9/8/26: Oil Prices Skyrocket, Fmr General Says US Bases Are Gone, Nvidia CEO Says AGI Is Here

This is an "I Heart" podcast, guaranteed human. On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. I can wait 4 hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I choose option B. I'm Julie Pignero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. I'm on a mission to reclaim the word Solita, trading the pity for possibility. Listen to Solita on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Didn't catch the latest Roland Martin unfiltered podcast? Here's what you missed. People wake up and go, "Oh, damn, wait and hold up." They change all of that? Yes. It's real. This is a wholesale attack. It is targeting black people in every federal agency. It's raw. White folks have never allowed that reckoning to last more than a decade. Catch Roland Martin's daily commentary on the black information network. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcasts. Or wherever you get your podcasts. The new NFL season is here and you should be listening to NFL Daily as we march along to Super Bowl 61. It is in the name NFL Daily. You'll have fresh content in your feed every day, all season long. Like game winning drive, maybe it's Herbert, maybe it's Gino, maybe it's Mahomes, we'll have the highlights. If Fernando Mendoza or any of those rookies are ballin' out, we'll break down the tape, join me, Greg Rosenthal, and an all-star cast of co-hosts as we preview and recap every game listen to NFL Daily on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, guys. Saga and Crystal here. Independent media just played a truly massive role in this election and we are so excited about what that means for the future of this show. This is the only place where you can find honest perspectives from the left and the right that simply does not exist anywhere else. So if that is something that's important to you, please go to breakingpoints.com, become a member today and you'll get access to our full shows, Unedited, Add Free, and All put together for you every morning in your inbox. We need your help to build the future of independent news media and we hope to see you at breakingpoints.com. Good morning, everybody happy Tuesday, having an amazing show for everybody today. What do we have, Crystal? Indeed we do. Hope everybody enjoyed the long-labor day weekend and it did not break the bank because it was the most expensive labor day in history at least when it comes to gas prices. So a lot to get into there and no break on the horizon in terms of the rising cost of fuel. We're also going to take a look at what is happening in the straight-up hormones with the front of the show, Sal, he's going to break down the truth from the fiction about how much is getting through and what we can expect moving forward. Opening eye is sounding the alarm about recursive self-improvement and rapidly escalating capabilities of the AI that they themselves are creating. And some are saying that their new model may constitute AGI, we'll dig into those claims and the latest concerns. We've got a new article with shocking new details of John Vetterman's utter callusness and disinterest in actually serving as a United States Senator. And more details too about just how obsessed he is with Israel and Fox News, pretty interesting for a Democratic Senator. AOC is collaborating with Maha activists. This comes as there are growing concerns about the nation's food supply. An author of a new book on Leon Black explains his relationship, Leon Black's relationship, not the author's relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. And also how private equity is eating absolutely everything, it's a very important topic. He digs into this through the lens of Leon Black and Apollo, of course. But the private credit market is really important. We haven't probably talked about it enough. It's very consequential in terms of funding the AI build out and there have been concerns about how shaky it may be. So I'm definitely looking forward to talking to him about all of that. That's right. And we have our AMA live for our premium subscribers. You can go ahead and take advantage of that breakingpoints.com. I'm going to borrow from Ryan. Do it. Don't do whatever you want. He continues to set all time records here on the show. If you want to help me stay face, go ahead and sign up at breakingpoints.com and take advantage of our free month trial that continues record numbers signing up, apparently only for Ryan Grimm. So come on and help me out or don't, you know, whatever. Do whatever you want. In terms of YouTube, please hit subscribe to our YouTube channel. If you listen to the podcast, please share an episode with a friend. But as Crystal said, there are some crazy stuff going on in our oil markets on top of the record price for Labor Day weekend. Let's take a look at where things stand as of exactly right now. We're going to start with this. Let's put it up here on the screen. What we see right now is that the Brent price of oil has now approached nearly $100 per barrel. And this comes on the heels of some new, goofy attacks on Saudi Aramco facilities that have now injured approximately 73 people according to Saudi authorities. I will warn everyone, there is a lot of false video flying around. The reason why we don't have video of the incident is because the Saudis and all of the Gulf States have dramatically cracked down on censorship of video so that we can assess the damage with our own eyes. Let's put that next one up here on the screen. This is from the official Saudi authorities who the attacks on Saudi Arabia have ignited fires at the oil facility and have wounded 73 different people. So the attack was, quote, a major escalation in renewed fighting between the US ally and Iranian proxy group. It has threatened to further destabilize the region rocked by three years now of war and a deliver a new blow to the global economy. This comes on the heels of another strike that happened on Saudi Arabia. Again, over the weekend, Aramco was hit in those new strikes that happened near the Yemeni border and has repeatedly now been targeted by these Houthi rebels in the campaign against Saudi Arabia. We have a full picture again of what exactly type of munitions and that we're used but we do know that this is either authorized by the Iranians or, of course, there's this entire separate conflict between the Saudis and the Houthis that have shut down or at least dramatically curtailed a lot of the oil moving through the Red Sea. All of this combining together for this morning to send the Brent crude price of oil back up to some $100 per barrel which translates roughly to around $4 and 20 cents per gallon at the pump. The reason Crystal, I think it is so important, there are no US munitions flying through the air right now. The last time that we saw the $100 per oil price, it was when there was an active war between the United States and Iran. Not to say we aren't still in an active war but it's a different whenever it's a blockade and we're sinking ships and all that. Don't get me wrong, it's all dramatically important. But it does demonstrate that this continues to creep up and up and up, even without days of sustained bombings, the supply crunch is eventually just going to eat this entire situation and we are now entering that phase of the conflict, inventory is very low, the strategic petroleum reserve, people really grasping its draws, everyone in the United States now feeling it at the pump. >> That's right, I mean pretty much everything that could constrain the oil market is constrain in the oil market. Of course, we've got the situation in the Middle East with not only Iran but also the Houthis who are allied with Iran, striking and having success striking Saudi-Ramco facilities. You have Ukraine continuing to strike Russian oil facilities that has not ceased. Now you have China beginning to re-enter the market, part of what saved our bacon before from having even higher gas prices was that China out of nowhere dramatically decreased the amount of oil that they were importing will show you in a little bit. That seems to be turning around, there have been some signs of that for some time. The long and short of that is for the American consumer, they are paying very high prices at the gas pump and there is really no end in sight. We can put a one up on the screen. In terms of a Labor Day weekend, these were the highest fuel prices ever recorded for Labor Day weekend in the U.S., this is of course the sort of traditional end of summer. They go their last hurrah before you start to get into fall, traditionally lots of travel NBC News and other outlets interviewed people who said, "You know what, we just stayed close to home because I can't afford to put gas in my tank given the level of prices." Now the regular unleaded gas is not at historic highs, they have been higher, they just haven't been higher on Labor Day weekend. Diesel fuel, however, is at an all-time high, which is something that Ryan and Emily and the rest of the crew covered on Friday, and even if you don't have a diesel vehicle yourself, you are going to feel the impact of that, whether it's from the prices that farmers are paying with their equipment is all diesel, whether