"Existential Threat To Human Life" Eric Weinstein On Iran, Epstein, UFOs & More...
While many of us have been debating men in women’s sport and woke Hollywood, Dr Eric Weinstein has long maintained that three far more consequential stories will define our age… the success or failure of the Iranian regime; the looming artificial intelligence megashock, and the extraordinary reach of Jeffrey Epstein into HIS world - the field of science. He joined Piers Morgan to explain more… Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices
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Regime Fall and US Repercussions00:15:14
We're seeing the rise of the sort of dirty hairy administration.
No president was willing to do what I am willing to do, so let's see how you respond.
When the world stops being able to handle the injustice and what's wrong with it, suddenly Inspector Callahan comes out of the woodwork and uses unorthodox methods to put things right.
Go ahead.
Make my day.
There are four forces of nature.
We know how to control two of them somewhat, the strong force and the electromagnetic force.
The strong force is what we got control of in 1945 and took out two cities in Japan.
What happens when you can control gravity?
This is absolutely national interest.
New Mexico is going to be the hub that connects atomic weapons, UFOs, and Jeffrey Epstein.
And they're all going to merge into one story about power that we don't understand.
You know, Eric, you always say stuff which gives us the most brilliantly sellable headlines.
Well, while many of us have been debating men in women's sport and woke Snow White, unapologetically, by the way, Dr. Eric Weinstein has long maintained that three far more consequential stories will define this era.
The success or failure of the Iranian regime, the looming artificial intelligence mega shock, and the extraordinary reach of Jeffrey Epstein into his world, the field of science.
Well, Dr. Weinstein joins me now.
I hesitate to call you Nostradamus, Eric Weinstein.
Welcome back to Uncensored, but all the pointers are that you are indeed a modern-day Nostradamus, not least because of your focus of all our attention on Iran.
What do you make of what has happened with these unprecedented attacks on Iran?
Well, good to be with you, Pierce.
As just to be completely honest, I'm not exactly sure what to make of it, but this was a very courageous, strong decision that may have far-reaching consequences.
We're just at the beginning of it, and it's going to ripple all the way to Pyongyang, Moscow, and Beijing in its implications.
And I think, as we've seen with Cyprus, the willingness of the Iranian regime to reach out and try to involve as many players as possible should not be discounted.
This is, in my opinion, simultaneously somewhat inexplicable in terms of the rules-based order, but also necessary, which is extremely confusing.
There wasn't enough of a move, in my opinion, to prepare any kind of groundwork or theory in which to fit this, which turns out to be important over time.
And roughly speaking, we're seeing the rise of the sort of dirty hairy administration, where when the world stops being able to handle the injustice and what's wrong with it, suddenly Inspector Callahan comes out of the woodwork and uses unorthodox methods to put things right.
And if there is a doctrine associated with this administration, I would say it's the FAFO, dirty, hairy doctrine of people finding out the consequences of trying to be cute, getting around the letter of the world order by using proxy armies and others to do the dirty work.
And I think Iran has just found that these long-deferred consequences have come home because this particular president has had enough.
How will history judge, do you think, the Iranian regime?
Assume for a moment that it is either toppled, which is obviously we're away off that, but severely damaged, which leads to a toppling over time.
And we end up with a regime that lasted, say, 47, 48, 49 years, whatever it ends up being, if that is the case.
How will history judge it?
Because many people have tried to frame this Iranian regime since 1979 as one of the worst regimes, if not the worst, in the world, primarily because of the way it simultaneously repressed its own people, but also acted as a kind of octopus with multiple tentacles to terrorists throughout that region through the Houthis, Hezbollah, through Hamas, and other groups.
That it became a sort of a terrorism octopus.
Do you think that's how history will judge it?
I think that history will probably judge it by its theocratic nuclear ambitions.
I think the idea of coupling a theocracy to a sovereign nation empowered with nuclear weapons, and particularly a theocracy devoted to martyrdom, presented game theory that was not easily understandable by anyone.
