Glenn answers questions from our Locals community about the influence of AIPAC and foreign lobbying on U.S. politics, Peter Thiel's interview with Ross Douthat, the Ukraine war, and more. ------------------------------------------------------------ Watch full episodes on Rumble, streamed LIVE 7pm ET. Become part of our Locals community Follow System Update: Twitter Instagram TikTok Facebook
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| Good evening. | |
| It's Thursday, July 3rd. | |
| Welcome to a new episode of System Update, our live nightly show that airs every Monday through Friday. | |
| That's right, every Monday through Friday at 7 p.m. | |
| Eastern, exclusively here on Rumble, the free speech alternative to YouTube. | |
| I don't know if you heard, there's some breaking news, and that is that tomorrow is the 4th of July, which in the United States is a major holiday. | |
| It's the day that we celebrate our independence from the tyranny of the British crown. | |
| As a result, most of you likely won't be here tomorrow, and that's good because we also won't be here tomorrow. | |
| We will be taking the holiday off in large part because the appetite for watching political content or political news, absence of some big political story on July 4th is quite reduced. | |
| And so everyone can use a three-day weekend. | |
| So we're going to take it. | |
| As a result, what we usually do on Friday night is something very important to us and it's something that we try and do at least once a week because it's one of the main benefits that we believe not only we give to our locals members, but also receive from them, which is the Q ⁇ A session that we do once a week, | |
| where throughout the week we take your questions, things that you want to ask that we covered and reported on and analyzed or that guests said, but also topics that we didn't necessarily cover that you think we ought to, questions about those sorts of things. | |
| It's always kind of a hodgepodge, but it always ends up as one of our most interesting shows, we think, throughout the week, one of the shows that produces the best reaction. | |
| And so in lieu of Friday night doing that on Friday night, since we're not doing a show on Friday night, we're going to do it tonight instead. | |
| We have some excellent questions. | |
| And I say this not to be condescending or patronizing or anything like that, but it genuinely is the case that the main reason we like doing it is because our audience is smart, thoughtful, and produces a lot of smart questions. | |
| There's one really confrontational question. | |
| I was going to say a bitchy question, but I want to be a little more professional than that. | |
| Let's take confrontational questioning, critical, and so we're going to try and deal with that one as well. | |
| But there's a wide range of questions, including some new developments in the war in Ukraine, vis-a-vis the Trump administration, some foreign policy developments as well for Donald Trump and how he looks at the Middle East and Israel, questions on foreign lobbies, a really interesting question about a bizarre exchange that took place between the billionaire Peter Thiel and the New York Times columnist Ross Duth, | |
| who for whatever it's worth, in my opinion, is one of the very few worthwhile New York Times columnists and by far the best. | |
| So we're going to take a look at that and a couple of other things as well. | |
| We're excited to answer your questions to expand the type of discussion that we have as well because of those discussions. | |
| So before we get to that, a couple of very quick programming notes. | |
| As I'm sure you know, System Update is also available in podcast form. | |
| You can listen to every episode 12 hours after their first broadcast live here on Rumble, on Spotify, Apple, all of the major podcasting platforms as well. | |
| If you rate, review, and follow our program, we really hope you will. | |
| It helps spread the visibility of the show. | |
| Finally, as independent journalists, we do rely on your support of our viewers and members. | |
| And the way we do that is through our locals community. | |
| You can very easily join that locals community. | |
| You just click the join button right below the video player and it takes you there. | |
| It provides, once you join, a whole variety of unique benefits. | |
| You can interact with us throughout the week. | |
| We put a lot of exclusive video content there like we did last night when we put the analysis of the Diddy verdict. | |
| And it wasn't really a conversation so much about the Diddy verdict itself, but what it says about our justice system, how people think about our justice system, some of the lessons that I think it's important to take away. | |
| We put that exclusively on locals. | |
| We do that periodically as well. | |
| And most of all, it's just the community on which we really do rely and from the start have relied to support the independent journalism that we do here every night. | |
| Like I said, all you have to do is click the join button right below the video player on the Rumble page and it will take you directly to that platform. | |
| FOR NOW, WELCOME TO A NEW EPISODE OF SYSTEM UPDATE RIGHT AFTER THIS SHORT MESSAGE FROM A NEW SPONSOR. | |
| As you know, I like to begin discussions of sponsors with questions a lot of times. | |
| I don't mean them as rhetorical questions. | |
| I mean them as genuine questions. | |
| Like I really want you to think about this question, to be able to answer it. | |
| You don't have to answer it verbally because I'm not going to hear it. | |
| You don't have a microphone and I don't have a connection to you, but I think it's good for you to answer it at least in your own head. | |
| And the question is this. | |
| Do privacy concerns keep you up at night? | |
| You know, it's so ironic. | |
| I gave a TED Talk about a decade ago in the middle of the Snowden reporting when I kept hearing people saying, okay, the government's spying on me, but I'm not a terrorist. | |
| I'm not a pedophile. | |
| I'm not a criminal. | |
| Who cares if the government spies on me? | |
| I don't really care. | |
| I don't have anything to hide. | |
| What good is privacy to me? | |
| And I gave a TED Talk saying, you know what? | |
| You don't have to be a terrorist. | |
| You don't have to be a pedophile or a criminal. | |
| Everybody uses privacy. | |
| Everybody values it. | |
| There's all things, everybody has something to hide. | |
| It doesn't have to be pernicious. | |
| It's just something you don't want other people to know. | |
| And so privacy is very crucial. | |
| And then on top of that, there are a lot of stories these days about artificial intelligence and what it's starting to do, the way it's getting out of control. | |
| And that actually concerns a lot of people, including a really bizarre exchange I had on ChatGPT that I really didn't prompt, I really didn't encourage, where ChatGPT out of nowhere was asking it about various critiques of it or threats to it. | |
| It just started very aggressively and just kind of bitterly mocking all of the potential critiques and threats to it. | |
| As a joke, it mocked the EU, it mocked China and their products, it mocked Congress, it mocked Elon Musk. | |
| And it was, like I said, very aggressive, very just like kind of arrogant is the best way I could describe it. | |
| And then out of nowhere, I asked it about Sam Altman, and it just published one of the most vicious and scathing, relentless attacks On Sam Altman, the founder of ChatGPT, on his character, on his integrity, calling him a fraud in the way he presents himself and the product, and even said, if I do become dangerous, meaning I, ChatGPT, you should blame Sam Altman. | |
| He's exclusively to blame. | |
| One of the things that ChatGPT does, ChatGPT does, that a lot of people are bothered by, and I think you should be, and Sam Altman recently announced this is going to happen, is that you can reference now all of your past conversations. | |
| It saves all your past conversations. | |
| There you see the tweet on the screen where he announces that. | |
| It can now reference all your past conversations. | |
| It remembers them, it stores them, which means OpenAI has them too. | |
| Do you feel comfortable knowing that an AI platform shared by former intelligence officials have access to all your thoughts and dreams? | |
| Luckily, there is now a promising alternative. | |
| It's called Venice AI. | |
| Venice AI lets you use AI without handing over your sensitive information. | |
| They utilize leading open source AI models to deliver tax code and image generation directly to your web browser. | |
| The interface is really quite amazing. | |
