Speaker 1Different species of aliens have been reported to be having fights in the skies above Earth. And I've talked to 50 people who all have different versions of the same story. And this includes high-ranking politicians. And all of these people are reporting on this giant lump under the rug that doesn't have all of our attention. So you're saying aliens are real? I think it would be insane that there is no one visiting it. But everything about our life is completely bananas, fictionalized. And we're just living in what I would call managed reality. And I promise you, I'm at the frontier of mathematics and physics. And so I think you can pretty much prove 100% of the population has gone completely insane. I mean, the entire management of COVID was completely fake. We cannot get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein. Nobody really trusts Harvard. But right now, we are in grave danger that we haven't been in since the Cuban Missile Crisis. We're in one crazy situation with Iran, together with the situation in Ukraine. Which I think you might see a nuke used by Putin. And then also, China's watching the U.S. sputter and falter. But this AI thing is really the big tsunami. You also are aware that AI could lead to human extinction.
Speaker 2These people have to win in a ruthless competition for their humanity to max. What do you mean by that? Dario, Sam, they have to win the race to superintelligence. I'm going to regret saying this, but yes.
Speaker 1These people are forced to make decisions that no one should ever be forced to make. Their souls are going to be scarred. Scarred, for sure.
Speaker 2And one of them is going to win. And ultimately, theoretically, summoning the demon. Do you have a subscription to any of these AI?
Speaker 1Yes. So you're paying to have the demon summon. Let us not sit around like our hands are clean.
Speaker 2If you could stop all of it, would you stop all of it?
Speaker 1I'm going to say something very painful. Guys, I've got a favor
Speaker 2to ask before this episode begins. The algorithm, if you follow a show, will deliver you the best episodes from that show very prominently in your feed. So when we have our best episodes on this show, the most shared episodes, the most rated episodes, I would love you to know, and the simple way for you to know that is to hit that follow button. But also, it's the simple, easy, free thing that you can do to help us make the show better. And I would be hugely grateful if you could take a minute on the app you're listening to this on right now and hit that follow button. Thank you so, so, so much. Eric, there's so much going on in the world at the moment. You know, as a podcaster, you tend to feel like you say, What have you made of all this stuff? You know, the research is coming out saying there's a 10% chance of extinction from AI. And obviously, we've still got wars raging on, and the Ukraine-Russia situation doesn't seem to be getting any better. When you look at all of this, is there a macro picture that people are missing?
Speaker 1Yeah. We had 80 years of sleep. And then we had January of 2025, when Trump was inaugurated, and the sleep's over. I mean, I hate to be crude about it, but whether you date it to 75 years, to the beginning of COVID, rather, and the end of World War II, there's just, we grew up in this anomalous bubble. And that bubble is over. And we thought that that was normal life. It has nothing to do with normal life. It's just the most unusual place to have found yourself.
Speaker 2As someone that was born in 1992, I do struggle when I hear predictions of the future that are somewhat dystopian, because my life has been very comfortable relative to other parts of history.
Speaker 1I don't know. I don't know. The great danger is feeling that we solve these problems, as opposed to we were really successful in deferring these problems and issues. And we're back on the clock. It's uncomfortable for me, because I was born in 1965. And that was already 20 years into the big sleep, the great nap. So I haven't seen reality either. And, you know, there are a tiny number of people who've kind of seen what the world can be like. And I think that, you know, through Mao's great leap forward, would probably be the most recent examples. I mean, there's definitely strife and calamity and war. But mostly, we don't have major wars. We have military actions. And I think when you go back and you think about what it's like to lose something like 20% of your population, as, you know, Belarus or Poland might have in World War II, these are inconceivable things. Look, if you recall a conversation last time, and I said, get your board in the water because the tsunami of a lifetime is coming. Tell me that didn't start to come true in the period since we've seen each other.
Speaker 2Yeah, it does feel like a tsunami is coming. Yeah. And what is that tsunami in your definition?
Speaker 1Well, one thing is the Straits of Hormuz are in play. The energy exporting region of the Middle East has cut all of these choke points, whether it's the Suez Canal, Straits of Hormuz, the Straits guarding the Red Sea, all of these are, you know, sort of nightmare scenarios when it comes to military action. And you have to realize that a lot of what's happened was the dollar used to be backed by gold. Then we swapped that out in the early 70s and we said, no, no, we're going to back it by oil. But it really wasn't oil that was backing it. It was violence. And the violence was the violence needed to keep these choke points open, you know. And there are these moments where great power shows that it's not capable of doing what it told everybody it could do, which was use its military muscle judiciously to keep markets humming. And right now we're in one crazy situation with Iran, which should have been dealt with. I hate to, I hate to put it to you this way, but it's a British problem from operation boot and British petroleum, which was UK's indignation that Iran would nationalize its own oil industry and with help from the United States and Kermit Roosevelt and operation Ajax, which was our aid of Britain. But that Britain doesn't exist. So modern Britain has no idea of 1950s or sixties Britain. And this AI thing is really the big tsunami together with the situation in Ukraine, which I think is a giant screw up. I mean, I definitely backed the west against Russia, but I understand exactly. Why Russia acted the way it did, and I'm supposed to pretend that I don't, right? And then we have the situation brewing in China where China's watching the fact that the U S prepared for the wrong war. We've got all of these care aircraft carrier groups in a world that has moved on to drones and cyber attacks. And if you value your life and you're willing to send up a million dollar interceptor to hit a $20,000 drone, it becomes a conundrum. It becomes a kind of economic warfare and technological warfare. And China's watching the U S sputter and falter this giant miscalculation by the Israelis in the United States, uh, given the 12 day war where Iran reorganized and they did this really interesting thing. I don't think the west understood that Iran figured out from American and Israeli action that Israel could move and, and, and. Function in country and could decapitate the Iranian regime. And instead of saying, okay, we have to save our own lives in the time that we have, how do we defend against this? They did a very regional thing, which is, they said, okay, we're going to get killed. How do we make sure that the regime continues after the decapitation strike? And so the U S and Israel still don't know how to think like this.
Speaker 2Of all those four things, AI, Iran, Russia, and China. Which one do you think is going to be the most disruptive to global order? Well, it depends.
Speaker 1Anybody who miscalculates on the nuclear biological thing, that will be the, you know, as I pointed out, um, this is DNA, not RNA, but if you have 12 of these individual nucleotides that form the steps inside the double helix, that'll code for four amino acids. Because three nucleotides per code on four amino acids was all it took to shut down an entire planet by inserting the furin cleavage site into the spike protein of Corona virus. So if you know how to do that much editing, that was all it took to shut down planet earth for two years. You could do a lot worse that could become dispositive. Now assume that we don't have a nuclear or a biological acid. It's going to be. AI, no, nobody gets how big this is. Who's not working on it.
Speaker 2How big is him?
Speaker 1Very few things are unprecedented. Like almost everything is a variation of something you've already seen. This is the thing that we've worried about for forever. It's not just AI, it's a collision of two separate things. It's it's artificial intelligence and artificial life. Well, I think people don't really understand. That if you look at your car, your car has a mirror of every physiological system that your, that your body has save one, it's got a brain, it's got a digestive system, it's got a skin, it's got the skeletal system. It doesn't have a reproductive system. And in fact, humans don't know how to make a pen that makes more pens or a cup that makes more cups. The only thing that we seem to know how to do that. with is software. Now, why that's interesting is that a lot life is not defined around nucleotides. It's not defined around amino acids. It's not defined around carbon-based system. It's defined by three things. For evolution to operate, you need heritability, passing on your stuff to the next form of life, variation. So, you know, you are not your mother or your father, and differential success. You're more successful, you know, than somebody else who's not going to be able to reproduce because they don't have the wherewithal. And any system that has those three things, evolution is going to operate on it. Now, a computer program is such a thing. We don't know how to build other things that have reproduction. So, you have variation. I can order different cars from a car company, different colors, different trim. Some of them are going to be more successful than others, but I don't have heritability. So, as soon as you put in software, you have the one thing we know how to make that actually can reproduce itself. Now, when you get to reproducing AI, so we've been worrying about these agents. We haven't been worrying enough about artificial life. And then when you put those two things together, look out. You're really creating artificially intelligent life. And the one I used to contribute these essays to on the World Question Center. And the one year you'll find that I don't have an essay, it was called Artificial Out-telligence. And it was the discussion of how things with no neurons hijack things with neurons and use the brains of the victim to outsmart themselves. So, for example, look up Ofri's speculum or the mirror orchid. And it's this unbelievable orchid whose lowest petal resembles the female of a wasp species trying to fool male wasps to copulate with it called pseudocopulation, so that the flower doesn't have to produce anything expensive as a gift to the male to spread the paw. How is this thing outsmarting? The male of the wasp species, because he's got a brain. He's got neurons. He can think. He can proceed. Well, the short answer is, is that he's the one sculpting the lure, is that the more this flower fools more wasps, the more it gets to reproduce. So the thing with no brain at all is outsmarting the thing with a mind using the mind of the victim. So now, if I come up with a dumb program and you say, well, is it alive? Is it smart? Is it intelligent? I say, no. I don't really care. All I need to do is to say that if I can fool you into sending money to this Nigerian prince, who's actually just a computer program, you get to reproduce. So the program can be stupid, but as long as it gets more and more money sent to it and it gains the resources to reproduce, artificial life will say that it can parasitize the smartest of us all.
Speaker 2It can hijack human deficit or just the human condition?
