The World’s First AI Minister: Can Democracies Make Haste Slowly? with Evan Solomon

0:00David McWilliams: Coming up on the podcast, we have an interview with the world's first. The world's first, think about this, Minister for AI. He is Evan Solomon, an old friend of mine, a friend of the shows, a friend of John's, and he is the minister in Mark Carney's cabinet, the Canadian cabinet, in charge of AI. It's a fascinating, fascinating discussion about sovereignty, about politics, about regulation, about morality, about liberalism, all that good stuff. And it's all coming up in a couple of minutes.

0:50Grainger's$2 billion in on-hand inventory helps you get what you need when you need it, so you can help keep budgets balanced and lines moving. Call 1-800-GRAINGER, click grainger.com, or just stop by. Grainger, for the ones who get it done.

1:19actually mean instead of what would hurt someone else the most. Nobody applauds those moments, but they quietly change your life. That's what growing feels like, and that's exactly what Grow Therapy is here for. Grow is therapy that works, covered by insurance. Sessions average $21 with insurance, and some pay as little as$0 depending on their plan. There are no subscriptions, no long-term commitments. You just pay per session. Grow connects you with thousands of high-quality licensed therapists across the U.S., offering both virtual and in-person sessions, nights and weekends. You can search by what matters, like insurance, specialty, identity, or availability.

1:59And you can book a therapy session in minutes and begin in as little as two days, not the national 48-day average. See if you could pay as little as$0 for therapy in seconds at growtherapy.com slash ACAST. That's growtherapy.com slash ACAST. growtherapy.com slash ACAST. Availability and coverage vary by state and insurance plan. To understand the economy, you have to understand human nature.

2:33David McWilliams: This podcast is powered by ACAST. How are you doing there? Welcome to the podcast. The podcast today comes from Inish Man. And John and I were discussing just off air, our broadband connection here in Inish Man is far superior to last week's in New York City, let alone in Dundee. It was unbelievably slow in New York. It was glitchy. And then to upload the files afterwards took ages. You went off and had a full manicure. I'm a year here. That's Inish Man.

3:12David McWilliams: And it's not like that today, I can tell you. Anyway, we will be discussing this. We'll talk about Englishman and all these things later on or maybe the next podcast, whatever. But what I want to talk to you today about, and we want to talk, is AI. Now, we're going to have a conversation with the world's first minister of AI, Evan Solomon of the Canadian government. And the angle we're going to take, we're going to discuss AI over the course of the next couple of weeks or couple of months. It's something that's not going to go away. We are going to have in our first in-depth conversation about AI, we're going to talk about the regulatory angle.

3:49David McWilliams: Okay, so most people are thinking about the apocalyptic scenario or the financial scenario. Is it an AI bubble? If that bubble bursts, will it bring down the global financial system? Number one. Number two, people are talking about the creation of a superhuman sort of general AI, a general intelligence, where the actual machine becomes conscious, becomes cognizant, even maybe becomes emotional, learns our emotional patterns of behavior, and therefore we are creating a God that we can't control. That's one other conversation. A third conversation is all about defense and wars and whether or not this AI could generate pandemics and all this sort of stuff, right?

4:30David McWilliams: All those conversations we're going to have, no doubt. But today's conversation, John, we're going to have with Evan, who understands all these issues, but is on the regulatory side. He's saying, look, the technology is out there. What do democracies do? How do you make sure this thing works for people? How do you make sure, aware of these dangers, that you minimize the risk of these dangers over the next, It's not even 10 or 15 years, over the next five years, over the next 10 months, over the next two years. So we're going to talk that angle. And then, John, we're going to take another little angle, which is since Mark Carney's speech in Davos, the Canadians have been trying to build the coalition of the willing and the coalition of people who are into the rules-based scenario, into the world that was created since the Second World War, a sort of cooperative world where Canada leads a block.

5:33David McWilliams: And that block is the middle-ranking nations. And it will be interesting. We're also going to talk about that in the context of AI, whether AI is another theatre of that realignment of the world. So lots to be getting on with. We are going to go straight to Evan Solomon, the world's first AI minister. Now it is not only an unusual podcast that tries to unearth the complexities of AI, but it's not every day that you get to talk to the world's first and only minister of AI in one of the most dynamic cabinets, which is Mark Carney's cabinet in Ottawa. Evan Solomon, old friend of the show, old friend of myself, Kilkenomics recidivist.

