Trump's Crucial State of the Union, the Key Difference Between 2016 and 2026, and AI and China Challenges

Summary

Podcast Summary: Next Up with Mark Halperin Episode Title: Trump’s Crucial State of the Union, the Key Difference Between 2016 and 2026, and AI and China Challenges
Date: February 24, 2026
Host: Mark Halperin
Notable Guests:

• Jaime Moore, Principal at Cornerstone Government Affairs
• Beverly Hallberg, President of District Media Group
• Alex Roy, General Partner at New Industry Venture Capital

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Episode Theme

This episode centers on the deep, durable divides in American politics—specifically the legacy and ongoing impact of Donald Trump’s presidency—while also tackling urgent and complex issues shaping the nation’s future: artificial intelligence (AI) and competition with China, especially regarding electric and autonomous vehicles. Through reported analysis and wide-ranging expert discussion, Halperin seeks to unravel why the U.S. remains bitterly split and to spotlight under-addressed policy threats and opportunities.

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Table of Contents

1. The Enduring Division: Trump’s America (Monologue)
   • 2016 vs. 2024: Two Turning Points
   • After Trump: Ongoing Divisions
   • Bridging the Divide: Empathy & Understanding
2. Panel: AI Threats, Opportunities, and Political Paralysis
   • AI as an Economic and Social Challenge
   • Money, Lobbying, and Regulation
   • Educating Leaders and the Public
3. Deep Dive: America, China, and the Electric/Autonomous Vehicle Race with Alex Roy
   • The U.S. Falls Behind on Electric Vehicles
   • Autonomous Vehicles: Promise and Perception
   • Why the Messaging—and Public Policy—Is Failing

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1. The Enduring Division: Trump’s America ([01:02 - 26:40])

Monologue Highlights

2016 vs. 2024: Two Turning Points

• Halperin reflects on the unique political cataclysm of Trump's elections:
  • On election night 2016 (with Stephen Colbert), he called Trump’s win “the most cataclysmic event the country’s ever seen, outside of the Civil War, World War II, and including 9/11.” ([08:50])
    • “Cataclysmic doesn’t necessarily mean negative. … It just means a big change. It means a shock to the system.” ([08:54])
  • In 2024, on Tucker Carlson’s show, Halperin predicted a “greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country” if Trump won a second time. ([13:28])
    • “I think it will be the cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country. … Tens of millions of people will question their connection to the nation, their connection to other human beings, their vision of the future, and their children’s future.” ([13:28])
    • “Are you being 100 serious?” – “100 serious.” ([14:03])

After Trump: Ongoing Divisions

• Even after years of Trump’s presidency and re-election, Halperin notes, the nation is still “a house seriously divided” ([15:57]):
  • “Blue America … cannot understand why he’s supported now. … For them, Donald Trump’s the worst possible person to be president.”
  • “His approval rating is down, but he’s still supported by more than 45% of the country, probably around 45. Maybe that’s not nothing.”
• Halperin describes the persistent inability of the Democratic Party to respond with introspection; rather, after 2016, “The reaction was, no, let’s move further to the left … all of this opened the door for Donald Trump to come back.” ([10:07])

Bridging the Divide: Empathy & Understanding

• Halperin repeatedly urges empathy and mutual understanding:
  • “Both sides need to do a better job. … If you support the president and you’re listening to the show, try to have some understanding for why [Democrats] are so upset. Don’t just mock it.” ([18:41])
  • “We still lack any understanding. … There’s lots to come together around—we got to do it.” ([21:38])

Memorable Quotes

• “Every mental health professional I talk to, no matter their political orientation, says, yeah, business is booming. Lots of people need mental health help now.” ([19:52])
• “Try to understand the other side. Try to think about why there’s triumph in red America and discombobulation in blue America.” ([20:32])

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2. Panel: AI Threats, Opportunities, and Political Paralysis ([27:45 - 44:48])

Panelists:

• Beverly Hallberg (Republican strategist, District Media Group)
• Jaime Moore (Democratic strategist, Cornerstone Government Affairs)

AI as an Economic and Social Challenge

• Discussion opens with the scale and uncertainty surrounding AI.
  • Halperin: “Some outfit writes a paper about how AI is going to destroy the economy and the stock market takes a crash. I don’t think anybody thinks the Trump administration is going to lead us through this.” ([28:09])
• Moore: “A lot of the AI conversation right now is because people just don’t know what the future holds for AI. … The President has an opportunity to bring [tech leaders] together and have a serious conversation.” ([28:46])
• Hallberg: “Even the smartest people seem to be a little bit worried … this isn’t about what we’ve seen before with technology, where blue-collar workers were the ones thrown off the assembly line. We’re talking about white-collar workers not having a job.” ([29:47])
• Moore (on benefits and cultural shifts): “There are some wonderful benefits to AI, particularly in health care … but the thing you’re talking about, Mark, is the cultural shift this is going to have on our global economy.” ([31:53])

Money, Lobbying, and Regulation

• Halperin addresses the lack of financial balance in the regulatory debate:
  • “There’s no one going to spend money on the other side. … Tens of millions [will be] supporting an extreme … which is no state regulation of AI, limited federal regulation. What’s the check on that?” ([34:14])
• Hallberg: “I am a free market person, so I do think that the market addresses a lot of the concerns. … However, I know that there are security and safety concerns with this as well. … I do think innovation shouldn’t be stifled.” ([35:22])
• Moore: “These are the biggest companies in the entire world who have more money than God … they want the least amount of regulation as possible, both on the federal and state level.” ([37:07])

Educating Leaders and the Public

• Halperin: “Even the smartest people I know … constantly ask me questions or say, I don’t know the answer to that. … So what’s the solution?” ([38:38])
• Hallberg: “Become educated, hold more hearings, figure out what it is. … The parental controls are not good enough on these devices or on these systems.” ([40:08])
• Moore: “If I were a governor advising the governor, I will get these people on the phone as often as possible and asking these questions as much as possible, because the only way you can really get educated on this, if you’re asking the experts. And right now they’re the only experts.” ([41:13])

Optimist/Pessimist — Panel Wrap-up

• Moore on optimism: “Healthcare aspect … hospitals are using AI in wonderful ways to target cancer and heart disease.” ([43:22])
• Hallberg: “The ability to have a personal editor … helps other people too with collecting information, making sure grammar is correct. … It makes simple tasks easier so we can accomplish more.” ([43:48])
• Moore on worry: “What are we trying to do? Are we just trying to do these big technology pushes because it’s cool … I’m not sure what the real goal behind it is.” ([44:17])

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3. Deep Dive: America, China, and the Electric/Autonomous Vehicle Race ([47:18 - 73:40])

Guest: Alex Roy

The U.S. Falls Behind on Electric Vehicles

• Halperin: “Where do we stand as consumers, where industry stands and our competition with China? … All important topics that I cannot solve except with the help of one patriotic American. Alex Roy...” ([47:19])
• Roy, on U.S. exports: “The United States does not export many electric vehicles because we can’t build at scale at price points that make sense in foreign markets. … That market is dominated by China, the export EV market.” ([51:24])
• Roy, on China’s lead: “Tesla is the only American carmaker that’s positioned today to compete with the Chinese and automotive markets anywhere on earth.” ([52:34])
• Halperin: “What are the implications of the Chinese dominating electric car manufacturing?”
  Roy: “It’s a catastrophe for the American automotive industry ... they’re not architected to manufacture EVs at scale today at cost points and retail price points that can compete with the Chinese.” ([53:22])

Why Is China Winning?

