Ep. 1864 - Governments Are Telling Citizens To Prepare For The Worst... Here's What You Need To Know

Well, the experts are unanimous. We are all doomed. You need to stock up on food, water, gasoline, ammo as soon as possible. Pay $10,000 for a generator. Don't forget to build a solar-powered farmhouse somewhere far away from the city, just in case the fuel supply completely runs out and/or the Chinese detonate an EMP over your neighborhood or something like that. These are all basic steps that you should be taking right now so that in the event of a total catastrophe, you won't be overtaken by the inevitable zombie hoard that results. At least not right away. These are the kinds of messages that we have all been bombarded with. I've been bombarded with over the past few days as the algorithm has decided to confront me and I think many of us with every imaginable doomsday scenario all at once. Now, on one level, this is nothing new. There's always been a market for hysteria and paranoia. Fear is, as we know, a lucrative industry. Now this market is bigger than ever thanks to amplification from the various big tech platforms. If you interact with just one post on X about how, say, the UK government is telling people to prepare for an emergency, as I did, then as I was, you will be quickly overwhelmed with all of this kind of stuff. This is what my feed looks like right now, more or less. It's just full-on apocalyptic, non-stop. Every story is something along these lines. Once you're swept up by the algorithm, it just, it just floods you with a fire hose of doom slop. This is how the algorithm works. Of course, you interact with one kind of piece of content and it just feeds you only that for weeks at a time. As you can see, various governments as we are seeing on X, including America and the UK, are warning of an impending disaster, the power grids about to get wiped out, and so on. There's no way to see content like this day after day and remain unaffected by it, even if you're a rational person as I try to be on my good days anyway. It's still, it gets in your head. None of us are immune. You're either going to take the warning seriously or you're going to try to tune them out. But even then, it's hard to ignore what you're hearing after all if there's even a small chance that some terrible calamity will occur than it's reasonable to make some basic preparations like what we're being encouraged to do. The cost-benefit ratio seems to favor a cautious approach. On his show the other day, Dan Bungino, the former Deputy Director of the FBI, weighed in with a somewhat measured take on the issue, I think a very measured take, actually. He didn't endorse any of the apocalyptic predictions, but he didn't dismiss them either. Instead, he encouraged his audience to prepare themselves for whatever's coming. We should pay attention to this, because he's not just a random person on X, so watch. There have been some warnings put out by the UK government and elsewhere, about 30 days of preparedness and have food ready and power. You know I am a firm, committed believer in the don't hit the bed theory, hit with an S in front of it. In other words, we were young agents. If you panicked on a security detail with the secret service, you were out. That was it. They would never take you on a protection assignment again. Panic kills. I was not in the military, I haven't been in combat, but ask your heroes who have been. They will tell you, you can't panic. I can't even imagine what that scenario is like. However, the way to reduce anxiety and panic in tumultuous times is to be prepared. Have yourself an emergency radio, have yourself some batteries, get yourself some emergency food, get yourself a rain collection and water filtration, some filtration tablets. The best day of your life, you don't need them in 10 years, you're like, I wasted a thousand bucks or whatever. And you throw it out. The worst day of your life is God forbid something were to happen. The worst day of your life is your kids are looking you into face like, hey, dad, mom, where's the water? Well, we don't have any. There are plenty of credible commentators who are basically saying the same thing. They're saying that it feels a lot like February 2020 all over again, just before the COVID lockdowns began, kind of has that feeling and once again, it's an election year where the Trump administration is clearly vulnerable. There's a threat of a new development that could fundamentally change the economy. In this case, it's AI. There are scattered reports of a pending crisis, but no one sure how to verify any of it, or even what the nature of the potential crisis even is. And in general, just like in 2020, there's a sense that we can't trust anything we're told. One of the experts have any credibility whatsoever. So what do you believe? Problem is that since we're all buried in constant slop and propaganda, it's very difficult to separate the wheat from the chaff, the signal from the noise. How do you identify which threats are real if any of them are and which threats are fabricated or exaggerated? There's their possibility that all of this hysteria is a siop designed to demoralize voters, especially conservatives, right before an election. Your challenge is to separate what's a real risk versus doom slop and paranoia driven panic and social contagion. So what's needed, I think, is