A Techno-Optimist’s Case for AI

Summary

Podcast Summary

Podcast: Offline with Jon Favreau
Episode: A Techno-Optimist’s Case for AI
Date: December 6, 2025
Guests: Jon Favreau (host), Noah Smith (economist, author of the Noahpinion Substack)

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Main Theme and Purpose

In this episode, Jon Favreau sits down with economist Noah Smith—a prominent techno-optimist—to discuss a more hopeful perspective on artificial intelligence, technology in society, and the transformation of the internet. Favreau, often skeptical about AI’s dangers and the social ills of the internet, invites Smith to lay out the case for optimism across issues like job displacement, social disruption, democracy, education, and the evolving structure of online culture.
The episode presents contrasting viewpoints, drilling into whether AI is about to ruin us—or save us—and how democracy and society might adapt.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. Are We Ever Prepared for New Technologies? (04:02–06:23)

• Smith's Historical Analogy: Smith notes that humanity has never been fully prepared for revolutionary technologies (e.g., cars, aviation, radio, the printing press) and argues this is the historical norm.
• Quote:

  "What's a good example of a technology that we were pre-prepared for, where none of the stuff ended up being disruptive because we knew how to handle it? ... What's an example of that?" (Noah Smith, 04:02)

• It’s unrealistic to expect flawless preparation, but societies and institutions adapt—often painfully and slowly.

2. The AI Job Displacement Debate (07:09–13:25)

• Job Loss Fears: Favreau raises the widespread concern that AI will replace vast swathes of human labor rapidly—“half of all entry-level jobs could be replaced” (referencing Anthropic CEO Dario Amodei; 07:13).
• Smith’s Rebuttal:
  • Cites shifts from agriculture to manufacturing—job types changed, but human employment as a whole eventually rebounded.
  • The Industrial Revolution saw similar panic; people always find new roles, even if transition is turbulent.
• Three Scenarios on AI & Jobs:
  1. Incremental changes in tasks (most people keep their jobs, but tasks evolve with AI as a tool).
  2. Large-scale societal disruption akin to the shift away from agriculture.
  3. Complete obsolescence of human labor (which Smith views as deeply unlikely and riddled with “subtleties people aren't thinking of”).
• Quote:

  "Are you talking about another case of that, or are you talking about humans becoming like horses and nobody needs you and you're just this obsolete thing?" (Noah Smith, 08:37)

3. The “AI Abundance” Paradox (15:12–17:07)

• Smith asks who would actually consume the abundance AI could theoretically create if no one had jobs to buy anything:

  "Who's consuming it? Is it just like five guys who own the AI companies, using the power of AI to colonize Mars and create robot cities filled with nobody, just filled with robots, filled with sexbots or something?" (Noah Smith, 15:14)

• Raises the necessity of mechanisms like Universal Basic Income or job-search assistance, but cautions against dystopian scenarios without plausible economic structures.

4. The Real Danger: Speed of Disruption (17:29–18:53)

• The pace of change is highlighted as a real concern:

  "Is that something that concerns you? That the transformation could happen quicker than in the past?" (Jon Favreau, 17:29)

• Smith agrees, noting historical transitions led to slums, unrest, and political upheaval; AI could compress these pains into a single decade.

5. Policy Responses: What Helps People Adapt? (21:03–22:10)

• Smith proposes job-finding assistance (like Denmark’s “flexicurity” model) as more effective than conventional re-skilling programs.
• AI could also deliver revolutionary improvements in individual education via one-on-one AI tutoring—something only wealthy kids typically receive now.

6. AI and Education: Personalized Learning (22:15–24:00)

• Smith: One-on-one tutoring is the gold standard; AI could democratize it.

• "AI tutoring is going to be the first technology we've had that can take education out of the hands of large classes... Instead, what we may be able to do is…give people AI tutors and then people just learn much more." (Noah Smith, 22:15)

7. AI Bubble and Financial Crises (24:17–25:19)

• Discusses the possible bursting of an “AI investment bubble,” but Smith minimizes its risk to the technology’s progress—innovation continues post-crash.

• "When that crash happens, I'm buying all the AI stocks. I'm ready to make a little money." (Noah Smith, 25:19)

8. Regulating AI: Risks and Responsibilities (27:06–29:02)

• Discussion on self-regulation vs. government regulation, contrasting the U.S. with China.
• Smith reminds: “Every technology gets used by bad actors… Even agriculture fueled the rise of large armies.” (Noah Smith, 27:47)
• Main existential concern: Bioweapons, with or without AI—needs real attention.

9. AI, Social Media, and Human Relationships (29:04–31:22)

• Favreau’s Worries: Could AI “supercharge” social media’s harms? Will chatbots amplify isolation and mental health issues, especially for teens?
• Smith’s Reflections: Our socialization already involves constructing models of other people in our heads. There’s little reason we won’t do the same with robots.

• "I sometimes think that humans, you know, our own relationships are us anthropomorphizing each other, just sort of making up stories about what each other are like so that we can get along." (Noah Smith, 29:34)

10. The Anatomy of Online Division and Political Disintegration (31:58–36:49)

• Smith suggests that the outrage over AI stems from a society still wrestling with the fragmentation and division wrought by the internet and especially mass social media.
• He posits that social media has uniquely damaged American democracy by shattering local ideological bubbles and exposing everyone—constantly—to the most extreme views, fueling division and resentment.

11. Will AI “Fix” Social Media? The Return of Gatekeepers (32:44–39:44)

• Offers a counterintuitive optimism:
  • AI could serve as the new gatekeeper, tamping down the “shoutiest, most divisive people” the way TV, radio, and newspapers once did.
  • Notes the hazards of this, including the politics of those running AI platforms (Elon Musk as a digital William Randolph Hearst).

  • "Elon Musk is William Randolph Hearst now, and Dario and whoever's running Gemini…I guess those people are the William Randolph Hearsts of our time.” (Noah Smith, 37:31)

• Warns that the concentration of power over what we see isn’t new, but who holds it—and what norms they adhere to—will shape democracy and culture again.

12. The End of Mass Social Media: Return to Bubbles? (42:35–49:54)

• Smith’s Thesis: Social media forced everyone into a virtual room, constantly exposed to the most extreme out-group perspectives, heightening anger and tribalism.
• TikTok, group chats, and Discords represent a retreat to algorithmically sorted “bubbles”—which Smith welcomes.
• Classic experiment: Regional differences used to insulate Americans; now, everyone is instantly exposed to the most inflammatory content from everywhere.

