The Weird Little Guys of AI with Adam Becker

0:10 Hello listeners, Molly here. I've got something a little different for you this week. A little treat, I hope. It was a treat for me anyway. Last month, I was writing about 20th century race scientists. You know the guys we've been talking about. Guys who were using the language of science and technology, often lying about the state of that science, to try to justify their nasty little beliefs.

0:39 But I'm not just the little voice in your ear on your drive to work on Thursday mornings. I've got a life, too. Admittedly, most of the reading I do is for this show. But in my spare time last month, unrelated to the episodes I was working on, I happened to be reading a book that felt really familiar in that context. I was reading Adam Becker's book, More Everything Forever.

1:07 And as I was reading this book about the very modern tech freaks and computer weirdos who were scared of the computer programs they created, I kept thinking, damn, they're just trying to get their ducks in a row to do eugenics in the year 3000. They're reinventing colonialism from first principles so they can do it in space, but they don't even have rocket ships that won't explode yet.

1:31 I felt like I was getting a sneak peek at the kinds of guys who would be featured on this show if those guys managed to upload me into the computer and force me to keep writing this show 100 years from now.

1:43 You know?

1:45 It's a fun book, and I spent a lot of time hollering at it. But the book never yelled back. And then I realized, I've got a podcast. I can probably get the book to talk back to me if I ask nicely. That's one of the many incredible perks of this job that helps balance out the fact that it's very embarrassing to have to tell strangers that your job is podcaster. So I reached out to the author and he was kind enough to agree to come on and let me say all the things I'd been yelling at the book. And he also answered my questions about the world's longest Harry Potter fanfic. Adam Becker is an author, an astrophysicist, a podcaster, and it turns out, a very friendly guy. So this week, I talked to Adam about

2:39 his second book, More Everything Forever, and some of the weird little guys of AI. Adam, thank you so much for joining us.

2:50 Thanks for having me, Molly. This is going to be fun.

2:52 I'm... So excited. I'm so excited about this. Like I said, right before we started recording, I read your book in my spare time. You know, I read a lot of books for this show and they tend to be about weird little guys. But in my off time, you know, I read books with my husband in the evening and he had been pushing for, I guess, since this book came out, right? So a year or so, right? He bought it when it was new and he really loved it.

3:16 And he was like, I think you would like this. And I said, I really don't think so because I don't care about that. I'm not interested in that at all. And I finally relented and I let him read it to me. And the whole time, you know, I'm sort of talking back to the book. I'm yelling at the book. And then something magical happened. The book yelled back. The book is as angry and contemptuous about this as I am.

3:41 That's why I didn't want to read something about these guys because no one treats them with this kind of contempt.

3:48 Whoa. Whoa. Hold on. Can I swear on this podcast? Oh, yeah.

3:52 This is for grownups.

3:53 Okay. Awesome. Yeah. Well, they fucking suck. They suck. Yeah.

3:58 You know, I have my weird little guys. You have your these fucking guys.

4:01 Yes. These fucking people. It's the true name of the book in my heart is these fucking people.

4:09 I just, I finally had sort of validation for my unfounded belief that these are just little boys who misunderstood Star Trek, who are trying to reinvent slavery, colonialism, and eugenics through a sci-fi lens.

4:28 Yes, that's exactly what they are. Yeah.

4:31 And that, I just, I felt that in my heart, but it feels so good to know that a scientist thinks that as well.

4:39 Yeah, I mean, it's, I'm going to push back on you saying that, like, you felt it was an unjustified belief. I think that, yeah, okay, you didn't have the receipts, but like the reason you believed that is that in some ways it's obvious. Right.

4:57 I just refuse to seek out information about it because it sucks so bad.

5:02 Yes, well, it definitely does. God, the research process for this book was not fun.

5:12 Okay, I was going to save this for later, but maybe we should just up front for the listener, my number one question about the research process.

5:20 Okay.

5:21 Did you read all 660,000 words of Harry Potter fanfic?

5:34 I'm going to plead the fifth.

5:38 My second question, are there sex scenes in it?

5:45 Okay, so let me actually answer the first question. I read most of it.

5:51 That's a fair answer.

5:52 I did not read every single chapter, but I read most of the chapters.

5:57 I mean, you could yada, yada, yada through the Quidditch scenes, I'm sure.

6:00 Yes, sure. Are there sex scenes? I don't believe so, but there's definitely... Fascinating. Well, so here's the thing. Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality.

6:21 Sucks so bad.

6:22 It sucks so, so bad. It's such a bad, bad book. And I'm never getting that time back. And I have to live with that. One of the weird things about it is that it is, you know, comparable in length to the entire Harry Potter series. But it only covers... The time period that is covered in the first Harry Potter book. Harry Potter is 11 throughout the entire book.

6:53 So there are no sex scenes.

6:55 Sorry, I'm just sort of in stunned. I didn't look into this at all.

7:00 No, I mean, look, this is.

7:02 But I just kind of assumed it covered the whole canon.

7:05 No, no, it does not. Because it's so long. No, no, no. The primary antagonist is Professor Quirrell from the first book. Oh. Yes.

7:22 That's... I'm gonna have to sit with that.

7:25 Yep.

7:25 I'm gonna have to sit with it.

7:26 He wrote.

7:27 660,000 words, just about an 11-year-old Harry Potter being the protagonist of his whole worldview.

7:37 Yep, yep. Are there sex scenes? I don't believe so.

7:42 So that makes it the only fanfic ever written with no sex.

7:45 Well, on the other hand, you know, there's a part where Draco Malfoy says that he wants to rape Luna Lovegood.

7:56 Well, that seems canon. It's been a minute since I read a Harry Potter, but that feels canon.

8:01 Right, but then Harry proceeds to be friends with Draco Malfoy.

8:05 Well, I'm sure they used the methods of rationality to arrive at a good conclusion about how that would be better for the race if he did that.

8:12 Yeah, probably. I mean, it's like the- They're both blonde, if I recall. Yes, I believe that's correct. Yeah, but- There is other fiction that Eliezer Yudkowsky has written that I also had to read chunks of, and that definitely has some weird shit about sex in it.

8:38 Yeah, I guess you don't write the world's longest Harry Potter fanfic and that just be your only fic. Like, he's got to be prolific.

8:45 Yeah. No, prolific is definitely one of the words that describes his writing. Yes. Yeah.

8:52 But I guess the protagonist remaining 11 through the whole story does kind of come back to something I wanted to talk about, this sort of arrested development they all seem to have.

