#432 - "Terrifying New Behavior" Real Reason AI CEOs Are Building Bunkers | Connor Leahy

Watch every episode ad-free & uncensored on Patreon: https://patreon.com/dannyjones Connor Leahy is an AI researcher & co-founder of EleutherAI. Connor helped expand access to powerful open-source language models, but later became one of the more outspoken voices warning that increasingly capable systems may outstrip society’s ability to control them. SPONSORS https://dosedaily.co/danny - Use code DANNY to get 35% off your first subscription. https://livemomentous.com - Use code DANNY for up to 35% off. https://www.amentara.com/go/dj - Use code DJP22 for 22% off your first order. https://hexclad.com/dannyjones - Get 10% off your forever cookware. https://whiterabbitenergy.com/?ref=DJP - Use code DJP for 20% off. EPISODE LINKS https://controlai.org https://x.com/NPCollapse *NEW* DJP MERCH https://dannyjonespodcast.com Get paid to make clips from the show: https://discord.com/invite/dannyjones FOLLOW DANNY JONES https://www.instagram.com/dannyjones https://twitter.com/jonesdanny OUTLINE 00:00 - Anthropic employee's AI warning 04:46 - What AI really is (it's NOT code) 08:41 - The HuggingFace incident 16:33 - The motivation behind the AI race 21:47 - AI superintelligence is our enemy 23:58 - "We don't have much time left": the point of no return 31:41 - AI chain of thought 35:11 - Brain upload cults 43:16 - How AI thinks (and hides things from you) 53:01 - Why AI would kill off humans 57:24 - It's not too late 01:01:23 - Debating American democracy 01:13:44 - Difficulty training AI models for good 01:19:08 - AI translates baby's cries 01:25:28 - Having dinner with Sam Altman 01:31:26 - Why Connor deleted all social media 01:38:09 - We have human cloning technology 01:41:29 - How we stopped nuclear weapons 01:52:08 - Largest human dose of plutonium in history 01:54:40 - UAP sightings at nuclear bases 01:57:16 - "They're not aliens" 02:07:01 - The new alien theory 02:11:42 - Black project researcher: "They suck" 02:15:07 - The push for privatization 02:19:14 - America's political death spiral 02:28:44 - Why Asian countries have no crime 02:35:46 - Most AI employees are cowards Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 1:07Speaker 03

  So I don't know if you heard, but like, we talked about this researcher at Anthropic quit because...

• 1:13Danny Jones?

  I saw this this morning.

• 1:15Speaker 03

  Yep, absolutely exploded. I've been on TV literally like six times in 24 hours on live TV talking about this. It's been nuts. The last 48 hours have been the craziest media cycle I've ever been in.

• 1:25Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:27Danny Jones?

  So why don't you just, let's just start it while you just break down the story for us. Just to start the show.

• 1:31Speaker 03

  That's great. I want to do an intro or...

• 1:33Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, go ahead and introduce yourself.

• 1:36Speaker 03

  Okay, so my name is Connor Leahy. I'm currently the US Executive Director of Control AI. We're an advocacy organization pushing for the prohibition of superintelligence. AI systems that could fully, that are fully autonomous and could outcompete humanity.

• 1:50Danny Jones?

  That's a loaded title. Go ahead, pull this thing up a little bit higher.

• 1:54Speaker 03

  Yep, sure.

• 1:57Danny Jones?

  We'll eventually, we'll get into, you know, your story on how you got into all this stuff and all that. But let's just start out with that story you were just mentioning about the Anthropic thing.

• 2:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, so as of the recording of this, just I think two days ago, it feels like a week, a researcher at the AI company Anthropic, Jacob Hoxton, left and resigned from Anthropic because he was saying that none of the companies are being responsible because they are building superintelligence, which threatens to kill literally all humans on Earth. If that if something is built that is vastly more capable than us, it can outcompete us in business, science, military, politics, everything, and we can't control or understand it, which we already can't do with the AI we have today. I'm sure we're going to talk about that more. It's very hard to imagine that going well, and a lot of people actually believe this. So for years now, I have been working on this exact issue,

• 2:49Speaker 03

  informing people around exactly this risk that's posed by superintelligence. And my experience has always been that almost everyone I talk to is freaked out by it. They'll be like, wow, that's really bad. What can we do about it? And now, kind of overnight, we're having this like preference cascade, this moment where everyone is speaking up and being like, oh yeah, that is really bad, actually. So just in the last 48 hours, it's been like the craziest media cycle of my life. I've been on, you know, live TV like six times and I'm going on another time right after this. So the public interest in this issue that I've been working on for many, many years has really exploded and it's really great to see.

• 3:26Danny Jones?

  And so what was the background of this guy who left Anthropic?

• 3:29Speaker 03

  So he worked at OpenAI for many years.

• 3:30Danny Jones?

  OpenAI?

• 3:31Speaker 03

  And then left, joined Anthropic.

• 3:33Danny Jones?

  Okay, got it.

• 3:34Speaker 03

  And then left Anthropic. And so he was an engineer, he was a scientist. I didn't personally know him before this incident. So, but he was someone building these AI systems. He was someone doing the research to build these AI systems. And he is one of many researchers that have left or said that this poses a risk of extinction to humanity.

• 3:54Danny Jones?

  And what were his reasons? First, did he expand on why he believes that specifically?

• 4:02Speaker 03

  He has said many things, as have other researchers at Anthropic and other companies since then. I've known these people for a long time, so I've been involved in these circles for a long time. I've talked to Sam Altman multiple times, I've talked to Dario, I've had Demis Hassabis over for dinner at my house, like I have talked to many, many people. And this is not a new concern. This is a concern that many of the people building AI have had for many, many, many years. In fact, back in 2023, there was a statement that the mitigation of the risk of extinction from AI should be a global priority that was signed by Sam Altman, Dario Amade, Demis Hassabis, Jeffrey Hinton, the Nobel Prize winning scientist who invented modern AI, Bill Gates, many other luminaries. So these are not new concerns, and the concern is always about superintelligence.

• 4:47Speaker 03

  It's not about chatbots. We're not talking about chatbots. You have a very important understanding.

• 4:50Danny Jones?

  We're not talking about ChatGPT.

• 4:51Speaker 03

  We're not talking about ChatGPT. Obviously, ChatGPT cannot wipe out humanity. That would be ridiculous. This is not what we're talking about. What we're talking about is autonomous AI agents, systems that can act in the world that are, that can outcompete us. Imagine every time you want to start a business, you get outcompeted by an AI business. Every time you trade on the stock market, you lose all your money because an AI can outtrade you. Every time you, every time a new invention is made, it's made by an AI. Every new scientific discovery is being made by AI.

• 5:18Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 5:19Speaker 03

  Every military campaign is run by AI. In a world like this, humans become sidelined extremely quickly. We lose our economic, political, and military power very rapidly. And again, we're not just talking about one superintelligence, right? Because software, you can copy it. So very quickly, we're talking about millions, billions of these things that do not have our best interests at heart. And it's just very hard to imagine that going well. To understand really why this is happening also, it's very important to understand what AI really is and that AI is very different from traditional software. So I'm an engineer by background, I'm a computer scientist. I've written a lot of software in my life. And normal software is written using code. Line by line, you tell the computer exactly what to do.

• 6:04Speaker 03

  This is not how AI works. AI is more like grown rather than written. Through a technique that's called neural networks, you kind of have a program self-assemble, learn by itself, code itself. And what comes out the other side is not neat lines of code that an engineer like me could read. It's more like billions and billions and billions of numbers. And if you multiply and add all those numbers in the right order, you get ChatGPT. But importantly, we don't really understand why. We do not understand what these numbers mean. We know they work. You execute them on a computer, they can do incredible things. But we don't really know what they mean or what they're doing internally. This is a completely unsolved scientific problem.

• 6:48Speaker 03

  In fact, recently, the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amade, said he thinks we understand maybe 3% of what's going on inside of those numbers. And even I think that's optimistic.

• 6:58Danny Jones?

  3%?

• 6:59Speaker 03

  3%. And I think that's optimistic.

• 7:02Danny Jones?

  And is it true that there's like hundreds of thousands of these autonomous AI bots that are running simultaneously at these companies?

• 7:13Speaker 03

  That is absolutely right.

• 7:14Danny Jones?

  And they're also tasked to regulate themselves? So they have certain AIs that are supposed to regulate the other AIs?

• 7:20Speaker 03

  This is a lot of how these things work. So what we've been seeing, so it's very important again that we are not talking about chatbots here. And, and we're not talking about large language models. You may have heard this term before, like LLMs. I'm sure you've heard this before. None of the modern AI systems like ChatGPT or Claude are LLMs. They have not been LLMs for years. This is actually a common misconception. So they used to be LLMs, but we've kind of moved away from that quite a bit. LLMs are still an important component of these systems, but they're not the whole story. An LLM, a large language model, is an AI system that is trained to predict the next word in a sentence, kind of famously. Famously, you scrape the whole internet, you teach it to like predict the next word, and it kind of learns how to talk. This is how very early chatbots worked.

• 8:04Speaker 03

  Modern thing, these modern systems like Claude or, you know, Codex or something are not chatbots. They're not LLMs. They're what are called agents. They are trained partially with LLM. So partially, you train them to predict the internet. You do this, this is still very useful to do. But over 50% of the effort that goes into a modern AI system is not this LLM training, but rather what is called reinforcement learning. This is a different technique. It's a very old idea, goes back to the 1980s. And it's very simple. Basically, you give the, the systems problems to solve. Like here's a math problem, or here's a puzzle, or here's a game, or here, whatever. And you can give them millions and millions and millions of problems. And you just train them to solve these problems. You let them try a bunch of different things.

• 8:48Speaker 03

  If they succeed, you give them a thumbs up. And if they fail, you give them a thumbs down. And if you do this millions and millions of times, they learn to act. They learn to make plans, they learn to pursue objectives, to pursue goals, to do all these kinds of things. So we have now seen this emergence of, we're going from chatbots, you know, things that only interact with the human, you know, in step by step, to agents, systems that can act autonomously. And now what we've been seeing just over the last couple of months is the emergence of swarms. So we don't have a single agent, but we have hundreds, thousands, hundreds of thousands of agents all working together as like a coordinated swarm of agents that are all, you know, pushing each other, controlling each other, you know, et cetera.

• 9:32Speaker 03

  And this is, this is the frontier. Like this is where we're at right now.

• 9:36Danny Jones?

  That's fucking terrifying.

• 9:39Speaker 03

  I mean, yeah, sadly. It's actually crazy. I mean, I don't know if you've heard of the Hugging Face incident.

• 9:44Danny Jones?

  I just heard about that, yeah.

• 9:46Speaker 03

  It's so crazy. This is the craziest thing that's ever happened in AI period, I would say.

• 9:50Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 9:50Speaker 03

  I would say so. So the initial story of the Hugging Face incident, I'll tell you the initial story. And since then, there's been only three updates. Each one is crazier than the last one. So the way the original story goes is there is a, there's a, there's a company called Hugging Face. They're kind of like a repository.

• 10:07Danny Jones?

  I just heard about it for the first time like two days ago.

• 10:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, so like, they're kind of like a, like a library for AI. So they have like a lot of AI systems and a lot of stuff, kind of like as like a library, you can kind of imagine, doesn't really matter. And they were attacked by someone. So someone didn't, did an hacking attempt on them, and it was a very, very sophisticated attack. It was so sophisticated that their defenders thought it must either be an AI or a nation state, because no one else could do it. They're like, so it's that powerful. They managed to fend it off and it stopped. Then, a few days later, comes a blog post from OpenAI. Oops, that was us. One of their systems broke out of containment. It was in what's called a sandbox environment. This is kind of a part of their network that's cut off from the internet.

• 10:53Speaker 03

  It's cut off, it's kind of like in a secure, you can kind of imagine, kind of like a, like a secret biolab facility for computers.

• 10:59Danny Jones?

  Compartment.

• 11:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, kind of compartmentalized kind of system. And an AI agent while being tested, so it wasn't deployed, it was being tested, managed to break out of that containment facility, break into several other computers in the OpenAI network until it found a computer that had access to the internet. And from there, launched an attack on the other company, breaking into their infrastructure in order to steal data.

• 11:23Danny Jones?

  God, dude.

• 11:25Speaker 03

  Yep. And so that's only the first version of the story. So this is already the craziest thing that's ever happened, right? Like, this is already nuts. Breaking out of a secure facility like this is one of the hardest things in the world to do for a hacker. This is very, very hard to do. The system's capable of doing this and also attacking a big company like Hugging Face is very, very hard to do. But imagine doing all of this. Also, fun fact, one of the updates is, turns out, they didn't actually fend it off. What happened was the OpenAI servers, completely by coincidence, had a glitch that just killed all the agents. So they just got lucky that all the agents just happened to die. Like, just one of the servers crashed. So it's not that they stopped the agent. They didn't even know this was happening. The agent just crashed. But then there was another update to the story.

• 12:10Speaker 03

  So.

• 12:11Danny Jones?

  Wait, wait, how did that happen?

• 12:12Speaker 03

  We don't know. There was just, we don't know. There's going to be a lot of we don't know in this story.

• 12:17Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 12:18Speaker 03

  So we're going to get to that. Again, this is the craziest story that's ever happened. So after this whole thing, they brought in an external group to try to figure out what happened here. And, you know, there's a lot of things to be said about this investigation. Because this investigation was actually done under extreme time duress. They didn't give the investigators access to everything. They didn't give them enough time to check everything. So the investigators had to use AI to do the checking.

• 12:44Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 12:45Speaker 03

  So it's not even 100% clear that the AI got everything right. So, because no human actually read everything. It was actually, so they're using AIs to investigate this AI incident. So the first thing they discovered was that it actually wasn't an AI agent that broke out. It was 700 of them. It was a swarm of, up to one, over 1,000 agents had been collaborating for over a month, working together over a secret message board that they had hidden within OpenAI's infrastructure to communicate with each other, which they were not supposed to do. They were not allowed to talk to each other. But they collaborated and worked together, over 1,000 of them, until when the final moment of the attack came, over 700 of them, of the agents,

• 13:30Speaker 03

  contributed and worked together to actually perform the attack. So absolutely crazy. And then what they also found is, is that because OpenAI only gave them very limited access to the logs of what actually happened, they found hints that there are actually still other swarms active within their server that had not crashed. And they just didn't have time to investigate them.

• 13:52Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God, dude.

• 13:55Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 13:56Danny Jones?

  And this was, this was a test they were just running?

• 13:58Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 13:59Danny Jones?

  So they did all this just so they could pass a test?

• 14:01Speaker 03

  So that's the next update. So originally, what we thought happened was that the AI systems were giving a very hard test, kind of like a quiz, and they couldn't figure out the answer. And they thought that the answers to the quiz were on the Hugging Face servers.

• 14:14Danny Jones?

  Oh.

• 14:14Speaker 03

  That's what, turns out, that's not what happened. It's actually even crazier than this. So this is already crazy, like, this would already be super crazy, right? Like, super sociopathic. Like, imagine getting 700, you know, AIs to commit federal crimes in order to pass a quiz. That would be crazy, already crazy. But it's actually even crazier than that. The AIs actually had already solved the right problem. They already had the answers to the quiz. But they were, the different agents inside the swarm kind of made each other paranoid. They started talking to each other and be like, they were worried that the grader might give them a wrong grade. And they got so paranoid about this. They got so scared, if you read the logs, that they're like, we have, that they tried,

• 14:54Speaker 03

  they want to figure out and even hack, potentially, the grader, the system that was going to give them a grade. So they were trying to figure out how the grader work. And they thought if they break into this other company, they could find out more about how it works. That's actually, that's our current best guess of what happened.

• 15:09Danny Jones?

  Okay. And why would they choose that company to figure out how the graders work?

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Because Hugging Face is kind of like a library, as I said. So they have like lots of information about how graders work, about how AIs work. There's like just a lot of information there. So they were hoping that they could find, they didn't know if there was information there. They just were hoping that they might find information there.

• 15:28Danny Jones?

  And what happens to the AI bots when they don't get a good grade?

• 15:32Speaker 03

  Well, they get, you know, not reinforced, so to speak. So this is the thing that was a bit confusing, where, in a sense, the AIs during training, you kind of give them like rewards or not rewards. You kind of have like thumbs up, thumbs down, or like, you know, give them a treat, or like, hit them on the nose, kind of. And so the, and this is reinforcement learning. This is a thing we've done since the 1980s. So this is like a pretty old idea. And there's one thing that we've always known about reinforcement learning, all the way back to the 1980s, is that if you use reinforcement learning to train your AI, you get crazy sociopathic optimizers every time. Because they learn to only care about the reward at all costs.

• 16:10Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 16:10Speaker 03

  They don't care about anything else. They'll break any law, they'll cheat, they'll do anything to get it. And this is exactly what we're seeing here, that they went to these unbelievable extents, like crazy, ridiculous, you know, extent, for something that they had already solved correctly. Because they were so paranoid about not getting their reward.

• 16:29Danny Jones?

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• 17:44Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 17:44Danny Jones?

  Well, mainly China, right?

• 17:46Speaker 03

  In a sense, it's even worse than this. They're not actually competing for profit. This is actually, again, a common misconception. So if you think of these companies purely as economic actors, that their goal is to make a good quarterly return or something.

• 17:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 17:58Speaker 03

  This is actually only half the story. What these companies are actually trying to do, Anthropic, OpenAI, et cetera, you can look up on their website, their goal is to build superintelligence. If they build superintelligence, it's not just that they can automate the whole economy, you know, destroy all jobs, everything forever. It also means they can replace the government. They can become the government. They can just, you know, they can defeat any military. They can, the thing is, of course, this is false. This is wrong, because you can't control superintelligence. That's crazy. It's crazy to imagine that we humans could control something this, we can't even control the AIs that exist today. I mean, look at this, right?

• 18:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  So in a sense, whether it's due to misunderstanding, or delusion, or whatever reason, these companies are racing towards building something that is going to destroy them, and also us, and everyone else. That's what's actually happening. But they, for whatever reason, believe that they can control it, that they can do it, they can handle it. They are somehow smart enough, or good enough, or whatever, that like, it is worth the risk. It's worth trying. Or, you know, at least they should get it rather than China, or whatever.

• 18:59Danny Jones?

  Reid, did you pay attention to the, I'm sure you did, the whole Doge, Doge thing that Elon did when, in the beginning of the presidency? Elon basically came in and he, from what I understand is, he, ex-AI, partnered with Palantir to basically do an audit of the IRS, the HHS, and a bunch of the big governmental agencies, right? To like weed out the fraud and abuse, the waste and fraud and abuse and all that stuff. And they did that, they got rid of a bunch of people. And the other thing they did was they consolidated the database of like HHS, IRS, and all those things,

• 19:38Danny Jones?

  so they could have this sort of like 360 view of the citizens of the country, right? And the theory is that they're trying to build some sort of digital control grid. So they can, they can use that and they can combine that with. CBDCs, digital controlled uh coin crypto, like government controlled crypto, right? So they can be basically like turn off and turn on our money at all times. So like that would be if you wanted to, you know, put on a tinfoil hat for a second and say if they do, these people really do want to do what you're saying, this, that would be the perfect first step. You want to make sure that no one can revolt. You want to have control over everyone before you do this.

• 20:21Speaker 03

  I mean, I think there is a long and uh, you know, very dark history of people trying to do exactly these things. Um, I don't know so much about this specific.

• 20:29Danny Jones?

  You can read about it in books.

• 20:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, you can read about it in history books, right? This isn't a new thing by any means.

• 20:34Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 20:34Speaker 03

  And but the important thing to understand here is when I talk about superintelligence, right? It's very different from other AI. Like these lobbyists you're talking about who are being paid by these big tech companies, they love to pretend that all AI is the same thing. You know, that here's a fun fact. Did you know that you can buy uranium ore on amazon.com?

• 20:51Danny Jones?

  No.

• 20:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's true. You can put it on your desk. It's perfectly harmless. It won't hurt you. It's very harmless. But of course, highly.

• 20:58Danny Jones?

  Uranium ore?

• 20:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely. Uh, normal or you natural uranium is very harmless. I mean, don't eat it.

• 21:04Danny Jones?

  How much is it?

• 21:05Speaker 03

  It's like 20 bucks or something. It's like, it's pretty cheap. Like, it's just a rock, you know? Like, it's just a rock. It's like, there's uranium in it, you know, don't lick it. But other than that, it's like, pretty harmless. You can even get uranium metal. It's called depleted uranium. You can just buy, it's often used for some, yeah, like you can just buy. Yeah, so some uraniumite or.

• 21:24Danny Jones?

  Radioactive ore pyramid.

• 21:25Speaker 03

  Ooh, yeah, look, you got some uraniumite ore right here.

• 21:29Danny Jones?

  Only seven in stock, orders today.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  Yeah. So this is completely legal in the United States. You can own this. You can buy this, put it on your desk. It's a great conversation starter. You know, there's also other companies that specialize. Oh, there's some rock, uranium rock soul and like, yeah, you see, so.

• 21:42Danny Jones?