a blow-by-blow analysis of the leading theories for why the apocalypse is approaching and what sort of apocalypse is approaching, if any. So we need to go through each claim, try to make sense of it one way or the other. We have to determine the credibility of as many of these claims as possible. And that's what we'll try to do. Now I have no special insight or sources here. You know, I can't claim that I can definitively set the record straight on any of this stuff, but I can try to use some basic common sense as far as that goes, and that's what we will do today. So we'll start with an ultra viral post from an account called Live Door News, which racked up more than 20 million views. And it says, quote, Minister Hassano issues emergency requests to all citizens to prepare food, water, and toilet supplies. The minister stated that on November 2nd, when the disaster prevention agency is launched, an emergency request will be issued to all citizens to prepare for disasters. He mentioned that even without public assistance, citizens should prepare at least a minimum of three days worth of food, toilet supplies, and water at home. Now because this post doesn't provide any context, you can map whatever theory you want onto it as a lot of people are doing. In truth, what's happening, though, on November 2nd is that Japan is launching a new disaster prevention agency to deal primarily with earthquakes. They are, after all, a volcanic island in the middle of an ocean that regularly gets hit by tsunamis, and they're situated directly next door to a rogue, nuclear state, and not to bring up a touchy subject, but they have been hit with nukes before on two occasions. And therefore, Japan's government routinely issues guidance like this, telling people to prepare for disasters. In fact, every year since 1960, Japan has held a disaster prevention day, where millions of people perform synchronized evacuation drills. This has been going on for a very long time, and they began their tradition on the anniversary of the 1923 Great Kanto earthquake, which destroyed nearly 400,000 homes in Tokyo. On disaster prevention day, government officials wear jumpsuits. Kids put on fireproof hoods in school. It's part of the culture, and the issue of guidance, and they hold many other drills on top of this. A decade ago, after a major earthquake and tsunami, Japan formally implemented a policy where people need at least three days and ideally seven days worth of supplies in case of another earthquake. And before that, the three day standard was the norm, and now it's just kind of the baseline. So this is how disaster management works in Japan. They've been issuing new guidance on preparing for disasters for a century. It's nothing new. But when you remove all the context, and you combine it with other reports, you know, it's easy for hysteria to take over. And they count live door news. This all works out. They get a ton of money from ad revenue because so many people clicked on their story, like I did, which was deliberately misleading. And the problem with the incentives created by the algorithm is that it inspires copycats. Lots of them. So another round of viral posts were created in which large accounts warned that various other governments around the world were telling their citizens, citizens to prepare for some unspecified apocalyptic scenario. And so now through the algorithm and through people's imagination, you're connecting all these threads. Japan, with this country, with this country, what's going on? One viral report mentions that the UK government is involved in this. And once again, some of the posts were more accurate than others. Polymarket, for example, published the following warning that was seen by nearly a million people, quote, "breaking. The UK government urges citizens to stockpile at least three days of emergency food and water amid the global cyber security crisis." Now Polymarket, of course, is a gambling platform, but lately, as you might have noticed, especially If you spend any time on X, they pop. a lot with non-gambling related content. They're getting into the business of posting breaking news, which seems kind of weird. It seems like a strange pivot, but it's actually a very smart marketing strategy. You know, one way to ensure that your brand is always showing up in people's feeds is to post some splashy headline about current events. It also helps push the idea that polymarket is a prediction market, a tool for serious policy analysts, and not just another betting website, which is what it is. Meanwhile, the account unusual whales, which normally focuses on noteworthy trades in the stock market, especially by insiders like Nancy Pelosi, weighed in on the situation as well. They posted this message, which was seen by millions of people, quote, "Breaking UK government has requested that citizens stockpile canned food and drinking water for at least three days per BBC." So in one thing you know, of course, we've seen on social media for a long time, especially on X is that the word "breaking" has lost all meaning. So you'll have an account that posts "breaking" and then it's information that has already been reported for three days by a million other accounts, so not exactly breaking news. But anyway, they cite a source, the BBC, and we're now led to believe that the UK state broadcaster is making this proclamation. Other