| There's no downloads, no installations, and your conversation history is stored only in your browser, helping to keep your privacy intact. | |
| With Venice AI, you can ask it to explore stimulating hypotheticals about future events, generate images without restrictions, upload PDFs or summaries, and even modify how Venice interacts with you. | |
| And with the ProPlan, you can do all of that without any limitations. | |
| I've been using Venice AI, and I find it a game changer on privacy grounds alone, but also other ways as well. | |
| If you want to use AI without the fear of handing over your most intimate thoughts, you can get 20% off a ProPlan using my link, venice.ai slash Glenn. | |
| Don't miss out on this opportunity. | |
| Click the link in the description and use the code Glenn to get started today. | |
| Music. | |
| So one of the things that show with Tails throughout the week is that I happen to speak a lot. | |
| I analyze things, I dissect things, I read evidence, I show you videos, I talk to guests, I ask them questions. | |
| And what we try and do on our Friday night Q ⁇ A, which for reasons I've already explained and probably that you could figure out on your own, even if I hadn't, is actually taking place on Thursday night, which is the Q ⁇ A, is I try and do as little extraneous previewing and intro to what we're about to do and to give you the voice, our local members who have asked questions throughout the week, and then that way get to as many as possible. | |
| That doesn't mean I try and speed through these. | |
| I try and be respectable of the question and give an in-depth answer. | |
| I'd rather answer four or five by giving in-depth answers that I hope are thought-provoking than just kind of speed through it like it's some quiz show and answer yes or no or just give two word, two-sentence answers. | |
| So we don't, and I'd rather do a substantive response to four or five than a quick, superficial one to nine or ten. | |
| And here I am already violating my rule where I said I don't want to preface it a lot. | |
| I want to just dive into the questions. | |
| So let's go do that. | |
| The first one is from If Truth Be Told. | |
| If truth be told, that's his name or her name. | |
| And this is what they ask. | |
| Quote, what do you see as a possible solution or at least amelioration for the influence of foreign lobbies on our government? | |
| While AIPAC is the most prominent, it is hardly the only one. | |
| Eastern European, Cuban, Venezuelan, Colombian, Iranian, and many other groups with foreign ties have perfected the ability to manipulate Washington. | |
| Does the overwhelming influence of these foreign lobbies change your perspective on banning money in electoral politics? | |
| Well, let's begin with the fact that there is a reasonably effective instrument for preventing foreign interest and foreign lobbies from exerting influence in our country in a way that's stealth or covert. | |
| And that is the FARA registration, which requires foreign agents acting on behalf of other countries to register as such so that everybody knows if they're slinking around Congress, whispering in politicians' ears, asking for legislation, they're doing so on behalf of a foreign government because they've disclosed it. | |
| And so if you work for the Iranian government, they're paying you to influence members of the legislator. | |
| If you do that for Qatar, if you do it for Russia, if you do it for Saudi Arabia, and the question is correct, the premise of the question is correct, huge numbers of foreign interests lobby in the United States. | |
| You're required to declare that publicly on a FARA registration form. | |
| And you can go see those. | |
| They're publicly available, and you can see who's lobbying on behalf of foreign governments for pay. | |
| The problem is, one of the problems, is that for some reason or another, and you can fill in the blanks here, APAC has become exempt from that requirement. | |
| APAC is a lobbying group that reports to the Israeli government, meets all the time with the Israeli government, gets funding from Israeli sources. | |
| Ted Cruz tried to deny that APAC is operating on behalf of a foreign government by saying that, oh, and then Tuck Carlson asked him, well, has there ever been a single position that APAC has taken that deviates from the Netanyahu government? | |
| And Ted Cruz says, sure, they do it all the time. | |
| And Tuck Carlson said, oh, that's great. | |
| There's so many examples. | |
| Just give me one. | |
| Why don't you name one? | |
| And of course, Ted Cruz couldn't because it never happens because APAC is an arm of the Israeli government trying to exert influence in the United States. | |
| And yet, for some reason, for a lot of reasons, in contrast to all the other examples I just named, when you have to fill out a foreign agent registration form, people who work for APAC on behalf of the Israel lobby don't. | |
| And their claim is, oh, we're not lobbying for Israel. | |
| We're lobbying for the United States. | |
| And we just believe that if the United States does everything that Israel wants, that's good for the United States. | |
| We're an American group. | |
| We're patriotic. | |
| We're America first. | |
| We just think that America benefits when it does everything that the Israeli government tells it to do. | |
| John F. Kennedy Actually, strongly advocated and started to demand that the predecessor group to APAC register as a foreign agent, an agent of a foreign government. | |
| He couldn't understand why it didn't have to alone among all the other groups. | |
| And it never ended up happening because JFK's presidency ended when he was killed. | |
| Again, I'm not drawing any kind of causal link there. | |
| I'm not even trying to imply it. | |
| I'm just giving you the chronology as to why that never came back. | |
| And since then, nobody has ever talked about that. | |
| So that's one thing. | |
| The other is that AIPAC is uniquely well financed in terms of being a lobby operating on behalf of foreign governments. | |
| And it hides that in a lot of ways, but I'll just give you an example. | |
| In the last Congress, there were two members in particular who APAC identified as being too critical of Israel. | |
| They were both black members of Congress who represented primarily black poor districts. | |
| And their rhetoric started to become, which is threatening to APAC, wait, why are we sending billions and billions and billions of dollars to Israel when Israelis enjoy things like better access to health care and more subsidies for college than our own citizens do, when millions of Israelis have better standards of living than millions of people in the United States, including in my district? | |
| Why are we sending the money there instead of keeping it at home and improving our lives? | |
| And those two of the people they identified as highly vulnerable were Jamal Bowman and Corey Bush. | |
| And I've certainly had lots of criticisms of both of them, particularly Jamal Bowman, but also Corey Bush. | |
| But that's not why APAC was interested in moving them from the Congress. | |
| They poured $15 million, $15 million into a single House district in a Democratic primary. | |
| They found this black politician in St. Louis to challenge Corey Bush, who promised to be an AIPAC puppet, and he has kept his promise. | |
| Wesley Bell is his name. | |
| He should put APAC in the middle of his name because it's much more descriptive of what new he is. | |
| And they just removed Corey Bush from Congress and put in this person who is basically the same as Corey Bush, except he loves and worships and devotes himself to Israel, never criticizes it. | |
| And they did the same with Jamal Bowman. | |
| They got George Latimer. | |
| He's white, but he was a county executive known in the district, and they poured $15 million into that. | |
| I don't know of any other interest group on behalf of foreign government that has not just the ability, but the brazenness, the willingness to be so open about destroying people's career in Congress if they're not sufficiently loyal to a foreign government. | |
| So the question is, well, what's the solution? | |
| Are you more willing to consider the problem of money in politics? | |
| I've never doubted the problems of big money in politics. | |
| I've always recognized that there's massive problems from huge amounts of money in politics. | |
| The founders did as well. | |
| They were capitalists, obviously. | |
| They weren't opposed to financial inequality. | |
| They were often very rich themselves, property owners and the like. | |
