Latest / DarkHorse Podcast / What the Flock? The 334th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying

Transcript

What the Flock? The 334th Evolutionary Lens with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying · DarkHorse Podcast

• 1:00:03
  (Upbeat Music) Hey folks, welcome to The DarkHorse Dodcast, live stream number 334, I being Dr.
• 1:00:15
  Bret Weinstein, you being Dr.
• 1:00:17
  Heather Heying.
• 1:00:18
  And we are, we're gonna do a little podcasting.
• 1:00:22
  And I talk about data centers.
• 1:00:23
  Yes.
• 1:00:24
  And surveillance cameras and the Cartesian crisis.
• 1:00:29
  Yes, the Cartesian crisis, which marches on.
• 1:00:31
  It marches right on at a time when so many of our systems, our health, our privacy, everything seems to be at greater risk than ever before, it is becoming ever more difficult to know what's true.
• 1:00:44
  Yes, the knowing what's true part, which would be the sort of basis for rational action going forward.
• 1:00:49
  So yes, it is getting harder and harder to act in your own defense with the cruddier, more compromised information.
• 1:00:55
  So we're gonna talk about that and many of its tendrils and outgrowths.
• 1:01:00
  Indeed, indeed.
• 1:01:01
  We won't have a Q and A after the live stream today, but we do have one on Sunday at 11 a.m.
• 1:01:05
  Pacific for two hours for our supporters on Locals join us there.
• 1:01:09
  The question answering asking period is open now.
• 1:01:14
  And just a reminder that YouTube demonetized us several years ago and they quietly remonitized us without actually supplying any of, much of any explanation or really much of our revenue back.
• 1:01:29
  We know part of the explanation, which is that they're scoundrels.
• 1:01:32
  They're scoundrels, they're scoundrels.
• 1:01:34
  And they did tell us the three offending videos that caused us to demonetize us in the first place, all having to do with COVID, miss, diss, and malinformation, I'm afraid.
• 1:01:43
  Right here, right here.
• 1:01:44
  Miss and diss from their perspective, malinformation from our perspective, meaning true things that make you distrust your government.
• 1:01:50
  Yes, yes, yes.
• 1:01:51
  We were not actually engaged in missed or diss information.
• 1:01:54
  These terms being kind of formally defined during the COVID era by the Biden administration.
• 1:02:01
  By the Department of Homeland Security, which labeled missed, diss, and malinformation forms of terrorism, meaning that once they accuse you of these things, you are unpersoned and de-citizened and all sorts of things can happen to you.
• 1:02:14
  Yeah, you could be unpersoned and de-citizened and such.
• 1:02:17
  It's not automatic.
• 1:02:18
  We're not there yet.
• 1:02:20
  Your rights become mere privileges and you may not know that it has happened.
• 1:02:26
  So consider, especially if you're watching us on YouTube, subscribing, liking, sharing, we're trying to get over whatever, I don't know, whatever shadow banning and censoring they still have in place.
• 1:02:39
  Right, Ballyhooing I think is also in order.
• 1:02:42
  I would have to look it up to be sure of what-- Who do you want to Ballyhoo?
• 1:02:45
  What do you think it means?
• 1:02:47
  Doesn't it mean celebrate?
• 1:02:48
  I don't think it can be used that way.
• 1:02:50
  I don't know my grammar well enough.
• 1:02:51
  I feel like you've used it as like a, I'm gonna get this way wrong, but like an intransitive verb or something and it's not that-- Oh, well, I don't think I've-- I don't think a person can Ballyhoo.
• 1:03:01
  You can't?
• 1:03:02
  I think it's, isn't it a noun?
• 1:03:05
  I don't know.
• 1:03:06
  I think-- You're the one who wrote the word noun.
• 1:03:08
  I definitely think you can Ballyhoo, but we are gonna find out because there are people out there who know.
• 1:03:11
  You say that sort of thing and then you never follow up.
• 1:03:14
  I'm following up.
• 1:03:15
  Next week's episode is going to be predicated on Ballyhooing and all of its various consequences.
• 1:03:22
  How many people do you need to remind you in order to make that happen?
• 1:03:25
  I think two is sufficient.
• 1:03:27
  And who are those people?
• 1:03:29
  Probably you and Jan.
• 1:03:30
  I see, I'm just not taking this on.
• 1:03:33
  All right, I withdraw any reference to Ballyhooing, though I am curious.
• 1:03:37
  I'm pretty sure you can Ballyhoo.
• 1:03:38
  I think that's the only thing that does happen actually.
• 1:03:42
  In the universe.
• 1:03:43
  No, no, there are other things happening in the universe at all kinds of scales.
• 1:03:46
  What I'm saying is that with respect to Ballyhoo, whatever it means, I think it is an action that one takes.
• 1:03:53
  Maybe a group of people can take it collectively, but it is something that has to be done.
• 1:03:58
  And I think it means celebrate.
• 1:04:00
  And if not, wow.
• 1:04:01
  Oh, there's definitely, there's like a joyous, somewhat chaotic connotation to it, whatever part of speech it is.
• 1:04:07
  And I was just suggesting that they do that for us because I mean, they're here, they like us, most of them.
• 1:04:12
  I'm sure there are some haters.
• 1:04:14
  I know it because there always are.
• 1:04:16
  But those who aren't haters, go ahead and Ballyhoo.
• 1:04:19
  (Laughing) I mean, maybe you should petition the various platforms to add it as an option, like share, like, subscribe, Ballyhoo.
• 1:04:29
  Well, I'm led to believe you cannot petition the Lord with prayer.
• 1:04:34
  I'm not talking about the Lord, I'm talking about YouTube.
• 1:04:36
  Okay, oh, all right.
• 1:04:37
  It's different.
• 1:04:37
  Yeah.
• 1:04:39
  Quite.
• 1:04:40
  Well, no, no, they're both, you know, it's a minor deity of sorts.
• 1:04:45
  YouTube?
• 1:04:45
  Yes.
• 1:04:46
  It has tremendous power, you will grant that.
• 1:04:49
  Power and deification are not the same thing either.
• 1:04:53
  All right, this has now become deeply philosophical.
• 1:04:56
  We have not paid the rent and may not be able to pay the rent, this level of philosophy being deployed up top.
• 1:05:01
  This is true, this is true.
• 1:05:03
  And pedantry.
• 1:05:04
  For sure, for sure that.
• 1:05:06
  Okay, we are indeed going to pay the rent now with as always is the case, three sponsors right up at the top.
• 1:05:13
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• 1:05:15
  I've already given you one, right?
• 1:05:17
  Yes, no, I got one.
• 1:05:18
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  You know, it's funny.
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  I found it hard to read, you found it hard to read.
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  It comes in the ears just fine.
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  Oh yeah, yeah.
• 1:06:39
  Yeah, even- I'm just gonna say it, I'm so, you can't like, I can show you this because I just read exactly what's on this piece of paper.
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  I don't even know how to say it.
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  Right.
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  Is this an example of Ballyhoo?
• 1:07:11
  I don't think this is Hala Ballyhoo.
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  Oh, yeah, maybe.
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  That's the number.
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  Yeah, and it's, you know, it's related to this thing where it's hard to read the color blue and it's written in the color red.
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  Right.
• 1:07:41
  Right, but this isn't that because it's not like the numbers aren't exactly what they say they are.
• 1:07:47
  It's just they're coming in in a medium.
• 1:07:51
  Medium's not the right word, but like they're coming in in word form when they're numbers.
• 1:07:54
  Yeah.
• 1:07:57
  That's, okay, yeah.
• 1:07:59
  It may continue to get weirdly philosophical this episode, I feel.
• 1:08:03
  And neurobiological and philosophical.
• 1:08:07
  I'm with you.
• 1:08:08
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  A spoonerism?
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  Is it a spoon, yeah, it's a spoonerism.
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  That was a spoonerism, not a stammer.
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• 1:12:41
  All right.
• 1:12:41
  All right.
• 1:12:42
  It's time.
• 1:12:43
  It is time.
• 1:12:43
  It is time.
• 1:12:44
  It is time.
• 1:12:46
  We're gonna talk a little bit first today about data centers and then talk about flop cameras.
• 1:12:51
  Yeah, and maybe put the things in a kind of a context where they both fit.
• 1:12:56
  Yeah, I mean, I think, did you say oddly?
• 1:12:59
  Clearly.
• 1:12:59
  Clearly, yeah.
• 1:13:00
  No, I think the connection in this case is not at all subtle.
• 1:13:03
  Yeah.
• 1:13:05
  Although they both came up separately for us this week.
• 1:13:09
  So, yeah, I think all Americans at this point are thinking about data centers.
• 1:13:13
  We've all heard of some of these sort of areas where there was a lot of brouhaha.
• 1:13:19
  Let's just continue to use words that maybe we can't entirely define.
• 1:13:22
  I don't know what part of speech they are.
• 1:13:23
  Yes.
• 1:13:25
  About whether or not these companies should be allowed to put down these massive lines, almost always above ground, through neighborhoods that have been pastoral, idyllic, beautiful, and certainly will not continue to be any of those things afterwards.
• 1:13:42
  And so we're gonna get to some of the known health risks of these data lines.
• 1:13:51
  But first, what prompted me to be thinking about this this week is I ran across this article in the New York Times, published this week, titled China, Russia, and Others Seek to Enflame Debate Over AI Data Centers.
• 1:14:06
  State, oops, state actors in China, Russia, and Iran have sought to exploit the US public debate over the effects of the technology.
• 1:14:12
  And I wanna read part of this article and then also read some of the research that the New York Times is basing this article on.
• 1:14:20
  And in part because my first read on this was, what the hell, why is this what we're talking about as opposed to the actual risks of these data centers?
• 1:14:30
  But actually this is a real concern too.
• 1:14:33
  And so this is part of, when you have something that is truly a risk, that individuals are being affected in ways that most of us aren't directly affected, but we can hear, we can imagine, we can empathize with what they're going through if they're about to have their entire lives changed by something they didn't ask for and do not want.
• 1:14:53
  Then the idea that the entire story may be being twisted by foreign agents is of course important, but that does risk making it seem like that's the only reason we care.
• 1:15:07
  Yeah, and I will just point out that in a landscape where powerful actors often want to make a true observation disappear, this is very clever.
• 1:15:20
  And this was exactly my reaction.
• 1:15:22
  So I wanted to sort of give that caveat upfront because I had a very negative reaction to this article and to the research it's based on, but they are making a real point which speaks to the Cartesian crisis, which is, why do you care about data centers?
• 1:15:39
  Like think about that now before we start talking about it.
• 1:15:41
  Why do you think you care?
• 1:15:43
  And we're gonna get to some of the reasons that in fact you should care.
• 1:15:47
  And there are real reasons to be concerned for your health about having such things in your backyard.
• 1:15:54
  But if you just have a sort of vague sense of like they're not good, it's quite possible that you are being squeezed by something that is not acting in your best interests.
• 1:16:03
  Yes, or we will get back here, I'm sure.
• 1:16:06
  But a third possibility is that it could be in the interests of our competitors abroad to exploit the rational concerns of the citizenry because the forces that our government is allowing to produce these phenomena is not actually on our team, which I think the evidence is ever clearer.
• 1:16:33
  In fact, I have a principle that I will deploy later on this topic.
• 1:16:37
  Yeah, and so it effectively, it points to an enemy that is known and public and pointable to while potentially obscuring further who we should actually be paying attention to.
• 1:16:49
  Not to say that again, China, Russia, Iran aren't potentially quite big enemies of the United States and its people, but the idea that the private public enterprise that the US government is increasingly engaging in with these private corporations are simply on our team is 100% wrong.
• 1:17:10
  Yeah.
• 1:17:11
  Okay, so New York Times article published July 9th.
