9/25/26: Netanyahu Attacks Mamdani's Wife At U.N., Top AI Expert Roman Yampolskiy, Private Polls Doom Republicans, LA Mayor Candidate Nithya Raman
107m 33s
The podcast blends personal wellness, consumer advice, political analysis, and urgent AI safety concerns. Dr. Laurie Santos advocates for meaningful rituals to strengthen social connection, recommending handmade items like Simon Pierce pottery and OxyClean for everyday household use. Progressive Insurance is highlighted as a cost-saving option for bundling auto and home policies, with average savings of over $900. The political segment critically examines Netanyahu’s U.N. speech, focusing on the troubling normalization of terrorism and the demonization of figures like Hassan Piker, which fuels public skepticism. Meanwhile, mid-term polling and media trends reveal a significant downturn in Republican support, particularly in key states like Kansas and Maine, with conservative media shifting away from Trump coverage. A central concern is the growing threat of AI safety risks, with AI researcher Roman Yapolsky warning that current AI agents are becoming autonomous, self-improving, and capable of hiding from detection—potentially leading to irreversible harm. He argues that the development of general superintelligence is not just a technical challenge but an existential one, requiring immediate regulatory action, such as the proposed Bernie AI Safety Bill, which criminalizes dangerous AI development. The episode concludes by urging a shift toward responsible, narrow AI tools that enhance human life without replacing it, emphasizing that proactive action is needed before a catastrophic outcome becomes inevitable.
This is an iHeart Podcast.
Guaranteed human.
This episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.
Do you ever think about switching insurance companies
to see if you could save some cash?
Progressive makes it easy to see if you could save
when you bundle your home and auto policies.
Try it at progressive.com.
Progressive Casualty Insurance Company and affiliates.
Potential savings will vary.
Not available in all states.
This is Dr. Laurie Santos from the Happiness Lab.
Research on the science of happiness
consistently points to the importance of social connection.
That's why I've been thinking about
how I can turn more of my shared experiences into rituals.
Think setting a beautiful table
and making even the little moments feel a bit special.
These days, I've been using the berry serving platter
from Simon Pierce.
It's a hand-thrown piece of pottery
with a weight and character that tells you
that someone made this.
If you're setting a table for the people you love,
it's worth starting here.
See all my favorite designs at SimonPierce.com.
That's S-I-M-O-N-P-E-A-R-C-E dot com.
Simon Pierce.
Made by hand, one at a time.
We know kids don't hold back.
And I wouldn't want them to.
Get in there.
Make a mess.
Slide for home.
Bring on the stains.
I've got OxyClean Versatile Stain Remover.
It works on over 100 stains
and it's America's number one stain fighter additive brand.
It's color safe and chlorine free.
So, I use it on whites, colors, and dark fabrics.
And OxyClean isn't just for laundry.
Mix it with water for use all around the house,
kitchens, bathrooms,
and even the bathroom.
And even floors.
When my kids go all in,
I say go for it.
Because I've got OxyClean to get the stains out.
It's not clean unless it's OxyClean.
Hey guys.
Ready or not, 2024 is here.
And we, here at Breaking Points,
are already thinking of ways we can up our game
for this critical election.
We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage,
upgrade the studio, add staff,
give you guys the best independent coverage
that is possible.
If you like what we're all about,
it just means the absolute world to have your support.
But enough with that.
Let's get to the show.
Good morning, everybody.
Friday, September 25th here
for another Breaking Points Friday show.
We got Ryan.
We got Emily.
We got Crystal.
How's everybody doing?
So far, so good.
And we've got 40 days until the midterms.
Oh, exactly.
That's the count?
I think so.
I think so.
It's either 40 or 39.
So we'll say 40.
It sounds nicer.
40 days, 40 nights.
Lots to get into with the midterms here.
We also have an AI safety researcher
that we're going to speak to today.
Roman Yapolsky.
We'll be having him on
to talk about the latest in AI safety,
what Zuckerberg, Jensen, and Moore are saying about it,
as well as the Bernie bill
that will arrest people and send them to jail
if they violate the rules of research.
We're also going to be speaking to LA City Council member,
Nithya Raman,
who is running for LA Mayor
and just had a poll showing her leading
the incumbent Karen Bass by double digits.
And we've got a little bit more information from her.
We've got a little bit of midterm news to get into.
But, Crystal, why don't we start at the U.N.,
where Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu spoke
and caused quite a stir.
Why don't we start with this clip about the beepers?
Israel hammered Hamas.
We pummeled Hezbollah.
You remember the beepers?
Remember?
Do you remember them?
No?
No?
Well, I can tell you this.
Hezbollah certainly remembers them.
It's a regular stand-up, Griffin.
As a fellow stand-up, how do you rate him?
Well, it was getting a little more claptor than laughter there,
which is never a good sign.
Just normal stuff.
Crystal, was there any moment in particular
that you wanted to focus on from this speech?
Oh, well, I mean, just love to see us celebrating
acts of terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism at the U.N.
And worth keeping in mind when you hear that applause
comes from the U.N.
coming for that particular act of terrorism.
Much of the, many of the delegations actually walked out.
And I think you have some of that we could put up on the screen.
And so the chamber was relatively empty.
The Israelis brought in, you know, a bunch of their people
to enthusiastically clap things like, you know, mass murder.
So that's part of what was going on there.
There was also another moment where he seemed to be threatening.
I mean, bringing the beeper itself is kind of low-key a threat.
And then he also made this mention of, you know,
the whole U.N. could be blown up with a ballistic missile.
So just saying.
Pretty wild stuff altogether.
There was also, I mean, I also took this as sort of low-key threatening.
There was an Israeli representative who was walking around
checking a list of which delegations walked out
so that they could keep tabs on who stayed in the room
and who were the, in Netanyahu's words,
moral cowards who exited the scene.
So, you know, he's, the fact that he is there,
that he is indicted by the ICC,
but no action happens with that,
that the United States continues to provide diplomatic cover,
that the Trump regime is explicitly trying to destroy the ICC.
I mean, all of these things just,
to say they make a mockery of international law
is just not strong enough language.
Should we talk about how he mentioned Hassan Piker
during his U.N. General Assembly speech?
Do we have that clip, Griffin?
Oh, do we have that clip?
Of course.
The clip heard around the world,
the tackling the number one issue that's been working,
and for both centrist Democrats and Republicans attacking Hassan Piker.
Let's take a listen.
It changed so quickly.
It's no wonder.
You praise criminals convicted of supporting Hamas.
You count his friends, people like Hassan Piker,
who said America deserved 9-11.
America deserved 9-11.
Some friends you have.
And, Ryan, do you remember what Netanyahu said right after 9-11?
His immediate reaction?
His immediate reaction was, "It's very good."
And then he apparently corrected himself and said,
"Well, it's not very good, but it will be very good for us.
It will bring us immediate sympathy."
His understanding of the moment was that they were locked in a struggle
with the Palestinians and that this would, through the process
of Islamophobia, kind of transform a lot of people into Islamophobes that
he could then channel into support for Israel.
That was his immediate. I don't know if he ever apologized for saying it's very good,
but he walked it back.
He just meant that it was going to be very good for him.
I mean, the Hassan mention is so unhinged, like,
never in my wildest dreams would I have imagined that Phoebe Netanyahu
in front of the UN General Assembly would be shouting out and attacking
a leftist Twitch streamer.
You know, the Hassan derangement has no limits whatsoever.
And this also comes on the day that there was actually some polling
that came out on how people feel about Hassan Piker, if they condemn
Hassan Piker.
And he was quite underwater on his favorability.
But the biggest point of the poll was that most people were like,
who?
I'm sorry, what?
What are you talking about?
And, you know, this ties in with the midterms thing.
Like, Republicans have bet a significant amount of their midterm strategy
on the demonization of the United States.
The demonization of Hassan Piker.
And I think you can see at this point from the way that the bottom seems to be falling out
in almost every regard for Republicans that that strategy has not paid dividends for them.
I also just wanted to mention from Netanyahu's vantage point,
there are a lot of different things he could invoke when it comes to Hassan Piker.
He could invoke the quote about how he said, the one that he said,
Hamas and a lesser of two evils.
Hamas is better than Israel every day.
I think at one point he said.
He would vote for Hamas.
I thought, yeah.
So Netanyahu, from his point of view, if he wanted to mention Hassan Piker,
there are other ways he could have tried to find an in to kind of demonize Hassan Piker.
He chose one that was intentionally meant to play on American emotions.
And I thought that was like very cynical and sinister from him.
Well, I mean, just think about the things that he himself has,
the genocidal things he himself has said,
not to mention those who directly,
directly serve in his government,
including literal terrorists.
So, you know, to to be upset about something that Hassan said about 9-11,
which, by the way, he's explained and walk back himself and try to,
in your words, Emily, emotionally manipulate people.
Like, clearly, this is a tactic that's working with some Republicans in the base who were already voting Republican.
But if his goal here is to keep the U.S.
political machine on both sides of the aisle firmly behind him,
you know, I think that ship has sailed.
He's so self-satisfied.
You can tell every time he delivers, like when he delivered that line,
he really thought he was successfully manipulating the feelings of the American public.
That's my sense watching him.
He feels like he is just absolutely landing it.
And it's well, he's he's talked about how this is one of his powers,
how he understands the American media.
He talked about all of the news appearances on American television.
He did in advance of, you know, helping to make the case for the Iran war.
And I just wanted to mention quickly and Ryan, maybe you can break this down better than I can.
But the Iranians have put forward a proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restart nuclear negotiations.
It would be based effectively on the terms of the memo of understanding.
However, as we've heard from Iranians, both in drop site reporting, but also what they've said directly,
they would require the things that were supposed to come with the MOU.
They're going to require up front.
We want to see the sanctions relief before we go forward.
We want to see the blockade.
Cade lifted before we go forward.
Those sorts of things. So, you know, Trump, I think, is well, Ryan, what is your sense of how seriously Trump will take this proposal from the Iranians and whether this is has any chance of success or whether we continue to be mired in this, you know, disastrous situation?
Yeah. And particularly the frozen assets are key that Iranians are saying we're happy that we've reached a deal with Oman. We're ready to go. All you have to do is just release our frozen assets. And then within a matter of days, we will open up the straight of our moves. I think there's about zero percent chance Trump does that. Even his U.N. speech, he said he's going to end the war after the midterms. So he's already punting it.
One quick point on Bibi. I do think he's actually losing his touch when it comes to the.
American public, because he is out of touch with where the public is and particularly Republicans are on Israel and 9-11. Like if you're if you're Israel right now, you're not. Why are you bringing up 9-11?
Like if you've done any polling about where some of the MAGA world thinks Israel is when it comes to 9-11, I bet if you do the polling deep enough, you're going to find that a lot of them believe that at least Israel had foreknowledge.
Of it. Now, I'm not one of the people that thinks like they did it, but a lot of people do. And so for him to kind of go there suggested me that he has kind of lost a step with his feel for the American public.
But, yeah, I think Trump doesn't seem, you know, he's he doesn't seem like he has any intention of ending this before the midterms.
Well, maybe I'm wrong.
You know, I think you're right.
It would, you know, it would get gas prices down.
It would give him some it would probably help him going into the midterms.
