Go back

Andrew Egger: Donald, You’re Rattled

66m 18s

Andrew Egger: Donald, You’re Rattled

The conversation centers on the unraveling of the Trump administration’s handling of critical global and domestic issues. Its narrative around the Iran conflict—blaming "crazy hooties" for soaring gas prices—fails to hold up under scrutiny, as the conflict has worsened, not improved, with increased attacks in the Red Sea. The administration’s absurd proposals, like militarizing a D.C. arch with snipers, reveal a lack of strategic coherence and deep insecurity. On AI policy, Trump’s refusal to acknowledge risks and his push to rebrand AI as "superior" intelligence signals a dangerously dismissive view, contrasting sharply with public and expert demand for safety. Public opinion overwhelmingly favors caution, with 76% prioritizing safety over rapid AI development. Trump’s stance is driven by close ties to tech investors rather than AI experts, further eroding credibility. Meanwhile, Democrats are actively advocating for caution and ethical development, creating a policy opening. As AI risks grow more tangible, this divide could become a defining issue in the 2024 and 2028 elections. The episode underscores a broader shift: the media and public are moving toward more partisan, polarized coverage, with both sides increasingly relying on ideological messaging over factual analysis, deepening the crisis of trust in democratic institutions.

Transcription

13405 Words, 72179 Characters

English
(upbeat music) - Hello, I'm loving the baller daily. I'm your host Tim Miller. It is Monday, it is Yom Kippur. So Bill Crystal is off. We have his younger pancamer Christian Gentile replacement on the morning shots newsletter in this morning. - Great replacement. - He's having all over. - Also, quasi-white house corresponded, but most importantly, author of the morning shots newsletter, it's Andrew Ager, what's up buddy? - Hey, Tim, I'm doing well, how are you? - I'm doing pretty good. I'm gonna talk about my weekend on tomorrow's podcast, so we're doing as good as we can. - Something about the chiefs playing over time game on Sunday night football into Yom Kippur, where I'm the Bill Crystal replacement, writing morning shots by myself, coming on the pod with you. It's a lot, it's a lot. It is, it is definitely a Monday. - Okay, here we go. Let's get into news of a, you know, war and peace and the state and the economy. We've got so much to talk about today. I was mostly struck by the spin coming out of the right white house this weekend. I feel like there's been a little bit of a shift as we get into the home stretch here of the midterms about kind of how to handle the rising prices, particularly at the pump. Kevin Hassett is the gift that keeps on giving the white house economic advisor. He was on Fox. You wouldn't think that you'd struggle with your talking points on Fox with Peter Ducey, but I think it shows you how dire of straights therein that Hassett couldn't handle that. Let's watch him and Peter together. - Prices down like a rocket ship in reverse went. - Well, one of the things you've seen first of all is that how, I guess, out of control, the irradiance and now the hooties are. And again, this whole thing started because the irradiance told us, like, we don't have to talk to you anymore because we're two weeks from having a clear weapon. And you see that there's like shooting ships like crazy in the straits that everything the president had to act. - Hmm, we don't play Trump's the way son here, but the lead in was Peter playing Trump over the lead in talking about how, you know, it's, we have to pay a little bit higher prices 'cause what we're doing with an Iran, it's totally worth it. But as soon as we resolve this, they're gonna go down like a rocket ship. He also bleeding over the weekend gas prices were higher under Biden than under Trump. All caps, so we're almost all other prices. And Hassan's going, "What are we gonna do? "These crazy irradiance, the crazy hooties. "What are we gonna do? "How do you, how do you feel that's gonna land?" - I think that first and foremost, they need to revisit this image of a rocket ship in reverse, typically a rocket ship that is like pointing downward is not something that anybody actually wants is not gonna go well for anyone. But I do think that, I do think that-- - Like the Palo 13 vibe. - Yeah, exactly, or one of Elon's sort of like misfires, right? We have seen so much hopeium for so long among these guys that like some way, somehow, Donald Trump is going to land this plane of the Iran war such that even if prices have not recovered at the very least, they'll be able to spike the football on that, they'll be able to say mission accomplished and we're heading in the right direction and you just need to have a little bit more patience until we kind of get back on the economic trajectory we were on before, which was not that good of an economic trajectory either, by the way. But, you know, that is the argument they have wanted to make and they've been dying to make for months and months. And I think what we are seeing right now is that they are finally waking up to the fact that they are out of time. There's no more room for this to happen. In fact, the conflict is moving in the opposite direction, right? I mean, the conflict is metastasizing. It's getting worse, the supply shock, the energy shock with the Red Sea now also being a hot combat zone that the president's trying to figure out whether or not to get involved with, you know, no arrows are pointing in the right direction. No arrows seem likely to be pointing in the right direction ahead of the midterms. And so they're just kind of stuck. Instead of getting this pivot that they have desperately wanted that the president has desperately wanted, the only card that they have left to play is this, well, you know, if you squint, you got to trust that the president's doing these things for the right reasons and, you know, look on the bright side, there have been worse economic times in world history, you know, back in the day, we didn't even have, you know, fossil fuels at all to be, to be mad about the price of them going up, you know, that kind of thing. So like, so it's really, really dire. And they have to go on the shows. They have to keep talking about it. They have to keep saying something, but. I'm strange that they feel like they have to. I don't know. The idea that it's like, oh, it's the crazy hooties. Look, you're a young man after 9/11. So I'll have a more clear memory of this. But it'd be one thing, you know, if this was George W. Bush going into the 2006 midterm, when like an attack on the country was fresh and everybody's memory. And it's like guys, you know, that we've had this energy shock by so little high, but we're on the right path. We have the surge. That didn't really work for him in 2006. So we've discussed, we're like, that's at least you're trying to offer, you know, something that resonates with some people. Who in the country is this for? This idea that it's like, oh, the Iranians and the hooties are crazy. And you know, I mean, they weren't even going to negotiate. It was like, there were two weeks away from a bomb. And it's like literally who believes this besides people that are just deep, deep, deep in the cults and just are like not willing to even contemplate the idea that Chairman Trump could do anything wrong. I got, you know, I mean, we've talked about this before, even like people in our lives, like who are Maggard listened to the focus groups. It's like, nobody thought this was a real threat, you know? And so like now to fall back on that be like, you know, the pain that you're feeling right now with these prices is really the fault of these crazy Iranians and the caves who are going to nuke us any minute. It's just, it doesn't pass the smell tests or even close. To me, the Rosetta Stone maybe of this entire war is just remembering that never in a million years, did Donald Trump think that this was going to be and become the defining crisis of his second term, right? It coming out of year one. He didn't mention it in the state of the end. Yeah, he thought this was going to be exactly the same sort of thing as bombing the boats off the coast of Venezuela or kidnapping the president of Venezuela or going and attacking Iran's nuclear program. It's like just keeping up this drum beat of USA flexes its muscles around the world and beats up some bad guys. As a way of just kind of keeping the base, you know, Jonesed up and patriotic while he pursued the agenda, he really cares about it at home, right? Which is going after the domestic enemies and the immigration stuff and all of these sorts of things. And instead, because Iran did not immediately buckle like he expected it to, he's just, I mean, he's been stuck since February. He's been stuck since like the first week of March with no way out of this thing. And it just keeps getting worse. It keeps deteriorating further. And there's no offering for it. And so like I was saying before, like that is why they're just left with this unbelievably poultry bag of like plausible arguments they can go out there and make. And they just have to keep their fingers crossed that like tomorrow, Iran will buckle when Iran hasn't buckled so far. And then again, they're still on the opposite. I mean, yeah, they're on the Prime Minister of the weekend saying, you know, we're not going to change until all of our demands are met. And then you have on the other side, as you mentioned, you know, the Hootsies are continuing to expand attacks on Saudi Arabia and in the Red Sea. This is what's going to happen last week. This is for the NDR times. On Thursday of last week, we discussed this a little bit. Trump had decided to strike the Targets and like engage in that expanded theater of the war that he started. That was after MBS called him and urged him to step in. But by Sunday, he had changed his mind and decided not to do that. We had approved target lists. Troops were loading bombs onto US warplanes. And Trump was like, eh, nah, I don't want to get involved. So the thing is expanding, not contracting. If you're MBS, you're like, man, what is $2 billion by a guy, not even a couple of bombs anymore. - Yeah, it really is. I mean, they are so far up a creek on this stuff. It is amazing and like, it's not gonna get better. It's not gonna get better. We're setting new records in like diesel