9:02 Oh, yeah. Totally.

9:02 This really childish worldview.

9:06 Mm-hmm. Yeah. No, I mean, I interviewed Yudkowsky for the book. In person? No. No. I almost said sadly, but honestly, I feel like maybe I dodged a bullet. No, it was over Zoom. And I got to say, so like one of the things that you try to do as a journalist is you try to find a way to connect with the people that you're interviewing, right?

9:41 Right, you want them to open up.

9:43 Right, exactly. You want them to open up. And- I found it surprisingly easy to do that with Yudkowsky for two reasons. The first is that it became clear almost immediately that what I believed to be an interview, Yudkowsky believed to be a debate.

10:08 Oh no.

10:10 And so I thought, oh, well, you know, that That makes it easy. He wants to win a debate. I want him to open up. These are compatible goals. So, yeah. So he won the debate that he thought we were having. He was super excited. Very proud. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. But the second thing, which I think in a way was more important, was he was instantly of a familiar type to me. You know, I'm a recovering gifted kid and went to, you know, various nerd camps growing up. And Yudkowsky reminded me very, very, very strongly of, like, 15-year-olds that I encountered at nerd camp. The issue was... When I say that, I don't mean that he reminds me of people I met when I and they were 15 at Nerd Camp many years ago. I mean, he reminds

11:19 me now of 15-year-olds. He got stuck. That I met when I was 15. Yeah, he got stuck because the issue is he's not 15. He's three times that age.

11:31 So he's almost 50, isn't he?

11:32 Yeah, yeah. He's in his mid-40s. Yeah. So yeah, mid to late 40s at this point. Actually, I'm not sure. I think he was born in 79. So yeah. But in any event, yeah. So no, when I interviewed him, he was around 45, but he reminded me of a 15-year-old. And, you know, and a particular kind of bright 15-year-old that thinks that they know absolutely everything and has never encountered any sort of serious intellectual challenge and, like, has sort of constructed an entire ego and personality around that.

12:18 And never had to really confront the consequences of failure or being wrong.

12:23 Yeah. Or even like what it might mean to encounter someone who knows more than you do. Forget smarter. Who just knows more, like someone who has expertise that you do not.

12:40 Right. I mean, when you're the smartest person in the room for so many years, you assume you always will be.

12:45 Yep.

12:46 But then most of those kids go to college and they have the experience of encountering people who are as smart or smarter than they are you know experts in fields that they're interested in who can sort of push back on you know on you just have to you have to experience being wrong you have to experience being wrong yeah and if you are a child prodigy who goes straight into being you know this this wunderkind in this made-up world you're still 15. You're still the smartest eighth grader in the room.

13:17 Exactly, yeah, because he dropped out of school after eighth grade. He not only never went to college, he never went to high school. And I think that, you know, there are some important pieces of socialization that happen in those places, especially for someone like that. And instead, he developed a whole community around himself and that is devoted to, among other things, singing his praises.

13:46 It's not healthy for the human mind.

13:48 No, it is not. Do we need to back up and explain who Yudkowsky is?

13:53 I guess we should because I'm not going to.

13:55 Okay.

13:59 There will be an introduction where I talk about sort of the overview of the book, but I'm not going to explain who that guy is.

14:06 Yeah, yeah, yeah. No, it's completely reasonable. Um....

14:11 I just wanted to get straight into the Harry Potter fanfic.

14:13 Of course.

14:14 I got ahead of myself.

14:15 Absolutely. Absolutely. Eliezer Yudkowsky. God. It's hard to explain who he is without explaining so many other things first, is the thing. Like, that's part of why I wrote the book, was I was seeing all this stuff out in the world. And I'm like, oh, God, that's Yudkowsky's ideas. They've escaped containment from his weird corner of the internet. That's not good because his ideas are bad, and he and the people who parrot them should feel bad. But explaining to someone who hasn't spent many years poking around in weird corners of the internet– Why any of that matters and who any of these people are is something that's very difficult to do concisely without sounding like you've gone legitimately insane.

15:14 I think that's part of what I liked so much about the book, because it is the sort of technology equivalent, the sort of modern pop science equivalent of Of what I feel like I'm trying to do all the time where I'm looking at like, oh, these like really obscure sort of white nationalist ideas have escaped containment. And now I'm responsible for explaining the ideological lineage of how we got here and where all these guys came from.

15:39 Yeah. Yeah. Like you've got to explain who Steve Saylor is and I have to explain who Eliezer Yudkowsky is. And together we fight crime. Yeah. Yeah, no, I'm so glad that you feel that way about it because that's exactly what I was trying to do. I mean, can I explain who Yudkowsky is without explaining all the rest?

16:04 I guess the short explanation is Yudkowsky is the single person most responsible for the idea that super intelligent... Well, no, he is the single person most responsible for... The fact that everyone is talking about the idea that super intelligent AI is going to kill us all. And this is not something based on science. This is just something based on his own sitting in a basement thinking about this shit after reading too much science fiction.

16:44 A big reason why I was struggling so much with this and why, you know, I was resistant at first to even engaging with finding out more about it because you look at this and you think, well, if you're so scared of your own thoughts, just stop thinking that.

16:57 Yeah. But just think about something else. Okay. But like now, now I'm going to defend that. Like you say that like someone who's never had some kind of anxiety disorder. Right.

17:09 But why is it my problem? Like, If 50 guys in California have a panic disorder, that's kind of a private thing for them. And I don't know why we all have to know about it.

17:21 Well, as I say at the end of the book, it would be a private thing for them if it wasn't that they were getting massive amounts of funding from billionaires.

17:30 Why are you going on the news and telling me that you're scared of your own thoughts? Like, dog, that's kind of a you thing.

17:36 Yeah. Yeah. But, you know, you put enough billionaire money in one place and it warps reality, right? I love it.

17:44 It's all, you know, he's talking about this science, this technology, this problem that we all have based on, you know, I'm doing my thought experiments. Like, a thought experiment is just you thinking.

17:54 Yep.

17:55 That's not, experiment is for science. And usually in science, you have, you know, variables that you're controlling or measuring. You're not controlling anything. Those are all your thoughts.

18:05 Yeah. And I mean, look, thought experiments definitely play a role in putting together certain kinds of scientific theories that but they are not where the rubber meets the road.

18:17 Eventually the experiment has to come out of your thoughts.

18:19 Yeah, yeah, exactly. And his answer is, oh, but if the experiment came out of my thoughts, then everyone would die. If anyone builds it, everyone dies.

