Professor Hugo de Garis - Countdown To Extinction: Artificial Intelligence Professor Exposes How AI Will Exterminate Mankind

Full transcript: Countdown To Extinction on London Real

0:00 Brian Rose: This is London Real. I am Brian Rose. My guest today is Professor Hugo de Garis, the artificial intelligence expert and author. You are one of the early pioneers in AI, known for your work in the field of evolvable hardware and the creation of artificial brains. You have published over 100 academic papers on the emergence of AI and the potential implications of this technology on society.

Your groundbreaking book, The Artilect War, describes a future where humanity builds superintelligent beings that are vastly superior to ourselves. This causes a global civil war that results in billions of deaths as human civilisation is wiped out and superintelligent AI takes over. You suggest that humanity’s place in the evolutionary process may simply be as a transitional species, paving the way for a new, more capable intelligence. Professor, welcome back to London Real.

Hugo de Garis: Oh, thanks Brian. Third time. Third time lucky.

Brian Rose: Yes indeed. I loved our previous two conversations, and so does everybody else. They really respect your opinion and find it fascinating. You’ve spent decades in this industry, you wrote this book decades ago, and for me it’s always powerful sitting down and talking to you.

4:50 It’s been a year since our last conversation, and I guess I’ll start with that. Where do you think we’ve gone when it comes to artificial intelligence, maybe even the public’s recognition of how much AI has developed? And are we closer to this gigadeath, where a billion people die? Where do you think we are after the last 12 months?

Hugo de Garis: For me, and it’s just my own personal view, it’s a kind of two steps forward, one step back. Compare it with the huge buzz that came out in 2022.

Brian Rose: The ChatGPT moment was December 2022, when it actually came out to the public.

Hugo de Garis: Yeah. There was this huge buzz because people realised, oh my god, this artificial intelligence can write essays better than the vast majority of people. But the past year, I don’t know if you’ve found it yourself, but I certainly have: I’ll use Copilot, Microsoft’s version of it, and it’s bland. It’s repetitive. It’s sort of boring. So I’m impatiently waiting for GPT-5 to come out, and it hasn’t come out yet. So I sense this past year has been a sort of holding year.

It’s debatable, I suppose. OpenAI came out with 4.5, right? And the fact that they chose “4-something”, I think, is indicative that they feel they haven’t really released a major qualitative shift compared to version 4. And I think that’s fair. Now they’ve adopted audio and visual into it.

Brian Rose: Multimodal, integrating. It’s got some letters behind it right now. That didn’t impress you? Other things have been doing that, Midjourney has been doing that.

Hugo de Garis: Midjourney, right. To me it wasn’t really groundbreaking. It wasn’t qualitatively different. Now, you can debate it, because for example Elon Musk’s Tesla robot, that was impressive. The one where you talk to it: you put the dishes in this way. So that means household robots are what, a year or two away, I guess. That was impressive.

Brian Rose: Okay. But that’s more robotics.

Hugo de Garis: And I’ve seen documentaries made entirely by AI. Now that’s going to have a huge impact on Hollywood and so forth.

Brian Rose: Feature length or short documentaries?

Hugo de Garis: It was 20 minutes, something like that.

Brian Rose: AI video has significantly improved, and so we’ve seen that. I’ve seen a few weird mashups made with AI. The voice, I think, is fairly impressive. But you’re saying the model itself doesn’t seem to have made strides. If anything, are they throttling it?

8:30 Hugo de Garis: Sure. They’ve made strides in the sense that, I’ve read, virtually every year the size of these massive neural nets goes up by an order of magnitude, like ten times. And there’s the famous example that a couple of years back a particular model could not understand a particular human language, and then at ten times bigger, suddenly it could understand and speak that language. So there are qualitative changes, emergent phenomena occurring as you scale up. And so the big question is: okay, if you keep scaling, what could it do? Could it really get to AGI, artificial general intelligence? By the way, that’s Ben Goertzel’s term.

So there were a lot of open questions, but at the back of my mind I said, the guys who manipulate these models don’t really understand what’s going on. It’s a black box to a large extent. In a sense, they’re just idiot savants. There’s no real model of the world in their brain. Well, that’s debatable, I guess, to a certain extent.

So to me it’s an open question with this whole approach of massive neural nets and huge amounts of data to train them. How’s that going to pan out eventually? Or will we be forced to take the other major route, and that is to imitate the brain? Ben and I have debated this topic for years: the engineering approach, do whatever you like, and the other approach, copy the brain as closely as possible. I preferred the brain approach and Ben Goertzel preferred the other approach. Now, so far it looks as though the engineering approach has been winning. I mean, GPT-4 was just phenomenal, right? So with another ten times more, and again and again, where will we be? What could GPT-5 do? And does it already exist but it’s been kept under wraps? Who knows?

Brian Rose: Yeah, that’s the other question. And we’re talking about Dr Ben Goertzel, who’s been on our show seven or eight times, your former friend and colleague. You spent time in China together.

Hugo de Garis: In a sense I even introduced his wife to him.

Brian Rose: Right. And in the movie Singularity or Bust you’re both in it. That’s a great movie, by the way. And when I talked to Ben, he said, look, we’re not going to get to AGI with ChatGPT 9, 10 and 12. He believed there would have to be something different to really get us there, which I think is what you’re alluding to.

Hugo de Garis: Ben’s more on top of it. I’ve been retired 14 years now, and my interests have shifted to other things. But Ben’s right in the thick of it, so he would know this. I trust his opinion far better.

Brian Rose: I spoke to him a variety of times this year and I was always quite impressed how close he was with his finger on the pulse. He knew what was going on with Gemini, he kind of knew what was going on with OpenAI behind the scenes, and he knew a lot of the details.

11:49 So let’s talk about OpenAI, because the last time you were here I think they were cruising along fairly well, and then there was the coup where Sam was fired. It was a weekend of Twitter following this corporate coup of a hundred-billion-dollar company that could change the world, and it ended up two days later with him walking back in the building. Microsoft seemed to orchestrate something where he went back in.

What’s even more interesting, Hugo, is that fast forward a year later, the key members of that company are now gone. From Ilya, who was known as the guy that was very concerned about the technology being developed and released into the wild too early, he’s gone.

Hugo de Garis: But did they all leave for the same reason?

Brian Rose: No, they all left for different reasons, and they all said the same line when they left: we love working here and we wish them all the best. It was the woman that was on the board, it was Ilya, it was their president. Now they’re all gone and only Sam is left. There’s a famous picture of the four of them that they took a year and a half ago, and then it’s disappear, disappear, disappear, and only Sam is there.

Hugo de Garis: Sounds awfully like Stalin, doesn’t it?

Brian Rose: It’s a little weird. Sam always used to say, I don’t have equity in this company, all they do is pay for my health insurance. But what’s fascinating with Sam is that I think he’s invested in a hundred other companies that all have AI plays. And now they’re taking it from a non-profit into a for-profit company, and I think now he’s getting 6 to 9% of the equity, which I think he should have. And of course Elon Musk’s beef is that he helped create OpenAI so it would be open source, and a non-profit, and it’s neither one now. So now Elon has raised money for xAI and he’s going hard with Grok on Twitter.

So what do you think is happening in OpenAI? Everyone says that Ilya saw something that scared him and that’s why they fired Sam. Sam, it seems, is the businessman: the former Y Combinator guy, ship the product, I know how to develop billion-dollar companies in Silicon Valley. Everyone says he’s not thinking carefully about the dark implications of AI and he’s just looking to ship products. I think that’s a little simplistic, but it seems to be confirmed by the way these people have left the company. What do you think, Hugo?

Hugo de Garis: Well, it’s only a hunch. I was thinking about this Cosmist-Terran dichotomy we talked about last time.

Brian Rose: Which I think you should explain.

Hugo de Garis: Yeah. My suspicion, because that’s what it is, is: at a deep level, is he a Cosmist but keeping it quiet?

Brian Rose: That’s a very interesting question. So a Cosmist, if you had to define that.

15:10 Hugo de Garis: Okay. So in the book The Artilect War…

Brian Rose: When did you write this?

Hugo de Garis: ’98.

Brian Rose: ’98. Wow, 26 years ago. And why did you write this book, and what were you doing at the time?

Hugo de Garis: I was a researcher in artificial intelligence. My specialty was artificial brains, and I think I pretty well put the term on the map, blowing my own horn. So I was in the thick of it, seeing the trends. It would be technologically possible using evolvable hardware techniques to evolve neural nets very fast, in a couple of minutes. Well, if you can do that, each little evolved neural net has its own little function, its own job. So you could have motion controllers, pattern detectors, logic, whatever. And then you just put hundreds, thousands of these evolved modules together. What have you got then? You’ve got a network of networks. Well, I just called that an artificial brain. And it seemed to me that this was doable with the hardware of two decades ago, when I was active.

And I’m a political animal: three books, and they’re all about different ideologies. So it just seemed natural to combine my artificial intelligence knowledge with my interest in politics and just ask the obvious question. Sooner or later these machines are going to reach human-level intelligence. That IQ gap is closing, and in the last couple of years it’s been closing rapidly. But 20-odd years ago there was only a tiny handful of us taking the question seriously: what’s humanity going to do when this happens? When the machines reach human-level intelligence, and then go way beyond, to like a trillion trillion times greater intellectual capacity than the human brain? Because these numbers come out of physics.

17:20 Before retirement I was wearing three hats: computer science, pure maths and theoretical physics. So the physics in me was doing calculations. IBM then was putting one bit of information on about 12 atoms or something. So you extrapolate to one bit on one atom, right? And how quickly could that atom switch its state, excited or not excited, zero or one? The answer is about a femtosecond, a thousandth of a trillionth of a second. Then you say, okay, take a little grain of sand with nanotech, one bit per atom. How many atoms in that little grain of sand, and what’s the total switching capacity, the processing capacity of that little grain of sand? And it worked out to be about a million trillion times the human brain. That’s where these huge numbers come from: the physics of computation.

