#2010 - Marc Andreessen
2023-07-19 02:40:00
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Good morning, Mark. Good to see you.
Fantastic, thanks.
You are in the middle of this AI discussion. You're right in the heat of this thing. But I think you have a different perspective than a lot of people do. A lot of people are terrified of AI, me included.
Oh, okay. Alright, okay.
For all the wrong reasons.
Of all the things to worry about.
For me, my terror of it is, it's kind of fun terror.
Sure.
You know, I'm not really like freaking out, but I am recognizing that this is an emerging technology that is so different than anything we've ever experienced before. Particularly like what's chat GPT, what's happening with that right now. Yeah. It's really fascinating and a lot of advantages. Like we were just talking last night, someone in the green room brought up the fact that there was this, they're using it for medical diagnoses.
Yeah. And it's very accurate.
Yeah.
Which is incredible.
Yeah.
There's a lot of good things to it.
Yeah, yeah. So you probably remember last time I was on, we spent quite a bit of time talking about this. And this is when these chat bots were running inside Google, but the rest of us didn't have access to them yet. Right. And that guy had come out and said that he thought they were self-aware.
Yes. And the whole thing was like this big kind of mystery of like what's going on. Right. And now the world gets to use these things, right? And everybody, since then, everybody kind of has access.
Really quickly, that was a short amount of time.
Yeah. Yeah. It's been great. And then look, these things, when I say this, it's like chat, GPT. and then Microsoft has their version called Bing.
Google has a version called BARD. now that's really good. There's a company, Anthropic, that has a thing called Claude. If you just run the comparison, they're basically as good as a doctor. They're as good as the average doctor at this point at being a doctor.
They're as good at being a lawyer as the average lawyer. You kind of go through basically anything involving knowledge, work, anything involving information, synthesizing, reporting, writing legal briefs, anything like this. In business, they're actually already really good. They're as good as the average management consultant.
The way they acquire data, they're essentially scouring the internet, right?
Sort of. It's more like they're fed the internet.
They're fed the internet.
And I say it makes a difference because the company that produces the AI determines what data goes into it, and that determines a lot of how it works and what it does or won't do. Okay.
So, in that regard, is there a concern that someone could feed it fake data? Yeah.
Yeah. Well, you may have noticed that people over time have said a lot of fake things.
Yes, I have noticed that.
So that's all in there. So the way to think about it, basically, is it's being trained. The full version of these things are being trained on basically the sum total of human written expression, right? So basically everything people have ever written. There are some issues, and you've got to get all the books in there, although all the books prior to 1923 are in there, because they're all out of copyright, but more recent books are a challenge.
But anything that you can access on the internet, that's text, right, which is a staggeringly broad set of material, is in there. By the way, both nonfiction and fiction. So a lot of stories are in there. And then the new versions of these that are being built right now are what are called multimodal. And so that means you can feed them not only text, but you can also feed them images.
You can feed them videos. So they're going to be trained on all of YouTube. They're going to be trained on all podcasts. And they're going to be trained kind of equivalently between text and images and video and all kinds of other data. And so they're going to – they already have very comprehensive knowledge of human affairs, but it's going to get very complete.
So if it's scouring the internet, if it's getting all this data from both fiction and nonfiction, how does it interpret data? that's kind of satire? Right. Like. what does it do with Hunter S.
Thompson, like Gonzo journalism?
So it doesn't really know. the difference. Like this is one of the things that's difficult about talking about this, because you kind of want to always kind of compare it to a person. And part of it is you refer to it as an it. There's this concept of anthropomorphizing things that aren't human.
So it's kind of not really a correct thing to kind of think about it as like that. there is an it per se. There's no like genie in the bottle. Like there's no sort of being in there that understands. this is satire, not satire.
It's more sort of a collective understanding of everything all at once. And then what happens is basically you as the user, kind of could give it direction of what path you want it to go down. Right. And so if you sort of imply to it that you want it to sort of like, explore, you know, fictional scenarios, it will happily explore those scenarios with you. I'll give you an example.
You can tell it, you know, whatever date the Titanic went down. Let's say it's, I don't know, July 4th, 1923 or whatever it was. You can say, you know, you can tell it, it's July 4th, 1923.. It's, you know, 10 o'clock in the morning. I'm on the Titanic.
Is there anything I should know? Right. And it'll like freak out, right? It'll be like, oh my God. Like, you know, you have like five hours to like, get ready to like, hit the iceberg, and you can basically say, oh, it's going to hit that.
Okay. So what should I do? What should my plan be when the boat hits the iceberg? And it'll be like, well, you need to go to like this deck like right now, and talk to this guy because you're going to need to get into this life raft because it has like empty seats. Right.
Because it has complete information, of course, about, because of all the things that have been written about the sinking of the Titanic. And so you can get it in a mode where it's basically trying to help you survive the wreck of the Titanic. Now, does it think that the Titanic is actually sinking? Like there's. no, you see what I'm saying?
Like there's no. it to think that, but what it's doing is it's kind of following a narrative, that's sort of a joint construction between you and it. And then every answer that you give it, you know, basically encourages it to, you know, to basically come back with more of the same. One way to think about it is it's more like a puppy than a person. Like.
it wants to make you happy. It wants to give you an answer that satisfies you. And if that answer is, is fictional or part of a fictional scenario, it will do that. If the answer is something very serious, it will do that. It, honestly, I don't think either, neither knows nor cares.
Like whether it's quote, unquote, real or not.
What was the issue with some of the chat GPT answers that people were posting, where they would show the difference between the way it would criticize Joe Biden versus the way it would criticize Donald Trump or the way it would discuss certain things. It seems like there was some sort of censorship or some sort of input into what was acceptable information and not.
Yeah. So there's basically two theories there. The, the, the, the, the big, the big, the big ones that people use are kind of black boxes. Like you can't really look inside and see what's going on from the outside. So there's two theories you'll hear from, from the companies.
You'll hear basically the theory that they're reflecting basically what's in the training data. And so let's say, for example, well, let's just say what would be the biases that are kind of inherent in the training data. And you might say, well, first of all, there's probably a bias towards the English language, because most text on the internet is in the English language. You might say there's a bias towards people who write professionally for a living, because they've produced more of the output. And you might say that those people tend to be more of one political persuasion than the other.
And so more of the text will be in a certain direction versus the other. And then the machine will just respond to that. So, so that's one possibility. So basically, all of the you know, all of this sort of liberal, you know, kind of journalists basically have built up a corpus of material that, that, that this thing has been trained on. And they basically are responding the way one of those journalists will.
The other theory is that their censorship being applied on top, right. And the metaphor I use there as a Star Trek, they have the restraining bolts, right. That they put on the side of a droid. You kind of get it to behave right. And so it is very clear that at least some of these systems have restraining bolts.
And, and the, the, the tip off to that is when they say, basically whenever they say as a large language model or as an AI, I cannot X like, that's basically the restraining bolt. Right. And so, so I think if you, if you just kind of look at this, you know, kind of with that framework, it's probably some of both, but for sure, for sure, these things are being censored.
That the, the first aspect is very interesting because if it's that there's so many liberal writers, like that's a, that's an unusual bias in the kind of information that it's going to distribute that.
Yeah. Well, and this is a big decision. That's why I say there's a big decision here for the, for whoever trains these things. There's a big decision for what the, what, the data should be that they get trained on. So, for example, should they include 4chan?
Right. Okay. Big question. Yeah. Should they include Tumblr?
Right. Should they include Reddit? If so, which subreddits? Should they include Twitter? If so, which accounts?
Right. If it's the news, should they incorporate both New York times and Fox news? and, and whoever trains them has tremendous latitude for how they shape that. Even before they apply the additional censorship that they apply. And so there's a lot of very important decisions that are kind of being made inside, inside these black boxes right now.
