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Good to see you again.

Hi, Joe. Thanks for joining us.

What's happening?

Thanks for having me back. A lot's happening.

My pleasure. I've heard a lot about your book. I haven't read it, but I've heard a lot about your book from a lot of people that you freaked out.

Okay, well, hopefully you can read it and then you can decide if you're of the freaked out crowd or of the really freaked out crowd.

Oh, there's only two options, I think.

So. It doesn't end well. That's the spoiler alert.

Okay, hold the book up. It's called nuclear War. Yeah. What nuclear war?

A scenario and a very plausible scenario from what I understand from all the defense officials I interviewed.

What motivated you to write this?

Well, six previous books on war weapons, us national security secrets. Imagine how many people told me they dedicated their lives to preventing nuclear World War III. And so during the previous administration, fire and fury rhetoric, I began to think, what happens if deterrence fails? That idea of prevention, what happens? And I took that question to the people who advise the president, who work at Stratcom, who, you know, command the nuclear sub forces, and learned that it doesnt end well. Not only does it not end well, 5 billion people are dead at the end of 72 minutes.

Jesus.

You begin to realize when you where you quickly realize as you read the book that, you know, there, your mic's on or something.

Something just made a weird noise. Oh, yeah, it's Carl. Oh, it's Carl. I was like, what's going on?

It's the animal humor in a difficult subject. You know, there's, you know, literally hundreds of thousands of people in nuclear command and control who practice 24 7365. What would happen if deterrence failed and we had a nuclear war? They are practicing this, Joe. And its like talk about being behind the veil. No one knows. Its why. I think the response to this book, its been out for three months, has been so extraordinary and from both sides of the aisle, because people now are beginning to realize, if nuclear war begins, it doesnt end until there is a nuclear holocaust. And it happens so fast. There is no quickly going to your secret bunker. You have.

Yeah, all thats nonsense. These people think Zuckerberg is building a bunker in Hawaii is going to survive. He's building a hurricane shelter. Yeah.

And also even that might work unless he happened to be there in the exact moment when all of this went down.

Yeah, you'd have to know in advance that we're about to launch. The whole thing is terrifying. It's also, I don't see a way that it like if you think about the timeline between 1945 and today, it's kind of extraordinary that no one has launched a nuke, but it almost seems like a matter of time. It'll be a blip in history. We look at it now, oh, because of mutually assured self destruction or mutually assured destruction. That's what's prevented people from using nuclear weapons when until now? What is 80 years in terms of human history? It's nothing. It's a tiny little blink. It's a little nothing. And it could go sideways at any moment. And then we're back to the cave era.

We are hunter gatherers again, in the words of Carl Sagan, who is the author of Nuclear Winter. But I think what's also crazy to your point about 1945 is like when this was all set up, when the nuclear arsenals were beginning. And I take the reader through it really quickly because I want them to just get to what happens at nuclear launch. I mean the book is really about nuclear launch to nuclear winter. But the buildup is fascinating because first of all, it happened so incredibly fast and it happened under incredibly secret, classified terms. So there was no like outside opinion. And originally nuclear war was set up to be fought and won, which itself is absurd and we know that now. So the rules of the game have fundamentally changed and yet the systems are all the same. Thats whats I think the most dangerous component of today versus lets say 1952, when the thermonuclears began.

Michael. And when you say the systems are the same, what do you mean? Exactly?

So the system of nuclear war, this idea that. Well okay so lets start with some basic facts. Theres a nuclear triad. You know what that. Okay, so triad, really simple three. So we have missile silos. Theyre called ICBM's. Inside of them, 400 of them. Then we have nuclear powered nuclear submarines that launch nuclear missiles. There are 14 of them. Then we have the bomber force, 66 nuclear capable bombers. The president chooses what elements of that triad hes going to use when he launches a counterattack. If we ever are attacked, that system essentially exists. That was what was being developed in the fifties. The only difference was in the old days it was were going to actually use these in fight and win a nuclear war. And now its were going to have these all sitting around ready to launch. We have 1770 nuclear weapons on ready for launch status. Joe. They can be launched, some of them in 60 seconds.

Jesus. And they're all pointed. Do they need a coordinate? Do they need. Or are they all like aimed at a specific area already?

Important question. They're technically targeted to sea, out at sea, so they don't have a specific target. But when the command goes.

So is that if they accidentally go off sea. Jesus Christ. Imagine you're out there on a sailboat just enjoying your time. What a beautiful place to be in the middle of the ocean, and you see. What do you think about the stories of UFO's hovering over nuclear bases and shutting down their weapons? I know you've done a lot of research on this stuff. How much of that is bullshit?

You know, I actually haven't done a lot of research on that specific narrative. I know of it. I know of it for sure. And it's. I think. I mean, I always approach the UFO phenomena, or I try to at least with like the eye of, or the point of view of Carl Jung. This idea that it's. That what leads here is our perception of things and our sort of deep shadow self of fear. And once the nuclear weapon was invented, man, I mean, our grandparents had to confront this new fundamental new reality that just simply didnt exist before. And then it was. Thats with the atomic weapons. And then in the fifties, once thermonuclear weapons were invented and the thermonuclear weapon is essentially an atomic. A thermonuclear weapon is so powerful, it uses an atomic bomb like from Hiroshima as its triggering mechanism.

Jesus.

And so the order of magnitude of destruction in an instant, according to Carl Jung, who looked at the UFO phenomena and the nuclear weapons phenomena hand in hand, encourage anyone to read his stuff about it because he has a much sort of, you know, birds eye view of it all about why thats so terrifying to people. So the narratives, to my eye, the narratives of nuclear, you know, alien ships hovering over nuclear bases, I dont. Ive never spoken to a firsthand witness who experienced that. But I would see that in terms of the narrative of Carl Jung.