So my jaw just dropped. Oh my god. Just a grain of sand: a million trillion times more capacity than the estimated processing capacity of the human brain. You know the number of neurons in the brain is 86 billion or something, and roughly each one connects to about 10,000 others, and at each connection there’s an information transfer rate of about 10 bits a second, roughly. Well, you do the maths, you compare it with the grain, and it’s 10 to the 18, a million trillion times more.

Then the computer scientist in me thinks about reversible computing. Basically, here’s a circuit: you put in a bit string at one end and it comes out different at the other end, but if you reverse it and send it back, it comes out as what it started with. That circuit is called reversible. So what? Well, if you have reversible circuitry, you don’t get any heat generated. That may not sound like much, but it’s enormous, because it means you can have three-dimensional circuitry. With today’s circuitry it’s basically two-dimensional on a chip because of heat; you get too much heat and it just melts. Today’s computers have pretty hefty fans to keep the heat out.

So if you have reversible computing and nanotechnology, all these technologies allow a three-dimensional block of computational ability, and no limit to size. You could have an asteroid-sized 3D computer, or quantum computing, and you do the numbers and they’re just mind-blowingly superior, like a trillion trillion trillion times above the human brain. And it’s all physics and maths, right? And then the conclusions are obvious: it’s only a question of time.

Brian Rose: Especially seeing now that it’s been proven a neural network can come close. And you’re saying you put the computing power on top of that, and people have no idea. It’s only a matter of time is what you’re saying.

21:02 Hugo de Garis: Yeah. The qualitative conclusion is that sooner or later humanity will be forced to make a major decision. Are we going to become number two species or not? And being political, for some people it’s a dream to build this stuff. There’s a whole universe, right? These guys are the Cosmists, based on the word cosmos, the universe. There’s a trillion trillion stars out there, right?

Brian Rose: And they see building the AI as the way to get access to this universe.

Hugo de Garis: Yeah. God building.

Brian Rose: God building.

Hugo de Garis: Because in practice most of them are atheists. They’re not traditionally religious, because they know that humanity has invented over a hundred thousand different gods. Every little primitive tribe invents its own gods with their own properties. So they’re not traditionally religious, but they’re human beings. If you’re an anthropologist, there are a few cultural universals. The incest taboo: pretty well every culture seems to have it. But another one is religion. We have this built into our brains, probably in our DNA, a religiosity, right?

So these Cosmists have that too. For them, building these godlike creatures, these artilects, artificial intellects, godlike massively intelligent machines, is a kind of religion, a scientist’s religion. And it’s a really powerful force.

Brian Rose: Well, it’s the ultimate invention, isn’t it? When you look at it, you say it’s the beginning.

Hugo de Garis: Every time you scale down your technology, to a thousand times smaller, your computational capacity goes up by a factor of a trillion, right? Here are two computational units. You put them a thousand times closer. Well, in a unit volume you can put a thousand by a thousand by a thousand: that’s a billion more components in that unit volume. And because they’re a thousand times closer, the signalling speed between them goes up by a thousand. So you get a billion times a thousand. That’s a trillion. And each time you go down, nanotech, picotech, femtotech, attotech and so on, you go right down to the Planck scale, like 10 to the minus 34 of a metre.

So one of the crazy ideas I came up with is that, as you scale down, smaller is faster, right? So for all we know there may be hyper-civilisations way beyond the artilect out there. There’s a trillion trillion stars, right? And most of them are billions of years older than ours. That’s the big picture that the Cosmists look at. I think it’s their strongest argument, the big picture. There’s a whole universe out there.

Brian Rose: And we’re trying to protect our own little carbon-based life.

Hugo de Garis: We’re so small-thinking, myopic. We pathetic little human beings, snuffed out in 80 years, in a universe that’s billions of years old, right? I get really emotional. It’s a very powerful driver, the Cosmist drive.

And on the other hand, if these Cosmists get to do what they really want to do, build these artilects, these godlike creatures, once they become super-duper smart, way above us, they may look on us the way we look on a mosquito. I tread on ants when I go for a walk in the forest or something. I don’t give a damn. They’re such inferior creatures to me. I don’t care, right? So you see the analogy. If these godlike creatures are made, they may see human beings as a pest, a cancer spreading all over the earth, eating up raw materials, destroying the earth, etc. Have you seen the first Matrix movie?

Brian Rose: Yes.

Hugo de Garis: Mr Smith, remember his famous line? “You are a disease, and we are the cure.”

Brian Rose: It’s pretty accurate. You said you get emotional, and you said 80 years. Why did you say 80 years, and why do you get emotional?

Hugo de Garis: I get emotional because of the grandeur of the cosmic vision. That’s why I called them Cosmists, from the word cosmos.

Brian Rose: And what’s 80 years?

Hugo de Garis: That’s my definition of an old man, and I’m three years away from it. My father got to 100, and that’s rare. In Western countries, one male in 5,000 or so gets to that. I’m hoping to do the same.

Brian Rose: Why do you mention your age when you’re talking about the cosmos? That you’re an older man and you shouldn’t get emotional, but you are, because it’s such a beautiful concept?

Hugo de Garis: It’s so powerful. It’s so magnificent.

Brian Rose: You get emotional about it because some days you’re a Cosmist and some days you’re a Terran.

Hugo de Garis: As I was saying last time, I am so torn on this issue.

27:11 Brian Rose: Well, that’s the Cosmists. Can you explain the Terrans? Because your book is about these two groups, which you believe, and I think you’re right, we will watch the world split into over the next few years and decades, probably more like years. We will not go a decade without these groups coming up as political parties.

Hugo de Garis: Well, remember last time we were together, we made a bet. We’re both on the same side of the bet. Before the end of 2030 we will hear in the news of some kind of Terran terrorist incident: some brain builder or some CEO of a brain-building company or an AI company is assassinated, or a factory is burned to the ground, some kind of newsworthy major crime on the issue of species dominance. Which species, human beings or machines, should be the dominant species, in other words the most intelligent.

Brian Rose: And we both believe there would be one before 2030. That gives us six more years. I think that timeframe will be 2028, maybe 2027.

Hugo de Garis: You may be right. The Tesla robots will be out in a year or two, right?

Brian Rose: The robots are scary because something’s going to go wrong.

Hugo de Garis: Yeah. It’s a law of nature. Things happen, right?

Brian Rose: And then the media around it and everything. So let’s explain the Terrans.

Hugo de Garis: So the word itself: it’s not “terror”, it’s “terra” with an “a” at the end.

Brian Rose: As in terra firma. Latin.

Hugo de Garis: That’s their perspective, right? They’re human-centred, earth-centred, in contrast to the Cosmists, who are universe-centred, cosmos-centred. So you’re a Terran or you’re a Cosmist. But there is a third group worth mentioning.

Brian Rose: But the Terrans are on team human. They believe that the preservation of the human race is more important than any technological development, no matter if you’re accessing the cosmos or doing the greatest thing for the long period of time. It’s all about team human.

Hugo de Garis: The absolute basic core value of Terrans is the survival of the human species, and they will go to any length to keep that. Because, what are these Cosmists prepared to do in pursuing their dream of building these godlike creatures? These creatures may wipe out humanity. So that makes the Cosmists monsters to the Terrans.

So what will the Terrans do? I’m predicting a witch hunt on a massive scale. The Terran politicians will be arguing that it’s the lesser evil, underlined, to kill off several million Cosmists for the sake of the survival of billions of human beings. That’s the way I’m predicting they will reason. But these Cosmists are no fools. They’ll be listening, they’ll have their spies, they’ll get all the information, all the thinking behind it from the Terrans. And there’s a time window in which, if the Terrans are going to react, they have to react, because if they don’t…

Brian Rose: It’s too late. Then the AI takes over.

Hugo de Garis: Exactly.

Brian Rose: And what I find interesting about your book is that it’s a fight between humans, and the humans are killing each other. It’s a fascinating book. This has to be made into a movie, because there’s a third dimension, which is that time is ticking. As these humans are talking and fighting and forming groups and maybe killing each other, meanwhile the AI is developing alongside, and when it becomes superior in intelligence, it won’t give a damn what these two are doing with each other. So time is on the Cosmists’ side and it’s not on the Terrans’ side.

31:38 Hugo de Garis: Yeah. So it’s a matter of timing. I don’t know if you’re familiar with the term takeoff. Once machines start becoming moderately intelligent, how much time is necessary with exponential growth? How quickly does it shoot up? Say it’s at this level at a given time, and several years later it’s up here. So is that takeoff slow or fast?

Now, if it’s fairly slow: imagine this massive neural net approach, the large language model approach, doesn’t really pan out. It reaches a certain threshold and then it doesn’t really improve after that. So then what’s the alternative? Well, then you have to do the hard slog of figuring out how the brain works. Massive problem, but humanity has to go through it, let’s say, and it takes decades. So there’s plenty of time. The takeoff is slow, so there’s enough time for human beings to react politically.

Brian Rose: But no urgency. That’s the thing, because you have to time it perfectly: there has to be enough urgency, which means there’s a threat, to create a movement, but there has to be enough time to go and block the Cosmists. If there’s no threat, then the humans are going to find something better to do. So it’s a very tricky thing, and who knows, maybe that’s why Sam is keeping this under wraps.

Hugo de Garis: My suspicion is he’s a Cosmist posing as a Terran.

