7/23/26: War Historically Unpopular, AI Hack Meltdown, Old People Debate

26:42That seems like a preposterous thing to do. At the same time, I mean, if you do have these open weight models that have basically the same capabilities, really undercuts the ability to regulate and constrain AI here at home. So, you know, how do you think about what we should do from a domestic perspective when we live in a global world, technologies, global, etc.? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I would say the open weight models are like six months behind still. I think there's like this Axios headline. I think that was just inaccurate. it um and if kimmy wasn't distilling from fable it was distilling from opus and other models like i don't know exactly the details but it's quite likely it was distilling from american models at least in part um i think we obviously need to have international rules around ai that are binding that don't require trust between the parties and there are technical approaches you can verify what's happening and data centers using like devices on the chips themselves and you could create institutions like the International Atomic Energy Agency, but for AI.

27:47And I think this hack is just a great example of like, you know, again, this will scale. Like this will happen again. It will be worse in the future. Like something will be worse than this. It's almost guaranteed. And if the U.S. decides to regulate and China, I mean, China is regulating actually far more than the U.S. is and still managing to catch up quite quickly. so i think there's like some assumptions that need to be tested here um but you can change the risk landscape you can create uh kind of like a floor within your own country and you can also say like hey if you're a chinese company and you want to serve models in the united states you have to comply with these regulations as well that's what states have been doing california new york illinois if you want to serve models in those states you have to do certain things and because those are big markets they're just going to do those things that's interesting yeah but i think the u.s should be i mean there are dialogues between the u.s and china i think that should continue and accelerate and i think ultimately in the good future there's going to be some kind of deal between the u.s and china to regulate ai to ban certain things to mandate other things and that will happen because again the bioweapon problem like the hackers the terrorists like there's going to be that at least.

29:05And there's also just this thing of like, we could lose control of AIs. We just did. We being open AI here. We could also lose control to AIs if they get capable, autonomous, numerous enough, which is like where things are trending. We don't know when, but that's just like the thing that happens by default. And so we just need to do something about it. Garrison, what do you make of the economic landscape here? Because that was a lot of the discussion around the Kimi K3 release as well. And even if you don't think it's as advanced as, let's say, Fable 5, it's, you know, they're getting pretty close here.

29:36And it's much, much cheaper. Anthropic and OpenAI seem to have freaked out pretty hard and are basically calling on the Trump administration to come in and bail them out because they have these incredibly mass amounts of investor money flowing into them. It only makes sense if they're going to get astronomical returns from replacing human labor. How do you think this all works out? I mean, do you see this as a bubble? Do you think that the future is more like AI is sort of a utility the way the internet is and more of the money is made in the applications? How do you view the economic pieces of this?

30:12Yeah, it's hard to say for sure. I think people speak very confidently on this and it's a really big, complex topic. I would say that prior to like recent months, the case for it being a bubble got a lot weaker because Anthropics revenue grew the fastest a company's revenue has ever grown at that level, going from like a few billion annualized at the start of the year to like 47 billion annualized by like May, I want to say. And we don't know what it is now. It may have slowed down. I think that the cost pressure or the pressure on prices from capable open weight models, it's just always going to be like chasing the frontier, right?

30:51And so the American business model for these releases is like have the very best models by capabilities, charge a premium for them, and then keep releasing better models to stay ahead of the open weight frontier. And that starts to break if it takes a lot longer to publish your own models. And so like Mythos was finished training in February. It doesn't come out as Fable until June, May. and then it's taken down and then it comes back. And so in that time, you know, Kimmy can catch up, get closer. And so, yeah, like the whole fast release, like release things is almost as soon as you have them and capture that premium while you can starts to break if there's like a kind of slowed down testing process, if the government is just deciding arbitrarily or without like transparent criteria of like what models are capable enough to release or have guardrails that are good enough to release, then it gives open-weight models more time to eat your lunch.

