Saying obvious true things that people are making an effort to forget - Ep 039

Ever feel like you're questioning reality or drowning in an overwhelming sea of chaos and misinformation? Join hosts JD, Bondor, and Cory as they dissect the pervasive mistruths in the media and the surprising parallels between the crumbling film industry and economics. Discover how small acts of honesty can counteract an oppressive system and how Bitcoin is reshaping our concept of freedom. Tune in for a transformative discussion that melds truth, technology, and the human spirit.

 

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Cory - @PykeCory on 𝕏

 

 

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All right. So topic for today, something I've been thinking about for a couple weeks and trying to put together in my head came out of living in the film industry and enjoying economics. And the issues that are stacked up against the film industry are very similar to a lot of other industries. There's an economic opposition to everything that America is doing right now in the form of debt, in the form of monetary debasement. and every industry will feel the effect of this. And I think in the film industry, you have this idea from people who love film and that they want it to be 1994 again, when there were like 60 movies, you know, there were, you know, there were two a week that you would be excited to go see. You would want to, you couldn't wait to go to the theater because this new movie was coming out. And that was true most of the way through the 90s. and before. And increasingly, it's just not true anymore. And I think for the normal person who doesn't love independent film the way I do, the way a lot of people out in LA do, they see things getting fed to them that are retread, that are lowest common denominator, that are written by a committee rather than a person, that are edited and adjusted based on focus groups. rather than a bold creative vision, sending something out. And the way I'm trying to put that all together is that there's so much opposition, it can feel overwhelming and feel like it's chaos and that individual people and small groups of people can't do anything about it. So I was thinking about what is the thing that you can do on a small scale if you're not the head of a studio, if you're not one of the major financiers doing something about this, what is the small thing you can do? And the thing I'm thinking about is that there's a tremendous amount of lies that are involved in propping this system up. And an individual person can do something very simple, which is just tell the truth in the situation that you're in. And that could potentially be this massive asymmetrical trade that is just stating obvious truths, truths that we all know, truths that children know to be true, that are inherently true, and that you convince yourself otherwise for any sort of number of pressures, any sort of number of reasons. What are those things that, what are those truths basically for the group, for you guys? What are some of the obvious truths that you think that people are making a real effort to forget for any number of reasons?

Well, I think before we get into that, I'm curious, you mentioned in the chat that it was, this is kind of spurred on or inspired a little bit by Andor. I'm curious like how that, like what's that story and why does that Yeah.

So I was reasoning through this on my own and then I remember that you remember the, the, I can't remember the character's name, but it's on the grass planet when they're going to rob the payroll and the guy's making a manifesto about the rebellion, the, this, the, what's going to become the rebellion that, that Luke joins. And he says the, that tyranny takes so much effort that, that the people that are opposed to it don't have to put in all that effort to fight it. They can do something so much simpler. Freedom is innate in the human and that's obviously a much more oppressive imperial presence. But he's making the point that every time there's a person acting in freedom, they are making a massive strike against tyranny. And that's how the small group of people over time is going to make a significant difference. And so I remembered that after I was thinking about this in terms of the film industry, but I think it's true in economics. I think it's true in a number of other industries as well. When something, you know, I think you see it in academic literature and the way that we say what do we know to be true? Well, what a group of professors write and then cite in each other and then it gets this critical mass and then we say, okay, that's true. And a lot of times it's not. It's just not true. And it's obviously not true. Like lab-grown meat is better for you and better for the environment. We all know that's definitely not true. And yet there's a whole host of literature just telling us that that's true. So in that case, all I have to say is, no, it's not. It's not. It's not better for the environment, and it's not better for you. That's it.

Right.

And that's kind of the, this small Act of Freedom against tyranny.

So one of the things that comes to mind, like, just immediately, again, going back to Twitter conversations, which I always do, but I just saw this today, and it's, it was a, is a commenter talking about how She, her words, hates the Joe Rogan experience podcast because there's hate filled people that he gives a platform to. So she being hate filled is standing in opposition to the Joe Rogan podcast for platforming people who are hate filled, right? When you think about the idea that totalitarianism requires all this massive effort, that's one of the things that comes to mind. And it's the same thing, it's a 1984 thing, right? Of, oh yeah, one plus one equals three. We just got to everybody, you just got to follow the line and believe that one plus one is three. It takes an incredible amount of effort to push that narrative to actually make that happen. There's a famous scene in 1984 where there's three world powers, right? And they changed their alliances from time to time for no apparent reason and everyone just has to go along with it. We've always been like, I forget what the names are, but we've always been aligned with the global north and it's always been aligned with Asia, and therefore our enemy is the global south. And then the famous scene in 1984 is they switch. And it was like, oh no, we've never been allied with Asia. We've always been allied with the global south, and now we're against Asia. And they have to go and do this crazy amount of effort where nobody is able to even sleep for weeks while they are literally rewriting all of history to convince everybody that they've never been allied with their allies that they've been allied forever with, and then they're now allied with their new allies. They're rewriting the past. It's so much effort to rewrite the past. And the asymmetric trade is just tell the truth because it's so little effort. You just speak the truth. I'm just going to speak the truth. This is true.

