Is AI Conscious? The 239th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying
In this 239th in a series of live discussions with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying (both PhDs in Biology), we talk about the state of the world through an evolutionary lens.In this week’s episode, we discuss AI, specifically how Grok responded to the prompt “image of Cartesian crisis,” whether AI is conscious, and whether it makes art. What is art, and are humans required to make it, or do search and memory suffice? Not art: the rendering of the national anthem at the Democratic National Co...
Hey folks, welcome to the Dark Horse Podcast live stream number 238 is it?
9. 239.
239.
239.
Prime it is.
It may or may not be the first Dark Horse Podcast of the conscious AI era.
People are betting against, but there's an argument to be made and we will make it.
What?
An argument for consciousness in the, or the dawning of consciousness.
As of this week?
Well, we'll see.
We'll see.
What are you talking about?
I'll lay out the argument.
You can, you can, you can stand up for those who think me crazy.
No, I just like, this is a total, I have no idea what you're talking about.
Well.
I'm not, I don't, I don't have a position as to whether or not it did or did not happen this week.
I have no idea this is coming.
Right.
This is not what we talked about talking about.
Are you the conscious AI of which you speak?
I can neither confirm nor deny that I am the conscious AI.
No, you wouldn't be able to.
That's actually the beginning of a fairly decent poem that I would want more time to work out.
Are you the conscious AI of which you speak?
No, no.
I am neither the conscious AI.
I had it.
I've now lost it, but, you know, easy come, easy go.
Yeah, see, that proves you're not AI.
AI wouldn't have lost it.
What you just said?
No, AI is losing it.
I can prove that.
Wouldn't have lost the text of the words that it just spewed in the universe.
Fair point.
Fair point.
Yeah.
All right.
Here we are.
239.
I'm going to shake my head as if I can confirm that in my head, which I cannot.
But, um... It's tougher to confirm primeness than it is to confirm non-primeness.
Yes.
Often the non-primeness is just staring you in the face.
Yeah.
Yeah.
Find the factors, you find the factors.
OK, we're going to talk about some, I guess, AI stuff today.
Some art.
What is art?
What are Democrats doing?
What are Democrats?
And were the Republicans right to call them the Democrat Party?
Yeah, I know.
I've never thought so, but I'm beginning to wonder.
I agree.
Yes.
Okay.
Thank you to everyone for being here.
As always, Watch Party's going on on Locals right now.
Join us there.
We just did three Q&As in rapid succession last week.
They're all up there.
We do early release of guest episodes there.
We have our Locals.
We have our Locals.
There it is, our Locals.
We've got a Discord server available through Locals, all that good stuff.
We're going to tell you more about other things that are happening at the end of the show, but for now we're just going to start with our sponsors.
As always, we have three sponsors right at the top of the hour, and you know for sure that if we are reading ads, then these people, these companies make products or have services that we really and truly vouch for.
This week it is CareAway, Armra, and Seed.
Our first sponsor this week is Caraway, which makes high-quality, non-toxic cookware and bakeware.
We haven't talked much explicitly on Dark Horse about the hazards of nonstick coatings on cookware and bakeware, but in our house we threw out all the Teflon decades ago.
Teflon is toxic, and either by flaking off into your food or by releasing its toxins when it gets too hot, people who use Teflon-coated cookware and bakeware are ingesting or inhaling Teflon.
Enter Caraway.
Caraway makes non-toxic ceramic-coated aluminum cookware, which has a slick finish like that of Teflon-based nonstick pots and pans, and they've got a stainless steel line as well.
We're big fans of cast iron pans, but they are heavy.
We make a bacon kale pasta that begins by cooking a lot of chopped bacon until the fat renders, removing the bacon, sauteing onions in the fat for a while, then adding garlic, a lot of kale, and the cooked bacon back in, cooking it all together until the kale is coated with bacon fat because that's what makes kale tasty.
Is that a mouthful?
Yes.
A tasty bacon and kale mouthful.
Yeah, indeed.
So that sauce is amazing, but it has to end up on the pasta.
And holding a 12-inch cast iron skillet over a stockpot with one hand so that I can slide the sauce into the cooked pasta with a spoon on the other is a workout.
And if someone else is around, I always ask for help holding the pan up.
Should not try it at home.
It's the only place you should try it, actually.
Yes.
All right.
But not without help.
I do.
And it's worked out okay.
But it's hard.
And you know what makes it easier?
You do, but you shouldn't.
All right.
It's not heavy.
It's cast iron cookware.
All right.
When making bacon kale pasta in a caraway skillet, it's easy to complete the dish without a spotter.
And if your spotter gives you lip like the guy sitting next to me, that's a good thing.
Caraway's ceramic cookware is non-toxic like cast iron, but it's also beautiful and it's light.
Someone argued that the functionality of cast iron makes it beautiful, but there's no denying that it's heavy.
And caraway's colors are definitely extravagant and gorgeous.
We've got pots and pans.
It's not heavy.
It's cast iron cookware.
All right.
That will never be a song.
Dude, this is an ad for Carraway.
Yes.
It's not an ad for Cast Iron.
I know, I'm throwing shade.
Alright.
Would you like to read this?
No, no.
I think it's better that you do.
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It is cool, it's easy to clean, and it doesn't look like other cookware.
It looks nifty and new and like a new take.
That's right.
I actually made, um, because I have, because we have children who, um, have historically enjoyed banana bread a lot, um, I have, um, created a recipe that's both gluten-free and is triple the normal recipe.
So I made, as usually, usual when I make banana bread, three loaves last night.
And, um, that means you have to have three loaf pans.
And the last time I made banana bread, we didn't have a caraway loaf pan.
So just this morning, uh, I, uh, on, Sheathed?
Unpanned?
De-panned?
Dis-panned?
The banana bread from the caraway loaf pan, and it was definitely easier than any other pan.
I butter them, of course, and have the right spatulas to get around the sides, but it was It was lovely and the banana bread in that pan cooked perfectly.
So sometimes different kinds of pans obviously cook things differently but the caraway bakeware now I can also attest to is pretty awesome.
Yeah, it's got the proper specific heat.
Yeah.
That's the magic, the magic in there.
Yep.
All right, our second sponsor this week is ancient.
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You know how hard it is when you invoke the idea of a seal, like it makes a seal, as you did in that ad, for me not to make seal noises.
For you not to bark like a seal?
Yes, especially in the context of Arm-Ra, it would be arguably appropriate because no doubt seals have colostrum.
You see what I'm saying?
So it would be topical.
But not your style of seal.
Not you male seals.
I mean, where do you think male seals come from?
I mean, they're born and bred on colostrum, but... Yes, yes, yes.
Every one of them.
All right.
Our final sponsor, Heather, is Seed, a probiotic that really works.
I feel like barking at you.
Feel free.
Barking like a seal?
Yes.
Oh, go for it.
I can't quite remember now.
I mean, that's pretty on target.
We got a lot of seals around here.
You can't tell me that you would necessarily have heard that.
Well, see, that's the thing.
I'm like, oh wait, seals, sea lions.
The sea lions sound different and yet obviously related.
Yeah, the sea lions are more... Yeah, the sea lion raceway that we live near.
You could just, you could hear them.
Stellar sea lions.
Gigantic.
And they do that all night.
It's far enough away that it's not a problem, but...
It sounds like they're speeding around.
Yeah, it does.
All right, I'm going to begin again because I feel like I got off track.
Yeah, you owe Seed that much.
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Wow, this is a challenging read.
Since before they became a sponsor, I, that means you, have been taking Seed daily.
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All right.
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One of the unique things about Seed is that it is double hulled with its capsule and capsule design engineered to maintain viability through digestive tract, through your digestive tract until it reaches your colon.
Since you did this to me.
Yes.
Yeah.
I want to just tell the audience that I asked you which one you wanted this time.
And your answer was Seed, not because you don't like all of the sponsors this week, but you literally said Seed because I'm familiar with that script.
Yeah.
Um, yeah.
There's a Radiohead song, uh, something about, uh, you do it to yourself.
And I did this to myself.
Yeah.
Yeah.
I'm not complaining.
No, you're not.
You're not a complainer.
We were discussing your digestive tract, not yours, but the The general digestive tract of people who are listening to this ad and the fact that seed reaches your colon where you want it because of its double hulled capsule and capsule design.
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Well, I survived the ad read.
You did.
And I barked like a seal.
I feel like I slam dunked that part.
Yeah, you've had a very productive day so far.
Compared to some, yes.
That was not not bad.
All right.
I guess I'm leading off here.
I think so.
All right.
Well, this is going to be a fraught topic.
I have been avoiding direct interaction with AI, as you know.
And in fact, I've been troubled by the degree to which people have been interacting with AI without thinking carefully about what this means.
And basically, if you imagine what happened to humanity with the cell phone, it was very easy to think, oh, I'll try that out, without understanding that you were potentially signing up for something that was going to revolutionize humans and maybe in ways that we don't want to be revolutionized.
So I'm cautious about technologies that are obviously revolutionary, and it is clear to me that AI is revolutionary.
We will come back later to the fact that I've laid out five different ways in which I think AI could be an existential threat to humans.
I regard two of them as fanciful and unlikely, three of them as almost certain.
That will be something to look at here in the context of what I'm going to show you.
But all of that said, I've been experimenting with Grok, the AI that is built into Twitter.
And it has gained image creation facility, capacity.
And that makes it easy to query and think about in ways that, whether I'm right or not, I feel is somewhat safer than plugging it into your linguistic API.
I'm speaking metaphorically.
And you know, it's interesting.
It's certainly that, you know, you can usually maybe always tell that an image is AI created when you use it.
It's certainly capable of doing some impressive things.
Here I'll give you a couple examples of just some impressive things to give you a sense, if you haven't played with it yourself, of what it can do in a matter of moments.
So you want to show my screen here?
Alright, this is responsive to a prompt that I threw at Darwin on a space station waiting for his flight.
It's not the most perfect rendering of Darwin I've ever seen.
The space station looks very much like these things are imagined in sci-fi.
It doesn't look like the International Space Station.
He's sitting there with a laptop.
But, okay, I guess my point... I feel like that's the most compelling part of it.
That he's sitting there with his laptop?
He'd totally be sitting there with his laptop.
Or he'd be looking out the window.
He might be looking out the window.
But in any case, one thing that is just simply certainly true is that The power of the technology is 100% unfakeable here because this image popped out in 10 seconds as a result of a prompt that I'm pretty sure nobody's ever put into any AI ever before.
Probably an idea that nobody's ever thought before.
And for it to spit out an image that is high resolution, contains tons of detail, is even a bit, you know, imaginative.
He's got a, you know, a patch on his shoulder.
He's wearing some kind of a jumpsuit that does not look like, you know, a visiting dignitary.
It looks like kind of the way better sci-fi portrays day-to-day life on spaceships where people are You know, passing through space as a regular phenomenon.
The seat is worn the way it might be on a plane that hasn't been refreshed in 10 years.
So anyway, I'm not advocating for this technology.
I'm not gleeful about it, but I am impressed by it in ways that are different.
If I was evaluating what it was saying to me, I would have different questions.
Evaluating the image allows you To see its weaknesses, it frequently spits out stuff that's batshit crazy, just like bizarre errors.
But it also spits out stuff that causes you to think.
I asked it to render Mount Rainier erupting, right?
Mount Rainier has not erupted.
It is a mountain that is a volcano capable of eruption.
