Broader Economic Impacts of Artificial Intelligence

This episode is brought to you by TELUS Online Security. Oh, tax season is the worst. You mean hack season? Sorry, what? Yeah, cyber criminals love tax forms. But I've got TELUS Online Security. It helps protect against identity theft and financial fraud so I can stress less during tax season or any season. Plans start at just $12 a month. Learn more at TELUS.com slash online security. No one can prevent all cybercrime or identity theft conditions apply. Today's number eighty. That's how many years have passed since a nuclear bomb was last dropped on Earth. And here's to hoping that by the time you hear this. Money markets map. If money is evil, then that building is hell. Show goes out! Sell! Sale Welcome to ProfT Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is April 8th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vit als . The major indices declined through the day, but ended the session flat, oil climbed, and treasury yields were flat . What else is happening? President Trump has threatened to completely wipe out Iran. Trump set an 8 p.m. Eastern deadline on Tuesday for Iran to fully reopen the strait or face strikes on civilian infrastructure. Trump posted on Truth Social, quote, a whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again. As of Tuesday evening at the time of this recording, Iran had ended direct contact with the administration, though talks with mediators were ongoing. Pakistan's prime minister called on Trump to extend the deadline by two weeks and for the Strait of Hormuz to open during that time, Trump then said he was in quote heated negotiations. The SP and the Nasdaq and the Dow all fell as much as one percent through the day as hopes for a cease fire dimmed but closed, roughly flat. So here to help us break down the situation, we're speaking with Ian Bremer, president and founder of Eurasia Group. Ian, so much to get into here. We're obviously recording before the deadline, so by the time people listen to this, things might have gone either way, and we'll get into that. But first, I would just love your reactions to what Trump has written here. Quote: A whole civilization will die tonight , never to be brought back again. Have you ever seen anything like this? And what do you make of it? No, no, I I haven't. Uh I mean if you were to take it at face value, uh it's threatening genoc ide. Um and uh it's it's an unhinged post. It it shows that Trump is increasingly really angry uh about how badly this war is going for him, about the fact that the Iran ians have not capitulated despite his superior military capabil ities, and he has no one to blame but himself. So he is, in a sense, painting himself in a corner. Uh but I I also uh and again I'm saying this only a few hours before the deadline, and at this point, uh the Iranians have given no reason to believe that they're engaging constructively whatsoever with Trump's ultimatum. And yet I firmly believe that Trump will not make good on his threat. And there are a couple of obvious reasons for that. One uh is that if he did, the United States would be seen as a rogue state by countries all over the world. And it would it would devastate uh America's standing, influence, and power not least with core allies, who would not sit back and tolerate that sort of behavior. It would have a very dramatic impact on the ability of the United States to continue to count on, rely on, coordinate with, share intelligence with allies. That's number one. Number two, uh, it would have enormous impact on the global economy because the Iranians would hit back. They'd hit back in a big way. We've already seen that the Iranians continue to have capabilities to use both ballistic missiles and uh large numbers of drones, uh which they can hit critical infrastructure targets across the Gulf states, which can cause a lot of damage. The big thing they've hit so far that they've really made a difference with is the LNG capacity of Qatar, $20 billion of damage with their strikes, three to five years to repair it. But we could see a lot more of that. If the desalination plants were destroyed, for example, in Gulf countries, you would have mass exodus from those countries. You would not have the viability economically to continue to support the livelihood of the people that live there. So this is a huge thing. And uh ultimately, as much as Trump is angry and narcissistic and short-term oriented and focusing on himself as opposed to the country, you can say all those things. But but this is still way beyond uh what one could plausibly imagine that he would do. So that's that's the constraint side. That that's why um there may be uh there are lots of ways he can he can find to get out of this. He can say that the Iranians are actually being more constructive and more tankers are going through, so he's gonna give them more time. He can say, uh, I'm hitting this one additional bridge or one power plant. I'm not actually going through with my full threat from eight to twelve o'clock, but I'm giving you one final offer. And now you've got until Friday or next week or two weeks or whatever it is, right? So lots of ways he can do it. But the actual threats that have been articulated as they have, he's not going through with those. I I mean I would stake my reputation on that, right? Yeah. Even though I have no knowledge of that, it is in my view utterly implausible. Now, having said that, two things I would want to really caution you about. And then wherever you want to go is fine. Yeah. One thing to caution you about is that the Israelis have engaged in strikes up against at least ten railroad