• 1:17:16
  So that's what, six days ago.
• 1:17:19
  OpenAI, so they've got a picture first, the caption for which is, "OpenAI released this cartoon as an example of one generated with chat GPT by people in China who the company believed were affiliated with a regional government.
• 1:17:33
  It is not clear what word in the title was blurred out." So that's sort of, it seems like a kind of a weak example to me and then they start with three more examples.
• 1:17:42
  A state owned newspaper in China recently published a satellite image of a data center in Gainesville, Virginia writing in English, the development of artificial intelligence posed a threat to Americans' physical and financial wellbeing.
• 1:17:55
  The only thing in that example that strikes me as possibly egregious is that there was a Chinese, a state owned newspaper in China writing in English, but presumably that happens a lot.
• 1:18:05
  Well, I would say let's take the darkest possible interpretation of that.
• 1:18:12
  It's very weak tea, so to speak.
• 1:18:15
  Yes.
• 1:18:15
  Right?
• 1:18:15
  Posed a threat too.
• 1:18:16
  Right, this is not a massive effort to manipulate the American public.
• 1:18:22
  At most it's a drop in the bucket in a discussion in which, you know, presumably almost nobody in the English speaking world saw that particular claim, nor does it change anything if they did.
• 1:18:36
  Well, I mean, to try to steel man their argument.
• 1:18:42
  The idea is they provide a few examples up top here and the argument is they're all over the place and increasingly we don't know what is coming from where and what appears to be grassroots, homegrown, citizens caring about the livelihood of themselves and others may actually be coming from shops elsewhere who never met an American, much less care about what happens in American soil in a good way.
• 1:19:11
  Second example in this New York Times article from a few days ago, a comic strip made to look as if it had been published by a Maryland news outlet created with open AI's chat GBT by people in China, the tech company said, circulated on X this year, blaming data centers for soaring electricity bills.
• 1:19:27
  It showed a tycoon smoking a cigar clutching bags of cash.
• 1:19:30
  So again, just an example of something that is made to look grassroots and isn't.
• 1:19:36
  And a video shared on X by a known covert Russian influence operation.
• 1:19:40
  I find that phrase very strange.
• 1:19:41
  Known covert Russian influence operation, questioned the viability of a data center that an American company, Firebird, is constructing in Armenia, the small Caucasus nation that has been a focus of Kremlin pressure.
• 1:19:55
  Quote, "The country's electrical grid and stability render it useless," end quote, the video's narrator says.
• 1:20:02
  Again, I would say, to your objection to the first one, weak T at best.
• 1:20:08
  Weak T at best.
• 1:20:09
  The second one, okay, there's a tremendous amount of money at stake in these data centers.
• 1:20:17
  Of course.
• 1:20:18
  The idea that all you gotta do is get somebody to China to put out a little something.
• 1:20:24
  But that's not, I mean, that I think is straw manning No, my point is, the New York Times has a serious journalistic budget.
• 1:20:34
  If their point is that the-- So does the state of Washington, but in both cases they're squandering them.
• 1:20:39
  Right, okay, but if their point is, hey, the discussion is not organic because there are antagonists of the United States intervening, they should find, if they found three industrial strength examples, it still doesn't say that the conversation is significantly altered.
• 1:20:56
  To find three examples, each of which is suspicious in its own right, suggests there's not a lot to find.
• 1:21:04
  Well, so I felt that too, and I am gonna read a little bit more from this article before going to the outfit, Alatheia, I think is how it's pronounced, that actually wrote the report on which this is based.
• 1:21:17
  Okay.
• 1:21:17
  And they have some better examples.
• 1:21:20
  So I'm not sure why the examples were chosen, that were chosen for the New York Times article.
• 1:21:27
  "All our examples continues the New York Times "of a push by foreign adversaries to seize "on what polls have shown as deep ambivalence "verging at times on hostility "about the spread of the data centers "needed to power AI, the United States and elsewhere." So that feels to me like they're changing the truth a bit.
• 1:21:41
  Deep ambivalence verging at times on hostility, I would say we're beyond deep ambivalence for a lot of people, right?
• 1:21:48
  The verging on deep hostility or verging on hostility is an understatement.
• 1:21:53
  And so, you know, again, I could see an argument that the authors of this piece are trying to sort of not go deep on either side, or not state the strongest version of the argument on either side, although that seems like not very good journalism.
• 1:22:10
  Okay, but one other thing.
• 1:22:13
  The third example in their list of three was about a data center, where again?
• 1:22:20
  Being constructed by an American company called Firebird being constructed in Armenia.
• 1:22:26
  Okay.
• 1:22:27
  Yeah, no, no.
• 1:22:28
  The chances that foreign adversaries have decided to highlight a data center being constructed in Armenia to embolden skeptics and hostile forces in the US.
• 1:22:42
  Ah, but that one was posted by a known covert Russian influence operation.
• 1:22:47
  Those five words, and I mean, what can you do?
• 1:22:49
  Right, oh, it's obviously-- Known covert Russian influence.
• 1:22:52
  Yeah, it's a direct hit on something really hard to see.
• 1:22:56
  But if you were going to try to get the American public whipped into a lather over these things, an Albanian data center-- Armenian.
• 1:23:04
  Armenian data center would not be the go-to.
• 1:23:07
  It's not the one that's gonna get anybody out of bed in the morning.
• 1:23:10
  Even those of us who love maps might have a hard time putting Armenia exactly in the right place.
• 1:23:15
  Right, but I mean, are the Russians targeting the Armenian public?
• 1:23:19
  Because, I mean, it's just a non sequitur that you would highlight that when there are so many data centers in the US about which there's already a lot of organic controversy.
• 1:23:27
  Yep.
• 1:23:29
  China, Russia, again continuing with the New York Times, China, Russia, and to a lesser extent, Iran, have sought to use state media outlets to turn the controversy over data centers in the United States into, quote, a domestic fracture point, according to a new analysis by Althea, a threat intelligence company which identified scores of articles and posts on social media this year.
• 1:23:49
  So again, I'm gonna get there.
• 1:23:52
  Scores-- Scores.
• 1:23:53
  Scores doesn't sound like that many.
• 1:23:55
  We're halfway through the year, a score is 12?
• 1:23:58
  12.
• 1:23:58
  12.
• 1:23:59
  Isn't it?
• 1:23:59
  Yeah, I think so.
• 1:24:00
  Yeah.
• 1:24:01
  Yeah, four score, yeah.
• 1:24:02
  A score is 12, scores a dozen.
• 1:24:04
  So scores of articles and posts on social media this year does not seem like that much.
• 1:24:08
  It's nothing.
• 1:24:09
  Yeah.
• 1:24:11
  You know, would it be better if none of them happened?
• 1:24:13
  Sure, but, okay.
• 1:24:15
  The foreign efforts appear intended to stoke the debate over data centers that has united political figures across the political spectrum, from Senator Bernie Sanders of Vermont, a progressive to Stephen K.
• 1:24:24
  Bannon, the erstwhile advisor to President Trump.
• 1:24:26
  That may be the kernel of why this article exists right here.
• 1:24:31
  Hold up, why is there agreement across the entire gamut of political thinking in the US?
• 1:24:37
  This is gonna be a problem for us who wanna put up data centers into your backyard.
• 1:24:41
  We better create skepticism about why you're skeptical about data centers.
• 1:24:45
  Oh crap, the pitchfork people and the torch people are talking to each other about their hostility to the data centers.
• 1:24:52
  Yeah.
• 1:24:52
  Yeah.
• 1:24:53
  That's a reason for alarm if you're a certain type of tycoon.
• 1:24:59
  Exactly.
• 1:25:01
  We can't allow any effort by foreign adversaries to extort these fears and undermine our technological development.
• 1:25:06
  Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, wrote to the acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, referring to genuine public concerns.
• 1:25:14
  The Trump administration, which after taking office dismantled many of the government teams that tracked foreign influence operations, has begun to recognize the political threat of the rising sentiment against AI.
• 1:25:24
  A Gallup poll in May found that 71% of Americans were somewhat or strongly opposed to having a data center built near them.
• 1:25:31
  Really, only 71%?
• 1:25:33
  The others haven't heard of it yet.
• 1:25:35
  Almost 20 percentage points higher than those who oppose construction of a nearby nuclear power plant.
• 1:25:41
  Many have brought concerns about the effects of AI on jobs and the climate, while people who live near data centers complain their eyesores and emit annoying sounds.
• 1:25:50
  Some cities and counties have enacted temporary or permanent moratoriums on new construction.
• 1:25:54
  Now, I include that sentence because, as we will see in another piece I'm gonna read to you from, the actual problems with having these near your house are routinely being underplayed, even when people are saying, "Oh my God, they're loud and they're hot," emit annoying sounds.
• 1:26:14
  But these are not the primary reasons to hate them as much as much as, and we'll see a picture here in an upcoming piece I'm gonna read from, like what it would look like to go from having an idyllic pastoral natural yard to something with one of these gigantic towers buzzing in it all the time.
• 1:26:32
  But as much as the aesthetic and natural effects of having such a thing in your yard will be huge, those aren't the main problems and the New York Times doesn't mention anything but eyesores and emit annoying sounds.
• 1:26:50
  Right, which makes it sound like an empty problem.
• 1:26:53
  But the truth is, come on, annoying sounds, annoying trivializes them in the description.
• 1:27:03
  The fact is, this is absolutely quantifiable, there's a decibel level there's a neurological cost to be paid for this white noise that you didn't buy your house expecting to exist.
• 1:27:14
  So it's a quantifiable harm, it's not an annoyance that you're being picky about.
• 1:27:21
  Even the annoyance that you're being picky about, I think you're fully entitled to be troubled.
• 1:27:25
  But the point is, no, no, this is a medical issue actually, this is something that is gonna have an impact on your ability to work, it's gonna have an impact on the quality of your life and the degree of that impact is an absolutely objective fact, right?
• 1:27:42
  It's not annoying sounds.
• 1:27:45
  It's certainly much more than annoying sounds.
• 1:27:48
  I will get a few articles from here to some of the known effects that no one appears to be talking about except for a handful of people.
• 1:27:58
  But I am pretty confident that we still don't know the extent of what the costs actually are.
• 1:28:04
  So objective, yes.
• 1:28:07
  Quantifiable, yes.
• 1:28:09
  Fully known and quantified, no.
• 1:28:11
  I was just talking about the decibel level as a perfect objective fact that could be described by the New York Times.
• 1:28:18
  Instead they've decided to trivialize it.
• 1:28:23
  Jumped forward a little bit in this New York Times article, lobbyists have also weighed in to insinuate that American opposition has been fomented with support from abroad.
• 1:28:31
  Power the Future, an energy industry group, argued recently that domestic opposition to data centers was manufactured by environmental groups financed in part by foreign donors like Hans-Jor Gwiss, I don't know how to pronounce his name, the Swiss philanthropist and conservationist whose foundation is well known for supporting environmental issues.
• 1:28:48
  Oh, diabolical.
• 1:28:49
  Yeah, that's awful.
• 1:28:51
  In a statement, the Gwiss Foundation said it did not provide grants to oppose data centers.
• 1:28:55
  Quote, "These reports are false, misleading, and an attempt by special interests to manipulate the public into accepting data centers," the statement said.
• 1:29:01
  So it's just like one layer on top of each other.
• 1:29:05
  Like the opposition that you feel must have been fomented by those green types who like to hug trees and look at otters.
• 1:29:14
  That's the argument we're seeing now.
• 1:29:16
  And it's easier to get that argument in once you claim that there are scores, scores of social media posts this year alone from Russia and China that aren't what they appear to be.
• 1:29:28
  Scores?