So it posed a unique sort of a threat where self-interest could not really be determined in terms of, I mean, all of the horrible crimes that have been committed through proxies like Hamas or Hezbollah or the Houthis or who have you, pale in comparison to what I think the regime ultimately aspired to.
And I should also say that the oppression of a thoroughly modern people, particularly in Tehran, is what is very disturbing to many of us, people who knew freedom, who were very much a part of the modern world.
And, you know, I'm just going to reiterate something I say frequently: that the Persian contribution to world culture is an astounding one.
This is not a random nation pulled at random out of the UN membership.
This is one of the most important peoples, cultures, nations in the world.
And for that nation to have this regime was an oddity never before seen.
You said something very interesting in September 2022.
You posted then: Iran is too advanced, modern, and important to the modern world to be under this kind of backward human rights-violating, religiously intolerant regime for this long.
It's been 43 years of imposed backwardness on an advanced civilization.
Maybe it's finally enough, which looks very prescient, I have to say, looking back on that now, what, three and a half years on.
But it has felt like that.
You know, whenever I meet a lot of Iranians who've come to the UK, for example, to get away from that regime, they are extremely cultured people.
They're very sophisticated in their thinking.
They're very well educated.
They're very modern in many ways in their thinking as well.
And yet they've had to flee a very draconian, as you put it, backward-looking regime that wanted to drag everybody back to the dark ages.
Well, give me that I am nothing if not consistent.
I hadn't remembered that tweet.
Yeah, I do think that, you know, particularly in my case, loving Persian music and, you know, having some appreciation for the way in which Persian filters into Turkish and Urdu, two languages that I fumble around with, there's no question that this is a people who, if freed,
are going to exert a major influence on the world at all levels, intellectually, scientifically, artistically, in terms of trade.
Obviously, the energy endowment, I don't even need to talk about.
So, you know, one of the things that we have to think about is that I, in some sense, believe that the regime has fallen.
You can't survive with that many of your leaders and not become something.
If that many of your leaders are killed off, you become something new.
So that's already been accomplished.
What this uncorks is unclear.
I mean, you know, in part, there are other cultures that are extremely important.
Shout out to the Kurds of Iran, as well as the Azeri population and Armenians.
You know, there's no shortage of diversity within the modern nation of Iran.
And all of these things, in part, may produce one of the most advanced civilizations if freed from this theocracy.
I think that that is something we're going to have to contend with because it's also going to be naturally a major regional player, even if it became a secular country, which I don't think is likely.
I do think that there's a little bit of wishful thinking where people pretend that there is no support for the regime and that there are no hardline fundamentalists in the country.
Obviously, that's not true.
But I think we're going to get a lesson in how much complexity was covered up by the sarcophagus of smothering Sharia law under clerics.
There are many people who are very skeptical that America has been sort of persuaded to do this by Benjamin Netanyahu and the Israeli government who've been itching to do this for decades.
You said last June in a post, Israel's not attacking the people of Iran.
It's trying to end a regional and global nightmare regime.
At least let us wish them and the Persian people a safe night while Israel is working through the wee hours to make sure the mullahs won't be able to strike us here with WMD.
Let us pray they know what they're doing.
Godspeed.
I think that was around the time of the 12-day war in which the Americans and Israelis attacked the nuclear plants there.
People say, well, hang on a second.
We were told then that the nuclear capability had been pretty well destroyed.
Now the pretext for this new war, less than a year later, is the threat of Iran having a nuclear weapon.
That is the pretext for doing this.
How can those two positions be right?
How can the 12-day war have been a spectacular success and neutered its nuclear aspirations, but we need to go and do this a few months later?
What do you say to people that think that?
You're asking a hell of a question.
Let's get into some trouble, which is frequently done on your program.
I myself have stepped in a few times.
I think that the Israelis, in part, have a great deal of love for the Iranian people and viewed themselves, whether rightly or wrongly, and again, I can't say because I've never been to Iran, Viewed themselves as wanting to liberate a great people.
