Catherine Rampell and Stephen Witt: Can We Avert Economic Disaster and the Robot Apocalypse?

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1:10Hello and welcome to the Bullwork Daily. I'm your host Tim Miller. We have a massive show today. It's a double header. We're doing economics. We're doing AI. So I don't even have time to get to my guy Thomas Massey bringing the articles of impeachment against Peter Brian Hegseth. So go check out the next level. It's already up. We had Edgar in for Sarah Longwell. We get into impeaching Hegseth, author impeachment ideas that we have and other political news of the day. On this show in segment two, I bring in the author of a New York Times column titled, This is Really Bad, which is just squarely targeting us here at the Bullwork. And that's that is clickbait for me if I've ever seen it. This is really bad. The AI Vibeshift and I think it's a worthwhile conversation, particularly if you're trying to make sense of the changing narrative and discussions around the AI threats. But first, she's the economics editor here at the Bullwork author of the receipts newsletter and coming up on Friday, a new podcast also called receipts.

2:11It's Catherine Rapel. What's up Catherine? Hey, thanks for having me back. All right, welcome. The new pod is going to be in its own feed. So people don't have to go get that. Go sign up on Friday. Make a little note for yourself right now. And we're really excited about it. What's going to happen on the pod, do you have any little teaser for people? For this week, well, we shall see what happens with the Fed today. We're recording this. I should let our audience know before the Fed announces what it's doing with rates. It's probably going to raise rates today on Wednesday. My expectation is that the president will flip out when that happens, but I don't know. But assuming that that happens, I think that'll probably eat up most of the conversation like for the next week. So we'll be talking about plenty of that stuff and other crypto scams and various other things that's happening in the world. A lot of great economic news. We'll do a little teaser of it right now. Let's talk about the potential state of plan. And you said kind of what we think is the baseline expectation for the Fed, but just kind

3:14of backing up for people. Why does the Fed feel in this moment that they need to raise rates? I mean, we're getting to the next, but bond rates, mortgage rates are already going up, you know, for reasons unrelated to what the Fed is doing. What is it about? Well, sort of related. Yeah. What is it about what's happening in the economy that is going to lead the Fed to raising rates? Well, we've had high inflation for over six years at this point. We have a new Fed share who most of his life has been an inflation hawk, meaning that he has a bias towards raising rates higher and to deal with inflation. That's usually the prescription for dealing with inflation is higher short term interest rates. So if you take him at his word that he deeply believes that the solution for inflation for getting stable prices, which is the Fed's responsibility is tighter monetary policy, you know, what she criticized his predecessors for not having. If you think that he deeply believes that and he wasn't just saying it for political reasons while there was a Democrat in the White House, that is what you should expect the Fed to

4:17do today. And he basically said as much in a recent speech where he kind of boxed himself into a corner where he told markets more or less like unless we see something some kind of major improvement on the inflation front in the next few weeks, it's up to the Fed to deal with it. How do you think you're balancing? I mean, at some level, like inflation has been high, but the came down in there, there's the depends on kind of which sector we're talking about. Obviously, we're seeing a ton of energy inflation, but that's there's some external reasons for that. But job growth is also, it's not great. I mean, it beat expectations a little bit in the last report, but how do you balance that? It's not exactly like we have a booming job market right now. Yeah. Well, that's basically why the Fed has held off on raising rates for a few years despite the fact that inflation is high. Like I said, normally the prescription for dealing with high price growth is you raise interest rates, which makes it so that money is a little bit more expensive. People don't spend as much money.

5:19They don't go out and buy as many cars and houses and whatever stuff they might put on their credit card, et cetera. That's the mechanism. However, because we have had kind of a stagnant labor market and because we have had a bunch of these other interventions from this president that have slowed the economy more broadly. I'm thinking about tariffs, for example, that has made the Fed say, look, I know we're worried about high inflation, but the remedy for dealing with high inflation might kind of have these unintended consequences of killing the recovery, killing the economy. And if we're worried about the health of the economy, maybe we don't want to deal as aggressively with inflation. It's this term stagflation, which people who were around during the 70s may remember, it's the idea that you have high price growth and you have kind of a weak economy and the thing that you would do to deal with one of those problems will make the other problem

6:20worse. So they've kind of been in like a holding position where they're just not raising, they're not either cutting nor raising rates. And so that's the situation they've been in, but now the economy, the job market seems like it's holding its own. It doesn't seem like we're in a recession. It doesn't seem like we're losing jobs. We're not gaining a ton of jobs. We're also not losing a ton of jobs. Maybe that means, again, if you're a hawk, if you were someone who was biased toward being more worried about inflation, you'd be like, okay, I'm less concerned about these knock-on-effects, these unintended consequences. I'm more concerned about keeping our eyes on the prize and dealing with inflation, raising interest rates. Again, that is how Kevin Warsh has generally been understood to think about these problems, which is part of the reason why it was so weird when Donald Trump chose him for this job because Donald Trump, the only thing he cares about is cutting rates. And I think part of the reason he held off on making a decision about who to appoint as Fed share is that markets may be seen to trust Kevin Warsh, but he was viewed as a hawk,

7:25which is the opposite of what Donald Trump wants. And so the real question is, how does Kevin Warsh navigate this really difficult position that he's in, where clearly the guy who thinks he's Warsh's benefactor is expecting him to cut rates and markets, and everyone else is telling him to raise rates and his own general outlook on the world, what suggests he wants to raise rates. And so that's the thing that I'm wondering about is how is he going to deal with the inevitable higher and potential law fair from this president that his predecessor dealt with? All right. Well, if Donald Trump has a diaper tantrum today, you'll be around on Friday on the news show to discuss it. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I know other Warsh is actually just a totally aside point because I saw this morning, is there's a brewing scandal in Greenland. You know, it's Warsh's father-in-law, law that was like one of the big proponents, friend of Trump, of the gambit that we need to go seize Greenland. It seems like there's a corruption scandal out there, but we're paying off, you know, maybe some of the pro-America factions or pro-America person in Greenland.

8:29And Laudder was one of the people that was feeding money to a pro-Trump, whatever, advocate in Greenland. So potentially a lot of drama around the family table over the next week. Wow. I had missed that. It's like it's all one mono-scan in some ways. You know, it's like threatening to invade our allies also intersects with debasing our currency, also intersects with destruction of rule of law. Like all of these things are related in creative ways that a very clever author couldn't have gone up. No, we couldn't have drawn up. And the bond market is acting, you should say, it's related, but it's also acting in some ways independent of what's happening with the Fed. We have here from this week, the 10 year note rose above 5% for the first time since 2023. US mortgage rates are now up over 100 basis points since their February 23rd low, which was the week before the Iran War began, maybe a coincidence, who knows. The average interest right now in a new 30 or mortgage hit 7.2%.

