Here Comes The Technological Revolution || George Chanos Interview

All right, people. Welcome back to the show. Today, we got with us George Chanos. George, welcome to the show. How are you doing today?

Well, thank you for having me. Good to be here.

This is going to be a fun time. I actually got your book here, The Millennial Samurai. We met a few months ago at an event, at Ryan Pineda's event, actually. We talked for— we had lunch together. We talked. I've actually read— well, I kind of skipped around, if that's okay, but I read— you do an incredible job at walking through kind of what the next 10, 20, 30 years could look like and what emerging technologies are coming out. I skipped to those chapters because I was really curious about your— because we were talking at lunch, I was like, I got to just skip. So, I skipped there. Sorry, I skipped some of the previous chapters, but it was very insightful, very intriguing. So, I'm excited for today's call. Now, I know people probably already know you around, they follow you around, but you've done a lot recently in the NFT crypto space. You're the former Attorney General of the Nevada State. You've done an incredible business career. You want to give us a 30-second just highlight thumbnail of you and your life and background?

Yeah. So, essentially, I'm a problem solver. So, I've spent the last 30 years as an attorney and as an advisor to companies, advising individuals, high-net-worth individuals, businesses, corporate executives, about their problems, whatever those problems might have been, and trying to help them find solutions, typically business and legal problems. And, you know, so recently, I've focused my attention more on the larger problems that are affecting society as a whole. And that came about through a variety of circumstances, had a heart attack, began writing a letter to my daughter, ultimately evolved into a book of advice for young people, people sent me on a new direction of starting to take a look at what was going to happen over the next 30 years in order to be able to advise my daughter, my nephews and nieces, and ultimately, here today speaking and writing about the future.

I love it. Well, let's dive in and unpack a few things. So, everyone's got the same question. What does the future hold? But we'll kind of unpack this. I read an incredible book. You might have read it as well, but The Future Is Faster Than You Think. It was written a few years ago by a couple of great guys out of Silicon Valley. They essentially just talk about— they talked about 10 emerging technologies that were coming out right now. And there may be, in your opinion, maybe more, maybe a little bit less than that, but they talked about these emerging technologies and the convergence. What's interesting right now is the convergence of technologies. Because in the past, we've had one technology take off and it's been really cool. Like, the printing press took off and it was really cool and it helped society. Right now, we're having 10 essentially printing presses take off. at the exact same time, and they're all helping one another at an exponential rate. And so, do you want to unpack that concept for us of what's currently happening? We're filming this in 2023 right now, kind of what's happening right now in the world.

Yeah. So, essentially, well, there are a lot of things that are happening in the world, and a lot of them are related to the technological revolution that you're talking about. So, it is this convergence of a myriad of technologies that are going to amplify one another. And for example, you know, Moore's Law, we're all familiar with Moore's Law. And one of the most profound things—

Computer chips compound about every 18 months, they double, and they've been doubling ever since they kind of came out, which is pretty interesting.

Yeah, Gordon Moore at Intel basically said 50 years ago that computing power would double every 18 months and halve in cost. And that has happened reliably for the last 50 years. What we're seeing today is something that's very different than that. And so the multiplying effect is, is much greater than doubling every 18 months. So for example, recently, I was reading about glass information storage. And this was just several months ago. And glass information storage where you could have a glass disc that would hold 3,000 times what a typical CD would hold, right? And these glass information discs were said to be the, you know, the storage technology for the future. Well, today they've got diamond information discs. And the diamond information discs don't hold 3,000 times a CD. They hold the equivalent of a billion Blu-ray discs. And they're read with lasers in— the glass information discs are read with lasers in 5 dimensions. The diamond information discs, I imagine, are also read with lasers in God knows how many dimensions. And they're able to store that data.

