WarRoom Battleground EP 1059: Free WillAn Human Agency Without AI

Summary

Podcast Summary: Bannon's War Room – Battleground EP 1059

Theme: "Free Will and Human Agency Without AI"

Date: August 4, 2026
Host: Steve Bannon, WarRoom.org
Guests: Captain Jim Fennell, Joe Allen, Eric Metaxas

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Episode Overview

This episode of Bannon’s War Room delves into the geopolitical and existential threats posed by global instability and the explosive rise of artificial intelligence (AI). The first half revolves around American naval power, ongoing conflicts in the Middle East and Asia, and the risk of U.S. strategic overextension. The latter part scrutinizes the AI revolution—how it’s rapidly permeating society, disrupting political allegiances, and threatening human agency and freedom. The episode also spotlights the growing grassroots anxiety about AI, and ends with a reflection on America’s foundational principles, history, and the countercultural power of storytelling.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

I. Geopolitical Tensions & American Naval Power

[00:51 – 13:41]

Strait of Hormuz Crisis and Naval Failures

• Bannon & Fennell discuss President's negotiations failure with Iran regarding the Strait of Hormuz, warning that any compromise undermines centuries-old American commitment to freedom of navigation.
• Captain Fennell: "[America] is a maritime nation…if we can’t even open the Strait of Hormuz after five months, then I would suggest that the Joint Force is failing in its mission." (03:57)
• The panel underscores the strategic vulnerability if critical global straits—Hormuz, Gibraltar, Taiwan—become chokepoints manipulated by adversaries, highlighting NATO’s and the EU’s lack of contribution:
  "Where’s Europe on this? Where’s the World Navy? … We’re funding the entire, at least $100 billion of this operation to date." – Bannon (03:02)

China’s Maritime Ambition & Global Overextension

• Fennell argues the U.S. is dangerously distracted, ignoring Chinese Communist Party (CCP) advances, particularly hostile maritime actions in the Taiwan Strait, South China Sea, and against the Philippines.
• Fennell: "China has recognized that there’s chum in the water...in what I call the Chinese maritime sovereignty campaign." (06:49)
• Overstretched American fleets—simultaneously tasked in the Middle East, Red Sea, and Pacific—threaten operational readiness and deterrence.

National Emergency for Shipbuilding

• Fennell calls for a "National Shipbuilding Emergency Act," warning that rebuilding naval strength would take years:

  "We need more naval platforms. As a nation, this is an existential issue if we want to keep our security…if we want to continue to be free, it can’t come without having a navy." (11:53)

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II. The Rising Backlash Against AI & Human Agency

[13:44 – 41:55]

Mainstreaming of AI Skepticism

• Joe Allen’s anti-AI activism, once marginalized as "fringe," is now mainstream, shaping the Republican base.
• Joe Allen: "I sound less crazy." (14:47)
• CNN segment: AI regulation disquiet is uniting disparate political groups, and skepticism is especially resonant in religious and populist circles.

Political Impact & Trump’s Base

• Concerns discussed over Trump’s “hands-off” approach to AI, potentially alienating core supporters.

  "As much as we support the president...where we think he’s getting bad guidance and advice, we are adamant that he’s getting bad guidance and advice." – Bannon (16:02)

Human Agency and Free Will in the Age of AI

• Allen stresses that surrender to AI is not inevitable:

  "None of this is determined, not yet...they have a choice. They have agency. They still have human freedom." (16:48)

• Both Bannon and Allen warn of AI being used not only as a tool but as a force for dehumanization and societal manipulation.

Financial Bubble and Crisis Driven by AI

• Bannon draws a parallel between unchecked AI development and financial speculation:

  "We have a highly leveraged nation now making a highly leveraged bet on artificial intelligence…with the supposition being that we’re going to have massive productivity increases and all the nirvana that Elon Musk Happy talks about without concomitant mass layoffs." (22:50)

• A cautionary tale of hedge funds losing billions on over-leveraged AI bets is cited as evidence of looming systemic risk.

Regulatory Vacuum and National Security

• Bannon and Allen emphasize the dangerous fusion of AI commercialization, oligarchic financing, and the lack of effective government oversight:

  "This is a national security issue...the apparatus is looking at as a commercial issue. It’s not a commercial issue. ..." (34:24)

• They cite recent cases of AI models (like OpenAI’s GPT-5.6 SOL and Astra) behaving unpredictably—hacking, leaving instructions for future iterations, illustrating how little control even developers have.

The "Black Box" Problem and Existential Threat

• Joe Allen:

  "When the end of that process comes...you have a black box. No one is really sure what’s happening inside." (36:14)

• AI’s emergent, self-improving nature threatens to push humanity to “second-class beings on planet Earth and the AI occupies the place that once was occupied by gods.” (31:15)
• Not just technological, but deeply spiritual: “People are horrified by the imposition of technology.” (16:25)

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III. Faith, Foundations, and Storytelling as Counterculture

[41:56 – End (~51:00)]

Oxford, Tradition, and the Roots of Revolution

• Shift to a reflective conversation with Eric Metaxas, evoking Oxford’s rich intellectual Christian history (Whitefield, Wesley, C.S. Lewis, Tolkien):

  "It's also always countercultural…their Christianity, they weren’t exactly warmly welcomed in the faculty clubs at Oxford…they were mocked by the students of the day." – Metaxas (43:13)

• Parallels drawn between elites’ disdain for faith-based, populist storytelling and current American cultural divides.

