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

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It does sound like you're directly connected to AI development. You're part of the ecosystem.
Yes. And we benefited a lot from when it started happening.
It was almost a surprise to a lot of people, but we saw it coming. You saw AI coming.
Saw it coming. Yeah.
So this recent AI wave, it surprised a lot of people. When Chad GPT came out in November 22, a lot of people just lost their mind.
Like suddenly a computer can talk to me. And that was like the holy grail.
Yeah, I wasn't into it at all. Really? It's like, this is 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.
He writes a lot of essays and he hates it. He thinks it's like a midwit, right? And it's just like making people write worse, making people think worse.
Of course. Or not think at all.
Right, not think. As the iPhone has done, as Wikipedia and Google have done.
Yes. We were just talking about that, 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 something that's going to give us superpowers, right? JC Licklider, the head of DARPA, while the internet was developing, wrote this essay called The Man-Machine Symbiosis.
And he talks about how computers can be an extension of ourselves. It can help us grow.
There's this marriage between the type of intellect that computers can do, which is high-speed, arithmetic, whatever, and the type of intellect that humans can do, which is more intuition. Yes.
But since then, I think the consensus has changed around computing, which is, and I'm sure we'll get into that, which is why people are afraid of AI is kind of replacing us. This idea of computers and computing are a threat because they're directly competitive with humans,

which is not really the belief I hold.

They're extensions of us.

And I think people learning to program, and this is really embedded at the heart of our mission at Repl.

is what gives you superpowers.

Whereas when you're just tapping, you're kind of a consumer. You're not a producer of software.
I don't want more people to be producers of software. There's a book by Douglas Rochkopf called Program or Be Programmed.
If you're not the one coding, someone is coding you. Someone is programming you.
These algorithms on social media, they're programming us, right? Too late for me to learn to code, though. I don't think so.
I don't think so. 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, 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 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 i've seen that a lot in the last few years where something very obvious will happen.
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, 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.
Yeah. But I wonder if that's not a result of the advance of technology.
Well, I don't think it's inherent to the advance of technology. I think 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 go back, Bertrand Russell wrote a book about history of philosophy and history of mathematics and going back to the ancients and Pythagoras and all these things. And you could tell in the writing, he was almost surprised by how much intuition played into science and math and 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, you're biased. Your intuition is racist or something.
And you have to to this is bad, and you have to be this blank slate, and you trust the data. But by the way, data is you can make the data say a lot of different things.
Oh, I've noticed. Wait, can I just ask a totally off-topic question that just occurred to me? How are you this well-educated? So you grew up in Jordan, speaking Arabic, in a displaced Palestinian family.
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, what was your education? Is everyone in, is every Palestinian family in Jordan this well-educated? Like what? Kind of, like, yeah, Palestinian diaspora is like pretty well-educated. And you're starting to see our generation who grew up are starting to become more prominent.
In Silicon Valley, a lot of C-suite and VP-level executives, a lot of them are Palestinian. A lot of them wouldn't say so because there's still bias and discrimination and all that.
They wouldn't say they're a 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? Yeah.
But there's a lot of them out there. But how did you, so how do you wind up reading, I assume you read Bertrand Russell in English? Yes.
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.

So, you know, it was a British colony.

I think one of the, you know, the independence,

they like happened in like 50s or something like that,

or maybe 60s.

So it was like pretty late in the, you know,

British 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 is a government engineer. He didn't have a lot of money.
So we lived a very modest life, kind of like middle, lower middle class. But he really cared about education.
He sent us to private schools. And in those private schools, we learned

using British diploma.

So IGCSE, A-levels,

are you familiar with...

Not at all.

So part of the

British colonialism

or whatever is like, education system

became international.

I think it's a good thing.

There are British schools everywhere.

Yeah, British schools everywhere, and there's a good education system.

It gives students a good level of freedom

and I'll see you next time. became international.
And I think it's a good thing. Oh yeah, there are British schools everywhere.
Yeah, yeah, British schools everywhere. And there's a good education system.
It gives students a good level of freedom and autonomy to kind of pick the kind of things they're interested in. So I went to a lot of math and physics, but also did like random things.
I did child development, which I still remember. And now that I have kids, I actually use.
In high school, you do that? In high school. And I learn.

What does that have to do with the civil rights movement?

What do you mean?

Well, that's the only topic in American schools.

Really?

Oh, yeah.

You spend 16 years learning about the civil rights movement.

So everyone can identify the Edmund Pettus Bridge,

but no one knows anything else.

Oh, God.

I'm so nervous about that with my kids.

No, opt out.

Trust me.

That's so interesting.

So when did you come to the U.S.?

Thank you. Oh, God.
I'm so nervous about that with my kids. No, opt out.
Trust me. That's so interesting.
So when did you come to the US? 2012. Damn.
And now you've got a billion dollar company. That's pretty good.
Yeah, I mean, America is amazing. Like, I just love this country.
It's given us a lot of opportunities. I just love the people, like everyday people.
I like to just talk to people. I do, too.
I was just talking to my driver. She was like, you know, I'm so embarrassed.
I didn't know who Dr. Carlson was.

Good. That's why I live here.

Yeah. I was like, well, good for you.
I think that means you're just like, you know, 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.

It means you're happy.

It means you're happy.

So I'm sorry to digress. I'm sorry to digress.
Please, please. I'm sitting here, you're referring to all these books.
I'm like, you're not even from here. It's incredible.
So back to AI and to this question of intuition, you don't think that it's inherent. 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? You can choose to, and I think a lot of people are being guided to do that.
But ultimately, you're giving away a lot of freedom. And there's a it's not just me saying that, there's a huge tradition of hackers and computer scientists that kind of started ringing the alarm bell really long time ago about the way things were trending,

which is more centralization,

less diversity of competition in the market.

And you have one global social network as opposed to many.

Now it's actually getting a little better.

And 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.

I don't know that.

But until you can tell me who Satoshi was, I have some questions.

What?

I actually have a feeling about who Satoshi was,

but that's a separate conference. No, let's just stop right now because I'll never forget to ask you again.
Who is Satoshi? There's a guy, his name is Paul LaRue. By the way, for those watching who don't know who Satoshi was, Satoshi is the pseudonym that we use for the person who created Bitcoin, but we don't know what it is.
It's amazing. It's this thing that was created.
We don't know who created it. 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.

They're not cashing out.

And it's like pretty crazy story, right?

That's amazing.

So Paul LaRue. Yeah, Paul LaRue was a crypto hacker

in Rhodesia before Zimbabwe. And he created something called Encryption for the Masses, EM4.
And was one of the early... By the way, I think Snowden used EM4 as part of his hack.
So he was one of the people that really made it so that cryptography is accessible to more people. However, he did become a criminal.
He became a criminal mastermind. In Manila, he was really controlling the city almost.
He paid off all the cops and everything. He was making so much money from so much criminal activity.
His nickname was Sletoshi with an L. And so there's a lot of circumstantial evidence.
There's no 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 cash.
And around that same time that Satoshi disappeared, he went to jail he got got he got booked for for all the crime he did he recently got sentenced to 20 years 25 years of prison I think judge asked him like what would you do if you if you would go out and he's like I would build an ASIC chip to mine Bitcoin and 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.