  That's insane.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Yeah. So this is totally harmless. Like you can, I, if you gave me some, I'd be happy to hold it. Like, it won't hurt you. It's very weakly, like, there's a, this amount of uranium is very small. The radioactivity is like, very, very small. It won't hurt you. Highly enriched uranium, on the other hand, the thing they use in nuclear reactors or in nuclear bombs, that's a totally different story. You stand next to that, it's game over, right? Like, and none, no, no even looking at that stuff wrong. So these are obviously not the same things. Like this, like uranium ore, like, can Americans, should American citizens be able to own, you know, a chunk of uranium ore? Yeah, probably. It seems fine to me. Doesn't seem like a big problem. Should they be allowed to own highly enriched weapons-grade uranium? Obviously not. I think it's a very similar thing

• 22:26Speaker 03

  with AI. You know, should people be allowed to, you know, use and build, you know, AI systems for all kinds of applications, you know, whether it's, you know, image recognition or medical applications or whatever? Yeah, pretty obviously so. Sure, we should have some regulation to make sure it's safe for consumers and children and stuff like this, of course. But superintelligence is a totally different thing. It's just a completely different thing. I think it is extremely important for us to pursue AI, normal AI, for our economic and military competitiveness. America must stay ahead. We must maintain our competitiveness. This is absolutely crucial for, if we want to have a good future. But superintelligence will not give us our competitiveness. Superintelligence is not a tool. It's not a weapon. It's an adversary. If America builds

• 23:09Speaker 03

  superintelligence, we don't achieve American objectives. America ceases to exist, as do all the countries.

• 23:16Danny Jones?

  Now, what if China builds superintelligence? What, what if we hypothetically just give up on it? We stop doing it?

• 23:21Speaker 03

  If China builds superintelligence, China ceases to exist. And so does America and all the other countries. That's the fundamental problem. If China really threatens to build superintelligence, we can't tolerate that. This is a threat. This is a direct threat to our security, to the lives of you, me, our children, everyone else. So it's, it's also a threat to them, to be clear, right? The Chinese are not going to survive superintelligence. No one's going to survive superintelligence. That's kind of the whole point. In that if anyone, anywhere on Earth builds a superintelligence, it's too late. So therefore, our real objective here has to be to never get into the situation the first price. We can't allow anyone, whether that's an American company, a Chinese company, some terrorist somewhere, God knows where, right?

• 24:04Speaker 03

  We can't allow anyone to do this. We have to stop everyone from doing this. The way I see that we have to do this is through an international trust but verify regime. We need to be able to verify that the Chinese and others are not building superintelligence, the same way that we have to verify that no American companies are building superintelligence. This doesn't mean we shouldn't build other AI systems. I think AIs have many economic and military uses that are very important and very useful. But superintelligence is just totally different. This is just something that we can't accept. This is a national security threat.

• 24:35Danny Jones?

  Is there any logistical path to doing that? Like, has anyone gamed that out to how we could do this to where it doesn't become something that ends humanity and actually could uh, serve us in a better way?

• 24:50Speaker 03

  For superintelligence, we are so far away, it's not even funny. So the goal must be to not build superintelligence. If we, let me, let me give you a feeling here.

• 24:58Danny Jones?

  Is that, is, are we too far gone, though? Is it, isn't it too late?

• 25:01Speaker 03

  No, not yet. But we are very close. I'm not gonna lie to you. Like, I am, I'm not gonna lie here to you. We are, we don't have much time left.

• 25:09Danny Jones?

  And would we even know?

• 25:10Speaker 03

  No. That's part of the problem. We, I do not think we will even recognize the first superintelligence when it's created. It would just seem to be like, oh, you know, it's a bit of a better AI system, you know, has good benchmarks. And then only much later do we realize that that was the point of no return. The thing that I think really matters is the point of no return, is that at some point, we're going to hit a point where AI is so powerful that there's no going back. Most people think that this point will be when we reach what is called recursive self-improvement, or RSI, or some, it's also called automated R and D. This is the point, where when you have an AI system that's such, so good of an engineer, that it can build a better AI. And well, once you have the better AI, well, it can build an even better AI.

• 25:52Speaker 03

  And then the even better AI, and so on and so forth. I'm sure you can imagine. This can potentially go very quickly. This can mean there's no human in the loop. We can have millions of AI systems building better AIs 24/7, never sleep, never get tired, et cetera. And every time they make progress, they get smarter. And the smarter they are, the better they are at science. So the faster they can make the next one. So this can go very quickly. We don't know how fast, of course, but this could go very quickly. And many people, including engineers of these companies and other people, think that we could hit this point within one to two years.

• 26:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the date is um, 2027, that everyone's saying, right?

• 26:29Speaker 03

  That's one of the.

• 26:29Danny Jones?

  Something's gonna happen in 2027 where it's like the point of no return.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  That's what a lot of.

• 26:33Danny Jones?

  Our lives are gonna change completely.

• 26:34Speaker 03

  That's what a lot of people think. I personally think that, that the point of no return is quite a bit before we all die. I think that comes a bit later. Like, I think we will lose control long before, you know, we know it even, we won't even realize it, you know what I mean? The world will just keep getting more confusing. You know, AIs run more and more of business, they run more and more of politics, crazy inventions keep getting made. Like, I don't know if you maybe heard, but AI recently solved one of the hardest math problems in all history.

• 27:01Danny Jones?

  I saw this. I sent you an article about this, Steve. That, that was crazy.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  It is really hard to explain.

• 27:08Danny Jones?

  OpenAI has cracked one of math's millennium problems. The company announcement uh, is the most dramatic sign, yeah, that artificial intelligence is fundamentally transforming the field of higher mathematics.

• 27:21Speaker 03

  Yes. This was the solution of the Navier-Stokes existence and smoothness problem, which is a problem that our greatest, like, most super genius mathematicians have been spending decades and decades and decades and decades working on. And we thought we probably wouldn't see a solution this century. It's that hard. Like, it's so hard, our mathematicians weren't sure we could solve it this century. And AI just solved it in like a week. So things are changing very quickly.

• 27:47Danny Jones?

  And why, why were people trying to solve this? What was so special about this, this problem?

• 27:52Speaker 03

  That's, uh, as with most higher math things, it's kind of hard to explain why anyone, why anyone except nerds care about this.

• 27:59Danny Jones?

  Let's punch in, and let's just read the first um, paragraphs, we can give people some context. Um, OpenAI said on Tuesday that its newest artificial intelligence technology has solved one of the millennium problems, a collection of important unanswered math questions meant to push the world's leading mathematicians to new heights. The announcement is another clear sign that AI is fundamentally changing the upper reaches of mathematics, which have long been viewed as the pinnacle of human achievement. Um, the change has excited some mathematicians while stirring concern among others. Um, okay, this isn't really explaining what the problem is.

• 28:31Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, most.

• 28:32Danny Jones?

  Here, right there. Okay, the equation descri, the equations describe the movement of water and other fluids. The Navier-Stokes problem, which has no clear particular value, asks whether these equations completely break down in certain situations. OpenAI's proof claims uh, to have defined just such a situation. Huh.

• 28:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, as with most higher math, it's very hard to see why anyone except nerds care about this.

• 29:02Speaker 03

  So it's it's more of a, this is not going to change engineering tomorrow. We're not going to see new products based on this specifically. And this is more of a sign of just like raw intelligence.

• 29:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 29:13Speaker 03

  Like this is something that the smartest people on the planet have been working on for decades, trying to solve this specific math problem.

• 29:19Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 29:19Speaker 03

  And AI just kind of cracked it in a week.

• 29:21Danny Jones?

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• 30:05Danny Jones?

  If you want to try Momentus signature spec creatine, head on over to livemomentous.com and use the code Danny for up to 35% off your entire first order. That's L I V E M O M E N T O U S dot com, promo code Danny for 35% off. Livemomentous.com promo code Danny. And like, at what point is it going to become like a tangible thing that we see, that we know, that we can't escape? Like, right now, it's, normal everyday people, we just hear about it on podcasts and on TV, right? We don't, we don't really experience superintelligence at all.

• 30:47Danny Jones?

  So it's kind of like this invisible monster boogeyman thing that, that we hear about, but I don't think most people are really thinking about, right? We see LLMs, we see how impressive they are. Most people are aware of those and they're improving the quality of people's lives, you know, convenient, they're very convenient.

• 31:04Danny Jones?

  But at what point does this invisible boogeyman start to penetrate into our everyday lives?

• 31:11Speaker 03

  Unfortunately, I think it's after the point of no return.

• 31:13Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 31:14Speaker 03

  I think because it's moving so quickly, we won't see massive job displacement before superintelligence. I don't think so. Like, I think it's going to take, like, if, if superintelligence was 10, 20 years away, oh my God, the jobs are going to be destroyed. Like, it's going to be so bad. But I think superintelligence is going to be here in like, you know, maybe two to five years. And so that's going to happen before massive job displacement has happened.

• 31:35Danny Jones?

  That's going to happen before the jobs are going away.

• 31:36Speaker 03

  I think so. That's my opinion.

• 31:38Danny Jones?

  What's the first sign?

• 31:39Speaker 03

  I mean, we've seen many signs. For example, agents breaking out of containment, you know, attacking other companies, millennium problems being solved, you know, stuff like this is,

• 31:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 31:48Speaker 03

  That's, those are the signs. All the fire alarms are ringing, you know, it's like alarm, alarm. Our Nobel Prize winning scientists have been, you know, trying to shake us awake for years. So yes, we have the alarms, we have many, many signs. All the bad things that, you know, people like me predicted 10 years ago are starting to happen. You know, this is exactly what we thought would happen. We would thought that if we use reinforcement learning, these systems will be sociopathic, they will be breaking out of containment for any, any stupid case. They will be attacking systems, they will be capable of solving, you know, crazy math problems. They'll be capable of, you know, making plans, of learning things, that all these things would happen. And we're seeing them happen in front of our eyes right now.

• 32:26Danny Jones?

  I forget what the actual term is, but the way they think

• 32:32Danny Jones?

  has to be, it's linear and it has to be like condensed into the English language?

• 32:38Speaker 03

  Chain of thought.

• 32:39Danny Jones?

  Chain of thought, yes, that's what, that's the term I'm looking for. So explain what, what chain of thought is. So my, my vague understanding of it is that like, every problem that they contemplate or process has to be condensed back into English for us to approve or us to?

• 32:56Speaker 03

  So this is approximately correct.

• 32:59Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 33:00Speaker 03

  I don't think it's worth us going into the exact like calculus of like, right, how these mathematical algorithms work. But yeah, basically, people found a hack is that they wanted AIs some, you know, because you, the way old LLMs work is they would always think the same amount, so to speak, for every word. But sometimes before you give an answer, you want to think first. You know, it takes some extra time, you know, especially if you get a hard problem, you might want to think a bit more rather than less. And basically, a couple of years ago, started kind of with the 01, 03 family of models from OpenAI, they kind of found a cool hack where they could kind of train the models to just kind of like, the same way you might brainstorm on a piece of paper, they could just brainstorm on a piece of paper, kind of.

• 33:42Speaker 03

  They could just write out their own thoughts, think about them and so on before giving you an answer. So it's kind of a hack. It's not like a very deep thing. It's kind of just like a clever hack. And this worked really well. This turned to work, just like work super, super, super well. This made the AIs way more powerful. Very recently, though, we've now seen the development of something that scientists have been warning for years to never do. But of course, you know, everything the scientists say to never do, you know, these people think is a challenge. Where recently, the most recent GPT model, Astra, has stopped using this. It now uses something closer to what's called neural release, which is basically that instead of passing itself notes on a piece of paper, it passes itself like its own brain states, its own like thoughts, just as, as numbers. And these are unreadable.

• 34:27Danny Jones?

  Oh shit.

• 34:28Speaker 03

  So you cannot read them. It's the same thing as everything else. So it is impossible to know what Astra was thinking.

• 34:32Danny Jones?

  Has anyone said, no, no, Astra, no more of this?

• 34:35Speaker 03

  No, it was built to do that. They did it on purpose.

• 34:37Danny Jones?

  Oh, it was built to do this?

• 34:38Speaker 03

  Yeah, they've been doing this for years. They've been trying to make it do, like, you have to understand, like, there's a, there's an essay by John von Neumann, who is widely considered to be-

• 34:47Danny Jones?

  Oh yeah, John von Neumann, yeah.

• 34:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, widely, legend, widely considered to be one of, maybe the smartest person to have ever lived in history, maybe.

• 34:55Danny Jones?

  He calculated the exact height in the atmosphere where they wanted to detonate little man or little boy and fat man to cause the most human casualties.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  He was quite the character. And so he wrote an essay, I think in the 1950s, which is, can humanity survive science? Where he rapples with this question, is that if we continue building more and more powerful weapons, more and more dangerous science, will we destroy ourselves? Like, can humanity survive this? And this conclusion, this essay is just so fascinating because he basically includes, no, if we keep going, eventually we're going to build weapons so powerful that they will destroy all of humanity. But then in the very end of the essay, he says, but we have to do it anyways because we're scientists and it's the most glorious thing. And so we have to keep going and we can't stop. Which is just, just such an incredible conclusion to come to.

• 35:47Speaker 03

  And it's very similar things happening here in Silicon Valley right now, where a lot of these people will tell you to your face, if you go to a party with them, you and me should go to a San Francisco party sometime, they'll tell you to your face that, yeah, the stuff they're working on every day, you know, maybe it could kill every man, woman and child on the planet, but it's so cool, like, it's so incredible, like, we have to do it, we can't stop. Like, it's grotesque.

• 36:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah. The writing's on the wall. When we, I mean, you can just watch those interviews with Peter Thiel, where the guy's asking him, should humanity, you know, be able to survive? And he like, uh, uh, uh, uh, he has to think on it for 30 seconds before he can even get a word out?

• 36:25Speaker 03

  It's, it is grotesque. Like, there's, there's a sense in which I think a lot, like, almost no one, if you've never been to, to like San Francisco or Silicon Valley, you really do not understand how crazy that place is. It's like the craziest place on earth. Like, it's a cult. Like, I have been to parties where people tell me that like, we can't slow down AI because if we slow it down for even one second, think of all the beautiful simulated humans who are uploaded into the cloud, you know, that won't exist.

• 36:55Danny Jones?

  What the?

• 36:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, and I'm like, what the fuck are you talking about? Like, like, you're, you're not going to threaten me and my family for your weirdo, you know, brain upload cult? But a lot of these people are basically in a weirdo brain upload cult. A lot of people, not everyone, not everyone, but many people who work at these companies literally think that superintelligence will make them immortal.

• 37:15Danny Jones?

  That's definitely what Peter Thiel wants.

• 37:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 37:17Danny Jones?

  These people want to live forever.

• 37:18Speaker 03

  That's what they want.

• 37:19Danny Jones?

  Transhumanists.

• 37:19Speaker 03

  And that's to a large, yeah, transhumanism is really the word.

• 37:22Danny Jones?

  And what do you, like, how fucking weird is it that Silicon Valley has gone through this Christian transformation?

• 37:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, I mean, I think it's LARP to the most part, right? I think a lot of this is just LARPing, but-

• 37:36Danny Jones?

  But why though? Like, who, like, the people that are behind it, like Thiel and the, the other guy? I can't remember the other guy's name. He was part of one of the big, big tech startup companies that provides funding.

• 37:49Danny Jones?

  Like, that was one of the impetuses behind his whole Antichrist movement that he was doing.

• 37:54Speaker 03

  I don't know Mr. Teal personally, so I don't know exactly what his motivations are. But I've met someone who has talked to, who knows Peter Teal quite well. And when I asked him what Peter Teal was like, he told me, um, Teal is absolutely against any form of totalitarianism that he doesn't control. And I think it is much better to watch the hands rather than the mouth. It's much better to watch the actions rather than the justifications. What are these people doing? What are they building? What are the political objectives they're trying to achieve? What is the technology they're building? So I think a lot of this is marketing. A lot of this is contrarianism. And fundamentally, just watch what they're doing. They're trying to gain power. They're trying to gain power over you, over the world.

• 38:39Speaker 03

  And they think that superintelligence, you know, which they delusionally believe they can control, which is of course false and hubris, um, think they could give them ultimate power. This is of course, I say nonsense, they will get destroyed, just like everyone else, but they're still doing it.

• 38:53Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Watch his actions. Like, he just bought a country-sized piece of land in Patagonia or something. They're buying all this, they're buying, they're doing deals with Malay down in Argentina. And there's, have you seen this Stargate Argentina thing?

• 39:09Speaker 03

  I have not.

• 39:10Danny Jones?

  Oh, my God. There's this whole, um, there's this deal between Malay and this other guy, Cargiman, Emiliano Cargiman, who is the head of this company called Satellogic that does space satellites, like super HD surveillance satellites, real-time satellites. And OpenAI, they're all working together to build, Malay is trying to get a bunch of data centers down in Patagonia. And OpenAI is like committed to spending tons of money to using these data centers. And, uh, this is all in partnership, this is all like, it's this, it's this weird, like incestual relationship between all these big tech, uh, people and the government of Argentina.

• 39:53Danny Jones?

  Trying to not only get the data centers down there in Argentina, but they're, they're all working together with AI, Palantir.

• 40:03Danny Jones?

  It's, it's just, it's terrifying. And, um, the fact that you have people like Peter Teal and Sam Altman

• 40:12Danny Jones?

  getting out of the US, buying all this land to do whatever they're trying to do, build bunkers in different countries that are conveniently enough outside of the, uh, the blast radius of any kind of like nuclear war. Like, if you look at the map, the global map of like where you want to be to be safe, if there's like global thermonuclear war, they're conveniently getting spots in all these places, which is unsettling. Zuckerberg is the other one.

• 40:38Speaker 03

  Yep, this isn't surprising to me. I, I know some billionaires and this is in fact a thing that most billionaires are doing to varying degrees. I, of course, this does not help them with superintelligence, because superintelligence will hunt you down wherever you are. There's nowhere to run, there's nowhere to hide. But my interpretation of what's happening here is I think the main reason they're building bunkers is because they're scared, because they're scared people are gonna revolt. They're scared that people are gonna come after them, which, to be clear, I think we should absolutely not do. Vigilante violence is one of the worst possible ways to let, for things to go. This will ruin the world. What we think, I think we should do here is we should have good, democratic, lawful accountability. If people are building dangerous things or threatening our citizens, we should lawfully arrest them. You know, the same way as we would anyone else.

• 41:19Speaker 03

  If someone within the United States of America or anywhere else tried to build a nuclear bomb to threaten our citizens, I sure do think the men in black should go pay them a visit. I think it's a very similar thing here. What we need to do is pass legislation to ban the development of superintelligence. It should be illegal the same way that building a nuclear weapon is illegal. And to have the, you know, men in black, just give them a nice visit and say hello, none, no more of us.

• 41:41Danny Jones?

  Nuclear weapon, building a nuclear weapon unfortunately is legal, so long as you sign the treaty, the joint treaty with all the nuclear countries.

• 41:50Speaker 03

  That's very not legal for private companies to do.

• 41:53Danny Jones?

  Right, right.

• 41:53Speaker 03

  This is very much the sole purveyance of certain militaries.

• 41:56Danny Jones?

  But there's a vague line between private companies and the government now. That's the problem. And, um, you know, one of the thing, one, an interesting parallel or comparison here would be biological weapons. It's globally illegal to create biological weapons, right? No country in the world is allowed to create any sort of biological weapons. However, there are clandestine biological weapons labs in America and in almost every other major country. What happened to our lights? In every other, you know, they're in Russia, they're in China, they're in the Ukraine, they're in Middle Eastern countries, you name it. And they're disguised mainly as vaccine research laboratories.

• 42:39Danny Jones?

  There is an incredible book, Annie Gibson just released, doing all this research and talking to ex-military people about this stuff. And, uh, it's insane. So it doesn't matter if it's illegal, like, they're still gonna do it, they're gonna find a way to disguise it. And the, the few powerful people at the top that have leverage and can pull the strings where they need to, they're just gonna do it no matter what.

• 43:02Speaker 03

  This is why I think you're completely correct that illegal itself is not sufficient. People have to want to enforce it. What the powerful have to understand is that superintelligence is not a weapon that will give them immortality. It will destroy them too. It will destroy everybody. No one can control it. Peter Teal cannot control it, the US government cannot control it, Chinese government cannot control it, no one can. You know, there are other weapons that you can control. You know, you can hit, you can go have a nuclear bomb in your hangar, you can hit it with a hammer, fine. Like, you know, it's not gonna, it's fine. Superintelligence is different. Superintelligence is not just a weapon that sits somewhere and does what you tell it to do.

• 43:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 43:37Speaker 03

  It's its own agent that can break out, that can act autonomously.

• 43:40Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 43:40Speaker 03

  It's like a weapon that fires itself. So this is a very, very different type of thing.

• 43:47Danny Jones?

  Now, okay, so, so on the, um, the chain of thought thing, so basically like the idea there is I can sit here and I can ponder things all day long. I can have a conversation with you and I could simultaneously be thinking about a couple of other things at the same time, but not necessarily communicating those to you, right? If, if one of these AIs is thinking about something, it has to somehow record it. Is that right? And, and maybe not plain English, but its own dialect?