There's a long historical relationship between Jews and Persians.
And mostly there's a great deal of respect from every Jew that I know who's knowledgeable about this.
So in part, there is the fantasy of being the Jewish liberators of a great nation as opposed to the attackers of Iran.
So you just have to understand that that's a reframe that is very common in Jewish and particularly in Israeli circles.
I also believe that in part Donald Trump is sparing us from the Israelis having to do this alone.
And, you know, as a person who is on record calling Donald Trump an existential threat, potentially to life on earth, I will say that this is an extremely courageous action that is not only America first, it's Earth first.
And the attempted reframe of this as Benjamin Netanyahu persuading Donald Trump, nobody's going to push Donald Trump around.
Try it.
You see what happens.
You know, in this situation, what you have is that Israel might have had to go to weapons that I don't even want to talk about, given the disparity between the two countries in terms of, let's say, humans.
Israel needs a technological military equipment advantage in order to take on Iran, and that would have been a disaster.
So I think that what you can say is that Donald Trump is in part acting to stop the Israelis from doing this alone and using methods that I think would be far more dangerous.
And, you know, let me just say this.
This is a return to the America that many of us are quite proud of, that has intervened on behalf of people who could not stand up for themselves.
And I just don't understand the level of anti-Semitic rhetoric.
This is a country that threatened our president, that released videos talking about the assassination of, you know, picturing, visualizing the assassination of Donald Trump, our sitting president.
And there's no question that this nation is different, unique in all the world.
There are probably a tiny number of countries that pose any kind of comparable threat.
And I think that you have to look at it from the time of the Iranian embassy being taken over, the U.S. embassy in Iran, and the time of the military barracks bombing in 1983.
These people have been at low-grade war with us for almost half a century and striking our targets as well as our allies' targets, as well as causing trouble for their Arab neighbors.
They're not an Arab country, and you look at where all of these missiles have fallen just to stir things up.
No, these people have shown you who they are, and I don't mean the Iranian people.
I mean this horrid regime.
And let me just say congratulations to Donald Trump for having the guts to do this, despite the fact that your base very often sinks into the simplicity of trying to figure out whether everything results in a lower price for butter at the supermarket.
That's not the extent of the U.S. project.
And quite honestly, I'm very proud of a president that I have, in general, had very little positive to say about over many years.
And I can tell you that I've had very little to say positively about Benjamin Netanyahu.
Say what you will.
If you're going to call balls and strikes, these are two courageous men taking on what the world feared to do.
And by the way, there are going to possibly be serious repercussions inside the United States.
This is not without risk, physically, for people far away from this theater of operations.
Cyprus is the beginning.
see what comes after.
There are some people who think that Donald Trump has only done this to try and distract the world from the Epstein files, which have become a massive sort of Damocles around him and a lot of people in his circle.
The Nature of Conspiracy Theories00:14:53
You for years have warned about Epstein's influence in an interesting way where you were most primarily concerned about his links to top scientists.
And it does seem from the files that have been dumped on the world, the millions of files, citing newly released documents from the Department of Justice, the distinguished science journal Nature, revealed that Epstein invested millions of dollars in science projects, made donations to MIT and Harvard, and maintained a list of nearly 30 top scientists.
The documents show researchers consulted the sex offender on publications, visas, and public relations crises, and even allowed him deep involvement in their research work.
So you've been clearly vindicated spectacularly in your concerns about this.
But now we know the full extent of Epstein's connections to the higher echelons of science.
It does beg the question, why was this happening?
Why was he allowed to?
Well, because we don't know the full extent.
I mean, I think if we ever get to the bottom of this, if we're playing the Nostradamus game, I'd like to go double or nothing.
I think some of this is going to have to do with a topic in number theory called elliptic curves, which people don't have at the tip of their tongue, but it's behind your ability to send an encrypted love letter or trade Bitcoin.
Cryptography rests on number theory.
And the Harvard mathematics department, where I got my PhD, was a leading source of innovation in the world of elliptic curves.
