2: The Midterms Move Toward the Democrats, and is AI about to Break Politics?

- I'm practicing my lean. - Yeah. - The podcast wraparound. - The wraparound. - Nate, the podcast wraparound. - The reach around. - Reach around. - Babe. - No. - No. - Before we're not the latter. We don't need H.I. on our case on our second official episode. - Okay, okay. Okay, here we go. (upbeat music) - Welcome to Still Counting. I'm Gail and Greg. - I'm Claire Malone. - And I'm Nate Silver. - On today's show, new polling suggests Democrats are in a stronger position than ever for the midterms. So have the midterms broken their way? And what would that even entail? Then concerns that AI safety have broken containment and entered the political debate. We're gonna discuss what Silicon Valley and now Washington are fighting about what Americans think and how it's changing politics. But first, the midterms. So since our last episode, there has been quite a bunch of new polling included one from the New York Times, it's gonna call it, in fact, Nate, you talked with Dan Fyfer of Pod Save America yesterday about that polling and folks can go check out that special on YouTube. But we're gonna talk about it more here and about what the model shows us more broadly. So, and usually we suggest that we don't write an article or do a segment based on one poll, which we're not going to. We're gonna talk about the whole sort of universe of new polling. But this is one, the New York Times is sort of-- - It's real good. - At this point, you drive the political conversation. It's a very high-quality poll. - Look, ordinarily, if our wonderful producers had asked us to do a segment on one poll, I would have said, no, sorry. I'm going for a walk or something instead or we're gonna write about how, you know, where the AI is gonna kill us all. The reason I chose to do this, and you can go to the YouTube feed for more on this, is because it's actually not an outlier, right? It's consistent with almost all the polling we've seen. - Well, let's say what it says, which is Democrats leading in the generic ballot, which is when pollsters ask, do you support a Democrat or Republican for Congress? - Okay, fair enough. - That's a generic ballot is. - Okay, Democrats leave in the generic ballot by about eight and a half points, according to the latest poll. - On a likely voter basis. Yeah, we talked about last week, after Labor Day, pollsters traditionally switch over from using registered voters to likely voters. And our model, Flipper. (laughs) - That's never gonna get old. That's always gonna be creepy. - I thought it was a week one Dolphin noise was better. That dolphin feels like-- - I know that was a throwaway. - I'm kind of more palatable. - I'm slid. - But our model had detected that likely voter polls were likely to be better for Democrats. So it was kind of priced into some extent, but still to see Democrats up by eight and a half points. It can be eight or nine, depending on how you round it, is consistent with what we thought. But any notion of like, oh, people will come back to school and then we'll see Republicans rebound because their voter will get fired up by Democrats being too left-wing or be loyal to President Trump. I mean, there's not many signs of that. Instead, you see in the New York Times poll, a pretty big gap between lectinist to vote, between Harris, 2024 voters, and Trump 2024 voters, and you also see independence really leaning toward Democrats in their congressional races. - Right, it's something like a little over 60% of Harris 2024 voters saying they're almost certain to vote. - Which is why JD Vance is telling all of the Republican voters to go out and vote, right? - Yeah, it was like, it was something like 56, 58% of Trump 2024 voters. We got this, I'm suggesting here that we got a lot of data here beyond just that generic ballot top line. Claire, what's that got to you in the latest poll? - Honestly, the immigration and economy numbers. Democrats on immigration, people trust them, 52% Democrat, 45% and on the economy, they trust Democrats, 51% to Republicans, 45%. The immigration number in particular when I was first scanning through, I was like, oh, that's really interesting because that's obviously where Trump was kind of doing his bread and butter work. Since 2016, but particularly in the last year, obviously there's been a lot of immigration actions by the administration and the economy. It's like all we can talk about ever is the affordability crisis. I mean, I was texting a group of friends yesterday about the bond market and casual. - And interest rates for home loans because you know, that's what you worry about when you're almost 40. And so I think a lot of people, you know, just those are really terrible numbers for a Republican that basically made his campaign and his party sort of coalesced around those two issues. - Yeah, it's driven as you might expect by college-ish-coded voters, voters with an advanced degree or a degree are 59, 37 in favor of foreign Democratic policy and immigration, non-college voters who are the majority electorate lean toward Republicans by only four points there, five points, excuse me. So yeah, you see, I think the aftermath of Minneapolis, also, I mean, ironically, you can argue that in certain ways Trump is being penalized for his own success. I mean, we have had a lot less immigration on the Southern border, right? So like it might be a less visible problem. And so now Trump looks more extreme with some of the ICE actions and things like that. But yeah, this was supposed to be his strength. It's not as bad as like some of his other numbers, but it's no longer a strength. It's a, it's a luster weakness, I guess you'd say. Yeah, I mean, folks will have heard me say on a previous podcast that voters still prefer Republicans over Democrats on immigration. Now, this is likely voters, which sort of over represents college-educated voters, high propensity voters, people who are very locked in, the electorate will look different from 2028, but this is a change, right? This is Trump's biggest strength becoming a vulnerability that is on par with the economy and foreign wars according to this, right? Underwater Republicans are by seven points on the economy immigration, foreign wars. Well, I just, I don't think, well, sorry, I don't think immigration is going to motivate nearly as many votes as they come. But in terms of preferences between the two parties, I mean, it's obvious that affordability is the number one issue in this election. Are we doing the affordability thing? In my child inflation, man, affordability feels too ephemistic to me. I have an objection to that term. Okay, what? Okay, yeah, no, I want to give. It's a question. That's what we've always called it. I mean, affordability might be kind of like technically more accurate, but it feels like a little bit of what about it? What about it? I mean, it just feels like a neo, how do you say neo-jilism or whatever, right? But like, I feel like it's a word that like is a little bit contains a little spin. I mean, there are a lot of political terms, you know, that I have. But doesn't it have to also do as wages not keeping up with inflation or cost of living? Isn't it more encompassing than simply just inflation itself? Isn't it wage segregation? I just feel like it's been a lot of time. I think