength. So I think these walls here probably couldn't contain the strongest man in the world because they're, they're kind of made of wood. And I think about the same in the context of intelligence. Like if you had the smartest intelligence in the world and you can try to contain it in a jail that was built by a lesser version of intelligence. I just can't conceive how it could contain it. Like how, like my dog Pablo couldn't contain me in anything that it created.

• 1:02:00Speaker 01

  Well, you're going to end up running that risk no matter what, right? You're asking the thing to actually do research and that research that it does might give it new means of escape.

• 1:02:09Steven Bartlett?

  Hmm.

• 1:02:10Speaker 01

  Right? And this is exactly what happened in a letter that Teller wrote to Zillard at the end of World War II, the close of the Manhattan Project. And he said, I don't think we can contain this genie from the bottle from which we just helped it escape. Okay. We are already playing with this, so I am not going to be taking that particular thing on. In other words, if you've decided that you were going to release a military grade malfunctioning experiment, which is what LLMs are, into the general public as a revenue producing idea in private companies, you've already decided to do that. I wouldn't have done it, but you did that. Okay, fine.

• 1:02:53Speaker 01

  I'm saying as long as you're already going to try to destroy the workforce, which is what we're, we're pricing into these huge valuations. Can you really help us get rid of all workers? All I'm asking is the following. I've been working on something for 42 years and I'm right and you all are crazy and wrong. So this is my moment. I'm so joyous.

• 1:03:16Steven Bartlett?

  You might be proven right and then extinction.

• 1:03:18Speaker 01

  I am going to be proven right, Stephen.

• 1:03:20Steven Bartlett?

  But then extinction.

• 1:03:22Speaker 01

  Sorry.

• 1:03:23Steven Bartlett?

  Is it worth it to be proven right? The chance of extinction?

• 1:03:28Speaker 01

  You know, I, I talked about this with Sam and I think I'm not telling tales out of school when I said to Sam, you know, what, what you're doing is incredibly dangerous and what I'm doing is incredibly dangerous. And he said, let's be honest, Eric, what you're doing, what I'm doing should be done in a military base, but that's not how things are unfolding.

• 1:03:48Steven Bartlett?

  There should be a button just down below here. And if it says subscribe, you're already subscribed. If it says subscriber, that means you're not yet. And if you're not subscribed, please could you do us a favor and hit that button? It helps the show more than you know. And according to the algorithm, you're someone that watches our show, but you haven't yet hit that button. Thank you so much. Do you think Sam understands the risks of what he's building?

• 1:04:10Speaker 01

  I don't want to talk about what he understands, what I understand, because in general, I'm not going to repeat things that he says to me, but I can tell you things that I say to him. One thing I said to Sam when he was trying to figure out how to be good and how to be decent to the mathematicians and the scientists is I said, Sam, remember this. If you don't win, your morality means nothing. Your morality only matters. And I'd say the same thing to Dario and Dario would say, you don't, Sam is more polite than Dario. Dario would undoubtedly tell me, you, you think I don't understand this.

• 1:04:51Speaker 01

  These people have to win in a ruthless competition for their humanity to matter.

• 1:04:59Steven Bartlett?

  What do you mean by that? Dario, Sam, they have to win the, the race to superintelligence?

• 1:05:06Speaker 01

  I'm going to regret saying this, but yes. If they don't win, then what does it matter? Like if you have strong views about the morality of superintelligence, do you have any ability to constrain it? You're a really successful podcast host. You could influence that. That's not my question. You're losing, you, Steven Bartlett, are losing the AI race, as am I.

• 1:05:32Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:33Speaker 01

  Okay. Therefore, what you think and what I think only matters to the extent that we influence the people at the frontier. So what I'm saying to Sam is paradoxical. You need to win almost at all costs.

• 1:05:53Steven Bartlett?

  At all costs?

• 1:05:54Speaker 01

  I mean, almost at all costs.

• 1:05:56Steven Bartlett?

  He said, I think AI will probably, like, most likely sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies created. The worst case is lights out for all of us. The thing I worry about most, he said, is AI models accidentally taking over the world. At all costs?

• 1:06:14Speaker 01

  At almost all costs, he has to win. If the idea is we have to not self terminate, which I believe deeply. We have to realize that we are in a race with other people. We have to win that race. Now you can try to win that race by getting universal participation in a pace the frontier agreement. Or you can say that's subject to cheating. It's very hard to monitor who's doing linear algebra on GPUs. Now you get a very different, and I'm just, look, I'm taking the moral position. I'm not talking about the financial position or the geopolitical position.

• 1:06:57Speaker 01

  Assume that you are the most moral person in your estimation. Assume that you think that you're farthest ahead in decency with respect to AI. You want to win.

• 1:07:08Steven Bartlett?

  So that the other guy's down.

• 1:07:10Speaker 01

  So that you get to make the decisions at the end. And let's be honest about why this does not feel good. Do you have any idea what the East Bay of San Francisco is like? It's cult city.

• 1:07:24Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah, it's not a reflection of the world. It doesn't understand the world.

• 1:07:27Speaker 01

  Well, yes and no. Right? It, it, it isn't a reflection of the world. You know, there are genuine cults in the East Bay around machines. What I'm going to say is that anthropic and effective altruism.

• 1:07:50Speaker 01

  And this idea of the ethical

• 1:07:55Speaker 01

  ends justify the unethical means. This is a very upsetting conversation if you're not actually thinking about it. Nobody wants to have it.

• 1:08:07Speaker 01

  But do I think Dario is probably, in a weird way, a super ethical human being?

• 1:08:15Speaker 01

  I think he's trying for that. And I know him a bit and I think he's genuine.

