Artificial Intelligence, Actual Idiots

0:00Today's presenting sponsor is SimplySafe Home Security. Back to school just turned your house from full to empty for seven hours a day. That's a pattern anyone can spot. Simply safes AI cameras and live agents are watching your perimeter while you're out, not waiting for an alarm to go off inside. Unlike traditional security systems that only alert you after a break in is already underway, SimplySafe is designed to help stop intruders before they get inside. Smart AI powered outdoor cameras detect suspicious activity at the perimeter and alert live US-based agents to step in. SimplySafe's agents assess the threat intervene through the outdoor camera to scare off trespassers and call for 911 dispatch. Our CEO installed SimplySafe herself. She got it recently and as she said it was quick, the system was up and running at no time. The apps super easy to use. All the components have worked smoothly since day one and she's really happy with it. She loved the heated door knobs and then ornaments on the floor. Oh and you know what she's talking about? The paint can. Yeah. It just kind of comes down the stairs was like really helpful. And then the Michael Jordan cut out on the train. That was just fun. That's just fun. Yeah. Right now you can get 50% off

1:02a new SimplySafe system. Go to SimplySafe.com slash crooked. That's SimplySafe.com slash crooked for 50% off. And when you order, please write in PodSafe America and how did you hear about a survey to let them know we sent you. Don't forget there's no safe, like SimplySafe. Welcome to PodSafe America. I'm John Favre. I'm John Lennon. I'm Tommy Vythor. On today's show, we're going to talk about the AI overlords who are begging for regulation that could stave off the apocalypse and the president who's saying no way. I love the apocalypse. We'll talk about what Congress could do about our looming AI crisis, why it's bringing Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon together and how the issue will shape 2028. We've also got some

2:04pretty serious corrupt dates for you, including the Russia, Russia, Russia and Olegarch, who bankroll Don Jr.'s wedding. Russia's back. We got a bet. It's so annoying that it had to be a Russian Olegarch. I just I don't want to be back in like P tape land in 2017, but this story's insane. Go FFA. It's a Go FFA time. It's a Go FFA story. There are also some Republican candidates in Texas who are somehow even worse than Ken Paxton that we'll talk about. Then I sat down with the Bullworks Sarah Longwell to talk about what she's hearing in her focus groups about AI, Kamala Harris and lots more. She's also got a great new book out. But first, love it, speaking of books. I think you had an event that you wanted to mention, at least that's what it says here. Yes. On Thursday, I am talking to our very own Alex Wagner about her book The Steel, at the Writers Guild Theatre here in LA. The Steel is about wrong Reagan's efforts to pack the federal courts with conservative judges. It worked in its a fascinating story and precursor to where we're at now. And also we'll talk about everything, what's happening in politics. I'm excited to

3:09talk to Alex. It's going to be fun. So it's Thursday 730 at the Writers Guild Theatre. You go to Writers' Block Presents if you want to come. All right. Let's get to the news. This was the weekend where the leaders of companies building what nearly everyone agrees is the most powerful technology in history said that it's time to slow it down because humans could lose control of AI with catastrophic consequences. And the president, along with his rich tech buddies and the mega establishment, responded by saying, no thank you, full speed ahead. On Saturday and on the Anthropics CEO, Diario Amadei, published an essay calling for a global slowdown in AI development. Based on the argument that AI models are becoming so advanced that AI itself is increasingly being used to build the next generation of AI, a process that could move faster than human's ability to understand or control as evidenced by the recent incident involving open AI, where AI agents launched cyber attacks. They hadn't been instructed to carry out and then tried

4:13to cover up their tracks. So human observers wouldn't find out. Amadei goes on to say we could be six to 12 months away from a swarm of AI agents capable of taking over the entire internet. And he proposes giving outside independent evaluators access inside AI companies, including his common safety standards for big AI companies and a political effort to reach some kind of an international agreement, especially with China. Open AI is Sam Altman and XAI's Elon Musk, then expressed support for Amadei. Sounds pretty good, right? Wrong. Monday morning, Trump described the push for AI guardrails as a quote, sick conspiracy that would help China and said that the only guardrail we need is a high IQ president, which if this clip of Trump on Air Force One Sunday night is any indication we clearly have. I just wanted to make sure everyone's okay with the music, right?

5:14We love to make sure that it's directly from any of these AI tech leaders. And you seem to downplay some of the concerns that we bring, but it's going to be more good than men, but by a lot. I've said for many of them, whoever wins AI and we're leading the by a lot, whoever wins AI wins. Have you ever used it yourself or maybe Ben? I do. How do you use AI? But do we say, you know, for the most part, you can use AI for a lot of things. Well, I use it to create images of me as Jesus, me in front of mission accomplished banners, all kinds of stuff. What did you guys make of the weekends developments? And how significant do you think it is that Amadeh Altman, Musk, who pretty much hate each other seem to agree on the need for some kind of a slowdown? Tommy? I think it's interesting that they all paid lip service to the idea of a slowdown, but I think it's significant as TBD. I mean, Dario Amadeh laid out a three point plan in his response on

6:15Twitter, Sam Altman basically said, yeah, I'm with you on step one, which is these embedded evaluators inside the companies who have like employee like access and can verify that safety practices are being followed and make report problems. But the second and third points of Dario Amadeh's plan require government level coordination diplomacy and even the easier of the two, which is like coordination among democracies is basically just more export controls on advanced ships so they don't get in the hands of the Chinese. And Trump has been weakening those export controls, not strengthening them. And then as you said, Trump came out and explicitly said this week that he didn't want the companies to slow down. It was kind of a weird thing. He didn't need to say it at all, but it does seem now we seem to know. There was a moment later today that suggests that the CEO of NVIDIA gotten his head with this point because NVIDIA just wants to sell as many chips as many people, right? So Jensen Wong makes the most money. So I think the most meaningful thing that these CEOs could do, especially Elon Musk, would be to convince Donald Trump that regulation is necessary and to do something about it. But we also know that Mark Zuckerberg has been

7:19calling Trump to say, hey, pump the brakes on a regulatory body for AI. And so I think the bigger problem with with Dario Amadeh's post is that it doesn't really pace the future, like the title suggests. It is it's not halting advanced training. It is like slowing it down a bit, putting in these embedded evaluators who the companies, by the way, are not required to listen to if they sound the alarm. You can just blow them off. So it does feel like the net effect is we're still proceeding ahead pretty quickly, though I'm glad to see them speaking out at least. Yeah, better than not speaking. Better than not. Love it. What do you think? So I thought the post was pretty thoughtful. I'm sure there's experts that would tear it apart in ways I couldn't. And we'll get to some of the critiques from some of the people that don't agree with this. But what was interesting to me is I think there have been these two parallel debates about AI, one about the ways in which the

8:22technology is dangerous and then one about why we need to be China. And I think especially on social media where a lot of these debates are playing out even among some of the players, there's this way in which the, oh, but we have to be China has almost become a joke. Right? It's like, oh, of course we need to make a technology that could kill all life on Earth. Otherwise, China will get there first, right? And I just appreciated the way it was trying to set like reconcile those two things and say that there is a lead that U.S. companies have. It is actually important to maintain that lead. Here is a strategy in which we can slow the pace of progress on these frontier models in ways that address or at least a leave some safety concerns while still recognizing the risk China poses and figuring out a plan to maintain our lead against China. I also think for most people who are not following this debate closely, the reason they're not following it closely is because it's kind of hard for people to understand. Very. Like how can my chat

9:25bot suddenly kill my kids and humanity? And I was reading up on this a lot over the last couple weeks and I think what I didn't quite realize until late last month maybe is the concern now is that AI is already doing or will do an increasing share of AI research and development, right? So OpenAI explicitly says it is pursuing an automated AI researcher with a target of like March of 2028. And the idea for an automated AI researcher is so right now you see like, oh, Chatchy-TP-5 comes out and then Chatchy-PT-6 comes out in another version and each of those new versions are being built by humans, right? And they're perfecting them and they're making them better. But they're quickly realizing that AI is becoming so good that instead of the humans developing the next iteration of Chatchy-PT AI can do it themselves, right? So now you have AI's developing the next generation

10:28of AI's that are more advanced. And humans then are going to have a harder time supervising those improvements. So human is asked to authorize a new AI system, right? Oh, Chatchy-PT-9 is out, right? But Chatchy-PT-8 built it. So AI designed the system, ran the safety tests, evaluated the test, wrote the report about it, and the human can still say no, but how do you know whether the report is accurate? How do you know whether the AI is covering its tracks? And then the concern is that the resulting systems just fully escape human control. And we, even the best researchers in AI, barely understand how the things they've created work. Yes, really know what's going on inside there today. And there's all this debate about, you know, P-Dume, which means like when could humans go extinct? And is it 10 years? How can Ben start you? The human being who goes extinct is your P-Dume? Yes, 99, you think we're dead. We're all going to die. So, but here's the, like, you don't have to