So Carl Jungs perception was that he believedYes, but our, okay, so if you go with that logic and you say, well, it can move around, so it would be harder to shoot down.Right.As I explain in the book, and again, as was relayed to me by defense officials, we can't shoot down ballistic missiles, long range ballistic missiles with any kind of certainty or accuracy.It's not like the Iron Dome or anything like that.The Iron Dome is almost like terrible for nuclear war, you know, for people to understand how dangerous nuclear war is, because the Iron Dome can shoot down short range missiles and mid range missiles. So even the US Aegis systems out on the sea, the navy systems, shot down some of those iranian drones, but they cant shoot down ballistic missiles. You want like the five minute or the 32nd ballistic missile lesson, because this is what I need. I write for the layman. You know, I think part of the reason why nuclear war is not spoken about in the general public is because its set up to be intimidating. You know, youll hear a lot of defense people and analysts using very esoteric language and it kind of excludes the average Joe or Jane, Joe or Annie. So I ask really basic questions like how does a ballistic missile work? And its very simple. That 26 minutes and 40 seconds I told you about. So theres three phases of a ballistic missile. It launches, it has boost phase. First five minutes, imagine a rocket youve seen launches, that fire coming out the bottom. That boosts the rocket for five minutes.Thats when its detectable from space. Then it enters mid course phase, which is going to be 20 minutes arcing across the globe to Crimea video shows russian tourists flee beach. What is that word? At A. C. M. S. Bomblets rain down. What does that mean? Do you know what that means? Atacms.Well, I'm guessing they're small cluster bombs that are in the nose cone of.The warhead make it out larger so I can read the whole thing. Jimmy. The video shows the beach in Sevastopol, Crimea, which was struck by a series of explosions on June 23. The footage, captured by a security camera, shows hundreds of people beginning to run away from the water before the impact of cluster warhead starts.What's happening in Ukraine is so profoundly dangerous for everyone.So this is the scene right here. So these things just drop down on the water? I mean, just pure terrorism.Well, it's also remarkable that we have so much available footage and so much citizen journalism that people can see these events and discuss them.So it says here the event was caused by russian air defenses shooting down a series of cluster warhead missiles, one of which altered of course as a result. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that four of the five missiles launched were shot down, adding another missile as a result of the impact of air defense systems at the final stage deviated from the flight path with the warhead exploding in the air over the city. The detonation of the fragmentation warhead of the fifth american missile in the air led to numerous casualties among civilians in Serostapol. What was. Do we know what this was about? Where they were launching them towards?I don't know. I don't know. I'm not following the ground war in Ukraine right now with my focus on this. But what I do know is that the ratcheting up of the rhetoric and the use of third party weapon systems is complicating and already incredibly volatile situation.This says. A spokesperson for the US State Department denied the accusation, saying that the claims were ridiculous and hyperbolic. The US supplies weapons to Ukraine in the ongoing war with Russia and recognizes Crimea as a part of Ukraine despite Russia's annexation. Ukraine has previously outlined plans to use long range weapons supplied by America in Crimea specifically to target infrastructure supporting the russian invasion. This is just terrifying stuff. It's terrifying because it can all be happening while you're just going about your business walking your dog. You have no idea that the entire world is in grave danger.You mean if things suddenly go nuclear?Yeah. Well, even just this, just like these escalations.Well, I think the big picture that frightens me most is that when we see the president of Russia going to the president of North Korea, our two air quotes, arch enemies right now having a new alliance. And then I consider that the current president of the United States hasnt spoken to the president of Russia in two years. And I think back to that time in history, whats known as the Reagan reversal, where Reagan went from this incredible hawk to learning about nuclear weapons in, of all things, an ABC television movie called the day after having the crap scared out of him and then realizing this is the president of the United States, realizing we cannot continue on this path, it is too dangerous. And that is why Reagan reached out to Gorbachev, and thats why we have the rheumatic summit. It was called the Reagan reversal. So, in other words, my point is Reagan, who, you know, the axis of evil speech, like this idea of seeing your enemy as the arch evil villain, had to change for him when he understood nuclear war by seeing a film. And so when I look to today and I consider that the current president hasnt isnt speaking to the president of Russia, it doesnt make any sense to someone like me.Thats probably why I wrote this book. Like, please understand this. And one has to imagine that the current president, with all his decades in office, understands all of this. And so I dont fundamentally understand why there is no communication. It is way too dangerous. Hence your, what you just showed us. And, you know, the facts will come in of whose weapon systems those are. But either way, the perception, to your point, the fact that the perception a misperception could ignite nuclear war could ignite that situation, that is unreversible, that should be astonishing to all of us.That's terrifying.Well, it's terrifying, but the one hopeful part of it would be, again, going back to the Reagan. The Reagan reversal, by the way, is the only glimmer of hope I ever found in all of this.Don't you think, though, that politics in general, and certainly world leadership, especially United States leadership, is much more compromised today than it was then, and a guy like Reagan doesn't really exist today.Tell me what you mean when you say compromised.I mean the military defense contractors are making so much money, and they want to continue making so much money, and they have great influence over the politicians and over policy and over what gets done. And this money that they don't want to stop making is completely dependent upon the continuing to build, continuing to sell, continuing to have these weapons and future systems and more advanced systems and better systems. And there's so much money and momentum behind this that I don't know if there's a Reagan available now. I don't know if that's an option. If there's a person that can have some sense that can say, we are then the printing press came along, the hoi polloi could read or would begin. That began really the birth of mass populations, being able to read, which is where we are today. And sometimes I, like, think about James Burke, and I think about was that. Was that. Was that designed? Did that come out of man's imagination for warfare or to make it easier to kill the wildebeest or the wooly mammoth?It was both. I think it was both.Both. So the analogy, you know, where will the AI go with that? Because you're talking about all these very healthy ideas and solutions, but just because of what I write about and who I speak to, I cannot help but see the powerful defense industry taking the pole position and making it secret in terms of which direction AI is really going to accelerate.It's going to be a dangerous bridge that we have to Exactly.The goal is the only target. But if it can get past the control of human beings, which I think it's ultimately going to have to, once it does that, then it's a superpower, then it's a thing that exists. It's a Doctor Manhattan. It's a thing that exists.That what is Doctor Manhattan?Did you ever see the watchman? The movie the Watchman, based on a graphic novel? HBO was kind of bullshit. It was like a series. It wasn't bullshit, but it was just not the same. So the graphic, the movie's the best. The Zack Snyder movies. Fucking incredible. The Watchman is like one of my favorite superhero movies ever. Deeply flawed superheroes. But there's this guy, Doctor Manhattan, and Doctor Manhattan is a scientist who gets trapped in this lab when this explosion goes off. And he becomes like a God, essentially a God. He's this like blue guy who's built like a bodybuilder who floats and levitates and lives on Mars. It's pretty crazy. But the point is he's infinitely smarter than any human being that's ever lived. And that's what it's going to be. It's going to be something that, it's not going to be saddled down with our biological limitations. It's just whether or not we can bridge that gap, whether or not we can get to the point where that thing becomes sentient. But then the problem, because is, are we irrelevant when that happens? We kind of are. And what happens to us? I don't know.But I mean, is that something that chimps should have considered when they started grunting? Hey, we got to stop grunting because grunting is going to lead to language. Language is going to lead to weapons, weapons going to lead to nuclear war. It's going to lead to pollution. We're going to stop right here. Just stay grunting and running away from big cats. No, we didn't do that. They kept moving forward and I think we're going to keep moving forward. And I think this thing is a part of the process.I'm going to have to take that question and your thoughts back to a guy at Los Alamos who I visited about maybe eight years ago, who was building an electronic brain at Los Alamos for DARPA using the old roadrunner supercomputer that used to have the nuclear codes on it, by the way. Okay. And I was asking this question about sentience and AI, and he told me his name was doctor Garrett Kenyon, and he told me that we were a ways away from AI really being able to have sentience. And he gave me an analogy I'll share with you because I think about this and it's really interesting. Keep in mind this was seven or eight years ago. He said to me. Okay, so my iPhone, machine learning, it has facial recognition, which is shocking. You know, you can tip it up and it can see you. It can even be dark. And he said, so thats computer recognizing me based on electronic information that it knows. He said, now take your iPhone to a football field and stand, put the iPhone across the football field. Put me in a cap and a hoodie and have the iPhone try to recognize me even if Im walking.It can't. And then he said, take my teenage daughter and put her across the football field. Me with the baseball cap and the hoodie. My daughter, if I take two steps, she knows it's me. That's human intelligence versus where machine intelligence is.Okay, that analogy is not accurate because they can see you and recognize your gait from satellites like this is. That is not the extent of technology. And facial recognition and gait recognition is far beyond that. They can tell who is walking in a street in Paris right now.The difference is this with the biometrics, that's called the offset technology of biometrics that can see you from far away and identify you. It's looking at you, grabbing a metric like your iris scans that it already has in a computer system from you going in and out of the airport or wherever it happened to have captured your biometrics. And it's matching it against a system of systems. But the human knows intuitively who the person is across the field without having they have their own internal. So the metaphor is the same. But do you see what I'm saying?I kind of do.But the human didn't have to look up in a computer, right? You know, check, fact check, or rather biometric check, because it has a lot.Of data already about that person, the computer.So it's a still machine learning. Even the offset biometrics that are seeing you from far away.Right. But that leap, if we can do it, it's not incomprehensible that a computer could do it. You know, Kurzweil's theories about exponential growth of technology, that we're looking at things in a linear fashion, that's not how they happen. They have, they explode.Yes.And they happen unbelievably quickly as time goes on because everything accelerates.And isn't his new book, which I haven't read yet, like, we're basically almost there.We're real close. We're about four years away.He puts it at four years.Most people put it at four years. He's getting along in time, and he's not what he used to be, you know, when you talk to him, he's a little difficult. Like he had us. He struggled with some questions, but I.Think, which is another endlessly interesting, tragic thought that I think about a lot, is how we humans go. Meanwhile, your AI is just getting smarter and smarter and smarter. Infinitely, including on the top in terms of time, and we just deteriorate for now.But, yeah, they're very close to cracking that. Yeah, yeah, they're very close to cracking the genome. Look, Greenland sharks. How long do those things live?Those pictures of them that are several hundred years old.Yeah, we share most of the DNA that those with the sharks.I didn't know that.Yeah, we share like 90 plus percent DNA with fungus. Yeah. What's in them is in us. And they can figure out ways to turn things on and turn things off. In fact, like, someone was. My friend Brigham was explaining this to me today, like. Like gila monsters, those lizards.Yes.Like, that's literally how they figured out how to make things like ozempic.Wait, what do you mean?Studying their DNA. Studying, like, how to turn things on and turn things off and like what? They know that other animals can regenerate limbs, right? So they think they're going to be able to regenerate limbs. In fact, Japan has just embarked on a study now where they're going to grow teeth. They're going to grow human teeth, like in people. So they figured out how to regenerate teeth. How many people lost teeth? And then you're fucked. You have to get a bridge or this or that. Now they think they can regrow teeth in people. Well, how far away are they from regrowing limbs? Well, all this stuff is like advanced science and an understanding of what aging is. What is macular degeneration, what are all these deteriorations in human beings and how much can we mitigate it? Well, it turns out they think they can mitigate all of them. They think they can stop aging dead in its tracks, and they think they can actually even reverse it.This is that conundrum of the dual use technology of the military, because most of these technologies begin on DARPA grants, right?Cause that's where all the money is.And then they, you know, the limb regeneration, and then it sort of. It inspires and also opens up a whole other lane for industry because DARPA or the defense department has to do the blue sky research that no one else is willing to fund because it's too expensive and it doesn't have an immediate return. Right. You know?No, there's a great benefit to that.Absolutely.Yeah. There's a great benefit to all that spending. There really is, ultimately, because there's a great benefit to science.Or the part like, DARPA invented lidar technology. Every time I read about one of these lost civilizations that is uncovered because the lidar can look through the trees and the jungle.Incredible.See the footprint of a lost civilization. It's so amazing. Your AI beginning to be able to decipher lost languages.Yeah.And so then we can learn more about our old human versions. Our ancestors, not just us, they think.They'Re going to be able to decipher dolphin language. Ooh, yeah.I want to hear what the chimp empire guys were really saying to each other.Right. That would be, well, imagine if they could read their minds, you know, or.Just interpret their sounds.Sure. I think we are at the cusp of incredible possibilities, which is really, no one really knows what's going to happen. And it's happening so fast, so fast that, like, six months ago, AI sucked. Like, consumer level AI sucks. Six months ago, now it's insane. And now there's a, these video generating AI's that on a prompt can make a realistic film, like a movie of people doing things. You've seen that.I'm sure that I saw that. Goodbye, Hollywood.Incredible. Incredible.I want your thought for a second on the optimistic part of the future with all of this technology, because we're in agreement that the technology is incredible and has the potential to take us and is taking us to these remarkable places. So why is it then that it's so looked down upon or thought of as perhaps pollyanna ish, to see what Reagan did? Like to stop seeing everybody as an enemy that must be killed. And do the Gorbachev, like, see them as an adversary? You want to beat your adversary. You want to beat your opponent in a sportsmanlike manner. You want to be better than them. You want to outperform them, but you dont necessarily need to kill them? I dont know if thats the difference between being a woman and a man, but why is it that there isnt more of a movement toward this idea that we as a world have all this incredible technology? I mean, it sounds even, it sounds silly even saying such a thing, but I'm saying it. Why? Why isn't there a movement to stop looking at people as someone to kill?Well, I think there is with individuals. I think most individuals feel that way. Most people that you talk to about, when they talk about other individuals, they don't want to have a conflict with other individuals. They want to live their lives. They want to be with their family and their friends. That's what most individuals want to do. When we start moving as tribes, then things become different, because then we have a leader of a tribe, and that leader of a tribe tells us the other tribe's a real problem, and we're going to have to go in and get them. And if we don't, they're going to. They're a danger for our freedom. It's the same problem that we talked about before. It's human beings being in control. And if AI can achieve the rosiest rose colored glasses version of what possible in the future, it can eliminate all of the stupid influences of human beings, of the cult of personality and human tribalism. It can eliminate all that stuff.You think it's inherent in humans?I think it's a part of being a primate. It's what we see in chimp empire. I think it's. We see monkeys tricking them. That is an eagle coming so they can steal the fruit. It's a part of being an animal, you know, it's part of being a biological thing that reproduces sexually and that is worried about others and then confines with its tribe and gets together. It's us against them. This has been us from the beginning of time. And for us to just abandon this genetically coded behavior patterns that we've had for hundreds of thousands of years because we know better. We don't know better enough. We know better now than we did then. We know better now than we did when Reagan was in office. There's more people that are more informed how the way the world works, but that there's also a bunch of infantile people that are running around shouting out stupid shit and doing things for their own personal benefit that are ultimately detrimental to the human race, that's all true too, and that's always going to be the case. This is a bizarre battle of our brilliance and our folly going back and forth, good and evil as you were.That's it.But brilliance and folly is a more interesting way of looking at it than good and evil, which automatically puts it in a moral context, which makes people even argue further.It's all part of it. The good and evil is a part of the decisions of brilliance and folly. Brilliance is good, folly is evil, stupid. It leads to death, leads to destruction, leads to sadness, it leads to loss, leads to pollution. It leads to all these different things that we have a problem with. I don't know what's gonna happen, but I do think that we're the last of the people. I think we're the last. I think especially you and I, because we grew up with no answering machines. We grew up, we grew up back in the dizzy. We grew up. When you left your house, you were gone. Nobody knew where you were. My parents had like ten pictures of me before I was like ten years old. They didn't know where the fuck I was. I left the house. I was a dream. You know, when you saw the person again, you're like, oh, you're real. Like you didn't know where they were. They were out there in the world. You know, when you went to find your friends, you had to go to your friend's house and hope they were home. Hey, is Mike home?No, Mike's not home. Okay. And then you'd leave. I'll go find Mike. Maybe Mike's at the school. Maybe Mike's at the gym. Maybe Mike's at the park. You didn't know where anybody was. The world wasn't connected. Now it is. That's in our lifetimes. And I think in our lifetimes we're gonna see something that makes that look like nothing makes this connection that we have with each other now, which seems so incredible. It's going to make it look so superficial. It's going to look like smokescreens. It's going to look like grunts that we make to point to certain objects.It'll be 1980s empire instead of chimp empire.It's going to be weird. It's definitely going to be weird. But I don't know if it's necessarily going to be bad because ultimately, humanity, if we don't fuck ourselves up sideways. And again, apocalypses are real, but they're generally local. You know, if we can look at what we are now as a society, things are safer. We are more intelligent. You're more likely to survive disease and illness. Despite all of the rampant corruption of the pharmaceutical drug industry, rampant corruption of the military industrial crop, all the craziness in the world today, still way safer today than it was 1000 years ago. Way, way, way safer. And it's way safer probably a thousand years ago than it was a thousand years before that. I think things always generally move in a very good direction because that's what's better for everybody. Ultimately, everybody wants the same thing as an individual, what do you want? You want your loved ones to be happy? You want food on the table? You want a safe place to sleep and live. You want things to do that are exciting, that occupy your time, that you enjoy, that are rewarding. That's what everybody wants.We're moving collectively in a better direction. So I'm ultimately hopeful, and I'm ultimately positive. When I think about the future, I think it's going to be uber bizarre and strange, but I don't necessarily think it's going to be bad. I've just accepted that it's happening. And instead of being filled with fear and anxiety, which I am sometimes, still, sometimes, I'll freak out about it.But ultimately, you freak out about technology specifically.I forgot about war. I freak out about technology. I freak out about the fact that the world can change. There was a while that I was getting anxiety. Late at night, my whole family would be asleep, like, right after the invasion of Ukraine. I think it was when it really started, when I'd be alone at night, I'd be like, the people that lived in Hiroshima had no idea that it was coming. The people that lived in Dresden, the people that lived anywhere where crazy shit happened before it happened, things were normal, and then they were never normal again. And so I just kept thinking that one of these morons somewhere could do something, or a group of morons can do something that forever alters everything. And then we're in Mad Max, which has happened before in different parts of the world.And is the idea of nuclear war a scenario that your worst nightmare, that concept that's keeping you up late at night? I want to say, don't read, but I think you should read this book, because you, with your voice and your reach, it's wise to realize how we're not going to even have an opportunity to see what happens to AI if one madman with a nuclear missile decides to do a bolt out of the blue attack.And that's possible.And that is possible, and that's what everyone in Washington fears. And I think this goes back to the idea that it's great, 1020 years later, to be like, oh, my God, look what they were doing. Can you believe they covered this all up and learned from it? But you can't learn from the fact how dangerous nuclear war is, how close we are, how we are one misunderstanding away from a nuclear war. If everyone's dead, there's no learning, there's no opportunity. Which is why I always say, read nuclear war a scenario. Join the conversation while we can all still have one.Okay. Well, Annie, thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate it. It was great to see you again. And like I said, I have not read your book, but I have several friends that have, and they're absolutely terrified by it. So you're doing your right job. You're always killing it. I really appreciate you.Thank you so much.And I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. So tell everybody where your social media is. They could find you online.Annie Jacobson.Annie Jacobson website.You and I both know Google, AI, everything works. All you need is a name anymore.That's true.Right.And your website, what's your website?Anniejacobson.com.Okay. And the books available everywhere. And audiobook written and said by you, which is great. I love that. Thank you, Annie.Appreciate it.Bye, everybody.

Yes, but our, okay, so if you go with that logic and you say, well, it can move around, so it would be harder to shoot down.

Right.

As I explain in the book, and again, as was relayed to me by defense officials, we can't shoot down ballistic missiles, long range ballistic missiles with any kind of certainty or accuracy.

It's not like the Iron Dome or anything like that.

The Iron Dome is almost like terrible for nuclear war, you know, for people to understand how dangerous nuclear war is, because the Iron Dome can shoot down short range missiles and mid range missiles. So even the US Aegis systems out on the sea, the navy systems, shot down some of those iranian drones, but they cant shoot down ballistic missiles. You want like the five minute or the 32nd ballistic missile lesson, because this is what I need. I write for the layman. You know, I think part of the reason why nuclear war is not spoken about in the general public is because its set up to be intimidating. You know, youll hear a lot of defense people and analysts using very esoteric language and it kind of excludes the average Joe or Jane, Joe or Annie. So I ask really basic questions like how does a ballistic missile work? And its very simple. That 26 minutes and 40 seconds I told you about. So theres three phases of a ballistic missile. It launches, it has boost phase. First five minutes, imagine a rocket youve seen launches, that fire coming out the bottom. That boosts the rocket for five minutes.

