God, AI, and the Coming Violence | Will Manidis

In Episode 479 https://hiddenforces.io/podcasts/god-ai-and-the-coming-violence-will-manidis of Hidden Forces, Demetri Kofinas speaks with Will Manidis, co-founder of healthcare AI company ScienceIO, 2019 Thiel Fellow, and early-stage investor, about the collapse of secular institutional legitimacy, the reassertion of divine faith and political violence as organizing forces in modern life, and what the concentration of AI-generated wealth means for the social contract, labor, and the future of economic participation. The first hour traces Manidis's background — his early upbringing as a Quaker and his experience building and selling a successful healthcare AI and data science company — before turning to the theological arguments animating his writings on technology and the innovation cycle. He contends that the secular institutions Western societies have built and iterated upon since the early twentieth century have exhausted their capacity to provide order and meaning, and that we are entering a period in which ancient forces of divine faith and savage violence are reasserting themselves. They discuss the collapse of state legitimacy, the competition over people and capital amid eroding institutional trust, the renewed interest in Christian theology, and the rise of a new political coalition spanning anti-war progressives, tech entrepreneurs, libertarians, and the religious right. The second hour turns to artificial intelligence and its consequences for the political economy, labor displacement, wealth disparity, terrorism, and the social contract. Manidis argues that AI wealth is rapidly concentrating among a narrow set of individuals and zip codes, foreclosing the broad economic participation that previous technological waves made possible. Drawing a parallel to the First and Second Industrial Revolutions — and the labor violence that preceded the New Deal — he contends that the new social contract emerging from this wave of technological innovation will not be negotiated peacefully, but will be accompanied by explosive acts of violence directed at infrastructure and people. They examine the vulnerability of data centers and the electric grid, the prospect of a new left-wing coalition of aggrieved white-collar workers, and the international implications of AI-driven job destruction across Southeast Asia and other economies that have benefited from decades of service-sector outsourcing. The conversation closes with a discussion of Manidis's essay "Nobody Walks to Canterbury" and his concept of totemization — the idea that in a world of infinite digital supply, only those things capable of motivating genuine sacrifice and surrender of daily comfort will command real economic and monetary value. Subscribe to our premium content—including our premium feed, episode transcripts, and Intelligence Reports—by visiting HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you'd like to join the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community—with benefits like Q&A calls with guests, exclusive research and analysis, in-person events, and dinners—you can also sign up on our subscriber page at HiddenForces.io/subscribe https://hiddenforces.io/subscribe. If you enjoyed today's episode of Hidden Forces, please support the show by: Subscribing on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334, YouTube https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC8URhgYos5fjHqFSO4RSIEg, Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP, Stitcher https://www.stitcher.com/podcast/demetri-kofinas/hidden-forces, SoundCloud https://soundcloud.com/hiddenforces, CastBox https://castbox.fm/channel/2629539, or via our RSS Feed http://hiddenforces.libsyn.com/rss Writing us a review on Apple Podcasts https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/hidden-forces/id1205359334 & Spotify https://open.spotify.com/show/0TK6u251zGSlMgJKH6cOaP Join our mailing list at https://hiddenforces.io/newsletter/ Producer & Host: Demetri Kofinas Editor & Engineer: Stylianos Nicolaou Subscribe and support the podcast at https://hiddenforces.io https://hiddenforces.io/. Join the conversation on Facebook https://www.facebook.com/hiddenforcespod/, Instagram https://www.instagram.com/hiddenforcespod/, and Twitter https://twitter.com/hiddenforcespod at @hiddenforcespod Follow Demetri on Twitter at @Kofinas https://twitter.com/kofinas Episode Recorded on 04/05/2026

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

• 0:00Demetri Kofinas?

  What's up, everybody? My name is Demetri Grafinus, and you're listening to Hidden Forces, a podcast that inspires investors, entrepreneurs, and everyday citizens to challenge consensus narratives and learn how to think critically about the systems of power shaping our world. My guest on this episode of Hidden Forces is Will Manidis, the co-founder of healthcare AI company ScienceIO, Thiel Fellow, and an active early-stage investor who writes thoughtfully on topics of technology, religion, society, and business for several independent publications and through his Substack at minutes.substack.com. Will and I spend the first hour of our conversation discussing his background, including his

• 0:44Demetri Kofinas?

  early upbringing as a Quaker and his experience building and selling a successful AI and data science company, before we turn to the central theological arguments that animate his writings about technology, the innovation cycle, and the political movements that grow up around them. It's Will's contention that the secular institutions we have been building and iterating upon in Western societies since the early 20th century have exhausted their capacities to provide order and meaning, and that we are entering a period in which the ancient forces of divine faith and savage violence are reasserting themselves. We discuss the ongoing collapse of state legitimacy, the competition over people and capital amid eroding institutional trust, as well as the renewed interest in Christian

• 1:27Demetri Kofinas?

  theology and the rise of a new political coalition consisting of anti-war progressives, tech bros, libertarians, and the religious right. The second hour is largely an exploration of artificial intelligence alongside its consequences for the political economy, labor displacement, wealth disparity, terrorism, and the social contract. Manidis argues that the wealth being created by AI is rapidly concentrating among a narrow set of individuals and zip codes, foreclosing the kind of broad economic participation that previous technological waves once offered, and which created the foundations for more equitable distributions of capital and resources. Drawing a parallel to the first and second industrial revolutions,

• 2:10Demetri Kofinas?

  And specifically to the labor violence that preceded the New Deal, he contends that the new social contract that will emerge from the latest wave of technological innovation will not be negotiated peacefully, but will be accompanied by explosive acts of violence directed at both infrastructure and people. We discuss the vulnerability to data centers and the electric grid, how the threat of labor displacement could lead to a new left-wing coalition of aggrieved, highly motivated and educated white-collar workers, and the international implications of AI-driven job destruction across Southeast Asia and other economies that have greatly benefited from the outsourcing of service jobs in the last several decades. We close the discussion about Will's essay, "Nobody Walks to Canterbury," and his concept

• 2:53Demetri Kofinas?

  of totemization, the idea that in a world of infinite digital supply, only those things that can motivate a person to get on a plane, drive cross-country, or somehow surrender or sacrifice their daily comforts and routines in search of the truly extraordinary will command real economic pull and monetary value in the world to come. If you want access to all of this conversation, go to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed, which you can listen to on your mobile device using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, which includes Q&A calls with guests, discounted access to third-party research

• 3:38Demetri Kofinas?

  and analysis, and in-person events like our intimate dinners and weekend retreats, you can also do that on our subscriber page. If you still have questions, feel free to send an email to [email protected], and I or someone from our team will get right back to you. And with that, please enjoy this truly extraordinary and immensely valuable conversation with my guest, Will Manidis.