accounts didn't bother with the attribution. Here's a post by a guy named Ethan Levins, for example. It racked up nearly two million views as well. Quote, "Something very bad is brewing in Europe, UK advising citizens to stockpile food, German hospitals prepping for mass casualty events, and German troops moving towards Lithuania. This is not normal. NATO is preparing to fight Russia. This has to stop." So you notice also various different explanations being offered by these random posts. The polymarket mentioned cybersecurity. This guy is saying, "Oh, it's Russia." Then there's this post from the account Watcher Guru, which also received millions of views. Quote, "Just in, UK government, urgent citizens to stockpile three days of emergency food and water due to growing cyber-attack threats." Okay, now we're back to cyber-attack. And there's many more posts like this, and then several of them, unlike the warnings about Japan, are actually legitimate. There has been a change in the UK's messaging on preparing for disasters. A month ago, for example, this was the kind of content that the state broadcaster was producing on the topic. Watch. "Dockup on food for extreme weather." That's what the UK government says we should be doing because climate change is making food supplies more unpredictable. But what food should you be buying? You should keep some healthy options at the back of your cupboards, things like whole grain cereals, crackers, pasta, and oats. For protein, you can stock up on things like lentils or tinned pulses, whilst canned fish like tuna or mackerel is also a really good option. You might be surprised to hear that fruit in a tin is actually quite nutritious, as are pickled eggs and vegetables. But there are some things to avoid. Things tinned in brine or syrup, instant noodles, and process meats such as corn, beef, or hot dogs, which provide extra salt, sugar, and saturated fats that we don't need in our diets. And if you're worried about these foods lacking flavour, be sure to keep some herbs and spices around for extra seasoning. That needs to be said not to get into the technicality, into the weeds too much, but this is utterly horrible advice on many levels. She says that in an emergency when the world is ending, you don't want to eat instant noodles or hot dogs, not because they might be difficult to prepare, but because they have saturated fats that are bad for your diet. Now personally, when I am experiencing the apocalypse, I'm not worried about having saturated fat in my diet. Okay, when there's a nuclear bomb falling in my neighbourhood, saturated fat is really the least of my worries. I'm also not going to be obsessing about cholesterol or salt intake. What I want above all is to have food, preferably food that doesn't taste terrible, that contains a lot of calories in a very small package. Hot dogs are a pretty good option in that regard, but she wants everyone eating lentils instead, which is a good way to make people even more depressed than they already are in this scenario. All of your friends are dead, the world's falling apart, climate change, zombies, AI robots, everything's happening, and on top of that, you're stuck eating lentils because you're through away all the hot dogs because you'll listen to the BBC. What's the point of staying alive in that scenario? It creates kind of a paradox. If there's a nuclear holocaust and you're safely hidden away in your bunker and all you have to eat are healthy, vegetarian options, then why exactly would you want to survive the nuclear holocaust in the first place? I'd prefer to be incinerated and just get it over with. Well, she never grapples with this paradox, but she does explain, hopefully enough, that she's offering this advice on behalf of the state broadcaster because of the threat of climate change. Now, everybody watching this video knows this is a pretext, even in the UK, the climate scam has played out. The real point of the video was to get people ready for another emergency that the British government might think is likely, although they don't want to say it out loud. And to that end, within the last month, the British government launched a more comprehensive B-ready campaign, which dropped in the climate change rhetoric for the most part. This is a three-year campaign that they're committing to where the British government is partnering with hundreds of organizations and agencies. They also published this website just a few days ago. You can see it on your screen there. The website reads, "Here are some simple effective steps you can take to be ready for emergencies and the disruption they cause. Many of these activities can be helpful across a range of different types of emergency." And some of the activities include having enough bottled water for three days. They estimate three liters per person per day, plus non-perishable food for three days along with a torch, which I believe is a flashlight, although you can never underestimate how primitive the UK is, plus a battery-powered FM radio and cash in case electronic payments or ATMs are disruptive. And you also need baby formula, pet food, etc. Now, this is much more general advice than the climate change guidance. And it's getting the attention of millions of people in the UK. This is reporting from the British outlet, LBC, quote, "bottle water baked beans and batteries are selling