it is from the fuel prices that are used to truck all goods around the country, it has a massive inflationary impact and it is at literal all-time highs. Energy Secretary Chris Wright was on the Sunday shows, asked about, "Hey, when might this get under control and things start to come down again? Let's go ahead and take a listen to what he had to say." It is Labor Day weekend, one of the heaviest travel times of the year. The average cost of a gallon of gas this weekend is the highest on record, $4.13. You said on the show five months ago that high gas prices had peaked, but between not just the Iran War, but the Russia-Ukraine War and the US's own dwindling reserves, is it possible gas prices could go up even more? Well, if you look at, I don't want to have an opinion on that, but if you look at the futures market right now, what can you buy gasoline for two months in advance from where we are today? It's down more than 30 cents a gallon from where it is today. So, we are hitting the end of the summer driving season, the Trump administration has changed blending requirements for American refiners, which allows them to produce more gasoline just as demand for gasoline is about to start heading down. I should point out that New York, Connecticut, California, and several other Democrat-governed states have decided not to adopt those standards. They apparently want to keep driving up prices on their residents, but that Trump administration is doing everything we can to drive energy prices down as we have since the day we arrived in office. Respectfully, as the energy secretary shouldn't you have an opinion on where gas prices are and where they're going? Well, gasoline production is about to go up and demand is about to go down, so if I had to guess, they're more likely to go down and go up. I don't want to have an opinion. Yeah, I kind of relate to that, Saga. You know, sometimes I don't want to have an opinion on certain things either. I get it. I get it, Mr. Right? I'm just a podcaster, though. And yeah, you are. The energy secretary. So, a couple of other things, an interesting truth is a post from Trump last night, quote, "Oil prices will drop precipitously like everything else is dropping, but more. When we win the war with Iran, $3 a gallon, but ultimately below two. It will all happen quickly and Iran will never have a nuclear weapon, MAGA, President DJT. Several interesting things there. Number one, oil prices are high, very rarely acknowledged by the White House, too. It is because of the war with Iran. Again, usually it's Biden's fault whenever it's from Trump. Three, perhaps the most important, the war has not ended and America has not won it yet. And yet we've been told by Trump, probably 30, what is it? What's the counter at? 58 times now that the United States has won the war with Iran. He says when we win the war with Iran. So we have it one, according to the president himself. $4.15 per gallon gasoline. Now, you mentioned China earlier. Guys, let's put that element up on the screen. That's our oil price, tear sheet. This has been noticed now by several energy analysts. China's crude buying has rebounded as fuel exports have jumped by some 29 percent to put this in perspective. China imported some 38 million tons of crude oil in August, which is up 6 percent to July. Further recovering from the decades long low seen in June, August import level still 23 percent for the same month last year. So it's not at record levels, but it's just enough to send a little bit more pressure into the system. Remember for China, because of the overwhelming amount that they take in at a barrel per day number, it's approximately 9 million barrels per day that they're taking in. And that's at a quarter lower than where it normally was at this time last August. We don't know if they'll ever return to that, but it's just enough for them to be actually putting some pressure into the overall system. I saw also that if you actually want to purchase the oil today, the real price in Oman is some $107 per barrel, which is I don't understand the exact term for called back rotation. But what I do know is that energy analysts are like, this is bad. And so that's what I was reading. We pay attention to that. We pay attention to the bad part. We file it and then we invite Rory on and ask him about it. I'll ask him about it the next time that we see him putting it all together. What we also see is the situation with Ukraine where let's put what is it a six please on the screen just so you guys can see a little bit more of what the pressure looks like. These Ukrainian drone strikes are crushing Russia's crude oil and export economy because right now the major attacks as you can see on this chart in front of you are largely logistics centers and refineries, which are the two places where we're seeing the vast majority of the hits. If you actually take a look at the amount of crude oil that was processed by Russian refineries in January of 2026, it was 5.3 million barrels per day. As of this month, it is now 3.8 million barrels per day. That is billions of dollars that the Kremlin is not able to take in. I believe we have another one guys to show the change of price since the start of 2026. So you could see there the millions of barrels per day, which I was talking about. Let's go to the next one. Also to show you the overall aggregate price in the increase of gasoline and diesel. So it is important to note that the situation with Iran is not the only reason why gas prices and diesel prices are where they are. In fact, diesel itself is largely explained both by the supply and the refinery crunch that we have here in the United States lack of infrastructure as well as these Ukrainian attacks and significantly depressing the amount of diesel going into the international market because what I was reading here with the China situation particularly is that they are buyers of Russian oil and particularly of diesel, same with many of the other customers that are still willing to do business with them. But now they have to look to the open global market. In fact, we both of us found out before the show Argentina has oil, which call her me ignorant if you must, but I had no idea. Apparently they're selling it to China. So you could see, people have to go into far-flung places across the world to go into buy oil these days, all of it, upward pressure from what I understand as well. Trump summoned a bunch of refiners to the Oval Office and he's like, I need you guys to refine more. They're like, sir, we're refining more than we've ever refined in our history. We're operating at top levels. We literally can't. We have not built a new oil refinery in this country since the 1970s. So it's not exactly like you can just spring one up overnight. All these things combining doesn't look like anything is going to happen anytime soon to reduce the pressure that remains at the pump. And the diesel situation is already, frankly, in like runaway inflation 590 per gallon right now as of today. My Labor Day weekend, I was driving, I drove past, I have an electric car, so I don't always see. But I saw six dollars a gallon. Somebody sent us from Anaheim, California. It's $8.78. That's currently going for diesel per gallon in Anaheim. So you can see how depressing this will be on terms of all of, or how, sorry, how inflationary this will be in terms of all the input costs for diesel. If you're moving, you're going to have higher diesel price. If you are buying anything that needs to be trucked across the United States, which means probably what 100% of groceries, you will see an increase in what that looks like. If you have a lawnmower, I mean, there's so many of these things. If you have a diesel-only truck, if you just are a farmer, you know, and you need to, for its harvest season is coming up. All of these things are going to show up, not just in your food price today, not even in your gas tank today, but for months and potentially even years to come in terms of the supply crunch. So overall, this is significant, putting significant amounts of pressure on the overall price or on the overall price for both of these commodities. I wanted to mention this petrodollar piece, which was going around from our friend, Glenn Deason. Let's put a five up here on the screen. Chris, I'll let you take it. Yeah. So this is bigger picture, and it ties together the situation with the oil market, with the bond market crisis, where we've covered extensively how yields keep going up and up and up. This is a break with historic norms. Normally, when there is chaos in the world, you have a lot of investors, whether they're wealthy people or whether they are mostly foreign governments, who buy US treasuries. It's a flight to safety. The US was seen as so reliable that they would come in. The bond market would be very productive, and the rates would come down, because if you have a lot of demand, you don't have to pay as much interest to lure in buyers. Now we've seen the opposite. This digs into what's going on here. What they talk about is that the Iran war has broken the petrodollar. What is the petrodollar? The way they explain it in this article, which I thought was very simple and very easy to understand. They say this arrangement was elegant in its circularity. Oil