13. The Need for a Patriotic, Liberal Narrative (50:22–53:42)

• Conversations pivot to identity politics and the Democratic Party’s challenge: how to make a case for broad, liberal, inclusive American greatness.
• Smith cites Obama as a model:

  "Obama did this incredibly well. Articulated the goodness of America in a way that liberals responded to and that normal people could believe. He did it really well. Just go back to that." (Noah Smith, 51:26)

• Dismisses the idea that demographic shifts alone will guarantee progressive politics—democrats must actually persuade.

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Memorable Quotes & Their Context

| Timestamp | Quote & Speaker | Context | |------------|----------------|---------| | 04:02 | "What's a good example of a technology that we were pre-prepared for, where none of the stuff ended up being disruptive because we knew how to handle it?" — Noah Smith | Challenging the idea that societies can ever be “ready” for massive tech shifts. | | 08:37 | "Are you talking about another case of [job displacement], or are you talking about humans becoming like horses and nobody needs you and you're just this obsolete thing?" — Noah Smith | Pressing for specificity on job-loss dystopias. | | 15:14 | "Who's consuming it? Is it just like five guys who own the AI companies, using the power of AI to colonize Mars and create robot cities filled with nobody, just filled with robots, filled with sexbots or something?" — Noah Smith | Satirical pushback on “AI creates everything, but no one benefits” worry. | | 22:15 | "AI tutoring is going to be the first technology we've had that can take education out of the hands of large classes... Instead, what we may be able to do is…give people AI tutors and then people just learn much more." — Noah Smith | Vision for AI to democratize personalized education. | | 27:47 | "Every technology gets used by bad actors…. Even agriculture fueled the rise of large armies." — Noah Smith | On dangers and inevitabilities of tech misuse. | | 29:34 | "[Human relationships are] us anthropomorphizing each other, just sort of making up stories about what each other are like so that we can get along." — Noah Smith | On how we might easily replace human relationships with chatbot relationships. | | 37:31 | "Elon Musk is William Randolph Hearst now, and Dario and whoever's running Gemini…I guess those people are the William Randolph Hearsts of our time.” — Noah Smith | On new tech titans becoming our information gatekeepers. | | 48:56 | "We're making TV for each other. It's TV." — Noah Smith | On how TikTok and similar platforms feel safer, less interactive, more “curated”—retreating from the mass social chaos of early social media. | | 51:26 | "Obama did this incredibly well. Articulated the goodness of America in a way that liberals responded to and that normal people could believe... just go back to that." — Noah Smith | Pointing to Obama’s example for political rhetoric and party identity. |

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Intro and setup: 02:11–02:55
• Noah Smith—Case for AI optimism: 02:55–04:47
• Historical tech disruptions, readiness: 04:47–07:09
• Job loss: Industrial Revolution vs AI: 07:09–13:25
• The AI abundance paradox: 15:12–17:07
• Speed of disruption and societal stability: 17:07–19:38
• Policy and adaptation: jobs and education: 21:00–24:00
• AI bubbles and investment: 24:29–25:19
• Risks and regulation of AI (weaponization, bioweapons, blackmail): 27:06–29:02
• Social fragmentation, mental health, and AI chatbots: 29:04–31:47
• Gatekeepers, media, and the return to information control: 32:44–39:44
• Social media’s evolution and effects on democracy: 42:35–49:54
• Liberal American narrative and political opportunity: 50:22–53:42
• Conclusion—Reflections and feelings about optimism: 53:51–54:10

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Tone & Style

True to the spirit of the show, dialogue is candid and often lightly humorous but rigorous, with Favreau’s measured skepticism and Smith’s glib yet analytical optimism sparking thoughtful back-and-forths. Smith is particularly adept at historical analogy, and delights in challenging received wisdom.

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Final Takeaway

While neither guest believes society is remotely prepared for the sweeping changes AI might bring, Smith’s case is that this is normal, the arc of history bends toward adaptation, and excessive doom-mongering probably misses the ambiguities and opportunities of today’s upheavals. In a world awash in AI anxiety, “A Techno-Optimist’s Case for AI” is a bracing—if not universally convincing—reminder that not every technological leap leads to disaster, and our social institutions, for all their flaws, tend to adapt—and might even improve—over time.

Transcript

[Jon Favreau]

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[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

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[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

More than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry.

[Radiolab Host]

But but we do also like to get into other kinds of stor stories about policing or politics, country music, hockey, sex of bugs.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Regardless of whether we're looking at science or not science, we bring a rigorous.

[Noah Smith]

Curiosity to get you the answers and.

[Radiolab Host]

Hopefully make you see the world anew.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Radiolab Adventures on the Edge of what.

[Noah Smith]

We Think We Know Wherever you get your podcasts, almost all of the discourse around AI is actually people realizing the problems with the Internet and taking this out on AI. Just like all the sort of positivity about the Internet. A lot of the positivity of the Internet was people feeling good about how TV and radio and whatever turned out.

[Jon Favreau]

I'm Jon Favreau and you just heard from economist Noah Smith, Noah's Many Things, a former finance professor and Bloomberg columnist and the author of the NOAA Opinion Substack. But one reason I wanted to talk to him is he's a real techno optimist and I am well aware that's a specific viewpoint in short supply on this show. A lot of Noah's takes, in fact, are pretty different from my own. That online fragmentation might actually be good for our society, that short form video is a good alternative to social media, and that the dawn of AI is not going to end in disaster. But his substack pieces are thoughtful, measured, and well researched, so I wanted to have him on to make his case, especially on AI where he's quite bullish, so that you can all hear another.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Perspective that isn't so doomerish.

[Jon Favreau]

After our conversation, I'd say I'm still closer to the doomerish end of the spectrum, but I thought he made some good points and gave me a lot to think about. We also talked about the ills of social media, why he thinks the era of social media is finally ending, and why that might be good for American democracy. Here's our conversation.

Noah, welcome to Offline.

[Noah Smith]

Hey, great to be here.

[Jon Favreau]

So I'm a longtime reader of your substack.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

I've wanted to have you on for a while because you write about quite a few offline related topics. AI, social media, the phones, the political moment we're living through. I want to touch on all of that, but thought we could start with one of your most recent pieces titled I Love AI why doesn't Everyone?

[Noah Smith]

That's right.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

So I definitely find AI quite useful for research and other tasks. I am not a full AI doomer.

[Jon Favreau]

But I just have almost no confidence.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

That we are prepared to handle the potential dangers and disruptions that are coming. But give me your best case as to why I'm wrong.