targets in Iran today. Those are infrastructure targets. They can be used by the military. They are used for civilian purposes too. The Israelis yesterday blew up a major petrochemical facility in Iraq. Second time they've hit such a facility, causing billions of dollars of long-term damage to Iran's economy. So, I mean, if you're Iran, this is even before the deadline. I understand that Israel is the one doing the bombing, not the United States. But from Iran's perspective, those bombs kind of feel the same, right? So the reality is they're fighting against the United States and Israel, and Israel is continuing to engage in this level of destruction, irrespective of the timing and the deadlines that the Americans are putting forward to Iran. And then the final point I would raise, the final cautionary point, which is even though I think it is ludicrous to imagine that the US would use a nuclear weapon um in this environment tonight, the civilizational destruction. I think it's ludicrous to imagine that. Even though I think it is absolutely the case that they will not follow through with bombing them into the Stone Age from eight to twelve o'clock and that tomorrow we wake up and there's no there's no Iran to speak of it's been Gaza fied. I don't believe that in for a second. But I also understand that we are seeing mission creep. I understand that every day this war goes on it, becomes a little easier to get a little deeper in to do more damage, to have more people killed, to risk more American service men and women, to send more troops. Um, I mean, Trump gave his big speech last week. He was saying two to three weeks, but privately he was saying four weeks. And then a few days later he was saying, but if we were just a little more patient than those four weeks, we could take the oil. And then we've got all of these opportunities. Right. And this was after the first week of the war. He had a G7 meeting, and he told the G7 heads of state that this war is going to be over within days, a matter of a few days, and it is just a question of how they surrender. They are preparing to surrender completely. So uh we are watching these continued um expansion, incremental expansion of America's engagement in this war in a way that, if it continues , will not only cause unheard-of economic damage, could make this war comparable to or worse than the damage that we saw and experienced all of us during the pandemic, but we also could see human damage consequences in Iran and across the region that could have enormous consequences I don't think those are the decisions he is considering taking today. But I absolutely see the knock on consequ ences of a few months of this getting you into an environment where you're well over your head, yeah, the tide is dragging you in, and you can't swim anymore. So I mean we should not uh despite the fact that I feel very confident about what we're gonna see this evening, I I don't feel confident at all about where I think we're heading in the medium to long term. Aaron Powell Part of uh why you believe, and by the way, I agree with you that that he won't drop a bomb in the next several hours is the idea that he hasn't complet ely lost his mind. Like he he he understands a little bit. There is a semblance of an understanding of the implications of dropping a nuclear bomb, which I think makes sense. But I think there would be others who would say, well, this tweet, this truth social, this statement is proof that he is now completely unhinged and he actually has lost his mind, which means all bets are off. I I don't personally think that instinctively, but what would you say to someone who would say that to you? That, you know, the guy is insane. Well, it depends on the tenor of the person who is saying it to me, because many of the people that are saying those things are folks that are already so far gone in the idea that this guy is Hitler reincarnate and the idea that there are no checks and balances on on him , right? So that everything he wants to do he can just do as if he were an actual dictator. Of course that's not true. Of course, people around him that are uh they are kissing his ass constantly and they're telling him things are going better than they actually are, and that is part of the problem. But but there are still constraints, there are still restraining mechanisms. is There Congress. There is a media that actually reports on him. There are polls. There are markets. There are all these things that don't exist in North Korea. Right? There are all these things that do not constrain an actual dictator that destra constrained Trump. Remember, you know, the United States, we've saw through a significant investig ation, very well done forensically, is responsible for uh targeting and blowing up a girls' school. And well over a hundred Iranian civilians killed. This was not intentional. It was um a a mistargeting. The the um the data had not been updated. It wasn't an AI mistake, but it was a mistake. But Trump's response was to blame the Iranians. It wasn't him. Why why? I mean if he doesn't care , and if they're just animals, they're not humans, and if it's all the responsibility of the Islamic Republic, well then just own it. Because they don't have human rights at that point. Like if you're if you're really going down that route, if you think that that Trump no longer he's unhinged, he doesn't care at all about human life, then many of the things that he would have done, he would have done differently already. But either way, they still got killed. I mean, I think this would be that the response is that th there's a there's a a little bit of a check in so far as he