Are they made out of diamonds then? Like, is diamond the main—

Apparently, yeah. Whether it's diamond dust or diamond fragments or, you know, and so in any case, the level of multiplication, we now have a computer, the Frontier computer, that calculates at 1 quintillion calculations per second. And we've got guys like Yuval Noah Harari speaking at the World Economic Forum and basically saying that organisms are algorithms. And that all we need to hack the human organism is data, primarily biometric data, and computing power. And we're getting very close on the computing power end of things. And we have the data, we just need to aggregate the data. When you aggregate that data, and you feed it into these supercomputers, and they're calculating at these levels, the, the amount of information that they're able to extrapolate is something that no human being is able to be, you know, to do. And so what you're going to have quickly is essentially the singularity, that moment in time when machine intelligence is going to eclipse human intelligence. And Hawking called that the greatest event in human history. And Ray Kurzweil at Google says that we can expect that as early as 2029. That's 6 years away.

That's freaky.

Yeah, very freaky. And what's really, what's even more profound is the rate at which that technology will multiply post-singularity. So once we hit that moment, that magic moment, over the next 20 years, not even over the next 20 years, he says by the 2040s, so 2029 for the singularity, 2040s is really only an additional 10 to 15 years away. And he's talking about artificial intelligence not being our equal, but being a billion times, a billion times more capable than human intelligence. So, what does that mean? I can't tell you. I don't think anybody can tell you.

On the singularity, how do we even know the singularity takes place? I've actually been curious about that question. Is it like a moment in time, like, okay, it's finally happened? Because I think people— some people would call it earlier, call it later. What would you say would be the moment of time we'd know?

Well, that's— so that's, uh, that's, that's an interesting question. Um, the, uh, the idea is, I guess, you know, there was a Google engineer who recently testified to Congress.

I was gonna bring this up to you. Yeah, so what are your thoughts on that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. And he said, uh, that, uh, he believed that the computer that he was interacting with and training was sentient, and that it had feelings, and that Congress should be investigating the appropriate level of protections. And what do we do with this sentient— this new sentient being? And his supervisors at Google said, no, we just designed it that way to make you think that it's sentient. And we did such a good job that it fooled the researcher. But it's not actually, you know, sentient. It's not actually— it doesn't actually have feelings.

Yeah.

And so, you know, first of all, when will it happen and when will we know raises the question, you know, has it happened and do we already know? You know?

Yeah.

Or is some conversation that's going to take place between one of these computers and one of these researchers at some point going to be acknowledged by everyone And it seems that's going to be the way this is going to be ultimately revealed, is that there will be a consensus around the sentient nature of the computer.

Interesting. Very interesting. I want to switch gears for a second. I was reading a paper and I want to get your thoughts, and we'll kind of dive into each one of these topics. But I love this idea of the technologies converging. Another example, I read a paper on where are the flying cars? It's like 50 years ago, everyone said, oh, we're going to have, by the 2020s, we'll have flying cars. And actually, right now, they're kind of working on a ton of them. We'll talk about that in a second. But, and they went, this whole paper digested why we don't have flying cars, because we don't have enough fast enough internet capabilities. We don't have enough computing power to track how to move things and enough AI to watch where to move. But all of a sudden now, you have computers at a fast enough rate, you have 5G technology that can move that speed of information fast enough. And couple that with AI that can then program flights and where to fly and move between other flying drones. And all of a sudden, there's about 100 startups or more launching essentially flying drone cars or flying planes, whatever type of model they're doing. If you've seen some of those, Uber invests, I think, $300 million into a flying drone, flying car project.

Yeah.

To kind of just iterate, listeners, the example of convergence. All of a sudden, we have a convergence of technologies and all these entrepreneurs like, finally, we're here. Let's— and there's like literally 100 startups now going after this space, which is so cool.

Yeah. Flying taxis are a strong likelihood before the end. What I've read is that there are some companies that are suggesting that they may come out as early as 2024.