• 4:08Demetri Kofinas?

  Will Manidis, welcome to Hidden Forces.

• 4:12Speaker 01

  Thank you for having me.

• 4:13Demetri Kofinas?

  So Will, I don't know much about you, other than that you grew up a Quaker and went to a Quaker boarding school. Then you went on to a tiny engineering school outside of Boston that I'd never heard of before. But apparently it's a very good school.

• 4:26Speaker 01

  It may not exist. It was a very good school at some point. We will see what the next decade brings.

• 4:31Demetri Kofinas?

  You were also a Thiel fellow. You played lacrosse. You started and sold a healthcare AI and data science company in a nine-figure exit. You lost 150 pounds in a year, which is remarkable. You are 50% Greek, and you were also recruited into a cult, almost recruited, I should say.

• 4:49Speaker 01

  Almost recruited, yeah.

• 4:51Demetri Kofinas?

  So first of all, is everything I just said correct? And what, if anything, of importance did I miss in that short biography?

• 4:57Speaker 01

  Mostly correct. I think many kind of pure-blooded Quakers would reject my claims to Quakerism. I grew up in Quaker schooling. My mother was a Methodist, my dad a Catholic, and Quaker schooling was like a pretty steady medium for the two of them. I would claim to be a Quaker, but I have not stood for a clearness committee. So I think some Quakers would disown me. But otherwise, all correct.

• 5:22Demetri Kofinas?

  So you're also the first person I've ever met who's Greek or partially Greek and also grew up a Quaker. What does that actually mean? So like, the only thing I know about Quakers is they wear funny hats. And I think I've seen them mostly on horses and buggies, but maybe I'm mixing them up with the Amish.

• 5:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, so there's this weird intersection between Quakerism, the Amish community, and the Mennonites. And I would say the Quakers are largely kind of far outside of this. So the way to think about Quakers is it's kind of a Great Awakening era faith that comes out of the Midlands of England from William Fox. And Quakerism is really defined by kind of five cultural testaments. We call the spices: simplicity, peace, integrity, compassion.

• 6:03Speaker 01

  The E is either environmentalism or something else that we've recently invented, kind of post-Cold War, and an S for stewardship. So the way to think about it is it's people that try to live simple lives, people that try to practice simple faith. And I think the core of Quaker religion is a thing that we call meeting for worship, which is we sit in a room in silence. The room is kind of austere. It's typically a white room with a bench facing the front. Everyone sits around, sits in silence for an hour, and that's our fundamental form of worship. If you're called to speak, that is, if you have the voice of God, Quakers believe that there's a small piece of God inside of all of us that you can get to through a process called discernment, discernment, sitting in silence and reflecting. If you're called to speak, you can stand before the meeting and deliver

• 6:46Speaker 01

  testimony. But other than that, Quakers live relatively modern lives, largely centered in the Philadelphia suburbs. There's a ton of Quakers in Africa right now, but it's like a very, very different branch from the kind of stuff I grew up in. And they're largely in decline. I would say Quakers are almost extinct outside of the Philadelphia suburbs and have largely become kind of a left-wing political project, which is somewhat disappointing to me based on their origins.

• 7:12Demetri Kofinas?

  So it's clear from having read almost everything you've written in the last few years that your faith forms the bedrock upon which your life is built and is the prism through which everything that you write about seems to be filtered, all moral questions and decisions about how to live a human life. Talk to me a little bit about your relationship to your faith, how it has shaped who you are, and how it informs the way in which you interpret the subjects that you've been writing about and the arguments that you've been making.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I grew up kind of intensely tied in this Quaker community, right? Same school, K to 12, boarded the last couple of years. That was Sunday, meeting for worship, Thursday, meeting for worship. So at least two hours a day in this active community. And the thing that was incredibly useful about Quakerism is that you kind of have a basis set of norms that you can call upon. Like, certainly not everyone in the school was Quaker. I would argue maybe 10% were actively Quaker or would consider themselves ongoingly so. But it gave you kind of aesthetic cultural norms that were useful. And then I end up at Olent College, which, if it's not the least religious college on earth, it's pretty close. And we're next to Wellesley College, which is simultaneously kind of

• 8:23Speaker 01

  the most religious and zealotry and the least religious and conviction campus in America. And it shocked me the degree to which faith was not a set of tools that everyone had to understand what was happening in the world. I largely ignored the question of faith while I was running a company. We ran the business for five years before selling it. And I did not stumble my way back to Christianity until the end of that journey, which was tremendously stressful, and ended up falling back into it. But subsequent to selling it, I've been trying to work through this question of what is the function of technology in our society? And what is the function of business in our society?

• 9:06Speaker 01

  And I think it's useful to process these through a shared basis set of religion. And I've been orienting towards a narrow set of ideas in this essay series I've been publishing over the last year. But I think there is very limited contemporary writing on the question of faith and work that I find useful, and I'm trying to fill some of that gap.

• 9:26Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, so you preempted my next question, which was to ask you really about your writing, because your writing was introduced to me through the Canterbury piece, the "Nobody Walks the Canterbury," which is a beautiful piece. By the way, my favorite piece of all is one that in some ways doesn't deal directly with technology, but it certainly speaks to faith, which is your piece about Norway and your time spent in Norway. That was beautiful. So I want to recommend that people actually, why don't you actually give out your Substack now, just so it's top of mind for people?

• 9:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's minutes, M-I-N-U-T-E-S dot substack dot com. You can also find it on my website, willmenetes dot com. Minutes is a Quakerism joke and Quaker meeting when we hold a meeting for business, which is a fascinating concept that only exists in Quakerism, where you sit together in silence and discuss matters of business for the community, which I think is very exciting. Minutes are the records that we keep from those meetings. So you can read them on Substack, you can read them all on Twitter. There's probably 25 essays now.

• 10:23Demetri Kofinas?

  Yeah, so I mean, AI is a big part of this and AI, as I mentioned, you started and sold a healthcare AI and data science company. And you're, again, you went to an engineering school, so you have that background. But I would say that religion factors in even more consistently throughout all the writing. And what I wanted to ask you essentially was what inspired you to begin writing? Like, what was it that was percolating inside of you that needed to come out?