Yeah, yeah, I think there was a spotlight on this a while back when as soon as we found out that vaccines didn't prevent transmission and they didn't even prevent you from getting it, they did prevent you from dying. They didn't change, no one in control changed the narrative on that for how long and some of them still haven't, but some did, you know, a year later or something, but there was still that period where there's this huge number of people who knew that it didn't prevent you from getting it and knew that it didn't prevent you from transmitting it, who were being told that it did even after the science came out that it didn't.

And.

I think you could see the mark of that by people just saying that out loud. No, that's not true anymore.

Right?

We know, we thought that was going to be true. It turned out to not be true. And incredible amounts of hatred are stirred and effort to try to silence that. And one person just saying that, like Dr. Peter McCullough, who's now in charge, there was so much effort just because he said the thing out loud that was true. And then there's all this wave of effort going against it. JD, I'm curious if you have something that when the topic came up that immediately came to mind or you want to pull on any of the threads we brought up already.

Yeah, it's really interesting because the, you know, the COVID idea is actually the one that pops up the most for me. It's interesting how drawn to truth we are, but then how steadfast in protecting our version of the truth we become. Because whatever the first thing you believe is the thing that you will start to protect. this, this, you know, tribal circling the wagons type thing that we have. And, you know, I think the big debate always is like, are we ruled by a global lizard people? It's like, I don't know. Plausible, I think, probably likely. But let's just walk to the easiest thing is like, you don't need a lizard people to control five billion people to put them in control. You just need them to control. five people who believe something, who control 50 people who believe something, who control 5,000 people who believe something, da, da, da, da, da. And then, like water, all of those belief systems start to coalesce and fight and argue regardless of what the actual truth is. And so I think, you know, the whole topic here of, like, tyranny and truth and, you know, again, like saying obviously, saying obvious true things that people are making an effort to forget. Like, it is an obvious true thing that there are men and there are women, period, full stop. Like, even with all the bonus ideology stuff going on right now, they still only sell two types of t-shirts I have never seen M, F and T. as a t-shirt option. And I'm using that as a very important moniker here, not to belittle anyone, but at the end of the day, truth does matter because truth is how you can understand things. It is really important to be specific in language. CS Lewis talked about this of the loss of the meaning of words. as we get to an idiocracy style state, if you can't actually talk correctly, like the amount of work the news outlets and everybody put into trying to convince people that up is down and down is up and the grass is blue and the sky is green when it comes to gender ideology or vaccines or whatever it is, like raw milk being bad for you or fast food.

Where COVID came from, right?

COVID origin one is a great example. Yeah, or, you know, it's just, the, the, the net net here is tyranny feels really, really hard, but it is actually the easiest thing to understand when you realize how foolish we become when we believe something.

Yeah, that's an interesting point. I, I think the The proclivity of a human being, and if we're going to say that we're trying to be as committed to truth as we can, you have to admit that any human being is susceptible to being deceived based on their interests and based on the power that's over them, based on their values and their desires for their life. It can be very hard to engage with real truths, especially when it comes to grief and when it comes to loss and those sorts of things. It's easier to believe other. It's easier to believe, for example, someone's in control than no one's in control, right? That it's easier to believe in a sense of order than a sense of chaos. A very, very good friend who went through a horrible tragedy that I won't go into here, just appalling of loss and his family member. And, and apart, along with all the grief that came with that, one of the things that I noticed in him in the a couple years after, as he got really into conspiracy theories out of nowhere. He had never been a conspiracy theory guy, but like the, I mean, all of them. And my takeaway from that was it was, it was, we went through such a chaotic event and it encountered the true chaos and, and the felt orderlessness of the world. And he, it felt more comforting for him at the time to, to think that there was someone in charge. There was someone behind the, the, the curtain pulling the strings than to say there's nobody. That was even more, even if the person was evil, even if that group was evil, it was still more comforting than engaging with true chaos. So I'm kind of trying to steel man the idea that a population or a person can get behind something that deep down they know isn't true because it makes them feel more safe, it makes them feel more comfortable. And I think every person is susceptible to that.

I think that there's some real connections to like the whole, I mean, obviously we talk about this a lot, but connections to Fiat and its incentives in the system, right? Like when somebody's getting paid in Fiat, they're bought into being paid in Fiat. Like if they thought that Fiat was worthless, they'd be like, well, I'm trading my time, I'm not trading my time for anything. Therefore, I'm a slave, so I'm not going to do that. But they have to believe that Fiat's worth something, right? And they have to go through this process of, okay, well, I'm going to sign a contract and get paid, and then I'm going to, you know, pay with Fiat to, or put it in my bank account or buy groceries or this whole thing. But if Fiat's just nothing, well, then why would they do any of that? Well, there you go. They're doing all that because they believe in this tyrannical system. And it's also, you know, the other side of it is like, oh, the people in charge, of course they want to use Fiat as their number one form because it makes tyranny so much easier for them. Tyranny, this impossibly hard thing to do, is so much easier if we can just get everybody to believe that little government coupons are actually valuable. If we can just do that, then boom, tyranny just comes in real much more easy.

