All Episodes
Previous Next
Jan. 24, 2023 - Dinesh D'Souza
49:20
RUN, BIDEN, RUN Dinesh D’Souza Podcast Ep502
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
This episode is brought to you by my friend Rebecca Walser, a financial expert who can help you protect your wealth.
Book your free call with her team by going to friendofdinesh.com.
That's friendofdinesh.com.
Coming up, I'm going to look at some early prospects for 2024 on both the Republican and Democratic side, all leading up to the conclusion, run Biden, run.
Wealth strategist Rebecca Walzer joins me.
We're going to talk about opportunities, risks, and black swan events in this uncertain economy.
And I'll explain why the project of artificial intelligence to create computers that think like human beings is bound to fail.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Show.
The times are crazy and a time of confusion, division, and lies.
We need a brave voice of reason, understanding, and truth.
This is the Dinesh D'Souza Podcast.
It seems very early, almost premature, to talk about the 2024 election.
And polls that come out today don't seem to have much bearing on what will happen, you know, a year and three quarters from now.
They're more of a reflection of what people are thinking now.
But they're still illuminating in that regard.
They're kind of more of a gauge of the current state of public opinion.
But in any event, I think it's quite interesting to see that there's a recent poll out, Harvard-Harris poll, that shows that both Trump and DeSantis would relatively easily beat Biden if the election were held today.
So let's take a look.
It's a survey of 2050 registered voters.
Pretty good sample.
Interestingly, 65% of them said Biden should not run again.
And that means that it's obviously not just Republicans.
These surveys, in fact, tend to sometimes over-represent Democrats.
But let's assume it's even.
That's still a substantial number of Democrats who say that Biden should get out.
Now, Trump versus Biden, 46% for Trump, 41% for Biden, 13% undecided.
So, fairly decent amount of undecided, but Trump leading Biden by five points.
And then if you switch it over to...
DeSantis, it's pretty interesting because the margin is actually smaller.
DeSantis beats Biden 42 to 39.
And that's 81.
So that's a larger number of undecideds.
And the difference between DeSantis and Biden is only three points.
Now, the poll also ran a straight Trump versus DeSantis and others for the Republican nomination, a separate question.
Trump is the clear favorite.
He leads DeSantis by 48 to 28, which is a pretty substantial margin.
And we've seen an interesting flux here.
At the beginning, Trump was heavily dominant.
He had 70%.
Everybody else had to share the remaining.
Other polls, not a Harvard-Harris poll, where DeSantis appeared to have overtaken Trump.
This was in the immediate aftermath of the midterms when DeSantis was kind of riding high and had decisively beaten his opponent, Charlie Crist.
And people thought, DeSantis is the guy.
We've got to go with DeSantis.
And DeSantis appeared to be edging out Trump in some of the GOP And now we seem to have lapsed into perhaps a more normal state where Trump is leading.
But again, Trump doesn't have the overwhelming lead that he had at the very beginning.
He's 48. DeSantis is 28.
Still a big difference, 20 points.
And there's a whole bunch of other guys, all in single digits, by the way.
Mike Pence, 7%.
Nikki Haley, 3%.
Mike Pompeo, 1%.
So these are people like running in the back of the race when you got two guys kind of contending, it seems.
Now, interestingly, the guy who did the poll, a fellow named Mark Penn, makes this comment.
He goes, Trump is ahead, but already has every vote he can get.
DeSantis is the candidate of potential.
I don't think this is really upholster speaking.
I think this is the guy who's kind of promoting DeSantis a little bit here.
I have long thought that the strongest Republican ticket at this point Looking ahead is a combination of Trump and DeSantis.
People go, well, that's not going to work because, you know, they don't like each other.
I don't know if they like each other or not.
They do both have the same general ideological trust.
And in politics, it doesn't actually matter if you like each other.
Think of how often the president and the vice president interact.
Not a whole lot, as it turns out.
And so there's no reason that an alliance, if it happens to be in both their interests, can't happen.
Now, Biden, of course, is a complete dud.
And this guy is like barely making it through this term.
He's like, I don't even know how he could even conceivably run, let alone what his support is going to be.
But I think that for this reason, my slogan is run, Biden, run.
I mean, if you're governing with half a mind now, maybe you could govern with a quarter of a mind the next time around.
Or no, No mind at all.
You can kind of go full Fetterman on the country.
But Biden, I think, is proving to be feeble, mean-spirited, callous, bumbling, malevolent, just the kind of toxic combination of bad results, but also bad intentions that we do not need in a president.
Mike Lindell is running a sale on his Giza Dream bedsheets.
They're as low as $29.99.
Now, Mike promises that the first night you sleep in these sheets, you're never going to want to sleep on anything else.
