Sam Altman Paid $10K to Be Killed — So He Can Live Forever | Ep. 24

The machines are coming. The post-human future is at hand. Nothing your father's taught you can prepare you for what's about to happen. AI is going to take your job, and not only your job, but every job. AI data centers are going to use all of your electricity and all of your water too. Only centralized government power can save you by redistributing with the machines create. The internet is saturated with AI hysteria right now. According to some corners of the web, AI is about to leak your entire search history. Everything you've ever typed into Google at 2 in the morning to every human being on Earth simultaneously. Say, "Better call your wife and apologize in advance." And if that doesn't get you, don't worry. Jeffrey Hinton, often called the Godfather of AI, says there's a 10-20% chance artificial intelligence just wipes out all of humanity itself in the next 20 or 30 years. Which is the kind of statistic that sounds terrifying, and tell you remember that someone's been predicting the end of the world for most of recorded history. So far the world has a pretty solid undefeated streak. We're just weeks away from economic collapse, they tell us from wars, from famine, and of course from cyberdying terminators laying waste in entire cities. Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI, has announced that he paid $10,000 to chemically preserve his brain after death, in hopes that future scientists can scan it and upload his consciousness to a server. The only catch is that the process requires the brain to be fresh, so he has to be euthanized first. So the man who says that humanity is "past the event horizon of building digital superintelligence" has decided to solve the problem of human death by killing himself. It's all grim stuff, really. Meanwhile, back in Congress, Bernie Sanders and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez have introduced the AI Data Center Moratorium Act to halt all construction of new data centers. The same people, who say they want good jobs for the American working class and rural communities, have decided that the single biggest job creation engine since the Interstate Highway system needs to be strangled in its crib. And of course, there's Kevin O'Leary's proposed 40,000 acre data center in Utah, which is "synthy internet" into a kind of moral panic. The claim ricocheting around social media is that this facility will dump 23 atomic bombs worth of thermal load on the environment every single day, which is a huge number designed to make you gasp and share, and of course it succeeds at both. But the reality is that 40,000 acres of barren Utah desert already receives around 62 nuclear bombs worth of energy every day, just from the sun. Boxelder County, where the data center is located, is already absorbing roughly 6,500 nuclear bombs worth of solar radiation daily. A data center, producing 23 more, just to drop in the bucket. The numbers that sound so apocalyptic in isolation are actually pretty mundane when you apply just a little bit of context to them. People are also saying that the data center will draw more electrical power than the entire state of Utah, which would strain the power grid and raise energy prices for everyone. But in reality, the new data center will generate most of its own power, onsite, through a dedicated natural gas plant fed by the existing Ruby pipeline. The project is also estimated to create 2,000 permanent jobs for the residents of Boxelder County and give them 30 million in annual tax revenue just during the first phase. All while adding 9 gigawatts of computing capacity once they reach full build out to help America compete with China in the battle to build the future. But don't let that get in the way of your panic. See, panic is what Americans like to do at times like these. When hydraulic fracking was first being implemented in rural America, we were told it would lead to a climate catastrophe and that we would run out of water too. We were told small town America would be completely destroyed. But what actually happened is that America became first in energy independent nation and then an energy exporting nation. Our nation was made richer and more secure. That's the thing about a good panic. Facts rarely fix it. Facts are boring. Fear is exciting. And there's an enormous well-funded industry on both the left and on the right devoted to keeping you afraid. Nobody's in cinnivies to tell you the truth. Nobody's in cinnivies to tell you to be hopeful. Nobody leads with good news. Of course all this fear mongering has real world consequences. Last month an Indianapolis city councilman named Ron Gibson woke to the sound of 13 gunshots being fired into his home in the middle of the night. His eight-year-old son was asleep in the house. A note was left on the front door. It read, quote, "no data centers." Days earlier Gibson had voted to approve rezoning for a data center to be built in his district. Amid all this panic, what you'll almost never hear is what AI can do for us rather than just what it can do to us. That AI carries with it the possibility of an enormous increase in human productivity, in creativity, in innovation, and in economic expansion. That it's far more likely that AI will create jobs than eliminate them permanently, that the picture of what mankind can do with AI. And therefore, what AI can do for mankind is only just beginning to come into focus. So far, it's mostly extraordinary news. Right now, for example, AI is being used to accelerate drug discovery at a rate that would have been unimaginable five years ago. The