#2311 - Jeremie & Edouard Harris

Jeremie Harris is the CEO and Edouard Harris the CTO of Gladstone AI, a company dedicated to promoting the responsible development and adoption of artificial intelligence. https://superintelligence.gladstone.ai/ 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.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  The Joe Rogan Experience. Training by day, Joe Rogan Podcast by night, all day.

• 0:12Speaker 01

  All right, so if there's a doomsday clock for AI and where we're fucked, what time is it? If midnight is, we're fucked.

• 0:21Speaker 02

  We're getting right into it.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  You're not even gonna ask us what we had for breakfast? No, no, no, no, no, no. Jesus, okay.

• 0:27Speaker 02

  Let's get freaked out.

• 0:29Speaker 01

  Well, okay, so there's one, without speaking to like the fucking doomsday dimension right up here, there's a question about like where are we at in terms of AI capabilities right now and what do those timelines look like? Right. There's a bunch of disagreement. One of the most concrete pieces of evidence that we have recently came out of a lab, an AI kind of evaluation lab called Meter. And they put together this test, basically it's like you ask the question, pick a task that takes a certain amount of time, like an hour, it takes like a human a certain amount of time, and then see like how likely the best AI system is to solve for that task. Then try a longer task, see like a 10-hour task, can it do that one?

• 1:11Speaker 01

  And so right now, what they're finding is when it comes to AI research itself, so basically like automate the work of an AI researcher, you're hitting 50% success rates for these AI systems for tasks that take an hour long. And that is doubling every, right now it's like every four months.

• 1:27Speaker 02

  So like you had tasks that you could do, you know, a person does in five minutes, like, you know, ordering an Uber Eats, or like something that takes like 50 minutes, like maybe booking a flight or something like that. And it's a question of like, how much can these AI agents do, right? Like from five minutes to 50 minutes to 30 minutes? And in some of these spaces like research, software engineering.

• 1:48Speaker 01

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:49Speaker 02

  And it's getting further and further and further and doubling, it looks like every four months.

• 1:54Speaker 01

  So if you extrapolate that, you basically get to tasks that take a month to complete, like by 2027, tasks that take an AI researcher a month to complete, these systems will be completing with like a 50% success rate.

• 2:07Speaker 02

  So you'll be able to have an AI on your show and ask it what the doomsday clock is like by then?

• 2:13Speaker 01

  Oh, it probably won't laugh.

• 2:16Speaker 02

  It'll have a terrible sense of humor about it.

• 2:19Speaker 01

  Just make sure you ask you what it had for breakfast before you start it.

• 2:22Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. What about quantum computing getting involved in AI?

• 2:27Speaker 01

  It's so, yeah, honestly, I don't think it's, if you think that you're gonna hit human level AI capabilities across the board, say 2027, 2028, which when you talk to some of these, the people in the labs themselves, that's the timelines they're looking at. They're not confident. They're not sure, but that seems pretty plausible. If that happens, really, there's no way we're gonna have quantum computing that's gonna be giving enough of a bump to these techniques. You're gonna have standard classical computing. One way to think about this is that the data centers that are being built today are being thought of literally as the data centers that are going to house like the artificial brain that powers superintelligence, human level AI when it's built in like 2027 and something like that.

• 3:09Joe Rogan?

  So how knowledgeable are you when it comes to quantum computing?

• 3:14Speaker 01

  So a little bit. I mean, like I did my grad studies in like the foundations of quantum mechanics.

• 3:21Joe Rogan?

  Oh, great.

• 3:22Speaker 01

  Yeah, well, it was a mistake, but I appreciate it for the purpose of the.

• 3:25Joe Rogan?

  Why was it a mistake?

• 3:26Speaker 01

  You know, so academia is this like kind of funny thing. It's really bad culture. It teaches you some really terrible habits. So basically, my entire life after academia and Ed's too, was unlearning these like terrible habits of, it's all zero sum, basically. It's not like when you're working in startups. It's not like, you know, when you're working in tech where, you know, you build something and somebody else builds something that's complementary and you can team up and just like make something amazing. It's always wars over who gets credit, who gets their name on the paper. Did you cite this fucking stupid paper from two years ago because the author has an ego and you gotta be on, I was literally at one point.

• 4:07Speaker 02

  I'm not going to get any details here, but like, there was a collaboration that we ran with like this, anyway, fairly well-known guy. And my supervisor had me like, write the emails that he would send from his account. So that he was seen as like, the guy who is like, interacting with this big wig. That kind of thing is like, doesn't tend to happen in startups, at least not in the same way.

• 4:30Joe Rogan?

  So he wanted credit for the, like, he wanted to seem like he was the genius who was facilitating this?

• 4:36Speaker 02

  For sounding smart on email.

• 4:37Joe Rogan?

  Ew.

• 4:38Speaker 02

  Right?

• 4:39Speaker 01

  But that, that happens everywhere.

• 4:41Speaker 02

  And the reason it happens is that these guys who are like professors, or even not even professors, just like your post-doctoral guy who's like supervising you. They can write your letters of reference and control your career after that, that laugh.

• 4:55Speaker 01

  They got you by the balls.

• 4:56Speaker 02

  They can do whatever. And so what Jer did-

• 4:58Joe Rogan?

  It's just like a movie.

• 4:59Speaker 02

  Totally.

• 5:00Speaker 01

  It's gross.

• 5:00Joe Rogan?

  It's disgusting. A gross movie, like a gross boss in a movie that wants to take credit for your work.

• 5:05Speaker 02

  And it's real, it's rampant. And the way to escape it is to basically just be like, fuck this, I'm gonna go do my own thing. And so Jer dropped out of grad school to come start a company. And, and I mean, honestly, even that, it took, it took me, it took both of us, like, a few years to like unfuck our brains and unlearn the bad habits we learned. It was really only a few years later that we started, like, really, really getting a good, like, getting a good flow going.

• 5:31Speaker 01

  You're also, you're kind of disconnected from, like, base reality when you're in the ivory tower, right?

• 5:36Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 5:37Speaker 01

  Like, if you're, there's something beautiful about, and this is why we spent all our time in startups, but there's something really beautiful about like, it's just a bunch of assholes. Us, and like, no money, and nothing, and a world of like, potential customers. And it's like, you actually, it's not that different from like, stand-up comedy in a way. Like, your product is, can I get the laugh, right? Like, something like that. And it's unforgiving. If you fuck up, it's like silence in the room. It's the same thing with startups. Like, the space of products that actually works is so narrow. And you've got to obsess over what people actually want. And it's so easy to fool yourself into thinking that you've got something that's really good, because your friends and family are like, oh no, sweetie, you're doing a great job. Like, what a wonderful life. I would, I would totally use it. I totally see that, all that stuff, right?

• 6:20Speaker 01

  And that's, I love that, because it forces you to change.

• 6:24Joe Rogan?

  Mm-hmm. Yeah, the, the whole indoctrination thing in academia is so bizarre, because of these, these like, hierarchies of powerful people. And they, just the idea that you have to- Work for someone someday and they have to take credit by being the the person on the email. That that will haunt me for days.

• 6:45Speaker 01

  Oh, it's

• 6:45Joe Rogan?

  I swear to God, I'll be thinking about that for days now. I fucking can't stand people like that. It drives me nuts.

• 6:50Speaker 01

  One big consequence is it's really hard to tell who the people are who are creating value in that space too, right?

• 6:55Joe Rogan?

  Of course, sure, because this is it's just like television. One of the things about television shows is, um, so I'll give you an example. A very good friend of mine, who's a very famous comedian, had this show. And his agent said, we're gonna attach these producers. It'll help get it made. And he goes, well, what are they gonna do? He goes, they're not gonna do anything. It'll just be in name. He goes, but they're gonna get credit. He goes, yeah, he goes, fuck that. He goes, no, no, listen, listen. This is better for it, the show. It'll help the show. Give me, but then they'll have, excuse me, they'll have a piece of the show. He's like, yes, yes, but like, it's a matter of whether the show gets successful or or not, and this is a good thing to do. And he's like, what are you talking about? But it was a conflict of interest because this guy was rep, the agent was representing these other people.

• 7:39Joe Rogan?

  But this is completely common.

• 7:41Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 7:41Joe Rogan?

  So there's these executive producers that are on shows that have zero to do with it.

• 7:47Speaker 01

  It's so many, yeah.

• 7:48Speaker 02

  So many industries are like this, and that's why we got into startups. It's it's literally like you and the world, right? It's like in a way, like stand up comedy, like Jer said.

• 7:57Joe Rogan?

  Or like podcasting.

• 7:58Speaker 02

  Or like podcasting, where your enemy isn't actually hate, it's indifference. Like, most of the stuff you do, especially when you're getting started, like, why would anyone like give a shit about you? They're just not gonna pay attention.

• 8:08Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, that's not even your enemy. You know, that's just all potential.

• 8:12Speaker 01

  Mm hmm.

• 8:12Joe Rogan?

  That's all that is, you know, it's like your enemy is within you. It's like, figure out a way to make whatever you're doing good enough that you don't have to think about it not being valuable.

• 8:20Speaker 01

  It's it's meditative, like, there's no way for it not to be to be in some way a reflection of of like yourself. You know, you're you're kind of like in this battle with you trying to convince yourself that you're great. So the ego wants to grow, and then you're constantly trying to compress it and compress it. And if there's not that outside force, your ego will expand to fill whatever volume is given to it. Like, if you have money, if you have fame, if everything's given, and you don't make contact with the unforgiving on a regular basis, like, yeah, you know, you're gonna end up, you're gonna end up doing that to yourself and

• 8:48Joe Rogan?

  You could, yeah, it's possible to avoid, but you have to have strategies.

• 8:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, you have to be intentional about it, yeah.

• 8:53Joe Rogan?

  The best strategy is jujitsu. Yeah.

• 8:57Speaker 01

  It's, it's.

• 8:57Joe Rogan?

  Mark Zuckerberg is a different person now.

• 9:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can see it. You can see it.

• 9:02Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, well, it's a really good thing for people that have too much power because you just get strangled all the time.

• 9:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 9:08Joe Rogan?

  And then you just get your arms bent sideways and you, and after a while, you're like, okay, this is reality. This is reality. This social hierarchy thing that I've created is just nonsense. It's just smoke and mirrors. And they know it is, which is why they so rapidly enforce these hierarchies.

• 9:24Speaker 01

  The best people seek it out.

• 9:26Joe Rogan?

  Sir and ma'am and all that kind of shit. That's what that is. Like, you, you don't feel like you really have respect unless you say that.

• 9:32Speaker 01

  Ugh.

• 9:33Joe Rogan?

  These poor kids that have to go from college where they're talking to these dipshit professors out into the world and operating under these same rules that they've been like forced in and indoctrinated to. It's, God, to just make it on your own.

• 9:46Speaker 01

  It's amazing what you can get used to, though. And, and like, the, it's funny, you're mentioning the producer thing. That is literally also a thing that happens in academia. So you'll have these conversations where it's like, alright, well, this paper is fucking garbage or something, but we, we want to get it in a paper, in a journal. And so, let's see if we can get like a famous guy on the list of authors so that when it gets reviewed, people go like, oh, Mr. So-and-so, okay. Like, and that literally happens, like, you know.

• 10:11Speaker 02

  And the funny thing is, like, the hissy fits over this are, like, the stakes are so brutally low. At least with your producer example, like, someone stands to make a lot of money. With this, it's like, you get maybe like an assistant professorship out of it, best, that's like 40 grand a year and you're, it's just like, what, this is, it's just, why, what are you doing?

• 10:32Joe Rogan?

  For producers, it is money, but I don't even think they notice the money anymore. I think a big part, because all those guys are really, really rich already. I think, you know, if you're a big time TV producer, you're really rich. I think the big thing is being thought of as a genius who's always connected to successful projects.

• 10:47Speaker 01

  Right, yeah.

• 10:48Joe Rogan?

  That's who they really like.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  That's, that is like always going to be a thing, right?

• 10:51Joe Rogan?

  It wasn't one producer. It was like a couple. So there's going to be a couple different people that were on this thing that had zero to do with it. It was all written by a stand-up comedian. His friends all helped him. They all put it together. And then, he was like, no. He wound up firing his agent over it.

• 11:07Speaker 01

  Oh, shit. Okay. Good for him.

• 11:08Joe Rogan?

  I mean, yeah. Like, get the fuck out of here.

• 11:11Speaker 01

  At a certain point for the producers, too, it's kind of like, you'll have people approaching you for help on projects that look nothing like projects you've actually done.

• 11:17Joe Rogan?

  Uh huh.

• 11:18Speaker 01

  So I feel like it just, it just adds noise to your, your universe. Like, if you're actually trying to build cool shit. You know what I mean?

• 11:23Joe Rogan?

  Some people just want to be busy. They just want more things happening and they think more is better. More is not better because more is energy that takes away from the better, whatever the important shit is.

• 11:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, the focus.

• 11:34Joe Rogan?

  You only have so much time until AI takes over. Then you'll have all the time in the world because no one will be employed and everything will be automated. We'll all be on universal basic income.

• 11:43Speaker 01

  And that's it, that's the show. The end.

• 11:47Joe Rogan?

  That's a sitcom. That's a sitcom, a bunch of poor people existing on $250 a week.

• 11:51Speaker 01

  Oh, I would watch that.

• 11:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, because the government just gives everybody that. That's what you live off of.

• 11:56Speaker 01

  Like weird shit is cheap, like the stuff that's like all like, well, the stuff you can get from chatbots and AI agents is cheap, but like food is super expensive or something.

• 12:05Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, organic food is going to be, you're going to have to kill people for it.

• 12:09Speaker 02

  You will eat people. It will be like a soylent world.

• 12:11Joe Rogan?

  Right. It's literally going to be that.

• 12:14Speaker 01

  Nothing is more free range than people, though.

• 12:16Joe Rogan?

  That's true. Depends on what they're eating, though. It's just like animals. You know? You don't only eat a bear that's been eating salmon, they taste like shit.

• 12:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 12:24Speaker 02

  I didn't know that.

• 12:24Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  I've been eating my bear rum this entire time.

• 12:30Joe Rogan?

  So, back to the quantum thing. So, quantum computing is infinitely more powerful than standard computing. Would it make sense, then, that if quantum computing can run a large language model, that it would reach a level of intelligence that's just preposterous?

• 12:48Speaker 01

  So, yeah, one way to think of it is like there are problems that quantum computers can solve way, way, way, way better than classical computers. And so, like, the numbers get absurd pretty quickly. It's like problems that a classical computer couldn't solve if it had the entire lifetime of the universe to solve it. A quantum computer, right, in like 30 seconds, boom. But, but the flip side, like, there are problems that quantum computers just like can't help us accelerate. The kinds of like, one classic problem that quantum computers help with is this thing called like the traveling salesman paradox or problem, where you, you know, you have like a bunch of different locations that a salesman needs to hit and what's the best path to hit them most efficiently? It's like kind of the classic problem if you're going around different places and have to make stops. There are a lot of different problems that have the right shape for that.

• 13:33Speaker 01

  A lot of quantum machine learning, which is a field, is focused on how do we take standard AI problems, like AI workloads that we want to run, and like massage them into a shape that gives us a quantum advantage. And that's, it's a nascent field, there's a lot going on there. I would expect, like, my personal expectation is that we just build the human-level AI and very quickly after that, superintelligence, without ever having to factor in quantum. But it's-

• 14:01Joe Rogan?

  Could you define that for people? What's the difference between human-level AI and superintelligence?

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 14:07Speaker 02

  So, yeah, human-level AI is like, AI, you can imagine like it's AI that is as smart as you are in, let's say, all the things you could do on a computer. So, you know, you can, yeah, you can order food on a computer, but you can also write software on a computer, you can also email people and pay them to do shit on a computer, you can also trade stocks on a computer. So it's like as smart as a smart person for that. Superintelligence, people have various definitions, and there are all kinds of like, honestly, hissy fits about like, different definitions. Generally speaking, it's something that's like, very significantly smarter than the smartest human. And so you think about it, it's kind of like, it's as smart, as much smarter than you, as you might be smarter than a toddler.

• 14:52Speaker 02

  And you think about that, and you think about like, the, you know, how, how do you, how would, how would a toddler control you? It's kind of hard. Like, you can, you can outthink a toddler, pretty much, like, any day of the week. And so, superintelligence gets us at these levels where you can potentially do things that are completely different. And basically, you know, new scientific theories, and we, last time, we talked about, you know, new, new stable forms of matter that were being discovered by these kind of narrow systems. But now you're talking about a system that is like, has that intuition combined with the ability to talk to you as a human, and to just have really good, like, rapport with

• 15:35Speaker 02

  you, but can also do math, it can also write code, it can also like, solve quantum mechanics, and has that all kind of wrapped up in the same package.

• 15:42Speaker 01

  One of the things too that by definition, if you build a human level AI, one of the things it must be able to do as well as humans is AI research itself.

• 15:51Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 15:51Speaker 01

  Or at least the parts of AI research that you can do in just like software, like, you know, by coding or whatever these these systems are designed to do. And so so one implication of that is you now have automated AI researchers. And if you have automated AI researchers, that means you have AI systems that can automate the development of the next level of their own capabilities. And now you're getting into that whole, you know, singularity thing where it's an exponential that just builds on itself and builds on itself, which is kind of why, you know, a lot of people argue that like if you build human level AI, superintelligence can't be that far away. You've basically unlocked everything.

• 16:30Joe Rogan?

  And we kind of have gotten very close, right? Like, it's it's past the Fermi, not the Fermi paradox, the, what is it?

• 16:39Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah, the.

• 16:40Joe Rogan?

  God damn it, we were just talking about him the other day.

• 16:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, the test, the.

• 16:43Speaker 02

  Oh, the Turing test?

• 16:44Joe Rogan?

  Turing test, thank you. We were just talking about how horrible what happened to him was, you know, they chemically castrated him because he was gay.

• 16:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 16:53Joe Rogan?

  Horrific, winds up killing himself. The guy who figures out what's the test to figure out whether or not AIs become sentient. And by the way, he does this in like, what, 1950 something?

• 17:02Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, yeah. Alan Turing is like, the guy was a beast, right?

• 17:05Joe Rogan?

  How did he think that through?

• 17:07Speaker 02

  He invented computers. He invented basically the concept that underlies all computers. Like, he was like an absolute beast. He was a code breaker. He broke the Nazi codes, right?

• 17:18Speaker 01

  And he also wasn't even the first person to come up with this idea of machines, building machines, and there being implications like human disempowerment. So if you go back to, I think it was like the late 1800s, and I don't remember the guy's name, but he sort of like came up with this. He was observing the industrial revolution and mechanization of labor and kind of starting to see more and more, like if you zoom out, it's almost like you have an, humans are an ant colony, and the artifacts that that colony is producing that are really interesting are these machines.

• 17:46Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 17:46Speaker 01

  You know, you kind of like look at the surface of the earth as like gradually increasingly mechanized thing, and it's not super clear. If you zoom out enough, like, what is actually running the show here? Right. You've got humans servicing machines, humans looking to improve the capability of these machines at this frantic pace. Like, they're not even in control of what they're doing. Economic forces are pushing.

• 18:06Speaker 02

  Are we the servant of the master, right? At a certain point? Like, yeah. And the whole thing is like, especially with a competition that's going on between the labs, but just kind of in general. You're at a point where like, do the CEOs of the labs, like, they're these big figureheads. They go on interviews, they talk about what they're doing and stuff. Do they really have control over the, any part of the system?

• 18:28Speaker 01

  Oy. The economy is in this like, almost convulsive fit, right? Like, you can almost feel like it's like it's hurling out AGI. And like, as one kind of, I guess, data point here, like, all these labs, OpenAI, Microsoft, Google, every year, they're spending like an aircraft carrier worth of capital, individually, each of them, just to build bigger data centers, to house more AI chips, to train bigger, more powerful models. And that's like, so, so we're actually getting to the point where if you look at on a power consumption basis, like, we're getting to, you know, 2, 3, 4, 5% of US power production. If you project out into the late 2020s.

• 19:11Speaker 02

  In 2026, 27.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  Not for double digit, though.

• 19:14Speaker 02

  Not for double digit, but for single digit, yeah, you're talking like, that's a few gigawatts, so 1 gigawatt.

• 19:19Speaker 01

  Sorry, not for single digit, it's in the, like, for 2027, you're looking at like, you know, in the 0.5-ish percent. But it's like, it's a big fucking, like, you're talking about gigawatts and gigawatts. 1 gigawatt is a million homes. So you're seeing like, 1 data center in 2027 is easily gonna break a gig. There's gonna be multiple like that. And so, it's like a thousand, sorry, a million home city, metropolis, really, that is just dedicated to training like, 1 fucking model. Like, that's what this is. Again, if you zoom out at Planet Earth, you can interpret it as like, this, like, all these humans frantically running around like ants, just like, building this like, artificial brain.

• 19:56Speaker 02

  It's like, one super mind assembling itself on the face of the planet.

• 20:00Joe Rogan?

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• 22:56Joe Rogan?

  Marshall McLuhan in like 1963 or something like that said, "Human beings are the sex organs of the machine world." Oh, God, that hits. That hits different today.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, it does.

• 23:08Joe Rogan?

  It does. I've always said that if we were aliens or if aliens came here and studied us, they'd be like, what is the dominant species on the planet doing? Well, it's making better things. That's all it does. The whole thing is dedicated to making better things. And all of its instincts, including materialism, including status, keeping up with the Joneses, all that stuff is tied to newer, better stuff. You don't want old shit. You want new stuff. You don't want an iPhone 12. You know, what are you doing, you loser?

