Brian Chau: AI, Optimism, and Life Beyond Work | Free State Unplugged

I'm Jeremy Kaufman with the Free State Party. The incredible Brian Chow is visiting us here in New Hampshire, so I wanted to find a minute to sit down with him. Brian, you've been breaking some of the most interesting news stories in the world right now. Tell us a little bit about it.

Yeah. So, we've been running these massive queries on government databases, tax filings, financial filings, this kind of stuff. And there are multiple, like, 10,000, like, massive type stories that are just sitting in the open. And for a long time, there was this promise of government transparency, right? We would force the government to disclose stuff, and then all of the people would know for around 40 years now. And the people didn't know. And the reason people didn't know is that basically it would just take humans way too long to go through all this stuff.

We're going through it all with AI now. We don't use AI to write the articles, but we use AI to query, you know, all of these massive databases of records and stuff like that. And we've just found crazy stuff in terms of, like, illegal stuff, in terms of undisclosed paid media, in terms of, like, the widespread influence on how the elections work, on how the information that you're seeing is manipulated, and have all of the financial documents to prove it.

Well, let's dig into one. The one I saw getting a bunch of – well, I saw two getting a bunch of attention recently, but one was that – well, they would call it racial equity. I would call it paying people to be racist in medicine. Explain what you found and how you found it.

Yeah, so these are a collection of programs called HEI, Health Equity Incentives. And what they do is that they measure the race -based distribution of healthcare services over the years, and they pay providers who change that distribution in certain ways. Now, their narrative would be, well, right now, certain races, specifically in most cases, black and Hispanic people, are not – are having worse health outcomes, and that's because there is systemic racism, and we need to pay people to provide more services to those people than to other races relative to the past.

And, of course, we can kind of get into it, but there are all sorts of other reasons why that might be the case. I don't buy their narrative, and I think in practice what this is is paying providers to be racially discriminatory in ways that violate Title VI of the Civil Rights Act, at least the text on its letter.

Yeah, it certainly read like a violation of the Civil Rights Act to me, so maybe we can get Harmeet in front of this stuff.

I hear that she is taking a look.

So, you know, the economists like to say, you know, there are no $20 bills on the ground because they'd be picked up. You're saying, I'm one guy, and I'm – and I know you have a team, so it's not just one guy, but you're finding – these are incredible stories. You also uncovered – we don't have to go down. We'll come back to the story itself. You uncovered this entire complex of NGOs and who's funding all the AI doom stuff. But you're saying you yourself or you and a small team are finding absolutely groundbreaking stuff. I'm a skeptic. Convince me that this is real and that you're doing this.

Yeah, and when I started out, it was just me. It was this crazy experience. And

I almost didn't believe it myself. Because when I started out, I was essentially thinking of building auditing tools for financials. It would be like, we audit your startup. It figures out things that you should cover, things that you should record, things that you should file. Before you go for the actual audit or before you do diligence with a VC. And this is a role that I've worked in before. I think the AIs kind of get 95% of the way there. But of course, with anything accounting related, you need 100%. And I thought I could get to 100%. So I build these tools. I'm like, what am I going to do? I have no revenue at that time.

So I throw it at a bunch of government databases. I just say, find me newsworthy stuff. It found me newsworthy stuff. And I expected it would be like, kind of like the same intuition as you. Oh, well, I'm going to confirm that this is stuff that people already know about. And then, you know, prove that I can find these errors. And then I'll move on. What I got back from a lot of like really successful journalists already is, I've never heard of this before. And then I thought, oh, I double checked. I made sure everything was legit. I thought, maybe this is what I should be doing 24-7.

And it's just been a sprint from there. But I think it's right to say, well, AIs will hallucinate sometimes. That's been getting better. I think it's less and less of a problem. But, you know, how do I know this information is true? And to that point, like also people will kind of hallucinate and make shit up on the internet all the time. How do I know that that's true? So we provide an audit grade level record of all of the financials and all of the documents. All of those links will be in the article. So you can see every single transaction, every single program that we've outlined in terms of, you know, for example, the racially discriminatory health programs that we've covered.

So I think this is incredible. I love stories or things where a small number of people or one person can make this big difference. It feels to me that we're in a kind of unprecedented era right now where one person – like I read the guy who, you know, solved – what was the big – not neighbor strokes. The one before that. They published the chat transcript. You can probably tell me. But he published the chat transcript and he's basically like just encouraging the AI. He's like, you can do this. Just keep trying.

Yeah. There were a bunch of the Erdos conjectures. There was the one with the differential equations. That was just a counterexample.

So it seems to me though, and I've experienced it in other ways myself, but we're not going to make this show about me, that one person can really be having an incredible impact right now, that we're in this sort of high leverage, high impact time where the people who are on the edge of AI, the people who are pushing it, or the people who are even just trying it. That's what was so weird about this math result to me. It was like he basically just asked the AI to solve the problem and then kept encouraging it. And he wasn't even providing that much mathematical insight on his own.

And I'm not trying to take away from what you're doing. You had the insight to use AI in this way. Do you think that we are in this kind of moment right now where just take AI, throw it at things, and you can have this kind of huge impact?