• Roy: “The Chinese government has subsidized the Chinese automakers, created conditions which make it really advantageous to them and devastating for anyone else. … Unless the United States was to come up with a … Marshall Plan for American car makers, [we can’t compete].” ([56:43])

Autonomous Vehicles: Promise and Perception

• On autonomous vehicles in the US:
  • Roy: “The United States is the technology leader here. … Waymo and Tesla [are] at the forefront.” ([62:39])
  • Halperin: “Every time one’s involved in an accident, people get freaked out, but the data is quite clear—yes, there are accidents … but they’re so much safer.” ([62:39])
  • Roy: “For every incident, there is development on the back end to mitigate and eliminate that incident happening again. … Autonomous vehicles … are already orders of magnitude better than the majority of human drivers.” ([66:00])
• Roy on job impact: “The best analog would be elevators. … The total number employed by the elevator industry is higher today than it was at peak operator.” ([67:33])

Why the Messaging—and Public Policy—Is Failing

• Roy: “The industry has done such a terrible job being consistent and clear with its language that it’s really up to consumers to figure it out. … Consumers have brought their biases to the technology and it’s become politicized before it’s even fully deployed.” ([72:07])
• Halperin: “They should spend a couple million dollars trying to explain all this to people because both electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles are the future, and too many Americans see them as some sort of scary monsters as opposed to the future.” ([72:56])

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments (with Timestamps)

• On 2016 being “cataclysmic”:
  Mark Halperin: “Out of the Civil War, World War II, and including 9/11, this may be the most cataclysmic event the country’s ever seen.” ([08:50])
• On the mental health crisis of Trump’s America:
  Mark Halperin: “It will be the cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country.” ([13:28]) Tucker Carlson: “Are you being 100 serious?”
  Halperin: “100 serious.” ([14:03])
• On the future of U.S. EV sector:
  Alex Roy: “It’s a catastrophe for the American automotive industry.” ([53:22])
• On autonomous vehicles and safety:
  Halperin: “The Waymo is not tired. It’s not distracted. It knows the road perfectly because it’s basing it on data, not on, you know, eyesight.” ([65:00])
• On communication failure:
  Alex Roy: “The industry has done such a terrible job being consistent and clear with its language that it’s really up to consumers to figure it out.” ([72:07])

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Key Takeaways

• America remains deeply divided over Trump; the host urges both empathy and bridge-building, warning that the mental and social consequences of this schism remain profound.
• AI is causing both optimism and anxiety—potentially revolutionizing healthcare but threatening millions of knowledge-economy jobs; the government isn’t prepared and special interests are shaping the regulatory conversation.
• The U.S. is losing the global EV race to China, largely due to lack of strategic industrial policy and investment; major policy action would be needed to catch up.
• Autonomous vehicles are much closer to safe, wide deployment than most realize, but the public is wary—due to industry messaging failures and political polarization.

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For Further Viewing/Listening

• Alex Roy: Accessible at @AlexRoy144 on X, Substack, and other platforms ([73:19])
• Contact the Show: Listeners are invited to share feedback with Mark Halperin at [e-mail]

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Transcript

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[A]

You want to know what? Next up, I got one. Next up. Hi there. Mark Kalperin, editor in chief of two Way Live interactive video platform. And thank you for joining this show. Next up, glad to have you here as a nexter. Great program for you today on the State of the Union Day. We start out with a panel of two smarty pants, two great thinkers. Jaime Moore, he's a principal at Cornerstone Government affairs, former director at the office of the dnc, chair for the Democratic Party, and Beverly Hallberg, a Republican strategist, president, District Media Group and also a fellow at the Independent Women's Forum. We'll talk to them about my new obsession, which is what are we doing as a country, a society of people, about AI and the threats and opportunities that are there. And then Alex Roy will be here. He's a extraordinary guy with an extraordinary career who understands two things, again that I'm super focused on. One is electric vehicles and, and the other is self driving cars. There's an overlap there. Alex understands it all. And these are, these are two huge topics that just don't get enough conversation, enough discussion. They have to do with our future, our economy, our competitiveness in the world, including with China. So we'll talk all about that. But before we get to our guests in just a moment, my reported monologue on just the way Donald Trump inspires so many and depresses so many who, who has been a divisive figure for his entire political career. And I've been thinking a lot this week about on the State of the Union where we stand in the face of Donald Trump as the president of the United States, beloved by some and to say the least not beloved by others. I'm going to walk you through how I'm thinking about that this on this critical week when there's so much going on at home and abroad. All of that coming up. All of that next up after this break. Hey, let me ask you something. Do you own physical gold? Most people don't. And given the current state of the world, that is worth thinking about. Acre Gold makes it simple. You pick a plan that fits your budget, make monthly payments, and when you've accumulated enough, they ship you a beautifully designed 24 karat Swiss gold bar. Gold is up 70% year over year and central banks are still buying it at record levels. Smart money has been moving into hard assets for a good reason. It's legitimate. They've had subscribers stacking consistently for six years because once you hold it in your hand, you understand the difference between owning something real versus a number on a screen. Right now they're giving away two five gram Ancient Collection gold bars. Enter for free and subscribe to Gold at getacregold.com/mark. That's getacregold.com mark. All right, next up, my reported monologue. Usually when I give you my reported monologue, it's based on some intense reporting over a day, a two, two days a week. This is more than 10 years in the making. And it's a topic I've been thinking about since 2015, when I first started understanding that Donald Trump not just might be the Republican nominee and might be president, but had a pretty good chance. And he's been such a divisive figure. People on the left don't understand how Trump won not once but twice. People on the right understand full well how Donald Trump won and supported him, but they don't really understand the left's perspective on this. And so a lot of my reporting now is part reporting, part therapy session, as it's been for the last decade, as I talk to people who love Donald Trump and love what he's doing for America and to America and those who do, not to say the least. And I'm so, I'm so frustrated by the inability to bring people together. It's not really my job to do it, but I, I know, I know in my bones it'd be good for the country. Two television appearances of mine, or video appearances, I should say, one was on TV, one was on YouTube that I want to share. They kind of bookend this period at least through the last presidential election and, and then bridge into today. One was with Stephen Colbert on election night in 2016, and one was with Tucker Carlson shortly before the 2024 election. And in both cases, I said things that, when I said them, were treated with shock, were treated with, in some quarters, criticism, accusations of being hyperbolic or off base. But I think they both stand up. I think they both stand up and survive the test of time. Because Donald Trump's presence in our lives is something that I think we haven't really understood fully. Even people who think about it a lot, who are paid to analyze it, like me. This is a very difficult thing to get our arms around, to have tens of millions of people in America shocked, stunned, disappointed, upset by this presidency. And tens of millions couldn't be more excited, think he's the greatest president. Or even if they see the flaws in Donald Trump, think he was an absolute essential corrective to decades of liberal governance, both in government, but also in politics, places like universities and corporations and in Hollywood. This is so tough for me personally. I've alluded to this before, the divisions in my own life, in my family, my friends, in my profession. But I see it all around the country and people I talk to every day. I talk to them on two way. I talk to you all nexters who write in and who I see out in public. Just the level of division which existed in America before Donald Trump. It's part of how he got elected. But I want to talk about where we are now. A State of the Union with three years left in his presidency, with a very raucous midterm coming up, with lots of conversation here and elsewhere about who will be next in the White House after Donald Trump. I want to start with 2016 on election night, when I had been the subject for several weeks of criticism by people in the media and elsewhere for saying Donald Trump might win. We went into election night. The poll suggested he would not, but that it would be close. And on election night, I did a bunch of stuff. It really was a kind of a whirlwind. I started at Hillary Clinton's headquarters here in New York City at the Javits Center. I then left and went and eventually ended up at Hillary Clinton's hotel, where she was staying two blocks from Trump Tower, which some considered to be a bit of a troll, and hung out in the lobby there to try to do some reporting about what was going on inside her camp. Then went a few blocks away to 6th Avenue to the Hilton Hotel, where Donald Trump was having his election night event. And in between those stops, I went to the Ed Sullivan Theater and appeared on Stephen Colbert show. And by coincidence, he was doing a. He was doing like a live show throughout the evening. And just by coincidence, I was there when enough states were projected for Donald Trump that he'd win. I think Wisconsin was the one that was projected while I was literally on set with him. And it was clear Trump was probably going to win at that point. Not a sure thing, but it seemed like he was going to win. And Stephen Colbert basically was asking me to put in context what a Trump victory would mean for the country, how people would react to a Trump victory. This is what I said on election night 2016, shortly after it became clear that Donald Trump was going to be the 45th president. S2, please. Out of the Civil War, World War II, and including 9 11, this may be the most cataclysmic event the country's ever seen.