• 1:29:30
  This year alone, Russia and China, they have not made their point that the problem is as big as they say it is, but it specifically opens the door wide for lobbyists, as the New York Times says, to make the claim that if you have skepticism about these things, you've probably been manipulated.
• 1:29:49
  Oh, and it will lodge that in the minds of people who would otherwise naturally be upset about this.
• 1:29:55
  And so what you have is, so far, three suspicious, tepid examples of the manipulation of the American public.
• 1:30:06
  And then you have a claim that there are a large number of posts when large is measured in dozens, and the number of posts is so mind-bogglingly large that that's not even a relevant number.
• 1:30:21
  And then, but my point is, the claim that they are stacking on top of those foundational pieces is that the opposition is a consequence of these vague operations, scores of posts.
• 1:30:44
  Here are three examples.
• 1:30:45
  My point is, there's no way that opposition in the US could in any way be profoundly impacted by scores of posts, none of which are apparently profound in their impact.
• 1:30:59
  I mean, it's not even that they've provided a viral post that turns out to track its way back somewhere.
• 1:31:03
  It's just, yeah, there are a bunch of posts.
• 1:31:05
  Yeah, just point of order, we both flubbed scores.
• 1:31:09
  It's 20.
• 1:31:10
  20.
• 1:31:10
  Yeah.
• 1:31:11
  Four score, yeah, and is it seven years ago?
• 1:31:14
  Yeah, okay, yeah, damn.
• 1:31:17
  Just, you know, so it's more than we were saying, but still not a ton.
• 1:31:21
  Yeah, well, yeah, it's not really more, given the orders of magnitude involved in how many posts.
• 1:31:27
  I mean, 20 is more than 12.
• 1:31:28
  It's not meaningfully more.
• 1:31:30
  First of all, it's more.
• 1:31:31
  Well, let's know, I will make the argument that significant digits wise, they are not being-- But we're making arguments about significant digits.
• 1:31:39
  I know, I'm just saying, in terms of your calibrating what we've said, they're not offering a different order of magnitude of the number of posts based on our error.
• 1:31:47
  We're still in double digits, and they wanna multiply that by some vague number scores.
• 1:31:55
  So it's a trivial number, no matter which version you got, the right or the wrong version.
• 1:32:02
  Of what a score is.
• 1:32:03
  Right, so to stack on top of scores of posts, three cruddy examples, the idea that the opposition is in some way a consequence of an organized something, if it is a consequence of an organized something being fomented from abroad, New York Times has an obligation to demonstrate that, which in doing such a poor job of providing evidence, it suggests there is no significant contribution.
• 1:32:31
  If there is, the New York Times didn't apparently find it.
• 1:32:34
  Well, again, the New York Times wasn't doing the research that it is reporting on here.
• 1:32:39
  That came out of the Alathea Foundation, which I'll get to in just a minute.
• 1:32:43
  Just two more paragraphs out of the New York Times article.
• 1:32:46
  Another pair of reports by the Bitcoin Policy Institute, a cryptocurrency advocacy group in Washington, also detailed what the group's researchers called an extensive multi-year influence campaign by China to sway the AI race.
• 1:33:00
  "There is an organic opposition to data centers," the author of the report, Sam Lyman said.
• 1:33:04
  "What we are calling for is simply transparency though, because we've been able to document an inorganic element that runs parallel to this specific opposition movement." That seemed clear.
• 1:33:14
  Like, okay, we know that there's an organic opposition movement, but there is a parallel inorganic movement that is running in his words, parallel.
• 1:33:22
  And I think that's likely to be true.
• 1:33:25
  That's likely to be true.
• 1:33:26
  So let's just go to the report out of this organization called Alathea, which is what the New York Times is reporting on.
• 1:33:37
  In fact, right at the top of their website, I happen to have pulled up a PDF so I could highlight sections here.
• 1:33:42
  But this is just off their website just a couple hours ago today, July 15th.
• 1:33:47
  It says, "New York Times cites new Alathea research.
• 1:33:50
  Russia, China, and Iran target US data center debate." So they are proud of, as you would expect a research outfit to be proud of being so prominently figuring in a New York Times article.
• 1:34:02
  They write, "With opposition to data centers cutting across traditional political lines," so again, there's that, right?
• 1:34:08
  "And multiple high-profile projects already blocked or delayed, the data center fight has become volatile at the hyper-local level, creating the conditions that foreign actors are built to exploit.
• 1:34:17
  Locally fragmented, emotionally charged fights like this one are exactly the conditions state actors look for, a chance to turn grievance into a wedge against trust in US infrastructure, companies, and government.
• 1:34:27
  Data centers are the current target, but they're also a preview of a repeatable playbook, local opposition hijacked and amplified by foreign state actors into a national narrative.
• 1:34:37
  Any industry that becomes the center in the next hyper-local fight should expect the same tactics, which is why what's happening to data centers right now is worth studying well beyond this one sector.
• 1:34:45
  The playbook itself isn't new, find a raw nerve, flood it with content that echoes what people are already saying, then let the fracture widen on its own.
• 1:34:53
  Russia, China, and Iran have all run this pattern before around natural disasters, elections, and protests.
• 1:34:59
  Data centers are just the newest venue." Who are these people?
• 1:35:05
  I don't really know.
• 1:35:07
  They're an independent research outfit that says, and I'm in a PDF now, so I'd have to exit this and have you talk while I went and duck, because these aren't hot linked, but this is a PDF.
• 1:35:25
  Yeah, so I can't answer that question at the moment with my screen on here.
• 1:35:30
  Well, I will say I am concerned that this is some sort of thing of the sort of organized effort that we've encountered surrounding vaccines with GAVI, trusted news initiative over pandemic issues that we've seen with respect to, you know, Stanford Internet Observatory and supposed misinformation.
• 1:35:57
  And what I'm getting is, hey, guess what?
• 1:36:01
  We are an organization very concerned about foreign influence in American opinion.
• 1:36:08
  It is certainly true that our adversaries abroad will have noticed that there is a go-to play that they can engage in where they can simply dump gasoline on the concerns that people already have, making them even more concerned, and that would be bad.
• 1:36:24
  So what we have to do is counteract this, and my point would be that is a 100% generic opposition play any time an industry has something that's unpopular that it wants to ram down the throats of the American public, is to claim that the opposition to it is getting, you know, foreign gasoline dumped on it to inflame people's otherwise mild opinions.
• 1:36:55
  And the point is, okay, you're claiming that our adversaries abroad will always notice this and exploit it.
• 1:37:01
  It's not really obvious to me that our adversaries, especially if there's not going to make a major effort, have much opportunity to affect how concerned people are locally about these data centers.
• 1:37:14
  People are concerned about them because they're concerning, duh.
• 1:37:17
  So, you know, okay, the fact that some foreign account you've never heard of adds to a chorus of people already rightly upset doesn't necessarily...
• 1:37:26
  It's not a leverage point, right?
• 1:37:29
  Well, it is...
• 1:37:33
  There is a different kind of threat being postulated for which there is some evidence, which is that we are having our story brains hijacked, that we think that we are internalizing local organic grassroots content in which Americans are revealing the insanity in their own backyards.
• 1:38:02
  And sometimes that is not in fact what we are internalizing.
• 1:38:05
  And I will say, so I've pulled up now the Alathea website and just, you know, we can click around a little bit.
• 1:38:13
  You have stopped tomorrow's narrative risks today, right?
• 1:38:18
  So protect your people, brand, license to operate and business continuity with the only proactive AI risk management platform that delivers early warnings of narrative threats so you can stop a crisis before it starts.
• 1:38:31
  Extend your radar, mitigate before it matters.
• 1:38:33
  Now I can read those sentences with totally opposite and balances.
• 1:38:39
  I can imagine a world in which that is something that we need because these are real risks.
• 1:38:46
  And I can imagine something in a world in which that is something that we need and that I would want, but not these people, not any people, no way, no how, because I don't trust anyone to actually do this kind of work.
• 1:38:56
  Well, but also in advance, I think that these people are offering a service.
• 1:39:02
  If you're gonna do something shitty to the American public, here's a service that will allow you to create the impression that the opposition to it is being fomented from abroad.
• 1:39:11
  I think that's what that is.
• 1:39:13
  Fair enough.
• 1:39:14
  And I, yeah.
• 1:39:16
  If we go to about Alathea the company, Alathea empowers organizations to navigate the growing risks of information manipulation, coordinated influence operations and digital deception with clarity and confidence.
• 1:39:29
  That could be just mumbo jumbo that is meaningless or it could be exactly the wink that you are talking about it being.
• 1:39:36
  Okay, and I think a wink is a good way to describe it, but I would just point out, you as a member of the public, a bonafide little person are going to be manipulated.
• 1:39:52
  You're gonna be manipulated from almost the moment you get up, as soon as you look at your phone, till the moment you put it down at night.
• 1:39:59
  Who should you be expecting to manipulate you?
• 1:40:02
  Well, there's probably a bit of foreign stuff in there.
• 1:40:06
  Why would foreigners be doing that?
• 1:40:10
  Well, you could make an argument that we're in an AI race and a foreign power, if it can get the American public more troubled than it already is about data centers could slow us down.
• 1:40:20
  They could dump some sand into the gears, but it's a pretty heavy lift given how concerning these things are, how fast it's happening and how much organic opposition there's obviously going to be.
• 1:40:30
  So you would expect a massive operation if somebody decided to increase the amount of resistance.
• 1:40:36
  A small effort wouldn't make any sense because it just claimed that the opposition is inorganic.
• 1:40:43
  So it's probably worse for you to do a little operation.
• 1:40:46
  It would have to be a big one to matter.
• 1:40:49
  And, but who also should you be expecting to manipulate you?
• 1:40:54
  The motherfuckers in these for-profit businesses that have decided they're going to transform our landscape and not going to ask us about it.
• 1:41:02
  So yeah, you're being manipulated.
• 1:41:04
  You're being manipulated.
• 1:41:05
  There might be manipulation on both sides, but where would I expect the bulk of the manipulation to come from?
• 1:41:10
  Are the people who stand to make a fucking mint from these things?
• 1:41:15
  Those people are out to manipulate you for sure, for obvious reasons.
• 1:41:18
  The implied evolutionary dynamics, honestly, is the companies based in America are more on your team than are obviously hostile foreign governments.
• 1:41:31
  And you could say that and go like, well, yeah, if I had to choose one, I guess I assume that an American based corporation is more likely to be in my team than the CCP.
• 1:41:44
  But that does seem like a false choice.
• 1:41:48
  The idea that a American based company is on your team any more than it's on the team of people in Armenia, for instance, is laughable.
• 1:42:00
  Oh, I think it's preposterous.
• 1:42:02
  But this is consistent with us talking about the decline of the West, us needing to defend the West.
• 1:42:07
  And we have talked before about what might be happening to so disintegrate and apparently tear apart the values of the West, including the First and Second Amendments and privacy and the family and just all of the things that we've talked about before about what the West stands for that are decaying through these, these non corporate entities like Black Lives Matter and the woke revolution and trans ideology taking over, which we have posited might have been seeded by outside influences, because how could it possibly make any sense for people, for instance, to destroy an entire generation of people by encouraging them to sterilize themselves, for instance.
• 1:42:59
  So it is not that you are arguing, I think, and certainly not that I am arguing, that foreign state actors couldn't be interested in having an influence in what we think and how we behave.
• 1:43:13
  I believe that you are arguing simply that the companies involved here have a high interest, a palpable interest, more of an interest in making sure that we are chaotic in our response to our objections to their particular things that they want to do in the American landscape.
• 1:43:31
  Whereas a foreign power has sort of interest potentially in creating chaos more generally.
• 1:43:37
  100%, and I think actually this is gonna pop out of the story very obviously, because the real question, and it's gonna be the question again and again, is you have some entity claiming to care about your wellbeing.
