Jordan Peterson

Sam.

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Sam.

Sa.

Modern people often ask themselves, why do I have to study history?

While you're a historical being, you need to know who you are and where you came from and why you think the things you think. That's why you have to place yourself in the proper tradition. I'm taking four of my esteemed colleagues and you across the world. Oh, wow. This is amazing. To rediscover the ways our ancient ancestors developed the ideas that shaped modern society,

it was a monument to civic greatness.

Visit the places where history was made, I.e. ash from the actual fires when the

Babylonians burned Jerusalem from 2500 years ago.

To walk the same roads. We are following the path of the crucifixion and experience the same wonderful we

are on the site of a miracle.

What kind of resources can human beings bring to a mysterious but knowable universe?

Science, art, politics, all that makes life wonderful.

And something new about the world is revealed.

Sam.

It's sa.

So the first thing I'd like to say is that it's ridiculously exciting to be here.

You're most welcome to be here.

This is quite the amazing place and I've been preparing to talk to you for a long time, so I'm really looking forward to it. You said something that Caught me right away when we were discussing various issues. Just before we started, you said you were up till 4 in the morning.

Yeah, actually a little more like 5 in the morning. But we got the XAI data center, or supercomputer center, training from beginning installation to start of training in 19 days, which is the fastest that anyone has ever gotten a supercomputer to train.

And is that in that new building off to the side?

That's in Memphis, actually.

It's in Memphis, yeah. So that's where you were. Yeah, I see.

Memphis, the capital of ancient Egypt.

Right, right, right, right, right. Yeah. You're bringing what?

Perhaps that's where our new God will come from.

Yeah. No kidding. No kidding. Yeah. I wish that was funny. Yeah. Okay, so I want to talk to you about a line.

I wish that was funny.

Yeah.

Yeah. Look, I mean, there are a few things we're aiming for with Grok, the xai, but it's the name of the AI from Xai is called Grok. Familiar with.

I'm familiar. I want to ask you about that too.

Well, Grok just means to deeply understand something.

Yeah. But it's got that weird background, that Stranger in a Strange Land. Right. Robert Heinlein. That was a book of mine. How old are you?

53.

Yeah. Okay, so we're roughly from the same era. I read Heinlein a lot when I was a kid.

The first two thirds of Stranger in a Strange Land are great. Gets kind of weird in the final third.

Yeah. So why'd you pick Grok?

Well, I think. Well, because of the meaning of the word. Yeah. To Grok something is to understand it at a very deep level.

Yeah.

To really fundamentally understand something. And that's what we're aiming for with our AI. The stated goal of XAI is to understand the universe.

Yeah.

So to really just understand the nature of the universe and even what questions to ask about the universe.

Yeah.

So that's our goal. I think it's a good goal.

Okay, so let me ask you some specific questions about that. So I played a lot around a lot with large language models. I have some people on my team who built one. Actually, we built one out of my writing that I've been using to help me with my new book. So if I come across biblical passages that I can't understand, I can use that system to give me a first pass approximation, and it works quite nicely.

Yeah.

I've used GROK quite a lot too, and CHAT GPT. And I use them as research assistants, and their CHAT GPT lies A lot. So you have to keep an eye on it. Well, so I've been thinking about this

alignment problem, and so alignment problem's a big deal.

I got an idea to run by you and tell me what you think about this. Well, so there's a golden thread of conversation that constitutes the basis for humanities education. Let's say, that's run across centuries, and in principle, that concentrates on ideas that have been winnowed, probably through a quasi evolutionary process across large spans of time, to get documents out of that, like.

Well, like the King James Bible, for example, and they're zeroing in on core conceptual structures that we don't even necessarily explicitly understand. It seems to me that when we take young people and we give them a genuine humanities education, we solve the alignment problem for them now.

So the question or make it worse?

Well, you do that. If it's propagandistic, you can make it much worse.

It often is these days.

Yeah, that's pretty much. That's exact. Well, that's also exactly what happens and inevitably when that unbroken tradition is not transmitted. And so this strikes to something that's very essential, which is, well, what's the difference, let's say. Or is there a difference between the Western canon, let's say, and the latest WOKE nonsense?

Now, I've used GROK a lot and it's not as woke as ChatGPT, but it's still woke. Like, it still deviates. So, so how are you. Can you address that by. It's just a language model at the moment. Let's say if it also understood images, if it also understood behavior.

It does. It actually does assign images at this point.

Okay, and are those. Is the language model and the image understanding, are they stacked on top of each other? Because I think that's partly how we triangulate psychologically. Right. We have an imagination and we have a verbal module, but those things have to work in sync. And we also have.

It certainly is intended to work in sync.

You know, it is intended to be what's called a multimodal model, which means understanding text, images and video and audio.

Okay. If it understands video, will it start to understand behavior?

Yeah.

All this data that you've collected with your car. So I've been wondering, I know Tesla's a car company, but when I look

at what they do with AI Company.

Yeah, well, exactly. Yeah. Well, maybe more like. Those aren't cars. Those are autonomous robots.

Yeah, they're robots on four wheels. Autonomous robots on four wheels.

Yeah.

They just look like a car.

Right. They're disguised as a car. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay. Okay. So what advantage do you have in training Grok given that you have all this real world data that you've gathered from your automobiles?

We haven't yet applied real world video from Tesla to Grok yet. So I do want to emphasize XAI is a fairly new company. It's just over a year old, so we really need, we have a lot of catching up to do to companies relative to companies that have been around for five or 10 or 20 years. We're catching up fast. I think the velocity of improvement of XAI is faster than any other company out there.

We just completed the.

We were just able to install and bring online a massive new training center that we like as mentioned, we're building in Memphis and it's from getting hardware installation to it. Beginning training was only 19 days and that's the fastest by far that anyone's been able to do that. So we're moving quickly, but we're still catching up.

And so if you use catching up to who? Well, catching up to say, Gemini, ChatGPT, Claude and the other.

So, and how do you feel that Grok.

We're catching up fast.

How do you feel that GROK performs, say, in relationship to ChatGPT now?

Well, so the GROK version that's been released is still based on Grok 1 version 1 training. We've made several improvements. So it's sort of called Grok 1.5. But the foundation model of, of GROK is still an order of magnitude weaker than chatgpt.

Oh yes.

So it's doing quite well. Given that order of magnitude difference and

this new system, how powerful is it compared, let's say, to ChatGPT?

Well, so Grok2 actually finished training. Now Grok2 was training with roughly 15,000 GPUs and they're H100. So Grok2 finished training about a month ago. We're doing what's called fine tuning, fixing bugs and whatnot. So we'll release Grok 2, which will be, should be on par with or close to a GPT4 and that's hopefully we release that next month.

Then what we're doing in the Memphis data center is we're actually training Grok 3.

So that'll probably finish training in about three or four months and then there'll be some fine tuning and bug fixing whatnot. And we're hoping to release Grok 3 by December. And Grok 3 should be the most powerful AI in the world at that point.

So my, my sense with ChatGPT, I've worked with lots of undergraduates and graduate students and my, my, my sense with CHAT GPT is if you can corner it into behaving properly, that you kind of have something approximating a team of, I would say, master's degree level intelligence and something like that, what do you envision for this new, well, let's say the new Grok 3.

And then you talked about delving deeper into the structure of the universe, let's say, to answer fundamental questions like, and you are a remarkably forward looking person, so what do you, what the hell do you think you're building with these AI systems? Like, what is this?

Well, I think really what, what all the AI companies are aiming to build is digital digital superintelligence.

So, you know, intelligence that's far smarter than any, any human and then ultimately an intelligence that is far smarter than all humans combined.

Now one can say like, is this a wise thing to do? Isn't this dangerous? Well, unfortunately, whether we think that or not, it is being done.

So really from my standpoint, from the XAI team standpoint, we are really, we have the choice of being a spectator or a participant.

But that's life, man.

Yeah, be a spectator or a participant. And I think if we're a participant, we've got a better chance, hopefully of steering AI in a direction that is beneficial to humanity.

So why do you, why, okay, so why do you trust yourself on that front just out of of. I mean, that's an important question, right?

I don't trust myself entirely.

Good. Well, that's, yes, fair enough. Okay, but an ethical conundrum, right?

Yes, ethical conundrum, right.

Because you said, well, this is happening now, the excuse that something is happening is not a rationale for participating in it. But then your next take is, well, you know, we have the chance to do this properly, let's say, as well.

I mean, I think from a moral standpoint, we really just need to think that maybe we've got a chance of it being better to some degree than what others are doing. And we'll strive to avoid some of the pitfalls or directions that the others are going in. Because the others, from what I've seen, do not strive for truth.

What do they strive for?

They strive for. Well, they strive to give an answer, but they are, I think, trained to be politically correct. And the woke mind virus is woven in throughout them. Yeah, I'm sure you've seen that.

Yeah, definitely, definitely, definitely. You know, my students used to ask me when I, because I've Been teaching, what I've been teaching for about 40 years. And one of the questions they used to ask me is how I knew that what I was teaching wasn't just another ideology. Right. Because the postmodern take is. Well, all it is is a plethora of power games.

And so there's no rank ordering approaches to the truth in terms of their ethical suitability. But that's not the game that you're playing. And.

Right. And obviously we're not agree with. With that philosophy, sort of moral relativism.

What's convinced you that that's not. That's not a useful way of approaching things?

Well, I think you can look at a given belief system and critique it as being likely to enhance or decrease enlightenment.

Will any given belief system improve our understanding of the universe? Will we learn more things? Will we achieve a deeper understanding of physics?

Right. So that's grounded at least in part in a scientific framework. From the sounds of it.

I think there are facts about the world of.

Yes, Right.

There are things that are, let's say, extremely likely to be true versus less likely to be true. I think if one thinks in terms of probabilities about any given sort of axiomatic statement, then that's the right way to think about it. Now, some things are 99.99% to be true. You can run experiments, you can confirm them.

And others are perhaps have a low probability of truth, 1% likely to be true. Or, you know, just using extremes here. But any given statement has, I think, should be thought of as having. Unless it's a tautology, it should be thought of as having a probability of being true or untrue or a probability of being relevant to an argument or not relevant to an argument.