The Giza Dream bedsheets are made with the world's best cotton called Giza.
It's long staple cotton, which makes the sheets ultra soft and breathable.
The sateen weave gives them a luxurious finish, available in multiple colors, styles, and sizes.
Machine washable and durable.
10-year warranty. 60-day money-back guarantee.
So go ahead, call 800-876-0227.
That's 800-876-0227.
Or go to MyPillow.com.
Don't forget to use the promo code DINESHDINESH. The bad news for January 6th defendants continues.
You might know the case of Richard Barnett.
This is a 61-year-old guy.
In fact, he's the guy who put his feet up on the desk of Nancy Pelosi's office.
And you could sort of see him, you know, grinning as he did that.
But this is a guy who went into the Capitol.
He didn't hurt a soul.
He didn't vandalize any property.
And guess what?
He is facing up to 20 years.
I repeat, 20 years in prison.
Now, this is nuts.
It's nuts and it's only explained by the fact that you've got swamp judges and you've got a swamp DC jury that is not giving these guys a fair hearing, not giving them a fair trial, and they don't get fair sentences.
I mean, even if they are found guilty of doing what they did, obstructing justice, which this guy didn't do, nevertheless, you need to have penalties proportionate to the crime.
And in case after case, this is obviously not happening.
Now, Joseph McBride, the lawyer who's been on this podcast, who represented Richard Barnett, made a motion to move the trial out of D.C. He said, listen, you got 92% of people in D.C., 92 to 95% of people in D.C. voting for Biden.
So in what sense is this guy getting a jury of his peers?
It's just political vengeance that is being inflicted on him by people who hate what he believes and what he stands for, and in a sense, quote, wants to teach him a lesson and other people a lesson by destroying his life.
Let's remember, by the way, that just...
Recently, we saw riots in Atlanta.
Antifa was in full gear.
And they burned a police car.
They vandalized a whole bunch of stuff.
They set all kinds of fires.
At one point, it looked like the whole of Atlanta was on fire.
They also committed property destruction at the airport.
Now, you would think...
To the credit of the Georgia cops, they moved in, they arrested these guys, but I bet you that none of them will get 20 years in prison.
They are going to get sentences that are perhaps proportionate, maybe even light, compared to what they did.
So I'm glad that they weren't just let go the way that a lot of Antifa writers were let go for earlier offenses, offenses committed in the aftermath of George Floyd, or offenses actually committed At Trump's inauguration going way back to 2016, in those cases there were many Antifa guys who did very bad things.
Nevertheless, they were just sort of caught and then let go.
No penalty at all.
So it is not only the disproportion, the disproportion of what you did compared to what you got.
That's one disproportion. The other disproportion is what you did compared to the Far worse things than other people did, for which they get lighter sentences, and you are basically locked up for years, if not the rest of your life.
Another case I think equally outrageous, this is an Oath Keepers case in which four men, Robert Menuda, Joseph Hackett, David Marshall, and Edward Vallejo, Are found guilty of seditious conspiracy.
There was no seditious conspiracy.
There was no conspiracy at all.
What you have is four big-talking, well, let's call them yahoos, who say all kinds of stupid stuff, irresponsible stuff.
And if you're going solely by what they said, yeah, it looks like these are really bad guys who are planning to do really bad stuff, but they're planning to do stuff that they don't do.
They're talking about doing things that are not carried out.
They're not in active concert with each other.
And they are facing, essentially, the ruination of the rest of their life.
So, these are people who basically are nothing more.
And it flashes my mind to the convictions in the Whitmer kidnapping case.
Now, there were a couple of defendants in that case who got off, but there were others who got convicted.
Again, not because they were the prime movers of a conspiracy, not because they were...
They would probably not have tried to carry out this kidnapping if it wasn't for the involvement of the FBI. But again, what happened in that case was the judge specifically instructed the jury to the effect that it doesn't matter if the FBI thought of it.
It doesn't matter if the FBI drove the plot.
It doesn't matter if it wouldn't have happened without the FBI. As long as these guys were willing participants, get them.
And I think you get the same psychology here.
It doesn't matter if they carried out the conspiracy.
It doesn't matter that the counting of the votes went forward was maybe held up for, what, an hour, 50 minutes?
It doesn't matter that nothing really happened and no harm was done.
So the standard metrics of the law, yeah, you did something wrong, but was anybody hurt?
Was anybody genuinely harmed?
And if not, alright, you impose a penalty, but it's a penalty proportionate to the harm that was done.
That's not happening in these cases.
And sometimes I ask myself, when I just contemplate January 6th, are we still living in America?
Do we still have the America we once knew?
My dad didn't believe in the stock market.
He was a put your money in the bank kind of guy.
