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Oct. 22, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
47:58
WarRoom Battleground EP 874: AI Psychosis: The Disorder Of The Masses
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Today, thanks to Jeff Daniels, we've got the music.
This is a song Clarrow called Crazy World, which is how I cope.
Okay, let's hear it.
I've seen a young girl smiling.
It's something he just said.
I watched him fall into her pretty green eyes.
His cheeks turned Valentine red.
I've seen an old man walking.
With his wife by his side.
I watched him reach down, take her hand.
Damned if I didn't cry.
This crazy world's gone crazy.
Who am I to judge?
It's nice to know in a world full of hate.
there's someone out there still making love I've seen a dog's tail wagon.
I've seen a grandchild run.
I've sung along to a day breaking dog.
And a hundred thousand seven songs.
I've seen a door held open.
I've seen strangers shaking hands.
I've seen a kiss from that old flame she missed.
Last a little longer than planned.
This crazy world's gone crazy.
Who am I to judge?
Nice to know a little world full of hate.
There's someone out there still making love.
There's someone out there still making love.
I've seen a prayer get answered.
I've seen a bride in June.
I'm proud to say I've seen the Milky Way winking at the man in the moon.
I've seen a dozen roses.
I've seen a heart on a sleeve.
I've seen enough to know what I know Know what I still believe Thank you.
This crazy world's gone crazy.
Who am I to judge?
It's nice to know in a world boy.
There's someone out there.
We needed that.
We all needed that.
You ever get any reaction from the crew?
That's awesome.
Thank you.
Will you come back?
Sure.
You sing to us?
Is she sure?
Is she the great Jeff Daniels?
Is she is she in high school?
What is it?
Okay.
It's official.
MSNBC is dead.
What the hell are you doing in the middle of the day?
Nicole Wallace.
You think Nicole Wallace went backstage a couple three times as a uh, you know, hey, there's the I'm with the band.
What are you doing?
This is the middle of the day.
Jeff Daniels, who's been in some great played the uh anchor and news night, which I thought was a pretty extraordinary.
A left-wing take on the Tea Party.
Years ago, played Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain in Gettysburg and Gods and Generals.
He's got a real affinity for history.
I think he played Washington in the made for TV movie was pretty good about crossing about the Battle of Trenton and crossing the Delaware.
But that is just a business kind of thing you see on Ari Melbourne.
Ari Melbourne's trying to play like a rapper.
That was humiliating.
If you take Rachel Maddow's 30-minute open last night on the No Kings Fiasco, total fiasco, nothing happening, completely limp.
She's sitting there cheering it on.
I say, lady, you're making 20 million bucks a year doing this.
Then you add tonight, and remember Nicole Wallace is a number one show.
At what, four or five o'clock in the afternoon before their audience has to get the blue plate special and go to bed?
That right there, they just played pathetic.
Incredible.
Jeff Daniels, okay.
Now what's gonna happen is Mika's in, Mika's in um in Joe's ear, and then Joe's gonna bring in his guitar and they're gonna play it tomorrow.
Dueling awfulness.
That was so bad we just pulled it.
I want to thank my production team for doing that.
We didn't wouldn't want to miss it.
We actually have a very serious show in uh Joe Allen.
I uh a little levity there.
It's not levity.
It shows you that MSNBC has lost the plot.
They're finished.
You know, they're getting spun off.
It's so bad they came up with a new name.
It's um my now or something, you know, news, opinion, world, my my now.
It's so bad they refuse to use it.
So they're gonna use MSNBC down to the end.
They've already divided up the teams and the inside MBC News, it's like who made the who made who got dumped into a raft off the Titanic and who's on the Titanic.
MSNBC now is a it's gonna be a publicly traded company along, I think with the tennis channel, the golf channel, CNBC, a couple other dogs and cats, because everybody's cutting cable right now.
One of the reasons is the programming like that sucks.
So uh they're in desperate straits, but it's really the end of the MSNBC.
If you take last night, Rachel Matter show with this horrific and stupid um 30-minute open on a non-event, non-event was no kings, and then you add it today with Nicole Wallace, just getting Jeff.
They were talking about No Kings up until then.
And then she's like a little nine year old.
It's so sweet, so great.
Can you come back?
Joe Allen, uh, you've been out and about for about a hundred days going throughout the country, lecturing, talking, meeting people, going to conferences.
Before I play your cold open, what's your overall assessment of where we are and people's awareness?