[Noah Smith]

I don't know that you are wrong. I think we're not prepared to handle those things, but I think that's the norm. Like, if you look at were we prepared to handle the dislocation of local communities that came from the adoption of the automobile? Were we prepared to handle the changes in warfare that resulted from aviation? Were we prepared to handle the pollution from industrial chemical manufacturing? Were we prepared to handle the social changes and disruptions from the Internet? Were we prepared to handle. Or radio or even print for that matter? Like the printing press? Were we prepared for the printing press? What's a good example of a technology that we were pre prepared for that we, you know, where none of the stuff ended up being disruptive because we knew how to handle it. And our institution's just like, yeah, we got this, man. We like, everything is good from this. Like, what's an example of that?

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Yeah, so that is true for sure. I, I wonder if it is. What's different about AI is just the potential for, you know, I mean, even the people that are, are developing AI, you know, talk about it like a humanity transforming technology. And the scale, I don't know if we've had a technology with the scale of the potential job loss, the potential threats. I mean, they're talking about bioweapons, they're talking about, you know, and so I wonder if not being prepared for this technology because it could be so transformative is a bigger issue than in the past. And I don't know, there's part of me that just feels like we're like rerunning the social media age experiment with the technology that's much more powerful. And I'm not sure that we've learned any of our lessons yet.

[Noah Smith]

Yeah, the idea that societies learn lessons and that then those lessons stick. I mean, once in a while you'll see some things a little bit like that, but I don't think that's typically true. Like, I think that we learn lessons in terms of our institutions, adapt to previous technology. So right now, like, you're not scared of tv. You're not scared that TV is destroying the minds of the youth. But when I was a kid, people were scared of that, and before that people were even more scared of that. But right now we've convinced ourselves that TV doesn't destroy the minds of the youth. I just think that people who expect us to.

Be prepared for this, I want that to be articulated. What does that look like? What would that look like? What would be different than what we've ever seen?

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Well, it's like right now the, you know, the Trump administration is trying to fight states being able to regulate AI on their own. And I do think there's arguments for having like one standard federal set of regulations for a technology like this and not having like 50 different states doing it. But I have not seen any effort, serious political effort, to put in place the kind of regulations and rules we might need to make sure that we, for example, you know, are ready to handle the massive job disruption that could come from this. I guess we should start there too, like, on the economic side of it. Like, what, where are you on sort of the level of potential job displacement we might be facing here?

[Noah Smith]

It's interesting because when you say job displacement, what do you mean by that?

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

You know, like Amodi, the, you know, the CEO of Anthropic said something like half of all entry level jobs could be replaced by Artificial intelligence. Elon's out there. I think he said that at some point humans. Humans won't be needed for any jobs. Bill Gates has said something similar.

[Noah Smith]

Let's take a previous example of job displacement. So if you go back to 1800, let's say almost all humans, I would say that 90% of humans or something like that worked in one job, which is agriculture. Almost everyone was a farmer. Right. Everyone worked on these farms. Then mechanized agriculture comes, and now almost no human beings work on farms. So in the sense of, like, if you just look at jobs that got replaced by this technology directly, it was. The answer was almost 100% of all jobs got replaced. And this obviously caused disruptions because then you had, you know, the dark satanic mills and you had Marxism and you had labor conflicts and you had pollution and obviously the working class conflict. And, you know, with. With management and bosses. You had unions, management fights, and like, Henry Ford getting gangsters to shoot union guys on a bridge, you know, and you even got communism, which killed millions of people, you know, resulting from sort of the disruptions caused by the shift out of agriculture. And so I won't say that. Oh, we. We handled that well. Everything was fine. Everybody got a nice factory job, and everyone just, you know. Yeah, you're not a farmer anymore. I won't say that it was free of disruption. I mean, like, tens of millions of dead citizens of communist China and the Soviet Union, not to mention like everywhere else, would beg to differ. However, humans still did important things. Ultimately, wages went up. Humans could make a lot more money doing the stuff they later did. So you could say that humans as a thing weren't replaced. But then jobs were displaced. You know, people were displaced from jobs. And I'm asking the people who are worried about AI to be explicit. Are you talking about another case of that, or are you talking about humans becoming like horses and nobody needs you and you're just this obsolete thing?

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

I mean, perhaps it seems like some of the predictions, and it's not just from, like, doomers saying that. I mean, like. Like I said, you got Elon and Bill Gates saying stuff like that the need for human labor itself might be replaced by artificial intelligence.

[Noah Smith]

Is this the first technology where that's been like, a big worry, big widespread.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Worry that humans themselves might be replaced?

[Noah Smith]

Yeah, the human labor itself might become obsolete.

[Jon Favreau]

I don't know.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

You tell me.

[Noah Smith]

I can actually tell you.

The answer is no. In the Industrial Revolution, tons and tons of people, at every wave of industrialization that happened, there were tons and tons of people who said there's nothing left for humans to do. You know, from the Luddites that smashed looms to like, you know, people in the age of, like, internal combustion electricity, it said, look, human power is being replaced by machines. Like humans have nothing to do. And then humans found other stuff to do. We've, you know, in fact, more humans worked in the market than ever before. If you look at the percentage of humans that now works in the market, you know, we've automated much of manufacturing.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Mm.

[Noah Smith]

We've now automated all of agriculture. But if you look at what percent of humans have jobs, what we call in the market, you work for a company. I'm not talking about like washing your dishes at home, right. Then it's, it's near record highs everywhere you look.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

So the sunny scenario here is that there is a period of huge and painful disruption, like there have been in, in the past when there's a brand new technology, but that even as powerful as this technology may be, humans will find ways to do productive things that the economy needs.

[Noah Smith]

That is one scenario, and I'm not saying that's necessarily the most sunny scenario. There's also the scenario that humans keep doing most of the same stuff they've done before. And just your job at work changes a little different. Your tasks change a bit. So like the Internet. The Internet, like, if you look at what people do at jobs now, it's different than what people did at jobs in, like, 1985, right? It's different. You don't have like the Outbox inbox. You don't have, like these blueprints you're drawing. You don't, you know, regional salespeople are kind of dead, right? Yeah, Like Arthur Miller, Death of a Salesman. That's all gone. But yet you still have a lot of sales jobs. And you still have a lot of, you know, people still make spreadsheets for stuff that's just electronic spreadsheets. And like people, you still have a lot of similar kinds of jobs, right? The Internet wasn't a giant job destroyer in terms of people didn't have to switch like they did in the Industrial revolution. Everyone had to switch out agriculture. But then in the Internet, in the information revolution, let's say, you didn't see a lot of that switching. So I think scenario one is people just do somewhat different things at work. You use AI now at your job, but you still have pretty much the same job. Maybe you're more productive. You have to take on some more roles because you have more time now, because AI Saves you time, blah, blah. But your job is generally easier now. Your job is like punching stuff into AI, correcting AI things, managing the AI agents. That's possible. That's possibility number one, I would say. I can't tell you that's not going to happen. Neither can Dario, man. You know.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

He'S just forging ahead.