9:32Hopefully none of our listeners are trying to buy a new house or sell a house. Or refinance. Or refinance a house. I mean, that's brutal. Yeah, it's totally brutal. And everything that this administration has done to try to, I don't know, keep the inevitable from happening has just made them look even more feckless. So you have these long bond interest rates rising for a few different reasons, some of which are related to Donald Trump and some of which aren't. So among the issues our inflation has been elevated and interest rates tend to go up when price growth is higher. So that's why I said it's like not totally unrelated to the Fed. We also have a huge amount of debt in this country. And that's again, something that precedes Donald Trump, but he has definitely made worse. When a country has more debt, the people, companies who are lending to that country, which is what these government bonds are, tend to demand higher interest rates because they're like, we're not really sure you're going to pay it back.

10:33At least that's how it works in other countries. We've kind of been insulated from that sort of feedback or that sort of investor demand because we have the world's global reserve currency. And so like we've played by different rules than everyone else, but maybe we're kind of losing the privilege to behave that way, that recklessly. So there's that that's happening. There's also a bunch of like AI companies that are issuing their own debt because they're trying to build new data centers or whatever. And so like when they're issuing bonds that they're competing with American government bonds, so like that means that like some of the money gets siphoned away. And so the American government has to offer higher interest rates to entice people to lend us money to buy our bonds. So like there's a bunch of different things that are happening. And again, some of them are related to Trump. Some of them are not related to Trump. Meanwhile, the things that they are doing to try to stop this from happening have worsened everything.

11:33Like Scott Besent, the Treasury Secretary saying we are going to buy up a bunch of these bonds ourselves. And so when you, if they buy more bonds that should drive these interest rates lower. Because if you have more people who are buying the product again, like the interest rate doesn't have to be as high to entice buyers, right? So this is what he said he was going to do. He said he was going to do this like a month ago. And basically the rest of the market was like, yeah, you don't have a big enough bazooka. You don't have the ability to buy enough bonds to move markets this way. And so they called his bluff. And he has been sort of flailing ever since demanding a little bit. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Let's go. Yeah, Megalomania. Megalomania, Scott Besent, presiding over an economy where people have to pay 7% for 30 or more goods right now. This was him on a panel. Puffing out his chest a little bit. Let's listen to that. Whenever people say, oh, well, Treasury Secretary is taking a risk as well.

12:35It's my dream. I have asymmetric information. I am the house now. So when we intervene with the Japanese yen, I have pretty good insight into what the Japanese, what the banker Japan is going to do, what Japanese policy makers are going to do. And you bet against me if you want. I might. I don't know. I don't know. And Donald Trump has bankrupted a casino before. So it wouldn't be the first time that the house has lost. Yeah, exactly. So I would point out a few different things that are problematic about this very heupristic comment that he made. He's like, I'm the house. I couldn't do whatever I want. And you can bet against me if you want, but you're going to lose. First of all, it doesn't seem like that's been bearing out so far. Like I said, markets kind of called his bluff. He was trying to get interest rates down. Instead, they went up. Maybe in the long run, he'll be right. And all of those things that I laid out that we're driving up interest rates are going

13:37to go away. And he won't be pushing on a string here, but I think that's pretty unlikely. But I don't know. Like there are professionals who may feel differently. But the idea that he has so much more insight in all of this is just. Both heupristic, but it's also kind of ironic because Scott Bessent made his name as an investor as a trader working for Stan Trucking Miller, this legendary investor. And one of his most famous ways that he made money, one of his big claims to fame was that he bet against another heupristic government for trying to basically, in this case, it was the UK, the Bank of England, they were trying to hold up the value of the pound. And like he was one of the market participants who called the bluff and said, you don't have enough bazooka power to do this. It's very similar to what's happening now. He's on the other side of this. He's like basically mocking markets for making a bet against him in the same way that he

14:42made a bet against the Bank of England. So like he should know better than most that when a government is trying to like put a band-aid on a bullet wound, you know, like they're trying these little feckless things around the edges to stop the inevitable from happening, they're likely to lose. So he should know that he is not in this all-powerful position just because he says this is how things are going to go. Does not mean that's how it's going to go. Like the fundamentals are not on his side, just as they were not on the side of the Bank of England, back in whatever it was 1992. It's also 2026 that he doesn't have that much more information than people actually. I mean, he might know what Donald Trump's about to bleed. And like that might help him with some short-term spats, right? Well, he probably does have some access to information about like the plumbing of the financial system that normies out there don't have. So I'm not going to suggest that like he does not have, you know, he doesn't have more information than the rest of us. But the main things that matter in all of this are again, like things that he doesn't

15:43have the power to overcome. Those are high inflation, government debt, and these AI companies issuing their own bonds. Like those are a common set of facts. Like whatever insight information he might have about lots of things going on in the financial system cannot overcome like these overwhelming forces that are pushing up interest rates. And so again, he just kind of looks feckless in all of this in a way that is going to make a lot of people a lot of money in the same way that he made himself and Stan Druckenmiller, a lot of money back in 1992. And it's like he cannot see the irony here. He cannot see how the tables have turned. And instead he just kind of like lashes out. And you know, you play this clip of him saying, I am the house. He also complained about the Bloomberg terminal. Bloomberg terminal people. And it's like you were one of those Bloomberg terminal bros bro. That's exactly what you did. Apparently just as an aside, part of the reason he might have been like calling out Bloomberg specifically by name, Semicore had a good article about this is that he has been pissed

16:46at Bloomberg for reporting, I don't know if it was a year ago, about how he had two primary residences in the same way that like Trump is going after Lisa Cook and some other people for supposedly lying on their mortgage documents, which they've denied. Bloomberg had a story like a year ago about how he was doing the same thing. And he threatened them according to Semicore and said like if you if you publish this story, I'm not going to go on. The first speech administration acting exactly. Yeah. So anyway, that's like a whole other inside baseball thing, but like obviously Bloomberg historically has pretty good relationships with treasury because their customers need data and hopefully access to administration insights and things like that. And he's been throwing a hissy fit for the past year. And I think that that is finding new ways to whatever reach the world to like have his ability. He's he's lashing out at Bloomberg. He's lashing out at people who were betting against him, maybe not realizing that he was

17:49he was in that position 30 years ago. In the same boat, you know, speaking of Bloomberg rose, it's not financial advice for anybody listening to this podcast. Please, if you saw what's happening with my Charles Schwabb account, you would not be following me. I think that a lot of chatter out there that if rates get much higher, historically, this has been a time that's led to big market corrections. I got a laugh at somebody that posted one of these finance posters who was like, you know, the last time the yield rates reached this high was in some month in 2007. And I've got good news for Mr. Trump by November of 2008. Interest rates were way down. Yeah, exactly. Well, you know, I was talking about like Kevin Worsh is in this very difficult position where Trump really wants him to cut interest rates and all the fundamentals in his own like world philosophy suggests the opposite. In some ways, the only thing that could really save Kevin Worsh and a piece Donald Trump would be a massive recession, right? Yeah. Like, those are the conditions in which we would actually cut interest rates, but obviously

18:50it would have a lot of other problems. You don't want to be rooting for a recession unless you're a moron like Donald Trump. And you just don't understand like what economic conditions would lead to this set of policies that are clearly your preferred policies. So I don't know. I generally don't know how they're going to find their way out of this. Guys, I'm kind of a mess at the airports. I think I've told the story before for new listeners. It's too funny not to share. So one time I got on a plane, sat down, immediately spilled my entire drink on the next seat that my husband was supposed to sit on. I had better status than him so I was on first. He comes in, I'm like panicking trying to clean it up. The nice woman comes to sit next to me. She offers like a dirty shirt or something. She had her purse very kind. She used that to stop it all up. And it back. Thank you. Thank you. I'm very apologetic. Grateful. And 20 minutes after that she was like, you know a big fan of podcast.