Thats when its detectable from space. Then it enters mid course phase, which is going to be 20 minutes arcing across the globe to Crimea video shows russian tourists flee beach. What is that word? At A. C. M. S. Bomblets rain down. What does that mean? Do you know what that means? Atacms.Well, I'm guessing they're small cluster bombs that are in the nose cone of.The warhead make it out larger so I can read the whole thing. Jimmy. The video shows the beach in Sevastopol, Crimea, which was struck by a series of explosions on June 23. The footage, captured by a security camera, shows hundreds of people beginning to run away from the water before the impact of cluster warhead starts.What's happening in Ukraine is so profoundly dangerous for everyone.So this is the scene right here. So these things just drop down on the water? I mean, just pure terrorism.Well, it's also remarkable that we have so much available footage and so much citizen journalism that people can see these events and discuss them.So it says here the event was caused by russian air defenses shooting down a series of cluster warhead missiles, one of which altered of course as a result. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that four of the five missiles launched were shot down, adding another missile as a result of the impact of air defense systems at the final stage deviated from the flight path with the warhead exploding in the air over the city. The detonation of the fragmentation warhead of the fifth american missile in the air led to numerous casualties among civilians in Serostapol. What was. Do we know what this was about? Where they were launching them towards?I don't know. I don't know. I'm not following the ground war in Ukraine right now with my focus on this. But what I do know is that the ratcheting up of the rhetoric and the use of third party weapon systems is complicating and already incredibly volatile situation.This says. A spokesperson for the US State Department denied the accusation, saying that the claims were ridiculous and hyperbolic. The US supplies weapons to Ukraine in the ongoing war with Russia and recognizes Crimea as a part of Ukraine despite Russia's annexation. Ukraine has previously outlined plans to use long range weapons supplied by America in Crimea specifically to target infrastructure supporting the russian invasion. This is just terrifying stuff. It's terrifying because it can all be happening while you're just going about your business walking your dog. You have no idea that the entire world is in grave danger.You mean if things suddenly go nuclear?Yeah. Well, even just this, just like these escalations.Well, I think the big picture that frightens me most is that when we see the president of Russia going to the president of North Korea, our two air quotes, arch enemies right now having a new alliance. And then I consider that the current president of the United States hasnt spoken to the president of Russia in two years. And I think back to that time in history, whats known as the Reagan reversal, where Reagan went from this incredible hawk to learning about nuclear weapons in, of all things, an ABC television movie called the day after having the crap scared out of him and then realizing this is the president of the United States, realizing we cannot continue on this path, it is too dangerous. And that is why Reagan reached out to Gorbachev, and thats why we have the rheumatic summit. It was called the Reagan reversal. So, in other words, my point is Reagan, who, you know, the axis of evil speech, like this idea of seeing your enemy as the arch evil villain, had to change for him when he understood nuclear war by seeing a film. And so when I look to today and I consider that the current president hasnt isnt speaking to the president of Russia, it doesnt make any sense to someone like me.Thats probably why I wrote this book. Like, please understand this. And one has to imagine that the current president, with all his decades in office, understands all of this. And so I dont fundamentally understand why there is no communication. It is way too dangerous. Hence your, what you just showed us. And, you know, the facts will come in of whose weapon systems those are. But either way, the perception, to your point, the fact that the perception a misperception could ignite nuclear war could ignite that situation, that is unreversible, that should be astonishing to all of us.That's terrifying.Well, it's terrifying, but the one hopeful part of it would be, again, going back to the Reagan. The Reagan reversal, by the way, is the only glimmer of hope I ever found in all of this.Don't you think, though, that politics in general, and certainly world leadership, especially United States leadership, is much more compromised today than it was then, and a guy like Reagan doesn't really exist today.Tell me what you mean when you say compromised.I mean the military defense contractors are making so much money, and they want to continue making so much money, and they have great influence over the politicians and over policy and over what gets done. And this money that they don't want to stop making is completely dependent upon the continuing to build, continuing to sell, continuing to have these weapons and future systems and more advanced systems and better systems. And there's so much money and momentum behind this that I don't know if there's a Reagan available now. I don't know if that's an option. If there's a person that can have some sense that can say, we are then the printing press came along, the hoi polloi could read or would begin. That began really the birth of mass populations, being able to read, which is where we are today. And sometimes I, like, think about James Burke, and I think about was that. Was that. Was that designed? Did that come out of man's imagination for warfare or to make it easier to kill the wildebeest or the wooly mammoth?It was both. I think it was both.Both. So the analogy, you know, where will the AI go with that? Because you're talking about all these very healthy ideas and solutions, but just because of what I write about and who I speak to, I cannot help but see the powerful defense industry taking the pole position and making it secret in terms of which direction AI is really going to accelerate.It's going to be a dangerous bridge that we have to Exactly.The goal is the only target. But if it can get past the control of human beings, which I think it's ultimately going to have to, once it does that, then it's a superpower, then it's a thing that exists. It's a Doctor Manhattan. It's a thing that exists.That what is Doctor Manhattan?Did you ever see the watchman? The movie the Watchman, based on a graphic novel? HBO was kind of bullshit. It was like a series. It wasn't bullshit, but it was just not the same. So the graphic, the movie's the best. The Zack Snyder movies. Fucking incredible. The Watchman is like one of my favorite superhero movies ever. Deeply flawed superheroes. But there's this guy, Doctor Manhattan, and Doctor Manhattan is a scientist who gets trapped in this lab when this explosion goes off. And he becomes like a God, essentially a God. He's this like blue guy who's built like a bodybuilder who floats and levitates and lives on Mars. It's pretty crazy. But the point is he's infinitely smarter than any human being that's ever lived. And that's what it's going to be. It's going to be something that, it's not going to be saddled down with our biological limitations. It's just whether or not we can bridge that gap, whether or not we can get to the point where that thing becomes sentient. But then the problem, because is, are we irrelevant when that happens? We kind of are. And what happens to us? I don't know.But I mean, is that something that chimps should have considered when they started grunting? Hey, we got to stop grunting because grunting is going to lead to language. Language is going to lead to weapons, weapons going to lead to nuclear war. It's going to lead to pollution. We're going to stop right here. Just stay grunting and running away from big cats. No, we didn't do that. They kept moving forward and I think we're going to keep moving forward. And I think this thing is a part of the process.I'm going to have to take that question and your thoughts back to a guy at Los Alamos who I visited about maybe eight years ago, who was building an electronic brain at Los Alamos for DARPA using the old roadrunner supercomputer that used to have the nuclear codes on it, by the way. Okay. And I was asking this question about sentience and AI, and he told me his name was doctor Garrett Kenyon, and he told me that we were a ways away from AI really being able to have sentience. And he gave me an analogy I'll share with you because I think about this and it's really interesting. Keep in mind this was seven or eight years ago. He said to me. Okay, so my iPhone, machine learning, it has facial recognition, which is shocking. You know, you can tip it up and it can see you. It can even be dark. And he said, so thats computer recognizing me based on electronic information that it knows. He said, now take your iPhone to a football field and stand, put the iPhone across the football field. Put me in a cap and a hoodie and have the iPhone try to recognize me even if Im walking.It can't. And then he said, take my teenage daughter and put her across the football field. Me with the baseball cap and the hoodie. My daughter, if I take two steps, she knows it's me. That's human intelligence versus where machine intelligence is.Okay, that analogy is not accurate because they can see you and recognize your gait from satellites like this is. That is not the extent of technology. And facial recognition and gait recognition is far beyond that. They can tell who is walking in a street in Paris right now.The difference is this with the biometrics, that's called the offset technology of biometrics that can see you from far away and identify you. It's looking at you, grabbing a metric like your iris scans that it already has in a computer system from you going in and out of the airport or wherever it happened to have captured your biometrics. And it's matching it against a system of systems. But the human knows intuitively who the person is across the field without having they have their own internal. So the metaphor is the same. But do you see what I'm saying?I kind of do.But the human didn't have to look up in a computer, right? You know, check, fact check, or rather biometric check, because it has a lot.Of data already about that person, the computer.So it's a still machine learning. Even the offset biometrics that are seeing you from far away.Right. But that leap, if we can do it, it's not incomprehensible that a computer could do it. You know, Kurzweil's theories about exponential growth of technology, that we're looking at things in a linear fashion, that's not how they happen. They have, they explode.Yes.And they happen unbelievably quickly as time goes on because everything accelerates.And isn't his new book, which I haven't read yet, like, we're basically almost there.We're real close. We're about four years away.He puts it at four years.Most people put it at four years. He's getting along in time, and he's not what he used to be, you know, when you talk to him, he's a little difficult. Like he had us. He struggled with some questions, but I.Think, which is another endlessly interesting, tragic thought that I think about a lot, is how we humans go. Meanwhile, your AI is just getting smarter and smarter and smarter. Infinitely, including on the top in terms of time, and we just deteriorate for now.But, yeah, they're very close to cracking that. Yeah, yeah, they're very close to cracking the genome. Look, Greenland sharks. How long do those things live?Those pictures of them that are several hundred years old.Yeah, we share most of the DNA that those with the sharks.I didn't know that.Yeah, we share like 90 plus percent DNA with fungus. Yeah. What's in them is in us. And they can figure out ways to turn things on and turn things off. In fact, like, someone was. My friend Brigham was explaining this to me today, like. Like gila monsters, those lizards.Yes.Like, that's literally how they figured out how to make things like ozempic.Wait, what do you mean?Studying their DNA. Studying, like, how to turn things on and turn things off and like what? They know that other animals can regenerate limbs, right? So they think they're going to be able to regenerate limbs. In fact, Japan has just embarked on a study now where they're going to grow teeth. They're going to grow human teeth, like in people. So they figured out how to regenerate teeth. How many people lost teeth? And then you're fucked. You have to get a bridge or this or that. Now they think they can regrow teeth in people. Well, how far away are they from regrowing limbs? Well, all this stuff is like advanced science and an understanding of what aging is. What is macular degeneration, what are all these deteriorations in human beings and how much can we mitigate it? Well, it turns out they think they can mitigate all of them. They think they can stop aging dead in its tracks, and they think they can actually even reverse it.This is that conundrum of the dual use technology of the military, because most of these technologies begin on DARPA grants, right?Cause that's where all the money is.And then they, you know, the limb regeneration, and then it sort of. It inspires and also opens up a whole other lane for industry because DARPA or the defense department has to do the blue sky research that no one else is willing to fund because it's too expensive and it doesn't have an immediate return. Right. You know?No, there's a great benefit to that.Absolutely.Yeah. There's a great benefit to all that spending. There really is, ultimately, because there's a great benefit to science.Or the part like, DARPA invented lidar technology. Every time I read about one of these lost civilizations that is uncovered because the lidar can look through the trees and the jungle.Incredible.See the footprint of a lost civilization. It's so amazing. Your AI beginning to be able to decipher lost languages.Yeah.And so then we can learn more about our old human versions. Our ancestors, not just us, they think.They'Re going to be able to decipher dolphin language. Ooh, yeah.I want to hear what the chimp empire guys were really saying to each other.Right. That would be, well, imagine if they could read their minds, you know, or.Just interpret their sounds.Sure. I think we are at the cusp of incredible possibilities, which is really, no one really knows what's going to happen. And it's happening so fast, so fast that, like, six months ago, AI sucked. Like, consumer level AI sucks. Six months ago, now it's insane. And now there's a, these video generating AI's that on a prompt can make a realistic film, like a movie of people doing things. You've seen that.I'm sure that I saw that. Goodbye, Hollywood.Incredible. Incredible.I want your thought for a second on the optimistic part of the future with all of this technology, because we're in agreement that the technology is incredible and has the potential to take us and is taking us to these remarkable places. So why is it then that it's so looked down upon or thought of as perhaps pollyanna ish, to see what Reagan did? Like to stop seeing everybody as an enemy that must be killed. And do the Gorbachev, like, see them as an adversary? You want to beat your adversary. You want to beat your opponent in a sportsmanlike manner. You want to be better than them. You want to outperform them, but you dont necessarily need to kill them? I dont know if thats the difference between being a woman and a man, but why is it that there isnt more of a movement toward this idea that we as a world have all this incredible technology? I mean, it sounds even, it sounds silly even saying such a thing, but I'm saying it. Why? Why isn't there a movement to stop looking at people as someone to kill?Well, I think there is with individuals. I think most individuals feel that way. Most people that you talk to about, when they talk about other individuals, they don't want to have a conflict with other individuals. They want to live their lives. They want to be with their family and their friends. That's what most individuals want to do. When we start moving as tribes, then things become different, because then we have a leader of a tribe, and that leader of a tribe tells us the other tribe's a real problem, and we're going to have to go in and get them. And if we don't, they're going to. They're a danger for our freedom. It's the same problem that we talked about before. It's human beings being in control. And if AI can achieve the rosiest rose colored glasses version of what possible in the future, it can eliminate all of the stupid influences of human beings, of the cult of personality and human tribalism. It can eliminate all that stuff.You think it's inherent in humans?I think it's a part of being a primate. It's what we see in chimp empire. I think it's. We see monkeys tricking them. That is an eagle coming so they can steal the fruit. It's a part of being an animal, you know, it's part of being a biological thing that reproduces sexually and that is worried about others and then confines with its tribe and gets together. It's us against them. This has been us from the beginning of time. And for us to just abandon this genetically coded behavior patterns that we've had for hundreds of thousands of years because we know better. We don't know better enough. We know better now than we did then. We know better now than we did when Reagan was in office. There's more people that are more informed how the way the world works, but that there's also a bunch of infantile people that are running around shouting out stupid shit and doing things for their own personal benefit that are ultimately detrimental to the human race, that's all true too, and that's always going to be the case. This is a bizarre battle of our brilliance and our folly going back and forth, good and evil as you were.That's it.But brilliance and folly is a more interesting way of looking at it than good and evil, which automatically puts it in a moral context, which makes people even argue further.It's all part of it. The good and evil is a part of the decisions of brilliance and folly. Brilliance is good, folly is evil, stupid. It leads to death, leads to destruction, leads to sadness, it leads to loss, leads to pollution. It leads to all these different things that we have a problem with. I don't know what's gonna happen, but I do think that we're the last of the people. I think we're the last. I think especially you and I, because we grew up with no answering machines. We grew up, we grew up back in the dizzy. We grew up. When you left your house, you were gone. Nobody knew where you were. My parents had like ten pictures of me before I was like ten years old. They didn't know where the fuck I was. I left the house. I was a dream. You know, when you saw the person again, you're like, oh, you're real. Like you didn't know where they were. They were out there in the world. You know, when you went to find your friends, you had to go to your friend's house and hope they were home. Hey, is Mike home?No, Mike's not home. Okay. And then you'd leave. I'll go find Mike. Maybe Mike's at the school. Maybe Mike's at the gym. Maybe Mike's at the park. You didn't know where anybody was. The world wasn't connected. Now it is. That's in our lifetimes. And I think in our lifetimes we're gonna see something that makes that look like nothing makes this connection that we have with each other now, which seems so incredible. It's going to make it look so superficial. It's going to look like smokescreens. It's going to look like grunts that we make to point to certain objects.It'll be 1980s empire instead of chimp empire.It's going to be weird. It's definitely going to be weird. But I don't know if it's necessarily going to be bad because ultimately, humanity, if we don't fuck ourselves up sideways. And again, apocalypses are real, but they're generally local. You know, if we can look at what we are now as a society, things are safer. We are more intelligent. You're more likely to survive disease and illness. Despite all of the rampant corruption of the pharmaceutical drug industry, rampant corruption of the military industrial crop, all the craziness in the world today, still way safer today than it was 1000 years ago. Way, way, way safer. And it's way safer probably a thousand years ago than it was a thousand years before that. I think things always generally move in a very good direction because that's what's better for everybody. Ultimately, everybody wants the same thing as an individual, what do you want? You want your loved ones to be happy? You want food on the table? You want a safe place to sleep and live. You want things to do that are exciting, that occupy your time, that you enjoy, that are rewarding. That's what everybody wants.We're moving collectively in a better direction. So I'm ultimately hopeful, and I'm ultimately positive. When I think about the future, I think it's going to be uber bizarre and strange, but I don't necessarily think it's going to be bad. I've just accepted that it's happening. And instead of being filled with fear and anxiety, which I am sometimes, still, sometimes, I'll freak out about it.But ultimately, you freak out about technology specifically.I forgot about war. I freak out about technology. I freak out about the fact that the world can change. There was a while that I was getting anxiety. Late at night, my whole family would be asleep, like, right after the invasion of Ukraine. I think it was when it really started, when I'd be alone at night, I'd be like, the people that lived in Hiroshima had no idea that it was coming. The people that lived in Dresden, the people that lived anywhere where crazy shit happened before it happened, things were normal, and then they were never normal again. And so I just kept thinking that one of these morons somewhere could do something, or a group of morons can do something that forever alters everything. And then we're in Mad Max, which has happened before in different parts of the world.And is the idea of nuclear war a scenario that your worst nightmare, that concept that's keeping you up late at night? I want to say, don't read, but I think you should read this book, because you, with your voice and your reach, it's wise to realize how we're not going to even have an opportunity to see what happens to AI if one madman with a nuclear missile decides to do a bolt out of the blue attack.And that's possible.And that is possible, and that's what everyone in Washington fears. And I think this goes back to the idea that it's great, 1020 years later, to be like, oh, my God, look what they were doing. Can you believe they covered this all up and learned from it? But you can't learn from the fact how dangerous nuclear war is, how close we are, how we are one misunderstanding away from a nuclear war. If everyone's dead, there's no learning, there's no opportunity. Which is why I always say, read nuclear war a scenario. Join the conversation while we can all still have one.Okay. Well, Annie, thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate it. It was great to see you again. And like I said, I have not read your book, but I have several friends that have, and they're absolutely terrified by it. So you're doing your right job. You're always killing it. I really appreciate you.Thank you so much.And I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. So tell everybody where your social media is. They could find you online.Annie Jacobson.Annie Jacobson website.You and I both know Google, AI, everything works. All you need is a name anymore.That's true.Right.And your website, what's your website?Anniejacobson.com.Okay. And the books available everywhere. And audiobook written and said by you, which is great. I love that. Thank you, Annie.Appreciate it.Bye, everybody.

