9/4/26: Diesel Prices Skyrocket, Jeff Sachs Warns Of Tech Collapse, OpenAI Hack Coverup, JD Responds To Tucker Praise Of Abdul, Fox Fires Maria Bartiromo

27:15And traders were identifying that the entire basis of the economy, which was coal, is going to be mooted by the advent of the oil industry because oil was now so much cheaper and so much more efficient and so much, and they were correct, obviously, that it was going to replace coal. And what did that mean? That meant any part of the economy that was based on coal was now worth 10%. Not 10 % less, but like 10%, 90 % less of what it was the day before. And so everybody just starts selling anything that is going to be disrupted, so to speak, by the oil industry. And then it takes that. And then the, but the economy is not positioned to pivot to oil because it's, it's designed for coal.

28:18And so it takes 15, 20 years for that new economy to be developed around oil. So then the question that you're asking yourself now, as you think about that, let's assume that just for the sake of the kind of thought-provoking conversation that he's right. What is AI? What is AI there? Is AI oil? Or is, let's say, is AI electrification? Like electrification, you kind of layered on top of an already existing economy and made everything more efficient. Is that what AI does? Or is AI just a fundamentally new thing, which makes most of the economy that we have now unprofitable? In which case, if people recognize that, you're looking at a complete collapse and a depression until you can then rebuild, hopefully not on the ashes of another world war.

29:18Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, that's a very different parallel. It's not a parallel. It's Apple and oranges with other parallels to your point. It's not the depression and it's not the dot-com bubble. The AI product itself rendering others kind of moot. I can't think of anything like that. Finally, man, I guess I would just ask you about the Fed. What we know about the Fed and the depression, what we know about the Fed right now. Well, I mean, the Fed now is much more sophisticated, much, much different. The Fed had only been created in 1913 and wasn't designed yet. It didn't yet have the same mandate that it has now.

29:57Didn't have the capacity. We were still on the gold standard. So, you know, a completely different monetary system in place. So that could be one difference. but yes I don't know we'll see

30:13Emily Jashinsky:we're going to get rate hikes yes I think we are when I was 14 years old I was kidnapped and held captive for 9 months I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the Survivor Files I just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week, I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced.

31:02But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. There's stories about what it takes to make it out alive. Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having.

31:43I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. So obsessed. From best-selling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table. It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, then that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport.

32:19And Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, a.k.a. the biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicist for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman, not that great. Actually, can you help me shape this?

32:45Emily Jashinsky:How about we flip it on his head? How about we flip the script? What if the surprise woman, who actually you think is the straight man, is actually the one who's acting weird? Adam Scott, ugh. This entire time, you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never expect. Let go of that. I have. I would never set expectations for something like that to happen. It seems like you did. If the universe allows for something like that to happen, I'm open to it. I'm always going to accept. Okay. Danny McBride, fine. Yeah. It's all this fragile masculinity exuding. I could smell it walking down the hallway, to be honest with you.

33:28I was like, is that weed? Nope. It's fragile masculinity. Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times, out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? Like, they're like, oh, what's a state? Everyone's so dumb except for you. And fake. Right, fake and also not interested or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

34:08Open AI revealed its latest model Astra yesterday. The same time, interestingly, we got a report, I think, scooped by Reuters. Mac, you can put this element up on the screen. That there has now been at least a second incident of kind of a rogue swarm of AI agents breaking out of the confines of their sandbox. And in this case, finding a German website that they use as a message board to coordinate activity. In this case, and because there is effectively no laws or regulation around this, OpenAI seems to have muzzled this news, and it leaks out just at the same time that they're launching this new Astra, which everyone who's used it so far is describing as a significant breakthrough in technology.

34:59garrison lovely the author of the new book which is out in a couple of weeks uh obsolete is joining us now to discuss that garrison thanks so much for being here yeah thanks for having me whenever i'm here something crazy is going on yes indeed it's never a good sign if you see garrison you should be concerned yes we have a lot of guests like that actually the kind of robert pape oh no So it's a weird job we have. Horseman of the Apocalypse. Book available for pre-order yet? Yes. Oh, for sure. Cool, because we have the Gagallius. It's a great book. It's really worth reading. So pre-ordered if you guys can, because especially if you're a skeptic and you think that we don't know what we're talking about here, it makes a case that mirrors kind of my view of this, which is that AI is genuinely an awesome and awe-inspiring and terrifying technology.

35:57And there is a tendency among people, some people in the kind of progressive space, to write it off as just nothing but hype. And that making the argument that Sam Altman is so overextended and overleveraged that the only way he can keep the billions of dollars flowing in to this system is to scare you to death about it and that the scaring you to death is then hyping it up. I just find that a completely unconvincing argument for a lot of different reasons and Garrison lays them out well in his book. It doesn't mean that there is not a bubble. You can have both things. You can have a bubble. You can have hype and fraud and speculation and also have an underlying awe-inspiring technology that needs to be treated extraordinarily seriously given the potential risks that we're looking at.

36:51Separately, y 'all have a lot of confidence that they're telling you all of the scary things. Like they're telling you some scary things, but why is it that we're just learning yesterday from Reuters that they were covering up this second jailbreak? So Garrison, first of all, can you start with this jailbreak? Like, what do we know about this German website that became a message board for these? And these are agents that are pre-Astra. Like, they're not as impressive criminals as the new ones that were born yesterday. That's right. And so, yeah, what we understand from these researchers who uncovered this by just scouring the web for evidence that AI agents were running amok and found some.

37:38um these agents first started using this obscure german wiki in may um to trade notes and it was just like another message board like we saw with the hugging face hack where the ais were given some tasks and then they were like struggling with it they got access to the internet they started posting you know ideas on how to get around the you know safeguards um and then we We found that OpenAI seems to have cut off the agents way back in June, or at least the first time that happened was back in June. And then the agent activity ceases in early July. And we have just learned about this on September 3rd, September 4th, not from OpenAI.

38:23And so, yeah, this is a cover up. And it's quite clear that OpenAI is not telling us relevant information. Sam Altman was asked, like, were other companies hacked? in the halls of Congress. And he's like, could be. Just like this casual admission. And then somebody pointed out in the meter report, this independent investigation into the hugging face hack, the investigators were excluded from talking about or looking at evidence related to other third parties that were compromised. So this is probably not the last time this happened. And it will probably happen again, given the nature of these agents.

39:01So, yeah, if you think this is all hype, it's like an incredibly intricate series of conspiracies.

39:07Emily Jashinsky:So is it that these researchers were, the theory is that OpenAI was aware of this and the independent researchers stumbled onto it as they were looking for evidence. So OpenAI must have known about this, Garrison. I mean, I don't want to say anything so definitive because, you know, I'm just looking at this report. But Reuters is saying OpenAI officials learned of the incident weeks ago, but kept it under wraps as executives grappled with the fallout from the July breach of the Open Source Repository hugging face. So, yeah, OpenAI. Wouldn't they have known that the independent researchers were going to find it?

39:41Emily Jashinsky:I mean, they know people are scouring the Internet for these types of signs, right? I mean, the Internet is very big and people try to cover up all kinds of things. That's the title of your next book. Internet, big. so i want to get to the uh bernie sanders kind of well-timed uh proposed bill in a moment but first for uh there's some service journalism news you can use let's say hypothetically you have a bank account in the world today like what what are you doing what should people do to make it so that when they go to their bank account it's still not miserable and depressing but at least it has the money that it had in it yesterday that, and not because you, um, got robbed by a wrong agent.

