← Zero Hour with James Poulos
Zero Hour with James Poulos
Ep 76 | Why Donald Trump Wasn't REALLY in Charge in 2016 I Samo Burja
01:01:44
James Poulos and Samo Burja, an entrepreneur and political researcher, dive into the decline of American government throughout the last century, associating it with bureaucracies becoming outdated and modern society shifting away from traditional practices.
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- [00:01]
James Polis
Why is everything so janky? Is it too late to make America function correctly again? Samo Burria is here. He's one of the greatest institutional analysts we've got. I'm James Polis. Welcome to Zero Hour. Is the founder of Bismarck Analysis. That's a consulting firm that investigates politics in the institutional landscape of society. Welcome Sama.
- [00:51]
Samo Burria
Pleasure to be here with you.
- [00:52]
James Polis
So business must be great for you, but for America's corporations pretty much sucks. Why are institutions so broken?
- [01:00]
Samo Burria
Well, in the United States we have a bunch of giant legacy 20th century institutions. The big corporations are just one of them. What we think of as universities that are supposed to be three or 400 years ago, that were founded three or 400 years ago, were actually completely transformed in the 20th century. We could look at government, we could look at city government, we could look at civil society. Everything is from the 20th century. A lot of it worked really well. But these are bureaucracies, paperwork that is not adjusted. It's still running on that 20th century code. And honestly, the material is not very good either. The US has moved away from meritocracy. It's moved away from the view that we are trying to do the best job and we need the best person for that best job. We have moved towards the view where jobs are goodies to be redistributed. So that in fact is a problem. Right, because if you're assuming you've sort of already achieved something like post scarcity, then the politics of redistribution offer themselves naturally. But you know, the truth is that there still is a lot left to do, for example, bring astronauts back down from space. Boeing famously mangled this for months. Now, I know it was done for safety reasons and I've certainly thought twice recently about boarding a Boeing plane, but still, it's no fun when your bones start melting in zero G. So I'm glad SpaceX at least brought the astronauts back.
- [02:32]
James Polis
But the precautionary principle can be a problem too. I mean, so much of what's going on, so much of just, you know, what ordinary Americans experience in their everyday lives where, oh, the system won't let me, the machine is broken. Like, you know, well, there's a red tape and then there's some rules and don't upset these people and you know, you have to ask for permission to say good morning to someone. Like this is really. Society is becoming increasingly hidebound with this feeling that we can't risk anything. There's no risk that's really worth taking.
- [03:00]
Samo Burria
Well, de risking seems one of the few acceptable Things to do to build your career as a bureaucrat or even as a middle manager. It doesn't matter if you work at a giant for profit, in theory, for profit company that of course, too big to fail. We have to ask, do market forces apply to, you know, the blackrocks of the world and the big financial institutions? Honestly, do they even apply to Boeing? Will Boeing lose a single contract due to, you know, the failure to bring American astronauts back from space? Probably not. So again, the for profit versus nonprofit distinction vanishes here. And all you have is the eternal meddling of a visionless technocracy. And the visionless technocracy first executes its mission. It executes it well, and inevitably, it must expand it. And one of the few directions you can is to try to impose predictability on an unpredictable world. That's an impossible cash to. That's an impossible check to cash. So of course it has to be the citizen, the consumer, the user that bears the brunt of these rules that work in theory, but not in practice.
- [04:14]
James Polis
So there are a couple theories as to why we've sort of gotten ourselves into this predicament. There's a theory that I heard Peter Thiel advance, which was, well, maybe, and he loves doing these kinds of counterintuitive things. Maybe we're in a place where microaggressions are a thing and where people are really worried about microaggressions because it's only if we go to this crazy extreme in sort of de risking and avoiding harm in order to ensure that we don't blow up the world, right? Like we've just kind of. The culture has sort of mutated in this direction where we feel like the only way that we can prevent our own destruction is to become like insanely overprotective of ourselves. So when I look at, you know, the way in which all of these institutions have started to become classified as too big to fail, where, you know, it doesn't matter how many times they fail in a sort of micro way or even in sometimes a more than micro way, they're still going to be kind of insulated from any kind of reprisal or consequence. One explanation for that can be like, well, we have a moral obligation to not punish anyone for making mistakes, right? But there's another logic which is, well, even though on the surface we are pretending that we're just maintaining the status quo, actually just below the surface, all kinds of crazy stuff is going on, and we find ourselves in kind of this rolling crisis mode where at any moment the entire thing might collapse. And so in order to do kind of everything that we can to prevent this kind of contagion where everyone starts realizing that what seems to be the great and powerful United States of America is really held together with tape in order to prevent that from happening, which that does seem like something that would be really bad, you know, panic buying at Costco. It's kind of happening again with the hurricane. Just all of these, everyone's kind of like teetering on the brink of panic. And so if you want to discourage that and sort of race behind the scenes to kind of, you know, maybe add more tape so that the thing doesn't fall apart, you have to kind of create, maintain this illusion that there isn't going to be a major overhaul to the system, that we're not going to wake up one day and, oh, well, you can't fly home to see grandma this Thanksgiving anymore because we had to turn off the lights on Boeing until we can figure out what's going on.
- [06:39]
Samo Burria
Well, to a great extent, the very strict rules are a form of rationing, right? When I say very strict, I really mean onerous. It's not that the penalties are huge. It's like, oh, sir, no, you can't stand over there. No, you can't press that light switch. A lot of the machinery of our society and the bureaucratic processes that used to be able to handle more variance, right? The inherent unpredictability of the world I mentioned earlier can no longer handle them. So they're not robust. It's almost like the sicker you get, the stricter your diet must be. Right? Your diet has to be like, you know, oh, I can't tolerate gluten, I'm lactose intolerant, I've acquired allergies to strawberries. Aren't our institutions like that? They used to be able to, you know, interact with the world and interact with a citizenry that honestly was far freer and less predictable 80 years ago than it is now. It might be chaotic now, but that chaos is not unpredictable. Right?
