Amjad Masad: The Cults of Silicon Valley, Woke AI, and Tech Billionaires Turning to Trump

Speaker 1 The second half of the basketball season is here and the race to the playoffs continues on Prize Picks, the best daily fantasy sports app to cash in on your favorite sports. The app is simple.

Speaker 1 Pick more or less on at least two players for a shot to win up to a thousand times your cash. Download the PrizePicks app today and use code FIELD and get $50 instantly when you play $5.

Speaker 1 That's code FIELD on PrizePicks to get $50 instantly when you play $5. Win or lose, you'll get $50 for just playing.
Guaranteed. PrizePicks.
Run your game. Must be present in certain states.

Speaker 1 Visit PrizePicks.com for restrictions and details.

Speaker 2 This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance. Fiscally responsible, financial geniuses, monetary magicians.

Speaker 2 These are things people say about drivers who switch their car insurance to Progressive and save hundreds. Visit progressive.com to see if you could save.

Speaker 2 Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates. Potential savings will vary, not available in all states or situations.

Speaker 4 Welcome to Tucker Carlson Show. It's become pretty clear that the mainstream media are dying.
They can't die quickly enough. And there's a reason they're dying because they lie.

Speaker 4 They lied so much, it killed them. We're not doing that.
TuckerCarlson.com, we promised to bring me the most honest content, the most honest interviews we can without fear or favor. Here's the latest.

Speaker 4 It does sound like you're like directly connected to AI development. Yes.
You're part of the ecosystem. Yes.
And we benefited a lot from when it started happening.

Speaker 4 Like it was almost a surprise to a lot of people, but we saw it coming.

Speaker 4 You saw AI coming. Saw it coming.
Yeah. So, you know, this recent AI wave, you know, it surprised a lot of people.
When ChatGPT came out in November 22,

Speaker 4 a lot of people just lost their mind. Like, suddenly a computer can talk to me.
And that was like the whole thing. I wasn't into it at all.
Really?

Speaker 4 You know what? It's terrifying. Paul Graham, one of my closest friends and sort of allies and mentors, he's a big Silicon Valley figure.
He's a writer, kind of like you.

Speaker 4 You know, he writes a lot of essays and

Speaker 4 he hates it. He thinks it's like a midwit, right? And it's just like making people write worse, making people think worse.
Worse. Or not think at all.
Right, not think.

Speaker 4 As the iPhone has done, as Wikipedia and Google have done. Yes.
We were just talking about that. The,

Speaker 4 you know, the iPhones, iPads, whatever, they made it so that anyone can use a computer, but they also made it so that no one has to learn to program. The original vision of computing was that this is

Speaker 4 this is something that's going to give us superpowers, right? J.C. Licklider, the head of DARPA, while the internet was developing, wrote this

Speaker 4 essay called The Man-Machine Symbiosis. And he talks about how computers can be an extension of

Speaker 4 ourselves. It can help us grow.
We can become,

Speaker 4 you know, there's this marriage between the type of intellect that the computers can do, which is high speed, arithmetic, whatever, and the type of intellect that humans can do, which is more intuition.

Speaker 4 But, you know, since then, I think the

Speaker 4 sort of consensus has sort of changed around computing, which is, and I'm sure we'll get into that, which is why people are afraid of AI as kind of replacing us.

Speaker 4 This idea of like computers and computing are a a threat

Speaker 4 because

Speaker 4 they're directly competitive with humans, which is not really the belief I hold. They're extensions of us.

Speaker 4 And I think people learning to program, and this is really embedded at the heart of our mission at Replit, is what gives you superpowers. Whereas when you're just tapping, you're kind of a consumer.

Speaker 4 You're not a producer of software. And I want more people to be producers of software.

Speaker 4 There's a book by Dog Hofset, not Hofsetter, Roshkoff, Douglas Roshkoff. It's called Program or Be Programmed.
And the idea of if you're not the one coding, someone is coding you.

Speaker 4 Someone is programming you. These algorithms on social media, they're programming us, right?

Speaker 4 So too late for me to learn to code, though. I don't think so.

Speaker 4 I don't think so.

Speaker 4 I can't balance my checkbook, assuming there are still checkbooks. I don't think there are.
But let me just go back to something you said a minute ago,

Speaker 4 that the idea was originally, as conceived by the DARPA guys, who made this all possible, that machines would do the math, humans would do the intuition.

Speaker 4 I wonder as machines become more embedded in every moment of our lives, if intuition isn't dying or people are less willing to trust theirs.

Speaker 4 I've seen that a lot in the last few years where something very obvious will happen.

Speaker 4 And people are like, well, I could sort of acknowledge and obey what my eyes tell me and my instincts are screaming at me, but,

Speaker 4 you know, the data tell me something different. I feel like my advantage is I'm like very close to the animal kingdom.
That's right. And I just believe in smell.

Speaker 4 And so, but I wonder if that's not a result of

Speaker 4 the advance of technology. Well, I don't think it's inherent to the advance of technology.
I think

Speaker 4 it's a cultural thing, right? It's how to, again, this vision of computing as a replacement for humans versus an extension machine for humans. And so, you know, you go back, you know, Bertrand Russell

Speaker 4 wrote a book about history of philosophy and history of mathematics and like, you know, going back to the ancients and Pythagoras and all these things. And you could tell in the writing,

Speaker 4 he was almost surprised by how much intuition played into science and math and, you know,

Speaker 4 in the sort of ancient era of advancements in logic and philosophy and all of that. Whereas I think the culture today is like, well, you got to check your intuition at the door.
Yes. Yeah.

Speaker 4 You're biased. Your intuition is racist or something.
And you have to, this is bad.

Speaker 4 And you have to be this like, you know, blank slate and like you trust the data. But by the way, data is, you can make the data say a lot of different things.
I've noticed.

Speaker 4 Wait, can I just ask a totally off-topic question that just occurred to me? How are you this well-edged? I mean, so you grew up in Jordan speaking Arabic in a displaced Palestinian family.

Speaker 4 You didn't come to the U.S. until pretty recently.
You're not a native English speaker. How are you reading Bertrand Russell? Yeah.
And how, like,

Speaker 4 what was your education? Is everyone in, is every Palestinian family in Jordan this well educated? Like, what?

Speaker 4 Kind of like, yeah, Palestinian diaspora is like pretty well educated. And you're starting to see this generation, our generation of kind of who grew up are starting to

Speaker 4 sort of become more prominent. I mean, in Silicon Valley, you know, a lot of C, Suite, and VP level executives, a lot of them are Palestinian originally.

Speaker 4 A lot of them wouldn't say so because there's still, you know, bias and discrimination and all of that.

Speaker 4 They wouldn't say they're Palestinian. They wouldn't say, and, you know, they're called Adam and some of them, some of the Christian Palestinians, especially kind of blend in, right?

Speaker 4 But there's a lot of them over there. But how did you, so how do you wind up reading, I assume you read Bertrand Russell in English? Yes.

Speaker 4 How did you learn that? You didn't grow up in an English-speaking country. Yeah, well, Jordan is kind of an English-speaking country.
Well, it kind of is. That's true.
Right.

Speaker 4 So, so, you know, it was, it was a British colony. I think one of the, you know, I, you know, the Independence Day happened in the 50s or something like that, or maybe 60s.

Speaker 4 So it was like pretty late in the, you know, British

Speaker 4 sort of empire's history that Jordan stopped being a colony. So there was like a lot of British influence.
I went to, so my father, my father is a government engineer.

Speaker 4 He didn't, he didn't have a lot of money. So we lived a very modest life, kind of like middle, lower middle middle class.

Speaker 4 But he really cared about education. He sent us to private schools.
And in those private schools,

Speaker 4 we learned kind of using British diploma, right? So IGCSE, A-levels, you know, that's, are you familiar with? Not at all. Yeah, so

Speaker 4 part of the sort of British

Speaker 4 colonialism or whatever is like, you know, education system became international.

Speaker 4 And I think it's a good thing. Oh, yeah, there are British schools everywhere.
Yeah, yeah, British schools everywhere. And it's a good education system.

Speaker 4 It gives students a good level of freedom and autonomy to kind of pick the kind of things they're interested in.

Speaker 4 So I, you know, went to a lot of math and physics, but also did, did like random things. I did child development, which I still remember.
And now that I have kids, I actually use.

Speaker 4 In high school, you do that? In high school. And I learned.
What does that have to do with the civil rights movement?

Speaker 4 What do you mean? Well, that's the only topic in American schools. Really? Yeah, oh, yeah.
You spend 16 years learning about the civil rights movement.

Speaker 4 So everyone can identify the Edmund Pettis Bridge, but no one knows anything else. Oh, God.

Speaker 4 I'm so nervous about that with my kids. No, opt out.
Trust me.

Speaker 4 That's so interesting. So when you, when did you come to the U.S.? 2012.
Damn.

Speaker 4 And now you've got a billion-dollar company. It's pretty good.
Yeah, I mean, America is amazing. Like, I just love this country.

Speaker 4 It's given us a lot of opportunities. It's love the people, like everyday people.
I like to talk to people.

Speaker 4 I was just talking to my driver, which she was like,

Speaker 4 you know, I'm so embarrassed. I didn't know who Dr.
Carlson was.

Speaker 4 You're good. That's why I live here.
Yeah. I was like, well, good for you.
I think that means you're just like,

Speaker 4 you're just living your life. And she's like, yeah, I'm, you know, I have my kids and my chickens and my whatever.
I was like, that's great. That's it means you're happy.
It means you're happy.

Speaker 4 So I'm sorry to dig I'm sorry to digress. I was sitting with referring to all these books.
I'm like, you're not even from here. It's incredible.

Speaker 4 So, but back to AI

Speaker 4 and to this question of intuition, you don't think that

Speaker 4 it's inherent.

Speaker 4 So, in other words, if my life is to some extent governed by technology, by my phone, by my computer, by all the technology embedded in every electronic object, you don't think that makes me trust machines more than my own gut?

Speaker 4 You can choose to, and I think a lot of people are being guided to

Speaker 4 do that.

Speaker 4 But ultimately, you're giving away a lot of freedom.

Speaker 4 And, you know, there's a, there's a,

Speaker 4 it's not just me saying that there's like a huge tradition of hackers and computer scientists that kind of started ringing the alarm bell like really long time ago about like the way things were trending, which is, you know, more centralization, less diversity of competition in the markets.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 4 And you have like one global social network as opposed to many. Now it's actually getting a little better.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 you had a lot of these people start the crypto movement. I know you were at the Bitcoin conference recently and you told them CIA started Bitcoin.
They got really angry on Twitter.

Speaker 4 I don't know that. But until you can tell me who Satoshi was, I have some questions.

Speaker 4 I actually

Speaker 4 have a feeling about who Satoshi was, but that's a separate conversation. No, it's not.
Let's just stop right now because I can't. I will never forget to ask you again, who is Satoshi? There's a guy.

Speaker 4 His name is Paul LaRue.

Speaker 4 By the way, for those watching and don't know who Satoshi was, Satoshi is the

Speaker 4 pseudonym that we use for the person who created Bitcoin, but we don't know who. It's amazing.
You know, it's this

Speaker 4 thing that was created. We don't know who created it.

Speaker 4 He never moved the money, I don't think. Maybe there was some activity here and there, but there's like billions, hundreds of billions of dollars locked in.
So we don't know who the person is.

Speaker 4 They're not cashing out. And it's like pretty crazy story, right? It's amazing.
So Paul LaRue. Yeah, Paul LaRue

Speaker 4 was

Speaker 4 a crypto hacker in

Speaker 4 Rhodesia

Speaker 4 before Zimbabwe. And he created something called encryption for the masses, EM4,

Speaker 4 and was one of the early, by the way, I think Snowden used EM4 as part of his as part of his hack.

Speaker 4 So he was one of the people that really

Speaker 4 made it so that cryptography is accessible to more people.

Speaker 4 However, he did he did become a criminal he became a criminal mastermind in manila he was really controlling the the city almost you know he paid off all the cops and everything he was making so much money for so from so much criminal activity his nickname was sletoshi with an l and so there's like a lot of you know circumstantial evidence there's no like cutthroat evidence but i just have a feeling that he generated so much cash he didn't know what to do with it where to store it and on the side he was building Bitcoin to be able to store all that, all that cash.

Speaker 4 And around that same time that Satoshi disappeared, he went to jail. He got, he got booked for

Speaker 4 all the crime he did. He recently got sentenced to

Speaker 4 25 years of prison. I think Judge asked him, like, what would you do if you would go out? And he's like, I would build an ASIC chip to mine Bitcoin.

Speaker 4 So look, you know, this is a strong opinion, loosely held, but it's just like there's... So he is currently in prison.
He's currently in prison. Yeah.

Speaker 4 In this country or the Philippines? I think this country.

Speaker 4 Because he was doing all the crime here. He was selling drugs online, essentially.
Huh.

Speaker 4 We should go see him in jail. Yeah, yeah.
Check out his stories.

Speaker 4 I'm sorry. I just had to get that out of you.
So I keep digressing.

Speaker 4 So you see AI, and you're part of the AI ecosystem, of course, but you don't see it as a threat. Do you? No.
No, I don't see it as a threat at all.

