Transcription
Well, everyone, we're calling this a little bit of an emergency podcast, though. That might be overstating it slightly. Last week, my brother, who is in finance, reached out to me, and he, um, he sent me an article that was going around Substack and the internet. And he said, "This, this article, this Substack alone is affecting the markets." It was a piece from, uh, Citrini Research. You know, I, I, this, this isn't exactly my world, but I, I found it rather, rather fascinating.
He, I won't, you know, I won't break down all of what he thought as somebody working in finance, but he, uh, he's quite, he was quite concerned that the developments with agentic AI have happened at such a rate, a rate that I think most people are unaware of the impact that could potentially happen is on the horizon right now. So, I reached out to to Jordan not long after reading that article, which was kind of written from the position of like someone in the future in 2028, uh, you know, talking about 10% plus unemployment rate, unemployment rates, the, essentially the almost total and complete elimination of white-collar work. And I was like, "I, I got to get your thoughts." And I think you had already been working up something that, I don't know, was it in direct response to that, or it had been something that had kind of been percolating in you already, Jordan?
No, no, I've had, I've been working on it for a little while before that article came out. The average person has no idea what's gone on in the last few months in the world of agentic AI, which you wrote about in your outstanding essay today on the Great Transition 2.0. So, could we start with maybe just giving people a little bit of an understanding of what has gone on recently in the world of agentic AI and why many people who are have a finger on the pulse are like, "There is something colossal that's about to take place here."
Um, I think maybe a concrete example, um, I can go way abstract, but I thought a concrete example might be nice. Um, for the past three years or so, the big AI companies have been, for somewhat, as it turns out, strategically important reasons, finding ways to make their AI systems do software development better. Right? So, if you're, if you're interfacing with AI through a chatbot, you're interfacing with one way that that particular technology can be used, and you're, and then of course, you're participating with it to do what you want to do. But one way that the big AI companies focused on was very specifically, "Can we make our AI better at writing software than it, than it has been?"
And the short answer was yes. They got really good at it. Um, to the point where most software developers are have already had to transition to using AI as a partner in their development. It's called the 10x to 100x leap. So, if you're, if you're a very good engineer, you're now using, in some cases, many, many different AIs simultaneously to write software, and then you're working with them to check and make sure they're doing things right, architecting it, things like that. So, so the net result is something like a 10 or 100x lift on the productivity of individual software engineers.
Okay. So, whatever, maybe even like three months ago, uh, that was that. And I should say that the, a key thing to keep in mind with AI is that the iterations have been coming fast and furious. And so, they went from being a little bit interesting three years ago, to, "Oh, okay, that's pretty cool" a year and a half ago, to, "Wait a minute, they're starting to actually write software better than people" nine months, 12 months ago, to, "Oh, wait, now they're meaningfully better than people at most things" uh, technically, on instantaneous, like more and more pieces are being knocked down. But that rate, it's the rate matters a lot. And, um, so then a big shift happened. And I'll just say for me, it's happened, it happened a little bit before I, I got on the sniffed it, but when I, when I started participating, I can now use an AI to do the software development for me. So, I'm not a software developer. I mean, I have a little tiny bit of practice and experience like 20 years ago, so I know a little bit, but never, it was never particularly good, and I definitely don't know anything right now. But I was able to drop in and have my AI agent direct software specialist AI agents to write software. And it wasn't just like "hello world." I actually wrote an entire iOS application, which it taught me how to actually get on my phone, as well as to write. I built a user interface, the whole bit.
Um, so in a matter of about two weeks, I went from being, let's say, completely incompetent in software development to being able to do something that would take months and cost tens of thousands of dollars in about three days. So, that's, that's a, like, that lands. And by the way, since then, I haven't been doing nothing. I've actually continued to press forward and now doing all kinds of stuff.
So, that's, that's an idea. You've got these things that can actually do real-world things, which is like, let's say, "Hey, write software." Um, and that's the idea of agentic. You've got two pieces. One, they can do real-world things. And two, some of the real-world things they can do is interface with other AI. And that piece shouldn't be lost. The fact that I no longer have to actually have any skill at software development. I can use an AI that's basically an ordinary, you know, just like I'm talking to a person. That AI knows how to do all the important stuff. And literally, all I do is I say, "I want it to look like this." It does stuff in the background, and then the thing I want comes up, and I look at it and say, "Yeah, no, a little bit more like this, less of that." Um, it's crazy, actually, to to think about the experience.
Okay. So, some of, some of the things that the, the, the piece that made its rounds were kind of predicting, and maybe you can provide some commentary on this. I, what I want to do is kind of help people who don't really have a sense of the, there's an apocalyptic mood, I think, among many people in this moment who have an understanding of what is going on. And especially in light of, in the past week, things escalated very, very quickly with not only this essay impacting the markets, but negotiations between Anthropic and the Department of War, which broke down over potentially, we, I don't know if we'll ever know the full story, but potentially some, what seemed like, uh, moral guardrails. Who knows? Uh, we'd have to pick apart that narrative. And then, of course, OpenAI steps into that gap, and, and Sam Altman announces, "Well, now we've got the contract with the Department of War." So, this has become very, very quickly, for those who understand what's happening, it, it feels apocalyptic. In the sense of, as you wrote about today, that the world that we know, or once knew, might be gone already on so many levels, right?
Um, so a couple of things that were brought up, and maybe you could kind of help people understand any sense of accuracy, or where someone might think that this could be the future outcome. Um, okay, so you've got, uh, automation, right? Automation leads to lower demand and job loss. Um, all these processes, you said, I, I give my AI agent work to do. It runs all night in the background. It doesn't get tired, you know, like a, like a person that would have to code something or to work out a technical problem.
Um, so again, couple of points that this Citrini Research brought up, you know, was projecting potentially unemployment hitting 10.2% by 2028. S&P crashing, uh, it crashes 38% from, from 2026 highs. The, the complete substitute of white-collar labor. Where in the world would somebody get these kinds of ideas? Are they based in reality at all? Um, does that capture the, the dark potential of the, the apocalyptic mood? And, and where we can certainly, we'll get into, like, you, you feel differently about this outcome, but when you put yourself in the shoes of someone that, um, maybe isn't as optimistic about what this moment affords us, can you understand and help people understand why people might feel a sense of doom and gloom in the midst of this?
Well, actually, even in the piece, I put it, a section called "The Bad News." And the bad news is, in fact, bad news. So, it's like, um, it's, it's not so much that I don't have a, a shared sense of the magnitude and rate of the impact, or that that rate and magnitude of impact is going to be quite significant for the economy, for say, for example.
Yeah. So, I mean, let's talk about some of that bad news practically.
I've put it in a bigger picture. So, let's talk about that. Um, I think it's the right way to put this. I guess there's, there's maybe two or three things to have to, to think about at the same time. One is the old pocket calculator. I mean, remember back in the day, the word "calculator" described a human job. Human beings who were skilled at taking numbers and processing them in a fashion to turn out other numbers using mathematical operations. There's actually a large job. There used to actually be people who were known as secretaries, whose skill was to take audio transcripts and convert them into text. And so, the pocket calculator came out. This, the job of the, of the human calculator went away. There are no more human calculators, unless it's a circus act. For the most part, the secretary, as such, went away when the word processor came out. Well, certainly when the computer came out, even more certainly now when I can speak to my phone and it can do an immediate, instantaneous voice-to-text transcript.