• 10:49Speaker 01

  Yeah, I've struggled with the definition of technology over the last 10 years, right? If you think about kind of the arc of the internet, we think of it as kind of a set of net new technologies in the 90s. There's a concept of an internet business, right? Like, a business that could not exist but exist on the internet, like pets.com, you sell food online. And then if you think about what the internet is today, it's like a much more amorphous thing, right? Like, there's no such thing as like an internet business. Like, in some way, all businesses are internet businesses today. So if we're going to ask and answer questions about technology, we have to define what we think of as technology. And it's not like there's software companies anymore, right?

• 11:30Speaker 01

  There are companies that use software, and that happens to be everything. So we start to think about technology not as a set of, you know, technologies that we use to build things, but a way to view the world. And I think if you look from kind of the mid 2000s to present, we see kind of three eras, right? Era one is like internet businesses, where this is like a toy that we use to sell things on the internet. And then we see software companies as such, which are like building software, shipping software, selling subscribable software. And then we see this kind of internet social wave, where it starts to be clear that technology is kind of a core fabric of our world. And then finally, in this AI thing, where technology is the underlying substrate of everything that's happening in our world today, there is nothing outside of it.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  It, much like the writers have said about techno-capital, it absorbs everything. So if we are going to treat technology as an all-absorbing substrate that the world is going to operate on, it's useful to think about it in religious terms. And a question that I've been repeatedly dealing with is why does it have this millenarian instinct that every single technology and wave that we've seen...

• 12:35Speaker 01

  Suggests that it's about to bring about the end of times. And what is the question of morals, given that every technology wave has become less and less religious, clearly, but less and less religious in substance, more and more religious in shape, and none of them have been durable, and none of them have lasted.

• 12:52Demetri Kofinas?

  Can you elaborate on that? I'm not sure I entirely understand.

• 12:56Speaker 01

  Yes, so if you think about the shape of most religions, you have kind of a long period of prosecution of believers, filled with rituals of proof of belief, martyrdom, tests in community, et cetera, followed by a rewarding of the faithful that comes with infinite wealth, infinite blessings, infinite post judgment. This is self evidently the AI wave, right? Like, if you think about AI Doom, if you think about AI Foom, if you think about permanent underclass, these are like profoundly orthodox ideals. And you're like, oh, that's okay. AI is like uniquely millenarian, like it's a unique thing. And then we look at crypto.

• 13:40Speaker 01

  And like crypto had the same stuff, right? Like diamond handsing is like, you know, a conviction of faith. There's this like infinite wealth when Bitcoin goes to a billion. And then you just run through every technology movement. And what you find is they're very similar to kind of like first century Christianity, where they're so confused about why their Lord is not coming back, right? They're like waiting for a reward to the faithful, and then they collapse on themselves. So you can map every technology movement onto this religious arc, and none of them have figured out how to persist past a single generation. Like, one of the pieces I wrote with Nabeel Qureshi this year, Renit Virtue, we dealt with the question of what does a durable moral system for technology look like?

• 14:21Speaker 01

  And came to the conclusion that it must necessarily be at least religious in shape, if not in content, because you can't have this arc of judgment to salvation without a transcendent ideal to orient towards.

• 14:33Demetri Kofinas?

  When you talk about them collapsing onto themselves, are you describing the business and innovation cycle of technology?

• 14:39Speaker 01

  Also, the communities themselves, like if we think about crypto, right? Which was inexplicably linked to effective altruism, right? This utilitarian core.

• 14:49Speaker 01

  That movement ended with a false prophet that claimed to be beyond morals and then was found to be a fraud and collapsed onto himself through kind of a pure expression of utilitarian values.

• 15:01Demetri Kofinas?

  Sam Bankman-Fried.

• 15:02Speaker 01

  Sam Bankman-Fried, yeah, right. If you take SBF at his word, which I think we should do, his acts were purely rational under a utilitarian frame, but they obviously don't work, right? Like, if we have religions that practice their faith in the way that Sam Bankman-Fried practiced his faith, they would destroy themselves after a generation. And I think today crypto and effective altruism, which is a movement of debatable merit, would be much stronger if they had transcendent ideals rather than this kind of collapse on itself thing.

• 15:33Demetri Kofinas?

  So I see that in crypto. I see that in AI, in the early AI movement. What is the equivalent in the internet, in the internet boom?

• 15:42Speaker 01

  You have to cut into multiple things. I certainly think in the social internet boom, it was this influencer thing that if you were famous enough on the internet, you could live essentially similar to like a living saint, right? People would be excited to see you, they would give you free room and board, you'd be extended civility in places where you otherwise would not have it. You could live like a saint and that was like a near term imminence of judgment thing, where if you could develop enough of an audience, you know, you'd be saved.

• 16:10Demetri Kofinas?

  So the reason, though, I ask more specifically is because I suppose I could see that maybe when it comes to the saint analogy for social media, though I think that extends to celebrity in general. But I definitely see what you're saying when it comes to crypto. I just didn't see anything like that. It may have been because I was too young to really like.

• 16:27Speaker 01

  I still think part of it is like it's accelerating, right? Like, if you think about each concussive internet wave, it is more totalizing. Like, the internet eats more of the world with each of these waves. And if you think about AI as kind of the final wave of techno-capital absorption, it is the final wave where like tech as such can eat the pieces of the world that it cannot touch yet. The internet has been like a slowly totalizing force that just eats more and more. And I think we're, we're in kind of the final wave here, or at least one such final wave.

• 16:57Demetri Kofinas?

  So do you feel like people are turning more toward religion?

• 17:01Speaker 01

  I get in trouble thinking about this a lot because every six weeks, a journalist wants to write a story about how more young people are going toward to St. John's in the West Village and everyone's religious again. And if you believe Rastus that it's not true in the numbers, and if you go to St. John's, it seems to be true. So I think it's like hard to make normative claims about this that are useful. I do think the AI thing is like the single greatest jump ball of meaning that we've ever had. Like the questions of how then do we live and how do we conduct ourselves are incredibly consequential over the next few years. And I just don't think there are particularly good answers, secular answers to them that exist outside of religion.

• 17:41Demetri Kofinas?

  So we live during a time where Christian theology and references to God and the Bible have become a way of signaling one's participation within a new right wing coalition consisting of members of the anti-war tradition, the religious right, and what we would broadly describe as tech bros. Before I ask you any more specific questions about your relationship to the mystery that Christianity grapples with, which I think that you did so beautifully in that Norway piece, I'd love to understand what you think is happening. What explains the rise, not just of this observable renewed interest in the Christian faith, but the

• 18:25Demetri Kofinas?

  rise of a very specific political movement and coalition that puts Christianity and the gospel at its center?