18:30 If all of these things I made up happen, then this conclusion that I made up will also happen.

18:36 Yes, yeah. Well, but that's just basic logic, right? I mean, this is the guy... That people within this community that he's created around himself are calling the greatest philosopher since Aristotle. And that is not how anything works.

18:55 It's very puzzling.

18:57 Yeah. Yeah.

19:12 So the listeners of my show will know that we've spent the last couple of months talking about race science and eugenics in this sort of 20th century manifestation of this attempt to foist race science onto the judicial process in the United States. And as I'm reading your book, I see that, that they're doing it again, right? We're in this sort of perpetual 1860, this perpetual 1960. It's 2560 and we've reinvented slavery in space.

19:41 Yeah.

19:42 They're just doing it over and over again. And maybe this is an oversimplification of this sort of effective algebra. influence on this community, but it's just eugenics, right? That if I'm imagining that it would be more beneficial for the world that I should take an action that will help a trillion people 500 years from now in such a way that it impacts our ability to do anything about present problems, Who are you ensuring survives to be those future people? If we do nothing about any problem today because it is more effectively altruistic to help the future people, those future people are all white. At the expense of people who are alive today. This is just sci-fi eugenics.

20:27 Yeah, absolutely. But look, that's everyone involved in putting these ideas together, you know, is white. Um, and they want to be able to quantify everything, right? And anything that can't be quantified must not be terribly important. And if you just come in with that assumption, um, then of course you're going to end up in a place where, you know, things like culture, heritage, history, um, all of those things just can't possibly be as important as, you know, this one thing that I've decided is the most important thing, which is preventing humanity from going extinct in this one very particular way that I've decided is real, despite any evidence to the contrary. And it's like, look, you know,

21:24 like the ethics is something that's hard. Like, like the reason why basic, questions about what the right way is to think about ethics do not have like widely agreed upon solutions among professional ethicists and philosophers is not because ethicists and philosophers are stupid. It's because of the questions are hard. And like, this is, I mean, there's so many different things that come in here because, yeah, it's eugenics, but also maybe this is just me seeing it this way because I'm a physicist by training, but there's so much physics envy at work here, right? They want to be able to do a physics at everything. They want to make everything quantified and just somehow turn everything into a differential equation. And I think the thing that these

22:22 people don't appreciate is, The areas of life and human experience that you cannot boil down to, you know, easily quantified stuff, the stuff that is not, you know, dealt with in physics, it's not there because it's unimportant. It's not there because it's difficult, right? The questions that physics deals with sometimes admit of exact– mathematical solutions, not because they're hard, but because they're easy. Like they're the easiest, simplest possible questions that you could ask in some ways.

23:03 And so they sometimes have answers in terms of math, whereas like bigger and more complicated shit doesn't because the world's a complicated and messy place. But these guys want the world to be really, really simple because they're If it's complicated, that means they have to pay attention to things that they don't already know about. And that ultimately leads them to bad ideas that we know don't work and hurt people like eugenics, libertarianism, misogyny, you name it.

23:37 All equally evil.

23:39 Well, they all, I mean, they're all connected. Right.

23:43 Oh, no, I was being sincere.

23:45 Okay, yeah, yeah, yeah.

23:47 I don't trust a libertarian.

23:49 Of course not. No, I mean, like, in some ways, my entire book was about, like, okay, look– being a libertarian is a bad idea. It doesn't work. It leads you to these very stupid ideas.

24:04 We live in a society and that's unavoidable.

24:06 I know, I know. But don't you know, Margaret Thatcher said there's no such thing as society, you know, and she's obviously right about everything.

24:14 But they want everything to fall within sort of their purview. So they end up saying things like one of the most shocking statements in the book was that someone you were talking to So that, you know, this AI apocalypse, this ultimate human extinction at the hands of the super powerful machine is far more likely than global warming ever being a problem.

24:35 Yeah. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

24:37 No, this is- But one of those things you made up and one of them is already killing a lot of people.

24:43 This was crazy to me, right? That was Toby Ord, who's a professor of philosophy at Oxford. And he said that by his estimation- the likelihood of human extinction or unrecoverable collapse of human civilization due to like a super intelligent AI killing us all was 50 times greater than the combined threat of climate change and nuclear war. Like, We have nuclear weapons. We know that the climate crisis is real. Yeah, we've used nuclear weapons.

25:24 These are both things that have already killed a lot of people.

25:26 That's the thing. Like, I got an email. So Yudkowsky has that book that he co-wrote with like one of his top lieutenants. called If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies. And I wrote a review of it for The Atlantic last year. And that got me a couple of pieces of very angry email. And one of the people who emailed me was like, You know, like it's it's like nuclear weapons. Like, you know, we know it's a bad idea to engage in nuclear war. But, you know, like what what you know, when you say that there's no evidence that that Yudkowsky is right. Like, what's the evidence that that nuclear war would kill everybody like other than like actually having a nuclear war? It's like, buddy, we use nuclear weapons. We know what they do. They're an

26:18 existing technology.

26:20 We knew what they would do before we used them. Because we did real science.

26:24 Yes, we did real science. Exactly. But these guys think that they know more about real science than scientists. Yeah. Like they've said such things explicitly. Yudkowsky has said such things explicitly. I mean, this is endemic among the ultra wealthy and their capped futurists like Yudkowsky. In Silicon Valley, the idea that like experts are almost always wrong is something that like you'll hear from people like Peter Thiel constantly.

27:00 I mean, it's the logic of a gambling addict.

27:02 Yeah.

27:03 That these guys have a couple lucky guesses, so they must have a system and it's the experts who are wrong.

27:09 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And like, The fact is that we live in a society and we live in a society where, unfortunately, if you amass enough wealth, then it doesn't matter if you keep being wrong because you can just keep being wealthy and powerful.

27:29 You're insulated from the consequences.

27:31 Exactly. And so if you get lucky a couple of times, then you're done. And you can just, like, be right all of the time because anytime you're wrong— it doesn't actually matter.

27:43 I don't know. Maybe it's the sort of Protestantism. This country was founded on this idea that if you are wealthy, it's because you worked very hard because you are good. And if you have money, you must be smart because you have money.

27:58 Yeah. Look, I, I, I hid a lot of jokes and references in, in the end notes of my book. Um, And there's a part where I talk about like this attitude of, you know, the ultra wealthy thinking that they're super smart and anybody who says no to them can't possibly be as smart as they are because they don't have enough money. And if they're so smart, how come they're still quote unquote poor? And then there's an end note.