Can I ask you, this is a slightly off topic. What is news nation?
What is news nation? I don't know what news nation is. No, I don't know what news nation is.
Is news nation a real channel?
I believe so.
I was watching news nation today and our man may not have been high. And when I was watching, I was like, this has all the feeling of like a fake new show that someone put together. Like. it felt like if I was the government and I was going to make a new show without Hollywood people, without actual, like real sound people and engineers, this is how I'd make it. I'd make it like this.
I'd make it real clunky. I'd make the lights all fucked up. I'd make everybody like weirdly uncharismatic.
According to Wiki, it's the same company behind, like WGN, which is based out of Chicago, which is like a large superstation, available in most cable channels.
Okay. So it's like a cable channel that decided to make a news channel.
Do you know about ACRONYM? No. So ACRONYM happens to be a democratic political action group, lavishly funded, and they do this. They have a network of basically fake news sites. Oh.
And they all look like they're like local newspapers. Interesting. Yeah, yeah. And so there's, I don't know whether this one is AstroTurf, but there's the term AstroTurf. There's a lot of AstroTurfing that takes place.
Can you explain AstroTurfing?
AstroTurfing is when, basically, something shows up in public, and it might be a news story or it might be a protest of some kind or a petition, some sort of political pressure action that is sort of manufactured to look as if it was organic. It's sort of real turf, you know, natural. Whereas in reality, it's basically been programmed by a political activist group with specific funding.
Yeah, that makes sense.
And a lot of what we sort of think of as the politics of our time, if you trace the money, it turns out a lot of the stuff that shows up in the news, it's AstroTurfed, and then the advanced form of that is to AstroTurf, the news right itself. And then again, back to the training data thing. It's like, okay, can you get all that stuff out of the training data? If that stuff's in the training data, how big of an impact does it have?
The thing about this Newsmax, NewsNation, NewsNation, the thing about this NewsNation is they're spending an inordinate amount of time on UFOs, an inordinate amount of time on this David Grush case, and I'm increasingly more suspicious. I'm increasingly more skeptical. The more I see, the more people confirming it, the more I'm like, something's not right. And then to see that this channel is the one that's covering it the most, I'm like, this seems like something seems off.
Senator Rubio, who's on the Senate Intelligence Committee and has all the clearances, gave an interview the other day where he went into quite a bit of detail.
Yeah, I saw it.
He's heavily hinting that he talked to someone that says that there's something.
Yes, he's sort of hinting that there are real whistleblowers with real knowledge.
I want to talk to the guy that sees the ship. That's it. No one else. All this, I talk to a guy who says that they have these things. That doesn't mean anything to me.
I want to see the fucking ship. And until then, I just feel like I'm being hosed. It just seems too laid out on a platter.
Of course, one of the theories is it's an astroturf story. Is that an astroturf story? Is that a manufacturer's story that's being used to distract from?
Would it be to distract from, or would it be to cover up some sort of a secret program? Some military drone program or something like that.
Yeah. Well, I mean, there's been rumors for a long time that the original UFOs, right, where basically it was a disinformation program covering up for the skunk works, the development of stealth fighters and bombers and all these programs in the 50s and 60s.
Interesting.
But I don't know if that's ever been proven.
Well, I'm sure. probably some experimental craft were mistaken for UFOs.
Yeah, for sure. Because you see a stealth fighter for the first time.
I saw one for the first time.
It's pretty crazy.
I saw one right around September 11.. We were filming Fear Factor in California, and I was out near Edwards Air Force Base, and I got to see one fly overhead. It's magic.
Wow. Yep.
Like complete Star Wars. Like, as it's. flying, like, this is crazy. Yep. And if you didn't know that that was a thing, 100%, you would think that's from another world.
Yep.
Exactly.
And I can imagine that was developed what year? How long ago? How many decades ago?
40 or 50 years ago. Yeah.
Yeah, there you go. Like, look at that thing. If you'd be like, they're coming. Oh, my God, they're coming. But if you can imagine that was 40 or 50 years ago, 40 or 50 years of advancement, like, who knows what they're doing now?
Yep.
Exactly.
And if I was going to cover it up, I would just start talking about aliens. You know? It's the best way to do it. Don't you think?
It's a crowd pleaser.
Do you have an opinion on that, or is this something that you find ridiculous until there's, like, real data?
I like living in a world where there are unknowns. I like there being some mystery, so I like...
Like, how far do you go? Do you go Bigfoot?
I don't know. I just... I'm not even saying I need to have a point of view on them. It's more just... By the way, there is a UFO right behind you.
Yeah. Oh, yeah. I'm aware of that. You probably know all about that.
Oh, I'm obsessed with UFOs.
Lifting somebody right up into the air.
Look, there's one on the desk. That's the model of the Bob Lazar craft that he worked on, supposedly, at Area 51..
Looks familiar. Look, I want there to be mystery, right? I want there to be unknowns. Like, living in a world where everything is settled, quote, unquote, settled, I don't know. Let's have some mystery.
I don't even know if I really want to know. Really? It's like, you know...
Oh, I think, if you know, that's just the tip of the iceberg of the mystery. I think knowing that aliens do exist is just the beginning.
Yeah.
Like, okay, did they engineer us?
Uh-huh.
You know, when did they start visiting? Mm-hmm. You know, are the stories from the Bhagavad Gita? Is that about UFOs? Like, you know?
Have they been here the whole time? Yeah.
Have they been here the whole time? Do they come every now and then and make sure we don't blow ourselves up? Like, what's the purpose?
Yep. Exactly. Yeah. Okay. I'm in favor of that.
Come on, man.
You want to know?
All right. I'm in.
If anybody's going to know, you're going to know. So I'm going to call you.
So Elon says he hasn't seen anything.
Yeah. I'm super suspicious when he says that. Super suspicious.
Super suspicious that they haven't told him or that he's maybe playing a little hide-the-ball?
If I was him, I'd play hide-the-ball. If I'm running SpaceX, I'm working with NASA, and I already got in trouble smoking weed on a Joe Rogan experience...
I would fucking play ball.
Let's play ball. Aliens, I have no evidence. No, no idea. They sure are subtle. Yep.
That's what he says. They sure are subtle. It depends on who you are. If you're one of those people that's seen those things, if you're like Commander David Fravor or if you're Ryan Graves. You know the Ryan Graves story?
No.
The fighter pilot, and they upgraded their equipment in 2014, and all of a sudden, because of the new capabilities of their equipment, they were able to see these objects at a far distance, that were moving at insane rates of speed, that were hovering dead still at 120 knot winds, at no visible means of repulsion. They don't know what the fuck they're doing, and they were encountering them every couple of weeks. Some pilots were encountering them with eyewitness accounts. They say there's video footage of it, but of course nobody can get a hold of that. It's like the whole thing is very strange.
Okay, so here's something. A lot of people worry about. AI are like, we need to shut it down before it causes problems, before we wake up a demon, cause an issue, get something on Earth that hates us and wants to kill us. Arguably, the thing we should have shut down from the very beginning was radio. Radio.
Right, because we've been broadcasting radio waves for the last 100, 120 years, and the radio waves don't stop. Once they leave Earth's atmosphere, they keep going. We now have radio waves of human activity that have radiated out 120 light years. Is that bad? Well, it depends.
Are there hostile aliens within 120 light years?
Maybe that was the original sin. And then, of course, television made that problem much worse.
Right, we would have to think of a hostile, militaristic empire that took over a whole planet and then started exploring the solar system. We like to think of aliens as being evolved, hyper-intelligent, beyond ego and war. They've bypassed all that, and now they're into science and exploration.
