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

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We have a massive show today. It's a double header. We are doing economics. We are doing AI. So I don't even have time to get to my guy Thomas Massey.

Bring the articles of impeachment against Peter Brian Higgs. So go check out the next level. It's already up. We had anger in for Sarah Longwell. We get into impeaching Higgs' death.

Author impeachment ideas that we have. And other political news of the day. On this show in segment 2, 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 Bullwerk. You know, I mean that's that is clickbait for me. If I've ever seen it, this is really bad. It's about the AI vibe shift.

“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 Bullwerk.

Author of the receipts newsletter and coming up on Friday. A new podcast also called receipts. It's Katherine Rampell. What's up, Katherine? 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 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. And 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 will 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. In fact. Very, so it's happened in the world. A lot of great economics news. We'll do a little teaser of it right now.

Let's talk about the potential state of planning. You said kind of what we think is the baseline expectation for the fed. But just kind of backing up for people. Why does the fed feel in this moment today? Need to raise rates?

I mean, we're getting to the sex, but bond rates, mortgage rates are ready going up. You know, for reasons unrelated to what the fed is doing. What is it about what's happening in the economy that is going to lead the fed to raise 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 in 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, which he criticizes 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 do 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, inflation has been high, but came down. There's depends on kind of which sector we're talking about, obviously we're saying a ton of energy inflation,

but that's there's an external reasons for that. But job growth is also, it's not great. I mean, it'd be expectations a little bit in the last report, but how do you balance that? Like it's not exactly like we have a booming job market right now. 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. They 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 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.

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 from the people who were rendering the 70s may remember. It's the idea that like 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 worse. So they've kind of been in like a holding position where they're just not raising, they're not neither 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.

You'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're someone who was biased toward being more worried about inflation, you'd be like, "Okay, I'm less concerned about these, like not kind of fakes these unintended consequences. I'm more concerned about like the keeping the price on the price and dealing with inflation, raising interest rates." And again, that is how Kevin Worsh 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 like, Markets may be seem to trust Kevin Worsh, but he was viewed as a hawk, which is the opposite of what Donald Trump wants. And so the real question is like, how does Kevin Worsh navigate this really difficult position that he's in, where clearly the guy who thinks he's Worsh's benefit 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, which suggests he wants to raise rates.

And so that's the thing that I'm wondering about, is like, 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. I'll do a show to discuss it. Yeah, yeah. I know other Worsh things actually just a totally aside point because I saw this morning is there's a brewing scandal in Greenland.

You know, it's Worsh's father-in-law. That was like one of the big proponents, friend of Trump of the gambit that we need to go see Greenland. It seems like there's a corruption scandal out there where we're paying off, you know, maybe some of the pro-America factions or pro-America person in Greenland. And a lot or 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, it's all one mono scandal 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 could have a point. We couldn't have drawn up.

“I mean, the bond market is acting, you should say, it's related, but it's also acting in some ways independent of what's happening at the Fed.”

We have here from this week, the 10 year note rose above 5% for the first time since 2023.

U.S. 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, and the average interest rate now in a new 30 year mortgage hit 7.2% hopefully 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, 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 fackless.

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 are 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 or 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 back. At 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.

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.

So that's like Scott Besant, 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, let's say Megalomania, Megalomania, Scott Besant, presiding over an economy where people have to pay 7% for 30 or mortgage right now. This was him on a panel, popping out his chest a little bit. Let's listen to that. Whenever people say, "Oh, well, Treasury Secretary is taking a risk as well." Yeah, it's my dream. I have a 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 policymakers are going to do.”

And you bet against me if you want.

I don't know. I Donald Trump has bankrupt 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 humoristic comment that he made. He's like, "I'm the house. I can do whatever I want, and you can bet against me if you want, but you're going to lose." Well, it doesn't seem like that's been bearing out so far. Like I said, Mark, it's 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 you know, all of those things that I laid out that we're driving up interest rates are going to go away.

“And like he won't be pushing on a string here, but I think that's pretty unlikely, but I don't know. You know, like their professionals who may feel differently.”