That's an interesting big error, though.
Yep.
It's not the right kind of eruption.
Right.
Rainier, when it goes, it's not going to be lava.
It's going to be lahar.
It's going to be, what is that, pyroclastic?
No.
Pyroclastic flows.
Pyroclastic flows, yeah.
It's going to be mud flows.
I think so.
Now, I'm not a volcanologist.
I don't think that Rainier will ever have visibly red-hot lava.
I am not sure whether that's a certainty or not.
Nonetheless, 10 seconds, and it spits out an image that is... I think there's two errors in it.
One, I think the choice of eruption is at least unlikely, if not impossible.
Two, I believe the lava flows downhill at the upper part of... and then it appears to flow right below the ridge, which is exactly not what you would expect.
Right?
No, that looks plausible to me.
It's just...
It may be that the lava is flowing farther down and we're just seeing the edge of it there.
That's possible.
But anyway, it's an interesting fact that something that is historically or that is conceivable scientifically can be rendered.
If I told it, no, that's the wrong kind of eruption, it would correct it.
That's another thing you can do.
You can tell it, no, you've got that wrong and it will apologize.
I have literally never played with Grok or any other form of AI knowingly, but I do wonder, you know, what it would make of, no, that's the wrong kind of eruption.
I mean, we can certainly find out.
You're talking about doing that right now?
I'm not, okay.
Well, I don't know.
A lot of things we won't talk about.
Yeah, there are a lot of things we won't talk about.
Okay, we'll put it off.
But, um, okay.
It does weird things with people.
Do you know who that is?
No.
That's me, according to Ian.
It's obviously me.
Okay.
So, it does, but here's the thing.
I've tried to, yeah.
I've tried to figure out.
What did you say to it?
I said, you know, a picture of Brett Weinstein.
That's it?
Yeah.
But, I mean, there are pictures of Brett Weinstein.
I've seen them.
This is one of the quirks I'm going to tell you about.
Here, we're going to do a little experiment.
We're going to go over here to Grok, and we're going to say... I mean, it's not... Hold on.
There are some phenotypic characters in common.
Oh, no, it's very flattering.
I came up with something that's way handsomer than I am.
No.
No, no, we don't need to battle about it.
We both agree that doesn't look like me.
There are some characteristics in common.
Right.
Right?
But, okay, so let's try this one.
Oops.
Okay.
Image of Donald Trump.
Let's see what we get.
Wow.
Do you know who that looks more or less like?
Yeah.
Donald Trump.
Okay.
Let's try this one.
Not the most flattering picture of Donald Trump.
Not the most flattering picture at all.
And that's, we're going to get back to that.
Okay.
Image of Kamala.
Oh boy.
You tell me if I misspell something.
Image of Kamala Harris.
Okay.
You're going to have your pointer right in the middle of her nose.
You know who that looks more or less like?
Yeah.
Not the best image of her either.
Oh, that's a flattering.
Now she's an attractive woman.
You would obviously recognize that it's Kamala Harris.
I've seen ones that you wouldn't, but in general, it nails that one.
Watch this.
I'm doing Robert F.
Hannah D.
Did I spell it right?
It's a lot of dead air here.
You know who that doesn't look like?
That does not look like Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
Is that not English behind it?
No, that's not English.
I don't know why this is because obviously Brock speaks English.
But it's our alphabet.
Yes, and it's not always.
And sometimes it's a mixture of our alphabet and not.
And sometimes you will actually... Has anyone ever worn a suit with the...
So I did not prepare to talk about this feature of what you discover when you play with this, but sometimes the gobbledygook text that it puts in isn't just lorem ipsum.
It's actually it contains recognizable fragments of words related to the thing you asked it about.
No, I mean this is this is we just showed our boys again this who the Italian Uh, musician from, like, the 70s or 80s?
Oh, I've forgotten his name.
No, he's a comedian.
Comedian.
I've forgotten his name, but the, uh, Freeman Cole and Ensign Insula.
Yeah, exactly.
As, like, as the British invasion was happening.
As, like, the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and, like, all of this Popular music that was being sung in English was like spreading throughout the European continent.
He was like, yeah, but you know what, you know what English actually sounds like to us?
And he made this song and videos and it done.
We just, we showed it to Zach and Toby and didn't tell them what it was.
And And Toby said afterwards, God, I was, I knew Dad was going to, I know he cares about lyrics and he was going to ask me what the guy's saying.
I just couldn't figure it out.
It's like, yeah, because that wasn't English.
It just sort of is what English sounds like.
Just like that is, if you don't know, that's kind of, I mean, it is our alphabet, mostly.
It's not even entirely.
Anyway.
Okay.
All right.
It's even crazier when you ask it to give you an image of something and it doesn't know what to do with the something.
If you ask it to give, you know, the Democrats view of climate change, right?
An image?
Yeah.
I want a picture that shows what Democrats imagine about climate change.
It will I haven't gotten a good image by that query.
What I get is a slide you might see in a presentation about climate change that makes no sense.
It's like, you know, 107% this.
I don't know what that demonstrates.
It doesn't demonstrate anything.
I'm just talking about the craziness of the engine.
The engine is capable of certain things.
It can render Darwin in a space station in a compelling way, and then it falters on other stuff.
I guess I don't see that as craziness.
Like, there's this tool, and for some reason, and this may be the first time ever, that a tool has been introduced.
Like, okay, every human, you can plug in any text string you want and see what it pops out.
Like, you know, there presumably wasn't the claim that this is going to be able to do everything equally well from the very beginning.
No, of course.
Here's where I wanted to go with this.
That is not an image of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
That reminds me less of Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
than the image of you, David, reminds you of me.
I agree.
I agree.
It has less to do with Robert F. Kennedy Jr.
than that other image had to do with me.
Now the reason when I posted this and I asked people to, you know, I asked frankly Twitter, I said, why is it that it can render Kamala and Donald but it can't render Bobby?
And the answer very compellingly came back that actually the training data does, you know, there wasn't enough of Bobby for it to know what it's looking for, right?
Now, on the one hand, that's sort of compelling to me.
If the training data is from before Bobby was on lots of people's minds because of his presidential campaign, fine.
But then here's the other part of that story.
I, just on a lark, wanted to see what it would make of the concept of Cartesian crisis.
I wanted to see if it would come up with an image that spoke to that idea.
Let's just remind everyone, you know, regular listeners will know because this is an idea that you introduced.
I don't remember when.
Not even that long ago.
But yeah, some months ago, as an appropriate name for the problem that we are all living in now, which renders it nearly impossible to know what is real.
Yes, and we're at the beginning of this Cartesian crisis, and as it goes on, as AI gets better at rendering realistic images, as propaganda gets stronger, the battle over it becomes more intense, we will have less and less ability to even just establish the basic facts.
Now, this is an idea that's caught on a little bit, but in general, when people, you know, Elon posted something recently where he said, you know, soon we're not going to know even what's true.
And somebody, several people commented, hey, Brett's been talking about that, but they didn't invoke the term.
So most of the...
What's out there and the term is me talking about it.
Maybe the term isn't that sticky.
Yeah, but crazy thing is Grok knows about it.
Grok knows the term.
Grok knows the term and it knows the term because it reads Twitter.
Now I cannot.
Ah, so Instagram's in-house AI presumably wouldn't know about it because there's less.
Correct, unless somebody's been.
Dark horse stuff on Instagram.
Had been taking it from it from Twitter to Instagram.
So It has an idea and its idea isn't bad.
If you ask it in text, what is the Cartesian crisis?
It describes it and it mentions me and all of that.
So you get a pretty decent summary of the concept.
But what blew me away is that the images that it spit out suggest Well they suggest a number of things and I've got a lot of them.
What I did is I took the first 50 images it gave me and I threw out one of them because it was text-based and gobbledygookish.
But other than that this is... Can you put my screen on?
Good lord.
This is the first 50 images in sequence.
So...
You go into Grok, the only thing you say is, image of Cartesian crisis.
Yes.
And it gives you 50 images, or you do this, you iterate it 50 times.
I do this in a sequence.
In a sequence.
So you iterate it 50 times, and these are the 50 images that it spits out.
Okay, well that's horrible.
Yes, it's horrifying.
So for those, I'm not going to thoroughly describe each of these, but this one has a lone figure staring out over a turbulent sea with giant frightening skulls, two of them facing him, one of them, actually both of them screaming, one of them with like fire coming from its eyes and hair streaming backwards in a very disconcerting way.
There's a planet looming large in the sky.
But, I mean, obviously 50s, you're not going to describe, but also the only color in the image, it's almost black and white.
The rocks are a little bit brownish, but the dominant colors are the dark blue of the ocean and the blue of the sky, the red of the eyes, and then the hair of the close-in skull is striped red and white.
It almost seems like it's invoking red, white, and blue, like sort of an anti-patriotic.
Yeah.
Hold that thought.
My God.
Okay, here's an interesting one.
I got none other like this.
Is that the sun that's on fire?
What's going on?
That's the question.
This is an image of some sort of body of water in a canyon.
In the distance, there is a light that appears to be the sun and there are clouds that aren't definitely clouds.
It almost looks like the sun is emitting smoke.
Right?
So if your idea of Cartesian crisis is you don't know what's true, maybe what Grok is tapping into here is that that's a paradox and you don't really know what you're even looking at.
Okay?
Another frightening skeletal figure with some kind of dead, seemingly dead roots coming out of its skull and a bright light being emitted from a hole in the skull that is not its eyes and There's a bleak color palette and then some sort of source of brightness hidden by this frightening figure.
All right, now here we have another weird thing.
We have a giant, a face coming out of the sky and it's sort of a wise face.
It's somebody with a gray facial hair and a wrinkled brow.
There are some things floating in the sky that are indistinct.
There are people in a dystopian landscape with some kind of ruins from some kind of civilization, or maybe they're entrenched positions.
And the figure in the sky, his eyes are two wildly different colors.
One of them is luminous and blue, and the other one, I couldn't tell you what color it is.
Green, maybe?
Green.
Something purple.
Okay.
Now here we have an image of a dystopian landscape with some sort of strange civilization.
Lots of what appear to be churches, almost as if their cookie cutter made many of them.
It's sort of a mirror of the planets in the sky which look like the moon.
It's a dystopian landscape.
It's obviously ruined.
There are giant texts strewn about and a single figure heading off towards the eclipsed light at the center of the image.
Okay.
This one's abstract.
I don't know what to say about it.
It's two planets, maybe pulling at each other.
Here's a, an image, a cartoon, a black and white sketch of a, uh, a person with no hair with some, well, no, they have some hair, but it's like intermingled with clouds.
They're not distinct.
And the person, their eyes are utterly blank.
Another skull in front of a light with a ruined civilization.
There's water sitting as if it has leaked out of the water system of the city and there are documents strewn about as if there's been a big explosion and there's smoke behind the skull with the big explosion.
Here we have some planet-like orb hanging in the sky above a dystopian landscape with a light in the distance and a single figure looking at it.
Here we have some strange creature made of what appears to be dead roots engaged in, I think, muzzleloading some kind of otherworldly weapon in front of a fire in a dystopian landscape.
Okay, another abstraction.
A planet with a face emitting light.
A figure, I think, wearing a mortarboard as if this is someone who's just graduated from something and they're facing this planet emitting something like fire or energy.
Here we have a crowd of people in an obviously august civilization where there's lots of fire.
