Oppenheimer & the Catastrophe of Communism

it feels eerily to me like history is repeating itself like a lot more directly than I would prefer exactly like it happened you know in oppenheimer's time with the Russians I think there are a lot of lessons to draw from the mistakes that were made in that era and that we should not make those mistakes in this era and at least sitting here today those lessons are not being drawn no hello Mark how are you hey good afternoon I am excited to be with you today all right well we're we're going to talk about a uh probably the the biggest and most important film of the Year Oppenheimer um and why don't we just start out like uh you know you've been doing a bunch of reading on Oppenheimer the man uh what did you think of the film yeah so on balance I liked it a lot um so uh you know and I I you know there's a lot of ways to kind of score these films and of course Christopher Nolan is you know one of the one of the best filmmakers of our of our time um so obviously it's a great artistic achievement the other way that I always look at these things if it's anything historical of course is you know historical accuracy or as as close to it as we could possible as possibly get the challenge I always thought you know that like the challenge with any topic like Oppenheimer which was you know this as you saw on the movie and by the way we're going to spoil the movie like crazy which is I think uh appropriate because it's it is actually based on history we actually Know How It Ends um but true but but it's all on the Wikipedia page but uh you know like the challenges you know it took place you know it obviously took place during the height of Communism during the height of World War II and then the Cold War um and so it took place at a time when you know political passions were like greatly inflamed uh in the country and around the world and you know for 50 or 60 years following that I think it was very hard for historians you know of sort of that generation or the generation that followed to be dispassionate about it um one of the things that struck me about the movie is it was you know no one is a Gen X filmmaker right um so he's post he's post Boomer he's Gen X and so he's he's scenario for a movie like this yeah I think that's right exactly yes the Boomers would have been a boomer would have been an issue a millennial would have been an issue uh the Gen X is is as usual Gen X is The Sweet Spot which is of course our situation by far generation exactly the generation that will never hold power but is nevertheless nevertheless the best one um and so um uh and so it would have felt like is he had enough removed from the passions of the time that he was able to be you know pretty I would say clinical about it um and so I I was I was pretty impressed by by how I told the story um and and well you know we'll talk about that in some detail um you know probably my my biggest issue with it was was the ending which we could also talk about um and on obviously a very down note um you know with respect to you know the potential end of the world which you know I think was actually very undeserved in terms of what actually ended up playing ended up playing out which I think we'll also talk about before we get into the ending um Let's uh just kind of start with some uh questions from Twitter uh this one's from DJ Wayne and he says what was it about oppenheimer's personality that made him different from other engineers and able to lead the Manhattan Project so it's a great question and also like how did General Groves like pick him really an unusual thing particularly when you think about how people are selected for things you know in today's government environment yeah well that's the thing and and you know they kind of alluded this in the movie A little bit I think a little bit of it was Oppenheimer was a very you know kind of well-respected he was like a very well respected interestingly almost like generalist physicist like he wasn't specifically known like he never won the Nobel Prize I don't think he was never specifically known for a single piece of breakthrough work the way that you know the way that an Einstein was but he was sort of respected by everybody and so I think it was a little bit of that I think it was honestly I think it was a little bit of down selection kind of the way that gross talks about in the in the film which is kind of like yeah he kind of ruled other other people out but but I actually wanted I would turn this question around to you which is at the time uh Oppenheimer was selected around the Manhattan Project he has not he had not actually run anything so it it really struck me in the interview he did with uh Groves in the movie which um you know I'm not sure exactly how historically accurate that interview was since it was just the two of them but it really felt like kind of a little like a selection process for an entrepreneur so you know we've invested in entrepreneurs who have never run anything uh and who have built giant companies and the thing that he had that was very clear in that interview was that kind of disagreeableness personality trait and specifically like he really thought for himself believed in his own ideas and didn't give a you know two cents what anybody else thought about what he thought which um in leadership turns out to matter probably as much as anything uh you know if you're influenced um if if you don't get strong enough conviction to be almost uninfluenceable it's very hard to build a company and I think that you know that thing kind of jumped out to me as oh I can see why he picked him you know this is the type of guy who could now the Manhattan Project was so spectacular and he was built a whole town he was the mayor he had people's whole families there you know he was directing like the smartest people in the world um who knew that he could do that like I think that was probably impossible to tell at the interview process but you could tell that at least he was the type of guy who had leadership skills um and and you know like many great leaders he was a bit of a Crazy Character yeah the other thing you know is he had a lot of he had a lot of infrastructural support behind him and he there was that great scene where they're out in the desert and oppenheimer's like we'll build it you know we'll build a town here and and uh grow snaps at his you know his adjective uh okay build him a town right and like you know boom there's a town yeah um right and so right and so and so part of that you know partly part of that was it was wartime and so part of that it was military control um uh part of that though it was you know look it was the old American industrial engine right was still running uh right it's the same industrial engine that won World War II right and there's there's great books about kind of the so-called Arsenal democracy which was this massive spin-up of the American manufacturing machine you know to build tanks and planes and everything there's actually this great book there's a economist Alexander field who's done this he's done a pair of great books in the 1930s 1940s but he talks in great detail he goes through basically the American Military production machine basically spun up in 18 months you know from making base to be trains and cars for civilian use to making bombs and planes and tanks crazy yeah it was like an 18-month cut over they they made stuff for like two years and then they spent the next 18 months in by 1944 they were already spinning that machine down um and and going back to civilian production and so the the whole American production Miracle of that era which you know for sure saved the Soviet Union which maybe we'll talk about and saved Europe um right uh and saved you know Britain and everything else um you know and you know potentially you know the world um you know the the entire thing basically played out over the course of like you know basically four years four or five years um and so the the the speed and sort of quality of execution of the American production machine at that time you know what was was light years beyond what we have today and I I would uh for people who want to know kind of how much things have changed um you know there's this guy uh Ezra Klein who writes for the New York Times who I I kind of generally disagree you know disagree with on on almost everything but he wrote this amazing piece a few months back about the chips act um and the you know what it is supposed to be the production of new chip factors in the U.S to kind of return to this kind of production mentality you know for the you know sort of for the new cold war with China and he he wrote this great piece it's called the title of the piece is the problem with everything bagel liberalism and he uses the metaphor of the everything bagel to basically be the full load of sort of political implications for actually building anything in the U.S today which is basically a completely different Channel if you just read this piece he goes through it in detail a completely different challenge to actually build anything and so there is an amazing compare and contrast kind of right there between what was possible then it was possible now and you know my hope you know one of the hopes you have for movies like this is it kind of creates this very Vivid picture you know that that people used to be able to accomplish a lot in a very short amount of time um yeah exactly and you know look we had operation warp speed with a vaccine which was a little bit of a return to that um but um you know the American system today largely does not run like that anymore but it could yeah I mean it it's very interesting in that um a few things one is you know there was a government's role versus the private sector's role and then the fact that you know the government let the private sect sector do its thing and the fact that the private sector was run um you know largely by the founders of the companies at that time you know it was the the early days of the Industrial Revolution which um you know many of the kind of big manufacturers these days you know with the exception of you know companies like Tesla um are not uh at all run by their Founders and to kind of change from anything they're doing I think would be quite the challenge exactly like you put him to shop Elon could build tanks right yeah you know can the Legacy car companies well you know it's funny because the Legacy car companies at this point just assemble cars um yeah you know so they they would have to change every bit of the supply chain they don't make any of the parts uh so it's very different than the Henry Ford days when he um uh bought rubber you know bought uh land and um the Amazon so he could grow rubber tree plants so he could you know basically make every single part of the car uh so we're not in that world anymore so this is from uh vibhav uh and his question is if you directed The Oppenheimer movie what changes would you both make oh okay so I've got I've got a I've got a small one and a big one well I guess they're both big ones um so the small one is the treatment of Einstein um and uh do you have and what about the treatment of Einstein the treatment of Einstein so the treatment of Einstein is very interesting so the treatment of Einstein uh the treatment of oppenheimer's involvement with Communism I thought was was pretty bad was pretty pretty true to life in terms of at least what what I've read in the histories and what we know today well we actually know yeah yeah right we can talk about and Joe for people just uh there's one very important thing about communism in that era which is we know a lot more about what happened and in particular uh the affiliation of Americans with the Soviet Union in that era we know a lot more about that post the 1990s than people knew pre the 1990s and so a lot of the history a lot of the cultural history of that era is set by histories that were written between like you know 1950 and 19 you know kind of 1990 kind of when the Boomers were writing history um but in the 1990s there was this uh this event happened which was the declassification of a set of intelligence files from the National Security Agency called the the winonophiles and it turns out that American intelligence had bugged Soviet Military Intelligence all through the Cold War and had intercepted all of the reports back and forth with their field with their case officers in the United States which means that the American intelligence Community all through the Cold War knew about a large number of Soviet spies operating in America um and they were they were unable to do anything about it because the information they were getting was so valuable it was one of those paradoxical situations where the information they were getting with this this Winona uh intercept system information was so valuable they couldn't use it because if they used it the Soviets would realize that their information would be info yeah yeah right the classic intelligence problem yeah yeah so they knew so that the intelligence Community knew that there were spies and they had to leave them in place um in senior levels of the government um uh because um they couldn't uh they couldn't risk the Soviets finding out that their uh their messages were being intercepted anyway you know the information gets you know uh Declassified at a certain point this information got Declassified in the 1990s and so we we know a lot more post the 1990s of exactly how broad and deep the Soviet intelligence penetration of American institutions in the Cold War actually was and by the way and in World War II before World War II um and you know the answer is it was very deep and very Broad and very pervasive and a very big problem uh in a way that is sort of very inconvenient you know to the memories of a lot of people at that time um and then also there there are just a lot of things that people said at the time that just kind of got brushed under the under the rug um uh you know later on and and so Einstein unfortunately and I know Einstein's a lot of people uh consider Einstein to be a hero not just scientifically but morally and in the movie paints him as a both a scientific and a moral hero which is kind of the received wisdom it's a little bit of an issue which is Einstein was kind of a stalinist he was kind of very Pro the Soviet Union and he was kind of very enthusiastic about Lenin um and he was kind of Pretty in favor of Stalin um and he said a bunch of things you know on the record you know kind of when his reputation was at its peak to sort of apologize for you know or sort of justify the Soviet Union and to attack the United States you know things today that you read and you're they're kind of eye-watering for people who want to dig into this there's a new book out that goes through this called when reason goes on holiday um and uh it goes through in detail uh Einstein's statements in the 20s and 30s in particular um uh that were sort of very kind