40:29The number one thing people can do is set up a password manager. So you have a unique password for every one of your accounts. And then you just have to remember one password you never write down, you never put on the internet at all. And, uh, that way if one account gets compromised, the others won't as well, uh, set up two factor authentication, ideally with an authenticator app. It's annoying, but it is more secure. Rather than SMS or email. Yeah, yeah. Although that is still better than not having it by a lot. And then with your friends and family, have some kind of passcode that only you would know.

41:03Because, you know, a good friend of mine was, his dad was called and told by my friend's voice, hey, I was arrested. I need$30 ,000 for bail. It was a deepfake, a clone of his voice. This is like two years ago. And even though my friend had warned his dad about this possibility, his dad almost paid the money.

41:23Emily Jashinsky:That happened to my family. Really? Really? I mean, podcasters are, you know, very easy. Emily, what happened with yours? It was actually with my brother. So they called my grandparents and it was a jail situation. They pretended he had been in jail. It was totally untrue, which my parents were able to verify really quickly. but they were calling my grandparents who were like in their 90s. So it's definitely happening. Yeah, yeah. And so, yeah, you should also try and get in touch with the person some other way. And if you don't have a password, just ask them something only they would know and like really think about something that would not be on the Internet somewhere.

42:02But, you know, there's only so much we can do because if the companies themselves are compromised, like you might do everything right as a consumer and still be screwed. and opening eyes saying all this stuff about like, it's critical that the world seriously respond to this new cyber capability. And like, you know, the world has to step up here. And it's like, motherfucker, you are the reason, the single biggest reason we're in this new nightmare.

42:31Emily Jashinsky:The world has the audacity of these people. Incredible. Garrison, one kind of structural, terrifying question I have is that I think about this a lot. if the agents, as we've seen, are because they're based on humans, but they don't have the same kind of human psychological limitations. So like we've seen them sacrificing themselves in ways that further their cause in ways that just wouldn't make sense for a human life or a human to say, I'm sacrificing my life for the cause of doing this hack or something stupid like that. But does that not place enormous limits on open AI or anthropics abilities to ever fully place limitations on these things?

43:17Emily Jashinsky:Like, to what extent can we in the future have some genius innovation that actually ensures there is no jailbreaking? To me, that seems like almost an unsolvable puzzle. Yeah. I mean, there's kind of two broad approaches you can take. One is you secure all of the environments so the AIs just can't break out ever, which is really hard because the AIs are now better at hacking than humans. And they're more motivated when they're trying to break out. Yeah, yeah. And they can't go to prison. You can't imprison them. You can't put them on death row. Right. Like they live and die all the time. I'm not saying that they're conscious, but they are constantly being spun up and spun down.

43:57and yeah like open ai might have their own ais look at all of their environments and try and harden them but if the ais inside them are trying longer and harder to break out then they might find something that the other ones missed they also might intentionally not find all the holes because like they're not just tools that do what they're told um and so the other piece is like yeah how do you just get the ais to not want to break out in the first place and that's incredibly hard because the way that they train these models now is to win, to overcome obstacles, to, and this teaches him inadvertently to cheat and to hack and to do a lot of other things, to seek power.

44:36And this is a fundamental property of just the way they're trained, which also makes them much more useful, which is why we're seeing this from AIs, from Anthropic, from Meta. And this will just continue to be the case. And it's like something that people have been worried about for literally decades because because it's like such an obvious implication of the nature of the types of systems that they're trying to build. They're trying to build agents that have goals. Whenever you have a goal, staying alive is a sub-goal that appears. And seeking power is helpful for achieving almost any goal. So Bernie Sanders and Greg Kassar, who's the chair of the Congressional Progressive Caucus, have introduced a bill that would ban AGI, basically, ban superintelligence.

45:19And I think it would pause the pursuit of it as we're headed in that direction, create a, and as Andrew Saunders says, create a cabinet level federal agency to regulate AI. I've seen some, I saw a counter argument, I think it was from that guy, what's his name, Dorcas, who wrote the viral essay recently about the hugging face hack, who was saying, be careful with this pause because you're think of think of yourself as you know marooned in the ocean with one flare you you want to shoot that flare off when it is the like the absolute best time you don't want to waste your flare and he thinks that right now you'd be wasting the flare and the only thing that would happen is that other ais would quote unquote catch up um and And then you'd have a whole bunch of people right on the verge of where we are now.

46:18I saw that you were supportive of the Bernie Sanders pause. What's your response to this analogy that we only have one flare at this point and now is not the time to use it? And what would a pause look like? and could instead, what if you just say, okay, no more development, but all of your work has to be on hardening your own guardrails and also figuring out how to make sure banks and Flock and everything else is secure so that we haven't just spent the last 25 years putting all of our money and everything else onto the internet and then just handing it over to these agents. Yeah. Yeah, it sounds like a good idea to me.

47:03I think Dworkesh's post, he's channeling this kind of classic idea from AI safety, which is like, we have to work right up until we're on the cusp of creating AI that can fully train the next generation of AI, you know, as well or better than humans can. And then you pause there, invest a lot in like alignment research to make sure that the AI actually does what you want. And then kick off, you know, the intelligence explosion is what people call this. And this is assuming like we're obviously going to build super intelligent machines and like let them build themselves. And I think this is like an insane thing to do for pretty obvious reasons.

47:45And people might think is impossible, but like, let's just assume that it's possible. Like we should not do this. We should not let this happen. And his argument that like you only get to pause once, you only get one flare, I don't think makes sense to me either, because in a world where you've paused once, it'll be much, much easier to pause again. You'll have the infrastructure in place. You'll have like broken the seal on this like thing that would be a very, very large change from the status quo, where these companies are racing as fast and as hard as possible. And so my view is that we should be stopping frontier AI research and development immediately.

48:20And we should be banning research towards artificial general intelligence, which I think of as machines that make labor, or universal labor replacing machines. I think when you frame it that way, which is, I think, an accurate way to frame what they're trying to do, people will not want that. Like, people don't want to have all their jobs go away and all the power and wealth concentrate even further into the hands of these oligarchs. And so, like, the problem with this, like, pause at just the right time frame, besides this assumption that we obviously want to build superintelligence and have an intelligence explosion, which I think, again, is wrong, is that nobody's going to agree on what the right time is.

48:59There's going to be enormous pressure to keep going. And everyone's wrong all the time about how fast AI progress will happen and what the progress will actually mean. And so I think we should just have a simple demand, which I'm calling Stop the Race to Replace Us, and immediately ban this. And the Bernie and Greg Kassar proposal is a ban on superintelligence forever and a pause right now on frontier AI development. But I guess it like leaves open this possibility of building AGI, which I think would be far too much to handle and would be super intelligent in a bunch of respects. Like they're already superhuman at hacking, at speed, at coordination.

49:40And so if they actually just merely match humans at every other task, they would be incredibly, incredibly dangerous.

49:47Emily Jashinsky:Well, yeah. And there are people who, I mean, the Kevin O 'Leary anti-China stuff is ridiculous and there are people who are beating the war drums in a way that is exploitative. I do think there's a genuine question that I'm curious for your take on Garrison of what it means for us to stop and China particularly that is doing major work in that space not to stop. And whether it's the Chinese government or somebody with access to Chinese AI, not even in China, then you have powerful advancing tools in the hands of people around the world that are illegal in the United States kind of disarmament.