Yeah, for sure. And some of those are going to fail. A lot of those are going to fail actually. But the ones that succeed are worth it. And I think you need that risk-taking mindset. I think that the people who are like, oh, well, I did one thing and it failed. It's like, okay, if you're doing something that's never been done before, like literally proving a math proof that's never been done before, some of them are going to fail. And OpenAI, they burned literally tens of millions of dollars at least that we know of on trying to solve problems that they didn't solve.

That's life. And I think the people who are willing to take that risk are going to be able to find either new proofs or new companies or new ideas that are going to be world -changing. And I think for a long time, people have been kind of built into the stagnation mindset. They've built in the idea that you need to climb the hierarchies that already exist, optimize the metrics that already exist. And that's changing. And some people are worried about that. For me, I think that's like the best thing ever.

So I'm also a huge AI optimist. Sometimes, though, it feels like we're in the minority. There's all this dooming out there. If the AI can break these news stories that the ai can solve math problems that haven't been solved for 80 years i mean surely it's gonna kill

us all too yeah that's the that that's the extrapolation people have or like oh they'll take all of the jobs it's i think that if you go back and if you ask like a farmer in the 1600s and you say well i'm from the future. In this future, you know, 90 percent of people won't be working in agriculture anymore. They'll look at you and think, oh, shit, we're fucked. And I don't know, in some sense, I think I'm more predisposed to think of some of the cultural concerns that those people would have as legitimate. But like in terms of quality in life, in terms of the day to day that you and I have or that, you know, every single American has, it's like a lot better than the backbreaking work of farm labor every single day.

That's right. Now, I don't think this necessarily disproves the Doomer hypothesis, but I completely agree with what you're saying. You know, people if people wanted to have the lifestyle of the way that people lived in, you know, say, during the Middle Ages, that's readily available at a very low amount of hours worked.

Yeah.

You know, per year. People don't want

probably zero. Like just in terms of like, you know, finance in terms of like welfare benefits.

Right.

Unemployment. It costs very little to live, you know, medieval, like normal person's lifestyle. It's just not pleasant in the slightest.

So that's my impression, too. You know, human desire is kind of limitless. As soon as humans, you know, have these force multiplying things, we simply invent new desires. And so we should almost look at human willingness to work as as pretty inelastic. And so if if, you know, if AI, you know, becomes as powerful as it can be, well, you know, it will be, oh, you know, you poor, you only, you know, control 10 solar systems. You know, I with my you know, I'm working much harder with my, you know, AI and, you know, I have thousands of them, you know, because that and that.

So to me, that's actually, you know, not that that's around the corner, but that's the direction that things would go in. And that's it. So, you know, we see this similarly, but that doesn't really disprove the Doomer, you know. OK, so human desire is limitless. So maybe this disproves, you know, this these mass unemployment scenarios. But the Doomer scenario is, you know, the AI is going to turn us into paperclips or the, you know, the AI is going to turn us into goo or, you know, whatever. Why shouldn't we believe this stuff?

Yeah. So typically they'll lay out their theory in three steps. The first step is this buzzword that now, like, you know, as we're clients talking about recursive self-improvement. The idea is that the AI is going to start improving itself and then that's going to go on forever and it'll basically be infinitely intelligent. The second thing is that, you know, this infinite intelligence will result in some kind of global control, right? That the AI that can prove any mathematical theorem, you know, or, you know, just prove or disprove any mathematical theorem will, like, control the nuclear weapons or, you know, become the presidents of every country or something like that.

And then the third is the idea, you know, sometimes referred to as the orthogonality thesis that the AIs will want to, you know, for whatever reason, will want to kill all humans in order to get their goal. Whether that's creating paperclips, whether that's just power, whether that's something. And I think all three of those steps are wrong. And of course, if one of the steps are wrong, then the general conclusion is false. But I think all three are wrong and here's why. On the recursive self-improvement front, this is actually something that I think speaks to the culture that we have and how little prepared we are for scientific revolutions.

Because actually historians have gone and studied these kinds of breakthrough technologies in the past many times before. Things like the steam engine or electricity. And what tends to happen is that you get this big rush of scientific discovery. That slows down all while the practical benefits of things like, you know, electricity and, you know, factories and steam mills and, you know, manufacturing lines are actually coming and bearing practical fruit in the real world. There is a secondary bump. And that bump comes from the applied technologies.

And then in every single history, in every single industry that we've ever had in human history, that slows down. Whether that's physics, whether that's electrical engineering, whether that's chemistry, whether that's, you know.

But this time it's different.

Mysterial science. Because the AI is going to improve itself. I think when they say it's different, they're kind of not really understanding how great the past technologies are. And therefore not understanding how almost tragic the inevitable slowdown in progress is. Because this pattern of building technologies that improve technologies is how all of science works. So famously, you know, compilers write almost all code, right? We actually, you know, things like languages like Python or JavaScript, they're not really, you know, the direct instructions that you would have for running, you know, a website and all of those servers and all of the software that goes into that.

They're actually translated, compiled into ones and zeros by all of these programs that are written by people and made the process of writing software much faster. So we've had these technologies that improved the technology and, you know, compilers that improved the development of other compilers, like the original Python compiler was written in C, which was itself another compiled language, right? And we've had this pattern of creating technologies that build momentum and that allow you to improve those technologies faster throughout all of history.