of staunchly pro-communist the idea that he was this kind of you know neutral Arbiter of morality I think is is untrue and undeserved but you know like like they did enough it did a good enough job with Einstein on that there on Oppenheimer on that that I'll I'll cut them some slack one interesting comment um that I want to make on that is you know in Reading um you know and reading the Einstein chapter in the book one thing that struck me was he like intellectually basically fell for the banana and the tailpipe uh kind of trick of Communism which is oh their intentions were good yeah they may have like murdered a bunch of you know like a crazy number of people but they had the best intentions and it's like what are you talking about they didn't have any good intentions um and and it and what it doesn't matter anyway if the result is that but that was like exactly the argument he was making to his friends at the time which I thought wow if Einstein literally Einstein gets fooled by that like that that was really kind of like a profound um thing for me anyway yeah and there was this real and they they show this in the movie a fair amount with kind of how Oppenheimer fell into communism you know which is look you have to you know you have to you have to um I'm gonna I'm gonna amuse my partner Ben here but I'm gonna sort of justify communism a little bit and then come back around on it um you kind of have you have to put yourself in the in the frame of mind of the era right in the frame of mind of the era was you know the early 1900s was supposed to be you know the 20th century was supposed to be a century of peace and prosperity right and people had very high expectations in the 1900s of the first decade and then World War One was a shattering event with just you know Mass Slaughter in all directions you know mechanized Slaughter for the first time and it was you know deeply you know it sort of fractured you know permanently sort of fractured Western culture and a whole bunch of profound ways and then um and then it was followed by the Great Depression right and so you know especially by the by the early mid 1930s you just had this kind of profound you know meltdown what looked like was capitalism was failing it looked like capitalism was was was basically a failed system um you know anybody who was sort of inclined towards commune anybody sort of incline of the egalitarian you know kind of presumptions behind communism kind of were like okay this is this is the proof that that the Communists are right and that we need a new system and then they kind of alluded this I think in the movie also which is like if everything else is changing in the world like if you know quantum physics changes our understanding of reality you know World War One changes our understanding of War right um and so you know it kind there was a revolutionary kind of fever of the time of like okay maybe everything is changing including the birth of this new system and so there was this it was this very kind of powerful magnetic pull uh especially for you know as it turns out especially for kind of super high IQ people um I would say super high IQ people super verbal people um which is sort of a recurring pattern um which we could talk about and then the other is is people who live in a world of abstraction and of course theoretical physicists you know for the most part live in the world of abstraction actually the movie right does this he says you know Theory only gets you so far um you know when when uh when they use that phrase in the movie it refers to the science but you could also use that to talk about you know communist Theory only gets you so far the problem with all of that right and so and this is kind of the excuse that people make which is like well you know kind of it looked good at the time you know kind of excuse the problem with that is the catastrophe of Communism sort of became visible for anybody who wanted to see it the catastrophe of Communism became visible very quickly um because when Lenin took control of the Soviet Union the Soviet Union immediately fell into a devastating famine which which was the direct consequence of basically killing the kulaks which basically meant killing all the productive people in the country which was a very kind of specific and replacing everybody in the government with peasants yeah that's right yeah well expertise right if you the the the Merit was gone you know just uh the whole meritocracy idea which actually did exist in Cyrus Russia to some degree in the government um was basically flattened in the in what like three days yeah you know this is all this comes across as ancient history now but it's relevant important so there was this concept of the kulax uh which is kind of this pejorative term inside the Soviet Union for you know they use these terms like the cool acts the Wreckers um um you know the the people who were kind of opposed to Communism and and basically what the definition was is they were the smart and productive people right um and so they were the p and so the the the way the story basically goes is if you were in a town or Village and you were like basically a destitute subsistence farmer and there was a farmer next door that had two cows and you had one cow he was a kulak and basically the presumption of the Russian Communist Revolution was you got to kill him and take his cows right um right and so like that was the core animating sort of resentment this is sort of the problem of Communism right resentment Envy rage right or sort of the the fuel that makes the thing run the result was they basically killed all the productive people and then yeah they basically tried to run the country with all the not productive people you know pull pot years later basically skipped the whole people with glasses right go straight straight to the logical conclusion right um right which is just like wipe out all the smart people quote unquote you know smart people anyway the the point though to the movie right is it there were reports out of the Soviet Union you know they were sort of the equivalent of whistleblowers basically from the very beginning and then and then the show you know the show trials you know kind of kicked in early on and they were sort of you know garishly embarrassing for anybody who wanted to look and then they were all the you know they were just all these cases of you know people were getting you know scientists were getting killed like there was all this just like crazy stuff happening and so the the the the book The when reason goes on holiday goes through this in detail but the information was available to anybody who wanted to see it and so I you know and again it's hard to argue this after the fact but like I was gonna say you had to be like an increasingly staunch communist to basically continue to be a communist not only through the 1920s but also the 1930s also the 19th 40s also the 1950s also the 1960s like new information just kept coming out uh and unfortunately you know the history of this is is that you know Einstein and Oppenheimer and others basically chose to ignore uh the information and they and they chose they chose to buy into a system sort of past the point that you know at least for people as smart as they were you know it kind of should have been obvious um and for unfortunately Einstein uh is is with Oppenheimer in that yeah so let me kind of defend the Communists a little more on that because right knowing what we know now um you'd have to be like either like a weird cultist or an idiot or something like that to to think that a system that killed 100 million people in the last century is a good idea 200 200 200 million give them give them full credit all right full credit good luck good god um but you know at the time so my my grandparents were Communists um and you know kind of remembering them like my grandfather got to the United States from Russia in 1908 um so and you know they had his family had to flee Russia from the from uh the Tsar uh and you know it was like a pretty bad situation and you know they got here with nothing and um you know he's a little kid who's has to learn English and all these kinds of things uh and then you know the Bolshevik Revolution happens and it's super exciting for them and then you know like the world the Social Circles the New York Times were all like you know the whole Community was was very pro-communism uh or a huge part of the intellectual Community was including the press a lot of the press uh and so you know and then the dream was Utopia so they were kind of yes they willfully overlooked um some of the or many of the facts coming out but for every kind of fact that was coming out about the atrocities there was somebody in the Press writing but this is a much better system and look at all the happy people and Stalin's a great guy and so forth so it was a lot more I would just say the times were much more confusing around what communism was and what it was going to become than it is you know like today you know we know what happened um sadly yeah I would just say I mean for me that leads to an even more damning critique though which is a broader critique of the system you know as it existed at that time right which to your point right which was basically and there's I'll recommend another book here called red decade uh which was written by an American journalist Eugene Lyons who kind of figured this out early and wrote this book basically about the 1920s and about the level of sort of communist enthusiasm in the United States the 1920s yeah right um by the way we to give you a sense of how enthusiastic people were about communism like basically an overt communist ran for president 1948 uh Henry Wallace um who was basically an overt communist and Soviet basically sympathizer and he got you know two million votes um probably all from smart people and I was going to say he got the two million votes from precisely the zip codes you would imagine he would get the 2 million votes from um it was not Factory workers in Ohio right right it was the fanciest you know suburbs yeah right and University towns and so you know even up until 1948 at the beginning of the Cold War right when you know when all of the show trials and everything everybody knew about everything you know the disasters the stalinism and the famines right and the whole the the whole thing was out you know he still you still had two million basically Arden Communists and you know kind of as late as that period and they were basically the American Elites but to your point like this phenomenon started basically in the early 1920s or even in the 1910s and then through the 1920s and 1930s you know the the American Elite Class like intellectuals the scientists the academics you know it was yeah I mean it was the thing it was the thing to do they they also mentioned this in the movie another thing I'll give the movie credit for is they have this kind of side comment which is half the faculty at Berkeley is communist right and it's like well okay first of all yes that was correct two is like was it only half yeah there are so many Communists in Berkeley today having grown up there I was going to say it's still true right and so so like yeah no look it was totally that you know look the you know the famous you know the famous uh you know case the New York Times you know correspondent Walter Durante you know basically outright you know basically just lying uh in the New York Times telling a fake story surprise for lying you know not just lying but being awarded the highest honor exactly and to my knowledge I don't think that's ever been retracted right I think that's still I believe that's still an active price I don't think they ever retracted it no no um right and so yeah so it was it was this it it was the philosophy of it was the philosophy of the American Elites it was it super saturated the culture um you know and then if you read the accounts of the time it's actually very funny um uh if you read the accounts of Communists at the time because basically it was like so basically a big part of the Communist kind of energy at that time right it started out with the Communist being against kind of the aristocracies like like the the Zara system in Russia but then it in the 20s and 30s you know the the sort of story the Communists told themselves as they were fighting fascism right and this was the this you know this was the rise of fascism in Germany and and Spain and Italy and other places right but but also uh you know the term anti-fascist was created in that era right actually by the Soviets as a propaganda term to basically and you know kind of mean communist but then there was this amazing moment where the uh Hitler and Stalin right Allied what was it in like 1940 1941 in the molotov ribbon top pact um and then the all of the all of the Communists in the west basically had to on a dime change their position from the fashion sorry the anime to the fascists are a friend um right and that caused a bunch of people a bunch of Communists had error to lose Faith right because they're like okay wait a minute like apparently there's there's no there are no morals here and and then and then and then it was like 18 months later right uh what was that Hitler broached that pact right and attacked the Soviet Union and then and then the party line from Moscow changed back to the fascists or the enemy yeah right um and the way that Soviet Union did that at that time right the term Party Line literally was the instructions from the Kremlin on what Global Communists are supposed to believe and when uh when American Communists would have there basically meetings they would have these study sessions uh to establish whether they were to basically test each other for being quote unquote politically correct uh whether they could follow the party line which was the dictates from from Moscow so so you you had these kind of wrenching turns you know basically in what communism meant um and and what the information was and it's kind of right it's kind of imprint on the on the American psyche and the Western psyche um and and then yeah look you had people were tested along the way and I'm sure you know you're I'm sure members of your family were tested like this along the way which was like okay like how long are you going to be willing to basically buy into this how long are you going to put up with it how long are you going to believe what's in the newspaper right like how many how many how many atrocities are you willing to count and that's how you know the old thing of like you can't make an omelette without breaking eggs okay how many eggs yeah yeah and I think you know like part of part of the and by the way like it just it's striking as you said that how many of the Communist terms have come back social justice cancel culture you know they're all uh you know they're all Concepts from from the kind of soviet-era Communism and uh and everybody's cool with it which is um you know Democratic