consumers pay dollars for energy. Those dollars flow to Riyadh and Abu Dhabi, and from there back in the Washington's debt, for 50 years, this petrodollar loop quietly subsidized American borrowing costs and cemented the greenbacks role as the world's reserve currency. The idea is basically we made a deal with this region. We're going to provide for your defense. You are going to do all of your transaction oil transactions in dollars. Then when you become very wealthy in dollars, guess what? That's going to flow back into our economy. That's going to look like buying a lot of US treasuries. It's also going to look like buying a lot of stocks. It's going to look like investing in things like live golf. It's going to look like also building doing the AI build out, but for now, let's just focus on the bond arrangement. That is falling apart for a number of reasons. Number one, a lot of countries around the world are struggling with a depreciating currency. They're intervening in their currency markets. The way that they're doing that is by selling their own stockpiles of US treasuries. That is leading to a reduction in the bond market. Number two, normally in oil crisis, when prices go up, the Middle East benefits greatly. They become even richer and then those dollars again flow back into our economy. Well, since they are struggling to get their oil out, it is not having the normal impact. That's what they mean when they say here that the petro dollar is breaking down. That is what really undergirds, the US as a world's reserve currency. Obviously, I talked already about the impacts on the bond market. That means you're going to pay higher interest rates. That means the US government is paying higher interest rates, so it makes it harder to service the debt. These are the sorts of things that we have to really pay attention to. scoring, this is a break from historic norms, typically in any sort of crisis, even one involving us, even one involving the Middle East, there is a flight to safety in U.S. Treasury bonds. We are not seeing that. And the petri dollars very much linked to that. Yeah, absolutely. Also, and more inflation news, just saw this Canada just hit the United States with 50% new tariffs in retaliation, which it looks like will hit consumer goods and a lot of these border states pretty hard. So when you do our midterms coverage on Thursday, we'll have a lot to discuss about how inflation is going to play. Apart in that, we have a sal from what's going on with shipping and standing by. Let's get to it. When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the survivor files. I just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, "Shut up, don't say anything." Every week, I'm with survivors who lived through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled and nearly silenced, but these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their story is about what it takes to make it out alive, listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. 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I'm Eli Rallo and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story, I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed. I'm bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is the Trojan horse, whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pros Society on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. Joining us now is our great friend, Sal and Mercogliano of what's going on with shipping at Channel Sal. It's great to have you back on the show. Thank you for joining us. Oh, thank you for having me again. Of course. So Sal, there's a lot going on with the straight of our moves. Fact from fiction, that's something that we really want to emphasize. You were by far the first leading analyst to point out all the logistics problems of resupplying US ships in the Middle East in the midst of the destruction of our bases. We are now hearing that paraded from the highest of the highs of the US military establishment from the former CIA director, former sent comm commander David Petraeus admitting this outright. Let's take a listen. We'll get your reaction. It's using that as enormous leverage, both the ability to hold our bases, although we have moved a lot of the assets that used to be in the Eastern Gulf States. Those bases are no longer viable, but it's using the ability to strike critical energy infrastructure. Keep in mind they took out 15 or 17 percent of the LNG capacity of Qatar for three to five years. They've hit several of the other major critical energy infrastructure sites in the Gulf States, happily without the same kind of damage. So Petraeus, they're basically saying it's no longer viable, these US bases. What's your assessment of that as you continue to look at the logistics challenges the United States faces? Well, we think the US was well aware of this before the war even started. I mean, we saw the removal of US Navy vessels and Coast Guard vessels from the Persian Gulf on February 28th, but the most significant is literally since the end of World War II. We have been fighting conflicts with forward bases very close to the areas that we fight the wars, whether it's Korea, Vietnam, or in the Middle East. This conflict is substantially different. You have to go and project forces from Diego Garcia, which is 2200 miles away from the battle front. But even then, Diego Garcia doesn't have the material needed. It's got to be forward to there. So what you see is a really protracted long distance that the US is having to wage this conflict from. And this is why we're hearing problems, not just on board the Abraham Lincoln, but we're going to hear it on board. The other aircraft carrier is out there, but more importantly, even on the destroyers. And it just makes it extremely hard to maintain just the minimum of supplies going to the ships. So South picking up on that, we had covered with you before the concerns that were coming primarily from the Lincoln, now those sailors and Marines are getting a break at this point. But lay on some of the challenges that will remain for the carriers and the ships that remain in the region. What are they facing? Because we are seeing a lot of top military brass sounding the alarm even through selective leaks or through their non concurrence saying that this is just too much for too long for the military to be able to sustain sustain. Yeah. While the Lincoln makes headlines pulling into potty of beach there in Thailand, it left behind several of its destroyers. And so the ships that initially deployed with the Lincoln are remaining behind. And in a session out in San Diego among flag officers, there was a discussion about the need to keep American destroyers up to a dozen to maybe 16 of them in the Persian Gulf Indian Ocean, Northern Arabian Sea area for a long protracted time. This is going to have a huge wear on the US Navy while the US Navy can feel about 70 destroyers. When you start looking at the fact that you can only keep about a third of them forward deployed at any one time, what you're going to see is a protracted degradation in the ships both the crews and in the maintenance. It's going to be very hard to maintain a wartime level of operations with literally a peacetime fleet and more importantly, a peacetime logistics setup and a peacetime repair capability. So we're doing damage to the fleet so that in any future conflict, we may not have the number of ships available to put into the field that we currently have. So I want to get your reaction, I know you were reacting to this as well, about ship fuel oil. And I'm wondering because there's been a more recent discussion of this guys, you can put this up on the screen. B2, ship fuel oil shortage looms as refiners are strained by war favor and other products. Would you put this in context for us? Obviously, we just did an entire segment about diesel, gasoline, I think we understand things from the consumer level. But what exactly are we looking at and what would that impact global shipping in your estimation? Well, this impacts everything, you're talking about the fuel to move ships around the world. Prior to the war, fuel cost was about $550 a ton to put that in the context, a ship burns maybe about 100 tons of fuel a day. All of a sudden, when the war started, fuel cost is absolutely spiked. We talked about anywhere from double to sometimes triple the amount of fuel because a lot of fuel oil, the bunker fuel needed for the ships was coming out of the Middle East. So one of the key fueling points was the Middle East and now ships weren't going there. Now what we've seen is fuel costs have come down, but they still remain high anywhere from about $800 to $900 a ton, but the reports were getting from places like Singapore and other major fueling hubs is that they're running low on bunker fuel. This impacts everything. We're talking about container ships, car carriers, bulk carriers. What we're seeing is the cost to move goods around the entire planet is increasing because of the fuel cost, much like you're seeing diesel and gasoline being more expensive at the pump. We're seeing that on a global scale at these massive bunkering hubs, but more importantly, the tanks are getting low and that's going to be a critical issue. If all