The Future of AI and Politics

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And that's a problem because a lot of what looks like ideology right now is really Loneliness, distrust, humiliation and people looking for some kind of anchor which is what we should expect People want to feel seen, they want to feel rooted, they want to feel like their lives are connected to something bigger. And when politics can't speak to that hunger. O things will. Markets will Algorithms will, conspiracy theories will Demagogues will It's hard to talk about this because we don't have a reliable political vocabulary for it. This is not really a policy problem It's about whether or not we have a system that can help people imagine a common life together. And what happens at the answer is No. I'm Sean Alllly, and this is the gray area Today's guest is Chris Murphy. He's the senior senator from Connecticut and the author of a new book called Crisis of the Common Good. The crisis Murphy is referring to is what I was just describing. And this is very different from a paint by number politics or campaign book Murphy takes seriously the idea that the country is, for lack of a better word, spiritually sick Lonely, atomized, commodified angry And his argument is that The Democratic Party And maybe liberalism more generally, has lost the ability to speak to that crisis And that is what I wanted to talk to the Senator about, Not necessarily about what he thinks the Democrats can do to win the next election. But about whether this version of liberal capitalism can still give people a sense of meaning and belonging Senator Chr Murphy, welcome to show. Thank for having Happy to be here, happappy to have you Okay, so let's Let's get right into the book, right? I mean this is It's not really a policy book that there is some policy in there Um This is much more of an attempt to describe a deeper malaise or spiritual sickness, whatever you want to call it, in the country. How would you describe that? Let's just start there I think this country is less happy than it has been in a long time. I think it's more lonely than it has been in a long time. And I think fewer people wake up every morning knowing what their meaning, their purpose, their identity is And I think there's all sorts of signs of that, growing rates of political instability, growing rates of self harm or kids showing up in our emergency rooms. than ever before and just lower rates of self reported happiness on surveys you could say that that's not something that government should concern itself with In fact, we're celebrating two hundred and fifty years of the Declaration of Independence and And in that document it actually says The government is supposed to guarantee the right to pursue happiness. Maybe we're not supposed to provide you with the last mile on that road, but we're probably supposed to provide you with access to the things that you need to be happy. And as I study, why people seem to be less happy, more lonely. more exhausted It seemed to me that there was a lot of government responsibility. We set up a system of rules norms in this country that make it a lot harder for folks to be happy. And so As a, you know as a politician who spends all of his time thinking and working to oppose Donald Trump, I wrote the book because I just I think it'd be a mistake to just think we could solve our problems electorally. There is a deeper spiritual rot in this country. We'll talk about the material conditions that gave rise to this, but I mean, ultimately is all of that to say that really And we can reach for all the words we want to try to capture the problem, cultural, spiritual, whatever But is all of that to say that this is really a problem that goes beyond mere politics Of course Um, You know, this is, you know, probably more a cultural problem than a political problem I But, you know, I do think that the rules and norms that have caused people to feel often have caused people to retreat from communion, right? where we're spending half as much time today know in person connection with friends and family as we did a generation ago. I think a lot of that is due to the rules that are set by governments. So I don't know that I'd say that it's beyond the scope of policy. Actually I think that policy has a lot with it, but I think you first just have to understand how people are feeling, why they're feeling those ways And once you do that, then I think you can match policies to meet those maladities. My argument here is that Congress politicians writ large just don't spend a lot of time doing a spiritual metaphysical diagnosis of the country. and I just don't think we're doing O work, if we aren't first asking, like what do people need to feel more fulfilled and happy in their lives? And it turns out that the answer is probably not a higher GDP or higher test scores for their kids. It's interesting. I've lived all over the country, including DC, but I'm from the deep South The Gulf Coast. It's where live Um And my politics is kind of weird in lots of ways, but'm I'm more on the left then A lot of people around me But when I engage with Trump voters and there's a lot around me. What I find deep down, if you can kind of get past the Fox News, culture war bullshit. and really drill down. What you find is They may not use this kind of language, but you find that people don't feel like they have a sense of agency anymore Now I would say they may be confused in many cases about the causes of that disillusionment, but that is the general feeling Do you think that is something that goes across all the partisan and ideological lines to typically you know, map us up Yeah, when it comes down to it, you know, I'm making the case in this book there are two things of many, but two primary things that people need to feel peaceful and feel happy and fulfilled The first is connection. You need to