Well, I think it relates to the Bitcoin conversation really well, JD, just to kick it to you. But it feels like every Bitcoin transaction, every time you move Bitcoin, you buy Bitcoin with Fiat and put it on a cold storage wallet, that's a tiny act of truth that's fighting the tyranny of Fiat. It's slow but steady. But it makes it feel like instead of this big tidal wave of chaos and tyranny that you're standing in front of, it feels like this, a pinprick of a balloon, right? That is, it makes it feel like a foregone conclusion that freedom will out, truth will out, whether it's in our lifetime or not, whether we're the ones bringing it or not. But there's so much effort convincing us that fiat is real money at a time when it's so obvious that We're in a state of financial ruin. Like you can talk to professional Keynesian economists that say there's a way forward here. They believe, as far as I can tell, they believe that we can keep printing money all the way and backfilling it with growth just indefinitely into the future. And already the numbers make it so obvious that we can't do that. It makes it feel to me like the truth is gonna come out no matter what, one way or another.

I think it's. There's an old adage that. Thanks, camera, for freezing on me. Bondroll.

There's an old adage. Thanks, camera. I'll kick it.

I'll kick it to you, Bondor, and then I can fix this. But my camera was on all night, and so it's not happy with me. But I'm curious your take on.

On.

On that piece, Bondor of, like. you know what the pinprick of truth, like the value of the pinprick of truth, it's like, you know, you get to a point where you're just like, you feel like you're fighting an uphill battle and you're just like, dang, like, you know, does it even mean anything anymore?

Here's the image that was coming to mind while Cory, while you were saying.

That.

Basically, you look at cryptography and it's essentially this, this idea that like, oh, the images coming to mind is we can kind of hide information. Let's say we're hiding information in the universe, in the stars. Right. There's billions and trillions of stars. We're kind of just, oh, yeah, we find a planet and you hide it there. That's kind of what cryptography does. It's saying, here's this message space, trillions of possibilities, and you kind of just insert the message. You insert the message into the one of those possibilities, and that's kind of your. private key. You can kind of think about that like a password, right? There's a trillion different possible ways to organize letters, and you've just chosen one of those ways for your password. Now, with Bitcoin, or before Bitcoin, the objective was like, that's fine, it's all out there, but we're kind of have to look inward and look toward ourselves to steward value. We have to create these structures of hierarchies and other other things like a central bank that allow and governments and militaries that enforce these rules and everything else. And so we have to build the structure of this tyrannical structure in the center, right? But if the money is stored in the stars, if the money is stored in the message space and it is vastly just out there when.

When you.

Basically to get access to that value now, you have to go out into the stars. You have the, oh, no, no, no. I'm not a part of that system anymore. I'm not even in the same system. I'm in a totally different solar system. My value is now completely ejected from this centralized source. My life's work, my savings, everything else, just completely ejected from that. And it completely, when you talk about popping a balloon, it slowly is just draining like each little Bitcoin buy that goes into a hardware wallet that leaves and exits the system, just slowly drains out the tyranny from the system. It's beautiful.

It's beautiful. I think the way that you described that made me say that made me think that the The balloon isn't a good analogy because that's all at once, but it's more like the leaky bucket theory, which is literally a theory that Keynesian economists put out as just what it is. You print money and then it's a leaky bucket on the way to where it gets to. And along the way, it leaks out into government agencies, special interest oligarchies, and then ultimately something actually buys a tuberculosis medicine for somebody somewhere.

There's all these people, there's all these people like grabbing it with their fingers I'm trying to get some and then putting it, some people are putting it back in the bucket and it's this huge, just facade of absurdity as this bucket is someone's flushes around, right? As opposed to like, why don't just, I don't know, maybe don't use a bucket, right?

Like ridiculous. And I think the beautiful thing about Bitcoin and the analogy you're talking about is now part of that leaky bucket is dropping into a cistern that is completely secure and doesn't go anywhere and actually grows, right? an organic system that just grows over time. And at some point, the leaky bucket just runs out and the cistern is the only place where anyone can find any water.

Or it's, I mean, what really is happening is that instead of transporting leaky bucket from a well to wherever you need the water, what Bitcoin is doing and what Bitcoiners are doing, to be clear, we're building an entire water like architecture. So all of the pipes, all the pumps, like we're just building that and you don't see it yet because it's not really there, but it's a hundred percent being built. And all of these systems, some of them are connected, some of them are not connected, some of them are working already, some of them are in process. But it's like, no, the, the absurdity of using a leaky bucket in this day and age is just, it's going to be just the, Yeah, yeah. Million examples of automobiles and horses and the rest of it.