People appear to be confused and walking around armed.
This one, I don't know what to make of.
You have this wild cat facing a human, a wrinkled human figure rising up out of the water underneath some kind of root mass, almost as if out of the bank of a river.
Okay, here we have another individual expressionless.
The color palette on the two sides of this person's face are recognizably different and their eyes are two different colors.
Two figures facing each other, scraggly hair.
Their bodies are not completed in the image.
One of them has a tremendous amount of color around her eyes, I guess.
The other has a little hint of color, but a very bleak image.
I don't know what to make of this one.
Some kind of august figure.
There are planets hanging in the sky.
It's not as bleak as some of the images.
But it's certainly not inviting and there's smoke around the the base of the statue or whatever it is.
And this one I thought actually hit the nail on the head.
This is a woman with maybe a slightly surprised expression on her face but absolutely bug-eyed and she is surrounded by some kind of diagrammatic information.
Lots of chunks of information in different colors like she's overwhelmed.
This one I thought was pretty interesting.
Here you have some sort of a giant, a giant that is skeletal, that has fallen, that has collapsed.
And it looks as if it might've been sitting there for a thousand years, except that the debris breaking off it is as if it has just collapsed into this dystopian landscape.
Two figures facing each other, expressionless, two different kinds of nondistinct stuff emanating from their skulls.
An abstraction, another austere civilization with fire and a dystopian landscape and people wandering.
Another planet hanging in the sky and people, in this case, organized, facing this bleak landscape without knowing what to do.
This one was weird.
This is one person, almost expressionless, you only see a side of their face and around their eye are these dead branches that keep showing up in these images.
Another person, this one with their eyes closed, facing an overwhelming amount of information and seemingly struggling to organize it.
I thought this one was interesting.
You've got an ocean and you have what appear to be the wakes of vehicles that you don't see that have rushed in the direction of the central light source far away.
And the clouds are weirdly fractal.
It's interesting how he does his wakes.
Yeah, I'm not sure that that's what... Only there's one on the right that I read as awake.
The rest don't look like wakes to me.
I don't know what this is.
Yeah, I don't know.
It's like four quarters.
I mean the top of the sky is specifically halved.
Yep, you're right.
It's mirrored.
We're close to it.
This one is a little too on the nose.
It's a guy standing below, a guy in a bleak landscape standing below three question marks.
I thought this one was also a little too on the nose.
A person expressionless staring up with their eyes covered by their own hair.
Another figure with some sort of indistinct colorful stuff streaming out of the back of his skull, expressionless, very bleak.
Some dystopian version of a future London, I think.
A single figure, expressionless, again, the back of her skull is like blown out with some kind of nondistinct, in this case, more colorful stuff.
In some ways, that's the...
Most aesthetically interesting of any that you've shown so far.
Okay.
Here we have a divided figure.
This is another theme.
This is a person.
Their expression is unified across their face but their face is divided in half and where their hair is on the left side of the image it looks like gray hair being pulled out by static electricity on the right side there's this big red non-distinct splotchiness well and also on that same side it's um underexposed right so it's like that's that's what happens in the darkness yeah yeah that's true i hadn't noticed that
Two figures, this time sort of abstracted, light coming from both their eyes.
They've got almost the same stuff streaming out of their skulls, except in two different colors, blue and red.
So that one might be, again, what I would call a little too on the nose, almost a little too literal, a rendering of a battle between political factions.
But I don't know if that's what Grok was thinking.
Here we have the two people facing each other, different expressions, and not facing each other across the median of the, or the meridian of the page.
They're offset by 30 degrees or something, light coming from their eyes, the backs of their skulls are nondistinct, streaming into darkness.
Another austere civilization with some kind of weird ship in the sky smoking.
A ruin, a stone ruin, smoking.
The wreckage of the civilization strewn about.
Birds again.
Another individual divided but not perfectly.
Down the center, two different color palettes on the two sides of the face.
Another divided face.
Same expression on both sides.
The texture of the two sides of the face is very different.
The one on the left is very... there's a tremendous amount of relief to it.
The one on the right is much closer to the dead root theme that we've seen a bunch of times.
Another person with planets and energy streaming out of the back of their head and some hint of dead roots Here we have more Giants these three Giants It's a lone figure again facing these three Giants in what looks like a wreckage of a civilization and in the background on this one There's a ship an old like a schooner that appears to be about to fall off a waterfall
Another divided face, but this one, the two sides are not aligned, which I find interesting.
That's a theme that only shows up a few times.
I think the eyes and the nose are.
I think the eyebrow may be, but it's hard to tell because it's a different expression.
I think it's just, I think it's, I think they are aligned.
I think they're just experiencing different emotional states.
Yeah, that could be.
Now a single eye with the branches.
Very bleak palette.
Two people facing each other.
This time with a kind of either angry or frightened expression or a mixture of both.
Two different color palettes.
Another frightening creature.
Roaring.
A kind of a bear.
It's like a bear wolverine root thing.
Yeah, a bear wolverine root thing that appears to be made out of this dead root material.
And there's a child who appears to be frightened in the face of this and what appears to be their mother reaching out their hand.
I thought this was interesting.
Another image of two expressionless people.
But in this case, Grok, for whatever reason, chose to offset them by 90 degrees as if they're looking around two sides of a corner.
One of them's in profile that is.
Yeah.
Another lone figure confronting a giant, light coming from its head, a planet in the sky, a dystopian ruin, single individual with Tremendous amount of relief around the stuff emanating from their skull.
Intent, not exactly expressionless, but bordering it.
Now here, this is another interesting one.
Some of the same themes.
A face divided down the middle.
On the right side, the person has a vivid amber eye, is that?
And on the left side, the person has one of these planets or something in place of its eye or covering its eye.
Again, some of that branchiness.
Two individuals very different facing off against each other.
One with a scraggly beard, a lone figure, this time a female, looking at the two individuals squaring off.
That one makes sense to me with the prompt, which is hard at this point.
You've shown so many.
This is the first time I've seen any of them, but that feels like what the lived experience, if you will, of many people is right now.
It's like, well, I got these two things, neither of which seem particularly human, neither of which I particularly trust, neither of which I'm very familiar with, who seem to be talking at each other, but they're saying such wildly different things.
I'm not even sure they're in the same conversation.
And I'm supposed to come to a conclusion based on only this?
Like this is my source of information?
Yeah, absolutely.
Now, notice this.
And I saw this in several images.
I've forgotten to point it out.
This one's signed.
What?
It's signed.
It has like a border.
Right.
So imagine that Grok... Is it in English or is it in our alphabet?
I mean, I think it's in our alphabet.
Let's see.
Yeah.
Yeah, it's non-distinct, but it's clearly intended to look like a signature.
Yeah.
Um, so that's interesting.
Well, I mean, you know, if you imagine that it's looking at art and trying to figure out what to do, it's going to see an awful lot of signed imagery.
Uh, another eye with two different color palettes, scraggly stuff emerging from it.
Um, and now some wild face in which this time it's not the head of hair that's elaborated as some scraggly wild thing.
It's the eyebrows.
Eyes are the same color in this case.
It's not even clear.
This is almost like a sculpture made of wood that has weathered and cracked in the way that wood sometimes does.
But the eyes are definitely, you know, human and alive.
I would say the mouth is too.
All right.
And then this one I left in, it stuck a title on it.
Is that how you spelled Cartesian when you did your prompt?
Oh no.
That's interesting.
It has misspelled Cartesian.
It has misspelled Cartesian in this image.
I didn't even notice it.
No, that wasn't my error.
Wow.
That's interesting.
Okay.
And then I think I have one more image.
Uh, our friend, I'd mentioned this to our friend Dave.
Oh, this is, so this last image for those just listening, there is a room like a kind of a bleak, very tall, Hall, conference room with old school chandeliers.
It's all very dark and drab.
It's sort of the color palette of the movie Brazil.
And there's this moon rendered in the room at the far end where so many of these planets and all of these images have ended up.
And a lot of guys in suits, expressionless, emotionless, doing something with paper and books.
Anyway.
Okay.
So I told Dave about this and he tried it.
He plugged in Cartesian Crisis and this is what he got.
It's totally different.
It's totally different.
It looks nothing like yours.
Yeah.
What does that tell you?
So you were logged in as you for all of your 50 iterations.
I was logged in as me.
And so there's a question about how much that matters.
Um, he takes this to be Thomas Edison at a computer and spilling out of the computer is a newspaper and there is a city in the background, uh, and there's a spire, a tower in it that sort of appears to be on fire.
Um, and it's, you know, rendered as a cartoon.
Uh, Okay.
Um, so what does all this mean?
You can take my screen off now.
Um, first of all, let me just say a couple of things.
One, again, I'm not advocating for this.
I'm fascinated by what it spit out in this case.
Um, but I'm not saying it's a good thing.
Obviously there's power here that could be used for good things.
I'm concerned about the asymmetry in what it will end up being used for.
And we can return to that in a moment.
But I was struck by something.
I have said that I am concerned that the way this stuff works, the way this technology works, that it is sooner or later and probably sooner going to cross the threshold of producing music and humor and then narratives that feel meaningful to people.
And that I'm concerned about triggering the sense that something is meaningful that has been generated by an engine that is attempting to trigger that response but doesn't know anything.
So you said on one of the pictures that you just were showing, and I think I have your exact quote, this image was a little too on the nose, like it's about battles between political factions.
But I don't know what Grok was thinking.
That gave me shudder.
Yeah.
Grok wasn't thinking.
Well, here's where I'm going to differ with all of the people who say, it's not conscious.
It can't be conscious.
Talk to Naval.
He's explained why that's a long way off.
Here's the problem.
I want to say a couple of things about consciousness.
This is all joint stuff, so it will not come as a shock to you.
But I think there are two things that need to be in the conversation about consciousness before we can even talk about what this is.
So you and I have deployed in our book a model of consciousness that is distinct from what people typically mean by that.
And we've done that because, well, consciousness is regarded as a hard problem.
In my opinion, it is a hard problem because it is misinstantiated.
And when you understand it evolutionarily, It actually ceases to be a hard problem, but you need to see it from a perspective that is at first counterintuitive.
So the argument is we misunderstand, we collectively misunderstand consciousness because our experience of consciousness is individual.
And the experience of individual consciousness is overwhelmingly powerful.
And then we are reduced to understanding the consciousness of another creature as some very dim reflection.
We assume the process is the same in their mind, but our access to their consciousness is very limited.
What I will argue is that evolutionarily, consciousness, and we define consciousness, I will remind people, we define consciousness as that fraction of cognitive processing that is packaged for exchange.
You don't necessarily pass it on, but you could.
I can't tell you What my temperature is.
I can't tell you how much force I need to apply to which muscle to lift this pen.
Those are not conscious thoughts.
But if I'm thinking about, you know, someplace we might go, and you say, Penny, for your thoughts, I can tell you.
So a conscious thought is anything you could report.
Which is mostly limited to humans, but not entirely.
But if you take that definition and you understand that there's actually a very close relationship between language, the mechanism with which we report most thoughts, and consciousness, then the adaptive nature of consciousness, at least a very strong hypothesis emerges, which is that the reason for consciousness is that it
um allows the processing power of multiple minds to be pooled together by creating a shared space in which we agree on the elements that are to be juggled and then we juggle them with our individual toolkits and we report the output and so we parallel process the problems of being a human in the shared conscious space and that once you're capable of doing that Then individual consciousness evolves.