• 1:43:52
  Is it paying a cost in order to protect your wellbeing?
• 1:43:55
  Is it demonstrating that it actually cares about your wellbeing anywhere where we could actually assess it for ourselves?
• 1:44:02
  No, these things, maybe because it's their fiduciary responsibility to their shareholders, or because they're in a ruthless game in venture capital land, whatever it may be, they have reasons to be absolutely psychopathic with respect to the interests of common people.
• 1:44:20
  This is born out again and again in their behavior, and then they come online and they do this thing about, oh, people who don't like you are trying to influence your opinion so that you'll oppose this thing that's actually good.
• 1:44:33
  Bullshit, I don't believe you.
• 1:44:35
  And the fact that the New York Times can only come up with weak tea in their article claiming that there's a foreign influence operation causing people to be more upset about data centers than they would be.
• 1:44:47
  Find something, if you found a million posts, I would still not be impressed, but at least I would say there's something to discuss there.
• 1:44:54
  How hard is it to come up with scores of posts?
• 1:44:58
  So we're gonna leave Alatheia here soon, but let me just scroll down in there, this again, their report that is the basis for the New York Times article that I was sharing some from before.
• 1:45:11
  I'm not gonna go through any of their examples.
• 1:45:13
  We'll post this of course in the show notes, overt media, covert operations in the slot machine.
• 1:45:18
  They're making the same kinds of arguments that we saw the New York Times make because they've got their ideas from here.
• 1:45:24
  And there aren't that many examples.
• 1:45:26
  There are some categories examples.
• 1:45:28
  The last of which is in some ways the most interesting.
• 1:45:33
  Domestic actors borrow the foreign playbook.
• 1:45:37
  Beyond foreign amplification, some domestic political actors are beginning to adopt foreign originated aesthetics and tactics in their own anti-data center messaging, a development that changes how these signals have to be read since calling out a homegrown candidate looks very different from calling out propaganda from Tehran.
• 1:45:54
  One recent example, a state level candidate posted an AI generated Lego style video attacking data centers, lifting the Lego propaganda aesthetic Iran deployed during the war.
• 1:46:05
  Iran's Lego videos achieved success because the video's weaponized American pop culture rap lyrics, trap beats and animation giving foreign messaging an emotionally familiar feel to domestic audiences, creating a cheap and aesthetically pleasing playbook that any actor foreign or domestic with a grievance and a laptop can replicate.
• 1:46:21
  There's a lot there.
• 1:46:23
  Wow.
• 1:46:23
  Right.
• 1:46:24
  And so I did not prepare this.
• 1:46:26
  So we're not gonna show the video here, but it's just as compelling as the ones that were coming out of Iran.
• 1:46:32
  This is coming out of a congressional candidate in Georgia, I think.
• 1:46:40
  And exactly as they say here, as Alathia says here, they're using American pop culture, rap lyrics, trap beats, animation to kind of get you interested in listening to the claim that the data center that is apparently steamrolling through some part of Georgia is really, really bad for you.
• 1:47:00
  What is this doing in a report on foreign influence?
• 1:47:05
  What this is doing here, the claim is, is see now even domestic people are using some of the aesthetics and tools that foreign operatives have used before.
• 1:47:16
  Therefore it's become even harder to tell, real from fake, from homegrown, from foreign grown.
• 1:47:22
  And I believe that implied, the implied message is, therefore don't trust any of it.
• 1:47:27
  Anything that makes you feel good, you shouldn't trust, which at some level, if it's on a screen is probably good advice at this point.
• 1:47:34
  But the idea that because one thing was effective, we now see copycats that are effective even though the message is different.
• 1:47:42
  We shouldn't trust any of it is a sheet of a move logically and doesn't actually belong in a report supposedly about the problems with foreign influence in how people are viewing data centers in America.
• 1:47:57
  Yeah, it's really an amazing claim actually.
• 1:48:00
  First of all, obviously the Iranian effort with the Legos borrowed from the Lego movie.
• 1:48:06
  So stylistically, whatever that effort was in Iran, they didn't invent that aesthetic.
• 1:48:15
  But the idea that something is aesthetically tainted is preposterous in its own right.
• 1:48:21
  Obviously the Iranian Lego videos reached a lot of us and were successful in a way.
• 1:48:28
  So you would expect anybody with any message to notice what works.
• 1:48:33
  There's no real accusation there.
• 1:48:35
  No, and it's actually, the accusation feels very much like the woke revolution.
• 1:48:42
  It's like, we are gonna identify a moment in time about which we are going to take all of our grievances and all of our reports of who originated what and say, these are the people who were the first peoples ignoring all the people that they killed off.
• 1:49:01
  And this is the moment, these are the only people who have ever been engaged in slavery and the only people who matter with regard to who's racist and who's not.
• 1:49:09
  And we get to define the very narrow terms of engagement with you and you have to accept what we've decided.
• 1:49:16
  And it's cheating, you don't get to do that.
• 1:49:18
  The woke revolutionaries didn't get to do it and neither do you who appear to be speaking to people on the other side of the line in some ways.
• 1:49:26
  Although maybe this is, given that the New York Times is picking this up, maybe it's speaking to exactly the same sort of, it's creating the same error in its own internal logic and therefore will risk creating exactly the same errors in the same audience.
• 1:49:41
  Well, I think the audience is partially the same.
• 1:49:44
  Obviously the New York Times readership is the same, but there's a general, I think what you're looking at is a slick operation that has spotted a problem.
• 1:49:55
  Hey, there's a lot of unpopular shit that we wanna do and it's gonna meet opposition and oh shit, guess what?
• 1:50:01
  The lefties and the righties are talking cause nobody likes this crap, right?
• 1:50:05
  Oh, what are you gonna do about that?
• 1:50:07
  Well, here's something, A, foreign influence has definitely been amping that stuff up.
• 1:50:13
  And we got the goods cause we found, is it scores of?
• 1:50:17
  Scores.
• 1:50:18
  Scores, posts, posted from here, there and everywhere.
• 1:50:22
  I don't even know whether, I mean, I don't think these people have a methodology.
• 1:50:26
  I think what they have is a PR mode that is going to demonize any grassroots effort to stop these things.
• 1:50:33
  I find no statement of methodology.
• 1:50:34
  At the very least it's verificationist.
• 1:50:37
  Right, but here's the thing.
• 1:50:38
  Let's suppose that you were a ruthless capitalist wishing to take advantage of the awkward fact that industry after industry is going to be betraying the citizenry and find itself unpopular and need to fight back in some ways.
• 1:50:52
  You're gonna provide a service which is to make anybody who stands up in opposition to something awful look tainted or naive because there's a foreign influence operation and they're obviously acting on behalf of it.
• 1:51:06
  So we're gonna provide that little service and we'll do it actually prospectively.
• 1:51:14
  Those people have no interests.
• 1:51:17
  Their economic wellbeing depends on them not falsifying.
• 1:51:23
  Oh, that's not really coming from China.
• 1:51:25
  That was somebody using a VPN.
• 1:51:27
  In other words, they might even have an interest in mistaking things that were posted from somewhere else with a VPN that made them look like they were coming from some state that we take to be antagonistic.
• 1:51:37
  They have no reason to throw that data out because all of it's gonna get swallowed up by the New York Times, which is gonna accept the story that there's a significant foreign component to opposition to data centers, which again, I think there's, first of all, these people I believe are weaponizing the Cartesian crisis.
• 1:51:58
  Yes.
• 1:51:58
  Right?
• 1:51:58
  You don't know what to believe.
• 1:52:00
  And so here is a plausible claim that's gonna be very hard to falsify.
• 1:52:04
  Oh, you think those people are really opposed to X, whatever X may be?
• 1:52:09
  Well, they're not really opposed to X because part of that is coming out of China, right?
• 1:52:13
  So they're gonna play that game again and again.
• 1:52:15
  It's probably a pretty good business because there's a lot of unpopular stuff that needs to be made to look more legitimate than it is.
• 1:52:24
  But there's no reason for a methodology.
• 1:52:26
  And just as there was no reason for a methodology when it came to demonizing people who were sorting out what was going on during COVID, the whole claim.
• 1:52:36
  You're not a horse.
• 1:52:37
  Don't take ivermectin.
• 1:52:38
  That didn't take a methodology.
• 1:52:39
  Right.
• 1:52:40
  It's just borrowing our love of story and shaming people.
• 1:52:45
  Yeah, it's a, hey, you're gonna need an expensive PR effort to blunt people's, let's say, concern about mRNA shots.
• 1:52:53
  Oh God, well, what are we gonna do about that?
• 1:52:55
  Okay, we're gonna portray the people who say this as economically motivated.
• 1:53:01
  We're gonna portray them as-- Grandma killers, anti-science, the whole thing.
• 1:53:04
  The whole thing.
• 1:53:05
  The point is you need a PR campaign targeted at this problem that you have.
• 1:53:09
  And we just so happen to have built one in advance, whatever it may be that's coming down the pike.
• 1:53:14
  We got your plan right here.
• 1:53:16
  And so anyway, well, the Cartesian crisis is real.
• 1:53:20
  I think these people are exploiting it.
• 1:53:22
  And we better get prepared because what they're really telling you is that again and again and again, you're going to see that same article in The New York Times with a different nominal subject matter.
• 1:53:33
  Yes.
• 1:53:33
  Yeah, and Alathea actually basically says that.
• 1:53:38
  They're like, this could be anything.
• 1:53:40
  It just happens to be data centers right now, but this could be anything.
• 1:53:43
  And in one way that's true.
• 1:53:45
  And in another way, they've just pulled the curtain back and like, there's the wizard.
• 1:53:49
  There it is.
• 1:53:51
  Okay, so yes, and we're gonna be coming back to this repeatedly today.
• 1:53:56
  The Cartesian crisis is in full swing.
• 1:53:59
  We don't know what is true.
• 1:54:00
  Often we don't know why we think what we think.
• 1:54:04
  And this is, I asked our audience at the beginning of this episode to try to think about before we started talking about this, what do you think about data centers?
• 1:54:11
  Like form your opinion before you start hearing more information and see if you can compare that opinion to what you think at the end.
• 1:54:18
  And we don't know why we think what we think and we don't know who all has an opinion about what we think and what they might be doing to inform our opinions in ways that we don't know.
• 1:54:31
  But the pushback against data centers is not primarily, if at all, I think somewhat, but the pushback against data centers is not primarily coming from form.
• 1:54:41
  So it's just not where it's coming from.
• 1:54:43
  So I wanna read a little bit from a guest post on Erin Brockovich's sub-stack.
• 1:54:47
  Erin Brockovich, who was a famous whistleblower from, I'll just say that, a famous whistleblower who has a sub-stack and she's got a guest post by a woman named Madison Taggart detailing some of what is going on in Virginia at the site of Taggart's childhood home.
• 1:55:05
  So this is not that, this, high voltage, high stakes.
• 1:55:13
  And so I'm just gonna skip through Brockovich's preamble and just read the very beginning of Taggart's piece and then read something of a rejoinder to the piece.
• 1:55:26
  My backyard has always felt like a timeless space.
• 1:55:29
  Our house is at the end of a cul-de-sac and, I should have looked up how to pronounce it.
• 1:55:33
  Is it Loudon, Loudon Valley Estates?
• 1:55:35
  Like the center of what's going on in Virginia with regard to the data centers.
• 1:55:38
  You haven't heard it?
• 1:55:39
  I don't know.
• 1:55:39
  Okay.
• 1:55:39
  Drop the top.
• 1:55:41
  Our house is at the end of a cul-de-sac in Loudon Valley Estates, overlooking the forested hills of the Broad Run River Valley, ringing around the back of the community.
• 1:55:48
  I could walk to my old high school from the property if I was willing to get my shoes wet.