So I think the biggest thing with the leaky bucket theory though is the leaky bucket theory only works if you're still inside the cave. So if you guys are familiar with Plato's analogy of the cave and it's basically like the people are inside of this cave and they see these create these creatures on the wall, right? So it's like somebody is sitting in a cave and they're looking at a wall and from behind them light is coming into the cave and then there's like these mysterious figures that they see and they're kind of kind of doing it. like, if you're in the Matrix, if you're in the cave, that's the only way the leaky bucket can actually work on you. Because literally all the leaky bucket is, is a group of Keynesian economics that have air in a bucket that they keep covering and they don't show you what's actually in the bucket because there's nothing in the bucket, by the way, guys. It's just numbers on a spreadsheet. And they keep putting more water or air into the bucket, and then they just keep changing. Oh, no, this is, this is now in the bucket. Oh, no, this is now in the bucket, too. Wait, this is in the bucket. But this is, this bucket matters. That bucket doesn't matter. It's like, the freaking ethereum foundation. Like, the moral of the story is as soon as you walk through the one-way door, that is Bitcoin, I.E. walk out of the cave and you get an understanding of this, you only want to put your feet and your trust in truth. And the amount of lies that it takes to keep people in the cave only increases and can only increase at the same rate that they keep. telling you there's more air in the bucket.

Yeah.

And the, the reason for that is because the only way they can keep you in the cave is with a knife. That's why the Second Amendment in the United States is the most important amendment. Because that's why you have what's going on in the UK. That's why you have what goes on, you know, what happened in Cambodia and all these other places where they had these genocides. The only way you can keep people. in the dark and uninformed is if you can do it at gunpoint, which is why it is so important for the proliferation of just people being able to protect themselves. Because at the end of the day, the person who's at the mercy of the other person with the weapon seldom wins because there's too much fear, there's too much uncertainty. And unless we were to go back to feudal Japan, where death was the highest honor in the sense that you were just fighting for truth literally and willing to put your life on the line for it. We're going to continue to live in the dark.

Yeah, I think that that moves us to a part of it that I wanted to talk to a little bit as well, which is the understanding of mystery and mysticism of humanity and how we've lost that. And I think in many ways it's coming back. But there's a quote who I won't tell you from who it's from because it's fun trivia. But he says the forward march of modernity will not be satisfied until man becomes woman and woman becomes man. Do you want to guess the year that he said that this guy just based on the context of the quote?

1913.

1898.

1898.

He saw the rise of modernity coming and he said, There's an aspect of modernism that is only its only objective is to tear up the structures that exist. And as it comes in good ways, as it tears up corrupt structures, it's also going to tear up structures that shouldn't have ever been torn up. And this is, I'm getting at the seeds of why we live in a society now, like the materialist atheists had a long run of being in control and telling everyone, There's literally no higher power than our scientific achievement can explain to you. And I think at a core level, this is another one of those lies that we just know isn't true. Like there are things that science can't explain, at least not yet, right? And kind of obviously so. And I think we all grew up under this kind of materialist atheist oppression. There's a form of tyranny there telling you that, There is no mystical side of you. You're a collection of molecules and nothing more. That's a pretty insidious lie, right? And I think the true thing, the way that those seems break is, you know, there's a whole wave of astrology coming, right? You took, people want that mysticism, they know that mysticism is part of them, and they'll put anything into that that they can. Like the hole in the human heart that needs authority, right? Which I think should be a spiritual authority first. If you don't have that, you just kind of place it on the government and then you say they're your highest authority. That's a lie. That's a tyranny. So I'm curious on that kind of, because we don't want to get rid of rationality entirely because it's very good for organizing the world and it's very good for rationalizing the things that we know about the mystical world as well. But it feels to me like a balance and we're way too far on one side of that balance. I wonder if that sparks anything for you guys.

Yeah, I think Chesterton talks about that a lot. He might have been the guy who has the quote, but Chesterton talks about.

Different types of magic, but similar time.

He talks about how there's some real truth and like, not magic in like.

The.

Goofy parlor tricks kind of magic, but like there's some real magic in a story and in fairy tales. I forget what book this is in, but he has this entire diatribe that just goes off about how that is more true than any materialistic version of reality. That always struck me as, wow, that's a really bold thing to say. I love that you brought up this mystery thing because It is like, I've been thinking about this a lot recently, which is just the human cell or any cell, if you look at the biology of what it takes to actually have a cell, and I'm going to butcher the biology stuff, I'm sure everyone just be aware. But I saw a post today that kind of goes through it, like for cells to have just basic error correction in DNA. It's something like 100,000 plus base pairs. And then you also need all of these proteins that are also working in concert with all these other proteins. And you can measure their lengths and you can figure out, hey, here's the atoms that are required for these things to happen. And they have to be in this order. And you can just go down these pathways of, okay, you see this and you need that. Here's the order for that and here are the requirements and here's the order. You can say, oh, well, if it's strictly a material world where all of this stuff just randomly comes about, poof out of a random thing, you can actually put odds to that. The post I saw today was the odds are 10 to the 70,000.

Right?

That's like, how do you put scale on that? That's like we're in a multiverse, then in each mult, and there's infinite amount of multiverses, but we're in one of them.

And.

The odds that life exists is.

Like.

More rare than an atom. in our, in a, in a beach, in a grain of sand in the Multiverse than, than that.

