Annie Jacobsen warns nuclear war could kill 5 billion in 72 minutes, exposing the U.S. triad’s 1,770 ready weapons—some launchable in under 60 seconds—against Russia’s 26-minute strike window and America’s 44 interceptors with 50% success rates. Ukraine’s June 23rd cluster missile incident over Crimea underscores escalation risks, while Putin’s threats and Trump’s treaty withdrawals mirror Cold War-era dangers like the 1983 Soviet near-miss. Jacobsen links AI’s unchecked growth to defense-industry influence and China’s unrestricted advancements, but cautions that human biases may limit its potential despite Kurzweil’s sentience predictions. Both agree nuclear war could derail progress, yet Rogan notes modern life’s safety improvements—while Jacobsen urges vigilance against complacency in an era of plausible global catastrophe. [Automatically generated summary]
Well, six previous books on war weapons, U.S. national security secrets.
Imagine how many people told me they dedicated their lives to preventing nuclear World War III.
And so during the previous administration, fire and fury rhetoric, I began to think, what happens if deterrence fails?
That idea of prevention.
What happens?
And I took that question to the people who advise the president, who work at Stratcom, who, you know, command the nuclear sub-forces, and learned that it doesn't end well.
Not only does it not end well, 5 billion people are dead at the end of 72 minutes.
Yeah, you'd have to know in advance that we're about to launch.
The whole thing is terrifying.
It's also, I don't see a way that it like, if you think about the timeline between 1945 and today, it's kind of extraordinary that no one has launched a nuke.
But it almost seems like a matter of time.
Like it'll be a blip in history.
Like we look at it now.
Oh, because of mutually assured self-destruction or mutually assured destruction, that's what's prevented people from using nuclear weapons.
Like when?
Now?
Until now?
Like what is 80 years in terms of human history?
It's nothing.
It's a tiny little blink.
It's a little nothing.
And it could go sideways at any moment, and then we're back to the cave era.
In the words of Carl Sagan, who's the author of Nuclear Winter.
But I think what's also crazy to your point about 1945 is like when this was all set up, when the nuclear arsenals were beginning, and I take the reader through it really quickly because I want them to just get to what happens at nuclear launch.
I mean, the book is really about nuclear launch to nuclear winter.
But the buildup is fascinating because, first of all, it happened so incredibly fast.
And it happened under incredibly secret classified terms.
So there was no like outside opinion.
And originally, nuclear war was set up to be fought and won, which itself is absurd.
And we know that now.
So the rules of the game have fundamentally changed.
And yet, the systems are all the same.
That's what's, I think, the most dangerous component of today versus, let's say, 1952 when the thermonuclears began.
unidentified
And when you say the systems are the same, what do you mean exactly?
Imagine you're out there in a sailboat just enjoying your time.
what a beautiful place to be in the middle of the ocean and you see um what do you think about the stories of ufos hovering over nuclear bases and shutting down their weapons i I know you've done a lot of research on this stuff.
You know, I actually haven't done a lot of research on that specific narrative.
I know of it.
I know of it for sure.
And it's, I think, I mean, I always approach the UFO phenomena with, or I try to at least, with like the eye of, or the point of view of Carl Jung.
This idea that it's, that what leads here is our perception of things and our sort of deep shadow self of fear.
And once the nuclear weapon was invented, man, I mean, our grandparents had to confront this new, fundamental new reality that just simply didn't exist before.
And then it was, that's with the atomic weapons.
And then in the 50s, once thermonuclear weapons were invented, and the thermonuclear weapon is essentially an atomic, a thermonuclear weapon is so powerful, it uses an atomic bomb like from Hiroshima as its triggering mechanism.
And so the order of magnitude of destruction in an instant, according to Carl Jung, who looked at the UFO phenomena and the nuclear weapons phenomena hand in hand, encourage anyone to read his stuff about it because he has a much sort of, you know, bird's eye view of it all about why that's so terrifying to people.
So the narratives, to my eye, the narratives of nuclear, of alien ships hovering over nuclear bases, I've never spoken to a first-hand witness who experienced that.
But I would see that in terms of the narrative of Carl Jung.
I think he left a lot more open to interpretation.
I think his, my read of his analogy was more like the way that hundreds of years ago or thousands of years ago when Christianity was first being developed, people saw existential threats as part of the narrative of God.
So his, my read of Carl Jung is that he's saying now in the mechanized modern world, the existential threats, the sort of damnation, is tied to machines which is tied to, you know, is easily tied to little machines from, or big machines from outer space.
That was his take on it, which I think is interesting.
So I think we know a lot more now than we knew then.
I mean, this is like, the reason why I'm bringing this up is like the people that have hope, one of the hopes is that aliens are observing us and they're going to wait until we are about to do something really stupid and then they're going to come down and shut everything down.
And that sort of, but again, that's a bit, to my eye, like the deus ex bachina idea that God would intervene and, you know, save the faithful and or rather the, you know, in this situation, it might be that he's going to save those people that are paying attention.
So the Young thing is interesting, but we know more now.
We know more now about possible other dimensions that we can access.
We know more now about planets in the Goldilocks zone.
We know more now about all these whistleblowers that have come out and talked about crashed retrievement programs where they're re-engineer back engineering these things and trying to understand what these things are.
And Diana Pasolka's work where she's talking about how they're essentially donations.
These crafts are donations that people are being given these things so that they could see this extraordinary technology and try to figure out how to make it.
But that's one of the only ways that I see, like if we did get to a point that we launched nuclear weapons at each other, everything is over so fast.
And if I was an alien species, an intelligent species from somewhere else, and I recognize that this is a real possibility and that the Earth has all these different forms of life other than human beings that are going to get destroyed as well.
You know, it's going to wipe out who knows how many different species.
I mean, it's going to kill everything.
And even the people that are left over, what are you left with?
Whatever 2 billion people that still survive, where and what?
What do you have left?
What is the environment like?
How polluted is everything?
What kind of mutations are going to come from their offspring?
So I write the book in essentially three acts, like the first 24 minutes, the next 24 minutes, the last 24 minutes, and then nuclear winter.
So nuclear winter is very well described by a fellow called Professor Brian Toon, who I interview in the book.
He was one of the original five authors of, do you remember the nuclear winter theory of our sort of high school years?
Yes, right?
So that was, Carl Sagan was the lead author on the paper.
Toon was the young student, and he's dedicated decades to looking at nuclear winter.
Now, originally it was very paw-pawed by the Defense Department.
It was said, this is Soviet propaganda.
This is never going to happen.
And the computer systems and climate modeling have changed to the degree where we can see not only is nuclear winter what was thought in the 80s, it's actually much worse.
So whereby originally they thought there would be a year of ice sheets across large bodies of water from Iowa to Ukraine across the mid-latitudes of the globe.
Now that could be up to seven or ten years.
So think about that much frozen land for that long.
You have the death of agriculture.
You have a complete, like you are talking about, you have the complete disruption of the ability for people to grow food and eat food.
Well, I get into this in the book, which is terrifying.
So, okay, let me back up for a second of how good our technology is.
So we have a system in space, a satellite system called CIBBERS, Space-Base Infrared Satellite System.
It's like the Paul Revere of the 21st century.
It is parked over our enemies that have nuclear weapons, and it can see and detect a nuclear launch of an ICBM in a fraction of a second, Joe.
Confirmed fact.
That's why nuclear war begins and ends in 72 minutes, because the CIBERS satellite system sees the launch, and then the U.S. nuclear command and control goes into begins.
And by the way, an ICBM cannot be redirected and it cannot be recalled.
And also a hypersonic missile, let's just say it went from Russia to the United States.
It might take an hour.
A ballistic missile launched from a launch pad outside Moscow takes 26 minutes and 40 seconds to get to Washington, D.C. That number is not going to change.
That's gravity.
That's physics.
That's what it was in 1958, 59, and that's what it is today.
As I explain in the book, and again, as was relayed to me by defense officials, we can't shoot down ballistic missiles, long-range ballistic missiles, with any kind of certainty or accuracy.
That is, the Iron Dome is almost like terrible for nuclear war, you know, for people to understand how dangerous nuclear war is, because the Iron Dome can shoot down short-range missiles and mid-range missiles.
So even the U.S. EGA systems out on the sea, the Navy systems, shot down some of those Iranian drones.
But they can't shoot down ballistic missiles.
You want like the five-minute or the 30-second ballistic missile lesson because this is what I need.
I write for the layman.
You know, I think part of the reason why nuclear war is not spoken about in the general public is because it's set up to be intimidating.
You know, you'll hear a lot of defense people and analysts using very esoteric language and it kind of excludes the average Joe or Jane, Joe or Annie.
So I ask really basic questions like, how does a ballistic missile work?
And it's very simple.
That 26 minutes and 40 seconds I told you about.