prices, basically every single day now. I mean, it's just, it's astonishing how completely hosed they are in terms of just like any strategic or even like rhetorical options for selling people on this anymore. - Just for fun, because there is worse spin out there than Kevin has. It's just like to do a little bit of shot in Florida, just a little treat for all of us on a Monday morning. I was looking through a collection of posts by MAGA influencers talking about this topic. Is there kind of working around how to do it? There is Hunter Eagleman, related to Gunther Eagleman. They're very popular, Hunter was talking about how people are walking around with $2,000 foldable phones, $800 shoes and a $14 pumpkin spice latte. Who's paying 14 bucks for a pumpkin spice latte? And then they're saying they can't vote for Trump because of gas prices, whatever. Bill Mitchell, like the OG Trump influencer, people complain about being broke as they watch one of their three flat screen TVs or decide which of their two cars they wanna drive to buy their over-priced Starbucks coffee. And then this is the best one that you find for this morning. I guess a memo went out. And there were several people that posted the same extremely long essay, too long to read all of, but I'm gonna read just a little bit for people. These are a series of mega influencers all posting the same thing. I keep hearing people complain that gasoline is over four bucks a gallon. And yes, I'd love to see it at two bucks a gallon again, but before we declare gasoline, the most outrageously expensive liquid on Earth, let's put things in perspective. For four dollars, I get a gallon of gasoline all caps. I pour it into a 4,000 pound machine, turn a key in that gallon. We'll haul me my wife, the groceries, the golf clubs, and half the junk in my trunk almost 30 miles down the highway. That's pretty impressive days work for four bucks. That's true. - That's true. - That's great. A restaurant sells me five ounce glass of wine for $9. That's about 230 bucks a gallon. How far does that transport me just from the dinner table to the men's room? Buy one of those little two ounce bottles of energy shots at the gas station. That's 192 bucks a gallon. At that price, it shouldn't give me energy. It should mo my lawn. Vanilla extra, six bucks for two ounces. That's $384 a gallon. For 384 bucks, I expect the vanilla being to come to my house and bake the cookies. Goes on and on. Checkmate, Libs, total victory. There, I'm sure that there are a lot of people reading that going, you know what? That's true. That's true. I am paying too much for my vanilla extract. Yeah, I mean, obviously this is just stupid on its face. They're grasping their ridiculous. These are crazy people. It's very funny that nine people posted this pretty much verbatim with little tweaks here and there. But also, all that other stuff gets more expensive too when the price of gas goes up. The entire economy runs on the price of gas and diesel. That's like the biggest part of the problem beyond just what you pay at the pump. You know, that stuff has to get to the grocery store. Everybody has to like pay to transport everything around. You don't want to monkey with the cost of energy when you are trying to get inflation under control. That's just one of the very basic problems about this war, which again, has been one of the basic problems we've now been talking about for like what, seven months since early March, since the Strait of Hormuz became a problem in the first place. And like, they weren't making this argument back in March. And the reason they weren't making this argument back in March is because they thought they were going to have better ones to make and all those better ones have been systematically squashed by events since then. And this is what they're left with. And it is kind of amazing. - You're right, Andrew. We have been talking about this for seven months. Let's move on just to a new item than the news. The war abroad is moving back home. You know, we also have to prepare ourselves for attacks on the homeland, particularly our nation's capital. And Donald Trump made a pronouncement this weekend about the proposed glorious arch that is going to go above Arlington Bridge. He wrote this. At the strong request of the United States Military and Financial Security purposes, I've agreed to convert the magnificent triumphant arch plans since the Civil War era many years ago, at the receptive circle into a top grade military complex, slash triumphant arch to house, store, and have the rapid ability to use large number of drones plus snipers, both on the roof and plaza areas, and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage. There'll be no facility like this anywhere in the world. I don't quite understand why we need a big arch with snipers on it. And it is for people who haven't spent any time in D.C. Like the Memorial Bridge goes from the Arlington cemetery to the Lincoln Memorial. So we already have a memorial there with a high roof where we could put snipers if we needed snipers. It's also quite near to the pentagon, which I would assume has very good sniper ammunition storage possibilities. I don't know why we need to put it inside the triumphant arch, but maybe there's another reason you might be doing this, Andrew, what do you think? - Yeah, so this is one of those ones where you almost have to like be familiar with the layout of D.C. to really understand how insane this is. Like if you live in Northern Virginia, like I do, this circle that is right in front of Arlington National Cemetery, as you say, it's a big, giant traffic circle, it's important. It is a part of basically everybody's commute who's coming in from Northern Virginia into D.C. The idea that, first of all, that you would put anything in the middle of there other than just like something decorative, the idea that a military installation, it's like the silliest possible place that you could imagine to put a military installation that in theory would need checkpoints and security, and like you can't not imagine that continuing to serve, it's very crucial current traffic-related role under these circumstances at all. But as you say, there is a secondary explanation here. It's exactly the same reason why the president started talking about how important the drone port on the roof of his east wing ballroom was going to be, even though what he really cares about is the ballroom, what he really cares about is the arch. He believes or he has been told, or he thinks that he has this one-weird trick to prevent the courts from snaring up, from monkeying with his plans, to unilaterally build all this stuff without any congressional approval. He thinks that the courts will give him a lot more deference if he claims that there is a national security rationale for this, and it's not just beautification, it's not just a memorial. He thinks that they are going to steer much clearer of the executives' authorities in terms of shoring up America's national security. And again, he has done that now, both places, even though it is obviously nakedly protectional. There is zero reason why national security or military security, or even just any sane purpose would be served by putting a bunch of snipers up on a room to tell, you know, overwatch on everybody's commute. Yeah, it's really, really, really crazy. But that is the thought process here, such as it is. You do wonder, I kind of as an academic exercise, if it wasn't representative of the fall of our republic in kind of this idiocracy, kind of curious, how it would play out in the courts. 'Cause like, sure, it's free textual in both cases. You can imagine a legitimate argument for why, you know, the White House would need additional security. I mean, we're a quarter century after 9/11, but there was a potential attack there at the White House. I mean, it's the same category, but like, there's a difference in how preposterous the argument needs to be between the ballroom, also being a military installation, and having to put like bullets inside of the arch. And it's like, there's a million places in DC where you can have a sniper storage. Like there's no, there's obviously no need for this. And you do wonder how that would go through. The other thing, this is an incredibly congested airspace for traffic, you know, passenger planes coming into and leaving DCA, which is also just snuggled right up there on the Virginia side of the river. There was very famously, infamously, that crash that happened, you know, just a year ago, where it was a military helicopter that collided with a passenger jet. The idea that we are now going to treat that exact corridor as a launching point for drones is crazy. I mean, it's just not gonna happen. It's never gonna happen. There's no point for it to happen there, but again, the president wants the arch there. And so the post-hawk military explanation needs to come into. - When I was at GW, my apartment was right there, senior year, it was great. We could sit on the back, you know, balcony, occasionally with a marijuana cigarette, and you'd watch the planes come in. And it was just constant, like a constant, you know, plane traffic coming in right there. So I don't think, I don't think it's gonna happen. JVL's hot take is he wants Trump to tear down the Kennedy Center. I'm not there, but there is something about it would be nice for Trump to do some structural damage to the Kennedy Center so that, you know, we can just move forward with tearing down the triumphant arch without any concern. 