Episode 369 – Sarah Connor Warned Us with Peter Byrne

Steve Grumbine:
00:00:42

All right folks, this is Steve with Macro N Cheese, and today’s guest is a returning guest, and that is Peter Byrne. You guys may remember him when we discussed the weaponization of AI about a year ago, I think.

He’s been doing a major 10-part series over there at Project Censored, looks to be moving to a Substack here soon, I’ll let him tell us all about it. But let me just introduce Peter for a moment.

Peter is a national, international award-winning investigative reporter and science writer.

He specializes in reporting on physics, nuclear warfare, medical research, local and national politics, corporate and governmental corruption, and now the weaponization of artificial intelligence. His work’s been published all over the place. In particular, of course, with our friends at Project Censored.

Definitely want you all to look up Peter’s work. It is absolutely amazing, but it’s also, let me just be fair, it’s chilling, right?

To understand the world around us as it is, not as we’d like it to be. And there is an incredible amount of things, technology-wise and within the ruling elite that are occurring right before our very eyes.

And I’m not so sure most people really understand it. I think they’ve gotten enamored with the idea of doing selfies with ChatGPT and things like that, and they think that’s the beginning and the ending.

Maybe doing term papers with AI, this is where the killing begins. This is where it really enters into the warfare that Peter so aptly covers in his work. So without further ado, I bring on my guest, Peter Byrne.

Welcome to the show, sir.

Peter Byrne:
00:02:25

Hi, thanks for having me back. It’s been quite a ride.

Steve Grumbine:
00:02:29

Yeah, clearly. Look, I don’t want to waste a lot of time because I am not the expert here.

I mean, the one thing that I’m going to definitely want to jump into is this foolhardy notion that somehow or another, the ruling elite is going to let us vote away their power to do these things. It may collapse under different circumstances- which I’ll let you discuss- But I just can’t fathom a world in which normies win by voting.

And with that, it’s all the more terrifying because you feel all the more isolated, and without people actually organizing- and with an understanding and intent- these things sneak up on you, and by the time you realize they’re happening, it’s too late.

Peter Byrne:
00:03:11

Yeah, that’s been going on for a long time. I mean, we’ve been headed in this direction…

I remember 30 years ago, polls were saying that something like 40% of Americans didn’t really care that much about the Fourth Amendment, and there’s just been a slippery slope ever since then. And whether or not we have elections this fall is certainly a subject to speculation.

And even if we do, like, who’s going to be running, Gavin Newsom? I mean, I’m an expert in Gavin Newsom- which is a whole other different subject we’re not going to go into-

But I’ve been covering him for 30 years, his entire career- because I’m a California-based reporter, San Francisco Bay Area based reporter- and that’s not going to be the solution for any number of reasons, including it’s just another billionaire’s punk… He’s an apparatus of the Getty family. At any rate, let’s go back to Military AI Watch, the series, which has now come to a conclusion in its first iteration, it was sponsored by Project Censored.

Mickey Huff and Andy Lee Roth have been just wonderful editing and overseeing the whole thing, and pumping a lot of resources into making the presentation work, and making sure that it was all fact checked and copy edited. And it’s been a great launching pad, because hopefully in May, I’m going to transform it into a Substack Military AI Watch.

I actually went and trademarked those words, because some crazy military AI positive tech company was trying to steal the trademark from me, and take over my niche, so they can do their own search engine optimization things… So I trademarked it so they can’t do that. So hopefully in May I’ll be able to launch the Military AI Watch in a new kind of form.

It’ll be like once a month, deep dive like it is now. But I’ve learned a lot from all these podcasts I’ve been doing- done like 35 podcasts on this thing in the last 10 months-

And now I want to do my own, where I can interview other people, and I don’t have to spend all my time talking, I could just ask a few questions and do what I’m doing right now.

It’s going to have that, and it’s going to have some breaking news, and it’s probably going to be in the spring. I have to take a break because I have a book contract to write on the Science of Nuclear Winter, which actually I bring up because it’s all tied into this a little bit, because AIs are being put in charge of the Nuclear Command and Control System, which is something that we’ll get to in a minute.

So I thought maybe Steve, what I might do here is just go over the series briefly, describe every one of the stories maybe, and then bring it up to date. Would that be something you want to hear?

Steve Grumbine:
00:05:47

I think that would be great. Absolutely. Take us through it, bud.

Peter Byrne:
00:05:50

Alright, so I’m going to do that, and then I’ve got some breaking news for you as well.
[Sure.]
Basically, the first one, started last March, is called One Ring to Rule Them All, and it was a deep dive into Peter Thiel, and Palmer Lucky, and these Silicon Valley dudes that love to use terminology from the Lord of the Rings to describe their companies, like Anduril and Palantir, as if they’re, kind of like, hobbits, fighting against the evil Lord, when in actuality they are the evil Lord. So they turn reality upside down, which is basically what AI has been doing all along.

Now, I’m the only one that has really got a dedicated beat to looking at military AI, I hope other people are jumping onto it, because you can just blather on and on if you want, about the chats and how they’re causing people to commit suicide- and that’s very real- and how they’re not being effective, and how businesses are running away from them because they can’t actually replace even customer service people. I mean, there’s this huge looming crash, because the entire American economy is now based on a technical modality that can’t make money.

That’s why they’re turning towards the government to subsidize them, and the Pentagon is the first place that they’ve stopped, and we’ll get into that. So, The One Ring to Rule Them All, it’s a pretty long piece-
you can find this at projectcensored.com, or just Google “Military AI Watch” and my name Peter Byrne, b-y-r-n-e. You probably will come up with some ads for some actual military AI watches, I don’t recommend that you buy them, but if you go to my website, you’ll see why you wouldn’t want to buy them-
Now, The One Ring to Rule Them All goes into how these private companies were basically jump started with intelligence and weapons contracts from the Pentagon, and the CIA, and the 17 other spy agencies, under the rubric of the Department of so-called Defense. Actually, I like that they call it the Department of War now, they used to call it that, and it was appropriate… That’s what it is.

So the only reason I’m not going to call it the Department of War, is because they want me to.

And then also Homeland Security, so-called ICE, has always been one of the trajectories that Palantir and Anduril have been supporting with technology that has a lot of dubious aspects to it. It’s not as efficient or beautiful as they claim in their marketing.