28:34 And in the end note, I say, see also Homer Simpson, if he's so smart, how come he's dead? Which is like my favorite quote from The Simpsons. And there's basically no context for that quote, other than the fact that Homer is talking about someone who lived like 150 years ago.

28:52 Yeah, but if he's so smart, why is he dead?

28:55 Exactly. Yes. I mean, that's like literally something that like, say, Larry Ellison believes, right? Larry Ellison believes that if you're smart enough, you don't have to ever die.

29:09 And again, everybody's 12. It's the everybody's 12 theory of society because it's like, so like I said, I'm admitting my own ignorance here. Your book was my introduction to so many of these guys. And when my husband was reading me, just like when I first met Ray Kurzweil in this book.

29:25 Oh, God. Yeah.

29:27 Oh, this is just a sad boy.

29:29 Yes.

29:29 This is a sad boy, and I'm very sad for him.

29:32 Yeah.

29:33 But I don't think it's my problem.

29:35 That's right. Yeah. Look, yeah, everybody's 12 and in the land of 12-year-olds. the 15-year-old is king. This is why Yudkowsky's ideas and Kiel's ideas.

29:44 Peter Kiel is their 16-year-old brother who can drive.

29:47 Yes, exactly. Yes. And then he let Yudkowsky use the car for a while. Oh, God. But yeah, no, I mean, yes, Ray Kurzweil is a sad boy. sad boy and like he clearly misses his dead dad a lot and that's very sad yeah it's very sad and it's very sweet and i think.

30:09 Building a robot dad that can tell you it's proud of you is the most insanely sad thing i've ever heard and i don't think you should tell people about it.

30:19 Yeah i mean there is a lot of people showing their entire asses in the book right like i mean hell toby ord This was like one of the most shocking moments in research for the book, like full stop, was when I was talking with Toby Ord, the guy who said that an AI apocalypse was 50 times more likely than the extinction or collapse from the climate crisis and or nuclear war. And I asked him– He should be laughed at in public. I know, I know. And instead he's advising UK Parliament on AI. And I asked him, where did this number come from? I know, yeah, I know.

31:03 That look on your face is where this book came from. Because I asked him, where'd you get that number, Professor Ord?

31:10 My mind?

31:12 Yeah, well, his answer was kind of more like his butt. But yeah, he said, oh, you know, just like having lived my life and stuff, basically. I mean, the answer is in the book. The answer he gave me is in the book. And that's almost exactly what he says. It's like, oh, do you understand that that's like wildly irresponsible and immoral to be running around saying that shit on that basis?

31:38 A lot of these people just need a lot of therapy in private, in private. These thoughts that you're having that are so distressing for you shouldn't be impacting public policy.

31:50 Yes, but men would literally rather, you know, try to take over the universe and or become apocalyptic cult leaders rather than go to therapy.

32:01 And again, you know, looking at sort of like the Elon Musk type characters, what he did to the United States government, what he did to USAID, what he did with Doge killed actual people. Actual human people lost their lives and will continue to lose their lives. In service of this vision of an imaginary future.

32:22 Yeah. I mean, although, again, I think for Musk, that's a feature, not a bug, right? I mean, the dude's racist.

32:34 But I think they all are.

32:37 Well, sure. Yeah, they all are.

32:38 I think they all are. So that the future imaginary people don't have an imaginary harm. Or we do something about global warming that's currently disproportionately killing poor people and people of color. You've made a racist decision. You know, they call themselves utilitarian philosophers. Then look at the utility of your current actions.

33:03 Yep.

33:04 On a human scale. I'm not talking about a trillion years from now because that's not a real number.

33:09 I mean, look, one of the nice things that like this sort of long-termist effective altruist nonsense lets you do. Yeah. It's totally fake. Right. But like it's fake in a familiar way. And actually one of the things there's always, always so many things that end up on the cutting room floor of a book. And one of the things that ended on, I ended up on the cutting room floor of this book was, was a point that, that I found several people making. And I, I think it's just correct, which is, you know, um, Advocating for the rights and interests of far distant future generations is so convenient because they have so, so, so many needs and never actually ask for anything because you can't talk to them.

34:06 And who does that sound like? Well, that sounds like the pro-life movement.

34:11 You hear that same argument about pro-lifers, that it's a perfect constituency because you have to speak for them. They can't speak for themselves, which means they can't contradict you. You can never be wrong.

34:23 That's exactly right. Yeah, it is exactly like the pro-lifers. And indeed, you know, it's not terribly surprising to find out that most of these people are like fucked up pronatalists. Mm-hmm. Right?

34:36 So natalism for whom.

34:38 You know? Yes, exactly. Exactly. I mean, and, and their response would be like, well, but you know, we just have to worry about, you know, the survival of the species. But look, the reason one of, one of the best moments actually in research for this book, um, was when I was, I was in the middle of working on it and I ended up having dinner with a, a very old friend of mine, um, uh, Old in that I've been friends with them for a long time, not in that they themselves are old. Ended up having dinner with an old friend who used to be libertarian and now is not.

35:17 Recovering libertarian.

35:18 Yeah, recovering libertarian. And I hadn't sought out dinner with her for this reason, but when I found out I was going to have dinner with her, I was like, oh, I can ask her about this. She'll understand this. And so one of the things I asked her was like, can you explain to me why these libertarians are so super racist? Like, I understand that both of these things are sort of being bad at thinking in a particular way, right?

35:51 And like a lack of empathy in a particular way.

35:53 Is it just because you're dumb?

35:55 Right. Is it because you're dumb and bad at empathy or is there like some kind of ideological connection?

36:00 It's inevitable.

36:00 And what she told me was something that you probably already know, but I did not know, which is that there is an ideological connection, right? Which is that if you're a libertarian, you have to believe that we're on a level playing field or something very close to it already. And if that's the case, then racial disparities in like economic and, and, you know, career success have to reflect innate problems that those races have or innate advantages that other races have. And that, you know, just leads you, I mean, that is racism, right? Right. And I hadn't thought about it that way because I've never been a libertarian and never thought that we had a level playing field because, like, of fucking course it's not a level play.

36:52 Of course we don't. Like, have you lived here? Have you met anyone?

36:57 Well, that's why these guys are so against the existence of any social sciences or history, right? Like, liberal arts studies would be illegal in their universe. They'll tell you, I don't think you should study history. I don't think there should be history books.