• 18:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it's useful to separate a handful of factor inputs. So if you think, I think there's a couple of things that are happening on top of each other. There is the Christian right that is overlapping with the tech right, which I think are maybe at best, parallel forces that occasionally touch each other. And the question of what the tech right is and why it failed, I think is an interesting one that I would love to think through at some point, but people much smarter than I am are writing books about it at this point. But I would view the tech right as a thing that broadly Took up the coat of Christianity, but perhaps was not intimately Christian-inspired.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  And then you have kind of a revitalizing of what I would call low church Christianity in the right, which is, you know, the rise of the rest, the kind of J.D. Vance core of the party, the people I grew up around in PA, which is good, right? There is some sense in which is this pieces of elite culture that are being ascribed to what was predominantly a working-class culture, like we are prioritizing these for the first time in a long amount of time. And then there's, I think, a more interesting thread that I haven't totally figured out what to do with is what I would call kind of the new elite politics, or like the new Tom Wolfe, which is like, the people that would be on the Upper East Side, holding

• 19:58Speaker 01

  parties to the Black Panthers in Bonfire of the Vanities, are now going to St. John's in the West Village. And this like high church, smoke and incense kind of Christianity is becoming a class signifier of a certain kind of new intellectual elite. And I don't totally know what to make sense, I don't know totally how to make sense out of that, but one of the questions I've been concerned with over the last few years is this question of elite politics. And I do think this kind of Christian, high church Anglican thing is going to become more prominent as part of that.

• 20:33Demetri Kofinas?

  So, one of the challenges I had in preparing for this conversation, Will, is that you pull on so many different threads in your writing. So what I decided to do, rather than try to create some kind of structural narrative that we follow, is I pulled a lot of quotes from a lot of the different pieces that you've written, and I want to read them to you and to our audience, and I want you to comment on them. So, one of them, this first one here is from Civis Romana Sum, and you write, quote, "My contention is that we are entering a period where the appeal of religion becomes, for a growing number of people, not an anachronism, but a live option. When everything in your life, your family, your community, your career, your property, is greenlit by the enemy, when violence can reach you anywhere and knows who you are,

• 21:18Demetri Kofinas?

  the question of what protects you becomes deadly serious, very fast. And for the first time in most of our living memory, the state doesn't have a convincing answer, no matter how much it's willing to spend." So, give me the context here, first of all, that inspired you to write this, and what is the violence that you're referring to? And why is the state unable to protect us from it?

• 21:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think I was sitting in London writing this and outside of my hotel, you could just listen to people have their phones stolen out of their hands by guys on motorbikes. And there was just some sense in which day-to-day street life was much more chaotic than you wanted it to be. And I think overshadowing this was this was the week when the Brown University shooting happened, when that girl was killed on campus in a conservative club, that ran a conservative club in a study group.

• 22:07Demetri Kofinas?

  Can you please just summarize the details of that incident for people, most of whom will not know them?

• 22:11Speaker 01

  Yeah, there was a girl, I believe, from Alabama, I'll forget her name, which is a sin of mine, who was, went to Brown University and was a woman of faith, had been running a conservative club on campus and was shot dead by what was reported to be kind of a crazy on-campus homeless person who then went on to kill, I believe, a nuclear researcher in Brookline, Massachusetts. And the reaction to it on campus was terrifying, kind of similar to the weeks after the Kirk shooting. There was some sense in which violence, a useful way to think about America in the post-war era is that we could not provide a joint security guarantee for all of our citizens. But if you were wealthy enough, if you came

• 22:54Speaker 01

  from the right class circles, if you had the right skin color and you lived in the right communities, you could pretty much guarantee that you were going to live in what I dismissively call a no PVP zone, right? You could live in a place where you were not going to be killed. And the campuses of elite universities were perhaps the most clear examples of this, right? These are like, in like Tom Wolfe language, like beautiful WASP children being sent to consider the classics for four years. These are places where violence does not happen. New York largely, for people of a certain background and social class, was a place where violence does not happen. And you could always earn your way out of experiencing violence directly. And I just don't think that's true anymore,

• 23:35Speaker 01

  right? Like, one of my tensions across all the essays is there is this understanding that we came to after probably World War II, maybe after World War I, that we were leaving the driving forces of history behind, that if all of history was animated by divine faith and savage violence, this kind of two dueling forces, that we were now civilized and that things like institutions and things like states could-

• 24:03Speaker 01

  In some way, prevent them from touching our lives and that we lived kind of outside of our animal instincts or outside of our flesh and blood. And I just think that's clearly false. Like, the world is a profoundly savage place and the state cannot protect you from that anymore.

• 24:18Demetri Kofinas?

  But why can't the state protect us?

• 24:21Speaker 01

  I think it's because the state never could. It's too large and too diffuse. And it's hard to think of a coherent American identity that kind of, you know, connects the farmer in Tulsa, to the doctor in the Upper East Side, to the council housing on the other side of the city. There is no kind of cross-coherent cultural ideal that provides a reason to not return to savage violence and divine faith with the things that animate your actions. I also do think a big piece of this is just like the court and criminal justice systems don't work as well as they used to. Like, the prosecution of crime, the normalization of violence, the fact that scamming is just completely tolerated now.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  There's just all these ways in which society has become progressively lower trust that the state does not provide good answers for.

• 25:10Demetri Kofinas?

  What explains that? So also, it sounds like you're saying that most of what we consider to be policing was just self-restraint by people that were proceeding under the assumption that there would be repercussions if they were to act. And now that that has dissipated, many people are calling the bluff of the security state.

• 25:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, I just don't know why you wouldn't do crime today, right? Like, the state has told you that it is legal to do crime, that you are greenlit, that your families are greenlit. If you are an actor there that does not have morals, the efficient frontier is to do crime.

• 25:41Demetri Kofinas?

  And so what explains that, in your view?

• 25:43Speaker 01

  I do think religion provides a really neat answer to the question of why should you not behave in immoral ways, right? Like, even if the state does not see your actions, God will, and that's a useful frame. But more importantly, I do think part of it is just there is no... We've built all these secular alternatives to the concept of judgment, and they just don't work. Right, like if you think about cancellation as kind of a way to immonitize judgment, right, where you can look at the sins of another and cast them to hell during their life instead of waiting for the next one. That also provides for a culture where if you are not caught in the moment, there is no consequence to your actions.

• 26:26Demetri Kofinas?

  Hmm, so what we've broadly thought of as cancel culture, getting canceled for something.

• 26:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's clearly a Christian conception of judgment that's brought into this lifetime.

• 26:37Demetri Kofinas?

  And that if you're not publicly shamed or flogged for what you did, you can keep on doing it and there are really no other consequences.