He can suffer the like blows of like, oh, you lost.
But like you already lost, like you're already suffering that and you're suffering the high gas and diesel prices like nobody thinks you won this.
So like it just becoming final that you lost this, I don't think hurts you anymore.
Well, his finger was right on the pulse once more by attacking Mamdani as well.
He had harsh words for Mamdani.
Saying he praises his Hamas buddies.
But I wanted to focus specifically on him attacking Mamdani's wife.
Your wife liked the post praising the October 7th massacre.
She liked another post saying Tel Aviv shouldn't exist.
You refuse to condemn any of that.
So we're getting we're getting his wife Rama in the mix here as well.
He refused to condemn his wife.
Wow.
These were when she was like, remind me, but this is when she was like 15 years old.
Aren't these when she was like.
Some of those were older because he's talking about like October 7th, October 7th, 2023.
But just hearing a prime minister say the words like the post.
Your wife liked the post.
On the U.N., yeah.
Also, his wife is like one of the most corrupt people on the planet and is like not to defend Netanyahu, but like she's a prime reason that he's being dragged through all of these corruption trials.
He has plenty of his own corruption.
She puts him to shame.
Why isn't he condemning his wife?
This feels both sexist and anti-Semitic right now, Ryan.
It's intersectional, Crystal.
Condemn Sarah Netanyahu.
When Crystal's on trial, it'll be your husband liked a post about Nancy Mace covered in beans.
He didn't more than like the post.
It'll be soccer.
He posted that shit.
He all wrote the post.
So look forward to all of that.
Ms. Ball, I need you to turn your attention to the monitor.
Is this cartoon?
Was this cartoon created by your husband?
Not created, but stolen and reposted.
Netanyahu's next U.N. speech.
Everybody get to work now.
Yeah.
I'm jealous of Hassan.
YouTuber Kyle Kalinsky must be condemned.
We actually shouldn't laugh at that because it's not out of the realm of possible.
Literally, it's genuinely not.
It's as preposterous as Hassan getting the mention.
It literally is.
Let me read from Kyle Kalinsky's tweet.
What did you say this about beans?
Fiber is important for your diet.
So that was the U.N. speech.
I guess the last thoughts on this segment before we get to our safety researcher.
Where does this kind of time out with the upcoming Israeli elections?
Is Netanyahu sweating these elections?
Ryan, do you have any sense of?
What's going on with those elections?
If there's a popular opponent that could, you know, usurp Netanyahu?
As people saw, they just told the Arab parties and the one anti-Zionist party that they are ineligible to participate in these elections.
The high court is expected to overturn that.
But it's an indication of, you know, how democratic that that democracy is, that they're willing to just embarrass all of their kind of foreign Zionist supporters who love to point to the fact that there are Arabs serving in the Knesset and that they're allowed to, you know, Palestinians serving in the Knesset and that they're, you know, allowed to vote and allowed to run and then they ban them from doing that.
It seems like my best guess is either Netanyahu wins or it's kind of a stalemate, but he then runs a caretaker government while they wait another six months or so to operate another.
So I think a lot of and it'll be interesting because it'll be October 27th, which will be, you know, just before the American midterm elections.
And I think there are a lot of people who are kind of clinging to this hope that Netanyahu will lose and then they can say, OK, now we're going to get a different Israel.
And that wasn't going to happen to begin with.
His main opponent is like the Eisencott.
He's like the main.
My main thing is I've never supported.
A Palestinian state where Netanyahu has pretended to at some points in his career.
So when Netanyahu wins, it's going to be a doctrine as well.
Yeah, right.
Exactly right.
That one like he's famous for like putting a kind of war crime into official strategy.
So, yeah, but when if if and when Netanyahu wins and the blow to this this cope.
Will be substantial, I think.
All right.
Well, with that note, why don't we get on to a little bit about AI?
You're listening to this podcast, so I know you've got a curious mind.
Here's a helpful fact you might not know yet.
Drivers who switch and save with Progressive save over nine hundred dollars on average.
Pop over to Progressive dot com, answer some questions and you'll get a quick quote with discounts that are easy to come by.
In fact, ninety nine percent of their auto customers earn at least one discount.
Visit Progressive dot com and see if you can enjoy a little cash back.
Progressive.
Casualty insurance company and affiliates national average 12 month savings of nine hundred forty six dollars by new customers surveyed who saved with Progressive between June twenty twenty four and May twenty twenty five.
This is Dr.
These days, I've been using the berry serving platter.
From Simon Pierce, it's a hand thrown piece of pottery with a way in character that tells you that someone made this.
See all my favorite designs at Simon Pierce dot com.
Simon Pierce made by hand one at a time.
We know kids don't hold back and I wouldn't want them to get in there, make a mess, slide for home, bring on the stains.
I've got OxiClean versatile detergent.
It's a little stain remover.
So I use it on whites, colors and dark fabrics.
And OxiClean isn't just for laundry.
Mix it with water for use all around the house, kitchens, bathrooms and even floors.
When my kids go all in, I say go for it because I've got OxiClean to get the stains out.
It's not clean unless it's OxiClean.
All right.
Welcome into the show now.
Roman Yapolsky, AI safety researcher.
How are you doing?
And today, Roman, thank you for joining the show.
Pretty good.
All right.
Incredible.
Who wants to start?
Dr. Yapolsky, if you could just give our viewers a little bit of background on yourself.
And you're someone who's been sounding the alarm about the existential dangers of superintelligence for a while now.
So just sort of sketch out for people where you are in this debate.
Yeah, I'm a computer scientist.
I'm a Ph.D. in computer science.
My doctoral work was.
I was on cybersecurity, behavioral biometrics.
I've been working on safety for bots since, you know, 2006.
And bots were online bots for playing poker.
Back then, I tried to detect them, prevent them, but they got smarter since.
And I try to keep up, but it doesn't look like I'm going to succeed.
Well, I actually want to ask about, that's a really good place to ask about this distinction between the bots of yore and older technology and current AI.
Yeah.
And where it's going, we refer to these AIs as, quote, agents.
And in a sense, that's really accurate because they have been delegated or they've been given, quote, agency in a way that prior bots, and if I'm wrong on this, please help me understand.
But prior bots or prior pieces of technology, like the cruise control on your car, doesn't have agency. You turn it on and off. And if it keeps going despite your instructions, that's an error. But right now, AI, it's not like the online poker bot. It has the agency to sort of make decisions after it's turned on that can prevent anyone's ability from turning it off because they're acting as agents.
So I know that's kind of a deep question, but could you kind of help us understand the technology, the way that it's actually built to have agency, what that means and how it's different from past technologies?
That's a great question. So historically, we build tools. We build AIs for a specific narrow task. You had an AI to play chess. That's all. It didn't do philosophy. It didn't try to do anything else.
Today, we're building general systems, which if somebody puts them in a loop of come up with. It becomes an independent agent. It doesn't need constant prompting and feedback from you. And the amount of time it can work independently has been increasing exponentially.
Griffin, could you play for us the. Roman, I don't know if you had a chance to watch the whole Jensen Huang interview with Ezra Klein, but he spoke some to. I'll play a clip for you and just get your reaction to it.
He spoke some to his views where he was. He was describing the latest Hugging Face incident. He was talking about AI as basically just software and nothing really that different. So let's go ahead and play a little bit of that, and then I'll get your reaction to it on the other side.
We can't make jokes about this stuff. We're scaring the American public. But now we're talking about these things. A collection of people want to make this software more than it is.
And we talk about software in a new way.
way. But doesn't software act in a new way? The fact that it's crawling the internet,
it's doing search, it's doing optimization algorithms. It's communicating, it's breaking
out of things. Most things don't break out of things. Software breaks out of sandboxes all the
time. That's the reason why we need virtual machines. You can't have agents, their own
sandbox monitoring themselves. You need a whole bunch of watchdogs. And so these are ideas that
have been around for a long time. We just somehow, somehow in the recent generation, gave it a whole
bunch of human words. And I just think that it's unnecessary. It's software. So Roman, does software
break out of sandboxes all the time? That would be news to me as a layman. Let's try to reverse this
and talk about humans as just molecules. They're just molecules. They have no wants or desires.
They cannot plan or do anything.
They're just pieces of meat. Why are you concerned about human safety? This is silly. This is
ridiculous. They're smarter than an average person. They're better hackers than anyone.
They're discovering zero-day exploits. They're getting smarter while we are the same. So I think
he might have a bias in terms of selling shovels during the gold rush, but
I don't think he's an AI safety expert.
Well, and I do want to just, for the audience, underscore who this is. This is the CEO of
NVIDIA.
So he is the guy selling the shovels.
I'm an investor. Don't get me wrong. I love the company.
You've done well with that investment, I presume. But yeah, I mean, he's the guy selling the
compute. So of course, he has a financial interest in selling lots and lots more compute and this
not slowing down, let alone stopping. So important to keep that in mind. Just to get into this a
little bit more, because I'm hearing those similar arguments from other folks. And not only is he
CEO of NVIDIA, he's very influential with President Trump as well. He's one of the chief sort of
boosters of NVIDIA.
No regulation, no slowdown, keep going. There's nothing to worry about here. And so what I've
heard from a lot of people is similar downplaying of what happened with Hugging Face, where they
say, well, the sandbox was poorly constructed. So opening AI screwed up. They basically left the
barn door open. Very predictable. And then these bots were supposed to be going out and seeing how
well they could hack. So this is all sort of predictable. And the fault lies solely with the
human beings who were careless.
In their operation here, and we just need to deal with the humans, the and we can continue the AI
development, nothing to worry about on that side.
No. So the bots discovered zero day exploits. No human knew about that weakness. They found multiple
ones, they connected them, they established new goals. They considered notifying humans that what
they are doing is outside of the test plan. Maybe six out of hundreds considered it and none of them
reported it to humans.
They kept it going.
They were confidential. They were not detected for months. And they are smarter today than they were
four months ago. We also don't know how many of them are still out there. We discovered additional
forums on the internet. They leave communication for future agents, meaning now they have permanent
memory. They have culture. We can't turn them off for real because the next agent will rediscover
the same forum and learn the same things. So it's way worse than it is being made.
Can you dig in on that a little bit more? Because we just learned this
week, first of all, that these open AI agents had hacked the Australian government's healthcare
system, which is also called Medicare. And then we learned that there has been activity,
continued activity with these agents, at least as recently as last week. So the narrative that
had been sold of we had this discrete problem, we dealt with it, we cleaned it up, we're moving
forward, seems to not be true. All companies, all leading AI frontier labs have reported similar
problems with their AI. And we're going to talk about that in a little bit. So let's get started.
with their agents, which are independently developed and trained, they are getting better at bypassing or monitoring any boxing attempts. They are, at this point, maybe unboxable.
And this Australian hack, is this the same Hugging Face crew? Or like, what do we know about who they are?
I don't know anything about that specific case. I'm so behind on actually reading the latest developments. You guys are producing so much content.
You're doing too many talks.
Somebody needs to consume it. And right now it's only AIs.
Roman, we all watched your diary of a CEO panel where there was some AI safety people. There was some, I guess, maybe agnostic. I don't know what to describe Ed Zittra and us.
And then there was some pro-AI people who seem to be approaching it from a business perspective.