Speaker 4 And I think, and I, you know, I heard some of your, you know, podcasts with Joe Rogan, whatever, and you're like, oh, we should nuke the data centers. And

Speaker 4 I'm excitable

Speaker 4 on the basis of very little information. Well, actually, yeah, well, actually, tell me, what is your theory about the threat of AI?

Speaker 4 I, you know, I always, I want to be the kind of man who admits up front his limitations and his ignorance.

Speaker 4 And on this topic, I'm legitimately ignorant, but I have read a lot about it. And I've read most of the alarmist stuff about it.

Speaker 4 And the idea is, as you well know, that the machines become so powerful that they achieve a kind of autonomy.

Speaker 4 And they, though designed to serve you, wind up ruling you. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And,

Speaker 4 you know, I'm, I'm really interested in

Speaker 4 Ted Kaczynski's writings, his two books that he wrote, obviously, as to say, ritually, I'm totally opposed to letter bombs or violence of any kind.

Speaker 4 But Ted Kaczynski had a lot of provocative and thoughtful things to say about technology. And it's almost like having live and help, which, you know, people make a lot of money.

Speaker 4 They all want to have live and help. But the truth about live and help is, you know, they're there to serve you, but you wind up serving them and it inverts.
And AI is a kind of species of that.

Speaker 4 That's the fear. And I don't want to live, I don't want to be a slave to a machine any more than I already am.
So it's kind of that simple. And then there's all this other stuff.

Speaker 4 You know a lot more about this than I do, so you're in that world. But yeah, that's my concern.
That's actually a quite valid concern.

Speaker 4 And I would like decouple the existential threat concern from the concern. And we've been talking about this of like machine, like us being slaves to the machines.
And I think Tet Kaczynski's

Speaker 4 critique of technology is actually one of the best. Yes, thank you.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 I wish he hadn't killed people, of course, because I'm against killing, but I also think it had the opposite of the intended effect. He did it in order to bring attention to

Speaker 4 his thesis and ended up obscuring it.

Speaker 4 But I really wish that every person in America would read not just his manifesto, but the book that he wrote from prison, because they're just so, at the least, they're thought-provoking and really important.

Speaker 4 Yeah, yeah. I mean, briefly, and we'll get to existential risk in a second, but he talked about this thing called the power process, which is, he thinks that it's intrinsic to human happiness to

Speaker 4 struggle. for survival, to go through life as a child, as an adult, build build up yourself, get married, have kids, and then become the elder and then die, right? Exactly.

Speaker 4 And he thinks that modern technology kind of disrupts this process and makes people miserable. How do you know that?

Speaker 4 I read it. I'm very curious.

Speaker 4 I read a lot of things and I just don't have

Speaker 4 mental censorship in a way. Like I can love.

Speaker 4 I'm really curious. I'll read anything.
Do you think being from another country has helped you in that way?

Speaker 4 Yeah. And I also, I think that just my childhood,

Speaker 4 I was like always different.

Speaker 4 When I had hair, it was all red. It was bright red.

Speaker 4 And my whole family is kind of, or at least half of my family are redheads.

Speaker 4 And,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 because of that experience, I was like, okay, I'm different. I'm comfortable being different.
I'll be. I'll be different.
And,

Speaker 4 you know, that just commitment to not worrying about anything, you know, about conforming, or like it was forced on me that i'm not conforming just by virtue of being different and and uh and being curious and being you know um

Speaker 4 good with computers and all that um i think that carried me through life it's just i like i get you know i i get like almost a disgust reaction to conformism and like mob mentality.

Speaker 4 Oh, I couldn't agree with you. I had a similar experience in childhood.
I totally agree with you.

Speaker 4 We've traveled to an awful lot of countries on this show, to some free countries, the dwindling number, and a lot of not very free countries, places famous for government censorship.

Speaker 4 And wherever we go, we use a virtual private network of VPN, and we use Express VPN. We do it to access the free and open internet.

Speaker 4 But the interesting thing is when we come back here to the United States, we still use Express VPN. Why? Big tech surveillance.
It's everywhere.

Speaker 4 It's not just North Korea Korea that monitors every move its citizens make. No,

Speaker 4 that same thing happens right here in the United States and in Canada and Great Britain and around the world. Internet providers can see every website you visit.
Did you know that?

Speaker 4 They may even be required to keep your browsing history on file for years and then turn it over to federal authorities if asked.

Speaker 4 In the United States, internet providers are legally allowed to and regularly do sell your browsing history everywhere you go online. There is no privacy.
Did you know that?

Speaker 4 Well, we did, and that's why we use ExpressVPN. And because we do, our internet provider never knows where we're going on the internet.
They never hear it in the first place.

Speaker 4 That's because 100% of our online activity is routed through ExpressVPN's secure encrypted servers.

Speaker 4 They hide our IP address, so data brokers cannot track us and sell our online activity on the black market. We have privacy.
ExpressVPN lets you connect to servers in 105 different countries.

Speaker 4 So basically, you can go online like you're anywhere in the world. No one can see you.
This was the promise of the internet in the first place. Privacy and freedom.

Speaker 4 Those didn't seem like they were achievable, but now they are. ExpressVPN, we cannot recommend it enough.
It's also really easy to use, whether or not you fully understand the technology behind it.

Speaker 4 You can use it on your phone, laptop, tablet, even your smart TVs. You press one button, just tap it, and you're protected.
You have privacy.

Speaker 4 So if you want online privacy and the freedom it bestows, get it. You can go to our special link right here to get three extra months free of ExpressVPN.
That's expressvpn.com slash tucker.

Speaker 4 Express EXPRESS VPN.com slash Tucker for three extra months free.

Speaker 5 A incredible nutritional supplement called Immuno150 is now available to the public.

Speaker 5 It contains 13 vitamins, 17 herbs, 18 amino acids, 17 antioxidants, 9 exotic fruits, COQ10, turmeric, and 70 plant-derived colloidal minerals.

Speaker 5 It may be the best health supplement in the world because of its 70 minerals. There's nothing like this amazing product.

Speaker 5 It supports the body with everything it needs to become healthy and stay healthy.

Speaker 5 Immuno 150 contains seven times more minerals and many more vitamins and enzymes than found in foods and most nutritional supplements. Immuno150 can be ordered from Amazon or Walmart.

Speaker 5 Or call 844-519-3400. That's 844-519-3400 or visit the website immuno150.com.
That's IMMUNO150.com.

Speaker 3 You may have noticed this is a great country with bad food. Our food supply is rotten.
It didn't used to be this way. Take chips, for example.

Speaker 3 You may recall a time when crushing a bag of chips didn't make you feel hungover, like you couldn't get out of bed the next day. And the change, of course, is chemicals.

Speaker 3 There's all kinds of crap they're putting in this food that should not be in your body, seed oils, for example.

Speaker 3 Now even one serving of your standard American chip brand can make you feel bloated, fat,

Speaker 3 totally passive and out of it. But there is a better way.
It's called masa chips. They're delicious.
I've got a whole garage full of them.

Speaker 3 They're healthy, they taste great, and they have three simple ingredients: corn, salt, and 100% grass-fed beef tallow. No garbage, no seed oils.
What a relief.

Speaker 3 And you feel the difference when you eat them, as we often do. Snacking on masa chips is not like eating the garbage that you buy at convenience stores.

Speaker 3 You feel satisfied, light, energetic, not sluggish. Tens of thousands of happy people eat masa chips.
It's endorsed by people who understand health. It's well worth a try.

Speaker 3 Go to masa, m-as-achips.com slash tucker. Use the code Tucker for 25% off your first order.
That's masachips.com.

Speaker 3 Tucker. Code Tucker for 25% off your first order.
Highly recommended.

Speaker 4 So Kaczynski's thesis that struggle is not only inherent to the condition, but an essential part

Speaker 4 of your evolution as a man or as a person,

Speaker 4 and that technology disrupts that. I mean, that seems right to me.
Yeah, and I actually struggle to sort of

Speaker 4 dispute that

Speaker 4 despite being a technologist, right? Ultimately,

Speaker 4 again, like I said, this is like one of the best critiques. I think we can spend the whole podcast kind of really trying to tease it apart.
I think ultimately, where

Speaker 4 I kind of defer, and again, it just goes back to a lot of what we're talking about, my views on technology as an extension of us. It's like we just don't want technology to be

Speaker 4 a thing that's just merely replacing us. We want it to be an empowering thing.
And

Speaker 4 what we do at Replit is we empower people to learn the code, to build startups, to build companies, to become entrepreneurs. And

Speaker 4 I think you can,

Speaker 4 in this world, you have to create the power process. You have to struggle.
And

Speaker 4 yes, you can,

Speaker 4 this is why I'm also, you know, a lot of technologists talk about UBI and universal basic engineering. Oh, I know.
I think it's all wrong because this just goes against human nature. Thank you.

Speaker 4 So I think. If you want to kill everybody, put them on the dole.
Yes. Yes.

Speaker 4 So, you you know, I don't think technology is inherently at odds with the power process. I'll leave it at that and we can go to

Speaker 4 existential threat. Yeah, of course.
Sorry. Boy, am I just

Speaker 4 aggressive? I can't believe I interviewed people for over.

Speaker 4 We had dinner last night.

Speaker 4 That was awesome. It was one of the best dinners.

Speaker 4 But we hit about 400 different threats. Yes.
That was amazing. So,

Speaker 4 that's what's out there. I know I'm sort of convinced of it.
Or it makes sense

Speaker 4 to me. And I'm kind of threat oriented anyway.

Speaker 4 So people with my kind of personality are like sort of always looking for, you know, the big, bad thing that's coming, the asteroid or the nuclear war, the AI slavery.

Speaker 4 But I know some pretty smart people who, very smart people who are much closer to the heart of. AI development who also have these concerns.

Speaker 4 And I think a lot of the public shares these concerns. Yeah.

Speaker 4 And the last thing I'll say before soliciting your view of it, much better informed view of it, is that there's been surprisingly and tellingly little

Speaker 4 conversation about the upside of AI.

Speaker 4 So instead, it's like, this is happening. And if we don't do it, China will.
That may, I think that's probably true. But like, why should I be psyched about it? Like, what's the upside for me? Right.

Speaker 4 You know what I mean? Normally, when some new technology or, or huge change comes, the people who are profiting from like, you know, it's going to be great. It's going to be great.

Speaker 4 You're not going to ever have to do X again. You know, you just throw your clothes in a machine and press a button and they'll be clean.
Yes. I'm not hearing any of that about AI.

Speaker 4 That's a very acute observation. And I'll exactly tell you why.

Speaker 4 And to tell you why, it's like a little bit of a long story because I think there is an organized effort to scare people about AI. Organized.
Organized, yes.

Speaker 4 And so this starts with a mailing list in the 90s. It's a transhumanist mailing list

Speaker 4 called the Extropians.

Speaker 4 And these extropians, they might have got it wrong, extropia or something like that, but

Speaker 4 they believe in the singularity. So the singularity is a moment of time where

Speaker 4 AI is progressing so fast or technology in general progressing so fast that you can't predict what happens.

Speaker 4 It's self-evolving and it just all bets are off.

Speaker 4 we're entering a new world where you just can't predict it. Where technology can't be controlled.
Technology can't be controlled. It's going to

Speaker 4 remake everything.

Speaker 4 And those people believe that's a good thing because the world now sucks so much and we are, you know, we are imperfect and unethical and all sorts of irrational and whatever.

Speaker 4 And so they really wanted to

Speaker 4 for the singularity to happen. And there's this young guy on this list.
His name is Eliezer Yutkowski. And he claims he can write this AI.

Speaker 4 And he would write like really long essays about how to build this AI.

Speaker 4 Suspiciously, he never really publishes code. And it's all just prose about how he's going to be able to build AI.
Anyways, he's able to fundraise.

Speaker 4 They started this thing called the Singularity Institute. A lot of people who were excited about the future kind of invested in him, Pierre Thiel, most famously.

Speaker 4 And he spent a few years trying to build an AI. Again, never published code, never published any real progress.

Speaker 4 And then came out of it saying that not only you can't build AI, but if you build it, it will kill everyone.

Speaker 4 So he kind of switched from being this optimist, you know, singularity is great to like, actually, AI will for sure kill everyone.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 then he was like, okay, the reason I made this mistake is because I was irrational.

Speaker 4 And the way to get people to understand that AI is going to kill everyone is to make them rational. So he started this blog called Less Wrong.

Speaker 4 And Less Wrong is like walks you through steps to becoming more rational. Look at your biases, examine yourself, sit down, meditate on all the irrational decisions you've made and try to correct them.

Speaker 4 And then they start this thing called Center for Advanced Rationality or something like that, CIFAR.

Speaker 4 And they're giving seminars about rationality. But the

Speaker 4 seminar about rationality, what's that like?

Speaker 4 I've never been to one, but my guess would be if they will talk about the biases, whatever, but they have also like weird things where they have this almost struggle session like thing called debugging.

Speaker 4 A lot of people wrote blog posts about how that was demeaning and it caused psychosis in some people. 2017, that community, there was like collective psychosis.

Speaker 4 A lot of people were kind of going crazy. And it is all written about it on the internet.
Debugging. So that would be like kind of your classic cult technique

Speaker 4 where you have to strip yourself bare, like auditing and Scientology.