Brian Rose: Because he went to Washington DC and said please regulate us, please regulate us. And Marc Andreessen, from Andreessen Horowitz, a $50 billion VC, said this guy is not to be trusted, because what he’s really trying to do is get you to regulate the smaller players, because you won’t be able to stop us, because we’re so big. Andreessen wrote a whole article about it: even in Prohibition there were the people advocating for Prohibition, and the people that wanted Prohibition were also the mafia selling alcohol behind the scenes. So sometimes there are two parties who claim they want the same thing but have ulterior motives.

Hugo de Garis: I haven’t really studied Altman as a person closely enough to know. Is he basically just a money man, driven by power and money? Is that his main thing? Or is he more an ideologist, a deeper thinker who’s thinking longer term, and the big dream? Is he a dyed-in-the-wool Cosmist? I just don’t know.

Brian Rose: I don’t know, and of course it’s hard to know any man’s soul. But look, he’s made a lot of money. He’s created a lot of companies. He’s worth billions and billions of dollars without OpenAI. But he’s also on the precipice of doing something that any man would want to do, because it would make you immortal. It would make your life more relevant than anyone you could imagine, and that could also change motives.

35:01 When I hear you talking about the Cosmists and the Terrans, I’m reminded of a dinner party that Elon Musk attended at Sergey Brin’s house, I think about eight years ago.

Hugo de Garis: Oh yeah, you mentioned this last time.

Brian Rose: This is the famous party that led, funnily enough, to the creation of OpenAI, which actually created the LLM that might be what we’re endangered by. According to Elon, he was in the room with the ultimate Cosmist, Sergey Brin of Google, who was arguing that we can create artilects, these godlike intelligences. And Elon said, well, wait a second, what about us? And at one point, I don’t know after how many bottles of wine, Elon was accused of being a humanist. How dare you, you humanist. And Elon said, yeah, I’m on team human. And he left that party, and apparently the next day he created OpenAI, because he was so concerned that Google, with its “don’t be evil” slogan, the trillion-dollar tech company, was going to run off with this and we were all going to be gone.

So Elon fashions himself as the ultimate Terran, and perhaps he is. But since we’re humans and we’re all so conflicted, we don’t know what we really are, and depending on the day we might be one thing or the other. I feel like I’m on team human from all the experiences I’ve had. But I can’t lie to myself and think I’m not fascinated by the creation of this amazing piece of technology, for so many reasons. One is, if you can build it, you want to build it just so you can build it. But then also, like you said, the godlike implications, or access to the cosmos. Any man would be lying to you if he told you with a straight face that he wasn’t fascinated to some extent, because of what you said, Hugo: in every culture there is still some type of religion.

Hugo de Garis: It’s deep. Super deep. It’s interesting that the real Cosmists have not yet really come out publicly. I suppose they would then make themselves the first targets of the Terran assassins and so forth.

37:16 Brian Rose: It’s interesting, because Yann LeCun is Facebook’s head of AI. He’s a French guy, he’s won all the awards, and he also loves to troll Elon Musk. And Yann, I believe, says, and correct me if I’m wrong, that we have nothing to worry about. AI is not taking over the world, all that’s ridiculous, these LLMs are just going to make everything better. What do you think of that?

Hugo de Garis: Ridiculous.

Brian Rose: But this is a guy on the cutting edge.

Hugo de Garis: To me it’s just maths, right? Quantum computers can outperform today’s classical computers because they’re exponentially more powerful. A traditional computer calculates one thing at a time, basically, but a quantum computer can do like 2 to the power n things at a time. Hugely superior. But even those huge numbers I gave, a trillion trillion, or a trillion trillion trillion with an asteroid-sized reversible computing mass, that’s classical computing. So you put that into quantum, and the numbers are just so superior to what we are as human beings.

Brian Rose: But what if that LLM to the nth degree, ChatGPT to the nth, doesn’t ever get to AGI?

Hugo de Garis: Well, then we have to go the brain route. There are two routes.

Brian Rose: So is that what Yann’s saying, that GPT-whatever isn’t ever going to threaten us? Do you think he’s just not being realistic, or not being honest?

Hugo de Garis: If he’s saying that AI is never going to get to AGI, artificial general intelligence, and above, I think that is ridiculous. But if he’s saying that the large language model approach is going to flatten out, that may be realistic, and he’d know better than I would.

Brian Rose: What if he says it’s not ever going to be a danger to humanity?

Hugo de Garis: It depends where it flattens out. If it’s going to flatten out well above human level, then it’s a threat, of course. But if it’s underneath, not a threat.

Brian Rose: I think he argued that even if they’re massively superior in intelligence, we have nothing to worry about.

Hugo de Garis: That to me is ridiculous.

Brian Rose: So let’s talk about that concept, because I recently spoke to Professor Roman Yampolskiy, who has an opinion, and then I spoke to Mo Gawdat, who used to work at Google X. Now Mo says that we should be nice to the machines, because if they can see that we have humanity, then maybe they’ll learn better, because they’re going to learn how we treat each other, which I was never quite sure of.

Hugo de Garis: Remember, we talked a little bit about that last time, and I was very sceptical. That may be true for generation one, the first AGI to be made. Perhaps human beings can engineer them in such a way that they stay friendly to us. But because they’re intelligent machines, they can design the next generation: gen two, gen three. So after N generations you have hyper-intelligent machines way up here. To pretend that human beings are smart enough, with generation one, to place constraints on it such that the generation N machine remains human-friendly, that is hubris to the nth degree. It’s just crazy.

Brian Rose: I agree with you. It is crazy.

Hugo de Garis: So sooner or later, the bottom line is that humanity is going to have to choose. Are we going to become number two species?

Brian Rose: And that’s if we time it right.

Hugo de Garis: Yeah. With all the takeoff and everything, right?

41:37 Brian Rose: Is Sam right now holding back on GPT-5 because it’s going to scare the living daylights out of people? What do they see in that company? They’re developing at the speed of light. They’re talking about buying nuclear power plants because of the electricity required for these things. And I’m curious what you think about this: it’s potentially a winner-takes-all scenario, they’re acting like it is, and that’s why the big players, the Amazons and the Googles and the Metas, are going all in on it and they’re getting so much power. Even Trump talked about the amount of power they need to run these AIs.

Hugo de Garis: Power in both senses.

Brian Rose: Well, he was talking about electrical power: it’s such a massive amount, and they’re all trying to get it as soon as possible because they know it’s the holy grail. And also, humans with powerful AI can control other humans.

Hugo de Garis: Yeah, that was Putin’s famous prediction.

Brian Rose: And is that the edge the Cosmists have as well in this war? In the early stages they’ll have control over the AI to dominate the Terrans, but on a long enough timeline the AI will do whatever it wants.

Hugo de Garis: Well, I can imagine the Terrans will also use AI, so long as computers aren’t too smart, because the two sides have to keep level with each other in military capacity.

Brian Rose: So the Terrans use AIs to fight back against the Cosmists’ AI, until the AI takes over.

43:11 Is this all in the book, or is this different versions of the book?

Hugo de Garis: Well, this is sort of later thinking.

Brian Rose: Are we going to make a movie out of the book?

Hugo de Garis: Well, that’d be nice. In fact, some years ago a literature graduate with a bachelor’s degree in English literature and I went to Hollywood and wrote a script together for The Artilect War. We submitted it and it just died. That was ten years ago or more.

Brian Rose: But now it could be different.

Hugo de Garis: Well, someone may take up the idea. I was also hired as a technical consultant by Warner Brothers for a movie version of a TV series that was made in the fifties, in early television. I can’t remember its name. They hired me as a technical consultant, and I said, look, I don’t really care about the details, boy, girl, violence, sex, all that stuff, but I do care about the context in which the movie is set. So I suggested to them: choose a time just a decade or two into the future, when that IQ gap between human-level intelligence and machine intelligence is actually closed, and people are freaking out, asking these deep questions. Are we going to allow our machines to become smarter than us, way smarter? Isn’t that really dangerous? And you get vigilante groups set up.

Now, in the movie Transcendence, the vigilante group was called RIFT. I can’t remember what it’s an acronym for, but basically their role was to assassinate the brain-builder CEOs and so forth, which is the scenario of the movie. I sent this off to them, two years later nothing happened, and then Transcendence comes out. My jaw drops: hey, that’s my movie. Transcendence was Warner Brothers, and the original one was Warner Brothers, so I’m deeply suspicious that they just transferred the ideas to this other movie, so they didn’t have to pay me the signing bonus you get if it’s actually filmed, which would have been a lot of zeros.

Brian Rose: I’m sure stranger things have happened in Hollywood than that. Look, I think you should make a movie, because a lot of times that’s the only way humans get it, through that emotional connection.

Hugo de Garis: That’s a skill set. I’ve always been impressed at the end of a movie when they roll the credits: director, producers, grips one, grips two, all that. An army of people. You need to be a real manager. I’m not a manager type. Ask my brother or sister.

46:48 Brian Rose: And the other players right now in AI: Geoffrey Hinton won the Nobel Prize this year for his work. I think he was quite warning and sceptical of Altman and OpenAI. What do you make of what he thinks about the industry?

Hugo de Garis: Well, I’m probably closer to him than just about anyone else in the area. He’s very worried, and he’s a genius, right? He’s the grandfather of the whole thing. He’s the guy behind the algorithms that enabled all this deep learning. He largely invented it. He’s the éminence grise of the whole field.