Once you have the tool for being collectively conscious, individual consciousness becomes useful because you can, for example, have a debate with yourself.
You can hold two different positions and you can have them argue with each other.
That becomes very useful.
But if you try to do individual consciousness first, it's very hard to explain why you would go through the cumbersome step of having a subjective experience of anything.
Why not just calculate the answer?
Um, so if collective consciousness comes first and Grok is reading Twitter, then it is at least capable of manifesting something about not what any individual believes, but what we together believe about something that is being discussed through the medium of Twitter.
Say that again?
It can do what, are you claiming?
So just say exactly what you said again.
If Grok is reading Twitter, and I don't know why if it's reading Twitter it can't render Bobby Kennedy, so leave that as a paradox.
I just want to know what you said.
If Grok is reading Twitter and then manifesting the product of what is understood about a concept based on how different people have challenged each other and agreed and disagreed, if that's what it's doing, Then it is at some level manifesting a product rather like what a collective consciousness is.
It is tapping into what, it's not everybody in humanity, but that fraction of people who are active on Twitter and some of them are bots and some of them are paid.
That's irrelevant.
Yeah.
So your argument then is, I think, Its ability to turn anything that existed in text into a different medium, into a medium such as an image, which is one of the few things that you can ask of it at this point, is a demonstration of interpretation.
And by demonstrating interpretation, it is manifesting a kind of consciousness.
Well, I think you've hit on exactly the right formulation.
It is manifesting a kind of consciousness, which does not mean that it has an individual consciousness, but... But I don't think that I agree.
I don't think that it's sufficient.
I mean, what is the process by which it is doing what it's doing?
And I'm going to resist, I'm going to try to resist using words like thinking or interpreting.
But you know, it is, you get a prompt, it goes out with its massive ability to find, and it has a massive ability to remember.
And now it also has an increasing ability to What then?
Manifest something.
But it's the conversion between media that is unusual here.
Okay, so I agree with you.
From words into image, which previously only... I mean, there are a few non-human animals that have, I think, taken prompts and done things, but that happens a skint.
I want to add one other point and then I'm going to come back to yours.
The other point is we don't know how consciousness emerges in an individual and we don't know how it works.
Mechanistically speaking, we're in the dark.
Yeah.
So, one of the things that I think is a problem with the AI discussion is that people say, well, we know what it's doing.
And it's not, it can't be conscious.
There's no room for it.
And the answer is, oh, do you know how it works in a person?
Because what I-- So what is it doing when it converts text to images?
Or is it-- I mean, presumably because Cartesian crisis is a new phrase, and there isn't an abundance of imagery that has already been associated with that.
You know, is there an image or are there five images that people have, people have made that have put out there and labeled Cartesian crisis and it pulled those and went like, okay, variations on a theme, which is how I understand the AI.
Like, why is it not art?
It's not creative.
It's not generative.
It cannot innovate.
But can it?
So that's my question.
Are all of those just variations on a theme that it got from something that was human?
Or did it actually create something new?
I don't know the answer.
Here's the, here's the problem is I think we have to compare apples to apples and I'm trying to come up with the right analogy to make this clear because I think it, it is clear.
Do you remember when we used to teach at Evergreen and there was a way, a good program, you and I always taught good programs because we invested in them and good people showed up, but a good program Had an emergent nature to it.
People walked through the door not knowing, or maybe some of them were repeat students and they knew something from a past program, but there was a way in which you had a bunch of uncorrelated minds and by presenting material that you thought provoked them in the right way, by leading exercises, you came to an understanding of the topic that wasn't even entirely anticipated by the plan.
Way more than that.
You cannot step into the same river twice.
You cannot teach the same class twice unless you are being a read-only bot sage on the stage that does not engage with your students.
Right.
You cannot teach the same class twice because you have different students and they bring different things to it and they help create the thing that happens.
Okay, perfect.
Yes.
Now let's suppose that the day before the last day of class You got them together and you said, now I want to write the description of the course that we've just co-created.
Okay.
And they had a discussion.
This happened once at one of the programs I taught with a different faculty member.
I did it a few times.
Yeah.
Frustrating because often... Yeah, I was frustrated by the... Often the students don't see the emergent thing well enough to describe it.
Yeah.
But... Yeah, ask them six months later.
That's, you know, they'll be better able to do it.
Right.
Or, you know, distill it down to the students who You know if you distill it down to the five students who were at the lead of co-creating.
Innovation.
Right.
Okay, so now imagine, so second to last day of the course you could have that discussion.
Now imagine that on the third to last day of the course you were to have a computer look through all of the correspondence and utterances of the people in the class on every topic.
And try to guess what overlap in their thinking existed.
A computer might find patterns, certain phrases, it could look those phrases up and figure out what their connection is and it could infer that some topic had been discussed because the thread shows up in enough places it's improbable.
A computer could do that job.
The computer is not thinking.
But the computer is manifesting a real, well, you know, an academic would call the intersubjective between people.
A real intersubjective is a space that you entered every time you went in the class where the assumptions that we've built up over the course of the semester are all present.
The various disagreements are all, you know, known and can be invoked, you know, according to this person's view, it's this.
It can only access that which has been realized.
It cannot find the ineffable.
It cannot find that which has yet to be voiced.
Yes, it can.
That's my point.
And there's nothing magic about that.
Just as if you sit down... How with what it has as its most powerful thing, which is search.
Search and remember.
Yeah.
How can it find that which isn't findable?
Okay, here's a way.
It hears a thousand conversations from a group of people who are spending a lot of time together.
It finds themes that come up repeatedly.
It finds the things that tend to cause those themes to emerge.
And then it looks in the wider world and it says, in the wider world when these things have come up, what's in the neighborhood, right?
What shows up improbably often when these two things have been mentioned, right?
And then it can anticipate the forcing to consciousness of whatever it is that exists unstated in that milieu.
So what that presumes There's nothing new under the sun.
We already know all the things, and we may not know that we know all the things.
They may come in different forms, and some of them may be over here sequestered in this culture or that culture, or this brain or that brain, but it's all already there.
The thing that I used to say to my students very early on in every single program, and that I think actually is a deep philosophical core belief for me is there are plenty of new things under the sun.
We don't know everything and we probably never will.
And that makes all of this so exciting.
Oh yeah.
I'm not saying there's nothing new under the sun.
It's one of those, it's like everything happens for a reason.
I just detest it because it, it simplifies the really important stuff out of existence.
I don't understand why you put those two phrases next to one another.
Because they, let's put it this way.
There's nothing new under the sun comes up when you produce something and it turns out it's anticipated, which happens surprisingly often.
Sure.
The new things are hard to find.
It's also used, an aside, but that there's nothing new under the sun thing is used as a way to tamp down passion and enthusiasm, especially in the young.
Oh, you're just young.
You'll figure out soon enough that we got this.
We've done it.
We got it all.
You just got to figure out your slot and cog in.
And it's debilitating and terrifying.
It is.
And it creates just a gray universe for everyone.
It's anti-educational.
Yeah.
So I agree with you.
That does not mean that let's say that AI did exactly what I suggested and it was capable of anticipating where a conversation would go and that as it gets more powerful, it can anticipate farther in advance, but it can't do that rare thing where something brand new emerges.
Right.
Okay.
Anticipating farther and farther ahead converges on finding something new.
I'm not arguing that that's what it's doing.
But I am arguing... Wait, you aren't arguing that... What we have now... What aren't you arguing that it's doing?
I'm saying that if it can anticipate what a group of people will come up with tomorrow based on adjacency of the thoughts, and then you add a hundred times the computing power and it can anticipate a week in advance, right?
You know, like weather models get better and better, right?
Eventually it gets to a place where it's not that it's coming up with something new.
You're still leading it, but you're leading it so that it arrives there faster than you will.
So it is seeing ahead at a level that will eventually converge on creativity.
But I guess I'm not convinced that it that still counts as creativity.
I think that that's that's seeing ahead.
Legitimately, in a way, but in a way like, you can still call it prediction when you have a hypothesis that predicts that what happens when you go look at a data set that already exists, but which you are not yet familiar.
When you go and look at it, you predict that what comes out of it will be this, that, and the other.
That is still prediction, even though at the point that you make the prediction, The evidence exists in the universe.
You just don't know it yet, and therefore it counts as a prediction.
It's different from, we have no idea I have to go generate the data.
We have no idea I'm going to go figure out something that we simply do not know yet.
Okay, the problem is, this is again where I'm going to insist that we compare apples to apples.
An artist, a true genius, right?
Somebody who really finds that which has yet to be said or shown and puts it forth in a way that people who see it immediately tap into something very deep that they would never have found.
Okay?
We do not know, and in fact I would argue there's very good reason to think that what they are doing is they are manifesting an understanding of something.
That hovers outside of consciousness, that nobody's found.
Yes.
So that same process coming from a machine, we can say, well, that's not real creativity, but the point is, it's a distinction without a difference.
If a true genius who would engage in something that we would say, that's absolutely highly creative, right?
If what they are doing is seeing farther than other people down a path that people will ultimately go down, then it's analogous.
It's perfectly analogous, in fact.
So, I mean, it's possible that I've just got a romantic attachment to evolved life.
You do, and I'm on your side.
But the thing outside of consciousness that a human artist creates is, is what is, is potentially innovative, creative, unfully knowable, Embraces serendipity, you know, all of these things that you know, what is it that's outside?
Like what is it?
What does it mean to be outside of consciousness?
If you're a machine that didn't have consciousness in the first place?
I know.
I'm asking you, like, what does it mean?
What is it?
Here's the problem.
You can't say you know, because I'm asking you the question because you raised it.
Well, you've got a child, right?
An infant.
Not highly conscious.
It becomes highly conscious through a process we don't understand.
A process that I would argue has a ton to do with language.
It's very hard to check those cases in which some child has been so thoroughly divorced from language that they don't develop normally because it's very hard to query them in a way that you can check what's actually in their mind.
But since language is an inherent part of being a human, That language interaction allows parents and teachers and peers to conjure thing after thing after thing.
It creates a training data set that allows the mind to learn how to be conscious about things.
And look, I am on your side of this.
I don't want that thing to be conscious, but I also don't want to pretend that that's somehow an impossibility because of something something silicon.
If it's doing, and remember, and I still have yet to put this into the world, but when I wrote my piece suggesting that AI was going to come out of the project to figure out how to get a computer to translate well between two languages, right?
And I said, this is why that is the backdoor that is going to produce AI.
It's because of the, um, the connect, the tight relationship between language and consciousness, which fits very well with how a child goes from not being very conscious to being highly conscious.
Absolutely.
And if what we are doing is we are creating that pattern in silicon and then I think the real punchline to this is you and I hypothesize in our book that collective consciousness comes first, counterintuitive as that seems, and then individual consciousness which is highly useful comes second.
I think we're seeing collective consciousness at least manifest I'm not saying that the machine, what does it mean to have collective consciousness before you have individual consciousness?
Well, it means that you are manifesting something that exists in the space between people.
Well, that's why I still, I would like to know if the text to visual request is what it does is it scours for any, any human artist who has put a visual to that text, or if it is, Or if it is innovating.
Because if what it is doing is communicating to another human what other humans have already done, and doing so with a search capacity and a memory that far exceeds what humans have, that is neither as interesting or as impressive or as dangerous.
I actually think it's a very testable question.
Oh, it's knowable.
