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Artificial Intelligence Masterclass
Battle of the Visionary Egos! Fear, Status, Profit - SALVATION FANTASY (Epic Lawsuit) HAVE AT THEE!
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- [00:00]
Dave
So I made a slide deck for the Altman vs Musk lawsuit, but the vibe was just off. So instead I just took some notes and I'm just going to riff at you because you know, the vibe's got to be right. So lots of people ask me to comment on this, and I spent some time thinking about it. I haven't had a chance to talk to my lawyer friends on this particular issue, but we have talked about other AI based lawsuits and pretty much kind of what they told me always panned out, which is in many cases, these lawsuits are going to get mostly tossed on, on process. And I'm not a lawyer, so I'm not going to try and state all of the things, but there are so many checklists that a lawsuit has to go through. There's certain legal tests that has to be in the right venue. It has to be filed right. Like there are. There are entire lawsuits that get dismissed just because they weren't filed right. Or because of a typo. And, and so the bar is very, very high. And we already saw this with Sarah Silverman's lawsuit mostly getting tossed out. And so the test remains on a very tiny percentage of it. And part of the reason that these lawsuits are so big and so sweeping is to kind of throw a wet, wet spaghetti at the wall and see what sticks. But then one of the final tests is, okay, even if you take everything at face value, even if everything that the lawsuit claims is true, we was there any damage? Like, is it even illegal or, or was there any harm done at all? Because in some cases it's like, yes, you accused me of true things, but it doesn't matter. Like, I didn't violate anything. And so, you know, personally, my intuition is that it might come down to, like, the judge or jury or whatever will say, yes, everything that Elon Musk says is true, but it's not actually a violation of contractual obligations or obligations to the sec. Or maybe Elon Musk isn't the injured party, so therefore it's not to him to file this lawsuit. But as a lot of people in the comments and a lot of people in my discord community have pointed out, the point might not be to win because Elon Musk doesn't need the money. It's either to slow OpenAI down or like crack open that egg or something along those lines. So that's really kind of like the tldr. That's the elevator pitch of, of the lawsuit. But what I really wanted to spend some time doing was really unpacking These two men. And the reason that I'm doing this is because there's been a few comments both, you know, publicly on YouTube and in my community, where it's just like, like, what is the motivation here? And I also sat on a podcast recording where we brought up the issue of consent. And that basically the idea is that most people are not consenting to the progress of AGI or AI. Many people are enthusiastically consenting to it, but. But the point is, is that neither Sam Altman nor Elon Musk ever stopped to take a poll of the world saying, hey, should I do this? They're making decisions entirely on their own. And so that is potentially problem. So it's like I wanted to unpack, like, what are the motivations of these people? Because what, what someone says, like, I'm doing it because this reason, that is post facto justification. And this is how humans have always worked. We are first and foremost emotional beings. We do things for emotional reasons. And then we justify it with a few data points to wrap it in a veneer of logic and reason and that sort of thing. And so, all right, so first I just want to unpack Elon Musk and his motivations. He's been a big thing for longer than Sam Altman, so he's a lot easier to poke holes in or to, you know, poke at or whatever. So he's a billionaire. I don't know if he's the richest person on the planet right now, but he's one of them. He's certainly like in the top three or top five at any given moment. Now, one thing is that billionaires tend to be highly biochemically rewarded by money. And so what I mean by that is that if you put them in an MRI machine and you say, oh, hey, you know, you push button A and you know, you're 10 times more famous, or you push button B and you're 10 times richer, they're going to have stronger neurological signals for money and, and higher endorphins, higher dopamines, higher serotonin, all of those things. And so I'm not saying that it's like genetically determined because also your upbringing has a lot to do with this. There is another study that I saw that, that people from low and for, from low income families, they're less biochemically rewarded by money just because money is not necessarily part of their worldview. It's not a stable source of, of acclaim or safety. And so they're going to be more, more rewarded by relationships. But Elon Musk coming From a wealthier family, he learned that money is rewarding. So I'm not saying that it's genetically deter is definitely influenced by both genetics and upbringing, but the fact that he is super wealthy means that he is rewarded by money and means that he has, I'm not going to say a love for money. That makes it sound more philosophical. What I mean is that his brain says, ooh, money, what can I do