5/19/26: Trump $1.8 Billion Slush Fund For Allies, Students Boo AI At Graduation, Kars4Kids Scandal Erupts

25:18We've covered some of this previously on the show. Basically, Elon and Sam Altman with others started OpenAI with the idea that they were concerned about the direction of AI development. They wanted it to be non-profit, and they also wanted it to be open source. Elon alleges, and I think with some standing here, some standing in the claims that he's making, that Sam Altman abandoned those promises, turned it, and this is clear, into a for-profit entity, and also went from being open source to obviously it was no longer open source. So that's what this lawsuit is over. Again, thrown down a court, but not based on the merits of the claims based on the fact that it was filed too late.

26:00Not that I think there are really any heroes in this story because Elon has just, you know, Elon's trajectory is actually very interesting because originally he was very concerned about AI development and, you know, keeping it under control. And we have to make sure that this doesn't become an existential threat to humanity. And then basically after this split with Sam Altman, now he's just like, okay, well, if it's off to the races, then I'm going to be off to the races as well. I'm going to be just as unscrupulous a steward of AI development as anyone else, if not more so. Grok has been one of the worst in terms of just taking all of the guardrails off and sort of letting a rip.

26:35So in any case - It's still not even that good. No, and it's the worst one. It's not even good. Yeah, I mean, he's desperate, right? It's honestly the worst one of the major models. What he is doing is he's doing the chip stuff. It's actually interesting, not to derail this entire thing, but the chip project that they're working on is actually very interesting. The one that's backstopping the, what is it? The backstopping Anthropic, which is allowing them higher levels of compute. But back to the core claim, Elon was obviously correct. Like what happened with AI, open AI is insane. I still have no idea how it is legal.

27:03You have a nonprofit, which splits into two kind of to create a for-profit trillion dollar company, which creates, which will, when it IPOs, create more billionaires in a single day than any time in the history of humanity. So, okay, like it was all founded. A for-profit company was founded on the basis of we need open AI quite literally so that all of humanity can benefit. And so it will be researched and done in such a way that it is not gated. It is made it so that it's open for science and for everything else. How is that humanly possible in a 10-year period that this is exactly where we have ended up?

27:37It's so ridiculously absurd. Because they all get into the same mentality of, well, if I don't do it, then this person's going to, and it's going to be Dario, then it's going to be Zuckerberg, then it's going to be the Chinese or whatever. And so they all get into this mentality of that's why I have to sort of abandon caution, throw caution to the wind and just develop as fast as I can and for as much money as I possibly can. And so basically they all have the same mentality. You know, I think Anthropic has been the most responsible, but still as long as this development is in the hands of a few oligarchs, This is a very dire situation for America, for the world, all sorts of risks.

28:15And the public is really waking up to this as evidenced by the fact you've had a number of commencement speakers who were booed when they brought up AI development. Now, it's also sort of extraordinary that they didn't anticipate that this would be a controversial topic, to say the least. speaking to new graduates who are facing down a job market that has been degraded by the advent and continued development of AI. But in any case, we put together a little compilation here for you of some of the most noteworthy events where speakers are getting booed. And I think we're starting here with Google's Eric Schmidt.

28:51Let's go ahead and take a listen to that. Last December, Time magazine selected its person of the year for 2025. And it was this time, It was the architects of artificial intelligence. Interesting. It will touch every profession, every classroom, every hospital, every laboratory, every person and every relationship you have. I know what many of you are feeling about that. I can hear you. There is a fear.

29:27We do not know. The rise of artificial intelligence is the next industrial revolution. Whoa. What happened? Okay, I struck a chord. May I finish?

29:58Only a few years ago, AI was not a factor in our lives. Thank you.

30:12Graduates, everyone who is standing, here's what's happening. We're using a new AI system as our reader.

30:27Yep. Yep. So that is a lesson learned for us. So in case you didn't catch what was going on in that last one, they used a new AI system to read off graduates' names, and it forgot I don't know how many. And so the ones who were still standing were the ones who never had their name called because their new AI system, why do you need an AI system to read people's name? Anyway, screwed up and failed to announce them. So they didn't get to do, you know, walk across the stage and do their whole thing because of this. But I mean, pretty wild to see the overwhelming negative response among new graduates to even the mention of AI from these people.

