Okay, everybody. So just in case you think there's not enough change going on for you,

I'm sure you're feeling what everybody else is, which is this huge wave of fundamental transition really for the human species that has to do, of course, with the eminence of AI. People say that it's the biggest thing to happen since the printing press. And I think that there's a really good argument that can be made behind that. There's a tremendous conversation to be had about all this, but it's way more than technological, it's way more than economic. We need to get really deep down into some of the ethical and philosophical questions that really have to do with the direction of humanity, even the survival of humanity, as we know it, over the next, what, even 100 years. So I didn't want to just talk to somebody who's going to talk about all the technological aspects of it. I didn't want to talk about just what's happening to the U.S. economy or anything like that. I wanted to talk to somebody who understands what's really happening in business terms and environmental terms and economic terms and in ethical terms because he's a good guy. You know, this is a thing. I was saying when I ran for President, I kept saying that it's the dichotomy that is the real one underlying events these days. It's not just between left and right. And I often said it's between top and bottom. It's between those who have wealth and wealth creation capacity versus those who don't. But we're moving into a new phase now. I think what's going to happen in the next hundred years is going to be determined by the dichotomy between sociopaths and not sociopaths. And an economic system in which we're so excited by technological capacities, economic capacities and aren't thinking about the deeper ethical issues here is a sociopathic system. And you and have to make sure that we're asking the right questions we're going deep and that's why we talk to people like my guest today, Brian O'Kelly. And I will also say that he's a friend and someone that I trust and someone that I ask a lot of questions to and always listen very deeply not only because of his information about what's happening in the world but because I know where his heart is. So Brian O'Kelly, thank you so much. Let me tell everybody a little bit about you. You are CEO and co-founder of scope three platform-powering safe sustainable growth in media and advertising. You were the co-founder and CEO of App Nexus through its $1.6 billion sale to AT&T in 2018. You co-founded Webridge, a supply chain technology company, served as CTO of rights media through its successful acquisition by Yahoo. You are credited with the invention of programmatic advertising and the online ad exchange. You are deeply committed to technology-driven innovations that benefit society while improving the health of the planet. So thank you so much for being here. Thanks for having me. Okay, so let's start. I want to start by just saying where I think the average person is. We get that it's here. Nobody's doubting that. We get that it's not going away. We also get to see in our own daily lives. Oh, this is cool. I can ask this question. I can ask that question. Although people also are realizing or should be realizing sometimes it lies. People are also asking questions because people understand that there's a tremendous environmental impact here. And also people are starting to talk about the dangers that could be confronting us. as certainly as a democracy. I want to talk to you a lot about that later and also as a species. So just starting with that, what do you see when I when I say that that's the lay of the land just that I think the average person is dealing with? How do you see that compared to what you actually see happening in the industry? Well, I keep coming back to that moment in 2001, the space Odyssey, when there's these apes banging around with rocks and all the sudden this monolith drops from the sky and suddenly they develop tools. And it's not this beautiful, peaceful thing, like then that becomes weapons. And then you have this incredible conflict and it goes through these different phases of the movie until at one point there's this, you know, space scene. And there's this question of, you know, AI, this is what 50 years ago, I mean, pretty prescient this idea, but this confrontation, and we have to unplug how because, you know because it is threatening humanity. And I think we're at that moment. We're at this moment where this monolith, I mean, obviously we built it. We discovered it. But it's so foreign and other that we don't even have the words to understand it. We gender it all the time. Is it my friend Claude? Is it him? And the idea that we personify something that is so clearly not human, but that is so deceptively and convincingly human puts us in a unique place where I think for the first time we've encountered the equivalent of alien life. Like If a UFO had come to Earth and started to speak to us in these ways, would it be dramatically different than what we're experiencing today, or if we found another intelligent species on the planet? To me, it feels that big. And I don't know if it feels like that to you, but for me, that's kind of where I sit is foreign. It feels foreign. I think it feels that big to most people now. And I think that we're an alien species to arrive on the planet. I think the question, what everybody would be asking is, is it friend or is it foe? Is it good guys or is it bad guys? And so I think the question is, is it possible to program into it, mercy, compassion, forgiveness? Somebody mentioned to me the other day, I thought it was a really good point. Somebody said, we need to program into it a capacity to admit when it's been wrong. Right now, it seems to be programmed with that kind of sociopathic mentality of the level of society which has created it. And that is a lack of essential care. Or even when essential care is presented, it seems to be manipulative. It seems to be for the purpose of getting me to ask other questions or do whatever. What are your thoughts about that? Well, the thing is that AI has been programmed trained by the sum of humanity. Right? Meta has basically taken everything anyone has ever written on Facebook, posted Instagram and dumped it into these large language models. And so what we have is the sum of humanity. And so what that means is that there is mercy and goodness and greatness in there, but there's also sociopathy and evil and hate. And the problem we have is that unlike a traditional computer, these aren't really programmed. They're trained. Meaning we give them a bunch of data. Something comes out in a very organic way. And we, we have to almost mentor it. We have to teach it and steer it. But we can't tell it what to do, which is why it feels so powerful and so scary is,