31:57And this is all predicated on the models continuing to get better, or at least there are continuing to be demand for the premium version of these things, which are priced at substantially above what it costs to serve them, which is why the open-weight models are able to undercut them so much, right? Like there's this big idea of like, oh, is it profitable to serve a given customer? The answer is clearly yes. The financial data shows this. The fact that open-weight models that are in the same ballpark are so much cheaper, again, it's just showing the raw cost, which we don't know from the outside, but we can infer from a bunch of reporting, a bunch of other things.

32:30And just think of how verbose the models are. Would they do that if they weren't making money by the token? Right, right. That makes a lot of sense. Really appreciate your analysis here, man. I'm looking forward to the release of your book. So thank you very much for joining us. Yep. And I think it's available pre-order now, right? Comes out on September 15th. Do I have that right? That's right. All right. Everybody go get that pre-order. Give us a copy. I already got a copy. I already read it. It's great. So I'll send you one. Thanks, Garrison. I'm Munga Shatikula and I'm back with a new season of the podcast Skyline Drive.

33:02This time I'm diving into a rabbit hole of peptides, organoids, blood boys, blue zones, and brain replacement to try to understand what this longevity obsession is all about and what it really means to live forever for all of us. I learned about some rad science. I can make a brain for you, and then we can test what draw is the best for your brain, as opposed to his brain. Here are some hard truths. I would expect Indians to age faster, but I did not expect it to be almost a four to five year acceleration. And get myself into a world of trouble. I'd say probably start bone smashing. That doesn't work.

33:46Make it look more defined. They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive, How to Live Forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. What did Black music, food, and culture teach us about who we were becoming? 2016 was sort of that last era of monoculture where we still consumed things in community. From Beyonce and Rihanna. Everybody wanted to be Beyonce. I don't think we'll ever see another Rihanna. To soul food, memory, identity, and the stories we carry through Black culture. What does it mean to be Black? And eat in America. So we were this group of people who knew how to work the land, who knew how to live with the land.

34:29We make it do what it do. Therapy for Black Girls is bringing together the conversation shaping black life right now. You will never make me feel bad for being a black girl, for being a black American girl ever. Therapy for Black Girls is bringing it all to the mic. Listen to Therapy for Black Girls on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey guys, Paul Verzi here and I want to talk to you about Paul's best podcast. Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio. I sit down each week with a special guest and we discuss the absolute best of things. It's that, and then there's everything else.

35:02He would just shout one line, and it would murder. Marie! Lunch! Bill Burr. Let's talk about the best moments that we had on the road. I would love a cocktail. Dude, Joe could get last row middle seat on a Southwest Airlines flight. Joe, how was your flight? It was great. The guy on Penn State, we were on the field, and the player thought Joe was his former coach. And he hugged him, and he hugged him, and Joe just went with it. And the guy goes, what are you doing here, coach? And Joe just goes, man! And you walk in and it is bananas. I mean, it's a feast for the eyes. And I was like, it's not my thing either, but we're here.

35:38When in Rome. Top athletes, chefs, musicians, everybody. Listen to Paul's Best Podcast on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Very excited now to be joined by a new author, Samuel Moyn. Let's put his book up here on the screen. Gerontocracy in America, How the Old are Hoarding Power and Wealth and What to Do About It. A man after my own heart. Professor Moyne is a professor at Yale University Law School, and he joins us now to discuss his new book. Thank you very much for joining us, sir. Appreciate it. Thanks so much for having me. So in this book, you describe gerontocracy in America as both a class element and an age element, a takeover of American institutions, the hoarding of wealth, the hoarding of power.

36:25You prescribe several solutions, some more radical than the others, including the dilution of older people's votes, awaiting younger people, mandatory retirement ages in business and in Congress, the abolition of the United States Senate, in fact. So why don't you start with your diagnosis, kind of where you're coming from and how you came to some of these conclusions? Well, gerontocracy is a rule of by and for the old people, and we have it in this country. and thankfully finally we've started to talk about the age of our politicians who at the end of their lives suffer cognitive decline like joe biden or or death like so many democrats who died to facilitate the passage of the current president's one big beautiful bill or ruth gator ginsburg who you know lost her bet on longevity and that debate is all to the good but what it misses is that there's a much deeper phenomenon, which is elder control of the political system generally, no matter how old the politicians are.