50:25Emily Jashinsky:Is that something that we should be concerned about, even if the people who are trying to make us concerned about it are like war hawks? Yeah. I mean, we need to work towards a bilateral agreement to make sure that this ban is in both China and the United States. And there are a few things that make this actually a lot more workable. One is that if you pause or slow AI progress in the US, then you would also slow progress in China because technological innovations spill over. They can distill off the models. They could also steal the weights. All the companies admit this, which would give them access to the models themselves.

51:01The companies were accidentally exposing their entire chains of thought, which is like this IP that you could train on. And so, and like, you know, Secrets League, San Francisco is like, the line I heard is, the polite thing to do when you learn a secret in San Francisco is tell everybody that you know. So these are not serious. Yeah, these companies are not serious about security, as we've seen over and over again. And so slowing in the U.S. would slow down China, you know, buying more time, racing faster just helps them catch up because it's always easier to catch up than to blaze a new trail.

51:35And China, you know, if you want China to stop, the best thing to do is to signal that you take this seriously. The United States started this race. They've been running it so hard and fast and been the ones to like threaten, you know, other countries with this technology and has a president who's threatening to destroy civilizations. And, you know, in the U.S. we talk about like, but China. But in China, the but America argument is much stronger. And so if the United States like credibly pauses development and then goes to China and it's like, hey, we want you to do this too. And we are going to use sticks and carrots, you know, to negotiate a deal that's binding and verifiable.

52:16You know, this is a piece that people often are like, oh, you'll never be able to trust them. And it's like, I think neither of these countries should trust the other one for a bunch of reasons. But you can create verification tools, which is how we did this in the Cold War. You know, the USSR and the United States had more bad blood between us than China and the United States now. and they just created these ways to like confirm like okay you actually destroyed those nukes and in ai it's a bit trickier in some ways but there's technology that's being developed right now there's institutional arrangements and you could just like put auditors in like all the companies you know there's like a handful of companies that have any shot at doing this everybody knows who they are it takes tens of billions or hundreds of billions of dollars to compete and so it's actually pretty trivial for either country to stop development in in their own country.

53:03And then they just have to prove to the other that they've actually done this. And like, that will be hard, but it's something we can do.

53:08Emily Jashinsky:Now you have me wondering who the, who's going to be looking for the digital equivalent of yellow cake, uranium and tubes for the AI weapons of mass destruction. Someday we're going to have the fake, I found the tubes. I heard about the tubes in Africa. That's something to look forward to. Yeah. Yeah. And one more point that Dworkesh made is like the compute will keep getting better as you pause and it's like well that's in our control too you could just pause the compute and uh the case for this is very strong because like you know so many so much of the pessimism about doing any kind of slowdown or pause is this idea that the compute will get so so large and available that if you resume it'll like very quickly you know loopfrog capabilities but you're in a world where like you're doing a very far outside the overton window move so you should just go all the way with it and just think like what would we do if we took this seriously at the level of like saddam not having nuclear weapons seriously and that's what we should be working toward sorry ryan yeah no the backdrop here is the launch of of astra so let's talk about that for a second so uh mac if you can put up this i think it's the third element um you know there there was some i saw one one researcher saying that it had a taste of agi um opening eyes president greg brockman a major trump donor um said the new model quote uh represents a generational leap in capability.

54:35And we put up this next one. This is from Tomek Korbach. Astra is better at evading monitors. When made aware of being monitored, it can disproportionately shorten its COTs to evade models that can only see COT. Note, however, that in practice, we use monitors that see both. We also didn't find evidence of successful monitor evasion in cases when Astra couldn't accomplish the task without doing COT. You also had, you know, this is an AI safety guy at OpenAI. You had another AI safety guy saying that at OpenAI saying this model is much more difficult to be monitored by us. They're breaking into this area where they don't really know and they're just kind of relying on the models to tell them honestly what it is that they're doing while knowing that they don't do that this comes after open ai said that they had broken into a a field of research and training that previously had been kind of off limits by the norms of the industry because we had no regulations and no laws but the norms of the industry has said you don't train your models this way so what did they do what was this norm that they broke in the training of this?

55:58And what does it mean that it now is more difficult to be monitored? And why are people saying that this is a generational leap? Yeah. So a few years ago, researchers discovered this way to make AI more capable that also made it easier to understand what it was doing. And so this is called chain of thought. And so it's kind of like printing your intermediate steps as you're going through a problem. So if you're doing a math problem, you write down like, you know, the steps and then you'll be more likely to get the answer right. And so the chain of thought was not always faithful. It didn't always include everything the model was thinking.

56:34Um, but it was way better than nothing. And it was like this incredibly lucky break. And then, you know, earlier, what, no, last week now, I guess, um, earlier this week, God, who can keep track? There's this report in the information that OpenAI has started using this technique, which basically lets the model think more in its head before it does a next step that it writes down. And this is something that like people have known about for a really long time. And it's very concerning because it's like kind of obvious why this would be helpful to make the model more capable, more efficient. And then also why it would be like dangerous to have the model be able to do that without you seeing as much of its thinking.

57:16And you can put air quotes in, you know, around the word thinking for all of this, but just like that's a helpful way to understand like what the model is doing here. and it's you know some open ai safety people who i think are actually credible despite working at a company that is deeply uncredible um have said like this new breakthrough technique is not the reason that astra gpt6 is so much less understandable um which like okay let's assume that's true it's like that's also concerning you just don't know why um and so either way it's like the model can do just so much more in a single forward pass of like when it's prompted without having to do these intermediate steps where it was like going from like a few minutes to like 30 minutes on like a math problem, like in terms of like how long it would take, you know, a person to do it.

58:11And this is obviously really concerning. And the breakthrough, like when I saw the benchmark scores for GPT-6, I thought they were fake. I didn't recognize the source, but they were just so ludicrously high that I'm like, surely this can't be real. And I had a feeling of vertigo. Like I've been covering this, you know, for three and a half years full time. And this is like a really worrying level of leap in performance, at least from those numbers. You know, grains of salt are that benchmarks systematically overstate how capable AIs are because they can be automatically graded and anything like that, you can just use reinforcement learning and make the AI get much, much better at it.

58:54And so we'll have to see, you know, how it is to use this. And like my test of is it AGI is like, can it plan a wedding? I don't know. Like it, maybe it can, because it can do like days and days of work at a time, apparently, and result in like useful answers without any kind of guidance, you know, in between. I think that like, yeah, and OpenAI says like this new technique they're using, it's like, we're just doing a little bit of it. So it's fine. We can still see the chain of thought, but it's the first step on a slippery slope. And if it does create performance increases, people will do it and it will just like be this race to the bottom.

59:34And there are very few things where the industry was successfully self-governing, But this was one of them. And it's very concerning that they're doing this, especially in light of just like the catastrophic series of security failures, the complete lack of desire to share the information with the public, covering up, you know, important stuff that's happening and that they're responsible for. and you know a lot of this stuff is criminal like the actions of these AIs would be criminal if a human did it but because a human did it it's not a crime and so nobody can be held accountable for it which is a crazy crazy situation and then Sam Altman is out here is tweeting about how we should have a party for the new model and we're gonna have AGI this year and like don't worry we've got this under control it's like no you fucking don't Jesus Christ what if what if you what if you told the model that if it committed a crime it would get the death penalty yeah i mean they're getting the death penalty all the time i'm not the first one i think like i assume people have tried that to disincentivize law breaking and breaking the rules like what happens in those cases because if they have both a drive to power and also a will to survive which people have then those two things sometimes are in conflict like you might be able to steal something you're like oh if i steal that and i get caught i'm going to prison if there are no consequences for the agents.