that's what it is. In the Biden era, denying that inflation was so high or that voters had realistic reasons to be concerned about it and then it kind of transformed, I'm just interested in political language. Probably you think I'm making a annoying pedantic? No, it's an objection. That's why I'm neat. Well, but the thing is, it's a new term. I don't know what people are pissed off about is just the fact that we're experiencing sort of 3.4% annualized inflation. I think people are feeling while the accumulation of inflation over a six-year span, but also the sense that, and there are certain parts of the economy that have to do also with interest rates, you're just talking about home costs, which are not directly inflation, but cost of living, if you wanna call it cost of living great, let me make a point though on exactly that, which is that in your silver bulletin model, when you look at Trump's approval rating on the cost of living inflation, whatever the fuck you wanna call it, he's 40 percentage points underwater. Like it's really fucking bad. It's really fucking bad. When you look at this though, when you look at the economy or cost of living in this, Democrats only lead Republicans by seven or eight points, right? Republicans are still getting 43 to 45% of the electorate on this issue. That means that there are a lot of people who are not happy with what Trump is doing, but are not gonna vote for a Democrat. They're still gonna vote for a Republican when push comes to shove. And there are a lot of people who still remember the Biden years. - The communist thing still works. And I do, I mean, to go back to your thing about the Biden years and inflation, that is true, right? Like there was a little bit of, - Yeah, it's like, oh, it's misinformation. Like, don't follow that guy. - A little gas, yeah, a little gas, lady. - A $5 dollar gallon gas. It's not misinformation, that's like, you know, that's actually what you have to pay if you actually try to get your tank filled. But look, there's this famous, I think, Bill Clinton debate answer in 1992, where a woman asked a question about the national debt and President Bush answers it very literally, and then Clinton realizes this woman just has concerns about the economy in general, and answers it less literally and talks about inflation and things like that. And so, you know, I'm just sensitive to like political speech because people were not calling it affordability in the previous presidency. I feel like it's a piece of framing that's actually affected. Like if I were John Assa for Cory Booker, or something, I'd use that term, but I'm just sensitive to like the speech thing. - I also think it is more setting aside the Biden, or the politicized use of it. I do think it's more descriptive of how people feel. Like, the reason why I was texting about the bond market is because shout out to Ben Castleman, former by 30th staffer, who is now the chief economics course monitor at the time, he was on the daily yesterday. And he said this one thing that really freaked me out, which was basically like, actually maybe the last 20 years, of low interest rates were. or the aberration itself and that we will just have like forever high interest rates. And I think that coupled with the fact that like the first home that people buy in America, the price of it has gone up astronomically in New York. I mean, let's not even talk about it. It feels sort of a filthy thing to say. And those things coupled with like 30, what grocery prices are 30% higher than they were in 2020. It just feels more encompassing and atmospheric than to say like interest rates or inflation high. - Right? - I agree. Maybe my plane is too pedantic, but like look people place, people don't cleanly differentiate the different economic anxieties that they have, right? And it's always been based on a mix of kind of vibes and objective data. I mean, that was kind of one of my big critiques about the Biden years, people would say, well, the economy is actually doing fairly well by jobs related measures and it's just bad vibes. It's like, well, the vibes are always bad because press coverage is usually negative. And like a lot of people in a lot of westernized countries feel as though they're getting their wrong end of the deal. And, you know, we now have one or two percent growth per year instead of two or three or four percent. And that compounds over a period of time. - Let me just say retroactively, we should have called it an affordability issue under Biden as opposed to just not calling it an affordability issue under Trump. And I say that because when you look at the data, Americans were becoming literally poorer for the first basically three years of Biden's presidency, which is to say prices were growing faster than wages and by the summer of 2022 by a real significant clip. And so Americans, as much as you could say, oh, but like look at employment levels, Americans were getting poorer and you couldn't tell them, don't believe you're lying pocketbook or whatever. Let's zoom back out to the midterms overall. When we sat down here last week for our first episode, the your Senate model over at Silver Bulletin was roughly 5050 and I made a joke about you amping up the drama as we returned from our summer vacations. Now Democrats are back up to about 60% in your Senate model. I think that's the highest they have been since you launched. I imagine the New York Times, the anti-college poll is a piece of this but not the whole. - Yeah, I mean, the model is designed so that anyone individual polls should not affect it all that much. It's the overall constellation of polling. Quinnipiac had a poll showing Democrats up 11 points on the generic ballot. UGov has them up like a 10 or 11 and among likely voters, they're doing much better than among registered voters. Marquette University, which is a strong pollster, had them up some gargantuan number like 12 or 13 points that's not even inner model yet that came out this morning. So it's been pretty consistent. It's also been like, it's really hard now to find any Texas polls where James Talleriko is not ahead. He's ahead within the margin of error in any individual poll, but collectively that presents a fair amount of evidence or sure Brown's been ahead and basically every poll of Ohio. There are some exceptions. I mean, New Hampshire polling has been maybe surprisingly close. We talked a little bit about New Hampshire last week. But our flipper is actually pretty steady and stubborn for a presidential model. It moves faster because you have more of a focal point on just this one race that has 50 different manifestations in 50 states. Despite that, we are gathering a fairly consistent story about democratic performance and these polls has been quite strong post labor day. And does this what we're looking at right now taken to account the fact that Cook just moved just rating for New Hampshire? Oh my god. Is this the care for the Cook race moves? It does, except we have to de bias the expert ratings because they are completely miscalibrated to what any reasonable person, probably including them, thinks what the national environment's going to be. Yeah, we got to listen to a question on this, which I was debating whether or not we should dive into. Let's do it really quickly and then we'll move on to whether AI is going to