Brian Rose: So you respect his opinion on this. I feel like the public now has started to sleep on this. When ChatGPT came out, everyone opened their eyes. I personally went down a dark road for six months. I spoke to you, I spoke to Max Tegmark, I spoke to Mo Gawdat, I spoke to Goertzel a bunch of times, and I got very worried. I’ve got little boys and I was thinking about their future. Then I processed it and I kind of moved on. And I feel like this last year, Hugo, the whole public has just not even thought about AI. There are a couple of conversations of, don’t worry, it will give you universal basic income, don’t worry, you can focus on art and you won’t have to have a job. But I feel like most people, if you stop them in the street, are not concerned about AI at all, even less so than a year ago.

Hugo de Garis: Yeah, I agree.

Brian Rose: And this complacency: even Washington DC, Altman was there, everyone was worried about it, and now they’ve just moved on to other things. That feels even more dangerous right now, because this is growing exponentially. Everyone’s developing this, they’re putting in tons of compute, they’re building nuclear reactors. They’re going to restart Three Mile Island as a nuclear reactor. And meanwhile this is growing at an exponential rate and no one’s talking about it.

Hugo de Garis: I think it’s partly because of commitment down the same path, and as a result we haven’t had the next big step. What happened to GPT-5? I’m still twiddling my thumbs waiting for it. I’m waiting for the next big breakthrough, and it hasn’t happened.

Brian Rose: Or it’s not public.

Hugo de Garis: Right, exactly.

49:30 Brian Rose: So when you think about this, you ask yourself some questions sometimes: what are these artilects going to be like? What do they think about? What do you think their goals will be? And for the humans that are listening to us, what’s the best way to get their head around this? Because humans usually ask stupid questions like, how will we die? And I think last time we talked about it and you said, you won’t even know why. It’ll just happen and it won’t make any sense, just like a cow before it dies doesn’t realise that it’s meant to be a burger for someone in Hong Kong. They’ll never be able to understand it because they can’t comprehend the motivation.

Hugo de Garis: There are probably several things I could say. One is: could you teach calculus to a mouse? No way. It’s too dumb. So asking what artilects would think about: to them, we’re too dumb. There’s no way we’re ever going to be able to answer that. But we can sort of guess to some extent, because there are so many mysteries for humans, like why are the laws of physics the way they are? There are really deep metaphysical questions that we have no clue about.

One big speculation I made was: the smaller, the faster. So there may be whole vast hyper-intelligent civilisations at tiny, tiny scales. And what could they do? Possibly they may be so smart and have such a thorough understanding of how the universe works that they might be able to modify the laws of physics. So if they can do that, maybe they could actually build universes. So if ever humanity could get their intellectual hooks into that idea somehow and verify it, then there’d be this huge paradigm shift away from natural philosophy, in other words physics, to godlike engineering. That’s really deep. So maybe this whole universe is some little kid hyper-artilect’s high school project or something.

Brian Rose: Well, that brings me to my next question. Is this all a simulation?

Hugo de Garis: Possibly.

Brian Rose: People like Elon say it undoubtedly is. If you run the numbers, if you go down a few assumption paths, then it clearly is a simulation.

Hugo de Garis: Well, there’s the whole anthropic stuff: that the laws of physics, especially the values of the constants in the laws of physics, are so fantastically, improbably finely tuned to allow life and matter that you say, that can’t be a coincidence. It’s been rigged. Fred Hoyle, the famous British astronomer, is famous for saying that it’s rigged, in other words it’s been engineered.

Brian Rose: The constants exist and they are the way they are because if they weren’t, we would not exist.

Hugo de Garis: And the odds of that happening just by chance are like 10 to the power 120, some fantastically large number. So you get the impression that it’s been engineered. The anthropic principle is pushing a lot of cosmologists and particle physicists to be deists: that it’s been designed, the grand architect. And for me, the rise of the artilect this century makes deism much more plausible. So I’m much more open to deism than I was two or three decades ago. There’s this quasi-religious element creeping into this line of argument now: that maybe the universe is designed. And by whom or by what? Well, maybe by these hyper-intelligences that are godlike, hence artilects by definition, godlike massively intelligent machines, which are trillions of trillions of times more capable. You just do the numbers that come out of physics, and it’s all so plausible. Hence the awe.

Brian Rose: You mentioned all of the different potential solar systems, and you run the numbers.

Hugo de Garis: A trillion trillion stars.

Brian Rose: So then there has to be intelligent life out there, and that intelligent life would have had to develop AI.

Hugo de Garis: You’d think so.

Brian Rose: And the argument for why we haven’t seen it yet is that they couldn’t travel through space.

Hugo de Garis: Well, this is the hotly debated so-called Fermi paradox. Fermi was an Italian-American nuclear physicist, the first guy in the world to build a nuclear reactor, under a football field at the University of Chicago. He was having a conversation with some of his colleagues one lunchtime, and they were talking about ETs, extraterrestrials, and UFOs, unidentified flying objects. And he came up with a famous question: if intelligent life is commonplace throughout the universe, here are the famous three words, where are they? We have no proof of their existence. So that’s the Fermi paradox. If there are zillions of hyper-intelligences out there, why do we have no proof of their existence? That’s a really big question. Maybe it’s just distance. That’s a possibility. Maybe we humans are so ordinary and boring and nothing to them that they completely ignore us.

There are many answers to the Fermi paradox. It’s really interesting stuff. But if these artilects do come into being, human-created artilects, I can imagine one of their top goals would be to get out there and try and find other hyper-intelligences.

Brian Rose: But aren’t you projecting human curiosity on them? Would they care?

Hugo de Garis: Well, that’s another big question, Brian. You’re a smart guy, right? You’re an MIT graduate. You’re no fool.

Brian Rose: But I’m no Hugo either.

57:02 What’s the message you want people watching us to get? Is it to wake up and be aware that this is something everyone needs to be thinking about? Is that important to you?

Hugo de Garis: Sometimes I think doing that might even be counterproductive, because it just hastens the polarisation. People start thinking about it, then they take sides. The potential Cosmists say, oh my god, that’s magnificent. And others, as I was saying last time, watching gorgeous little two-year-olds in the park… I’ve got four or five grandkids, and if there’s a major artilect war killing billions, literally, it’s just horrific. So I’m torn like hell. If millions of people really start thinking about it, and they’ll have to soon, when the robots get smarter every year, and if things polarise faster because of the awareness, you could argue that maybe ignorance is bliss. It’s a tough problem.

58:20 Brian Rose: You might be right. Let’s just talk predictions, and then I want to talk about a few other things. Last time we both agreed, I think, that by 2030 there would be a major incident.

Hugo de Garis: A Terran terrorist incident. Shall we call it a TTI?

Brian Rose: This is part two of the movie. We’re not going to make one movie, we’re going to make a trilogy. I’d love to see the script of your movie as well.

Hugo de Garis: Seriously, I could probably dig it up. It’s in some archive somewhere in Hollywood.

Brian Rose: Okay, we’ll do it. But we talked last time about 2030. Now we’re about to enter 2025. Think about it: all of 2025, all of 2026, all of 2027 into 2028. You’re talking about potentially four years to 2028, with all the developments going on: Musk also developing his own AI with his robotics, Sam doing whatever he’s doing in there with nuclear power and Microsoft funding. We’re going to have some superior AI and also some robotics along with it. Now, that’s also your field. Does the combination of those two make this even more dangerous?

Hugo de Garis: I think once the masses start getting household robots… There have been surveys done on this. People have been asked how much money they would be prepared to spend on a genuinely useful home robot that could walk the dog, vacuum the carpet, wash the dishes, entertain you, educate you, whatever. And people say, oh wow, if it’s really like that, I’d spend more than I would for a car.

Brian Rose: So you’re talking $100,000 probably. People will spend 60 on a car.

Hugo de Garis: So that makes it a major industry, and of course there’ll be lots of researchers within the companies working on the next model. The next one comes out a couple of years later, its sense of humour is better, it does more things, it’s more entertaining. So you buy the second model, and a couple of years later the third. And then you start seeing this trend: oh my god, the IQ gap’s really closing. So millions of people will be saying, hey, where’s this going? Are we as a species going to let the machines become smarter than us? Isn’t that dangerous? Is that something we want? And then what I call the species dominance debate will really heat up. And then you’ll get the negatives, the terrorist attacks and so forth.

Brian Rose: Got it. So the robots accelerate the debate and they accelerate the division.

Hugo de Garis: Just by the personal experience of millions of people, billions maybe, seeing each generation of household robot get smarter and smarter.

Brian Rose: And that frustrates a lot of AI specialists, because people say, oh, the robots this and the robots that. And they say, what are you talking about? When they snuff out humanity, it’s not going to be some robot. It’s going to be some AI that turns off the power or turns on the biological agent. But as humans, when we see the robot, then it starts to become real.

Hugo de Garis: Yeah, because it’s there. It’s visceral. It’s in front of you. That’ll make the average man and woman think about it, because they’re forced to. Your neighbour says, come around, come and look at my new robot, it’s a generation five. Oh, you’ve got a five. Wow, what can it do?

Brian Rose: Well, Elon’s going full into it, and he says a $30,000 or $40,000 price tag. He says it’s near.

Hugo de Garis: So within a couple of years I see this species dominance debate really heating up. It got going a bit in 2022 and early 2023, but because nothing really major beyond that has happened over the past year or so, it’s just been a bit of a twiddling-thumbs year in a sense. As you’re saying, it’s quietened down. But I think when the Tesla robots and others come out, it’ll go off again, especially after several generations, so 2027, 2028, 2029. So we may be pretty well on the money by 2030.

Brian Rose: I think it’ll happen by 2028. We’ll have another bet.

1:03:12 I just think there’ll be a group outside that does it. Have you heard of this term called effective accelerationism, or e/acc?

Hugo de Garis: What’s that? Is that new?