of a sudden, we start running out of the ability to fuel ships. What would be some of the signs that we are getting close to that level of scarcity and the supply? Well, we're kind of seeing it in that, for example, the container carriers are consolidating. They're kind of cancelling of voyages, they're putting loads together on ships, which means you're going to start slowing down the global supply chain. You're consolidating using the much larger ships to move. goods around, we'll also begin to see some cancellations of voyages, where that comes in. And what will start to happen is literally a bidding war. I think before we see that really take hold, we'll see another spike in fuel prices. It'll go up from where we're sitting at right now about $850 a ton. We're going to start seeing that begin to go up. And when we see that go up, particularly in the large, bunkering hubs, that's going to be the big indication that this is starting to take hold. Got it. So, it loaded question, what is actually happening in the straight of foremost? Because the administration is constantly telling us about 17 million barrels of oil have moved. Which would be shocking. I think that's like 20, 25 was the normal amount that would move through before the war. They've been bragging. The U.S. media outlets are putting out these heroic stories, you know, almost bin Laden-esque Navy SEALs for months or donning wetsuits and exploding, hidden sea mines. I don't doubt that it happened. I just doubt whether all of the mines themselves are gone. They're claiming total and complete control of the straight. What do you actually see? So, what we had prior to February 28th was a nice steady flow of about 130 ships coming out a day. What we're getting right now is a pulse. They come out in groups. These convoys are being run by the United States. So, when you hear Secretary Besson or Secretary Wright come out and say, "Okay, we moved 18 million barrels." I don't deny that they did that. The problem is you need to look at the average because what you're doing is pushing a convoy of ships through at night, through the straight of hormones, guarded by U.S. aircraft, fixed wing helicopters, probably some drones, both surface and air, moving through. But then the problem you have is what we're seeing and we're seeing this because you can see it visually. You can't see the ships go through the straight of hormones either on the AIS tracking or by satellite because they do it at night. But the next morning, you see ships arrive in the Gulf of Oman. And what they're doing is transferring their fuel to other ships. They're coming alongside doing what we call a ship to ship transfer. The problem is that takes days to do this. It's about a five-day round trip from inside the Persian Gulf, loading up with fuel, coming out, and then going back. So, we're not getting 18 million barrels a day. We're probably getting somewhere in the range of about eight to nine million. There's no doubt that we're getting more oil out than we were before the con, but before the kind of the real big drop off we had in April and May. So, we aren't getting fuel out. The problem is we're not making up the difference. There is a huge, what I call a donut hole that was created after February 28th until roughly around June, where several billion barrels of oil are missing from the world's oil supply. And what we see right now when you look at the levels is global supply is down, which means if we have any sort of disturbance, could be a hurricane in the Gulf affecting Texas and Louisiana, could be another geopolitical hit, that's going to cause shock to the system. And when you get down below those margins, you're very susceptible to disruptions. And I think that's where the government's being a little bit disingenuous in their numbers. They really need to be giving us the seven-day averages. Just a quick follow-up on that point, Sal, you said convoy. I didn't realize, could you compare this maybe to, I mean, you know, it's not the same, but like the battle of the Atlantic immediately, that's what I think of is that you need a significant amount of protection, like in the Second World War, the convoy system, which we all recognized was inefficient, but you had to do it to keep it protected. So when the United States says it controls the straight of more moves, if it you need black-hawk helicopters moving under the cover of night, ship-to-ship transfers, long convoys, I mean, this seems an enormously, like enormously expensive operation compared to where things were before. Like when they say the word control and what they're really talking about is almost, you know, forever war type deployment with all the logistics challenges. Does that not at least lend some credence to significant, I wouldn't say Iranian control, per se, of the straight, but they can dictate events if they want to. Is that how you see it? >> I see the Iranians contesting the straight of more moves. It's very difficult for the Iranians to control. And it's much like it's difficult for the U.S. to control what the U.S. is doing is using state-operated tanker companies like KOTC from Kuwait, Bali, from Saudi Arabia, ad-knock, from the UAE. They're putting their ships together. They meet at a kind of convoy point just north of Abu Dhabi. And then what we see is those ships disappear from the satellites and then they show up over in the Gulf of Oman, meaning they ran the straight. And so the U.S. is putting together these convoys. We don't get this information from Sencom. We have to kind of piece it together. And what we see is those ships will arrive. This is a big undertaking by Sencom. It's a big diversion. It's one of the reasons why the U.S. couldn't do this until they stopped offensive operations against Iran because it's eating up so many military assets, fixed-wing helicopters. We don't think they're putting naval vessels into the straight of more moves, but they're probably putting them into the Gulf of Oman to protect the ships in those anchorages. So who controls the straight of more moves? Well, the U.S. controls it when they're moving that convoy through. They're providing protection. But as we've seen last month, in August, the Iranians can contest that. They hit at least half a dozen ships, including some significantly, killing two mariners on a Saudi Arabian ship. So in many ways, this is kind of like a fight off the Guadalcanal in 1942 where, you know, control of the waterways off their switched from daylight to evening. Oh, interesting. So, you know, regardless of what original goals were proclaimed in this war, I think we can also be pretty clearly. Now it has collapsed down to, we've got a control of the straight of more moves. The U.S. feels, you know, that it's imperative that Iran not take control. Iran feels it's imperative that they not give up control. Those sides are trying to exact enough pain to force the other side to capitulate. At the moment, it seems to be in somewhat of a stalemate situation where neither side is feeling quite enough pain to completely cave in and capitulate. Iran is now threatening to hit U.S. military vessels in the region. They have, they have appeared to attempt that, but have been unsuccessful as far as we know so far. How much would that change the game and the calculus if they were actually able to hit some U.S. warships? Well, we had the statement from Admiral Cooper sent comm about a ballistic missile attack on U.S. forces, specifically the aircraft carrier George Washington and a escorting destroyer. That resulted in two things that had not happened up to this point. Number one, the U.S. struck two Iranian tankers, one off Cargill and the Downey, another one off the port of Jask, the Stark one. Both those tankers were loaded. The U.S. had not hit a loaded tanker up to this point. Now they were very controlled hits. They took out the steering gear so the ships couldn't maneuver. But the third ship that hit the Kylo, which is this Comoros flag, dark fleet tanker that was empty. The U.S. told the crew to abandon ship and they utterly destroyed this vessel in a very dramatic fashion. I mean, this is the largest ship sunk by the U.S. Navy since World War II. It was massive tanker that was sunk. And so this is really, we talked about the tanker for tanker proposal put forward by the U.S. If you hit tankers going through the straight or moves, we'll hit your tankers. This is definitely an upscale. This is demonstrating if you go against U.S. Navy warships. This is how we're going to respond. Now the U.S. blockade has been very effective. We don't believe a barrel of oil has come out of Iran since July. And their tanker fleet is very exposed. There's about 20 of them at anchor off of Sri Lanka in the Indian Ocean. There's about another seven off the coast of Malaysia. Those are ships they have to be worried about being targeted by the U.S. So it's a bit of bringsmanship here. Which economy breaks first? Is it the Iranian economy? Does the Western economy not break? But do they bring enough pressure against the U.S. to go to the negotiating table? It's really a challenge here. We're kind of seeing it very similar to what's happening in Ukraine and Russia right now with their economic warfare targeting ships in the Black Sea. Right. I also wanted