31:12And you can see that second woman, like very uncomfortable and giggling and like, oh, I didn't really know that this was going to go that way. I loved it. I like to make them uncomfortable. The kids are all right. Look, I actually think this is an important view. So what are these kids booing? Because I can guarantee you 108 % of them used ChatGPT, Claude, or Gemini to help them while they were in school. Probably literally. I would be hard pressed to find a single one who was actually graduating college today who had not used it. So what do they think? They recognize the utility of AI. We do too.

31:49We recognize the utility as a tool to help human accomplishment. What they do not recognize is the term industrial revolution and of the replacement rhetoric, which every one of these CEOs fundamentally believes in. And I think that is the difference. We can celebrate, not necessarily celebrate, but we can say, wow, this technology is useful. It makes things more efficient. That does not mean that I am going to fully embrace the techno-utopian vision of all the CEOs and others behind it. And that's what explains, because I see there's so much criticism that I see. Like what I just said, every one of these kids use AI to help them graduate.

32:30I'm like, yeah, but you're not getting it, bro. They used AI to help them graduate to have a degree and to learn. You're trying to have AI replace their need for a graduate degree at all, period. So that's the difference. They can use the tool, but they do not want and are definitely not signing up for some sort of a revolution where it will entirely replace them and all of their human labor. And I think that's how everybody needs to square the circle. And where their whole future is being put in the hands of this handful of oligarchs. I mean, that's the part, too, is it's like we have not given consent.

33:03We have no say over this. This is something that is being done to us versus something that we have some sort of democratic control over and say. That, for me, is the biggest rub. I can imagine a reality, a very different reality than the one we live in, where I'm just, like, excited about AI. I'm like, oh, this could be really amazing. And I already see, you know, I tinker around with it. We've, you know, we've tinkered with it here. The things that it can already do is incredible. Not to say there aren't hallucinations and there aren't still problems to be worked out. But, you know, I would love to be in a place where I could just be excited about this, where I felt like human beings would be centered.

33:37versus right now, these oligarchs, they're traitors to humanity. They want to, they prefer the robots. They want to replace us with robots. That's who we're up against. That's what the boos are about, is the fact that they see these oligarchs who are controlling AI as traitors to humanity, as they should. Had a recent interesting comment here from, or actually let's do the polling first, put D3 up on the screen. This just reflects, you know, the trends that we're seeing, AI skepticism grows among U.S. youth. Backlash is growing in the U.S., especially among young people. Former Google CEO Eric Schmidt was booed as he gave a university commencement, as we just showed you.

34:16Polls show 70 percent of Americans think AI is moving too fast. Over 50 percent of Americans have negative views of it. You ready for this? Just 18 percent of young people say they feel hopeful about it. Partly they are turned off by AI's upending of the job market. Quote, Every other day, a new AI agent is being released in the market, said a recent graduate of UC Davis, who's applied to 500 jobs so far, quote, what am I doing with my life? So that is, you know, I mean, it's very understandable. They're coming out into this new world. You can see that companies aren't doing mass layoffs. There are some layoffs, but companies aren't doing mass layoffs.

34:58They're just not hiring these new grads because they already see the way they're able to integrate AI to replace them, to lower the number of human beings that they need to add on. And they are richly rewarded for that by Wall Street. So it creates even more of an incentive even before they've figured out how they can fully replace the humans. It creates an even more of an incentive to adopt this technology and show they're moving in that direction. Yeah, the polling is really important because what they're concerned about is they see all of the rhetoric that comes from them. And also, look, I mean, the richest, most powerful people in the world are all celebrating, not just like I celebrate whenever it can save us a little bit of time.

