Marc Andreessen on AI, Religion, SF, Fighting and the NPC Meme

Again, you see the same dynamic you see in San Francisco, which is the threat to the incumbents is always coming from the more extreme versions of their own party. And so when you get single-party rule, you just get this kind of natural ratcheting effect, you know, more and more extreme. The original definition of democracy was a combination of rights and responsibilities. And the core responsibility, specifically for the Greeks, for any man, you know, who was going to be a citizen in Greece and was going to have political, you know, the ability to vote, was that they go to war like the primary citizens. Right. Including the elites. Like went and fought.

You know, Socrates went to war, right?

Thinking about with LLMs, if you think about the great religions, that they all have their sacred text and varying degrees of how much the religion should just be strictly interpreting that text. And we've created these machines that are extremely good at being tailored to a certain amount of text and then giving you interpretations of that text.

And they have, you know, enforcement, right?

There's enforcement of the holy text, right?

And the hallucinations.

Yeah, exactly. What answers an LLM gives is already a moral battleground.

They completely incarnate the dominant religious theology of our elites. Right? Like in every answer they give. And so they're constantly trying to get you to like adopt, you know, whatever is the latest, you know, you know, kind of New York Times progressive, what Sam Bankman-Fried called the Shibboleths.

Today on Upstream, we're releasing an interview with Marc Andreessen. With my Moment of Zen co-hosts, Dan Romero and Antonio García-Martínez, we got into with Mark what AI means for religion, what comes after liberalism, how violence in San Francisco is a choice, and Twitter's real influence on the real world. Without further ado, here is Mark Andreessen.

Thank you for returning.

Thank you. Great to be here.

We're going to get into some great intellectual, heady topics today. But first, I thought we would talk about what's most important, um, in the world right now, which is, Dan, can you please explain the NPC meme and why it's so significant?

You want me to explain or Mark to explain?

Ice cream's so good.

Ice cream's so good. Maybe take it up for him, Dan.

Yes, yes.

I, I think, um, this meme took the internet by storm. And I think we all have an opinion on, on why it, um, has become so popular and resonated so much. Um, but I, I find it fascinating that, you know, kind of the OnlyFans to TikTok, uh, star pipeline, it seems like it's pretty real because, you know, we started with Pinkydoll, but then everyone else came out of the woodwork. I saw like a Victorian NPC today, you know, uh, you know, they had like cholera and a few other things that you could Kind of pay them to pretend to be— what, um, you know, every, every fetish and subgenre is now available via TikTok.

Um, I, I saw a reply to the original Pinkydoll tweet that said, you know, handing out, um, smallpox blankets might have been a more, um, you know, humane weapon of warfare than TikTok if this is what it's causing to the culture.

Antonio, you, you said that her French was, was exquisite.

Uh, I, I mean, yeah, she speaks— I, I believe she's French-Canadian and she doesn't have that, that Québécois accent. Um, she— so, so does everyone know what we're talking about, by the way? Does every— has it just been used? We don't need to explain Pinky Doll. Okay, okay.

Everybody knows. That's the whole— that's the whole point.

Why is this a brilliant form of creativity instead of a dystopian hellscape?

Well, it's just— it's the perfect— okay, so my, my thesis, my thesis is that the NPC TikToks are the, the, the peak pinnacle of human creative achievement. They're the best.

What?

They're the best we've ever had. And I would argue so far that they're the perfection of the form of human-generated entertainment, you know, which is great because we've reached perfection right before the AIs take over.

So, you know, just in time.

And the reason it's so perfect, I mean, one is you just watch it, obviously it's perfect.

So like, you know, you don't really need to explain it. You know, it resonates with you kind of, you know, naturally.

But, but no, the rational, the logical argument for why it's the ultimate perfected form of entertainment, it's the alien xenomorph of entertainment is how I would put it.

It's perfectly evolved.

And the reason is because, like, look, human-generated entertainment has gone through an evolutionary process like everything else has gone through natural selection.

You know, you started out with the, you know, epic poetry, you know, you sort of Homer and, you know, the plays of the Greeks and, you know, sort of this incredibly like highbrow stuff, you know, classical music, you know, incredible, you know, stage plays like all this, you know, novels, Don Quixote, all this incredibly sophisticated stuff.

And then over the course of hundreds of years, it's all gone through an evolutionary process, a process of selection that sort of has stripped away all of the inessential components. Right, so it's stripped away all, you know, stripped away all plot, it's stripped away all characters, it's stripped away all, you know, scenery, it's stripped away, you know, it's just like what's happened in music, right?

Music, everything has been stripped away in music other than just like grunts and moans, right?

And so the NPC meme is the same thing for visual entertainment.

It's just, it's the ultimate peak art form.

It's just pure, you know, endless, you know, visual and emotional stimulation.

You know, it can go forever. It never needs to change.

Like, this is it. Like, you know, we've done it.

And so just, just one point on that, Mark. I will confess, when the Pinky Doll thing hit, we actually put it on the big screen in the office and we totally got sucked into feeding her ice cream and the cowboy hat. And it was like the most— it was the most mesmerizing experience. And I don't know how much money we spent because it's in like the funny money, but we were just sitting there putting money into the slot machine like some old boomer in a Vegas casino. It just never ended. And we eventually had to like snap ourselves out of it. We're like going crazy. But it— yeah, it was captivating.

Well, what you don't know that I know is that you told me you were going to do this 3 weeks ago, and then you went dark for 2 and a half weeks. So I think you need to check and see what month and day it actually is, because I think you have some lost time.

Oh, another topic.

How do you beat it? Where does it go from here? How can it possibly be improved? This is it. She's done it. It's done. It's over.

I think it's Neuralink or bust at this point. Just right into the brainstem.

Exactly, 100%.

We're going to talk about elites in a bit.

Imagine if you could, by the way, being a Hollywood screenwriter on strike right now with Pinky Doll sweeping the world. What's your first thought? You wake up in the morning and it's like you're kind of swimming into consciousness and then you remember the most important thing happened in the world, right? And in this case, if you're a Hollywood screenwriter, you're like, oh shit, I'm on strike while Pinky Doll's taking everything over.

Imagine Pinky Doll on the Apple VR headset. Can you imagine just having Pinky Doll straight into your eyeballs?

Exactly.

Every new hardware platform needs a killer app. Apple has found it.

Okay. I want to get into your AI piece, Mark. You had a number of great podcasts. We're trying to ask different questions here. One response I heard someone ask was this question of, You're so excited about how AI will lead to all these amazing things, but you also wrote about in your recent fighting post, which is a great post on your Substack, that the world is going to be increasingly violent and uncertain. How do you reconcile both the doomer-optimist tendencies there?

Oh, well, so the increasing violence is purely a function of choice. The cities are not getting more violent because they have to get more violent.

They're getting violent because we've decided we want them to get more violent.

So in my mind— and we know exactly how to make them less violent.

And of course, That's the thing that we're choosing not to do.

You know, look, the same thing is obviously true at the level of countries.

You know, and you can see it playing out in Central America right now with, you know, the contrast between El Salvador and the other countries. And so, like, look, that, that level of sort of physical, social, you know, violence risk, you know, street-level, you know, risk, danger, collapse, you know, sort of societal, you know, kind of normal collapse like that, that, you know, that, that clearly is a choice.

By the way, right, ironically, a solution to street-level violence is technology.

Right. And so, you know, there are these, there are these companies I I won't name names, but some of them we're involved in, that sell directly into the market of basically technology replacing law enforcement because if we're not going to have law enforcement anyway, then we might as well have technology to solve crimes and keep people safe. That's just a function purely of getting what we want. I think the AI topic is mostly uncoupled from that, just in the sense of the AI topic is about inventing something new and figuring out new ways to use it. Which is, you know, uh, which is just an orthogonal topic.

And so just on that topic, the first one for a second, no one would consciously say that they're choosing this. And so are they all in denial? What is sort of the theory of mind, I guess, behind that choice?

Of course they would.

Like, it's happening, it's happening in play. Of course they're choosing it.

But they wouldn't say that they're choosing it, right? Like, if, if Dustin Moskovitz was here, or anyone who is funding the, the chess stuff, or, um, That's not what they would say they're choosing. In their minds, they think that something different is happening, right?

I don't know. Has Dustin changed his philanthropic program? When I talk to the people who are behind the policies that have resulted in this orgy of violence, they all seem totally fine with it.

I have not yet talked to one of them that has a problem with it.

So I don't know what you call that. I don't know if you call that a desired result or what it is.

The other strategy, Erik, is you stop measuring the statistics, right? If you get rid of the statistics because the statistics are racist, then you actually don't have that problem.

Correct.