socialists like they're all like you know Lenin's ideas and so forth and people are like you know could you it's hard to imagine like Hitler's ideas coming back and people being like okay using his language uh but yet here we are for sure yeah I think that um that my father always said uh you know kind of having grown up in that world was that it was a full religion like it was you know they weren't really and communism you know one of the things it did is it outlawed other religions um and communism itself was a full religion so like that that notion of faith and um belief I think overrode facts to a dramatic degree for most of those people well also as it showed in the movie right it was also how you got laid oh yeah yeah yeah yeah that was a big thing right like these are the coolest people at the coolest parties right with like lots of girls right um and lots of you know young men no no puritanical Christian morals and many none of that BS you toss that out yeah no look I mean the USSR even wanted to eliminate the family right one of their one of their big programs just eliminate you know basically the idea of monogamy the idea of you know having to take responsibility for you know they wanted the Soviets wanted children's children raised in group homes um right which would leave the parents free to be full-time Communists and you know do all the things that you got to do if you were Communists it's come back yeah these words and these these ideas yeah yep exactly the ideas are not dead um so um so yeah so the the other thing in the movie um we can come back to Communism if you want but um you know the other thing in the movie that I thought um was important I that I thought was in a sense it was a it was correct and in a sense it very it very much wasn't and so the the very end of the movie um you know there's this kind of pivotal final kind of conversation with uh uh Einstein and Oppenheimer where Einstein basically says you know you didn't set the world on fire but maybe you actually did right which is to say that the bomb didn't literally burn down you know the the atmosphere as they were worried about for a moment but you know nevertheless you have now created the an arms race you know the existence of the bomb now creates an arms race both sides are gonna you know the implication being both sides are going to build arsenals and then at some point the Bob's going to get lost and it launched in the world would be destroyed and so it it ends in this note of like basically you are you Oppenheimer and you know by implication us the audience right are kind of responsible for the end of the world yeah now in a sense you know I think that's a valid choice because with what they knew at the time like that was a very you know valid fear and lots of you know smart people who you know including people like the Rand Corporation who were thinking through like game theory of nuclear war and so forth were very worried about you know these these scenarios um so on the one hand like that was a valid Choice given what they knew at the time you know look having said that sitting here in the year 2023 and looking back um I think we now know I would say quite conclusively um you know as much as you can know anything involving counterfactuals I think we know or I would argue that we know that the invention of the atomic bomb and the uh the doctrine of mutually assured Direction destruction that resulted from that prevented world war three um and when I say prevented World War III I mean that had the bomb not been developed and had both the you know had both ultimately the US and USSR not not developed the arsenals that they did um you know the it like it was it seemed very probable then and now um that the US and the USSR were going to have World War III in the 1950s or the 19 60s or frankly maybe as late as the 1980s um the way things unfolded um and that the world war three would have been you know if not a nuclear war it would have been you know a conventional war that would have made World War II look like Child's Play right so it would have been and if you think about the stepwise thing you had the the rise of mechanized Slaughter with you know tanks and planes starting in World War one and then you had like you know World War II is just devastating levels of death um writing including by the way Mass civilian death by firebombing right which which which the movie didn't spend that much time on which which we could talk about right the the deaths from the civilian death from the skies was not new with the atomic bomb right like the Germans and the Americans right we you know we we we we did a lot of firebombing of both German cities many war crimes many such cases well they were okay yeah there were other cases there I think it was I forget I think it was Lemay who said yeah basically if the US loses World War II we're all going to get prosecuted for war crimes because you know the the US was firebombing cities um you know with you know with conventional incendiaries and killing hundreds of thousands of people um you know kind of per City so um so so anyway the point being like World War II was like a a Charnel house like it was just absolutely devastating in terms of mass death and so you have to kind of close your eyes and imagine basically the atomic bomb didn't exist the project failed or never happened um and then you roll into World War III with the USSR in the 50s and 60s with another step up in The lethality of conventional Munitions and of Convention of of mechanized Warfare um and you just have to imagine basically a massive ground war you know on the European planes you know for the next decade you know and you know and spilling you know all throughout the extending all throughout the world and you know imagine you know 200 million people dying in that war right um and and and it at least it seems to me and I think a lot of historians now believe the the existence of the bomb and I should talk about what we mean by the bomb also because the existence of the A-bomb but also in particularly existence the h-bomb the hydrogen bomb uh prevented that from happening um and and so you know look sitting here today like that's the war that never happened there have been other Wars that have happened but not at that level of scale in the time sense and so there are probably something like 200 million people alive today who would not be alive had Oppenheimer not invented the bomb if this gets into the the underlying kind of theory you know the game theory of nuclear war which is like okay like if you know if there's some non-zero chance if there's a 99 chance of preventing world war three and a one percent chance of destroying everything you know like the you know the game theory on that gets very tricky but but but look like at some point you have to give credit for what actually happened and what actually happened is that World War III didn't happen and hopefully doesn't with nuclear capability that would suck uh just you know one kind of comment on that original question about how how to change the firm there the the film I think that um and it's a minor thing but it would have been great to have John Von Neumann as a character for a couple reasons when he's just like a brilliant funny guy and it would have brought in the kind of invention of the of the modern computer architecture um but the other thing is you know he was not a communist uh so the the non-communists did exist and it would have been at least intellectually really interesting to kind of understand what those conversations were like anyhow so next question let's talk about let's talk about him for a second if we could because I know he's he's your favorite he's your favorite also so so there's this great book that that Ben and I've read this I think it's called The Man from the future the Van Norman book and so I think it does a very good job of telling telling about Norman's side of the story so a couple things about that so so one is look there were people you know back to our earlier discussion of Communism there were people who saw this clearly at the time they saw the Soviets for what they were in the 20s and 30s and Von Neumann was one of those people um and Von Neumann is quoted by many people who knew him in the 20s and 30s as basically being almost eerily prescient in terms of like how world affairs would unfold he was a Jewish immigrant from from Hungary he hated the Nazis as much as anybody but he had the Soviets dialed in from jump right he knew exactly what they were and and the threat that they were he was anti-communist in a sort of a a staunch cold warrior you know an anti-soviet you know his his whole life so he saw it by the way other people who saw it uh they the Boris Pash the security officer um he saw it and they mentioned that in the movie and then they they lost us over but Lewis Strauss you know who's a major character in the movie um he also had seen the horrors of Communism up close in the around the time of the Russian Revolution there were people who saw it by the way another person who saw it interesting around right who was starting to rise to prominence in this era because she was a refugee from you know basically the the Russian Revolution she saw it she told everybody what was going on and you know most people ignored her uh and so so there were people who saw it anyway so Von Neumann is one of the people who saw it so so that turned him into this very very staunch anti-communist um and you know he's a hero both Ben's in mind but let me say that you can apply also a general critique to Von Neumann also which which is very interesting thing which is sort of this this this this idea of like the danger of science the danger of people who are very intellectually smart um and live in a world of abstraction and in a world of ideas um basically when they when they map into politics things don't go well and you know of course sitting here today at least Ben and I would say that van Neumann like had a clear review of politics than you know the napenheimer Einstein did however having said that Von Neumann uh you know by the early 19 late 1940s early 1950s was advocating a nuclear first strike against the Soviet Union and his famous line his famous line was um if you tell me we could bomb them tomorrow I I say why not today if you tell if you tell me we could bomb them at 5 PM I say how about 1 p.m yeah and so in his theory and he had a theory his theory was if America has the bomb and the Soviet Union doesn't have the bomb then there's basically a moment in time opportunity to basically take them out before they get the bomb and they become a threat um and basically he he then advocated a full nuclear First Strike now and let me just say for the record like I I'm not I don't support that either right I don't think that would have been good either right so so you had this thing where you know you had basically the the scientists on the one side being way too sympathetic to the Soviets you had the people on the other side being you know arguably um you know way too hawkish um and so you know you have these like Ultra you know and Von Neumann may be the smartest person in the 20th century right and even he got so kind of pulled into all this that he advocated for you know what were certainly war crimes if not you know genocide um and so this thing where we take our best and brightest scientists intellectuals and thinkers and professors and academics and sort of media Superstars and we and Adventures of new technology and we kind of impute into them moral wisdom and sort of political judgment like the entire history of that era is basically a giant case study and don't do that yeah well and Von Norman went on to invent Game Theory um which then he tried to apply to politics again and I think retrospectively most of those ideas were extremely bad personality wise you know he he was kind of both funnier and then uh much more direct than the other guys kind of running away from the facts well and he was appalled right by what he saw right he was appalled by all the Communists in the government and in the scientific establishment right and and by the way I think justifiably so yeah no he was Furious actually this brings um the next question which is very interesting which is uh Sanjay Thacker who says can you discuss the historical context of oppenheimer's security clearance revocation during the McCarthy era and its implications for the balance between individual freedoms and National Security which is very interesting because it's it's kind of an idea that um or a question that's come up come back up in that uh you know we have a kind of mccarthy-esque kind of uh movement going on now you know from the other uh Direction um so how do you think about that you know both with Oppenheimer and then in general so the history here is that the it's very important so the the there's very important Point thing to be learned from the history here which is sort of so we have this quite a cultural memory of this thing called the Red Scare right and and even the term of It kind of loads the thing of like it was a scare right as opposed to something real right and then it was sort of this McCarthyism and it was so unfair that these people were getting blacklisted I know you have Ben has family members who are blacklisted so this is maybe still a little bit of a sore spot um yeah yeah I'd like to talk about that actually it's a fairly interesting story yeah exactly so we'll come to that but um uh just for the record I did not but um if you go back and you reconstruct sort of what actually happened in that era like let's let's put the term Red Scare aside for a moment because it's gotten very loaded up with assumptions but let's just say like anti-communist sentiment um it actually turns out there were sort of three ways of anti-communist sentiment in the U.S so there were there was a wave immediately following the Russian Revolution so there was sort of this is sort of referred to as the original Red Scare sort of from sort of 1917 to like I don't know what it was 1921 or 1922 there was this moment where basically it was like oh my God the reds are coming um right and and I think a lot of that when I read the history a lot of that was basically it was it was literally going to be that it was like the labor basically it was the unions basically it was that the unions were going communist and that basically they were going to be like General strikes and you know the American economy is going to get shut down and Communists were going to take over all of our industrial companies so there was like this brief moment in time um where there was like an anti-communist sentiment and then in the 1920s that that faded and I think the reason that faded um is because the Soviet Union actually reopened economically in the 1920s and so the the the true story of what happened is Lennon took over the the country immediately fell into famine um Lenin actually backpedaled on economic communism