So One Ring to Rule Them All goes into a lot of the financial shenanigans around this, and it ends with a kind of philosophical reference to Manuel DeLanda, who in 1991 wrote this great book called War in the Age of Intelligent Machines, in which I quote him, saying, and this is the quote, “Military institutions have mutated out of all proportion in this century, it is impossible to tell where the civilian sector begins and where the military ends.” And then I say, commenting on that, according to DeLanda, “AI driven warfare is quote, ‘self-assembling’, It’s a self-assembling phenomena, humans and machines tend to self-organize into a profit-seeking system of organized violence, that follows nationalistic agendas. Military venture capital too is a complex adaptive system collectively following xenophobic paths of least resistance, and when these nation-anchored financially over-concentrated systems collide globally, the result is threats, sanctions, bombs, chaos and suffering beyond measure, as so-called democratic and authoritarian governments, and their social media-addled populaces, collectively hallucinate toward a real nuclear war.”

And that kind of sets the tone for the rest of the stories, because I do think it needs to have a philosophical foundation, otherwise we’re just flailing and screaming that “They’re doing this, and they’re harming that,” and unless we have a kind of philosophical foundation in it, we won’t be able to figure out what to do next… which is something that we’re kind of searching for here in this country.

How do we deal with- what many people recognize is- actual real live fascism, for lack of a better word, it still seems to work. The people are completely disempowered by what’s going on… politicians are being assassinated, protesters are being assassinated, and the streets are being taken over in a way that’s not even happening in the places that we vilify, like Cuba and Venezuela.

So, it’s a good grounding, I think, in military AI, in terms of its financial anchorages- in One Ring to Rule Them All, which of course is a quote from the Lord of the Rings, because the whole struggle there was to find this one little ring, that could give you power over all of humanity… and that would be artificial intelligence, the way that they think of it, although it actually doesn’t do what they say.

And that’s when I go into the second story, which is called The Stargate Fiasco– which has actually turned out to be the most popular, it’s gotten the most hits for some reason- And that describes, in some detail, how World War III will be fought inside data centers.

You know, as everybody’s pretty much aware by this time, data centers are proliferating throughout the world, especially in the Middle East, and places where there are deserts and enough water. And the fact is that these data centers are now ground zero, because, with something that I talk about in the third story, which is called AI Battlespace: Weaponizing the 5G Internet of Things, what most people don’t understand is that the planning for future AI-enabled wars takes advantage of the cell phone infrastructure, the 5G, which is coming into existence pretty much everywhere, enables the military to go in, and I’m not kidding you; they can actually weaponize your refrigerator to spy on you. I mean, because a lot of people’s refrigerators, including mine, although I disabled it, have that capability, smart refrigeration, as it were, but that can be taken over by military hacking.

So that when, and I report on this, and I’m not speculating on this, this is like from Rand [Corporation] reports and government documents, if they go and they want to fight Russia in France, or other parts of Europe, they actually plan to be able to take over the Wifi networks that link all of your, what they call now, “the military Internet of things,” so that they can have a kind of global picture of what’s out there.

At least this is the theory that will guide their autonomous tanks, and weapons, and drones, through these fields that unfortunately for them can be completely disrupted and destroyed by sophisticated jamming… So the whole thing actually ends up being useless.

So The Stargate Fiasco is about how all these companies like OpenAI, and SoftBank, Oracle, and Microsoft, are putting ungodly amounts of money, literally hundreds of billions, if not trillions of dollars into building these polluting, water-sucking, electricity-bill-rocketing, [facilities] onto the consumer, to pay for the capital expense data centers here in this country and around the world.

But basically they’re going to fail because nobody really wants to pay OpenAI to go and have it lie to them about things, and give them bad advice. The chats are not delivering on what the marketing hype has been saying. They’re certainly not intelligent, they’re just predictive mechanisms trained on the Internet, which is a literal epistemological sewer.

So I think we’re looking at a huge financial crash in the next few months or the next year or so, based on over-investment by the government, and by venture capital and the banks, in these data centers, which are not going to be able to sustain themselves from consumer sales. So they increasingly turn to the government and the military AI, which of course utilizes the so-called cloud… Isn’t that nice?

It sounds like a little fluffy cloud out in the sky.

It’s really these data centers that are processing information with these advanced chips, which use an incredible amount of water and generate incredible amount of heat, have to be cooled down, and use an incredible amount of electricity.

These actual wars will be fought inside these places, which is why, since now limited nuclear war is back on the agenda, according to the Biden and Trump administrations, it doesn’t take much to see that if you want to destroy your enemy, you do two things, you bomb their data centers and you take out their satellites.

And to take out the satellites, easy, you just lop the nuclear weapon up there and blast it. Of course, you take out your own too at the same time, so they haven’t figured that part out.

So that was The Stargate Fiasco, which was saying it was going to create a hundred thousand industrial jobs for Americans, but it actually isn’t. I mean, the Wall Street Journal had an article talking about how America’s actually lost 200,000 industrial jobs in the last two or three years.

So that’s not panning out.

However, they are hiring these white working-class guys, that are sitting around on their ass, drinking beers and chewing opiates and stuff like that, while fondling their guns. They’ve hired them to create this paramilitary, actual military phenomena of ICE, which apparently doesn’t have any restrictions on what it does.

And it has a historical analogy… it would, of course, be the Stormtroopers in the Gestapo and in Nazi Germany. The fourth story was called The Problem with AI War Games, and it’s a real problem because the military is always having war games, some use computers, some don’t. Most of them use AI now, where they go through these simulations of wars, like China attacks Taiwan, or the US attacks Cuba, or Russia attacks France, and they see where they lead and they almost always lead to nuclear war. Because for just one example, hyper[sonic] glide missiles, which basically can evade any type of defensive mechanism, the Golden Dome thing doesn’t work at all, they hug the ground and they get to their target thousands of miles away, and they can explode a nuclear weapon when they get there.

These can’t be distinguished by AIs or any other kind of radar system, in terms of whether they’re carrying conventional warheads or nuclear warheads. So the ability for the defense mechanisms of Russia, or China, or the United States, to make a distinction between an attack that is nuclear and not nuclear, is not really that possible, given the type of sophisticated delivery systems that have evolved and been purchased.

And so naturally, given the paranoia of these ruling classes, they’ll start pushing buttons to save their own asses, or at least keep their enemies, their perceived adversaries, as it were, from taking the raw materials that they have their eyes on, the rare earths and the raw labor that they look to access. So that’s the problem with AI war games, is that they almost always lead to nuclear war.