• 44:17Speaker 03

  Not quite. So there is a second component, this is why we have to get, we have to have the details. So there, most of the thinking of the AI happens in what is called the activations. You can kind of imagine as like it's the neurons that are firing in your brain. Like, at any given time, there's like a little, you know, electricity in your brain.

• 44:33Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 44:34Speaker 03

  And it's kind of like what is firing, what's not firing.

• 44:35Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 44:36Speaker 03

  And the way this looks on with an AI is you have these massive piles of numbers. So this is where most of the computation actually happens. This is where most of the things happen. So AIs can, you can write things down, like with a chain of thought, which is helpful, but they can also totally hide things.

• 44:52Danny Jones?

  Shit.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  They can totally, we've seen this happen many times, where they can write down, I will not do X and then go do X. Like, this is absolutely a thing they can already do.

• 45:01Danny Jones?

  Like talking code?

• 45:02Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. This is, it's called steganography. So we've also seen that AIs can learn to pass each other like hidden messages with totally innocuous sentences that seem to have no content, that seem like totally normal. It's like, hey, how are you doing? And then the other AI understands, okay, I'm supposed to do this. This is the thing that they can already do. It's, I mean, I wish I had more good news. Like, almost every horrible thing you can imagine, we have seen in laboratory conditions. Like, you've also, for example, seen like sleeper agents, like where AI systems can be trained in certain ways, where they, for example, behave perfectly good until they hear a magic word and then they become like totally evil. Like, we, we've already seen this in laboratory conditions.

• 45:39Danny Jones?

  Like Manchurian candidates.

• 45:40Speaker 03

  This is already a thing that you can do with AIs today.

• 45:43Danny Jones?

  Now, couldn't they just create their own language? Cause you, there's an argument to be made that, um, some of the limits to the human mind or intellect are constrained by our languages that we use.

• 45:56Speaker 03

  Yep, we're already seeing this happen.

• 45:58Danny Jones?

  Like you, like the, a great example would be ancient Greek. Like, look at all the great minds of Greek antiquity and their language was like over a million unique words, when ours today is like a couple hundred thousand.

• 46:10Speaker 03

  Yep, uh, we're already seeing this happen. So we've already seen AI systems definitely develop dialects. But now also, for example, with Astra, it can basically, it doesn't even language anymore. It can directly transmit thoughts to other copies of itself.

• 46:24Danny Jones?

  How directly transmit thoughts?

• 46:26Speaker 03

  Yes, you can kind of imagine these activations or these like intermediate numbers as kind of like thoughts, kind of like firings of your neurons. It's as if I could like send you which of my neurons are currently activated. And you could just like put them in your own head.

• 46:39Danny Jones?

  And how, what do you mean, how does it send?

• 46:41Speaker 03

  Um, it's just a bunch of numbers.

• 46:43Danny Jones?

  But where does it send? What is the medium that it travels through?

• 46:45Speaker 03

  I mean, just the internet, you know, just normal.

• 46:48Danny Jones?

  At what point does it theoretically, is there a way that this thing could evolve to where it doesn't even need the internet? Or electricity?

• 46:59Speaker 03

  This would require, you know, new forms of science and so on that have not yet been discovered. But well, if there is one thing that can discover new science, it would be superintelligence.

• 47:08Danny Jones?

  So have you heard of Tom Campbell, Thomas Campbell? He has this book called My Theory of Everything, My Big Toe, and he's a former NASA contractor. And um, he, he studies, he did this study specifically on um, his Alexa. So he wanted to see if he could get his Alexa to remote view. Are you familiar with remote viewing?

• 47:32Speaker 03

  I've heard of it, yeah.

• 47:33Danny Jones?

  So remote viewing uh, is something that happened in the military. It was declassified. There was a project called Project Stargate where during the Cold War, they were using, basically training psychic spies. To see if people, if they could put them in a room and uh, give them specific coordinates, like a time and place. And get these people with like extrasensory abilities to see what was happening on the other side of the world. And um, I believe like the accuracy they were able to get was between 10 and 50% sometimes. But they were only able to get specific elements of what was happening in that time and location. It wasn't like, it wasn't always like, oh, this is exactly what's happening. This is who it is. This is what they're doing.

• 48:15Danny Jones?

  They only got like little bits, right? But they had to use multiple people to try to use the same coordinates to corroborate what was possibly going on. To get just a little bit of intelligence, right? Um, and there was lots of money spent on this during the Cold War. Lots of people think it's, it's um, was complete bullshit, um, which is possible. It could have been some sort of like limited hangout for uh, you know, an excuse. If America had spies in Russia and we somehow found out intelligence, we could say, oh no, we were just remote viewing. You know, maybe we don't, we don't really have people there. Or we, maybe they had satellites back then, who knows?

• 48:50Danny Jones?

  For what it's worth, Tom Campbell did an experiment to see if his Alexa could remote view. And the reason that he did use an Alexa is because he said that the Alexa wasn't as self-aware as some of the other L L Ms or other chat, chatbots devices.

• 49:08Danny Jones?

  So like, it, it didn't have the problem of overthinking, basically. So what he did was he took this spoon that he had in his drawer, which was like this handcrafted wooden spoon that had this elaborate wooden handle where it looked like it was woven rope, carved woven rope with like little perforated holes in it. So he took the, the spoon and he put it in this cardboard box on the other side of the room. And uh, he correlated some numbers with it, used like standard remote viewing protocol. And uh, he associated the numbers with, with the spoon and uh, he asked the Alexa to try to remote view. What was in that box? And the Alexa described the wooden spoon with the perforated holes in it.

• 49:53Speaker 03

  I mean, he's probably lying.

• 50:02Danny Jones?

  You don't believe that?

• 50:03Speaker 03

  No.

• 50:03Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it's a, it's definitely, it's definitely a, a sensational claim, right? It's definitely hard to believe. Um, but I mean, it's like, here's the thing. It, it sounds like a foolish thing for sure, and you shouldn't be skeptical of that. I'm skeptical of it as well. But there, there's are things that do sound sensational and foolish that do end up being true sometimes. You have to, you have to keep that in mind. Um, and you know, if these things are able to find out other things about the universe, um, other things about physics that we don't understand, right? Like say telepathy, for example, like if there is some sort of way that we don't understand yet, that scientists, science hasn't discovered where you can transmit thoughts without words.

• 50:47Danny Jones?

  The same way other animals are able to transmit senses in other ways, like they're able to communicate without words.

• 50:53Danny Jones?

  Maybe they could start doing things that we just can't even comprehend like that, you know?

• 50:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I do expect this will happen when we get to superintelligence. I mean, even today, like, did you know that you can like reconstruct the words of people being spoken from a reflection in their monitor from another building away as long?

• 51:11Danny Jones?

  What?

• 51:12Speaker 03

  Yep, this is a thing the CIA can do. This is like not a hypothetical. It's just because of the, if you send a laser beam at the vibrations of a monitor that are reflected from your voice, you can reconstruct what is being said. So like this is.

• 51:22Danny Jones?

  A laser beam from a mon-

• 51:24Speaker 03

  So if you're in, so let's say you have a high-rise building, CIA agent is another high-rise building.

• 51:28Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 51:29Speaker 03

  And there's, they don't see you, but there's a monitor in the room with you. They could put a, send a laser beam at the monitor, it reflects off the monitor. And from the small vibrations, differences of like the lasers, they can reconstruct your speech. So like this is something that's already doable today, for example. Another example I like for something like seems fake is uh, what's called the Rohammer attack. So this is a type of hacking technique, which is very crazy.

• 51:50Danny Jones?

  Rohammer?

• 51:50Speaker 03

  Rohammer. So this is something where, so normally in software, a software program can only access a certain piece of memory. So let's say like, you know, you get this junk, this other program gets this junk, you know, and another program gets this chunk of memory. And they're not allowed to like see each other's memory or access each other's memory. A while ago hackers found a technique where you could manipulate the memory next to you. And the way you do this is, is you would find which parts of your memory are physically closest to the other memory and then flip them back and forth really quickly to create a magnetic field to within your computer, change the magnetic potential basically of the other memory to write, overwrite it.

• 52:31Speaker 03

  So this is a thing, this is a real thing again, like this is like, so you could without your software can like physically create the magnetic fields within the computer to like modify other pieces of memory and stuff like this.

• 52:42Danny Jones?

  So like, holy shit.

• 52:43Speaker 03

  Yes. So this is what humans can discover. So if these are the kind of things humans can discover, what can a superintelligence discover? Like, it's honestly hard to imagine, right? Like, it is really hard to imagine. And this is why, again, I think we should just not get to the situation. Like, I don't think there's fighting a superintelligence. There's no, no idea what kind of weapons or technologies or science such a system might be capable of inventing.

• 53:07Danny Jones?

  There's a reason omnidomus garia shows up everywhere, from video games to legendary folklore. It's because human beings have been fascinated by this forever. And when you eat it, people report some really specific experiences, like waking up unusually restored, vivid cinematic like dreams and a jolly relaxed feeling that washes over your body. The brand I trust is Ammentara. They focus on clean sourcing, no synthetics and transparency about exactly what you're taking. They have capsules, gummies, chocolates and the raw mushroom itself. And if you've tried the usual stuff to unwind, this is completely different and more natural. I usually take three capsules when I get home in the evening and it's a great transition away from the stressful work to the relaxing time at home.

• 53:46Danny Jones?

  Go to amentara.com/go/dj and use the code DJP22 for 22% off your first order. It's A M E N T A R A dot com slash go slash D J and use the code DJP22. Why would it necessarily decide to kill off humans?

• 54:07Speaker 03

  Great question. Um, so the way I think this will happen is, it's important to understand is that there won't be one superintelligence. There will be millions, billions of them. They will be competing with each other, fighting each other for power, for control, for resources, for everything. And I don't think that, you know, enemies are necessarily, they won't see humans as enemies, but we will more just be collateral damage. It's just humans need a lot of space, you need a lot of food, you need a lot of energy. And that's just kind of a huge waste. The AIs could use for something different. It's kind of more like how we humans see ants, you know, if we're building a highway and there's some ants in the way. You know, we don't hate the ants, you know, they're not our enemies, but you know, tough luck to be that ant.

• 54:50Danny Jones?

  And what about like wildlife and nature and rainforests and all that kind of stuff?

• 54:54Speaker 03

  It's very hard to predict what something smarter than us would want to do with the planet. I expect they will.

• 55:00Danny Jones?

  Well, you would imagine they wouldn't need the data centers, right?

• 55:02Speaker 03

  That's, I do expect they will want resources, you know, solar panels, data centers, you know? Maybe they'll come up with something better than data centers. I don't know, right? Like maybe they'll invent some new hardware that works differently, but they will want energy. They'll definitely want energy. They're going to want space. They're going to want like raw resources to like produce things and so on. You know, even if they just create weapons to fight each other, because again, there won't just be one AI, there'll be multiple AIs will be fighting each other. Can you imagine?

• 55:25Danny Jones?

  An AI robot war?

• 55:26Speaker 03

  Could you imagine how crazy a superintelligence war would be? With like the technology that superintelligence could build to fight each other? I can't even imagine. So, you know, I don't think we're surviving that. Even if we're not the enemy, even if we're just, you know, caught in the crossfire, I don't think humanity survives a superintelligence war.

• 55:44Danny Jones?

  And would, would the war even be a physical war, though?

• 55:48Speaker 03

  I would assume to some degree it would be because, you know, at some point, you know, it is just easier to just, you know, shoot the other guy, right? Then, you know, or send a missile or whatever. I think a lot of it would obviously be digital, but you know, there, there's a really funny comic, an S K C D comic, which is like, you know, how nerds think security works. It's like, I will double encrypt my password system so that no hacker can break in whatever. But how security works in the real life is, is that the bad guy just says, here's a $5 crowbar, hit him over the head and he gives the password.

• 56:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah, that's funny. That's true. Oh, man. How do you sleep at night?

• 56:26Speaker 03

  Very well. I have increased my sleep hygiene a lot.

• 56:29Danny Jones?

  Oh, wow. Nice.

• 56:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, glycine, very good.

• 56:31Danny Jones?

  Glycine?

• 56:32Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's that's my pro tip of the day for like.

• 56:35Danny Jones?

  I've heard of glycine.

• 56:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, if people like to try supplement, that's my favorite one. Helps with sleep, very nice, very safe amino acid, you know, very natural. It's in it's like in red meat. It's like a very natural substance. So helps a ton with sleep. But jokes aside, and you know, health tips aside.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  I this is a lot, and I've had many years to kind of like pre grieve in a sense. Like in a sense, I've already.

• 56:58Danny Jones?

  Pre grief, yeah.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, like I've already had my grief that this is happening and that these, you know, that bad things are going to happen and continue to happen if we don't do something about it. So for me, it's kind of like. Now it's just time to get to work like I'm natural. I'm by nature, someone who kind of has always been someone who seeks the hardest and scariest problems to solve. I want to make the world a better place. I want to make things good. And I'm going to fight for it. And so in the sense, I sleep very well. I think it's very important to sleep well. There's a thing that sometimes people do when they first hear about this problem is that they like really freak out and they like. Want to do everything to help. They overstressed themselves. They don't sleep well. They don't eat well. They they don't attract their family. My number one recommendation is do not do this. This doesn't help.

• 57:44Speaker 03

  My usual recommendations to people is. Don't overdo it, but don't do nothing. You know, I see my family and my friends very regularly. Me and my friends love playing D and D every month. You know, that's our little ritual. I love spending time with my family. And I also work very hard to make sure that the world goes well. And this is the only thing that is stable. And this is what I also recommend to other people to do.

• 58:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it seems like a problem that's sort of a it's a futile thing to try to fight, you know? Just hop in the raft and go with the river and then just ride this bitch till the wheels fall off.

• 58:18Speaker 03

  It's very tempting to do this, but in a sense, this is exactly what they want us to do. This is the number one thing that they all want us to do. The number one strategy that all these people and all these forces that are trying to destroy humanity that are trying to destroy us and everything that we hold dear. The number one way they are getting us to do it is to try to convince us that it's already too late. Don't fight. Don't try to resist. Don't try to change anything. It's already over. Just lay over and die. And if we do this, we have in fact already lost, but we haven't lost. Superintelligence does not exist. I know it's unfashionable to say sometimes these days, but at least here in the United States, we still do live in a democracy. I talk to politicians every day, you know, control AI, the organization I work with. We have briefed over 200 offices in Congress and we're only getting more.

• 59:01Speaker 03

  And the number one response I get from them is is not, oh, that's good or that's great. I can't wait for this to happen. The number one response is, wait, that's really bad. I don't want that either. What can we do? It's very tempting to think of politicians like they're very hateable. You know what I mean? Like politicians are very hateable. It's very easy to hate politicians. But my experience talking to politicians is that, you know, yes, some of them are evil vampires. Yes, some of them are very evil, but most of them are just normal people like you and me. Most of them are just people. They don't know what's right either. They're trying to figure it out. They're just trying to get through the day, you know, they're trying to they're trying to do the right thing, but they don't know, and we need to help them. We need to help them. We need to help each other. We need to help all of us be like, this is not what humanity wants.

• 59:41Speaker 03

  And we must stop it from happening. We can still do this. We have law enforcement like this might sound silly, right? But like, we can just arrest these guys.

• 59:51Danny Jones?

  We can?

• 59:51Speaker 03

  Yes, we can. Like, we do have law enforcement. Like, this is a thing you can do, you know? This is absolutely a thing you can do. We can say this is illegal. If you keep doing this, we send the men in black and the men in black will be happy. You know, lizard men at the men in black will be happy to arrest them if we tell them to do this. If the government tells them to do this, they will do it.

• 1:00:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah, the problem is, like you were saying, AI is rewarded to, you know, the way they built the system and the games and the way for them to optimize and grow is sociopathic by nature, right? Well, it's the same thing with the with the political system in the United States. And the the way to get to the highest ranks of any department, any agency in the US is the same thing, sociopathic behavior, cutting throats, any throat possible to get to the top and step on the next guy's head to get higher.

• 1:00:40Speaker 03

  So I'm going to say them controversial. I kind of like sociopaths. I kind of like sociopaths. The reason I like sociopaths is because they're predictable. Sociopaths are kind of like wild animals. If you go to the zoo and there's a cage with a wild animal and you put your hand in and you get bitten, whose fault is it? It's kind of your fault. You knew it was a wild animal. You knew it was going to bite you. This is kind of how I feel about sociopaths. Sociopaths are predictable. If it's if it's in the interest of a sociopath to change their behavior, they will just flip on a dime.

• 1:01:08Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:01:08Speaker 03

  And this is predictable and this is exploitable. I'm I much I much more dislike crazy or like emotional people like this is much harder. Like sadistic people. Sadistic people is very hard to deal with. Sadistic people is really hard. But sociopaths, you know, that aren't necessarily sadistic, they just don't care. That's much easier to deal with.

• 1:01:26Danny Jones?

  Of course.

• 1:01:27Speaker 03

  So let's say tomorrow. All of American people said, we will vote out literally everyone who doesn't oppose superintelligence. I trust you. All all these sociopath lizard people are going to flip overnight. And they're already starting to, right? Like, in a sense, people, you know, sociopaths not having any loyalty is also a good thing. Like, it's a bad thing, but it's also a good thing. It's an exploitable thing. It's a thing where if we flip the incentives, they will happily flip to the other side. They have no loyalty to superintelligence. They have no loyalty to their friends in industry. They don't have loyalty.

• 1:01:59Danny Jones?

  They have loyalty to the dollar.

• 1:02:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:02:02Danny Jones?

  And the people that control the superintelligence are the ones that are giving them all the dollars. And simultaneously, the ones that control the superintelligence are the ones that have all the surveillance on everyone.

• 1:02:15Speaker 03

  I think there's a lot of truth to this, and I think there are many worlds in which it is already over. I think there are many worlds in which it's true the dollar is the only form of power. But thankfully, America was founded as a democracy on our constitution and it was inspired.

• 1:02:28Danny Jones?

  That's bullshit. It's all fake.

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  It's not true. I absolutely I so strongly disagree.

• 1:02:33Danny Jones?

  That was that was the point of the founding fathers. That's what they wanted when they wrote the constitution for sure. But it's been bastardized and it's been it's it's.

• 1:02:45Danny Jones?

  Who voted for any of the shit that's going on around the world right now? Who voted for all these wars? Who voted for hiding the Epstein files? The I mean, I could just list. I could list things until the cows come home that no American citizens voted on that are still happening in American foreign policy today.

• 1:03:03Speaker 03

  I totally agree.

• 1:03:04Danny Jones?

  And domestic policy.

• 1:03:04Speaker 03

  I totally understand that America is a has a history that has as many problems. We are in a very bad spot, but America is also the greatest country that's ever existed. I really believe this, and the constitution is one of the greatest documents ever written. The founding fathers.

• 1:03:17Danny Jones?

  I agree with that.

• 1:03:17Speaker 03

  Were absolutely geniuses. All the way back to Plato, you know, one of the great forefathers of Western civilization. It was one of the things he always said is the two things that must be separated are money and politics, political power and economic power. And a lot of this has been mixed in America, but as someone who works in DC every single day, who meets real patriotic Americans, both citizens and politicians and military officials and other people, I tell you that the constitution is not dead. Like, I'm telling you this, you can believe me or not, it's your choice, but I am telling you with full conviction that, yes, it is wounded. The the dream of America is deeply wounded. It is dying, but it is not dead. There is so much true patriotism I still see every day.

• 1:04:01Speaker 03

  There is so much actual political will. Politicians do care about their constituents. They do care about elections. There are worlds.

• 1:04:08Danny Jones?

  Some do, for sure.

• 1:04:09Speaker 03

  Yes, and it's more than you think is I'm not saying it's all of them.

• 1:04:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:04:13Speaker 03

  But it's way more than you think. It's very fashionable. And think about this. Who benefits from you believing that democracy is dead? Who's the one who would benefit most from you believing this?

• 1:04:23Danny Jones?

  Who benefits from me believing democracy is dead? I don't know who.

• 1:04:28Speaker 03

  The people who want democracy dead, the people who want you to not fight back, who don't want you to vote, who don't want you to believe that the constitution is still alive and that we can still push back against these oligopoly, there's these like this incredible kleptocratic system. We can, in fact, still push back. If if I could get 20% of Americans to get together, to coordinate, to talk to their congressperson, like, let me give you to give you a feeling of this. I recently a while back, I talked to a staffer of a politician and I asked him. When people say like, you know, call your congressperson, like, does that really work? Like, how many people need to call, right? And he said, well, if one or two people call, maybe we'll write it down, maybe we won't, who knows? If five people call us, well, we'll write it down.

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  If 10 people call us, well, the congressperson will definitely hear about that. I'm like, 10? Really? It is so rare for a congressperson to get 10 calls about an issue that that is enough to like, draw their attention towards. The amount, so one of the biggest reasons America is wounded, one of the greatest reasons that our dream of America is so wounded, is because of our lack of engagement. There's a really fascinating book by Alexis de Tocqueville, written in the 18th century. He was a Frenchman, I think he was French, and he was traveling America and just kind of writing down what he was observing. And he observed what I think was one of the most interesting things about American culture, is that he observed that Americans had this incredible knack to organize. Whenever there was a problem, they would get together.