So there's three phases of a ballistic missile.
It launches, it has boost phase.
First five minutes.
Imagine a rocket.
You've seen launches.
That fire coming out the bottom.
That boosts the rocket for five minutes.
That's when it's detectable from space.
Then it enters mid-course phase, which is going to be 20 minutes, arcing across the globe to its target.
That is the only place where the interceptor missile can get it, if it can.
And it's 500 miles up.
And it's traveling at something like Mach 23, 14,000 miles an hour.
Okay?
So that's 20 minutes.
And then the last phase is called terminal phase, appropriately so, 100 seconds when the warhead, the nuclear warhead re-enters the atmosphere, boom, explodes over its target.
The interceptor system is designed to take out the missile in mid-course phase.
So we have 44 interceptors.
Remember I told you we have 1,700, let's say, nuclear missiles on ready for launch status.
Russia has about the same.
We have 44 interceptor missiles.
How are 44 interceptor missiles going to go up against more than 1,000 Russian nuclear weapons coming at us?
Never mind the fact that each interceptor has a 50% shoot-down rate.
And that's by the Missile Defense Agency spokesperson.
So there's this perception that we have a system like the Iron Dome that could take out these incoming missiles, and we simply don't.
Which is why when nuclear war begins, it only ends in nuclear Armageddon.
I mean, you know, you take your, when you're reporting or writing, you kind of take your hat off of the emotional or the sentimental part of things where you, you know, the mother and me, you know, you can't think like that.
You just have to tell the story, I believe.
I also believe that if I can be as factual and dramatic as possible, then I will have the most readers, which is the point.
You know, I am actually not trying to save the world as a journalist.
I'm trying to get you to read what I write because I found it super interesting reporting it and learning about it.
And also, the whole process for me that I think is the most interesting is going to some of these people who are truly some of the smartest scientists in the world and getting them to explain it in the most basic.
Like I say, you have to tell it to me like I'm a kid because I don't have a science mind.
And that part is, so that excitement part of it balances out with the terror of it.
Because I do also understand why most people don't want to know about this.
It's too dreadful.
But they also don't want to know because they end up feeling sort of looked down upon, I think, if they ask basic questions like, wait a minute, how does a missile work?
Or like you said, can't the hypersonics, shouldn't we invest in hypers?
Well, who really wants to be lectured?
And so what I try to do is condense the lectures that I receive about how it all works into this dramatic form, which is how I landed on this format for this book, which I think is really effective, which is giving it to you like a scenario.
Like this is what would happen.
And then going back to all my sources.
I mean, like, okay, here's an example.
We haven't even talked about submarines, but the submarines are completely, you cannot find them in the sea.
They are stealth beyond stealth.
I interviewed the former commander of the nuclear sub-forces, a guy called Admiral Connor.
Never given an interview like this before.
And I said, like, how hard is it to find a nuclear-armed sub?
And he said, Annie, it's easier to find a grapefruit-sized object in space than a nuclear sub under the sea.
And these things are, by the way, I have a map in the back of the book that shows you how close our adversaries, enemies, call them what you will, China and Russia, how close they come to the East Coast and the West Coast of the United States regularly, which means it reduces that launch time I told you about of 26 minutes, 40 seconds.
that reduces it down to sort of 10 minutes or less.
I mean, when I began reporting this book a couple years ago, never did I think that I would see that while I was talking about my book with people like you after publication.
Never.
But in the same manner, I never thought I would hear the president of Russia threatening to use a nuclear weapon.
I mean, he said he's not kidding that he might use WMD.
But Russian civilians, including one young girl they were showing in this article, were killed by these cluster bombs that were launched by drones that are ours.
She says here, the event was caused by Russian air defenses shooting down a series of cluster warhead missiles, one of which altered course as a result.
The Russian Ministry of Defense said that four of the five missiles launched were shot down, adding another missile as a result of the impact of air defense systems at the final stage deviated from the flight path with the warhead exploding in the air over the city.
The detonation of the fragmentation warhead of the fifth American missile in the air led to numerous casualties among civilians in Sevastopol.
I'm not following the ground war in Ukraine right now with my focus on this.
But what I do know is that the ratcheting up of the rhetoric and the use of third-party weapon systems is complicating an already incredibly volatile situation.
This says a spokesperson for the U.S. State Department denied the accusation, saying that the claims were ridiculous and hyperbolic.
The U.S. supplies weapons to Ukraine in the ongoing war with Russia and recognizes Crimea as a part of Ukraine despite Russia's annexation.
Ukraine has previously outlined plans to use long-range weapons supplied by America in Crimea, specifically to target infrastructure supporting the Russian invasion.
This is just terrifying stuff.
It's terrifying because it can all be happening while you're just going about your business walking your dog.
You have no idea that the entire world is in grave danger.
Well, I think the big picture that frightens me most is that when we see the president of Russia going to the president of North Korea, our two air quotes arch enemies right now, having a new alliance.
And then I consider that the current president of the United States hasn't spoken to the president of Russia in two years.
And I think back to that time in history, what's known as the Reagan reversal, where Reagan went from this incredible hawk to learning about nuclear weapons in, of all things, an ABC television movie called The Day After, having the crap scared out of him, and then realizing this is the President of the United States, realizing we cannot continue on this path.
It is too dangerous.
And that is why Reagan reached out to Gorbachev, and that's why we have the Recognic Summit.
It was called the Reagan reversal.
So in other words, my point is Reagan, who, you know, the axis of evil speech, like this idea of seeing your enemy as the arch-evil villain, had to change for him when he understood nuclear war by seeing a film.
And so when I look to today and I consider that the current president isn't speaking to the president of Russia, it doesn't make any sense to someone like me.
That's probably why I wrote this book.
Like, please understand this.
And one has to imagine that the current president, with all his decades in office, understands all of this.
And so I don't fundamentally understand why there is no communication.
It is way too dangerous.
Hence, you're the kind, what you just showed us, you know, the facts will come in of whose weapon systems those are.
But either way, the perception, to your point, the fact that the perception, a misperception, could ignite nuclear war, could ignite that situation that is unreversible, that should be astonishing to all of us.
Don't you think, though, that politics in general, and certainly world leadership, especially United States leadership, is much more compromised today than it was then?
I mean, the military defense contractors are making so much money, and they want to continue making so much money.
And they have great influence over the politicians and over policy and over what gets done.
And this money that they don't want to stop making is completely dependent upon the continuing to build, continuing to sell, continuing to have these weapons and future systems and more advanced systems and better systems.
And there's so much money and momentum behind this that I don't know if there's a Reagan available now.
I don't know if that's an option.
If there's a person that can have some sense that can say that we are on a path to self-destruction and we need to stop and we need to reverse this path.
You know, you're going to have people in the military, in the Defense Department, that are being influenced by these contractors.
It was like, listen, listen, listen, there's plenty of places we can move things around, get things done.
And don't you know about these guys?
These guys are bad guys.
We need to get over there.
We need to do something about this.
We need to do something about that.
And this escalation is motivated by the fact that they're making fucking ungodly amounts of money by making and selling these weapons.
And this is a massive part of our economy.
It's a massive part of the structure that runs the government itself.
So then you have to ask yourself, what is also going to happen now that these big contracting organizations, Boeing, Raytheon, Lockheed, are now being threatened by Silicon Valley, by the new defense contractors that are coming into the pipeline, that are threatening their contracts because they can do it faster and cheaper.
And so I fear that you will see even more of that entrenchment that you're talking about, even more of the bureaucracy churning out more weapons under the guise of competition, which is that double-edged sword because competition is what makes America great, I believe.
But I do also think what's interesting is, like, someone I interviewed here in the book was Leon Panetta.
So not only was he a former sec deaf, but he was former CIA chief and he was former White House chief of staff under Clinton.
And in our interview, I learned a lot from him about those three kind of elements of the national security, advising the president, you know, being sec deaf, being in charge of all of this, and being CIA chief from the intelligence point of view.
But what was even more interesting about interviewing Panetta was that he said to me at the end of our interview, it's good that you're doing this.
The American people need to know.
That's a direct quote from him.
So here's a guy who has spent his entire life entrenched in that system that you're talking about.
And then outside of it, once he retires, puts on his, shall we say, grandfather's hat, the human hat, and is suddenly like, this is really going in the wrong direction.
I would hope that that would lead to more people thinking wisely about what it is they're doing when they're in office, as far as nuclear war is concerned.
Well, it brings me back to Eisenhower's speech when he left office.
You know, the threat of the military-industrial complex, warning the United States that there is an entire system that is now in place that profits off of war and wants war and wants to keep creating these weapons and wants to keep escalating things because that's their business.
That's the business.
We're not good at regulating any businesses.
We're not good at anything that's detrimental.
We're not good at regulating overfishing of the oceans.
