0:00:00 - 0:00:23 So, um, a viewer asked me to watch this Tucker Carlson, Joe Rogan interview and give some thoughts on it. So this is just part, one of what will probably turn out to be a multipart series. I can't do the, let's watch a clip and then comment because one that's gonna produce too much of a, of a video and 0:00:22 - 0:00:44 I know people don't have time for that and two, I don't have time for that. So I may give you some thoughts while I'm checking on my pigs and some rodent traps. I have set, you can hear the pigs so they're quite happy and give them a little snacky snack. Um, ok, so in the, the first part of the video 0:00:43 - 0:01:08 , I'm not gonna comment on, that's Rogan and Carlson talking about UFO S and things. Um But the first part I want to say something about is when they get into what, what will be the effect of artificial intelligence over time. And it sounds like they're both of the opinion that that will be a net negative 0:01:07 - 0:01:32 . Um, um Carlson Tucker Carlson raises the question of why we shouldn't just go out and quote unquote bomb, the data centers, if we know that it's gonna lead to this poor outcome. Uh putting it, putting it lightly because it, you know, could include the destruction of humanity. And if it's this existential 0:01:31 - 0:01:55 threat, why don't we just do something about it? Interestingly, within just a couple of minutes, the conversation seesaws into a dis, discuss a discussion of the use of the atomic bomb on Japan in World War two. And here's why that's super fascinating to me. So Tucker says that any use of atomic weapons 0:01:55 - 0:02:24 is, is quote unquote, pure evil and anyone who supports that is pure evil. Well, how can you on the one hand say we should be bombing data centers or suggesting that as something somebody should think about. And then on the other say that using the Yukon Japan was a bad idea. You see, as always or almost 0:02:24 - 0:02:47 always the problem here is not the actual problem. The apparent problem is not the actual problem. So first let's talk about Japan to clear up that boondoggle, which should not be a boondoggle. There's a whole ton of discussion about what did Truman know? When did he know it, et cetera, et cetera. Here's 0:02:46 - 0:03:14 the facts that matter. Japan was warned extensively before the first bomb was dropped. Um Even the citizens were warned the US dropped an enormous number of leaflets on Hiroshima and Nagasaki warning them that this was going to happen and telling them to flee the city. Of course, they didn't, the government 0:03:14 - 0:03:34 didn't respond. They could have surrendered. They didn't, they dropped the bomb. They waited three days and they warned there was going to be another one. They could have dropped both of them on the same day. They didn't, they waited three days to drop the second bomb. So then it wasn't the, the case 0:03:33 - 0:04:01 that Japan immediately surrendered. They delayed again, I believe it was for six days. So we didn't drop another bomb on them. I don't think we had one but they still waited days to surrender. That was a choice by the Japanese and I, I have never heard any argument that's relevant outside of these facts 0:04:00 - 0:04:23 . It's, it's a, I don't know, mixing metaphors. It's rear view window, rearview mirror, quarterbacking. It's absurd. Of course, those bombs should have been dropped and if I were in the position to make the decision, I'd make it in a heartbeat today. I wouldn't even have to think about it. And I'd have 0:04:23 - 0:04:48 not a speck of guilt on my conscience. The Japanese in World War Two were maniacs. They were savage maniacs who murdered and maimed millions. They committed greater atrocities than Hitler, but they get a free pass because they became our allies after that and forgive and forget their nation was rebuilt 0:04:48 - 0:00:00 and it's all, it's all good. Although I don't think the Chinese have forgiven or forgotten because they were the victims of a whole lot of those atrocities and time will tell whether they get their comeuppance, but it's gonna be a sins of the fathers deal because obviously all those people are dead. 0:00:00 - 0:05:31 So there's that ok. Now, why can't people who are apparently intelligent and trying to do good things with their lives? Like Tucker Carlson? Why can't they see that? Why can't they see the need for that sort of action? Well, Joe Rogan pushed on him a little about the A bomb and he said, well, all the 0:05:31 - 0:05:53 efforts should have been to prevent that from happening in the first place, prevent that from being uh needful in the first place. That's great. If you live in a world where people are rational and that they'll, they'll, they'll yield to reasoning. And