same technology that the fear mongers say will in civilization has already helped identify novel protein structures that were invisible to human researchers. It's being used to detect cancer earlier and with greater accuracy than any human radiologist working the loan could possibly do. It's being used by farmers in the American Midwest to optimize crop yields, manage water use, and reduce the need for chemical inputs in ways that had up across millions of acres to a meaningful increase in the world's food supply and a cleaner food supply to boot. And those are just the things we can already see. This thing's just getting started. The potential applications in energy, including the clean energy that everyone claims to want are genuinely staggering. AI is not a threat to human flourishing. And the hands of the right people with the right values, AI is very possibly the most important tool for human flourishing ever devised. Now, let me tell you about a man who probably never existed. According to legend, around 1779, a young apprentice textile worker named Ned Ludd smashed two knitting frames in a fit of rage. By 1811, his legend was famous. And the textile regions of England skilled weavers were breaking into factories and destroying the knitting machines they believed were stealing their livelihoods. They called themselves "Ludites". The Luddites weren't stupid or backward. They were skilled artisans who'd spent a lifetime mastering a craft. And they were watching that craft be rendered economically worthless almost overnight. The mechanized looms didn't require their skill. A factory owner could put an unskilled laborer in front of a machine at a fraction of the wage. So the Luddites fought back the only way they knew how. They broke the machines. The British government eventually deployed more troops to suppress the Luddites than Wellington had taken to fight Napoleon on the Iberian Peninsula. Machine-breaking itself was made a capital offense. Dozens of people were hanged or transported to Australia. By 1813, the movement was over. The machines had won. But the Luddites didn't just lose. They were proven wrong. The textile revolution didn't end work. It multiplied it. The goods that skilled craftsmen had once made expensively and only for wealthy patrons became affordable for ordinary people to own. The economy exploded and the whole society benefited. And the Luddites aren't even the beginning of this story. Socrates opposed writing. He argued that the written word would weaken memory and produce people who possessed only the appearance of wisdom without its substance. He had a point. And he was spectacularly world historically wrong. Writing didn't weaken civilization. It built civilization. The railroad was going to drive passengers mad with speed. That's not a joke. Physicians in the early 19th century genuinely warned that human beings weren't designed to travel at 30 miles per hour. They coined the term railway madness. They theorized that excessive speed and noise from writing on trains would cause nausea and memory loss, panic and confusion, even violence. One infamous pamphlet distributed in 1839 to protest the development of a railroad in Philadelphia, red as follows. "Mothers, look out for your children, artisans, mechanics, citizens. When you leave your family and health must you be hurried home to mourn a dreadful casualty? Philadelphia's. Your rights are being invaded with a locomotive railroad through your most beautiful streets, to the ruin of your trade, the annihilation of your rights, and regardless of your prosperity and comfort." Committees were formed. Patitions were signed. Clergy been preached against it. And the trains ran anyway. Electricity was going to electrocute every person in their beds. The automobile was going to destroy the moral fabric of society, the telephone was going to make us all anti-social. Each one of these concerns had a small kernel of truth, but in every instance civilization adapted. The technology proved more useful and more beneficial than the doom savers could ever imagine. Transformative technologies can often produce very real disruption and very real suffering in the short term. But in the medium and long term, term, they produce abundance and freedom on a scale that critics could never imagine in their wildest dreams. So what is artificial intelligence? What is it actually? Well, let me start with what it isn't. Many of the tech CEOs who are building AI are materialists. To them, human beings are nothing more than fortunately arranged molecules, biological circuits, meat computers that have fooled themselves into believing their conscious. M. Altman's decision to pay to have his brain preserved and uploaded to a cloud is the logical extension of this worldview. If consciousness is just information processing, then it can be theoretically copied, stored, and run on different hardware. You in this view are your data. Andthropic CEO Dario Amode recently said that he's no longer certain that Claude, his company's AI model, isn't already conscious. Now, Amode is a brilliant man, but even a fool knows that Claude isn't conscious. Claude isn't conscious because Claude can't be conscious. Claude is a predictive language model. In fairness, Amode is an extraordinarily gifted marketer and saying your robot is alive is a pretty good way to make headlines. But whether he believes it or not, we know something that these men for all their brilliance have chosen not to know, or perhaps can't know because their philosophical framework doesn't allow for it. Men beings are made in the image of God. We are alive. We have souls. We have the