kill us. So Korko Queen on X asked about the gap between the quantitative forecast models like yours and the model at split ticket, which is the argument, our friend Lakshadjain runs that vote hub, which is exactly Danini, where Democrats are projected to win in your model like 30 plus seats. The modal outcome is like 30 plus seats in the house or 27 seats over at split ticket, et cetera. Then when you look at the expert ratings like Savita's Crystal Ball, Cook Political Report, Inside Elections, the modal outcome is, you know, Savita's Crystal Ball, it's Democrats winning four house seats inside elections. It's Republicans winning five. This may have changed since this listener asked this question. How do you make sense of the vast described as you're there? - Extremely, I'm trying to figure out how un-PC I can be. - Just go with like media un-PC. - Yeah, like-- - No, no, they have no fucking balls. They have no balls. They're terrified to put themselves on the line and say the Democrats are gonna have a good year and then what will happen is, you know, on like October 25th, they'll say, oh, now the blue wave has arrived. The blue waves are already fucking here in the polls. The polls might be wrong. The polls probably are not gonna change that much between now and November. So, you know, grow a pair of balls. You can aggregate that. I don't care. Like, it's gutless to call something like New Hampshire a toss up. Would you really-- - Were you shit talker in baseball, like in sports? - I wasn't very good at sports, Claire. - I was just kidding. - I've spent up over a lifetime. Can I ask you, is there anywhere on the map where you're like, I believe the race raiders over Whipper? - Well, it might be something like, like in Texas, the fact that they rate it as toss up or maybe even tilt R or something, right? Like, that's you suppose a relative signal, right? So, like, if you can sort out, you know, I might disagree with them on like New Hampshire or something, but like, it's directionally helpful to have like a, um, an expert signal. But it's like, why on earth are you telling us this is gonna be like a D plus one environment? It's not even a good baseline assumption. In a presidential year, yeah, the house tends to be fairly neutral. But like, in midterm years, particularly in second terms, it almost always favors the out party anyway. And like, it's just, it's just kind of hedging in this very strange way that as a forecaster who's been more criticized than anyone else being frankly often more right than anyone else, not always. But like, being criticized with like, let's you building in the public of how we present probability is like, they're making my job kind of harder and then it's pretty fucking annoying. Well, we'll see, maybe they'll respond. We'll bring it up next time. We gather here. But we'll bring them on the show next time. All right, Gauntlet is down. Gauntlet is down. Still counting is brought to you by Zipper Cruder. Hiring these days is very time consuming. I mean, it always was right. It took a while to hire you guys. And look at that turned out, I mean, I couldn't have been worse. I'm all right, Claire. I'm thrilled. I'm a rigorous hire, I'll tell you that much. Um, but Zipper Cruder can help. The future of hiring looks much brighter because Zipper Cruder's latest tools and features help speed up finding the right people for your roles. So you save valuable time, valuable time. You can be modeling naked back to build a model man. Get that model running. Need some model juice. And now you can try Zipper Cruder for free at zippercruder.com/counting zippercruder.com/counting. See a candidate that you're really interested in? You can unlock their contact info instantly. Over 320,000 new resumes are added to Zipper Cruder monthly. That's a lot. Which means you can reach more potential hires and fill roles sooner. Use Zipper Cruder and save time hiring. Four out of five employers who post on Zipper Cruder get a quality candidate within the first day. And if you go to zippercruder.com/counting, right now, you can try it for free. Again, that's zippercruder.com/counting. Zipper Cruder, the smartest way to hire. (dramatic music) All right, I'm sure we're gonna talk about them in terms more as we discuss AI. But let's dive into the AI apocalypse. So over a month ago, 1300 staffers at Frontier AI companies wrote an open letter calling for AI regulation. There was barely a ripple in the news. A week ago, a researcher at Anthropic named Jacob Coxon posted about his resignation on acts warning that quote, "the people building AI "urnously believe that it could kill us all "by the end of the decade." Those tweets set off a fervor that is still in progress as we record rippling through Silicon Valley in Washington, like Claire. Why did Jacob Coxon's post break through in a way that I mean months, but also like years of warnings have not? - It is kind of a mystery to me. I can't remember actually who the first politician was, who amplified it. I think it helped that the other AI leaders amplified it. But it was a little bit odd to me. Because like honestly, I've been as the person who on this podcast who doesn't really use AI. I have been like morally disturbed by AI for a long time. And some-- - Is the Catholic thing? I'm kind of-- - Yeah, like I think it is. Yeah, I mean, I do think that I have like a very, that there is something to me that is really disturbing about when AI people will talk about the new world that we can live in with the benefits of AI. Like many people, I'm the idea of curing cancers or things like medical breakthroughs. Great, that sounds good. But when they talk about things like, we can all just like not work and pursue our hobbies. I mean. And that stuff actually, you know, you can look at a state like West Virginia, which has been not hollowed out by AI, but hollowed out by industries that don't exist. Like coal and people, you know, there's there is something to the dignity of work and people feeling a purpose in their life. I mean, I do have pulled up in front of me on my computer screen, the papal encyclical by Leo the 14th. No, I'm just saying I'm saying this is listen, just this is a long preamble, but I actually think it's important because the reason why people are so existentially disturbed by this is it is like the industrial revolution, like the Luddites before them, like it is this real feeling of threat to humans, a human's way of life. And the fact that it no longer feels like total weirdos talking that way feels like people are sort of saying like, OK, well, that's part of part of what you're seeing now is that like I've known these weirdos for a long time, I'm weirdo adjacent when I say, right, there's a lot of coverage of AI in my book where I talk to Sam Altman and a lot of the leading figures. In all the labs, talk to all the effective altruists, all the rationalists, I'm happy to do a little glossary of people want or not. It's always a mystery as people who cover the news cycle, but you know, in some ways are critics of the news cycle too. It's always a mystery why Evan any given story blows up, right. Why some mass shootings, for example, dominate the front pages for days, others are just ignored. Sometimes I have to do with the privilege of where these are taking place, right. Why some police killings become major stories