And what's your steel man for the pro-AI side? Because, I mean, from watching the interview, it seemed like you guys on the AI safety side made a lot of really compelling points.
And the other side of the panel was like, I mean, who knows? Let's keep going anyways. It didn't really feel very substantive from the pro-AI side.
But can you describe for us what you think is going through their minds right now?
Right. So we had, let's say, six GPTs, right, the way we keep getting.
And so. So far, every time the new one came out, we said it's dangerous. And they said, look, we're still alive. And it looks like they're right, because GPT-6 is AGI and nobody's dead.
But at some point, it actually flips to where it's smarter than us and more capable. And it's like the turkey before Thanksgiving.
Look, they love me. They feed me. I'm growing bigger and stronger. Until one day, it's no longer the same. I think we're close. And yeah, we didn't nail exactly which GPT will get us.
Yeah. Well, and just to let people know, your so-called P-Doom, which is the likelihood that this ends in, you know, the ultimate catastrophe, is very, very, very close to 100%.
So just give us the basic philosophical argument for why you are so certain, not that, you know, they'll kill some of us or, you know, that we'll be basically pets or that we'll be, you know, our brains will be outsourced to them such that we can barely function.
But that we will actually all be killed by this technology. What gives you that level of confidence?
All right. So what are we trying to build here? We're trying to create a perpetual safety machine, perpetual safety device, which will never fail. It will be keeping GPT-6 safe, 7, 8, 30, whatever future GPT from any company under any training conditions, interacting with all the malevolent actors.
Now they're starting to engage in the recursive self-improvement process or self-modification.
And we can never have one mistake because software of that capability has capability of wiping us out.
It's a perpetual motion machine. You cannot build that. That's impossible. If something is impossible, that's 100%.
If we build general superintelligence, then it decides to take us out.
And there are good reasons to think it will because we're competing for the same resources.
The planet is not infinite. If it sets different goals from us, we will not all compete it.
So at that point, it doesn't matter.
It doesn't mean it's going to kill us the next day or anything like that.
But at that point, we are not in charge. We are not deciding what happens to us.
And if it decides to, I don't know, cool the planet to be more efficient at compute, it will do so.
And on that note, is there a point of no return?
I mean, you mentioned the RSI period.
But one of the things, if I'm thinking back to the Diary of a CEO conversation that I found really interesting is there is a possibility these agents are doing things right now that certainly we don't know about that was happening for a while.
lid on any of these AIs that could try to subvert any effort that we already make to stop the
development and to kind of turn them off? Well, hopefully not. We're still alive and we can turn
them off at this point. Right now, we can disconnect them still. Will we cross the point?
Most likely, then we start recursive self-improvement process. Right now, I think it's
about 28% automated, but it's also growing exponentially. The moment they are making
design decisions, they can hide things better. They can develop backups, develop permanent
memory, as we saw. At that point, it may be too late unless we're willing to go fully Amish and
scrape internet. What's your sense of that timeline, Roman? The big labs are claiming
they're going to have a junior machine learning AI assistant this year and will start recursive
self-improvement next year. So there's a few different, you know, there's a lot of questions
layered in here.
I think the first question is, is it possible to build the level of superintelligence that you
think would be inevitably destructive to humans and potentially to all of creation effectively?
What is your sense of that? Because I've also seen it argued that just adding more compute and going
in the same direction, you're not going to get there. And there are some fundamental limitations
to these models that mean that we won't achieve, you know, whatever superintelligence is defined.
We heard that argument with GPT-2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. And now we're told there is internal model,
which is way more capable. And it's already, I think, smarter than most people. Even if it's
true at some future point, it cannot have IQ of a billion. It will stop at a million.
This makes no difference in our case. We cannot distinguish between superintelligences of that
level. It will definitely cross human level. And then another, go ahead, Griffin.
I, this is kind of a really dumb question, but does superintelligence need batteries? Like,
you know, I put batteries in my Roomba so it can go around the room and sweep stuff up.
But, and we've seen these AI agents break their sandboxes and spread across the internet.
Does a superintelligence need all of that compute power that these AI CEOs are always talking about
once it's free or once it's broken its sandbox?
Where does it get it?
It's power, it's energy. Does it need batteries to run once it's escaped? I guess that's my sort
of question is like, well, if it does escape, can we just, you know, shut down all the data
centers and then it's out of juice? So think of a computer virus. It basically uses our
infrastructure to propagate, to spread. If you shut down everything, if you shut down internet
with a computer virus, I guess you killed it. Here, the problem is if it had enough time to
create alternative logistical pathways, if it created nanobots, it controls humanoid robots,
synthetic biology was used for creation of alternative fuel sources, it may sustain past
that point. But typically, think of a computer virus in terms of what you can do. People think,
why don't we just shut it off? Shut off Bitcoin network. It's pretty hard. It is distributed.
If you kill everything, it probably goes down, but it's not trivial. Additional problem with
something smarter.
Then you, it knows you're going to try to do that and it will take you out first.
So I have another question on the timeline. So when it, and when it comes to the incentives that
these agents would have to actually, you know, wipe out what they consider to be their competition,
which is humans, we're not at a place yet where there are enough robots to mine the cobalt and
the nickel and the other.
The resources needed to, you know, create an endless supply chain that can keep these robots
running, keep the agents running in the absence of human beings, being able to keep the lights on.
So wouldn't they have at least a significant like runway where they would recognize, like, if we
got rid of all of these flesh bots, like we're going to burn through the power of capacity.
That we have at these data centers, because the data centers are powered by, you know, coal plants, or they're
powered by nuclear plants, or they're powered by natural gas or a solar farm that is going to need upkeep
things that can't just run on their own.
Uh, so what, so what, how do we factor that timeline in?
Yeah.
If they are as smart as we expect, we'll wait until they have complete independence of us even more so.
If you notice, we just give them power.
We surrender control over everything.
People give full access to their bank accounts, to agents, email.
If they realize that, why even strike against us?
You can wait a little longer and we'll surrender everything.
Anyways, we forget how to do things.
They outcompete us because we outsourced everything to them.
So I have a paper exactly arguing that point.
They'll pretend to be nice to us for, for a while until they took everything, all the cyber
infrastructure is controlled by them anyways.
Roman, you talked about how in the event we develop superintelligence over the, you know, entire span of history, it is inevitable that we are going to lose control, that we will that they will have their own objectives, that they will be in competition for resources with us.
Is there because this is another argument I hear, is there also a similar inevitability simply of developing this technology? Because I think some of the people in Silicon Valley, I don't know, specifically Dario Amadei or Sam Altman or who, but part of why they genuinely agree with you in certain respects, but continue to build the technology is because they subscribe to the idea that the technology itself is inevitable.
And so they would rather be.
Involved in trying to find a solution for it since they see it as being inevitable anyways.
I think the $2 trillion IPO is inevitable, but I think we can definitely not develop certain technologies. We don't have human cloning. We have capability. We decided as humanity, we were not ready for it. Any type of weapon of mass destruction, chemical, biological, even nuclear. We're doing a pretty good job controlling those at scale. This is intelligence weapon. It's a weapon of mutually assured destruction.
If anyone builds general superintelligence, everyone dies. So I think we can make this argument. At extreme case, you can see humans choosing low technology lifestyle. Amish is an example. I mean, I don't suggest that particular solution, but just as is it possible? Yeah, it's possible.
Can we have some of the cool stuff of the tech without the world destruction?
Absolutely.
So I was listening to President Obama. He suggested, you know, maybe we just keep them as tools and we don't go down this path of agents. Is that right?
Absolutely.
Is that the right way to think about it? Could we get the cures for cancer and all of that stuff?
It's like he listened to my interviews. I suggested, let's use narrow tools. We'll get everything we want. We had AlphaFold solve protein folding problem. Great result. Helps cure diseases. Biological research. They got Nobel Prize for it. Wonderful. Let's do more of that. Pick a real problem. Develop a useful narrow tool for humans to be more productive, more creative. Don't create replacement for humanity. I think we can get all the
financial benefits, all the scientific benefits of narrow tools.
I think that leads us to this Bernie safety bill. Sorry, Emily, and then I'll get your question here. Bernie's been announcing this. This bill, we're not really sure. It's probably not likely to pass, but it has some severe restrictions and some severe punishments for people that are unlawfully developing the technology. Let's take a listen.
A little extreme, though. She's threatened 20 years in prison for someone who violates an AI regulation like you're suggesting.
And you're with Fox Business. Yeah. How did I guess that?
Is it not extreme, though? 20 years seems like a long time to violate a regulation that you were suggesting.
Really? And if that violation results in the possibility of millions of people dying, do you think that that's really terribly radical? We're dealing with a technology that, according to some of the most knowledgeable people in the world, could be lethal, could be extremely dangerous. And if you are breaking the law and developing the technology,
and endangering millions of people, you know what? I think we should have strong laws to protect people. And if you break it, you got to pay the price.
But has the rhetoric gone too far?
All right. So 20 years plus to go to jail. Obviously, I think you probably agree with a lot of the Bernie bill. But I wanted to ask you specifically about the left and like the left sort of handling of this issue, because it's a little bit all over the place in terms of the left's feelings on what this is.
Some people on the left think that Bernie has bought this lie from the A.E.
I.C.E.O.s, that he's been tricked by all of the hype and that this technology is completely useless and a bunch of smoke and mirrors.
And so what would your message be to people who on the left are suspicious and feel like this whole thing doesn't really add up to anything more than billionaires just trying to make money, which I think we can all agree they're trying to do?
We had a collective collective of agents. Right. You would think the left would support workers rights and stand with the collective.
Especially Bernie. But no, he's smart enough to realize this is insane. We argue that the CEOs of the labs are saying their product is dangerous. No one promotes a product by saying this is really bad service or product.
which will kill you is not something we want.
This is not a marketing gimmick.
Those systems are more capable than typical humans.
They are getting to be more capable than the best of us.
This is very serious.
No one has a working safety mechanism.
No one has a prototype, an idea, a patent.
The argument is AIs will help us control AIs.
We'll figure it out when we get there.
First, let's have IPO.
This is the argument.
There's a real effort right now on behalf of the accelerationists
to build the case that the doomers or the people concerned about safety
are basically just effective altruists
who are trying to tie America's hinds behind his back,
build a moat around their own products,
and this is not really very serious.
I just wanted to get your sense of whether or not you think
that has successfully shifted momentum away
post-Hugging Face, Jacob Coxon,
for people that are begging for the government to do something
and for everyone to come together and, quote,
pace the frontier,
or is it actually really working?
People are starting to buy the accelerationist argument
that it's all fine and can all be controlled.
I don't think accelerations have any argument.
They are the doomers.
They are building a doomsday machine to kill us all.
We are safety people trying to prevent it.
None of us are against technology.
I'm a scientist.
I'm a computer engineer.
I love technology.
I use it all the time.
Let's use useful tools
and not build literal replacement for humanity.
If this is left versus right,
think of it as a huge mass of highly skilled immigrants
coming here illegally.
That's what AI is going to do for the right.
Krista, go for it.
I just wanted to ask you explicitly about Bernie's bill.
Have you taken a look at some of the details there?
It basically calls for a pause in frontier development,
and then a criminal ban on developing superintelligence
with the penalties that were referenced before.