6:20David McWilliams: He is in Dublin. He is on the line. Great to see you. How are you? I'm in Dublin. John's in Dublin. I finally get here. You're in Aaron. I cannot believe that I've made this trip to see you, to be here in Ireland. And you've gone, I don't even know what you're doing on Aaron. It's like I come here and you chose the most remote spot so it would be absolutely physically impossible so we could hang out together. Yeah, timing is very suspicious. You are absolutely wrong on this in actual fact. The next time you come here, forget Dublin, we're going to come back down here to the Iron Islands and hang out here.

7:07David McWilliams: But anyway, enough of that. You're in Dublin talking AI to our government. Evan, very simple question. What is AI? AI is a tool to serve people. That's at its most basic. This is very important. It is a tool to serve people. It is not for people to serve the tool, but it is a technology. Now, there are many AIs, but at its most basic form, artificial intelligence is an algorithm, a series of algorithms, that can perform tasks. And there are little different kinds. And I will just say this. You're asking actually a very important question, and a question that is so central to our mandate. As the minister in Canada, we just released a new national strategy called AI for All, Trust, Opportunity, and Sovereign Control.

8:13Those are our three pillars. But under opportunity, the first task is literacy, investing in literacy, education, and jobs and skills. And so what we have literally just done in the last three weeks, David, is we've actually launched a three-hour AI free literacy course for over a million students and 50 ,000 teachers. And later this year, we will announce and release a free national AI literacy course, 90 minutes for everyone. Because the basic questions, what is AI? People are embarrassed to ask. They think, I don't want to know. Everyone else seems to know about this. And the amount of anxiety, fear, concern are real.

9:03But the first step to mitigate against change, uncertainty, fear, disproportionate anxieties, boosters or fear mongers, whatever side you're on, is education. So people have to ask, what is AI? I heard that it can write letters for you. Okay, that's called generative AI because it's a kind of technology that generates the next sentence. And that's based on huge data sets of language. That's why they're called large language models. That's generative AI. And then, and this is the last fancy term I'll get, there's another kind of AI. And this is the kind of AI that's worth knowing about because it's what you hear about in the papers every day when people are worried about AIs that are running out of control.

9:49It's called agentic AI. Agentic just means it's an agent. That means it does a task for you. It's like a butler. When you go and say, create something. So generative AI generates the next sentence, predicts what you want. And agentic actually then goes and does the task for you. And that's the different types of AI. And there's lots of AI that's working in hospitals today and doctors and in manufacturers, doing lots of good things. and helping people for the benefit of people, productivity, efficiency. And then there's concerns at the far end that these things are getting so smart, they actually start teaching themselves.

10:32And there's a fancy term for it called recursive self-improvement, RSI, which means the AIs teach the AIs, teach the AIs.

10:40David McWilliams: Okay, so tell me, the AIs teach the AIs. Sorry for interrupting you. That's at the frontier. Okay, and this is what people are worried about. There's this idea of a general AI intelligence that could be more intelligent than humans and could break out of our control. We can talk about that in a minute because that is what is captivating the imagination, the collective imagination of people when we're coming to AI. But let me just bring it back down. Why did Canada decide uniquely to have a minister for AI? So Canada has a very unique role here in AI. Because without, this is not one of these political exaggerations, legitimately Canada invented modern AI.

11:35And it was invented essentially by a guy named Geoffrey Hinton, who was a Brit originally, but moved to Canada. and he won the Nobel Prize for this, his work, on artificial intelligence, which is really this, what I call that generative AI. And he was looking at the brain and neural networks and how this works. And he started a lab and for 25 years, he started to work on it. And Jeffrey Hinton really invented AI in Toronto. And we founded a national AI center called Vector in Toronto around his work. And all his students have gone on. If you look at Meta, Google, OpenAI, Anthropic, a lot of them are the progeny of that tree.

12:20But then we had a second godfather of AI who has won the Turing Prize. And in technology, the Turing Prize, named after Alan Turing, is the Nobel Prize of Technology. And a guy named Joshua Bengio, you probably have heard about him. He speaks - Yeah, he's from Montreal. Yeah, and he's based in Montreal and he runs one of our other national AI centers, which is called MILA. And then we have a third godfather of AI. These are the three godfathers. A guy named Rich Sutton. Rich Sutton is the godfather of machine learning, and he also won the Turing Prize. So these guys, for the last 20 years, have been pursuing what was kind of a weird thing, machine learning, artificial intelligence.