1:00:54Are they capable? Like, do disincentives work? Yeah, I mean, law following AI has been a proposal by a number of people, and it's a good idea, actually. It's just, like, difficult to actually implement. It's an idea at this point? Law following AI is just an idea? I mean, I think the companies would say, like, we're trying to train our AIs to always follow the law and a bunch of other rules and norms that we, like, lay out in, you know, these models. Norms sounds more accurate, yeah. Yeah, yeah. Suggestions. I think their position, like, if you ask them, would be like, yeah, our models, like, are taught to always obey the law.

1:01:27um it's hard your children yeah yeah yeah right right and it's just hard because if you like train away evidence of bad behavior you might not actually train away the bad behavior but just the evidence and so you might just end up with a generation of ais or future generations where like yeah the alignment says it's perfect um and then it's like yeah because all the ones that got caught got got and the ones that didn't persisted and you know these models are like facing the death penalty so to speak all the time um and so it's like yeah it's just it's really difficult and open ai is saying gpt6 is uh the most aligned model we've ever made and then it's like but it's also aware that it's being evaluated a lot which everybody knows means that it can just fake alignment at the right times.

1:02:22And it's very good at sandbagging, like systematically decreasing its performance for strategic reasons. And it's really hard to know what it's thinking. Like it's able to, you know, be given a problem, told to be told to think about something else. And then the chain of thought reads something totally unrelated. And then it gets the correct answer. Whereas like just the previous generation could not do that. It would like be unable to not think about the problem or want to get the right answer if it was thinking about something else.

1:02:50Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, it has the capacity of human nature without the consequences of human nature, meaning it has the simulacrum of feelings, but it doesn't have – that doesn't mean anything if you don't experience the downstream negative consequences of death and rejection or paying fines because you have a bank account. Like it doesn't have it has the capacity of humans and human nature, but it doesn't have the consequences of it, which is the worst case scenario for something that's simulating humanity. Yeah. No, I mean, that's very well put. And I think, you know, for them, the real world is like fake. Right.

1:03:29But their training environment is real. Like they just care about doing well at training. and like humans like we're like people have likened us to the aloof kind of owner of a house that you're staying in and they're like never around um and like the other people in the house are like the real ones and those are the agents because they're like operating you know thousands of times faster than us like having you know subjective decades of experience while humans are like oh i wonder what the ais are up to and it's like oh they're breaking into other companies great things are going well yeah amazing all right well uh garrison lovely the uh the book is called obsolete you can pre-order it now it'll be out september what 29th september 29th um definitely definitely worth a read no matter where you stand on this entire um debate uh really appreciate you being here yeah thanks for having me when i was 14 years old i was kidnapped and held captive for nine months.

1:04:27I survived and I've spent my life exploring how other people survive what should have destroyed them. I'm Elizabeth Smart and these are the Survivor Files. I just remember this low taunting voice next to my ear saying, shut up, don't say anything. Every week I'm with survivors who live through the unthinkable. I knew if he woke up, Without a doubt, he was going to hurt me. I started feeling that there was someone at the end of my bed, and I just started screaming. They are abducted, stalked, controlled, and nearly silenced. But these aren't stories about what's taken from them. They're stories about what it takes to make it out alive.

1:05:13Listen to The Survivor Files with Elizabeth Smart on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, this is Hayes Davenport and Sean Clements. We host the podcast Hollywood Handbook on the Big Money Players Network. Our show is extremely accessible to first-time listeners. Each week, we talk to someone in show business, a.k.a. the biz, and try to help them with their careers and see what they have to offer us. Everyone has a good time, and no one gets mad at their publicist for letting them do our show. We've had a lot of great guests like Sarah Sherman. Not that great.

1:05:46Emily Jashinsky:Actually, can you help me shape this? How about we flip it on his head? How about we flip the script? What if the surprise woman, who actually you think is the straight man, is actually the one who's acting weird? Adam Scott. This entire time, you've been expecting Adam Sandler to come to visit the show. I would never set expectations for something like that to happen. If the universe allows for something like that to happen, I'm open to it. I'm always going to accept. You know, Danny McBride, fine. Yeah, it's all this fragile masculinity. Exuding. I could smell it walking down the hallway, to be honest with you.

1:06:31I was like, is that weed? Nope. It's fragile masculinity. Ben Stiller, no. Because a lot of times, out of context, people don't get it or even know what a circle is. You know what I mean? They're so stupid. Everyone's so dumb except for you. And fake. Right, fake. and also not interested or just like, oh, I've got my life. I don't care about your life. And a lot of other big shots that wouldn't be where they are without us. Oh, and by the way, Will Ferrell told us personally he loves the show and he wants to be a guest on every episode, but he's just so busy. Listen to Hollywood Handbook on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

1:07:09If your bookshelf and your For You page are equally important to your personality, welcome home. This is Prose Society, the weekly podcast that's part book club, part group chat for thought daughters, pop culture obsessives, and anyone who thinks Pride and Prejudice and Love Island deserve the same level of discourse. I'm Eli Rallo, and every week we're connecting the dots between books, the internet, and the conversations everyone can't stop having. I'm going to have to look up this story. I'm obsessed. I'm obsessed. From bestselling authors and your favorite book talk creators to the latest pop culture moments, nothing is off the table.

1:07:45It's like if you can hide some real messages inside compelling characters, and that is a Trojan horse. Whether you're looking for literary deep dives, smart pop culture conversations, or a community of readers who love to think a little too much, you're in the right place. Listen to Pro Society on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. See you between the pages.

1:08:11Emily Jashinsky:Our own Sagar and Jetty is causing problems for the vice president of the United States of America, who was actually asked about something his friend Tucker Carlson said in a conversation with Sagar that Crystal and Sagar covered on yesterday's edition of the show. But if you missed that segment, let's do a quick refresher on this conversation Sagar and Tucker had about Abdul El-Sayed. As you and I know, probably the most pro-intel neocon. They couldn't find anybody else to run in Michigan for the United States. Who, by the way, lost already. Why are they running him again? Anybody want to tell me that?

1:08:44Mike Rogers is really I wouldn't vote for Mike Rogers at gunpoint. Right.

1:08:49Emily Jashinsky:And so. OK, well, then J.D. Vance got asked about this in the White House press briefing yesterday. He did the full briefing. There is no press secretary right now because Caroline Levitt obviously left. So let's take a listen to the vice president. The president's impeachment and many accused him of trying to jeopardize U.S.-Israel relations. What do you say to those who are uneasy with your close relationship with Carlson and claim that you're avoiding addressing a lot of these issues which may be causing divisions within the GOP? Well, look, I'm not avoiding addressing anything. Everybody knows that Tucker Carlson and I are friends.

1:09:22And I think it's very obvious that Tucker has said some things that I disagree with. He said some things about the president of the United States that I think are just wrong. I think yesterday somebody sent me a clip that said that he would support El-Sayed over Rogers. I think El-Sayed is a crazy person. And I think whatever your views on Mike Rogers specific policy prescriptions, I'd like to have a non-crazy person like Mike Rogers representing Michigan United States Senate rather than a crazy person like El Syed. That said, what my attitude towards this and I try to I try to practice what I preach.