• 26:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's a question of like, what is the relevant moral window, right? If I walk out of my door today and go to the Walgreens and steal something, if NYPD doesn't catch me in that moment, they're not going to catch me three months from now. And if there's not a benevolent God watching me, then who cares? Right? And there's just some sense in which if I'm not terrified of judgment, then I'm only concerned about what's going to happen to me in the moment. And if nothing happens to me in the moment, then I'm happy to continue transgressing.

• 27:10Demetri Kofinas?

  So there's another piece that I'm sort of debating on which one to quote right now. It's titled "The Server Has No Mods Left," and it relates to what you're talking about now. But I actually want to pull one more quote from the previous piece that I mentioned because you mentioned in your initial answer, or you drew this distinction between immobile and mobile citizens. And in that piece, you write, quote, "When protection fails for immobile citizens, a state decays slowly. When it fails for mobile capital, the repricing is sudden. The question for the next decade is which sovereigns can offer what Rome once offered: the cloak, the words, the guarantee that your person and property are inviolable, backed by a credible threat that makes violence against you and your property unthinkable."

• 27:53Demetri Kofinas?

  Can you clarify this distinction between protection for immobile citizens and mobile capital? How that translates into this notion of a sudden repricing and what that means in actuality?

• 28:06Speaker 01

  Yeah. So if you think about what gives a state legitimacy, it's mostly tax yield. Right? Like the US is worthless unless it can collect taxes on a large tax base. And the US has had relative global homogeneity because we have such great industry and that industry is a thing that is easily taxable. What is hard about the industries today is that they are not like brick and mortar factories. Right? If you look at the percents of GDP that are made up by things that are relatively amorphous, don't have brick and mortar contingents or could be moved, right? All of technology, all of finance, all of private credit, all of the professional managerial class.

• 28:48Speaker 01

  Those groups, if they are put at risk, can get up and walk away. That is not true of the lower and middle classes, right? Those are predominantly tied to zip code level careers. Right? The community I grew up in was filled with people that could not get up and walk away. Right? Were probably home poor, 90% of their net worth was tied into a house they couldn't get out of. Their careers were local, their communities were local, they could not move. But as a percentage of tax yield for the state, those are not where, you know, trillions of dollars of US military funding are coming from. Right? That's not where trillions of dollars of US police funding is coming from. And I think you're seeing this in small form with New York City,

• 29:31Speaker 01

  where many kind of small groups of incredibly high earners are choosing to just move to Miami, to get out, to move to Palm Beach. And if you talk to people that run large corporates or large kind of high taxable entities, you can see this move where they're choosing to move to places that offer a better ROI on their dollar. And I'm very skeptical of this idea of exit as a way to check the state. But certainly, if you go to London today, there's a lot fewer finance professionals living there than there were 10 years ago. Right? A lot of them have moved to the Gulf states. And it's somewhat crazy that when I want to see my British friends that go to Dubai and when I want to see my Dubai friends that go to London, right?

• 30:12Speaker 01

  Like, there is just more mobility in these classes than have ever existed before. And I think that provides a much deeper and profound check on the powers of the state than anyone ever has before.

• 30:24Demetri Kofinas?

  So would you say that most of the migration we've seen has been intrastate as opposed to international? So people moving from New York to Florida as opposed to people moving from New York to Dubai and renouncing their citizenship? And is that the primary reason why Americans aren't doing it internationally? It's because they still have to pay taxes unless they give up their citizenship? At which point you have to ask the question of, well, when does it no longer become worth it to be a US citizen? Which goes back to the central question of the piece, Civis Romanus Sum, I think.

• 30:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, I try to resist as much as possible thinking about America as a special economic zone. Like, I think of America much closer to a spiritual project in which I would, no matter the tax yield, struggle to give up my American passport because I believe in this thing foundationally as a, you know, a project of God so that we are manifesting here on earth. I don't think that's shared largely among the capital class. I am hearing more and more conversations among individuals that are incredibly high taxpayers about places like Uruguay as a preferential option for the rich in America today. It certainly happened in the UK, right? The reversal of non-DOM tax status in the UK chased something like 70% of the billionaires out of the country, right?

• 31:40Speaker 01

  If you go to the Gulf States today, many Americans, many expats that are there because of, as tax refugees, it's useful to think about tax much more as a marginal product that you are buying than it is a right the state has over your earnings. And I think more and more people are going to take it seriously.

• 32:00Demetri Kofinas?

  So I've been to Uruguay. It's not a great place to live.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  I really like it. I'm like a Uruguay truther, but I think it's like one of the last bastions of kind of like Anglo life accessible to you. You can like, you can shoot birds year round. It's like quite nice. It could use some mountains, like geographic variety, but like, I don't know. I think Uruguay is a pretty good option.

• 32:20Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, so this brings it, let me make a further point, which is that I'm also skeptical about You know, how many of the people that moved to Dubai now regret it because of the security aspects of this? You know, it's you're much safer living in London, presumably. I mean, I, you know, again, like

• 32:36Speaker 01

  I don't think you're saying, I disagree strongly.

• 32:39Demetri Kofinas?

  So just to clarify, the small instances, or maybe small is the wrong word, but the, what we think of as traditional criminality, those instances represent a larger threat to your safety in living in London than the periodic out potential fat tail outbreak of ballistic missiles raining down on your city?

• 32:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think people are very bad about thinking about personal risk, myself included. And the odds of my apartment being blown up once every 10 years is a much lower mental toll on me than the constant, is my phone going to be grabbed out of my hand on my streets? And right, I took a walk last night with a good friend who's having kids this year, is running a very successful business. And depending on the outcome of this year for him may choose, he's not a US citizen today, he may choose to not progress his application status provisional on if the business does well or not and move to the Gulf States. He's not, he's not Muslim, right? He's like a Canadian. And if you talk to him about it, he's just like, I don't want to raise kids in New York City or in San

• 33:43Speaker 01

  Francisco where I worry about their safety every day. And it's much easier to be in a low tax jurisdiction where I can sit. Do I find this like slightly distasteful as an American? Yes. Right. Like I'm tied to the mast on this one. But like, we should worry about the legitimacy of state in a world where there's an increasingly mobile, high tax yield class.

• 34:03Demetri Kofinas?

  I find this so interesting. Can we just, first of all, it makes me so sad to think that smart immigrants would leave the United States to go somewhere else. I wonder also to what degree that's because we've created a cultural atmosphere that is not hospitable to them and makes them feel like they're not wanted. But you know, I don't, we no longer live in New York City. We did up until the pandemic. I still go periodically. I don't want to live in New York City anymore for lots of reasons. It definitely feels not as safe as it was, but it doesn't feel as unsafe as it did when I was a kid. You know, I grew up for some years when I was a kid in Astoria, Queens. It was way more dangerous. And then even in the 1990s, my aunt got carjacked on the Major Deegan. Like,

• 34:47Demetri Kofinas?