So, uh, Marc Andreessen had a phrase a long time ago called "Software is eating the world." And the basic idea is that some very large fraction, not all of it, but a very large fraction of what humans do is the kind of thing that software can ultimately become capable of doing. And we're now at the point where big chunks of what human beings do is, or very, very soon will be, the kind of thing the software does, and does better, faster, basically at zero cost. So, again, to give the example, the software developer, the software app I wrote, uh, was, from a human perspective, this was an actual bid that I got from an actual, live, real, skilled, 20-30-year veteran engineer, was about a 2.5-month job and was going to cost about $17, $18,000 to do. Okay? And it's not just that the AI runs overnight without getting tired, it's that it did that entire job in two days and at zero.
Okay. Now, expand that to all the things that human beings do that are ultimately, at the end of the day, actually, let's call it AI work. This is, I think, a good way of thinking about it. Are you actually currently doing AI work? As it turns out, when you were a, a human calculator working at NASA processing numbers, you were doing AI work, very early AI work. When you were translating audio to text, uh, to, to typewriting, you were doing AI work. Now, it turns out, if you're writing software, you're doing AI work. But as it turns out, if you're making movies, if you're a cinematographer, if you're a filmmaker, if you're an actor, you're doing AI work. If you're a journalist, you're doing AI work. If you're a banker, if you're a financier, you're definitely doing AI work. If you're a real estate agent, if you're a DoorDash driver, >> you're almost doing AI work.
So, that really starts to put like a fine point on. And that article did a great job of walking you through the steps of how AI begins to work. It percolates its way through the economy, >> and displaces more and more and more that doesn't seem obvious, but as you start peeling the layers back, you go, "Oh, yeah. I guess that's true."
>> Like some of those things seem obvious, Jordan, like, uh, you know, you, you, anything that requires intelligence where the, the scarcity was, you would get a job because that level of intelligence was scarce, you would be in high demand. Anything that requires high levels of intelligence and it's simply doing, uh, intelligence, which is different. We probably should talk at some point between the difference between intelligence and wisdom, but it's simply doing intelligence. You can kind of see how that gap gets closed, right? You can see how that can be replaced. A calculator, a human calculator replaced with a more efficient calculator. Uh, a financial portfolio, uh, you know, advisor. I mean, how do you compete? How do you compete with a super intelligent, uh, AI? But what about DoorDash? I mean, that one, that one for me, I had, I, I had not seen that one on the horizon. Help people understand how something like DoorDash, or these things that you might go, "Wait, hang on. How, how could that be completely destabilized and replaced with something else?"
Right. So, the driver is not, and in fact, in some sense, the driver actually gets a bigger piece of the pie, but DoorDash is completely eliminated. And that's the, that's the thing to think about. So, you can imagine that right now, DoorDash exists for the most part because human beings, we're, we're trained. We don't like to learn new techniques. And so, once you've learned, "Okay, order food, DoorDash, got it. Click, click, done." The likelihood of you changing to some other service for, let's say, a 10% less expensive experience is low. You're just not going to do it. Uh, software development, the software companies have been resting on that for a long time. And once you've trained on a certain user interface, you're kind of stuck to that unless a new thing comes along which is very different and a lot better. AI doesn't care. It can learn a new user interface instantaneously. And so, what it is able to do is optimize entirely for efficiency and effectiveness. And it can write its own software at zero marginal cost. So, if it's going out and saying, "Hey, what does it look like for me?" I'm literally speaking like an agent to begin to build something that enables my user to be able to access food, and I can get 5% cheaper by doing it this way instead of this way. It just will. And as a user, you'll, you won't even notice it happen. It's like you don't currently notice how your packets go from your home to to here. You're not, you don't care about that. The machine's taking care of that. Think about the same thing in terms of all of your various kinds of, uh, software use decisions. Now, on the back end, there's a lot of inefficiencies sitting in the back end of how DoorDash does what it does. It takes a big cut. If you can offer a bigger cut, a discount to the customer and a bigger cut to the driver, what's going to happen?
When, and you can, because you've got zero marginal cost. It takes about a weekend for a three-agent swarm to build DoorDash. And by the way, they can market. They can hit social media. They can create the best marketing materials you've ever seen. They can, they can get all, they can load apps and get them on phones. This is so nothing is not losing. The driver is going to get the, >> the driver might actually be doing better. >> It's the person operating the intelligent infrastructure between the consumer and the person doing the work.
Now, here's the thing. The driver might be doing better for a little while, but now we have to go to the second order. So, you have the first order, which is AI directly replacing people's jobs. And maybe we'll go to the 1.5 order, which is like we're talking about with DoorDash, where it's actually replacing companies, and therefore replacing people's jobs. But the second order, remember, our economy sits on top of a transactional layer that has flows, real estate. Uh, people pay rents, they pay mortgages, they pay DoorDash. Well, if people are losing their jobs, one of the things they're not doing is they're not ordering DoorDash anymore, >> particularly if they're not paying their rent. And so, you start seeing a decrease in secondary markets. And all those secondary markets, as they start to get hit, that creates a spiral. If there's less ordering of DoorDash, then less DoorDash jobs.
So, like, let's say, like, no doom and gloom to the real estate agents out there, but that, that might be an, potentially an early casualty as a real estate agent.
Oh my gracious. I mean, how much does it cost to get an MLS listing, like to be able to access, like, $600? >> And whoever builds an AI agent who has access to MLS basically just took the entire category because those agents can do better than almost every real estate agent.
Yeah. Can, can understand your contracts, negotiate for you on your behalf, can do all of those things, and then they don't take, you know, $25,000 out of your, your home sale.
Right. They don't take nothing. So, the, Yeah. >> Right. The downstream effect of that is it's more so when that happens. Hope, I mean, again, hopefully my real estate agents out there are not hearing this as a prophecy of doom and gloom to them, but it might be wise to to consider the future here. So, if they lose that income, and they're the ones more likely to use the DoorDash feature, and now you take out of the, the, the market that available income, and the demand >> for that. So, it might not be right away. The driver is like, "Sweet, I'm taking home more profit from this direct agent-to-agent relationship." But maybe three, six, nine months from now, I, that seemed like a good arrangement, but now we have these kind of, the dominoes start to fall, and now the available pool of people with wanting to use DoorDash decreases because that's, you know, you, you lose a bunch of potential white-collar work, uh, and discretionary income, and, and now you're on the kind of Dave Ramsey, "beans, beans, and rice" program instead of instead of ordering DoorDash. So, I, I, that makes, uh, that makes a world of sense. And a very simple way of thinking about it is just the concept of efficiency. You know, if, if something cost $100 and you can do it for $50, two things happen. One is the people who are interacting with it at $100 are all shifting to you. But the other is that $50, it's going to a different place. It's not going to the place where it used to go, >> right?