Yep. Yeah, we are close. There's these flying motorcycles I keep seeing on ads that you can buy one right now and you can fly them and they have prototypes, they're ready to go. And Dubai has just ordered a bunch of bikes. But then you start to think, and then you think about the compounding effect of that. So then it's like, and I'd love for you to hear your thoughts, but the compounding effect of that is if you can have a flying taxi or flying drone car, all of a sudden, like Dubai wants to order them for their police officers so they can fly over traffic and like paramedics can fly over traffic and then pick up somebody and fly them home. But then it's like, well, if we all used it, we wouldn't need really roads, and we could live in different— so, real estate gets shaken up, because then all of a sudden, a lot of real estate's around maybe a central hub of a freeway or something. All of a sudden, you can live in different parts of town that maybe weren't used before, but all of a sudden, real estate can change very quickly. I saw another report, a third of metropolitan areas are dedicated to parking right now. All of a sudden, if you don't need parking, because taxis are just picking you up and dropping you off, all of a sudden, you have essentially a third of real estate comes available in Manhattan or in LA that you can now use, which is pretty interesting. I'm curious. So, then you have this next effect of the compounding effects after the conversions. That's where your mind starts going crazy. I'd love to hear a few other thoughts from your examples from there.

Yeah. So, on the compounding effect, the best book that I've read in that area is called The Spatial Web. by Gabriel Byrne and Dan Mapes. And essentially, it talks about what you're talking about, which is the interconnectivity of all of these various technologies. The Spatial Web envisions trillions of sensors that are connected to everything, right? So everything from your watch to the glass in the restaurant on the dining table. has a sensor. Roads have sensors, airplanes have sensors. And so what happens is that these sensors talk to each other, and through their communication, they create increased efficiencies, right? So just like UPS truck is now guided by AI in terms of its route to maximize the efficiency of travel, of that vehicle.

Yeah.

Or Uber vehicles are mapped out and redirected depending on traffic. And so that interconnectivity of information will allow increased efficiencies. And according to Byrne and Mapes, what they're saying is that they're expecting a 10x of the global GDP, and that it could move from $80 to $100 trillion to 10 times that. And that this is—

Driven by just so much connectivity across the world?

Driven by the increased efficiency that results from that connectivity. So if you've got sensors on bridges that tell you, you know, what nut and bolt needs to be addressed, I see. As opposed to all of them needing to be addressed. How much does that save in time and energy and resources, right? If you have grain shipments and you can tell the heat of the container inside the shipment and trigger some type of a cooling mechanism when it's needed, and, you know, in colder climates not have it triggered, or on cooler days not have it triggered. How much efficiency can you create with that? And the multiplying effect of that global increase in efficiency is what they're talking about as creating this 10x multiplier of the global GDP, which their belief is creates a level of abundance that allows you to solve the world's problems like global hunger and, you know, healthcare and issues like that.

Hmm.

Sensors, sensors in our bodies. You know, you're driving down the road, and you're about to have a heart attack. And before you realize it, the watch that you're wearing picks up the irregular heartbeat and understands that this is emblematic or symptomatic of a heart attack. and redirects the vehicle. The watch actually speaks to the vehicle, communicates with the vehicle, and tells it to go to the nearest hospital. And they identify, you know, the vehicle identifies the hospital, routes you, and sends you, and then makes an announcement to you that this is all taking place, you know, without your command. It's just automatic.

Ah, this is so interesting. Well, I got a bunch of other follow-up questions, but let's— I want to go— we'll go one at a time. But I want to— so, you brought up healthcare. The advances in healthcare right now are phenomenal. I've been hearing people say online and stuff, the first person to live to 200 years old is already alive. I would love to hear your thoughts and some interesting insights on current advances in healthcare right now.

Yeah. So, Aubrey de Grey of the SENS Research Foundation has actually said that the first person who will live to 1,000 is alive today. And what he's essentially saying is that a baby born today over the— who has a life expectancy of 90 to 100 years, can generally anticipate that during that lifespan, during the next 90 to 100 years, we will have arrived at a— we will have acquired the ability to increase longevity, again, essentially 10x. And, um, you know, what's interesting about some of these things is, is that the, the numbers that are being used and the dates that are being used, a lot of people get bogged down on, on, you know, is it going to be 200 times, uh, are we going to live to 200 years old or are we going to live to 1,000 years old? Is it going to happen in 5 years or is it going to happen in 50 years?

Yeah.

Um, you know, the, the bottom line is this. It really doesn't matter whether it happens in 5 years or 10 years or 15 years. It's coming during your lifetime. It's coming during your children's lifetime. It's coming like a freight train. It's going to have massive implications globally. And the exact timing is unknown to all of us, but that doesn't mean that we shouldn't be preparing.