But I discovered in the early 1990s that investing in the market makes a lot of sense if you're in it for the long term.
The problem is we're in a rocky economy with a lot of craziness at home, a lot of instability abroad.
There's always the risk of a black swan event, a single event that comes out of nowhere and basically cripples your savings.
So how do we take advantage of the upside of the market and protect ourselves against the downside?
We need some really good guidance here.
Now, my friend Rebecca Walser is a tax attorney and wealth strategist with her MBA from the London School of Economics.
She knows a heck of a lot about all this.
In fact, I'm going to have her on the podcast today.
Rebecca and her team can help protect your wealth during these unprecedented times.
So go to friendofdinesh.com and book your complimentary introductory call to see if you qualify.
Again, that's friendofdinesh.com.
Guys, you've heard me talk about Rebecca Walser on my podcast regularly, and I'm delighted to say that we have Rebecca Walser herself, a wealth strategist, a tax attorney, bestselling author.
You frequently see her on national media, Yahoo Finance, Newsmax, Fox Business, and more.
She also does a podcast.
And I wanted to invite Rebecca to come on and talk about the economy.
Rebecca, welcome. Delighted to have you on.
I want people to start by getting to know you a little better.
So talk about how you tell a little bit about your story and also how you got into this line of work.
That's a great story. Well, I have a little light bulb that's in a statue on my desk that my employees bought for me just because of the story that really turned me on to money.
I was four years old.
I was a Navy brat in the military.
My dad was a Enlisted person and we traveled the world.
I was actually born in Japan.
I lived all over before my dad really moved us to Florida when I was almost in high school.
And so I had the life of a military brat.
Both of my parents really came from money and didn't really know what to do on a You know, a military salary with four kids in a very short time.
So we really struggled financially.
I remember at four years old, the lights being off.
And, you know, I thought I broke the lights.
I had to go and say to my mom, the bathroom lights are broke.
I think I broke them. And they sat me down, Dinesh, and they explained what bills are and what money is.
And if you didn't have enough money to pay the bills, the lights could go out.
And I think that that was such an impactful situation at four years of age that I just I was determined that I was going to figure out this thing called money and bills, and that's what I was going to do with my life.
And I did not ever stray from that path.
I graduated. I have four degrees.
I took every exact amount of credit hours.
I did not take one wasted credit hour in any of those four programs because I was laser focused on finance, economics, mathematics.
That's my passion, and I love it.
Well, it's funny, Rebecca, your story really resonates with me.
And I think it has to do with the fact that although I grew up in a middle class family, pretty comfortable circumstances, even in India, I came to America with $500 in my pocket.
And I And I knew that if I stayed, that's kind of all I would be, that's all I would have to start with.
And so four years of college, I mean, so I think that Debbie sometimes jokes with me about this, that there's a little part of me that still has that mentality of extreme scarcity, where I remember, in fact, when on the flight over at an airport, we had stopped to make a connection, I think, in Frankfurt.
And I saw a McDonald's and I realized I cannot afford to eat at McDonald's.
So that feeling that I had, gosh, years and years ago, a little part of that is still with me.
And it gives one a psychology that sort of never goes away.
Well, I think one interesting thing about that is that your background prepared you for the fields of finance.
Let's talk a little bit about...
How you think about the economy, because if you're projecting or advising people and saying the economy is going to be good or the economy is not going to be good, what factors do you take into account?
Is it fiscal policy?
Is it the Fed and the money supply?
Is it events going on around the world?
I'd just like people to get a window into your psychology of how you process this kind of information.
Yeah. Well, I would have to really break it down into time periods, Dinesh, for people to really understand because we are now at the ending of a time period.
It is absolutely clear to me in black and white, the world doesn't really know it yet.
Certainly the media and the United States does not promote this yet, but it is being blasted all around the world and certainly in Asia.
We are at the ending of the fiat system.
It is coming to an end very, very quickly because of everything that has happened.
So if we take that, and we'll pause on that for just a second, we just take a normal, let's say we were just a normal market cycle prior to 2008, or even 2002, the dot-com crash.
We would look at gross domestic product, we would look at total economy debt to the GDP of a country, and we'd say, okay, this country can survive with this level of debt burden, And this amount of tax collection because they're creating this much national product, whether it's services related or goods related or whatever.
And we would normally look at it as an overall country equation.
And we'd look at the risk of the country and assign a risk factor to the cost of capital.
Just basic economics, Dinesh.
But really, things have changed since the turn of the millennia.
We had the dot-com crash in 2000 that really rolled people's confidence in the stock market.
And then you can see that we kind of got through that.
But we got to 2008, 2009.
And that was the beginning of the end.
And we're now at the end of the end.
So this has been going on since 2008.