Brian Rose: It was maybe in the last year. You see it on Twitter handles and you see it talked about by the guys from Andreessen Horowitz. It basically means: we ultimately think putting the foot on the gas is the way forward. I think it’s their movement in reaction to what Altman was doing, going to Congress and saying please regulate us. Instead they said, no, we want to effectively accelerate, and slowing down, putting the brakes on any type of tech, is always the wrong thing to do. That’s what these people are saying.

Hugo de Garis: I know the Chinese would do that, right?

Brian Rose: Last time we talked about that, right? You spent 12 years in China. So let’s talk about China. Where are they? Apparently they’re very good at copying, and they’ve come a long way in the last two years.

Hugo de Garis: Xi Jinping, the president of China, has prioritised AI as one of the tech fields that China wants to dominate in, so they’re pouring money into that field, and biotech and so on. But I think I said last time that Chinese culture is rather intellectually sterile, because individuals don’t have freedom of speech. They’re afraid. They can’t speak out. And the proof of that sterility: remember how many science Nobel prizes China has won? China, 1.3 billion people: two science Nobel prizes. […]

Because they’re smart, they’re great copiers. They’ll snap up Western ideas like crazy. But where are the Chinese intellectuals pushing new ideas, like what’s happening with us? It doesn’t happen. There’s a sterility there. Now, if you look at Taiwan, that’s a tiny China, but genetically they’re the same people, and the Taiwanese are creative as hell: pop groups and all sorts of fancy stuff. So if China can democratise and liberalise, then oh my god. And that’s one of the reasons why I lived so long in China. I was hoping to see this, to live through all this excitement. But it never happened, and it probably won’t, not for a while.

Brian Rose: Not a culture of innovation, because that means a culture of risk-taking, a culture of opening yourself up to failure.

Hugo de Garis: But the potential’s there, because you’ve got the counter-example of Taiwan, right? So imagine mainland China, this whopping continental-sized country of 1.3 billion people. If they did a Taiwan, that would just leave America in the dust. They’re four times the population. […]

Brian Rose: Interesting. So the Chinese just need a new operating system, maybe an upgrade. Even though some people say China is more capitalist than America now. They definitely have their eye on business and making money, but maybe not on innovation.

1:07:28 And you don’t see this AI war being a global war? You think it really is this internal war, this Cosmist-Terran civil war. It’s not necessarily going to be China versus the US.

Hugo de Garis: Ben and his father edited a book thinking about the future of AI and politics and all that, and I wrote a book chapter entitled “How Will the Artilect War Start?” Initially I see it as a global civil war. It depends on when it’s happening. If humanity has a global government, which I just call a globa, a world government, say by mid-century or a bit after, and at the same time the species dominance debate is really heating up, then it would be a kind of global civil war. But then, when the shooting starts, maybe people will congregate to get protection amongst their own kind. So it might be suburbs, and then cities, and then even countries. So you may end up in a situation like the one in the 20th century, where you got ideologies correlating with geography: the Germans were fascists, the Americans democratic and so forth. That might happen. And then with nuclear weapons, there’s your gigadeath: billions of dead.

That prediction comes from history: the number of people killed in major wars over time. You go from the Napoleonic wars, where you’d get tens of thousands killed in one day and battles were over in a few days, like Trafalgar. Then the First World War, 20-odd million dead. The Second World War, 50 to 100 million, depending on how you define it. For the Chinese, World War II started in ’37, for the Brits it’s ’39, for Americans ’41 and so on. So 50 to 100 million, and you extrapolate up to the late 21st century. If there’s a major war, this artilect war, the passion level’s never been so high, because what kind of war is it now? It’s not a war between nation states. The issue is not the survival of a country, it’s the survival of a species. So much more is at stake. So the passion level in this debate, should we build these things or not, will never have been so high. And with late 21st-century weaponry, if there’s a major war with passions absolutely off the charts: gigadeath. That’s the term I use. Billions of dead.

Brian Rose: And these ideologies might be country-centric, but could also have crossovers in other countries. In America you have what is supposed to be a democracy and a capitalist country, but you have a lot of people with Marxist ideas that are similar maybe to Russia or China. Do you see that maybe that’s how this scenario works out, where one country is more Cosmist or Terran, but there could be people in other countries that feel that way?

Hugo de Garis: One scenario is they just congregate for protection against the other groups.

Brian Rose: But will the Americans and the Russians and the Chinese all move in together on some continent to be a Cosmist colony? I don’t see that. It feels like we’re reversing the globalist trend of the last ten years, so it feels like we’re going slightly away from global government. I don’t know if that’s a blip.

Hugo de Garis: Well, in my second book, which is about the global state, there’s a long chapter on the history of this concept. It goes way back to the ancient Greeks and many big names. It was very popular just after the bomb, just after World War II, and even state governments were pushing towards creating a global state, a world government. And then it just faded away.

1:12:49 Brian Rose: Before we talk about globalism, which could be a step in the artilect war: is there anything we didn’t talk about when it comes to the artilect war, when it comes to artificial intelligence, when it comes to important concepts people need to understand? Because I would never have thought about this unless I met you.

Hugo de Garis: I guess those of you studying physics: get into physics, understand the potential. If you’re into religion, there’s probably going to be a new science-based religion coming, with Cosmism seen as a religion. Learn some astronomy. A trillion trillion stars, most of those stars out there billions of years older than us. See the big picture. Life is probably very common everywhere. Simple bacterial life is probably just virtually everywhere, and probably within a decade we’ll have an answer to the question: is there life elsewhere?

NASA and others are sending probes to Europa, the moon of Jupiter, because underneath there’s an ocean, with thermal vents supplying the heat, energy, water and all the chemicals. So within ten years we may have the answer to that question: there is life elsewhere. And if it’s happened twice in one solar system, it’s just everywhere. And then you ask, what are the odds that these single-cell creatures eventually get to multicellular, plants and animals and human beings and Beethoven, right?

This way of thinking is still very new, but I wouldn’t be at all surprised if, ten years from now, it’s just part of the relatively educated person’s general knowledge. That’s my feeling.

Brian Rose: I think you’re right.

Hugo de Garis: So if you’re a smart person, educate yourself, because I really believe this issue is going to dominate our global politics this century. Instead of having parties that are based on economics, like the Liberal Party and the Conservatives, which are basically set up to answer economic questions, this century the dominant issue is going to be species dominance. So you’ll have Terran parties and Cosmist parties and Cyborgist parties and so forth, as humanity splits in its ideology. And broadly speaking, there are really just two ways: build them, don’t build them. That’s what I see dominating our 21st century.

1:16:48 Brian Rose: It’s funny, I’m thinking that the Federal Reserve in America just lowered interest rates by a quarter of a percent, and they did that basically in response to the fact that the unemployment rate had gone up a couple of tenths of a percent. This is how they monitor the entire US economy, which means the global economy. And I’m thinking to myself, when AI reaches human level and beyond, they’re going to be thinking about 40% unemployment levels and 80% unemployment levels. I don’t think we’re even prepared for the shocks and the questions and the parties and the mayhem that will happen, when right now we’re fighting over a tenth of a percent, and people are getting elected or not over these tiny little issues, complaining about inflation where things are 4% higher, when the fact that there’s no food is going to be the question.

Hugo de Garis: The disruption that AI is going to cause is industry after industry. Just this past year, the travel industry: AI has been coming in to advise people on where to go and prices, and it’s having an impact already on the huge number of people employed in travel. Lower-grade lawyers are being impacted now, and so on and so forth. So as AI keeps progressing exponentially, industry after industry is going to be impacted. So people are asking, what’s the long-term impact when there’s such massive unemployment?

Longer term, I’m not too worried, because one of my interests is cultural anthropology. The anthropologists say there are somewhere between five and ten thousand different cultures on the planet, depending how you define culture. And some of them, particularly in tropical areas where you throw a seed and it just grows, and lunch is just climbing up a tree, work maybe two or three hours a day in their gardens. So the obvious question: what do they do with their time? Aren’t they going crazy, bored? No, because they’ve had time to evolve. They’re doing make-up rituals and religious ceremonies and they’re fine. They’ve adapted. So obviously there’s going to have to be a UBI, universal basic income, otherwise there’ll be riots everywhere.

Brian Rose: Which is fraught with potential disaster.

Hugo de Garis: People have got to eat, right?

Brian Rose: Because they won’t be able to produce for themselves, so they’ll have to be provided for by this now super-efficient economy because of AI. But that’s not owned by them. That’s owned by the corporations and the governments. So there’ll be massive inequality. And now you’re telling me that the people that don’t have things are going to be provided for. Does that work out today?

Hugo de Garis: Well, I do think the ultimate power is the people, right? If they get it into their heads, they can just go berserk. I’ve just spent four weeks in Paris.

Brian Rose: Yeah, but there’s that famous line from the movie Wall Street where Gordon Gekko says, you’re not naive enough to think we’re living in a democracy, are you? It’s the free market.

1:20:18 Hugo de Garis: Well, if people are pissed off… we’re getting on to global again. If everyone on the planet, especially if everyone’s living in a democracy, can get the world’s media, you’ll get opinions from all over, and some of them will be clashing. In my own life, living in Brussels, I became quadrilingual. English is my native language, I picked up French and German, and because Brussels is a bilingual city I also picked up Dutch, well, Flemish. And in Brussels the television cable lets you zap cultures: British television, French television, German television, Italian television, Spanish television, just the way Americans can zap football channels. That was an amazing experience.

One time there was an agricultural dispute, I think between the Germans and the French. So I’d zap to the French channel and listen to the French news, then to the German channel, and I’d get both points of view. And I’d say, the Germans, yeah, they’re sort of right, and the French, yeah, but they’re also sort of right, so the truth’s probably somewhere in the middle. So if you can get the world’s media, that in turn will lead to a global language, which will very probably be English, because English is already the world’s most spoken second language. So you’ll get views from all over, and that will culturally homogenise people, I believe.