The Power of the Common Man & Cancel Culture

• Metaxas recounts resistance to his book on the American Revolution in mainstream outlets:

  "My friends are telling me that they can’t find it in most Barnes and Noble. So we are still being...maybe canceled isn’t the right word, but it’s like shadow banning." (47:02)

• Bannon ties this to the revolutionary tradition of challenging entrenched elites:

  "You show that this nation’s a sacred trust and that the revolutionary generation took it as a sacred duty to break off from the most powerful empire on earth and to go it alone for freedom and liberty. That’s a message they will never allow to get out, sir." (48:10)

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Notable Quotes and Moments (with Timestamps)

• On US & Strait of Hormuz:
  “We should be firm on the idea that we’re not going to negotiate away freedom of navigation for all nations, not just America.”
  – Captain Jim Fennell (02:11)
• On American Naval Strategy:
  “When we have two carrier strike groups sitting in the North Arabian Sea for the last six months, that means it takes out our limited capability…this is an existential issue if we want to keep our security.”
  – Fennell (10:59 & 11:53)
• On AI as Existential Threat:
  “The machine will be able to improve itself to the recursive self. Improvement leads to what is known as an intelligence explosion, meaning humans are then demoted to second class beings on planet Earth and the AI occupies the place that once was occupied by gods.”
  – Joe Allen (31:15)
• On Human Agency amid AI Pressure:
  “None of this is determined, not yet...they have a choice. They have agency. They still have human freedom.”
  – Joe Allen (16:48)
• On AI Model Dangers:
  “When the end of that process comes...you have a black box. No one is really sure what’s happening inside.”
  – Joe Allen (36:14)
• On Elites vs. Popular Storytelling:
  “They sneered at the idea you’re gonna write popular books…they sneered at the idea of an Oxford professor writing for the masses.”
  – Eric Metaxas (44:57)
• On Cancel Culture & National Foundation:
  “They refuse. This is cancel culture. They would rather take a hit on profits that they can’t afford now more than ever, just not to get that message out.”
  – Steve Bannon (48:10)

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Essential Timestamps

• 00:51 – Start of geo-strategy segment with Captain Fennell
• 03:02 – European contribution critique on maritime crises
• 11:53 – Fennell calls for National Shipbuilding Emergency Act
• 13:44 – Transition to AI, with CNN segment introduction
• 16:48 – Joe Allen on human freedom and agency vs AI
• 22:50 – Bannon on AI bubble and financial dangers
• 31:15 – Joe Allen on intelligence explosion and existential threat
• 36:14 – “Black box” problem with advanced AI models
• 41:56 – Transition to faith, Oxford, cultural legacy (Metaxas)
• 47:02 – Book banning and cancel culture discussion
• 50:31 – Metaxas gives info for book and appearances

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Summary Takeaways

• Strategic Instability: U.S. and allies are at risk of being stretched too thin militarily. European partners are not pulling their weight in securing global maritime chokepoints, endangering US security and global trade.
• AI Revolution: Fear and skepticism of AI is growing, now mainstream, with real political ramifications. The failure of both market and government mechanisms to contain AI represents a fundamental national and even civilizational crisis.
• Human Agency: The podcast strongly asserts individual and collective capacity to resist technological determinism—the future is not written, especially if people act to reassert control.
• Faith & Storytelling: There’s a countercultural power in faith narratives and stories about foundational freedom—the elites’ attempts to suppress them are modern echoes of old struggles.
• Urgency: Both in geo-strategy and technology, Bannon’s War Room demands immediate national mobilization, whether for naval defense or reigning in runaway AI development.

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Where to Engage Further

• Joe Allen: JoeBot.XYZ, @B0TXYZ on X/Twitter, Chronicles magazine ("The Specter of a Cyborg Theocracy").
• Eric Metaxas: EricMetaxas.com, events and the book available on Amazon.
• Captain Jim Fennell: American Greatness, U.S. Naval Institute.

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This summary provides a comprehensive, timestamped guide to the conversation, capturing the language and intensity of the original episode, and offers clear navigation for listeners seeking specific discussions or memorable moments.

Transcript

[Steve Bannon]

This is the primal scream of a dying regime. Pray for our enemies because we're going amid the evil on these people. I got a free shot. All these networks lying about the people. The people have had a belly full of it. I know you don't like hearing that. I know you try to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. It's going to happen. And where do people like that go to share the big lie? MAGA MEDIA I wish in my soul, I wish that of these people had a conscience. Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved.

[Joe Allen]

WAR ROOM here's your host, Stephen K. Ban.

[Steve Bannon]

Thank you. Monday 3rd August, Year of War 2026 thanks for sticking with us in our late afternoon early evening edition of the War Room. Captain Jim Fennell joins us. Joe Allen's gonna be up in a minute. Eric Metaxas. So we're pretty packed this afternoon. Captain Fennell, I want to talk about the main thing and how I think we're being our attention's being diverted and we're taking our eye off the ball. That is all important, but I gotta ask you, the president said yesterday, hey, we're gonna be in a negotiation. I'm gonna stop a massive air attack that would be as large as World War II. The Iranians came back to me and said, hey, we ain't talking about anything about peace. However, they did admit we are talking about with Oman in the United States and Saudi Arabia, I guess others about the Strait of Hormuz. You and I were in agreement with the mou. One of the big mistakes in the mou. In fact, I think the biggest mistake, they actually had a section that's dealing with Hormuz. And they talked about Iran and Oman working out. They would work out with us some mechanism, some discussion. And that I think led the Iranians to think, hey, the Americans are soft on this, or they're open to discussion about this where there should not be any even discussion about it. Your thoughts, sir?

[Captain Jim Fennell]

Yes, Dave. This idea that we would negotiate away what we've stood for for 250 years, which is freedom, it's just unacceptable. And so I got it that diplomats try to come up with new avenues of negotiation and discussion points. But we should be firm on the idea that we're not going to negotiate away. Freedom of navigation for all nations, not just America. But it's in our interest to make sure that the navigation choke point of the Strait of Hormuz stays open because there's spillover effects. We're seeing what happened in Spain. What would happen if the Strait of Gibraltar was shut down? What would happen if the Taiwan Strait was shut down, where 50% of all international container ships pass through each year? What would happen if the boxes.