Speaker 4 you're yes it's very common yes yeah so yeah it's a constant in cults yes is that what you're describing yeah i mean that's what i read on these accounts yeah they will sit down and they will like audit your mind and tell you where you're wrong and and all of that um

Speaker 4 And it's, it caused people huge distress. And young guys all the time like talk about how going into that community has caused them huge distress.

Speaker 4 And there were like offshoots of this community where there were suicides, there were murders, there were a lot of really dark and deep shit.

Speaker 4 And the other thing is like they kind of teach you about rationality. They recruit you to AI risk because if you're rational, you know, you're a group.
We're all rational now.

Speaker 4 We learned the art of rationality.

Speaker 4 And we agree that AI is going to kill everyone. Therefore, everyone outside of this group is wrong.
And we have to protect them. AI is going to kill everyone.

Speaker 4 But also, they believe other things.

Speaker 4 Like they believe that, you know, polyamory is rational and and everyone that polyamory yeah like like uh you can have sex with multiple partners essentially that but they think that's i mean i i think it's um it's certainly a natural desire if you're a man to sleep with more indifferent women for sure

Speaker 4 but it's rational in the sense how like you've never met a happy polyamorist long term it's i've known a lot of them not a single one so how is it might be self-serving you think

Speaker 4 to recruit more impressionable people into

Speaker 4 and their hot girlfriends. Yes.
Right.

Speaker 4 So that's rational? Yeah, supposedly.

Speaker 4 And so they, you know, they convince each other of all these occult-like behavior. And

Speaker 4 the crazy thing is like this group ends up being super influential

Speaker 4 because

Speaker 4 you know, they recruit a lot of people that are interested in AI.

Speaker 4 And the AI labs and the people who are starting these companies were reading all this stuff. So Elon, you know, famously read a lot of Nick Bostrom is

Speaker 4 kind of an adjacent figure to the rationales community. He was part of the original mailing list.

Speaker 4 I think he would call himself a rational part of the rational community, but he wrote a book about AI and how AI is going to kill everyone essentially.

Speaker 4 I think he moderated his views more recently, but originally he was one of the people that are kind of banging the alarm.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 the foundation of Open AI

Speaker 4 was based on a lot of these fears. Like, Elon had fears of AI killing everyone.

Speaker 4 He was afraid that Google was going to do that. And so they, you know, group of people.
I don't think everyone at OpenAI really believed that, but some of the original founding story was that.

Speaker 4 And they were recruiting from that community.

Speaker 4 So much so when

Speaker 4 Sam Altman got fired recently, he was fired by someone from that community.

Speaker 4 Someone who started with effective altruism, which is another offshoot from that community. Really? And so the AI labs are intermarried in a lot of ways with this community.

Speaker 4 And so it ends up, they kind of, you know, borrowed a lot of their talking points. By the way, a lot of these companies are great companies now, and I think they're cleaning up house.

Speaker 4 But there is, I mean, I'll just use the term. It sounds like a cult to me.
Yeah. I mean, it has the hallmarks of it in your description.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 And can we just push a little deeper on what they believe? You say they are transhumanists. Yes.
What is that?

Speaker 4 Well, I think they're just unsatisfied with human nature, unsatisfied with the current ways we're constructed

Speaker 4 and that we're irrational, we're unethical.

Speaker 4 And so they start,

Speaker 4 they long

Speaker 4 for the world where we can become more rational, more ethical by transforming ourselves, either by merging with AI via chips or what have you, changing our bodies

Speaker 4 and like fixing fundamental issues that they perceive with humans via modifications and merging with machines. It's just so interesting because, and so shallow and silly,

Speaker 4 like a lot of those people I have known are, not that smart actually.

Speaker 4 Because the best things, I mean, reason is important and we should, in my view, given us by God and it's really important and being irrational is bad.

Speaker 4 On the other hand, the best things about people, their best impulses are not rational.

Speaker 4 I believe so, too. There is no rational justification for giving something you need to another person,

Speaker 4 for spending an inordinate amount of time helping someone, for loving someone. Those are all irrational.
Now, banging someone's hot girlfriend, I guess that's rational.

Speaker 4 But that's kind of the lowest impulse that we have, actually. We'll wait till you hear about effective altruism.
So they think our natural impulses that you just talked about are indeed irrational.

Speaker 4 And there's a guy, his name is Peter Singer, a philosopher from Australia. The infanticide guy.
Yes. He's so ethical, he's for killing children.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, so their philosophy is utilitarian, utilitarianism is that you can calculate ethics and you can start to apply it. And you get into really weird territory.
Like, you know, if

Speaker 4 there's all these problems, all these thought experiments, like, you know, you have two people at the hospital requiring some organs of another third person that came in for a regular checkup,

Speaker 4 or they will die, you're ethically

Speaker 4 you're supposed to kill that guy, get his organ, and put it into the other two. And so it gets, I don't think.

Speaker 4 People believe that per se. I mean, but but they

Speaker 4 but there's so many

Speaker 4 problems with that. There's another belief that they have.
Can I say that belief or that conclusion grows out of the core belief, which is that you're God.

Speaker 4 It's like a normal person realizes, sure, it would help more people if I killed that person and gave his organs to a number of people. Like that's just a math question.
True.

Speaker 4 But I'm not allowed to do that because I didn't create life. I don't have the power.
I'm not allowed to make decisions like that

Speaker 4 because I'm just a silly human being who can't see the future and is not omnipotent because I'm not God.

Speaker 4 I feel like all of these conclusions stem from the misconception that people are gods. Yes.

Speaker 4 Does that sound right? No, I agree. I mean, a lot of the,

Speaker 4 you know, I think it's,

Speaker 4 you know, they're at roots, they're just fundamentally unsatisfied with humans and maybe perhaps hate hate

Speaker 4 the humans. Well, they're deeply disappointed.
Yes.

Speaker 4 I think that's such a, I've never heard anyone say that um as well that they're disappointed with human nature they're disappointed with human condition they're disappointed with people's flaws and i feel like that's the i mean on on one level of course i mean you know we should be better and but that we used to call that judgment which we're not allowed to do by the way um that's just super judgy actually what they're saying is you know

Speaker 4 you suck

Speaker 4 and it's just a short hop from there to you should be killed i think i mean that's a total lack of love whereas a normal person a loving person says you kind of suck I kind of suck too yes but I love you anyway and you love me anyway and I'm grateful for your love right that's right that's right well they'll say you suck join our rationality community have sex with us

Speaker 4 so but can I just clarify are these these aren't just like

Speaker 4 you know, support staff at these companies? Like, are there. So, you know, you've heard about SBF and FDX.

Speaker 4 They had what's called a polycule. Yeah.
Right. They were all having sex with each other.

Speaker 4 Given now, I just want to be super catty and shallow, but given some of the people they were having sex with, that was not rational.

Speaker 4 No actual person would do that. Come on now.
Yeah, that's true.

Speaker 4 Well, so, you know, yeah, you know, it's.

Speaker 4 What's even more disturbing, there's another ethical component to their philosophy called long-termism.

Speaker 4 And this comes from the effective altruist sort of branch of rationality.

Speaker 4 Long-termism. Long-termism.
And so, what they think is

Speaker 4 in the future,

Speaker 4 if we made the right steps, there's going to be a trillion humans, trillion minds.

Speaker 4 There might not be humans, it might be AI, but they're going to be trillion minds who can experience utility, can experience good things, fun things, whatever.

Speaker 4 If you're a utilitarian, you have to put a lot of weight on it. And maybe you discount that, sort of like discounted cash flows,

Speaker 4 but you still

Speaker 4 have to posit that

Speaker 4 if there are trillions, perhaps many more people in the future, you need to value that very highly. Even if you discount it a lot, it ends up being valued very highly.

Speaker 4 So a lot of these communities end up all focusing on AI safety because they think that AI, because they're rational, they arrived, and we can talk about their arguments in a second.

Speaker 4 They arrived at the conclusion that AI is going to kill everyone.

Speaker 4 Therefore, if effective altruists and rational community, all these branches, they're all kind of focused on AI safety because that's the most important thing.

Speaker 4 Because we want a trillion people in the future to be great.

Speaker 4 But, you know, when you're assigning sort of value

Speaker 4 that high, it's sort of a form of Pascal's wager. It is

Speaker 4 sort of,

Speaker 4 you can justify anything, including terrorism, including

Speaker 4 doing really bad things. If you're really convinced that AI is going to kill everyone

Speaker 4 and the future holds so much value,

Speaker 4 more value than any living human today has value, you might justify really doing anything.

Speaker 4 And so built into that, it's a dangerous framework. But it's the same framework of every genocidal movement.
Yes. From

Speaker 4 at least the French Revolution to present.

Speaker 4 A glorious future justifies a bloody present.

Speaker 4 And look, I'm not accusing them of genocidal intent, by the way. I don't know them,

Speaker 4 but those ideas lead very quickly to the camps. I feel kind of weird just talking about people because generally I like to talk about ideas about things.

Speaker 4 But if they were just like a silly Berkeley cult or whatever, and they didn't have any real impact in the world, I wouldn't care about them.

Speaker 4 But what's happening is that they were able to convince a lot of billionaires billionaires of these ideas. I think Elon maybe changed his mind, but at some point he was convinced of these ideas.

Speaker 4 I don't know if he gave them money. There was a story at some point, Wall Street Journal, that he was thinking about it.

Speaker 4 But a lot of other billionaires gave them money, and now they're organized and they're in DC lobbying for AI regulation.

Speaker 4 They're behind the AI regulation in California

Speaker 4 and actually profiting from it. There was a story in Pirate Wares where

Speaker 4 the main sponsor, Dan Hendricks, behind SB 1047,

Speaker 4 started a company at the same time that certifies the safety of AI. And as part of the bill, it says that you have to get certified by a third party.
So there's aspects of it that are

Speaker 4 kind of let's let's profit from it. By the way, this is all allegedly based on this article.

Speaker 4 I don't know for sure.

Speaker 4 I think Senator Scott Wiener was trying to do the right thing with the bill, but he was listening to a lot of these

Speaker 4 cult members, let's call them. And

Speaker 4 they're very well organized. And also, a lot of them still have connections to the big AI labs.
And

Speaker 4 some of them work there. And they would want to create a situation where there's no competition in AI, regulatory capture.
per se. And so I'm not saying that these are like the direct motivations.

Speaker 4 All of them are true believers, but know, you might, you, you might kind of infiltrate this group and kind of direct it in a way that benefits these corporations. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Well, I'm from DC, so I've seen a lot of instances where, you know, my bank account aligns with my beliefs. Thank heaven.
Yeah. It just kind of happened.
It winds up that way. It's funny.

Speaker 4 Climate is the perfect example. There's never one climate solution that makes the person who proposes it poorer or less powerful.
Exactly. Ever.
Not one. We've told you before about Hallow.

Speaker 4 It is a great app that I am proud to say I use. My whole family uses.
It's for daily prayer and Christian meditation, and it's transformative.

Speaker 4 As we head into the start of school in the height of election season, you need it. Trust me, we all do.
Things are going to get crazier and crazier and crazier.

Speaker 4 Sometimes it's hard to imagine even what is coming next. So with everything happening in the world right now, it is essential to ground yourself.

Speaker 4 This is not some quack cure. This is the oldest and most reliable cure in history.
It's prayer. Ground yourself in prayer and scripture every single day.

Speaker 4 That is a prerequisite for staying sane and healthy and maybe for doing better eternally.

Speaker 4 So if you're busy on the road, headed to kids' sports, there is always time to pray and reflect alone or as a family, but it's hard to be organized about it.

Speaker 4 Building a foundation of prayer is going to be absolutely critical as we head into November, praying that God's will is done in this country and that peace and healing come to us here in the United States and around the world.

Speaker 4 Christianity obviously is attacked, under attack everywhere. That's not an accident.
Why is Christianity, the most peaceful of all religions, under attack globally?

Speaker 4 Did you see the opening of the Paris Olympics? There's a reason, because the battle is not temporal. It's taking place in the unseen world.
It's a spiritual battle, obvious.

Speaker 4 So try Hallow. Get three months completely free at Hallow.
That's hallow.com slash Tucker. if there's ever a time to get spiritually in tune and ground yourself in prayer it's now hallow will help

Speaker 3 personally and strongly and totally sincerely recommend it hallow.com slash tucker so you probably got verizon at t t mobile that means you are definitely way overpaying for wireless service and we're not just saying that it happens for a reason when you join a massive cell phone company you get charged to support everything that their operation is doing and that's a lot big corporate programs huge HR departments, thousands of retail stores you're never going to visit.

Speaker 3 You think your money is going toward getting better sell service, 5G service, but it's not. So the wireless company we use, PureTalk, is very different.

Speaker 3 They use the exact same cell network as the companies we just mentioned, but they don't do any of the other garbage. And for you, that means $25 a month for your phone's data plans.

Speaker 3 Actually, $25 a month.

Speaker 3 You'll be amazed. Switch to Pure Talk.
It's super easy. Visit puretalk.com slash tucker and you save an additional 50% off your first month.
PureTalk.com slash Tucker. It literally takes minutes.

Speaker 3 It's America's wireless company.