feel like you have people in your life that care about you. You need to feel connected to a community. You have to have a sense of belonging to something Second, you need to feel powerful. People when they wake up in the morning want to believe that the inputs will match the outputs and they don't feel powerful today. I think that's particularly acute amongst men who are going through this broader crisis of masculinity in the face of the rightful rise of feminism, but it hits them even harder When they at the same time have both lost their natural position of primacy in the modern world. and they also can't work hard and get ahead. They feel really powerless. And yes, this is an economy that is intentionally designed to not give people a sense of agency and power. a big part of the book. In a liberal pluralistic society like ours where we do not agree about what's fair, where it's just or what's even worth valuing or wanting or we don't agree about what it means to pursue happiness Where do you think the common good? That's your phrase, common good. Where do you think that comes from? What is the basis of that Yeah I mean, obviously D Toteville is all over this book and he worries deeply about that question, right? This is a country filled with strivers, right? People from different backgrounds speaking different languages. What on earth is going to hold them together He has two answers. His first answer is democracy, right? Everybody is going to feel like they have a role to play in the setting of rules and norms. And so they're going to set aside their differences and work together in that common project of democracy, which felt so new and wild at the time Second, he says church, right know, which maybe is a code for institutions, right? There are going to be places where you can find meaning and identity that allow you easy access to connection communion and meaning each day. Our democracy is withered, it's heurt, it's badly damaged and people do not feel like they have a role to play in our democracy because billionaires and millionaires have such control. And church specifically as an institution, has become a less healthy place, just not as many people are showing up, but other institutions aren't available either U And so I think I sort of, you know, look at the Tqu fill and say Um, okay What can we do to make democracy healthier so that people feel like that is a common project that they can engage in And what about institutions? What about the things we can do to make people find a sense of belonging in institution or other places where people might find easy identity Yeah, you mean, that's Tille is such an interesting character. know and there's a critique of liberalism that I think a lot of people in the left avoid because people we don't like often make it but it's not obviously wrong, and it's that You know, liberalism gives people freedom, but it does not tell us what the freedom is for And if nothing else fills that space, those Tquville intermediary institutions, religion, community, famil, civic life, all of that Then markets and algorithms and demagogues, and I guess now AI will do it for us. I mean, do you agree that that vacuum, for lack of a better word, eaves a real vulnerability of liberalism, mayaybe even a fatal Yeah, I do. you know, I saw about four or five years ago that the new write, you know, that Jie Vance was a big part of was doing a much more interesting critique of the spiritual state of the country than the left was. And they seemed to be crafting policies that answered the way that people were feeling empty, feeling that liberalism had pitted them against each other U and so yes, this book you know clearly comes from my own recognition that liberalism broadly was failing Americans. And, you know, I think that that's I think that that's inevitable in some ways because We are solidaristic reatures We are a solidaristic species. We survived thousands of years because we found a way to group together. We have selflessness in our biology, and I give sort of a bunch of anecdotes and evidence in the book about why we know we actually want to be selfless, that we want to exist in groups. We don't want to be viewed simply as individuals And I don't think that, you know, classicalis liberalism has, you know, ever been able to understand that spiritual health comes, you know, not by freedom, spiritual health comes through communion and a sense of belonging to something bigger than ourselves Well, the liberal counter. is always to say, Well liberalism isn't supposed to provide meaning in that way. It is supposed to protect the spaces Wh you know, unions and communities and all those institutions can fill that gap and provide the meaning. but And you know this, we have kind of destroyed those institutions. We have surrendered every aspect of life to market logic. And so we don't really make citizens anymore. Yeah. and you know we are, whether we're in an oligarchy or close to an oligarchy, you when you structure an economy in which Um people who are powerful Um profit by the disintegration of the broader populace it becomes hard for liberalism to work because you know, for instance, the people that are running are big technology companies, which, you know, I think it's hard to over hype how much of this story of spiritual rot is connected to the rise of social media and AI and television and the internet more generally. The people who control those technologies U, you know, write the rules. And those technologies unregulated or unprotected make it really hard for free individuals to find communion. But despite all those philosophy, you're still Proud to small L liberal. ye Yeah, no, I think the project can still work. I think that you just need to come up with a different set of rules that guards against the influences that push people into lives of isolation right, let's do with Trum Because I