37:34If Trump doesn't make it his whole term, we might have the youngest president ever, but we would still have the oldest voters. And our wealth in this country is to an astonishing extent controlled by older people. So I realized that I should just present the receipts to try to convince people just how deep the syndrome of gerontocracy goes. Talk about some of your solutions, like what you would do about this problem you perceive. Well, it depends on the problem. I mean, I've got a long list and, you know, it's up to the politicians to decide, you know, if any are viable. But if we start with the politicians, I do think, like most Americans, that we should have age limits for office.

38:20And, of course, we do at the state level in many cases around the world. They're very familiar, including for judges. If we only go for age limits or term limits, we're still likely to end up with a very old political class. We might control the risk for cognitive decline and death. But what about unfair representation? In our Senate, we have one guy under 40, and we have very few 30 - and 40-year-olds in the House. And so what we need to potentially consider for politicians is youth quotas to kind of expand the range of generational representation. On elections, I mean, you mentioned my most radical solution, but there are a lot of modest ones like a federal holiday for voting so that young people aren't punished for not yet being retired or not being powerful enough in their jobs to leave work.

39:15We need to relax registration requirements so they're not punished for their likely greater mobility when they're younger. I would also argue we should have fewer elections because we know that it's in the boring elections that older people are likeliest to control. Young people do show up in greater numbers for presidential elections. But just as an example, in New Mexico in 2024, the median age of primary voters was 72 years old. We also need different campaign finance rules because the donors of two politicians in a privately financed system are 60, 70, even 80 on average. And so those are the fixes there.

40:04And then when it comes to wealth, I advocate higher taxes, which means that older people who have so much more wealth will pay more to younger generations. I advocate incentivizing them to leave their housing and build for seniors so that they can downsize without fear in order to make way for younger people. And as you mentioned on jobs, I think many jobs should have mandatory retirement ages. So one of the things, what I found fascinating is that a lot of your analysis is actually rooted in an old Marxist tradition. I'd never heard this line before, quote, age is the modality in which class is lived.

40:41you know we have plenty of time here so why don't you give us some of the history I was not particularly familiar with that strain of Marxism well so you know the standard Marxist view and it's right a lot of the time is that the problem is class duh and that's often right and it's always right to some extent and yet there have been folks who said we can't be too much into just getting rid of every other factor And the classic example, which Stuart Hall, the Marxist you mentioned, invoked was race. And he said that race is the way we live out class, both in the sense that class is racialized, the lower class is much more likely to be non-white in the United States, but also white people are more likely to understand their class predicament in racially antagonistic terms.

41:39That's how you get a candidate and presidency twice over now like Donald Trump. And so I'm just proposing to adapt that view for age. It's actually a little worse in terms of age because we have formal laws like apartheid for race that actually privilege older people. I think that's just and right in many cases. For example, older people do get more federal benefits. maybe not to the extent they do, which is$6 to$7 they get for every one spent on a child at the federal level. But we also have a lot of, especially tax protections designed of by and for older people, even when they are some of the wealthiest Americans.

42:29If you look across the world at the billionaire class, I'm going to concede we have a younger trillionaire, although he's not that young. Yeah, he's not that young. But billionaires, you have 45 % are between 50 and 70 and 45 % are above 70. Only 10 % of billionaires are under 50. And so partly we explain that by saying the older you are, the more time you've had to accumulate and hoard. But we also have to explain it by the privileges that a generation in the right place at the right time has kind of reaped by gaming the system. So you bring up the racial wealth disparity and just cards on the table.

43:17This is why I have some issue with your analysis because to me, it seems like if we're pitting groups against each other, for example, whites versus blacks, old versus young, we are dividing in a way that ultimately is beneficial to the oligarchic class, the Elon Musk, the Sam Altman, the Peter Teals, the Mark Zuckerbergs, in a way that is beneficial from them and distracts from what is the consistent core problem across all of these, which is class. So let me ask you this with regard to the racial wealth disparity. You propose weighting younger voters, giving them more weight with their vote, a sort of three-fifths compromise for older voters, I guess.