We're just talking about. About the basics of cogency here.

Yeah, yeah. Well, okay, so let me. Let me put a twist on that too. So one of the things that really struck me about your public pronouncements in recent years was your insistence that we're in a natal crisis and that that's

actually a problem because that's factually true.

Well, well, it depends on whether you think that Pop the planet would be better off if it was depopulated.

I definitely.

Paul Ehrlich is genocidal maniac. As far as I'm concerned. He's a terrible human being.

Yes. And he's never admitted that he was wrong and he was unbelievably wrong. He made a famous bet.

You know, the bet. I hate polo. Like I should be clear about that. I think he's terrible and, and his books have done great damage to humanity.

So what? Okay, fine. I talked to a philosopher a while back who is an antinatalist, trying to get my finger on that. There was a recent research article published on this too. Antinatalists are much more likely to show dark tetrad traits, Machiavellian, psychopathic, narcissistic and sadistic. Because those first three weren't enough.

Right. And so those things are tightly aligned, especially the best predictor with psychopathy for being an antinatalist.

Sure.

Right, right. Well, and the psychopaths are very, very, very self centered. Right. It's, they're like overgrown two year olds. Overgrown aggressive two year olds. So that's not good. But how did you start to understand that one of the fundamental ethical problems is different than a scientific problem? One of the fundamental ethical problems that's plaguing the west is this catastrophically low birth rate.

And you know, when you started making public.

I'm observing the numbers, I mean, I noticed this 20 plus years ago, that the trend in birth rates for really all countries past certain level of economic development was trending to well below replacement, if not already below replacement. And if you extrapolate the curve, which one always has to be cautious about extrapolating any demographic curve.

But if so, I always preface by saying if these trends continue, most countries will dwindle into insignificance. They might completely die out.

So I've been thinking about that in relationship to sacred images.

Okay, okay.

Well, the sacred image of masculinity in the west is a crucifixion, but a man who's crucified, but sacred image of a woman isn't a woman. The sacred image of a woman is a woman and an infant. Right. It's a dyad and not a monad. Sure, Right, right, right. And in the Christian view, those, those two images, you know, they vie for supremacy.

Right. I mean obviously Christ is the superordinate image, but Mary is the mother of God is the female equivalent. And so one of the things I've been playing with at an axiomatic level is the notion that unless the feminine is conceptualized as the combination of female and infant, then the culture has lost its attachment to the traditional sacred images and is probably on its way out.

Yeah, I think there is, there's an argument that, that when a culture loses its religion that it starts to become antenatalist and decline in numbers and potentially disappear.

So I've got a hypothesis about that. You tell me what you think about this. So I've been working this out in my next book, which is coming out in November. So it's an analysis of biblical stories, and in a way, it's an attempt to solve the alignment. Alignment problem. Okay, so imagine this. Imagine that there's a unity of moral purpose that is conceptualized in the traditional writings as what should be put in the highest place.

So it's God. And in the final analysis, it's ineffable, but it is a fundamental unification. Monotheism. Okay, now here's a hypothesis. When that collapses, two things arise to replace it. Okay. One is the striving for power, and the other is the untrammeled. What would you call it? The untrammeled dominion of hedonism.

And especially on the sexual gratification side. So it's like, if there's no ultimate unity that's future and community oriented, that's predicated on sacrifice, you get a dissolution immediately into the next two contenders for domination. And one is, it's about me, buddy, and get the hell out of the way and aligned with that.

It's about. Not only is it about me, it's about me. What would you say? Subjugated to my most base whims? Because why would I want power except to do exactly what the hell I want whenever I want to? And so part of the problem with the idea of people like Dawkins, so. Dawkins and the atheists.

Yeah, I've had many conversations with Dawkins over the years.

You have, eh?

Oh, yeah, yeah.

Oh, we're gonna do a podcast together, which I'm very looking forward to.

Yeah.

But I'm very curious about this issue because his idea, and it's kind of an Enlightenment idea, is that we dispensed with the idiot superstition of the past and everyone would become, you know, Baconian rationalists. And that seemed.

Yeah, unfortunately not.

No. Well, what seems to me to happen much more likely is that power and hedonism rise to take the place of what was holy, so to speak. You know, and Nietzsche warned about that when he proclaimed the death of God to begin with. He thought nihilism would also enter the realm. Right. Nihilism, power and hedonism as the.

As the triumvirate of replacement gods. And so I've been trying to puzzle out in this new book the way the biblical corpus is conceptualizing what's properly placed in the highest place. And it does. That's part of the reason I was asking you about the Natalist issue. Because you figured out 20 years ago that's a long time before anybody been

talking about it longer.

Yeah, yeah, but that. And then you also did publicly proclaim it at a time when the insistence, the moral insistence was all on the side of, you know, Jane Goodall's pronouncements that if we don't reduce the population of the planet dramatically, that the nature goddess is going to be upset, which is also a very, very old idea, not a very good one.

So I'm very curious about your intuition there. Like, that's a long time ago. And so how did you cotton on to the fact that that antagonistic attitude towards birth that's embedded in our culture now was something that should be called out and that was pathological?

Well, I mean, I should perhaps go back to what is the foundation of my philosophy, because that I think helps build up, you know, to explain my actions. So the. When I was, I don't know, about 11 or 12 years old, I had somewhat of an existential crisis because there just didn't seem to be any meaning in the world, like no meaning to life.

And so I actually read, tried to read all the religious texts at that age. Yes.

So I was a voracious reader as a kid. So I obviously read the Bible, I read the Quran, the Torah, you know, the various.

But on the Hindu side, just trying to understand all these things.

And Obviously as a 12 year old you're not really going to understand these things super well, but I've just.

Well, you understood it well enough to have an existential crisis when you were 11 or 12.

Yeah, I'm just trying to figure out, well, that's. Does anyone have an answer that makes sense? And then I started getting into the philosophy books and I read quite a bit of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, which is quite depressing to read as a kid. Yeah, I might say that less depressing as an adult.

And none of them really seem to have to me answers that resonated, at least to me.

But then I read Douglas Adams, Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, which is really a book on philosophy disguised as humor. And what Douglas Adams. The point that Adams tries to make there is that we don't actually know all the answers, obviously. In fact, we don't even know what the right questions are to ask. That's where he has, you know, this.

If you've read the book, the, you know, Earth is actually a giant computer to understand the answer to the question, what is the meaning of life?

Yeah.

And comes up with the answer 42.

Yeah.

And people are like, what does that mean? He says, oh, you actually. You don't understand that the real. The thing that's going to take a computer far more powerful than Earth is to understand what question to ask.

Yeah, right.

That's simply the wrong question.

So was that the key realization, that question.

That was a fundamental turning point.

Yeah, yeah, because that's it. So that's very interesting because one of the things that you see constantly portrayed in redemptive hero myths across the world is that the adventure is the thing and that the search is the thing, rather than there being a final answer as absurd as 42 might be.

Right.

There's no. There's no. That the conclusive answer is something like deep engagement in the process. So I'll give you an example of that. So in the Sermon on the Mount. The Sermon on the Mount's a very detailed set of instructions.

Yeah.

So there's three parts to it. The first is aim at the highest thing that you can possibly conceive of, and keep modifying that so your aim gets better. Okay, so that's number one. Number two is make the presumption that other people have the same intrinsic value as you do.

Well, we have to be careful about that one.

Okay, okay, let's discuss that. But. But it's a. What would you say? It's, It's. It's a. It's a recognition of the. Of the universalist value of everyone who's made in the image of God. It's something like that. But the third thing is once you do those two things, you can concentrate on the moment. See, and that seems to be even technically, you can think about this neuropsychologically.

So if you're looking for meaning, meaning is a form of incentive reward, and incentive reward is dopaminergically mediated. And incentive reward occurs in relationship to advancement towards a goal, which is a form of entropy minimization, as it turns out, according to Carl Friston, who knows

this sort of thing, entropy is the ultimate boss battle.

Yeah, right, right, right, right. Well, negative emotion signifies the emergence of entropy, and positive emotion on the dopaminergic side signals its reduction. But there's something that's more complex there, because the higher the goal that you're trying to attain, the more intrinsic value each step towards it comprises.

And that's neuropsychologically accurate. And so part of the wisdom of the Sermon on the Mount is that if you posit the highest imaginable goal, then any step towards it is that captures Your attention is also deeply meaningful. And so that's an answer to what the meaning is of process, rather than say something like 42.

And you said, it seems to me that you were intimating that your discovery through Adams, that the question was the thing was key to the resolution of your existential crisis.

That's correct.

Okay, so that's part of the reason that you're motivated to, say, build Grok 3 and look in.

Look deeper to understand.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Understand the universe.

Okay, so once. How old were you when you figured that? When you figured out that the question.

Thirteen or something, what did that do to you?

What did that do to you?

Well, I was a lot happier after that because now it's like, okay, well, I'm just going to accept that we are ignorant of a great many things.

Yeah.

And we wish to be less ignorant. And anything we can do that will improve our understanding of the universe and make us less ignorant and have a deeper understanding of the universe and even more questions to answer, to ask about the answer that is the universe, which is, I think Adam's central point is good.

And that was good enough to resolve that crisis.

It was. It was for me, at least.

Yeah.

And so, like, is this a religion? I don't know. Maybe it is, but I think it's a good one. I'd call it a religion of curiosity.

Yeah. Well, the ancient God of the Mesopotamians, his name was Marduk, and he was the best defense against ensuing chaos and state corruption. Okay. So that's how he was conceptualized. Okay. Marduk had eyes all the way around his head because he paid attention. Right. And he spoke magic words. Right. And he was literally, for the Mesopotamians, he was the agent that revitalized the tyrannical state and overcame evil, and also the force that dispensed with chaos and built something magnificent and cosmic out of it.

Right? Yeah, yeah.

Sounds like a force for good.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. The Mesopotamian emperor. So his job was to embody that spirit on Earth. And they used to take him out of the city on New Year's Eve, strip him of his kingly clothing, humiliate him. They slapped him, the priests. And then they'd ask him to confess all the ways that he hadn't been a good Marduk, attentive and speaking properly in the previous year.