'Cause I do think that they're gonna build it, don't you? - They do seem to be trying very hard to move toward building it. They don't seem to think that their case is bulletproof. Their legal case, really, Trump has continued to say, we're gonna do the groundbreaking. It's right around the corner, it's happening. And then when they file documents in the court, they're like, don't worry, Judge, this is just, you know, some like pre, pre, pre, pre-construction survey work that we're doing, it is not at all clear that he has nearly as much authority to do this as he did to do the East Wing. So I do still think that there's a chance that this really does get bottled up in the courts. That said, if they do put it up, it will be fun to tear it down and they should do that absolutely immediately, no matter what happens to the Kennedy Center, which I do hope survives. It's easy for JVL to say, you know, he's off and he's off in New York now. I wanna take my kids to the Kennedy Center, you know, like they should keep that one up in my view. - That's a good point. This might be a job for like the No Kings people and our listeners, you know, it's kind of like the old days, remember when the hippies used to kind of like create circles and stand around trees. So like the businesses couldn't tear down the trees, maybe we're just gonna need that, like a permanent running human chain, which will also be really great for traffic around the circle, so good luck with that. It's just an idea, I'm just spitballing. We'll keep working on it. And now a message from our sponsor, The Reading Room, as of this week Todd Blanche has been Trump's Attorney General for over a month in the full Epstein files. Well, they're still not public, you know that. So instead of waiting on the government to stop its cover up, the Donald J Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial reading room has printed out three and a half million pages the DOJ has released and built a free traveling exhibit that puts the files on display. It's a museum you can actually walk through to see the scale of the release files, the timeline of Trump and Epstein's relationship and attribute to the survivors. It's open now in Des Moines. What's up to all my pals in Des Moines? And then heads out across the country for 20 plus stops in the next eight weeks. You won't be surprised to hear the moving 17,000 pounds of evidence and the bookshelves needed to hold it across the country, ain't cheap. And The Reading Room runs entirely on donations. So if this is something you want more people to see, you can learn more and ship in to fund the tour at trumpebstinereadingroom.com/bolwork or check out our morning shots newsletter. The other big news of the weekend, Donald Trump decided to ban three outlets from the White House press corps, Politico CNN and MSNOW. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the brains behind this was none other than Natalie Harp, the human printer, Mashnote writer. The general reports this, Trump's frustrations with the press reached a fever pitch on Friday when one of his closest agent Natalie Harp showed him clips of anchors on MSNOW, criticizing his administration. According to people familiar with the matter, hours later Trump banned the network and two other news organizations from the White House, White House reporters that go to the White House press briefings, reporters that are part of the pool that covers Trump and his events, they had their key cards, you know, revoked basically blocks that could not get into the facility. This morning, the other TV networks in solidarity, we'll see an NMS now, I've said that they won't be providing video footage for Trump's pool events. So that kind of brings us to a head somewhat though, maybe he'll just make OAN and Newsmax, a permanent TV video, you know, poolers, we'll see how that goes, what do you make of all this? Yeah, that is essentially the move that Pete Hegseth went with when he pulled a similar stunt at the Pentagon last year. He basically said, we're just getting rid of all normal press. It's just going to be, you know, the podcasters and the right wing sites from now on in the press pool. I do not think that Donald Trump will consider that a durable solution that he likes. I think that in fact, if this embargo proceeds, and there's reason to think that it will, you know, that the TV pool in particular refuses to carry his events for as long as he keeps this up. I think he could very well blink. I do not think that Trump wants to be the kind of guy you can only find on one America news and, you know, Breitbart.com. I think that he likes the adulation he gets from those places, but he wants to be McDonald's. You know, he wants to be Coca-Cola. He wants to be everywhere. He gets very upset when the news networks do not cover his, you know, his rallies, his speeches, these sorts of things, like in prime time, just broadcast out there on his shows. He is a TV media guy. He is a mass media guy. He sees it as important. Who knows exactly the way this will shake out? Because, you know, he is so far off of his ordinary moves in so many different ways here. He's taking, you know, more erratic steps than he's taken before and across a whole bunch of different things. So maybe now is different. Maybe he does dig in his heels and just in a total fit of peak says, "Fuck you, everybody, you know, I'm just going to ban more people. I'm going to keep throwing out more and more and more outlets." But I really do think that he is likely to be rattled by the different organizations of the White House Corresponds Association's sort of linking arms around these people, but he is unconstitutionally thrown out of the pool. And we may see a resolution on account of that. Yeah. He's definitely rattled. This is like, MS now was mean to me, and so now I'm going to start banning people. And like that is not, like the Trump had a lot of hubris in the first year. You know, there was a lot of football spiking, a lot of confidence. Like this is not the action of somebody who's confident. Like confident Trump wants would then call MS now into the White House and be right them and say, you know, call the reporter a piggy or whatever. You know what I mean? Like, not just say that's bad, but I just think that like analyzing Trump, like this is a move of somebody that is frustrated with this data platform. And just and just totally flailing, right? I mean, like Donald, MS now viewers are not the people you need to worry about in the upcoming midterms. They are lost to you. They have not been Trump voters ever since, you know, at any point, since you came down the escalator, MSNBC now, MS now viewers were not Trump people. You have a lot more to worry about when it comes to Fox News viewers and Joe Rogan experienced listeners and, you know, people who turn on their local, you know, Sinclair affiliate. Like these are, these are the people in the middle who are just tuning out from the Trump show in droves and I think that you should not accelerate their, their, you know, trip away from you by cutting off your last access to them. But what do I know? I like when you call Donald. It's very dismissive. I like when you're like addressing. I don't know. Yeah. I felt kind of weird. I don't usually do that kind of thing. That's Donald. Donald your route. I don't know, the laws are closing in on your Donald, Donald, Donald, you're rattled right now. Donald, you're showing no confidence. It's true. Here's kind of the depressing part of this for me though. Some of these things are unfixable. We talk about this sometimes from time to time. Like, you know, that, that having him go back in the second time, you know, created a change in the way that business is done that I think is going to be hard to unravel across a bunch of different verticals. But in this case, I just think we've permanently moved to more partisan press being around the president in both parties. I mean, I saw Mediasan posting over the weekend about how the next Democrat should kick Fox out of the pool. It's interesting that head of the White House Correspondence Association and Jackie Eindrick is a Fox reporter. So that's kind of an interesting pickle that she's in because she knows that depending on who the Democratic president is, there would be pressure to come for Fox in a future term and their access. And they've been leading the charge on this, by the way. I mean, it's the Fox, Fox news is currently, you know, helming the TV pool and they are the ones who led the decision to say, we're not going to cover Trump's events while CNN and MSNOW and Politico have been kicked out. So it's interesting from that point of view as well. Yeah, for sure. So maybe I'm wrong about this, but I just worry that like, you know, we've already seen this at the Pentagon, people get used to it. Like we have these crazy pools now with Trump, where people ask like, dear leader style questions. You know, it's just like we've moved to something that is more like what you see in soft authoritarian and hard authoritarian countries in the way that the press covers the president. It's been kind of mixed, but like there's been this gradual move to having more propaganda press around. And I don't know like who is going to be the person that tries to pull it back, especially if you think that the other side will just, well, this go back to the Trump precedent as soon as possible. I can already imagine the, you know, the stupid circular arguments in the future when someone, you know, whatever president JB Pritzker says, I'm not going to have Breitbart in the White House. It's like, well, what the hell is that difference than Trump kicking out MSNOW, you know? And so I don't know how you unravel that. Am I too pessimistic about that, do you think? On this specific side of things, on the cutting people's access outside, I think we are unlikely to see other people follow the same strategy as Trump, at least in the, in the near term. I mean, this is already kind of blowing up in his face a little bit in the same way that it would sort of blow up for anybody's, for anybody because it lets all these network's, you know, sort of link arms and solidarity and, and, and refuse to give the president what he wants. I think what we are likely to see a lot more of is the stuff we've been seeing all along, where you just, you add more and more just sort of like silly, grotesquely partisan elements to the pool, to the, to the press rotation, all these sorts of things, you prioritize them in briefings, you let them, you know, you give them priority access because they're going to give you the, the, the best gloss and because the, the sort of big independent hitters just don't have the power that they used to punish you for that and make you look silly for that. And I think that is likely to be a bipartisan problem, you know, for as long as the current sort of media structures and incentives persist. But I, I do think, I mean, depending how this one shakes out, I think there's a chance that, that Trump ends up feeling stung by this and that future president see this particular thing, you know, making martyrs of some of these institutions instead of just letting them sort of slip into further relevance and inside the pool. I think that might be a, a decision that they realize was foolish for the president to go down