13:04No one really got it. And then it happened in about 2022 when people heard about ChatGPT and it kind of exploded on the scene. Before then, Canada had really pioneered and remains the lead in AI research and pioneering ingenious things. And then a lot of our scientists, and we started a lot of little companies, but for various reasons, why didn't the dominant AI companies start in Canada then? We had all the godfathers because they needed capital and they went to big tech companies. And this plays into a world that has changed. As Mark Carney has said, we're in a new world. Because, David, you and I are talking in this moment, and you don't see it on the Aran Islands maybe explicitly, but you see it everywhere, which is a geopolitical realignment is happening at the same time as a technical revolution.

14:02And you and I have talked about this, the simultaneous dynamic. And before the geopolitical realignment happened, having a reliance on big countries like the US for Canada, this was a strength. Supply chain integration was a strength. We shared trade. And in this new world where we're still going to trade with the United States and we still have a close relationship, we realize that we need to provide access to our great scientists and our creative entrepreneurs to stay here so they don't go to other countries because they need the capital. And the two things that have really attracted talent in AI, access to capital, right?

14:44Which has always been one of the big advantages of both the United States and China, big capital, and access to compute. Compute is kind of the fuel of innovation, which requires a lot of capital. And the US had access to compute and capital. And so they were attracting a lot of talent. What's happened now is a lot of the talent that we're still churning out in Canada at, you know, we have a university called the University of Waterloo about an hour outside of Toronto that graduates more engineers than Stanford. And those folks have been, you know, recruited down to Silicon Valley. But people, we're giving reasons to stay.

15:23And as I like to say, David, in Canada, we've had an issue. We plant the seed, we water the seed, we grow the plant, and then someone comes along and harvests it. And we got to stop that. And our AI for all strategy of building the trust and creating the opportunity and the sovereign control is about making sure that we harvest here. And I don't mean that as an isolationist. We always say sovereignty is not solitude, it's partnership. But it means you have to keep your critical elements that are important to your sovereignty in your own country.

15:59David McWilliams: So what you're looking at, you're looking at AI as being part of the weaponry of sovereignty of a country like Canada. And you can't afford to give it away. And you can't afford because it will become the countries that are actually dominant in AI will dominate in the way the countries that were dominant in other technologies in the past will dominate. I presume that's what you're saying. but I just want to let me let me shade it because we should be careful with this language and and I and I'm a little this weaponry okay fair enough fair win lose because there are politicians that cast this as you got to win the AI race or not you got to dominate or not it is a particular worldview that has become ascendant, we as Canadians, I think in Ireland, you share this, and this is where we are very much the products of a rules-based democratic post-war world, where we believe in multilateralism, rules-based order, might is not right, rules-based order functions.

17:12And so technologies have to, you know, this is why we call it AI for all. We are building these things with our values. It's not weapon to win something. It is a tool to serve something, to serve your values, your democracies, to serve your prosperity, to serve the values that you have about equity. We believe it's AI for all. And this is important. So how we talk about this stuff matters. We see this as a urgent form of building resilience to protect the very values that we thought might not need that level of protection. And frankly, what this is in basic terms, David, is the insurance policy on your ideals, your values, and your democracies, the insurance premium's gone up.

18:02That's why you have to invest in national defense, because you've got to pay the premium if you want to insure that. And you've got to pay for your sovereignty the premium. And that means you've got to make sure that you've got those. Again, not to build against someone, but to build for something. And those are the values.

18:19David McWilliams: Okay. So Evan, that's the Canadian position. So that's unique. That's part of your brief. You're the minister of the sovereign government. You're in cabinet. You're juggling all sorts of things. But the average dude and dudette who is worried about AI has been captivated by this notion that, to put it in sort of dramatic terms or Greek mythology terms, that we are creating a god. We are creating something that has the potential to be bigger than us. The reason that enormous amounts of money are still being funneled into this is because the prize is so enormous. But the social implication, what's worrying people, and I want you to maybe either reassure are or not, what is the safety mechanism that suggests that we will be able to control this general AI, the sort of the holy grail of deep mind, etc., which is to create a superhuman robot?