>> Um, and anything that was attached to that $50, let's say people who were working at the original organization, >> they're gone, right? That, that, that, uh, energy is actually a good way of putting it, is out of the equation. Now,
here's the thing. I wrote an essay called "The Coming Great Transition" like 11 years ago about this. This was not a, "Oh my gosh, I can't believe that happened." It was a, "This is going to happen. It's just a matter of time." And let's take a look at what it, what we need to think about when it does happen. And now,
>> Yeah. So, what were you seeing there?
>> Oh, it's, I mean, um, take it back, like, look at, look at the Yellow Pages. Look at, like, the secretary. Look at, um, flea markets. It's just, once you get that there is, >> Thunder Mifflin. >> Yeah. Buster Unlimited paper in a paperless world. >> Uh, when, when you see the dynamics of how software operates and how there's this feedback loop of software has this thing where once you've invented it, it can't cost a certain amount of money to develop it, but once you've developed it, two things happen. One is you can iterate it almost for free, and two is you can now build on top of it. That's the next thing you do. Every additional expense. Like, let's say I'm making cars. Every car costs a certain amount of money to build the car. If I'm making software, it costs, let's say, a million dollars to make the software. Every copy is free. And I, and since I get that entire copy for free, my next generation doesn't go to reinvesting in the car. It goes to making the next software iteration better, which means making it capable of taking up more of reality. So, once you realize that, and people were talking about this in the in the late '90s, maybe even in the mid-'90s, um, then it's really a question of trajectory. How long is it going to take to get from here to there? And what's it going to look like as it moves through the world? And so, the thing that I hit on was the, the magnitude of this is not the kind of thing that many people think about, and I mean, almost anybody. And to be able to perceive what's likely to happen, you have to to think about orders of magnitude.
What I landed on was the distinction between a society of scarcity and a society of abundance, right? Meaning that we're dealing with a, uh, a transition. We're dealing with a set of events that have a magnitude of impact. And by the way, a rate, those both matter. They go down to the very root of what our society is. And I mean, like, at the level of civilization, at agricultural civilization, like accounting, Sumeria, that kind of stuff.
It's old. There are roots of how civilization operates that are very fundamental. And we're now all the way down to those roots. We're down to things that are so old that Western civilization is novel in relationship.
And we should note that civilization is not a given, though we've lived in it our entire life. Civilization is not been the default mode in which humans have organized themselves. I mean, if you take this, the standard anthropological model, we're probably looking at somewhere in the neighborhood of 97% of human history, humans have lived primarily by kinship bonds, you know, bonds of kin. And then maybe you begin to slowly scale that out into bands and tribes where there are some sort of worked familial alliances. But civilization, where you have the kin is not the primary marker of unification, but a story. And that's really what it is. The, the highest story that unites a civilization is their religion. That's their religio. That's the thing that binds them. And so, I, I think it's difficult even just for us to to imagine. We take what we, what we live in right now, where the, the, the, you know, the guy comes and picks up my trash on Friday morning, and I go to the grocery store and there's food on the shelves, and I drop my kids off at a place where people that aren't related to me teach my kids. Well, that's not true. One of my kids gets taught by my sister-in-law. But you, you get the concept is like, we've have this whole network that's built around some sort of invisible fabric like that, that there's something invisible that binds us together, a story, there's something religious about that. And so, I, I just, just to interject, because it's hard for us to to imagine. We take what we're doing here for granted. That, and it's not always been like that. So, please take us back to kind of scaling the civilizational project down to its, you know, to to core component parts to help us understand what, what is going on and what's been driving us.
So, there's basically two forces that drove civilization in the very, very beginning. Uh, one force was, uh, what I called the navigating the problem of scarcity, which is pretty simple. Um, on occasion, back in the former days, quite often, you didn't have enough. You didn't have enough food, didn't have enough water, maybe you didn't have enough housing, whatever it was. Um, and that was a problem. It's a problem for everything. It's not just a human problem. It's a problem for plants, a problem for, problem with all chemistry. And, um, so we tried to solve that problem. We invented things like irrigation so we could more reliably grow more crops. We invented things like fences to keep the animals from eating our crops, right? We, we began to build techniques, technique to endeavor to cope with scarcity more and more. Think about the, the, uh, the story of Joseph in Egypt, right? The cows. >> Sometimes the rain doesn't fall, and there is famine. What does Joseph do? Well, Joseph says, "If we harvest and store, we, we have to have a technique to store your wheat. We, let's build a technique. Let's put them in storehouses. And then when the famine comes, we can cope with scarcity more effectively." Right? So, that's one side. The other side of the equation is, well, if I'm storing a lot of grain and my neighbors are going hungry, they may want to take it. So, then we have to deal with other people wanting to take our stuff. So, those are basically the two sides of the coin that have been driving civilization since the very beginning. And they feed back on each other. Some civilizations get very, very good at taking other people's stuff because that actually has is more effective for them than trying to get good at, >> making. Yeah. Like the Huns or the Mongols. Excellent taking other people's stuff.
>> Um, other civilizations tend to be more focused on holding and protecting, which, by the way, also tends to produce tyranny. And we'll maybe ignore that, like Babylon. Um, so that's that. And the, the point is, that's been the driver. Like, that's been at the absolute core of everything, and for, for 10,000 years. But in reality, the notion of scarcity, which, while it is fundamental, right, there are certain things like food and water where if I've got it and I eat it, it's just gone. And if I've got it and you take it, I no longer have it. And you do, right? There's the characteristics of a scarce phenomenon. There's a whole other portion of reality which, in this essay, I call the generative. And the generative is something like, say, mathematics. If I invent geometry and teach you geometry, we both have it. And by virtue of us having it, and the more we use it, the more useful and powerful it actually is in the world. So, it doesn't deplete, it generates. And so, what we began to discover is that by playing in and with the generative, we are more successful in navigating the problem of scarcity, right? We invent a new technique by means of the generative. The new technique, at the end of the day, is actually in the generative. Let's, let's do irrigation. You could tell your neighbor, "Do irrigation." You haven't lost the ability to do irrigation. If your neighbor comes and takes your fields, that's a different story. And we also had to begin to change who we were to participate in that. We had to learn how to do things like tell the truth routinely. We had to do things like check and do things like write stuff down. Right? The science, for example, is entirely a discipline, a way of disciplining people to be able to participate in a collaborative community focused on the generativity of mutual investigation of the nature of reality, and then the sharing of the principles that are derived from that investigation.
>> Yes. >> It turns out that's very powerful. >> Yeah. >> Uh, you get better at all the various things in scarcity, including, by the way, taking other people's stuff. So, for sure.
>> Yeah. And that makes me think dynamic.
>> So, that makes me think, Jordan, right away, in which, uh, particular civilizational stories will take the, the conflict story, in of Marx and oftentimes the postmodern and postcolonial approach, which is to reduce life to shrink or to eliminate the vertical dimension. Right? So, the pursuit of transcendence, we've shrunk that down to being only about the, the horizontal component. So, there's a way you can kind of frame the civilizational story to make it about scarcity is primarily the, a, a problem that is only horizontal, and you, you neglect by doing that, you neglect that it is the vertical component. Especially, I mean, both, we, we share, we share, um, a kind of foundational alignment with the, the, the historic Christian story in this regard. But you, you take a vertical, um, approach in which the experience of transcendence opens you up to modes of being more cooperative, trusting. I mean, just, I, I picked this up even when I was very young, Jordan. I, I remember, um, in, in my church and Christian school context, we had, we had, in early in high school, we had something that people would have called a revival hit our school. And one of the things that instantly stood out to me in these kind of revival meetings was how much when I felt the spirit, when I felt a sense of communion with God, one of the first things that I wanted to do, and I would notice in the room right away, was people going over to hug each other.