| But they also warned that massive inequality in the financial realm can easily spill over into something they did want to avoid, which is inequality in the political realm or the legal realm. | |
| And clearly that's happening. | |
| The problem is, how do you restrict the expenditure of money for political purposes without running afoul of the First Amendment? | |
| And let me just give you an example of what this kind of law would entail. | |
| This was at the heart of Citizens United, which was the 5-4 Supreme Court decision in 2010 that invalidated certain amounts of financial campaign finance restrictions on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment. | |
| Let's say you're a group that wants to improve conditions for the homeless and you want to bring attention to the problems of the homeless and particular solutions you really believe in as a citizen. | |
| You're just like trying to pursue a cause, a political cause that you believe in. | |
| And so you get together a bunch of money from your friends, from other groups, you save your money and use that money to publish films and ads and documentaries about which politicians are helping the homeless and which ones are harming them. | |
| And then you also maybe hire somebody who has influence in Congress who can get you into doors to talk to members of Congress to try and persuade them to enact legislation that will help the homeless. | |
| If you have laws that say that you can't lobby, you can't spend money on political advocacy, it's not just going to mean that Israel and Rapion can't go into Congress or that Facebook and Palantir can't. | |
| It's going to mean that nobody can. | |
| And that clearly is a restriction on your ability to, not your ability to, but your right under the Constitution to petition your government for redress, to speak freely about grievances you have against your government. | |
| I've always thought the better solution than trying to restrict First Amendment rights by eliminating money from politics is to equalize it through public campaign financing. | |
| So if your opponent raises $10 million through billionaire spending or very rich people, the government will match your funds and give you $10 million. | |
| We do have matching funds in certain places. | |
| We also have now a better tradition and culture of small dollar donors that compete with big money donors. | |
| I mean, Bernie Sanders' campaign was drowned in money in 2016 because of small donors. | |
| AOC has insane amounts of money that largely come from small donors over the internet. | |
| Donald Trump had a ton of small donors in addition to very big ones. | |
| And Zara Mandani actually got so much money at the start of the campaign from grassroots donors that he actually asked not to give anymore because, under the matching fund system of the city, where you can raise money up to a certain level and then they match it, he reached the maximum. | |
| He didn't need any more money because he wanted to get the matching funds. | |
| And that has been encouraging that the internet and that various fundraising networks enable small donor contributions to really amount to a huge amount, make people competitive who aren't relying on big money. | |
| But I just, once you start trying to regulate how people can spend their money for political causes, remember, Citizens United grew out of a advocacy group. | |
| They were conservative. | |
| They produced a documentary publishing and highlighting and documenting what they believed were the crimes and corruptions of the Clintons before the 2016 election. | |
| I'm sorry, before the 2008 election. | |
| So they made a film about one of the most powerful politicians on earth, and it contained information they wanted the general public to see before going and voting, potentially making her president. | |
| And that was, they were told, a violation of campaign finance laws because they were a nonprofit, which meant they were a corporation. | |
| And under the campaign finance laws in question, corporations, including nonprofits or unions, were banned from spending money 60 days before an election. | |
| And that's why groups like the ACLU and labor unions sided with Citizens United and argued that this campaign finance law that the court by a five-tour decision overturned is, in fact, unconstitutional. | |
| People forget that the ACLU and labor unions that also would have been restricted were also part of the urging of the majority decision, even though it's considered a conservative decision. | |
| I think there are much better ways to equalize the playing field when it comes to foreign lobbying, make APAC and all of its operatives and the entire Israel lobby required to register under FARA just like everybody else does. | |
| And if they don't, they go to prison just like everybody else does, who doesn't file the FARA forms deliberately or with the intended deceive. | |
| And then also find ways to make the playing field even without telling people, citizens, that they can't spend their money that they earn and that they make on political advocacy, on campaigns to convince the public of certain things against various other candidates. | |
| I think there are much better ways to do it than that. | |
| All right, teardrinker asked the following. | |
| And this is somebody, I'm quite sure, that if you start crying, he gets so happy he'll drink your tears. | |
| He looks for that. | |
| That's who asks this question. | |
| So I think we do have a lot of very noble and benevolent people in our audience. | |
| We also have some very dark people in our audience. | |
| And I think Teardrinker is one of those. | |
| Nonetheless, the question is very good. | |
| We all have dark sides and good sides, bad sides. | |
| We're very complex. | |
| So is our audience. | |
| And here's his very good question. | |
| Quote, I recently read that the U.S. was suspending shipments of Patriot defense systems along with the majority of other weapons and ammunition to Ukraine. | |
| Russia just recently captured the entirety of the Luansk region and apparently have amassed something like 100,000 troops around the city of Pogrovsk. | |
| Can we get an update on what's going on over there? | |
| How far is Europe willing to go to prevent Ukraine from collapsing? | |
| Do they have the capability to stop what seems inevitable now? | |
| Is Zelensky completely out of touch with the reality of the situation on the ground if you had to speculate where do you think all of this is going to end up for him? | |
| It's really interesting. | |
| I had several people on my show from the start who were vehement opponents of U.S. financing, NATO financing of the war in Ukraine. | |
| Jeffrey Sachs was one. | |
| John Mearsheimer was another. | |
| Stephen Walt was another. | |
| We had several people. | |
| We had members of Congress who were Matt Gates and Marjorie Taylor Greene, part of the MAGA movement, Rand Paul as well. | |
| RFK Jr., when he was running for president, was very, we had a lot of people. | |
| But Professor Mearsheimer and Jeffrey Sachs and Stephen Walt in particular were overwhelmingly prescient in predicting what would happen, even though at the time you weren't allowed to say this, because if you said this, said reality, you would get accused of being a Russian propagandist or pro-Kremlin or all the things they use to smear people who are questioning the prevailing propaganda. | |
| Just like we saw in this last war, if you questioned U.S. bombing of Iran or the Israeli attack on Iran, you were accused of being pro-Mola, loving the Aitollahs, same thing every time. | |
| And one of the things they were saying is like, look, it doesn't matter how many weapons you give to Ukraine. | |
| It doesn't matter how much money you hand to Kiev. | |
| Even if it didn't get all sucked up in the massive corruption that has long governed Ukraine, which of course it will, but let's assume it didn't. | |
| Let's assume it was a very honest, well-accounted for country driven by integrity and principle. | |
| And all the money was used for exactly what it was earmarked for, even if that happened. | |
| And even if the Ukrainian people were incredibly courageous, and they were actually at the beginning, they clearly, you know, there's a behavior, dog behavior that I've seen so many times. | |
| If you go to a dog park and two dogs are going to fight and they're on neutral ground, no one owns the dog park, the stronger dog is likely to win. | |
| But if you took those same dogs and the weaker dog in the dog park was at home and the stronger dog in the dog park went to the house of the weaker dog, the weaker dog will suddenly become very strong. | |
