The following is an abridged transcript from System Update’s most recent episode. You can watch the full episode on Rumble or listen to it in podcast form on Apple, Spotify, or any other major podcast provider.
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I don't know if you heard, but there's some breaking news, and that is that tomorrow is July 4, which in the United States is a major holiday. The Fourth of July is the day that we celebrate our independence from the tyranny of the British Crown. Tomorrow we will be taking the holiday off in large part because the appetite for watching political content or political news apps and some big political story on July 4 is quite reduced and so everyone can use a three-day weekend.
What we usually do on Friday night is the Q&A session, something very important to us and something that we try to do at least once a week because it's one of the main benefits that we believe not only give to our Locals members but also receive from them.
It's always kind of a hodgepodge, but it always ends up as one of our most interesting shows, we think, throughout the week, one of the shows that produces the best reaction. Since we're not doing a show on Friday, we're going to do it tonight instead. We have some excellent questions. There's one really confrontational question – I was going to say a bitchy question, but I want to be a little more professional in that – let's say confrontational questioning, critical. We're going to try to deal with that one as well.
So one of the things that shows throughout the week is that I happen to speak a lot. I analyze things, I dissect things, I read evidence, I show you videos, I talk to guests, I ask them questions. And what we try to do on our Q&A is to be respectful with the question and give an in-depth answer.
I'd rather answer four or five by giving in-depth answers that I hope are thought-provoking than just speeding through them. I'd rather do a substantive response to four or five than a quick, superficial one to nine or 10. So let's go do that.
The first one is from @If TruthBeTold and this is what they asked:
Well, let's begin with the fact that there is a reasonably effective instrument for preventing foreign interests and foreign lobbies from exerting influence in our country in a way that's stealthy or covert; that’s the FARA registration, which requires foreign agents acting on behalf of other countries to register as such so that everybody knows if they're slinking around Congress, whispering in politicians' ears, asking for legislation on behalf of a foreign government because they've disclosed it.
And so if you work for the Iranian government, they're paying you to influence members of the legislator, if you do that for Qatar, if you do it for Russia, if you do it for Saudi Arabia – and the premise of the question correct, huge numbers of foreign interests lobby in the United States, you're required to declare that publicly on a FARA registration form and you can go see those, they're publicly available, and you can see who's lobbying on behalf of foreign governments for pay.
One of the problems is that, for some reason – and you can fill in the blanks here – AIPAC has become exempt from that requirement. AIPAC is a lobbying group that reports to the Israeli government, meets all the time with the Israeli government, and gets funding from Israeli sources. Ted Cruz tried to deny that AIPAC is operating on behalf of a foreign government. Tucker Carlson asked him, “Well, has there ever been a single position that AIPAC has taken that deviates from the Netanyahu government?” and Ted Cruz said, “Sure, they do it all the time.” And Tucker Carlson said, “Oh, that's great. Why don't you name one?” And of course, Ted Cruz couldn't because it never happens, because AIPAC is an arm of the Israeli government trying to exert influence in the United States.
And yet, for some reason, for a lot of reasons, in contrast to all the other examples I just named, when you have to fill out a foreign agent registration form, people who work for AIPAC or on behalf of the Israel lobby don't. Their claim is, “Oh, we're not lobbying for Israel. We're lobbying for the United States. We just believe that if the United States does everything that Israel wants, that's good for the United States. We're an American group. We're patriotic. We're America first. We just think that America benefits when it does everything that the Israeli government tells it to do.”
John F. Kennedy strongly advocated and started to demand that the predecessor group to AIPAC register as an agent of a foreign government. He couldn't understand why it didn't have to, alone among all the other groups. And it never ended up happening because JFK's presidency ended when he was killed.
Again, I'm not drawing any kind of causal link there. I'm not even trying to imply it. I'm just giving you the chronology as to why that never came back. And since then, nobody has ever talked about that. So, that's one thing. The other is that AIPAC is uniquely well-financed in terms of being a lobby operating on behalf of foreign governments. It hides that in a lot of ways, but I'll just give you an example. In the last Congress, there were two members in particular who AIPAC identified as being too critical of Israel. They were both Black members of Congress who represented primarily Black, poor districts, and the rhetoric started to become, which is threatening to AIPAC, ‘Wait, why are we sending billions and billions and billions of dollars to Israel when Israelis enjoy things like better access to health care and more subsidies for college than our own citizens do, when millions of Israelis have better standards of living than millions of people in the United States, including in my district? Why are we sending the money there instead of keeping it at home and improving our lives?
