Trump's 80s Movie Approach to Foreign Policy w/ Chris Hayes

19:57Chris Hayes:Absurd and kind of comical and actually pretty effective. The kind of thing that like clearly reverberated out through the world past people that consume the news, past paid advertising. Daron Mondani obviously was like a huge innovator in this. He did an incredible job. The vertical videos. Now, it may be the case like Roy Cooper in North Carolina is incredibly well-known. He just won the nomination to be the Democratic nominee. He's going to go against Michael Watley, the Republican nominee for that Senate seat. Roy Cooper is super well known. He's been elected statewide, I want to say three or four times.

20:30Chris Hayes:He was the governor for two terms. Also, he's going to raise a ton of money. And it may be the case for Roy Cooper. He can just – he's got a theory. He's going to raise money and run ads. Roy Cooper. And people know who Roy Cooper is. But like James Tallarico. I was going to ask you about James Tallarico. Yeah. Yeah. So he's a – he's state rep. Jasmine Crockett. He defeated Jasmine Crockett in that contested Democratic primary in Texas. Now, Jasmine Crockett obviously has a theory of attention, which is – Well, I was going to say, I sort of I think that that is interesting to me because I feel like they both have theories of attention.

20:59They're just very different.

21:01Chris Hayes:They are very different, but they both had a sense of how do I how do I become known? How do I make sure that people whose votes I'm going to want or need know even who I am? My point is that you better have a theory of this. Right. Like that's based on who you are. That cannot be. What you cannot do is you cannot default to what had been the paint by numbers approach for literally decades. I'm going to raise a bunch of money and I'm going to run a bunch of local TV ads. That is not going to work.

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23:05Chris Hayes:bizarre ways people are using the internet. Listen on bbc.com or wherever you get your podcasts.

23:19I want to ask you about where politics and technology sort of collide and come together. We talked a little bit about this at the top, but, you know, when I got to Wired, it was very obvious to me and I think to the team here that covering politics more closely was not an optional decision, right? It was an imperative. There was no space between Silicon Valley leaders and the government, particularly true after Trump took office. You've been a political journalist for a very long time. You spent your career, I think, observing and documenting how power shifts in government. How have you sort of seen that merging of power between those two spheres, between sort of the Silicon Valley elite, the tech industry, and politics and politicians?

24:02Chris Hayes:I thought the inauguration was such a shocking moment. Was that shocking to you when you saw them all sitting there? I'm genuinely curious. Yeah. I mean, the fact that the support wasn't shocking, but the we're all going to stand up here with him. And, you know, because there are downsides to those calculations. And usually they're thinking about those downsides. I think a few things happened. I think as the industry matured from an insurgent industry to an incumbent one, its politics got more right wing. This is not a very surprising trajectory. It does happen. It's like, yes. Like sometimes if you interview someone who's 23 trying to break into something and then you interview them when they're 63 and they make six figures or seven figures, like they have some different politics.

24:49Chris Hayes:For sure. And so I think part of it is that. I think part of it is they absolutely all cook their brains on the Internet and Twitter and with each other. I mean, I think they just like spun each other out. I think they like just pickled their brains in a brine of reaction. Huh. I really do. I just think they're like the same way that people talk about people talk about this all the time. They talk about this is a very common documented almost trope, which is relatives who were lost to Fox News. Oh, of course. You know, people that just, you know, they used to have a certain set of views. Maybe they're kind of right leading a Republican and they just started watching Fox all the time.

25:28Chris Hayes:And it almost did something at like a chemical level. They're just angrier and more irascible. And I just think there's a kind of right online version of that that happened to the tech elite. And then I think there's just a political economy of it. They are the most powerful and profitable corporations in the world. And then, of course, the big part of it is the AI bet, right? So that's like the final component. I think they were kind of cooking their brains. They were personally getting radicalized and kind of – I think there's a lot of like backlash reaction politics. I think they were mad at their woke workers.

26:04Chris Hayes:I'm putting that in air quotes. They were a mature industry that wanted to cozy up to power on the government. And then they had this technology that they think is the kind of make or break technology. and their relationship to the state is existential. That's all so interesting. I mean, I think I'm always curious to hear different people and sort of smart people who look at this in different ways about whether they see what has happened as more ideological, that these sort of tech elites, tech leaders, like genuinely moved to the right. And this is legitimately how they feel, that this is the right way to run a country, the right way to run a business, the right way to work with government, or whether it is simply like they are biting their tongues and holding on for four years and presenting the president with tchotchkes in the Oval Office when they need to because they have a fiduciary obligation to their shareholders.