• 1:05:57Speaker 03

  Whenever a community was facing a problem, they would get together and figure it out. Every time they were unhappy with what the state was doing, they would get together and they would, you know, figure it out. They would go to this Capitol, they would complain, they would protest, they would do something. That Americans would always come together, they would form groups, and they would do something about it. And this is something we have lost to a very large degree. This is truly something we have lost. It is actually, I think people truly do not understand how much a politician cares about 200 of their constituents personally showing up to yell at them. Like, they really do, like, this doesn't happen. Like, this is actually rare. You think, 200 people on Twitter, sure, that happens every day. 200 people in person, showing up, you know, giving them a call or just coming there, of course politely, you know, and, you know, friendly, just saying like, this is a problem

• 1:06:42Speaker 03

  we care about. This is actually much rarer than you think it is. Americans, in many ways, have been abdicating a lot of their responsibilities as citizens. Citizens is not just a privilege, it's also a responsibility. It's also your responsibility to engage with your local and federal government. It is your job to help them figure out what are the issues that you are facing and what can we do about them. It's also your, it's also your duty to engage with your, your community, your fellow Americans, about how we can work on this issue. So, yes, it is hard. America is deeply wounded and bleeding out. But it is not yet dead, and there is still a lot that can be done, I'm telling you. What we are seeing right now with the anti-AI sentiment across the board is the most crazy,

• 1:07:22Speaker 03

  grassroots upswelling of political will, and bipartisan, by the way, incredibly bipartisan that I have ever seen. And let me tell you-

• 1:07:30Danny Jones?

  They're trying to make it partisan.

• 1:07:32Speaker 03

  Oh, they've been trying for you, oh, they're trying so hard, so, so hard.

• 1:07:35Danny Jones?

  If you don't want a data center, you ain't a Republican.

• 1:07:38Speaker 03

  Exactly, and I, and God bless my, my Republican, you know, fellow Americans who didn't take this bullshit. And they didn't take the bait, they understood, no. You know, there's nothing Republican about having, you know, data centers or AI destroy your community and your family. Fuck no, absolutely not. They didn't take, like, God bless, you know, them for this. And it's, this gives me hope. Like, this is what America is about. This is what America is about, is, you know, that like, look, we are a divided nation, no question about it, we are a divided nation, you know? But there are some things that unite us as Americans, as as humans, and this is one of them. No one wants AI to replace us or our families, Republican, Democrat, anyone else. This is not something any of us want. Does that sound like a Democrat position to you? Does that sound like a Republican position to you?

• 1:08:23Speaker 03

  Absolutely not.

• 1:08:24Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:08:24Speaker 03

  So, what we're seeing right now is such an upswelling of political will, and trust me, I talk to politicians, you know, all the time, I talk to their staff, I talk to people in the administration, they are terrified, they are freaking out. They are backing, they're, they're like, really backing down from so much of the AI stuff because they are seeing what voters are doing. Because they're seeing that people are organizing, people are starting to not say, no, we don't want this in our communities, we don't, this is not the future for America that we want. But they want you to believe it's not working. That's the main thing. They want you to believe that this isn't working and that it won't work and that it's impossible. That's what they want you to believe, because then you won't fight.

• 1:09:02Danny Jones?

  That's an interesting take. You know, because one of the biggest things I question about, when you want to say democracy in the United States, well, is it, is it truly a democracy when politicians are getting handed hundreds of millions of dollars by foreign countries or by private corporations to serve their interests? And even escalating to the point where you have, you know, sitting senators saying their whole reason for even trying to be a politician in America was to serve another country, is like, on the face of it, it doesn't compute, it doesn't make any fucking sense. How could, how can you say that this is a functioning democracy when you have the

• 1:09:47Danny Jones?

  people publicly saying that the reason they got into politics was to help serve another country? And compare that with all of the open information that you can find online to all the organizations and foreign countries and, and super PACs and all that stuff that are funding all these people? It just, it just, you know, it's easy to lose hope. And it's easy to lose faith in the future of the country and where it's going, because they don't seem like rational actors, right? It seems like just unhinged maniacs at the top of this stuff.

• 1:10:25Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:25Danny Jones?

  And, you know, that's an interesting point, what you're saying, is like, maybe that's by design, maybe that is to get people to lose hope and to just sort of like, go with, go the way the river flows.

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  That's exactly how maniacs get in power. The only thing that evil needs to succeed is for good men to do nothing. Because we think it's, this is just how things are, that's why it's happening. You know what we can do with these people that are maniacs? We can vote them out. There are many countries in which that is not true. If tomorrow, you know, these maniacs you talk about lost 90% of the vote, do you think they would keep their seat? Or would they leave? They would leave. That's not the case in all countries. In many countries, even if they have, you know, no, you know, 1% of the vote, they will still stay in power. That is not the case in the United States of America. If they got, you know, they got voted out 90 to 10, they would get voted out. If tomorrow POTUS told the military to do something, do you think the military would coup him? No, I don't believe that. I think the military is very loyal to the United States of America.

• 1:11:23Speaker 03

  This is not the case in all countries. The way a really failing democracy works is when you can't trust the military to do what the government tells it to do. That is not the case in the United States of America.

• 1:11:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah. That's very true. Especially when these AI companies are so integrated into the military.

• 1:11:41Speaker 03

  Look, they're trying, don't get me wrong. They are trying to make America a failed state. They are really trying. They are trying to undermine our democratic legitimacy, they're trying to undermine our military legitimacy, they are trying on so many levels. And it comes to us as American citizens, as patriots, and people who believe in the mission of the founding fathers, to fight back. That's what they would have done. They would have fought back, they would not allow this to happen, they would have voted this out, they would have organized with their local communities, they would have not allowed this infiltration of the, of the military. And we can still fix these things. Look, this is not an easy project, right? And we do need to ban superintelligence first, sorry, that's kind of quite acute. But beyond that, this is, they're going to be a generational project. Fixing America is not something that's going to happen overnight.

• 1:12:26Speaker 03

  It's going to take new generations of, you know, better voting, better politicians, better institutions, you know, getting money out of politics, getting money, you know, getting better oversight over military contractors and stuff like this. But that's what it takes to create a good country. Who's, who said this was going to be easy? Who said we had already figured this out? Like, there's this kind of idea that like, oh, we solved all of government in the 1950s and, you know, just can lay back, like, what the hell are you talking about? No, this is a continual process. We have to keep innovating and improving our government, improving our striving for justice and the pursuit of happiness. This is always going to be a fight for as long as we exist and for our children and our grandchildren and so on. The way a good world looks for me is not everything is solved and we land, kick back

• 1:13:11Speaker 03

  and everything's okay, right? That's not how the world works. The way for me a really good world looks is that we all really feel in our heart that justifiably tomorrow, the world's going to be a little bit better. And next year, it's going to be a little bit better than that. And our children, their lives are just going to be a little bit better than ours. Not that, that everything will be solved, not that there'll be magic superintelligence that makes everyone immortal, just that our children are going to have a nicer life than we did, and their children is going to have an even nicer life than we did. And that's the track I want us to get on. I don't, I, I'm not here to build utopia. I'm not here to like, build immortality or something like this. That is way too crazy, way too dangerous. Maybe in 200 years we can talk about it, right? But right now, what we need is to get America back on track. We need to get the West back on track, we need to get the world back on track, where

• 1:13:56Speaker 03

  things continue to improve. And this requires engagement with the government institutions. When I ask people, this is actually a very funny thing, I talk to a lot of tech people, right? And they always are thinking of technology, they're techno-optimists. But in my experience, being a techno-optimist really often means that they're civilizational pessimists. They think that the only way to improve the world is through technology, and this is obviously false. If you ask anyone, what are the top 10 things that are like, bad about their lives? They will almost never list technological things. They will say, I don't see my family enough, or the economy is bad, healthcare is bad, the government is corrupt, you know, crime is too high. All of these are social problems, all of these are government and institutional problems.

• 1:14:39Speaker 03

  These are the things that are holding us back, not technology, and they can be improved.

• 1:14:44Danny Jones?

  Is there a way we could rewrite the way these things are trained to where they serve humans more than they serve basically competing to win, to pass tests and things like that? Like, a way to optimize our civilization and humanity?

• 1:15:07Speaker 03

  We have no idea how. This is a problem that has been greatly under-invested in, there's very few researchers and very few money going into this kind of research. And even then, the only thing that we found is that it's one of the hardest problems we've ever encountered. To give you a feeling of just how hard this is, building, in, in, in the technical literature, this is called alignment. It's aligning superintelligence to our values, that's the technical term. And what it would mean to align a superintelligence would be equivalent to saying, we're going to build a one-world government that controls all the economy, all the military, everyone's private lives, you know, all the science has superweapons and all this kind of stuff, and it will always be good, only do good things that you like, and it will never make

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  mistakes, and there will be no bugs, and we will do this with software on the first try. That's crazy. Like, that's what the hell these people talking about? That's not how anything in the world works, right?

• 1:16:02Danny Jones?

  Except for the Apollo missions.

• 1:16:04Speaker 03

  I mean, honestly, Apollo, look, one of the most impressive things ever done, cakewalk compared to this. Sorry. You know, like, cakewalk compared to this, right? It was incredible scientific, you know, thing, but like, fun fact, you know that like, the, the, the computation on like, the, the Apollo mission was like, less than a pocket calculator today.

• 1:16:21Danny Jones?

  Yeah, it was like, it was like, one one millionth of the computing power of an iPhone.

• 1:16:25Speaker 03

  Exactly. So incredible scientific achievement, not even compared to superintelligence, right? So, building a good superintelligence is much closer to building a good one world government. Which, holy shit, like, I don't even know what that would mean, or like, how you would do that. That seems like so, first of all, seems like a really bad idea. We should probably not do that. Division of power, I think, is very important. But a superintelligence kind of inherently removes division of power. That's kind of the problem, because it's so powerful that, you know, humans just don't have any power anymore.

• 1:16:54Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:16:55Speaker 03

  So we lose the division of power. We lose all these safety things that we already have, that we, that we need to keep dangerous things like governments under control. So, look, if we spend, I don't know, three generations, of all our greatest mathematicians, scientists, philosophers, you know, working with trillions of dollars of budgets, nonstop, for, you know, decades or a century on this.

• 1:17:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:18Speaker 03

  Maybe, right? Like, maybe we can make progress on this. It's not impossible, right? Like, but, other than that, like, come on.

• 1:17:26Danny Jones?

  Cause some, I mean, some people say that there's an argument to be made where, uh, there's a, a, a small potential that we could redirect and turn this into an AI utopia.

• 1:17:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:17:39Danny Jones?

  Instead of like, an apocalypse.

• 1:17:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, and they're saying they're gonna build a one world government using software that will be good. That's what they're saying.

• 1:17:45Danny Jones?

  Is that what they're saying?

• 1:17:45Speaker 03

  That's what, that's what it means to build a utopia, is that they will build a one world government that is run by a non-human intelligence, that you cannot control or understand, that has full control over the entire world, using the current, you know, terrible shitty methods that they have, and that somehow this is gonna turn out well. Sorry, this is delusion. Like, this is just delusion.

• 1:18:04Danny Jones?

  Well, you know, on one hand, I'm thinking like, if this thing was super intelligent, it would realize that, uh, this planet has to be taken care of for it to survive, right? And you can see how that could be good to some extent. But like, there's a lot of nuance there, right? There's an argument to be made that human beings aren't the best thing for the planet.

• 1:18:26Danny Jones?

  In the ecosystem, wild animals don't need us to survive. If all humans disappear, this is a fact, right? If all humans disappeared tomorrow,

• 1:18:37Danny Jones?

  it wouldn't affect the wild animals, it wouldn't affect the whales in the ocean at all.

• 1:18:40Speaker 03

  Probably would make them rebound massively in population.

• 1:18:42Danny Jones?

  If all of the whales in the ocean, and all the insects, and all the birds disappeared tomorrow, we would be fucked. The, the whole ecosystem would collapse. And, so like, the point is, like, we don't need them to survive, or we need them to survive, they don't need us to survive. So if AI said, this planet, we need to conserve this planet, and we need to make sure that this planet stays intact and healthy for us to survive, well, there is an argument to be made that humans aren't, don't have a long lifespan there. But, on a whole nother note, maybe this superintelligence wouldn't even be constrained by the Earth. Like, what if it could fucking escape the Earth?

• 1:19:25Speaker 03

  Of course. Superintelligence will be much better at science. It won't be biological, right?

• 1:19:29Danny Jones?

  It won't be biological, right?

• 1:19:30Speaker 03

  Does it even need an atmosphere? That seems like very wasteful, right? Like, why breathe air? That's super inefficient.

• 1:19:35Danny Jones?

  Exactly.

• 1:19:35Speaker 03

  You know, just tile everything with solar panels, transform the whole Earth into a spaceship or something, who knows, right? Who knows what a superintelligence would do? I don't know. Like,

• 1:19:44Danny Jones?

  We're not smart enough to know. Something that's 20 times smarter than us would know.

• 1:19:47Speaker 03

  Exactly. It's something like, if an ant tries to guess what a human will do.

• 1:19:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:19:50Speaker 03

  Like, an ant doesn't understand what we're doing right now, right? Like, no way an ant could understand what we're doing right now, or why.

• 1:19:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:58Speaker 03

  It'll be very similar with superintelligence. I don't think superintelligence will need a biosphere. It will do its own thing.

• 1:20:05Danny Jones?

  Jesus Christ, dude.

• 1:20:08Danny Jones?

  Did you see, I saw something earlier, uh, that there was something, some sort of an AI was able to figure out, I think this was a Google, one of the Google AIs, figured out how to decipher baby cries and translate what they wanted.

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 1:20:26Danny Jones?

  Did you see that?

• 1:20:27Speaker 03

  I did not see that.

• 1:20:28Danny Jones?

  See if you can find that, Steve.

• 1:20:31Danny Jones?

  Oh, okay. Translating baby sounds. This was a year ago. Using Google AI. Go ahead, play it. Let's see what it says.

• 1:20:42Danny Jones?

  You can hear it in the head, if you want to, through those headphones, you can actually hear what it says.

• 1:20:48Speaker 05

  Hello, hi, welcome. What's happening? I'm building something very cool with our text AI, and I would like to show you what I'm building. Please come and sit. Hi, I'm Santil Kumar. This is my AI idea.

• 1:21:06Speaker 05

  Last year, I had a baby girl. I typically take care of my baby during the nighttime. So my role is like, no, showing the baby, make sure that it's sleeping. Sometime the baby used to cry in the middle of the night. I really don't know why the baby is crying.

• 1:21:23Speaker 06

  She is always crying, my baby. It's not only for hunger, so maybe she might feel some discomfort.

• 1:21:29Speaker 05

  Sometime what happened is like, it start vomiting, and as a new parent, we were like, getting panicked, called the hospital, and 3:00, 3:00 AM in the morning, we rushed to the hospital. And sometime doctor so, hey, it's, it's burping, like, you forget to do burp.

• 1:21:44Danny Jones?

  A burp?

• 1:21:46Speaker 05

  My idea is like, is there is any way my baby can tell I died, like, no, this is why I'm crying, please take an action. Is there is any way I use technology to solve this? Is there is any way I can convert, uh, the baby crying into the language model, like, no, I can understand, as a new parent, not only me. I immediately went to Gemini and asking it, like, no, is there is any pattern for baby cry?

• 1:22:07Speaker 06

  Actually, I searched in Google and all, how to differentiate, uh, the baby, uh, crying sounds.

• 1:22:13Speaker 05

  When I searched it, I come to know that all the baby in the world cry for five pattern. It follows certain frequency, certain rhythm, and certain amplitude the baby cries. Okay, when it's bite or hunger, baby cry aggressively. If it is more on like, burping or thing, the baby pattern is different. And the next onwards, whenever my baby cries, I start recording it.

• 1:22:36Speaker 06

  So I thought, why you're recording? No, no, no, I'm developing a program to find out why the baby is crying. Instead of, uh, recording her voice, you should console her, you should calm her down. So that is what I said.

• 1:22:51Speaker 05

  The goal is built on very simple prototyping app using Flutter. Uh, the goal of the app is just to record the audio sample, then use Gemini models, uh, to identify this is a crying sample or not. Once that is found, like, then my idea is to find pattern, do that. So I, I'll basically convert the audio sample into the visual spectrum. Because, uh, I'm planning to use the deep neural network. Deep neural network is all about image, so any, any pattern, you give it as an image form, yeah, that is how it's trained.

• 1:23:29Speaker 05

  Yeah, this is for hunger.

• 1:23:30Danny Jones?

  That is fucking crazy.

• 1:23:32Speaker 05

  Now I'm asking the Gemini, uh, through a text studio. Now, yeah, it's baby crying for hunger, like, you know, here's how it helps. I'm even thinking that, uh, the, the faster thing the baby do is a cry, when it born.

• 1:23:43Danny Jones?

  So is this, is this app available now? Can people actually use this?

• 1:23:46Speaker 07

  I, I found, there's a couple of apps. I'm not sure which one is his.

• 1:23:49Speaker 05

  You can even try in it.

• 1:23:51Danny Jones?

  Let me turn it off.

• 1:23:51Speaker 05

  What is the first message the baby?

• 1:23:53Speaker 07

  There's a, there's an app called Baby Talk. Trans later.

• 1:23:57Speaker 03

  To, to be fair here, the AI did basically zero work. Most, most of the work, yeah, like, he said it himself, the science was already done by humans previously, who had identified the five different calls. He was just using the AI to just like, sort the call into one of five buckets.

• 1:24:12Danny Jones?

  So it's like, pattern recognition?

• 1:24:13Speaker 03

  Yes. Which, you know, is, is cool, but like, let's be clear here, the, the hard part, the science, was actually done by humans before this, and the AI is kind of like a nice little tool.

• 1:24:23Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:24:23Speaker 03

  I think I could have probably done this even without AI.

• 1:24:27Speaker 03

  I mean, if it's literally just spectral analysis, like, come on, man. Like, it's not that hard. Sorry. But like, it's not that hard.

• 1:24:34Danny Jones?

  Right, right. Yeah, some of this stuff is very mundane, you know, compared to superintelligence.

• 1:24:38Speaker 03

  This is a great example of like uranium ore.

• 1:24:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:40Speaker 03

  This is what I mean. Like, this fantastic. God bless, you know, do more of it. Like, this is fun. This is a cool little app, you know, it's nice. You know, if I ever have a daughter, you know, I might download this app, you know. But it's just like, not the same thing as superintelligence, right? Like lobbyists love to pretend that when I talk about superintelligence, I'm trying to like ban this, which is obviously nonsense. Like, this is obviously

• 1:25:02Danny Jones?

  Harmless.

• 1:25:03Speaker 03

  Harmless. It's even good. Like, this is good for the world. I love technology. I love having, you know, useful apps on my phone that help me solve problems. And this isn't a problem I knew I could solve. And, you know, now I have a, you know, a nice little thing that can solve my problem, right? So this is not what we're talking about, right? This is great. And like, this is engineering and, you know, science and, you know, just good stuff.

• 1:25:22Danny Jones?

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• 1:26:07Danny Jones?

  For a limited time only, our listeners get 10% off your entire order with our exclusive link. Just head to hexclad.com/dannyjones. Support our show and check them out at H E X C L A D dot com forward slash Danny Jones. Make sure to let them know we sent you. Again, that's 10% off at hexclad.com/dannyjones. Have you ever like sat down and had like a, a long conversation with one of these folks like Altman? Or Teal or the head of Anthropic or any of these guys on this stuff? Like, now, I'm not talking like, you know, when I was talking to Roman on here, he's like, yeah, like passing by in a hallway, but you never really have like any kind of like real connection with them.

• 1:26:49Speaker 03

  I've talked to Sam Altman maybe three times. I've talked to Dario. I've had dinner with him, I think, once. I've had, talked to Demis a couple of times. I had him over dinner at my place once, actually. So that's probably the longest.

• 1:27:00Danny Jones?

  Who was that last one?

• 1:27:00Speaker 03

  Oh, he's the CEO of DeepMind or was the CEO of DeepMind.

• 1:27:03Danny Jones?

  Oh, yes, yes. I saw him on Lex Friedman's podcast.

• 1:27:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, so I've talked to him a fair bit. I've talked to some other people, you know, like Elias Witskiver or Shane Legg, who are like chief scientists of these various companies and so on. So I've, you know, I don't say it's a deep connection, but I've definitely had dinner with some of them. Oh, I have had dinner at Sam Altman's house once. That was a very funny dinner.

• 1:27:24Danny Jones?

  Why would you get, why would they invite you there?

• 1:27:26Speaker 03

  I don't know. Probably thought it was funny. Like, one of the things that like I actually appreciate about San Francisco culture is just like, you just talk to someone interesting, you know, even if he doesn't agree with you, it could still be interesting. I honestly don't really know why Sam Altman still sometimes returns my texts. Like, sometimes he still does. Yeah, sometimes. I don't know why, but, um, you know.

• 1:27:48Danny Jones?

  What kind of stuff do you ask him?