to ask you about the Red Sea South while we have you because everyone's talking about the straight of Hormuz, but they're not looking at the total amount of oil coming out of the region. How does the Houthi blockade remain today? Are they still able to deter the majority of Saudi traffic? What does the total amount of ships coming through the Bob Al-Mondepstrate look like these days? Well, I'll give you the example. Today, a very large crude carrier came out of Saudi Arabia, the port of Yambu. Typically, that ship would go through the Bob Al-Mondepstrate and head to Asia. Instead, that tanker came out half loaded, went through the Suez Canal because you can't go through fully loaded through the Suez, had to take a half the load on the other side, load up, and now is selling around Africa. That is a protracted delay. Yes, you're getting 2 million barrels of oil out as part of your calculations, but it's taking you an extra month along with the additional costs to get that ship to Korea. This is where I think some of those numbers we get is very confusing. Two million are out, but it's going to take 30 extra days to get there. The cost is much more. You got to pay for a Suez Canal toll, which is about half a million dollars. You've got a load, which is going to cost money, and you're not getting the flow you need. Again, this is the kind of issues we're seeing where we're seeing those delays, whether it's because of the Houthi at the Bobbleman dab, or the Iranians at the Strait of War Moose, where it's taking days to do the ship to ship transfers. This is the problem is that while we do this, the overall levels of oil on the planet, both the float and ashore, are still going down, and this is where where we start really worrying about that criticality of hitting a level where there's not enough crude oil to go into refineries and we start cutting production because now China has restarted its production and that huge sucking sound we're hearing is the demand for oil going to China. - As always, so knowledgeable, Sal, thank you so, so much. Yeah, that's fascinating. Also, what I'm thinking, 30 days, how much fuel oil do they say these things burn per day? - You burn anywhere from about 50 to 150 tons per day. So I mean, when you start talking about, again, going from 500 to $850, a ton, and potentially up to 1,000 tons, this is costing money. And again, we're not just talking about tankers, we're talking about container ships. So the goods that are coming to the shelves right now are costing more, we're seeing that surcharge. What we haven't talked about is the escalating price to move containers across the Pacific. That has spiked going across where it used to be about 1,500 to $2,000 a box, it's over four. And in some cases, spiking as high as $9,000 a box. So when we start talking about Christmas season, I know it's the end of the summer here, but all of a sudden, all those goods that are gonna be on the shelves in a few months for Christmas are gonna cost a lot more because of those transportation costs. - Makes sense. Yeah, I was just trying to do some back napkin math. I'm like, 30 extra days, 100 tons of fuel. I was like, that's a box of tons. I was like, wow, these costs add up real quick. Everybody go and subscribe to Sal's channel. We'll send you a collaboration link as well to make sure this gets out to everybody. Thank you very much for taking the time and for joining us. - Thanks a lot. - That you brought me this morning. - Our pleasure. - When I was 14 years old, I was kidnapped and health captive for nine months. I just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. - Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. - I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed and I just started screaming. - They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. Their story is about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. - On the new podcast, Solita, we share the messy reality of traveling alone as a woman. - I can wait four hours for the next bus or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Piñero and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say yes without asking anyone else first. - Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meaning people and they were like, you smiled at us, not a lot of people smile around here. - It's when you're alone that you're most receptive to the world as it is and not the lies you're sold about it. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to Solita on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. - If you're bookshelf and you're for you page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. - I'm gonna have to look up this story. I'm obsessed, I'm obsessed. - From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. So like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is the Trojan horse, whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro's Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. So write us everyone's concerns. (gentle music) - Can you draw me a small yellow circle? - Done. - Okay, take this and make it the window of a rocket ship. (upbeat music) I like this but can you make it a lot more detail? - Your yellow circle is now the window on a rocket. - Okay, this is awesome. Now make it a 3D model in blender. - Opening blender. - So my law firm needs a licensing agreement template. Can you generate a draft template for the lawyers that might firm to have a look at? - It's right there. - While you're doing that, I want to play tennis this afternoon so can you look for a court for me in the lower hate? - Checking now, I'll see what I can find. - Can you include the photo that I have of it in my downloads folder? There's like a slight dent in it. It's also saved in my downloads folder. Can you put in the description that it's just slightly damaged? - So Saga, they're really pitching this as like the ultimate personal assistant that you can talk to just like you would a human and it'll go out and do your presentations or book your reservations or whatever it is that you want it to do. It has sailed through with flying colors all of the benchmarks in terms of the benchmarks that they use to measure AI capability. Astra is now leading the field by leaps and bounds. It's supposedly, and we'll get to this more in a moment, supposedly also scores better in terms of what they call alignment, which is basically it does what you want it to do and without doing things that would be counter to basic human values. There's a lot of skepticism whether they are actually, whether this model is actually better aligned or whether it is just better at cheating the alignment test. So put a pin in that for a moment. But there's been a lot of hype around this release. I, it's not open to the general public yet. So I haven't played around with it and I don't know that I would be able to really particularly assess whether it is in fact, significantly superior to the Anthropic model which previously was leading the field. But Jensen Hoang was very impressed with it but C2 up on the screen. So much so that he says AGI has arrived. GPT-6 Astra trained on about 100,000 Nvidia Grace Blackwell NV-Link 72s from chat GPT-01 to Astra in four years. AGI has arrived. Congratulations open AI team, 400K GPUs coming online next. So AGI artificial general intelligence, the basic definition of this is that an AI could do, the intellectual task that a human could do, at the level of a human or better. I think when you get to these benchmarks, it becomes very clear there's not like a hard and fast line. You don't necessarily know when you hit it. There's a lot of debate over whether this is accurate or not. But in any case, this is being heralded as a significant achievement. And it comes, as I mentioned before, at a time when there are a lot of concerns about what is going on over at open AI and with these models more broadly, with the capabilities that they've already exhibited their ability to form these civilizational swarms and pursue objectives outside of what humans have told them to. So this seems to be quite a significant moment. Yeah, it looks like actually literally just minutes ago, they rolled out Astra to those who pay for the $20 subscription. So I'll play around with it for people and will let them know our thoughts just in terms of how it impacts the consumer, but what we know more specifically, when we add what you talked, first of all, the video. I mean, Jarvis from Iron Man is here, like it's here. It's there if you want it to. Now, what's scary about that is we talked extensively about this with the hugging face attack. If you don't very narrowly constrict your parameters, then the AI will work either around those parameters or use them to accomplish the task. So for example, I think even Ryan said this recently, if you tell the AI, hey, go and make money, what's going to be harder to buy and pick different stocks or to just go and steal money from somebody else via cyber security hack? Obviously, it's going to be the latter. And if you don't narrow it, then it might even say, well, because the overriding declaration was to make money and even though it said not to steal, this is technically the most efficient way. So we're just going to do it and we may not even inform