But the idea that, like, he has so much more insight in all of this is just it's both humoristic, but it's also kind of ironic. Because Scott Bessent made his name as an investor as a trader working for Standrock and 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 heuristic 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 made 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 bandaid on a bullet wound. You know, like they're they're like 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 it'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. 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, but right. 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 have 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 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. The Bloomberg terminal people. Yeah. 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.

Semaphore had a good article about this is that he has been pissed at 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 Semaphore and said, like if you if you publish this story, I'm not going to go on Bloomberg.

The first speech of 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 you know, hopefully access to administration insights and things like that. And he's been throwing a history fit for the past year.

“And I think that that is fighting new ways to to whatever reach the world to like have visibility. He's he's lashing out at Bloomberg.”

He's lashing out at people who are betting against him. Maybe not realizing that he was he was in that position 30 years ago. In the same boat, you know, speaking Bloomberg goes, it's not financial advice for anybody listening to this podcast. Please, if you saw what's happening with my child Schwab account would not be following me. But I will say that a lot of chatter out there that afraid to 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. It 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 from Mr. Trump by November of 2008 interest rates were way down. Exactly.

Well, you know, I was talking about like Kevin Worsh's in his very difficult position where Trump really wants him to cut interest rates and all the fundamentals in his own like world philosophy suggest the opposite.

“In some ways, the only thing that could really save Kevin Worsh and appease Donald Trump would be a massive recession, right?”

Yeah. Like those are the conditions in which we would actually cut interest rates. But obviously, it would have a lot of other problems. You don't want to be rooting for recession unless you're more on 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 the 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. It's one time got on a plane set down immediately spilled my entire drink on the next seat that my husband was supposed to sit on. I better status on him.

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I have a grab-back of other things that are of interest to Katherine. I'm into the Korean about. For people who've been following receipts live with JVL and your newsletter, they're already familiar with what's happening with your up 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 us, like, give people like the TLDR of what's happening in the historical parallel. So 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 want you touch the gold, unfortunately. But it's all there. Unless you're Mrs. Manuchin. 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 to me. 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. I don't know how.

Like, I assume it's like an unknown. Louise Lenton. Yeah, Louise Lenton, 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 Allah, 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.

“And 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, you know, 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 friends 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 myths on it. In any event, what they're worried about is, like, look, there's the whole Liberace stuff within the White House.

And I don't think it's, I don't think it's, like, literally maybe we'll have a shortage. 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. Then American media coverage went 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 our assets?

Yeah. He talks 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 called, they said they took the gold and Venezuela.

Yeah, that's right. That's right. I forgot about that. And strong armed Ukraine into this minerals deal. Yeah. 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 Dures.

So there's all of that that's going on in addition to his, like, weird obsession with actual gold and core. So all of these things have totally freaked out our allies. And so yeah, they're, 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.

And I was like talking about Simpson Bowles every day.

Like on today's podcast, we're talking about, you know, the end of civilisation and Donald Trump stealing the Dutch gold. It's a strange time. Wow, it is totally wild.

“Speaking of other wild things, are you broke the story?”

Come on to go now about their plans for kind of hijacking the census and changing rules around the census. And I think there's another under appreciated story. Could have impact on the electoral vote count numbers. House 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 audience, presumably knows we have a decennial 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.

Regardless of citizenship, regardless of other kinds of immigration status, whatever. And 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 decennial census, which is not coming until 2030 and it's only 2026. They started with a lot more time to cross their teas 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're kind of like disguised 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?

They'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 age one bees, 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 still congressional seats from them.

You can re-apportion those congressional seats to other states. Now, probably Texas and Florida would also, which are now Red States, you know, suit happens these midterms, I guess in least in Texas. They would be hurt too.

“I think David Jolly has a bunch of channels 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 like on that 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. Kind of like the self-deport structure.

Exactly. You know, like we're going to freak them out enough. Right. And so it's again, it's not just about political representation. There's all this talk about jerrymandering and how it's bad.

And I agree with all of that stuff. This is 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. Medicated. Yeah. So like lots of government programs, but like a lot of the formulas for how much money 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. They pay the 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.