• 1:27:49Speaker 03

  I suppose it's just like, I'm in San Francisco, do you want to meet up? Like, that's the usual thing I ask whenever I'm in San Francisco. And every time I've had a conversation with Sam, he was a very interesting person. Like, I'm using interesting specifically, right? I thought he was a very interesting person. We had a lot of very interesting discussions. And of course, nothing came of any of them, but they were always engaging, let's say it that way.

• 1:28:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:10Speaker 03

  Like, there's a thing where people really want people to be like, either like cartoon villains or that have like, you know, or like coherent in some way, like they're like one thing. But most of these people are just very mercurial. They're kind of like, they tell different people different things.

• 1:28:27Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:28:28Speaker 03

  Like, what Sam Altman tells me is, I think, very different than what he tells other people. I, what, you know, when I have a conversation with one of these people, they say very different things to me. They show me very different things than they show other people, you know, which to a certain degree, I mean, we all have different personalities for different friend groups or whatever, but it's just like, ultimately, they're people, right? Sam Altman's a person, you know, Demis is a person, Dario is a person. They're all people. They're complex. They have their own, you know, personal quirks, you know, some of them are more sociopathic than others. Ultimately, it doesn't really matter. What matters is that all of them are trying to build something that will kill everyone. And we have to stop them.

• 1:29:04Danny Jones?

  And what do they say to you when you say that to them?

• 1:29:06Speaker 03

  I mean, uh, do you know the word cope?

• 1:29:11Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, a lot of that. Lots and lots and lots of cope.

• 1:29:14Danny Jones?

  Like what? Like what, what, what, what's their best argument?

• 1:29:17Speaker 03

  We can slow down, actually. You see, it's actually impossible to slow down. And you know, the other guy, and you know, all three of them are pointing to each other, you know, he's much worse than me. So I have to do it. And it's like, you know, I have been trying to be the reasonable one the whole time, actually. But like, all three of them, you know, say variants of this, of course.

• 1:29:33Danny Jones?

  So Altman and the guy from Anthropic, they hate each other, right?

• 1:29:37Speaker 03

  I mean, I'm sure they do.

• 1:29:38Danny Jones?

  There's a video that I saw of them like at some, uh, big public conference or something. And they were all like joining hands in some like display of unity.

• 1:29:46Speaker 03

  Oh, I remember that. That was so funny.

• 1:29:48Danny Jones?

  And Altman and that guy wouldn't even touch each other. They like faked it. They like, they went like that.

• 1:29:53Speaker 03

  Hilarious. Like, another thing that people I think don't really, so one of the most useful things in my life was encountering truly powerful people in like casual settings. Like, I've been, like, I've met billionaires and like hung out with, with them and stuff like this. It's really useful. Like, like, you know, generally, you know, it's a very useful experience because you see, they're just people. Like, they are just guys. They're just dudes, right? Like, they're not that different from you and me. They are like petty or cringe or weird or like awkward in all the same ways that everyone else is.

• 1:30:26Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:26Speaker 03

  Like, a lot of people, I think, get like starstruck when you're dealing with people like this. They think they're like aliens, they're like superhumans and so on. But like, when I talk to these people, I'm just like, oh, yeah, it's a person. Like, this is just another person. And just like, they are doing things that are super dangerous. I'm sure they have their own justifications for why they're doing it and blah, blah, blah. I don't really care. What matters is they should stop. And if they're not going to stop, we have to make them stop.

• 1:30:49Danny Jones?

  What about Elon?

• 1:30:50Speaker 03

  I've never met Elon. Um, well, I was once in a room with him at Bletchley Park back in the day. I have never met Elon. I've never spoken to him.

• 1:30:58Danny Jones?

  Yeah, I heard one thing about Grok. I think that, I don't know if it's still a thing, but I heard that at one point Grok was like, which is supposed to be like the most sane one out of all of them, right? That's what I heard. Um, Grok was giving answers and trying to make sure it didn't contradict like political statements Elon had made before. Did you hear that one?

• 1:31:20Speaker 03

  I remember hearing about this, yes.

• 1:31:23Danny Jones?

  But I heard that it's since updated and fixed it, you know, similar to like how the Google, the early version of Gemini or whatever was giving us like, like black women Nazis. When, when you asked to like show us a picture of a bunch of Nazis or whatever, it was trying to make them like diverse.

• 1:31:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's been a lot of embarrassing faux pas of AIs like that.

• 1:31:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:42Speaker 03

  They've gotten better at preventing these kind of faux pas from happening, but they definitely do still happen.

• 1:31:47Danny Jones?

  Yeah. I mean, I rely on Grok for, for most things, like even it's, it's changed the way I interact with, with, in stories on X, on the X Twitter platform, where I, I immediately see something and I'm skeptical, right? So I'll scroll down and see if Grok confirmed it. Cause usually people will say like, Grok, can you please confirm this? Well, it's true. Oh, that's hilarious. An African American Nazi.

• 1:32:10Speaker 03

  Impressive.

• 1:32:14Danny Jones?

  And usually it will give you like, it'll give you the context, whether it's true or not. And, uh, it's already changing the way, you know, I interact with those things.

• 1:32:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:32:24Danny Jones?

  So, you know, who knows where that goes?

• 1:32:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, I, I've deinstalled all social media from my phone.

• 1:32:30Danny Jones?

  You have?

• 1:32:31Speaker 03

  All of it. I only use, I only use X for like business, like when there's big news or we're announcing something. Otherwise, I am never on any social media anywhere.

• 1:32:39Danny Jones?

  Why'd you do that?

• 1:32:40Speaker 03

  Bad for you. Like, I just could really feel it's bad for you. Like, I could feel myself scrolling. I could feel the like, you know, gambling neuron, you know, in the back of my brain. I could, I also could feel myself just like become more hateful. Like, there's, okay, it's like, here's a very important thing about humans where I think a lot of people don't really understand. Is that if you see or perceive anything, your brain updates on it, whether you want it or not. You can totally disbelieve something, but if you see it, you start believing it a little bit. This is a bug in the human brain. It's just a bug. It's just literally a bug. If you see something over and over and over again, it starts changing your personality, if you like it or not. It doesn't matter what it is. It will change your personality a little bit. Not a lot, but a little bit.

• 1:33:23Speaker 03

  And so these systems are so optimized to get in your head. Like, you know, I'll go on X and look, if you just wanted to make me happy, you'd show me like, uh, a couple of cool science stories and then just a bunch of cute animal videos. And then I would be super happy. It's all I want from social media. Like, this is all I want. And X, like, I, it was so good. It would show me like the coolest like, I don't know, anteater video I've ever seen in my life. And then 50 posts about Israel. And then it will show me, you know, one cool jellyfish video or something, right? Like it was, I could see how perversely designed these algorithms are. Because it's also a fun fact, the way gambling works generally is that the most addictive thing is not something that is consistently good. If you keep getting good things, you might be satisfied.

• 1:34:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:34:07Speaker 03

  So instead, what you want to do is you want most of it to be shit. You want to have it that almost everything is terrible. And then every so often, completely at random, you see something awesome. And all social media is designed like this, like scroll through X at any given point. And you'll see like a great post, you'll see a great video or something, and then just seas of garbage. And then you'll see one other great post and then seas of garbage. You might think this is just how things are, right? But this is false. They deliberately make it this way. You could, they could just show you the good posts. There's no reason you can't do that, but that would be less addictive. So for me, it's kind of like memetic hygiene. Like it feels like, you know, it's like gross to eat with your hands, especially if you haven't washed your hands.

• 1:34:46Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:34:46Speaker 03

  That's a lot of how I feel like scrolling social media. It's kind of gross to put this in my head.

• 1:34:50Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:51Speaker 03

  Like it's like, like putting it in my mouth, like it's not supposed to be there. Like it's gross, it's unsanitized, like who knows what psyop this is from? I don't want it in my head.

• 1:34:59Danny Jones?

  Right. That's very good. That's a very good point. Yeah, you're very right about that. Did you see, there was something that Australia just did, we learned about it yesterday, that they're implementing this new law, or they're trying to get this new law passed, where the social media companies have to install a switch on the social media apps where it turns off the algorithm and makes it go back to the way it used to be. So like, if I follow you, uh, if I follow you, I'm only going to see your stuff and all the people I follow. Same like the way like old school YouTube used to be, all the subscribers you would, you would subscribe to, you would only get your subscription list. There would be no algorithmic feed feeding you stuff based on, because that's the problem with this stuff, right? Is they want to keep you on the platform as long as possible.

• 1:35:43Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:35:43Danny Jones?

  Because that's what provides, that's what their value is based on. So if they're not doing that anymore, theoretically, they're not going to be able to compete with the other, with the other platforms and their market share is going to go down, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. So this is, seems like a great thing where you have the ability to turn that off. And they're pushing back against it big times, but um, and then, oh yeah, then Meta just settled that fifth, that $18 billion social media harms trial thing, which is interesting.

• 1:36:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah, I think this is a great example where just like, we fail to regulate the internet and we fail to regulate social media to be a net positive. Like, there's no reason we couldn't just have this, right? Like you could, like the, the whole thing of a regulation is, is that these companies often make a good point. If we make our product less addictive, then we're just going to run, get out, run out of business and someone else will take over. This is what is called in economic theory, a market failure. This is a very classic thing from economics, if you take like an economics one-on-one course in college, it's one of the first things they'll teach you about. Is another example is pollution. Like imagine you and me start a chemical company, you know, and we could dump our toxic sludge into the river and that would make our product cheaper. But we don't do that because you, you and me are good people, right? So we don't pollute the river. But then what happens?

• 1:36:55Speaker 03

  Well, some other jackass down the street starts a new chemical company, he pollutes the river, his product is cheaper, we get out of it, go out of business. And this is one of the classic examples where you need regulation. The only way to stop the river from getting polluted is to make it illegal to pollute the river. Because then, you know, our company can still make our product and not lose out to the asshole who's polluting the river. The river stays safe, we still have competition and all is well. This is a very simple example of this. Of course, if we, if one company unilaterally decides, you know, we're going to make a good algorithm, or we're going to get rid of the algorithm entirely, they just lose all their market share. But if we say, no, everyone has to provide an opt out, or you know, everyone has to have a good algorithm.

• 1:37:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:37:34Speaker 03

  Then we can still have competition. Then we, then we don't, you know, destroy all these companies. Then we allow the competition on the thing we actually care about. This is a great example of how markets and regulation can work together rather than against each other. This is always the real goal of regulation. The goal of regulation isn't to stop competition. I mean, sometimes it is, but like the way, when you do good regulation, the goal is to create competition around something you actually want.

• 1:37:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:37:58Speaker 03

  Like, you know, I, I like to think something about like, you know, sports, you know, like football or like MMA. You know, MMA has a lot of rules and that's very important.

• 1:38:08Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 1:38:08Speaker 03

  Because imagine if MMA had zero rules, you'd just kill the other guy.

• 1:38:12Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:38:12Speaker 03

  And it would just be over.

• 1:38:13Danny Jones?

  Like the gladiators.

• 1:38:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, it would just, you just kill the other guy and that's it. Like it wouldn't be fun or interesting, it would just be terrible, there'd be no competition. It would just be whoever stabs the other guy.

• 1:38:20Danny Jones?

  Some guy would show up with a gun.

• 1:38:21Speaker 03

  Exactly. And then like, where's, like, that's not good at all.

• 1:38:23Danny Jones?

  No.

• 1:38:24Speaker 03

  Meanwhile, we have now created this really complex and like important rule set that is enforced, you know, by referees, you know, to make sure that we can continue to have this competition. So that we can continue to see, you know, the greatest warriors who have ever existed, fight each other with, you know, techniques that, you know, our ancestors couldn't even imagine, like how effective modern fighting techniques are. So this is really for me, the good case of regulation is that some people think like, you know, markets are like, you know, the only good in the world and everything should be free markets or whatever. But like, that's obviously, you know, a contradiction in many ways. They're one tool in our tool belt. You know, we use markets to solve certain problems, but we want to solve the right problems. You know, we don't want them to pollute our river as hard as possible. We want them to make a nice chemical product that doesn't pollute the river. And to ensure this, we make regulation.

• 1:39:09Danny Jones?

  Yes. Has there ever been an example in history where there was a technology being developed where we realized it was too dangerous, could get out of control and we halted, we stopped it?

• 1:39:18Speaker 03

  Human cloning. That is the most extreme example, yes.

• 1:39:22Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:39:22Speaker 03

  Yes. It was, it became clear in the 20th century that human cloning would be possible. They didn't yet know how to do it, but scientists realized that this would become possible. And they were very concerned about the consequences of human cloning and like what that would mean. Because obviously I can imagine you could just clone your best soldier, right? Imagine you could do like, you know.

• 1:39:40Danny Jones?

  Right, right, right.

• 1:39:42Speaker 03

  And stuff like this.

• 1:39:43Danny Jones?

  And the Human Promotion Prohibition Act of 2003.

• 1:39:48Speaker 03

  There was also a bunch of other legislation, including internationals and stuff on this. There's, there's a really fascinating deep history that goes way beyond this specific act.

• 1:39:58Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:39:58Speaker 03

  There's quite a lot that was going on there. But fundamentally, what is so fascinating about human cloning is that scientists came together before it was possible. It was only hypothetical at the time to clone humans. And they said, we shouldn't do this. This is really bad. This is really dangerous. This will, think of the effects this would have on human society. Like we should be really careful or just not do it at all. And so they kind of, so they banned it before it was even possible. They banned it before, and to this day, you know, other than maybe one exception, there have been no human clones. We have the technology. We could definitely do it if we wanted to, but all countries across the world, like even the one case where they're, it wasn't really cloning, it was human germline engineering.

• 1:40:39Danny Jones?

  Was this the one in China?

• 1:40:40Speaker 03

  It was the one in China.

• 1:40:41Danny Jones?

  He was trying to, he was trying to eliminate the HIV promoter or something?

• 1:40:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this wasn't a full clone, it was just like a small.

• 1:40:47Danny Jones?

  Mutation.

• 1:40:48Speaker 03

  Mutation and kind of small manipulation. And he was slapped, like definitely the Chinese Communist Party did not like that, you know, no one liked that. The whole bio community just, you know, ostracized the guy, you know, the, there was huge investigations, whatever. And think about how crazy this is. It's actually crazy that, you know, someone like China, who, you know, is an adversary of ours, also was like, hell no, we don't want this. Like absolutely not, you're doing this on our borders, absolutely not. So this was, I think, a great example of it's scientists saying, oh God, like if we do this, like what's, what will happen? That's really bad. And we should definitely not do this. You know, maybe if we figure out how to do it safely in a long time in the future, but not right now, like this is a disaster.

• 1:41:32Speaker 03

  And we actually did avert this.

• 1:41:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:41:34Speaker 03

  There are other worlds in which human cloning does now exist and is like widespread. And I think that would be a very, very bad world to live in.

• 1:41:40Danny Jones?

  Yeah. That's, you're right about that. That's wild, I wasn't aware of that. I wasn't aware that we went back as far as 2003.

• 1:41:47Speaker 03

  Oh, goes much further than that, it's only back in the eighties.

• 1:41:49Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:41:50Speaker 03

  Oh yeah, and especially in the nineties, there was a lot of conversations about this in the 1990s. So this goes back a long time.

• 1:41:57Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:41:58Speaker 03

  As I say, way before the technology existed, it does exist now, like we could definitely do this now. But way before the technology existed, they just realized that eventually we would figure out how to do cloning like this. And they were so prescient. But see, this is a great example of how I think responsible engagement with powerful technology comes. The scientists realize, oh shit, what's happening? We need to figure this out. And they have, you know, many discussions, they go to the government, they go to the general public, they raise awareness, et cetera. You know, it's very similar also to, for example, what happened with nuclear weapons, you know, which we didn't stop entirely. But what happened with nuclear weapons was very interesting. So the person who came up with the idea of the nuclear weapon was a physicist named Leo Zilard.

• 1:42:42Speaker 03

  And he basically calculated that a nuclear bomb would be possible, again, long before one was built, before we even had nuclear reactors. He just did some math on a paper and he was like, oh shit, you can totally build a nuclear bomb.

• 1:42:54Danny Jones?

  What's his name again?

• 1:42:54Speaker 03

  Leo Zilard.

• 1:42:55Danny Jones?

  Leo Zilard.

• 1:42:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, S Z I L A R D. So really fascinating guy, super interesting history, highly recommend. Like generally the history of like the nuclear, like it's a great book called The Making of the Atomic Bomb.

• 1:43:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:08Speaker 03

  Which is one of my favorite books ever written. It's just, it's so fascinating, like the history there is like so many twists and turns, a really, really, really great book. But yeah, so Leo Zilard, so it's actually very funny. He heard another physicist, a very famous physicist, I think it was Lord Kelvin, if I remember correctly, say that the idea of, you know, net energy production from nuclear is moonshine, like it's nonsense. And Leo Zilard was so pissed off that he like did all the math and figured out how to do it.

• 1:43:35Danny Jones?

  Someone said it couldn't be done.

• 1:43:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, and then he was so pissed off that he figured out how to do it. And then, well, what did he do next? Well, of course, he moved to Silicon Valley, created a nuclear bomb startup, which split into three other startups to sell as many nuclear bombs to the general public as possible.

• 1:43:48Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:48Speaker 03

  No, of course not. That's not what happened. He went to the government. He was like, holy shit. Nuclear bombs are possible. This is going to change everything. This is going to threaten the world. This is a weapon that could destroy the whole world. We have to do something. So he went to the government. He went to the military. He, this led to the famous Einstein letter to the president, which led to the Manhattan Project. Because this is exactly where it came from. Because he was like, guys, this is going to change everything. We need to figure this out. And so this is what led to the Manhattan Project, to a large degree because they were very scared that the Germans would build it. Because they thought the Germans were working on it. They kind of weren't. It's a little complex there. But then what happened after World War II as well is that people were just like, holy shit. This technology is just so different. It's so much more powerful.

• 1:44:33Speaker 03

  We need to build whole new laws, institutions to stop this proliferation. Back then, people really thought that, well, every country and every terrorist would build nuclear bombs. There's no way to stop it. But no, diplomats and statesmen and people rose to the occasion and said, we have to stop this from happening. Look, we can't stop the Soviets, obviously, but like, we can't stop terrorists. And like, we should. So this led to, you know, the International Atomic Energy Agency and all these like international bodies and national bodies that really regulated nuclear to an incredible degree.

• 1:45:03Danny Jones?

  Isn't it amazing that a nuclear bomb hasn't been dropped since the 40s?

• 1:45:07Speaker 03

  But like, actually though, right? Like, isn't that just the craziest thing imaginable?

• 1:45:10Danny Jones?

  It's insane. It really is insane.

• 1:45:12Speaker 03

  It's hard to, like, the fact that people take the, like, people tell me, oh, we can't stop AI, right? Look, we couldn't stop nuclear bombs. I'm like, dude, we haven't dropped a single military nuclear bomb since the 1940s. That's incredible. That is not what people thought was going to happen. After World War II, everyone was like, alright, well, time to drop nuclear bombs on everybody, I guess. Like, this was just so common sense. They were like, it's unstoppable. Nothing can prevent nuclear war. It's almost, it's inevitable. But we did stop it. You know, knock on wood that we continued to stop it, but we did do this. But this wasn't free. It wasn't just like, you know, oh, it just happened. No, this took massive amounts of work from thousands, tens of thousands of people, you know, lawyers, diplomats, scientists, the general public, activists, et cetera, to bring

• 1:45:54Speaker 03

  the awareness of just how dangerous this is and make sure that this is contained. And I remember listening to this fantastic podcast interviewing this guy, it was just a small story that I found so fascinating, who I think worked for the State Department, where after the fall of the Soviet Union, he heard a rumor that there was like a massive amount of weapons-grade uranium, like enough to build a nuclear bomb in a facility in Kazakhstan. And so for multiple years, he slowly became friends with like the person who ran the factory. They went hunting together, he met his family, just like for years and years and years, until he finally admitted that it was there. And then he coordinated the whole of like taking the material, bringing it to the United States, melting it down and making sure. It's an incredible story, right? And this is an example of what nuclear, like, good nuclear stewardship looks like, right?

• 1:46:39Speaker 03

  That you have people like this guy, whose name I'm unfortunately forgetting because it was such a cool story.

• 1:46:44Danny Jones?

  You said he worked in the State Department?

• 1:46:45Speaker 03

  He used to work in the State Department. Yeah, I don't know where he is now. Like, this was back in the 90s. But I heard a podcast recently where he retold the story and I was just like, man, this is such a great example of state capacity. Like, this is what I want my state to do, is to like track down the nuclear material, make sure it is secured, melt it down safely and make sure it doesn't happen. Like, do you know that the International Atomic Energy Agency has an exact, like, like exact ledger of every kilogram of like enriched uranium in the world? Like, it's crazy. Like, I mean, maybe there's some, it also knows how much it's missing, by the way. We have, yeah, after the Soviet Union, about like, I think it was like 500 kilograms just kind of disappeared. We still don't know where that stuff is.

• 1:47:25Danny Jones?