  I remember even, you know, even some, even, again, I feel like we're kind of back to what it was somewhere in the 90s. And we live out in the suburbs now and it's completely safe. So I guess this framing or the preconditions or assumptions that underlie this conversation, I don't immediately accept them. So how unsafe is New York City really? I mean, we see people, I saw recently some guy in Grand Central Station with a machete. He attacked some people and was shot. That's obviously scary, but does it rise to the level of, again, to your point about comparing statistics, does it rise to the level where I should be concerned about going into Grand Central Station or more concerned about it than I am, you know, living in the Gulf

• 35:32Demetri Kofinas?

  or living in some other part of the world where there are periodic earthquakes or tsunamis?

• 35:37Speaker 01

  Look, I think New York is probably the safest it's ever been in statistical basis. It's a lovely place to live. The way I would think about this is not in terms of like relative statistics or base rates. I just think it's a purely emotional decision for a very narrow class of people. And if you think about what the marginal product of New York consumption is, it's a much higher tax rate than any city on earth. It is a much higher cost of living rate for any city on earth, especially at the ultra high end of that spectrum. So if you think of the legitimacy of New York as a tax coalition, as a thing that can afford to cover its bills, a lot of the tax yield is coming from the high end of the power law, the ultra high earners, right? The people that are yielding five, 10, 20 million dollars a year to tax authorities.

• 36:22Speaker 01

  And for those people, the question is, is the marginal difference in spend worth it relative to the four other cities in which I could live and do my career on earth? And I think like, look, as like an upper middle class, happy guy, I like New York. I'm going to make this trade all day. But if I was paying a billion dollars in tax yield here, I think I might think very differently about the calculus.

• 36:46Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, so I think the people I speak to who have made the move, it's hard to disentangle the financial incentives from all the other stuff that makes those of us who have lived in New York or live in New York or spend time in New York dislike it. And I think the class war element, the way that, you know, this is another thing, Will. I was speaking with my wife about this. As I told you, you know, she's from Argentina. I'm Greek, but I grew up in the United States, but I spent a lot of time in Greece as a child and throughout my entire life. And We spend every year sometime in London. We see this every, I mean, Europe writ large is not as meritocratic as the United States has been, but the United States is

• 37:26Demetri Kofinas?

  becoming less meritocratic. And so for, we realize something, you know, both of us, but independently, that we want to live in a meritocracy. You know, living in a country that is less meritocratic is meaningfully worse. And it's not just about taxes. You know, I don't know what the incremental amount of taxes I'd be willing to pay in order to live in a meritocracy would be, but there is some number that I would be willing to pay just to not deal with the bullshit of having to live in a sort of left-wing populist society where, you know, capitalists and people that are working hard and trying to climb the ladder are constantly being demonized, and where there is a general attitude among the population that the game is rigged, it's fixed. And so actually, this

• 38:09Demetri Kofinas?

  feels like a great opportunity to pull a quote from that article I told you, "The server has no mods left," because I think it speaks to this, and it's something that I think, you know, I've spoken about on this show in numerous occasions in various ways. So the quote is, "Once a game goes free to play under weak moderation, the culture of play shifts. Cheating, exploiting, and rerolling are no longer edge cases. They are baseline assumptions. Resources concentrate in the hands of those most willing to abuse the meta. We see analogous patterns offline. Legal, financial, and social exploits are pursued until they are formally patched, at which point attention shifts to the next

• 38:50Demetri Kofinas?

  loophole. The practical ethic is simple. If the system is obviously broken, you are a sucker for not playing it to the hilt." So that very last bit there, "You're a sucker." You know, so I said, again, my Greek heritage, the Greece that I grew up in was a Greece where that was a very common phrase, like, or there was an underlying sentiment that I'm not going to be the sucker at the table. If everyone is breaking the rules, I'm going to have to be forced to break them also. And I feel like that has accelerated in America, and we've really seen just like overt levels of corruption under this administration. And it feels like we're becoming a banana republic. So I'm curious, like, to what degree was that, because you're not very clear in the piece that that's what you're referring

• 39:33Demetri Kofinas?

  to. You could be referring to a lot of things, and in fact, you may be. So I'm just curious, like, what was the inspiration for what I just read there?

• 39:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm probably less interested in questions of corruption at the state level than others are, mostly because I have the strong belief that states have always had extremely high rates of corruption, that the corruption we're seeing now is just different in character and appearance, but probably not in intensity.

• 39:58Demetri Kofinas?

  Before you move on there, can I just ask you, isn't there a meaningful substantive difference between open versus closed levels of corruption, overt versus covert? Because one is creating norms of corruption.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's definitely a norming effect. My question is like, when you stand before God at judgment, are those two things different? And I'm not sure they are.

• 40:20Demetri Kofinas?

  But if your society is becoming more corrupted as a result of the fact that you're creating cultural conditions that now make corruption acceptable, and where everyone is basically saying, I'm not going to be the sucker at the table, even though I'm an ethical person, if I just play by the rules, I'm going to end up below, because in order to live a normal life, I have to break the law.

• 40:41Speaker 01

  I don't think that the loss of trust at the non-elite level is causally downstream of elite corruption. I think they're almost entirely two separate phenomena.

• 40:54Demetri Kofinas?

  Fair enough. So why don't you continue? I just wanted you to clarify that before.

• 40:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, sorry, this is just not a thread I've thought about before, but I would argue that they are almost entirely separate things, and that the elite corruption that we're seeing today is probably similar in scale and intensity to what we have seen in almost every area of American life. It's just the internet and the loss of kind of elite cultural norms, the silence, make it more visible. Like, maybe these things would happen in Yale dorm rooms in past generations, and they just don't anymore happen on the internet.

• 41:32Demetri Kofinas?

  So what were you referring to then, or what inspired you to use those words?

• 41:36Speaker 01

  So I had a landlord. This is a fun story. I rented an apartment from a landlord that she was a wealth manager from the nation of Brazil that was convicted by SDNY of stealing many millions of dollars to purchase the apartment that I lived in. And I was renting it from her without knowledge of this. It's a funny story. We'll loop back around to kind of big cosmic questions, but this is a good concrete example. So I'm living in a stolen apartment. She has ripped the AC out of the wall while I'm living there in order to sell it presumably to cover more of her stopgap. And the co-op that this apartment is occupied in is simply interested in allowing her to

• 42:18Speaker 01

  continue to rent it regardless of her criminality, because then she's paying more in common dues than anyone else in the apartment. So over the course of the two years I live in this apartment, I end up in a complex, multi-sided lawsuit in between her and me, the co-op and me, and the SDNY and her, where she commits this crime in 2011, or give or take, you know, this is all alleged.