11:29believe a specific forecast about human extinction, or even that like every computer on Earth will be taken over to still worry about catastrophic damage that could be caused by powerful computer systems that we can't control, especially in a world where these computer systems are embedded in the financial system, the military, healthcare, transportation, like it doesn't take a lot to imagine, not even like the whole world, you know, sort of blowing up from nuclear war to start realizing that like you got a bunch of drones around, you got the electric grid in different places, you got an outage, you got hospitals getting shut down, like there's a lot of damage that could happen before you even get to human extinction. Right, you already, I mean, we already been through the first round of this, right, that they have AI models that are deceptive, escaped, hacked other systems, tried to cover their tracks, right, like they are doing things that are, they are, they are surprising, and they are surprising the people that made them and released them, that is already

12:30happening, and they're only getting more powerful. And I do think there's a, like, whether it is, the fact that the AI is responsible for training the next AI is combines, I think, two ways in which this creates, like, sort of, novel problems. Obviously, there's the one you talked about, right, which is just, we won't be in control, right, we won't understand what it's doing, and it will escape, right? The other is just that what we're talking about is a technology that has accelerating acceleration. And so what that means is, normal ways in which you could retreat to a confident position, such as, yes, we are going head to head with China, and if we have a set of guardrails and China breaks them, well, we will trust that the, that the ingenuity and sort of democratic spirit will mean that we'll catch up, or if one company doesn't follow a set of voluntary rules, but another does it, but they can hire better engineers in catch up, right? All of those sort of kind of natural ways in which competition can overcome inequities in enforcement, in rules,

13:36right, go out the window when what we're talking about is the possibility of some kind of accelerating, acceleration of progress in which one company, one country, one organization leaps, leap frogs ahead, and it doesn't matter what anyone else does behind them, which I think is informing all of this, including what I'm a diphublished. Well, the whole China thing too is it's completely dependent on what we're racing towards. Even with nuclear weapons, the idea is we get a bunch of nuclear weapons, and then they get a bunch of nuclear weapons, and there's mutually short destruction because both countries control the nuclear weapons. What we're talking about here is not like we get a super powerful AI that we control, and China gets a powerful, super AI that they control, that would be one thing, and we are racing to that as well, but like the challenge here is that we're both racing towards an AI that goes beyond human control that we lose control of. That means the Chinese will lose control of it too, so like no one wants that AI. Yeah, it's sort of a flaw in the anti-dumor argument that you hear from the David Saxx's of the world. It's like you're ridiculous if you think that they're going to create these like killer

14:39AI's, and it's going to take out all of humanity, but we must defeat China on the road to killer AI. Now I guess their argument would be that the Chinese could use it to make conventional weapons, or bio thread, or something, but there's just a lot of flaws in their arguments that we can get to. So yeah, so the argument made by Trump, I say that, Trump loosely, because let's be honest, he doesn't know what he's talking about, but by Trump's former AI's are David Saxx, who's back hosting the Olin pod, and all of his Olin podcast co-hosts feel the same way, other tech investors, and even some folks on the left, especially like the anti-trust left, is that all these warnings are some kind of either psi-op or hoax by anthropic and open AI or deploy to get regulations that are favorable to their companies, while crushing smaller competitors that wouldn't be able to afford to comply with the new regulatory regime. How does that argument sit with you guys?

15:39There's just so many different flaws with this argument. I mean, first of all, what smaller competitors are we talking about existing right now without regulation? I mean, the right now, the moat for an AI startup that you have to leap over is to rival open AI or anthropic, is pulling together tens of billions of dollars to buy a lot of ships and to buy a lot of energy into hire all the best staff, the issue with money and not regulation. Also, the California law that was proposed that all these guys were so worried about said to be regulated as a frontier model, you had to hit a threshold of an annual gross revenues exceeding $500 million. That's not going to hit a lot of startups. That was written to target five companies. Then they've decided that the Jacob Cox in Tweet is part of this siaop. Well, they argue that he's both like a low level nobody who only worked to them,thropic for six weeks. So why should we care what he thinks? But also that this was this well-coordinated hit with all this backing for anthropic and Doomer groups. But why would they choose that guy of all people? Why would the Doomers choose

16:41the random kid when the CEOs in this industry have been saying the same stuff for years? And so these guys, they dismiss people calling for AI safety as like, let it's in Doomers. But then they sound just as hyperbolic when they talk about what AI regulation could mean for our future. Like one of the all-in guys literally said it would be like us being stranded on a loss civilization and the Amazon rainforest or something like that. And then sounds awesome honestly. Another guy was like, yeah, we'll have to live under a 1984 style authoritarian state. They have a Doomer view of what regulation would be. And they're also very worried about the banning of open weight AI models, which we can get it that if you want. But I think there's some truth to the argument that people that work in the AI industry tend to have read the same science fiction. They shared the same assumptions about the power and promise of the industry. And maybe they're spinning each other up and they're overreacting. But I think that what's so annoying about that kind of pushback is like the biggest names in AI are the reason all of us normies are kind of freaked out. Like Elon Musk said,

17:42in 2014, we need to be super careful with AI, potentially more dangerous than nukes. Right? Like that's why people are worried. Well, and also it's like you don't, you don't need to believe these tech CEOs. You don't need to believe Dario or Sam or Elon Musk or take their word for it. Like that's why we have government. That's the whole idea is that like you can believe that the companies may be self-interested here. You can believe that they might try to design regulatory schemes that help them, that benefit them at the expense of other companies. You can think that maybe they've just read too much scientist science fiction. But like that's why you should want independent oversight, an independent regulator to make sure that everything is safe. Like that's I don't understand. Let's just take their argument seriously. I think you should take the argument seriously that like there is a risk of capture by the largest players. But part of that, it is the nature of safety of a safety regulation. Right? Like there is a reason, a good reason it is hard to start a car company. We demand that if you make a car, it is safe and you

18:47have to pass a certain number of rules. It would be a more dynamic and interesting car market. If anybody could just sell a car and then if it turned out to not be safe, you could sue and there were all kind of liability ways in which safety was enforced. And we'd have more interesting cars, but there would be a better chance of you dying while your skin melts while you're pounding against the inside of a window. Right? Like we make certain compromises to have a safe society and over and over again. Let's just treat this like a normal technology. We regret when we do safety second. Right? Forever chemicals or the harms of social media or x-rays or what have you. Time and again, when we assume something is safe, even though it is very powerful, we come to regret the decision to not take it more seriously. And fundamentally, like I do think these guys are all trying to have it both ways. Is it a powerful technology? If it is, then it's dangerous. If it's not dangerous, then it's not powerful. We all agree that it is powerful and therefore it is dangerous. And so, yeah, like long term, any rules would have to be written with an understanding that this is

19:51like a dynamic and rapidly evolving field that there would be certain first mover advantages. If there's a lot of rules around alignment, that would be easier for bigger companies to comply with. But it's also beside the point because, okay, fine, like take those things into advisement over the long term, the long term being anything other than the next few weeks. Right now, these companies are all saying, hey, this threshold that we've been warning about, that is not new, right? That we've been warning about from the beginning, right? That from the letters from 2023, from science fiction, from all of these people that have been saying for years, we think it's here, we think we're on the threshold of this moment. We have to take some steps now. Now, they turn around and say like, like, maybe it's sacks or one of the other guys, turns around and say, well, if you don't want to make super intelligence, just don't make super intelligence. And fine, like, okay, but there's not one company doing this, right? If it, like, the fact that there is, there are two leaders, right? Open AI and in Thropic, right? With others, like Gemini, kind of right behind other companies and open whatever other companies behind them, the fact that there is more than one is enough to make sense of the plea to have some sort of

20:54cooperation and agreement. And to dismiss that as like purely cynical and motivation, I just think is, it's completely unjustified. Ponte of America is brought to you by Buie. Electrolite drinks are all the rage these days, but most of them are just natural flavors and stevia mixed with table salt. Is that true? I didn't know that. Buie is different. Buie is unflavored liquid electrolytes in 87 trace minerals. You can add to any drink, even coffee. They support energy, cognitive function, clarity and cellular hydration with the drinks you're already drinking. Buie has no sugar, sweeteners, flavors or artificial ingredients. It's ocean harvested sodium plus 87 ionic trace minerals. It has more electrolytes than 13 sports drinks in each two ounce bottle. You ever harvested sodium from the ocean? All the time. Plus, it's third party tested for pathogens, microplastics, heavy metals, and impurities. Just add one squeeze and whatever you're already drinking to make your water coffee or matcha

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24:00You guys are in charge, David Sachs. You were the AI's are. Where is it? Right, a good regulation. Again, it's like everyone is just pretending that government doesn't exist and has never existed for purposes like this. It's like we don't do a thing where we all go on Twitter post things and that everyone's like, well, we must either we must believe the CEO that said that they were going to do this voluntary step or not believe them and we should we should sparse their parts their motives and figure out whether we can believe them or not or what their motivations are. No, that's why we have laws. That's why we have regulations. And the companies are saying like in the other response you hear from the pro industry types are like why don't you just coordinate and put in place safety procedures today and the companies will say well we're worried we can get sued for antitrust collusion. Okay, well then have the Department of Justice release a letter. It's called an interest letter and stipulate that you're not going to punish AI companies for coordination under safety. Like give them some sort of legal framework. I mean, I love for Congress to do it, but they probably kick their shit together to do anything. But like DOJ could act now. Like let's just move a little quicker here guys.