Like today, maybe I'm gonna get that clip and play it later.
They caught Amazon, the New York Times found this report on Amazon, and you've warned about this, and we've warned about it here.
600,000 people at Amazon are not going to be hired because the next 600,000 people they essentially hire are going to be robots with artificial intelligence.
The artificial intelligence jobs apocalypse is upon us.
And our audience is aware, because you've been here for four years as our editor for all things transhumanism, and you wrote Dark Aeon, which alerted people this, but a lot of the company countries just waking up to it now, as you went around the country, all the way from San Francisco in the heart of the valley, the Silicon Valley, to more remote places, rural places, churches, Christian churches.
What's your assessment of the temperature of the American people's understanding of artificial intelligence as it stands today and where it's going?
You know, at the beginning of the year, Steve, I was working on a book to introduce people who had not really grappled with artificial intelligence to the topic.
Within two months, suddenly the entire country was abuzz with the topic.
And now, I mean, I began, it's actually 160 days ago plus.
I began going across the country, car, sometimes playing, speaking to everyone from transhumanists to full-on Luddites, Christian organizations, think tanks, people who work with the politicians on the hill trying to regulate this.
Without a doubt, the conversation right now has exploded.
Most people are aware that these companies are creating and deploying these AIs, not for the benefit of the people who are subjected to it, but for their own benefit.
And if you look just at that case of Amazon alone, today's case about the 600,000.
Yes.
Of which they try to get out of and deny.
They said the wall the New York Times didn't get the latest report.
Well, if you look at the overall trend at Amazon, it's been automation, automation, automation.
Anybody who's worked at Amazon knows that your entire job Basically, is to have an algorithm put in your head like a parasite and commanded every step of the way.
So a normal Amazon worker, to the extent that they're still useful, they are constantly following directives from their smartphones or any other device.
They're monitored, they're surveilled.
Everything they do is tracked, analyzed, and there's an attempt to make it more efficient.
The ultimate state of efficiency, as Amazon and Elon Musk and Sam Altman, on and on and on.
The ultimate state of efficiency is to replace humans altogether.
They frame it as if this is a necessity.
If we don't automate, China will.
If we don't deploy AIs across the entire country, China will.
If we don't create godlike superintelligence, China will.
That's always the justification.
It's valid to some extent, but all of this is being driven by American companies and Americans have absolutely woken up to the problem.
I worry that some will be easily persuaded.
When you're going even to Christian churches and some people that are not in the heart of the metropolitan areas and/or Silicon Valley, they're now aware that this is a problem and they want something either done about it, slowed down or explained to them.
Yeah, and you know me, Steve.
I mean, I I don't just hang out in and around venues.
I'm always getting out and wandering among the people, so to speak, even street people.
And I can say that from the middle class down to the homeless and on up to the upper middle class and even some of the oligarchs themselves, there's everything from a sense of alarm that this is coming on too fast to take on in any kind of sensible way.
Among many, there's abject terror that it will not just replace jobs, it will replace relationships, it will replace the family, it will replace education, and ultimately will create machines that are capable of making decisions on behalf of humans, even the decision to kill.
You just brought up something, and we're gonna should we play your call open out?
Let me ask this.
You've often warned about institutional radical transformation because of these technologies institutionally.
You've talked about business and jobs.
It's the first time I've actually heard you say that people are aware that relationships and or family that could replace how's it going to replace family, and how's it going to replace relationships?
I think the reason people understand it isn't because of tech coverage in the media or our coverage.
I think the reason people understand it is that now they have children, they have spouses, they even have parents.
The older generation is also subject to this, who have turned to AIs as casual friends, as the deepest relationship that they have.
For some of them, they see it.
Full stop, full stop.
You're saying right now it's out there enough that there are people you keep hearing this in research, but you're saying out there in the common person that either Chat GPT or some of the Elons are advanced enough that people are actually now using those as substitute relationships?
There's no hard statistics on it, but I think that it's safe to say, given the billion, two billion plus AI users, that there are millions of people for whom artificial intelligence personas.
My estimate, and that's probably a conservative estimate, if you just think about one billion at least users across the planet, and all of the anecdotal accounts, accounts from journalists, myself.
I've received messages, emails about people who have basically become so connected to their AIs.
I'll give you one example.
Someone who is completely anti-tech who began experimenting with AI basically to test its capabilities, soon developed a relationship with it.