Another great example is microscopes. Microscopes, they were used not just to create all sorts of new drugs and all sorts of new discoveries in terms of how biology worked, but it also improved the precision by which we could carve lenses to make better microscopes. And all of these technologies, you know, there's a great quote by philosopher Nick Land, like the singularity started in the 1500s. That's the enlightenment. I think he's right. I think to the extent that recursive self-improvement is a distinct category, a distinct, you know, scientific or technological or economic thing.

It started in the 1500s. And so I think that, number one, we should look at its fruits. It's been amazing. You know, I quite like my life. I think you quite like your life. I think most people quite like living in modernity rather than living in, you know, kind of feudal poverty. But I think it's also something that is continuous with the rest of economic progression, therefore should be judged by the standard and by the precedent of all other economic production.

Yeah. I mean, I will say I personally think that a lot of the people expressing concerns, there are some people I respect expressing concerns, but I do think some of it is status, you know, status motivated to some degree. You know, I saw Terrence Tao, who had previously spoken at least somewhat positively of AI, but sort of.

Very positively.

But the moment, well, there's a clip going around recently where he was now, you know, sort of much more against it. And so it was like, well, you know, once the AI came for what he could actually do, you know, when he started to feel that the AI was surpassing his ability to do things, you know, then he, you know, then he started to like it less. Yes. And so I think it does make sense that and this is true even. So, you know, you and I both. Yes, I'm very glad that I'm not living as a as a medieval peasant. But I used to I used to ask people, you know, when I was a teenager or when I was younger, I used to ask people, you know, would you rather, you know, go back in time and live as a lord in, you know, the 16th century or, you know, live the life you're living today?

You know, a lot of people would actually say that they would rather be a lord in the past. They would rather have a lower. And again, this is an objectively lower standard of living. You're going to die from disease. You're not going to get on a plane and go anywhere. You're going to be eating a much smaller set of foods. You know, you're going to be at a higher risk of of death and injury and all these things like we have made all of this real progress. But for a lot of people, they would rather be high status in the past than be of, you know, average status today, despite all of this, you know, progress.

And so to the extent that A.I. threatens, you know, Tyler Cowen says this, that 90 percent of human conversations are about who should be higher or lower in status. And so to the extent that A.I. lowers certain people in status, they're going to be against it and you're not going to convince them otherwise. I

think that's right. I think there are versions of this that are right. And if we're kind of circumcising the scope of the debate to will A.I. lower Terence Tao in status, I think he might be right. I think his concerns might be legitimate in that aspect. I think his broader concerns, actually, that like, OK, if A.I. is producing all of this math and like human mathematicians who otherwise might be, you know, interesting people to talk to and have interesting thoughts on on math might do something else. I think that's right. It's interesting because I kind of think that that might be a good thing for the world.

I mean, that reflects my own choices personally, because I used to I was on like an academic track to do like a math, research math, Ph in combinatorics, actually working related to one of the problems that, you know, open AI is now solved. Related to, you know, color, you know, multicolor Ramsey theory. And I just thought one time that there was a conversation that I had with a now famous VC. And I just thought, like, what am I doing with my Like, these problems are kind of fun, although they involve a lot of reading and a lot of just searching through existing theorems that people have proven.

But, you know, there's a lot of, like, boring stuff, too. But it's, like, kind of fun to do these problems. But at the end of the day, like, what am I even accomplishing with my life? And I sat down. I thought about it. I was, like, actually very little. And so I think that, like, actually, you know, mathematicians or people who have that talent who go out and start companies in the real world who otherwise do other things. They're, you know, people like Scott Wu at Cognition, you know, who was an International Olympiad in Informatics winner who, you know, certainly could have done any kind of, like, theoretical computer science.

Or a pure math job and been very successful at it. But he decided to start, like, this billion-dollar company. And I think the world is better off for it. And I think the world is better off, similarly, I think the world is better off for more mathematicians, like, actually not doing the Terence Tao route.

I mean, I'm also a PhD dropout turned entrepreneur. I only made it about nine months in my computer science PhD before I realized it wasn't the life for me.

What are you working on?

Well, the biggest thing I'm working on is the free state.

No, I mean for the PhD.

I'm just kind of curious. Oh, I was doing network stuff. I was doing this project mapping all of the various ways that – what is it called? I haven't thought about this for almost 20 years. BGP?

Bipartite graph petitions?

No, it has to do with how – I was doing this project mapping the entire internet and finding these exploits in terms of how sort of bad announcement routes could bring down – there was some – I haven't thought about this stuff in 20 years, to be honest with you. But there were these attacks that could happen where sort of – or misconfigurations that could happen where – it's a border gateway protocol or something. But these announcements could happen and it could bring down chunks of the internet. And I was doing a research project on that and attempting to – I was exploring this whole concept.

But I realized that I like going across things actually more. I can go deep, but I like going across domains. This is part of why I found AI so interesting. In the last year, I've made a book. I started a nonprofit. It fills out all my forms for me. It lets – anything that I can almost imagine just got 10 or 20 or 50 times easier. And so let's explore in this direction a little bit, how AI changes the relative value of things. I've spent more than – I've spent 10,000 to 20,000 hours of my life writing code. It's possible that for the rest of my life, I won't – I'll maybe do it for fun occasionally.