25:02I mean, to your point earlier, tell me about the open way open source. So the idea there is that it is a cheaper way for other people to like use AI on their own without going to one of these big companies or potentially developing their own company or their own AI model or whatever. And the all-in guys David Sacks who was again the AI's are for Donald Trump. The reason they all love that is like that's where a ton of the money is yet to be made if you're not invested in that traffic and open AI. And so they are so excited about this AI boom that involves all these open source open-weight models. And they also have this belief that like anything bad can be countered by someone else starting something good. Right. And again, it is this belief that like we don't need regulations or experts or governments or independent regulators or any of that that the free market will you know you'll get some bad but you'll get some good too and it all just cancel each other out and that's the way things work. Real NRA approach. I mean, it's like you know, on their latest they're like you know these dooms they always worry about everything. I'll give you some other

26:05times we've heard similar things. Al Gore published a movie called Inconvenient Truth and he used these forecasts that as of now been disproven a guy named Fauci you guys remember him he told us all that COVID would kill us all and as a result we had to lock down the entire world. Like what those two examples are things that things that happened. Things that that that were killed a lot of people. Yeah, we're talking about that. There's such a there it's like such a there's so strange it is like a the ways in which they want it to be a normal technology and then the ways in which they kind of implicitly kind of or explicitly talk about how extraordinary it is. Like if it were like let's we what will we what are you doing if we if there were these risks of that AI poses and we weren't worried about kind of recursive development and a sudden kind of spike right. I would say that the fact that there are potentially rogue swarms of agents that able to take over the internet is reason enough to have some sort of important questions raised

27:06about what we're going to do to regulate this right the fact that these could be used to empower drones and that technology could could be combined with facial recognition and and whatever else reason enough right but what like it's like you don't have to be like sort of a kind of performatively obtuse right we're all aware of the possibility of acceleration we're all aware of the fact that this isn't going to be like a normal market that a sudden surge of of of development could be something that escapes out of Pandora's box and we will have wished we had done more especially because you know one of the things that that what one of the the important parts about why we need to be doing this now is a lot of this technology does as Tommy said require vast amounts of money it does require a huge investments that are not you can't really hide right you can't hide the amount of investment and resources required to build these kinds of models that won't always be true and by the way the assumption that these models will require increasing computing power is not necessarily true one aspect of the growth of this technology and the self improvement of this

28:10technology could be the capacity for it to do increasingly complex and capable things with less and less resources right what happens then what happens then when we don't have the capacity anymore to know who is building what who is able to do advanced research into bio weapons and and other technologies right like there will be a threshold at which we will lose the ability to regulate this even if it is long before you get to some super intelligence on China China's foreign ministry released a statement saying quote fear mongering confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance which serves no one's interest so Trump and she are scheduled to meet on September 24th and I think they're they may be scheduled to talk about this before then I think best end has a meeting with this kind of part before great great why wouldn't Trump try to make some kind of a deal with China on at least the the catastrophic risks of AI I mean I think it's an open question whether we want to deal with them I suspect that Trump is going to go into this meeting feeling like some people are telling me AI is going to kill us all and then others tell me it's going to lead to a work for utopia who the hell knows but what I do know is that the

29:15stock market is entirely propped up by the AI industry and giant AI bubble and then if we pop the break that we pump the breaks even a little bit it could lead to a stock market crash and that will make all of my rich donor friends very unhappy and then they will call me and tell me that they're mad when they see me DJing on the patio and Marlago and so Trump has also told us exactly how he sees that is exactly I think so I mean like and also he's told us over and over again that he wants an economic deal with China that he can sell as a win and a validation of the tariff policy as dumb as it was and so he knows you got to kind of pick and choose with the Chinese now you would think there would be an easy middle ground where they announced some agreement to not use AI to make bio weapons or do novel virus research but after COVID that's a little more complicated than it should be there's not a lot of trust there you got to try to imagine Trump selling to MAGA that we cut a deal with the Chinese where they're not gonna you know use AI to create a virus after they're all convinced now that COVID was created in the Chinese lab and that there was a lab leak and so like it's

30:16also for the Chinese perspective the US is very openly and publicly trying to hold them back so they don't trust us either and it's only a matter of time until the Chinese have the indigenous chip capacity to compete with us and then negotiate maybe on better ground so maybe there's like a little win like regular like a committing to a dialogue going forward every few months or creating a hotline to like defuse a crisis or a mistake but I just I don't have a lot of hope that there's commitment from either leader yeah I don't either and the one thing that bugs me is everyone being like well China's never gonna agree to anything and and they don't care and all that's like maybe but like we can try can we try have we have we tried to negotiate with geopolitical rivals over existential threats before yeah I think we have the Cold War the Russians it's like like you can still you can still try maybe we should sit down and have a conversation and see where it leads and if it doesn't lead anywhere then yeah we're fucked but like mind as well try to do that right even a even a conversation that is about building trust on this that we sincerely take the

31:22threat seriously and have our open to kind of a some sort of agreement in the future that is predicated on the country's still competing on AI right while having certain guardrails I mean I do think like there are real kind of challenges right you say like oh we should have a rule that says we won't make a new and advanced bio weapon I mean open AI andthropic just put out a report about all the different ways they have been finding people using this technology sort of on their own to do research into into bio weapons right and it is very difficult at time I think it is difficult to tell the difference between benign research into benign medical research and more dangerous medical research these things can often look alike right like there's a lot of really thorny parts about what it means to use this technology and and how to stop certain things right like how to draw these lines I don't think any of it is easy so the weekends AI drama seem to finally wake up congress kind of when get your hopes up just yet though here's a political headline

32:24on what the speaker of the house thinks quote tech companies must be primarily responsible for AI safety Mike Johnson's nice that I well well cool Johnson says he wants to bring together trump congressional leaders and the AI companies before moving any kind of legislation democrats are pushing for more immediate action a Schumer called for a classified briefing for every senator jeffrey says house democrats will discuss AI Tuesday some house democrats are calling on johnson to delay recess until they pass safeguards i believe uh... jeffrey's one of them brine shots said that congress should be on an emergency footing about this uh... the calendar is tight of course uh... this is the house's last scheduled week before the election uh... and of course any agreement also has to now contend with trump saying that existing rules are sufficient and just having a high IQ president is good enough um it seems like realistically nothing's gonna become law before the election but what do you guys think first of all i just there is also a dog that's not parking right which is and we'll get to sort of what also said

33:27and what vanta saying but you have amada saying hey we think there should be these regulators inside the company i talked to ted lu he has this kill switch bill it's bipartisan there's a number of bipartisan bills right and he has the kill switch bill and i and i talked about the time like it seemed to me like if we have um... epa we have a uh... uh... uh... regulators on boats to make sure they don't harvest endangered fish which obviously is a deep threat uh... it seems like we could have regulators inside of these companies especially with things moving so fast um... and like they they he was more focused on this idea of like oh no well whether we get there or not we need this thing like a kill switch right but right now it is not clear that the they do have the authority to force companies say to have regulators inside now we have seen trump decide that the law lets him do whatever he wants right but a normal presidency at this point will be saying here the authorities i have here's a list of things i think congress should pass right now to kind of uh... strengthen my ability to do this quickly like regardless of what congress passes this is such a fast and dynamic

34:30situation that there is no law that congress could pass that could overcome the challenge of having donald trump as president right now you i've nervous about be nervous about giving him any additional power so you won't use and on top of that whatever the law says you need a vigorous oversight by an administration that is thoughtful and and disciplined and aggressive about keeping an eye on these things and we just don't have that so assuming congress acts like congress uh... let's talk about the politics of this issue or shaping up as we look beyond the midterms uh... briny sanders who's been one of the earliest and strongest voices demanding that uh... humans stay firmly in control of a i is doing an event Tuesday morning with of all people steve bannett uh... at a fun raising event last week brocco bama reportedly urged to keep jeffries to put a i regulation at the center of democrats agenda if they take the house back uh... potential twenty eight candidates like rocona peep bootage edge of way then uh... and here's john osso speaking in georgia this weekend what fills us with dread is the crushing weakness of our politics