[C]

Well,

[A]

so cataclysmic doesn't necessarily mean negative. It just means a big change. It means a shock to the system. And I stand by what I said. I took a ton of criticism, as I suggested earlier, for saying that this would be cataclysmic, some because people thought it, saw it as I was saying it was something negative. I just knew from having traveled the country and seen the reaction to Donald Trump, both positive and negative, that this would be cataclysmic, that his first term didn't know at that point it would only be one consecutive term, would discombobulate so much of the country, would shake things up so fundamentally. And I stand by what I said that night. I think as. As horrible as 911 was, as much as it impacted the city where I live, as much as it impacted so much of the country, I really don't think it had its profound effect in society and how people think about America as the election of Donald Trump did in 2016. So he serves his term and then loses. People can debate all they want about the 2020 election circumstances, the role of COVID the role of changes in election laws because of COVID the roles of the social media platform, the roles of how the country saw Trump's first term, there's all sorts of debates about that stuff. But what I do know is that after he lost and the assumption was he would not be back, that he was done politically, that there was kind of a sigh of relief in blue America that said, okay, Hillary Clinton screwed that up. He barely won the first time, he didn't win the popular vote, but everybody's seen who he is and what he's like, and he'll never be back again. The Republicans won't nominate him. And if they do, we'll be so lucky as a Democratic Party to have Trump to run against. And of course, they then spent the intervening period trying to send him to prison, trying to keep him off the ballot, trying to repudiate everything he'd done as president, not giving him credit for things he'd done positive. And the Democratic Party went crazy. Woke. The reaction to Trump being president was not to say, well, let's, let's do some soul searching and see where the party was off track in 2016 and maybe try to maybe move more to the center. No. The reaction was, no, let's move further to the left. And Joe Biden and the Democratic Party during the four years Donald Trump were out, moved, Moved to the left, obviously, on immigration, moved to the left on a lot of cultural things, a lot of things having to do with dei, with corporations, with title titles that affected universities in various ways. All of this, all of this opened the door for Donald Trump to come back. And as I watched the 2024 election, I had a feeling even more intense than I did in 2016, because 2016 was, even for me, someone who thought Trump could win. A surprise. I didn't, didn't think for sure he would by any means. 2024, in, in not just looking at the polling data, but in thinking about the arc of the two parties and of Trump's leadership and of Joe Biden and the, the, the con that he and his team tried to put on America about his mental decline and then Kamala Harris and her weaknesses as a candidate. I went into election season, final days, more confident about Trump's chances than I had been in 2016. And I was concerned because, again, this was not the fluke of 2016, where Trump gets elected almost, almost in a lark, almost accidentally, and because of so many mistakes made by Hillary Clinton and so many actions by people like Assange and Comey and her own husband that, that produced a confluence that allowed Trump to win. This was different. This was. You've, You've seen what he's like as president. He was president for four years. Now you have a chance to have him president again. Up or down? Do you want it? And my concern, my concern going into Election Day was that Trump would win and that the country would be ill prepared to deal with it, particularly blue America, whose, whose connection to the country I felt could be severely damaged, should be almost severed if Trump won. So here's what I said in October of 2024 when Tucker Carlson asked me on his show, what would happen in blue America if Donald Trump won? I think it will be the cause of the greatest mental health crisis in the history of the country. I don't, I think tens of millions of people will question their connection to the, the nation, their connection to other human beings, their connection to their vision of what their future for them and their children could be like. And I think that will be. Require an enormous amount of access to mental health professionals. I think it'll lead to trauma in the workplace. I think there'll be some degree of. Are you being 100 serious? 100 serious. I think there'll be alcoholism, there'll be broken marriages. What? Yeah, they, they, they think he's the worst person possible to be president. And having won by the hand of Jim Comey and fluke in 2016 and then performed in office for four years and denied who won the election last time and January 6th, the fact that under a fair election, America chose by the rules pre agreed to Donald Trump again, I think it will cause the biggest mental health crisis in the history of America. And I don't think it will be kind of a passing thing that by the inauguration will be fine. I think it will be sustained and unprecedented and hideous, and I don't think the country's ready for it.

[C]

So. Mental health crises often manifest in violence.

[A]