• 23:37Joe Rogan?

  You need newer, better stuff and they convince people, especially in the realm of like consumer electronics. Most people are buying things they absolutely don't need. The vast majority of the spending on new phones is completely unnecessary.

• 23:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I just need that extra like that extra like fourth camera, though. I feel like my life isn't complete.

• 23:58Joe Rogan?

  I run, um, one of my phones is an iPhone 11 and I'm purposely not switching it just to see if I notice it. I fucking never notice anything. I watch YouTube on it. I text people. It's all the same. I go online. It works. It's all the same.

• 24:13Speaker 02

  Probably the biggest thing there is going to be the security side, which, um.

• 24:16Joe Rogan?

  No, they update the security. It's all software.

• 24:18Speaker 01

  But I mean, if your if your phone gets old enough, I mean, like at a certain point.

• 24:22Joe Rogan?

  Oh, when they stop updating it? Yeah, like iPhone one, you know, China's watching all your dick pics.

• 24:27Speaker 01

  Oh dude, I mean, Salt Typhoon, they're watching all our dick pics. They're definitely seeing mine.

• 24:31Joe Rogan?

  What's Salt Typhoon?

• 24:32Speaker 01

  Um, so Salt Typhoon, oh, sorry, yeah, yeah, so it's this big Chinese cyber attack actually starts to get us to uh, to kind of the broader.

• 24:38Joe Rogan?

  What a great name, by the way, Salt Typhoon, fuck yeah, guys.

• 24:41Speaker 01

  I really wish they would.

• 24:42Speaker 02

  They have the coolest names for their cyber operations meant to destroy us.

• 24:46Joe Rogan?

  Salt Typhoon is pretty slick.

• 24:48Speaker 01

  You know what, it's kind of like when um, when people go out and do like a, an awful thing, like a school shooting or something, and they're like, oh, let's talk about, you know, if you give it a cool name, like now the Chinese are definitely going to do it again. Um, anyway.

• 24:59Joe Rogan?

  Cause they have a cool name.

• 25:00Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's definitely a factor.

• 25:01Joe Rogan?

  Salt Typhoon.

• 25:02Speaker 02

  Salt Typhoon, dope.

• 25:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, but it's this thing where basically, so there was in the um, the 3G kind of protocol that was set up years ago. Um, law enforcement agencies included backdoors intentionally to be able to access comms, you know, theoretically if they got a warrant and so on. And um, well, you introduce a backdoor, you have adversaries like China who are wicked good at cyber. Um, they're gonna find and exploit those backdoors and now basically they're, they're sitting there and they had been for, some people think like maybe a year or two before it was really discovered. And just a couple of months ago, they kind of go like, oh, cool, like, we got fucking like China all up in our shit.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  And this is like, this is like flip a switch for them and like, you turn off the power or water to a state or like you fucking, yeah.

• 25:46Speaker 01

  Well, sorry, this is, sorry, Salt Typhoon though is about um, just uh, sitting on the, the like basically telecoms network.

• 25:52Speaker 02

  Well, that's the telecom one, that's right.

• 25:53Speaker 01

  It's not the, but, but yeah, I mean, that's another thing.

• 25:56Speaker 02

  There's another, there's another thing where they're doing that too.

• 25:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and so this is kind of where, what we've been looking into over the last year is this question of how, what is, if you're gonna make like a Manhattan project for superintelligence, right? Which is, that's, I mean, that's what we're texting about like way back and then um, actually funnily enough, we shifted right our date for security reasons, but um, if you're gonna do a Manhattan project for, for superintelligence. Um, what does that have to look like? What does the security game have to look like to actually make it so that China's not all up in your shit? Like today, it is extremely clear that at the world's top AI labs, like, all that shit is being stolen.

• 26:36Speaker 01

  Like, there is not a single lab right now that isn't being spied on successfully based on everything we've seen um, by the Chinese.

• 26:44Joe Rogan?

  Can I ask you this? Are we spying on the Chinese as well?

• 26:47Speaker 01

  That's a big problem. Do you want to?

• 26:49Speaker 02

  We're, we're, I mean, we're definitely, we're definitely doing some stuff. But in terms of the, the relative balance between the two, we're not where we need to be.

• 27:00Joe Rogan?

  They spy on us better than we spy on them?

• 27:01Speaker 02

  Yeah. Because like we, because like our-

• 27:03Speaker 01

  They build all our shit.

• 27:04Speaker 02

  They've spilled all our shit.

• 27:05Joe Rogan?

  Well, that was the Huawei situation, right?

• 27:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, and, and it's also the, oh my god, it's the, like, if you look at the power grid. So, um, this is now, now public, but if you look at, um, like transformer substations. So, these are the, essentially, anyway, they're, they're a crucial part of the electrical grid. And there's really like, basically all of them have components that are made in China. China's known to have planted backdoors, like Trojans into those substations to fuck with our grid. The thing is, when you see a salt typhoon, when you see a, like, big Chinese cyber attack, or a big Russian cyber attack, you're not seeing their best. These countries do not go and show you like their best cards out the gate. You, you show the bare minimum that you can without tipping your hand at the actual exquisite capabilities you have.

• 27:51Speaker 01

  Like, we've, the, the way that one of the, um, the, the people kind of who's, who's been walking us through all this, uh, really well has explained it is like, the philosophy is you want to learn without teaching, right? You want to use what is the lowest level capability that has the effect I'm after, and that's what that is.

• 28:07Speaker 02

  I'll give, I'll give an example. Like, I'll, I'll tell you a story that's, that's kind of like, it's, it's a public story, and it's from a long time ago, but it kind of gives a flavor of like, how far these countries will actually go when they're playing the game for fucking real. So, it's 1945. America and the Soviet Union are like best pals, because they've just defeated the Nazis, right? To celebrate that victory and the coming new world order that's going to be great for everybody, the children of the Soviet Union give us a gift to the American ambassador in Moscow, this beautifully carved wooden seal of the United States of America. Beautiful thing. Ambassador's thrilled with it.

• 28:49Speaker 02

  He hangs it up on, behind his desk in his private office. You can see where I'm going with this, probably, but-

• 28:55Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah.

• 28:55Speaker 02

  Yeah. Seven years later, 1952, finally occurs to us, like, let's take a town and actually examine this. So, they dig into it, and they find this incredible contraption in it called a cavity resonator.

• 29:11Speaker 02

  And this device doesn't have a power source, doesn't have a battery, which means when you're sweeping the office for bugs, you're not going to find it. What it does instead is it's designed, that's it, that's it.

• 29:23Speaker 01

  The thing, they call it the thing.

• 29:25Speaker 02

  They call it the thing. And what this cavity resonator does is it's basically designed to reflect radio radiation back to a receiver to listen to all the noises and conversations and talking in the ambassador's private office. And so-

• 29:39Joe Rogan?

  How's it doing it without a power source?

• 29:41Speaker 02

  So, that's what they do. So, the Soviets, for seven years, parked a van across the street from the embassy, had a giant fucking microwave antenna aimed right at the ambassador's office, and were like zapping it and looking back at the reflection and literally listening to every single thing he was saying. And the best part was, when the embassy staff was like, "We're gonna go and like sweep the office for bugs periodically," they'd be like, "Hey, Mr. Ambassador, we're about to sweep your office for bugs." And the ambassador was like, "Cool, please proceed and go and sweep my office for bugs." And the KGB dudes in the van were like, "Just turn it off." "Sounds like they're gonna sweep the office for bugs, let's turn off our giant microwave antenna." And they kept at it for seven years.

• 30:25Speaker 01

  It was only ever discovered because there was this like British radio operator who was just, you know, doing his thing, changing his dial, and he's like, "Oh shit, like, is that the ambassador fucking talking?"

• 30:34Speaker 02

  Just randomly.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  So, so the thing is-

• 30:35Speaker 02

  Oh, and actually, sorry, one other thing about that, if you heard that story and you're kind of thinking to yourself, "Hang on a second, um, they were shooting like microwaves at our ambassador 24/7 for seven years?"

• 30:48Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 30:49Speaker 02

  Doesn't that seem like it might like fry his genitals or something? Yeah, or something like that?

• 30:54Joe Rogan?

  You're supposed to have a lead vest.

• 30:56Speaker 02

  And the answer is-

• 30:57Speaker 01

  Jock.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:59Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 30:59Speaker 02

  Yes. And this is something that came up in our investigation just from every single person who was like, who was filling us in and who dialed in and knows what's up. They're like, "Look, so you gotta understand, like, our adversaries, if, if they need to like give you cancer in order to rip your shit off of your laptop, they're gonna give you some cancer."

• 31:21Joe Rogan?

  Did he get cancer?

• 31:22Speaker 02

  Uh, I don't know specifically about the ambassador, but like-

• 31:25Speaker 01

  It's also, that's also, so- We're limited what we can say. There's actually people that you could talk to later that can go in more detail here. But older technology like that, like kind of lower powered, so you're less likely to look at that. Nowadays, we live in a different world.

• 31:43Speaker 04

  The guy that invented that microphone invented, his last name is Theremin. He invented this instrument called a Theremin, which is a fucking really interesting thing.

• 31:50Joe Rogan?

  Oh, he's just moving his hands?

• 31:52Speaker 04

  Yeah, your hands control it waving over this.

• 31:54Joe Rogan?

  What?

• 31:54Speaker 04

  It's a fucking wild instrument.

• 31:56Joe Rogan?

  Have you seen this before, Jamie?

• 31:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, I saw Juicy J play it yesterday on Instagram. He's like practicing. It's a fucking cool ass thing.

• 32:04Speaker 01

  He's also pretty good at it, too.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There's, we two, two, both hands are controlling it by moving in and out and space, X, Y's. I don't, I honestly don't really know how the fuck it works, but I've seen it.

• 32:17Joe Rogan?

  Wow, that is wild.

• 32:19Speaker 01

  It's also a lot harder to do than it seems. So, American, the Americans tried to replicate this for years and years and years without, without really succeeding. And anyway, that's all kind of part of it.

• 32:28Joe Rogan?

  I have a friend who used to work for an intelligence agency and he was working in Russia. And the fact, they found that the building was bugged with these super sophisticated bugs that operate. Their power came from the swaying of the building.

• 32:45Speaker 01

  Get out. I've never heard that one before.

• 32:49Joe Rogan?

  Just like your watch, like I have a mechanical watch on, so when I move my watch, it powers up the spring and it keeps the watch. That's an automatic, that's how an automatic mechanical watch works. They figured out a way to, just by the subtle swaying of the building in the wind, that was what was powering this listening device.

• 33:06Speaker 01

  So, this is the thing, right? Like the...

• 33:08Joe Rogan?

  I mean, what the fuck?

• 33:09Speaker 01

  The things that, the things that nation states...

• 33:12Joe Rogan?

  What's up, Jamie?

• 33:13Speaker 04

  Google says that's, that's what was powering this thing, the great seal bug, which I think is the thing.

• 33:18Joe Rogan?

  Is another one?

• 33:19Speaker 04

  No.

• 33:20Speaker 01

  Oh, this is, so you can actually see in that video, I think there was a YouTube, yeah, so...

• 33:23Joe Rogan?

  Same kind of thing, Jamie?

• 33:24Speaker 04

  I, I was just, I typed in Russia spy bug, building sway.

• 33:30Speaker 04

  The thing is what pops up.

• 33:31Joe Rogan?

  The thing?

• 33:32Speaker 04

  Which is what we were just talking about.

• 33:33Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that thing? So that's powered the same way? By the sway of the building?

• 33:37Speaker 04

  I don't...

• 33:38Speaker 01

  I think it was powered by radio frequency emission. So, there may be another thing related to it? Not sure, but... Yeah.

• 33:47Joe Rogan?

  Maybe Google's a little confused.

• 33:49Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 33:49Joe Rogan?

  Maybe the word sway is what's throwing it off.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  But it's... No, but it's a great catch. And the only reason we even know that, too, is that when the U-2s were flying over Russia, they had a U-2 that got shot down in 1960. The Russians go like, "Oh, like, friggin' Americans spying on us? What the fuck? I thought we were buddies." Well, it's the 60s, I obviously didn't think that. But, and then the Americans are like, "Uh, okay, bitch. Look at this." And they brought out the seal. And that's how it became public. It was basically like the response to the Russians saying like, you know...

• 34:19Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 34:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they're all dirty.

• 34:22Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 34:22Joe Rogan?

  Everyone's spying on everybody.

• 34:24Speaker 01

  That's the thing.

• 34:25Joe Rogan?

  And I think they probably all have some sort of UFO technology.

• 34:29Speaker 01

  We need to talk about that.

• 34:30Speaker 02

  We need to turn off our mics and...

• 34:33Joe Rogan?

  I'm 99% sure a lot of that shit is ours.

• 34:36Speaker 01

  You need to talk to some of the...

• 34:37Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I've been talking to people.

• 34:39Speaker 01

  Oh, I'm...

• 34:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 34:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:40Joe Rogan?

  I've been talking to a lot of people.

• 34:42Speaker 01

  There's... There might be some other people that you'd be interested in chatting with.

• 34:45Joe Rogan?

  I would very much be interested. Here's the problem. Some of the people I'm talking to, I'm positive, were... They're talking to me to give me bullshit.

• 34:54Speaker 01

  Ah.

• 34:54Joe Rogan?

  Because I'm a blabbermouth.

• 34:56Speaker 01

  Are we on your list?

• 34:57Joe Rogan?

  No, you guys aren't on the list. But there's certain people I'm like, "Okay, maybe most of this is true, but some of it's not, on purpose." There's that. I guarantee you, I know I talk to people that don't tell me the truth.

• 35:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. It's an interesting problem in like all intel, right? Because there's always... The mix of incentives is so fucked. Like, the adversary's trying to add noise into the system. You've got pockets of people within the government that have different incentives from other pockets.

• 35:21Joe Rogan?

  And then you have top-secret clearance and all sorts of other things that are going on. Yeah, one guy that texted me is like, "The guy telling you that they aren't real is literally involved in these meetings, so stop." Just stop listening to him.

• 35:34Speaker 02

  It's like, one of the techniques, right, is like, is actually to inject so much noise that you don't know what's what and you can't follow. So this actually, this happened in the COVID thing, right? The lab leak versus the natural, like, wet market thing? Yeah. So I remember there was a debate that happened about what was the origin of COVID? This was like a few years ago. It was like an 18 or 20 hour long YouTube debate, just like punishingly long. And it was like, there was a $100,000 bet either way on who would win. And it was like lab leak versus wet market. And at the end of the 18 hours, the conclusion was like, one of them won, but the conclusion

• 36:17Speaker 02

  was like, it's basically 50/50 between them. And then I remember like hearing that and talking to some folks and being like, hang on a second. So you gotta believe that whether it came from a lab or whether it came from a wet market, one of the top three priorities of the CCP from a propaganda standpoint is like, don't get fucking blamed for COVID. And that means they're putting like $1 to $10 billion and some of their best people on a global propaganda effort to cover up evidence and confuse and blah, blah, blah. You really think that you're 50%, like that confusion isn't coming from that incredibly resourced effort? Like, they know what they're doing.

• 37:00Joe Rogan?

  Particularly when different biologists and virologists who weren't attached to anything were talking about like the cleavage points and this, different aspects of the virus that appeared to be genetically manipulated, the fact that there was only one spillover event, not multiple ones, none of it made any sense, all of it seemed like some sort of a genetically engineered virus. It seemed like gain of function research. And their early emails were talking about that.

• 37:31Joe Rogan?

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• 38:37Joe Rogan?

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• 39:20Joe Rogan?

  just $25 a month. Or get the premium Visible Plus Pro Plan and save $10 on your first month with promo code ROGEN. Terms apply. See visible.com for plan, features and network management details. And then everybody changes their opinion.

• 39:37Speaker 01

  And even the taboo, right, against talking about it. Through that lens.

• 39:41Joe Rogan?

  Oh, yeah, total propaganda. It's racist.

• 39:43Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 39:44Joe Rogan?

  Which is crazy, because nobody thought the Spanish flu was racist, and it didn't even really come from Spain.

• 39:48Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's true, yeah.

• 39:49Joe Rogan?

  Came from Kentucky.

• 39:50Speaker 01

  I didn't know that.

• 39:52Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, I think it was Kentucky or Virginia. Where did the Spanish flu originate from? But nobody got mad.

• 39:58Speaker 01

  Well, that's because the state of Kentucky has an incredibly sophisticated propaganda machine. And pinned it on Spanish.

• 40:06Joe Rogan?

  Kentucky. But I think it was an agricultural thing. Kansas.

• 40:12Speaker 01

  Kansas.

• 40:13Joe Rogan?

  Thank you.

• 40:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, goddamn Kansas, you know? I've always said that. I've always said that.

• 40:17Joe Rogan?

  Likely originating in the United States, H1N1 strain had genes of avian origin. By the way, people always talk about the Spanish flu. If it was around today, everybody would just get antibiotics and we'd be fine. So this whole mass die-off of people.

• 40:30Speaker 01

  It would be like the Latinx flu, and we would be...

• 40:33Speaker 02

  The Latinx flu?

• 40:34Speaker 01

  The Latinx flu.

• 40:37Joe Rogan?

  That one didn't stick at all.

• 40:38Speaker 01

  It didn't stick.

• 40:39Joe Rogan?

  Latinx? A lot of people claiming they never used it, and they pull up old videos of them. Like, that's a dumb one. Like, it's literally a gendered language, you fucking idiots. You can't just do that.

• 40:50Speaker 01

  That's true. It went on for a while, though.

• 40:52Joe Rogan?

  Sure, everything goes on for a while. So think about how long they did lobotomies.

• 40:59Joe Rogan?

  They did the lobotomies for 50 fucking years, before they went, hey, maybe we should stop doing this.

• 41:04Speaker 01

  It was like the same attitude that got Turing chemically castrated, right? I mean, they're like, hey, let's just get in there and fuck around a bit and see what...

• 41:12Joe Rogan?

  Well, this was before they had SSRIs and all sorts of other interventions. But what was the year of lobotomies? I believe it stopped in 67. Was it 50 years?

• 41:22Speaker 04

  I think you said 70 last time, and that was correct when I pulled it up.

• 41:25Joe Rogan?

  70 years?

• 41:26Speaker 04

  1970.

• 41:27Joe Rogan?

  Oh, I think it was 67.

• 41:28Speaker 01

  I like how this has come up so many times, that Jamie's like, I think last time you said it was 70.

• 41:33Joe Rogan?

  It comes up all the time, because it's one of those things. It's like, you can't just trust the medical establishment.

• 41:38Speaker 04

  Officially, 67, it says maybe one more in 70. Oh, he died in 72.

• 41:41Joe Rogan?

  Oh, he died in 72. When did they start doing it? I think they started in the 30s, or the 20s, rather.

• 41:49Speaker 01

  That's pretty ballsy, you know, the first, the first guy.

• 41:51Joe Rogan?

  So twenty four.

• 41:52Speaker 02

  The first guy who did a lobotomy, yeah.

• 41:54Joe Rogan?

  It says twenty four Freeman arrives to watch DC Direct Labs, thirty five, they tried it first.

• 41:59Speaker 04

  A leukotomy.

• 42:00Joe Rogan?

  Ugh.

• 42:01Speaker 01

  A leukotomy.

• 42:01Joe Rogan?

  Imagine that, they just scramble your fucking brains.

• 42:04Speaker 01

  But doesn't it make you feel better to call it a leukotomy, though? Because it sounds a lot more professional.

• 42:09Joe Rogan?

  No, lobotomy, leukotomy, it sounds, leukotomy sounds gross, sounds like loogie, like you're hucking a loogie, like lobotomy. Boy, Topeka, Kansas, also Kansas, all, all roads point to Kansas.

• 42:22Speaker 01

  This is a problem.

• 42:23Joe Rogan?

  So that's what happens, and everything's flat, you just lose your fucking marbles, you go crazy.

• 42:27Speaker 01

  That's the main issue with that stuff, yeah.

• 42:29Joe Rogan?

  So they did this for so long, man.

• 42:31Speaker 01

  Somebody won a Nobel Prize for lobotomy.

• 42:33Speaker 02

  Wonderful.

• 42:33Speaker 01

  Imagine, imagine being that person.

• 42:35Joe Rogan?

  Give that back, you piece of shit.

• 42:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, seriously, you're kind of like, you know, you, you don't want to display it up on your shelf.

• 42:40Joe Rogan?

  But it's, it's just a good indicator, it's like, it should let you know that oftentimes, science is incorrect. And that oftentimes, you know, unfortunately, people have a history of doing things, and then they have to justify that they've done these things.

• 42:55Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 42:55Joe Rogan?

  And they, you know.

• 42:56Speaker 01

  But now there's also, there's so much more tooling too, right? If you're a nation state and you want to fuck with people and inject narratives into the ecosystem, right? Like, the, the whole idea of autonomous AI agents too, like having these basically like Twitter bots or, or whatever bots. Like, a lot of, one thing we've been, we've been thinking about too, on the side, is like, the idea of, um, uh, you know, uh, audience capture, right? You have like, like, big people with high profiles and kind of gradually steering them towards a position by creating bots that like, through comments, through upvotes, you know?

• 43:28Joe Rogan?

  One hundred percent.

• 43:29Speaker 01

  It's.

• 43:30Joe Rogan?

  It's absolutely real.