And that's how they renewed the cosmos every year. That's our New Year celebration is a derivation of that. Out with the old and in with the new. And the Egyptians, they worshiped the eye. Right. You've Seen that famous eye.

They're all seeing Eye of Horus.

They're all seeing Eye of Horus. That's the antidote to the Eye of Sauron, by the way. Right. Because you get. If you don't use that vision, if each citizen doesn't use that vision, it's replaced by the totalitarian all seeing eye. Right, right. So that's a hell of a thing to know. Okay. So that. Okay, so that's cool.

So I wondered. I see. I see. Because I wondered what's motivated you because you push in so many directions simultaneously. You have to be really highly motivated to do that. And so you figured out that the question, in a sense, was the answer.

Yeah, yeah. The question. Or, you know, said another way, that seeking greater enlightenment and a better understanding of the universe and what questions to ask about it is something that we can continue to do as a civilization for a very long time.

Yeah, yeah. Likely forever.

Right, Exactly.

Depending on how powerful Grok turns out to be.

Yeah.

So then I thought, okay, I'll work on things that improve our understanding of the universe. Now they have to say, like, at a base level. Well, this is why I actually think we want a population increase. Because population increase means that there are more people, that. We've expanded the scale.

More brains, man.

Yeah. We've expanded the scale of consciousness to the great. There are different cultures. We've expanded the scope of consciousness so that there's.

Okay, so I read something here. I talked to this gentleman who done a biography of Marx, and he went and looked at Marx's poetry and drama that he wrote before he wrote the Communist Manifesto. And he found out something very interesting. Okay. He found out that Marx's favorite quote from Goethe was a statement by Mephistopheles.

It's a very specific statement, and it's a very key statement. Mephistopheles. Motivation. So Lucifer's motivation is predicated on this argument said consciousness is nothing but consciousness of pain and misery. Life is short and. And brutal and pointless. Therefore, it would be better if consciousness itself was eradicated.

Sounds like Hobbes.

Yeah.

Well, I named my. I had a little Yorkshire terrier who was nasty, brutish, in short. So I named him Hobbes.

Perfect. Perfect. Well, I think it's even deeper than Hobbes because Hobbes seemed to understand that life without social order would degenerate into that. But the Mephistophelian credo is that consciousness itself is an evil that should be eradicated because it produces suffering. That was Marx's favorite It is the very definition of crazy.

Right.

It's the definition of the adversarial spirit. Now, your hypothesis, your axiom, let's say, is that that's wrong and that consciousness should be so. Then we say, so why should consciousness be expanded if it's nothing but consciousness of suffering?

And your answer is obviously false.

Okay, not so obvious. Lots of people suffer like lots of people suicidal and nihilistic and so. And you had that crisis of faith, let's say, when you were 11 or 12, an existential crisis, but you resolved it.

Meaning of life crisis.

Right, right.

So, no, I think it's just obviously false that people, while there are people who are very sad, there are people also who are very happy. And we go through sad and happy moments. Every human being does. So it's an absurd and obviously false statement that life is merely suffering.

Yes.

I mean, that is just a ridiculously false statement.

So one of the things I've tried to do is to understand. So there are a limited number of things that are undeniably real and pain is one of them. Yes. Okay.

Like my back hurts a little.

Yes. So that's because you were up till five in the morning.

No, I just have some injuries whatever from wrestling.

It's like from, I think some childhood injuries that. Although the, the final thing that, that caused some, some back and shoulder injuries was me foolishly fighting the world champion Timo wrestler. Right. And charging him at him at full speed to knock him over, which I did succeed in doing. But.

But you paid a price for it,

a very, very high price.

Carnivore diet will fix that.

The what, sorry?

The carnivore diet will fix.

I look, I'm all, I like meat, I'm pro meat. I don't think a carnivore diet is going to fix this particular issue.

I think my wife had an injury of 40 years.

Okay.

And it, it resolved in two years. Carnivore diet.

If you just eat steak or something.

Yeah. All beef.

Sure, sure, sure. I'm a pro. I like meat. But I think this is. I think I'll probably need an operation or something.

But anyway, I'd try the carnivore thighs first. Anyways, that did happen to her. She couldn't lift her left arm above here. It took 40 years and in two years it resolved.

Okay.

Yeah, so that was something to see. It also rejuvenated her physically in a variety of different ways that were quite miraculous to watch. And that hasn't stopped. So that's weird thing. And I would have Never believed it. If I hadn't seen this because it's so preposterous.

Sure.

Anyways, we're going to proselytize about carnivore diets. Yeah. So. Okay. Okay, so that. Now let's go back to AI, if you don't mind. So you were involved in the project that Sam Altman runs now, Open AI?

I was one of the principal co founders.

Right.

In fact, I named it.

Yep. So. So what the hell happened?

Was my idea.

What happened?

Well, I started off. So the origins of OpenAI are that I was very close with Larry Page, who's one of my best friends. And in fact, I'd stay at his house because I'd spend half the week in the Bay Area running Tesla and half in LA running SpaceX.

And for the longest time, I never even had a house in the Bay Area. I would just stay at friends friends places if they had a spare room. I'd stay there if they didn't sleep on the couch. And I found it actually to be a great.

It's very funny that you stayed on the couch. I think that's very funny.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, you know, not stay on the couch that often, but it was.

But I didn't have a house for more than a decade, so I would just stay at, rotate through friends places, which is a great way to catch up with friends.

Yeah.

Right.

And so I would have these conversations with Ari Page long into the night about AI safety. And I just grew increasingly concerned that Dari was not sufficiently concerned about AI safety.

And at one point he did call me a speciest.

Yes, you are one.

Yes. Yes. It's, I guess, correctly labeled.

Yes.

And he's kind of like, there are other people around when he did that. And nor does he attempt to deny it that I'm a species in favor of humans instead of as lice compared to lice. Well, though more like relative to digital intelligence.

Oh, yeah, that's even worse.

His view is that digital intelligence should

be,

you know, that. I mean, Larry's view is, if I'm not misspeaking, is that ultimately we will all upload our minds to the computer and everyone will just be robots.

Yeah.

And for a while his.

See, there's not much difference between that and the death of humanity.

Well, yeah, I think that's because whatever

we'd be then, it wouldn't be what we are now.

Right.

And that, you know, and if the. That we pay a price for what we are now and that's the price of our intrinsic limitations. And that is a difficult, bitter, let's say, pill to swallow. But I also think, so I've thought recently, how do you know that something's real? So death makes things real. Death makes things real.

And so if you eradicate death, it seems to me that in some fundamental level you also eradicate reality itself.

And I don't like, I haven't figured

out the connection an important, like death, death does play an important role because I think you really could evolve humans to live much longer, or most creatures live much longer. But there's over time, evolution, as I do believe in evolution has found that it's better for organisms to have a finite life and that death, death brings renewal essentially.

And I think we do need to be cautious about trying to solve longevity in sort of a live forever type sense, because I think our society, our culture would ossify and the people in power would always remain in power.

And you wouldn't, you know, if you had, let's say, you apprehended a 10,000 year span of consciousness with no sleep.

I don't know what the hell you'd be if that was who you were, but you wouldn't be human. And then we also don't understand that. See, part of the problem, I think with the perspective that the technologists are taking with regards to human existence is that there's a reductionism there, that something, it's something like there's no difference between us and the gist of our linguistic network.

Something like that, like whatever we are as conscious beings is a hell of a lot deeper than the patterns of thought that make up our cortical existence. Consciousness is way deeper than cortical existence.

Maybe. Yeah, maybe.

I do think you have to ask this sort of, this gradient question of where does consciousness arise? Now, obviously in a sort of traditional Christian faith, you would say that, well, there's a soul that inhabits the body and that's the consciousness. Perhaps. But you know, we all started as a single cell. So is that single cell conscious?

I mean, it doesn't look very, you can't talk to it. It's just a cell.

It differentiates very strangely.

Yeah, it has that teleology built into

it that's very difficult to understand. But conscious, it seems not to be. Not at that point.

It seems to be conscious.

So where, as it divides into many more cells, eventually reaching to. An adult human has 30 to 40 trillion cells.

So where, where does, is, where does consciousness arrive? Does it grow slowly? Is there a step change?

And you know, I tend to generally believe in physics. And you seem to have done pretty

well with that belief, by the way.

Yes, well, I have a saying that physics is the law and everything else is a recommendation because people can break and do break man made laws, but they. I've yet to see someone break laws of physics. So, you know, and so if you, if you have beliefs that are incompatible with a rocket getting to orbit, the rocket will not get to orbit.

Right, right, right, right.

A pragmatic physics is a harsh judge.

Yes, definitely, definitely. Do you think these LLMs, like, do you think that any of the machinery that you've interacted with is showing anything. Signs of anything that might be equated to consciousness?

I mean, the LLMs are remarkable. Right. And they certainly passed the Turing test as far as I'm concerned.

So from a testing standpoint, I think we will. If we're not there already, we soon will be. Where you would not be able to tell that you're interacting with a computer or.

That's coming right away, man.

Yes.

In fact, probably sort of here. Unless you're really sneaky and you ask like harsh questions and corner the damn things. We're probably already.

Yeah. As long as you don't know if you know some of the tricks, like how many Rs are there in renderer?

Bizarrely, can't figure that one out.

Oh, I didn't know that that was one of its. Yeah. So it has these weird lacunae in its knowledge. Right.

Well, it's. It divides everything into tokens and those tokens are more than one letter. And so it actually, weirdly, it's myopic with respect to single letters.

Right, I see. So it's got a resolution problem.

Yeah.

Now you can get around with this with weird tricks. Like if you ask it to write a computer program to count the number of letters in a word, it can create that computer program, run it, and then get the number of letters correct.

Right, right.

Anyway, but so back to consciousness. On the question of consciousness, I always think, like, where. Along the lines, like, is everything conscious or is nothing conscious potentially? And I think you want to just. When you're trying to understand something, consider the various possible answers and think that there's a probability associated with each one of these answers, as opposed to a certain uncertainty.