[Noah Smith]

So that's possibility number one. And I think possibility number two is what you said. There's this big disruption, like there was when agriculture gave way to, like, manufacturing and services, right, where people just found different stuff to do. But there was a lot of disruption and society was disrupted and took a long time, so that could happen too. Possibility number three, this is the end of human usefulness for most humans. And most humans are just like, useless. There's a lot to think about about that scenario. There's a lot of subtleties that people who think about that scenario don't actually think about and how that would manifest and why horses became obsolete or things like that.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Jon Favreau]

What do you think?

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Some of the subtleties people aren't thinking.

[Noah Smith]

Of in that scenario are one, subtlety is like, suppose AI produces all the stuff. Okay, you just like AI agents are like producing all the houses, all the cars, all the dur da da, the software and the healthcare and the legal stuff. And who's consuming it? Is it just like five guys who own the AI companies? It's just like Sam Altman, Dario Amadei, Elon Musk. Is it just like those guys using the power of AI to colonize Mars and create robot cities filled with nobody, just filled with robots, filled with sexbots or something? Who is consuming all this stuff? Who's buying it and how are they buying it? With what money are they buying it?

People envisioning this world of incredible AI generated abundance where AI just makes things much more cheaply and easily than humans ever could. Makes all these different things from services to goods, everything in our world, you know, who's buying it? That's what I want people to think about.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Yeah, consumers with their stipend that they get from the government for their universal basic income.

[Noah Smith]

Maybe so. Yeah, maybe so. Maybe we do that. But suppose we don't do that. Suppose we decide not to do universal basic income. We just let the economy run, no government check, and nobody has a job. And so AI can make all this stuff incredibly cheaply. Who will buy it then? Why would AI make all the cheap stuff?

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Right. And so then your contention is at some point there's going to have to be a market created or else. Like.

[Noah Smith]

Like, are we envisioning a world where just AI doesn't create anything and everyone's super impoverished because nobody can buy anything, so nothing gets made. But the minute a human tries to make something, AI swoops in and makes it instead, and then the human can't buy it. And then we're all just like. There's this equilibrium where like nothing gets created at all. Because AI could create it so easily, we might as well not and we all die of starvation. That's goofy. That's goofy. That's not going to happen.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

So I guess the other thing that could be different about this transformation is the speed at which it happens. And so to the extent that you do have job displacement, it happens much quicker than it has in the past. And then you just have suddenly over a period of several years, I guess a decade where you have a whole bunch of people who just like can't find work. And then, I don't know.

[Jon Favreau]

Is that something that concerns you?

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

That the fact that it's. That the transformation could happen quicker than in the past?

[Noah Smith]

It certainly does concern me. It concerns me because a lot of the disruptions we had from the age of agriculture with people moving off the farms, moving into the cities, we didn't necessarily have a smooth system for those people to immediately all get good jobs in the cities. A lot of times you had slums, you had periods of high unemployment, you had overcrowding, you had a lot of things. And then you had a lot of anger among the working class that boiled over into communism. Sometimes I've seen something a little bit like that that happened 150 years ago, 100 years ago, we've seen that happen. But it wouldn't necessarily happen the same way this time. So I can't exactly imagine. I've read science fiction stories about all the angry truck drivers start rioting because of the self driving trucks. I can't tell you that won't happen. But then that seems like a pretty thin limited. Like could you really imagine something like mao Zedong from 1850? Like even Marx didn't imagine all the crazy shit that would be done in his own name. Like he didn't imagine any of it. He talked about dictatorship of the proletariat. He didn't imagine what Stalin would look like. And so you couldn't imagine, you know, you could be dystopic and like I could tell you that, oh, there'll be like these robot lords that will like surveil us all with their armies of robots and we'll just be cattle to them. I can spin you the wildest sci fi scenarios, but I can't tell you the probability that any of these things will happen.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Yeah, like I said, I don't quite know either. I do feel like there's, you know, we already have a lot of that sort of populist anger brewing in our country, in many countries in different political systems. So I do, I sort of wonder what happens when you sort of throw fuel on that fire with the AI transformation, you know, that's coming and if that makes things a little worse. And again, like I don't, I don't know what the solution is because I don't think you can just like stand in front of the technology and say stop. Right. Like it certainly seems like we're not going to, we're not going to slow it down anytime soon. But you know, then you hear people like, you know, Tucker Carlson, people like that be like we should just ban the self driving cars for that reason for the truckers.

[Noah Smith]

I mean, Europe might do all these things, but then that's just going to make them a backwater. Europe like relies on the car industry. They're going to export zero cars and they're going to only be selling cars to each other because they mandate that you have to have human driven cars. So they don't allow self driving cars. So Europe can only make and sell cars to Europe, but they can't sell cars overseas, which means they can't get foreign exchange to buy the materials to build their own cars for themselves, build their own human driven cars themselves. They can't get the foreign exchange because they're not selling cars overseas. And so they can't get that foreign exchange. And so what happens then is that their costs go up and European manufacturing basically vanishes. You're already seeing a lot of this with electric cars out competing the German car industry today with self driving cars, it would be 10 times more. And so Europe just becomes, they become large North Korea because they aren't able to trade to get the stuff they don't naturally have because they can't sell anything the rest of the world wants because they've banned it all. And so we could become large North Korea. Perhaps there is something fundamentally humanist in keeping ourselves prisoned in the worst regimes of the 20th century forever. Rather than simply embrace the uncertainty of.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

New technology, what is your ideal public policy to handle the potential job disruption? Because like I think we've all seen that job training programs, I think they.

[Jon Favreau]

Have a spotty record.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Over the last several decades, the most.

[Noah Smith]

Effective policy that we know of to help people switch jobs is not training assistance, but job finding assistance. So training usually happens at the corporate level or sometimes you go back to school. But like training happens at the corporate level. You just learn on the job how to do stuff. That's how most corporate education happens. Denmark has this system called flex security where basically like what, you lost your job, we'll find you a job. They have basically government sponsored recruiters and Japan is trying to copy this. And so that could be an effective system for helping people find new jobs. That doesn't mean that you don't have to have government bureaucrats who know exactly what kind of thing you'll be qualified for, you know, or how you become qualified for that. But then they can, you know, if you're just sitting there like thinking, should I send out resumes and stuff? It can be very demoralizing. You can sit on your butt for a long time. Denmark is like, we'll help you. You know, we'll take on some of this burden for you. We'll, we'll assist you. That doesn't mean they know what you'll eventually find and they'll know what you can eventually do. They're not like perfect omniscient, like matching service.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Right.