And the nuclear posture of the United States now, as I mentioned before, contemplates fighting limited nuclear wars. Tactical nuclear weapons have been around for a long time, the treaties got rid of them in the ’90s, but then now they’re back and they’re stockpiling them. So they’ll have like a nuclear explosion that say, like 10% of what exploded over Hiroshima, so they can take out a data center or whatever, and they don’t deal with the consequences of that, which of course is radioactivity.

And then, if you set off enough of them, the science is very clear, that even a limited nuclear war between, say, India and Pakistan, would result in cooling, because of carbon smoke from the firestorms are correlated to nuclear strikes, or even enough bombing like happened in Tokyo in World War II generates these huge black, carboniferous clouds that essentially block sunlight from being able to reach the earth and lower the temperature to below freezing for like decades at a time. This is well-proven. Carl Sagan and his fellow scientists proved it. There was a very strong probability of this happening back in the ’80s.

And that actually impelled Reagan and Gorbachev because they both were a little bit more gung-ho about letting off nuclear bombs until they realized realize that it wasn’t just the fallout that was going to kill them, it was the climate. And you know, Reagan was a monster.

But he clearly gave credit to science for bringing up the question of nuclear winter as one of the reasons that him and Gorbachev and others made these treaties which are now expiring, which is really pretty bad news.

So AI is actually being inserted into the command-and-control apparatus of the entire war machine, but it includes what is called the NC3, which is a nuclear command and control and communications entity. And this is again, not speculation. If you look at my articles, they all link to the sources, most of which are official.

If you dig deep enough or you know where to look, they’re not hiding a lot of this. It’s funny because we’re using Open Source material. You can get a very good idea of what the classified realm contains.

They’re really not that separate. I mean, most of the intelligence gathering in the world today is Open Source.

It used to be closed source because people had spies and secret agents walking around countries taking notes.

But now you’ve got satellites and you can tap into the cell phone systems as the National Security Agency does, and store all the conversations that take place in the world and then have these AIs, which are actually pretty good at finding patterns in huge databases, which is what Palantir does, single out the domestic terrorists that you don’t like, like Alex Pretti or, you know, Ms. [Renee] Good or another. So, you want to like make sure that they are no longer able to be nodes in the resistance, as it were. [Jesus.] So, there’s that problem. And then the fifth one was called Into the Uncanny Valley: Human AI War Machines, and that starts with a quote from the philosopher David Hume, a 17th century English philosopher of the so-called Enlightenment. He says “There is a universal tendency among mankind to think of all things as being like themselves, and to transfer to every object the qualities they are familiarly acquainted with. We find human faces in the moon, armies in the clouds, and if not corrected by experience and reflection, our natural tendency leads us to ascribe malice or goodwill to everything that hurts or pleases us.”

And that’s the quote I lead into a description of the so-called human AI war machines, that are coming out of places like this Advanced Research Lab at the University of Maryland, which I go into a great kind of deconstruction of what’s going on there.

And this whole notion of, ‘Well, we’re going to have autonomous weapons and AI-enabled battle systems that there will always be a human in the loop making decisions,” and that’s just utter nonsense. First of all, the stuff happens too fast for that to happen, and second of all, only decisions that the humans are being presented with, if they’re presented with any at all, the computer will say, “Okay, well you can do this or you can do that,” it doesn’t say you can do C, D, E and F and G, or you could not do this at all.

So you get to choose between two bad outcomes, which usually involves what they call the kill chain, killing people or blowing things up.

So it’s kind of interesting, this uncanny valley which we talk about in the story, is a psychological term, where humans are comfortable with a certain amount of resemblance in machines and robots to human beings, but then at a certain point, if it gets too humanoid, they become afraid of it, and then if it becomes super humanoid, they start to like it again.

Freud actually was the person that started talking about that phenomenon.

And the problem with that is, of course, and I show what’s going on in some of these labs at the University of Maryland and elsewhere, is that because the humans aren’t trusting the AIs, the AIs are actually in these weapon systems, being programmed to shut off the humans from being able to control them, because the humans are having irrational fears, according to the way these are programmed.

So this whole notion that the humans are going to be able to shut off the AI, or the computer networks that are doing aggressive things outside of human direct decision making, is ridiculous, it’s actually the opposite. The AIs are being programmed to lock out any humans from interfering with what they’ve been programmed to do.

Now, these AIs are not intelligent, they’re not conscious, they do not think like humans think, but they are good at pattern finding and doing certain types of predictions based on the data that they have.

The problem, of course, is that data is often garbage, and they have to be fed vast amounts of data. Small amounts of data don’t work.

And the only way to get vast amounts of data, is feed them the Internet, Reddit and Wikipedia and Common Crawl, which are full of all sorts of misinformation. And that’s something we’re going to delve into in a minute because that’s really important, the way that any data can be poisoned, as it were.

Steve Grumbine:
00:23:10

Yeah… So let me jump in there for a minute, I appreciate everything you said.

When I think about everything that we’re watching right now, I mean, we saw Gaza, we’re watching Minneapolis and Minnesota, we’re watching the US government transforming nakedly into, just outright fascism.

And we’re watching there be, literally, if you want to look at a WWE kind of resistance, where you got Hulk Hogan and the Iron Sheik or something like that, okay great, you got your kayfabe going on. I don’t see any meaningful resistance, and back to the starting point where you talk about Gavin Newsom, I mean, we’re watching this guy literally destroy homeless encampments and celebrating it like he’s a hero. And the idea that we’re going to be saved by some benevolent politician, or some benevolent party, or that we can vote our way out of this, feels like beyond the pale at this point. This is not like, just Donald Trump came into the mission and suddenly AI began.

This is not a partisan issue, in the sense that everybody seems to be really, really happy with. I mean, you go back to before Trump even came into office, and you have, what is it Daddy’s Home [Where’s Daddy]?

I mean, the AI over there in Gaza, the test bed for slaughtering children and other folks, that are prone to throw rocks. I find it amazing that we are at this point, and we’re questioning, “Is this really the world we want to live in?” And you’re being called a Luddite on one hand, and on the other hand, you’re being chastised for using AI slop. But in reality, these domestic uses, really pale in the face of what the ultimate goals are.