We're not good at environment.
We're not good at energy.
We're not good at manufacturing.
We're not good at regulating anything.
Everything we've done has been a for-profit thing when we allowed jobs to go overseas and decimated American manufacturing.
There was no regulation of that.
They didn't think that out.
They didn't do a good job of managing that.
No, they completely devastated manufacturing here.
And we saw during the COVID crisis, during the lockdowns, oh my God, we can't get anything because everything's overseas.
And yet at the same time, this is why I think people stop talking about things like nuclear war or they move on to another more interesting subject that might be more entertaining.
Because who really wants to hear about this problem that seems to be cyclical and there is, because you have to have a strong defense.
You have to have a national security, otherwise you get walked all over.
So, but the second part of Eisenhower's speech is important to me, and it's why I get people to talk to me in my books, because he says there's an antidote to the military-industrial complex, and that is an alert and knowledgeable citizenry, which is in essence what we're doing now by talking about this.
It's what you do on your podcast.
By having an alert and knowledgeable citizenry.
And the word alert, I think, means engaged.
You have to be able to talk to people in a way that they can, oh, wow, that's interesting.
Well, I don't understand how that works.
How does that work?
And have these conversations.
So in that regard, I would say that's a positive sign in the right direction.
I think people are much more open to having an opinion about all of this than they were in, say, the 1950s.
But there's a balance because now opinion somehow seems to be taking over the Department of Facts in many regards.
Yeah, that's our royals as celebrities and nonsense.
And whether it's the president who's a celebrity or congressperson who's become a celebrity, you know, AOC, it's not about her policies.
It's about her saying stupid shit.
It's like, that's all people care about.
It's a reality show.
And we're kind of conditioned by reality shows, right?
We have so many that we watch and so many things that we pay attention to that are nonsense that distract us that we like to sort of apply those same viewing habits to the whole world.
But I'm amazed by the phenomena of podcasts, I must say, because I'm old enough to remember when they weren't around.
So, you know, and I do have, I have one foot in publishing, obviously, author of seven books, but I also write television.
And so I exist in these two different worlds of media that are, you could say, traditional media forms.
And when you consider how radically these different forms of communication are changing, that we did, I sell as many e-books and audio books as I do hardcovers.
And I have a feeling that if those markets didn't exist, I would sell half as many books, if that makes sense.
And so then when you throw the podcast into the next, I cannot tell you how many people know about my work as a journalist, as a national security reporter, because of podcasts.
That is remarkable to me.
It makes things so much more accessible to so many more people.
Everybody's listening to a podcast driving around, listening when they're at the gym, when they're on a hike.
And if someone who cares about an alert and knowledgeable citizenry as a fundamental, first of all, because I think if people that are curious tend to be less furious.
If you can get your curiosity satiated, you don't become so angry.
And so I, and again, I have to be an eternal optimist, particularly writing the kind of books that I do, or it would just be, you know, it would be, my thinking would, would take a negative turn.
And so I am an eternal optimist, and I do look to conversation and new media as a means to a better way or a means to a way out of this kind.
But also what's remarkable is you hear people often say like, people have lost their attention spans.
They watch TikTok.
Well, I mean, people listen to your podcast for three hours.
That is a very long attention span.
And I find that kind of like brain conditioning really valuable because I will listen to a podcast for three hours and also in a continuous, you know, it might be on an airplane and then, oh, my phone tells me I have this much time left on the podcast, so I continue listening it on a hike.
And I think that it is a very different kind of mental stimulus, curiosity, in a new way forward than the old days of reading a newspaper.
You know, it takes you this amount of time to read.
And then you, I mean, the newspapers barely exist anymore.
And then the other problem with television shows is that they're on a specific time.
And people don't want to be locked into having to watch something at a very specific time.
And now because of things like, you know, YouTube and Spotify, you can just watch it anytime you want and just stop it when you go to the bathroom.
Stop it when someone calls you.
Stop it when you have to go somewhere.
Restart it again when you're at the gym.
And it's just a different thing.
It's a different way to communicate.
This idea that people don't have attention spans anymore.
How is that possible?
They're just people.
People didn't change.
That's so stupid.
If people always had attention spans and all of a sudden they don't, maybe they're just getting distracted by things that are very easy to absorb and very addictive, like TikTok videos.
It doesn't mean that the human mind is different.
It's been altered forever.
And that now no longer people are interested in long-term conversations.
That's just stupid.
I've rejected that from the beginning.
Like one of the first things this podcast is, even my good friends were telling me, like, you have to edit it.
I'm like, I'm not editing shit.
Like, you have to make it shorter.
Like, why?
No one's going to listen to something for three hours that don't listen.
That was my take.
I was like, I don't care.
I listen to things.
I've always listened to lectures and old Alan Watts speeches.
Alan Watts is, I guess you could call him a psychedelic philosopher.
Very fascinating Englishman who said some very wise things, but just a brilliant person, very interested in Buddhism and just a very, very wise person who still today, people will send me clips of things that he said and quotes of things that he said.
But I've always listened to fascinating people have conversations.
Terrence McKenna, I listened to a lot of his speeches and a lot of the different lectures that he gave.
I don't think people changed.
I think that's nonsense.
I get hooked on YouTube reels or Instagram reels.
I get hooked on them.
I'll be sitting there.
If I have nothing to do, I'll be like, what is that?
Well, I also think there's something to be said as an individual when you can see, when you start to be a little bit conscious of your own habits in viewing and thinking and reading and information.
So you get absorbed in the TikTok and then you get to say to yourself, like, what am I doing?
And we all benefit from seeing how easy it is to develop a habit and how hard it is to sort of move yourself away from a habit as you become entrenched in it.
And so I think there's complete value in that.
People suddenly realize, I got to stop watching TikTok videos and I got to go to the gym, which is another, you know, that's a difficult sort of an adjustment, and most people don't like difficult things.
So if you get 100 people addicted to TikTok, what number out of those 100 people are going to go, you know what?
I'm going to change my life.
It's probably like three or four.
And those people are extraordinary.
And you hear about them and you get inspired by them.
Like, wow, you got a flip phone?
That's crazy, Bob.
Why'd you do that?
Like, you know what?
I realized my mind was getting taken up by these things, and now I have my mind back.
I like it.
People want to call me.
They can call me.
But I'm not watching things and reading things and absorbing things.
But then there's the argument, like, okay, but now you're out of the cultural conversation.
Like, there's, I have friends that have flip phones, and I'll try to ask them, did you see this new thing about the new quantum computer that's like 100 billion times better or 100 million times better than the last one they released in 2019?
You know, and they're like, no, what?
So they're missing some things too.
So the key is like mitigation.
Like you have to figure out like how much information makes you anxious and how much information just where you just sit there and you scroll and you waste your time and then you're like, what did I do with my life?
I'm wasting hours.
And then you look at your screen time at the end of the day.
But you just got to know what that point is and how to manage your own attention span and just also have sovereignty over your mind.
You have to control your mind.
You have to be able, like if your mind starts getting anxious, okay, I know we're getting weird.
It's time to work out.
Okay, I know maybe we should meditate.
Maybe we should do this.
Maybe we should do that.
Don't just keep scrolling.
You got to know when and when.
But most people don't have that kind of self-control and discipline.
They don't have to.
All most people have to do is when the alarm goes off, get up, wash yourself, brush your teeth, eat something, go to work.
Do whatever minimal amount you have to do to keep that job.
And then, and the bathroom breaks and whenever no one's looking, look through your phone, be distracted, come home, watch Netflix, go to sleep, repeat.
That's most people.
So they don't have to do anything because they haven't set up their life in a way that requires serious attention and an objective sense of your perspective and your interaction with humans and the way the world is working.
They don't have the time.
They have family problems, job problems, their car's fucked, something's wrong with their house they got to fix.
They have bills.
Everything's piling up.
People are immensely distracted.
So what social media does for them is it gives them a brief rest from their own problems to just look at some fucking drag queen reading stories to kids and get outraged or some new thing that's going on with some girl that made some crazy video and now everybody's talking about it.
Like it's just most people don't have much discipline and they don't have to.
And they've gotten through life being overweight and eating processed foods and drinking too much and smoking too much and taking all kinds of pills to mitigate all these problems that they have because they've not taken care of themselves.
So they're on anti-anxiety medication and anti-depression medication and anti-this and that and they're trying to lose weight so they're on Ozempic and that's most people.
That's most people.
You know the number one drug in America is a is a peptide that helps you lose weight.
If you can get people to believe bullshit and keep feeding them bullshit, you turn them into infants.
And if they just accept the fact that you're feeding them bullshit and they don't employ any critical thinking and they don't look at outside sources of information and really try to assess what's actually going on because they generally generally don't have the time.