And specifically what changed in 2008 was monetary policy, not fiscal policy.
Our fiscal policy has really been in the doldrums for decades.
For decades now, we've really been overspending.
We've been building the national debt really in earnest since the 70s, and that really hasn't changed.
What did change was monetary policy.
In 2008, 2009, we really got out of what we call in America the Great Recession, what the rest of the world calls the Global Financial Crisis, the GFC. We turned to something called MMT, Modern Monetary Theory, Which is a Keynesian theory of you can produce and generate as much money as you want as long as you can service that debt with tax collection.
And so we went a little bit crazy and we stimulated our way out of the GFC. And then we got to 2020.
And in 2020, we took MMT to an extreme by basically globally.
Globally, we had about $30 trillion of currency printed in 2020.
In the United States, about $10 trillion.
And we absorbed that very quickly, which is what led us into massive inflation beginning in 2021, which the Fed discounted as $1.
It's transitory. But then last year, they finally had to be called on the carpet and said, no, this isn't transitory.
You've got to deal with it.
And that's where you started to see Powell pivot and really strengthen the dollar internally by all of his rate hikes.
We had all of those rate hikes last year and he really had no choice.
But that is what is actually bringing us to the end that we're getting to now.
I believe 2023 will be the end of The final nail in the coffin.
And that is going to be very uncomfortable for us this year.
America is going to be going to go through a hard time.
And that's why people need to really prepare and understand that this is different than anything we've ever seen before in the history of time.
Let's take a pause, Rebecca.
When we come back, let's return to the issue of the fiat that you mentioned earlier and also what we can expect in this rocky, uncertain year of 2023.
It's always good to make a fresh start.
Now the phrase literally means an opportunity to begin something again.
And you know you need a fresh start in your eating habits, right?
How many times last year did you say to yourself, I need to start eating better?
Well, eating the right amount of fruits and veggies every day is almost impossible.
I have a better way, a more convenient way for you to make that fresh start.
Well, Balance of Nature.
Sourced from 31 whole fruits and vegetables, you get maximum nutrition with their star product which is this, fruits and veggies in a capsule.
Debbie and I take them every day.
You should too.
Right now, take advantage of the Balance of Nature New Year's offer.
Get $25 off plus free fiber and spice with your first preferred order of fruits and veggies when you use discount code AMERICA.
The offer can end at any time so go ahead.
Call 800-246-8751.
That's 800-246-8751.
Or go to balanceofnature.com.
Use discount code AMERICA. I'm back with Rebecca Walzer, wealth strategist, tax attorney.
You've probably seen her on Yahoo Finance or Newsmax or Fox Business.
We're talking about the economy.
And Rebecca, if I can recapitulate and personalize a little bit for people to get a clear understanding of what you're saying.
Are you saying that if you make an analogy, let's say, between an economy, the economy of America, and let's say a family or an individual, there's been a lot of irresponsible spending that's gone on for a while.
In fact, you dated to the 70s for 50 years, kind of outspending your paycheck, accumulating debt, but it seemed that this is something that you could endure because, you know what, you can pay the interest on the debt.
So even though the debt keeps rising, you can sort of keep it going.
But I think what you're saying is that there have been a series of, let's call them cataclysmic shocks, one after the other, spaced out maybe 10 years apart, and at a certain point, If it hits you in which you reach a point where the old rules just don't work anymore,
you're now in a new situation, you're in a genuine crisis, and your normal kind of things, which is, hey, listen, I'll go to my nest egg, oh, I'll tap this, oh, I'll pull a little money out of my IRA, are just going to be insufficient.
Would that be a description of where America is?
And if it is...
How should we, both as a country and as individuals, think about it?
Yeah, I think it's a great analogy, Dinesh.
And I would also just add that, like, just imagine that you couldn't go to your 401k or your IRA for a reason, so you decided, let me go to the bank.
The bank will let me borrow.
I just need a short-term loan for the next six months, and then I can pay it back and I'll be okay.
And you go to the bank, and the bank is gone.
There is no bank. And that's really the analogy.
That's where we're at.
Because the reason that we've been able to sustain this overspending, and now certainly in the last two years, this massive extreme overspending, is because we have been the sole reserve currency of the world.
And we have had something called the petrodollar.
Which meant that in order for all the countries of the earth to buy from OPEC, producing nations, and even Russia, Russia was agreed to it even though they weren't a part of OPEC, everybody had to buy their crude in US dollars.
So they would have to buy US dollars from us so they could actually execute their oil sales.
That ended when Russia invaded Ukraine and the West kicked Russia out of the SWIFT system.
So that set off a series of events that are now unstoppable.