And you're like, yeah, we happen to be in the one that worked and can reason that out. It's, it's literally saying that it's, it's like the materialist atheists figured out how improbable life was all, like the, even the, the laws of thermodynamics and how fine-tuned physics has to be for all of this to hold together, much less. the question of why it happens at all. There's reasonable discussions to be had about all of those things. How did they happen? Why did they happen and whatnot? But the biggest question is like why that versus anything else? And if you're a materialist atheist, the multiverse is kind of the only thing you can do because it's so wildly improbable, like one out of whatever that enormous number is, that mind boggling number. So literally what they did was say, okay, well there's that many opportunities for it to happen. We'll just say there's infinity opportunities for it to happen. So that it is now reasonable and rational that it did happen. That is, that is the bottom rung on top, right? That is mysticism should give way to rationality until you try to put rationality back on top of mysticism. It makes no sense. And you get these, these things. This is a great example of that's obviously not true, right? We know that's not true. But we're being told it is because we, we, we put so much stock into these other things. And if we're wrong about those things, what else could we be wrong about?

Right?

I don't blame a scientist who's 70 years old and spent their entire career and published a lot of papers and books around a thing realizing that thing isn't as expansive and as true as they thought it was. Now just kind of saying, whoops, you know, there's a lot at stake for that person. So it feels like it may need to be a generational shift. But I think it's a small little piece of truth, a little piece of freedom that we can say.

There's something that's really incredible about it because when you actually sit down and figure out the math like this guy did, it's like the only possible explanation is magic. It's a miracle that we're even having this conversation. And for me, as a developer, you have to deal with information and information processing systems all the time. And part of that is like, well, you have to understand what information theory is. you have to understand what are the requirements for information. And the more you look into this stuff, you're like, well, information is.

You.

Can'T have any information without encoding and decoding, but you can't have any encoding and decoding without first agreeing on what the encoding and decoding scheme is. And to agree on anything, you already have to have information to communicate. You get in these bonkers, like the only way this could have happened. Yeah, the only way this could have happened is if there's something outside the system that started the system, had an initial state for the system, and then said, here you go, you can move now, you can go through this. And you also see it in math, like the whole, like Goedel's incompleteness theorems, like just basically prove this in math. Like if you create a system, create a formal system, it'll always be incomplete. If it has the certain requirements to be able to do math, it's always going to be incomplete. And then, oh, well, we've just kind of built, oh, we'll build computers. Computers can do anything. Oh, they can do anything, except they can't tell you if you feed the computer code of one computer into another computer, that is a, the code is supposedly a halting code, like, oh, is this program going to run forever? Is it going to halt? If you feed that code into another computer, that you get into these weird logical loops of, oh, well, the halting code, that's impossible. You'll never be able to read code and tell you if it's going to loop or not. I'm butchering that as well. The halting problem is just the Godelian incompleteness, undecidability about this system. Oh, well, How did computers come about? The only way you can create a computer then is from an outside source actually just creating a computer. The only way you can have languages from an outside source creating language. The only way you can have DNA is from because DNA is information. It's total wonder. It's incredible. It's incredible that we're here at all.

And it should be wonder, right? And I think you lose all the beauty of the world and of the human spirit of humanity if you just say everything is is order, right? That is a, that's a tyranny of itself. You also lose it if you say it's all chaos, right? Not to, I'm starting to sound like Jordan Peterson. But I think the, just to link these two ideas, to me, the multiverse theory is very similar to a currency debasement, debt spiral and hyperinflation in that as you're enforcing a tyranny that is based at least in part on an untruth, It gets exponentially harder to enforce it as the truth comes out more and more. Right? So in the fiat world, it's we've saddled ourselves with all this debt, so we have to print more in order to cover the debt and it rises and rises and rises. For the materialist atheist scientific position, which I think is dying very rapidly, so we don't have to spend too long on this position. But you get to that point where rationality explains everything. But we've encountered what science would or what a normal person would call a miracle. We can't have that. We're not even going to entertain the idea that there is a mysticism or that there is something we can't explain. So we're going to we're just going to break the computer and say like it could be anything. But it also counts as science, right? And as soon as you get to that point, right, you see in the popularized way, you saw it in the Marvel universe, as soon as they jumped into the multiverse, Everyone lost interest. They're like, this is so dumb. There are no stakes. Nothing matters. Everyone who's dead can just come back if you want to make a few bucks on your movie or whatever. But that's because they completely departed reality, right? And so the story doesn't work anymore because they're not in anything approximating reality. We were all on board when it was mysticism, when it was like the god of thunder coming down from a different planet. We were like, hell yeah, that taps into something that I understand. There's like it associates with a myth that I know, but as soon as they said, no, actually it's the rationality that explains everything in the world. Then we were like, no, it's not. That doesn't make any sense.

Yeah.

Do you guys think or go ahead, Judy?