• 1:55:53
  I know my backyard from the tall rolling hill where a bird feeder currently sits.
• 1:55:57
  The sheer cliff decked in cedars, sycamore and dogwood and yet more native brush plunging toward the stream were lines of rocks I made with my father when I was younger, make the river verbal.
• 1:56:07
  In the winter, the hill is perfect for sledding.
• 1:56:09
  In springtime, rains flood the stream and blue bells arise around the floodplain.
• 1:56:13
  My grandmother's garden still stands as a living reminder of her puttering out to tend to the chives.
• 1:56:18
  Further back in the woods is a place named Picnic Park on Google Maps where my dad has put down picnic tables and is home to the high school cross-country's team's trails.
• 1:56:27
  My parents' home is the place we could run away to when the weight of modern life was heavy.
• 1:56:31
  But since 2025, the backyard is no longer just green space.
• 1:56:35
  It's the stage of a legal and industrial war we had been blissfully oblivious to until a phone call changed everything in 2025.
• 1:56:42
  The call from hell, as my mom calls it, came on a Friday the 13th.
• 1:56:45
  I was not home for the call, but I was there for the aftermath when my mom gave me the news, seething in anger and dread.
• 1:56:51
  Dominion Energy, our power company, asked if they could walk our property for an alternative Golden to Mars high voltage power line called Route 3A.
• 1:57:00
  We had heard of Golden to Mars.
• 1:57:02
  Our community had already been fighting another route following Loudoun County Parkway directly in front of us, listed as Route 5 in their plans.
• 1:57:08
  We previously learned they planned to have nine underground options alongside five above-ground options with an open house to weigh them.
• 1:57:14
  Route 3A was different.
• 1:57:16
  It arrived with no public meeting and no advance notice.
• 1:57:18
  Until that call, none of us had known it existed.
• 1:57:22
  So here's a picture of Vicki Hugh, who's the author's mother, standing next to a banner showing a size comparison of the 185-foot power poles next to other objects, taller by a lot than the Statue of Liberty.
• 1:57:37
  The banner itself is placed where the proposed pole for Route 3A would be with their house right there in the background.
• 1:57:43
  And so you've got a house, a person, the 151-foot-tall Tower of Liberty, Tower of Liberty, Statue of Liberty, and the 185-foot-tall tower, one of many, that would be erected here.
• 1:57:58
  Now, the article itself is full of all of the drama that we have learned to expect, and it is worth reading.
• 1:58:05
  I'm not gonna read any more of it now.
• 1:58:08
  But among other things, as the part I just read suggests, the company Dominion Energy is, or Dominion Energy is proposing 13, 14, 15 different plans, which is not testament to their caring about the community.
• 1:58:28
  It's testament to a divide and conquer strategy, right?
• 1:58:32
  So if you have 15 different plans, however many different plans, well over a dozen different plans, and some of the plans go through your property, and some of them go through your neighbor's property, and some of them go through neither of your property, but go through someone across town, he never met's property, you're gonna divide the community.
• 1:58:47
  Instead of having the community united in defense of not here, not now, not ever, don't do this.
• 1:58:54
  But the big point here that I wanna make is with regard to this image, is what they say, tell the SEC, protect homes, not data centers, underground the lines, underground the lines.
• 1:59:08
  And you will remember from what I just read, that Dominion Energy did have five underground plans, but never, never do we see these things being built underground, why?
• 1:59:20
  Because expensive, because it's gonna cost a lot more for the energy companies in the moment to actually do that.
• 1:59:26
  And so from there, let me go to this piece, which is where I actually began thinking about this week.
• 1:59:34
  Peter Anthony Cowan, his excellent sub-stack, I highly recommend it, and we'll link to it again in the show now, it's called "Living Energy".
• 1:59:41
  He does a lot with EMFs, and we're not gonna spend a lot of time talking about some of his deep dive into EMFs today, but we will come back to it in future episodes.
• 1:59:51
  He writes, "Erin Brockovich, power lines on the missing magnetic field." And I'm just gonna read a little bit from his piece here.
• 1:59:58
  And he begins with an acknowledgement.
• 2:00:00
  "Erin Brockovich's record needs no defense.
• 2:00:02
  She has spent a career making invisible toxins visible and making the people responsible answer for them.
• 2:00:07
  That's exactly why the emission below feels so consequential and why with data center driven high voltage lines pushing back through neighborhoods at a pace never seen before, this is a fight where her contribution will be very welcome." So he now is going to be referring to this piece that I was just reading, which is a guest post on Erin Brockovich's sub-stack, about this 500 kilovolt transmission line cutting through a family's backyard in Loudoun County, Virginia.
• 2:00:32
  The line will stand 185 feet.
• 2:00:34
  It will run less than 100 feet from some bedroom windows to move power to the data centers of Ashburn, AKA data center alley, home to the largest concentration of data centers in the world.
• 2:00:44
  The essay is well written and sympathetic.
• 2:00:46
  It names the voltage, the trees lost, the eminent domain statute, the wildlife corridor, the 11th hour land due to the school board.
• 2:00:52
  The term magnetic field does not appear in the article and forget about EMF.
• 2:00:57
  So Cowan's point here is Brockovich came to public notice by actually defending the public against a health risk, not just an aesthetic risk, not just a land grab by private corporations, but a health risk.
• 2:01:14
  And the health risk seems to specifically the health risk for these lines is being ignored.
• 2:01:21
  And so he continues.
• 2:01:24
  Brockovich's reputation comes from her proving that an invisible toxic industrial exposure can move through a community for years while the people responsible look away.
• 2:01:32
  Hexavalent chromium was the toxin in Hinkley, California where she sued PG&E.
• 2:01:37
  A 500 kilovolt line is the textbook case of an invisible exposure running in close proximity to children's bedrooms.
• 2:01:43
  And the piece treats it as a zoning issue and an aesthetic problem, real problems to be sure, but not the one her career was built on exposing.
• 2:01:50
  Let's just jump down since we've already spent a long time here.
• 2:01:54
  Great stuff here.
• 2:01:55
  And I encourage you to read it with regard to what happened in California with regard to what Brockovich was first bringing to our attention.
• 2:02:07
  And also, not just that, sorry, but the original fight against power lines being near high voltage power lines being near homes, which actually I will go back here and say, in 1976, I'll read this paragraph.
• 2:02:21
  The New York Public Service Commission opened hearings of whether 765 kilovolt lines could hurt the people living under them.
• 2:02:28
  The central witnesses were Andrew Marino and his supervisor, Dr.
• 2:02:31
  Robert Becker, out of the VA hospital in Syracuse, who would expose rats to low frequency fields and found stunted growth.
• 2:02:38
  The utilities cross examined Marino for 10 days by Marino's own account of the hearings from his book, "The Electric Wilderness," the commission's health report then devoted a significant portion of its length of discrediting his experiments and his character.
• 2:02:50
  And then the commission conceded the point anyway.
• 2:02:55
  Those fights were ceded, and the frame that regulators would hear narrowed to real estate and public necessity, then the recent data center build out started dragging 500 kilovolt lines back through backyards at a scale the country hasn't seen since Marino was on the stand.
• 2:03:08
  But, and sorry, I'm jumping back and forth here, that concession is still sitting there, that this is a real health problem, unretracted in a 1978 government document that has largely been forgotten.
• 2:03:20
  Okay, so is there no hope?
• 2:03:23
  There is hope, bury them, he writes.
• 2:03:26
  The Loudoun families want the line buried.
• 2:03:28
  So do the New York farmers, so do the Minnesotans.
• 2:03:31
  It is the oldest demand in this fight, and it is worth understanding what that actually gets us, besides better views.
• 2:03:35
  So it's not just an aesthetic point.
• 2:03:38
  Magnetic fields pass through soil, concrete, and the walls of a house.
• 2:03:41
  It is extremely difficult to shield them the way you shield an electric field.
• 2:03:45
  It is much easier to cancel them out with geometry.
• 2:03:48
  A power line's magnetic field comes from the current running through it.
• 2:03:51
  When you put two conductors carrying the same current in opposite directions close together, their fields fight each other and mostly cancel out.
• 2:03:57
  The closer they sit, the more complete the cancellation is.
• 2:04:00
  This is a very good visual for those just listening, in which a single ambient magnetic field is what you expect it to look like.
• 2:04:07
  If you have one that is effectively the inverse a field canceling systems, you get a resultant magnetic field of effectively zero.
• 2:04:16
  High voltage lines carry three conductors.
• 2:04:19
  The three phases of AC power, and the same rule governs them.
• 2:04:23
  What determines how far apart they sit is the insulation.
• 2:04:25
  Overhead, that is in unburied lines.
• 2:04:27
  The only thing holding the conductors apart is air, and air is a poor insulator.
• 2:04:32
  If you place high voltage lines too close in open air, the current can arc across the gap, releasing intense light, sound, and extreme heat, and as we know, fire.
• 2:04:41
  And that's what happened in the Paradise Fire in California a few years back.
• 2:04:44
  That's what happened in the fire that you saw in 1970, whatever, in the hills in the Santa Monica Mountains, Eight. 77, eight.
• 2:04:52
  Yep, and so many of the wildfires in the West have been attributed to these lines that were not far enough apart, and so swung together and arced and caused fires.
• 2:05:05
  And so you have same thing with magnetic lines that are overhead.
• 2:05:09
  They're far apart, and that means they have no chance of canceling one another.
• 2:05:13
  So overhead, the three phases hang meters apart, cancel poorly, and cast a wide field that diminishes slowly, reaching homes at still elevated levels.
• 2:05:21
  Burial swaps that air gap for solid insulation wrapped around each cable, letting the three sit inches apart in a tight bundle called a trefoil, where the cancellation is much more effective.
• 2:05:31
  The field directly over the trench in the middle of the street can run higher than the street under an overhead tower, but by the time it gets to the sidewalk line, it is minimal, and by the house line, it typically will have collapsed into the background.
• 2:05:42
  For homes similarly situated in relation to the right-of-way, burial means less exposure, not more.
• 2:05:48
  And here we have a graph showing this, that yes, indeed, if you bury it, the ground right above where it is buried will have higher magnetic field, but almost nowhere else is it nearly as high, and certainly by the time you get to people's homes, it's not as high, and the real health risks of these lines is in the magnetic fields when they do not cancel, which they will not cancel out if you are keeping them above ground.
• 2:06:14
  Yes, it's the obvious solution, and the fact that it is not obvious to the industries involved-- Oh, it may be obvious to them.
• 2:06:24
  Oh, I'm sure it's obvious.
• 2:06:25
  The fact that it is not the obviously right thing to do demonstrates the principle that I think echoes through all of these stories, which is the, they don't actually give a shit about us principle.
• 2:06:39
  And you did it with an acronym, even.
• 2:06:41
  Yeah, T-D-A-G-S-A-U, if we exclude the little a in between the G and the S.
• 2:06:49
  But here's-- It's not a pronounceable acronym, but an acronym that's less.
• 2:06:52
  They're gonna tell you that this is not a problem.
• 2:06:54
  They're gonna lead you to believe this is not a problem.
• 2:06:57
  But they're demonstrating in refusing to mitigate all of the problems.
• 2:07:02
  The aesthetic problem is mitigated too.
• 2:07:04
  You're actually taking people's homes and degrading them with these giant, crackling tower structures.
• 2:07:13
  The point is, if these industries actually gave a shit about us, then the point is this would be the obviously right way to do this, and yes, it would be more expensive.
• 2:07:20
  But the point is, how would you know if they gave a shit about us?
• 2:07:23
  They would be willing to spend more to do this properly and not destroy the communities that, oh, by the way, they don't live in, right?
• 2:07:31
  They're doing this in your backyard.