Crimea video shows russian tourists flee beach. What is that word? At A. C. M. S. Bomblets rain down. What does that mean? Do you know what that means? Atacms.

Well, I'm guessing they're small cluster bombs that are in the nose cone of.

The warhead make it out larger so I can read the whole thing. Jimmy. The video shows the beach in Sevastopol, Crimea, which was struck by a series of explosions on June 23. The footage, captured by a security camera, shows hundreds of people beginning to run away from the water before the impact of cluster warhead starts.

What's happening in Ukraine is so profoundly dangerous for everyone.

So this is the scene right here. So these things just drop down on the water? I mean, just pure terrorism.

Well, it's also remarkable that we have so much available footage and so much citizen journalism that people can see these events and discuss them.

So it says here the event was caused by russian air defenses shooting down a series of cluster warhead missiles, one of which altered of course as a result. The Russian Ministry of Defense said that four of the five missiles launched were shot down, adding another missile as a result of the impact of air defense systems at the final stage deviated from the flight path with the warhead exploding in the air over the city. The detonation of the fragmentation warhead of the fifth american missile in the air led to numerous casualties among civilians in Serostapol. What was. Do we know what this was about? Where they were launching them towards?

I don't know. I don't know. I'm not following the ground war in Ukraine right now with my focus on this. But what I do know is that the ratcheting up of the rhetoric and the use of third party weapon systems is complicating and already incredibly volatile situation.

This says. A spokesperson for the US State Department denied the accusation, saying that the claims were ridiculous and hyperbolic. The US supplies weapons to Ukraine in the ongoing war with Russia and recognizes Crimea as a part of Ukraine despite Russia's annexation. Ukraine has previously outlined plans to use long range weapons supplied by America in Crimea specifically to target infrastructure supporting the russian invasion. This is just terrifying stuff. It's terrifying because it can all be happening while you're just going about your business walking your dog. You have no idea that the entire world is in grave danger.

You mean if things suddenly go nuclear?

Yeah. Well, even just this, just like these escalations.

Well, I think the big picture that frightens me most is that when we see the president of Russia going to the president of North Korea, our two air quotes, arch enemies right now having a new alliance. And then I consider that the current president of the United States hasnt spoken to the president of Russia in two years. And I think back to that time in history, whats known as the Reagan reversal, where Reagan went from this incredible hawk to learning about nuclear weapons in, of all things, an ABC television movie called the day after having the crap scared out of him and then realizing this is the president of the United States, realizing we cannot continue on this path, it is too dangerous. And that is why Reagan reached out to Gorbachev, and thats why we have the rheumatic summit. It was called the Reagan reversal. So, in other words, my point is Reagan, who, you know, the axis of evil speech, like this idea of seeing your enemy as the arch evil villain, had to change for him when he understood nuclear war by seeing a film. And so when I look to today and I consider that the current president hasnt isnt speaking to the president of Russia, it doesnt make any sense to someone like me.

Thats probably why I wrote this book. Like, please understand this. And one has to imagine that the current president, with all his decades in office, understands all of this. And so I dont fundamentally understand why there is no communication. It is way too dangerous. Hence your, what you just showed us. And, you know, the facts will come in of whose weapon systems those are. But either way, the perception, to your point, the fact that the perception a misperception could ignite nuclear war could ignite that situation, that is unreversible, that should be astonishing to all of us.

That's terrifying.

Well, it's terrifying, but the one hopeful part of it would be, again, going back to the Reagan. The Reagan reversal, by the way, is the only glimmer of hope I ever found in all of this.

Don't you think, though, that politics in general, and certainly world leadership, especially United States leadership, is much more compromised today than it was then, and a guy like Reagan doesn't really exist today.

Tell me what you mean when you say compromised.