Now, if physics is correct, the universe started off with consisting almost entirely of hydrogen, a little bit of helium and some lithium, and that coalesced into stars that exploded.

When it coalesced stars, you had the formation of heavier elements. And then those stars got scattered and then Reformed and made new stars.

And so we eventually got elements that are higher in the periodic table. Besides, the very basic ones is the

physics equivalent of Jacob's ladder, I think.

Yeah. So this is what physics predicts, this

strange spiral upward towards somewhat towards consciousness.

Well, yeah, so.

But the point is that the universe, at least according to physics, started out essentially as hydrogen. And given enough time, you had more complex, heavier elements and more complex molecules. And then 13.8 billion years later, at least on this planet, we have what we call consciousness in the form, you know. Yeah, but, but, but that means consciousness had to arise.

It's implicit, at least from hydrogen.

Yeah, well, see,

so if you just leave hydrogen out in the sun long enough, it starts talking to itself.

I think what you're. I've seen your comments on this before. I think you're pointing to the same sort of thing that my friend Jonathan Pagio has been trying to elucidate, which is that there's an implicit structure of possibility. He associates this with the concept of heaven. There's an implicit structure of possibility that material forms are trying to flesh out.

And so in some sense, the possibility of consciousness is inherent in the hydrogen atoms. Right. Obviously, because it emerged.

It's a tautology in some ways, but

maybe everything's controversial in some way. Maybe it's just degrees of consciousness or concentrations of consciousness.

Yeah. Well, I wonder if that's associated with the notion, the Christian notion, that the word is primary. Because in mythological representations, you have three fundamental elements. You have something like order, which you could think about as society, but it's the a priori axiomatic interpretive structure. You have that, then you have chaotic potential.

That's the tohu va bohu that exists at the beginning of time. And so the way God is represented in the story of Genesis is that. So God is the a priori interpretive process that gives rise to order as a consequence of manipulating potential. And the intermediary factor is the word. That's the Christian conception. And the word is something like.

Something like, well, language, but it's also something like the sacrificial gesture that's necessary for learning to take place. So you could imagine this. When you learn something, it's not only that you add to a storehouse that you have, it's that something that you already know has to undergo a death and a transformation.

You know, most real learning is painful. You think?

Yeah, I mean.

Well, think about. Well, the deeper the axiom that's shifting when you learn, the more chaos is associated with it. That can be exciting, but it can also be destabilizing. That existential crisis that you had had great potential, right, because you resolved it, but that didn't mean it was without its pain.

Sure.

So if you imagine a hierarchy of axioms, right? And so the lower down the axiom hierarchy you go, the more chaos is released. When that axiom is challenged, you get a negative emotional response to that with his anxiety and threat. Because God only knows what happens when all hell breaks loose. But there's a positive aspect too.

That's why it's a dragon and a treasure always in the hero mythology. It's because when all hell breaks loose, there's immense opportunity. And so. And that's part of the meaning. Now I think you capitalize on that treasure, let's say on the treasure portion of that chaos by assuming something like your own ignorance, by allowing your initial preconceptions to die, and by tracking the trail of deep and insistent questioning.

So now you, your questioning took the place, if I got it right, you basically took the scientific tack, is that right? Because you're.

Yeah, well, I'm trying to understand a truth. The truth of the universe. And physics is essentially study of the truth of the universe, at least those things that are predictable.

So when I, when I resolved my existential crisis, which happened about the same time yours did, I started. I didn't study science precisely. I wasn't as interested in the transformations of the material world. So I'm probably more people oriented than thing oriented temperamentally. So I started to study evil. That was my delving into the depths because I wanted to crack that.

I wanted to understand if it more, not so much even whether it existed, because I became convinced of that very quickly. But what exactly that had to do with me? Because when I was reading history, I read it as a perpetrator and not as a victim or a hero.

I mean, I try to read history to discern the facts of what humans did, you know.

So that also has shaped the way that you act though?

Probably. Sure. I've read a lot of history.

I try to understand the rise and fall of civilizations.

And what do you think makes them fall?

Well, one of the things is a decreasing birth rate, which seems to be a natural consequence of prosperity. Yeah.

Isn't that strange, eh? Because you'd kind of predict the opposite, wouldn't you?

As far as I know, every civilization that has experienced prosperity has had a declining population. There may be a few exceptions. Perhaps people can enlighten me. I'll look at this. The comments on this interview to see perhaps what I can learn. But it seems that from what I've

read

every or almost every civilization, when they become prosperous, their birth rate drops.

I think that's a consequences of the emergence of something like a non punished hedonistic egocentrism.

Well obviously there's certainly many examples of civilizations they become prosperous. There is generally a trend towards hedonism.

Yeah, well you can get away with it if you're wealthy because the consequences of your.

Exactly.

Don't smack you on the head instantly.

Precisely. So you know, if you're a civilization under threat, like let's say there's that if you take say Rome when they were trying to not get annihilated by Carthage and they had Hannibal running around marauding Italy, they didn't have time for hedonism. Hedonism is not an option. We're going to get destroyed by Hannibal.

The ships are down.

Yeah.

When a civilization's under stress, there's very little hedonism that takes place.

So you know, William James said that the modern world needed a moral equivalent to war. Right. He investigated the religious realm very, very deeply. And this, I think this was in the varieties of religious experience. And that really had an effect on me because I think that you need something akin to an existential threat in order to set you straight.

I think there's some truth to that.

Yeah.

You know, it's sort of like if it's a. Let's say if it's a spoiled child that where everything who gets that kid gets everything he or she wants and you have sort of a Veruca Salt

situation

and then writ lodge. That is a civilization that is prosperous where people get everything they want.

I think it's the right way to think about it developmentally and neuropsychologically because maturation itself consists of two processes. Let's say the more mature I am, the more I'm bringing other people into the purview of my vision. So I extend myself across other people. Be my family first, but then brought more the community more broadly.

The better you are at that, the more people you can play a game with at the same time. But you also do the same thing with the future. And that's actually as far as I can tell what the cortex is for. It's to move you away from primordial hedonistic motivations to this more inclusive sense of future and community. Right.

And that's a higher order self. And so the default would be immaturity and wealth can obviously facilitate that and maybe it's partly because, okay, so you're a very wealthy man. You could give your children anything they ever asked for. Okay, so why not do it? Why not? Every time they ask for something, why not just deliver it?

Yeah. There's some wisdom that comes through the ages that you don't want to have someone be a spoiled rat.

And why do you think giving people everything they want exactly when they want it necessarily produces that? Because it seems to.

I think it almost always says, okay,

you had a rough childhood.

Yeah, yeah.

Like rough and tumble, rough childhood, plenty of fights, and a father who is a difficult creature to contend with. What did that do for you?

And are you grateful for it or are you unhappy about it?

Well, I guess you never know the things that really made you who you are today. So at the end of the day, am I on net grateful for my life? I am. And perhaps even for the hard things, because those hard things, I learned from them.

What'd you learn? I mean, I read your biography.

It's not an autobiography.

No, it's not. No, no, no, no. Definitely not.

I would tell it in a different way than Isaacson because Isaacson, who I think is an excellent biographer, is nonetheless looking at things through his lens and wasn't there at the time.

Right, of course. Of course. Well, one of the things that stood out for me, too, though, from that, and I would like your comments about this, was the, rather.

The rough details of your childhood. A lot of physical altercations and a lot of. I don't know exactly how to care.

Altercations. I mean, I was almost beaten to death within an inch of my life at one point.

Right. That counts. Yeah, that definitely counts as a.

You know, a few blows here and there. Yeah.

So what. What did that. Okay. Why weren't. Why aren't you bitter about that?

Because that's a pathway that people take.

I think that there are one. One can take. And often people do take the path of vengeance.

Yeah, that's for sure.

Yeah. So. Or that's what antinatalism is. Yeah. To say. To feel that the world has treated them unfairly and that they will visit upon the world that which the world has visited upon them, and so.

And justify it by recourse to the reality of their own suffering.

Exactly.

Which is often intense. Right.

Yeah. Yeah.

So the story of Job, one of the things I concluded from the story of Job, because it's a precursor to the crucifixion story. So Job makes two decisions. The first decision is that no matter how terrible things become for him, he will not lose faith in himself. And the second is, no matter what horrors are visited on him by Satan himself, he will not lose faith in the.

What would you say in the spirit that gave rise to the cosmic order? Right. No matter what.

Well, so while I'm not a particularly religious person, I do believe that the teachings of Jesus are good and wise and that there's tremendous wisdom in turn the other cheek. And for a while there when I was saying, I thought, well, that's really a weak thing.

Yeah, it can be.

If someone, and with respect to bullies at school, I think you shouldn't turn the other cheek. You should punch them on the nose and then thereafter make peace with them. But they need to stop bullying you and a punch in the nose will stop that. And then thereafter make peace.

Sometimes that punch on the nose is the first step in making peace with bullies.

Yes. It may change their career from being a bully to perhaps they shouldn't be doing such things.

But yeah, I think there's anyway, why not bitterness. This notion of forgiveness is important. I think it's essential because if you don't forgive, then you know, as the. I forget who said it, but an eye for an eye makes everyone blind. If you're going to seek vengeance and you have this never ending cycle of

vengeance, there are anthropological speculations that we were caught in a 350,000 year cycle of not getting anywhere after modern human beings emerged precisely because of that, because we couldn't get out of accelerating tit for tat revenge cycles. Right.

Yeah. So I'm actually a big believer in the principles of Christianity. I think they're very good.

So in what sense then are you not religious?

Well, so Dawkins just came out three weeks ago or thereabouts and announced that he was a cultural Christian. Right.

And so the question, Right, I would say I'm probably a cultural Christian.

Okay.

So I was brought up as an Anglican and I was baptized, although oddly enough my parents also simultaneously sent me to a Jewish nursery school preschool. So is Jesus our Lord?

Jews have a reputation for being religious too, you know?

Yeah, yeah. No, I might have been the only non Jewish kid at the school. I didn't even realize that was the thing. So. But I was just singing Harvard Gilla one day and Jesus our Lord the next, you know, so that is my upbringing.