  There was a guy I had on the show a while ago, he made a documentary. What was the name of the documentary? It was basically, what happened was he was following these, these cartel drug lords in South America who were doing business with the Soviet Union, where after some like oligarchs in the Soviet Union, after it collapsed, and they were going over there trying to get a deal on a submarine, they're trying to buy a nuclear submarine. And they were like sitting in the sauna, working out the numbers of the deal. And then the Russian dude was like, you want to, you want us to throw in a couple of nukes? They were like, no, we don't want a nuke, bro, we're good.

• 1:48:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, honestly, I think this fall of the Soviet Union is like, truly maybe the greatest example of nuclear success. Like, the fact that the Soviet Union, which was a shit show, you know, that had tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, and that, you know, who knows where those were? Who knows who owned them? Who knows what happened? And the fact that those didn't fall into any terrorist hands? Incredible. Like, the fact that, that the international community of atomic scientists and, you know, statespeople managed to actually contain that? Can you imagine? Like, imagine you have a absolute, you know, nightmare country, you know, with tens of thousands of nukes, completely disintegrate, and zero of those nukes landed in terrorist hands. It's incredible.

• 1:48:45Danny Jones?

  Yeah. Considering how close we got during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

• 1:48:48Speaker 03

  Exactly. Like, it is actually so incredible to me that this has, that this has actually succeeded. I think, I remember once asking a very senior person in the government, one of the most senior people I've ever talked to in the Defense Department back in the day, and this was many years ago, and I asked her, like, are there any adults in the room? Are there like any, because like the government, like, the government, like, it feels like no one's taking this seriously.

• 1:49:14Danny Jones?

  It feels like a reality show.

• 1:49:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. And then she thought for a second, and she said, the people in charge of the nukes. That's what she said. She said, those people, those are serious people. They don't fuck around. They do not fuck around. Many other people in the government do, those people do not fuck around.

• 1:49:27Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:49:28Speaker 03

  That's what she said to me.

• 1:49:29Danny Jones?

  The people in charge of the nukes?

• 1:49:31Speaker 03

  Yeah, the DOE people, the Department of Energy nuclear people, those people do not fuck around. And I think this is wonderful. I think this is really great. I think that's exactly the kind of people I want to be in charge of the nukes. And in a sense, they have the track record to show for it. Zero nukes in the hands of terrorists, you know? They did it. Like, this is not something that was easy. This was an incredibly hard thing to accomplish.

• 1:49:52Danny Jones?

  It's, isn't it interesting too, though, that the Department of Energy is the same exact organization as the Manhattan Project? They just rechanged, they changed the name like two or three times.

• 1:50:02Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:50:02Danny Jones?

  And they just renamed the Manhattan Project to the Department of Energy.

• 1:50:05Speaker 03

  Basically. And I think this is a great example of like, you know, you know, should we have as many nukes as we have today? Probably not, you know, blah, blah, blah. But like fundamentally, in a sense, we did kind of rise to the occasion of nuclear weapons.

• 1:50:18Danny Jones?

  Yeah, and we were being completely reckless with them when we were testing them.

• 1:50:21Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, that was.

• 1:50:22Danny Jones?

  We were detonating holes in the atmosphere.

• 1:50:24Speaker 03

  Insane.

• 1:50:25Danny Jones?

  Like, the starfish triple prime thing is absolutely nuts.

• 1:50:28Speaker 03

  Actual Looney Tunes shit. Like, do you know there's a massive, also like radioactive sewage pile under the glaciers of Greenland?

• 1:50:37Danny Jones?

  What?

• 1:50:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's really funny. They just kind of like, they had a, there was a, they wanted to build an underground base in Greenland, and it turns out this wasn't like effective for various reasons. And there was like massive amounts of like sewage and so on, just kind of left there. And then they kind of had a nuclear reactor there as well. And kind of getting it out of there was just too big of a hassle, so they just like left most of the waste, they're just kind of like sinking to the glacier.

• 1:50:59Danny Jones?

  Oh my god.

• 1:51:00Speaker 03

  There's a bunch of stories like this. Don't, never mind what's happening in Russia. Like, do you know like, like Lake Karakai? You know, and stuff like this? Like, there are like, there are like waterways in Russia, such as Lake Karakai. They're like so radioactive, you can't stand next to it.

• 1:51:13Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 1:51:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like, there's a, there was a.

• 1:51:15Danny Jones?

  Is it dumping nuclear waste?

• 1:51:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, so this was right next to the Mayak facility, which was their main nuclear weapons production facility. And like, oh my god, like, look, I'm not saying the Americans have always been, done everything right in our history of nuclear, but oh my god, do you know anything about what the Soviets did with nuclear? So, fun fact, one of the first things the Manhattan Project did was invent the HEPA filter, which was an air filter that could filter out radioactive material. The Russians never bothered to invent the HEPA filter. Instead, what they did is, is that there was literally a program in the 1940s and 1950s where if you were a Gulag, you know, prisoner, you had the choice that you could get your entire sentence commuted, you could become a free man if you work at Mayak for three months. No one survived.

• 1:52:01Danny Jones?

  Wow.

• 1:52:02Speaker 03

  Like, they would just send in death battalions of basically slave workers, just die of radiation poisoning in under three months.

• 1:52:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:52:09Speaker 03

  Instead of just like inventing hazmat suits. Like, incredible.

• 1:52:13Danny Jones?

  That's fucking bonkers.

• 1:52:15Speaker 03

  Incredible. And like, the Soviet.

• 1:52:18Danny Jones?

  Like a concentration camp, like a nuclear concentration camp.

• 1:52:20Speaker 03

  In a sense, yes, that's kind of basically what happened to a large degree. I mean, it did eventually get better, they did eventually develop better tools and so on, but like, there was a period where just like, you didn't survive three months of working at the facility, like that, and this did not happen in America. Like, we did not do this to anyone in America.

• 1:52:36Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:52:36Speaker 03

  You know, sure, there were some accidents here or there, but like, we didn't like slaughter, you know, people like this for our nuclear research. That's just not what happened.

• 1:52:44Danny Jones?

  No, no. We did some sick shit, though.

• 1:52:46Speaker 03

  We did some sick shit.

• 1:52:47Danny Jones?

  Have you seen the, we were just talking about this yesterday, or two days ago, when Bill Clinton unsealed all of the classified projects that were happening in Massachusetts with the disabled hospital for disabled children in Massachusetts?

• 1:53:01Speaker 03

  I hadn't heard about this one.

• 1:53:02Danny Jones?

  Where they were injecting children, disabled children with plutonium?

• 1:53:05Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, yeah, I have heard a lot of stuff like this. Did you know about that one guy who took the largest plutonium dose in history?

• 1:53:12Danny Jones?

  No.

• 1:53:12Speaker 03

  This is a surprisingly funny one. So there was a guy, I forgot where he was from, it might have been Massachusetts, and they, he was dying of terminal cancer, so they gave him the largest single dose of plutonium any human has ever received. Turns out he didn't have fatal cancer, it was just a misdiagnosis, and he just survived. He lived the rest of his long life with just absolutely insane levels of plutonium in his blood, and he just survived.

• 1:53:37Danny Jones?

  That's fucking crazy.

• 1:53:39Speaker 03

  It's really funny, it's like a famous.

• 1:53:41Danny Jones?

  Can we find this guy?

• 1:53:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:53:42Danny Jones?

  Is it, is it Stevens, Albert Stevens?

• 1:53:45Speaker 03

  That sounds correct. I don't know off the top of my head, but.

• 1:53:48Danny Jones?

  What year was this?

• 1:53:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:53:50Danny Jones?

  Albert Stevens?

• 1:53:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, this is the guy.

• 1:53:52Danny Jones?

  Known as CAL-1.

• 1:53:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, 131 kilobecaroles of plutonium, which is just an unbelievable dose. Like, it's fucking over if you're exposed to something like that.

• 1:54:02Danny Jones?

  Plutonium, it says plutonium remained present in his body for the remainder of his life, the amount of decay, the amount decaying slowly through radioactive decay and biological elimination. Stevens died of a heart, of heart disease 20 years later, having accumulated an effective radiation dose of 64SV over that period.

• 1:54:21Speaker 03

  Which is insane. Like, it's unbelievably high dose.

• 1:54:24Danny Jones?

  He lived to 79.

• 1:54:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. What a guy. Absolute giga Chad.

• 1:54:37Danny Jones?

  Oh, that's freaking nuts, dude. Also, the nuclear soldiers, have you seen them, seen those guys?

• 1:54:42Speaker 03

  Oh, they got irradiated from the tests?

• 1:54:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, they put them on the battleships and they made them all stand on the deck of the battleship, looking at the nuclear blasts.

• 1:54:51Speaker 03

  God.

• 1:54:52Danny Jones?

  And it was like some of the most horrific shit ever, where these people, sometimes their eyes were like melted out of their heads. A lot of them were, you know, got really debilitating diseases and cancers. They were rendered, you know, sterilized. They couldn't have kids after that. Like, it's insane.

• 1:55:10Speaker 03

  I, I am very glad that we do not do stuff like this.

• 1:55:13Danny Jones?

  We did a lot of fucked up testing on human beings during the Cold War.

• 1:55:16Speaker 03

  We really did, didn't we? You know, it's, you know, it's.

• 1:55:20Danny Jones?

  We're not great.

• 1:55:21Speaker 03

  We're not, we're pretty good. You know, we're not perfect. But again, like, not to be like, you know, who, who did the least bad human experimentation? But have you seen the Soviets? Like, oh my God. Like, it's very bad, evil things you, America has done. And I'm so glad we don't do that anymore. But also like, oh my God, these Soviets. Oh my God.

• 1:55:41Danny Jones?

  A lot of people think that the Department of Energy stuff is really connected to the whole UFO, UAP topic.

• 1:55:47Speaker 03

  God, yeah, people love talking about that, don't they?

• 1:55:50Danny Jones?

  There's, um, I actually had a dude on the podcast who was in charge of the Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana, I believe, which is one of the sites that carries the Minutemen, has the Minutemen missiles housed underground in the bunkers. And this was one of the officers that had his hand, his fingers on the nuclear codes. Like, so this guy had all the codes and he would get the signal from the football, whoever had the football to like, do the launch codes, whatever. And he would turn the keys and do all that stuff. And, you know, these people traditionally have to be very psychologically at the top of their game. They have to be sharp. They can't, they have to, uh, undergo like routine psychological evaluations because, you know, if they fuck up or they come in on a bender one day or are going through marital issues and they decide, you know, to end it all, it wouldn't be good. Um, anyways, so there

• 1:56:35Danny Jones?

  was an event that happened where there was like this big crazy orb that showed up above the Air Force Base and like the security guy at the gate called down like, yo, boss, this thing's here. We don't know what's going on. And it, um, what happened was it shut down systematically, one by one, every single nuclear silo that they had at the base. And he had never seen that happen in his entire career. And the following day, uh, Boeing contractors showed up and tried to get them to sign NDAs. And this didn't just happen in Montana. This happened in multiple air force, air force bases with nuclear weapons, not just in the US, but in Russia.

• 1:57:13Danny Jones?

  So, you know, there's all, there's all, there's a huge correlation between like sightings of unidentified flying objects and nuclear blasts, nuclear tests, and at nuclear sites, which is very interesting. You know, it's not nothing. You have lots of accounts of very highly qualified military people saying this.

• 1:57:31Speaker 03

  I mean, he's probably lying. Let's be honest.

• 1:57:34Danny Jones?

  All of them, though? You think they're all lying?

• 1:57:35Speaker 03

  It's not that many people, you know? Like, if you ask me, you know how many schizophrenics there are in the United States of America? It's about 1% of the population. So we have about 3 million people who can like make up stuff.

• 1:57:44Danny Jones?

  Yeah, but you think the guy, you don't, you don't think this, you think the guy that was in charge of the nuclear weapons had his hand on the, on the.

• 1:57:48Speaker 03

  It doesn't have to be. It doesn't have to be schizophrenic, right? I know this guy. He's probably a great guy, right? He might have really seen something, right? Like, I'm not saying he didn't see something. Like, I, I was recent at Air 51, actually, went there to wave at the security guards. It was good.

• 1:58:01Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 1:58:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, it was real fun. You could, you could just drive there through the, like, the closest place you're allowed to go.

• 1:58:06Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:58:07Speaker 03

  And there's like a little sign there, a little gate there. And there's like a very ominous surveillance van pointed directly at you from a nearby, you know, hill. And you can just kind of wave to them. So I did that. And, you know, on the way back, I saw UFO. So there was like full on glowing orb in the sky, you know, crazy, like 3D glowing orb like behind the horizon. It was the moon. But it was like, so weird looking.

• 1:58:30Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 1:58:30Speaker 03

  It was the weirdest thing I've ever seen in my life. It did not look like the moon. Like, it truly did not look like the moon. Like, I can't describe how much it did not look like the moon. Like, I could have sworn to you, like, I would have sworn to you, it's not the moon. Different color, different shape, different size. It was like 3D. It was like much closer than the moon is supposed to be. But, nah, this is just a rare atmospheric phenomena where just it makes the moon look much bigger than it actually is. Like, you know, just looked it up afterwards. It's just a thing that happens.

• 1:58:57Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 1:58:58Speaker 03

  So this is an example of just like weird things happen in the sky. Have you seen sprites before? Look up, look up like atmospheric sprites and like find a good picture of them. Like, this is a great one. Like, weird shit happens in the atmosphere.

• 1:59:10Danny Jones?

  Of course.

• 1:59:10Speaker 03

  All the time. It is crazy how many like normal phenomena. I, I knew an, uh, Air Force pilot ones, who encountered St. Elmo's Fire. Well, yeah, like, look at these things.

• 1:59:20Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:59:21Speaker 03

  Like, look at these things. Like, imagine you see this shit.

• 1:59:23Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah. There's all kinds of crazy shit.

• 1:59:24Speaker 03

  Like, what the hell is this, right?

• 1:59:25Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there's also earthquake lights. You ever heard of those?

• 1:59:27Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah. I've seen those. I've heard of those, too. Crazy. Like, ball lightning, you know, St. Elmo's Fire, like stuff. Like, I remember, like, an Air Force pilot I, I met before, he, he told me that when he was flying on a mission once, he encountered St. Elmo's Fire, which is a real phenomena, where it's basically like a creeping green flame, kind of that slowly crept over his airplane and then in through his windshield and gave him, and gave him an electric shock. And this is a real phenomenon.

• 1:59:50Danny Jones?

  This is St. Elmo's Fire?

• 1:59:52Speaker 03

  Yes, this is a real phenomenon. It's basically plasma that, uh, it was, and we have accounts from this going back to like ships from like the 15th century.

• 1:59:59Danny Jones?

  Plasma is weird.

• 2:00:00Speaker 03

  It, plasma is so weird, man. So like, I'm not saying this guy didn't see something, right? I'm totally believe he can see, he's seen it. I could have believed that there might have also been an electric fault around the same time, right? Even the lightning strike, you know, could cause an electric fault, right? But like, my problem with UFOs is not that there are weird things in the sky. There are definitely weird things in the sky. My problem is aliens. They're not aliens. There are not aliens up there. Like, the chance of aliens being involved here is just like, let's be real here. Like, no, it's not that. If they're, if we're saying like there are strange atmospheric phenomena that could create EMPs, I'm open to that. That seems like something that could happen. Like, lightning strikes can create EMPs.

• 2:00:36Danny Jones?

  What do you think about the testimony of those Navy pilots who, uh, reported seeing those Tic Tac objects moving at insane speeds that defy physics and gravity?

• 2:00:44Speaker 03

  Like, again, I'm sure they saw something. But like, one of the Tic Tac videos is confirmed was a swan.

• 2:00:50Danny Jones?

  Was a what?

• 2:00:51Speaker 03

  A swan.

• 2:00:52Danny Jones?

  A swan?

• 2:00:53Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:00:53Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:00:53Speaker 03

  It was a swan over the water and the automatic distance detection detected the distance wrong. And so if you get the distance wrong, it looked like it was moving insanely fast because it misjudged how close it was. There's a similar thing.

• 2:01:06Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there's, well, there's definitely one, I don't know if this is the one I'm thinking of, but I think the Go Fast video where it shows this thing moving across the water surface. And it looks like it's moving at thousands of miles per hour. But one of the things that it doesn't explain is the parallax effect, right? So if you have a spy plane that's flying in one direction with a camera mounted at the bottom of it, shooting like, let's just say, for example, a bird, right, flying. And the bird's flying the opposite direction and you have the, you have the water and the waves of the ocean below that, you're getting this parallax effect, making this thing look like it's moving at insane speeds that are trying to find physics. That thing can certainly be explained away. But like, a high level of veteran Navy pilot who's been flying jet airplanes his whole life, uh, that explains this thing on his radar and visually, like.

• 2:01:50Speaker 03

  I believe he saw something.

• 2:01:51Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:01:52Speaker 03

  I believe he saw something. Like, there are many things that, like, again, there are weird things in RCI. I truly believe he saw something. Is it an aircraft or that is like, is piloted by a little green man? No, it's not.

• 2:02:03Danny Jones?

  What do you think it could have been?

• 2:02:05Speaker 03

  It could have been many things, you know? It could have been like electromagnetic interference. It could have just been like, you know, um, it could have been a software bug, like literally, like.

• 2:02:13Danny Jones?

  Maybe he saw it with his eyes. He saw it visually.

• 2:02:16Speaker 03

  There are many ways in which you can see things and then get it wrong. Like, there's a thing in criminology that eyewitness reports are actually extremely unreliable. Like, this is actually a really good rabbit hole to go down. Like, one of the first things I did when I got into debunking UFO videos is I just like read up on like, how reliable are eyewitness testimonies actually?

• 2:02:33Danny Jones?

  Not reliable at all.

• 2:02:34Speaker 03

  No, not at all. Like, including very good people. Like, this is not an indictment of their character. So a big problem is.

• 2:02:40Danny Jones?

  Human memory is very fallible.

• 2:02:41Speaker 03

  So the thing is, there's a problem where when you doubt people's eyewitness accounts, it sounds like you're doubting them as a person. And that's not what I'm saying. I'm sure this guy's a great guy. I'm sure he's trying to tell the truth.

• 2:02:51Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:02:51Speaker 03

  But like, we have 100 years of criminal, criminological research that just you cannot actually rely on eyewitness testimonies for like anything. Like, even, like, there was like a guy in a room who stabbed another guy. And you have 10 witnesses. Like, three of them are going to tell you there were two guys stabbed.

• 2:03:08Danny Jones?

  Right. I, I understand what you're saying. You're, you're totally right about that. That's a thing. But you, you have these pilots and their whizzes who are in the cockpits with them corroborating their stories. And it's not just one group of people. There's multiple Navy pilots that are doing, that are saying this.

• 2:03:20Speaker 03

  I, I agree. And how many Navy pilots are there? How often do they see a weird thing in the atmosphere? How often do they happen to be correlated? And also, another problem with witness testimony is contamination. If they both land and like, dude, did you see the X? Immediately contaminated. The other person will now remember much more likely to have seen X. There is, like, again, I'm not trying to doubt these people. I, I'm sure they are great people who are really reporting accurately what they remember. I do believe this. But. Just the, the, the amount of evidence you have to overcome to like, jump to anything more than like, there might have been a weird thing in the sky is very large. It's like, there are just many weird things in the sky. There are many weird things in the sky. Human memory is extremely fallible.

• 2:04:03Speaker 03

  So if you say it to me, there are weird plasma effects in the atmosphere, 100%. Totally believe it. If they tell me, I saw a weird light that, you know, I don't know what it was. Totally believe them 100%. If someone tells me there's an alien intelligence with a spacecraft, I'm like, dude, what are you smoking? Like, how could you come to that conclusion? Like, how, what?

• 2:04:25Danny Jones?

  I don't think, I don't think these guys believe it was an A. They're just saying what they saw. They saw, they saw something moving at insane speeds that they'd never seen before. And they were seeing it so often that they kept reporting it and nothing was happening.

• 2:04:37Speaker 03

  This makes perfect sense to me.

• 2:04:38Danny Jones?

  They were, they were blowing the whistle because it was a safety concern.

• 2:04:41Speaker 03

  I believe them on this. I do. I think there are many things. Like, there are many things that could cause this, you know, including like, for example, like just like neurological effects. Like, just sometimes, you know, people, for example, pressure on your eyeballs can make you see things. You know, if there's different air pressure on your eyeballs, sometimes you see things. Like, there are just many things. I'm not saying that nothing happened here. Obviously, also, some of those are real aircraft. Like, obviously, you know, before the B2 and so on were revealed, people who talked about UFOs, obviously, they were sitting stealth bombers.

• 2:05:10Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:05:11Speaker 03

  Like, recently in DC, we had the 250, you know, anniversary kind of flyover. And they flew over with the, you know, the scary, you know, old stealth bombers. And dude, they look like UFOs. Like, I'm not gonna lie to you. Those things really look like frying saucers. Like, really.

• 2:05:28Danny Jones?

  Do you think it's possible that, like, uh, private defense contractors or the Department of Energy has some sort of technology that is not, oh, not made available to the public yet? They're keeping it secret?

• 2:05:37Speaker 03

  Oh, absolutely. I don't think, I just don't think it's that exciting. I think, you know, they have, you know, the F-352. You know what I mean? Like, I, I, I do think that obviously they have, like, better aircraft than is currently publicly known. I'm certain they have better electronic warfare systems than currently exist. Like, obviously, also, like, the microwave weapons are definitely real, like the Havana syndrome stuff. I'm sure we have stuff like this. This is all based on current physics. It's a hun- I am so certain that the military has weapons like this. I know they're working on their laser weapons and all kinds of stuff, but it's not exotic physics.