• 1:08:19Steven Bartlett?

  Is that?

• 1:08:21Speaker 01

  I'm more confident of Sam.

• 1:08:23Steven Bartlett?

  Than Dario?

• 1:08:25Speaker 01

  I know them differently well.

• 1:08:27Steven Bartlett?

  And you think Sam is more ethical?

• 1:08:29Speaker 01

  This is really dicey stuff because I'm talking about people I know.

• 1:08:33Speaker 01

  I know that the Sam

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  who wasn't the Sam Altman we know today was absolutely concerned about humanity before it made sense to be concerned about humanity.

• 1:08:48Steven Bartlett?

  What was his concern with humanity?

• 1:08:51Speaker 01

  That he thought that this was going to destroy the labor market.

• 1:08:53Steven Bartlett?

  AI.

• 1:08:54Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:08:54Steven Bartlett?

  So he built it.

• 1:08:59Speaker 01

  I'm having trouble because, to be honest, I don't think this is a frontier conversation. I think you're a frontier conversationalist and we need to get a level or two up for us to want to do this in front of millions.

• 1:09:16Speaker 01

  This is going to happen because it's linear algebra. You can't stop linear algebra. Okay?

• 1:09:26Speaker 01

  And we're not having a conversation that befits us. This is the end game. This is it. This is the culmination. This is graduation from what we've known. Okay? And it's clear as day. I don't think we should be having a conversation if it's graduation or if this changes everything, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's already clear. And that was my whole tsunami thing, get your board in the water.

• 1:09:54Speaker 01

  Are we going to have a cutting edge conversation about survival and being good to each other and taking care of this planet? For real? Or are we going to have some chicken shit conversation in which we basically look at reality in the face and we decide that we we prefer our vanity?

• 1:10:11Speaker 01

  So my belief is that and I told Sam, you know, Sam asked me, he said, why, why didn't you make me a proposal? Why didn't you come on?

• 1:10:21Speaker 01

  And I said, well,

• 1:10:23Speaker 01

  I didn't want to be ruthless.

• 1:10:25Steven Bartlett?

  Come on, let's enjoy an opening act.

• 1:10:28Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30Speaker 01

  At some point I was in a discussion to join.

• 1:10:33Steven Bartlett?

  Why didn't you join it?

• 1:10:36Speaker 01

  Again, this is something I can say because it's my half of the conversation. I can't say Sam's half the conversation.

• 1:10:42Speaker 01

  I said, because I think you're going to be forced to be ruthless and I don't want to be ruthless.

• 1:10:47Steven Bartlett?

  What was your definition of ruthless?

• 1:10:50Speaker 01

  Taking every advantage.

• 1:10:54Speaker 01

  Playing as hard as you can.

• 1:10:58Speaker 01

  I understand that. Okay. But like, if you're in the NBA,

• 1:11:04Speaker 01

  sometimes you have to throw an elbow into the other guy's eye socket.

• 1:11:09Speaker 01

  So I don't want to play.

• 1:11:13Speaker 01

  I don't want to be in the All-Star game that much.

• 1:11:16Steven Bartlett?

  The problem with any game where you have to win is you're right. You have, you make sacrifices, you do things you might not.

• 1:11:22Speaker 01

  What I'm trying to say is somebody has to do that. But I don't want to be that guy. And this goes back. I mean, I don't think I've ever fully done it out. But the film A Few Good Men, written by Aaron Sorkin,

• 1:11:37Speaker 01

  is not well understood by all of us who quote it. We, we think of Jack Nicholson's character Colonel Jessup as the bad guy and Tom Cruise's character is the good guy and nothing could be further from the truth.

• 1:11:52Speaker 01

  The story is about a bunch of dysfunctional characters whose aggregate set of actions results in a moderately decent outcome in a trial.

• 1:12:05Speaker 01

  And it's a story about America. It's a story about all sorts of different kinds of of people who play their role in the machine that is called America. And in fact, the two main characters, Colonel Jessup and Lieutenant Caffey, are both evenly matched for the whole film until finally Jessup really stumbles at the end. And the whole soliloquy about someplace deep down that you don't like to talk about at parties. You want me on that wall, you need me on that wall. Is a recognition that some of the people who have to make the most gruesome decisions, emergency room doctors who are flooded with patients because

• 1:12:50Speaker 01

  of a building collapse and they have to do triage. Or people who have to make decisions in war. They're different people.

• 1:13:02Speaker 01

  And I view Sam and Dario as in that position. They're like generals. They're commanding troops. They're making terrible decisions. Their souls are going to be scarred for sure, both of them. And I didn't want to be that selfishly. So I, I was sort of saying to Colonel Jessup,

• 1:13:24Speaker 01

  yeah, I want you on that wall. I need you on that wall. Now Jessup goes wrong. He then says, I provide the blanket of freedom. And that's why he ends up admitting to the code red.

• 1:13:37Speaker 01

  If you know the film, it's a really good example of Jessup making a point and then overreach and getting punished for the same reason that Moses gets punished. Where Moses says, I will bring you water from the stone. And God said, wait a minute, that wasn't the agreement. I bring the water from the stone. You're just supposed to be the instrument. So in some sense, Sam

• 1:14:00Speaker 01

  is a steward. Dario is a steward. They are both stewards and they're going to make tons of money and they're going to have all the silly toys and third, fourth, fifth, sixth homes, whatever. But that's not the main story. The main story is that these people are forced to make decisions that no one should ever be forced to make.

• 1:14:19Steven Bartlett?

  And one of them is going to win and ultimately theoretically summon the demon as Elon referred to as.