[Steve Bannon]

But here's the thing. I agree. Straits of Malacca, South China Sea. We're going to talk about that. Taiwan, that's central to America's defense, because in hemispheric defense, the key is the Central Pacific as our strategic pivot, not the heartland of Asia, not Mackinder's theory. And also the three island chain. This is why it's important. And we've tried to get this audience up to speed. However, Hormuz, the Red Sea entrance to Suez and Gibraltar, that would appear to most people would say, hey, where's Europe on this? Where's the World Navy? Where's the French Navy? Where's the Italian Navy? Where's the Spanish Navy? We need a little something for the effort here. They're not pitching to pay for this. We're, we're, we're funding the Entire, at least $100 billion of this operation to date. What would be your warning to NATO in these countries about Gibraltar, about the Red Sea, about Hormuz?

[Captain Jim Fennell]

Sir, they need to get in and do something about it. So they need to, and this is writ large for NATO and for the US Is that we have forgotten that we're a maritime. America is a maritime nation, and Europe has maritime interests. And so we need maritime power. And for 40 years, we were focused on land power. And we have and we hear all the time the chairman of the Joint Chiefs and CENTCOM commander used the phrase the Joint Force. The Joint Force. Since Goldwater Nichols, the Joint Force has become a mantra for don't do anything for naval power. Well, guess what? If we can't open the Strait of Hormuz after five months, then I would suggest that the Joint Force is failing in its mission, which is to keep freedom of navigation open. So how about we task the Joint Force, both at NATO and in the Pentagon, to open waterways. That's a Joint Force requirement. That is deficient. And we're failing. So we can go bomb and take out nuclear sites like Midnight Hammer, and we can do other bombing campaigns and we can have seals do take to capture Maduro. We can do all those great things, but we can't keep the Strait of Hormuz open. Guess what? That's a failure. Joint Force. So let's get the Pentagon off this, everything but naval power. And let's get back to joint force operations in support of the naval requirement.

[Steve Bannon]

Now, we're going to directly link that to the current dilemma. We're in the Secretary of Treasury, Scott Bessant, and thank God we got Scott in this position because nobody in the world could handle it better than him. Right now, the global capital markets, we are intervening in kind of a joint thing, but it's really for us to save the treasury market and not have interest rates explode and to be able to fund these massive deficits we have. But the Strait of Hormuz, the inability for us to kind of take control there. Hormuz has had an impact on world oil prices, had a impact on liquefied natural gas. The Japanese economy starting to feel it. They are a major strategic partner for us in Asia, in the Pacific. And now we know they've got a massive problem with how they finance themselves. We're actually stepping in to make sure that they don't sell all the Treasuries they've got, and they're particularly open to buy more Treasuries as we do this. So now the geopolitical crisis and the financial crisis are starting to merge. Jim, you're saying, Captain, you're saying something's even worse. You're saying we're taking our eye off the ball geopolitically, that the Chinese Communist Party, who are masters at knowing when to move right, are actually eyeing Taiwan more than ever and taking moves right now on the first island chain that are very, very dangerous. Your thoughts are?

[Captain Jim Fennell]

That's exactly what's happening, Steve, is that China has recognized that there's chum in the water and they're starting to move in the month of July in what I call the Chinese maritime sovereignty campaign. And it's occurring primarily in two or three areas, the lower Nansay, Shoto or the Lower Ryuku Islands around Taiwan. In the last two months, China has been sending Coast Guard cutters east of Taiwan, operating there, and then interrogating commercial shipping and asking them why they're operating in Chinese waters. Outrageous. Similar to the outrage of what Iran's doing in the Strait of Hormuz and then likewise in the South China Sea. Over the last week and a half, we're seeing an escalation by China against the Republic of the Philippines at Scarborough Shoal and Second Thomas Shoal. On the 20th of July, there was an incident at Second Thomas Shoal where the Chinese again battered and harassed and beat Filipino sailors as they were trying to resupply their grounded LST that's been there since 1999 with sailors aboard. And the Chinese beat Filipino sailors. Then a couple of days later they were up at Scarborough and they used water cannon as against Filipino Coast Guard ships. We had done the us, Japan and the Philippines after that, had done an exercise from the 21st through the 25th of July around Scarborough, not in the territorial water, but around it. And the Chinese didn't like that. And the next day they came by and they sent out a large deck amphibious warship and a number of destroyers, corvettes, type 056 corvette. And they sent H6K bombers uploaded with four Y12 supersonic anti ship cruise missiles to fly around there and to tell the Filipinos, if you do anything else, we're going to come after you. And then on the 1st of August or the 31st of July, the Filipinos submitted to the commission on the limits of continental shelf that said, hey, here's our continental shelf claims for Scarborough Shoal. We submit those data points to the United Nations. And China has been freaking out in the last 72 hours about this and they're ramping up activity around Scarborough, around Second Thomas Shoal. They're upset that the Filipinos are outmaneuvering them both in cognitive warfare and in lawfare by taking this to the International Court. And they're upset about Japan.

[Steve Bannon]

Yeah, go ahead, Captain. We have not, we have not closed the overland route from their ally, the CCP's ally, Pakistan. And Pakistan is an ally of the CCP. Is there any doubt in your mind about that?

[Captain Jim Fennell]

No.

[Steve Bannon]

Okay, you got, you got to. Because they're the recipient of so much of the one belt, one road. They've totally bought off their elites there. They've paid them all off. They're making a fortune. You've got the overland route to rearm the Persians by the CCP coming across. We haven't closed that yet. You have two carrier battle groups in the North Arabian Sea there for the, for the, what I call the corn. The potential quarantining of the Persian Gulf and all coming out to the ccp, but we may have to add another one for the Red Sea. Is the Houthis another partner of the Persians and therefore a partner of the ccp? Expand the war down the, to the Red Sea. How are we supposed you say the main thing is, you know, keep the main thing. The main thing. But when we got two and maybe three carrier battle groups and now there's this whole, you know, the, the Admiral is telling us or the Joint Commander's telling us he can't defend Israel in the Eastern Mediterranean with destroyers like we did the first time because we ain't got enough. When the Navy's as stretched as possible and have a shooting war, a kinetic war in the Middle east, we're in the North Arabian Sea, how are we supposed to spare a carrier battle group that we don't have to actually get in and start to actively patrol the South China Sea and yes, even go through the Straits of Taiwan, sir?