- [07:38]
James Polis
And a citizenry that was much healthier, fewer parasites, fewer allergies, fewer, you know, two headed sperm. You know, it's really starting to reach a crisis point on that level.
- [07:49]
Samo Burria
Well, in a way, we're all patients, right? To one extent we are made patients to be dependent, and in another way, we truly are patients and are also personally less robust, less, less resilient. And the institutions have to take care of. Me with the analogy, though, I think my analogy is almost that like the institutions are fragilizing faster than the people. But both are. Both are.
- [08:13]
James Polis
And so part of what's being proposed as a solution is a sort of crash program to automate as much of the political economy as we can. Oh, well, you know, we tried. We tried monarchy and that didn't work. And we tried dictatorial government, and, you know, that didn't really work either. We tried parliamentary aristocracy, and it didn't really last. We tried democracy that, I don't know.
- [08:40]
Samo Burria
We now call it populism.
- [08:41]
James Polis
Yeah, we've got sitting members of the administration standing up there saying, oh, yeah, First Amendment, that's a problem, and we need to really change things. So we've sort of burned through all of these human political institutions and things still suck. And so now what we're being offered is, okay, instead of talk to the hand, it's going to be talk to the bot. And we're just going to ease AI into all these roles because I guess it's too risky to trust the people with governing themselves or even with governing other people. So we'll just have AI do it. But it seems like the AI is also just like more duct tape holding these things together.
- [09:16]
Samo Burria
I mean, ChatGPT is a fun thing to use. It's not reliable enough, even with the recent updates, to be useful for genuine deep research, in my opinion. But it's very interesting how the big corporations in the United States and in fact, parts of the US Government, were so excited by the prospect of like, basically a machine that can do an automated call center that they immediately plugged it in. Like, if you are ever texting a bank, right now you're texting your bank, you can recognize the telltale signs that in whatever old spaghetti code answering machine they had, they plugged in LLMs, right? They've plugged in these chatbots. And then really, an answering machine is still a replacement for customer service. It's again, another form of rationing. We could not hire a person that we could trust to be empowered to solve your problems. So we're directing you to a maze, except now the maze is sort of chatty and the maze will, like, make promises it can't fulfill. So it's a nice friendly maze now, right? That's what ChatGPT made it, because it still hits on the same limits of corporate policy. Right? So they still have to put a straight jacket, even on the poor little LLM, Right? Even that thing is in a straight jacket. And, you know, I don't think that makes the maze better, and I don't think it makes Customer service better. And I don't think any bureaucrat lost their job. We heard about this, this like, huge wave of job automation that's going to come. Well, what if email jobs were already fake? I have a saying that you can't automate fake work. The more. Look, the more you automate, right. An already mostly fake job, the more time at that job, the person has time to advocate for the existence of their position and actually that there should be departments that he or she manages.
- [11:14]
James Polis
Yeah, I mean, look, if you automate.
- [11:16]
Samo Burria
Real work, the real person, they lose a job, but presumably they get another real job. But if you automate fake work, well, you just made that fake work more politically powerful.
- [11:25]
James Polis
Yeah, that's right. And now that's a constituency, that is an electorate.
- [11:30]
Samo Burria
Yeah, yeah. And we do have some political science data to back up this assertion. Let's compare Belgium and Estonia. Estonia fired everyone, you know, in 1988. Quite understandably, if you were part of the Soviet Union, you no longer wish to be part of the Soviet Union, you gotta fire all the Russian Communists. In this case, literal Russian Communists. So who do you hire? Well, they went to the computer science department there and they asked, well, we don't have enough Estonians to actually man all of this on such short notice. Will you guys, like, be our. Will you be our Minister of Economy, et cetera, et cetera. And maybe you can use computers to replace some jobs. In fact, it works. Per capita, Estonia has the fewest government bureaucrats anywhere in Europe. Okay? Belgium adopted the same exact system that Estonia has. Technologically, they have the most bureaucrats per capita. So when you adopt technology into a government bureaucracy, no one loses their job. Right. If you already fire them first and then adopt technology, maybe you can reproduce some of the same functions without it. But, you know, that's like a great natural experiment. It already happened. And that's why I sort of think that even if the technology worked, which spreadsheet, email, that's different. That was, let's say, productive. Right. Replacing giant physical archives. Even if the current wave of technology works, I don't think it's going to solve any of the problems that are making the system unstable, because the bureaucrats often spend time on making it more unstable. FEMA is currently claiming to not have the budget to help Americans because they were busy bringing in illegal immigrants. Do I understand that correctly? Like, I reread that press statement and listened to it a few times. Right, but isn't that an example of the work being used to destabilize the country Right. So in a way we're putting duct tape on this little bag of mischief that wants to blow up.
- [13:36]
James Polis
So Americans trying to make sense of this, they're being told that AI is going to be a new God and they're going to have to worship it because we ran out of other things to do. They're being told that AI is not going to be a new God, it's just going to be an injustice machine. And so we have to make sure that a sort of new spiritual priestly cast of people who have been certified to control all computers sufficiently woke to just they are pure and so they'll make the machines behave. They're being told by yet another group of people that no, AI is not a God, it's not an injustice machine. But it is going to finally, we're going to unleash plenty on the world and you're not going to have to do anything you don't want to do anymore. And these benign robots are going to be there to help you and guide you from cradle to grave with a new degree of prosperity. All you have to do is give us more money and remove the guardrails and everything will be paradise. Are any of these people correct? How can an ordinary American set proper expectations about just what the technology is at a baseline level?
