← Bulwark Takes
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- [00:00]
Bill Kristol
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Bill Kristol
that's R A K U T E.
- [01:30]
Andrew Egger
Hi everybody out there. I am Andrew Egger, White House correspondent with the Bulwark, co author of our Morning Shots newsletter with the guy to my right, Bill Kristol, our editor at large. We're the Morning Shots authors and this is Morning Chaser. We're coming to you on Tuesday morning to talk about our newsletter, talk about what's going on in the world and in the week ahead. Thanks for tuning in on YouTube. Thanks for tuning in on Substack, wherever you might be. We are at such a strange place when it comes to the conflict, the war. Still not 100% sure what to call it. Calling it a war feels like sort of kowtowing to the reality that Congress is completely cut out of this thing. But it does feel like a war. It's basically a war. It's a war in everything but name. We're in a weird place with it. We are continuing to ramp up. Pete Hegseth, the secretary of Defense, said this morning that today is going to be the most intensive day yet of bombing and of aerial planes in the sky over Iran. And yet we are also starting to get some of the strongest signals yet from the president, especially because there's been a lot of economic shakiness with the price of oil and things like that. Some of the strongest indicators yet that the president is already looking for a way out of this thing. He's got his eyes on the exits. We're not 100% sure what's gonna happen in the next few days, but Bill had a great item this morning in Morning Shots talking about the old taco trade, the old Trump always chickens out way of analyzing the White House, particularly last year after tariffs, applying that to kind of what's going on in Iran today. Bill, what do you make of where the president is in his headspace right now and what that means for the war in the days ahead?
- [03:09]
Bill Kristol
I think he pretty clearly is looking for the exits. I wrote about this Thursday in Morning Shots when I put myself into Trump's mind. Always a very difficult and painful thing to do. Takes me a day or two to recover from that and thought that he would be looking for a way out. But I do think the one lesson he's learned over 50 years is prolonged wars in the Middle east are bad for presidents. And he cares about his own presidency more than his own ratings, more than about the country or about the people of Iran or the Middle East, God knows. So I've sort of thought he would go in that direction. I agree. There's an awful lot of bellicose rhetoric and an awful lot of killing and destruction. And Hegseth likes to emphasize that part of things. Our colleague Mark Hertling has a wonderful piece today. Really, really a must read on the Trump administration and particularly Hexass, I would say, love for war porn, a term I guess the military uses to describe this kind of excessive and somewhat grotesque relish in the death and destruction that is part of war. So Hexaf emphasized that again this morning in his press conference. But I take that, I mean, look a, it's not inconsistent to have even ramped up bombing a day or a week before you're going to end a war that's actually somewhat has happened in the past. I think you sort of do all the destruction you can do near the end. I will say, just personally, I don't know who knows what exactly they're bombing. Maybe they're genuine military and regime targets. I do feel a little bit this time. I say this is, you know, not exactly a pacifist or anti militarist type that it feels like we're just killing now, you know, bringing Death and destruction to the city of Tehran and a somewhat indiscriminate and pointless way from a military point of view. Right. I mean, it's one thing to go after the nuclear, obviously the nuclear side, simplistic missile capabilities, key regime targets. It's another thing just to have, you know, destroy oil facilities in the city and create environmental disasters. I'm old enough to remember when we held that against Saddam, when he did it actually on his way out of Kuwait. The kind of gratuitous war crime. So I hope we're not committing war crimes, but I feel like that does fit in with the war porn side of the thing. I'm not confident. Look, the one thing point I make in the piece, I'll be quiet after this for a minute, is it's harder to taco your way out of a war than out of tariffs. You put on tariffs, the markets don't like them, you take off the tariffs, some price is paid, but it's doable. Wars are a different thing, and there are all kinds of unanticipated consequences and others involved, allies and enemies get a vote and all this, and it's not so easy to just pivot on a dime and God knows what the consequences would be of doing so. As I say, I don't think Trump cares that much about that, though. So I think it's taco time for this war in the pretty near future for Donald Trump. And I just. Final point is, I think if you just look at, he reads the speech, he reads the sentences they wrote for him about we are in this to, you know, achieve our objectives and blah, blah, blah, Stern kind of Stephen Miller type rhetoric, occasionally Pete Heath type war porn. But then when Trump is actually just answering questions and, you know, being sort of himself, he seems much more eager to emphasize this could be over very soon. Not this week probably, but very soon. And it's a kind of weird, it's an excursion. It's not really a, you know, a long lasting commitment. I think that's where Trump's head is. What do you, what do you think?
- [06:35]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, no, I'm, I'm right there with you. And I think like a big part of this just comes back to the fact that, you know, some of the lessons that Trump and Hegseth have taken away from the last 20 years of war in the Middle east have not just been, you gotta be careful about getting involved over there because there can be all kinds of unintended consequences that you can't predict going in. But their thing is more like, those leaders were just stupid. Those leaders were full of. They thought they could build democracies over there. They thought they could do nation building. They thought they were gonna win in a woke way by sort of keeping to the rules of engagement and prosecut soldiers who committed war crimes and all of these sorts of things. And I think that because they have such a low view of sort of the people who prosecuted those wars, that has led them to sort of undercount some of the incentives for why it was so hard for us once we had gone in to get back out of a lot of those countries. I mean, it's the whole you've kind of caught the tiger by the tail sort of thing, right? You've put yourself in this situation where if you were to immediately just try to go back to the way things were, you might create more dangers. You might have a worse status quo coming out than the status quo that you had going in. I want to hit a couple of the clips from Pete Hegseth's presser just this morning on this topic, because this is a thing that Hegseth has repeatedly. I mean, every single day he's gone up and said to his new Potemkin Pentagon press corps, when he's giving these briefings, he says over and over again, look, this isn't 2003. We're not making the same mistakes again. This is not going to be an endless war. This is going to be a totally different thing. So let's hear Pete Hegseth saying that just this morning, 2003.