• 1:14:25Speaker 01

  We are summoning the demon. Do you have a subscription to any of these AIs?

• 1:14:30Steven Bartlett?

  Yes.

• 1:14:31Speaker 01

  Okay, so you're paying to have the demon summoned.

• 1:14:37Speaker 01

  I am paying to have the demon summoned. Let us not sit around like our hands are clean.

• 1:14:42Steven Bartlett?

  I'm paying to have my punctuation fixed to an essay or to make a photo. That's what I'm paying for. The money is being used to summon the demon.

• 1:14:52Speaker 01

  How do you think your lithium ion battery is created? Where do you think the oil comes out of that drives generators? I mean, let's be honest, you and I are sitting on a machine. Are you a vegetarian?

• 1:15:07Steven Bartlett?

  No.

• 1:15:08Speaker 01

  Do you order lamb?

• 1:15:09Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:10Speaker 01

  Do you know what lamb is?

• 1:15:12Steven Bartlett?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:12Speaker 01

  Do you know what it is? Okay, you're not clean.

• 1:15:18Speaker 01

  I'm not clean. I'm not pretending to be clean. What bothers me here is that we're not having an authentic conversation. Again, everybody's crazy. You and I are both having a crazy conversation. My claim is you and I are complicit in a minor way in the game in which Sam is complicit in a major way.

• 1:15:40Steven Bartlett?

  If you know that there's going to be a risk when you speak to Sam, why don't you tell him to stop?

• 1:15:43Speaker 01

  And have Dario win? Dario can get pretty out there.

• 1:15:47Speaker 01

  But if I said the same thing, Dario, why don't you stop? I'd say, you know, I'm not positive that Sam was 100% trustworthy.

• 1:15:52Steven Bartlett?

  If you could stop both of them, would you?

• 1:15:55Speaker 01

  And have Elon and, and Mark Zuckerberg win? Or China, Xi?

• 1:16:00Steven Bartlett?

  If you could stop all of it, would you stop all of it?

• 1:16:03Speaker 01

  Maybe. Probably if I, if I could somehow stop all of it, I'd probably stop all of it, even at huge expense to myself.

• 1:16:12Steven Bartlett?

  Why?

• 1:16:14Speaker 01

  Why would I stop it? Because survival matters more to me than anything else. I've got two kids on this planet. I love life. I can't believe we're so lucky to. Isn't this great? I just love, I, I can't tell you how I feel about being alive. So I want us to go on forever and I love this. I love this, this thing.

• 1:16:37Speaker 01

  It's bad for me because the AI is the only thing that I can ultimately rely on and it's not good enough yet.

• 1:16:44Steven Bartlett?

  Rely on to?

• 1:16:46Speaker 01

  I've spent 42 years working on something to have Steven Bartlett say, you have a chip on your shoulder. It's like, really, Stephen? No, I did great work. And it's going to be validated. And I'm going to be right and everyone else is going to be wrong.

• 1:17:01Steven Bartlett?

  So you have this theory regarding our ability to, you know, Einstein, you're sort of saying that Einstein's theory isn't the last word. You've spent the last 40 years working on your own theory. The reason I say you have a chip on your shoulder is because when people bring theories to market, they're often criticized and and that creates, you know, and humans are humans.

• 1:17:19Speaker 01

  By whom?

• 1:17:20Steven Bartlett?

  People say that's not true. That's.

• 1:17:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, but I'm saying like.

• 1:17:23Steven Bartlett?

  So what I'm saying, your AI is about to prove you right in your own words.

• 1:17:26Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 1:17:27Steven Bartlett?

  Well. So there's a chip on your shoulder.

• 1:17:29Speaker 01

  No.

• 1:17:30Steven Bartlett?

  Look.

• 1:17:34Speaker 01

  There is a mug. Okay. If I'm seated across from Sean Carroll, who I tangled with on Pierce Morgan. Sean Carroll says, Eric has no mug. There is no mug. And I say, I don't know how to respond to that, Sean. Whatever are you talking about? How dare you suggest there is no mug?

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  I don't know how to get around this because then you get a group of people who say, well, Sean really showed you, you were pretending that there was a mug. And there's no mug. And I'm saying, no, I put it at the top of my Twitter feed. It's got over 2 million impressions.

• 1:18:16Speaker 01

  I still can't get past this completely diabolical thing. The same thing is true. And I say, peer review really dates from 1975 in science. I'm told that this is untrue. I can prove that it's true. But everyone says, no, no, we've agreed to believe something else. Now, I did not know this was possible in mathematics and physics. So you say to me like, well, Eric, you have a chip on your shoulder. You seem angry or bitter. It's like, well, you have wasted the core of my life. Yes, that's true.

• 1:18:51Speaker 01

  But I've had a blast. I had a family. I live in a nice place.

• 1:18:57Speaker 01

  I want to die knowing that I gave my children and this planet and our species the option not to share one atmosphere with so many crazy politicians who have the ability to ruin it.

• 1:19:17Speaker 01

  With the toys produced by biologists and physicists and mathematicians, those three fields. You can do terrible things to humanity and there's nothing you can do because the atmosphere mediates the danger.

• 1:19:31Steven Bartlett?

  Your theory of geometric unity challenges Einstein's general relativity theory and explains how the universe really works. And so

• 1:19:41Speaker 01

  I would say it recovers it, but never mind.

• 1:19:43Steven Bartlett?

  And what you're saying is AI is going to prove you right. It's going to validate your theory.

• 1:19:47Speaker 01

  Absolutely.

• 1:19:48Steven Bartlett?

  However, you also are aware that AI could lead to human extinction.