doesn't want to admit or s or not admit, but he would say that it wasn't our intention or that it was the Iranians' fault. But either way, I mean Congress exists , but he's still willing to blow past and make decisions without their approval. The media still exists and he's still willing to do completely outrageous things despite getting pilloried by people like I don't know, me. Doing outrageous things. I'm pushing back against a nuclear weapon. Uh I'm also pushing back against the intentional targeting of a girl school, which he did not do. Again, the the the the investig ations from the New York Times and other sources were very clear. This was not an order of shock and awe, let's blow up an Iranian girl school. They did not intend to do that. They don't they they are not trying to maximize civilian casualties. They're just enormously angry that that the Iranian regime is not capitulating despite all of their bravado and all of their superior military strength. And, you know, it's kind of funny in the sense that what Trump has been saying to the Iran ians, again, if you take him at face value, he's been saying this is not our problem, and that other countries need to deal with this. This is their problem, right? Well other countries have been dealing with it. They're worried that they can't get their oil through, and so they are paying the Iranians $2 million a ship to get their oil through. Trump is dealing with it. You know, he's worried about oil and gas prices, so he has suspended sanctions on Iranian oil. Iranian oil. That's money that's going to the Islamic Republic. Why? Because Trump's revealed preference is I hate these guys. I want them to lose, but I don't hate them so much that I'm willing to take even higher costs for my own gas prices in the United States that I'm gonna be punished So again, at every step, he is showing that he is constrained. He's not showing that he has uh value, that he values human life. Right. He's not showing that he cares about people other than himself. He's not showing that. But he's showing he's constrained. And that is the core, you know, rational conclusion from people that are watching what he is doing and not just focusing on his tweets as if they are somehow a reflection of actual reality. Now, I mean, look, it's hard because we've never had usually presidents don't say very much in their real-time public statements. And Trump obviously says far too much, and he's frequently incoherent. And he he allows his impulses, his id to act in a completely unrestrained way, and the people around him facilitate that. So it makes it harder to analyze and assess this guy. And it also makes it harder because if you're on one side or the other politically in the US or globally, uh and you don't get any benefits from having a nuanced perspective. You know, everybody wants you to say that this guy is either America first and no one has ever been a president like him, no one's ever accomplished much, or he is e vil incarnate. He is literally Hitler. Um, which I mean I the neither of those two things in my view are true or useful. And so I don't take them as my as my starting off point. I think my starting off point is I'm going to do analysis. I've spent my entire career trying to understand international relations. By the way, frequent, not that much on the United States. So I look at the U.S. in the context of how other countries act in similar scenarios and how might I apply that to my own country, the Americans, right? Um, but and then I tell people what I think. Yes. So so let's say let's say you're right, uh people will be listening to this in the morning. Let's say Trump doesn't bomb Iran tonight . How will the story play out then? I mean, what will have changed? I mean again, the US continues to bomb, but he's not he is not going to make good on the eight to twelve o' clock end of civilization. All the bridges, all the power plants are getting hit. He will not do that. People watching this now know he has not done that. Right. Right. So let's say he doesn't do that. Uh let's say he doesn't end the civilization, go fully nuclear, go totally insane. How will things play out from then on? Because it still seems like something has changed here. He's threatened it. I can't tell whether that means something geopolitically. I have Well look, I mean the Iranians have called his bluff in so far as after this post . And remember, the end of the post was the whole God bless the Iranian people. So even in the unhinged post, he's trying to make a distinction between the Islamic Republic and the Iranian people. And I I can promise you, everyone that's asked me about this post, no one's brought up the last sentence because it the last sentence doesn't serve the narrative. The first sentence does. So not that I care that much because it it the whole thing is unhinged, but if we're really digging into it, we we should recognize that he wrote the whole thing. He didn't just write the first sentence. Yeah. Um what do I think? I think that when the Iranians saw that, they said, Great, okay, we're just we're done. We're not talking, we're breaking off the conversations with the Pakistanis for today. So let's assume that he finds a bit of an off-ramp, he gives them some time, or he doesn't go fully ballistic, nuclear. Um, and and now the Iran ians have the ability to come back. Uh they have the ability to engage again. And then you can have some more talks in this slightly more escalated environment. Um let's keep in mind that the Iranians just uh let go these French uh prisoners that they had. So they are engaging with the French. They are engaging with the Pakistanis, they are