26:59They have a huge base of employees that they need to support and pay and uphold. And that is just sort of this fundamental like, I hate this guy, but I have a business imperative.

27:10Chris Hayes:Yeah. And I think there's different individuals on different side of that. I mean, I think. Sure. Yeah. They're also not all the same person. I think Bezos has gotten very right wing. Yes. In his personal politics. I mean, I don't think he was ever a liberal by any stretch of the imagination. Obviously, Musk has got, you know. Elon be Elon. Yeah. Terminal brain worms. But like Tim Cook, I don't know. You know, I think that's an example. He looks deeply uncomfortable, but he won't say anything about it. Yes. You know, Sergey Brin and Larry Page's don't be evil model for Google. Right. But again, like that was, you know, it looks ridiculous now, but I think it was a genuinely felt at the time.

27:49Chris Hayes:And I also think they thought, you know, again, this sort of the trajectory of how this happens. When Google was created, it was the perfect example of like genuinely building a better mousetrap. I was searching the Internet at the time. All the searches were bad. Google came along and it was very good. So much better. And it was better in a way that transformed the usability of the Internet. And I think they thought, well, this is a we're providing a good service and we're going to sell advertising and like a pretty ethical business, which like, yeah, yeah, this works pretty well. You sell, you know, and then slowly over time.

28:27Right. Yeah. Things escalated from there. Things change. And here we are. I mean, when you think about looking at the next, I mean, we've got three more years of this administration and you think about the level of proximity, of collaboration, of I'll say collusion, you don't have to, but the sort of very close relationships that we see between someone like Sam Altman and the administration. Does that scare you? Yeah.

28:55Chris Hayes:I honestly was chilled to my core when there was, you know, there's a meeting between the head of Anthropic and the head of the Pentagon and which they can't come to terms on. Basically, it's a terms of service agreement of implementing Anthropics Claude model in Pentagon situations. and then the Pentagon throws this temper tantrum that sounds completely deranged. Yeah. Like Bond villain kind of thing. Yeah. And we're going to try to cut them off from all that are supply chain risk. Yeah. You can sell NVIDIA chips to the Chinese government. Yes. But God forbid. But you can't use – I mean, come on.

29:36Chris Hayes:Yeah. And then for Sam Altman to post this thing being like, hey, we've swooped in and we've made a deal. Look, these companies, particularly those two, which are the two that are startups, right? OpenAI and Anthropoc. They're not the legacy incumbents that have their own AI models like Gemini or whatever. They're on a treadmill. They got to run fast. And they got to raise money. And their revenues are increasing a lot, but their costs are increasing arguably faster. There's a sort of sense of desperation. And I think you people, the combination of people with a very powerful technology who are banking on making a world changing fortune, but also have a kind of like ghosts in Pac-Man, like financial burden trailing behind them.

30:27Chris Hayes:Yes. Is. To the tune of like many, many, many, many, many, many, many, many billions of dollars. Yes. That's a. Shocking amount. I would not say that that is the best setup for like ethical and responsible decision making or decision making that takes into account the stakeholders involved. And I think that's incredibly terrifying. It is really scary. It's scary. And I want to ask you a little bit more about how you're thinking about AI. I think you've called yourself a lame centrist. I would say I probably fall into a similar camp, at least in the context. You're saying on the AI debate. On the debate.

30:59Chris Hayes:Sorry. Yes. But the conversation around it, you know, very polarized. you've got the doomers, you've got the boomers, very sort of overly simplified arguments. I would say in general, I think we spend too much time like ping ponging between those two extreme views and maybe not enough time talking about the practical implications or like the potential future scenarios that we really should be taking seriously. You posted on Blue Sky that the left needs to, quote, start thinking seriously about the AI hype being true. Tell me more about that. You know, the thing that I'm most worried about is the job replacement issue.

31:38Chris Hayes:All of these jobs that people have right now, from coders to first-year law associates to the administrators who work at large health insurance companies, you know, the world in which those are automated in a relatively short period of time, it's going to cause some pretty profound dislocation. And do you – is your general sense that not enough people, maybe people on the left, are taking that seriously? that there's like a head in the sand kind of. I think there's an idea that if you take that seriously, you're ceding to their own propaganda about how useful their product is. I think there's a huge question about how quickly this is all going to happen.

