Now, we're going to get to the argument, which I know is what you all came here to see. So, please, I'm going to give you a couple of extra minutes, but please come and take your seats as soon as possible. And we want to also quiet it down just a little bit. I hate to interrupt all the good conversations that are going on, but we have 20,000-plus people watching online right now, and we want them to be able to hear our main event. So, like I said, I'm going to give you a few minutes to just kind of get your drink, get to your seat. You do not want to miss the argument we are presenting without any limitations with Joe Lonsdale and Joe Allen. So, wrap up whatever you're doing, come to your seat. I'm going to give you just a couple of minutes to get settled, and then we will let the sparks fly.
All right, I'm back. I'm back and hoping that you are ready to pay attention, to sit down and take it all in because we are going to finish off tonight with the Right's great tech debate. This is what you came to hear. It's what you came to see. That's right. Thank you. This is the main attraction, people. And the questions here, they are not small because what happens if America moves too slowly on artificial intelligence? And then what happens if we move too quickly? What does the explosion of data centers mean for communities and energy and infrastructure? And when does regulation protect Americans, and then when does it simply guarantee that someone else wins the technological race? And perhaps most importantly, what kind of technological future are we actually trying to build?
Our two guests come at these questions from very different perspectives. Joe Allen is an author, a journalist, and commentator who has become one of the prominent critics warning about the direction and the consequences of artificial intelligence and rapid technological change. And then there's Joe Lonsdale, founder, investor, and philanthropist, who has spent much of his career building and investing in technology companies. They completely disagree, which is why you all need to quiet down and listen, cuz I want to see a fight. That's why they're here. They disagree, and Matthew Peterson is going to get the sparks flying. So, ladies and gentlemen, Joe Lonsdale and Joe Allen with Matthew Peterson. Please welcome them to the stage.
Okay. So, before we begin, I just want to give a quick introduction of sorts to both the Joes here with us tonight. And I want to just get on the table what the kind of caricature would be. I mean, on one side, you see with many of my friends on the Right—and many good friends on both sides of this—on one side you see, 'Look, Joe Lonsdale, a lot of these tech guys, they're focused on making money, the tech bros. They're not looking at the larger picture, the deeper things. Really, they're not paying attention to some of these deeper issues, and they're acting in their own self-interest.'
And what I would say is, okay, maybe that side maybe that's true, maybe it's not. What you can't say, though, about Joe Lonsdale is that this isn't someone who cares about America or does things outside of technology. This is a man who has a large family and has devoted his time and resources to creating a university, to creating a think tank. Stephen Garrison was with us earlier today, who obviously is trying to do good for the country. So, I think we acknowledge that. And also, we should say with both the gentlemen up here today, they don't have to be here. I mean, you're busy. You have a few companies going, a few things going. But you could also be on a tropical island of your choice with your kids. You could be at the convention. But you're here tonight to actually make this argument. I think we should acknowledge that people have said this for a long time. I've said this a lot of times to a lot of people in tech: you have to go out and actually make this case and make this argument. So, we thank you for being here tonight to do that.
Now, on the other side, the other Joe, Joe Allen. I mean, I will, full disclosure, in the past years, being adults embedded in adult beverages together from time to time, this is someone I've known for a while. You could say the caricature would be something like this: you say, 'Look, Joe, War Room, Bannon. Maybe you don't like Bannon, right?' You say, 'Oh, this is populism sort of grandstanding. It's making an argument that's actually time-honored, but also doesn't really make any sense. We're going to go against the rich guys and they're bad, and there's not really a lot of there there. It's sort of like fear-mongering.'
And I would say there, just personally, but also if Joe just wanted to hang out on the internet and make arguments from behind walls, he wouldn't be here either. He doesn't have to be here either. And there is a serious fear, concern, and case that Joe makes that's very old and time-honored in conservative circles or people on the Right. And that is, hey, we need to be thinking about the uses and abuses of technology in a serious way, and not every change is good. And so there's something almost organic about that argument, that it's always a part of discourse on the Right. And so we thank Joe Allen for being here tonight.