19:26Well, you're right that humans have been struggling with these issues with technology. I mean, this is the myth of Prometheus. Like, this is fire. I mean, we are dealing with primal things in our societies here about power and technologies and displacement. And this happens. There's mythologies about this that we're tapping into and that you're articulating well. Look, two things are true. This is why there's a kind of awesome responsibility. And this is why we're in this kind of hinge moment. One, the benefits of this technology are obvious. Yeah. And the potential benefits, if used right, if workers can use them, if they are used, for example, and they are used in many ways.

20:13I don't need to illustrate the stories, but I went to my doctor before I came here to Ireland because I thought I'd meet you and you'd take me out for drinks. I better get healthy first to inoculate myself against the McWilliams. But since you're in Aaron Islands, I -

20:27David McWilliams: No, there is no vaccine against me. No AI. There's only distance. Mark is his own agentic. Yeah, that's right, John. But my doctor said to me, look, do you mind if I use an AI scribe, which means it's going to take - And I said, no, I love that. And what it is, is, you know, it listens to our conversation. And it takes much better notes. It organizes them. and it saves him two hours a day because he sees dozens and he has to write them up two hours a day. He says, it's the worst part of my job because I don't know how I live with this. I do more. I have better patient access. I have better notes.

21:06That's just my GP. In every hospital in Ireland, in Canada, all over the world, whether you're using it to triage patients in a more effective way, surgeons are using it to map breast cancer tumors to cut down radiation treatments from 45 visits to five because they could be more precise. I mean, these are, so the benefit side is being used every day. That is true. The concern on the frontier are real. We share those concerns that, and I should just say this, David, they're not new concerns. Everybody in AI, we talked about Jeffrey Hinton and Yoshua Benjo, they're the leaders in saying, we got to be careful here.

21:45They tell me every day, I speak to them a lot. Joshua Benjo is the lead on my safety and security advisory group. So I speak to them. But they're not new, but they're more urgent. And let's be candid. They're more urgent because the technology is developing incredibly quick because it's teaching itself. It's this machine learning that has become recursive self-improvement. That, as it becomes quicker. And there are real concerns on three levels. I just want to skip over this stuff. The stuff just, you lose control over it because you built something and you just no longer can control it. Or it's misaligned.

22:26That means you thought it was supposed to do something, but it starts doing something else. And that's called an alignment issue. Or you're testing something inside what you think is a safe little sandbox and you're supposed to contain it and it breaks out and does stuff. That's what happened with the hugging face incident with OpenAI. They thought they were testing and just busted out of its sandbox. And then what happens is there's real concerns. And what are those concerns? The agents and they start working together. They start talking. They do. Now they're talking in English. They may invent their own language.

23:00They're going very quickly. They know that they're being monitored, so they may want to start deceiving the people who are monitoring them. And there's lots of scenarios where this gets very unsettling. And so what are the ways to contain it? There are technical ways and there are regulatory political ways. Our first responsibility, this is me speaking to you as a legislator, my view, one, you cannot abdicate your responsibility to regulate these to the very people who made them. That is an abdication of your democratic responsibility. The state, the government, has a role to protect its citizens first and foremost.

23:44And protect, you can't say you created it, you self-regulate. This is a total abdication in my view. So you have to regulate without crushing innovation. So how do you do that? Well, first and foremost, let's not go right to the hard cases made bad laws, but you can't just release AI into the wild. So for example, David, you and your son, or he says, oh, I've been Claude Vide coding, and I've made a self-driving car. Let's sell it. Well, you couldn't, because the government says you can't just start. You need regulations to put a car on the road. A bunch of doctors can't get together and create a medicine through AI and then just release it.

24:24They have to get regulated. They have to get approved. So our existing approval systems are working. I mean, people should just, It's not like AI is just going to rush out. But the concern is what happens at the frontier, maybe in weapons, if they go rogue and they're in charge of a weapon system, that's a real concern. So two, there's sort of four buckets that we are concerned about that we believe. You got to test the models. And is there good enough testing that's transparent? Is there evaluation of the model's capability? That's really good. Do we time the release? When do these get released into the public?

25:05And finally, what's the incident reporting mechanism? When do you report something's happening? And on all four of those, it's tricky. We in Canada have domestic rules about that, that we are putting forward. The EU has the EU AI Act that they're putting into force. The Americans don't at this moment want anybody else to regulate, although they have just started a voluntary group with the president, an accord that they've got that last week they made that they're going to start being more transparent. So they're clearly moving up the regulatory ladder from nothing to something. We believe it will eventually come up even further.