Right? When that happened, when I was taken outside of my selfish, that survival mode, which is overly consumed with scarcity, deeply afraid that my needs will not be met. When I'm taken out of that survival, egotistical mode, and I have a proper orientation, even for a moment, to the truly transcendent, one of the things I noticed right away is I want to go hug that person. Like, I want to give them something of what I have. Like, there was an old, there was an old saying in our church, you know, you called it the, um, the Pentecostal handshake. What was the Pentecostal handshake? Was you go shake hands with somebody, and all of a sudden, you'd find in your hand a $50 bill.
You know, that was the Pentecostal handshake. >> You know, that was, and that was the sense in which like God is doing something in you that releases that generativity, right? It aligns you with the kingdom of God in such a way that you become more generative, less concerned about playing a game under a deceptive game in which you think the rules of the game will lead to a particular outcome, and that outcome is the thing that you need, but it's actually not what you need.
>> Uh-huh. So, when you talk about the necessity in civilization of having a, this wasn't exactly your language, this is what I heard, was scarcity responding to scarcity. If we frame this within kind of a strict Marxist lens and we make it only about the horizontal, we lose sight of the vertical. And what that ends up doing is creating in us more of a scarcity mindset. Yes.
>> Creates in us more fear. It creates more tribalism. Um, it, it reduces the, the, we eliminate the, the great works of art and music in culture. We reduce the vertical component and strip it only down to the political class struggle, a struggle for scarcity of resources. But it's only in right relation to the vertical component that we find the solutions to our, our scarcity problem. And so, we are faced with this choice of cooperation or coercion in regards to our experience of, or an awareness of scarcity and our finitude.
Nice. So, so this book, "The Prince," so Machiavelli's "The Prince," I think does a great job of describing this great intermediary period, let's say, from like the Pharaoh or Babylon all the way up until very recently, um, which is the perilous trade-off between cooperation and coercion. Um, if, if the grounding, if the, if the foundation, if the early days are dominated by the need to dominate, then that's at the core.
>> Yes. And what "The Prince" deals with is to the degree to which I allow cooperation to produce generativity that potentially creates disruption. It threatens the stability of the kingdom, which could be bad for everybody, by the way, and it's certainly bad for me. So, I don't want to do that. But the prince is faced with a risk. If his neighbor allows cooperation and generativity in his kingdom, which produces a certain amount of innovation and novelty, his neighbor might achieve enough capacity to overcome our prince. This is an unstable equilibrium, >> where coercion, or the spirit, the heart of the society of scarcity, is forced to participate in some degree in abundance in order to maintain a competitive position vis-à-vis in the game of scarcity. And that >> drives history. And so, you have, you have a period of time where a society is innovative, and they begin to outcompete their neighbors. >> And then you have the neighbors begin to capture a lot of that generative knowledge, which, by the way, is hard to keep secret. Um, and they begin to lift up. And then there's a, there's a moment of stabilization, and by the way, usually then a moment of decadence, and then a new wave of innovation comes. But the key is that it's been up and to the right. That where we are now is a radically more collaborative global civilization than anything vaguely before for a very simple reason. That's the most competitive. And so, if you want to win the competitive game, you have to play the cooperation game better. So, that was, that's been the driver. Think about, like, in World War II, where we began, for the very first time. Historians made this point to me. It was powerful. Um, take any, any given army in 1945, after all the various technologies that had been developed throughout the war. Any given army in 1945 could have taken on all of the armies in 1939. That's how much innovation was packed into that short period. And when you look at the stuff at, like, Bletchley Park with Alan Turing and the computers and Enigma, all that, or obviously the Manhattan Project and many other things as well, what you see is how much potent generativity was produced by coordinating and cooperating in a new fashion. And a bunch of generals were sitting around going, "Man, like, if we don't get better at just doing that kind of thing, then the other guys are going to, going to take us out completely." This began the thing that was called the space race.
>> But the space race was actually more like the generative, um, how do I put it, right? A challenge. How do we maintain a continually accelerating rate of generative creativity so that we can match our opponents, but without losing the fundamental structures of the society of scarcity upon which we are founded?
>> Yeah. How can we hold those?
I want to bring them together. I'd like to pick at that from two, two different heuristics. One being the historical, kind of contemporary moment that we're living in, but also connected to the theological. That, as a perhaps somewhat appropriate historical comparison, let's say the Manhattan Project and the World War II climate, that let's make that maybe one of the best things that we can, as a historical comparison to our current moment with artificial intelligence. And in some ways, it may be, I know this seems hard for people to believe, it may be even more potent of a moment than than that for the generative possibilities. I mean, the generative possibilities of, uh, nuclear fission are, you know, profound if we actually tapped into them, but, uh, I think this, the potential on this is very, very high. Where it becomes relevant, like, as a historical comparison, is let's say you become aware, you know, that the, the Germans are developing the bomb. You know that, let's, let's kind of put this in kind of a game theory perspective. You're American culture plays a particular game by a particular set of rules that has been in some way, shape, or form, has some loose connection, albeit somewhat severed, to the Christian story. There, there's ways in which the Christian story has informed the rules of the game that we play within our culture in ways that were different than the Japanese, right? So, we'll use the Japanese, that's a clearer cultural distinction. Um, maybe more clear than the United States and in, and Germany at the time. You're faced with this dilemma about, well, do we continue to play by the rules of this game with its particular ethical boundaries, knowing that in the kind of global game, not just the game we're playing internally, but the game in which we are competing with other civilizational games, what happens if they're playing by a different set of rules that give them an immediate short-term advantage? They play by less ethical norms and constraints. This is, this is the concern that they had, right, that drove, "We've got to have this Manhattan Project happen now because if the Nazis get it, you think they're going to hold off on on dropping an A-bomb on New York City? No. They're playing by different rules."