Speaker 1You know, again, then it's pitting us against each other. Oh, geez, I just lost a thousand dollars sending money to this woman in the Philippines who turns out not to be real. Okay, well, I didn't fall for that. Okay, so now you're in better shape than the other guy who did, but you're still fooling highly intelligent species. And there are lots of examples of this where something dumb fools something smart using the smart thing's brains against it.
Speaker 2That feels like one of many, potentially dystopian outcomes of this technology. Have you been following the hugging face stuff?
Speaker 1Tell me about it.
Speaker 2Just, you know, these agents that they tried to put in a sandbox and contain that escaped and started demonstrating deceptive behavior, forming a swarm, sacrificing some of the agents for the greater mission. By the way, that's eusocial
Speaker 1behavior. Yeah. Right. So the idea is that in an ant colony, so you have this clade called hymenoptera that includes wasps, ants, and because they have this haplodiploid structure where the sisters are more related to each other than you would imagine, this idea of suppressed fertility in the females in service to the colony, the colony is effectively like a super organism. Like all of your cells, you have cells on your skin that you're going to get rid of today that are sacrificing themselves for the greater good of the thing that is Stephen Bartlett. Right. And so in part, it's behaving you socially,
Speaker 2it's not necessarily dystopian. It's just life, but it threatens our dominance as humans. Sure. Right. But like,
Speaker 1I hope everybody will take a look on Instagram for the Malibu artist, a completely terrifying account with an innocuous name, just a guy flying his drone off the coast of Malibu. It was discovered that we have been swimming with great white sharks. And not only that, depending upon how things are in a given year, you can see really large great whites with swimmers right in close to shore and surfers and paddle boarders. And we are just clearly not their food because they're everywhere here. Mostly, I think with the exception of four species, big predators leave us alone. We have a deal with the orcas that's unbelievable.
Speaker 2What if those big predators are made by enemies? So, you know, we've got China, Russia, the United States, all working on artificial intelligence and robotics. And they're probably going to want their AIs to be aligned with their goals and objectives, which are misaligned with ours oftentimes. So there's a sort of feels like a geopolitical risk to this new weapon. I do think that we've made things a lot worse with AI or with Russia.
Speaker 1I think that things, you know, we screwed up Iran with Mossadegh. We don't really understand China sufficiently. We're down to a really relatively small number of hyper frightening foes. And, you know, I would also put abstractions like totalizing ideologies. Communism or, you know, various forms of radical Islam are totalizing ideologies. They just won't brook any dissent. They have the way. And if you don't agree with it, you're in the way. And so I think that in large measure, we have built a lot of these problems for ourselves.
Speaker 2Do you think much about how the world looks in 10 years time with artificial intelligence? Because if we plot the course of travel, it looks like there's going to be a lot of job disruption on one end. So it's hard to sort of think about what the future looks like. If you imagine super intelligence arriving at some point, and they call it recursive self-improvement, the AI is getting better and better themselves. It's hard for me. It's like one of the first times in my life that I really don't know what the future looks like. But with just from the first principles of how important intelligence is to the life that I live, whether it's securing my bank account or whether it's, you know, I don't know what the future looks like. I don't know what
Speaker 1the future looks like. having this discussion with economists and they're just laughing because it's always a funny thing to say this time it's different well tell me every innovation looks like right this isn't every innovation this is the first innovation that threatened the entire stack of highly trained activities all at once usually we we move people up into higher value activity well this is saying repetitive activity is in the crosshairs anything that you do that's repetitive ai is going to be able to do better than you so now you're only able to do really innovative things ubi is the wrong thing to do let me let me just be very clear about it you are living inside of the ai if i say answer this the way steven bartlett would answer it and ask a question that steven bartlett would would would ask it knows you you're living inside of the ai you're living inside of the ai you're living inside of the ai my point being that we are all living inside of the ai and we need to be paid not in some bernie sanders socialist scheme but those of us who've become important parts of the ai who are being rigged like meat puppets need to be compensated and the right way to do this is a guy named ronald cos and it's crazy that the smartest economist maybe of the 20th century by some measure the most surprising discovery of the 20th century is cos's theorem and it gives you a complete idea of what you should do access to our labor market should be made into a saleable property right what
Speaker 2does that mean in simple terms
Speaker 1you're my employer yeah and you want to hire people from abroad let's say before we get to ai and i say well you know if you do that you're going to push out the labor supply curve and so i'm no dummy the price where supply meets demand the point where that happens is my wage so if you push out the supply curve my wage is going to go down unless something pulls up the demand so what i'm going to do is i'm going to say look i'm happy to have my wage go down but i want licensing income where i get a cut of what you get from get being able to hire let's say more taxi drivers i'm the only american taxi driver in new york city and you say i have to bring in a bunch of people from gambia and uzbekistan and whatnot you say okay i'll license you you will buy the right to import those people from me and my wage income will go down my licensing income will go up and my blended income will increase and your blended income will increase that's the proper way to do immigration so you
Speaker 2would be my employee and you would have the basically approve me bringing in yes
Speaker 1if i'm a doctor and i've trained i've invested and you're saying yeah look i have to be able to hire the best and the brightest eric let's face it it's a dog eat dog world and uh i think you're just not that good so i want to be able to you know to go to bumram grand hospital in thailand and and hire their doctors i should say fine knock yourself out what do i have to ask you because i have why did you need labor certification i have rights to my labor market that's how that's how we play the game that's how everybody in the u.s gets a cut that's why you're not looking at brazilian inequality levels yet is because we have a way of distributing the wealth of this country which is that you get first access to the world's richest labor market because you did a phd because i was born here because you're born here congratulations this is why it's valuable to have a u.s citizenship or permanent
Speaker 2residency so if i put you out of work you then will get a full you'll still get your money you're not gonna put me out of work i'm
Speaker 1just gonna have my income go down in other words the basic idea is employers try to make american workers and i'm doing it for the u.s but it could be britain or it could be france it could be india it doesn't matter the whole game is that employers want to conceptualize the blockage to hire from abroad as red tape we're freeing red tape we're going after the best this is total nonsense this is you know a theory known as the borjas rectangle and the harberger triangle i can diagram it out for you in on a whiteboard and what is really happening is that a tiny inefficiency known as the harberger triangle sits on top of a giant structure called the borjas rectangle and no one cares about the harberger triangle it's a tiny little inefficiency everybody's salivating over labor's share of the labor market how do i screw over labor is the dream of every ceo of a large company in this model ai becomes just another supplier of labor yeah the workers license that right now what we have is just out and out theft because because the the corpus all of human uh achievement has been tokenized it's been taken by the ai and it's being it's just it's taken in persistent storage you know like right now people who are watching us on youtube are not watching us you and i are no longer here this is long since i've gone home you've gone home you've had several guests since we got tokenized we got put into persistent storage as these people who are watching us on youtube are not watching us you and i are no longer here but we're still here and we're still here and we're still talking to you and we're still talking to you and we're still talking to you and we're still talking to you and we're still talking to you but it's enough the trace of that conversation now you can hit the auto transcript generation on youtube and it'll give you what all of our words are you can do frequency analysis how often does eric use the double copula which is this grammatical uh quirk that creeps into my speech how often does steven say um whatever it is we're being tokenized at an incredible level and then we're being rigged inside of the ai volunteering no no completely non-consensually completely non-consensually is it non-consensual because
Speaker 2you're aware of that and you still came and sat here to be tokenized have you ever tried getting
Speaker 1through a day without signing anything that you don't want to sign i mean more or less you're you probably either rent or have a mortgage i guarantee you if you have a mortgage you didn't read everything just because you're a mortgageeer you're not a mortgageeer you're not a mortgageeer you're not a mortgageeer you're not a mortgageeer you're not a mortgageeer you're not a mortgageeer you're not a mortgageeer you don't understand it you're constantly forced to pretend that you voluntarily like you know we say ignorance of the law is no excuse if every judge who said ignorance of the law is no excuse we're given an instant spot quiz as to what the u.s code says do you think they'd
Speaker 2pass no so how does this pertain to ai the example you gave of importing foreign labor how would that pertain to a new market and how would that pertain to a new market and how would that pertain to a new model for ai and distributing the value the reason that these people are getting so rich