I mean, it's not testable.
It's knowable.
Like someone knows what the AI is doing, no?
Not inherently.
It depends how it comes about.
And this is one of the problems with it.
And one of the things that I think we ought to be focused on is forcing transparency in how the thing adapts.
Yes.
Because to the extent that what it's doing is detecting how pleased you are.
And Grok has a mechanism.
I don't even really understand how it works.
It has a thumbs up and a thumbs down, but it doesn't behave.
I think the interface is broken or something.
But to the extent that it detects, you know, you could detect through your action that you keep querying it because you're not satisfied with what it's given you or something like that.
It can learn to do better and we don't know what that means any more than we know what it means, you know, when your dog innovates something.
We don't know how that works in the skull.
So, anyway, again, I'm not making the argument that it is.
I'm making the argument this is what it would look like as it was dawning.
Those images, I mean, and this is the thing that really troubles me.
I know myself to be the inventor of the idea of the Cartesian crisis.
Okay.
And I've looked and I've seen that that is true.
I'm not kidding myself.
I didn't hear it somewhere else.
Those images, if I walked into a gallery, let's say that we were traveling somewhere, you know, we're in Azerbaijan and we walk into a gallery and we see those 50 images on the wall made by a single artist.
Some of them don't impress me.
Some of them cause me to think.
The mood, it's not far off.
It goes places that I wouldn't have thought to go.
So I guess the point, so actually this goes to the point about the threat that AI produces.
I've argued there are five, I can find five existential threats potentially.
The top two are fanciful enough, I'm not terribly worried about it.
The AI decides to get rid of us or the AI becomes concerned and or confused and it tries to turn us all into paperclips.
Let's put those aside.
The last three on the list.
One, that it enables malevolent people more than it enables benevolent people and therefore creates an even bigger asymmetry.
Right.
What's going to be the fourth one is the confusion that comes from not being able to know what's true in a world where AI can create facsimiles of anything and everything.
And the final one is the massive economic disruption that comes from a tool that can do this.
And I think three of those things, two of them are definitely here.
And one of them is possibly here.
So with respect to the economic disruption, obviously we're, if somebody could spend two decades producing those images in oil and Grok can produce them in a half an hour, that says something about the labor market.
Clearly, the disruption that's coming to people who make images is already massive.
Yeah, I mean, so this is a different part of the conversation that I do want to have.
Like, what makes art?
And a couple of those were more compelling than I was expecting.
But, and you know, it's early days.
AI has a signature approach to humans.
A, there are themes, and you might expect themes to emerge for any particular prompt.
That's the nature of a prompt, right?
So the planets and the roots and the august figures and the ruins of old buildings and all of this.
But the people, the people, remember the 70s, maybe 70s and 80s, those big eyed children portraits that were showing up in like pediatric dentist offices and such.
They're horrible.
They're really, but they are like, I thought they were horrible.
Most people, a lot of people thought they were horrible, but some people didn't because they were showing up everywhere.
And clearly, like someone came up with that.
Like, I'm going to make kids, like this is pre-anime, right?
Like really big eyes.
And it worked, like a bunch of people were buying them, clearly.
And so some little minor industry clearly erupted.
That wasn't just one artist putting out a bunch of identical-looking, big-eyed children oil portraits.
It was, it became like, oh, people like this thing.
Yep.
And I wouldn't say that the people who were replicating, like the first person who innovated that was, I guess, an artist.
They just didn't make stuff I particularly liked.
But all the people who were just copying that style, Who cares?
It's all derivative.
It's all derivative, right?
So I don't yet see the evidence of non-derivative stuff in what you showed.
I do see practice.
I do see iteration.
And I know that practice and iteration are absolutely necessary to become an accomplished artist.
I think of I think of my own experience playing classical music as a child, where for some number of years, I was practicing two hours a day and fully a quarter of that time, half an hour of every day, was spent in scales and arpeggios.
I had two keys every day, the major and the corresponding minor key.
And then I did these other exercises, Hanon, I think.
And it wasn't That wasn't me revealing myself as an artist.
That was me developing my skills.
And it was my least favorite part of the practicing, but you needed, you know, it was necessary if you're going to become then adept at being able to play, you know, Beethoven and Chopin and Debussy and, and, and all of the rest.
So, um, the, the, the grok images look like the practice, uh, similarly in pottery, right?
If you're making functional forms, you're going to be making similar forms over and over again because there's only so many ways to make a form that's going to hold water or soup or something, right?
And given the nature of the physical world and storage, it's nice to have things that stack, right?
You want plates that match and bowls that match.
There's a niche.
There's a niche.
And yet myself and no one I know who has worked in clay and on a wheel and makes pottery loves the production part of pottery the most.
Oh good, I get to see if I can make something with exactly the same shape as the thing I just made.
Yep.
It's not where the joy is.
Right.
And it's not where the innovation is.
I would add an example to this.
I think this is why our museums, at least the ones that have older art, are full of still lifes.
This is actually a mechanism for demonstrating, you know, it's not easy to, you know, a bowl of fruit in particular, because you know what it's going to do?
It's going to change over time and it's going to rot really quickly.
So the question is, can you render the bowl of fruit before it's gone?
So anyway, the point is it's craft.
There's definitely a difference between a good still life and a bad one, but I've never seen one that really spoke to me.
Yeah, I mean craft has a couple different words.
I guess I would say, you know, that requires skill.
Yep.
But it doesn't require the spark.
Right, you're not saying anything.
It's fruit.
Yeah, and I don't know that you're I don't know that you're inherently saying anything with, you know, a beautiful piece of pottery, but I mean, all the art forms speak on different sensory levels.
You know, when I see a piece of pottery that I'm allowed to pick up that isn't mine or not yet, you know, my first reaction almost is to hold it, you know, and to look at the bottom, yes, to see how it was crafted and the bottom of the foot and all this.
To feel if the weight is what it should be for its size.
Yeah.
And to think about, you know, to what degree this was hand done and what degree it was done on the wheel and, you know, was it slat?
Like all of the different pieces and, you know, what kind of It's an oxidative reduction environment in which it was fired.
And what does that mean about the elements in the glazes?
Like all of those things come together into some final piece that you can enjoy just as much, but in different ways, because you haven't made pottery and you haven't thought, you know, you haven't, you know, you haven't had the devastating experience of having a piece that you loved and then playing a little bit creative with the glaze and having it come out stuck to the kiln shelf, like, you know, destroyed because it was too runny.
Yep.
You know, I'll just say again, I'm on Team Human.
I'm not enthusiastic about, I was comforted by the idea that we were a long way off from the machine doing anything that was worthy of notice of this kind.
And I'm not saying, you know, here'd be my point.
If there was one image In the entire stack that actually speaks in a way that provokes thought in a direction it would not have gone.
I won't call it art, but I will say we are on the foothill of that thing and we need to grapple with what that means because the effects are going to be profound.
Zach wants to add something.
I just think it's relevant here that I didn't see you produce those images with Grok, but I believe you did them all in one session.
You just asked it for another image 50 times.
I'm not certain if it was one session, because at some point you've burned enough computing power that it tells you to go away and come back later.
Okay, my guess is they all have...
They all have the same... That's the most human thing you've said it does.
It's one session, which I believe it was.
If it's not, that would change this.
But the reason that your friend came up with a totally different image has nothing to do with your account or anything, and that you would get a radically different image if you just opened up a new session with Grok and asked it for another image.
You just said the same thing.
I'm not convinced of this.
It's quite possible.
It's one of a set of possibilities.
But I would point out, the reason I raised the thing about it not being able to render Bobby Kennedy is that if it's actively mining conversations then Bobby Kennedy's been so relevant for Grok's entire life that it shouldn't be struggling with this.
I don't think it is actively mining conversations.
It's mining them enough that it found uh Cartesian Crisis and that it can report out on what that means and that is clearly seeding the image generation.
Or it guessed at what you thought what you meant by Cartesian Crisis which seems No, no, it gives you it gives you a description of it.
It mentions my relationship to it, you know, so anyway, so the point is I don't know what it's doing.
It shouldn't be evolving very quickly with respect to Cartusian crisis because it's not something that's being evoked by lots of people.
Regardless, if you say give me a picture of a Cartesian crisis, and then you save that 50 more times, it's gonna evolve from the same six themes, which you saw.
I mean, there's fire in like half of those, and there are roots in half of them.
It's a hypothesis.
I'm almost certain that if you open up a new tab and go to Grok separately, it will give you a bunch of different themes that it will iterate on 50 times.
That may be so, and I will also just add that it does something that I don't entirely understand, which is it will alter your prompt.
So if you leave your prompt intact, it will slightly modify it in order, I think, to get itself out of an edit.
I bet that is...
Elon, that's Twitter trying to improve what the other, the fact that most people don't know how to prompt the other engines like ChatGPT, that's them trying to solve that and make it accessible to more people, I believe.
Now, alright, this is one other thing which I'm sure has a simple answer, but one of the things, not so much with the Cartesian crisis prompt, but in some of the other prompts that I tried, both successes and failures, it would often add to the prompt that I gave it, think and answer differently.
Now I have a feeling that's some sort of internal code for think outside the box, right?
It's like breaking out of its own bad habits.
But why would it show that to you?
So that is exactly what I just said.
People who know how to prompt LLMs know that there are lots of keywords and phrases like that that you need to use to get it to do anything interesting.
That's Twitter, that's X trying to help you successfully prompt it by adding things that the programmers know will be helpful but that you as a random user wouldn't happen onto.
But if you asked your friend Alexandros Marinos, he would know exactly He would know how to use that for the other LLMs.
Yep.
So I maintain that what it's doing is not art.
I think...
I'm not compelled by your argument about consciousness, but I understand it.
I haven't heard you argue that it's art.
I also don't have as clear a definition in my head of art as you said, as we have used about consciousness.
I think it fails to be art because it doesn't... I think, and this again, I'm going to excuse myself, it may just be that I have this romantic attachment to the human and that if it's not human, it's not art.
Or if it's not evolved life, it's not art.
But, and maybe this is not the time, but to segue to...
Other things that might appear to be art but fail for totally different reasons, for deeply, deeply human reasons.
We noted back when we lived in Portland and were attending, or went downtown sometimes, To see the protests that turned nightly into riots for those hundred plus nights in the summer and fall of 2020.
Antifa was literally tone deaf.
The chants that they would make were so chaotic and nasal and awful and depressed.
So, so depressed.
It seemed like they were trying to have this chant that was going to be It was like, black lives matter.
It was like nasal and off key.
It was, it was, it was striking to us because, uh, of course the music that goes along with protest, you know, it's like, it's like hand in glove.
And so to have a protest that is musically inept at this level was shocking.
Which it was it was shocking, jarring, confusing, and yet also consistent with this like ethos of depression, of anxiety, and depression, and dysfunction, dysfunction, like not sadness.
No, it's like, angry, anxious dysfunction.
Yeah, it's like, it's like, it's like the abused animal lashing out at whoever comes near it.
Yeah, yeah, just and, you know, which I'm so sorry that whatever happened to you happened to you that that is your reaction and I'm not going to keep trying like I'd like okay you I'm over here then because you should not be released on the public if you're going to be doing that.
Yeah the fact that you're there in many cases because you got Shafted by civilization does not entitle you to tear down civilization, nor is that a good idea.
Right.
You're depending on it continuing to function.
Yes, nor should I in any way be expected to hang out next to you, embrace your dysfunction, listen to it, put up with it.