I wonder very strongly whether people paid attention to that Steve Bannon pseudo-interview in which while doing media training, Jeffrey Epstein directly, and somehow nobody broke this out until I clipped it for Twitter, which I find astounding.
He literally says, why did I get the ranch in New Mexico, the Zorro Ranch?
It was because Los Alamos was downsizing and firing its nuclear weapons physicists and high priests of high energy physics, and I wanted to be close to them.
He's saying that when the Cold War ended, he recognized that there were going to be a lot of disaffected, disgruntled, laid-off people because the U.S., in its most asinine moment, decided that it was entitled to a Cold War dividend by screwing the very people who won the Cold War by inducing a threat so severe no one could contemplate going to war with us.
Well, what he was doing was he was setting up listening posts in exactly the most telling places.
Zorro Ranch is close to Sandia Laboratory and Los Alamos Laboratory, where he found his high energy physicists, as he said.
And one Brattle Square in the O2138 area code of Massachusetts is a listening post to listen in on Harvard and MIT, which are connected by a 30-minute walk down Mass Ave.
So if you just go into those documents, as I said to everybody, you will find that he had an extensive relationship with the Harvard Mathematics Department.
Search on math.harvard.edu in those files.
And you'll see he was meeting with everyone from ST Yao, who often acts in part as a representative of Chinese interests in the American mathematical elite, Martin Noek, Clifford Taubes, Michael Hopkins.
All of these sorts of people were meeting with Epstein.
And then we find out in particular, like, you know, you had a debate on with Sean Carroll.
I believe Sean Carroll shows up as having a meeting with him, as well as Benedict Gross, who was a number theorist elliptic curve expert who pioneered Jeffrey Epstein's entry into the Harvard math department.
People are not understanding.
This was a science spy.
And he was spying directly.
The reason I knew that, it wasn't a prediction.
He was spying directly on my work.
The earliest we see him in the Harvard math departments around 2002.
I got my PhD in 1992.
He had information on me that was from the late 80s, early 90s, about something called the Cyber-Witten equations, which actually weren't recognized then and aren't recognized now to have to do directly with gravitational theory.
He somehow knew that my work, which technically would have been about something called self-dual Yang-Mills equations, was actually about gravity.
He was very focused on gravity, and this is going to come up in the UFO disclosures, which is that the UFO weirdness is not just about UFOs.
It's about the golden age of general relativity and U.S. attempts to gain control over additional forces of nature.
There are four forces of nature.
We know how to control two of them somewhat, the strong force and the electromagnetic force.
The strong force is what we got control of in 1945 and took out two cities in Japan.
So what happens when you can control gravity?
This is absolutely national interest.
The national security apparatus has completely fallen down on the job.
Nobody's picked up on what kind of a spy he was.
And the idea that this is some sort of auxiliary thing that he was doing with respect to science when the main story is just about the sexual misdeeds, this is not true.
I mean, his operation, I think, in part was about spying on scientists.
So that's fascinating.
I mean, what do you think his real modus operandi was?
What was it that he was trying to do, and who was he doing it for?
Well, I guess I'm very confused about this.
Everyone saw Oppenheimer, you know?
And if I put up names like von Neumann, Fermi, Bohr, Oppenheimer, Feynman, everybody knows that that's a security risk.
But if I were to name the 10 most powerful minds in mathematics and physics, and I said that the goal is to break codes, come up with new directed energy weapons, go beyond Einstein's concept of the space-time continuum, you'd say, oh, that sounds like tinfoil hatter stuff.
It's like, wake up, man.
This is the most powerful stuff on Earth.
Physics and mathematics are much more powerful than money.
And mathematics created Bitcoin.
You can't have Bitcoin without mathematics.
And physics created the ability to end the human species as we know it.
When did we become disinterested in protecting all of these ninja priests with this, like, do you think of me as a cultural commentator, or do you think of me as a differential geometer focused on the standard model and general relativity and trying to push the edge?