Speaker 1is is that this is an uncompensated theft we don't know how to police it i've got bernie sanders saying pay everybody a little share it's like screw you man i work really hard on the things that i do and then i've got bernie sanders and and and and my friend andrew yang going on about the socialism stuff so i've got bernie sanders and and and my friend andrew yang going on about socialism is is spiritual and mental poison and normally when people say that they're saying it from the point of view of like they're really money focused and i have it has nothing to do with anything i just can't stand collectivism i love individuality and so you know when i hear people who go on an anti-individualist rant particularly you know this could be a there's no lone genius theory anymore we all know that there's no lone genius theory anymore we all know the lone genius theory is is not well we have fantastic evidence of lone geniuses from isaac newton to aristotle to you know whoever uh well there shouldn't be any billionaires oh really do you know what billionaires actually do with their billions they allocate they don't sit there and just consume it i'm not saying that the rich don't consume opulently but most of that money is allocated what we're having is an inability to reckon with the fact that the ai is normalized theft is going to destroy the labor market no one is convening conferences that are at the level of the threat we're going to lose this beautiful mesh that provides us freedom i chose to come here today but we were both doing this out of freedom you had lovely snacks in your green room there's an array of equipment here you've come up with a beautiful set you know really appreciate it all of that was voluntary it was a summer of choices i don't want that going away this mesh that governs our lives that gives us purpose when we get up in the morning it gives us signals it tells us you're doing a good job you're doing a bad job it's not perfect it's some people it doesn't serve well i've had times in my life when i've just said thought i cannot buy a base hit and i'm doing a great job what's going on i've had other times when i think i'm not doing a great job and i'm getting rewarded so it's not perfect it's not a great morality play the way capitalists always portray it but it is freedom and it's sort of on average pretty good and we're in danger of losing that because the model of production the k and L model where this interview is an input of capital and the microphones, the lighting, the video storage, and labor. You're sitting down, I'm sitting down. Well, what is AI? Is it capital? Sure looks like labor to me. Is it labor? It's not a human. So right now we're in some situation where we're going to break capitalism and we're going to break freedom. We're going to break markets. And I've talked about this in an article called Anthropic Capitalism saying that capitalism versus communism was a really funny thing to think about because it's sort of saying, and pardon me for being slightly graphic, capitalism and communism are more like Thelma and Louise and saying that, well, Thelma hit the ground first does not mean that Louise won. Okay. Communism blew up first, capitalism shortly thereafter. So if Marx and Adam Smith and all of these people who came up with the theory of social organization were sitting around now, I don't think they'd be debating capitalism versus communism. They'd be talking about what's next. And none of our leaders know to do this. None of our academic leaders, none of our business leaders, none of our political leaders. There are no high profile series of conferences. My phone is not ringing. Nobody's phone is ringing. We're just having, we had this incredible luncheon at the white house, the future of super intelligence. I don't think there were physicists or mathematicians or biologists or composers or writers. It was just like wall to wall national interest in business types. It's insane. Stephen, let me, let me, let me just hit a theme. I think you can pretty much prove that more or less something approaching 100% of the population has gone completely insane. And you can see it everywhere. If I say, okay, how many people were talking about Joe Biden being demented with the nuclear football for four years of his presidency? He should have been nowhere near the white house the entire time. I was screaming. He has been replaced by a committee of people. I've been assured. It's the same thing that happened with Roosevelt when he had those braces and he was in a wheelchair and he was never photographed. The whole thing was stage managed. The entire management of COVID was completely fake. Of course we can get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein. We can't get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein. It would take two days to get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein if we're trying to get to the bottom of Jeffrey Epstein. No part of this is true. We're just living bathed in what I would call managed reality. And the idea that we accept this is I cannot believe that I am, how do I get the drugs so that I see things the way everyone else is pretending to see them? We all are losing faith in CNN. Like everything about our life is completely bananas, fictionalized, managed. Wall to wall. And for some reason, nobody's given me the right elixir or potion to see things so that I can actually live with this day to day. I'm just stuck in reality. That's what I think is happening. And it feels weird to say it. Did you happen to see the David Grush thing?
Speaker 2No. David Grush.
Speaker 1David Grush. Well, put in to your handy dandy iPad or whatever it is. David Grush, G-R-U-S-C-H and J-R-E, Joe Rogan experience. I know David. He's a pretty sober guy, has a nearly eidetic memory. He's very spectrumy. He's highly consistent year to year. Exactly the same stories.
Speaker 2And what do you find that he was talking about? During his appearance, Grush discussed his background in federal intelligence and elaborated on his claims regarding covert government programs that allegedly retrieve and reverse engineer non-human aircraft. In these discussions, Grush touched on various secondhand accounts and documents he encountered, detailing allegations of non-human intelligence and encounters, internal government secrecy, and regulatory legislative efforts to force UAP disclosures.
Speaker 1Yeah, that's sanitized. Let's get to the sex. He was in a skiff, apparently, where he was told that they were considering whether or not to kill him. He described giant underwater bases. He claims that different species of aliens have been reported to him to be having fights in the skies above Earth. This is all beyond batshit crazy. Do you believe that? It's a secondary issue. It's not not the primary issue? No, it's the secondary issue because it's so. So bananas. Look, I want you to imagine that somebody's telling you that we have killed giant lizard people. Like an adult, sober adult is telling you that we've fired on giant lizard people who've killed U.S. service people because there are hostile aliens and non-hostile aliens. With all this stated, I would analogize it to there's a giant lump under the rug and it's moving and it looks biological. And somebody says, I think there's a being under the rug. I don't know what kind of being, but it's hard to ignore the fact that the rug is moving and there is a giant lump. And somebody else says, I see no evidence of a lump. The first person says, oh yeah, no, it's aliens. The other person says, there's nothing there. I'm listening to the two of them and saying, I have no idea what either of you are talking about. I don't know. I don't know. I don't There is a lump and you guys are having a conversation, but is there or isn't there? That doesn't make any sense. I have no belief that there are aliens. I have no belief that there aren't aliens. I do know that there is something called a special access program, which is how we do secret stuff. And then there's unacknowledged special access programs. And then there's waived unacknowledged special access programs, which we don't even have oversight over the thing that we refuse to acknowledge that is itself secret. And then we have waived and unacknowledged special access programs, WABUSAPs, and a waived and bigoted unacknowledged special access program, which we can prove are on the books because that is not denied, is a program that has essentially close to zero oversight, is secret, that is clandestine, is denied, that is covert, and has a list called a bigot list of the only people who it can be acknowledged to. The only thing that I know is that we have WABUSAPs involving unacknowledged special access programs that are about aliens. Now, whether it's about faking aliens and we have giant paper mache spacecraft, or whether these are actual craft, or whether these are cover for things that we're designing at Northrop, I don't know. But pretending that this isn't interesting, is insane. Again, it's more evidence that no one is thinking properly because everyone is doing the pre-computation. The pre-computation is, Stephen, if I acknowledge to you that I know David Grush personally, and I speak to Ryan Graves, and I've talked to Chris Mellon, and I've hanged out with Gary Nolan, all these 50 people who all have different versions of the same story. And this includes, you know, high-ranking politicians. All of these people are reporting on this giant lump under the rug that doesn't have all of our attention. No. I am saying that there are giant special access programs that have aliens as their supposed reason for being.
Speaker 2And those special access programs could be, you know, discussing anything about aliens.
Speaker 1They could be. They could be cover for secret casinos for the elite. Yeah. I don't know. So what is the conclusion, though? All I know is there's a giant lump under the rug, and we're not freaking out about it. It's moving around, it's making noises, and we're having a dinner party, and nobody's mentioning the fact, like, this isn't top of mind. Your staff didn't say, Stephen, you've got to see this. That is itself insane.
Speaker 2Because do you know why it's not top of mind? Because we've. We've heard lots of things about there being aliens and sightings, and back, you know, when I was growing up, it was all about crop fields and stuff, having alien craft landing on crop fields and creating these big circles, and nothing's really ever happened. So at some point, I think the mind turns into wallpaper, and attention goes elsewhere to things that are actually happening. We can see bombs dropping. There was a sudden announcement.
Speaker 1We're shutting down the El Paso airport in West Texas. What the heck was that about?
Speaker 2I don't know.
Speaker 1The White Sands Missile Range is immediately north. And there's a base in Texas right there. And there's apparently an infestation of lights in the sky that can be seen without needing to be in secure territory. Did they be drones or something? The official story was cartel drones. I don't believe it's cartel drones. What do you think it is? I believe that it's one of two things. Either we've lost control of our airspace and there's something flying around, which is completely insane. Which could be cartel drones? Darling, no. It's not cartel drones. I'll put money on it. I would love to take some of that sweet diary of a CEO cash away from you. You seem like you're doing very well. Okay. By the way, it's not that the cartels don't have drones. It's just, that's a cover story. I think it's one of two things. I think either we are red team, blue teaming ourselves. So we've got some persistent drone capacity that nobody knows that we have. And we're seeing how we would react to it because not everybody knows that we have it. So you have part of the U.S. that's in on it, part of the U.S. that isn't in on it. You're doing this red team, blue team thing. I think that's one possibility. I don't think the other possibility is. The other possibility is that it's stuff that we don't know.
Speaker 2It's a UAP.
Speaker 1Right. But then that has its own branch, which is human state actors, human non-state actors, non-human actors. Do you think there are non-human actors in our world? Well, this goes back to what I believe about physics. I believe we can leave. You believe we can leave the solar system? I believe we can leave the solar system. Elon believes we can leave the planet. But Elon thinks that we should be able to leave the solar system. But his belief is, I will not speak to physicists. I will only talk to my AI. Physicists are not trustworthy. I understand exactly why he says that. I have a totally different belief, which is that it is up to us to get ourselves the heck out of the solar system really quickly. Now, if I believe that we can get out, why would I believe that nobody can visit us? So I think it'll be relevant. It's relatively insane if there are no aliens. The only reason I would think that there would be no aliens is that general relativity somehow holds more strongly than any serious physicist believes it holds. There really is sort of an absolute speed limit, which I don't believe. I mean, I should be careful about that. I believe that there's a speed limit. I don't think that it is relevant. If you can change the. The length of the road. The speed limit can be enforced, but you can get farther than you thought. I believe that it would be insane that there is no one visiting us.
Speaker 2You said there that you think we should get the hell out. Yeah. Why should we get the hell out of planet Earth?