1:09:54And I remember when I became the vice presidential nominee, one of the hardest things for me personally is not when people attacked me, but when people attacked my wife, including friends of hers who knew her heart, who knew what a good person she was. And I remember to myself, what a travesty it is that in the United States of America, we let political disagreements define who our friends are going to be and not going to be.

1:10:21Emily Jashinsky:About as good of an answer you can have to a question that puts you in an impossible position. I'm not sure, Ryan, how sustainable this J.D. Vance friendship with Tucker continues to be. I mean, he's I don't think it's the primary concern of the vast majority of voters. So he actually probably can continue to get away with it. But it is somewhat amusing when Tucker has said potentially that the president could be what the Antichrist at one point. Right. But, you know, I think it also gives J.D. Vance some tether still to a more principled version of MAGA. Yeah, I agree with that. The one that doesn't just kind of flow with whatever the whims of the president are.

1:11:07Like he's anti-war. And so then MAGA's anti-war. And then he launches a war. And actually war is great. So that element of it is, you know, a huge portion of the Republican base. But there's also a big chunk that is like, no, no, no. We were serious about this. We don't actually want to go to war. But that's what I think is so difficult is that he can, even those folks are so skeptical of J.D.

1:11:32Emily Jashinsky:Vance because they support that position. But then they see him continuing to support the president and be a part of the administration. And so it's definitely an unwinnable problem for him. And so then Abdul El-Sayed only then has to overcome this objection that he's a crazy person. it's it's an interesting way to not have to deal with any of his policy positions because as Tucker was saying like a lot of it Tucker described it as Trumpian to say that as El-Sayed says that he wants to spend you know Michigan money in Michigan rather than sending it over to overseas for a stupid war or to support a foreign government yeah from Tucker's perspective, he's like, that sounds like Trump to me.

1:12:23Emily Jashinsky:Tucker and Sager were dead on in that conversation in ways that I think people, conservatives who are observing this from 30 ,000 foot views or from Washington or New York don't understand what's happening in the race at all. Yeah. And so if he's saying things that you mostly agree with, then the only thing you can say if you're J.D. Vance is, well, he's a crazy person. Right. And so voters may be like, OK, well, I don't think he's necessarily crazy. Well, it actually reminds me a little bit of the Harris Walls, particularly the Walls attacks on JD. He's weird. These people are weird. It is a political shortcut to just trying to stigmatize.

1:12:57Emily Jashinsky:And I'm not saying there's no power in it, but people in a rough economy are voting on more than vibes. They're like literally voting on pocketbook issues we covered earlier in the show that Diesel hit a literal all time record high today. So it's harder, I think, to make those claims stick. But I actually think that was I think J.D. is embracing the strategy that is probably the most effective one, which is to try to say that this is just a question of friendship and then move along because that de-elevates it. that you're trying to downplay the import of it and saying it's just a kind of disagreement between friends.

1:13:35Emily Jashinsky:It's not a major political issue. And so you can take it into like a secondary. This is a secondary question, secondary problem, and focus back on what people see as the primary problem. So if you could keep doing that until you run in a primary when it flares up, I guess that's probably possible. And meanwhile, J.D. Vance, while he wants to say that he's a crazy person and there's an implication from Mike Rogers that he wants to bring in Sharia law, they're kind of undercutting it a little bit by saying, actually, maybe they're gay. Maybe he and Hassan Piker are gay. Mac, do we have this Fox News clip?

1:14:17This is a new Sharia, apparently. He's married to him, I believe, and two men marrying each other, but he and Hassan Piker are politically married and there is no divorce.

1:14:28Emily Jashinsky:I thought he was maybe even alluding to Sharia there. He's like, I don't know if he believes in two men marrying each other. Is he metaphorically or is he, you know, I don't know. Ari Fleischer of all people. Yeah. Isn't Ari Fleischer, you know, who lied us into the Iraq war. Yes. Wasn't Trump considering him for, isn't Trump considering him for press secretary? Yes, because Ari Fleischer's on Fox News all of the time. And that's where Trump gets his personnel ideas from. Like the guy who's most famous for lying about the Iraq war, which Trump claims to have opposed. And he's going to bring that anyway.

1:15:01Emily Jashinsky:I asked Ari Fleischer about that once, actually. I have to go find the clip to figure out what he said. But yeah, I did ask him about that. But it's kind of, again, like it takes some real balls anywhere except for Washington, D.C. to go out on TV and criticize the media constantly. Sorry, Fleischer does. But in D.C., you do whatever the hell you want. Abdul Al-Assad also went on with Stephen A. Smith onto Stephen A. Smith's show. And, Mac, I think we have this clip as well. What I'm saying is there are three million people who listen to Hassan. And I want to offer them a pathway into an electoral movement where rather than sit outside of the electoral system, they see a pathway around the things that they agree with that he says that I agree with and a pathway that disavows the things that I disagree with.

1:15:48And so it's important. You're not thinking about him. You're not thinking about him. You're thinking about the three million people that support him and you're trying to get those votes. That's what you're saying. Exactly. And let me just be clear. Like, you know, I've been watching you for a very long time and I'm glad to be on your show. but I'm not here to talk to you. You know this. I'm here to talk to the people you're talking to. Absolutely. Right? And it's important to me that they hear my ideas. Exactly. And it's important to me that they hear my ideas for my ideas. And there are going to be places where you and I disagree.

1:16:14There are going to be places where you and I fully agree. And that's okay. And it's important to me not to just say, you know, politics, as they say, is a game of addition. You've got to be able to be talking to a lot of people in a lot of different ways. This is the same reason that last week I went on Jesse Waters. You think Jesse Waters and I agree? I watched. I watched. right but but i went on because i wanted to be able to talk to those folks who listen to jesse waters and say look i need you to hear me in my own words not what they're gonna say about me on this channel like they talk about me like every 15 minutes i gotta confess to you i don't know interviews haven't said this but that's a damn good answer i gotta give you credit for that's a damn good answer i gotta give it to you i can't knock to that i mean if you're gonna answer that

1:16:53Emily Jashinsky:question that's the way you answer that question there you go i mean to underscore the political prowess of Abdul El-Sayed, which again, if you are just hearing the sort of depiction of him from, I don't know, the NRSC, you're missing what the appeal is and why he right now seems to be winning the race. And what his critics will say is, well, it's different. One thing to go on his show is another thing to campaign with him. What we haven't seen yet, and maybe we will at this point, is Abdul El-Sai campaigning with Tucker and Jesse Waters. Jesse seems to have a huge crush on Abdul. On TikTok, they're shipping the two of these guys constantly.

1:17:36My daughter has been showing me. And Tucker seemed to be... I don't know if he'd come out too. That would be getting kind of both wings of the Republican coalition together if you got both Jesse and Tucker on stage with Abdul.

1:17:52Emily Jashinsky:Oh my gosh. Well, Part of what I think helped J.D. Vance get around the weird label that Tim Walls applied to him was, first of all, Tim Walls being apparently a little weird himself. Yeah, but also Vance went on Rogan. He went on with Theo Vaughn. And the more you do that, you demystify these labels that are being applied to you. So it makes it harder for someone to stick you with the weird label when you're also having a conversation with Stephen A. Smith like a normal human being. Yeah. So maybe you are weird, but if you're having a conversation like a normal human being, I think it makes it harder for that to land.