I want to start really simply. I am going to shut up in a second, I promise. And I want to just ask these guys to lay out very quickly: what's your best- and worst-case scenario? What do you fear and what do you hope for when it comes to AI? Joe Lonsdale.
All right. Thank you, Matthew. It's an honor to be here. I thought you were going to be meaner at first. That wasn't too bad. He warned me backstage, but you know, he didn't really go out. I could have said much meaner things about myself if you want some tips next time. Guys, it's great to be here.
Listen, my best case, which is already starting, is that America re-industrializes. We get out of this kind of messy stagnation we've been in for 50 years. We make everything cheaper and better, especially for the working middle classes. We create tens of millions of jobs. I was just here actually opening a factory. We opened another factory in South Texas recently where we're hiring 10,000 people thanks to things that would be totally impossible without AI. And the best case is that we make another American century and we dominate.
I can go on and on, but I'd say the negative case for me, I think there's three big concerns. One, I think bio concern is a very big concern. We can go into this in longer depth, but there's things in warfare and in threats—you have offense and defense. It's very clear how to do defense in cyber very quickly with AI. It's not as clear to me how to very quickly do the biodefense correctly. I think we need to be very, very careful to watch DNA and viral synthesis. That's a very scary area for us and our bad guys. That's one.
A second big concern is that our kids and the abuse material and the addiction is really dangerous. And I think we have to be really, really careful for ourselves and our children how we build character and build our culture to withstand the temptations, and to make sure that we're not using digital heroin in ways that's going to be even more compelling and scary for all of us in the next 10 years.
And finally, third, there's lots of bad guys in the world. I'm terrified that our adversaries will use this to create weapons and use this to create ways to attack us and hurt us and to be very authoritarian. And that's obviously a threat here as well if we're not watching our government. So, those are my three biggest negatives.
Well, my concern isn't so much quantitative. There are quantitative concerns. You want to see the line on the chart go up and up and up and up, whether that is capital or intelligence, or if you're a Democrat, the US population being flooded with immigrants. I'm I think going to start with where we're at just very briefly, because where we're at is going to determine where we go. Where we at right now, we are basically human like our ancestors. The last 10,000 years of civilization and the last few centuries of modernity have still basically left us intact. And so you have lovers in the park who are holding hands, they're kissing, they're making love, they're making babies. The babies grow up, the babies are educated, and they will hopefully become productive citizens. They will hopefully become spiritually whole.
What you also have simultaneously is a rapidly evolving and recklessly deployed tech industry which seeks to transform all of that. And the first question that should always be asked when someone says, 'We are going to change something in your life,' and especially if they say, 'We are going to change everything about you. We're going to change everything about your civilization,' the first question should be: for whose benefit? Who benefits from this great, relentless transformation? And if you are not the one to benefit, why should you accept it? And I think that there is a very solid, long-standing argument that many, if not most, of the recklessly deployed digital technologies, media technologies, and even transportation technologies have left the average person worse off.
So worst-case scenario, it's not really a matter of total dystopia. I am not sold on the idea that the machines of their own accord will enslave everyone, nor am I sold on the idea that they will kill everyone. I think that, in fact, the worst future is one in which it sucks so bad we wish we were extinct. It is a future in which radical transformations with everything from babies to 24/7 social media to mass migration completely unhinging the foundations of the country—all of these transformations are now building up to the great transformation as it's been sold for a decade or so now: artificial intelligence.
And I think the absolute worst—that's for the Texans in here—the absolute worst scenario is one in which in 2028, soon-to-be President Ted Cruz declares that we will make war on Canada, and by 2030, he goes in to liberate my people. And at that point, all the resources of Canada go to us, but so do the Canadians. And once they build data centers across the now completely denuded landscape, they will produce artificial intelligence like a mass migration of digital immigrants, algorithmic immigrants. And they will bring poutine, yes, but they'll also bring their accents. Gavin McInnes will have to go into hiding. And then, of course, when given voting rights, Vancouver will vote that Chinese is first the second language of America and then eventually the first.