Speaker 6 If you love to travel, Capital One has a rewards credit card that's perfect for you. With the Capital One Venture X card, you earn unlimited double miles on everything you buy.

Speaker 6 Plus, you get premium benefits at a collection of luxury hotels when you book on Capital One Travel. And with Venture X, you get access to over 1,000 airport lounges worldwide.

Speaker 6 Open up a world of travel possibilities with a Capital One Venture X card. What's in your wallet?

Speaker 4 Terms apply. Lounge access is subject to change.
See capital1.com for details.

Speaker 4 I wonder

Speaker 4 about the core assumption, which I've had up until right now, that these machines are capable of thinking. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Is that true? So let's go through their chain of reasoning. I think the fact that

Speaker 4 it's a stupid, cult-like thing, or perhaps actually a cult does not automatically mean that their arguments are totally wrong. That's exactly right.
I think it does.

Speaker 4 You do have to kind of discount some of the arguments because it comes from crazy people. But argument, the chain of reasoning is that

Speaker 4 humans are general intelligence. We have these things called brains.
Brains are computers. They're based on purely physical phenomena that we know they're computing.

Speaker 4 And if you agree that humans are computing and

Speaker 4 therefore we can build a general intelligence in the machine.

Speaker 4 And if you agree up till this point,

Speaker 4 if you're able to build a general intelligence in the machine, even if only at human level, then you can create a billion copies of it. And then it becomes a lot more powerful than any one of us.

Speaker 4 And because it's a lot more powerful than any one of us, it would want to control us or

Speaker 4 it would not care about us because it's such it's more powerful kind of like. we don't care about ants.
We'll step on ants, no problem. Right.

Speaker 4 Because these machines are so powerful, they're not going to care about us. And I sort of get off the train at the first chain of reasoning, but every one of those steps I have problems with.

Speaker 4 The first step is

Speaker 4 the mind is a computer.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 based on what? And the idea is, oh, well, if you don't believe that the mind is a computer, then you're believing some kind of woo spiritual thing.

Speaker 4 Well, you know,

Speaker 4 Well, you have to convince me.

Speaker 4 You haven't presented an argument, but but

Speaker 4 the idea that like speaking of rational, but

Speaker 4 this is what reason looks like. Right.

Speaker 4 The idea that we have a complete description of the universe, anyways, is wrong, right?

Speaker 4 We don't have a universal physics. We have physics of the small things.
We have physics of the big things. We can't really cohere them or combine them.

Speaker 4 So just the idea that you being a materialist is sort of incoherent because we don't have a complete description of the world. That's one thing.
That's a slight argument. I'm not going to.

Speaker 4 No, no, no, no. It's a very interesting argument, though.
So you're saying, as someone who, I mean, you're a scientist, you're effectively a scientist.

Speaker 4 Just state for viewers who don't follow this stuff, like the limits of our knowledge of physics. Yeah.
So, you know, we have essentially two conflicting theories of physics.

Speaker 4 These systems can't be kind of married. They're not a universal system.
You can't use them both at the same time.

Speaker 4 Well, that suggests a profound limit to our understanding of what's happening around us in the natural world, does it? Yes, it does.

Speaker 4 And I think this is, again, another error of the rationalist types is that just assume that we were so much more advanced in our science than we actually are.

Speaker 4 So it sounds like they don't know that much about science. Yes.

Speaker 4 Okay. Thank you.
Thank you. I'm sorry to ask you to pause.
Yeah, that's not even the main crux of my argument. There is

Speaker 4 a

Speaker 4 philosopher slash mathematician slash scientist, wonderful. His name is sir uh roger penrose i love how the british kind of give the sir title someone is accomplished um

Speaker 4 the uh

Speaker 4 he wrote this book called the emperor's new mind

Speaker 4 and the in the uh and it's it's based on you know the emperor's new clothes the idea the idea that you know the emperor is kind of naked and and uh in his opinion the argument that the mind is a computer is a sort of consensus argument that it's wrong the emperor is naked actually it's not really an argument, it's an assertion.

Speaker 4 Yes, it's an assertion that is fundamentally wrong. And the way he proves it is very interesting.

Speaker 4 There is, in mathematics, there's something called Gödel's incompleteness theorem.

Speaker 4 And, you know, what that says is

Speaker 4 there are statements

Speaker 4 that are true that can't be proved. in mathematics.
So he constructs, Gödel constructs a, like a number

Speaker 4 system where he can start to make statements about this number system.

Speaker 4 So the, you know, he, he creates a statement that's like, this statement is unprovable in system F, where the, where the system is F, the whole system is F.

Speaker 4 Well, if you try to prove it, then that's, then that statement becomes false.

Speaker 4 But you know it's true because it's unprovable in the system.

Speaker 4 And Roger Pano says, you know, because we have this knowledge that it is true by looking at it, despite like we can't prove it. I mean, the whole feature of the sentence is that it is unprovable.

Speaker 4 Therefore, our knowledge is outside of any formal system. Therefore,

Speaker 4 the human brain is, or like our mind is understanding something

Speaker 4 that mathematics is not able to give it to us. To describe.
To describe.

Speaker 4 And I thought, the first time I read it, again, it read a lot of these things.

Speaker 4 What's the famous, you were telling me last night, I'd never heard it, the Bertrand Russell self-canceling assertion. Yeah, it's like this statement is false.

Speaker 4 It's called the liar, it's called the liar paradox.

Speaker 4 Explain why that's just, that's going to float in my head forever. Why is that a paradox? So this statement is false.
If you,

Speaker 4 if you look at a statement and agree with it, then it becomes true. But if it's true, then it's not true.
It's false. And you go through the circular thing and you never stop.

Speaker 4 It broke logic in a way. Yes.
And Bertrand Russell spent his whole, you know, big part of his life writing this book, Principia Mathematica.

Speaker 4 And he wanted to really prove that mathematics is complete, consistent,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 decidable, computable, all of that.

Speaker 4 And then all these things happened, Gödel's incomplete theorem.

Speaker 4 Turing, the inventor of the computer, actually,

Speaker 4 this is the most ironic piece of science history that nobody ever talks about, but Turing invented the computer to show its limitation.

Speaker 4 So he invented the Turing machine, which is the ideal representation of a computer that we have today. All computers are Turing machines.
And he showed that

Speaker 4 this machine, if you give it a set of instructions, it can't tell whether those set of instructions will ever stop. will run and stop,

Speaker 4 will complete to a stop, or will continue running forever. It's called the halting problem.
And

Speaker 4 this proves that mathematics have undecidability. It's not fully decidable or computable.
So all of these things were happening as he was writing the book. And, you know, it was

Speaker 4 really depressing for him because he kind of went out to prove that mathematics is complete and all of that.

Speaker 4 And,

Speaker 4 you know, this caused kind of a major panic at the time between mathematicians and all of that. It's like, oh my God, like our systems are not complete.

Speaker 4 So it sounds like the deeper you go into science and the more honest you are about what you discover, the more questions you have,

Speaker 4 which kind of gets you back to where you should be in the first place, which is in a posture of humility. Yes.

Speaker 4 And yet I see science used certainly in the political sphere. I mean, those are all dumb people.
So it's like, who cares? Actually, Kamala Harris lecturing me about science. I don't even hear it.

Speaker 4 But also some smart people like believe the science.

Speaker 4 The assumption behind that demand is that it's complete and it's knowable and we know it. And if you're ignoring it, then you're ignorant willfully or otherwise, right?

Speaker 4 Well, my view of science, it's a method. Ultimately, it's a method.
Anyone can apply. It's democratic.
It's decentralized. Anyone can apply the scientific method, including people who are not trained.

Speaker 4 But in order to practice the method, you have to come from a position of humility that I don't know. That's what I'm using this method.
to find out. And I cannot lie about what I observe, right?

Speaker 4 That's right. And today, you know, it's, you know, capital S science is used to control and it's used to

Speaker 4 propagandize and lie. Of course.
But, you know, in the hands of,

Speaker 4 you know, just really people who shouldn't have power, just dumb people with, you know, pretty ugly agendas.

Speaker 4 But, but we're talking about the world that you live in, which is like unusually smart people who do this stuff for a living and are really trying to advance the ball in science.

Speaker 4 And I think what you're saying is that some of them,

Speaker 4 knowingly or not, just don't appreciate how little they know. Yeah.
And, you know, they go through this chain of reasoning for this argument. And, you know,

Speaker 4 none of those are

Speaker 4 at minimum,

Speaker 4 you know, complete.

Speaker 4 And like, you know, they don't, they just take it for granted.

Speaker 4 If you even doubt that the mind is a computer, you're, you know, I'm sure a lot of people will call me heretic and will call me like, you know, all sorts of names because it's just dogma.

Speaker 4 That the mind is a computer? That the mind is a computer is dogma in technology, science. That's so silly.

Speaker 4 Yes.

Speaker 4 Well, I mean, let me count the ways the mind is different from a computer. First of all, you're not assured of a faithful representation of the past.
Memories change over time, right?

Speaker 4 In a way that's misleading and who knows why, but that is a fact, right? That's not true of computers. That's right.
I don't think.

Speaker 4 But how are we explaining things like intuition

Speaker 4 and instinct? Those are not feet. Well, that is actually my question.
Could those ever be features of a machine?

Speaker 4 You could argue that neural networks are sort of intuition machines. And that's what a lot of people say.

Speaker 4 But neural networks, you know, and maybe I will describe them just for the audience.

Speaker 4 Neural networks are inspired by the brain.

Speaker 4 And the idea is that you can connect a network of small little little functions, just mathematical functions, and you can train it by giving examples, like give it a picture of a cat.

Speaker 4 And if it's yes, you know, let's say that this network has to say yes if it's a cat, no, if it's not a cat. So

Speaker 4 to give it a picture of a cat, and then the answer is no, then it's wrong. You adjust the weights based on the difference between the picture and the answer.

Speaker 4 And you do this, I don't know, a billion times. And then the network encodes features about the cat.

Speaker 4 And this is literally exactly how neural networks work is

Speaker 4 you tune all these small parameters until there is some embedded

Speaker 4 feature detection of, especially in classifiers, right?

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 this is not intuition. This is basically

Speaker 4 automatic programming, the way I see it. Right.
Of course. So we can write code manually.

Speaker 4 You can go to our website, write code.

Speaker 4 But we can generate algorithms automatically via machine learning. Machine learning essentially discovers these algorithms.
And sometimes it discovers like very crappy algorithms.

Speaker 4 For example, like, you know,

Speaker 4 all the pictures that we gave it of a cat had grass in them. So it would learn that grass equals cat, the color green equals cat.
Yes.

Speaker 4 And then you give it one day a picture of a cat without grass and it fails. And they're like, what happened? Oh, it turns out it learned the wrong thing.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 because it's obscure what it's actually learning, people interpret that as intuition because it's not,

Speaker 4 the algorithms are not

Speaker 4 explicated. And there's a lot of work now on trying to explicate these algorithms, which is great work for companies like Anthropic.

Speaker 4 But I don't think you can call it intuition just because it's obscure.

Speaker 4 So what is it? How is intuition different?

Speaker 4 Human intuition?

Speaker 4 For one, we don't require a trillion examples of cat to learn a cat.

Speaker 4 Good point.

Speaker 4 You know, a kid can learn a language with very little examples.

Speaker 4 Right now, when we're training these large language models like ChatGPT, you have to give it the entire internet for it to learn language. And that's not really how humans work.

Speaker 4 And the way we learn is like we combine intuition and some more explicit way of learning.

Speaker 4 And I don't think we've figured out how to do it with machines just yet.

Speaker 4 Do you think that structurally it's possible for machines to get there?

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 so you know, this chain of reasoning, um,

Speaker 4 again, I can go through every point and present present arguments to the contrary, or at least like present doubt, but no one is really kind of trying to deal with those doubts.

Speaker 4 Um,

Speaker 4 and uh, and uh, my view is that I'm not holding these doubts, you know, uh, very, very strongly, but my view is that we just don't have a complete understanding of the mind.

Speaker 4 And you at least can't use it to argue that a kind of machine that acts like a human, but much more powerful can kill us all.

Speaker 4 But

Speaker 4 do I think that

Speaker 4 AI can get really powerful? Yes. I think AI can get really powerful, can get really useful.
I think functionally, it can feel like it's general.

Speaker 4 AI is ultimately a function of data. The kind of data data that we put into it,

Speaker 4 the functionality is based on this data. So we can get very little functionality outside of that.
Actually, we don't get any functionality outside of that data.

Speaker 4 It's actually been proven that these machines are just the function of their data. The sum total of what you put in.
Exactly. Garge in, garbage out.

Speaker 4 The cool thing about them is they can mix and match different functionalities that they learn from the data. So it looks a little bit more general.
But let's say we collected all data of the world.

Speaker 4 We collected everything everything that we care about, and we somehow fit it into a machine. And now everyone's building these really large data centers.

Speaker 4 You will get a very highly capable machine that will kind of look general because we collected a lot of economically useful data and will start doing economically useful tasks.

Speaker 4 And from our perspective, it will start to look general. So I'll call it functionally AGI.
I don't doubt we're sort of of had it in some direction like that.

Speaker 4 But we haven't figured out how these machines can actually generalize and can learn and can use things like intuition for when they see something fundamentally new outside of their data distribution, they can actually react to it correctly and learn it efficiently.