now. I don't know, you just kind of see this from the top down now, like just a, a lack of, there's kind of no incentive for politicians to deal with just regular mainstream media or adversarial media anymore and, you know, influencers mixed in with the press pool and a lot of this is kind of naval gazing stuff and sometimes like a cringe a little bit when the, when media members are like, it's not like the old days with our W apple from the New York Times going by and the boys on the bus. And so there is some like eye rolling part of this, but I just, I don't know, I mean, the, a lot of the attention on both sides has now moved to much more partisan media and and it's kind of like, okay, well, why should, you know, it's about the asymmetry that we talk about, like the Democrats started to be like, why should we put ourselves in situations where we're dealing with challenging media when these guys just have like North Korean scribes covering them constantly? And I, I think it's a problem that's going to, it's tough to untangle. All right, guess who our next sponsor is, I'll give you a hint, you know, they won't need a meow. They literally, they're asking me on the script to meow, meow, meow. We can use that on a blipper reel or something at the end of the year. Meow. My cat is meowing. I bet a lot of you out there are just wondering for cat updates because we are the saga related to our sponsor, small, so we're going to get to small. In a second, we are the saga related to smalls for years now where we had a neighborhood cat, a wreatha that we were kind of taking care of, particularly after the weird Northern snow storm. And then I got bullied into getting an actual cat, Slinky is now in the house with us. And the latest of those things are going pretty good. Slinky is pretty codependent with my husband now, I would say, and he was gone this weekend. And so, until I was stuck with them, it's, it's okay. Like we're doing our best, you know, me and Slinky are still kind of checking each other out. By the end of the weekend, he's comes to getting pets from me because I just think he was in need of a human touch and I was the best option available because him and I daughter have more of a child cat, like kind of cat and mouse play vibe than they do a calm petting vibe, as you might have mentioned. So he came to me and one thing that I think I did to, you know, start to bring a thaw into the relationship to make Slinky like me better is feed them the great food from smalls. They make fresh human grade food for cats. It's made from the same stuff you or I would eat, but formerly it's specifically to help the cats thrive. Cats are carnivores, you need lots of real meat to stay healthy, but most calf foods that they're used meat by pride. and cut their food with cheap grains, fillers, and artificial ingredients. All that stuff in great for the cat. Big pet food does this 'cause it's cheaper, but what they save you on cost to your cat pays for what they're held. Smalls is different. Their fresh rep species are over 80% animal protein. No fillers are artificial ingredients. The food is so healthy that 88% of cat parents say that after feeding smalls, they notice that the cat has better digestion, that's softer and shinier, has more energy to play. I wouldn't know about that. I do make my daughter deal with any outgrowth of digestion issues, if you know what I mean. But the smalls is great. She loves the snacks, the treats, especially. Couldn't recommend it more. Stop serving your little carnivore a bowl of processed shortcuts for a limited time because you are a bowl work daily listener. You get 60% off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life. When you head to smalls.com/thaballwork, one last time that 60% off your first order, plus free shipping and free treats for life, when you head to smalls.com/thaballwork. Should we move on to the stuff that we're really excited to talk about? - Absolutely. - Your newsletter this morning is on artificial intelligence, Trump's AI hubris. And you talk about all the ways where you think that Trump's position on AI is gonna hurt him politically and he doesn't see it coming. Why don't you just give us the big picture pitch and then we're gonna go through the various elements of it. - So Donald Trump has carried himself as a pro AI president. Basically since his second inauguration, he's much closer to tech, oligarchs of various stripes than he was in his first term. He's laid out this sort of regulatory framework where he does not want states to be himming in or fencing in AI in various different ways. It certainly does want the federal government doing that. This has been a very secondary or even tertiary political issue for a lot of his term so far. A lot of it has been this sort of secondary issue of data centers and whether they should be constructed and whether they have these environmental impacts. And Trump has been very pro data center construction. But just in the last couple of weeks, as we have sort of turned as a nation or at least as a commentary it into this conversation that a lot of these AI people have been having all along about like, wait a minute. What if the robots, what if it's not a bubble? What if in fact they're too good? What if they're too smart? What if they're gonna start getting smarter too fast and start being able to do too many things too well and get hard to control? There has been a lot of new energy around that conversation, especially after at least one high profile exodus from anthropic, safety researcher who quit and sounded the alarm, we've talked about all of that. Bernie Sanders, a lot of these guys have been using the opportunity to vlog their own packages to say, slow down AI development. Let's put a ban, a permanent ban on super intelligent AI. We do not want these things to ever get smarter than us. No matter how possible that is, we want to just say, let's not go there. Trump has taken a completely different tack on all of this and I have even been surprised. I mean, when he posted last month, you know, you should let people build data centers in all your communities and he said, let data rain. I thought that was kind of a funny way to put it, but it's actually kind of turning out to be the thesis statement of his entire AI build out. He says he had a post over the weekend where he seems to think that, you know, the problem for AI is just bad branding. He doesn't like the term artificial intelligence. He thinks we should call it superior intelligence or perhaps supreme. Let's pause on that for a second. I think it's pretty interesting because it shows you where he's at right now. It's like he's not reflecting at all on whether, you know, going full speed ahead on AI's bad politics room. He's bought in on that, as you say. So as Trump, as those Trumps want, he thinks, well, maybe this is just a branding issue. You know, maybe I just need to put it, get a new hat, you know, get some new words that people can resonate that. So he posts first and he starts with a poll, offering three options for renaming for his followers on Truth Social. He offers supreme intelligence, superior intelligence and extreme intelligence. He did a follow-up lead. So what you want about the guy, this is, he knows how to do content engagement strategies. The follow-up lead read this, supreme intelligence, probably because of its relationship to the Supreme Court is losing badly to both superior and extreme intelligence. Therefore, we're going to take supreme intelligence out, deleting it as a qualifier and let you vote for the final two, superior intelligence or extreme intelligence. A fresh vote begins now. - Isn't that just such a beautiful little window into this singular mind that we all have to pay so much attention to now is he brings up the possibility, what if we build this machine? And it's called supreme intelligence and we let it run everything from now on. But don't worry 'cause I will be president and I will keep it under control. So that's the future that I'm promising you. - And we'll decide how to name it using kind of like an American Idol style. - Yeah, yeah. - That's time. We'll fully reality show. - When people are like, actually, that sounds terrible. I don't like that at all. That sounds like it would suck a lot to live under, you know, Donald Trump's joint rulership with supreme intelligence. The place his mind jumps to just by complete, sort of like broken brain word association is, they must not like that one so much because they makes them think of the Supreme Court, which has been so mean to me this year. It's like, he's a maniac, he's a lunatic. But he actually does have a lot of control over all of these different policy things. And he's not farming it out to the people whose brains work, whatever their other deficiencies to have to have like, you know, come up and flourish and thrive in Trump land. He is just word associating his way to policy about these extremely consequential things. And he is all for, you know, our new robot overlords. He thinks that's gonna be great. - Superior intelligence, an extreme and extreme. Like these do feel like words like that something they would come up with in a kind of a low rent futuristic dystopia sci-fi movie. Maybe even, you know, kind of like a spoof movie, right? Like they're not even serious. Like a space balls movie about dystopia. They come up with this. But Trump is like, yeah, people love that. Extreme and if we just change it from AI to AI, then then all of the other problems are people are concerned about, you know, the probability of doom or losing their jobs. So the fact that their kids won't be able to read or they won't be able to know the difference between truth and fiction. Like all of those concerns will wash away. Once it's just called extreme intelligence. - It's got electrolytes. - You pointed out a poll that I hadn't seen. The gap when it comes to like what people's priorities are on AI development versus whether they wanna prioritize safety or rapid innovation was 76 to 12 that wanted to prioritize safety. The pollsters I think are still just trying to figure out how to phrase these questions to get people's real opinions because it is confusing. A lot of people don't really understand it, you know, and like people have mixed views about various things. And so you see some, like there was that one poll like last week or something where it was like, who do you trust more? The Republicans