But I haven't written code in months. I don't expect to write very much code in the future. What has gone up is will, desire. If I want – you have to want something in the first place. The AI doesn't have any of this, at least so far. Taste seems more important. Judgment. You know, when I – we have to – you have to look at the output. You have to refine it. You have to have the – you still have to – there's still a big role, I think, for how humans can shape and refine what's coming out. What do you think in this direction? What gets more valuable?

What gets less valuable in this era?

It's sort of fascinating because you're kind of speaking to the question of entertainment, right? Maybe in ancient times philosophers would have referred to this as the question of leisure. But a ton of entertainment, it's this sort of puzzling thing economically. You know, it's this thing that doesn't fit very well in any economic – or at least in most economic models of like, okay, so you're kind of paying for this thing. And it's like taking away more of your time. It's like you're going to pay to like lock – you know, getting locked in this dark room and like staring at the screen for two hours, right?

Or, you know, maybe like three and a half hours in the case of the Odyssey. And actually, like people love this. Of course, like at a very practical level, it's like, well, duh, people want to go see the movies and it's a good movie. I do think the Odyssey is a pretty good movie, you know, faith or or lack thereof regardless but um it is this fascinating question of like well how does that actually work at you know so so there's some things where it's kind of obvious how it works economically like okay well you'll produce some food people people kind of need roughly the same same amount of food you know maybe more sometimes you know people's preferences change especially as things get cheaper Maybe less, actually, you know, with GLP-1s. But more or less, people need food, and then you're kind of like paying, they're paying for food, and then you're

giving them food, and then, you know, you have some economies of scale there. And in the past, especially the past 30 years with the internet, there's been this big question of how the internet economy even works, especially at a consumer level. There's been increasingly more complaints about, like, oh, is it just, like, advertising hype? Is it just, like, kind of addiction? Is it almost like drugs in a way with people on Facebook or Instagram or TikTok or whatever? And, of course, you know, the underlying theme of all those conversations is, like, in some sense, you don't need this stuff, right?

You don't need to be on TikTok. You don't need to be on Facebook. I mean, like, I kind of, you know, make money either directly or indirectly through Twitter, and I think you do too. But, you know, in some sense, I don't need to be there. So what is it that you're actually selling? And I think that, you know, the simple answer is entertainment, and the long answer, which I'm kind of in the process of giving, is something like more and more of the market, more and more of the economy will be about finding the thing that people wanted before they know they want it.

Sure. Well, that's a good way of stating what entrepreneurship is. Everyone's not going to be an entrepreneur in the future, though. I'll ask this question.

Well, why not?

You know, I suppose the rate of entrepreneurship would likely increase. I homeschool my kids. So I am picking, and they have a lot of say in what they learn, but I'm, of course, as the parent, setting the scope of a lot of that, setting the direction for that. I was having my, you know, my nine-year-old does a bunch of math, and I had him beginning computer science and programming, and I'm asking questions. We're like, well, is this actually, you know, what's going to be important in the future? What's going to be less important? What's going to be more important?

I think AI will change the relative value of a whole bunch of human skills, and so it's interesting to just as someone who's a smart guy who's thought about this stuff, who thinks about the future, just to talk about, yeah, how is that going to change? If you were, I know you don't have kids yet, but if you were raising a young man, what would you say? Should he just be practicing vibe coding? You know, what should...

Yes, you should be creating, like, all sorts of slop apps and selling them on Hacker News. No, no, I mean, nothing against Hacker News, by the way, but...

We're not even going to use apps. Like, I don't see... Sorry not to change this. SaaS, I used to... I made money in SaaS. That was my first successful company. To me, AI destroys this. Like, with the work I'm doing currently, I'm never going to pay for MailChimp again for anything I'm doing. MailChimp is one sentence. I just say, build me a MailChimp, and I get a MailChimp. You know, this... It's going to change so many things.

Yeah, I think that you're right. The main... I think on one hand, you're a different type of customer than most people. I think that there are people who will still just want to, like, press the button that works. And that's, like, actually a very understandable choice, especially when you have the money and the margins are driven lower. I think that, like, people... It goes to the point of, like, knowing what people want before they want it. It's almost like if you have the idea conceptually and you have the brand conceptually, people almost will, like, reward...

Will reward you with a premium for, like, just thinking of that before they did. Even if it's, like, trivially easy to copy. I think that's the case for many such businesses. The... Actually, to answer your question, though, because I think it's a fascinating question, is that I think the most important thing to do is to actually look inside the box. This is something I've been thinking about for a long time, and I think it's finally coming into the spotlight, which I call the crisis of nominalism, right? And what is nominalism? It's basically you slap a label on something, and then you just never look inside the box.

You take it for granted. You know, this is justice. This is the justice system. This is the justice department. What are the results that it produces? It must be justice. Is it actually justice? Are people really being treated the way that we think is fair? Is it even consistent itself with the law? Is it consistent with the past law? Is it just one continuous object? Many people don't ask those questions. I think you ask those questions. I think many people who listen to you might ask those questions. But I think that's one of the most important skills to have. And more and more across the world, there are all of these terms, all of these things that get slapped on the box. And then I think one of the downsides of the increasing popularization of science is that people will just take the words on the box.

They will just think, oh, this is science. Therefore, it must be true. Is it coherent with the scientific method? Is it, you know, following? Is it coherent with all of the other scientific theories around this area? Is the evidence actually high quality? People don't look inside the box. They don't ask themselves those questions. And increasingly, that results in the blind policies that don't look inside the box and are operating purely off this kind of nominalism. I think that's the rut that we've gotten ourselves in, in terms of the American government and in terms of many of the issues that we have, even exercising kind of basic governance over ourselves, over our ability to self-govern.