out at some supermarkets after Britain's were urged to prepare for short term disruption to essential services. The rush follows the launch of the government's B-ready campaign, which advises households to keep a three-day supply of long-life food, drinking water, and basic emergency equipment at home. Shoppers using OK-do found several essentials unavailable shortly after the announcement, including bottled water, batteries, and baked beans. Some super ranges were also listed as out of stock alongside brands of bottled water." So they got everyone's attention. This is obviously a situation that most people in Britain recognize as out of the ordinary. But according to British government officials, including their security minister, the point of the campaign is just to bring the UK in line with other countries in Europe. Watch. Now, our research shows that just 13% of people in the UK feel that they're prepared for an emergency, like a severe storm, that could cut them off from the services they rely on. This figure is far lower than our European neighbors. The very same research showed that 84% of people in the UK want the government to share more information about the steps they can take to increase their preparedness. So Mr Speaker, to give some credit to the opposition, they also recognise this resilience gap while in government, and launched a new website to share preparedness guidance with the public. But that website stopped short of a proper campaign, not enough people noticed it, and those who did found the guidance hard to follow. This government is committed to having an honest conversation with the public about the risks that we face and helping them to prepare household by household, step by step, to improve our national resilience. To that effect, we've published updated preparedness guidance for households and launched a three-year campaign to raise awareness of the simple steps people can take to be ready for everyday emergencies. Now I want to be clear from the outset that we are not launching this campaign because of any specific or imminent threat. Instead, launching this campaign brings the UK into line with almost every single European country and countless others around the world who already run similar campaigns every year. Now it's true that other countries in Europe have emergency plans that they expect people to follow, although most of them don't tell their citizens to hoard cash in case the electrical grid fails. What's unique about the UK's approach is that it's a massive three-year blitz that seemingly came out of nowhere without any clear articulated justification. The British government began issuing general household emergency guidance in 2024, but this is a much more developed program. So they went from zero to 60 very quickly, and that raises the obvious question of why now? Why are we now concerned about all of these other threats when they were telling us about climate change? You know, telling us that was the real issue just a few weeks ago. Whatever your bias may be, you have to ask, does this have something to do with the fact that the United States military? is also simultaneously preparing for a worst-case scenario where our basic, you know, where our military bases are cut off from essential services, including power. It's a very similar scenario that they're preparing for. Watch. -The Pentagon preparing for a nightmare scenario, a global war that could knock out power grids, cripple supply chains, and leave military bases cut off from essential services. Achieve National Security Correspondent Jennifer Griffin reports live in Washington. This is getting a lot of play online, Jennifer. -That's right, John. Well, the Pentagon has a doomsday plane, and now it's updating its doomsday plan. Moving beyond its Cold War era continuity of government planning, which called for key military leaders to retreat to hardened facilities in Cheyenne Mountain in the event of an incoming nuclear attack. Now the Pentagon sees a new nightmare scenario, a global war that knocks out America's power grids, cripples, supply chains, and leaves. U.S. military bases cut off from essential services. Other allies, including the U.K., have been warning their populations to stockpile 90 days of food and water just in case. Under the new Pentagon initiative called Fortress, every major military installation in the continental U.S. would be expected to operate independently for at least 90 days with its own electricity, water, fuel, and communications. Documents obtained by Fox reveal plans for portable nuclear reactors, backup power grids, and massive reserves of ammunition, critical minerals, medical supplies, and spare parts. The Pentagon also wants civilian factories ready to switch to wartime weapons production, alternative supply chains in place if foreign suppliers are cut off, and military communications, capable of functioning, even if GPS and satellites are disrupted. Now, the question is not, why do we need our military bases to survive for 90 days without outside support, including power, grid access, fuel, and communications? You could think of plenty of reasons for that kind of preparation, that makes sense. The question is, why is all this preparation happening at this particular moment across several different countries all at once? What kind of cyber attack or nuclear attack are they worried about