Transcription
I do want to get your reaction to these, um, Peter Teal clips that have been circulated. This is from a Ross Dat interview last week. And the reason that Peter Teal is important is not only because he is a billionaire, but he is someone who is very influential. He is very ideological. Um, he is very influential specifically in terms of this administration. So this is a person that you really should be listening to the things that he has to say.
And so Delat asked him some pretty interesting questions. Um, Peter Teal has been talking about his view of how the antichrist might arise. And his theory is effectively that someone like a Greta Tunberg is the example he specifically uses, would come in and claim that they're trying to save us all and, you know, create peace and safety and unity and save us in this instance from the climate crisis. And they would use that as a way to create a totalitarian one world government and that would be how we, you know, get the rise of the antichrist. And Death sort of flips that on him and says, well, isn't it possible that the tools you are creating and helping to create through uh entities like Palunteer for mass surveillance, isn't it possible that that could be the means by which the antichrist rises? Let's go ahead and take a listen. This is D2 to that exchange. My very specific question for for you, right, is that you are you you're an investor in AI, you're, you know, you're deeply invested in Palunteer, in military technology, in technologies of surveillance, in technologies of warfare and so on, right? And it just seems to me that when you tell me a story about the antichrist coming to power and using the fear of technological change to sort of impose order on the world, I feel like that antichrist would be maybe be using the tools that you that you were that you were building, right? Like wouldn't the antichrist be like, great, you know, we're not going to have any more technological progress, but I really like what Palanteer has done so far, right? I mean, isn't that a, isn't that a concern? Wouldn't that be the, you know, the irony of history would be that the man publicly worrying about the Antichrist accidentally hastens his or her arrival?
Uh, there all look, there there are all these different scenarios. I obviously don't think that that's what I'm doing. I uh, I mean, to be clear, I don't think that's, I don't think that's what you're doing either. I'm just interested in how you get to a world willing to submit to permanent authoritarian rule. Well, but but again, uh, there there are these different gradations of of this we can describe, but is is this so preposterous what I've just told you as a broad account of the stagnation that the entire world has submitted for 50 years to peace and safety? This is a first Thessalonians 5:3. The slogan of the Antichrist is peace and safety.
So, Glenn, what did you make of that answer? And what do you personally put the odds at that Peter Teal is himself the Antichrist? I mean, I guess if you were to force me to place my money in a casino on any one individual of the eight billion people on Earth being the Antichrist, he would be one of the top two or three people I might consider. Yeah, same. But, you know, I do think.
Yeah. But, you know, there was another there was an interesting part, another interesting part that's very related where I'm sure you saw this and I actually did a 20, 25 minute, someone we do a Q&A on Friday night. Someone asked me about it. I did a 25 minute response on it where Ross Gat asked him, "Do you actually favor the continuation of the human species? Like, do you favor the survival of humanity as it is?" And he basically was saying no. He refused to say yes. He was stuttering around like, you know, way more than he usually does. It wasn't like an autistic stuttering. It was like really he he was struggling with that question. And Russ like, that's a very basic question that should be an easy yes, like I'm asking, should humanity survive? And he basically described this trans. Yeah, that's that's something we should all have a, that's like the warm-up question that I think we should all be able to answer quickly, but he couldn't because he has this very transhumanistic vision that is shared by a lot of Silicon Valley tycoons like him. They basically view themselves as transcendent beings, as kind of the uber mench. And there's a lot of reasons why billionaires become accustomed to thinking that way. They're surrounded by people who treat them that way. They have a the kind of power that makes them believe that they're uniquely capable of doing that. Mark Zuckerberg talking to Joe Rogan show about merging uh technology and robots and artificial intelligence with humanity to create a different form of human, a superior form of human. And a lot of them have this vision that is essentially, in my view, so antihuman. It's like a kind of vision where our efficiency and our utility is going to be maximized even if it means the elimination of all the things that we think about as being the essence of humanity in a way that would destroy whatever you think about is the soul or the spirit or whatever.
So, if you want to talk about the Antichrist and coming and attacking humanity with the intention of destroying it, I do agree with Ross' premise that it seems like a lot of what Peter Teal is doing is way more likely than say Greta Thunderberg, who has spent the last 18 months protesting the genocide in Gaza, not very antichrist like to me in order to do that. And I think the fact that, you know, obviously the Antichrist comes and poses as a noble and benevolent figure, and there he is saying safety. The whole point of Palunteer is based on safety. Let us spy on you to keep you safe. Like the projection there is so remarkable.
Well, and also actually put D4 up on the screen here, guys, because, you know, he's he's invested in AI and they have an almost, I shouldn't even say almost, they they have a religious belief around what AI will do for the world and will do for, you know, effectuating this outcome of of transhumanism and allowing them to live forever like they are literally gods. You know, it's complete with like, you know, the story of redemption and forces of evil that are trying to stop them, and they are in the driver's seat in terms of the direction of AI regulation or lack thereof. Um, you can see here that Americans are deeply opposed to just letting a rip with AI. Um, this is overwhelmingly bipartisan sentiment of like, we need to be thinking about what all of this means. And even if you don't subscribe to some of the more apocalyptic possibilities of basically like the AI taking over and like killing us all, there is going to be significant, there is already significant disruption from these technologies. And people like Teal have made themselves, you know, very influential in this administration. And again, the alliance with with JD Vance, I think is very significant here as well. They have really gotten what they've wanted in terms of, we're just going to race forward with this thing. We'll figure out the consequences later. We got to beat China. China's developing AI. We got to be first to get to artificial general intelligence. And it's very much at odds with how the vast majority of Americans want this to be approached.