- [08:20]
Bill Kristol
This is not endless nation building under those types of quagmires we saw under Bush or Obama.
- [08:28]
Andrew Egger
It's not even close. Our generation of soldier will not let that happen again. And nor will this president who very clearly ran against those kinds of never ending, nebulously scoped missions. Those days are dead. Yeah. So again, I mean, every single time he gets up and he makes this point, the problem is they are also making a lot of really maximalist claims about what the objectives are here. Right? I mean, the things that they want to see happen before we can be willing to pull up stakes and head back home. So let's go to a second clip from Hegseth talking about that today of what the US Wants to see happen once we leave. The President has indicated that maybe the
- [09:13]
Bill Kristol
operation will wrap up sooner than he thought it was going to.
- [09:17]
Andrew Egger
What's the plan once the US Stops military action? Will the US play a role in the aftermath or will they leave Iran to sort it out? Ultimately, the Aftermath is going to be in America's interests, our interests. We won't live under a nuclear blackmail scenario of conventional missiles that can target our people, which is why the objectives
- [09:40]
Bill Kristol
have been scoped from the beginning.
- [09:43]
Andrew Egger
So essentially, I mean, when they have actually succeeded in laying out the objectives for this, and we've talked and written before about how many different explanations have been given for this war since it began, but this is sort of the sort of official line that they have zeroed in on is they need to have this permanent destruction of Iran's nuclear capacity. So that, I guess kind of makes sense. Although the permanent side of things sort of raises questions of how much we can afford to not be there but permanently cripple Iran's ambition of getting a nuclear weapon, also completely cripple its domestic infrastructure for building smaller missiles, shorter range missiles, completely destroy their navy. So these are objectives that are accomplishable. Right. And I think that if anything that they say is to be believed, and I think they can be trusted in some respects, here they are on their way to achieving some of those short term military objectives. The problem is what happens after. The problem is if we then leave, are we completely abdicating any sort of responsibility or any sort of control over what happens next after we have just gotten done sort of raining hell from the sky on this country and on these people? Why would we have any hope that, that, you know, the next regime that comes to power wishes us any less harm than the previous one did? And, and it's one. It's all very well and good to sort of say, well, we're just sort of taking away all of the ways. Like it almost doesn't matter how much they hate us because we're taking away any way in which they could actually exercise, you know, wreak damage on us. But that's another lesson of the past 20 years, is there's a complete asymmetricality to this sort of thing. You actually cannot completely take away a terrorist regime's ability to hur hurt you because terrorism is asymmetrical. It's not that hard for them to shoot rockets indiscriminately into Israel or at bases or to come to America and commit crimes here. I mean, people slip through. That sort of thing happens. So these are the sorts of difficult things that they are trying to sort through right now, now that they have engaged in this conflict. And I don't know how you feel about it, Bill, but it just kind of seems to me like they don't have any good options. They could leave tomorrow. And that would probably help with the oil markets and things like that, but it would open them to these risks and later. Or they could stick around and sort of engage in exactly the kind of conduct they've been condemning this whole time.
- [11:58]
Bill Kristol
I think you're being nice to them when you say that they're trying to sort through. I mean, they're not trying to sort through anything. They're just relishing the death and destruction, and they don't care what happens. What Trump doesn't care what happens when he leaves office. And he figures he can attack them over the next two years again, as he's attacking them now, having allegedly obliterated the nuclear program. What was that eight months ago or something in June? He can do it every eight months, I suppose, and if it's just an air attack, he won't have too much of a pushback here. I mean, just a couple of points, though. I think that's a very good summary of what they're sort of thinking. I mean, there was a. First of all, there was a reason back in 2003, and I supported the war that a. I supported it. And we argued very strongly in the Lutheran Standard. You have to go in on the ground with enough troops. And then we criticized Ramsfelden, were very strongly with McCain and others and saying we got to send in more troops and do counterinsurgency, which did ultimately sort of work actually, in 0708, but too late, really, to save the war in terms of its domestic support. But there was a reason we were for that. And it's because we thought you can't really reshape the country unless you have troop boots on the ground. You can't make it a better place. And Iraq is actually a better place, though there was much too much death in between to get there. We let the civil war break out. And this is where regime change, that term that's become. So I guess such a term of appropriate, of course, is what matters most because as you said, if you don't change the regime. Yeah, you can destroy the missiles. For now. Missiles are pretty easy to get. And if the regime wants to hate us two years from now or five years from now, they'll get missiles. They'll have terror capacities. You know, there are plenty of missiles floating around in other nations. We don't worry about it a lot if they're not determined to kill us. Right. The regime matters more than the capacities. Now, that's a little different on nuclear, I would say, which is kind of a category of its own and maybe ballistic missiles, but so we can do a lot of death and destruction. Iran will be very weak, I suppose for a while, but it's a 90 million person country and they are not without their own capacities to rebuild and with, not without allies like Russia and China who might decide that maybe they want to cause some trouble for us and for some of our friends in the Middle east by helping Iran rebuild. So it's very short sighted. They're very short sighted. They don't care. It is all about the performance, I would say for them. And it seems harsh to say this. This is not true of the uniform military who are doing their job. But that gets me to the final point I wanted to make. I hadn't really. I can't watch Hexath. I didn't watch it this way. I find him so repulsive. I can just be honest.
- [14:20]
Andrew Egger
But.