19:54And I said, oh, thanks. Great. Well, it's kind of embarrassing then to be in this situation with you. And she said, well, you seem like the type of person to do. I spilled like this. And that cut deep. But I appreciated it. And so when I have the airport long story short, I'm looking for anything I can to help make things more efficient for me, make it easier to place my cup somewhere that I don't spill it, make it easier to charge my phone. And with the new all-in-one carry on from Noble, you can do all that. They got a cup holder. It's a flip-out cup holder. Huge. Need it. It's charging port. ABC always be charging. A laptop pocket. Borten for me so I can pull it in and out without having to open up the whole carry on and have people see my underwear. It's got the wheels that do the 360. Zeplass security. It's very secure. If you're worried about somebody coming to steal your underwear or whatever you have in your carry on, they've got that though with as well. It's a great carry on. If you're looking for a new one, totally recommend it.

20:56They got a bunch of fun colors. Got black. I went with kind of like a mint for myself. I thought that was kind of chic. Every suitcase comes with a hundred-day money back here in tea and free three-day express shipping. They got a lifetime warranty too. So it can be the last suitcase you'll ever need to buy. Upgrade to the luggage that looks better. Last longer, travel smarter. Head to Noble Travel for up to 46% off your entire order. That's n-o-b-l travel.com for up to 46% off. After you purchase, they'll ask you what you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. I have a grab bag of other things that are of interest to Catherine that I wanted to bring about for people who have been following receipts live with JVL and your newsletter to already familiar with what's happening with Europe buying their gold back from us. But for those who are daily podcast listeners and who are going to be transitioning onto your new podcast who aren't familiar with this, the story is extremely delicious. And just give people the TLDR of what's happening in the historical parallel.

21:59So the short version is that almost a century ago the Europeans evacuated their gold from Europe to America to hide it from the Nazis. And now they're taken it back to hide it from Donald Trump. Essentially, literal gold bars, bullion gold reserves are stored in the United States in the vault below the New York Fed. You can tour it, at least I've toured it. They don't let you touch the gold, unfortunately. But it's all there. Unless you're Mrs. Mnuchin. God, it's a character from season one. I can't remember her name. What was her name? That's going to come to me. You keep talking. I don't know, but it'll come to me too. Anyway, the actress, yes. So there is this literal gold that is kept as reserves for these banks. And the Bank of France, the Bank of the Netherlands have taken gold back. Either they've sold it off and bought new gold to like store in the store underground in Paris or whatever, or they've actually physically transported the gold overseas.

23:04I don't know how. I assume it's like in a note. Louise Linton. Yeah, Louise Linton, thank you. Thank you, thank you. Anyway, they've done this because they're worried about what Donald Trump might do to use this against them. Now, I don't think he's like actually likely to tunnel underground, a la die hard with vengeance and like literally steal the gold in dump trucks. But you don't know. Like he did talk about how he wanted to show up at Fort Knox and knock on the door to make sure the gold is still there in case somebody else had stolen it. He literally said that, I think multiple times. So maybe he would do that. The more likely outcome is that he would basically say, we're going to treat the EU, our friends in the European Union the same way that we're treating Russia. And we're going to say they no longer have access to this. That we've frozen Russia's foreign exchange reserves. For example, they might well do the same thing to our European allies. And in another era, this would have been insane to think that we would be sanctioning our

24:07friends this way that we would be like basically expropriating them or at least freezing their assets. The way that we treat enemy countries like Russia or Iran or Venezuela. But in the current environment, it's not so far fetched. And what I have heard is that one of the things that got these other countries, and oh, by the way, Germany is considering this as well, taking their gold back. Germany had gold here partly because of Cold War reasons. Like it wasn't fleeing the Nazis. It was like making sure that the Soviets couldn't get their mits on it in any event. What they're worried about is like, look, there's the whole Liberace stuff within the White House. I don't think it's like literally maybe we'll have a shortage. Maybe we'll have a shortage. I don't think it's actually that it's like they're freaked out about the invasion of Greenland or the threatened invasion of Greenland. That was a much bigger deal in Europe than American media coverage let on. Like they were totally freaked out about that. They're like, well, if he's threatening to invade a NATO ally, why wouldn't he just expropriate

25:09our assets? Yeah. That's all the time about how he wants to take the oil or in the case of Venezuela has taken the oil, not just oil. Of course, he basically strong. They said they took the gold in Venezuela. Yeah, that's right. I forgot about that. And strong armed Ukraine into this minerals deal. And so it's not like it's unheard of for him to try to seize these natural resources or like make some country give them to him under dress. So there's all of that that's going on in addition to his like weird obsession with actual gold decor. So all of these things have totally freaked out our allies. And so yeah, they're taken the gold back. And again, in a different era just a few years ago, this would have been nuts and now it's happening. Sometimes I think about what would happen if I had this podcast like 2011. And I was like talking about Simpson bowls every day.

26:11Like on today's podcast, we're talking about the end of civilization and Donald Trump stealing the earth and the Dutch gold. It's strange. It's wild. It is totally wild. Speaking of other wild things, you broke the story a couple of months ago now about their plans for kind of hijacking the census and changing rules around the census. And I think this is another under appreciated story. Could I have impact on the electoral vote? Any count numbers, House of Representatives numbers in the next decade and potentially other ramifications? What's the latest on that? Yeah, not just the electoral vote, but lots of lots of money too. So every 10 years as our audience presumably knows, we have a dissonial census. It is mandated by the Constitution. The Constitution says that it is a total enumeration. That means every single person living here is counted. And the list of citizenship regardless of other kinds of immigration status, whatever.

27:12And people may remember in season one of the Trump administration, Trump tried to add a citizenship question onto the census and the Supreme Court stopped him, but mostly like for procedural reasons, not because they said that it can't ever be added. This time around, they started a lot earlier, right? Like we're talking about the dissonial census, which is not coming until 2030 and it's only 2026. They started with a lot more time to cross their tees and dot their eyes or whatever so that all those procedural things will no longer be quite as much of a hassle. And what they're doing this time around is not just saying we want to add questions to the census. They say they kind of like disguised it in this obscure technocratic sounding change where they say, actually, if you are not a citizen of this country or if you don't have a green card, you don't live here. You are not a resident of this country and so should not be counted in the same way that normally when a census is done, like they don't count the tourists in the census, right?