to make more money? And there's, there's a reason behind this, and I'll unpack that in a minute. But also what I, what I have talked about frequently is that for the last couple decades, pretty much everything Elon Musk does has been motivated by fear as well. So, you know, two decades ago when he was looking for Russian rockets because he wanted to get to Mars. The reason that he wants to get to Mars and that he always is talking about getting to Mars is to, you know, we don't have a plan B and we need to be a multi planetary species so that we don't go extinct. X Risk. The reason that he created Neuralink and he kind of toned this down, because in order to get FDA approval, you can't be aiming for improvement, you can only be aiming to cure a disease. But when he created Neuralink, if you watch the original videos and stuff, he said like, you know, oh, like we need to be useful to the AI. So basically he wanted to create like the first cortical implant so that we can become the Borg. Because again, he's afraid of AI and has been for a long time. And so the ghost is opening my door. My house is totally haunted. Anyways, so he created Neuralink because he wanted to basically make sure that we were useful to the AI or so that we could augment ourselves to outcompete the AI. Then in 2015 or 2014, whenever it was, he co founded OpenAI with the express purpose of creating safe open source AGI. He eventually rage, quit the board and then founded XAI, which, you know, again, he's competing directly with OpenAI. So there's a little bit of a perverse incentive there. It's like, oh, hey, you have a competitor with a, with, with OpenAI, so then you lob a lawsuit at them. And this is nothing new. Like, I think it was Sergey Brin, who or Larry Page, one of the guys from Google, said success breeds litigation. The bigger you are, the bigger of a target you are. So like that's, that's nothing, neither here nor there. But then also with Tesla, he's making Tesla into an AI company with Dojo and Optimus and all those other things. So when you look at, when you look at what Elon Musk has said over many years and his behaviors over many years, he's incredibly consistent with this terror, this existential terror of AI. And so you could say, okay, well, this is a self preservation instinct. If you perceive a threat, if your brain says, hey, I've recognized a threat, you're going to react to it, you're going to try and do something about it, even if nobody else perceives the threat. So as an example, if you're in a house and you smell smoke, you're going to be like, oh, oh crap, like we need to wake everybody up and get out of the house, even if nobody else smells it.
- [07:30]
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- [08:25]
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- [08:54]
Dave
If you see a storm on the horizon or if you know that a tsunami is coming, you're going to raise the alarm. And so that's what he's been doing now. So you take these two facts. He's highly financially motivated and I would make the argument that he's his financial motivation comes from childhood, his fear comes from adulthood. But you mix those together and he sees money as an instrumental path towards solving the thing that he's afraid of. Because the more money he has, the more he's able to, you know, save the world from itself by building Neuralink and AI and SpaceX and those sorts of things. And then of course, he's adopted a very simplistic moral framework called effective altruism, which is basically just maximize the number of humans in the future. And so on the face of it, like, that's not necessarily a bad thing. We want more humans, not fewer humans in the long run. But his actions kind of don't jive with that because SpaceX and Tesla and all those other places constantly getting hit with lawsuits for being sexist and racist. And he's known for ultra hardcore mode, which, if you haven't heard of that, it's basically he expects everyone to work as hard as he does, which is 70 to 80 hours a week, six or seven days a week. And it's like, okay, this is like, this is kind of crazy. But if you, if you keep in mind one, he's terrified of AI. So time is of the essence. If you say, okay, we're, we're, we're heading towards a cliff, that we're all going to go off the cliff, then everything else that he does makes sense. It's like, push people as hard as possible to go as fast as possible. Now, one thing that is not explained by this is him buying Twitter. Now, I think that he bought Twitter one, he was kind of forced to because he, you know, his mouth is too big and put his foot in his mouth too slowly. But I think he bought Twitter because he started realizing neuralink wasn't going to work OpenAI was pulling ahead. And then he realized that humans are part of the problem. And so he thought that he could influence geopolitics and other stuff with, with Twitter, with Starlink and all the alliances. Like, he's constantly talking to politicians, including Vladimir Putin and others. But then also he's got, he's had this like, hard right political swing, which kind of doesn't make any sense. And then also more recently, there are increasing reports that he is a heavy user of drugs, both prescriptions and other drugs. And so usually when you see someone who's using substances to cope, they're coping.