[Noah Smith]

But they can assist you with job search. They can provide that assistance and that can be very valuable. So that kind of thing. I would love to see that kind of thing in the United States.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

How do you think the education system here would need to change to help that?

[Noah Smith]

I don't know, because I think there's so much of the education system that's going to change anyway. I think AI tutoring is going to be the first technology we've had that can take education out of the hands of large classes. So past a certain size, class size doesn't really matter. Essentially, one on one tutoring is much more effective than anything else. And once you get to just three or four people, you might as well have 50 people. Like class size doesn't matter. So we've got technologies that can increase or decrease class size, whatever, but we can't. So far we haven't had any technology that can scale up tutoring. Private one on one tutoring, which we know is by far the most effective education method. It's just not economically efficient because who can afford to hire a tutor? Only rich people. I've been a tutor. I know it works, but I know it has to be one on one. And all the research bears that out. So instead, what we may be able to do is we may be able to give people AI tutors. We're not quite there yet, but we may be able to do that, there's no reason in principle why that shouldn't be possible. And we give people AI tutors and then people just learn much more. So that may be a quantum leap in education in terms of what things people should get educated about. It may be that AI tutors are able to flexibly figure that out by doing searches. AI can search the web and process an unimaginable amount of information, kind of analyze it. So maybe that AIs are sitting there saying, well, here's what you should learn. This would be a good idea to learn, and that AI itself will solve this problem or not solve it, but at least address it more effectively than like human created institutions could do. So you may have an AI tutor a little like, imagine you have like a little like primer, illustrated primer. You know, it's AI and it's an AI agent and it just, it can educate you, but it can also figure out what you need to learn and.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Potentially what you need to learn and where you could be useful and what kind of job that you could get in this.

[Noah Smith]

That's right. And it could do it at a much higher frequency than like the school system. You know, imagine if your, if your tutor were also like a personal agent, labor market agent for you that could just like find you stuff to do for work. Wouldn't that be fucking cool?

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

That would be cool. Yeah. I'd like that. This is more of a short term thing. How worried are you about an AI bubble and one that potentially leads to a, a financial crisis? I know you wrote about this recently.

[Noah Smith]

I'm not actually worried about the implications of that for AI itself. I think that if you look at history, you see this happening again and again with these new technology buildouts, telecoms, railroads, you know, all the standard examples, right? In all of those cases there was a giant bust. But the bust didn't stop the technology itself. Like all those railroads that got built, got used, all those, those fiber optics that got laid, got used. And so I don't think we're building lots of useless stuff that will stand like a, like an old Soviet monument out in the tundra.

Data centers are not going to be like these useless monuments. That stuff will all get used. AI works. People keep investing in it. The day that crash happens, I'm buying all the AI stocks. I'm ready to make a little money, ready to get a free doubling of all my capital.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

So anthropic stress tested all the big LLMs earlier this year found that it wasn't, wasn't too difficult to give them prompts that led them to attempt blackmail, espionage, even homicide. What do you think about like the potential for either self regulation for some.

[Jon Favreau]

Of these companies to try to figure.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

This out or like government regulation. And I realize this is extra challenging because say we had a fairly robust regulatory regime here in the United States. You've got China doing their thing, you've got individual loan actors doing their thing. Potentially like another big concern is just sort of the you know, the robots will kill us all concern. Which is a. Yeah, there's a lot of concerns.

[Noah Smith]

So every technology gets used by bad actors.

[Jon Favreau]

Right.

[Noah Smith]

The USSR got nukes. They didn't use them, but they certainly used them to blackmail people into not stopping some of the more nefarious things they were doing. You know, bad people got a hold of industrial technology and used it to, like, wipe out whole cities. Yeah, like, it's hard to name technologies that didn't get used by baddies for bad things. Yeah, even agriculture fueled the rise of, like, large armies. People will use technologies, new technologies. They'll use it to, like, wail on each other. They'll use it to beat the fuck out of each other. Yeah, but like, military stuff. Terrorism, oppression, surveillance. Like, humans like to do bad stuff to each other, and we're going to use these new tools to do bad stuff. Now, is it an existential risk? I don't know. Could we build, like, the super virus that kills us all with the help of AI? Maybe. I don't actually know how easy it is to control the inputs to that. I think that worries me the most is bioweapons. Whether it's created by human or an AI agent. I actually think that human is more likely because we know humans are terrorists. We don't yet know how to make an AI be a terrorist, but we know how to make a human a terrorist. Just let them go. Like, humans do it already.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Right. Well, if a human could become a terrorist, that could kill people on an existential scale with the help of their robot friend.

[Noah Smith]

Correct. I am worried about that.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Yeah. This is a smaller worry, but, you know, it sticks with me, especially because of what we've just been through with social media, which is I worry about all the ways that AI and specifically AI chatbots could replicate and amplify some of the problems that social media has fueled, like mental health challenges, especially among kids and teens, trend towards loneliness and isolation. And so sometimes it worries me that, like, our. Our sycophantic robot friends end up replacing actual human relationships.

[Noah Smith]

It's possible. You know, humans are inconstant. They're, you know, like, moody. They are doing their own thing, they're selfish, they change over time. They, you know, are sometimes assholes like you could imagine building perfect companions of robot friends. And if you anthropomorphize your robot friends, and I mean, like, we may even anthropomorphize each other. Like, I sometimes I think that humans, you know, our own relationships are us anthropomorphizing each other, just sort of making up stories about what each other are like so that we can get along. We interact with these constructs of other people that make in our own minds instead of interacting with the person as they really exist. And we could do that to robots. There's no reason we can't do that to, like, a chatbot or something.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Yeah.

[Noah Smith]

We are machines. Our socialization is built around modeling other people. We build models in our heads of what other people are like. We don't really know. You don't know what it's like to be me. I don't know what it's like to be you. I'll never know. We'll never know. Instead, we make models of each other. I think, okay, if I were a guy who had this job with that kind of shirt, that haircut, and maybe I know a little more about you, where you come from. The more I know, maybe the better model I can build. But it's still just going to be a model, right? There's going to be tons of stuff that leaves out. It's a simplification.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Yeah, but the more you interact with someone, the more you get to know them, right?

[Noah Smith]

Yes, but I mean, there's plenty of examples of married couples who've been together for decades and decades that didn't know some huge thing about the other.

[Jon Favreau]

That's true. I guess I worry about.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

I mean, look, there's mental health challenges here, but. And you've written about this a lot. Like, when I think about social media and some of the problems that social media have fueled, if not created, it's made it more difficult, I think, to practice democratic governance, to, like, live in a democracy with other people. And it has given us the sort of illusion of connection with one another.