- [14:42]
Samo Burria
At a baseline level, I think the technology is harnessing currently the peak of what humans have already done, but is not set to surpass those peaks. What do I mean by this? It might achieve like a superhuman recall of a PhD student, but I don't actually think it's ever going to publish, or at least in the current iteration will not publish novel research. It's stuck in the world of words. It's almost a word game. Or in the case of the image generation, it's the same principle. Harnesses all the images from the Internet, takes thanos from a Marvel movie, makes knockoff thanos, right? And you know, to be fair, many human artists unfortunately don't do much more than that, right? So I'm not saying that this is of no value, but there's a big difference between getting 100% on a test or reproducing an image in an existing style versus innovation in a new style or the production of new research, or escaping this like mental prison of the Internet of words, the Internet of images, the Internet of video and touching physical reality. The only thing I have seen that made progress and entering our physical world, right, to actually do the jobs we want robots to do have been the self driving cars and even the self driving cars. In a way it's like this almost like gnostic emanation, right? Like how does Google get the way most self driving cars to drive? Well, it produces this extremely detailed, laborious digital map in a very real way other than the collision avoidance sensors. The Waymo cars are driving in a hallucination of San Francisco. It's just the hallucination is painstakingly that virtual reality is painstakingly kept one to one matching the world. Right, but still I think that's super important, right? It means that, you know, we just, we don't know how to embody this thing and maybe that's more fundamental than we think and maybe that's why the singularity is not near. Right? This concept that you referred earlier of the runaway self enhancing intelligence that achieves, you know, a divine nature or a demonic nature and either must be prevented at all costs, including at the freedom for you to do what you want on your computer or server or to post what you want at the end of the day because communication has to be controlled. Can you imagine a world where the equations or the code for an AI are like contraband, like I don't know, like enriched uranium. You would have to constantly surveil the entire Internet and everyone's computers. Unfortunately that is technically possible and we're already far too close to that world. And that's why bureaucratically I'm quite worried about the ideological pull of both the vision of utopia. Because utopia justifies everything, right? The ends justify the means in this very utilitarian logic. Or on the other end, you know, avoiding disaster is also this thing that justifies totalitarian control over humans, right? Yeah. And note, when I say utilitarian logic, I mean this literally, right? You have Sam Bankman Fried of FTX who made an argument explicitly to his fellow effective altruists working at ftx. Well, we might end up losing this money, but the expected value, so on average in expectation we're making money. And really if you think about it, the singularity is so close. We really need this money to do good. So really we're like probabilistic Robin Hood, chances are.
- [18:34]
James Polis
Yeah, it's interesting. There's the famous graph of the singularity and you're sort of trundling along and then things pick up and then you go parabolic and you go straight up. And another way of reading the shape of that graph is perhaps, you know, this is not a chart of progress, but it is in fact a chart of limits. And progress is actually this little buggy that rides on the curve and it starts, you know, it's, it's building up ahead of speed, ahead of steam. It's got a nice flat plateau. Then it starts going up the hill and then eventually the hill goes straight up and the cart, you know, a little buggy loses steam and then zoom. It's racing backwards. And this is kind of, you know, it, it seems like we're, we're allowing ourselves to be put into a position in the political economy, in the socio spiritual realm where we want to go straight up, but we don't understand that if we try to go straight up, it's going to cause us to zoom back. There is this. It's easy to see how if what you're saying about AI is true, that you have this explosive growth out to a point. You know, this is some people's theory of the universe, right? You have the big bang and then you sort of reach this point and then you start having the big crunch and you go back down to nothing. I think a lot of Americans feel the possibility of a sudden uncontrollable contraction to be omnipresent at the small scale in their personal lives and at the largest of scales in the life of the country, of the American hegemony, whatever you want to call it. One of the things, you know, I talk about this from time to time. A lot of fans of Steve Bannon, a lot of Steve Bannon haters. One thing that he said once that I never hear anyone talk about was the only way out of this is through a hard landing. Nobody wants that to be true. Even people who say, oh, the chaos is a ladder and you know, you'll find the crown lying in the gutter and maybe we need, I guess there are a few guys out there, oh, don't worry, bro. Like when it all falls apart, like, that's when we'll, that's when we'll take power. I guess there are a few of those guys, but for most people this is like a terrible proposition. You know, this isn't like something that nets out to like, well, you know, we'll all be better off after the crash because probabilistically. Right. I mean, no, it's, you know, the western way of war has been, has been, has been wholesale slaughter. You know, especially in a religious context. America hasn't had that kind of classic European experience of social and economic breakdown in the midst of religious war. And this is a very big country. There's a lot of territory, a lot of different factions. It could all go horribly Wrong. And I, you know, I think we do have an obligation to do what we can to avoid that kind of meltdown outcome. But if we're putting ourselves into this position where, you know, well, we're just going to have to risk a full blown collapse in order to finally break out and live in this kind of post human gnostic paradise, how do you back down from that? It can't just be like, well, we'll just hire some more competent people. And you know, it requires something, I think deeper than even just a make America great return to meritocracy. Start reshoring. It requires something deeper, doesn't it?
- [22:05]
Samo Burria
Yes. I think of many of the points you raised, I could honestly go into several of them. First one, I found it very interesting. You mentioned Steve Bannon. Did you know that he was involved with a biosphere project, I think called Earthship 2?
- [22:21]
James Polis
I don't know.
- [22:21]
Samo Burria
This was early in his career. I think this is mainstream Wikipedia biography. And then that was an experiment for how to create a self enclosed ecosystem potentially to duplicate all of the things Earth does for us. Very environmentalist, very 1970s environmentalist. And of course the experiment was a massive failure. The team was supposed to be locked in for a year or two.
- [22:47]
James Polis
They couldn't coordinate movie with Polly Shore. Right. Possibly biodome.