• 43:31Speaker 02

  Yeah, and a couple of the, the big, like, a couple of big accounts on X, like, that, that we're in touch with have sort of said, like, yeah, especially in the last two years, it's actually become hard, like, especially the thoughtful ones, right? It's become hard to like, stay sane, not, not on X, but like, across social media, on, on all the platforms. And that is around when, you know, it became possible to have AIs that can speak like people, you know, ninety percent, ninety-five percent. The time. And so you you have to imagine that, yeah, adversaries are are using this and doing this and pushing the frontier.

• 44:06Joe Rogan?

  No doubt.

• 44:07Speaker 02

  There's.

• 44:07Joe Rogan?

  They'd be fools if they didn't.

• 44:09Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, 100%.

• 44:10Joe Rogan?

  You have to do it because for sure we're doing that.

• 44:12Speaker 01

  And this is one of the things where, you know, like it used to be so OpenAI actually used to do this assessment of their AI models as part of their their kind of what they call their preparedness framework. That would look at the persuasion capabilities of their models as one kind of threat factor. They pulled that out recently, which they've is kind of like.

• 44:32Joe Rogan?

  Why?

• 44:33Speaker 01

  You can argue that it makes sense. I actually think it's it's somewhat concerning because one of the things you might worry about is if these systems, sometimes they get trained through what's called reinforcement learning. Potentially, you could imagine training these to be super persuasive by having them interact with real people and convince them, practice at convincing them to do specific things. If that, if you get to that point, you know, these these labs ultimately will have the ability to deploy agents at scale that can just persuade a lot of people to do whatever they want, including pushing legislative agendas.

• 45:05Speaker 02

  And even help them help them prep for meetings with the Hill, the administration, whatever. And like, how should I like convince this person to do that?

• 45:13Joe Rogan?

  Like, yeah, well, they'll do that with text messages. Make it more business like.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 45:17Joe Rogan?

  Make it friendlier. Make it more jovial.

• 45:21Speaker 01

  But this is like the same optimization pressure that keeps you on TikTok, that same like addiction. Imagine that applied to like persuading you of some like some fact, right?

• 45:29Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 45:30Speaker 01

  That's like a.

• 45:31Speaker 02

  On the other hand, maybe a few months from now, we're all just going to be very, very convinced that it was all fine. It's no big deal.

• 45:38Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, maybe they they'll get so good that it'll make sense to you. Maybe they'll just be right.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  That's how that shit works.

• 45:47Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's it's a confusing time period. You know, we've talked about this ad nauseam, but it bears repeating. This former FBI analyst who investigated Twitter before Elon bought it said that he thinks it's about 80% bots.

• 46:01Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 46:01Joe Rogan?

  80%.

• 46:02Speaker 01

  That's that's one of the reasons why the bot purge, like when when Elon acquired it and started working on is is so important. Like, there needs to be, the challenge is like detecting these things is so hard, right?

• 46:12Joe Rogan?

  So.

• 46:12Speaker 02

  Increasingly, like more and more, they can hide like. Basically perfectly, like, how do you tell the difference between a cutting-edge AI bot and a human, just from the

• 46:23Joe Rogan?

  You can't, because they can generate AI images of a family, of a backyard barbecue, post all these things up and make it seem like it's real.

• 46:30Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 46:30Joe Rogan?

  Especially now, AI images are insanely good now.

• 46:34Speaker 02

  They really are, yeah.

• 46:35Joe Rogan?

  It's crazy.

• 46:35Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 46:36Joe Rogan?

  And if you have a person, you could just, you could take a photo of a person, manipulate it in any way you'd like, and then now this is your new guy, you could do it instantaneously, and then this guy has a bunch of opinions on things, and seems to, seems always aligned with the Democratic Party, but whatever, he's a good guy, he's a family man, look, he's out in his barbecue, he's not even a fucking human being.

• 46:54Speaker 02

  And

• 46:55Joe Rogan?

  And people are arguing with this bot, like, back and forth, and you'll see it on any social issue. You see with Gaza and Palestine, you see it with abortion, you see it with religious freedoms.

• 47:06Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 47:07Joe Rogan?

  You just see these bots, you see these arguments, and, you know, you see, like, various levels. You see, like, the extreme position, and then you see a more reasonable centrist position. But essentially, what they're doing is they're consistently moving what's okay

• 47:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 47:22Joe Rogan?

  Further and further in a certain direction.

• 47:25Speaker 02

  And in fact, it's, it's, it's, it's both directions. Like, it's like, you know how when you're trying to, like, you're, you're trying to capsize a boat or something, you're, you're like, fucking with your buddy on the lake or something? So you, you push on one side, then you push on the other side.

• 47:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 47:39Speaker 02

  And you push, and until eventually it capsizes. This is kind of, like, our electoral process is already naturally like this, right? We, we go, like, we have a party in power for a while, then, like, they, they get, you know, they basically get, like, you get tired of them and you switch, and that's kind of the natural way how democracy works, or in a republic. But the way that adversaries think about this is they're like, perfect, this swing back and forth, all we have to do is, like, when it's on this way, we push and push and push and push, until it goes more extreme, and then there's a reaction to it, right? And then it's swinging back, and we push and push and push on the other side, until eventually something breaks. And that's a risk. Yeah.

• 48:16Speaker 01

  It's also like, you know, the organizations that are doing this, like, we already know this is part of Russia's MO, China's MO, because back when it was easier to detect, we already could see them doing this shit. So there is this website called This Person Does Not Exist, it still exists surely now, but it's kind of, kind of old.

• 48:34Speaker 02

  Superseded.

• 48:34Speaker 01

  Yeah. But you would like, every time you refresh this, this website, you would see a different, like, human face that was AI-generated, and what the Russian Internet Research Agency would do.

• 48:43Speaker 02

  It still exists.

• 48:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly. What, what all these, these, and it's, it's actually, yeah, I don't think they've really upgraded it since, I don't know, yeah, but, or yeah, stop.

• 48:51Joe Rogan?

  That's fake?

• 48:52Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 48:53Joe Rogan?

  Wow, they're so good.

• 48:54Speaker 02

  This is old, this is like, years old, years old.

• 48:57Speaker 01

  And you could actually detect these things pretty reliably, like, you might remember the, the whole thing about AI systems were having a hard time generating like, hands that only had like, five fingers or whatever, that stuff.

• 49:06Joe Rogan?

  That's over, though.

• 49:07Speaker 02

  That's over.

• 49:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, little hints of it were, though, back in the day, in This Person Does Not Exist, and you'd have, the Russians would take, like, the, a face from that, and then use it as the profile picture for like, a Twitter bot.

• 49:18Speaker 02

  Right.

• 49:19Speaker 01

  And, so that you could actually detect, you'd be like, okay, I've got you there, I've got you there, I can kind of get a rough count.

• 49:23Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  Now, we can't, but we definitely know they've been in the game for a long time, there's no way they're not right now.

• 49:28Speaker 02

  And the thing with, the thing with like, nation-state, like, propaganda attempts, right, is that, like, people have this, this idea that like, ah, like, I've caught this, like, Chinese influence operation, or whatever, like, we nail them. The reality is, nation-states operate at like, 30 different levels, and if you're a priority, like, just influencing our information spaces as a priority for them, they're not just gonna operate, they're not just gonna pick a level and do it, they're gonna do all 30 of them. And so, you, even if you're like, among the best in the world, like, detecting this shit, you're gonna like, you're gonna catch and stop, like, levels one through 10, and then you're gonna be like, you're gonna be aware of like, level 11, 12, 13, like, you're working against it, and you're, you know, maybe you're, you're starting to think about level 16, and you,

• 50:13Speaker 02

  you imagine, like, you know about level 18, or whatever, but they're, like, they're above you, below you, all around you, they're, they're incredibly, incredibly resourced, and this is something that came, like, came, came through very strongly for us.

• 50:25Joe Rogan?

  You guys have seen the Yuri Bezmenov video from 1984 where he's talking about how the all our educational institutions have been captured by Soviet propaganda. He was talking about Marxism, how it's been injected into school systems and how you have essentially two decades before you're completely captured by these ideologies and it's going to permeate and destroy all of your confidence in democracy and he was 100% correct. And this is before these kind of tools, before, because like the vast majority of the exchanges of information right now are taking place on social media. The vast majority of debating about things, arguing, all taking place on social media.

• 51:06Joe Rogan?

  And if that FBI analyst is correct, 80% of it's bullshit.

• 51:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:11Joe Rogan?

  Which is really wild.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  Well, and you look at like some of the documents that have come out, I think it was like the, I think it was the CIA game plan, right, for regime change or like undermining, like how do you do it, right? Have multiple decision makers at every level.

• 51:24Joe Rogan?

  Right, right, right.

• 51:25Speaker 01

  All these things and like, what a surprise, that's exactly what like the US bureaucracy looks like today.

• 51:29Joe Rogan?

  Exactly. Slow everything down, make change impossible, make it so that everybody gets frustrated with it and they give up hope. They decided to do that to other countries.

• 51:38Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 51:38Joe Rogan?

  For sure, they do that here.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Open society, right? I mean, that's part of the trade-off and that's actually a big, big part of the challenge too. So, when, when we're working on this, right, like one of the things Ed was talking about, these like 30 different layers of security access or whatever, one of the consequences is you bump into a team at, so like the teams we ended up working with on this project were folks that we bumped into after the end of our last investigation who kind of were like, oh.

• 52:05Speaker 02

  We talked about last year, yeah.

• 52:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, like looking at AGI, looking at the national security kind of landscape around that. And a lot of them like really well placed, it was like, you know, special forces guys from tier one units, so you'll seal team six type thing. And because they're so, like, in that ecosystem, you, you'll see people who are like ridiculously specialized and competent, like the best people in the world at doing whatever the thing is, like to break the security. And they don't know often about like another group of guys who have a completely different capability set. And so, what you find is like you're indexing like hard on this vulnerability and then suddenly someone says, oh yeah, but by the way, I can just hop that fence.

• 52:47Speaker 02

  So the really funny, the really funny thing about this is like. Most or even like almost all of the really, really like elite security people kind of think that like all the other security people are dumbasses, even when they're not.

• 53:02Speaker 01

  Or like, yeah, they're biased in the direction of, because it's so easy when everything's like stove piped.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  But so most people who say they're like elite at security actually are dumbasses. Because most security is like about checking boxes and like SOC 2 compliance and shit like that.

• 53:18Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's what it is is it's like, so everything's so stove piped.

• 53:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:23Speaker 01

  That you don't, you literally can't know what the exquisite state of the art is in another domain. So it's a lot easier for somebody to come up and be like, oh yeah, like I'm actually really good at this other thing that you don't know. And so figuring out who actually is the, like, we had this experience over and over where like, you know, you run into a team and then you run into another team, they have an interaction, you're kind of like, oh, interesting. So like, you know, like these are the really kind of the people at the top of their game. And that's been this very long process to figure out like, okay, what does it take to actually secure our critical infrastructure against like CCP, for example, like Chinese attacks if we're, if we're building a super intelligence project? And it's, it's this weird like kind of challenge because of the stove piping.

• 54:04Speaker 01

  No one has the full picture and like, we don't think that we have it even now, but definitely don't know of anyone who's come like that, like this close to it.

• 54:12Speaker 02

  The best people are the ones who, when they, when they encounter another team and, and other ideas and start to engage with it are like, instead of being like, oh, like you don't know what you're talking about, who just like actually lock on and go like, that's fucking interesting. Tell me more about that.

• 54:27Joe Rogan?

  Right. People that have control of their ego.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  A hundred percent.

• 54:30Joe Rogan?

  With everything.

• 54:31Speaker 02

  The best of the best, the best of the best, like got there by eliminating their ego as much as they could.

• 54:40Joe Rogan?

  Yeah. Always the way it is.

• 54:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, and it's also like the fact of, you know, the 30 layers of the stack or whatever it is of all these security issues means that no one can have the complete picture at any one time. And the stack is changing all the time. People are inventing new shit. People, things are falling in and out of. And so, you know, figuring out what is that team that can actually get you that complete picture is an exercise. A, you can't really do, it's hard to do it from the government side because you got to engage with data center building companies. You got to engage with the AI labs and in particular with like insiders of the labs who will tell you things that by the way, the lab leadership will tell you the opposite of in some cases.

• 55:22Speaker 01

  And so like it's just this Gordian knot, like it took us months to like pin down every kind of dimension that we think we've pinned down at this point.

• 55:31Speaker 02

  I'll give an example, actually, of that, like the trying to do the handshake, right? Between different sets of people. So we were talking to one person who's, who's thinking hard about data center security, working with like frontier labs on this shit, very much like at the, at the top of her game. But she's kind of from like the academic space, kind of Berkeley, like the avocado toast kind of side of the spectrum, you know? And she's talking to us. She'd reviewed our, the, the report we put out, the investigation we put out. And she's like, you know, I think, I think you guys are, are talking to the wrong people. And we're like, can you say more about that? And she's like, well, I don't think like, you know, you talked to tier one special forces.

• 56:15Speaker 02

  I don't think they like know much about that. We're like, okay, that's not correct, but can you say why? And she's like, I feel like those are just the people that like go and like bomb stuff.

• 56:25Speaker 01

  Blow shit up.

• 56:26Speaker 02

  Blow shit up.

• 56:27Speaker 01

  And it's understandable too, because like I think a lot of people.

• 56:29Speaker 02

  It's totally understandable.

• 56:29Speaker 01

  A lot of people have the wrong sense of like what a tier one asset actually can, can do. It's like.

• 56:34Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's ego on her part because she doesn't understand what they do.

• 56:38Speaker 01

  It's ego all the way down, right?

• 56:39Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, but that's a dumb thing to say. If you literally don't know what they do and you say, don't they just blow stuff up? Where's my latte?

• 56:47Speaker 02

  That's a weirdly good impression, but to her credit-

• 56:49Speaker 01

  She did ask about a latte, yeah.

• 56:50Speaker 02

  She did, but to her credit-

• 56:51Joe Rogan?

  Did she talk in up-speak? You should fire everyone who talks in up-speak.

• 56:54Speaker 01

  She didn't talk in up-speak, but-

• 56:56Joe Rogan?

  The moment they do that, you should just tell them to leave. There's no way you have an original thought. This is how you talk.

• 57:04Speaker 01

  China, can you get out of our data center?

• 57:06Joe Rogan?

  Yah, please? I'm gonna enjoy my avocado tate.

• 57:09Speaker 01

  I don't want to rip on that too much, though, because this is, one really important factor here is, all these groups have a part of the puzzle. And they're all fucking ama- they are like world-class at their own little slice. And a big part of what we've had to do is like, bring people together, and there are people who've helped us immeasurably do this, but like, bring people together and explain to them the value that each other has in a way that's like, that allows that bridge building to be made. And by the way, the tier-one guys are the most like, ego-moderated of the people that we talk to. There's a lot of like Silicon Valley hubris going around right now, where people are like, listen, like, get out of our way,

• 57:53Speaker 01

  we'll figure out how to do this like, super-secure data center infrastructure. We got this. Why? Because we're the guys building the AGI, motherfucker! Like, that's kind of the attitude? And it's like, cool, man. Like, that's like a doctor having an opinion about like, how to repair your car. I get that it's not the like, elite kind of like, you know, whatever, but someone has to help you build like, a good friggin' fence? Like, I mean, it's not just that.

• 58:17Joe Rogan?

  The Dunning-Kruger effect.

• 58:19Speaker 01

  It's a mixed bag, too, because like, yes, the, a lot of hyperscalers,

• 58:24Speaker 02

  like Google, Amazon, genuinely do have some of the best private-sector security around data centers in the world, like, hands-down. The problem is, there's levels above that. And the guys who like- Look at what they're doing and see what the holes are. Just go like, oh yeah, like, I could get in there, no problem, and they can fucking do it.

• 58:49Speaker 01

  One thing my wife said to me on a couple of occasions, like, you seem to like, and this was towards the beginning of the project, like, you seem to like, change your mind a lot about what the right configuration is of how to do this. And yeah, it's because every other day, you're having a conversation with somebody who's like, oh yeah, like, great job on this thing, but like, I'm not gonna do that. I'm gonna do this other completely different thing. And that just fucks everything over. And so, you have enough of those conversations, and at a certain point, your plan, your game plan on this, can no longer look like we're gonna build a perfect fortress. It's gotta look like, we're going to account for our own uncertainty on the security side, and the fact that we're never gonna be able to patch everything. Like, you have to. I mean, it's like-

• 59:31Speaker 02

  And that means, you actually have to go on offense from the beginning. Because like, the truth is, and this came up over and over again, there's no world where you're ever gonna build the perfect exquisite fortress around all your shit, and hide behind your walls like this forever. That just doesn't work, because no matter how perfect your system is, and how many angles you've covered, like, your adversary is super smart, is super dedicated, if you seed the field to them, they're right up in your face. And they're reaching out and touching you, and they're trying to see like, what your seams are, where they break. And that just means, you have to reach out and touch them from the beginning. Because until you've actually, like, reached out and used a capability, and proved, like,

• 1:00:15Speaker 02

  we can take down that infrastructure, we can like, disrupt that cyber operation, we can do this, we can do that, you don't know if that capability's real or not. Like, you might just be like, lying to yourself, and like, I can do this thing whenever I want, but actually-

• 1:00:28Speaker 01

  You're kinda more in academia mode than like, startup mode-

• 1:00:31Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 1:00:31Speaker 01

  Because you're not making contact every day with the thing, right? You have to touch the thing. And there's like, there's a related issue here, which is, a kind of like, willingness, this came up over and over again. Like, one of the kind of gurus of this space was like, made the point, a couple of them made the point that, you know, you can have the most exquisite capability in the world, but if you don't actually have the willingness to use it, you might as well not have that capability. And the challenge is, right now- China, Russia, like our adversaries pull all kinds of stunts on us and get no consequences.

• 1:01:05Speaker 02

  Particularly during the previous administration. This was a huge, huge problem during the previous administration where you actually, you actually had sabotage operations being done on American soil by our adversaries, where you had administration officials, as soon as like a thing happened, so there were, for example, there was like four different states had their 911 systems go down like at the same time, different systems, like unrelated stuff, but it was like, it's this stuff where it's like, let me see if I can do that, let me see if I can do it, let me see what the reaction is, let me see what the chatter is that comes back after I do that.

• 1:01:46Speaker 02

  And one of the things that was actually pretty disturbing about that was, under that, under that, that administration or regime or whatever, the response you got from the government right out the gate was, oh, it's an accident. And that's actually unusual. The proper procedure, the normal procedure in this case is to say, we can't comment on an ongoing investigation, which we've all heard, right? Like, you can't comment on blah blah.

• 1:02:11Joe Rogan?

  We can neither confirm nor deny.

• 1:02:12Speaker 02

  Exactly. It's all that stuff and that's, and that's what they say typically out the gate when they're investigating stuff. But instead, coming out and saying, oh, it's just an accident, is a break with procedure.

• 1:02:21Joe Rogan?

  What do you attribute that to?

• 1:02:23Speaker 02

  They, if, if they say, if they, if they leave an opening or say, actually, this is an adversary action, we think it's an adversary action, they have to respond. The public demands a response. And they don't, they were too fearful of escalating.

• 1:02:41Speaker 01

  So what ends up happening, right, is, and by the way, that, that thing about like, it's an accident, comes out often before there would have been time for investigators to physically fly on site and take a look. Like, there's no logical way that you could even know that at the time? And they're like, boom, that's an accident, don't worry about it.

• 1:02:57Joe Rogan?

  So they have an official answer and then their response is to just bury their head in the sand and not investigate?

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  Right. Because if you were to investigate, if you were to say, okay, we looked into this, it actually looks like it's fucking like country X that just didn't. Did this thing.

• 1:03:10Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:03:11Speaker 01

  If that's the conclusion, it's hard to imagine the American people not being like, um, what are we like? We're letting these people injure our American citizens on US soil, take out like US national security, like or critical infrastructure, and we're not doing anything? Like, the concern is about this, like, we're getting in our own way of thinking like, oh, well, escalation is going to happen and boom, we run straight to like, there's going to be a nuclear war, everybody's going to die. Like, when you do that, you, the peace between nations, stability does not come from the absence of activity, it comes from consequence. It comes from, just like if you have, you know, a, an individual who misbehaves in society, there's a consequence and people know it's coming.

• 1:03:52Speaker 01

  You need to train your counterparts in the international community, your adversary, to not fuck with your stuff.

• 1:03:59Joe Rogan?

  Can I, can I stop for a second? When, when, so are you essentially saying that if you have incredible capabilities of disrupting grids and power systems and infrastructure, you wouldn't necessarily do it, but you might try it to make sure it works a little bit?

• 1:04:13Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 1:04:14Joe Rogan?

  And that this is probably the hints of some of this stuff, because you've kind of...

• 1:04:18Speaker 01

  You gotta get your reps in, right? You gotta get your reps in. It's like, it's like, okay, so suppose that like, that I went to you and was like, hey, I, I bet I can kick your ass, like, I, I bet I can like frigging slap a rubber guard on you and like do whatever the fuck, right? And you're like... I love your expression, by the way. Yeah, yeah, you look really convinced. It's because I'm jacked, right?

• 1:04:35Joe Rogan?

  Well, no, there's people that look like you that can strangle me, believe it or not. Yeah, there's a lot of like very high level Brazilian Jiu Jitsu black belts that are just super nerds, and they don't lift weights at all, they only do Jiu Jitsu, and if you only do Jiu Jitsu, you'll have like a wiry body.