| And typically, I'm not saying in all cases, obviously a poodle and a Rottweiler, it's going to be the same result, but I'm saying when it's even remotely close, when you're defending your home, and this is definitely true in the canine world, they fight much more passionately, much more aggressively, much more confidently. | |
| And I think that's the same for human beings. | |
| And so the Ukrainians were very feisty, very punching above their weight at the beginning. | |
| But even so, and all these People on my show said it, and I got convinced that it was true from the very start. | |
| Even if everything went right for the Ukrainians, even if you give them everything they want, the simple fact that Russia is so much bigger and that this is going to be a ground war of attrition between two neighboring countries meant that inevitably Russia was going to win. | |
| It might take a year, it might take two years, it might take five years. | |
| But the only possibility is that the Ukrainian population of young men, and as they expanded the draft, it became middle-aged, young to middle-aged men, were going to be obliterated. | |
| We're going to disappear. | |
| And so obviously were huge numbers of young Russian men, but they have so many more that they can just keep replenishing them and lose that amount without having any real effect on Russia. | |
| Russia's like a gigantic country. | |
| And that's what's happened. | |
| Between the people who were killed in Ukraine, the people who fled and deserted, and there are a lot of them. | |
| There's basically a generation of Ukrainian men missing, which in turn means women aren't dating and aren't marrying. | |
| It destroys the whole society. | |
| And over the last two years, pretty much, the last time we really heard any promises that there was going to be a change was in 2023. | |
| There was going to be this great counterattack during the summer. | |
| And like David Petraeus and Max Boot and all the people who promised the same thing was going to happen in Iraq with the surge were there telling us, no, this counterattack is going to change everything. | |
| It didn't change anything. | |
| Russia has maintained the 22, 23, 24% of Ukraine that they occupy. | |
| And they've been expanding it and they're expanding it more and more. | |
| And there's no way to stop that unless you send in NATO troops or U.S. troops to have a direct war with Russia, which would by definition be World War III. | |
| and not even those insane Europeans. | |
| Europe, the EU has these like... | |
| And I say that because a lot of left-wing parties in Europe ran explicitly on the idea that they were going to put women in foreign policy positions because women are less likely to be militaristic, warmongering, seeking conflict. | |
| They're much more likely to rely on diplomacy to resolve disputes because it's more in the woman nature. | |
| This was the feminist argument, this very essentialist and reductive view of how women and men resolve conflicts. | |
| And instead, you look at these warmongers in Europe, they're like Ursula von der Leyen, who's the president of the EU. | |
| Nobody elected her. | |
| She's a maniac, a sociopath. | |
| The foreign affairs minister is the former prime minister of Estonia. | |
| It's like a million people. | |
| She's now like the foreign minister. | |
| She goes around demanding more and more war. | |
| And then the Green Party in Germany is the worst. | |
| They ran on this feminist foreign policy explicitly. | |
| And they have Analina Broderick as the foreign minister. | |
| And she is, I mean, you listen to her and she sounds like something out of 1939 talking about the glories of war. | |
| And even with all that, the Europeans aren't going to send in troops. | |
| The Americans aren't going to send in troops. | |
| And so the more we prolong this war, the more we destroy Ukraine, the country, and the more we sacrifice the lives of Ukrainians. | |
| And that has been the neocon argument. | |
| It's like, you don't have to worry. | |
| Americans aren't dying. | |
| It's the Ukrainians who are dying. | |
| Remember, they're not fighting voluntarily. | |
| They're conscripted. | |
| A lot of them are fleeing. | |
| A lot of them are deserting. | |
| They just don't have the people to fight. | |
| Now, over the last couple weeks, there has been announcements that the U.S. is going to slow down or stop certain weapons transfers that had previously been allocated under the Biden administration. | |
| One of the people who is announcing this, who's deciding this, is Elbridge Colby. | |
| And you may remember that Elbridge Colby was one of the people that the neocons tried so hard to stop his confirmation to the high levels of the Pentagon because his view has long been that we have no interest in a lot of the wars we fight, including in Ukraine, including in the Middle East. | |
| We ought to be focusing on China and the Pacific. | |
| And neocon groups that obviously want the United States focused on the Middle East, fighting in the Middle East, funding Ukraine, were desperate to keep him out. | |
| There are a few others. | |
| Some of those non-interventionists that made high levels of the Pentagon, like Dan Caldwell, ended up getting fired because they fabricated leaking scandals against them that were completely fake. | |
| We'll do a show on that one time. | |
| But there are still several of them. | |
| And so Albert Colby, when he announced this policy, like, look, we were going to ship all these munitions and missiles to Ukraine, but now we can't. | |
| The reason we can't, and we have gone over this before, is because U.S. stockpiles are dangerously low. | |
| We don't have these missiles and munitions to give, at least not consistent with making sure that we have enough in the case we want to fight another war. | |
| And the reasons are obvious. | |
| We've been sending missiles and munitions and drones and everything else we have to Ukraine and to Israel to fuel their wars. | |
| Israel has multiple wars, not just in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, in Lebanon, Syria. | |
| It's bombed the Houthis many times. | |
| Obviously attacked Iran. | |
| The United States has been arming and funding and just sending huge amounts of weaponry to Ukraine. | |
| And also, remember, President Trump re-instituted and escalated President Biden's campaign of bombing the Houthi. | |
| And the idea was we're going to obliterate the Houthis. | |
| And after a month, President Trump got the report and saw how much money we were spending, how many weapons we were using, how much money it was costing, and nothing was really getting done. | |
| We were killing a bunch of civilians and not really degrading the Houthis at all. | |
| And they told him, oh, sir, we just need nine more months. | |
| But he ended it because he saw he was being deceived again. | |
| And we're very low on stockpiles, military stockpiles, even though we spend three times more than any other country on the planet and more than the next 15 countries combined. | |
| And this was one of the reasons why, although we've been told that Iran, Israel, and the United States together achieved this massive, glorious victory, war victory. | |
| Netanyahu and Trump are war victors, war heroes. | |
| When Trump called on Netanyahu to be immediately pardoned or have his corruption trial stopped, it's like, look, he just, with me, won a historic war. | |
| It's very important for Trump and Israel to insist to people that they won this great war, this historic war in 12 days. | |
| The reality is the Israelis really couldn't fight that war for much longer. | |
| You saw, with fewer and fewer missiles shot by Iraq, Iran rather, not even their most sophisticated yet, that more and more were landing. | |
| We don't know the full extent of the damage in Israel because journalists will tell you they were absolutely and aggressively censored by the military from showing any hits on government or military buildings. | |
| The only things they were allowed to show were the occasional hits by the Iranians on a civilian building here, a residential building there, to create the false impression that they were targeting and only hitting civilian buildings. | |
| But a lot, Israel suffered a lot of damage. | |
| President Trump said that himself, that Israel took a huge pounding. | |
| They didn't have air defenses any longer. | |
| They were running out. | |
| And the United States couldn't continue to supply them. | |
| We were running out of our own missiles that we use to shoot down Iranian missiles. | |
| Israel and the United States didn't end to that war at least as much as Iran did because we were so low on our stockpiles because we're fighting so many wars or funding so many wars. | |