Yeah, I think there'll be some violence. I think there'll be, there'll be workplace fights, there'll be fights at birthday kids, birthday parties. I think there'll be protests that will turn violent. I hope they're not. But I think there will be some, but I, I think it will be more, it'll be less anger and more a, a failure to understand how it could happen. You know, like, like, like the death of a child or your spouse announcing that, that, that, you know, your wife announcing she's a lesbian and she's leaving you for your best friend. Like a, like a, like a. Something that's, that's so traumatic that it is impossible for even the most mentally healthy person to truly process and incorporate into their daily life. I hope I'm wrong, but, but I think that. I think that's what's going to happen for tens of millions of people because they, they think that, that, that, that their fellow citizens supporting Trump is a sign of fundamental evil at the heart of their fellow citizens and of the nation. So how right was I? How right was I in October of, of 24? In some quarters, I'm giving credit for being very right. I don't think I was totally right, but I was a lot right. I was a lot right. And the reason I was a lot right was because, just like in 2016, I talked to a lot of voters in 2024 about how they saw this election, how they saw the prospect of Donald Trump winning again. And I talked to people who were going to vote for Donald Trump who saw this as a huge corrective, not just of the Biden policies on immigration and the economy, but of the failure of. To have a fair election, in their view, in some cases in 2020, but also because Donald Trump had been, in their view, shackled as president by various things, including the people he hired, and they wanted Trump unshackled, and they got. Have gotten Donald Trump unshackled. And in one short year, we've seen an extraordinary amount of change, foreign and domestic, but particularly on the domestic front. What he's done with Congress, what he's done with business, what he's done with universities, the media, the use of his office, tearing down the East Wing, changing the name of the Kennedy center, all these things that he didn't do like this in the first term have reinforced in. In the minds of so many people I talk to just how upsetting this is and, and how inexplicable they find the fact that he's supported. Okay, and why am I talking about this today? You know, I. I've been this on my mind now for over a decade. State of the Union. So many Democrats choosing not to go. So many Democrats bringing guests to the State of the Union purposely to troll the president, annoy the president so much on social media with Gavin Newsman, other Democrats using profanity, striking back at Donald Trump with the same level of vitriol and profanity that he uses so frequently in his pronouncements on social media and elsewhere. This is. This is a house seriously divided. It's a house seriously divided, and it's divided in asymmetrical ways. So many Democrats bristle when I talk about Trump derangement syndrome, and I get why they do. And not everyone who opposes Donald Trump has derangement. They have. They have their reasons, valid reasons in so many cases for. For vociferously opposing him on policy, on. On style, on. On what they believe is the most corrupt administration of all time. But under girding all of that is a. A something that. That is. It's rational from their point of view to be emotionally upset about this and, and the disconnect that it causes, even for all but a handful of Democrats, whether They have so called Trump derangement syndrome or not. They can't understand why he's supported now. His approval rating is down, but he's still supported by more than 45% of the country, probably around 45. Maybe that's not nothing. And, and it's a lot for, for because from their point of view, Donald Trump's the worst possible person to be president. And what I have found in asking people this week about the rest of the year, not about the midterms, we've talked plenty about that. We'll talk more about it. But how do you see the rest of the year for America where we face tough choices as a country on Iran, on, on Russia, Ukraine, on China, on Greenland, on the fentanyl crisis and then here at home about AI and about taxes and spending and all the issues, housing, all the things that we face. Ask, I ask people in politics and who are interested in the government and the country, how do we, how do we go forward like this together? And then sometimes people want to say, well, let's talk about post Trump. Post Trump's far away, number one. Number two, I don't think there's much to say about post Trump. I'm not sure what that's going to look like. But in the here and now in 2026, when I've asked people this week in both parties and again we're talking about pros and civilians, what are your hopes for the country? What do you think we can get done? How can we come together to grapple with AI which continues to be such a huge possibility for America and a apparel in the minds of the many and in reality, how do we deal with a unified position on China? Should we go to war with Iran? It's all freighted, it's all colored by this deep, deep concern on the left that Donald Trump is a menace, which for many of them is discombobulating to say the least. And then on the right, a, a belief that all of the dynamics, all the factors that got Donald Trump elected the first time and then reelected the second time, that all those things are still out there, that there's still too much woke, that there's still too much government control, still too much government regulation. I look at, I look at the things I said in 2016 and 2024 and I think I was so right. I was so, I was so aware of the division and yet almost nothing in our society is doing anything to change it. I try on two way I try here. I try to do my best to be an explainer, Okay, I can't afford doing what I do to have Trump Derangement Syndrome or to have the reality of Donald Trump as president give me a mental health problem. I can't. That'd be irresponsible to do. To do. To do either of this. But I also must be vigilant. Must be vigilant in explaining to people who are maga, just how upset people are. They see that, and I see this every day on Twitter. In particular, they see what they call Trump Derangement Syndrome. What they see the emotion of governors and members of Congress or just folks on X. They see their anger at the president. They're upset, and they mock it. They mock it. They. They look at it as weakness, and they delight in it. You know the phrase own the libs? They delight in that. What they don't try to do and what I'm asking all of you to do, if you support the president and you're listening to the show, is try to have some understanding for why they're so upset. Don't just mock it. Maybe stop mocking it. Maybe think about why are they so upset? Why has. Unfortunately, I was at least partially correct. Why has the president's reelection caused a mental health crisis in America? Every. Every mental health professional I talk to, no matter their political orientation, says, yeah, business is booming. Lots of people need mental health help now. And as a nation, I don't care what your politics are. You should have sympathy for your fellow countrymen and country women who right now are still struggling a year in here to Trump's second term. They are struggling to understand how the country could have done this. And then again, I'd ask people who are struggling with it, look for things you can like, look for things that, that are going on both with the Trump administration and outside that maybe you can be positive about or think about. Why are so many other people in the country positive about what's going on? That capacity to have empathy for the people who are suffering and for the people who are celebrating. Both directions. That is what. That is what we need to foster. That is what is missing. And when I, When I continue to watch, to see how upset people are, breaks my heart. I don't mock them, but I do think they need to do a better job. Both sides say to me, well, they don't understand. They're not spending the time understanding me. Both sides need to do a better job. So I'm asking all of you, if you're listening to my voice, watching the program, try to understand the other side. Try to think about why there's triumphants in red America and discombobulation in blue America over this. He's going to be president for three more years, ladies and gentlemen. It's time to try to make some peace over this. Time to try to reach a moment of intellectual understanding, emotional sympathy, end the mental health crisis and the cataclysm. Donald Trump won't be president forever, but he's going to be a president for a good long while. And we still lack any understanding. And we see it today on the day when the country should have a moment of unity around the US hockey team, both teams, and around the 250th anniversary of the country. There's lots to come together around we got to do it. Thank you for listening. All right, that wraps up today's reported monologue. Grateful to you for listening. Curious what you think? Send me an email nextup halpernmail.com Tell me what you think about this conundrum of America divided against each other and please share the program. Go to YouTube.com nextup halperin subscribe it like it. Send it to your friends. Let them know that you like the show. Ask them to listen. Do the same thing on the podcast format. Podcast platforms Apple or Spotify would love to get your you subscribing and set the automatic downloads but also tell your friends about it. Tell them to become Nexters. The automatic downloads aren't set for you. Please do that. Everyone who does is pleased that they do because they never miss an episode. They never have to. Remember every Tuesday and Thursday another episode drops and on YouTube the bonus content is there as well. All right, quick break and then next up when we come back, Jaime Moore and Beverly Hallberg will be here there. Next up, are you being lied to? 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All right, next up, joining me now to try to make sense of all the things I'm confused about, two people capable of doing just that, Beverly Hallberg, president of District Media Group. She's also a fellow at the Independent Women's Forum. And Jaime Moore, principal at Cornerstone Government Affairs, a former director of the Office of the DNC Chair. Grateful to you both for making time. Happy State of the Union Day.

[B]

Happy State of the Union Day.

[D]

Good to see you, Mark.

[A]

Hi, Ma. I'm so concerned about AI. I want it to be wonderful for America, for every family, every individual. And then on Monday, some outfit writes a paper about how AI is going to destroy the economy and the stock market takes a crash. And I don't think anybody thinks the Trump administration is going to lead us through this. So if you were White House chief of staff to President Bartlett or whoever, what would you think the proper role of a president is? To lead us through the elites and and people at large in America to lead us through this.

[D]

Yeah. Look, I think one thing that President Trump's been really good at is galvanizing the support of industry. And so I Think the first thing is bringing these guys, you have all of these tech sort of execs who have come to dc, come to the White House on various occasions. And so I think the President has an opportunity to bring this group together and have a serious conversation. A lot of the AI conversation right now, it's because, because people just don't know what the future holds for AI. They're not sure what these billion dollar investments will, will entail. They're not sure what jobs are going to be displaced or replaced by AI. And so if I were the President, I would bring these people to the White House and have a frank conversation about it and say, look, if we're going to, if we're going to displace 250,000 workers in the next two years or the next five years, where do they go? Can we use AI to help do some up tooling, upskilling, retooling and getting people different industry jobs? And so I think it starts with a conversation one and then secondly with a plan.

[A]

Beverly?

[B]

Well, I completely agree. You have to bring business in because I do not expect our elected officials on Capitol Hill to be AI experts. I know I'm not myself, so you have to work with the private sector on this. But here is my concern is we're seeing these doomsdays reports where even people who are very skilled and have built these AI models, where we're going from they're talking to us to doing things for us, it seems to be that these systems are able to manipulate and work on their own, obviously, but do things that was never expected. And so I think part of the problem is we don't know where this goes. Even the smartest people seem to be a little bit worried. And so I'm not sure exactly how you deal with that, other than completely agree you need to bring in the private sector to work on this because this is leading to a big concern that this isn't about what we've seen before with technology, where blue collar workers were the ones thrown off the assembly line. We were talking about white collar workers not having a job. We don't know exactly what that looks like, but we're looking in one or two years potentially. And these are the warnings that the white collar workforce is going to be upended.

[A]

All right, I love the way you both framed it, and you lead to this, this gap between, like this paper that got written that caused the market to go down. Like we, we're, we're the people, we need to take control of this. We can't just be repeaters of doom day doomsday scenarios. And if the people who people are worried about the combination of the scale of change this is going to bring, not just in terms of jobs lost, although that's huge, but the scale it's going to bring to all corners of our society, along with, as you be Beverly said, doomsday scenarios coming from some of the smartest people around. If government is not going to deal with that in a decisive way and it's going to be a challenge to do, we can't expect the private sector to do it. So are we all just sitting around, I say powerless, but passively not meeting the moment to explain this to people and to make sure that this channel's in a positive direction?

[D]

JAIME yeah, I think you're right, Mark. In some ways, yes, that's the simple answer. But I think we have to be a little bit more broad in the way we think about AI. And there are some wonderful benefits to AI, particularly in health care, particularly in some of these to Beverly's point, some of these white collar jobs that were there were entry level jobs have now become a little bit more automated. And so companies are taking advantage of that. So there are some good things that are coming from AI already. I think the thing you're talking about, Mark, is the cultural shift this is going to have on our global economy.

[A]

Yeah.

[D]

One, and then two, just a cultural shift on how we interact with each other, how we interact with our own jobs. And so there's so much uncertainty. While the government cannot be the the one driving the bus, they can be the facilitator and the convener. And so President Trump, who has said that he has a grand vision for this economy, I think he's got to use that vision and parse it out a bit around AI, particularly because of the workforce implications.