And in Teal's ideology, you know, he talks a lot about stagnation. He has this view that we've sort of like stagnated technologically and we haven't been innovating in the way that we previously had in this sort of transformative way. And I haven't thought that deeply about it to, you know, to say whether I think that is true or false. But as an antidote to that, he believes that we should just race forward with this technology, come what may. And has this, and again, I don't think this is just Peter Teal, he's very influential, but many of these Silicon Valley titans have this same view that effectively, you know, there's a, um, you know, there's there's a faith, like a religious faith that this technology is what we have to pursue and it's going to actually create this bounty and sort of utopia that they have in their minds.
I ab I absolutely agree with you that they have this utopid utopian vision of what AI is that is obviously in their interest to foster and and perpetuate because of how heavily invested they are in it and because they're the masters of the AI. So they want to get people to believe that it will just lead to bountiful, abundant, loving futures for all of us. So there's a lot of propaganda with that. But, you know, also uh, one of the reasons why I'm so concerned and I do think I I know I'm I'm very of of many minds about AI. I want to understand it better. I want to, you know, really, I don't think any of us really understand it, including the people who are unleashing it. Correct. And I think that we need debates about what kind of safeguards are needed. The problem is, is that it's not just what you've described, which is this kind of transhumanistic narcissism that the people in control of this technology possess and really do believe in as a religious faith, but it's also the competitive aspect. You know, as nation states now, we're told, oh, China has it and China does have it, at least as advanced as the United States has. And that was that deepseek uh trauma to the American mind that it seems like they even might be ahead of us in terms of technology. And so the idea then becomes, well, if we limit it, the Chinese never would, or the Iranians never would, or all the bad people or the terrorists never would. And that is the really, that to me is the biggest danger. This idea that for our own survival, we can't really allow any limits on AI because if we place limits on it, others won't, and they will come to dominate us.
Trump named as AIAR David Saxs, who's one of the co-founders of of PayPal with Peter Teal. He was uh the chief financial officer. I I know David uh pretty well. Um, you know, he's, I I think there's, I don't think he's like this Bond villain, but he definitely is somebody who really believes in the urgency of going forward with AI. Trump believes in that. Everyone around him believes that. And we're barreling toward a future, which I don't think people really understand without any kind of contemplation or debate for all because all the incentives of powerful people are to just barrel forward with it and and and and have it unleashed with with zero restraints of any kind or even debate about whether we should allow that to happen.
Yeah. Um, Glenn, last question I have for you, and thank you for being generous with your time this morning, is, you know, I have long thought that we shouldn't have billionaires, that billionaires are sort of inconsistent with the democratic society, because when you do amass that amount of wealth, the amount of commensurate power and disconnect from just like what ordinary people are going through really does create a ch. It's almost an impossibility to have a truly sort of like democratic representative society when you have that much money, wealth, and power concentrated in the hands of a few. But if I had any doubts about that view, those doubts have been swept aside by what I've seen in this era of Trump 2.0. I mean, first you had Elon Musk buying, you know, buying his ability to have this whole of government mandate through Doge, um, buying Twitter and making it his personal playground for whatever it is that he wants to do politically at the moment. You've had the spectrum of Bill Aman, who's out there right now, you know, workshopping in real time how to intervene and get his candidate of choice and to sink specifically Zoran Mani, who won overwhelmingly in a Democratic primary, and he's trying to he's out there saying, I've got hundreds of millions of dollars available to a candidate who wants to come forward to try to defeat Zoron. Um, you have Peter Teal, as we've been discussing, and you know, the influence of of Palunteer and what that means for everyone, and the extraordinary access that he has, and you know, the links with David Sax and with JD Vance, etc. I mean, where are you on this question of whether or not billionaires should exist and are consistent with a democratic representative society?
Well, let me say this about that, which is there was that Zoron interview where he said, I don't think billionaires should exist. And everybody acted like, you know, that was like from the red book of Mao or like, you know, right out of of Lenin. And if you go back and look at the founders, who definitely were capitalists, they didn't believe in, I mean, there was no sense of communism then, but they didn't, they they believed in capitalism. They were very wealthy, they were landowners, etc. And they wanted to preserve those those prerogatives uh economically that they thought was their birthright. Nonetheless, they talked openly about how if economic inequality, equality becomes too severe, it will inevitably spill over into political inequality and will undermine and subvert all the principles they're trying to create of nobody being above the law, of everybody being subjected to the same political rights of. And and so this is, you know, intrinsic in the idea of the American founding that yes, you're going to have political equality and economic inequality, but if that economic inequality becomes too grave, too, you know, lopsided, the political rights will become purely illusory. And I think that's exactly what we've been seeing. Um, and what we're seeing even more so now. I mean, the, it's hard, I've gotten to know some billionaires and I I think that it's hard to express what it does to people's minds. You know, we've seen that with fame. You know, how people get too famous, too wealthy, end up sick and ill, and they die early because it's just too much for the human brain to handle. Being a billionaire is that times a thousand. And to have those people with that kind of mental outlook exerting almost unlimited power in our democracy, nothing good can come from that.
I think that is well said. Um, Glenn, thank you so much. Great to see you, my friend. Always good to see you, Crystal. Take care. Hey, if you like that video, hit the like button or leave a comment below. It really helps get the show to more people. And if you'd like to get the full show, ad free and in your inbox every morning, you can sign up at breakingpoints.com. That's right. Get the full show. Help support the future of independent media at breakingpoints.com.