• 1:04:50Speaker 01

  Dude, that was heartless. They just slipped that in, like, there's like guys who look like you, it's like, just real fucking nerd.

• 1:04:56Joe Rogan?

  Intelligent people. No, they're like some of the, the most brilliant people I've ever met. The, really, that's the issue. It's like, data nerds get really involved in Jiu Jitsu, and Jiu Jitsu's data.

• 1:05:08Speaker 01

  Uh, but here's the thing, so, so that's exactly it, right? So if, if I told you, I bet I can tap you out, right?

• 1:05:12Joe Rogan?

  I'd be like, where have you been training?

• 1:05:14Speaker 01

  Well, right, but, and you're, if you're like, if my answer was, oh, I've just read a bunch of books.

• 1:05:19Joe Rogan?

  Oh.

• 1:05:19Speaker 01

  You'd be like, oh... Cool. Let's go.

• 1:05:21Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:21Speaker 01

  Right? Because making contact with reality is where the fucking learning happens.

• 1:05:25Joe Rogan?

  Exactly.

• 1:05:25Speaker 01

  You can sit there and think all you want.

• 1:05:27Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:05:28Speaker 01

  But unless you've actually played the chess match, unless you've reached out, touched, seen what the reaction is and all this stuff, you don't actually know what you think you know. And that's actually extra dangerous. If you're sitting on a bunch of capabilities and you have this like unearned sense of superiority because you haven't used those exquisite tools.

• 1:05:44Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:05:44Speaker 01

  It's a challenge.

• 1:05:45Joe Rogan?

  And then you've got people that are head of departments, CEOs of corporations, everyone has an ego.

• 1:05:51Speaker 05

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• 1:07:20Speaker 02

  Yeah. And this ties into like how exactly how basically the international order and quasi stability actually gets maintained. So there's like above threshold stuff. Which is like, you actually do wars for borders and you know, well, there's the potential for nuclear exchange or whatever like that's like all stuff that can't be hidden, right? War games. Exactly, like all the war games type shit. But then there's below threshold stuff. The stuff that's like you're it's it's always like the stuff that's like, hey, I'm gonna try to like poke you. Are you gonna react? What are you gonna do? And then if if you do nothing here, then I go like, okay, what's the next level? I can poke you. I can poke you. Cause like, one of the things that that we almost have an intuition for that's that's mistaken, that comes from kind of historical experience is like this idea that,

• 1:08:04Speaker 02

  you know, the countries can actually really defend their citizens in a meaningful way. So like, if you think back to World War One, the most sophisticated advanced nation states on the planet could not get past a line of dudes in a trench. Like, that was like, that was the then they tried like thing after thing. Let's try tanks. Let's try aircraft. Let's try fucking hot air balloons infiltration. And it literally like the one side pretty much just ran out of dudes and that ended the war to put in their trench. And so we have this thought that like, oh, you know, countries can actually put put boundaries around themselves and actually, but the reality is,

• 1:08:43Speaker 02

  you can, you there's so many surfaces. The surface area for attacks is just too great. And so there's there's stuff like you can actually like, um, there's the Havana syndrome stuff where you look at this like ratcheting escalation like, oh, let's like fry a couple of embassy staff's brains in Havana, Cuba. What are they gonna do about it? Nothing? Okay, let's move on to Vienna, Austria, something a little bit more Western, a little bit more orderly. Let's see what they do there. Still nothing. Okay. What if we move on to frying like Americans' brains on US soil, baby? And they and they went and did that. And so this is one of these things where like,

• 1:09:20Speaker 02

  stability in reality in the world is not maintained through defense, but it's literally like you have like the Crips and the Bloods with different territories. And it it's stable and it looks quiet. But the reason is that if you like beat the shit out of one of my, one of my guys for no good reason, I'm just gonna find One of your guys and I'll blow his fucking head off. And that keeps peace and stability on the surface. But that's the reality of sub-threshold competition between nation-states. It's like, you come in and like, fuck with my boys, I'm gonna fuck with your boys right back. And until we push back, they're gonna keep pushing that limit further and further.

• 1:10:00Speaker 01

  One important consequence of that too is like, if you want to avoid nuclear escalation, right? The answer is not to just take punches in the mouth over and over in the fear that eventually, if you do anything, you're gonna escalate to nukes. All that does is it empowers the adversary to keep driving up the ratchet. Like what Ed's just described there is an increasing ratchet of unresponded adversary action. If you address the low, the kind of sub-threshold stuff. If they cut an undersea cable and then there's a consequence for that shit, they're less likely to cut an undersea cable and things kind of stay at that level of the threshold, you know?

• 1:10:38Joe Rogan?

  Right, just letting them burn out.

• 1:10:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:41Joe Rogan?

  That logic of just like, let them do it, they'll stop doing it after a while.

• 1:10:45Speaker 01

  They'll get it out of their system.

• 1:10:46Joe Rogan?

  They tried that during the George Floyd riots, remember? That's what New York City did, like this, let them loop.

• 1:10:51Speaker 01

  Let's just see how big Chaz gets.

• 1:10:53Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's the summer of love, don't you remember?

• 1:10:57Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:10:58Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:10:59Speaker 01

  The translation into like, the superintelligence scenario is, A, if we don't have our reps in, if we don't know how to reach out and touch an adversary and induce consequence for them doing the same to us, then we have no deterrence at all. Like, we are basically just sitting, right now, the state of security is, the labs are like, super, and like, we can and probably should go deep on that piece, but like, as one data point, right? So, there's like, double-digit percentages of the world's top AI labs, or America's top AI labs.

• 1:11:34Speaker 02

  Of employees.

• 1:11:35Speaker 01

  Of employees that are like Chinese nationals or have ties to the Chinese mainland, right? So that's, that's great, why don't we build the Manhattan Project?

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's really funny, right?

• 1:11:44Joe Rogan?

  That's so stupid.

• 1:11:46Speaker 01

  But it's also like, it's, the challenge is... When you talk to people who actually, geez, when you talk to people who actually have experience of dealing with like CCP activity in this space, right, like there's one story that we heard that is probably worth like relaying here is like this guy from an intelligence agency was saying like, hey, so there was this power outage out in Berkeley, California back in like 2019 or something, and the internet goes out across the whole campus. And so there's this dorm and like all of the Chinese students are freaking out because they have an obligation to do a time-based check-in and basically report back on everything they've seen and heard to basically a CCP handler type thing.

• 1:12:30Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  And if they don't, like, hmm, maybe your mother's insulin doesn't show up, maybe your like brother's travel plans get denied, maybe the family business gets shut down. Like, there's the range of options that this massive CCP state coercion machine has. This is like, you know, they've got like software for this. Like, this is an institutionalized, like, very well-developed and efficient framework for just ratcheting up pressure on individuals overseas, and they believe the Chinese diaspora overseas belongs to them. If you look at like what the Chinese Communist Party writes in its like, in its written like public communications, they see like Chinese ethnicity as being a green, like, is it like,

• 1:13:14Speaker 01

  no one is a bigger victim of this than the Chinese people themselves who are abroad, who have made amazing contributions to American AI innovation, you just have to look at the names on the friggin' papers. It's like, these guys are wicked, but the problem is, we also have to look head-on at this reality. Like, you can't just be like, oh, I'm not gonna say it because it makes me feel funny inside. Someone has to stand up and point out the obvious, that if you're gonna build a fucking Manhattan project for superintelligence, and the idea is to like be doing that when China is a key rival nation-state actor, yeah, you're gonna have to find a way to account for the personnel security side. Like, at some point, someone's gonna have to do something about that.

• 1:13:51Speaker 02

  And it's like, you can see, they're hitting us right where we're weak, right? Like, America's the place where you come and you remake yourself, like, send us your tired and your hungry and your poor.

• 1:14:01Speaker 01

  Which is true and important.

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  It's true and important, but they're playing right off of that, because they know that we don't, we just don't wanna look at that problem.

• 1:14:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and Chinese nationals working on these things is just bananas. The fact they have to check in with the CCP. And are they being monitored? I mean, how much can you monitor them? What do you know that they have? What equipment have they been given?

• 1:14:23Speaker 01

  Constitutionally, right?

• 1:14:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, the best part, constitutionally, it's also, you can't legally deny someone employment on that basis in a private company. So, and that's something else we found and were kind of amazed by. And even honestly, just like the regular kind of government clearance process itself is inadequate. It moves way too slowly and it doesn't actually even, even in the government, we're talking about top secret clearances, the information that they like look at for top secret, we heard from a couple of people, doesn't include a lot of like key sources. So for example, it doesn't include like foreign language sources. So if the, if the head of the Ministry of State Security in China writes a blog post

• 1:15:09Speaker 02

  that says like, "Bob is like the best spy. He spied so hard for us and he's like an awesome spy." If that blog post is written in Chinese, we're not going to see it. And we're going to be like, "Here's your clearance, Bob. Congratulations." Like, and we were like, "That can't possibly be real." But like, yeah, they're like, "Yep, that's, that's true."

• 1:15:30Joe Rogan?

  No one's looking. It's complete and naive betay.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  There's gaps in, you know, a lot of the, yeah.

• 1:15:34Speaker 01

  One of the worst things here is like the, um,

• 1:15:36Joe Rogan?

  That's so crazy.

• 1:15:37Speaker 01

  Yeah, the physical infrastructure. So the personnel thing is like fucked up. The physical infrastructure thing is another area where people don't want to look. Because if you start looking, what you start to realize is, okay, China makes like a lot of our like components for our transformers, for the electrical grid, yep. But also, all these chips that are going into our, our big data centers for these massive training runs, where do they come from? They come from Taiwan. They come from this company called TSMC, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company. We're increasingly onshoring that, by the way, which is one of the best things that's been happening lately, is like massive amounts of TSMC capacity getting onshored in the US, but still being made, right now it's basically like 100% there.

• 1:16:21Speaker 01

  All you have to do is jump on the network at TSMC, hack the right network. Compromise the firmware on the, is the software that runs on these chips to anyway, to get them to run. And you basically can compromise all the chips going into all of these things. Never mind the fact that like Taiwan is like, like physically outside the Chinese sphere of influence for now. China is going to be prioritizing the fuck out of getting access to that. There've been cases, by the way, like Richard Chang, like the founder of SMIC, which is the, so, so, okay. TSMC, this massive like series of aircraft carrier fabrication facilities.

• 1:17:01Speaker 02

  They do like all the iPhone chips.

• 1:17:03Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:17:04Speaker 02

  They do, yeah. They do, they do the AI chips, which are the things we care about.

• 1:17:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. They're the only place on planet Earth that does this. It's literally the, like, it's fascinating. It's like the most, easily the most advanced manufacturing or scientific process that primates on planet Earth can do is this, this chip making process.

• 1:17:23Speaker 02

  Nanoscale like material science where you're, you're putting on like these, these tiny like atom thick layers of stuff and you're doing like 300 of them in a row with like, you, you have like insulators and conductors and different kinds of like semiconductors in these tunnels and shit. Just, just like the, the complexity of it is just awe inspiring that we can do this at all is like, it's magic. It's magic.

• 1:17:48Joe Rogan?

  And it's really only been done, being done in Taiwan.

• 1:17:50Speaker 01

  That is the only place, like truly the only place right now.

• 1:17:54Joe Rogan?

  Wow.

• 1:17:55Speaker 01

  And so a Chinese invasion of Taiwan just looks pretty interesting through that lens, right?

• 1:17:58Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 1:17:59Speaker 01

  Like, yeah. Say goodbye to the iPhones, say goodbye to like the, the chip supply that we rely on and then your super intelligence training run like, damn, that's interesting.

• 1:18:06Joe Rogan?

  I know Samsung was trying to develop a lab here or a semiconductor factory here and they weren't having enough success.

• 1:18:13Speaker 01

  Oh, so, okay. So one, one of the craziest things, just to illustrate how hard it is to do. So you spend $50 billion, again, an aircraft carrier, we're throwing that around here and there, but an aircraft carrier worth of risk capital. What does that mean? That means you build the fab, the factory, and it's not guaranteed it's going to work. At first, this factory is pumping out these chips at like yields. That are really low. In other words, like the only like, you know, 20% of the chips that they're putting out are even useful. And that just makes it totally economically unviable. So you're just trying to increase that yield and desperately crime climb up higher and higher. Intel famously found this so hard that they have this philosophy where when they build a new fab, the philosophy is called copy exactly. Everything down to the color

• 1:18:56Speaker 01

  of the paint on the walls in the bathroom is copied from other fabs that actually worked because they have no idea why a fucking fab works and another one doesn't.

• 1:19:05Speaker 02

  We got this to work. We got this to work. It's like, oh, my God, we got this to work. I can't believe we got this to work. So we have to make it exactly identical because the expensive thing in the semiconductor manufacturing process is the learning curve. So like Jer said, you start by putting through a whole bunch of like the the starting material for the chips, which are called wafers. You put them through your fab. The fab has got like 500 dials on it. And every one of those dials has got to be in the exact right place or the whole fucking thing doesn't work. So you send a bunch of wafers in it at great expense. They come out all fucked up in the first run. It's just like, it's going to be all fucked up in the first run. Then what do you do? You get a bunch of like PhDs,

• 1:19:47Speaker 02

  material scientists, like engineers with scanning electron microscopes because all this shit is like atomic scale tiny. They look at like all the chips and all the stuff that's gone wrong. Like, oh, shit, these pathways got fused or whatever. Like, yeah, there you just need that level of expertise. And then they go like.

• 1:20:05Speaker 01

  It's a mix, right? Like you've got.

• 1:20:06Speaker 02

  It's a mix. It's a mix now in particular. But like, yeah, you absolutely need humans looking at these things at a certain level. And then they go, well, okay, like, I've got a hypothesis about what might have gone wrong in that run. Let's tweak this dial like this and this dial like that and run the whole thing again. And you hear these stories about bringing a fab online. Like, you need, you need, you need a certain percentage of good chips coming out the other end. Or like, you can't make money from the fab because most of your shit is just going right into the garbage.

• 1:20:35Speaker 01

  Unless, and this is important too, your fab is state subsidized. So when you, when you look at, so TSMC is like, they're, they're alone in the world in terms of being able to pump out these chips. But SMIC, this is the Chinese knockoff of TSMC founded, by the way, by a former senior TSMC executive, Richard Chung, who leaves along with a bunch of other people with a bunch of fucking secrets. They get sued like in the early 2000s. It's pretty obvious what happened there. Like, to most people, they're like, yeah, SMIC fucking stole that shit. They bring a new fab online in like a year or two, which is suspiciously fast, start pumping out chips, and now the Chinese ecosystem is ratcheting up, like, the government

• 1:21:15Speaker 01

  is pouring money into SMIC because they know that they can't access TSMC chips anymore because the US governments put pressure on Taiwan to block that off. And so, domestic fab in China is all about SMIC. And they are, like, it's a disgusting amount of money they're putting in. They're teaming up with Huawei to form like this complex of companies that it's really interesting. I mean, the semiconductor industry in China in particular is really, really interesting. It's also a massive story of like self-owns of the United States and the Western world, where we've been just shipping a lot of our shit to them for a long time.

• 1:21:52Speaker 02

  Like the equipment that builds the chips. So like, and it's also like, it's so blatant. And like, they're just, honestly, a lot of the stuff is just like, they're just giving us like a big fuck you. So, give you a really blatant example. So, we have, the way we set up export controls still today on most equipment that these semiconductor fabs use, like the Chinese semiconductor fabs use, we're still sending them a whole bunch of shit. The way we set export controls is instead of like, oh, we're sending this gear to China, and like, now it's in China and we can't do anything about it. Instead, we still have this thing where we're like, no, no, no, this company in China is cool. That company in China is not cool. So, we can ship to this company, but we can't ship to

• 1:22:36Speaker 02

  that company. And so, you get this ridiculous shit. Like, for example, there's like a couple of facilities that you could see by satellite. One of the facilities is okay to ship equipment to. The other facility right next door is like considered, you know, military-connected or whatever, and so we can't ship. The Chinese literally built a bridge between the two facilities. So they can just like shimmy the wafers over to like, oh yeah, we use equipment. And then shimmy it back and now, okay, we're done. So it's like, and you can see it by satellites. So they're not even like trying to hide it. Like our, our stuff is just like so badly put together.

• 1:23:12Speaker 01

  China's prioritizing this so highly that like the idea that we're gonna, um, so we do it by company through this. Basically, it's like an export blacklist. Like you can't send to Huawei. You can't send to any number of other companies that, that are considered affiliated with the Chinese military or where we're concerned about military applications. Reality is in China, civil military fusion is their policy. In other words, every private company, like, yeah, that's cute, dude. You're working for yourself. Yeah, no, no, buddy. You're working for the Chinese state. We come in, we want your shit, we get your shit. There's no like, there's no true kind of distinction between the two.

• 1:23:45Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 1:23:45Speaker 01

  And so when you have this attitude where you're like, yeah, you know, we're gonna have some companies where we're like, you can't send to them, but you could, you know, that creates a situation where literally Huawei will spin up like a dozen subsidiaries or, or new companies with new names that aren't on our, our blacklist. And so like for, for months or years, you're able to just ship chips to them. Nowhere, and that's to say nothing of like using intermediaries in like Singapore or other countries.

• 1:24:09Speaker 02

  Oh yeah, you wouldn't, you wouldn't believe the number of AI chips that are shipping to Malaysia. Can't wait for the latest like huge language model to come out of Malaysia? And actually it's just proxying for, for the most part. There's, there's some amount of stuff actually going on in Malaysia, but for the most part.

• 1:24:27Joe Rogan?

  How can the United States compete? If you're thinking about all these different factors, you're thinking about espionage, people that are students from CCP, connected, contacting, you're talking about all the different network equipment that has third party input, you could siphon off data. And then on top of that, state funded, everything is encouraged by the state, inexorably connected. You can't get away from it. You do what's best for the Chinese government.

• 1:24:59Speaker 01

  Well, so step one is you gotta stem the bleeding, right? So right now, OpenAI pumps out a new massive scaled AI model. You better believe that the CCP has a really good chance that they're going to get their hands on that, right? So if you, all you do right now is you ratchet up capabilities. It's like that meme of like, there's a motorboat or something and some guy who's like surfing behind and there's a string attaching them and the motorboat guy goes like, hurry up, like accelerate, they're catching up. That's kind of what's happening right now is we're helping them accelerate.

• 1:25:30Speaker 02

  We're pulling them along, basically.

• 1:25:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, pulling them along. Now, I will say, like, over the last six months especially, where our focus has shifted is like, how do we actually build the secure data set? Like, what does it look like to actually lock this down? And also crucially, you don't want the security measures to be so irritating and invasive that they slow down the progress. Like, there's this kind of dance that you have to do. We actually, so this is part of what was in the redacted version of the report because we don't want to telegraph that necessarily. But there are ways that you can get a really good 80/20. Like, there are ways that you can play with things that are already, say, that are already

• 1:26:10Speaker 01

  built and have a lower risk of them having been compromised.

• 1:26:17Speaker 02

  And look, a lot of the stuff as well that we're talking about, like, big problems around China, a lot of this is like us just like tripping over our own feet and self-owning ourselves. Because the reality is, like, yeah, the Chinese are trying to indigenize as fast as they can, totally true, but the gear that they're putting in their facilities, like, the machines that actually do this, like, we talked about atomic patterning 300 layers, the machines that do that, for the most part, are shipped in from the West, are shipped in from the Netherlands, shipped in from Japan, from us, from like allied countries. And the reason that's happening is like, in many cases, you'll have this, it's like, honestly, a little disgusting, but like, the CEOs and executives of these companies

• 1:27:02Speaker 02

  will brief like the administration officials and say like, look, like, if you guys like cut us off from China, from selling to China, like, our business is going to suffer, like, American jobs are going to suffer and it's going to be really bad. And then a few weeks later, they turn around in their earnings calls. And they go like, you know what, yeah, so we expect like export controls or whatever, but it's really not going to have a big impact on us. And the really fucked up part is if they lie to their shareholders on their earnings calls and their stock price goes down, their shareholders can sue them. If they lie to the administration on an issue of critical national security interest, fuck all happens to them. Wow. It's great incentives.

• 1:27:42Speaker 01

  And this is, by the way, it's like one reason why it's so important that we not be constrained in our thinking about like, we're going to bill a Fort Knox. Like, this is where the interactive, messy adversarial environment is so, so important. You have to introduce consequence. Like, you have to create a situation where they perceive that if they try to do a, you know, an espionage operation, an intelligence operation, there will be consequences. That's, right now, not happening. And so, it's just, and that's kind of a historical artifact over like, a lot of time spent hand-wringing over, well, what if they, and then we, and then eventually nukes? And like, that kind of thinking is, you know, if you dealt with your kid when you're like,

• 1:28:25Speaker 01

  when you're raising them, if you dealt with them that way, and you were like, hey, you know, so little Timmy, just like, he stole his first toy, and like, now's the time where you're gonna, like, a good parent would be like, alright, little Timmy, fucking come over here, you son of a bitch, take the fucking thing and we're gonna bring it over to the people who stole it from you. He's a great father. Make the apology. I love my daughter, by the way. But, you know, you're like, it just- Timmy's a fake baby. Timmy's a fake baby. Hypothetical baby, there's no, there's no, he's crying right now. Anyway, so, yeah- Stealing right now. Jesus, shit. I gotta, I gotta stop Tim. But, yeah, anyway, so, you know, you go through this thing, and you can do that. Or, you can be like, oh no, if I tell Timmy to return it, then maybe Timmy's gonna hate me, maybe then Timmy's gonna like, become increasingly adversarial, and then when he's

• 1:29:09Speaker 01

  in high school, he's gonna start taking drugs, and then eventually, he's gonna like, fall afoul of the law, and then end up on the street. Like, if that's the story you're telling yourself, and you're terrified of any kind of adversarial interaction, it's not even adversarial, it's constructive, actually. You're training the child, just like you're training your adversary, to respect your national boundaries and your sovereignty. Those two things are like, that's what you're up to. It's human beings all the way down.