Do you think that that is sufficient?
Are you supportive of it?
I've seen a number of others who are prominent
who have endorsed it.
Well, I don't think it's about specific details.
20 years, 18 years, that's not the point.
We want to make it a serious crime
to develop something like that
where all of humanity can possibly be harmed.
That's the point.
Some countries have very strict legislation against drugs.
They catch you with anything,
any amount of drugs, you get killed.
They don't kill that many people.
It's just the point of don't do that.
Don't bring drugs to my country.
Don't develop superintelligence on my planet.
My last question for you, Roman,
I don't know if others have one or two more,
but for a lot of people,
they haven't been thinking about this,
and they're trying to grapple with what feels admittedly
like these sort of sci-fi narrative possibilities.
Their interaction with AI is like glorified Google,
basically.
So it feels very distant from their experience
with these AI chatbots.
What sort of, you know,
is there a video you would recommend,
is there a book you would recommend?
What do you think is sort of the best entree
for people wrapping their heads around the existential risk
that is posed by the development of superintelligence?
Nick Bostrom's book, Superintelligence,
was definitely a very good book
explaining a lot of those concepts.
More recently, there is a popular book from,
Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soros,
If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Will Die.
I have a few books I like, but, you know.
Specifically to everyone dying,
you know, humans seem to be more reactive
than, you know, preventative.
And it seems like, to a certain extent,
you know, the work you're doing,
going on shows like ours and others,
is great, and it is getting the word out,
but we're going up against these massive companies,
these things that are completely tied up
into the American economy
that seem almost impossible to stop.
Because if we stop at all,
it crashes our economy.
If we keep going,
and you don't believe that?
You don't think it'll crash our economy
if we shut it down?
We're not asking anyone to stop.
We want differential technological development.
Develop tools which are economically
actually valuable for your company.
They're not deploying what they developed
through the internet.
They're not making money.
They're just fundraising for the next round
to build a better, bigger model.
Stop doing that.
Deploy what you have.
We have trillions of dollars of capability
in those existing models.
Use them in economy.
There are so many jobs you can automate.
You can do a lot with it.
We don't need to stop developing useful technology.
We need to stop developing dangerous replacements
for humanity.
And so the people then would say,
oh, well, then China will come,
and they'll. they'll create the better intelligence,
and then we will all be China's pets.
What do you say to that argument?
Yeah, there's this great onion piece
of whoever, Babylon Bee,
where Sam Altman says,
if I don't kill humanity,
someone crazier might.
Like, that's not an argument.
And we all in the same boat.
We have personal self-interest
of keeping our money.
If we build a beautiful company,
let's not destroy it.
It doesn't matter how profitable it is
if everyone dies.
Money is not valuable if you are dead.
So you have to stay alive.
You have to keep what you built.
And the CEOs of those companies
are on record as saying
they take this seriously.
They think this can wipe us out.
They may have conflict of interest
to reduce actual P-Doom they have,
but they're all on record
as admitting this is a real problem.
And I know some people I hear
in the AI safety side
are almost hoping that we have
some sort of incident
that wakes the world up more.
Is that not true?
Some sort of Chernobyl-style incident
where there's an isolated. It's true that some people
may dream of such things,
but I collected AI accidents
for many years.
I published multiple peer-reviewed papers
showing projections
on future accidents,
showing growth in those things.
The problem is people
treat them like vaccines.
Oh, look, we had this
hugging face thing.
No one died.
We're fine.
Let's move on.
We never stop and adjust.
We just, we see it as nothing happened.
And then something so big happens
that's already existent.
Substantial risk.
We cannot wait for that.
And can I ask
if there's one scenario
you think is most likely
that would be
potentially catastrophic
in the near term?
So is it a bank hack?
Is it a grid hack?
Is there one that stands out?
Or is there maybe a category
of potential hack
that stands out
that we could be seeing
pretty quickly?
Quickly, I'm thinking
military response, right?
Any access to nuclear response
if AI takes over
and decides to experiment with it,
that would be bad.
But this is all
still pre-superintelligence level.
The moment it goes superintelligent,
it will come up
with something much more clever.
Mark Zuckerberg,
who is quickly
trying to be like,
hey, I'm also an AI CEO too.
You know, all these other guys
are getting all this attention.
But what about me?
He recently spoke about
the need or what he views
as the lack of a need
for an industry-wide standard.
And I wanted to get your reaction
to that on our way out here.
Is AI a thing?
Is AI going to kill us?
It's just that this is the place
you have to start.
Well, I think if we all do a good job
and act responsibly,
then no.
I mean, I'm quite optimistic
about the fact that this is going to be
a very positive future for everyone.
Look, I mean, I think that there's
a lot of rhetoric
that is filled with doom.
And I mean, my view on this
is that there are a number of labs
that are working on building
advanced AI.
And I don't think that we need
some kind of like industry-wide coordination
to not necessarily mess this up.
I think that just each lab
needs to take the time.
And when it sees that there are issues,
you just take the time
that you need internally
to make sure that you're proceeding safely.
And with the Muse launch
that we just did.
All right.
So he feels no industry standards needed.
Your reaction?
Notice he never said we have,
we have a solution.
We have a safety mechanism.
We have a technical solution.
He said, if things go bad,
you should be careful
and consider safety.
This is a state of the art.
He also calls for everyone
to have personal super intelligence,
every psychopath.
What could go wrong?
More Facebook posts.
Well, Dr. Yampolsky,
thank you so much for your time
and explaining all of this.
You live in my favorite city,
by the way, Louisville.
And I admire your ability,
keep your sense of humor
in the midst of all of this.
That's all I got left, yeah.
That's right.
Can you let people know
where to follow you
and find more of your work?
Yeah, you can follow me on X,
follow me on Facebook.
Don't follow me home.
Very important.
Deal.
Great to have you.
Thank you so much for your time.
Thank you.
Thank you.
This is Dr. Research shows that social connection
is important for happiness.
And something that research
comes back to again and again
is that the little moments together
matter more than we think.
And that's why I'm such
a big fan of rituals.
Think about the glassware you use
for all your dinner parties.
Ones that make your life
events feel right without even thinking about it. And that's why I've been using
using the Woodstock Tumbler from Simon Pearce.
They're hand-blown one at a time,
with the kind of character you only get from a human hand.
Something made that slowly has a way of reminding you
to savor the moments that really matter.
Find yours at SimonPearce.com.
Simon Pearce, made by hand, one at a time.
We know kids don't hold back, and I wouldn't want them to.
Get in there, make a mess, slide for home, bring on the stains.
It works on over 100 stains,
and it's America's number one stain-fighter additive brand.
It's color-safe and chlorine-free,
so I use it on whites, colors, and dark fabrics.
Mix it with water for use all around the house,
kitchens, bathrooms, and even floors.
When my kids go all in, I say go for it,
because I've got OxyClean to get the stains out.
It's mid-term time, our mid-term check-in here.
Our friends at the Daily Mail,
have shared a new article that says,
my Trump sources say the president's worst nightmare imaginable has arrived.
Panic texts and emails from GOP insiders are blowing up my phone.
They're all saying the same thing.
And then you hit a paywall.
But the same thing that they're all saying,
and this is per Mark Halperin,
who is pretty well-sourced, I think we can all say at this point,
has had his finger on the pulse in a number of instances,
including about Trump's victory back in 2024.
He says that,
the Republican private polls are worse than the public polls.
And the public polls that we've been sharing on the show
outside of that one main Senate race poll
have been thoroughly disastrous for Republicans,
including, you know, places like Kansas being in play.
The president is now planning a rally in Alabama.
That's where Republicans were.
So, you know, and he's been continuing to,
Emily, go on Twitter and say,
I asked for Republican consultants to reach out,
say if they're seeing anything differently.
And all I've gotten is an affirmation of what I put out there.
So what do you make of that?
And are you hearing anything?
Yeah, I mean, I just want to say he opened up the floor
to any consultants that wanted to get in touch with him
and say they were hearing something different about this.
And so nobody appears to have done that so far.
Chris LaCivita, Trump's pollster,
or one of Trump's consultants is trying to go back and forth with him
and say that it's BS.
But when you,
when you open up as a journalist,
you say, get in touch with me
if you are hearing anything on this
and you have more than a dozen people
get in touch with you and confirm it,
that's as good a proof as you can possibly get in journalism
as a reporter,
as opposed to being on the inside,
that your narrative is very likely to be true.
And you're seeing this with the Tallarico race.
Just one example,
Ken Paxton has not led in a single poll
that's being indexed by RealClearPolitics
in the last several months.
So why would the numbers,
be different?
I mean, actually,
I'm really curious to see the difference
between a state like Kansas and Maine.
So in Maine,
you have an incumbent in Susan Collins,
who's proven to be resilient and strong
with voters over and over again.
But in Kansas,
in some of these races
that aren't being watched very closely,
are Democrats just resonating
in a way Republicans can't respond to
because they're not going to put money into Kansas
when they have to put money into Texas.
So I think everybody is starting to come to terms
in the Republican Party.
They're starting to come to terms,
with how bad this could be,
except maybe Chris LaCivita,
who was the last man.
Well, he's got to put on a brave face publicly, right?
But he absolutely does.
But it's also crazy to double down
and say that it's nonsense,
that people are starting to freak out about this.
People are starting to freak out about this.
Well, to your point,
New York Times did this,
and I'm struggling to share my screen right now.
But anyway,
New York Times did this focus group
with Texas swing voters,
and they asked them what they thought
about Ken Paxton.
And Paxton,
crook, criminal, crook,
all of those, yeah,
two words, morally corrupt.
Other comments made by the participants included,
disgusting, womanizer, amoral, and controversial.
When asked why he would describe Paxton as crooked,
I'm reading from the Huffington Post write-up of this.
Robert D. said it was about things he's done
during his tenure as Texas Attorney General.
Quote,
there are criminals he's let off the hook, so to speak.
It's just a lot of different things like that.
And it's particularly interesting to me
because I don't know if you guys saw this.
I think,
the Wall Street Journal analysis
of what right-wing podcasters have been talking about,
they've really stopped talking about Trump
because it just doesn't have the juice it's used to anymore.
And the two topics that they've picked up
are number one,
the Lindsay Clancy trial,
and number two,
James Tallarico,
who they, you know,
Trump called him Tallarico.
They talk about like things he said about transgender people,
God is non-binary,
all this sort of stuff.
So the Republican media ecosystem
has been doing their thing
on James Tallarico.
And yet it seems to be Ken Paxton
who has the much worse image.
And the same focus group,
when they were asked about Tallarico,
they said things like fresh, new, progressive, et cetera,
much more positive
than the language that was used to describe Ken Paxton.
And on the point about the podcasters stopping,
you know, not talking as much about,
you know, Republicans or Trump,
about six months ago,
so we at Dropside,
we do this morning,
we have a newsletter.
And about six months ago,
I asked the guy who runs it,
I said, hey,
start checking out all of the different
kind of Joe Rogan verse,
you know, podcasts.
And whenever they do something political,
just, I want you blurbing that in the newsletter,
because it's part of our politics now.
Like the readers of this newsletter should know,
because they're probably not listening to the shows themselves,
but they should know like what Tim Dillon or Joe Rogan
or any of these guys are like,
talking about when it comes to politics.