Two of the people they identified as highly vulnerable were Jamaal Bowman and Cori Bush. I've certainly had criticisms of both of them, particularly Jamaal Bowman, but also Cori Bush – but that's not why AIPAC was interested in moving them from Congress. They poured $15 million – $15 million into a single house district in a Democratic primary – they found this Black politician in St. Louis to challenge Cori Bush, who promised to be an AIPAC puppet, and he has kept his promise. Wesley Bell is his name. He should put AIPAC in the middle of his name because it's much more descriptive of what he is now. And they just removed Cori Bush from Congress and put in this person who is basically the same as Cori Bush, except he loves and worships and devotes himself to Israel, never criticizes it.
They did the same with Jamaal Bowman. They got George Latimer, who's white, but he was a county executive known in the district, and they poured $15 million into that. I don't know of any other interest group on behalf of a foreign government that has not just the ability, but the brazenness, the willingness, to be so open about destroying people’s careers in Congress that they're not sufficiently loyal to a foreign government.
So the question is, well, what's the solution? Are you more willing to consider the problem of money in politics? I've never doubted the problems of big money in politics. I've always recognized that there are massive problems with huge amounts of money in politics. The founders did as well. They were capitalists. Obviously, they weren't opposed to financial inequality. They were often very rich themselves, property owners and the like, but they also warned that massive inequality in the financial realm can easily spill over into something they did want to avoid, which is inequality in the political realm or the legal realm. And clearly that's happening.
The problem is, how do you restrict the expenditure of money for political purposes without running afoul of the First Amendment? Let me just give you an example of what this kind of law would entail. This was at the heart of Citizens United, which was the five-to-four Supreme Court decision in 2010 that invalidated certain amounts of financial campaign finance restrictions on the grounds that it violated the First Amendment.
Let's say you're a group that wants to improve conditions for the homeless, and you want to bring attention to the problems of the homeless and solutions you really believe in as a citizen; you're just like trying to pursue a political cause that you believe in. You get together a bunch of money from your friends from other groups, you save your money and use that money to publish films, ads and documentaries about which politicians are helping the homeless and which ones are harming them. Then, you also may hire somebody who has influence in Congress, who can get you into doors to talk to members of Congress, to try to persuade them to enact legislation that will help the homeless. If you have laws that say that you can't lobby, you can’t spend money on political advocacy. It's not just going to mean that Israel and Raytheon can't go into Congress or that Facebook and Palantir can't; It's going to mean that nobody can. And that clearly is a restriction on your ability to, not your ability but your right under the Constitution to petition your government for redress, to speak freely about grievances you have against your government.
I've always thought the better solution than trying to restrict First Amendment rights by eliminating money from politics is to equalize it through public campaign financing. So, if your opponent raises $10 million through billionaire spending or very rich people, the government will match your funds and give you $10 billion.
We do have matching funds in certain places. We also have a better tradition and culture of small-dollar donors that compete with big-money donors. I mean Bernie Sanders' campaign drowned in money in 2016 because of small donors. AOC has insane amounts of money that largely come from small donors over the internet. Donald Trump had a ton of small donors, in addition to very big ones. Zohran Mamdani, actually, got so much money at the start of the campaign from grassroots donors that he actually asked them not to give anymore because, under the matching fund system of the city, where you can raise money up to a certain level and then they match it, he reached the maximum. He didn't need any more money because he wanted to get the matching funds.
That has been encouraging; the internet and various fundraising networks enable small donor contributions to a huge amount, making people competitive, who aren't relying on big money. But once you start trying to regulate how people can spend their money for political causes, remember Citizens United grew out of an advocacy group, they were conservative, they produced a documentary, publishing, highlighting and documenting what they believed were the crimes and corruptions of the Clintons before the 2008 election. So, they made a film about one of the most powerful politicians on Earth and it contained information they wanted the general public to see before voting, potentially making her president. And that was, they were told, a violation of campaign finance laws because they were a nonprofit, and under the campaign finance laws in question, corporations, including nonprofits or unions, were banned from spending money 60 days before an election.
That's why groups like the ACLU and labor unions sided with Citizens United and argued that this campaign finance law, which the court, by a 5-4 decision, overturned, is in fact unconstitutional. People forget the ACLU and labor unions that also would have been restricted, were also part of the urging of the majority decision, even though it's considered a conservative decision.
I think there are much better ways to equalize the playing field when it comes to lobbying: make AIPAC and all of its operatives and the entire Israel lobby required to register under FARA, just like everybody else does. If they don't, they go to prison, just like anybody else does who doesn't file the FARA forms deliberately or intends to deceive. And then, also, find ways to make the playing field even without telling people, citizens, that they can't spend their money that they earn and that they make on political advocacy, on campaigns to convince the public of certain things against various other candidates. I think there are many better ways to do it than that.