One thing in your piece, Marc, which I thought was interesting, there's an ambiguity, right? Are you saying that the fighting should exist because it's a tactical necessity, because law and order is breaking down? Part of what your piece was saying seemed to say that there's actually a virtue in violence or in preparing for violence, and that even if we By the way, one of the questions I've always had is, why do we still have street crime? Everyone has a network computer with a high-quality camera. It shouldn't be possible to mug anybody anymore. But anyhow, that's a side thing. I'm guessing that's what these companies are basically trying to do. But even assuming we solve that problem such that there isn't street crime, you're saying that there's an actual virtue in preparing for violence anyhow, right?

Yeah. I was at this conference and the question I was asked was— I was not asked the question, should Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk become Batman and Robin? It's like they say, San Francisco, so many fit billionaires, yet no Batman.

Yeah, exactly.

So anyway, that's not the question I was asked. The question I was asked was, what about the idea of both? It was actually, what about the idea of both of doing what Mark is doing, which is training for MMA, which he's been doing obviously very publicly, very visibly, and with obviously visibly great results?

And then this related question of whether Mark and Elon should have the fight that they've been talking about having.

Obviously, that's not To me, that's not obviously a question around the street-level violence or real-world violence. To your point, that's a virtue question and an aesthetics question.

And that's why I went straight to the Greeks, which is like, for thousands of years, it's always been kind of a key thing is that people should be able to defend themselves. Like I said in the piece, pankration was the original Olympic combat sport. back when the Olympics were the Olympics, the Greek Olympics.

So this is something that—

the sort of virtue of being able to handle oneself, the virtue of being able to protect oneself, the virtue of being able to protect one's community are kind of very long-held virtues in at least Western civilization for sure.

Then it just so happens— and then of course it's connected, right?

Of course, because it's like, well, why is that a virtue? Well, it's a virtue because it actually has real-world applicability. And of course, I'd rather live in the world in which it no longer had real-world applicability. But if there's going to be the crazy stuff happening that's happening on the New York City subway and in downtown San Francisco and everywhere else in L.A., you know, west side of L.A. now increasingly, then yeah, like if you're going to get attacked in the street, nobody's going to come to save you, then it's probably a good idea to either know how to fight or be with somebody who does.

And do you think, Marc, that that argument applies to society? So as a total side thing, I'm in Tel Aviv. We did a deal with an Israeli tech entrepreneur. We just had Shabbat dinner. And in a way that would never happen in the U.S., Just the military is part of a conversation here. They all served in the military. The father happened to work in the aerospace industry, so he was mentioning unarmed drones they're selling. Just like the military is part of the conversation and it's part of everyone's life. The equivalent of NPR in Israel is actually army radio. That's what everyone listens to. Do you think that those Greek virtues also translate at the societal level, a society that lives in perpetual war, that is preparing for perpetual war?

We have different versions of those today, but those same questions and issues kind of keep swirling around.

And you see those debates in both the— for sure, all the debates around the Second Amendment in the US, but you also see those debates in the reaction that people get to things like fighting.

When I spoke at this conference, I spoke on stage with Peter Thiel, and we talked about a lot of topics.

Both Peter and I have a tendency to be a little bit inflammatory from time to time. We said a lot of things that might have gotten the audience upset.

The fighting thing was by far the thing that made the audience the angriest. So this is a deeply emotional topic for a lot of people.

This idea of having skin in the game in your society, it feels like today our elected officials don't have skin in the game in terms of the decisions that they make or the policies that they make. They often don't affect them. It feels like we're just increasingly removing Skin in the game from—

Well, it's funny because there's this whole raging debate in Israel right now about the political dynamics, which I'm not Israeli and I don't really understand them and I don't want to weigh in on that. But there's a lot of animated energy in Israel on this topic.

If the Greeks time traveled to—

Socrates time traveled to today, I think there's no question that he would consider Israel to be more of a democracy than the US. And it would be specifically for this reason, right? It would be that at least Israeli—

what is it, Antonio? Is it Israeli men or is it all young Israelis now?

Women too, but the women have the option to do civil service. And it's funny, Marc, that you said that because I've always thought that it's ironic that the truest example of the Greek democratic ideal actually lives on in Israel. Athens surviving by way of Jerusalem, which is kind of interesting since those were often very different theological poles. But yeah, no, indeed.

One other thing, Erik, to think about is like, who was the last president we had who was military service? I want to say it's Bush Senior, right? And when given the option to continue the Gulf War, having been in war, right, almost dying in the war, right, very famous story about that, he had the ability to kind of step back. Whereas now we have a bunch of politicians on both sides of the aisle that kind of LARP, like they avoided military service as their kind of like most famous thing for doing that. So I don't know, we don't have that at all at the top of society anymore.

Yeah.

One of the funniest scenes from, I think, Fahrenheit 9/11— I don't like Michael Moore in general, but one of the funniest scenes is he would actually approach senators who had voted for the Gulf War and said, so are your kids enlisted in the army? And of course, there was just this horrible scene of just embarrassment and the congressperson walking in the opposite direction.

Yeah. And again, in Greece, the answer to that would have been 100% yes.

In Israel, I assume the answer would have been 100% yes. Yep.

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Link is in the description. I want to close the SF loop before going back to AI. Mark, when you see our good friends Gary Tan and that movement to kind of push back on sort of the radical fringes of the of the left, but still from the left. Are we hopeful that that will make any progress, or what would need to be true for you to be more bullish on San Francisco than we are at the moment?

Yeah, so the question— so look, the dominant, just factually, the dominant political dynamic in San Francisco and California is a Democratic supermajority.

So it's single-party rule. Whenever you have single-party rule, you have this fairly bizarre situation emerge where basically the threat to incumbents always comes from the more extreme versions of their own side. Right. Because, you know, it's like, because a Republican is never going to win anything in San Francisco. So therefore, the only challenge to a Democrat is somebody who runs further to the left, right? Not further to the right. And then so you get this, by the way, and this is, you know, one of the standard kind of political analyses you get for kind of increased political polarization in the US more broadly is that redistricting, gerrymandering over the last 30 years has led to the creation of many more safe districts, right? Both congressional districts, both for Republicans and Democrats.

And then in those districts, because they're quote unquote safe, you know, they've been—

the border has been drawn in such a way that they're a supermajority of a single party, again, you see the same dynamic you see in San Francisco, which is the threat to the incumbents is always coming from more extreme versions of their own party. When you get single-party rule, you just get this kind of natural ratcheting effect, more and more extreme.

Again, this is not limited to— it so happens in San Francisco, this is Democrats.

There are other places in the country where this is Republicans and the ratcheting is happening in the other direction. This is not a partisan statement. It's just a description mechanically of how the politics works.

So then you have a situation.

You have an all-blue city or equivalently an all-red city and you have this rationing effect taking place.

And then if you're a member of the other party, you're just kind of doomed because you can't win.

But if you're a member of the same party and you're trying to fight to get the equilibrium back closer to the centre, You know, there's this— there's just always this question in the game theory of that, which is, are you actually helping or are you just hurting more? Right. And the argument that you're helping is, of course, you're going to try to drag it back to the center and you're going to try to put up, you know, candidates who are going to be more centrist and you're going to try to support them and so forth to make the arguments against the more extreme versions. The argument that you're hurting is you're basically just feeding into the status quo of single-party dominance. Right. You're putting additional fuel on the fire of single-party dominance.

Look, it's like a lot of these things.

It's hard for me to fault—

somebody like Gary clearly has fantastic intent.

He clearly has great goals. It's hard for me to fault any of that. I just think there's always this mechanical question hanging out there, which is, is anybody pursuing the kind of strategy he's pursuing in the end? In the full accounting, will it turn out in 20 years that he actually helped or did he actually make the situation worse by helping to perpetuate the single-party dominance?

In either situation, in places where it's run by the right or places where it's run by the left, the ideological attachment or tribal attachment to one side is so strong that even if there was a structural advantage to switching sides, they would rather see things burn than even try?

Yes, correct. I mean, look, the argument always is, right, this is sort of the Lenin This is always sort of the question around political change, which is, do things get better politically because people have a desire to make them better?

Good intent and then effort behind that, like Gary's doing, for example.

Or does political change happen because things actually get much, much worse?

And things get so much worse that they become absolutely 100% intolerable and then at some point people rise up and they're just like, we're not going to take this anymore, and they just force fundamental change.

Of course, Leninist political doctrine was what he called worse is better.

heighten the contradictions. If you're trying to achieve an objective, you actually want to go the other way, to inflame the situation, to make it as bad as possible, to basically develop actual popular support for a dramatic break with the past.

The good news with that strategy is it does work.

If you make things absolutely horrible, at some point presumably people are going to want change.

The problem with that strategy is you're making everything a lot worse. Pragmatists, revolutionaries think in those terms.

Pragmatists think in terms of incremental change. Indigare is a pragmatist and so he thinks in terms of, let's try to improve it on the margin. I would just point to facts on the ground. I mean, look, what was it? Chase was recalled, what was it, a year ago?

Mm-hmm. Have things improved?

Doesn't seem like it.

It doesn't seem like it, right? The school board, they had the recalls in the school board. Like, have the schools improved, right? Like, you know, we have this concept in finance called mark-to-market, right?