[Noah Smith]

And.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

And in reality, I feel like it has helped make us even more divided from each other and angrier at each other, less trustworthy of each other. So I, you know, I do worry about AI sort of supercharging that.

[Noah Smith]

Yeah, I worry about it too. But. But I also think we always fight the last war. Like, we weren't worried about the Internet doing this, right?

[Jon Favreau]

No.

[Noah Smith]

Why not? Because ultimately, TV and radio didn't do that. Media we'd had before, or communication devices, the telephone, none of these communication information devices that we'd made before did that. Sure, radio is used by fascists to organize some of their fascist stuff. But ultimately, radio is pretty benign.

Ultimately, TV was pretty benign. We had all these worries about it. It's pretty benign. So we're like, okay, the Internet's going to be great, going to hook us up altogether. Our world will be better linked up more because television, radio, print, and all these other new media technologies that always seemed to have a positive effect. And so we weren't ready for what was coming because we fought the last war. But this time I think we're going to fight the last war too. And almost all of the discourse around AI is actually people realizing the problems with the Internet and taking those out on AI. Just like all the sort of positivity about the Internet. A lot of the positivity of the Internet was people feeling good about how TV and radio and whatever turned out. Hmm.

[Jon Favreau]

So you think there's a good chance.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

That AI could help solve some of the problems that social media has fueled?

[Noah Smith]

Yes, I think there is. I don't. I'm not telling you this will happen, right? I'm not saying this is what's going to happen. I'm not telling you that I think it will happen. It might be useful to think about some scenarios of how AI could not be like the Internet. And I think the easiest way to do that is to think of scenarios where the AI could actually correct some of the problems we had from the Internet. So, for example, everybody yelling, yelling, yelling. And social media, we have very good evidence by now that social media elevates and promotes the shoutiest, most divisive people.

What if AI can shout down those people? And what if AI algorithms can gatekeep those people out of the discourse, just like humans used to do at cbs. I'm sure the CBS guys weren't angels, you know, I'm sure that they were like, I don't know, like, secretly fascist or communist or like, having affairs, doing drugs. I don't even know what they were doing. But the point is that, like, they were pretty efficient gatekeepers in that they kept a lot of these, these crazy shouters out who are now just dominate Twitter and podcasts. They kept them mostly out, right? We didn't have Nick Fuentes and Hassan Piker and all these assholes running around saying, like, you know, America's evil needs to be brought down. Kill all the Jews. You didn't have that shit.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

How would AI potentially do that? Like, is that just like downrange? I mean, Elon Musk could do this right now on Twitter with some algorithmic tweaks, right?

[Noah Smith]

100%. It's not so simple as a push button thing because, like, people will see it's getting done to them. You have to make it subtle.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

So you think AI could make it more subtle?

[Noah Smith]

AI could make it more subtle. I think eventually AI will figure out how to gatekeep. And whether we gatekeep by promoting like Nazis or whether we gatekeep by promoting reasonable middle of the road people depends a lot on who owns the AI companies, who owns the algorithms, how does the government get involved, blah, blah, blah, you know, for the last stuff, remember, for newspapers, for print. The people who initially owned all the newspapers were some of the worst people. And if you look at like William Randolph Hearst, right, Citizen Kane himself, like that guy, he like promoted the most racist, jingoistic, militarist bullshit that said we've got to kill all the Asians, kill all the, you know, whoever, War, race, war. The white race must kill all the Asians. What a fucking asshole, man. I didn't like that guy. He stayed playing with the sled and.

They made a whole movie about how that guy was an asshole. But that was bad. Eventually we got these very. We developed these norms, institutions by these monopolies that. The New York Times was kind of a monopoly company or the Washington Post or all these things were local monopolies because they had efficient distribution networks for physical papers and efficient networks for getting local classified ads. And that was their monopoly. Local monopolies, not national. They developed these norms around good journalistic practice, what it meant to have a newsroom, what it meant to cite a source, and all these things that William Randolph Hearst couldn't care less about, those developed over time. And we learned to trust those things. And it took us hundreds of years. If you look at their first things that were printed, it was basically all just genocide and murder advocacy. The French Revolution was totally motivated by all these pamphlets and broadsheets and stuff like that that were like, the rich people have taken everything from you. You must kill them in their sleep. It's like that's what they were doing. It was very Twitter esque, right? It was very much like Tucker Carlson's podcast, but worse. And so that's what happened. It took us a long time to sort of evolve defense mechanisms against that in society so that we had reasonable people in charge. Eventually we sort of did not everywhere did. Some places just had government propaganda. But you know, some places the newspapers were relatively reasonable. They sometimes told lies, they sometimes believed fake news. But then at least it was more benign than probably what we've got now, which is ruled by the fakest and the evilist. And so like AI algorithms, eventually over time they could become the replacement for the guys at CBS back in the day. Walter Cronkite Digital Cronkite.

I think the people who run the AI companies are receptive to this and they don't agree on what that should look like. But I think they understand now that they are going to become in the position of William Randolph Hearst.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Where I see this already playing out is like GROK is quite different as an LLM than your chatgpts and your clods and the rest of them, just in the way that it sort of mimics some of Elon's politics. And so I do think that, like so much of the hope of AI is dependent upon the people who run these companies. And I'm not sure that I have a ton of faith in those people right now.

[Noah Smith]

I don't either. But I like I didn't have faith in William Randolph Hearst. So for a little while we got used to thinking of the press as like this participatory anarchy that was more like in the days of the French revolution or the 1700s. Like the press was a participatory anarchy. You could just have your own little printing press in your house out in the country and print like broadsheets and pamphlets and distribute them. That was like the analogous to the social media discussion age, but it didn't last. Now we're going to have to start thinking of the press as the people who control the algorithms, the AIs that create and curate the algorithms that give us your algorithmic feed. That's the new press. Elon Musk is William Randolph Hearst now, and Dario and whoever's running Gemini, I guess those people are the William Randolph Hearsts of our time. And there was never just one William Randolph Hearst. There were a bunch of them. But that's how we have to think about the press, because that's who's going to control what you see. There was someone who controlled what you saw in 1965. There were some guys in a back room who decided which facts of the world, which information you would see and which you would not see. In every country, in every system, someone somewhere was controlling what you saw because TV had economies of scale, and that's why they did it. And radio to some extent, but less. And print to some extent, but less. All those things had economies of scale. Economies of scale led industrial concentration. Concentration created space for someone to control what you saw. And that stabilized society because industrial concentration was what enabled gatekeeping, and gatekeeping was what kept out the crazies with the broadsheets saying, kill them all, kill them all. And we're going to get that again. We're going to get the gatekeepers back. We're going to get the industrial concentration back. I think because I think feeds, algorithmic feeds, still have some sort of network effect of some sort. The more people watch TikTok, the more people make TikTok. If humans are the ones doing the creation, I guess we could have AI slop do it. And then we have to ask what kind of economies of scale AI has. Anyway. There's multiple blog posts in here to be written in the future. But I guess the point is that we're probably going to get gatekeepers back in some way. We're not going to have the anarchy that we had in the 2010s where it was just like every shouty schmuck seizes the bullhorn and goes viral.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Yeah, the gatekeepers go away. Everyone has a bullhorn. And there were obviously problems with the gatekeepers. It does feel like, you know, the pendulum could swing back a little bit towards gatekeeping. But if it swung back towards gatekeeping where the gatekeepers are, just imagine, you know, all, all Elon Musk's with his politics or like all William Randolph Hearst.