and some don't proximity to, you know, New York and DC and things like that probably helps too. Yeah, we were, you know, people are experiencing a lot of understandable anxiety about AI and objectively speaking when you have when you have leaders of these companies saying, by the way, I agree with him, right, I agree with him that this could cause an existential risk. I think it's overdue. A lot of sudden shifts in news coverage have to with stories that were overlooked before and I'm happy that this is penetrating from just the, just the weird nerds who I support. I'm a weird nerd myself into, into mainstream discourse and it feels like timeings about what I would expect to do if Coxon is not a particularly remarkable. I mean, what are you saying is what a lot of people have been saying for years. I think it's sort of, it is like the weirdos in Silicon Valley who have been doing this thing. Like if you're an AI researcher, you have existed for the past 15 years in a subculture, right. You got a PhD, you got a PhD at one of these places, you went to become a mathematician, maybe at one of these Silicon Valley companies, you lived in a group house, you were segmented within others like you talking to each other for years and years. There's a group think that sort of became, you know, that turned into the different sort of contagions of humorism or the effect of altruist, all those things, but you were all talking to each other. And frankly, like the fact that it has broken contagion, like all respect to weirdos and, you know, smart weirdos and people building technology, but I don't want to live in their world. Like I do not, I do not, I and a lot of other people do not ascribe to that being like a good future. And I think the fact that so many people are sort of realizing like, oh, this is the president's not going to stop it. The government doesn't know how to regulate it. These guys sort of are also telling us that it's bad, but they don't have a plan to stop it. It is kind of like, oh, maybe we should freak out. I want to valet, like given that we try to direct our lens towards the broad public and analyzing these things. I want to maybe add some numbers to this. I did a poll. It was like, if you want to listen to every poll out there about AI, we talked about it on gd politics this week, but like to summarize a bit, what you see is a lot of skepticism. And I think this is quickly shifting train. And so we're going to have to see how the past week and a half gets priced into American concerns going forward. Even in this New York Times, the oncology poll, you don't see AI as a particularly big concern. And you also don't see a call like, oh, there's one issue where Republicans actually had more trust. But I'm not sure how it would make of that, but assuming this poll happened before not exclusively it ended over the weekend, but it was the biggest issue on which people didn't have an opinion, 20% of Americans couldn't choose a party, whereas like 97% of Americans can choose a party on immigration. But let me say up until this point, at least when you and actually you got did a poll that after Coxon was in the press a lot and Daria on the day, et cetera, started reacting. You saw still in the sort of fast, quick response, you go pull by far the bigger concern is still jobs over will AI kill. I mean, they literally asked, well, are you concerned that AI is going to kill us all. Americans are concerned about that by a 12 point margin, are you concerned that AI is going to take all of our jobs Americans are concerned about that by more than a 50 point margin. And so to your point about maybe a, you know, a Catholic work ethic or keeping a human in the loop or the role of humans in determining the outcomes of their own lives. A lot of Americans are there. And then when you ask them what do you want the government to do and you can propose almost anything and it'll only be like 15% of Americans who are like, no, I don't want to do that, whether it's like AI safety for children, whether it's stopping AI from becoming super intelligent, whether it's protecting artists, et cetera. Like there is, there's been this growing concern, there's been this growing local issue of data centers, too, which is also signing about affordability, ultimately water and electricity prices. And it's sort of burst open in this way that's about safety, but still the biggest concerns are about humans role in working. Well, it is also I will also say just it is actually a big thing in education and and how it's affecting children, like I think, you know, we live in New York City, like I'm sort of in that discourse, right, like New York City. Just banned, I think the use of AI products, I think a lot in the schools, I think a lot of other school systems are sort of starting to think about that that sort of goes with the pairing of like phones, people are in addition to the work aspect and I wouldn't frame it as Catholic work ethic, I would say like the dignity of the human and how work and purpose is connected to that. I was giving you an opportunity to read the encyclicals really what I was doing. My dad and I can do it together, but I think it's the idea of not just work, right, I mean, this is about work, but it's about people envisioning a future and thinking about their kids and thinking, wait a second, is the education that I'm giving my kid going to even be useful. Like it's people really starting to turn on to not just the the Andrew Yang thing of like, hey, when he said what four years ago, yeah, the robots are going to come take your jobs. I think we all kind of get that that the robots are going to take a lot of jobs and now it's it's an it's an existential level further where it's like people are thinking about kids and education too and how their work lives will be. And I think that that's deeply unsettling for a lot of parents and families and that yeah, I think it's a double layer, I think unsettling is a good term because I don't think this is necessarily the direction is clear the direction is anxiety. Fear of AI, right, in a you go poll, I'm looking at the chart of this, I'm going to interpolate the numbers, but looks like 66% people say roughly that AI is advancing too quickly, only 3% say it's advancing too slowly, you know, I think with Hey David Sacks, I see you in that poll. Yeah, you know, so I think data centers have some nimbism and some environmentalism and things like that and concerns about water use, which might be slightly misplaced, but like, but this technology is improving very quickly. If you don't use it regularly, you might not understand the hype about it, if you do use it regularly, then you might have a right opinions to me, it seems kind of almost almost magical, right, I use chat, GPT and cloud to some extent Gemini all the time now for helping to code my models right a year ago at this time, they were not very good at that and now 98% of my code is written with these models and they can take like a 30,000 line, you know, flippers like 25,000 lines of code. And I can say diagnosed this code and it can do it in a few minutes and if something happens and I have to patch the code, I mean, it's, it's, I mean, so part of it, I just want to say though, like part of the reason for the timing too, is that like, A, the models are getting better, B, there have been these