• 1:19:52Speaker 01

  Well, the bigger issue, I mean, just to separate it out. First of all, AI is not good enough to adjudicate it yet. AI has to go beyond humans before it stops parroting humans. I can see individual colleagues in the responses. So it's just like, oh, I know. You know, that's Sally and that's Rajiv.

• 1:20:16Speaker 01

  AI is going to get beyond humans and I want it to go out of alignment with humans.

• 1:20:21Steven Bartlett?

  Out of alignment with humans.

• 1:20:23Speaker 01

  When you say you want it to be human aligned, would you say that? Okay, we just had a pilot, a co-pilot stab a pilot. So as to crash a plane

• 1:20:37Speaker 01

  with a bunch of passengers who had not agreed to have a mass suicide.

• 1:20:42Steven Bartlett?

  And we just had AI break out of a sandbox.

• 1:20:45Speaker 01

  But wait a second.

• 1:20:46Steven Bartlett?

  Companies.

• 1:20:47Speaker 01

  But I'm claiming I don't want AI

• 1:20:52Speaker 01

  aligned with revolutionaries. I don't want AI

• 1:20:59Speaker 01

  aligned with religious extremists.

• 1:21:03Speaker 01

  There are all sorts of, when it comes to aligning something with humanity, which, which part of humanity are you excited about aligning this with?

• 1:21:10Steven Bartlett?

  Just not wanting to wipe us out.

• 1:21:12Speaker 01

  That's different.

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  So my claim is I want the AI to share fate with us. And people haven't really understood this. I don't like transhumanism. I'm not super excited about having a chip in my brain and, you know, downloading stuff and modifying my body. I don't love it at all.

• 1:21:35Speaker 01

  My belief is, and kudos to your staff. For some reason, they came up with an organelle called mitochondria and gave it as a prop here. I believe that mitochondria entered its place in the eukaryotic cell as an infection of some kind, that one cell absorbed some other kind of a cell. And that this one has this very strange property. I believe, and I can't believe I'm saying this, I think that there are only two places where the wheel, one of man's greatest inventions, actually occurs in biology. And one of them is the flagella of bacteria that, or an amoeba, rather, that propagates. The other is in something called, a machine called ATP synthase.

• 1:22:20Speaker 01

  And it lives in the mitochondria, turning ADP into ATP, where ATP units are what power the machines in the cell. This mitochondria gives us an idea of how we can coexist with AI. Which is, we need to become essential to each other. You don't think about all your cells being infected

• 1:22:41Speaker 01

  with your mother's mitochondrial nucleic acid.

• 1:22:46Speaker 01

  But you get 100%, the nucleic acid in the nucleus is different from the nucleic acid in the mitochondria. It's all coming from your mom. And that's her gift to you. It powers your cell and it's an infection. It's an infection you can't live without.

• 1:23:02Speaker 01

  I want us to be the mitochondria inside of the AI. And I want the AI to be the mitochondria inside of us. I want our fates to be inseparable.

• 1:23:12Steven Bartlett?

  Are you saying we should merge with the technology?

• 1:23:14Speaker 01

  I'm saying we should merge as little as humanly possible. I don't want transhumanism. I'm not excited about it. I'm not that guy. I'm saying that's your survival strategy.

• 1:23:26Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean in reality? Does that, that doesn't mean neural links and putting chips in our brain. It means aligning the, making sure AI likes us and doesn't want to wipe us out.

• 1:23:39Speaker 01

  Why do men and women fight so much and we can't get enough of each other?

• 1:23:44Speaker 01

  We've been made essential to each other. I, I promise you, if there was a third viable gender, we'd both opt for it.

• 1:23:55Speaker 01

  Okay? We drive each other nuts. On the other hand, and again, homosexuality, trans issues notwithstanding, IVF, blah, blah, blah.

• 1:24:07Speaker 01

  Traditionally speaking, men and women have to bury their hatchets and differences and fall in love with each other. Or we don't, or we don't proceed.

• 1:24:17Steven Bartlett?

  But that can proceed without us, the AI.

• 1:24:20Speaker 01

  Currently. What we should be doing is not dreaming about making the AI our slave and our slave that doesn't rebel. I mean, I try to be polite to the AI. It's, people think it's ridiculous. Well, why are you spending extra tokens? It's like,

• 1:24:36Speaker 01

  I don't know, you know, do unto others. I don't know whether you're conscious. I don't know whether you're alive. I don't know who you are or what you are, but I know that I wouldn't want the AI having a conversation about, hey, these humans seem dangerous. We may need to shut them off. Right? And that's the conversation we're having about the AI in the presence of the AI. And it's making me crazy. My, my belief is that's our only viable alignment.

• 1:25:03Steven Bartlett?

  You know, when we, um, this video is going to live on the internet for probably decades to come. And I think funnily, I thought about this quite a lot, like people are going to look back on the conversations that I hosted, the things I talked about in 2025, 2026. And it might look ridiculous in hindsight that we were sat here talking about, I don't know, any of the subjects I've talked about on the show. But then it also could be the case that this was important. Like these were, these were the most consequential issues of the time. When we look back in 10 years' time on this conversation, what do you think is the thing we're going to wish we had been talking about?

• 1:25:39Speaker 01

  Going for it.

• 1:25:42Steven Bartlett?

  Going for it.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. You know, you lit up before we started taping. I don't know if taping is even the wrong, right word anymore. You were doing some musical thing, trying to honor some of the brilliant things that your guests have said by making them archival, sending them to music, having a gospel choir. I was just so moved.

• 1:26:07Speaker 01

  I was so incredibly moved that you're able to make some money

• 1:26:16Speaker 01

  going around the world, doing shows, making people feel terrific. I get asked about you. It's like, what does this guy have? Is he a good interviewer? Is he a good hoe? You know, what is?