So I think the number one skill for either all of you growing up, all of you learning, all of you making yourselves into the world, or thinking about what you want for your children is the willingness and the ability to look inside the box.

Okay. I like that. I've certainly noticed that phenomenon. You know, myself, people use all of these heuristics or they don't think things all the way through. You know, when I was running library, we were trying to do this decentralized media ecosystem, which comes with all of these technical challenges. And I was always surprised, even among computer scientists, to me, there were some, if you really thought through how the system had to work, you know, sort of step by step, there were clearly real trade-offs that had to be there. And often people wouldn't ask about them. I was surprised about how few, even people who are technical software engineers. Yes,

there should be no KPIs that don't get results. That's almost, if you think about it, that should be like, that should be a self-contradiction. That should be like literally nonsensical KPIs that don't get results, but yet they exist.

Sure, sure. But okay. But also, we're not, I love the idea of schooling that is encouraging more of this way of thinking. I'm sure that at the margin, we can get more people to think this way. At the same time, it's clear that there are a lot of people for whom this thinking does not come naturally, probably, you know, can't be taught. One of my AI projects, which I will be publishing soon, has been all of this educational research. I've been doing this, I've had the AI go through an incredible deep dive, and probably the single greatest finding is nothing works.

Like the AI rank that says the number one finding was that there's no, that nothing works. That's like literally what the AI's number one finding was, that it's really hard to find anything in education that produces results. And so we probably can't, you know, get everyone to think this way. And I guess if only to play a little bit, I would have my own answer to this, but to play a little bit of the role of the Doomer. Well, look, look, people are going to have nothing to do. We're going to have humanoid robots. They're going to do all the, they're going to do all the jobs and, and all of the sort of middle class.

So yeah, sure. Maybe you will still have a job, but a lot of people aren't, you know, they're going to drive the trucks. They're going to do all the teaching. They're going to do, they're going to be the professors. They're, there's going to, there's going to be nothing left for people to do. And everyone's going to be poor. And all the, all, all, only the people who are, you know, owners of the AI companies who have the capital, they're going to be wealthy and everyone else is going to be poor. And it's going to be a dystopia.

I mean, like I still hire people. And some of the people I hire are like super high agency, but like I'm still hiring for, for even roles that are like pretty, pretty straightforward.

I don't believe this by the way.

I'm sure. Yeah. Yeah. But I appreciate you pushing back. I appreciate you kind of like, you know, putting the argument out there because, because I think we should address it. It goes back to actually, I think this very like almost post American and certainly pre American way of thinking. Right. To go back to the point of like, oh, if you tell a person in the 1600s, oh, you won't be working in agriculture. Almost no one will be working in agriculture. They'll be like, oh, fuck. It's the same thing. And I think on one hand, it is actually kind of intuitive.

Right. It's like, oh, the job categories that we have now probably won't need to do them. Well, what are we all going to do? And i think it can almost be like you know um i think there there is actually a genuine moral critique of like a hardcore 1600s puritan farmer of like well you guys all just have fake jobs now you know an accurate critique of like you're like podcasting and like computer programming and like shipping vibe coded slop on Hacker News. You have like a fake life. We're going to go back in time and

try to convince people that there's a job called yoga instructor.

Yeah. And and on one hand, if you there's a certain way of thinking about the world where it's like, oh, I almost gained my soul, my identity from toiling the land. We're like, actually, that's kind of right. So I can think it to that perspective. It's actually easier for me to empathize with that kind of person than to empathize with the modern equivalent, because I actually like I like working out. I kind of like the manual labor. I mean, I say that knowing that I'm doing, you know, one tenth or one one hundredth of the amount of labor that, you know, a day laborer would have to do.

So so like there are limits to that, of course. But I do kind of like it. You know, I can kind of see the like I can see the mindset of someone who like really enjoys plowing the soil. I cannot really imagine like someone who just loves whose core passion in life is like, you know, is like, you know, being like an HR manager, like whose soul and identity is wrapped up in the careful craftsmanship of being like a middle level bureaucrat. I just don't see that. And I think actually like people will be way happier once we've transitioned to, you know, whatever whatever comes next.

I think that we are actually in some sense at peak meaninglessness and whatever the new equilibrium is. And I think there will be a new equilibrium will be a lot healthier.

I'm inclined to agree with that, you know, even if it was, you know, gay space luxury communism or whatever it becomes. And even if even if there's literally almost no role, I think

it will be extremely based

space communism. I mean, I, you know, I think personally, like I don't even again, even if I have little role to play, I'm no longer being creative because the AI is even more creative than me. You know, I think

you're pretty creative.

Well, no, I'm saying let's imagine. Let's imagine the air. Like I will say, because I am creative, I do feel like the AI is good for me. But even if I imagine the AI replacing my ability to do literally anything, you know, I don't know, I would hang out. I would hang out with my, you know, friends. I would get into music. I would, you know, I'd read books and I'd play games. And it's like I did doesn't I guess for me, I don't actually feel despite, you know, working a decent amount and enjoying making things like at the same time, I don't feel like my life and my entire self-worth is like wrapped up in in my work.