- [14:20]
Bill Kristol
So this is the first time I've seen these clips. I do try to read them and keep up with them on social media and so forth. Our duty as informed commentators, you know. But that comment of his, our generation soldier will not permit this. That he says and this president won't permit this. That is the quagmire, the nation building stuff. What does that even mean, our generation of soldier? Are the soldiers to be blamed for Rumsfeld's and Bush's strategy and mistakes? I don't think so. I mean individual generals may have miscalculated, certainly we were critical of General Casey and were welcomed, Petraeus coming in and so forth. But the idea that our generation of soldier, with the generation of soldiers who fought in Afghanistan and Iraq inferior to Pete Hegseth, the generation Pete Hegseth is turning into those tough warf, non politically correct war fighters in the Pentagon. I find that repulsive, honestly. I know a lot of people who served in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's my kids generation, you know, people your generation who served, they served as honorably as young men and women are serving today and in. I don't want to make comparisons one way or the other, but obviously if you're on the ground, it's a different kind of burden than, than usually than, than, than, you know, supporting air operations. And they, they bore that burden. So the kind of denigration of the soldiers from 20 years ago I find particularly offensive.
- [15:41]
Andrew Egger
Quieres mejor Internet Cox Internet? The tresientas megas tiene las velocidades rapidas e comfiable es que buscas perfecto para streaming y gaming y TRA bajardes de casa todo porso Dolores alme es con do agregas Cox Mobile include yaquipo de wifi y guarantia Depression de dos Sanyos en tu plan nues pere cambia te hoy a Cox re quiere Cops Mobile Gig Unlimited. Yeah, yeah. You mentioned the sort of relish in all of this, right? I mean, the degree to which, at least as this war is being sort of like publicly propagandized from the point of view of swaying public opinion. I mean, I. It's hard to know whether this is largely performance for the masses or whether this is sort of the actual thing that is motivating the primary decision makers. Obviously, Pete Hegseth is the kind of guy who really likes this sort of stuff. He talks about it all the time. But the other thing that we wrote about in morning shots this morning, in fact, Mark Hertling wrote for us, was about this element, the sort of war porn of it all. And we have just a couple of. Maybe we can just run them kind of back to back. Just ways in which the White House and the Defense Department have been kind of tweeting out the sort of sizzle reel, short form video version of this conflict. It's actually, we have sort of a difficult time playing the clips for you because they just sort of grab like copyrighted music and sort of put it to these sizzle reels to make everybody kind of like, you know, bump along with it and kind of get emotionally involved. So we'll give you just a little bit of the audio and some of the video here so you can get a sense of how they're messaging it. Yeah, I mean, you get it. Like, it's. It's. This is. They're doing this thing a lot, you know, just sort of like heavy metal score, you know, Footage of unclassified airstrikes on different military targets indicated that maybe the. I'm giving our video guys too much. I should not have. I should not have tried to be like, all right, play six clips back to back, guys, go. I'm learning. We're all learning with the, with the live process. But that kind of gives you a sense of it, right? I mean, it's propaganda. It's between somewhat and very repulsive. It's sort of like inviting you to just sort of suspend any sort of higher thought about what's going on with this conflict and just sort of be like, man, explosions are cool. Isn't it awesome that we have the mightiest military in the world? Isn't it awesome that we have total air supremacy over Iran, don't get me wrong. If we're going to be in this conflict, I'm really glad that we have the greatest military in the world. If we're going to be in any conflict, I'm really glad there's not parity between our forces and Iranian forces. I'm really glad that. That our military casualties, you know, are far, far, far below those of Iran at this point. And yet, I mean, it's just sort of an insane way to. To. To. To run your military communications. I don't know. I find it kind of stomach turning.
- [19:10]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, I do, too. And we've had plenty of propaganda in past wars, and very rarely is it degenerated to this level. And when it has, we've sort of viewed this as kind of. It's. It's been done by, like, some movie makers or some, you know, I gu. People outside of government. I don't think the actual Defense Department or the government of the United States has done much like this before. So I don't know. I don't know how the American public reacts to it. Honestly, I'm dubious that this resonates with people, but I don't trust my judgment on this. Maybe this is, you know, speaking to people's desire to revel in war. Let's not kid ourselves. And if we're at war, we're going to win, and we're going to be as tough as we get. We're going to relish every victory. Of course, we love the victories. We love the heroism. Think of D Day and, you know, everything, all the movies and all the tributes and if you've been there, how amazing that is, just to really see where it had, you know, the cliffs and that they scaled. But I don't know, that's more of a tribute to their heroism and bravery and courage, not to their ability to crush everything beneath them. You know, if anything, it's almost too. I mean, not to overthink this, but part of the heroism of war is, of course, defeating an enemy who is. Who can fight back, you know, and. And this is more relishing the fact that, as Hexess sort of says, they can't really fight back in many ways. And I don't mean to diminish that. They do, and they can, and we need to. That's something we have to be careful about, try to prevent them from doing. And obviously, we have had casualties, but, yeah, the relishing and pummeling a helpless enemy, it gets close to, I really do think, and that's why they call it war porn. A kind of a really degraded form of, of celebrating our military.