security incidents like hugging phase where they're capable of very persistent and very one might say creative and potentially dangerous behavior and that's freaking people out a little bit too. So, you know, it seems like the people who are very knowledgeable right are also very freaked out by the behavior of the model misbehavior that we actually know. I mean, the other now to the people make is just like a slower moving early COVID phase right where you know, I remember as someone who follows the news I'm like, well, obviously look what's happening in China and Italy, New York City has people from all over the world, we're going to get. It's going to hit us fairly hard, right, but there's still kind of like a denial. I remember like every day it seemed like the streets got like 5% or 10% lesser, you know, I remember I would go to a couple of restaurants where it's like, oh, it's really hard to walk into, but like. People are staying home and then and then but you kind of saw the world emptying out you kind of saw it coming in and. You know that happened over a span of a few weeks, this is a span of a few years, right, but still things that grow exponentially, you know, suddenly they're over the place. Still counting is brought to you by Sundays, we are what we eat and the same holds. for our dogs. A long, healthy, active life starts with clean, real food nutrition every day. I mean, I'm trying to do that for myself. Folks should be trying to do that for their dogs. Do you love your dog? Come on. Yeah. Sundays for dogs is different from that trash you get elsewhere if I'm being honest, right? It's human grade real food. You feel good eating yourself. Sundays recipes contain 80% plus all natural meat, roughly twice the meat content of some leading frozen brands, plus ingredients like kale, ginger and blueberries. I mean, it's like one. It really is less time. I'm getting hungry. No fillers, no chemicals, just simple, complete nutrition. It doesn't look or smell like dog food. It looks like high quality jerky protein protein. I mean, that's the trend. And it's a vet founded and vet for I guess that's a trend for humans. It's always been the trend for dogs be left out. Yeah, I know. And it's a vet founded and vet formulated created by Dr. Tory Watsman to meet her high standards as both a veterinarian and a dog parent. And the best part, it's effortless. No fridge, no freezer, no prep, no mess, just scoop and serve. Over 100,000 dogs are now eating sundays and many dog parents notice the same things. Shininger coats, better digestion, more energy and finally getting excited at meal time, sounds like me. Even the pickiest eaters are excited at meal time. Hello, are you not excited about meal time? I am. I am. I don't do sad discolences. I like going out of my apartment and actually ordering from a human being, man. And dogs, like honestly dogs deserve the same. I feel like I'm becoming a dog activist just reading this ad. Yeah. And maybe you'll get one and feed it sundays. And I would feed it sundays. I don't have a dog, but I know dogs, you know, like two, I know dog. And I love the dogs that I know. And I would say if you love your dog too, feed them sundays, make the switch to sundays. Go right now to sundaysfordogs.com/count and get 50% off your first order, or you can use code count at checkout. That's 50% off your first order at sundays for dogs.com/count. Sundaysfordogs.com/count or use count at checkout. I want to put a finer point on the polling conversation that we're having and how Americans feel about AI. And so I have a very quick quiz for you all pop quiz. Okay. We're going to play a game of is this more or less popular than AI per an NBC poll of it earlier this year? Okay. First, more or less popular than AI, ice, immigrations and customer enforcement. More popular. More popular. More. Neat. How was the YouTube? No, no, no, no, no, no. You just got to give me an answer. Okay. We need to have spelling be rules in the future so I can. I'd say ice is more popular. Ding, ding, ding, ding, ding. Ice is more popular than AI. Okay. Which is more popular? Kamala Harris or AI? Kamala. Yeah. Kamala. Okay. Ding, ding, ding, ding, right. The Democratic Party or AI? The Democratic Party. Democratic Party. Wow. Okay. I rescinded the entire first segment. That is more popular than Democrats. What is more popular? AI or Iran? The country? No, the country. Oh, AI. Yeah. I guess AI. Am I aware? Ding, ding, ding, ding. It is more. Okay. I'll save everybody the rest of this quiz. No, one more. Okay. You want one more? AI or the Republican Party? AI? The Republican Party is more popular than AI. Democratic Party, less popular than AI. Republican Party, more popular than AI. What about AI versus democratic socialism? Do you have that one? AI. I don't have that on hand. Okay. Thank you for participating. Your prizes are in the mail. Let's translate this all into political coalitions. There are coalitions in the tech world, which if you want to get into, you can, but there are also coalitions forming in the political world. Ted Cruz, Amy Klobuchar, John Thune, are working together on an AI safety bill in the Senate. We'll find out more about the details, I believe soon. Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon appeared together at a pro-human conference this week, where people heard from everyone ranging to concerned parents to artists and intellectual property concerns to a group of Mormon, Catholic, and evangelical spiritual leaders talking about the importance of humanity in the future of the world, which still feels crazy to say, how is this either transforming politics or getting funneled through the political divisions that already exist? I think the long story short is that you're going to probably see a super majority wanting greater AI regulation and some type of slowdown. You know, people have concerns about their jobs, they have concerns about their child's education, they have just fear of technological growth in general, they have fear about more and more power being in the hands of fewer and fewer people because these are not technologies, like it's not been Atari being made in someone's garage, right? These are already powerful incumbent companies, they're becoming more powerful potentially. So, you know, where are the exceptions to that? You might have some people on on the right who want faster growth and are concerned if the AI bubble deflates, it will hurt the economy, right? You have some people who are tech accelerationists, is the term they use for themselves or EX. Those might be people who think this technology is going to cure cancer, they might think actually it's good if the machines succeed us, right? And they're very, very, you know, and they, yeah, I mean, they're even saying that you were talking about and you got full, basically, that might be the two or three percent. Some of them are even transhumanists who say it's okay if we kind of fuse with computers or computers of the superior species and they replace them. He's weirdo, right? That's what I'm saying. Yeah, and then, then there is a weird group of AI denialists. These people are people that established a position back five or some years ago that like, oh, AI is just hype. The bubble is going to burst, it's not really intelligence in any form, some of them still put AI in square