• 2:07:33
  They're not doing it in their backyard.
• 2:07:35
  So anyway, they're demonstrating that they're psychopathic.
• 2:07:38
  We shouldn't really expect them to be anything else.
• 2:07:41
  That's the ecosystem of the market.
• 2:07:43
  If you do not make it pay to care about people, will result in the evolution of critters that don't.
• 2:07:51
  And these are critters that don't.
• 2:07:53
  So the point is we are going to have to force them to do the right thing, or they're not gonna do the right thing.
• 2:07:58
  And they're gonna claim, of course, that what they've done is harmless to you or that you're being petty.
• 2:08:03
  But of course, if it were your house, you would know that that was preposterous.
• 2:08:09
  That's right.
• 2:08:12
  I think I've said enough today on this.
• 2:08:17
  There are real reasons to be concerned about these lines running through your neighborhood.
• 2:08:23
  Real reasons and the biggest reasons are mostly not the ones you're hearing about.
• 2:08:28
  Bearing the lines doesn't solve all the problems, but it solves so many of them while also solving the problem of, we don't have enough power that we're generating.
• 2:08:41
  We don't have enough places, we don't have enough data centers.
• 2:08:44
  That is a real problem given our exploding use of AI.
• 2:08:50
  So this feels like an obvious step, but for the initial higher cost.
• 2:08:56
  And as actually Cowan writes about later in that piece, with regard to what PG, I think it was PG and E still, had to do in the wake of the Paradise Fire in California, where they finally are like,"Okay, I guess we've got to bury these lines "because we keep on having these fires "sparked by overhead lines." And they quoted a price that was sky high at first said, "Oh, what was us?
• 2:09:15
  "We can't do this, we're just a poor utility company." And then what they have reported since now doing it is that their prices are actually going lower, the more they do it because economies of scale and actually having to do it, they find ways to make it cheaper.
• 2:09:28
  Yes, and it also has benefits down the road, which is storms, it's different with high tension wires, but the point is above ground wires are not only ugly and not only expose you to much greater EMF, but they're also vulnerable.
• 2:09:45
  It's been done because it's cheap on the front end and they're running it through your backyard, not theirs.
• 2:09:52
  But the benefits, R.
• 2:09:54
  Crumb, the artist, actually used to make a point when he drew drawings of cityscapes, he would make a point of including the unbearably ugly electrical and telephone wires because he was very focused on the ugliness of things.
• 2:10:14
  And most of us spend a lot of time trying not to see those things, to think about them because they are degrading of the beauty of everything.
• 2:10:26
  We got this background edit going and it's taxing and it means that we live, we inherently live in a less rich world because we're trying to edit away big parts of it if we live in such landscapes.
• 2:10:40
  Yeah, but the obvious right thing is either, if you can't do this in a way that's tolerable, then you damn well better buy the people out who live in the places that you're going to destroy and you better buy them out at an appropriate price.
• 2:10:55
  You can't cheap out on what you're doing to people because you claim to have this right of eminent domain through their backyard.
• 2:11:04
  Right, but as you well know, as we've talked about before, of course, people's homes aren't a commodity.
• 2:11:12
  If they just moved in three years ago and they aren't sure they wanna be there, that's great for them.
• 2:11:17
  But in the case of Taggart, the guest author on Brockovich's site, she's talking about her grandmother puttering with the chives in the garden, right?
• 2:11:26
  I get it.
• 2:11:27
  But you gotta do something to balance the fact that sometimes it is important to do something that forces somebody to be displaced.
• 2:11:34
  And the problem is if the idea is, well, we'll buy you out, but you're not gonna buy me out for a level that I can buy something equivalent somewhere else, then you're a criminal, right?
• 2:11:48
  I'm not arguing that there's not a tragedy that is forced out of their ancestral home because of eminent domain.
• 2:11:56
  But the point is 90% of the problem is you're not giving people the ability to make a lateral move to some place that they will like equally well.
• 2:12:07
  I'm not saying it's perfect, but at the very least, a civilization that gave a shit about people and did recognize that sometimes we have to do something that takes a piece of property that somebody owns, the minimum you've gotta do is buy them out appropriately.
• 2:12:21
  And of course we don't do that because, you know, see earlier principle.
• 2:12:26
  Say it again.
• 2:12:27
  Oh, they don't actually give a shit about us, the TDAGSAU principle.
• 2:12:35
  Tdags how?
• 2:12:36
  Tdags how, yeah.
• 2:12:37
  Kind of just rolls off the tongue.
• 2:12:39
  Yeah.
• 2:12:42
  All right.
• 2:12:42
  Speaking of.
• 2:12:43
  Speaking of not giving a shit about us.
• 2:12:45
  They don't actually give a shit about us.
• 2:12:46
  They don't actually give a shit about us.
• 2:12:48
  No, and this becomes clearer every hour.
• 2:12:51
  All right, so we are gonna switch gears, but not really.
• 2:12:53
  Because we're not expecting of.
• 2:12:55
  Yeah, we are talking about a different head on the same Hydra.
• 2:13:01
  Hydras have multiple heads, right?
• 2:13:04
  Yeah.
• 2:13:04
  Yeah, okay.
• 2:13:04
  So we're talking about a different head of the same Hydra.
• 2:13:06
  We're gonna talk about the Flock camera phenomenon, which people are increasingly aware of, but I would say that one of the key dimensions of the Flock story is that it kind of suddenly erupted in many of our consciousnesses recently because it's sort of quietly been installed around the country without a discussion, which is a big key to the problem.
• 2:13:33
  So these cameras are, Flock is a company.
• 2:13:37
  This company is producing cameras.
• 2:13:39
  I think there is something like 80,000 acknowledged cameras in the US at the moment.
• 2:13:46
  And what they ostensibly do is sit there and passively they're solar powered.
• 2:13:53
  The technological innovation to the extent that there is one is that they don't have wires that have to conduct data back to some sort of data center.
• 2:14:02
  They are wireless and therefore broadcast through the cloud.
• 2:14:06
  And what they are ostensibly there to do is to track license plates.
• 2:14:11
  And you wanna, can we put up their website just to see exactly what you're talking about?
• 2:14:17
  You want Flock's website or De-Flock?
• 2:14:18
  Yeah, Flock first just to see in their words what it is that they're doing.
• 2:14:25
  How effective is Flock?
• 2:14:27
  2025 impact census results from 700 law enforcement agencies.
• 2:14:31
  Their claim is that Flock technology supported more than 1 million investigations, assisted in solving 20% of cleared cases, helped locate more than 10,000 missing persons and contributed significantly to stolen vehicle recoveries across the country.
• 2:14:45
  So that it was worth showing.
• 2:14:47
  What they say is they're doing-- The face that they're putting forward and the face that they're putting forward is, look, this is not really an invasion of privacy.
• 2:14:57
  It's just tracking license plates as you drive down the street on a public road.
• 2:15:01
  So there's nothing really to be worried about.
• 2:15:04
  And these things do a hell of a lot of good according to that.
• 2:15:07
  Now, the problem is that the issue, the argument to make in favor of these things is very straightforward.
• 2:15:15
  In fact, we've just done it for them.
• 2:15:18
  The argument against them is actually subtle and at least complicated and many dimensional.
• 2:15:28
  So let us just acknowledge upfront that if you have a network of these cameras deployed across civilization, it will result in the solving of a bunch of crimes that you would not otherwise solve.
• 2:15:40
  But I would also-- The evidence actually doesn't support that conclusion.
• 2:15:45
  So what I find when I go looking is cars are found, but perpetrators are not.
• 2:15:54
  So people get their property returned to them with the help of Flock cameras, but crimes are not being solved at a greater rate and the people who stole the cars aren't being found.
• 2:16:04
  Okay, well, I would point out that this actually points of our current police situation, which is that the people who are organizing it and dictating it don't actually give a shit about us.
• 2:16:18
  That's the point.
• 2:16:19
  They've stopped policing in large measure.
• 2:16:20
  There are entire parts of the country, we've lived in them, where people don't call 911 because nobody fricking shows up and it doesn't matter what it is that you're reporting.
• 2:16:28
  You can be reporting a literal home invasion where somebody is threatening you in your house and the police don't come for an hour, if at all.
• 2:16:35
  So the point is they're not solving crimes even with the data about where to find the car.
• 2:16:41
  Well, that's because nobody's doing any policing.
• 2:16:43
  Why are they not doing any policing?
• 2:16:45
  Because they don't actually give a shit about us.
• 2:16:46
  That's why, right?
• 2:16:47
  This is not their neighborhoods that aren't being policed.
• 2:16:49
  It's our neighborhoods that aren't being policed.
• 2:16:51
  So I will grant that in a world that actually functioned, if you deployed these cameras everywhere, you would solve a good many crimes.
• 2:16:59
  Some of them absolutely horrifying.
• 2:17:01
  You would solve some crimes.
• 2:17:03
  But I would also point out that if you were to activate every microphone on every cell phone carried by every person and record everything said by those people, you would also solve a bunch of crimes.
• 2:17:15
  So the point is the fact that you're going to do some good here, A, doesn't mean anything if you're not doing the good that you could be doing by going back to actual policing and investing in it, right?
• 2:17:27
  But it's also not true that everything that does some good should be embraced involves a massive compromise of the liberties that make this a great country.
• 2:17:34
  You know what?
• 2:17:35
  Unfortunately, there's a perfect analogy here to sunscreen.
• 2:17:40
  Does sunscreen reduce sun exposure?
• 2:17:44
  Best case scenario, okay?
• 2:17:46
  Using a physical zinc and tallow based sunscreen and you've reduced your sun exposure, not so much that you're now sun deprived, but enough that you don't get the melanoma that you would have gotten that has killed you.
• 2:17:57
  That is the equivalent of a crime being solved because there was a Flock camera in the right place at the right time.
• 2:18:05
  But more people end up harmed by lack of sun exposure and by the toxins in their chemical based sunscreens than they do helped by the fact that they had exactly the right confluence of factors that helped them with regard to their melanoma.
• 2:18:22
  It's exactly the same thing.
• 2:18:23
  Wow, we've got a problem and we can solve it with perfect surveillance.
• 2:18:28
  So you're telling us that all we have to do is sacrifice our First Amendment rights and all of our privacy and we can move towards the asymptote of a crime-free state?
• 2:18:39
  No, thank you.
• 2:18:40
  No, thank you.
• 2:18:41
  Yeah, I mean, you know, of course, Ben Franklin nailed this one.
• 2:18:44
  I'm sure I won't get the quote exactly right, but he said, you know, those who would surrender liberty for safety deserve neither.
• 2:18:54
  But this is just one of many objections.
• 2:18:57
  This is an invasion of privacy.
• 2:18:59
  It is an invasion of privacy without probable cause.
• 2:19:04
  I mean, that probable cause is one of the central protectors of our privacy, which is that government doesn't have the right to search you unless it has really good reason, you know, enough to stand up in a court to think that you're doing something that would justify a breach of your privacy rights.
• 2:19:19
  This is just gonna be done en masse, but there's also something utterly preposterous about the presentation.
• 2:19:27
  Well, it's just looking at license plates.
• 2:19:30
  Hey, let me show you something.
• 2:19:32
  You know what this is?
• 2:19:34
  This is a kid camera.
• 2:19:35
  What it does is it photographs children.
• 2:19:37
  Oh, that's sweet.
• 2:19:37
  Yeah, isn't that nice?
• 2:19:38
  Yeah.
• 2:19:39
  So don't worry about it.
• 2:19:40
  You're not a kid.
• 2:19:41
  You're not gonna get photographed because this is for photographing children.
• 2:19:44
  So basically-- Everyone wants more photographs of children.
• 2:19:47
  Not everybody does, but most people presumably do.
• 2:19:50
  That's not helpful.