43:55I mean, would you do the same thing for white people? Would you say, well, as a group, you know, yeah, there's poor whites and there's rich whites, but as a group, they have much more wealth than black Americans. So their vote should count less so that we can help even the playing field here. So briefly, yes, but a couple of background points before I explain my answer. First, you know, it's tough to figure out how we're going to build a coalition to face down oligarchy. And my ultimate view is that we need intergenerational solidarity for the sake of intergenerational equity, just as we need a cross-racial, trans-racial majority in this country to face down the real evildoers.

44:40The question is, how do we analyze the situation properly? Because, you know, oligarchy has a lot of tools at its disposal. and actually most people who've made criticisms of generational unfairness have been in favor of oligarchy because they've wanted to target federal benefits for old people and destroy the welfare state and we can't just turn our back on the idea that there might be intergenerational unfairness that intergenerational solidarity is going to have to solve. Now second I never call for diluting older people's vote, let alone stripping them a vote. What I do suggest is that we should think of the equality between human beings differently.

45:27And the stake that someone who's 20 has in an election is just much greater than the stake someone who's 80 has in an election, just because what matters is how long will you live under the policies? How much of a say do you get in addressing long-term problems? And so my solution is inflating the weight of younger people's votes to take account of this fact. Now, you asked a hard question and I'll answer it directly. We already do try to inflate the significance of the votes of African-Americans votes, or at least we did until recently. Classically, we did things like have majority-minority districts so that African-Americans could have their districts organized so they could have a black representative in Congress, which mattered a lot to them, and understandably so.

46:25And, you know, you can also argue that we already have weighted voting. It's just in favor of residents of small states whose votes because of the Senate and the Electoral College count way more. And so my suggestion is we think about who's being treated unfairly and set up rules that take account of injustice. So I'm sticking with this point, you know, in terms of whose voice counts more in democracy, the biggest glaring issue is, and I know you mentioned it earlier, campaign finance. I mean, isn't a big part of the reason why older voters have more power in our political system simply that concentration of wealth, that there is, you know, a larger preponderance of wealth among older Americans versus younger Americans.

47:12that gives them more power in our political system. But it's not just it's not just a problem of old versus young. It's also a problem of the wealth among, you know, with white people versus black people. Again, the way to deal with this is not to pit one group against the other, but to deal with the underlying issue here of of money in politics and the way that that has completely skewed our system. So you're making a couple of very good points. One is the importance of reforming campaign finance. And I provide the data about just how much elder control there is of picking candidates, of funding them, and then having the successful politicians do their bidding.

47:55And of course, that ought to change. You're also right that this is a problem of wealth. But to go back to Stuart Hall, it's like saying white supremacy isn't real, doesn't account for why the class structure is the way it is. Of course it does. And the same is true of age. It's not accidental that so much wealth is controlled by older Americans. Now, you're right that if we want to create solidarity, we can't create an age antagonism any more than we can create a race antagonism, I'm not arguing for either. I'm arguing for saying to take class seriously, we have to take age seriously, just like we have to take race seriously.

48:43But don't you think, just on that point, don't you think the history of racism in America is quite different from the history of reverse ageism in America, given obviously slavery, given Jim Crow, given continued legacy of that? I mean, there's a very clear, clear-cut pattern of mass discrimination against black Americans that doesn't exist in terms of, you know, discrimination against young Americans. I agree with you, but it's not clear what force that has because every form of discrimination will have its own history. That's like saying, you know, patriarchy isn't real because it's different from white supremacy.

49:22It also can't be argued, I think, that the only kinds of unfairness that are real are old kinds. That's clearly false. And it's true that this is a new kind of discrimination because the situation of older people, mainly through the extension of life and the fact that they're still around in much greater numbers, and thankfully so, has changed the score in American class. And so, you know, with all due respect, I think we have to take each kind of discrimination on its own terms while also recognizing that class is made up of a lot of different kinds of factors. I also wanted to get your response to some of the criticism.