and he created this thing called the new economic program uh the NEP and he basically invited in America and American Business and American Business people to basically make money in Russia in sort of the same way that happened by the way in Russia the 1990s it was sort of a parallel you know kind of thing to that and it was literally because he needed he needed American and Western industrial production to basically like keep the country from like literally just dying um and so the 1920 and that was when sort of Communism became cool in the U.S right which which is sort of like oh okay these are our friend these are our friends you know these are our kind of Junior Partners you know we're kind of rescuing them we're kind of in bed with them we're making a lot of money with them and so there was very little anti-communist energy in the US the 1920s um there was very little in the 1930s you know with as we discussed with with the Great Depression by the way through that era um like the US government was basically not concerned with whether people were Communists when they hired them and this is the setting you know with which you know in which Oppenheimer is selected and all these other scientists are selected you know Groves Groves makes that comment later that you know we wouldn't have been able to clear any of these people you know um right because many of them were Communists or Economist affiliations um and and by the way there were Communists you know there were Communists they were was according to the reports of the time um you know they were Communists in the OSS which was the Forerunner of the CIA at the time and Donovan who ran the general Donovan who ran the OSS at the time really fundamentally didn't care Whitaker Chambers tells this amazing story in his book of how he basically tried to out himself to the US government as a Soviet Military Intelligence uh recruiter um in the 1930s and he's he according to his story it takes him six years to get taken seriously by the FBI and the justice department they just didn't care like it wasn't the Soviets were not the problem they were not the problem they didn't care so then there was a flurry of anti-communist sort of energy in the during that period where Hitler and Stalin were Allied and so there was sort of this abortive short little moment in the early 40s and then that faded and then you know look Stalin became our huge friend and Ally you know kind of all the way through World War II and then the quote-unquote Red Scare the McCarthy thing didn't really start until the late 40s early 50s and so the point being like whether you even cared or if you were in a position of responsibility and Power in the U.S and even if you weren't a communist and didn't have communist sympathies you didn't really care if you were dealing with a communist except During the period in which there was actual inflamed relations between the US and the Soviet Union and so basically the the morality as experienced in the US was dependent on what was happening internationally at that moment um and I think that's very important to understand because it's we can go back to this later but this directly applies to what's happening with China today um yeah right which is there are people who have been close to China over the last 20 years who are starting to wake up and realize that they probably made a big mistake um because the moral valence of China is changing in real time as the US becomes more anti-china as China becomes a greater threat uh it's perceived to be a greater threat um you know but sort of by both parties in Washington and so it feels like we're going through one of those moments again um but anyway I just wanted to go through that which is like that's the nature that the reason the quote-unquote Red Scare and McCarthyism and so forth like seem so shocking at the time to people including people of course who got caught up in it right um is because it it followed 20 or 25 years for the most part of nobody caring right and so so it was like this is what Nisha called a revaluation it was like this change in values and morals that basically was the result of a geopolitical power shift and then the threat of a threat your business and yeah everybody everybody including John Von Neumann had communist friends like Einstein yeah right well you couldn't I mean yeah I mean much like today right you couldn't you couldn't live or work in the setting of an American University and not no Communists like it was not not possible right and again like we talked about like they were the cool people right um yeah the people you wanted to be friends with absolutely they had the best parties right so um so anyway like so so my sympathy such as it is for people who got caught up in the Red Scare is basic it's less that they were unfairly it's less that it was unfair to basically Target them for being communists it was I would argue it was more that it was unfair that the rules changed on them kind of in the middle of the game which is it was fine to be communist up to a certain point and then all of a sudden it wasn't anymore anyway my point being like or even independent of your view of the morality of that like that was a giant change in kind of the ethos of what it meant to be communist um that that kicked in around the time McCarthy getting prominence so so my grandfather is um story is actually sort of interesting on this so he he was a school teacher um and he was during the McCarthy era he was fired from his job for being a communist which he was uh but the way he got busted was actually quite interesting so the the whole not just the term but the concept of cancel culture originated in the uh actually I think in the American Communist party I'm not positive but I I'm pretty sure but it was certainly prevalent in the American Communist Party and uh the head of the teachers union was also a communist um and he voted against her on some whatever School issue and as Revenge she canceled him by turning him over to the McCarthy Heights and he was thus fired and and I'll just say this about that is he really should not have you know like he was a communist but he should have been fired because he was absolutely not teaching communism in his classroom he wasn't doing anything to promote it or and he was he was like very um kind of strict about that with himself he he believed that would be a bad idea so you know this gets into you know how far these ideas go of like okay well can you are you allowed to do bad things like be a Russian spy well we shouldn't allow that but are you allowed to think bad thoughts are you allowed to have bad conversations and once you go once you cross that line then you kind of become the thing that you're trying to prevent uh so that's so I I would say fairly um you know the McCarthy era gets criticized for that and look we're seeing that brought back now where you know it's important even if people are wrong it's important uh I think in a free society that they be that we'd be able to have the discussion um at least among adults you know like indoctrinating kids that kind of thing you know I can understand why why that uh might not be a good idea um but uh to start to go as far as okay we're outlawing this whole kind of line of thinking um gets very very dangerous fast so let's talk about the gradations there because I think we agree probably on the extremes right um but I think we maybe disagree somewhere in the middle so how many how many communist School teachers do you think there were in your grandfather's era in the U.S let's talk about that yeah so Queens Queens New York what what percent what would you estimate what percentage at that time would have been Communists of the teacher I mean to be fair this would be a better question for my father I don't know but there there's certainly a lot of them and so and what portion of those were um let's let's assume your grandfather was being as strict as you say that he was and not bringing communism into the classroom what percentage of the Communist teachers in Queens of that era were bringing communism into the classroom yeah I know they I mean certainly somewhere there's there's no question um but you know like some were teaching you know it's I actually think it's a fairly novel thing that people who teach you know math and science are introducing communism into that uh which certainly I I don't think happened at that to that degree in that era but I don't know well it did so it did it I don't think it happened in math but it happened inside so it's happened it happened in biology right so like like senkoism right so the Soviets like Soviet Communists developed their own biology right um lysenchoism right which was literally a communist it was literally politically correct biology right um and if you if you if you trace the history of that it's pretty mind-blowing because basically like it turns out biology is not very egalitarian um yeah that was the sad thing about life and so the Soviets developed their own egalitarian biology which by the way was one of the big reasons for all for all the famines um but it was taught for sure in Soviet universities you know kind of as the way you do biology even though it like didn't actually work um and so I I don't know if they transmitted that all the way through into the American education system but like they for sure they had communist biology so so so so anyway so so in the middle the reason I'm pushing on this is because it's like you have okay so you have this concept of freedom of speech freedom of thought for you know for adult individuals um uh but then you have this this thing of like okay Public School teachers are not just individuals they're also like government employees yeah right and they're they're chartered by the government right to teach kids who are mandated by law to attend these schools yeah right and so when you have let's say hypothetically let's say hypothetically you have a large number of teachers um that are teaching kids either you know at that time communist material or you know today whatever you would think the equivalent of that is um right like you know does the First Amendment apply right like well so my grandfather was not fired for that though and and so there there's are you fired for being a communist or are you fired for teaching outside of you know the curriculum and like I I think it's reasonable to um fire somebody for something that they do but something that they think um or like you know do outside of their actual responsibility which is to teach like a certain thing um I think that's over the line and like McCarthyism would like McCarthy was way over the line on that uh you know look and and there were many people who were kind of who lost their jobs and got blacklisted and so forth who were um actively working with the Soviet Union as well which uh I think my grandfather might have liked to but he wasn't actually you know he did have a card he was a card-carrying member of the American Communist party and so I I do think like you you do want to be able to debate these kind of big important issues very freely uh but then look once you start undermining National Security or uh brainwashing kids or those kinds of things those I I would agree that's probably over the line all right I'll let your grandfather off the hook for today so so I will note one thing McCarthy's an interesting figure um because again he's one of these guys the movie didn't you know the movie kind of ends before McCarthy kicks in they kind of they kind of sized up McCarthy they mentioned him but they sidestep it but you know the story that gets told today of course McCarthy is you know is he was this moral is this moral monster right you know making all these unjustifiable claims and of course and again this goes back to what do we know today that we we didn't know you know kind of when that when that that that kind of impression got set um and so what we know today is actually quite interesting what we know today is McCarthy was like let's say at the very least an imperfect messenger and specifically um he made claims that he could not support um you know especially with his famous thing where I have a list of XYZ and he didn't actually have the list and then you know undoubtedly there were cases where people were smeared um you know and unfairly targeted and you know even other cases maybe as you say we're targeted for their beliefs but not for their actions um having said that what we know today following the Winona transcripts what we know today is McCarthy actually underestimated the level of Soviet penetration in the US government um just on the numbers he underestimated it and so his estimates you know topped out I believe in the 200s and it turned out you know the number was certainly higher than that it was at least in the 400 you know sort of 400s you know meanings you know senior placed Soviet Assets in you know significant government positions uh including very senior positions by the way including into the white house uh under FDR um and then um and then um you know current estimates the current you know kind of History estimates are the the you know those numbers you know may well run into the thousands um you know kind of from that era and so so with what we know today there's this interesting kind of twist of the McCarthy story which is he actually understated the problem and something from my youth that that really um screwed me up is the rosenbergs turned out to actually be guilty um which by the way wasn't known and and yeah that uh execution was one of the most kind of horrifying things I I remember when I was a kid it was like well this is like one of the worst things the country ever did um now I don't know about like executing them in the death penalty and all that kind of thing that's a different issue but um they definitely gave uh the nuclear secrets to the Russians probably ended up you know leading to like some set of those uh Secrets being given led to unimaginable number of deaths uh by the just extension of the regime which you know I still have trouble with that today to be honest with you how to think about the rosenbergs well for people who don't know about this historically it was that Julius nether Rosenberg were husband and wife uh team they were accused of being communist basically conduits basically recruiters and and asset handlers for the Soviet Military Intelligence in the U.S during this period um they they became a uh of course it's called a casa lab uh among the American left of the of that era 40s 50s 60s yeah yeah right it was like I don't know it was like you know the closest analogy you'd make today probably would be like a George Floyd or something like that right like just in the sense of like or Emmett Till or something it's like it was like they were like iconic figures um where it was such it was just it was seen so clearly by a lot of people in that era that they were being unfairly targeted and then and then they literally