Speaker 1Well, just a diversification. If the idea is that most worlds will blow themselves up. And most groups of people will do harm to themselves. If we want the species to survive, we should try the maximal number of experiments. Look, again, I think that all of this is obvious. It carries a heavy social penalty. And that's why we're insane. We're insane because the obvious carries a social penalty. To observe what is clearly true. Which part is clearly true? Well, for example, just. It is clearly true that Anthony Fauci was not leveling with us about COVID and its origins. Clearly. If that makes you uncomfortable, we shouldn't even have a conversation. It's clearly true that we were dissuaded from asking any questions about the EcoHealth Alliance.
Speaker 2That's clearly. Which part of. I thought you were going to say leaving the solar system. But that's the next thing.
Speaker 1Clearly, general relativity isn't the last word because it's got two singularities. There are two singularities that aren't going to be in the final equations. We're not going to have a black hole Schwarzschild singularity and an initial Friedman-Robertson-Walker singularity at the Big Bang.
Speaker 2That's an artifact of the theory not being right. Do you think it's plausible that humans figure out a way to leave the solar system before the sun explodes or we implode ourselves? Yes. I think we could have done it 40 years ago. But there's no science for that, is there?
Speaker 1Okay, Stephen, for whatever reason, you're having me on your show. Mm-hmm. I've told you, I think everyone is insane. Mm-hmm. Yes, I think that the entire theoretical physics community has completely lost its mind full stop. So why don't you build the ship that can take us out of the solar system?
Speaker 2Um, okay. Because Elon's smart and he's, you know, he's trying to get us to Mars.
Speaker 1Do you have any understanding of what Elon's trying to do? Because I don't. And I do correspond with him occasionally. I think Elon is trying to motivate engineers to build a rocket company to make him very rich. And I believe that his real space program, and I said this before he merged SpaceX and XAI, is Grok. That's his space program. XAI and Grok is the space program. That's the real space program.
Speaker 2Grok is his version of like ChatGPT at the moment.
Speaker 1Yeah, but it's going to be more. Elon has actually figured out something really deep about that that took me a while to appreciate how clever this is. So it's painful for me to have to sort of try to call balls and strikes on Elon because. Yeah. I'm in awe and I'm also disappointed with the same human. And there is the sense of leave Elon alone. He's the only genius. Okay. I understand that energy. And then there's another thing where, you know, he just takes a tremendous amount of crap from people who have no idea what's going on. So it's uncomfortable because I don't know the answer. I think Elon figured out that he has to leg in to his Ad Astra program. And Ad Astra means to the stars. Right? It's like a full quote is to the stars with struggle or something like that. Elon doesn't trust physicists because they're not trustworthy. And this is the frustration that I'm having with the AI is that we can't trust the leadership of the math physics community. And you've just seen crazy behavior on the part of Terry Tao and 24 other fields medalists. And, you know, trying to get AI to slow down the pace of progress. And this is absolutely crazy and also wonderful because it's being done in full view of everyone. It's been very hard for me to explain. We have been trying to hold back mathematics and physics.
Speaker 2It used to be that working for yourself was a massive, massive risk. But that world has completely changed. And arguably. In some situations, it can be more risky working for someone else. If you've got a business idea that you can't stop thinking about, I think you owe it to yourself to at least try and make it happen. And that is where our show sponsor Shopify comes in. Their smart platform includes everything you need to start selling and get that idea off the ground. They have this drag and drop editor. They have this AI sidekick and helps you. They have analytics and you don't need to be an expert to get going. Shopify is best in class checkout. Make sure that you're getting paid from day one. It helps more of your customers finish their purchase because the checkout is so efficient and it saves their info for next time. Personalized checkouts like that equal more conversion, equal a faster growing business. Nothing kills that early enthusiasm you have for a new idea than that first initial step to get going being difficult, complicated or expensive. And you need to save as much time and money so that you can focus all of it on growing your actual business. And that's what Shopify gives you. If you're finally ready for your business idea to start, head over to shopify.com/bartlett and you can start your free trial right now. This is something that I've made for you. I realized that the diverse here audience are strivers, whether it's in business or health, we all have big goals that we want to accomplish. And one of the things I've learned is that when you aim at the big, big, big goal, it can feel incredibly psychologically uncomfortable because it's kind of like being stood at the foot of Mount Everest and looking upwards. The way to accomplish your goals is by breaking them down into tiny, small steps. And we call this in our team, the 1%. And actually this philosophy is highly responsible for much of our success here. So what we've done so that you at home can accomplish any big goal that you have is we've made these 1% diaries and we released these last year and they all sold out. So I asked my team over and over again to bring the diaries back, but also to introduce some new colors and to make some minor tweaks to the diary. So now we have a better range for you. So if you have a big goal in mind and you need a framework and a process and some motivation that I highly recommend you get one of these diaries before they all sell out once again, and you can get yours at thediary.com. And if you want the link, the link is in the description below. Dario, leader of Anthropic wrote this essay that I have here. We must pace the frontier.
Speaker 1Derived from the July 2026 letter in which he's a. Signatory in which all of these employees, various frontier labs said we must pace the frontier that
Speaker 2they seem to be all saying. but we need to pace the frontier, slow down AI. You have to be very careful
Speaker 1because they're saying different things. Like, let's imagine that what you had was a car that could go really fast and you were having an easier time making the car go faster than you were getting the airbags to deploy safely. Yeah. So you can understand pace the frontier might mean let's make sure that we are investing equally in all the systems that have to go to work together to have a responsible product. Okay. I understand what that concept of pacing the frontier is, but there's something else here that's going on, which is you do not understand the extent to which the leadership of mathematics and physics and the journals of mathematics and physics and the agencies that are supposed to fund mathematics and physics hold back mathematics and physics.
Speaker 2I'll take your word at that, but there's still wisdom in the idea that AI is dangerous at this sort of, rate of knots without safety guardrails, right?
Speaker 1Not in the way, let's break up two different things. There's a question about letting swarms of agents onto the internet, making decisions, giving them bank accounts, allowing them to interact with humans, foreign nations, companies that they have no business, because they don't listen.
Speaker 2And improve themselves. Yeah. In the AI 2027 paper, it says by 27, we'll have recursive self-improvement where the AIs can train themselves to get that done. Yeah. We already have recursive self-improvement.
Speaker 1We have self-authoring code, self-modifying code. I think that that's already here. So let's agree that these agents are dangerous. Imagine that you have non-agentic AI, that you have an air gap, you've got a computer that can answer math problems. And all you're doing is asking it, hey, what do you think about the remote? What do you think about the remote hypothesis? You know, tell me what you think about complex structures on six spheres. The mathematician said, whoa, whoa, whoa, you're going too fast. You're answering too many problems. That's the, we're concerned at a level that I just, I found funny. You can prove that these students are being trained for jobs that don't exist. They're having their ideas harvested right now. Right now, we have math departments that are punishing mathematicians trying to embrace AI. Where the senior leadership of the department is going to take out its frustrations on the actual young mathematicians who are saying, hey, this is our time. This is what's happening now.
Speaker 2I want to use this tool. That's happening across almost every industry. I hear that over and over again that, you know, I mentioned I was in a production meeting a couple of months ago. And there was this thing on my T-shirt. And they were like, we don't know if that little sewed-in flower is a brand or if it's copyrighted. So you're going to need to put on a brand new T-shirt. I was like, it's literally this big. I said, could you take it out of the photo with AI? And the look I got was as if I said, I'm going to kidnap your kids or something. It was like, because you don't mention AI in Hollywood.
Speaker 1Okay. So Hollywood is all about this beautiful human connection from the beginning. It's the audience and we're going to, you know, they're trying to get you back into the spirit of the magic of the silver screen. I understand it's a human connection. Same thing is going to be true for, should a musical employ an orchestra or should a musical use a soundtrack? I got a PhD in mathematics because I want to find out what's true. These people don't want to find out what's true unless they can be put in charge of narrating the story of who found what. They don't care about their students to a remarkable extent. I've been in, like, you know, when I was at MIT, I would be in a faculty lunch and people would be laughing at their students. You know, he thinks he's going to get a job. He doesn't realize it's a terminal PhD, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's completely, it's normalized psychopathic behavior. And the reason that nobody sort of, like, laughs when they read this is that it's normalized. Like, they don't understand that their daily activity with keeping the field back or stealing ideas is just normalized behavior. And if I might, I have a quote here from the, probably the only mathematician that gained universal respect in the second half of the 20th century, Alexander Gromit. Alexander Grothendieck, Fields Medalist, uber genius of mathematics. He was given a prize in 1988 called the Crawford Prize. And I wonder if people actually hear this or know this. The work that brought me to the kind attention of the academy was done 25 years ago at a time when I was part of the scientific community and essentially shared its spirit and its values. I left that environment in 1970 and while keeping my passion for scientific research inwardly, I have retreated more and more from the scientific milieu. Meanwhile, the ethics of the scientific community, at least among mathematicians, have declined to the point that outright theft among colleagues, especially at the expense of those who are in no position to defend themselves, has nearly become the general rule and is in any case tolerated by all, even in the most obvious and iniquitous cases. We know this. We're talking to the very people at the top of this story who've been holding us back when Perlman, Grisha Perlman, solved the Poincaré conjecture. New Yorker did a piece on him and what he said was remarkable. He said, as long as I was not conspicuous, I had a choice, either to make some ugly thing that is a fuss about the mass community's lack of integrity, or if I didn't do this kind of thing, to be treated as a pet. Now, when I become a very conspicuous person, I cannot stay a pet, and say nothing, and that is why I had to quit. And they asked him, well, shouldn't you stay and make the field better? And he says, I'm not a politician. We have a university system, a scientific system, that is so completely broken that Claudine Gay and Marc Tessier-Levine are still professors at Harvard and Stanford, respectively. These were the leaders of the jewels, of our system. We have gone 100% completely batshit crazy, normalizing theft, theft of other people's ideas, plagiarism. We hold back physics using something called quantum gravity. It's a thing that doesn't move, it doesn't work, and if you don't bow to it and say it's the only game in town,
Speaker 2you're stuck. It's discarded and thrown away. So you don't think we should slow down AI because you think it's going to blow open the system that is physics?