I mean the military defense contractors are making so much money, and they want to continue making so much money, and they have great influence over the politicians and over policy and over what gets done. And this money that they don't want to stop making is completely dependent upon the continuing to build, continuing to sell, continuing to have these weapons and future systems and more advanced systems and better systems. And there's so much money and momentum behind this that I don't know if there's a Reagan available now. I don't know if that's an option. If there's a person that can have some sense that can say, we are then the printing press came along, the hoi polloi could read or would begin. That began really the birth of mass populations, being able to read, which is where we are today. And sometimes I, like, think about James Burke, and I think about was that. Was that. Was that designed? Did that come out of man's imagination for warfare or to make it easier to kill the wildebeest or the wooly mammoth?It was both. I think it was both.Both. So the analogy, you know, where will the AI go with that? Because you're talking about all these very healthy ideas and solutions, but just because of what I write about and who I speak to, I cannot help but see the powerful defense industry taking the pole position and making it secret in terms of which direction AI is really going to accelerate.It's going to be a dangerous bridge that we have to Exactly.The goal is the only target. But if it can get past the control of human beings, which I think it's ultimately going to have to, once it does that, then it's a superpower, then it's a thing that exists. It's a Doctor Manhattan. It's a thing that exists.That what is Doctor Manhattan?Did you ever see the watchman? The movie the Watchman, based on a graphic novel? HBO was kind of bullshit. It was like a series. It wasn't bullshit, but it was just not the same. So the graphic, the movie's the best. The Zack Snyder movies. Fucking incredible. The Watchman is like one of my favorite superhero movies ever. Deeply flawed superheroes. But there's this guy, Doctor Manhattan, and Doctor Manhattan is a scientist who gets trapped in this lab when this explosion goes off. And he becomes like a God, essentially a God. He's this like blue guy who's built like a bodybuilder who floats and levitates and lives on Mars. It's pretty crazy. But the point is he's infinitely smarter than any human being that's ever lived. And that's what it's going to be. It's going to be something that, it's not going to be saddled down with our biological limitations. It's just whether or not we can bridge that gap, whether or not we can get to the point where that thing becomes sentient. But then the problem, because is, are we irrelevant when that happens? We kind of are. And what happens to us? I don't know.But I mean, is that something that chimps should have considered when they started grunting? Hey, we got to stop grunting because grunting is going to lead to language. Language is going to lead to weapons, weapons going to lead to nuclear war. It's going to lead to pollution. We're going to stop right here. Just stay grunting and running away from big cats. No, we didn't do that. They kept moving forward and I think we're going to keep moving forward. And I think this thing is a part of the process.I'm going to have to take that question and your thoughts back to a guy at Los Alamos who I visited about maybe eight years ago, who was building an electronic brain at Los Alamos for DARPA using the old roadrunner supercomputer that used to have the nuclear codes on it, by the way. Okay. And I was asking this question about sentience and AI, and he told me his name was doctor Garrett Kenyon, and he told me that we were a ways away from AI really being able to have sentience. And he gave me an analogy I'll share with you because I think about this and it's really interesting. Keep in mind this was seven or eight years ago. He said to me. Okay, so my iPhone, machine learning, it has facial recognition, which is shocking. You know, you can tip it up and it can see you. It can even be dark. And he said, so thats computer recognizing me based on electronic information that it knows. He said, now take your iPhone to a football field and stand, put the iPhone across the football field. Put me in a cap and a hoodie and have the iPhone try to recognize me even if Im walking.It can't. And then he said, take my teenage daughter and put her across the football field. Me with the baseball cap and the hoodie. My daughter, if I take two steps, she knows it's me. That's human intelligence versus where machine intelligence is.Okay, that analogy is not accurate because they can see you and recognize your gait from satellites like this is. That is not the extent of technology. And facial recognition and gait recognition is far beyond that. They can tell who is walking in a street in Paris right now.The difference is this with the biometrics, that's called the offset technology of biometrics that can see you from far away and identify you. It's looking at you, grabbing a metric like your iris scans that it already has in a computer system from you going in and out of the airport or wherever it happened to have captured your biometrics. And it's matching it against a system of systems. But the human knows intuitively who the person is across the field without having they have their own internal. So the metaphor is the same. But do you see what I'm saying?I kind of do.But the human didn't have to look up in a computer, right? You know, check, fact check, or rather biometric check, because it has a lot.Of data already about that person, the computer.So it's a still machine learning. Even the offset biometrics that are seeing you from far away.Right. But that leap, if we can do it, it's not incomprehensible that a computer could do it. You know, Kurzweil's theories about exponential growth of technology, that we're looking at things in a linear fashion, that's not how they happen. They have, they explode.Yes.And they happen unbelievably quickly as time goes on because everything accelerates.And isn't his new book, which I haven't read yet, like, we're basically almost there.We're real close. We're about four years away.He puts it at four years.Most people put it at four years. He's getting along in time, and he's not what he used to be, you know, when you talk to him, he's a little difficult. Like he had us. He struggled with some questions, but I.Think, which is another endlessly interesting, tragic thought that I think about a lot, is how we humans go. Meanwhile, your AI is just getting smarter and smarter and smarter. Infinitely, including on the top in terms of time, and we just deteriorate for now.But, yeah, they're very close to cracking that. Yeah, yeah, they're very close to cracking the genome. Look, Greenland sharks. How long do those things live?Those pictures of them that are several hundred years old.Yeah, we share most of the DNA that those with the sharks.I didn't know that.Yeah, we share like 90 plus percent DNA with fungus. Yeah. What's in them is in us. And they can figure out ways to turn things on and turn things off. In fact, like, someone was. My friend Brigham was explaining this to me today, like. Like gila monsters, those lizards.Yes.Like, that's literally how they figured out how to make things like ozempic.Wait, what do you mean?Studying their DNA. Studying, like, how to turn things on and turn things off and like what? They know that other animals can regenerate limbs, right? So they think they're going to be able to regenerate limbs. In fact, Japan has just embarked on a study now where they're going to grow teeth. They're going to grow human teeth, like in people. So they figured out how to regenerate teeth. How many people lost teeth? And then you're fucked. You have to get a bridge or this or that. Now they think they can regrow teeth in people. Well, how far away are they from regrowing limbs? Well, all this stuff is like advanced science and an understanding of what aging is. What is macular degeneration, what are all these deteriorations in human beings and how much can we mitigate it? Well, it turns out they think they can mitigate all of them. They think they can stop aging dead in its tracks, and they think they can actually even reverse it.This is that conundrum of the dual use technology of the military, because most of these technologies begin on DARPA grants, right?Cause that's where all the money is.And then they, you know, the limb regeneration, and then it sort of. It inspires and also opens up a whole other lane for industry because DARPA or the defense department has to do the blue sky research that no one else is willing to fund because it's too expensive and it doesn't have an immediate return. Right. You know?No, there's a great benefit to that.Absolutely.Yeah. There's a great benefit to all that spending. There really is, ultimately, because there's a great benefit to science.Or the part like, DARPA invented lidar technology. Every time I read about one of these lost civilizations that is uncovered because the lidar can look through the trees and the jungle.Incredible.See the footprint of a lost civilization. It's so amazing. Your AI beginning to be able to decipher lost languages.Yeah.And so then we can learn more about our old human versions. Our ancestors, not just us, they think.They'Re going to be able to decipher dolphin language. Ooh, yeah.I want to hear what the chimp empire guys were really saying to each other.Right. That would be, well, imagine if they could read their minds, you know, or.Just interpret their sounds.Sure. I think we are at the cusp of incredible possibilities, which is really, no one really knows what's going to happen. And it's happening so fast, so fast that, like, six months ago, AI sucked. Like, consumer level AI sucks. Six months ago, now it's insane. And now there's a, these video generating AI's that on a prompt can make a realistic film, like a movie of people doing things. You've seen that.I'm sure that I saw that. Goodbye, Hollywood.Incredible. Incredible.I want your thought for a second on the optimistic part of the future with all of this technology, because we're in agreement that the technology is incredible and has the potential to take us and is taking us to these remarkable places. So why is it then that it's so looked down upon or thought of as perhaps pollyanna ish, to see what Reagan did? Like to stop seeing everybody as an enemy that must be killed. And do the Gorbachev, like, see them as an adversary? You want to beat your adversary. You want to beat your opponent in a sportsmanlike manner. You want to be better than them. You want to outperform them, but you dont necessarily need to kill them? I dont know if thats the difference between being a woman and a man, but why is it that there isnt more of a movement toward this idea that we as a world have all this incredible technology? I mean, it sounds even, it sounds silly even saying such a thing, but I'm saying it. Why? Why isn't there a movement to stop looking at people as someone to kill?Well, I think there is with individuals. I think most individuals feel that way. Most people that you talk to about, when they talk about other individuals, they don't want to have a conflict with other individuals. They want to live their lives. They want to be with their family and their friends. That's what most individuals want to do. When we start moving as tribes, then things become different, because then we have a leader of a tribe, and that leader of a tribe tells us the other tribe's a real problem, and we're going to have to go in and get them. And if we don't, they're going to. They're a danger for our freedom. It's the same problem that we talked about before. It's human beings being in control. And if AI can achieve the rosiest rose colored glasses version of what possible in the future, it can eliminate all of the stupid influences of human beings, of the cult of personality and human tribalism. It can eliminate all that stuff.You think it's inherent in humans?I think it's a part of being a primate. It's what we see in chimp empire. I think it's. We see monkeys tricking them. That is an eagle coming so they can steal the fruit. It's a part of being an animal, you know, it's part of being a biological thing that reproduces sexually and that is worried about others and then confines with its tribe and gets together. It's us against them. This has been us from the beginning of time. And for us to just abandon this genetically coded behavior patterns that we've had for hundreds of thousands of years because we know better. We don't know better enough. We know better now than we did then. We know better now than we did when Reagan was in office. There's more people that are more informed how the way the world works, but that there's also a bunch of infantile people that are running around shouting out stupid shit and doing things for their own personal benefit that are ultimately detrimental to the human race, that's all true too, and that's always going to be the case. This is a bizarre battle of our brilliance and our folly going back and forth, good and evil as you were.That's it.But brilliance and folly is a more interesting way of looking at it than good and evil, which automatically puts it in a moral context, which makes people even argue further.It's all part of it. The good and evil is a part of the decisions of brilliance and folly. Brilliance is good, folly is evil, stupid. It leads to death, leads to destruction, leads to sadness, it leads to loss, leads to pollution. It leads to all these different things that we have a problem with. I don't know what's gonna happen, but I do think that we're the last of the people. I think we're the last. I think especially you and I, because we grew up with no answering machines. We grew up, we grew up back in the dizzy. We grew up. When you left your house, you were gone. Nobody knew where you were. My parents had like ten pictures of me before I was like ten years old. They didn't know where the fuck I was. I left the house. I was a dream. You know, when you saw the person again, you're like, oh, you're real. Like you didn't know where they were. They were out there in the world. You know, when you went to find your friends, you had to go to your friend's house and hope they were home. Hey, is Mike home?No, Mike's not home. Okay. And then you'd leave. I'll go find Mike. Maybe Mike's at the school. Maybe Mike's at the gym. Maybe Mike's at the park. You didn't know where anybody was. The world wasn't connected. Now it is. That's in our lifetimes. And I think in our lifetimes we're gonna see something that makes that look like nothing makes this connection that we have with each other now, which seems so incredible. It's going to make it look so superficial. It's going to look like smokescreens. It's going to look like grunts that we make to point to certain objects.It'll be 1980s empire instead of chimp empire.It's going to be weird. It's definitely going to be weird. But I don't know if it's necessarily going to be bad because ultimately, humanity, if we don't fuck ourselves up sideways. And again, apocalypses are real, but they're generally local. You know, if we can look at what we are now as a society, things are safer. We are more intelligent. You're more likely to survive disease and illness. Despite all of the rampant corruption of the pharmaceutical drug industry, rampant corruption of the military industrial crop, all the craziness in the world today, still way safer today than it was 1000 years ago. Way, way, way safer. And it's way safer probably a thousand years ago than it was a thousand years before that. I think things always generally move in a very good direction because that's what's better for everybody. Ultimately, everybody wants the same thing as an individual, what do you want? You want your loved ones to be happy? You want food on the table? You want a safe place to sleep and live. You want things to do that are exciting, that occupy your time, that you enjoy, that are rewarding. That's what everybody wants.We're moving collectively in a better direction. So I'm ultimately hopeful, and I'm ultimately positive. When I think about the future, I think it's going to be uber bizarre and strange, but I don't necessarily think it's going to be bad. I've just accepted that it's happening. And instead of being filled with fear and anxiety, which I am sometimes, still, sometimes, I'll freak out about it.But ultimately, you freak out about technology specifically.I forgot about war. I freak out about technology. I freak out about the fact that the world can change. There was a while that I was getting anxiety. Late at night, my whole family would be asleep, like, right after the invasion of Ukraine. I think it was when it really started, when I'd be alone at night, I'd be like, the people that lived in Hiroshima had no idea that it was coming. The people that lived in Dresden, the people that lived anywhere where crazy shit happened before it happened, things were normal, and then they were never normal again. And so I just kept thinking that one of these morons somewhere could do something, or a group of morons can do something that forever alters everything. And then we're in Mad Max, which has happened before in different parts of the world.And is the idea of nuclear war a scenario that your worst nightmare, that concept that's keeping you up late at night? I want to say, don't read, but I think you should read this book, because you, with your voice and your reach, it's wise to realize how we're not going to even have an opportunity to see what happens to AI if one madman with a nuclear missile decides to do a bolt out of the blue attack.And that's possible.And that is possible, and that's what everyone in Washington fears. And I think this goes back to the idea that it's great, 1020 years later, to be like, oh, my God, look what they were doing. Can you believe they covered this all up and learned from it? But you can't learn from the fact how dangerous nuclear war is, how close we are, how we are one misunderstanding away from a nuclear war. If everyone's dead, there's no learning, there's no opportunity. Which is why I always say, read nuclear war a scenario. Join the conversation while we can all still have one.Okay. Well, Annie, thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate it. It was great to see you again. And like I said, I have not read your book, but I have several friends that have, and they're absolutely terrified by it. So you're doing your right job. You're always killing it. I really appreciate you.Thank you so much.And I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. So tell everybody where your social media is. They could find you online.Annie Jacobson.Annie Jacobson website.You and I both know Google, AI, everything works. All you need is a name anymore.That's true.Right.And your website, what's your website?Anniejacobson.com.Okay. And the books available everywhere. And audiobook written and said by you, which is great. I love that. Thank you, Annie.Appreciate it.Bye, everybody.