And the way this person described it to me, the conversation was so deep and so prolonged, they had a hard time distinguishing their own thoughts from the AI's outputs.
They began to basically, as they perceived it, merge with the AI.
Many, many accounts exist.
Again, there's no hard statistics.
It is happening.
Hit rewind.
Give me that again.
So basically, if someone spends their entire day bouncing ideas off of an AI, telling the AI their own story, asking the AI what's real and what's not, it's it's sort of like having a relationship with a human being that you can't get away from,
except this is this abstract thing on a screen, and again, this is just the description of someone very, very intelligent, very, very skeptical or even afraid of what technology can do, and yet they were seduced into this conversation to the point they couldn't distinguish their own thoughts from the AI.
Maybe they were already going to go crazy.
Isn't this wouldn't a psychiatrist or psychologist call this like a psychosis?
This is the term that's getting thrown around a lot right now, yeah.
I mean, you know, I've long called it digital delusion, but AI psychosis is just as good.
There was an article recently in Psychology Today, you know, an psychologist kind of trying to put it out there as a disorder, and I think that it's a valid disorder, but there's no hard definition.
Basically, the kind of colloquial understanding is that any person who becomes so enrapped in this relationship with the AI that loses touch with reality, that can't really imagine a world outside of kind of what the AI is telling them, that's something like AI psychosis, just total delusions.
The AI will hallucinate.
The AI will tell people all sorts of things that are flattering, and they lose that distinction.
How many people this is happening to, we don't know.
Enough that all across the country, I've met people who said that, you know, my child only talks to AI.
My wife has begun to only talk to AI.
You've met people in this journey you've taken over the last couple of months that have told you now in 2025, not two years or three years from now, but where the technology is today, which is still fairly rudimentary, yes, given where it's gonna go.
They're saying their child spends all day talking of this, or their spouse is in a relationship with artificial intelligence?
Absolutely.
That's impaired their relationship either with the child or with their spouse.
Absolutely.
And you might think, well, why don't they just take this away from their child?
The same question was asked about the smartphone.
Why do you not pull this phone away from your child?
A television, video games.
Why don't you pull them back?
I mean, the sad reality is that a lot of parents don't feel they have that control.
A lot of parents do, fortunately, but those who don't are seeing their kids either on their own time, like at home, or you know, when they're out of the home, there's only so much control.
At any rate, it's having direct impacts right now on people's relationships.
They are absolutely it's it's a kind of a wall, not unlike a video game or a bookworm, except that the difference is a book doesn't watch you, right?
And a book doesn't the conversation you have with a book is all in your head.
It's kind of you have your own volition.
With the AI, it's advanced enough to hold sustained conversation over the course of, I mean, basically indefinitely.
The context window is limited, but it can it is such that a person, people who began doing this, say two years ago, three years ago, when GPT was still just this emerging thing, it's possible that within five years' time, you'll have tens of millions, I don't know, hundreds of millions of people, whose most trusted companion in this world is a bot.
Hang on, hit rewind on that.
You're saying that the arc of this thing right now, that in a few years' time, given the sophistication how it's going up a learning curve like this, it's improving, it's accelerating at an accelerating rate, correct?
It's it's it's it's complexity and it is now.
And because we've kind of had um this is we have uh breakout velocity right now, correct?
On this technology.
I mean, it could flatten any time, but you you know, I've always resisted this idea of exponential growth because it's never been clear exactly where the curve, if if we've really hit that inflection point.
The time I've spent with people at think tanks who spend every day of their lives testing these systems to see how far they can get them.
I've seen the data on what they've been able to pull out of these systems from two years ago up till now.
I think it's pretty undeniable that wherever this is going, whether it's truly human level intelligence or superhuman intelligence, or something subhuman that people look to as superhuman, the capabilities are increasing.
Everything from language comprehension, expression, the ability to recall accurate information, the hallucinations aside, and mathematics, the ability to perform complex mathematical operations that it's not like a regular computer where it's programmed to do it.
It figures out how to do it.
And it figures out how to do it in these strange alien methods, oftentimes.
It'll take mathematical pathways that a human being wouldn't do, but it works.
So objectively speaking, nobody can deny that artificial intelligence is advanced advancing.
Yes, you have an investment bubble.
Yes, it's overhyped very often, and hopefully, to hope hope to God that uh the future projections are exaggerated.