ironically is, is this very situation the people 0:05:52 - 0:06:14 who are on the fence or on the wrong side of the fence with this, with this question of the A bomb in Japan as this demonstrates, not all people are capable of the level of reasoning required to cope with all circumstances, to come up with the best answer to all questions. So if Tucker can't understand 0:06:14 - 0:06:37 this, he is providing evidence for its very need. Do, do you get that that connection there? So Joe Rogan pushes back on him. Tucker says, no, well, all effort should have been spent in preventing it. Ok. And what if those failed because they were and they failed? No one wanted. Uh maybe some bankers 0:06:37 - 0:06:57 , but almost no one wanted World War Two to happen. And it happened anyway. So the, the, the effort was already expended to prevent that. It didn't work. Everything that could have been done to get the Japanese to surrender before that was done. It didn't work. And I'm tired of hearing people say, oh 0:06:57 - 0:07:20 , well, if they had just given them two more weeks, two more months, two more years, the Japanese would have surrendered. They didn't need to do this. You don't have that proof. 12, it's completely irrelevant. The need was already there. When people put themselves in a place where they're doing that 0:07:20 - 0:07:48 much harm, it is absolutely justified to take them out by whatever means necessary. So, back to the data centers, why should we not go around bombing data centers? Tucker Carlson? Well, because the question is who can make that decision? Who can make that decision? Now, I think that there are people 0:07:48 - 0:08:07 , I think there are very few, but I think there are people in this world who have vastly more wisdom than everyone else. I think if you put everybody on a distribution of wisdom, it's pero distributed. I think that there's plenty of evidence to support that. And what that means is if you pick somebody 0:08:06 - 0:08:26 from the right tail, they'll make better decisions than anyone else. That's, that's, that's on the left of them on that distribution, you could look up the preto distribution if you're not familiar with what I'm talking about. I'm not gonna spend the time to talk about it right now. But this has been 0:08:25 - 0:08:48 an, an inescapable problem for humanity since the dawn of time, which is how do people who lack wisdom suddenly get enough wisdom to recognize the people who have more than them? This is a huge problem. Now, let me ask you, do you think that's a bigger or smaller problem today than it has been historically 0:08:47 - 0:09:13 ? If you look at the civil war, if you look at the revolutionary war backing up even more, what percent of people. So we have this, we have this image from movies that 100% of the population had a strong opinion on these issues and that the opinion was, was almost completely in one direction we like 0:09:13 - 0:09:41 to think of, of just your neighbor Bob or some random person being an instrumental um influence in things like the revolutionary war. That's not how it ever works. It's not how it ever worked. It's not how it ever will work. The revolutionary war happened because a very small percent of people decided 0:09:40 - 0:10:03 that they would risk their lives and their fortunes on that bed and they stood up and they said I'm gonna take a public stand and I'm gonna dedicate everything I have in my life, including my life itself for this cause. And then a whole bunch of normal people at various levels of influence and various 0:10:03 - 0:10:30 levels of commitment supported them at least vacuously, something like 2 to 4% of the population is what made the revolutionary war happen. There were a lot of people who just rode along the coattails of those folks. But by and large, a whole lot of people were either ambivalent or against it. I'm not 0:10:29 - 0:10:53 saying 50% of people are strongly against it. I think it was also a small percentage but normal people don't do stuff like that ever at best. They join the bandwagon late in the party because it's obviously better for them in the short term. They don't lay the groundwork. They're not on the early side 0:10:53 - 0:11:15 of things. They're not the ones paying the price. They just jump on the bandwagon when it's, when it's late and obvious that that's what's in their short term best interest. So those things still happen today in the same exact ways because that's human nature and you can't break it. What's the difference 0:11:14 - 0:11:42 today in the revolutionary war period? Who had the influence? Who was George Washington, who was Ben Franklin, who was Thomas Jefferson, who was James Madison. We could go down the list here. If you look at those men, they