I'm curious your take on this, actually, because it kind of goes down the line of, you know, let's assume there was a moment called the big bang, whatever you want, but there is a moment. Where one of two things happened. Something became nothing or nothing was created, if that makes sense. And one of them was God or Dane and one of them was not. And one of them is just a bunch of mass that has a bunch of momentum exploding outwards and then that momentum somehow became sentient. But the question I want to ask you guys is what I'm curious about is, Do you think if there was an extinction level event for humanity, but robots existed to the point where they were inside of Optimus, we'll just use that as the binary that everybody knows, or the reference point everybody knows. But do you think robots would.

Try.

To find a way to survive, or do you think they would just wither away and die? you know, cease. Because it's not like they're not existing, but like cease to cease to do what they need to do. Like, I'm curious, like, do you think, you know, and at that point does time stop? Like, if humanity, if we're not experiencing anymore, like, just time stop. There's a lot in there. So I'll land the plane really quick on the question is, if humanity died, would AGI, you know, augmented humanity or augmented creativity continue? or would it just kind of whither out and die?

Well, eventually it's going to run out of energy and it's going to need either a new energy source or to invent a new energy source and that's just never going to happen. Or it needs the ability to.

It.

Needs the ability to discover energy, consume all the energy, discover a new energy source, consume all, it's like, And then also, oh, it needs to be able to produce enough energy to repair, like, for instance, oh, unlimited energy from the sun with solar panels until the solar panels get destroyed by the hail storm. Okay, so we need to be able to repair this. And it's like, I don't think there's enough ingenuity. So, no, I don't think there's not enough ingenuity in AI.

Maybe one day, but no way. I think the AGI is a great example of harnessing everything that they know about humans understanding of mysticism and rationality together to create repeat copies quickly and help us access that information. But I think it's a great example of the rationalists saying, this is the delivery, this is the deliverance of the issues with humanity, the issues of imperfection with humanity. We fixed it, right? And you hear tech leaders talk about it in this way. they're talking about it like it's God because they. They have this God-sized hole in their heart, and they made technology their God, this transhumanist idea that Peter Thiel's on about, that we can codify the human mind and Consciousness, and within a certain amount of time, we'll be able to just kind of carry on without bodies. That's a fundamental untruth, right? That is. That is so obviously not true, but. It's, if you've made that your God, it's the only thing you're pursuing, right? And you, the way they talk about it is in spiritual language, right? They talk about it in terms of apocalypse and in terms of solidarity being reunited, right, with your creator, which is either nothingness or the ultimate solidarity of information, right? They made that their God and then they took the language of revelation and just applied it to their God. and I think it's, it's based on a fundamental untruth, and I think it's gonna crack at the seams wherever it's based on that.

It's interesting. The, the reference points for AGI and Peter Thiel and all these people who are like, hey, you can just upload your conscience, your Consciousness to an AI and live forever. Like, that's what they're saying. You can remove your body from it. But what? Yeah, because I was just curious as we're talking, and so I was looking at What is the, you know, because the, the, the, the lie that we're told is your body reproduces every single cell in itself and it's a new body every seven years. That's a lie. Because there are three types of cells that never regenerate your eyes, your brain and your heart. They're with you for life. And so it's interesting, this AGI quandary where the three things that I would argue that are the most malleable and the most true to experience, right? Like what you think and how you think, which can be changed, you know, your heart, which strength can be increased or decreased based on what you do and what you think and how you feel and stress and all this stuff. And then your eyes, which, you know, are the main way for a lot of people. Some people don't have that. They just have their organ of their, their Skins to feel, but. all of these experience and story type organs, I'll call them, would not be in AGI. And so at that point, you know, you can exist forever. Something would exist forever, but, you know, is it really alive? I would argue it's not. I would argue it's actually just a, you know, it's just a.

A.

It's a fraud. It's a fop ha. it's a puppet.

It's a great necromancy all over again.

I wouldn't say it's necromancy, though. Necromancy, in my mind, has to revive those three things. It has to revive your capacity for thinking, continuing to change, because, like, I think that's the. The human mind is the greatest organ, in my opinion, because it.

It. here's.

I think it would be interesting. I'm curious. All takes on it. I'm curious. Your takes on this. Here's the. Here's the question. Here's the thought. There is a tinsel strength to Metals. You can push them so far and then they break. There is also a capacity within a human being to lift a weight. You can bench press 150 pounds or 200 pounds, whatever it is. But then based on the story you are told, you can supercharge your capacity for doing things. Everybody hears the story about the mom who hears their daughter or son crying in a car and they can rip the door off type situation. And so I'm curious your take on the superhuman attributes of all this stuff. And we're coming back to this question about like, You know, the obvious thing that we all know is true is that we are physical beings, but there is a metaphysical thing that we explain away with certain aspects of science, cortisol and things like that, but that we can't see, touch, smell, or feel from a metaphysical perspective. You know, the fact that light is a particle and a wave. And so I guess I'm curious, like, you know, what are your thoughts on People trying to explain away the superhuman metaphysical aspects of life, the superhuman moments and like the miracles. I don't know. I'm rambling now, but I'm just like curious if there's anything in there.

