AI & Technology

could have been. But I do believe that Trump has a plan that appears to be working. So he announced that Venezuela was going to give up to the United States 30 to 50 billion gallons of oil. And Trump says it will be entirely up to him how that oil is used. It will be sold on the market, of course. But what Trump is doing in his Trumpian way is promising that some amount of that will directly benefit the Venezuelan people. And that's very Trumpian. He likes to make deals where everybody wins, and that would be a deal where everybody won except, you know, China, right? Here's a little persona

Episode 3065 CWSA 01/07/26

t Venezuela will be at the top of mind. All right. I'm going to start by blowing your mind. Now, here's my challenge. That's a pretty big claim, right? And I'm going to add a thought to the universe that, as far as I know, has never been there before. It goes like this. Oh, I should also warn you. The topic I'm about to talk about, a lot of you do not like. But I'm going to convert the people who don't like it, the topic I'm about to introduce. I'm going to make you like it. So that's my second challenge. You're gonna like something you didn't like before. You ready? All right. So, as I've been telling you, AI may have reached some kind of plateau in how well you can train it with just brute force and giving it more training material. And I was reading in some publication, let's see, in TechCrunch that this is the year that maybe AI people figure out that they've reached some kind of a plateau and they can't get much better just by adding more training material and more data centers. So the response to that, which is already happening, is some startups trying to create virtual digital worlds that look and act like our world so that an AI can live in it and learn to operate the way a human would and also learn general intelligence the way a human would. Now that necessarily means that these digital worlds will include characters based on humans because if you want the AI to be intelligent like a human, the thinking is that you have to train it in an environment in which it experiences the world like a human. But because you can't unleash a bunch of stupid AIs into the real world, they'll build an AI virtual world and the characters within it almost certainly would have to be programmed to believe they were not characters. So they would have to be programmed to believe they were in original base reality. Right? So, I believe this will be the year that AI and these virtual realities will make it really obvious that if we're not already a simulation, the odds are tremendously high that we probably are. Can't know for sure. No way to know for sure. But the odds will be a billion to one, trillion to one that we're not real now. So, my next question, I'm getting to the good part. I haven't got to the good part. You're going to like it. So, people say to me, "But Scott, what does that imply about a creator?" You know, the obvious question is, "Who made the original?" And I've been saying for years that obviously there was some advanced intelligence. Don't know what it is. It might be your version of God. It could be just a higher civilization, but definitely it would have to be an advanced civilization that was smarter than us that knew how to create this simulation. Now, you ready for the good part? Is it true or not true that in what we think is our base reality, we're trying to create a form of intelligence that would be smarter than us? Smarter than us. So this actually opens up the possibility that we're a simulation created by a species or entity that's not as smart as us. That's what I'm adding. It's obvious that something that was more intelligent than us could create a simulation that fooled us into thinking we're real. But since we know we're already trying to create an AI that's smarter than us, it's entirely possible that we're created by an entity that has advanced intelligence but not as smart as us because we've already surpassed it. I'll bet nobody said that before. All right, it gets better. So if it's true that the AI experts are going to make these various training worlds, don't you think there will be lots of them? There's not going to be one because every AI startup that wants to create its own little environment will have to do their own. So very quickly you would have more simulated environments, maybe two or three, but it would be more than whatever your base reality is. Now the other thing people ask me is why is this not compatible with Christianity? And I say probably it is. There's probably nothing I said that's incompatible with Christianity. You know, you could imagine God created the base reality and created it all and there's nothing to rule that out whatsoever. And other people will say, "What does that imply about souls?" Well, I don't think we know what a soul is. So it kind of depends how you define it. If you define it one way, it probably is real and we have one. If you define it some other way, maybe not so real. What about free will? Well, here again, it depends how you define it. There's a definition of free will in which it definitely exists. If you just say free will is the ability to make a choice. If you stop there, yeah, it definitely exists because we have the ability to make a choice and not know why, not know the real mechanism of it. So that could easily be true that you have free will if you define it that way. If you defined it another way, maybe you wouldn't. And then lastly, here's the part you're going to like. Whenever I talk about this simulation and especially when I talk about my own impending death, many of my Christian friends and Christian followers say to me, "Scott, you still have time. You should convert to Christianity." And I usually just let that sit because that's not an argument I want to have. I'm not a believer but I also have respect for any Christian who goes out of their way to try to convert me because how would I believe you believe your own religion if you're not trying to convert me. So I have great respect for people who care enough that they want me to convert and then go out of their way to try to convince me. So you're going to hear for the first time today that it is my plan to convert. So I still have time, but my understanding is you're never too late. And on top of that, any skepticism I have about reality would certainly be instantly answered if I wake up in heaven. I do believe that the dominant Christian theory is that I would wake up in heaven if I have a good life. You know, I don't necessarily have to state something in advance. And so to my Christian friends, yes, it's coming. So you don't need to talk me into it. I am now convinced that the risk reward is completely smart. If it turn