[Noah Smith]

Then you get Pravda.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Is there and there, is there room for, for other voices, for other perspectives and viewpoints with. If the technology is this powerful, I don't know that's.

[Noah Smith]

I think unfortunately the shape of technology determines the balance between independent and gatekept. And that ultimately that balance has to be a balance. There's some sort of internal solution that, some sort of equilibrium point that's the best, some internal optimum. Right. We need to find that. But I don't, I can't find it for you. I can't tell you where that is.

[Jon Favreau]

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[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

I want to talk about social media, since you've written about that a bit and obviously social media made us trust each other less angrier. Your case as to why that happened is one that I hadn't heard before, which is that social media took us out of our ideological bubbles and forcibly exposed us to opposing views, basically throwing us all in a room together. Can you explain that a little bit? I thought that was interesting.

[Noah Smith]

Yeah. So like in 2005, suppose you wanted to live in a conservative place where Christianity was the norm and you know, traditional, everyone respected traditional marriage and all these things. You could just move to, I don't know, Oklahoma and you could live that life. You could have that life. And if suppose you wanted to live a progressive existence where people did land acknowledgments and everybody composted. You could move to San Francisco, you could do that and the people you'd be surrounded with would be people who were generally like you. We could sort right then one day there was Twitter and the old Facebook news feedback, and then that day all those people who had spent decades and decades sorting themselves into like minded communities were all thrown into a single room with each other. Instead of the Internet being an escape from the real world, the real world became an escape from the Internet.

And as Jean Paul Sartre once famously said, hell is other people. We were unable to sort ourselves into like minded communities. So imagine that Steve Miller got his way and we deported all the immigrants back to like Somalia or whoever, right? Yeah. Port all immigrants. Stephen Miller gets his wish. They'll still all be there, they'll just be online. And because online is now where you live, you won't have gotten rid of them. The only country that has actually gotten rid of the foreigners is China because they built the great firewall and so you can't talk to the foreigners. China is the only country that's preserved localism because they used press control to force it.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Right.

[Noah Smith]

Media control. And so. But the fact that we all live online now and that online we're exposed to foreigners constantly means that you can't get rid of the foreigners by just physically kicking out the physical foreigners because you weren't talking to those people anyway. If you lived next to like some Somali family, maybe you talk to them, maybe you'd like have them over for dinner or whatever, but you don't have to. And most people don't. Like people in America don't know their neighbors. They haven't since we got cars because we're so mobile. Right. We don't know our neighbors anymore. It's not because of immigration. People don't know their neighbors in Japan either. Like people don't know their neighbors in like any, in any country where like you have cars and mobility, people don't know their neighbors. And then so we're all just on the Internet all the time. So like kicking the Somalis out of your neighborhood or whatever, or the Afghans, the Haitians, whatever, whoever you're going to kick out, it might have some effect, but it's not going to affect your social life. It's not, you know, your social life is online now. You're sorting into like minded communities online and whoever's there, whatever people are like, you know, you're interacting with there, who gets physically removed from your neighborhood is not going to have a big effect on your social circle anymore because it's online. And so I think that's what happened. Our country stopped being able to spread out and sort geographically because geography stopped suddenly, stopped mattering. That's an oversimplified story, but that's basically what happened, I think.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

And then it just made us angrier because we were hearing opposing political viewpoints that we necessarily wouldn't have heard otherwise by from. Because it's not like our neighbor that we didn't know that well would just like walk out of their house and start like screaming about, you know, how the. Whatever you hear online.

[Noah Smith]

Exactly. So, like, everybody lived in the town square all the time. What kind of society is that where people all live in the town square all the time? Communal bullshit. Like, you know, imagine in 2005 if you lived in a red state, how often would you have people say that, like, all white people are racist? You'd never hear that. No one would say that to you. But in 2014, you'd see it. Every time you opened up Twitter, you'd see someone saying, and they didn't live next to you. They lived in California, they lived in New York. But they'd say it and you'd see it. And then you'd think, wow, my society is so intolerant. Brooklyn was always like that. But you didn't hear it because there was no way for you to hear it. People geographically sorted. Then one day you heard it all. Or like, suppose you're living in San Francisco in 2005 and San Francisco's created this gay friendly community. Maybe in the 70s you'd hear, gay people suck. That's unnatural. Maybe you'd hear that in the 70s, but then San Francisco became this very gay friendly place where you could just go, you could be gay, no one would bother you. It was just normal. Then one day in the 2010s, when you get Twitter and stuff like that, suddenly you're hearing a million homophobic people yelling at you.

I can count the number of times I experienced antisemitism before social media. Mass social media. Like, I can count it on my nose. Because once I met one guy who was anti Semitic one time, I was very surprised. Growing up this Christian conservative place in Texas, never once, never once, I never heard anybody say anything bad about Jews. Like, I knew that, you know, I could read about the Holocaust in like a book or the Spanish Inquisition or some shit, or like how like Jews were like discriminated against in the 50s in like, Princeton. But, like, it wasn't real. It wasn't in my society. I never encountered it. And then, then one day on Twitter, there were like hundreds of people saying, gas the kikes. Race war. Now every day I'd open it up and I'd see those guys. That was jarring. That was new. And it was because of social media. Everybody went through that. Everybody had someone out there in America who hated the out of them. And everybody woke up one day and met that person. I'm surprised our society held up as well as it did.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Yeah.

[Noah Smith]

Wow.

[Jon Favreau]

So do you think we're moving away from that now?

[Noah Smith]

Yes. Yes. We're learning our lesson. We're separating into like discords and group chats and offline mass social media is dying. People don't go on Twitter that much anymore. People stare at algorithmic feeds, they look at TikTok, they look at scroll, they scroll videos. We're still in touch with each other, but at a remove. We're making TV for each other. It's TV. There's this impersonality to TikTok where, yeah, you can make a TikTok response to what someone else says, but you're not talking directly to them. It's not like back and forth in real time and it's mediated by an algorithm too. So if people don't want to see that politics shit, TikTok is going to pretty quickly realize that I don't want to see anybody making a video that says, gas the kikes, race war. Now.