or the Democrats, everybody's like shrug, you know? But I think so this gets at it a much more clearly, which is like, do you want policies to prioritize safety or development? And just a total blowout on the safety side of things. And Trump is on the 12% side. Yeah, and it's a really well tuned question because it actually does get at the current political split on this. This issue is so much in its infancy. Obviously there's going to be a lot of further sorting and further different politicians of different parties staking out different territory here. But right now, the two main political polls for this issue are Bernie Sanders on the one side saying stop development, you know, give us a moratorium on further improvements of these models for a while. And also a hard cap of, we can never let them be smarter than us. Now you can, you can quibble with a bunch of different things about that proposal. I would quibble with a bunch of different things about that proposal. But that's one poll here. The other poll is Donald Trump, who says, let it rip. It's going to be great. We have to beat China and you don't have to worry about any of this stuff because I'm in charge and no super intelligent AI would dare cross me while I'm president. I mean, that's basically the case that he is making. And if those are the two political polls, the public is dramatically in favor of the Bernie side rather than the Trump side because they say safety is more important in this moment than innovation is. And the whole Trump argument is based on, we have to innovate absolutely as fast as humanly possible because otherwise China will leave us in the dust. I love your sentence describing Trump's economic views. It's contrary and like depending on the topic, you know, sometimes I'm railing against Trump for like him acting like a communist or a socialist in the way that he handles the economy and then there are other times. It's like total laissez faire capitalism. And you summed it up this way. Trump's view is let business leaders do whatever they want. So long as they're willing to bend the need personally to me. I'm like, that's basically it. And these guys have bent the need personally to him unlike whatever Disney or CBS when they didn't want to change the way they edited a television program. And so these guys get to do whatever they want. When it comes to AI, specifically, the weird wrinkle here is that Trump, he is very close to the tech industry but he is not close to these actual leading AI labs. He does not trust the guys who run open AI. He does not trust the guys who run anthropic. He thinks they're a bunch of, you know, liberal wacko egg heads who maybe, you know, have this psychosexual fetish thing for their own AI chatbots. Like he does not like Dario or Sam Altman at all. The people that he talks to are the people who are the big investors in the AI build out. It's the David Sacks of the world. - And Jim Wilson. you know, the people that are building the plants because that's another thing that he cares about to the chip makers, you know, the manufacturers, right? And so these are all the people who are heavily incentivized to like whatever Even though the labs themselves are now kind of like sounding the alarm like these chatbots are getting kind of freaking out of control and Scary and we we're having second thoughts about how fast we're developing them It's all the people who are invested in the build out more than the chatbots themselves where they're like wait a minute We can't stop now. We can't slow things down now We've got you know a trillion dollars in CapEx tied up and and keep in the pedal push all the way down to the floor And those are the people who are in Trump's ear on on all of this stuff more than either the people the populist types We're like we don't like this or even the people who are in the biggest position to know who are actually developing these advanced AI's in the labs the Opportunity for Democrats you get into this here I saw a story over the weekend with the worsen democratic consultants basically advising Democratic candidates like not to lean in on this the AI guys have so much money They'll dump a bunch of money into your race. It's just not worth it. Like keep your head down focus on Kitchen table issues to me. That's like classic terrible cautious consultant advice. I would say that But you keep mentioning Bernie On data centers we've seen some Democrats lean in particularly like you know I think I've talked to somebody in Ohio. It was like all of shared browns ads basically are you know about The data center build out and how we need to slow it down. So you've seen some of that Democrats have been pretty cautious overall on you know kind of wanting to take a AI safety like an aggressive AI safety position Into the campaign and seems like you think that's a mistake Yeah, and I don't I don't want to give people the wrong idea. I mean it's a target rich environment Right, I mean this guy has a lot of weaknesses. He's he is you know taking on water at every at every level basically And I do think that that you know there's an argument to be made that some of this stuff is so Sort of sci-fi inflected that that when it comes to the midterms in particular You know Democrats are better off with you know focusing on some of the stuff that's hitting people more directly harder closer to home I do think though that as we're looking ahead to 2028 this issue is going to be more and more and more and more salient And whether Democrats are really able to slam the door on Republicans over some of this stuff while also By the way, hopefully rolling out a policy package that lets us keep some of the good things about AI, right? I mean, it's not it's not necessarily the case that like just slamming the door on this industry is a good thing for for the country for the world I mean there are a lot of unknown unknowns here And I think that but but I do think that the position that Trump is sticking out is so extreme It's so far out over his skis. It's so completely disconnected from where any real people actually are on this That he has given Democrats an enormous opportunity to carve out more and more space going forward Because this the super intelligence stuff that's only going to get more salient like it's it's it's it's only the possible future risk of this That has people so freaked out right now There's a very plausible pathway to that becoming a realistic like Present tense problem for politicians to have to deal with before you know we're even nominating people in the primaries for 2028 So it's it's only going to get more fraught If you've been listening to the show for a while you already know how much I love souls out of office THC beverages Definitely needed one of those watching the football game on Saturday, but One thing that we can move from it's not just the beverages. They now have something new which is mood gummies They say balance is the key to life well soul nailed that with their new mood gummies You can find the balance that you're looking for maybe sometimes it's a pick me up or a line me down or something in between No matter what it is they've got the perfectly balanced formulas designed to keep your level Soul is a wellness brand that makes delicious hemp drive CBD and THC products designed to make feeling good simple Souls new mood gummies have precise dosing clean ingredients and formulations designed for predictable effects So you can choose how you want to feel while staying in control You might want the uplift gummies or the mellow gummies before bed Or for that just right anytime vibe souls balance gummies have an easy versatile feel Whatever the moment there's a soul mood gummy to match make today a good day and get yourself some soul gummies right now Soul is offering my audience 30% off your entire order go to get soul calm and use the code double work That's get soul calm promo code double work with 30% off One Democrat has taken out staked out a kind of serious So reminded we center left position on this so it'd be encounter to Donald Trump He's not up for an election this year And I don't think he's eligible anymore, but you might have heard of him Barack H Obama. Let's listen to him The models are going to get smarter and smarter and better and better at a much faster pace at an exponential pace What are the risks of that There's the big science fiction risk uh, you know of Wow these guys these models get smarter than us and They decide humans Are fine, but not necessary They start setting their own goals and we the killer robots You know kill us or we bow down to them I do not want to exaggerate that particular risk, but I will say there is a non-zero risk of Non-zero chance of that happening But that's not actually the risk that I'm most concerned about although it's the risk that gets most attention And the reason that's a risk is is not because the the computer models Are conscious necessarily it doesn't mean that they are necessarily um Feel malice towards humans It's just that if they start setting their own agendas they You may get a misalignment Between what they want to do and what we want them to do and that gap can be dangerous. That's Problem number one the more serious problem is these models are getting powerful enough that if they get in the hands of bad humans they can do bad things They can be weaponized in certain ways They can do a lot of mischief I guess like he has the benefit right of you know not being in the middle of a campaign Sometimes when it's in a campaign that like doesn't really serve you To kind of like talk about the potential worst-case scenarios and kind of like hash out your thinking in real time On the other hand I think that like there are a lot of people who care about this stuff right now. They're looking for somebody that you know is offering You know some kind of like comfort and security about like what would be a smart way to move forward Might be a model for some 2020ators. I don't know. What do you think about Obama? Yeah, yeah, let's uh, you know It's not a super high bar to clear to read the articles to read six or seven articles about where where we're at I mean the way you and I have been have been you know belatedly getting up to speed on on a lot of the AI safety stuff That people have been talking about for a while But you know you would much rather have that you'd much rather rather have a guy who's able to converse on it at a very