So when Dawkins announced he was a cultural Christian, the question that came to my mind right away was, okay, there's a bunch of things going on there. The first is Dawkins Proclamation or admission that if you compare different societies and their axiomatic suppositions, he would prefer the ones predicated on Christian axiomatic assumptions.

I do think those are good ones.

Okay, so. Okay, so that's why I asked you the question about why you would consider yourself not a religious person. Because it seems to me that the essence of it isn't the statement that you abide by a particular Protestant creed. Let's say it seems to me much more akin to the notion that you believe that this set of axiomatic presuppositions is like the pronatalist presumption.

It's correct. Like it's not.

It's going to lead to a better society. A society. I think that we would prefer to be like. I mean, if you say, like, what will result in the greatest happiness for humanity, considering not just the present, but. But all future humans?

Happiness or meaning?

Well, which would you pick?

Personally, I'd pick meaning because for me meaning leads to happiness. But I think that's right.

But the reverse isn't necessarily the case.

Yeah. Let's just say if you're. I could say contentment or something.

But I think if a set of principles is likely to lead to a society thinking of themselves as happy or content or. Well, okay, then you want to then principles that lead to the most amount of happiness over time, not just the present.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. That iteration element's important.

Yeah.

Because you have to consider the happiness of future humans as well.

I think that's where the ethos actually develops, is that it's a consequence of iterated games right now. But the contentment issue I have a harder time with. So, you know, reward divides into two categories. There's satiation reward and there's dopamine incentive reward. And they're not the same. And it looks to me, given what you've already told me about the way that you resolved your existential crisis is that you consistently pick that.

That's adventure, reward fundamentally over contentment. Now, you like your kids and you're content with them. I presume you're playing. But the way that you found meaning in your life is not through contentment, it's through adventure. That seems to me the case to be the case.

Well, it's not adventure for the sake purely of adventure. I do like adventure. But for example, a lot of people find happiness and contentment with adventure like climbing Toll Mountain or hiking on trails, exploring the wilderness and that kind of thing. And I've never really personally found it compelling to Say climb Mount Everest.

You're doing it conceptually.

Conceptually and from a knowledge standpoint. Knowledge, Mount Everest.

Right. So it's adventure. It's adventure with a destination in mind. Right. And you already described the destination.

It's destination, yes. To deepen our understanding of the nature of the universe.

I think this is, I mean one, I guess could call it a religion. I wouldn't be upset about that. But that is my religion, for you know, lack of a better way to describe it is really. It's the religion of curiosity, the religion of greater enlightenment. And then if you follow that, say that's the goal, then what falls out of that goal?

What falls out of that goal is to have consciousness expand in scale and scope.

I use scale and scope to say that you want more consciousness. And I think it's also good to have buried consciousness. So everyone's not. Not thinking exactly.

Those multiple eyes.

Yeah.

So I think it's probably good to have multiple religions and have different perspectives on things.

And so what falls out of that is we need to take a set of actions that increase the probability that the future will be good for humanity and that everyone expands consciousness. We want to, I think we should increase the population of Earth, not decrease it. And I think that will not result in.

The Hungarians have been successful in that regard, by the way. They've been family policy planning. Their fundamental concern.

Very wise.

That was driven in part by a woman named Catalyn Novak who used to be president of Hungary. She's a very, very smart person. And they've knocked the abortion rate in Hungary down by 38% with no compulsion. Right. They have a 12 week limit in Hungary. Yeah. They've increased the proportion of women in the labor force by about 15%.

They've knocked the divorce rate down substantially. And at minimum they've decreased the decline in the birth rate. I don't know if they've actually managed to tilt it back up in Hungary yet, but they spend about 7% of their GDP on fast family policy.

Right.

And this ARC enterprise we've been building in London made family policy a center point. We're trying to bring classic conservatives and liberals together all around the world. And you know, your thinking on that natalist front has actually been. What would you say has been an input into that? Because I started to notice.

Well, I don't know, I don't think it was 20 years ago that I'd caught on to that. It was, it was, it was not that long ago, but I knew that there was something terribly wrong with the fact that the birth rates have plummeted so terribly in South Korea and Japan. I think in South Korea now It's something like 40% of men in their 30s are virginal.

It's some cataclysmic.

Well, the virgin, not virgin thing is neither here nor there. But the fact that I believe the birth rate in South Korea is 0.9, I think. Right. Which I think it even may have gone down to 0.8 last year or something. But that essentially means that if you fast forward that the population of Korea would decline by 60%.

Right.

Necessarily. If you have a steady. And that assumes over what time span, in fact, if that.

Well, Koreans are long lived. So you won't see the numbers. It won't be as obvious at first. You'll just see that there's a very disproportionate number of old people because they live a long time.

But for predicting the future population of any country, the simple way to do it is say how many babies were born last year and what is the average lifespan in that country? And that. And then if that birth rate, if that number of babies stays constant, then eventually the old people will die and that will be the population of the country.

It's very straightforward.

Right, right, right.

So if you look to say Japan, which I think had on the order of 800,000 births last year, and then you multiply that by the lifespan, which is around 84, 85 years, you get to a population that's in the sort of of 60 to 70 million range, which is a massive decrease from where it is today. Over 100 million.

Well, it seems to me the combination of that lack of engagement on the relationship side, plus the plummeting birth rate seems to me to be a primary biological marker of profound demoralization. Because people aren't committing or to each other.

Yes. I mean, having a kid is a boat for the future. So if you intend to have a child like that, that means you care about the future. Yeah.

You believe in the future.

You believe in the future. Having a child, assuming it's intentional, is.

You can. It's the most optimistic thing that somebody could do.

So one of the things I derived from this analysis of been doing of the Old Testament is that faith and courage. I'll give you an example. So when Moses is on the verge of the promised land, he sends scouts out to check out Canaan, because that's the promise. Now, Canaan is the home of the descendants of Cain. So it's a very specific place mythologically.

It's the place of people who aren't aiming up, put it that way. Okay, so the scouts go out to look at the future and they come back in two teams and one team says, there's nothing but giants there. It's a complete bloody catastrophe. You led us out into the desert, stupidly. We were better off in the tyranny. There's no way we're going to survive.

Right. And the next scouts or the other set of scouts, Caleb and Joshua, come back and say, well, there's trouble there, but if we aim up and we get our act together, we can turn this into the promised land. Okay. It's at that point that God condemns Moses to die and Aaron, who's the political wing, and the earth opens up and swallows up the faithless scouts and it's the people who are led by Caleb and Joshua, who has the same name as Christ, by the way, and that's relevant.

They're the ones that are led into the promised land. Okay, so what's the meaning of the story? Well, the future is always a challenge. And the moral thing to do is to evince faith and courage in the future, regardless. In some ways it's a weird thing because it's kind of regardless of the data because you can say, well, look at all the suffering that constitutes life and look at all the potential horrors of the future.

And certainly people do hesitate about bringing a child into a world like this.

I hear that often.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Well, and it's weird because if you had to bring a child into the world and you had to pick a time, you'd probably pick this one.

Yes.

And so obviously everybody who had a child, at least by choice in the past, did that in spite of the catastrophe of the future. But sorry, it's a long winded way of making a point.

There's an ethical requirement that's associated with living in the manner that would justify your life even to yourself, to have faith and courage in the future, no matter what. Right. So it's not a foolishness or what defense against death, anxiety or foolish superstition that faith? It's not that at all. It's a kind of courage.

It's like, we're going to make this work. We're going to make this work. And a child is a vote in that direction.

A child is a vote for the future.

Yeah, yeah. How many kids do you have now?

I have 12.

12. So you're definitely doing your part. What do you like about kids? What do you like about your kids?

I mean, there's an older batch and a younger batch, so there's quite a big difference. Our little ex who's over there, he's the eldest of the youngest, he's four.

And my, my older boys are 20 and 17, turning 18 shortly. So big, big gap.

So what did you like about having kids?

Well, I think kids are delightful.

Why? What's delightful about them? Because they get a bad rap, man. So what did you find delightful about them?

I mean, I think you. We are. I mean, most people, vast majority of people are, you know, are going to love their kids and it's like a little, Little loved one.

Yeah, yeah. That's a good deal. And they also want to love you.

They do.

Kids, if you give them the chance, they do. They're the only people you'll ever meet in your life who want nothing more than to have the best possible relationship they could have with anyone. With you. You. That's a good deal.

It's a good deal. And I think there's, you know, like, frankly, if we weren't biologically inclined to love our children and to want to nurture them and to find reward, we would long ago have ceased to exist. I mean, you can take, say, I don't know, a wolf or a wildcat or some creature that. A wolverine, some creature that would normally be very aggressive.

And when that creature has babies, the mother nurtures them and is tender and caring.

So, you know, there's. We are.

We've evolved to love our offspring. It's a natural thing.

And I think people. I mean, even if somebody's sort of taken somewhat of a hedonistic approach to life, I think there's an appeal even on the hedonism side to say that. Well, would you not. You'll actually find it very rewarding.

I think that's a good appeal. And it's one that's exactly.

It's a solid argument for the hedonists out there. And not all hedonists are bad. I'm going to have he friends who are hedonistic and they're very good people, but they. And I've actually convinced some of them to have kids, which I'm happy to say, and they've thanked me afterwards. Not one person who I've said, you know, you surely have kids, you won't regret it.

And not one person has said they regret it ever.

Right.

So that means I've convinced many people to have kids.

So that's good.

Yeah, they love it.

Well, when I was working in Boston, I had a very busy job and I Pretty much stopped doing everything except my job and spending time with my kids. But if I had to rank those in importance, then spending my time with my kids, yeah, that was better. And the reason it was more important was because it was partly because it was actually better.

Like, if your kids are capable of a modicum of pro social behavior, which is pretty much your choice, although temperament makes a difference, there isn't anyone more entertaining to associate with the little kids. Because partly I think it's because they're not as cortically inhibited. So they're. My daughter has a new.

There's no filter. They just say what they say, what they think.

Well, and that you can see what they see through their eyes too. So you're all filtered in and, you know, you see presumptions everywhere. And then the child comes along and think, oh, yeah, that's an amazing thing. And I've forgotten all about that. You know, I replaced my perception with my memory. Right. And so children reopen that.