I have no idea why nobody...
I had an interview with the Diary of a CEO podcast, and at the end, I'm saying, is there no one at the Department of Energy who knows what their job is?
Because the Department of Energy is tasked with safeguarding our national laboratory.
They have an intelligence wing that's supposed to know if a mysterious pseudo-fake billionaire shows up and says, I need to make contact with all the people we've decided to stop paying who know the deepest secrets of the United States with respect to theoretical physics.
I mean, it's quite extraordinary.
Do you think we know the half of it yet about Epstein?
I mean, we know that over 3 million documents have still not been released.
I mean, that alone, you'd have to be a conspiracy theorist to think, well, what the hell's in there, given what we've already seen?
3 million?
No, no, no, you're falling for the oldest trick in the book.
The whole idea is that they're going to say something.
Let's imagine that they said, look, we have 10 million documents and we've released 4 million of them.
And then you say, well, what about the other six?
Well, now you've just bought into the idea that there's only another six.
You didn't question the 10.
Tell me something.
If you really ran an FX foreign exchange hedge fund, how many documents does that throw off?
Like just the compliance alone on a hedge fund creates reams and reams of documents.
I know of at least two documents that haven't been released, one of which, well, I'm not going to get into that.
I don't think you're on the right order of magnitude.
I think you're being led down a garden path which says that we've released half of the documents.
Let's see the other half.
And I hope, Pierce, that we can use your program to inform people.
Don't be dumb enough to follow this.
This is like magician's choice.
They're pushing you to pull the card out of the deck that they want.
Ask the right question.
If there really was a hedge fund, how many hundreds of millions of documents might that have thrown off just for compliance?
You see, it's interesting.
Someone asked me the other day, what's your sort of overview about the Epstein files?
I went, you know, I'm not a conspiracy theorist, genuinely.
I just try and get through all conspiracy theories to some kind of reality.
And if they turn out to be true, as some of them do, okay, great.
I have to say on the Epstein scandal, there's pretty much no conspiracy now, no conspiracy theory that I've heard that I would be very confident at ruling out simply because of the concerted effort by so many rich, powerful people to suppress the information.
All my journalistic antennae tell me when people go to this amount of trouble to suppress the truth from the public, then you can pretty much think that almost every theory might be true.
And ruling any of them out might be a very foolhardy thing.
I'm very surprised to hear you say what you said.
Surely you believe in La Cosa Nostra.
I have no doubt that you believe that the Manhattan Project existed.
Therefore, you are a conspiracy theorist.
Every smart person, and I certainly count you in that group, has to be a conspiracy theorist.
The idea that we claim we're not conspiracy theorists is really what we used to say when we wanted to give room for our intelligence and covert operations to work.
So we would pretend that we didn't believe in our own conspiracies so that our hopefully ethical and public-spirited covert operations and intelligence services would have the room to move.
But it's much the same thing, Pierce, as when you go past a five-car pile up with burning cars and body parts scattered all over the road and somebody says nothing to see here.
Move along.
You say, okay, I agree to act as if there is nothing to see here.
The question is, do you agree to act as if conspiracies are not true or that those who speculate about them must be mad?
And the odd part about it, of course, is that you can look up the terms special access program, unacknowledged special access program, and waived unacknowledged special access program as three different categories of conspiracies that the United States government has agreed to create.
These are containers into which we put our conspiracies.
So to say that you're not a conspiracy theorist is basically just in good faith saying, I agree not to investigate what we've put in our secret containers.
But in bad faith, it's an attempt to make people who speculate about such things knowledgeably into pariahs, and that way we can keep our intelligence services safe.
As I said to the FBI in a meeting with them on Wilshire Boulevard not too long ago, if I find out that you guys are behind covering up the rape of little children, all bets are off.
And the old adage that I swear to defend the country against all enemies, both foreign and domestic, holds.
Now, the key question is, can we report the FBI to the FBI?
Can we seek justice against the Department of Justice?