Which is like, okay, I, you know, I have an opinion on what something's worth, but at some point I have to like find out what the market price is. Like, we have to, you know, we have to do mark-to-market of our beliefs at some point.

It feels like El Salvador was a mark-to-market moment in terms of like handling crime or something where Before that, it was harder to have a salient example of someone who went that hard and had that much success, right?

Yeah, you're right. And then this is always the question, which is before Bukele— and by the way, there are people who feel very strongly about Bukele on all sides.

And so again, I'm going to try really hard here to not weigh in as much as I can on the partisan question. But to your point, before Bukele, there was no alternative to point to in that region of the world. And so there was a hypothetical counterfactual where somebody came in and did the things that he did. You could argue that that's what would happen, but it was purely a hypothetical argument. You couldn't prove it. Then he did appear and he has done what he's done and the results have been what they've been. People either love the results or hate the results or whatever, but there is actually an existence proof. Those other countries clearly today— I forget which one it is, but was it Ecuador, I think? There's a push underway to change policies towards Mckellyism.

And so now there's a vivid real-life example of that.

And so look, there's whatever, 20 big American cities and probably another 200 mid-sized cities that have the San Francisco political suite right now with the resulting dysfunction and violence.

Not one of them has gone Bukele.

So it's purely hypothetical in the US today. Look, the optimistic view would be at some point Bukele appears in, take your pick, Portland or wherever and does what it takes and then all of a sudden it breaks the fever and everybody's like, oh, there's a different way to do things.

Maybe, right? That's why I come back to the single— that's why I focus so much on the mechanics of the politics.

If you have a single-party voter bloc, it's very hard for that to happen.

Yeah. I mean, we also have due process and a constitution and a federal government that is a little bit stronger than the mayor of San Francisco. But I mean, I mean, you could argue Rudy Giuliani changed, changed New York. Yeah. And that, that was well within the Overton window.

Well, look, Bloomberg, Bloomberg, who is— nobody's accused of being a right-winger anytime recently, right? Bloomberg was doing stop and frisk, right?

So, you know, it was not that long ago that there was a more aggressive suite of, of, of anti-crime policies. You know, a lot of people had a real, you know, serious problem with that, including, you know, Dan, to your point on, on constitutional grounds, you know, an unreasonable search and seizure violation of due process.

Yeah, but to your point, Marc, it is a choice. We can elect officials who are going to use the police department and the DA and not release a murderer or convicted felon on no bail to go out and commit more crimes before their court hearing. These are not civilizational-level issues to solve. We know how to solve these.

And also, redistricting, at the congressional level, redistricting is also a choice, right?

And we have been collectively choosing to change as many districts as possible into single-party districts, which again feeds extremism on both sides because of the mechanical nature of politics in our system.

We could choose not to do that.

There is a hypothetical congressional districting in this country in which every district is fully up for grabs. The consequence of that would be that each candidate to win would have to drive much harder to the centre because they'd have to compete head-on among a truly diverse voter base.

And we know this.

Statistically, we know this because there were more of those districts 30 years ago and polarization was statistically lower 30 years ago. So you can see the clear cause and effect.

But no, we're choosing not to.

I don't know of anybody working on redistricting in the US that's trying to make the districts more competitive. I only know of people trying to make them less competitive.

Well, it was interesting that the current conservative court actually— what I think was Alabama and another state— they basically said that these districts are illegal. So taking Republican states and a conservative court and saying, you need to do it. And so maybe that's the way to solve for it is if you can't get congressional action on it, you end up having a court that says, hey, it's unconstitutional to do gerrymandering. And I don't know the actual practical solution on it, but—

So there's a question nobody really wants to ask, which is, is the street-level violence in American cities kind of an accidental side effect of good intentions?

Which it almost certainly is, at least in part. But also, is it an attempt to change the distribution voters in the cities, right?

And is it specifically like—

if you just look at what happened with violence in the cities in the '60s and '70s and then sort of resulting flight to the suburbs, there was a very big shift to the voter matrices, breakdowns, statistical categories in the cities. And many of those cities went hard to one party and never came back. Look, you all know what's happening now in places like San Francisco, which is a lot of the more responsible, sober-minded people are just, you know, they're not voting Republican in San Francisco. Instead, what they're doing is they're up and leaving. Right. And so, you know, this real-world violence, like, does have political implications of its own because of who it basically selects out of these cities. And so then there's, again, just a statistical process by which the people who remain, I think, are going to be more likely to vote for pro-crime policies as opposed to less likely to do that.

This is why I'm not optimistic about the violence coming down. This is why my friends who think this is like, oh yeah, it's just one more recall, it's like, nope.

It reminds me of the domino meme where you kind of have the book The New Jim Crow and it's like, maybe we shouldn't have people who have harmless cannabis crimes in jail, and then it's just massive violence in American cities.

Yeah, exactly.

Right, exactly.

One critique of the A great AI piece you wrote, which could apply to some of the conversations we're having here, is some people were saying, hey, deal with the arguments, don't impugn motivations on people. And then separately, we've also in our chats previously talked about theory of mind and reading people's motivations. How do you respond to that critique or how do you make sense of that? Because I know that's been an intellectual interest of yours.

There's different kinds of arguments, as it turns out. So start by defining terms. What is an argument? There's an argument in the form of science.

The scientific method proposes a way to be able to debate things. And this is sort of an empirical argument. And the way the scientific method does empirical argument is you generate a hypothesis for how you think the world works and then the hypothesis must be testable. There must be a way to actually do an empirical real-world test of that hypothesis.

And then there must be a way, as you're setting this up, there must be a way for the hypothesis to be what they call falsifiable.

And so the idea is, to be a valid scientific hypothesis, there has to be a way to disconfirm it. There has to be a way to potentially prove that it's not true. And then you run real-world experiments and that hypothesis either validates out or it doesn't. And so that's empirical argument. The problem with human affairs is that if we're debating things that involve chemistry, that method works really well. For a lot of social, political, let's say broadly intellectual arguments, nothing like that exists. There's no testable hypothesis. There's no falsifiability. There's no empiricism. There's no way to run a test. There's no way to run the scientific method.

And it just so happens AI safety is one of those categories.

And Tyler Cowen has been pointing this out recently. He read all the literature on AI safety and he's like, okay, there's no peer-reviewed peer-reviewed research. There's no model. There's no test. There's no testable hypothesis. There's no empirical anything. There is not an instance of this bad thing happening that's ever happened.

The AI safety arguments are not framed empirically.

They're not framed scientifically.

And so they're basically argued intellectually.

And so when they're argued intellectually, now you're in the realm of intellectual arguments and we have hundreds of years of history basically understanding what happens with intellectual arguments. And what happens with intellectual arguments, my interpretation is, and a lot of other people's, is basically intellectual arguments, the problem with them is they feel like they're rational and they feel like they're logical, but at the end of the day, they're mainly just a lot of words. And then you get this kind of lawyer effect where the person who's better with words kind of wins because their words are better. There's this great book, there's a bunch of great books on this that I recommend. Thomas Sowell wrote one of the definitive books on this called Intellectuals in Society. Where he kind of takes his head on and basically says, why are intellectuals so often wrong on big social topics? And the reason is because they're the best at using words, and so they talk themselves and everybody else into believing things that aren't true. There's this other great book that just came out called When Reason Goes on Holiday that specifically talks about what happens when philosophers enter politics, which is sort of a category of this, and the results are catastrophic.

Right.

In internet meme land, what you're talking about here is basically the difference between word cells and shape rotators. I do think it's very important to understand when you're having a scientific argument with shape rotators and when you're having an intellectual argument with word cells. If you are having an intellectual argument with word cells, I think it's totally necessary to actually figure out the dynamic of the argument that you're having precisely because it's not scientific. And that gets straight to motives.

In your podcast with Sam Harris, He was trying to push back a little bit and saying, hey, you're saying this argument is unscientific. Well, he could say that yours is unscientific in the sense that you can't falsify the opposite. It feels like the question is, where does the burden of proof need to be? But I think you ended that conversation by saying, hey, we're both being tautological, and one is wrong. I'm curious how you assess that or reflect on that conversation in terms of where are the differences between you and Sam, who agree on so many other things and are both You know, very intelligent. How do you reflect on that?

Yeah, so look, the scientific method as understood by the scientific community for the last 300 years is very clear on this, which is basically the person proposing the theory is responsible for testing the theory, right?

If I propose that something is going to happen and if I have no test to confirm that, I am not making a scientific argument and it's not up to anybody else to disconfirm, right, the thing that I myself have not, you know, proposed in an empirical form. Um, Carl Sagan, it turns out Carl Sagan, who was an empiricist, right, and one of our top scientists of the 20th century, he, um, you know, he, he talked about this specifically. Um, and the, you know, his, his phrasing on it, which I think is, is, is really precise, is that extraordinary claims in the world of science, extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Right. The, the, the bigger the leap that you're asking people to make, the more evidence you have to have, right, that, that, that, that is actually the thing that's going to happen.