engaging with the Chinese. The Iranians are negotiating with lots of countries right now for different things, but not with the Americans. So the qu the one big question for for tomorrow or today when people are now watching this is are the Iranians now having gone through the deadline and lived to see another day, are they now engaging with the Americans directly or indirectly again? And is the United States prepared to engage in that process? I suspect the answer is yes, but we don't know that. Yeah. Um, absent that, Trump has also said this war is going to be over in two to three weeks. Now that means one to two weeks. Um again, I expect that he's going to continue. So I expect that he's, you know, he's pulling back on his maximalist rhetoric, but he's pushing forward on all of the constraints on his time. The problem is that when you tell the Iranians two to three weeks and then I'm done, they're thinking if we just survive two to three weeks, you know You. know, we're golden. You know, that now we've got the influence over the straits and everything else. So I mean Trump's he he is his own worst enemy in so many ways on this conflict. And then and meanwhile for the markets , every day we keep talking about this are are weeks that the global economy is going to be experiencing the knock-on damage of what's happening Yeah. I could ask you questions for hours, but I have to let you go. I guess my final question here, given what has happened now , would you say that this it sounds like you believe that this actually extends the timeline. I was wondering maybe we're at at the we're approaching the end game here. He's now threatening what amounts to pretty much a nuke. Maybe the story's coming to a close. Or maybe it's just beginning. And maybe this actually, to your point, we wake up, we're still alive, let's keep fighting. Again, we've heard explosions on Carg Island. Um, that seems to me relevant. That seems to me. It looks like it came from the United States. If that is true, and I don't have full visibility on that, but if that's true, that's softening military targets um while the American troops are getting in place. The the one thing we haven't talked about at all in this conversation is the most real thing here, actual physical real thing, which is that the Americans have a third aircraft strike force and thousands of additional troops that they have deployed to the region, but they're not all there yet, and they won't be until around April 16th . And so it it seems to me that what I see are American military engagement that is meant to set the table for eventually Trump considering using those ground forces. I mean, he has used the ground forces to rescue an American airman um uh successfully uh from that F-15 this weekend, but he hasn't used them in any significant way. Yes. And and that that's again, I so for me, I don't think we're close to the end game, in part because we haven't yet got to that point in the conflict. The point we're in the conflict we're in right now is just all of this continued escalation in in geopolitics by tweet. That that's that is where the 21st century is right now, and it's it's sad and dystopian but it it doesn't really relate that closely to what's happening in the war. All right. Ian Bremer, president and founder of Eurasia Group. Ian, always appreciate your time. Thank you so much. Good luck to you. After the break, an inside look at the most damning Sam Altman investigation yet. And if you're enjoying the show, please follow our new Prof G Markets YouTube channel. The link is in the description . For the last 10 years, everything in American politics has basically revolved around one man. And as a political journalist who came of age during Donald Trump's rise in 2016, I've had a front row seat. I am officially running for president of the United States. It's going to be only America first . Amer ica first. Thousands of supporters of President Trump stormed the US Capitol building. But is it possible to talk about politics without talking about Donald Trump? That's the question I'm gonna ask in our new show from Vox. The idea of like a post-Trump or not exactly Trump focused show can exist because he's not really driving any agenda items. It really does feel like so reactive. You know, I think this Iran thing is also gonna cause a big split in the GOP. So far it doesn't among like people who say they're MAGA voters are still with Trump, but like for the first time you see on a major issue, open opposition from the st I'm a Steth Herndon and welcome to America Actually . Hi, I'm Brene Brown. And I'm Adam Grant. And we're here to invite you to the Curiosity Shop. A podcast that's a place for listening, wondering, thinking, feeling, and questioning. It's gonna be fun. We rarely agree. But we almost never disagree, and we're always learning. That's true. You can subscribe to the Curiosity Shop on YouTube or follow in your favorite podcast app to automatically receive new episodes every Thursday. This week is the 50th anniversary of Apple. And so this week on the VergeCast, we're taking stock of where Apple is five decades into its existence. How's the company doing? And we also decided to do something slightly ridiculous, which is identify and rank the 50 best Apple products of all time. After a lot of hours of debating, I think we finally got there. That's on the VergeCast this week, along with the state of OpenAI as it raises a ton of money, tries to go public, and tries to convince you that you also love AI. All that on the VerchCast wherever you get podcasts. We're back with Prof. Markets. One of the most powerful people in tech might also be the least