All right, @TearDrinker asked the following. And this is somebody, I'm quite sure, that if you start crying, he gets so happy, he'll drink your tears. He looks for that. That's who asked this question. So, I think we do have a lot of very noble and benevolent people in our audience but we also have some very dark people in the audience and I think @TearDrinker is one of those. Nonetheless, the question is very good. We all have dark sides, good sides and bad sides. We're very complex. So is our audience. And here's his very good question:
I had several people on my show from the start who were vehement opponents of U.S. financing, NATO financing of the war in Ukraine. Jeffrey Sachs was one, John Mearsheimer was another and Stephen Walt was another. We had several people, we had members of Congress, Matt Gaetz and Marjorie Taylor Greene, part of the MAGA movement, Rand Paul as well, RFK Jr., when he was running for president. We had a lot of people but Professor Mearsheimer, Jeffrey Sachs and Stephen Walt in particular were overwhelmingly prescient in predicting what would happen, even though at the time you weren't allowed to say this because if you said this, if you said reality, you would get accused of being a Russian propagandist or pro-Kremlin or all the things they use to smear people who are questioning the prevailing propaganda. Just like we saw in this last war, if you questioned U.S. bombing of Iran or the Israeli attack on Iran, you were accused of pro-Mullahs, loving the Ayatollahs, same thing every time.
One of the things that they were saying is like, “Look, it doesn't matter how many weapons you give to Ukraine, it does matter how much money you hand to Kiev.” Even if it didn't get all sucked up in the massive corruption that has long governed Ukraine – which of course it will, but let's assume it didn’t, let's just say it was a very honest, well-accounted for country driven by integrity and principle and all the money was used for exactly what it was earmarked for – even if that happened and even if the Ukrainian people were incredibly courageous and they were at the beginning but even so…
You know, there's a dog behavior that I've seen so many times. If you go to a dog park and two dogs are going to fight and they're on neutral ground, no one owns the dog park, the stronger dog is likely to win. But if you took those same dogs and the weaker dog in the dog park was at home and the stronger one in the park went to the house of the weaker dog, the weaker dog would suddenly become very strong. And typically, I'm not saying in all cases, obviously a Poodle and a Rottweiler, it's going to be the same result, but I'm saying when it's even remotely close, when you're defending your home – and this is definitely true in the canine world, they fight much more passionately, much more aggressively, much more confidently. And I think that's the same for human beings.
And so the Ukrainians were very feisty, very punching above their weight at the beginning but even so, and all these people on my show said it, and I got convinced, that it was true from the very start, even if everything went right for the Ukrainians, even if you give them everything they want, the simple fact that Russia is so much bigger and that this is going to be a ground war of attrition between two neighboring countries, meant that inevitably Russia was going to win. It might take a year, it might take two years, it might take five years. The only possibility is that the Ukrainian population of young men, and as they expanded the draft, it became middle-aged, young to middle-aged men, were going to be obliterated, were going to disappear and obviously were huge numbers of young Russian men, but they have so many more that they can just keep replenishing them and losing that amount without having any real effect on Russia, which is like a gigantic country. And that's what's happened between the people who were killed in Ukraine, the people who fled and deserted, and there are a lot of them. There's basically a generation of Ukrainian men missing, which in turn means women aren't dating and aren't marrying. It just destroys the whole society.
The last time we really heard any promises that there was going to be a change was in 2023. There was going to be this great counterattack during the summer, like David Petraeus and Max Boot and all the people who promised the same thing was going to happen in Iraq with the surge were they telling us, “No, this counterattack is going to change everything.” It didn't change anything. Russia has maintained the 22%, 23%, 24% of Ukraine that they occupied, and they've been expanding more and more. There's no way to stop that unless you send in NATO troops or U.S. troops to have a direct war with Russia, which would by definition be World War III.
The EU, has these – I'm going to say they're primarily women and I say that because a lot of left-wing parties in Europe ran explicitly on the idea that they were going to put women in foreign policy positions because women are less likely to be militaristic, warmongering, seeking conflict, they're much more likely to rely on diplomacy to resolve disputes because it's more in the woman nature. This was the feminist argument, a very essentialist and reductive view of how women and men resolve conflicts.
But instead, you look at these warmongers, and you're up there like Ursula von der Leyen, who's the president of the EU. Nobody elected her. She's a maniac, a sociopath. The foreign affairs minister is the former prime minister of Estonia. It's like a million people. She's now like the foreign minister; she goes around demanding more and more war. And then the Green Party in Germany is the worst. They ran on this feminist foreign policy explicitly. And they have Annalena Baerbock as the Foreign Minister: she sounds like something out of 1939, talking about the glories of war.