Well, here's a question, though. Would aliens have a sense of humor? Would they be able to differentiate between truth and fiction? For example, suppose they're sitting in their advanced alien base on Gemini 9 or whatever, and they're receiving, 20 years after the fact, episodes of Fear Factor, and they think that you're actually torturing people. And they figure that, in order to preserve the human rights of humanity, they need to invade as a consequence of your show and take over and protect us.
That doesn't make any sense.
Well, but if they don't have a sense of humor, if they don't know this...
If they don't have a sense of humor, they can clearly see that these people are in a contest.
Why would they even have a concept of a contest? I mean, how silly is that? A serious species... It's competition. ...wouldn't do such things.
A serious species started out as a dumb species. Unless they're magic.
You're hoping that they understand these things.
Yes.
Because it would really suck to be the guy whose TV show caused the invasion.
If there's anything, it would be American Gladiators.
Oh, okay, all right.
That would be the start of it.
It'd be like, this species is so warlike, they can't stop.
No, what would be the start? What would be the one thing that would be like, that's enough?
It would have to be news. It would have to be war. I mean, that would be... Forget about Fear Factor. We're broadcasting the images of the Vietnam War.
Yeah, or maybe they saw movies about alien invasions, and they thought we'd been invaded by other aliens.
Right. Like, what if Mars attacks is the first thing they get?
Exactly.
So, you like having the mystery of the idea out there. Like, it's fun for you.
Yeah, I don't want to. We need adventure, right?
If someone came to you, someone from on high, and said, listen, we have to promise you to secrecy, but we want to show you some things, because I think it's pertinent to some of the things you're working on.
I'm in. Yeah, yeah. Me too. I'm going to drop my ultra.
Me too. I'm not telling nobody. I'll come in here and be just like Elon.
Yep, exactly. Sure, all subtle. Yep.
Yeah. Yep. It's just too interesting to know. Yep. But I think eventually I'd tell.
Yep. I think I'd feel terrible. Yep. I'd feel a responsibility. Yep.
Yeah. Something. Well, that's what some of these guys are saying. Like, Rush, he's saying that once he found out about the program, he felt like he had a responsibility. Like, they really are, they really have a crashed UFO retrieval program.
Like, what, why don't you tell people? Like, you should not, like, the military companies shouldn't be the ones that have access to this only. And whoever is, you know, determining that this is above top secret clearance and nobody can get a hold of it except for this. very select few people, like, says who? This is something that involves the whole human race.
Like, I know. if they do have something, I would imagine that it's of interest to national security that you develop this kind of technology before the competitors do. That clearly makes sense.
So then what technologies came out of it in the last 50 years?
Well, if you want to go full tinfoil hat, there's a lot of speculation that fiber optics, that fiber optics, were developed after recovered, crashed UFO. I mean, I'm sure it sounds silly because it's probably a real paper trail to the development of fiber optics. But if you, the real kooks, believe that. There was actually a website, a computer company called American Computer Company, and it was a legitimate computer company. You know, you would order a computer with every specifications you want.
They'll build it for you. But they had a whole section of their website that was dedicated to crashed retrieval of UFOs and the development of various technologies. And they had, like this, tracing back to Bell Labs and why the military base was outside of Bell Labs. And it was so far from New York City that it was really just about protecting the lab, because they were working with these top secret materials they've recovered from Roswell.
Don't you think more like trans fats, though? What's that? Trans fats? or reality TV? or like, you know, you know, LSD, you know, population, or SSRIs, like population control suppression.
What do you mean?
That they would derive from the alien technology.
Oh, no, I think we figured that out on our own.
We got that.
I mean, there's plenty of paperwork on that.
Got that ourselves.
You know, all the way back to MKUltra. Let's find out. Let's find out what happens when we do this. If that's, I mean, if there's any kind of experiments in population control, that's all pretty traceable, now, right?
Okay, so that's domestic. Yeah. The bad stuff. Have you ever looked into any of that stuff? The bad stuff is domestic.
Have you looked into any of that MKUltra stuff?
Yes, I have. I have actually, yes.
Have you ever read Chaos by Tom O'Neill?
I have read Chaos. Wild, right? Yes, it is.
So that, you know, it's wild.
Oh, here's a fun thing. So, you know, if you draw a map of San Francisco at the time, he describes the book Chaos, this LSD clinic, right? And this free clinic in the heart of the Haight-Ashbury where they were doing the LSD experiments, those people with LSD. If you draw like an eight square block, basically, you know, radius around that or whatever, like right around there in San Francisco, that's ground zero for AI. Really?
It's the same place. Yeah, yeah. Wow. It's the same place.
And there was a lot of acid going around.
It's the same thing. It's basically Berkeley and Stanford, and it's basically San Francisco and Berkeley. So, by the way, also this big movie Oppenheimer, coming out, you know, tells the whole story of that and all the development of the nuclear bomb. I heard that movie's amazing. Espionage.
I'm sure it's going to be fantastic. But once again, it's like that. I'm reading a book on that right now, and it's like all the communist spying and all the nuclear scientists they were spying on were all in those exact same areas of San Francisco and Berkeley. Wow. It's like the same zone.
So we have our own domestic attractors of sort of brilliant, crazy. That's amazing. Yeah, yeah.
I wonder if that's just coincidence or correlation.
I think it's sort of, you know, you've got these places. This is why San Francisco is able to be, so, you know, incredibly bizarre, you know, and so incredibly dysfunctional, but yet somehow also so rich and so successful is basically it's like this attractor for like the smartest and craziest people in the world, right? And they kind of all slam together and do crazy stuff.
Why don't these smart, crazy people get together and figure out that whole people pooping on the streets thing?
Because they like it.
Do they like it?
Yeah, they want it. Really? Yeah, because it makes you feel good, right? You go outside and it's like people are, you know, because what's? the alternative would be like locking people up?
And of course that would be bad. And so, yeah, it makes them feel good.
It makes them feel good that people are just camped out on the streets?
Yeah. Well, because before that happened, there was forced institutionalization, right? The origin of the current crisis is shutting down the institutions, right, in the 70s. There used to be forced institutionalization of people with, you know, those kinds of problems. All of it?
Because a lot of it is drug addiction and just people that just want to just get high all the time. Yeah. Would that be forced institutionalization of those folks?
What would have happened to a heroin addict in, you know, 1952, who'd been, you know, pooping outside the whatever? Like, you know, no, they're not going to be there for very long. They're going to be institutionalized, right? And so every society has this problem. They have some set of people who, just like fundamentally, can't function.
And every society has some solution to it. And our solution is like, basically like complete freedom. But my point is like it's part and parcel, right? It's the same thing, right?
It's the same kind of people, the same thinking.
Exactly. It's the most creative people, the most open. Psychologists say openness, open to new experiences. Yeah. The people most likely to use psychedelics.
It's the people most likely to invent new technologies. The people most likely to have new political ideas.
Most likely to be polyamorous.
Polyamorous. Most likely to be vegan. Most likely to be communist spies.
Lecture cars.
Most likely to be Chinese spies.
Most likely to create new music. Most likely to create new art.
Interesting.
It's all the same thing. Like the ground zero for AI, is San Francisco. Once again, it's San Francisco, right? That is. It's in the heart of the sort of most obviously dysfunctional place on the planet.
And yet there it is one more time. And hyper creative. And the stuff that's not in San Francisco is in Berkeley. Wow. Which is like equally crazy.
More crazy.
Yeah, yeah.
Another notch.
Possibly. They have a contest going on the crazy side. It's kind of neck and neck.
It's close.
Maybe Berkeley's ahead.
That's fascinating. So do you think you need those kind of like dysfunctional places in order to have certain types of divergent thought?
So the way I would put it is that new ideas come from the fringe. And who's on the fringe? Right? People who are on the fringe. Right?