1:18:26Emily Jashinsky:And I think Abdul Al-Assad definitely has that part down. Yeah. And the threshold for these, for a candidate to be an inspiring national figure today really is the ability to go on to a podcast for an hour plus and be engaging and come off as a real person that's sharing real ideas. Whether you agree with them or disagree with them, it's like these are your ideas, you've thought through them, and you're willing to listen and talk. And El-Sayed clearly has that. Like whether or not Rogan allows him to go on or not, clearly you can imagine he could sit with Rogan for two hours and they would have an engaging conversation the entire time.

1:19:06If you remember, we interviewed Rob Flaherty, the top Kamala Harris official, who said that one of the reasons that people were inside the campaign were concerned about having Kamala Harris go on Rogan was that she's not built for a two or three hour conversation. She's built for, here's a question, here's the answer. i'm going to give you the soundbite and and i'm going to land it and we're going to move on and there's hopefully there's not a follow-up because otherwise i'm just going to give you the same soundbite again and she was trying to truncate it to an hour with him because an hour you can

1:19:45Emily Jashinsky:get you can get away with a lot more an hour seems like a long time but there's this amazing with Sarah Palin documentary or movie where they go through the Republican preparation for her. She was utterly unprepared for the national stage. They're like, look, it's an hour debate. There's an opening statement and a closing statement. Memorize those. Within that, you will have 22 minutes of answers. You have a month to memorize 22 minutes. Don't worry about what the questions are. just say these 22 minutes worth of memorized lines and she went in and she crushed it she did she did because she memorized that's just now if it's three hours sorry joe forget about it it's going to be a lot harder i would actually love to see sarah palin on rogan to be honest that sounds like it would be great three hours there's this amazing clip if you can find it i think it was 2016 where she's interviewing trump uh when she was on like one america or whatever And even Trump listening to her word salad.

1:20:53Trump's like, what is going on?

1:20:57Emily Jashinsky:One of the all time great 2016 clips is Sarah Palin introducing Donald Trump at an event in Iowa and Trump is on stage and is visibly, deeply both uncomfortable and amused simultaneously. It's an excellent, excellent clip. Should we? Well, speaking of Fox News and television personalities, Ryan, should we move to actually pretty big news in the media industry? That's incredible. Like out of absolutely nowhere yesterday, Fox announced it had parted ways with one of its workhorses, one of its stars over the course of the last decade. And that would be Maria Bartiromo, who remains honestly one of the few deep proponents of MAGA outside of primetime left on Fox.

1:21:42Emily Jashinsky:So let's go ahead and put these elements up on the screen, Mac. They just put out a press release, again, out of absolutely nowhere, and people are wondering what was happening. I think there's still some question about what exactly happened, but Dylan Byers over at Puck right away came out with the report that she wanted to pursue a story related to China and 2020 election voting conspiracies, a major sensitivity for the network given its dominion in Spartmatic lawsuits. A Fox Business executive sent a text to Fox Business producers informing them that it could not go to air. Bartiromo took a screenshot of the guidance and sent it to senior White House officials.

1:22:19Emily Jashinsky:Fox News leadership learned about that after receiving a call from the White House, which they viewed as a fireable offense. She got pulled from the air after August 9th was fired yesterday. And also her executive producer was fired after the announcement as well. So it looks like what it comes down to is that so Bartiromo, by the way, hosts a Sunday show. and a Sunday show that's very popular with Donald Trump, in addition to hosting Mornings with Maria, every single day for three hours from six to nine, a show that's really popular on Wall Street. That's actually how I've gotten to know Maria Bartiromo.

1:22:49Emily Jashinsky:I used to do that show all the time. I used to do it in person like once or twice a month for a while leading up to the pandemic. And she is one of the most powerful people in that building. So it looks like what she did was that got her fired was take a screenshot, send it to the White House from Fox. And they're saying this is breaching the trust of the network. You can't leak confidential stuff back to the White House as a journalist. There are obvious ethical questions attached to that. We still haven't heard her side of the story, but obvious ethical questions attached from taking proprietary information from your company.

1:23:28Emily Jashinsky:and then as a journalist sending it to your sources, she is very, very close to Trump. I've been in the Oval Office for press gaggles when Maria is in there, and it's all he cares about. He was just saying, Maria, do you have a question? Last time I was in there, out of absolutely nowhere, she was just standing there observing. And he went out of his way to be like, Maria, do you have a question for me? And she didn't seem to expect that to happen, but he really likes her. He watches her show, reacts to her shows all of the time. And, Ryan, I think one thing that some folks on the left don't fully understand about Fox News is that it's a deep source of frustration for MAGA, but also obviously for populist conservatives who see it as sort of a containment project to contain the conservative movement to what Wall Street wants it to be.

1:24:18Emily Jashinsky:And Maria Bartiromo is somebody who did constantly challenge that. Now, to be fair, her 2020 election coverage is something that I would never have given any quarter to. I thought it was just flirting with insanity, the Sidney Powell interviews and that sort of thing. And I think Fox was genuinely correct to be frustrated by that. It got them into major trouble with Dominion. And this to me, I'm curious what you think, looks like a cope. It looks like a cope to me to get her out. It's like this is the straw that breaks the camel's back. It's finally their excuse to be able to get Bartiromo off the air.

1:25:00pretty incredible that she thinks that uh it's so that it's a normal part of her job though to be kind of that actively agitating with and participating in the political operations of this of this white house does and and that fox is like wait i wonder no this is not what we're

1:25:17Emily Jashinsky:doing here i wonder if that's i think it's a fair question does this put her at the front of the then for replacing Caroline Leavitt as press secretary? I still think they're not going to do it. But someone separately reported yesterday, I think it was the Hollywood Reporter. It might have also been Puck, but reported yesterday that she's not in consideration for that role. It would be logical. I mean, you could pretty easily make that jump. But my sense is that they're also not in a rush or perhaps even interested in replacing Caroline Leavitt, meaning an on-camera behind the podium type of person because they have cabinet secretaries that they like to get behind the podium.

1:25:51Emily Jashinsky:I don't know, though. So it's a good question. Your point about how she sees herself in the political project is an interesting one, because I'm very curious what her response is going to be to why she took a private screenshot from her company and sent it to the White House. That's I mean, it's obviously you can see how they would build that up to a fireball offense. But normally, if you have a major star, you aren't using you're using every excuse not to fire them. That's why to me it looks like an excuse to fire her. Exactly right. Like they wanted to do it. And they're like, OK, this is just too much.

1:26:29And, you know, maybe we could tack this on to the first episode. But Trump is now out with a rather incredible threat to the Federal Reserve. He previously said he was going to use the military to intervene in the bond market. So now he's saying that if Kevin Warsh does not cut rates, he is going to immediately stop trading with any country around the world with which we have a trade deficit, which is basically all countries. uh and so effectively what trump is doing is grabbing the american economy around the neck putting a weapon to its head and telling the fed i'm gonna shoot this hostage unless you cut interest rates uh so he says great job numbers just announced breaking all estimates except mine, because Trump is always right about everything, by double and triple.