I think we communicated to people in our education system and in our hyper, I think it's a very American mindset what we're talking about here. I think most of the rest of the world understands that there's mysticism in the world and they're not trying to explain that away. I think it's a very American thing to say everything is rational, everything can be explained. But it's a pretty intense tyranny that we've accepted. And I think one of the reasons is because it gave us the most wealth, the most resource management of any country in human history. And it's not all bad because the affairs of the poor in America are better than probably any poor community in history. I would say definitely any poor community in history that's also diverse, that's non homogeneous, right? The diverse poor of America are in a better state than any other poor population ever. And so I think we don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater on the other hand.

Thanks, Obama.

Easier. Either. Yeah, exactly. Right.

So.

So it's. There's been a use for it, right? It didn't just rise in tyranny. It Rose in genuine economic growth that led to flourishing, like real prosperity and flourishing. The problem is we made the whole plane out of the black box.

Right.

That Jerry Seinfeld joke. The black box is the only thing that survives the plane. Plane crash. Why don't they Make sure to boost the whole plane out of the black box? And it's a funny joke, but the obvious reason is because it wouldn't fly. You can't make a plane that doesn't crash in a crash. It doesn't work. It only works when it's small. So in my opinion, this American mindset of individualism and individual prosperity is really helpful when it's just that. But when you over apply it, then you have to make this hyper-rationalism explain away all of humanity. that's when it becomes a real tyranny.

Yeah, I mean, that also touches on the abolition of man idea from C.S. Lewis, which is you can't go on explaining away everything. Like it's good to your point, exactly. It's good that you can see through the window and see that the garden can't be seen through. So you can see the garden, but if you can also see through the garden, Well, then what are we doing here? Eventually you'll have to explain away explanation itself, right? And you've lost everything at that point, right? It's good that there are limits to this stuff. It's good that we have individualism. It's also good to not take individualism to the extreme that it's been taken.

Yeah, I'd add science is an incredibly good thing. It was originally like the Renaissance. It was financed by the church and they were finding rational ways to explain God's creation. And it led to all these amazing things and it led to medical developments and technology developments and again, massive human flourishing. The problem is when we, like you said, we used science to observe God's creation and at some point we said, we actually don't need, we don't need to call it God's creation at all, right? Look at the beaks on the Galapagos, they changed size from island to island, therefore there's no God like that leap. knocked the pillar out from under it. And I think we've been on about a hundred year run of trying to explain everything just by science and not saying it's God's creation and it's breaking. Now it's breaking at the seams. And now even the science is one of the ways that we see the tyranny happening most frequently.

Within the science community and within academic papers, you see this all the time, but you basically, it's people coming to these, like, conclusions that are like, well, so we've ruled out this, this, this, this, this. And we've also determined that it can't be anything else.

So.

Did you, though?

And it's like.

What?

Guys, just, like, say this is evidence of God. Like, it's not proof that he exists or whatever, but it's like, evident like this is, this is what it's pointing towards. Like you, you participated in science where there's an axiom, the premise that says, well, reality is governed by laws and we're going to try and figure those out. Well, who's the lawmaker? Like you're just throwing away the lawmaker and then processing reality via the laws and you are dumbfounded. completely aghast that the laws point to a lawmaker. Like, come on, guys, the.

The balance. It's really interesting. The pendulum of humanity, right? As we talked about, you know, we kind of started out, like, you know, with these, you know, people who just kind of, like, blindly believe there was something bigger. I'm just saying people in general, but it's like all the indigenous and. and old cultures of the world that just kind of knew there just had to be a thing. And then kind of like, the church then started to fund science and understanding essentially. And it's not even understanding. Science started to fund a way to communicate what the hell was going on. That's what science did. But science was like, hey, if I throw this rock or this apple falls on my head, it does it pretty consistently. Let me figure that out. Let me find a way to articulate that and explain that. So then we can do something cool, like build an airplane or build a boat or build computers. And we're kind of in this moment where I agree, Cory, where the pendulum has swung so far, AGI to the other side of the spectrum, that we're kind of on our way back. I think it'll be really, really interesting over the next 100 years because these have been really slow, long, leaky bucket, popped balloon pendulum swings. to where we come back around and people are just like, oh, yeah, that was silly. We kind of ignored total truth for a minute there. That was weird. But now that we're back, it's gonna be interesting. It'd be really interesting to see what happens.

Yeah.

And I think it's interesting if you look at the pre-renaissance just pre-renaissance you know, and if you look at the Reformation, one of the, one of the things they were trying to introduce was rational protection from people manipulating people's proclivities to over emphasize superstition and mysticism. And that's a good instinct as well, right? If you lose that balance, then you leave a tyranny of a different kind. And we haven't talked about it as much here because I don't think I've ever really experienced that. Maybe in the most Southern Baptist community I was ever in, they were trying to manipulate, but that's even a pretty rationalist group of religious people as that goes. Exactly, exactly. But the too far to that other side of the tension leads to a tremendous amount of tyranny as well.

Did we go to the moon?

We went to the new moon with Newtonian physics, which is still incredible.