We now are looking at, instead of a singular world reserve currency, we are looking at something called multipolarity, where you are seeing the BRICS nations, Brazil, Russia, India, China, South Africa, now being joined by Saudi Arabia, which was the one piece that we were so weary of happening.
But as of January 15th, the week of, Saudi Arabia made a public pronouncement that they are ready And able and willing to start to sell crude outside of the US dollar for the first time since 1974.
And as they do that, the petrodollar collapses completely.
The singular reserve dollar hegemony that we've enjoyed since 1974, really since Bretton Woods in 1944, that is going to end.
We are moving towards multipolarity and the BRICS nations are going to be introducing an alternative reserve currency, Which, if you just think about that for a minute, Dinesh, what does that mean to us in America?
That means that we don't have this singular ability to raise capital anytime we want by just selling our dollars because the rest of the world will no longer have to buy them.
Rebecca, I remember when I first read about what the Saudis were doing, it struck me with a little bit of a surprise.
The United States has had a kind of fairly tight alliance with Saudi Arabia going back to the middle of the last century, really goes back to the deal made with the Saudi sheikhs in the aftermath of World War II, or maybe even a little before.
And the alliance weathered a lot of storms.
I mean, the most dramatic storm I can think of was 9-11.
Because, of course, the hijackers came from Saudi Arabia.
They weren't sent by the Saudi government.
But a lot of people thought Saudi Arabia did 9-11.
We weathered that storm.
And then it looks like almost gratuitously the Biden administration sort of gave the Saudis the finger.
And what I mean is they demonized the Saudi royal prince.
They made the Saudis seem like they're run by a bunch of thugs and murderers.
They pushed away what appeared to be a willing ally.
And now the Saudis have decided, well, okay...
We actually think you need us more than we need you.
So do you agree that this is a blunder of mammoth proportions in the area of foreign policy for the Biden administration to chase away an ally with now long-term implications for America's own economy?
I agree, Dinesh. If we look at the timeframe, when Saudi Arabia basically entered into a military security agreement with Russia in April, right after we pulled out of Afghanistan, I think that they really were a little bit panicked how we rushed out of Afghanistan and the way that we did.
And obviously their security is tied to the United States, so they decided to take matters into their own hands and look elsewhere.
So they basically created that agreement in April of 2022 with Russia.
And then they announced last year that China, in fact in December and November, China was their number one economic partner.
So you can see that both the military and the economics are moving towards the BRICS group away from the West.
And this is very important to America because of our monetary policy and the dollar.
And this is so oddly timed that all of these things, Dinesh, are happening in such lockstep at the same time that the World Economic Forum has really been pushing the central banks to move to central bank digital currencies. I mean, the central bank digital currencies, the digital dollar on the FedNow platform, which is to be operational. It's in beta testing now with 12 banks and MasterCard, and it is to be fully operational beginning in May to July of 2023,
So as we start to see potentially a dollar collapse, are we going to be moved onto a digital dollar and a new economic platform?
And that's a whole other area of topic, Dinesh, that obviously we can't cover in this short interview.
But it's just all coordinated to be happening in lockstep.
And it's very concerning for the strength of the dollar and America and our position economically in the world.
Well, Rebecca, we will pick up on that topic the next time.
But this has really been a brilliant and eye-opening analysis.
And it's very clear, I think, that this is not just something that we have to be worried about for the country, but we have to be worried about for our own finances.
Well, thank you very much, Rebecca.
We're delighted to have you on the podcast.
Thanks, Dinesh. Debbie and I started taking Relief Factor a couple of years ago.
The difference we've seen in our joints has been nothing short of amazing.
Feeling is believing.
The aches and pains are gone thanks to this 100% drug-free solution called Relief Factor.
Now, Relief Factor supports your body's fight against inflammation that's the source of aches and pains.
The vast majority of people who try Relief Factor love it.
They order more because it works for them.
Debbie's a true believer. She can finally do the exercises that for several years she wasn't able to do.
It's been a real game changer for her, her aunt, other members of our family, and for many other people.
Now, you too can benefit. Try it for yourself.
Order the three-week quick start for the discounted price of only $19.95.
Go to relieffactor.com or call 833-690-7246 to find out more.
That number again, 833-690-7246.
690-7246 or go to relieffactor.com.
Feel the difference. I enjoy watching videos online by leading philosophers and my motive for watching these is to kind of deepen my understanding of great thinkers of the past and to See aspects of them that I might not be familiar with.
So I was watching a video by a Berkeley philosopher named Hubert Dreyfus.
Very smart guy.
And he has also a gift for making his ideas accessible, which I always enjoy.
Makes life easier when you're listening to somebody who's easy to comprehend.
And I was watching his video.
He's kind of an expert on Heidegger, the philosopher Heidegger, German philosopher from the early part of the 20th century.