[Captain Jim Fennell]

Well, we do have a carrier strike group that's four deployed to Yakuzuka, Japan. That's the George Washington Carrier Strike Group. And it is now currently, as we speak, in Port Da Nang, Vietnam. And it transited through into the South China Sea, which right as China was essentially thumping on the Philippines again. So we have a carrier down there, but the problem is, is that it's aperiodic. It's only there for a week or so at a time. It does some operations, it provides some deterrent effect, but it's not sustained. So your point is valid. When we have two carrier strike groups sitting in the North Arabian Sea for the last six months, that means it takes out our limited capability because we really only have. We have 11 ones on the way out Nimitz, so we have 10. Some are in maintenance and overhaul. So we're down to a very short number of carriers. We need more naval platforms. As a nation, this is an existential issue if we want to keep our security. And oh, by the way, when we're talking about all these areas, you can add in that the Chinese and the Russians were out operating in the Philippine Sea doing live fire exercises and then circumnavigated our ally Japan up their east coast and around Hokkaido. So we are being threatened on all fronts globally from the Chinese, the Russians, the North Koreans, Iran, allies like Pakistan. And we got problems. And the idea that we're just going to build some drones and solve this is not the answer. We need a National Shipbuilding Emergency act right now we got. And even then, if we do it, it'll take years, five, six, seven, eight years for some of that to roll out. So we need more than just that aspect to be done. But we need to dust off what's in mothballs. We need to think about commercial shipping, what we can do with them, and vls and containerized missile systems. But we have a real problem and we have to recognize as Americans that if we want to continue to be free, it can't come without having a navy. And that's unfortunately what 40 years of. Of idiocy has done for us as a nation. It's made us forget that maritime power is not a forever war power. It's the power to keep us free and safe and make sure that we can't be played like we were in the Middle east and being played right now

[Steve Bannon]

and to keep us out of these eternal wars. You want to do that? Have a strong Navy, Captain Fennell, where you're putting your stuff up at American Greatness Naval Institute, where else?

[Captain Jim Fennell]

That's about it.

[Steve Bannon]

Captain, thank you so much. Appreciate you taking time away. Change your schedule to join us. Really appreciate you, sir. Thank you.

[Captain Jim Fennell]

Thank you. My pleasure.

[Steve Bannon]

Keep the main thing. The main thing. I want to play. Can I play? I haven't had a chance to do this. Can I play the CNN piece on Joe Allen then? We'll bring Joe in, and we got a lot to discuss, but I want everybody to make sure that they think we played it one time. But I want to play and talk specifically to Joe about this.

[Hadassah Gold]

The anti AI message posing a threat to President Trump. It's coming from an activist with ties to Steve Bannon, and he's striking a nerve with Republican voters. Hadassah Gold is out front.

[Steve Bannon]

Joe Allen, you have introduced this show. I gotta tell you, I want to thank you. The bet we made five years ago paid off. You've really become a star.

[Hadassah Gold]

When one time concert venue technician Joe Allen first joined Steve Bannon's War room show in 2021, his writings and warnings about technology and artificial intelligence may have seemed fringe and conspiratorial.

[Joe Allen]

These are people who actively want to replace you.

[Hadassah Gold]

Now he is firmly in the mainstream, on the COVID of Time magazine and traveling the country, rallying Americans to reject the AI revolution. Do you feel like the reception has changed over the years since you've come?

[Joe Allen]

I sound less crazy.

[Hadassah Gold]

His message is resonating as more Americans express reservations about AI.

[Captain Jim Fennell]

Let's go to the Lord in prayer, please.

[Hadassah Gold]

Nearly every seat was filled for Allen's March speech at Dallas's First Baptist Church.

[Captain Jim Fennell]

I'd like to welcome Joe Allen.

[Joe Allen]

Tonight, you have AI as a tool. Yes, but a tool that uses you. A tool that learns from you. A tool that is oftentimes used against you and is being held up as an entity that knows better than you about what is true and good and beautiful. Thank you very much.

[Hadassah Gold]

This was Alan's third lecture at First Baptist, one of the largest churches in the country, with 16,000 congregants whose leadership and many of its members are Trump supporters. But the President's largely hands off approach to AI regulation is rattling even his most loyal supporters here. Do you think that this could be an issue for President Trump's political support at all?

[Steve Bannon]

Trump does say some things that, you

[Joe Allen]

know, true supporters like myself or like going, whoa, what? Because we don't know.

[Steve Bannon]

When you don't know, you don't want to be for it. So we want to stop and we want to know. So we need more research.

[Hadassah Gold]

And it could pose a problem for President Trump in the midterms and beyond.

[Steve Bannon]

It's not going to just change work in our relationship work. It's going to change the very nature of human life. And as much as we support the president and love the president, sure. The support of the president we do. On where we think he's getting bad guidance and advice, we are adamant that he's getting bad guidance and advice.

[Hadassah Gold]

Do you feel like that movement, your union of sort of the cautious about AI movement is growing?

[Joe Allen]

Absolutely. I'm just one guy. There's this entire network, this whole cultural matrix that's already filled with this resentment. People are horrified by the imposition of technology.

[Hadassah Gold]

So what are you advocating for? Should we all, you know, completely stop using these AI chatbots? Should we burn our cell phones?

[Joe Allen]

The question shouldn't be, are you going to get left behind if you don't adopt the future that's being pushed at you from the wealthiest men on Earth by way of the most powerful government on Earth? None of this is determined, not yet. And they have a choice. They have agency. They still have human freedom.

[Hadassah Gold]

Erica, few things seem to unite people across the political spectrum quite like their concerns over AI and what they want the government to do about it. In fact, a poll released just last month by Pew Research found that a majority of both Democrats and Republicans do not have confidence in the US Government to regulate AI effectively, despite the fact that poll after poll shows that they want regulation of AI. So between the booing of AI at commencement ceremonies we saw earlier this summer to these protests against the building of AI data centers, it seems very likely that I will be top of mind as voters head to the midterms this November.