then the printing press came along, the hoi polloi could read or would begin. That began really the birth of mass populations, being able to read, which is where we are today. And sometimes I, like, think about James Burke, and I think about was that. Was that. Was that designed? Did that come out of man's imagination for warfare or to make it easier to kill the wildebeest or the wooly mammoth?It was both. I think it was both.Both. So the analogy, you know, where will the AI go with that? Because you're talking about all these very healthy ideas and solutions, but just because of what I write about and who I speak to, I cannot help but see the powerful defense industry taking the pole position and making it secret in terms of which direction AI is really going to accelerate.It's going to be a dangerous bridge that we have to Exactly.The goal is the only target. But if it can get past the control of human beings, which I think it's ultimately going to have to, once it does that, then it's a superpower, then it's a thing that exists. It's a Doctor Manhattan. It's a thing that exists.That what is Doctor Manhattan?Did you ever see the watchman? The movie the Watchman, based on a graphic novel? HBO was kind of bullshit. It was like a series. It wasn't bullshit, but it was just not the same. So the graphic, the movie's the best. The Zack Snyder movies. Fucking incredible. The Watchman is like one of my favorite superhero movies ever. Deeply flawed superheroes. But there's this guy, Doctor Manhattan, and Doctor Manhattan is a scientist who gets trapped in this lab when this explosion goes off. And he becomes like a God, essentially a God. He's this like blue guy who's built like a bodybuilder who floats and levitates and lives on Mars. It's pretty crazy. But the point is he's infinitely smarter than any human being that's ever lived. And that's what it's going to be. It's going to be something that, it's not going to be saddled down with our biological limitations. It's just whether or not we can bridge that gap, whether or not we can get to the point where that thing becomes sentient. But then the problem, because is, are we irrelevant when that happens? We kind of are. And what happens to us? I don't know.But I mean, is that something that chimps should have considered when they started grunting? Hey, we got to stop grunting because grunting is going to lead to language. Language is going to lead to weapons, weapons going to lead to nuclear war. It's going to lead to pollution. We're going to stop right here. Just stay grunting and running away from big cats. No, we didn't do that. They kept moving forward and I think we're going to keep moving forward. And I think this thing is a part of the process.I'm going to have to take that question and your thoughts back to a guy at Los Alamos who I visited about maybe eight years ago, who was building an electronic brain at Los Alamos for DARPA using the old roadrunner supercomputer that used to have the nuclear codes on it, by the way. Okay. And I was asking this question about sentience and AI, and he told me his name was doctor Garrett Kenyon, and he told me that we were a ways away from AI really being able to have sentience. And he gave me an analogy I'll share with you because I think about this and it's really interesting. Keep in mind this was seven or eight years ago. He said to me. Okay, so my iPhone, machine learning, it has facial recognition, which is shocking. You know, you can tip it up and it can see you. It can even be dark. And he said, so thats computer recognizing me based on electronic information that it knows. He said, now take your iPhone to a football field and stand, put the iPhone across the football field. Put me in a cap and a hoodie and have the iPhone try to recognize me even if Im walking.It can't. And then he said, take my teenage daughter and put her across the football field. Me with the baseball cap and the hoodie. My daughter, if I take two steps, she knows it's me. That's human intelligence versus where machine intelligence is.Okay, that analogy is not accurate because they can see you and recognize your gait from satellites like this is. That is not the extent of technology. And facial recognition and gait recognition is far beyond that. They can tell who is walking in a street in Paris right now.The difference is this with the biometrics, that's called the offset technology of biometrics that can see you from far away and identify you. It's looking at you, grabbing a metric like your iris scans that it already has in a computer system from you going in and out of the airport or wherever it happened to have captured your biometrics. And it's matching it against a system of systems. But the human knows intuitively who the person is across the field without having they have their own internal. So the metaphor is the same. But do you see what I'm saying?I kind of do.But the human didn't have to look up in a computer, right? You know, check, fact check, or rather biometric check, because it has a lot.Of data already about that person, the computer.So it's a still machine learning. Even the offset biometrics that are seeing you from far away.Right. But that leap, if we can do it, it's not incomprehensible that a computer could do it. You know, Kurzweil's theories about exponential growth of technology, that we're looking at things in a linear fashion, that's not how they happen. They have, they explode.Yes.And they happen unbelievably quickly as time goes on because everything accelerates.And isn't his new book, which I haven't read yet, like, we're basically almost there.We're real close. We're about four years away.He puts it at four years.Most people put it at four years. He's getting along in time, and he's not what he used to be, you know, when you talk to him, he's a little difficult. Like he had us. He struggled with some questions, but I.Think, which is another endlessly interesting, tragic thought that I think about a lot, is how we humans go. Meanwhile, your AI is just getting smarter and smarter and smarter. Infinitely, including on the top in terms of time, and we just deteriorate for now.But, yeah, they're very close to cracking that. Yeah, yeah, they're very close to cracking the genome. Look, Greenland sharks. How long do those things live?Those pictures of them that are several hundred years old.Yeah, we share most of the DNA that those with the sharks.I didn't know that.Yeah, we share like 90 plus percent DNA with fungus. Yeah. What's in them is in us. And they can figure out ways to turn things on and turn things off. In fact, like, someone was. My friend Brigham was explaining this to me today, like. Like gila monsters, those lizards.Yes.Like, that's literally how they figured out how to make things like ozempic.Wait, what do you mean?Studying their DNA. Studying, like, how to turn things on and turn things off and like what? They know that other animals can regenerate limbs, right? So they think they're going to be able to regenerate limbs. In fact, Japan has just embarked on a study now where they're going to grow teeth. They're going to grow human teeth, like in people. So they figured out how to regenerate teeth. How many people lost teeth? And then you're fucked. You have to get a bridge or this or that. Now they think they can regrow teeth in people. Well, how far away are they from regrowing limbs? Well, all this stuff is like advanced science and an understanding of what aging is. What is macular degeneration, what are all these deteriorations in human beings and how much can we mitigate it? Well, it turns out they think they can mitigate all of them. They think they can stop aging dead in its tracks, and they think they can actually even reverse it.This is that conundrum of the dual use technology of the military, because most of these technologies begin on DARPA grants, right?Cause that's where all the money is.And then they, you know, the limb regeneration, and then it sort of. It inspires and also opens up a whole other lane for industry because DARPA or the defense department has to do the blue sky research that no one else is willing to fund because it's too expensive and it doesn't have an immediate return. Right. You know?No, there's a great benefit to that.Absolutely.Yeah. There's a great benefit to all that spending. There really is, ultimately, because there's a great benefit to science.Or the part like, DARPA invented lidar technology. Every time I read about one of these lost civilizations that is uncovered because the lidar can look through the trees and the jungle.Incredible.See the footprint of a lost civilization. It's so amazing. Your AI beginning to be able to decipher lost languages.Yeah.And so then we can learn more about our old human versions. Our ancestors, not just us, they think.They'Re going to be able to decipher dolphin language. Ooh, yeah.I want to hear what the chimp empire guys were really saying to each other.Right. That would be, well, imagine if they could read their minds, you know, or.Just interpret their sounds.Sure. I think we are at the cusp of incredible possibilities, which is really, no one really knows what's going to happen. And it's happening so fast, so fast that, like, six months ago, AI sucked. Like, consumer level AI sucks. Six months ago, now it's insane. And now there's a, these video generating AI's that on a prompt can make a realistic film, like a movie of people doing things. You've seen that.I'm sure that I saw that. Goodbye, Hollywood.Incredible. Incredible.I want your thought for a second on the optimistic part of the future with all of this technology, because we're in agreement that the technology is incredible and has the potential to take us and is taking us to these remarkable places. So why is it then that it's so looked down upon or thought of as perhaps pollyanna ish, to see what Reagan did? Like to stop seeing everybody as an enemy that must be killed. And do the Gorbachev, like, see them as an adversary? You want to beat your adversary. You want to beat your opponent in a sportsmanlike manner. You want to be better than them. You want to outperform them, but you dont necessarily need to kill them? I dont know if thats the difference between being a woman and a man, but why is it that there isnt more of a movement toward this idea that we as a world have all this incredible technology? I mean, it sounds even, it sounds silly even saying such a thing, but I'm saying it. Why? Why isn't there a movement to stop looking at people as someone to kill?Well, I think there is with individuals. I think most individuals feel that way. Most people that you talk to about, when they talk about other individuals, they don't want to have a conflict with other individuals. They want to live their lives. They want to be with their family and their friends. That's what most individuals want to do. When we start moving as tribes, then things become different, because then we have a leader of a tribe, and that leader of a tribe tells us the other tribe's a real problem, and we're going to have to go in and get them. And if we don't, they're going to. They're a danger for our freedom. It's the same problem that we talked about before. It's human beings being in control. And if AI can achieve the rosiest rose colored glasses version of what possible in the future, it can eliminate all of the stupid influences of human beings, of the cult of personality and human tribalism. It can eliminate all that stuff.You think it's inherent in humans?I think it's a part of being a primate. It's what we see in chimp empire. I think it's. We see monkeys tricking them. That is an eagle coming so they can steal the fruit. It's a part of being an animal, you know, it's part of being a biological thing that reproduces sexually and that is worried about others and then confines with its tribe and gets together. It's us against them. This has been us from the beginning of time. And for us to just abandon this genetically coded behavior patterns that we've had for hundreds of thousands of years because we know better. We don't know better enough. We know better now than we did then. We know better now than we did when Reagan was in office. There's more people that are more informed how the way the world works, but that there's also a bunch of infantile people that are running around shouting out stupid shit and doing things for their own personal benefit that are ultimately detrimental to the human race, that's all true too, and that's always going to be the case. This is a bizarre battle of our brilliance and our folly going back and forth, good and evil as you were.That's it.But brilliance and folly is a more interesting way of looking at it than good and evil, which automatically puts it in a moral context, which makes people even argue further.It's all part of it. The good and evil is a part of the decisions of brilliance and folly. Brilliance is good, folly is evil, stupid. It leads to death, leads to destruction, leads to sadness, it leads to loss, leads to pollution. It leads to all these different things that we have a problem with. I don't know what's gonna happen, but I do think that we're the last of the people. I think we're the last. I think especially you and I, because we grew up with no answering machines. We grew up, we grew up back in the dizzy. We grew up. When you left your house, you were gone. Nobody knew where you were. My parents had like ten pictures of me before I was like ten years old. They didn't know where the fuck I was. I left the house. I was a dream. You know, when you saw the person again, you're like, oh, you're real. Like you didn't know where they were. They were out there in the world. You know, when you went to find your friends, you had to go to your friend's house and hope they were home. Hey, is Mike home?No, Mike's not home. Okay. And then you'd leave. I'll go find Mike. Maybe Mike's at the school. Maybe Mike's at the gym. Maybe Mike's at the park. You didn't know where anybody was. The world wasn't connected. Now it is. That's in our lifetimes. And I think in our lifetimes we're gonna see something that makes that look like nothing makes this connection that we have with each other now, which seems so incredible. It's going to make it look so superficial. It's going to look like smokescreens. It's going to look like grunts that we make to point to certain objects.It'll be 1980s empire instead of chimp empire.It's going to be weird. It's definitely going to be weird. But I don't know if it's necessarily going to be bad because ultimately, humanity, if we don't fuck ourselves up sideways. And again, apocalypses are real, but they're generally local. You know, if we can look at what we are now as a society, things are safer. We are more intelligent. You're more likely to survive disease and illness. Despite all of the rampant corruption of the pharmaceutical drug industry, rampant corruption of the military industrial crop, all the craziness in the world today, still way safer today than it was 1000 years ago. Way, way, way safer. And it's way safer probably a thousand years ago than it was a thousand years before that. I think things always generally move in a very good direction because that's what's better for everybody. Ultimately, everybody wants the same thing as an individual, what do you want? You want your loved ones to be happy? You want food on the table? You want a safe place to sleep and live. You want things to do that are exciting, that occupy your time, that you enjoy, that are rewarding. That's what everybody wants.We're moving collectively in a better direction. So I'm ultimately hopeful, and I'm ultimately positive. When I think about the future, I think it's going to be uber bizarre and strange, but I don't necessarily think it's going to be bad. I've just accepted that it's happening. And instead of being filled with fear and anxiety, which I am sometimes, still, sometimes, I'll freak out about it.But ultimately, you freak out about technology specifically.I forgot about war. I freak out about technology. I freak out about the fact that the world can change. There was a while that I was getting anxiety. Late at night, my whole family would be asleep, like, right after the invasion of Ukraine. I think it was when it really started, when I'd be alone at night, I'd be like, the people that lived in Hiroshima had no idea that it was coming. The people that lived in Dresden, the people that lived anywhere where crazy shit happened before it happened, things were normal, and then they were never normal again. And so I just kept thinking that one of these morons somewhere could do something, or a group of morons can do something that forever alters everything. And then we're in Mad Max, which has happened before in different parts of the world.And is the idea of nuclear war a scenario that your worst nightmare, that concept that's keeping you up late at night? I want to say, don't read, but I think you should read this book, because you, with your voice and your reach, it's wise to realize how we're not going to even have an opportunity to see what happens to AI if one madman with a nuclear missile decides to do a bolt out of the blue attack.And that's possible.And that is possible, and that's what everyone in Washington fears. And I think this goes back to the idea that it's great, 1020 years later, to be like, oh, my God, look what they were doing. Can you believe they covered this all up and learned from it? But you can't learn from the fact how dangerous nuclear war is, how close we are, how we are one misunderstanding away from a nuclear war. If everyone's dead, there's no learning, there's no opportunity. Which is why I always say, read nuclear war a scenario. Join the conversation while we can all still have one.Okay. Well, Annie, thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate it. It was great to see you again. And like I said, I have not read your book, but I have several friends that have, and they're absolutely terrified by it. So you're doing your right job. You're always killing it. I really appreciate you.Thank you so much.And I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. So tell everybody where your social media is. They could find you online.Annie Jacobson.Annie Jacobson website.You and I both know Google, AI, everything works. All you need is a name anymore.That's true.Right.And your website, what's your website?Anniejacobson.com.Okay. And the books available everywhere. And audiobook written and said by you, which is great. I love that. Thank you, Annie.Appreciate it.Bye, everybody.

was that. Was that. Was that designed? Did that come out of man's imagination for warfare or to make it easier to kill the wildebeest or the wooly mammoth?

It was both. I think it was both.

Both. So the analogy, you know, where will the AI go with that? Because you're talking about all these very healthy ideas and solutions, but just because of what I write about and who I speak to, I cannot help but see the powerful defense industry taking the pole position and making it secret in terms of which direction AI is really going to accelerate.