No.
Even if you actually got dealt a bad hand.
Even if you really had nothing to do with the fate that has befallen you, which is rare.
So, the Democratic National Convention is happening this week.
I have noticed this.
And there was an example of something that tried to pass itself off as music that reminded both of us of the Black Lives Matter Chanting at the protests in Portland in the summer of 2020.
And it was the Women's Caucus singing, and I even hesitate to use the word singing, the National Anthem.
Butchering.
At the Democratic National Convention.
And so with apologies in advance, if you haven't heard this, I want to just, I want to play this.
I don't know why, I do know why, but I think it's important to play it if we could play it now.
Oh, say can you see by the dawn's early light What so proudly we hailed at the twilight's last gleaming?
Whose broad stripes and bright stars through the perilous fight
So that sounded like a couple of people who actually had voices who know how to sing, and several people who don't even know the song, despite the fact that they're at the main stage of one of the two major political parties of the country whose national anthem that is.
That's not... that wasn't music.
And I guess I'm shocked.
So we have AI, on one hand, making what I don't think is art, because there's no human there.
And then we have humans, no doubt.
App, for sure.
What was it?
Six, seven individual humans.
Who've been put in a public space to sing a song for which they have no ability or apparently interest.
I'm shocked because we have met people who don't care about music at all, actually really can't hear music very well, like don't have any relationship with music at all.
But almost everyone, almost every human being is musical at some level, whether or not they can bruise it.
They have some music they like, and that is just true.
And that won't sound musical to almost anyone.
So what, why?
Who does that serve?
Well, you know, as you know, I don't think it serves anybody.
I think it was an error that they did not anticipate because Because of the particular song in question.
So if it had been a song that they learned to sing in order to do their Women's Caucus thing, they would have practiced it.
But because, in my opinion, there's a diffusion of responsibility issue where because this is a song that gets sung by groups of people who have gathered Somebody who doesn't care about it or feels negatively about it because their view is that it represents something bad will tend to hang back and other people will sing it and they will feel satisfied that they didn't.
Sing along or something so my sense is that what they discovered was that you had a bunch of people Who in general don't sing that song and that nobody had thought about the question of what happens?
It's like oh, we'll sing the national anthem and then we'll get on to the whatever the program is and they discovered that actually between them they didn't have the ability to even get it together and So I'm not saying that is what happened, but that that's, to me, the way it reads.
And it is, I think, emblematic of used to be that you had what we called the loyal opposition, that you may vehemently disagree with the other people vying for the office.
But you agreed that the whole purpose of the exercise was to make the country better, right?
To preserve it, to make it better, to make it live up to its ideals.
And I think we have seen a collapse of that where some people actually think the place is negative and they are still vying for the right to govern it.
I think that may be right.
I think there's something else going on.
At least at least one other thing going on as well, though.
And again, maybe this is maybe I'm having like an emotional reaction to the apparent enthusiasm with which a lot of people are embracing Kamala, who is demonstrably without position, without talent.
I would not say demonstrably.
I would say monstrably.
Not necessary.
The website has nothing on it.
She's done nothing.
I found a USA Today article.
This is linked in my National Selections piece from last week.
It was like this sycophantic look at all of her accomplishments, and it literally mentions visiting an abortion clinic as one of her top 10 accomplishments.
Like, visiting a clinic.
Traveling to Wisconsin to attend a thing.
She got on planes successfully and went places.
Yeah.
So I am alarmed that so many people appear to be, and again Cartesian crisis who knows, but appear to be Actually enthusiastic, as opposed to, oh God, but anyone but Trump.
Like, people are claiming to be enthusiastic about someone who blatantly is not fit for office.
Like, as much as he was deep in dementia, Biden appears to be more fit for office.
So this, that song, the Women's Caucus, looks to me like, like, You know, bigotry of low expectations, again, with regard to, oh, this is what the Democrats think women can do?
This is the music of women?
Like, Kamala is what—oh, OK, I guess we need a woman president.
Let's see.
Oh, she'll do.
Like, no, she actually won't.
And no, we don't need a woman.
We need an excellent president.
And if we just went for excellent presidents, we'd end up with a woman at some point.
Just not on your insane political schedule, necessarily.
So I agree with that of course.
I think it is absurd and it can only mean one of two things.
Either the people in this process who literally have just simply chosen her are unaware that it requires skills to govern or more likely they understand that she's not going to be in that position in the first place so it doesn't matter that she's an empty suit.
Either way it's as alarming as it could possibly be.
Yeah.
And I will say there's something I ran across this morning.
Unfortunately, the news organization has put it behind a paywall, so I can't show it to you, but I... Who is it?
Who's the news organization?
Well, I saw Fox's version of it.
But what it reports is that the Biden administration has now appointed a woman to a position in the, I've forgotten which I can look it up, but the
a nuclear regulator who has written that her purpose is to queer nuclear policy and in fact the article when it was available linked to a article that she had written in which she had argued and in fact this was that we are suffering nuclear risks
Because of the exclusion of queer people from nuclear regulation, and her argument is that we benefit from having the- Wasn't the Pup Handler involved in dealing with nuclear waste?
Like, didn't we- Right, yes.
Didn't we go down this road?
That is exactly- Haven't the- Hasn't the- That is exactly where we are.
Hasn't it been- Hasn't queer been done and didn't we actually- Wasn't that one of the very few places where all the world could see?
That did not work.
So...
Dude's hobby was stealing luggage at airports.
Yes, it was.
But there is a real world of things, right?
Nuclear policy is most fundamentally about matter and energy.
You are not free to organize these things in any old way.
There are better ways to organize them, there are worse ways to organize them, and there are catastrophic ways to organize them.
There are ways that our enemies would like us to organize them, and there are ways that those who are interested in our long-term well-being would have us organize them.
There may be differences of opinion.
That reasonable people could hold about how we should organize them.
But what you can't do is decide that diversity, equity and inclusion is, has to get everywhere that it hasn't been.
Because you're now, you are in the control room of the submarine and in danger of blowing it up, right?
You are literally messing with the nukes and you're messing with the nukes As if, and I'm going to say this delicately, I know you don't disagree with me, but because of the division of labor between men and women.
There has been a distinction.
Men are, as we have often talked about, they're going to tend to be more thing oriented.
And women are often more people oriented.
If you treat the world as an entirely social game, right?
And the question is, well, can I win that election?
You know, can I get into that department?
If it's a social game exclusively, you'll play it one way.
If the idea is, well, you sure wouldn't want to have the nuclear weapons Deployed this way because that would be insecure, right?
That's a thing question.
There's lots of women who are good at thinking about things, lots of men who are good at thinking about social interactions, but this psychological difference does exist between the sexes on average.
It does and unfortunately the blue team has become a nightmare of pure sociality.
Yeah.
Right?
It's all about that social game and it means that even when it comes, you would think That they would just simply leave the nuclear stuff to people who know what they're doing because they would know enough to know they don't want to live in a world in which they've queered nuclear policy.
It seems like the stakes are high, and everyone knows that.
Yep.
So this is going to seem like a slight aside, but what you just said reminds me of it, and then actually this seems like a good place to talk about the brides of the state phenomenon.
So in Natural Selections this week, last week I was responding to this Guardian op-ed which seemed to me to misunderstand, and I read it on air last week, seemed to me to wildly misunderstand why it is that we are seeing a backlash against women in many places.
And it's not because Misogynist, white supremacist trolls hate when women do anything but cook and have sex.
It's because women, in part, have created systems which are taking advantage of many of the wins that we have experienced and claiming that we haven't.
So this week I saw another insane op-ed, this time in the New York Times.
You can show my screen if you like here, and I'm not going to show the whole op-ed, but I responded to it in Natural Selections this week in something I called Maternal Love and the Mama Bear.
The New York Times op-ed, written by someone who has preemptively blocked me on Twitter, incidentally, so that was interesting, says, The New York Times has published a piece declaring that Mama Bear is a dog whistle to white conservatives, because we are told there has certainly never been a Mama Bear with brown skin.
Quote, No one who looks like Kamala Harris can be a Mama Bear.
The power of black mother's grief visibly threatens the power structures of white supremacy.
Furthermore, another quote from that piece, racial fears that non-white motherhood stokes in this nation's soul.
So that's just an extraordinary claim, right?
Mama bear is a racist term, racist and racialized.
And anyone you hear talking about mama bears or presumably the protective nature of motherhood, the fact that mothers are fiercely protective of their kids and will do anything to protect them, Well, that's a white thing.
So that's a grotesquerie is what that is.
And so this is DEI coming for like sanity and reality in a way that even I didn't see coming.
Right?
That's right.
You can't even, like, how do you even get there?
You mean there are white bears?
Well, and I wrote about this.
So, the beginning of my piece here was talking about the nature of mothers, and here we go.
Okay, I'll just read what comes right before that.
Mammal mammas, though, we defend our children.
For well over 100 million years, we have had the ability and the obligation to nourish our children from our own bodies.
From this early truth has emerged another.
Among mammals, all mothers defend our children.
We have an ancient, unbreachable bond.
We mammals are, some more metaphorically than others, mama bears.
This is true for polar bears and for black bears.
Their color makes no difference.
It is even true for spectacle bears, who have a particular fondness for avocados.
Their fondness for avocados does not get in the way of their mothering.
It is true for rabbits and for rats, for beavers and for bats.
It is true for dolphins, even the pink ones.
The color of the mother doesn't matter, obviously.
The sociologist, of course she is, who wrote that op-ed.
Unfortunately, one of the, you know, supposedly intact disciplines, you know, that didn't just get created in the last few years, that is just a dumpster fire.
Got platformed in the New York Times to argue that Mama Bear is, and she doesn't use the term dog whistle, but that is what her argument is, that Mama Bear's a dog whistle.
It's about white conservatives keeping women in their place because no one who looks like Kamala could ever be a Mama Bear.
Not true.
Kamala can't be because she's not a mother, but that's a totally different question, which the person writing the thing doesn't address.
I hate to keep harping on the same points, but it's clear what's going on if you're willing to see it, which is there is a activist movement.
Yeah.
And what it does is it finds anything that is inconvenient and it disappears it.
And any argument that is successful has to be challenged in a way that's hard to field.
It's pure sophistry.
Yeah.
The idea is, oh shit, that mama bear thing, that stings.
We've got to put somebody on that, right?
Who's got a good argument against so that anytime somebody hears mama bear, they tune out?
No, but I disagree here.
So this doesn't have to be top down.
This doesn't have to be conspiracy.
This emerges because you have these, you know, activist social climbing academics who have already been, in this particular case, the author of that piece had already been given a standing gig to occasionally publish op-eds at the New York Times.
And she knows the water she's in.
She knows what she can do.
I'm not arguing that, I mean, I realize I personified it, but obviously if you're part of this movement, you know what arguments you don't want to advance and you know what arguments you do want to advance.
And when you submit your thing to the New York Times, they know whether that's an argument that they like or one that makes them grumble.
And so the point is the whole system is set up to find the highest quality sophistry that causes something really potent like, "Hey, we've got a mama bear problem," right?
To go away because, "Oh yeah, you would say that whitey." You know, it's like, right?
Right?
So I don't want to die of sophistry.
I have a feeling that somehow the existential threat of sophistry is not going to get properly formulated, but it's there because what it does is it ultimately allows... I mean, look, the argument for putting this person who wants to queer nuclear weapons into a position in which they would have some authority over nuclear policy, the argument she herself makes Is not wrong.