capacity to perceive beauty, to choose, sacrifice over self-preservation, to love in ways that cost us something real, to reach out toward the transcendent. These aren't computational functions. They're not predictable outputs of a sufficiently complex information processing system. They're the marks of a being who was created by and for a relationship with God himself. Language models are at their core just extraordinarily sophisticated versions of autocomplete, like you sometimes use when writing a text on your phone. I don't say that to be flippant or dismissive. That's literally what they are. The underlying mechanism is the prediction of the next token in a sequence trained on almost incomprehensibly vast amounts of human-generated text. When you talk to one of these systems and it seems to reason to empathize to understand, it's doing something genuinely impressive. It's reflecting the intelligence embedded in the billions of human documents it was trained on. But it isn't thinking. It's predicting. It isn't understanding. It's pattern matching at a scale we can barely comprehend. And even if machine cognition eventually does exceed human cognition, Christian anthropology still distinguishes personhood from computation. And not machines and machines will never be us. The machine will never have an inner life because it has no life to begin with. It will never be curious because curiosity requires a self that wants to know something. It will never sacrifice because sacrifice requires a self that values something more than its own continuity. The universe was created by God for God's glory. And God's glory is revealed in the redemption of man in Christ, who is both God and man. Which means in a very real sense, the universe itself was made for man. Everything. Every star, every galaxy, everything exists as the stage on which God is working out the salvation of His people. The people building AI, understand none of this. When Tecantrepreneur Brian Johnson talks about AI as building God, when the Silicon Valley material is speaking of achieving digital immortality, they are with the best of intentions speaking nonsense. There's no post-human future. AI isn't going to replace man in the created order. It can't because God didn't make the universe for machines. Saying that AI can't replace man in the cosmic order doesn't mean that it won't displace a lot of men from a lot of jobs in the next decade. Of course it will. It already is. Old people have and will lose their jobs to AI. Real families will endure hardship. Maybe yours may be mine. That's always been true of technological change, and it always will be true of technological change as long as the world is fallen. Nor is AI going to replace God. That's not to say that some people won't make an idol of it. Man has been making idols for himself to worship out of wood and stone and metal since the very beginning. And the wood and stone and metal and silicon going up in Utah and elsewhere around the world will be no exception. AI will confuse people and mislead them if they allow it to, but God will still be God, and our graven images will still turn to ruin every time. So what is AI if it's not the apocalypse and if it's not the Messiah? Well, it's two things, really. It's a mirror and it's a lever. It's a mirror because it creates nothing original. Everything it produces is just a reflection, a recombination of what human beings have already thought or written or built. Now, it's an extraordinarily good mirror. It's more comprehensive, more nuanced, more capable of novel synthesis than any mirror we've ever built. But it's still a mirror nonetheless. Like all mirrors, it can be useful. But if you stare into it obsessively, if you look into it for too long, you risk sharing the fate of Narcissus, who was so transfixed by his own reflection that he could no longer engage with anything real. And AI is a lever because it amplifies human capacity for good and for ill. The same is true of all technology. Warner von Braun designed the V2 rocket as a weapon of vengeance for Nazi Germany. It could reach speeds of 3,400 miles per hour. It could travel hundreds of miles to strike targets like London. But that same rocket technology designed by von Braun to wipe out innocent people, ultimately carried human beings to the moon and returned them safely to Earth. The same AI technology that can identify and exploit vulnerabilities in internet security systems, which some people predict could wipe out your internet privacy forever, will also be used to make those same security systems stronger than they've ever been. Every powerful tool in human history has cut in both directions. The question is who holds the power. If you don't pull the lever, someone else will. The person who does gets to shape the future. One of the most essential things to know about AI, both to help you evaluate it and to help immunize yourself against all this fear mongering, is this. Every single thing AI does, everything it ever will do is man doing. When AI detects a cancer, man detected that cancer using a tool that man created and that man deployed and that man aimed at the problem. When AI writes code, man wrote code using a tool built by man for that purpose. When AI one day helps solve the energy problem or feed the world or eradicate the disease, it will be man who solved all of those problems with a tool of man's own making. There is no conversation about AI apart from man because the universe exists for man. An AI is built by man to do work on behalf of man. AI is not an actor in human history. Man is the actor in human history. AI is just the instrument. The