And even with all that, the Europeans are going to send in troops, the Americans are going to send in troops and so the more we prolong this war, the more we destroy Ukraine, the country, and the more we sacrifice the lives of Ukrainians. And that has been the neocon argument. It's like, you don't have to worry. Americans aren't dying. It's the Ukrainians who are dying. Remember, they're not fighting voluntarily. They're conscripted. A lot of them are fleeing, a lot of them are deserting. They just don't have the people to fight.
Over the last couple of weeks, there have been announcements that the U.S. is going to slow down or stop certain weapons transfers that had previously been allocated under the Biden administration. One of the people who is announcing this, who's deciding this, is Elbridge Colby. You remember that Elbridge Colby was one that the neocons tried so hard to stop his confirmation to the high levels of the Pentagon because his view has long been that we have no interest in a lot of the wars we fight, including in Ukraine, including in the Middle East, we ought to be focusing on China and the Pacific. And neocon groups that obviously want the United States focused on fighting in the Middle East, funding Ukraine, were desperate to keep him out.
There are a few others. Some of those non-interventionists who made the high levels of the Pentagon, like Dan Caldwell, who ended up getting fired because they fabricated leaks against him that were completely fake. We'll do a show on that one time. But there are still several of them. And so Elbridge Colby, when he announced this policy, like, Look, we were going to ship all these munitions and missiles to Ukraine, but now we can't. The reason we can, and we have gone over this before, is because U.S. stockpiles are dangerously low. We don't have these missiles and munitions to give, at least not consistently with making sure that we have enough in the case we want to fight another war. And the reasons are obvious. We've been sending missiles and munitions and drones and everything else we have to Ukraine and to Israel to fuel their wars.
Israel has multiple wars, not just in Gaza, but also in the West Bank, in Lebanon, in Syria. It has bombed the Houthis many times and attacked Iran. The United States has been arming and funding and just sending huge amounts of weaponry to Ukraine. And also remember, President Trump re-instituted and escalated President Biden's campaign of bombing the Houthis. And the idea was we're going to obliterate the Houthis. After a month, President Trump got the report and saw how much money we were spending, how many weapons we were using, how much money it was costing, and nothing was really getting done. We were killing a bunch of civilians and not really degrading the Houthis at all. And they told him, “Oh, sir, we just need nine more months.” But he ended it because he saw he was being deceived again. And we're very low on military stockpile, even though we spend three times more than any other country on the planet and more than the next 15 countries combined.
This was one of the reasons why, although we've been told that Israel and the United States together achieved this massive, glorious war victory, Netanyahu and Trump are war heroes, when Trump called on Netanyahu to be immediately pardoned or have his corruption trial stopped, it was like, “Look, he just, with me, won a historic war.” It's very important for Trump and Israel to insist to people that they won this great war, this historic war, in 12 days.
The reality is that the Israelis really couldn't fight that war for much longer. You saw with fewer and fewer missiles shot by Iran, not even most sophisticated yet, that more and more of a landing. We don't know the full extent of the damage in Israel because journalists will tell you they were absolutely and aggressively censored by the military from showing any hits on government or military buildings. The only things they were allowed to show were the occasional hits by the Iranians on a civilian building here, a residential building there, to create the false impression that they were targeting and only hitting civilian buildings, but a lot of Israel suffered a lot of damage. President Trump said that himself, that Israel took a huge pounding. They didn't have air defenses any longer. They were running out and the United States couldn't continue to supply them. We were running out of our own missiles that we use to shoot down Iranian missiles. Israel and the United States didn't end to that war at least as much as Iran did because we were so low on our stock files because we're fighting so many wars or funding so many wars. And so the argument of the Pentagon and Elbridge Colby is, “Look, we just don't have these weapons to keep giving to Ukraine. We need them for ourselves. If we keep giving them to Ukraine, we're not going to have any on our own and our priority should be our military and our protection and not Ukraine's.”
If this were really a difference between Ukraine winning the war, if we give them the weapons as defined by NATO, which was always a pipe dream. However, the definition was expelling every Russian troop from every inch of Ukraine, including Crimea, which the Russians would never ever allow to happen. If it were a difference between Ukraine winning or Ukraine just getting rolled over, then I would say, okay, maybe there's a debate to be had. But the reality is we've been feeding them weapons into the fourth year now. It's four whole years, coming up on four years, three and a half years of not just the United States sending billions and billions of dollars, but also Europe, and Ukraine hasn't been saved. Ukraine has been destroyed. Ukrainians haven't been freed. They've been slaughtered in mass numbers. And that's all that's going to happen if we keep sending weapons there.