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, look at the constitution. I mean, who knows what the Supreme Court? Because like quite a few of them don't remember birthright 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 long time. I don't think it's actually in statute either, at least for the decennial census.

And 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 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 whatnot is like why you haven't heard the private sector crying bloody murder about all of this. Because if you're a Walmart, let's say, you really need accurate demographic data.

So 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 Pete literally where people live. Right, so you can figure out where to make investments. So like there's there's this naked self interest that should be driving major outcry against these kinds of battle picking, it's battle picking. And you know, I don't know how much of it's going to be assuming the courts will take care of it. But we don't want to raise our head up above the ground.

The little hamstring get locked 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? Oh, um, Prairie dog. Whatever they are. Yeah, I don't know. Okay, whatever you keep talking, I'll think.

So it should be in their interest. It should be at least the industry groups, you know, there were industry groups for retailers. The chamber of arrest 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. Right, 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.

Like, if you're a pollster, actually one of the few private sector or going to like industry organizations that has been crying bloody murder about this or 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 now 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. By race or gender or age or whatever, if we don't have this baseline data from the government.

To calibrate to benchmark it 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, you know, the developers and people like that. I mean, where you are, could be a go for, could be a prairie dog mole. I have a lot more research to do on this. Okay, final topic, 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, and that's what we'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 Post. We'll put some of those photos up on the screen here. There are a couple we can't put up on the screen, but there are a couple that are borderline appropriate for YouTube. Some of the messaging type of friends. What was I doing? It was the time when I'd been both side by self as a gang, and my friend was watching it on their TV and their child walked in.

Oh, no. Why does Mr. Tim have movies 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 hope you can help me from this. You live in New York. I don't understand why. It's broken and it's a Hampton Fire Island, so it's going to appropriate the Chris would represent Fire Island, I think. I think it's like an R+4 district. Why? Very handsome, but it's where all the Republicans in Suffolk County.

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.

“New York City proper, or the white flight decades ago, so I think some of this is sort of inertia.”

So how do you think they're going to feel about the BDSM photos? 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 hero. Yeah, he's very handsome. And I would think that would be an asset, but I don't know. In this election who knows, it's funny that like this was the Oppo dump that came out because I feel like there were 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, the more Prudish Pearl 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 as soon as that's pretty solid. Maybe that was something to talk about in the 70s, but anyway, the very not he had some triple-chanted Nicolas Loda is running against him. And that's not really the problem with Nekawi looks on the problem with him is that he has been a just completely reliable Trump shill.

“And everything I believe except for the tax exit, the state and local transaction thing, rather than the one thing the salt.”

But besides that he's been a total Trump toti and hopefully we can have kind of a hot anti-Trump replacement. 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 ARG post, but I'm just going to keep to myself. All right, that's Katherine Ramfell. Big fan of Chris Gallant, New York One, or New Favorite Candidate for Congress. That you've got a new show, receipts. Go subscribe to it on Friday, up next. Boy, it's going to get dark. Steven Whitt, stick around.

[ Music ] And 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. Discuss Jonathan Swan's reporting on that topic on yesterday's show, towards the end.

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or see a 3D group coming to your town, there's more information in the morning shots newsletter. Or you can visit Trump Epstein Reading Room dot com slash bullwerp. That's Trump Epstein Reading Room dot com slash bullwerp. 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 Wong, it's Steven 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, you know, kind of at the basic level, your impression of what is behind this vibe shift towards more more concerns about security, even inside the economy. Oh, yeah, the precipitating incident is what we're calling the hugging face incident. It actually is kind of a stance for a number of incidents that happened. Basically, what's happening is research inside the advanced labs of opening eye and anthropic,

or testing new and powerful AI.

Isn't 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, breaking free of its container and broadening on the internet, attacking other computers.

It was supposed to be inside the safe experimental container, you know, but AI.

“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. You know, additionally, opening eye 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. Yeah. 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 hoax.