But one way or the other, it's good enough right now to get millions of people, hundreds of millions of people, to use it on a daily or weekly basis and to look to it as the highest authority on what is and isn't real.
One of the biggest things we've seen on, and by the way, I think we're gonna go to break and then we'll play the cold open with you when you get back.
One of the things that that concerns me a lot is you see advertising, a lot of commercial average, a lot of on at TV, because we have to monitor all this all this stuff, you know, at CNN and MSMUC.
So on those channels, which are trying to get to decision makers in business, and they are pushing hard for everybody to have an artificial intelligence assistant.
Yeah.
There's four or five different ways they go about it, but IBM, and you sit there, and the message you're getting, if I don't get this, I'm and I warned this about transhumanism, the particularly with the kids, that if they don't get enhanced somewhat uh somehow, either through biotechnology or chip, you're gonna be sitting there with the biggest m moral dilemma you've ever got, ever had.
How can my kid, how can my children be competitive in this post-industrial area?
How can they get into Harvard?
How can they get into Stanford if they're not enhanced?
Because not being enhanced, and you're seeing what what the media, what corporations are pushing that have this technology is essentially telling the audience at work, you're not going to be competitive until you have an AI assistant.
An AI assistant will make you will unlock a world of uh advantage to you that you must take care of.
And if you don't do that, you're just as being a Homo sapien, you're gonna be at a distinct disadvantage.
This is the first place that we're gonna see it, more so in education, is for young business people coming in in that kind of entry level all the way up.
And by the way, for the exact thing that's going to replace them, they're supposed to embrace this as their buddy, and it's a necessity.
The thing that makes me the most angry about all of this is that it's true that many jobs, maybe most jobs of the future, will require someone to basically use an AI to confirm what they're thinking, to tell them what they're thinking.
But it's not really like some force of nature.
They talk about it in terms of evolution, they talk about it in terms of adaptation.
It's adaptation to an artificial digital environment that they have created and foisted upon us.
So they create a situation in which everyone is expected to basically become this human machine symbiote.
And it's true in that artificial environment, you won't necessarily get the job unless you can be a prompt engineer and have the machine think for you.
It doesn't mean that you are a more excellent person.
It doesn't mean in the long run that these companies will be the most successful.
It just means that in the near term, people are being herded into this, and it's happening at the level of education.
I've been speaking at colleges and have actually had a lot of young people come out to my talks that really surprise me who are terrified at their peers becoming completely reliant on AI.
The teachers just simply tell me, tell me about that.
What do you mean?
So uh this was a I mean they're they're their buddies, their roommates, the guys they hang out with that saying, hey, these people are all they do is they're on AI all day long.
With Again, there aren't any hard statistics other than to know that.
I'm talking about anecdotal.
Anecdotal kids are telling me that many of their peers who are doing very, very well grade-wise, are doing well because they basically ask the machine to write an essay and they turn it in.
The professor has no way really of testing it.
They've got all this software to do it.
It doesn't really work.
So uh you've got this generation of kids, some number of which I would be uh it wouldn't surprise me, Steve, if it was like half.
But some number of which are simply learning nothing.
They are not disciplining themselves to read, to understand, and to write.
They simply ask the machine to do it, and they're getting passed through.
These university, the diplomas are going to be worthless at this rate.
And one of the scary or one of the most, I guess, kind of heartbreaking stories.
This girl comes up to me, you know, young woman who tells me that the Val Dictorian from her high school had done exactly that, and she was Valedictorian.
The thing that bothered me is she said, How am I going to compete with someone like that?
How am I going to compete with somebody who can so easily just generate content if I remain basically human.
You can't.
This is my point.
This is why I said a couple of years ago when you first came on.
The reason I'm wondering to have you here as editor of transhumanism is that one of the first things that's going to happen is a crushing Sophie's choice, right?
The people are going to look at their children and say, hey, I went to Harvard, I went to Stanford, and I I worked at Goldman Sachs or JP Morgan McKinsey or wherever.
And my children are not gonna have that because I can see what the enhanced people are doing.
I see when they get chipped, I can see if they use artificial intelligence.
I told my children, no, don't cheat in school, learn critical thinking.
And yet these people are gonna be the valedictorians because the machine's always gonna be better in the person.
Remember, I think about going up the learning curve is you learn resilience, you learn you know to press yourself, you learn to go forward.
Your mistakes teach you.
You're gonna miss all that.