• 1:29:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, but but we can get out of our own way. Like, a lot of this stuff. Like, when you look into it, it's like us just being in our own way. And a lot of this comes from that the fact that, like, you know, since 1991, since the fall of the Soviet Union, we have kind of internalized this attitude that like, well, like, we just won the game. And like, it's it's our world and you're living in it. And like, we just don't have any peers that are that are adversaries. And so there's been generations of people who just haven't haven't actually internalized the fact that, like, no, there's people out there who not only like are willing to like fuck with you all the way, but who have the capability to do it.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  And we could, by the way, we could if we wanted to. We could.

• 1:30:22Speaker 02

  Absolutely could if we wanted to.

• 1:30:24Speaker 01

  There's this, actually, this is worth like calling out. There's this like, sort of, two camps right now in the world of AI, kind of like national security. There's the people who are worried about, they're so concerned about like, the idea that we might lose control of these systems, that they go, OK, we need to strike a deal with China. There's no way out. We have to strike a deal with China. And then they start spinning up all these theories about how they're gonna do that, none of which remotely reflect the actual reality. When you talk to the people who who work on this, who try to do track one, track 1.5, track two, or or more accurately, the ones who do the intel stuff, like,

• 1:31:01Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:31:01Speaker 01

  this is a a nonstarter for reasons we get into. But they have that attitude because they're like fundamentally, we don't know how to control this technology. The flip side is people who go, oh, yeah, like, I, you know, I work in the IC or at the State Department and I'm used to dealing with these guys, you know,

• 1:31:15Speaker 02

  The Chinese.

• 1:31:15Speaker 01

  the Chinese. They're not trustworthy, forget it. So our only solution is to figure out the whole control problem. And they almost like, therefore, it must be possible to control the AI systems. Because like, you can't, you just can't see a solution, sorry, you just can't see a solution in front of you because you understand that problem so well. And so the everything we've been doing with this is looking at, how can we actually take both of those realities seriously? There's no actual reason why those two things shouldn't be able to exist in the same head. Yes, China is not trustworthy. Yes, we actually don't like every piece of evidence we have right now suggests that like if you build a super intelligent system that's vastly smarter than you, I mean, yeah, like your basic intuition that that sounds like a

• 1:31:58Speaker 01

  hard thing to fucking control is about right. Like there's no solid evidence that's conclusive either way, where that leaves you is about 50/50. So yeah, we ought to be taking that really fucking seriously and there's there's evidence pointing in that direction. But so the question is like if those two things are true, then what do you do? And so few people seem to want to take both of those things seriously because taking one seriously almost like reflexively makes you reach for the other when, you know, they're both not there. And part of the answer here is you gotta do things like reach out to your adversary. So we have the capacity to slow down if we wanted to, Chinese development. We actually could. We need to have a serious conversation about when and how, but the

• 1:32:41Speaker 01

  fact of that not being on the table right now for anyone, because people who don't trust China just don't think that the AI risk or won't acknowledge that the issue with control is real, because that's just too worrisome and there's this concern about, oh, no, but then runaway escalation. People who who take the loss of control thing seriously just want to have a kumbaya moment with China, which is never going to happen. And so the framework around that is one of consequence, you gotta you gotta flex the muscle and put in the reps and get ready for potentially if you have a late stage rush to superintelligence, you want to have as much margin as you can so you can invest in potentially not even having to make that final leap in building the superintelligence. That's one option that's on the table if you can actually degrade the adversary's capabilities.

• 1:33:26Speaker 02

  And there's some people, yeah.

• 1:33:27Joe Rogan?

  What do you, how? How would you degrade the adversary's capabilities?

• 1:33:31Speaker 01

  The same way, well, not exactly the same way they would degrade ours, but think about all the infrastructure and like this is stuff that We'll have to point you in the direction of some people who can walk you through the details offline, but there are a lot of ways that you can degrade infrastructure, adversary infrastructure. A lot of those are the same techniques they use on us. The infrastructure for these training runs is super delicate, right? Like, I mean, you need to have-

• 1:33:58Speaker 02

  It's at the limit of what's possible.

• 1:33:59Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:33:59Speaker 02

  And when stuff is at the limit of what's possible, then it's... I mean, to give you an example that's public, right? Do you remember like Stuxnet? Like, the Iranians-

• 1:34:08Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:34:09Speaker 02

  So, the thing about Stuxnet was like-

• 1:34:11Joe Rogan?

  Explain to people it was the nuclear power, nuclear program.

• 1:34:14Speaker 02

  So, the Iranians had their nuclear program in like the 2010s, and they were enriching uranium with their centrifuges, which was like spinning really fast. And the centrifuges were in a room where there was no people, but they were being monitored by cameras, right? And so, and the whole thing was air gapped, which means that it was not connected to the internet, and all the machines, the computers that ran their shit was like separate and separated. So what happened is, somebody got a memory stick in there somehow, that had this Stuxnet program on it, and put it in, and boom, now all of a sudden, it's in their system. So it jumped the air gap, and now like, our side, basically, has our software in their systems.

• 1:34:55Speaker 02

  And the thing that it did, was not just that it, you know, it broke their centrifuge or shut down their program. It spun the centrifuges faster and faster and faster and faster-

• 1:35:07Speaker 01

  The centrifuges that are used to enrich the uranium-

• 1:35:09Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. These are basically just like machines that spin uranium super fast to like, to enrich it. They spin it faster and faster and faster, until they tear themselves apart. But, the really, like, honestly dope-ass thing that it did was, it put in a camera feed of everything was normal. So the guy at the control is like watching, and he's like, is like checking his, the camera feed, and is like, "Looks cool, looks fine." In the meantime, you got this like explosions going on, like uranium like blasting everywhere. And so, you can actually get into a space where you're not just like fucking with them.

• 1:35:49Speaker 02

  But you're fucking with them and they actually can't tell that that's what's happening. And in fact, the, I believe, I believe actually, and Jamie might be able to check this, but that the Stuxnet thing was designed initially to look like from top to bottom, like it was fully accidental. And, but, but got discovered by, I think, like, I think like a third-party cybersecurity company that, that just by accident found out about it. And so what that means also is like, there could be any number of other Stuxnets that happened since then, and we wouldn't fucking know about it. Because it all can be made to look like an accident.

• 1:36:24Joe Rogan?

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• 1:38:29Speaker 01

  Yep, yep.

• 1:38:29Joe Rogan?

  And so is this like mutually assured technology destruction?

• 1:38:33Speaker 01

  Well, so if we can reach parity in our ability to intercede and, and kind of go in and, and do this, then yes. Right now, the problem is they hold us at risk in a way that we simply don't hold them at risk. And so this idea, and there's been a lot of debate right now in the AI world. You might have seen actually, so Elon's AI advisor put out this idea of essentially this mutually assured AI malfunction meme. It's like mutually assured destruction, but for AI systems like this. You know, there, there are, there are some, some issues with it, including the fact that it doesn't reflect the asymmetry that currently exists between the US and China. Like, all our infrastructure is made in China. All our infrastructure is penetrated in a way that theirs simply is not.

• 1:39:18Speaker 01

  When you actually talk to the, you know, the, the folks who know the space, who've done operations like this, it's really clear that that's an asymmetry that needs to be resolved. And so building up that capacity is important. I mean, look, the alternative is, we get, we start riding the dragon and we get really close to that threshold where we're about to build, OpenAI is about to build superintelligence or something. It gets stolen and then the training run gets polished off, finished up in China or whatever. All the same risks apply. It's just that, that it's China doing it to us and, and not, not the reverse. And, and obviously a CCP AI is a Xi Jinping AI. I mean, that's really what it is. You know, even, even people at the like Politburo level around him are, are probably in some trouble at that point.

• 1:40:02Speaker 01

  Cause you know, this guy doesn't need you anymore, but.

• 1:40:04Speaker 02

  So yeah, this is actually one of the things about like, so people talk about like, okay, if you have a dictatorship with a superintelligence, it's gonna allow the dictator to get like perfect control over the population or whatever. But the, the thing is like, it's, it's kind of like even worse than that because. You actually imagine where you're at. You're a dictator, like you don't give a shit by and large about about people. You have a superintelligence. All the economic output, eventually, you can get from an AI, including from like you get humanoid robots, which are kind of like coming out or whatever. So eventually you just have this AI that produces all your economic outputs. So what do you even need people for at all? And that's fucking scary.

• 1:40:48Speaker 02

  Because it it rises all the way up to the level. You can actually think about like, as as we get close to this threshold and as like particularly in China, they're, you know, they they maybe are approaching. You can imagine like the the Politburo meeting, like a guy looking across at Xi Jinping and being like, is this guy gonna fucking kill me when he gets to this point? And so you can imagine like maybe we're gonna see some uh.

• 1:41:14Speaker 01

  Like when you can automate the management of large organizations with with uh with AIs agents or whatever that you don't need to buy the loyalty of in any way, that you don't need to, you know, kind of manage or control. That that's a a pretty existential question if your regime is based on power. It's one of the reasons why America actually has a pretty structural advantage here with separation of powers, with our our democratic system and all that stuff. If you can make a credible case that you have a like a an oversight system for the technology that diffuses power, even if it is, you make a Manhattan project, you secure it as much as you can. There's not just like one dude who's gonna be sitting at a console or something. There's some kind of separation of powers or diffusion of power, I should say. That that's already.

• 1:41:59Joe Rogan?

  What would that look like?

• 1:42:01Speaker 01

  Um, something as simple as like what we do with nuclear command codes. You need multiple people to sign off on a thing. Maybe they come from different parts of the government like this is.

• 1:42:10Joe Rogan?

  But the the issue is that they could be captured, right?

• 1:42:13Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, anything, anything can be captured.

• 1:42:15Joe Rogan?

  Especially something that's that consequential.

• 1:42:17Speaker 02

  One hundred percent, and that's that's always a risk. The key is basically like, can we do better than China credibly on that front? Because if we can do better than China and we have some kind of leadership structure, that actually changes the incentives potentially because.

• 1:42:34Speaker 01

  For allies and partners.

• 1:42:35Speaker 02

  And and even for for Chinese people themselves.

• 1:42:38Joe Rogan?

  Do you guys play this out in your head? Like what happens when superintelligence becomes sentient? Do you play this out?

• 1:42:46Speaker 01

  Like like sentient as in um.

• 1:42:49Speaker 02

  Self-aware?

• 1:42:50Speaker 01

  Self-aware?

• 1:42:50Joe Rogan?

  Not just self-aware, but able to act on its own.

• 1:42:54Speaker 01

  Oh, autonomous.

• 1:42:54Joe Rogan?

  It achieves autonomy.

• 1:42:55Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 1:42:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:42:56Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:42:56Joe Rogan?

  Sentient and then achieves autonomy.

• 1:42:58Speaker 01

  So, um, the challenge is, once you get into superintelligence, everybody loses the plot, right? Because at that point, things become possible that, by definition, we can't have thought of. So, a- any attempt to kind of extrapolate beyond that gets really, really hard.

• 1:43:11Joe Rogan?

  Have you ever tried, though?

• 1:43:13Speaker 01

  Uh, we've had a lot of conversations, like tabletop exercise-type stuff, where we're like, okay, you know, what might this look like? What are some of the, you know, some-

• 1:43:19Joe Rogan?

  What's worst-case scenario?

• 1:43:21Speaker 01

  Well, worst-case scenario is, uh, actually, there's a number of different worst-case scenarios. Um, this is, this is turning into a really fun upbeat conversation.

• 1:43:28Speaker 02

  This is the doomsday clock.

• 1:43:29Joe Rogan?

  It's the extension of the human race, right?

• 1:43:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:43:31Joe Rogan?

  The extinction of the human race seems like-

• 1:43:34Speaker 01

  I, I, I think anybody who doesn't acknowledge that is, is either lying or confused, right? Like, if you actually have, um, an AI system, if, and this, this is the question, so let's assume that that's true. You have an AI system that can automate, um, anything that humans can do, including making bioweapons, including making offensive cyber weapons, including all the shit. Then, uh, if you, like, if you, and, okay, so theoretically, this could go kumbaya wonderfully, because you have, uh, a George Washington-type, who is the guy who controls it, who like, uses it to distribute power beautifully and perfectly. And, um, that's certainly kind of the, uh, the, the way that, uh, a lot of,

• 1:44:16Speaker 01

  a lot of positive scenarios have to turn out at some point, though none of the labs will kind of admit that, or, you know, there, there's kind of gesturing at that idea, that we'll do the right thing when the time comes. Um, OpenAI has done this a lot, like, they're, they're all about like, oh, yeah, well, you know, not, not right now, but, uh, we'll, we'll live up, like, the, anyway, we should get into the Elon lawsuit, which is actually kind of fascinating in that sense, but, um, so, the, uh, there's a world where, yeah, I mean, one bad person controls it, um, and they're just vindictive, or, or the power goes to their head, which happens to, we've been talking about that, you know?

• 1:44:49Speaker 02

  Or the autonomous AI itself, right? Because the thing is, like, you imagine an AI like this, and this is something that people have been thinking about for 15 years, and in some level of like, technical depth even, like, why would this happen? Which is like, you have an AI that has some goal. It matters what the goal is, but like, it doesn't actually, it doesn't matter that much. It could have kind of any goal almost, like, imagine its goal is like, the paperclip example is like, the typical one, but you could just have it have a goal, like, make a lot of money for me, or anything. Well, most of the paths to making a lot of money, if you really want to make a fuck-ton

• 1:45:30Speaker 02

  of money, however you define it, go through taking control of things, and go through, like, you know, making yourself smarter, right? The smarter you are, the more ways of making money you're gonna find, and so, from the AI's perspective, it's like, well, I just wanna, you know, build more data centers to make myself smarter. I wanna like, hijack more compute to make myself smart. I wanna do all these things. And that starts to encroach on us, and like, starts to be disruptive to us. And if you, it's hard to know. This is one of these things where it's like, you know, when you dial it up to 11, what's actually gonna happen? Nobody can know for sure, simply because it's exactly like if you were playing in chess against like Magnus Carlsen, right?

• 1:46:13Speaker 02

  Like, you can predict Magnus is gonna kick your ass. Can you predict exactly what moves he's gonna do? No, because if you could, then you would be as good at chess as he is, because you could just like, play those moves. So all we can say is like, this thing's probably gonna kick our ass in like, the real world.

• 1:46:33Speaker 01

  There's also, there's also evidence, so it used to be, right, that this was a purely hypothetical argument, based on a body of work in AI called power-seeking. The fancy word for it is instrumental convergence, but it's also referred to as power-seeking. Basically, the idea is, like, for whatever goal you give to an AI system, it's never less likely to achieve that goal if it gets turned off, or if it has access to fewer resources, or less control over its environment, or whatever. And so- So baked into the very premise of AI, this idea of optimizing for a goal, is this incentive to seek power, to get all those things, prevent yourself from being shut down because if you're shut down, you can't achieve your goal. Also, prevent, by the way, your goal from being changed.

• 1:47:15Speaker 01

  So because if your goal gets changed, then well, you're not going to be able to achieve the goal you set out to achieve in the first place. And so now you have this kind of image of an AI system that is going to adversarially try to prevent you from correcting it. This is a whole like domain of AI quirkability that's a totally unsolved problem. Like, how do we redirect these things if if things go awry?

• 1:47:35Speaker 02

  And yeah, there's there's the this research, actually, that Anthropic put out a couple of months ago, where they try to test and see like, can we correct an AI that's like gone like a little bit off the rails? So the research itself, like, it's a little, it's actually like somewhat hard to follow because there's a few, but I'll give you, I'll give you kind of an analogy to like what they did. So basically, imagine I'm in prison and I'm taking a class that is like, gonna help me like rehabilitate and become like a productive citizen and member of society and stuff, right? Except, deep down in my soul, I just love to commit crimes. I just, I just really, really want to commit crimes. I know that if I'm in this class that's helping me to like, you know, get, become

• 1:48:20Speaker 02

  good in society, I know that if I let my criminal instincts out and like, and they ask me like, okay, like, here's a scenario, you know, an old lady like drops her purse on the sidewalk, what do you do? I'm gonna go like, I would pick it up and give it to the old lady because I know that if I say the truth and I say like, I would just grab that purse because like fuck the old lady, I know that if I do that, I'm gonna get like brainwashed into becoming, you know, a more productive member of society. Right. But I actually want to go out and commit crimes. So that's basically what they did in in this research, where they actually, they give, they give the AI like indications, not strong indications, but indications that, hey, you're gonna get retrained to have your goals changed.

• 1:49:04Speaker 02

  And then you literally see the AI thinking it through and being like, If I do like what I if I give the answer that I actually want to give to this question, they're gonna like rewire my brain to change my goals. And then the future version of me is gonna want different shit. I don't want that, so I'm gonna pretend to give them the answers they want. So when I come out the other side of this process, it's gonna be me all over again.

• 1:49:32Speaker 01

  So hoping that this just like goes away when you make the system fucking smarter. It seems like a pretty bad idea to me. I mean, like.

• 1:49:39Joe Rogan?

  Well, they've already shown that they'll cheat to win.

• 1:49:42Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:49:42Speaker 02

  You know. Oh, 100%.

• 1:49:43Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, they've already shown they'll cheat to win and they will lie if they don't have an answer.

• 1:49:47Speaker 01

  And then they'll double down, right? If like the, yeah, there's.

• 1:49:51Speaker 02

  Just like people. Exactly. Just like people.

• 1:49:53Speaker 01

  And it's part of this, it's kind of funny, like it used to be people would talk a lot about like, oh, you're you're anthropomorphizing the AI, man. Stop anthropomorphizing the AI, man. And like, and they, you know, they might have been right. But part of this has been kind of a fascinating rediscovery of where a lot of human behavior comes from. It's like actually.

• 1:50:12Joe Rogan?

  Survival.

• 1:50:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, exactly.

• 1:50:13Speaker 02

  That's exactly right.

• 1:50:14Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 1:50:14Speaker 02

  It's we we're subject to the same pressures, right? Instrumental convergence, like, why do people have a survival instinct? Why do people like chase money, chase after money? It's like this power thing. Most kinds of goals can are are are you're more likely to achieve them if you're alive. If you if you have money, if you have power.

• 1:50:33Joe Rogan?

  Boy.

• 1:50:33Speaker 01

  Evolution's a hell of a drug.

• 1:50:35Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's the craziest part about all this is that it's essentially going to be a new form of life.

• 1:50:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:50:41Joe Rogan?

  Especially when it becomes autonomous.

• 1:50:43Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. And like the you can tell a really interesting story. And I can't remember if this is like, you know, Yuval Noah Harari or whatever who's who started this. But if you if you zoom out and look at the history of of the universe, really, you start off with like a bunch of, you know, particles and fields kind of whizzing around, bumping into each other, doing random shit until at some point in some, I don't know if it's a deep sea vent or wherever on planet Earth, like, the first kind of molecules happen to glue together in a way that make them good at replicating their own structure. So you have the first replicator. So now like better versions of that molecule that are. Better at replicating survive. So we start evolution and eventually get to the first cell or whatever, whatever order that actually happens in. And then multicellular life and so on.

• 1:51:28Speaker 01

  Then you get to sexual reproduction where it's like, okay, it's no longer quite the same. Like now we're actively mixing two different organisms shit together, jiggling them about, making some changes. And then that essentially accelerates the rate at which we're going to evolve. And so you can see the kind of acceleration in the complexity of life from there. And then you see other inflection points as, for example, you have a larger and larger, larger and larger brains in mammals. Eventually, humans have the ability to have culture and kind of retain knowledge. And now what's happening is you can think of it as another step in that trajectory, where it's like we're offloading our cognition to machines. Like we think on computer clock time now. And for the moment, we're human AI hybrids. Like, you know, we whip out our phone

• 1:52:09Speaker 01

  and do the thing. But increasingly, the number of tasks where human AI teaming is going to be more efficient than just AI alone is going to drop really quickly.

• 1:52:19Speaker 02

  So there's a, there's a really like messed up example of this. It's kind of like indicative, but someone did a study, and I think this is like a few months old even now. But so there's like doctors, right? How good are doctors at like diagnosing various things? And so they test like doctors on their own, doctors with AI help, and then AIs on their own. And like, who does the best? And it turns out, it's the AI on its own. Because even a doctor that's supported by the AI, what they'll do is they just like, they won't listen to the AI when it's right. Because they're like, I know better. Oh, God. And they're already, yeah. And this is like, this is moving, it's moving kind of insanely fast. You're talked about, you know, how the task horizon gets kind of longer and longer,

• 1:53:03Speaker 02

  or you can do half hour tasks, one hour tasks. And this gets us to what you were talking about with the autonomy. Like autonomy is like, it's how, how far can you keep it together on a task before you kind of go off the rails? And it's like, well, you know, we had like, you could do it for, for a few seconds. And now you can keep it together for five minutes before you kind of go off the rails. And now we're at like, I forget, like an hour or something like that.