basic level than What we have now, I mean, it's just it's just crazy. It's crazy that that the The level of policy work that is happening on this issue at this moment where where where we're not at super intelligence But we are at this moment where maybe if we take three or four more steps forward We'll be stepping on to a treadmill toward super intelligence right with with these recursively self-improving models and things like that and the Visible policy action that is coming out of the White House is a truth social pull on whether or not we ought to rename the concept to make people more comfortable with it I mean like that's that's insane that's insane that's insane and I think it would be better if it weren't that way I want to talk about the Stephen Whitt episode from last week because I got a bunch of pushback from it I did my best to like read all of the emails the people sent you know Particularly people because I asked for them who are like smart on this stuff and In the either the AI industry or computer science or cyber security and like there were two critiques basically That were being offered like one was on the more optimistic perspective that like we're giving too much credence to the Pedoom probability of doom arguments and like they're all this potential good stuff that's happening I just gonna want to dispense with that side of it really quickly because I actually think Stephen Whitt did talk about that some and I Was been a while now, but I'd read off off been on where he talked about that. I do think that they're some positive I mean obviously particularly in health and in a bunch of areas like there's huge potential Positive opportunity here at like so the question is just more about how to balance that with the risks The but the pushback that I really wanted to focus on was the much more common pushback Which was that we're overhyping this AI's a bubble These guys are all lying for profit the quote-unquote effective altruists or the rationalists or whatever you call them that are the most concerned about those are kind of like a cult of their own And it's a little bit of like a super intelligent Q and on like that that's like you know kind of a summary of the pushback I got and I just and a lot of us who are asking me like we have one on super on it and I'm working on trying to have somebody smart on He's on the other side of this but there was not a single person that emailed me or I can't find a single person even online Fushing back on this that is arguing that this is a bubble and these guys are lying for profit You know AOC put out something about this this weekend It's like these guys want to convince you you know that they have a super robot. It's gonna kill everybody because that's how they It increase their you know whatever market share and that's how they protect you know put a mode around themselves and protect their profits And like maybe there's some motivation in there among Sam Altman, I don't know, but that doesn't deal with the fact that there are a lot of extremely smart people who are at the frontier to use a word of this type of research who are not in the effective altruist cults who have changed their mind recently based on what happened with hugging face, etc. And I brought this guy up in several podcasts now, but I just want to say it one more time. Sam Dan sells him. He is a top researcher at OpenAI, working on all this stuff. He was one of the people that had working on the alignment problem, which is like this question of making sure that the, you know, AI is aligned with what humans want. And he wrote a very long Twitter thread. I'll put it in the show notes again. And so this, I want the glorious Renaissance future as much as anyone. I've worked for it torturously. My whole career, it breaks my heart to see the potential in sight and forego it. But the argument that if we get there by growing models rather than engineering them, we'll lose everything in the end. Seems very strong to me. I'm wrestling with it and it's staggering implications. Like, I've not dealt with, I've not heard from anybody who has dealt seriously with like this, this person's critique, who is somebody that like wanted AI, thought that AI was going to lead to a great future for humanity and like is not, you know, doing some sort of, you know, whatever financial spin for the company is an engineer who like thought this was going to be great and has looked at what has happened late in the last few months and has said, guys, I'm freaked out now. We need to change course. And I don't, I haven't heard from anybody who has like compellingly, like dealt with that person and their others like it, but I'm just going to use Dan like that person's concern. Yeah. Yeah. No, I absolutely think it's fair and true that we should all keep in the back of our minds that one possible motivator for motivation for, for some of these executives to speak in this way could be a profit motive. Like, of course, of course, everybody's self-interested. These people want to make a lot of money. They have more money than, than crease is already and maybe they're diminishing returns there. But, but, but of course, that's, that's plausible and a possible thing. But, but I just, when I see people make this argument, I have not really seen anybody account for the number of people to whom it could not apply, who are also raising these same concerns. You know, people who are quitting these companies. I mean, that, that is, that was the, the big significance of the, the, the Jacob Coxen quitting anthropic that kind of kicked off this whole conversation is that he was a guy who left open AI over some of these concerns, who went to anthropic because anthropic was supposed to be and, and bills itself as and, and is, in, in some significant ways, the more AI safety focused of these companies, he's like, I'm going to go help them build their thing. He gets there. He's like, whoa, they don't know what's going on, either. There, these concerns have not gone away at all. He quits to, you know, blow the whistle on this stuff. He loses his economic exposure to anthropic. His shares do not vest. What else could you ask a person to do to specifically push against that exact argument than what this guy did? And, and, and still people make the argument. And, and that's to say nothing of people who have never had any exposure to any of these companies who are not, you know, involved in anthropic or open AI or XII at all, who are just outside researchers who are crunching the numbers on this stuff and trying to, like, figure out the implications for the future of humanity, same as everybody else. Like, I, I just cannot get my head around seeing that argument, treating it as dispositive to the whole question and, like, letting it just sort of reassure me so totally that I don't have to pay attention to this issue anymore. And I do think that is kind of the main draw for it. I, I, I, I don't mean to say that people are just sort of deluding themselves to give themselves a false sense of security. But, look, again, I don't want to impede these, but, well, it's like some people don't want to update their priors. Like, I've changed my view on this literally two weeks ago, right? Like, I, I, I started paying more attention to, to the concerns being offered by people that I felt seemed credible for variety of reasons. So, and I think that some people it's like, there were reasons, I think to have a counter view. And even though it's by the way, like, dance also might be wrong, but these people might be wrong. Yeah. But I just, I just think that it's important to deal with it seriously. So, people have pushed back on that in particular. Fire go, I'll listen to it. And can I just say one other thing, which is that like, I, I totally recognize to the like, we're layman here. Like, we are generalists. We are coming in to this conversation that is ongoing for a long time. Like, I've had a lot of people in, in the morning shots, comments who are much closer to this industry than I am, who disagree with the things I've written in various ways. I have very much appreciated like getting their pushback on various things. It's, it's helpful. And like, I don't, I don't want to, I feel like I was kind of inching toward imputing motives a minute there in a way that I should not be because I have not earned that at all. So like, just, just to say that, that part of it as well. Okay. Final topic goes in the discourse over the weekend. Nicole Hannah Jones is the, is a writer for the New York Times. You excited about this? Oh, yeah, man. She wrote a column about 10 years ago about how she is going to put her daughter as a very prominent column in the New York Times. She's got a lot of attention about how she's going to put her daughter in the neighborhood school. Rather than giving her a chance to go to a better school, you know, because she thought that was important, you know, for commitment to the community. She talks about, like, her and her husband are black, their daughter's black, about how, like, people had made sacrifices like their, their parents and generations before. I made sacrifices in order to help de-segregate schools and give more opportunities. I'm like, they should do the same and like, they should use their power and influence and privilege to like make the neighborhood school better. And the advocates in, with the principle, and on this PTA for the school. So that was a decision that she'd made 10 years ago. She wrote a column this weekend saying that her daughter is now, I believe, in eighth grade and is pissed at her. And basically said, "Mom, I can't believe you did this." Like, this school has been terrible. And I just was at the beginning, like, I actually wanted to engage with you on, like, the substance that was happening in the school rather than Nicole Hannah Jones. Like, she's really hard on herself. And so kind of props for anybody that writes something that's really hard on themselves. And I want to talk about this in particular because, like, well, I myself am obviously white breaking news. Like, I, but like, I thought about this with, with Toulouse and like, what school to put her into. And we're living in Oakland. We put her into the neighborhood preschool because we thought it would be good to kind of, like, be part of the community and for it to meet other kids that look like her. And, you know, the, the, we went and met the preschool teacher. She