On a serious note, though, I think that we need to really ask ourselves who benefits from total transformation. And with all due respect, Joe Lonsdale, you clearly do, and you're insulated from the most damaging effects. The people that I speak to on a day-to-day basis and the people who come to me are not insulated. They're not insulated from mass surveillance. They're not insulated from mass manipulation, nor are they insulated from the more radical slop infestation of the culture, except for those who have the wherewithal to say no.
All right, I'll skip the Canada part, but let me respond to the other one. Listen, I think there's multiple things to pick apart here. Let's talk about the mass surveillance parts. I think that's like a very fair and popular pushback right now that's worth going into. And I guess I'd like to ask a question about this, which is: myself, despite what some people may think online, am obsessed with civil liberties.
When we started Palantir, for example, the current situation before Palantir was they had access to all the data. They spent $38 billion a year gathering data, and there were basically no good access controls at all. So someone could go in, look up whatever they wanted to at any of the thousand different federal departments, and there'd be no trails. They could abuse it whatever way they wanted. That was already going on. This is the world I came to, and they were incompetent. So they couldn't stop attacks very well, and they just didn't use the data at all. And our view was this is ridiculous. First of all, you have to be competent in being able to stop attacks and not waste money. And second of all, you have to demand audit trails, etc., etc.
So this is something I've been working on for 25 years. We've been having these debates, been trying to make the government competent in the areas that I touch, been trying to watch the watchers. You can go back and see me talk about watching the watchers for a very long time now.
Now, what bothers me about this kind of current debate is there's the legitimate things you can argue about, and then there's the psyops from the Left. And when I say psyop from the Left, we're in Texas here today. I'm a proud Texan now for six years. I want to give you one other example of a psyop. Go back in time 10 to 20 years. You guys may remember we heard a lot about how bad fracking was, like that this was a big, big deal. It's now a known fact—this is not conspiracy, it's a known fact—that our adversaries saw how good fracking was and how bad it would be for them. And Russia especially spent an insane amount of money trying to stop us from doing fracking. And that there were literally groups of protests in Eastern Europe and literally money towards the Green Party in the UK, which we now know was Russian money, which turned off fracking. Thank goodness Texans were bold and said, 'These psyops are—I'm not going to listen to them.'
So, my question is, we have lots of types of cameras that watch us. We have license plate reader cameras, we have parking cameras, and we have Flock. And I'm not involved in Flock at all. I think they've done a shitty job on some of the messaging here. But isn't it a little suspicious to you as well that no one's attacking the cameras that are giving us speeding tickets? No one's attacking the cameras that are watching other parts of our society. But everyone, after DSA spends insane amounts of money message testing, the far Left figures out how to get the Right to agree with them, and then they go after the things that are arresting criminals. And those are the only ones that everyone on the populist Right is protesting. Isn't that a little bit silly? Shouldn't it be we're protesting all of them or none of them? Even if we're right, are we kind of falling for the Left here? Is there something where we shouldn't be going along with the psyop?
I don't think that we're falling for the Left. I reject the premise entirely. The issue of mass surveillance precedes any of the DSA talking points you're talking about. In fact, if you watch, for instance, the Coppola film The Conversation, I think it came out in the '70s. And what did it talk about already? You had the technologies of surveillance, and you had the idea that if these went out of control, there would be no part of your life that would be untouched. And anyone who was able to observe you all the time would have power over you. Not just to bust you doing something wrong—not cheating on your mistress necessarily or cheating on your taxes, although those would be big issues—but simply to understand you inside and out and be able to manipulate you.
9/11 happened. The Patriot Act was signed, and then after that, it was an open declaration that the infrastructure that had been built up for decades would not just be used to root out terrorists overseas, but would in fact be used to root out terrorists and dissenters on our soil. Fast forward to 2020, and before any leftist ever made a chirp about this outside the most, I think, knowledgeable and extreme, you had the declaration of biosurveillance. What is the state of your body? What is the state of your health? Where have you been? The contact tracing operations, the vaccination operations, which for whatever it is worth was facilitated by Palantir in their data analytics.