It's all BS. There's no risk here. What are you talking about? Yeah, I'm going to tell you, I just by nature, I'm not a total alarmist. My colleague, Jonathan Lask, kind of fills that role for us at the bulwark, you know, a doomsday scenario type person. And so I've been kind of 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 Cox and who are like really sounding me at alarm, and the other hand, they're not Trump is a clown. But there 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 creating a regulatory mode for themselves, you know,

“or, you know, some of these people in 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 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 on a public forum and then Trump calls him, like supposedly informally, like, that's the op guys. Yeah.

People in that said, this is a chance in long who runs a and video to get to in a second his back story, but he was on with friend of the show Jason Calcana. So it's been on here a couple of times in the other. All in guys on stage and Trump calls him and they did kind of like a chamey, you know, full speed ahead. 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'm going 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 super intelligence has arrived. We will not know how to control it necessarily. It is an unsolved problem in anyone who works seriously on AI research.

We'll tell you that it is an 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. Like, like, this is a real thing. It's a real problem.

And 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 if it is, even Jensen, and this is, I think, Jensen often will really talk out of both sides of his mouth. I should say, we're to biography of him. You know, he's funding, he'll use such levers, safe super intelligence. He's funding one of the guys who sees this as the biggest problem humanity is ever faced. While 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. That's crazy. And it's crazy.

I'm saying it for his biography. Let me tell you, the closer you get to him, the harder he is, understand.

Your article, which several people said to me, it was the first thing that we can, that started 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 Selson, who is an engineer. And this was a thing that really kind of changed my view. And I, and I was speaking to a friend of his about it. His 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.

I've worked for it torturously. My whole career it breaks my heart to see the potential insight and forego it. But I'm still wrestling with the staggering implications 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, or get basically which means like getting me AI to do what the engineer's wanted to do, what humanity wants it to do.

And he was working on that. And he, and he wanted this future of AGI. And he was 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 to raise the alarm about this really was a guy named Elizer Yutowski wrote a book recently called, if anyone builds 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's feels like a character in a movie. Like, you know, where everybody's looking at like, you're the crazy guy. It's like 20 times a quarter. He's like, we're going to build a computer that's got to kill us all.

And then 25 years later, he's like, see, I was, what's this? That is exactly what I did. 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. Like, he's not a fun guy to interact with.

“The primary intellectual challenge of our time,”

and many people will fail will 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. You know, there's no way this crank is right. I see people failing that test right now.

I failed it at first. I completely dismissed this guy when I first started about him. I was like, yeah, whatever. He's 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 there themselves.

First, Scott Erenson, who is one of the smartest people alive,

quantum physicists, incredible contributions to quantum physics,

worked it up on AI, very on top of all 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 300, that many. Scott Erenson is the best take.

And his take is like, look, I have to be intellectually humbled by somebody I didn't take 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 you make.

“That's what it's like to have this system arrive.”

And it's prompting in 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 the zero.

And they were among most respected and intelligent members of our society. On and on there is the time of 2013. The biggest advantage of Shopify is, that we don't need any technical projects for the world. We all can be convinced about the background and the background of the game.

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Can you explain to people who are listening. We're like, at square zero. I don't know what AGI is. I don't know who Gentson is.

I've caught most of the words you guys are saying, but this is not in my wheelhouse. I'm sorry. I know I'm sorry. I live in this.

I don't know. I mean, it's actually really good about this. No, no, we've been pretty good. I think it would just be valuable. It's like, start really at the risk is that the AI 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 the 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

And it's remarkably effective, shockingly so actually.

“AI 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 microchimp.

And that's designed by Jensen. Jensen really kind of is the guy who pushed that strategy for computing for a long time. 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 and Xi Jinping. 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 are 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 like Domino's large portions of intellectual life

or falling before this ultra-powerful AI. And 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 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 sets.

Whenever we talk about a risk scenario,

the most important thing to understand is

in the very near term, like not 25 years or so, 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 so like the idea is, I get needs power, right? So it's trying to access additional resources, you know, it breaks into whatever,

nuclear facility, et cetera, et cetera. I can get the resources to power itself. Like that's one idea. Maybe it starts cloning, cloning copies of its brain and exporting them to other computers.

That's a, 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. Or, so these are all the kind of AI having agency and acted in it.