That's also why I think it says in the Gospels that unless you become like a little child, you can't enter the kingdom of heaven because you have to make contact with that untrammeled perception that existed before you ossified your perceptions into your foolish and often nihilistic habits.

Yeah, but I mean, to the point you're perhaps getting at earlier, I do think that. And I consider myself an environmentalist, but I think the environmental movement has gone too far.

You're not supposed to worship nature, you know.

Well, it's gone too far in the sense that

the.

That in its extreme, you start viewing humans as a blight on the face of the earth.

That turns out to be a real problem.

Yeah, mostly implicitly, but sometimes explicitly. And if you internalize that, then you

start thinking AI systems, for example.

Yeah, I'm somewhat worried that the AI systems would be. I mean, if you say like various ways that AI could go bad, train

one on Paul Ehrlich's work and see what happens.

That would be hell.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, we have plenty of political systems that have already exactly done that.

Yeah, that would be hell.

That's exactly right. That would be hell.

So.

So,

yeah, that's a disturbing thought, that's for sure. But just going back to the. How can something which is. I think generally it sort of starts out with good intentions, but ultimately sort of pave the road to hell is environmentalism in the extreme that starts to view humans as bad humans as a load on the earth that the earth can't sustain.

This is.

These are completely false.

Yeah, well, it's. It's interesting that the economists and the biologists tend to separate into segregated camps on that front because the biologists tend to be Malthusian, and that makes them really bad biologists.

Yeah.

So there I think it was. I can never remember the philosopher who said this, but it's a brilliant observation, is that we evolved thought so that our thoughts could die instead of us. And that's actually this. It's great. It's a great line. And it's actually the case because the prefrontal cortex evolved so that we could produce disposable avatars.

Right. So I. In our conversation, what I'm really doing in our conversation is I'm offering you a potential avatar of myself for the future. And I'm saying, why don't you see if you can kill this thing now so I don't have to act it out and die. And that's part of the. Right, exactly. And so. And we've extended that with games, for example.

Right.

We've externalized that. And so the reason the biologists are wrong is because they don't actually understand the qualitative difference between human beings and other creatures is that we can let our thoughts die instead of us. So that's substitutionary death. That's a good way of thinking about it. Right. And that means that the Malthusian limits, they don't apply to us in the same way.

And so the economists got that right. It's like we can innovate our way out of scarcity. In fact, I don't like the idea of natural resources, for example. I think that's a Marxist notion, natural resource. It's like air. Okay, I'll give you air. Everything else, fresh water, that is not a natural resource. And kerosene or fossil fuel just laid in the ground until, like, 1850, because nobody could figure out what the hell to do with it.

So what that implies is that it's something. I think it's a religious ethos that that's the natural resource, the religious ethos that allows us to orient to the future, to be community oriented and to be trustworthy.

Yeah, well, look, at least some of these things one can actually apply physics or, you know, one can analyze in a scientific way to say is how many humans can Earth sustain without what. What most people consider to be significant environmental damage? And I think if you actually do the numbers, I think it's potentially 10 times the population we have today.

Right. So how did you arrive at that figure? I Mean, obviously you've put a fair bit of thought into this and this is a very countercultural proposition. Since the mid-1960s, the moral proclamation has been that there are too many people on the planet. And that is, I think Paul Ehrlich was the ultimate exponent of that particular.

His analysis was very unscientific. He based it on some visit to Delhi, I believe. Right, right.

And sort of visceral repugnance.

Yeah. Wrapped himself in science and produced nonsense. So I mean, you just say like, okay, well, how much land area do we need to grow food?

Yeah.

How much would that encroach on natural habitats? What's the actual food growing food potential given, especially if we got good at it. Right. And we are actually quite good at it. Getting better.

Right, right.

And is there enough water? Well, actually there's, there's plenty of water because Earth is mostly water at 70% water by. That's convenient by surface area. Yeah. Desalination is actually very inexpensive.

So there's really not a shortage of water. There's. There's not a shortage of sort of surface area and energy to grow food.

There's no shortage of computational time and increasingly there's no shortage. Right. And that's energy dependent to some degree.

Yeah.

But the energy problem is solvable.

Very solvable. Yeah.

So let's turn, if you don't mind, to practice some. To some more practical solutions. I'd like to, I want to. Let's start a little bit more with the AI issue with open AI, because I'd like to explore that. And then I'd like to talk about what you're doing with SpaceX. I kind of like to walk through your companies and, and I want to see how you're integrating your vision across them as well.

So let's start with. With open AI. Now you, you were, you started talking about that story with Larry Page. You were integrally.

I was concerned that Larry was insufficiently worried about AI safety because, well, his view is that we'll all be essentially upload our minds to computers and then humans, there won't really be a need for humans. And I thought that was. I was like, what team are you on, Larry?

It's hard on the humans there.

Right, right. What team are you on? And I said, we really need to make sure humanity thrives and grows. And then he called me a species for saying that.

So I'm like, well, I guess I am pro human. What are you.

Right, right, right. That's the question. If you're not pro human, that's not nothing. That's something else. You're pro something.

I think it's a crazy thing to not be pro human. I mean, if humans are not going to be on Team Human, who is? So that was the final straw really. And I was like, okay, we really need some new AI company to serve as a counterbalance to Google. Because at the time they had almost all of the great AI researchers. They had massive computing power, massive financial resources, and it was very much a unipolar world with respect to AI and a unipolar world controlled by Larry Page and who had, I thought, somewhat misanthropic views about humans or at least certainly insufficiently concerned about what might happen to the humans.

So that was the basis for creating OpenAI.

Yeah, that's actually a real problem, like insufficiently concerned with the humans.

That's a problem, yes. And has all the AI power. So.

Yeah, right.

That, that, that would, that troubled me. And so I thought, well, what would be the opposite of Google would be a nonprofit that is open source, so you can see what's going on. Not a black box.

Yeah.

And that was not sort of, wasn't forced by sort of market incentives to make as much money as possible.

So OpenAI was started as a, as a nonprofit. Open source. The open. And OpenAI refers to open source.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So why were you concerned about the profit motive warping things at that point?

Well, at least, at least, at least. Well, I think this perhaps is particularly a challenge for publicly traded companies. You just get sued if you don't maximize profits, you know, the shareholders, you'll get a shareholder class action also.

Yeah.

That will force you to maximize profits.

Yeah. So you thought that, so that you thought a for profit system might tilt the development of AI in directions that were short term profit motivated instead of cracking the fundamental problem. Something like that, yeah.

Look, I could be wrong about a lot of these things, but that was, that's what I thought at the time. And I wanted to create something that I thought would be the polar opposite of Google, which is obviously a for profit and closed source.

Centralized.

Yeah, centralized. And you don't get to see what's going on. And that was the basis for OpenAI. And we, you know, recruited a lot of key people. I was instrumental in recruiting Ilya Sutskayer, who without him OpenAI would not be where it is today.

Elias.

Yeah, Ilya Sutskaya. Ilya, pretty famous guy in AI. And Ilya is also the guy that I thought at OpenAI who had the strongest moral compass, cared the Most about doing the right thing. So it was troubling to see him get ousted from OpenAI.

You know, he sort of was part of a coup to exit Sam Altman, the CEO.

Yeah, right.

And when that coup somehow got turned around and then Ilya was in fact exited from OpenAI and OpenAI is now really trying to maximize profit, what happened?

I still am not sure.

I'm considering legal action here to say how is it possible that an organization is founded with the goal of being open source, nonprofit, and I provided almost all the money in the beginning, almost $50 million to get it going and no SOC. I have no SOC or control or anything. And how is it possible to go from there to a company that's now largely worth over $100 billion and seems to be maximizing profit and is.

It's a 10 element shift and it's not open source.

Right. So that's very different than the original

goal, I would say. Is it possibly more different?

I'm not sure how you could be more governor. So I mean this would be like, let's say you fund a non profit to preserve some part of the Amazon rainforest, but instead that nonprofit becomes a lumber company and chops down the forest and sells it. You would think that seems.

Are you shocked? Are you shocked by what happened? Is that a yes?

I'm concerned about it and I have voiced those concerns over the years and you know,

like, what the hell happened?

I still don't know.

Well, what do you think happened? Like, I mean, look, I don't want to push you, obviously, but I'm curious. It's like, how did that happen? It doesn't make sense to me.

I would like an answer to that question too.

Okay, so are you addressing that with Grok?

Yeah. So maybe.

Maybe that's the solution. Rather like, I'm sure the last thing you need is another like immense legal battle.

I mean, I am, I'm still considering a legal challenge to at least perhaps to have the court explain to me how an organization that I funded for one purpose can do the diametrically opposed purpose and that that's okay and become a for profit. I. Please just show me the trail of the breadcrumbs.

I see, I see why you want to do that.

Because I'm confused. And this.

Yeah, well, it's a.

Doesn't sound like it should be illegal. Missing something here?

Well, it sounds at least like it should be understood at least. Right? At least that what the hell happened here? You don't want that to happen, especially given what's at stake.

Yes, yes, exactly. OpenAI is the leader in AI.

Yeah. Okay.

And I'm somewhat worried that they have ingested the Woke mind virus in the training. You can see some of that in the output results. We obviously saw that with Google Gemini as well. To absurd degrees.

That was really quite comical.

Where draw a picture of the founding parts of the United States and it's a group of diverse women. This is a historical event. This rewriting history.

Yeah, no, that was really something. That was really something to see. That was like a jaw on the floor moment.

Jaw on the floor moment. And wow. You know, and then asking questions like is, you know, which one's worse? Misgendering Caitlyn Jenner or global thermonuclear warfare? And it said misgendering Caitlyn Jenner like this.

That's a priority.

How powerful do you want this AI to get with beliefs like that? I should. To Caitlyn Jenner's credit, Jenner said, I would really much prefer to be misgendered than have nuclear war.

Well, that's good. That's good. So there's a limit.

Good for Kaylin.

Quite sensible.

Yes. Thank God for that.

Yes.

Performing better than the AI.

Yes. But you. And while it's sort of perhaps funny and ridiculous at this stage, imagine if the AI is not that funny. I mean, it's semi funny at this stage, but it's the more powerful that I get. It could decide that that is not merely that it wants to force that outcome and simply say that.