- [20:52]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah. The one other thing that I wanted to bring up, and then we'll turn away from the war into a different story, is just, it's strange. We've talked so much about Hegseth. We've talked so much about just sort of like the general overall military strategy and the way they're messaging this stuff. One thing that we have not so much talked about in all this is the person of Donald Trump. Right. And I mean, that was what you were leaning on with the taco stuff right at the beginning. Obviously, it will ultimately be Donald Trump's call, you know, at what point to pull the plug on this thing and how soon and under what circumstances and conditions. And yet anytime we're getting Donald Trump out here talking about this stuff, I mean, this has been one of the stranger sort of like overarching narratives of the White House is that Trump does, like any president, must delegate an enormous amount of this stuff. And, you know, the things that preoccupy him tend to be sort of the small bore. And it's renovating the Kennedy center and building his ballroom and, you know, trying to punish his political enemies in courtrooms and things. And yet even kind of over and over beyond that, the degree to which he has said a number of things about this conflict that just seem flatly untrue even in the moment have been really striking. And we'll just do one example of that really quickly, which is over the weekend he was asked about that initial strike on February 28 that hit a girl's school in Iran. It's horrible tragedy, horrible. What appears to have been just a horrible mistake on the part of the US military, that we were bombing all these targets. We were bombing a compound essentially of Iranian soldiers, IRGC troops, and there was a girls school that was basically just right next door to some of these military buildings. And we hit that as well. That appears to be all the available analysis is that that's what's happened. Some US Policymakers, Senator John Kennedy said yesterday that's what he thinks happened. It was a mistake on our part. Over the weekend, Trump said, well, I'm pretty sure that was actually Iran. I'm pretty sure it was Iran that did that. It was a false flag attack from Iran. Even then, there was no reason to believe that that was true. But he was asked about the fact that he had said that yesterday by a reporter. And let's play that clip real quick here.
- [23:04]
Bill Kristol
Tested that Iran somehow got its Hands on a Tomahawk and bombed its own
- [23:08]
Andrew Egger
elementary school on the first day of the war.
- [23:10]
Bill Kristol
But you're the only person in your government saying this.
- [23:12]
Andrew Egger
Even your Defense secretary wouldn't say that
- [23:14]
Bill Kristol
when he was asked, standing over your shoulder on your plane on Saturday.
- [23:17]
Andrew Egger
Why are you the only person saying this? Because I just don't know enough about it. I think it's something that I was told is under investigation. But Tomahawks are, are used by others. As you know, numerous other nations have Tomahawks. They buy them from us.
- [23:33]
Bill Kristol
But I will certainly whatever the report shows. But I'm willing to live with that report.
- [23:39]
Andrew Egger
Yeah. To be clear, Iran does not have Tomahawks. They're not among allied nations that have ever bought Tomahawks from the U.S. but just the, I mean, just the pretty brazen admission there. Well, you know, I said that because I didn't really know what was going on. I mean, that's kind of a keystone statement for a lot of what's happening right now, if you ask me.
- [23:57]
Bill Kristol
Yeah, and one thing that struck me about that, of course, is he doesn't even occur to him. This is very much like with the Epstein survivors, I think, to say, look, we regret the loss of life there. No one should be happy that one hundred and fifty Iranian schoolgirls were killed. We're not confident exactly. We don't know exactly how that happened, and we're investigating it. But you can have the sentence or two of regret. He doesn't do that for the Epstein survivors. He doesn't do that for schoolgirls in Iran. He really is, in that way, something of a. I don't like throwing these terms around. I've never liked the kind of psycho. Psychologizing or psychoanalyzing from afar, but there's something almost sociopathic about the lack of any human empathy there, I think.
- [24:37]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah. I mean, there's, there's a brutishness to it, for sure. And then just the fact that ultimately, like all of this analysis aside, that's the guy up there with his sort of questionable information intake and all of his different sort of interesting psychological qualities, maybe we can go that far, at least his own sort of idiosyncratic views of the political pressure involved and of foreign policy in general and the macho posturing and the mano a mano negotiation. And that's the brain that's going to ultimately decide where all this goes and how all this goes.
- [25:11]
Bill Kristol
And you sort of hinted at this before, but just to make this point clear and he'll decide, but without the counsel, as in the first term, of people who were willing to push back against him and give him grown up advice, the Mattis and the John boltons and the McMasters and so forth. So it's him and sycophants or posturers like Hegseth. So he's deciding with no, so far as one could tell, no really good external advice. He's got a sophisticated ally, beat Ben Netanyahu, but he's got his own interests and maybe already we've seen some divergence of those interests. We said earlier Trump will decide when the war ends. That's true, but not quite true since Netanyahu gets to keep on doing things conceivably and maybe drag us back in in certain ways. If he does, of course, Iran gets to keep on doing things too. So that also complicates things a bit. But he doesn't I don't think he's taking advice from Netanyahu and nor should he probably, as I say, that's in Yahoo. Has his own interest. But again, no one in his administration, no one in Congress who's a serious person who can give him counsel or give him constructive criticism the way McCain did with Bush from within the same party in 2004, 2005, 2006. So it's yeah, it's a little we're depending on him and as he likes to say, and he's arranged it this way in his second term, him alone. Right.