exactly? Or is this something else? Now, it's worth noting that the UK isn't simply telling its citizens to prepare for a worst-case scenario. There are signs that their military is taking action as well. This is from the Times in London, quote, "Three of Britain's four nuclear deterrent submarines are out at sea in an unusual situation. It's been at least five years since this happened according to former naval source." Now, this is from a Sky News, which followed up on that report. And here's what they said. - There was some posts on social media. You have people that sort of stand outside Faes Lane where we have our nuclear deterrent submarines and can sort of see them moving in and out. And there was observations that three of the four nuclear deterrent submarines are at sea. And that is correct. The Times first reported this, but it is very unusual to have three submarines out at once. Like, one, of course, is going to be part of the continuous at sea deterrents. So we have one ballistic missile on nuclear warhead carrying submarine that is at sea all the time at any time ready to fire if needed. It is the UK's ultimate security guarantee and also, obviously, part of the NATO umbrella. But the other two boats, the Ministry of Defence is not commenting as to why. But it does seem as though it's more a sign of improved availability than any kind of response to any threat because any movement in nuclear deterrent submarines could be seen as some kind of signaling. It will definitely be noticed by the UK's enemies. But it would seem as though, most likely, one of these other boats is working up ready to go on operations. And the other one, most likely undergoing sea trials to be able to be ready to replace that boat when it comes back in due course. So by itself, this doesn't necessarily mean anything. Apparently, several of these ships have had maintenance issues for many years. And they're now back in service all at once. So maybe the timing is purely coincidental. And to be clear, to be fair, there are plenty of people who are stringing together various misleading claims to make it seem like other countries are doing the same thing. For example, I've seen people claim that Germany is suddenly investing in bunkers this week when in reality, they've been doing that for more than a year. Again, there's a lot of deception going around. A lot of maybe disconnected things that are being tied together. And there's a lot of people that are trying to terrorize you for various different reasons. Sometimes for reasons as simple as it gets them clicks. Along those lines that came across this report from Reuters yesterday, quote, "Breaking a hacker is attempting to breach the US Federal Election Commission and systems, and that agency has had to temporarily shut down its web facing services as a result, according to an email seen by Reuters." Now, it sounds pretty bad. And again, you're getting this in the midst of all this other stuff. So it just feels like the sky is falling. But then you realize that the FEC doesn't actually count ballots or handle election returns. They track campaign donations mostly. So there's no indication here that anything sensitive may have been compromised or deleted or who might have been behind this attack. But seeing this headline, plenty of people came to the conclusion that the election is already compromised, which is not supported by this report. What is supported is that very soon the Middle East is going to become a much bigger problem. This is from the Wall Street Journal late last night, quote, "The US has told several Gulf Arab countries to be prepared for a short, intense military campaign after the US midterm elections. People briefed on the conversation said, the communications through diplomatic and military channels are among a growing number of indications. The US and Israel are readying to launch a new round of heavy combat operations against Iran, risking a major escalation in hopes of degrading Iran's strength and pushing it towards negotiations. The US military is bringing in a Patriot system from Texas to beef up its missile defenses and has moved troops off bases where they were vulnerable in preparation for escalation, officials familiar with those moves said. Now, I'm not sure why we're bothering to wait until after the midterms of this point. It's not as if voters are under the impression as they head to the polls that the war in Iran is over. We've gone through about 30 different ceasefire agreements at this point. We've had about 30 different mission accomplished moments. And for many voters, the reason they have abandoned this administration is precisely because of the war in Iran. And so it doesn't seem logical to pretend it's not happening and to delay these attacks until after the midterms as a result. There's a strange assumption that once you finish your work day, you're supposed to be able to relax, which is a nice idea, except that if you have children, getting home from work is often when the second shift begins. There are kids to feed, homework to deal with, activities to get to, and approximately 17 other things that need your attention before anybody is going to bed. Problem is that your family doesn't particularly care. If you've already had a long day at work, they still need you. This is something a lot of us at the daily wire understand. 