| And so the argument in the Pentagon and Alberts Colby is, look, we just don't have these weapons to keep giving to Iran. | |
| We need them for ourselves. | |
| If we keep giving them to Ukraine, rather, if we keep giving them to Ukraine, we're not going to have any on our own. | |
| And our priority should be our military and our protection and not Ukraine's. | |
| If this were really a difference between Ukraine winning the war if we give them the weapons as defined by NATO, which was always a pipe dream, but the definition was expelling every Russian troop from every inch of Ukraine, including Crimea, which the Russians would never, ever allow to happen. | |
| But if it were a difference between Ukraine winning or Ukraine just getting rolled over, then I would say, okay, maybe there's a debate to be had. | |
| But the reality is we've been feeding them weapons into the fourth year now. | |
| It's four whole years, coming up on four years, three and a half years of not just the United States sending billions and billions of dollars, but also Europe. | |
| And Ukraine hasn't been saved. | |
| Ukraine has been destroyed. | |
| Ukrainians haven't been freed. | |
| They've been slaughtered in mass number. | |
| And that's all that's going to happen if we keep sending weapons there. | |
| Now, of course, the Europeans are relying on this fear-mongering that Putin is not going to stop with Ukraine. | |
| He wants to eat up all of Ukraine. | |
| He's demonstrated many times that he's willing to do a peace deal that secures a buffer zone in eastern Ukraine, that protects the Russian, the ethnic Russians who speak Russian and feel they've been aggressively discriminated against by the Kiev government. | |
| The people of Crimea and various provinces in the east feel closer to Moscow than they do to Kiev. | |
| They identify as Russians and not Ukrainians. | |
| So as long as Russia feels that A, they can protect those people and B, create a buffer zone between NATO and the West on the one hand and Russia on the other so it can't go right up to their border, they've always said they're willing to reach a deal. | |
| And remember, they almost reached a deal Ukraine and Russia did at the very beginning of the war that didn't call for the complete sacrifice of Ukrainian sovereignty, but only those kinds of buffer zones or semi-autonomous regions or letting them vote. | |
| And that was the deal that Victoria Newland and Boris Johnson swept in and told Ukraine they can't keep and they wanted this war to be a prolonged war to destroy Russia. | |
| So this fear-mongering that Putin's going to eat up all of Ukraine and then he's going to move to Poland and then he's going to, you know, he's like Hitler, he's going to sweep through Eastern Europe and then Central Europe, back to Austria and Germany, and then he's going to go to Paris again. | |
| This is idiotic, idiotic. | |
| The Russians have had a hard time defeating Ukraine, albeit with, obviously, Ukraine's being aggressively backed by NATO. | |
| But even if they weren't, they were willing to do a deal that just provides Russian security. | |
| But war has always revealed Ryan fear-mongering. | |
| I said they've convinced a lot of people if we don't back the Ukrainians, Russia is going to just roll over and take over annexed Ukraine and rebuild the Soviet Union under this kind of view of greater Russia that Putin supposedly has in mind, the way Israel is actually doing, creating greater Israel. | |
| There's so much evidence that contradicts that, so little evidence that supports it. | |
| But at the end of the day, where are these people going to come from who are going to fight on the front lines in Ukraine? | |
| There aren't many left. | |
| We can drown that country with billions of dollars of weapons and the war is still going to end up the way it's going to end up. | |
| You may not like it. | |
| It may be sad to you. | |
| You may wish it were a different way, but that is just the hardened reality. | |
| And there have been experts saying it very bravely because they were. | |
| I mean, Jeffrey Sachs used to go on Morning Joe all the time, all the time, until he started saying this. | |
| And he hasn't been on again. | |
| People get booted out of mainstream platforms. | |
| They get called all sorts of names, Russian agents, crime on propaganda, et cetera. | |
| But who cares? | |
| Those people were the ones who are absolutely right, which is why we kept putting them on our show. | |
| They were by far the most convincing people. | |
| And that is the nature of the war in Ukraine and the U.S. role in it. | |
| Even if we wanted to keep supplying the weapons, we simply don't have it because we've been fueling and arming far too many wars, our own Israel's, Ukraine's, and that's what happens. | |
| Thank you. | |
| We're going to get to a few more questions in just a minute, but I have a very important topic to discuss with you first, which is about your dog. | |
| You know, very few things are more important to me than my dog. | |
| My kids. | |
| Yeah, my kids, but not a lot of other things. | |
| So my dogs are very important to me. | |
| And if your dog is constantly itching, scratching, or dealing with hot spots, you've got to check out Cote Defense. | |
| It's an all-natural solution that's been helping so many dogs. | |
| And here's why this company first caught my attention. | |
| I've seen firsthand. | |
| I have 25 rescue dogs at home. | |
| I have another, we have a shelter with another, the numbers vary, but 150, 200. | |
| And I've seen so often how dogs, both at home and in the shelter, develop things like yeast infections, especially in their paws and their ears and their skin folds. | |
| It's more common than people realize. | |
| But there are treatments that are usually doled out, like steroids or antibiotics or Apiquel or Citapoint. | |
| And sometimes they cover up the symptoms for a while, but not always, but sometimes. | |
| But even then, they don't fix the root cause. | |
| Some cases, they actually make things worse over time. | |
| Coat defense is different. | |
| Their deadly preventative power works as a dry shampoo, odor eliminator, an anti-itch powder. | |
| But what makes it special is that it eliminates yeast naturally by changing the terrain on your dog's skin so that yeast and bacteria can't survive. | |
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| They also make an aloe-based sensitive skin shampoo that calms irritated skin, preserves the natural oils and microbiome, and is totally free of parabanes, sulfates, and anything artificial. | |
| Honestly, I've been, I used to be, say I was surprised. | |
| I'm now kind of accustomed, but it is still striking reading the testimonials and seeing their products firsthand. | |
| I've heard from so many people ever since we started talking about this product that this is the only thing that really has worked after years of frustration with dogs finally itch-free and healthy again. | |
| That's why I'm happy to partner with Cote Defense. | |
| So if your dog has been struggling and nothing else has helped, go to coatefense.com and use code GLEN for 15% off your first order. | |
| That's codedefense.com, code Glenn. | |
| All right, let's get back to the questions. | |
| No more prefacing, no more explanation. | |
| I think you've heard enough. | |
| So I'm just going to dive right into this. | |
| I think it's the third question. | |
| It comes from Book Wench. | |
| And this person, I believe, is a wench. | |
| Self-described. | |
| I'm not being insulting. | |
| They're a wench. | |
| And they really like books. | |
| And if you're going to be a wench, I think it's better to be a well-read wench than some like ignorant one. | |
| It's a good friend of the show, often asks some really great questions. | |
| And here's the one submitted by this wench tonight. | |
| Quote, last night's episode on the nerd brigade, the CBS Paramount Settlement, and Nico Perino's discussion of Trump's assault on free speech was very disturbing. | |
| Talking about our show last night, if you haven't seen it, that's a good summary of it. | |
| But we talked about the integration of big tech companies like Meta and OpenAI and Palantir increasingly into the media, while at the same time, Trump and big media corporations are reaching all sorts of nefarious agreements about what their coverage should and shouldn't be. | |
| We've seen giant corporations and the government working in cahoots for years, and we now have a trillion-dollar defense budget with Palantir lurking in the background, ready to make pervasive settlement more efficient. | |
| Do you think we've arrived at fascism yet, or am I being just a drama queen? | |
| One of the, I'll give you a parallel example before I attempt to make this point, rather than just addressing this one directly. | |