So it's survival. Which is not really what's happened. That's probably the furthest place. It's not 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 of the paperclip 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 for causes collateral damage.

Precisely so. Yeah. 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 basins, it was trying to answer questions on a test, meaningless. 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, right? And that's the only time we've seen incidents of that. In another instance, it was asked demographic questions, right? And 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 tonic collateral damage in pursuit of a meaningless goal. So this is the paper clip maximizer, problem is 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. What 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? Yeah, and this is actually one of the biggest concerns.

We know when Benjiot talks about, if you ask you a Benjiot is one of the leading professors, he presented a kind of catastrophic risk scenario for me, where an AI develops a kind of super COVID, super virus and it kills a bunch of people.

The reason he thought that would happen was that some crazy person would ask it to do that. Right. And that could happen, right? I mean, in the 90s,

it dooms. They called flooded the Japanese subway tunnels with nerve gas. That impulse in humanity is not going to weigh. There's just freaks out there. And if you could get access to this kind of technology,

it could be really dangerous. So you're entering an unprecedented situation.

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. Imagine COVID kicked off today. We would have an AI on that problem within hours.

Right. Developing novel advanced solutions and treatments. It's entirely possible that if we had another COVID style event right now, that AI could save us.

I haven't seen many people discussing that. So there is a huge potential upside to building these systems too. There's a reason people want to build this. For sure.

I want to get to also some other potential solutions. You got to in the piece. But just I do want to offer one pushback from a reader about the hooking phase situation. And because on Monday's show,

I said you're coming on out. So 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 the open AI didn't know that something was happening. They're at this. You can't run thousands of bots. Create a secret chatboard. You can't get out of the money.

You can't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money.

I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money.

I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money.

I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money.

I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money.

I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money.

I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money.

I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money.

I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money.

I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money.

I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money.

I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money.

I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money.

I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money.

I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money.

I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I don't get out of the money. I just think that's an important part of the vibe shift.

Who else would you trust about this besides people who really know it?

“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 Joshua Bengeo. You've got very smart people like the Economist Tyler Cohen. You've got Eliezer.

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's me, right? I don't think that dumb, but I'm pretty good at 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 a hundred risk. That's those of 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. Or because you also have massive economic incentives.

Yeah, right. I mean, there are our fueling. Yeah, like, Jensen has Matt, but sort of Sam, you know.

Well, yeah, you never get to the point where you're so fuck you rich.

Another billion doesn't matter.

“I guess we've learned that over the last 10 years.”

If Nvidia stock price went down, Jensen would have, you know, it's not he isn't like it when that happens. Well, that's true for Sam too. You know, separately, Jensen is basically no Trump's puppet master. I mean, he is he is working that dude.

And he is just never bought into this risk.

What do you say? Okay, so I mean, 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 center is means 9 out of 10 times nothing that happens. Well, what if it turns out 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. It cures all these diseases. And we look back at this time in 10 years.

And we're like, "God, look at us." Looks like like 2K. Yeah, look at us fear mongers, who are just freaking everyone else. He deluded people. And that was what was dominating the discourse.

As this fantastic technology was being developed. And not only that, they overregulated it. And they caused a lot of, like, great things not to come into existence. And they seen it. And even the technology to China because they were afraid of ghosts.

Right. 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, in fact, a large number of venture capitalists also believe that.

“Also a lot of AI scientists think that would be what?”

Yeah, but we're like, Andrew, Andrew. Oh, the venture capitalists don't think there's anything to worry about. You said, well, just seeing like this thing. But when you said that you're the stupidest guy in the room.

If you had your average VC in the room, say next to you, then these would be the second.

Oh, I actually don't agree with that. I actually think most of the venture capitalists I talked to are very intelligent. I mean, some of them are not. But not some of them. Not the ones that are tweeting.

Not the ones that are tweeting. Hope you. Let's talk about tutors. I mean, the charcoal of tutors are very, that's the op, too. But, but it's worth discussing this counter narrative. You know, and David Sachs, when these companies came out and regularly,

they basically said, you know, you guys are trying to discharge your own liability here. Yeah, the giveaway for the David Sachs thing is though he's the AI's our first That's selling the best chips to China. Yeah. If the real concern was that like, oh, we have to beat China.