got executed um you know yeah I I think that's one of the last executions in you know at the federal level the federal level yeah yeah anyway of course there's a husband a wife right and so it's like okay even if the ho you know so you know who you know so so so so it was sort of assumed for many decades that that was a travesty um uh a friend of mine just sent me a Bob Dylan recorded a protest song called Julius and Ethel in the 70s right as late as the 70s where you know still talking about what Heroes they were um what we know today um is that they were guilty um what we know today is that specifically they were handling I think it was their nephew if I recall correctly a guy I believe his name is David Greenglass and he was a technician he was an engineer at the Manhattan Project um and he conveyed he conveyed get this guy on the job at the Manhattan Project conveyed to the rosenbergs who conveyed to the Soviets um the actual wiring instructions for the bomb um and that was one of the key like it was basically the Practical design to build the bomb and the reports afterwards were that that that basically was the turning point for the for the Russian bomb program um because right it was one thing to understand that you could split the atom and the theoretical physics of it it was another thing to actually do it mechanically and electrically um and to wire the thing up to actually detonate and and that was sort of that key moment um where they got the bomb and at least there are reports that the first you know literally the first uh Soviet uh atomic bombs were as they say uh wire for wire compatible um right with the uh you know with the Nagasaki with the nagasaka bomb um and so and we know this today from the Winona transcripts and so we know today they were guilty of sin they did it to your point the moral implications of this right and this goes back to this goes back to the what the apparent craziness of of uh Von Neumann you know advocating a first strike but which again I I don't support but um you know look had the Russians not gotten the bomb um you know would the would the Soviet Union have lasted um you know to 1989 um would the Iron Curtain have descended across Eastern Europe right um would you know another 50 million people you know probably have died over the course of the Decades that followed in the Soviet Union and Eastern Europe right uh because the Soviets had deterrence once they had the bomb of course they you know they alluded this at the end of the movie and I think a pretty good way uh with that scene in the restaurant um so so so so the rosenbergs were like like that was an actual pivotal moment um uh you know where basically these people decided that they were going to you know determine the future of you know the rest of the century um you know with with with the suffering tens of millions of people in their hands and they made the wrong choice um we know that now um so anyway I am I am strongly I'm strongly I'm strongly Pro the execution of the rosenbergs um yeah yeah and thrown in jail for a long long time but yes one more time yeah yeah anyway so so this all you know I just want to come back real quick to this this China thing because I I think this is you know this this this the reason I'm so fascinated with this whole period is because it's a significant foreshadowing of what's happening right now right because you know we I mean look if people know like you know China has been ruled by the Chinese Communist party you know basically you know now for since the 1950s um you know the Chinese Communist party is responsible for you know a level of moral horror certainly on par with you know a Stalin oh yeah under Mal yes yes under under Mile right and then in the last you know basically in the last 20 years you know starting in the early 2000s you know there was like a 20-year run between kind of call it 2000 and 2020 or so you know or into the into the late 20 you know the late teens this run where it sort of became the morally correct thing to do to basically be protein pro pro China which is fine by the way well and and things have ping really changed um the workings of the economy dramatically during that period so it wasn't it the government uh remained intact um but the way he governed um sir I mean well it created certainly an economic Miracle of the likes that you know um you know maybe we've never ever seen before he he pulled many people out of poverty so we have to give some credit where credit is due it wasn't like that was nothing well it wasn't nothing but there's another way to look at it which is he took the boot off the throat a little bit yeah right but the boots still on this no I I do want to get into this concentration of power issue because I think that's the the that is really the key problem with Communism I'm for sure right well so the historical analogy just the historical analogy and we could talk about that the historical analogy I just wanted to get to is your point of dang which is is is well made but like what Deng did in China is actually quite similar to what Landon did in the 1920s in Russia it did with this thing called the people should read about the New Economic program it's been lost to history it's a very fascinating moment um where there were a lot of American businessmen a lot of American companies who basically went to Russia 19 in the 1920s um and and did a lot for them and also made a lot of money in the process um and I I think basically the way the history is getting written here is basically the with the new economic program with with Russia in the 1920s is going to be kind of analogous to that you know kind of dang era uh in China right although the dang era lasted much longer well sort of 10 years 20 years yeah so well so the nap was give or take a decade the the the the China thing probably you'd probably say 30 years total um so yeah maybe three or three times as long but yeah yeah okay fair enough but you had American Business people um I'll just name one as an example he's his name's kind of lost history now but he was a key figure in the 20th century named Herman Hammer um who and there's this great he ran a big Oil Company in the in the in the in the in the in the 1900s and was very uh very associated with uh with the Russians there's two great moments in his Wikipedia biography um one is it was always very confusing how somebody how parents had actually named their kid Arm and Hammer right which is like literally Arm and Hammer right um and um which was like a communist slogan at the time and and it turns out in a baking soda right ultimately they came out of that period also but um uh it turns out actually the Wikipedia entry sort of concedes that in fact his parents were named him for the the sort of socialist slogan um but also there's this great moment where as a young business person working for his father in the family company at the time uh there's this great thing in Wikipedia where he went on vacation to the Soviet Union in 1921 and like came back in like 1930. and it kind of just glosses over the fact that he was there for a decade yeah yeah yeah and then for many many decades of followers he was for a long time and it was there it was during this new economic program era right where he was so what he was doing was he was doing business right what he was doing was he was he was he got deeply entangled with the Russian system and did a lot of business and made a lot of money um which which is at the time by the way he was allowed to do at the time the American government was encouraging that um so but but in his later decades he became a staunchy advocate for nuclear disarmament and a staunch advocate for diplomatic relations with the Soviet Union and so there was always this question hanging over him which has had he been compromised by the Soviets right had he had he basically been turned and become a Soviet asset you know kind of from his time from his time when he was there anyway like the reason I go through this is there are a lot of American Business people who have been enthusiastically in bed with the Chinese system you know country system Communist party you know for the last 10 years 20 years 30 years right that basically and again like they were like authorized to do it they were permitted to do it the American government was often encouraging it right um and it was considered to be a good thing to do you know but there are a lot of American CEOs you know a lot of American companies have gotten very entangled over there and my point is like the moral valence on China you can feel it in DC the moral valence on China is Shifting in real time right now on both sides of the political aisle in Washington in the same way the moral valence on the Soviet Union shift in the late 1940s early 1950s and I think there I think there are people who have been in bed with a you know a system where I I think they're you know they're gonna if they haven't already they're gonna wake up one morning in the next you know a few years and be like oh my god what have I done um and there's and I think there's actually and I'm not saying I'm in favor of it I just I'm trying to be kind of clinical about it I think there's a pretty good chance uh that we're going to enter a face here in which there's going to be a tremendous amount of let's say second looks um at activities that have that people thought were okay that are going to get judged you know historically is maybe not being okay although it's the the disentanglement will be much more complex this time in the sense that um you know the the Chinese supply chain to the United States is dramatically more robust than any economic connection that we ever have with the Soviet Union uh and yeah it's it's uh the who's who of uh American large companies um doing you know massive business in China and using China as a supply chain and and so that'll be interesting um so Let's uh actually why don't we kind of get into kind of more like fundamental Theory we have a question from uh Nicola Maharaja uh which is um what do you believe to be the biggest flaw in communism and why do you believe people fail to see it and let me give you let me give it like just like a quick simple treatment but I think that is really important because it's so obvious yet people miss it which is you know communism is is sold as power to the people um and many things many things many such cases have been solved as power to the people over the centuries um but the truth is and uh this is that you know the people never actually rule themselves um in the whole history of humanity uh that that that's not actually a construct that's stable it's more akin to Anarchy than any kind of stable system and so what communism really is in effect is it's not a distribution of power to everybody it's a massive concentration of power uh to the small number of people who run the government because you remove 100 of the power from the private sector and place it with the government and so the couple of problems with that one is you know it is uh you know it's the ring of power um from The Lord of the Rings it's the thing that uh is you know just is eminently uh corrupting uh but as important um you know all systems have incentives and by doing that then there's two kinds of incentives in this world carrot and stick uh but by concentrating power 100 in the government you remove and following the Communist philosophy you remove the carrot from society there is no incentive to work hard to earn more money to have a better life for your family that's gone and so you're left with only the stick and basically in the history of Communism you know over the in the 20th century it just meant mass murder because that's literally the only way you can affect anything as the as the entity with all this power because you've given up the other incentive and you know and look I think people fail to see that because the sale is part of the people and you know particularly intellectuals and and this kind of goes back to the genetic thing look if you if you're born gifted um in any way athletically intellectually artistically you do there is a sense of guilt and that there are a lot of people who weren't born like that um and communism has that like great appeal to make things Fair um but of course it doesn't make things Fair like the actual mechanics guarantee that it makes things the opposite of fair yeah David David Milton Friedman's son David Friedman had this great formulation he said there are three fundamental motivations for somebody to do something for somebody else um love money or Force yes right and so like very accurate right so I do things for my family because I love them right I do things for other people because of money um people I haven't met right uh for money and then What communists say is you should love everybody and you should do everything for everybody out of you know Universal love but what ends up happening of course is people don't do that it's not natural human motivation for people to work you know work their butts off for people they've never met um and so when you remove money you're left with love and force and love it does not scale Force four scales um yeah there's a great there's another great fictional portrayal of how this goes wrong um the the the the the FX show The Americans was I thought excellent yeah yeah written by uh CI it was created by a CIA officer who had actually fought the Russians in the Cold War and so he he really kind of knew what what was what um and there's this great uh plot later on I'm gonna spoil it but it's Central to this this discussion it's a great plot later on they have a KGB officer you know kind of uh character who goes back to gets recalled back to Moscow they have a season where he basically is working he's working for the KGB officer but he's working in Moscow his father is like a senior party official um and so he gets put on this basically detective assignment um it turns out basically the good food is being stolen out of all the supermarkets in Moscow uh in the 1980s right like all the good stuff is being diverted somewhere stolen somewhere um and he gets assigned to basically track down who's stealing it and the the way they set it up is it's gonna you know in any other TV show would be like there's some organized crime ring right there's some criminal you know he's going to find some criminal running some conspiracy that's going to have you know been stealing all the food and they go through the whole season like that and it turns out at the end it's just the system it's just the good food is being taken by the senior party officials I'm curious who run everything yeah he finally realizes this and he's like there's literally nothing to do these are the people who run the country they're taking all the good food fu they get it and you don't right um and of course right exactly right the people in charge the people with the power to administer Force use it on their behalf and the people who don't