To whom do we report what is effectively, almost certainly, an international, interstitial, covert operations hub that we've pretended is one man named Jeffrey Epstein?
I mean, it's very interesting you're challenging me like that, and it's made me think about what my response should be.
I would say what I meant to infer was that there are certain conspiracy theories that do the rounds, which have been very clearly, in my view, proven to be untrue by cold, hard fact, and yet they continue to be promoted and propagated and spread around.
That's my definition of a genuine conspiracy theory.
It's not a very out there idea about something that's in the news or something historic that remains unproven by hard evidential fact.
For example, there are people who still think we didn't land on the moon.
I think that's complete bullshit.
I think it's been absolutely proven we land on the moon.
People think Elvis is still alive.
He's not.
He died at age 42 back in the 70s.
And so on.
In other words, there are things that happen which people have decided didn't happen and they promote them and those are what I call conspiracy theories.
I think it's different to what you're getting at, which is that especially with the way that modern media has gone and going through things like the pandemic, for example, but that actually it's incumbent on people to be naturally very curious and that however wacky the theory and the Epstein scandal is a perfect example of a lot of the more out there theories about this have sort of been borne out by evidence contained in these files.
So that's how I would clarify my view about conspiracy theories.
Curiosity vs. Social Degeneracy00:06:51
I appreciate what you're trying to say.
I definitely think, you know, I had to go on Joe Rogan to say that one times one is not equal to two because a rumor spread that Terrence Howard had shown that multiplication was incorrect.
There are a lot of wacky things that people say.
I've talked, particularly on the portal, my podcast, about responsible conspiracy theories.
I don't know what you can say, for example, about Building 7, but you'll notice that just the words Building 7 causes an immediate reaction to, am I in Nutterville?
If I said to you that there has never been a building that collapsed like Building 7, you should suddenly feel very uncomfortable because the social cost of pointing that out, even though I've said nothing about who did it or how it happened or anything like that, I'm just going to say that we have, it's an unprecedented building collapse in the history of construction.
We can't talk about certain things in part because they're defended by stigma.
And so I think that one of the things that you and I are both concerned about is how do people who are responsible members of society, who want to take us away from the brink of degeneracy and madness,
operate if those who are engaged in degeneracy, madness, and the destruction of our society's trust structure, if those people are in charge of newspapers and behind the scenes of our computers, hurling epithets at us.
And so that's what you're trying to say.
You're saying, please don't confuse me with a nutter.
And I say, of course, I'm not going to confuse you with a nutter.
But if you can't let me mention that there are 300 man pads missing from the Afghan theater from the U.S.'s time in Afghanistan, those are shoulder-launched missiles.
Now, is that a conspiracy theory?
No, that's a fact, but it's a very disturbing fact.
It will cause you to start thinking about whether or not they could shoot down commercial airliners.
So anything that starts to cause a loss of confidence in the system is defended by the same exact mechanism, which is to call the person pointing it out nutty.
And by the way, I very much appreciate, even though it was totally unwarranted, the very kind words you had in the introduction, because in order for me to keep playing this game, I have to get things right, like saying Joe Biden is not going to make it to November with high probability, and then being borne out.
And the more times I do that, the more times you'll see the words grifter and charlatan attached to my name on social media.
And that is itself called a covert influence campaign, which is something that has been studied as part of another concept, look it up, called human terrain, which was the weaponization of the social sciences, particularly cultural anthropology, against targets involved in spreading information which is not supposed to be in the public's hands, which got renamed as malinformation, which is true stuff the public isn't supposed to know.
The third prong of your Nostradamus positions has been AI.
And there is actually a link between Epstein and this, because I did one of the last interviews with Professor Stephen Hawking.
I think I said this to you before.
And he's been dragged into the Epstein Files.
He's in there several hundred times, his pictures, and him with Epstein.
He went to the island to attend a physics conference and so on.
From everything you've seen or gleaned, and I'll come to what he said about AI in a moment, but from everything you've seen and gleaned in relation to his relationship with Epstein, do you see anything particularly sinister there?