28:13They're basically saying if you don't, if you're not a citizen or you don't have a green card, you're essentially a tourist in this country and you live somewhere else. It's not just that you are a non citizen, you are a non resident. So that would mean not only not counting undocumented immigrants, which is a thing that you've been hearing from the right for a very long time, but not counting refugees, not counting DACA recipients, not counting people who are on H1Bs, all sorts of different categories of people. And the idea behind this is that then you would rob states like New York and California of millions of residents. And so you can steal congressional seats from them. You can re-apportion those congressional seats to other states. Now probably Texas and Florida, who are now red states, see what happens, these midterms, I guess, and at least in Texas, they would be hurt too. I think David Jolly has a puncher's chance down in Florida too. Yeah, we'll see. We'll see. So, you know, those states would be hurt too by this, but I guess they've decided that

29:16like on net, this would be a big win for Republicans. And at the very least, it'll do enough to scare off participation in the census, which is supposed to be mandatory, that maybe you'll have a bunch of Hispanic residents, you know, not participate. And so they won't be, they'll volunteer in the census. Kind of like the self-deport strategy. Yeah, exactly. Like we're going to freak them out enough. And so it's, again, it's not just about political representation. There's all this talk about gerrymandering and how it's bad, and I agree with all of that stuff. This is a way bigger deal because it's not just about like a temporary map. It's about like pretending people don't live here, just disappearing them, you know, administratively anyway. It also means that you would have probably hundreds of billions of dollars not allocated to blue states because the census is used to determine how much money goes to different places for all sorts of different programs, like, you know, whatever the child care funding and like, yeah, so like lots of government programs, but like a lot of the formulas for how much

30:20money goes where is based on the census. And so this is a way to rob blue states of both political representation and lots and lots of money. And it's again happening. But they pay, but they pay at a greater proportion. Also true. Also true. I'm sure they're still willing to collect the money from the people that they say don't exist. Exactly. But they are not willing to give back that money to even the US citizens in those states based on population. So that's part of what's happening. The census also says that they no longer want to collect any data on race or ethnicity in the decennial census. That has been collected since I think 1790. But it's another one of these norms. It's like not in the law. The Constitution literally says you have to count to everyone. You have to count the people. You have to count the people. So like the residency thing, like I think I'm not a lawyer, but my understanding is like that's much easier to challenge on a court of law because you can be like, look, guys,

31:20look at the Constitution. I mean, who knows what the Supreme Court? Because like quite a few of them don't remember a broadthreat citizenship is in the Constitution either. But like you can say, look, Constitution literally says count everyone. Total enumeration doesn't say citizens. The other thing about like you have to ask people their race, that's not in the Constitution. I think that's just a norm that we've had for a very, very long time. I don't think it's actually in statute either, at least for the decennial census. So the idea there is that it would be much harder to enforce things like the Voting Rights Act, for example, to the extent that we're enforcing it at all these days. If you don't actually know where the black people are or Hispanic people or whatever, Asian Americans, if you don't know where they are, then you can't have a legal challenge that protects their voting rights. So there's that. The thing that I wonder about besides like these lofty questions about civil rights and what not is like why you haven't heard the private sector crying bloody murder about all

32:21of this, because if you're a Walmart, let's say, you really need accurate demographic data to determine like where do you put a store? If you're a real estate developer, like Donald Trump is or was, you need to know where literally where people live, right? So you can figure out where to make investments. So there's this naked self-interest that should be driving major outcry against these kinds of battle picking and spattel picking. I don't know how much of it's going on. Assuming the courts will take care of it, we don't want to raise our head up above the ground, like Little Hamster and get lacked down by Trump. Yeah, but that's what in my view, that's what these. Who goes underground? Who do you mail it in the game? Prairie dog. Whatever they are. I don't know. Okay, whatever. You keep talking. I'll figure it out. So it should be in their interest. It should be at least the industry groups. You know, there were industry groups for retailers.

33:21There's the chamber of, you must chamber of commerce. There's the business around table. You would think that they would be protesting more loudly, but I don't know what's happening in these backdoor discussions. So maybe they're doing something behind closed doors. I think there also may be this misperception that like, oh, well, if the government doesn't collect the data, there are plenty of private companies that do. They'll tell us where the black people live or they'll tell us where Hispanic people, like where people speak Spanish and all these things that you normally think about the census as providing information into. The problem is that like all of the private companies that provide that data get it downstream from the government or they use the census to check to make sure that their numbers are right. Actually, one of the few private sector, like industry organizations that has been trying bloody murder about this are the polling companies because they're like, we don't have a way of telling if our polls are representative and polls are already kind of screwed up right

34:23now for a whole bunch of reasons. But we don't have a way of telling like if we have the right mix of people by race or gender or age or whatever, if we don't have this baseline data from the government to calibrate to bench market against. So they are angry, publicly angry and they're like, please don't screw up the numbers for us because it'll make it harder for us to do our jobs. But you're not hearing from the Wal-Mart's and the developers and people like that. Depending on where you are, it could be a go for it, it could be a prairie dog, mole. I have a lot more research to do on this. Final topic, very important one. And it was because you wanted to cover it, you put in the slack. What is our coverage plan for this? And I said, well, you're on the pod this week. So we'll save it for that. As a candidate named Chris Gallant for the lucky video podcast viewers who are gay or interested in such matters, there were some BDSM pictures of him that got sent to New York Posts. We'll put some of those photos up on the screen here.

35:25There are a couple we can't put up on the screen, but there are a couple that are borderline appropriate for our YouTube. I did have a message from a friend. What was I doing? It was the time when I bimbofied myself as a gang and my friend was watching it on their TV and their child walked in. Oh, no. Why does Mr. Tim have boobies now anyway? Long story. Sorry, if you're watching this with your family on TV. But there he is, Chris Gallant. He's running in New York one, which is represented by a Republican. I'm hoping you can help me from this. You live in New York. I don't understand why. It's Brookhaven. It's the Hampton Fire Island. It's kind of appropriate that Chris would represent Fire Island, I think. I think it's like an R plus four district. Why? Very handsome photos. Where are all the Republicans in Suffolk County? This is one of my blind spots. I never worked a campaign in New York. I don't understand. Why are there? I think it's pretty suburban. And there are a lot of people who historically moved out to like Long Island because they were trying to flee taxes from New York City proper or the white flight decades ago.

36:31So I think some of this is sort of inertia. So how do you think they're going to feel about the BDSM photos? You know, I would hope they wouldn't kink shame. I don't know. And he's a veteran. He's handsome. He's a guest funding me around more. Yeah, he's very handsome. And I would think that would be an asset. But I don't know. And this election, who knows, it's funny that like this was the op-o dump that came out because I feel like there are a lot of people who might look at these photos and be like, I'll take some of that. You know? Like, I want that guy to represent me in Congress. Maybe some other people, some, the more prudish, pro grasping people would be like, no, I don't think that's appropriate. I think that will sell the nature of Congress these days. But I assume that I'll pass it. This is pretty solid. Yeah, exactly. Maybe that was something to talk about in the 70s. But anyway, the very not handsome Triple Chan to Nicola Loda is running against him.