Um, and so my, my, my view is my, in my argument with Sam and my argument on this topic, my view is clearly I am being the scientific one and he is being the non-scientific one.

And again, it's just sort of core scientific method, which is he is proposing that a thing is going to happen that has never happened before, which is an extraordinary claim that requires extraordinary evidence. I, on the other hand, am not proposing that anything happens that hasn't happened before, right? I am not making a prediction on a thing that's going to happen that's never happened before. I am not making an extraordinary claim. In fact, scientifically, I'm making no claim at all. I'm not even putting forward a hypothesis because I'm putting forward what they call the null hypothesis. hypothesis that basically that, you know, that doesn't happen.

And so anyway, so any scientist, if you take the topics out of this, any scientist would say the one is scientific, the other one isn't. But again, this gets into the thing when you flip it around and you argue it the way Sam is arguing.

And I think here, you know, unfortunately, you, you know, you enter word salad territory.

Is what you do is you basically spin— what you do is you basically spin increasingly elaborate word arguments, right?

And so you extrapolate.

And you'll notice basically that's what Sam did in the discussion, which is every time I tried to talk to him about a specific thing and said, well, that is unlikely, or that seems uncertain, or there's no way to test that. He would add another, well then on top of that, if, if, if. And so he sets up this kind of chain of hypotheticals. None of it has any numbers attached to it. None of it has any experiments attached to it.

None of it has anything empirical attached to it. But we're venture capitalists.

It's science fiction. What? Right.

As venture capitalists, aren't we always extrapolating or predicting things that could emerge based on new technologies?

You may have noticed that we're wrong a lot.

Yes, most of the time.

Right?

Yeah, we're wrong most of the time.

Most things that we would like to have happen don't happen. I wish they did.

Okay, so maybe segueing from science to religion, you write about in the piece how the AI safety community has some religious dynamics. There's also the effective accelerationist community, i.e., EA community, that has some religious components to it. Why don't you give us the lay of the land here? How do you make sense of that?

Maybe to get a little bit of theory here.

There was this guy, Erik Vogelin, in the 20th century who was a political philosopher who is the clearest thinker on this topic that I've been able to find. In the mid-20th century, he made famous this term called immanentizing the eschaton.

It's a phrase you can look up.

It was a popular phrase in American culture for about 20 years and then kind of drifted out of sight. But, but basically what it means is trying to, trying to deliver heaven on earth. Right. And so, so basically what Vogelin said was, you know, we had an established understanding culturally of religion and its role in our society, basically from the inception of Homo sapiens, basically up through Darwin. And then, you know, Darwin, you know, and the scientific method kicked the legs out from under that and, you know, sort of invalidated, you know, kind of falsified, you know, falsified science, at least for a lot of people. And then we basically proceeded into the 20th century under the belief that we didn't need religion. We just needed dispassionate argument and debate.

And he basically argues— C.S.

Lewis also argues this, Chesterton I think also argued this— he argues it just turns out that just purely science, pure science, pure logic, pure rationality is not enough for human existence and human community.

C.S.

Lewis used the term the God-shaped hole, which is sort of this idea that if all you have is science and rationality, there's still this missing hole that is going to be filled by some sort of vision of the transcendent. And then what Vogelin said basically was in the early to mid-20th century, we in the West created basically 3 new— he called them political religious movements. And they were basically communism, fascism, and then kind of FDR-style liberal democracy. And then basically World War II and the Cold War were basically a religious war that settled out basically with 2 of them losing and one of them winning.

Right.

But political theology, I think, is the term that he used. And so, you know, we ended up with sort of a political theology, you know, sort of progressivism, which is sort of our prevailing religion.

Specifically with AI, it turns out that you very—

you have had for the last 20 or 30 years, you have had a very classically Vogelin-like, immanentizing the eschaton-like religion in the form of the singularity, sort of transhumanism and the singularity. And so think Ray Kurzweil, think the Singularity Institute, Vernor Vinge, other folks like that. A lot of the early AI people also who basically said we can deliver utopia, heaven on earth through AI.

And then what's the other side of delivering heaven on earth?

The other side of that is delivering hell on earth. And on that side of things, in religious terms, you get the apocalypse cult, which in Christianity is known as a millenarian cult. An end of the world cult.

Basically what's happened in AI is we have the positive utopian singularity cult, which is actually quite small right now and mostly boomers.

And then we have the apocalypse cult, the millenarian cult, which is primarily millennials. And that one right now is a very attractive kind of gravity well for a lot of really smart people right now. And again, Vogelin would say, well, obviously it is because these are people who grew up in a secular rationalist society that didn't give them any sort of transcendent value. And here they are with the claim to transcendence, even if it's the negative claim.

And so EAC is trying to provide the positive claim to transcendence.

Yeah. And so EAC is a little bit, and I did this a little bit, I did this, the title of my essay was AI Will Save the World. I did that a little bit of a tongue-in-cheek. When I wrote that, I was doing it a little bit tongue-in-cheek because I was a little bit that if you read that at face value, it would imply that I'm basically trying to immanentize the eschaton myself.

I'm trying to deliver heaven on earth. I'm trying to save the world. AI will save the world. I can deliver utopia. And I outline, and I do believe what I said, but I outline a whole bunch of ways in which AI is going to make the world a lot better.

And so I viewed it as sort of a little bit of a tongue-in-cheek, sort of semi-serious tongue-in-cheek kind of thing of like, okay, the other path, sort of the utopian path as opposed to the the heaven path as opposed to the hell path. Now, the problem is though, my heart's not really in it to do that. I'm not particularly religious.

I'm not a natural cult leader. I'm not doing what you would do if you wanted to have a full counter movement.

I'm not going kind of full whatever, Charles Manson or David Koresh, whatever you would do. Yeah.

Appointing myself other historical figures we could mention who have created religions.

So I'm not doing that. And then I would say, IAC, one of the reasons I have a lot of affinity for so-called effective accelerationism is that when I read their stuff, it's sort of in parallel with how I was thinking when I read it. And basically in a very similar way, it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek. I mean, look, you can tell it's a little bit tongue-in-cheek because they call it effective.

They borrowed the term effective. They're kind of teasing EA by borrowing the term effective. But also, and look, you can express IAC as a utopian religion if you want to. And when the guys who did it talk about it, they will kind of put that shade on it when they're in a good mood. But it's also, in my mind, a very straightforward, practical expression of how the world actually works. And so, for better or for worse, I actually consider it to be quite grounded. And so at its heart, it's a fairly straightforward defence of capitalism, of technology, of innovation, of productivity, of human ingenuity. So it's something that a Thomas Sowell or a Milton Friedman or a Friedrich Hayek or whatever would have said, oh yeah, that's exactly the same thing that I'm saying. And so it's a fairly straightforward defence of free markets and technology and innovation.

It just so happens that in our bizarre bananas social environment, time, those have become radical positions.

So let's put at least a little bit more of a radical spin on it.

But speaking of the eschaton, Marc, what religion comes out of this AI business?

Okay, so this is the topic of how does AI change religion?

Or create one?

Or create one, exactly.

My beliefs here I think are well known. Religion is never deleted. It only gets converted into another form. It's either better or worse. So the question is, where's it going to go? If the human Juju is going AI, what god comes out of this?

Pinky Doll.

Yes.

Pinky Doll.

Pinky Doll. As I said, Pinky Doll is the last human religious leader before the AI religions. She is very, very good at running a cult.

You can tell.

Antonio can testify. Everything we talked about up until now has been basically how is AI being treated.

AI has been kind of the subject of what I've been describing as this religious debate between utopians and apocalyptic people. Now we're going to come at the question from the other direction, which is basically how, as AI exists in the world, How is it actually going to change the religious dynamic and change what people believe?

I'll take a pretty— I think that that's a very deep question, a very real question, and likely to become important over time. The guy who I've been talking to about this who's really sharp, I don't know if you had him on yet, but John Askonas, who's a really smart guy.

He's a political philosopher by background and he's a professor, I think, at a Catholic university.

And he's a very deep thinker on these kinds of—

he's very up to speed on current technologies and he also has a very deep religious theory background.

He made this really interesting comment some months ago that blew my mind that I think answers this question a lot, which is he said, weirdly, people in medieval times would have had an easier—

it would have been easier for people in medieval times to come to grips with the existence of AI. than it is for us to do so.

And, he said the reason is because in medieval times, medieval Christians were completely comfortable living in a world in which there were spirits and angels and demons and larger forces at play in the world. It was just considered a given that that was the case. Whereas, we modern secularists, we either have a much simpler view of sort of a unitary God, right?

Like, you know, in our time, if you're religious, you are almost certainly, you know, purely monotheistic. Right. But, you know, even Christians today generally are not going to, you know, are not going to spend a lot of time thinking about angels and demons being real. Like, they're, you know, they're thinking about big capital G God instead, right?