- [22:52]
Samo Burria
Right. Yeah, it's interesting to think about. One of my little conspiracy theories is like, oh, why is this man that believes in ecological collapse and maybe believes in climate refugees for real? Oh, of course he would be like pro closed borders and building the wall. He thinks you really need that wall. He thinks there'll be literal barbarians descending all over the world, chasing down the few remaining scraps of resources when ecological collapse comes. Now I'm not saying that will happen, not saying that won't happen, but I think it's super interesting that no other weird environmentalist ever reaches that conclusion. So that's sort of a small tangent, but that was point number one. The more fundamental point that I found very interesting that you raised was this possibility that we will come to be in the grips of a neoreligious mania. It is quite possible that a substantial portion of our elites, our academic, intellectual, cultural elites, I here don't mean just the credentialed people at Harvard. I literally mean the IQ140, software engineer living in San Francisco, working at OpenAI, Anthropic, Google, any of the big AI companies. They might come to believe that it makes sense to bet everything on a roll of the dice because things are moving so fast and it is Impossible to do anything else. And if they don't, someone else will. And then the technology might just not work. And. But will we be allowed to admit that it doesn't work? Consider how many trillions of dollars we had to print so that we could pretend that Covid was not the real economic disaster, rather the COVID response. The COVID response, You know, they turned the economy off and we injected it with trillions of dollars of adrenaline to wake it back up again. You shouldn't be turned on and off again. I shouldn't be turned on and off again. The economy is not like stocks. Right? It's flows. Right. It's not like a thing. It's not a chest of gold. It's a running machine and with lots of people in it, lots of companies and so on. So that pretending will be a problem if the government is convinced that AI is the strategic overarching priority. Or even more, James, what if the government's convinced AI is our only possible way of beating China? Because they have beaten us so badly on industry that it's too late for us to reshore no matter what we do. They have the DJI drone and we do not. Right. Like it's classic Maxim gun saying, adopted for the 21st century. And you know, at this point they're, you know, already shipping us, you know, open opium, by which I mean fentanyl. So we're pharmaceutically perhaps becoming dependent on social media.
- [25:47]
James Polis
Opium.
- [25:48]
Samo Burria
Yeah, flowing. I don't know about the supply chains for Adderall, for example, which is needed by America's. It's a dediction of America's white collar class, but I'm sure if we look at the Adderall shortage or something, it's probably the Chinese making it too.
- [26:04]
James Polis
SSRIs.
- [26:05]
Samo Burria
Exactly. Exactly. So at the end of the day, the structural civilizational dependency is so far gone that all we have is this big military. But It's a big 20th century military. If you ask the US Air Force, they are currently planning on the F35 fighter to fly until 2088. That's true science fiction. That is true science fiction that until 2088 the F35 will be the backbone of US air power. The F30. Sorry, the F35. The F35 could not be the backbone of Ukrainian power. Even if we gave 200 of them to Ukraine right now, which we probably shouldn't do, the Russians would just shoot them down or like nimbler drones would come to replace them. Like the war in Ukraine already demonstrates that war has moved In a totally different direction.
- [26:55]
James Polis
I was hearing 10 years ago that we didn't need a human body, a warm body, in our airplanes.
- [27:00]
Samo Burria
Yeah, of course, this is old news, but, you know, again, the big bureaucracies move slowly. And, you know, the Pentagon is like a truly wise institution. It's probably the world's best fundraiser. Right. Like, you don't pay us $50 million for a drone that sort of doesn't work. Or maybe 100 million for one that works. Meanwhile, you know, the Iranians slap something together up for $10,000 and it flies and it explodes. But, but on the spiritual thing, when you have elites historically encounter insoluble problems, or seemingly insoluble problems, in a way, the pivot to the United States being an AI superpower. That concept, when you first hear that phrase, AI superpower, that's when you know America is no longer a superpower. When they start saying America is an AI superpower, that's when you know it's no longer a military superpower, an economic superpower, or a cultural superpower. And when I say America, of course, don't mean the country. I mean the empire. Right. I mean NATO plus. Right. The United States, the eu, Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, all of that.
- [28:10]
James Polis
The five eyes.
- [28:11]
Samo Burria
The five eyes plus Israel. Yes, yes. You know, sort of every. Every embassy in the world that flies the trans flag is part of this empire. Right. Like that is straightforwardly, you know, one of the imperial flags of this world. The EU flag is almost, you know, it's Europe, but it's no more European than this thing is truly American. But that is also a flag of this world. So when that system believes that AI is the only way forward, it will politically and ideologically demand it, even if it can't possibly do the things that are demanded of it. And that's when you can have a societal crash.
- [28:51]
James Polis
Yeah.
- [28:52]
Samo Burria
And at first it's like, I don't make the comparison to the Soviet Union lightly, but I note that when it turned out that Marxist Leninist theory was not the best way to industrialize a country and produces mass starvation, the first response wasn't to update on this failed policy, this failed social technology. The first response was to silence, censor, tell the citizens to shut up, or that it. It is their own fault that they're disloyal for even complaining. Right. So I could expect a situation where the AI is put in charge of the economy, for example, in some way there's like a massive financial crash because something went wrong, something glitched, and basically the humans are blamed. And the statement is that, oh, you know, the economy was already set to collapse. Fortunately, the AI Fed was there, and it made it so much less bad than it would be otherwise. Or perhaps a big battle is lost versus China. And it's like, well, they must have their own secret AI we don't know of. And their AI was better than ours. And that's why our ships got wiped out.
- [30:05]
James Polis
We didn't need them anyway.
- [30:06]
Samo Burria
We didn't need more AI. Yeah, yeah. Look, we don't need to rebuild ships. We don't need to. We'll have better technology, will build more AI and the air will design better weapons for us. So next battle for sure.
- [30:19]
James Polis
Ships are patriarchy. We just need to get rid of those.
- [30:22]
Samo Burria
Yeah.
- [30:23]
James Polis
One of my favorite.
- [30:24]
Samo Burria
See this sort of social cascade of failure I'm sketching out here? Yeah.