Speaker 4 We don't have the science for that.

Speaker 4 So, because we don't have the understanding of it on the most fundamental level, you began that explanation by saying we don't really understand the human brain.

Speaker 4 So like, how can we compare it to something? Because Cause we don't even really know what it is. And there are a couple of, there's a scientist, there's a machine learning scientist, Francois Cholet.

Speaker 4 I don't know how to pronounce French names, but I think that's his name.

Speaker 4 He took a sort of an IQ-like test, you know, where you're rotating shapes and whatever. And

Speaker 4 an entrepreneur put a million dollars for anyone who's able to solve it using AI. And all the modern AIs that we think are super powerful couldn't do something that like a 10-year-old could do.

Speaker 4 And it showed that, again, those machines are just functions of their data. The moment you throw a problem that's novel at them, they really are not able to do it.
Now, again,

Speaker 4 I'm not fundamentally discounting the fact that maybe we'll get there, but just the reality of where we are today, you can't argue that we're just going to put more compute and more data into this and suddenly it becomes God and kills us all.

Speaker 4 Because that's the argument. And they're going to DC and they're going to all these places.
They're springing up regulation. This regulation is going to hurt American industry.

Speaker 4 It's going to hurt startups. It's going to make it hard to compete.
It's going to give China a tremendous

Speaker 4 advantage.

Speaker 4 And it's going to really hurt us based on these flawed arguments that they're not actually battling with these real questions. It sounds like they're not.

Speaker 4 And what gives me pause is not so much the technology, it's the way that the people creating the technology understand people.

Speaker 4 So I think the wise and correct way to understand people is as not self-created beings. People did not create themselves.
People cannot create life

Speaker 4 as beings created by some higher power who at their core have some kind of impossible to describe spark, a holy mystery. And for that reason, they cannot be enslaved or killed by other human beings.

Speaker 4 That's wrong. There is right and wrong.
That is wrong. I mean, lots of gray areas.
That's not a gray area because they're not self-created. Yes.
Right.

Speaker 4 I think that all humane action flows from that belief and that the most inhumane actions in history flow from the opposite belief, which is people are just objects that can and should be improved and I have full power over them.

Speaker 4 Like that's a really, that's a totalitarian mindset. And it's the one thing that connects.
every genocidal movement is that belief.

Speaker 4 So I've, it seems to me as an outsider that the people creating this technology have that belief. Yeah.
And you don't even have to be spiritual to have that belief.

Speaker 4 Look, I um, you certainly, you certainly don't. Yeah, yeah.
So I think that's actually a rational conclusion based on 100% agree. I'll give you one interesting anecdote again from science.

Speaker 4 We've had brains for half a billion, if you believe in evolution, all that. We have had brains for half a billion years, right?

Speaker 4 And we've had kind of a human-like species

Speaker 4 for,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 half a million years, perhaps more, perhaps a million years.

Speaker 4 There's a moment in time

Speaker 4 40,000 years ago, it's called the Great Leap Forward, where we see culture, we see religion, we see drawings, we see, we saw like very little of that before that, tools and whatever.

Speaker 4 And suddenly we're seeing this Cambrian explosion of culture. Right.

Speaker 4 And pointing to something larger than just like daily needs or the world around them. Yeah.
And it's not, we're not, we're still not able to explain it. You know, David Reich wrote this book.

Speaker 4 It's called, I think, Who We Are, Where We Came From. In it, he talks about trying to look for that genetic mutation that happened, that potentially created this explosion.
And

Speaker 4 they have some idea of what it could be and some candidates, but they don't really have it. right now.
But you have to ask the question, like, what happened 30 or 40,000 years ago, right?

Speaker 4 Where it's clear, I mean, it's indisputable that the people who lived during that period were suddenly grappling with metaphysics. Yes.
They're worshiping things.

Speaker 4 There's a clear, clear separation between,

Speaker 4 again, the animal brain and the human brain.

Speaker 4 And it's clearly not computation. Like we suddenly didn't like grow a computer in our brain.
It's something else happened.

Speaker 4 But what's so interesting is like the instinct of modern man is to look for something inside the person that caused that.

Speaker 4 Whereas I think the very natural and more correct instinct is to look for something outside of man that caused that. I'm open to both.
Yeah. I mean, I don't know the answer.

Speaker 4 I mean, of course, I do know the answer, but

Speaker 4 I'll just pretend I don't. But

Speaker 4 at very least, both are possible. So if like you confine yourself to looking for a genetic mutation or change, genetic change, then you're sort of closing out.

Speaker 4 That's not an empiricist, a scientific way of looking at things, actually. You don't foreclose any possibility, right? Science?

Speaker 4 You can't. Right.

Speaker 4 Sorry. Yeah.
Yeah. No, that's very interesting.
So, you know,

Speaker 4 I think that these machines, I'm betting my business that on AI getting better and better and better. And it's going to make us all

Speaker 4 better. It's going to make it all more educated.
Okay. So, okay.

Speaker 4 Now, now's the time for you to tell me why I should be excited about something I've been hearing. Yeah.

Speaker 4 So

Speaker 4 this technology, large language models, where we kind of fed

Speaker 4 a neural network, the entire internet, and it has capabilities mostly around writing, around

Speaker 4 information lookup, around summarization, around coding. It does a lot of really useful thing, and you can program it to kind of pick and match between these different skills.

Speaker 4 You can program these skills using code.

Speaker 4 And so the kind of products and services that you can build with this

Speaker 4 are amazing. So one of the things I'm most excited about this application of the technology,

Speaker 4 there's this problem called the Bloom's Two Sigma problem.

Speaker 4 There's this

Speaker 4 scientist that was studying education.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 he was looking at different interventions to try to get kids to learn better faster or have just better educational outcomes.

Speaker 4 And he found something kind of bad, which is there's only one thing you could do to move kids not in a marginal way, but in two standard deviations from the norm, like in a big way, like better than 98% of the other kids

Speaker 4 by doing one-on-one tutoring using a type of learning called mastery learning.

Speaker 4 One-on-one tutoring is the key formula there. That's great.
I mean, we discovered the solution to education. We can up-level everyone, all humans on Earth.

Speaker 4 The problem is like, we don't have enough teachers to do one-on-one touring. It's very expensive.

Speaker 4 No country in the world can afford that.

Speaker 4 So now we have these machines that can talk, that can teach, that

Speaker 4 can present information.

Speaker 4 that you can interact with it in a very human way. You can talk to it.
It can talk to you back, right?

Speaker 4 And we can build

Speaker 4 AI applications to teach people one-on-one.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 you can have it. You can serve 7 billion people with that.
And

Speaker 4 everyone can get smarter. I'm totally for that.
I mean, that was the promise of the internet. It didn't happen.
So I hope this.

Speaker 4 I'm... was going to save this for last, but I can't control myself.
So I just know being from DC that when

Speaker 4 the people in charge see new technology, the first thing they think of is like, How can I use this to kill people?

Speaker 4 So, what are the military applications potentially of this technology? You know, that's one of the other things that I is, I'm sort of very skeptical of this lobbying effort to get government to

Speaker 4 regulate it because, like, I think the biggest offender would be of abuse of this technology, probably government. You think?

Speaker 4 You know, I watched your interview with Jeffrey Sachs,

Speaker 4 who's like a Columbia professor, very, very mainstream.

Speaker 4 And I think he got assigned to like a Lancet

Speaker 4 sort of study of COVID origins or whatever. And he arrived at a very, at the time, heterodox view that it was created in a lab and was created by the US government.

Speaker 4 And so, you know, the government is supposed to protect us from these things. And now they're talking about pandemic readiness and whatever.
Well,

Speaker 4 let's talk about

Speaker 4 how do we watch what the government is doing? How do we actually have democratic processes to ensure that you're not the one abusing these technologies?

Speaker 4 Because they're going to regulate it. They're going to make it so that everyday people are not going to be able to use these things.
And then they're going to have free reign on

Speaker 4 how to abuse these things. Just like with encryption.
Right. Encryption is another one.
That's right. But they've been doing that for decades.
Yes.

Speaker 4 Like we get privacy, but you're not allowed it because we don't trust you.

Speaker 4 But by using your money and the moral authority that you gave us to lead you, we're going to hide from you everything we're doing and there's nothing you can do about it.

Speaker 4 I mean, that's the state of America right now. Yeah.

Speaker 4 So how would they use AI to further oppress us?

Speaker 4 I mean, you can use it in all sorts of ways, like autonomous drones. We already have autonomous drones.
Like it got a lot, a lot worse.

Speaker 4 You can, you know, there's a video on the internet where like the

Speaker 4 Chinese guard or whatever was walking with a dog with a robotic dog and the robotic dog had a gun mounted to it

Speaker 4 and so you can have robotic set of dogs with shooting guns little sci-fi like you can make

Speaker 4 as a dog lover that's so offensive to me it is kind of offensive yeah

Speaker 4 in a world increasingly defined by deception and the total rejection of human dignity we decided to found the tucker carlson network and we did it with one principle in mind tell the truth you have a god-given God-given right to think for yourself.

Speaker 4 Our work is made possible by our members. So if you want to enjoy an ad-free experience and keep this going, join TCN at tuckercarlson.com/slash podcast.
TuckerCarlson.com/slash podcast.

Speaker 3 Breaking news, Beam's cyber sale is open for early access to the people who listen to this show, the select few, their best offer for the year. It lasts for 48 hours.

Speaker 3 Listeners of this show get up to 50% off by using the code Tucker. That means you can get Beam's Dream Powder for just $32.50.

Speaker 3 That's only $1.08

Speaker 3 per night for the best sleep you've ever had. Visit shopbeam.com slash Tucker use the code Tucker.
This is the lowest price Dream has ever been sold anywhere.

Speaker 4 Don't miss out.

Speaker 3 Probably sell it fast. Dream is packed with ingredients your body needs to sleep.

Speaker 3 Natural ingredients, nothing weird, magnesium, melatonin, but dosed intelligently, not like the drugstore garbage that knocks you out and leaves you groggy. It's like a head injury.
Totally different.

Speaker 3 Better. Visit shopbeam.com slash Tucker.
Use the code Tucker. Get up to 50% off during Beam Cyber Sale.
You can grab Dream for just $32.50, but only until it sells out. Think about it.

Speaker 3 How much would you pay to get a great night's sleep? Eight hours uninterrupted with Beam Cyber Price, $1.8 per night. Shopbeam.com slash Tucker.
Shopbeam.com slash Tucker.

Speaker 3 Where do you keep your most valuable possessions?

Speaker 3 Not your necktie or a pair of socks, but things you wouldn't want to replace or maybe couldn't heirlooms from your parents your birth certificate your firearms your grandfather's shotgun where do you store those under the bed in the back of a closet

Speaker 3 that's unwise and maybe unsafe liberty safe is the place to store them i would know i have a colonial safe from liberty safe it's in my garage it's the best i keep everything in there it's a pro flex system allows you to design the inside of your safe in a way that works for you it's not a fixed setup Someone else puts the shelves in, you have to deal with it.

Speaker 3 You make it the way you want it. Have a stock of rifles, you can make room.
Need more shelves for handguns, for documents, for valuables, for gold. You can do whatever you want.

Speaker 3 You can refigure your safe in minutes. Maximum flexibility, maximum convenience.
Liberty Safe is America's number one safe company made in the United States. Great people, I know them.

Speaker 3 Visit libertysafe.com. Use the code Tucker10 at checkout for 10% off Franklin and Colonial Safes featuring the ProFlex interior that you customize.
You're going to dig it.

Speaker 3 We definitely put good-looking, I will say.

Speaker 4 There was this huge expose in this magazine called 972 about how Israel was using

Speaker 4 AI to

Speaker 4 target

Speaker 4 suspects, but ended up killing huge numbers of civilians. It's called the Lavender.

Speaker 4 A very interesting piece.

Speaker 4 So the technology wound up killing people who were not even targeted? Yes.

Speaker 4 It's pretty dark.

Speaker 4 What about surveillance?

Speaker 4 I think this recent AI

Speaker 4 boom, I think it could be used for surveillance. I'm not sure if it gives a special advantage.
I think

Speaker 4 they can get the advantage by, again, if these lobbying groups are successful, part of their, you know, their ideal outcome is

Speaker 4 to make sure that no one is training large language models. And to do that, you would need to insert surveillance apparatus at the compute level.
And

Speaker 4 so perhaps that's very dangerous. Our computers would spy on us to make sure we're not training AIs.

Speaker 4 I think the kind of AI that's really good at surveillance is kind of the vision AI, which China sort of perfected. So that's been around for a while now.

Speaker 4 I'm sure there's ways to abuse language models for surveillance, but I can't think of it right now. What about manufacturing?

Speaker 4 It would help with manufacturing. Right now, people are figuring out how to do,

Speaker 4 I invested in a couple of companies,

Speaker 4 how to apply this technology foundation models to robotics. Um, it's still early science, but you might have a huge advancement in robotics if we're able to apply this technology to it.

Speaker 4 So the whole point of technology is to replace human labor, either physical or mental, I think. I mean, historically, that's what, you know, the steam engine replaced the arm, et cetera, et cetera.