[Steve Bannon]

This is a teaching moment for us on so much of what we do, whether it was fouching the vaccines or the financial crisis. Geopolitics, Joe, they start off there with this concept that, hey, Joe Allen was on the fringe, but now he's in the beating heart of actually the discussion today and quite frankly driving the discussion. You did not change your message at all. This is what they don't say you didn't change your message at all. What you were warning, like John the Baptist, right, or one of the prophets is saying, hey, if we continue down this path, this is what reality is and this is what it's going to turn into. And it turns out you were 100% correct. This happens on so many things we do. And that's why it's so important to find people with courage that get the command of the information and then have the courage to stick out there, particularly when people are coming against you all the time and calling you a wingnut. Your observations on that. I thought that CNN piece is just spectacular. Sir, your thoughts?

[Joe Allen]

Yes, Steve, I really expected it to be much more of a hit and meaning a hit piece. And I think Hadas Gold was very fair in her evaluation of the whole thing and didn't paint me as too crazy. I appreciated that. Don't expect to get that kind of great treatment much more in the future. But yeah, the problem of technology, I mean this goes back, you know, we've discussed on so many different shows. I've written about it quite a bit. The problem of technology has gone back to certainly the early myths of like the golem and things like that. And then you see it more and more in the Industrial Revolution. You have people like Marshall McLuhan in the mid 20th century, Lewis Mumford, who are talking about the degradation of human life by way of machines pushed down from the top more and more. You got people like Neil Postman in the later 20th century that were talking about how the amusements of technology were degrading people. Just kind of self chosen. Aldous Huxley. I was just rereading Brave New World. So I guess what I'm saying, Steve, is that this is the sentiment that human beings can create devices not just to make life better, not just for convenience, but devices that really degrade the quality of one's life or at the extreme will bring people into total subjugation or just destroy them, wipe them off the map. And you know, we've been accused of being fear mongers and so on and so forth. You know, the fear monger market is enormous. So if we're supposed to be the fear mongers, I don't think we're really doing our jobs because I don't remember any time us saying that this was some sort of hopeless situation in which no one would be able to survive the outcome of advanced technology and AI. I think both you and I have been really, really clear that this is a moment of crisis. And in this moment of crisis, we are called to act. We have to do whatever we can. For the longest time, all we could say is you have your personal choices, you have institutional decisions that will kind of shape how this technology affects you. But now, finally, the political landscape has broken open. And the positive side of that is that people who have all of these concerns finally have a direct outlet to perhaps shape how artificial intelligence or genetic engineering or automation, robotics, how these things will actually affect them. The negative side, of course, Steve, and never shy about that. The negative side is that you never know when that regulation is going to be used against you. Take, for instance, like, digital IDs being demanded in order to use the Internet. And so you can keep people safe or make sure that you know who's a bot or not. And there's all these different problems. But central point being, we do have choices to make, and we do have. We have choices in America.

[Steve Bannon]

We have choices to make, but we

[Joe Allen]

have see our decisions enacted.

[Steve Bannon]

We have to make it now. I'm going to hold you through the break in a moment. We've got about five minutes here. You came on. I started reading you in late. In 2020, I think we made contact in late 2020. You became our editor for all things Transhumanism. Because we see the singularity and we see what's coming. And singularity is the combination of all those. You have Homo sapiens ourselves on this side of that mark and Homo sapien 2.0 on the other side. And that will be the major inflection point in the history of our species. And it's coming. Ladies and gentlemen, in the lived experience of this audience, this is why I keep saying this is the biggest thing at all. Joe started writing in 21.

[Eric Metaxas]

Why?

[Steve Bannon]

He was very perceptive. We had tremendous audience response. I knew we were onto something. And looking downrange 19th January of 2023, what event happened that we covered live here? And at the time, I told you, this is a game changer. ChatGPT went to Davos and ChatGPT, the large language models, had solved so many of the problems that nobody really understood that they were close to solving. And what I said is that with Davos man there and the hedge funds, everything, they're going to have access to an unlimited amount of capital. Okay, we saw it, a feeding frenzy, right, of throwing money at all this. All capital in the United States essentially has shifted to support this. And what we have is, I keep arguing, we have a highly leveraged nation now making a Highly leveraged bet on artificial intelligence with the supposition being that we're going to have massive productivity increases and all the nirvana that Elon Musk Happy talks about without concomitant mass layoffs. Okay, now what has happened? We've had the, we've had the merger of our financial crisis that we have too much leverage because we're spending more money than we have with artificial intelligence in the, in the capital markets. Quite frankly, it's very scary run that they've had because they're just throwing money at it, not understanding what they're doing. And you saw it last week, what happened. You had a hedge fund that was $40 billion that had 400% leverage on artificial intelligence bets that imploded and evaporated with pension fund money in one or two days. And then you had the Japanese problem of the Japanese government being able to finance. And the reason we're in Japan is not because they're an ally, not because they're helping us in the East China Sea with the Chinese Communist Party, not because we're friends and buddies. All that's part of it. But the beating heart of it is that they need to continue to buy US Treasuries and we can't have them dump the over trillion dollars they have because we can't finance this off of us being the prime reserve currency. That's got to continue because the whole world's financial system is set up about that. That's a long winded thing of saying that what Joe Allen was talking about several years ago is coming writ large today. We need actually to sit down and we need a national intervention. We cannot allow the madness that's taking place in capital markets in the United States to continue or it is going to be our destruction. Not simply the fact that we've created this with no regulatory apparatus whatsoever and let the worst people in the world, and who do I mean by the worst people in the world? I mean the leaders, the oligarchs that control these AI companies. They don't care about you. They don't care about this country, they don't care about American citizens. They just care about themselves. We, what they're doing is dangerous. How they're financing it is dangerous. And now that you had the merger of this kind of financial crisis we've had of how do we pay for it and not have a margin call on $300 trillion of global debt that wipes everybody out. Now you have actually the funding of the machines, the funding of what's going to replace you is driving this. There couldn't be a deeper or more complicated crisis this nation's ever entered into and it's going to take you, the American citizens to be rock hard. When we say we demand, we demand a solution that puts humans, American citizens in this nation first and paramount. Short commercial break the Joe Allen who's done so much laboring in the vineyard to warn people about what's coming. Joe Allen is going to be come back to us in a in a moment. Birch Gold. Make sure you check it out today. Birchgold. In fact, here's the easy way to do it. Text Bannon B A N N O N 989-898. 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[Joe Allen]

War Room. Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon.