quotes and they were laughably wrong about this. What AI can do, even if AI doesn't get any better, which they probably will, you know, the things that it does on a routine basis now are things that they would have described as impossible five years ago. So to cover their ass, these denialists are going against, by the way, the expert consensus, all these famous, you know, Nobel Prize winning scientists who say AI is dangerous and AI is very capable and just denying their own common sense. But like, but they're in this kind of anti-regulation coalition because if they admit there's need for regulation, they have to admit they were full of shit. Who are those people? You can go to my Twitter feed if you want to see names. I do criticize people by name. I mean, there are people that I have very little respect for, but like, in the context of this show, I can't show you the evidence where they're constantly full of shit. On Twitter, you can see some examples of people who are completely out to lunch. All right. Because one thing that you said earlier, Galen, when you were when you were reading out some of the, the polling is that most Americans haven't coalesced around a partisan opinion about AI, right? We're in this kind of, it's like a plasma stage of where sentiment goes and there are all these, like, yeah, ban and and Bernie, who are actually not a strange fellow bedfellows as you would think, right? They're populists. So it's, it's, I mean, very different kinds of populists with very different kinds of rhetoric, but populists, right? Humanists, you might say, maybe we should all go back to referring to ourselves as humanists. But I'm really interested in how, how normies, people like me who don't use AI that much, normy politicians, like, I'm not talking about like an Alex Boris, right? Like a person with an AI background who's, you know, starting this, like, AI, um, pack, I guess, just sort of try to raise awareness. But I'm talking about, yeah, like Amy Klobuchar, like who eats her salad on a comb and, you know, maybe use the Japanese GPT, I don't know, but it's obviously weird to not buy it. But like, how does those forces who are sort of getting more interested in how do they interact with, as we must say, like the high weirdos, and like, I think actually, what's it, I keep on forgetting his name, our new, our, our, our doomer, our baby doomer, Jay. What's the name? Jacob Coxen, who, who was, you know, angered, I think people on the left the other day when he went on and said something on Fox, where he was like, um, what was he saying? You would know this. He had, he had like, I think he'd been saying that doomsday fears about environmentalism. Climate change, environmentalism had been exaggerated, which I was like, this is so, this is like a perfect example of, um, total, burrowed into his own, you know, probably social sphere, weirdo, coming out into, well, it's not, okay, but like, I mean, he's, he's someone who's, who's, um, on television, probably pissing off people on the left who thought they had found sort of like this, uh, I think he's smart, fair. Right. Totally. I think it was very deliberate for him to go to right leaning news outlets, because they're the ones, you know, but my question is how are, they're a small, small part of the population. The mainstream, you know, your dad or whatever, I have a party, but like, that's some more important coalition to persuade and Trump is a more important actor to, to persuade, um, so yeah, so to go back to my question, which is, I mean, Trump has come out and basically, been like, this is all hui, uh, onward, let's beat China. How do you, and I think, you know, um, he, uh, he was put on speakerphone the other day at some conference by. Johnson Huang. Johnson Huang. How do the various camps, who, who let's say, want to slow down? How do they deal with Washington? And I mean, like the Trump administration, but also sort of like the well-meaning, probably like bipartisan people are like, how do we regulate this? No, and this is where the eccentricity of both the effective altruists and the kind of Silicon Valley founders themselves makes it difficult. I'd say their political instincts are not all that good, but also they, I mean, they have a really difficult position. I mean, look, I'm impressed by the EA slash rationalist. I won't parse that distinction because they were in some cases predicting something like this. In some cases, when he was 25 years ago, which 25 years ago would seem frankly insane. So they really, they kind of really understood the technology years in advance of when the general public or even kind of other elites did. Um, but I think Jacob Cox and said this, the very things that make them like good at like predicting these eccentric things kind of make them very unpersvasive political actors. I mean, you know, I'm not afraid to say that like, you know, you probably see a lot of a high functioning people with Asperger's in that community. It's probably locating that somewhere in the right vicinity if you haven't met one of these people yet. Um, so very smart, eccentric, interesting interests. Um, what, you know, also some of them are, do have this like transhumanist. Some of them think, hey, actually it would be great if no one were ever working again. And, uh, and maybe the machines have agency and well, it's going to be weird, but we can all of whatever go out of the, go to your woods and do mushrooms together. I don't know what they're envisioning exactly. So much of this conversation has been about what happens when, you know, a group, I mean, I think you first described them as, you know, people who've been working on this for 15 years, who've been living in a house together, working on this kind of stuff, like shorthand weirdos, tried to like people living in a, I won't say people living in a bubble. Interact with median America. Right. And boy, if the past, however many years of American politics, haven't been a similar experience of our politics becoming defined by this group of people. I called the 15 to 20 percent, which is much larger than people working in AI, who define the conflict in America become obsessive over the twists and turns. And then every like come election time, especially presidential elections are shocked to learn that people in the rest of the country view the world far differently from the way that they did. Even politicians whose job it is to trap this kind of stuff, in part, I mean, it's to govern, but also, you know, get elected. And so track public opinion, I mean, if there's anything that's less unpopular than AI, quote unquote, while it's Iran, but like less unpopular still, it's data centers specifically almost. And so many politicians have gotten caught flat-footed on that issue. Greg Abbott says Texas is ground zero for the AI revolution. Josh Shapiro touts the biggest investment in the state in AI. And then and both of them have flipped. And they said, nope, we're pausing. We need to make sure that things don't get out of hand. We want to ensure that these development companies are producing their own electricity off the grid. We want to do all these reviews to make it whatever. Now, Republicans in Texas saying we need to do environmental reviews to see how this is going to affect water. That's a U-turn of significant proportions. And is reaction to something