Yeah. So, what are some of the driving things of predictions like that? Is it based on Age of cells, how cells reproduce, what are some drivers? Is it nano things going in your blood? I've seen all these different reports, but I'm curious which ones excite you the most that's moving the needle the most right now.

In terms of what's happening that excites me the most?

In healthcare. So, what do you think is driving right now in healthcare those types of things the most? Is it, you know, I've seen people reverse age of cells or not reverse, but pause, because our cells reproduce every day. And then But, and then slowly over time, they slowly age and we don't know why. But if you can stop that from happening and they just stay, those cells reproduce and there's no aging that happens on those cells, you could essentially live like you're 27 years old forever. I'm just curious, are there any new insights that— Quiet.

Sorry.

Any new— oh, you're all right. Any new insights in the healthcare space that you think are really compelling currently that you've seen?

Well, I think that what they're trying to do in longevity is they're trying to essentially increase our advances in healthcare by buying us more time, right? So if we can prolong our life, that should be the first angle of attack, because if we can prolong our, you know, the period of life that we have, we can then continue to work on fine-tuning and adjusting the quality of life, I guess, throughout that process. There are a number of things that they're doing in terms of— there's some work in the area of telomeres, where de Grey and his researchers are basically talking about increasing the length of our telomeres. And that—

What's a telomere?

It's the end of a DNA sequence or molecular sequence. that looks like these elongated objects.

Okay.

And I'm not deep on the science on this, in terms of, you know, being able to dive very deeply in it. But that's the— that's essentially what they're working on. Others are talking about rebooting our code, looking at organisms as algorithms. And essentially, Harari was saying this at the World Economic Forum in 2018, that, that organisms are essentially algorithms, and that you can, you can learn to reboot these algorithms and reverse aging. Hmm.

Yeah, interesting. And I've seen, well, there's been other studies done with, Altos Labs just raised something like $2 billion in their seed round, which is the highest raise of all time, because they were reverse or elongating the lives of mice to like 3 or 4 times their current life cycles. And they thought they could do the same thing to humans by doing a genetic code change. Very interesting what's going on.

And again—

Exactly. There's all these, again, which the thing right now, back to the convergence of technology, they're using all these different like AI or other things in blockchain to now map and use and put into things that for longevity that can allow humans potentially to live to 1,000 years that are already currently alive today, which is just wild to think about. So, I wanted to change gears for a second. So, how did this book come about? The Millennial Samurai. What was the story behind this book? And you mentioned you had your nieces, you're on your deathbed, you've had a heart attack. I'm curious the whole story behind this book, though.

Okay. So essentially what happened was in 2012, I had a heart attack and my daughter was 15 at the time. And so my concern was that I might pass away and not provide her the full level of guidance and direction that I had hoped to provide. And so I began to write a letter and the letter became very long. And then ultimately the letter became the first book that I wrote, which was called Seize Your Destiny: A Roadmap to Success. And that was essentially me downloading what I had learned in my professional life over the past 30 years. And after finishing that, I realized that the world that my daughter was going to live in was not the past 30 years, it was the next 30 years. And so then the question became, well, what's going to happen over the next 30 years? And so from that point forward, I started looking, and I'm not a technologist. I'm not a scientist or a technologist. I'm a lawyer. I'm a critical thinker and a complex problem solver who had never looked at any of these issues prior to that time. And what happened was that caused me to start looking at the next 30 years, and what I saw was profound and surprised me. And I thought, well, look, if it's surprising me, there are probably a lot of other people that would be surprised by what I've discovered. And so I began to write the second book, and that was Millennial Samurai: A Mindset for the 21st Century. And Millennial Samurai, let me kind of tell you what that's about.

Yeah, yeah, dive into it for us.

So first of all, if I were going to drop you off in the Amazon rainforest, and I were going to give you a duffel bag for your survival, you know generally what would go in that duffel bag, right? And so if I'm going to drop my daughter off in the middle of the 21st century, And I want to give her something for her survival, give her a duffel bag. This book is that duffel bag, right?

Yeah.