have the power to administer the force you know basically just get like completely screwed um so it's just it's as cut and dried as it could possibly get but been to your point like you you have to put it this way if you think your way into it you have to think your way out of it right yeah yes yes very well put um what it turns into what it turns into is just basically rule by the resentful right so what what it turns into is just like the worst people uh end up in charge and they end up basically ruling through resentment um and uh and and bitterness and envy and then just everything just goes to but I I think that you know the you know one problem with it is even in the case that um it was a good person right it wasn't you know okay it wasn't chochesco or Pol Pot or Stalin or Mao or like you know there's a pattern here everybody seems to be a bad person who runs a communist country um the the problem of the economic system removing all the incentives kind of leads you to that conclusion anyway you know even if they're great people even if they're you know full of love in their heart um it's it's gonna end badly um eventually uh which is why it's so dangerous and it's amazing that you know the ideas keep coming back um so so I have a this is a interesting question interesting question for me uh it's from Diamond hands I don't know that that sounds like a made-up name but it could be a real name no no that's the uh it's one of your one of your retards oh it's one of the retards though awesome I can't believe you had me say that on a podcast again after I got blasted the last time but a meaning that not uh person or a person with special needs but a part of the Revolution which is an uh anagram on Traders which are the people who led to the uh GameStop um amazing stock climb so that's what we meant uh but yes great so Diamond hands it says do you consider Hiroshima and Nagasaki a genocide um and maybe I'll start uh to help because this is a troubling question um so I I think you know a genocide is a very strong word um and you know genocide is meant you know kind of literally as a as an ethnic cleansing of a kind and I think it's very very hard to get to the idea that the intent of here are the bombings of Hiroshima Nagasaki were ethnic cleansing like that's that's very difficult to come by um and then now bombing you know nuking um you know what ended up being 200 000 civilians uh you know is like that that's very like I can't get behind that I think that's uh that's hard to swallow now to Mark's point though um that was a little bit the nature of this war um that civilians were um fair game and the rationale for it um was that and this is something I've studied a lot and then I've spent a lot of time in Japan so I I I think it was like not illegitimate fear which is the Japanese would never stop fighting um you know without something of this magnitude and that you know from a cultural standpoint um is actually a pretty rational position in the sense that you know Japan of that era was coming with very very heavily influenced by the culture of the Samurai and the samurai culture was such that that level of sacrifice uh even if you were losing the war even you know to go all the way to the end was very very built into the culture and you know like we saw that with the Kamikaze Fighters and and uh and so forth and you know and they were not only did they have that culture but they were also like they were very Fired Up by actually interestingly defeating the Russians in the early 19th century um or in the early 1900s I should say uh which was their first kind of Victory kind of coming out of the East and going into the West so they were they were fired up they were culturally prone to fight to the death um and so that that was a real thing and then you know when you talk to people in America about the bombing of Hiroshima Nagasaki um it's like one of the most morally horrifying things that we've ever done and totally unjustifiable and look you can understand that because it was 1945 it felt like the war was close to over the Germans were kind of done and the end it was civilian so like all those things would make you think that when you talk to people in Japan they're less angry about it than we are I would say and and part of the reason is they really understood the Japan of that era and the things they were doing um you know and like leading up to the bombing of Pearl Harbor but like where they where they were willing to take it themselves um if you that or or at least that you know like I shouldn't speak for the entire uh Japanese people but for the Japanese people that I spoken to in in Japan um they do recognize the atrocities the other way and uh and what they were willing like what they did and what they would have done um you know had they been able to so I I think it's uh you know that decision where as you know maybe probably 10 years ago I would have said it was the most horrible thing we ever did um I I do understand the rationale I still don't I still kind of I think I'm personally against it but um I understand a lot better why that decision was made yeah let me add a few things so one is um there were two arguments at that time for doing it um which I think they alluded to in the movie A little bit um so one was saving the lives of American soldiers right so have the Japanese in the war and which means you know that um West you know Allied soldiers we're not going to have to um you know continue to die in a in that conflict there was another argument at the time and this I would say this this one pains me to make and I'll describe why in a little bit but um you know the other argument was those bombings may have saved Japanese lives on net right so right had the had the war continued it's certainly possible that more Japanese would have died in the continuation of the war than in the ending of the war with 200 000 people dead in those bombings well particularly because they were willing to fight to the end they willing to fight to the end so so so there's a utilitarian argument that basically it was you that actually both America and Japan were better off that those bombs were dropped now let me say the problem I have with that the problem I have with that is now we're we're engaged in utilitarian ethics which is the ethics of that era and how that how that decision was made and the the problem with utilitarian ethics is precisely this problem which is okay now you're sitting here on Mount Olympus right either at that time or today and you're you're basically saying 200 000 people have to die for the greater good right and like by the what I've my reading of history is by the time you're by the time you're making that call like boy have you worked yourself into a position that is really bad right like that should not be the decision right that that that should not be the way it like utilitarian there's something there's something profoundly logical about utilitarianism as an ethos and there's something profoundly evil about it right which is it sort of it gets you into this situation where you can say things like 200 000 people need to die for the greater good and so my well and it gets into kind of the the most danger one of the most dangerous things about communism which is the ends justify the means right like oh we're going to get to this good place so we can just murder people drop nukes do whatever the we want because you can justify anything by that logic yes yeah and so my my conclusion from cases like this in history my conclusion is like you don't want it if you can possibly avoid it you actually don't want to go down the road utilitarian ethics and I bring this up because utilitarianism has become very trendy among our current intellectual Elite who has gotten very fond of sitting on Mount Olympus and making these calls um and deciding you know which eggs you break to make an omelet and like I think that's a bad Road um like I I I think that's a that's that's a bad ethical and moral world view to get wrapped up in well particularly I mean you know the the lab Lake was a great example of that the you know people absolutely knew his lab Lake the scientists absolutely knew as a lab Lake but for the greater good um we're going to say it was not um and by the way um you know in doing that gain a function research like like if it had come out immediately that this pandemic that's killed so many millions worldwide was a lab Lake as a result of research that we ourselves funded maybe that would have created a movement to stop funding the research which by the way we're still funding in many areas and could cause the next pandemic and that whole cover-up for the greater good is a kind of a very murderous idea yep exactly so yeah so three cheers against utilitarianism let's figure out let's figure out let's figure out how to order Society in a way where people are not sitting on Mount Olympus making calls of this nature I I think that would be where I come out of it absolutely so then here's a question from McCoy how different is the Los Alamos project of John Von Neumann doesn't accept the invite from Oppenheimer they mentioned this briefly in the movie there were two paths to detonate uh to actually set off an atomic bomb oh right right and they figured out that Heisenberg had gone the wrong way right yeah well they were uh that was part of it but then also on the Manhattan Project itself um there was there was I think what was called the gun method I think was references which is like which was the main thing they were researching the beginning which was to kind of forget what it was like literally you know shooting in some form um uh to try to generate the Chain Reaction um but then there was this other method called the implosion method um and the the the one method got the bulk of the resources and then didn't work but they had this there was a brief moment in there there was a brief moment where the the one of the scientists whose real name was Seth needlemeyer um uh says oh there's this other method I think we might want to look at and up a number is like fine go ahead and anyway it turns out like that other it was like the backup method for setting off the nuke the implosion method is the one that worked um there's a um there's a there is a TV series there's a TV series that nobody saw um that in a different era would have won every award you could win called Manhattan um that was a few years back that they only made two seasons of but um it uh the setting it's it's a recreation of the Met it's a TV series about the Manhattan Project and uh the lead character and it's it's the story of that second method it's a story of the the implosion method and of the of the sort of renegade effort inside the Manhattan Project to have this backup method um and it's it's a show so they have a lot more time to kind of deal with what what that all was and so for people who are interested in that that topic uh that show actually is actually very good interesting all right um foreign but back to Oppenheimer backed up and I'm a genius to give up and Oppenheimer credit they had sort of plan a but he had he had a loud Plan B to continue to run um right he didn't he he did not feel the need to reconcile the strategy uh he was comfortable having multiple approaches um to have multiple shots on goal yeah yeah which which which was very prescient and turned out to be the thing that really I mean without that they would not have succeeded and um we would be living in a different world today um so um you know that took credit to another another example of his leadership skills well and then the guy see recruited like the other thing that's so amazing is and it's probably the highest concentration of talent intellectual Talent um for sure in the history of the country maybe the history of the world uh including recruiting John Von Neumann um you know as well as you know every great physicist um who wasn't a Nazi by the way they alluded this in the movie also um uh many of those Minds many of the brightest Minds with to your point many of those brightest minds are what they call the Martians um which was the term for basically it was the Jewish immigrants from The Budapest uh area yeah yeah yeah and so and and actually a lot of them were like from the same it was like I forget there was like there were a small number of high schools that they all went to in Budapest yeah um so there was this like there was this thing that was like was was from that area yeah yeah it's that same thing so exactly that same area generated the American Semiconductor industry with the so-called so-called Hungarian Mafia at Intel uh switch like Andy Rove and Les vides and a whole bunch of those guys um and so there there was a there is this kind of giant mystery at the heart of both the atomic project and at the the semiconductor industry which is why did that specific place and time generate this set of just like incredible super Geniuses um and uh nobody's ever quite been able to answer that well you know actually brings up this interesting thing that that also was touched on the movie which is um you know World War II like many more Wars than I think are given credit for was was a race war um and you know very specifically race war and one of the things that costs Hitler the war was um you know his hatred for the race that ended up inventing most of this stuff uh the Jews and you know and that turned the whole thing so it was an incredible ironic twist um in that the master race was literally defeated by the race that they were trying to exterminate um but it does bring up this like interesting you know issue of war and humans which is you know historically you know it's almost always race um you know it like it is very very often race that causes these just major conflicts um you know including potentially right now Russian Ukraine uh you know there's a race element there and so why do I bring this up I I bring it up because you know this whole idea that we have uh in America these days that we should divide ourselves by race um seems just exceptionally dangerous in that you know like maybe it doesn't end in genocide um but the chance of it ending in something peaceful and good and unifying is just seemed very remote to me yeah so I had this moment I've told Ben the story I had this moment where so um you know Russia invades Ukraine you know it leads to kind of you know people are obviously shocked and alarmed in the U.S and um inside this moment it's a few weeks after the invasion at this moment I bought this new place in La and there's this Cafe it's kind of this kind of hippie crunchy LA cafe down the street right um uh which is kind of you know super uh you know kind of lash thing um been there since the 60s or something and so I got on the street I go to the cafe and I go in and on the host station of the cafe in the front there's this big sign red white and blue with you know stars and everything and it says no Russian food or drink served here hmm right