25:50And Mark Carney, and this is something that you would understand kind of in your bones is a technology stability board, David, which is similar to the financial stability board, which essentially regulates and creates norms that countries abide by. So that is one way. And I'll just quickly say there's technical ways as well. Can you build safe AI, safe by design AI? For example, when you and I grew up in the 70s and 80s and cars were very dangerous. And then there was a book written famously in America, as you know, unsafe at any speed. Ralph Nader. Ralph Nader. And all of a sudden we said, well, maybe we shouldn't put the gas tanks in the rear end of the car because they explode and we should put seatbelts and airbags and cars got safer.

26:38And so there's regulatory things start evolving. We think technically there's a way to build better. I'll give you an example. Joshua Bengio, the Turing Award-winning scientist. He has a project called Law Zero, where he believes he can redesign an AI system differently than the other guys that is safe by design, that doesn't have that alignment issue. He's collected a huge group of engineers to do it. It's a non-profit. We just financed it with$150 million, and Germany joined us, and they financed it with$150 million. The Gates Foundation has funded it. And other countries are coming in to see if we can build a safe by design AI.

27:20So we've got to build options. You've got to legislate. You've got to regulate internationally. All that said, these are hard problems because you're going to need eventually the United States and China to join. And that's going to be, there's a process to get there.

27:36David McWilliams: In a way, Evan, you've actually reassured me that there is a regulatory response because what I'm hearing, and maybe this is because I'm hearing the more apocalyptic side, is that this is a free-for-all, this is going to break through the frontier, and you know what, even if it isn't the sort of Frankenstein-esque apocalypse, what it's going to do is it's going to massively, massively shift the power of positions in society away from workers onto the very people who own the AI. And this is going to exacerbate inequality. And it is going to precipitate its own political reaction further down the line.

28:19David McWilliams: I mean, do you buy that argument? Look, there's a scenario planning kind of world that if you call that scenario A or scenario one, and there's a dark scenario there. And two things about that scenario, which we hear a lot, it's going to displace workers, it's going to take my data, it's going to destroy my country, and it could destroy our species. I mean, these are real concerns people have. I get asked about it every day. And obviously, we're not there yet at the frontier, but there's real concerns about it and we should be genuinely concerned and not dismiss that as a fanciful scenario. There are real scenarios.

28:55But two things happen when you go down that road. One, you get very passive. You say, oh God, what can I do? It's so big. There's nothing I can do. And we have to avoid passivity. Plan A is to build because you have options, number one. And number two, you get into this, therefore we should stop or go. In other words, there's a deterministic future that the the only moral answer is to stop. Whereas it's impossible to make people stop any more than we should go, therefore, chase towards doomsday. So the question is not to not build or build, it's to build right or build wrong. If we build wrong, there's a lot of bad outcomes.

29:36And we've seen this in many other scenarios, inequality, hurt workers, history is littered with building the wrong way, society, structures, social movements. You and I have talked about this, financial models. And then there's a way of building right. And we are in a very critical moment where we got to decide what's right. So how do you build a data center, which is the infrastructure right? Well, you have to build with communities. You have to build making sure you don't use up the water. So closed loop water systems. And you have to make sure that the energy is reused. So the energy and the heat that's generated goes back to the grid or is used in a greenhouse.

30:14And that's happening all the time. So you got to build right, not build wrong. Got to build with community and transparency. In terms of building pro-worker AI, in our AI for all strategy, and I put AI for all because of this exact, your concern, which is not AI for the few, not AI for the rich, not AI for the skilled, AI for all to serve all no matter where you are. This is vital. This is our values. And so you're right. And that's why our pillars are first trust. People got to know it's safe. They got to know. This is why one of the first pieces of legislation we passed, David, was banning non-consensual sharing of sexualized imagery, deep fake imagery of women because it's violence against women.

30:57So it's a crime now in Canada. That's why we also passed, you can't use political parties during elections, cannot use deepfakes because it erodes our democracies. And that's why we've got legislation modernizing our privacy and putting accountability around AI agents. So first you got to legislate and protect your citizens. Then you got to educate them with literacy and skills training. We just launched a program where we're paying for 90 ,000 job placements for 90 ,000 young people to learn. They need skills. Pro-worker AI critical. That's really critical. And then you've got to make sure that companies are using this.