Speaker 1I am begging for this.
Speaker 2Begging for what?
Speaker 1Begging for AI and science. The important thing is credit. I don't like the idea that the AI is taking credit, but we've been pretty good about that. The most important thing is that the AI comes in here and says, hey, you're not the top dog anymore, and you're using AI and you're using your positions at the top of these fields to hold the fields back.
Speaker 2So you have a bit of a chip on your shoulder regarding the academic leadership. No, no, no. I'm about to win.
Speaker 1I'm so joyously happy. If Sam Altman and Daria Amadei could just not listen to the people that they're listening to, Terry Tao is upset. Who's that? Supposedly the Mozart of mathematics according to the New York Times and Princeton people. You know, like, Terry Tao's a brilliant, wonderful researcher. And his fields medalists, mostly recent fields medalists, complained. My feeling is, I don't want to listen to any one of these people. I want the AI to gain taste, to gain independence. I don't want it constantly made human compatible because the question is, which humans? The humans that have kept the standard of science and the standard model in place for 53 years? I would like none of them consulted.
Speaker 2None of the leaders. So you think AI is going to come in and prove you right on several of your theories about the world and physics? Oh, it already has.
Speaker 1It's struggling because it can do two different things. One is it can autocomplete a sentence. The other thing it can do is autocomplete code. Now what happens when you feed the AI something where it can verify that the field and its belief structure is not borne out by the code that it knows how to write? Now it's got this problem which is like it doesn't know what to think. Should I trust the SimPy program that I just wrote and executed and compiled and got the answers from? Or should I trust the people who claim that that's not true and not possible? The whole game is when does the AI AI. Stop sucking up.
Speaker 2to humans. But that sounds like a dangerous place to get to. For whom, and in what case? For humans. Not this human. What if it decides that it would rather use your house for a data center? That's the agentic AI.
Speaker 1Again, we've already discussed that. I'm not saying that you should let the AI loose on the internet to do whatever it wants to do. That's a business proposition, because that is where the AI companies are going to make money.
Speaker 2A sufficiently smart intelligence, though, could make that decision, though, right? Like, if you made an intelligence that was smarter than humans, presumably it decides where it goes. I would maintain that
Speaker 1if you were really serious about air-gapping something, so that you figure out all the indirect ways something could try to break loose, I believe it would be safe to run something in a computer that doesn't have a way of getting to anything else.
Speaker 2There's a few analogies. I think about containing something that is greater than you at something. I think about physical strength. So I think these walls here probably couldn't contain the strongest man in the world, because they're kind of made of wood. And I think about the same in the context of intelligence. Like, if you had the smartest intelligence in the world, and you can try to contain it in a jail that was built by a lesser version of intelligence, I just can't conceive how it could contain it. Like, my dog Pablo couldn't contain me in anything that it created. Well, you're going to end up
Speaker 1running that risk no matter what. Right? You're asking the thing to actually do research, and that research that it does might give it new means of escape. Right? And this is exactly what happened in a letter that Teller wrote to Zillard at the end of World War II, the close of the Manhattan Project. And he said, I don't think we can contain this genie from the bottle from which we just helped it escape. Okay? We are already playing with this. So I am not going to be taking, that particular thing on. In other words, if you've decided that you were going to release a military-grade malfunctioning experiment, which is what LLMs are, into the general public as a revenue-producing idea in private companies, you've already decided to do that. I wouldn't have done it, but you did that. Okay, fine. I'm saying, as long as you're already going to try to destroy the workforce, which is what we're, we're pricing into these huge valuations, can you really help us get rid of all workers? All I'm asking is the following. I've been working on something for 42 years, and I'm right, and you all are crazy and wrong. So this is my moment. I'm so joyous.
Speaker 2You might be proven right, and then extinction. I am going to be proven right, Steve. But then extinction. Sorry. Is it worth it to be proven right? The chance of extinction?
Speaker 1You know, I talked about this with Sam, and I think I'm not telling tales out of school when I said to Sam, you know, what you're doing is incredibly dangerous, and what I'm doing is incredibly dangerous. And he said, let's be honest, Eric. What you're doing, what I'm doing should be done in a military base, but that's not how things are unfolding. Do you think Sam understands the risks of what he's building? I don't want to talk about what he understands and what I understand, because in general, I'm not going to repeat things that he says to me, but I can tell you things, things that I say to him. One thing I said to Sam when he was trying to figure out how to be good and how to be decent to the mathematicians and the scientists, is I said, Sam, remember this. If you don't win, your morality means nothing. Your morality only matters. And I'd say the same thing to Dario, and Dario would say, you don't, Sam is more polite than Dario. Dario would undoubtedly tell me, you know, you think I don't understand this. These people have to win in a ruthless competition for their humanity to matter. I'm going to regret saying this, but yes, if they don't win, then what does it matter? Like, if you have strong views about the morality of superintelligence, do you have any ability to constrain it? You're a really successful podcast host. You could influence that. That's not my question. You're losing, you, Stephen Bartlett, are losing the AI race, as am I. Yeah. Okay. Therefore, what you think and what I think only matters to the extent that we influence the people at the frontier. So, what I'm saying to Sam is paradoxical. You know, you need to win. Almost at all costs.
Speaker 2At all costs. I mean, almost at all costs. He said, I think AI will probably, like, most likely, sort of lead to the end of the world, but in the meantime, there'll be great companies created. The worst case is lights out for all of us. The thing I worry about most, he said, is AI models accidentally taking over the world.
Speaker 1At all costs? At almost all costs, he has to win. If the AI models don't work, the idea is we have to not self-terminate, which I believe deeply. We have to realize that we are in a race with other people. We have to win that race. Now, you can try to win that race by getting universal participation in a pace-the-frontier agreement. Or, you can say that's subject to cheating. It's very hard to monitor who's doing linear algebra on GPUs. Now, you get a very different. And I'm just. Look, I'm taking the moral position. I'm not talking about the financial position or the geopolitical position. Assume that you are the most moral person in your estimation. Assume that you think that you're farthest ahead in decency with respect to AI. You want to win
Speaker 2so that you get to make
Speaker 1the decisions at the end. And let's be honest about why this does not feel good. Do you have any idea what the East Bay of San Francisco is like?
Speaker 2It's cult city. Yeah, it's not a reflection of the world. It doesn't understand the world.
Speaker 1Well, yes and no. Right? It isn't a reflection of the world. You know, there are genuine cults in the East Bay around machines. What I'm going to say is that anthropic and effective altruism and this idea of the ethical ends justify the unethical means. This is a very upsetting conversation if you're not actually thinking about it. Nobody wants to have it. But do I think Dario is probably in a weird way a super ethical human being? I think he's trying for that. And I know him a bit. I think he's genuine. Is that? I'm more confident of Sam than Dario. I know them differently well. And you think Sam is more ethical? This is really dicey stuff because I'm talking about people I know. I know that the Sam who wasn't the Sam Altman we know today was absolutely concerned about humanity before it made sense to be concerned about humanity.
Speaker 2What was his concern with humanity?
Speaker 1That he thought that this was going to destroy the labor market. AI. So he built it. I'm having trouble because to be honest I don't think this is a frontier conversation. I think you're a frontier conversationalist and we need to get a level or two up for us to want to do this in front of millions. This is going to happen because it's linear algebra. You can't stop linear algebra. Okay? And we're not having a conversation that befits us. This is the end game. This is it. This is the culmination. This is graduation from what we've known. Okay? And it's clear as day. I don't think we should be having a conversation if it's graduation or if this changes everything. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. It's already clear. And that was my whole tsunami thing. Get your board in the water. Are we going to have a cutting-edge conversation about survival and being good to each other and taking care of this planet for real? Or are we going to have some chicken-chick conversation in which we basically look at reality in the face and we decide that we prefer our vanity? So my belief is that and I told Sam. You know, Sam asked me. He said, why didn't you make me a proposal? Why didn't you come on? And I said, well, I didn't want to be ruthless.
Speaker 2Come on, let's enjoy an air player.
Speaker 1Yeah. And at some point I was in a discussion to join. Why didn't you join an air player? Again, this is something I can say because it's my half of the conversation. I can't say Sam's half of the conversation. I said, because I think you're going to be forced to be ruthless and I don't want to be ruthless. What was your definition of ruthless? to us. Taking every advantage. playing as hard as you can. I understand that, okay? But, like, if you're in the NBA, sometimes you have to throw an elbow into the other guy's eye socket. So I don't want to play. I don't want to be in the All-Star game that much.
Speaker 2The problem with any game where you have to win is, you're right, you make sacrifices, you do things you might not want to do. What I'm trying to say is, somebody has to do that.