And even that motivated Hiroshima and Nagasaki, it's like, "Okay, they have a different civilizational game that they're playing in Japan. And it seems unlikely, I know there's a lot of historical debate about this, but it seems unlikely that they're going to give up anytime soon. Do we want a land invasion?" Well, my own grandfather's life was spared by not being sent on that, that mainland invasion, uh, of Tokyo. So, what do we do? Well, we better strike first. You have this sense in which if they're playing a different game than we're playing, maybe we will be at a disadvantage. How this ties in to this present moment in artificial intelligence is I think what we've seen even the past week with Anthropic and OpenAI negotiating with the Department of War. So, my read on it, which is incomplete, is that Anthropic says, "Hey, we have a couple, at least, ethical limitations that we do not want, uh, we do not want our what we have made being employed in that direction." They go to the Department of War. Department of War goes, "Sorry, we're not going to consult you on this in the midst of it." Right? Like, "You have to turn over full use of it to us." And I hear many people going, "Well, how terribly immoral." But I understand the pressure the Department of War is facing if they know that the civilizational game that China is playing has far fewer ethical constraints on their use of artificial intelligence. So, now we face a moment that, to tie it to the theological, we have, we have a game in which we still have some loose tethering to the Christian story that might inform things like, "But we want to respect human dignity." So, if we have mass surveillance capabilities by the Department of War on every, which we probably already do, but to the level in which Anthropic's tools could provide, uh, invasions of privacy, we see that as going red flag because we have this inherent sense of the Imago Dei. And that, even though, you know, Anthropic's CEO might not articulate it that way, that's the program that's running kind of deep in the substructure of this. But if you go, "All right, our, our rival in this global game doesn't play by those rules." The theological comparison to me that we talked a little bit about was something akin to what John the Revelator was trying to address to the seven churches in Asia Minor in the first century in the book of Revelation. They are living under a beast. Uh, the, the way of the dragon seems like it is the way that wins all the time. It is a way that is compared to Jezebel. It's about short-term tradeoffs. Might cost you in the long run, but you're going to feel the lure and the appeal of the short term. Whereas the way of the Lamb, that John consistently presents throughout this book, is the ultimate long game. The way of the Lamb is an eschatological picture in which all of creation wins. It's a win-win game for all facets of creation. And that gets fully realized in the future. It's a long game.
But now you're facing in the middle of that world. Let's say you're living in Pergamum here. I, I promise everyone listening, this all connects. I, hopefully, you're tracking. You're living in Pergamum in the first century, right? And you are among a Christian community that might be 200 to 500 people in a city of 150,000 to 200,000. So, you're a statistical minority trying to play by the way of the Lamb in a world which would have been your entire world that seems wholly and totally committed to the, the, the way of the dragon. And now you're faced with a choice. Do I play by the way of the Lamb, knowing that right now it really would look like Team Dragon is going to win this thing playing by their rules? Do I give in? So that, you know, the Christians in Pergamum are wrestling with, "Do I compromise? You know, do I, do I offer incense on the great altar of Zeus or to the imperial cult of worship? Do I give in just a little bit so that I can retain my economic stability?" Because if you don't do that, you can't participate in the trade guilds. So, hopefully, people are seeing the historical connect to the theological here. And the question that we face, it seems like right now, that I think you were great in helping us think through in that essay, Jordan, was, "Does the way of the Lamb, a win-win, generative, other-centered game that we take by faith, is going to win in the long run?" What do we do in the midst of this moment in which it feels like, I feel a lot of pressure, and I know a lot of people do, and thinking that that doesn't seem like the game, the AI game, that's going to win here. It feels like the way of the dragon might be the thing that wins. Help, help me, uh, help everybody listening to this think through all of that. There's a lot there.
Let me, let me maybe give the end. The answer is, it does. And I don't mean eschatologically. I mean practically. So, that's, we're going to get there. Okay. So, the way of the Lamb is, in fact, the best way to play the AI game. That is the argument.
>> Uh, again, I mean, practically, strategically, not just, >> And I don't want to at all say just, but not >> exclusively in eschatologically. So, let me zoom a couple of pieces. Uh, one, when you look at the Manhattan Project, the payload of the Manhattan Project was not the nuclear bomb. The payload of the Manhattan Project was the Manhattan Project, which was, "Whoa, we just built the capacity to make nuclear bombs and also lots of other super powerful things." Our entire society was pivoted around that insight. We suddenly, all at once, began to test every student for aptitude. We suddenly, all at once, began to fund every university from the Department of Defense. The entire economy became the Manhattan Project so that we could tap into innovation. And that's the key thing. And we had to continue to organize and reorganize and organize and reorganize the way that we educated, the way that we ran economies, the way that we financed, in order to continue to stay on the bleeding edge of innovation. So, the, the arms race wasn't really a race of against weapons. It was a meta-race of your ability to develop weapons and to deploy them. By the way, develop and deploy to integrate them into your society. This is what got us into space. This is what got us into ultimately into AI. Okay.
Second, where we are now with regard to say, AI, China, etc., has been very well thought about for at least 15 years, longer actually, but at least 15 years in Silicon Valley. And the people who've been working on this kind of stuff, they've been thinking about these kinds of problems. What you were describing in the term is called a multi-polar trap. This is where, "I don't want to do it, you don't want to do it, but because we can't cooperate, I have to do it, and therefore you have to do it, and you have to do it there, and therefore I have to do it." Right? So, we're forced in this terrible spiral, a downward spiral. It's called mutual defection in, in the Prisoner's Dilemma.
Norm's race. So, we, we both agree that if we, if we fought right now, it would be bad. If we fought 10 years from now with better weapons, it would be worse. It would be better if we couldn't make better weapons. But we both know that if either one of us makes better weapons, then they're going to win. Then boom, you're done. Right? So, that's, by the way, this is also in the, in the community that thinks about these kinds of things is called a multi-polar trap. It's also sometimes called Moloch, which for those of us who are familiar with demonology, we're like, "Hey, well-named, well-named secular, uh, AI researchers, very well named." That's exactly what we're talking about. So, we'll get there. And the point is that, that OpenAI was originally created because it was considered to be too dangerous to allow
Closed source, closed companies like Google to dominate AI, and I guess at the time, maybe Facebook. I can't remember who else was meaningfully important at the time.
Now, of course, what we saw is that Moolok consumed OpenAI, and they became a closed source, closed, very powerful, wealthy company, and allied with Microsoft in perfect symbolic, uh, symbolism. They got their, uh, SS tattoos and their full-length black leather jackets when they made that alliance.
So then Anthropic was born, right? Directly out of that. "Hey, we need to actually be the ones who focus on making this thing work." And here's the thing: within the AI community, there are two race conditions. One race condition, you could think of as being small 't' tyranny. The second race condition is big 'T' tyranny.
Small 't' tyranny is China. So if the Chinese get to decisive strategic advantage, they get to such good AI that they can just beat us, then they win. They dominate in just the same way that, that the West dominated the world when it got science and the various advantages of that, which you could think of science as a variation of, like, slow AI, by the way.
Mhm. Okay. So that's small 't' tyranny. It's okay. We're, we're racing, classic arms race. We have to research AI faster and harder than they do, because if they get it faster and better than we do, they get too much of an advantage, and then they'll beat us, and then we'll lose, and that's very bad for us.
And so they, they look at the same story. Why are we running so hard? Well, we don't run, they'll run. And look how bad they're going to be. However, there's also big 'T'. And this is where the AI guys specifically focus. And the AI guys is really basically four guys. You got OpenAI, Microsoft, Saudi Arabia, Japan. You got Anthropic and the cluster around them. You've got Google and the cluster around them. And you've got the House of Musk and the cluster around him, potentially including Peter Thiel's resources, and China. All right, that's pretty much it in the whole world.
So, it's actually kind of nice. You don't have to have a scorecard. You can, you can, you can remember the players on the back of your hand. But those guys have for years been very clear that this is plausibly most likely a winner take all game. Meaning, if you can get escape velocity on AI, because AI, one of the things the AI can do is it can make better AI, which we're already seeing happen. This is important. Remember, the payload of the Manhattan Project was not the atomic bomb. It was the Manhattan Project. Well, the payload of AI is AI, because AI is the Manhattan Project. Does that make sense?