we don't really know what's going to come out. It's not deterministic, like a normal

computer would be.

So, in other words, if I understand what you're saying, it will only get better if we get

better.

Or if we figure out just like a child, if you will, like if you think about nature versus nurture, right? Like I don't know that there are children who are predestined to be sociopaths or evil, but if you think about the process of raising a child and nurturing it and training, think how many years it takes, you know, to get a kid from, from, you know, diapers through through college and then, you know, even then they're not ready. To really make a human, an adult wise, thoughtful person might take 70 years. I don't know yet, but I'm getting there. I think if you look at my parents and the job they continue to do, why are we trying to train these artificial intelligences in months? What makes us think? We can do that entire call it parenting. I know it's not the right word, but like that grooming and training and all these things we need to do so quickly. And that's the risk I think we take is we've brought these into everyone's computer phone life before they're really mature. And I worry that if these are

showing sociopathic tendencies or hallucinating or lying or deceiving us, it's on us to slow down. And it's also extremely not human to slow down in the face of technological progress. Well, if I understand what you're saying, what comes up for me is not just the time it takes to a parent, but the most important issue in parenting and that is teaching values. So if this is an issue of parenting and mentoring, we're really failing because the values we're teaching at is how do I cut jobs in order to make more money? Some of the some of the predictions are already catastrophic. There are those which say we could have lost 300 million jobs in the US economy within two years. So that's number one. All it's being programmed to care about is how it can cut jobs. Also it's being programmed or trained or raised without a lot of concern for the tremendous environmental devastation that it's doing. And also, to me, you know, six months ago, the issue was will it ever turn against us? Could it ever be the predator species that actually gets rid of us? Now, I'm very concerned, as I think many people are, about how it can be used, particularly in the hands of Peter Tio, particularly in the hands of Palantir, by those who actually are already partnering with the Trump administration and building the structure of a totalitarian state. So if what it's being mentored into right now is how to data mine in order to know every possible thing about everyone, so that theoretically, whether it's a corporation or a government could control absolutely every little thing. How do we turn to this? I think that's an incredibly important question that we'll wish we'd listened to 10, 20, 30 years from now. But I think the potential here is so great that even as a human, I often ask questions of AI because the answers are so useful and valuable to me. And that's not me using it for evil, I don't think. No, I mean, yeah, and we all do at this point. Think about Google, right? In 2019, I was in front of the Senate Judicial Committee testifying about whether Google search was a monopoly and whether it should become a public utility. Today, Google search is getting eaten by AI. And there's a question of whether Google as a sort of search engine will even exist in five years. I mean, this is a fundamental change in how the internet, which I think I would have said was the most transformational technology since the printing press like two years ago. Now I might say it was just the beginning. And so there's a lot of hope here. The hope is not going to come from regulation in the US right now. That's not the climate we're in. But there is, but there is so much grassroots uprising against, for instance, data centers. What we're seeing is power prices going up all across the country because there are massive data centers right outside of communities that are competing with residential for electricity. We're seeing brownouts and blackouts because the power surges are so great from these data centers. And so it's a very real experience of getting your power bill or not being able to build a new house or you know the strain this is putting on our physical infrastructure. And look, you and I have been talking about infrastructure for how long? You know, like we've been saying infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure. If you look at China, they're laughing at us. They've been building this infrastructure for years, getting ready for this moment. And here we are trying to install the next generation of technology on probably two or three generation old infrastructure. I do blame Democrats and Progressives for this to some extent because some of the pushback against infrastructure has been on NIMB or environmentalist rationales. And so we've kind of gotten ourselves into a bind where the only way out may be through a bit of a trough where we have to go do some pretty significant things to get where we need to be. And I hate being in this position. I feel like a wiser species would have seen this coming and been ready for it. And I'm really nervous that I don't see a great way out of the box. We're not going to stop doing chat to GPT. And yet we don't have the energy or