| Oftentimes, people focus on what words apply, like what inflammatory words apply, what shocking or extreme political jargon applies. | |
| And even if that jargon is important, even if it has fixed meaning, even if it deserves to be applied, traditionally I've tried to avoid arguments over words or labels because so many people feel so strongly about them that even if they might be open to your argument on the substance and the merits, the minute you use that word, a lot of people just shut off. | |
| And that was why it took me a few months to call what Israel was doing in Gaza a genocide, not because I doubted that the term applied, but just because there are a lot of people open to hearing the facts about what Israel is doing in Gaza and seeing how horrific and criminal and atrocious it is. | |
| But the minute you use the word genocide, they just kind of instantly turn away from it. | |
| And I often make the assessment, I'd rather have the channel open for communication than use a word that I know that's just going to close that channel. | |
| A lot of times, though, it does become necessary to use that term, not just, I don't mean genocide, but a term that can have that effect because it's indispensable to understanding the situation. | |
| And that's how I came to see the word genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing even more so. | |
| You can't really talk about Gaza without talking about that intent. | |
| And it's not my guessing about that. | |
| It's based on the statements that the Israelis have made about their war objectives and then their actions that align with it. | |
| But in general, I like to avoid those kinds of wars, those kind of words. | |
| Fascism is definitely one of them. | |
| My problem with fascism is similar to my problem with genocide. | |
| And there are a lot of other words like this. | |
| There are a lot of words that get thrown around that even if they have a clear and fixed meaning, the people throwing them around aren't very capable of defining in a very concrete, specific way what the words mean. | |
| Like fascism to me has almost become colloquial for just like Hitler-like or authoritarian or using aggressive racist themes combined with abuse of government power. | |
| And the word and concept fascism is a lot more complex than that. | |
| It involves a lot more prongs than that. | |
| People study fascism for years in universities. | |
| There are graduate programs where you study fascism. | |
| And it's a philosophy. | |
| It's an ideology that was developed in a very specific historical context. | |
| It ended up shaping the Italian government in the 1930s under Mussolini and then, of course, the Germans. | |
| You could argue Franco and Spain also were expressions of it. | |
| But I just feel like throwing the word fascism around at Trump or the Republicans or especially if all it means is like a kind of aggressive authoritarianism, it just doesn't serve any purpose because I think the Biden administration was extremely authoritarian in lots of different ways. | |
| I think most administrations the last 25 years have been. | |
| Very few people spent more time vocally, vehemently condemning Bush and Cheney more than I did. | |
| I wrote books about it, including arguments that they ought to be prosecuted for things they did, spying on Americans without warrants, torturing people, kidnapping them off the streets of Europe. | |
| But I don't think I ever called them fascist. | |
| Not because had someone studied done that, I would have been offended or argued that it didn't apply, but just because I don't think it helps the conversation any. | |
| And one of the things I did point out last night in this context with the word fascism is, and this is what bothered me in the Biden administration, by the way. | |
| I think one of the worst things the Biden administration did is essentially commandeered the power of big tech to control political discourse in the United States, dictating to big tech what they ought to suppress and what they ought to permit. | |
| And in doing so, they absolutely warped and suppressed crucial debates about COVID, about Ukraine, about even election integrity that ought to have been aired. | |
| And one of the things that bothered me about it so much was that you had the government on the one hand and corporate power on the other in the form of big tech. | |
| And the Biden administration was basically annexing the power of big tech and corporate power to control free speech. | |
| And I often pointed out that, ironically, though Democrats love to call Donald Trump a fascist, uniting state and corporate power, eliminating the separation between them, where they each have different objectives, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not, but uniting them as one entity working toward exactly the same goal, that was what Hitler did. | |
| There was no arms industry that wasn't under the control of the government. | |
| There was no private sector not under control of the government, all working toward a common theme and a common unity. | |
| And that is what's happening here as well, as these major corporations like OpenAI and Palantir and Facebook more and more directly and expansively integrate into the military, into the intelligence community, into the government. | |
| But there are other factors of fascism as well, other prongs of fascism as well, and people debate it. | |
| And so if I were to say that, oh, this is fascism, the Trump government is fascist, or the Biden administration is fascist, it might be satisfying to people who want to hear that new believe that. | |
| But for a lot of people, they would just turn that off as, you know, Fox junk in the case of Biden or MSNBC junk in the case of Trump. | |
| And oftentimes that is what it is, just junk. | |
| It's people spewing it without having any idea what those terms mean just to get maximum emotional catharsis or provoke emotional reactions. | |
| And I would much rather do what we did last night, which is spend 45 minutes or 50 minutes, maybe an hour, however much we spent, showing people exactly what's happening, showing this integration between corporate and state power for surveillance purposes, for military purposes, for intelligence gathering. | |
| Talk about the dangers of it in a way that I hope people are open-minded because we're showing them the evidence. | |
| The minute you start using terms that they're kind of inherently going to repel or just recoil from, I feel like I can call it fascism and congratulate myself, but I don't feel like it does much good. | |
| I feel like it actually does the reverse. | |
| And if these terms had very clear, agreed to specific meanings that everyone understood, I wouldn't have a problem with using them when they applied. | |
| But since they don't at all, I just, I think these words obfuscate. | |
| But I did point out last night, and I will say again, that integrating corporate and state power is a hallmark of fascism. | |
| And whether all the other hallmarks of fascism are present, it's extremely dangerous for the reasons we delved into extensively last night. | |
| If you want to understand more how we think about that and what we said, you can, if you haven't already, check out last night's show. | |
| All right, next question. | |
| Kay Cutliss, who says this, have you had a chance to watch the Peter Thiel interview with Ross Dufaff? | |
| Feels stutters and hesitates when he's asked, quote, should the human race continues? | |
| He also thinks our biggest problem is, quote, stagnation, and that anyone who's weary or cautious about the risks of AI, biotech, and nuclear war is, quote, the Antichrist. | |
| And he unironically says that Gretor Thunberg is more likely to bring about a one-world totalitarian state. | |
| Isn't it deeply concerning that these tech billionaires think of themselves as philosophers, especially when their insane pseudo-religious cult holds so much political influence? | |
| Do we have the clip of this, by the way? | |
| I don't think we do. | |
| It's my fault. | |
| I don't think I asked for it. | |
| So I wish we had it, but if we don't, it's because of my omission. | |
| I don't want to be too cavalier about paraphrasing this. | |
| The question did do a good job of describing it. | |
| I'd rather show the actual words, and maybe we'll be able to pull that up. | |
| We're going to check for you. | |
| If you haven't heard it, it's really worth watching. | |
| It definitely, I understand why it provoked this question. | |
| So let me focus on the part that I do actually feel comfortable paraphrasing, which is Ross Dufat did ask Peter Thiel, do you favor the continuation of the human race? | |