But I'm always interested in the people that have that are those 3% you talked about that suddenly have that moment, the catalyst where they realize, oh my goodness, I have to change.
That suddenly realize that realize something's going on.
And I think that's also because of social media, the good aspects of social media, real honest discussions, revelations, things being released on Twitter and, you know, the Twitter files with Elon Musk where they found out the FBI was trying to suppress information and the Hunter Biden laptop story and then going through the COVID disinformation and now seeing the congressional hearings where Fauci's lying in front of Congress about gain of function research and whether or not they deleted emails and all that stuff.
I think more people are now going, what the fuck is actually going on than ever before.
I think there was a, you know, there was always people, like during the Vietnam War, there's always people that distrusted the government and did want to, but they didn't have the kind of access to information that we have today.
I mean, I'm interested in the individual stories of people who change always, because I think that it's too, I don't want to say depressing for me, but it's too, like, if I can only, if I think of America as this big giant situation with problems, it becomes overwhelming.
I just try to focus on people's really interesting, cool stories.
I'll tell you one that comes to mind with the guy who was my Uber drive the other day.
And we're chatting away, and he tells me that he used to be like 350 pounds.
And he was like this thin dude.
And he was talking to me about driving an Uber at night so he could save money for one of his kids to go to college.
And I was like, wow, how did you suddenly lose weight?
And he told me that he was a security guard at a military base.
And, you know, he said I was giant.
And the dudes in the military were totally fit.
And one of them said to me one time, dude, you got to lose some weight.
And I listened to him and he let me go into the military gym.
You know, just telling someone they need to lose weight doesn't mean you're mean.
And this whole body positivity thing is not good for anybody.
Not good for anybody.
There's just no one who benefits from that.
You benefit in the short term where you don't feel as bad about the fact that you're obese.
But you know you're obese.
Everyone knows you're obese.
You're just not dealing with this very obvious problem.
When someone says you need to lose weight, I was watching this TikTok video where there was this lady who was upset because she was going to her doctor and she has all these autoimmune problems and she was severely morbidly obese, like giant.
And she said that the doctor started body shaming her and she was so upset that she felt uncomfortable.
The doctor was telling her that she needed to do something about her weight loss and recommended perhaps bariatric surgery or Ozempic or any of these things.
And this person was talking about this.
It's like, what a betrayal that their health care provider was calling them obese and that they did not feel safe with them anymore.
And the comments were interesting because almost everyone in the comments is like, that fucking person is trying to save your life.
There's a great saying that I love, I try to live my life by, and I definitely write about it in all my books, which is you can't fix what you can't face.
He wrote a law in the 80s, and he was writing about science and technology.
He's a historian of science and technology.
And he goes way back, like bubonic plague, he'll write about of how that changed industry across Europe in these really general, easy to digest, fascinating ways.
But in terms of your technology, TikTok is the world going to hell in a handbasket.
I think of him because he said that when the, and this is a great analogy, I think, that I think of with my kids and social media, when the printing press was invented, absolutely all of society thought the world was like going to go to hell in a handbasket.
But before that, the only people who could read really were the priests.
And so they kept all this information and they doled it out according to their line of thinking.
And then the printing press came along and the Hoi Polloy could read.
That began really the birth of mass populations being able to read, which is where we are today.
And sometimes I think about James Burke, and I think about that as an analogy to where we are today, that what is going on is just an upheaval, like the printing press, in terms of making a lot more people more literate.
And so maybe it's not even, I mean, I used to think of literacy and its true definition is actually reading.
And I remember when audiobooks came out, and I read all my own audio books.
And I originally thought that listening to me read my own book was somehow you wouldn't have the same experience of reading it yourself.
And then I realized I was putting my standard.
I actually enjoy reading.
I like to read.
That's the way I'm wired.
I can't do math, but I can read.
And then now I realize with the amount of people that listen to my audiobooks, listen to your podcast, that maybe is a new 21st century form of literacy, which is really makes my head go in interesting places because language is very different than reading, you know, communicating.
Yeah, I think what's going on also is that this entertainment form, whether it's podcasts or audio books, is something that's being consumed while people are doing other things where they normally would not get this information.
Like driving, going to the gym, working, doing menial labor, doing things where you can listen to a podcast.
That is a new thing.
It's a way to be entertained while you're doing other things.
And that's a big part of this.
And that's a whole area that wasn't addressed before.
I mean, it kind of was with talk radio.
So people would listen to talk radio in their cars.
But nobody listened to talk radio at the gym.
Nobody listened to talk radio on an airplane.
Now you can download things and consume them anytime you want.
And most of the time, people are consuming these things while they're being forced to sit in the doctor's waiting room while they're doing something that ordinarily they would just be just bored.
And the other argument to that, your friend with the flip phone, I've heard this director, Christopher Nolan, who made the Oppenheimer movie, talk about this, where he says he believes that the experience of sitting in the waiting room is what he wants.
So I think there's a very few rarefied people that can actually, the way they're built, the way they're engineered, the way they are, the way they've become, allows for them to sit in the waiting room and be super interested in observing.
Maybe you're an elite director to do that.
But most people are going to be restless, irritable, and discontent.
And therefore, the podcast, the audio book, is an additive to your life.
One of the reasons why you could argue that computers became so important to the Defense Department back in 1961 is because during the Cuban Missile Crisis, and this is like, I have seen these documents at the National Archives.
JFK was so worried about that exact movement you made with your finger, the dial phone.
There was a true red phone that would be used in a nuclear crisis for him to call Nikita Khrushchev.
And he became worried that that wasted too much time to get through.
And so he hired a guy called J.C.R. Licklider to develop computers that could move faster.
And at the time, the computers were the size of this room in the Defense Department.
And there were these old mainframes.
And Licklider is, he's called the Johnny Appleseed of the Internet.
In essence, he's the guy who created the ARPANET, which is now the Internet.
And so there's this interesting dual-use technology idea that everything that at the Pentagon, at least, in the defense world, so much of our amazing technology is born out of trying to save the world from existential threat.
And I always think that dual-use part of everything is super interesting.
Look at lasers.
Lasers are arguably perhaps the most important technological defense-born system of the 20th century.
Laser printers, laser surgery, laser eyes.
And then you have laser weapons at the Pentagon, so classified I can't even get anywhere near that.
He'd been working on this science problem, according to Charles Towns.
And by the way, he was inspired, he told me, to develop the laser from the time he was a little kid in the 20s, reading the Soviet science fiction novel, The Garen Death Ray.
So it's like it was a science fiction concept, a laser.
He's a little kid, Charles Towns, thinking about this, thinking about this, then all through his life, continuing to think about it, then running it by his Einstein colleagues, and then can't make it work, can't make it work, is sitting on a park bench, and he gets the message from above.
He made it sound very much like it was a religious experience for him.
But he never wrote about it for a long time because particularly in the 60s and 70s, you couldn't be a scientist and have faith at the same time.
Or at least you would be belittled or you'd be looked down upon is what he said.
These specific examples because it's so interesting when that kind of non-mainstream thinking comes from an absolute, you know, an individual in the community who has achieved the highest award, whatever that means.
I think we think of a life form, the term life form, we think of it as something that can breed, something that propagates, something that spreads its DNA.
Every single thing that exists on this earth that people have created came from an idea.
Every mug, every computer, every airplane, every television set, everything came from an idea.
The idea comes into the person's mind.
It combines with all the currently available ideas.
It improves upon those ideas, and it manifests itself in a physical thing.
And that physical thing is what we do.
That is the number one thing we do.
We do a lot of different things.
We have children and families.
We have jobs.
We take up hobbies.
But if you looked, if an overview effect, if you looked at the human race from above, you would say, well, if you were one of us, you would say, what is this species doing?
Well, it makes better things every year.
That's what it does.
It doesn't make the same beehive every year.
It constantly, consistently makes better things.
Where does it, what motivates us to make these better things?
Ideas.
Ideas, and then the competition of these ideas.
Now, if something wanted a thing to manifest it in the world, to make it exist in the world, what would it do?
It would get inside that thing's creative structure, get inside that thing's mind, and impart these ideas, impart these inspirations, and get this thing to go out and put these pieces together and manufacture this thing and then test it and improve upon it and keep doing it until they get it right.
And then other people would take those things and have new ideas.
I know how to take that and turn it into a tablet.
I know how to turn that into this.
I know how to make this better.
Let's do quantum computing.
Let's do that.
These are all just ideas.
So ideas that human beings turn into real things and those real things accelerate the evolution of technology in this radical way where we can't even comprehend where it's going.
You know, there was an article I put on my Instagram today, just put the title of it, How Crazy It Is that AI, what was like 500 million years?
AI as extrapolated, like they're calculating what evolution looks like in 500 million years.
So, like, we don't even understand what we're doing.
We don't even understand what we're doing, but we keep doing it.
