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This is an iHeart podcast, Guaranteed Human.
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Welcome to Newt's World podcast on the iHeart podcast network. You know, one of the most interesting and I think understudied aspects of the Trump presidency is his passion for building things. Comes out of his childhood, of course, and the fact that his entire career he's been out there making money, building stuff, building hotels. He still has the only Hyatt Regency in New York City, a contract he cleverly got done very early in his career. He has always gone around building Trump Towers, Trump hotels, Trump golf courses. That shouldn't shock us. Now that he's back in the presidency, he is going around building things. All of which, by the way, will have some impact of Trump. My two favorites right now are the fight with the federal court, which I think is almost certainly wrong on the court side about whether or not Trump can build a new ballroom. He concluded that there was no place in the White House where you could have a big enough event to have people come and be dressed in really fine outfits and have a big evening. And so, in a Trump like manner, he tore down the East Wing and is now putting in a brand new, huge ballroom. He also, however, is putting an entire safe area below the ballroom. So once they had created the space, they talked to the military about, about how to create a really safe, survivable center for the presidency in the East Wing where it had never existed before. And that's going to be part of this. Now, what's fascinating is Trump, I think, intuited that if he followed the tradition, the tradition which, for example, Jackie Kennedy had followed when she created the Rose Garden, then it would all be paid for privately. So he didn't go to the Congress and ask for money. He simply raised the money to build this entire thing. And it's a lot of money. It's a big project. And now this federal judge is saying, well, you can't do this without congressional approval. But the fact is that Trump's lawyers had looked at all this, and historically, there is no congressional involvement in, in the White House if it's being done privately. So there's an ongoing fight developing here. And of course, being Trump, he already went out. He didn't ask permission, he didn't go to court first. He just went out, tore down the building and began rebuilding, which is something he's done in a number of his properties over the years. I think his attitude is, look, there's this huge hole in the ground and I'm prepared to pay to fill it. And if you guys want to, you know, mess around with it, you're going to have just a total disaster on your hands. So I suspect in the end, the court will be overruled. The Supreme Court will decide that. In fact, the tradition that presidents can do with the White House what they want to, as long as they pay for it, still stands. And Trump will, before he leaves office, have his brand new ballroom. In fact, I wouldn't be shocked to see them get it done in time to have at least one really big event before he goes back into private life. Meanwhile, in the last couple of days, his son Eric, who really runs the day to day company, has announced a mockup of the Trump presidential Library. Now, you may know that Obama has built a large and fairly ugly building in Chicago which kind of stands out. But Obama, never having been in construction, but being a lawyer by trade, lacked the understanding of what you really could get done. And if you look at the pictures, they're talking about putting up gigantic skyscraper which will of course have at the very top of it, Trump. So the Trump Library south of Mar? A Largo fits the tradition of Trump Tower, Trump National Golf Course worldwide. My guess is there must be 80 or 90 places now that have Trump's name on it. And he just cheerfully goes along doing it. And of course, the library again will be built with private funds. So he doesn't actually care what the political system thinks of it. But it's so perfectly, classically Trump. It's going to be big, it's going to be bold, it's going to be visible, and it's going to have Trump on it. Watching all this, if you have a sense of humor, sometimes it's pretty darn funny. Coming up, is AI hype or hope? Promise or peril? Existential threat or the next great technological leap towards prosperity and human flourishing? I'm going to talk with Wynton hall about his new book, Code Red. That's next.
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Before we had AT&T business Wireless coverage, our delivery GPS wasn't the most reliable. Once our driver had to do a 14 point turn to get back on route. A 14 point turn. An influencer even livestream the whole thing. Not good for business. Now with AT&T business wireless routes are updating on the fly and deliveries are on time. And the influencer did get us 53 new followers though. AT&T business Wireless connecting changes everything. I'm really pleased to welcome my guest Breitbart News, Director of Social Media, Distinguished Fellow at Peter Schweitzer's Government Accountability Institute, and former visiting Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution. He's joining me to discuss his new book, Code the Left, the Right, China and the Race to Control. AI Wynton, welcome. Thank you for joining me on Newts World.
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Oh, it's a pleasure to be with you, Mr. Speaker. Thank you.
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I think this is a very important book and you describe AI as potentially the defining national security challenge of the next decade. What do you mean by that?