- [11:25]
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- [11:56]
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- [12:24]
Dave
Probably stress or fear. And so it's like, okay, this to me is all very, very consistent. This is a man who is primarily motivated by fear, and he's kind of getting to the end of his rope is kind of my read on it. Like, I wouldn't be surprised if we wake up one morning and we hear that Elon Musk has been hospitalized for, you know, drug overdose or something. You also. So talking back to his childhood, he. He has talked publicly. He had a very difficult relationship with his dad. I don't know that we know much more than that, but there's some implied childhood trauma there, especially when you look at the region that he came from. But then he's also talked about being Asperger's, so he's got a little bit of the tism like I do. And so all of this is like, you want money. You've never really fit in. You've always been different. There's some childhood trauma. There's a lot of fear. His worldview is very based on fear, which is a common trauma response. And so then it's like, what I my calculation is all this is a salvation fantasy. And so in the, in the annals of trauma recovery, there's what's called a salvation fantasy. And a salvation fantasy is, one day I'll be better, one day I'll be happy, one day I won't be scared anymore. And. But all I need to do is get to X, or all I need to do is achieve Y. And then I'll be happy, then I'll be safe. And in many cases, our society says, oh, you just need more money, and then you'll be happy and safe. You just need more fame. And then you'll be happy and safe. You need more power, and then you'll be happy and safe. And also in those reports of Elon Musk doing drugs, it's about, like, kind of fake friends where, like, a lot of, a lot of his, you know, co workers and fellow leaders, they kind of feel pressured into doing drugs with him because he doesn't want to be alone. And he's talked about in Interviews how lonely he is. And so you have this, you have this array that it's like autistic guy with childhood trauma who's trying to self soothe with money and drugs and he's terrified of the world that he lives in. And so for me, this whole, this whole worldview is very consistent and it's very easily explained by a combination of fear and childhood trauma and everything else. So that's Elon Musk's motivations. Now again, he's also a sharp guy. So when he perceives a threat, just because he's got all these other things going on doesn't mean that he's wrong. But also keep in mind that his worldview is fundamentally one that is based on fear and trauma. That's my personal opinion. So now let's take a look at Sam Altman. So Sam Altman is one way that people often describe him, and sometimes he's described himself this way is he's just a Midwest Jew, which I think that he frames it that way to try and say that he's like kind of, you know, the boy next door, like he's just an ordinary guy. Right. He wasn't born in New York or, or whatever. He was kind of born in a smaller place. But when you say Jew, when that is part of your identity, when that's part of how you introduce yourself, that means that that identity is important to him. And all Jews have a lot of intergenerational trauma. Like if you're alive today and you're Jewish, there is intergenerational trauma. So again, we see that T word trauma. Now I don't know if he's Ashkenazi, I don't know if his family fled Germany like mine did. But if you see a Jew in America, like we didn't get here on accident. Yeah, no. So it's like, okay, if I had to guess, his family came around the same time mine did and they're probably fleeing, you know, some of the horrible stuff that was happening in, in Europe at the time, so on and so forth. So again, you got trauma. Now also, this is going to be somewhat controversial because I know that Sam Altman gets angry about this, but between his flat affect and his owl eyes and, and by owl eyes I mean the fact that he kind of like has this like wide eyed look most of the time. And then he's also very clearly a heavy systemizer. Those four facts, Jewish, flat affect, owlize, heavy systemizer. I think he's probably on the spectrum too. And the fact that he gets angry when people bring this up, kind of means that he wants to distance himself from being autistic. And if you read Devin Price unmasking Autism, this is actually a really common reaction. And that is because autistic people are so deeply pathologized that it's like, no, I don't want anything to do with that. And again, like, you can't diagnose someone. But, like, it also kind of takes one to no one. Like, you know, we. We tend to recognize each other. So Jewish, autistic, and also gay. He just got married. And like, I have no problem with that. I, in the. In. In my friend group, like, it's more strange to be perfectly straight than anything. So when I bring this up, I'm not saying, like, oh, that's a bad thing. What I mean, though, is that there are. There's another category, another group that Sam belongs to that is oppressed, and that is that he's gay. And so, you know, he's my age. Like, we're almost the same exact age. So he remembers, you know, when Disney wants to know.
- [17:25]
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- [17:27]
Dave
Yes.