And already Anthropic has talked about the fact that their most recent version was like 70% built with their previous version. Of course, right? If you're getting a 100x improvement in software development by using cloud code, Anthropic is going to be using cloud code to build the next version of cloud code. And there's only a matter of time before that starts to become closed loop by hypothesis, where the AI closes its eyes, focuses on itself for what to us appears to be two days, and does two years' worth of work, and comes back out the other side so much more powerful that it just, what happened?
And so if any, and so this is what's happening in the Department of War. This is very important. It is a negotiation between what are effectively peers at the level of power. The United States government, Department of War, is negotiating with one of the four major players in AI, because guess who's not a major player in AI? The United States government is not on that list. They are not a major player. Now, they're trying to figure out maybe how they could become a major player, but that's going to be hard for them.
Because it's democracy. It's an inefficient bureaucracy. It gets shifted all the time. So, and, and by the way, the other four major players are strategically aware of what's happening. They're not dummies. So Sam looks at that and says, "I could use the advantages of the Department of War to accelerate my ability." But he's not really, at the end of the day, that worried about competing with even China. Maybe, but maybe probably. I mean, China's on the board, so China's there. But he's really worried about Google. He's really worried about Elon. That's where the real game is being played. Because they, they're not necessarily certain, but they're confident enough that whoever wins has won big 'T' tyranny, capital 'T'. They call it a singleton, a single dominant AI that is so smart that it can absolutely extinguish all competitors forever, right? The true dream of Fra, something that because it's so smart, it knows how to observe anything on the world using satellites, for example, etc., etc. Like surveillance at a level that we don't really, it's available. By the way, the technology I'm about to mention is available. There are satellites out there that can count the number of hairs on your head. I think that that power is there now. One of the problems is data processing. It's not observation, it's the ability to process it. But if you got enough AI, you can process that data. So just imagine AI that is smart enough to be able to use the observation capabilities that currently exist, smart enough to build better observation capabilities on a hyperscale, and uses that to make sure that nobody else can ever compete with it. And then it just establishes dominion over the earth. That is, that is kind of the, the nightmare dream of the AI community. That's what drives them. They think about that. They've thought about it. They've run the, they've checked the boxes. They've checked the logic, and they've said, "Shit, I've got to get rid of my security protocols. I've got to become, you know, Sam. Oh, you know what I'll do? Deal with the guitar war. Anthropic, if you guys want to go ahead and be a little bit slow and not get access to those resources because you feel like you're holding an ethical boundary, I will take that deal. Because I believe that if I don't win, and by the way, for the most part, well, that's not entirely true. These guys might be straight-up psychopaths, but it is entirely plausible that they earnestly believe that they and they alone have the ethical acumen to hold this thing in proper humanity.
Right? This is certainly a thing that I have heard in talking to the top people in these various places. Um, or at least a worry that you can't trust anybody else. So you can only trust people who you trust, and the people you trust are on your team right now. That's what happened.
Yeah. So, so that's the thing to be thinking about, right? That's, that's the arms race, and that, that arms race is driving everything. It's driving geopolitical behavior. It's driving, you know, if you want, if you want a way of analyzing like, why are we attacking Iran? It may be X, Y, or Z. AI is probably involved, non-trivially.
Absolutely. To me, that feels like even over the weekend, that with all that going on, which would normally be in any other news cycle, obviously historic, world-changing, the, the toppling of the Ayatollah, but the thing that for me over the weekend was still grabbing more of my attention was what we're talking about right now. Yeah. That fact is, it's interesting because that fact is recursive or reflexive, meaning it's correct, it's a correct orienting basis. You're, my my sense, of course, is that your judgment is correct. This is more important. But also, as more and more people have that, more and more attention begins to focus. So, but then let's get to the good news. So that's the bad news. So the bad news is you've got, you've got two big doses of bad news. Let's recapitulate. One dose is the very foundations of a, of civilization are going to be shattered by the magnitude and rate of what AI is bringing. That's one dose. So if you, if you work for something, it's unreasonably likely that you'll be unemployed, for example. The second dose of bad news is that, and all the major players are focused on a winner take all endgame, and are, are going to be willing to sacrifice the disconnected faith. That's the key thing. The values they've been willing to sacrifice their values on the altar of Moolok, on the premise that at least the one or two things they're able to preserve, they're able to preserve. Which is real. We have the story, right? That constant process of Solomon or whoever, like, "Oh, you know, the devolution from worshiping God to worshiping idols so that you can defeat the enemy who worships the idol." You know, the Assyrians come in, they're like, "Man, we better worship those gods because those guys are kicking everybody's ass."
Exactly. Yeah, that, that framing is really helpful, Jordan. That to, to connect what you're saying here to circle back into the theological. It's, it's very hard for us to conceive of how different that, that, that view in the ancient Near East and the biblical world, anything essentially pre-modern, because the question is not the question that we wrestle with, is there a god or not? That, that, that kind of Western, uh, post-Enlightenment thing that runs in the back of our head, where they're not wrestling with the Nietzschean question per se. What they're wrestling with is, who is Lord? And we have to keep in mind, even the, even the name Baal is simply a title. Baal means Lord. There's plenty of overlap. I mean, to connect this back to even like Pergamum in the first century, here you have, uh, I mean, the Greeks when they moved into the, the lands of the ancient Near East, they're like, "Oh, Baal, that, yeah, that's Zeus. It's the same thing, right?" And so you have a guy by the name, we're going to start calling him Zeus now because we won. So obviously our version of that is the actual Lord. But you, you guys get that, and everybody's like, "Yeah, okay, fine. Zeus."
Yeah. But I also think they noticed parallels, right? Uh, that there's a, there are symbolic parallels in the stories they were telling about both of them as well. Yeah. There's a great book, Steven D. Young, you know, Lord of Spirits podcast guy.
Stephen D. Young's got a great book on the Baal cycle. I'd highly recommend to everybody. He brings up these connective tissues between, uh, what you can see in the Baal cycle and the, the points of similarity between Baal and Zeus. And that's not lost on people, especially living in this. Just so I've been studying this a lot lately. So this happens to be the, the context that's in the forefront of my mind right now is in Asia Minor. This was definitely a reality. You take Antipas, a guy, I think he's the only historical person outside John the Revelator mentioned in the book of Revelation in the first century. None of the, none of the politicians, none of the emperors are given names. They're all given symbols. Antipas. Antipas was a martyr in Pergamum who, uh, according to like fifth-century church historians, because he did not give in, uh, did not offer incense to the, the cult of worship to Zeus, which was possibly also connected to Baal and also connected to the emperor. Uh, he was roasted alive inside of a golden calf or bronze, uh, bull. Right. And, and so the parallels there between, it's much messier, between Zeus, Baal, Molech worship, right? And so the temptation that they're feeling right now in the moment is, I think, still akin to to what I'm trying to get at here, is the sense in which if we don't, if we don't, if we allow ourselves to give into the temptation of the dragon, which is to say, uh, we are going to play the scarcity game in its full coercive, destructive manner. Winner takes all. This is ultimately a win-loss game. There's no possibility of it being a win-win game.