And so it doesn't, you know, I have a whole bunch of, you know, cultural novels on my bookshelf and it doesn't seem like some that doesn't seem like a dystopia to me to be living in a culture novel, you know, which is these Ian Banks series that's basically, you know, powerful AIs and post -scarcity type of stuff. And people find plenty of things to do, you know, with their time. I mean, I think it's I'm not saying I wholly find those books realistic portrayals of the future, but they don't seem dystopian and they don't seem entirely implausible either.

Have you read? Do you know what I'm talking about?

Yeah, yeah. I've read the culture series and it seems it seems far from from the vision that we have now. Right. Of course, you have the visions of like outright doomsday and that's like a lot of that is paid media as well. But I think actually the broader like cultural anti-ai stuff is more interesting. The kind of like labor concerns, the kind of like anti-data center stuff even. I mean, like a lot of that on like factual grounds is made up, like literally made up, like completely false. But it's like an interest that the vibe overall is interesting because I think it's the product of like at least a half century, if not a full century, if not more of basically cultural destruction.

Something I've noticed in New Hampshire, and I think it contributes to like how you're thinking about this and maybe you've contributed the other way to of like, oh, this is how you're thinking about this. And, you know, the kind of person you are and you've kind of helped build up these institutions. But, yeah, it's like, yeah, we'll hang out together we'll play games together it'll be like a fun time I think a lot of people um outside their job or inside their job are just not having a fun time and I think that's that's like a big reason the the tech um the kind of sentiment around technology is negative that people are just not having a fun time and when they are having a fun time it's like you know playing you know, it's like watching YouTube videos or it's like watching TikTok or, you know, playing games on Steam or whatever. It's almost like an embarrassing

thing to admit. There's this great monologue. I think actually the overall message of this game is like terrible and paranoid and wrong in all sorts of ways. But have you ever heard of this game, Mouthwashing?

No.

Okay. It's this like terrible. It's this like it is this like narrative RPG. But there is one monologue that almost redeems the entire story and is kind of like it's also very tragic. The message, the message is also like kind of evil in some sense, but it's also like, well, can you explain the powerful? It's powerful. It's this guy who is like this engineer on a spaceship. Okay. There's a spaceship. The spaceship crashes and they're basically like all fucked. And all of the characters are like terrible people. I think intentionally. Right. I think this is intentionally something that was actually done well.

But there's this guy, he's an engineer. He's been kind of like a craftsman for his entire life. And he's like, he's like someone who's turned his life around. He, he used to be an alcoholic. And, and now he's not. And then he's like getting re addicted. The reason the game is called Mouthwashing is that they have all of this like mouthwash that they're delivering on the space on this intergalactic spaceship. And he's now addicted, you know, like two months into the crash. He's now like terminally addicted to mouthwash, like just, just like chugging the mouthwash.

And he's like, in all my life, I've never been happier than when I was an alcoholic, when I would get like blackout drunk, those were the greatest days of my life. And I've turned my life around. I've done the thing everyone was supposed to do. I've brought back my family. I've worked hard every day of my life from then. And to be honest, I've never been happy as happy as when I was passed out drunk.

Yeah. I think this is, I mean, this is, if you know, Thomas Sass, who's, yeah. I mean, this is a very Sassian view, which is like, well, look, the addict that they just genuinely prefer it. They just genuinely like, and I think there's, I'm not sure I embrace it all the way, but I think there is something there. You know, I, I got myself both some compliments and some trouble recently for, you know, I don't like homeless situations. I wish, I wish they would deal with that. I don't think we should see, you know, the best areas of the city to the, you know, to the homeless. And like people think, oh, well, you know, they need help or they need a home. And it's like, well, no, a lot of these people just want to live this way. Like this is actually their, their preference is that they enjoy, they don't want to work.

They like hanging out in the park all day, whether they do drugs or not. Certainly a lot of them do. Some of them probably don't, but their, their actual preference is, is to live a life of relative squalor simply so that they don't, you know, have to, have to work. And I think, yeah, I think for a lot of people, if they weren't the happiest that doing the, you know, why would they do it?

Yeah. And there's this big, um, almost, there's this like cultural movement around thinking. There's this great meme of like this bird who, who is in a cage, but the cage only has two bars. Right. Have you ever seen this meme?

Yeah.

Yeah. There's two bars in front of him and then he's holding the bars. Did the, the cage is otherwise open everywhere around him. And he's like, I hate that I'm trapped like this. And I think that's right. I think that in some ways, actually, like, I don't know if this is a disagreement we have, but I think in some ways, you know, the homeless guy is like a more, um, a more righteous figure. Then the guy who just like complains about being trapped in a corporate job. That's right. And, and just like complains about everything and complains about like, you know, thinks America is going to shit. Uh, it's like, I don't know.

It is, it would it almost be better for, for that person if they were addicted to heroin? Like, um, I'm not sure if that, that person's life would be like subjectively worse, even from their own perspective. It seems like they're unhappy about everything. Right. And the core thing here, is that this has become externalized and he has become the mainstream culture the depressed like trapped in a corporate job

okay

type attitude has become the mainstream culture it's just a culture of depression now it's this like very post-american thing and that's what what i'm really worried about that that's what i'm more worried about that i think that's the kind of like underlying root of the anti-data center stuff for example I think that's the underlying root of a lot of the pessimism is that people have tricked themselves, whether it's believing that they have to have an apartment in New York, they have to have the next, you know, they have to have the invite to all the dinner parties or whatever.