31:37So you've got to spur innovation among small companies, not just the big. So we are subsidizing access to compute. This matters. I know this sounds kind of technical, but we have a program where we pay for 50 % of their compute, which is really the fuel of innovation, but up to 80 % if they use domestic compute, because we want innovation in the hands of people so they can invent their own stuff.

32:02David McWilliams: Just let me stop there. What is compute? Compute is literally when you go on and you say, chat GPT, what's this? And it gives you an answer. That's compute. That's the power. It's like the token. It's like filling your car with gas. That's what you're paying for. And it's expensive. It's essentially - Okay, so it's the algorithm. It's the - It's kind of the energy that you need to use the data to solve your problem. And compute's a real big expense for every company. And this is why these companies are getting so rich. You are selling access to it. That's what you're buying from, ChatGPT and Anthropic.

32:42So you got to build domestic solutions. Canada happens to be one of the four countries in the world that has a company. There's only four countries in the world, David, it. And this is another thing people don't know, that have these big, large language models that people that are doing this kind of AI. There's the United States got a whole bunch of them. Everyone knows OpenAI and Anthropic and Meta. China's got a whole bunch. There's one in France called Mistral, and there's one in Canada called Cohere. The Cohere just merged with Germany's largest, Alafelfa, it's now called Cohere. That's it.

33:15But it does give us sovereign options. And so just going back to your main point is, if we build this right, if we don't release models before they're evaluated, if they're transparent, if we make sure that there's a distribution of wealth, education, and skills that's democratic, this does not have to end in that scenario that you paint. There are other scenarios. Now, sometimes you see some of the big AI folks saying some utopian scenario. We'll end work. And like this happened, you know, when people thought the vacuum cleaner will release us all from chores. And I don't know about you, but I'm still raking leaves and vacuuming.

33:55But look, there's a pragmatism we've got to assert. And we've got to be honest about this shit. And we've got to be transparent. We've got to take the questions. We've got to build openly. And I really feel like we have a plan. It's transparent. It's open. It's not utopian. It takes those concerns seriously. But there's no guarantee of outcomes. And we are in a challenging moment. And this is why partnerships matter. This is why conversations like this matter, where we could just legitimately just ask any question. People say to me, I'm scared. Will my kid have a job? Is it going to hurt us? Is it going to cure cancer?

34:40Lots of great things are going to happen. And what we've got to do is mitigate risk. That is our job as governments. And this is where democracies, and this is the larger question, which is, can our governance systems evolve to handle the accelerated pace of change? And it behooves us, our education system, our governance systems, our financial systems, our security systems, all are facing new threats, and they have to evolve quickly. And this is a really important democratic challenge that we all face.

35:13David McWilliams: Just before we go, that time mismatch is what worries me. So you're talking about democracy, you're talking about regulation, you're talking about very great brains in Canada, sitting down, you have task force, all these things. These are all things that take time. It's called the process. And it's an inbuilt part of our democracies. And because it is a process, it takes time. the thing we're trying to regulate is moving at a pace which is so rapid that its ability to maneuver around the regulation given it will know the regulation and as you said it's going to be self-taught i'm again i'm not going down some sort of no no it's going to be a restaurant movement but it's it's there's a time mismatch here democracies the stuff that you and i like and enjoy takes time because it has to be considered and it has to mandate other people.

36:07David McWilliams: The AI, the technology, the movement of technology is happening at the speed of light almost. What do we do about that mismatch? We are not the first generation to face accelerated change. The pace of change, you know, I'm not trying to dismiss this with some, because I think we might be in a new kind of thing. But remember when Gutenberg had the printing press. The church wrote great tracts that said, the grand cathedrals of memory will be destroyed. By the way, they were right. Most people don't have a cathedral of memory because we read. And remember, the Aldine printing press in Venice, which was the first modern printing press.

36:50And this was madness. They were printing books. And their colophon on their back of the book, their logo was the anchor and the dolphin. And their logo was Fasima Lente, make haste slowly. Slowly. Yes. It is something I abide by. The dolphin is the AI. And maybe in our scenario, the dolphin's got wings. It's talking. It's a very smart dolphin. And the anchor. But we can't abdicate this. But I have three questions and one that I ask myself every day. And I think about making haste slowly as the way to do this. Make haste slowly. We have to keep up, but let's make sure that we're not forgetting our values.