You know, if we play, I think the biggest temptation right now that I, I feel in the atmosphere around this is that whoever, like this is in some sense still the, the, the Nietzschean question, right? Is like, I'll put it like this. I've used this phrase before, right? The, the perennial struggle is whether or not whoever slayed the lamb, the slain lamb, is enthroned in Revelation. And you're faced with the question all the time of whether or not who or what slayed the lamb is really in charge. And so when we think about the different games and the rules of these games that are being played in this moment, I even just think about on a basic level, if you have the capability, like, um, who's the former Jack Dorsey, right? Former Twitter CEO just laid off 40% of his workforce. Now, maybe he employs, maybe he has a history of kind of unnecessary extra employment. I don't think this is that. Oh,
He does have a history of unnecessary extra employment. For sure. But I don't know if this is, this still bucks that history.
Yes. Uh, 40% cut is when you know that you could become more efficient by making the lives of what was it? Uh, 4,000 or 10, 4,000. Yeah, something like that.
4,000 of your 10,000 employees' lives worse. But it makes your stability and security better. I think even in the short term, we have, we're gonna have, we have serious questions about even internally, not thinking about the game we play with other civilizational games, but kind of within our own cultural context. I, I, I would love for you to speak to the thing that people will be faced with these decisions as you run a, you know, a software company.
Well, okay. So, let me, let me maybe jump to the end.
Okay, do it.
Cuz it's, it's, it's tricky. People might get a little bit confused. Software companies are over. Trying to hold the bar to like, not fire your software engineers or your employees at your software company is nice. It's well-intentioned, but it's actually looking the wrong direction. Software companies, the whole category is over. There are no, there are no more software companies. They're all dead men walking except for which aren't software companies anymore.
Yeah.
That's an important thing to keep in mind. Like, what the point I'm trying to make is that the entire concept of scarcity civilization is over. Everything. Universities over. Banks over. Remember that scene from The Big Short where he was talking about the Type A trenches? That's what I'm doing. That Jenga board over, right? So, it, it will look and feel like apocalypse from the inside of the world that we live in, regardless, completely of external adversaries. And it's entirely the internal logic of, of what happens when you're using the game theory theoretic logic that is at the foundation of the society of scarcity means that there is an internal defection problem that cannot be avoided because it's the foundation of the think game that we're playing. So this game, the whole game, over.
That's the bad news, right? Here's the good news. The good news is that these technologies are actually at their most generative when they are actually in the hands of individuals and small groups who are collaborating with each other. That's profound. All right. So the, the argument that I make is that there are four primary, five, four primary, one additional reason why the vision of one ring to rule them all isn't the actual vision. Remember earlier I talked about the notion of the singleton, one AI that just got so smart that it outputted everything.
Yeah.
The hypothesis, the argument is that, and by the way, we can do this theologically if you'd like. Um, a, a properly constructed network of individuals who have their own AI, their own personal AI, like running on your computer, not a cloud thing, your own, your own personal AI running on your computer, network together and collaborating with each other produces a substantially more generative power than the fundamental approach that is being taken by the primary frontier AIs, the four big four horsemen and China. And by the way, if China modifies to be playing the game that I'm describing, yay, because then they're playing by the, the rules of the lamb. So weirdly, or maybe not weirdly, providentially, if you play the game of the lamb, if you do things like are faithful and are honest and are willing to trust, but intelligently, right? The word faith. If you are faithful and you have faith, I used peace in the essay to make it so that people didn't have to struggle with that definition, so they could think about the concept, because the concept of faith has been deeply, deeply destroyed for the past, whatever, whoever knows how long, 2,000 years, certainly the past 250.
The net result, and we don't have too much time. I can go into more depth if you'd like. But the net result is you actually produce something that is stronger. And I mean this in the level of, like, strategic conflict power, has more power than Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, Moolok. As it turns out, and again, this is beautiful. It causes the heart to sting when you really think about it. The eschatological and the day-to-day practical meet at that point. Yeah. Okay. One point of connection. I know we'll land the plane here shortly. Jordan, when you, when you say that, it reminds me again, kind of, I'll stick, I'll stick within the, the, the framework of Revelation. There's this thing that kind of perplexes people when they get into their charts and their timelines about the, the dragon being, uh, put into the abyss for a temporary period of time and then, you know, being released and understood within its proper first-century symbolic context. I think what you're really getting at here is you need to be watching what happens when the dragon does get released. Is immediately the nations are led astray. So the deeper theological point there is that the, the power the dragon gets is only through deception and only through our willing participation in his con game.
Right?
So the only power that he has is the power to deceive, and it's by our willing participation in the game that that game has any power. So the game in and of itself has no power if you don't participate in it.
Yes. At the end of the day. That's right.
Yeah. So, one of the things I really appreciated about your essay, Jordan, was that I think at a most practical level, what I heard you saying, and my heart did leap with joy, because I'm wrestling with, will the, is the way of the lamb feasible in the short term? I, I have full, not full confidence, I have as much confidence as what comes with pistis, that the way of the lamb wins in the end. Right? And I also know historically that oftentimes those who play by the way of the lamb, this is the Hebrews 11 Hall of Fame in faith, they never lived to see the promised land.
Yeah.
And that, that's why they're the Hall of Fame of pistis, is because they continued to live in the way of the lamb, even though they did not see the victory of the lamb in their lifetime. I have that sense. My concern has been in the short term, right? And, and what I really appreciated, and maybe you can, as we wrap up here, kind of loop people into why, if we take that approach, that the way of the dragon only has power because we would participate in it, that it actually gives us a high degree of agency in how this thing turns out. So it feels apocalyptic because there's an unveiling of potential doomsday scenarios. And like all apocalyptic prophetic projections, whether it's Jonah to Nineveh, uh, whether it's Isaiah and Jeremiah, the notion is that this is not necessarily a settled future from our perspective. How we respond to the unveiling determines whether or not the thing that is being unveiled to us takes place. And so what I saw, kind of reading your essay, in a theological level, if you have just a remaining moment or two to address it, is a great sense of hope that we have agency to not participate in the way of the dragon. Even if it feels like things are somewhat outside of our control, that we can cooperate in collaborative networks of generativity and trust together. But it's going to require each of us going, "I will make the first move."
Like that's where the pistis comes in. I will be willing to sacrifice.
Will you be willing to sacrifice? And when we do that together, it's not Moolok.
We're carrying the cross, right? We are, we are participating in Christ's sufferings by being, I'm not putting my kids on the altar. That's Moolok. That's Baal.
Yeah. I am offering myself to you in love. Is there any way in which I, I see you laying it out. Could you maybe, I don't know, provide any commentary on how that could practically kind of play out as, as you're seeing?
Sure. I, I'll actually be extremely practical. I think you did a beautiful job of speaking it at the theological level. And let me just put a, you are in fact a theologian, and so it makes sense. But I wanted to, in the essay, mention that the, what we're dealing with is not the kind of thing that could be handled with a toolkit less than the theological.