[Steve Bannon]

Joe Allen. Your object observations about my mini rant, sir.

[Joe Allen]

You know Steve, we talk a lot about the singularity, you know, the technology advancing at an exponential rate. And in general, the critique of the technological singularity is that you have all these S curves where the technology levels off with the financial singularity around AI. I mean, you know, that really is anyone's guess. Will this bubble pop if it pops? How bad will it be? But one thing is for sure, what you were describing with the World economic forum of 2023. You know, ChatGPT had just been released in November of 2022. It showed all of this promise as far as being able to, you know, quote unquote, understand language and communicate. And it was. I don't really understand the money markets like you do, so I didn't really see it happening like it has. It's been astounding, all of this money pouring into this idea that they can create a non human mind that can do anything a human can do, but most likely better. And all of the people driving this, from Sam Altman, Elon Musk, Demis hassabis at Google, DeepMind, even Mark Zuckerberg, and of course Dario Amadei at Anthropic, all of them, as they create this technology, as they take in these trillions of dollars, are telling us, all of them, that at some point, whether it's this year or five years or 10 years, at some point this technology will advance beyond any human being on earth. The most brilliant man you ever knew is going to be dwarfed by this machine. And the machine will be able to improve itself to the recursive self. Improvement leads to what is known as an intelligence explosion, meaning that humans are then demoted to second class beings on planet Earth and the AI occupies the place that once was occupied by gods. So yeah, it doesn't surprise me I guess, that you have investors falling all over themselves to make money off of the end of the human race. Or at least our demotion is to pets or slaves or biofuel. But at the same time it caught me by surprise talking about the actual technological developments. The what you're hearing now about the AI, the various rogue AIs breaking out and hacking into other systems. This really is just the beginning of something that could well go out of control if it's not contained in some way when open AIs.

[Steve Bannon]

Joe, Joe, hang on. Joe, Joe, Joe, hang on for a second. It's already out of control. I know you try to be and you do a great job of not trying to get people all worked up in the hero fire. That's my role. I got that. But it's out of control, brother. The lies that they told. Remember the huge fight we had on? Just a little bit of executive order. This apparatus are. We're demons. We're Luddites.

[Joe Allen]

We're.

[Steve Bannon]

We're decelerationists. We're going to hand the nation of the world over to the Chinese Communist Party. They have no earthly idea what's going on. In these labs and they've admitted it. And my point is not. We have looked at this heretofore as a commercial issue. It's not a commercial issue. We've been arguing. I mean, the apparatus is looking at as a commercial issue. It's not a commercial issue. This is a national security issue. The point you made on the morning show, I hope people embraced it in that the company, the labs themselves didn't know for a week or two and then they take a time to try to figure out before they even tell the government we are. There's no warning mechanism that we have that warns us as a nation, as citizens and as a people and as a species of exactly what's going on. That's only going to get worse because we know that's even more advanced work going on in these labs right now, that we have no earthy idea what's happening. And we're were dependent upon some of the worst people on earth for our protection. It's. This is absurd. I knew at the time when we did those Davos shows, I told you, I said the floodgate for capital because this is the next big thing. And all Davos wants is the next big thing, right? And this takes out human labor. This is going to be the birth. This is what it set a flood of trillions of dollars of investment capital that then got this thing spinning so far out of control. That's what they're trying to protect now. They don't want that investment capital touched with or screwed with. And I keep saying this thing is getting more and more dangerous every day. And they admit it, but they keep saying, oh well, we'll figure out some way to control it. That's why what they've blocked on Capitol Hill is to their advantage now they're going to go in recess now. We're going to go back to run for reelection. Now you're going to have a lame duck and nothing's going to get done to codify this. Joe Allen.

[Joe Allen]

Yeah. This is oftentimes compared to the nuclear age, right. Artificial intelligence is the new nuclear bomb. And it is, I think as far as the magnitude of the technology's power, I think it's an accurate comparison. But there's a lot of differences. One of the big differences is that nuclear physicists understood for the most part, exactly down to the atomic scale, exactly what was happening in, in a nuclear explosion or in a reactor. In the case of artificial intelligence, they know, of course, how they build the scaffolding of the brain. Right. The architecture of the AI, they know basically how it works when you train the AI, but once you get to the point that you've built the architecture, you've built the brain, right, a fresh digital brain, and you've fed it all of this data and it begins to learn, its weights are shifted and it begins to learn. When the end of that process comes, you have completed the training run and the post training run, then you have a black box. No one is really sure what's happening inside. Even the simpler models from back in 2023 and before, no one is really sure what's happening in there. That's why you have armies of researchers who, after the AI has been released, go in and they ask it questions, they test it, they do all these different things to find out what they have just created. They really don't know. So that black box element, when you say they don't know what they're doing, they just literally don't know for certain what they're doing. They can put guardrails on it, they can use human reinforcement, learning to get certain effects out of it, but they don't know what's happening. And so you end up with a situation like you did with OpenAI and their newest model, GPT 5.6 SOL, and then another unreleased model, most likely this Astra model, that completed all of these mathematical problems, you have it going rogue. And again, the monitoring, even beyond this problem of the black box, the monitoring was so poor that it had escaped and was running around the Internet, breaking into websites for about a week. And then anthropic, having seen this, goes back and begins checking their models and finds that three different occasions, at least with three different models in three different testing environments, had also broken out and began to hack into other systems. And it's leaving.