were immensely successful men who knew other, immensely successful men, DC. Now 0:11:42 - 0:12:10 , what's the difference today? How well do you think wisdom correlated to success in 1776? And how disconnected do you think those two things are today? Do you think it's the same. It's not, it's very, very different. Why? Because um if you're Jeff Bezos or Mark Zuckerberg, you're s, you're a sharp cookie 0:12:09 - 0:12:29 . You are, you're smart. But that's not actually what differentiates you from other people because there are a whole ton of people who are, at least as smart as you are like a million people. No, no, but there are many people, at least as smart as those folks who are not nearly as wealthy as they are 0:12:28 - 0:12:53 or wealthy at all. The differentiation is in two things. One is the continued leveraging of everything they have so far betting on something bigger in the future, that's actually irrational, not rational. Um You can read for example, Mark Zuckerberg's story, but Jeff Bezos did the same exact thing. They 0:12:53 - 0:13:11 put it all on the line again and again and again, at some point, I actually had these inflection points mapped out. I was teaching a class on entrepreneurship and I was trying to squash this idea that most rich people don't deserve what they have. And so we did a poll and I walked through the history 0:13:11 - 0:13:30 of Amazon and I asked them if they were Jeff Bezos, would you sell at this point? Not knowing what would happen in the future? Just betting on the, the uniform probability which leans heavily towards failure. Would you bet it all again? And as we walked through those time hacks, more and more hands went 0:13:30 - 0:13:52 down and no one in the class was left like three steps into the process before he was ever a gazillionaire. And so that is a very, very unusual property to have in a person where you have what it takes to get some money, but you're also so irrational that you'll continue to bet it again and again, something 0:13:52 - 0:14:10 similar happened with Zuckerberg and people like Peter Thiel have commented, he was an early investor for Facebook and famous for other things and had a lot of money already. And he commented on how shocked he was that Mark Zuckerberg refused to sell when he had the opportunity to much earlier and it 0:14:10 - 0:14:30 ended up working in his favor. But most people who decide that way, lose it all and that happens all the time. And usually if they're inclined towards that, they'll lose it all far earlier. So you'll never even hear, hear of them. So anyway, the thing that, that really differentiates them though, other 0:14:29 - 0:14:57 than essentially recklessness, uh uh overwhelming overconfidence, what what else differentiates them is uh luck. It's luck because in the world today, um if things are so complex that that more and more situations cannot be planned ahead of time in an optimal way, it's, it's that much more difficult 0:14:56 - 0:15:19 to make a plan that ends up solving the equation from the beginning and getting it right. It's just too complicated to figure out. So a bunch of people have to try and almost all of them will fail. And some people get through the cracks. Right. It's like sperm, getting to an egg and, uh, a, a, at some 0:15:18 - 0:15:45 point you have to just look at it and, and roll the dice. And it's a thing of luck. Was this a factor in historic times? Absolutely. But it was an enormously smaller factor. What I'm trying to say is that wisdom and success were much more correlated historically than they are today. And the reason for 0:15:45 - 0:16:13 this is basically because our, our economic and other systems have grown so complex, so far away from the land. Basically, you reap what you sow God's law in its simplest forms. It's drifted so far from justice that the people who end up in those positions are not more likely to have good ideas than 0:16:12 - 0:16:36 , than I'm not gonna say you or me. But the set of people who may in fact be much wiser than them. Um Someone once asked me referring to a story in the book of Mormon about a guy named King Benjamin. They said, well, why, why don't we have more Almas and more King Benjamins today, Alma was a holy man 0:16:35 - 0:00:00 , a prophet king. Benjamin was a king who's also a righteous man. And um his, his claim to fame, one of them was that even though he was a king, he didn't charge anyone any taxes. He worked his own land with his own hands. Alma's claim to fame was that he, he started a church that was quite success, 0:00:00 - 0:17:18 successful in convincing people to become better people. And was also pretty big on the idea of not charging money, not accepting money for preaching the gospel. Well, in their