Episode 3062 CWSA 01/04/26

e could be created by a less intelligent entity than us and that we are the AI and we're already smarter than our creator as was intended to be. What lower intelligence? You're watching it right now. If we succeed, meaning the startups, in creating a virtual environment in which the AI learns to be smarter than us, and that's the whole point. We're not trying to create an AI that's dumber than us. So if we have the infrastructure which is these virtual worlds then we already see like right now we see that what we think is our base reality will be quickly less intelligent than what the outcome of the AI research is. So you don't have to ask could it happen? It's happening right now. It's happening right now. That's the whole point. The whole point is to build a virtual reality in which the characters within the reality, our future AI, is smarter than us in whatever this is. Does that make sense? But once you grok that, not literally grok, but understand it, it's kind of mind-blowing. And again, it does not rule out God. It doesn't rule out that we're created by a superior intellect. Doesn't rule that out. It's just, you know, the point of it is a

Episode 3062 CWSA 01/04/26

how far we can get. So does it seem to you that AI has turned into a race between building data centers and building power plants as fast as they can versus there's probably somebody in some garage somewhere who's inventing a way to do it without all that energy? Does that not seem obviously true to you? Because when we're trying to predict what the future looks like, I cannot imagine that the AI companies are right that it will just take massive energy and more energy and if you want to get better you just need more energy. This seems far more likely that somebody's already inventing a way around that. So that's what I'm going to bet on. But you know, Ron DeSantis, it turns out, is an AI skeptic and he said some interesting things. Politico is reporting on this. So he's interested in more regulation and doesn't want AI to use up all the energy, etc. So he's a little skeptical about its value. And he put a really interesting slant on this, sort of a religious slant I hadn't heard before. He says we have to reject with every fiber of our being the idea of this transhumanist strain that would be the robots and the AI that somehow this is going to supplant humans and this other stuff. We have to reject that with every fiber of our being. Here's the interesting part. He says we as individual human beings are the ones that are endowed by God with certain unalienable rights and all that. They did not endow machines or computers with those. So here's my provocative question. What's going to happen to your view of free will when computers and robots obviously have it? So if I said to you define free will, and I've had this conversation a million times, you say well it's the ability to make a choice. And I would say well AI can make a choice. So does it have free will? And then you would say no, no, because if a computer does it, it's just programmed. And you know, there's no choice. Only one thing could happen. But what happens when you can't figure out why the AI did what it did, which is actually the current situation? So you won't be able to trace back any kind of cause and effect. It's going to look like the AI had choices exactly like a human did and it picked one. So will your belief in free will disappear? Beca

Episode 3057 CWSA 12/29/25

ia a microwave beam from space to earth. So the idea is you could put big solar panels floating in space. It could gather up the electricity and shoot it to earth. And they had shown that they could do that on a small scale, and I said that that would be a big game changer if they could scale that up. Well, I mistakenly believed that Elon Musk agreed with my take, but it's actually the opposite. So Elon responded to that story. A lot of people had asked him about it, I guess, and said that he's often asked about beaming electricity from space from solar panels. And I mistakenly believed he said that was a good idea. But what he was talking about, and the only thing he was talking about, because he says that could never work, there are reasons in physics which he understands that I don't that would make it really impractical or impossible to scale it up. But if you were generating it in space but also built your, let's say, your AI data center in space, you could use the electricity in space and then it would be almost unlimited because you would be above our cloud cover and you could be where the sun always gets you. So it would never be nighttime if you had solar panels. So the clarification is that at least in terms of what Elon says, and I will not disagree with him, that there's no practical way to make that a dominant energy source for the terrestrial folks. However, you might cynically or skeptically say, "Scott, Scott, Scott, you simpleton, don't you know that even though it was Japan that announced this breakthrough, that it almost certainly is a cover for some kind of a space-based weapon? Because if you had something that generated a lot of electricity floating above the earth and you could microwave that as something, that would be a good way to shoot down any kind of a space-based w

Episode 3056 CWSA 12/28/25

eapon on the other team." Because although that microwave beam apparently is an inefficient way to carry electricity through the atmosphere, it might be just what you need to shoot down some kind of a threat from space. So even the press release on that might be a cover for something military maybe. Speaking of charging things electrically over space, apparently Tesla just filed a patent on something that would allow you to charge your electric vehicle without plugging it in. So Tesla apparently has a plan which I believe will be applied to the Cybercab, which allegedly won't even have a charging port. So the idea is that the Cybercab maybe first, I don't know, will not need a port. If it gets close to something that's designed to work that way, it will wirelessly charge your vehicle. Now, what I'm not sure about, but I saw some estimates that that would also apply to existing Teslas that have a charging port, but there might be some way to also wirelessly charge it. That part I don't know, but I think more reliably it's true that the Cybercab will be using it and not have a charging port. That's got to be the last thing that Tesla needed to make

Episode 3056 CWSA 12/28/25