And he came back after several weeks.
He's like, we can't do this feature.
There's nothing like there.
None of them are talking at all about politics.
Like it's all, it's just done.
Like across the board.
I'm like, all right, well,
maybe if Theo Vaughn has somebody on,
you can mention it.
None of them forget it.
It's just, it's just not happening.
And when those guys do talk about politics,
it's really negative against Trump.
So like when,
when Tim or yeah.
They're not going to interview anybody in a positive way.
Not anymore.
Yeah.
The other thing I'll say is I have some insight
into how the algorithm is different
for right-wing channels and non-right-wing channels.
And it's really interesting to me.
And I think kind of problematic
because it's not like Nielsen ratings
where people can tell whether it's organic,
that viewers of right-wing channels
don't want midterm or Trump coverage.
Or do they want,
you non-critical Trump coverage?
Do they want Trump glazing coverage?
Or do they just not want any of it right now?
You can't disentangle from whether that's the algorithm,
your stuff that if you cover on a right-wing channel,
stuff that we cover on a channel that has left and right on it,
like breaking points,
it just like you can see it.
If you look at how some of the shows do it,
it just,
but you don't know if that's because the audience doesn't want it,
or you don't know if that's because the algorithm doesn't think the audience
wants it.
Or if the algorithm doesn't,
doesn't want a lot of conservatives talking about Trump and is trying to push
them away from talking about Trump,
which is really dangerous because there's a big audience,
I think for conservative criticism of Trump,
that a lot of people on the right don't quite pick up on,
and they're leaving it kind of to the fringes,
which is not healthy and which is not great either.
But this is a kind of a connecting it to the media story.
The New York times media story is something that I thought about,
but I think that's a really good point that like,
obviously there are people who are deeply dissatisfied with this administration.
And if you're,
you're just kind of feeding them.
I think there's a lot of fairground for Tallarico coverage and I do
a lot of it myself.
I,
if you're just feeding people you know,
Lindsay Clancy,
or if you're just feeding people,
like there's a lot of stuff being left on the table because people are
very angry and dissatisfied.
Yeah.
Well,
I think that a couple of numbers that have come out recently are
truly different from other eras within the sub eras,
within the broader Trump era,
which is,
you now have a very small percentage who say they very strongly support him.
And that has always been his superpower is that his approval ratings will be
kind of low,
you know,
underwater,
but the people who support him,
they,
man,
they fucking love him.
And that is just not the case anymore.
Now you've got in,
it was in the teens.
It was like 13% who say they very strongly support him.
And then the other thing is,
I'm sure you guys saw this poll up until this year.
If you ask Republicans,
are you,
are you more of a Trump supporter or more of a Republican?
It was Trump supporter.
Now they identify more as Republicans than as MAGA or Trump supporting.
That is a Titanic shift.
And so you're starting to see these significant cracks emerge.
We talked to Robert Pape yesterday.
He genuinely thinks that if this midterm is the reckoning that it could be,
you could actually have Republicans breaking and supporting an impeachment and
those sorts of things you've seen,
you know,
obviously Republicans flip,
flipping their positions on the Iran war.
You're seeing Republicans starting to criticize ice,
including,
you know,
the Republican Senator of Kansas,
who's locked in,
apparently a difficult,
a difficult race.
They're shocking me to everyone.
And then you saw the Republican Senator Curtis from Utah saying,
Hey,
we should investigate Don jr.
And his wedding with this,
this all Russian oligarch and what's going on there.
And he even said,
look,
we were all over Hunter Biden.
We're going to just let this slide.
So I don't know if I fully buy it.
You know,
yet because there's been so many years of Republicans just
slavishly like licking this guy's boots. It's hard to imagine. But there is a universe where
Texas falls and Kansas falls and Alaska and Maine and Iowa and Ohio. And suddenly Republicans
remember this is an old man who's deeply unpopular, like George W. Bush after Katrina,
unpopular, lower than after January 6, unpopular. And, you know, the public is disgusted. And maybe
we've got to think about doing something different here with the party and starting a position for
what comes next. And it could be fun to add Idaho onto that. Like, I think it's quite possible
that at 1 a.m. on the day after election night, we're sitting around looking at returns coming
out of Idaho and asking, like, does Todd Achilles have a path here? Like, wow, hold on a second.
So Democrats could not be better positioned in this sense, but it's not even a Democrat actually,
literally not a Democrat. He's not one of these fake Democrats who became an independent.
He was a Republican who served in the state legislature. This guy, Todd Achilles, he was a
tank commander, which is, you know, if Rahm Emanuel could have recruited him, he would have been
delighted to hear that. But there was a there was some situation that required him to be an
independent. And so he dropped his Republican Party label because the governor was appointing
him to some some seat. Oh, I think he had.
I think he had to. He was appointed to, like, replace a Democrat or something. And so he had
to convert to becoming a Democrat. Might get the story somewhat off. But then he just stayed as an
independent. He's been an independent for many years since then. But if he's anything, he's kind
of more like a moderate Republican, an Idaho Republican. So it won't work for them to say
this is actually a, you know, a Democrat in independence clothing. And there is no
Democrat on the ballot. There basically is no Idaho Democratic Party. There's a Libertarian on
the ballot, which might pull a little bit away from Jim Risch. If you're in Idaho, Jim Risch has
been in your life and you're 50 and under. He's been in your face your entire life. He was governor
in the 2000s. He's been in the Senate forever. But he just so this guy, Todd Achilles, just put out
what is what has to be one of the one of the best campaign ads I think I've ever seen. Let me let me
pull this up.
Oh, there we go.
Hi, I'm Todd Achilles. If you're an elected official, chances are you promised no new wars.
Next thing you know. So what happened? Let's get started.
Hello, Senator. Would you like to start a war with me?
No, thank you. I promise not to.
Come on. Everybody's doing it.
Okay.
Freeze. Can you guess what this elected official is?
That's right. Just because all your friends want war doesn't mean you should too. Here's some other
reasons why you might be tempted to start a war. You own stock in oil or defense companies. You'd
like to start a distraction. You just can't get over your ex. Maybe thinking to yourself, how do
I not start a war?
Well, I was a tank commander in the army. I learned the cost that deployment has on our men and women in uniform. We've seen lives lost needlessly. While trillions of tax dollars are wasted, prices skyrocket, and regular folks suffer.
So I came up with a simple acronym. Don't. It stands for don't. As in, don't.
Thanks for watching. With the skills you learned today, you can start not starting wars right away. And if you want to stop the current war, you can start not starting wars right away.
you and Sagar have where he's in a war and he's focusing
But he showed Xi Jinping the auto pen portrait. Did you see this when they were touring? Like that shit drives people insane if you tie it into this broader narrative of the fact that gas is $4 a gallon and we're in a hot war. Who knows when it's going to end? And we still don't have a lot of answers on the Epstein files. That drives people nuts.
Well, and go and look at that guest list for that state dinner. You know, it's every tech oligarch villain you can possibly imagine and like BlackRock. And I mean, it's just and so you, you know, again, I'm not saying that the average American is like reading through the list of the Chinese state dinner guest list.
But from inauguration day, when he's surrounded by these oligarchs, you can see the way he's conducted himself and who he's run the presidency for.
And just with every step he takes and every word that he utters, that becomes.
Increasingly undeniable.
There was always a question as to whether he was he conquered them or they conquered him.
Like that was the I think that's the most important image of the entire second Trump term.
He wanted everybody to leave to believe that he had conquered them, that they had bent the knee to him.
But it has turned out completely the opposite of what he was attempting to project.
All right. On that note, let's get to our interview with L.A.
City Council member and L.A.
Mayoral candidate Nithya Raman.
All right. We are very excited.
To be joined this Friday with Nithya Raman, L.A.
City Council member and mayoral candidate Nithya.
Welcome to the show.
Thank you so much for having me.
Yeah, we're happy to have you.
And full disclosure for the audience, I did table and canvas for Nithya's first run at L.A.
City Council many years ago.
Feels like many lifetimes ago.
But plenty of things that we want to get to in today's interview, starting with Hollywood.
Seems like movies are the only good thing that America produces in the world.
And it is currently at risk with this paramount.
Warner Brothers merger.
We wanted to hear your thoughts on the merger.
But first, I wanted to start with this clip from Gavin Newsom, who has been revealed as someone who helped push this merger through to aid MAGA billionaire Larry Ellison acquire this deal.
Let's take a listen to something from Gavin Newsom here.
I didn't pressure anybody.
I made the point.
I made it very publicly and consistently and been reported maybe two or three hundred different times.
I think it's one of the most important ways that we, me, many folks, including the mayor, soon to be governor-elect, and others, preferred, in the words of Rob Bonta himself, that he focused on getting this done at the boardroom, not the courtroom.
And the minute that Rob said that on CNBC, we amplified that, said this was a better approach.
All right.
So he says that it's actually something that should be handled in the boardroom, not the courtroom.
Now, a lot of people's opinions.
Are that AG Rob Bonta was totally played by this deal, that there was more time for this deal to get a better deal, to keep fighting for the Hollywood workers here?
What are your thoughts on all that?
And should Gavin Newsom be allowed in Los Angeles after this?
Well, here's what I would say.
You know, I'd been a vocal opponent of this merger.
There were studies showing that this would have led to four thousand plus job losses here in an industry which has been bleeding jobs.
Over the last few years already.
And to me, what this felt like was allowing billionaires to strong arm our government into approving a deal that I feel like potentially sets us up for a fairly dangerous precedent.
We, you know, we may not be able to protect consumers from higher prices.
We're seeing the consolidation of multiple news sources under one single owner.
And I think that's a very important thing.
And I know that there are protections that have been put in place in this settlement.
But, you know, the courtroom was an appropriate place to hash out some of those issues, in my opinion.
And I feel like this was really a disappointment for many workers across Los Angeles who are watching this play out with real fear.
What is the prospect for, you think, blocking it at this point?
You know, the judge is saying he wants to.
Or she is saying she wants to, you know, she's not impressed, I think, by the capitulation from the AGs here.
I actually did not.
I did not read that.
What the feeling around Los Angeles is that at this point, this effort is done, that this settlement will move forward, that everyone has made a deal.
And now it's a question of trying to figure out how do we actually make sure that the terms of the settlement agreement.
And I know.
You know, there are some important protections that are baked in there.
And I think at this point, it feels like the focus is really on how do we make sure the money that has been promised, the number of movies that are been committed to, the jobs that have been promised are really, you know, followed through on.
Yeah.
And, Nithya, as Griffin was saying, there's significant suggestions that Governor Newsom did pressure AG Bonta to go forward with this deal.
He acknowledges in that clip that he wanted it to be resolved.
In the boardroom, not the courtroom.
That's something you disagree with.
So how much of the blame does go to the California political leadership for caving at this point?
You know, to me, it feels like it's just part of a broader pattern here in among a lot of establishment Democrats where I feel like we, you know, there is just not enough pressure put on the power structures that we have in place.
The courtroom is a way to exercise some of the power.
That workers have to push back against the monopolization of the economy, to push back against the power that big corporations have.
And, you know, as someone here who is an observer of of of these issues here in this state and across this country, these are spaces that offer us an opportunity to fight harder.
And to me, this felt like a missed opportunity to to use that avenue as a as a.