time, which overlapped, it was the same time in their time, they lived in a system where you didn't have to pay taxes, right 0:17:17 - 0:17:41 . You got to keep 100% of what you earned. And because of the, the justice of the laws, it was possible for a person to succeed based on what they produce with their hands and have surplus sufficient to preach the gospel part time, which is what they did. Uh Alma priests were only preached one day a 0:17:41 - 0:18:02 week and actually, it was only part of the day, one day a week. Everyone set aside their labor and went and did this and King Benjamin wasn't exactly on the circuit either. Uh It was a, it was a landmark end of his life experience when he asked everyone to gather at his place, I guess. And he built this 0:18:01 - 0:18:19 tower and preached to everyone. This wasn't a normal event because guess what, when you're farming full time, you don't have time to do that. You don't have time to go and preach full time, you can't do it right. And Alma showed this himself when he had to quit his full time job to go preach full time 0:18:19 - 0:18:38 because you can't do that at the same time. So why am I bringing this up the answer to the question? Why aren't there more Almas and King Benjamin's one? Because you need those guys in order to have a system that produces more of those guys. The story from the book of Mormon, that's key about this is 0:18:37 - 0:18:59 uh King Benjamin's father Mosiah. And no one talks about that. Mosiah. They all talk about his son who was also named Mosiah. But it was that Mosiah who generated the system that made King Benjamin possible. And no one talks about him. So it's good to look up. But the other thing is that we live in a 0:18:59 - 0:19:24 society so distant from the laws of justice, you reap what you sow in a nutshell that if we had an Alma or we had a King Benjamin, you can bet your butt that that guy would not be the king and that guy would not be the head of the church because they're corrupt. The systems are corrupt. And why are the 0:19:24 - 0:19:41 systems corrupt? Because the people believe the lie that we're all the same. If an Alma came along, people would squash him and say, you know, you're just like everybody else. Why do you think you're special? If a king Benjamin came along, the people would overthrow him and say, we shouldn't have a king 0:19:40 - 0:19:59 . We're all the same. We're all, we could all be king. We're all as virtuous as you who do you think you are? And that's the problem if George Washington came along today, or Thomas Jefferson and you don't even have to speculate on this, on how people would react because they're tearing their statues 0:19:58 - 0:20:22 down people. What do you think folks would do to a modern Thomas Jefferson? Perhaps the best man who ever lived in the United States? Definitely in the top 10 of those we know of. Right? Can't argue it did more good for more people than anyone else ever born in the United States. Top 10 at least. And 0:20:22 - 0:20:50 they're tearing down his statues. So does this make sense? It's the Thomas Jeffersons who should decide whether data s centers should stand or fall? It's the Thomas Jeffersons who should decide whether or not to drop the bomb. The George Washington's the James Madisons, not the Tom, your neighbor Tom 0:20:50 - 0:21:13 or you, you know random guy, Tom Smith. Let's just say if there's a Tom Smith out there, I'm sorry, you know John Doe, John Doe doesn't get a vote. Sorry. Who cares what he thinks? There's no evidence in his life that he has any idea what he's talking about. What about Elon Musk or Bill Gates? No. Sorry 0:21:12 - 0:21:36 . Now Musk is a Musk is a sort of a, an odd one out. Let's set him aside for another conversation, but a Bill Gates. No, I'm sorry, I'm sorry. There's nothing in that guy's life that suggests that he is more wise. Than many other people. You, you probably know someone in your life that's more wise than 0:21:36 - 0:21:57 Bill Gates. He sh he shouldn't be making the co the decisions even though he has the money. That's not the same as merit. There's overlap, but it's not the same. All right. That ended up being way longer than I intended. Interestingly, Tucker says that we shouldn't be doing things like dropping bombs 0:21:57 - 0:22:18 on people a bombs because we ought to be humble. And he makes this hilarious point that I agree with. He says, how can any of us think that we're anything special when we can't even make our wives happy? It's true. And he says at, at, at, at root, we all have to admit that we're, we're pretty much powerless 0:22:17 - 0:22:43 . It's true. And this is, this is such an important point. How do you bridge the gap between admitting that humanity has fallen and admitting that