think we both see in the symptoms or as a symptom.. And there's a lot going on with Trumpism, race and history and cultural identity. These are all big pieces Be. Um On some level This is a guy who gave millions of people a story. And it worked. They got them elected twwice How do you, a sitting Democratic senator make sense of that story? How does it fit into the story you're telling This book Yeah, I mean, I certainly give him credit in this book for better understanding. where people are emotionally in this country than the left. And I you know I give a bunch of examples where things that he has said sound ridiculous, sound nativist and racist, and many of them are, but they are speaking to Americans in a spiritual way. I also think we should give him credit for creating a sense of belonging. So he gives them a narrative to understand why they are powerless. and a route to power It is wrong, it is racist, it is xenophobic, but it's a narrative. But he also gives people a sense of belonging. I mean, that's what MGa is. It's a community for many people. It's a source of identity. But what is he doing in you know his talk about putting up a wall with Mexico or these giant superficially unpopular tariffs with other countries He's saying, listen, we're not powerless, right? The government has seem to have been powerless in the face of mass migration in the face of jobs being outsourced. I'm going to tell you it's not powerless. We collectively can do things to control who comes into this country. We can together, collectively do things to stop the outsourcing of jobs And that narrative of power, in this case, government having actual agency over forces that felt uncontrollable, that speaks to people who had kind of given up on government being able to be powerful. And if government couldn't be powerful, then maybe it's justified that I'm powerless I think have you have to sort of understand his power narrative. And then last, you know, he is telling a story of who's screwing, you know, you are powerless because of immigrants, of Muslims, of drag shows, of gay children And that's obviously a false narrative, but people want to know why. peopleople want to know why I have been left to feel this exhausted and this alone. And he's telling you why. Democrats, the left broadly has been you know, with the exception of the Sanders movement has been, you know, unwilling or uninterested in a competing narrative. He just tells a very simple story. Something happened to you, something was taken from you. This is who did it And I'll make them pay for it I mean, that's not there's not a lot of spiritual wisdom in that, right? It's just, here's your enemy and I'll make Yeah,,, but it does speak to, you know, something that's deeply biological. I mean, we for sure. we as I kind of put back into this narrative of why we're still on this earth, we're on this earth because we're solidaristic because we join in together with others, but because we fear peopleople different from us. I mean so what somebody says your problems are because of folks with the different skin color than you. that speaks to something that's You know, that's by that's biological. But I I think that, you know, the there there's There's a silver lining here in our failure as a broad sort of left movement to compete with his storyline, it's that there's a true story of who is causing you to become so adrift and why you have this sense of powerlessness. And it's concentrated economic power. It is the corporate class and the billionaires who have developed a set of technologies that has broadly harmed us culturally, and who have constructed an economy which has a very low floor, a very low safety net that has compromised economic mobility Do you really think the write is better diagnosing the spiritual crisis Yeah, I mean, I think they spend a lot more time thinking about it than we do I think the left has become technocratic. and convinced that our job is to just move the needle on indicators unemployment test scores GDP, numbers of factories opening or closing I'm not in a lot of rooms where people on my side of the aisle or my side of the political spectrum are talking about the ways that people that people feel. And I do, I mean, having spent time you know listening to some of these guys and how they write and what they think. Yeah, I guess I do think that they for over the last ten years have been better than the left Yeah I mean, I guess some of this hinges on what we mean by the right Yeah. I think the problem for me And the frustrating thing for me is and you can be curious what you think about this I think the left is better Diagnosing the material roots of our crisis. I think the right is better at obscuring those roots and offering fake solutions to non problems. It was the right who told Working class people, the problem wasn't corporate greed, right? It was the welfare of queens and their Cadillacs. It was the right who said it's not deregulation and corruption and the destruction of unions. It's the illegals taking your jobs, right? It's the same playbook over and over again. I don't know if they're really diagnosing a spiritual crisis there, right? They're just stoking presentment. Well, but I mean, they understand better than the left that Hans need a narrative, right? Humans Humans want to hear The why Right? They don't want to just hear the what. They want to hear the why. And it just makes you feel better to know why this is happening to me. It wasn't my fault, right? That it was someone else's fault And again, with the exception of Bernie and AOC there's not a lot of why there hasn't been a lot of why. We have viewed the people who do the why as fringe political threats to the left. not as mainstream messengers The over relliiance on technocratic Bush or everyone want to put it, whereere does that come from? Why is that Why that a democratic thing