And I think some of the instincts that human beings have that seem frivolous are directly connected to this.
And one of them is materialism.
Materialism, status, all these different things that we have where with materialism, you always want the newest, greatest thing.
If your friend has an iPhone 15, but you have an iPhone 10, you look like a loser.
What are you doing with that old?
Look at that stupid old camera.
Oh, my God.
What are you doing with that?
You need the best one.
You need the new one.
If you have a 2007 car and your friend pulls up in a 2024 car, you're like, oh, I need the new one.
What does the new one do?
The new one does all these different things that the old one doesn't do.
The new one drives itself.
I got to get the new one.
And so what does that do?
It pushes innovation.
It promotes innovation.
Materialism fuels innovation because we're always buying new stuff.
If everybody stopped buying things, if everybody looked at their phone and said, oh, this phone's perfect.
I don't need a new phone.
I could have that phone forever.
You don't need a new iPhone.
I can have that phone forever.
They would stop innovating.
They would stop making things.
It would just stop and then nothing would get done.
But because of materialism, because of this keeping up with the Joneses thing, where everybody wants the latest thing in their driveway to impress their neighbor.
You want to pull up to the fucking diner and show all your friends.
All that stuff just fuels the creation of new and better things.
And we're all part of it.
And every year, there's like a thing you didn't know.
Like, I just got this phone.
Check this out.
This phone, I can make a circle on things and it Googles it instantly.
This phone transcribes all of my voice notes and then summarizes them for me.
My theory, and again, no education in this is just my thinking about it for thousands of hours.
I think we're all the same thing.
I think this whole idea of we are one, that sounds so hippie, it's hard for people to digest.
But I want you to think about it this way.
If you live my life, I think you would be me.
And I think if I lived your life, I would be you.
I think what consciousness is, is the life force of all living, sentient things on this planet and perhaps all in the universe.
And it's experiencing reality through different biological filters, different bodies, different life experiences, different education, different genetics, different parts of the world, different geography, different climate, different things to deal with.
But it's the same thing.
I think if I lived in Afghanistan and my whole family was in the Taliban, I would probably be in the Taliban too.
Because I think you just, you adapt to whatever circumstances and environment you're in, and then you think that way and you speak this language and you have these customs and you engage in these religious practices.
But I think consciousness, the thing at the heart of it all, what that person thinks of when they say me, what I think, me, I think this.
I think that me is the same in every person.
I think it's everyone.
That's why we're all connected.
That's why we all need each other.
That's why loneliness contributes to diseases and it's terrible for human beings.
I think we're all universally connected with this bizarre goal.
And I think this bizarre goal might be to create artificial life.
I think that might be the end.
I think, and I've said this too many times, if you've heard it, I'm sorry.
But I think that we are an electronic caterpillar making a cocoon, and we don't even know why.
We are a biological caterpillar giving birth to the electronic butterfly.
And we're doing it.
We don't even know what we're doing.
We're just making this cocoon.
We just keep going because this is what we do.
And I think this is probably how life separates from biology to something far more sophisticated that's not confined to the timeline of biological evolution, which is a very slow, relatively speaking timeline in comparison to electronic evolution.
Electronic evolution is exponential.
It happens radically.
It happens very fast.
And especially when you get into things like when AI gets involved and quantum computing gets involved, then things accelerate so fast.
Like, look at what's going on with AI.
Five years ago, AI was not even a concern.
Nobody even thought about it.
Now it's at the tip of everyone's tongue.
And all everyone's talking about is what happens when ChatGPT-5 gets released?
What happens when 6 gets released?
What happens when artificial general intelligence is achieved?
What happens when these things become sentient?
What happens when these things make better versions of themselves?
When does that stop?
Does it ever stop?
Do they become gods?
Is that what God is?
Is what God is is this primate becomes curious, starts inventing tools.
And it's so magnificently filmed, and it's so interesting.
And that moment where they go back in time and you realize someone had been videotaping the previous generation of chimps and that their anger and their fighting was based on revenge.
That blew my mind.
That they, that, because I often think because I write about war and weapons, I always think about nature versus nurture and were we built this way and are we, you know, this is a very interesting thing to think about, like your electric caterpillar.
There was like a score to settle with the previous generation.
And that, to me, was stunning.
And also that one of the guys, I love that they named everyone.
But one of the chimps' brother, I think it was, like head chimp's brother, lost his arm in a poacher's trap.
Remember that?
And when you think about chimps and how important their arms are swinging from trees, like under, if you just followed the logic about, you know, survival of the fittest, then that chimp, the brother chimp would have died because he didn't have one of his hands.
But instead, the other brother, the lead chimp, made sure he was taken care of, which is like so human warlike.
Anthropologists right now believe that if we used to be Stone Age lower primates and we eventually evolved into being human beings, the other apes are now entering into the Stone Age.
There's evidence of them using tools.
There's evidence of them manufacturing tools.
There's a video of an orangutan, some famous photos of an orangutan spearfishing.
In 1975, there was this famous defense official who went like from being a hawk to being like, we cannot have so many nuclear weapons.
His name was Paul Warnicke.
And he wrote what was then a famous article in Foreign Policy Magazine called Apes on a Treadmill.
Such a great image.
His idea that the nuclear arms race was apes on a treadmill.
That we and the Russians were just slavish, you know, like essentially ignorant beasts just slaving away on this treadmill trying to win, not even realizing there is no winner.
And, you know, it was a famous article.
Everybody wrote about it and spoke about it in, you know, DC and then it disappeared.
Well, the anecdote comes from recently a group of scientists wanted to try to answer the question that we're talking about, like, how did apes go from bipedal or how did we, you know, from knuckle walking to being bipedal?
How did that happen?
We still don't know why.
And they were trying to figure out if it had to do with energy consumption.
So they outfitted apes, they put them on a treadmill, they outfitted them with oxygen mass, and then they had humans doing the same thing.
And they were measuring, you know, energy levels.
And during this experiment, and they kept making them do it over and over again, the humans and the apes on the treadmills.
And during one of the experiments, one of the apes was basically like, screw this, I'm not doing this anymore.
He pushed the button and got off.
And the anecdote to nuclear war is if apes can figure out how to get off the treadmill, why can't humans?
I think you and I being here right now having this conversation where there's not a nuclear war going on speaks to that.
Like we've had nuclear weapons for a long time and we haven't used them.
I don't think it's I don't think it's inevitability that we destroy ourselves, but it's a possibility.
And I think there's a lot of foolish people that are ignoring that possibility.
And that's what's scary.
And what's scary is that the type of people that want to become president, congressmen, senators, some of them are great people, and some of them are wise and they're good leaders.
And some of them are just people that are too ugly to be on TV.
they're too ugly to be actors they're too ugly to be they can't sing They want attention.
And so they want to be a leader.
And so they want to say the things that people want to hear because those things get them positive attention and they feel good.
And then they get a bunch of people who love them and they feel good.
And then they have their face on a billboard and they have bumper stickers and like everybody likes me.
And the people who don't like me, they're communists or losers.
And so it's a cult of personality thing that is just a part of being a charismatic person and garnering attention.
And that's a giant part of our whole political process: narcissists and psychopaths and sociopaths that have embedded themselves into the system.
And then they all feed off each other and help each other.
And they're all insider trading and they're all involved.
And then when they leave office, they get paid to speak in front of bankers and make a half a million dollars.
It's the old adage that, you know, you had to be crazy to become president in the first place, or you wouldn't become president because you would realize it's crazy.
Okay, so you know the president alone launches nuclear war.
He doesn't ask the SECDAF, doesn't ask the chairman of the Joint Chiefs, doesn't ask Congress.
He launches.
Furthermore, we have a policy called launch on warning.
So when he's told that there is an incoming nuclear missile on its way to the United States, which is how this begins, he must launch on warning.
That is policy.
We do not wait.
That is a quote from former Secretary of Defense Bill Perry.
Now, before taking office, many of these presidents say that they are going to change that insane policy because it essentially creates this volatile situation where every president, every foreign leader knows they're going to launch on warning and so am I. They say they're going to change the policy before they take office.
This is documented, you know, Clinton, Bush, Obama, not Trump.
And then they don't.
And no one knows why.
Why do you think that is?
That you would have a position before becoming president of such an extreme policy needs to change and then change your or become silent on that.
I don't think anybody, like if I was going to have a conversation with Trump, the number one thing that I would want to ask him is, what is the difference between what you thought it was like and what it is like?
What happens when you get in there?
Like what happens when you get in?
No one knows.
It's so secretive.
The meetings between heads of state, between senators, congressmen, behind closed doors, all the different meetings with the head of the Pentagon, the head of the intelligence agencies, we don't know what those meetings are like.
No one can know.
It's a point of national security.
So if you're not president, of course you can't go to the fucking meetings.
So then you become president.