And Heidegger was a very controversial figure.
He became for a while infatuated with fascism and Nazism, a supporter of Hitler.
And there are some people who refuse to read him for that reason.
But of course, Heidegger's philosophy is much broader than that.
It's not really a Nazi philosophy per se.
And there's a lot that we can learn from it.
So I was listening to Hubert Dreyfus expound Heidegger.
And essentially what Dreyfus was saying is that the importance of Heidegger is that he challenges a tradition of Western philosophy that goes back to Descartes.
This is Rene Descartes, the French philosopher of about 1650, the middle of the 17th century.
But in some ways goes all the way back to Plato.
Now let's think for a moment about Descartes because...
What Descartes did was, in a kind of crisis of confidence, a crisis of how do we know anything?
How do we know for sure?
Descartes goes and locks himself in a dark room, closes all the windows and doors, and he starts wondering about what is it that he definitively, indisputably knows.
And the result of this is Descartes' famous cogito.
The cogito is, I think, therefore I am.
And so Descartes basically realizes that he's thinking.
Now, he might be mistaken in what he's thinking about, but, says Descartes, I can't be wrong in the fact that I am thinking.
A thought is occurring, and it's occurring to me, and therefore we've got me, the subject, and since I'm thinking about things, the about things is the universe out there.
It's all the things I think about, and those are the objects of my thoughts.
Now, Descartes knows he's a long way from establishing the reality of an independent world, independent of his senses, but nevertheless, starting with Descartes, you get this clear idea that the world is divided into thinking subjects, that's us, and objects, which is the world out there, including, by the way, the world that includes other people.
And it's this tradition that Heidegger challenges, and he challenges it by saying, in effect, that A, we don't come or experience the world that way as subjects and objects.
We are beings in the world.
This is Heidegger's phrase. We come with the world already being part of us, and we are part of the world.
And Heidegger demonstrates this through a bunch of really interesting and very simple examples.
He goes, think about a guy walking into a room.
He doesn't think about, I need to turn the doorknob before I enter the room.
No, says Heidegger. Even as you're approaching the door, your hand begins to form the shape of the doorknob.
You just automatically or unselfconsciously do it and you're in the room.
And the moment you're in the room, you take stock of what's in there.
You're not, quote, thinking about it.
You just know there's a chair.
I'm heading to the normal chair I sit in when I listen to a lecture.
Well, think about driving a car.
Now, true, when you first learn to drive a car, you're thinking about it.
What do I do? I need to go first gear, now into second gear, and so on, if you're driving a stick shift.
But, of course, once you learn to drive, it comes, you may say, naturally.
You're a being in the world and the world and you are operating almost like, well, two sides of a scissors or operating in harmony.
This is what Heidegger wants to stress.
And he goes, you're not even really thinking about it.
You only think about it when something goes wrong.
You make a wrong turn or the car starts to lurch and then you have to think about it.
But otherwise, in the normal course of things, you can say, particularly for someone who is used to doing something or skilled at doing something, think of a craftsman with a hammer or He's not thinking about hammer.
This is an object. This is made out of wood and steel.
I've got to take aim in this way.
No, basically the hammer is like an extension of his hand.
In fact, he could be carrying on a conversation even while he's hammering nails if he's a skilled craftsman in the same way that you or I could have a conversation about the podcast or philosophy in the car while we're driving.
Now, While I'm listening to this, and I'm sort of expecting the conversation, the discussion by Hubert Reifus to continue in this way, it actually takes a surprising turn.
It takes a turn into a subject I did not expect to come into the conversation, namely artificial intelligence, AI. And a few days ago on the podcast, I talked about how we can use AI, artificial intelligence, today to In very interesting ways to create new memes,
to, in some cases, compose music that is not entirely bad music, to write op-eds by David French, because what they do is the AI sort of takes the familiar vocabulary, the kind of mode of argument that French makes, and mimics it. Creating, if you will, a David French-like op-ed, which is perhaps in some ways more coherent than David French.
But the question I want to explore in the next segment, and this is where Hubert Dreyfus goes, is can AI, can artificial intelligence make a computer, in effect, that thinks like a human being?
Guys, I hope you enjoy the podcast.
And the podcast, of course, is free.
But the podcast also comes with a little bit of a restriction.
We post the podcast on YouTube, on Facebook, and, of course, we're dealing with the censorship regimes in those places.
So what if you want more Dinesh?
What if you want uncensored Dinesh, unchained Dinesh?
And what if you want some more direct interaction with Dinesh, in which you can ask me questions and I reply?
Well, the answer is you need to join my local channel.
This is a subscriber-only channel.
It's a channel where you can either join month-to-month or you can become an annual subscriber.