panic merchants on both sides want you to think of AI as a subject, as something that acts upon the world independently that has its own agenda, its own trajectory, its own will. But it doesn't. And it never will. Not now, not ever. AI is a tool. A remarkable, unprecedented civilization scale tool. But a tool nonetheless, and a tool is only ever as good or as bad as the hand that wields it. If AI cures a disease, we cure that disease. If AI is used to surveil and control a population, we're the tyrants. The technology doesn't have values. We have values, which is precisely why it matters who builds AI and who uses AI. And why sitting this out isn't neutrality, it's abdication. AI will be disruptive. History doesn't promise us a soft landing. But the negative consequences of technological change tend to be front-loaded. The positive consequences take longer to reveal themselves. It takes human beings in human society's time to evolve the legal frameworks and the social norms, the cultural guardrails that maximize the upside of a new technology while mitigating the worst of the downside. When man first learned to split the atom, he destroyed cities. He only learned to use that same technology to cleanly power cities later. And we've never lived through a more fission level disruptions in a shorter period of time than we have in the last 30 years. The internet, social media, the smartphone, now AI. We haven't yet evolved the social or legal frameworks to manage these disruptions. We haven't figured out how to channel social media away from its corrosive effects on attention and relationships on fertility and public discourse. We haven't solved the last revolution. And the next one is already here. That isn't an argument for stopping. We can't stop. The technology can't be stopped. And more importantly, it shouldn't be. The potential upside, what it means for real human life and flourishing, is just too enormous. But it is an argument for the kind of sound policy and steady judgment that lets us survive our advancements long enough to see their ultimate benefits. Panic doesn't produce good policy. It produces bad laws, bad reactions, and a seated field. And while the bad policy panic producers may feel good in the moment, it's exactly the kind of thing that turns a hard transition into national ruin. There's a word for the deliberate destruction of machinery. That word is sabotage. It comes from the French word "sabo," which were the wooden shoes that workers threatened by the new machines would sometimes throw into the gears of automation to jam them. Of course, the machines were just repaired, the factories pressed on, and the men who threw their shoes were left with neither their old jobs, nor a place in the new economy. We're already seeing modern versions of this. Protectionist policies designed to slow AI adoption. Government mandates to preserve existing jobs. Moratoriums on data centers, all of it motivated by real anxiety about real destruction, and all of it guaranteed to produce the same result. National stagnation, falling behind the countries that don't impose such restrictions, and eventually fewer jobs and less opportunity than if we had just engaged in the first place. The countries and companies that try to protect their way through this transition will find that protection doesn't work when the competition is global and when the technology is borderless. You can ban a data center in Boxelder County. You can't ban the future. We have to stop asking what AI is going to take away from us, and start asking ourselves what we can build now that we have AI. In every major advancement throughout all of human history, the people who came out the other side weren't the saboteurs. They were the men of agency. They were the men of optimism, not victims living in fear. Sound policy is channeling that agency. It's retraining programs, not job preservation schemes. It's tax environments that encourage businesses to invest in their people as they adopt new tools. It's education systems that prepare the next generation for the work that will actually exist, not the work that used to exist back when the curriculum was written. That's the challenge before us. Elon Musk may be the greatest living American, but when he and others talk about superabundance and the end of human labor, they're missing a fundamental truth about the created order. You can't engineer your way around human nature. The idea that young people shouldn't save for retirement, or that AI will soon make work economically unnecessary as a small number of enormously productive companies produce superabundance and government distributes that abundance as universal basic income. All of it is both utopian and dystopian at the exact same time. It's also wrong. God told Adam, "By the sweat of your brow you will eat." That's the punishment for original sin, and that punishment isn't going to be lifted by a sufficiently advanced technology company. And even before sin entered the world, we were made to work. The garden didn't tend itself. Work isn't a problem to be solved. It's the primary mechanism by which man exercises dominion over the created world. It's the primary mechanism by which he builds character and provides for those he loves and in which he participates in the divine act of creation. Silicon Valley isn't about to prove God wrong. More practically, the history of economic development just doesn't support the superabundance thesis. Every single previous automation revolution produced more work, not less. There's no reason to believe this one will be different in kind, only different in scale. So please, be responsible