32:14Chris Hayes:Yeah. But I also just like I can see it. I mean, I use I use several different LLMs for different things. And I was going to ask you a little bit about like your personal use cases. I have been using them more because I think I want to understand what they do. Yeah. For instance, like notebook LLM where you can upload sources. and then you can use it to navigate from those sources is extremely useful so that you're not getting hallucinations. And it's also citing back to something. So if I say like, oh, what date did this thing happen? This obscure historical detail that won't be Googleable, A, because Google no longer really works, but B, because it's embedded in a PDF of a scholarly article I've uploaded to you.

32:54Chris Hayes:So there's lots of useful ways of using it to me when you're bounding sources, particularly for research purposes. But it's just manifestly getting better. Like, obviously, I mean, it's just like this idea that it's not is insane. Yeah. And the idea that it's not going to start to touch jobs people do is also seems insane. I mean, I have a few friends who are very senior level software engineers who until very recently, maybe December, thought this was just so ridiculous. Yes. They were like, our CEOs won't stop talking about it. They're insufferable. This will never. This is just a ridiculous toy.

33:30It's the new metaverse. It's the latest tech fad. And then I think it was the Cloud Code release that all of a sudden they are writing book proposals. They are trying to use AI to, like, launch businesses. Like, they're trying to figure out, like, what's my next thing? Because I'm in my 50s and I want to work another 10 or 15 years. I need to work. And I don't think I'm going to have a job in a few years. And that, for me, just sitting and having a drink with them and listening to them talk about that was pretty jarring, actually.

34:00Chris Hayes:Yeah. And I think, again, you know, part of the problem is I think that we should have some clarity about the business case proposition of this technology is exactly this. Like the reason that they think they can sell this to people. I mean, think about how much money revenue that is for you, right, if you can sell that. And also it's a savings for them. And the only problem is that someone's out of a job, right? That's the business case. So like part of the problem is if you start to talk about that, it does feel like you're seeding. Well, I was about to say when you get that reaction from the left, it's like, but I don't like this and I don't want this to be the case.

34:39It cannot be the case that all of these elites and oligarchs in Silicon Valley are telling me that I'm not going to have a job. I don't accept that. And so what would it look like to you for, quote unquote, the left? to start to have, to start to take that more seriously? How does that manifest?

34:59Chris Hayes:I mean, I think you got to start thinking about, like, job protections. Like, how do we want to deal with that? You mean, like, meaningful regulation? Yeah, meaningful regulation. I mean, I'm laughing a little bit because I... First of all, we should be regulating AI. And I don't know how. I think the idea that it's, like, totally unregulated is insane. So partly that's going back to real blue sky thinking, to be thinking in a broad sense of like, well, if all these jobs were automatable, like if you didn't need people to do all these things, what do we want people doing? What does society do?

35:38Chris Hayes:Like we're just locked into like where are the good jobs going to be? And, you know, work has changed over time and productivity has increased. And the big thing is like, well, what do you want? What should a person have a shot at? What should they be guaranteed? What should they have a shot at in a wealthy society like ours? And how do we order the society fairly to do that? And that's like real first principle stuff. But I do think in some ways this calls for some real first principles thinking. And I don't know that I want Donald Trump to be the person, you know, making those calls. No. The timing is very unfortunate.

36:14Chris Hayes:No. And I think the saving grace is he's not going to make those calls because he's just going to let the AI companies run rampant and do whatever they want. Sure. But I also think that like small acts of resistance, I think like people at the grassroots level fighting data centers. Is that like the solution? No. But is it a way to operationalize the sentiment? It's like, wait a second. You're telling me this is going to replace all of us. This thing, it's driving up local electricity prices. It's intentionally being created as a technology that will move the distribution of national income from labor to capital.

36:48Chris Hayes:And you want to build one in my town? No. Like, that's a totally good, legitimate, actionable way to start. A small act of resistance in the context of data centers is a bit of a hopeful place for us to end.