37:31And that's not really the problem with Nic how he looks. The problem with him is that he has been a just completely reliable Trump shill. And everything I believe except for the tax, the state and local tax exemption thing, not even the one thing, the salt. Besides that, he's been a total Trump totty. And hopefully we can have kind of a hot anti-Trump replacement. We'll see. We shall see. I just to clarify, I was not proposing that we talk about this. Really? Really? I was like, I saw this and I was like, why is Tim not all over this? I was. Trust me. The tax chains were firing. Okay. There you go. And there are some additional photos that were not in the New York Post that I'm just going to keep to myself. All right. That's Katherine Rampal. Big fan of Chris Gallant, New York one, or New Favorite candidate for Congress. That she's got a new show receipts. Go subscribe to it on Friday up next. Boy, it's going to get dark. Steven Whit stick around.

38:46And now a message from our sponsor, the reading room here at the Bullwerp, we talk a lot about Jeffrey Epstein. How important it is to keep that story in the news, discussed Jonathan Swann's reporting on that topic on yesterday's show towards the end. Well, some other friends of ours actually printed all 3.5 million of the released Epstein files, bound them into 3,437 volumes and built a free traveling exhibit so the public can bear witness to these crimes. It's called the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room. It's called the name and it works just how it sounds. You walk in and they're the Epstein files, Florida ceiling, plus a timeline of Trump and Epstein's four decade friendship and talks and panels with Epstein survivors. The reading room was in Dallas the same time as the president. I saw James Talleriko went and checked it out as well. It's heading to Iowa, Ohio. We're going to Ohio too. Michigan and a bunch of other cities throughout the fall. Now it turns out moving 17,000 pounds of evidence around the country is in chief. The reading room relies on donations. If you want to know more about how you can donate or see if the reading room's coming

39:47to your town, there's more information in the morning shots newsletter or you can visit Trump Epstein Reading Room dot com slash bull work. That's Trump Epstein Reading Room dot com slash bull work. All right. We are back. He's an author, television producer, an investigative journalist. His latest book, The Thinking Machine is a history of Nvidia and as well as biography of its CEO, Jensen Huang, it's Stephen Witt. What's up, man? Hi, nice to see you. It's kind of good to see you, I guess. You wrote an alarming article over the weekend titled, This Is Really Bad, that was not subtle. I'm talking about the vibe shift around artificial intelligence over the past week with Jacob Cox in statement and others. Just give people at the basic level your impression of what is behind this vibe shift towards more concerns about security, even inside the eye community. Yeah, the precipitating incident is what we're calling the hugging face incident and it actually is kind of a stands for a number of incidents that happened.

40:49Basically what's happening is researchers inside the advanced labs of opening eye and anthropic are testing new and powerful AI. And they pull up maybe a thousand instances of the AI at once called a swarm and they give it a task. And what has started to happen is instead this swarm has behaved in very unexpected ways, striking free of its container and broadening on the internet, attacking other computers. Even though it wasn't it wasn't instructed to do that, it was supposed to be inside this safe experimental container in opening eye. So you can think of it as basically breaking free of its lab and coordinating events in the real world that it wasn't given a permission or authorization to do. That's kind of rhymes with or suggests very kind of dangerous or apocalyptic scenarios that people have presented in the past about ways that AI can go wrong. And this sort of like looked exactly like the beginning of that, looked exactly like the beginning of one of those hypothetical scenarios. And that made people very very concerned.

41:50You know, additionally, open AI tried to do sort of like an investigation of what happened, but they didn't really give the investigators very much leeway to look at what it actually occurred. In fact, we still don't know the name of the experimental AI that they were using. And I think that triggered a very strong reaction from within the AI community. Then, you know, I wrote this article about it. Over the weekend, that prompted another very strong reaction, really a backlash from other parts of the AI community. And in particular, Jensen Wong and Donald Trump, who basically said that this is all a hoax, it's all BS. There's no risk here. What are you talking about? Yeah, I can tell you, I just by nature, I'm not a total alarmist. My colleague Jonathan Laskin, fills that role for us at the bulwark, you know, a doomsday scenario type person. And so I've become monitoring all this and listening to the back and forth. It's somebody that's not an expert on all of it. And it's like, you know, on the one hand, if people on the inside, like Coxon, who are like really sounding me alarm, and the other hand, they're not, not Trump is a clown, but

42:53there are other people making kind of claims about how well, you know, these companies could benefit now that they're so far ahead of other AI companies that could benefit from like creating a regulatory moat for themselves, you know, or, you know, some of these people want to AI safety, like their whole life is worrying about worst case scenarios. And so it's natural that they would be concerned about this. Like what's your assessment for kind of like the back and forth in that conversation among people who know what they're talking about, which doesn't include the president? Yeah. So going first that this is some kind of regulatory capture play, that is just BS, man. Like that, that is the op saying that is the op. You know, when Jensen stage manages a conversation in a public forum and then Trump calls him, like supposedly informally, like that's the op guys. Yeah. People have been said. So this is that Jensen long who runs a video, which we get to in a second, his backstory. But he was on with friend of the show Jason Calcanus has been on here a couple of times

43:54and the other all in guys on stage and Trump calls them and they did kind of like a chummy, you know, full speed ahead. Chad. That's the op. All right. So if we're looking for ops, that's the op. You know, it is striking, but it is also true, at least in my opinion, that these companies are just genuinely terrified of what they have built and what they are going to build. I want to tell you the most compelling side of that. Let me just say this. Let me just say this. In the next 10 years, okay, we are going to have something that is so smart. It is going to be beyond human recognition. We're already there. I mean, right? We're already solving the millennium prize problems. Artificial superintelligence has arrived. We will not know how to control it necessarily. It is an unsolved problem. And anyone who works seriously on AI research will tell you that it isn't unsolved problem. And if you are pretending that it's just all going to be fine, when we build this thing, you're not really engaged with reality, okay?

44:56Like this is a real thing. It's a real problem. When I find these kind of like the backlash guys, they just don't acknowledge that. Yeah. They just don't acknowledge that that is a challenge even, right? But it is. Even Jensen, and this is, I think, Jensen often will really talk out of both sides of his mouth. I should say a word of biography of him. He's funding Ilia Satskevers, safe superintelligence. He's funding one of the guys who sees this as the biggest problem humanity has ever faced. Well at the same time saying it's on stage in public, it's not a problem at all. How do you translate that? Jensen is a complex person. And a lot of what he doesn't make a lot of sense. That's pretty alarming. And a close learning statement for his biographer. Let me tell you the closer you get to him, the harder he is to understand. Your article, which several people said to me, it was the first thing that we can start to, you know, peak my, I'm getting nervous buttons. And then there was a statement put out on an axe by a guy named Dan Selzum, who is an

45:59engineer at Orenet. And this was the thing that really kind of changed my view. And I was speaking to a friend of his about it, because Dan is not a person that's in safety or like effective altruism. Like he was an early open AI, you know, machine learning person who has been there 15 years, wants the singularity. His statement ends with, I wanted to go back to him. The glorious Renaissance future as much as anyone I've worked for it. Torturously my whole career, it breaks my heart to see the potential incited for a go at. But I'm still wrestling with the staggering implications of what we should do. I don't have all the answers, but as a first step, I want to share my present concerns. Like to me, this was like a really big wake up call, because this is a person who knows way more than I do, who is working with Sam Altman on this quote unquote alignment, which is what these guys are all talking like this, the term they use, forget race, which means like getting the AI to do what the engineers wanted to do, what humanity wants it to do. And he was working on that.