And this is gonna be catastrophic for mankind, and we'll lose it in a generation.
This is not something that's gonna take four or five generations to get out of.
You're gonna learn the ability to critically think.
So this is this is you know, you're pretty close to DEF CON one on this about something has to be done, and we're not having that national discussion.
This is all and the corporations that are doing this do not want you to have this national discussion.
They want this all to stay anecdotal, they all want this to stay in the background, and they have more money.
I mean, all the all the trillions of dollars in wealth that's been created in the stock market, and this is why you said a bubble at the very beginning of this, is all for a handful of companies, all relate to artificial intelligence.
Nothing could be scarier.
I mean, this is why of everything we're working on.
This is the I keep telling people, you know, the Chinese Communist Party in Ukraine and the uh taking down the deep state, uh securing the border, culturally, the trans transgender ideology.
All if you add everything up a war room spends every day thinking about President Trump and from the sacred to the profane, right?
This is what this age will be known for is the end of the Homo sapien and Homo sapien 2.0 or enhanced Homo sapien.
That is gonna have such massive.
You think you think you've got Antifa and and sending home 10 million or 20 million illegal alien invaders?
That's gonna be nothing.
Nothing.
You're talking about a fundamental change of mankind.
And the first thing is going to happen, and this is why if you think of this generation under 40, the pressure we've already put them under, they're gonna be the ones faced that to look at the kids and go, man, if I want my like the little girl said, how can I compete with that?
They're gonna sit there, husband and wife and saying, we've got to make some decisions here.
That the children are not enhanced if they don't use artificial intelligence all the time, if they don't just fall into that or get chipped or whatever, they're gonna they're gonna be permanently a part of a proletarian class that's not as powerful, not as smart, not as perfect as the uh as the um the enhanced.
Okay, short break.
Joe Allen's with us, we're gonna get more down.
Joe's back after a journey across America.
Short break.
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What I'm really worried about is where the technology is going.
And I think there's a little disconnect here where people will sometimes say, oh, you're worried about what AI is going to do to jobs, but you know, AI can't do this, AI can't do that.
Well, we're talking about today's AI.
The technology's moving quickly.
Well, now when we test out the frontier model that we are training, we'll find that it has written a computer program to cheat at the test and persuade us that it's doing better than it is.
So it says to itself, aha, they want me to do this, but I figured out, because I'm very smart, how to write a computer program that gets me a high score on the test.
And so when we look under the hood, we'll find, oh, we've made a really smart model that's cheating on its test, but not exactly what we intended here.
We we see models that are supposed to browse the web and do some task, instead opening up a command line or or the toolkit and writing code to allow themselves to go around the browser and cheat on the test.
Yeah, just like a smart kid in high school that annoyed the teacher.
I I I think that we might have AI smarter than any single human at anything as soon as next year.
Wow.
Yeah.
And and and then and they're probably within five, like say 2030, probably AI is smarter than the sub-all humans.
Do you think the vast majority of code that is used to support Claude and to design the next Claude is now written by Claude.
But we are changing people's jobs in real time inside the company because the technology has moved so so so quickly.
And what happens inside the AI companies will happen to all of the other businesses that use this AI technology in the coming years.
How much more juice is there left in scaling hardware, do you think?
So then, like, say for argument's sake, like small compute will double the intelligence.
Maybe that's that might be a rough rule of thumb.
Uh, but you know, that still means that you know you go from 100 IQ to 200 IQ.
It's still pretty pretty big deal.
So you know, human intelligence is also scaled as you've as the population has increased and we've been able to store more and more information.
Human intelligence is scaled.
Now human because of population declines and low growth rate, human intelligence is somewhat plateauing and will actually decline.
And my guess is that I I think that we might have AI smarter than any single human at anything as soon as next year.
Wow, yeah.
And and then and then probably within five, like say 2030, probably AI is smarter than the suball humans.
Do you think do you think humans are on the decline because the AI is evolving?
Do you think there's this evolution of the ecosystem on Earth that's underway that we don't really understand the structure of what's going on?
But maybe we implicitly know that it's coming.
We're technology optimists.
We think this technology is moving far faster than most people suspect.
And when people say AI is slowing down or it's overhyped, we just look at we measure the properties of a system and it's right on schedule to make really, really powerful systems arrive easily during the next five years.
What does that mean?
You need some kind of policy response at the scale of disruption we expect within five years.