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Cyberattacks, on the other hand, seem like a much more legitimate risk, and that's something that pops up in a lot of these scary stories we're hearing, especially since AI apparently has the capability of launching these attacks on its own without any instruction from a human. So how close are we to AI that can hack into literally anything with ease? How many months or weeks could it take for an AI to bring down the Internet or render it unusable for human beings? To me, these are the catastrophic scenarios that are worth taking seriously. And the weird thing is that it seems like some people are freaking out about that and kind of everyone else is not remotely worried at all. But if you are worried about it and you engage with any of any kind of content at all about it, well, then again, the algorithm will just pour it on you by the gallon. And so very quickly, reasonable concerns turn into hysterical panicking. It's just kind of a bizarre and unsettling state of affairs no matter how you look at it or how it turns out. But if you try to tune out the panic and focus on what we do know, it does appear that things are curing out of control. This is a report from Axios, quote, "major US banks are detecting unauthorized third party AI agents operating inside customer accounts with some agents attempting to take actions that appear to be independent of user instructions, sources tell Axios. AI agents are becoming a nightmare for America's banks, making their way into banking systems faster than financial institutions can respond. The difficulty in distinguishing between a human and an unauthorized bot is forcing banks to block the technology and rapidly rewrite their terms of service. Banks including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, JP Morgan, Wells Fargo and others are racing to contain agent risks, some are aware of unauthorized access. Bank executive described the situation as horrifying, with one official saying the industry has grave concerns about agents gaining access to customer accounts and taking steps that could impact user finances." Now they clarify in that report that many customers for reasons no one will ever understand have voluntarily given AI agents access to their bank accounts. I have no idea why you would ever do that, but that's what people have done. But at the same time, they also established that there's a risk of an AI intrusion into the banks that to some extent is already happening, and you have to wonder how long is it until AI start gaining access to millions of people's bank accounts without any authorization whatsoever. Now, it's probably not as hard as you might think. If someone is determined to gain access to your bank account, they can bombard customer service representatives 24/7 until one of them finally cracks. They can search through various data breaches and find your personal information. AI, by the way, makes that a lot easier. There's a lot of information about you that's out there through data breaches, but you're basically safe because no one has the time to go find it because there's just so much of it. AI makes it a lot easier for someone to go find that sort of stuff. These are the more immediate sort of practical risks that it poses. It could get a lot worse than that, but, you know, and even if that doesn't work, AI can probably steal your personal information through websites that it compromises. This is reporting from Fox, quote, a pair of recently disclosed computer software vulnerabilities could put millions of websites and the personal information of everybody who uses them at risk from hackers. Researchers last week announced they had used AI to help discover two vulnerabilities in a programming language known as PHP, which underpins large sections of the internet. An estimated 70% of the internet uses PHP in some form, meaning most websites are impacted. Now, I'm not going to pretend to be a computer security expert, but it stands to reason that 10 years ago, vulnerabilities like this would have been much harder to exploit at scale with AI new vulnerabilities are being discovered every day and they can be exploited instantly by thousands of AI agents working around the clock all at once. Now I understand the arguments about, you know, regulatory capture and how AI companies are certainly not trustworthy actors, but at the same time, we cannot ignore the fact that they are now warning us the companies themselves about all of this. And here's an article from TechRadar, for example, quote, "as AI firm andthropic gears up for an enormous $2 trillion initial initial public offering IPO could be the largest in stock market history, the company has just warned that AI could pose catastrophic or existential risk to humanity." In papers filed with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission andthropic outlines some of the risks facing the company and its investors, one of the more startling sections of the document outlines how anthropics AI models could accelerate beyond anyone's ability to evaluate and safeguard them and pose catastrophic or existential risk to humanity, particularly if such systems were misused, replicated, weaponized, or allowed to operate with a high degree of autonomy. Aside from the obvious danger posed to humanity, anthropic is also apparently worried that such an outcome could adversely