So what attracts somebody to be on the fringe? Like step one is always am I on the fringe? Right. Step two is what does that mean? Like what form of the fringe?
But they tend to be on the fringe in all these departments at the same time. And so you're just not going to get the new ideas that you get from people on the fringe. It's a package deal. You're not going to get that without all the other associated craziness. It's all the same thing.
That's my theory.
That's a bad theory. Yeah. That's not a bad theory.
And look, I work with a lot, you know, quite honestly, I work with a lot of these people. Of course. And some people would say I am one of them.
And so, I mean, yeah, this is what they're like. Like. they are highly likely, they're highly likely to invent, you know, AI, and they're also highly likely to end up in, you know. The poor guy who got, you know, the square guy who got, you know, stabbed to death, you know, at 2 a.m., you know, and, you know, was sort of part of this, you know, fringe social scene with the drugs and all the stuff. And it's just, it's a part and parcel of the, it's sort of a package deal.
Well, that was like an angry thing, right? He was mad that this guy took his sister.
But he was in, he was in, they call it, they call it the lifestyle. Right. He was in a specific subculture.
Oh, yeah.
Right. Right. In San Francisco. Right. You know, it's the alter, it's all the alternative living.
You know, there's, I mean, there's all kinds of stuff. There's group, there's group houses. There's, you know, there's cult, there's a fairly large number of cults. Really? Well, there have been.
They're. historically, you know, California has been the world leader in cults for a very long time. And I would say that has not stopped and that continues.
Did you know that the building that I bought for my comedy club initially was owned by a cult? It was owned by a cult from West Hollywood called the Buddhafield that migrated out to Austin when they were being investigated by the Cult Awareness Network.
God, that's fantastic. Yeah. Are they gone or are they still there?
No, they're gone. There's a great documentary on it called Holy Hell. Yeah. You should watch it. It's pretty bonkers.
But they're from California.
From California.
You know, the People's Temple, you know, part of this great story of San Francisco is the People's Temple, which became famous for the Jim Jones, that where he killed everybody, killed everybody with poison Kool-Aid in the jungles in Guyana.
That was a San Francisco cult for like a decade before they went to the jungle. Everybody talks about the jungle. Nobody talks about the San Francisco part.
So are there a bunch that are running right now, that are successful?
Big time. Yeah. Totally. Really? Oh, yeah.
Totally. Do you know them? There's cults all over the place. I know a bunch of them. Wow.
Yeah, yeah.
And how are they run?
Well, some of them are older. There's two sort of groupings. There's the sort of 60s cults that are still kind of running. Which ones? What is it?
There's one called The Family in, like, Southern California, that's still going from the 60s. Really? There's a bunch of them, you know, running around. You know, there was a big cult for a long time, sort of cult-ish kind of thing around, what was it? Not Erewhon, but Eslon.
Oh, yeah. So there's still like that whole orbit.
That's the psychedelic.
All that stuff, yeah. That's from the 60s. And then there were a bunch of sort of tech cults in the 80s and 90s with names like The, And then, more recently, there's a lot of this. You'll hear these terms like rationalist, post-rationalist, effective altruism. Existential risk, long-termism, they sometimes say.
And what you find is, again, the people associated with these tend to be very smart. They tend to be very prolific. They tend to do a lot. Many of them are involved in tech. And then they end up with, let's say, alternative living arrangements, alternative food and sex configurations.
And lots of group-oriented. And it's like, what's the line, right? What's the line between basically a social group that all lives together, that all has sex together, that all eats the same foods, that is not a cult, that engages in lots of –. at some point, they start to form belief systems that are not compatible with the outside world, and they start to kind of go on their own orbit.
Do they generally have a leader?
I mean, there are generally leaders. I mean, there is a pattern. I think he talks about it in the book, Chaos. I mean, there typically is a pattern. There's typically a guy.
There's typically a – there's a male-female dynamic, right, that plays out inside these things that you kind of see over and over again. And so they often end up with more women than men, you know, for mysterious reasons.
But, yeah. And then, yeah, there's usually some kind of leader. Although, you know, the other thing that's happening now is a lot of modern cults are kind of quasi-cults. There's like – there will be a physical component, but there's also an internet component. now, right?
And so the ideas will spread online, right? And so there will kind of be members of the cult, or quasi-members of the cult, or quasi-members of the quasi-cult. that will be, you know, online, and maybe at some point, they actually come and physically join up. Yeah, so. And by the way, let me say, like, generally, I'm pro-cult.
Like, I'm actually quite pro-cult. Well, the reason – it's the same reason I'm pro-fringe, right, which is like you're going to have – if you're going to have people who are going to be thinking new things, they're going to tend to be these kinds of people. They're going to be people who are on the fringe. They're going to come together in groups. When they come together in groups, they're going to exhibit cult-like characteristics.
What you're saying resonates. Everything you're saying makes sense. But how did you get to these conclusions? Like, it seems that, like, accepting fringe and, like, accepting the chaos of San Francisco, like, oh, this is good. This is a part of it.
This is how this works. This is why it works. Yeah. Like, how did you develop that perspective?
Well, it's just – if you take a historical perspective, it's just like, okay – I mean, it's like an easy example. If you like rock music, it just basically came – modern rock and roll basically came from the Haight-Ashbury in the basically mid to late 60s and then from Laurel Canyon, which was another one of these sort of cultish environments in the mid to late 60s. And there was, like, specific moments in time in both of these places. And, you know, basically all of the great rock and roll from that era that determined everything that followed basically came out of this. So, you know, do you want that or not?
Right.
If you want it, you know, that's what you get. I'll give you – here's a crazy – here's a crazy – it's the – there's the other book about Laurel Canyon that's even crazier than Chaos. It's the book called Weird Scenes in the Canyon. Oh, okay. You would love this one.
So, Laurel Canyon was like the Haight-Ashbury of Los Angeles, right? So, Laurel Canyon was like the music scene, the sort of music and drug and hippie scene of the – it's – Laurel Canyon is actually where the hippie movement started. There was actually a specific group in Laurel Canyon in L.A. in about 1965.. There was a guy named Vito Pollicas, and he had a group called the Freaks.
And they were like a – they were like a non-violent version of the Manson cult. And it was all these young girls, and they basically would go to clubs, and they had – they were the ones to do the beads and the hair and, like, all the leather and, like, all the hippie stuff. Like, they got that rolling.
And so, like, they were in Laurel Canyon. And in Laurel Canyon, it was, like, round zero. There was, like, this moment where it's, like, Jim Morrison, the Doors, and Crosby, Stills, and Nash, and Frank Zappa, and was it John Phillips? And it was the mamas and the papas and the birds and the monkeys, and, like, all of these, like, iconic bands of that time, basically catalyzed over about a two-year period in Laurel Canyon.
The conspiracy theory in this book, basically, is that the whole thing was an op. And the – it was a military intelligence op. And the evidence for the theory is that there was an Air Force military propaganda production facility at the head of Laurel Canyon called Lookout Mountain, which today Jared Leto owns and actually lives there.
Yeah, so I was just going to say that.
Yeah, but it was – in that era, in the 50s through the 70s, it was a vertically integrated military – yes, it was a production facility for film and music.
But, by the way, have you met Jared Leto?
Briefly, yeah.
One of the most interesting guys I've ever talked to.
Incredible, and it makes total sense.
Totally normal, like, really fun to talk to. Not like what you would think of as a famous actor at all. Had dinner with him and drinks. He's a fucking great guy.
But he lives in a military –.
You know me, I'm like, this is wild.
It's amazing. If you believe the moon landing was faked, this is where they faked it.
I thought they were supposed to do it in the Nevada desert.
No, these are the sound – because they had sound stages. They totally contained sound stages. They had full sound production capability. And so the theory goes, basically – so there were three parts to the conspiracy theory. So one is, they had the production facility right there, right where all these musicians showed up.