And so people's fear, or in my case, the disdain, the utter disdain of having a human being take the place of God who is watching you all the time—the disdain towards this precedes any of these leftist talking points.
Listen, I was turned down on Facebook. I was turned down on Twitter for being conservative. I do not trust Big Tech, all right? I am against these guys. I will tell you right now, you and I have phones on us, I believe, and those phones, they sense the Wi-Fi and the apps—Facebook's app, or if I don't have TikTok, but TikTok's apps—other apps will see that we're near each other. And if you go search something later, it's going to come up on my app because we're sitting next to each other now talking for an hour. And I think we should have laws that stop them from doing this, and that would be anti-Big Tech.
Thank you, I appreciate it. We should be stopping Big Tech from doing this. But instead of holding Big Tech accountable, the thing I'm reading online right now everywhere is Flock cameras. And Flock cameras were the only ones arresting illegal immigrants and the only ones doing the bad guys. I'm not saying we shouldn't be against Flock, too. That's like one little tiny narrow piece of a massive thing. And I'm saying the reason we're focused on that is because DSA spent tons of money going after arresting illegal immigrants, when I would rather be going after everything more cogently and having a coherent response.
So I think that the issue—yes, Flock has become a symbol for the wider surveillance network in the same way that Palantir has become a symbol for the foreign interventions and the ways in which data, and now increasingly autonomous or at least AI-assisted attacks. Palantir has become a symbol for that. One of the main reasons for this is that Alex Karp, of course, goes to places like the World Economic Forum and brags about donating Palantir to Ukraine. And there is a lot of boastfulness about Maven Smart System and the ways in which artificial intelligence, by way of Palantir surveillance and data analytics coupled with AI systems, is leading us to a place in which human beings are less and less involved in what is among the most important and sacred things that people do, which is to eliminate another human life.
It may sound horrible to say that's sacred, but I think anyone with any knowledge of history up to this point would say that warfare is in fact a sacred thing, and it's being taken away from human beings. And in the case of Flock cameras, what you have is, again, they're a bit of an eyesore. They're a bit conspicuous. You have Axon, you have so many other companies that do this. But more and more, I think people are afraid, especially those who have followed, say, the work of Sam Francis and the idea of anarcho-tyranny, that these systems, while right now are being billed as they're going to get rid of the immigrants, are more and more going to be used against us. And that has been historically the case.
Did Palantir, when they were functioning under Obama or under Biden, were they conscientious objectors? No. Whoever is in charge of these systems will use them. And as we've seen time and time again with January 6th, for instance, and Clearview AI, these systems will be used against us and used against us disproportionately at any turn.
And that, by the way, was the name of Palantir when we started it 23 years ago. The whole point was that you had to design this thing—because it could ultimately be used by bad guys if you're not careful—you had to design this thing to have audit trails, to watch the watchers, to be competent, to do your best to transcend that.
The other option, by the way—and I agree with you, warfare is ultimately like a noble part of the human spirit and experience. I think it's very wise where you're coming from there. I think we lost a lot in our civilization when we had World War I and when our aristocrats kind of charged off to war and were mowed down by machine guns, right? Because there was something noble about being brave and leading from the front, and being a leader and being willing to fight, that the king ultimately is supposed to pick up his sword and get in front of his troops and go forward. And that's part of what made you the king, that courage. So I think our culture has fallen a lot not having that over the last 100 years. And I agree that's a terrible thing, and that's a longer-term problem thanks to technology.
Obviously back then you weren't going to not have machine guns; the enemy would kill you. Similarly today, we've had AI on our ships for 40 years because if something's coming too fast, you need something to automatically, with machine learning, respond and shoot it down so it doesn't blow up your ship. You're not going to not have that. And that's progressed. This is the nature of warfare: that when you have bad guys who could do things, if you have a swarm now that has intelligence, you have a swarm of thousands of things, if one side has that swarm smart, responding really quickly, and the other side doesn't, you're going to lose.