This is what I think can help lead her through that process of discovering how to think about issues, how to make the right decisions about issues, understanding what is important in life and what's not important, and being prepared for this technological tsunami that is going to hit, and understanding that you need to run at it, as opposed to run away from it. And that you need to leverage it, you need to learn how to surf a technological tsunami, and you need to learn how to dance with machines. And, you know, whatever disruption all of this causes, or whatever adversity it may cause, it will also create opportunities, huge opportunities. And you need to be looking for those opportunities in change. And, and in adversity, there is always opportunity. And so the book, you know, talks about essentially the mindset that's required to survive and thrive in that kind of a dynamic, ever-changing, radically and rapidly, rapidly changing landscape. And out of all the things that I would leave to my daughter, there's none that I feel is more important than that book.

That's amazing. So, again, you guys can go find Millennial Samurai. Where? Amazon? Or what's a good place to find it?

Yeah. So, you can go on Amazon to get the book itself, or I'm also trying to give away 1 million free copies. So, you can download the entire book, a digital copy of the book at millennialsamurai.com. And it's completely free. Or if you want a physical hard copy, go to Amazon, read the reviews, and buy the book. Get it for your kids, get it for your nephews and nieces, your friends' kids. It's something that if you read the reviews, you'll see, you know, people are saying it should be in every home in America. And I believe that.

Oh, that's amazing. So again, What's the link one more time to download the free book?

millennialsamurai.com. Okay.

millennialsamurai.com. Awesome. Okay, George, changing gears again on you. Let's talk about how this affects freedom. You talked about, you gave an example earlier, you're having a heart attack, your car can just pivot and take you right to the hospital and check you in, kind of against your will. With new technology, every time we've had new technology, you kind of give up freedoms for convenience, typically. As we have these convergence of technologies, what do you think, from a regulator point of view, from a central government point of view, how should— you worked in the Nevada State Legislature as an attorney general in Nevada State for a while. You've seen that end of politics. How do you think politicians should approach emerging technologies and what's going on right now?

very carefully with, with a, with some guiding principles about individual privacy and individual freedom. And I think that the, the implications of this technology are profoundly positive and potentially profoundly negative. There, there is a trade-off between—

Unpack that for a second. Yeah.

Well, so first of all, profoundly positive in that, you know, like, like Gabriel Byrne and Dan Mapes say, the interconnectivity of a spatial web could increase global efficiencies, economic efficiencies tenfold, and that could create abundance, and that could be very, very, you know, incredibly positive for humanity. On the other hand, If you have a spatial web with complete interconnectivity and trillions of sensors on everything, then you know every move I'm making, you know everywhere I am, you know what I'm doing.

Yeah.

You know massive amounts of information about me, and some of that information can be used to help me and to meet my needs. And some of that information can be used to control me if someone were wanting to put it to that use and were in that control. There are also more subtle influences that will come about as a consequence of what we're talking about. You look at ChatGPT today and you look at the fact that it's got a programmer bias, right?

Yeah, interesting.

Whoever's, you know, programming that ChatGPT today is, uh, uh, that bias is, is, uh, definitely going to influence the, uh, recommendations that it offers. And the—

And for people, for people that didn't see that, it was, they had it write a certain clause about President Biden versus President Trump. It wrote a great thing about President Biden. It would, it wouldn't write anything about President Trump, right? It was really interesting. And, and they've, they've come out now and said, we're trying to fix this on our firewall and stuff to block it. But it's, it's kind of a a filtered view, at least what we're seeing of ChatGPT. It'll give you all these red flags. If you ask it for, hey, give me a great trading algorithm to trade the S&P 500, it says, well, I can't give financial advice, which is just a blocker thing, or I can't comment on the presidential elections. But it does have a thought. It'd be nice to get the true unfiltered thought. But anyways, that's what's currently happening with ChatGPT.