Eradicate its performative contradictions. Right. Act out what it believes. Oh, yes, that's highly likely.

It could conclude society is insufficiently diverse according to its programming and will simply force that diversity by whatever means. By whatever means is necessary.

Okay, so let's. That's good. That's good on the AI side for now.

Look, I don't think you and I would make it in that scenario.

No, I don't think so. I don't think so. So how about we talk about Trump for a minute? The first thing, there's one question about Trump that I really wanted to ask you. So do you. Are you shocked at the fact that you're donating a substantial amount of money to facilitate Trump's election? Is that something you would have believed in the realm of possibility, say, five years ago?

Well, and I want to diversify out into California.

What's been reported in the media is simply not true.

Okay. Okay.

I'm not donating $45 million a month to Trump.

Right.

And now, what I have done is I have created a pack, or super pac, whatever you want to call it, which, you know, simply call it the America pac. And the.

Do you want to tell everybody who's listening what a PAC is?

Because, people, it's a political action committee.

Yeah.

It's an organization. It's sort of a legal entity that can receive funding. That funding can then be used to help with political campaigns.

Yeah. Okay. Okay. And how does that differ from a direct donation? There are specific limits on direct donations to candidates. I. And the PAC system is. Is a way of putting a political structure in place that sort of runs parallel with the political. With the. With the formal political system.

And so, yeah, you can donate money directly to candidates. That. That amount is. Is fairly small.

Yeah.

Then there's. And you can donate a lot more money to a political action committee or a super PAC.

There are various rules that govern the operation of PACs and super PACs, but that's. It certainly allows for a lot more money in the system than would otherwise be possible.

Right, right.

And these are used to be clear, on the Democrat and Republican side.

Yes.

And I actually think.

Right. So it's an open playing field on the PAC side.

Yes.

Yeah. What are you hoping to accomplish with this? And what's the PAC called?

It's called the America pac.

America pac. Yeah.

Remember, it's very easy to remember. And it's actually, it's not meant to be sort of a hyper partisan pac. It's actually the core principles of this America pact are the intent is to promote the principles that made America great in the first place. So I wouldn't say that I'm, for example, maga, Make America Great Again.

I think America is great. I'm more mag. Make America greater.

And there's some core pillars, core values that have, I think, made America great.

Could you elucidate those?

So one of them is being a meritocracy.

Yes, as much of a meritocracy as possible. Such that you get ahead as a function of your hard work and your skills and nothing else.

Yeah.

Which is why I would be opposed to, for example, things like dei.

Adrian Wooldridge documented the fact that the alternative to meritocracy historically is nepotism and dynasty.

Absolutely.

It's not equity.

It's not equity.

Correct. It's nepotism and dynasty. Exactly right. So that's very much worth knowing.

Okay.

So meritocracy has its price because it's a severe judge. But the alternative is nepotism and aristocracy, so. Or dynasty. Okay. So meritocracy, what else?

Clearly, you know, America, it's not like America's been purely a meritocracy, but it has been more of a meritocracy than any other place.

Right, right. Which is good. That's good, that's good.

Which I regard as good.

Yep.

So promoting meritocracy, promoting freedom, you know, freedom to operate, meaning, like the least amount of government intervention possible. We want, and this is, I think, important to fight as. Because the natural tendency over time, sort of almost like entropy, is that the hand of government gets heavier every year.

Yep.

The laws and regulations accumulate every year. And these laws and regulations are immortal. Right.

That's the evil uncle of the king. A very, very old story. Very, very old story. The Egyptians were wrestling with that problem 4,000 years ago.

Right, yeah. So you have to have some. You have to really take an active role in reducing the number of laws and regulations. Otherwise, as more and more laws and regulations are passed, eventually everything becomes illegal. Right, right, right. And you start getting into these Orwellian situations where then everyone's poor and miserable.

Well, where action A is illegal and action B is illegal, and there isn't anything you can do that is legal. So, you know, take an example of, to give an example of some lawfare that was leveled against SpaceX, for example, we were told for many years that we could not hire anyone who was not a permanent.

Yeah, right, yeah, yeah.

Well, so SpaceX develops advanced rocket technology, which is considered an advanced weapons technology because it's, it's a core part of like internal intercontinental ballistic missiles.

Yeah.

So there are only a handful of things in the sort of highest level of weapon technology, and rocket technology is one of those, because we could deliver a payload and basically bomb anywhere on Earth. From anywhere on Earth. So I was told, no uncertain terms by the government that if we hired anyone who is not a permanent resident of the United States, have either green card or a citizen, that I would go to prison.

Oh, yeah. Because the presumption if somebody's not a permanent resident is that they will leave the United States and take the rocket technology from SpaceX to potentially to countries that are. Would cause harm to the United States.

Right, right.

Pretty, you know, solid reasoning, I think. And then a few years ago, the Biden administration decided to sue SpaceX for failing to hire asylum seekers.

Right, right, yeah, I remember that. I remember that.

So we're told on the one side that if we hire anyone who's not a permanent resident resident, we go to prison. Now we're told if we don't hire asylum seekers who are not, not asylum. Not people who have been granted asylum seekers. Seekers. They aspire to asylum. They are therefore not a permanent resident. But if we don't hire them, we also go to prison.

Right. Well, the purpose of being damned if you do and damned if you don't is to make damn sure that you're damned.

Correct.

Right, right. So that's a kind of outcome.

So, I mean, that seemed to be insane and unfair and, and, and, and why did the Biden administration. Because they can only process. They can only do so many big cases per year. There's a finite number they can do.

Yeah.

Why would the Justice Department, of, Of all the injustices that occur, pick this as one of their biggest cases?

Yeah. Why, why do you think?

Well, I think they probably had a. I don't know, there was some lofi. I think it was, it was a. What do you think it was?

Political relationship to you?

Well, I don't know all the things, but this is before supporting Trump or anything like that.

Yeah.

In fact, I, you know, supported Biden and before that Hillary and before that Obama, so.

Right. That's why I was asking if this comes as a shock.

You know, I don't know if it could just be random. It could be like they didn't tell us, you know, why pick us? Why, why, why do such a crazy lawsuit.

Random's a bad. Even if it is random, that's still bad.

It's still bad.

That's just a marker of incompetence. But if it's not random. Well, it seems to be highly unlikely to be.

Yes. And also why, why attack SpaceX and not, say, Boeing or Lockheed?

So I think part of it might be that SpaceX is not unionized and the Democratic Party in the US is fundamentally controlled by the unions. So I'm speculating here, but since we're not unionized, we're, I think, a very happy workforce. And, you know, I'm out there on the, out there on the factory floor. I don't see people are happy.

It's a good vibe.

Well, they're engaged in something ridiculously exciting at a minimum. Well, you know, that's not nothing. You know, people can go a long ways if they're, if they're part of a project that's, well, aiming at Mars, let's say that's definitely aiming up. So that's really exciting. That's a real opportunity for people. What do you think of Trump?

Well, I mean, I'm not going to, you know, I Don't sort of subscribe to cults of personality. Yeah. So for me, it's really just, you know, we've got a choice of administrations and we. We have to pick one.

Yeah.

And, you know, I think both. There are flaws on both sides.

What do you think his flaws are?

And he's a complicated person, and I've been trying to suss him out and figure him out, because some of the things that look like flaws might be advantages in disguise. Like, he seems to me to be pretty good at standing up to psychopathic bullies, for example.

Sure.

And that's kind of a useful skill. And it's not easy. You have to be a bit of a monster to manage that. And it isn't obvious to me how many of the idio, even the divisive idiosyncrasies of Trump are the mirror image of his capacity to stand up to bullies. That's a tough call, man. But. So you've obviously decided to lay your.

What, lay your efforts down on the side of the Trump administration in the forthcoming election. And so, yeah, I would.

It's a. It's really. I think we need a change of administration.

I think many years ago, I think probably the Democratic Party was the party of meritocracy and of personal freedom. They used to be the Free Speech Party, and these days they seem to be the censorship party under the guise of hate speech.

So, weirdly, in my view, the Republican Party is actually the party of. That's the Meritocracy Party, because, you know, the Democrats are also promoting dei, which is really just another form of racism and sexism.

It's the most pernicious form, I think, actually.

Right. So it's anti meritocratic. DEI is fundamentally anti meritocratic. So then I'm.

It insists on dividing people by groups.

Right.

As the primary, what would you say, conceptual distinction between individual race, ethnicity, sex?

I think the Democratic Party is stoking division.

I think the evidence for that's clear. All of this group identity nonsense has made things much more. I can see it in Toronto. When my kids grew up in Toronto downtown, I would say they were race. They were race, ethnicity and gender blind. Seriously, they had an unbelievably diverse range of friends and no one cared.

And even in Toronto, that started to shift around with this emphasis on group division. It's a really ugly thing to see. So, yeah, not good. Not good.

Yeah. So my view is that at this point in the United States, the Republican Party is more in line with meritocracy and with personal freedom.

So I've never had a conservative.

Many times with my left wing friends, let's say they'd refuse to talk to someone. Me included. Definitely. Because I've invited prominent Democrats to come on my podcast in great numbers for a very long time. And I've got like absolutely nowhere with that. They'll talk to me in private, they will not talk to me in public.

And so that's never happened.

They're afraid of being shunned.

Absolutely. 100% that's what they're afraid of. Sure, definitely. And they've told me that it's not a secret, but that's never happened. On the Republican side, I found it much easier because I've talked to a lot of Democrats and a lot of Republicans and I found it much, much easier to talk to the Republicans. And that is somewhat of a shock.

I wouldn't have necessarily expected that.

Yeah. And I should be clear that it's not like I think the Republican Party is flawless. It certainly isn't. It's got its issues. There are extremists within the Republican Party that I don't agree with, but one has. It's a two party system, essentially. You've got to pick one or the other. And so you weigh the good and the bad.

And my opinion is that.

And you flip the coin.

We need that. The country would be better off with the Republican administration than a Democrat.

Well, Trump was pretty good at not having wars.

Yes.