By the way, you get exclusive content either way, but if you join as an annual subscriber, you also get a whole bunch of, well, exclusive posts.
But you also get free films.
And I've got a bunch of films already up there in my channel, including, by the way, 2,000 Meals.
More going up in 2023.
My films as well as other great films by others.
It's $50 a year to become an annual subscriber.
That's less than $5 a month.
Plus you get other exclusive content, including my weekly live Q&A. Sign up at dinesh.locals.com.
I'd love to have you along for this great ride.
We all know that artificial intelligence is used today in all kinds of things.
It can compose music.
It can write medium-level op-eds.
But it has all kinds of commercial applications.
It's used, for example, in business processing.
Obviously, it's capable of astonishing feats of calculation.
Now, none of this is particularly new.
Or by new, I mean it's not new in principle.
We've known that there are machines that can do things, there's technology that can do things that human beings can't do, and this has been known for eons, long before the computer.
For example, an abacus can calculate perhaps faster than a child or even a human being, and that's been known for centuries.
A forklift has strength that human beings don't have.
It can lift all kinds of stuff that human beings couldn't dream of lifting.
Or even a normal calculator can do transactions far more complicated.
It can multiply giant numbers in seconds.
Something that, except for a few human savants, a normal person, even an intelligent person, can't do.
But the question is, and this has always been the dream of AI going back now 50 years or about 50 years, can AI function intelligently like a human being?
Can artificial intelligence think?
Now, when Deep Blue, the computer, was able to beat Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, And today, by the way, the best computers can beat any human player.
Many people thought, oh, well, that's proof computers can think.
But it's not really proof of that because there's a finite number of squares on a board.
And even though there's a large number of potential moves, that number is finite.
So computers that can do millions or tens of millions or billions of calculations can obviously, through sheer brute calculating force, Outplay a human being at chess.
Even though there are elements of strategy and creativity involved in chess, those are not good enough to overcome, you may say, brute complex calculation.
But in AI labs around the country, the most famous of which the MIT lab, they were always trying to create computers that can function normally, a kind of artificial intelligence system that could operate, for example, like somebody attending a birthday party.
In which you could say to the computer, in effect, what's going on here?
It's a birthday party. What's going to be served next?
Cake. Why are there balloons?
Because it's a birthday. So in other words, the computer, quote, understands what that event is about and what's going on in that room.
Now, Hubert Dreyfus...
The Berkeley philosopher I've been talking about has a brother who is an applied mathematician at the Rand Corporation.
And Rand, which is a government-funded entity, was building this artificial intelligence program.
But Hubert Dreyfus' brother went to the head of the Rand Corporation and said, My brother, Hubert Dreyfus, He doesn't think this is going to work.
And he doesn't think this is going to work for, let's call it, Heideggerian reasons.
In other words, the point that Heidegger makes is that we're not thinking beings that are subjects that look at objects and go, oh, there's an object.
It has this kind of weight, color, mass.
I'm not going to make a representation of that object in my mind.
And this is really the model for artificial intelligence.
Artificial intelligence thinks that it can function like a human mind.
Why? Because it thinks that this is what the human mind does.
The human mind sort of abstracts itself or pulls itself away from the world, takes a picture of the world out there, names the different objects that are, let's say, in the room and decides that if that's a balloon and that's a kid with a hat on And a little badge, that's the birthday boy, and everybody else is there to celebrate the birthday party.
So you put all these inputs into the computer, and the computer, quote, knows what's going on.
But Hubert Dreyfus's point is, no computer can ever really do that.
And the Rand Corporation was sort of astonished when they heard this.
They commissioned this fellow, Hubert Dreyfus, to write a paper that was so devastating that when it was published, Rand decided, we're not going to put our name on it.
We're not even going to distribute it.
Why? Because they were afraid, Hubert Dreyfus says, that they would lose their government contracts to continue with this research.
In other words, what's the point of continuing the research if the funders of the research discover this project is doomed to fail?
And kind of the same thing happened at MIT. Where they had a big AI lab, and they were trying to build computers that work, that think.
And they came to Hubert Dreyfus, who was teaching temporarily at MIT for a while, and they told him, hey, Hubert, you know what?
You philosophers have been trying to figure out the human mind for 2,000 years, and you've gotten pretty much nowhere.
Well, we figured it out.
We, the scientists, have beaten you at your own game, and we're making a human mind, which is to say we're making a computer that mirrors the human mind.
And again, Hubert Dreyfus goes, that's never going to work.
And it's true that in the 70s, of course, the computers were kind of primitive, but the great hope of AI was, listen, as we put more inputs, in other words, not thousands of pieces of information, but hundreds of thousands and millions, maybe even billions, The computer basically becomes a human mind and can think.