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Mr. Speaker? I think one of the things that we have to realize is that AI we often hear described as a tool. It is a tool, but it's also political power and increasingly within the AI warfare space. I think it is going to become essential when we talk about beating China. I think we can beat China without becoming China, maintain our values. We're seeing the use of AI right now in Iran and certainly in the Maduro raid. And I think when you talk to folks in the military and leadership in the defense tech space, they really understand and explain that having that speed, efficiency and also as we move toward things like rsi, recursive self improvement, which is of course the AI potentially theoretically one day being able to constantly update and improve itself, that whoever gains that advantage is going to have full spectrum battlefield dominance in things like cybersecurity, encryption, hacking of missile systems, hacking of infrastructure. So we really have to understand that we are in a real sprint. And I think thankfully you're seeing a lot of leadership around that, whether you're talking about the War Department, President Trump and just military leadership who have long understood that technological innovation brings battlefield opportunities for us to keep not just our soldiers, sailors, airmen and Marines safe, but here at home as well as asymmetric threats start to Emerge.
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We've already seen a pretty big jump in both Pentagon spending and general government spending on AI related contracts. Are we doing enough in that direction?
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I think we should do more. And I think that, you know, one of the things that's important is, you know, a lot of the traditional warfare machinery that we've seen, we know that the costs are exceptionally high. And now with the AI innovation, that cost curve can be brought down and also the efficiency can be brought up. One of the advantages not just in the actual weapons themselves, but of course, is in the intel process for AI. Because if there's one thing that AI really excels in, as you know, is massive pattern recognition. And so you'll be able to take all of that intercepted communication, whether it's satellites or images, surveillance, and be able to sift and sort that in what would have taken months, if not longer, in teams of hundreds or thousand thousands. And you're now able to do that in a matter of days with just a smaller team. So it's one of those opportunities. I think it also extends. I have a chapter in this book about also on the domestic side, not just in the foreign space, of how we can use AI toward a conservative vision of a smaller, more efficient government as well. So I think there are opportunities on both sides of it, and I think that if we can expand on that in the military side, it will be to our advantage.
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AI has a potential both to be an empowering tool in dramatically improving a lot of what we do already do, but also potentially inventing, if you will, a virtually new battlefield of speed and complexity unlike anything we've ever seen before. And that these are actually kind of two parallel areas. That is, if you just get defense logistics, or you could get the defense accounting system, since they've never had a successful audit of the Pentagon. You know, with AI, you should be able to do that. But at the same time, a military which understands the rhythm and capability of AI may be able to generate combat capabilities in ways that would literally be unthinkable for people that don't have that kind of advantage. Aren't these two sort of parallel but very different applications of AI?
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They really are. Right. So on the one hand, you're saying in talking about the efficiency side of just the logistics. Right. The actual functions, and there I think there's no doubt. Right. That's almost in many ways like you would think of in a corporate setting or in a large institutional setting, being able to have just the rudimentary nuts and bolts of motion and logistics improve and I think there, there's no question on that. The second piece though, on the speed part of the actual battlefield, I think that becomes very important, particularly as we look at the race with China that we often hear about. I mean, you see that in two directions, right? One I think is just the economics of it.
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Right.
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The 1/3 of the S&P 500 is constituted around that Mag 7, the Magnificent 7, our biggest seven tech companies. And so just on an economic scale, we see that, we saw what Deep Seats R1 model did from China in that one day wipeout in American history for one single company and that was in Nvidia at about $600 billion. So on the economic side it becomes very important to win. On the military side though, we know that, you know, China has said and put down a marker from 2017 to 2030, they want to have be dominant in this space. So you're absolutely right that we can gain those efficiencies. But if we have that leadership push to really accelerate on the military side, both in terms of logistics as well as battlefield dominance and I think all that accrues economically from your research, how
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many countries are potentially at the cutting edge of developing artificial intelligence?
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Yeah, there are many players, but thankfully right now the American enterprise labs are in the lead and we will hope to maintain that lead. China is usually referred to as the major dominant competitor in that space in that regard. And they really are right. It's not that other countries don't have AI labs that are efficient and are doing good work, but honestly, quite frankly, their regulatory schema has really slowed those other countries who have pursued a more regulation heavy approach as opposed to our lighter touch with that now China doesn't really have to worry. Xi Jinping sort of has a one way decision making chain. Obviously we do not want to pursue a CCP authoritarian style surveillance state or anything like it. But nevertheless, that's why we often hear, you know, leaders like Sam Altman, Mustafa Suleiman, Dario Amadei and others frame it around China because they do know that that's their main competitor.