with your money. Continue to save and invest. Build your skills. Build your life. The future is still out there, and it will have more for you to do, not less. That's the way it's always been, and that's the way it will always be. There's a failure of imagination baked into all the doom narrative. Call it a fixed pie fallacy. First level thinking about AI goes like this. AI can make one man ten times more efficient. So fire nine people and do the same amount of work for 10% of the cost. That's the math of fear and failure. It's also completely wrong about how economies actually function. See, second level thinking goes like this. So hire a thousand more man and do the work of 10,000. Not the same work for cheaper, more work, different work, better work, work that wasn't even possible before. That's the math of growth and success. That's the math that's been right about every transformative technology in human history. The economy is not a fixed pie. It never has been. When the automobile displaced the horse and buggy industry, it didn't just reallocate those jobs somewhere else. It created entire new categories of human activity, road building, highway building, building suburbs, building gas stations, motor hotels, drive-in theaters, interstate commerce. None of that even existed before the automobile. The same thing happened with electricity. The same thing happened with the railroad. The same thing happened with the internet. We use virtually 0% of the energy available to us in this solar system. Zero. The sun bathes the earth in more energy every single hour than humanity uses in a year. The resources available to man when properly understood aren't scarce at all. They're almost incomprehensibly abundant. What has always been limited is our capacity to harness them. And every major technological leap has expanded that capacity. AI doesn't shrink what's available for man to do. It expands it. It's the latest instrument by which man extends his dominion over the created world, not the instrument by which machines replace man in that dominion. The ceiling on human achievement is not lower because of AI. It's higher. And the people who figure that out first are the people who are going to build the next century. Conservatives have been reflexively retreating from cultural and technological arenas for decades. And it's cost us enormously. Facebook was built by a materialist who famously described his early users as dumb for trusting him with their data. Twitter was built by people who had a particular vision of public discourse, one that turned out to be deeply hostile to conservative and Christian ideas and who encoded that vision into everything from moderation policies to recommendation algorithms. YouTube and Instagram TikTok, all of it built by people who didn't share our values and who baked their values consciously or unconsciously into the machinery they made. And for 15 years, conservatives sat on the outside complaining about the bias, filing lawsuits and holding congressional hearings while the people who built the platforms set the terms of the culture. Hollywood is another great example. Hollywood is a 75-year story of conservative retreat. In the 1940s and the 1950s, the most popular films in America spoke to mainstream American values. But as the culture of Hollywood shifted in the 1960s and the 1970s, conservatives gave up. We responded by pulling back by dismissing it all as a lost cause, treating mainstream cinema as enemy territory to be criticized from the outside instead of contested for from the inside. The result? By 2026, the major studios have spent 50 years telling stories that reflect a worldview most of their customers don't share. We can't let the same thing happen with AI. The stakes are just too high. When we first launched the daily wire, while other conservative outlets were spending their time complaining about leftist bias on the platforms and the oppression of conservative accounts, we took a different approach. Internally, our staff was never allowed to blame the algorithm for failure. It didn't matter if the algorithm really was biased, sometimes it was, and sometimes it wasn't, but either way, it was beside the point. The platforms just were what they were. Our job was to figure out how to win on the platforms anyway. Because you have to win, and you only win by winning. So we did. For 18 months, the daily wire was the number one publisher on all of Facebook. Nothing number one conservative publisher, the number one publisher, period, more engagement than the New York Times, CNN, The Washington Post, much to their outrage. Every other conservative outlet was busy explaining to its audience why Facebook was unfair. The daily wire was busy winning. The lesson here is not to fall for the doom narrative about technology, and especially not the doom narrative about AI. The platform is going to be what the platform is going to be. Sitting around bitching about it isn't a strategy for success. There are two kinds of people in the world with respect to artificial intelligence. The people who are going to win with it, and the people who are going to lose to the people who are going to win with it. That's it. There is no third category. You don't get to be the people who neither engage with it, nor are affected by it. That option is off the table and has been since the first model was trained. And the question of who wins with AI isn't just a cultural question or an economic question. It's a question of our national survival. China understands this. China's government has made the development of artificial intelligence a stated national security