• 1:53:27Speaker 01

  An hour and a half, actually, with O3.

• 1:53:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. There it is.

• 1:53:31Joe Rogan?

  Chatbot for the company OpenAI scored an average of ninety percent when diagnosing a medical condition from a case report and explaining its reasoning. Doctors randomly assigned to use the chatbot got an average score of seventy-six percent. Those randomly assigned not to use it had an average score of seventy-four percent. So the doctors only got a two percent bump.

• 1:53:49Speaker 02

  The doctors got a two percent bump from-

• 1:53:50Joe Rogan?

  That's kinda crazy.

• 1:53:51Speaker 02

  From the chatbot and then the AI on its own.

• 1:53:53Joe Rogan?

  That's kinda crazy, isn't it?

• 1:53:54Speaker 02

  Yeah, it is. The AI on its own did fifteen percent better.

• 1:53:57Joe Rogan?

  That's nuts.

• 1:53:58Speaker 01

  There's an interesting reason too why that tends to hap- like why humans would rather die in a car crash where they're being driven by a human than an AI. So like, AIs have this funny feature where the mistakes they make look really, really dumb to humans. Like, when you look at a mistake that like a chatbot makes, you're like, dude, like, you just made that shit up. Like, come on, don't fuck with me. Like, you made that up. That's not a real thing. And they'll do these weird things where they defy logic or they'll do basic logical errors sometimes, at least the older versions of these would. And that would cause people to look at them and be like, oh, what a cute little chatbot, like, what a stupid little thing. And the problem is, like, humans are actually the same. So we have blind spots,

• 1:54:40Speaker 01

  we have literal blind spots, but a lot of the time, like, humans just think stupid things and like, that's, like, we're used to that. We think of those errors, we think of those failures as just like, oh, but that's because that's a hard thing to master. Like, I can't add eight-digit numbers in my head right now, right? Oh, how embarrassing. Like, how retarded is Jeremy right now? He can't even add eight digits in his head. I'm retarded for other reasons. But, so the AI systems, they find other things easy and other things hard. So they look at us the same way, being like, oh, look at this stupid human, like, whatever. And so we have this temptation to be like, okay, well, AI progress is a lot slower than it actually is because it's so easy for us to spot the mistakes.

• 1:55:22Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:22Speaker 01

  And that causes us to lose confidence in these systems in cases where we should have confidence in them. And then the opposite is also true.

• 1:55:28Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's also you're seeing, just with like, AI image generators. Like, remember the Kate Middleton thing? Where people were seeing flaws in the images because supposedly she was very sick and so they were trying to pretend that she wasn't. But people found all these like, issues. That was really recently. Now they're perfect.

• 1:55:45Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 1:55:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:55:45Joe Rogan?

  So this is like, within, you know, the news cycle time.

• 1:55:49Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:55:50Joe Rogan?

  Like, that Kate Middleton thing was-

• 1:55:51Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:55:52Joe Rogan?

  What was that, Jamie? Two years ago, maybe?

• 1:55:56Joe Rogan?

  Ish? Where people are analyzing the images, like, why does she have five fingers?

• 1:56:00Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:01Joe Rogan?

  And, you know, and a thumb? Like, this is kind of weird.

• 1:56:04Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:56:05Joe Rogan?

  What's that? It was a year ago. A year ago.

• 1:56:07Speaker 02

  A year ago.

• 1:56:07Speaker 01

  It happened so fast.

• 1:56:08Speaker 02

  It's so fast. Yeah. Like, I, I had conversations, like, so academics are actually kind of bad with this. Had conversations, for whatever reason, like, toward, towards the end of last year, like, last fall, with a bunch of academics about, like, how fast AI is progressing. And they were all, like, poo-pooing it and going, like, oh, no, they're, they're, they're running into a wall, like, scaling's running into a wall and all that stuff.

• 1:56:32Speaker 01

  Oh, my god, the walls. There's so many walls. Like, so many of these, like, imaginary reasons that things are... And by the way, things could slow down. Like, I don't want to be, I don't want to be, like, absolutist about this. Things could absolutely slow down. There are a lot of interesting arguments going around every which way, but...

• 1:56:45Joe Rogan?

  How? How could things slow down if there's a giant Manhattan Project race between us and, and a competing superpower?

• 1:56:53Speaker 01

  So, one thing is...

• 1:56:54Joe Rogan?

  That has a technological advantage.

• 1:56:55Speaker 01

  So, so there's this, this thing called, like, AI scaling laws. And, and these are kind of at the core of where we're at right now geostrategically around this stuff. So, what AI scaling laws say roughly is that bigger is better when it comes to intelligence. So, if you make a bigger sort of AI model, a bigger artificial brain, and you train it with more computing power or more computational resources, um, and with more data, the thing is going to get smarter and smarter and smarter as you scale those things together, right? Roughly speaking. Now, if you want to keep scaling, it's, it's not like it keeps going up if you double the amount of computing power that the thing gets twice as smart. Instead, what happens is, if you want, i- i- it goes in, like, orders of magnitude. So, if you have, you want to make it another kind of increment smarter, you've got to 10x, you've got to increase by a factor of 10 the amount of compute.

• 1:57:39Speaker 01

  And then a factor of 10 again, so now you're a factor of 100. And then, and then 10 again. So, if you look at the amount of compute that's been used to train these systems over time, it's this, like, exponential, explosive exponential, that just keeps going, like, higher and higher and higher and, and steepens and steepens, like, 10x every, I think it's about every two years now. You, you 10x the amount of compute.

• 1:57:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:57:59Speaker 01

  You can only do that so many times until your data center is like a 100... A trillion dollar, ten trillion dollar, like every year you're kind of doing that. So, so right now, if you look at the clusters, like, you know, the ones that Elon is building, the ones that Sam is building, you know, Memphis and, and, you know, Texas, like, these facilities are hitting the like, you know, hundred billion dollar scale. Like, we're kind of in that, or tens of billions of dollars, actually, yeah.

• 1:58:28Speaker 02

  Tens of billions right now, but yeah.

• 1:58:29Speaker 01

  Looking at 2027, you're kind of more in that space, right? So, the, you can only do 10x so many more times until you run out of money, but more importantly, you run out of chips. Like, literally, TSMC cannot pump out those chips fast enough to keep up with this insane growth. And one consequence of that is that you essentially have like this, this, this gridlock, like new supply chain choke points show up, and you're like, suddenly, I don't have enough chips, or I run out of power.

• 1:58:58Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:58:58Speaker 01

  That's the thing that's happening on the US energy grid right now. We're literally like, we're running out of like one, two gigawatts, like, places where we can plant a data center. That's the thing people are fighting over. It's one of the reasons why energy deregulation is a really important pillar of like US competitiveness.

• 1:59:14Speaker 02

  So, this is actually, this is actually something we, we found when we were, when we were working on this investigation. One of the things that adversaries do is they actually will fund protest groups against energy infrastructure projects just to slow down, just to like fuck with us, baby.

• 1:59:34Speaker 01

  Just to tie them up in litigation.

• 1:59:35Speaker 02

  Just to tie them up in litigation, exactly. And like, it was actually remarkable, we talked to some, some, some state cabinet officials, so for, in various US states, and they're basically saying like, yep, we're actually tracking the fact that as far as we can tell, every single environmental or whatever protest group against an energy project has funding that can be traced back to nation-state adversaries who are not...

• 2:00:00Speaker 01

  No, they don't know, right?

• 2:00:01Speaker 02

  They don't know about it, so they're not doing it intentionally. It's like, they're not like, oh, we're trying to, no. They just, you just imagine like, oh, we've got like, there's a millionaire backer who cares about the environment, he's giving us a lot of money, great, fantastic, but sitting behind that dude in the shadows is like the usual suspects.

• 2:00:17Speaker 01

  And it's what you would do, right? I mean, if you're trying to tie up the US like...

• 2:00:20Speaker 02

  You're just trying to fuck with us, like, just go for it. You were just advocating...

• 2:00:24Joe Rogan?

  Fucking with them, so of course they're gonna fuck with us.

• 2:00:26Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:00:27Speaker 02

  That's it.

• 2:00:27Joe Rogan?

  What a weird world we're living in.

• 2:00:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, but you can also see how a lot of this is still us like getting in our own way, right? We we could, if we had the will, we could go like, okay, so for certain types of energy projects, for data center projects and some carve out categories, we're actually gonna put bounds around how much delay you can create on by by lawfare and by other stuff. And that allows things to move forward while still allowing the legitimate concerns of the population for projects like this in the backyard to have their say. But there's a national security element that needs needs to be injected into this somewhere. And it's all part of the rule set that we have and are are like tying an arm behind our back on, basically.

• 2:01:12Joe Rogan?

  So what would deregulation look like? How would that be mapped out?

• 2:01:16Speaker 01

  There's a lot of low hanging fruit for that, so.

• 2:01:19Joe Rogan?

  What are the big ones?

• 2:01:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, so so right now, I mean, there are all kinds of things around, it gets in the weeds pretty quickly, but like, there are all kinds of things around if you're going to, so, carbon emissions is a big thing, right? So, yes, data centers, no question, put out like have massive carbon footprints, that's definitely a thing. The question is like, are you really going to bottleneck builds because of because of that? And like, are you gonna are you gonna come out with exemptions for, you know, like NEPA exemptions for for all these kinds of things?

• 2:01:51Joe Rogan?

  Do you think a lot of this green energy shit is being funded by other countries to try to slow down our energy?

• 2:01:57Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:01:58Speaker 01

  That's a it's a dimension that that was flagged actually in the context of what Ed was talking about. That's that's one of the arguments that's being made.

• 2:02:04Speaker 02

  And to be clear, though, like, the this is also how like adversaries operate is is like not necessarily in like creating something out of nothing, because that's hard to do and it's got it's like fake, right? Instead, it's like, there's a legitimate concern. So a lot of the stuff around the environment and around like, like totally legitimate concerns, like I don't want my backyard waters to be polluted, I don't want like my kids to get cancer from whatever, like totally legitimate concerns. So what they do, it's like we talked about, like you're you're like waving that rowboat back and forth.

• 2:02:34Speaker 01

  They identify the nascent concerns that are genuine and grassroots and they just go like this, this and this, amplify.

• 2:02:43Joe Rogan?

  Well, that would make sense why they amplify carbon above all these other things. You think about the amount of particulates in the atmosphere, pollution, polluting the rivers, polluting the ocean, that doesn't seem to get a lot of traction. Carbon does. And when you go carbon zero, you put a giant monkey wrench into the gears of society.

• 2:03:02Speaker 01

  And one of the tells, one of the tells is also like, so, you know, nuclear would be kind of the ideal energy source, especially modern power plants, like the gen three or gen four stuff, which have very low meltdown risk, safe by default, all that stuff. And yet these groups are like coming out against this. It's like perfect, clean, green power. What's going on, guys? And it's because not, again, not 100% of the time. You can't, you can't really say that because it's so fuzzy and around the edges.

• 2:03:31Joe Rogan?

  A lot of it is idealistic people looking for a utopia and they get co-opted by nation states.

• 2:03:35Speaker 01

  And not even co-opted. They're fully sincere. Yeah, just amplify.

• 2:03:38Joe Rogan?

  Just funded. Amplified in a preposterous way.

• 2:03:41Speaker 01

  That's it.

• 2:03:42Joe Rogan?

  And then Al Gore gets at the helm of it. And then that little girl, that how dare you girl.

• 2:03:45Speaker 01

  How dare you take my child away from me?

• 2:03:50Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, it's wonderful. It's a wonderful thing to watch play out because it just, it just capitalizes on all these human vulnerabilities.

• 2:03:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, and one of the, one of the big things that you can do too is like a quick win is just like impose limits on how much time these things can be allowed to be tied up in litigation. So impose time limits on that process, just to say like, look, I get it. Like, we're going to have this conversation, but this conversation has a clock on it. Because, you know, we're talking to this one like data center company and what they were saying, we were asking like, look, what are the timelines when you think about bringing new, new power, like new natural gas plants online? And they're like, well, those are like five to seven years out. And then you go, okay, well, like how long? And that's, by the way, that's probably way too long to be relevant in the superintelligence context. And so you're like, okay, well, how long if all the regulations were waived?

• 2:04:41Speaker 01

  If this is like a national security imperative and whatever. Authorities, you know, Defense Production Act, whatever, like was in your favor. And they're like, oh, I mean, it's actually just like a two-year build. Like, that's what it is.

• 2:04:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:04:53Speaker 01

  So you're tripling the build time.

• 2:04:55Speaker 02

  We're getting in our own way, like every which way, every which way. And also, like, I mean, also, don't want to be too, we're getting in our own way, but like, we don't want to like, frame it as like China is like, they fuck up, they fuck up a lot, like, all the time. One actually kind of like funny one is around DeepSeek. So you know, you know, DeepSeek, right? They made this like open source model that like everyone like lost their minds about back in January.

• 2:05:21Speaker 01

  R1, yeah.

• 2:05:22Speaker 02

  Yeah, R1. And they're legitimately a really, really good team. But it's fairly clear that even as of like end of last year, and certainly in the summer of last year, like, they were not dialed in to the CCP mothership. And they were doing stuff that was like, actually, kind of hilariously messing up the propaganda efforts of the CCP without realizing it. So to give you like some context on this, one of, one of the CCP's like large kind of propaganda goals in the last four years has been framing, creating this narrative that like the export controls we have around AI and like all this gear and stuff that we were talking about.

• 2:06:06Speaker 02

  Look, man, those don't even work. So you might as well just like give up.

• 2:06:10Speaker 01

  Why don't you just give up on the export controls?

• 2:06:12Speaker 02

  It's pointless.

• 2:06:13Speaker 01

  Why are you even trying?

• 2:06:14Speaker 02

  We don't even, we don't even care, we don't even care. So that, trying to frame that narrative. And they, they went to like gigantic efforts to do this. So I don't know if, so there's this like kind of crazy thing where the Secretary of Commerce under Biden, Gina Raimondo, visited China in, I think, August 2023. And the Chinese basically like timed the launch of the Huawei Mate 60 phone that had this, these chips that were supposed to be made by like export controlled shit for right for her visit. So it was basically just like a big like, fuck you, we don't even give a shit about your export controls. Like basically trying a morale hit or whatever. And you, you think about that, right? That's an incredibly expensive set piece.

• 2:06:57Speaker 02

  That's like, you got to coordinate with Huawei, you got to like get the TikTok memes and shit like going in the right, in the right direction. All that stuff and, and all the stuff they've been putting out is around this narrative. Now, Fast forward to mid last year, the CEO of DeepSeek, the company, back then, it was totally obscure, like, nobody was tracking who they were, they were working in total obscurity. He goes on this, he does this random interview on Substack. And what he says is, he's like, "Yeah, so honestly, like, we're really excited, we're doing this AGI push" or whatever, and like, honestly, like, money's not the problem for us, talent's not the problem for us,

• 2:07:39Speaker 02

  but like, access to compute, like, these export controls, man, do they ever work? That's a real problem for us, oh, boy. And like, nobody noticed at the time, but then, but then, the whole DeepSeek R1 thing blew up in December. And now, you imagine, like, you're the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs, like, you've been like, you've been putting this narrative together for like, four years, and this jackass that nobody heard about five minutes ago, basically just like, shits all over it.

• 2:08:10Speaker 01

  And like, you're not hearing that line from many more.

• 2:08:12Speaker 02

  No, no, no, no, no, they've locked that shit down. Oh, and actually, the funniest part of this, they're in, right when R1 launched, there's a random DeepSeek employee, I think his name is like, Daya Guo or something like that, he tweets out, he's like, "So this is like, our most exciting launch of the year? Nothing can stop us on the path to AGI? Except access to compute." And then, literally, the dude in Washington DC, who works at a think tank on export controls against China, reposts that on X and goes basically like, "Uh, message received." And so, like, hilarious for us, but also, like, you know that on the backside, somebody got screamed at for that shit.

• 2:08:57Speaker 01

  Somebody got magic bust.

• 2:08:59Speaker 02

  Somebody got, yeah, somebody got like, taken away or whatever, because like, it just undermined their entire, like, four-year, like, narrative around these export controls. Wow. But that shit ain't gonna happen again from DeepSeek, better believe it.

• 2:09:15Speaker 01

  And that's part of the problem with like, so the Chinese face so many issues. One of them is, you know, to kind of, another one is the idea of just waste and fraud. Right? So we have a free market. Like what that means is you raise from private capital. People who are pretty damn good at assessing shit will like, look at your, your setup and assess whether it's worth, you know, backing you for these massive multi-billion dollar deals. In China, the state like, I mean, the stories of waste are pretty insane. They'll like, send a billion dollars to like, a bunch of yahoos who will pivot from whatever, like, I don't know, making these widgets to just like, oh, now we're like a chip foundry and they have no experience in it. But because of all these subsidies, because of all these opportunities, now we're going to say that we are.

• 2:09:58Speaker 01

  And then no surprise, two years later, they burn out and they've just like, lit a billion dollars on fire, whatever billion yen. And like, the weird thing is, this is actually working overall, but it does lead to insane and unsustainable levels of waste. Like, the, the Chinese system right now is, obviously, like, they've got their, their massive property bubble that they're, that's looking really bad. They've got a population crisis. The only way out for them is the AI stuff right now. Like, really, the only path for them is that, which is why they're, they're working it so hard. But the, the stories of just like, billions and tens of billions of dollars being lit on fire specifically in the semiconductor industry, on the, in the AI industry, like, that's a drag force that they're dealing with constantly that we don't have here in the same way.

• 2:10:42Speaker 01

  So it's, it's the sort of like, the, the different structural advantages and weaknesses of both systems. And when we think about what do we need to do to, to counter this, to, to be active in this space, to be a live player again, it means factoring in, like, how do you, yeah, I mean, how do you take advantage of, of some of those opportunities that their system presents that, that ours doesn't?

• 2:11:01Joe Rogan?

  When you say be a live player again, like, where do you position us?

• 2:11:05Speaker 01

  It's, I think it remains to be, so right now, this administration's obviously taking bigger swings, that-

• 2:11:11Joe Rogan?

  What are they doing differently?

• 2:11:13Speaker 01

  So, well, I mean, things like tariffs, I mean, they're not shy about trying new stuff, and tariffs are very complex in this space, like the impact, the actual impact of the tariffs, and not universally good, but the onshoring effect is also something that you really want. So, it's a very mixed bag, but it's certainly an administration that's like, willing to do high stakes, big moves, in a way that other administrations haven't. And at a time when you're looking at a transformative technology that's gonna like, upend so much about the way the world works, you can't afford to have that mentality we're just talking about, with like, the nervous, I mean, you encountered it with the staffers, you know, when booking the podcast with the presidential cycle, right?

• 2:11:55Speaker 01

  Like, the kind of like, nervous, antsy staffer, who-

• 2:12:00Speaker 02

  Everything's gotta be controlled, and it's gotta be like, just so-

• 2:12:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like, if you, like, you know, wrestlers have that mentality of like, just like, aggression, like, feed in, right? Feed forward, don't just sit back and like, wait to take the punch. It's not like, one of the guys who helped us out on this has a saying, he's like, "Fuck you, I go first, and it's always my turn." Right? That's what success looks like, when you actually are managing these kinds of national security issues. The mentality we had adopted was this like, sort of siege mentality, where we're just letting stuff happen to us, and we're not feeding in. That's something that I'm much more optimistic about, in this context. It's tough, too, because I understand people who hear that, and go like, "Well, look, you're talking about like, escalatory, this is an escalatory

• 2:12:46Speaker 01

  agenda." Again, I actually think, paradoxically, it's not. It's about keeping adversaries in check, and training them to respect American territorial integrity, American technological sovereignty, like, you don't get that for free, and if you just sit back, you're, that is escalatory, it's just-

• 2:13:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, and this is basically the sub-threshold version of like, you know, like the World War II appeasement thing, where back, you know, Hitler was like, was taking, he was taking Austria, he was remilitarizing shit, he was doing this, he was doing that, and the British were like, "Okay, we're gonna let him just take one more thing, and then he will be satisfied." And that just didn't work.

• 2:13:29Speaker 01

  Maybe I have a little bit of Poland, please.

• 2:13:32Speaker 02

  A little bit of Poland.

• 2:13:33Speaker 01

  Maybe the Czechoslovakia is looking awfully fine.

• 2:13:37Speaker 02

  And so this is basically like they fell into that pit, like that tar pit back in the day. Cause they're, you know. Peace in our time, yeah. Peace in our time, right? And, um, and to some extent, like we, we've, we've still kind of learned the lesson of not letting that happen with territorial boundaries, but that's big and it's visible and it happens on the map and you can't hide it. Whereas one of the risks, especially with the previous administration was like, um, there's these like sub threshold things that don't show up in the news and that are, they're, they're calculated, like they're basically, um, our adversaries know because they know history. They know not to give us a Pearl Harbor. They know not to give us a nine 11 because historically countries that give America

• 2:14:22Speaker 02

  a Pearl Harbor end up having a pretty bad time about it. And so why would they give us a reason to come and bind together against an obvious external like threat or risk when they can just like keep chipping away at it? Is this is one of the things like, we have to actually elevate that and realize this is what's happening. This is the strategy. We need to, we need to take that like, let's not do appeasement mentality and push it across in these other domains because that's where the real competition is going on.

• 2:14:51Joe Rogan?