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It strikes me that one of the side effects of AI may be that it actually empowers kind of mid level countries with levels of capability they could never have gotten otherwise. I'm wondering to what extent we're going to see sort of mid sized countries actually have very formidable military by the application of this kind of artificial intelligence.
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Yes, Mr. Speaker, I mean you're the ultimate historian and you could probably explain it even deeper. But one of the things you're Hitting on is so important. The democratization of artificial intelligence is going to be a force multiplier for people that are either restrained because of scale of technological limits and, or budgetary limits. And so in that way it becomes a catapult, right? It gets you more for less. It helps you to be able to do more with less. And that's both militarily as well as in things like, like education, for example. I mean, having AI tutors for a developing country for a $99 tablet and having the ability to have machine learning improvements, that's going to really give gains and real opportunities there as well. So I think you're exactly right. Now the darker side of course is it also will potentially that democratization, that bringing that cost scale down and access will also obviously enable the potential for non state actors to use AI. Whether you're talking about the propaganda side and deep fakes which we've just been seeing right now happen in real time, or the actual building of biological chemical weapons. When you have PhD level intelligence and an unmetered level of intelligence, relatively low cost, with reasoning models and advanced models and AI, then you would have, if you had determined, you know, jihadist forces or things of that sort of greater fears. The other thing of course is with drones and facial recognition technology now you're able to do what would have taken a 10x component in budget and skill levels for far less. And so it really is going to be like, you know, fire. You can either help warm a civilization or burn it down. Who uses it and how they decide. But you're absolutely right. Those middle and lower tier countries or actors or groups, they're going to now have a lot more power for a lot less money.
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Next we're going to discuss the power of artificial intelligence in modern warfare. I look at things like the Ukrainian use of underwater drones. You have a $50,000 drone taking out a 13 million dollar ship. It's something we have to worry about. I mean, we've had a tendency to go to very, very big, very, very expensive ships and we only have a handful of aircraft carriers. If you suddenly run into an opponent who has an ability to get through your various defenses, and part of the challenge there is cost. I mean there are drones out there between 5 and $50,000 being shot at by missiles that cost a million dollars, you can't sustain that exchange rate.
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That's exactly right. Palmer Luckey at Anduril talks about that a lot. When you look at how much money if, like you say, if you're spending a million dollar missile to knock down something that you know is $50,000. That math doesn't work in your favor very long. And I think it also encourages us to really stay at that bleeding edge and realize that we've got to innovate in these spaces because this battlescape is moving very quickly.
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I'm going to give you two problems. One, that our procurement systems are designed to match the speed of evolution that we're seeing with artificial intelligence. And second, that artificial intelligence is potentially going to create an entirely new scale of mass that is the opposite of how we've designed our war fighting capabilities. These are both, it seems to me, really, really big challenges for the United States.
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I couldn't agree with you more, Mr. Speaker. You want to think of being able to sprint and chew gum at the same time, but I think you're right. The calcification of a lot of institutional sort of inertia that sets in prevents some people from being able to give up certain turf and so forth. I think we have to have this speed mindset that you're talking about. And I'm not suggesting for a minute that, you know, we're going to do away with any of what exists in totality, but I think we can be doing both. And when you look at the fact of how fast this is moving, I mean just look at Even with what AI's architects, the way they describe their own technology that Sam Altman says there is a private betting pool among the AI billionaires of who will create the first one person billion dollar company. Now what does that suggest to you? Right? It suggests that you can do so much more with so much less. And I think that if we know our ENEM are thinking that way, then we want to be thinking about that so that we can get in front of that curve instead of stay behind it. I think the other thing that you're talking about is even within the procurement process, right, let's take away weapons outside of it for a moment. Just the actual flow of being able to spot fraud, double billing, cost cutting, all of that. And I go through actually in code red, how we can do that, and we should do that, did a lot of research into that procurement process. That alone will provide enormous savings that we can then use to do the kind of innovations that you're talking about or put back into general budgetary usage. So I think that we've got to get in that mindset. I mean, one of the things I have been a little bit encouraged by the President's AI action plan that we saw the 2025 AI action plan that came out gave very specific pillars inside of that plan. And they were talking about this need to be able to move quickly on this because nothing matters more our national security for the safety of our country and certainly our soldiers, sailors, airmen and marines. So we, I think, recognize this has to happen. I think it's going to really take people like yourself and others who are able to speak that language with authority to really explain this 5D chess matrix and why we need to be doing this.
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When you think about all that, a couple big issues as you know. One is this question about truly autonomous weapons. Given your studies, where do you come down on the development of genuinely autonomous systems?