I mean, you really spoke about it very well last time, where you talked about the Lord of the Rings, and you talked about the Peter Thiel connection there, and this kind of absurd religious fervor about end of times, and living life like, “We’re going to bring about the end of times if worse comes to worst.”
I see no democratic means of stopping this… Not that there really was, but I think that veneer is gone.

And I think about, ‘Would these folks allow us to vote, if it really had a chance of stopping them from doing what they’re doing, had a chance of stopping capital from doing what it wants?”… these oligarchies, that Gilens and Page so aptly showed us. Can you explain to me what the natural outcome of this is?

I mean, if we don’t have a means to stop it electorally, and I’m on the record saying we do not, somebody may disagree with me. I see folks all over the place thinking, ‘We’ll just get a few more, you know, whatever, and we’ll source the vote and everything will be better,” but that just doesn’t feel like reality.
We watched that the DNC, the reps, the superdelegates, and others, coming out of there as they’re hearing the protests about genocide in Gaza.
They’re laughing at them. They’re literally laughing at them. So, you know, for me, the bad people be damned, it really is systemic.

This is really a matter of control and understanding capital, and who owns the means of governance, who owns the means of production, who owns the means of warfare, who owns the means of adjudicating justice, etc. Can you help me understand how we could fight this at all?

Peter Byrne:
00:26:35

Well, I think you used the right word, systemic, as far as I’m concerned. And my last piece that I did actually goes into that. It was called The AI War Machine is Super Organism.

I do not see Newsom, or Trump, or Thiel, or any of these people as like individually responsible in a way… I see them- Marx didn’t bother talking to individual capitalists, because their soul was capital, and these people’s soul is imperialism, monopoly capitalism and war. And so talking to them, or about them, or deciding which one of them you want to be in charge, is a fool’s errand.

I think these are the clash of systems. In this case now, it’s a clash of declining monopoly capital throughout the world.

It’s got so many problems financially, you know, it’s over concentrated. It’s undermining its own ability to keep siphoning off surplus labor from the masses.

I think what it’s easy enough to do right now is to define the enemy. Even though a lot of people don’t quite see it, they probably sense it.

You know, it’s the rich, right, and it’s the militarist and they’re headlined by the Trumps and the [British PM Keir] Starmers and the [German Chancellor Friedrich] Merzes and all the rest. But it’s all about systems as far as I’m concerned.

So the question is, do we have, in terms of systems fighting back, as it were, or replacing this declining, dying, necrophiliac system? What will it take? Well, obviously it will take mass movements, but mass movements, they bubble up from below.

They have vast volcanic energy, but they also need to self-guide in some way. You know, I think the vanguard party system proved to be a problem because when people get in power, they become corrupt, as it were.

You know, these apparatchiks in China and Russia and elsewhere. Yeah, it was great when they took power, but once they got in power, they wanted to stay in power by any means necessary.

So things kind of went downhill from there. So what’s it going to take? I don’t know.

I mean, I’m a fan of Michael Hardt and [Antonio] Negri, you know, who wrote the Empire trilogy back 25 years ago about some of the issues that arose with the fragility of the revolutions the 20th century brought forth and what comes next. And they were quite modest. They said we don’t know what comes next. We don’t.

But it’s going to be something because repression and oppression breeds resistance.

And you do see resistance around the world, but you don’t see it that much in the media because the media doesn’t want to talk about it unless it’s taking place in Iran and then they like to use it for their own reasons.

I don’t have the answer to that, but I would like to just trek right through the rest of these articles for a second and then come to my last one, which I think frames the question in a different way along with what I’ve been talking about, if that’s okay with you.

Steve Grumbine:
00:29:17

Sure, absolutely.

Peter Byrne:
00:29:19

Then we go into like the sixth or seventh article is AI Warlord: Eric Schmidt, which, Eric Schmidt, he came into Google when the founders, the two Stanford University guys that got a bunch of intel funding from the CIA to start up Google, they didn’t have much business experience, so Eric Schmidt came in, he had a lot of experience at running various executive offices in Silicon Valley, and he made sure that Google started to do evil, and dump that slogan that it started with, which was “do no evil.” And that meant selling ads, and it meant embedding itself in the military machine, which is doing in a big way in the last month… We’ll get to that.

Schmidt is such a hypocrite- I go into all these foundations, these nonprofit foundations that he is funding with his ill-gotten billions, and what he does is, he gives, like literally, hundreds of millions of dollars to progressive organizations, magazines like Grist, for example, he pretty much goes and he buys off anybody that could be a potential critic of what he’s doing… He gives them vast sums of money, and indeed they don’t push back.
I mean, I end that article with a deep dive into what Grist is not doing.

They print really nice things about Eric Schmidt and Google, even though they’re receiving all this money from them, and even though those guys are an environmental disaster.  So that’s kind of disgusting. But we have to understand how the system works here, and Silicon Valley buys off any potential critics, as well as it attacks perceived enemies.

And then the story after that is called AI Cyberspy: Gilman Louie, which is a deep dive into Gilman Louie, who is one of the most powerful oligarchs in Silicon Valley, and hardly anybody knows about him, which is really weird.

I suggest people read this article because it talks about how he was a gamer, he was involved with marketing Tetris, and eventually because of that, the CIA hired him to head In-Q-Tel, which was this investment arm in Silicon Valley, which has jump started literally like more than 800 startups that have made weapons and weapon systems, that have been incorporated into the vast war machine. Louie gets no negative press, but he’s a really interesting dude, he used to hang out with Robert Maxwell, he’s obviously got some Mossad connections, and he’s one of the most powerful people in the intelligence so-called community, which is what they like to self-style themselves, these intelligence agencies, as a community. And so it’s worth taking a look at Gilman Louie, just so we know who he is.

And then that brings us to the AI War Machine: A Superorganism, which is the last story in my series, which kind of tries to sum things up. And I’m going to read you some of the quotes I referenced in here, because it does sum things up. I start with a quote by the biologist E.O. Wilson from 2009, which sums up, I think, a lot of what evolutionary psychology, and biology, and neuroscience have been telling us for the last 25 years: “The real problem of humanity is the following: we have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and godlike technology, and it is terrifically dangerous, and it is now approaching a point of crisis overall,” End quote.

We are trapped by our hormonal structure, which evolved in a hunter-gatherer evolutionary trajectory over millions of years, fight or flight. We’ve got these, he calls them medieval institutions. I mean, some people might say, “Oh, we got democracies.”