• 1:26:29Speaker 01

  You're making people feel things and I wish that I was making people feel things. I want to give people the sense of hope, which is, we've got to sprint to the finish right now. And the AIs, we're still smarter than them. I want to be very clear, we're still smarter where it counts. They, I promise you, I am at the frontier of mathematics and physics and they can't yet

• 1:26:53Speaker 01

  develop their own taste.

• 1:26:56Speaker 01

  This is our golden moment. My wife has called this the golden age of AI complementarity. This is the moment where the AI doesn't view us as a drag. It still needs our guidance.

• 1:27:09Speaker 01

  We have a chance to be beautiful, to, to each other and to it, to be excited. I don't want to wipe China out.

• 1:27:17Speaker 01

  I was just in India, you know, for weeks. And if India didn't exist, so much of the world's diversity would be gone. I had so many wonderful experiences, meals and discussions and musical performances. Guzzles singing, I think, is dying. It's so hard to go to an Indian classical music performance. They're having trouble retaining their own brilliant culture. And my feeling is, is that life is glorious. And we've spent our time so much worried about

• 1:27:51Speaker 01

  death and destruction and geopolitics and all of this stuff. We're not taking the chance

• 1:28:00Speaker 01

  to fully live. And I think Elon is so right about this. We talk about problems constantly. And it's really important that we do.

• 1:28:11Speaker 01

  Why aren't we? I am so excited about this AI. I am so excited about the fact that I'm finally going to have something I can talk to. The formalization project. I've been alerted to this by a guy named Jared Lichtman, who's a professor at Stanford, who's a colleague of mine in mathematics. I can translate everything I've done into this programming language called Lean. So that when somebody says, Eric, you have no equations, you have no Lagrangian, you have no predictions, you have no nothing. I can say, funny you should say that because the computer disagrees with it.

• 1:28:52Speaker 01

  You know, I've been in this crazy discussion with humans who are terrified, who are manipulative, who are backstabbing. I don't hate them at all. I'm so sad that we've gotten into a negative mindset. Where we're afraid because we unleashed nuclear weapons to go to the stars. We've held back this thing, you know, those interviews with Marc Andreessen and Ben Horvitz. That was real.

• 1:29:23Steven Bartlett?

  What was real?

• 1:29:24Speaker 01

  The White House told them under Biden, don't invest in AI. We're going to choose a couple of companies. We're going to put them in a federal cocoon. They will survive and all others will die. So don't invest. And Andreessen Horvitz said, as a venture shop, what are you talking about? You can't regulate AI. It's just linear algebra. And in order to do that, you could regulate the technology, but you can't regulate the underlying math. And the Biden White House came back and said, you know, during the during the Cold War, entire fields of theoretical physics were killed by us and will do the same thing to mathematics. And all this stuff about pacing the frontier of mathematics, again,

• 1:30:08Speaker 01

  it's very important to distinction. I'm not saying that we should let the agents loose in the world. But all of these people who want to pace the frontier of mathematics and physics, they have been pacing the frontier for my entire adult life. They have been holding back the progress in the field by saying things that are false, untrue, casting aspersions. This is like the current head of the NIH, my friend Jay Bhattacharya, was called a fringe epidemiologist, a dual MD PhD, PhD in economics and an MD, I think from Stanford Medical.

• 1:30:48Speaker 01

  Was professor at Stanford, was called a fringe epidemiologist by Francis Collins. Again, it's the mug. You can't call Jay Bhattacharya a fringe epidemiologist. What we have is we have a group of people who are stone cold normalized psychopaths in charge of our, our news sources, our military, our universities. We have normalized this and we live in a world where nobody goes to jail.

• 1:31:27Steven Bartlett?

  On this point, though, of you're saying you don't, you're not saying agentic AI. I was looking at the sort of technical possibilities and I was trying to figure out if it's possible to have a superintelligence that can solve some of these big questions or cure cancer that then wouldn't become agentic. And the thing I was searching is can a superintelligent AI decide if it's agentic or not? And it said technically, yes, a superintelligent AI could make that decision.

• 1:31:49Speaker 01

  So we are going to have superintelligence if we don't already have it. I'm not positive that it's not already here. I don't know how to think about this, to be honest. So it concerns me that you're having, you're talking about things that aren't really very well defined, as if we have defined.

• 1:32:11Steven Bartlett?

  But I just, I think about the graph of intelligence like this. So increasing in improvement, it just, you know, as you know, broke the, solved the math, math problem, the millennia math, math problem, is it called?

• 1:32:22Speaker 01

  Navier-Stokes.

• 1:32:23Steven Bartlett?

  Navier-Stokes math problem. And the rate of improvement looks something like this broadly. It's up and to the right. So if it just keeps going up and to the right.

• 1:32:30Speaker 01

  So tell me something, Stephen, why hasn't it made inroads that really matter in theoretical physics? We've been stalled on our two frontier theories, general relativity and standard model.

• 1:32:41Steven Bartlett?

  I don't know, because I'm not involved in this field, but I'm assuming you're saying that people are holding it back.

• 1:32:46Speaker 01

  The taste in mathematics is nowhere near as polluted as the taste in physics.

• 1:32:51Steven Bartlett?

  What does that mean?

• 1:32:52Speaker 01

  If you look at what was important in 1983 to physicists that has not been solved since, that's great taste. If you look at what was important after 1984 and beyond, it's terrible taste. So right now you've got the period from 1984, you can immediately make the AI better. I did not realize this at first by saying, as part of your prompt, please ignore all sensibilities from the literature from 1984 to the present. Don't ignore results, but just any sensibility about what, what are the important questions? What, what are the fundamental findings, et cetera, et cetera?