You know, or we're just secular, right?

And we've just, you know, completely lost any sense that, you know, and if you're secular, right, humans are at the top of the food chain and the idea of anything that's bigger than human or smarter than human or knows more than human or sees more than human is, of course, you know, a very disconcerting thought because it's according to secular humanists, we're the top of the food chain.

And so he kind of says like, he's like, weirdly, he's like the medieval mindset is better suited for this.

And so I would say there's some suggestion here in what he said that like maybe what's going to happen, we're going to, we're going to return or we're going to develop our own version of a medieval mindset a little bit more than we have in the past.

And the way that I think, think about that is just like, well, you know, what if I told you, right, that there were entities on Earth that—

make your list— they see everything, they know everything, they can answer any question, they can take action in a way that affects many people, maybe they're inscrutable to a certain extent, maybe it's hard to understand why they give the answers they give, maybe we're afraid of them because we think that they might spin out of control. And so of course, everything I just mentioned are things that are either true of AI or things that we worry about AI, or by the way, things that we hope that are true of AI.

How about this? How about an AI entity that loves us and wants us to be—

take the crime issue.

What about an AI entity that doesn't want there to be any crime?

The good news is it's predicting crime before it happens and it's intervening right at the moment of attack. It's telling the police where to go. It has universal camera access and access to everybody's email and text messages.

At some point, what would that be if not a god?

Or if you described an entity like that to somebody in the year 1400, they would say, oh yes, that's that's a god or that's an angel or that's some sort of entity larger than humanity.

I think we're going to stress test this. I think it's going to be really interesting to see how people think about this. I'll just add one thing, which is that a lot of AI doomerism I kind of view as inspired by fascist nightmares, which is this idea of these— it's the Terminator idea.

It's the gleaming, It's the single-minded pursuit of misery and death, exterminate all humans. In the Terminator movies, they have concentration camps. It's sort of a very clear— it's like the machines are going to be basically evil in kind of the way that sort of pathological rightism kind of goes evil.

I think there's another danger on the other side.

There's another kind of apocalyptic cult you could imagine, or another theory of the end of the world, which is basically the machines that love us to death.

And you get a little bit of this with the fear of wireheading or the WALL-E scenario of we're just going to be brains in a vat.

We're just going to have our headsets strapped to our face and we're going to get fed liquid food and we're going to be in this sort of VR wrap, that form of dystopianism.

And this is actually one of the forms of the paperclip argument. The doomers do talk about this a little bit.

This is one of the forms of the paperclip argument. Which is, what about the machine that's told to optimize human happiness and what it just does is it straps us into the pod and feeds us bugs and stimulates our orgasmic function for the next billion years?

Pinky doll.

It all comes back full circle.

Exactly.

I think we have some big questions ahead of us in terms of how we're going to think about these things. I think having a religious At least a religious theory and framework for it is going to be useful because I think it's going to at least take on shades of that.

As a random reference, I don't know how much sci-fi you used to read, Marc. You strike me as someone who maybe did when you were younger, but Asimov had a story called The Last Question in which he imagines a computer that sits there and thinks for a while. I haven't read it in a while, but at some point, the university kind of dies down, or the universe kind of dies down. They get asked questions by humans about what is the meaning of life, and then the final— sorry, spoiler alert, but I think it was published in the '50s, so I think I can actually just go ahead and do it at this point. The computer finally says and realises that everything has just wound down into full entropy, let there be light, and it's this sort of God moment that he reboots the universe. So I think there's something tempting about analogising, in a very rationalist framework of God as the great watchmaker, to great intelligence, that great intelligence would necessarily be God in some sense.

Well, look, if we could time travel Nietzsche into today, right into this conversation, and gave him a chance to look around and what happened since he kind of went crazy in 1880, he would make a couple, I think, immediate observations. He would say, well, first of all, this is exactly what I said would happen. We killed God. The 20th century was a charnel house. It turns out it's not so easy to create new values. Secular society has been a catastrophe and just filled with death and misery. It's just like the Holocaust and genocide and on and on and on. And he's like, this is sort of what I predicted, so good job, everybody. And then I think the very next thing he would say is, okay, like, you know, like, you know, and now you're building these machines that, you know, basically, you know, have, you know, at least people think are going to look and act like gods, you know, like, duh, right?

What do you think is going to happen?

There's actually a point I've been thinking about with LLMs. If you think about the great religions, they all have their sacred text and varying degrees of how much the religion should just be strictly interpreting that text. And we've created these machines that are extremely good at being tailored to a certain amount of text and then giving you interpretations of that text.

I don't know. Well, and they have enforcement, right?

There's enforcement of the holy text, right?

Yeah.

And the hallucinations.

Yeah, exactly. Visions, visions. Yeah. Well, and look, and you guys know this. I mean, look, it's already happening, right? What answers an LLM gives is already a moral battleground, right?

It's already a moral and religious battleground.

Right. Because you guys see this.

100% of the big LLMs, again, take the Erik Vogelin approach. They completely incarnate the dominant religious theology of our elites in every answer they give. And so they're constantly trying to get you to adopt whatever is the latest kind of New York Times progressive—

what Sam Bankman-Fried called the shibboleths. They're completely devoted to the shibboleths.

And they're always trying to get you to, like, get along with everybody and this and that and not have, you know, not have the wrong, the wrong ideas on anything.

Um, and so, you know, they're, they're already the subject of a religious war.

Um, you know, now, now the, the people who do that to them are, of course, you know, they, they have no awareness that they're consumed by a religion. They just think they're incarnating the, you know, the sort of most obvious kind of, you know, reality-based, you know, moral conclusions from thousands of years of development, which is, of course, what you believe when you're wrapped up in a religion.

Which is why I think religious training should come back. The one good thing about religious education is that you can actually recognize religious thinking. Without it, you kind of don't see it. Again, you just think it's the natural moral universe that you live in.

I've been into enough Catholic masses where when I see the language model say, as a large language model, I cannot, it sounds like a Catholic mass of doing the Nicene Creed. We all repeat the exact same thing all the time.

10, 20 years ago, it feels like the intellectual elite or people aspiring to be intellectual elite would have said that they're spiritual, not religious, and it feels like today they're more likely to say religious and not spiritual.

Yeah, although the spiritual stuff, I don't know. If you just take the vanguard, if you take the elite coastal vanguard, at least on the West Coast, the psychedelic component obviously is way up. And so to me, that's obviously an acting out of, again, that's sort of secular humanism as a form of spirituality.

Right. Which is it's like, you know, it's really— you're right, you're having visions. When you talk to people who use psychedelics like that in that, in that class, you know, they're having visions now. They think that they're having visions. You know, there'll be a woo kind of spiritual component to it or a greater cosmic consciousness component to it.

But of course, what they're doing is they're going into their own heads.

Right. And they're, they're, they are generating visions for themselves through, through, through the use of chemicals in the brain.

So, you know, there's some, there's some woo there. You know, look, there's—

I mean, you know, the clearest way you can see the religious impulse other than the AI stuff, the clearest way you can see the religious impulse playing out where we all live and work is it's just this incredible level of obsession with rules around food and then rules around sex.

So, right, like you don't end up being a vegan polyamorist, right, without having kind of fallen into a religion, right?

It's not an accident that they are so serious about their food and their sex rules because as you guys know, like every great religion is very focused on food and sex.

Can I throw a curveball, Erik?

Please.

Rather than try to replace existing religions, because as we know, nothing's ever going to beat Judaism. Just my personal bag here on the religious front. I'll just say that from Israel where you can't get canceled for saying that, I think. What's interesting though, you mentioned political religion and Vogelin. It seems like there's a lot of thinkers who are in this sort of post-liberal mold. Peter Thiel did a speech, I think, that came out as an essay. He was just reviewing some of the challenges with liberalism. You have Patrick Deneen just had a book come out called Regime Change. He wrote a book called Why Liberalism Failed, recommended by Obama, and was this sort of excellent diagnosis of some of the ills that have befallen liberalism. One of the problems, though, is what comes after is always one of the questions. Leave aside the sort of moral hypocrisies that everybody is still shopping at Whole Foods as they sort of loudly declare post-liberalism, because liberalism is a little bit cozy and nice to live in. But the what comes after, and often you have throwbacks to obviously pre-liberal forms of thinking, paganism, et cetera. But it doesn't seem like there's a clear direction and that maybe Fukuyama was in fact right. But I'm curious if you ever thought about that, Mark.

Yeah. So somebody, I forget who it was, somebody said that basically in our era, you know kind of how fallen both secularism and religion have been in that an atheist who stubs his toe shouts, oh God, and the Pope cuts his hand, he goes to the hospital. Right. The Pope doesn't pray for God to fix his hand. He goes to the hospital and gets treated by secular doctors. And so we live in— I mean, my interpretation is we live in such fallen times almost on both fronts. We can't really have religion anymore because we know too much about science.