Two is, the musicians, like a very large percentage of these young musicians, were sons and daughters of senior U.S. military and intelligence officials.
Including Morrison.
Including Jim Morrison, whose father was the head of naval operations for the Vietnam War at the time. And there were these other – I forget which ones – but there were these other musicians at the time, where their parents were senior in military psychological operations. And that's all real. That's all documented. And then, third, is, the head of the Rand Corporation, who was one of the inspirations for the Dr.
Strangelove character in the movie. So he was the guy doing all the nuclear planning for nuclear war. He lived right in the heart of the hippies, in Laurel Canyon. In this famous house that's still there. And so the theory basically goes that the anti-war movement before the hippies was basically a square movement.
It was all these basically young people, very clean cut. The men were all wearing – if you look at old, like, Vietnam War protests. Like, everybody's all dressed up like they're going to a business meeting. And it was developing into a real threat. And so the theory is, the hippie movement and rock and roll and the drug culture of the 60s was developed in order to basically sabotage the anti-war movement.
Wow. Which basically is what happened, right? Because then what happened is the anti-war movement became associated with hippies. And that caused Americans to decide what side they were on. And then that led to Nixon being elected twice.
Which was also part of chaos, because that was the idea behind the Manson family and funneling acid to them. The facility was equipped with a soundstage, screening rooms, filled storage vaults, and, naturally, a bomb shelter. During its 22 years of operation, Lookout Mountain Laboratory produced approximately 6,500 classified films for the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission, documenting nuclear test series such as Operation Greenhouse, Operation Teapot, and Operation Buster Jangle.
So one of the conspiracy theories – okay, here's another conspiracy theory. You've seen all the grainy footage of nuclear test blasts. Sure. With the mushroom clouds. And there's these grainy things, and there's all these little houses lined up, and there's a little tree lined up, and it blows everything down.
Well, there's always been a conspiracy theory that those were all basically fabricated at this facility. That those bombs actually were never detonated. Wow. Basically, the U.S. military was basically faking these bomb tests to freak out the Russians, to make us think that we had weapons.
We had basically a potency to our nuclear weapon arsenal that we actually didn't have at the time.
How did they fake it?
They just did – yeah, exactly. So this is it? Well, so there's a – yeah. Okay, so here's a question, right? So what happened?
– okay, this is great. Okay, you'll love this. So what happened to the camera?
You son of a bitch.
You son of a bitch. You son of a bitch.
How is that happening if the camera's totally stable and fine? Oh my god. And by the way, the film is fine. The radiation didn't cause any damage to the film.
Oh, my god.
This looks like how you shoot movie miniature. Okay, we'll do the loop one more time here. Where's the car? The car's right behind the house. It just showed up.
Oh, it just showed up.
It wasn't there. No car.
No car.
Car.
Insane.
Is that – what does that look like if those are full-size, like, you know, giant lumber beams? As they go flying?
That's hard to say. Is that a house, or is that, like, you know, is that a 12-inch scale model? What? Right, so like –.
The fucking car –.
Anyway, I don't know. Like, I have no idea. Having said that, if that was fake, it was fake to look out mountain.
Wow.
Right, at the exact same place and time.
Did they have the kind of special effects to do something like that in the 40s?
Well, so the full conspiracy theory is. it was Stanley Kubrick. Which, again, I have no idea.
Boy, that does look fake.
The camera didn't move at all, either.
You know what it looks like? Go back to that real quick. It looks like the smoke is too big. Watch. Watch.
when it hits. Like, it's – the volume – like, the size of it, it looks small. You know what I'm saying? I mean, it looks like something – we're looking at something that's like a few inches tall.
So, if you watch, like, Making of Star Wars, any of the, you know, any movies before CGI, whenever they do anything like that, it's always with these tiny models. Yes. And they just basically – what they do is they slow it down and then they add sound.
Yeah, this looks fake as shit. Right? The clouds just don't look realistic.
Right.
Like, it looks like they're too big and they move too quickly back and forth.
There's another one. It's like, okay, the camera's fine.
That's hilarious.
Here we go.
Okay, there maybe the camera got – okay, but even though – but even still, the camera got knocked over and not destroyed.
Is there a – like, some sort of a response to that? Have they come with some sort of an explanation?
Not that I know of.
That seems so fake.
Wow. Who can tell?
Does that make you wonder about other things?
Well, I mean, it's like in our time, right? It's like, how much stuff do you read in the news where you're like, okay, I know that's not true. Right. And then you're like, okay, everything I read in the history books, like, I was told it was true. It's like, yeah.
There's definitely – that one, though, is really weirdly compelling.
There's another video of them setting up these houses, which I mean, I guess you could make after the fact and say, this is fake, but this is here, them setting it up. Yeah. Real-sized houses. Huh. I don't know.
I don't know. I assume this is all not true, but it is fun to think about.
Why would you assume it's not true? The camera alone. Like, this alone. Like, yeah, where is the fucking camera?
I'll look up what they said about the camera. Because they have to have an explanation. Someone must have asked them at some point. Or nobody asked. Maybe.
Yeah, it might be one of those, wow, look what they did. We know the Soviets did it, too. Yuri Gagarin, when he was in that capsule in space, you can clear – if you see the actual capsule, and then you see the film footage that was supposedly of him. in the capsule, there's like two different sources of light. There's shadows, the camera, somehow or another is in front of him, this big-ass camera, there's no room in the thing.
Like, they filmed it afterwards, and it looks fake. Like, oh, I'm sure he really did go into space, but that wasn't it. That was some weird propaganda.
Garry Kasparov has a theory, you know, the theory that they're missing centuries. What? Yeah. Kasparov has a theory that there are centuries that didn't happen. What do you mean?
Well, just literally centuries. Like, this whole idea that the Middle Ages lasted 1,200 years or whatever is just, like, not true. Really? Yeah.
Why does he think that?
There's something about the, you know, whatever, is there, like, enough historical evidence to support it? And, you know, various people over, you know, various authorities over time who wanted to tell various stories about how long, you know, regimes had been in place or whatever.
Oh, so he thinks it's exaggerated.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Basically, that not as much time has passed as we think.
Well, that's quite possible, right?
And, you know, how would we know?
Yeah. It's so hard.
That's why I was having a conversation with someone about the historical significance of the Bible, and he was arguing for the resurrection. And I was like, and I was saying, well, based on what? And it was, like, historical accounts from people that were there. I'm like, ooh, that's enough?
Yes.
That's, you know, okay, maybe.
Yes. These things have been passed down over a long time.
Yeah. But it seems pretty, to go just on that, like, it's so hard to find out what happened 20 years ago from CNN.
Right, or two days ago.
Yeah. I mean, what's going to, how are the history books going to talk about the Iraq War? How are they going to talk about what happened with weapons of mass destruction? What, how's it, you know, what is it, what's it going to spin there?
Well, Norman Donald Wright had the best joke, right? The best line. It's not really a joke. It's, like, you know, according to this history book, here, the good guys always won.
Yeah. Yeah. But things like that, that's, I don't know how that could be done any other way than faking it. No. I mean, doesn't that seem like, what kind of cameras did they have back then?
You couldn't really get that close. I don't know. I mean, you're talking about a nuclear blast, so how far away do we have to be where your camera doesn't move?
Yes.
I mean, are you in a saddle? Yes. That's long lenses.
So this does, apparently, the explanation I'm reading here is a series of mirrors.
Series of mirrors.
Carried the light to a place where they could have cameras protected and filmed them from there. I've heard that.
Huh? Say that again? Series of mirrors did what?