seemed like way overqualified, frankly. She's a really awesome woman. And she's in a class and like, her entire class was black girls. And we're like, this is so cool. We're in the neighborhood school. And like, this is great, rather than putting her in the private school at the rich tech teach back skits. Right. And preschool ends. We go to end the teacher calls us in. And she's like, Hey, I want to meet with you guys. And we're like, great. We came in. We sat down with her in the classroom. And I'm like, sitting in the little kids chair. So you always feel like you're a little that brings you back to like being a kid and having a teacher lecture you when you're in trouble. And the teacher looks at me and she's like, You have to take her out of the school next year. Like, just like totally blunt. Like, appreciate what you're trying to do. I see what you're trying to do. But like, she's like, this isn't going to serve her for her to be in here. And like, that was like a real rude wakeup call for me. And I appreciate that she did that. And, um, obviously, you know, kind of we can't wait to move in New Orleans. So I ended up becoming not material about Oakland anymore. But like, I understand that point. So on that part of it, I'm kind of sympathetic to her. The part that I'm not is where you get into where she starts talking about what's happening at the schools. I just want to read a couple of parts. She talks about she's an elementary school. She decided to visit during the lunch period. Her class and other classes were sitting at their tables on the cafeteria with no lunch and no adult supervision. Children were running wild, chasing, hitting, and pushing each other while the teacher's aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored. It was during elementary school, also during elementary school. A few days before school went up for winter break, I got a folder in her backpack with a math assignment. So I had been requesting since our conference. I sat on my dining table, scanned one page, then another and another. None of them were graded. I started checking her work and discovered most of her answers were wrong. She believed herself to be good at math. It was her favorite subject. But now I understood that she thought she was correctly solving all her problems because her teacher wasn't checking the work. This is an elementary school. She goes on, it happens again in middle school with algebra where she thought her daughter thought she really knew algebra and was good at it, but it turned out she knew nothing and then she ends up going to a better school. Actually, I'm going to crack myself down. She's in high school, I think, but she ends up going to a different school for high school and goes into algebra class and all of a sudden she thinks she's good at this subject and she's not. She hasn't learned anything. And I just like, you look at these stories and it's like, I'm kind of Gomp smack that I do feel like both parties at the national level. It's different in some states and cities, but like at the national level, I've just like kind of abandoned this and like decided that like no child left behind was a failure and standards are failure and teaching to the test and blah, blah, blah. And so now where it's like not even talking about this anymore, this is a huge subject conversation in the 90s and 2000s. And it's like now nobody even talks about this. And it's like fucking crazy. Like schools like this exist at all. And to me like reading the article, I was like more riled up by that than I was by like the personal kind of issues of the author. Yeah. Yeah. And it's hard when an article like this blows up like on Twitter. And that's how you kind of experience it as like a Twitter fight first and foremost because everybody has, you know, lots of like pre existing baggage baked in about Nicole Hannah Jones. And I don't I do not do not care about that stuff at all. I thought that it was an extremely bracing read about the total lose lose situation that a parent in this position is placed into, right? Where where the only option that you're given for your own kid is bail out on the public school system that's there because the public school system that's there is so completely dysfunctional and broken just abandon that with with all of the sort of corollary stuff that she struggles with with that because she's like, I don't want to abandon all of those kids to that just because I have the ability to kind of like pluck them. my kid out of there and put her in a more sheltered, privileged environment, right? You can totally understand where she's coming from with that. She's like, I think I have the ability, not just to sort of like cocoon my kid off, but actually make a difference in this school because the school has been failed by all of the other people who are supposed to be making it like a workable place to get an education. And the whole article is so compelling because it's her struggling so hard against that and actually trying very hard to make that happen and make that work and failing. And then grappling with, okay, I was not able to exert this kind of like positive influence on these institutions like I thought I would be able to. And maybe all that I did was failed my own kid because I was not only unwilling to sort of cocoon her off from this dysfunction early and just put her in a different school where she would thrive, but also I didn't really make things better for anybody else either. And so like I really do encourage people to go and read the thing. You're absolutely right about the sort of main problem on a political level being Republicans who have given up on this system altogether and just want to give people more and more pathways to opt out of public schools and Democrats who have reversed polarized into saying, "Fuck you guys for wanting to opt out of the public school, "the public schools are great, the public schools are fine, "the public schools are doing well, they just need more money, "they just need more funding." I mean like it is such a dysfunctional, horrible mess and like you almost struggle to really know what to say other than like what a shame, what a mess, what a tragedy, yeah. - I don't actually, I have more to say. This is where my old, sometimes my old Jeb Bush muscles start firing because this school that she went to, the kid, there's $52,300 per student at this school. Like this school is getting funded in New York. New York has plenty of funding, this is not, she's not in rural Louisiana or whatever where the school is not getting enough funding. - Louisiana schools are doing pretty well. - Well, Louis and that, it's really Mississippi. Louis and we're copying now, we're trying to catch back up. But Mr. Zimissipi miracle, it's done better. DC is actually DC schools are trying to do better 'cause they made changes. We talked about this in the Christoff Cup website ago when he's like, he's an organ and he's like the Mississippi schools are now doing better than an organ, schools. And he's like, this is crazy. And it's like, what is it? It's accountability, it's like standards. It's making sure that the kids actually learn and not just moving them along. And so like you said about the reverse polarization, the stuff gets like all wrapped up in like these arguments from fucking 30 years ago about like, oh, teaching to the test and no child left behind and like, or whatever, common core and all this stuff. And it's like my recommendation to a 20, 28 Democrat is to pick up this issue and be like, we should pay teachers very well and we should have high fucking standards for the students. And like we should be really serious about this and commit it to it again. And like, I'm sorry if some teachers don't like that or some schools don't like that or administrations don't like the standards that we're setting, but like, we are failing these kids. And certainly some schools need more funding. Like I'm not saying that that's not nothing, but like the kids are, if you look at where school districts are doing better or worse, like a lot of it is just, are you committed to actually serving these kids and making sure that they learn what they need to learn? And like to me, the most damning part of the story is like it's like makes you want to cry. Like this girl who like thinks she's good at math and isn't because they're not even grating the papers because like whatever, either because Steve's was lazy or because they've decided that grating and testing is, you know, some whatever, like is unfair. There's not, doesn't include equi, it's not equitable and it's just like, no, like kids have to fucking learn. And I don't know, you look at this and it's pretty, pretty despairing. So there's my, there's my final rant. Sometimes people ask me, you know, if I've gone fully native and everyone's while I like to bring back my kind of Jeb Bush education reform type, that doesn't mean, I'm not even fully on board with all that stuff in New Orleans. We have full school choice, which I think is also huge. It's a problem in itself because it's like, all it does then is really helps the poor kids that have very active parents because they like are on the ball enough to like sign up at the right time. And so anyway, I'm not, you know, like there's challenges to every system, but the standards part is it's not negotiable. I don't think, all right, that's Andrew Eger. What else do you have any other final thoughts for us? - No, man, hear here to that stuff. My oldest kid is four and it's terrifying. - Yeah, no, man. They just, the kids fucking deserve better. The kids deserve to learn. So we'll see how it is. I appreciate you, brother. We'll be back here with Bill Crystal next Monday. For those of you that miss Bill Crystal. And we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of the show with a Mississippi and is gonna get to rub my nose and the outcome for the football game this weekend. But we'll give it this fun politics as well. We'll see y'all there. ♪ That clap didn't was the second comment ♪ ♪ Far so far, we all got work to do ♪ ♪ It gets dark, we all got work to do ♪ ♪ She is the lead man ♪ ♪ She is the lead man ♪ ♪ We sell Vegas is near ♪ - The Bullwork Daily is brought to you thanks for the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, associate producer Anzali Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DeCicco and audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.