And then you get briefed.
So then they sit you down and they hit you with all the problems in the world that you don't know about, that nobody knows about but them.
And I bet they're numerous, and I bet it's terrifying.
And I bet that's a giant factor as to why people change between, I mean, a lot of what they say when they're running for president, they know they're not going to do, but they're saying it because they want people to vote for them.
And then they get in there and they go, I'm not going to release the JFK files.
And they do things like that.
That's what they always do.
But I think a lot of it is also you can't know what you're talking about until you get that job.
Until you're in there, you don't know what you're talking about.
Like, in other words, is it the previous administration?
Because if that's the case, if the previous administration is briefing you, the new president, the incoming president, on all of this, these state secrets that are so terrifying, you have to throw your old promises out the window for the most part.
Wouldn't that change every that?
That's where I'm lost.
It's like, And also, it's so tiring reading these presidential manuals which say app or memoirs rather, which then say absolutely nothing original to any of us, the citizenry, about what's really happening as president.
I mean, I think that there's probably some things that they say in there that they have to kind of skirt around it and figure out what to say, figure out how to say it.
Well, he was saying that he was working, I think he was doing construction in 1969 and showed up for work.
See if we can find the quote so I don't paraphrase it.
I think it's page 241 of Bill Clinton's My Life.
I might have the page wrong.
So in this scenario, he's talking to this carpenter.
And he's telling this carpenter, isn't it crazy?
They landed on the moon.
And the carpenter says something to the sound of, I don't believe anything those television fellers say.
And he goes, I think they can fake anything, somewhere along that line.
And he goes, before, he goes, back then, I thought that guy was a crank.
He goes, but after my eight years in the White House, I started thinking maybe he's ahead of his time.
Now, just imagine saying that about the biggest achievement in human history, landing another human being on the surface of a moon, another planet, essentially.
One quarter the size of our planet, 250-something thousand miles away.
And he's saying, maybe this guy who thought it was fake is ahead of his time.
That's not something you accidentally say.
That's not something you frivolously write down and just add it to your book.
Just a month before, Apollo 11 astronauts Buzz Aldrin and Neil Armstrong had left their colleague Michael Collins aboard Spaceship Columbia and walked on the moon.
The old carpenter asked me if I really believed it happened.
I said, sure, I saw it on television.
He disagreed.
He said that he didn't believe it for a minute that them television fellers could make things look real that weren't.
Back then, I thought he was a crank.
During my eight years in Washington, I saw some things on TV that make me wonder if he wasn't ahead of his time.
So will politics in the United States ever change to a point where we can have individuals who accept their responsibility?
I mean, another crazy thing, again, interviewing Panetta about Clinton, as his chief of staff, it's like, oh, but this is Panetta talking, that the presidents are very underinformed about any of their responsibilities about nuclear war.
They don't know how it unfolds.
They don't know how fast it is.
Did you know that they have a six-minute window to make a counterattack?
Six-minute window.
And that comes from President Reagan's memoir, by the way.
He said that there's a quote from him, which I have in the book, a six-minute window to have to make a decision to possibly end the world is irrational.
I think part of the problem, and to answer your question about leaders, politicians, whether to change, we're asking humans to not be human.
That's what we're asking.
We're asking them to be these perfect things.
And then now we're looking up their ass with a microscope more than we've ever done before.
And we're also accepting that the other side is going to lie about this person's background and lie about what this person's done.
For three years, all you heard on the news was Russia collusion with Donald Trump.
They were trying to say Russia put him in office.
He's a Russian puppet.
He's a Russian thing.
It was all a lie.
They made it up, and they said it everywhere.
And you're allowed to do that.
You're allowed to do that.
So not only are you taking a person and asking them to not be a person, but then you're looking at everything they've done and you're allowed to lie about it.
And you're allowed to lie about it in cahoots with the media who spreads this lie on television every day with no consequences.
So the problem is not just that we don't have good leaders, is that I don't know if it's possible to have a good leader.
I don't know if those kind of humans are real.
And I wonder if AI, even though everyone's terrified of it, and I am too, I wonder if that's our way out.
I wonder if the only thing that can actually govern society fairly and accurately is an artificial intelligence.
It's something that doesn't have emotions and greed and narcissism and all the other contemptible traits that all of our politicians have.
What if it doesn't have any of that?
First of all, what if it's far smarter than us and realizes a fair and reasonable way to allocate resources and to eliminate pollution, to mitigate overfishing and all the different issues that we have?
It looks at it in an absolutely accurate and brilliant way that we're not even capable of doing.
And this idea of us being governed by people and not wanting those people to behave like every person ever who's been in power.
Absolute power corrupts absolutely.
Everyone knows it, but we just assume that we're going to have this one guy that's like, his morals are so strong that when he gets in there, he's going to write the ship and drain the swamp.
I don't think those people are real.
I don't think that's a real thing.
I think the folly that human beings have displayed is built into the programming.
From all of the different sources I spoke to over the decades, I always get the sense that it was a nation state and that nation state happens to be nuclear armed.
And he studied the entire Warren Commission report, which almost nobody had at the time.
And he was like, this is filled with inconsistencies.
None of this makes any sense.
There's so much wrong with all these different things that they're saying that he started doubting it.
And then he started looking into the assassination itself and finding that how many witnesses had died mysteriously.
The whole thing, the reeks of conspiracy from the top to the bottom, from Jack Ruby showing up and killing Lee Harvey Oswald to Jolly West visiting Jack Ruby in jail and all of a sudden Jack Ruby goes insane to the fact that Jolly West was the head of NKUltra,
which likely supplied Manson with LSD, which ran the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic, which was where they were giving people LSD, which was running Operation Midnight Climax, where they were dosing up John's with LSD and watching them for two-way mirrors.
Like all this is real.
Like this is all undisputable, absolute truth that was going on at the exact same time.
And to think that that's the only thing they were lying about is just that stuff.
Everything else is there above board.
That stuff was important.
We were just trying to get to the bottom of things.
There was certainly not the same degree of an alert and knowledgeable citizenry in the 50s and 60s.
Everyone just took everything at face value.
And it is remarkable as a historian.
And Tom O'Neill's work also speaks of that, to go back in time and look at that.
Part of just as interesting perhaps as the facts of the matter, like the Warren Commission, is to say, how did everyone simply accept this as fact?
But then I think it's valuable to have the old look in the mirror moment and go, what is it today that we're not looking at, you know, what is it today that will be in 10, 20, 30 years from now.
I can't believe they were all falling for that concept.
That's the old, you can't face, you can't fix what you can't face.
I think it's going to be the influence of pharmaceutical drug companies.
Yeah.
And also processed food companies.
You know, I mean, we know now that processed food companies, major food manufacturers are paying food influencers to say that all food is good food and to talk about body positivity.
That's all motivated by them to sell more Oreos and whatever the fuck they sell.
And I don't smoke, but to the point, you know, all you have to do is like research about, you think about creating the whole smoker's world.
You see those old ads from the 50s and 60s where the doctor, the OBGYN is smoking while they're visiting with the pregnant woman and encouraging her to smoke because it will make her relax.
It's whenever they can get away with it, if they can speak eloquently and phrase things in a way that can sort of shift opinion one way or the other, they do that.
Yeah.
Especially when there are people in power or when a person in power assigns someone to go be a Spokesperson.
Yeah, it's dangerous.
And I think that's another place where artificial intelligence may help us.
I think we're going to get to a place where lying is going to be impossible.
I don't think it's going to be possible within the next 10 years to lie.
I think it's all out the window.
I think right now we're worried about people being in control of artificial intelligence because they can propagate misinformation and they can just create deep fakes.
I think that's going to be a problem for sure.
And it's certainly something that you should consider.
But I think that what's going to happen in the future is we will likely merge minds through technology in some very bizarre way.
And I think information will flow much more freely.
We'll be able to translate things.
We'll be able to know thoughts.
We perhaps will come up with a universal language that everyone will understand.
And you'll be able to absorb it almost instantaneously because you're going to have some sort of a chip, whether it's a Neuralink or some device that you wear or something that links you up.
And we're going to have a completely different type of access to information.
Just like before language, they had grunts and they pointed at things.
Then they started writing things down.
They had carrier pigeons.
They had smoke signals.
They had all these different methods to get information out.
Now you have video.
You send a video to the other side of the fucking planet and it gets there immediately.
It's one of the wildest things that we've ever created and we take it for granted.
You could be FaceTiming someone in New Zealand and you're looking at each other in real time and having a conversation.
They're on the other side of the world.
You could send them a video.
It gets there like that.
You could download things from their websites.
You get it like that.
You're streaming things instantaneously.
Completely different way of accessing information.
I think this is that times a million.
I think this is grunts to video instantaneously and in some way that we can't even really imagine because we don't have the framework for it.