trustworthy. That is the finding of an 18-month New Yorker investigation into OpenAI CEO, reported by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Mor ant.z They interviewed more than a hundred people, reviewed hundreds of pages of previously undisclosed documents, and sat down with Altman himself more than a dozen times. The central question they pose is simple: Can Sam Altman be trusted? One former board member's answer echoes throughout the piece: quote, he is unconstrained by truth. Here to discuss this investigation. We are speaking with the author himself, Ronan Farrow. Ronan, thank you so much for joining us. You spent over a year and a half on this piece. You interviewed over a hundred people. I guess let's just start with. What were your biggest takeaways from this investigation? Well, I think that my interest in this, and I was coming off of a body of reporting about Elon Musk and Musk essentially having acquired in a lot of arenas supra governmental power, was that sources around that story, including Sam Altman, who was on the record in it, um, were talking about AI in a way that, you know, had some substantive, consequential promise, and then also included a lot of hype. Now, of course, it's Silicon Valley. The entire foundational story, the creation myth is hype, building companies on hype and promise. Um, and often that uh cart coming before the hor se of actual functional value added in America. Uh it was striking to me as I started looking just writ large at like what is it in the AI gold rush that is the most in need of additional interrogation. How even above and beyond that baseline expectation of some dissembling from tech CEOs, there was this particular phenomenon around Sam Altman , where across his career there have been these claims that he deceives, lies, manipulates, uh are the allegations, uh, to an extent that eclipses even those norms. And so what I set out to examine with my co-author, Andrew Morance, is what are the particulars? Um does it actually rise to that level? Uh, or is this just criticism from you know sour grapes competitors? Uh and if it's true, to what extent should we care about it? Right. And we really did obtain a a huge density of you know interviews with more than a hundred people in this piece, um, documents, many hundreds of pages of documents, and did a forensic look at this. Um, you know, we obtained and reviewed these sort of fabled Ilya Sutzgiver memos, which was some seventy pages of Slack messages and HR documents and explanatory text from him, um, that was sent to board members before an episode where Sam was actually fired a couple of years ago, people in tech , probably most of the followers of this podcast, will remember that episode. The answers really didn't emerge at the time as to what the basis was, but what is documented in that memo is the phenomenon I was just referring to. There's a line that says Sam exhib exhibits a consistent pattern of, and then the first item is lying. Yeah. Um, we obtained two hundred plus pages of uh records related to Dario Amoday, uh, including a lot of notes that he kept. Um, you know, and he writes the problem with open AI is Sam himself, and there's a really um personal chronicle that we lay out in the piece of how the rift deepened between them and ultimately led to the creation of Anthropic. Um some of the supposed lies documented uh here are signific ant. One of the episodes that precipitated the board's firing. U youh, know was, a a case in which uh Sam had assured uh board members that the most controversial features of a model had been safety tested and then they went out and looked and they hadn't been. Um there was a major breach uh that was playing out that he didn't mention to them over many hours of briefing with them. Um some of them are are interpersonal. You know, over the course of the deepening mistrust between him and Dario Amade, there's an episode we describe where he calls Amade and his sister Daniela, who is also working at the company, into a room and said, You know, I believe you're plotting a coup against me. I have this on good authority from a senior executive at the company. And they called in the senior executive who said, I never said that. And then Sam right there in the room, as this account goes from the documents and other people around this, um, said, Oh, I never said that myself. I didn't make the allegation in the first place. And Daniela Amade said, You just said it. So it it's something that becomes so pervasive that look, there's a split of opinions on how much we should care about the safety stakes of AI. There's people who say we're all doomed, um, you know, AI may kill us all, there could be a terminator, Skynet scenario, and therefore the the person with the their finger on the button needs to have a lot of integrity. But it's not just that. There are just really nuts and bolts, pragmatic investors that we talked to in this piece, board members we talked to, who said this is just too much lying for a senior executive at a Right. Yeah. Some of the some of the quotes that you had there, we we mentioned that what we heard about his consistent pattern of lying, also he's unconstrained by the truth. You also wrote that a board net the board member was not the only person who unprompted used the word sociopathic. He also said that one of his batchmates at Y Combinator said, quote, you need to understand that Sam can never be trusted. He is a sociopath. He would do anything. And then a senior executive at Microsoft, you wrote, said, quote, there's a small but real chance he's eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff or a Sam Bankman Freed level