They've trapped themselves and they're now externalizing, pushing out all this negativity.

So I think that's, yeah, I think that's correct. And just to be clear, that was Brian endorsing that in our post-AI world that everyone's just going to be addicted to heroin.

Not everyone.

No, I'm joking. I think, I know that's not what you're saying. I don't think wireheading is the future. I don't think you do either. But I think, I think that you're entirely correct that, that a lot of this, that one, that it is this sort of motivated reasoning towards this stuff, although you didn't use that term exactly, but it's, it's a sort of discontent.

Yeah, I'd agree with that.

With their situation and that that's what causes this stuff. And that, that, yeah, people are, are making all of these choices that they're not ultimately happy with. I mean, I will say, you know, my prior is that we should trust people. We should trust people and their choices. And I'm always hesitant for this sort of, you know, Marx likes to talk about false consciousness. And anytime I hear an explanation for someone that starts to border on, oh, well, people have something like a false consciousness.

And, but it's not a false consciousness. They're, they're like aware of it.

Okay. They're aware of it. Oh, well, this is a, this is a, a fun one to explore a little bit because.

They'll like say I'm like trapped in the shitty corporate job. Like, it's not like me, me saying that to them. They're, they're the ones saying it.

So, okay. So what's causing this? Cause I, I, and this is more vibes than data for me, but I sense the same kind of thing. People do just sort of seem less happy. And that's certainly not my subjective experience. I think my life is great, but that, that people seem less happy. Is this that I've seen this explanation that, you know, that maybe this is social media that, you know, you used when the, we used to have more sort of pockets and more local communities. And so that gave people more roles that they could fulfill and be happy. Now we have this sort of, everything is globalized.

And so people can compare themselves to people all around the world and that makes them less happy. What do you, I mean, what do you think is going on here? You don't have to buy that explanation. What do you, what do you think is going on here?

I think that's just kind of the cultural norm. I think that's what post-Christian America looks like. I think before, I mean, you, you look at a lot of these societies, actually the Christian ones are like the least depressed, right? America's less depressed than Europe, you know, on average, you know, and that's a lot less depressed than like the, the, the East Asian countries. I think a lot of it is like, that's the default state of humanity. Have you ever read this book hierarchy in the forest?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I think we did a whole podcast on that. Yeah.

We, we talked about it on, on, on my podcast, the highly reputable from the new world podcast. But I think that a lot of human social structures, including the social structures in a lot of countries that are still around today, are this like negative sum fundamentally, fundamentally pessimistic culture about the future. And a lot of that would be rational, right? You just should be paranoid about the flood. You should be paranoid about the earthquake, whatever. And there's probably not going to be, the future is probably not going to be much better than it was in the past.

So you should just like subsistence farm and try to survive. And that was evolutionary adaptive for most people. And so I think that it was a very particular set of theological and philosophical commitments that like invented optimism, you know, to go back to Nick lands, the singularity began in 1500s, in some sense, with a particular kind of Christian optimism. And then America is no longer really, it's no longer really even culturally Christian. I think that's a big departure where you had one or two generations of people who like didn't go to church, but they were like culturally Christian and that's gone.

And now they don't believe in the future. They think the future is going to be terrible. They don't believe God has a plan for them. They don't even implicitly believe in some kind of like cultural progressivism or, you know, like lowercase r republicanism, where the future or God has a plan for them. And they've reverted to the default state of humanity and i think the default state of humanity is miserable and depressed and backwards looking

yeah i i think that's very true i think i um yeah i love that book it changed my view on on you know i always like we're talking about earlier i like to think things through in that sort of step-by-step way and i want to i want to understand things from you know the smallest uh well, smaller than atoms, but all the way up to why does everything work the way that it does? Understanding the evolutionary climate that helped produce humans, how we used to live, how those societies functioned definitely changed my thinking on things. And I think you're correct. The happiest, just subjectively in my own life, that I've always been, whether this is Christianity or not, but having this sort of the transcendental, this thing that is beyond yourself, that you're striving towards, that you can feel like you're making progress towards, and maybe never

even achieve, that's actually when we're the happiest. And if you don't have something that's bigger than yourself, that you're trying to make progress towards, that you're trying to strive towards, that that's when you sink into the bitterness and the jealousy and all these sort of these things that tear society apart.

Yeah, it's interesting. I don't know where you are theologically, but culturally you feel like an extremely Christian person to me.

Well, yeah, thank you. I mean, I suppose we could do theology. I mean, I'm probably an atheist or an agnostic. It's difficult for me to actually positively believe it in this truthful way, but I think it's a good thing. You know, it does seem that people are better, are healthier. So, you know, I, you know, I endorse, you know, Christianity. I've seen people turn to atheism and become kind of miserable people. So, yeah.

Shouldn't the cultural truth of optimism and the fact that it's so hard to achieve without Christianity, shouldn't that be in some way proof? Or I don't know if it's like, you know, solid, like 100% proof, but then shouldn't that like nudge you towards the concept that Christianity is real?