• 2:19:51
  All right, I take it back.
• 2:19:53
  But the point being, look, you're talking about license plates.
• 2:19:58
  You're installing a camera.
• 2:20:01
  What you say it's for when you install it is hardly the limit of what it can be used for, as many people have demonstrated.
• 2:20:08
  I mean, for one thing, we know that these things not only look at license plates, but they also look at other features of your car.
• 2:20:15
  They look at things like whether you have a roof rack, whether you've got a dent, whether you've got a bumper sticker or a stripe or whatever.
• 2:20:22
  Do you wanna show the deFlock site?
• 2:20:23
  Yeah, let's look at the deFlock site.
• 2:20:26
  You can either show it from my screen or yours.
• 2:20:29
  So deFlock is the, I guess the major, although there are plenty of outfits that are objecting to Flock.
• 2:20:36
  An open source project mapping license plate readers.
• 2:20:39
  So what are ALPRs?
• 2:20:43
  Automated license plate readers, are AI powered cameras that capture, analyze the images of all passing vehicles during details like your car's location, date and time.
• 2:20:52
  They also capture your car's make model color and identifying features such as, exactly as you were just saying, dents, roof racks and bumper stickers, often turning these into searchable data points.
• 2:21:02
  These cameras collected on millions of vehicles, regardless of whether the driver is suspected of a crime.
• 2:21:08
  These systems are marketed as indispensable tools to fight crime, but they ignore the powerful tools police already have to track criminals, such as cell phone location data, creating a loophole that doesn't require a warrant.
• 2:21:19
  Doesn't require a warrant.
• 2:21:20
  I will also point out that this subtly reflects many of the other novel abuses in our rights landscape these days.
• 2:21:29
  I'm thinking in particular of Real ID, which I did an episode with Twyla Brace at some point, in which I learned quite a bit about it.
• 2:21:39
  And the central point that she made in that episode was that this takes a state level kind of data, your driver's license and federalizes it.
• 2:21:49
  And that that's really the point of what they're doing.
• 2:21:51
  This does the same thing where it takes local surveillance and runs it through a national, both a company and a, you know, a nationalizing police entity.
• 2:22:03
  And so there's not, as far as you know, there's no national database yet or is there?
• 2:22:08
  I think it's kind of inherent to the way you do it because what these things are doing is they are uploading their data to the cloud.
• 2:22:16
  This is not divided by state.
• 2:22:18
  And so-- Right, but the cloud isn't, I just don't know the specifics.
• 2:22:23
  Let's put it this way.
• 2:22:24
  If you don't have the protections, then there's no reason that this will be done in a state level.
• 2:22:28
  It's being done through a company that isn't fundamental to one state.
• 2:22:31
  So what you've got is a national system and you've got lots of ways in which this can be abused.
• 2:22:38
  First of all, we know from, you know, Edward Snowden, I believe.
• 2:22:45
  He's certainly the whistleblower, but I think the story I remember correctly is, I think I remember it correctly, that there was a report inside the NSA of agents using their fancy surveillance tools to spy on girlfriends and wives and things like this.
• 2:23:03
  So here you've got a system in which you can, you know, a private entity can search to find out where somebody's going or has been or the collection of places that they've been.
• 2:23:17
  So you've got all kinds of potential for abuse there.
• 2:23:19
  You've got potential for abuse by the state.
• 2:23:22
  So I'll just point to one thing.
• 2:23:25
  There is a principle that protects the Fourth Amendment, your right to privacy, called the fruit of the poisonous tree, which says that if the police violate your rights in order to, let's say, solve a crime, they discover something having violated your rights and then they use the something that they have discovered and they come up with a legitimate path to have discovered it, right?
• 2:23:53
  Then it is not admissible in court.
• 2:23:56
  The court protects you because it is fruit of the poisonous tree, the illegitimate search, but there's very little protection against something like that here.
• 2:24:03
  This can be used to figure out patterns of behavior and then an apparently legitimate path to the discovery can be phoned up and there'd be very little opportunity to detect it.
• 2:24:17
  But there is also, in light of the fact that the people who are claiming that we need this in order to improve policing are not up in arms about the bad state of policing to begin with, right?
• 2:24:28
  So they're not doing this because they give a shit.
• 2:24:31
  What are they doing it for?
• 2:24:32
  And I would argue we're gonna end up here all the time indefinitely.
• 2:24:38
  There is an architecture being built up.
• 2:24:41
  It is clearly a control architecture.
• 2:24:44
  It has different elements to it.
• 2:24:45
  It has elements that involve a kind of universal surveillance.
• 2:24:51
  I would argue that the surveillance does not trigger the right kind of fear in us because most of us grew up at a time when in order for surveillance to happen, somebody would have to take notice of you and for most people, that's not an issue.
• 2:25:04
  Now it is an issue for civilization.
• 2:25:06
  If they surveil the people who are actually making a difference, they can prevent change by just surveilling people who have become a problem.
• 2:25:17
  But in this case, there's a new kind of surveillance that's possible.
• 2:25:20
  I call it retroactive surveillance, which is you bank it all.
• 2:25:23
  You bank all of the emails, all of the text messages, all of the traffic.
• 2:25:27
  And then at the point somebody becomes interesting five years down the road, you can figure out what it is that you can catch them for.
• 2:25:34
  It's data-driven society.
• 2:25:36
  It's data mining.
• 2:25:37
  It's creating the conditions that allow for near perfect data mining, which is powerful and not how truth is discovered, right?
• 2:25:47
  This is not the same thing as a scientific investigation and it is extraordinarily dangerous at the same time that it feels like it's gonna open up the world to us.
• 2:25:58
  Well, it's extraordinarily dangerous.
• 2:26:01
  It's not new.
• 2:26:02
  This was proposed in fact out loud during the Bush years as total information awareness, which is now-- Bush too.
• 2:26:10
  I believe it was actually, I believe it actually spanned that entire period.
• 2:26:20
  It was initially a proposal to start banking everything before that was all that technologically plausible.
• 2:26:25
  It would have been a major investment now.
• 2:26:26
  It's become much more tractable.
• 2:26:28
  But anyway, the point is you bank all of that stuff.
• 2:26:32
  Well, what does that mean?
• 2:26:33
  Does that mean, yes, we've paid a huge price, but we're gonna be prosecuting all the crimes?
• 2:26:38
  Oh, I don't think so.
• 2:26:40
  I think we're gonna be prosecuting people who are a threat to power and that people who are actually acting in service of power are gonna get away with all kinds of things.
• 2:26:51
  Witness Epstein, for example.
• 2:26:54
  So there's gonna be a two-tier aspect to this.
• 2:26:57
  The opportunity to go after you for any little thing is gonna be there, but the important people, they're gonna get away with murder, probably literally.
• 2:27:07
  So-- Can we hear from the Flock CEO responding to D-Flock?
• 2:27:14
  Absolutely.
• 2:27:15
  Yeah, so D-Flock, we only showed you the first part of their site, but they of course are, I actually don't know exactly what they're doing, but there are people acting aligned with D-Flock who are taking out Flock cameras.
• 2:27:29
  I think Flock-- Let me just say that.
• 2:27:31
  Flock is just legitimately crowdsourcing information on where these cameras are and where they're pointed and what people do with that information is on them.
• 2:27:43
  How is, what?
• 2:27:44
  I'm agreeing with you that D-Flock is just putting together information on the Flock cameras so that the public has it, and then there are people doing things, clearly breaking the law, going after Flock cameras, using that data.
• 2:27:57
  Okay.
• 2:27:58
  You've got organizations like the ACLU and the EFF who take an above-the-board approach to fight for their point of view, and thankfully we live in a beautifully democratic, capitalistic country where we can fight in court.
• 2:28:10
  And I have a lot of respect for those groups because they have reasonable debates and we follow the law.
• 2:28:16
  And then unfortunately there's terroristic organizations like D-Flock whose primary motivation is chaos.
• 2:28:22
  They are closer to Antifa than they are anything else.
• 2:28:25
  And that I think is unfortunate because we don't want chaos or I don't want chaos.
• 2:28:29
  I like law and order.
• 2:28:30
  I like a society that has a bedrock of safety.
• 2:28:33
  So for those groups I think it's just disappointing that they haven't chosen a more constructive mannerism to try to get what they want, which they have a right to have, but that's why we have a democratically elected process.
• 2:28:44
  We're not forcing Flock on anyone.
• 2:28:47
  Elected officials know that as a community, you want to be safe.
• 2:28:52
  We're not forcing Flock on anyone.
• 2:28:55
  Yeah.
• 2:28:55
  Yeah, they get to negotiate with local municipalities and police departments and the people don't get a choice at all.
• 2:29:04
  So actually we are having it forced on us and you can speak indirectly and say, we aren't forcing it on you.
• 2:29:09
  Your police department, your HOA, your whatever is forcing it on you.
• 2:29:14
  It's still you who's doing it.
• 2:29:16
  The bigger objection to that is the idea that law and order, that this is about law and order and the only way to accomplish law and order is to be wholly surveilled, is to give up your privacy.
• 2:29:28
  That like, you can either have your privacy or you can have law and order.
• 2:29:32
  And if you choose privacy, you're encouraging chaos.
• 2:29:36
  That's wrong.
• 2:29:37
  Yes, now I find something else objectionable here.
• 2:29:40
  And this is a theme that has echoed for decades.
• 2:29:45
  The portrayal of the admittedly law-breaking vigilantes who are taking down these cameras as terrorist is batshit insane.
• 2:29:57
  And here's the reason.
• 2:30:00
  Words have meaning.
• 2:30:02
  Terrorism is about manipulating people into harming themselves using fear.
• 2:30:10
  How many people do you know who are terrified that Flock cameras are being attacked by vigilantes?
• 2:30:17
  I don't know anybody who's afraid of this at all, except maybe the people who are minding the bottom line at Flock.
• 2:30:24
  Yeah.
• 2:30:25
  It's not frightening.
• 2:30:27
  You can like it, you can hate it, but it's not scary.
• 2:30:31
  And so the point is the idea, the reason that this guy who-- CEO.
• 2:30:37
  Yeah, but he looks like he came from central casting, the same place Mark Zuckerberg came from and Sam Altman, and why do they all look like that?
• 2:30:46
  But anyway, this robot here who's deploying language in this clumsy way, what he's trying to do is trigger your amygdala because you spent the last 25 years thinking terrorism was something.
• 2:31:06
  And the point is, okay, we're now going to borrow that the same way the Department of Homeland Security declared mystic and malinformation terrorism.
• 2:31:13
  It's a magic term, and this robot is deploying that magic term in order to portray these people who again, like them or hate them, are not frightening.
• 2:31:22
  They're not threatening people, they're threatening objects, right?
• 2:31:25
  He's portraying them as terrorists because it makes him seem sympathetic, which is not something it's easy to do for a robot.
• 2:31:33
  But-- Well, he also, I mean, this is perhaps only deserving of a footnote of a footnote, he also invokes the ACLU with great pleasure.
• 2:31:43
  And so it prompted me to just take a look at the ACLU.
• 2:31:46
  We've talked for years about how far the ACLU has fallen, but just the very beginning of their site.
• 2:31:53
  Can you see it here?
• 2:31:55
  No?
• 2:31:55
  Okay, why?
• 2:31:56
  Nothing changed.
• 2:31:58
  Okay, maybe now.
• 2:32:04
  Can you see it now?
• 2:32:05
  Cool.
• 2:32:07
  ACLU, defend the rights of all people nationwide.
• 2:32:09
  Okay, sounds good so far.
• 2:32:11
  With immigrant rights, trans justice, reproductive freedom, and more at risk, we're in courts and communities across the country to protect everyone's rights, and we need you with us, donate now.
• 2:32:20
  Those are their three top examples of the work that they are doing.