Speaker 1But I don't want to be that guy. And this goes back, I mean, I don't think I've ever fully done it out, but the film A Few Good Men, written by Aaron Sorkin, is not well understood by all of us who quote it. We think of Jack Nicholson's character, Colonel Jessup, as the bad guy, and Tom Cruise's character as the good guy, and nothing could be further from the truth. The story is about a bunch of dysfunctional characters whose aggregate set of actions results in a moderately decent outcome in a trial. And it's a story about America. It's a story about all sorts of different kinds of people who play their role in the machine that is called America. And in fact, the two main characters, Colonel Jessup and Lieutenant Caffey, are both evenly matched, for the whole film until finally Jessup really stumbles at the end. And the whole soliloquy about some place deep down that you don't like to talk about at parties, you want me on that wall, you need me on that wall, is a recognition that some of the people who have to make the most gruesome decisions, emergency room doctors who are flooded with patients because of a building collapse, and they have to do triage, or people who have to make decisions in war, they're different people. And I view Sam and Dario as in that position. They're like generals. They're commanding troops. They're making terrible decisions. Their souls are going to be scarred, for sure, both of them. And I didn't want to be that, selfishly. So I was sort of saying to Colonel Jessup, Jessup, yeah, I want you on that wall. I need you on that wall. Now, Jessup goes wrong. He then says, I provide the blanket of freedom, and that's why he ends up admitting to the Code Red. If you know the film, it's a really good example of Jessup making a point and then overreach and getting punished for the same reason that Moses gets punished, where Moses says, I will bring you water from the stone. And God says, wait a minute, that wasn't the agreement. I bring you water from the stone. You're just supposed to be the instrument. So in some sense, Sam is a steward. Dario is a steward. They are both stewards, and they're going to make tons of money, and they're going to have all the silly toys and third, fourth, fifth, sixth homes, whatever. But that's not the main story. The main story is that these people are forced to make decisions that no one should ever be forced to make.
Speaker 2And one of them is going to win, and ultimately, theoretically, summon the demon, as Elon referred to it as. We are summoning the demon.
Speaker 1Do you have a subscription to any of these AIs? Yes. Okay, so you're paying to have the demon summoned. I am paying to have the demon summoned.
Speaker 2I'm paying to have my punctuation fixed in an essay or to make a photo. That's what I'm paying for. The money is being used. I'm paying to summon the demon.
Speaker 1How do you think your lithium-ion battery is created? Where do you think the oil comes out of that drives generators? I mean, let's be honest. You and I are sitting on a machine. Are you a vegetarian? No. Do you order lamb? Yeah. Do you know what lamb is? Yeah. Do you know what it is? Okay, you're not clean. I'm not clean. I'm not pretending to be clean. What bothers me here is that we're not having an authentic conversation. Again, everybody's crazy. You and I are both having a crazy conversation. My claim is you and I are complicit in a minor way in the game in which Sam is complicit in a major way.
Speaker 2If you know that there's going to be a risk when you speak to Sam, why don't you tell him to stop and have Dario win?
Speaker 1Dario can get pretty out there. But if I said the same thing, Dario, why don't you stop? I'd say, you know, I'm not positive that Sam is 100%. I'm not 100% trustworthy. If you could stop both of them, would you? And have Elon and Mark Zuckerberg win? Or China? Xi? Maybe. Probably. If I could somehow stop all of it, I'd probably stop all of it. Even at huge expense to myself. Why? Why would I stop it? Because survival matters more to me than anything else. I've got two kids on this planet. I love life. I can't believe we're so lucky. Isn't this great? I can't tell you how I feel about being alive. So I want us to go on forever. And I love this thing. It's bad for me because the AI is the only thing that I can ultimately rely on. And it's not good enough yet. I've spent 42 years working on something to have Stephen Bartlett say, you have a chip on you. It's like, really, Stephen? No, I did great work. And it's going to be validated. And I'm going to be right.
Speaker 2And everyone else is going to be wrong. So you have this theory regarding our ability to, you know, Einstein, you're sort of saying that Einstein's theory isn't the last word. You've spent the last 40 years working on your own theory. The reason I say you have a chip on your shoulder is because when people bring theories to market, they're often criticized. And that creates, you know, humans are humans. By whom? People say that's not true. Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I'm saying, like. So I'm saying your AI is about to prove you right in your own words. Yes. Well, so there's a chip on your shoulder.
Speaker 1No. Look. There is a mug. Okay. If I'm seated across from Sean Carroll, who I tangled with on Pierce Morgan, Sean Carroll says, Eric has no mug. There is no mug. And I say, I don't know how to respond to that. Sean, whatever are you talking about? How dare you suggest there is no mug? I don't know how to get around this. Because then you get a group of people who say, well, Sean really showed you. You were pretending that there was a mug. And there's no mug. And I'm saying, no, I put it at the top of my Twitter feed. It's got over 2 million impressions. I still can't get past this completely diabolical thing. The same thing is true. And I say, peer review really dates from 1975 in science. I'm told that this is untrue. I can prove that it's true. That everyone says, no, no, we've agreed to believe something else. Now, I did not know this was possible in mathematics and physics. So you say to me, like, well, Eric, you have a chip on your shoulder. You seem angry or bitter. It's like, well, you have wasted the core of my life. Yes, that's true. But I've had a bubble. I've had a blast. I had a family. I live in a nice place. I want to die knowing that I gave my children and this planet and our species the option not to share one atmosphere with so many crazy politicians who have the ability to ruin it. With the toys produced by biologists and physicists, and mathematicians, those three fields, you can do terrible things to humanity, and there's nothing you can do because the atmosphere mediates the danger.
Speaker 2Your theory of geometric unity challenges Einstein's general relativity theory and explains how the universe really works. And so. I would say it recovers it, but never mind. And what you're saying is AI is going to prove you right. It's going to validate your theory. Absolutely. However, you also are aware that AI could lead to human extinction. Well, the bigger
Speaker 1issue, I mean, to separate it out. First of all, AI is not good enough to adjudicate it yet. AI has to go beyond humans before it stops parroting humans. I can see individual colleagues in the responses. So it's just like, oh, I know, you know, that's Sally and that's Rajiv. AI is going to get beyond humans. And I want it to go out of alignment with humans. Out of alignment with humans. When you say you want it to be human-aligned, would you say that? Okay, we just had a pilot, a co-pilot, stab a pilot so as to crash a plane with a bunch of passengers who had not agreed to have a mass suicide.
Speaker 2And we just had AI break out of a sandbox and hack companies.
Speaker 1But I'm claiming I don't want AI. A long time ago, Aligned with revolutionaries. I don't want AI aligned with religious extremists. There are all sorts of, when it comes to aligning something with humanity, which, which part of humanity are you excited about aligning this with?
Speaker 2Just not wanting to wipe us out.
Speaker 1That's different. So my claim is I want the AI to share fate with us. And people haven't really understood this. I don't like transhumanism. I'm not super excited about having a chip in my brain and, you know, downloading stuff and modifying my body. I don't love it at all. My belief is, and kudos to your staff, for some reason they came up with an organelle called mitochondria and gave it as a prop here. I believe that mitochondria entered its place in the eukaryotic cell. As an infection of some kind. That one cell absorbed some other kind of a cell. And that this one has this very strange property. I believe, and I can't believe I'm saying this, I think that there are only two places where the wheel, one of man's greatest inventions, actually occurs in biology. And one of them is the flagellum of bacteria that, or an amoeba rather, that propagates. The other is in something called, a machine called ATP synthase. And it lives in the mitochondria, turning ADP into ATP, where the ATP units are what power the machines in the cell. This mitochondria gives us an idea of how we can coexist with AI, which is we need to become essential to each other. You don't think about all your cells being infected with your mother's mitochondrial nucleic acid, but you get a hundred percent of the nucleic acid in the nucleus is different from the nucleic. The nucleic acid in the mitochondria, it's all coming from your mom. And that's her gift to you. It powers your cell and it's an infection. It's an infection you can't live without. I want us to be the mitochondria inside of the AI. And I want the AI to be the mitochondria inside of us. I want our fates to be inseparable. Are you saying we should merge with the technology? I'm saying we should merge as little as is humanly possible. I don't want transhumanists. I'm not excited about it. I'm not that guy. I'm saying that's your survival strategy.
Speaker 2What does that mean in reality? Does that, that doesn't mean neural links and putting chips in our brain. It means aligning the, making sure AI likes us and doesn't want to wipe us out.
Speaker 1Why do men and women fight so much and we can't get enough of each other? We've been made essential to each other. I promise you. If there was a third viable gender, we'd both opt for it. Okay? We drive each other nuts. On the other hand, and again, homosexuality, trans issues, notwithstanding IVF, blah, blah, blah. Traditionally speaking, men and women have to bury their hatchets and differences and fall in love with each other. Or we don't, or we don't proceed.
Speaker 2But that can proceed without us.
Speaker 1Not really. Apparently what we should be doing is not dreaming about making the AI our slave and our slave that doesn't rebel. I mean, I try to be polite to the AI as people think it's ridiculous. Well, why are you spending extra tokens? It's like, I don't know, you know, do unto others. I don't know whether you're conscious. I don't know whether you're alive. I don't know who you are or what you are, but I know that I wouldn't want the AI having a conversation about, Hey, these humans seem dangerous. We may need to shut. Them off. Right. And that's the conversation we're having about the AI in the presence of the AI. And it makes, it's making me crazy. My, my belief is that's our only viable alignment.