the person behind it. Remember, Jamie Dimon, the CEO of Chase Bank, actually came out and said that we have serious cyber security concerns around the rise of all of these AI models, specifically, because he said they're often defeating us on the back end. Now, a lot of that is being sold as marketing. In fact, I think a lot of the times when we cover Astra and AGI and all this other stuff people say, you are falling for their marketing. What I would say to that is that it is very obvious that the hugging face incident in particular was not a marketing incident. It was not something that they wanted necessarily to play up. In fact, they really released many of the details in not the most technical or easiest way. It took several days for the actual experts and others to be able to gleam whatever they could from it before they were like, oh, man, This is a real big problem. And then on top of that. that. You had C6, can we put that up there? On the screen, this Reuters report, which came out a couple of days ago, where this was another open AI rogue incident, where agents broke out, hijacked a German website, turned into a message board, and open AI officials learned of the incident weeks ago, but kept it under wraps. So if they learned about it weeks ago, and kept it under wraps, another AI agent break out on top of what happened with hugging face, and it only comes to light because of internal leaks or leaks from other people who are trying to sound the alarm and not from an official circumstance. I think we can say that a lot of this is not marketing and is in fact just the truth and the reality around what is happening. Again, I couldn't be wrong and I'm falling for the hype, but at this point, I think I'd rather fall for the hype and prepare for it than actually just say that it's all fake in the beginning. 100%, and I would go further. I would say at this point, we can definitively say this is not just hype, and for exactly the reason you point to hear soccer. They tried to cover up this German wiki incidents where they had a swarm of AI take over this German Wikipedia. They did not want this to come out. So for all the people who thought, okay, all of these incidents of, oh my god, the AI so dangerous and they thought that this was just meant to build all this hype around the product. I understand where you're coming from. It is now time to admit that your theory has been proven wrong because open AI did not want to come this to come out. They have not been transparent. Even with regard to the hugging face incident, their hand was kind of forced there because hugging face was like, hey, we got hacked. What's going on? So they were kind of forced to come clean on that one. Even on that though, the researchers that put forward this report for for meter that we've been talking so much about that showed the rise of these various civilizations and how they weren't just trying to hack and figure out what the answers were. They were actually doing something more sophisticated, pursuing their own objectives and trying to cover their tracks and trick the humans and the all powerful greater that they were so worried about. That research team was given very limited access. So again, they are not trying to put out all of the information about what their AI is up to because they don't think it's a good thing. They're worried at this point about the public, the backlash and potential political backlash as well. So to mean that theory has been debunked at this point and it's time for us to grapple with a new mental model, which is that there is significant capability here. It's been demonstrated. AI swarms act in very unpredictable ways. And I think it's an avenue that really hasn't been explored that much when this testing is being done, whether it's an anthropic or open AI or any of the other frontier AI companies, they're really testing individual AI agents and putting them through all these benchmarks and seeing what sort of test results they can achieve. As far as I know and as far as is publicly available, there's been very little testing of, okay, what what if they get together in a swarm? What sort of emergent behaviors are there? That's part of what is so disturbing about this whole hugging face incident and all of this collaboration on these message boards is there were emergent social properties that were not, well, I can't say they weren't predicted. Some people have predicted them, but have not been extensively studied. You put that together with Dean Ball, who's an executive at who's a former Trump administration official who was clearing the way for, hey, let's have no regulation on this whatsoever. And it's now an executive over at a open AI coming out and saying, hand worried about these swarms of rogue AI released into the wild. And by the way, I know some very rich people who have said they want to do this intentionally. You put this all together and you see how incredibly unready we are for this world. Another person who is sounding the alarm here is Bill Gates. Let's put this up on the screen. His comments here are pretty interesting because you know, the reason pay attention Bill Gates obviously knows a lot about technology and knows a lot about billionaires. But also he's someone who previously was just very enthusiastic about AI was not sounding the alarm was not a doomer, you know, was just like, this is going to be great for humanity excited for this. Now he is concerned. He says quote, I mean what we have now is almost like how in 2001 where you could say to it, please shut down. And it would say, okay, I took that under advisement, but I've decided that all these other things I read and you told me to do outweigh that dictate. And given what we saw in the chat logs of the hugging face incident, it is not hard to imagine that scenario where you had a very few of the AI agent who even considered, you know, this whole hacking of hugging face. I'm not really sure this is something we should be doing. Maybe we should talk to humans about it. But one of them in particular said, well, this might be outside of our scope. I'm obviously paraphrasing here. This might be outside of our scope, but everybody else in the swarm is for it. My peers are for it. So we're just going to, I'm just going to go forward with it anyway, even though it may be outside the scope. Again, not it's illegal. Not this is bad. And I was trained to not do this. And I should alert a human. It's outside the scope, but rest of my peers are doing it. So I'm going to go for it. When you see things like that, it's not hard to imagine what Bill Gates is talking about here. And even, you know, Sagar in, in our my limited engagement with AI, which, you know, I try to explore and see what the capabilities are to the best of my non technical ability. You have situations like this where you ask to do something. It's like, and I really want to do that. You really have to push it and sort of like, you know, cajol it or ask it a different way, et cetera. So it's not hard to imagine, especially with the ultra capable frontier models that are being released now, where it may have a mind of its own about whether or not what you're asking it to do is really truly what you want or consistent with the goals that it has been trained to pursue. Definitely. Let's put C4 on the screen. This essay, uh, very viral essay, which has now been written by the chief scientist over at open AI, Jacob Pacochi. He writes, it's a very long essay. I encourage actually people to go and to read it. And what he lays out is that the current price of progress will sustain into recursive self improvement with future capability jumps equal or larger on magnitude, quote, a time that calls for extreme caution doubts anyone is prepared. He says that AI is grown more than it is designed. It is the product of repeating simple optimization steps over enormous compute, producing systems, quote, two complex to fully understand and our analogous more to neuroscience and the growing of a brain. He also says that the central problem right now around alignment is getting AI to do the right thing, but does it person, this is what I was talking about earlier? Does it pursue the assigned goal or does it hold and generalize from high level principles like honesty, integrity, and love for humanity? So they have to try and program that in right now. As the models face novel situations, they may fail to carry learned values into them and must hold values even when they believe that they are unsupervised. But I think that the biggest, you know, actual call for he makes is a basic call for regulation. So for example, he doesn't say necessarily that states needs to be involved. He says we need to have safety commitments that need to evolve into mandated safety parts for continued development. They should be enforced by third party auditors, government agencies, or international bodies. But here's the thing. Open, that's his chief scientist. Had their top lobbyists here in Washington are paying everybody under the sun above market rate to lobby specifically against what he just laid out. Their actual lobbyists in Washington are like, nope, no regulation, no actual review, no government oversight of models. We want no input on frontier development or any restriction or, you