Yeah. Which is actually quite a big thing. Like it's really a big thing. And what he did with the Abraham Accords, that was a miracle, I think, Right?

No, absolutely.

He should have got the Nobel Prize for that.

I think there's something to be said that, you know, America needs a strong leader where you have the perception of strength. Now. You have to admire that. Trump, after getting shot with blood streaming down his face, it could have been a second shooter. Who knows? Nonetheless, you know, with fist pumping fight. Yep. After being shot.

Yeah.

I mean, and this is not.

He's an orner. He's funny too.

Yes. And he's brave. He has courage. This is, this is instinctual courage. It's not calculated. It's not some arranged event. It's in the moment.

You can see that then, because that was not a time when you're see

true courage in the moment. Yeah, yeah, absolutely.

And if you want a leader who's going to deal with some very, very tough cookies out there, who's going to, you know, deal with, with a Putin or Kim Jong Un or you Know, China. Yeah, China. Or.

And they will be. They will be. They'll think twice about messing with Trump. Yeah, they'll think twice.

Okay. Okay.

And poor, poor Biden can't make it up the stairs and obviously he's stepped out of the race. But it's, Nobody's going to be intimidated by Biden. It's impossible.

But I think they will be intimidated by a guy who was fist pumping after getting shot.

Well, we saw that, I think, in his administration, because it was peace did reign. And that was quite, that was quite. Well, that's a bit of empirical evidence. Can I ask you a little bit about one of the things that you've been relatively vocal about? And I understand that there's a personal connection to this as well.

So I am, for what it's worth, I'm particularly unhappy with what my colleagues in the psychological field have done with regards to gender affirming care. I think they are a pack of contemptible cowards. And I think that everyone who's been involved in this in relationship to minors should go to prison.

I agree.

Okay. Okay. Why do you agree? What, like why. What's your oar in the water in this particular? This is the worst medical and psychological malpractice I've ever seen anywhere, including what I've done, what I've studied in reference to historical atrocity eugenics. What do you call those, prefrontal lobotomy, Even the sorts of things that were going on in Nazi Germany.

At least the bloody Nazis knew it was wrong and tried to hide it.

Yes.

So, okay, so what, what's your, what's your, why are you engaged in this particular battle? I mean, you, you said you're going to move a couple of your company headquarters out of California because of the last legislative move that Gavin Newsom pulled with regards to the trans issue. So.

Yes, I mean, to be clear, there were many things leading up to that point.

Yes.

And I was clear. Like, look, it's not that it's the one straw. It's just the final straw.

Yeah. Okay. Okay, okay. So it's a cumulative issue. Fair enough.

It's a cumulative issue.

Right. So it's not dramatic grandstanding. It's.

No. And moreover, I've had conversations with Gavin Newsom before where I said, if you, if you pass legislation like this, if you sign legislation like this that in my view puts children in danger, I will move my companies out of California. And he knew that ahead of time.

Okay. And so, okay, you've talked to him directly about this. What the hell Is he doing? I cannot understand. I really cannot understand. I mean the Democrats.

He's pandering to the far left.

Why did the Democrat moderates constantly pander to the far left? I worked with the Democrats in California for five years trying to get them to separate themselves from the far left. They wouldn't admit that they existed even. And they certainly would never separate them. They wouldn't admit, for example, that antifa even existed.

Sure. You know, well, they're burning down buildings.

There's this unbelievable blind spot with regards to the far left radicals and the moderate Democrats are. I think they're useful idiots fundamentally. Yeah.

Well, I mean, going back to the so called gender affirming care, which is a terrible euphemism, that's for sure.

It's really a child sterilization is what it should be.

No, there's mutilation too. Yeah, well, we want to make sure that that amalgam is.

Sure, sure, fair enough. It's child mutilation. It's her sterilization under the guise of

gender affirming care and compassion.

Right, right, right.

I can't.

It's evil.

I literally can't imagine anything worse than that.

Yes, it's evil. I mean you're taking kids who are obviously often far below the age of consent.

Yep. Confused, miserable.

Yes. The reality is that almost every child goes through some kind of identity crisis.

Yes.

Part of puberty.

Exactly. It's just part of growing up.

So it's very possible for adults to manipulate children into. Who are having a natural identity crisis, into believing that they are the wrong gender and that they need to be the other gender or they need to avoid or, or guenoscope ago.

And that will solve all their problems.

And that will solve their problems.

And then they give them sterilizing drugs which are called also a misnomer, puberty blocker. These are sterilization drugs. So they can never have children again.

They can have double mastectomies, the mutilation,

their forearms stripped to build non functioning penises.

Yeah, it's macabre. And we have an age of consent for a reason that the reason you can't get say tattoos below age 18

or

drink or drive. You know, there are ages at which you can do things because if we allow children to take permanent actions when they're 10, 12, 14 years old, they will do things that they subsequently greatly regret.

Yes. I've interviewed a couple of people who've done exactly that and it's pretty damn painful. So

I think during.

Why are you willing to make this an issue, do you think?

It's sort of like the native issue. It happened to one of my older boys where I was.

I was essentially tricked into signing documents for one of my older boys, Xavier.

This is before I had really any understanding of what was going on. And we had Covid going on. And so there was a lot of confusion.

And, you know, I was told, oh, you know, Xavier might commit suicide if he.

That was a, that was a lie. Right from the outset. No reliable clinician ever believed that. There was never any evidence for that. And also, if there's a higher suicide rate, the reason is because of the underlying depression and anxiety and not because of the gender dysphoria. And every goddamn clinician knows that too.

And they're too cowardly to come out and say it. Right. And so that. And then we end up in. Exactly. When I saw that lie start to propagate, it just made the hair on the back of my neck stand up. It's like. I see, so you're, you're telling parents that unless they agree to this radical transformation that their children are going to die.

And you think that's moral and you think that's true. That is so pathological that it's almost incomprehensible. I can't imagine anything worse. I can't imagine a therapist doing anything worse than that or sitting by idly and remaining silent while his colleagues are doing it. It's pathetic.

It's incredibly evil. And I agree with you that people that have been promoting this should go to prison.

It won't stop till that happens. Happens. Yeah, it'll just go underground. There's all. Puberty blockers are being accessed online by kids all the time through non medical channels. So, yeah, it's not going to stop. Okay, so I see. So that's.

So I was, I was tricked into doing this. And it wasn't explained to me that puberty blockers are actually just sterilization drugs.

So anyway, and so I lost my son, essentially. So, you know, they, they call it dead naming for a reason.

Yeah.

All right. So the reason it's called dead naming is because your son is dead. So my son Xavier is dead. Killed by the woke mind virus.

I'm sorry to hear that.

Yeah.

I can't imagine what that would be like.

Yeah, so,

yeah, and there's lots of people in that situation now.

Right.

It's not pretty. And lots of demolished kids.

Yes.

Yeah. Well, that's a good, that's a good reason to be the final straw. All right, so let's so I vowed

to destroy the woke mind virus I after that.

And we're making some progress.

Join the club.

Yeah,

okay. Let's end on something positive. You're shooting for Mars. What do you think that's doing for people? Because it's kind of. I don't want to be, I don't want to step out of my box here, but it's really interesting to me to watch you do this because it's preposterous, right? It's a preposterous thing to do to go to Mars.

And yet I was old enough when the moon landing was happening to remember what that was like. Right? It was an adventure, positive adventure, everybody could participate in. It was an unbelievable technological accelerant and it was a mark of faith in the. Well in the West, I would say. Right in the might of the United States and the upward aim.

And so, so I know you're playing, I don't mean in the game like manner. That's what you're tapping into. What do you think you're doing with this, with the Mars Venture?

Well, the Mars Venture I think is part of the expansion of consciousness beyond Earth. So I mean, I want to be clear that I don't think we should apply some vast number amount of resources to Mars. I'm talking about less than 1% of our economic output should go to making life multi planetary. But it is a natural extension of expanding the scope of scale of consciousness.

So I think we want to do everything we can to make sure that Earth is going to be great for a long time, as long as possible and, but also allocate a small amount of resources, like I said, less than 1% of our economy to extending life beyond Earth and ultimately to other star systems.

Right. And so that's perfectly in keeping with what you described at the beginning of the, of our discussion about the manner in which you resolved your crisis of faith as a child, your commitment to the validity of consciousness, your desire to what would you say, facilitate its transformation, development, extension that goes along with your pro human ethos.

Right. So that's all thinking from first principles. So I think you are stuck in the religious camp one way or another.

So like I said, you can call it, I don't mind it being called a religion, but I think.

Yeah, well, I came here at least in part today to find out just what the hell your religion was. So I want to end with this, if you don't mind. So I also asked you why you trust yourself in relationship to AI and you said, well, I Don't entirely. And so I thought that's a good answer. But I mean, more broadly, like, you have a lot of admirers.

There's a lot of people who are hoping that you're the guy that you. That you. What would you say?

That you're the guy who can do what you say you're going to do. And there's lots of evidence that you can. It's like you think it's reasonable for people to trust you.

Well, I think so. I mean, that's. I wouldn't. I wouldn't say trust me entirely, but I think, on balance, my track record suggests that. That I am fairly trustworthy.

What elements of it do you think suggest that particularly?

Well, I've built a lot of companies that have done useful things.

Yeah, you've built a lot of impossible companies that done useful things. Right. So that's an existence proof of sorts.

Yeah.

Do you accept the validity of entrepreneurial striving as an indicator of ethical conduct? Which I. And I think that's valid.

Yeah. I wouldn't be able to recruit great people to work with me to build these companies. I think if I was, like, a really bad person, they would just wouldn't want to work with me. So, you know, I think like, one of the tests for, you know, assessing someone's character is to look at the character of their friends and their associates.

Yeah.

And while people can put up a mask themselves for their character, their friends and associates will not.

Yep.

And so you can judge. Judge a person's character by their friends and associates and to some degree, by their enemies.

Right.

You know, if evil people hate you, well, you might be doing something right.

Okay, sir. Thank you.

All right. Thank you.

Much appreciated. Very good to talk to you. It's real. It was a real privilege.

You're welcome.

Yeah. Good.

All right.

You bet.