Yeah, it's a good question. I don't I don't know why that what the origin of that is and this is getting a little bit too into the political weeds, but I do think as a party we became you know, a little bit too reliant on Obamaism Um, Obama succeeded a lack of narrative because he was just a generationally uniquely talented political figure, and so he was a technocrat. He was not willing to pit one group against each other. He wasn't going to blame the billionaires and corporations, but he was successful because of his just unique once in a generation personal magnetism. And I think we thought broadly that, well, that was going to be our future, that we had this new coalition that was going to be constantly resistant to the demagoguy on the right, and somebody else like Obama would come along. I think we just missed the fact that without Obama, we actually do need a narrative and we never developed a persuasive one I know There are people who will hear the premise the book and say, Well, hold on, Sentor, wait a second. Democrats aren't failing because they refuse to offer people meaning and it's not that Republicans are better at giving people the things they need to live a more meaningful life. That's for damn sure. They're just lying to people, right? They're just giving them scapegoats. So how do you answer that? Yeah, they're telling a story. So what is the answer? just tell a better story Well, but if the better story is true, then shouldn't we have confidence that it makes it easier to unmask their false story I I guess that's just the basic premise. and I might be wrong, right? It might be that that their narrative is always going to be more pungent than ours. but we're not even trying to tell and alternative narrative. And I think Our narrative is strong the concentrated corporate power is doing this to you? Um that the normalization of corruption in our government is an extension of the corruption of our economy if we did that narrative well, I think it would I think it would win. We're not by the way, we're not that far away from winning, right? I mean, Trump and his movement don't win these elections by enormous margins. So if we just you know, did a ten percent better job at selling a narrative to people about why they feel powerless. We'd be in a lot better shape I mean, I take your question in good faith and I don't have a good answer Right? Like it doesn't matter if the story is true Yeah, don't I don't know but you have to have you have to have a story. And as I talked about at the end of the twenty twenty four election, you know, Harris, I I'm not telling you that Mronday morning, quarterbacks her race. She was in such a tough spot, but she kind of has a choice to make at the end you know, whether she ends the race with, you know, union leaders by her side with Bernie Sanders or whether she ends the campaign with Mark Cubin. And she ends the campaign with Mark Cubt She basically says, no, I'm not going to tell you a story of how concentrated corporate power is making you feel alone and powerless. I'm not going to take on the tech companies in my closing argument Um, and I I think that was a mistake. and I think it's a mistake that we are you know potentially destined to repeat Support for this show comes from Shopify Whenever you're taking on something new, it's easy to focus on what could go wrong. That's especially true when you're starting a business where so much feels uncertain But there's another possibility worth considering. What if it works? 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Why do you think it's not qu landing with the people you needed to land with? Well, I think because and listen, I'm not sure of this. U My sense is that most of our values rhetoric is around those first words fairness and justice And I do not think in my experience, that that is the first sort of moral on ramp people into our politics I think they are thinking mostly about power and agency because that is literally what they don't have when they wake up in the morning. Um and they are and We know the community and belonging is so important to people. We've never really talked about that as much. But I think if our values conversation was more rooted in power agency, community and belonging We would be much more connected to where people are emotionally. I think people care about fairness and justice U, but I don't think that that's the primary place that they go. The elephant in the room here is the perception R of the Dems as a party that has become too culturally progressive for much of the country. And some of the woke stuff is overplayed But it's not all made up. I mean, do you see this as a real problem for the political project you lay out in the book and getting over this so that people hear what you're saying Yeah, I certainly make the argument in the book and I've made it to my party limited success over the last couple of years, that we do need to become a bigger ten party I don't think the party needs to moderate itself on social and cultural issues. I think the worst thing you can do as a politician is to say you believe something that you don't believe, right? I mean, we as Democrats broadly believe in equal rights for everybody, no matter what your sexual orientation or gender identity is. we believe in a woman's right to choose. like we shouldn't We shouldn't say that we don't believe in those things just to win votes. That'll actually cost us What we should do is be less judgmental about people who don't believe those things and ask them to be part of our party, nominate them for office so long as they agree that concentrated power is the biggest problem and there are lots of people on the right who believe that. and so long as they believe our democracy needs to be unrigged and there are lots of people on the right who believe that my argument is that we shouldn't moderate our views