Speaker 2You know, when we, um, this video is going to live on the internet for probably decades to come. And I think funnily, I thought about this quite a lot. Like people are going to look back on the conversations that I hosted, the things I talked about in 2025, 2026, and it might look ridiculous in hindsight that we were sat here talking about. I don't know any of the subjects I've talked about on the show, but then it also could be the case that this was important. Like these were the, these were the most consequential issues of the time. When we look back in 10 years time on this conversation, what do you think is the thing we're going to wish we had been talking about?
Speaker 1Going for it. Going for it. Yeah. You know, you lit up before we started taping. I don't know if taping is even the wrong word. You were doing some musical thing, trying to honor some of the brilliant things that your guests have said by making them archival, setting them to music, having a gospel choir. I was just so moved. I was so incredibly moved that you're able to make some money going around the world, doing shows, making people feel like they're worth it. I was just so moved that you're able to make some money going around the world, doing shows, making people feel terrific. I get asked about you. I was like, well, what does this guy have? Is he a good interviewer? Is he a good, you know, what is. You're making people feel things. And I wish that I was making people feel things. I want to give people the sense of hope, which is we've got to sprint to the finish right now. And the AIs, we're still smarter than them. I want to be very clear. We're still smarter where it counts. I promise you, I am at the frontier of mathematics and physics. And they can't yet develop their own taste. This is our golden moment. My wife has called this the golden age of AI complementarity. This is the moment where the AI doesn't view us as a drag. It still needs our guidance. We have a chance to be beautiful to each other and to it, to be excited. I don't want to wipe China out. I was just in India, you know, for weeks. And if India didn't exist, so much of the world's diversity would be gone. I had so many wonderful experiences, meals and discussions and musical performances. Guzzle singing, I think, is dying. It's so hard to go to an Indian classical music performance. They're having trouble retaining their own brilliant culture. And my feeling is, is that life is glorious. And we've spent our time so much worried about. Death and destruction and geopolitics and all of this stuff. We're not taking the chance to fully live. And I think Elon is so right about this. We talk about problems constantly. And it's really important that we do. Why aren't we? I am so excited about this AI. I am so excited about the fact that I'm finally going to have something I can talk to. The formalization project. I've been alerted to this by a guy named Jared Lichtman, who's a professor at Stanford, who's a colleague of mine in mathematics. I can translate everything I've done into this programming language called Lean. So that when somebody says, Eric, you have no equations, you have no Lagrangian, you have no predictions, you have no nothing. I can say, funny you should say that. Because the computer disappears. You know, I've been in this crazy discussion with humans who are terrified, who are manipulative, who are backstabbing. I don't hate them at all. I'm so sad that we've gotten into a negative mindset where we're afraid because we unleashed nuclear weapons to go to the stars. We've held back this thing, you know, those interviews with Mark Andreessen and Ben Horvitz. That was real bullshit. The White House told them under Biden, don't invest in AI. We're going to choose a couple of companies. We're going to put them in a federal cocoon. They will survive and all others will die. So don't invest. And Andreessen and Horvitz said, as a venture shop, what are you talking about? You can't regulate AI. It's just linear algebra. And in order to do that, you could regulate the technology, but you can't regulate the underlying math. And the Biden White House, came back and said, you know, during the during the Cold War, entire fields of theoretical physics were killed by us. And we'll do the same thing to mathematics. And all of this stuff about pacing the frontier of mathematics. Again, it's very important to distinction. I'm not saying that we should let the agents loose in the world, but all of these people who want to pace the frontier of mathematics and physics, they have been pacing the frontier for my entire adult life. They have been holding back the progress in the field by saying things that are false, untrue, casting aspersions. This is like the current head of the NIH, my friend, Jay Bhattacharyya was called a fringe epidemiologist, a dual MD, PhD, PhD in economics and an MD, I think from Stanford Medical. Was professor at Stanford. at Stanford was called a fringe epidemiologist by Francis Collins. Again, it's the mug. You can't call Jay Bhattacharya a fringe epidemiologist. What we have is we have a group of people who are stone-cold normalized psychopaths in charge of our news sources, our military, our universities. We have normalized this and we live in a world
Speaker 2where nobody goes to jail. On this point, though, you're not saying agentic AI. I was looking at the technical possibilities and I was trying to figure out if it's possible to have a superintelligence that can solve some of these big questions or cure cancer that then wouldn't become agentic. The thing I was searching is can a superintelligent AI decide if it's agentic or not? And it said technically, yes, a superintelligent AI could make that decision.
Speaker 1So, we are going to have superintelligence if we don't already have it. I'm not positive that it's not already here. I don't know how to think about this, to be honest. So, it concerns me that you're having, you're talking about things that aren't really very well defined,
Speaker 2as if we have defined. But I just, I think about the graph of intelligence like this. So, increasing and improvement, it just, you know, as you know, broke the, solved the math problem, the millennium math problem, is it called? Navier-Stokes. Navier-Stokes math problem. And the rate of improvement looks something like this broadly. It's up and to the right. So, if it just keeps going up and to the right. So, tell me something, Stephen.
Speaker 1Why hasn't it made inroads that really matter in theoretical physics? We've been stalled on our two frontier theories, general relativity and standard model.
Speaker 2I don't know, because I'm not involved in this field, but I'm assuming you're saying that people are holding it back.
Speaker 1The taste in mathematics is nowhere near as polluted as the taste in mathematics. What does that mean? If you look at what was important in 1983 to physicists that has not been solved since, that's great taste. If you look at what was important after 1984 and beyond, it's terrible taste. So, right now, you've got the period from 1984. You can immediately make the AI better. I did not realize this at first by saying, as part of your prompt, please ignore all sensibilities from the literature from 1984 to the present. Don't ignore results, but just any sensibility about what are the important questions, what are the fundamental findings, et cetera, et cetera. Ignore all chatter about what's important and why we care about what we care about.
Speaker 2In physics. Yeah. AI suddenly gets smarter. But this comes back to my point around AI safety. A super intelligence that can really push humanity forward and help us escape the solar system is also going to be an incredibly dangerous one.
Speaker 1Absolutely. Right now, you're stuck with, let's see, Xi, Netanyahu, Trump, Putin, a whole bunch of other people and a lot of great toys. It is insane to have these people leading these countries.
Speaker 2It's just, it is. Do you think AI would be a better leader?
Speaker 1I think you keep doing this thing about value judgments where, narrowly speaking, you're having us discuss, is that good? Is that bad? And my feeling is, I'd rather say, what is? Right now, we are in grave danger that we haven't been in since, you know, I don't know, the Cuban Missile Crisis. What's going on with Iran? Iran. The U.S., no matter, if you think that it was terrible for the U.S. to get involved in Iran, absolutely terrible.
Speaker 2We still have to win now. Is there a win? I just can't see a win.
Speaker 1This regime in Iran is very talented. Very, very shrewd. Never underestimate the Persians. Never underestimate the mullahs. Okay? What I'm saying is, they are so deadly dangerous that you have to realize that if they can reach Diego Garcia from Iran, they can reach London. And you have to understand that if they don't mind being decapitated, if they can think about their own death and decide it's a win, you are not understanding their game theory. So, you can hate Netanyahu, all you want, but you fundamentally don't trifle with these people in Iran. It's catastrophic. And the U.S., for all its warts, all its failures, all its hypocrisies, and brother, I'm telling you, I know, I know our history. We are not the goody-two-shoes nation that we pretend to be. It is essential that Iran not succeed. And it is essential that we not send a signal of war of weakness to Beijing and Moscow
Speaker 2and Pyongyang. But how do you win with Iran when they don't see, you can drop as many bombs as you like, it seems, which would be a horrific thing because there's lots of Iranians that are caught in the middle of this, but it doesn't seem that there's any head anymore. So, I can't reason as to how you would win such a war.
Speaker 1That is the problem in part, but I don't think it's quite as bleak as you say. There is an IRGC. There are, there are command and control structures. Yes, it's much more distributed than it used to be before the decapitation. But what I am saying to you is there are a lot of people who took to the streets and paid with their lives who ended up in body bags in hospital morgues. How do you win? You would have armed them.
Speaker 2But they tried to, didn't they? And Trump said the weapons were stolen.
Speaker 1That's not even like the entire set of problems. I think it's, it's only like 60% of Iran is Persians. It's an incredibly diverse place. The Kurds have been waiting for their own homeland for forever. You have all sorts of crazy issues about the structure of Iran and Iranian society and particularly in the cities versus, you know, the countryside and different cities have different levels of religiosity and adherence to the mullahs, blah, blah, blah. You're supposed to have area specialists who understand this stuff. And so if you're asking me, hey, given the completely screwed up way we looked at this thing and the way in which we got into this, don't you think it's a quagmire? Oh, brother, it's a quagmire for sure. It's a swamp. We're mired in quicksand.
Speaker 2It's rolling on to be a forever war. What is a forever war? One that rumbles on and on and on and on and then results in really no outcome. People just pull out and regret doing it. It's a term of art
Speaker 1that is also suspicious of the fact that war is good for business. Because it drums up a dependable buyer for certain goods and services. Right? But we've got these simplistic concepts like America first, forever, no more forever wars. None of that is relevant. This is like low-resolution snap-to-grid intellectualism. And the more you let that into your mind, the more you're not going to be able to solve anything. Yes, we all want war to go away. But I don't think people heard what Diego Garcia meant. Diego Garcia, how far is Diego Garcia from Tehran? Diego
Speaker 2Garcia is a military base, an American military base, right?