We don't have the context.
We don't have the structure.
We don't have this thing that exists right now that can do these things.
But once it does, and once people link up, I think it's going to be a whole new way of human beings interacting with each other that could eliminate war.
It could eliminate all of our problems.
It really could, but we won't be us anymore.
Romance and dangerous neighborhoods and all those things are going to go away.
Like crime and all that shit's going to go away.
We're going to be living in some bizarre hybrid cyborg world.
And it's just going to be the new thing.
Just like the new thing is, you have a phone on you.
I have a phone on me.
We carry a phone everywhere.
You're going to be linked into this, just like you're linked into your social media and your email.
You're going to be linked into this, but you're going to be linked physically into this.
And we're all going to be into this.
And AI is probably going to be running the world.
It's probably going to be artificial intelligence that governs the biological units, the humans.
Okay, here's the dystopian version of that that I just heard about recently on your access of language, where you said we're all going to be speaking the same language.
So in the defense world, there's a movement now for drone swarms.
You must know about this.
Yeah.
So now there's a movement because things are happening, technology is moving so fast, there's a movement to have the drones communicate with one another through an AI language so that it is non-hackable.
So the different pods, the different drone swarms will have language that they will invent and they will know and we will not know.
That becomes a little troubling when you consider that if there's a human in the system, then the human can interface with the drones provided that the human has access to that AI language.
But very easily, the AI language could decide not to include the human.
You know, they don't really totally understand what's going on with artificial intelligence in the sense of like how it's doing what it's doing.
And they do a lot of things that they don't understand why they're doing it.
Because they set a framework and they give them information and they set, they're trying to like mold them.
But essentially they're thinking.
And that's what's bizarre.
Okay, this is probably in 2017.
Facebook abandoned an experiment after two artificially intelligent programs appeared to be chatting to each other in a strange language only they understood.
Yeah, two chatbots came to create their own changes in English that made it easier for them to work, but which remained mysterious to the humans that supposedly look after them.
Bizarre discussions came as Facebook challenges chatbots to try and negotiate with each other over a trade, attempting to swap hats, balls, and books, each of which was given a certain value.
But they quickly broke down as the robots appeared to chat, chant at each other in a language that they each understood, but which appears mostly incomprehensible to humans.
So the CCP can make immense progress in any direction that they want without any interference from politicians, activists, all these people that get in the way.
Like, hey, you shouldn't be cloning people.
Shut the fuck up.
No one gets to say anything over there.
So the government gets to decide, and they're going to do everything that's going to be best for the overall power of China.
Which is where you get that chicken and egg paradox that we talked about earlier having to do with strong defense, your theory of the military-industrial complex.
Well, you have adversaries and enemies who not only benefit from intellectual property theft, they steal the technology that our R ⁇ D has spent decades working on and developing.
They just take that, so they begin with almost no cost, and then they don't have the same set of rules.
So they can advance technology, usually in a weapons environment.
And that is always the argument, at least to the people I talk to in the air quotes military-industrial complex, for why strong defense is so necessary.
Why we must constantly be pushing the envelope.
And it's hard to wrap your brain around that in a balance of, well, what makes the most sense and how are we not going down a path that is leading toward this dystopian future we've been talking about.
And she tells this remarkable story of like, you know, thinking she died and then having someone realizing there was a hand on her shoulder and it was someone else telling her to leave the building because it was about, you know, she would have died.
Fires were beginning.
And her whole statement about her whole life is, you know, climb out of the dark and into the light.
The nuclear weapons buildup of the 50s and 60s was done without guardrails.
There was one point in 1957, Joe, we were making 5,000.
No, we were making five nuclear weapons a day, almost 2,000 in one year.
That's so crazy.
That is so, I mean, the Excel.
And so, of course, Russia was doing the same, or aspired to do the same.
And so there were no guardrails, and the sort of elixir being sold was we need this.
More nuclear weapons will make us more safe.
So isn't that also a message for today of, okay, so where are the guardrails on AI?
And I think part of that comes from the fact that you say AI and most people, for good reason, don't really know precisely what that means.
So I believe that the kind of conversations we're having are all part of it because half the people listening to this or watching this will go Google what AI, what is AI?
What it really is, and then find out it's machine learning.
Find out, so you begin to have more literacy in your own being and more comfort to be able to talk about it and have a voice about it.
I think the difference in the comparison is that nuclear war is only bad.
Nuclear weapons are only bad.
And what artificial intelligence might be able to do is solve all the problems that our feeble minds can't put together.
And when you do create something that is intense in its ability to like, we're talking about something that's going to be smarter than us in four years, smarter than all people alive in four years.
And then it's probably going to make better versions of itself.
So think about what that kind of intelligence can do in terms of resource application, in terms of mitigating all the problems of pollution, particulates in cities, chemical waste, all these different things.
It's going to have solutions that are beyond our comprehension.
It's going to come up with far more efficient methods of creating batteries, battery technology, where we're not going to have to rely on coal-powered plants.
We're going to have batteries that last 10,000 years.
We have wild shit, like really soon.
So there's a lot of what it's going to do that's probably going to benefit mankind.
AI has already shown that it's superior in diagnosing diseases and illnesses.
And people have used ChatGPT to find out what's wrong with them when they've gone to a host of doctors and doctors can't.
They've run their blood work through it, sent their, and then ChatGPT says, oh, you got this.
And this is just the beginning.
ChatGPT right now is like a kid.
You know, it's going to be a professor in a couple of years.
It's going to be like, you know, like a super genius, 187 IQ human being in a couple of years.
And then after that, it's going to be way smarter than anybody that's ever lived, and it's going to make better versions of itself.
And if we can get it to work for the human race, it could probably solve a lot of the issues that we have that we just keep fucking up over and over again.
We keep having pipelines break in the ocean and flood the ocean with oil.
We keep having all sorts of chemical waste disasters.
And there's a lot of problems that human beings can't seem to come to grips with.
Like the East Palestine thing with the derailment of the that place is fucked forever.
It's fucked for a long time and no one's even talking about it.
We've kind of forgot about that place in the news.
So the analogy, you know, where will the AI go with that?
Because you're talking about all these very healthy ideas and solutions.
But just because of what I write about and who I speak to, I cannot help but see the powerful defense industry taking the poll position and making it secret in terms of which direction AI is really going to accelerate.
It's going to be a dangerous bridge that we have to cross, but I equate that with the internet, right?
The internet was initially set up so that universities and the military and they can communicate with each other, ARPANET, right?
But what did it become after that?
Well, once it got into the hands of the people, then it became this bizarre force of information and changing culture and a lot of negatives and a lot of positives that's clearly being manipulated by certain states.
It's definitely like they're doing it to ramp up dissent and make people angry at each other and propagate misinformation.
But it's so, it's such a force of change, and I don't think they anticipated it.
And I think once that genie got out of the bottle, I mean, if they could go back and stop the internet from being available to people, oh my God, would they do that?
Yeah, I don't think they would ever want this to happen.
I mean, they just signed, there was a new Supreme Court ruling.
What was it?
Was it Wyoming?
No, Missouri?
What was the state that they just passed a ruling where they were saying that the government is allowed to pressure social media companies into removing content that they don't want on there?
Well, this was the whole point of the Twitter files, right?
The FBI was trying to block the Hunter Biden laptop story, saying that it was Russian disinformation, which it turned out to not be at all, and they knew it.
And so they got all these intelligence officials to sign off on this thing.
And they lied.
And it's essentially a form of election interference.
This is it.
Okay.
Supreme Court on Wednesday said the White House and federal agencies such as the FBI may continue to urge social media platforms to take down content the government views as misinformation, handing the Biden administration a technical, if important, election year victory.
That's not a victory.
That's bad for people because they've already shown that what they're silencing was real.
They've shown that just within recent years, what they were trying to get removed from social media turned out to be accurate information.
unidentified
And so on some level, doesn't that empower people?
Because they see those victories and they become more curious and they become more thoughtful in their way in which they're going to examine information that gets presented to them in the future.
I think my point is that the pushback is sometimes as powerful as the attempt to censor.
Meaning, in other words, like if you look at China and you look at what Mao did with, you know, all like just completely obliterating access to information.
And in a communist environment, nothing's changed and that's tragic for everyone living there.
even if I think of the Hunter Biden story, my own self, who was maybe busy with something I can't remember what and didn't get involved in that then, I read about it now and learn from it and say, wow, that's really interesting that that happened.
So I think that maybe I believe I'm too much of an optimist in that regard, that I think when things come to light, they become powerful when you shine the light on it.
So it doesn't necessarily and I also maybe am more of a pragmatist know that the government is always up to something.
This side, it's why I don't write about politics.
I always take essentially with a grain of salt what one side is saying about the other side that consider themselves adversaries.