infrastructure or safeguards or even like the societal framework to handle this in our midst. Well, a couple of things. First of all, just on a really basic level, I want you to explain to everybody, I've been reading about the whole data centers issue in Texas and the the residential communities who aren't happy. Would you explain little bit just for those of us who are

enormous in this. What is the data center?

What does it actually do? And what is the environmental impact that some people are so concerned about? Yeah, I mean, a data center is just a big, windalous warehouse with thousands or hundreds of thousands of computers or servers as we call them. And these are incredibly dense, hot computing devices. Like if you ever put your hand in the cabinet under your TV and even the set top box, make your cabinet hot. Well, imagine a million of those jammed into the smallest space possible. So they have these massive coolers on top, like basically an entire air conditioning system. They're now water cooled, so they have water flowing through them. And the amount of energy these things take is like million people, you know, worth, like an entire metropolis worth of energy just being used by these things. There's not that much power. Like if you go to Texas and say, well, how much excess power is on the grid? Well, not that much. I mean, there's blackouts in really hot moments. And so what these companies are doing is they're actually building gas turbines, like massive industrial scale power plants next to their data centers. And then they're trying to get gas pipelines built across Texas or North Carolina or whatever to bring natural gas in to fuel these data centers. I mean, it sounds like something from science fiction. If you look at the top-down picture from space of these data centers, I mean, think about cornfields as a similar scale. A cornfield, not of corn, but of AI GPU servers. I mean, it's incredible. So let me ask you a question just so that somebody can have a general idea of what we're talking about. Somebody goes on to chat PT and just ask a question about something and gets a few paragraphs back. What was the environmental impact of that one question? It is a few grams of carbon dioxide worth of energy. So just to put that in context, if you added all up in about two or three years, that will be about 11 or 12 percent of all electricity in the US. More than like California and New Jersey and throw one more state combined. I mean, it is as if every single person in California, all the energy, all the air conditioning, all the airports, everything else, that's AI. It's very interesting what you were talking about earlier. You talked about China and of course, and a completely totalitarian, you know, dictatorial system. You can have a long range planning, right? So that, you know, there's bad news about the good news there. They were able to do this long-range planning. But when you were talking about certain environmental groups, being obstructions and so forth, what tends to happen in the United States is not just the timing, which is it's a two-year or four-year or two-years, four-years. But it's also the fact that everybody's talking from their silo, what will be the impact on this group,

what will be the impact on this particular area.

We don't have a holistic conversation

about where humanity is going.