Yeah. So, There are going to be— there's going to be a period of adjustment and of modifications and tweaking that's going to occur over a period of time in which we're going to— either it's going to— either I think that the market will essentially create different AI chatbots, and some of them might have a more conservative bias, and some of them might have a more liberal bias, and some of them may be designed to have a neutral or very limited bias. I don't know that you can eliminate bias entirely. I don't think you can. But you can balance it. And I think that what people want— what it really— it's going to get down to consumer preferences, right? So you look at the news media, In the 1960s, Walter Cronkite was the most trusted man in America. The Fairness Doctrine was in place, and we got a balanced media without a lot of editorial. Today, we get relatively zero balance and nothing but editorial. And the media has evolved into a very market-segmented industry, right? So Fox News has a market and a segment, and they create content that, that plays to that market. And MSNBC does the same thing in the opposite direction.

Yeah.

We probably will have these AI chatbots that will evolve in the same direction where, as media have, where we'll have different options. Do you want a You know, the MSNBC chatbot, or do you want the Fox chatbot?

Very interesting. Yeah, it's, it's, and we'll see how technology emerges, I guess, and evolves. And you would hope, you know, you would hope, like one hope of a, you know, a world that has sent, like you mentioned, sensors everywhere and things that you could have almost an unfiltered media. It's actually funny enough, one of my favorite media sources for a world event Is TikTok. Have you ever been on TikTok during a major event?

Oh, yeah.

It is amazing. When the United States was leaving Afghanistan, remember that terrible week there? I saw probably 100 videos from just people on the ground.

Oh, yeah.

There was a video of the guy on the plane. It was his account. He's like, I'm on the plane. Remember, it was rolling away. And then I saw another angle of a different guy over here, and then a guy on the ground filming them as they went by. Another guy that was a US soldier, a different guy that was an Afghan. You saw 100 videos of different angles of one thing. And I was like, wow, that's media. And the Ukraine war took off, and it was incredible to watch thousands of videos from just people in their homes, taking a video, posting it, taking a video, posting it. You saw a holistic view of what this war entails, which is so interesting.

Yeah. I'm actually, I'm on TikTok every day. And I'm watching it because most of the video that you see on TikTok, you don't see anywhere else. And so if you really want to know what's going on in Ukraine, one of the best ways is to watch TikTok. And it's sad.

I 100% agree. People are always like, it's chat. Dude, it is so— it's just unfiltered. It's raw. It's right from someone's phone. It's amazing. Sorry, keep going. Yeah.

And you're getting all these views. So there are a couple of things that are important about this. particular topic that we're on, and how it dovetails into everything else that we've been talking about, which is, first of all, sources of information, trying to discover the truth, the need for an unbiased media, and most importantly, something that we haven't even discussed, which is the malleability of the human brain. We don't, you know, no one's talking about this. But the fact is that our brains are incredibly incredibly malleable. So just so that you understand the threat that this poses is there— our brains receive approximately 11 million bits of information per second, every second of the day. Yet our conscious brain can only process roughly 15 to 50 bits of information per second. So we are being bombarded with information, more information than ever is coming into our brain. The knowledge of marketing and, and the use of social media and the ability to weaponize media and target media very specifically to specific individuals that we know a great deal about, we know how to— we know what triggers they have, what buttons to push. The ability of someone to use media as a weapon against the public, to shape public opinion, influence our elections, move us in a direction, is a very, very substantial threat. You know, war in the future is not going to take the same form that war in the past has, or that war is currently taking in Ukraine. You know, the conventional-based war that we're seeing with artillery shells and tanks and missiles and old weapons, it's almost like they're clearing out their unused inventory.

And that's what it seems like. I totally agree with that.

Yep. You know, and just running through this garbage munitions because they have it, and, you know, it's not good for anything other than killing people, so let's put it to use. But the wars in the future aren't going to be fought that way. Very soon, wars are going to take on a very different shape, like drone warfare, or electronic or computer virus warfare, or warfare against our satellites, or the use of insects. I mean, there's all sorts of things that are potentially available today that countries are working on, and those wars scare me. Those wars are the wars that I am more concerned about. And so my attitude is I'm against the war in Ukraine, and the reason that I'm against it is because it seems that the rationale is very flawed to me. It's fundamentally flawed. The idea is that let's degrade the Russian military by taking out, you know, as many of their soldiers and armaments as possible at a very low cost using non-American lives, right? So we've got Ukrainian soldiers that are fighting this battle, so we don't have to use or lose American lives. And we're able to, you know, thoroughly degrade the Russian military and the Russian economy at a fraction of our annual military budget. It seems like, you know, a great idea. But the downside is that, what are we leaving in the wake of all of this, right? Let's say you have a degraded military in Russia. They've still got 6,000 nuclear weapons. So what have you done? Have you turned them into a North Korea? Have you turned them into— have you turned Putin into a Kim Jong-un? Right? Where's this all going? Right? So, and with the weapons that are available for future wars, the idea that we can't figure out a way to get along with the Russians or to get along with the Chinese is very disturbing, you know?