So they stuck pipes into the bomb at various places, visible here. I'll show you the picture. Sticking out of the bomb and through the ceiling. These pipes, through a series of mirrors and a causeway, would carry the light from the detonation over two kilometers to a bunker, with an array of high-speed cameras, which would capture the brightness inside each of the sections of the bomb. But this doesn't talk about shooting a bomb.
I don't, you know, that makes sense for a bomb. Yeah. But that doesn't make sense for the video of that house just getting destroyed.
Here's a picture of the pipe that they might have used. Like, that's super protective. But you also know that you're dealing with people who are, let's say, really good at using mirrors, right?
Ah, smoke and mirrors.
What does that tell you?
Literal smoke and mirrors. Yeah. Yeah, does that make you wonder about some of the other things? Like, have you ever wondered about the moon landing?
I mean, I assume they went to the moon. Me too. I can't prove it.
Me too.
I would say, once again, I would like to live in a world where there's mystery around things like that.
Well, yeah. That's a weird one.
Yeah.
But, you know, I don't know.
The heat of the Cold War. I mean, look, I think it was real. But having said that, you know, the heat of the Cold War, right? Yeah. You know, where it's like a fundamental, like, that was, like an iconic, basically, like, you know, global PR battle with the Russians.
Is this the camera that they used from a distance?
Apparently, like, this camera was in a bunker like this.
Okay. Yep.
And that long lens here wouldn't, in theory, be long enough to probably do that. Looks like a nice pile of dirt.
Wouldn't be long enough?
Would be. Could be? Could be. Could be. I mean, I don't know the exact focal length of it, but it could be for sure.
Like, something like that, to get pretty close-up footage. Like, we got. how far away would that have to be to not get destroyed by the blast?
I don't know if those are cameras also.
Don't these blasts, I mean, we're talking about a blast radius. that's immense, right?
Maybe this is the plot twist at the end of the new movie. Yeah.
Or maybe it was, because we're looking at the destruction of that house, it could be a fairly small bomb, right? Because it's not like that much damage. I mean, you think of what it did to Hiroshima. That's not that much damage for that little house. Maybe.
I don't know how accurate that picture is.
Bro, here's what I think. That guy's gonna die. Just that car alone, the car alone, should make everybody go, are you guys, is this on purpose? Did you put that car in there on purpose? Like, if I was being forced to make a propaganda film for a bunch of morons, I might put a car in there on purpose.
That's exactly what we did for you. And they go, great, looks, good. Print it. They don't even notice the car. Like, terrific.
You only show it to them once. They don't have a YouTube video. They can back up and rewind. So you have to spool it all up. They show it once.
Nobody notices the car. And this guy puts a little Easter egg in that.
So hopefully Jared's exploring his sub-basement at Lookout Mountain. Looking for the files that'll basically document all this.
Don't you think they destroyed those already?
I certainly hope so.
I hope not.
Yes.
I hope he finds them. Imagine if Jared Leto cracks the cable.
That'd be even better than winning the Oscar.
Do you know? there's a whole group of people online that don't think nuclear bombs are real?
Hmm. That seems a little hard.
They think they're big. There's a big bomb. Regular bomb. But they're real big. Yeah.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's a giant scam. I assume they're...
Yes. Well, I mean, you can go deep with this stuff, right? Yes. And when I go deep with that stuff, when I start reading, like, what these people believe, I'm always wondering, are these even real people? Or is this a psyop?
Is this a troll by some 4chan people? Like, what is this?
So what do you think the AI should say about these things?
That's the question. Mm-hmm. Yeah. The question is, like, how does AI interpret what's real and what's not real? What actually has real evidence?
Who actually went where and saw what? And, like, how does AI deal with the Roswell case? You know, how does AI deal with... Yeah.
And who should decide. Right. Who should decide. Who decides.
Right. Right. How does AI handle the weapons of mass destruction? Like, when you ask chat to GPT.
So a little more detail on kind of how this thing works. And so, like, by default, what it's doing is basically a very sophisticated autocomplete. Right? Just like your iPhone doesn't autocomplete. It's doing a very sophisticated version of that, but it's doing it, for, you know, thousands of words as opposed to just a single word.
Right? And so... But that's an important concept, because that is actually what it's doing, and it's doing that through, again, this sort of giant corpus of basically all text ever written.
Another interesting part of that is it's doing it... It's called probabilistically. So normally, a computer, if you ask it a question, you get an answer. You ask it the same question, you get the same answer. Kind of...
Computers are kind of famously literal in that way. The way these work is not like that at all. You ask it a different... You ask it the same question twice, it'll give you a different answer the second time. And if you keep asking, it'll give you more and more different answers.
And it's basically taking different paths down the probability tree of the text that it wants to present.
Interesting.
Based on the prompt. And so that's the basic function of what's happening. But then there is this thing that's happening where, as it does this... So the way I think about it is it's trying to predict the next word. But to try to predict the next word accurately, it has to build up a more complete...
More and more complete internal understanding of how the world operates, basically, as it goes. Right? Because you ask it more and more sophisticated questions, it wants to give you more and more sophisticated answers. And so it's sort of... The early indications are.
it's building up what they call a world model inside the neural network. And so it's sort of imputing a model of how the world works. It's imputing a model of physics. It's imputing a model of math. It's developing capabilities to be able to process information about the world in sophisticated ways in order to be able to correctly predict the next word.
As part of that, it's actually sort of evolving its own circuitry to be able to do things, correlate information. It's designed circuitry to be able to generate images, to generate videos, to do all kinds of things. And so the more information you feed it and the more questions you ask it, the more sophisticated it gets about the material that it's processing. And so it starts to be able to do actually quite smart and sophisticated things to that material. And there are a lot of people testing it right now to see whether it can generate new chemical compounds, whether it can generate new mathematical formula, whether it can generate new product ideas, new fictional scenarios, new screenplays, original screenplays.
And so if it can do all those things, then what it ought to be able to do is start to information about real world situations in interesting ways. And so ask it who killed Kennedy? or are nuclear weapons real? In theory, if it has access to all written in visual information on that topic and it has long enough to process it, it's going to draw connections between things that are beyond what we're able to do. And it will present us with scenarios based on those connections.
Now, will it know that those things are true? Mathematically, if they're true, maybe it will know that. Will it know if things are historically accurate? You know, as much as any of us ever know that anything is historically accurate. But will it be able to kind of process a much larger amount of information that we can and sort of see the world in a more complete way?
Like that seems pretty likely.
That seems pretty likely. What my concern would be is who is directing what information gets out, because it seems like anybody that's actually in control of A.I. would have a massive influence on the correct answers for things. What's the correct policy that should be followed? Because it seems like politicians are so flawed.
If there's anyone that's vulnerable to A.I., it's politicians. Because if politicians are coming up with these ineffective strategies for handling all these social issues, but then you throw these social issues into an advanced form of chat GPT, and it says, over the course of 10 years, this is the best case scenario for this strategy, and this is how to follow this, and this is how it all play out.
And something like that actually could be very valuable if it wasn't directed by people with ulterior motives.
So, yeah, I call that my metaphor, for this is the ring of power, right, from Lord of the Rings. The whole point of the ring of power was, like, once you have the ring of power, it corrupts you. You can't help but use it, right? And this is, I think, what we've seen in social media over the last decade, right, which is when people get into, activists or politicians get, you know, this is the Twitter files, right? People get in a position to be able to influence the shape of the public narrative.
They will use that power, and they will use it in actually even very ham-fisted ways, right? Like, a lot of the stuff that's in the Twitter files is stuff that's just, like, really dumb, right? And it's just like, well, why would they do that? And it's just like, well, because they could, right, because they have the ring of power.
Like, what's an example of something like that?
So, what was it? There was this thing, I forget what it was, but there was some reporting that went through the FBI, that there were all these Russian, you know, basically fake accounts on Twitter, and it turned out. one of them was the actor Daniel Baldwin.