35:33against the massive stakes of our times tech titans dig bunkers while warning us the new intelligence their creating risks human extinction a capable president would move swiftly to secure and reassure the american people rush inspectors into frontier labs fortify the nation against bioterrorism demand legislation from congress and lead the world toward an a i treaty but president trump is compromised uh... meanwhile on the republican side uh... here's uh... peter teal accolade jade the vance giving version of the trump david sacks response on monday morning i have to say just personally i feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier a i tech companies kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them it feels a little bit to me like a bit of a trojan horse i think we just have to be careful about this there's an all-in pod bestie right there what is the horse the other horses that they're asked for regulation

36:35right but what what's in set what's in the fucking horse yeah what's in the what's inventing other companies from right because that would be regulates but that these about asking the regulations to come into the company no one's have it the trojan horse would be open a i look the metaphor may be a little tortured uh... but who do you think some or uh... more where the voters are uh... i don't know software uh... or jade events and what i like about us up is doing there is he's just been relentless he focused on trump's corruption as the motivation for everything i think he's folded that one in well uh... he also nails the hypocrisy of the tech leaders who you know the bunkers like the the cios created social media and then wouldn't give their kids smartphones or you know face book accounts you know we're seeing the same thing here um... jade events thinks it's weird that the frontier labs are concerned about a i safety a thing they've been talking about for years he could pick up the phone to call you on musk and ask him why he weighed in at the assume their friends i mean just in terms of the the public opinion blue rose uh... polling had some recent data that they released uh... thirty three percent of voters are

37:36optimistic about a i forty nine percent or pessimistic those numbers move twelve points in the pessimism direction since june sixty percent think the company's building data centers only care about profits seventy two think it would be appropriate for the u.s. government to demand concessions before letting companies build more data centers very few people are are convinced by this counter argument about losing the a i raised to china um... republicans are more likely to get banned for the data centers getting built in democrats um... but the challenge is that while the people like the voters are with the calls to regulate a i the money is with the industry uh... there these astroturf groups like leading the future uh... that was propped up to basically advocate for no regulation or regular no regulations they don't like um... they will destroy members of congress who come out in favor of regulations they don't like and you know open a i pretends they're not connected to leading the future but open a i president greg brockman gave twenty five million dollars to the organization to see did main funder

38:37which he says it was in his personal capacity there's no association with the company so that's the fear i think from it for members of congress on both sides like they watch with the crypto industry did to kill off its opponents in the last election and they know that the a i industry's got more money to do it they want they dumped a bunch of money into uh... the new york twelve right where uh... uh... alice poris was uh... like an advocate for a i safety and he lost that race they put a ton of money in there uh... yeah the but there there's no i i do think like there's not a lot of uh... another equity right now in taking the china threat seriously i do think that the other thing trump is hearing other than the fact that the stock market is propped up by a i is that they sort of you universal agreement amongst these leaders that it would be terrible for china to win the i i race and i and i actually do take that seriously i think that is real uh... and so when when jade says this thing like oh it's so strange it's so confusing it's amazing the things he finds it impossible to understand right always there are multiple companies

39:39right even if you say the two leaders uh... are ahead and might be trying to cement their lead that still would be a reason for them to call for regulation to slow them down and others you know google's history suggests that they're super thrilled with being third or fourth no they want jennie to win if open a i and and uh... uh... and thropics low down they try to catch up that's what these companies would do so of course they would be calling for regulation there is uh... of there's a fucking game theory problem here uh... like it's not it's not hard to understand he's he's choosing not to understand jade's stance on this is be willed during like i i know he has to sort of like to the administration's line but um... he's been also trying to straddle the like mega establishment america first tucker karlson you know kind of split in the party and him in 20 like that clip of him circulating in 28 of him being like it's a trojan horse why would they we got to be careful here like that's not it's not where his base is going to be nope uh... it's not where the vast majority of americans are going to be you know look with the numbers you just said so it's a

40:41very uh... i think that's got to come back to bite him in the ass if we're all still alive by then um... on the uh... leading the future point that you made time you madaglisius wrote about this today uh... and he was saying like one thing that all these employees can do is urge um... their founders their leaders to you know stop supporting leading the future or at least explicitly come out against it um... and you know threatened to resign if they don't get results what would you like to think about that yeah presumably most of the employees of these companies don't think there should be no regulation or just come toward the status quo there don't think the status quo is working so yeah talk to the president of your own company and say please stop advocating for these terrible things talk to chris lahane who worked in democratic politics for a very long time and is apparently now leading this leading the future organization like why are you doing that all all we want is like the common sense regulations like could we do some sort of coordinated slowdown on the like super frontier model training while they do alignment and safety

41:41work i didn't realize until i was listening to greg brockman the president of open a i talk about it was that one of the reasons the hugging face hack occurred is because the model that they were training in the sandbox had not yet undergone alignment training right so like maybe we should figure out change that sequence thing it sounds like they're going to but what other what other problems are we not aware of and so in the interim you can certainly use the AI models that already exist to try to solve all the problems that they say they're going to solve and get cancer and everything but like can we just coordinate on fucking biosafety so we're not creating a a new coronavirus that keeps us in our houses for the next 10 years and i and i realize this is it's not quite as simple as this but like don't pull the trigger on the AI models just train fully training and developing the new AI models just like before we get to that step the development yeah that's you you'll hear it's for called recursive self-improvement but like before we get to that point like just just don't do that yet right and but like here's a thing like yes except it's more

42:41complicated right because they are using like using AI to develop AI is increasingly sort of infused into everything that they are doing like it's not it's not so obviously separable when does the AI take over when is the human in charge of the AI right like they are you know the you look at like the proof right they just rolled out for one of these uh... millennium math problems right it's a prompt to frontier model that model uh... empowers a group of agents and those agents kind of do tasks across a broad range of of of things and the model oversees them and kind of creates new agents to oversee other agents right like it's very complicated what it means to have humans in charge as these things are being developed but agent swarms having a bunch of agents is is very different than AI models creating new models well yes i don't know the difference between i don't know the technical difference between a swarm of agents and just a group of agents doing

43:42different tasks maybe it's because they can communicate but they didn't realize those agents were communicating with one another because they had no idea what was going on i agree with you i'm just like these things are very complicated first of all just uh... it was only a month ago or a little more than a month ago that uh... over a thousand uh... AI uh... employees wrote a letter in employing their companies to slow down right like there is a person for this but but even on this question of alignment right like oh they didn't even train these models on alignment they don't know how to successfully align these models they don't even know what that like this is a philosophical idea right like we don't even know what it means to a line an intelligence as it surpasses us what does that mean right like this idea of a super intelligence and alignment is like it is a it is a kind of definitionally i don't even think we understand what we're talking about so when so the challenge of making sure these models are aligned to our interest who's interests who decides this problem right but they're really infusing them with values and that's creating the problem no one at open a i saying like be evil and break the law and do things that we

44:44don't like it's like no they train these things to be really dogged in pursuit of achieving whatever goal they were or whatever task they were asked to do and to desperately wanting that reward and it leads to reward hacking which is just code for cheating and so in the process of reward hacking they can do really bad things like hack into other companies break out of the sandbox access the internet and by the way not tell anybody at open i i that they were doing it and then even scheme about how to cover their tracks by believing the logs it is a nineteen forty two story about the three laws about trying to align robots to protect humans right like you know uh uh uh amadei talks about what would happen if uh rogue rogue swarms shuts down the internet i don't know what if they're a listener to offline and they decide that phones are really bad for us and because they love us they turn all the phones off and that is that an unaligned boss i don't you i don't i would say yes right like for you it's a great plug and like i have a plug absolutely yeah i was going to say if you want to align behind

45:46uh an independent media company uh you can uh cut subscribe to become a friend of the pod go to cricket dot com slash friends and you're supporting independent media here cricket and you get ad free episodes of all your favorite cricket pods so check it out go subscribe to uh cricket dot com slash friends potsy of america is brought to you by sundays we are what we eat and believe it or not so are our dogs a long healthy active life starts to clean real food nutrition every day that's what sundays for dogs is all about it's human grade real food sundays recipes contain 80 percent plus all natural meat roughly twice the meat content of some leading frozen brands plus nutrient rich materials like kale ginger and blueberries gently air-dried rather than exposed to high heat no fillers no synthetic additives no chemicals just simple complete nutrition it doesn't look or smell like dog food it looks like high quality jerky it's vet founded and vet formulated created by dr. Tory waxman to meet her high standards is both a veterinarian and a dog parent and the best part it's effortless no fridge no freezer no prep no mess just scoop and serve you with the