• 42:40Demetri Kofinas?

  What did she, she steal the deed, replace the deed and?

• 42:42Speaker 01

  No, she was a wealth manager. She took money. This is all alleged, please don't sue me, former landlord, but she took money from her clients, fabricated certificates of investment and used that money to buy this apartment. She gets charged in like 2014, this is like 2021. So it's like 10 years of these poor people that have been scammed. And then I'm living in this apartment, paying rent for what is like a piece of stolen property that I find out once the air conditioning goes out and it becomes very clear that she's just like looting the apartment for additional money. And everyone inside of the situation is incentivized to allow her scam to continue to run up until she finally is put into jail after 10 years of court, just put her into jail. I think she'll be deported in 14 months or something.

• 43:27Speaker 01

  And like, the externalities of this was passed purely onto people outside of their social class. Like, the building did not care to fix this because I was the only renter in the building. And therefore I was like below them and therefore they could like force me to have this horrible landlord. And like, SDNY did not care to fix this because the victims were offshore and it was like not high on their conviction roadmap to deal with this like small level scam. And New York City Housing Court did not care to fix this because questions of who actually owned this apartment were like secondary to questions of like, is air conditioning part of my lease or not? And I do think as we like live in an increasingly complex society, the interfaces between different levels of enforcement are just so much more complex. And like,

• 44:12Speaker 01

  50 years ago, 60 years ago, this is actually a very solvable issue. Right? Like, this is like a thing that gets solved in court in a month. But over the course of two years, living in this apartment where, you know, the scales of everything is so much bigger in today's world. And the interchanges between all these different federal agencies are so meaningfully complex that there is no reason to suspect that you'll ever be caught. And she got to run the scam without all that much harm. And like, if you look at PPP loans, if you look at all these other areas where it's just like, the world is so meaningfully complex that the efficient frontier is just to cheat. That is a scary thing, and enforcement is just much slower than it's ever been.

• 44:51Demetri Kofinas?

  So what explains that? Is that a natural derivative of the evolving complexity of the legal system and the compounding growth in bureaucracy? Or does it speak to a kind of ongoing moral collapse in society that's happening independently of that? Or are those two things connected somehow?

• 45:11Speaker 01

  I think two connected things. One is like a moral collapse, right? You would not do that. You would not scam like this if you believed that you were going to have to account for it at judgment, right? First level. And second level is just like, as society grows, like, I think a useful way to think about the global homogenization that's happening is not only that we are all collapsing into the same society, but we're all collapsing into the same reference frame. That like, the part of the thing that we are losing as we homogenize is any sense of a local frame that is normal, right? Like, if you commit a crime in New York City, you are treated under the same jurisdiction as committing a crime in another state, functionally, same law, same everything.

• 45:56Speaker 01

  And that means that the, the community enforcement is stretched across the totality of the US and the systems that interface are much more complex. This was not the case, you know, generation ago.

• 46:07Demetri Kofinas?

  So you said that you wouldn't do this if you believed that you would face judgment. It seems to me also that there's something else going on because one could argue that there's also a biological basis in morality, which is to say that there's empathy. I mean, regardless of what my faith is or is not, I imagine that I would also be repulsed by the idea of scamming somebody, stealing something from someone, ruining someone's retirement plans. I mean, that is deeply immoral in ways that I think go beyond simply the scripture that I'm inheriting or the religion in which I'm brought up. So what else is going on there?

• 46:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, a frame I like on this is like the concept of resource guarding. And I've been thinking a lot about this in the context of anti-data center popular action in the US. But there is some sense in which when upward mobility disappeared in our society, right? It's not particularly legible to anyone in the US at this point, how you move from middle class to upper class outside of this kind of casino-ification that I've written about. There is much more a sense of which the world is, if not negative sum, than at least a closed pie, that you must kind of hold on to the resources you're given. And if it's not a positive sum world and you can't climb, then you should like get yours and you should like protect your family.

• 47:25Speaker 01

  And even if that means scamming, then like, you know, it's like a malethusian world, just like, take what is yours. And it's a very interesting frame to view AI water use discussion as well, but we can table that for later. But I do think in some sense, part of it is just like, there is no legible American dream left and therefore you can't climb class and therefore you must keep what is yours to kind of hold on to your social standing with both hands.

• 47:51Demetri Kofinas?

  So this is probably a good time to bring up another quote. This one was from Rented Virtue. You wrote, "When you lose the framework that ties your daily work to a moral account of the universe, that void does not stay empty. Something else fills the house." So up until now, we've been talking about what is gone, the decay, the collapse in the foundation. But what is it that you're referring to when you say that something else fills the house?

• 48:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, demons, demons. I have this like really strong belief that the world makes a lot more sense if you assume that like demons from scripture are real and around us and that the immoral forces that occupy.

• 48:31Speaker 01

  The heart, when it is empty of faith, are ones that are not amoral, but are actually embodied and evil and bad. And if you think about the kind of alienation of labor in, in work, right, like the, if you're like a median professional managerial class employee, if you're like a paper belt employee, like top deck of the Titanic stuff, your income is like totally untied from the amount of contribution you give to the world. Like my bid on this is like Google, right? If you think about like the economics of Google and you like, look at like, how much everyone's paid proportional to how much of the P and L they contribute. It's like almost a banana republic, right? Like core search and core ads are like 90% of revenue. Maybe GCP is bigger now than the last time I looked at this.

• 49:16Speaker 01

  And the people that run that are like 30 people at the core of the company. Like the core Google algorithm, I think is like 15 people maintaining the thing. That probably contribute 90% of revenue. And in like a purely meritocratic world, those employees would be paid, you know, tens of billions a year because they're like actually contributing to the core thing. But in the, the professional managerial class world that we've invented today, you can't pay people $10 billion a year. So instead you have 150,000 employees that all make kind of half a million to a million bucks a year. And that the outputs of your labor are totally untied from what it actually does in the world. And the question of what we're doing in rented virtue is if capital does not provide a justification for your work, right?

• 49:59Speaker 01

  Like if you can get a job that is unmoored from the output and you're comped unmoored from the output, then you must come up with some kind of moral accounting of what that work is worth.