In this country or the Philippines?

I think this country.

Because he was doing all the crime here.

He was selling drugs online, essentially.

Huh.

We should go see him in jail.

Yeah, yeah.

Check out his story.

It's fascinating.

I'm sorry.

I just had to get that out of you.

So I keep digressing.

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.
And I heard some of your podcasts with Joe Rogan or whatever, and you were like, we should nuke the data centers. I'm excitable on the basis of very little information.
Yeah, well, actually, tell me, what is your theory about the threat of AI? I always, I want to be the kind of man who admits up front his limitations and his ignorance. 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. And the idea is, as you well know, that the machines become so powerful that they achieve a kind of autonomy.
And they, though designed to serve you, wind up ruling you. Yeah.
And, you know, I'm really interested in Ted Kaczynski's writings, his two books that he wrote, obviously, as to say, ritually, totally opposed to letter bombs or violence of any kind. But Ted Kaczynski had a lot of provocative and thoughtful things to say about technology.
It's almost like having live in help, which people make a lot of money. They all want to have live in help.
But the truth about live in help, they're there to serve you, but you wind up serving them. It inverts.
And AI is a kind of species of that. 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. You know a lot more about this than I do since you're in that world.
But yeah, that's my concern. That's actually a quite valid concern.
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 Ted Kaczynski's critique of technology is actually one of the best. Yes.
Thank you. Yeah.
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 his thesis and ended up obscuring it. Yeah.
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. 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 struggle for survival, to go through life as a child,

as an adult,

build up yourself,

get married,

have kids,

and then become the elder and then die, right?

Exactly.

And he thinks that

modern technology

kind of disrupts this process

and makes people miserable.

How do you know that?

I read it.

I'm very curious.

I read a lot of things

and I just don't have mental censorship in a way. I love it.
I'm very curious. I read a lot of things and I just don't have mental censorship in a way.
Like I can... I love that.
I'm really curious. I'll read anything.
Do you think being from another country has helped you in that way? Yeah. And I also, I think just my childhood, I was like always different.
When I had hair, it was all red. It was bright red.
And my whole family is kind of, or at least half of my family are redheads. And because of that experience, I was like, okay, I'm different.
I'm comfortable being different. I'll be different.
And 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 good with computers and all that um i think that carried me through life it's just i like i get you know i get like almost a disgust reaction to conformism and like mob mentality oh i couldn't agree i had a similar experience childhood i totally agree with you yeah 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. And wherever we go, we use a virtual private network, a VPN, and we use ExpressVPN.
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So Kaczynski's thesis that struggle is not only inherent to the condition but an essential part yes of your evolution as a man or as a person um and the technology disrupts that i mean that seems right to me yeah and i actually struggle to sort of of dispute that despite being a technologist, ultimately, again, like I said, it's one of the best I think we can spend the whole podcast really trying to tease it apart. I think ultimately where I 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 a thing that's just merely replacing us. We want it to be an empowering thing.
And what we do at Replit is we empower people to learn the code, to build startups, to build companies, to become entrepreneurs. and I think you can, in this world,

you have to create the power process. to build companies, to become entrepreneurs.
And I think you can, in this world,

you have to create the power process.

You have to struggle.

And yes, you can, this is why I'm also,

a lot of technologists talk about UBI and universal basic engineering.

Oh, I know.

I think it's all wrong

because it just goes against human nature.

Thank you.

So I think- You want to kill everybody, Put them on the dole. Yes.
Yes. So I don't think technology is inherently at odds with the power process.
I'll leave it at that and we can go to existential threat. Yeah, of course.
Boy, am I just aggressive. I can't believe I interview people for a living.
We had dinner last night. That was awesome.
It was one of the best dinners. It was the best, but we hit about 400 different threats.
Yes, it was amazing. So that's what's out there.
I know I'm sort of convinced of it. Or it makes sense to me.
And I'm kind of threat-oriented anyway. So people with my kind of personality are sort of always looking for the big bad thing that's coming, the asteroid or the nuclear war, the AI, slavery.
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. And I think a lot of the public shares these concerns.
Yeah. 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 conversation about the upside of AI.
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.
Do you know what I mean? Normally when some new technology 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.
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.
That's a very astute observation. And I'll exactly tell you why.
And to tell you why, it's like a little bit of a long story because I think there is a organized effort to scare people about AI. Organized? Organized, yes.
And so this starts with a mailing list in the 90s. It's a transhumanist mailing list called the Extropians.
And these Extropians, I might have got it wrong, Extropia or something like that. But they believe in the singularity.

So the singularity is a moment of time where AI is progressing so fast

or technology in general progressing so fast

that you can't predict what happens.

It's self-involving and just all bets are off.

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 remake everything. And those people believe that's a good thing because the world now sucks so much and we are imperfect and unethical and all sorts of irrational and whatever.
And so they really wanted for the singularity to happen. And there's this young guy on this list.
His name is Eliezer Yudkowsky. And he claims he can write this AI.
And he would write really long essays about how to build this AI. 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. They started this thing called

the Singularity Institute. A lot of people

were excited about the future, kind of

invested in him, Peter Thiel most famously.

And he spent a few years

trying to build an AI.

Again, never published code, never

published any real progress.

And

then came out of it saying that not only you can't build AI, but if you build it, it

will kill everyone.

So he kind of switched from being this optimist, you know, singularity is great, to like actually

AI will for sure kill everyone.

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

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.
And Less Wrong 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.
And then they start this thing called Center for Advanced Rationality or something like that, CIFAR. And they're giving seminars about rationality.
But the intention... What's a seminar about rationality? What's that like? I've never been to one, but my guess would be, they would talk about the biases or whatever.
But they have also like weird things where they have this almost struggle session like thing called debugging. 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. 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 where you have to strip yourself bare, like auditing and Scientology.
It's very common. Yes.
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 all of that.
And it caused people a huge distress. Young guys all the time talk about how going into that community has caused them a huge distress.
And there were offshoots of this community where there were suicides, there were murders, there were a lot of really dark and deep shit. 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. We learned the art of rationality 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.
But also, they believe other things. Like, they believe that, you know, polyamory is rational and everyone that- Polyamory? Yeah, like, you can have sex with multiple partners, essentially.
But they think that's, I mean, I think it's, it's certainly a natural desire if you're a man to sleep with more indifferent women,

for sure.

But it's rational in the sense, how?

Like you've never met a happy polyamorous long-term.

I've known a lot of them, not a single one.

So how is it? It might be self-serving.

You think?