scammer. I mean, the evidence that he is somewhat sociopath ic in his tendencies to lie are I mean, it's very substantial here. And I think it raises the question like, why should we care? Who does this affect? I get the sense that it kind of affects all of us because he is the leader of the most important technology AI company in the world right now, a company that's going to go public at uh at least a trillion dollars, or at least that's the plan right now. I mean, what are your takeaways on on what this means for us , for regular Americans, for people who perhaps interact with AI? I mean, what does this mean for a listener, perhaps? Why does this affect them? Aaron Powell Well, listen, first of all, I just want to point out this piece very carefully filters for its competitors like Amoday making a criticism, uh its people with personal sour grapes. This isn't a hit piece that carries water for any of Sam's opponents. In fact, it's really strenuously generous to him wherever it can be. And as in any large-scale piece like this, there's a lot that, you know, isn't included that we learned um because we really just wanted to convey the essential things uh and stay away from sensationalism. Yes. Um so it's very fair, it's very forensic, it's very measured. I think even with all of that said, you're exactly right that there is a pattern here that emerges that is consequential even above and beyond Silicon Valley norms. Now, there's the argument that this is just dysfunctional from a business standpoint that I mentioned . And then as you're alluding to, there are the stakes for all of us. You don't have to buy into the over-the-top uh AI will go rogue and kill us all argument, although, for what it's worth, that is a scenario that Sam Altman and the co-founders of OpenAI fundraised off of and formed the company around. That this was uh a technology as dangerous as nukes. But you can look more immediately for the ways this affects us. Uh every credible economic projection has millions and millions of jobs exposed to disruption from this and potentially elimination from this. Um you have a growing number of economists warning of the risk of a recession if the AI bubble bursts. Um, you know, this is something that you guys have talked about and covered. Uh AI is now propping up U.S. economic growth. Yeah. Uh, the markets are highly dependent on a few companies that are uh, in the view of many people, even within them, over-leveraged. You know, we have uh a board member in this piece saying of open AI right now, we're levered up in a way that is scary. Um, there is an ecosystem around OpenAI to sustain the massive spend. You know, this is one of the fastest cash burn rates of any startup ever. Building AGI and racing to build AGI in the way that these AI labs are now is monumentally expensive. And the way that's being sustained is partners borrowing from each other. And there's analysts in this piece saying, you know, there is circularity here and someone's gonna have to pay the piper. Sam Altman himself has said at various points, someone's gonna lose a lot of money. So there's these economic stakes, and then there's all of the other stakes. There's the fact that this is being deployed on battlefields already. Um, the concerns about autonomous weapons firing without human oversight, that's not a fantasy. That's there's already a uh what appears to be a documented instance of that. Yeah um it is being used to identify chemical weapons at a rate never before seen. It is being used for political disinformation. Um there's the whole separate conversation about, you know, suicides and in one case a a murder, um, that a lawsuit alleges was a result of chat GPT encouragement. Uh so the stakes are real, and we have a scenario where we're in this late-stage capitalist moment where the individuals and companies who have their fingers on the button here really don't have outside guardrails that are nearly as meaningful as any credible safety activist or advocate says they should be. Right. Um and those same companies, the ones best positioned to track the dangers, and often the ones warning about the dangers, uh have every incentive financially to downplay those dangers and rush past them and ask forgiveness rather than permission, while the regulatory infrastructure that would be needed to hold them accountable simply doesn't exist. One of the biggest questions and then we'll let you go, I know you have other appearances, one of the biggest questions uh in the mulchets right now is this question of is AI a bubble? I mean, that is the the trillion dollar question that everyone is trying to figure out right now. And some people are bulls, some people are bears, and a lot of this show is trying to figure out what is the answer to that question. Do you think that your findings from this investigation shed any light on the answer to that question? Is there anything in there that you think perhaps can lead us to an answer? Well, look, the piece is sober on this front to,o, and very even. It acknowledges the ways in which uh AI is not just vaporous. Uh, it already has consequential and life-saving applications. Um, medical diagnostics are transformed already by AI. Um drug research is transformed already by AI. There are some applications like uh emergency weather warning systems that are transformed by AI. Um these are real, not just type. That said, if you look at Sam Altman's language over recent years, and in fact, even on the day that we put this piece out, there was a concerted round of press. Um there were a lot of moves within this company right around uh this piece coming out. Um, and one of the things that you