Of course, the Europeans are relying on this fearmongering that Putin is not going to stop with Ukraine. He wants to eat up all of Ukraine. He's demonstrated many times that he's willing to do a peace deal that secures a buffer zone in eastern Ukraine that protects the ethnic Russians who speak Russian and feel they've been aggressively discriminated against by the Kiev government. The people of Crimea and various provinces in the east feel closer to Moscow than they do to Kiev. They identify as Russians and not Ukrainians. So, as long as Russia feels that, A, they can protect those people, and B, create a buffer zone between NATO and the West on the one hand and Russia on the other so it can't go right up to their border, they've always said they're willing to reach a deal.
And remember, Ukraine and Russia they almost reached a deal at the very beginning of the war that didn't call for the complete sacrifice of Ukrainian sovereignty, but only those kinds of buffer zones or semi-autonomous regions to letting them vote, and that was the deal that Victoria Nuland and Boris Johnson swept in and told Ukraine they can't keep and they wanted this war to be a prolonged war to destroy Russia. So this fearmongering that Putin's going to eat up all of Ukraine and he's going to move to Poland and then he's like Hitler, he's going to sweep through Eastern Europe and then Central Europe, back to Austria and Germany and then is going to go to Paris again, this is idiotic.
The Russians have had a hard time defeating Ukraine, albeit with, obviously, Ukraine's being aggressively backed by NATO. But even if they weren't, they were willing to do a deal that just provides Russian security. But wars always are raw and fearmongering, and so they've convinced a lot of people if we don't back the Ukrainians, Russia is going to just roll over and take over, annex Ukraine and rebuild the Soviet Union under this kind of view of Greater Russia that Putin supposedly has in mind, the way Israel is actually doing, creating Greater Israel. There's so much evidence that contradicts that, so little evidence that supports it, but at the end of the day, where are these people going to come from who are going to fight on the front lines in Ukraine? There aren't many left. We can drown that country with billions of dollars in weapons and the war is still going to end up the way it's going to end up. You may not like it, it may be sad to you, you may wish it were a different way, but that is just the reality.
There have been experts saying it very bravely, I mean, Jeffrey Sachs used to go on “Morning Joe” all the time, until he started saying this, and he hasn't been on again. People get booted out of mainstream platforms, they get called all sorts of names, Russian agents, Kremlin propaganda, etc., but who cares? Those people were the ones who were absolutely right, which is why we kept putting them on our show. They were by far the most convincing people. And that is the nature of the war in Ukraine and the U.S. role in it. Even if we wanted to keep supplying the weapons, we simply don't have them because we've been fueling and arming far too many wars: our own, Israel's and Ukraine's. That's what happens.
I think this is the third question, and it comes from @BookWench. And this person, I believe, is a wench, self-described, I'm not being insulting, they're a wench. And they really like books. And if you're going to be a wench, I think it’s better to be a well-read wench than some ignorant one. It's a good friend of the show, often asks some really great questions. And here's the one submitted by this wench tonight.
She’s talking about our show last night. If you haven't seen it, that's a great summary of it. But we talked about the integration of Big Tech companies like Meta, OpenAI and Palantir increasingly into the media, while at the same time, Trump and big media corporations are reaching all sorts of nefarious agreements about what their coverage should and shouldn't be.
I'll give you a parallel example to make this point, rather than just addressing this one directly. Oftentimes people focus on what words apply, like what inflammatory words apply, what shocking or extreme political jargon applies, and even if that jargon is important, even if it has fixed meaning, even if deserves to be applied, traditionally, I've tried to avoid arguments over words or labels because so many people feel so strongly about them that even if they might be open to your argument on the substance and the merits, the minute you use that word, a lot of people just shut off.
That was why it took me a few months to call what Israel was doing in Gaza a genocide, not because I doubted that the term applied but just because there are a lot of people open to hearing the facts about what Israel is doing in Gaza and seeing how horrific and criminal and atrocious it is, but the minute you use the word genocide, they just kind of instantly turn away from it. I often make the assessment, I'd rather have the channel open for communication than use a word that I know that's just going to close that channel.
A lot of times, though, it does become necessary to use that term, I don't just mean genocide, but a term that can't have that effect because it's indispensable to understanding the situation. And that's how I came to see the word genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing, even more so. You can't really talk about Gaza without talking about that intent. It's not my guess about that; it's based on the statements that the Israelis have made about their war objectives and then their actions that align with it. But in general, I like to avoid those kinds of words.