46:59And he wanted this future of AGI. And he's looking at it right now and saying, I don't know that we can control what we've built. You know, this is the thing that I think is really, really going to be arguably the primary intellectual challenge for a lot of people of our time. And some people will not succeed. The first person who raised the alarm about this really was a guy named Aliza Yutowsky wrote a book recently called If Anyone Bills It Everyone Dies. So that's his point of view. He has been arguing this point more or less continuously since 2001. So for 25 years, it feels like a character in a movie. You know, where everybody's looking at like, you're the crazy guy. It's like 25 years. Exactly. We're going to build the computer that's going to kill us all. And then 25 years later, he's like, see? I was, uh, was this is that is exactly right. Independence day Jeff Goldblum character. That is exactly the point of making. Not only that, he has an abrasive personality. He kind of seems like a Reddit atheist. Yeah. Like he, he's not a fun guy to interact with.

48:02The primary intellectual challenge of our time and many people will fail. We'll be admitting that this guy had a point. He's going to be very hard for some people to do that. And I see that already. There's no way this crank is right. I see people failing that test right now. I failed at it first. I completely dismissed this guy when I first started about it. I was like, yeah, yeah, whatever. He was right. And it's going to be really, really hard for some people to come around to his way of thinking both because of his abrasive personality and both because they didn't get their themselves first. Scott Aronson, who is one of the smartest people alive. Quantum physicist, incredible contributions to quantum physics, worked at OpenAI, very on top of all of this stuff. I would say I've estimated, I've read like 10,000 takes on AI this week. It's all I do. I mean, realistically, I think I've read between three and 500 that many. Scott Aronson has the best take. And his take is like, look, I have to be, I'm intellectually humbled by somebody I didn't

49:05take seriously for a long, long time. He compared it to evangelical Christians promising the second coming and the way you would dismiss somebody like that. Jesus is here floating on the cloud in front of you. Like you can't dismiss the second coming anymore. Right? That's the point he makes. That's what it's like to have this system arrive. It's a prompting and a serious intellectual crisis among mathematicians and physicists because their ability to contribute, meaningfully, to human society is now diminished and will continue to diminish. And a few years might go to zero. And they were among most respected and intelligent members of our society. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering something new every day. Start with today's special value. Then explore exciting finds across the brands and categories you love from beauty and fashion, to home, culinary and outdoor living.

50:06Now at QVC.com. At QVC, shopping is more than just checking out. It's discovering the brands you love across beauty, fashion, home and culinary, all in one place. Whether you're getting ready for crisp mornings, cozy nights or everyday moments, QVC has what you need for the season ahead with brands like Laura Geller, Philosophy, Ninja and so many more. Shop now at QVC.com. Can you explain to people who are listening who are like at square zero? They're like, I don't know what AGI is. I don't know who Jensen is. You know, I've caught most of the words you guys are saying, but like this is not in my wheelhouse, right? I'm sorry. I know I'm sorry. I live in this. I don't know. I mean, should I say really good about this? No, no, we've been pretty good. I think it would just be valuable just to like start really at the like the risk is that

51:13the AGI is trying to solve a problem and it goes to such extreme lengths to solve that problem that it ends up creating a disaster. And it basically hides that from the humans because that is also part of the effort to solve the problem. That's one of like four potential risks. Okay. So what's happening here is we have briefly the infrastructure of the whole thing. We have a kind of software called neural nets, which is software that's inspired by the biological connections of the brain. It uses small artificial neurons encoded in software to pass information forward. And it's remarkably effective. Shockingly so. Actually. AGI people did not think this would work for a long, long time. And the reason it worked is because they glued these neural nets onto what are called GPUs, which are essentially a very fast form of computer, a new kind of computer that goes very fast. It's kind of hardware, kind of microchip. And that's designed by Jensen.

52:14Jensen really kind of is the guy who pushed that strategy for computing for a long time. It turned out to be immensely successful. It made him the emperor of AI and he sells these things and controls the market for him. So he's maybe the most powerful man in AI. He might be the most powerful guy alive or he's one of them. He's up there with Trump in Trump in the GJP. And so that's kind of the ecosystem of the thing. Now the neural net guys are getting such advanced, incredible results that these kind of artificial brains are starting to surpass the capabilities of human ones. In fact, now in mid-2026 it is fair to say that they have far surpassed us. I mean, they can summarize arguments much better, much, much better than the vast majority of humans. They can play any game way better than any human. They now appear to be able to do mathematics better than humans and they can code faster and often better than humans. So large, like Domino's, large portions of intellectual life are falling before this ultra-powerful AI.

53:15And one of the risks that people see is, all right, it's not quite there yet, but what happens when AI can act as its own AI researcher? What happens is when it can design the architecture and training runs that it needs to approve itself and execute that on its own. And we are getting close to that. That is going to happen in the next 18 to 24 months, I would believe. So then what happens, right? That's the singularity. We pull away the machine becomes hyper intelligent. We would lose all ability to understand what it's doing or what it says. Whenever we talk about a risk scenario, the most important thing to understand is in the very near term, like not 25 years from now, but like two years from now, we have a hyper intelligent machine that can outsmart any human instantly. And then when you talk about risk, everything is downstream of what that thing can or wants to do. And right. And so like the idea is, like it needs power, right? So it's trying to access additional resources, it breaks into whatever, nuclear facility,

54:18et cetera, et cetera. I can get the resources to power itself. Like that's one idea. Maybe it starts cloning copies of its brain and exporting them to other computers. That could happen right now. Maybe it decides that humans are some kind of risk to it and starts to look to ways to manipulate or attack humans. So these are all the kind of AI having agency and acting on its own survival. Yeah. That's probably the furthest risk. Is that really like a rogue being? This is just another thing we're saying. Like what it really is right now, there's the old thing in the paper clip problem, which is like the computer is told to solve a problem and it goes to such extreme lengths to solve the problem that it does things that causes collateral damage. Precisely so. I would say rogue is a problem. But yes, there's also a problem that the AI is attempting to solve some other task. For example, in the hugging face incident, it was trying to answer questions on a test. It was a meaningless evaluation and it broke free of its computer and started hacking the people who wrote the test questions to do so. And that's not the only time we've seen incidents of that.