[A]

BEVERLY is there anybody in public life you hear talking about this that gives you comfort that they've sort of got a handle on how to deal with it?

[B]

Well, the only thing I really hear the Capitol Hill is picking up on is a safety issue for kids and talking about how we deal with it from that standpoint. Of course, that's social media as well, but terrible when chatbots are encouraging a child to kill themselves. And tragically, some have because of it. So the privacy angle I'm seeing, but here's the needle you have to thread. We also want innovation and I agree that AI can make good things better, but it can make bad things worse. And so there's a lot we still don't know. We don't want to stifle that innovation. I think as we're looking at this, it is the government making a concerted effort to try to understand as best as possible what this means, because we're going to even need think about Gen Z to be able to meet the challenge for where the workforce is going. So I think a lot of this is about education and helping people prepare for what's coming.

[A]

Right. Okay. Again, you both are framing it so well and so thoughtfully. Here's another concern I have. I'm not against money in politics. I'm a big First Amendment person and I think if you try to outlaw money in politics, the money just finds some other way in. That's just my general view. I don't think that point of view favors or one party over the other. But in this case, you've got the AI community, corporate world giving a lot of money in this campaign cycle. And I don't know what the, what it's going to top out at, but they're going to give tens of millions. And unlike, you know, labor unions giving money and businesses giving money or people who want more access to guns and people want less access to guns, there's no one going to spend money on the other side. There's no tens of millions of dollars to candidates who want regulation of AI. The Biden administration was on track to overregulate AI and put America at disadvantage. This administration is extremely laissez faire. And now you have the AI industry spending tens of millions in contributions to super PACs and candidates supporting an extreme. Not, I'm not saying, I'm not saying they're wrong necessarily, but it's extreme point of view, which is no state regulation of AI, limited federal regulation. What's the check on that, Beverly? What's the check on? Just they're using their money the way that First Amendment allows them to do to change the contours of the public regulation and public debate about how much there should be controls on what AI can do.

[B]

Well, even talking about the money side, you mentioned elections but also super bowl ads. So much was AI driven and technology driven. So it's obviously the future. It's where the economy is, it is where even our national defenses. And thinking about a race against China. And I, I am a free market person, so I do think that the market addresses a lot of the concerns. However, I know that there are security and safety concerns with this as well. What I am hopeful for is the fact that we have multiple corporations trying to Find the best technology, the more actors you have battling it out usually have better outcomes. Competition drives better quality, better results. But I don't pretend to know that I know all the answers to this. But I do think innovation shouldn't be stifled. We need to watch over it. But I also think competition and more companies being involved will help us get to better, better systems.

[A]

I agree with everything you said, but, Jaime, there is no competition for supporting candidates on both sides of the AI debate. There's no one going to give a dollar to a candidate to say, regulate AI. Or am I wrong? Is there such a group or such a. It's a group of rich people who want to support candidates who are for regulation.

[B]

Well, I am for. Oh, go. I'm sorry. Go ahead.

[A]

Go ahead.

[D]

No, no, I was gonna say. And Beverly, I completely agree with everything you said. I think, Mark, I think there. There are some burgeoning groups that are. That are starting to take. Take this opposition approach. I think some of it is more around data centers and energy that happens to be sort of couched in the AI conversation. So there are individuals who are spending money, but look, you're talking about the biggest companies in the entire world who have more money than God in the.

[A]

In the history of the.

[D]

In the history of the world. And so you can't expect that these guys are going to play a little bit more fairly when they have so much money to give. And they're very clear about where they want to go with this. They want the least amount of regulation as possible, both on the federal level and the state level. And the reason why they're spending so much money right now, particularly, you know, in the midterms, is, is to prepare for. If the Democrats take the House back, there's going to be a lot of conversations about regulation, and then it's going to go back to the states. And so they're spending money in the state legislatures. If you look, Mark, and look at the election cycle, this particular year, they're spending more money in state elections than they are in the congressional elections because they're preparing for what's going to happen next year. That's one. But the thing that I've always said, and, you know, full disclosure, I work with a lot of these companies in my professional life. What I've always said and think. And one of the things that they are really trying to hone in on is American innovation and in the race against China. And if they can crouch that in real American innovation while keeping the workforce moving forward, helping to upskill and retool. And there's honestly, there's been some strange bed feathers with bed partners with AI and unions. And so the unions and the labor movement are starting to get smart about AI as well. And so they're using AI to automate things before it takes their jobs away. And so, look, it's going to be an interesting year. It's very clear about what these companies want to accomplish and we're going to see it more and more and more, particularly as we get to 2028 and beyond.

[A]

I always hearken back of the failure of members of Congress, in particular the executive branch as well. But focus on members of Congress for a moment and governors to deal with social media. We've had, we've had decades where people have said, as you reference earlier, harm to kids, right? There needs to be some ability of parents to have help from the government to deal with this because the companies don't want to do it. They'll pretend they do, but they don't. Here's the problem that I see and I'm asking you both if you see a solution for this. This is such a complicated topic. I'm spending a ton of my time on it. I'm reading about it, I'm talking to smart people. Even the smartest people I know, with few exceptions, constantly ask me questions or say, I don't know the answer to that, or people don't really know the answer to that question. If you're a member of Congress or governor, you're busy, you're doing a million things, you're not an expert in this, but there's nothing more important. You know, I keep saying to people, let's say there's going to be a Martian invasion. You drop everything else and you'd read up on the Martians, you'd read up on how to deal with the Martian invasion. So what's the solution if a member of Congress, Beverly, or a governor came to you and said, I need to know more, I can't possibly address this. What should they be doing? Should they be setting aside time for meeting with experts? Should they be asking the leadership in Congress to do something? How can we get them better informed? As busy as they are and as complicated as this is, as we learn

[B]

that social media is an issue, especially for children, whether that's the addiction of scrolling, whether that is chatbots used within it, there's a wide variety of factors. Isolation, loneliness. You have a lot of groups that have popped up that have studied this. I think part of this is we just didn't have the long term research. We're starting to get that now. So become educated, hold more hearings, figure out what it is. And on your note that you said there about parents, parents want to do the right thing. I don't think they know what that is because they're not experts in this and I don't blame them for that. The parental controls are not good enough on these devices or on these systems. And so I think that's something that can be addressed as well. But so much about this is education, but I think it's one of those issues that just gets put on the back burner. It is becoming more talked about in the news. But economy, the economy is usually what drives the conversation in so many regards. And, and we have a lot of issues going on in our country and our world. So I'm hoping it's going to be a focus. I think it's an educational push right now.

[A]

All right. I liked everything he said, except the hearings are not going to educate anybody, unfortunately. Fair.

[B]

That's fair.

[A]

Yeah. Jaime, if a governor called you a member of Congress and said I need to get better educated, I want to understand this360, what can they do?

[D]

Well, look, that's, and that's such a tough question. And I ponder this all the time in my professional life. Just another full disclosure. But you know, if I, if, let's say, let's just take J.B. pritzker for, for instance, if I, if I were, If I were J.B. pritzker and, and I, and I have the ability to call up, you know, Mark Zuckerberg or, or one of these sort of tech CEOs or tech founders, I, I would, I would call those individuals as much as I can and I would get them on the phone as often as possible and ask them real questions. Because at the end of the day, I'm trying to figure out what we're, what the end result is like. Do. I don't. And I'm not, I don't have children, so I don't have to deal with that, thankfully. But I'm trying. I want to know what do parents need most? The social media is not going away. We know that for a fact. AI is. These companies have invested more in AI in this last year than I think has been invested in American industry in the last 50 years. And so these things are not going anywhere. And I tend to be someone who, who wants to regulate these private, the private market, the free market, as least as possible. And so to Beverly's point, the economy and the Social well being are sort of in conflict right now. And at some point we have to, we have to ask ourselves what's more important for us to continue sort of this innovation push or for us to be straight up with each other and say we want to save more kids, we want to make sure that we're being honest about the, the impacts of social media addiction, the impacts of social fabric and social life isolation. And I don't think that we're there yet. And so if I were a governor advising the governor, I will get these people on the phone as often as possible and asking these questions as much as possible, because the only way you can really get educated on this, if you're asking the experts. And right now they're the only experts.

