Latest / THE DAILY BRIEF / 'Kissing this world goodbye' Tech billionaires encourage politics of 'End Times'

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'Kissing this world goodbye' Tech billionaires encourage politics of 'End Times' · THE DAILY BRIEF

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: I don't speak for you, but I think it's fair
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  Speaker 1: to say that most of us would really rather not
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  Speaker 1: see any more hints of dystopian fiction appearing in newspaper headlines.
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  Speaker 1: But unfortunately for us, here we are on what Rachel
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  Speaker 1: Maddow often refers to as Earth 2, what feels like
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  Speaker 1: a parallel dimension that came about when a morally bankrupt
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  Speaker 1: reality TV star wannabe dictator first took the presidency. The
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  Speaker 1: CEO of Anthropic, one of the biggest artificial intelligence companies
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  Speaker 1: in the world, warned this week that if AI companies
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  Speaker 1: don't slow down their development and install some guardrails, rogue
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  Speaker 1: AI agents might be able to take control of the
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  Speaker 1: Internet in six to 12 months. The warning has revved
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  Speaker 1: up a debate about whether AI or advanced AI could
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  Speaker 1: escape human control and literally threaten human survival, which sounds
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  Speaker 1: again like dystopian science fiction. And yet here we are
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  Speaker 1: actually having that discussion. But there's something stranger happening than
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  Speaker 1: all of this. These dire warnings from tech leaders are
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  Speaker 1: growing alongside an increase in talk in fundamentalist Christian circles
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  Speaker 1: about whether we are entering the so-called end times. You know,
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  Speaker 1: the biblical doomsday prophecy of the end of the world
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  Speaker 1: leading up to the second coming of Christ. And thanks
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  Speaker 1: to today's politics, this isn't a fringe idea. It's being
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  Speaker 1: discussed by Vice President J.D.
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  Speaker 2: Vance.
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  Speaker 1: Take a listen to what the actual Vice President of
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  Speaker 1: these United States said two weeks ago during an interview
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  Speaker 1: on a Christian podcast.
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  Speaker 2: While I wouldn't be shocked if we are living in
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  Speaker 2: the end times, what I'm trying to focus on is
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  Speaker 2: doing as much of God's work as possible right now.
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  Speaker 2: And if that leads to the end times, okay. And
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  Speaker 2: if that leads to us building a better world that
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  Speaker 2: thrives and survives for a very long time, After I'm gone,
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  Speaker 2: that's great too.
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  Speaker 1: Wow. That leads to the end times. Okay. Vance is
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  Speaker 1: not the only one who talks this way, by the way.
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  Speaker 1: It's a provocative and chilling new book that's out by
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  Speaker 1: Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor, which argues that not only
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  Speaker 1: are some leaders of the global far right okay with
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  Speaker 1: the imminent arrival of the end times, they're actually accelerating
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  Speaker 1: it and even profiting from it. In End Times Fascism
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  Speaker 1: and the Fight for the Living World, Klein and Taylor
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  Speaker 1: argue that the new far right coalition of the Trump era,
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  Speaker 1: tech bro billionaires, Christian extremists, ethno-nationalists, pose a clear and
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  Speaker 1: present danger. I'm going to talk about this. Joining me
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  Speaker 1: now is Naomi Klein, social activist and award-winning New York
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  Speaker 1: Times bestselling author and my old friend. Naomi, nice to
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  Speaker 1: see you on the show. It's been a while.
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  Speaker 3: Very nice to see you. Thanks for having me. Nice
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  Speaker 3: to be reassured by your description of these events. It
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  Speaker 3: feels saner coming from you.
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  Speaker 4: But it's so crazy.
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  Speaker 1: It's out there, and I don't really understand when people
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  Speaker 1: are gaslighting us and what they really believe. You argue
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  Speaker 1: in the book that these events End time fascists are
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  Speaker 1: intentionally accelerating some form of world destruction because they believe,
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  Speaker 1: and I'm going to quote from the book, that only
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  Speaker 1: a small deserving group of people will survive the coming cataclysm,
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  Speaker 1: whether in their bunkered refuge in the sky or their
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  Speaker 1: bunkered corporate city or their bunkered nation state fortress against
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  Speaker 1: alien invaders. Tell me what you mean by this.
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  Speaker 3: So this grows out of an attempt to understand the
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  Speaker 3: what is new about this iteration of the far right
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  Speaker 3: and even just of the Trump administration, right? We were
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  Speaker 3: both around the first time he was president and he
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  Speaker 3: was not behaving in some of the ways that he
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  Speaker 3: is behaving now, right? He was not threatening to make
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  Speaker 3: Canada the 51st state the first time. He was not
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  Speaker 3: threatening to annex Greenland. The kind of drive for the
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  Speaker 3: expansion of war in the Middle East has taken on
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  Speaker 3: apocalyptic qualities. I mean, one of the things we could
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  Speaker 3: have added to your list there are the complaints from U.S.
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  Speaker 3: service members, U.S. soldiers, that their own commanders, as the U.S.
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  Speaker 3: and Israel launched their latest attack on Iran, saying that
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  Speaker 3: their commanders were telling them, that this was the beginning
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  Speaker 3: of the end times of Armageddon. And the more violent,
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  Speaker 3: the better, because, you know, rivers of blood means that
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  Speaker 3: the Messiah is coming. But then in the Israeli government,
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  Speaker 3: you have more and more explicit incursions onto Al-Aqsa with
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  Speaker 3: people like Itmar Ben-Gavir, right? So this is why it's like,
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  Speaker 3: are we being gaslit or do they mean it? It's
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  Speaker 3: the combination of rhetoric and action, right, for many, many years.