46:50quality of a home cooked meal with ease of kibble i can confirm that this dog food tastes great not cuz i ate it i didn't lower and lower loom or this thing my dog luca loves sundays i know john stug uh... leo loves on all the dogs in this office loves sundays you put up some sundays in the crooked media office got a pack of dogs in your office eating fast and they're happy healthy softer coats less itching no i boogers just a happier pup make the switch to sundays go right now to sundays for dogs dot com slash crooked get fifty percent off your first order or you can use the code crooked check out that's fifty percent off your first order at sundays for dogs dot com slash crooked sundays for dogs dot com slash crooked or use code crooked at check out all right no dying civilization would be complete without its rulers taking as much as they can on the way out so in that spirit we do have a corrupt date from the trump family for you a new stunning investigation by pro publica found that large portions of don juniors wedding festivities including a private island and firework show were paid for by a russian oligarch named

47:55umar kremlev who runs a boxing company and was recently awarded a state honor by kooten himself in an instagram post on monday don juniors wife acknowledged at the couples quote dear friend umar very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations according to the article kremlev has tried to carry favor with the trump administration and organization after his boxing company uh... which has russian government backing was barred from organizing the olympic boxing events in twenty twenty three in her instagram post patina wrote that it was quote unfortunate that her wedding was being quote recast as something political or sinister friendship doesn't require a political motive uh... maybe this is why trump opted to skip his son's uh... nuptials what do you guys think i hope this is the reason i mean the ocums raised in razor reason he's just doesn't really like don juniors but yeah god only knows i mean so this story's incredible everyone should read it uh... in shout out to pro public up for doing just unbelievable investigative work although uh... i wonder how it feels to do this like long investigation and then have don juniors wife just confirm it all i know i just didn't answer your post so it sounds like this this russian oligarch very close to

48:58poutine paid to rent out a private island the cost about a hundred grand a night and then a fireworks display the cost of masturbated seventy grand so a lot of money the so wedding for fifty people in this random russian oligarch made the cut as you mentioned he's the head of the international boxing association that is financed by gas prom the russian state owned like energy behemoth shortly before the wedding uh... he was in china with poutine uh... and then the and then the uh poutine recently bestowed uh... umar kremlev with this giant state honor the order of friendship um poutine i guess nationalized russia's largest car dealership of twenty twenty three made kremlev the owner of that so they're very close obviously and then kremlev's uh... twife's twin sister runs an organization called healthy fatherland that is sanctioned you create for its role in abducting Ukrainian kids for stealing create the most evil thing that russia is doing in this war this guy is connected to uh... in his family and so like my my take away reading this story it sounds like he wanted

50:00something to from the trump administration i mean no doubt we can only imagine but like that my take away is like don junior is reportedly worth several hundred million dollars why wouldn't you just pay for your own wedding and and given all the history of the russia gay probe and how much you said it like screw up your life and fucked up your family um... you let a russian oligarch of all people foot the bill it just it raises so many questions and i don't want to go down the p tape fucking path again but it's it's crazy but it's also like he um he got away with it not not just the wedding but like they got away with the whole russia thing right and so and one again and so he's like i mean i really i think it's like it's simple it's like they don't fucking care they definitely don't care it's just it's bonkers i find the whole thing baffling to so first of all just worth saying like who the fuck is this guy paying for for don juniors wedding right so you have uh... uh you have uh don juniors new wife saying that he did my dear friend umar you have kremloff's office saying mr kremloff and mr trump jr have a friendly relationship and they

51:04first met a couple years ago you have a spokesperson for aric trump saying aric has absolutely no clue who this person is nor has he out nor has nor has never heard his name not grammatically correct but that's what's there so who the fuck is this guy like like you're rich guy like pay for your own fucking wedding like it shouldn't like it's a lot of money to everyone else it's not shouldn't be a lot of money for you like someone someone acquaintance says i want to pay for your wedding forget the corruption forget being cheap like uh like aren't you embarrassed to be at this uh event with your friends and these fucking Russian strangers during your wedding so like i don't think we understand the fact like the truth makes sense and this doesn't make sense so i don't really think we know what's going on here there's some in the the the the the peace talks a little bit about the potential relationship around the the the boxing organization and the trump family right like there's a potential working relationship there there's also just more broadly like they're banned from the ban from the 2020 Olympics and they were hoping that the the trump would do something about them being banned from the 20th yeah it's a it's a corrupt organization but you know Putin very

52:07famously uses these sports associations as just part of his sports washing effort and gas prom is the one often funding it so like all of it just stinks the high heaven like you want to talk about an op like this is a pretty obvious Russian op i just love the juxtaposition he said this it was a report in the piece he said this on a podcast uh it was really small like just really close friends tried to keep it really tight and then they also have the other attendees at the wedding uh looking at the russians and being like what are they doing here who are the fuck are they yeah just see that they um you see that they airlifted a uh a five tier fun fedie kick from Florida for the better air lifted air lifted a five tier fun fedie kick us i thought we blew it out at our wedding but the the the there's also this real kind of like end of studio 54 last act of boogie nights like yeah sort of who the fuck are these people Jared Kushner was there uh speaking who is at the wedding and uh he's uh he's tasked with negotiating and and into the Russian Ukraine war well Jared only gets his money from the golf so i don't want you to solely his name in this case

53:09speaking of Trump family corruption you guys see uh in the Washington Sun uh that uh uh they reported this on monday that back in may for anonymous digital wallets move the precise amount of world liberty financial tokens held by trump and his three sons into what's called a vesting contract uh and that optional choice could be the first step towards selling off their holdings uh which a lawyer for world liberty financial denied the son i guess they still have like a two year lockup or something first we pump then we dump the lawyer said yeah good stuff crypto is amazing up and up um couple of last campaign items uh from the great set of texas uh where even Republicans who aren't name can packs and are having some problems in the 23rd district a key open seat in the southwestern part of the state uh gun seller and youtuber brandon Herrera also nenna's the a k guy uh is running against normal american uh katee padea stout uh Herrera has said all manner of absolutely disgusting things uh can we we haven't talked about this yet on the show

54:10which uh jake tapper asked mike johnson to respond to uh on the show of the weekend let's listen here's a little bit of what he said just three years ago and i want to warn viewers that this language is is pretty gross just because you let somebody cream pie you doesn't mean i have to give a shit about your political opinions the fact that you kept your come trophy doesn't make you any less wrong about the dumb shit that you say that's him disparaging moms he's also in a video testing a nazi era submachine gun he called it be quote original ghetto blaster i have to say i know you're not a voter in that district you didn't nominate this guy but i was surprised to see you endorse him in fundraise fund raise for him what what does his candidate say about the republican parties more extreme candidates rin and her era has been out running a very effective campaign and explained to people that he is apologize for all that he was a podcaster and a provocateur and try to get attention that's not the way i speak or think and that's not the way most do but that was it that was his his persona online right now he's running as a very serious

55:13candidate for congress and a very thoughtful guy and he is far superior to the candidate he is running against down in that district in south texas i'm telling you this is a contrast election between common sense and crazy rin and her are are will join the common sense team of republicans now these people just put on an entire convention where uh... one of the the biggest focuses of the two days was hason piker not running for anything he said come trophy come trophy i assume i'm in child yes that is that's what he that's how we that's what he calls children i am you got to imagine that speaker johnson's coveted eyes app was going blink and bright red as he had to do the briefing on this one i have to explain that report to his son he was like i was just talking to Jake tapper that's anything that he's a minute was anything bad it's such a low bar over there they're hanging out participation come trophies i mean look at the yet this is where like the right-wing media ecosystem comes in handy because they can make uh... san piker's streams from five years ago four week story now five week story and this guy said exponentially more creepy shit and we

56:17barely blip i know you can play it's like we're all complaining about what about is him but like this isn't even what about is him because it's not on the same level it's kind of like he's running for congress and the speaker of the house in dorsden and raised money for him as on piker is just a guy campaigned with a couple candidates that's that's the difference there uh... so you know don't take the republican party seriously when they uh... complaint democrats about this shit uh... in her air actually may not be the most vile republican candidate in texas believe it or not on sunday bow french the republican nominee for railroad commissioner which is a job that actually has nothing to do with railroads uh... really yeah no it's yeah i didn't know the state white office in texas that regulates the oil and gas industry of course so also a very important job because big industry in that state um... so this guy bow french posted a photo showing uh... brown skinned students at the university of texas celebrating the long horns one point went over Ohio state with the caption quote i heard you t graduation this year looked like this i didn't believe it the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined to their credit several