Mm-hmm.

I don't think it's the right path. I think that ultimately, as a world, we have to learn how to coexist, especially in a technological era in which we could extinguish ourselves, right?

It's so interesting. The US does not have any motive to de-escalate this war at all. It seems like we are only escalating this war. We're using old munitions. It seems like old tactics as well, old military tactics. We are not using the new— it's kind of this weird pseudo-old-fashioned war that's being fought with other lives, to destabilize potentially. And I'm trying to question, what's the goal of whoever's running the decision in the United States? What's the goal? Is the goal to destabilize Putin? Is it to kill Putin? Is it to put them in a shell like North Korea? Is it to just revamp them? Is it to make China— are we trying to destabilize both these guys so that we can make sure that they use our currency, and we launch a central bank digital currency that they use? I'm trying to find the end, the game, because we are not We are perpetuating this war. We are not giving them a way to retreat. We're not negotiating for peace. Biden just went last week and said, we will do as long as it takes. We will help Ukraine. And I don't know, any thoughts there on the endgame of this kind of war?

Yeah. So, that's what I think is the missing piece as well. I don't understand the endgame, and it doesn't make a lot of sense to me. I understand the short-term thinking. The short-term thinking is we don't want Russia, we don't want a muscular and militarist Russia running around, you know, Latvia and Poland and Estonia and Ukraine causing trouble, right? So let's take them out, right? We have an opportunity here to take them out, and Ukraine is willing to fight the battle. You know, what's interesting also is that Poland is, and, you know, you mentioned this on TikTok, you mentioned this ties into TikTok. I saw a video on TikTok recently, and it's talking about the plans of the Polish military. The Polish military has announced that they are going to be spending 3% of their GDP on their military, and that this expenditure is going to cause them to be spending more than Britain, France, and Germany combined. Okay?

Wow.

So Poland, a member of NATO— so first of all, understand that NATO has expanded from the 1980s of 12 original members to now 30 members. They've moved east. They've essentially caused all of these Eastern European bloc countries to join NATO, all but Russia and Ukraine. And, you know, Putin spoke in Munich in 2007 and basically said that, you know, why are you marching east? What is going on? What is your plan? Who is your enemy?

Right.

You know, and if you come further east, know that we are drawing a red line at Ukraine.

Yeah.

And we consider that an existential threat if NATO were to go into Ukraine. And he was telling them this in 2007. And NATO continued to march forward towards Ukraine, continued to court Ukraine. Ukraine should be neutral. Ukraine should not be part of NATO or part of Russia. It should be a neutral country that's able to do what it wants. without interference from either one. It shouldn't, I don't believe, be part of NATO, because that's a— that does create a security threat for— a legitimate security threat for Putin because of proximity.

Yeah.

It puts NATO's forces too close to his border. And so it's understandable that he wouldn't accept that. I don't buy the argument that Putin— it's all about Putin being the madman who wants, you know, to reconstitute Russia. I don't think any Russian leader would have allowed NATO to come into Ukraine and put offensive missiles or troops in Ukraine. So I'm not sure where this is going. I think what they wanted to do—

Yeah, it's interesting.

Yeah, they wanted to basically defang Russia, right? Make them weaker. But are you really making them weaker when they still have 6,000 nuclear weapons and now they're just poorer, angrier, more isolated, and have fewer options other than nuclear options. Has that made us safer? I, I don't, I don't think it has.