50:04So a friend of mine, Russ Green, he coined a term I love, boomer luxury communism. He wrote a critique of your book, From the Right. And what he said is that your proposal, here's in derentocracy America, would actually entrench gerontocracy and not necessarily reverse it. So I'm just curious for your response to his general argument. For example, I believe your endorsement of the Bernie Sanders Social Security expansion tax for saying that you should reject means testing, or sorry, your reason for rejecting means testing whenever it comes to Social Security, the general diagnosis that seniors are hard up for retirement.

50:44So yeah, I am curious to engage with some other critics, I think, from more the right wing of gerontocracy from more of your left wing kind of Marxist analysis? Yeah. So I liked Russ's piece. I think he's representative of a neoliberal take on life in general. And for many, many years, their view has been that if you care about intergenerational justice, you have to target entitlements for the sake of older people. Whereas I call for expanding them. And I think he's, with all due respect, again, wrong for a couple of reasons. One is that the main way that older people have control over our political system is not that they get entitlement, especially when they're poor.

51:35It's all the other ways, being the politicians in extraordinary numbers, being the voters and controlling the political system through campaign finance and then just wealth, housing, jobs. None of that has anything to do with social security. And so I want to argue against Russ that we shouldn't treat intergenerational fairness as a pretext for attacking the elder benefits that older people need. And as I mentioned, I actually think contrary to that neoliberal POV, that we should expand elder entitlements because Because my firm belief is that one reason a lot of older people do retain their wealth is that they're going to live indefinitely long.

52:25They know it. And deep down, they don't know who's going to take care of them. Our welfare state does not because Medicare excludes long-term maintenance of older people, which is a scandal. And so my sense is that if we were more generous to older people, they either would dilute their own influence over our affairs so that it's a more just society or taking their power from them in exchange for care would be a kind of just compensation. But what's the evidence for that? I mean, every entitlement for them has been expanded, has been protected whenever it comes to the way that they've manipulated property tax rules.

53:07I don't know if you're familiar with the more recent case where a house was passed down in a 55 over community to a younger woman and the entire community is banded together to kick her out from the property that she was deeded because they said it's for seniors only. I mean there's only really evidence of genuine hoarding and a zero-sum mentality from their perspective. So I'm not really sure why we should give them so much grace. Well, so it depends what we're talking about. I mean I try to convince you with all the receipts in the book that housing is in a very large part a crisis that's of old people's making for a few reasons.

53:45One is that because of the insane way that we make land use decisions in our country at these local town meetings, older people control supply and constrain supply. Second, as you noted, and that story exemplifies this, older people are very averse to downsizing, in part because they've made sure there's nothing to downsize into at the local level where these decisions are made. And that's a crime and we should address it. And that's part of my case. What the neoliberals say, because they're with me on housing, is really that entitlements are too expensive. And to have intergenerational justice, we need to cut entitlements.

54:31I think it's actually the reverse, that what we need to do is move to single-payer socialized care so that the expense of medical care is cheaper. Raise taxes, which means we will get older people who are typically the rich ones to pay if they have the means. On means testing for Social Security, I steer away from that because the traditional view about Social Security is that it's popular only because it's a universal program that everyone gets. And there's no reason to interfere with that universality if we take those rich people who are collecting Social Security anyway and just raise their taxes, not reduce their Social Security payment, but increase their taxes, including on the housing they control.

55:22And so the main question is who pays and the rich older people should a lot more than they do. That doesn't mean we have to destroy the entitlement state. I mean, it just seems to me that the rich in general, not just the rich older people, but the rich in general should pay more than what they're paying now. Agreed. I'm not against that at all. Yeah, because just like within racial groups, like you would much rather be the top 1 % black American or, you know, millennial than you would to be in the bottom quarter of white people or boomers. But I wanted to ask you, too, about the root of how we ended up here, because it didn't happen that older people were able to accumulate wealth because they're nefarious and they hate young people and they just want to save everything for themselves.

56:06They benefited from the New Deal. They benefited from the end of World War II, the New Deal programs, which allowed them to be able to buy a house and go to college for minimal cost. Health care was much less expensive, et cetera. And so isn't the real solution here to go back to more of a social democratic system rather than trying to target old people, but to try to create a system that younger people would benefit more from that includes more of the sort of universal programs and public spending that the New Deal included? I agree mostly with you. The only place I might resist is when you say it's either or.