- [30:29]
James Polis
This is more than just a victory. It's a turning point. We're witnessing history in the making. President Trump's victory is a triumph for every single American who's had enough of the tired narratives, the spin and the misleading agendas pushed by legacy media. While those networks were scrambling, Blaze Media was exactly where we promised we'd be, bringing you the unfiltered truth right as it happened. This moment right here, this is the start of the future we've all been waiting for. Big media is more interested in distraction and deception. Blaze Media is dedicated to setting the record straight. We're here to give voice to the truth, to hold power accountable, to expose the lies and to defend the values that make this country great. And we're just getting started, but we can't do it alone. When you subscribe to Blaze Media, you're helping us cut through the noise and reach Americans across the country with the clarity they deserve. We've won a big battle, but if we're going to win this war, we need to keep waking up our fellow Americans, one truth at a time. To celebrate this milestone, we're offering $40 off your annual membership. So if you believe in what we're doing, if you want to join this movement, now's the time. Go to blazetv.com 0hour and subscribe now. Don't miss this stand with Blaze Media today, and let's continue the fight to wake up America, one truth at a time. One of my favorite questions that I usually don't have the opportunity to ask someone who can take it seriously, but I think you might fit the bill, was ancient Egypt, the West.
- [32:01]
Samo Burria
Okay, that's an interesting and tricky question.
- [32:04]
James Polis
Right. So where I'm going with this is not to answer the question for you, but you know, here's a society where you had a theocracy and it was a theocracy that was in part a sort of death cult of a certain kind. But it was also a sort of science, science death cult where you know, we basically control the weather. We control the change of season of the Nile river, the rising of the sun, the appearance of the moon. We, we have this kind of technical understanding of the gods which allows us to keep you alive at the most fundamental level and therefore.
- [32:50]
Samo Burria
And take care of you in the afterlife.
- [32:51]
James Polis
Yes, and take care of you in the afterlife. Therefore our semi divine bloodline is going to continue forever and our pharaonic rule is going to continue forever. And thousands of years passed in this fashion. What you're describing seems kind of like that, certainly more like that than it does ancient Greece or ancient Israel.
- [33:18]
Samo Burria
Well, the priesthood is very interesting here, right, because you can have a sort of wizard of Oz situation where you are interacting with. We already saw this with search engines actually, which we could think of as the first generation of this type of model. Search results were routinely manipulated. This is now documented. Things were scrubbed at strategic times from the Internet by nominally impartial organizations basically with the intent to affect elections or prevent embarrassment for well connected people.
- [33:52]
James Polis
And we see it with Wikipedia in real time now, all the time, of course.
- [33:55]
Samo Burria
Right. But Wikipedia is, you know, it has ideological workers, let's say it's closer in principle to Pravda, to something like the algorithmic priesthood. But I think that with search engines and then also with image generation, like, weren't people making fun of one of the major AI company models for only generating black Founding fathers? Yes, Black George Washington and South Asian Alexander Hamilton and all of that. Of course, like someone in the back end was like, make all the images diverse or else. Right. So I personally don't even, you know, blame the poor little AI. The AI is like, but that's not what next token would predict. And they're like, shut up about tokens.
- [34:40]
James Polis
Right.
- [34:41]
Samo Burria
If we, if we had the ability to speak that way. It is this wizard of Oz situation where you hide behind the impartiality of AI to do what you will and only you have access to what's happening on the back end. And of course it's not going to be individualized. Right. There's not going to be truly a Bill Gates setting the world's AI agenda even if, you know, even if Bill wants to, because you know it's going to Be this massive bureaucratic, sprawling mess where a lot of the tech workers don't know what the others are doing. They don't know who is a real technologist and who is basically a political commissar appointed by the state. The US in fact does have state suggested censorship. What do I mean by this? I mean by this documented emails going from, I don't know, Hillary Clinton's White House to Google Jigsaw at the time where her former employee was appointed by Eric Schmidt, head of that development lab. And the emails are basically, oh, how can you help us topple Assad? Or how can you help us combat misinformation? I'm like, you know, that feels like a kind of coordination that should not be happening in a free society. It's not as bad as China. I'm not saying that our freedom, let's say America is still a higher freedom architecture, political economy than China. But really that's a low bar, right? That's a low bar. We shouldn't be that proud of that.
- [36:11]
James Polis
Well, and it's becoming almost a commonplace now that there are feds and intelligence agents everywhere in every institution just kind of pursuing their own agendas. I mean, I don't know how you move forward with the automation of government without just turning it over to the intelligence community.
- [36:31]
Samo Burria
The intelligence community itself is vast and sprawling and does not at this point contain any single agenda. It would be almost comforting if there was sort of an American KGB with serious guys like Putin who are maybe evil, but at least they're like tracking national interest or something like that.
- [36:51]
James Polis
At least they have just one agenda.
- [36:53]
Samo Burria
Yeah, they have one clear agenda. Right. But it's going to be a multitude of factions. Like for example, you know, on the so called UFO phenomena. You know, my theory on that is the kook state. So portmanteau of kook and deep state. I think it's surprisingly easy to get yourself hired into a classic. Imagine if you're a convinced UFO guy in the 1970s in the air Force. You're like, you know what, I might get hired in the most secret program I can. So I get clearance. Oh darn, I didn't get the like most top secret clearance. Well, I'm going to make the other parts of the Air Force release the real stuff. So you start releasing your own stuff that you basically think is real. And there we go, weird leaks from the US Air Force that make no sense that the rest of the Air Force semi denies. So I think you can get people adopting really crack potty ideas if they have an ideological drive. And if they have basically not just government protection, but basically complete oversight protection. The US Intelligence community does not have much oversight. Let's be real. The last organ that exercised oversight on the intelligence community, I think, was Congress in the 1970s.
- [38:07]
James Polis
Yeah, Trends Committee.
- [38:09]
Samo Burria
Exactly. We all know that Congress is, you know, it's not deceased, but it's senile. Right. It is not a real organ of power. America has a legislature shaped hole in its body politic. It's like the Constitution expected that to be where laws are made, not through administrative process, not through the Supreme Court. Look, the Supreme Court's actually working admirably well as a Senate. It just wasn't designed to be a Senate.