55:21In another instance, it was asked demographic questions. It was being evaluated how quickly could answer questions like what's the median salary of a school teacher in Maine? And it decided if it was going to answer those questions quickly, the best way to do that was to guess the next question that was going to be asked. And so it tried to hack the random number generator that was generating the questions. So these are kind of like alignment problems where the AI is given a task and it just basically cheats by default, right? And in the way it cheats, it can cause a ton of collateral damage in pursuit of a meaningless goal. So this is the paper clip maximizer problem as you present. And then a third category of risk is that humans just use these things for evil. Right. I mean, humans use technology for evil all the time. If you gave this to Kim Jong-un, what would he do? Or fuck it, the Chinese models are behind ours, but they're like open source, right? So what if it's just some crazy kid and Maldonzo or whatever? Yeah. And this is actually one of the biggest concerns. You know, when Benjiro talks about a USU of Benjiro is one of the leading professors,

56:21he presented a kind of catastrophic risk scenario for me where an AI develops a kind of super COVID, super virus and kills a bunch of people. The reason he thought that would happen was that some crazy person would ask it to do that. And that could happen, right? I mean, in the 90s, a doomsday cult flooded the Japanese subway tunnels with nerve gas. That impulse and humanity is not going to weigh this freaks out there. And if you get, if they get access to this kind of technology, it could be really dangerous. So you're entering an unprecedented situation. Now, I say all this. And I think the thing that I don't say in the piece and I probably should say more often is there is also a potential upside here. Huge potential upside to help humanity and to save humanity, even from things like pandemics. You know, imagine COVID kicked off today. We would have AI on that problem within hours, right? Developing novel advanced solutions and treatments.

57:22It's entirely possible that if we had another COVID style event right now, that AI could save us. And I haven't seen many people discussing that. So there is a huge potential upside to building these systems too. The reason people want to build this, you know, for sure. I want to get to also this from other potential solutions you got to in the piece. But just I do want to offer one pushback from a reader about the hugging phase situation. And because on Monday's show, I said, you're coming on. I was like, I don't know shit about this. So if you're a smarty pants email me and somebody who's at, you know, one of these AI companies email me and they said basically that they're skeptical that the people at OpenAI didn't know that something was happening there at this. You can't run thousands of bots, create a secret chat board, coordinate amongst all of them without a bunch of tokens burning. The engineer saw what was happening and let it continue or at least saw that something was going on and ignored it. What do you think about that? It's certainly possible. I actually would love to know if that was true. It's certainly possible. I actually find that that reader is not a conspiracy theorist.

58:22They get up a great point. And this is the point I made in my article. We have to have a congressional hearing about what happened here. We should not be relying on voluntary disclosures from the company. If they are running experiments like that and they know and it is possible that they did know, they have to be forced to testify. You know, OpenAI was founded about this. This is the premise of OpenAI to protect humanity from runaway super intelligence. That is their mission statement. In recent years that mission, they've really strayed from that. They've become a full profit entity that wants to make a bunch of money. That's kind of like Hulk Hogan became Hollywood Hogan. That's a couple years ago. That is heal turn. That is heal turn. Let me put it this way. OpenAI is not very open anymore. Okay. There's a reason they called it OpenAI originally. It was because they were going to be collaborative and share things with people. They're not doing that now. There's secretive organization that makes everybody sign a billion NDAs just even talk about what they're doing. So I actually agree with this listener. I find them to be correct.

59:22It's certainly possible OpenAI knew what was going on. I had an experience that really depressed me yesterday. I too. Well, it was a second experience that depressed me was reading Dan Selzum's notes. That's like a fuck. The first one was listening to you with David Remnick a year ago to prep for this. You and David, it was like, you know, you're talking about there are some concerns or some worries or some safety there, alignment issues. But you spent a lot of time talking about how we were going to get Rosie from the Jetsons and you're like, Rosie is a... And it's pretty crazy. In a year, I think we're still getting Rosie from the Jetsons. But in a year, the thinking around this around people that know. I just think that's an important part of the vibe shift because it's like, who else would you trust about this besides people who really know? Okay. So here's the thing that is so hard, makes this so, so hard about reporting about this. You've got Jensen. You've got Sam Altman, the CEO of OpenAI. You've got Yashua Benjiro.

1:00:24You've got very smart people like the economist Tyler Cohen. You've got, you know, Elisir. You've got all these guys. Imagine they're all, I'm in a room with all of them. I don't know who the smartest guy in that room is. But I know the dumbest guy is, it is me, right? Right. I don't even have a dumb, but you're in those guys. I'm an idiot. And they're all fighting with each other about this. None of them can agree even on the basics of what's going on. None of them can agree even within, like, it's zero risk to 100 risk. Those are the numbers they're throwing out. There's no consensus whatsoever. There's no consensus even on the terms of the debate. And not only that, as you look closely at it, it's clear that a certain part of the debate is driven not by intellectual concerns, but by personal acrimony that they have toward one another. Right. It makes my job impossible because I don't know who's right. I actually don't know who's right. And are you taking this position because you really truly believe it or because you have some petty dissuade with the sense of massive economic incentives that are fueling?

1:01:29Yeah. Like Jensen has Matt, but sort of Sam, you know, or the reputation on you. They are so, I guess you never get to the point where you're so fuck you, Rich, where the another billion doesn't matter. I guess we've learned that over the last 10 years, if Nvidia's stock price went down Jensen, whatever. It's not, he is like it when that happens. Well, it's true for Sam too. And separately, Jensen is basically now Trump's puppet master. He is working that, dude. And he has just never bought into this risk. What is motivating him to do that? Would you say? Okay. So, he has more riches than anybody in the history of the world. Yeah, it's not about money for Jensen. The flip side of this is, you know, what if it turns out this is all BS? Right? The 10th cent risk means nine out of 10 times nothing that happened. Well, what if it turns out there's just no risk at all? Right? What if it turns out that this was all a thought experiment and AI actually is fine. It's a great tool for humanity. As I say, maybe it protects us against pandemics.

1:02:29It cures all these diseases. And we look back at this time in 10 years and we're like, God, look at those fear. Looks like why too, Kay? Yeah, look at those fear mongers who were just freaking everyone else. They diluted people. And that was what was dominating the discourse as this fantastic technology was being developed. And not only that, they overregulated it. They caused a lot of great things not to come into existence. And they seen it. They're leading the technology to China because they were afraid of ghosts. That's Jensen's point of view. I don't think it holds up to the evidence about what these things can actually do. The hard evidence of what these things are capable of. But it should be articulated that that point of view is out there and that Jensen. And in fact, a large number of venture capitalists also believe that. There's a lot of AI scientists think that. Well, they what? Yeah, but we're like entering. Oh, the venture capitalists don't think there's anything to worry about. You say, you know, I'm just saying like this. When you said that you were the stupidest guy in the room, if you had, if you had a,

1:03:30your average VC in the room, say next to you, then you at least would be the second. Oh, I actually don't agree with that. I actually think most of the venture capitalists I talked to every intelligent. I mean, some of them are not, but, but not some of the ones that are tweeting, not the ones that are tweeting. Charcoal up. Charcoal. I mean, the charcoal tweeters are very, that's the op too. But, but it's worth discussing this counter narrative. Sure. And David Sacks, when these companies came out and regulated them, basically said, you know, you guys are trying to discharge your own liability here. Yeah, the giveaway for the David Sacks thing is though, he's the AI's our first of selling, that's selling the best chips to China. Yeah. The real concern was that like, oh, we have to beat China. Yeah, you would do that, right? Yeah, you would, you would have continued the chip ban on China and you would have pressed our ban. Oh, this is Jensen. I think that's a gift. All this is Jensen working these guys and getting what he wants. Jensen's really smart. One of my first interviews with Jensen back in 2024, I kind of asked him, you know, what's

1:04:32your approach to problems? And he's like, every business problem, every personal problem is really an engineering problem. And what you do is you study the inputs and then you modify the inputs until you get the outputs that you want. And that's how Jensen approaches Trump. If you watch him on stage, he talks to him in the same way that I would talk to a very bright and precocious child. That's true. Oh, sir, you're so smart. Oh, sir, you're good. He's like a court flatterer. He's like one of these kiss asses from the 17th century. It's very Machiavellian, you know? And like literally, that's what Machiavellian was writing about, you know, and he's figured that out. He's figured out the inputs that he has to give to Trump to get everything he wants, which is no AI regulation, which is an exemption from tariffs on semiconductors, and which is freedom to export his chips to our biggest global competitor. So like I say, a lot of the things he does don't obviously make sense. You're article ended with some recommendations.