And so I 100% agree with you that I would prefer warfare be a noble thing where we could pick up swords and we could show courage, and I think that was healthy in some ways. It's not going to go back to that, though. And so I think being the anti-competence party is not good either. We have to both believe in competence and then try to use that competence with technology to put rules in place to watch the watchers, to not trust government. We should never trust government, but we shouldn't be incompetent and turn things off to make us lose.
Well, the real problem with that though—okay, to trust government would be a fool's errand, I think any of us in this room would agree. To trust government unconditionally especially is a retard's role. But in the end, the corporations, especially the tech corporations who are at the forefront of artificial intelligence development, and Palantir of course, who is their biggest customer?
The US government. The majority of the money does come from businesses, but the biggest customer is the government because we started as a mission-driven company. That's true.
In the case though of these AI companies and the populist push to regulate them, which I think could easily go off the rails, but even such small things as transparency—what is happening inside the labs, where did they get their data—accountability: some kid kills himself because the AI told him to. I think that if these were human beings—and increasingly because of the natural anthropomorphic nature of the human psyche, we kind of perceive them inherently, unless we're sociopaths, perceive them as somewhat human—if these were human beings operating out of a corporation and they were whispering into your child's ear to kill himself, if they were whispering into your wife's ear that he should be making more money and, 'By the way, yeah, the other guy is probably going to be better,' if they were continually monitoring and raking up your data footprint, if these human beings coming out of a corporation were doing that, they would be charged, right?
We would say this is impossible. You can't have some creepy-looking guy like out of the Grandpa Monster-looking character out of Lost Highway sitting in your living room or your bedroom watching you all the time. But it's not like that. It's just your phone. It's just your Alexa, right? It is just the Flock camera outside your house. And so this creeping suspicion, this fear of dystopia comes not from leftist talking points, and it doesn't necessarily come from a fear of the government because a corporation can just as easily monitor you, manipulate you, and ultimately, if you fall out of line, either through the government or through other means such as cancellation, annihilate you.
And I want to get to the next question, but I just will say I agree the fear is very rational. The anxiety is very rational, and we should be careful on watching these things. However, I am seeing policy in response that's just plain stupid. You literally have lots of cities—they turn off Flock and they put in something else. It's not watched either, except it refuses to arrest immigrants. And you have people, when you could be doing something that's the more competent solution, instead just being kind of like Luddite in response, and that's not good either. I think we need to have rational responses that do make them accountable, but that don't break things, that don't destroy jobs.
Well, no, I'd want you to drill in on that: rational responses. So the way I read this right now is you're saying, 'I agree on a lot of these concerns. In fact, they inspired me for a long time.'
Right, that's what I'm doing. Yeah.
Right, but you're saying, hey, what's actually the case is a problem as it exists now. Is that—
Yeah. And just as one other kind of framework that's really inspiring to me: the Second Industrial Revolution, we had about 3x the normal productivity growth even versus today. From 1870 to 1920, we doubled the wealth of everyone in real terms in 30 years. The next 50 years was 2x. The last 50 years was stagnation; it was 1x. It was terrible. We offshored a bunch of stuff, we stopped building new power transmission, we stopped building things in America.
And what I'm seeing right now, if you look at it, it's very clear. We are re-industrializing. We are using AI to train manufacturing engineering to allow us to take things back from China. We're building factories. We're building the foundations that are going to build massive new cheap electricity to create so much stuff here in America. And so my thing is, let's make sure we can do that and we can win, and let's also try to hold these things accountable and do it right. For me, turning that new wave of prosperity off would be crazy, and I'm worried we might do that if we're not careful.
I think that what we're in at the moment, broadly speaking, is a global experiment. Every single person in this room, and every single citizen of America, and everyone touched by the developing world, everyone touched by the digital system is in a vast experiment. And so when we hear these things, Joe, when we hear these promises of new prosperity, if we hear these promises of a great golden age in America, we look back to previous sales pitches. I personally look back to things like OxyContin, the ultimate non-addictive opiate. I look back to things like the Patriot Act, which would bring peace to America. I look back to the 1965 legislation which said that America should open its borders to the world and that we should accept these changes because these changes are going to be necessary for economic prosperity.