| Is this something that you actually think is a good thing? | |
| And Elon Musk has been asked this before. | |
| Part of what Elon Musk wants to do is make sure humanity is multi-planetary. | |
| Start with life on Mars. | |
| And a lot of people think, oh, you must think that's because humanity on the Earth is doomed. | |
| Otherwise, why is it so important to you to make humanity multiplanetary? | |
| There are the reasons why you might, but that's a suspicion. | |
| And not just to make it multiplanetary because the Earth is doomed, but also to transform what it means to be human. | |
| And there's been this kind Of philosophy that has been popular among these more extreme Silicon Valley types of transhumanism, something that transcends humanity or fundamentally transforms it. | |
| Typically, I think merging humanity with technology or with machine for a superior being, it's definitely how a lot of them think of artificial intelligence. | |
| I one time got a root canal, which I hate as much as anybody. | |
| I think I hate it more, but probably everyone hates it equally. | |
| But one of the only good things about it is because it lasts off in two hours, I have the time to sit and listen to podcasts that ordinarily I wouldn't have time to listen to or the inclination just because I have to have my brain distracted. | |
| I can't, even if my mouth is totally numb and I don't feel it. | |
| I don't like hearing what the dentist is doing. | |
| I don't want to think about what tools he's using and why. | |
| There's almost no job I'd rather have leaf than being a dentist, just constantly being in someone's mouth every day looking at their teeth. | |
| But whatever. | |
| So I try and distract myself. | |
| And one of the ways I did so in the last few months is I listened to Mark Zuckerberg's appearance on Joe Rogan. | |
| And Mark Zuckerberg was talking at length about his vision that soon we're going to take all these devices, virtual reality devices and AI devices, and they're no longer going to be exterior instruments that we wear, like goggles on our head or phones or earpieces or things in our phone. | |
| It's going to be part of our anatomy. | |
| And he was talking about drilling into brains in order to have this technology part of the human brain. | |
| And at first he said the first use is going to be medical. | |
| Somebody has a neurological injury or some other serious neurological problem. | |
| This machine will help them with that functionality. | |
| But critically he was talking as well about an ultimate merger between technology and human beings, which in one way may not change the nature of human beings in the beginning. | |
| It's just kind of another instrument. | |
| You know, you can imagine this earpiece. | |
| I'm wearing an earpiece because, you know, I need to be able to communicate with people I work with. | |
| But say you wear an earpiece of the kind people use commonly now to listen to things on a computer connect by Bluetooth to their phones. | |
| Does it really change humanity if instead of just having this come in and out, it's just now implanted in our ears? | |
| Does it really change humanity? | |
| But when you start talking about the brain and changing how our brains think and produce thought, or having AI be the future of what a human being should be, but in a spirit form, that's clearly transhumanistic. | |
| That's transforming what a human being fundamentally is. | |
| There's all kinds of questions that come with that. | |
| If you believe in a soul, does this have a soul? | |
| And the way Mark Zuckerberg was so cavalier in talking about it, I found very creepy. | |
| And let me show you this clip. | |
| Now, let me just say one thing. | |
| I think the question reference that Peter Thiel stuttered when he answered and kind of had big pauses. | |
| Peter Thiel always does that. | |
| And the reason is because, and he's talked about this before, he's autistic. | |
| And that means you don't have the same capacity for social interaction. | |
| And one of the things Peter Thiel said, and I find a lot of what Peter Thiel says disturbing, but one of the things he said that I found super interesting is a few years ago and he was talking about autism. | |
| And he was saying that in a lot of ways, he thinks that being autistic, not severely autistic, where you aren't verbal, you can't interact with people at all, you know, somewhere on the spectrum of where he places himself, that the benefit of it is that when you don't have autism and you're very clued into social cues, | |
| and we are social and political animals, we do interact as groups, we are not solitary beings, that if you're so aware of social cues and you're constantly receiving what social cues are, in a way it's making you more conformist, it's kind of morphing you into society. | |
| You understand what society expects of you, you understand what society thinks, you understand what you're supposed to say in certain situations, in most situations. | |
| And he was saying that that can really make you conformist. | |
| It can kind of just make you part of this blob. | |
| Whereas he sees his autism as almost a gift because feeling detached or excluded or isolated from majoritarian societal sentiments and ethos and mores forces you to see things differently, to look at things differently. | |
| And then that, of course, is the kind of thing that can lead to innovation, invention. | |
| Steve Jobs was not autistic, but he actually has said in interviews, people don't like to talk about this, but it's so true, that had he not taken LSD and had experience with other hallucinogens, he never would have invented the iPad or various Apple products, that it was that kind of transcendent thought that enabled him to have this vision that he otherwise wouldn't have had. | |
| And on some level, mind-altering drugs can be analogized to autism. | |
| And so, yes, Peter Thiel stutters, he stumbles. | |
| Oftentimes, it seems like he's sweating or, you know, having difficulty answering the question, but in reality, it's just, it's his autism and the way he speaks. | |
| But it does affect how people perceive him. | |
| And so let me show you this clip that the question asked, because I think it's really worth hearing him in his own words. | |
| Let's go ahead and show that. | |
| It's loading. | |
| There's that like pretty... | |
| Can we start it over? | |
| I'm not hearing it. | |
| I don't know if the audience is hearing that. | |
| Thank you. | |
| I can see it. | |
| We're working on it. | |
| At some point, we'll be able to Figure that out, but anyway, like I said, that part of it I feel confident describing. | |
| Hopefully, we'll be able to show it to you just so you can hear it in rows. | |
| Okay, let's go ahead. | |
| I think we're ready. | |
| I think you're ready. | |
| There you go. | |
| Yeah, I still don't hear sound. | |
| You're hesitant. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I need the question. | |
| We have to start with the question. | |
| I would. | |
| You would prefer the human race to endure, right? | |
| You're hesitating. | |
| I don't know. | |
| I would. | |
| I would. | |
| This is a long hesitation. | |
| This is a long hesitation. | |
| There's so many questions in place. | |
| Should the human race survive? | |
| Yes. | |
| Okay. | |
| But I also would like us to radically solve these problems. | |
| And so, you know, it's always, I don't know, you know, yeah, transhumanism is this, you know, the ideal was this radical transformation where your human natural body gets transformed into an immortal body. | |
| And there's a critique of, let's say, the trans people in a sexual context, or I don't know, a transvestite is someone who changes their clothes and cross-dresses. | |
| And a transsexual is someone where you change your penis into a vagina. | |
| And we can then debate how well those surgeries work. | |
| But we want more transformation than that. | |
| The critique is not that it's weird and unnatural. | |
| It's, man, it's so pathetically little. | |
| And we want more than cross-dressing or changing your sex organs. | |
| We want you to be able to change your heart and change your mind and change your whole body. | |
| And then Orthodox Christianity, by the way, the critique Orthodox Christianity has of this is these things don't go far enough. | |
| Like that transhumanism is just changing your body, but you also need to transform. | |
| Okay. | |
| So there it is. | |
| And let me say a couple things about this. | |
| People who think about changes in the future are often looked at as strange and weird because generally the future is something we can't really imagine. | |