37:09Chris Hayes:This week on the political scene from The New Yorker, Trump's rupture in the world order. Europe caught between two adversarial great powers. That's basically dialing back the clock to not only pre-World War II, but really it's a pre-20th century view of the world. And I would say it's a world of permanent insecurity that we're looking at. Join me, Evan Osnos, and my colleagues Jane Mayer and Susan Glasser every Friday on The Political Scene, available wherever you get your podcasts.

37:52I want to play a very quick game that we invented. It's called Control-Alt-Delete.

38:01so i want to know what piece of technology would you love to control what piece would you love to alt so alter or change and what would you love to delete and people have been very generous in their interpretations of that question someone tried to control the weather and i didn't have the heart

38:18Chris Hayes:to tell them that that is not technology i mean i guess i want to control ai yes well because Because, you know, I guess I trust myself maybe more than Sam Altman. Arguably, I would trust you more than most of the people involved in AI. So that sounds good to me. I mean, yeah, I guess if I could control it, I'd figure out a humane nothing. I'll be the one. It's Chris Hayes. I'm the one. He's in. Alt I've got, which is I would love to alter Internet search so that it works again. Yeah, what's your beef there? What's going on with your searches? I just think that it's gotten so bad. It's not great.

38:57Chris Hayes:It was, I think, the quality of the product of just Google search particularly. There's other ones that people, you know, suggest that I've used as well. But essentially it's all, you know, it's been displaced now by AI partly because search got so bad. Yeah. And so, but it's nice to search things and be able to find them. And that's become more and more difficult. Do you just get that big, like, AI box? Well, first you get the big ad box. And you have to X out of it. You also get the big ad box, but you also get overwhelmed by ads. And you also just the search does not surface things that you're looking for as well as it used to.

39:32Chris Hayes:Here's my delete. Okay. I just I want to get rid of cell phone calls and replace them with landline quality calls. I find cell phone cell talking on the cell technology is the highest level of failure that we tolerate from any technology in our lives. Just in terms of like the service being patchy. If your oven just shut off as often as a call dropped or you couldn't hear someone or your alarm didn't go off as many times or your computer just didn't turn on as many times as you can't hear someone or a call drops. It's insane. We would be in the streets. No one would tolerate it. No. And it's the reason people text all the time and don't talk.

40:20And the other thing that I hate about cell phone calls, you know, FaceTime audio can fix this, WhatsApp audio a little bit, is that they don't have what's called side tone.

40:31Chris Hayes:What is that? Okay. Okay. When you were in junior high, I think we're roughly same cohort, when you were in 12 or 13 or 14 and you would go home after school and talk on the phone for hours. Oh, yeah. You would be, when you were talking on that phone, that landline, you would be hearing your own voice through the receiver in what's called side tone. Because the way that a landline works is in the same way that when you have cans on and you're doing a podcast and you're getting your own voice in your ears. Yep. Okay. A landline does that. And it is such a better, more pleasurable way to talk to someone because you can calibrate your own volume.

41:06Chris Hayes:Cell phones don't have side tone, which is why people shout when they're on phones. Why people sound weird. Why you sound weird. Why you can't actually have good and intimate conversations on cell phones. It's why people always want to put their headphones in even though the headphone doesn't even give you side tone. So this is my big – I guess that's an alt because I like to bring side tone into cell. But I basically just want to delete cell vocal technology and start over. That is so specific and so well-studied. I really applaud that. I love that one. Chris Hayes, thank you so much. Thank you.

41:38This was fabulous. Thanks.

41:44The Big Interview is a production of Wired and Kaleidoscope Content. This episode was produced by Kate Osborne and Adriana Tapia. It was mixed by Pran Bandy, who was also our New York studio engineer. It was fact-checked by Matt Giles. Kate Osborne is our executive producer. And I'm, of course, your host, Katie Drummond, Wired's Global Editorial Director. Thanks for listening.

42:19Now more than ever, technology is a dominating force in our lives. Then there's the threat of AI everywhere. And yet, tech can be inspiring and help level playing fields. I mean, a YouTuber with a self-funded debut movie just dominated the box office.

42:37Chris Hayes:I thought, hey, if you interview me, it'd be good for your publication. And that's not ego. I just have a lot of followers. But it's that stigma. It's like YouTubers, they're not real. Join me, Lizzie O 'Leary, the host of What Next TBD. Slate's podcast focused on technology, power, and the future. Follow What Next TBD now wherever you get your podcasts.