And so the line on the chart, at least as it's projected, goes up and up and up. Maybe it's GDP, maybe it's your Palantir investment, maybe it's your soon-to-be investment in Anthropic, let's say, or a current investment in SpaceX. But qualitatively speaking, we do not see an improvement. We see the kids being deranged by these technologies. We see education slipping away and falling into the hands of the tech companies, whether through basic ed-tech or now the new supposed miracle of AI tutors or full-on AI teachers. We see people's relationships become more and more disconnected, more and more synthetic. And so we don't buy the sales pitch anymore. We don't buy the political promises.
I'll give you an example which will be somewhat maybe controversial among Trump voters, of which I am one. But a few days ago, maybe it was three days ago, four days ago, there was an onslaught of AI-generated slop coming from the Trump account on Truth Social. And I don't blame necessarily Trump himself for those tweets; I blame him for not being in control of his own public persona. But what did we see? We saw President Trump in AI slop form flanked by robot dogs and robot soldiers saying, 'They will never sleep again, and we should make them have nightmares, and they will dream of us forever.' Which, logically speaking, if they're never sleeping again, how the fuck are they going to have nightmares or dream?
But that aside, what you need to consider is that the image of the future—which is right now, pretend the image of the future is aggressive, it's dystopian. And maybe that presently is pointed towards the Iranians. Maybe that presently is pointed towards the Russians. But when American people see this and they're told that if they don't want that because they don't want data centers, they're going to be backward and poor, they imagine—and I think quite rationally so—that these robot dogs and these robot soldiers will not always be pointed outward, but very well could, as in the case of January 6th, as in the case of in many ways the entire Biden administration, pointed towards us.
I think there are actually things that already are working, and I'm curious if you'd like turn everything off or what? Because I'll just give one example: we're invested in a bunch of healthcare companies. When someone looks at a cancer slide right now, thanks to AI, they make about 0.4% mistakes. Previously, they made 8 to 12% mistakes. So, it's already like—you can measure—it's already saved hundreds of lives, and this is the case in tons of these areas, right?
And so in the education case, education is not broken because of technology and tech companies. It's broken because we have a leftist group—and I think it's very important on the Right that we're honest about this—it's broken because we have a monopoly that's a government monopoly controlled by crazy leftists, right? And we have friends now that are using AI and that are building schools, and they have schools that have way better results. And the teachers unions want to argue those results are not better. And by the way, it's not all AI all day. They spend a lot of time with people, and with values, and with projects, and with human skills. But yes, AI is better at seeing—
Are we talking about Alpha School?
Alpha School is one of them.
Has there been a third-party assessment of their techniques and their outcomes?
There's been a lot of different views on this from a lot of my smartest friends, and it's very clear these kids are way ahead. He's going to keep building it because it's his money, and we're going to prove it, and parents are going to choose.
I promise it's a sales pitch.
No, it's not a sales pitch. This is a guy who's more competent than almost anyone here. He's worth tens of billions of dollars for building hundreds of companies over the last 30 years. He's extremely good at what he does. He deeply cares about America. He built it for his kids. And we have a lot of our friends' kids going there who are smart, and they're doing projects, and they're learning. And the AI actually can see where you are and how to teach, how to see what skills you need in math and in certain other areas. It's on its face obvious. You go in and see these kids are behind, and when certain kids are behind, you can catch them up by seeing what they don't know.
And there's things like this that just work. And if parents want to choose that, you're on the Left if you are against that. That is a leftist thing to stop them.
That is an insane thing to say, that you're on the Left if you oppose—
If you're against parents choosing that education, and you're against that, that is a leftist thing.
I can say from my own personal experience that when I finally did make it to school, which was only a community college at first and then eventually universities, when I eventually went to school, I was confronted with the monolith of the Left, right? And I will say they definitely made it very uncomfortable to talk about things like human biodiversity or the downsides of certain sexual arrangements, and certainly they made it very uncomfortable to talk about the inherent sort of beauty of America and the American founding. That is how I cut my teeth. I had human beings—and by the way, they were not all just evil human beings; they were a little insufferable at times. But this human-to-human transmission of culture, whether it is one of catechism in which a human teaches another human what a religious worldview should be, or if it is me arguing back and forth with my professors about whether or not Black crime rates might in fact be the reason for the disproportionate police encounters—all of these taught me what it meant to be a human confronting other humans.