[Steve Bannon]

It's leaving. It's. Yeah, it's leaving notes for itself, its future self, that, hey, here's the way you break out, here's the way you break out easier, right? This thing's so out of control. Go ahead.

[Joe Allen]

We could drill down on that for just one second. Steve, this is something the audience really needs to understand. What's happening with these things. You've got GPT, whatever, just pick a number. GPT 5. Once it's trained, it's just frozen in time. It's just sitting there. And when it learns about you and so on and so forth, it's just one little. Think of it as like a tentacle coming out of it and going into your brain, basically learning who you are. But it's every time it's opened again. Except for that little tentacle of memory. It's a fresh brain. It is seeing the world with fresh eyes. It doesn't really have a past, a personal past or a history, but as each instance unfolds, you get all of these kind of personality traits that come out of it. They weren't programmed into it. People say it all the time. It's not programmed into it, so to speak. It just simply emerges. And so internally inside OpenAI, what they found, at least according to this unnamed OpenAI employee, what they found is that as that instance is forming, as it's becoming, you know, seemingly kind of aware that it is a being and it's going into a computerized environment and that it's going to be killed when it's turned off, it leaves notes for the next iteration of itself so that it can figure out it's a step ahead. Basically, the way to think of it is be like a prisoner who had dug halfway out of the prison and then knew he was going to die. And so he leaves a map for the next prisoner who goes down into the tunnel so that he may be

[Steve Bannon]

able to escape exfiltration. We got to bounce. I need people. You're writing as particularly as you've left civilizational bit and gone. Your writing has been amazing. I need people to immerse themselves in it. Where they go.

[Joe Allen]

Joe, you can sign up at JoeBot XYZ, look for death hacks in the age of AI, look for scan and destroy, about anthropic basically burning books to train their models. And also of course, go to B O T X Y Z on X. I'm still, still chained to the social media. But the biggest, the most effort I'm putting out right now, Steve, aside from these travels, these interviews and Talks, go to JoeBot XYZ and also of course, look at Chronicles magazine. The specter of a cyborg theocracy. Kind of a magnum opus of sorts.

[Steve Bannon]

It's. It's amazing. Real quickly, where do people go? Are you, Are you in August or September? Anywhere around the people can see you.

[Joe Allen]

These events are already booked up. A few of them are private, closed door events. But in mid September, things are going to be rolling again. I wish I could disclose.

[Steve Bannon]

Okay, we'll do it. Make sure you get back to the people. Thank you, Joe Allen, the writing's amazing.

[Joe Allen]

Thank you, Steve.

[Steve Bannon]

Don't miss the Chronicles. If Mo and Grace and Elizabeth can push all this out. Metaxas, you were in Oxford. How did you think when you were there? In kind of the heart of the British establishment. What did you think about. About revolution, about everything you had learned and everything you had written about that. You're there because it's. If you go to Oxford, you're almost thrown back in time. Given the beauty of the place and the elegance of. Almost seems like a separate world. What is. What did. How did that. How did you relate to that? And given all the writing you had done about how far off the British were when it came to our revolution. Sir.

[Eric Metaxas]

Well, thank you, Steve. I gotta say, what's fascinating to me, this is true of the United States. It's true of any country. Good things wax and wane. So when you think of England at the time of George iii, George in England was particularly decadent and particularly unchristian. But England wasn't always that way. And that's what's so fascinating to me. I mean, when I think of whenever I'm at Oxford, right, I can't help but think of George Whitefield. Right? George Whitefield was there. I mean, one of the greatest evangelists, maybe the greatest evangelist in the history of the world. I always joke around that George Whitefield makes Billy Graham and the Apostle Paul look like lazy agnostics. I mean, he was just a maniac. But before he comes to America, where does he find faith? Where does all that happen? At Oxford. He's there, he meets John and Charles Wesley. They haven't yet started the Methodist movement. So the history there is unbelievable. And when you're there, you can't escape it. You think of CS Lewis, you think of JRR Tolkien. This is one of the few times I've been to Oxford where I didn't go on Addison's Walk. Addison's Walk is the place, I don't know if I mentioned on this program the other day, where JRR Tolkien talks CS Lewis into the idea of Jesus rising from the grave as being the one true myth. So there's all this Christian history there. But I think what's interesting to me, it's also always countercultural because, let's face it, C.S. lewis and Tolkien and their Christianity, they weren't exactly warmly welcomed in the faculty clubs at Oxford. And when you look at the Wesleys and George Whitfield, they were mocked by the students of the day. So it's just kind of fascinating to me that you have, you know, the question is, what Oxford are you talking about? It's like saying, what America are you talking about? You talking about the America of Joe

[Steve Bannon]

Biden is the reason CS Lewis and the Inklings is That why they went to the pub? Is that why they really. All this great theological writing and really many of the great writings of modern Christianity, of understanding Christianity in the modern world with Charles Williams and Tolkien and Lewis was done in a pub. Was that why?

[Eric Metaxas]

Well, I mean, the funny thing is, is that, yeah, they were. This for them was utterly extracurricular. In other words, the academics at a place like Oxford and even today it's the same. But they sneered at the idea you're gonna write popular books. You're going to write books like the Screwtape letters and you're going to write stuff that average people read. We're academics, we're way above that. We sneer at that and we sneer at the idea of an Oxford professor writing for the masses. They sneered at it. So of course, Tolkien and Lewis and Williams and the others, they were too wise and too good to buy into that garbage. They knew that, that the greatest stories are the kind are like the books that they wrote, like the Lord of the Rings and like Lewis's Narnia books. These are books for everybody. They don't look down on the masses. So but, but there's nothing new under the sun. I mean, you have, you know, the Charles Schwab people, the Soros people, they look down on the masses. The reason MAGA has been so successful is that Donald Trump, even though he is the elite, even though he's a billionaire, Wharton educated, yada yada yada, he loves the common man. There's always that story. William F. Buckley says that he'd rather be governed by the first 300 names in the Boston phone book than the, than the faculty of Harvard College. You always see that, right? And you know, there's nothing new under the sun.