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Well, I would love your historical background. One of the fascinating things that comes through in the research is, you know, autonomous weapons, depending upon how you're defining autonomous weapons, have been around for a long time. And one of the things that Palmer Luckey says is that he had this great phrase, he says, you know, I don't think there's a lot of moral authority in a landmine. In other words, something that can be stepped on and activated without a human input, that is taking a human life or God forbid, you know, one of our own. So I think that the moral consequence needs to be there. I think that, you know, having a kill switch is very much a part of that sort of baked in situation. But being able to go to full auto. One of the things that was fascinating, when you really look at what defense experts will tell you and you study this, they say, look, if we're in a metaphorical gunslinger duel and one side has the equivalent of a metaphorical icbm, in other words, a full auto and you have a slingshot, if you have to stop and pause to pull that trigger and have the human decision, it's over before it's begun. And so we're going to get into this situation where having to pause and have the human green light. If you're up against an enemy that is in a full auto capacity, you've been neutralized already. I think that's where it's going. And I think that's the reality. Personally, my view would be that, yes, we have to be able to ultimately have kill switches on anything, even if you've decided to go into a full autonomy. And then secondly, I think that we have to recognize that the commander in chief has to have that ability. That's the reason why we haven't banned autonomous weapons and we've had autonomous weapons depending upon, again, how you're defining that For a long time. I think it's very scary to a lot of everyday Americans because we've been taught by Hollywood and Terminator and the rest of it that we're going to have these robots with laser eyes and so forth. And we're seeing that in the polls just last week. I'm sure you saw it, Mr. Speaker, the NBC poll. 26% have a positive view in America of AI. 46% of Americans have a negative view. And so I think there's a communication gap. I think people have to really clearly communicate and very openly handle some of these real, genuine ethical concerns left, right and center, because we have to understand this. You don't get to opt out of the AI race. It's already here. 99% of us use AI every day, even though only 64% of people don't realize they're using it because it's baked into the algorithms of life. So I think that Silicon Valley has got its communication work cut out for them because I don't think they've really explained a lot of this.
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It's, I think, very challenging to get across to people the sheer scale of change that we see coming down the road on every front. And one of the reasons that I thought it was really so important that you wrote Code Red, the left, the right, China and the race to control AI, you're describing what may be the most important change agent of the next half century. And people got to get that into their heads.
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I've written many books as a ghostwriter, and I honestly didn't want to write this book. I felt compelled to. I think that when you look at conservatism, you know, William F. Buckley, the job of a conservative is to stand at thwart history yelling stop. I think that sadly, someone, our side think that meant technology. And of course it didn't. You know, he was referring to the preservation of order and tradition and conservative values. So I think we've got to get our side coached up as conservatives. But even more than conservatives, I just think everyday people, this is a seismic shift. And the disruption we're going to see and the opportunity and the pitfalls and all that comes with it in the next five years is going to be unlike anything we've ever seen. And so the speed issue is going to be the real issue because when you look at the Industrial revolution, right, there was time, it took time to lay roads and build factories and electrification and so forth. Every person in America has a phone. And so the speed with which the proliferation of artificial intelligence can spread has been deeply accelerated. And I think, yes, people do learn over time how to adapt to disruption as the horse buggy goes the way of the car and the candle goes the way of the light bulb. But I think that if you're not prepared and understanding how the ground is going to shift around you in things like education, national security, economics and so forth, there's going to be a lot of opportunity for ideologically motivated people to do power grabs and to scare and disrupt a lot of people. So this was just a humble attempt to try to get people really thinking about these things.
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When you look at the Chinese effort, and I really want you to comment from the study you've done, to what degree is their ability to focus resources offset their inability to liberate entrepreneurs, to go out and take risk and be wrong?
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I think that they realize is that it goes back to what you were talking about earlier about the speed and cost efficiencies. China's mindset around AI is not as focused on this huge. We're trying to reach AGI, Artificial General Intelligence, or asi, Artificial Superintelligence. It's really about process and function. The way I like to tell people is China kind of thinks of it like a Toyota AI, like a Toyota. And we're looking at it like a Bugatti, right? Or a Ferrari. We're going for the huge wins and they're looking at supply chain improvements, efficiencies, things that aren't maybe as sort of razzle dazzle, capture the imagination, but in terms of actual functionality, have a lot more efficiency.
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Coming up, we're going to discuss how 99% of Americans are already using AI in their everyday lives. Wynton will explain what he means by that next. Can you say something which is I'm certain, certain true. You said that 99% of Americans already use AI. Walk us through that. I'm certain you're right, but I want to hear your version of what are the ways in which normal, everyday people are already immersed in artificial intelligence?