that is that is happening like, do you this is grassroots politics kind of 101? I mean, how does that, you know, I think it's just interesting to reflect on that. Like how often people get it wrong when they try to either do business or politics that's geared towards a country of 340 million people and step in it. But I'm curious how this all works itself out like within the two parties, right? Because to make a question out of this, Trump is Operation Warp Speed in early 2020. He wants backs, backs, backs, backs. Because that's kind of what the public wants. But at and we're all looking at all of this polling Americans are so worried about COVID, whatever. Ultimately, we can end up getting basically divided 50, 50 on COVID with like these pretty kind of extreme camps in either direction. And what feels nuance and what feels bipartisan and what feels like this groundswell of concern gets sorted through a two party system that does what two party systems do with those kinds of concerns. I mean, but the thing about ALAI issue that is I think so confounding to everyone in America is that it's not an American issue. It's just like, I mean, not to sound like the cheeseball here. It's like a literal human issue. And so to Well, COVID COVID right exactly. But like to stop, you know, I've heard just stops, just slow down progress to, you know, increase the focus on safety would require the cooperation of the Chinese. And you'll hear people say like, well, why are we selling them the chips that are enabling their AI? You know, advances, which feels like a really fair question. But I think the idea of like internationally, how do we slow it? It feels like if there were ever a time in the world where we would get together and cooperate and kumbaya over something, it's like not now. And people have said like, we should form like IAEA inspection equivalence, right? Like someone should people at these there should be these unaffiliated researchers who go in and are safety extra. And like, I'm like, sure, great. But like, who's going to broker that? Because it doesn't seem like the US. It doesn't seem like China. And I think China has their own concern. There's good extra client episode on this this week friend of friend of the friend of the pod. I don't know if he's, you know, but, but yeah, I'm not so sure that China wants unregulated AI models either. I mean, they have much more restrictions on speech, for example, and they want to maintain one party leadership. They're way to the social aspect. Yeah. And they think we're the ones who are being irresponsible. But, but look, I don't think this is going to polarize quite in the same way that COVID did. I mean, COVID was uniquely famously difficult because you had these two terrible alternatives. Shutting society down for months at a time is extraordinarily harmful. Hundreds of thousands or millions of people dying is extraordinarily harmful. And, and, and, well, that's where we're going to argue about that. But with, with, with AI, like, I mean, could, I think you on non ideal extremes with AI, which is, but like, totally unregulated and shut everything down. And to be honest, that's what I'm hearing right now from Trump and Sanders, right? From Trump, I'm hearing, shut the fuck up. Everything's fine. You have a high-key president, full-seam head. We need to beat China. And then what I'm hearing from Sanders is, shut it all down, stop building the data centers, put a pause on where we are right now, pursue jail time of 20 years for anyone who tries to pursue superintelligence in a rogue manner. No, I mean, so I am that ability to see to pretty extreme views come to the fore. I mean, like, genuine question. Is that extreme? Like, how do you slow down the extreme? I mean, I know, but I guess I'm asking like, this is a real open question. Like, is that, is the Bannon Sanders proposal of shut it down? Is that realistic? I think government takeover is plausible, maybe even likely at some time interval. I'm not sure what interval. But, you know, if you were working in a private lab on a nuclear weapons or technology, say, could kill all of humanity, of course the government would take that over, you know, I think also kind of death by a thousand cuts through like lawsuits and things like that. So there's this whole debate about like, well, are the AI lab leaders being self-interested in causing calling for regulation? There are dumb versions of that argument. There are better versions of that argument. But like, if they have any people advising them on the politics at all, they have to get out in front of this because this 2-to-1 majority against data centers against AI is before we've seen, if we see them, massive job losses, it's before we've seen, you know, if you're a silver bulletin meter, we wrote about the hugging face incident yesterday, this scary thing to people who really understand the tech. But you haven't seen things like a power grid getting shut down by like a rogue AI hacker, right? You know, I think somebody loses access to their bank account because of AI. It's like show up at the data center site and start hammering away. What do you make of someone like Alex Bore is starting this pack or whatever we want to call it? Like, does that do anything or is it just kind of like, I would like to run for president at some point. And here is my, you know, organization that's surfacing my name in like a high profile way. I mean, you should that's actually sort of where I wanted to end this conversation. So thank you, which is, which is 2028. Like, I think it's a little bit lead in the game for this to become the defining issue of 2026. And if it is going to affect people's views for 2026, I think it's in line with what people already feel, which is like things have gotten out of hand with prices, things have gotten out of hand with Iran and things have gotten out of hand with AI, reminds me a lot of how people felt about Biden at the end of Biden's term except swap out AI for immigration at the Southern border. Um, I think ambitious politicians are looking out the situation saying, Oh, fuck like I thought I was going to be running on Medicare for all. But what if all we're talking about in 2028 is AI, right? It's kind of like we were all talking about the Iraq war for the 2008 presidential cycle, and then you get into the fall and all of a sudden, there's a financial crisis, and there's people like walking out of bear strength crying. So, and then we're all talking, we're all talking about that. So I don't know the answer, like how do you position yourself? I would be surprised if the answer was fully standards, like shut of the fuck down, because when you look at, also when you look into this polling, there are people who, a lot of people who are skeptical of AI, use it in their daily lives. Right, I mean, - They do, they do, they do as most data is appropriately. - They do, but you've been far more than that right now. - For example, right, because I understand how incredibly powerful this technology is because I use it for frankly pretty advanced use cases, right? And like to me, it's not like a chatbot. I don't use it for that kind of shit, right? It's like this thing, how long peanut butter can stay in the fridge? - This thing is important to my productivity as a small business and improves that productivity by, I don't know, 