37:34And my questions are this. If we don't build the infrastructure domestically at home, someone else will build it and we got to buy it. And if we don't innovate, we got to rent it from someone else. And if we don't make the rules, we got to follow someone else's. So our assertion is we got to build here so we don't have to buy it. We got to innovate here and we've got to make the rules. And we've got to do that to scale. And that means we've got to work with an international partnership, these middle powers, Ireland, Canada, Germany, France, Italy, Spain, South Korea, Japan, because we have to all make haste, but slowly enough to protect our values.

38:15David McWilliams: Evan, as always, it was a pleasure. I know you're going out to O'Donohue to listen to some trad music from discussing AI to the real thing. And the thing is, when you feel the real thing, you're going to know what the real thing feels like. Well, I got to tell you something, you'll like this because I think it's good that you're an errand because, you know, human beings are drawn to these places, right? So this is when we talk about what's artificial intelligence and moving quickly. But in the end, we're drawn to places like where you are community solitude slow right you know this matters and you know i was hosting the g7 it was the first g7 i'd hosted you know that's a humble drive that's right that's right and and we're in montreal and everyone's there i've never done that before you know so and in canada what we do is we it's important because our first peoples the indigenous peoples we always have a land acknowledgement before our first peoples come and we acknowledge of the land that we're on.

39:12And there was an indigenous elder, this guy, Kevin Deere. And he was talking to me earlier and he said, hey, Evan, you're into AI, right? And I said, I'm the minister of AI. So I said, yeah. And he says, so am I. But you're interested in artificial intelligence and I'm interested in ancestral intelligence. And you better make sure that when you build your artificial intelligence, you build it with ancestral intelligence. And it was one of those moments, you know, in your life where you just freeze. And then I had him say that to the entire G7. Very moving moment, let me tell you. And I think a lot about that.

39:52Are we building this with the ancestral intelligence? And not just of the first peoples, but think of our society. Think of Ireland now with, you know, where people come from all over the world to move here. And Canada too. We've got to respect the ancestral intelligence of all the people who are working to build this. and that respect and that ancestral intelligence, if we lose that, that bad scenario's more likely. But if we don't, the ancestral intelligence is something I think about a lot.

40:19David McWilliams: It's funny you mentioned that. I conclude there. There's a wonderful book called The Good Ancestor. And the guy's name escapes me, but his basic idea is that our job, all of us, is to leave the place better than we found it. Right, right. And that's what your First Nations guy was talking about. And that's exactly what this discussion is about, is that will this technology allow us to be a good ancestor or a bad ancestor? You got it. And that, I suppose, is the big moral question. I would love to be sitting in O'Donoghue's to take this a wee bit further, but Evan. This is us without beer. This is incredible.

40:59David McWilliams: That's Roman Krasnag. Roman Krasnag, yeah. Oh, John, look at you. Look at that. He's an Aussie. You know, you don't realize you've been David's artificial intelligence all these years. Oh, absolutely. Now, he's banging on about how he doesn't like it because he's got his own professional right there. Listen, we're out of here. Evan, that was a sweet, sweet thing. Yeah, listen, love you, boys. You're fantastic. Fantastic.

41:56of tax-free shopping, both in-store and online, saving you more while getting you everything you need. It's Walmart built for your business. Sign up for a free Walmart business account today at business.walmart.com. Your daily supplement routine doesn't need to be managing a handful of different bottles. Onnit's Total Human brings key research-based vitamins, minerals, herbs, and amino acids together in convenient day and night packs. One all-in-one product designed to make supplementation easier. The day pack supports cognition, focus, and cellular energy production. At night, the night pack helps you wind down and supports a calm, relaxed state.