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Yes, Mr. Speaker, it's so important when I encounter my friends or family or somebody at church or something, and they have a sort of negative disposition toward AI. I just asked them, well, did you use a weather app today? Did you use a movie streaming service over the weekend with the family to watch a family movie? Did you use your GPS when you went fishing on that trip and you had to get around to go to the lake? And they say, well, of course, you know, of course I did. I said, well, guess what? You used AI and That's generally depending upon what application referred to as narrow AI. Doesn't necessarily mean they were using generative AI, but I think it helps people to understand. Look, we've had since 1950, since and McCarthy's term in the public facing term artificial intelligence. So artificial intelligence has been with us for a long time, but obviously it has progressed enormously in recent. The reason why it's 99% is because it's baked into the daily algorithms that power. And so when you see someone on Twitter X or on Facebook say I hate AI, the grand irony is AI is what's allowing them to communicate that message. What I was mentioning too is that 64% of people can't identify when they're using AI because they don't really think of AI in that kind of daily life. So I think it's important for us to understand there are real landmines and real challenges, ethically, morally, in security, personally, I think politically in the bias space is going to be a real big battle. But it's also important to recognize there are roses of opportunity and that maybe it's not as scary as you thought because quite frankly, you've been using AI for quite a while.
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You can get so used to things. I'm told I don't understand this exactly, but I'm told that there is an exquisite timing system worldwide which enables your automatic teller machine to work. And that if that timing system wasn't there, you literally couldn't match up around the world. I've been in places in rural Africa where I got money out of an atm. It sort of works. Which also, by the way, is a reminder that in certain kinds of conflicts you may have an attack on the very structure of how you live. Where the ATMs don't work, the phones don't work, GPS doesn't work. And that's part of why we have to continue to invest, I think, and being able to defend ourselves. I have to say this has been exhilarating. You've given me a whole bunch of new ideas. I want to thank you for joining me. Your new book, Code Red, the Left, the Right, China and the Race to Control AI is available now on Amazon and in bookstores everywhere. I really appreciate your taking the time to be with us.
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Thank you so much, Mr. Speaker. It's such an honor.
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And now I'm pleased to introduce a new segment to Newt's World where I answer listeners questions. To ask a question, please email me at newtinguish360.com as an inner circle member William asks, Mr. Speaker, my question is about Iran. The first objective should be the removal of all uranium. I suggest that the Israelis be given this task and that they get to keep the uranium that they capture. Qom is the theological capital. Removing the libraries and the scholars is essential. What is the support for the regime in the eastern part of the country among other ethnic groups there? It's a lot of different questions. William Let me just say first of all that I think we are either going to capture the uranium or we're going to bury it so deep that it will not be reachable in the next 20 or 30 years. And I think the question there is how risky is it to go in and get the uranium? Remember, it weighs a pretty good amount. It's difficult to handle, and you can't just run in the way we did with Maduro, pick up two human beings and hustle them out of the country. So it's a significant question. And there's a question of do you really want to take casualties if you can just stand off and bomb them so much that they're literally physically not reachable? Qom is the theological capital. I think it's very dangerous to get involved in people's religions, and it creates a level of emotion and a level of natural support that would not necessarily be there otherwise. So I'd be very cautious about any activity aimed at the religious centers. You ask about the regime in the eastern part of the country, there's a real question about that. A very high percent. Almost half of the people in Iran are not Persians. They come from Kurds, Azurbanis, and other ethnic groups, including some Balukis from Pakistan in the southwest part of the country. The potential is always there for them to spin apart and to decide that they want some kind of separatist movement. But at the moment, the dominant force is still the slight majority that are Persians. And I suspect on the one hand, they'd like to get rid of the dictatorship. On the other hand, they want to keep Iran as a single country. So it's a tightrope we're having to walk. I look forward to hearing from you, and you can ask a question by just emailing me at newtingrich360.com thank you to my guest, Winton Hall. Newt's World is produced by Gingrich360 and iHeartMedia. Our executive producer is Garnesey Sloan. Our researcher is Rachel Peterson. Special thanks to the team at Gingrich360. If you've been enjoying Newt's World, I hope you'll go to Apple Podcast and both rate us with five stars and give us a review so others can learn what it's all about. Join me on substack@gingrich360.net I'm Newt Gingrich. This is Newts World.
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This is an iHeart podcast. Guaranteed Human.