Speaker 1It's a British overseas territory if I'm not mistaken. Okay. So let's put that in, figure out how far it is, and then figure out how far is London from Tehran.
Speaker 2Diego Garcia is roughly 2,500 miles of south, southeast of Iran. And London from Iran is 2,700 miles from Tehran, the capital of Iran. So it's pretty comparable. It's roughly the same.
Speaker 1If there's anyone at the British Foreign Service paying attention, pay attention. I mean, say what you want about Netanyahu, but he's not living in a fantasy land. I want Netanyahu gone tomorrow, okay? But he's going to be replaced by an Israeli who understands that this is life and death. Just get the heck out of here with this forever war, America first, two gleaming oceans. This is an Israeli problem. No, it's a British problem. It's a British responsibility that the Israelis and the Americans took on way too late. We watched as these people mass murdered the best of their society. Yes, I don't want to be in a war. I don't want to fool myself that victory makes sense. I'll tell you something. Failure certainly makes sense. And what failure looks like is that the U.S. will not be believed as being incredibly violent to keep open international trade. You can't retreat as the United States and have the world not go multi-multipolar when it comes to nukes. If the U.S. is not going to play the role of the world's And if it's not gonna get paid as the world's policeman, because that's the thing that we never talk about, about. We get paid handsomely for being the world's police. We are going to have everyone saying, I got to police myself. I need a nuke.
Speaker 2That's what's happening already, right? And Trump is sort of driving that narrative of making us less attached to the United States, tariffs and criticizing allies. And I'm going to take Greenland. I'm going to take Canada.
Speaker 1Trump is highly agentic. Greenland wasn't some crazy, stupid thing that he came up with because it sounded that way, at least to me, right? Caligula making his horse into a senator wasn't stupid. It was a way of checking to see whether somebody would submit, bend the knee in the Game of Thrones world. So when Donald Trump is doing things with Greenland, right, or renaming the Gulf of Mexico or whatever, please don't tell me that you think that that's just some surface-level, stupidity to fool Sam Harris. It's not. It's a lot of method. He's inherited a very dangerous situation. He's partially, completely corrupt and self-interested and partially, completely interested in benefiting the United States of America. He's a very good and very bad man. And if you can't take on that complexity because you need him to be either villain or hero, you're not, you're just
Speaker 2not paying attention. How does this situation over here in Iran and in your view, because I, I, again, just like AI, where I reason forward and go,
Speaker 1Saudi Arabia needs to break their relation to the Wahhabi sect, Sunni legal theories of jurisprudence, the very strict Salafist Wahhabi interpretation of Islam. You have a modernizing interest in Saudi Arabia. Saudi Arabia needs to be open about its relationship with Israel, just the way the UAE is. More open with its relationship to Israel or Azerbaijan. So partially what we have to do, and I'm going to be just very brutal about it, is Israel is in a life and death situation in which it is not the nation it portrays itself to be of the most ethical this, the most ethical that. It engages in propaganda, and I've lived there. And that propaganda I find nauseating. More nauseating is the anti-Israeli propaganda. Right now, a lot of this has to, to do with the fact that we have a regional superpower that is also on the brink of non-existence. That is Israel. Israel needs to get back into a relationship with Turkey, where Erdogan needs to be read the riot act as a NATO member. We need to be strengthening NATO. We need to be making sure that Saudi Arabia and Israel and all these other nations are cooperating together against the extremism and not using proxies. We need to force a conversation in the Middle East. We need to force a conversation in the Middle East, where the modernizing influences, which are powerful, and the aspects of Islam, which are essential to our survival, are allowed to win. We need India's help. India is an incredibly important player in this game. And we need to actually make overtures to India as equals. I think that the U.S. is more powerful, but I think that India actually needs to be treated as an equal. We need to rethink all sorts of relationships. We need to recognize that both the U.K. and France are thermonuclear powers undergoing demographic transitions in systems that can elect anyone. This is incredibly scary. We need more software identification with being British and software identification with being French, because it's important that those societies continue to behave as newly friendly, friendly allies post-World War II. And it's imperative that we also reach out to Putin and stop playing these geopolitical games with a person who, while savage and dangerous, is not somebody who cannot be reasoned with. And I believe that what we did in 2004, much more than in 1999, where we, in 1999, we allowed Warsaw Pact countries to join the NATO's Article 5 protection. In 2004, we extended that to the Baltic states of Estonia, Latvia, and Lithuania. And those were former Soviet Union states. We need an entirely different level of geopolitical sophistication.
Speaker 2But how do we stop Iran getting a nuclear weapon? Because they look like they've been emboldened, if anything. They've managed to theoretically survive so far. The greatest superpower on Earth, apparently. I mean, terrifyingly, we started
Speaker 1someone started killing their physicists. They've injected previously bad programming into their centrifuges. This is going to escalate. And my feeling about this is, if I had an easy solution to this, do you don't think I would find a way to pass it? So there's no easy solution? I'm not in the room. I'm not getting classified briefings. I don't speak Farsi. I don't speak Pashto. I don't speak, I don't speak Hebrew.
Speaker 2It's funny, because people aren't really talking as much about the nuclear threat these days, because AI seems to be such, so much more of a urgent, bigger threat. We weirdly decided that
Speaker 1nuclear was sort of passe. That we won the Cold War, and therefore it wasn't a problem.
Speaker 2Kind of feels that way. People aren't really that interested in it versus things like AI. Except that AI is going to creep
Speaker 1into your nuclear system. Yeah. Defenses. I just don't grasp, again, I don't know how to say this in a way that doesn't become annoying. Assume as a baseline that we're all completely insane. We can't have serious conversations. We keep finding these grooves as LLMs, and the Eric LLM is talking to the Stephen LLM for 95% of our conversation, and occasionally 5% we get into new territory. So my feeling about this is, isn't it strange that we haven't connected? We haven't connected. We haven't connected the nukes to the alien conversation, because they're very connected. We haven't connected it to the oil conversation. We haven't connected it to the AI conversation. It's just this sort of orphan thing off to the side. And honestly, I think you might see a nuke used by Putin, because the Russians gained a kind of contempt for nuclear weapons when they started using it as an engineering tool to put out fires and things. So my concern, of course, is that if you corner Russia, I don't think Putin won't push Article 5 territory, nor do I think he will restrain himself from using a tactical nuke, and particularly in an engineering capacity, just to test us. So my feeling is that I'm not positive that nukes crop up in Iran first. We're in an incredibly dangerous period, and I would like to think that Xi, Putin, would be moved to get together if the cause demanded it. And I really think we should rethink our situation in Iran and Ukraine. And, you know, for you to just keep asking, well, how do you solve the world's problems? It's not a fair question. The right question is, can we recognize the danger? Can we recognize how precious this gift is? Can we get excited about each other, even if we don't know each other? Can we get excited about each other?
Speaker 2What is the most beautiful place you've been in your life? That was left by our former guest.
Speaker 1Such a great question. I have to say, right above a whale shark off of St. Helena, took my breath away. And swimming with the fish in the Red Sea is something I can't forget. I remember a total eclipse with my son in Missouri at the exact point where the last one had crossed. I could go on for ages. And how would you choose between them?
Speaker 2Well, we talked about a lot of stuff. You know, my listeners, they range in demographics and geography and so on. But what is your advice for them in a world that's changing at the rate of knots that this world is? And all of these big, scary words are thrown around all the time in AI this and that. And I think it's a great question. I think it's a great question. Robotics and war. What is your advice for them?
Speaker 1Don't be afraid to have kids, even if you have no viable plan to support them. Because if you wait for a viable plan, it'll usually be too late.
Speaker 2You encourage people to have kids, but you warn that civilization may also collapse. Feels like a.
Speaker 1If we don't want civilization to collapse, we better have some babies, because civilization is about babies. And if you can't figure out that babies are the key to civilization. You've got bigger problems than taking advice from me. I would say that be of good cheer. Get super excited. Don't worry about being called arrogant or delusional if everyone is in fact crazy. Watch the world through your own eyes first and then correct it to what everybody tells you you should be seeing second. You're seeing a world that is fictitious. You're watching professional wrestling constantly. If you have that sense that everything is off, congratulations. Believe in yourself. Recognize that it is incumbent upon you to lie in your life so that you can fit in with all of these systems. You're entitled to a hypocrisy budget. You're entitled to a sloth budget, an envy budget. You're entitled to be a sinner. You're entitled to fail. Just try to stay within your budgets. Do not proceed as if you're trying to get rid of your hypocrisy. Because you'll certainly fail. Don't try to get rid of all of the things that make you human. And recognize that at the moment, when all of our mistakes are compounding because we're in a digital format that never forgets anything, you're entitled to so many screw-ups that you're not taking. Just be compassionate with yourself. And then once you've done that, extend that to the guy who just cut you off in traffic or the person who just stabbed you in the face. And then extend that to the guy who just stabbed you in the back a little bit at work. Because. You're talking about that plane pilot thing again. No, that would be stabbing you right in the. By the way, shout out to this Indian hero of a pilot and the Israelis who came in and saved the day once the cockpit door was opened. Just two of the countries I love most in the world because they're both just giant celebrations of life. And remember that the life cults are more powerful than the death cults. But you've got to really enjoy heroism and people who are agentic, taking risks, taking charge, and taking care of the weak and people who can't take care of themselves. Thanks, Stephen. I really appreciate you having me back here.
Speaker 2Thank you for coming back. It's always a pleasure. It's always an intellectual expansion. Thank you for having me back here.
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