Podcast Summary

Key Points:

  1. The Trump administration’s narrative around the Iran conflict and rising gas prices is increasingly discredited, with officials relying on implausible claims about "crazy hooties" and Iran to deflect from deteriorating energy costs and strategic failures.
  2. The war in the Red Sea is expanding, not resolving, with continued attacks on Saudi Arabia, undermining any claim of progress and worsening global energy shocks.
  3. The administration’s attempt to justify military actions through "national security" is absurd—such as proposing snipers in the triumphant arch near D.C.—highlighting a profound disconnect between policy and reality.
  4. Trump’s push to rename AI as "superior" or "extreme intelligence" reflects a lack of engagement with real safety concerns, showing ideological dismissal of risks like AI misalignment or weaponization.
  5. Public opinion strongly favors AI safety over rapid development, with a 76% to 12% gap in support, contrasting sharply with Trump’s pro-innovation stance.
  6. Trump’s AI policies are shaped by close ties to investors and chipmakers, not AI researchers, deepening distrust in his understanding of the technology and its risks.
  7. A growing political divide exists
  8. The current AI policy vacuum creates a strategic opening for Democrats to position themselves as leaders on responsible innovation, especially as AI risks become more tangible in the near future.

Summary:

The conversation centers on the unraveling of the Trump administration’s handling of critical global and domestic issues. Its narrative around the Iran conflict—blaming "crazy hooties" for soaring gas prices—fails to hold up under scrutiny, as the conflict has worsened, not improved, with increased attacks in the Red Sea. C.

arch with snipers, reveal a lack of strategic coherence and deep insecurity. On AI policy, Trump’s refusal to acknowledge risks and his push to rebrand AI as "superior" intelligence signals a dangerously dismissive view, contrasting sharply with public and expert demand for safety. Public opinion overwhelmingly favors caution, with 76% prioritizing safety over rapid AI development.

Trump’s stance is driven by close ties to tech investors rather than AI experts, further eroding credibility. Meanwhile, Democrats are actively advocating for caution and ethical development, creating a policy opening. As AI risks grow more tangible, this divide could become a defining issue in the 2024 and 2028 elections.

The episode underscores a broader shift: the media and public are moving toward more partisan, polarized coverage, with both sides increasingly relying on ideological messaging over factual analysis, deepening the crisis of trust in democratic institutions.

FAQs

The main concern is that AI models are advancing too quickly and may develop capabilities that outpace human control, leading to misalignment between AI goals and human interests, which could result in dangerous outcomes.

Trump dislikes the term 'artificial intelligence' and suggests renaming it to 'superior intelligence' or 'extreme intelligence' to make it more appealing, reflecting a lack of concern for safety risks and a focus on branding.

A poll shows that 76% of people prioritize AI safety over innovation, while only 12% support rapid development—highlighting a strong public preference for caution, which contrasts with Trump's pro-innovation stance.

Trump's position ignores AI safety risks, promotes unchecked development, and relies on unverified claims, which alienates the public and gives Democrats a clear opportunity to position themselves as more responsible and cautious.

Trump does not trust AI researchers like Sam Altman or Dario Amodei, viewing them as liberal 'wacko egg heads,' and instead relies on investors and tech executives who prioritize profit over safety and ethical development.

The growing public concern over AI safety, combined with Trump's extreme stance, creates a political opening for Democrats to champion safety, responsible innovation, and a balanced approach to AI development.

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.