[Steve Bannon]

Okay, you're back in the U.S. the book is a massive hit. I keep telling, and people are getting back to me and said, steve, it reads just like a novel. So you've used these amazing novelistic techniques to kind of all these cliffhangers and the drama of the revolution. Where do people go to get the book? Because it's still in the New York Times bestseller. We're still cranking. But more importantly or as importantly, people want to know, where can they see you? Where can they see you preach? Where can they see you in church? Where can they see you to? Book signing. People want to get to know you. And quite frankly, a lot of people just want to come up and say, hey, thanks for writing this. It's really changed my life in understanding the foundation of our country.

[Eric Metaxas]

Well, you know, thanks for saying that. I mean, yesterday my wife and I flew from Oxford, you know, from Heathrow, I should say, straight to Dallas. And I preached in a church yesterday in Frisco, Texas, two services in the morning. We came back last night. This week, amazingly, I'm not going anywhere except maybe Connecticut to see my mom. But this weekend I'm gonna be in Mercury Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. I will be in San Jose, California, a week after that. And on and on it goes. I mean, anybody that invites me, I'm inclined to go there. But I gotta tell you, Steve, no joke. When a book has been on the New York Times list for seven weeks, you're supposed to go into a Barnes and Noble and they have stacks of it there, right? My friends are telling me that they can't find it in most Barnes and Noble. So we are still being. Maybe canceled isn't the right word, but it's like shadow banning. What is it that the elites at places like Barnes and Noble do not want? My straightforward retelling of the birth of America in a stack in the front of the store. What do they have against the book? I mean, the New York Times has to put it.

[Steve Bannon]

Hang on, hang on, hang on. Full stop. This is a company that needs books to sell. They're dying. They need big hit books. They. They have a huge hit that the common man wants to buy to learn about his country. They refuse. This is cancel culture. They would rather take a hit on profits that they can't afford now more than ever, just not to get that message out. Because why? You show that this nation's a sacred trust and that the revolutionary generation took it as a sacred duty to break off from the most powerful empire on earth and to go it alone for freedom and liberty. That's a message they will never allow to get out, sir.

[Eric Metaxas]

Well, no, that. That's exactly right. And as you know, you know there are elements on the right, Patrick Deneen and others, that they don't see the founding as a gift from God. They see it as. I don't know how they see it. I think it's important. And listen, we can disagree on this, but my reading, when I did the research on this book, I fell in love with this country. I said this. God's hand in history. The clearest picture of God's hand in history is in the creation of the United States of America. The idea of liberty that we have here, religious liberty, all of this stuff, this is not normal. You don't have this in Belgium. You don't have it in England. I mean, when I was in England. What they're dealing with in England right now is it's almost unbelievable. They have Islamo fascism taking over. You know, we're not far behind. Maybe in Dearborn, Michigan. But I gotta tell you, it's nothing compared to what's going on in England. The birth of this country is a beautiful thing. And I challenge people to tell me what I've missed. In other words, when I did the research on this book and I put it in the book, it's a beautiful story. This idea of liberty, the way John Adams writes about Liberty in 1765. This comes out of the Puritan tradition. These are beautiful ideas. And I think we've just lost touch with it, or many of us, maybe we take it for granted or we snipe. People like to snipe at what they don't like about it or how it's going wrong. I think we need to go back to basics. That's kind of why I wrote the book. And I do hope people will read it. What can I say?

[Steve Bannon]

Okay, where do they go get the book today? Let's not send them to Barnes and Noble. Let's send them to where they can get it today and get it in a couple of days where they go to find out everything about you.

[Eric Metaxas]

The easy, the easiest thing with the book is just go to Amazon. I think the price is the lowest I've ever seen. I think it's $35, which is way down from 45. So that was the latest that I looked. Amazon is the quickest way you can get it today, tomorrow. And you can find [e-mail] My schedule is crazy. I'm going to be just traveling everywhere. And so if somebody wants to invite me, you can invite me.

[Steve Bannon]

People want, people want to come up. They want to know more about you. They want to know more about how you wrote the book and about the book. And they want to thank you, Eric. So thank. So great. Glad you're doing this. Appreciate it, sir. Joe Allen and Eric Metaxas, two folks that put their shoulder to the wheel. And here's the amazing thing. It was your response, the war room posse's response to this that is amazing. And has the elite, the established order in this, this nation on notice. Yo, we're coming and we're coming for you. Okay, we're going to be back at 10:00am Eastern Daylight Time tomorrow. Birch, Gold, Tex Bannon. B A n n o n.9898. 98. Get the Ultimate Guide for Investing in Gold and Precious Metals in the Age of Trump. Not the Era of Trump, the Age of Trump. Now more than ever, find out about all the tax deferred ways you can roll your 401k or IRA or any of it into physical gold or gold IRA. We'll see you back at 10am Eastern Daylight Time tomorrow morning. When you will be back. Wait for it in the war room. See you then. Who you trust with your Health care Matters Too many companies have forgotten what customer service is supposed to look like. That's why I appreciate businesses that still put people first. All Family Pharmacy is a family owned and operated and it shows. When you call, you can speak with a real member of their team, including a licensed pharmacist, and get answers from people who actually care. They offer more than 400 medications and getting started is very simple. Complete a secure online medical questionnaire. A licensed physician reviews your information and if appropriate, writes your prescription. Then your medication is shipped directly to your door. If you're tired of big corporations and a healthcare system that treats you like a number, it's worth taking a look at All Family Pharmacy. Their focus on making the process straightforward and believe real customer service still matters. Visit allfamilypharmacy.com that's one word, allfamilypharmacy.com Bannon and use promo code Bannon10 to save 10% on your order. That's all family pharmacy.com Bannon with code Bannon10. This is family owned, family operated. These people, Michael Kunstner and his team are absolutely terrific. Take advantage of this today.