To recruit more impressionable people into-

Yeah, and their hot girlfriends. Yes.
Right. So that's rational? Yeah, supposedly.
And so they convince each other of all these cult-like behavior. And the crazy thing is this group ends up being super influential because they recruit a lot of people that are interested in AI.
And the AI labs and the people who are starting these companies were reading all this stuff. So Elon famously read a lot of Nick Bostrom as kind of an adjacent figure to the rationality community.
He was part of the original mailing list. I think he would call himself a, you know, part of the rational community.
But he wrote a book about AI and how AI is going to, you know, kill everyone essentially. I think he moderated his views more recently, but originally he was one of the people that are kind of banging the alarm.
And, you know, the foundation of OpenAI was based on a lot of these fears. Elon had fears of AI killing everyone.
He was afraid that Google was going to do that. I don't think everyone at OpenAI really believed that, but some of the original founding story was that.
They were recruiting from that community. So much so when Sam Altman got fired recently, he was fired by someone from that community.
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.
And so it ends up, they kind of 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.
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. And can we just push a little deeper on what they believe? You say they are transhumanists.
Yes. What is that? Well, I think they're just unsatisfied with human nature, unsatisfied with the current ways we're constructed and that we're irrational, we're unethical.
And so they long 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, 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, like a lot of those people I have known are, not that smart actually, 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.
On the other hand, the best things about people, their best impulses are not rational. I believe so too.
There is no rational justification for giving something you need to another person. Yes.
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. But that's kind of the lowest impulse that we have, actually.
We'll wait to hear about effective altruism. So, they think our natural impulses that you just talked about are indeed irrational.
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.
yeah I mean so their philosophy is utilitarian utilitarianism is that

you from Australia. The infanticide guy.
Yes. He's so ethical, he's for killing children.
Yeah, I mean, so their philosophy is 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 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 or they will die.
You're ethically, 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 people believe that per se.
I mean, but there's so many 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. 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.
That's just a math question. True.
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 because I'm just a silly human being who can't see the future and is not omnipotent because I'm not God. Yeah.
I feel like all of these conclusions stem from the misconception that people are gods. Yes.
I agree. Does that sound right? No, I agree.
I mean, a lot of the, you know, I think it's, you know, they're at root. They're just fundamentally unsatisfied with humans and maybe perhaps hate, hate the humans.
Well, they're deeply disappointed. Yes.
I think that's such a, I've never heard anyone say that 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 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. That's just super judgy, actually.
What they're saying is, you know, you suck. 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 and have sex with us.
So, but- Can I just clarify? These aren't just like, you know, support staff at these companies. Like, are there- So, you know, you've heard about SBF and FDX.
Of course, yeah. They had what's called a polycule.
Yeah. Right? They were all having sex with each other.
Just 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.
No rational person would do that. Come on now.
Yeah, that's true. Well, so, you know, what's even more disturbing, there's another ethical component to their philosophy called long-termism.
And this comes from the effective altruist sort of branch of rationality. Long-termism? Long-termism.
And so what they think is, in the future, if we made the right steps, there's going to be a trillion humans, trillion minds. They might not be humans, they might be AI.
But there are going to be trillion minds who can experience utility, can experience good things, fun things, whatever. If you a utilitarian, you have to put a lot of weight on it.
And maybe you discount that, sort of like discounted cash flows. But you still have to posit that 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. 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, they arrived at the conclusion that AI is going to kill everyone.
Therefore, effective altruists and rational community, all these branches, they're all kind of focused on AI safety because that's the most important thing because we want a trillion people in the future to be great. But when you're assigning value that high, it's sort of a form of Pascal's wager.
It is sort of, you can justify anything, including terrorism, including doing really bad things. If you're really convinced that AI is going to kill everyone and the future holds so much value, more value than any living human today has value, you might justify really doing anything.
And so built into that, it's a dangerous framework. But it's the same framework of every genocidal movement.
Yes. From, you know, at least the French Revolution to present.
Yes. A glorious future justifies a bloody present.
Yes. And look, I'm not accusing them of genocidal intent, by the way.
I don't know them, but those ideas lead very quickly to the camps. I feel kind of weird just talking about people who just generally I like to talk about ideas, about things.
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. But what's happening

is that they were able to convince

a lot of billionaires of these

ideas. I think Elon

maybe changed his mind, but at some point he was convinced

of these ideas. I don't know

if he gave them money. There was a story at some point

that he was thinking about it.

But a lot of other billionaires

gave them money, and now they're organized and they're in D.C. lobbying for AI regulation.
They're behind the AI regulation in California. And actually profiting from it, there was a story in Pirate Wares where the main sponsor Dan Hendricks behind SB47, 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 kind of less profit from it.
By the way, this is all allegedly based on this article. I don't know for sure.
I think Senator Scott Wiener was trying to do the right thing with the bill, but he was listening to a lot of these cult members, let's call them. They're very well organized.
Also, a lot of them still have connections to the big AI labs. And 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, all of them are true believers, but you might kind of infiltrate this group and kind of direct it in a way that benefits these corporations. Yeah.
Well, I'm from D.C., so I've seen a lot of instances where, you know, my bank account aligns with my beliefs. Thank heaven.
Yeah. This kind of happens.
It winds up that way. It's funny.
Climate is the perfect example. There's never one climate solution that makes the person who proposes it poorer or less powerful.
Exactly. Ever.
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including at 2121 15th Street North in Arlington, Virginia. I wonder, like, about the core assumption, which I've had up until right now, that these machines are capable of thinking.
Yeah. Is that true? So let's go through their chain of reasoning.
I think the fact that it's a stupid cult-like thing,

or perhaps actually a cult,

does not automatically mean that their arguments are probably wrong.

That's right. That's exactly right.

I think you do have to kind of discount some of the arguments

because it comes from crazy people.

But the chain of reasoning is that 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.
And if you agree that humans are computing, and therefore we can build a general intelligence in the machine. And if you agree up to this point, if you're able to build a general intelligence in the machine, even if only at a human level, then you can create a billion copies of it and then it becomes a lot more powerful than any one of us.
And because it's a lot more powerful than any one of us, it would want to control us or it would not care about us because it's more powerful kind of like we don't care about ants, we'll step on ants, no problem. Right.
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.

The first step is the mind is a computer.

And based on what?

And the idea is, oh, well, if you don't believe that the mind is a computer, then you believe in some kind of spiritual thing.

Well, you have to convince me. You haven't presented an argument.
But the idea that like... Speaking of rational, this is what reason looks like.
Right. The idea that we have a complete description of the universe anyways is wrong.
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.
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 dwell on it.
No, no, no. It's a very interesting argument though.
So you're saying as someone, I mean, you're effectively a scientist. 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.
These systems can't be kind of married. They're not a universal system.
You can't use them both at the same time. Well, that suggests a profound limit

to our understanding

of what's happening around us

in the natural world, does it?

Yes, it does.

And I think this is, again,

another error of the rationalist types

is that just assume that, you know,

we were so much more advanced

in our science than we actually are.