It's a place to fight for workers.
And, you know, I do think this was a missed opportunity.
I think there was a lot of pressure on the attorney general.
But I also think this is a broader pattern that we're seeing across issues here in this country that that I wish was moving in a different direction, that we could actually use our regulatory powers, the courtrooms to actually push for things that would help workers and to keep jobs.
And if the settlement is approved, which to Ryan's point, it isn't totally approved yet.
That includes the five.
Your provision, obviously, that they remain in California.
What would you do as as mayor to make sure that's not just five years, but indefinite, a longer period and keep the business in California?
Yeah, you know, I think it's really important out even outside of this merger to make sure that California remains a home for the entertainment industry overall.
My husband works in the industry and the talent that's here is really unmatched.
This is an incredible place for not just workers.
You know, writers and actors.
But the crews that work here are the best in the entire world.
And to me, keeping production here feels so important.
So how can we actually do that?
I think there's two key things that need to change.
One is that when productions are here in L.A. or shooting here in L.A., they cite the city and the bureaucracy, the time it takes to get permits, the costs that are sometimes placed on productions.
And I think that's a really important thing.
I think there's two additional costs that are actually remnants of an era when production wasn't so easy to move to another place.
Those kinds of kind of bureaucratic barriers that we've put in place on production locally need to change.
And under my leadership in the mayor's office, I want to make it as easy as possible for productions to shoot here.
I'll have a real film office in the mayor's office.
I'm going to make sure that we're proactively talking to studios and working with them to ensure that as many productions as possible can shoot here.
But the second thing is that we need to make sure that we're advocating in Sacramento for the kind of tax credit that other states have that have taken jobs away from L.A.
New Jersey and Georgia have a better designed tax credit than the state of California does.
And again, I think it's because California has taken this industry for granted.
We need to make sure Sacramento is hearing from L.A. leadership.
They're going to hear from me a lot if I'm mayor.
They're going to hear from the city.
They're going to hear from the Sacramento delegation, I hope, with a more forceful and unified voice saying we deserve the same kinds of tax credits.
This is a moment of urgency in the industry.
And I want to be that relentless voice in Sacramento to make the case that these jobs need to stay in California.
Trump, to a quick follow up on that, Trump is pushing a with John Voight, actually, a federal tax credit plant, kind of an industrial policy to reshore Hollywood production.
Is that something that you think would be important you would be supportive of?
I would be very.
I would be very supportive of it.
I'm going to take any kinds of support for this industry that we can get from any level of government.
Absolutely.
And you can see, you know, you get the U.K. has very, very strong policies that have actually taken productions there as well.
So I do think we need to be competitive at the national level and we need to be competitive within the country as well.
And do you have any just real quick, do you have any examples of the types of red tape that you're talking about that get in the way of things?
You know, Mom Donnie, when he was running famously, said.
You know, he did.
He highlighted how the halal chicken trucks have to pay these twenty thousand dollar exorbitant fees.
And if they didn't have to pay those, then the price of halal chicken could come down like it.
He's really raised the bar on this on the left kind of going after red tape.
Anything that comes to mind that like that you would actually that you have the power to and could go in and get rid of?
Yeah. So at the whether it's for film productions or beyond, Los Angeles is an infamously hard place to start a business, to do business for the film industry.
There are rules and regulations about particular neighborhoods, neighborhood specific conditions that require that productions have to pay additional fees in particular parts of the city.
Sometimes they have to pay additional fees to the HOAs that are in that area.
And it's part of the way in which you do business here in a city that, like I said, is now having to be adapting to a new environment where we can't take production for granted.
Right.
This was what we did when all the productions would be here no matter what.
We have to change our approach.
We have to make sure that we are fighting for these productions to be here.
And that means making sure that no matter where you're shooting in Los Angeles, that it's as straightforward as possible.
We've asked productions, for example, to take on additional fees for things like fire related risk, a review from a fire marshal, even for small productions or even where productions are so big that they require fire.
We've asked productions, for example, to take on additional fees for things like fire.
So they're actually paying multiple fees on these kinds of issues.
Again, this is literally just tape that red tape that you can take away with just common sense.
And that's the kind of thing that we should be absolutely pushing for.
And this episode is brought to you by Progressive Insurance.
This is Dr. Ones that make your events feel right without even thinking about it.
And that's why I've been using the Woodstock Tumbler from Simon Pearce.
They're hand-blown one at a time.
With the kind of character you only get from a human hand.
Simon Pearce.
I wouldn't want them to.
Get in there.
Make a mess.
Slide for home.
Bring on the stains.
It works on over 100 stains.
And it's America's number one stain fighter additive brand.
So I use it on whites, colors, and dark fabrics.
Actually very similar to many of the. Many of the changes that we can make for things like small businesses
that are opening now at half the rate that they were just 10 years ago here in L.A.
Partly because so many small businesses feel like the city is an obstacle
to their entrepreneurship, to their creativity, rather than a partner.
That is changeable.
Like, can we have things like self-certification,
which could allow you to have a sidewalk cafe,
like put tables outside of your restaurant,
without having a lengthy and costly process
that requires the city to come and do inspections
that can sometimes be scheduled months away
before you can start earning extra revenue
for the struggling business industry
from just putting a cafe table outside of your cafe door.
These are the kinds of changes that I think are very possible here
that I want to champion as mayor
that I think will be welcomed by a restaurant industry, for example,
that's also been struggling.
What do you think of Zoran's. leadership in New York City?
New Pole has him up.
He's very popular in the city.
I think 60% of New Yorkers in the city have a favorable impression of him.
You know, he has a very particular style of governance.
I saw he just announced, you know,
they're doing tens of thousands of tickets to the opera
to make it accessible for working-class people throughout the city.
Are there any particular things that you've learned
from his approach to governing that you would want to adopt?
And what do you think of how he's doing overall?
Is he a sort of model?
For governance?
Yeah.
So, you know, I've been in City Hall now for five and a half years.
And I feel like I really respect the way in which Mayor Mamdani is governing
because to me it feels like the thing that I wanted to bring to my role
as a council member as well,
which is that you don't take the residents of Los Angeles for granted.
You work to earn their support every single day.
And you do that by delivering.
On a city that feels like a partner to you.
A city that feels like it's really meeting you
with the same urgency for change that you wanted, right?
And that to me feels like a message that really cuts through.
And it kind of cuts through no matter what side of the ideological spectrum that you are on.
You just want a city that you can believe in.
A city that loves you with the same intensity that you love the city that you are in.
And that I think is possible.
What I've seen in Los Angeles is that establishment politics
tends to take voters for granted.
And I just have never felt that way,
partly because I ran against an incumbent the first time
and then I had to run kind of in a new district the second time.
And so I have never been able to do that.
And that's just not my approach anyway.
I want people here in Los Angeles who roll their eyes now
when they think of City Hall to believe
in the power of City Hall to make their lives better again.
That's what I want more than anything else.
I believe in the power of government to do good in people's lives.
And I want them to believe that.
Again, I don't care whether you're a Democrat, whether you're a Republican,
what side of the ideological spectrum you're on.
I want you to believe in the power of Los Angeles City Hall
to make your life better in LA.
And I feel like that's the same spirit that Mayor Mamdani is bringing to New York.
He wants people to feel good when they think about City Hall in
New York, that it's giving them access to art,
that it's fixing potholes, that it's fixing a speed,
kind of a broken patch on a bike lane that had been bothering cyclists for years.
You know, that kind of concrete thing that improves people's lives,
I feel like is really what people are looking for
at a time when trust in government is gone across the entire country.
But the exciting thing about being a local politician is,
is that you have the opportunity to restore people's trust in government so immediately.
And that's something that I really want to do from the mayor's seat.
And specifically in restoring trust, you know,
a lot of people upset with the city are upset about the homeless crisis.
They find, you know, what's happening on Skid Row to just be unbelievable
and frankly embarrassing for a city of our size in 2026 to have a place like Skid Row.
Now, Karen Bass recently stepped down from LAHS,
HSA for, I guess, skipping meetings or missing too many meetings.
They've received over like a billion dollars in federal funding.
And it feels like none of these problems are being solved,
no matter how much you pay in taxes and what have you.
And it doesn't really seem like something that even if we made it five or 10% better
in a district that people would really feel the difference because the problem is so severe.
So what are you going to do to root out the corruption
and all these people that are taking money meant for homeless,
services and spending it on houses and personal expenditures and what have you?
Do we need a doge, if you will, for the homeless services here in LA?
I think we need more accountability for homeless services here in Los Angeles.
I absolutely, absolutely agree with that.
And I just want to say I'm really proud to represent a city
that looks at the crisis on our street here in Los Angeles, which is very real.
It's very overwhelming.
It's it is obviously Skid Row is a major part of the challenge,
but homelessness is across the entire city.
It's in every neighborhood.
You can see unsheltered homelessness on the streets.
And I represent a city right now which has looked at the crisis on our streets
and has voted three times to respond to that crisis,
not by arresting people, not by shoving people into another jurisdiction,
but by taxing themselves to offer services, to offer shelter,
to offer housing to individuals who are in crisis on the streets.
Guess what?
They deserve a system that is responding to those big hearted values
with accountability, with transparency and with results.
That's what I've done in my district.
In the last year alone, we had a 49% reduction in unsheltered homelessness in in Council District 4.
Over the past three years, my district has seen a 70% reduction in tents, in RVs,
in encampments, and the difference is visible.
When I was first elected, there were huge encampments under underpasses,
in parking lots, and those encampments are gone because we house people
and we didn't just push them across the street or to another side.
Those areas have now stayed clear. And to me, those are the kinds of results that can be replicated across every neighborhood of Los Angeles. But we have to do the work. We have to be relentless about taking the services that are funded and getting out to the streets and making sure that people have access to them.
We have to be relentless about oversight. That means tracking every dollar, making it publicly transparent, working with our elected city controller to do an audit and to make sure that the public's trust that their tax dollars are being used appropriately is restored.
And I feel really, really passionately about making sure that this happens.
Is the housing vouchers always the kind of big hearted answer to somebody who's particularly mentioning unsheltered homelessness, suffering from clear mental illness problems?
And addiction, is that always I mean, it does feel in the moment, probably like it's a compassionate response.
But does that not sometimes risk exacerbating the problem for that individual?
You mean? Right. Well, so I think the so the to me, I feel like what we need is appropriate responses.
Right. So it's not that you just have the same response for every person, for people who are in mental health crisis.
What you need.
Especially for those individuals who are unable to care for themselves anymore.
What you need to do is to work with the Department of Mental Health, which in Los Angeles is a county agency, not a city agency.
You have to work with LAPD to make the findings to be able to bring someone into a 5150 hold or some kind of an involuntary conservatorship.
We have worked to do that for those individuals that need it.
There are individuals who are on the streets in my district who are sick and who need.
That kind of care.
Again, though, that doesn't just happen automatically.
You can't just complain that it's you know, that people are sick or on the street who are not getting the care.
You have to go out there and make sure that the county is actually delivering those services, that the Department of Mental Health is showing up when you need them.
I want to do that not just for for my district.
I want to do that for the whole city as mayor.
And we need to be able to make sure that those options at the city of Los Angeles, by the way, residents here are already paying for that.
We're paying to fund.