Speaker 4 So if this is as transformative as it appears to be, you're going to have a lot of idle people.

Speaker 4 And that's, I think, the concern that led a lot of your friends and colleagues to support UBI, universal basic income. Like, there's nothing for these people to do.

Speaker 4 So we just got to pay them to exist.

Speaker 4 You said you're opposed to that. I'm adamantly opposed to that.
On the other hand, like, what's the answer? Yeah. So, you know,

Speaker 4 there's, there's two ways to look at it. We can look at the individuals that are losing their jobs, which is tough and hard.

Speaker 4 I don't really have a good answer, but we can look at it from a macro perspective. And when you look at it from that perspective, for the most part, technology created more jobs over time.
You know,

Speaker 4 before alarm clocks, we had this job called the knocker upper,

Speaker 4 which goes to your room and you kind of pay them. It was like, come every day at like 5 a.m.
They knock on your

Speaker 4 ring the village bell. Right.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 And, you know, that job disappeared, but like we had, you know, 10 times more jobs in manufacturing, or perhaps, you know, 100 or 1,000 more jobs in manufacturing.

Speaker 4 And so overall, I think the general trend is technology just creates more jobs. And so I'll give you a few examples how AI can create more jobs.
Actually, it can create more interesting jobs.

Speaker 4 Entrepreneurship is like a very American thing, right? It's like America is the entrepreneurship country, but actually new firm creation has been going down for a long time, at least 100 years.

Speaker 4 It's just like been going down. Although we have all this excitement around startups or whatever, Silicon Valley is the only place that's still producing startups.

Speaker 4 Like the rest of the country, there isn't as much startup or new firm creation, which is kind of sad because again, the internet was supposed to be this great wealth creation engine that anyone has access to.

Speaker 4 But the way it turned out is like it was just concentrated in this one geographic city.

Speaker 4 Well, it looks, I mean, in retrospect, it looks like a monopoly generator, actually. Yeah.

Speaker 4 But again, it doesn't have to be that way.

Speaker 4 And the way I think AI would help is that it will give people the tools to start businesses because you have this easily programmable machine that can help you with programming.

Speaker 4 I'll give you a few examples.

Speaker 4 There's a teacher in Denver that, you know, during COVID was, was, was a little bored, went to our website. We have a free course to learn how to code.
And he learned a bit of coding. And

Speaker 4 he used his knowledge as a teacher to build an application that helps teachers use AI to teach.

Speaker 4 And within a year, he built a business that's worth tens of millions of dollars, that's bringing in a huge amount of money. I think he raised $20 million.

Speaker 4 And that's a teacher who learned how to code and created this massive business really quickly.

Speaker 4 We have stories of photographers doing millions of dollars in revenue.

Speaker 4 So it just, it's a, it's a, you know,

Speaker 4 AI will decentralize access to this technology.

Speaker 4 So there's a a lot of ways in which you're right, technology tend to centralize, but there's a lot of ways that people kind of don't really look at in which technology can decentralize.

Speaker 4 Well, that was, I mean, that promise makes sense to me. I would just, I fervently want it to become a reality.

Speaker 4 I have a, we have a mutual friend who showed me name, who's so smart and a good, humane person

Speaker 4 who is very way up into the subject and participates in the subject. And he said to me, well, one of the promises of AI is that it will allow people to have virtual friends or mates

Speaker 4 that it will feel you know it will solve the loneliness problem that is clearly a massive problem in the united states and i felt like i don't want to say it because i like him so much but that seemed really bad to me yeah i'm not interested in those

Speaker 4 i mean you we i think we have the same intuition about about you know what's what's dark and dystopian versus what's and he's a wonderful person but i may i just don't think he's thought about it or i don't know what but we disagree but i just i don't even disagree i don't have an argument just an instinct but like people should be having sex with people not machines right that's right that's right um

Speaker 4 like i i would go so far as to say some of these applications are like a little unethical like the you know preying on sort of lonely lonely men with no yes uh with no with no opportunities for for a mate and uh like you know it will make it so that they were actually not motivated to go out and yes and date date and get an extra girlfriend, like porn 10x.

Speaker 4 Yes, yes. And I think that's really bad.
That's really bad for society.

Speaker 4 And so I think the application, look, you can apply this technology in a positive way or you can apply it in a negative way.

Speaker 4 You know, I would love for this, you know, doom cult, if instead they were like trying to, you know, make it so that AI is applied in a positive way.

Speaker 4 If we had a cult that was like, oh, we're going to lobby, we're going to

Speaker 4 sort of go out and,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 make it make it so that um you know ai is a positive technology i'd be all for that and by the way there are in history there are you know times where the culture self-corrects right i think there's some self-correction on porn that's happening right now um you know uh fast food right i mean if uh you know just generally junk you're right uh you know everyone is like whole foods is like high status now like you you eat whole foods there's a place called whole foods you can go to that's right and people are interested in eating healthy.

Speaker 4 Chemicals in the air and water. Another thing that was a very esoteric concern even 10 years ago was only the wackos.
It was Bobby Kennedy cared about that. No one else did.

Speaker 4 And now that's like a feature of normal conversation. Yes, everyone's worried about microplastics and the testicles.
That's right. Which is, I think, a legitimate concern.
Absolutely.

Speaker 4 So what, I'm not surprised that there are cults in Silicon Valley. I don't think you named the only one.
I think there are others. That's my sense.

Speaker 4 And I'm not surprised because, of course, every person is born with the intuitive knowledge that there's a power beyond himself. That's why every single civilization has worshiped something.

Speaker 4 And if you don't acknowledge that, you just, it doesn't change. You just worship something even dumber.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 But so my question to you, as someone who lives and works there, is what percentage of the people who are making the decisions in Silicon Valley will say out loud, you know, not I'm a Christian, Jew, or Muslim,

Speaker 4 but that, like, I'm not, you know, there is a power bigger than me in the universe. Do people think that? Do they acknowledge that?

Speaker 4 Yeah, for the most part, no.

Speaker 4 I thought. Yeah, like I think most, I don't know, I don't want to say most people, but like, you know, the vast majority of the discussions tend to be like more intellectual.

Speaker 4 I think people just take for granted that everyone has like a secular, mostly secular point of view.

Speaker 4 Well, I think that, you know, the truly brilliant conclusion is that we don't know a lot and we don't have a ton of power. That's my view.

Speaker 4 Right, right. So like the actual intellectual will, over time, if he's honest, will reach.
But this is the view of like many scientists and many people who really went deep.

Speaker 4 I mean, I don't know who said it. I'm trying to remember, but someone said, like, the first gulp of science make you an atheist, but at the bottom of the cup,

Speaker 4 you'll find God waiting for you.

Speaker 4 Matthias Desmet wrote a book about this, supposedly about COVID. It was not about COVID.
I just cannot recommend it more strongly.

Speaker 4 But the book is about the point you just made, which is the deeper you go into science,

Speaker 4 the more you see some sort of order reflected that is not random at all,

Speaker 4 and a beauty exhibited in

Speaker 4 math, even.

Speaker 4 And the less you know, and the more you're certain that this is by, that there's a design here and that's not human or quote natural, it's supernatural. That's his conclusion, and I affirm it.

Speaker 4 But how many people do you know in your science world who think that?

Speaker 4 Yeah, I can count him on one hand, basically. How interesting.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 That concerns me because I feel like without that knowledge, hubris is inevitable. Yeah.
And, you know, a lot of these conclusions are from hubris. Like the fact that

Speaker 4 there's so many people that believe that AI is an imminent existential threat. A lot of people believe that we're going to die.
We're all going to die in the next five years

Speaker 4 comes from that hubris. How interesting.
I've never, until I met you, I've never thought of that, that actually

Speaker 4 that is itself an expression of hubris. I never thought of that.

Speaker 4 Yeah, you can go negative with hubris, you can go positive. And

Speaker 4 we're gonna, and I think the positive thing is good. Like, I think Elon is an embodiment of that, is like just a self-belief that you can like fly rockets and build electric cars is good.

Speaker 4 And maybe in some cases, it's delusional, but like net net will kind of put you

Speaker 4 on a good path for creation. I think it can go pathological if you, um,

Speaker 4 if you, you know, if if you're, for example, SBF, and again, he's, he's kind of part of those groups,

Speaker 4 just sort of believed that he can do anything in service of his ethics,

Speaker 4 including steal and cheat and all of that.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I don't, I never really understood, well, of course, I understood too well, I think, but the

Speaker 4 obvious observable fact that effective altruism led people

Speaker 4 to become shittier toward each other, not better.

Speaker 4 Yeah, I mean, it's such an irony, but I feel like it's in the name. If you call yourself such a grandiose thing, you're typically

Speaker 4 horrible. Like

Speaker 4 the Islamic state is neither Islamic or state.

Speaker 4 Effective altruists are neither altruist. The United Nations is not united.

Speaker 4 No, that's, boy, is that wise. So I don't think, to your earlier point, that any large language model or machine could ever arrive at what you just said.

Speaker 4 Because like the deepest level of truth is wrapped in irony always.

Speaker 4 And I don't, machines don't get irony, right? Not yet. Could they?

Speaker 4 Maybe. I mean, I don't think, I don't take as strong of a stance as you are at like the, you know, the capabilities of the machines.
I do believe that, you know, if you represent it a lot.

Speaker 4 I don't know. I mean, I'm asking.
I really don't know what they're capable of.

Speaker 4 Well, I think maybe they can't come up with really novel irony that is like really insightful for us but if you put a lot of irony in the data they'll understand right they can ape human irony they can ape i mean they're ape machines they're imitation machines they're literally imitating like you know

Speaker 4 the the way large language models are trained is that you give them a corpus of text and they hide different words and they try to guess them and then they adjust the weights of those neural networks and then eventually they get really good at guess guessing guessing what humans would say.

Speaker 4 Well, then, okay. So you're just kind of making the point unavoidable.
Like if the machines, as you have said, and it makes sense, are the sum total of what's put into them. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Then, and that would include the personalities and biases of the people putting the data in. That's right.

Speaker 4 Then you want like the best people, the morally best people, which is to say the most humble people.

Speaker 4 to be doing that. But it sounds like we have the least humble people doing that.
Yeah, I think some of them are humble.

Speaker 4 Like I wouldn't like, I think some people working in AI are really upstanding and good and want to do the right thing, but there are a lot of people with the wrong motivations coming at it from fear and things like that.

Speaker 4 And look, this is the other point I will make is that,

Speaker 4 you know, free markets are good because you're going to get all sorts of entrepreneurs with different motivations.

Speaker 4 And I think what's what

Speaker 4 determines the winner is not always the ethics or whatever, but it's the larger culture. Like what is the, what kind of product is pulling out of you? If they're pulling the porn and the,

Speaker 4 you know, companion chatbots, whatever, versus they're pulling the education and the healthcare and I think all the positive things that will make our life better, I think that's really on the on the larger culture.

Speaker 4 I don't think we can regulate that with government or whatever. But if the culture creates demand for things just makes us worse as humans,

Speaker 4 then there are entrepreneurs that will spring up and serve this. That's totally right.
And it is a

Speaker 4 snake eating its tail at some point because,

Speaker 4 of course,

Speaker 4 you know, you serve the baser human desires and you create a culture that inspires those desires in a greater number of people.

Speaker 4 In other words, the more porn you have, the more porn people want, actually. Yes.

Speaker 7 If you're a custodial supervisor at a local high school, you know that cleanliness is key and that the best place to get cleaning supplies is from Granger.

Speaker 7 Granger helps you stay fully stocked on the products you trust, from paper towels and disinfectants to floor scrubbers.

Speaker 7 Plus, you can rely on Granger for easy reordering so you never run out of what you need. Call 1-800GRANGER, clickgranger.com, or just stop by.
Granger for the ones who get it done.

Speaker 4 I wonder about the pushback from existing industry, from the guilds. So, like, if you're the AMA, for example, you mentioned medical advances.
That's something that makes sense to me

Speaker 4 for diagnoses, which really is just a matter of sorting the data, like what's most likely. That's right.

Speaker 4 And a machine can always do that more efficiently and more quickly than any hospital or individual doctor. So, like,

Speaker 4 and diagnosis is like the biggest hurdle. Yes.

Speaker 4 That's going to like, that's going to actually put people out of business, right?

Speaker 4 If I can just type my symptoms into a machine and I'm getting a much higher likelihood of a correct diagnosis than I would be after three days at the Mayo Clinic, like who needs the Mayo clinic?

Speaker 4 I actually have a concrete story about that. I've dealt with like a chronic issue for a couple of years.

Speaker 4 I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on doctors out of pocket, get like world's world's experts and all hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yes.

Speaker 4 And they couldn't come up with a right diagnosis. And eventually it took me like writing a little bit of software to collect the data or whatever, but I ran it.
I ran the AI. I used the AI.

Speaker 4 I ran the AI once, and it gave me a diagnosis they haven't looked at. And I went to them.
They were very skeptical of it. And then we ran the test.
It turns out it was the right diagnosis.

Speaker 4 Oh, that's incredible. Yeah, it's amazing.
It changed my life. That's incredible.
But you had to write the software to get there. Yeah, a little bit of software.

Speaker 4 So that's just, we're not that far from like having publicly available.