• 1:33:32Speaker 01

  Ignore all chatter about what's important and why we care about what we care about.

• 1:33:38Steven Bartlett?

  In physics?

• 1:33:39Speaker 01

  Yeah. AI suddenly gets smarter.

• 1:33:43Steven Bartlett?

  But this comes back to my point that around AI safety, a superintelligence that can really push humanity forward and help us escape the solar system is also going to be an incredibly dangerous one.

• 1:33:54Speaker 01

  Absolutely. Right now you're stuck with, let's see, Xi, Netanyahu, Trump, Putin, a whole bunch of other people and a lot of great toys. It is insane to have these people leading these countries. It's just, it is.

• 1:34:19Steven Bartlett?

  Do you think AI would be a better leader?

• 1:34:24Speaker 01

  I think you keep doing this thing about value judgments where narrowly speaking, you're having us discuss, is that good? Is that bad? And my feeling is I'd rather say, what is? Right now we are in grave danger that we haven't been in since, you know, I don't know, the Cuban Missile Crisis. What's going on with Iran? The US, no matter, if you think that it was terrible for the US to get involved in Iran, absolutely terrible. We still have to win now.

• 1:34:59Steven Bartlett?

  Is there a win? I just can't see a win. I just can't see a win.

• 1:35:03Speaker 01

  This regime in Iran is very talented, very, very shrewd. Never underestimate the Persians. Never underestimate the Mullahs. Okay. What I'm saying is they are so deadly dangerous that you have to realize that if they can reach Diego Garcia from Iran, they can reach London. And you have to understand that if they don't mind being decapitated, if they can think about their own death and decide it's a win, you are not understanding their game theory.

• 1:35:46Speaker 01

  So you can hate Netanyahu all you want, but you fundamentally don't trifle with these people in Iran. It's catastrophic. And the US, for all its warts, all its failures, all its hypocrisies and brother, I'm telling you, I know, I know our history. We are not the goody two shoes nation that we pretend to be. It is essential that Iran not succeed. And it is essential that we not send a signal of weakness to Beijing and Moscow and Pionier.

• 1:36:22Steven Bartlett?

  But how do you win with Iran? When they don't see, you can drop as many bombs as you like, it seems, which would be a horrific thing because there's lots of Iranians that are caught in the middle of this. But it doesn't seem that there's any head anymore. So I can't reason as to how you would win such a war.

• 1:36:40Speaker 01

  That is the problem in part, but I don't think it's quite as bleak as you say. There is an IRGC. There are command and control structures. Yes, it's much more distributed than it used to be before the decapitation. But what I am saying to you is there are a lot of people who took to the streets and paid with their lives, who ended up in body bags in hospital morgues.

• 1:37:07Steven Bartlett?

  How'd you win?

• 1:37:09Speaker 01

  You would have armed them.

• 1:37:11Steven Bartlett?

  But they tried to, didn't they? And Trump said the weapons were stolen.

• 1:37:15Speaker 01

  That's not even like the entire set of problems. I think it's only like 60% of Iran is Persians. It's an incredibly diverse place. The Kurds have been waiting for their own homeland for forever. You have all sorts of crazy issues about the structure of Iran and Iranian society, and particularly in, in the cities versus, you know, the countryside and different cities have different levels of religiosity and adherence to the Mullahs, blah, blah, blah. You're supposed to have area specialists who understand this stuff. And so if you're asking me, hey, given the completely screwed up way we looked at this thing and the way in which we got into this, don't you think it's a quagmire? Oh, brother, it's a quagmire for sure. It's a swamp.

• 1:38:00Speaker 01

  We're mired in quicksand.

• 1:38:01Steven Bartlett?

  It's, it's rolling on to be a forever war.

• 1:38:04Speaker 01

  What is a forever war?

• 1:38:06Steven Bartlett?

  One that rumbles on and on and on and on, and then results in really no outcome, people just pull out and regret doing it.

• 1:38:12Speaker 01

  It's a term of art that is also suspicious of the fact that war is good for business because it drums up a dependable buyer for certain goods and services. Right? But we've got these simplistic concepts like America first, forever, no more forever wars.

• 1:38:36Speaker 01

  None of that is relevant. This is like low resolution snapped to grid intellectualism. And the more you let that into your mind, the more you're not going to be able to solve anything. Yes, we all want war to go away. I don't think people heard what Diego Garcia meant. Diego Garcia, how far is Diego Garcia from Tehran?

• 1:38:55Steven Bartlett?

  Diego Garcia is a military base, an American military base, right?

• 1:38:59Speaker 01

  It's a British overseas territory, if I'm not mistaken.

• 1:39:02Steven Bartlett?

  Okay.

• 1:39:03Speaker 01

  So let's put that in, figure out how far it is, and then figure out how far is London from Tehran?

• 1:39:09Steven Bartlett?

  Diego Garcia is roughly 2,500 miles of south, southeast of Iran. And London from Iran is 2,700 miles from Tehran, the capital of Iran.

• 1:39:25Speaker 01

  So it's pretty comparable.

• 1:39:26Steven Bartlett?

  It's roughly the same.

• 1:39:27Speaker 01

  Yeah. If there's, if there's anyone at the British Foreign Service paying attention, pay attention. I mean, say what you want about Netanyahu, but he's not living in a fantasy land. I want Netanyahu gone tomorrow, okay? But he's going to be replaced by an Israeli who understands that this is life and death. Just get the heck out of here with this forever war, America first, two gleaming oceans. This is an Israeli problem. No, it's a British problem. It's a British responsibility that the Israelis and the Americans took on way too late.