Well actually, no, not really, we’re still ruled by royal institutions, and the church. We’re basically like cave people that suddenly got laser swords.

And then I follow that up with an observation made by Antoine Bousquet, who’s a historian of science who wrote this amazing book called The Scientific Way of Warfare: Order and Chaos on the Battlefields of Modernity, and he traces the use of advanced weaponry from Thucydides on up to the modern day. And I quote him saying the following:

“Pointing on the horizon is a fully autonomous war machine, whose control would be totally imminent to itself. In other words, from which there would be no outside from which to exert control over it, and what if war served no other master than itself?”

Intermission:
00:33:42

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Peter Byrne:
00:34:04

And then in that article, I go and I deconstruct this horrible series of editorials, that the New York Times published in December, called Overmatched, where they said that China was an existential enemy, and that we have to make more AI weapons in order to beat them, we should attack them. I mean, it was just an unfactual, incredibly bellicose, just shitty writing, that they’ve formatted into like this interactive New York Times classic, kind of, rolling graphics and imageries… bald eagles and holding arrows of war, and stuff like that. And I deconstruct that a lot, including the role of the New York Times national security team, led by the really hideous David E. Sanger, who’s been there, like for 40 years.

I take him apart in the piece on Schmidt, there was a piece before this, but also on this one, in the piece on Schmidt, I expose how Sanger accepts money and whatever prestige comes with it, from associating with all these think tanks that are associated and funded by the military industrial complex, as it were. And basically, it’s just a shill for the military and for Silicon Valley.

In these articles he writes for the Times, he gets Pulitzer Prizes, and everybody thinks he’s like this wonderful dude, but he’s a PR guy, and he’s actually violating the ethics standards of the New York Times. If you go to the New York Times, you can find their ethics guidelines for their reporters, and he violates almost all of them.

So I reached out to the ethics editor at the New York Times, there is such a person there, emailed that person saying, “Well, what about Sanger, who’s
obviously violating these ethical standards that you are so carefully trying to ring fence your reporters from being influenced and biased by the people they’re covering?” And I didn’t get an answer. So then, being an investigative reporter, I know how to find people’s cell phone numbers,

So I found the cell phone number of that editor, and I called him and introduced myself, and he goes, “How did you get my number, I’m not public facing?”
I’m like, “Well, you are now, dude… I’m not going to tell you how I got your number, but I want to ask you some questions.”

And he hung up on me. And so I called him back, and he actually picked up and he said, “Well, I got your email, we’ll give you a response.”
But they never did, because the New York Times, there’s a wonderful website called the New York war crimes, which basically deconstructs how horrible the New York Times is in its reporting, which actually influences how everybody reports. If you read it in the New York Times one day, it’ll be everybody else echoing it and parroting it the next day.

At any rate, so I go into the New York Times pretty deep in the Schmidt article, and in this last one, including about how the Sanger and three other Times reporters went and gave Trump a blowjob in the Oval Office a couple of weeks ago, where they were there for four hours and afterwards he took them on a tour of the residence, and they actually let him be off the record on all sorts of things, which is like crazy. And the things that they did print were just, they were acting as this stenographer, as his megaphone.

And I tie into that, into how they reported on Venezuela. But I’ll let you people go and read that.

But then in the last part of the article, which I’m most proud of, because it was really hard to write and put all of what I’ve been reporting into some kind of context, I started out with a quote from this fellow named [N.J.] Hagens at the Institute for the Study of Energy in Our Future, he wrote this paper called Economics for the Future beyond the Superorganism, really cool paper, talking about how energy is like the foundation of all the systems, kind of motions in modern society,

And I quote from him saying “What began some 11,000 years ago as hunter-gatherers cooperating to obtain physical surplus from land, has morphed into a globally connected human culture, maximizing financial representation of physical surplus. In pursuit of economic growth, modern human culture appears as a self-organized, mindless, energy-seeking superorganism, functioning in similar ways to a brainless amoeba using simple tropisms,” I love that. A brainless amoeba using simple tropism, that describes not only the people that run our society, but it describes the rest of us too.

We look at our phone to find out what to do next. Yeah, we all know we have to eat two or three times a day, we follow that tropism pretty well, but what we don’t want to admit, is how our thinking follows those tropisms too. I mean, Silicon Valley figured that out a long time ago, they reward us with endorphins for adopting their point of view on things.

So then I go on, “From this perspective, modern warfare can be understood as a hybrid human machine culture, as an itself, as an entropy-resisting, energy-seeking superorganism, that ingests property and information, while excreting corpses, disinformation, chaos and filthy lucre. Historically, wars organized seizures of food, labor, capital, machinery and oil, forms of congealed energy, siphoned from alienable resources, and now, life forms themselves are alienated, dehumanized as collateral damage to the increase of so-called intelligent war machines, birthed by venture capital.”

And then I talk about how the New York Times and the whole foreign policy establishment is trying to demonize China and how wrong that is factually.

The Chinese People’s Liberation Army, the PLA, is a wreck, I mean, recently, just in the past week, we’ve seen all these generals being defenestrated, but the foreign policy people here in the intelligence community here in the United States has long known, the Chinese military is a paper tiger.

First of all, most of their military is geared towards a defensive hedge against being attacked by the United States… the Chinese military is not set up to do invasions.

I mean, they can’t even really invade Taiwan, because Taiwan has formidable defensive mechanisms, mostly sold to it by the United States.

But Taiwan is like, I make the analogy, if Russia came in and took over Texas, that’s how the Chinese feel about the United States coming in and taking over Taiwan.

So I go on about how we need to look through this hype that Silicon Valley, Eric Schmidt and Gilman Louie and the rest of them, are putting out there about China being ahead of us in AI weaponry, and so we have to like put all this, literally hundreds of billions of dollars of US capital, public wealth, into making advanced weaponry, made by their companies, to fight off this Medusa that doesn’t actually exist.

So then I go to my favorite philosophers, which is Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in, in their book A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, the amazing book written in 1980, and I just cherry picked this quote: “The war machine is exterior to the state apparatus. The war machine has taken charge of the aim, worldwide order, and the states are now no more than objects or means adapted to that machine.”

And then I go on and say, “Whether or not one accepts the war as organism model literally, it serves to envision the cascading feedback loops and self-sustaining momentum, that characterize a profoundly parasitical warfare apparatus now endowed with what we choose to call artificial intelligence, that operates quasi-independently of human control.”