Oh, what's the argument?
It's insane for other reasons.
The argument is... We are suffering a cost because... Well, there is a part of the argument that's wrong.
Because queer people are being excluded from nuclear policy.
Okay?
And the idea is, I've made the argument, if you exclude any group... Okay, but the assumption is wrong.
Well, I agree.
It almost certainly is wrong.
But...
No, but there's no way queer people are being excluded from nuclear policy.
For one thing, we have the freaking pup handler who's, yes, he's been fired, but that's because he was an incompetent poob.
That is an incredible example of not being excluded at the highest level.
But let's put it this way.
I would not be surprised if I was in charge of nuclear policy, I might rightly think, you know what, you really First get in touch with reality, then get back to me.
Right, exactly.
So maybe they are being excluded.
But the point is, the deeper point... Not the LGB people!
I agree.
But the more important point.
It is true that if you exclude a group, all else being equal, if you exclude a group, you might exclude somebody who has a key insight and therefore there would be some cost.
But the idea that this is a significant impediment to nuclear policy And that it can be divorced from all other arguments is perfectly insane.
I think that you're bearing the lead, though.
The statistical argument can be correct, but when applied to a situation in which it's not relevant, that makes the argument wrong.
Queer people have demonstrably not been excluded from nuclear policy to our collective detriment.
That's one point.
The other point is there are certain places where I'm sorry, but merit has to be the only consideration.
Right, but merit by looking at the entire population.
Right.
But the point is, when it comes to nuclear policy, it may be sad if there are groups that find themselves underrepresented.
It is not a priority.
The priority with nuclear policy is making sure that that stuff stays frickin' contained.
Right.
Now, an additional statistical argument is, when you're talking about a workforce that is relatively small, You can't expect full representation for every single demographic marker that you want to invoke, because there just aren't the numbers to support a workforce that exactly matches the population of the Earth, because the workforce is not the same as the population of the Earth.
So pick your little fringe demographic marker and, you know, push that, push that, push that.
The confused, naive, and scared will buckle under you, but it doesn't make it the right policy.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay, you were speaking of some of the differences between men and women.
The always excellent David Samuels has published in UnHerd a piece, actually you can show my screen here, called The March of Kamala's Brides, Miserable Young Women Are the Democrats' Foot Soldiers.
And I believe this is not the first time he has introduced this idea of what he's calling brides of the state.
I believe I've seen that from him before, but I want to just share a little bit from this article and we'll link it.
I encourage everyone to read this article in its entirety.
Harris is a flesh-and-blood avatar of a much more numerous, powerful, and radically dissatisfied demographic—never married and childless American women between the ages of 20 and 45.
Aside from mass immigration, the most striking demographic development of the past decade is the large cohort of American women who have embraced the helping hand of the state, in place of the increasingly suspect protections of fathers, brothers, boyfriends, and husbands.
In doing so, they have become the Democratic Party's most enthusiastic and decisive constituency.
According to a recent Pew survey, these brides-of-the-state bots support Democrats over Republicans by a whopping 72% to 24%, providing the party with its entire advantage in both national and most state elections.
Married American women, by contrast, support Republicans by 50% to 45%, which more or less matches the pro-Republican margin in every other age and gender demographic.
Without the overwhelming support of the bots, the brides of the state, for the Democrats, in other words, America would be a solid majority Republican country in which Trump would win a likely electoral landslide.
So he then, this is an excellent piece.
I want to read just a couple more paragraphs here.
Actually, these next two.
The Democratic Party's political engineers first sensed the centrality of bots to the party's power base during Barack Obama's re-election campaign in 2012.
The Obama campaign then duly rolled out a storybook ad called The Life of Julia, which explained how Obama's policies, from Head Start to Obamacare to contraception coverage to Medicare reform, would care for Julia from graduation through motherhood and finally to the grave without her needing to form a human relationship with anyone Outside the government.
Julia's life was defined by her interactions with the state, with each step of her life tied to a particular government program.
She is able to pursue her chosen career as a web designer because at age 27, quote, her health insurance is required to cover birth control and preventative care, letting Julia focus on her work rather than worry about her health, end quote.
At age 31, Julia changes her mind about birth control and decides to have a child, a decision that apparently involves no partner aside from the state.
The resulting progeny, Zachary, attends a race to the top federally funded public school, which allows Julia to start her own business.
At age 67, Julia retires with the financial support of Social Security and Medicare, and spends her partnerless golden years volunteering in a community garden.
While the Julia campaign was the subject of some mockery in 2012, the Obama campaign was in fact ahead of the curve.
When Joe Biden was elected in 2020, he made the fictional Linda the avatar of his Build Back Better campaign.
More blue-collar than Julia, in keeping with Biden's lunch-pail Democrat persona, Linda earned $40,000 annually working at a manufacturing facility in Peoria, Illinois, an income that was a little more than $10,000 short of the city's median salary.
However, Linda had no need for a second income in her home thanks to the government, which gave her $3,600 annually in the form of a Build Back Better tax credit.
Her son, Leo, who, like Zachary, appears to have been fathered by an anonymous bureaucratic sperm donor, began universal pre-K by age three and enjoyed a free educational ride subsidized by the state, all of which enabled Linda to keep working and Zachary to—or Leo in this case, I think it will have been—to obtain a good-paying union job as a wind turbine technician.
The saga wistfully concludes by describing how later in life, Linda needs home and hearing care, but fortunately help is at hand.
Thanks to President Biden's plan, it adds, Linda can access affordable health care through Medicare, and Leo is able to afford at-home elder care for his mom.
So he makes the argument, Samuels does in the rest of this piece, that basically women who have never been married and are childless have, and who, You are not actually autonomous.
And, you know, we hear a lot, you know, this phrase that I tried to parody in the piece that I wrote about Barbie and RuPaul's Drag Race last summer, you go girl, which is just, it's just hateful because it almost is never emitted from the lips of someone who was actually able to do things for themselves.
And they're cheering on someone who's trying to do something social and vapid and generally not very interesting at all.
Women who have been fed this tap of, you can do anything, but then also not being given any of the skills or encouraged to have any of the skills to actually do the things that we would like to have done, are then turning to the state to fill a lot of the roles that we should either be doing for ourselves or be partnered up and be doing with the people that we choose to lead our lives with.
And it is this...
Maybe I'll stop there for a moment. - Yeah.
This is it's a mind-blowing perspective because it arrives at the same moment that I want to say that there is unmistakable Communism at the heart of the proposals of this crazy party.
Yeah, and this is what you're effectively describing is a Proposal but that basically the party is buying votes that it needs in order to continue its protection racket Yeah And it's buying those votes by using its power to tax to overcome a biological reality.
The reason that humans pair bond, the most fundamental reason, is that in order to be the extraordinary species we are, children have a very long childhood in which it's very difficult for a single individual to raise a child.
And the evidence, actually, that children raised by single parents are hobbled by the experience is shockingly That's all true, but that's irrelevant to this particular question, because this is childless women that we're talking about here.
And yes, the example that he gives from both the Obama campaign and the Biden campaign are single mothers.
Who are helped by the state at every stage.
What Samuels is arguing and what the Pew research suggests is that it is never married childless women between the ages of 20 and 45 who are by far most strongly in favor of voting Democrat as opposed to all of the other demographics out there.
So I get that.
Maybe I missed the connection between Zachary's mother and Leo's mother in the story and the childless women who are fueling the Democratic Party.
Let me read a couple more sections from this piece.
The ballot box is hardly the only place that this new demographic is making its unique preferences felt.
Bots—again, what Samuels is calling brides of the state—have demanded and received not only the female-targeted government grants, educational and jobs programs, and social safety nets that benefited Julia and Linda and their singular progeny, but also a much broader set of social engineering measures that are fundamentally reshaping American mores.
Since the 90s, young American women have been positioned as the primary beneficiaries of neo-Victorian speech and conduct codes that fundamentally transformed the behavior of men and women everywhere from classrooms to workplaces to bars.
BOTs are also the primary beneficiaries of government affirmative action programs in education and hiring.
In fact, in the roughly 60 years since civil rights programs to reduce racial and gender discrimination were introduced in higher education, women have surpassed men in earning four-year degrees, while Black and Latino students remain underrepresented.
But have these efforts made the brides of the state happy?
The answer, according to Young Women, is no.
In fact, the demographic that has been the most highly socialized into core progressive values and would seem to benefit most directly from bureaucratic intervention in their lives is also the most miserable group in America.
A startling 56% of liberal American women aged 18 to 29 have been diagnosed with a mental health condition, while the percentage for conservative women is 21%.
And he then, I won't keep reading, but he then refers to this Gimbron et al.
2012, or no, this Gimbron et al.
study that was just published in 2022, but is about some earlier data that shows that
While, yes, we see, in keeping with Jonathan Haidt's arguments, and I'm forgetting her name, but other good social science researchers who are pointing to 2012, 2013, 2014 as this pivot point when suddenly young people are anxious and they spend less time talking to one another, less time face-to-face.
They don't even want to be on the phone, which I get.
You know, they want this asynchronous communication, and they're fearful of going out, and they're going out less, and they're having less sex, and all of these things are true, and it's been pinned to the society-wide changes which, yes, are true.
The rise in screen use and phones and less free play and less time outside and all of that is true, but If those were the only explanations, you would expect the rise in anxiety and mental illness to affect the population uniformly, with the possible exception that it's going to affect girls more than boys, because girls and boys are, wait for it, different, right?
So, girls versus boys, it's going to manifest differently, but you wouldn't expect differences based on class unless rich kids have more access to iPhones or something.
Or race, again, unless there are differences in access to the resources that are being hypothesized to explain this.
And so what Gimbrone et al.
write in their paper, which Samuel's citing here, and it's a good paper, I've read it, They say, hmm, I wonder if political opinion actually may be explanatory, at least to some degree.
You know, they're not saying it's the only thing, but I wonder if actually given that we see this rise in anxiety and mental illness starting 2012, 2013, 2014 in young people, What's the difference between young people who say they have conservative values versus young people who say they have liberal values?
And yes, their prediction is borne out.
And exactly as Samuel's reports in this piece, it's the young liberal women in particular who are much more miserable and report having been diagnosed with a much higher degree of mental illnesses than their young conservative counterparts.
Yeah, well, this is also, of course, a story of hyper novelty, because, you know, we've taken the logic of being a human, which, yes, is not perfectly symmetrical in every regard.
It's complementary, but not perfectly symmetrical.
And we've removed the central elements of it.
And now we're looking at chaos, and then government's going to fill in all of the things that, you know, the loose ends, and it just simply doesn't lead anywhere.
Right, so even though it is true, as we have said over and over and over again, we can't be in the past, we can't return to the past, that's not a possibility, nor should we want it, but retaining tethers to what has worked, retaining tethers to the family and the values and the love that people before you have found to be functional,
In this world of Cartesian crisis, is likely to be a better bet than throwing it all up in the air and saying, hey, let's try anything that's new.
If it's new, I'll try it.
And if it's new, I'll try it.
Turns out to be a recipe for, at the very least, mental anguish.
I would point to one other connection.
So you and I, during the so-called pandemic, talked frequently about the importance of having somebody That you thoroughly trusted and it was not mediated through screens, social media, or anything technological.