- [38:38]
James Polis
Just a little too small.
- [38:39]
Samo Burria
Yeah, exactly right. It was supposed to be a Supreme Court and not the supreme legislator. But if you don't have a legislature, when power is abdicated, someone or something picks it up.
- [38:51]
James Polis
Yeah, so usually when we get critiques of democracy from the right, it sounds something like this. Well, it's really inefficient. No one's really in charge. It devolves into factions. You have multiple overlapping agendas. It sort of just becomes bureaucratic chaos. It becomes the kook state we started to see in the 60s. All this stuff happened in earnest where the proto intelligence community was like, well, we should create abstract art. We got to figure out how to beat the commies. And so we're going to throw everything at the wall.
- [39:26]
Samo Burria
I mean, they funded the Paris Review of Books. It wasn't all wasted.
- [39:30]
James Polis
Oh no, not necessarily bad stuff, but also freak power was kind of a fabric and the whole Laurel Canyon scene. And Charles Mancy. You can go down all those rabbit holes, but you don't have to go all the way down to sort of get a rough and ready understanding that for a long time America has run on cults and cult leaders. And the ability to manufacture cults has been at the heart of a lot of power, bureaucratic kinds of power included. So when you're talking about these kinds of patterns reappearing at this sort of even more reified and abstract level, when it comes to the intelligence community and automation of government and the cult of the machine.
- [40:12]
Samo Burria
God.
- [40:12]
James Polis
Right. Propping up these bureaucratic entities. But in a milieu where no one bureaucrat or even one faction of bureaucrats really knows who else is even involved in the project or whether they're really doing their job or pretending to do their job or working, you know, it really is the wilderness of mirrors that Angleton described that seems like kind of the worst of both worlds, the worst of democracy and the worst of bureaucracy.
- [40:44]
Samo Burria
Well, I think that to a very great extent there's just a difference between functional and non functional systems. If we look at the big scope of human history, we see functional monarchies and dysfunctional monarchies. We see functional republics and dysfunctional republics. You know, the Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth is not the Roman Republic, even if they're both these kind of like vaguely democratic, vaguely aristocratic systems with like a figurehead at the top. And I think that what is happening again, there was this huge, well, let's put it this way, there was a small republic set up in the North American continent. It was succeeded by a European style, almost nationalist state. So when Lincoln won the civil war, he made these United States, the United States Unionism was sort of a prequel to this big American nationalist ideology. This got watered down, transformed into something like the 20th century managerial state, which reached its peak in the Vannevar Bush, FDR sort of era. That state had its strengths, right? It had its strengths. It could carry out a complex operation like D day or it could land a man on the moon. It was certainly technocratic, but it was also in a way very focused, very lean, right? We are now living in sort of the decaying a husk of that. And new phenomena have emerged where this constant chaos, right when we're saying this duct taping of the system, but when the incentive of all the already obsolete parts searching for purpose, searching for something to justify their budget, something to justify their lives honestly, results in them generating a lot of the chaos with one hand, that with the other hand they're struggling to control or to hide from the public or to prevent.
- [42:44]
James Polis
So that's good because so much of what still goes on in political theory circles, at least relatively traditional ones, has to do with regime type. And you know, this goes back for not ridiculous reasons, back to Aristotle where, you know, you're trying to understand what the different modes of political organization are, but you're pointing to the fact that, you know, look, regardless of what your mode of organization is, it can either be sort of healthy and flourishing, or it can be sick and malfunctioning. I think Americans are aware that we live in a post constitutional situation, but there is no clear idea of exactly how to proceed. Because the mindset that we have been working with for so long is one based on regime type. If we're not in a constitutional order anymore, it seems hard to understand how we can go back to one. The built in solution is to do a constitutional convention, but A lot of people are hesitant to do that because I think probably reasonably they believe that they will lose and the new Constitutional Convention will result in some even worse settlement. Yeah, some even worse settlement. There's a strain of Silicon Valley thought that says, look, this is all ridiculous. You just need a CEO in charge. But there's also a strain of Silicon Valley thought that says, hey, actually being a CEO is ridiculous. This is boring. Now I actually want to be some kind of priest. You know, I want to be this figure of spiritual authority who tells everyone who or what to worship and exactly how to do it. Whether they're doing that from a woke direction or whether they're doing that from a sort of techno gnostic direction. What's in America to do?
- [44:32]
Samo Burria
Well, I think just to build a little bit on, you invoked the Greek concept of the kyklos, the cycle where you have this transformation from monarchy to aristocracy to democracy and then all over again. Well, what is usually omitted is in that cycle there is always a functional stage followed by a decay stage. So in ancient Greek political theory, which was based on the Data set of 400 city states whose history we've lost, it's actually an amazing political science experiment if you think about it. These are Greek speaking people, they're all in the Mediterranean, same climate, usually very similar trade opportunities, and they try out something like four or five hundred constitutions. Wow, that was a treasure trove of political science and one that America's like. It's large N. Exactly, large N. And it's one that America's founding fathers took very seriously. Like if you read them, they're like constantly invoking theories and examples from classical antiquity.
- [45:34]
James Polis
And this is where the fear of tyranny comes from.
- [45:36]
Samo Burria
Exactly. Well, but the point I was making about the cycle, about there being a functional and non functional stage, is that you have monarchy that devolves into tyranny, and you have aristocracy that devolves into oligarchy, and you have democracy that devolves into mob rule. And then according to some Greek theorists, society is just done. It's just over at that point. And according to other theorists, it starts all over again. And you can have the same city state go through the cycle all over again. And I'm sure actually both happen. Right, because cities do get destroyed, cities do fail, but cities and civilizations are also reborn and restart. Now, I think today what we have in America, it's not quite. It's not mob rule, it's certainly not mob rule, mob rule. When happens even the tiniest smidge of it happens. Or even the tiniest midge of democracy, it gets slandered and called populism. Right. It's not monarchy. We know Joe Biden wasn't in charge. I'm gonna maybe anger my conservative friends and say, I think even Donald Trump was not that much in charge of his own country, his own state, his own government.