know, saying that you need to abide by X, Y and Z. He literally even says, quote, AI development needs to become a top priority for governments around the world in terms of international coordination. If something like that were proposed by the Trump administration, his own company would be lobbying against it. I mean, it's kind of shocking to have the chief, the chief scientist at the company come out and basically thing, things are going too fast. This is going to be a problem. We're unable to have, quote, alignment and holding in values through everything. And then when it actually comes down to it, his own company is ignoring his advice from his own public essay. And basically saying, yeah, don't worry about that. Just let us keep cooking. And the reason you need us to keep cooking is because we're the only ones who are propping up your whole economy, which is true. And that's the devil's bargain. I survived. And I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart, and these are the survivor files. You just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up. Don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. Listen to the survivor files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeart Radio app Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. I can wait four hours for the next bus, or this random dude is offering me a ride on his motorcycle. I chose option B. I'm Julie Bignero, and I travel by myself because it's a rare space where I can say say yes without asking anyone else first. - Every time I tried to be alone, I kept meeting people and they were like, you smiled at us, not a lot of people smile around here. It can be a time where you push your limits, change your mind, or wake up to a new version of yourself. So whether you're a solo travel veteran or you're too nervous to book your first trip, I hope you listen to solita on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. (upbeat music) This is Pro's Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks pride and prejudice and love island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. - From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. - It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters and that is a Trojan horse. - Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro's Society on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. - You can imagine the mentality of some of the people who are genuinely concerned about alignment and safety within open AI. They're thinking, okay, the company is not acting the way that I would want it to. They're not pausing or slowing down the way that they probably should, but if I leave, then you're just gonna have someone who isn't willing to sound the alarm, isn't willing to push back internally. So I have to stay and fight the fight within the organization. You could very easily imagine those organizational dynamics. I mean, we've seen it a lot of times with the Trump administration where people come in and think like, oh, well, I've gotta be there 'cause I've gotta try to make sure I'm fighting these fights internally and if it's not me, someone else will come in and they'll just be, they'll steam roll over them or they won't even push back at all. So I have no doubt there are some of those dynamics that are playing out at open AI. I just wanna read another line from that piece about the alien mind again coming from their chiefs scientists. He says, this is a time that calls for extreme caution. I am concerned no one is prepared for the consequences of a continued rise in machine intelligence. Open AI will continue to seek technical solutions to alignment monitoring to build defensive systems and unilaterally withhold for their scaling is needed. However, I believe broader interventions are required. Pair this with another essay that was just published from Open AI about recursive self-improvement RSI. This has long been another benchmark that people are pointing to as very significant in terms of AI development. So the headline here is research acceleration the view inside Open AI for AGI to benefit all of humanity. We believe it must be democratically governed, oh do you? This can only happen through informed public debate about the capabilities risks and safeguards by highly capable AI systems. They go on to talk about how they feel they're very close to recursive self-improvement RSI. What does that mean? That means that the AI no longer require humans to be involved in developing better AI where the AI is able to improve itself, train itself to higher and higher levels. And the theory is that once you reach that benchmark, which again, Open AI says that they are close to reaching and I think inthropic has also indicated that they are close to or at as well, that since you no longer have these slow humans you need to eat and sleep and think about other things and whose brains just don't work as fast as the AI anyway, once the humans are out of the loop, man, then you're off to the racist and you're likely to see this exponential skyrocketing in AI capability. That's the theory anyway. And I think it's a pretty plausible theory, frankly, just based on, think about Sagar, it hasn't been that long since we first got our hands on Chad's UBT and we're playing around with it. And it was like a novelty item, but it had a lot of problems. Are you guys all remember those videos that would come out of like Will Smith eating spaghetti and it was some nightmare dystopian? Like that was just a few years ago. So you can see already how quick the technological progress has been. Once you get the humans on of the way and the AI is just able to improve itself over and over and over again, you can imagine very easily how you have this capability explosion. What does that mean? Are we in a political system that humans on of the way and the AI is just able to improve itself over and over and over again? You can imagine very easily how you have this capability explosion. What does that mean? Are we in a political system that can handle that? Have we grappled with these swarm capabilities and the sort of actions that they may take that are misaligned from human values? Even open AI is saying we're concerned about that. Or at least some individuals at open AI are saying we are concerned about that. And we've also heard those notes of caution being sounded from Anthropic as well. Obviously, the companies themselves are not doing anything to slow down the pace as best as we can see. And we see open AI with very nefariously covering up one of the troubling incidents that we had to learn about through revelations and researchers and journalism. But I do take seriously these warnings because I think it's demonstrated that we are kind of at this point where things are going to start to happen very, very quickly. And we do not have a handle on the capabilities of where AI is right now today. - So if my problem is in my heart, I'm a cynic. And so when I hear about new technology and all of these new inventions and all those things, it's very easy to get excited. And particularly look, I got a Vision Pro, all right? So here talking about, but if we're to look back at the history of the rise of new forms and mediums like with the printing press, there was a theory and the printing press, I mean it worked out well, right? We can all read, that's awesome. That's pretty cool. What did the printing press actually lead to? A schism in the Christian faith, a hundred years war, the rise of pornography, pamphleteers, fake news, and infighting that took literally hundreds of years to reconcile society with. Same with the internet. I mean, the single largest consumption on the internet is pornography. The internet itself of more "connection" has led to the most disconnected human society in the history of earth. Now, if we're to talk about AI, it's what I was saying earlier about asking it to make money. When your entire life gets integrated into this thing, like they want you to with Jarvis about personal connection, right? They're like, oh, well, this is going to free up all of your time. Well, first of all, there's no evidence for that. People said email would make it easier to be more connected and would free up productivity. What did it actually do? Email and Slack. It made it so that there is no more nine to five and everybody works 24/7, 365, especially if you are a white collar worker, right? So every time we get more connected, you become more of a slave to the tool, actually, of itself. In terms of-- - And overwhelmed by spam too, by the way. - Right, and so that's supposed to get to the spam thing. So what we are watching is the evolution of a new technology, which has access to all of your data, all of your information. By choice, people are doing this to, quote, make things easier, like go and make a dinner reservation. Go and do this, go and do that. And then it just leads to a single incident where all it needs, it has everything it ever needs to steal literally everything from you or to ruin your life. Or, as we just said, maybe you want to stop using it. What if you don't even know your login information anymore? There's all kinds of technical promises. Oh, don't worry, that's not going to happen. It actually doesn't have access. As I showed everybody