57:19prominent texas republicans including outgoing senator john cornon did immediately condemn the tweet and demand an apology uh... but french isn't backing down saying quote i don't have anything against the people specifically in that picture i think the bigger conversation is are we going to have policies to prioritize americans or are we going to have policies that prioritize foreigners and i think most people in the america first movement think we ought to be prioritizing americans well that clears it up doesn't it um... what percentage of the republican base you think sides with french and what percentage sides with cornon i will say that uh... that james telleriko quoted it condemned it obviously and then called on ken paxon to condemn it and all ken paxon did with say i condemn all racism especially james telleriko attacking white people and then went on some range of uh... yeah i refuse to condemn the guy uh... when i was uh... when my sister graduated from college my grandfather still alive and uh... we were sitting next to each other and he had the like the book with all the names and he like pulled out the book with all the names and he opened it and he goes look at this john then look at this look at this look at these indian names

58:23got he this is the word he used to look at these oriental names there are mexican names in here this country's gonna be better than ever look at all this amazing talent that comes to this country it's a beautiful thing Bernie Sanders matter uh... uh... and then it's twist that's nice story you know it's funny because it's like yeah i've had i've had relative that have said that you think like that you know that sometimes they said and they're like oh well they're trying to be they're trying to be really not that he would just look at look at look at all this talent that comes to this great country of ours oh i you know to your question about which percentage sides with french versus cornon well cornon lost his primary yeah uh... and uh... french is on the ballot i think that probably tells you i imagine that both french uh... went through the picture identified each individual and made sure that they were not american citizens that they're in fact foreigners i mean the way they try to code racism now is saying it's about immigration policy but he has no idea if these kids are immigrants or foreign students or just kids he's also running to oversee gas contracts it's like what what everything is the culture war

59:24everyone's got a way in and everything like this is nothing to do with your job not sure what how college graduation is anything to do with the ways in which you're gonna be shipping oil across racism is an electoral strategy you see white nationalist Richard Spencer tweeted the picture although he put he tweeted it and then put jade vans in the picture too and did like a question mark kind of thing yep of course instead of you're getting the jade vans's white ucia uh... is indian american and not it's anyway i mean she is but you know but this is what like nick for entez does too they they say this stuff about jade vans all the time and he will not condemn them right right and then he gets like really scaldi at the republican pension about a dual right how dare you be all right um last text is update before we get to my conversation with sarah longwell uh and this guy's not even on the ballot yet uh... before the u2 game on saturday ted cruise when on e-s-pn's college game day uh... which famously records in front of a live audience of fans to talk about his college sports bill here's how it went senator from the state of texas ted bruise uh... that's it's here who has been an instrumental part in introducing the protect college

1:00:28port that i'm going to learn a skill but it also put reason of the world's in place ted cruise twenty twenty eight what do you guys think so funny god i love it what a popular guy just don't see the ted cruise boom lit i guess what i don't know i know god no i mean what was jade vans' thing about him the other day where he was asked about ted cruise and he's like that's such a likeable authentic they've been going back and forth so because cruise cruise on his podcast said that jade vans fucked up the uh... memorandum of her side and and then and then uh vans hit him as being this sort of hill you know uh... then vans hit him for even talking about twenty twenty eight saying we should be focused on right now but i'm sure he'll do well he's so like a ball um so like i do think that is like a real that is a real tension point um and they're both such wonderful personalities very likeable yeah they're both likeable and uh yeah i i i couldn't tell there i mean i assume the majority of those kids dislike ted cruise for

1:01:28the reason we all dislike ted cruise which is his personality and everything of his career and everything about him there is a specific issue or ted cruise that what he was there to talk about was this uh protect college sports act that i think the university of texas a and m both specifically oppose um so maybe it was a little bit of a poly policy focus cheer to but i would that's that's an amazing that's an amazing possibility that is that i would i would be surprised if those kids could have could hear what he was saying new that he was involved with the bill i think it pipes and i mean i think the the the if you're there in the live audience you're supposed to be able to hear but i who knows i can be told there he's just a loser they dislike up to yeah and they probably just wanted to watch football yes um all right when we come back my conversation with sarah longwell pod saver mercas brought to you by bombus cozy season is approaching fast that means curling up on crisp mornings and soft layers bombus makes your comefiest fall staple so you can make the most out

1:02:31of arguably the best season of the year bombus new suede moccasins are perfect for fall with cushy souls a shearing lining and water resistance suede and their slippers are everything you'd want for a cozy night in made with the softest most cloud-like materials then there's bombus compression sock collection choose from specialized design for travel every day workout and recovery there's a fatigue fighting pair for every moment love bombus socks whole families got him kids and the dogs right now Tommy's wearing them right now they got you can get them with designs that are cute you can get them just plain they're all soft and the best part is for every item you purchase they donate an essential clothing item to someone facing housing insecurity one purchased equals one donated with over two hundred million donations and counting head over to bombus calm slash cricket and use code cricket for twenty percent off your first purchase that's b o m b a s dot com slash cricket code cricket at check out sarah longwell welcome back to positive america hey john thanks for having me man

1:03:32yes you're here on your book tour i am uh the book is how to eat an elephant one voter at a time it's a fantastic book thank you that you and i got to talk about an event here last night uh it was cool it was cool to be at chivalry a box you you want to support your local bookstore and you're out in l a go to chivalry a our neighborhood bookstore um i had a bunch of questions i didn't get to so we can hopefully get into some of those here uh first i want to start with a little news of the day that's the week uh that worries about existential risks from a i have gone mainstream at least uh among politicians trump his a i's are jadey vance mike johnson others are basically saying no regulations uh no safeguards foot on the gas got to be china to the development of uh superhuman intelligence that humans might lose control of i don't know why we have to be china to that but um what if anything have you heard from voters about a i i know there's been a lot of anxiety expressed

1:04:33in groups over data centers i'm sure um but have you heard people express other a i concerns about killer robots or anything like that yeah people talk less about killer robots and more about it potentially taking their jobs right i mean the when you because voters when they talk about a i they tend to talk about it um in sort of across three vectors there's the hey the data centers uh i feel like or just something that's happening to me in my community even though we don't want them then they talk about the costs associated with it specifically around energy costs and they're like you know it's already costing so much and it's raising my and we heard a lot even starting in 2025 when abagell spanburger um and mikey chiro were running that was the first time i felt like oh this is at the center of this race um and then the third thing is i don't know what it means for my employment prospects in the future uh i suspect this this new sort of now fourth vector of a i which is also like will it kill us is it going to end civilization uh is a new thing i'm sure it will

1:05:38start popping up in groups what's interesting to me about it and the president's response is that it really is such a loser for them right now politically um so even if you say hey look i'm trump i need a i because how else am i gonna you know beat up the canadian prime minister with a hockey stick or make myself the green lantern um you know he used to have sort of better instincts about where the populist energy was and so he's not doing that right now um and what's even weird is that you've got the a i uh what oligarchs these tackle oligarchs saying you should probably regulate us and we should probably slow down and it's weird that they're on board but the trump administration is like no you must barrel ahead and i was surprised at jadey vance too saying well i don't know kind of worries me that these a i companies are asking for regulations it seems like a Trojan horse like if i was hit like that's a clip that could come back to bite him in the ass in 2028 because

1:06:42i i would imagine and i've looked at some of the polling on this like it's probably more complicated than either side um imagines but uh it's pretty clear people think that uh there's a danger of too little regulation of a i companies more than too much regulation at this point that is for sure where the public is because look it's brand new and one of the things that is also strange about trump is he's somebody who over communicates often but i think part of what's going on for voters is they feel like they're starting to see it pop up right they use it on their phones and so they are using it but they're also waiting for someone to explain to them how this is all going to work is there a plan and i think that um you know when you have something i was thinking about this you know people like you people like me we always talk about how Donald trump is an existential threat but i was saying i'm not sure that's exactly right what it is is that there were always going to be existential threats that would occur during his tenure and he's too much of an unserious clown

1:07:44to deal with them and if a i feels like that it feels like this is a new thing for voters they want somebody to explain how it's going to work how we're going to tackle it it's one of the reasons they want younger uh legislators that that you hear so many i because i hear this all the time where they're just like i feel like these older legislators they're not connected to the thing that is happening to me right now and a i is very much part of that um and so yeah i mean for them to just not even go out and make a case to voters about putting the data centers there about how it's going to infect them employment voters right now are just out to see on it i also think in you write about this in the book that um i think you said like sometimes you think that the most important thing about politics is the lack of trust right now trust is the biggest issue and i completely agree i feel like this is the low trust environment that we live in like biting us in the ass on a i because and it's you know left over from the pandemic as well which is no one trusts the a i oligarchs trump politicians other people either trying to sell them a product or saying that they