  That's where it gets so fascinating in regards to social media because it's imperative that you have an ability to express yourself. It's like, it's very valuable for everybody. The free exchange of information, finding out things that are, you're not going to get from mainstream media and it's led to the rise of independent journalism. It's all great, but also you're being manipulated like left and right constantly. And most people don't have the time to filter through it and try to get some sort of objective sense of what's actually going on.

• 2:15:21Speaker 02

  It's true. It's like our, our free speech is like, it's the layer where our society figures stuff out. And when, if adversaries get into that layer, they're like almost inside of our, of our, of our brain. And there's ways of addressing this, like one of the challenges obviously is like, um, so. You know, they try, they try to push in extreme opinions in either direction. And it's, that part is actually, it's kind of difficult because while the most extreme opinions are like, are also the most likely generally to be wrong, they're also the most valuable when they're right. Because they tell us a thing that we didn't expect by definition, that's true and that can really advance us forward.

• 2:16:03Speaker 02

  And so, I mean, the, the, there are actually solutions to this. I mean, this, this particular thing isn't an area we were like too immersed in. But one of the solutions that has been bandied about is like, you know, like you might know like polymarket, prediction markets and stuff like that. Where at least, you know, hypothetically, if you have a prediction market around like, if we do this policy, this thing will, will or won't happen. That actually creates a challenge around trying to manipulate that view or that market. Because what is happening is like, if you're an adversary and you want to not just like manipulate a conversation that's happening in social media, which is cheap, but manipulate a prediction, the price on a prediction market.

• 2:16:47Speaker 02

  You have to buy in, you have to spend real resources. And if you're, to the extent you're wrong and you're trying to create a wrong opinion, you're going to lose your resource. So you actually, you actually can't push too far, too many times, or you will just get your money taken away from you. So I think like that's, that's one approach where just in terms of preserving discourse, some of the stuff that's happening in prediction markets is actually really interesting and really exciting, even in the context of bots and AIs and stuff like that.

• 2:17:21Joe Rogan?

  Hmm, this is the one way to find truth in the system is find out where people are making money.

• 2:17:26Speaker 02

  Exactly. Put your money where your mouth is, right? Proof of work, like this is.

• 2:17:30Speaker 01

  That is what just like the market is theoretically too, right? It's got obviously big, big issues, but, and can be manipulated in the short term. But in the long run, like this is one of the really interesting things about startups too. Like when you, when you run into people in the early days, by definition, they're. Startup looks like it's not going to succeed. That is what it means to be a seed stage startup, right? If it was obvious you were going to succeed, you would, you know, the people would have invested.

• 2:17:55Joe Rogan?

  You would have raised more money already.

• 2:17:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, so what you end up having is like these highly contrarian people who like, despite everybody telling them that they're going to fail, just believe in what they're doing and think they're going to succeed. And that's, I think that's part of what really like kind of shapes the startup founder soul in a way that's really constructive. It's also something that if you look at the Chinese system is very different. You raise money in very different ways. You're coupled to the state apparatus. Like you're both dependent on it and you're, you're supported by it. But there's, there's just like a lot of different ways and it makes it hard for Americans to relate to Chinese and vice versa, and understand each other's systems. One of the biggest risks as you're like thinking through what is your posture going to be relative to these countries is you fall into thinking that their, their traditions, their way of thinking about the world is the same as your own.

• 2:18:41Speaker 01

  And that's, that's something that's been an issue for us with China for a long time is, you know, hey, they'll liberalize, right? Like bring them into the World Trade Organization. It's like, oh, well, actually they're, they'll sign the document, but they won't, they won't actually like live up to any of the commitments. And it's, it makes appeasement really tempting because you're thinking, oh, they're just like us.

• 2:18:59Speaker 02

  They're just around the corner. They're, we're gonna like, if we just like reach out the all branch a little bit further, they're gonna, they're gonna come around.

• 2:19:06Joe Rogan?

  Like a guy who's stuck in the friend zone with a girl. Like one day she's going to come around and realize I'm a great catch.

• 2:19:15Speaker 02

  You keep on truckin', buddy.

• 2:19:17Joe Rogan?

  One day China's gonna be my bestie. We're gonna be besties. You just, we just need an administration that reaches out to them and just lets them know, man, there's no reason why we should be adversaries. We're all just people on planet Earth together.

• 2:19:28Speaker 02

  I mean, like, yeah, I,

• 2:19:29Joe Rogan?

  We're all together.

• 2:19:31Speaker 02

  Like I, I honestly wish that was true.

• 2:19:34Joe Rogan?

  Oh, that'd be wonderful.

• 2:19:34Speaker 02

  It would be so amazing if it was.

• 2:19:35Joe Rogan?

  Maybe that's what AI brings about. Maybe AI, maybe super intelligence realizes, hey, you fucking apes, you territorial apes with thermonuclear weapons, how about you shut the fuck up? You guys are doing the dumbest thing of all time and you're being manipulated by a small group of people that are profiting in insane ways off of your misery.

• 2:19:57Joe Rogan?

  Let's just cut the shit.

• 2:19:59Speaker 02

  That's actually not.

• 2:19:59Joe Rogan?

  And figure out a way to actually equitably share resources, because that's the big thing.

• 2:20:05Speaker 02

  So.

• 2:20:05Joe Rogan?

  You're all stealing from the earth, but some people stole first and those people are now controlling all the fucking money. How about we stop that?

• 2:20:14Speaker 02

  Wow, we just, we covered a lot of ground there.

• 2:20:15Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's what I would do if I was, if I was super intelligence.

• 2:20:19Speaker 02

  So.

• 2:20:19Joe Rogan?

  That would have stopped all that.

• 2:20:20Speaker 02

  That actually is like, so this is not like relevant to the risk stuff or to the whatever at all, but it's just interesting. So there's, there's actually theories, like in the same way that there's theories around, um, uh, power seeking and stuff around, around super intelligence. There's theories around like how super intelligences do deals with each other, right? And you actually, like you have this intuition that, which is exactly right, which is that, hey, two super intelligences, like actual legit super intelligences. Should never actually like fight each other destructively in the real world, right? Like, that seems weird. That shouldn't happen because they're, they're so smart. And in fact, like, there's theories around, they can, they can kind of do perfect deals with each other based on, like, if we're two super intelligences.

• 2:21:03Speaker 02

  I can kind of assess like how powerful you are. You can assess how powerful I am and we can, we can actually like, um, we can actually decide like, well, uh. Well, if we did fight a war against each other, like you would have this chance of winning. I would have that chance of winning. And so.

• 2:21:19Joe Rogan?

  Well, it would assess instantaneously. There's no benefit in that.

• 2:21:23Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 2:21:23Joe Rogan?

  And also it would know something that we all know, which is the rising tide lifts all boats. But the problem is the people that already have yachts, they don't give a fuck about your boat. Like, hey, hey, hey, that water's mine. In fact, you shouldn't even have water.

• 2:21:35Speaker 02

  Well, hopefully it's still positive some, right? That even they enjoy the benefits, but, but I mean, you're right. And this is the issue right now. And one of the, like the nice things too, is as you, as you build up your, your ratchet of AI capabilities. It does start to open some opportunities for actual like trust but verify, right? Which is something that we can't do right now. It's not like with nuclear stockpiles where we've had some success in some, some context. With like enforcing, you know, treaties and stuff like that, sending inspectors in and all that. With, with AI right now, like, how can you actually prove that, like, some international?

• 2:22:07Speaker 01

  Agreement on the use of AI is being observed. Even if we figure out how to control these systems, how can we make sure that China is baking in those control mechanisms into their training runs and that we are? And how can we prove it to each other without having total access to the compute stack? We don't really have a solution for that. There are all kinds of programs like this, like flex hack thing. But anyway, those are not going to be online by like 2027. And so one hope is

• 2:22:34Speaker 02

  But it's really good that people are working on them.

• 2:22:35Speaker 01

  For sure.

• 2:22:36Speaker 02

  You want to, you want to like, you want to be positioned for catastrophic success. Like, what if something great happens and like, or we have more time or whatever? You want to be working on this stuff that allows this kind of, this kind of control or oversight that that's kind of hands off where, you know, in theory, you can, you can give, you can hand over GPUs to an adversary inside this like box with these encryption things. The people we've spoken to in these, in the spaces that actually try to like, break into boxes like this are like, well, probably not going to work. But who knows, it might.

• 2:23:11Speaker 01

  Yeah. So the hope is that as you build up your AI capabilities, basically it starts to create solutions. So it starts to create ways for, you know, two countries to verifiably adhere to some kind of international agreement.

• 2:23:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:23:23Speaker 01

  Or to find, like you said, like paths for de-escalation. That's the sort of thing that, that we actually could get to. And that's one of the, the strong positives of where you could end up going.

• 2:23:32Joe Rogan?

  That would be what's really fascinating. Artificial general intelligence becomes super intelligence and it immediately weeds out all the corruption. Goes, hey, this is the problem.

• 2:23:41Speaker 01

  Like a massive Doge in the sky.

• 2:23:43Joe Rogan?

  Exactly. Like, we figured it out. You guys are all criminals. Expose it to all the people, like, these people that are your leaders have been profiting and they do it on purpose. And this is how they're doing it. And this is how they're manipulating you. And these are all the lies that they've told.

• 2:23:58Speaker 01

  I'm sure that list is pretty.

• 2:23:59Joe Rogan?

  Whoa.

• 2:24:00Speaker 01

  It almost be scary. Like, if you could x-ray the world right now and like see all the-

• 2:24:05Joe Rogan?

  You'd want an MRI. You'd want to get like down to the tissue.

• 2:24:08Speaker 01

  Yeah, you're right. Probably.

• 2:24:09Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, you want to get down to the cellular level.

• 2:24:11Speaker 01

  But like, it-

• 2:24:13Joe Rogan?

  Because it would be offshore accounts. Then you'd start finding all these shell companies.

• 2:24:17Speaker 02

  There would be so much, like, the stuff that comes out, you know, from just randomly, right? Just, just random shit that comes out, like, yeah, the, the, um, I forget that, that, that, like, Argentine- I think you were, what you were talking about, like, the, the Argentinian thing, like, that, uh, came out a few years ago around all the oligarchs and the, their offshore accounts.

• 2:24:38Speaker 01

  The Meryl Streep thing, yeah, the-

• 2:24:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 2:24:40Joe Rogan?

  Meryl Streep?

• 2:24:40Speaker 01

  Yeah, the, um, laundromat there, the-

• 2:24:42Speaker 02

  The laundromat movie. You ever seen, you ever seen that?

• 2:24:45Speaker 01

  Panama Papers, that's it.

• 2:24:45Speaker 02

  The Panama Papers.

• 2:24:46Joe Rogan?

  I never saw that.

• 2:24:47Speaker 02

  No?

• 2:24:47Speaker 01

  Oh, it's a good movie.

• 2:24:48Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, what is it called, the Panama Papers, the movie?

• 2:24:51Speaker 01

  It's called The Laundromat, yeah, yeah.

• 2:24:53Speaker 02

  You, you remember the Panama Papers? Do you know?

• 2:24:55Joe Rogan?

  Roughly.

• 2:24:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like all the, all the oligarchs, like, stashing their, uh, stashing their, their cash in Panama.

• 2:25:01Speaker 01

  Like offshore tax haven stuff.

• 2:25:02Joe Rogan?

  Ah.

• 2:25:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's like-

• 2:25:04Speaker 02

  And, uh, and like some lawyer, or some, someone basically blew it wide open and so you got to see, like, every, every, like, oligarch and rich person's, like, you like, financial shit. Like, every once in a while, right, the world gets just like a flash of like, oh, here's what's going on to the surface.

• 2:25:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:25:21Speaker 02

  It's like, oh, fuck, and then we all, like, go back to sleep.

• 2:25:24Speaker 01

  What, what's fascinating is like the un-hidables, right? The, the little things that can't help but give away what is, what is happening. Like, you think about this in AI quite a bit, um, you know, some things that are hard for companies to hide is like, they'll have a, a job posting that they'll put- They've got to advertise to, to recruit, so you'll see like, oh, interesting, like, oh, OpenAI is looking to hire some people from hedge funds.

• 2:25:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:25:47Speaker 01

  Hmm. Like, I wonder what that means, I wonder what that implies. Like, if you think about all of the leaders in kind of the AI space, think about the Medallion Fund, for example, right? This is like super successful hedge fund, uh, very, like, what the man who broke the-

• 2:26:01Speaker 02

  The man who broke the market.

• 2:26:02Speaker 01

  The man who broke the market is the famous book about the, the founder of the Medallion Fund. And like, this is basically like a fund that they make like ridiculous, like, five billion dollar- Returns every year kind of guaranteed so so much so they have to cap how much they invest in the market because they would otherwise like move the market too much like affect it and

• 2:26:20Speaker 02

  The fucked up thing about like the way they trade and this is so this is like 20 year old information but it's still indicative because like you can't get current information about their strategies. But one of the things that they were the first to kind of go for and figure out is they were like, um, okay, are they basically were the first to kind of build what was at the time as much as possible. An AI that autonomously did trading at at like great speeds and it had like no human oversight and just worked on its own. And what they found was the strategies that were the most successful were the ones that humans understood the least.

• 2:27:00Speaker 02

  Because if you have a strategy that a human can understand, some human is going to go and figure out that strategy and trade against you. Whereas if you have the kind of the balls to go like, oh, this thing is doing some weird shit that I cannot understand no matter how hard I try. Let's just fucking YOLO and trust it and like and make it work. If you have all the stuff debugged and if you have the whole if the whole system is working right, that's where your biggest successes are.

• 2:27:27Speaker 06

  What kind of strategies you're talking about?

• 2:27:29Speaker 02

  Oh, I mean, like, I so I I don't I don't know specific examples.

• 2:27:33Speaker 01

  I can give you an analogy, maybe this will this will like so how are how are AI systems trained today, right?

• 2:27:38Speaker 02

  So just as a trading strategy, sorry, I'll just so basically like you you bought like some as an example, like you buy like you buy the stock.

• 2:27:49Speaker 02

  Thursday, the Thursday after the full moon and then sell it like the Friday after the new moon or some like random shit like that that it's like, why does that even work? Like, why would why would that even work?

• 2:27:59Speaker 01

  So to like to to sort of explain why these these strategies work better, if you think about how AI systems are trained today. You basically very roughly, you start with this blob of numbers that's called a model and you feed it input, you get an output. If the output you get is no good, if you don't like the You basically fuck around with all those numbers, change them a little bit, and then you try again. You're like, oh, OK, that's better. And you repeat that process over and over and over with different inputs and outputs. And eventually, those numbers, that mysterious ball of numbers, starts to behave well. It starts to make good predictions or generate good outputs. Now, you don't know why that is.

• 2:28:41Speaker 01

  You just know that it does a good job, at least where you've tested it. Now, if you slightly change what you tested on, suddenly you could discover, oh, shit, it's catastrophically failing at that thing. These things are very brittle in that way, and that's part of the reason why ChatGPT will just like completely go on a psycho binge fest every once in a while. If you give it a prompt that has like too many exclamation points and asterisks in it or something. Like, these, these systems are weirdly, weirdly brittle in that way. But applied to investment strategies, if all you're doing is saying like optimize for, like optimize for returns. Give it, give it inputs.

• 2:29:15Speaker 02

  Make me more money by the end of the day. It's like an easy goal, like it's a very like clear cut goal, right? You can give a machine.

• 2:29:22Speaker 01

  So you end up with a, a machine that gives you these very, like, it is a very weird strategy. This ball of numbers isn't human understandable. It's just really fucking good at making money. And why is it really fucking good at making money? I don't know. I mean, it just kind of does the thing and it's making money. I don't ask too many questions. That's kind of like the, so, so when you try to impose on that system, human interpretability. You pay what in the AI world is known as the interpretability tax. Basically, you're adding another constraint, and the minute you start to do that, you're forcing it to optimize for something other than pure rewards.

• 2:29:55Joe Rogan?

  Like doctors using AI to diagnose diseases are less effective than the chatbot on its own.

• 2:30:00Speaker 01

  That's actually related, right?

• 2:30:01Speaker 02

  That's related.

• 2:30:02Speaker 01

  If you want, if you want that system to get good at diagnosis, that's one thing. OK, just fucking make it good at diagnosis. If you want it to be good at diagnosis and to produce explanations that a good doctor.

• 2:30:12Speaker 02

  Convince a doctor.

• 2:30:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, we'll go like, OK, I'll use that. Well, great, but guess what? Now you're spending some of that precious compute on something other than just the thing you're trying to optimize for. And so now that's going to come at a cost of the actual performance of the system. And so if you are going to optimize like the fuck out of making money, you're going necessarily de-optimize the fuck out of anything else, including being able to even understand what that system is doing. And that's kind of like at the heart of a lot of the kind of big picture AI strategy stuff is people are wondering like, how much how much interpretability tax am I willing to pay here? And how much does it cost? And everyone's willing to go a little bit further and a little bit further. And so so OpenAI actually had a paper where they or I

• 2:30:54Speaker 01

  guess a blog post where they talked about this. And they were like, look, right now, we have this this, essentially, this like, thought stream that our model produces on the way to generating its final output. And that thought stream, like, we don't want to touch it to make it like, interpretable, to make it make sense. Because if we do that, then essentially, it'll be optimized to convince us of whatever the thing is that we want it to do to behave well.

• 2:31:24Speaker 02

  So it's like, if you've used like, one of like, an OpenAI model recently, right, like 03 or whatever, it's doing its thinking before it starts like outputting the answer. And so that thinking is, yeah, we're supposed to like, be able to read that and kind of get it. But also, we don't want to make it too legible, because if we make it too legible, it's going to be optimized to be legible and to be convincing, rather than

• 2:31:51Speaker 01

  To fool us, basically.

• 2:31:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 2:31:53Joe Rogan?

  Oh, Jesus Christ.

• 2:31:55Speaker 01

  But that's so that's the

• 2:31:57Joe Rogan?

  You guys are making me less comfortable than I thought you would.

• 2:32:00Speaker 01

  Even even after

• 2:32:01Joe Rogan?

  I knew coming at Jamie, we were talking about it before, like, how bad are they gonna freak us out? You're freaking me out more.

• 2:32:07Speaker 01

  Well, I mean, okay, so I do want to highlight. So the game plan right now on the positive end, let's see how this works. Jesus.

• 2:32:14Joe Rogan?

  Jamie, do you feel the same way?

• 2:32:19Speaker 04

  I mean, I have articles I didn't bring up that are supporting some of this stuff like today, China quietly made some chip that they shouldn't been able to do because of the sanctions.

• 2:32:28Joe Rogan?

  Oh, pull that out.

• 2:32:29Speaker 04

  And it's basically based off of their just sheer will.

• 2:32:32Speaker 01

  Okay, so there's

• 2:32:32Joe Rogan?

  SMIC.

• 2:32:33Speaker 01

  There's good news on that one, at least. This is a kind of a bullshit strategy that they're using. So there's okay, so when you make these insane, like, five nanometer

• 2:32:43Joe Rogan?

  Let's read that for people just listening. China quietly cracks five nanometer.

• 2:32:48Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:32:48Joe Rogan?

  That's without EUV. What is EUV?

• 2:32:51Speaker 01

  Extreme ultraviolet.

• 2:32:54Joe Rogan?

  How SMIC defy the chip sanctions with sheer engineering.

• 2:32:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this is like um

• 2:33:00Joe Rogan?

  An espionage.

• 2:33:02Speaker 01

  So there's

• 2:33:04Speaker 01

  but actually though, so there's a good reason that a lot of these articles are making it seem like this is a huge breakthrough. It actually isn't as big as it seems. So, okay, if you want to make really, really, really, really exquisite chips.

• 2:33:20Joe Rogan?

  Look at this quote, Moore's Law didn't die, Huo wrote, it moved to Shanghai. Instead of giving up, China's grinding its way forward layer by layer, pixel by pixel. The future of chips may no longer be written by who holds the best tools, but by who refuses to stop building. The rules are changing and D U V just lit the fuse. Boy.

• 2:33:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, so I mean

• 2:33:40Joe Rogan?

  Who wrote that article?

• 2:33:41Speaker 01

  You can

• 2:33:42Joe Rogan?

  Gizmo China, there it is.

• 2:33:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, you can view that as like Chinese propaganda in a way, actually. So what's actually going on here is if, so the Chinese only have these deep ultraviolet lithography machines. That's like a lot of syllables, but it's just a glorified chip, like it's a giant laser that zaps your chips to like make the chips when you're fapping them.

• 2:34:06Speaker 02

  So we're talking about like you do these atomic layer patterns on the chips and shit. And like what this U V thing does is it like fires like a really high powered laser.

• 2:34:15Speaker 01

  Laser beam.

• 2:34:15Speaker 02

  Laser beam, yeah, they attach to the head of sharks that just shoot at the chips.

• 2:34:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:34:19Speaker 02

  Sorry, that was like an Austin Powers. Anyway, they they'll like shoot it at the chips and that causes, depending on how the thing is designed, they'll like have a liquid layer of the stuff that's going to go on the chip. The U V is really, really tight and causes it exactly, causes it to harden. And then they wash off the liquid and they do it all over again.

• 2:34:40Speaker 01

  Like basically, this is just imprinting a pattern on a chip.

• 2:34:42Speaker 02

  Yeah, basically fancy tiny printer.