They'Re going to realize, oh, you don't actually want that, so I'm not going to show it to you. And then algorithms put us into our bubbles and that's good. People are like, oh, no, you're going to be in a filter bubble. You're never going to see anyone who disagrees with you. And then you see the actual person who disagrees with you and it's some dipshit saying, gas the kites, race war now, that's who disagrees. That's the opposing view. Do I want to see the opposing fucking view all day? No, thank you. I would like to talk to people who are somewhat on the same page as me and can maybe debate stuff with reasonable, modest disagreements, you know, who aren't just like screaming for me to die.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Yeah, point taken on that for sure. It does feel like living in a big multiracial, multi ethnic democracy of over 300 million people. We do need to figure out how to interact with and debate and mediate conflicts with people who are very different than us and have opposing views. Like, don't we. We do still need that muscle, right?

[Noah Smith]

Yeah, we do. But, you know what do you think we got that muscle in like 2005 or we just. We were in these homogeneous filter bubbles?

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Well, yeah, I was gonna say in 2005, it was better than the heyday of Twitter.

[Noah Smith]

When was the best. When was the best for debate? The best period of our history?

[Jon Favreau]

Best?

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

I don't know, like early 2000? I don't know. Well, I would compare. I feel like from.

2015 to now has been certainly the worst of my lifetime.

[Noah Smith]

It's shit.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

You wrote a few pieces about America's identity crisis and the. The opening for a patriotic defense of traditional liberal American values. And, you know, it's an opening that I think in some ways was created by the MAGA post liberal right, also the far left, and one that the Democratic Party, I think, has at least to be as generous as possible, not taken advantage of just yet. What would that kind of liberal nationalism look and sound like coming from a. A Democratic candidate say for. For president in 2028?

[Noah Smith]

I would like to point out that Kamala Harris improved mightily in 2024. They had a bunch of, like, pro America stuff at the convention. It didn't make it through because this stuff has to be repeated and repeated and repeated over, like, a decade, I think. Yeah, but it was a damn good start. And we haven't seen this stuff from Mamdani because Mamdani is allied with, like, the left, which is, like, hypercritical of America, and they're still running off the, like, gas fumes of, like, Soviet propaganda from, like, a million years ago. So, like the Zuron Bernie left, they're not going to do it. They're structurally anti American. But then regular progressives can do it all the time. People who are not allied to that small faction within the Democratic Party can just do this very freely. And so we saw it with Obama. Obama did this incredibly well. Articulated the goodness of America in a way that liberals responded to and that normal people could believe. He did it really well. Just go back to that. Like, just look up old Obama speeches and do what Obama did. There's nothing like the world hasn't, like, moved on in a way that makes it impossible to do that. Just go back to that. Yeah, just like, look up fucking Barack Obama. Like, he's great, you know, I like to think so.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

I've been waiting for this for some.

[Jon Favreau]

Because I think that sometimes Democrats, moderate.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Democrats, talk about my problem with them, which is that they have the policies that align with the broader electorate and they know the politics, but sometimes they come off quite boring. And I feel like you do need sort of.

[Jon Favreau]

That there's something more to politics and.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

To being a leader and to being an elected politician than just figuring out the right economic policies. But it is speaking to something bigger about the country's identity. You've been talking about America's identity crisis. And I do wonder if in the next couple years, as we head towards 2028 and beyond, if a Democrat's gonna be successful or the Democratic Party's gonna be successful, they're going to need to have that sort of bigger story about America, defense of American values that, you know, I think that the left or the, the broader coalition of the Democratic Party can see itself in if they want to be successful.

[Noah Smith]

Yeah, a lot of progressives got really drunk on the idea that, like, there was this invincible, like, demographic drift toward make. Like, you know, as our country becomes more Latino, we would become more Democratic. And Trump has disabused them of that. I think they understand now that Hispanics can be very conservative and vote Republican and will be willing to vote Republican. And I grew up in Texas, so I knew that already, but they did not because they grew up in New York and California where, you know, like.

Hispanics are just as progressive as everybody else. So they thought that was a structural thing. They looked at the national statistics like, oh, Hispanics vote 60, 40 Democrats. So just get more Hispanics and we'll win. Look what happened to California. But it doesn't work like that.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

Yeah, I know. You need to go out and actually persuade people. Can't take anyone for granted. Noah, thanks for joining Offline. Awesome.

[Noah Smith]

It's been great. Did I manage to convince you of anything?

[Jon Favreau]

I feel a little bit better about AI. I do.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

I want to join because I'm like.

[Jon Favreau]

You know, I was getting towards AI doomerism and I've had a lot of.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

People on who were quite negative on AI and so I thought we needed.

[Jon Favreau]

A. I thought we needed a different perspective.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

And we got it.

[Jon Favreau]

And I feel like you made some good points on that.

[Noah Smith]

Cool.

[Crooked Media Host (possibly Tommy Vietor or Jon Lovett)]

All right, well, thank you very much. Appreciate it.

[Noah Smith]

Absolutely.

[Jon Favreau]

Before we go today, some quick housekeeping. If you're not sure where to get your family and friends this holiday season, think about giving them the gift of content. It's the gift that keeps on giving. A Friend of the Pod subscription will keep them informed, entertained, and mostly sane. They'll get access to all the good stuff, exclusive content like Polar Coaster with Dan Pfeiffer, ad free episodes of all their favorite Crooked shows and endless bragging rights that they support independent progressive media. Now that's a present gift a Friend of the Pod subscription. Grab one for yourself or learn [e-mail] friends.

As always, if you have comments, questions or guest ideas, email [e-mail] and if you're as opinionated as we are, please rate and review the show on your favorite podcast platform. For ad free episodes of offline and Pod Save America exclusive content and more, go to cricket.com friends to subscribe on Supercast substack, YouTube or Apple Podcasts. If you like watching your podcast, subscribe to the Offline with Jon Favreau YouTube channel. Don't forget to follow Crooked Media on Instagram, TikTok and the other ones for original content, community events and more.

Offline is a Crooked Media production. It's written and hosted by me, Jon Favreau. It's produced by Emma Illich. Frank Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Adrienne Hill is our head of news and politics. Jarek Centeno is our sound editor and engineer. Audio support from Kyle Seglin, Jordan Katz and Kenny Siegel take care of our music. Thanks to Delon Villanueva and our digital team who film and share our episodes as videos Every week. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America.

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