35:33I'm not going to be sitting around celebrating, talking about, oh, look at its ability to replace all of this different human labor. So, for example, D4, let's take a listen. This is Ken Griffin talking about AI, one of the richest financiers in the world. Let me just share a few thoughts with you on this. Number one is, in the last few months, there has been a step change function in the productivity of the AI toolkit. It is profoundly more powerful than it was just nine months ago. And for us at Citadel, that has allowed us to unleash a much broader array of use cases for AI. And it has been really interesting to watch, to be blunt, work that we would usually do with people with masters and PhDs in finance over the course of weeks or months being done by AI agents over the course of hours or days.

36:36So these are not mid-tier white-collar jobs. These are like extraordinarily high-skilled jobs being, I'm going to pick a word, being automated by agentic AI. And I got to tell you, I went home one Friday actually fairly depressed by this because you could just see how this was going to have such a dramatic impact on society. like and and when you witness in your own four walls when you see work that used to be man years of work being done in days or weeks it's like wow like that's the first time i've seen real impact in our four walls there you go um these literally what's his net worth like 40 billion something like that like whenever you earn a run one of the you know top finance trading desks and all of wall street and he even said these are not mid-tier white collar jobs these These are extraordinarily high-skilled jobs.

37:37I'm going to be, pick a word, automated by agentic AI. And he said that that's what made him depressed. That is the vision, the goal. And that's what people are rebelling against. Well, and it's very interesting because typically and certainly in recent times here with technological innovation, it's usually young people who are most excited and embrace it first. It's usually, I mean, think about it. It's usually the older people are like, back in my day and it wasn't like this and these kids with their screens or whatever. And young people are like, no, this is great. Like, I'm enjoying this. And I can see what social media is going to do for the future.

38:09Now, it turns out the older people may have had a point with some of this stuff. Yeah. The silent gen was right about Facebook. And it's time to admit it. In any case. But normally that is the way it works. Young people are like just excited about, oh, this is changing. This is new. And this is, you know, this is going to change the world in a way that's positive. And older people are wanting to maintain the way things previously were when they were growing up and their understanding of the world. Here you have a total reversal where it's older Americans who have actually less exposure to the new technology, less understanding of it, who are the most excited about it, who are the most open to it.

38:47Whereas younger people who have a deeper understanding of the technology and more use with it and see more directly its impact on the world are the ones who have the deepest reservations. I think that's very telling. I think that's actually really, you know, quite a dire sign of where things are heading because the very people who are most exposed to it are the ones who have the lowest opinion of it and want to put the genie back in the world. They're also the victims of technology. Like we were young enough to be naive about the promises of social. I mean, come on. There wasn't a little part of you that was tingling around the Arab Spring rhetoric in 2011.

39:24Oh, of course. There was. You've got to be honest. I was in college. Yeah. I had Egyptian friends. They're crying about their family's finally free and Twitter. I believed it, man. I really did. When I got that iPhone 4, I was like, this is going to change the world. Oh, this is going to be a new day for democracy and people are going to have input. You know, I mean, and it could have gone that way, too, by the way. There was a possibility that it could have gone that way. But I mean, I don't know, maybe. But there was, you know, the early days of the Internet were much more open and much more grassroots versus it became much more controlled and much more top-down, algorithmically driven, etc.

40:02But yeah, you're right about that. Now they've seen the wreckage of the previous promises of the technological development. And so there is a wariness there to begin with. And then you add to that the fact that they're thinking about college. I mean, my daughter literally graduates today. Congratulations, Ella. Congratulations, Ella. But they're looking at college, thinking about what to study or what job to try to take up. and it's impossible to know. That's the toughest question I'll get. It's impossible to know. What should I study? I'm like, dude, I don't know. Nobody knows. I really don't know.

40:32You know, it would be easy to be like, oh, learn a trade, but they're like, what if I don't want to? You know what I usually say is learn how to read and learn how to think. I know it's a total cop-out answer, but I'm like, at the very least, that one will not be automated, hopefully, anytime soon. Yeah. If you learn how to think, how to study decision-making and the various different approaches that people have, then that will hopefully put you in a good position whenever it comes time to make big decisions in your own life. That's genuinely all I can give you. I can't give you coding or accounting or - Don't do coding.