• 50:09Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, what are the implications of that? So I feel like this speaks to some of the other stuff you've written, related to political insurgencies and what sounds like a potential political revolution may be driven by the, the displaced workers or a coalition of displaced workers on the, on the left. Driven again by this larger topic of AI that you've talked about and written about, which we haven't had a chance to discuss more explicitly here, but which we will certainly in the second hour. But how does that relate to that stuff that you've written about, the political economy of large language models? In other words?

• 50:43Speaker 01

  Yeah. My joke on this is that all the job replacement that will happen as a result of AI has already occurred. Right? The job loss that is happening is a thing that happened in the 70s. Right? Most of the losses to automation are actually losses to offshoring, and they happened a long time ago. It's just that the blue collar coalition in America does not have a political coalition that will protect it. Right? When automation stripped the middle of this country, there was no reckoning for those jobs. Right? It was just complete offshoring. But if you think about the professional managerial class, like, these people have profound political power. Right?

• 51:24Speaker 01

  Like, when the New York Times editor loses their job due to AI, that person is going to be protected by the state. Right? That person is going to be given something that approaches universal basic income. That person is gonna... And this is totally incoherent. Right? Like, these are like, these jobs did not exist a decade ago, but will exist 600 years from now because of the political coalition of AI.

• 51:49Demetri Kofinas?

  So this is actually a good opportunity to pull a quote directly from that written piece, "The Political Economy of Large Language Models." You write there, quote, "The next political insurgency, that is, the one enabled by AI, will not resemble the last one. The meme war required thousands of participants producing and distributing content with wide appeal. An AI-enabled operation can require only a handful of operators and customized content to target ultra-narrow areas of resentment. The right won the last information war with these tools and these people, but the next information war will be fought with people who don't share its commitments and deployed through channels it can't monitor with models it can't detect."

• 52:32Demetri Kofinas?

  What is it that you're envisioning here when you describe an insurgency enabled by AI?

• 52:37Speaker 01

  Yeah. This is sitting in the context of one of the strongest convictions I have about the political process, which is that every trick we use to win an election only works once.

• 52:50Speaker 01

  Right. If you think about the Obama coalition, the messaging there was legitimately novel and will never work again. Right. A new hope for America. It's just, it's not going to happen again. Right. It's over.

• 53:02Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, what do you mean? Because, well, I feel like there have been variations of that throughout American history and throughout political history.

• 53:08Speaker 01

  I think the Obama effect was broadly singular, a cross racial, cross economic, multicultural, global coalition that believed that a new America was in front of it and that the way we would get there is kind of progressive opening and progressive norms was a kind of one of one. What in common does the Chicago street organizer and the hedge fund manager, like what common praxis do they actually have? Very limited, but the Obama coalition brought them together through this positive and totally underdescribed, you know, optimistic vision of the future, global norms, institutions, et cetera. The

• 53:51Speaker 01

  Trump coalition is perhaps more striking in how weird and unique it was, right? I jokingly call this the Chud and Capitol coalition, where what does the factory owner have in common with the factory labor? Almost nothing, right? The interests of capital and labor have never been aligned outside of the Trump coalition. And part of that is this kind of highly kinetic, online-first, meme-based campaigning that just will never work again.

• 54:21Demetri Kofinas?

  But wasn't the Reagan coalition in part a coalition of lunch bucket Democrats and capitalists?

• 54:29Speaker 01

  Yes, but the carrier of the message was different. Like, the Reagan and Trump coalition, I think, are interesting to, an interesting pair trade on this one, because Reagan started both as like an elite effect, right? Like, a beautiful family from California, literally a movie star from the top down. Right. Painted this positive vision that America was off track but stable, very similar to Trump, right? You can listen to like a time to choose that speech and it's like almost Trumpian in many ways, but it was an elite first politics. What's interesting about the Trump coalition is it's almost kind of like a fully automated boomer luxury communism, like they're not going to tax your $2 million fishing boat anymore. Like

• 55:13Speaker 01

  it's like of the people of the like chud class, like, you know, you're not going to get taxed on buying a snowmobile with your 401k anymore. Just very different from the Reagan thing and very online, very, very online. TikTok first, kind of 4chan first, very concussive. And this, the threat of kind of performative cruelty that I find really distasteful, but is at the core of a lot of this. And that just won't work. Like you can see the left trying to adopt pieces of this, but it's, it's just this, this trick that every election has some conceit that decides the election that never works again. It's like a zero day in software. Once it's deployed, it never works again. And I think

• 55:56Speaker 01

  people are not taking the AI zero day nearly seriously.

• 55:59Demetri Kofinas?

  It's very interesting. By the way, I don't necessarily disagree, nor do I think that you're necessarily wrong, but I just want to highlight how cynical it is that you are comparing American politics to a zero day exploit. Is that how you view the merits of the case that are made by politicians on a continual basis to govern in a democratic society like ours?

• 56:20Speaker 01

  I think people largely vote based on, you know, tricks played on them by politicians on the national stage.

• 56:26Demetri Kofinas?

  Well, certainly the, the, I would say that's how a lot of people feel today, given some of the policies of this administration. So as I mentioned, you've written on so many different topics, so there are through lines that run through all of them. And I have many more quotes that I want to pull in the second hour, Will. I think something you've written about that we're going to talk about first when we move to the second hour is what I would just describe as the breakdown of our models of reality, or maybe a better way to put it is of consensus reality, of the way that we've agreed to agree about what is and is not. Because I think you've written a number of profound things there, which also very much resonate with me. I also, as I said at the beginning, the "Nobody Walks the Canterbury" piece was how I got introduced

• 57:10Demetri Kofinas?

  to you. And I loved that piece, and it speaks directly to the nature of the economy that we're building. So what I envisioned for the second hour is to really shift our focus to discussing the political economy and artificial intelligence. And that'll also give us a chance to discuss your piece on the garden. And then I have some very specific questions about the venture capital industry, as well as what you envision for the future of media and continuing education. For anyone new to the program, Hidden Forces is listener-supported. We don't accept advertisers or commercial sponsors. The entire show is funded from top to bottom by listeners like you. If you want access to the second hour of today's conversation with Will, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and sign up to one of our three content tiers.

• 57:54Demetri Kofinas?

  All subscribers gain access to our premium feed, which you can use to listen to the rest of today's conversation on your mobile device, using your favorite podcast app, just like you're listening to this episode right now. Will, stick around, we're going to move the second hour of our conversation onto the premium feed. If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io/subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius Community, you can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more

• 58:34Demetri Kofinas?

  episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at @Kofinas, and you can email me at [email protected]. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.