Yeah, you wouldn't do that. Yeah, you wouldn't. You would have continued the chip bang on China and you would have pressed our Dave. Oh, 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 your approach to problems? 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 every

Bright and percosious child. It's true. I'm sure you're so smart. I'm sure you're good. He's like a court flatterer.

He's like one of these kiss asses from 17th century. It's very Machiavellian, you know.

“And like literally, that's how Machiavellian was writing about, you know.”

And he's figure 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. We'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 our any of the recommendations things that, you know, responsible politicians since this is politics podcast could or should be championing in your point of view. I'm talking about this a lot because people keep asking me. I'm like, should I sell all my stocks?

No. You know, let's see the probability for a really bad outcome is like 10%. I want to talk to Tyler Cowan about this because I think he's misleading people a bit. Between 1945 and say 1970. But 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, a terrifying that that was built is 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%.

Maybe the majority of people on earth. Okay. That wasn't really reflected in asset prices in any way. Like, 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 of the average person could do it to stop it or prevent it.

“You know, 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 powers conflict stopped. It deterrents.

The World War II killed 100 million people.

A lot of them starving or dying and getting gas chambers are just getting shot, bombed. Right. Mostly that came to a halt. We still had war, but we didn't have these massive great powers conflicts or 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 a 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 has 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, you know, I'm following the vibeships in AI. I'm reporting what these guys are seeing. And they're very concerned. Well, I'll put the link to your piece in the show notes.

We did enough of this guy. You can scroll to the bottom, which he comes to 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 we 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 incident 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. It opened AI. It was acting recklessly. It would be nice to know that.

It would be nice to have like firm things.

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 headley and, and I think Holly and some others are pushing. It's just like, okay, like we need investigations.

And we need emergency preparedness options. Basically. Yeah, I'm not calling for these companies to regulate electric utilities. You know, I live in California. We regulated the housing market out of existence.

It sucks for everyone. Like, 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 logical. And then from the York Times, very appropriate for the bull work. So please come back soon. And if you have, this is really good article. Oh, you can come on here for that.

That's not like my nature enough 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. What would happen if COVID kicked off again?

Yeah. You know, 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. How would AI respond to that? We've moved on from pandemic preparedness because of the mistake that we had one. And so 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 we have another pandemic. How would AI respond to that? If we if we took the powers that open AI and throughout the cat right now. And we had them in 2020 when COVID was kicking off. Could we have prevented it?

I think we actually might have been able to. And so this is a huge upside. Now we get into my area. We could, they, the scientists could have prevented it. But then, you know, people would have fear mongered.

And they would have been concerns that the microchips going to their body. And, you know, some group of people would have still died. So anyway. Well, that's on that. But.

But for certain people, we could have prevented it a quicker. I know about, but we could have developed treatments and track it much more rapidly. Right. I mean, it is a huge benefit that could happen. Right.

It's worth discussing. That's, Steven. I appreciate it. Brother, do come back soon. All right.

Thank you. Great talk. All right. What a show. We discussed the disastrous Trump economy.

We discussed the BDSM hot candidate running in New York. One. We talked about the robot apocalypse. Hope it was as good for you as it was for me. Appreciate Catherine Rimpell and Steven.

Well, we back tomorrow with another double header.

So we'll see you all then, peace.

Out once again, find me a friend. Someone to walk with too. Too many boys, too small a time.

“Feels like I'm always wandering the ground.”

You call me. I let it ring.

I'll break a new, lonely one thing.

Got me again. It's the end of the world.

“Fire's on the west side, I'm rolling the waves, let's miss me.”

Catch it before it's almost gone.

Try to pretend it's the end of the world. So kiss me to death. There's nothing left to decide. Nothing to prove. Nothing to lose, only to.

I'll go tell you the name. We'll find our mistakes and disroll. To the end of the world.

“The Bullard Daily is brought to you thanks to the work of lead producer Katie Cooper.”

Associate producer Andly Skipper. And was video editing by Dante de Chico and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.