37:12 Exactly. And why is that? Yeah, like, look, you know, there is this superiority complex that people get from studying, you know, STEM fields, where you'll get people calling, like, you know, engineering students calling, you know, humanities classes like underwater basket weaving and stuff like that. It's like, no man, I'm actually studying like the history of your field. And I understand why you believe the shit that you believe better than you do, because I know shit that you don't.

37:49 Like one of the things, one of the things that just astonished me But was also completely unsurprising in a way when I was researching the book was I kept finding people in this community making posts on their websites, you know, saying things like, oh, you know, these people who say that we're connected to like, you know, weird early 20th century or late 19th century intellectual movements clearly have no idea what they're talking about because I've never even heard of those movements. Do you believe that you can only be influenced by stuff that you already know about?

38:30 What do you think history is? What do you think it is to be a person in the world? How can you possibly be that stupid?

38:41 By refusing to know about the past, I prevent myself from being influenced by it.

38:45 Yes, exactly.

38:46 I have just reinvented being human from first principles by myself.

38:50 Yeah, well, look, you know, there's that famous saying that those who are ignorant of history, nothing bad happens to them at all.

38:59 Or the people around them at all.

39:00 Or the people around them. Yeah, everything's cool.

39:04 No, the more these people say that we should not learn history, the more interested I become in the history of their ideas.

39:11 Yes, indeed.

39:12 Like, I know what you're doing because I've seen you do it before on like a 40-year cycle for all of human history.

39:17 Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, exactly. So what other questions do you have for me?

39:27 Oh, I guess in the spirit and spirit of the show, who do you think? is the weirdest guy?

39:32 Oh, no. Who do I think is the weirdest guy?

39:35 Yeah.

39:37 I hadn't thought about that.

39:38 I think that's going to be too difficult of a question. I would not be able to answer that question.

39:41 Yeah. For this, for this particular gang of people, I mean, Yudkowsky is one of the weirdest. He has to be like up there in the top five. Um, like I, you know what I can do is I can rank a few of them. Okay. Right.

39:56 Give me your top guys.

39:57 Yeah. So like Yudkowsky is one of the top guys. He's one of the top weirdest guys in the whole thing. Um, Kurzweil isn't.

40:09 He's just sad.

40:10 Yeah, Kurzweil is actually, in a way, one of the least weird guys in the whole story. Who else comes even as close to being as weird? Oh, Nick Bostrom. Nick Bostrom is so weird and so, so racist. It's not good. Oh, God. Yeah. So yeah, Nick Bostrom is super weird. And then let me come up with a third weird guy who's like the weirdest.

40:45 Oh, I just looked up what Nick Bostrom looks like and I'm troubled.

40:48 Yes. I'm troubled. Oh, but if you're troubled by what Nick Bostrom looks like, look up what Marc Andreessen looks like. Do you know what Marc Andreessen looks like?

40:57 He's got a strange head.

40:59 He does. Yeah. His head is an egg.

41:02 I know I've been saying- you know, these guys are eugenicists and that's very bad. So I shouldn't get into phrenology. But you just can't, you can't look at the man and not think about his skull.

41:12 So I have a theory about phrenology, which is phrenology is junk science that doesn't work except on racists themselves. You can tell if someone's a racist by looking at them. Like, this is not something I actually believe, but people like Marc Andreessen and Nick Bostrom really make it hard for me not to believe what i just said because you look at them and you're like oh that guy's racist um.

41:42 Like is he a billionaire because they got a lot of money from the doctor that did that to his head.

41:49 Jesus oh god no um yeah okay so let's see i think my top guys and treason's not actually one of the weirdest he's up there he's certainly weirder than kurzweil but I think my top three weirdest guys are probably Bostrom, Yudkowsky, and let's say Scott Siskind. Okay. Scott Siskind being that guy behind that blog, Slate Star Codex, Astral Codex 10. Bad writer. Also explicitly a eugenicist. and someone who is super cool with Steve Saylor showing up in the comments all of the time on his blog.

42:48 So I guess maybe this is not a question we can answer until we have the benefit of hindsight. It might take a few decades to know the answer to this, but we've been looking at a lot of sort of these mid-20th century scientific racism. And I think this is the scientific racism. I mean, I guess scientific racism still exists, but this is sort of an outgrowth of that in many ways.

43:08 Totally, totally. I mean, a lot of the ideas about AI are outgrowths of that. Yeah.

43:13 And in hindsight, we can see the way that these people were connected socially and financially to sort of harder elements in the movement.

43:24 Yes.

43:25 Do you think we will be able to see that in 40 years?

43:29 Yeah. I mean, you can see some of it now, but yes. Um, I mean, God. Also, I'm going to, I'm going to just go back and add one more name to weird guys. Um, because now I'm thinking about weird guys who influenced these guys who show up in my book. Robert Heinlein was fucking weird. Um, and they definitely read too much Heinlein.

43:55 Um, People forget that some of those sci-fi writers of that era were not great guys.

44:03 No, no.

44:04 They weren't just like kindly fiction writers writing cool stories about the future. Like some of them were evil men.

44:11 I mean, like, and this sort of is part of the answer to your question, right? Like, because the ideological connections to science fiction are right, right there, right? Like the nanotech stuff. comes out of Heinlein, uh, who is the only like bestselling author I can think of who wrote at least two different books about how much he wanted to fuck his mom. Um, like explicitly, like he's just like incest is a running theme in Heinlein's work, which is confusing.

44:41 I didn't know that.

44:43 Oh yeah.

44:44 I don't read a lot of sci-fi. I.

44:47 I have read too much sci-fi. Um, I, know about those Heinlein books. I never actually read them because I was like, wait, this book's about what? But even Stranger in a Strange Land, which is his best-known book, is filled with all sorts of deeply weird shit and not in a, oh, well, sci-fi's a weird genre kind of way.

45:14 But their ideas about AI are A lot of them are patterned after Isaac Asimov's work in particular, right? Isaac Asimov being, like, the robot sci-fi guy. But Asimov's robot stories are about slavery. Like, they're just about having slaves. And, like, in ways that are astonishingly explicit.

45:37 Right, that we want to create a perfectly docile servant that will always do it as it's told and cannot rebel against us.

45:45 It's very.

45:46 I mean, a lot of the sort of white anxiety of the mid-19th century was about slave revolts.

45:52 Yep.

45:52 You know, you have this wolf by the ear and you can't let it go. It's Jefferson, right?

45:57 Yeah.

45:58 And so you can't have slaves anymore. So the mid-20th century, you have, you know, we're sort of doing the second reconstruction. We have this anxiety about Black uprising. And now where are we now? What is going on societally now? We have mass uprising again. And there's this anxiety about creating a docile worker.