Yeah. You know, so if you're thinking with, say, philosophy, philosophy is nice. It's great. You can go to a certain level. You're thinking of science, right below philosophy. It's good. It's useful. This is above both of those in terms of the pay grade of the toolkit. You have to be using things that are at the theological level. And if you don't think the theological is above the philosophical in terms of the strength of the tools, you're going to have to figure that one out. Um, but I'm letting you know it is. So, the theology guides us quite nicely. But I'll be very, very practical. Um, almost like the heuristics. So, heuristic number one, there's no real good reason at this point to even think about groups of humans that have been put into techniques like corporations, as being things to deal with very much. You, you still have to do a deal with Anthropic to be able to use their AI. You still have to fill in the blank, and certainly corporations make hardware, but for the most part, the future, and by the future, I don't mean like 50 years. I mean like the next three to 10 years, um, will be built by human beings interacting with other human beings in a direct relational way, like you and I are doing right now. You are not a representative of the CBS Corporation. You're, you, and I don't need to deal with the CBS Corporation, and probably never would. I have no interest in that. Why would I do that? That's a silly thing to do. Nothing good will come of it, right? But I can deal with you. And by the way, if somebody who currently works at the CBS Corporation, I don't know who it would be, I don't even have a clue who works there, but is interesting and useful and has got good ideas and good faith, leaves and wants to talk with me, I'll do it. So, that's one. Yeah, I think about it.
Everything in the human world is made up. The dragon is, is has been around for a long time, right? Government is made up of humans. Corporations are made up of humans. Institutions are made up of humans. We're now dealing with humans again. We're back to just dealing with actual humans as humans directly. Okay. Two, as Christians, we have this incredible capability. If you're actually really believe, you're not afraid of death. You have no fear of death. And you have a very specific mandate. You have to do your level best to be like Christ. So that means that you're willing to interact with other people in a fashion that is known as good faith. You're, you're willing to do the right thing. You're willing to enter into a relationship which is collaborative, cooperative, generative. Now, you turn one cheek, you don't turn two. By the way, that's two swords, one cheek. Um, there's a protocol. The protocol is a protocol where you can help people onboard into behaving properly. You want everybody to be able to participate in the kingdom. If you train to, to not participate by virtue of giving them the ability to defect, then you're not doing your job properly. But the key thing is, if you're not afraid, if fear is not driving your heart, then you can participate. All right? So that's heuristic number two. First, people. Second, ordinary Christian ethics, but you can just live that way. Third, as it turns out, and if you look at the long arc of the history of how human beings have innovated, ordinary Christian ethics is the secret sauce of how human beings collaborate at the best possible level. That's really important. And I'm, I'm trying to say, like, a circle has 360 degrees. This is, I'm making a geometric argument. Ordinary Christian ethics is the optimal way for a multiplicity of humans to collaborate to enter into a unity of purpose. That is, that is the, the trinity embodied in the imminence of human beings. That is bang, right? That's the thing. And so what happens is you're able to build the recursive Manhattan Project, be able to build that thing which outputs from itself an increasing capacity to increase capacity, because you are using that which is the most effective at producing generativity in the entirety of creation. Right? God created it that way. You're doing it the way God created it. The result of that is you're actually able to produce the benefits of that verticality at a rate and in a magnitude. Now, here also, and in a quality that is superior to degenerate versions. And OpenAI is running a degenerate version. Google's running a degenerate version. You know, it's not, not really that different than saying running a crappy Manhattan Project is not as effective as running a really good Manhattan Project. Yeah. We're saying there's an arrow that takes you from crappy Manhattan Project to good Manhattan Project to really good Manhattan Project. If you keep following that arrow, you end up with a multiplicity of people operating ordinary Christian ethics in a mutual, collaborative way. And that right there is the endgame. That wins practically, like literally, in time, in the world we're in. It wins. It wins the race we're dealing with right now. I don't know if it wins the big end game, right? There may be other games down the road. Probably are. Like, I'm not talking about the end times in a purely, how would you say, "Left Behind" sensibility. Like, that's not what I'm talking about.
But I am talking about in this war that's happening right now. This wins this war in a very, very, very good way. A way that is so good that people now looking at the end result, and again, 10, 20 years, we're not talking about centuries, maybe even five years, will look at it and say, "That is a lot closer to the kingdom of heaven than we've been in."
Yeah. I, just to leave people with, I think what you're sharing, that Jordan, I think of how people could practically respond in this moment, even if they don't even use ChatGPT to write their emails, right? Like they have no connection to this, and they're going, "Okay, so, so how could I participate in the, make sure that the way of the lamb is the thing that gets spread around me, and that becomes the game we're playing?" And one of the things I think of right away is the necessity of those who are called to bring about that vertical component of life, the vertical relationship, artists, songwriters, poets, storytellers, because we have to have an encounter with truly transcendent with a capital T in order for us to be able to identify when it is Moolok, and to actually lose a desire for that Moolok, right? We have to taste.
Can I actually, I can generalize that. Let me generalize. I agree with you, but let me generalize. I have to do a caveat.
Because you said the word called, and called is the key.
Um, everybody, regardless of what it is you are called to.
Yeah.
Must do that which you are called to. Nothing that you are not called to, and surrender into the calling impeccably.
So if you are an artist and you're holding back your art for the purposes of, fill in the blank, success, competitive advantage, local fashion, drop it. You're now fully in warrior mode. Do the thing that God put you here to do perfectly.
Yes.
That's it. If, and if you're a mom, great. Raise your kids. Do that. If you, whatever you're called to do, this is the key. Whatever you're called to do. That's where you're supposed to be. And if you, if you aren't currently where you're called to do, guess what? How fun this is. The fact that you're about to be unemployed becomes a liberating possibility to move toward what you're called to do.
That's kind of neat, isn't it? Um, you've been dragged around being a, fill in the blank, you know, junior marketing agent at an accounting firm when you're actually supposed to be making music, for example. Well, since there ain't going to be more jobs as a junior accounting executive at a junior marketing executive accounting firm, you can do something else. What should you do? Don't be governed by fear. Do the thing that God put you here to do. I mean, that's been the right thing to do for all time. Now, oddly enough, the, the entire machine is greased because the whole thing's going away anyhow. But that's the winning move.
Wild, man. And in that sense, when you frame it that way, it, it will feel hard. But like, like all sorts of apocalypse, apocalypses, like all sorts of apocalypse of the past, the unveiling exposes our idols. And so in this process, there may be things that have been idolatrous that if we really trust that the way of the lamb is going to win in the long game, that in the short term, I can trust.
It's very, it's easier said than done, right? That that job loss feels insurmountable. If I trust the way the lamb is going to win, but in the short run, we'll go with the way of Goldman Sachs, right? But that's painful.
But that which doesn't, if, if it's not built upon the foundation of the rock, what happens happens when the storms come. The storms blow the house away that's not built on the proper foundation. So I think for those listening to this, if you believe in the way of the lamb, whether you're like, "I don't know what to make of all the Christian metaphysics and doctrine," but I still am kind of jingling with what you and Jordan are saying here, Paul, I, I would just say like, build upon the rock, right? And then when the storms come, there will be certainly features of it that will test, but the foundation will still, will still be there, and then you can, you can stand.
You can stand.
If you do believe in the way of the lamb. No more kidding around. Let's make that the final.