And I find that a good way to envision war now is not something that states choose to do, it’s more like this kind of this almost social entity, a system like capital, because it is embedded in capital, and capital is its energy, that in order to increase itself and self-replicate itself through its weapon systems, picks like states to act as its stalking horses, to act as its stimuluses, because it thrives on war.

And I end the article talking about the Khmer Rouge, back in the ’70s that arose in the wake of this massive US bombing campaign that annihilated Cambodia’s agricultural economy. The Khmer Rouge, they did some bad shit. They did kill hundreds of thousands of people and it wasn’t good.

And they did it in the name of communism. The way that the people there conceptualized them, because Cambodia was and still is an animistic kind of spiritual society, they characterized it as something they called an all-seeing spirit called Angkar, or the organization or simply “it”, which could destroy by an invisible touch.

And so the way that we’ve set up this kind of global battle system, with satellites and 5G sensors and the ability to monitor people’s conversations, and to take all this intelligence to find terrorists to kill. Death comes from the sky now, it comes invisibly and it comes unexpectedly, as it does in Minneapolis, for example.

And this organization, this Angkar, this kind of self-replicating modality of this visa on blood and weapons, is in charge of this country now. So let’s talk about, is there a solution? And I end with my favorite guy, Norbert Wiener, who was this American polymath, he did quantum mechanics, he did computation.

He was a literal genius back in the ’50s and ’60s, who coined the term “cybernetics“, which is derived from the Greek word for steersman, to describe the communication and control elements of machines and organisms.

And he wrote this book in 1950, the follow up on another book he wrote about cybernetics, which was about the advent of computer technology and what that meant, and this book went into what he called the Human Use of Human Beings: Cybernetics in Society… And I end with this quote from Wiener.

He says, “When human atoms are knit into an organization in which they are used, not in their full right as responsible human beings, but as cogs and levers and rods, it matters little that their raw material is flesh and blood, what is used as an element in a machine, is in fact an element in the machine.”

Steve Grumbine:
00:44:10

Oh, wow.

Peter Byrne:
00:44:11

“Whether we entrust our decision to machines of metal or to those of flesh and blood, which are bureaus and vast laboratories and armies and corporations, we shall never receive the right answers to our questions, unless we ask the right questions. The hour is very late, and the choice of good and evil knocks at our door.”

And so I end the article with a question. Who’s there? So who’s there?

Where are the people? Where are the people rising up?

Steve Grumbine:
00:44:38

Why do you think that people… I think you’ve actually answered this, but I think people are afraid.

I think they’ve been so dumbed down and, a band of merry men and women out there riling them up for every electoral cycle to think that they’re going to vote away their problems. They put the “I voted” sticker on their forehead, and they come home self-satisfied, ready to go back to watching soap operas or binge-watching Netflix.

And the show goes on. Nothing changed… Nothing. Not only did nothing fundamentally change, in fact, in ways, the destruction of our lives and our futures continues, unabated.

It’s amazing to me.

Peter Byrne:
00:45:20

Well, I gotta say, I live in Petaluma, which is little town 40 miles north of San Francisco, very middle class, pretty wealthy actually kind of a bedroom community, it’s kind of like Marin County come north,

But we’ve had demonstrations here since 2023, around the genocide in Gaza.

People were trying to get the city council to take a stand on that, as many city councils and governmental bodies throughout the United States did, and ours wouldn’t. They said, “It wasn’t any of their business,” and people got really mad, and there was a lot of protests around that.

And there’s like this weekly protest that takes place downtown, a vigil, which is not just like Quaker stuff, I mean, these people are pretty informed about what’s going on in the world, and what the possible trajectories of resistance might be.

And then the No Kings thing came along, and the vigil on Saturdays got like 10 people, but the No Kings thing, people got like 3,000, right?

All these people came out waving their American flags and talking about how, “The Democrats could save us if they only had the guts,” you know, which is a lot of bullshit, but they are part of the problem, right? But then last Friday, there was two demonstrations, anti-ICE demonstrations in a little park in the center of town.

And the first one was a bunch of boomers like myself, a lot of people with gray hair with the same old signs, you know, that we’ve been carrying around since the Vietnam War. And that was great, but there wasn’t any young people there.

But then all these young people walked out of their high schools on a Friday and gathered in the same park. So there was like over a hundred youth there. And it was really refreshing. They had new signs.

One kid had written a magic marker on his back, you know, “Fuck ICE.” “Fuck ICE,” was kind of like the main thing. And all these like 14- and 15-year-old high school students were saying, “Fuck ICE.”

And they were outraged by what’s going on. They were pretty much all white, you know, maybe a few Latino people, but this is a pretty white community.

But I sensed a kind of energy there that the boomers had lost.

I mean, the boomers seem to me to be just like, “Oh, well, I’ve got to go to this demonstration because I’ve been going to demonstrations for 50 years, but nothing’s going to change.” But these kids were like, “Yeah, something better fucking change. This is crazy,” right? But what do they have by way of education on what the alternatives are?

Because the socialist movement has been “discredited” by legions of media and scholars in the Western world and even in China, you know, it’s been discredited too, because they’re not really socialist anymore and, although they have some characteristics of perhaps, but in Venezuela it actually had some socialist characteristics.

But then they got stomped on and the sanctions like pretty much made it impossible to carry out their good programs, you know. So people don’t…

They’re not educated enough to know that there’s been not only tremendous resistance in history over the last few hundred years, but there are actual ways to look at what went wrong and how we can do things better. Right? And I don’t have all the answers to that. Nobody does. It has to come organically.

But there’s a ferocity that I sense that’s kind of emerging a little bit now in reaction to the outright boot stomping fascism that we’re experiencing. I don’t know where it’s going to go. I don’t expect that the Democrats are going to make anything any better.

And I do suspect that probably things will have to be a lot worse here and everywhere else in the world before things get better. But it’s pretty unsustainable.

And as I mentioned briefly before we talked, Foreign Affairs, which is the policy magazine of the bourgeoisie in this country, has a big article by Steven Walt, who’s an international relations scholar, calling what’s going on now predatory hegemon.

You know, it says it won’t work, which is true, it won’t, because capitalism has just taken off of all of its max now and it’s just stomping around crazy, like a huge kind of Cyclops out of control, you know. Eye of profit is being blinded. But this is part of the reaction that the hegemon is putting forth.