20 or 30%, and most people don't have that experience, really. But like the same things that like, I'm like, oh wow, cool. It can do this now. Now I can get to bed earlier, and I'm not gonna have to have to, you know, stay until two in the morning grinding on this program. But the same things that make me excited about it make me worry. Like what if this thing gets two X better within six months again, then where is that project out to? - Can I make you focus on the politics? Again, just really quick as we wrap here. - So hard, it's so hard not to focus on it. - Focus focus, but the question was about 2028, which I meant to say, like I used you as an example, maybe that was wrong, but just to say, there are a lot of people who find this useful, who are also skeptical of it. And so I think basically saying, let's stop all data center development, let's pause everything, right? I mean, maybe people would be fine pausing it where it is right now. What is, if you're an ambitious politician in America today, and you see yourself potentially in the White House after 2028, what is the position that you take? - I mean, my quick answer is, I don't know. I have a, I mean, to what you said earlier, it is rough for Josh Shapiro, famously, you know, ambitious for 2028, swing state, right, like flipping positions, but like to go back to you, we're in this weird plasma stage of no one knows where their partisan affiliation goes. Again, like why, where we're automatically framing, maybe I'll look back at what I'm about to say as like crazy a year from now, but we're automatically framing the Sanders, shut it down as an extreme, but like why, right? I guess that's my open question is like, you know, are there ways to have people still access like the chat GPT version of it, but shut down the kind of research that is having models break out of their sandboxes, right? Like, isn't there a way where you can shut down some of the cutting edge research until there are safety parameters while people still can use the consumer product? - I mean, you have this whole open source versus closed source debate, but like to stick on the politics, you know, if I were a politician, I'd say AI must broadly serve the interests of the American people, and if it doesn't, it must be shut down, right? That's what I would say as a stump line. You know, I mean, again, the benefits accruing only to a small class of people, like you'd say, well, no, we'll have to work again, and in fact, you know, people in Silicon Valley and the VCs won't have to work again either. I guarantee you, I'm gonna be living in the, you know, they're hippie compound in Palo Alto or New Zealand or wherever it was. It's gonna be a lot nicer than everyone else. - Can I read from our fellow American, Pope Leo the 14th in Magnifica, Humaniac? - Well, I knew this model was coming. - I knew what I was talking about. - All right, carry us out of this podcast. - No, 'cause it is actually, it is actually kind of a human, it's a humanistic polemic about, like you responsible use of AI. People should read it. If the human being is treated as something to be perfected or surpassed, it becomes easier to accept that some lives are less useful, less desirable, or less worthy. In the name of progress, necessary sacrifices may begin to be justified, placing the burden on the most vulnerable in the pursuit of a supposed optimization of the species. That feels like a political message that's very palatable and like that politicians would use, right? Like the common good, like our common humanity, right? That's kind of what all these politicians are saying. - And I'll tell you, I've gotten that exact feedback on the, on AI episodes that we've done on GD, which is, okay, all well and good. You actually didn't touch on my biggest concern, which is all of the benefits of AI are occurring to the top where all of the benefits already are. And so again, with the whole like data centers actually being about affordable electricity and the politics of place and having control over local environmental resources and whatever, it's not like, the data center backlash is not because people are afraid that AI is going to kill them, per se. There's another concern here, which is people feel that the stratification of society along economic lines is getting completely out of control and that AI is going to exacerbate it further. - Yeah, look, I put it like this. I think it's very irrational for people to have profound anxieties about AI based on what people in Silicon Valley say AI can and will do, is that anxiety manifested in the most coherent ways? Probably not. AI requires a lot of technical ability to understand and I'm lucky in that AI kind of run in the same social circles as some of these people and like I may frequent user the technology myself. If I didn't use AI myself for these fairly advanced tasks, I don't know what I think, but it's almost, I mean, I'll get the function hammering away as a data center. - Can I ask like a loaded question to end it, which is like, where do you put, it's actually twofold. It's like, where do you put the likelihood of AI killing us in the next 10 years and like, could your AI ever break out of their sandbox and pop with the model? - I want to say Nate's personal p-dume for like a special episode or something 'cause I'd have to think about that more. - Yeah, we need to have like a. - We'll do it, we'll play that game. - I use constraints on how I apply my AI's, right? So I don't actually have the desktop version intentionally, I keep them in the browser window. They're allowed select permissions to interact with like some Google sheets, right? But I don't want it touching. - I don't even want them into Google Drive. - Yeah, I let it do Google Drive. I don't want it touching anything on my computer because it's proprietary stuff. And by the way, I'm also a little concerned that like, it has all this really awesome code that I wrote or I guess we wrote together, Claude and ChatGPT and. - Don't have more fries. - Okay, like if they're, I hope they won't steal that code and train on that. Like that's a concern as well. - So this is, I've done this many times when I live really end a podcast by saying, we're gonna check back in. This is to be continued. This is the most to be continued conversation we've ever had amongst the three of us. And for those of you who loved, I'm looking at the camera now. To those of you who love this deep dive into existential dread over AI, morality, the Catholic church, humanism. I'm glad you enjoyed it. We're gonna get lots more into them in terms of future episodes and sort of talk about electoral politics and all that jazz. But thank you for indulging us today and thank you Nate and Claire for joining me in doing it. - Thanks, Caitlin. - Thanks, Caitlin. - That's it for today's episode of Still Counting. Listen wherever you get your podcasts and subscribe on YouTube at youtube.com at Still Counting Podcast. We'll be back next Wednesday evening for another episode. Still Counting is a crooked media production. Our team includes Saul Ruben, Emily Four, Claudia Shang, Charlotte Landis, Reed Churlin, Johanna Case, Ben Heskot, Matt DeGro, Katie Long, and Adrian Hill. Our music is by Break Master Cylinder. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the writer's guild of America East. (upbeat music)