So it sounds like they don't know that much about science. Yes.
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 a philosopher slash mathematician slash scientist, wonderful.
His name is Sir Roger Penrose. I love how the British kind of give the sir title, someone has accomplished.
He wrote this book called The Emperor's New Mind. It's based on the emperor's new clothes, the idea that the emperor's kind of naked.
And in his opinion, the argument that the mind is a computer is a sort of consensus argument that is wrong. The emperor is naked.
It's not really an argument, it's an assertion. Yes, it's an assertion that is fundamentally wrong.
And the way he proves it is very interesting. There is, in mathematics, there's something called Gödel's incompleteness theorem.
And, you know, what that says is there are statements that are true that can't be proved in mathematics. So he constructs, Gödel constructs like a number system where he can start to make statements about this number system.
So the, you know, he creates a statement that's like, this statement is unprovable in system F,

where the whole system is F.

Well, if you try to prove it, then that statement becomes false.

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

And Roger Perno says, 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.
Therefore, our knowledge is outside of any formal system. Therefore, the human brain is, or like our mind is understanding something that mathematics is not able to give it to us.
To describe. To describe.
And I thought, the first time I read it, again, I read a lot of these things. Like 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.

It's called the liar paradox.

Explain why that's going to float in my head forever.

Why is that a paradox?

So this statement is false.

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 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.

Right.

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.

And he

wanted to really prove that

mathematics is complete, consistent, you know, decidable, computable, all of that. And then all these things happened, Gödel's incompletes theorem.
Turing, the inventor of the computer, actually, this is the most ironic piece of science history that nobody ever talks about, but Turing invented the computer to show its limitation.

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 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, will complete to a stop, or will continue running forever. It's called the halting problem.
And 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 it was really depressing for him because he kind of went out to prove that mathematics is complete and all of that.
And 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.
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.

Yeah.

Which kind of gets you back

to where you should be

in the first place,

which is in a posture of humility.

Yes.

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.
But also some smart people like believe the science. 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? 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.
But in order to practice the method, you have to come from a position of humility that I don't know. And I'm using this method to find out.
And I cannot lie about what I observe, right? That's right. And today, the capital S science is used to control and it's used to propagandize and lie.
Of course, you know, in the hands of, you know, just really people who shouldn't have power, just dumb people with, you know, pretty ugly agendas. 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.
And I think what you're saying is that some of them, 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, none of those are at minimum, you know, complete.

And like, you know, they don't,

just take it for granted.

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.

That the mind is a computer?

That the mind is a computer is dogma

in technology, science, all that.

That's so silly.

Yes.

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? In a way that's misleading and who knows why. But that is a fact, right? That's not true of computers, I don't think.
But how are we explaining things like intuition and instinct? Those are not, well, that is actually my question. Could those ever be features of a machine? You could argue that neural networks are sort of intuition machines, and that's what a lot of people say.
But neural networks,

and maybe I will describe them

just for the audience.

Neural networks are inspired by the brain.

And the idea is that you can connect

a network of small little functions,

just mathematical functions,

and you can train it by giving examples. You could give it a picture of a cat.
And if it says, let's say this network has to say yes if it's a cat, no if it's not a cat. So 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.

And you do this, I don't know, a billion times.

And then the network

encodes features

about the cat.

And this is literally

exactly how neural networks work.

Is you tune

all these small parameters

until there's some embedded

feature detection of, especially in classifiers. But this is not intuition.
This is basically automatic programming, the way I see it. Right, of course.
So we can write code manually. You can go to our website, write code.
But we can generate algorithms automatically via machine learning. Machine learning essentially discovers these algorithms.
And sometimes it discovers very crappy algorithms. For example, 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.
And then you give it one day a picture of a cat without grass and it fails and we're like, what happened? Oh, it turns out it learned the wrong thing. So because it's obscure what it's actually learning,

people interpret that as intuition because the algorithms are not as explicated. And there's

a lot of work now on trying to explicate these algorithms, which is great work for companies

like Anthropic. But I don't think you can call it intuition just because it's obscure.
So what is it? How is intuition different? Human intuition. We don't, you know, for one, we don't require a trillion examples of cat to learn a cat.
Good point.

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

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.

And the way we learn is like we combine intuition and some more explicit way of learning. And I don't think we've figured out how to do it with machines just yet.
Do you think that structurally it's possible for machines to get there? So, you know, this, this chain of reasoning, um, I, 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. Um, and, uh, and, uh, my view is that I'm not holding these doubts very strongly but my view is that we just don't have a complete understanding of the mind and you at least can't use it to argue that kind of machine that acts like a human but much more powerful powerful, can kill us all.
But do I think that AI can get really powerful? Yes. I think AI can get really powerful, can get really useful.
I think functionally can feel like it's general. AI is ultimately a function of data.
The kind of data that we put into it, 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. It's actually been proven that these machines are just the function of their data.
There's some total of what you put in. Exactly.
Garbage in, garbage out. Yeah.
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, we collected everything that we care about, and we somehow fit it into a machine, and now everyone's building these really large data centers. You will get a very highly capable machine that will kind of look general because we collected a lot of economically useful data and we'll start doing economically useful tasks.
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 headed in some direction like that. 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.
We don't have the science for that. Because we don't have the understanding of Yes.
On the most fundamental level, you began that explanation by saying we don't really understand the human brain, so how can we compare it to something? Because we don't even really know what it is. And there are a couple of there's a machine learning scientist, Francois Chollet, I don't know how to pronounce French names, but I think that's his name.
He took a sort of an IQ-like test,

where you're rotating shapes and whatever.

And 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 a 10-year-old kid could do.

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, 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. Because that's the argument and they're going to DC and they're going to all these places that are springing up regulation.
This regulation is going to hurt American industry. It's going to hurt startups.
It's going to make it hard to compete. It's going to give China a tremendous advantage.
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.
And what gives me pause is not so much the technology. It's the way that the people creating the technology understand people.
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 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.
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. 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.
Like that's a real, that's a totalitarian mindset. And it's the one thing that connects every genocidal movement is that belief.
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. Look, I, um, don't.
Yeah, yeah. I think that's actually

a rational conclusion based on...

I 100% agree.

I'll give you one

interesting anecdote.

Again, from science,

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?

And we've had

kind of a human-like species

for, you know, half a million years, perhaps more, perhaps a million years. There's a moment in time, 40,000 years ago, it's called the Great Leap Forward, where we see culture, we see religion, we see drawings.
We saw very little of that before that, tools and whatever. And suddenly, we're seeing this Cambrian explosion of culture.
Pointing to something larger than just daily needs or the world around them. Yeah, and it's not, we're still not able to explain it.
David Reich wrote this book. 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 they have some idea of what it could be in 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?

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 worshipping things.

There's a clear separation between

again, the animal

brain and the human brain.

And it's clearly not computation. Like, we suddenly didn't like grow a computer in a brain.
It's something else happened. But what's so interesting is like the instinct of modern man is to look for something inside the person that caused that.
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.