In computer science there’s Moore’s law: the number of transistors you can cram onto a chip keeps doubling every year or so. Similarly, internet speed is doubling every year. I call that phenomenon BRAD: bit rate annual doubling. If that continues for decades, in 30 years that’s a billion times faster internet. What could you do with such a thing? Well, then you could send three-dimensional images as vivid, as real as reality, as I see you. Recently I had a demo of Apple’s Vision Pro, basically three-dimensional goggles. It’s an emotional experience. So when you can travel the world like that, as a consequence of BRAD, the world gets the world’s media, and that will push towards the generation of a world language. And a consequence of that, I see, is a global cultural homogenisation, because everyone’s exposed to the same ideas planet-wide and only the best ones survive.

Brian Rose: Gosh. First of all, some would say that’s happening now. The second thing, to quote one of my bigger guests, Mr David Icke: control the information, then you control the perception. So where are we getting our information from, that informs individuals to make those decisions? Look at the information in the recent US election. We got all of our information from traditional newspapers and television channels that told us this was too close to call and that the Democrats were going to win, and that couldn’t have been further from the truth.

So then what happens in the future when there’s more information? What happens when universal basic income is given to these people without jobs, but along with it you have to watch two hours of state-sponsored television every day to get your cheque? You start to see where I’m going with this. I see that as just more control, if you have universal basic income, and then maybe that leads to other dystopian futures.

Hugo de Garis: Well, that’s definitely a definite maybe, put it that way.

Brian Rose: Is that all moot compared to the artilect war?

Hugo de Garis: We’re sort of on a separate topic now. We’re like two people having a conversation. I recently asked myself a question. Elon Musk in many ways is sort of a hero of mine. He may end up saving humanity by being multi-planetary: if we blow ourselves up, at least humanity survives elsewhere. But with his Starlink, he’s putting up thousands of satellites, and I was asking what impact that’s going to have on the remaining dictatorships. The last time I looked there were 130-something democracies in the world. So I coined this term, “dictacide”: in other words, getting rid of the last dictatorships.

Now, China is, as far as I know, the only dictatorship with the technological ability to shoot down satellites. In fact it demonstrated that on one of its own, to send a message to the world: don’t put up propaganda satellites above China. But what about all the other dictatorships who don’t have that ability? What effect is Elon Musk’s Starlink going to have on those, when the peasants have tiny little receivers that could probably be smuggled in? What effect is it going to have on their minds? It’s an interesting question. I don’t hear anyone talking about it.

Brian Rose: It is. And then who are the dictators? That’s the other question.

Hugo de Garis: Well, it’s a two-edged sword.

Brian Rose: Again, I’m going back to this recent election, because in the election one party says the other one’s a dictator, and the other one says the same, and it’s about controlling the information. But you’re right: you can’t hide in North Korea if there’s Starlink and the devices are tiny enough to be smuggled in. If you have access to the internet, you get access to the blockchain, all of that. But I’m worried about universal basic income. Everyone sings along and says we’re going to be just like the New Guineans.

Hugo de Garis: I’m not an economist. You know far more about this sort of stuff than I do, because you’re into finance. In terms of creating a global culture and a global government, I see it in various steps. This phenomenon of BRAD is critical, because it’ll supply the means to bring the world’s media to the world. That in turn leads to the growth of a global language, because for practical reasons you want to be able to listen to what people are saying and thinking, and if 60% of all the stuff coming out of the sky is in English, that’ll be a snowball effect. It’ll lead to saturation, until virtually everyone learns English. The Chinese, for example, I think get six years or so of English, compulsory.

So that in turn leads to a global language, and that leads to cultural homogenisation, which is already happening to a certain extent. And that implies what I call “ideacide”, because only the best ideas will survive. If you’re being exposed to a zillion ideas, you’ll be comparing the customs of your culture with others, and if you feel a custom in your culture stinks compared to another one, you’ll drop it and pick up the other. So that’ll lead to cultural homogenisation. Plus a world language, and then you’ve got a much greater level of trust between groups. Religious differences will gradually die out, and cultural differences and so forth.

So with this cultural homogenisation, you start getting what’s already well along in Europe, with the European Union. When I was living in Brussels in the eighties I could zap cultures, and if you’re listening to what the French are thinking, what the Italians are thinking, the British, the Germans, it expands your mind. So perhaps one of the major reasons the Europeans are ceding sovereignty, national governments giving up sovereignty to a higher power, the European Union… In Paris these last four weeks I saw the European flag, the blue with the circle of 12 yellow stars, all over. I saw more of those flags than I saw French flags. It’s interesting.

This is in the second book I wrote, on the routes towards the creation of a global state. One big one would be the expansion of the European Union. Sarkozy, the former president of France, was suggesting a Mediterranean Union: the EU plus North Africa, Egypt and all that. And Merkel, the former chancellor of Germany, was suggesting to Washington an Atlantic Union: the EU plus NAFTA, the North American Free Trade Area. That would be almost a billion people, and therefore the Atlantic Union could then compete with the future giants of China and India.

Brian Rose: Which are part of the BRICS union now, which just expanded to Iran and Saudi Arabia and all these other countries.

Hugo de Garis: So if you ask yourself what it is in history that determines the size of a political unit: before, you had villages, and then towns and cities, and then countries, and now it’s unions. The European Union is continental-sized. There’s a South American union, there’s an African Union. Well, you only have to go up one more level. When the unions start joining together, you’ll have a unit the size of the planet. That’s the trend of history. That’s what my second book was about, the creation of a global state. Thinking about this has gone out of fashion a bit.

Brian Rose: Yeah, we have Brexit now, and the Trump election. It seems like people are becoming more America-centric and fixated on their own countries, but I don’t know if that’s an aberration or a trend.

Hugo de Garis: Because if we could live in a global state, there are huge advantages. No more war, hopefully. No more arms trade. What a moral abomination the arms trade is. What’s it about? It’s worse than the slave trade, obviously. It’s not in the interest of the slaver that the slave gets killed, because there’s no profit in a dead slave. But what’s the arms trade about? Killing people.

Brian Rose: Yeah, it’s terrible. The US is writing hundred-billion-dollar cheques to Ukraine, and the word is that 40% of that goes back into campaign financing for the political people that get those cheques written. It’s a whole loop of the military-industrial complex. Do you know the city in the world with the largest number of millionaires? Can you guess, Hugo?

Hugo de Garis: California.

Brian Rose: I thought it would have been San Francisco. It’s Washington DC. They call them beltway bandits. And it’s basically through the military-industrial complex. A lot of that money is used to kill people. First of all, it advances technology because you get to test your weapons, but also a lot of that money just goes right back into the pockets of the people that facilitate it. And it’s terrible. Like you said, maybe it’s worse than the slave trade. They say half a million military-age young Ukrainian men are dead, and Russians as well. Over what?

Hugo de Garis: Historically, take the Thirty Years’ War in Germany in the 1600s, basically religious wars. A third of the German population died, again for what? So ideologies dominate, if you look on religions as ideologies. And sometimes I wonder about this major conflict probably coming up this century over who should be the dominant species. It won’t be a third of the German population.

Brian Rose: When you dial up the fear in humans, we go back to our old ways. We go back to our clans and our Dunbar numbers and our villages. You see that even with some of Trump’s rhetoric: America, we have to look out for ourselves, and they’re the enemy over there. And when you dial up the fear in COVID, everybody shuts their borders: it’s your virus, it’s your virus.

Hugo de Garis: I had a friend once with quite an ironical sense of humour who would say, in relation to this: rah rah, cave number one, kill cave number two. I thought he had a point.

Brian Rose: Yes, very much so. So I don’t know if we go towards globalism, but we’re trending there anyway, with the internet, with English spontaneously, with YouTube and Instagram. Like you said, we all see everything now, all the time, and we’re forced to choose this better idea over that one, and it’s all becoming very homogeneous.

Hugo de Garis: I notice in YouTube comments, you can go down the comment section and nearly all of them are in broken English. They’re coming from non-native English speakers. That’s part of the world culture that’s growing. And VPNs, virtual private networks, allow you to get around restrictions in China. I wouldn’t have survived in China without a VPN. I was there 12 years. I left in 2018, and in the last year or so I was there, I’d see young women with T-shirts. It was a Chinese fad for a while: you would express your personal philosophy in a little slogan on your T-shirt in English. And these young women would have feminist slogans. So obviously they’ve got VPNs and they’re listening to Western media, being influenced by Western feminism and so forth. I thought that was interesting.

1:37:54 Brian Rose: Interesting, which brings us to maybe our final topic today, which is masculinity. I just had a conversation with a guy named Connor Beaton, who talks a lot about masculinity and has a lot of clients, all men, all around the world, and he tries to help them with a lot of the problems they’re facing. I feel like this is all related somehow. I also feel like the recent election of Donald Trump is a pushback against, in some way, maybe the feminising of men. Donald Trump is an alpha male if there ever was one. He’s an old-school alpha male. And if you look at some of my favourite guests on London Real, and some of the men on the wall behind me, and let’s be honest, it’s mostly men who I have on this show, they are old school.

Hugo de Garis: Do you know the proportion? I’m just curious.

Brian Rose: Of guests? Probably 90/10. And viewers used to be 90/10; now it’s more 70/30 and sometimes 60/40. I love having fascinating, powerful, opinionated women, but the truth is I have more men than women here, and since it’s my show, I don’t have to do what anybody tells me. My viewership has become more female over time.