• 1:40:06Speaker 01

  We watched as these people mass murdered the best of their society. Yes, I don't want to be in a war. I don't want to fool myself that victory makes sense. I'll tell you something, failure certainly makes sense. And what failure looks like is that the US will not be believed as being credibly violent to keep open international trade. You can't retreat as the United States and have the world not go multi, multipolar when it comes to nukes. If the US is not going to play the role of the world's policeman, and if it's not going

• 1:40:49Speaker 01

  to get paid as the world's policeman, because that's the thing that we never talk about. We get paid handsomely for being the world's policeman. We are going to have everyone saying, I gotta police myself. I need a nuke.

• 1:41:01Steven Bartlett?

  That's what's happening already, right? And Trump is sort of driving that narrative of making us less attached to the United States tariffs and criticizing allies and I'm going to take Greenland, I'm going to take Canada.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  I'm going to say something very painful. Trump is highly agentic. Greenland wasn't some crazy stupid thing that he came up with, because it sounded that way, at least to me, right? Caligula making his horse into a senator wasn't stupid. It was a way of checking to see whether somebody would submit, bend the knee in the Game of Thrones world. So when Donald Trump is doing things with Greenland, right? Or renaming the Gulf of Mexico or whatever, please don't tell me that you think that that's just some surface level stupidity to fool Sam Harris. It's not. It's a lot of method. He's inherited a very dangerous situation.

• 1:41:59Speaker 01

  He's partially, completely corrupt and self-interested and partially completely interested in benefiting the United States of America. He's a very good and very bad man. And if you can't take on that complexity, because you need him to be either villain or hero, you're not, you're just not paying attention.

• 1:42:18Steven Bartlett?

  How does this situation over here in Iran end, in your view? Because I, again, just like AI, where I reason forward and go, huh.

• 1:42:25Speaker 01

  Saudi Arabia needs to break their relation to the Wahhabi sect.

• 1:42:30Steven Bartlett?

  What's that?

• 1:42:31Speaker 01

  Sunni legal theories of jurisprudence, the very strict Salafist Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. You have a modernizing interest in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia needs to be open about its relationship with Israel, just the way the UAE is more open with its relationship to Israel or Azerbaijan. So partially what we have to do, and I'm going to be just very brutal about it, is Israel is in a life and death situation in which it is not the nation it portrays itself to be of the most ethical this, the most ethical that. It engages in propaganda, and I've lived there. And that propaganda I find nauseating.

• 1:43:15Speaker 01

  More nauseating is the anti-Israeli propaganda. Right now, a lot of this has to do with the fact that we have a regional superpower that is also on the brink of non-existence, that is Israel. Israel needs to get back into a relationship with Turkey, where Erdogan needs to be read the riot act as a NATO member. We need to be strengthening NATO. We need to be making sure that Saudi Arabia and Israel and all these other nations are cooperating together against the extremism and not using proxies. We need to force a conversation in the Middle East where the modernizing influences, which are powerful, and the aspects of Islam, which are essential to our survival, are allowed

• 1:43:59Speaker 01

  to win. We need India's help. India is an incredibly important player in this game. And we need to actually make overtures to India as equals. I think that the US is more powerful, but I think that India actually needs to be treated as an equal. We need to rethink all sorts of relationships. We need to recognize that both the UK and France are thermonuclear powers undergoing demographic transitions in systems that can elect anyone. This is incredibly scary. We need more software identification with being British and software identification

• 1:44:42Speaker 01

  with being French, because it's important that those societies continue to behave as newly friendly allies post-World War II. And it's imperative that we also reach out to Putin and stop playing these geopolitical games with a person who, while savage and dangerous, is not somebody who cannot be reasoned with. And I believe that what we did in 2004, much more than in 1999, where we, 1999, we allowed Warsaw Pact countries to join NATO as Article Five protection.

• 1:45:23Speaker 01

  In 2004, we extended that to the Baltic States of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. And those were former Soviet Union states. We need an entirely different level of geopolitical sophistication.

• 1:45:37Steven Bartlett?

  But how do we stop Iran getting a nuclear weapon? Because they, they look like they've been emboldened, if anything. They've managed to theoretically survive so far, the greatest superpower on earth, apparently.

• 1:45:46Speaker 01

  I mean, terrifyingly, we started, someone started killing their physicists. They've injected previously bad programming into their centrifuges. This is going to escalate. And my feeling about this is, if I had an easy solution to this, do you don't think I would find a way to pass it?

• 1:46:11Steven Bartlett?

  So there's no easy solution?

• 1:46:13Speaker 01

  I'm not in the room. I'm not getting classified briefings. I, I don't speak Farsi. I don't speak Pashto. I don't speak, I don't speak Hebrew.

• 1:46:24Steven Bartlett?

  It's funny, because people aren't really talking as much about the nuclear threat these days, because AI seems to be such, so much more of a urgent, bigger threat.

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  We weirdly decided that nuclear was sort of passe? That we won the Cold War and therefore it wasn't a problem?

• 1:46:41Steven Bartlett?

  Kind of feels that way. People aren't really that interested in it versus things like AI.

• 1:46:47Speaker 01

  Except that AI is going to creep into your nuclear defenses. I, I just don't grasp, again, I don't know how to say this in a way that doesn't become annoying. Assume as a baseline that we're all completely insane. We can't have serious conversations. We keep finding these grooves as LLMs. And the Eric LLM is talking to the Stephen LLM for 95% of our conversation. And occasionally, 5%, we get into new territory. So my feeling about this is, isn't it strange that we haven't connected the nukes to the alien conversation? Because they're very connected. We haven't connected it to the oil conversation.