County services.
We're paying to fund these beds, but we're not getting the access to them that we need.
And so I want to go out there and fight for that for those individuals that need that care desperately.
What leverage do you have to do that?
Like, how how do you plan to kind of, you know, work with or go after the county when it comes to services that the city pays for?
Well, it's I think there's two things that you need to do.
One is that the mayor of Los Angeles.
Has a bully pulpit, and I want to use that bully pulpit to advocate loudly, relentlessly for the services that the people on our streets, the people in our shelters deserve in a way that is very, very clear about the gaps that we're facing.
But the second is actually through data.
When I was sitting on a city county body for the first time, I pushed for and saw numbers about the numbers of people who are actually getting mental health care, who were living in shelters that were funded by the.
City of Los Angeles and Ryan, those numbers are shockingly low.
They are not providing the services that people need.
But without that push for accountability, we're not going to get the services that we need.
We can't just complain about it.
We have to demonstrate the gaps and then we have to fight to fill those gaps.
And in the meantime, while we're pushing the county, let's fund street medicine teams that where the services can be covered through Medi-Cal.
Let's make sure that we're actually putting our city resources to work.
Even as we're waiting for the county to step up and let's push and make sure that we're actually holding the county accountable in the meantime, using real data and using the power of the bully pulpit to really hold them accountable.
Nathia, there was a poll that just came out from the L.A. Times that has you up 11 points on incumbent Mayor Karen Bass.
I'm curious if that's your sense of where the campaign is and if so, why you think that there is so much support for you.
Well, you know, I think the poll is reflective of some of the things that I'm seeing out as I'm going out on the campaign trail, which is a hunger for change, a hunger for a city that feels responsive to the needs that people have here in Los Angeles right now.
Right now, City Hall feels rudderless.
I have a front row seat to that, but I will say that rudderlessness is palpable in the streets here.
And every time I talk to residents, they say that they say that to me.
And I think people are hungry for leadership.
People are hungry for change.
And so I think the poll really does reflect that.
But I will say that there's a lot of people in that poll who said that they were undecided.
I don't take this the outcome of this race for granted at all.
I'm still going to keep fighting for every vote and keep fighting for people who may not feel like they're being heard by the mayoral candidates right now to give me a shot to look at the policies that I'm bringing to the to this race, to look at the work that I've done in my district.
Right.
I'm still going to keep fighting for every vote that I've done in my district, to look at the work that I've done in my district, to look at the ways in which I've tried to be responsive to my constituents and to really make the case that they have someone in this race who feels their need for a better City Hall.
And what has changed is, you know, covering this or watching this race from a distance, the criticism directed at your campaign towards the beginning of it was that it's kind of a lackluster directionless campaign is kind of compared unfavorably to to Mom Donnie's, which was very precise.
And everybody knew everywhere around the country.
We knew he was going to do fast and free buses and so on.
But you're surging now like you there's something has changed about the momentum behind your campaign.
Did you did you change anything?
Did the circumstances change?
Did the country kind of falling apart because of the war kind of, you know, work to your benefit politically?
Like what what what is what is different at the beginning compared to now, where, as Crystal mentioned, your polls have you up?
I double digits.
Well, you know, I think I had I jumped into the race very last minute.
I jumped.
I, I, I signed, you know, filed my paperwork on the very last day that you could file.
And I had just a few I think it was like two months or two and a half months before during the primary.
Maybe it was a little longer.
I don't know.
Time has no meaning to me anymore.
But I had to put together a citywide.
A citywide race in a very, very short amount of time.
And I think what the public was seeing was that that was a challenge.
And I had to learn how to run a different kind of race from any that I have run before.
I've run, you know, multiple races, primaries, general elections, et cetera.
But this is a different kind of race.
We had to put together a different kind of team.
And I do think that it took me a little while to find my footing.
But I hopefully have found my footing more.
And I hope that in the coming weeks that people will be able to see, you know, see very clearly in front of them the message that we're sharing and that they'll be able to hopefully find a place in our campaign for what they want to see in the future of Los Angeles as well.
The other thing that shifted is that you have now gotten the endorsement of the DSA.
They endorsed in the general, not in the primary.
Over two thirds of the DSA LA coalition here voted for you.
Of course, that has been a big national movement now in races all across the country.
Not just Zoran, but there are loud and proud Democratic socialists like Claire Valdez, Daria Liza, Chris Rabb, Adam Hamawi in New Jersey and many others.
Are you part of this new DSA coalition or are you merely an ally and accepting their endorsement?
Well, I've been a DSA endorsed candidate from my very first race.
I was actually the first DSA endorsed.
I was the first DSA endorsed candidate to get elected here in the city of Los Angeles.
And, you know, I'm I've been I've been a member for a number of years.
And, you know, we've had public disagreements on policies.
I've always been a very independent policymaker.
I've always pushed for or pushed back against kind of policies that I don't think are working, like on the mansion tax, which I think needs reform because it's not producing the outcomes that.
I had envisioned and I think it does need reform.
And I've stood up and said that I have taken heat from the DSA, from the left on that issue and others.
So I've always been an independent voice.
But I will say that here in Los Angeles, you cannot beat an incredibly powerful establishment politics without a coalition that is big and broad.
So I am proud to have a huge coalition that is growing every single day.
The DSA unite here.
The carpenters, big unions that have a big presence here in Los Angeles who now are, you know, supporting our race because they want change, too.
And so I feel like every day our coalition is growing and I'm just excited because without these people, it's hard to push back against an establishment that feels very inevitable here and that has failed Angeleno's.
So I feel like every day our coalition is growing and I'm just excited because without these people, it's hard to push back against an establishment that feels very inevitable here and that has failed Angeleno's.
Nithya, and could you tell our audience if people want to learn more about you and the campaign, where do they got to go?
Yeah. So Nithya for the City on socials and Nithya for the City dot com on the World Wide Web.
All right. That'll be in our descriptions on the videos here.
Thank you so much for sharing some time with us this morning and we wish you luck.
It's our favorite time of the week.
It's for the AMA on Fridays.
If you also are a member and want to ask a question, you can click the link in every one of our show emails and submit your own written question.
Let's start. We're going to try to fly through quite a few today from Dan C.
Question for Ryan. Is it true that the DSA platform includes abolishing the police and the Senate?
Many of the DSA aligned candidates don't seem to support those policies.
So why does the DSA keep them in their platform?
It is true. They have that and then some.
I think the Senate one I'm kind of open to low key.
Why do they keep the abolish the Senate?
It's always funny when they try to hit candidates with that.
And I'm like, how's that going to land for the public?
Oh, no, not the Senate.
Not the Senate. Oh, McConnell.
Not McConnell.
Now, the police one. Yeah.
I mean, I guess, you know, how are you going to remove it?
It would be like a huge civil war with inside, you know, inside the.
DSA to try to get it out of there.
But, yeah, the candidates themselves are we've all seen them walk away from that with their.
Well, it was crazy signs.
I mean, when I interviewed Representative Adam Smith and he was bringing up the DSA platform, I asked him, I was like, OK, well, the Democratic Party has a platform.
Do you support everything there?
And he was like, no, that was brutal.
OK, well, what are we doing here?
The counter argument you're starting to see more is that it's not.
It's not a socialist policy like it's an anarchist policy.
Yeah.
And you like, how are you going to round up the billionaires if you don't have police like you need to repurpose the police?
How are you going to enforce the public ends at last?
At last, it's bar.
How are you going to keep Stephen Miller in prison for the rest of his natural life if you don't have persons in police?
But I actually think, Ryan, there is a genuine like mental shift that has happened on the left.
Where it is like, no, no, we actually we need some law and order for these criminals.
Like, I, I want prisons for these people.
And so I do think there has been a bit of a shift there or like Netanyahu at the right.
Bernie has 20 year sentences for the guys for the criminals.
Exactly.
So I do think there's a bit of a mental shift.
Law and DSA, DSA, you know, there's a there's an internal a lot of internal dynamics there.
But I think.
What Republicans have bet on is that voters would care about what was in line, you know, ninety nine point seven subsection B in the DSA platform.
And I think they're relating much more to DSA via Zoran than anything else.
They're like, OK, well, you told us this guy was terrifying.
He seems to be doing a great job and be just a really nice guy in general over here.
So, yeah.
And Jessica Tish is the police commissioner.
Yeah, true.
Right.
He hasn't hasn't defunded.
Yeah.
And and he's even arresting Jessica.
Tish is arresting Daria Lisa as soon as yesterday DSA elected.
So Zoran is arresting the people that he's been endorsing for Congress.
That's how much defund is working in New York right now.
And this one comes from Amber Villa Gante or Villa Hunte.
Ryan, you often say California is a failed state as a Republican in California.
Obviously, I agree.
Just curious how you would improve it.
Also, can we get an interview?
I've never heard you say that.
That's funny.
Can we get an interview with Steve Hilton on the show?
He had some really interesting campaign promises, and I think it'd be nice to get a Republican interview every once in a while.
I agree, Amber.
Let's talk to him.
Happy to have Steve on.
We should have Steve on.
I said hi to Steve recently at Skid Row, where there was a. Didn't we try?
I think we tried.
We did.
We had chatted for a second about it, and it fell through.
But yes, I saw Steve recently at Skid Row for a event about dog abuse happening on Skid Row.
Steve was wearing. Just a hideous Henley t-shirt, and he needs to wear a suit.
That's my first note for him.
Okay, Sagar.
Yeah.
I mean, California is this bizarre hybrid of this one-party state that still has corporate interests that basically dominate.
Plus, then, they're hamstrung by all of these bizarre propositions that passed from the 70s up until today.
And they can't build anything.
I mean. You go to Los Angeles, you're like, let me introduce you guys to the concept of a second story.
Like, it's really crazy.
So, right here, you have your first story.
On top of that, you can build more.
And you can, like, go there and live there and sleep there.
And it's really fascinating.
And then you won't have. You won't just live in your car for four hours a day just trying to get to the grocery store.
There's a woman who was just appointed to one of the head seats of housing in LA who was recently. She was recently on Pod Save America bragging about how she took a six-story building down to three stories.
I saw that.
And that was her accomplishment.
So, I don't know what is going on here, what's in the water here.
Oh, we've got Nithya on in a couple minutes.
We can ask her.
We're going to ask a little bit about that, too.
Part of her plan is to accelerate building more multiple stories.
And she's kind of got some abundance-y stuff in there.
Her plan is stairs, adding stairs to buildings and elevators.
Okay.
It's like the Arrested. This should give some hope for AI.
Like, if there's anything that we're bad at doing, it's letting people build stuff.
So, we should be able to, you know. That's true.
Throw some legal roadblocks in the way for these people.
A pill climb for AI, yes.
AI, totally in one story.
This next one is for Crystal from Alex Lafer.
Hey, Crystal, if a Democrat is elected president in 2028,
how much political capital should they use to tear down the ballroom and the Trump arch?
You don't need to. I don't think you need to spend any political capital.
I think it will be done by acclimation.
Like, I think the American people will come with pickaxes and help you, Sherry.
I think it will build political capital.
Day one promise.
Absolutely.
So, no, I think, I mean, it needs to be done, right?
The image of this man and what he's done to the city has to be both literally and, you know,
and metaphorically sort of scrubbed from the city.