I mean, of course I do know the answer,

but I'll just pretend I don't.

But at very least, both are possible.

So if like you confine yourself

to looking for a genetic mutation

or change, genetic change,

then, you know, you're sort of closing out.

That's not an empiricist,

a scientific way of looking at things, actually. You don't foreclose any possibility in science.
You can't. Right.
That's very interesting. So, you know, 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 better.
It's going to make it all more educated. Okay, so now's the time for you to tell me why I should be excited about something I've been fearing.
Yeah. So this technology, large language models, where we kind of fed a neural network, the entire internet, and it has capabilities mostly around writing, around information lookup, around summarization, around coding.
It does a lot of really useful things, and you can program it to kind of pick and match between these different skills. You can program these skills using code.
And so the kind of products and services that you can build with this are amazing. So one of the things I'm most excited about this application of the technology, there's this problem called the Bloom's Two Sigma problem.
There's this scientist that was studying education. And he was looking at different interventions to try to get kids to learn better or faster or have just better educational outcomes.
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 by doing one-on-one tutoring using a type of learning called mastery learning. 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. The problem is like we don't have enough teachers to do one-on-one tutoring.
It's very expensive. No country in the world can

afford that. So now we have these machines that can talk, that can teach, that can present information that you can interact with it in a very human way.
You can talk to it. It can talk to your back, right?

And we can build

AI applications

to teach people one-on-one.

And we can build AI applications to teach people one-on-one. And you can have it, you can serve seven billion people with that.
And 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, I was going to save this for last but i can't control myself so i just know being from dc that when uh the people in charge see new technology the first thing they think of is like how can i use this to kill people um so what are the military applications potentially of this technology you know that's one of the other thing that i i i'm sort'm very skeptical of this lobbying effort to get government to regulate it because I think the biggest offender would be of abuse of this technology, probably government. You think? I watched your interview with Jeffrey Sachs who's like a Columbia professor, very mainstream very mainstream.
And I think he got assigned to like a Lancet sort of study of COVID origins or whatever. And he arrived at very, at the time, heterodox view that it was created in a lab and was created by the US government.
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, let's talk about how do we watch what the government's doing? How do we actually have democratic processes to ensure that you're not the one abusing these technologies? 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 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. Like we get privacy, but you're not allowed it because we don't trust you.
Right. 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.
Yeah. I mean, that's the state of America right now.
Yeah. So how would they use AI to further oppress us? I mean, you can use it in all sorts of ways.
Like autonomous drones. We already have autonomous drones.
They get a lot worse. You can a video on the internet where the Chinese guard or whatever was walking with a robotic dog and the robotic dog had a gun mounted to it.
And so you can have robotic set of dogs with shooting guns. A little sci-fi.
As a dog lover, that's so offensive to me. It is kind of offensive, yeah.
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Hostess, we speak a snacky. There was this huge expose in this magazine called 972 about how Israel was using AI to target suspects, but ended up killing huge numbers of civilians.
It's called the Lavender. A very interesting piece.
So the technology wound up killing people who were not even targeted? Yes. It's pretty dark.
What about surveillance? I think this recent AI boom, I think it could be used for surveillance. I'm not sure if it gives a special advantage.
I think they can get the advantage by, again, if these lobbying groups are successful. Part of their ideal outcome is 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 so perhaps that's very dangerous.
Our computers would spy on us to make sure we're not training AIs. 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. I'm sure there's ways to abuse language models for surveillance but I can't think of it right now.
What about manufacturing? It would help with manufacturing. Right now people are figuring figuring out how to do, I invested in a couple of companies, how to apply this technology foundation models to robotics.
It's still early science, but you might have a huge advancement in robotics if we're able to apply this technology to it. 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. So if this is as transformative as it appears to be, you're going to have a lot of idle people.
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, so we just got to pay them to exist.
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, there's two ways to look at it.
We can look at the individuals that are losing their jobs, which is tough and hard. 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. Before alarm clocks, we had this job called the knocker-opper, which goes to your room, you kind of pay them, and it was like, come every day at like 5 a.m.
They knock on your window. Or ring the village bell.
Right. And that job disappeared, but we had 10 times more jobs in manufacturing.
Or perhaps 100 or 1,000 more jobs in manufacturing. 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.
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, it's just been going down. Although we have all this excitement around startups or whatever.
Silicon Valley is the only place that's still producing startups. 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. But the way it turned out is like it was concentrated in this one geographic area.
Well, it looked, I mean, in retrospect, it looks like a monopoly generator actually. Yeah.
But again, it doesn't have to be that way. 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.
I'll give you a few examples. There's a teacher in Denver that during COVID 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 he uses knowledge as a teacher to build an application that helps teachers use AI to teach.
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.
And that's a teacher who learned how to code and created this massive business really quickly. We have stories of photographers doing millions of dollars in revenue.
So it just, it's a, you know, AI will decentralize access to this technology. So there's 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.
Well, that was, I mean, that promise makes sense to me. I would just, I fervently want it to become a reality.
I have a, we have a mutual friend who's showing me, who's so smart and a good, humane person who's 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, that it will fill, 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.

I mean,

I think we have the same intuition

about what's dark and dystopian

versus what's cool.

And he's a wonderful person,

but I just don't think

he's thought about it

or I don't know what,

but we disagree.

But I don't even disagree.

I don't have an argument,

just an instinct, but people should be having sex with people, disagree. I don't have an argument.
It's just an instinct. But

people should be having sex with people,

not machines. That's right.

I would go so far as to say

some of these applications are a little unethical.

Like the preying on

lonely men with no

opportunities for

a maiden.

It will make it so that they were

actually not motivated to go out

Thank you. with no opportunities for a maiden.
Like, you know, it will make it so that they were actually not motivated to go out and date and get an extra girlfriend. Like porn 10X.
Yes, yes. And I think that's really bad.
That's really bad for society. 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.
You know, I this doom cult if instead they were trying to make it so that AI is applied in a positive way. If we had a cult that was like, oh, we're going to lobby, we're going to go out and make it so that AI is a positive technology.

I'll be all for that.

And by the way, there are in history,

there are times where the culture self-corrects, right?

I think there's some self-correction on porn that's happening right now.

Fast food, right?

I mean, just generally junk.

Everyone is like, Whole Foods is like high status now. You eat Whole Foods, there's a place called Whole Foods you can go to.
Oh, that's right. And people are interested in eating healthy.
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.
And now that's like a feature of normal conversation. Yes, everyone's worried about microplastics in the testicles.
That's right, which is, I think, a legitimate concern. Absolutely.
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. 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 worshipped something. And if you don't acknowledge that, it doesn't change.
You just worship something even dumber. Yeah.
But so my question to you as someone who lives and works there is what percentage of the people who are making decisions in Silicon Valley will say out loud, you know, not I'm a Christian Jew or Muslim, 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? Yeah, for the most part, no.
I thought. Yeah, like I think most, I don't want to say most people, but like, you know, the vast majority of the discussions seem to be like more intellectual.
I think people just take for granted that everyone has a secular, mostly secular point of view.