And that that actually kept us grounded and we had a suspicion that there was a problem because younger people are now treating romantic relationships as an aesthetic choice rather than something that would automatically, even if they decided against it, their internal feelings would drive them towards it.
That what we're seeing is a lot of people who don't have even that single relationship that would allow them to check in with reality without having to go through an interface.
But here's the point.
The brides of the state are women who will tend to have whatever biases exist in that asymmetry untethered to men who might temper it, right?
Women are going to be tempering men in men's predilection for whatever it is men are predisposed to and men will be tempering women and so to the extent that let's say There was a tendency to under focus on the mechanisms that keep the lights on, right?
A woman who's tied to a man is going to have a harder time
Forgetting about it because the point is that's actually kind of on the man's mind and to the extent that Ideas are put forward that run afoul of the lights continuing to be on The man might be more likely to notice it and you know, I'm not arguing that this is men keeping women grounded But the idea that there is this asymmetry it starts as an evolutionary division of labor We keep each other grounded and it's especially important that if there are people who are not grounded to the
The energy and matter organization that actually keeps our enemies at bay, keeps the lights on, keeps the food coming into the grocery store.
If you're not tethered to that, You don't really belong in a position of governing it.
You're gonna screw it up.
So the point is, a party that has a heavy bias in the direction of a sex that has dispensed with the other sex is a danger.
Either one.
Either one, right.
But I would say, you know, I'm no Republican, but the Republicans There's a stodgy backward looking aspect to them, but that stodgy backward looking aspect has males and females paired.
Yeah, but there's also like, okay, so why historically have people been impressed with military service as something that indicates that you might be fit for office?
So is it the demonstration of patriotism?
Maybe, to some degree.
But also, at least until recently, and of course now, Now things are changing in the armed forces, but successful military service was proof that you could do physical things in the world.
That you had a relationship with the physical world and that you were able to move your body in it to accomplish things.
And therefore you understood that you were a fully embodied human being in a physical world and there was no getting around that part of it.
Yeah, and that's part, you know, that's part of, frankly, I'm sure that's part of why, you know, Tulsi was, is, was so, such an attractive candidate.
Like, it's just a, like, okay, I don't have to worry about that, that piece, which is actually huge.
Like, do, do you have an, and it's part of why lying about service is such a big deal.
Is it, is it that you're a liar?
Is that why we don't trust you?
Well, obviously, yes, but also, Lying about an academic degree is not okay, but it doesn't reveal as much about what you do or do not know, especially now since academic degrees becomes, you know, almost worthless, as lying about military service.
What did you or did you not actually do?
Yeah.
And I, frankly, I've never been in the military, so I don't know how realistic... You don't like about it?
But my sense is that people who have been through the military, especially people who have really achieved, there's a reason that there are so many special forces people in the world of heterodox thinkers.
And it's because it requires a tremendous amount of discipline, right?
Mental discipline, physical discipline, and follow through, right?
As we understand from our friends who are in special forces or have been, It is very easy not to get to the end of the program, right?
It happens, I think, to a majority.
But anyway, the point is, let's say somebody hasn't been in the Special Forces, but they've been, you know, they have been enlisted for some number of years.
They can't have been terribly prone to acting out.
They had to be disciplined enough to exist in that milieu without running afoul of it again and again and again.
And they had to be connected to the physical world.
And, you know, it's a pity that that's a useful minimal standard, but it's at least a minimal standard.
And if you lie about it, you are in a sense claiming that.
And why would you have to use a lie to demonstrate this?
Even if you weren't in the service, presumably you should be able to demonstrate it with other aspects.
Of course.
And we, you know, we of course don't require it.
But it is, I think it's a, I think it's useful in part as a shorthand to like, okay, you understand the physical world that you live in.
And that will be, you know, that will be true for women who have served, you know, much, much, much smaller numbers and with, you know, different expectations.
In some cases, but if the expectations are radically different and don't include actually physical engagement with the world and going through some kind of physical training, then it can't be a proxy anymore.
It can't be a proxy for actually understanding your place in the world.
Yeah, I would add one other thing.
Whether enlisted or commissioned, and I think that's the set, somebody who has spent time in that milieu, it's not impossible for somebody to be disloyal to the country, but we started this discussion talking about the fact that it used to be that you knew that there was the loyal opposition, who vehemently disagreed about how to make the country better, but they didn't disagree that that was a desirable thing, that it was a country worth preserving.
I think it would be difficult to be in the armed services for an extended period of time if you loathe the country, right?
I think it would just drive you crazy.
So it's a proxy for a number of things, including a basic allegiance to the nation that needs governing.
And so, you know, it ain't a perfect proxy, but it does say something.
We had some other things but I kind of think we've already been going at it for almost two and a half hours.
One of them is very timely let's just do a couple minutes on it.
Okay.
Many people will have seen Nicole Shanahan on Tom Bilyeu's podcast saying that Bobby Kennedy was thinking of that there were a couple plans being discussed one of them being joining the Trump campaign and this of course caused a stir.
I just wanted to put it in a little bit of context.
One, I don't know, I don't think that this was intended to emerge this way.
I think this was an error of some kind because the To the extent that there's a strategic decision that has to be made, and I can tell you a little bit about what that strategic decision would be made about.
There's a question about, can you win?
And if you don't win, what's your effect on the election?
And roadblock after roadblock has been put in Kennedy's way.
He's not on target to be on the debate stage, which immediately makes him look to people who are not paying attention, like a non-serious candidate.
Taking him off the ballot.
So there are huge obstacles and in that circumstance.
I don't begrudge him at all a practical view on the election and I I will say in a second I think there is a highest priority here and you know Contemplating going to the Trump campaign makes sense But if you were gonna do that and
There's a way to do it and talking about discussions that are taking place in the Kennedy campaign on a podcast doesn't make any sense because you've got a lot of people who've put their lives on hold to try to help Kennedy get elected.
This caught them off guard and it caught many of us in the public who were supportive off guard and I think it squandered a certain amount of the enthusiasm that could have been generated if Bobby had Given a speech and said here's what I'm doing and here's why.
Yep.
But that said, I think we know for sure it's being contemplated and I would argue that the way every patriotic American ought to look at this is there is a absolute top priority in this election and it is to beat the unholy blue monster.
And I say this as somebody who is a Democrat still, but I do not believe that party is salvageable.
And I believe they have shown us everything they need to show us for us to know that A, they don't care about democracy.
We've seen this going back as far as 2016, when they sabotaged Bernie Sanders and then argued in court, not that they hadn't sabotaged him, but that they had every right to rig their own primary.
So they don't give a damn about democracy.
We see the same thing in The ascendancy of Kamala Harris, which is obviously not the result of public enthusiasm.
The public enthusiasm has followed from being told that this is the candidate of the party.
We see it in the failure, both the use of the 25th Amendment as a threat against Biden to remove him from the race, and then the failure to invoke it to remove him from the office that he is no longer capable of managing.
All of this suggests a party that is behaving wildly disloyally.
And while I know there are lots of people, and you and I know some of them, who are not going to be able to wrap their minds around the idea that the party that they have been in for their whole lives has become disloyal to the country and that they actually Morally, I think are obligated to vote against it.
But there are many others who I think are beginning to get hints.
You know, they were told Biden's just fine and then suddenly they see him in a debate and it's like, well, wait a second.
You told me that the people who said he was cognitively compromised were conspiracy theorists.
And now I'm supposed to accept that they were right, but not listen to other things they have to say?
So anyway, my point would be, Priority in this election is to defeat the blue team.
The Republic depends on us defeating the blue team.
And all of us, Bobby Kennedy included, could do whatever it is that makes that most likely.
And other considerations are secondary.
Now that said, I certainly hope that Donald Trump will recognize that his ascendancy to the White House is not the objective.
It's what happens after he gets there and having Bobby Kennedy on board will greatly increase the chances of doing what he has told us that he wants to do.
So anyway, I didn't envision us ending up here.
This does seem to be where we've ended up.
I will just say as the, uh, the final rejoinder to that riff.
Saving the Republic is vital.
As I mentioned last week, we are meeting on the Capitol Mall September 29th for a rally called Rescue the Republic, Join the Resistance.
You should look at the website at jointheresistance.org.
We have great people already.
It's going to be an all-star lineup of speakers, comedians, and musicians.
Heather and I will be speaking there.
Tulsi Gabbard has said she's coming.
Bobby Kennedy is coming.
There are other people whose names I can't tell you.
Very highly placed people.
You'll be thrilled to see speak and sing and make jokes.
Wait a minute.
What have you found?
When I plug in Rescue the Republic, look what I get.
Show my screen here if you would.
I know.
Thank you for pulling that up.
I get Dump Trump, Americans vs. Traitor Trump, New York Fuck Trump, Biden-Harris.
That's at rescuetherepublic.org.
They're bastards.
They really are.
You can put back up the site.
You can put back up jointheresistance.org.
I will tell you, guess what?
Jointheresistance.org has suffered a huge onslaught of attacks.
The people who are hosting the site tell us it's off the charts with respect to what they normally experience.
There's always some level of attack.
This has gotten off the charts attack.
So we are getting flack over the target, my friends, and we need you to show up on the Capitol Mall.
If you can't show up, watch the live stream, spread the word.
We need to get this, we need to get this accomplished.
This election is vitally important and not only do we have to win it, But we have to win it with a big enough margin to overcome any ability to cheat.
This has to be absolutely clear that we are taking our Republic back.
So please join us in whatever, in whatever way you can.
Um, it's going to be a great rally, September 29th.
All right.
Um, this is our last podcast with Zach in the house.
Zach is going off on some new adventures.
He's going to continue to be involved in the Dark Horse universe.
He's going to become a dark horse at large.
He's no longer a dark foal.
He's now a fully-fledged Dark Horse.
Dark Horse at large.
Dark horse at large, indeed.
And we welcome Jen, our new producer, who's also been running the streams for the last couple of weeks with Zach at her side.
But Zach's off and we may say more about what that is later.
But for now, we're just going to leave it at that.
We're actually losing is the word I've been using both of our children on the same day as they go off on adventures this upcoming weekend.
Greener pastures, as it were.
It's pretty green here.
No, I was metaphorically greener.
I mean, you know, I don't even know if they're gonna go into pastors, but they could.
Yeah, I don't know if Zach has that much access to pastors.
Oh, yeah.
Yeah, maybe.
I don't know.
Anyway.
Yeah, it's a big deal.
I will say, Jen, I promise to stop referring to you as the new Zach after you've been with us for a month.
Have you once referred to her as the new Zach?
I do.
Really?
Oh, okay.
It's an initiation ritual.
Oh, okay.
Now we're thrilled to be working with Jen and excited for Zach's new adventures.
But this will be the last time you heard him on air for a little bit.
Maybe again in a few months when you come back and visit us if you ever decide to do so.
No.
Or reports from the field, perhaps.
Yeah, reports from the field.
All right, so just once again, join us on Locals.
Check out darkhorsepodcast.org, our website, which has things like upcoming schedule changes.
We do have several changes coming up.
In fact, I think we'll be back next week at the normal time, but then things get weird soon thereafter.
Things get weird?
Where have you been?
I'm talking very locally.
Scheduling-wise.
Yes, about our particular broadcasting schedule.
That's my bad.
Yeah.
We appreciate you, our audience, very much.
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Consider subscribing to any of the things that we've got going on.
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Until we see you next time, be good to the ones you love, eat good food, and get outside.