Speaker 4 Right. And by the way, I think that anyone can write a little bit of software.
Right now at Replit, we are working on a way to generate most of the code for you.

Speaker 4 We have this program called 100 Days of Code. If you give it 20 minutes,

Speaker 4 you know, do a little bit of coding every day in like three months, you'll be good enough coder to build a, you know, a startup.

Speaker 4 I mean, eventually you'll get people working for you and you'll upscale and all of that, but you'll have have enough skills. And in fact, you know, I'll put up a challenge out there.

Speaker 4 People listening to this, if they go through this and they build something that they think could be a business or whatever, I'm willing to help them get it out there, promote.

Speaker 4 We'll give them some credits and cloud services, whatever. Just, you know, tweet at me or something and mention this, this podcast.

Speaker 4 What's your Twitter? A-Mosad, A-M-A-S-A-D.

Speaker 4 So, but there are a lot of entrenched interests. I mean, I don't want to get in the whole COVID poison thing, but I'm revealing my biases.

Speaker 4 But I mean, you saw it in action during COVID where, you know, it's always a mixture of motives. Like, I do think there are high motives mixed with low motives because that's how people are.

Speaker 4 You know, it's always a boolean base of good and bad. But

Speaker 4 to some extent, the profit motive prevailed over public health. Yes.
That is, I think, fair to say.

Speaker 4 And so if they're willing to hurt people to keep the stock price up,

Speaker 4 they, I mean, what's the resistance you're going to get to to allowing people to come to a

Speaker 4 more

Speaker 4 accurate diagnosis with a machine for free? Yeah.

Speaker 4 So in some sense, that's why I think open source AI, people learning how to do some of the stuff themselves is

Speaker 4 probably good enough.

Speaker 4 Of course, if there's a company that's building these services, it's going to do better.

Speaker 4 But just the fact that this AI exists and a lot of it is open source, you can download it on your machine and use it is enough to potentially help a lot of people.

Speaker 4 By the way, you should always talk to your doctor. I talk to my doctor.
I'm not giving people advice, got to figure out all this themselves, but I do think that

Speaker 4 it's already empowering. So that's sort of step one.

Speaker 4 But for someone like me, I'm not going to talk to a doctor until he apologizes to my face for lying for four years because I have no respect for doctors at all.

Speaker 4 I have no respect for anybody who lies, period. And I'm not taking life advice and particularly important life advice, like about my health, from someone who's a liar.

Speaker 4 I'm just not doing that because I'm not insane. I don't take real estate advice from homeless people.

Speaker 4 I don't take financial advice from people who are going to jail for fraud. So, like,

Speaker 4 um,

Speaker 4 I'm sure there's a doctor out there who would apologize, uh, but I haven't met one yet.

Speaker 4 So, for someone like me, who's just not going to a doctor until they apologize, uh, this could be like literally life-saving. Right.

Speaker 4 So, um, to the question of whether there's going to be a regulatory capture, I think that the

Speaker 4 that's, I mean,

Speaker 4 that's why you see Silicon Valley getting into politics.

Speaker 4 You know, Silicon Valley

Speaker 4 was always sort of into politics.

Speaker 4 You know, when I was, I remember I came in 2012. It was

Speaker 4 early on in my time. There was the Romney-Obama debate.

Speaker 4 And I was

Speaker 4 pausing.

Speaker 4 Imagine a debate between Romney and Obama, who agree on everything. Yes.

Speaker 4 I didn't see a lot of daylight. And people were just like making fun of Romney.

Speaker 4 It was like, he said something like a binder's full of women and kind of that suck with it or whatever.

Speaker 4 And I remember asking everyone around me, like, who are you with? I was like, of course, Democrats. Like, of course.

Speaker 4 It was like, why isn't anyone here for Republicans? And they're like, oh, because they're dumb.

Speaker 4 Only dumb people are going to

Speaker 4 vote for Republicans.

Speaker 4 uh and you know silicon valley was this like one state town in a way

Speaker 4 uh

Speaker 4 actually look you know there's like um data on like donations by company for for for state there's like netflix is 99 percent to democrats and like one percent to uh republicans if you look up the you know diversity of parties in north korea it's actually a little better oh of course it is they have more choices they have a more honest media too But anyways, I mean, you see now a lot of people are surprised that a lot of, you know, people in tech are going for Republicans, going for Trump.

Speaker 4 And particularly Mark Andreessen and Ben Harwitz put out a two-hour podcast talking about they are the biggest venture capitalists in the United States, I think.

Speaker 4 I don't know on what metric you would, you would judge, but they're certainly on their way to be the biggest.

Speaker 4 They're the most, I think, the best for sure.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 they put it up.

Speaker 4 I should have watched it. I didn't.
Yeah. So

Speaker 4 the reasoning for why they would vote for Trump. By the way,

Speaker 4 you know, they would have never done that in like 2018 or 19, whatever.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 so this vibe shift that's happening. How is it received?

Speaker 4 It's still mixed, but I think

Speaker 4 way better than what would have happened 10 years ago. They would have been canceled and no one would ever like no founder would take their money.

Speaker 4 But it's like, I mean, again, I'm an outsider just watching, but Andreessen Horowitz is so big and so influential and they're considered smart and not at all crazy. Yeah.

Speaker 4 That like that, that's got to change minds. If Andreessen Horowitz is doing it.
Yeah, yeah. It would have certainly changed minds.

Speaker 4 I think. you know, give people some courage to say,

Speaker 4 I'm for Trump as well at minimum. But I think it does change my.
And they put out the arguments is,

Speaker 4 you know, they put out this agenda called little tech. You know, there's big tech and they have their lobbying and whatever.
Who's lobbying for little tech?

Speaker 4 Like smaller companies, companies like ours, but much smaller too, like, you know, one, two-person companies.

Speaker 4 And actually, no one is.

Speaker 4 Your company would be considered little? In Silicon Valley, yeah.

Speaker 4 But,

Speaker 4 but, I want a little company. Right.
Um,

Speaker 4 so, uh, but you know, let's call it like really just startups that just started, right? Like, you know, typically no one is

Speaker 4 protecting them sort of politically. No one's really thinking about it.

Speaker 4 And it's very easy to disadvantage startups, like you just talked about, with healthcare regulation, what are very easy to create regulatory capture such that companies can't even get off the ground doing their thing.

Speaker 4 And so they came up with this agenda that like, we're going to be the, you know, the firm that's, that's going to be looking out for

Speaker 4 the little guy, the little tech, right? Which I think is brilliant. And part of their argument for Trump is that

Speaker 4 AI, for example, like the Democrats are really excited about regulating AI.

Speaker 4 One of the most hilarious things that happened, I think

Speaker 4 Kamala Harris was invited to AI safety conference, and they were talking about existential risk. And she was like, well, someone being denied healthcare, that's existential for them.

Speaker 4 Someone, whatever, that's existential. So she interpreted existential risk as like, any risk is existential.
And so, you know, that's just one anecdote.

Speaker 4 But like, there was this anecdote where she was like, AI is a two-letter word. And you clearly don't understand it very well.
And they're, they're moving very fast at regulating it.

Speaker 4 They put out an executive order that a lot of people think.

Speaker 4 They kind of, I mean, the tweaks they've done so far from a user perspective to keep it safe safe are really like just making sure it hates white people

Speaker 4 like it's about pushing a dystopian totalitarian social agenda racist social agenda on the country like can that is that going to be embedded in it permanently

Speaker 4 um i i think it's a function of the culture rather than the regulation So I think the culture was sort of this woke culture

Speaker 4 probably

Speaker 4 in America, but certainly in Silicon Valley. And now that the vibe shift is happening, I think Microsoft just fired their DAI team, Microsoft.
Really? Yeah.

Speaker 4 I mean, it is a huge vibe shift. Are they going to learn to code? Do you think Microsoft? Perhaps.

Speaker 4 So,

Speaker 4 you know, the,

Speaker 4 you know, I wouldn't pin this on the government just yet, but it's very easy. Oh, no, no, no, no.
I just meant Democratic members of Congress, I know for a fact, applied pressure to the labs.

Speaker 4 Like, no, you can't. It has to reflect our values.
Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah.
So maybe that's where we're at.

Speaker 4 is that permanent am i always going to get when i type in who is george washington you know a picture of denzel washington you know it's already changing is what i'm saying it's already a lot of these things are being reversed it's not perfect but it's already changing and that's i think just a function of the larger culture culture change yeah i think elon buying twitter uh is uh in letting people talk and debate moved the culture to like i think a more moderate place i think he's gone a little more,

Speaker 4 you know,

Speaker 4 a little further, but like, I think that it was net positive on the culture because it was so far left.

Speaker 4 It was so far left inside these companies, the way they were designing their products, such that, you know, George Washington will look like there's like a black George Washington or what have you.

Speaker 4 That's just insane, right? It was like, it was verging on insanity. Well, it's lying.
And that's what freaked me out. I mean, it's like, I don't know, just tell the truth.

Speaker 4 There are lots of truths I don't want to hear that don't comport with my, you know, desires, but I don't want to be lied to. George Washington was not black.
None of the framers were.

Speaker 4 They were all white Protestant men. Sorry.
All right.

Speaker 4 So, like, that's a fact. Deal with it.
So, if you're going to lie to me about that,

Speaker 4 you're my enemy, right? I think so. I mean, you're, and I would say it's a small element of these companies that are doing that.
Yes. But they tend to be the control.

Speaker 4 They were the controlling element, those like sort of activist folks that were. And I was at Facebook in 2015.

Speaker 4 You worked at Facebook? I worked at Facebook. Yeah.
Oh, I didn't know that. I worked on open source mostly.

Speaker 4 I worked on React and React Native, one of the most powerful kind of wave programming user interfaces. So I mostly worked on that.
I didn't really work on the kind of blue app and all of that.

Speaker 4 But I saw this sort of cultural change where like a small minority of activists were just like shaming anyone who is thinking independently.

Speaker 4 And it sent Silicon Valley in this like sheep-like direction where everyone is afraid of this activist class

Speaker 4 because they can cancel you. They can, you know,

Speaker 4 I think one of the early shots fired there was like Brandon Icke, the inventor of JavaScript, the inventor of the language that like runs the browser.

Speaker 4 because the way he votes or donates whatever, got fired from his position as CTO of Mozilla Browser.

Speaker 4 And that was like seen as a win or something. And I was like, again, I was like very politically,

Speaker 4 you know, I was not really interested in politics in like 2012, 13 when I first came to this country. But

Speaker 4 I just accepted as like, oh, you know, all these people are Democrats, liberal is what you are, whatever. But I just looked at that.
I was like, that's awful.

Speaker 4 Like, you know, no matter what his political opinion is, like, you know, you're, you're, you're taking from a man his ability to earn a living.

Speaker 4 Eventually, he started another browser company and it's good right

Speaker 4 but uh this like sort of cancel culture created such a bubble of conformism and the leadership class at these companies were actually afraid of the employees so that is the fact that bothers me most silicon valley is defining our future it that is technology we don't have kind of technology in the united states anymore manufacturing creativity has obviously been extinguished everywhere in the visual arts you know everywhere yeah silicon valley is the last yes

Speaker 4 important what's the most important. Yes.
And so the number one requirement for leadership is courage. Number one.
Yes. Number one.

Speaker 4 Nothing even comes close to bravery as a requirement for wise and effective leadership.

Speaker 4 So if the leaders of these companies were afraid of like 26-year-old, unmarried, screechy girls in the HR department, like, whoa, that's really cowardly. Like, shut up.

Speaker 4 You're not leading this company. I am.
Like, that's super easy. I don't know why that's so hard.
Like, what?

Speaker 4 The reason I think it was hard was because these companies were competing for talent hand over fist.

Speaker 4 And it was the sort of zero interest era and sort of U.S. economy.
That's right. And everyone was throwing cash at like talent.

Speaker 4 And therefore, if you offend the sensibilities of the employees, even to the slightest bit,

Speaker 4 you're afraid that they're going to leave or something like that. I'm trying to make up an excuse for them

Speaker 4 well you would you could answer this question because you are the talent that you know you came all the way from jordan yeah to work in the bay area to be at the center of creativity in science so um

Speaker 4 the people who do what you do who can write code which is the basis of all of this are they i don't like they seem much more like you or james demore or they just they don't seem like political activists to me for the most part yeah they're they're still a segment of the sort of programmer population.

Speaker 4 Well, they have to be rational because code is about reason, right? Nah, I mean, this is the whole thing.

Speaker 4 You know, it's like, I don't think, I mean, a lot of these people that we talked about are into code and things like that. They're not rational.
Really? Yeah.

Speaker 4 And, like, look, I think coding could help you become more rational, but you could very easily override that. I think that's.
Isn't that the basis of it? I thought.

Speaker 4 If this is true and that is true, then that must be true. I thought that was the point.
Yeah, but people are very easy, very, it's very easy for people to just, uh, you know, compartmentalize, right?

Speaker 4 I was like, now I'm doing coding. Now I'm doing emotions.
Oh, so the brain is not a computer.

Speaker 4 The brain is not a computer. Exactly.
Exactly. That's my point.
I know.

Speaker 4 You know, when it's, so, you know, I, I'm probably, you know, responsible for the most amount of people learning to code in America because I, I was like a, um, I like built the reason I came to the US is I built this piece of software that was the first to make it easy to code in the browser.