[A]

Right. All right. Close by asking you both the same questions. Optimist and pessimist. Jaime, you first. What's happening with AI right now that makes you most optimistic about its possibilities for the future?

[D]

Something specific, the healthcare aspect of it. You go to, and I spend a lot of time with hospitals and you go to these hospitals and they're using AI in such wonderful ways to target cancer and heart disease and surgeries and all of that. And so I'm really, really encouraged by that.

[A]

They using it for research. Are they using it to treat individual patients or both? Both, yeah. It's amazing. Beverly, what's something that's making you optimistic about it?

[B]

Well, it's going to be both my optimistic and pessimistic. So there are certain things it's going to make better. And so in my field of media, really, the ability to have a personal editor has helped me tremendously. I think it helps other people too with collecting information, making sure grammar is correct. They use the EM dash too much in certain, certain sites. But I do think that it makes sense. Simple tasks, easier and so we can accomplish more.

[A]

Yeah. Jaime, what's something that's scaring the bejesus out of you with AI?

[D]

Just where does it end? What are we. What are we trying to do? What are we. Are we trying to make life a little easier and a little bit more efficient? Are we just trying to do these big technology pushes because it's cool and it's. And, and it's innovative? I don't know where it ends. I'm not sure what the, the real goal behind it is.

[A]

Yeah. Have either of you designed an app yet?

[D]

Not yet, no.

[A]

You both, you both need to do that as your weekend homework assignment. All right. Hi, my Beverly. Grateful to you both. Love having you on and look forward to having you back soon. Thank you so much, Beverly.

[B]

Thanks, bye.

[A]

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21 All right, next up, two other problems I'm having understanding is America's relationship to electric vehicles and what I like to call self driving cars. These are massive, massive pieces of technology that, that I don't know where the United States stands and, and where we stand as consumers, where industry stands and our competition with China. All important topics that I cannot solve except with the help of one patriotic American. Alex Roy, the general partner at New Industry Venture Capital, co founder of. Alex, how do you pronounce that? Autonicast. Autonicast. If you Google Alex or feed him into the AI machine, you'll probably see that he's, he's got lots of different things that he's done. Best known perhaps as the godfather of the modern Cannonball Run. We'll talk about that. He said has set numerous transcontinental driving records, most recently the first ever fully autonomous zero intervention cross country record. I went in AI and I, I had a big fight with it about Alex because I was like, let's define Alex because Alex, Alex should be the subject of miniseries novellas, telenovelas, been a tech entrepreneur, underground endurance racer, best selling author, EV record setter, autonomy and mobility commentator. Alex, are all those accurate?

[C]

Those are accurate. And thanks so much for the renaissance introduction.

[A]

Yeah, you're like, you're like a modern day Thomas Jefferson meets Burt Reynolds. That's all I think of you. That's too kind of just talk about these races that you've done record breaking competitions. What does it involve and why are you so into it?

[C]

Well, I mean, it involves getting a car in New York City and driving as fast as you can to Los Angeles by any means necessary, without any sanctioning body or cooperation from the government. This has become an underground thing in recent years. But what's fascinating and totally relevant to EVs and AVs is that 100 years ago, car companies would pay a motorcycle racer named Irwin Baker to drive cross country as fast as possible to demonstrate that personally owned internal combustion vehicles were easier to own than a horse and more liberating than trains. And he did this hundreds of times with massive media coverage. In the modern era, this has gone underground. But back then this was how you marketed new transportation technologies. And that's what fascinates me about the Cannonball.

[A]

How many times have you driven from New York to LA in this kind of competitive way?

[C]

At least 20 times.

[A]

At least 20. And who monitors it like there's no sanctioning body? So who's in charge of keeping track of how you do?

[C]

Well, when I did it for the first time 17 years ago, I had a very hard time getting anyone to, to even cooperate in validating it. So I got Wired magazine to send a journalist. I had a plan overhead that followed the car with cameras Video and witnesses of both ends and, and GPS trackers. I mean today, even in the underground races, hundreds of people will follow the progress of the car in real time. But 17 years ago, that type of tracking did not exist.

[A]

Yeah. And do you drive just on highways? You drive it on back roads. How do you do it?

[C]

So the shortest route from Midtown Manhattan to, to Los Angeles is really the central route of which there's really only seven or eight traffic lights. And it's 99.9999% on the interstate. A few streets in New York City, a little bit in Ohio and then getting off to get gas.

[A]

Yeah. And what's the maximum speeds you do you've done when you've done this?

[C]

Well, I, my maximum speed was 160 miles an hour. Others have gone faster than I have in, in the ensuing years, as fast as 175 miles an hour.

[A]

Amazing. All right, I, I could do the whole hour on this, but instead I want to, I want to, I want to talk about electric vehicles. So there's electric vehicles in the United States. And the United States, do we export a lot of electric vehicles to other countries?

[C]

Unfortunately, United States does not export many electric vehicles because we can't build at scale at price points that make sense in foreign markets. The exception to that might be Tesla, but Tesla also manufactures in foreign countries, then exports from those countries to other markets. So that market is dominated by China, the export EV market. Right.

[A]

China is killing us in this. And if you go almost anywhere in the world, people are driving electric vehicles made in China. How has China gotten so far ahead of us? What have they done to be the world's dominant producer of electric cars?

[C]

Well, there's a wonderful book called Apple in China which basically tells the story of how the Chinese learned everything about manufacturing, you know, modern software based technologies, even, even you know, capex heavy like deep tech technologies at scale. And so they've verticalized multiple industries. Automot most notably and basically copied the Tesla ground up from scratch model of software defined vehicles and begun exporting cars from multiple Chinese, you know, company byd, Xiaomi. All these companies are eating, there's like

[A]

half a dozen, right?

[C]

Yeah, I mean fundamentally Tesla is the only American car maker that's positioned today to compete with the Chinese and automotive markets anywhere on earth.

[A]

So how big's the worldwide market today? How, how many cars are electric vehicles are on, on in the planet currently and what's it projected to be? Any idea?

[C]

I'm afraid I can't answer that question. I don't have that.

[A]

All right, that's on. But, but it's, it's a, it's a hugely, it's a hugely growing market, right?

[C]

It is. And you know, it is growing everywhere except in the United States where it's kind of flatlined recently because the subsidies have gone away.

[A]

Right. So without the subsidies we don't. Tesla, as you pointed out, there are only horse in this game. They don't manufacture very much in what are the implications of the Chinese dominating electric car manufacturing and export?

[C]

It's a catastrophe for the American automotive industry. Is it Ford, gm, Stellantis, you know, these are great companies of great design, but they're not architected to manufacture EVs at scale today at cost points and retail price points that can compete with the Chinese anywhere. I am praying that the Chinese vehicles are not allowed in the United States until the big three American automakers can't compete. And we have the Chinese arriving in Canada sometime quite soon, which is extraordinarily dangerous because people are going to see these cars on the road and Canadian is going to enter the United States driving these cars.

[A]

Right.

[C]

And it's going to be very clear how good they are. And they're very good, scarily good.

[A]

Tell me how good they're like. Are they as good as a Tesla?

[C]

So there are, you know, several BYD models and a S.H. shami sedan called the SU7 which are very competitive with the Tesla Model 3 and Model Y.

[A]

The it.

[C]

What remains to be seen, we don't know, are the long term reliability of these cars because we just haven't seen them. They haven't been in market long enough. Tesla's been in the U S market long enough that we do have some history there and it's mostly good.

[A]

Yeah, the, the Chinese cars again as you point out, if they're going into Canada, are they desperate to get into the United States? If we'd let them in, they'd come here. Right.