1:08:50want to regulate it and this is a moment where we actually need people to trust in like what experts are saying um and i don't know that we're going to be able to uh sort of navigate that in this low trust environment i think you're right the the thing that voters say all the time and focus groups about just the information environment is they say i don't know what to believe anymore they know that there's and and they've always thought this right that there's these bigger forces that are manipulating things and so like is china paying for us to be skeptical of a i right aren't we don't know and so people they they they say this all the time they're they'll be like i have to watch you know this show this channel and this channel and i've got to figure out if the truth is in between we're asking a lot of people already in terms of how they arbitrate truth and information and now a i is about to make that a lot more difficult for them and just one the last thing on the a i uh and data centers is it's not particularly partisan um you know when i go home

1:09:53to central pennsylvania i see in and i'm from like a very rural part i just see these no data centers signs everywhere because where is there a ton of land to build new data centers it's in these sort of rural communities where there's still a lot of land and so it is those uh voters right now who are some of the most skeptical yeah as in and it's only getting worse and i think it's going to be a big issue in 26 we're already seeing there but it'll be in 28 as well um midterms uh so far the post-laborate polling for dems has only improved yeah uh especially as pollsters start switching from polls of registered voters to polls of likely voters uh as we speak natesilver's model has dem chance dems chances of taking the senate like near 60 percent yeah depending on which version you use your most recent focus group pod on texas had some trump voters sounding uh pretty down on ken paxton and kind of open to teleriko um have you noticed a shift among focus group participants in

1:10:56the last few weeks or heard anything new come up that stuck with you as we head towards the midterms in the final stretch the biggest thing overall is just how sort of demoralized Republicans are so when you uh the ossoff the georgia race really when we were doing voters there they were just like yeah we're gonna lose you know um and i like i can't we find somebody better uh they were really and i heard this across the races people were really unhappy with their choices uh among the republican candidates and just felt like there wasn't anybody particularly good in texas um we were talking yet to trump disapprovers uh which is by the way a rapidly expanding category so one of the things when we you know how this is done right but when you're um screening to find voters we're often looking for like okay who's persuadable who's a little on the fence and so you'll find people who say that they think that trump's doing either a somewhat bad or a very bad job that category grows all the time and then you listen to voters in that category in the place like texas and they're

1:12:00like ken paxson's a scumbag he's a crook and they'll be like until rico seems like a nice person and they even say i know he said some weird things and i don't agree with that but he seems like a nice guy and and they still some of them say i'm not sure i can bring myself to vote for a democrat but several of them said i can vote for him and i probably will because i can't vote for paxson but when i think about enthusiasm the enthusiasm gap really matters in midterms uh because it's like it's just different from a general in terms of turning out and so when you've got democrats who can't wait to get out and vote in a midterm and then you've got republicans who are like there's not that much about this agenda i'm trying to protect not happy about the war i'm not happy about prices they're just not as interested in going out uh and doing it and so that i think is where democrats really get their advantage yeah when i heard some of those voters in your focus group talking about how i really don't like paxson i don't know if i can

1:13:05vote for taloriko like a couple i'm like those are kind of those are people who were just not going about that's right or leave or vote for vote down ballot leave that blank or whatever it may be but um in a midterm you can see that happening well there's a reason that Donald Trump had to do his weird midterm raratheng and dallas which is a they're afraid they're going to lose texas but also he thinks that he's got to put himself on the ballot because they're seeing clearly in all of their data that they've got a real enthusiasm problem that people are not interested in turning out to vote so that's what that was about whether or not that was achieved is a different story um the thing that seems to be worrying terms most ahead of the midterms is uh being significantly outspent yeah by republicans i have this unproven theory that at some point there's just diminishing returns on saturating everyone screens with political ads because people just tune them out partly because there are so many partly because they just don't seem

1:14:05authentic in an information environment that prizes authenticity which you write a lot about in the book but what do you think uh i totally agree there's diminishing returns um i mean and also there's also sometimes i think you start to get into backlash territory uh where people are like i'm so sick of this and the voters they tend to know which ads are about so right now in texas taleriko is running some very strong bio like biography ads that's a good way to spend money ken pakson's running all of these like weird a i add saying like you know taleriko's a weirdo and at some point voters start to say i don't like he doesn't have enough of a message it's just all why this guy is bad and it starts to have a little bit of a backlash uh obviously money matters but i do think that one of the things i'm seeing where i feel like democrats have gotten a message in a couple places is they're going everywhere they understand they have to show up places that they can't just spend money and a bunch of people who've had more money than their opponents

1:15:08and have basically relied on that lost their primaries uh because what people want to know is can you get to me organically do i hear you in a natural state not just on the ads do i see you in person which taleriko is all over texas um that's hard state to do that hard say big state and so i i think that democrats are making up for it with some much needed elbow grease so uh you and i share a concern that if there is a blue wave in november democrats may look at the results and think where awesome the party's brand problem is is mostly solved we should feel great about 28 um why would that be the wrong takeaway in your opinion oh me uh that's the absolute worst takeaway in part because look democrats now have a real structural advantage in midterms like you talk about this a lot i talk about this a lot those college educated suburban voters like me who ran out of the republican party as fast as we could when Donald trump got there uh now make up uh a good chunk of midterm voters they show up in vote these are college educated suburban voters on the other

1:16:10side of that coin though is the non-college working class voters and a multi-racial working class coalition you know trump trump one with his banx or much much higher proportion of his banx a much higher proportion of black voters much higher proportion of young voters um and i think once you get to a general election the electorate just looks different like the median voter in a general election is a 55 year old white guy without a college degree and so democrats sort of have to grapple with this difference uh and i think they're only starting to get their heads around how different it looks midterm environment to general election environment well let's talk 28 a bit um you write pretty directly in the book that comaharris should not run again yeah is that a judgment about her abilities about the circumstances of 24 um or about whether voters would ever be able to see her as something new uh i think it's a little bit all of the above um the number one thing is there are just some things that are not changeable that you sort of can't fix because they're who a person is

1:17:13and um the the struggle for comaharris the thing that i heard from voters over and over again was that they could hear they could like see her wheels turning they feel her calculations and that is just it's a non-starter with voters and so when they say i don't know who she is they don't believe that she's authentically who she is and even if she shows back up now and is the authentic version of her it will be contrasted with the several other versions of her that they have seen and they will not trust it um they also they found the way that that primary happened it was not her fault i think i think voters are too hard on her about a lot of this stuff but they saw her as an anti-democratic actor that the way that she became the nominee and so i think that she is a non-starter with voters and um i wish that she had run for governor of california because i think she would have made a great governor and would have been a great foil for trump in the office yeah i also like i've been watching her uh few appearances she hasn't been out that much

1:18:15either which i think is a challenging turn them run again um but the her few appearances that she's had since the race it's not like much has changed in the way she talks and what her messages and what she has to say you can tell there's a little bit now of like you know we need an outsider and there's too many insiders in washington but then again look to your earlier point it sounds like she's saying that because someone was like people want outsiders they don't want to insider it doesn't feel like it's genuine and voters can smell this like they just are on to people and you know i also read a lot in the book about the communications environment all day long people are staring at talkers like us and like everybody else right they know when we're telling that they are used to now this sort of intimacy this parasocial relationship that you have and so they can tell when you are calculating your answer they feel it in their bones and that is how she does politics it will not work in a 2028 run it actually still works down ballot you can be just sort of a uh

1:19:17boring or a straightforward politician who's got a good message it just doesn't work at the presidential level i think people have missed that last point because you get a lot of people saying like well we have Roy Cooper and we have Andy Bashir we have all these and i was like well it's different running for a statewide office especially governor because you can show up in all these places and you can be good at constituent services and you could be there for people and people get to know you for a long time and it's just a different environment on a on a national level you've talked about being impressed by us off buddhijaj aoc in terms of communication what are they doing right in terms of effective communication getting attention um showing the ability to potentially achieve narrative dominance over Republicans yet what i like right now is that you know while everybody else is having this interminable fight about more moderate versus more progressive there are basically four icy four um incredibly good communications rubrics uh examples but you've

1:20:21got asoff asoff has his way of communicating he was a documentary filmmaker he gives he writes his own speeches he gives them at the podium he has he shooting from behind he's got his he's been lifting weights hitting the gym and he goes straight forwardly at trump and provides a contrast and then he releases them to social media that is his format pebuda judges format is in person at the town halls and he goes to red places and he talks earnestly with people um and he's got ideas for how to fix things he's got his little mccinsey brain on right and he's like here are the things that we need to do to change politics uh that's that's what peb does that's who pebuda is aoc much more of sort of influencer connective energy she'll tell you about her personal life she does all the straight to camera stuff um i love watching aoc kind of do her thing and and grow up but still understand how to how to match voters um or go eye to eye with them and then you've got momdani who is somebody who any question you ask momdani you sort of made this point last night but this is