and yeah like how did we instantly get to that yeah right like really like really race war really right and so yeah no look like it it is it is I guess my interpretation my interpretation more generally my interpretation I think this this became true in World War II for sure and was also true in World War One Like These Wars wars can start on issues of like complex geopolitics or like ideological differences or like commercial whatever trade conflicts or whatever border conflicts but like they start one way they end another way and they they do seem to end in a race war and that that does not seem to be out of our system no yeah well I mean like we're trying to regenerate it with you know like everything we have um you know and it's uh scary I would just say well there have been all these you probably have also seen there have been all these cases there are like classical music competitions where they won't let Russian performers participate there are like literature prizes where like Russian authors you know are not eligible anymore like the the the the impulse among our most enlightened and intellectually sophisticated people to instantly demonize an entire race is yeah it is pretty lit well it's lit and it you know like it and it gets into like the darkest part of human nature and what's been like just a complete shock to me is the intellectual movement in the United States to racialize everything um which is by the way very bad for me personally um if there if there's a race war I I'm in a lot of trouble um and you know the fact that people think that's a good idea is just so unusual to me that that it would like we'd go to that place and say okay you know we're gonna have to decide things think things are going to have to be decided on race and you've already seen it like the massive increased Heights hostility internally of Americans against Americans almost entirely on a racial basis uh is uh quite alarming Remy Moore asks up in heimerson's story involves themes of ambition moral dilemmas and personal sacrifices how can we draw parallels between these themes and the responsibilities that come with developing and deploying AI Technologies in our society today would you like to start so I would say um you know there are certainly some similarities and differences uh um but let me start with one of the similarities so you know it was you know Mark and I actually had a very interesting conversation with an entrepreneur and uh you know a very kind of accomplished um and important AI researcher um the other week and one of the things that he said that I I found like super interesting is in electing at AI um one of the things that was very confusing for them early you know with these large particularly with a very large models so when the models were smaller this actually wasn't as big a deal um is that it's very hard to analyze them the way you would analyze like a normal computer program because they're just too big you know like you've got a billion or 70 billion or 230 billion parameters or nodes in the system uh you know how do you Analyze That and his comment was you know like we realized we need to look at it more like physics um and kind of look at it from a systems standpoint I mean the way you might look at you know things like you know temperature or velocity or this or that you know in a system that you'd be observing from a physics point of view and that's actually where there's a term in these large language models temperature which kind of determines the level of Randomness which they took from you know the physics analogy from this this kind of idea and so you know when you think about the responsibilities of AI I think um you know the the model is actually more analogous to physics like literally the study of physics itself then the weapon um and you know when you think about the responsibilities there's I think you have to separate uh the science of it the technology of it um math you know these these building blocks uh very powerful and important tools for um really solving many of the world's problems uh from an application uh you know in this case an operator hybrid's case a nuclear bomb um but in the case of AI like there's many many applications uh just like there's many applications of physics and I think that if you went in like many are advocating and say okay we're going to regulate physics um the implications of that would be you know very weird and also bad and I think that's uh that's very kind of dangerous point that we we find ourselves in currently yeah so the the case I'll make and I'll make the strong case for it case I'll make is that it is it and I think the movie actually shows this in the the history of the era it certainly shows this also um and the topics we talked about about uh all the Communist scientists and so forth and the the Soviet spies um the presumption that the people who invent the science and invent the technology um are moral authorities um for how that Science and Technology will get used um does not hold up well um and let me let me elaborate on that we've talked about some of it but I'm going to elaborate on that a little bit so um so first of all like you know like I said I I think the the A-bomb prevented World War III so all of the hand ringing including oppenheimer's famous hand ringing and the Oval Office with German which happened which was true um like basically it was a lot of handwringing over what I think a project that saved like 200 million lives so first of all like it was like one of the like in the fullness of time probably one of the greatest things for peace that that ever happened and a lot of that a lot of those scientists like did not did not see that um and they had very strong strong opinions otherwise um number one um uh number two you know as we've discussed like a lot of them took matters into their own hands and through a combination of you know a combination of of internal agitation and and then some cases direct action um you know they made decisions including some of them to literally hand over the secrets of the bomb to the Russians um you know they which I like like we discussed I think led to the survival of the Soviet Union and the Iron Curtain and and all the all the deaths in Eastern Europe that followed in Russia uh you know for decades that followed like they they they made you know those those spies I think made horrible decision horrible moral decisions and they were spying most of those spies were spying for Morality In Their in their their views they weren't smart for money they were spying because they thought it was morally correct for the Russians to have the bomb um and then there's another Twist on the whole nuclear thing which we haven't even touched on yet which is nuclear power um and um you know there there's the civilian application of nuclear technology which is nuclear power and you know sitting here today you know the world is you know generally very you know kind of upset and and um and uh scared of of the prospect of of uh continued carbon emissions and climate change and so forth and we we have had the Silver Bullet technology for zero emissions unlimited energy for you know 60 70 years in the form of nuclear power um and we have chosen to uh to to not deploy that you know to I think just like devastating effects had we deployed it we we would have sidestepped the whole uh climate change issue that we're in currently by the way also the U.S would not have had to be involved in the Middle East right for this entire period right with the consequences there right like you know you know none of that right and again like you know like lots and lots of death right followed from from from you know from that um and so um and then you know this this basic presumption that scientists are somehow morally responsible for how their Technologies get used you know that's been formalized into this thing called the precautionary principle um and the precautionary principle had a specific Moment In Time invention that's very relevant it was invested by the German Greens in the 1970s to prevent the use of nuclear power um which is a decision that is causing you know tremendous damage not just globally but specifically to Germany right now um you know Germany is basically you know de-industrializing in front of us um uh because of of this mentality to sort of catastrophic effect um and and you know and a lot of why Russia was able to invade Ukraine is because they you know make so much money from you know selling uh fossil fuels to Europe because 70 of 70 of GDP in Russia I believe is fossil yeah it's energy fossil fuels and like that market would go to zero if we had properly deployed news Richard Richard you know the the you know the demonized Richard Nixon had a plan in 1971 the year I was born uh he proposed a plan called project Independence which he said we should build a thousand civilian nuclear power plants in the 1970s we should be completely fossil fuel independent free zero use uh 100 nuclear energy by by 1980. um and we could have done it we had the technology we knew how to do it and we didn't do it and it was a choice and it was a catastrophically bad choice and a lot of scientists every step of the way were against the use of nuclear power um they were involved in all of this and so that this presumption that because you are the scientist or the technologist that you have the moral authority to make these sort of sweepings or the filmmaker or the filmmaker The China Syndrome was it was very influential or the filmmaker or by the way the journalists who cut you know all the news stories written about Three Mile Island right which we now know today like you know basically I think I think that I believe the total number of deaths attributable through Mile Island I think is still zero yes um right um and so yeah this like Panic um you know that basically was fed by many of us and by the way the total number of deaths annually on oil rigs is extremely high like it's shockingly high it's the most dangerous job one could imagine yeah civilian nuclear power globally in the last 70 years has been responsible for a number of deaths very close to zero in contrast to basically every other form of energy we know of um so so we could talk a lot more about that but yeah not to mention the geopolitical like issues and the wars exactly so so what we have today I think we have like a shockingly kind of direct analogy which is we have this new basically breakthrough science technology of AI um it has potential National Security implications it also has potential civilian you know lots of Civilian use cases lots of implications um and then we have a scientific Elite Class um many of whom you know so some of whom are not involved in politics and they're just in the lab and they're doing their thing and some of them you know um whatever have different views but like a fair number you know the ones that are in the press the ones that are in Washington overwhelmingly um are playing the same role that you know the handwringers played um you know following the creation of of nuclear technology and they are moving as aggressively as they can to cut off um the use of AI um and uh for sure in civilian use cases by making all these lobbying efforts for regulation and all this all this fear migraine that they're doing um and and and and then the fact that this is happening against the backdrop of what looks like a new cold war with with a totalitarian Communist Regime um right like exactly like it happened you know in oppenheimer's time with the Russians like like it's it feels eerily to me like history is repeating itself like a lot more directly than I would prefer um and I think there are a lot of lessons to draw from the mistakes that were made in that era and that we should not make those mistakes in this era and at least sitting here today those lessons are not being drawn no they are not well this is an interesting question for you and to me um because I think we'll have very different answers uh what attracts Fringe ideas people to the Bay Area as in oppenheimer's time uh why was it a hotbed for Communists and I I can actually you know I grew up in Berkeley so I can probably speak directly to that well you should talk if you could just concept for people who don't aren't familiar with the Bay Area like just describe describe the nature of the Bay Area then and now in terms of in terms of this question so when I was growing up um look the Bay Area is a one it's an intellectual hotbed um you know just so many of the smartest people that I you know like I went to Berkeley High School which was a public school in Berkeley and um you know I went to Columbia which is an Ivy League school and and there's no question the smartest kids at Berkeley High were smarter than the smartest kids at Columbia um you know it's just like huge concentration of intellectual Talent uh uh you know and of course the Bay Area has kind of evolved into you know which to me isn't surprising at all into this you know the the the mecca of high tech and I'm also kind of uh you know intellectual Ground Zero um but it's also uh you know incredibly left-wing um and Berkeley is a basically a a communist City yeah I mean it's a p I call it the People's Republic like there are many Communists in Berkeley like and even you know to the extent they're not like they're communes there's like communist ideas uh you know Berkeley instituted I think the first nuclear free zone in in America you know you had all these very you know People's Park which is like a communist Park owned by the people um when I was growing up as a kid like just like many many communist ideas there um and you know what was the appeal uh so I I think like one the highly intellectual kind of creative people are are certainly open to new ideas um and you know communism is you know because it's an idea uh you know mostly an idea at least in the United States thankfully um you know it's got appeal uh but I I see there's there's something kind of deeper growing up in Berkeley you know and I still have a Nostalgia for it that at small scale um there's a there's an Ethics to Communism that is you know similar to a religious set of Ethics so Christianity or you know to some extent you know you know certainly Jewish culture if not exactly Jewish religion but Jewish religion too um where uh you know there's just like a real obligation to care for each other um and to uh treat each other correctly you know the Golden Rule all those kinds of things are very you know Jesus arguably was a communist uh and you know these kinds of ideas are really great to live in when when everybody abides by them it makes for a great society and I think that at a small scale you know in a lot of Berkeley like you had some of that um and you know like I mean it was one of the one of the things that was very shocking to me when I left Berkeley was you know just like how racialized the rest of the country was when like Berkeley was like that was like explicitly