And that, you and I, of course,

having had many conversations when I was running for president,

you and I are very aware

that the political system, as it exists today,

is deeply resistant to any deeper ethical, philosophical conversation. And we'll say and do whatever it takes to peripheralize such a thing. And yet that is what we have to have now. This is way, what is, there was somebody famous general or something, said, war is way too important a topic to be left in the hands of the politicians. And I see the same thing here. This is way too important a topic to be left not only in the hands of politicians, but in the hands of corporate chiefs and to our only thinking of it in terms of the economic capacity. Now, you already have, Palantir, for instance, something like a $300 billion company bigger than Verizon, bigger than Disney, almost as big as Bank of America. So that right there is a tremendous power. Then you have Peter Teele partnering with the Trump administration. I mean, that's your essence of fascism right there. You're talking about this marriage of corporate and governmental power. And then you're getting into talking about civil rights. We already know that Palantir is working with the Trump administration on finding where some of these immigrants are, if some of the neighborhoods and so forth. We already know how this is being used in the Warren Gaza. This is actually terrifying. The idea of this being used for totalitarian purposes. I don't know if you personally know the investor Paul Graham over in Silicon Valley, but he's really been talking about this and about our recognition and our resistance to what Palantir is doing, providing the technological backup for what could be a totalitarian state. And of course, we're at the point now, is it the Trump-ass Peter Teal to do it or the Peter Teal-ass Trump to do it? We don't even know what's really going on. What are your thoughts about some of those things? As an American, what are your thoughts about those things? I feel very deeply scared, to be honest. I think we are dealing with powers that our constitution couldn't comprehend. We fled England because we did not want to be ruled by tyrants and we wanted religious freedom and we wanted, you know, the idea that we could effectively be on the frontier and live together in some kind of

harmony. And I think that spirit of America is powerful and strong and so many of us. We are loyal patrons. I walked in JFK airport and there's these metal of honor winners on the wall. And I sat there and I felt so grateful and odd by America, like these men, they're all men, you know, who who served our countries and you read the stories and it's, you know, crawled for miles to save someone and then got him to see and inflated and swam for two hours to try to get to free. I mean, this is the America that I was raised on. It's communities and neighborhoods and families and picnic tables. And I feel like we're losing something that is inherently connecting about who we are as people. We don't need AI for that. We don't need social media for that. We don't even need cell phones for that. And I worry that the conversation we're having about exclusion, about stalking people, about getting into private lives, about all these things, we may need another constitution. We may need another country of some sort that is watching to your point the totalitarian of China and this deep struggle we have with technology. I mean, technology is basically, there's a risk we fall into a dark age, right? Where we don't know what we're doing and we mess up and we lose steps of civilization. Like civilization is not up into the right civilization. If, if you go back thousands of years, it's up and down. And we put on quite an up. And so how do you or I or any of us use the voice we have to say, no, I don't want to take this risk with the most precious thing ever built by humanity. I think America is the most incredible ideal. And how can we let that be compromised or corrupted? And we saw each other in Italy, and you go to Rome, and you see these fallen buildings, and you learn about what caused that empire to crumble. And that neglect of something beautiful in them. There were slaves, and there were a lot of bad things about Rome. And I'm not trying to say it was perfect, but I'm also saying you can't help but feel a sense of loss at the fact that that beautiful, you know, shining tower in a hill, crumble. I don't want that to happen to our country. Well, we're already at the point where the barbarians had made it to the gate and where they were already sacking the city in many ways. They could not have gotten into the city, had there not already been those inherent compromises with their own principles within the city of Rome. I think that that's a very good analogy actually for what's been happening in the United States. I don't think it's that we need a new constitution. I think it's that we need to recognize the barbarians that have been shredding the Constitution and have been making the way for the shredding of the Constitution. I, you know, when you talk about the spirit of America and this is something where you and I, we share that, that love and that recognition of those things which are more important than some things now consider the bottom line in modern society. When I was running for president, I saw the dark side of the machinery that dominates our political and media industrial complex. But I also saw every day, every single day, Brian, I saw that spirit of America, which is the decency of the American people and the nobility of the American people. But the dots have gotten people, people don't even, people don't know the stories, people don't know. There's been too much, not that has been forgotten, but it's been forgotten because it has been obscured. And I thank you for being here because I think what's important is that we simply have, you know, anytime somebody has a noble idea and somebody hears it, their own nobility is awakened. People here is at the level we speak from. So I think the conversation that you and I are having, even when you mention the word spirit, spirit is ultimately stronger. The question is how long will it take?

Even if it takes, it could take less than it could take

hundreds of thousands of years

...