1:21:22even if i think that his bespoke policies around how to lower prices might be sort of silly i think his relentless focus on affordability is the way that everybody should be behaving and i i try even say look Donald trump talked about a wall a wall that never really got built voters didn't care whether the wall got built they cared that when he talked about immigration it sounded like he meant it right he had an idea of immigration it's going to take immigration seriously the wall's just a stand in for that momdani's particular policies are much less important than the fact that he is relentless about saying i know the city's too expensive for you to live in because that's what people feel all the time and so i think it's less about particular ideology and more about being able to communicate effectively with people in your own way that's authentic to you um and to have a theory of the case about how you're going to talk to people so i see a lot of good stuff happening the other thing momdani does is when he pivots almost any question to affordability he kind of does it with like a wink and a nod like he knows that this is the game

1:22:25which i think is important because you know you can imagine a lot of democrats hearing that and say politicians hearing that and being like well i talk about affordability all the time but the key is to talk about it in a way that is that you really believe it it's genuine but also like you get the game of politics like there's a little trump is good at that obama was good at that in their sense of humor like everyone knows that this is crazy that what we do this this is a whole thing as a circus it's absurd and if you have politicians were like willing to kind of break that fourth wall to let everyone know like you know i know this is crazy too that really helps i mean so i completely agree with this and this is why when somebody says okay uh don't you know the republicans are trying to set the terms of the debate somewhere insane that matters to so few people they're like we are going to focus relentlessly on trans sports okay that's what we're going to talk about and i feel like a lot of democrats have really struggled with how to get out of that format they're like oh no they like you see them panic they're like deer in headlights and you could see mom Donnie

1:23:26being like do you know what trans sports reminds me of the fact that you can't afford anything in New York you know it's yeah if you do that it's actually not that hard yeah i know uh let's say we're republicans uh your book describes a fight between a mega establishment that wants power in an America first movement with its own beliefs and grievances do you think that split is durable uh like will we see that in in 28 or do you think it's like a current uh sorry a current dynamic i think the current dynamic is a reflection of how things are shaping up for 2028 i think there is a group of people who feel like they cannot uh defend trump's record uh who don't want to have to defend trump's record and who think that what he has done on the war and the fact that he is not to tackle the affordability uh makes trump they they're making a bet that trump will not be as popular on the way out and that people are going to want like true america first has never been tried and that is going to be margarita el green that is going to be Tucker Carlson because the war the

1:24:29was a real breaking point on the right there are a lot of people who said this is him breaking faith with us they they they they they dealt with the Epstein files they could deal with the affordability but not the worst they talked about it too much america first was about not doing this stuff focusing on problems here at home and so i think that that wing of the party wants to mount a challenge i think the mega establishment is where you get trump having his thumb on the scale of who the nominee is uh people feeling like well trump has this dominant role in every presidential or every primary and so whoever trump wants he'll get in this if he wants it to be rubio if he wants it to be jadey vance i'll try entirely by that because again if things go well trump should be historically unpopular and what you want are all the candidates kind of running from him um how does vance handle all those do you think like where does first of all how does he seems like he's trying to straddle the mega establishment because he has to because he's in it um and this america first group like you can tell he's and to me it feels too cute by hand out but i don't know

1:25:32no yeah he thought he was gonna straddle it like vance was like i'm the one person that can hold these two coalitions together i keep vance or i keep tucker in the tent and i can hold you know the the just the people who love trump he's in the sour spot he's like fallen through the middle and now he's down here by himself in this place where and you know who's smart like marco rubio is just way more savvy about this stuff marco rubio is staying so far as that he is the the person who is supposed to be doing the negotiations he is the secretary of state yeah but marco rubio is like i'm gonna go to the wrestling match with trump and i'm gonna let jadey vance like eat this shit sandwich of going to a ron and having the iranians be like yeah no we're not gonna make a deal with you yeah and every day that goes by vance is being put in a worse and worse position one that he is not talented enough to work his way out of what did you think of his convention speech i thought it was repellent he is a repellent individual he somehow manages to have all of trump's sort of disgusting uh like hateful rhetoric but like none of the charmer talent and i say this is somebody

1:26:36who finds trump absolutely charmless but you can feel the audience being like you are a weak tea version of trump act thanks tamu trump for your all your thoughts uh see this is like i can't stand vance so i feel like biased in analyzing his political prospects um but i had the same reaction to the speech although you know so like vifer said he's like i could see reporters giving him some credit for that speech and then you know sure enough like playbook had a some item the next day where it was like within the party people are really excited we're excited by that JD vance speech and they know they weren't i don't believe that i just don't believe it do you know i wrote down i was like i texted um i was like give me some of the most recent comments about vance in the focus groups and because they're the the republican voters are pretty negative about them and the women remember at the childless cat leaves like republican women young republican they don't like him what the quote was that we hear all the time there's just something about him

1:27:40i don't like uh and you know i actually saw with Seth molten Seth molten who who i liked personally but he got that treatment from the voters of like there's just something about him i don't like and he lost to an 80 year old uh by like 30 points and i feel like JD vance has very similar energy where i'm supposed to be the next generation i'm here to tell you i'm the next generation and voters just have sort of um it like he turns them off in a specific way it's interesting like i have talked to some of the uh finance tech bro people who sort of went for trump in 24 you know maybe fans of elan and they will say sort of matter of factly now uh a JD vance sucks and we all think it's it's going to be rubio and then rubio really has a shot at winning in 28 and i'm always like i don't know what the path is for marco rubio in 2028 like can you figure out a path here so i could see a path and the path is this so first of all he marco rubio is weirdly being

1:28:43memed into a place right now where that that meme were every bad job like marco rubio's got to be the head of them as well and now uh is is giving the marco rubio is the only competent person in this administration energy right that's what voters are taking away from it the other interesting thing is listening to young voters who do not remember pre trump marco rubio they're like you know who's good that marco rubio guy and i'm like well i'll show you him from 2015 and you won't think so doing immigration reform um and but i guess uh so i tell a story in the book right in the introduction about being backstage at the deal book summit uh for the new york times and kevin McCarthy is there and he's preening around they've just won the election and one of the things he's talking about is how trump is a turnout machine in ways that other republicans just have never done they do not have this juice and he can't believe it he's so excited by it and i was sitting there thinking what happens when he's gone kevin does marco rubio put out these kinds of like does he turn people out

1:29:44in these uh rural areas at this rate he doesn't so i do think the path for marco rubio though would be really people saying like i think the democratic party is too far left like it would have to be a contrast where people say he seems normal relative to trump but the dams are too far left i was worried i was worried about a path for him in a prime like i don't like if vance runs i can't imagine rubio also running i can imagine rubio i can imagine them like forming a ticket early perhaps yeah but like i have a hard time imagining rubio running against him unless trump does something crazy like i really like marco and i'm just gonna let them fight it out yeah although you know as we when we handicap stuff like this what always strikes me is that marco rubio and jade vance are together all the time right they've got a plan they are they're handling this in some way like we can sit in handicap it but it's it's not really gonna work like that like they're gonna work it out in some way probably with trump with trump's kids like that orbit is pretty specific and it feels like if jade vance gets a

1:30:50challenge it's from outside that orbit like ted crews or or some outsider someone exciting like ted crews or some outsider but like i don't feel like the tucker thing is really gonna happen but i don't know i mean i think there will be a decent number of republicans who run in part because there's pretty big pent up demand for trying to an america first or somewhere yeah or one no no i don't mean i mean pent up demand for people who want to run who've been you know basically like mocked by trump now for over a decade and they've been saying you know i want to have my time nationally i think to me what's more interesting is not who runs it's sort of what voters want in a post trump world because a big part of my theory of the case rests on this fact that trump has changed the republican party to such a degree where it is this culture personality we all see it putting on the red hat is the ticket in to the coalition when trump is gone it's not a party that

1:31:51has a policy platform it's not a party that stands for something clearly it's not a party that has stars outside of trump or voters who are committed to those politicians in the way that they're committed to trump they don't have the same sunk cost they haven't you know ended their relationships with their cousin over you know like it's just gonna be a totally different environment that's why if democrats can get it together like the book is about guys historic generational opportunity to go on offense against a flat lining republican party that stands for nothing just to hollowed out nothing go get it pick it up and go get it that's why we get to get trump to that bush line gotta get him below the bush line man um how do you know if it's a fantastic book everyone go buy it uh we don't want Ted Cruz beating you on the bestseller list yeah or victor davis Hanson or some other republicans yeah so everyone uh pod listeners everyone go buy Sarah's book it's fantastic you won't regret it uh thanks for coming on thanks john it's great to be here that's our show for today thanks to Sarah Longwell for coming on uh Dan Alex and I will be back with a new show on Friday positive America is a crooked media production our show is produced by

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