because that would be inauthentic. we should just choose to believe that Um everybody who is not yet where we are on transgender rightes is a racist or is a bigot The second thing to say is that the The broader critique when you sort of do qualitative analysis of what people think about Democrats is that they just think we're weak Part of what they like about Trump is that he's strong They perceive him to be strong. My seventeen year old who is pretty plugged into politics and is, not aid fan of Donald Trum. That's the only thing he knows about Trump. He's like, Well, Trump does stuff, right? He does stuff and I think that that may be more than there a a the nuances of how we approach the social and cultural issues is really important. We've got to show that we're willing to act, that we're willing to act in big ways, that we won't let the bureaucracy stand in our way. If it gets in our way That was a lot of Trump's attraction. And again, this is back to this question of people feeling powerless. People feeling like they have no agency, people feeling like their government is powerless to help them. And so you're going to only win if you are speaking a language of power at least that if you get power, you will use it in government. That speaks to the way that people are feeling like nobody is able to move the levers that impact the quality of their life But even that perception speaks to like the disconnect between perception and reality. So Trump is strong. Everybody says that He certainly performs strongness Right, Right in the way a you know, a WW wrestler does, but He's not actually strong. I mean, he's actually spectacularly weak in many ways. and he's actually embarrassed himself on the public stage in lots of ways, and there are lots of things about him that are not strong That's not the story that's not the perception. And there are plenty of Democrats who have been actually strong in the way that he isn't but they're not perceived the same way I don't know what that is. Well, but I mean, that's like humanity, right? Like I mean, from the beginning of time, impressions matter , you know, that first impression you have of a person even if it is not matched by reality over the course of the first year of your life is powerful. L that's how our brain works is through impression and performance And you know, we could sit around and like you know worry that that's a imperfection of the human species, or we could do a better job of performance as Democrats again not in service of false narratives, in service of true narratives and not be shameful partart of politics and part of life is appearance and performance Do you think you can really We expand the tent without moderating. I mean, I feel like the implication is always that those two things have to go hand in hand Yeah, I don't know. I mean, we were once a big ten party with the majority of our members feeling passionately about protecting the environment or stricter gun laws. people who were pro oil and gas and people who didn't believe in universal background checks felt comfortable inside the party, right? Like John Dingle was a longt timee Democratic member from Michigan who was an A rated NRA member. He never questioned whether or not he was a Democrat And ultimately he wasn't able to stop the improvement of gun laws in nineteen ninety three and nineteen ninety four. Yeah, I think history tells us that you could actually be a party that holds strong views on social issues. create a home for people who disagree with you. And then what do you work together on? You work together on that agenda of improving the democracy and improving the economy. There was no separation between Representative John Dingle and the rest of the Democratic Party on a higher minimum wage or on campaign finance reform, they just agreed to be okay with disagreements on other issues Well, there's another problem here and you're pretty honest about it in the book. It is that the Democratic coalition includes a lot of the winners in a society criticizing know Wall Street, professional class, cultural institutions, big donors, you know, this is' in the book U The dims are not, have not been. fully committed to Baking corporate power. mean is that to change Yeahes, I certainly think that if you adopt my recommendations, which is to you know, have a narrative that talks about power Um, and you're much more forthright that you're going to take it from people. who have lots of it and give it to people who have very little. I think, yeah, you might lose some votes amongst the wealthy and powerful, but you will more than make up for it by picking up you know, members of Trump's coalition, probably those who are, you know, lower income voters. U So I think that that's a trade we should be willing to make. I think it's a little hard to like get up every day as a party and say to your friends, Hey, we're the party of for people. And then poor people keep on voting against you over and over again. Like mayaybe you're not, the party of poor people, mayaybe you should you know change the way that you talk, the things that you accentuate if you' if you're actually not getting the votes of poor people. I think the second thing we have to do and maybe it will chase off from some higher income voters really prioritize fixing the democracy people know that the rigging of the economy is downstream with the rigging of our democracy. And our party just kind of stops talking about fixing our democracy which makes it a lot easier for the rightite to just make the claim that democracy can't fix any problem So, you know, for me, like getting big money and corporate money out of politics has to become priority issue again. And yes, that might scare off some of the folks who make the big donations but I do think it would pick up a sizable group of people in Trump's camp who thought that in electing him he was going