Fascism is definitely one of them. I promise fascism is similar to my problem with genocide and there are a lot of other words like this. There are a lot of words that get thrown around that even if they have a clear and fixed meaning, the people throwing them around aren't very capable of defining in a very concrete, specific way what the words mean. Fascism, to me, has almost become colloquial for just, like, Hitler-like or authoritarian or using aggressive racist themes combined with abuse of government power but the word and concept Fascism is a lot more complex than that, and it involves a lot more prongs than that.
People study fascism for years in universities. There are graduate programs where you study fascism. It's a philosophy, it's an ideology that was developed in a very specific historical context. It ended up shaping the Italian government in the 1930s under Mussolini and then, of course, the Germans; you could argue Franco in Spain also was an expression of it. But I just feel like throwing the word fascism around at Trump or the Republicans, or especially, of all, it means a kind of aggressive authoritarianism. It just doesn't serve any purpose because I think the Biden administration was extremely authoritarian in lots of different ways. I think most administrations of the last 25 years have been. Very few people spent more time vocally, vehemently condemning Bush-Cheney than I did. I wrote books about it, including arguments that they ought to be prosecuted for things they did, spying on Americans without warrants, torturing people and kidnapping them off the streets of Europe. But I don't think I ever called them fascists. Not because someone had studied or done that, would have been offended or argued that it didn't apply, but just because I don't think it helps the conversation any.
I think one of the worst things the Biden administration did is essentially commandeered the power of Big Tech to control political discourse in the United States, dictating to Big Tech what they ought to suppress and what they are to permit. In doing so, they absolutely warped and suppressed crucial debates about COVID, about Ukraine, about even election integrity that ought to have been aired. One of the things that bothered me about it so much was that you had the government on the one hand and corporate power on the other in the form of Big Tech and the Biden administration was basically annexing the power of Big Tech and corporate power to control free speech.
I often pointed out that, ironically, the Democrats love to call Donald Trump a fascist, uniting state and corporate power, eliminating the separation between them, where they each have different objectives, sometimes overlapping, sometimes not, but uniting them as one entity working toward exactly the same goal. That was what Hitler did. There was no arms industry that wasn't under the control of the government. There was no private sector not under the control of the government, all working toward a common theme and a common unity.
That is what's happening here as well as these major corporations like OpenAI, Palantir and Facebook more and more directly and expansively integrate into the military, into the intelligence community, into the government. But there are other factors, other prongs of fascism as well, and people debate it. And so if I were to say that, oh, this is fascism, the Trump government is fascist or the Biden administration is fascist, it might be satisfying to people who want to hear that and who believe that. But for a lot of people, they would just turn that off as Fox junk in the case of Biden or MSNBC junk in the case of Trump, and oftentimes that is what it is, just junk. It's people spewing it without having any idea what those terms mean, just to get maximum emotional catharsis or provoke emotional reactions.
I would much rather do what we did last night, which is spend 45 or 50 minutes, maybe an hour, however much we spent, showing people exactly what's happening, showing this integration between corporate and state power for surveillance purposes, for military purposes, for intelligence gathering. Talk about the dangers of it in a way that I hope people are open-minded, because we're showing them the evidence. The minute you start using terms that they're kind of inherently going to repel or just recoil from, I feel like I can call it fascism and congratulate myself, but I don't feel like it does much good. I feel like actually does the reverse. If these terms were very clearly agreed to specific meanings that everyone understood, I wouldn't have a problem with using them when they applied, but since they don't at all, I think these words are obfuscated.
But I did point out last night, and I will say again, that integrating corporate and state power is a hallmark of fascism and whether all the other hallmarks of fascism are present, it's extremely dangerous for the reasons we delved into extensively last night if you want to understand more how we think about that and what we said you can, if you haven't already, check out last night's show.
All right, next question @KKtowas, who says this:
I don't want to be too cavalier about paraphrasing this. The question did do a good job of describing it. I'd rather show the actual words. If you haven't heard it, it's really worth watching. I definitely understand why it provoked this question.
So, let me focus on the part that I do actually feel comfortable paraphrasing, which is Ross Douthat did ask Peter Thiel, “Do you favor the continuation of the human race? Is this something that you actually think is a good thing?”
Elon Musk has been asked this before. Part of what Elon Musk wants to do is make sure humanity is multiplanetary, starting with life on Mars. A lot of people think, ‘Oh, you must think that's because humanity on Earth is doomed; otherwise, why is it so important to you to make humanity multiplanetary?’ There are other reasons why you might, but that's a suspicion, and not just to make it multiplanetary because the Earth is doomed, but also to transform what it means to be human.