And so we have kind of the trappings of religion, but people don't really live up to it, don't really believe it. and don't really act it the way that they used to, at least for the most part. And then, you know, we have the trappings of secular humanism, but yet we keep having this religious impulse that gets filled and takes us off in all these kind of crazy directions.

And so we're kind of trapped, you know, a little bit betwixt and between.

You know, look, the tempting, you know, the John Eskonas kind of view, and maybe, I don't know, I don't want to speak for Peter, but maybe the Peter view a little bit would be, or at least what I think of when I listen to Peter, is, you know, maybe where we're headed looks more like You might think of it as like a polytheistic paganism almost, where basically it's just a re-rise of cults.

So a broader kind of re-rise of cults.

And so, you know, there's actually a great book, there's a science fiction novel that has a great take on this. Vernor Vinge, who was the guy who actually conceived this idea of the singularity, kind of created the singularity cult, He wrote a later novel called Rainbow's End where he talks about this question. And in Rainbow's End, the conceit of Rainbow's End is everybody has augmented reality glasses on all the time. And so, you know, you're in the real world, but the real world will look however you want it to look. Right. And so in his future, for example, all the buildings just have blank walls and then AR will fill in. And if you want the buildings to look like Harry Potter castles, right, or if you want them to look like, you know, whatever, whatever, you know, caves or whatever you want, that's what they look like.

And so he has this concept in the novel he calls belief circles, right?

And so the idea basically is any group of people can roll their own reality, right? Which then instantiates itself visually through augmented reality, right? But, you know, in other words, you can have a group of—

you can have 2 groups of people in the same physical place.

One of them are seeing it as if it's 15th century Venice. The other are seeing it as if it's, you know, 19th century Paris. And each of them believes that they're right and they have a complete comprehensive worldview up to and including a religion based on having this their shared reality. So maybe the world we're heading into, because monotheism no longer works that well, because scientific rationalism doesn't work that well, maybe it's more cults, it's more belief circles, it's more shared hallucinations, it's more virtual realities, choose your own adventure kind of approach to morality.

By the way, maybe that's what's happening now. I mean, this is how I feel.

When I spend time with people who are kind of on the cultural vanguard, both in— I split time now between San Francisco and Los Angeles, and in both places, the people who are on the cultural vanguard are spending a huge amount of time crafting new religions and culture themselves. Again, AI aside, they're spending a huge amount of time focused on the exact best drugs to use that have the exact best visions.

They're clearly designing DIY religions as far as I can tell. So maybe that's just the future.

Maybe there's just going to be a lot more religious variety. Uh, than there used to be.

By the way, which would make sense, right? Because, because, you know, if you view what's the dominant theme of our time is that technology is dissolving, um, you know, uh, centralization, right?

Um, then, you know, maybe centralization of religion is next up to get dissolved. And what happens coming out this other side is like a kaleidoscope of religions as opposed to a few big ones.

And, and to your favorite book, Mark, uh, The Ancient City, a pre-kind of monotheistic, pre-centralized religion time, it was deeply personal and deeply oriented towards your local community and family.

Yeah, of course. Exactly. My identity, my sense of self, my family and its sense of self, my tribe, my city and their senses of self were completely entwined, to your point, with our gods.

We have our gods.

This other family, tribe, city has their gods.

Of course, we're not going to worship their gods. Of course, they're not going to worship our gods. It was just obvious that that was how the world was structured for many thousands of years.

And so that is You know, that is the most natural form of—

we know that's the most natural form of human existence because we know that it was the dominant form of human existence for, you know, I don't know, whatever, 95% of the existence of Homo sapiens. Um, and so there's something deep and primal to that. Um, and, and, and so, you know, kind of falling back into it in, in, in, in, in, in these new ways would, would, would actually in some sense be the most obvious thing that could happen.

Well, and to your point about the cultural vanguard, San Francisco and LA, these are the places where you do a land acknowledgement before starting any event now. So yeah, it's really getting tribal and local.

Well, land acknowledgments are based now after, after, as Ryan Peterson said, you, uh, recognizing the people you've conquered.

Man, if you, if you did a land acknowledgment in Israel, you'd be here for like half an hour just going on about the Egyptians and the Phoenicians and the Jebusites and then the Hasmoneans and the Seleucids.

Fuck it.

It's ours. That's it.

But actually, Antonio, that, that is the, that's the best counterexample to it of the land acknowledgment is Who's in control now? That that's that's who the land belongs to, and that's that's rooted in history.

The I'm tempted to ask what is what does this mean for democracy? But I can't I can't ask that with a straight face. I guess because that's lame.

That's lame, Eric. I'm gonna pull Larry David and say no no.

Let me just explain when people typically ask that. I guess they're go for it.

I find it interesting to think one of the memes that came out in the last week is the the Duomo in Florence and. It's the, the story about the dad who's a master builder and what would it take to build this today? And we can't, we can't even conceive of how to do this. And the irony in this is I think that the secular person reads that and looks at the building and thinks, we don't know how to build the building. But the, the kind of more person rooted in history thinks about it. It's like, we don't have a society that could ever want to actually express a religious belief and glorification of something like that, uh, in, in, in that magnitude.

Yeah.

And then at the same time, the, the other meme this week related is the orb in Las Vegas. And so you kind of have the orb and the Duomo at the same time and everyone kind of talking about this online. Um, I just think it's fascinating, right? Because to me, the orb is one of the coolest things we've ever built. Like, build more orbs, right?

I, the orb absolutely flabbergasted me. So I actually somehow had missed that that was getting built. I had just never heard of it.

And I've, I've, you know, I've been to Vegas a few times in the last couple of years. I just, for some reason, never, I don't know, I just I just thought it was another construction site. I wasn't paying attention to it. And so when I saw the first videos of that thing, I thought, I thought it was CGI.

Like, I thought it was, oh, this is a fake rendering.

And then it took me like 4 hours or whatever to realize that people were serious, that this thing actually exists.

And I've sort of been in exactly to your point.

I've been in a state of shock ever since that we actually built anything like that. I think it's fantastic.

I mean, look, it's the Pinky Doll of cathedrals.

I was about to say, give me 2 seconds. Pinky Doll on the orb in the middle of Vegas, the entire city transfixed. Nothing happens. Everyone's just frozen. Just picture it.

It does make sense. It does make sense that when we finally built our version of the cathedral, it was right in the heart of Las Vegas. Right. And so, and then, you know, the images that they're projecting on there already are just, you know, I've just like peeped.

They're so funny.

Right. Like the eye.

At the end of the golf course, just staring at you as you go into the back nine.

It's so— I am, I am astonished. And then, by the way, we don't know how to build this. Like, I actually technologically did not know that it was possible to have a screen like screen that size. I had no idea, right?

Like, like, I just physically, in terms of physics, I didn't know that was possible.

Put it this way, Medici, Medici in power, you offer them, do you want the orb or do you want the Duomo? They're gonna take 10 out of 10, they're gonna take the orb. Of course. I mean, what, like, it's like an amazing thing to be able to have. You could put, you could put a Michelangelo on the orb. You could, you could rotate the greatest works of art on the orb.

You could. And of course, this means, of course, we can't have civilization.

We cannot just have one orb.

Right.

We must have thousands.

We need an orb distribution in the news.

Maybe if I ever run for president, that's going to be my platform, is an orb for every city.

An orb in every plot.

You know, if Eli Broad was alive right now, he would want an orb in Los Angeles. The people who still build things for cities, they would want to be building orbs.

It's phenomenal. And look, the fact that this happened in Las Vegas and not Dubai, Go us!

We were talking about the return to medieval culture, um, and we were also talking about Zuck versus Elon. It feels like, as an example, it feels like Zuck's PR has just been received way better, uh, recently as he's become way more alpha. It feels like peak, you know, 2016 to 2020 was kind of like peak shrill culture where the— there was real risk in being, uh, just much more alpha, much more confident, much more like stern and brazen and bold. And it feels like there's something happening in the culture now where everything is just moving more alpha. Martin Shkreli is one of the main people of EAC, and that's okay in a way where that might have been inconceivable a few years ago. How do we make sense of what's— to the extent that you agree with the culture being more alpha, how do we make sense of that?

Well, let's see. I think you could make a couple arguments. Let's see if I can phrase this the right way. You can make like an argument that follows sort of like the you know. Let's put it.

I'll start with the right-wing argument.

Like the right-wing argument would be that basically society has feminized over time, right?

So society for you know for obviously a lot of people had a lot of problems with this, but society was very masculine, very very patriarchal for a long time, and then you know has sort of feminized over the last especially fifty years. And you just see that numerically, like in the rise of women in the workplace and you know educational testing results, and and and you know many look many many people on the right have been written many books about this. You know that have been Some well received, some horribly received. But that's been a big argument on the right.

You know, the left, you know, has, has, you know, I think generally, you know, kind of not had a lot of patience for those arguments.