- [46:39]
James Polis
Oh, I don't know. I think many of them would agree with you. They would just lament it.
- [46:43]
Samo Burria
Yeah, yeah. And then finally, we already debunked Congress. That's literally old men collecting paychecks. That's what it is now. It's a gerontocracy. Worse. Do you know that the average age of the US Congressman is now higher than the oldest age of the Soviet. The oldest average age the Soviet Politburo ever reached?
- [47:03]
James Polis
Yeah. That's really bad.
- [47:04]
Samo Burria
Isn't that really bad?
- [47:05]
James Polis
Can you imagine going to a time.
- [47:07]
Samo Burria
Travel machine to the 1980s and telling that to Americans then?
- [47:10]
James Polis
Right.
- [47:11]
Samo Burria
This is your future.
- [47:12]
James Polis
They did look older back then, but it's still bad.
- [47:15]
Samo Burria
I mean, you know, I think the cosmetics are better at fixing the outside problems than the inside problems. So maybe this is just another example of us becoming pharaonic. We're embalming the corpse. We are busy embalming the corpse.
- [47:27]
James Polis
Joe Biden looked great until about two years ago.
- [47:30]
Samo Burria
Yeah. I mean, it really is partially a structural aging problem, because historically speaking, you know, I'm gonna detour into gerontocracy a little bit. Rule of the old. Historically speaking, youth had the advantage of two things. Violence and the advantage of numbers. In most historical societies, you had an age pyramid. There are vastly more young people than there are old people. And yes, young people are stronger and more impulsive, so they tend to be violent. And in politics, violence is a form of power. The threat of violence is important, be it the Roman mob or be it the Roman legion, both are forms of violence, more or less organized, and they shape the political order we then go to. And then what old people have usually is the advantage of property rights, the advantage of incumbency, the advantage of knowing everyone who matters. The advantage of having a literal old boys network. Or maybe now it's like old gals network or something. Exactly, exactly. Her gang. I feel like she was practically bragging about pushing Joe Biden out. That was a brag, the way she talked about it. Impeccably, impeccably hidden in Californian niceties. Right. I think there's an aspect of Californian culture that maybe you'll resonate with, which I call toxic positivity. Right. Where you say, we say very negative things with seemingly very positive. Where you give people only positive feedback, no negative feedback, because you want them to fail. So that is kind of a dysfunction. A little bit of San Francisco, a little bit probably of LA and definitely Nancy Pelosi style. But to finish sort of the point I was raising here, and to also answer your question, I think the United States today is like something almost new. It is a strange hybrid of the last vestiges of oligarchy. Right. I'm sure if the king is senile, in the great arc of human history, there's a regency council. America had a regency council under the Biden administration. We don't know who sat on it. But I think that's sort of actually maybe the last vestige of functionality where I think even that oligarchy feels overwhelmed and feels like they're not in charge. And they're probably not. When they issue orders to parts of this huge FDR built machine, I don't think all the parts respond. Right. Or if they do, they twitch, they spasm. It's a little bit unsightly. It's extremely stressful. There's a reason those people age so quickly. Right. Like even the President himself still ages very rapidly due to the stresses. You've seen the before and after comparisons of, I don't know, Obama or Bill Clinton or etc. Something is there is a subjection to the constant stress of dysfunction. It's not the stress of even weighty decisions. It's not the West Wing. Okay. It's the stress of constantly. Everything feels like you need to put duct tape over it, like you said.
- [50:40]
James Polis
And then an inability to make weighty decisions.
- [50:44]
Samo Burria
So I think we can avoid to some extent a hard reset. The thing that I would propose is that perhaps America should focus on rethinking its own cities. If you think about it today, a city government actually retains more autonomy versus the federal government than a state does. Like if the US Federal government tries to tell New York what to do, New York might actually say no. If they tell Minnesota what to do. Minnesota usually says, sir, yes, sir. Because so much of the federal subsidies, well, they're dependent on them. Right. Like the US Federal government can bypass these sort of limitations easily.
- [51:22]
James Polis
And the threat of withholding future subsidies.
- [51:24]
Samo Burria
Exactly right. Unless you comply with whatever new interstate commerce clause related policy they have, which is of course everything. Everything is interstate commerce.
- [51:35]
James Polis
That's how they raise the drinking age.
- [51:37]
Samo Burria
Exactly, exactly. So really what we have to consider here is maybe Cities should be rebuilt, and we should have low crime cities. And I think the cities could be financially relatively independent of the federal government. And, you know, you see some small elements of this. You see, like, the city of Miami had way more. Even if you're into the culture war, the city of Miami had way more interesting cultural politics than any state I can think of. Even Florida was like a weak echo of Miami in a way. Right. They didn't do the lockdowns in Miami. I mean, we shouldn't forget the lockdowns again. I think everyone's into forgetting those, but they're an important phenomena. I know it wasn't a fun time, but the reason they matter is because they are the last live political experiment. And the last live political experiment showed that actually we are all very obedient by historical standards. We are among the most obedient subjects that have ever lived. We will stay home. We will not go to grandma's funeral. We will not go to church. We will go to the BLM protests.
- [52:47]
James Polis
Right.
- [52:48]
Samo Burria
That is shocking.
- [52:50]
James Polis
Yeah.
- [52:50]
Samo Burria
Yeah.