Yeah, sure, of course I do.
I think that Professor Hawking, along with Roger Penrose, are two of our most important theorists working primarily in general relativity and secondarily in the quantum theory.
I think people don't understand how dangerous not if I can predict something on your show for the future, space-time is about to be superseded, both for theoretical reasons and for reasons of an experiment in Arizona called the Dark Energy Spectroscopic Instrument, or DESI, which has shown that the cosmological constant is likely not constant.
I think that we don't realize that kindly old Stephen Hawking was a very potent physicist who might give a military advantage or a national interest advantage to anyone who could understand his mind.
And I will point out also that the normal sexuality of men, and you'll notice he's not pictured in that salacious photo with people who appear to be underage.
You know, my guess is that he had a healthy appetite for romance and amorous activity, which was relatively well known in the community.
And I'm also tired of us creating a situation in which we make fun of anyone who has a normal sexual appetite, which makes it very difficult to get anyone to go after the depravity that was Jeffrey Epstein.
So I think it's very important to realize that a lot of people were sucked into Epstein's orbit with proximity to attractive adult females and that the sideline, which was children and maybe even infants and maybe even,
you know, horrible satanic rituals, was not the same thing as the fact that he was, you know, gathering adult females to entice scientists in order to learn all they knew.
Yeah.
Well, he said, I mean, just on that picture, it turned out his family said there were two long-term carers.
I think he did end up with one of his carers, actually, in a genuine relationship.
But they said it wasn't on the island that picture, and that seems to have been the case in that particular circumstance.
The link to AI with him was when I asked him what's the biggest threat to mankind, Stephen Hawking said to me, when artificial intelligence learns to self-design, that will be the end of the world.
And Elon Musk has said we're in the singularity already, which is the point in time when artificial intelligence surpasses human intelligence, leading to rapid, unpredictable, and irreversible technological advancement, which seems pretty similar to what Stephen Hawking was warning about.
Lost Control of Superintelligence00:04:56
Where do you feel we are with AI?
Are we about to, or could we have already lost control of it?
Well, again, you know, somehow, for whatever reason, my view doesn't exactly fit with anyone else's.
I believe that, for example, Grok already knows secrets of the universe that are not public.
I believe that we are not that close in a certain sense to AGI, artificial general intelligence or superintelligence.
But on the other hand, I believe that we underestimated just how much of what can be just how much can be done without getting to true intelligence.
Most of what we do, Pierce, as I've said before, is we are functioning as LLMs who use thinking as an absolute last resort.
So mostly what we learned was about humans.
And we learned that most human behavior, speech, and discussion is pre-programmed in a certain sort of a way that we hadn't understood.
So it turned out to be much easier to mimic that, much the way a parrot can speak to us and not necessarily understand what it's saying.
Now that said, if you actually code, as I've gone back to in order to understand what's going on with AI, coding is right now being transformed.
And I think February will go down maybe as the Rubicon between two regimes where things that happened in February of this year show what code can be capable of when given a mech suit.
Effectively, a lot of what happened was that these agents were dropped into an Ironman-style mech suit and allowed to do things on the Internet.
You could give it a task like found a company that does this, make sure you get business insurance and open the, you know, an employer identification number for the IRS.
All of those things now are sort of doable.
What I think is, is that those innovations that separate us from the machines are going to be found once we realize that there is a wall and that the AI will get very, very good reading our corpus, but they won't cross that wall until we have one or two more ideas and we give them those ideas, and then the machines will become very similar to us.
And so in a discrete sense, yeah, I think we're a couple of innovations away.
But before we ever get to that, you're going to see a labor market dislocation, which is bizarre that no one is really talking about or planning.
In other words, you can see the tide rushing out, and you know that a tsunami is coming, and nobody's holding the conferences that says, how do we get rid of UBI, which is the dreaded wrong solution to the AI tsunami that's coming.
We're supposed to be going after somebody named Ronald Coase's ideas on COSIA and rights so that we can preserve markets, agency, and freedom, even as these things gobble up our jobs.