affect our business, financial condition, and results of operations." Yes, I mean, it might destroy humanity, but the bigger concern anthropic says is that it could affect their business too. Now, hearing this, even as anthropic is in the middle of creating technology that they know is going to destroy thousands of businesses, but we should be worried about theirs. Anyway, hearing this, maybe you'll say, "Well, anthropic is run by anti-white left-wingers, who have a long history of exaggerating their capabilities and the capabilities of their products, and that's all true, but it would be simply foolish to assume that these kinds of warnings from the actual companies who are creating this technology should not be taken seriously at all." That would be foolish. There is no precedent for this, exactly, no matter how you slice it. Now, sure, companies like to exaggerate how powerful their products are. That's always happened, but we have never, not ever, had major corporations in a particular industry all agreeing unanimously that their product, that they are making, poses a catastrophic threat to mankind. That has never happened. I defy anyone to come up with another example of this sort of thing, of an industry making a product, and then all the major players in that industry turning around and telling the public this thing we're making could really hurt you. That doesn't happen. So we're in unprecedented territory, no matter how you look at it, which means that any attempt to explain this away using historical frameworks or analogies like regulatory capture or marketing employees just doesn't exactly hold up, or at least it might not hold up. We shouldn't take what these companies are saying as gospel. That would be quite stupid, but it would be just as stupid, if not considerably more stupid, to simply assume out of hand that a technology is not dangerous even when the people making the technology are telling us directly and explicitly that it is. And if you listen to other major players in AI, people like Elon Musk, who is not an anti-white left-winger, you're hearing something very similar. Watch. In five years, we'll have probably, so five years being say, 2031, I think, digital intelligence will exceed the sum of all human intelligence. That there will be in five years, probably, there might be a, let's say at least a hundred million humanoid robots, but maybe a billion. Let me end and I'll predict that the economy is probably vice its current size in maybe six years, five to seven years, because you're going to hit a doubling period where the economic output is increasing so fast that plus minus a few years, we'll see giant changes. So you might only have three years left according to Elon to make money selling your labor. And he promises a much brighter future as a result, but of course you can't guarantee that. There's no predicting what will happen when the economy is transformed like this, if that happens. the transfer. is 10% of what he's describing. And that's not even getting into the fact that, you know, in the best case scenario he's talking about, everybody will basically be on welfare. No one's doing anything. Well, we're all just dependent on our AI paychecks. So even the optimistic predictions for AI predictions from people who know what they're talking about like Elon still involve a sudden extreme, totally unprecedented, extraordinary radical shift in the way that human society's function. And any shift of that kind when it is radical extreme and sudden will be tumultuous and difficult and carry with it huge risks, both foreseeable and unforeseeable. That is unavoidable. You cannot radically and suddenly transform human society without it being at a minimum extremely tumultuous. Even if it all works out for the best in the long run, which is far from guaranteed, the path to get there is likely to be profoundly turbulent. And even the optimists, again, again, I'm talking about the optimistic case here, we'll admit that. 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But there is one silver lining and because this show has been maybe depressing so far as a change of pace, we'll mention this. The good news is that if AI takes everybody's jobs, it's going to take down a lot of adult daycares in Silicon Valley as well. Yesterday we talked about how Microsoft offered buyouts to 25% of its workforce ahead of massive layoffs that are expected. Upon reflection, 25% appears to be a very low number. When you take a look at what these Microsoft employees do all day, it quickly becomes clear that AI simply cannot replace jobs in Silicon Valley quickly enough, at least in their case. They'll be clear, these Microsoft employees are not simply phoning it in. They're also uploading day-in-the-life videos on Instagram where they brag about how little they work and how many perks they get, like coffee and ice cream, watch. [Music] [Music] It's amazing they can even be bothered with voluntary buyouts when their employees are posting videos like this on social media. It's just fire everyone who records themselves treating the office like a resort. That's not difficult. You can probably cut 50% of the workforce basis based solely on these videos. Here's another. [Music] [Music] So doing work at Microsoft seems to involve writing a few random words on a whiteboard before going back to your catered lunch or playing squash