56:53So it's true that we should tax the rich no matter their age. However, we also have a lot of formal privileges for older people that younger people don't have. And they're also financial privileges. And so taxation is one thing. But if we just tax without regard to age and focus on wealth, we won't even have seen, let alone targeted, all of those other privileges, especially involving housing and land and property that older people have built into the system. You're talking about like the mortgage interest deduction, things like that? Or homestead exemptions. They're like, there's a very long list and it's all in the book of all the ways that through their voting power, which is distinctive.

57:42And even poor older people vote a lot more than poor younger people. Older people have privileged themselves as old, not just as wealthy. And so my case is, you know, really that we can't just blind ourselves to the way class is being made and live. Now, you're right, absolutely, and I'm totally with you, Crystal, that we should have a return to, you know, a social democratic America to the extent there ever was one, because the New Deal left a lot to be desired, especially for if you take intersectional oppression seriously. It didn't do much for blacks, didn't do much for women, especially when they were workers.

58:24And so my view is you're absolutely right. We need to build an opportunity state for everyone of all generations. The question is, how do we get there? And where I might differ slightly is worrying that we can't just blind ourselves to who has power in order to distribute power fairly. How can we do that if we don't know how power is exercised, including in all these diverse domains where older people do have outsized authority? We can't get to where we both want to go. Really enjoy this discussion. I got one more question for you. Sorry, go ahead. Mitch McConnell, alive or dead? I'm a conspiracy stan, so I would guess he's been dead for a while.

59:12I love it. And, you know, he's the tip of the iceberg. But it's been fascinating to see that saga unfold. I'm going to put my money on, you know, dead Mitch, not live. Or at least like in some sort of vegetative state. Absolutely. We're not buying the AI photos here. It's totally nuts. Really fascinating conversation. Really appreciate you, you know, laying out your thoughts and sparring with us a little bit here. I never thought I'd have so much in common with a lefty Yale professor. But, you know, here we go. There's only one of us. No, there are dozens. There are certainly dozens of you. I appreciate the conversation.

59:49Everybody should just go by the books. It's interesting. And you actually have a lot of good statistics. In particular, it's a big takedown of the AARP. Maybe you'll come back and we'll talk about that one next time. Anytime. Appreciate you, sir. Thank you. Really appreciate you guys. Really enjoyed that conversation. Appreciate him stopping by. Thank you guys so much for watching. There will be a Friday show tomorrow. A lot of it will be pre-taped, et cetera. You'll see. We have some reasons why. But there will be it will be out. So don't worry. And we're about to do the AMA. So we'll see you later.

1:00:18Hey, everybody, I'm Tariqa Foster Brasby. What's up, y 'all? I'm your girl, Cheryl Swoops. When you tune in to a new episode of our podcast, Levels to This, you're definitely going to get some spicy WNBA analysis. But we're more than just hoops. And the real conversation is what we actually bring. It's been really, really cool seeing kind of these women just really step into their power off the court and understand that they are basketball, right? And they're not asking for permission. Listen to Levels to This with Stroh Swoops and Tarika Foster-Brasby on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:00:59I'm Mange Shatikular and I'm back with a new season of my podcast, Skyline Drive. This time I talk to scientists, biopunks, curmudgeons, blues owners, super seniors, and Goa's top cryotherapy lab to try to understand this obsession with living forever and what it means for all of us. And I get into a bit of trouble along the way. I'd say probably start bone smashing. That doesn't work. Make it look more defined. They say it works. I don't know. Listen to Skyline Drive, How to Live Forever on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Bill, why is my eye twitching? Does this mean I'm in perimenopause?

1:01:35Where's my phone? Juliana, maybe we can ask an actual human. Yes, because I have questions and I bet you do too. Like, is it normal to sleep in separate bedrooms? We do that and I still need to know why my poop's been green. We've got actual people answering these exact questions. Listen to Bill and Juliana. The podcast. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.