46:20 Yeah.

46:21 It's hard to ignore that we're just having this slavery anxiety again.

46:26 Yeah. No, it's right there. And like, you know, you get statements from people like Dario Amadei talking about a data center filled with geniuses who don't sleep. And it's like, yeah, first of all, that's not going to happen. Like, that's not what AI is. But second, that's what you want? You want slaves?

46:50 And you want to make it conscious.

46:51 Yeah, exactly.

46:52 You want to create human consciousness that you then own. You want to create a perfectly docile replica of the human mind, and then you want to enslave it.

47:03 Yep, yep, exactly. And I mean, like, look at Yudkowsky. I mean, right there, literally on page one of my book, he's already talking about, like, having slaves, having robot slaves. And his whole obsession with this idea of aligning AI so it serves our interests. And it's like, okay, I get that you've got this, you know, untreated anxiety disorder, but also like- It sounds like you love slavery. Yeah, exactly.

47:34 You're talking about like enslaving a conscious being and how awesome that would be. And if you go back and look at Asimov, it's right in there too. I mean, this is one of, One of the most shocking things to me that I ran into when I was working on the book, I grew up reading all of the same sci-fi as these guys, right? As I talk about at the end of the book, part of the reason why I wrote the book and part of the reason why I think I was able to write the book and understand these people is I have a lot in common with them. I was raised on the same stuff.

48:09 I know about the contempt that STEM majors have for humanities majors that they express behind closed doors because I was behind those closed doors and saw them do it. And it was like an undercover philosophy major who was also doing a physics major. But I grew up on Asimov. and Clark and Heinlein and all of this, you know, old school sci-fi. And so I understand where they're coming from.

48:41 But when I went back and looked at those Asimov stories, I found that, you know, like in the same way, like there's so many like sort of societal implications of stories that you read as a kid that just go right over your head.

49:03 Because you haven't learned the history yet.

49:05 Because you haven't learned the history. You haven't learned the culture. I read the lion, the witch and the wardrobe when I was a kid. And I didn't understand that Aslan was supposed to be Jesus because it's just a cool lion and I didn't know that much about Jesus because my family's not Christian. Um, And in the same way, I read the robot stories and the fact that the robots call the humans master and the humans call the robots boy. Okay.

49:37 Oh, I didn't know that.

49:38 Oh, yeah. They call the robots Boy. And these are stories that were written, like, while the Jim Crow South was still alive and kicking. These are stories from, like, the 1940s and 1950s.

49:52 It's a pretty distinct choice of words.

49:54 It sure is. And the anxiety that the robots will, you know, escape control, but Asimov specifically... wrote about why he wrote these stories, he said, you know, like he kept finding that robot stories in science fiction were Frankenstein stories where, you know, humans create robots and then they escape their control. Humans create robots, they escape their control.

50:18 And he was like, but, you know, I'm a scientist. I know how science and engineering works. There's no reason why you wouldn't be able to keep them under your control as long as you're smart about it. Yeah, Dr.

50:29 Frankenstein thought that too, dummy.

50:31 I know, I know. Dr.

50:32 Frankenstein was a scientist too, okay?

50:38 Right. But Asimov then writes these things and he says that this is why he's doing it. And I don't think, I don't know. I would love to know if this is... Not the case, but I think that maybe he didn't know consciously that this was what he was doing, but it's right fucking there on the page. And by the 80s, by the 1980s, he is writing stories about robots in which robots have dreams in which they say things like, let my people go. Uh-oh. And the humans' responses are to destroy the robots that have those dreams.

51:16 We really never got over slavery, huh?

51:18 No, we really did not.

51:20 We did not adequately deal with that as a culture and a society. We are still wrestling with that sin.

51:28 Yeah. Yeah.

51:29 Oh, that's really dark.

51:31 Yeah.

51:31 And that's the world they want for us. That's the world they're building for us.

51:35 Exactly. Yeah. And like, I just, if you had a conscious being that you had somehow built built inside of a box which i actually don't think is something that you could do i think that consciousness requires a certain kind of interaction with the world but if i'm wrong about that and you did somehow build one that was in a box i mean this is this is something that i sort of agree with some of the ai bros about if you did that that would be a crime it would have rights That would be very evil. Yeah, it would be very evil. The but, though, is not, but we have to enslave it because otherwise it'll kill us all. Then don't build it. The but is, that's not, like, not only don't build it, but also that's not what

52:25 they're building. They're not building anything like that.

52:29 It's so frustrating. They're always, we need billions of dollars to build this thing that I'm concerned might kill us. Right. Then don't.

52:37 I know, but they- Then don't. They don't think that technology, the development of technology is something that involves human agency because if it did, it would involve moral responsibility. They think that like, it's like playing civilization. There's a pre-revealed tech tree and the only real choices we have are about how quickly we progress through it. And so this is why you hear them saying like, well, we need to slow down, not we don't want to build it because they don't, they don't see that there is a choice that because they're fucking stupid and they don't understand anything about like the history of science and technology. And, uh, and they think that these language generation programs that they

53:27 are building are, have more rights than they think that all humans have. Like, I just don't... That's what it is. Like, we're talking about, you know, AI having rights when there are people that don't have those same rights.

53:41 And this is ridiculous. That's what I keep getting really stuck, is that we need to sacrifice currently living human lives for this hypothetical future computer.

53:53 Yeah, but, you know, if you think that... Technology is the only thing that matters, like these people do. And you think that technology is on rails, there's just a tech tree, and you just, you know, you know what's coming, like these people do. Then you think that the future has been revealed to you. You think that, you know, that there is a secret about the future that is inevitable, that has been vouchsafed to you and you alone, or you and the rest of the elect. Right. Right.

54:23 It's religion.

54:24 It is religion. It's religion. This is where you get, you know, things like situational awareness. Right. Which which did that guy know things that other people didn't know? He lost an enormous amount of money on the stock market because people bought his shit. But I do think that that wasn't I mean, it was a grift in that, you know, he lost their money. It wasn't a grift in that. Like, I think he's a true believer. I think most of these people are true believers, but it is a religion. It's all religious. Um, and, and of course they don't think that that's true because they're ignorant of their own motivations and ignorant of the history of their own ideas.

55:06 And they want us to be too.

55:07 Well, professing that that's not possible. Right. Yeah. Yes. And they want us to be too. Exactly. Yeah.