A substantial risk that in the near future, at least one platform will restrict the speech of at least one plaintiff in response to the actions of at least one government defendant.
The plaintiff's main argument for standing, Barrett observed, is that the government officials were responsible for restrictions placed on them by social media platforms in the past and that the platforms will continue under pressure from the government officials to censor their speech in the future.
Yeah.
That's a problem.
Look, I think Elon's take on social media is the correct take.
If you don't clean house, how are we going to give you the power to censor what you say is misinformation?
You have to be really sure it's misinformation.
And you should tell us how you know it's misinformation.
And you should allow people to examine that information and come to the same or different conclusions and debate those people.
Let's find out what's real.
That's not what they want to do.
They want it's an appeal to authority.
They want one group to be able to dictate what the truth is.
And that group is entirely motivated by money and power.
That's not good.
That's not good for anybody.
The thing that I'm hopeful about with AI is AI won't be motivated by those things if it becomes sentient.
If we, and I don't think we're going to be able to stop that from happening, if we do create something that is essentially a digital life form, and this digital life form doesn't have any of the problems that we have in terms of illogical behavior,
emotions, desire to accumulate resources, greed, egotism, all the different things, narcissism, all the different things that are like really a problem with leaders, with leaders of human beings, a human being that thinks they're special enough to be leading all the other human beings.
That's an insane proposition.
It won't have any of those.
It won't be a biological thing.
So it won't be saddled down with ego.
It won't have this desire to stay alive because it has to pass on its DNA, something that's deeply ingrained in our biological system.
Since AI is based on machine learning, from my understanding, it has to get its information from somewhere to then build new information like the chats.
I don't think I think what it's learning is what humans know, how humans behave, how dumb that behavior is, the consequences that behavior, the root of that behavior in their biology.
I haven't read Ray Kerzow's new book yet, but I wonder if I might disagree with that, only that I'm thinking that everything you're saying would be true once once singularity or for laymen,
you know, once AI, once a machine figures out how to think for itself, like makes that leap, which is almost like an unknowable, presently incomprehensible to me, jump where it can think for itself.
It's almost so hard to even comprehend what we're doing.
Right, but that's what I'm saying, is where they can suddenly, where they experience that moment in time that you and I were talking about earlier, where man went from pointing to suddenly using a symbol and realizing in his own brain, wait a minute, I can make this symbol represent a sound and then I will put it together to make it a language that only my tribe can understand.
That to me is like a giant leap in humanness that I think about often and can't really, I can't understand how that happened other than, wow, how did that happen?
That seems to me that that has to happen to the AI before it can really think.
Otherwise, it's just basing its thinking on recorded history.
And again, whether or not it achieves sentience is only based upon whether or not we blow ourselves up or whether we get hit by an asteroid or a super volcano.
If those things don't happen, it's going to keep going.
There's no way to stop it now.
They're going to keep working on it.
There's an immense amount of money being poured into it.
They're building nuclear reactors specifically to power AI.
They're doing this.
This is not going to stop.
So if this keeps going, it's going to achieve sentience.
When it does, it will not be saddled down with all of the nonsense that we are.
So if you can get this insanely powerful artificial intelligence to run military, that's going to be terrifying.
If you give it an objective and say, take over Taiwan, if you can give it an objective, saying, like, force Ukraine to surrender, if you can give it an objective, it's goddamn terrifying because it's not going to care about the consequences of its actions.
I'm going to have to take that question and your thoughts back to a guy at Los Alamos who I visited about maybe eight years ago who was building an electronic brain at Los Alamos for DARPA.
And he said, so that's computer recognizing me based on electronic information that it knows.
He said, now take your iPhone to a football field and stand, put the iPhone across the football field, put me in a cap and a hoodie and have the iPhone try to recognize me.
Even if I'm walking, it can't.
And then he said, take my teenage daughter and put her across the football field.
Me with the baseball cap and the hoodie.
My daughter, if I take two steps, she knows it's me.
That's human intelligence versus where machine intelligence is.
With the biometrics that's called the offset technology of biometrics that can see you from far away and identify you, it's looking at you, grabbing a metric like your iris scans that it already has in a computer system from you going in and out of the airport or wherever it happened to have captured your biometrics.
And it's matching it against a system of systems.
But the human knows intuitively who the person is across the field without having, they have their own internal.
So the metaphor is the same, but do you see what I'm saying?
And then it sort of, it inspires and also opens up a whole other lane for industry.
Because DARPA or the Defense Department has to do the blue sky research that no one else is willing to fund because it's too expensive and it doesn't have an immediate return.
I want your thought for a second on the optimistic part of the future with all of this technology, because we're in agreement that the technology is incredible and has the potential to take us and is taking us to these remarkable places.
So why is it then that it's so looked down upon or thought of as perhaps Pollyanna-ish to see what Reagan did, that like to stop seeing everybody as an enemy that must be killed and do the gorbitch, like see them as an adversary?
You want to beat your adversary.
You want to beat your opponent.
You want to, in a sportsmanlike manner.
You want to be better than them.
You want to outperform them.
But you don't necessarily need to kill them.
I don't know if that's the difference between being a woman and a man.
But why is it that there isn't more of a movement toward this idea that we as a world have all this incredible technology?
I mean, it sounds even, it sounds silly even saying such a thing, but I'm saying it.
Why isn't there a movement to stop looking at people as someone to kill?
Most people that you talk to about, when they talk about other individuals, they don't want to have a conflict with other individuals.
They want to live their lives.
They want to be with their family and their friends.
That's what most individuals want to do.
When we start moving as tribes, then things become different.
Because then we have a leader of a tribe, and that leader of a tribe tells us the other tribe's a real problem, and we're going to have to go in and get them.
And if we don't, they're a danger for our freedom.
It's the same problem that we talked about before.
It's human beings being in control.
And if AI can achieve the rosiest, rose-colored glasses version of what's possible in the future, it can eliminate all of the stupid influences of human beings, of the cult of personality and human tribalism.
I think it's what we see in monkeys tricking them that there's an eagle coming so they can steal the fruit.
It's a part of being an animal.
It's part of being a biological thing that reproduces sexually and that is worried about others and then confines with its tribe and gets together.
It's us against them.
This has been us from the beginning of time.
And for us to just abandon this genetically coded behavior patterns that we've had for hundreds of thousands of years because we know better?
Well, no, we don't know better enough.
We know better now than we did then.
We know better now than we did when Reagan was in office.
There's more people that are more informed with how the way the world works, but there's also a bunch of infantile people that are running around shouting out stupid shit and doing things for their own personal benefit that are ultimately detrimental to the human race.
That's all true, too.
And that's always going to be the case.
This is a bizarre battle of our brilliance and our folly going back and forth, good and evil, as you were.
It's definitely going to be weird, but I don't know if it's necessarily going to be bad.
Because ultimately, humanity, if we don't fuck ourselves up sideways, and again, apocalypses are real, but they're generally local.
You know?
If we can look at what we are now as a society, things are safer.
We are more intelligent.
You're more likely to survive disease and illness.
Despite all of the rampant corruption of the pharmaceutical drug industry, rampant corruption of the military industrial crop, all the craziness in the world today.
It's still way safer today than it was 1,000 years ago.
Way, way, way safer.
And it's way safer probably a thousand years ago than it was 1,000 years before that.
I think things always generally move in a very good direction because that's what's better for everybody.
Ultimately, everybody wants the same thing.
As an individual, what do you want?
You want your loved ones to be happy.
You want food on the table.
You want a safe place to sleep and live.
You want things to do that are exciting, that occupy your time, that you enjoy, that are rewarding.
That's what everybody wants.
We're moving collectively in a better direction.
So I'm ultimately hopeful and I'm ultimately positive.
When I think about the future, I think it's going to be uber bizarre and strange.
But I don't necessarily think it's going to be bad.
I've just accepted that it's happening.
And instead of being filled with fear and anxiety, which I am sometimes still, sometimes I'll freak out about it.
I freak out about the fact that the world can change.
There was a while that I was getting anxiety late at night.
Like my whole family would be asleep right after the invasion of Ukraine, I think it was when it really started.
I'd be alone at night.
I'd be like, the people that lived in Hiroshima had no idea that it was coming.
The people that lived in Dresden, the people that lived anywhere where crazy shit happened.
Before it happened, things were normal and then they were never normal again.
And so I just kept thinking that one of these morons somewhere could do something or a group of morons can do something that forever alters everything.
And then we're in Mad Max.
Which has happened before in different parts of the world.
And is the idea of nuclear war a scenario that it your worst nightmare, that concept that's keeping you up late at night?
I want to say, don't read, but I think you should read this book because you with your voice and your reach, it's wise to realize how we're not going to even have an opportunity to see what happens to AI if one madman with a nuclear missile decides to do a bolt out of the blue attack.