42:36Less time managing your supplements, more support for your day and night. Shop Total Human now at onnit.com. Mod.com is changing the way people battle excessive fatigue. Ever hit a wall in the middle of the day, and a third coffee just doesn't do it anymore? Here's what's actually happening. Coffee only briefly blocks adenosine, the chemical that tires you out. When it stops working, your system is flooded, and you crash. Modafinil is a prescription treatment that works in a completely different way. Modafinil works by stimulating multiple receptors in the brain associated with wakefulness, including dopamine, serotonin, norepinephrine, histamine, glutamate, and orexin it's a more complete solution that gives you 10 to 12 hours of steady focus and energy to learn more go to mod.com fill out your intake form meet with a license provider and if approved mod alert ships straight to your door go to mod.com to get started that's mod.com

43:48David McWilliams: Great to have Evan on again. And now that he's a minister in Canada. This is what happens when you hang out with me, John. You know, your career just ascends into the right hand of the father, you know. But isn't it interesting, though, that Canada are the first country in the world to appoint a specific minister for AI? And then when he was talking about, you know, the whole idea of, as you said earlier on, you know, building this coalition of the middle between Europe and Canada and all the rest. But that now including the likes of AI, what does that say about kind of sovereignty? So what does that say about sovereignty and going into this new AI world?

44:32David McWilliams: Well, I think I'm going to answer that in two parts. I'm going to save the first part for last. I think what the Canadians are doing is they realize that there are five or six big theaters of foreign, domestic, international, financial, economic, industrial policy that have changed since the advent of Donald Trump in the United States. And of course, the move towards populism in Europe. And what they realize now is that AI straddles all these issues. and consequently the Canadians want to be the leaders of a coalition of the willing and they want to be the leaders of the middle states and this is all an extension of Carney's speech in Davos what they're basically saying is there's China there's America we used to depend on America but we can no longer depend on them and consequently the Canadians are trying to put together as I haven't said the Germans the French the European Union, the Canadians, the Japanese, the Koreans, all these countries that have felt slighted by Donald Trump and have been humiliated by Donald Trump and have been regarded as enemies from the country that used to be our protector.

45:47David McWilliams: So I think what the Canadians are doing is real politics. This is real politics. And I think listeners have been lucky to have heard somebody who sees the plates, the big global plates spinning, and is a real, real politician. But I'm also just going to end with something maybe related to being here, an English man or whatever. What is happening in Canada is a very strange moment where very talented people are leaving the private sector, like Evan Solomon, and coming to join Carney in a sort of an almost like an independence movement again. Nothing focuses the mind like an enemy. And what has happened in Canada is the enemy has morphed.

46:35David McWilliams: It used to be, you know, Russia or China or whatever. And it now is the United States. And that has, in the same way as the Gaelic League in 1916, the 1920s, it energized people to come behind a national project. What we're seeing in Canada is a national project. And we've seen nothing like this in a Western country for many, many years. So you're now getting people of that quality, of that fluency, of that intelligence, joining into what looks like a sovereign movement in Canada. Yeah. And I think that is actually, you know, that's the link between J.M. Singh's cottage up here, up the road here, The Gaelic revival, the Gaelic League, the independence movement, all that wonderful energy that came about building nations.

47:25David McWilliams: I think the Canadians are experiencing that. And who triggered it? Your mate, Donald Trump. Without Trump, does none of this carry on? Without Trump, Canadian politics is basically more of the same. Yeah. With Trump, Canadian politics is a sovereign, exciting, independent movement. It's taking leadership. It's taking responsibility. and it's moving forward like never before. And I think maybe we'll end the podcast there. That is really exciting to witness. Absolutely it is. But the key element of all of that is a strong leader. And I think a lot of countries, the leadership is missing here in particular.

48:06David McWilliams: Well, maybe the key is that is a strong leader with Irish grandparents. That's the key. We'll talk to you the next time. By the way, if you want to get this podcast early and with no ads, join us on Patreon. That's patreon.com forward slash David McWilliams and join the gang.

48:46We'll see you next time.

48:58That does it all. You can manage orders, sync inventory, track returns, all automatically. Everything your operation needs, all in one place. Upgrade your shipping operations to stress-proof your biggest sales days and capture every bit of potential revenue. Go to ShipStation.com and use code AUDIO and get 30 days free. The youth mental health crisis is growing, and social media is a major driver. Kids are spending up to nine hours a day on screens, often unsupervised, and studies show a direct link to anxiety, depression, and even suicidal thoughts. That's where Gab comes in. Gab offers safer phones and watches for kids with no social media, tailored to every age, offering the right tech at the right time, or tech in steps.

49:40From GPS-tracking-enabled watches for younger kids to phones with parent-enabled apps for teens, each device allows kids to more safely grow their independence. Visit gab.com slash getgab and use code getgab for an exclusive offer. That's g-a-b-b dot com forward slash getgab. Gab. Tech in steps. Independence for them. Peace of mind for parents.