not a thing um so it had you know there was a lot of those kinds of appeal um but of course you have like a massive scale issue with it uh that that we uh certainly overlooked as kids I think there's also be curious what you think of this I think there's also a reaction that takes place which is a lot of people in the Bay Area then and now are Imports um and you know some from overseas but a lot from inside the US right and I'm an example of this I grew up in rural Midwest and moved here and a lot of the kind of you know kind of classic Silicon Valley characters like Bob noyce right were somewhere similar um from the Midwest yeah I think there's also a reaction thing which is I think if you I I think if you grow up in the American like Midwest or South a lot if you're like and you're like super like high IQ and super open to new ideas you probably view the culture of the where you grew up as sort of not being conducive to do ideas stay inside the lines exactly or what they you know called tall poppy syndrome um yeah right you know a fair number of people you know kind of come here because they're going they're they're they're they're reacting against that um right and so they have sort of a natural reaction against what they view as you know traditionalism um you know what they would they would characterize like hide bound morality um anti-intellectualism um you know lack of creativity lack of openness to new ideas and then the other thing you get is you get people who come from the east coast and they're reacting I think to something different they're reacting to like almost history right they're they're reacting to you know the East Coast you know in the US as you know New York Boston so forth at least you know historically is more you know focused on you know old old more old money more High more kind of established social hierarchies you know more kind of clear gradations of like who matters and who doesn't you know where you would right where you went to school who your family is um you know who you're married to and so forth you know kind of social status being the the sort of thing that arguably is is sort of central to the the Eastern kind of establishment yeah so it's the big thing that Bob Noyes kind of rooted out of Intel like at its core I mean he he he he got rid of all of that East Coast idea that was actually the birth of the Silicon Valley culture amazingly right egalitarianism right everybody in cubicle right nobody gets the fancy office nobody gets the guaranteed parking spot well and ironically the term meritocracy came from uh Bob noyce and and that idea of you aren't going to be judged on your family your title it was going to be you're going to be judged on your ideas and somehow that that became a negative yeah so it's kind of like the selection thing I think where you get this thing where it's like old is you know sort of it's like if if what you believe it's let's say you're young maybe alienated person where you're growing up and you are smarter than the people around you and you're more open to new ideas and you have this sort of ins sort of visceral reaction where things that are let's say the following old traditional right backwards reactionary hide bound um hierarchical um non-egalitarian um uh you know stuck in the mud um you know Philistine right like not open a new art not open to new music and so forth like all these things then you select into the place that welcomes all of that right um which is the San Francisco Bay area and California right um but but but then what you right but then the the risk is of course what you get is you get you you by by by fleeing the pathological thing that you hate right you kind of become the pathological thing on the other side yes yes the old line I always heard growing up was California everybody's so open-minded their brains have fallen out right like which yeah you know okay can happen can't it can't happen and so you you get this like hyper you know then let's try to characterize on the other side you get in California bear you get this kind of hyper what do they call it xenophilia right so you the sort of Love of the other right rejection of One's Own love of the other this extreme level of openness this extreme level of um you know sort of embrace of creativity new ways of living by the way new sexual mores new food habits right drug ideas new drug ideas right new religions new Cults yeah right and so you you get that whole other side of it and I and I and anyway my my interpretation is therefore therefore the Communist right therefore communism right and then therefore a lot of the other kind of it's yeah yeah of course of course it's going to be here and of course all the people who are going to think that all those things are good ideas are going to be here and and it's and it's it's the good with the bad right it's the it's the it's the it's why you get Silicon Valley it's why you get Hollywood it's why you get all the new ideas it's why you get all these new things right uh it's not an accident right um but um it's it's a total package with the potential dark side I mean and then part of the um challenges the level of talent is so high in the ability to convince the world of these um sometimes not terrific ideas is is potent all right well we have one from your buddy Beth Jesus and uh what he would like to know is how do we stop the anti-capitalist Communists from decelerating AI progress with red tape like they have done with the advancement of nuclear energy how can we call them out for prioritizing control and top-down power over civilization growth that's a lot yes yeah give it a whack well it's a good Insight look I think that um it's very very important to join the conversation and I think that um so so look the danger is as with nuclear right like if you're a pro-nuclear uh you could be painted as you know amoral um because everybody knew nukes were so dangerous and it was like this devil technology and all these things um and so as a result I think that look the the the the people of the time did not argue strong enough for it to to win the thing didn't argue didn't Lobby didn't um you know legislate didn't didn't stand up for it because like nobody wants to be painted as a bad person and uh you know history is a funny thing because you know at the time it's always oh like you know history is going to look back on you badly the people who say that are usually the people who history looks back on badly on um and so I you know like I think we have to make the argument and you know I think you've done a great job of that in your in your blog post Mark um um why AI will save the world uh but you know the the the good the obvious good that's coming out of AI right now versus the theoretical um the theoretical kind of not just unproven but unsubstantiated threat uh which you know like if you read any of the arguments about okay this is what AI is going to do this is this is my idea like okay how do we test for that how do we know um there's nothing so it's just like literally we're the good guys um so we're going to either uh you know we're going to curb AI we're going to capture Monopoly for ourselves or you know we know like the truth with a capital T even though we have no way of proving it and so we're going to stop progress which I like is very dangerous right now because you know if you look at the threats that we Face be it you know pandemics or climate change or just general kind of challenges with population growth Ai and technology is the way out it is a way to to solve these problems um and you know it's it's really kind of devastatingly scary that people would like undermine the one technology or the the best hope for solving so many of these problems disease etc etc etc yeah it's literally an attempt to withdraw the increase of intelligence from the world right like it's literally an attempt to make the world dumber than it has to be which whole pots idea Paul pot had that idea like people really need to think that one through we talked about a lot of this let me talk kind of around a lot of this I think at the core of it there's a philosophical distinction and you just kind of alluded to it but I'll make it explicit um so there's a philosophical distinction in how people think about the world and Thomas Soul uh who's one of the you know great great minds of our time um the way that he described you know he grappled with a lot of these questions around communism and progress and growth and so forth we started out as a communist yeah he started out as a communist exactly and he thought his way out of it but um he he what he said basically is look there's when it comes to all these issues like this there are like two World Views you can have and he he calls them Visions there's two visions of the world you can have um in the future the future world you can have and you call them the the unconstrained vision and the constrained vision um and the unconstrained vision is basically any vision of you can achieve Utopia um you can sit on Mount Olympus and you can decide how things are going to play out you know utilitarianism fits into the constrained Vision communism fits into the unconstrained Vision um uh sort of you know anything where it's like we can make you know we can make decisions on behalf of everybody you know the the good and the wise and the elite and the the scientists and the academics and so forth like we can make decisions on behalf of everybody we can centralize power within us because we are the ones that can be trusted to make the right decisions um that's what he calls the unconstrained vision and you know basically what he points out is to as you kind of as Ben has described the centralization of power that happens in the unconstrained uh Vision leads to you know sort of sort of predictably catastrophic results he says look the the the real world the way things actually work the way when things actually get better the way the way they get better is through what they call the constrained vision and the constrained vision is is like you know decentralized as opposed to centralized right so the constraint the unconstrained vision of centralized control and and dictatorship of everything uh by this by the smart and the wise the the constrained vision is bottoms up decision making right decentralization uh people working their way through it um uh you know it's a market the the constrained vision is the market economy versus the planned economy right the the constrained vision is AI is a tool for people to be able to experiment in many different ways to do things as opposed to a you know set of sort of enlightened scientists or or academics who can make decisions on how this will get used um and and what the constrained vision is it's basically a recognition of the of the imperfectness of man right it's sort of a it's sort of a recognition that there's no one of us that's like wise enough to be able to play Zeus or God or Jesus or whatever and and basically dictate right it just it doesn't exist like Jesus you know Superman doesn't exist Jesus this is like they're not you know they're not here they may have been here at one point in the past they're not here today we're left without we're left with imperfect Homo sapiens um and so therefore what you want to do if you want progress you want basically maximum Freedom flexibility right inventiveness local application of of Technology ability for people to experiment right um and and and and with that Vision you're much better off because you're harnessing the intelligence and energy of a much larger set of people to discover uh the the the the best path forward and and to me it's just like again under reading in history it's just kind of crystal clear how this plays out um but we are back in this moment where there are people who are claiming the power to be able to make these decisions on everybody's behalf and you know look the the bad news is they're they're winning in a lot of ways like they're very dominant in Washington they're a lot being very aggressively right now um you know they're very dominant in the Press um you know they're they're serious danger here the EU is about to pass you know a law based on these ideas that I think is going to be very devastating for them um the good news is these people are a very small minority these are not you know they're they're hundreds or thousands not tens or hundreds of thousands of these people or Millions um and so you know the rest of us don't have to put up with this um and we don't have to let the decisions get made this way um you know any more than we had to put up with the people who basically banned nuclear power in a way that we now know to be catastrophic it's really interesting that the constrained version is the the constrained vision is the vision of humility um and kind of understanding the limitations of humans and uh the the kind of the the the the self-appointed good people have zero humility about this and are willing to kind of dictate the future of the world from on high and it is uh it it's just striking to me that um uh you know people who are literally acting badly are acting badly under the belief that they are the good people um and and I think that's been true kind of throughout history uh it's any you know the other kind of uh very encouraging thing about AI as opposed to nuclear uh Power and nuclear energy is you know with nuclear energy the kind of it was a physical thing um that needed to be kind of uh licensed and built and and was kind of more directly controllable and deployed um you know like to deploy a power grid which is kind of the main use of it you do need the government's cooperation I think with AI um you know a lot of these ideas are going to be pretty hard to enforce and I think that's actually a good thing I think that you know you can't like you can try to Outlaw math you can try to Outlaw textbooks you can try to Outlaw open source um but you know it's very difficult to enforce and like you know forcing it underground would be bad but uh it would be like there is no underground nuclear power like that that that is not an option um so you know I think that as a force the unenforceability of it um kind of may lead to a situation where as it manifests itself people will come to understand um the value of it and it being a Force for good and it not being uh you know something that needs Banning or massive constraining or concentration in the hands of two or three companies or that kind of thing which is all being pushed very hard today I'm all right well we're coming up like right on two hours so uh I hope you all enjoyed this um our first of many podcasts and uh yeah we certainly had a good time doing it and I'd like to on behalf of Mark and and uh Andreessen Horowitz we just say thank you for listening great thank you everybody thank you foreign

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Length: 112min 56sec (6776 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 02 2023