- [26:27]
Andrew Egger
Yeah. Yeah. So on that extremely fortifying, gratifying, compelling note, let's turn the page on the war. For the time being, we have one or two other quick things to talk about. I should say, as I am always forgetting to say, because we're still so new to this Morning Chaser business. That's what this is. This is Morning chaser. I'm Andrew Egger. That's Bill Kristol. We write the Morning Shots newsletter and we're going live on Tuesday mornings to talk about the newsletter, talk about what's in the news. Thanks to you guys out there who are, who are watching, who are following along. Hope you'll subscribe to our feed. Let's turn real quick to a different story. This has been kind of a running joke for the last couple of weeks in the Morning Shots slack channels and things because I personally am getting more and more obsessed with a bunch of different AI related stories, specific ones that are going on right now. But I keep not being able to write about them because there's this war going on and it seems pretty important that we continue to talk about it. One thing that we did very briefly note in the newsletter this morning is the latest development in the kind of standoff between the Defense Department and the AI company Anthropic, which if you've been following along at all, you know, Anthropic has been a longtime defense contractor. They wanted the Pentagon to continue to agree, as the Pentagon had agreed in the past, not to use its AI models to conduct mass surveillance on Americans or to pilot autonomous weapons systems. The Defense Department pretty recently decided those those red lines weren't going to fly anymore, tried to pressure Anthropic to drop them. Anthropic would not drop them. So the Pentagon tore up its contract with Anthropic and additionally decided to label Anthropic what's called a supply chain risk, which means that the company can no longer even contract with other defense contractors on government business. The latest development in this came yesterday morning because Anthropic finally sued the Pentagon, and not only the Pentagon, but in fact, basically every branch of the government and a bunch of cabinet secretaries in their official capacities, basically saying that this was targeted political retaliation for affected speech and that a court should essentially forbid them from continuing to enforce this supply chain risk thing. So that's a story that's going on. But I just wanted to talk a little more, just sort of broadly with you, Bill, about AI as an issue going into not only the midterms, but also into the next presidential elections. I think we've talked about this a number of times, that this is sort of coming a little bit out of nowhere to be maybe like one of the big defining. I mean, probably not. Maybe perhaps the defining political issue of the next political era of like, how, how governments and parties are going to respond to, you know, increasing the promise of AI but also the risks and the sort of economic destruction that is threatened by this stuff. So let me just give you one NBC headline here which maybe we can throw up. Politicians are starting to pay a lot more attention to the plight of white collar workers. Blue collar workers have been at the center of political messaging for years. Politicians meet with waitresses at a diner to pitch raising the minimum wage, tour a factory to spotlight job growth or tell stories of their families. Hardscrabble bonafides. Lately, though, it's a different group that is starting to sort of like sound the alarm. Hey, what about us? It's these white collar professionals and we have guys like Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, we have people like Bernie Sanders and California Governor Gavin Newsom, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley. There's like sort of this bipartisan coalition of people who are starting to make it more and more their brand to sort of say, hey, this AI stuff is going to have a lot of negative effects and we need to do some policy work on that. So I don't know. Bill, you were telling me that you have had some recent experiences in the AI policy space that you were wanting to talk about.
- [30:19]
Bill Kristol
Well, just a couple, briefly. And then you should probably say a word about the piece you've been promising, but keeps getting bumped by the war. But I still think people would be very interested to hear more of a reporting piece on what's happening in a particular state legislature. Two experiences I'm on one zoom call occasionally with more political politico types, Democrats mostly, and let's cover a bunch of issues, sort of trying to share notes on what we think is what's up, what's now, what's happening. And suddenly in the last two, three weeks, these people who I think are intelligent and have their finger on the pulse much more than I do, more like Sarah in terms of really knowing what's going on in focus groups and looking at the polling said AI has just come out of nowhere to become a huge concern. Both the economic issue that you mentioned, but also broader issues. In fact, in some states, the issue of grok sexualizing girls and boys I suppose too, and women particular though, has become a big political issue. With legislation has been introduced. AI is pouring in money to try to defeat it, to try to defeat state level curbs on them doing anything or holding them liable, I think is the way they try to do it for, you know, exploiting younger, you know, underage people and so forth. And, and AIs put a lot of money into both parties. But actually the popular wave of kind of concern about this has been so great that at least in a few states has overridden the money so far. We'll see if that happens continues. We'll see if it happens at the federal level. But so I think it's, it's, it's the economic side of it, but also the kind of broader cultural and social side. Second and final sort of anecdote is so occasionally I go to a very informal get together of sort of think tank public policy types and sometimes there's a topic that's proposed, but it's very, it's informal and people have been around for a while mostly. And so the topic last night was what about the economics of AI? And there Were two think tank economists there who gave very intelligent, very brief presentations. I say one of them thought things would be fine. On the economics, we're always very worried about these jobs, whether it's blue collar or white collar. And eventually people get other jobs, you know. And there's a lot of evidence over a lot of centuries now of technological breakthrough that on the whole these things sort of work out okay. We all end up wealthier. Now, the transition of that. That on the whole covers a lot of ground, right? As we've seen in the US in the last 20 years, you can make an argument that people are wealthier and most people are, including even people who lost manufacturing jobs. But the disruption and the effects in the short and medium term and the psychological effect almost sometimes, as in Britain in the 1850s. No one doubts that Britain in 1890 was much wealthier than Britain in 1820 or something, but went through an awful lot in those years and so did other nations and a lot of political turmoil and social turmoil as well. So anyway, the economists were actually the least worrisome people because then the conversation drifted into a much broader conversation about AI and how it works. Who is using it, is anyone, what experience do we have. What came clear to me, and I say this as someone who's used it, really not at all. And need to, I think, start doing, learning much more. The people who knew the most about it were by far the most impressed by how fast it's moving and how quickly it's developing, particularly if you are willing to pay for the more for the expensive kinds of AI on your phone, not the kind of starter ones. They're both huge fans of it in the sense that some of them are getting work done. As one woman said to me, I'm getting stuff done in five or 10 minutes. That used to take me two hours in terms of kind of routine writing grant proposals and so forth, you know, anything that's at all routine. But. And this is the more interesting part to me, and I don't know if you've had much experience with this with you or your peers. I mean, that also the more sophisticated stuff is now at a whole different level and the interaction with. With Claude or whoever you choose to interact with, whichever AI quasi human you choose to interact with. And actually we had a little demonstration of. She said, let me just show you. And she put her phone on the table there, there about 10 of us around kind of a table and had a long conversation, not long, I mean, three or four minute conversation with Claude where they. Iterated to tell me what you think about X. I mean, some study in social science, you know, well, what do you think are the best counteractions or what do you, what conclusions do you draw from this back and forth about some dispute about public policy? What would you suggest we look at next? Where do you think this might. I mean, the degree to which Claude was making intelligent and interesting points and sort of his own points. If I could put. I mean, it wasn't obvious that it was just, you know, synthesizing what was already out there. It was a little freakish. So I am on the freaked out side of AI and I. But I also think it's foolish. I mean, it could be wildly helpful and wildly dangerous at one and the same time.