Speaker 4 And it went super viral. And a bunch of US companies started using him, including Code Academy.

Speaker 4 And I joined them as like a founding engineer. They had just started two guys, amazing guys, that just started.
And I joined them and we taught like 50 million people how to code.

Speaker 4 Many of them, many millions of them are American.

Speaker 4 And the sort of rhetoric at the time, what you would say is like, coding is important because it'll teach you how to think, computational thinking and all of that.

Speaker 4 I sort of like not, maybe maybe I've said it at some point, but I've never really believed it. I think coding is a tool you can use to build things, to automate things.
It's a fun tool.

Speaker 4 You can do art with it. You can do a lot of things with it.
But ultimately, I don't think

Speaker 4 you can sit people down and sort of make them more rational.

Speaker 4 And you get into all these weird things if you try to do that.

Speaker 4 People can become more rational by virtue of education, by virtue of seeing that

Speaker 4 taking a more rational approach to

Speaker 4 their life yields results, but you can't like really teach it that way. Well, I agree with that completely.
That's interesting.

Speaker 4 I just thought it was a certain, because I have to say, without getting into controversial territory, every person I've ever met who writes code

Speaker 4 is kind of similar in some ways to every other person I've ever met who writes code. Like,

Speaker 4 that's true, yeah. It's not a broad cross-section of any population

Speaker 4 at all.

Speaker 4 Well, people who make it a career, but I think anyone sort of can write a lot about code. I'm sure.
I mean, people who get paid to do it. Right.
Right. Yeah.

Speaker 4 Interesting. So bottom line, do you see? And then we didn't even mention Elon

Speaker 4 Musk and David Sachs

Speaker 4 have also come out for Trump. So do you think

Speaker 4 the vibe shift in Silicon Valley is real?

Speaker 4 Yes. Actually, I would credit Sachs originally like perhaps more than Elon because,

Speaker 4 look, it's one-party state. Yeah.

Speaker 4 No one watches you, for example. No one, no one ever watched anything sort of, you know,

Speaker 4 I was, I don't want to overgeneralize, but most people didn't get any right-wing or center-right opinions for, uh, uh, for the most part. They didn't seek it.
It wasn't there.

Speaker 4 You're swimming in just, you know, liberal, democratic sort of talking points.

Speaker 4 I would say Sachs

Speaker 4 in the all-in podcast was sort of the first time a lot of people started on a weekly basis hearing a conservative talk being David Sachs. Amazing.

Speaker 4 And I would start to hear at parties and things like that, people describe their politics as Saxism. Like they started calling it.

Speaker 4 They would be like, you know, I agree with, you know, most of the time I agree with, you know, Sachs's

Speaker 4 point of view on all-in podcasts. I'm like, yeah, you're kind of maybe moderate or center-right at this point.

Speaker 4 He's so reasonable. He's, first of all, he's a wonderful person, in my opinion.
But

Speaker 4 like, I didn't have any sense of the reach of that podcast until I did it. I had no sense at all.
And he's like, will you do my podcast? Sure, because I love David Sachs. I do the podcast.

Speaker 4 Like everyone I've ever met texts me. Oh, you're on all-in podcasts.
Like, it's, it's not my world. But I didn't realize that is the vector if you want to reach.

Speaker 4 sort of business-minded people who are not very political, but are probably going to like send money to a buddy who's bundling for Commonwealth because like that she's our candidate. Yes.

Speaker 4 I mean, that's the way to reach people like that. That's right.

Speaker 4 And by the way, this is my point about technology can have a centralizing effect, but also decentralizing. Yes.
So YouTube,

Speaker 4 you can argue, oh, YouTube is the centralized thing. They're pushing opinions on us, whatever.
But, you know, now you have a platform on YouTube after you got fired from Fox, right?

Speaker 4 You know, Sachs can have a platform

Speaker 4 and put these opinions out. And I think,

Speaker 4 you know, there was a moment during COVID that I felt like they're going to close everything down.

Speaker 4 Yeah.

Speaker 4 For good reason you felt that way. Yes.

Speaker 4 And maybe they were. Maybe there's going to be some other event that will like allow them to close it down.
But one of the things I really love about America is the First Amendment.

Speaker 4 It's just, it's just the most important

Speaker 4 institutional innovation in the history of humanity. I agree with that completely.
And we should really grew up without it too. I mean, it must be.
We should really protect it.

Speaker 4 Like we should, like, we should be so coveting of it. Like, you know, we should be, you know, like your wife or something.

Speaker 4 Can you totally agree? Hands off.

Speaker 4 Can you just repeat your description of its importance historically? I'm sorry you put it so well.

Speaker 4 It's the most important institutional innovation in human history. The First Amendment is the most important

Speaker 4 institutional innovation in human history. Yes.
I love that. I think it's absolutely, absolutely right.

Speaker 4 And as someone who grew up with it in a country that had had it for, you know, 200 years when I was born,

Speaker 4 you know, you don't, you don't feel that way. It's just like, well, it's the First Amendment.
It's like just part of nature, right? It's like gravity. It just exists.

Speaker 4 But as someone who, you know, grew up in a country that does not have it, which is true of every other country on this planet, it's the only country that has it.

Speaker 4 You see it that way. You see it as the thing that makes America America.
Well, the thing that makes it so that we can change course. Yes.
Right. And the reason why,

Speaker 4 you know, we had this, you know, conformist

Speaker 4 mob rule mentality that people call woke.

Speaker 4 You know,

Speaker 4 the reason that we're now past that almost, you know, still kind of there, but we're like, we're on our way past that is because of

Speaker 4 the First Amendment and free speech. And again, I would credit Elon a lot for buying Twitter and letting us talk and can debate and push back on the craziness, right?

Speaker 4 It's kind of, it's, well, it's beautiful. I've been a direct beneficiary of it, as I think everyone in the country has been.

Speaker 4 So I'm not, and I love Elon, but I'm,

Speaker 4 I mean, it's a little weird that like a foreigner has to do that. A foreigner, foreign-born person, you, Elon, appreciates it in this way.
It's like, it's a little depressing.

Speaker 4 Like, why didn't some American-born person do that? I guess because they don't, we don't take it

Speaker 4 take it for granted. I wrote a thread.
It was like 10 things I like about America. I expected it to do well, but it was like three, four years ago.
It went super viral.

Speaker 4 The Wall Street Journal covered it. Peggy Noonan called me and was like, I want to write a story about it.
I was like, okay, it's like a Twitter thread. You can read it.
But

Speaker 4 I

Speaker 4 and I just talk about normal things. free speech, one of them, but also like hard work, appreciation for talents and all of that.

Speaker 4 And it was starting to close up, right? I started to see, you know, meritocracy kind of like being less valued. And that's part of the reason why I wrote the thread.

Speaker 4 And

Speaker 4 what I realized is like, you know, yeah, most Americans just don't think about that and don't really value it as much. I agree.
And so maybe you do need, you do need to be able to do that.

Speaker 4 Oh, I think that's absolutely right.

Speaker 4 But why do you think, I mean, I have seen, I hate to say this, because I've always thought that my whole life that foreigners

Speaker 4 are great you know i like traveling to foreign countries i like my best friend is foreign born actually um as opposed to mass immigration as i am which i am arabs really like you by the way oh well i really like arabs i've sort of thrown off the brainwashing um

Speaker 4 just to sidebar i feel like we had a bad experience with arabs 23 years ago and what a lot of americans didn't realize but i knew from traveling a lot in the Middle East,

Speaker 4 yeah, it was bad. It was bad.
However, like, that's not representative of the people that I have dinner with in the Middle East at all.

Speaker 4 Like, someone once said to me, like, those are the worst people in our country. And, right? And no, I totally agree with that strongly.

Speaker 4 I always defend the Arabs in a heartfelt way. But,

Speaker 4 no,

Speaker 4 I

Speaker 4 wonder if

Speaker 4 some of the, particularly the higher income immigrants recently, I've noticed, are like parroting the same kind of anti-American crap that they're learning from the institute.

Speaker 4 You know, you come from Punjab and go to Stanford, and all of a sudden, like, you've got the same rotten, decadent attitudes of your native-born professors from Stanford. Do you see that?

Speaker 4 No, I'm not sure what's the distribution like. I mean, speaking of Indians, I mean, on the right, on the right side of the spectrum, you have Vivek and who's the best? Yeah.

Speaker 4 Who's a perfect example of what I'm saying? Like, Vivek has thought through not just like First Amendment good, but why it's good. Yeah.
Well, I, I, you know, I, I'm not sure,

Speaker 4 you know, I'm not sure it could, you know, I think it's, yeah, I think foreigners, for the most part, do appreciate it more, but it's easy.

Speaker 4 You know, I talked about how I just, you know, try not to be, you know, this conformist, kind of really absorb everything around me and, and act on it. But it's very easy for people to go in these

Speaker 4 one-party state places

Speaker 4 and really

Speaker 4 get,

Speaker 4 you know, become part of this like mob mentality where everyone believes the same thing. Any deviation

Speaker 4 from that is considered cancelable offense. And, you know, you asked about the shift in Silicon Valley.

Speaker 4 I mean, part of the shift is like, yeah, Silicon Valley still has a lot of people who are independent-minded and they see this sort of conformist type of thinking in the Democratic Party.

Speaker 4 And that's really repulsive for them, where, you know, there's like a party line.

Speaker 4 It's like Biden is sharp as attack sharp as attack everyone says that and then the debates happen oh unfit unfit unfit and then oh he's out oh come on

Speaker 4 it's like right it's like you know lockstep and there's like no range there's no there's very little dissent within within that party and maybe republicans i think at some point were we're the same maybe now it's a uh it's it's sort of a little different but this is what why people are attracted to to the other side in silicon valley by the way this is advice for the democrats like if you want sort of Silicon Valley back, you, you know, maybe don't be so controlling of opinions and like be okay with more dissent.

Speaker 4 But you have to relinquish a little bit of power to do that. I mean, it's the same as raising teenagers.

Speaker 4 There's always a moment in the life of every parent of teenagers where a child is going in a direction you don't want.

Speaker 4 And obviously, you know, it's shooting heroin direction, you have to intervene with maximum force, but there are a lot of directions a kid can go that are deeply annoying to you.

Speaker 4 And you have to restrain yourself a little bit. If you want to preserve the relationship, actually, if you want to preserve your power over the child,

Speaker 4 you have to pull back and be like, I'm not going to say anything. That's right.
This child will come back.

Speaker 4 My gravitational pull is strong enough that I'm not going to lose this child because she does something that offends me today. You know what I mean?

Speaker 4 You can't hold too tightly. And I feel like they don't understand.

Speaker 4 I feel like the Democratic Party, I'm not an intimate, of course, I'm not in the meetings, but I feel by their behavior that they feel very threatened. That's what I see.

Speaker 4 These are people who feel like they're losing their power. Yes.
And so they have to control what you say on Facebook. I mean, what? Yes.

Speaker 4 If you're worried about people say on Facebook, you know, you've lost confidence in yourself. That's right.
That's right. Do you feel that? Yeah.
And I mean, you know,

Speaker 4 there's Matt Taibi and Michael Schellenberger and a lot of folks, you know, did a lot of great work on censorship. Yes.

Speaker 4 and the government's kind of involvement in that and how they push social media companies.

Speaker 4 And I don't know if you can put it just on the Democrats because I think part of it happened during the Trump administration as well. For sure.
But I think they're more excitable about it.

Speaker 4 They really love misinformation as a term, which I think is kind of a BS term. It's a meaningless term.
It's a meaningless term. All that matters is whether it's true or not.
Yeah.

Speaker 4 And the term mis and disinformation doesn't even address the veracity of the claim. That's right.
It's like irrelevant to them whether it's true or not. In fact, if it's true, it's more upsetting.

Speaker 4 Yeah, it's like everything what we talked about earlier. It's just making people stupid by taking their faculty of

Speaker 4 trying to discern truth.

Speaker 4 I think that's, you know, that's how you actually become rational by like trying to figure out whether something is true or not. And then

Speaker 4 being right or wrong. And then that really

Speaker 4 kind of trains you for having a better judgment.

Speaker 4 What you talked about, judgment.

Speaker 4 That's how people build good judgment.

Speaker 4 You can't outsource your judgment to the group, which again feels like what's asked from us, especially in liberal circles, is that, no, Fauci knows better, two weeks to stop the spread, you know, take the job, stay home, wear the mask.

Speaker 4 You know, it was just like talking down to us as children. You can't discuss certain things on YouTube.
You'll get banned. At some point, you couldn't say the lab leak theory, right?

Speaker 4 It was just now the mainstream theory. Yes.

Speaker 4 And again, a lot of this self-corrected because of the First Amendment. Yeah, and Elon.
Wow,

Speaker 4 that was as interesting as dinner was last night. A little less profanity, but I'm really grateful that you took the time to do this.
Thank you.

Speaker 4 It's absolutely my pleasure. It was mine.
Thank you. Thanks.

Speaker 4 Thanks for listening to the Tucker Carlson Show. If you enjoyed it, you can go to tuckercarlson.com to see everything that we have made, the complete library, tuckercarlson.com.