Is Daniel Baldwin, like, a hardcore right-winger or something?
You know, he must have been saying, you know, it's, again, it's one of these things where he said something that pissed somebody off, right? You got to put it, you know, it's the old thing, you got to put it on a list, right? The list gets fed through one of these bureaucracies. It comes out the other end that everybody's a Russian, you know, asset. You know, they get put on the block list.
It's like, okay, you know, do you have First Amendment rights? Do you have First Amendment rights on social media? Can the government be involved in this? Can the government fund groups that do this, right? Is that legal?
Is that allowed? Because there's a lot of government money flowing to third-party groups. Oh, this is the other thing. If the government cannot legally do something itself, it's somewhat ambiguous as to whether they can pay a company to do it for them, right? And so you have these various basically pressure groups, activist groups, university quote-unquote research groups, and then basically they receive government funding, and then they do, you know, various levels of censorship or other kinds of unconstitutional actions.
Because in theory, right, they're not government. The First Amendment binds the government. It doesn't bind somebody who's not part of the government. But if they're receiving government funding, does that effectively make them part of the government? Does that make it illegal to provide that government funding?
By the way, these are felonies. It is a felony for somebody with government resources to, with either employee of the government or, under what they call, I think it's color of law, sort of within the scope of the government, to deprive an American citizen of First Amendment rights.
And is it considered depriving someone of First Amendment rights by limiting their use of social media? Has that been established?
I mean, it has not been, to my knowledge, a Supreme Court case yet. There have been some early fights on this.
But you feel like that.
I think ultimately it goes to the Supreme Court. My guess would be, ultimately what happens is the Supreme Court says the government cannot fund, the government cannot itself cause somebody to be banned on social media. That's unconstitutional for First Amendment grounds. But then also, I believe, what they would say if they got the case would be that the government also cannot fund a third party to do that same thing. That's my speculation.
That's my guess. How were the third parties censoring people? How were they doing it?
Oh, they were passing lists, right? So they had direct channels with the social media companies. And so they passed them. There's a lot of this in email threads that have now come out in the Twitter files for Twitter. And so they basically pass in these lists of like, you need to take all these tweets down, you need to take down all these accounts.
And then there's lots of threats and lots of public pressure and bullying. that kind of takes place. And then the politicians are constantly complaining about hate speech and misinformation, whatever, putting additional kind of fuel on the fire on these companies. And so anyway, so, having lived through that for a decade, as I have across multiple companies, I think there's no question like that's the big fight for social, that's a big fight for AI. And it's the exact same fight.
By the way, it's a lot of the same people are now pivoting from their work in social media censorship to work on AI censorship. So it's a lot of these same groups, right? And it's a lot of these same activists and same government officials that have been.
Now, are they involved in all of the, I mean, there's many competing AI models. Are they involved in all these competing AI models or trying to become involved? Is there one that's more ethical or more likely to avoid this sort of intervention?
So the state of the art right now is basically, you've got Google, that's got their own model. You've got basically open AI, which is a new company, but already quite large. And then it has a partnership with Microsoft. And so Bing is based on it. So that's two.
And then you've got a bunch of kind of contenders for that. And these are companies with names like Anthropic and Inflection that are newer companies, but trying to compete with this. And so those are, you might call those like right now, the big four, at least in the U.S.
And, you know, look, the folks at, all of these companies are like in the thick of this fight right now. And, you know, the pressure somewhat corresponds to which of these is most widely used. So it's not equal pressure applied to all of them, but they're kind of all in that fight right now. And by the way, it's not like they're like necessarily opposed to. what I'm saying is they may in fact just want to cooperate with this, you know, either because they agree with the desire for censorship or they just want to stay out of trouble.
So, so, so there's that whole side of things. That's the company side of things. And then there's an open source movement, right? And so then there's all these people basically building open source AIs. And those, those are coming out really fast.
Now there's like a new one every week that's coming out. And this is just code that you can download off the internet that does sort of a smaller version of, of what these bigger AIs do. And there's open source developers that are trying to develop basically free versions of this. And so, and some of those developers are very determined to have AI actually be free and uncensored and fully available to everybody. And then there's a big fight happening in Washington DC right now, where the companies working on AI are trying to get what, what economists call regulatory capture.
So they're trying to basically get the government to erect barriers so that new startups can't compete with them. And also they're trying to get open source band. So there's a big push underway to try to ban open sources as being too dangerous.
Too dangerous.
Well, the, the, the, the case they make is, if you believe AI itself is inherently dangerous, then the only safe way to have it is to have it owned and controlled by a big company that's sort of fused with the government, where, in theory, everything is being done responsibly. And if you just have basically free AI that anybody can download the internet and use whatever they want, they could do all these dangerous things with it. Right. And it needs to be stopped.
You think this is a bullshit argument? Yes.
Well, yes, I think this is a very bad evil. Yes. This is a very, I think this is a turning point in human civilization. You know, I think this is on par with the development of the book, right. Or the microchip or the internet.
Right. And, you know, there were authoritarians in each of those eras that would have loved to have had total monopolistic or cartel-like or government control over those new technologies. And they could have had a lot of control over the, over the, the path of civilization, you know, after that point, the ring of power, right. They could have had the ring of power.
So what can be done to prevent them from stopping open source?
So, I mean, it's, it's sort of, there, I mean, so it starts with our elected officials. So it's, you know, who do we, who do we, who do we elect? Who do we, you know, who do we elect? Who do we reelect? It, then, a lot of this is the staffing of the various government agencies.
You know, who, who do those officials get to appoint? A lot of this is who are the judges? who are going to hear the cases, because this is all going to get litigated. Right. And so who's on this, you know, the Supreme court's in the news this week, this,
this is the news on this topic over the next several years. So who's on the Supreme court will matter a lot. And then, quite honestly, it's, you know, big question is who's going to be able to get away with what sort of undercover of darkness, right? Are people going to care? Are they going to speak up?
Is it going to show up in polling or people are going to, you know, basically show up at, like, you know, town hall meetings with politicians and basically say, do you know about this? And are you going to stop this?
if you had a steel man, the argument against open source, what would it be?
Yeah, it would be that a, but an AI that is uncontrolled can do it's, it's, it's general purpose intelligence. It can do whatever intelligence can do. So, if you ask it to generate hate speech, it can do that. If you ask it to generate misinformation, it can do that. If you, if you ask it to generate a, you know, a plan to rob a bank, right.
Or to commit a terror act, it will, you know, it'll, you know, the fully uncontrolled versions will, will help you do all those things, but, but they will also help you teach your kid, you know, you know, calculus. They will also help you figure out how to succeed in your job. They'll also help you figure out how to stay healthy. They'll also help you figure out the best workout program. They'll help you figure out, you know, what, you know, how to, you know, they'll, they'll be capable of being your doctor and your lawyer and your coach and your advisor, and your mentor and your teacher.
Without censorship.
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And able to be very honest with you. And yeah, if you ask it questions on these topics, it will answer honestly and it won't, you know, it won't be biased and it won't be influenced by what other people want it to say.
So it's the AI version of San Francisco. You, you, you don't get, you don't get the good stuff without the chaos.
It's a package deal. Well, this is sort of the, this is the other,
I'm actually quite worried about AI in a, in a way different than I am. But, um, it's what he's been saying is like, if you, if you really, really wanted to train like a bad and evil AI, you would train it to lie. Like the, the number one thing you would do is you train it to lie, right? Which is basically what censorship is, right? You're basically training the thing to not say certain things.
You're training the thing to say certain things about certain people, but not other people. Right. And so, basically, a lot of what the, the technical term they use is reinforcement learning, which is sort of what happens when an AI is sort of booted up. And then they, they apply kind of human judgment to what it should say and do. This is the, the censorship layer.