41:03Yeah, any of you. Definitely don't do that. I'm saying, or literary or physics or any of these things just because I don't see how that won't, at the very least, be attacked sometime in the future. Anyway, it's been an interesting discussion. Let's get to Cars for Kids. Who doesn't love warm, carby comfort? satisfying sandwiches, loaded bagels, rich mac and cheese. Crape-worthy and smart, Hero Bread's loaves, bagels and noodles have just 0-5 gram snack carbs, 0 gram sugar and up to 19 grams of protein and 32 grams of fiber per serving. Hero Bread bakes with heart-healthy olive oil and delivers a soft, fluffy, flavorful experience you love.

41:42Shop now on Hero.co. Use code IHEART for 10 % off. That's Hero.co. Per serving, not a low-calorie food. Some products contain allulose. See nutrition info on Hero.co for sodium and sugar content. When it comes to advancing your education, you have more options than you think. At Rasmussen University, we find ways to remove barriers, not build them. Like a new laptop if you're eligible and enroll in select online or on-campus programs. That means flexible and engaging online courses and resources, tuition savings options if you qualify, exceptional student support, and much more. Online nationally or check out their 20 campuses across six states.

42:16Start when you're ready and get the support you need. Visit rasmussen.edu. You know what quality feels like. You can see it in the way a fabric moves, recognize it in a flawless fit, and appreciate it in the details that make our styles unique. It's the standard Coldwater Creek has honored for over 40 years, derived from a rich Mountain West heritage, and designed for today in styles that are distinctively Coldwater Creek. For a wardrobe you can count on season after season, visit coldwatercreek.com, Shop new arrivals and save 15 % on purchases$75 or more with code IHART. We talked a lot about fraud earlier in our show, and it's a very interesting case out of the state of California with a jingle that many of you might remember.

43:021-877-CARS-4KIDS stuck in the brains of a lot of us. I think they called it an earworm. But this new court case in California exposes something truly shocking. Let's go and put it up here on the screen. A court has now banned these Cars for Kids ads in the state of California, as they report here in the local NBC News Bay Area. Cars for Kids, known for its catchy jingle, will no longer broadcast ads in California. The Orange County judge found that the charity violated false advertising laws. The case stems from a lawsuit in 2021. a man sued the charity's affiliated organization, URA Inc., where he discovered that the money from the car he donated was not going to underprivileged children in California.

43:49Instead, the money landed with an Orthodox Jewish group in New York and New Jersey that sends teenagers on gap year trips to Israel with their families. Cars for Kids ads will be banned in California until there is an audible disclosure on the charity's religious affiliation, the region of where the money goes, and a more accurate age range of the recipients. Now, to be clear here, Cars for Kids is denying that they weren't open about this. Let's put E5 up here on the screen. They say that the California court order to pull its ads is deeply flawed and claims that their religious affiliation was clear.

44:25I don't know. Was it clear to y 'all? It wasn't clear to me, certainly. Make up your mind for yourself. Cars for Kids says it is well known we are a Jewish organization and referred to the suit as a lawyer-driven attempt to siphon off charitable funds from their own gain. Again, the organization is based in the predominantly Orthodox Jewish city of Lakewood, New Jersey, and claims it has helped, quote, hundreds of Californians. Now, some of the details here are genuinely shocking. So just to read here a little bit from the New York Times in their write-up of what actually happened, is it primarily funds this New Jersey-based Jewish organization, which provides programs including an adult matchmaking service, trips to Israel for teens and summer camps in New York.

45:12The only program in California that Cars for Kids sponsored was a promotional giveaway of Cars for Kids branded backpacks. Similarly, what they write is that there was testimony where they testified, actually, that about$45 million a year that they raise, 60 % goes to URA, its sister organization, which operates out of that same building in Lakewood, New Jersey. Another 30 % is spent on in-house advertising, 6 % on administrative costs. URA has also spent the money overseas, the judge wrote, including$16.5 million to buy a building in Israel. And so when we went down a little bit further, let's put E4, some of the photos that we were able to find from URA, this organization.