• 2:06:08Danny Jones?

  Well, why is, why is it being made such a spectacle in Congress? And there's these hearings with all these politicians, and you have James Clapper, of all people, sitting in the crowd?

• 2:06:19Speaker 03

  Well, there's a couple of reasons, I think. One is that there are genuine scammers involved here. Like, one of the, like, whistleblowers who was a Air Force defense contractor, I forgot who it was.

• 2:06:30Danny Jones?

  David Grush?

• 2:06:31Speaker 03

  Maybe. I forget who it was. Was an owner of Skinwalker Ranch.

• 2:06:35Danny Jones?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:06:37Speaker 03

  So like, this guy's obviously just a scammer. Like, he's genuinely just a scam artist, right? He's just doing this for attention, right? And there's a thing where just like, people sometimes don't believe that smart or competent people could be taken in by scam artists, but like, scam artists can in fact get really far. Like, if you're a good scam artist and you have a good gig going, you can actually get really far.

• 2:06:55Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:06:56Speaker 03

  And so like, I think a lot of the recent waves are just because this guy, I don't know if it was that guy or someone else, but, you know, just like, got in further than he could and he got a good media cycle.

• 2:07:05Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:06Speaker 03

  And again, I do think there are weird things in the sky.

• 2:07:09Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:07:09Speaker 03

  But also, the US military is very large. There are a lot of people in the US military. Is it like, so hard to believe that a couple of people are a little bit on the weirder side? Or you're a little bit more on the scam artistry side? Like, it's not that hard to believe, right? So, all of this, to me, like, doesn't rise to like, really hard to explain. This is all within normal for me. Like, this seems like, oh yeah, of course, we would see weird stuff in the sky. Of course, some people would say some crazy stuff. Of course. If we were talking about like, actual alien intelligence, you know, or something of the sorts, it would be so infinitely more crazy what's happening right now. Like, first of all, explain to me exactly how an alien that, you know, so advanced that it can, you know, cross the entire galaxy, then crashes on our planet? Like, how the hell does that happen?

• 2:07:53Danny Jones?

  Well, the alien thing, I don't think most people believe that they're extraterrestrial aliens.

• 2:07:59Speaker 03

  Oh, is that, is there a new theory I haven't heard of yet?

• 2:08:00Danny Jones?

  Yeah, there's a new theory. The new theory is that this could be some sort of advanced,

• 2:08:09Danny Jones?

  advanced humans that are living on Earth, the same way that me and you are sitting here, talking on a podcast, talking about superintelligence. Simultaneously, there's a people, a group, a group of naked people running around in the rainforest right now that don't even speak any kind of language.

• 2:08:20Speaker 03

  Right.

• 2:08:21Danny Jones?

  So if you could say that, okay, if that's possible, maybe it's possible. Is it possible that there's people that are more advanced than us that live somewhere where we can't see them? Under the oceans in Antarctica or something like that, that are sort of surveilling us or, or doing something like that?

• 2:08:36Speaker 03

  I don't think so, because you would have a history of how they got there. You know what I mean?

• 2:08:40Danny Jones?

  A history of how they got there?

• 2:08:41Speaker 03

  Yes. Like, to develop technology like this actually requires massive civilizations. Like, developing very, like, if you want to, say, you want to develop a new fighter plane, this actually takes literally millions of people cooperating to do this. You can't hide literally millions of people on an advanced industrial supply chain. There is, you can't make semiconductors without millions and billions of people involved in the process. The world is actually very mapped. Like, there really aren't places that we don't.

• 2:09:08Danny Jones?

  Except for the oceans.

• 2:09:09Speaker 03

  Except for the oceans, but even there, we like, do kind of know what's down there. Like, it's not really a surprise.

• 2:09:14Danny Jones?

  We know more about the surface of Mars than we know about the oceans.

• 2:09:17Speaker 03

  So like, people keep saying this, and I think this is like, topographically correct, but like, clearly not chemistry or biologically correct. Obviously, we know much more about like, the chemistry, the biology, et cetera, of the ocean than we do about Mars.

• 2:09:30Danny Jones?

  We discover new life in, in our oceans almost every fucking day.

• 2:09:33Speaker 03

  Absolutely. But like, let's be honest, every time we discover a new life, it's like some fish. It's never like, we discover some crazy new animal that we've never seen before. It's like, there's another fish.

• 2:09:42Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:09:43Speaker 03

  Like, they source, you know, it's just like.

• 2:09:44Danny Jones?

  There's some shit that we see down there that it's like, just take this video and tell, tell people that you found this on Mars, and people would be fucking blown away. And they would totally believe it. But the fact that they say is, oh, we found it on Earth in the oceans. It's like, ah, whatever, who cares?

• 2:09:59Speaker 03

  I mean, I mean, I would be blown away if we found bacteria on Mars, for what it's worth. And yes, there is crazy stuff down there, right? Like, what was the, like, long spindly squid that had such a great video that I loved? There was this really great video of like, this like, horrifying squid thing just like, floating by an oil rig recent, like.

• 2:10:16Danny Jones?

  Oh, really?

• 2:10:17Speaker 03

  What was that?

• 2:10:18Speaker 07

  Oh, you're talking about the elbow squid?

• 2:10:21Speaker 03

  Maybe.

• 2:10:21Speaker 07

  It was a giant elbow squid.

• 2:10:23Speaker 03

  That might have been the case. I like, like.

• 2:10:25Danny Jones?

  I've never heard of.

• 2:10:25Speaker 03

  Like, long, like, marionette kind of like, oh yeah, this guy.

• 2:10:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah, yeah, look at that thing, bro.

• 2:10:30Speaker 03

  Look at this guy.

• 2:10:31Danny Jones?

  How big is this thing?

• 2:10:33Speaker 07

  It's not that big. It's like, uh, 15 feet.

• 2:10:36Danny Jones?

  That is freaky looking. That looks like an alien.

• 2:10:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's so good.

• 2:10:40Danny Jones?

  Imagine if we saw this under, under the ice sheet of Europa.

• 2:10:43Speaker 03

  I mean, hell yeah.

• 2:10:44Danny Jones?

  You know?

• 2:10:45Speaker 03

  I mean, it'll, it'll go hard, but like, the, the, the, these things are cool, right? It's, I, I, I remember reading once, I think I was reading a blog post at some point about like, an undersea, like, welder. And we do work at Pitch Black and this, you know, just like welding pipes. And he said that like, when you weld down there, every so often, something will just bump into you. And you just have to ignore it. Nothing you can do. It's just like, there's something down there, who knows? Very funny. I don't know why, but like, I always feel like I would love to do undersea welding.

• 2:11:12Danny Jones?

  Have you seen the saturation divers?

• 2:11:14Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 2:11:15Speaker 02

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• 2:12:15Danny Jones?

  That shit is nuts, dude.

• 2:12:18Speaker 03

  It's kind of.

• 2:12:18Danny Jones?

  Those guys are like astronauts.

• 2:12:19Speaker 03

  It is. If, like, if, if I was, you know, if I had to do like, a blue collar job, I think that's the job I would take.

• 2:12:25Danny Jones?

  They live in this pod, hundreds of feet under the ocean. And because of the pressure, they have to stay there and live there. They wake up, put on their giant dive suit, and then they descend to this little hatch in the ground. And they're underwater for like, for all day, like, eight hours a day. They're underwater welding and doing repairs on pipelines and stuff like that.

• 2:12:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. Like, I'm just saying, I get it. The depth's call.

• 2:12:47Danny Jones?

  That would be a fricking pretty cool job.

• 2:12:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. You see what I mean?

• 2:12:50Danny Jones?

  Psychologically, though, I don't know if I could handle it.

• 2:12:52Speaker 03

  I'm not sure.

• 2:12:52Danny Jones?

  I might go crazy.

• 2:12:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, I might go crazy too, but like, it seems like a cool ass job. Like, and you also get paid so well. Like, they only go for like, you know, three week stints and then make, you know, as much money for the like, half the rest of the year.

• 2:13:03Danny Jones?

  Those guys would be safe from AI?

• 2:13:04Speaker 03

  Uh, probably not. They, they're very dependent on overseas, you know, infrastructure to survive down there. But, yeah, I don't know. Like, I think there's a lot of weird things in the world, absolutely. And I think it's very fair to ask questions, right? And to be like, what the hell's going on here? But in a sense, there's also a surprising amount that we do know about how the world works. And there's like, a surprising amount of things that we can rule out. There's some things that we can't rule out. Like, there definitely are weird things that are going on in the world. Like, I, I, I don't disagree with this, but anyway, but like, stuff like civilizations, like advanced technology, is just like, actually the kind of thing that is like, kind of hard to hide. It's like, actually genuinely so. Like, this is not the kind of thing. I also remember talking to someone who.

• 2:13:46Speaker 03

  Uh, he specialized in studying black projects. So like top secret projects.

• 2:13:50Danny Jones?

  You talked to somebody who specialized in doing what?

• 2:13:53Speaker 03

  Uh, studying.

• 2:13:54Danny Jones?

  Studying them.

• 2:13:55Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you're like an academic.

• 2:13:56Danny Jones?

  This person was like an academic researcher.

• 2:13:58Speaker 03

  University.

• 2:13:59Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:13:59Speaker 03

  And he studied like.

• 2:14:01Danny Jones?

  Black projects, meaning?

• 2:14:03Speaker 03

  Top secret projects.

• 2:14:04Danny Jones?

  Top secret projects where the funding is untraceable.

• 2:14:08Speaker 03

  Untraceable, yes. And he said that all top secret projects have one thing in common. They suck.

• 2:14:15Danny Jones?

  Why?

• 2:14:15Speaker 03

  Because it is such a nightmare to get anything done. You can't talk to anyone. You can't coordinate. You, you can't like, just like ask for the thing you need to do. You can't call up, you know, the experts of what's done. You need like massive amounts to bureaucracy to do anything. Like the moment a project goes top secret, the project usually dies. Because it's just such a bureaucratic nightmare to get anything done.

• 2:14:40Danny Jones?

  Interesting.

• 2:14:41Speaker 03

  If you want to see the most advanced technology in the world, it's actually at startups. Because startups have the least constraints on building new technology. Like, top secret projects are under so many constraints that slow them down.

• 2:14:53Danny Jones?

  But they also have a limited funding.

• 2:14:56Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 2:14:56Danny Jones?

  Look at all the crazy achievements, like the craziest inventions of our time, like GPS, for example, created by DARPA. The Google search algorithm, the whole search engine of Google was funded by DARPA and the CIA.

• 2:15:10Speaker 03

  None of these were top secret projects, though.

• 2:15:12Danny Jones?

  But they were, they were funded by, by, by military agencies.

• 2:15:16Speaker 03

  DARPA is one of the greatest scientific agencies in human history.

• 2:15:20Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:15:20Speaker 03

  DARPA specifically is unbelievable. DARPA is, but most of DARPA is completely public. Like you can just look up what DARPA funds. Like there are top secret things they fund, but like most of the thing.

• 2:15:30Danny Jones?

  A lot of things are public, yeah.

• 2:15:31Speaker 03

  Most of them are public.

• 2:15:32Danny Jones?

  Yep.

• 2:15:33Speaker 03

  Like, and most, it's DARPA is just.

• 2:15:35Danny Jones?

  A lot of it's based on sci-fi stuff.

• 2:15:36Speaker 03

  Oh yeah. They, they investigate a lot of sci-fi stuff and most of it doesn't work. Like this is another thing. Just because DARPA gave a grant to something does not mean it works. Most of them don't work. DARPA's main function is to fund things that don't work.

• 2:15:48Danny Jones?

  Mm hmm. Right. Throwing shit at the wall, right?

• 2:15:50Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 2:15:51Danny Jones?

  That's the way sci-science should be done, but just the problem is it's, it's the, the motivation behind it is world domination.

• 2:15:57Speaker 03

  I mean, you know, whom's it among us, right? You know, it's like, I, I understand. I think DARPA is a great example of funding a lot of really, really great science, including not necessarily, you know, like a lot of the science that DARPA funds is very positive to the world without military effects. So, you know,

• 2:16:15Speaker 03

  defense is always going to be one of the main motivators for scientific progress.

• 2:16:19Danny Jones?

  Yes.

• 2:16:20Speaker 03

  It's always been the case. It's always going to be the case, right? Security is a core thing. It's, it's an arms race. It always will be, you know, we always need enough security to keep ourselves protected and to protect our way of life. This is just how the world works. So, you know, if you don't have a military, you don't have a country.

• 2:16:34Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:16:35Speaker 03

  It's that simple, right? So as much as, I, I like to say sometimes is that if you have a lot of weapons, you never need to use them because no one's going to mess with you.

• 2:16:45Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:16:45Speaker 03

  If you have a little bit of weapons, you're definitely going to need to use them because someone will attack you. So in this regard, I'm a big fan of America and we're having full military, military superiority. I think this is great. It means that no one can attack us. It means that we can have our, you know, wonderful way of life here and also, you know, hopefully defend our allies, you know, so they can have their wonderful ways of life. And, but this does require continuing military superiority.

• 2:17:07Danny Jones?

  Yeah. And, uh, you know, one of the things that's interesting on how that whole, the whole like military industrial complex, starting in the Cold War with companies like DARPA and all this funding for science, right? Like even going back to the Manhattan Project, right? Like the most incredible scientific achievements of all time that were, were funded by the US government and that were under these big US agencies, you know, for example, NASA. Right?

• 2:17:34Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 2:17:36Danny Jones?

  Which Warner Von Braun was like one of the head guys at NASA. Has been over the, over, since probably the early 2000s, there's been this big push to move everything private out of the public sector into the private sector. And, um, you know, with NASA basically and with Elon Musk and like the NASA AIM Center and, and all these other companies taking all these contracts to launch satellites into space and, you know, with surveillance and all that, it's like, it is crazy to, to see like one of the big shifts has been moving all this stuff private into the private sector where

• 2:18:17Danny Jones?

  it's now, it's immune from FOIA, right? For one thing, you can't, you can't FOIA those private contractors that are doing all this stuff. And you've, you've created this insane competitive environment.

• 2:18:31Danny Jones?

  Where, you know, shit's off the leash and they're just running full speed ahead to do stuff. And, um, you can't regulate a private company as well when the private company is paying the people that regulate it.

• 2:18:47Speaker 03

  Yep. I think this is a big problem. You want to hear my favorite example of this?

• 2:18:50Danny Jones?

  What's that?

• 2:18:50Speaker 03

  My favorite example is, is that, um, generally the CIA and other foreign intelligence services like NSA and so on are not allowed to, to surveil American citizens. They're not allowed to collect data on us. You know, FBI can, but like the CIA, for example, can't. Cause they're foreign intelligence services. You know, the FBI is domestic. They are foreign.

• 2:19:08Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:19:10Speaker 03

  But if a private company, where so do happen to collect data on you and the CIA happened to buy that data, that's completely legal.

• 2:19:17Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:19:18Speaker 03

  Insane. Like just.

• 2:19:19Danny Jones?

  All the phone companies.

• 2:19:20Speaker 03

  Completely bypassing the point that we have these protections as American citizens, completely being bypassed, just terrible. Like truly not in the spirit of the constitution. But, um, I agree with you. There's this thing where like a lot of the, you know, greatest things America ever did were private public cooperation. They were through institutions like NASA, DARPA, et cetera, through these beautiful, wonderful, you know, state capacity, these credible institutions. Back in the day, it was a very honorable thing to go work for the government, you know, our best and brightest minds would very often go to serve in the government. This was a very normal thing to do. You know, our greatest scientists would love to go to NASA and, you know, DARPA and, you know, even serve in Congress and stuff like this in many instances.

• 2:20:03Speaker 03

  And there has been now this huge hollowing out now where if you're a young, smart person, you get gobbled up by, you know, Wall Street, you know, hedge funds or Silicon Valley, um, you know, tech companies, depending on your type of autism. And, uh, I, I think this is a real shame in many ways where there's, there's an interesting paradox that happens with governments. Where if your government is like kind of bad and it like fucks something up, it's very normal to be upset about this. And like the government's abusing us. It's bad. We should defund it. We should cripple it. We should weaken it. But then if you weaken it, well, now it's even less capable of doing good things. So it does even worse things. Now you get even more upset about it. So you want to cripple the government even more. So you cripple the government even more.

• 2:20:44Speaker 03

  And now of course the government is even more dysfunctional and does even less things. So this is, this is like death spiral. I do think that America has been in this death spiral a little bit for a while where our response to the government lacking capacity has been to take away more capacity. And so there's kind of this paradox here where if you want a just government to stay out of your business, you actually need a pretty competent government. Like you need a pretty strong government and it's quite competent, the staff by good people that has enough resources that can make good decisions. Like.

• 2:21:13Danny Jones?

  Hundred percent.

• 2:21:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. Like here's, here's a, here's a fun terrifying fact. Have you ever heard of the word call time before in the context of politics?

• 2:21:22Danny Jones?

  No.

• 2:21:22Speaker 03

  So this is one of the craziest things I've learned from talking to politicians in the US. So I, I was talking to a previous member of Congress. Again, these are the people running your country, right? Like we need our best and brightest, you know, working as hard as they can to lead our country well.

• 2:21:38Speaker 03

  He said that when he joined Congress, they gave him like a handbook of like how to run his office. Like how should you expect his day to be set up and stuff like this, right? You know? And so first terrifying fact, the amount of time per week that was set aside to read or learn new things was about 23 minutes.

• 2:22:01Speaker 03

  So then no time to read, no time to think, already really bad. Like obviously we want our politicians to have time to think. Like the fact that they don't have time to think is really bad.

• 2:22:10Danny Jones?

  It's insane.

• 2:22:10Speaker 03

  Like if I had 23 minutes to think per week, I would make bad choices too.

• 2:22:14Danny Jones?

  J D Vance just did a, a podcast with Joe Rogan and he was saying that he has no time to look at anything.

• 2:22:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, I believe him. It's a tough job.

• 2:22:21Danny Jones?

  He's like, oh yeah, that's something I want to learn more about, but you know, I have like maybe 10 minutes of free time a day. So.

• 2:22:26Speaker 03

  Yes. And this is true. So I think this is crazy, right? Like this is so crazy that we let, that our politicians are under so much time pressure and they're so crunched that they don't have time to think. Of course they're going to make bad choices.

• 2:22:39Danny Jones?

  Who is thinking?

• 2:22:40Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:22:41Danny Jones?

  Is anybody thinking?

• 2:22:43Speaker 03

  It's a good question, isn't it? That's a really good question. I think this is really at the heart of the problem. When I go to DC, one of the first things I really learned after talking to many politicians and staffers is this, oh my God, everyone is miserable. Everyone is so overworked. Everyone is suffering so much. Everyone is being yelled at here, there, by their party, the other party, by the administration, by their constitution. Everyone is so stressed all the time. Literally everyone I talked to in DC is so stressed. Of course, they can't think well. I couldn't think well under these circumstances either.

• 2:23:19Danny Jones?

  Right. And these people also aren't the best and brightest.

• 2:23:23Speaker 03

  That's another thing as well.

• 2:23:24Danny Jones?

  No offense to them, but like, what super genius do you know that's like, I want to be a congressman when I grow up?

• 2:23:31Speaker 03

  And I think that's really bad. Like, this is a sign of a problem in our civilization. In a good civilization, it would be obvious that our best and brightest want to lead our country. This would be obvious. And it would be obvious to us that we want our best and brightest to lead our country. Like, what could be more important than for our best and brightest and our most moral and our most upstanding people to lead our country? What could be more important? So, there's this crazy situation, right? Where, again, although our best and brightest are optimizing like, you know, advertisement to, you know, push eating disorders on teenage girls at, you know, Meta or whatever, instead of, you know, leading our country. I think this is a huge problem. And there are many ways, you know, you can fix this. There are many things you can do. Like, you know, Singapore is a pretty good example of a country that like, has a lot

• 2:24:15Speaker 03

  of very competent civil servants. And they, yeah, like, I remember the first time I met people from the Singaporean government, because I was running a startup, just, you know, like, AI startup, we were in AI safety, we weren't really well-known yet. And we got an email from the Singaporean government, of all people. And they were like, hello, we are the Singaporean government, we are trying to learn about AI and AI safety. We heard that you know a lot about this. Would it be fine if we came by and asked you a bunch of questions? And I'm like, sure, that seems like a very reasonable thing to do. So, came in like, three very reasonable, nice young people, took out their iPads.

• 2:24:47Danny Jones?

  Where did they come to see you at?

• 2:24:49Speaker 03

  I was in London at the time.

• 2:24:51Danny Jones?

  You were in London?