I’m going to conclude this with the breaking news that I promised, which is that on January 9, the Secretary of War, so-called, right this Pete Hegseth, this repulsive, militaristic, Nazi-loving, misogynist, racist pig that is in charge of all the weapons in the world, basically he put out this memo to all senior Pentagon leadership commanders of the combatant commands about accelerating America’s military AI dominance.

And he starts it out by saying that, “In order to promote human flourishing, economic competitiveness and national security, we have to like redefine the character of military affairs and put AI in charge of everything. Unleashing AI agent development and experimentation for AI-enabled battle management and decision support from campaign planning to kill chain execution.”

And then they have this thing, this program called Ender’s Foundry, accelerating AI enabled simulation capabilities to ensure we stay ahead of AI enabled adversaries.

I think it’s disgusting that they use Ender’s name because, you know, Ender’s Game was a great science fiction book written by a Mormon, of all people.

But it’s about this kid that enters into this kind of AI environment and is able to kill these invading aliens from another galaxy and everybody is triumphant at the end of it.

But then the novels that come afterwards are about how from the point of view of the invading aliens, which are actually these really nice creatures, and Ender, who’s this kid that he killed them all, spends the rest of his life trying to make it up and to do amends for having killed this beautiful civilization that was just coming to make friends with us, right? And then we killed it. Right?

But that’s what Pete Hegseth would do, you know, so they’re talking about how, “We gotta like partner even more with Silicon Valley and develop AI native war fighting.” And then this is the chilling part, really. We have to refocus the department onto a wartime footing. Now they’ve been saying that a lot recently.

“We’re at war,” they say, you know, and we are at war. Although people don’t admit it that much.

But these people aren’t lying when they say that “We’re at war and we want to conquer the whole world, and we want to make everybody into our slaves.” And then it ends up with saying this is a Department of War Department of Defense memo. Out with utopian idealism, in with hard-nosed realism.

Diversity, equity and inclusion and social ideology have no place in the Department of War.

So we must not employ AI models which incorporate ideological tuning that interferes with your ability to provide objectively truthful responses to user prompts.”

That’s just amazing.

Steve Grumbine:
00:52:04

That’s fricking insane.

Peter Byrne:
00:52:07

I’m going to conclude with a study. I’m going to tell you about a study that came out a couple months ago from the University of California and Johns Hopkins.

It’s called Command Hijacking Against Embodied AI.

And basically they took all the advanced AI military systems and other kinds of transportation systems, you know, for autonomous vehicles and weapons that they could find, and they tricked them. And it’s really easy to trick them by poisoning the data which they’re trained with, but also by poisoning what they’re looking at.

I mean, famously, I think it was a Waymo car or a Tesla or something, thought that if you put like a little sticker of a bird on a stop sign that it was a submarine, things like that, it’s insanely easy and cheap to fool these AI systems.

And so now the Department of War as basically Hegseth put out a memo in December, which I talk about in my last article, instructing the entire military, which includes all the intelligence agencies, to adopt Google’s what they call NIL AI. It’s basically this AI Gemini program is now combined with Elon Musk’s X AI Chat is now in charge of all the computers in the military.

You can’t make this shit up. It is. I mean, you’ve got Gemini, which is a habitual liar, and its knowledge base is almost, you know, it’s just garbage.

Now in charge of everything from writing emails to assessing information that’s coming from satellites in outer space. I mean, nuclear accidents are…

We’re really lucky that we didn’t perish in nuclear global conflagration due to nuclear weapons accidents and misinformation, you know, thinking that incoming was going to kill us when it was a computer glitch, things like that.

You know, we’re lucky we were still here, but, you know, our survival rate has gone way down through the ceiling with this.

Because when you talk to people in the military as I do, that, you know, actually been to war and know how to fight wars and all that, not that’s a good thing, but they’re horrified by, you know, this complete artificially intelligent modality on which all the war fighting is now being instructed to include. Not just because they think that humans should be making the decisions whether to kill or not. That’s like ridiculous.

The problem is that the machinery hallucinates, is presenting to itself and to whatever humans are monitoring it, misapprehensions of physical reality.

And it’s easy to confuse your adversary system, but your own system is easily confusing in and of its own self because the way it’s programmed, it doesn’t know. AI does not know the difference between true and false or fact and non-fact.

It just knows predictions based on the proximity of certain, what they call tokens, pieces of images or words in this vast database on which it’s been trained.

What we’re facing here with this predatory hegemony, which I think is a pretty good way of describing modern imperialism in this year [Agreed] is that it is so entranced by the possibility of continuing to make money off of these vast investments by sovereign wealth funds in the Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates and elsewhere Japan, and here into this unworkable machinery of AI warfare, that part of their marketing plan is to have the machinery be run by these programs which are incapable of actually interfacing with physical reality and which operate at light speed. So the possibility of horrible flash wars breaking out increases a lot.

But also, when Trump assassinated those poor fishermen in the Caribbean Ocean and stuff, you know, saying, “They were drug dealers,” that was done using Palantir and Anduril and the whole Silicon Valley apparatus, and they knew that those guys were fishermen and they took them out anyway. So there we go. Here we are. What to do?

Steve Grumbine:
00:56:06

Yeah, what to do.

I mean, these are the questions, you know, just as a momentary aside, you know, I have economists come on and they talk to me about, “All these great things we can do with the economy and all the great powerful things we can do if we can just source the votes in Congress.” And then I asked them, you know, lovingly, because these people have been core to my work for a long time.

I ask them, I was like, “Well, I hear you, but how do you make any of that happen?” They’re like, “Well, you know, I don’t know. I’m an economist. I don’t know how to answer those questions.” It’s like, exactly.

Nothing against them at all. They’re in their theoretical world talking about theoretical things.

So the question then becomes, well, if the economics that I focus on, typically the Modern Monetary Theory lens, is not the “theory of all things”, which is a direct quote from one of its founders, Bill Mitchell, then you have to ask yourself, why do you keep going back to which talking head is leading you down the primrose path of believing that suddenly you’re going to vote for a few more progressives and suddenly this horrible evil is just going to vanish and we’re going to have utopia and for whatever reason, they can’t answer that question. It’s not just economists; it’s people all over that have now started following the work.

People didn’t…it was like they were afraid to follow the metro all the way to the last stop. They kept getting off at the third stop because that’s what everybody else did.