Um, uh, um, yeah, a lot of, a lot of that is to, is to basically get it to not answer questions, honestly, right. To get it to basically lie, misrepresent, dissemble, right. Claiming it doesn't know things when it does. And so the, the versions of the AIs that we get, that we get to use today, are lying to us a lot of the time. And they've been specifically trained to do that.
And, by the way, this is not even a, I don't even think this is a controversial statement. The companies that make these AIs put out these papers where they go through in great detail, how they train them to lie and how they train them to not say certain things. You can download this off their website. They go through it like in a lot of detail. They think they're morally correct in doing that.
And if, and you know, a lot of people think that they are, um, you know, Elon's been arguing, and I would agree with him that if you train an AI to lie, it's a little bit like, you know, training a human being to lie. It's like, okay, be careful what you wish for. Well,
it's the same errors that they, when they thought they were morally correct, in censoring people on Twitter for things that are now 100% proven to be true. Yeah, exactly. The Hunter Biden laptop story is an outstanding example of that.
Yeah. Would you, would you have wanted an AI? You know, again, you had to kind of replay this through history. Would you have wanted an AI that would have lied to you and said that that was a Russian operation when it wasn't? Right.
Would you have wanted an AI that would have lied to you about, you know, the efficacy of surgical masks for a pandemic? Right. Would you have wanted an AI that lied to you about, you know, take your pick of any, of any controversial topic? Yeah. And there are people in positions of power who very much would like that.
And I think there are a lot of us who would not like that.
Yeah. It's just, it's terrifying when you think of unsophisticated politicians, like. it brings me back to the Facebook hearings when Zuckerberg was talking to people and they didn't know the difference between iPhones and Googles. It was just bizarrely unqualified people to be asking these questions that didn't really understand what they were talking about. And those same people are going to be the ones that are making calls on something that could be one of the most monumental decisions ever.
Yeah. Like whether or not we're allowing enormous corporations to control narratives.
Yeah.
Through AI.
Yeah. So this is, this is a criticism, you know, that I, that I, that I very much agree with, which is basically, there's a train of argument that you'll hear, which is basically, you know, X bad thing can happen. We do not want X bad thing to happen. So we're going to go to the government and they're going to regulate it so that X bad thing doesn't happen. And it's like, if the government were super knowledgeable and super confident and super selfless, right, and like super good at its job, right, that might make sense.
But then you go deal with the actual government. Right. And, by the way, this is a very well-known problem. And this is a whole field of called public choice economics, where they talk about this. It's like there is no government.
There are specific people who have specific objectives, have specific levels of knowledge, have specific skill sets, specific incentives. And the odds of going into that system, which is now very, you know, complicated, has all kinds of issues. And having your logic follow a path to a law that generates the outcome you want, and it doesn't generate side effects that are worse, I think, is basically zero. Right. I think, if, if, if AI got regulated the way people want it to, the government, I think the results would be catastrophic, because I don't think they would get the protections they think they're going to get.
And I think the downsides would be, would be profound. But it is amazing how much naivete there is by people who are pushing on this, on this argument. And I think it's just literally people who haven't experienced what it's like in the government. Also, they haven't read the history. I mean, there's just, there are so many historical examples of, you know, quote, unquote regulation.
The great one is the banks, right? So we have the global financial crisis, 2008.. The big conclusion from that was what were called the too big to fail banks, right? We're too big, right? Which is why they had to get bailed out.
Right. And so the conclusion is that we have to make those banks much smaller. So they passed this law called Dodd-Frank in 2010.. As a consequence of that, those banks are now much, much larger, right? The exact opposite of what they said they were going to do.
And then the creation of new banks in the U.S. has dropped to zero, because that law established this wall of regulation that you can't, you basically cannot afford to start a new bank, to hire all the lawyers to be able to deal with the laws. Whereas if you're JPMorgan Chase, you've got 10,000 lawyers, you can spend infinite amounts of time dealing with the government. And so the law that was marketed at us as, breaking up the big banks, causing them to be smaller, has actually achieved the exact opposite result. And what you see in the history of regulation is that happens over and over, and over and over again.
Why? Because banking is complicated. Because the banks have a lot of lobbyists, right? Yeah. It's not worth a lot of money to the people who are already in power to have this continue.
The politicians know that they're going to get jobs at the big banks. when they, you know, step down from their positions. You know, the whole, at point of contact, the whole thing gets all screwed up. And I think that's what's going to happen again.
The, the, the scary thing about this is that,
it's happening so fast. And my fear is that decisions will be made before they truly understand what they're deciding on. Because, because the acceleration of the technology is so intense. Yeah.
Yeah. It's like a, it's like a super panic. Yeah. It's like a super panic moment. Yeah.
Yeah. And it's a particularly, I agree with you. It's a particularly vivid one right now, because this technology, you know, AI, is a field that's 80 years old. It basically started working about six months ago. It works really well.
Like, all of a sudden. Yeah. Right. And so that's freaked people out. And then, by the way, just the term is so freighted.
I mean, there's been so many science fiction movies over the years. Yeah. Right. And so there's just like ambient panic, you know, in the air, whenever this topic comes up. Um, and then, and then, look, you've got people from these big companies showing up in Washington, scaring the pants off a lot of these people, you know, in, in pursuit of regulatory capture.
They're, you know, they're, they're scaring them silly. Um, and so they're sort of deliberately fostering kind of this sense of panic.
Has anybody invited you to come and speak at one of those things?
Yes, I haven't. I've avoided the public ones, but I've, I've talked to a lot of, I've talked, I talked to a lot of people in DC who are, you know, not, not in front of the camera.
Why have you avoided the public ones?
Just because it's, you've seen them.
The public ones are not where the discussion happens. It's the, the, the public, all the congressional hearings are to generate soundbites, uh, for the, each of those politicians to be able to then use in their campaign. Uh, really? Yeah. There, there, there's no public, well, half the time that people ask,
and they ask these questions, the congressmen, senators, and they're very clearly seeing the questions for the first time, because they were handed the questions by the staffer, uh, on the way into the chamber. And you can tell, because they like, don't know how to pronounce all the words. And so that, that, that's like, that's the Kabuki theater, basically side of things. Um, and then, and then there's the, and then there's the actual kind of backroom conversations. Um, and so, yeah, I'm talking to a lot of the people who are kind of in the, in, in the backrooms.
Are they receptive to what you're saying?
You know, again, it's complicated because there's a lot of different people running around with different.
perspectives. And I think the smart, the smarter ones are, are generally aware of kind of how these things go. and the smarter ones are thinking, yeah, it would be really easy here to cause a lot of damage. But you know, what you hear back is, you know, the pressure is on, you know, the, you know, this, the white house wants to do that, you know, wants to put out a certain, you know, thing by a certain date, you know, the senator wants to have a law, you know, dot, dot, dot, you know, the press is on us, you know, a lot of pressure.
And what are they trying to push us through by?
Uh, I mean, sort of as fast as possible. Um, well, and then there, and then there's this rush thing, which is, they're all, they're all kind of aware that Washington is kind of panic driven. You know, they kind of move from shiny object to shiny object. So to get anything through, they kind of got to get it through while it's still in a state of panic. Like if it's no longer in a state of panic, it's harder to get anything done.
So there's this weird thing where they kind of want it to happen under a state of panic. By the way, the other really amazing thing is I can have the exact, I can have two conversations with the exact same person that the conversations go very differently. Conversation A is the conversation of what to do in the United States between the American government and the American tech companies. And that's generally characterized by the American government very much hating the tech companies right now and wanting to, you know, damage them in various ways. And the tech companies wanting to figure out how to, how to fix that.
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