see out there from Sam of late is a renewal of his sort of um utopian projections, right? That this is technology that's going to I'm using his own uh uh phrases from various blog posts and also recent comments, you know, put us on other planets, cure all forms of cancer, uh, lead to a kind of utopian scenario where all problems are solved by everyone uh being uh empowered to make their own startups. This was the same answer he provided in our conversations when I talked about the jobs exposed to elimination, the uh less sunny economic projections. Uh he his main answer was , well, you know, we'll have a foundation that does good work on that. And also, you know, ChatGPT is going to allow everyone to make startups. I don't know that that is going to be terribly comforting to people whose jobs are eliminated as a part of this and who need serious government investment into reskilling and into oversight in this industry. Just the promise of these private companies saying it's all going to be fine. I think on the question of whether it's a bubble, one telling thing is that some of the most serious technologists in this field uh are in this piece and are people we had long conversations with in the course of this reporting, and say even if you believe some of Altman's more bullish projections, some of the things he's saying have arrived. Uh and this is a guy who we talk about him telling government officials um, you know, five years ago or so that by 2026 um you know there'd be nuclear fusion power across the United States. Um often overpromises. Yeah. And even these serious technologists saying maybe we believe some of this very often also sound the note of caution of that could be years, maybe even decades away. So I think people who are watching how this evolves, I'm not going to get into prediction, um, but I I do think they should be aware of that split of expert opinions. And a lot of people saying, hey, let's tap the brakes. This is gonna take time. Yeah, I think this should honestly be required reading for anyone who's thinking about investing in this company. I mean, if you want to invest in a company, you need to know the management. This this article is it? Uh Ronin Farrow, we really appreciate your time. You can read the article in the New Yorker. It is out now. Thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Ed. Appreciate it. Well, I'm currently recording this on Tuesday evening, which means that in a few hours, when this episode is published, it's possible that the world will have fundamentally changed. Just a few hours ago, the president said that if a deal with Iran isn't reached by 8 p.m., then their quote, whole civilization will die. This essentially sounds like a threat to drop nuclear bombs on Iran, but if it isn't that, well then it's certainly a threat to commit war crimes against Iran. He is essentially saying, if you don't do what I say, I will kill millions of innocent civilians, which is the kind of statement that would be made by a Marvel supervillain, which kind of forces us to consider the possibility that maybe he actually is one. Now again, I don't know what will happen in the next few hours, nor does anyone, but my instinct tells me that he won't go through with these threats. Ian Bremer agrees. I think we will wake up in the morning, and the conflict will remain violent, but it won't be nuclear. Either way, though, the stakes have now changed. Because as Katie Martin once told us, you can't unsay the things that have now been said. And we are now living in a world where the President of the United States is willing to make threats of genocide out loud. In fact, he just has done. And that is an entirely new kind of world. And so the question for us is: how do we react to this new world ? Does this mean that we should also change in some capacity? Should we think differently about the world? Should we behave in a different manner? The more pertinent question for this show would be: should we invest differently ? And I don't know, but I think the answer to those questions is probably . We probably should change something. But then the next question is of course even harder, and that is what exactly should you change? What should you do? And my answer is, I have no idea. And so far, that has been the market's answer as well. Stocks were remarkably unreactive yesterday. And I don't think that's because investors are downplaying the situation. I think it's because they simply don't know what to do . We have never seen a situation like this. We've never seen a president like this. And so to presume that you know what's coming next is kind of to be crazy. In other words, we're all about to learn about this whole thing together. There are practically no authorities on the matter, no one on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley or even in Washington who knows more about what's going on in Trump's head than you do. We all really know nothing . But it would be my hope that over the next few weeks, regardless of what happens here, that this podcast will help us to at least begin to understand this new world and this new frontier. Yes, we cannot predict the future, but we can always try to understand it, and we can perhaps try to prepare for it just a little bit more . Okay, that's it for today. This episode is produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss, edited by Joel Patterson and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Shallan, Isabella Kinsel, Kristen O'Donaghue and Mia Silverio, and our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from Prof G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I will see you tomorrow