fixed democracy, he was going to drain the swamp and they now have at least some evidence that he did not have that I feel like the dents talked a whole lot about fixing democrac in the last presidential election. And maybe it was more talking about Trump as a threat to democracy, which perhaps is not exactly the same thing as talking about fixing democracy. But whatever it was, it did not seem to cut through. People did not seem to be overly interested or buying it. Yeah, no, but I think you hit it on the head. We did not talk about fixing democracy. I don't actually think we'd ever talked about fixing the democracy. We just talked about protecting the democracy protecting it from Trump. and people were like, why Why should I want to protect this version of democracy? I have no role in this democracy Um You know, in my neighborhood in the south end of Hartford, I live in one of the poor neighbororss, I think, one of the poore neighborhoods in in the state. Um People I mean people are like voting Why would I vote What what difference would that make Um, and like I, you know, I make the argument I hear where they're coming from So yeah, when Democrats went out in twenty twenty four and said protect this democracy People were like, No thanks No thanks. This democracy is not serving me. Maybe I'm willing to take a chance. on putting one person in charge. So I just don't think we've ever made the argument of fix it Well I get that a lot down here too o, ye, it's Coke or Pepsi. what difference does it make? right? And so the Republican Party, they just seem culturally more friendly to me, so I'll look for them, but ultimately it doesn't really matter, which is not actually true in any way, really But that is the perception. and I don't know what to do about that Yeah, but dont I don't think people believe that it can be fixed But that's part of it. Yeah, but you won't You won't know that until you actually put some Uph behind an argument to fix it, and we haven't done that 's what's preventing the party from having done this already? Well, I think we have our own billionaires U And so we have become not as addicted to the big money as Republicans, but we are partially addicted to that money I think some of it is because and again this is again in the political Weeds Our democracy reform message over the last ten years migrated from get big money out of politics to voting rights So we sort of check the box on improving democracy by making the primary project in the democracy reform bucket protecting people's right to vote, which is a super important project, especially when Republicans are trying to tear down the Voting Rights Act. But that's not really a broadcast message. Not everybody cares about the right to vote because most people don't feel like their right is being infringed upon. That doesn't mean you don't still work on that because we need to protect you know, the right for black people, poor people to vote. but The broadcast message is get big money out of politics. 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You mentioned Bernie Sanders what happened to him and the party or between him and the party twenty sixteen How big a mistake was that? becausecause a lot of what you're saying, I mean, he Bnie wasn't making this kind of argument and making it well. and I actually think it was cutting through for whatever reason And then he just kind of got pushed aside and, you know, back to the status quo antte, and here we are I think it was a mistake Um Now, I didn't endorse Bernie and, you know, either of his campaigns. I'm closer to him now than ever before because I think in the last three or four years, I've come to believe that it was a bigger mistake to set him aside. You know, he is a democratic socialist and there is a question as to whether this country thinks the solution to what Ails our economy right now in the way that it has made them feel lonely and powerless. is socialism here's my worry is that the impression is there's only two choices a profit obsessed market fundamentalism on one side and socialism on the other side Just like people think when it comes to our democracy, there's only two choices. a super broken corporate captured democracy Oggan Dald Trump charge totalarianism thoseose are not the two options. And so You know, I certainly get eyebrows raised by my Democratic socialist friends or allies when I use the term common good capitalism I do believe that there is a way for capitalism to work If you create a higher floor, a higher minimum wage, if you aggressively break up concentrated power so that you know your local downtowns are healthy places that you can feel like you have a sense of identity and belonging. in that you don't let technologies isolate us into lives in which we don't commune with others There's a version of common good capitalism that we could run on U And I think that that's you know, the same thing for democracy. It's like we we can run on vast improvements to our democracy, vast improvements to are form of capitalism so that people don't give up on. either I do before we leave, want to ask you what you think is the most important political fight Democrats need to pick up moving forward and just own it. Is it tech? Is it AI? Is it campaign finance? Is it corruption? Wall Street Fixing democracy, all the above, how would you rank order those fights I think the most important political fight is the fight. to unreg our democracy. I think it's there for the taking I think if we made getting billionaire and corporate money out of politics, and we're sincere about it and light every conversation with it. and we would broaden our coalition pretty quickly I think the most important policy fight is over the future of AI. As I argue in this book, I really am somebody who believes that unregulated AI will be a civilization destroyer and I primarily think that because once it