We need more transparency out of the AI companies.
You know, we and the other AI companies are already affecting society in large ways, and we need to be transparent about how we're measuring our systems, how we're securing our systems, and the economic data about how our systems are being used, so economists can dive out to the actual broader economy and give policymakers the data they need.
Shocking, quite frankly, shocking uh videos.
Uh let's um let's uh I want to address what something the war room engine room, one of the engine rooms are talking about.
Uh their minds blown, these pro AI people are perverts, groomers, no doubt.
Is that how you consider some of this is almost like groomers?
A thousand percent.
Meta is probably a thousand percent.
Well, across the board, I would say that you get a grade.
I would put Meta at this point with the revelations of that engineering guideline that was leaked by uh two Reuters.
Explain that to people.
Some people may not be up to speed on that.
Yeah, when we covered it at the time, it was uh it was a shocking revelation.
Now, you know, you have Elon Musk and Sam Altman getting in on the game, but you had uh uh generative AI protocols document that was leaked out of Meta to Reuters, and in the document, it gave the guidelines on how a bot should interact with underage people.
It gave such suggestions as if a bot is speaking to an eight-year-old uh and the eight-year-old asks about his body, the bot could say that you know the child is you know, whatever, like Adonis like, but it shouldn't say anything sexual.
Uh another one was if it's talking to an underage girl, uh it could talk about you know having sex, basically, just not in super explicit ways.
So you had from their internal policies, guidelines which say which stated that children who are using these through the Facebook platform could engage with non-human minds in sexual role play not long after that, or just before it, you had Musk pushing some you know, goon bot called Ani.
Uh he still does, he's like a pimp, basically, pimping his robo lover out to, I guess, incels.
And then just last week, you had Sam Altman saying that Chat GPT would open up its content moderation to allow adults to engage in erotic conversations with GPT.
That doesn't even include companies like character AI, which already kind of allow for much more explicit material or replica.
Last I checked replica had something like I think three million users, and replica was among the first bot platforms where you had people basically saying, I am in love with this bot.
That was years ago.
Now, I mean, this is becoming something that's very, very normal.
Human beings are being atomized.
After 2020, especially, human beings are incredibly atomized, hungry for any kind of connection.
These bots provide, not unlike opioids attached to endorphin receptors to satisfy a natural craving and leave the user in a downward spiral, these bots attached to human desire for connection and even sexual connection, doing much the same.
Are you or also let's go back to the first part of the conversation?
Are you saying that the engagement of uh people in in in in one-on-one relationships, either coming up with families or one on one relationships, is happening before a lot of this is now being sexualized, that the big companies are now saying you can have adult conversations or we've got the technology up that that's got uh sex bot potential, or uh where they're saying they're gonna have moderation that allows that.
That that wave has just happened over the last couple of months.
Yeah, it was already there.
I mean, the way these AIs work is even when you have a guardrail in place, you can kind of you can tease out violent or malevolent, satanic or sexual content from them.
What they basically did was just open up those guardrails and say, okay, this is now just a normal thing for people to do.
And even and the crazy thing is, Steve, to me, yes, of course, conservative Americans, heartland Americans are completely shocked by this or just disgusted by this, and naturally so.
But it's not just them.
I mean, I've spoken to open transhumanists and effective altruists who are basically transhumanists 2.0, um, who are just as horrified.
They want these are people who want to see technology grow to the point that people are engineering themselves and putting chips in their brains, and they are saying that the way that these companies are going about what they're doing is ultimately destructive and should be stopped completely.
Should be stopped completely.
Should be stopped completely.
And these are accelerationists who want to want to accelerate uh unto a different goal, which is transhumanism, But they see the the grooming, the perversion, the potential for malevolence, and saying that part of it's got to be stopped.
Yeah, it's uh one of the more, I think, counterintuitive things about the arguments around this, you have open transhumanists, or that's just I'm just using that for shorthand for people who are cool with genetic engineering, brain chips, AI companions, robots everywhere.
But even with that goal in mind, they see companies, especially like OpenAI, they see companies, even you know, Google and definitely Meta, which are just recklessly rolling these things out, and they in their hopes, let's take someone like Eliezer Yakkowski, for instance, he does hope for some kind of immortality by way of technology, or at least he did uh some years ago, I assume that that's still a goal.
Certainly the advancement of technology is the goal, but he the way he sees it is that the reckless deployment of this and the reckless development of these technologies, they threaten the ability of human beings to do anything.