[C]

The Chinese are desperate to come in because they know that if they arrive and subsidize the cost, the price points of these cars for a couple years, it's going to crater American EV sales, what remains of them beyond Tesla and then it's consider eating into internal combustion sales. It's really dangerous. The United States was exporting cars, owned this for half a century and this is evaporating before our eyes. There was a critical point that ten when GM was bankrupt, where GM could have been forced to switch to becoming an EV company in exchange for, you know, being allowed to go into Bankruptcy, and that was not imposed on them. And that may have been the fork in the road which set the future in motion.

[A]

Do the Chinese cars charge on the same standard that other countries use? In other words, could, could. Is that an advantage that they have, that they've, they manufacture one, one style of charging or do they custom the cars for each country that has different charging method?

[C]

Well, European, you know, Europe has, there are multiple standards, you know, connection standards in Europe. The United States has really defaulted to the next standard, which is the Tesla standard. Pretty much every carmaker that wants to sell an EV in the US is going to default to NAX and has already announced it because if they don't, it'll be very difficult to connect common charging points on public roads. Chinese are, the Chinese are doing this. I mean they'll adapt to any market easily. Probably giving away the adapters for free.

[A]

Right. Are, are we, number two, are we the second best manufacturer, second biggest manufacturer of the, of electric vehicles after China, or there are other players?

[C]

That's it. It's Tesla and it's byd.

[A]

Yeah. So what do we do? Because, because most people listening to us have never considered this topic, but cars are obviously a huge part of the American economy as both a sales point of view and a consumer point of view. We're in an existential economic struggle with China and they're killing us in an area that it doesn't seem we're doing much to counteract. So what could the government do, what could industry do to try to make this a little bit more of a fair fight?

[C]

Well, it's unfair out of the gate because the Chinese government has subsidized the Chinese automakers, created conditions which make it really advantageous to them and devastating for anyone else. So unless the United States was to come up with a, a, an incentive program or a structural program, you know, call it the like Marshall Plan for American car makers that would put them on an even playing field in that way. There isn't very much that we can do other than come up with incredibly great products. That's what Tesla's doing now. The underneath that is a necessity of, you know, the precious minerals and the refining of the, of these metals. So the good news is there is a lot of money going into American industrialization and there's the potential in coming years, probably decades, to be able to mine and refine these, if not in the United States, then in the Americas. So this is a multi decade solution to an immediate problem. But there really is no alternative other than subsidizing EV sales right now. And that is politically not going to happen.

[A]

Why not? Why shouldn't the government make the case, President make the case to Congress and say we have to compete with the Chinese, we're going to have to spend money doing what they do in subsidizing the industry?

[C]

He could, but he's chosen not to.

[A]

But do you think the American people that, that, that. Do you think that's forget what the public would want? Do you think that's a national security and economic imperative to. And that's the. We have to compete with China in EVs and that's the only way to do it.

[C]

I don't know if that's the only way to do it, but it is the immediate way to do it. And unfortunately, EVs and like autonomy itself have become politicized in ways that are not advantageous to making decisions that are best for the industrial and like labor force of the United States. Neither of these should be political issues. They should be American issues which would lead us to a solution.

[A]

Do you drive an ev?

[C]

Yeah, I have several cars. I have a Tesla, which I absolutely love. It's my fifth. I also own several, you know, vintage internal internal combustion cars. But even as a driving enthusiast, it is clear to me that long term, EVs make logical sense.

[A]

Right? Because they're better for the economy, they're better for the environment. Why are they, why are they better?

[C]

Well, from an environmental standpoint, they're really quiet. From an efficiency standpoint, they're more efficient and it's a more pleasurable driving experience for daily commuting. It's just if you were to invent the car today and pick a propulsion technology, you would pick electric for every, every reason.

[A]

Right?

[C]

And it's purely vestigial cultural memory of internal combustion that keeps them in the mix.

[A]

Right. What is it, how, how easy is it, depending on where you live, to charge an ev now? How much infrastructure has been built?

[C]

There is more than enough infrastructure for EVs to become ubiquitous, but only because Elon Musk figured out 15 years ago that he should build a supercharger network and make the charging points ubiquitous. If you didn't drive a Tesla, an EV was not convenient to drive for the last 10 years. But if you had a Tesla, you could pretty much live seamlessly, as if gas is never an issue.

[A]

Who's, who's the second biggest provider of electric vehicles on American roads today after Tesla?

[C]

Nissan, I believe. Nissan with a Leaf. If not, GM might be right behind them. But no One can touch Tesla for quality of ecosystem convenience and the Apple type experience of just having a car be part of your life without even thinking about it.

[A]

Right. Okay, what do you think will be like in five years in the United States? What will the market for EVs be like?

[C]

I mean, I think it's going to grow beyond where it is today. It will grow at a pace much slower than it could have or should have, primarily because of the lack of vision outside of Tesla about building out charging infrastructure that set it back 10 years. But the good news is, you know, you are going to see much better EVs come out of Tesla and come out of every American car maker that survives this because they know that they have to or they're going to be out of business in 10.

[A]

Right. The thing I don't get is we know enough as a people, as a government about what a threat China is to keep their cars out of here, but not enough to do anything about it, you know, because American consumers would benefit from cheaper, more widely available electronic electric vehicles.

[C]

So I mean, this is the fundamental nature of the American system versus the ccp, which is, you know, China is a monolithic top down command economy and with elements of capitalism baked into it. And so when they pick a goal or they pick a strategy, they pick an enemy, they will spend every day, every year for 10 years getting to that goal. The United States is a highly dynamic capitalist system that is reactive only when pushed against the wall. We're not quite at that wall yet, but we're coming close to it. And enough people see it that we're beginning to react to it.

[A]

Just amazing. Talking to Alex Roy about electric vehicles. We're about to talk about autonomous vehicles. I went to San Francisco with my family, we took Waymo everywhere, changed my whole understanding of autonomous vehicles. And you know, there's an argument because every time one's involved in an accident, people get all freaked out and they say, oh, we can never have autonomous vehicles because they're so dangerous. When in fact the data is quite clear. Yes, there are accidents with autonomous vehicles, but they're so much safer and all these than, than, than having drivers like in an Uber. And all these, all these government officials who are trying to block it are, are hurting their constituents and keeping them from safety. Do you agree with that?

[C]

I fully agree with you. You know, I used to be a bit of a skeptic. I mean, I love technology, but after, you know, 10, almost 11 years of riding in the vehicles and having spent four years as an executive at a self driving car company. I'm fully convinced that this is both inevitable. And the good news for the United States is that the United States is the technology leader here. And we have two, two companies that are at the forefront. Waymo and Tesla.

[A]

Yeah. So according to statistics, just to double Back before, about 1.5 million new electric vehicles were sold in the U.S. that's about almost 10% of the market. So it's not nothing, but it's obviously not that we the way it is in so many other countries. You rode in an autonomous vehicle from coast to coast?

[C]

Yeah, about a month ago I was, my team was the first to get a vehicle from New York to LA to set the autonomous Cannonball run record. In other words, we were zero. Interventions cross country, no hands on wheel.

[A]

Yeah. And which vehicle was it?

[C]

Oh, it Tesla Model S, my personal car.

[A]

Yeah, so. So it was it. You sat in the driver's seat but you never touched the steering wheel.

[C]

There were the three of us, we rotated it, taking turns as we stopped to charge the vehicle and one of us would have to sit in the seat. The Tesla requires you at this point to have someone in the seat with a camera on your eyes, observing that you're paying attention. So it still requires supervision in car.

[A]

Right. How much have you been in a Waymo?

[C]

I've spent, I've probably taken hundreds of Waymo rides because, you know, where I live in Arizona, they're ubiquitous and they're fantastic.

[A]

Yeah. Explain why they're safer than human driven cars.