sometimes some people have to do incredible things or else we're all gonna die. The, the maintenance of the human species requires that some people be extraordinary 0:22:42 - 0:23:17 on a regular basis. Well, every person has to act up to the light they see there's two parts to this and it's absolutely critical to understand. The first is you do the best that, you know, all the time that's called repentance. But a piece of that is learning the limits of your own uh capability and 0:23:17 - 0:23:43 humility is not just about reducing the apparent value of things. So the most common interpretation of humility is that we need to think less of ourselves sometimes. And I'd say even most times that is absolutely what we need to do. But in some cases, humility also requires us to think more of each other 0:23:42 - 0:00:00 , including ourselves. The example I've used many times is a true story one day uh at a place I used to live, we had this, this street out front and it had this old fashioned huge drop off ditch on the side of the road for water channeling. I guess it's a flood area and that's how they deal with it. 0:00:00 - 0:24:24 So people who didn't know any better, they'd come down our street and try to do a U turn. And on a regular basis, somebody would, would drive into the ditch and one of their tires would go or, or two of their tires would go into this little gutter and, uh, they'd have to call, call tow truck, whatever 0:24:24 - 0:24:42 . So one day I think it was a Saturday, I saw someone u-turn and their tire went in the ditch. And I said to my wife, I'm gonna go help this person. She said, what are you gonna do? I said, I don't know, but I'm gonna try. So I brought a, a big bar, a steel bar and I walked out there and I said, I'm 0:24:42 - 0:25:01 gonna try to lift up your car. So when you hear me shout, just gun it and see if you can drive off. And she said, ok, and so I went back there and I put the bar underneath the car and I dead lifted the back corner of her car and she drove off and it was fine. Right? It just so happened that a couple 0:25:01 - 0:25:20 of neighbors had come out to see what was going on. So I got some credibility there. That was pretty cool. But if you don't know that you can deadlift the back corner of a small car, you're not even gonna try, right? If you don't think that that's possible or useful, but sometimes people are needed to 0:25:20 - 0:25:42 do things like that and it might be some feet of strength, which is easy to understand and we can all wrap our heads around that. But what does an emotional deadlift look like? What does a deadlift of faith look like faith? Meaning a willingness to do what has abundant or sufficient evidence. There are 0:25:41 - 0:26:08 all these different versions of this, you know, uh starting a business might be a deadlift, taking good care of your kids in this modern crazy world we live in is absolutely a deadlift. Deciding whether or not to drop bombs on a foreign uh enemy is a deadlift. And part of humility is, is seeing what 0:26:08 - 0:26:31 parts of you are exceptional and living up to that. And another part is seeing what parts of other people are exceptional and living up to that. What do I mean by that one, trying to copy their example. But two, recognizing in the areas that you're unwilling or unable to achieve what others do to go 0:26:31 - 0:26:55 with that, to submit to that, to go with it instead of against it, to not tear it down by lying about it and to not fight it to just get out of the way and let them do their exceptional thing. We don't need a nation of Thomas Jefferson's. But if one rolls around, we should all support him because to 0:26:55 - 0:27:24 do anything else is retarded. And unfortunately, like that guru guy, it's a famous meme but it really happened, said the problem with democracy is that the people are retarded, human nature is evil and most people are stupid and lazy and dishonest. And so this presents quite the problem. And until folks 0:27:23 - 0:27:45 start recognizing that there is a hierarchy of virtue, a hierarchy of people according to their virtue and living accordingly, none of this can get fixed, none of it. And so it's pointless to debate things like the atomic bomb or whether or not we should support A I until we can wrap our heads around 0:27:45 - 0:28:07 . The fact that people are vastly different from one another. And some of those things, many of those things are due to choice and some of those things are not and they can't be helped. So the way you can get the most out of that is to identify the things that are a choice and fix them and then also 0:28:06 - 0:28:15 identify the things that aren't a choice and live orient yourself. So that what's best for everyone is the outcome.