But again, Dreyfus's point is, for Heideggerian reasons, that will never work.
Why? Because we human beings are beings already in the world.
We have what can be called a background knowledge of the world that no amount of information fed into a computer can possibly comprehend.
I'm talking about Hubert Dreyfus and artificial intelligence.
And the point I want to make is as I was listening to Hubert Dreyfus talk about Heidegger, I had no idea that the conversation would pivot into this field of artificial intelligence and what is it that computers can and cannot do.
Can they build a computer that thinks like a human being?
And Dreyfus said no, and his reason for saying no had to do with the philosophy of Heidegger and Heidegger's idea that we are wrong to think of human beings as subjects in a world that the human beings have to contemplate, you may say, separately or from a distance or objectively.
Heidegger's point is that human beings are in the world.
We come into the world, and we're already there.
And even from a time that, like, an infant opens its eyes, it has a sort of basic comprehension of where it is.
The world is not an utterly strange place.
And particularly in areas of life where we have what can be called familiarity.
We have an underlying background knowledge of what's going on, and it's not specified simply by what you observe.
Think, for example, if you walk into a lecture hall.
You walk into a lecture hall and you see this object that is right up front on the top of a table and you happen to know it's called a lectern.
Now, if you weren't a student and you weren't familiar with college, you would be like, what is that?
Imagine someone from, you know, the Amazon rainforest or Papua New Guinea who walks into that room.
They'd have no idea what the lectern is.
But a student who is in a classroom has a background understanding that a lectern is something that a teacher will put a document on and read from.
So a lectern has that kind of a function.
Now, you can obviously, just looking at a lectern, think of it as having all kinds of other functions.
It could be seen as, for example, a weapon or something else like that.
But the meaning of the lectern goes far beyond just the physical properties of it or just naming what it is.
Heidegger's point is all texts that we have about the world, text here referring not to written text, but any observation exists in a context.
And human beings have this ability, being as beings who are at home in the world, we have this background knowledge of things that even if you feed all kinds of bits, near infinity of bits, into a computer, the computer isn't going to know.
So let's say, for example, you feed all this information to a computer about a birthday party.
You can nevertheless put questions to that computer that the computer has not anticipated.
Why? Because there's an infinity of things that are going on there, things that are impossible to necessarily specify.
For example, the computer might, quote, know that in birthdays you bring a present.
But what if you bring a present and the kid already has that present?
And the kid goes, I got that.
The computer now has to have anticipated the possibility of a duplicate present and already made provision for that.
And if the computer hasn't done that, it's going to be stumped.
It's going to be stalled.
Why? Because human beings already know the meaning of what a present is, what the purpose of presents are, why people exchange presents, the reciprocity of presents.
Whereas for a computer, it's simply an input.
Birthday, present.
And so the computer can't, quote, make sense of what it means to give somebody a present.
It simply makes an association of an event with the idea of a present.
So this is the point, that computers are...
Well, I guess the phrase garbage in, garbage out is a little bit too extreme because computers have all kinds of useful purposes.
And as I've mentioned at the beginning, there are all kinds of ways in which artificial intelligence can multiply our efficiency and the way we function at home.
It can multiply our business efficiency as well.
Computers have a lot of uses.
They process information faster.
They can do things better than the old computers can do.
But Dreyfus's point, it was to see, and this is really his great insight, that even though computers get better and better and better, there are certain things that they can't in principle do.
Why?
Because they are not the kind of thing, they're not the kind of being that does those sorts of things.
And so even when it comes to things like driving, computers can get better.
And we now have self-driving cars.
We have things that artificial intelligence can do that perhaps Hubert Dreyfus couldn't anticipate in 1970.
But I think in principle, Dreyfus is nevertheless right that computers will never be able to think in a human fashion.
In other words, they'll never be able to think in the way that human beings do.
Why? Because we are not merely beings who, quote, process information about the world, create representations of the world, then apply rules.
This is Heidegger's point, is that most of the time we don't apply a rule.
Take this podcast. I mean, there are certain basic rules.
I show up on time. I've got a certain amount.
Debbie's kind of chuckling because she knows I've got a certain number of minutes for each segment.
Debbie goes, you break all the rules.
But I'm actually more confident in breaking the rules in the third year of the podcast than I was in the first year of the podcast because in the first year, it was completely new.
I was consciously thinking about everything I was doing.
Oh, whoops, I've got to stop here.
Oh, whoops, I can't go overtime.
Oh, whoops, I... And of course, with censorship, I can't say this, I can't say that.
But now, as I'm doing it more automatically, I have quite an intuitive sense of what I can say, how far I can go.
And so, as a result, I am more of a being in this world, in this particular ecosystem of the podcast, than I am a Cartesian actor.
▲
Export Selection