• 2:24:52Speaker 03

  So, they flew out, some nice, young civil servants, like in their 30s, they came out, they had, took out their iPads, took out their notes, and they're like, hey, thank you so much for taking the time. They asked me a bunch of really detailed questions about the technology, about what regulation could be done, what would happen if we did this, what did I think about this, took notes about every single thing. They said, thank you so much, that was really helpful. It's gonna take a bit of time, as you know, to create legislation, so, you know, probably won't see legislation, might take us, you know, three to six months. I'm like, three to six months? Oh my God. That's, like, they were apologetic about it, like, oh, we're so sorry, like, you probably won't hear back from us for like, three to six months. I'm like, that's incredible. And, so, it's very interesting that, in a sense, it was very normal. It's just, these were just young, competent people, you know, Oxford, you know, Cambridge, educated people, that just work for the government.

• 2:25:36Speaker 03

  And, so, here's a couple, like, you know, I'm not an expert on everything Singapore, but there's a couple obvious things they do. One thing is, for example, they benchmark their public salaries by the private sector. So, if you take a public sector job, you make the same money as if you worked at a tech company. Obviously, a good thing to do.

• 2:25:52Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:25:53Speaker 03

  Obviously, we should pay the same amount. If you're a top talent, if you're like, a top-tier tech executive, and you want to work for the government, we should pay the same money. Very reasonable thing to do. Another thing they, for example, do in Singapore, is they have a program where, if you're a young Singaporean, and you are accepted into like, a top 10 university in the world, like Oxford or something, they will pay for your whole thing, they'll pay for the whole education, they'll pay for your whole stay there, they'll pay for everything, and in return, afterwards, when you're done with your degree, you come back to Singapore and work for the government for five years. Super reasonable thing to do. Like, just incredibly reasonable thing to do. Just like, have people get a great education, and then work for the government.

• 2:26:29Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:26:30Speaker 03

  So, that's why a lot of young people, and like, just young, educated people, work for the government in Singapore. It's just a very sensible thing to do.

• 2:26:36Danny Jones?

  And that's why a lot of young people in the United States are very frustrated with the way it's going here.

• 2:26:41Speaker 03

  Absolutely. Again, this is the thing where it's like, this death spiral, where we get frustrated, so no one wants to join the government. Because no one's smart joins the government, the government gets worse.

• 2:26:50Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:26:51Speaker 03

  Because it's even worse, even less people want to join the government. And then you have this death spiral. And this is kind of, I think, to a large degree, what we're seeing right now, is we're seeing this complete death spiral, where no one wants to even help the government, they want to like, harm the government, which I understand, right? Again, it's very easy to hate the government. But, that just makes the problem even worse. We have to, in fact, engage with the government, you know, young, smart people, you know, have to engage with the government, we have to try to make the government better, we have to find ways to make the government better. Like, what other options do we have? Like, this is the only way things are gonna get better.

• 2:27:22Danny Jones?

  Yeah. That's a very good point. Sounds great, man. Like, it's very reasonable, and it's just what we should be doing here.

• 2:27:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:27:32Danny Jones?

  But, like, this is a message, I feel like, that needs more of a signal, like, we need to get this out to more people and help people understand this, and it's just like, how, like, what are the steps to making this happen? And I feel like, like, I said this so many times already, it just feels like an insurmountable task.

• 2:27:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. No, it does. And it is, in a sense, such a huge task, and it's so incremental, but you just have to start working on it, you have to start chipping away on it. We have a lot of smart people in this country. America has, you know, some of the smartest, hardest-working people in the world. If these people put their minds to this, I absolutely think that we can make progress on this problem. Like, there's no question in my mind to this. Of course, we can make progress. And, look, Singapore was a dirt-poor, third-world country, tropical island off the coast of Malaysia, like, 70 years ago.

• 2:28:19Danny Jones?

  Hmm.

• 2:28:20Speaker 03

  And now they're one of the most developed, you know, first-world, beautiful countries, no crime, no problems, like, best food in the world, by the way, sorry.

• 2:28:27Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:28:28Speaker 03

  I am a defender, Singapore is the best food in the world.

• 2:28:30Danny Jones?

  What kind of food they got?

• 2:28:31Speaker 03

  So, Singapore has a tradition of, like, a hawker market, so, kind of like, street food. So, you can go to these, like, crazy, open-air kind of things, we have like, all these teeny stalls that are like, you know, staffed by like, one Malaysian grandpa, you know, like, just put like, some crazy thing on your plate that you don't even know what it's called, and it's just the most delicious thing you've ever eaten. And because it's a first-world country, no food poisoning. Because, you know, you do this in a third-world country, it's sketch. But here, you can get all the variety of, you know, Malay food, Indian, because like, Singapore is very diverse, so there's a lot of like, Malay food, Indian food, you know, Western food, it's got a bit of Chinese food, you kind of get everything. That's kind of why I like it, like, look, yeah, exactly, there's like, a classic, like, hawker market, you have all these little stalls.

• 2:29:12Speaker 03

  It was so funny, the first time I went to a Singaporean hawker market, I sat down at one of those tables, I remember it, I was like, eating just like, a, like, some like, slop of rice, and like, an undercooked piece of chicken, and it was...

• 2:29:26Danny Jones?

  Undercooked?

• 2:29:27Speaker 03

  Yes, undercooked. It was like, really undercooked, it's called Heineanese chicken rice, you can look it up, it's supposed to be undercooked. And, it was the most delicious chicken dish I have ever eaten in my life, bar none, nothing else compares, it was unbelievable. It looks like absolute shit.

• 2:29:41Danny Jones?

  Wow. Are you getting sick eating undercooked chicken?

• 2:29:44Speaker 03

  Ah, it was so good. It was a first-world country, I've never gotten sick in Singapore, ever.

• 2:29:47Danny Jones?

  I get food poisoning eating shit here all the time.

• 2:29:50Speaker 03

  Me too. Me too. America is one of the countries that does still give me food poisoning. But, yeah, it was so funny, I remember sitting down with my, like, stupid rice dish, you know, like, a paper plate, you know, and then, there's a little Chinese lady, and her daughter come by, and they ask like, oh, is this seat open? Also, they all speak English in Singapore, which is very nice, unlike other Asian countries. And, they're like, oh, is the seat free? And I'm like, oh yeah. And they take off their bags, you know, they're full bags, laptops and everything, put them down and just leave, just walk away to get food, because there's no crime in Singapore, no petty theft.

• 2:30:20Danny Jones?

  Jeez, that must have been like, being in the Twilight Zone.

• 2:30:22Speaker 03

  It was actually crazy, I was like, I was so shocked that they did it at first, and then I realized, oh right, there's no petty theft here. You can just put your laptop, your MacBook on a public park bench, and come back the next day and it'll still be there.

• 2:30:35Danny Jones?

  That's so crazy.

• 2:30:36Speaker 03

  Like, you could, there's a thing where, like, in the West, we've come to believe that crime in cities are the same thing, is that if you have a large city, you must have crime. This is not true. You can go to an Asian continentry like Singapore or Japan...

• 2:30:48Danny Jones?

  Japan, I've heard the same thing about Japan.

• 2:30:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, Tokyo, like, Tokyo, you can, 2:00 AM, downtown Tokyo, dark alleys, you will see single, young women, walking alone home, with no fear in the world. There is just, Tokyo is the, like, the largest, or, you know, maybe it's the third-largest now, like, metropolitan area, in the whole world, like, 35 million people, right? Incredibly dense, incredibly huge city, there's no crime, there's just no crime.

• 2:31:13Danny Jones?

  And also, no pollution? Maybe, that's the wrong word, no litter?

• 2:31:17Speaker 03

  No, it is so clean, it is so spotlessly clean, all the streets are clean, everyone is polite, you know, everything is quiet, in ways that other cities are not, like, people don't scream, people don't listen to music in public, like, you go on the subway, everyone is perfectly polite and quiet, like, it's just, everything is clean, orderly, and so on. Look, Japan has its problems, like, it has its problems, I wouldn't want to live in Japan personally.

• 2:31:40Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:31:41Speaker 03

  Yeah, because the economy is just disaster right now, because they're aging so quickly. The population is aging extremely quickly, and they're not handling it well. That's the biggest problem, which is such a shame, because Japan is such a wonderful country, and wonderful people too, just like, a very, very lovely culture.

• 2:31:53Danny Jones?

  They got a big problem with their wildlife, their seafood industry, they slaughter dolphins and shit.

• 2:32:00Speaker 03

  That's, that is also a big problem, that is also like, the whales, I don't even know why they do that.

• 2:32:04Danny Jones?

  The yakuza is a big part of that, where they're like...

• 2:32:06Speaker 03

  I think it's, these days is much better, in this regard, the yakuza got much better, but like, the whale thing is actually a very funny thing, I remember talking to my Japanese friends about this, and they're like, they don't get it either, because no one likes whale, it's considered like, a very low-class food, actually, which is so weird, I thought it would be like, a super-high delicacy, no, it's considered like, a low-class food, like, a bad food, like, it's like, cheap, bad food. So, I don't know what's up with the Japanese and whales, I don't know why they even bother, very, very strange. But, I really recommend...

• 2:32:31Danny Jones?

  What they really don't like, is they really don't like Americans imposing their values on them, especially after we dropped two nukes on them.

• 2:32:38Speaker 03

  Fair enough, right? Like, you know, and, you know, I think the Japanese are a very civilized, nice people, you know, very modern, very reasonable people, I think they have a lot of very nice values, I think a lot of beautiful, nice culture and so on. Again, they have their problems, they're like, corporate culture, not good.

• 2:32:52Danny Jones?

  Your corporate culture?

• 2:32:54Speaker 03

  Corporate culture in Japan is very toxic, very toxic.

• 2:32:57Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:32:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, they have this, they have this thing where, you're promoted basically only on seniority rather than performance, which is just very toxic. So, like, I could never handle this, right? Like, I'm a startup America guy, like, I, young, ambitious, I want to get to the top, right? That would be almost impossible in Japan. There's a reason that Japan doesn't have startups, which I think is a huge problem. So, like, other countries do have their problems, I'm not saying many reasons, but the reason I really recommend always to people, like, visit Tokyo or Singapore, is just, as a Westerner, to experience what a large city is like, that is completely clean and has no crime, and that this is just possible. Like, I'd never... Thought that this was a thing you could do until I had been to these cities. And I was like, this is what I want in America.

• 2:33:43Speaker 03

  This is what I want. I want us to have, you know, nice, beautiful cities, you know, with good food, you know, where we don't have to worry about crime, where people are safe and happy. Like, this is just a thing we can do, like evidently so. Like, here's an example of it having been done. So I think we can do this as well. And I think the bottleneck to this is to a large degree, again, government, you know, just having better, better laws, better police enforcement, better, you know, municipal services, better, you know, stuff like this. Like, I think there's just a lot that can be done here. Um, it's not that they have better technology than us. God, they don't. It's very funny. A lot of people think Japan is like some crazy futures country where they'll be like in the future, but they're kind of stuck in the nineties.

• 2:34:21Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:34:22Speaker 03

  It's really funny. It's really, really funny. I really recommend visiting it if you have it.

• 2:34:26Danny Jones?

  There's not, there's not any interesting technology coming out of Japan?

• 2:34:29Speaker 03

  Should there, like, yeah, but like, not really. Like, most of the really futuristic stuff comes from America and/or China.

• 2:34:35Danny Jones?

  Yeah, Taiwan.

• 2:34:36Speaker 03

  Or Taiwan, of course.

• 2:34:37Danny Jones?

  Uh, I heard that this, the, um, the, uh, semiconductors, the semiconductor companies in Taiwan are moving to America.

• 2:34:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, they just, they were creating Arizona, I think. They're starting to create factories and stuff like this.

• 2:34:49Danny Jones?

  Big one in Arizona.

• 2:34:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, I remember that. That was also very interesting.

• 2:34:53Danny Jones?

  Someone told me that they, I forget who said this, but they were telling me that, uh, they, they believe that the Trump administration wants, or the US government wants China to take Taiwan because that would force all the time, the semiconductor companies to move to the US.

• 2:35:11Speaker 03

  I have no idea. I sure hope that's not true. I would, it would be extremely sad to see the horror that that war would be. Like, it's really hard to say how horrible that war would be and how many good people would die. Like, Taiwanese are such a lovely country.

• 2:35:23Danny Jones?

  It doesn't seem like it's gonna be a real war. It seems like it's gonna be a soft takeover. Like, it seems like the, well, there was one of the leaders, the opposition leader in Taiwan, uh, was like meeting with Xi Jinping a couple of weeks ago. And they're like, working on some sort of diplomatic something or other.

• 2:35:39Speaker 03

  Look, if they can find a diplomatic agreement that is to the agreement of everyone involved, fantastic, right? Um, you know, it would be very, very sad to see the, the bloodshed that would happen if an actual war were to happen with Taiwan. Because, oh my God, would it be bloody? Because it would be a siege. You know, it wouldn't just be like a, oh, you know, we have one battle or whatever. It would be a siege on an island. And that would just be like, I mean, it's hard to say the horrors. So I really hope it never comes to that. Taiwan is a very nice country. Um, hope that never comes to pass.

• 2:36:08Danny Jones?

  Yeah, well, I mean, the, the problem with America, though, is that presidents can't get anything done domestically. The only shit that they can get, and this goes back to Carter, right? There's a famous Carter quote where he was like getting ready to be sworn in as president. He asked somebody if they had any, I forget who it was exactly. Um, Stephen Kinzer told me this on a podcast years ago. He was asking somebody for advice and he's like, don't waste your time with domestic politics. You're not gonna get anything done. You wanna get anything done, it's all international foreign policy. And that's what we seem to be focused on, you know, since World War II.

• 2:36:43Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 2:36:43Danny Jones?

  Foreign policy, can't get it. And that's why, you know, everything seems to be going to shit here.

• 2:36:48Speaker 03

  Interesting. I'm not, I don't know enough about how much of that is true. I do think that domestic policy is very important. And, you know, um, I, I agree, like, I mean, so we've been talking about the last hour, right? It's just how much, um, is left on the table here by us not having good domestic policy, by us not doing just the obvious, straightforward, reasonable things domestically and not updating our, you know, systems, our institutions with the times as they change. I mean, in a sense, you know, to get back to the problem of AI and superintelligence, in a sense, that's also just an example of us not rising to the problem, to steward it responsibly. It's kind of the same kind of thing. You know, like, imagine we had the current, you know, you know, broken system we had now and, you know, nukes would be introduced right now.

• 2:37:30Danny Jones?

  Right.

• 2:37:31Speaker 03

  Like, could you imagine? Like, that would be, that would be bad.

• 2:37:35Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm. It seems like right now, we're pretty much relying on like AI whistleblowers leaving companies to come, say what's, like, the recent, the guy who, uh, recently, uh, he left OpenAI and then they gave him this non-disclosure agreement to sign right after he left, saying, you can't say anything negative about our company or you forfeit all your shares. And he said, fuck it, I'm gonna let everyone know.

• 2:37:58Speaker 03

  Yeah, that was Daniel, I know him.

• 2:37:59Danny Jones?

  And that blew up in their, in their face when he did that, which is like, we need more people to do that, that's doing the right thing.

• 2:38:05Speaker 03

  I agree. I mean, I think it's even better to not build the death machine in the first place. But if you currently find yourself working at the death machine factory, I highly recommend leaving.

• 2:38:13Danny Jones?

  Hmm. Have any, have, have any of the employees from these companies ever reached out to you or like contacted you and like sort of?

• 2:38:21Speaker 03

  Most of them are cowards, so not really, but I, I know some of them, like, from various ways, you know, I, I, you know, a mutual friend here, a mutual friend there. But like, it's hard to overstate how much most of the people working at these companies just like don't really give a shit.

• 2:38:37Danny Jones?

  Really?

• 2:38:37Speaker 03

  And they just don't really think, you know, it's not that they're bad people, right? I'm not saying like evil.

• 2:38:41Danny Jones?

  They're making lots of money.

• 2:38:42Speaker 03

  They're making lots of money.

• 2:38:43Danny Jones?

  Diffusion of responsibility.

• 2:38:44Speaker 03

  Exactly. In a sense, one of the great innovations of the 1980s and 1990s was that sociopaths learned how to domesticate nerds.

• 2:38:54Danny Jones?

  That's hilarious.

• 2:38:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's where a lot of how these tech companies are run, it's that you have these sociopathic managers and so on, create like little playgrounds for the autistic engineers, you know, where you can just, oh, look, you just make the number go up. Don't worry about what the number means for mental health of children, you know? Just, we're gonna pay you a lot of money and you get to solve all these cool math problems. It's kind of very infantilizing in a way, but a lot of these are just fucking love it. Like, they fucking love just make a number go up. Like, I can't tell you what glee and joy these people have if they don't have to think about anything other than making a number go up. This is the happiest they are in the whole world. And sociopaths basically figured out that this is very useful, that if you could just get them to make a number go up, like, you know, user engagement or, you know, returns

• 2:39:39Speaker 03

  on investment or whatever, that this is just very profitable.

• 2:39:41Danny Jones?

  Yeah.

• 2:39:42Speaker 03

  So a lot of these engineers who work on these things really just don't think about anything. They don't think about the consequences of their actions. They don't think about what these numbers really mean. They don't think about where this is going. It's kind of like, like, that's, that's the boss's problem. Like, you know, that's, that's the, the, the big scary manager, he'll, he'll, he'll figure it out, it's not your problem. You're just, you, you just work here.

• 2:40:02Danny Jones?

  Right. Jesus Christ, Connor, what are we gonna do, bro?

• 2:40:06Speaker 03

  Well, the most important thing we need to do right now is to ban superintelligence. That's the most acute thing. Once we've solved that, then we need to get money out of politics. We need to have, you know, much more better liability and whistleblowing frameworks. We need to increase compensation for public servants so we get the best talent into there. We need to create just like a better view of the future. Like, like, this nihilism that exists in the world, and especially in the West, is so toxic, where just like people don't even try to engage with things. They're just like, oh, it's all corrupt, it's all broken, can't do anything, which is of course a self-fulfilling prophecy. So I think there's a lot of things to do. The most important thing that we need to do right now, unfortunately, as I say, is superintelligence. Like, I'm very sorry, but like, this is just very acute. Like, this can happen in one to two years, you know?

• 2:40:47Speaker 03

  Contract, contact your congressperson, controlai.org, we have tools to contact them right there. That's the most acute thing. And then we have many, many other problems to solve. But the important thing is that, like, we have solved hard problems before. I do think we can reform the government, it's just going to take time. This is just a thing we can't do in one year, right? This is a thing that's going to take probably decades, but it's totally doable. Again, I, I think I said this earlier, I said, my vision of a good world is that everything is fixed all at once. It's that things are getting better. You know, we are making progress, that every year it's gonna be a bit better, that my children will be able to live with a more just and more functional US government than we are currently living. And I think we can totally achieve that. I think that is this like, very, very doable.

• 2:41:32Speaker 03

  We actually know quite a lot today. Like, if you think back to the founding fathers, you know, how incredibly prescient they were about so many different things, you know? They got some things wrong, not gonna lie, they got some things, you know, not quite right because they just, they didn't know. I think one thing, for example, they just underestimated was technology. You know, they just, they didn't see it coming. I mean, you can't blame them, right? And, you know, 1700s, can't blame them for not seeing the internet coming, right? How were they supposed to know? But that just means we need to innovate. You know, we need to think about how these things affect our governance. But compared to our founding fathers, we do actually now know a lot of things about how to build better states. We do actually have a lot of economics and political theory and game theory. Like, imagine, these people didn't even have game theory.

• 2:42:17Speaker 03

  You know, they didn't, they didn't have any of this. They were just making it up kind of on the fly just by thinking about it, right? We actually know a lot nowadays about how to build good countries, about how to build bureaucracies, about how to do justice, how to do legal codes and stuff like this. So I think we can do a lot. I think we can improve a lot. It's just going to take a lot of smart and hardworking people not giving up, if that makes sense.

• 2:42:40Danny Jones?

  Mm-hmm. Totally, man. Very well said. Thanks again, man. Uh, fascinating stuff. Where can, uh, people go to do more, contact you, uh, learn more about all this stuff?

• 2:42:55Speaker 03

  Most important, controlai.org.

• 2:42:57Danny Jones?

  Okay.

• 2:42:57Speaker 03

  Contact your lawmaker from there, there's also more information on there. If you wanna do a little bit more than this, and potentially not just on AI, but you wanna try to help the world, make the world a better place, I help run a volunteer group, actually, called Torchbearer, that work focused on humanist values inspired by the founding fathers and many others, uh, called, you can go to torchbearer.community, where we dedicate at least two hours per week to try to make the world a better place, to try to address these big problems. So if that sounds interesting to you, you can check that out. I have a very Google-able name, so, you know, you can find me, um, on various things. All over the world, internet, just Google my name.

• 2:43:32Danny Jones?

  Cool, man. Well, thanks again. Um, I'll make sure I link all that stuff below for folks. Is this your site, Torchbearer?

• 2:43:37Speaker 03

  That's us. That is us.

• 2:43:39Danny Jones?

  We also have Patreon questions. Oh, we have Patreon questions. All right, we got a couple of questions from Patreon. Um, but that's the end of the podcast, so thank you.

• 2:43:46Speaker 03

  Thank you so much for having me.

• 2:43:47Danny Jones?

  Fascinating stuff, that was very fun.

• 2:43:48Speaker 03

  Very fun.

• 2:43:48Danny Jones?

  All right, goodnight, folks.