- [35:08]
Andrew Egger
Yeah. And I think that kind of gets at it. Let me, I'll make this point. I should also say if there's anybody out there who wants to pepper us with, with some questions, you can throw them in the chat on YouTube or on Substack. We can do a few of those here in a minute. But I think you've hit on it there like the whole ball game, right? Is that the upscale and the downsides are both gigantic. They are both very vague because we are so much still right at the very, very, very beginning of the on ramp as far as this technology is concerned. Even the people who program it don't really understand fully how it works or what it's capable of or what's likely to come next. But you are right. I mean, I think, I think for people out there, if you perhaps formed your opinions of generative AI a couple of years ago and it was sort of first coming onto the scene and it was bumbling and it was, it was obviously stupid and making a lot of obvious errors. And you know, there were a lot of news stories about, you know, lawyers getting caught with their pants down because they had relied on an AI for some of their research and it had hallucinated a bunch of studies. These problems have not gone away, but they have been controlled for much, much better. And the sort of ceiling that a lot of people assumed would immediately materialize for this technology just hasn't appeared. And in fact, the capabilities have accelerated over time rather than slowing down. And that's true sort of across a number of different fields. So it's going to be a massive, massive thing. And the question is, what are we sort of as a people going to do about it and how is it going to, how are we going to try to blunt some of the harms as A matter of public policy without strangling the technology in the crib, which is another thing public policy can do. I have some worries about that. Let me throw up this NBC poll because I think this is really just sort of evocative of just how much of a no man's land this is politically right now. I mean, you look at this is just NBC asked a bunch of voters a week or so ago, which party do you trust more across a whole suite of different issues? And it's all stuff you'd totally expect. Republicans are more trusted on border security and crime and immigration, and Democrats are better on constitutional rights and democracy and health care. And they're tied on the economy, which is its own whole thing. But we don't need to get into that right now. But wait, bring it back for one more second because the last thing in there dealing with artificial intelligence, total outlier, total anomaly. Not only is there no difference between the parties, but nobody trusts either of them. Them. It's 19% for the Democrats and 20% for the Republicans. Nobody has a clue how these parties are going to shake out in their approaches to AI. But increasingly it is a thing that everybody is more and more worried about. So there's this enormous sort of latent political energy around this topic, this enormous latent economic energy around this topic. And we have no idea what's going to happen in the next few years with it. But we have some inklings of what's happening right now. So let me just real quick turn to this, this Reuters story about this bill that's going through the legislature right now just came out of committee in New York. New York has proposed a whole suite of sort of state level AI regulations. This is one that has caught my eye. I'll just read here. A proposed law working its way through New York's legislature would bar artificial intelligence chatbots from impersonating lawyers and other licensed professionals in the state, opening up AI platforms to lawsuits by users. The bill, whose sponsor called it the first of its kind in the country, would bar AI chatbots from giving substantive responses and offering advice that if taken by a natural person, would constitute the unauthorized practice of law. So essentially what we have here is Republicans and conservatives have argued for a long time about the need for what you might call occupational licensing reform, which is that there is a whole sort of wide class of sort of different professions who sort of operate as cartels by, by requiring a license from the government to be able to practice that sort of profession or even sort of give advice that's related to that profession. For some of these professions, it makes more sense than others. Right? I mean, I think we are all happy that lawyers and doctors are professionally licensed. There are a lot of professions that occupational licensing reform advocates like to bring up about, for instance, you know, beauticians, hairdressers, needing to go through like a big sort of certification process. We can. People can argue about the ins and outs of that, but essentially what this bill is saying is that if the government requires a license of you to practice it as a human being, we need to sort of wall off chatbots from giving any sorts of advice in these fields at all. I think this is a gigantic mistake of a bill. I think it basically, what it really points to, as far as I'm concerned, is the sort of blinkered thinking of the legislatures and just the ways in which our currently constituted legislatures are not equipped to deal with sort of this new technology in new ways. Basically, they're saying, well, gosh, here's this insane sort of like genie in a bottle that we now. That's now sort of come upon us. We have to figure out how to deal with it. How are we going to deal with it? Well, let's just sort of apply the same old sort of licensing cartels to the output of the genie as we've been applying to people for all of this time. I don't know. I just think like this. If this is the quality of the work that we are going to get in terms of legislative approaches, I mean, I could go on about all the sort of, like, different downside risks of all this. It's not even necessarily possible to just sort of forbid an AI from weighing in on anything related to the law or to medicine or any of these sorts of things. And the fact that the private right of action that's in there, you know, not only, like, if. Not only are they forbidden to give it to you, but if you sort of trick an AI bot into giving you medical advice, you can then sue the company. I mean, it's a really hostile law in a lot of ways. I mean, I just think, like, again, we need regulation here, we need some legislative thinking here, but this dog is not going to hunt. This is the sort of thing that is likelier to just sort of strangle the whole thing in the cradle. So I'm against that. I don't know how you feel about it.