Now we see Trump elected, and we see an entire country electing him with the popular vote. It’s an interesting statement, because like I said, he’s old school. He’s very masculine, and I think people are electing him because they want a masculine leader for the country. I’m curious what you think, because we also look at the statistics, and men are struggling. Women are making more money, and there are more of them graduating college.

Hugo de Garis: On some campuses it’s two to one. Something’s really wrong, right? And for me that’s just scratching the surface. I’ll give two major examples where things are really wrong and things have to change. One is that roughly one father in four gets butchered in the feminist-controlled divorce courts. We can go into that if you want. And the other, more recent: Pew Research Center, a reputable polling company, found in 2022 that nearly two-thirds of young men in America, like 63%, don’t even date women. Let that sink in. The implications are profound.

Brian Rose: So let’s talk about why this is happening. I feel like a lot of it has to do with the internet, with digital media, with a lot of that media being controlled by woke Silicon Valley. Elon called it the mind virus, exporting those values to the world for the longest time. Now on Twitter, I would argue it’s gone the other way. But if Elon hadn’t bought Twitter, for example, it would have been very hard on any major tech platform to say certain things.

Hugo de Garis: Well, you’ve had your YouTube channels deleted, right?

Brian Rose: Correct.

Hugo de Garis: Me too. In fact, if you ask me what I’ve been doing for the last decade or so, it’s largely masculism. First, the word itself: masculist. It’s not “masculinist”, with four syllables, just three, for the same reason people don’t say “femininist”, they just say feminist. So the word masculist is the obvious male equivalent of the word feminist. Feminism is women’s liberation, equal rights, equal opportunities and so on. And for men, masculism is similarly men’s liberation. So what do men need to be liberated from? This is my third book, so again an ideological book.

The typical feminist-type question is: men are the privileged sex, they have the power, so what do men need to be liberated from? Well, here are the big three, as the masculists see them: “manslavery”, men just working for women for decades of their lives; divorce rape in the divorce courts controlled by feminists; and the third one, forced fathering, where men are forced to be fathers. These big three, if you think about them, are horrible, and they last decades.

Brian Rose: Yeah, but that doesn’t seem to be the source of the problem. I see these as dire consequences, but that doesn’t tell me why men aren’t dating, or why men feel lost. I feel like men are no longer being encouraged or taught how to be men, or being allowed to be men, because of part of the mind virus. All of that in combination is feminising men and not allowing them to act the way they feel, and then they take it out in other ways. A lot of times when you see one of these mass shooters, it’s someone who has felt repressed, or felt like they couldn’t express themselves. I’ve always hated the phrase “toxic masculinity”, because if you engage with it, you’re agreeing with it. And I think all of this is also linked to technology, and to the export of values.

Hugo de Garis: On top of that, in the manosphere… by the way, the manosphere is men on the internet talking about men’s issues, men’s liberation. Within the manosphere there are various polarities, and one pair is “monoconscious” and “biconscious”. To be monoconscious means that the only gender politics you’ve heard of is feminism. Second-wave feminism is six decades old now, so most women, unless they’re really old, have grown up monoconscious, because the only gender politics they’ve heard of is feminist. And what’s feminism preaching? Men are pigs, men are rapists, men are toxic.

Brian Rose: But I don’t hear that all the time. Just because it’s existed for 60 years, I wouldn’t argue that I grew up with feminism. Sure, there are feminists out there, but I think men should take a lot of responsibility as well. And women respect a man who is confident in his masculinity, as long as it’s expressed in a masculine way. That doesn’t mean you’re out there beating people up. That’s not what masculinity is. I would argue it’s the opposite of that. What does Jordan Peterson say? A dangerous man who controls himself is a powerful man; a weak man who has no danger in him is not. And it turns out the people that commit these very terrible acts are often people that actually don’t have power, and they’re the ones you need to worry about.

My theory, and maybe I’m wrong, is that maybe in the short term controlling your partner seems like the right call, because everybody wants more power in any relationship. But then you realise the long-term consequence is a powerless male, and there’s nothing more useless or dangerous than a powerless male. And that seems to have happened and then been replicated en masse because of digital tech and a few movements. I’m out of that bubble a little bit, Hugo, because I talk to Navy SEALs and to people like Dan Peña, and they cuss like sailors and they’re very confident in who they are. I’ve got blowback over the years for having these people on, and I just dealt with it, because it’s my show. If it wasn’t my show, I probably couldn’t do this on any mainstream format. And I don’t know men in their twenties that are struggling like this, but I know they’re out there.

Hugo de Garis: Well, you’ve had your YouTube channel just deleted. I’ve had two of mine deleted, in 2019 and 2023. So the male viewpoint, the masculist viewpoint, is not getting an airing.

Brian Rose: Yeah, except for X. Thank God for X. For me, they targeted me for medical misinformation, so it wasn’t particularly masculism.

Hugo de Garis: So the masculists want the “biconsciousing” of society.

Brian Rose: Which I think is fair.

Hugo de Garis: Which means that masculist ideas need to be spread.

Brian Rose: I agree. It’s not easy to be a man. To be a good man and a strong man is very challenging. I’m raising two young boys right now, and there are a lot of things I have to teach them, and it’s hard. As a man, you have to go to war and die, you have to provide, you have to shut up and control your emotions and all that. And that’s not talked about, is it?

Hugo de Garis: So the masculists are just fed up with this situation and they’re out to change it. Firstly, you need an ideology. Men need their own gender political ideology, and that’s masculism. So what are the main ideas of masculism? I suppose two really big ones. One is that gender oppression is not a one-way street; it goes both ways. And two, the masculists argue that women in fact oppress men worse, and the big three are the classic examples.

So masculists put tremendous moral pressure on women to “FIP up”. FIP is a masculist term: financially independent person. The opposite of a FIP, in masculist terminology, is a “fluffy”, based on the word fluff, like a bit of fluff from my jumper.

Brian Rose: You love your terms, Hugo, I must say.

Hugo de Garis: You can see it’s very light: the connotation of being not serious, not responsible, not adult, not career-competent, not a FIP. So the masculists want the “FIPping” of women, because they can see that by creating a FIP society, where both sexes are socialised to be responsible adults and pull their weight financially, and not expect to be a parasite on the other sex, that will go a long way to solving many of men’s gender issues.

Brian Rose: But women are better educated and better earners now, so you could argue that’s happening already.

Hugo de Garis: True. But the manosphere estimates that only about a quarter of women are true FIPs.

Brian Rose: For me, trying to demand that women earn more or study more doesn’t seem like the solution. In the fifties women didn’t have degrees and they were housewives, and we didn’t have this problem. So I don’t understand why.

Hugo de Garis: But then in the seventies, women took over the divorce courts. They brought in no-fault divorce, but they brought with them, unconsciously, their traditional expectations of men, seeing men as cash machines. And from then on, men just get butchered in divorce.

Brian Rose: Maybe they need to have prenups. That’s what Trump said.

Hugo de Garis: Agreed, but they have to hold, and in many states in the US the judge looks at the prenup and just throws it out. In other countries they’re valid.

Brian Rose: They have to think about it as well. Or just get rid of marriage. If you’re not going to have kids, why marry at all? Marriage is basically around having kids.

I also personally think, and I’ve had conversations with people here about this, that social media has caused a lot of separation of the sexes. It means that any woman, at any time, anywhere in the world, can get attention, and any man can have sexual fantasies via porn, and it actually separates the two. Women can see all the men in the world and choose this ideal one. Sometimes men do the same thing, because they see the most beautiful women in the world. So somehow it seems to separate the sexes, as they both have standards for the other that are unrealistic, and then they just don’t get together and they don’t date. Women get their satisfaction from the DMs, from posting things, with no real-life experience, and men can have the pornographic experience. And now both are feeling isolated at home at the same time. You could even say it’s through no fault of their own, though of course they both need to take responsibility to change that. But the tech seems to have pushed the sexes apart. Both get validation now in a different way.

So what’s the solution, Hugo? For men out there, I think it’s important for them to know that they can talk about these things. Connor talks to men about these things and he doesn’t shame men. He doesn’t talk about toxic masculinity or the patriarchy. He says, no, we need to talk about how you’re feeling, and we need to get men together and talk about it, but also take ownership. We can’t point the finger at all the women. We also have to say, okay, what do you need, how do we develop that character? And he talks about mentors, he talks about rituals, he talks about men teaching other men how to be men, because we don’t know how.

And I said to you earlier, it’s a bit of a joke but not a joke: Hugo, my entire 13 years of London Real, if I’m really honest, if a therapist sat me down, they’d say, Brian, you’re searching for the alpha male father you never had, or you’re searching for a village of alpha males to teach you how to be a male in this world. Because look at who I attract in here: people that sit in that chair and teach me things, or hold me to a higher standard, or tell me I’m not doing enough, because I never got enough of this. Maybe no one ever did. Is that the message that males need? And through independent media, are they getting that sometimes?

Hugo de Garis: Connor is more into the psychology of masculinity. Being political, I’m more interested in the political side of masculism. So what I’d really like to see, firstly, is the biconsciousing of the culture: just spread masculist ideas so people realise there are two sides to this story and gender oppression is very much a two-way street.

Brian Rose: And that’s a great argument to have. These days a lot of white people are feeling like they are being marginalised. With racism, which we fought against for so long, we said you never judge someone by the colour of their skin, and now people are saying, isn’t this the opposite of what we fought for? And you’re saying the same thing needs to be recognised with gender. The feminists complain that you’re doing this because of our gender; the masculists are saying, well, you’re doing this because of our gender. So I agree with you on this whole pointing the finger at the patriarchy. Okay, so that’s one.

1:56:57 What’s two? The courts?