- [17:28]
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- [17:33]
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- [17:33]
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- [17:40]
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- [17:47]
Dave
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- [17:48]
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- [17:52]
Dave
Guessed it, Disney plus in the 90s and early 2000s, when, you know, the. When Doma, right, the defense of Marriage act was struck down when all that was being heavily debated. And of course, then there's been all, like, the. The gay club shootings and violence against gay people over the last few decades. And so here we have, like, another set of, like, things that have been wrong with him. And of course it's like, okay, Dave, why are you. Why are you psychoanalyzing these people? It's like, well, they're very highly public figures. But then another thing is that he's a prepper. He has a ranch full of guns and MREs. And. But he masks over the fact that he has this escape hatch with his optimistic, cheerful demeanor. But then he'll also go on a podcast or an interview and say, oh, yeah, like, it could be lights out for humanity. So he also very clearly has a fearful worldview that is based on, in my estimation, probably based on oppression, a different form of. Of. Of intergenerational trauma based on who he is. And so then the same thing emerges when he's talking about, AI is going to make the world infinitely better. Techno, optimism, and all that kind of fun stuff. That's also a salvation fantasy. And I made a video about this about salvation fantasies. Like, if, you know I'll be happy just once I get full dive VR, I'll be happy once AGI takes my job from me. All of those are salvation fantasies. Your trauma, your depression, your grief, whatever the oppression, the injustice that you've focused. Technology doesn't fix any of that. And so basically, the quote that I wrote in my note is, AI will fix my life and the world that mistreated me. That is, I think, kind of the truth behind both Sam Altman and Elon Musk's motivations is that they want technology to solve the problems of the world because humans were the ones that hurt them. And of course, this is why I always talk about how Scooby Doo taught us that humans are always the monster. And so that's their motivations for doing what they do. And that's why they throw caution to the wind. And that's why they think that it's up to them to save the world. Really, what they're trying to do is they're trying to save themselves because of a salvation fantasy. Who else has done a salvation fantasy? Vladimir Putin, Donald Trump, Xi Jinping, Adolf Hitler. And I'm not saying that like, you know, just because someone, like, because all these other tyrants have engaged in salvation fantasies, that's what they're doing. But what I do mean is that if you're reacting to internal pain, you can go really far in the wrong direction. And that is, you know, I think that that needs to be addressed. And that's why I'm making this video. I think that. I think that we need to address. The elephant in the room is that we have two men here who have not fit in in their lives. And, you know, raise your hand if you haven't fit in as well. But also that implies things about their motivations and why they're doing the things that they're doing. And also it speaks to their worldview why they think that the things are going the way that it will and why they want to intervene in the ways that they want to intervene. So winding now and kind of getting back to the first principles view as to what's going on here. First, profit motive, as I talked about, Elon Musk demonstrated to be highly profit motivated, highly power seeking. Um, that has been a durable thing. But again, that could be part of his salvation fantasy where he says, okay, I need money and I need power in order to save the world from AI Altman. Also already very wealthy. I don't think he's quite in the billionaire club. Last I heard it was like he's got a net worth of 700 million or something like that. Nothing to shake a stick at. But he's also made decisions not to increase his wealth, but those are kind of more, more principled decisions, which you could see as virtue signaling. He wants a signal. Look, I'm not profit motivated. I want to save the world. But still you don't get to $700 million on accident is kind of my point there. So both of them somewhat profit motivated. On, on Altman's part, highly profit and power motivated. On, on Musk's part. Now, status motive. I've been talking about the status game for a long time. Elon Musk, wealthiest person on the planet, spends a lot of money on pr, bought Twitter, demands worship. This is something that he's actually famous for in his companies, on Twitter, everywhere else. So Elon Musk, highly, highly status motivated. Incredibly highly status motivated. Likewise, Sam Altman, he's been on Time magazine, he's CEO of the year, man of the year, whatever. Again, you don't get to those things on accident. So both men, Elon Musk and Sam Altman, highly status motivated. They want to be important. Now all, all people want to be important. I want to be important. I don't want to be important that bad. And so it's like, okay, so they want money, they want status, and then finally self preservation again. If you're aware of a problem, if you're aware of a fire, you're going to spring into action and try and put it out. Elon Musk, very consistent over the last two decades. Very clearly motivated by fear.
- [22:55]
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- [23:23]
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- [23:54]
Dave
And then Altman, the fact that he has a prepper ranch but is also the one starting the fire. Like, you know, as Dario Amade said from, from anthropic, like they're deliberately not, you know, accelerating. And even Google wasn't. Google was sitting on this research for several years. So Sam Altman is the one who started the fire with chat GPT. So he started the fire, but also has a prepper ranch. And, and it's like that seems a little bit, there's a little bit of inconsistency. Inconsistency there, especially when you consider how optimistic Sam Altman is. And I think in that respect, Elon Musk is a little bit more consistent. I'm not going to say like rational or realistic because he's consistent with his worldview. I don't necessarily agree with either of their worldviews. But this lawsuit, so the reason that I framed it all this way is because this lawsuit is a contest of visionary egos. This, that's, it's nothing more, nothing less than that. And, and I also wanted to point out these, these blind spots that both of these men have because we have basically a techno oligarchy right now where a very few number of people with various personal issues are making decisions that affect literally the rest of the entire planet. That is a suboptimal system. That is a suboptimal set of competitive dynamics. That is a suboptimal structure for the safety of humanity. And so what I hope comes from this video and this lawsuit is continued demonstration that the adults are not in the room. That's kind of, that's kind of the, the, the mic drop moment that I'll leave you on is the adults are not in the room right now and we need to do something else. So thanks for watching.