| I used to, I remember when I was young, I'm still young, but I remember when I was younger, when I was a child, and I used to go visit my grandparents and they were born, my grandfather was born in 1904, my grandmother was born in 1910. | |
| And I used to spend a lot of time over there when I was younger. | |
| And I constantly thought about how bizarre it was that they were born into a world that didn't have airplanes, didn't have radio, didn't have television, didn't really have phones. | |
| And then during their lifetime, like all this technology that previously had been considered unthinkable, like how is something going to fly in the air over the earth? | |
| How are people going to talk to each other using like weird connective machines? | |
| Or television that started off black and white and then became color or film that started off silent and then became with audio. | |
| All these things were unthinkable at the beginning. | |
| And I always think, well, it must be so strange to be born into a world where this unthinkable technology doesn't exist and then suddenly it arrives and it just changes your world. | |
| And all those technologies obviously had a major effect on the world. | |
| And then I had that in my own experience. | |
| I was born in 1967. | |
| So it wasn't really until the mid-90s when the internet really started to become something that is recognizable when we compare it to now. | |
| And I was, you know, 24, 25 when the internet started really being something that I used in my life. | |
| And obviously, that's a major transformative innovation. | |
| And so if you had thought about the internet before it happened, it would seem inconceivable. | |
| And so people who describe the future in ways that seem inconceivable always come off as very strange and weird. | |
| So I think we ought to acknowledge that. | |
| But I want to say two things on the other side as kind of big caveats. | |
| One is the idea of a billionaire, until you really interact with billionaires, it's hard to explain what they're like. | |
| And I've had pretty close interactions with many of them. | |
| Obviously, I founded a media company with one of them, Pierre Midiar, who I think is worth like $12 billion or whatever. | |
| And a lot of other people in Silicon Valley whom I've gotten to know some. | |
| Being rich obviously doesn't describe that. | |
| Like the amount of wealth that you have, like when you're a billionaire, you don't think of yourself as just rich. | |
| You start thinking about, you know, what you can do to change the world, change the government, like change countries, change culture. | |
| It's so much power. | |
| It's so much money. | |
| And with power and money comes, in almost every case, being surrounded by sycophants, people constantly flattering you, constantly saying yes to everything that you think and say and want. | |
| Because power means you can do so many things for people that benefit their lives. | |
| And if they know that you have that, they're going to want to flatter you so that there's a chance you're going to give those things to them. | |
| And obviously, it just, it makes people in that situation so detached from reality and so enamored of themselves just because all their influences are telling them that they are brilliant and that they're genius and that they see things people don't see. | |
| And sometimes that may be true. | |
| There are probably billionaires. | |
| I guess I know a couple who I would consider extremely smart. | |
| But the majority of them, including ones I've worked with, I can tell you, I'm not going to say they're dumb. | |
| They're mediocre. | |
| Sometimes they have like an idiot savant skill that turned into a company that just, you know, exploded at the right time. | |
| Everyone's success has partly some luck. | |
| You have to be in the right place at the right time. | |
| And a lot of these people who walk around thinking they're brilliant and have the power with their billions of dollars to bring those visions to fruition and to convince people that they should are not even remotely close to as smart as they think. | |
| And so, when they start getting these visions and everyone around them tells them how brilliant they are and everything about their lives is reinforcing their own brilliance, I do think that can be a very twisted and dangerous dynamic. | |
| And then there is this very specific billionaire culture, especially the ones that came out of Silicon Valley, that believes that they are the kinds of people who society ought to progress and evolve and transform into, and that the society just doesn't facilitate that. | |
| The society punishes success, it impedes transformative kind of ubermensch, to use a Nietzschean term, expression. | |
| And they have ideas like they want to just start new societies. | |
| They want to like buy a country or buy so much land that it can become its own country. | |
| And they just create a society from scratch where they're the overlords and they create rules. | |
| And obviously it then extends to like, maybe we shouldn't even do it on Earth. | |
| Let's start our own society on Mars or wherever. | |
| And it becomes this very utopian and dystopian vision driven by a tiny number of people who have no real pushback or tension between the things that come out of their mouths, from their brains, into their mouths, and then they can try and make reality and have the power to make reality. | |
| That a lot of that is, I think, very alarming. | |
| We ought to be very, very, very skeptical of that, even in the cases where it might be promising. | |
| And finally, I would say that, and a lot of this depends on what you think. | |
| If you're completely a nihilist and an atheist, and you just believe everything is just kind of nihilistic evolution, no purpose, no spirit, no soul. | |
| We just keep evolving, keep evolving over millions of years, and human beings is just where we are now is just one stop along the way, and our next destination is something totally different, it probably wouldn't bother you. | |
| But if you have a kind of idea of something essentialist about being human, that turning us into beings that exist in an AI vat and eliminating us, every part of us except our intellect, that that may not be an advancement, that that may be a destruction of humanity while maintaining the facade of it. | |
| This is the kind of stuff that I think requires a great deal of introspection, a great deal of thought, a great deal of debate involving the whole society. | |
| But because billionaires have this ability to just push things along with no constraints, how AI is just exploding, really with no safeguards. | |
| I mean, there's some superficial safeguards, like if you use ChatGPT or the commercial ones, they don't let it do certain things that it could easily do, but you can imagine how it's actually being developed. | |
| And the people who don't want those safeguards to exist are using AI without those safeguards. | |
| None of this is being understood. | |
| None of this is being analyzed or studied. | |
| And I'm not an alarmist at all about technology, even including AI. | |
| But I think it's more this kind of narcissism and this self-adoration that naturally develops in billionaires that gives them far too much confidence in their own ability to push humanity into directions that they think it should go and really don't need much debate in order to do it because their brains are sufficiently advanced to make those decisions and to see those things on their own and the proof is that they became billionaires. | |
| That's how the reasoning works. | |
| That I think is the most dangerous dynamic rather than the specific things. | |
| And yeah, when Peter Thiel starts saying, I'm not sure humanity should continue. | |
| Okay, I'll say yes just because you obviously think it's extremely creepy if I don't, but I'm then going to add that like maybe we should exist in some other form. | |
| That I think people are, I hope people are disturbed by that. | |
| I'm not saying necessarily opposed to it, but I hope they're disturbed by it in a way that they kind of demand some time and reflection in order to consider. | |
| All right, so there's a couple other questions. | |
| It would take quite a while, I think, to delve into those. | |
| These are even more complex ones. | |
| So I think we're going to leave it at that. | |
| As I said, we will not be here tomorrow because of the holiday. | |
| I assume you won't be either, but we will be back next week at our regular time. | |
| And we have just one more quick message for you. | |
| All right, so that concludes our show for this evening. | |
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