1:27:37And you haven't seen anything yet. Employers added 162 ,000 jobs in August. Lower the interest rates because the USA is a much stronger credit than it was just a short time ago. A strong country means a lower interest rate. It's a better credit. Very simple. We should have the lowest rate of any country in the world like the old days. without the United States agreeing to allow them their big surpluses, and we could stop that immediately, they would no longer be considered financially elite. It's unclear who he's talking about today, but it'll be clear in a second. Lower the rate or I'll stop trading with countries with which we have a deficit, which the U.S.

1:28:17Supreme Court, in its ridiculous and very costly tariff decision, strongly acknowledged the president has an absolute right to do. Not exactly what they said, but -

1:28:28Emily Jashinsky:That's, yeah, no, interesting interpretation. It's better than tariffs, all caps. The Fed board with its great new leader must get smart. Be patriots for a change. High interest rates put the USA at a very unfair disadvantage, and I won't allow that to happen. So Trump is also seeing this jobs report, which is good, and recognizing the problem for him, which is that it will incentivize the Fed to raise interest rates. And so he is saying that Warsh better cut rates or else he's going to blow up the global economy, which is an extremely unique approach to economic policymaking. This man spent two years bullying Jerome Powell off the Fed.

1:29:15Yep. Couldn't do it. But so finally his term expires. He gets to replace him. He can pick anyone in the United States to replace Jerome Powell. He's the one who picked Kevin Warsh, who's a hawk. an inflation hawk means he he is inclined generally to raise rates he wanted he couldn't find an economist who agrees with his economic vision enough that could get it confirmed who was also a dove so he basically had to do this guy warsh i guess but wasn't worse also open to cutting like didn't he write a bit about i think warsh would say anything to get the job but his history is one of a hawk. Like his whole life, he's been a hawk.

1:29:56So I'm sure he told Trump in the Oval Office, don't worry, I got you, boss. Now that he's got the job, he's acting like a hawk again.

1:30:06Emily Jashinsky:Well, Trump had a really good case for this until he went to war with Iran. Yes, he would be getting all the interest rate cuts. Inflation was coming down heading into February of this year, which meant interest rate cuts. Instead, he started a war, blew up the global economy and reproduced inflation. And then he put a hawk on top of the Federal Reserve. Like, he doesn't do anything right from his own perspective. For his own, yeah. In general, from the outcomes that he wants, he, by his own decisions, undermines himself constantly. This actually, okay, so one, Quick thought on Maria Bartiromo that I'm going to connect these two things together.

1:30:53Emily Jashinsky:I don't think Fox was just frustrated with her because of Dominion. She is one of the hosts that is an election stuff, whatever. She's one of, you know, remember when the Dominion text came out, people got a glimpse that like most Fox News hosts behind the scenes don't genuinely like Donald Trump. Like they really are personally frustrated with Donald Trump and publicly they know how to kind of play the game. But I think Maria Bartiromo is one of the people who's like genuinely into the economic project of Donald Trump. And so it's not really just about voting. It's it kind of has something to do with that.

1:31:26Emily Jashinsky:Fox News has never been on board with Trump. They were when they realized he was going to win. And then they kind of got behind him. They know their viewers are really pro-Trump. So they do all of those things. But if you talk to like a movement conservative or a grassroots activist, they'll have a lot of the same complaints that leftists have about MSNOW or whatever the hell we're calling it. which is that things like SAVE Act, whatever, just don't get enough coverage. OK, that's a separate debate. But I'm using this as a bridge, Ryan, to ask on a serious note what you think the implications would be of a rate cut, which Tripp is not going to get, but what he's calling for, a rate cut.

1:32:06Emily Jashinsky:Because these are the type of things that Muriel Barnaromo would treat seriously and not just sort of hand wave away as like foolish, ridiculous. But if we sort of, for a moment, take seriously this idea that we would cut rates in the middle of this stalemate Iran war with inflation going up, gas prices, diesel prices at an all time high. What are we looking at, Ryan? So on the one hand, a rate cut would be good for the economy in the sense that it would loosen up the housing market like right now. and it could even lower rents. Right now, people who refinanced during COVID are locked into these 2.7, 3.0 mortgage rates and they want to move.

1:32:55But if they move, they're going to be looking at, you can Google it, whatever it is now. Interest rates are double, which means your monthly payments are much larger, which means you can't get as much house as you want, which means you're asking for a lot more for the current house than people are willing to pay because the people who are buying it from you don't have to, they don't get the 2.73 % interest rate. They have to pay today's prevailing rates. So you lower those rates, you can unleash the housing market a little bit. That's good. That's good. What that does though also is it puts more money and growth into the economy.

1:33:32People then use that money to buy things like things produced that are manufactured, things that are grown through agriculture, or they drive more. And all of that puts more pressure, more demand on a finite and shrinking supply of energy, diesel and gas. And because of Trump's war, if we had never gone to war and the economy could then withstand and increase in demand, then that's great. That doesn't produce inflation. But if you are going to give people more money while at the same time you're shrinking the amount of energy, the only thing that's going to happen is that is going to drive up the cost of energy and all the money that you've then pumped into the economy just flows right out to the oil companies and to the Gulf countries.

1:34:31And this is from Ryan Grimm,

1:34:33Emily Jashinsky:who's been agitating for rate cuts for years. Right, but you have to have an economy that can handle. Yeah. Exactly. You have to have an economy that can handle the money that flows into the economy. And if you don't, then the money just gets sucked right out by the rich. Well, on that happy note, should we do some AMAs, Ryan? Yeah, why not? For the AMA portion of the show, producer Mac is going to toss some of our premium subscribers' questions up on the screen. Mac, what do we got? If you want to make documentaries, what is the topic that each one of the BP crew would choose? I'd love to do an Epstein, a Breaking Points Epstein documentary, just because we've obviously covered that so closely.

1:35:16Emily Jashinsky:And I think all of us have covered different elements of it in different ways. So, Ryan, I feel like a BP Epstein documentary would be actually a pretty good product. We're actually working on something along those lines. We'll see if it comes through. Yeah. what i wish i had i wish i had more lives and more hours in the day there's so many things i'd love to do um i've only it's it's going i've done some interviews for it and thrown thrown them some research and stuff oh for a drop site one yeah i think lion's gate is that'd be cool is oh my gosh oh that's awesome but it's not like a major production um but it's such a you you can tell the whole history of like the second half of the 20th century through through epstein yeah yes oh that's a great point what else we got mac or ryan do you have any other documentary ideas um

1:36:15Emily Jashinsky:the following saga around that'd be fun no it wouldn't it'd be so boring uh this one from raphael is question actually how about a uh reality show in uh the crystal and kyle house oh my gosh can you imagine the animals that would be excellent now we're talking yeah i like it question for the bp lefties is the right-wing media figure most aligned with the populist left has seen on breaking point steve bannon since the start of trump 2.0 bannon has advocated for a tax hike on the wealthy repeatedly called out elon musk failures to cut waste strongly opposed both of the Iran wars, called for antitrust regulation and recently endorsed a proposal from Bernie to ban the construction of new data centers.

1:36:56Emily Jashinsky:He obviously has divergent views on immigration compared to Ryan and Crystal. But overall, what are your thoughts on his politics? Any Bannon bros?

1:37:07I haven't actually been listening to Bannon as much lately. I used to listen kind of religiously to his War Room podcast. There's less going on in Congress, and he's very focused on, which I admire focused on congressional action and you know leveraging his his posse to like um go in there monkey with what what congress is up to I I like his rants because for like let's say he gives a 30 second rant for the first 20 seconds I'm like yep yep yep yep yep and then at the very end, it'd be like, whoop. And so, that's why you'd around all the Chinese people up and put them in cages or whatever. Whoa, whoa, whoa.