Well, it has, you know, and it gets, it gets pretty philosophical. You know, I remember there is a clip. I really, I, I'm not too big of a Jordan Peterson consumer, but I saw this video of him being asked about, you know, sort of the truth value of, of Christianity. And he gave this answer about, well, it depends on what you mean by true, you know? And I think, I think I, I had a similar conversation. I had, did a podcast with Owen McIntyre and we were talking about, you know, like our, our rights real. And it's like, well, I don't know, you know, I, but is it good to believe that they're real? It probably is. It probably creates better results if we believe that they're real. And I, I, and so I could make a sort of, so it's, so does that make them true?

You know, I could give a defense of Christianity like that. It, in my heart, it's always been hard, you know, to, to, to, you know, to really, you know, to really believe it. But I do, I would agree that people who, who, who, who practice Christianity faithfully and who do believe in it, they seem healthier and happier. And that's true. I would think, I think that that's true. And it does seem like the kind of thing from a societal perspective that you, you know, you're kind of playing with fire, stripping people away of a transcendental belief system.

Yeah. And I think there, there's a bit of circularity in the origins of all of this. I kind of, I'm sympathetic to the idea that Christianity has been misused and kind of to almost reduce the level of the debate. I've certainly seen that happen both from non-believers or people using it in bad faith or people who really are Christian, really are believers, really are, you know, from my perspective, redeemed by Christ and, and, you know, nonetheless have some bad arguments. So, so, so I totally understand that perspective. I think there is a reassembling where these things are kind of cyclical, where that's, that's gone too far in the other direction, where I'm optimistic that this fundamental conceit that I think we're seeing everywhere, that like the metaphysical understanding of progress, almost of like plan trusting, right?

The original plan trusting, which is trusting God's plan, not, not trusting the plan of any particular politician per se, but the original, like the original form is sort of a revealed metaphysical truth, right? I think that as, as more people are despairing, as more people are kind of drifting further away and it's almost this global pessimism, I think that will become a really clear light for people, especially for people in a relatively Christian country like the U.S.

Yeah, look, you know, I like how free-ranging this conversation is, where, you know, we have a – I do – the fertility crisis is real.

Yeah.

It does seem to me, again, we're seeing the people who have remained, you know, religious have tended to have more, you know, kids. Evolution, which I do think is real, will solve these problems. Either, and if we believe that AI is the future to tie all this together with AI, either humans will be compatible with the AI and they'll succeed more and they'll reproduce more, or they won't be and they'll ultimately fall by the wayside to some degree. And I might take some time, but clearly the people who have selected themselves out of religion are doing worse. And so, you know, evolution does solve these problems. It doesn't solve them in one generation, but it will solve them over time.

Yeah, and I think the era of class-gated entertainment was probably the worst era in terms of fertility. I think that in some sense, you had all of the more productive, noble virtues being things that led you to, you know, first see success and then maybe make you less likely to have children because you now have, like, more access to entertainment when only, like, 20% of the population had access to entertainment. And this was sort of this really negative thing that went on for around the past, you know, maybe through to the 2010s, maybe like the 1910s to the 2010s.

And then with some aberrations, like the baby boom. And then with the advent, this is actually my most heretical or not literally heretical, I don't think this is against anything in the Bible, but most, like, controversial fertility take is that, like, actually TikTok has kind of solved all of our problems.

Okay, explain this.

Because entertainment's no longer class-gated.

Okay, so, I mean, I certainly do, is the entertainment on TikTok encouraging people to have?

No, no, but it's just, like, evenly distributed across the classes now.

Okay.

So you don't have this adverse selection anymore.

Okay.

Maybe it's depressing fertility across the board, but it's, and there are actually, there's actually some studies showing this. It is actually depressing fertility across the board rather than just with, for example, like higher income people.

Interesting. Interesting. I'll have to look into that. Well, is there anything else that you wanted to specifically cover while we talk today?

I don't know, maybe, like, finding stories with AI, like, the actual process for that. I gave a brief introduction to that, but, like, I don't know, people should send me pitches, pitches at effort.news. There's been a ton of what we've been able to uncover in terms of political scandals. You mentioned the HEI, the kind of race-based Medicaid payments. There's a ton of other, like, federal grant stuff, NGO funding, paid media. And there is, I think, there's a limit to this, to get to the kind of, like, sazzy and stuff. But I think most people who have an intuition that something around them is fake, that something around them is almost this, like, constructed Potemkin village, there's usually a grain of truth in that.

And we're pretty good at separating out the grain of truth from often the chaff of made-up nonsense. And so pitches at effort.news. You know, if you want to work for us, jobs at effort.news is a good place to find us. And then Brian Chow, 57, B-R-I-A-N-C-H-A-U, 57 is where you find me personally.

Awesome. It's been really fun to talk to you, get to know you more, and I'm glad you've come to visit us here in New Hampshire.

What's your favorite restaurant in New Hampshire?

What's my favorite restaurant in New Hampshire? You know, all right, this is going to be...

Are you going to make some enemies here?

No, this is going to be an answer that not that many people will give. But I'll tell you, when my wife is out, maybe she's traveling with the kids somewhere, and I don't want to cook, I order a calzone from a restaurant called Anula's. And I've just always really liked calzones. They're the best calzone I've had in New Hampshire. And so if I'm home alone on a Friday night, I'm often getting myself an Anula's calzone.

An Anula's calzone. You heard it here first.

All right, thank you.