This kind of philosophy has been popular among these more extreme Silicon Valley types of Transhumanism, something that transcends humanity or fundamentally transforms it. Typically, I think merging humanity with technology or with a machine for a superior being, it's definitely how a lot of them think of artificial intelligence. I, one time, got a root canal, which I hate as much as anybody – I think I hate it more, but probably everyone hates it equally – but one of the only good things about it is that it lasts for two hours. I have the time to sit and listen to podcasts that ordinarily I wouldn't have time to listen to, or the inclination, just because I have to have my brain distracted. I can't, even if my mouth is totally numb and I don't feel it. I don't like hearing what the dentist is doing. I don't want to think about what tools he's using and why. There's almost no job I'd rather have least than being a dentist and just constantly being in someone's mouth every day looking at their teeth. But whatever. So, I try to distract myself and one of the ways I did so is I listening to Mark Zuckerberg's appearance on Joe Rogan. He was talking at length about his vision that soon we're going to take all these devices, virtual reality devices and AI devices, and they're no longer going to be exterior instruments that we wear, like Googles on our head or phones or earpieces or things in our phone. It's going to be part of our anatomy. He was talking about drilling into brains in order to have this technology part of the human brain, and at first he said the first use is going to medical, somebody has a neurological injury or some other serious neurological problem, this machine will help them with that functionality. But critically, he was talking as well about an ultimate merger between technology and human beings, which in one way may not change the nature of human beings in the beginning. It's just kind of another instrument. You can imagine this earpiece. Say you wear an earpiece of the kind people commonly use now to listen to things on a computer, connected by Bluetooth to their phones. Does it really change humanity if, instead of just having this come in and out, it's just now implanted in our ears? Does it change humanity? Well, when you start talking about the brain and changing how our brains think and produce thought, or having AI be the future of what a human being should be, but in a spiritual form, that's clearly transhumanistic. That's transforming what a human being fundamentally is.
There are all kinds of questions that come with that. If you believe in a soul, does this have a soul? And the way Mark Zuckerberg was so cavalier in talking about it, I found very creepy.
Let me just say one thing. I think the question referenced that Peter Thiel stuttered when he answered and kind of had big pauses. Peter Thiel always does that. The reason is – and he's talked about this before, he's autistic – and that means you don't have the same capacity for social interaction.
One of the things he said that I found super interesting was what he thinks the benefit of being autistic, not severely autistic, where you aren't verbal, can't interact with people at all, but somewhere on the spectrum of where he places himself. When you don't have autism and you're very clued into social cues – and we are social and political animals, we do interact as groups, we are not solitary beings – that if you're so aware of social cues and you're constantly receiving what social cues are, in a way it's making you more conformist, kind of morphing you into society, you understand what society expects of you, you understand what the society thinks, you understand what you're supposed to say in most situations. And he was saying that that can really make you conformist. It can kind of just make you part of this blob. Whereas he sees his autism as almost a gift because feeling detached, excluded, or isolated from majoritarian societal sentiments, ethos and mores forces you to see things differently, to look at things differently. And then that, of course, is the kind of thing that can lead to innovation and invention. Steve Jobs was not autistic, but he actually has said in interviews, people don't talk about this, but it's so true, that had he not taken LSD and had experience with other hallucinogens, he never would have invented the iPad or various Apple products, that it was that kind of transcendent thought that enabled him to have this vision that he otherwise wouldn't have had. On some level, mind-altering drugs can be analogized to autism and so, yes, Peter Thiel stutters; he stumbles. Oftentimes, it seems like he's sweating or having difficulty answering the question, but in reality, it's autism and the way he speaks. But it does affect how people perceive him.
Let me show you this clip that the question asked, because I think it's really worth hearing him in his own words.
Video. Ross Douthat, Peter Thiel, TikTok.
Let me say a couple of things about this. People who think about changes in the future are often looked at as strange and weird because generally, the future is something we can't really imagine.
I remember when I was young, I'm still young, but I remember when I was younger, when I was a child, and I used to go visit my grandparents. My grandfather was born in 1904. My grandmother was born in 1910. I spent a lot of time over there when I was younger and I constantly thought about how bizarre it was that they were born into a world that didn't have airplanes, didn't have radio, didn't have television, didn't really have phones and then during their lifetime, like all this technology that previously had been considered unthinkable – how is something going to fly in the air over the Earth? How are people going to talk to each other using weird connective machines? Or television that started off black and white and then became color, or film that started silent and then became with audio. All these things were unthinkable at the beginning and I kept thinking how strange to be born into a world where this unthinkable technology didn't exist, and then suddenly it arrives, and it just changes your world. All those technologies, obviously, had a major effect on the world. Then I had my own experience. I was born in 1967. I was 24, 25 when the internet started really being something that I used in my life, and, obviously, that's a major transformative innovation. If you had thought about the internet before it happened, it would seem inconceivable; people who describe the future in ways that seem inconceivable always come off as very strange and weird. So, I think we ought to acknowledge that.