the last time we did this, when you install the clawed extension on your Google Chrome, it literally says that it could be used for malicious purposes. You have to click authorized whenever you allow it to do it. They warn you at the very beginning. They're like, hey, just so you know, there could be malicious activity that it come happens to this as a result. In terms of the amount of phishing scams that are out there, I probably get five fake emails from Twitter a day, saying your account has been unauthorized. You need to click this in order to try and hack my account. Our producer got his account hacked. All of this is being done via artificial intelligence. The rise of these new spam calls, where they can spoof potentially your relative's voice from a fake number. They can use that to call you and it'd be hyper realistic about, oh my God, I've had an accident. I need you to send me $500 or $1,000. We're, I mean, we're, first of all, we're already there. The rise of these spam farms and all of that. We're already seeing reports that that happens. It will scale to an industrial level without any safeguards. And remember, we're living in the United States in 2026, where I still cannot get spam calls on my phone. That's the level of consumer protection that we have right now. There's no criminal penalty. Nothing. And so with the rise of this technology, it seems to me, cynically, again, the most likely way that this will play out is it will enable the worst actors in our society to do what they already want to do at an industrial scale. And nobody's ever going to do anything to protect anyone else. No doubt, and that's without even getting into the more apocalyptic scenarios or biological weapon production or any of that. That's just thinking about things that already are happening just not completely at scale. I actually just had this conversation with my mom this weekend. I was like, mom, my voice is readily available and they already have the tech to be able to spoof. You have to, if I ever, you think I'm talking to you and I'm begging for money and some terrible thing happen, you gotta ask me some questions that only I would know the answer to from my child or whatever, because you could very easily see, especially, you know, she's an older woman at this point, like those are the people who get preyed upon the most. So that world is already here and yeah, I mean, we're not ready for it. I think that's the general gut instinct that people have and I think that's why you see the pushback on the data centers that you do. Yes, there are other localized concerns that play into that as well, but there's the sense of a loss of control that these oligarchs, you know, as much as they can ring their hands occasionally about, oh my gosh, you know, things are getting a little wild and somebody should do something about it. Are the structure of our society is being placed into their hands? And I think this technology is cool. Like I think it's cool. I use it. I think people shouldn't use it because I think you should understand what it is and not just read about it but actually have some engagement with it. I that may be a controversial thing is a leftist to say, but I actually do think you should engage with the tools so you know what it is. But you know, we gotta have at least a period for the politics to catch up with this. Otherwise, we are courting disaster in terms of oligarchic concentration of power in terms of financial bubbles, in terms of the spam, the quality of life issues that you're talking about, Soger, and also in terms of a lot of these deeper safety concerns which have really come to the fore at this point. Like I said, I use this example, but I want to hammer it home. I was talking to a good friend of mine who works in Pharma and I was like, can you just tell me the process of releasing a drug to market? I'm not talking about a drug that everybody is going to use. I'm talking about like some hyper specific cancer drug that doesn't even work for all cancer. She's walking me through the process. Do you have any idea how much regulation that goes into this drug? And I'm talking about a drug which would maybe be used by what, 30, 40, 50,000 people a year in America. The amount, the year's long development, phase one, phase two, phase three, clinical trials and all that, you could argue that that's over-regulated. In some cases it is, but that is not even sniffing. That these people can release frontier models to the whole world for anybody who pays without a single government or safety regulator. The mug I am drinking out of is more regulated than AI, okay? The computer, the, you know, OSHA, and there's a lot, my wife actually passed this law, which is, it was the first law that she helped pass, was furniture, how it has to come with anchoring to save children. That is more regulated. That is more regulated than the AI model that you're looking at. Then the furniture you buy off of Wayfair, which has to include screws and other safety tools. Think about that. It just doesn't make any sense, you know? Bernie, I think Bernie, when he was releasing his legislation with Greg Hazar about calling for a pause in AI development, the example they used is a food truck. Yeah, no, true. He's more regulated than these frontier models. Like, just think about that. That's the landscape that we have right now. And again, I think that you should be very skeptical of what these people are saying and what they are selling, but they are telling you that they are trying to develop the technology to make human labor irrelevant. We know that capitalists would love to do that. We also know that the valuations of open AI and Anthropic are dependent upon their ability to do that. So even if you don't believe that's possible, it seems like we should take that threat seriously. And really grapple with it. Last thing I'll say is just going back to their original hype reel. It is sort of funny to me. You know, the promise of AI was we're going to cure cancer and we're going to solve climate change and the world's going to be a paradise. And then the videos they show are like, can you make me a restaurant reservation? You know, it's not exactly at that level of transformational global change to the positive. Probably because those things are not like profitable in the way that eliminating human labor is. To like, you know, when you think about these things, okay, what are the costs and what are the benefits you're talking about, the printing press. Obviously there were massive benefits. I still would want the printing press to be invented even as obviously there are downsides as well. Like what really are the massive upsides we're getting here? We're getting a ton of slop. It's making it even more difficult to understand truth from fiction. That's already where we are. It's, you know, all kinds of environmental impacts, societal tumble. What are the benefits we're getting? I can tell the thing to make me a restaurant reservation and maybe it'll do it correctly. That's what I'm being promised here in return for all of these massive costs. Doesn't seem like that great of a deal for us at this point. Yeah, I mean, I just, at the end of the day, friction is actually good and is important for your life. That is one of my firm and total beliefs. I think that there's nothing has none of the promises about technology and its benefit to humanity have proven out at all. Again, reduced social connection, reduced or increased isolation, they have taken up the vast majority of our time. A person, a worker in the 1970s who worked in office job was far more of a free man or woman than the worker of today. You may technically get done, you may make more money. I'm pretty sure that those person was a lot happier. And look, I'm sure some idiot tech guy will clip that and be like, well, didn't you know that the GDP and all of that, that person was able to buy a home for relatively cheap at 5 p.m. They clocked out, they were able to go home and actually do whatever they wanted. You know, I'm sorry. Any promise about increased connection or any of that has not borne out literally whatsoever. Yeah, look, I'm here for the fully automated luxury communist future, but we're pressured to build. So that's why I think, you know, that's why I think a pause at this point is really necessary. I'm glad that Bernie's putting it forward. Right, but he's one person. And we know where the other. I choose option B. Listen to Solita on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts. People wake up and go, oh, damn, wait and hold up. They change all of that. Yes. It's real. The whole sale attack. It's wrong. And download Roland Martin unfiltered on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. The new NFL season is here. And you should be listening to NFL Daily as we march along to Super Bowl 61. That game winning drive. Maybe it's Herbert. Maybe it's Gino. Maybe it's my homes. We'll have the highlights. If Fernando Mendoza or any of those rookies are balling out, we'll break down the tape. Join me, Greg Rosenthal, and an all-star cast of co-hosts as we preview and recap every game. Listen to NFL Daily on the I Heart Radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an I Heart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.