priority. They're not debating whether to build AI. They're debating how to build AI first and how to build AI that most effectively can be used to extend Chinese power. and Chinese influence in every domain, military, economic, informational, and diplomatic. What does it mean for the free world if the most powerful information technology in human history is built primarily by people whose values are antithetical to human freedom? Now, not every problem is a nail that requires a military hammer, but the story of human civilization is in large part the story of which civilization had the best tools and the will to use them. America has led the world for the better part of a century, not only because of its values, but because it consistently led the world in the development and deployment of the most powerful technologies of each era. The question before us is whether we'll continue to do that, or whether we'll be the first generation of Americans to voluntarily relinquish that advantage out of fear. Building AI with the right values and with American interests and human dignity in mind isn't optional if we want to remain a free people. There's a genuine opening right now that won't remain open indefinitely. If Christians and conservatives refuse to shape the most powerful technology in human history, then we're not preserving civilization. We're abandoning civilization. God gave human beings a mandate. Take Dominion. Subdued the earth. Fill it and cultivate it. Tend the garden. That mandate has never been revoked. It doesn't have a technology exception. It doesn't say take Dominion over everything except the things that seem really scary or complicated. The promised land may contain giants. And if it does, it's our job to drive them out. That's the mandate. So go and create, go and build, will wisely over what you've been given. And the fact that these tools can be used for evil doesn't negate the mandate either. Everything that can be used for good can also be used for evil. That's been true since the first stone was shaped into a tool and since some jerk relies he could also use it as a weapon. The response to that reality is not to stop making things. The response is to ensure that we are the people making things. The solmest says that God is our refuge and strength and ever present help and trouble. Therefore, we will not fear. The earth give way and the mountains fall into the sea. That's not a command to be naive. It's a command rooted in clear right understanding of who is actually in charge of history. Not the tech CEOs. Not the politicians who want to stop data centers. Not the AI doomsayers calculating percentages of human extinction. No, Christ is King and he hasn't lost the plot. So seize the moment and don't be afraid. The tools that the doomsayers say will end us are the same tools that in the hands of the right people will let us out produce and out publish, out teach and out build the institutions that have been failing this country for two generations. And at whatever level you operate, be it engineer or business owner, teacher or pastor, writer or parent, learn what AI can do and make it work for you. Learn what it can't do. Learn where it reflects genuine human wisdom and where it encodes the assumptions of the people who built it. You can't engage critically with the tool you refuse to pick up. Neither should you accept its predictive text as gospel. You should just use it. Figure out what it can do that would take you 10 hours to do yourself and let it do it in 10 minutes so you can spend the remaining 9 hours and 15 minutes doing things that only you can do. Work changes, life changes. We're not promised that tomorrow will look like yesterday. It never has and it never will. But you are alive. You have agency. You can adapt. You can push yourself. You can grow. You can win. And you must. It's a thrilling time to be alive. The uncertainty is real. The disruption is coming and some of it will be painful. There will be jobs lost and industries transformed, cultural dislocations we can't fully predict and we won't fully understand until we're standing on the other side of them. But there will also be levels of ingenuity and human flourishing never seen before in all of history. Every generation has been handed a moment like this. The men who built this country were handed one. The men who carried it through the industrial revolution were handed one. The men who carried it through the world wars were handed one. Every one of them looked at what was in front of them and had the same choice you're being offered right now. Decide that the problem is bigger than you and live as its victim or decide that the problem is for you to solve and overcome and then get busy working to solve it and overcome it. You weren't born into a generation that got the easy version of being alive. The easy version doesn't exist and it never has. You were born into this moment because this is the moment that needs you. It doesn't need luddites or saboteurs. It doesn't need utopianists or transhumanists. It needs builders and doers and get up and goers. So be one of them. Build the future. Build it the way generations before you built the country you inherited. Not because the work was easy, but because the problems were theirs to solve. Build it the way Adam tended the garden with your own hands and with your own judgment, with the wisdom of the people who came before you, with the help of the people who stand beside you and with the most powerful tool human beings have ever invented, just sitting on your desk waiting for you to figure out what to do with it. If you do, the future belongs to you.