46:02They include some of these. By the way, I literally pulled this image. It's from their own website, if anybody's accusing me of doctoring it. This, for example, is Last Chance Deadline. It features their mascot, Five-ish, which is a$5 bill, speaking into a microphone saying the biggest event of the year, URA-thon. They have several images that they show of this mascot, in some cases with Orthodox Jewish children, which are around it. So it is, I mean, look, it's shocking to me because of the ubiquity of the jingle of the 1A77. Everybody knows that. And this gets to what we were talking about earlier with fraud.

46:42Just the other day, I told a story at our AMA. I was at Old Navy and there was some organization where the guy was like, hey man, we buy clothes, like cheap clothes for foster kids. I'm like, you know, I put a 20 out of my wallet and I was like, here you go. Now I'm like, I don't know. There's something like this. I'm like, maybe I'm an idiot. It's like a drug addict who is pretending or something. I have no idea. I hope that's not the case. Maybe I got bamboozled. But this is the type of stuff which really makes you think about it. And yeah, I mean, I had a hard time getting through a lot of that with a straight face.

47:14But I mean, it's crazy. It's objectively crazy. One of the most famous jingles on all of television, a nonprofit-based organization that it ends up this California court decision finds that their religious affiliation is undisclosed and that the testimony from the actual court case reveals how much of that money is being funneled to this separate Orthodox Jewish group. There's nothing wrong with people who want to support an Orthodox Jewish group or whatever they wanna do. That's fine, that's your right as Americans. However, using this advertising, which a lot of people, well-meaning folks, people like me who are like, yeah, let's give money to foster children.

47:51And then if that is then used for a different purpose, that's a very, very different story. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the assumption when you hear that, the intended assumption which is made is that they're taking these cars and they're selling them off for parts or whatever. And the money is going to benefit underprivileged children of all stripes. That is what you assume. And by the way, this organization, Aura, it's not just about kids even. It's like, you know, adult matchmaking services and what is all kinds of stuff that they're doing. But it's not anything approaching what most people thought that this money was probably going towards, which is why this judge in California.

48:31And I think the standard for false advertisement, fraudulent advertisement is pretty high. Oh, you see a lot of claims on TV, which are like, oh, it's not really true. There are you can make a lot of claims on TV without it being deemed to be fraudulent advertisement. So it's a pretty high bar they had to meet to be like, no, this is too far. You are deliberately misleading people to thinking that their money and their donation is going to something which it is not going to. I told you yesterday, I'm pretty sure. I have to go back and double check, but I'm pretty sure that my old Volvo that I donated to Cars for Kids.

49:06You know what? I'd had it a long time. I had like 200 ,000 miles. I stopped working. And I was like, all right, I need to get rid of this thing. What's the easiest thing? Oh, Cars for Kids. that's you know that's the first thing that pops to mind and i now yeah i feel like i should have investigated the more i should have looked into where does the money actually go etc but you know i like many people just assumed you know okay this is an easy way to get rid of my car and it's a famous thing whatever you have no real you know it's it's like save the children yeah i mean it's solving a problem that i have and i assume it's going to some sort of reasonable purpose so we're just going with it right i mean here in the dmv you are inundated with street canvassers you know, Save the Children, Planned Parenthood, whatever, right?

49:47So it's common. But at the very least, like, you know, I usually just pretend that I'm on a phone call whenever I walk past them. But what was that? Sorry, can't hear you. But one of the things that you at least know about those organizations is they're usually like pretty well vetted. You know, you know what Save the Children does. You know what Planned Parenthood does. You know what you could disagree, you know, whatever, Médecins Sans Frontier, any of these organizations. But then I, again, very naively assume Cars for Kids is in that category. How else can something be on the air for over 20 years?

50:20Right. And nobody from the Better Business Bureau or any of these - Yeah, I just had an assumption like, oh, it must be legit. Yeah, it's got to be. Because it's ubiquitous. Right. And joke's on me. It's fair. Totally, totally get it for being too well-meaning or any of those for not doing more investigation. But honestly, people do deserve to know. And the fact is, is that all of the quotes that I read from the money and the percent wise comes from the chief operating officer's testimony before the state of California, who the judge herself described as strikingly candid whenever it came out.