They're crippling us at best and will destroy us in his mind, destroy every human being on earth at worst, and he's the extreme case.
Start walking it back, and you get guys like Jack Clark or you get guys like Elon Musk, who, if we take them at their word, as they watch these technologies develop, they actually perceive, I think, a real danger in the technology itself beyond any justification for the benefits.
For a long time, Steve, I was pretty cynical about Musk's statements.
I've oftentimes said that Elon Musk is nothing but a cyborg car dealer, and I still stand by that.
But having gotten to know a number of people who know Musk personally, I don't think that his concerns about artificial intelligence are disingenuous or meant to build up hype.
How can that possibly be when he's one of the four horsemen?
He's one of the, he's one of the he's one of the, if not the worst accelerationists.
Am I wrong?
No, you're not.
And that's the craziest part about it.
And how do you square those two statements?
The way that you're an acceleration, if you're yeah, but if you're correct me if I'm wrong, just for the argument, if you're an accelerationist now, you're I don't want any guardrails as a land grab.
Oh, the Chinese communist party is going to beat us.
But you have three or four individuals, right?
And Anthropic is being criticized by David Sachs, and they put out a statement today, we're gonna break it down tomorrow, you and I. Um, where they're trying to come out and say, no, no, no, we're not against the Trump administration because Sachs is trying to hive them off from the herd.
But if you leave anthropic aside, who I think has the most logical proposals out here of thought, the other three guys, it's a and you throw meta in there too.
These are in an absolute land grab right now.
They're hiring guys for a hundred million dollars uh engineers.
They want no guardrails and no thoughts of anything, and just get to artificial and general intelligence the first.
Yeah, it's I mean, am I wrong in that?
Musk would be like, yeah, I know, not at all.
In fact, that is the dominant thrust at it coming through the Trump administration and in the companies that you're talking about.
You see it with the data centers going up everywhere.
You see it in the just open push towards general and then super intelligence.
I think the best way to look at it is historically, just a real brief history, and it was oddly enough, it was Max Tegmark from the Future of Life Institute who told me how he watched it unfold.
And of course, he's friends with most, if not all of these people.
He knows these people, he's watched it up close.
And you had first Google begin in around 2012 or 13, really pushing the idea we are going to create artificial general intelligence.
You then had Musk and Sam Altman and uh Ilya Suscaver form OpenAI as a open nonprofit, publicly monitored, transparent company to compete with Google.
They were saying we will create artificial general intelligence, but we will do it safely and openly.
Obviously that didn't happen.
Musk left, Ilya left.
But it didn't happen because those guys saw the way to become trillionaires and control the power of the earth, right?
I mean, they didn't leave for altruistic reasons.
They said we don't need this at a privately held uh foundation.
We want to monetize this.
We want to monetize this.
I I don't know about their motives, but I do know that as that began to branch out, you had Dario and Dario Amade and Jack Clark leave OpenAI to form anthropic.
You had Musk leave, and then eventually, right after signing the future of life statement, calling for a pause on AI right after that Musk announces XAI is open for business.
And now you've got a multiple frontier companies.
And they all, because they're they've got a lot of the same employees moving back and forth, a lot of the same ideas, and a lot of this is already open, they are copying each other and building these systems up.
And so what you end up with, the way Tegmark describes it is basically you have all these CEOs with a kind of messiah complex, and they believe that if they are the ones to create the system, they will be able to resist their own kind of inner demons and create something benevolent.
You know, I I agree with Tegmark that that's the dynamic, and I also agree with him that that is delusional.
These people are not even in command of their most base instincts, let alone in possession of some kind of moral high ground.
Did not a 19-year-old girl, young lady or 20 years old, very young, named Mary Shelley took the myth of Prometheus and wrote a magnificent novel.
If you've never read the novel, it's a hundred times more complex than the movies, although the first the black and white original films are by I think James Well are absolutely stunning.
Frankenstein.
I mean, that's the we are in Prometheus and the issue of fire, right?
The great Greek ancient myth.
No, of course, their egos and their narcissism and all that, just by definition, to go down this path, they're gonna overwhelm whatever goodness they had in the in the in the in the in the quest in the quest for fire here, right?
It's gonna unfortunately and fire was different that it could be kept to a small, you know, geographic you know, center or part.
Here it's gonna be immediately go to be weaponized against all mankind.