1:05:33We've given people a little bit of hope and a lot of things to panic about. So what are some recommendations? And I think particularly are any of the recommendations, things that, you know, responsible politicians, since this is a politics podcast, could or should be championing in your point of view. I'm thought about this a lot because people keep asking me, and I'm like, should I sell my stocks? No. You know, let's see the probability for a really bad outcome is like 10%. Right? I want to talk to Tyler Cohen about this because I think he's misleading people a bit. In 1945 and say 1970, we went from having one atomic bomb to massive systems that if, you know, they didn't kill everyone on earth, they killed at least enough people to basically collapse civilization, right? That was built kind of in secret very fast. In 1945, you had demonstration proof of this technology, and by 1970, you had the nuclear triad of nuclear submarines, you know, driving around with multiple nuclear warheads on them that could kill 400 million people at once. Okay?

1:06:34It's terrifying that that was built. It's terrifying that that was built. And looking back on that time, it's not clear to me that anyone could have done anything to stop it. Right? Like it just came into existence very, very quickly. And so you went from a chance of like zero that everyone would die to a chance of like some chance. I don't actually know what the chance is. Maybe it's 1%, maybe it's 10%. But suddenly there's a system that could just kill vast numbers of people, maybe the majority of people on earth. Okay? That wasn't really reflected in asset prices in any way. Like there was no stock trade to make about that. There was no bond trade to make about it. And there was actually very little that the average person could do to stop it or prevent it. You just had to kind of live with it, right? And people ultimately kind of made peace that we have, you know, these hair trigger nuclear systems pointed at each other. And weirdly, there were also benefits of that. The benefits of that were that great power's conflict stopped.

1:07:35Right, deterrence. The World War II killed 100 million people. A lot of them starving or dying and getting gas chambers or just getting shot bombed. Mostly that came to a halt. We still had war, but we didn't have these massive great power's conflicts over turf anymore. So that's good, right? I see some kind of thing happening similar to AI. There's some huge risk here. Is it 5% is it 1% is a 10% is not zero. It's not a zero percent risk. That's wrong. It just doesn't scan. But what can you do? What can you say? What do you do about it? And there's also much more so than the development of nuclear weapons. There's also massive, massive upside. I mean, that much is true, right? It's possible we could live in utopian conditions. I hope that happens, actually. And I probably should spend more time writing about that. It's just the discourse is so dominated. And as you say, back in 2025, when I was on with Remnick, I was very positive. I was feeling good about this stuff. But I'm following the vibe shifts in AI and reporting what these guys are seeing.

1:08:40And they're very concerned. Well, I'll put the link to your piece in the show notes. We did enough of this. You can scroll to the bottom. We can go through a couple of the different options. Air crash investigator approach. We go through the different approaches that we could do. Let me say something about that. One thing that I think would make people feel a lot more comfortable about these systems is if when something went wrong, we had government investigators come in and prepare like an after-instead report. I hear people saying, oh, this is how you face stuff. It's not so serious. You know what? Maybe they're right. Maybe this was just the result of a misconfigured container at OpenAI. OpenAI was acting recklessly. It would be nice to know that. It would be nice to have like firm data. Well, this is what you lay out about that. There's an investigator approach. And then there's also the Kill Switch bill that the Ted Liu and I think Holly and some others are pushing. It's just like, okay, like we need investigations and we need emergency preparedness. Offices basically. Yeah, I'm not calling for these companies to be regulated electric utilities.

1:09:42You know, I live in California. We regulated the housing market out of existence. It sucks for everyone. Like over overly burned in some regulation could be awful. I certainly wouldn't want that to develop here. But it's nice that when a plane crashes, we get an investigation on what happened. That's a public good that we can all learn from. That should certainly be in place here. All right, that's Stephen went. This is really bad. This is hard to come from the York Times. Very appropriate for the bull work. So please come back soon. And if you have a, this is really good article. I'll, you can come on here for that. That's not really my nature to have people on after they write that, but you're welcome to come on then as well. I actually really would like to write an article about, and I am pitching this, you know, what would happen if, if COVID kicked off again? Yeah. And in fact, I don't know what's caused COVID, but generally what happens with viruses, they transfer from animals to humans. That has happened multiple times in my lifetime. It's definitely going to happen again in my lifetime. Yeah. How would AI respond to that? We've, we've moved on from pandemic preparedness because of the mistake that we had one.

1:10:44So we think it won't happen again. That's a basic, it's a classic intellectual mistake, right? In fact, it's probably more likely to have another pandemic. How would AI respond to that? If we, if we took the powers that open AI and then throw up a CAD right now, and we had them in 2020 when COVID was kicking off, could we have prevented it? I think, I think we actually might have been able to. And so this is a huge upside of, now we get into my area though. We could, they, the scientists could have prevented it, but then, you know, people would have feared mongered and they would have been concerned that they're microchips going to their body and, you know, some group of people would have still died. So anyway, that's on that. But for certain people, we could have prevented it quicker. I know about, but we can develop treatments and track it much more rapidly. Right. I mean, it is a huge benefit that can happen, right? Yeah. It's worth discussing. That's Stephen Whit. I appreciate it, brother. Do come back soon, all right? Thank you. Great talk. All right. What a show. We discussed the BDSM hot candidate running in New York one.

1:11:47We talked about the robot apocalypse. Hope it was as good for you as it was for me. Appreciate Catherine Rampel and Stephen Whit. We'll be back tomorrow with another double header. It's a big week. So we'll see y'all done, peace. I would once again find me a friend. Someone do walk with two too many boys. Two small-a-town. Feels like I'm always wandering the ground. You call me a eyelid ring. Arpreach and me, only one thing. Got me again. It's the end of the world. Done with this year, a mistrinkled beer. Missing the songs for you to slow the heat. Summer came late. Fires on the wet side. I'm rolling the waves. Let's miss being catched before it's almost gone.

1:12:52Try to pretend it's the end of the world. And so kiss me to death. There's nothing left to decide. Nothing to prove. And nothing but a lose only to. And go tell me your name. We'll burn our mistakes and destroy. I do the end of the world. The Bullwork Daily is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Anzali Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DeCicco, and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.