or rock climbing or whatever. You can spend all day going through these kinds of videos and trust me, there are a lot of them. You get the point. It's reminiscent of the day-in-the-life videos that Twitter employees would record before Elon took over and fired all them. There's a question that there are a lot of fake jobs in this country, and if AI got rid of the fake ones, it wouldn't be the worst thing in the world. But as for the rest of the economy, people will actually produce something of value. There is indeed some cause for alarm to put it mildly about what's coming next. So in summary, some of these terrifying doomsday stories are probably not worth taking seriously. Some on the other hand might be. You probably were hoping that the moral of the story would be slightly more reassuring. You're hoping that we would just go through and debunk all the stuff and say, "Yeah, everything's fine. Don't worry." Nothing to worry about these people are dumb. But it's not quite that simple. And blithe, baseless reassurance is just as irresponsible as apocalyptic fear mongering. So I'm trying not to fall into either trap here. The most reassuring thing I can say in this only goes so far admittedly, but it's not for nothing. Is that no matter what potential catastrophes may lurk somewhere out there on some possible horizon? There's nothing to be gained from obsessively worrying about them or spending all your time and mental energy, you know, marinating an anxiety over them as the click farmers and the algorithm that puts their slop in front of you want you to. The story of humanity is a series of disasters and calamities spaced out by periods of relative stability. That pattern has not changed. It never will. The best thing you can do is accept that fact for what it is. Don't let it take up an anordinate amount of mental and emotional real estate and stay prepared within reason. It's probably a good idea to bring us back to the beginning and some of what Dan Bangeino said and others are saying. It's probably a good idea to think about how long your family could comfortably survive if, let's say, the power grid went down or the internet was shut off. The answer for most people in the modern world, I imagine, is that they would comfortably survive for about 45 minutes and physically survive not much longer than that. And this is part of what makes the Doomsday Slot propaganda on social media so powerful and unsettling, aside from how relentless and all-encompassing and ubiquitous it is. But the other thing is that maybe at a deeper level, many of us recognize just how vulnerable and helpless we actually are. So we have a special sensitivity to this kind of thing because we realize that our lives are very precarious. I mean, life is always precarious in a sense, but modern life in particular. It's dependent on so many things working perfectly all the time. And so many things that we don't even understand or know how to fix or work ourselves and it just needs to all kind of work. And if it doesn't, then we're in a lot of trouble. Everything is fine and our lives are comparatively easy. So long as we are attached to the umbilical cord of electricity and the internet and GPS. Well, if you lose any or all of those, then if you lose the first one, you lose the rest for any extended period of time and will be like infants left in a crib. So it's reasonable and smart and responsible to take enough precautions and make enough preparations that you could survive, perhaps not comfortably or as comfortably, but survive nonetheless in a scenario where these things are severed or inaccessible for a time. Not saying that will happen, but it's a good idea to be in a position where if it did, you would be able to make it through. That's just a good idea in general. You know, even without any war overseas or any nuclear armed adversaries or any rogue AI agents prowling the internet, still it would be a good idea. With all of those threats actually present and they are, it seems foolish to not be prepared in this way. And then once you are prepared, as prepared as you can be, then the only thing left to do is go live your life. What else can you do? Now, one thing to keep in mind is that mass hysteria or at least people being very worried about something particularly on platforms like X is often wrong. But when it's right, it beats the mainstream narrative by several weeks or even months. And that's what happened with COVID. And that's one of the reasons why people are saying now is that this is a February 2020 vibe to it. And what do they mean when they say that? Well, what they mean is that people who are chronically on Twitter were way ahead of normal people and of the mainstream media in anticipating COVID and the lockdowns. And we can't overlook the possibility that with just a few days to go until the midterms, you know, as several countries begin preparing for a massive catastrophe of some kind, they could be right again. And that's reason again, not to be scared or panicked, but simply prepared. I'll do the show today. Thanks for watching. Thanks for listening. Talk to you tomorrow of a great day. All right. Professor. Let me out! You will remember your duty. This isn't heroin! You're useless, Todd. You sit there and shake because you're dependent on drink. Your sick is all over you. Have you ever seen a child start a death professor? No. I am.