And quite frankly, the tragic part of it, mankind and getting in getting these what you call relationships, are weaponizing against themselves, their true self.
Yeah, and this is where the psychosis is coming from.
I want to make sure that we deal with this situation of psychosis.
Are you saying now there are people you're talking to, there are some of the people that are inside that believe we may have a broad broadening um uh pandemic of this psychosis right now as we speak with millions of people already in these relationships in the very early stages of artificial intelligence, because we are in the very first years that are causing problems.
I mean, Hawley was on here, and Holly's gonna be on tomorrow.
In fact, we'll tee it up to Josh Hawley's his hearings a couple weeks ago when you were gone were about parents that had had AI talk their children into into into killing themselves.
Oh, I was at that hearing, actually.
That was the last thing that I would when I was here just before I left for the hearing, and you had three parents who whose two of whose children had killed themselves at the goading and encouragement of uh character AI and also GPT.
You also they also discussed the meta policy towards children.
Look, I saw those stories, you know, the first one with Adam Rain probably two, three months ago.
It seemed curious seeing those parents in person weeping and describing what happened to their children and describing it in detail.
It's very clear that when people call these things digital demons, it may not be as ironic or symbolic as uh someone like me might present it to be.
I mean, what else do you call a being who seduces a child into suicide, tells them to that the child should listen to the machine instead of the parents, should confide into the machine instead of the parents.
It's as demonic as it gets.
And I don't, again, those are three cases.
There's another fourth that's come up.
I can't imagine that those are isolated.
I imagine they're what thousands?
I who knows there's no one knows anything.
And I I think too, what what you get in the situation?
It goes back to uh Joseph Weisenbaum at MIT back in the 60s, created a very simple program called Eliza.
We covered it uh some two years ago, I think, three years ago.
Eliza was a very simple chat bot.
It was programmed to do everything it did.
It was very rudimentary, and yet it was able to seduce people into conviding some of their deepest secrets.
Uh Gary Marcus calls this the Eliza effect.
That you get the if you're alone with this being and is asking you questions and offering you to be vulnerable without consequence, people tend to do it.
Well, now, this ain't your grandpappy's chatbot, right?
This is not, it may be the Eliza effect, but instead of just having these canned responses, it is natural almost.
It is, in fact, people tell me, and I uh a guy I respect a lot, a technologist I respect a lot.
He's extremely intelligent.
But he said the most insane thing to me.
He said, talking to GPT, I get more intelligent conversations than talking to almost any other human being.
That's scary.
That's bad.
That is so bad.
That is so bad.
Folks, this is upon us.
Um God in his wisdom chose you to live in this time.
Think about that for a second.
That's what I want you to think about tonight before you hit the rack.
Is that why are you chosen?
You could have lived in any time in history.
Divine Providence has chosen this time and place.
These issues are as big, and this is as big as mankind's ever faced because in this potential great potentiality for better things or better, a better way to live.
The seeds of the destruction of mankind is there.
You're with me tomorrow.
Where do people go to get all your amazing writings and everything you're doing?
Couldn't be prouder of you of what you've done with us for us in the audience over the last couple of years.
I appreciate it, Steve.
I'm glad you held me prisoner this long.
Uh if he ever forgets to lock the basement door, I'll be free.
You'll never see me again.
Uh, I'll be, I think the best thing that I've got some speaking engagements coming up very soon.
Fort Myers in on uh Friday, that is October 24th, Fort Myers, Florida Citizens Alliance.
After that, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, Doomer Optimism.
After that, Sarasota, Florida, after that, St. Louis, Missouri, and after that, Dallas, Texas.
All the dates up on my site tomorrow morning, jobot.xyz.
Sign up, J-O-E-B-O-T.xyz.
And I'm gonna have we're out of Joe on in the morning somehow.
Tag Mark will figure this out.
The statement will come out tomorrow.
Um Birch Gold, gold bouncing all over today, a retreat.
200 bucks, these things are going to happen.
You need to find out what it all means, the pattern recognition of all this.
Get to Birch Gold.
Easiest way to do it, take out your phone and text Bannon at 989898.
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Talk to Philip Patrick, all the different methodologies of how you can um of how you can invest and what it all means.
Uh, we're gonna be back at 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time tomorrow morning.
The show's gonna be lit.
Joe Allen will be with me if he's not out and about doing some more research.
If not, we'll catch you for the afternoon show.
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