55:12 I'm going to ask you an unfair question because I know if I was asked this question about my area of expertise and the way these ideas have escaped containment and destroyed society, I would not be able to answer the why.

55:22 Yeah.

55:24 Why is this clearly wrong, clearly harmful idea accelerating so quickly and gaining so much like Why are we all being subjected to it and why is it being allowed to shape the conversation and public policy and the world around us? Because it makes no sense.

55:42 I know. I know. I do actually have an answer to that. Oh, good. I don't think it's an unfair question. But you also shouldn't be afraid of asking me unfair questions. I'll just say it's unfair. But no, I don't think that's unfair. I mean, you're not going to like the answer. The answer is– there's two answers, OK? OK. One answer is precisely that these ideas do come from science fiction.

56:12 And science fiction has sort of created a shared notion of what the future might look like.

56:22 That's why iPads look the way they do.

56:24 Right. And so this notion of what the future inevitably holds, the future– has robots in it. The future has, you know, the future takes place in space. The future involves colonizing Mars. The future has, you know, like a space war and stuff like that in it. Right. These ideas come from science fiction, but they are taken as sort of, you know, assumptions of, well, but that's what the future looks like.

56:59 The future has jetpacks and chrome and rockets and robots. And like, okay, yeah, that just comes from a particular literary genre that went through a phase of popularity in the mid-20th century, and that served certain corporate purposes, and so it got pushed in certain ways at the time. And yeah, okay, we did go to the moon in But going to the moon is significantly easier than going anywhere else in the solar system that's not Earth. And there's nothing inevitable about any of those ideas. And most of those ideas are not just not inevitable, but not workable.

57:39 But that didn't make it through because science fiction isn't about predicting the future. Science fiction is about playing with ideas of you know, the way humans are and the way society could be, right? And also that science fiction was written in a time when we knew a lot less than we know now about the relevant technology and the relevant science. So that's one answer. But that's not the whole story.

58:11 I was going to say, is it just a coin flip that people who love science fiction want to join a cult? Could have just been Scientologists.

58:16 Yeah. No, because the other thing is money.

58:20 Why is it Heinlein and not L. Ron Hubbard?

58:23 Yeah. There's just so much money behind these ideas right now. There's so much money behind pushing these ideas about AI and about the future because it's in the economic interests of, you know, the ultra wealthy and powerful. You know, it's in the economic interests of Marc Andreessen, for example, to claim that Super intelligent AI is inevitable as long as we push technology forward fast enough and get out of the way of the technologists who are doing such good philanthropic things for humanity by bringing about the robot utopia.

59:05 It's also in the economic interest of, say, Sam Altman. or Dario Amadei to say that the robot apocalypse is the real threat that AI poses and not the presently existing harms from presently existing systems like the climate impact and the, you know, workers in the global south who are, you know, feeling real impacts from the horrors of reinforcement learning, training on these machines, and AI psychosis, and intellectual property theft, and, and, and, and, and, and.

59:40 It's much more in their interest to say, no, no, no, no, no, all of that's a distraction from the real threat, which is this made-up sci-fi thing that implies that my product is far more powerful than it actually is and will become even more powerful, and therefore the AI bubble isn't a bubble, those valuations are justified. because we're going to eat the entire economy. And it's like, no, none of that's true. No, does that mean that those guys don't genuinely believe it? No, they might really believe it. Dario Amadei, I think, has to be a true believer. I think he really is. He's been in this whole Yudkowsky, definitely not a cult thing for a long time. Marc Andreessen, Sam Altman, I don't know what they genuinely believe. They're

1:00:25 slippery figures. I kind of think My personal theory about Sam Altman is that he believes in something kind of like the secret that he can just manifest shit. And then, I don't know. It worked for a while. Yeah, exactly. It worked for a minute. But yeah. But regardless of whether or not these are genuine beliefs, it is in their economic interest to push these ideas into the public sphere and get them out there. And the fact that it's in their economic interest makes it more likely, not less likely, that they do genuinely believe it. And so when you get billionaire tech people like Dustin Moskowitz saying, oh, no, no, no, I genuinely believe in this stuff. That's why I'm funding all of this effective altruist bullshit. It's like, yeah, dude, no,

1:01:11 I don't doubt that you're genuine. You're just fucking wrong. Right.

1:01:15 And I guess at the end of the day, parsing someone's true belief is impossible and maybe not useful. Because what they do and the outcome of those actions is what matters. I mean, I get bogged down in trying to parse what is inside the heart of a particular bad actor too often. And sometimes you can get close, but you can never really know. And ultimately, what you do matters.

1:01:42 Yeah, I think that's right. Although I do think that it's important... I think that you're completely right, and we can't really know what's in their hearts, and what they do is much more what matters. But I do want to caution against not taking the possibility seriously that they believe this stuff for real. Right. I don't know.

1:02:17 That's a more concrete belief than have you completely succumbed to an AI psychotic delusions.

1:02:23 Yeah.

1:02:26 Are you in a death cult?

1:02:28 Yeah. I mean.

1:02:30 Because if you have truly succumbed to an irretrievable delusion, your actions will stop making sense.

1:02:39 Yeah. But I mean, look... I think that part of the problem here is that Protestant thing that you were talking about before of like, these people must have worked hard and it must prove that they're really smart, that they have all this money. And I think, I mean, this is one of the reasons I wrote the book.

1:02:56 It's very important to emphasize that Elon Musk is a fucking dumbass. Who has no idea what he's doing.

1:03:04 You can't lose sight of that.

1:03:05 Yeah. And like, do I think that going to Mars is his top priority? It might be. Do I think he genuinely wants to colonize Mars? Yeah, I do actually think he wants to do that. And that right there.

1:03:20 A lot of little boys want to go to space.

1:03:22 Exactly. He definitely wants to do that. And that's proof that he's a dumbass.

1:03:27 Build me a self-sustaining year-round colony of one million people on the South Pole first. Prove you're serious.

1:03:34 Yeah, exactly. Like, look, do you know what Neom is? Okay, I'm so glad I get to tell you about this. It's like yet another delusional fantasy of a puffed up oligarch who thinks that they know more than they actually do. It's this idea... This plan that the Saudis, that someone in the Saudi royal family had.

1:04:03 Guys with a lot of good ideas.

1:04:05 Guys with a lot of good ideas to build like a like something like a hundred mile long, half mile wide linear city in like South Africa. what, I think it was Southwestern Saudi Arabia.

1:04:20 Oh, I didn't think I had seen that.