I know, it's very interesting. I, I wonder if there's some, some way to neutralize the nuclear threat. Like, they, you know, they put that code into, um, Iran. I believe it was Iran where they— oh yeah, that, that thing that went in. If you guys don't know, you're talking about future warfare. Yeah, yeah, they developed a, um, a virus that only attacked Iran's nuclear missile program. And it went in, they put it in the web, and it went in, and it actually attacked and demobilized their entire nuclear program just through a piece of code, which is so cool. This is like 2014, I think, right?

Yeah.

From the US military.

I think it was called Stuxnet or something like that.

Yeah. Go look it up on YouTube. Fascinating thing. The other one you mentioned is kind of future warfare, drone warfare. Saudi Arabia, I believe it was 2 years ago, was attacked by a swarm of drones. So, you can imagine, imagine like 3,000 drones all holding a grenade. Flying over your fence border towards a city. Like, how would you stop that, right? Would you have to do an EMP? Do you have to have a net? Like, and they went and attacked one of their oil facilities and it blew up and had this crazy thing. And, and, um, I mean, that's kind of warfare of the future, right?

Yeah. Here's, here's the thing. The drones don't have to be big. They can be miniaturized drones the size of insects that can contain a deadly poison on the tip. or that can contain a small explosive that is big enough to hit you in the forehead and kill you, right?

Yeah.

So insect drones released in the tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands, imagine that in urban areas. There are no ways to protect against something like that because it could come at— it could come in at any altitude. It could come in, you know, skirting across the ground. You can't create a net that's big enough. Maybe some kind of electronic pulse or magnetic field or something.

EMP. Yeah, something like that. Yeah, it's super interesting. So, yeah. Anyways, George, it's been fantastic having you on. I know we've gone a little bit long here. I've kept you, but this is just so intriguing and so interesting. I love, as you can tell, this is fun to talk about. I just think it's just so intriguing. Final 2 questions for you. So, we already mentioned your book. What's the best way for people to get in touch with you? Is it your book? Is that the best place to go? And one more time, drop that link for everybody.

So, I'll hear the book again. Sure. So, you can reach me at gjchanos@gmail.com is my email, or you can go to georgejchanos.com, and it's C-H-A-N-O-S. or Millennial Samurai, millennialsamurai.com, to download the digital version of the book for free or find the book on Amazon, Millennial Samurai: A Mindset for the 21st Century. I promise you, it's something that you'll be happy that you got and that you read.

I love it. George, thank you so much for that. And you guys can go get the free book there. Final question, George. I love asking this as a final question. If you could leave this audience, if this was kind of your last interview and you had to leave the audience with one thing that you thought was most important, most valuable, most pertinent to this audience to leave them with today? I'll give you about a minute, minute and a half. What would you leave this audience with?

Okay. So, I would tell you that our power lies in our unity, that individually, we're not very powerful, but collectively, we're immensely powerful. And that if you look at even the animal kingdom, if you look at colonies of ants or colonies of bees or schools of fish or flocks of sterling. It's all about collaboration. It's all about cooperation. That's what has allowed our species to thrive above all others, is our ability to collaborate and our ability to plan ahead. And, and those are the 2 things that we really need to focus on. We need to think about the future. We need to think ahead, and we need to learn to collaborate. We need to understand that we are profoundly interdependent with one another. And everything that we do to tear apart at the social fabrics that bind us is a mistake. We need to be doing what we can to create greater unity in the country and in the world and understand that our— that we have the tools, we have the technology, we have the tools to overcome all of the challenges that we currently encounter, and that we are likely to encounter, but only as a united group, not as divided, warring factions. And so stand against war, stand for freedom, and stand with one another. Those would be my, you know, most important pieces of advice. Have an open mind. Understand that you don't have all the answers. Understand that a lot of the information— Alvin Toffler once said that The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write. It will be those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn. There's a lot that we have to unlearn, and we need to open our minds to do that.

I love it. That's amazing. George Chanos, everybody. Thank you so much for coming on. Again, go grab the book, Millennial Samurai. Here it is again, one more time. We'll drop the link down below. But George, thank you again for coming on, you guys. Like, subscribe, follow this podcast, and we'll see you guys later. Bye.

Thank you. Thanks so much.