It's going to be a dangerous bridge that we have to Exactly.The goal is the only target. But if it can get past the control of human beings, which I think it's ultimately going to have to, once it does that, then it's a superpower, then it's a thing that exists. It's a Doctor Manhattan. It's a thing that exists.That what is Doctor Manhattan?Did you ever see the watchman? The movie the Watchman, based on a graphic novel? HBO was kind of bullshit. It was like a series. It wasn't bullshit, but it was just not the same. So the graphic, the movie's the best. The Zack Snyder movies. Fucking incredible. The Watchman is like one of my favorite superhero movies ever. Deeply flawed superheroes. But there's this guy, Doctor Manhattan, and Doctor Manhattan is a scientist who gets trapped in this lab when this explosion goes off. And he becomes like a God, essentially a God. He's this like blue guy who's built like a bodybuilder who floats and levitates and lives on Mars. It's pretty crazy. But the point is he's infinitely smarter than any human being that's ever lived. And that's what it's going to be. It's going to be something that, it's not going to be saddled down with our biological limitations. It's just whether or not we can bridge that gap, whether or not we can get to the point where that thing becomes sentient. But then the problem, because is, are we irrelevant when that happens? We kind of are. And what happens to us? I don't know.But I mean, is that something that chimps should have considered when they started grunting? Hey, we got to stop grunting because grunting is going to lead to language. Language is going to lead to weapons, weapons going to lead to nuclear war. It's going to lead to pollution. We're going to stop right here. Just stay grunting and running away from big cats. No, we didn't do that. They kept moving forward and I think we're going to keep moving forward. And I think this thing is a part of the process.I'm going to have to take that question and your thoughts back to a guy at Los Alamos who I visited about maybe eight years ago, who was building an electronic brain at Los Alamos for DARPA using the old roadrunner supercomputer that used to have the nuclear codes on it, by the way. Okay. And I was asking this question about sentience and AI, and he told me his name was doctor Garrett Kenyon, and he told me that we were a ways away from AI really being able to have sentience. And he gave me an analogy I'll share with you because I think about this and it's really interesting. Keep in mind this was seven or eight years ago. He said to me. Okay, so my iPhone, machine learning, it has facial recognition, which is shocking. You know, you can tip it up and it can see you. It can even be dark. And he said, so thats computer recognizing me based on electronic information that it knows. He said, now take your iPhone to a football field and stand, put the iPhone across the football field. Put me in a cap and a hoodie and have the iPhone try to recognize me even if Im walking.It can't. And then he said, take my teenage daughter and put her across the football field. Me with the baseball cap and the hoodie. My daughter, if I take two steps, she knows it's me. That's human intelligence versus where machine intelligence is.Okay, that analogy is not accurate because they can see you and recognize your gait from satellites like this is. That is not the extent of technology. And facial recognition and gait recognition is far beyond that. They can tell who is walking in a street in Paris right now.The difference is this with the biometrics, that's called the offset technology of biometrics that can see you from far away and identify you. It's looking at you, grabbing a metric like your iris scans that it already has in a computer system from you going in and out of the airport or wherever it happened to have captured your biometrics. And it's matching it against a system of systems. But the human knows intuitively who the person is across the field without having they have their own internal. So the metaphor is the same. But do you see what I'm saying?I kind of do.But the human didn't have to look up in a computer, right? You know, check, fact check, or rather biometric check, because it has a lot.Of data already about that person, the computer.So it's a still machine learning. Even the offset biometrics that are seeing you from far away.Right. But that leap, if we can do it, it's not incomprehensible that a computer could do it. You know, Kurzweil's theories about exponential growth of technology, that we're looking at things in a linear fashion, that's not how they happen. They have, they explode.Yes.And they happen unbelievably quickly as time goes on because everything accelerates.And isn't his new book, which I haven't read yet, like, we're basically almost there.We're real close. We're about four years away.He puts it at four years.Most people put it at four years. He's getting along in time, and he's not what he used to be, you know, when you talk to him, he's a little difficult. Like he had us. He struggled with some questions, but I.Think, which is another endlessly interesting, tragic thought that I think about a lot, is how we humans go. Meanwhile, your AI is just getting smarter and smarter and smarter. Infinitely, including on the top in terms of time, and we just deteriorate for now.But, yeah, they're very close to cracking that. Yeah, yeah, they're very close to cracking the genome. Look, Greenland sharks. How long do those things live?Those pictures of them that are several hundred years old.Yeah, we share most of the DNA that those with the sharks.I didn't know that.Yeah, we share like 90 plus percent DNA with fungus. Yeah. What's in them is in us. And they can figure out ways to turn things on and turn things off. In fact, like, someone was. My friend Brigham was explaining this to me today, like. Like gila monsters, those lizards.Yes.Like, that's literally how they figured out how to make things like ozempic.Wait, what do you mean?Studying their DNA. Studying, like, how to turn things on and turn things off and like what? They know that other animals can regenerate limbs, right? So they think they're going to be able to regenerate limbs. In fact, Japan has just embarked on a study now where they're going to grow teeth. They're going to grow human teeth, like in people. So they figured out how to regenerate teeth. How many people lost teeth? And then you're fucked. You have to get a bridge or this or that. Now they think they can regrow teeth in people. Well, how far away are they from regrowing limbs? Well, all this stuff is like advanced science and an understanding of what aging is. What is macular degeneration, what are all these deteriorations in human beings and how much can we mitigate it? Well, it turns out they think they can mitigate all of them. They think they can stop aging dead in its tracks, and they think they can actually even reverse it.This is that conundrum of the dual use technology of the military, because most of these technologies begin on DARPA grants, right?Cause that's where all the money is.And then they, you know, the limb regeneration, and then it sort of. It inspires and also opens up a whole other lane for industry because DARPA or the defense department has to do the blue sky research that no one else is willing to fund because it's too expensive and it doesn't have an immediate return. Right. You know?No, there's a great benefit to that.Absolutely.Yeah. There's a great benefit to all that spending. There really is, ultimately, because there's a great benefit to science.Or the part like, DARPA invented lidar technology. Every time I read about one of these lost civilizations that is uncovered because the lidar can look through the trees and the jungle.Incredible.See the footprint of a lost civilization. It's so amazing. Your AI beginning to be able to decipher lost languages.Yeah.And so then we can learn more about our old human versions. Our ancestors, not just us, they think.They'Re going to be able to decipher dolphin language. Ooh, yeah.I want to hear what the chimp empire guys were really saying to each other.Right. That would be, well, imagine if they could read their minds, you know, or.Just interpret their sounds.Sure. I think we are at the cusp of incredible possibilities, which is really, no one really knows what's going to happen. And it's happening so fast, so fast that, like, six months ago, AI sucked. Like, consumer level AI sucks. Six months ago, now it's insane. And now there's a, these video generating AI's that on a prompt can make a realistic film, like a movie of people doing things. You've seen that.I'm sure that I saw that. Goodbye, Hollywood.Incredible. Incredible.I want your thought for a second on the optimistic part of the future with all of this technology, because we're in agreement that the technology is incredible and has the potential to take us and is taking us to these remarkable places. So why is it then that it's so looked down upon or thought of as perhaps pollyanna ish, to see what Reagan did? Like to stop seeing everybody as an enemy that must be killed. And do the Gorbachev, like, see them as an adversary? You want to beat your adversary. You want to beat your opponent in a sportsmanlike manner. You want to be better than them. You want to outperform them, but you dont necessarily need to kill them? I dont know if thats the difference between being a woman and a man, but why is it that there isnt more of a movement toward this idea that we as a world have all this incredible technology? I mean, it sounds even, it sounds silly even saying such a thing, but I'm saying it. Why? Why isn't there a movement to stop looking at people as someone to kill?Well, I think there is with individuals. I think most individuals feel that way. Most people that you talk to about, when they talk about other individuals, they don't want to have a conflict with other individuals. They want to live their lives. They want to be with their family and their friends. That's what most individuals want to do. When we start moving as tribes, then things become different, because then we have a leader of a tribe, and that leader of a tribe tells us the other tribe's a real problem, and we're going to have to go in and get them. And if we don't, they're going to. They're a danger for our freedom. It's the same problem that we talked about before. It's human beings being in control. And if AI can achieve the rosiest rose colored glasses version of what possible in the future, it can eliminate all of the stupid influences of human beings, of the cult of personality and human tribalism. It can eliminate all that stuff.You think it's inherent in humans?I think it's a part of being a primate. It's what we see in chimp empire. I think it's. We see monkeys tricking them. That is an eagle coming so they can steal the fruit. It's a part of being an animal, you know, it's part of being a biological thing that reproduces sexually and that is worried about others and then confines with its tribe and gets together. It's us against them. This has been us from the beginning of time. And for us to just abandon this genetically coded behavior patterns that we've had for hundreds of thousands of years because we know better. We don't know better enough. We know better now than we did then. We know better now than we did when Reagan was in office. There's more people that are more informed how the way the world works, but that there's also a bunch of infantile people that are running around shouting out stupid shit and doing things for their own personal benefit that are ultimately detrimental to the human race, that's all true too, and that's always going to be the case. This is a bizarre battle of our brilliance and our folly going back and forth, good and evil as you were.That's it.But brilliance and folly is a more interesting way of looking at it than good and evil, which automatically puts it in a moral context, which makes people even argue further.It's all part of it. The good and evil is a part of the decisions of brilliance and folly. Brilliance is good, folly is evil, stupid. It leads to death, leads to destruction, leads to sadness, it leads to loss, leads to pollution. It leads to all these different things that we have a problem with. I don't know what's gonna happen, but I do think that we're the last of the people. I think we're the last. I think especially you and I, because we grew up with no answering machines. We grew up, we grew up back in the dizzy. We grew up. When you left your house, you were gone. Nobody knew where you were. My parents had like ten pictures of me before I was like ten years old. They didn't know where the fuck I was. I left the house. I was a dream. You know, when you saw the person again, you're like, oh, you're real. Like you didn't know where they were. They were out there in the world. You know, when you went to find your friends, you had to go to your friend's house and hope they were home. Hey, is Mike home?No, Mike's not home. Okay. And then you'd leave. I'll go find Mike. Maybe Mike's at the school. Maybe Mike's at the gym. Maybe Mike's at the park. You didn't know where anybody was. The world wasn't connected. Now it is. That's in our lifetimes. And I think in our lifetimes we're gonna see something that makes that look like nothing makes this connection that we have with each other now, which seems so incredible. It's going to make it look so superficial. It's going to look like smokescreens. It's going to look like grunts that we make to point to certain objects.It'll be 1980s empire instead of chimp empire.It's going to be weird. It's definitely going to be weird. But I don't know if it's necessarily going to be bad because ultimately, humanity, if we don't fuck ourselves up sideways. And again, apocalypses are real, but they're generally local. You know, if we can look at what we are now as a society, things are safer. We are more intelligent. You're more likely to survive disease and illness. Despite all of the rampant corruption of the pharmaceutical drug industry, rampant corruption of the military industrial crop, all the craziness in the world today, still way safer today than it was 1000 years ago. Way, way, way safer. And it's way safer probably a thousand years ago than it was a thousand years before that. I think things always generally move in a very good direction because that's what's better for everybody. Ultimately, everybody wants the same thing as an individual, what do you want? You want your loved ones to be happy? You want food on the table? You want a safe place to sleep and live. You want things to do that are exciting, that occupy your time, that you enjoy, that are rewarding. That's what everybody wants.We're moving collectively in a better direction. So I'm ultimately hopeful, and I'm ultimately positive. When I think about the future, I think it's going to be uber bizarre and strange, but I don't necessarily think it's going to be bad. I've just accepted that it's happening. And instead of being filled with fear and anxiety, which I am sometimes, still, sometimes, I'll freak out about it.But ultimately, you freak out about technology specifically.I forgot about war. I freak out about technology. I freak out about the fact that the world can change. There was a while that I was getting anxiety. Late at night, my whole family would be asleep, like, right after the invasion of Ukraine. I think it was when it really started, when I'd be alone at night, I'd be like, the people that lived in Hiroshima had no idea that it was coming. The people that lived in Dresden, the people that lived anywhere where crazy shit happened before it happened, things were normal, and then they were never normal again. And so I just kept thinking that one of these morons somewhere could do something, or a group of morons can do something that forever alters everything. And then we're in Mad Max, which has happened before in different parts of the world.And is the idea of nuclear war a scenario that your worst nightmare, that concept that's keeping you up late at night? I want to say, don't read, but I think you should read this book, because you, with your voice and your reach, it's wise to realize how we're not going to even have an opportunity to see what happens to AI if one madman with a nuclear missile decides to do a bolt out of the blue attack.And that's possible.And that is possible, and that's what everyone in Washington fears. And I think this goes back to the idea that it's great, 1020 years later, to be like, oh, my God, look what they were doing. Can you believe they covered this all up and learned from it? But you can't learn from the fact how dangerous nuclear war is, how close we are, how we are one misunderstanding away from a nuclear war. If everyone's dead, there's no learning, there's no opportunity. Which is why I always say, read nuclear war a scenario. Join the conversation while we can all still have one.Okay. Well, Annie, thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate it. It was great to see you again. And like I said, I have not read your book, but I have several friends that have, and they're absolutely terrified by it. So you're doing your right job. You're always killing it. I really appreciate you.Thank you so much.And I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. So tell everybody where your social media is. They could find you online.Annie Jacobson.Annie Jacobson website.You and I both know Google, AI, everything works. All you need is a name anymore.That's true.Right.And your website, what's your website?Anniejacobson.com.Okay. And the books available everywhere. And audiobook written and said by you, which is great. I love that. Thank you, Annie.Appreciate it.Bye, everybody.

Exactly.

The goal is the only target. But if it can get past the control of human beings, which I think it's ultimately going to have to, once it does that, then it's a superpower, then it's a thing that exists. It's a Doctor Manhattan. It's a thing that exists.

That what is Doctor Manhattan?

Did you ever see the watchman? The movie the Watchman, based on a graphic novel? HBO was kind of bullshit. It was like a series. It wasn't bullshit, but it was just not the same. So the graphic, the movie's the best. The Zack Snyder movies. Fucking incredible. The Watchman is like one of my favorite superhero movies ever. Deeply flawed superheroes. But there's this guy, Doctor Manhattan, and Doctor Manhattan is a scientist who gets trapped in this lab when this explosion goes off. And he becomes like a God, essentially a God. He's this like blue guy who's built like a bodybuilder who floats and levitates and lives on Mars. It's pretty crazy. But the point is he's infinitely smarter than any human being that's ever lived. And that's what it's going to be. It's going to be something that, it's not going to be saddled down with our biological limitations. It's just whether or not we can bridge that gap, whether or not we can get to the point where that thing becomes sentient. But then the problem, because is, are we irrelevant when that happens? We kind of are. And what happens to us? I don't know.