Well, I think that 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.
Right, right. So the actual intellectual will, over time, if he's honest, will reach out.
This is the view of many scientists and many people who really went deep. 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

you of like many scientists and many people who really went deep. 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, you'll find God waiting for you. Matthias Desmet wrote a book about this, supposedly about COVID.
It was not about COVID. I just cannot recommend it more strongly.
But the book is about the point you just made, which is the deeper you go into science, the more you see some sort of order reflected that is not random at all. Yes.
And a beauty exhibited in math even. And the less you know, and the more you're certain that there's a design here, and that not human or, quote, natural.
It's supernatural. That's his conclusion and I affirm it.
But how many people do you know in your science world who think that? Yeah, I can count them on one hand, basically. How interesting.
Yeah. 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,

you know,

there's so many people

that believe that AI

is an eminent existential threat.

A lot of people believe that,

but we're going to die.

We're all going to die

in the next five years.

Comes from that hubris.

How interesting. I've never, until I met you you i've never thought of that that actually that is itself an expression of hubris i never thought of that yeah you can go negative with hubris you can go positive and we're gonna and i think the positive thing is is good like i think elon is an embodiment of that.
It's just a self-belief that you can

fly rockets and build electric cars

is good. And maybe in some cases

it's delusional, but net

will put you on

a good path for creation.

I think it can go pathological

if you're, for example,

SPF, and again, he's kind of part of

those groups,

just sort of believed

that he can do anything

in the next video. If you're, for example, SBF, and again, he's kind of part of those groups, just sort of believed that he can do anything in service of his ethics, including steal and cheat and all of that.
yeah i don't i never really understood well of course i understood too well i think but the the obvious observable fact that effective altruism led people to become shittier toward each other, not better. 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 horrible. Like the Islamic State is neither Islamic or state.
The effective altruists are neither altruists. The United Nations is not united.
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.
Because the deepest level of truth is wrapped in irony always. And machines don't get irony, right? Not yet.
Could they? Maybe. I mean, I don't take as strong of a stance as you are at the capabilities of the machines.
I do believe that if you represent it a lot. I don't know.
I'm asking. I really don't know what they're capable of.
Well, I think maybe they can't come up with real novel irony that is 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, 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 guessing what humans would say. Well then, okay, so you're just kind of making the point unavoidable.
Like, if the machines, as you have said, it makes sense, are the sum total of what's put into them, then, and that would include the personalities and biases of the people putting the data in, then you want the best people, the morally best people, which is to say the most humble people, to be doing that. But it sounds like we have

the least humble people doing that.

Yeah, I think some of them are humble.

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.

And look, this is the other point I will make

is that free markets are good because you're going to get all sorts of entrepreneurs with different motivations. And I think what determines the winner is not always the ethics or whatever, but it's the larger culture.
Like what kind of product is pulling out of you? if they're pulling the porn and the companion chatbots, whatever,

versus they're pulling the education

and the healthcare,

and I think all the positive things

will make our life better.

I think that's really on the larger culture.

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, then there are entrepreneurs that will spring up and serve this. That's totally right.
And it is a snake eating its tail at some point because of course you serve the baser human desires

and you create

a culture

that inspires

those desires

in a greater

number of people

in other words

the more porn

you have

the more porn

people want

like actually

yes

that sound

is the leaky

shower head

that came

with your place

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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 for diagnoses, which really is just a matter of sorting the data, like what's most likely. That's right.
And a machine can always do that more efficiently and more quickly than any hospital or individual doctor. So like, and diagnosis is like the biggest hurdle.
Yes. That's going to like, that's going to actually put people out of business, right? 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? I actually have a concrete story about that. I've dealt with like a chronic issue for a couple of years.
I spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on doctors out of pocket, get like world's experts and all that. Hundreds of thousands of dollars.
Yes. And they couldn't come up with a right diagnosis.
Eventually, it took me writing a little bit of software to collect the data or whatever, but I ran it, I ran the AI, I used the AI, 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.
Turns out it was the right diagnosis. 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.

So we're not that far from having publicly available.

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.

We have this program called 100 Days of Code.

If you give it 20 minutes, do a little bit of coding every day, in three months, you'll be a good enough coder to build a startup. Eventually, you'll get people working for you and you'll upscale and all of that, but you'll have enough skills.
In fact, I'll put up a challenge out there, 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 it. We'll give them some credits and cloud services, whatever.
Just tweet at me or something and mention this podcast and I'll help them. What's your Twitter? Amasad.
A-M-A-S-A-D. So, but there are a lot of entrenched interests.
I mean, I don't want to get into the whole COVID poison thing, but I'm revealing my biases. 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 were high motives mixed with low motives because that's how people are. You know, it's always a good and bad but um but to some extent the profit motive prevailed over public health yes that is i think fair to say yes and so they if they're willing to hurt people to keep the stock price up they i mean what's the resistance you're going to get to allowing people to come to a more more accurate diagnosis with a machine for free.
Yeah. In some sense, that's why I think open source AI, people learning how to do some of the stuff themselves, is probably good enough.
Of course, if there's a company that's building these services, it's going to do better. 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.
By the way, you should always talk to your doctor. I talk to my doctor.
I'm not giving people advice to kind of figure out all this themselves. But I do think that it's already empowering.
So that's sort of step one. 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. 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. I'm just not doing that because I'm not insane.

I don't take real estate advice

from homeless people.

I don't take financial advice

from people who are going to jail

for fraud.

So like,

I'm sure there's a doctor out there

who would apologize,

but I haven't met one yet.

So for someone like me,

who's just,

I'm not going to a doctor

until they apologize,

this could be like

literally life-saving.

Right.

So to the question of whether there's going to be a regulatory capture, a doctor until they apologize. This could be like literally life-saving.
Right. So,

to the question of whether there's going to be a regulatory capture,

I think that

the...

That's why you see

Silicon Valley getting into politics.

Hmm.

Silicon Valley

was always sort of into politics.

When I was... I remember I came in 2012.
It was early on in my time. It was the Romney-Obama debate.
And I was... Can I just pause and say, imagine a debate between Romney and Obama who agree on everything.
Yes. I didn't see a lot of daylight

and people were just like making fun of Romney.

It was like,

he said something like binders full of women

and kind of stuck with whatever.

And I remember asking everyone around me,

like, who are you with?

I was like, of course, Democrats.

Like, of course.

It was like, why isn't anyone here for Republicans?

And they're like, oh, because they're dumb. Only dumb people are going to vote for Republicans.
And Silicon Valley was this one-state town in a way. Actually, look, there's data on donations by company for state.
Netflix is 99%

to Democrats

and 1% to

Republicans. If you look up the

diversity of parties in North

Korea, it's actually a little better.

Of course it is. They have more choices there.