- [41:10]
Bill Kristol
The only thing I'd say differ with maybe is I think it's very unlikely to strangle it in the trade. I think it's going to Be foolish and ineffectual and maybe costly and create stupid lawsuits and slow down the adoption in some areas. But I actually think, I think it very much illustrates the point you want to make this law, which is the system, the political system, the public policy world even hasn't thought seriously about this in either way. That is, for now, the Trump administration position is just, it's the Wild west. That's great. Just go for it. We have to fight with China so we can't curb anything. And I think that's really nuts. And the idea that you have to depend on the particular CEO of one company to maybe stop certain uses by the Defense Department is kind of crazy, as you've written, actually in warning shots. So on the one hand, the kind of let it all go is kind of crazy. I think the efforts to stifle it are probably more foolish than dangerous in the sense that, as I said, in terms of strengthening the cradle, but some could be dangerous or the side effects could be foolish becoming dangerous. So I don't want to minimize that either. You know, you earlier said in passing something I think is very important and really is a nice illustration of where we are, which is the, I mean, it's almost this textbook case study. I mean, you get this massive technological breakthrough which is accelerating, which isn't true of a lot of some breakthroughs. You get big breakthroughs and then they're kind of stable. I mean, the automobile was a huge change for the horse. Automobiles today, such a huge change from automobiles 20, 40, 60 years ago, not so much. You can build the highway System in the 50s, it has to be updated but still usable today. Right. I mean, that's sort of a kind of technological change that a society can manage, very disruptive and then slows, calms down. I guess eventually we could get to that highway system situation with AI, but we're so much in the initial disruptive and acceleratingly disruptive stage. That's when the system is going to be the slow at its worst because it doesn't know how to deal with it. Now, the good news might be, if I wanted to put an optimistic spin on what you've been saying, what you've been describing correctly is this is sort of what it looks like when a political and social system at a social fabric even has to deal with something that's totally out of nowhere and moving extremely fast. You can't expect people are just going to be befuddled and somewhat foolish and knee jerk. And one libertarians will say every effort to ever curb anything never Helps. It always works. And the rules will say, well we have these occupational licensing rules, let's make sure we protect those. And both are not really addressing the issue. I mean, that would be the question going forward, right? Do we have a system that's flexible enough, that can learn enough, that's as we have in the past sometimes I think adapted and adjusted enough to deal with this problem in a more intelligent way. There'll still be huge debates and disputes, but we need to have much higher quality debate on this. And the Trump administration is probably not going to help that a lot. Congress is dysfunctional. There are other places these debates can happen than the executive branch or Congress, but usually there's more serious. Now maybe serious work's happening in the executive branch below the surface and we'll learn about it in three years, if not today, but anyway, but it is, it's a, it's maybe a particularly worrisome time to have this massive thing explode onto the scene.
- [44:24]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, one thing that's kind of funny is we had a big, a big sort of heap of below the surface executive branch policy work around us last year in the Trump White House and they put forward this AI policy plan that was very pro business. It was basically, we need to unleash these labs, we need to give them the capacity to grow and figure out ways to help them do that in this race against China. And it is some of the very people who wrote that AI policy who are now some of the loudest, most dismayed critics of the way that the White House has picked this big fight with anthropic. So that's a whole interesting other side of things we don't need to get into. Let's do a couple of quick questions here before we split the. From the simulation 9651 isn't that interesting. From the simulation 9651 isnn't outsourcing our decision making and critical thinking to AI the final slippery, the final slippery slope. I think this is an interesting question and I think it kind of gets to one thing I've been thinking a lot about recently, about what it means to sort of like educate for AI right now. And I think that one thing that we have consistently seen is an issue with these technologies that have burst on the scene. We've talked a lot about Internet literacy and the problems with disinformation and misinformation in recent years and the way that the Internet can be a really potent tool and it can also completely one shot your brain and ruin you if you are not careful with how you use it and if you are not sort of discerning in your approach to it. And AI is completely the same way, right? I mean, there are a lot of horror stories that are coming out all the time, not just about sort of like these, the worst, worst, worst case scenarios. Like a person, you know, gradually fell into this parasocial relationship with one of these chatbots where they gradually convinced them they were living in a simulation and they were actually sort of an aspect of the Divine, and then they needed to go, you know, blow up an airport and then, and then kill themselves. I mean, like, there's horrible stories about these sorts of edge cases happening right now where people just completely give themselves over to this non existent parasocial relationship. There are also much more systemic versions of that that are not that horrible, but that. I mean, kids in schools are using AI now and they are outsourcing an unbelievable amount of the workload to these bots. They're not learning. And in fact, not only are they not learning the sort of material that's put in front of them which the writing about is supposed to help synthesize for their minds, but they are also teaching themselves a specific habit of mind that is just put it all off on this robot and he'll do it for you. And what was the point of you doing it anyway in the first place? And these are also extremely unhealthy ways to use these products. If you talk to people who use them professionally and who use them professionally in a way that is actually net plus that they feel like it's a force multiplier. They are not outsourcing really anything almost. I mean, they're outsourcing tasks, they're outsourcing a lot of busy work. They are letting the AI collate a lot of sort of raw material for them. And they are also. There's almost like a dialectic, right? There's a discursive approach where you're bouncing ideas off the chatbot and the chatbot's bouncing ideas back off you, and you're bouncing ideas back off the chatbot. And it actually is kind of a force multiplier is the way that they describe it. But it is very much not a turn off your brain and let the God in the machine think for you. That's where people start to get into trouble. Do you have thoughts on that, Bill, or should I move to the next one? One?