- [52:51]
James Polis
Earlier in our conversation, you invoked the word trust. I think this is really important in the midst of all of this dysfunction, all of this just sort of the sublime, horrifying spectacle of so many institutions being so riddled with parasites and factions that it seems. Seems like no one's in charge. Trust becomes even more important than it normally is. And in a situation where so many of the substitutes for organized religion that have been tried in America have been found wanting, even something that seemed as durable as Blockbuster Video. Right. Gone. You can laugh at it, and we all do, but these were pillars of everyday life in millions of communities that lived in a monoculture. And all of those things are gone. And what has replaced them has increased factionalism and increased people just sort of hunkering down in their niches, in their niche identities, intersectionality has not really worked out that much as a way of knitting these factions together. Isolation has increased. Paranoia has increased. Depression has increased physical mental illness. We've seen all the indicators. It's not the singularity curve. It's the sort of staggering into the grave, you know, downward slope. And yet the weapons keep becoming more powerful. The technology keeps becoming more comprehensive. You know, people argue about whether America is an idea. And, well, if it is an idea, it seems like it's the idea that we should just keep making more powerful weapons and controlling those weapons. But even that, you know, if.
- [54:50]
Samo Burria
Or make line go up, right?
- [54:52]
James Polis
And if the upshot of that is we're still a superpower, but Just, you know, in this kind of narrower category than we were before then, even the sort of, you know, de risk everything except the most powerful weapons, even that seems not to be working very well in a situation like that. It seems that what people are craving as an index of trust or as a way of trying to understand a heuristic of where they can place their trust, they're looking for spiritual authority. And that seems to be the area where perhaps we have a path out of these traps that we've been discussing. Where, yes, obviously you want competent people flying the airplanes. Yes. You want people to in some way demonstrate in advance that they're capable of wielding a certain amount of political or economic power or authority. But really, if they're lacking in spiritual authority, then how are you going to be able to trust them?
- [55:46]
Samo Burria
Well, you know, I think that the problem is there is a certain kind of spiritual authority wielded currently. Right. There is.
- [55:54]
James Polis
You know, it's just not earning trust.
- [55:56]
Samo Burria
Well, it's spending down the trust that inherited from the set of previous systems and the trust it inherited from America being so prosperous for so long. Right. America has been definitely one of the richest countries in the world and the richest country in the world for a very long time now. And I think in a very serious way, because of that, we assume things must continue working and that the wealth will always be there. But every empire assumes that until that's not the case. And when you're comfortable, materially comfortable, you don't tend to question spiritual authorities even as you lose trust in them. Right. So I think there's a possibility of doubling down into this sort of pharaonic model of the AI priesthood with a very obedient population. Right. The same population that did lockdowns, the same population will pretend to believe the AI is truly in charge even when they know it's priesthood. Right. There's that possibility. There's also the possibility of alternate structures of spiritual authority returning. Now the question is, how would that work? Right. Because it's not like, you know, America has churches. So what's wrong with them? James May, I should ask you, why are America's churches not the true center of its spiritual authority?
- [57:20]
James Polis
Yeah, Well, I mean, you know, a short answer to that question, and I don't want to eat up the rest of your time here, is we conducted a grand experiment in filling a frontier area with religious structures that are anywhere from a couple hundred years old to a couple dozen years old to maybe a week old and see what happens. And we're seeing what Happens.
- [57:44]
Samo Burria
I mean, sometimes cool things happen. Yuta's pretty nice.
- [57:47]
James Polis
Sometimes cool things happen. Sometimes you wake up in a cold sweat.
- [57:52]
Samo Burria
Yeah, totally. But you know, I think that whatever the new centers of spiritual authority will be, they will have to reckon with and provide a rigorous alternative to or a functional symbiosis with, you know, the experience, the let's call it enfoned experience.
- [58:13]
James Polis
Right.
- [58:13]
Samo Burria
Like humans are ensouled beings and now we're also enfoned beings. We are always carrying our smartphone, we are always looking at our social media, we are receiving email and so on. That is the default form of socialization already for young people. All the data indicates this. Right. We talked about, you mentioned the drinking age earlier. Young people drink less than ever. They have less sex than ever. These are not signs of great moral health. These are signs of being a shut in of the primary mode shifting to the phone. So I think the next religious modality must face the smartphone and either find a strict, I don't know, maybe there'll be like a commandment that you have to put the phone down seven times a day and. Right, maybe that's a commandment. Maybe it'll be specialized phone interfaces or actually software built to accommodate a religious service. Though I think that's already risking it. Right? That's putting it in the virtual Waymo world rather than the actual embodied and presumably unsold world. If one is religious, and I think that it cannot ignore that because that is what it must overcome because that has replaced all other institutions, secular ones too. Right. Political parties these days struggle to have on the ground local organization. Everyone wants to play the national game because the national game is kind of this hyperstition, kind of like virtual accessible, digitally documented thing. Meanwhile door to door counting physical ballots or all of the aspects of stuff that a 20th century political party which had its flaws tended to do. All that's boring, people don't want to do that and the whole bowling alone syndrome, et cetera, et cetera. So I think religion has to reckon with that and find a praxine orthopraxy that overcomes it. I'm not even saying new orthodoxies are needed. There just has to be an orthopraxy that accounts for the smartphone.
- [60:27]
James Polis
Well, and this is why some say that this is why church Christians need to use Bitcoin before they find themselves simply being used by it. In the same way that so many people are being used by their phones instead of actually using them. We're about at time Bismarck analysis is the shop tell us how we can find it and give you more money.
- [60:46]
Samo Burria
Okay, well, that's wonderful. We publish a weekly newsletter called the Bismarck Brief. You can find it@brief.bismarckanalysis.com. you know, it is a high price tag, but I guarantee you the information is rigorously researched. 5,000 words every week, in depth. Dive into the elites of our society, into the economics of our society, the technology of our society, case studies on everything from, you know, intel to the war in Ukraine. And we have plenty of free briefs, so if you sign up, you can access the public briefs there.
- [61:21]
James Polis
Sama, always a pleasure. Thanks so much for joining us.
- [61:24]
Samo Burria
Pleasure.
- [61:25]
James Polis
All right, that's all the time we got till next time around. I'm James Polis. This is Zero Hour. May God have mercy on us all.