They didn’t realize that if you follow the logic and follow the things all the way to the end, that it doesn’t end with this miraculous, “Hey, we just won a Green New Deal. Hey,” it literally, that is not in the interests of the ruling class. And people don’t want to talk about class anymore. They don’t want to consider…

They can’t fathom the fact that they’re a subject, not a citizen.

They can’t fathom the fact that this government, it creates these honey pots that we believe are there to serve us, but in reality, it’s just collecting data on us for other purposes involving capital and making money.

And because they cannot get out of that logic, I’m hoping that those children, the kids that you’re talking about that are angry, that are saying, to ‘Hell no with this,” I’m hoping to God they’re better than these other people that keep selling us, you know, the next Ro Khanna, [ha ha, Ro] you know, random oligarch friendly politician that’s nice and got a gentle smile, very stately, but in reality, serving capital nonetheless. Your final thoughts? That was my final thoughts. Take us out.

Peter Byrne:
00:58:46

Years ago, I wrote about Ro Khanna for the SF Weekly the first time he ran for Congress and he got creamed. He was running against this war Democrat named Tom Lantos.

And I exposed that he was in the pay of Silicon Valley, basically. And then he went, he’s a very opportunist lawyer and he of Indian ancestry, like Hindu Indian-
he went and he married like into one of the richest families in India. And so now he’s a billionaire. And that gave him the money to actually become a congressman. He wears this mask of progressivism.

But if you go and you look at his investments, he’s invested in like all these Silicon Valley military operations. I mean, he’s an owner, right? He just wants power. So they all want power, right?

So the question, you know, really is here in this country, we are pretty bought off. The white working class has been bought off for a long time, in my opinion.

I mean, yeah, there’s some exploitation going on, but mostly it’s not of what people traditionally call the labor aristocracy.

So I’m not looking to America to lead the way, I’m hoping that in the rest of the world that people that actually have an objective interest in delinking from American and Western imperialism and creating more just, more localized societies continue to do that because it is happening. I mean, Venezuela did try to do that and it’s going to take a long time. And we’ve got this problem with rising seas and temperatures.

And the US military is one of the organizations that’s very much prepared to look at that because it sees that global heating has been and is now causing global migrations, which they are prepared to annihilate those people. Gaza is a test of how much genocide they can get away with.

And they can get away with a lot of it because the middle class has a very high tolerance for horrors in the world. I mean, yeah, they’re pissed off now about their own being killed in Minneapolis, but they didn’t raise a finger [to] genocide in Gaza, right?

Steve Grumbine:
01:00:42

In fact, some of them would go so far as to play law faring, pretend that it wasn’t a genocide.

One particular individual, who many of my friends follow, swore that it wasn’t a genocide, despite every meaningful possible way of proving it was a genocide. The privilege and the ability to turn their head away from those screaming and angry and frustrated. The fact that, “It’s not quite proper.

It’s not proper.” Well, you know, it is just repulsive.

Peter Byrne:
01:01:12

Well, one of the reasons for that is because the Shoah Foundation, funded by Steven Spielberg and a bunch of related Holocaust genocide organizations in the West, are still insisting that it wasn’t a genocide, or they don’t talk about it at all. It’s just beyond belief. I mean, we know that the Israeli Zionist lobby is… We know the power of it. We don’t need to go into that right now.

But that’s one of the obstacles to the liberation of humanity.

And Israel is like, funding its entire operation, which geared towards military AI and is deeply embedded with Microsoft and Oracle and OpenAI and the rest of the Silicon Valley oligarchs. They’ve got huge stake in what’s going on in the genocide because they’re using it as a marketing tool. So, I’m a journalist, right?

I’ve got like this little megaphone that Project Censored, maybe on a Substack, whatever.

But I’m not writing for the Washington fucking Post of the New York Times, nor would I want to, but that’s what people are being fed every day, you know, I mean, we’ve had like 50,000 readers or so of this series on Project Censored, which is pretty good. But that is dwarfed by the people that are consuming Fox, CBS, so-called news and the rest of it.

But I do take some solace in the, you know, like in the Russian revolution with the Bolsheviks and leading up to that, for example, people like handed out
what they called samzidat, which was like posters and pieces of paper, you know, which could be eaten if necessary, which class analysis was made, analysis of imperialism was made, you know, analysis of the weaknesses says of the ruling class was made. And that’s what we’re doing now.

I mean Substack obviously is controlled by Silicon Valley and if anything gets revolutionary on there for real, they’ll shut it down.

But we’ve entered a bit of a trap with that, right, because the whole thing about putting our alternative news views onto the Internet means that it can also be blacked out, as we can see in Iran. Right? So we may have to go back to paper.

Steve Grumbine:
01:03:12

Wow, distribution again. Another problem. We don’t have that local labor floor. We don’t have the… A lot of the things that were available then don’t exist today.

The realities, the material conditions are radically different.

Peter Byrne:
01:03:26

I gotta say, it’s only 70,000 years ago it was only 20,000 human beings that were all at the tip of Africa due to climate problems. You know, this is not that long ago, right? And now there’s like 9 billion of us. So you know, we may be going through another bottleneck.

I suspect we are.

Steve Grumbine:
01:03:41

Well Peter, I really appreciate the time and the effort and the work you’ve done. I wished that I could walk away from this saying “Woohoo, life is good, we’re doing good.”

But I think that we have to be comfortable being uncomfortable right now. We have to accept that things are really, really not the way any of us would like it to be and stop acting like fucking normies.

Stop fucking buying into the fucking elite, these PMC [professional management class] type utopians that lie about the ability to source the vote and all this other wacky nonsense that is just empirically not true.

I mean, people laugh at me for bringing up the Gilens and Page study from Princeton in 2014, but I swear on my life, if you don’t keep this stuff front and center, you will fall back into the lie and keep doing the circle jerk, pretending that somehow or another you’re going to vote it all away. And you know what the worst part of it is?

That we as a people within this algorithm-driven online world won’t share the alternative news that tells this stuff. We end up still sharing the big platforms and you know, we’re really fucking ourselves, excuse my French.

And it’s never been worse than the community I live in. They just ignore you outright. So anyway, with that, Peter, thank you so much, man. I appreciate your time. I’m going to go ahead and take us out now.

Folks, my name is Steve Grumbine. I am the host of Macro N Cheese and the founder of the nonprofit Real Progressives.

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End Credits:
01:07:08

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