But I want to say two things on the other side, as kind of big caveats. One is the idea of a billionaire; until you really interact with billionaires, it's hard to explain what they're like, and I've had pretty close interactions with many of them. Obviously, I founded a media company with one of them, Pierre Omidyar, who I think is worth like $12 billion or whatever. A lot of other people in Silicon Valley whom – I've gotten to know some – ‘being rich’ doesn't describe that, like the amount of wealth that you have, like when you're a billionaire, you don't think of yourself as just rich, you start thinking about what you can do to change the world, change the government, change countries, change culture. It's so much power; it's so much money.
With power and money comes, in almost every case, being surrounded by sycophants: people constantly flattering you, saying yes to everything that you think, say and want, because power means you can do so many things for people that benefit their lives and if they know that you have that, they're going to want to flatter you so that there's a chance you're going to give those things to them. Obviously, it makes people in that situation so detached from reality and so enamored of themselves just because all their influences tell them that they are brilliant, and that they're a genius and that they see things people don't see.
Sometimes, that may be true, there are probably billionaires, I guess I know a couple, who I would consider extremely smart, but the majority of them, including ones I've worked with, I can tell you, I'm not going to say they're dumb. They're mediocre. Sometimes they have like an idiot savant skill that turned into a company that just exploded at the right time. Everyone's success has partly some luck. You have to be in the right place at the right time and a lot of these people who walk around thinking they're brilliant and have the power with their billions of dollars to bring those visions to fruition and to convince people that they should, are not even remotely close to as smart as they think.
So, when they start getting these visions and everyone around them tells them how brilliant they are and everything about their lives is reinforcing their own brilliance, I do think that can be a very twisted and dangerous dynamic. Then there is this very specific billionaire culture, especially the ones that came out of Silicon Valley, that believes that they are the kind of people society ought to progress and evolve and transform into, and that the society just doesn't facilitate that. The society punishes success; it impedes a transformative kind of Übermensch, to use a Nietzschean expression. And they have ideas like they want to just start new societies, they want to buy a country, or buy so much land that it can become its own country and they just create a society from scratch where they're the overlords and they create rules. Obviously it then extends to like, maybe we shouldn't even do it on Earth, let's start our own society on Mars or wherever and it becomes this very utopian and dystopian vision driven by a tiny number of people who have no real pushback or tension between the things that come out of their mouths into their from their brains into their mouths and then try they can try and make reality and have the power to make reality. But a lot of that is, I think very alarming; we ought to be very, very, very skeptical of that, even in the cases where it might be promising.
A lot of this just depends on what you think. If you're a complete nihilist and atheist, and you just believe everything is just kind of a nihilistic evolution, no purpose, no spirit, no soul, we just keep evolving over millions of years, and human beings are just where we are now, it’s just one stop along the way, and our next destination is something totally different, it probably wouldn't bother you. But if you have a kind of idea of something essentialist about being human that turning us into beings that exist in an AI vat and eliminating us, every part of us, except our intellect, may not be an advancement, that may be a destruction of humanity while maintaining the facade of it, this is the kind of stuff that I think requires a great deal of introspection, a great deal of thought, a great debate involving the whole society.
But because billionaires have this ability to just push things along with no constraints, AI is just exploding really with no safeguards. I mean, there are some superficial safeguards, like if you use ChatGPT or the commercial ones, they don't let you do certain things that could easily be done, but you can imagine how it's actually being developed. And the people who don't want those safeguards to exist are using AI without those safeguards. None of this is being understood. None of it is being analyzed or studied.
I'm not an alarmist at all about technology, even including AI. But I think it's more this kind of narcissism and this self-adoration that naturally develops in billionaires that gives them far too much confidence in their own ability to push humanity into directions that they think it should go and really don't need much debate to do it because their brains are sufficiently advanced to make those decisions and see those things on their own and the proof is that they became billionaires. That's how the reasoning works. That, I think, is the most dangerous dynamic rather than the specific things.
And yeah, when Peter Thiel starts saying, “I'm not sure humanity should continue, okay, I'll say yes, just because you obviously think it's extremely creepy if I don't, but I'm going to add that maybe we should exist in some other form,” I hope people are disturbed by that. I'm not saying necessarily opposed to it, but I hope they're disturbed by it, in a way that they kind of demand some time and reflection in order to consider.