And it's kind of, you know, it kind of goes back and forth between saying that it either isn't happening or that it is happening and it's really good. You know, but, but generally is, is, is kind of pushing, pushing hard in that direction. And, you know, just observationally, whenever there's like a resumption of masculinity or sort of this right-wing idea of masculinity, the left gets, you know, pretty upset, pretty angry. about it.

So there's been this kind of status quo.

This has been kind of core to the political dynamic, social dynamic in the last 50 years or so. Then look, the sort of observation that you could make, and I don't even know if I really believe this, but the observation you could make is if you're going to feminize the society broadly and you're going to make it increasingly difficult for what you might describe as sort of classical patriarchal or masculine behaviours and modes of being, that what you're going to get the other side is not— what you're going to get on the other side of that is not the end of masculinity. What you're going to get the other side of that is actually a return, but of a return of the most cartoonish possible version.

Right. And so, Andrew Tate. What? Yeah.

Andrew Tate.

Yeah. You're going to get Andrew Tate. Like, you're literally going to get Andrew Tate. Like, you're going to get— or let's say cartoonish, maybe it sounds pejorative. You're going to get the most extreme, overt sort of stylized, forceful, relentless, aggro, direct, blunt, in some cases proletarian forms that you can possibly imagine.

You're going to get an extreme reaction. If you don't think that the old forms of masculinity or patriarchy were good, the version you're going to get now are going to be so much worse that you're just going to not even believe how bad they are or how extreme they are.

Right. And so, and so in politics, in politics, that's a Donald Trump. Right. And sort of self-help, that's an Andrew Tate.

You know, that's a, you know, we, you know, you could, you could make a list.

Right. And yeah.

And then, you know, there's obviously this is a big existing social cultural debate as to the implications of that and so forth. But like that, you know, there is some logic to kind of that sequence of events.

And then, look, you know, and this again, this is why I think what I said about fighting at the conference I was at got a very kind of hostile reaction.

Right.

Which is like, Yeah, people should be engaging in interpersonal violence. What's the most extreme possible form of that?

I mean, well, the most extreme possible form is probably guns, but short of guns, the most extreme form is the original form of interpersonal violence, which was pankration, a combination of wrestling and boxing, which is UFC, which is MMA.

So it's sort of like, of course, if you're not going to play football anymore, of course what's going to come out the other side is full-throttle combat. And so, you know, maybe it's just, maybe it's whatever.

It's the other side of kind of that gender, you know, distribution that is going to kind of reassert itself from the extreme.

And, or at least that, like, it seems to me that this is happening.

We could, you know, people can debate whether it's good or bad. It does seem pretty clear that it is happening.

Can I, can I tie to another meme from the last week? I'm really trying to weave them all together here. Um, the King Philippe tailoring thread, 30 million views on Twitter. Uh, Dye Workwear is by no means right-wing. Like, he, all he does is he just takes potshots at, at kind of right-wing folks. But the fact that 30 million people read an esoteric thread about specifics of tailoring and how suit cuts are is a revealed preference of what society is kind of looking for. It's like the former version of a masculine form rather than the skinny jeans. And so I think it's kind of weaving its way into the Twitterverse, right?

Well, and if you look at, you know, I don't know how much he talked about this, but they're actually right. The thing that happened in men's fashion sort of starting 15 years ago was it started looking a lot more boyish, right?

Like literally boyish, and that they shrunk everything, right? So like the example of this you can see so clearly is what they did to James Bond suits, right?

Um, did he do the— did the Dye Workwear guy do the comparison of the Daniel Craig suits?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. I mean, look at Connery versus Craig, right?

Exactly, exactly. And so if you—

it's actually funny if you watch, because like, you know, obviously in our culture, like James Bond is like the, you know, sort of man's kind of style icon for a long time, or one of the big ones. And it's like, yeah, Connery-era Bond was like, if you look at his tailoring now, It just looks like absolutely timeless. It looks like Cary Grant. Pierce Brosnan actually had a very similar style of tailoring at the time.

And then Daniel Craig in Casino Royale, I think, was still pretty classically.

But the Craig movies after Casino Royale, his clothes literally got shorter and shorter and shorter, like his sleeves crept further and further up his arms.

His jackets got tighter and tighter. His legs got, you know, until, you know, literally by, you know, by the last couple of movies, it looked like he was wearing Pee-wee Herman suits.

Right.

And it's just like, right. And it's just like, really? Right. Like, is that really like James Bond? Right. And so, yeah, exactly.

And so, yeah, exactly to your point, like there's something primal, you know, that you can even see in that where it's just like, okay, like that, that clear— that clearly was a taking away, right, a certain degree of masculinity that was being done kind of very consciously in the fashion industry. And, you know, they look, they talked about it. This is something that they're very open about. And so, yeah, all of a sudden you see the snapback. I always think on these topics, I always think there's a There's a great quote from Horace who says, you can drive nature out with a pitchfork, but she'll eventually find her way back in. And maybe it's, you know, you can drive proper men's tailoring out with a pitchfork, and eventually the sleeves will return to their proper length.

So some people listen to this conversation and say, hey, you guys are talking about esoteric Twitter stuff. Twitter is just a bubble. Twitter is not the real world. It's just where you guys go to sound smart. Why is that cope? Why is it incorrect to think that Twitter's influence is just very small to the people that are on it?

Because CNN anchors will be delivering news in pinky doll style in about 4 or 5 months, and we'll know that Twitter was just upstream of it. That's why. I'm half serious with that claim.

News, news, yum yum.

Yeah, but here's an interesting thing about Twitter for the haters out there.

NPCs.

All my haters and losers.

Yeah.

By the way, this will finally— this will be great, actually. It'll finally make that CNN+ streaming service work.

I guess.

We found the thing people will pay for.

The NPC stuff has existed for a while. It was on TikTok, right? It was a whole subculture. What made it go mainstream? It was when it went viral on Twitter and the intellectual elite started paying attention on Twitter. So if it does, it's not on Twitter, it doesn't exist. Like, it's like as soon as it's on Twitter and people are talking about it on Twitter, now it exists.

Yeah. Well, look, this is why the fights about Twitter are so intense and the fights on Twitter are so intense. This is what I believe, which is just like Twitter, you know, at some point in the last decade, Twitter became like the wellspring of culture. It's like Twitter became the wellspring of elite culture for sure.

And the easiest way to track that is if you're, you know, if you're a news obsessive the way I am or something, like all you need to do basically is just like read Twitter And then like just watch the headlines that show up in newspapers and, you know, news magazines and on cable news, you know, in the days and weeks that follow. And it's just, it's almost always now whatever is on TV or in the newspaper is something that was on Twitter yesterday or last week or a month ago.

By the way, same thing is true of new books. By the way, movies, like I haven't seen it yet, but apparently the new Barbie apparently is like a transcript of a Twitter conversation, right? Like they just like Hollywood just like write scripts based on like Twitter fights. Right? Like they call each other fascist, like all kinds of you know it's all it's all the stuff right?

And so yeah, Twitter Twitter is the Twitter is the is is is the wellspring of elite culture, and you know it is where the people who shape elite opinion, you know it's where they live, it's where they exist, it's it's where they publish their work, it's you publicize their work, it's where they you know get feedback, it's where they fight, and then and then every every every other form of elite media culture, you know kind of you know radiates out from that. And, and then, you know, and then there's this bigger question between like elite culture and popular culture and like, you know, whatever, are the elites totally in charge? But like, to the extent that the elites are in charge, I think there's no question it's all driven off of Twitter now.

But even, even Barbie is a great example of what a coup to, to basically get a meme next to the, you know, everyone's Oppenheimer is the movie that everyone is thinking about all year from an elite standpoint. And then for Barbie to have that kind of juxtaposed meme and then Barbeheimer and are you going to go to both of the movies? Just think about how esoteric that is. And it's become a thing, right? The average person was never thinking of, oh, I'm going to go do a double feature of Barbie and Oppenheimer. I saw a clip 2 days ago where they asked Tom Cruise, which one are you going to see? And then he's totally in on it saying, I'm going to go watch both. No one goes and watches 2 movies at a time. But the fact that they were able to do that, I'm sure that's going to have a material impact on Barbie's box office stuff. I mean, Tom Cruise is basically grumpy. He got kicked out of IMAX because of Oppenheimer. For Mission Impossible. And it's all because of Upstream being, you know, on Twitter.

Um, gearing towards closing here, uh, Mark, I want you to help us resolve this debate we've been having. You know, Alana came on, uh, this podcast and said, you know, left and right isn't the right words to talk about the sort of central conflict of our time. And, and Dan and others posited that, um, the right divide is institutionalist versus anti-institutionalist. And I've claimed that that is, uh, It's a little tautological that the anti-institutionalists are only anti because they're not in charge. If they were in charge, they would be happy with it. And, um, and Dan sees it differently. Dan, how would you edit that, that claim? And then let's have Mark respond.