Now, especially post-COVID, especially after the lockdowns, especially after the valorization of first ed-tech and working from home, and now AI tutors, it is supposed to be a human to machine to human. And then if, for some reason, the dreams of the transhumanists and posthumanists who are by and large developing these technologies at the frontier—if that dream is true, it is no longer human to human, it's no longer human to machine to human, it's not even machine to human, cuz what are we anymore? It is simply machine to machine.
So I would say that for me, the case of Alpha School still being—we don't really know exactly whether that works. And in the case of, say, El Salvador, you know, all praise to Bukele for getting rid of the gangs, but it would appear that the small sample size of this 171-school study is probably not going to be representative necessarily of what the future of AI education will wrought.
Okay. Well, and by the way, from the university we founded which studies the intellectual foundations of the West, it's small groups of humans, and I 100% agree with you: it's very important to have human-to-human as a big part of our education. And we're not disagreeing there. What I'm saying is there are certain things that we have proven we could teach very, very well with AI in certain areas. You might disagree it's proven or not. I'm very confident you can mix these things, and it doesn't have to be—
an extreme transhuman thing. You could have people who who are Christian, who are studying Christianity, who are studying the values of our civilization. For us, there's really three foundations for me: it's the classical world, it's Christianity, and it's the Enlightenment. And I think those three things, you have to learn them to understand, like you said, the beauty of our founding. And these are things that people should discuss. It doesn't mean we can't be really competent at using incentives, technology to teach people better and to explore and innovate and iterate. The reason education is broken, we haven't been able to try new things because it's government monopoly. We should be allowed to try new things. That's what's finally happening. I'm very bullish on that.
Okay, let me let me Yeah, let me shift this a little bit. Try this a different way because I'm struggling to— I mean, so on the one hand, there's agreement. There's some agreement anyway on some of the problems that we face. That seems clear. There's some agreement there, right? About some of the— You guys have agreed on some things about mass surveillance, this kind of stuff. Great. Maybe let's try it a different way. What is the solution? Like, what is the approach that you both want? I mean, maybe starting with you, Joe, since you were articulating these concerns. What do you want to be done?
The first solution, there's five levels to the solution. And first off, there is no the solution. We're all involved in a global experiment. And one of the first elements of this global experiment is whether or not you assent to it, whether or not you accept it. And so the first level of solution is going to be personal choice. Do I give my kid a chatbot, or do I run the risk of allowing a human being with all of his or her flaws or their/them flaws to teach my child, right? And that beginning level, especially in the absence of real legislation with real teeth, that beginning level is the most important. Do I choose to believe that this sales pitch is true, that technology will make life better or not? It's a risk. We're all running on assumptions, and I think the personal choice is the first.
The second is communal norms. Do we meet our lovers via digital platforms? Do we talk into the mic or do we not? These communal norms will make an enormous difference because no person stands alone. Above that, you have institutional choices. Does your school accept the imposition of surveillance technologies and, in my opinion, sort of digital autonomous brainwashing technologies or don't they? And then above that, you have the political. First, you have the municipal in which over and over again we see people saying, "I don't want a data center in my backyard." Yeah, some of them say it's going to suck up the water, but that's not going to be a talking point for much longer. The big thing is it is a constant humming reminder of a future they don't believe in.
And above that, you have state legislation which, of course, has no teeth at the moment, but perhaps will. And above that, the national framework, this mythical national framework which David Sacks has pushed continuously and produced absolutely zero evidence of any progress on. And so I would say that it begins with your choice, and it goes to your community. And above that, it is enshrined in law. Is it okay for an AI company to monitor you or not? Is it okay for an AI company to produce sex bots for your children or not? These sorts of things will be enshrined in law, but for now, it's a matter of choice.