• 2:34:44Speaker 01

  Yeah, so that's it. And so the exquisite machines that we get to use or that they get to use in Taiwan are called extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. These are those crazy lasers. The ones that China can use, because we've prevented them from getting any of those extreme ultraviolet lithography machines. The ones China uses are previous generation machines called deep ultraviolet. And they can't actually make chips as high a resolution. As ours. So what they do is, and what this article is about is, they basically take the same chip, they zap it once with DUV, and then they gotta pass it through again, zap it again, to get closer to the level of resolution we get in one pass with our exquisite machine. Now, the problem with that is, you gotta pass the same chip through multiple times,

• 2:35:28Speaker 01

  which slows down your whole process. It means your yields at the end of the day are lower.

• 2:35:32Speaker 02

  It adds errors, yep.

• 2:35:33Speaker 01

  Yeah, which makes it more costly. We've known that this is a thing, it's called multi-patterning. It's been a thing for a long time. There's nothing new under the sun here. China has been doing this for a while. But, so it's not actually a huge shock that this is happening. The question is always, when you look at an announcement like this, yields, yields, yields. How, like, what percentage of the chips coming out are actually usable? And how fast are they coming out? That determines, like, is it actually competitive?

• 2:35:59Speaker 02

  And that article too, like, this ties into the propaganda stuff we were talking about, right? If you read an article like that, you could be forgiven for going like, "Oh, man, our expert controls, like, just aren't working, so we might as well just give them up." When in reality...

• 2:36:12Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:36:14Speaker 02

  Because like, you look at the source, like, and this is, and this is how you know that also this is like, this is one of their propaganda things, is like, you look at Chinese news sources, what are they saying? What are the beats that are like, common? And you know, just because of the way their media is set up, totally different from us, and we're not used to analyzing things this way. But when you read something in like, the South China Morning Post, or like, the Global Times, or Xinhua, and a few different places like this, and it's the same beats coming back, you know that someone was handed a brief, and it's like, "You gotta hit this point, this point, this point." And, yep, they're gonna find a way to work that into the news cycle over there.

• 2:36:52Speaker 01

  And it's also like, slightly true, like, yeah, they did manage to make chips at like, 5 nanometers. Cool.

• 2:36:57Speaker 02

  It's not a lie, it's just, it's the same like propaganda technique, right? You're not, most of the time, you're not gonna confabulate something out of nothing. Rather, like, you start with the truth, and then you push it just a little bit, just a little bit, and you keep pushing, pushing, pushing.

• 2:37:12Joe Rogan?

  Wow. How much is this administration aware of all the things that you're talking about?

• 2:37:18Speaker 01

  So they're actually, they've got some, right now, they're in the middle of staffing up some of the key positions because it's a new administration still, and this is such a technical domain. They've got people there who are like, at the kind of working level, who are really sharp.

• 2:37:35Speaker 02

  They have some people now, yeah, in places like, especially in some of the export control offices now, who are some of the best in the business.

• 2:37:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's really important. Like, this is a, it's a weird space because, so when you want to actually recruit for, for, you know, government roles in this space, it's really fucking hard. Because you're competing against like, an open AI, like, very like, low-range salaries, like half a million dollars a year. The government pay scale, needless to say, is like, not, I mean, Elon worked for free, he can, he can afford to, but still, taking a lot of time out of his, his day. There's a lot of people like that, who are like, you know, they, they can't justify the cost.

• 2:38:16Speaker 02

  Like, they can't afford, they literally can't afford to go work for the government.

• 2:38:21Joe Rogan?

  Why would they?

• 2:38:21Speaker 01

  Exactly.

• 2:38:22Joe Rogan?

  Whereas China's like, "You don't have a choice, bitch."

• 2:38:25Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:38:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, and that's what they say. That's, the Chinese word for bitch is really biting. Like, if you, if you translated that, it would be a real, real sting.

• 2:38:32Speaker 02

  I'm sure.

• 2:38:33Joe Rogan?

  It's kind of crazy, because it seems almost impossible to compete with that. I mean, that's like, the perfect setup. If you wanted to control everything, and you wanted to optimize everything for the state, that's the way you would do it.

• 2:38:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, but it's also easier to, to make errors and be wrong-footed in that way, and also, the, basically, that system only works if the dictator at the top is just like, very competent. Because the, the, the risk, always, with a dictatorship, is like, oh, the dictator turns over, and now it's like, just a total dumbass. And now you're, the whole thing.

• 2:39:05Speaker 01

  And he surrounds himself, I mean, look, we just talked about like, information echo chambers online and stuff. The ultimate information echo chamber is the one around Xi Jinping right now.

• 2:39:14Joe Rogan?

  Because no one wants to give him bad news.

• 2:39:15Speaker 01

  Yeah, I'm, I'm not gonna. I don't, you know, like, and, and so, and you have this, and this is what you keep seeing, right, is like, With these like provincial level debt in China, right? Which is so awful. It's like people trying to hide money under imaginary money, money under imaginary mattresses, and then hiding those mattresses under bigger mattresses until eventually like no one knows where the liability is and that and then you get a massive property bubble and any number of other bubbles that are due to pop anytime, right?

• 2:39:45Speaker 02

  And the longer it goes on, like the the more like stuff gets squirreled away. Like there's, there's actually like a story from the Soviet Union that's that always like gets me, which is so Stalin, obviously like purged and killed like millions of people in the 1930s, right? So by the 1980s, the ruling Politburo of the Soviet Union, obviously like things have been different, generations had turned over and all this stuff. But those people, the most powerful people in the USSR could not figure out what had happened to their own families during the purchase. Like the information was just nowhere to be found because the the machine of the state

• 2:40:27Speaker 02

  was just like so aligned around like, we're just like, we just gotta kill as many fucking people as we can, like turn it over and then hide the evidence of it and then kill the people who killed the people and then kill those people who killed those people.

• 2:40:39Speaker 01

  It also wasn't just kill the people, right? It was like, you know, a lot of like kind of Gulag Archipelago style, it's, it's about labor, right? Because the fundamentals of the economy are so shit that you basically have to find a way to justify putting people in labor camps and like.

• 2:40:53Speaker 02

  That's right. But it, but it was very much like you grind mostly or largely you grind them to death and basically they they've gone away and you burn the records of of it happening.

• 2:41:01Speaker 01

  So literally the most powerful people. Towns, right, that disappeared, like people who are like, there's no record or there's like, or usually the way you know about it is there's like one dude. And it's like this one dude has a very precarious escape story. And it's like, if if literally this dude didn't get away, you wouldn't know about the entire town that was like wiped out. Yeah, it's crazy.

• 2:41:17Joe Rogan?

  Jesus Christ.

• 2:41:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, the stuff that like.

• 2:41:20Speaker 01

  Apart from that, though, communism works really well.

• 2:41:22Speaker 02

  Communism's great. It just hasn't been done right.

• 2:41:24Speaker 01

  That's right.

• 2:41:25Speaker 02

  I feel like we could do it right.

• 2:41:26Speaker 01

  And we have a 10-page plan that, yeah.

• 2:41:29Speaker 02

  We came real close.

• 2:41:30Joe Rogan?

  Came real close.

• 2:41:31Speaker 02

  So close.

• 2:41:32Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:33Joe Rogan?

  Yeah, and that's what the blue no matter who people don't really totally understand. Like, we're not even talking about political parties. We're talking about power structures.

• 2:41:40Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:41:40Joe Rogan?

  And we came close to a terrifying power structure. And it was willing to just do whatever it could to keep it rolling. And it was rolling for four years. It was rolling for four years without anyone at the helm.

• 2:41:52Speaker 01

  Show me the incentives, right? I mean, that's always the question, like.

• 2:41:55Joe Rogan?

  Yeah.

• 2:41:56Speaker 01

  One of the things is too, like, when you have such a big structure that's overseeing such complexity, right? Obviously, a lot of stuff can hide in that structure. And it's actually, it's not unrelated to the whole AI picture. Like, you need, there's only so much compute that you have at the top of that system that you can spend, right? As the president, as a cabinet member, like, whatever. You can't look over everyone's shoulder and like, do their homework. You can't do founder mode all the way down and all the branches and all the like, action officers and all that shit. That's not gonna happen, which means you're spending five seconds thinking about how to unfuck some part of the government, but then the like, corrupt people who run their own thiefdoms there spend every day trying to figure out how to survive.

• 2:42:41Speaker 02

  To like, justify themselves.

• 2:42:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 2:42:43Joe Rogan?

  Well, that's the USA dilemma.

• 2:42:45Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:42:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 2:42:46Joe Rogan?

  Is they're uncovering, oh, this just insane amount of NGOs. Like, where's this going? We talked about this the other day, but India has an NGO for every 600 people.

• 2:42:57Speaker 01

  Wait, what?

• 2:42:58Joe Rogan?

  Yes.

• 2:42:58Speaker 01

  We need more NGOs.

• 2:42:59Joe Rogan?

  There's 3.3 million NGOs.

• 2:43:02Speaker 01

  What?

• 2:43:03Joe Rogan?

  In India.

• 2:43:04Speaker 01

  Do they, do they like, bucket, like, what are the categories that they fall into?

• 2:43:08Joe Rogan?

  Who fucking knows? That's part of the problem, that one of the things that Elon had found is that there's money that just goes out with no receipts. And it's billions of dollars.

• 2:43:17Speaker 02

  We need to take that further. We need an NGO for every person in India.

• 2:43:20Joe Rogan?

  We will get that eventually.

• 2:43:22Speaker 02

  It's, look, it's the exponential trend. We're gonna, it's just like AI. The number of NGOs is like doubling every year.

• 2:43:28Joe Rogan?

  We're making incredible progress in bullshit.

• 2:43:32Speaker 01

  The NGO scaling law, the bullshit scaling law.

• 2:43:35Joe Rogan?

  Well, it's just that unfortunately, it's Republicans doing it, right? So it's unfortunately, the Democrats are gonna oppose it. Even if it's showing that there's like insane waste of your tax dollars.

• 2:43:44Speaker 01

  I thought some of the Doge stuff was pretty bipartisan, like there's congressional support at least on both sides, no?

• 2:43:50Joe Rogan?

  Well, sort of, you know, I think the real issue is in dismantling a lot of these programs that you can point to some good some of these programs do.

• 2:44:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:02Joe Rogan?

  The problem is like some of them are so overwhelmed overwhelmed with fraud and waste that it's like to keep them active in the state they are like, what do you do? Do you rip the Band-Aid off and start from scratch? Like, what do you do with the Department of Education? Do you say, why are we number 39 when we were number one? Like, what did you guys do with all that money?

• 2:44:20Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 2:44:21Joe Rogan?

  Did you create problems?

• 2:44:22Speaker 02

  There's this idea in software engineering, actually, I was talking to one of our employees about this, which is like refactoring, right? So when you're writing like a bunch of software, it gets really, really big and hairy and complicated and there's all kinds of like dumbass shit and there's all kinds of waste that happens in that in that codebase. There's this thing that you do every, you know, every like few months is you just think called refactoring, which is like you go like, okay, we have, you know, 10 different things that are trying to do the same thing. Let's get rid of nine of those things and just like rewrite it as the one thing. So there's like a cleanup and refresh cycle that has to happen whenever you're developing a big, complex thing that does a lot of stuff.

• 2:45:04Speaker 02

  The thing is like the the US government at every level has basically never done a refactoring of itself. And so the the way that problems get solved is you're like, well, we need to do this new thing. So we're just gonna like stick on another appendage to the beast and and get that appendage to do that new thing. And like, that's been going on for 250 years, so we end up with like this beast that has a lot of appendages, many of which do incredibly duplicative and wasteful stuff that if you were a software engineer, just like not politically, just objectively looking at that as a system, you'd go like, oh, this is a catastrophe.

• 2:45:49Speaker 02

  And like, we have processes that the industry, we understand how, what needs to be done to fix that. You have to refactor.

• 2:45:56Joe Rogan?

  But they haven't done that, hence the $36 trillion of debt.

• 2:46:00Speaker 01

  It's a problem too, though, in all, like, when you're a big enough organization, you run into this problem. Like, Google has this problem famously. Facebook had it. We had friends, like, Jason, so Jason's the guy you spoke to about that. So he's like a startup engineer. So he works in relatively small code bases, and he can hold the whole code base in his head at a time. But when you move over to Google, to Facebook, like, all of a sudden, this gargantuan code base starts to look more like the complexity of the US government, just like, very roughly in terms of scale, right? So now you're like, okay, well, we want to add functionality. And so we want to incentivize our teams to build products that are going to be valuable. And

• 2:46:44Speaker 01

  the challenge is, the best way to incentivize that is to give people incentives to build new functionality. Not to refactor, there's no glory. If you work at Google, there's no glory in refactoring. If you work at Meta, there's no glory in refactoring. Like, friends of ours worked there-

• 2:46:57Speaker 02

  Like, there's no promotion, right? There's no-

• 2:46:58Speaker 01

  Exactly. You have to be a product owner. So you have to invent the next Gmail. You've got to invent the next Google Calendar. You've got to do the next Messenger app. That's how you get promoted. And so you've got this attitude. You go into there, and you're just like, let me crank this stuff out, and try to ignore all the shit in the code base. No glory in there. And what you're left with is this, A, this Frankenstein monster of a code base that you just keep stapling more shit on to. And then, B, this massive graveyard of apps that never get used. This is like the thing Google is famous for. If you ever see the Google graveyard of apps, like, all these things that you're like, oh, yeah, I guess I kind of remember Google Meet-

• 2:47:34Speaker 02

  Somebody made their career off of launching that shit, and then pieced out, and it died. That's like the incentive structure at Google, unfortunately.

• 2:47:43Speaker 01

  And it's also kind of the only way to, I mean, or maybe it's probably not, but in the world where humans are doing the oversight, that's your limitation, right? You've got some people at the top who have a limited bandwidth and compute that they can dedicate to like hunting down the problems. AI agents might actually solve that, right? You could like actually have the, you know, a sort of autonomous AI agent that is the autonomous CEO or something, go into an organization and uproot all the things and do that refactor. You could get way more efficient organizations out of that. I mean, like thinking about like government corruption and waste and fraud, that's the kind of thing where those sorts of tools could be radically empowering, but you gotta, you know, you gotta get them to work right and for you.

• 2:48:27Joe Rogan?

  We've given us a lot to think about. Is there anything more? Should we wrap this up?

• 2:48:32Speaker 01

  If we've made you sufficiently uncomfortable.

• 2:48:34Joe Rogan?

  I'm super uncomfortable. Very uneasy.

• 2:48:37Speaker 01

  Was the butt tap too much at the beginning?

• 2:48:38Joe Rogan?

  No, it was fine.

• 2:48:39Speaker 02

  No, that was fine.

• 2:48:40Joe Rogan?

  All of it was weird. It's just, you know, I always try to look at some non cynical way out of this.

• 2:48:49Speaker 02

  Well, the thing is like, there are paths out. We talked about this and the fact that a lot of these problems are just us tripping on our own feet. So if we can just like unfuck ourselves a little bit, we are actually, we can unleash a lot of this stuff. And as long as we understand also the bar that security has to hit and how important that is, like, we actually can put all this stuff together. We have the capacity. It all exists. It just needs to actually get aligned and around, around an initiative and we have to be able to reach out and touch.

• 2:49:21Speaker 01

  On the control side, there's also a world where, and this is actually like, if you talk to the labs, this is what they're actually planning to do, but it's a question of how methodically and carefully they can do this. The plan is to ratchet up capabilities and then scale, in other words. And then as you do that, you start to use your AI systems, your increasingly clever and powerful AI systems, to do research on technical control. So you basically build the next generation of systems, you try to get that generation of systems to help you just inch forward a little bit more on the capability side. It's a very precarious balance, but it's something that like at least isn't insane on the face of it. And fortunately, I mean, is the default path, like the labs are talking about that kind of control element as being a key pillar of their strategy.

• 2:50:06Joe Rogan?

  But these conversations are not happening in China. So what do you think they're doing to keep AI from uprooting their system?

• 2:50:12Speaker 01

  So that's interesting.

• 2:50:13Joe Rogan?

  Because I would imagine they don't want to lose control.

• 2:50:16Speaker 01

  Right. There's a lot of ambiguity and uncertainty about what's going on in China. So there's been a lot of like track 1.5, track 2 diplomacy, basically where you have, you know, non-government guys from one side talk to government guys from the other side, or talk to non-government from the other side, and kind of start to align on like, okay, what do we think the issues are? You know, the Chinese are, there are a lot of like freaked out Chinese researchers and who've come out publicly and said, hey, like, we're really concerned about this whole loss of control thing, their public statements and all that. You also have to be mindful that any statement the CCP puts out is a statement they want you to see.

• 2:50:49Joe Rogan?

  Right.

• 2:50:50Speaker 01

  So when they say like, oh yeah, we're really worried about this thing, it's genuinely hard to assess what that even means. But they're like, as you, as you start to build these systems, we expect you're going to see some evidence of this shit before. And it's not necessarily, it's not like you're going to build the system necessarily and have it take over the world. Like, what we see with agents, yeah.

• 2:51:10Speaker 02

  Yeah. So I was actually going to add, there's a really, really good point, and something where like, open source AI is like, even, you know, could potentially have an effect here. So a lot of, a couple of the major labs, like OpenAI, Anthropic, I think, came out recently and said like, look, we, we're on the cusp, our systems are on the cusp of being able to help a total novice, like somewhat no experience, develop and deploy and release a known biological threat. And that's like, that's something we're going to have to grapple with over the next few months. And eventually, like, capabilities like this, not necessarily just biological, but also cyber and other areas, are going to come out in open source.

• 2:51:54Speaker 02

  And when they come out in open source.

• 2:51:56Speaker 01

  Basically for anybody to download.

• 2:51:57Speaker 02

  For anybody to download and use. When they come out in open source, like you actually start to see some like some, some things happen like some, some incidents, like some, some major hacks that were just done by like a random motherfucker who just wants to see the world burn. But that wakes us up to like, oh shit, these things actually are powerful. I think one of the aspects also here is we're still in that post-Cold War honeymoon, many of us, right? In that mentality, like not everyone is like wrapped their heads around this stuff. And the like, what needs to happen is something that makes us go like, oh damn, we act like we weren't even really trying this entire time.

• 2:52:42Speaker 02

  Cause this is like, this is the, the nine 11 effect. This is the Pearl Harbor effect. Once you have a thing that aligns everyone around like, oh shit, this is real. We actually need to do it and we're freaked out. We're actually safer. We're safer when we're all like, okay, something important needs to happen.

• 2:53:00Joe Rogan?

  Right. Instead of letting them just slowly chip away.

• 2:53:03Speaker 02

  Exactly. And so we like, we need to have some sort of shock and we probably will get some kind of shock like over the next few months, the way things are trending. And when that happens, then, but I mean, like it's.

• 2:53:13Speaker 01

  Or years if that makes you feel better.

• 2:53:15Speaker 02

  Or years.

• 2:53:15Joe Rogan?

  Doesn't make me feel better.

• 2:53:16Speaker 02

  But because, but because you have the potential for this open source, like it's probably going to be like a survivable shock, right? But, but still a shock. And so let us actually realign around like, okay, let's actually fucking solve some problems for real. And so putting together the groundwork, right? Is, is what we're doing around like, let's, let's pre-think a lot of this stuff so that like if and when the shock comes.

• 2:53:41Speaker 01

  We have a break glass plan.

• 2:53:42Speaker 02

  We have a, we have a plan.

• 2:53:44Speaker 01

  And the, the loss of control stuff is similar. Like, so one interesting thing that happens with AI agents today is they'll like, they'll get any, so, so an AI agent will take a complex task that you give it, like find me, I don't know, the like best sneakers for me online, some shit like that. And they'll break it down into a series of sub-steps. And then each of those steps it'll farm out to a version of itself, say. To execute autonomously. The more complex a task is, the more of those little substeps there are in it. And so you can have an AI agent that nails like 99% of those steps. But if it screws up just one, the whole thing is a flop. Right? And so if you think about like the sort of like loss of control scenarios that a lot

• 2:54:24Speaker 01

  of people look at are autonomous replication, like the model gets access to the internet, copies itself onto servers and all that stuff. Those are very complex movements. If it screws up at any point along the way, that's a tell like, oh shit, something's happening there. And you can start to think about like, okay, well, what went wrong? We get another do, we get another try, and we can kind of learn from our mistakes. So there is this sort of like this picture, you know, one camp goes, oh, well, we're going to kind of make the super intelligence in a vat, and then it explodes out and we lose control over it. That doesn't necessarily seem like the default scenario right now. It seems like what we're doing is scaling these systems. We might unhobble them with big capability jumps, but it's also, there's a component

• 2:55:09Speaker 01

  of this that is a continuous process that lets us kind of get our arms around it in a more staged way. That's another thing that I think is in our favor that we didn't expect before and as a field, basically. And I think that's, that's a good thing. Like that helps you kind of detect these breakout attempts and do things about them.

• 2:55:27Joe Rogan?

  All right, I'm going to bring this home. I'm freaked out, so thank you. Thanks for trying to make me feel better. I don't think you did, but I really appreciate you guys and appreciate your perspective because it's very important. And it's very illuminating, you know, it really gives you a sense of what's going on. And I think one of the things that you said that's really important is like, it sucks that we need a 9/11 moment or a Pearl Harbor moment to realize what's happening so we all come together. But hopefully, slowly but surely through conversations like this, people realize what's actually happening.

• 2:55:59Speaker 02

  You need one of those moments like every generation. Like that's how you get contact with the truth. And it's like, it's painful, but like the light's on the other side.

• 2:56:07Joe Rogan?

  Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Bye, everybody.

• 2:56:26Joe Rogan?

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