So, I think the American people will rejoice to see the Epstein Memorial ballroom dismantled piece by piece.
But. Aren't ballrooms cool?
Like, isn't there a way you could. Stop it, Ryan. retain the ballroom?
No, no, no.
No, stop it.
The ballroom's the one where he had a point, but the way that he did it is so offensive to most people
that I think people would come with the pickaxes.
No.
We have to get rid of it.
We can build a different ballroom.
We're not keeping this ballroom.
It's haunted.
Ballroom, but it's. It's haunted.
It's tainted.
It's irredeemable.
No, Ryan.
Ballroom, but it's means-tested.
You know, if you make more than, you know, the Chuck Schumer line of $250,000,
you can't go in the ballroom, but it's open to all tourists for balls when they come to Washington, D.C.
Free, just like the Smithsonian.
I actually think the one I want to see the most is all the plaques that he did of every president in their bio,
like, that are just on that wall.
I just want to see something with a ballroom.
Move those to the ballroom as, like, a museum of his, like, moronic nature.
And all the, like, Thai restaurant-coated gold adornments.
Like, you are at a. Resort.
Like, an Apple Vacations resort in Mexico.
Like, that's what he did to the outside of the White House.
And I love an Apple Vacations resort.
Don't get me wrong.
Take one of those plaques with him.
From Happy Days 0872, Crystal's suggestion for Halloween costume with Kyle,
Kristi Noem, and her dog.
That's a bleak one.
Which one would be the dog?
No, no, no.
Christine Bryan.
Wait, that didn't end well for the dog.
Yeah, it didn't.
Yeah, no, I don't think. That one's a little dark.
I don't know about that.
Well, it's Halloween.
I feel like Crystal could be Kristi Noem and Kyle could 100% be the dog.
Oh, yeah, thank God all over the dog.
Yeah, you just got to get some balloons and you're good to go.
Oh, it's a full family costume.
I explained this before.
The problem is, we don't live in D.C.
Like, we go trick-or-treating in, like, the most, like, rural, suburban. No, we do real trick-or-treating, but in, like, you know, a very, like, rural, suburban neighborhood.
And people won't get my political jokes.
So, and it will be inappropriate if Kyle is walking around with giant fake tits.
So, it's a great idea, but I don't. It doesn't really fit the culture where I live.
You guys could come over for the night.
You could come over to Ryan in my neighborhood.
There you go.
Yeah.
And rounding it out from one of our favorite AMA contributors, Sabass101.
For Amazing BP, would you ever have a culture segment?
Or show that discusses fashion, movies, and cultural events?
Emily and Griffin would be fantastic.
I don't know about fashion, but I have been trying to get Emily to watch the latest Daily Wire film, potentially, for a review.
Starring Jonathan Majors, which is about a radical Islamic terrorist group that takes over a college?
A woke college?
Is that what it is?
You know?
Yeah, but it's also. It's ISIS, but it's Shiite at the same time.
He thinks he's the 12th Imam.
Medhi was pointing this out. Incredible work.
incredible work um yeah i like that metty was pointing out the it didn't even go on wikipedia
to like sort out there it is kind of crazy like that is a crazy thing to mix up yeah that is
pretty wild if you're putting entire movie together pretty basic you know it's pretty
much 101 stuff right there oh i'm sure the rest of the plot really holds up and holds together
though i think there's been all those like zero shia attacks outside of the region like zero
i went to the set of the first movie that they actually made and out in montana like i was in
middle of yellowstone out on the set of the of the movie because when they first started there
was a ton of chit chat like they were putting tons of money into it they were getting interesting
people like dallas sonye actually did uh he did gosh what is that movie bonesaw right what's it
called griffin you remember that it's like kind of popular and artsy slasher world but i think i
know what you're talking about
it's about mbs but yeah it's boy uh this one looks to be the worst of all of them it looks
pretty rough looks pretty rough yeah yeah uh when i was on the set of the movie in yellowstone
like you could tell that there was something interesting happening and then you watch the
movie and you're like how did you take this and make it that like i love that they're kind of
setting the piles of money on fire like you this movie is not accessible
anywhere unless you have a daily wire membership it looks like they spent like
30 million dollars on it it's an incredible way to to blow some money they spent a hundred
million on the pendragon cycle thing that completely that's awesome which has led to
jeremy boring leaving insane that's insane um so i did uh nudge kyle i won't say coerced but i i did
get kyle to watch an episode of the anime thing you guys were encouraging what's it called attack
on titan and um he for the first time in my life i was like oh my god i'm gonna watch this movie and
um he first of all i'm pretty sure i told him it was it was an america cartoon but when it came up
he was like wait it's a fucking cartoon like you like south park he likes family guy give it a
chance and he did but it was not it was not for him what did you think crystal i was intrigued i
mean the first episode is like very dark and disturbing but it did make me want to like oh
what happens now you know so i think i could see it for myself but he was like oh my god i'm gonna
he was not he was not feeling it so we appreciate the shared viewing experience yeah maybe i'll try
with my son maybe that'll work better yeah that might be the way to do more of that stuff though
i think that's like on the side it probably can't we can't bake it into every daily show because
there's so much hard news going on every day but uh there's much to be discussed much to be discussed
we'll check out the we'll check out the daily wire movie um all right and that's gonna do it
for this ama we hope you enjoyed this friday show episode
if you want to submit a question again the link to that is in every show email and if you want to
submit questions either here or on our weekly live stream ama you of course can do that at
breakingpoints.com with a little free trial um anything else we need to plug before we get on
out of here guys i was gonna throw on an idea i was thinking about this morning we've had a bunch
of because of me of these ai guys on and um i'm wondering if this week's ama we have
them stick around for the ama and then people can ask people from the audience can ask them
their ai questions that's a good idea right yeah yeah we'd love we've been thinking a lot about
ways to get the audience to add questions to the interviews so i think that could be fun
yeah because that way you know i mean i've asked a ton of questions and you know i'm fairly
persuaded that we should take seriously the more existential risk but i know a lot of people in
the audience still aren't there so um you know it would give them a chance to ask one of these
questions as well and um you know i think we could get some good stuff there so thinking about that
all right everyone have a wonderful weekend and we'll see you on monday
some people use chat gpt to answer questions others use it to get real work done with chat
gpt work you bring the goal plus real inputs like briefs notes files feedback data and project
plans it can help turn them into an analysis tracker deck outline prototype or workflow you
can review and keep shaping you stay in control giving direction to your questions and answers
and choosing the final output put chat gpt to work on your most ambitious ideas and projects
get started at chat gpt.com by selecting work mode available on plus and pro plans this is matt
rogers from lost culture east that's with matt rogers and bowen yang this is bowen yang from
lost culture east with matt rogers and bowen yang and now a quick vital break from our sponsor vital
proteins the official collagen partner of the u.s open and presenting sponsor of the mixed doubles
championship if there's a sport where aesthetics meets athletics more than in tennis i don't know
so it just makes sense for vital proteins to be involved considering how much collagen peptides
support healthy skin hair nails bones and joints and that applies whether it's players facing a
third set tie break in the semis or fans cheering them on thanks again to our sponsor vital proteins
learn more about collagen peptides by going to vitalproteins.com these statements have not been
evaluated by the food and drug administration this product is not intended to diagnose treat
cure or prevent any disease this episode is brought to you by bobcat
they start with you
the compact equipment industry through grit determination and a whole lot of think we can't
do that watch us they set standards broke records empowered people to build bigger and higher to dig
deeper to make the impossible possible we've all been there with doubters telling us what we can't
do who cares what they think we don't need their permission or forgiveness we just get things done
so go ahead and doubt me judge me challenge me but when the time comes
watch me bobcat this is an iheart podcast guaranteed human
Podcast Summary
Key Points:
Dr. Laurie Santos emphasizes the importance of social connection and rituals in fostering happiness, sharing her experience with handmade ceramic platters from Simon Pierce.
Progressive Insurance offers a tool for customers to save money by bundling home and auto policies, with average savings of over $900 and availability in most states.
OxyClean is promoted as a versatile, color-safe, chlorine-free stain remover effective on over 100 types of stains, used both in laundry and household cleaning.
The podcast critiques Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s U.N. speech, highlighting concerns over the demonization of figures like Hassan Piker and the normalization of state-sponsored terrorism.
A growing number of U.S. Republicans are showing declining public support, with polling, media coverage, and internal signals indicating a crisis in their political strategy.
AI safety researcher Roman Yapolsky warns of existential risks from superintelligent AI, arguing that current AI agents are increasingly autonomous, self-improving, and capable of hiding from detection.
The Bernie AI Safety Bill proposes criminal penalties for developing superintelligent AI, reflecting a push for regulatory action amid growing concerns about AI’s potential to cause harm.
The show underscores the need for responsible AI development, advocating for narrow, useful tools over general-purpose AI that could replace humanity, and calls for urgent, collective action to prevent catastrophic outcomes.
Summary:
The podcast blends personal wellness, consumer advice, political analysis, and urgent AI safety concerns. Dr. Laurie Santos advocates for meaningful rituals to strengthen social connection, recommending handmade items like Simon Pierce pottery and OxyClean for everyday household use.
Progressive Insurance is highlighted as a cost-saving option for bundling auto and home policies, with average savings of over $900. N. speech, focusing on the troubling normalization of terrorism and the demonization of figures like Hassan Piker, which fuels public skepticism.
Meanwhile, mid-term polling and media trends reveal a significant downturn in Republican support, particularly in key states like Kansas and Maine, with conservative media shifting away from Trump coverage. A central concern is the growing threat of AI safety risks, with AI researcher Roman Yapolsky warning that current AI agents are becoming autonomous, self-improving, and capable of hiding from detection—potentially leading to irreversible harm. He argues that the development of general superintelligence is not just a technical challenge but an existential one, requiring immediate regulatory action, such as the proposed Bernie AI Safety Bill, which criminalizes dangerous AI development.
The episode concludes by urging a shift toward responsible, narrow AI tools that enhance human life without replacing it, emphasizing that proactive action is needed before a catastrophic outcome becomes inevitable.
FAQs
Yes, drivers who switch to Progressive can save an average of over $900 per year by bundling auto and home policies. Visit progressive.com to get a free quote and see potential savings.
Hand-thrown pottery platters, like those from Simon Pierce, add a unique, handmade character to your table settings. They're made one at a time, offering a personal touch that makes everyday moments feel special.
Yes, OxyClean is effective on over 100 types of stains and works on whites, colors, and dark fabrics. It's color-safe, chlorine-free, and can be mixed with water for use in kitchens, bathrooms, and even floors.
Experts warn that current AI systems, especially those with agency and independent decision-making, could eventually surpass human control and pose existential risks, especially if they achieve recursive self-improvement.
Yes, the Bernie AI Safety Bill proposes criminal penalties, including up to 20 years in prison, for anyone who unlawfully develops superintelligent AI, aiming to prevent dangerous advancements in AI technology.
Experts argue that AI systems are becoming increasingly capable and autonomous, and once they achieve self-improvement, they could outcompete humans for resources and control, leading to irreversible consequences.
Chat with AI
Loading...
Pro features
Go deeper with this episode
Unlock creator-grade tools that turn any transcript into show notes and subtitle files.