And the idea is, roughly speaking, that we, those who are soon to be unemployed in traditional terms, will gain licensing income from licensing the right to all the work on which these things trained, and we will lose wage income.
So the blended stream will be a decrease in our ability to earn a living from our labor and toil, and an increase in our ability to earn a living from licensing the right to use all this stuff that has just been appropriated by these AI companies.
The law hasn't caught up, the economics haven't caught up, and in particular, I very much wonder what outfits like the Institute for New Economic Thinking are doing, not convening conferences and saying, look, the era of capitalism and communism is over.
Right now, we have to come up with a new theory.
And if Karl Marx and Adam Smith were alive today, I don't think they would be going back to capitalism and communism.
They'd be trying to figure out what's next.
Somehow all we do is look backwards.
It's like we've lost our agency.
And I can't understand it because this is imminent.
This is about to happen.
And somehow we don't have the leadership in Washington that understands you better figure out what COSIN rights are very quickly and get rid of UBI or we are all going to become on the dole and enslaved in a relatively short time if we can't figure out what to do next.
Evidence of an Enormous UFO Program00:02:31
Yeah, I share a lot of your concerns about that.
Let's just end with a couple of quickies.
UFOs, aliens.
We saw Barack Obama stumble into global headlines by saying he thought aliens existed.
People assumed he'd seen evidence of this.
He sort of reigned back on that.
But Donald Trump has now said he will release all the classified files on UFOs and aliens.
And you posted after that, an enormous secret is buried here.
I have failed to guess it year after year.
What did you mean by that?
We have a puzzle that I can't solve.
There is more accumulated anecdotal, circumstantial, and sporadic evidence of an enormous program about UFOs than I know how to dismiss.
I've talked to people who have strikingly similar first-hand accounts of bizarre behavior, either in terms of objects in the skies or the seas or seeming U.S. government employees with no insignia and no identification behaving in bizarre ways.
I can't explain the amount of first-hand claims from non-actors delivered with perfect sincerity that would make Hollywood blush if there isn't a reality behind it.
Now, sometimes we get a look at that.
For example, there's a private Air Force that seems to come down from the skies and destroy equipment of people observing UFOs that I think turned out to be the CIA's Office of Global Access.
I wasn't smart enough to figure out how you could hide an Air Force inside of the United States from a breakaway society, but I think it was just the CIA.
So, you know, that was bad for me.
I didn't get that right.
I think what you're seeing is that there's probably a very long-standing program, particularly involving physics and particularly involving aerospace companies, not as aerospace as we know it, but as shells in which you can put very sensitive stuff that could be FOIA if it was found inside of government.
I don't know what's in that structure.
I think Wright-Patterson Air Force Base is going to be very important.
There's a site in Indiana, several in New Mexico.
My guess is that you're going to find out that a lot of these stories, just take New Mexico.
New Mexico is going to be the hub that connects atomic weapons, UFOs, and Jeffrey Epstein.
New Mexico as the Story Hub00:01:40
And they're all going to merge into one story about power that we don't understand.
Human power is going to be centered in the state that we barely ever talk about.
And including Bill Richardson at the Department of Energy, which, of course, is really the custodian of physics and our nuclear weapons that Jimmy Carter converted from the AEC, where atomic energy was the cover story for atomic weapons.
So we went from atomic weapons to atomic energy to just energy.
And now we sound like Bill Richardson went there to be the head of oil and gas.
So I think that you're going to find out that New Mexico is going to be the hub that connects all these stories.
You know, Eric, you always say stuff which gives us the most brilliantly sellable headlines for the content that people then watch when I interview you.
I don't think you've ever done anything to surpass the words that just came out of your mouth, linking the trifecta that you just illustrated.
Absolutely riveting.
Eric, thank you.
I can always talk to you for hours.
We've run out of time, but I really appreciate catching up with you.
Thank you very much.
Good to be with you, Piers.
Thanks.
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