• 2:32:23
  Immigrant rights, by which they largely do not mean legal immigrants, no, they do not.
• 2:32:29
  Trans justice, okay, guys.
• 2:32:31
  And reproductive freedom, by which they mean, of course, because Ro Fell, they are looking to make, the most generous interpretation is they are looking to make abortion available in all 50 states for women who need it, which I am in favor of, but largely that has become such a weaponized and politicized issue beyond what it is inherently by the fact that some people simply feel that it's the wrong decision to make always, and some people don't.
• 2:32:59
  If those are seriously the top three issues that the ACLU thinks it's defending, then who's donating to them, and why?
• 2:33:07
  Yet not only are those conspicuous as a collection of issues, but in some sense, the need for an ACLU, like the need for an FBI, has never been greater, and to have them missing in action is awfully strange.
• 2:33:20
  It's not like there isn't more important stuff for them to be focused on, and yet they've decided to focus where they focus, which suggests that they've been captured.
• 2:33:28
  Yeah, you know, maybe for instance, the people who are about to have giant magnetic fields erected outside of their homes are deserving of having several liberties protected.
• 2:33:37
  I don't know, seems like an issue more important than at least by the taglines here any of these are.
• 2:33:45
  Yep, so I had a couple more points.
• 2:33:49
  Have we shown the DFLOC site and their map?
• 2:33:52
  People at least ought to be aware of it.
• 2:33:55
  So DFLOC is an organization that-- We showed DFLOC, but I don't know the map you're talking about, is it down on the same page?
• 2:34:01
  Yeah, show the map.
• 2:34:04
  So this map allows you to scan around.
• 2:34:09
  You can see how many of these things there are, where they're clustered, you can zoom in and you can discover-- Montana doesn't have many.
• 2:34:17
  No, it doesn't.
• 2:34:18
  Of course it doesn't have many people.
• 2:34:19
  But anyway, this goes right down to the individual camera.
• 2:34:22
  I would point out that these are cameras, this is I believe crowdsourced data.
• 2:34:27
  This is not being supplied by-- Like I saw a camera here.
• 2:34:29
  Floc, yes, exactly.
• 2:34:31
  And so there is a substantial effort by people to take these cameras down.
• 2:34:41
  And you may have seen some very clever videos in which people ironically describe the actions you might take against these cameras as things that you definitely shouldn't do as a way of distributing the information without getting in trouble.
• 2:35:00
  Anyway, it's all a very humorous thing and I must tell you, whatever you think about such efforts, you gotta be pretty upset that this massive network was deployed raising obvious privacy concerns without us being consulted, right?
• 2:35:14
  Just as the data center plan was being erected without any consideration for what the effect was gonna be on people living near these things or what the effect frankly on civilization of the data centers and the thing that they're designed to do.
• 2:35:31
  But what I want people to keep track of is a couple of things.
• 2:35:36
  One, when you and I were much younger people, there was an active discussion about the failure or the loss of the cop on the beat.
• 2:35:48
  And the idea was that actually the relationship between the police and the citizens used to be very different because cops walked a beat and they interacted with the people in the neighborhood.
• 2:35:56
  So they were an aspect of the neighborhood.
• 2:35:58
  And then they ended up in patrol cars, which took them to a remove.
• 2:36:04
  And this is like the ultimate version of that where the cop is really like a little sensor on a pole and will be deployed when the powers that be decide that the thing in question is important enough.
• 2:36:20
  Same thing happened to medicine.
• 2:36:21
  Same thing happens across all systems.
• 2:36:23
  Maybe humanity doesn't scale.
• 2:36:25
  Right, that's the thing.
• 2:36:27
  The market for all of its genius has a defect, which is that it is going to promote the most efficient way of doing something.
• 2:36:35
  And sometimes the efficient way is destructive of the values at the core of the system that you're building.
• 2:36:41
  So, yes, we all, I wouldn't use the phrase law and order, that one's charged, but we all want equal protection under the law.
• 2:36:51
  We want the law to be fair and reasonable to result in a very low rate of crime.
• 2:36:57
  We all want those things, every reasonable person does.
• 2:37:00
  This is not about that.
• 2:37:02
  This is about policing on the cheap.
• 2:37:04
  It's about creating a system with a rational explanation that will be abused by the powerful for their own purposes.
• 2:37:11
  Consider for a moment the opportunity to create a false pattern of evidence.
• 2:37:19
  If you want actually to frame somebody with a system like this, you can create the impression that their car went from here to there.
• 2:37:27
  Obviously that won't be among the first use cases, but the opportunity to do such things with a relatively low resolution camera uploading to the cloud, can these things be spoofed?
• 2:37:39
  How good is the security?
• 2:37:40
  Can somebody send a feed up as if it comes from a particular Flock camera that leaves the impression that this car passed by here at this moment?
• 2:37:49
  The opportunity for abuse is through the roof.
• 2:37:53
  And then the final thing is, well, what is this all really for?
• 2:37:57
  And I think it's kind of obvious.
• 2:37:59
  If you look at the push towards tokenization of assets, towards central bank digital currencies, that is programmable money that can be turned off if you displease the powers that be.
• 2:38:10
  If you look at the creation of these massive data centers, is that really about citizen use of AI?
• 2:38:18
  Maybe, some of it is, but is it really about creating a storehouse of information that will allow you to be controlled and locked down?
• 2:38:28
  That's certainly the impression I have, and we didn't have a discussion about any of this.
• 2:38:33
  This is happening, and then we have to react to it because it's all on a freight train, headed down the line, and we're always playing defense.
• 2:38:43
  So it's pretty frightening stuff.
• 2:38:48
  And at some level, we have a moral right to object.
• 2:38:52
  We're not being given the opportunity to object, and hence the current discussion about people tearing these things down if they're on volition.
• 2:39:01
  That was an excellent little soliloquy.
• 2:39:03
  I'm reminded of what I think is observation, a truism of yours that is one of these things that feels obvious in retrospect.
• 2:39:14
  And you may have a more concise or elegant way of saying it, but it's something like every good system requires discretion, that any system that entirely removes all human influence from it, and simply allows for the aggregate, the machine, the average, to make the decision that, again, on average, would be the right decision, is going to fail, except in a system that is merely complicated and not complex.
• 2:39:46
  You need human beings to be able to come in and say, "Oh, actually, there's mitigating factors that the AI, or the statistics, or the model could not account for, did not want to account for, would not account for, whatever it is, but I, human, am going to have my humanity override your machine thinking." And increasingly, we need to remind ourselves that the error we're living in is actively interested in, as you say, efficiency over effectiveness, often.
• 2:40:17
  It claims to do both, and the words are so similar in English that it feels like they're the same things, and they're anything but.
• 2:40:24
  Efficiency and effectiveness are anything but the same, and we need the error capacity, not just the ability to think outside the averages, but frankly, also the ability to make errors and correct them of the individual human being with discretion in a system, because if we hand it over entirely to the machines, to the Flock cameras, to the data centers, to the AI, we will become assimilated.
• 2:40:55
  I mean, that's inherently what it is asking of us, to be assimilated, to lose our humanity.
• 2:41:01
  Yes, well, you need discretion for any of these systems to work.
• 2:41:06
  That discretion has to be wielded by something that's mission aligned, and what we're getting instead is a whole lot of discretion being wielded by people who are indifferent to us.
• 2:41:17
  That's really the point, is they have decided.
• 2:41:19
  They have discretion.
• 2:41:20
  They have discretion, and they have enough discernment that they're not gonna do this to themselves.
• 2:41:25
  They're gonna do it to the rest of us, and we don't get to say anything about it because somehow the consent of the governed has failed in the corruption of government and the shift in the way power is wielded, right, so that corporate power exists in a way that is not, you know, we've got international corporations, and we don't have a structure that can properly regulate their behavior or monitor their intent or anything like that.
• 2:41:54
  So we are sort of suffering the downside of discretion where nothing is wielding it on our behalf and something is wielding it as a result of, you know, I don't know, meetings that they've held where they've decided how it is that we are supposed to, not only how it is that we are supposed to live, but how we are supposed to feel about it.
• 2:42:21
  Right.
• 2:42:21
  You know?
• 2:42:22
  Yeah, and then we come full circle then to what the story we started with, that we are being hamstrung, we are being corralled and contained and averaged and told that efficiencies are what matter rather than qualities that we may choose to value around truth seeking or beauty or movement or any number of things, connection, humanity, relationship, any of these things.
• 2:42:49
  We must have their values, and in order to keep us thinking the way they want, we are going to have all of the information coming at us that we do not experience in real time with another human being suspect because we never know what it actually means or where it came from.
• 2:43:08
  Yeah, yeah.
• 2:43:09
  It's, we're gonna have to get better at playing this game because it's going to be one front after the next in part because the actual objective is pretty clear.
• 2:43:22
  It's frightening, it's strange, and it's a little bit hard to believe once you see it, but it's not an accident that we're looking at universal surveillance and a shift in currency that provides near perfect control.
• 2:43:36
  You know, it's not an accident that that's happening all at once, and it's not an accident that it is happening internationally across the West.
• 2:43:43
  That's a part of some kind of plan, and it's a completely unacceptable plan, and it is largely being protected by the fact that people find it hard to imagine that anybody would do that to them.
• 2:43:59
  It is unimaginable, and yet true.
• 2:44:02
  And yet true.
• 2:44:02
  And yet true.
• 2:44:04
  Okay, we're gonna be back.
• 2:44:07
  Let me actually just give a plug.
• 2:44:08
  I am continuing to publish "Cobadara Stories" on natural selections, and we'll put a link to that in the show notes as well.
• 2:44:16
  They are extraordinary, and I still have, I closed down the submissions because I got so many in the first month that I still have dozens that I haven't even looked at and responded to yet, and several in the hopper yet.
• 2:44:32
  They are remarkable with regard to the diversity of experience that people have had and also where they're coming from.
• 2:44:38
  So certainly a lot out of the United States, but from really all over the world, all the demographics, all the experiences you might imagine, and I encourage you to go look.
• 2:44:47
  I've heard from people who say, people who have submitted stories and people who have not, who say, "I didn't know how much I needed this.
• 2:44:58
  I didn't know, I thought, because I lived this era, and it was so recent, and I was fighting it." And so I thought watching people forget, go through the memory holding of it all that I still remembered, but each one of these stories for many people has brought something else back, like, "Oh, right, that did happen," or, "Oh my goodness, I didn't know that was happening." So, and it's not, overall, I don't find it a depressing exercise.
• 2:45:27
  I think I encourage you to read them in order to continue to make sense of what happened to us in 2020 through now at some level.
• 2:45:37
  But like the authoritarianism that became so impossible to ignore, even though many people had seen it before, that there are many more people whose eyes are open and won't close again, yeah.
• 2:45:50
  Yeah, it's cathartic.
• 2:45:52
  And I think it's galvanizing.
• 2:45:55
  It's amazing how successful they were at hiding and bringing those stories back at the very personal level of detail is how we're going to remember.
• 2:46:06
  Yeah, that's right.
• 2:46:08
  Okay, so we'll have a Q&A on Sunday, 11 a.m. to 1 p.m.
• 2:46:12
  Pacific.
• 2:46:13
  You can go on Locals and find a place to ask your questions now.
• 2:46:17
  We have a lot of fun with those and we interact with the chat.
• 2:46:20
  And then our next livestream is gonna be next Tuesday, rather than Wednesday.
• 2:46:25
  We have our sponsors this week.
• 2:46:28
  We're American Financing, Caraway & Dose, all awesome, check them out.
• 2:46:33
  And until you see us next time, be good to the ones you love, eat real food, and get outside.
• 2:46:40
  Be well, everyone.
• 2:46:42
  (Upbeat Music)