[C]

So you know, from a statistical standpoint, if you compare the driving of a Waymo to human drivers in the same domain, which is in the weather, same conditions, same area, there was a lot of evidence that they are safer today. Now it's going to take time before they're safer than every human driver on every road. Because some human drivers are great and some roads are very hard, but this is, you know, this is in motion already. And if you look at the progress over 10 years, it's extraordinary. Frankly, I'm stunned that anyone even debates this at this point is certainly in the case of Waymo, other companies remains to be seen.

[A]

Yeah, so I'm, I'm not stunned because I get why people react negatively to it. And when I rode them around in San Francisco, and again folks, if you haven't been in one, you get in the back seat, you unlock the car with, with the app, you get in the backseat, the driver already knows where you're going. You get to control the music. That's my Son's favorite part. And it drives you very carefully and precisely to your destination. People would see me in the back of the car, see us in the back of the car, and they would, they would, they would laugh and they would be stunned to see a car without a driver. But just think about it logically. The Waymo is not tired, it's not distracted. It knows the road perfectly because it's basing it on data, not on, you know, eyesight. And, and it's not, it's not ever, it's consistent, it's not ever flawed in any way. However, there have been some accidents, high profile accidents that have gotten attention. And most of those, as I've read about them, are not accidents that an average or above average human driver would get into. So are you saying that over time they'll avoid those kinds of accidents that it is having now?

[C]

Of course. I mean, look, there are 100 deaths a day to human drivers. Human error. And you know, people focus on these fairly, I mean, almost always insignificant incidents that occur with these autonomous vehicles and Waymo, you know, nothing when a vehicle's in motion, no vehicle is perfect. But Waymo is by far the best actor here, doing extraordinary work and demonstrating this every day. Now for every incident, there is development in the back end to mitigate and eliminate that incident happening again. I mean, the logic here against this, the technology is so absurd, you know, people forget, you know, commercial aviation is hundred, less than 100 years old as we know it. And it had, they were extraordinary disasters. It had absolutely no effect on the growth of commercial aviation. Autonomous vehicles out of the gate and Waymo certainly are already orders of magnitude better than the majority of human drivers. And so to suggest that because after 15 years they have it, they're not 100% perfect shows a profound lack of seriousness in how technologies evolve and get deployed. The rate at which they're improving is so extraordinary. I would urge someone to open a book and read about aviation and the automobile and rail and everything else ever been deployed to get a sense of how good they are.

[A]

Yeah, so we know it's bad for society because it's going to put a bunch of drivers, cab drivers and Uber drivers out of business. Why are, why are autonomous vehicles good for society?

[C]

So I actually disagree with the labor, the job loss narrative completely. The best analog would be elevators, which were required human operators for, you know, the first, you know, 80 years. And when actually they only require them probably the first 30 years that they were deployed until the 19s, 100 years ago. And in 1946, there was this strike in New York City. The elevator operators stopped going to work for a week. The city shut down, and within 25 years we went from 100% human operation of elevators to 1%. But the total number of people employed by the elevator industry is higher today than it was at peak elevator operator 100 years ago. So this is ridiculous. Every autonomous vehicle deployed is going to require people to support it and that, that business is in its infancy. People also forget that Uber ride hail gigs, you know, as a job didn't exist 20 years ago. And so we're going to see a massive job shift, but not an elimination, not to mention all the new jobs.

[A]

So what's good? Okay, so you think that, you say that it's a job creator, which I think you might be right. But some individuals in the short term will be displaced. But what's good for society, why is it good for society to have autonomous driven vehicles?

[C]

So the financial burden on any country which has vehicles deployed at scale from crashes, you know, traffic, you know, just general disruption insurance is enormous. Sending the billions and billions of dollars, a lot of that's just going to go away, which is fantastic. And beyond that, think about how much time and money is spent just moving people around who can't drive or how much we have to invest, you know, have to invest in getting in, building, you know, transit systems at great cost that are often inefficient. Now I'm all for mass transit. I'm a New Yorker now, I'm born and bred. But there are a lot of places where it's just not feasible. And so if you eliminate the, even a minority of crashes, you make traffic more efficient and you reduce the cost of insurance and disruption and injury. This is a huge burden removed from society. It's fantastic. I'll give you an example. In my personal life, my mother was unable to drive many years because she, you know, she had dementia and she wanted to shop outside, but instead of being able to get around, she had to have a home health aide, which then had to bring a car or get in taxis. It was a huge cost and time burden on our family. My mother hated it. But that goes away if there's an autonomous vehicle that could deliver an aide that does not have to have a car of their own and doesn't have to think about driving and doesn't have to worry about, you know, safety and can just help her with the bags. And so there are startups that are coming into existence now that are purely in the support and Assistance industry think Uber for help.

[A]

Yeah.

[C]

And they won't need to bring cars they wanted to park. So parking will go away. Like there are so many burdens on society caused by personal car ownership that will be eliminated when autonomy is ubiquitous. And of course once it's available on your personal car, that'll be the mother

[A]

load Is is autonomous autonomous vehicles from point A to point B cheaper than human driven cars.

[C]

They can be. It depends on whether they have to park or not. It depends on whether they're electric or not. Depends on whether there are congestion charges where they're operating. So there are other factors. You can't just throw them into the mix and say the world will be better. I mean to me the perfect car is a personally owned vehicle capable of autonomy that I can contribute to a fleet or sent to take my daughter to school that I don't have to think about and when I'm tired I don't have to drive.

[A]

Right. And that that exists now in Teslas. To some extent. Right.

[C]

To some extent. Tesla still requires supervision. I still have to sit in the seat. So I can't send it take my daughter to school without me in the car. But that's going to happen. That's inevitable.

[A]

How soon will that happen?

[C]

It's going to depend on where. So in places like Phoenix and the the southern archipelago of American states where weather's good and there's not much rain within three years. In other places, snow complexity, New York City, Boston, probably within five. But that's going to depend more on regulatory hurdles than the technology itself.

[A]

Yeah. Last question about the autonomous is, is. Is are they doing a good enough job of explaining this? Seems to me like they're on the short end of the perception people are just too afraid. Don't they ask it this way? Don't they need to do a better job explaining all this?

[C]

So this has long been the Achilles heel and probably the grand failure of all the self driving car companies. Maybe save Tesla. Tesla has what I call narrative command. So they ignored the language everyone else was using and defined their own words. So autopilot full self driving because. And these terms are sufficiently vague that they allow audiences to project upon them what they believe to be true. As a result, words like self driving and autonomy can mean a car that's just driver assistance. It can also mean a car that's driverless.

[A]

Right.

[C]

And so it is. The words are so vague and the industry has done such a terrible job being consistent and clear with its language that it's really up to consumers to figure it out. And as a result, consumers have brought their biases to the technology and it's become politicized before it's even fully deployed.

[A]

Yeah. A huge, huge failure on their part. They should spend a couple million dollars trying to explain all this to people because both electric vehicles and autonomous vehicles are the future and too many Americans see them as some sort of scary monsters as opposed to the future.

[C]

Fully agree.

[A]

Yeah. All right. So gratefully, if people want to see your stuff, read your stuff, watch your stuff, listen to your stuff, where can they go?

[C]

I'm Alex Roy, 144 on almost every platform. Hit me up on X sub stack. I'm easy to find.

[A]

What's the 144?

[C]

My racing number from back in the day.

[A]

Awesome. Alex Roy is, is the Thomas Jefferson and toqueful of our age. And very grateful to you, Alex, for joining with us. Thank you.

[C]

Thank you, Mark.

[A]

All right, that's our program for today. We're going to be back in a couple days. Thursday, brand new episode. You won't want to miss that. We have a special guest coming. I won't spoil it yet, but stay tuned for that announcement. In the meantime, do us all a favor. Expand the network of next year's spread the word. Tell your friends, your family, all your enemies, even that they want to check out the program. We're building something special here and we need more of you. So please go to NextUp at YouTube as a podcast on any platform. Make sure you're subscribed on the YouTube channel. Make sure, sure you've set to download the podcast and make sure you tell everybody you know so they'll be like you and they'll always know what's coming. Next up,

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