- [47:48]
Bill Kristol
Well, just the Internet's interesting. I mean, an AI, an AI juiced Internet, certainly AI juiced social media, will compound all the problems we've seen with sort of old fashioned Facebook and old fashioned, you know, X and so forth and is doing it as we speak. Actually, someone at one of these discussions had a nice formulation which I won't get quite right, but that it may be that 50 years from now we'll look back at the Internet as kind of the early stage, very preliminary stage of AI that, you know, the Internet's not the big thing in which AI is just kind of juicing up. AI is the thing. And the Internet was kind of a pre, you know, pre AI, Google search and obviously all that kind of stuff, kind of a primitive version of AI.
- [48:32]
Andrew Egger
So yeah, yeah, we cannot stress enough how little we know about the future. I'm with you on that point. It's crazy. It's crazy. I mean, like, you're totally fair.
- [48:42]
Bill Kristol
It's not, I mean it's not easy to know that much. And it says that it's moved so fast and really was introduced basically what, 2022. So now some people knew about it ahead of time earlier if they worked at one of the key companies. But I think this is probably what it always feels like at the very beginning of these revolutions. Probably what military analysts thought when the tank just was coming on the scene in World War I and they were like, well, I don't know, these just like horses that we should. We use them the way we use horses, but they're like a little bigger and. Yeah, I mean, I don't know. But I think I totally agree with you in the sense that it's such early days, but it's moving so fast that it's a little hard. Normally in early days you might say, well, let it play out for five or 10 years. Right. I mean we'll figure out later on. I don't know, I'm making this up. And maybe when the autos came in first. Okay, well, most people still aren't using horses and horse drawn carriages and you let the autos get on the streets as well and then you sort of had a little time to figure out, well, I don't know what kind of streets work for autos. And you know, do we have to have different situations that we have for the horses and so forth? I don't know how much time we have here. I think that's what's so scary about this.
- [49:49]
Andrew Egger
Yeah, yeah. Let me, let me hit a couple other questions here. Thoughts on energy and the ethics surrounding this. From Figment 5, thoughts on energy and the ethics surrounding how we all don't agree on how AI is being used and how energy and water is being wasted. To make pretty pictures. This is a very, very common view. The water thing actually from what I have heard and seen and talk to people in the know, the water thing is overstated. That's a little bit of a canard. They, the, the, the, the water use is, is less significant than a lot of people have made it out to be in part because it does not sort of despoil the water in any way. You know, they're, they're using a certain amount of water but not on, I mean not compared to a number of much more water intensive industries. These data centers and, and the water that, that comes out is no more polluted than the water that goes in because it's just being used for cooling. The energy thing is a little different. Obviously these, these, these data centers are a massive energy suck. The White House has actually been doing, I will say a good, a good policy thing real recently in the last couple of weeks in this one field where they have been sort of encouraging and doing a little more than encouraging some of these AI companies to pick up some, some of the costs, more of the costs than they were already picking up for the energy in their, in their areas. And that means more than just buying the electricity that goes in but, but also doing, doing some work to ensure that the, that you know, energy costs are not rising enormously after data centers go into communities. And then beyond that there's just all the normal energy policy questions. Right. It's like, well, should, should they be smushing all of these renewable energy? Probably not. Should they be investing in, in more renewable forms and even like sort of in theory scalable renewable forms like nuclear energy? Probably they should. It really does look like there is almost no limit to the amount of energy that we could be pouring into these things in the next couple of years in order to just make the. I mean there's basically experts in this talk about basically a bottomless thirst for compute energy for this technology in the years ahead. So the more energy we have, the more energy we'll use and the more we're going to need. Let me do one other quick question.
- [51:58]
Bill Kristol
I should go here Andrew, because I've got a something with Sarah that she's going to kill. Well, let me do one quickly. Two minutes. Two minutes.
- [52:06]
Andrew Egger
Holy cow. We go, we've gone for 50 minutes already. Sorry about that. We're long winded. We're going to, we keep saying we're going to make these shorter. Jessica Fillion, how do you think about the tension between holding big tech accountable for AI harms and making sure regulation doesn't just end up locking in the dominance of companies like Google, Microsoft and OpenAI? It seems like heavy compliance costs could actually protect incumbents more than rein them in. So how do we regulate in a way that's genuinely protective without accidentally crushing smaller players and new competition? It's a great question. People are talking about that a lot. I can't weigh in on it hardly. Except, I mean, I would just say it's a really good question.
- [52:38]
Bill Kristol
But that is, you know, that's a very sensible question and it's a question we've dealt with in other areas. And in theory at least, the system should be able to balance obviously regulation with innovation and also not simply make it favor early movers or existing industries as opposed to new ones. Again, these are trade offs that we deal with in lots of other areas. You don't always deal with them well, but I hope, honestly it's a good question, but I would say I hope, honestly the debate remains at that level, which I think is sort of manageable and not at the scarier level that I think we could end up with at pretty soon. Just to end on an appropriately dark and gloomy note. Not necessarily gloomy, but the upsides are of course in medicine and other areas are so great as well. But it is, I'm unnerved by just what a big deal I think it's going to be.
- [53:28]
Andrew Egger
Yes, we are going to keep talking about it. We're going to keep hitting it a lot. And that I will use as an excuse right now to pull the plug on this conversation. I mean, we're going to be talking about this so much. It is huge. It's an era defining technology and we don't know what's going to happen with it. But we'll call it there for now, I'll say one more time as we walk ourselves out. I'm Andrew Egger. That's Bill Kristol. We write the Morning Shot newsletter for the Bulwark. Thanks for watching. Thanks for tuning in on YouTube and on Substack. We hope that if you are not already subscribed, you'll head over to the bulwark.com and get our daily morning newsletter, which is free. A lot of stuff at the Bulwark is free. Ours is free. And as well as many of our other, you know, sample, sample our platter, go through the buffet, go see what interests you over there. Thanks for watching. We'll be here again next Tuesday, and we'll see you then.