They have a more honest media too.

But anyways, you see now a lot of people are surprised

that a lot of people

in tech are going for Republicans,

going for Trump.

and uh

Thank you. But anyways, I mean, you see now a lot of people are surprised that a lot of people in tech are going for Republicans, going for Trump.
And particularly Mark Andreessen and Ben Horowitz put out a two-hour podcast talking about... So they are the biggest venture capitalists in the United States, I think.
I don't know on what metric you would judge, but they're certainly on their way to be the biggest. They're the most, I think the best for sure.
And- They put up, what was their, I didn't, I should have watched, I didn't. Yeah, so their reasoning for why they would vote for Trump.
By the way, you know, they would have never done that in like 2018 or 19, whatever. And so this vibe shift that's happening.
How is it received? It's still mixed, but I think way better than what would have happened 10 years ago. They would have been canceled and no founder would take their money.
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.
That's got to change minds if Andreessen Horowitz is doing it. Yeah, yeah.
It would have certainly changed minds. I think give people some courage to say I am for Trump as well, at minimum.
But I think it does change my mind. And they put out the arguments is, they put out this agenda called little tech.
There's big tech and they have their lobbying and whatever. Who's lobbying for little tech? Like smaller companies.
Companies like ours, but much smaller too. Like one, two person companies.
And actually no one is... Your company would be considered little? In Silicon Valley, yeah.
I want a little company. Right.
But really, startups that just started, typically no one is protecting them politically. No one is really thinking thinking about it and it's very easy to disadvantage startups like you just talked about with healthcare regulation very easy to create regulators to capture such that companies can't even get off the ground doing their thing and so they came up with this agenda that we're going to be the firm that's going to be looking out for that little guy, the little tech, which I think is brilliant.
And part of their argument for Trump is that the AI, for example, like the Democrats, are really excited about regulating AI. One of the most hilarious things that happened i think uh um kamala harris was uh 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 someone uh whatever's existential.
So she interpreted existential risk as like any risk is existential. And so that's just one anecdote, but like there was this anecdote where she was like, AI, it's a two-letter word.
And you clearly don't understand it very well and they're moving very fast at regulating it. They put out an executive order that a lot of people think.
They kind of, I mean, the tweaks they've done so far from a user perspective to keep it safe are really like just making sure it hates white people. Like it's about pushing a dystopian, totalitarian social agenda, racist social agenda on the country.
Like, is that going to be embedded in it permanently? I think it's a function of the culture

rather than the regulation.

So I think the culture

was sort of this woke culture

broadly in America,

but certainly in Silicon Valley.

And now that the vibe shift

is happening,

I think Microsoft

just fired their DEI team.

Microsoft.

Really?

Yeah.

I mean, it's a huge vibe shift. Are they going to learn to code? Microsoft am, perhaps.
So, you know, I wouldn't pin this on the government just yet, but it's very easy. Oh, no, no, no.
I just meant, Democratic members of Congress, I know for a fact, applied pressure to the labs. Like, no, you can't.
It has to reflect our values. Okay.
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So maybe that's where it's coming from.
But 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

change. I think Elon buying

Twitter

is, in letting

people talk and debate,

moved the culture

to, I think, a more moderate place.

I think he's gone a little

more, you know,

a little further. But

I think it was net positive on the culture because it was so far left. It was so far left inside these companies, the way they were designing their products such that George Washington will look like there's a black George Washington or what have you.
That's just insane, right? 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.
There are lots of truths I don't want to hear that don't comport with my desires, but I don't want to be lied to. George Washington was not black.
None of the framers were. They were all white Protestant men.
Sorry, all of them. Yeah.
So like, that's a fact, deal with it. So if you're going to lie to me about that, 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, they were the controlling element. Those like sort of activist folks that were, and I was at Facebook in 2015.
You worked at Facebook? I worked at Facebook, yeah. I didn't know that.
I worked on open source mostly. I worked on React and React Native.
One of the most powerful kind of way of programming user interfaces. So I mostly worked on that.
I didn't really work on the kind of blue app and all of that. But I saw the sort of cultural change where like a small minority of activists were just like shaming anyone who is thinking independently.
And it sent Silicon Valley in this sheep-like direction where everyone is afraid of this activist class because they can cancel you. They can...
I think one of the early shots fired there was like Brendan Eich, the inventor of JavaScript, the inventor of the language that runs the browser because the way he votes or donates, whatever, got fired from his position as CTO of Moselle Browser. And that was seen as a win or something.
Again, I was very, I was not really interested in politics in like 2012, 13 when I first came to this country. But I just accepted as like, oh, you know, all these people are Democrats, liberals, what you are, whatever.
But I just looked at that and I was like, that's awful. Like, you know, no matter what his political opinion is, like, you know, you're taking from a man his ability to earn a living.
Eventually, he started another browser company and it's good, right? But this 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.
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. Silicon Valley is the last place.
Yes, it's important. What's the most important.
Yes. And so the number one requirement for leadership is courage.
Number one. Yes.
Number one. Nothing even comes close to bravery as a requirement for wise and effective leadership.
So if the leaders of these companies are afraid of like 26-year-old unmarried screechy girls in the HR department, like, whoa, that's really cowardly. Like, shut up.
You're not leading this company, I am. Like, that's super easy.
I don't know why that's so hard. Like, what? The reason I think it was hard, it was because these companies were competing for talent hand over fist.
And it was the sort of zero interest era and sort of US economy. And everyone was throwing cash at like talent.
And therefore, if you offend the sensibilities of the employees, even to the slightest bit, you're afraid that they're going to leave or something like that. I'm trying to make up an excuse for them.
Well, you could answer this question because you are the talent that you came all the way from Jordan to work in the Bay Area to be at the center of creativity in science. So 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 Damore.
They just, they don't seem like political activists to me. For the most part, yeah.
They're still a segment of the sort of programmer population. Well, they have to be rational because code is about reason, right? Nah.
I mean, this is the whole thing, 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. Look, I think coding could help you become more rational, but you could very easily override that.
Isn't that the basis of it? I thought. 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.
It's very easy for people to just compartmentalize, right? It's like, now I'm doing coding. Now I'm doing emotions.

Oh, so the brain

is not a computer.

The brain is not a computer.

Exactly.

Exactly.

That's my point.

I know.

You know,

so,

you know,

I'm probably,

you know,

responsible for

the most amount of people

learning to code in America

because I was like a,

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. And it went super viral and a bunch of US companies started using him, including Code Academy.
And I joined them as a founding engineer. They had just started, two guys, amazing guys.
They had just started and I joined them. We taught like 50 million people how to code.
Many of them, many millions of them are American. And the sort of rhetoric at a time, what you would say is like coding is important because it'll teach you how to think, computational thinking, and all of that.
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. You can do art with it.
You can do a lot of things with it. But ultimately, I don't think you can sit people down and make them more rational.
And you get into all these weird things if you try to do that. People can become more rational by virtue of education, by virtue of seeing that, taking a more rational approach to their life yields results, but you can't really teach it that way.
Well, I agree with that completely. That's interesting.
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 is kind of similar in some ways to every other person I've ever met who writes code. Yeah, that's true, yeah.
It's not a broad cross-section of any population. No.
At all. Well, people who make it a career, but I think anyone sort of can write a lot of code.
I'm sure. I mean, people who get paid to do it.