But I mean, is that something that chimps should have considered when they started grunting? Hey, we got to stop grunting because grunting is going to lead to language. Language is going to lead to weapons, weapons going to lead to nuclear war. It's going to lead to pollution. We're going to stop right here. Just stay grunting and running away from big cats. No, we didn't do that. They kept moving forward and I think we're going to keep moving forward. And I think this thing is a part of the process.

I'm going to have to take that question and your thoughts back to a guy at Los Alamos who I visited about maybe eight years ago, who was building an electronic brain at Los Alamos for DARPA using the old roadrunner supercomputer that used to have the nuclear codes on it, by the way. Okay. And I was asking this question about sentience and AI, and he told me his name was doctor Garrett Kenyon, and he told me that we were a ways away from AI really being able to have sentience. And he gave me an analogy I'll share with you because I think about this and it's really interesting. Keep in mind this was seven or eight years ago. He said to me. Okay, so my iPhone, machine learning, it has facial recognition, which is shocking. You know, you can tip it up and it can see you. It can even be dark. And he said, so thats computer recognizing me based on electronic information that it knows. He said, now take your iPhone to a football field and stand, put the iPhone across the football field. Put me in a cap and a hoodie and have the iPhone try to recognize me even if Im walking.

It can't. And then he said, take my teenage daughter and put her across the football field. Me with the baseball cap and the hoodie. My daughter, if I take two steps, she knows it's me. That's human intelligence versus where machine intelligence is.

Okay, that analogy is not accurate because they can see you and recognize your gait from satellites like this is. That is not the extent of technology. And facial recognition and gait recognition is far beyond that. They can tell who is walking in a street in Paris right now.

The difference is this with the biometrics, that's called the offset technology of biometrics that can see you from far away and identify you. It's looking at you, grabbing a metric like your iris scans that it already has in a computer system from you going in and out of the airport or wherever it happened to have captured your biometrics. And it's matching it against a system of systems. But the human knows intuitively who the person is across the field without having they have their own internal. So the metaphor is the same. But do you see what I'm saying?

I kind of do.

But the human didn't have to look up in a computer, right? You know, check, fact check, or rather biometric check, because it has a lot.

Of data already about that person, the computer.

So it's a still machine learning. Even the offset biometrics that are seeing you from far away.

Right. But that leap, if we can do it, it's not incomprehensible that a computer could do it. You know, Kurzweil's theories about exponential growth of technology, that we're looking at things in a linear fashion, that's not how they happen. They have, they explode.

Yes.

And they happen unbelievably quickly as time goes on because everything accelerates.

And isn't his new book, which I haven't read yet, like, we're basically almost there.

We're real close. We're about four years away.

He puts it at four years.

Most people put it at four years. He's getting along in time, and he's not what he used to be, you know, when you talk to him, he's a little difficult. Like he had us. He struggled with some questions, but I.

Think, which is another endlessly interesting, tragic thought that I think about a lot, is how we humans go. Meanwhile, your AI is just getting smarter and smarter and smarter. Infinitely, including on the top in terms of time, and we just deteriorate for now.

But, yeah, they're very close to cracking that. Yeah, yeah, they're very close to cracking the genome. Look, Greenland sharks. How long do those things live?

Those pictures of them that are several hundred years old.

Yeah, we share most of the DNA that those with the sharks.

I didn't know that.

Yeah, we share like 90 plus percent DNA with fungus. Yeah. What's in them is in us. And they can figure out ways to turn things on and turn things off. In fact, like, someone was. My friend Brigham was explaining this to me today, like. Like gila monsters, those lizards.

Yes.

Like, that's literally how they figured out how to make things like ozempic.

Wait, what do you mean?

Studying their DNA. Studying, like, how to turn things on and turn things off and like what? They know that other animals can regenerate limbs, right? So they think they're going to be able to regenerate limbs. In fact, Japan has just embarked on a study now where they're going to grow teeth. They're going to grow human teeth, like in people. So they figured out how to regenerate teeth. How many people lost teeth? And then you're fucked. You have to get a bridge or this or that. Now they think they can regrow teeth in people. Well, how far away are they from regrowing limbs? Well, all this stuff is like advanced science and an understanding of what aging is. What is macular degeneration, what are all these deteriorations in human beings and how much can we mitigate it? Well, it turns out they think they can mitigate all of them. They think they can stop aging dead in its tracks, and they think they can actually even reverse it.

This is that conundrum of the dual use technology of the military, because most of these technologies begin on DARPA grants, right?

Cause that's where all the money is.

And then they, you know, the limb regeneration, and then it sort of. It inspires and also opens up a whole other lane for industry because DARPA or the defense department has to do the blue sky research that no one else is willing to fund because it's too expensive and it doesn't have an immediate return. Right. You know?

No, there's a great benefit to that.

Absolutely.

Yeah. There's a great benefit to all that spending. There really is, ultimately, because there's a great benefit to science.

Or the part like, DARPA invented lidar technology. Every time I read about one of these lost civilizations that is uncovered because the lidar can look through the trees and the jungle.

Incredible.

See the footprint of a lost civilization. It's so amazing. Your AI beginning to be able to decipher lost languages.

Yeah.

And so then we can learn more about our old human versions. Our ancestors, not just us, they think.

They'Re going to be able to decipher dolphin language. Ooh, yeah.

I want to hear what the chimp empire guys were really saying to each other.

Right. That would be, well, imagine if they could read their minds, you know, or.

Just interpret their sounds.

Sure. I think we are at the cusp of incredible possibilities, which is really, no one really knows what's going to happen. And it's happening so fast, so fast that, like, six months ago, AI sucked. Like, consumer level AI sucks. Six months ago, now it's insane. And now there's a, these video generating AI's that on a prompt can make a realistic film, like a movie of people doing things. You've seen that.

I'm sure that I saw that. Goodbye, Hollywood.

Incredible. Incredible.

I want your thought for a second on the optimistic part of the future with all of this technology, because we're in agreement that the technology is incredible and has the potential to take us and is taking us to these remarkable places. So why is it then that it's so looked down upon or thought of as perhaps pollyanna ish, to see what Reagan did? Like to stop seeing everybody as an enemy that must be killed. And do the Gorbachev, like, see them as an adversary? You want to beat your adversary. You want to beat your opponent in a sportsmanlike manner. You want to be better than them. You want to outperform them, but you dont necessarily need to kill them? I dont know if thats the difference between being a woman and a man, but why is it that there isnt more of a movement toward this idea that we as a world have all this incredible technology? I mean, it sounds even, it sounds silly even saying such a thing, but I'm saying it. Why? Why isn't there a movement to stop looking at people as someone to kill?

Well, I think there is with individuals. I think most individuals feel that way. Most people that you talk to about, when they talk about other individuals, they don't want to have a conflict with other individuals. They want to live their lives. They want to be with their family and their friends. That's what most individuals want to do. When we start moving as tribes, then things become different, because then we have a leader of a tribe, and that leader of a tribe tells us the other tribe's a real problem, and we're going to have to go in and get them. And if we don't, they're going to. They're a danger for our freedom. It's the same problem that we talked about before. It's human beings being in control. And if AI can achieve the rosiest rose colored glasses version of what possible in the future, it can eliminate all of the stupid influences of human beings, of the cult of personality and human tribalism. It can eliminate all that stuff.

You think it's inherent in humans?

I think it's a part of being a primate. It's what we see in chimp empire. I think it's. We see monkeys tricking them. That is an eagle coming so they can steal the fruit. It's a part of being an animal, you know, it's part of being a biological thing that reproduces sexually and that is worried about others and then confines with its tribe and gets together. It's us against them. This has been us from the beginning of time. And for us to just abandon this genetically coded behavior patterns that we've had for hundreds of thousands of years because we know better. We don't know better enough. We know better now than we did then. We know better now than we did when Reagan was in office. There's more people that are more informed how the way the world works, but that there's also a bunch of infantile people that are running around shouting out stupid shit and doing things for their own personal benefit that are ultimately detrimental to the human race, that's all true too, and that's always going to be the case. This is a bizarre battle of our brilliance and our folly going back and forth, good and evil as you were.

That's it.

But brilliance and folly is a more interesting way of looking at it than good and evil, which automatically puts it in a moral context, which makes people even argue further.

It's all part of it. The good and evil is a part of the decisions of brilliance and folly. Brilliance is good, folly is evil, stupid. It leads to death, leads to destruction, leads to sadness, it leads to loss, leads to pollution. It leads to all these different things that we have a problem with. I don't know what's gonna happen, but I do think that we're the last of the people. I think we're the last. I think especially you and I, because we grew up with no answering machines. We grew up, we grew up back in the dizzy. We grew up. When you left your house, you were gone. Nobody knew where you were. My parents had like ten pictures of me before I was like ten years old. They didn't know where the fuck I was. I left the house. I was a dream. You know, when you saw the person again, you're like, oh, you're real. Like you didn't know where they were. They were out there in the world. You know, when you went to find your friends, you had to go to your friend's house and hope they were home. Hey, is Mike home?

No, Mike's not home. Okay. And then you'd leave. I'll go find Mike. Maybe Mike's at the school. Maybe Mike's at the gym. Maybe Mike's at the park. You didn't know where anybody was. The world wasn't connected. Now it is. That's in our lifetimes. And I think in our lifetimes we're gonna see something that makes that look like nothing makes this connection that we have with each other now, which seems so incredible. It's going to make it look so superficial. It's going to look like smokescreens. It's going to look like grunts that we make to point to certain objects.

It'll be 1980s empire instead of chimp empire.

It's going to be weird. It's definitely going to be weird. But I don't know if it's necessarily going to be bad because ultimately, humanity, if we don't fuck ourselves up sideways. And again, apocalypses are real, but they're generally local. You know, if we can look at what we are now as a society, things are safer. We are more intelligent. You're more likely to survive disease and illness. Despite all of the rampant corruption of the pharmaceutical drug industry, rampant corruption of the military industrial crop, all the craziness in the world today, still way safer today than it was 1000 years ago. Way, way, way safer. And it's way safer probably a thousand years ago than it was a thousand years before that. I think things always generally move in a very good direction because that's what's better for everybody. Ultimately, everybody wants the same thing as an individual, what do you want? You want your loved ones to be happy? You want food on the table? You want a safe place to sleep and live. You want things to do that are exciting, that occupy your time, that you enjoy, that are rewarding. That's what everybody wants.

We're moving collectively in a better direction. So I'm ultimately hopeful, and I'm ultimately positive. When I think about the future, I think it's going to be uber bizarre and strange, but I don't necessarily think it's going to be bad. I've just accepted that it's happening. And instead of being filled with fear and anxiety, which I am sometimes, still, sometimes, I'll freak out about it.

But ultimately, you freak out about technology specifically.

I forgot about war. I freak out about technology. I freak out about the fact that the world can change. There was a while that I was getting anxiety. Late at night, my whole family would be asleep, like, right after the invasion of Ukraine. I think it was when it really started, when I'd be alone at night, I'd be like, the people that lived in Hiroshima had no idea that it was coming. The people that lived in Dresden, the people that lived anywhere where crazy shit happened before it happened, things were normal, and then they were never normal again. And so I just kept thinking that one of these morons somewhere could do something, or a group of morons can do something that forever alters everything. And then we're in Mad Max, which has happened before in different parts of the world.

And is the idea of nuclear war a scenario that your worst nightmare, that concept that's keeping you up late at night? I want to say, don't read, but I think you should read this book, because you, with your voice and your reach, it's wise to realize how we're not going to even have an opportunity to see what happens to AI if one madman with a nuclear missile decides to do a bolt out of the blue attack.

And that's possible.

And that is possible, and that's what everyone in Washington fears. And I think this goes back to the idea that it's great, 1020 years later, to be like, oh, my God, look what they were doing. Can you believe they covered this all up and learned from it? But you can't learn from the fact how dangerous nuclear war is, how close we are, how we are one misunderstanding away from a nuclear war. If everyone's dead, there's no learning, there's no opportunity. Which is why I always say, read nuclear war a scenario. Join the conversation while we can all still have one.

Okay. Well, Annie, thank you very much for being here. I really appreciate it. It was great to see you again. And like I said, I have not read your book, but I have several friends that have, and they're absolutely terrified by it. So you're doing your right job. You're always killing it. I really appreciate you.

Thank you so much.

And I really enjoyed the conversation. Thank you. So tell everybody where your social media is. They could find you online.

Annie Jacobson.

Annie Jacobson website.

You and I both know Google, AI, everything works. All you need is a name anymore.

That's true.

Right.

And your website, what's your website?

Anniejacobson.com.

Okay. And the books available everywhere. And audiobook written and said by you, which is great. I love that. Thank you, Annie.

Appreciate it.

Bye, everybody.