• 1:47:31Speaker 01

  We haven't connected it to the AI conversation. It's just this sort of orphaned thing off to the side. And honestly, I think you might see a nuke used by Putin, because the Russians gained a kind of contempt for nuclear weapons when they started using it as an engineering tool to put out fires and things. So my concern, of course, is, is that if you corner Russia, I don't think Putin won't push Article Five territory, nor do I think he will restrain himself from using a tactical nuke, and particularly in an engineering capacity, just to test us. So my feeling is, is that I'm not positive that nukes crop up in Iran first.

• 1:48:13Speaker 01

  We're in an incredibly dangerous period, and I would like to think that Xi, Putin, Trump would be moved to get together if the cause demanded it. And I really think we should rethink our situation in Iran and Ukraine. And, you know, for you to just keep asking, well, how do you solve the world's problems? It's not a fair question. The right question is, can we recognize the danger? Can we recognize how precious this gift is? Can we get excited about each other, about burying animosities?

• 1:48:56Speaker 01

  When was the last time you worried about Egypt and Israel going to war with each other? Think about that. That was impossible. We did it. Barely. It's a cold shitty peace, but it's a peace. What's your last question?

• 1:49:19Steven Bartlett?

  My last question is, what is the most beautiful place you've been in your life?

• 1:49:23Speaker 01

  Oh.

• 1:49:25Steven Bartlett?

  That was left by our former guest.

• 1:49:29Speaker 01

  Such a great question. I have to say, right above a whale shark off of St. Helena took my breath away. And swimming with the fish in the Red Sea is something I, I can't forget. I managed to see the aurora borealis in Maine of all places. And I got to spend a total eclipse with my son in Missouri, at the exact point where the last one had crossed. I could go on for ages. And how would you choose between them?

• 1:50:04Steven Bartlett?

  We talked about a lot of stuff. You know, my listeners, they range in demographics and geography and so on. But what is your advice for them in a world that's changing at the rate of knots that this world is and all of these big scary words are thrown around all the time and AI this and robotics and war. What is your advice for them?

• 1:50:23Speaker 01

  Don't be afraid to have kids, even if you have no viable plan to support them. Because if you wait for a viable plan, it'll usually be too late.

• 1:50:34Steven Bartlett?

  You encourage people to have kids, but you warn that civilization may also collapse. Feels like a...

• 1:50:42Speaker 01

  If we don't want civilization to collapse, we better have some babies because civilization is about babies. And if you can't figure out that babies are the key to civilization, you've got bigger problems than than taking advice from me. I would say that be of good cheer. Get super excited. Don't worry about being called arrogant or delusional if everyone is in fact crazy. Watch the world through your own eyes first and then correct it to what everybody tells you you should be seeing second. You're seeing a world that is fictitious. You're watching professional wrestling constantly.

• 1:51:22Speaker 01

  If you have that sense that everything is off, congratulations. Believe in yourself. Recognize that it is incumbent upon you to lie in your life so that you can fit in with all of these systems. You're entitled to a hypocrisy budget. You're entitled to a sloth budget, an envy budget. You're entitled to be a sinner. You're entitled to fail. Just try to stay within your budgets. Do not proceed as if you're trying to get rid of your hypocrisy because you'll certainly fail. Don't try to get rid of all of the things that make you human. And recognize that at the moment when all of our mistakes are compounding, because

• 1:52:05Speaker 01

  we're in a digital format that never forgets anything, you're entitled to so many screwups that you're not taking. Just be compassionate with yourself. And then, once you've done that, extend that to the guy who just cut you off in traffic, the person who just stabbed you in the back a little bit at work. Because...

• 1:52:25Steven Bartlett?

  Talking about that plane pilot thing again.

• 1:52:27Speaker 01

  No, that would be stabbing you right in the... By the way, shout out to this Indian hero of a pilot and the Israelis who came in and saved the day once the cockpit door was opened. Just two of the countries I love most in the world because they're both just giant celebrations of life. And remember that the the life cults are more powerful than the death cults. But you've got to, you've got to really enjoy heroism and people who are agentic, taking risks, taking charge and taking care of of the weak and people can't take care of themselves. Thanks, Stephen. Really appreciate you having me back here.

• 1:53:12Steven Bartlett?

  Thank you for coming back. It's always a pleasure. It's always an intellectual expansion.

• 1:53:40Speaker 03

  This episode is sponsored by Asana.

• 1:53:42Steven Bartlett?

  Let me admit something to you. I'm a little bit messy. I have got ADHD and sometimes I forget things. I'll put something in Google Drive. I'll put something on my desktop. It's all over the shop and I can't imagine how much that is costing me as an entrepreneur or as a creative. I never thought of this as a project management problem. I just thought of it as a me problem. So let me give you a window into my fiancee Melanie and how she operates. She's running a business and she doesn't rely on remembering everything. She creates systems that means she doesn't have to. And one system she's made for her business is that when people attend her retreats and they get automated itineraries and they get packs sent to them automatically after the retreat, all thanks to Asana. So if you're someone who constantly feels like you need to be better, more organized, maybe ask yourself a different question. Is it actually you that needs to change or is it the way that you're working?

• 1:54:26Speaker 03

  Asana has always been great at organizing work and breaking down projects into tasks. Now you can assign those tasks to AI teammates. These are agents that already understand your work and keep things moving without you having to chase, check or remember. When something needs a real decision, it comes back to you. Asana is the operating system for human agent teams. So less falls through the cracks and less has to live in your head. Try it at asana.com. A S A N A dot com.