Right, right.

Yeah.

Interesting.

So bottom line, do you see,

and then we didn't even mention Elon Musk, David Sachs.

Yeah.

They've also come out for Trump.

So do you think the vibe shift in Silicon Valley is real?

Yes.

Actually, I would credit Sachs originally perhaps more than Elon because, look, it's one party state. Yeah.
No one watches you, for example. No one ever watched anything.
I don't want to over-generalize, but most people didn't get any right wing or center-right opinions for the most part. They didn't seek it.
It wasn't there. You're swimming in just liberal, democratic sort of talking points.
I would say Sachs 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.
And I would start to hear at parties and things like that, people described their politics as sex, sexism. I just started calling it.
They were like, you know, I agree with you. Most of the time I agree with, you know, Sachs' point of view on All In podcast.
Like, yeah, you're kind of maybe moderate or center right at

this point and he's so reasonable he's first of all he's a wonderful person i in my opinion but um like i didn't have any sense of the reach of that podcast until i did i had no sense at all and he's like we do my podcast sure because i love david sacks i do the podcast like everyone i've ever met, text me.

Oh, you're on All In Podcast.

It's not my world.

I didn't realize that is the vector if you want to reach sort of business-minded people who are not very political, but are probably going to send money to a buddy who's bundling for Commonwealth because she's our candidate. That's the way to reach people like that.
That's right. By the way, this is my point about technology can have a centralizing effect, but also decentralizing effect.
Yes. So YouTube, you can argue, YouTube is the centralized thing.
They're pushing opinions on us, whatever. But now you have a platform on YouTube after you got fired from Fox, right? Yeah.
Saks can have a platform and put these opinions out. And I think there was a moment during COVID that I felt like they're going to close everything down.
Yeah. For good reason you felt that way.
Yes. And maybe there were, maybe there's going to be some other event that will allow them to close it down.
But one of the things I really love about America is the First Amendment. It's just the most important institutional innovation in the history of humanity.
I agree with that completely. And we should really protect it.
You grew up without it too. We should really protect it.
We should be so coveting of it. Like your wife or something.
Can you, I totally agree, hands off. Can you just repeat your description of its importance historically? I'm sorry you put it so well.
It's the most important institutional innovation in human history. The First Amendment is the most important institutional innovation in human history.
Yes. I love that.
I think it's absolutely right. And as someone who grew up with it in a country that had had it for, you know, 200 years when I was born, you know, 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. But as someone who, you know, grew up in a country that does not have it,

which is true of every other country on the planet. It's the only country that has it.
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, you know, We had this conformist mob rule mentality that people call woke,

the reason that we're now past that almost, it's still kind of there, but we're on our way past

that is because of the First Amendment and free speech. And again, I would credit Elon a lot for

Thank you. almost, you know, it's still kind of there, but we're like, we're on our way past that is because of the first amendment and free speech.
And again, I would credit Elon a lot for buying Twitter and letting us talk and debate and push back on the craziness, right? 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.
So I'm not, and I love Elon, but I'm, 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. Like why didn't some American born person do that? I guess because they don't, we don't take it.
Yeah. You don't 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.

Did Wall Street Journal cover it?

Peggy Newnan 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 I just talk about normal things,

free speech, one of them, but also hard hard work, appreciation for talent and all of that. And it was starting to close up, right? I started to see meritocracy kind of like being less valued and that's part of the reason why I wrote that thread.
And what I realized is like, 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 foreigners.

Oh, I think that's absolutely right.

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 are great.

I like traveling to foreign countries.

I like my best friend is foreign born actually, 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'm sort of thrown off the brainwashing.
Just a 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 of the

Middle East, 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. 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.
I always defend the herbs in a heartfelt way.

But no, I totally agree with that strongly. I always defend the Arabs in a heartfelt way.
But no, I wonder if 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. You know, you come from Punjab and go to Stanford and all of a sudden, like you've got that same rotten decadent attitudes of your native-born professors from Stanford.
Do you see that? No, I'm not sure what's the distribution like. I mean, speaking of Indians, I mean, on the right side of the spectrum, we have Vivek and...
Who's the best? Yeah. And 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'm not sure, I'm not sure it could, I think it's, yeah, I think foreigners for the most part do appreciate it more, but it's easy. You know about how I just try not to be this conformist,

kind of really absorb everything around me and act on it.

But it's very easy for people to go in these one-party state places

and really become part of this mob mentality

where everyone believes the same thing.

Any deviation from that is considered cancelable offense. And you asked about the shift in Silicon Valley.
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 and that's really rep repulsive for them. Where, you know, there's like a party line.
It's like, Biden is sharp as a tack. Sharp as a tack.
Everyone says that. And then the debates happen.
Oh, unfit, unfit, unfit. And then, oh, he's out.
Oh, Kamala, Kamala, Kamala. It's like, you know, lockstep, and there's like no range.
There's no, there's very little dissent within

that party. And maybe Republicans

I think at some point were the same. Maybe now

it's sort of a little

different. But this is what

why people are attracted 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 know, maybe

don't be so controlling of opinions and like be okay with more dissent you have to relinquish a little bit of power to do that i mean it's the same as raising teenagers 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 you know if it's a 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. 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, you have to pull back and be like, I'm not going to say anything. That's right.
This child will come back. My gravitational pull is strong enough

that I'm not going to lose this child

because she does something that offends me today.

That's right.

You know what I mean?

Yeah.

You can't hold too tightly.

And I feel like they don't understand.

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.

Yeah.

These are people who feel like

they're losing their power.

Yes.

Thank you. course, I'm not in the meetings, but I feel by their behavior that they feel very threatened.
That's what I see. 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. If you're worried about what people say on Facebook, you've lost confidence in yourself.
That's right. That's right.
Do you feel that? Yeah. And I mean, there's Matt Taibbi and Michael Schellenberger and a lot of folks did a lot of great work on censorship.
Yes. And the government's kind of involvement in that and how they push social media companies.
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. 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.
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.
Yeah, it's like everything what we talked about earlier. It's just making people stupid by taking their faculty of trying to discern truth.
I think that's how you actually become rational by trying to figure out whether something is true or not. And then being right or wrong and then that really kind of trains you for having a better judgment.
You talked about judgment. That's how people build good judgment.
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. Take the job, stay home, wear the mask.
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, which is now the mainstream theory.
And again, a lot of this self-corrected because of the First Amendment.

Yeah, and Elon.

Wow, 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.

It's absolutely my pleasure.

It was mine.

Thank you.

Thanks.

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