1:04:22 Yeah. Like, for why? Right, for why. And also, it looks incredibly fucking stupid. And also, there's a reason why cities are not linear. There's a reason why.

1:04:32 That's not convenient at all.

1:04:34 It's not convenient at all, exactly. Yeah, there's a lot of good reasons why cities are the shapes that they are. And also, why they are where they are. But no, let's build a city in a spot where you shouldn't have a city... And let's do it in a shape that cities don't work in. That thing was never going to work. It was never, ever going to work. It's so manifestly obvious that it won't work. And then when you dig down into it, it won't work for all of those obvious reasons and then some other less obvious ones as well. Once you hadn't even thought of it. Yeah, exactly.

1:05:09 Your first impression was correct and is also like, and then when you dig down, like, yeah. Anyway, the point is it was never going to work. The fact that anyone took it seriously and that there were ever like think pieces about like, can this work? Like, what's wrong with you? This is a failure of, you know, journalism, a failure of all sorts of things. And now it finally seems clear to everybody that it's not going to work because it seems to have been abandoned, which is not what it should have taken for it to be clear that it wouldn't work. We should have.

1:05:46 Been not taking this seriously from day one.

1:05:48 Exactly. Do I understand why sycophants and yes-men around whoever it was in the Saudi royal family were humoring them about it? Of course I do, because that's their job.

1:06:03 Yes, and your boss, if your boss dismembers people.

1:06:06 Right. Yeah. But do I understand why anybody else took it seriously? No. Well, it's money, of course. But the point is, as stupid and as implausible as Neom was, it's so much easier than building a city on Mars. It's so much easier.

1:06:23 You could build a 200 mile long city a hundred times over.

1:06:28 Yes. And so like if you can't even do that with all of the power of like an autocratic billionaire behind it. No, no.

1:06:39 We're not growing lettuce on Mars.

1:06:41 Yeah. No, the SpaceX IPO is just a fucking scam. But yeah.

1:06:49 So I guess the answer is we have to tax the billionaire out of existence because his bad ideas are a cancer on the world that cannot be eradicated any other way.

1:06:58 Yeah, I think that's right. There shouldn't be billionaires. It's fundamentally unjust and dangerous to all of us, including the billionaires themselves, right? Not dangerous enough. Yeah, exactly. Like, not only is it making the world a more dangerous and more deadly place for everyone— But also, I genuinely think that the best thing for, say, Elon Musk's mental health or Marc Andreessen's mental health would be for them to lose their entire fortune.

1:07:30 We need to send them all to one of those troubled teen wilderness camps.

1:07:33 Yeah, exactly. Like, look, in a just world, there would not be billionaires and these guys would be under intensive psychiatric care. Right? Because, like, whatever it is that drives you to do what these guys have done, it is some kind of psychopathology.

1:07:51 It absolutely is.

1:07:53 Yeah.

1:07:53 It absolutely is. Oh, they remind me so much of my weird little guys, but they're much more powerful.

1:08:02 Yeah.

1:08:02 I think that's my distaste for it because I look at a guy who obviously needs help and is very dangerous and has very many bad ideas and is trying to do violence to the world, but... His ability to do that violence is usually limited by his own sort of inefficacy, right? He does not have the power to do more than build a bomb at his house, which is bad. That's bad that they would do that. But, you know, one guy building a bomb at his house is a sort of limited zone of harm.

1:08:29 Yes.

1:08:30 These guys have a lot of the same really bad ideas, but the bomb they're building is as big as the whole world.

1:08:36 Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the good news is The AI that kills everybody is not a thing. It's not a thing. Yeah. The bad news is the billionaires who end up getting us all killed through, you know, creating global instability and preventing us from addressing the climate crisis, that's a real thing that we're currently on track for and we got to do something about it. Right.

1:09:03 These guys who are saying we're all going to die, I am worried they're going to kill us all, but not with the thing they're worried is going to kill us all.

1:09:10 Yeah, exactly.

1:09:11 They're going to cause us all to die. They are absolutely going to cause us all to die, but not with a magical machine from their mind experiment.

1:09:17 Right. No, no. I mean, look, they're just... I mean, as a journalist, one of my favorite movies is All the President's Men, because it's a movie where the journalists are heroes, right? And all you have to do is follow the money. And it takes place in a magical world where discovering criminal malfeasance by the president leads to that person not being president anymore. And this is a fantasy land called the 1970s. Beautiful fiction. Yeah. I know.

1:09:47 I know. God. My parents tell me that that was a real place in time, but I'm not sure I believe them anyway. But there's a line from that movie that I just– I almost made it actually another epigraph at the beginning of More Everything Forever, but I already had three epigraphs and I didn't want to throw in a fourth. At one point, Woodward– you know, Robert Redford, is talking with Deep Throat and is like, but what you're telling me doesn't make sense. Like, why would they be stupid enough to do that? And Deep Throat's response is, you know, forget all the myths that the media has told you about the White House. The truth is, these are not very bright guys and things got out of hand. And, like,

1:10:43 just replace the White House with you know, Silicon Valley.

1:10:48 It got out of hand.

1:10:49 And yeah, these are not very bright guys and things got out of hand.

1:10:55 I think that's the best place to leave it.

1:10:58 Okay. I think it is.

1:10:59 I think that is the epigraph, maybe not for the book, but for the interview. Things got out of hand.

1:11:05 Yeah, they sure did.

1:11:06 Adam, thank you so much for joining us today. Where can people find you?

1:11:12 Well, you can find both of my books, but we were mostly talking about my second book, More Everything Forever, wherever books are sold. You can find me on my podcast, which is called Dreaming Against the Machine, wherever you get your podcasts. And you can find my writing– outside of my books in all sorts of magazines and newspapers. And you can hear about that if you go to my website, which is freelanceastrophysicist.com. Or if you follow me on Blue Sky, adambecker.bsky.social.

1:11:52 Perfect. Thank you so much.

1:11:55 Thank you, Molly. Thank you.

1:12:12 Weird Little Guys is a production of Cool Zone Media and iHeartRadio. It's researched, written, and recorded by me, Molly Conger. Our executive producers are Sophie Lichterman and Robert Evans. The show is edited by the wildly talented Rory Gagan. The theme music was composed by Brad Dickert. You can email me at weirdlittleguyspodcast at gmail.com. I will definitely read it, but I probably won't answer it. It's nothing personal. You can exchange conspiracy theories about the show with other listeners on the Weird Little Guys subreddit. Just don't post anything that's going to make you one of my Weird Little Guys.