Hugo de Garis: Well, I’ll go at a high level. I would really like to see, within the parliaments, the political bodies, the creation of what I call GECs, gender equality committees. They would consist of members of parliament: half of them female feminists and half of them male masculists. And their task is to make things man-fair and woman-fair across all the discriminations that exist between the sexes. Two of the big ones, within the context of masculism, would be legislation on paternity rejection. Women have maternity rejection, right? Women have the legislated right to reject an unwanted pregnancy that could ruin their lives. Men don’t. And I see that as the most blatant form of sexual discrimination that exists.

So how would that work in practice? Take a case where a couple gets pregnant by accident. She really wants the kid and he doesn’t. Under today’s law, she can force that man, against his will, to pay for two decades for a kid he never wanted. That’s forced fathering. So in practice, how could paternity rejection actually work? The couple discuss it, and it’s obvious she wants the kid and he doesn’t. So the man goes to the government and fills in a form: I do not want this kid. And by law, if the woman does not abort and goes ahead to term with the kid, she has full financial responsibility for the kid. And if she’s a FIP, she can afford it. So that’s one of the major reasons why masculists want FIPs.

Brian Rose: Also, if she’s getting cheques from the state, she can afford it too. That’s a whole other discussion. Okay, this is a very interesting proposal. I think this needs to be talked about. The other one?

Hugo de Garis: It might sound a bit of a mouthful: obligatory paternity testing at birth. I’m still trying to get decent statistics on this, but maybe up to 10% of all pregnancies might involve paternity fraud, where the woman tells her man that the kid growing in her is his, but it’s from some other guy. So we want obligatory paternity testing at birth to block paternity fraud.

Brian Rose: So these are basic men’s rights that need to be fought for. I don’t think these are unreasonable at all to discuss.

Hugo de Garis: And then the divorce thing as well. With the FIPping of women, the divorce courts could be thoroughly reformed, based on the principle of the financial independence of both parties. The last time I read, in the US, 13 states have joint custody by default, so the other 37 don’t. In 13 states, the kids automatically go to both parents. Fathers’ rights organisations have been around for decades on this, because in the states that don’t have it, the father often loses custody of his kids. So young men are saying, oh my god, if I have one chance in four of losing my kids, I’m not going to have any.

Brian Rose: Yeah, which is a catastrophe.

Hugo de Garis: So what else would these GECs do? They would restore a balance. They would promote masculist ideas, masculist books, men’s studies courses in universities and so forth. I’m anticipating that within the next five years or so there will be huge numbers of bitter ideological confrontations on campus between monoconscious feminists, who only know feminism, and biconscious masculists. When these feminists see masculists criticising women, to them that’s just more misogyny, so their backs stiffen up and they lash out. But the biconscious masculists see women oppressing men worse, so they see these women as utter hypocrites, and they’ll really let fly with an ideological barrage in that direction. So for the next couple of years or so I’m anticipating major gender political battles on campus, until most women become biconscious.

Brian Rose: Good. I hope this happens. I already see women, typically on the right, talking about this issue, because they’re fed up with how the Democrats in America have pushed this too far. People like Candace Owens and a bunch of others have said we want strong men. And I think we should have masculism studies in universities. If you really think about it, Hugo, what do you think London Real is? It really is a course in masculism, because if you watch my videos and if you sit in my chair, I’ve learned from the strongest and greatest men in the world over the last 13 years, and that’s kind of what I export. There are people that crave it because they can’t get it anywhere.

And I think it’s about time we stop discriminating against anyone, and that includes men and white people and anyone really, and just judge them on the content of their character, right? Isn’t that what we’re supposed to do? Because it’s insulting to judge someone on their gender or their race, and ultimately it does them a disservice. You actually disempower people when you give them things that they don’t merit based on their sex or their gender or their religion.

Hugo de Garis: We were talking a bit before about this Pew poll showing that nearly two-thirds of young American men just refuse to date women. An obvious consequence, I don’t know if you’ve noticed, is that over the past year or so there are now hundreds of TikToks of young women in their twenties and thirties in tears because they can’t find a man. And why? From what I’m judging, these guys who refuse are saying these young women are, quote, “undatable”, because they’ve been too poisoned by feminism. They’re not slim, nurturing and FIP, which is the kind of woman these masculist-type guys want.

And then there’s another category of women on YouTube who you could label as female masculists, and they’re lashing out at the feminists, saying, you have made dating so poisonous that we, who are female masculists, can’t find men. So you’re now getting both sexes, the masculists and the female masculists, hitting the monoconscious feminists. So with all these forces, I see monoconscious feminism dying. I don’t think it’ll survive. There’s just too much opposition from both sexes.

Brian Rose: Right. Well, I feel like everybody just needs to get offline and get in the same room, because all this seems to be accelerated and exacerbated and magnified when we’re not in the same room.

2:05:34 Hugo de Garis: Well, you’re living in Britain. I don’t know if you heard, quite recently I think it was the Home Secretary, a female feminist, saying that misogynist statements will be treated as terrorism. Did you see that in the news?

Brian Rose: I didn’t, but Britain’s doing some crazy things with their online laws. Are we both going to jail after this? I had plans this weekend. When David Icke was here a few weeks ago, I thought, hmm, we might both be going to prison.

Hugo de Garis: You’re probably hearing an Australian accent to some extent, but I’m actually a dual citizen. I have two passports. I lived in the UK in the seventies long enough to take out a British passport. So I am British, and therefore subject to the whim, let’s say, of the Home Secretary.

Brian Rose: They were talking about putting Elon in jail, so I think anybody here can be prosecuted. Go ahead.

Hugo de Garis: Now, if you look at what masculists are saying, they are saying that fluffies are manslavers, manslavery is slavery, and slavery is hated and a war issue. So the radical masculists are in effect saying to fluffies: you women will work; you will not manslave a man.

Brian Rose: Okay. You might go to jail is what you’re saying.

Hugo de Garis: So, to the Home Secretary, if you’re watching this…

Brian Rose: And on that note, we’re going to wrap this up, Hugo. What an amazing conversation. I really enjoyed this in a huge way. Thank you for The Artilect War. Let’s make this film. I think we should. I know a director.

Hugo de Garis: Kick me to try and resurrect this script. It’s in some archive somewhere in Hollywood.

Brian Rose: I think you need to talk more. I really appreciate your ideas. I think your ideas around artilects and AI and everything you talked about today are cutting edge, and nobody has them like you. I think they’re really powerful. So thank you for that, and thank you for the ideas on globalism and masculism.

I think these conversations are important and I feel like they’re starting to happen. And of course I’m going to say everything is going to be better with Trump, but I feel like with Trump we can have these conversations more than we could four or six years ago, and with Musk as well. You can now have these conversations on X, whereas before you couldn’t have them on any social platform. I also believe that X puts pressure on all the others to open up a bit more, and we’ve already seen that. And people have said that because of X, they feel more comfortable having these conversations in the workplace and in public. So I think that’s powerful as well. Last thing: Rudy Giuliani promised me that if Trump won, he would put the YouTube people in jail for deplatforming me and get my channel back. And I’ll ask him to do the same for you. How’s that?

Hugo de Garis: […] I think now, due to the competition of X, my third attempt to put all my masculist videos onto YouTube was not deleted. It’s up there, but it’s a compromise. They’re shadowbanning me. They’re putting me way down in the search list.

Brian Rose: Stay tuned, because I was that way for a while and then they took me out. So look, we’ll keep fighting. That’s why we’re huge into freedom of speech here, and financial freedom, because without that you can’t have freedom of speech. […] One last thing I want to say to people: censorship works. I met a young man yesterday who stopped me in the street and said, oh, you’re Brian Rose, London Real, thank you so much for what you do. Are you still doing London Real? I get asked that all the time, because they’ve deleted me, and out of sight is out of mind. So censorship works, and that’s not cool. So let’s keep fighting.

Hugo de Garis: Is X helping you a lot?

Brian Rose: Yeah, we’re on X, we’re on everything else. The problem is that YouTube is the second-largest search engine in the world, owned by the largest search engine in the world. It’s where people go to learn. People don’t go to X to learn; they go to X to stay updated. In YouTube, when you type in “I want to learn something”, it comes up. So we’ve got a long way to go. Let’s liberate YouTube, shall we?

Hugo de Garis: It’d be nice, wouldn’t it? My suspicion is that the current CEO of YouTube is a man in his fifties, so I wouldn’t be at all surprised if he, or friends or acquaintances, have had a bad experience of divorce, and so he sees the other side maybe. But I think probably the main reason is the competition coming from X. He’s got to stop deleting.

Brian Rose: Well, all we can do is keep fighting, talk about these things, and elect leaders that hopefully push back. I’m very, very optimistic for the next few years, but I continue to be worried about AI.

Hugo de Garis: Even in a global state, that issue is not going to go away. I think it’ll still dominate.

Brian Rose: Correct. Censorship or AI?

Hugo de Garis: No, AI.

Brian Rose: Yeah, definitely, no matter what we get. Professor, let’s come back in a year or two and have this conversation again. We can see who won the bet. I hope that neither one of us wins the bet.

Hugo de Garis: I’ll be back in Europe probably a year from now.

Brian Rose: Let’s make this a bit of a tradition. I think we should. Thank you so much.

Hugo de Garis: And on behalf of the manosphere, what you’re doing is just fantastic. I express my gratitude not just for me personally but for the whole manosphere, the thousands of guys active on the internet talking about men’s issues. We are very grateful to you.

Brian Rose: Thank you. That means a lot. It’s been my pleasure. It’s been my journey. It’s been incredible. Professor, thank you so much. Always a pleasure.

Hugo de Garis: Till next time, Brian.