Yeah, indeed.

So good. Yeah, so I guess we're probably at the like last last thoughts, last moments piece. But I think, I don't know, I was really thinking about this here earlier about, like, the tyranny aspect of things, and it's, you know, I'll go with the simplest one for me of why this whole idea of tyranny is a lot harder to maintain than truth. The biggest tyranny that people actively fight to maintain is that paying your taxes is good. because the irony of taxes is that the politicians who set the rules don't actually follow the tax laws. Like Nancy Pelosi doesn't follow any of the laws. You know, Ted Cruz doesn't follow any of the laws. Like, I'll pick on both sides because they understand the game. The game is to play by the truth of the reality of the situation. And the truth of the reality of the situation is if you know somebody at the IRS, you can just have them not audit your taxes. and the only power the IRS has is every so often they're gonna beat somebody over the head and then they're gonna put it on the news and they're basically gonna be like, hey, this person didn't pay their taxes. And so then you're afraid of the violence that could come potentially. And because people are not good at ExPonentials, they just get fearful, and so they just pay their taxes. And so we're in this really weird thing where we're getting literally nothing for something. when we pay our taxes and we fight to protect it. And I think that's one of the things that's the most important to start trying to understand is how do I get something for something and fight for that? And the only way to do that is actually to break yourself free of this really uncanny way of believing that the world you grow up in is the truth. Because the world you grow up in was taught to you at a school, most likely by a person who is controlled by an incentive that was created by a person that thinks leaky bucket theory is logical.

Yeah, I would add on to my closing. I was just, just quickly, Bonner, my closing statement will be very, very simple. One of the obvious truths that I've been working out in my own life and see it applying is knowledge is not wisdom. And the accumulation of knowledge doesn't Make you any better at navigating reality if you don't apply wisdom with it. And I think it's one of those untruths that's been told to us over and over again. If someone knows a lot of things, they should be the one deciding things for people. And they're not the same thing. I would rather follow a wise leader who doesn't know very much than a very knowledgeable one who isn't.

Was.

I think, actually, let me jump in there real quick. That, I think, is actually the best case for why AGI will die. AGI will die because it will have all the knowledge in the world and not a monocum of wisdom to use it.

Yeah. If.

If humans weren't there, you mean.

Yeah.

If humans were not there, AGI would die because it would know everything and do nothing.

Yeah.

I'd have no reason to.

So at the. When we were discussing the podcast topic, one of the ideas that came up is like children know these things to be true. I was just curious or what are the things that children know that are true that adults spend years trying to forget? I know Cory and JD, both of you have answers to this, but.

Yeah, I think. I think hatred. I think xenophobia is one of them.

Right.

Like racism and xenophobia, I think, has to be learned. I don't think children come out, you know, hating people based on skin color or a religion. And it's kind of wild that I think our best efforts recently at trying to eliminate that have just been pointing the, the racism and xenophobia at a different group instead of undoing it altogether. I think that's one of those, that one of those tyrannies that's gonna, that's gonna go away.

Right.

I think the, like, the idea that, I don't know if you saw Constantine kiss and recently on stage, said the reason that the slave trade doesn't exist is because the British Empire ended it. and he's 100% right. And the entire room started shouting at him and they wouldn't let him finish the point. He just said something that's very true. It's true. It's the first place that ever ended. It's the only community that had the authority and the power to have slaves. All of them did until the British Empire said, we don't want to do that. They also participated and it was horrible. Every bit of that was horrible. But it's just this simple, simple truth that completely, that had people just shouting at him, screaming at him. that's true. It's just, like, basic, basic truth.

I'm gonna have one that I know.

Off the top of my head, but I want to know what babies know about grass because they won't sit down on it.

It's more of a question, right?

See those videos? You try to put a baby down on grass, and they just, like, pick their legs up. I'm like, they must know something I don't know.

So I was gonna say, I mean, this is. This is like a direct quote from Anton. and you can go look it up on his Twitter.

But.

Children know that there are good guys and there are bad guys, and then every adult spends their entire life trying to convince themselves that there's only good guys. Everyone's good. Everyone's good. But there are bad guys. Children know this.

It's.

It's part like, oh, yeah, there's cops and there's robbers, like. Kids know it's like innate in their being. It's like obvious. That's the bad guy. Who's that? That's the bad guy. Who's that? That's a good guy. You're like, I don't know where they got that. Like as an adult, right? Like all the adults are like, well, all the everyone's kind of good and they have, you know, they just make mistakes and the kids are like, no bad guys. Good guys. Yeah, just complete. It's fascinating stuff.

So, yeah, it is.

It's always interesting when the kids want to be the bad guys, too. You're like, no, we don't want to be a bad guy. You want to be a good guy. Like, no, I'm gonna push people. And it's like, ah, it is fun. You're not wrong, but we don't do that.

Well, I'd love to pick up this thread, too. If we come up with other examples, I think there's a lot of threads started that we could pick up on another pod as well. Indeed.

Good stuff. Well, thank you everybody for jumping in and we'll see you guys soon.

Ciao.

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