50:54The only question is about whether any of this is going to be applied in the future. And if anybody from the White House, you know, they're very upset about fraud and all that. I welcome your interest in this particular case. I am not in any way alleging fraud. I'm just saying, you know, based upon what was in the trial. Well, no, no. They weren't found guilty as if they have to repay. They just have to amend their advertising. Their advertisements, as is, were banned in California based on a court decision. I wonder if other states are also going to follow suit because I know, yeah. I mean, when I lived in New York, I saw these things more than anywhere.

51:30Makes sense since it's a New Jersey organization, so it's right there. Had a couple of updates, speaking of trips to Israel and all of these sorts of things. I have a couple of updates with regard to Israel Kappa E6 up on the screen. There's a report from Haaretz. By the way, the ICC is disputing this. But there's a report from Haaretz that the ICC prosecutors seeking warrants for the arrest of Ben Gavir, Smotrich and several other Israeli officials for war crimes. So, like I said, the ICC is denying this report. Previously, warrants had been issued for the arrest of several other officials, including Netanyahu.

52:08I believe it was Netanyahu and Yoav Gallant for whom arrest warrants have already been issued. So we'll follow this and see what comes of that. But also wanted to make sure to highlight and make sure it doesn't fall out of the news, what's going on in Gaza right now. We told you before, first of all, the ceasefire was completely bunked. They continued to strike and kill Palestinians within Gaza. The Israelis have taken control of much more of the Gaza Strip than they were supposed to in accordance with the ceasefire plan. The idea that, you know, you'd start with a phase one and you'd move to a phase two, which included reconstruction and, you know, some governance apparatus, et cetera, that has never come to fruition.

52:47I think it was never intended to come to fruition. And instead, you have this just horrific limbo where people in Gaza are still living in abjectly horrific, unsanitary conditions, suffering gravely, you know, inadequate food, inadequate medical care. The sanitary conditions are horrifying. rats, infestations, just everything terrible that you can imagine. And Netanyahu went out and was bragging about how much of the Gaza Strip the Israelis now control and saying, and we'll see what happens next. Today, it's 60%. Tomorrow, we'll see. Let's take a look at this. So he said, and I quote, we returned all our hostages, the last one of them, and we did this without giving back territories.

53:30Did you hear? We returned all our hostages. There were those who said, leave, go outside. We did not go outside. Today we control how much? 60 % of the Strip. Tomorrow we will see. Tomorrow we will see. So just overtly bragging about annexing the Gaza Strip. You know, I mean, the idea that there was going to be some, like, great resolution here and it was going to be amazing was always quite fraudulent. And now he's just happy to brag about the fact that they are completely annexing this territory at this point. Yeah, and by the way, everyone will be interested to know Netanyahu's corruption trial was cut short his testimony again today for the second time in a row because of diplomatic and security reasons.

54:11So I just wanted to make sure everybody was aware of that while that's happening and for why maybe that war might need to resume sometime soon if that testimony and trial continues, which just happens to very conveniently get delayed for national security reasons all the time. In addition to now having literally, what is it, 1 ,000 new kilometers of Gaza and now this new expulsion of a significant part of the West Bank, which has nothing to do with Gaza. Well, that's where we are. All right. We have Chris Rabb standing by. Let's get to it. Looks like State Representative Chris Robb had a scheduling snafu today.

54:46Busy day, election day. So understandable. We'll be following the results closely tonight. And Ryan and Emily will cover that and so much more tomorrow. We will see you then.

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55:53That means flexible and engaging online courses and resources, tuition savings options if you qualify, exceptional student support, and much more. Online nationally or check out their 20 campuses across six states. Start when you're ready and get the support you need. Visit rasmussen.edu. You know what quality feels like. You can see it in the way a fabric moves, recognize it in a flawless fit, and appreciate it in the details that make our styles unique. It's the standard Coldwater Creek has honored for over 40 years, derived from a rich Mountain West heritage, and designed for today in styles that are distinctively Coldwater Creek.

56:31For a wardrobe you can count on season after season, visit ColdwaterCreek.com, shop new arrivals, and save 15 % on purchases$75 or more with code iHeart. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.