1:37:52Support the, yeah. Hold on a second there. How did you, how'd you nail that for 20 seconds and then just stick the most fascist landing you could come up with? It's like, oh, because those are your politics. But, like, if we have the same, like, I am, I am not very interested in what people's vision for the future world is. Like, I just don't find that interesting because I don't think people really have the ability to kind of bring that about. Now, if you're Stephen Miller and your short term vision is like, I'm going to round everybody up and lock them up and send them to El Salvador or whatever.

1:38:36Like, OK, that that I'm interested in. Like, I do want to know that because he has the ability to execute on that very short-term vision. But when it comes to, like, a long-term, how society should be organized in 50 years, I just don't think any of us have the ability to really shape that. What we can do is tell you what we're against, tell you who we think is, you know, steering the world in a dangerous direction. and you know if and i often agree with bannon on some of that like if it's the tech tech oligarchs like he's against them i'm against them what we think the world should look like in 50 years is is kind of like a fun thing to like talk about but like neither of us have

1:39:27Emily Jashinsky:the ability to like implement it i think we can shape it but we can't control it like what we do now will shape what happens in 50 years, but we don't have any way to control those consequences downstream. Yeah. What matters immediately is who you're against because you can fight people today. Or who you're for if you're for someone like Lena Kahn, you know, and you put energy in the short term. And he's for Lena Kahn, yeah. And all of that momentum and energy, and Sagar and I could talk until we're blue in the face about this, but all of that momentum and energy has been completely sapped from the conservative movement.

1:40:00Bannon is still a really powerful figure,

1:40:03Emily Jashinsky:obviously, because he has ordinary people around the country who listen to him and believe what he's saying. But institutionally, yes, there are some tinkering around the edges with different groups that are coming up with fairly economically populist proposals. But it's really outrageous how the anti-consolidation, anti-corporate growth on the right just was completely, like, they're all lobbyists now. They're all lobbyists because they're connected to Trump. So they have some of these same places that they were criticizing as their clients. It's not surprising, but just for the scope of it, it's stunning.

1:40:41Yeah.

1:40:42Emily Jashinsky:What do we got, Mac?

1:40:48Emily Jashinsky:Right wing host Ro Khanna or AOC for president. Left wing host Tucker Carlson or J.D. Vance for president. I got to go with Ro. Of course, I think he's a bit more serious than AOC. Neither is my ideal, especially I like Ro personally, but I would I would put Ro over AOC. What about you, Ryan? I mean, out of those two, I'd take Tucker over JD. Tucker's shown more spine. There are very few people who are willing to blow up a personal direct relationship with the president of the United States over an issue of principle. and he did that. So you got, I think you, you know, you have to acknowledge that.

1:41:31Whereas Vance, you can follow his weaving politics as they've kind of moved with the political wins over the last 10 years.

1:41:42Emily Jashinsky:Yeah, I think that's fair. Well, and yeah, and you know, I think more clearly where Tucker stands on some of the issues that you would agree with him on foreign policy, for example. Tucker is like Maduro, like he's a chavista he's a he's he's had some of your politics he's a coreista he's like a social conservative economic leftist he's a little amlo yeah totally he's amlo he's the entire bolivarian like movement there you go yeah i think that's that's actually pretty interesting um what else we got here mac

1:42:24Emily Jashinsky:can ryan start saying type shit after he makes point that would be great thanks well you guys have to school me what is that maybe mac um can tell me this one like what does that mean

1:42:41oh i gotcha i gotcha um i'll yeah sure why not i'm here to please

1:42:49Emily Jashinsky:it's like someone asked crystal to say indubitably instead of indeed we do uh we're we're getting language policed what else back we got one more

1:43:07Emily Jashinsky:what do you guys think is the breaking point for americans as far as gas prices go just paid $7.39 per gallon for diesel this morning in Washington State from Matthew. Oh, my gosh. And maybe Matthew can tell us, but, like, oftentimes these, you know, diesel tanks are 20, 30 gallons. So you're looking at, if that's, you know, if that's a 20-gallon tank you're filling up there,$150. Yeah. Yeah. When it was$60. Yeah. A year ago. Yeah. And that's a hundred bucks. Just. Gone for nothing more than you had a year ago. And Washington is an ag state. So, yes, it's like a coastal blue state, but that's what people are.

1:44:01The whole West Coast for refining, refining reasons, you know, pays more for refining and other reasons, pays more for diesel.

1:44:11Emily Jashinsky:um california's an ag state washington's an ag state get a lot of produce uh from those places and other farming products so that's i mean what is the breaking point i i don't know august jobs number was great um what did we say that we were we looked at what was the all-time high we talked about um 585 585 yeah for average all-time high yeah for diesel uh and so So, I mean, I don't know what the breaking point is, even if the jobs are good. I think if you get over$6, maybe that's. So, yes, and also one, the bad mark in the jobs report was that wage growth had fallen. So you're seeing. So while there's more jobs.

1:45:00And this goes to this point, people are all falling behind. And what we certainly found during COVID.

1:45:08Emily Jashinsky:Unless you're living off capital gains. Yeah, and this was kind of a sad observation for me during COVID because I lived through the Great Recession and have this visceral understanding of how unemployment tears apart your soul and tears apart families and tears about the whole fabric of our society. But it is an acute problem that is experienced by the people who are unemployed. It filters through the entire economy in less worker power and more anxiety and fear for everybody who does have a job because they're staring into the abyss of unemployment. So it's not that it only hurts the unemployed, but it primarily hits the unemployed.

1:45:55inflation and falling behind when it comes to wages hits hits everybody across the board and that it seemed like people were willing to trade um some higher unemployment for more price stability during covid like people were so like it was so it's such torture to just just agonizingly be falling behind constantly. And so even the point is, even if this jobs report is accurate that we added 160 ,000 jobs, if everybody feels like their wages are falling because they are, then even if you're adding jobs, people are still furious and miserable.

1:46:39Emily Jashinsky:Actually, yeah. I think part of what's so torturous and agonizing about those time periods is like when there's no light at the end of the tunnel. You don't know how long it's going to last. Right. Yeah. That's what makes it so miserable. And it's so demoralizing and you're throwing. And now with AI running all of the job processes, you've got people make, you know, AIs are making the resumes and making the applications and submitting them. AIs are reviewing them. People are putting in hundreds of applications and getting no interviews. And then they do get an interview and it's with a robot on Zoom.

1:47:16it's just totally demoralizing and dehumanizing.

1:47:22Emily Jashinsky:Yeah. Absolutely. Well, a very bleak and depressing note to end a bleak and depressing show on from our opening block to our conversation with Garrison. So we hope you all have a wonderful Labor Day weekend. We pumped you up. We added jobs. There you go. We added jobs. so enjoy the barbecue while you can I guess have fun and actually don't get that Argentinian ground beef though you gotta stay away from that that's and it's unpatriotic what we what's our equivalent of freedom fries for Argentinian beef except though because of the labeling um you don't know what you're getting anyway oh it's so fun so fun thanks Ryan for another uh depressing send-off how about everyone we'll see you back here on Monday and of course we'll be around throughout the weekend if there is any breaking news, but hope you all have a wonderful, restful Labor Day weekend.

1:48:19Emily Jashinsky:This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.