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  Speaker 3: What reigned in Jerusalem was the so-called status quo. And
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  Speaker 3: you wouldn't see Jews praying by al-Aqsa. But now, thanks
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  Speaker 3: to Ben-Gavir, every time he goes to what they call
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  Speaker 3: Temple Mount, he brings more people the latest time. I
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  Speaker 3: believe he had a few thousand people with him praying
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  Speaker 3: in the open. And so this is very volatile. So
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  Speaker 3: even though I don't believe that they will bring about
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  Speaker 3: the prophecy that they're trying to accelerate, I don't believe
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  Speaker 3: that they're going to bring the Messiah's return, they could
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  Speaker 3: well trigger Armageddon because this is extremely inflammatory behavior and
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  Speaker 3: we all don't want to be part of their apocalypse.
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  Speaker 3: So we do need to pay attention to it.
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  Speaker 2: Right.
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  Speaker 1: There's an earthly end times you're talking about here. In
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  Speaker 1: other words, they may not, Jesus and anybody else may
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  Speaker 1: not be involved in this, but they may be doing
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  Speaker 1: things that are so damaging to us. In fact, you
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  Speaker 1: write in the book that these fascists are desperate to
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  Speaker 1: profit from conflict and catastrophe. Well, if that's true, there's
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  Speaker 1: lots and lots of conflict and catastrophe for them to
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  Speaker 1: profit off of right now.
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  Speaker 3: Well, exactly. And I think we see this with the
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  Speaker 3: visions of a privatized so-called New Gaza. But what we're
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  Speaker 3: arguing in the book is that this is not a monolith.
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  Speaker 3: Fascism always has strange bedfellows. It's always a coalition. It's
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  Speaker 3: a binding together of different factions. So we have the
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  Speaker 3: literal religious end timers personified by people like like Ben-Gavir.
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  Speaker 3: You know, they think they're going to rebuild the third
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  Speaker 3: temple and bring the Messiah. And then they have allies
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  Speaker 3: among Christian Zionists like Mike Huckabee, who has said some
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  Speaker 3: very inflammatory things about what constitutes, you know, greater Israel
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  Speaker 3: being the entire region. This is what I'm what I mean.
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  Speaker 1: Like, but it's always rooted in the Bible, right? Everything
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  Speaker 1: Mike Huckabee says, he's quoting from the Bible the whole time.
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  Speaker 4: Exactly.
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  Speaker 3: But then you have a kind of a vision of
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  Speaker 3: a secular sort of rapture, right? So the reason why
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  Speaker 3: they want to accelerate the end times is because they
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  Speaker 3: believe they are among the chosen. They believe that the
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  Speaker 3: worse things get, the better things are for the chosen
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  Speaker 3: in group. And in a way, this is mirrored by
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  Speaker 3: a non-religious version of what we're seeing from big tech,
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  Speaker 3: where there's this drive to accelerate artificial intelligence and And
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  Speaker 3: obviously minting its first trillionaire, it's very, very profitable. But
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  Speaker 3: also just kind of kissing this world goodbye. Just, you know,
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  Speaker 3: Sam Altman saying, well, maybe the whole world will be
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  Speaker 3: covered in data centers. This has very material implications because
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  Speaker 3: these are. In the words of Donald Trump, the data
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  Speaker 3: centers are electricity eating monsters and overwhelmingly they're being powered
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  Speaker 3: by fossil fuels. So once again, what we say in
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  Speaker 3: the book is, you know, in a twist on the
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  Speaker 3: biblical tales, they're not just building their own arcs. They're
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  Speaker 3: also causing the floods because they are in our shared world,
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  Speaker 3: accelerating climate change and disasters because they think their wealth
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  Speaker 3: will protect them.
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  Speaker 1: And there's something to that argument that their wealth will
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  Speaker 1: protect them, right? In our K-shaped economy, we just had
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  Speaker 1: numbers to show that retail sales were up, right? Because
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  Speaker 1: the people at the top, they might not like higher prices,
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  Speaker 1: but they can pay them when the people in the
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  Speaker 1: bottom can't. So there is something to be said that
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  Speaker 1: you can be on your planes and you can be
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  Speaker 1: in your international community and somehow you can have filters
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  Speaker 1: if the air is bad and the air conditioners if
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  Speaker 1: it's too hot. Is there something to the fact that
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  Speaker 1: they can create a terrible world and yet thrive in it?
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  Speaker 3: I think maybe in the short term, that's true. And
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  Speaker 3: I think that the level of wealth is so intoxicating, right?
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  Speaker 3: Because we're talking about rewards, the likes of which we've
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  Speaker 3: never seen, that I think that they have become, in
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  Speaker 3: a way, a kind of deranging. They've had a deranging effect. Like,
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  Speaker 3: I don't think that they're thinking particularly clearly. I think
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  Speaker 3: when the prize is an IPO for OpenAI, which would
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  Speaker 3: estimate valuations essentially the size of the entire US economy.
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  Speaker 3: I'm not sure they're thinking all that rationally. Yes, they
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  Speaker 3: have bunkers. We've all heard about their bunkers. And I
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  Speaker 3: do think that this level of wealth, what it does
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  Speaker 3: to the brain, maybe I'm wrong, but I think they
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  Speaker 3: just think they don't have to live in the same
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  Speaker 3: world as us. I believe they're wrong. I don't believe
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  Speaker 3: that they're creating wonderful lives for their children. but I
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  Speaker 3: think that somehow the wealth has become, in the book
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  Speaker 3: we say it's like a W & D in and
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  Speaker 3: of itself, and we need a disarmament movement to kind
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  Speaker 3: of bring these people back down to earth so they
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  Speaker 3: understand that they actually have to live in our shared world.
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  Speaker 3: You wouldn't think you'd have to make an argument like that,
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  Speaker 3: but I think it's come to that.
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