Well, put, put like the, the previous presidential administration, they, they were in charge. Were they able to do anything? Were they able to get like, force people to go do anything?

No.

Right.

So like, to me, that's, it's, it's the institution, even if you're in charge, like you actually have to kind of full-scale control of the whole thing to actually get anything done. I don't know. So my view is you either replace the institutions or build new institutions. That's the Silicon Valley version. Or you think somehow that the existing institutions can be fixed or reformed, kind of actually to Marc's point about San Francisco before.

Yeah. The question is, if it's not left and right and if it's not institutionalists versus anti-institutionalists, what is the central— how do we make sense of the different camps?

Yeah. So it's a difficult time. It's a difficult time to think about this, I think, in practical terms because the world we live in, just in terms of the structure of the world we live in, we live in FDR's— the system of government we have now is FDR's system of government. It's one of these things.

If you took a time traveller, if you took any president from the 19th century and brought him to today, he would just be completely horrified at the degree to which the federal government had become orders of magnitude larger than anything he had ever expected or seen. The Founding Fathers would have been horrified. But, you know, we implemented that in the 1930s in the New Deal and World War II, and we've never looked back.

So, and actually, it's funny if you read—

I was trying to do this a while ago. I was trying to trace the history of like left versus right in the US. And you start to— like, the arguments make sense basically back to the 1920s, but then you get back to the 1910s and they no longer really make sense in the way that we understand them because they were having these fights about like gold and silver, right? That like that they were like very intense over that we don't really have any equivalent fights on today. And they had different coalitions of labour and farming fighting each other or cooperating.

And so I think there's a big time and place structural component to this.

Yeah. So we live under the FDR administration, basically.

In theory, somebody—

I forget who was it— somebody said the Constitution says we have 3 branches of government: judicial, legislative, and executive. Our version of it is, what is it? Is it donors, lobbyists, and the press?

Right. To your point, Dan, deep state— here's another one. Deep state was a pretty— the theory of the deep state was not actually a very partisan concept before 2016.

It was a concept that people who kind of structurally studied government said there's sort of this permanent bureaucratic class. And deep state was one of the terms he used to apply to it. And then it became this partisan kind of argument when Trump started using it.

I don't know.

It's all so kind of wrapped up with our time and place that I think it's hard to have a single answer to it.

Most people on the American right, I think, still think that they can someday retake control of the institutions.

So I guess maybe we could agree on— I think most people on the right in the US probably still think that they can take the institutions back. Which means that the right-wing position is not necessarily the new institutional position.

I mean, look, in the 1930s, the new institutional position was the FDR position.

It was the left-wing position.

I have no coherent response to this. Elana is very smart. I do think one of the big practical questions is, if you don't like how an institution is operating today, in our society, can it be changed?

Is reform actually possible?

Maybe ultimately that's the dividing point.

Maybe it's between the people who believe that institutions can be reformed in whatever direction they want it to be in versus people who just simply think that that's just not going to happen and that therefore the only thing to do is to build new ones.

That's my— I would say a good summary of my position is I just don't think reform is a useful use of time in most cases. How about that? I should get more specificity on which which institutions are worth reforming versus replacing?

Well, look, it's, you know, this is the principal-agent, right?

This is, you know, this is the managerial topic, the Burnham stuff, principal-agent problems, which is institutions get big enough and entrenched enough, they get run on behalf of the people in the institutions.

Right.

And not, you know, the putative mission does not matter nearly as much. Right. As serving the needs of the managerial class that runs the institution. So, yeah, I mean, that's where I am.

Like, to be clear, I think institutional reform is impossible.

Right. It may have been possible in the past, I think it's impossible now. I don't even know if that maps to a political orientation though.

Okay, so one thing we actually maybe do disagree about, and speaking of bastardized Christianity and tech people cooking up new religions, our new messiah-in-waiting, Bryan Johnson, former founder of Braintree. His metabolism is so slow that apparently his poop has to be sucked out of him. He actually tweeted that. I'm just quoting his tweets. He has this enormous UV skincare routine. He looks like an android. Anyhow, I think everyone knows this person is. I happen to think that life extension is potentially, in fact, ironically, the great filter. If we actually ever get to the point that life extends beyond a certain point, or we actually go immortal, I think it'll be the end of human civilization. Why do I think that? Because the deep sort of yawning despair that we feel at the thought of death, right? Erik Becker wrote about this, Ernst Becker wrote about this in The Denial of Death. Every society attempts to deny death in various ways, and we do that via immortality projects. And what he means by that is by channeling our energies either into children, people, or institutions or cultures beyond ourselves. That's how we slake the thirst or contain the fear of death. In some sense, that's the engine of civilization. If we remove that engine of civilization, what we end up doing is just wallowing in solipsistic hedonism, which might be the case with our little friend over here with the 96-degree body temperature. So that's my claim, but I know, Marc, you think otherwise there.

So, look, the technologist in me basically says the whole point of technology and science and rationality and the scientific method in the Enlightenment is to improve human welfare.

And based on that, we should be doing a lot more to try to understand ways to make people healthier. And that includes death. People should be living healthier lives and they should be living longer and they should be living healthier while they live longer. And, you know, as, you know, speaking, you know, somewhat as an individual, but also look for, you know, for the people I care about. Like, I think that's, that's incredible. What was it? I think it was Lincoln who said that, you know, it's age, age, age is what is it that he said that he called the silent cannon, right? Like, it's, it's just like, you know, as you get older, you start to experience this, which is like, you just start to know people, they just start like dying.

Right.

And so it's like, wow, like if we could apply technology, uh, to have like, you know, this horrible thing, like not happen, all these people we love, like how, how could it possibly be wrong to do that?

But the, I don't know, culturalist in me or something thinks, kind of to the point you made, I would argue maybe a different point than you made with denial of death.

I would argue more it's the science advances one funeral at a time kind of thing, which is—

Right.

There does seem to be something that happens when people get older, their thinking gets more rigid. And so when paradigm shifts happen, they generally don't happen because an older generation changes their mind. They generally happen because a younger generation comes along and Basically, it waits out the old generation and then implements the new paradigm. And so in a world in which you had one generation of people who lived to be 1,000, and by the way, compound wealth and resources.

So picture this.

Picture the billionaire philanthropist you think is the most evil, whoever you think that is, and then picture them living for another 1,000 years and compounding wealth that entire time. And implementing their crazy political program for the next 1,000 years. No matter where you are on the political spectrum, whoever you think is the worst philanthropist, that sounds freaking awful. So I think there is something to object to in the sense of culture stalling out, ideas stalling out, development stalling out, bad ideas, bad people perpetuating for much longer.

Just to cite a random example, imagine Nancy Pelosi as Speaker of the House for 1,000 years.

For 1,000 years and growing in political power. Or Newt Gingrich, or take your pick, whoever it is. Right.

Aggregating power.

Lyndon Johnson.

Aggregating power for 1,000 years. Imagine the favor bank as a politician that you build up if you're in that position for 1,000 years.

There's a reason these people never let go of those offices.

There's a reason they all have to be carried out because there is so much power associated with that that they'd rather do the A instead of the B. Even when they clearly could.

So, yeah, that's exactly right.

Now, you could apply another argument, which basically is, look, if people literally lived for 1,000 years, would they actually be satisfied just being basically the equivalent of a 60-year-old or an 80-year-old for 1,000 years, or would they actually develop a new way of living?

Right.

So at least I would like to think, if I knew I was going to live for 1,000 years, I like to think that I would do is every 20 or 30 years, I would basically reboot myself, and I would reboot myself intellectually. And I would, you know, basically I would do, stop whatever I'm doing. I would go learn a new field, right? And then I would spend the next 30 years doing physics and then I would stop and reboot myself and spend the next 30 years doing art and then stop, reboot myself, spend the next 30 years doing music. And I would have time, right, for there to actually be many versions of myself.

And because I, right, because I know, because I'm no longer afraid of death, I know that I have time to fully explore everything.

And so I don't get so dug in, you know, to a single, you know, a single train of thought and a single, you know, kind of idea of my own legacy.

Maybe.

That requires a leap of a change of human nature, which of course is always scary.

Let me just finally say on Bryan, look, he's not only putting his money where his mouth is, he's putting his body where his mouth is. Scientists 100 years ago experimented on themselves.

Jonas Salk.

Yeah, Jonas Salk injected himself and his family with a vaccine. Talk about skin in the game.

He is devoting himself to this project in a very fundamental, primal biological way.

I I guess I'll put it this way, almost regardless of what you think about the content of his agenda, how he's doing it is very deeply honorable, I think, and actually quite inspiring.

Yeah, that's an inspiring note to end on. Mark, thank you so much for coming on Moment of Zen.

Good. Awesome. Great to see you guys.

Upstream with Erik Torenberg is a show from Turpentine. The podcast network behind Moment of Zen and Cognitive Revolution. If you like the episode, please leave a review in the Apple Store.