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- [00:01]
Megan McArdle
Quieres mejor Internet?
- [00:02]
Sarah Longwell
Cox Internet.
- [00:03]
Megan McArdle
The tresintas megas tiene las velocidades rapidas y com fiables que buscas perfecto para
- [00:08]
Sarah Longwell
streaming e gaming y tres de casa todo por solo quarente cinco dolores almes
- [00:14]
Megan McArdle
con do gregas Cox Mobile inculia quipo de wifi y guarantia deprecio de dos anos en tu plan nues cambia te hoy a Cox.
- [00:23]
Sarah Longwell
The quiere Cox Mobile gig unlimited guaranteed apresion.
- [00:31]
Megan McArdle
This is Mike Bolough of Lexicon Valley, and I'm Bob Garfield. Are you one of those people who sometimes uses words?
- [00:38]
Sarah Longwell
Do you communicate or acquire information with, you know, language?
- [00:43]
Megan McArdle
Hey, us too. So join us on Lexicon Valley to chew over the history, culture and many mysteries of English, plus some wisecracks. Find us on one of those apps
- [00:57]
Sarah Longwell
where people listen to podcasts. Hello everyone, and welcome to the Focus group podcast. I'm Sarah Longwell, publisher of the Bull Work, and this week we are talking about a civilizational change that is almost too big for a political punditry show like this one, but we're going to try anyway. But we're talking about AI, artificial intelligence. Usually on this show, we slice and dice the American public eight ways from Sunday. But what we've heard has not had a super obvious political valence, at least not yet. Unlike most topics we cover on this show, AI does not break down neatly along partisan lines. It's something we're all sorting through in real time. So a lot of what you're going to hear is about how people across the political spectrum are using AI and the pitfalls they're running into, both for themselves and for their information diets. My guest today is Megan McArdle, economics columnist for the Washington Post, host of their Reasonably Optimistic podcast, a co host of Central Air with Josh Barrow and Ben Dreyfuss, and a regular on the Dispatch podcast. Megan, thanks for being here.
- [02:11]
Megan McArdle
Thanks for having me.
- [02:12]
Sarah Longwell
I'm so excited you're here because I'm a big fan of yours. I read everything you do. It is mutual and you write a lot about technology, and so I thought you would be an excellent guest for this show. Why do you write so much about technology?
- [02:26]
Megan McArdle
So fun biographical detail. Before I went to business school in the early 1990s and mid-1990s, I became an IT person totally by accident.
- [02:37]
Sarah Longwell
Like a help desk.
- [02:39]
Megan McArdle
I was a help desk. I designed and built basically networks for banks. Oh, the server workstation part. Not the part that, like, makes your IP packets go out on the Internet and find other stuff. And so I've always liked tech and that didn't seem like a very useful quality in a political columnist, but, you know, the, the universe provided and it has turned out to be a more and more like, major part of our politics. So here we are. I write a lot about it. It's, I think, the most interesting story of our day, outside of politics at least. And it's more fun to follow than politics because people may be anxious or afraid or, you know, preparing to welcome our new robot overlords, but they're not angry about it in the same way that everyone is just angry about the smallest thing in politics.
- [03:31]
Sarah Longwell
Part of the reason people are angry in politics is that they have like some strongly held opinions that they can slot into an existing like. So there's like these existing frameworks in which the technology piece, it's like it touches all kinds of parts of their lives and they interact with it all the time. And in many ways it's made their lives better. So they're not exactly hostile to it, but they're also constantly seeking to understand it, know how it might change things for them. I think they have a sense that, like, this is coming always, like things are going to change. It could have some positives, it could have some negative. And so they're just trying to figure out what it means for their lives. Now, because you have written about technology so much, I think you've seen a lot of like, tech hype cycles come and go. I think the Internet, smartphones, social media. And so like, how does the AI moment right now compare to past tech disruptions? And what, if anything, feels genuinely different this time? So.
- [04:28]
Megan McArdle
So I'm a little older than you, so I lived through the dot com bubble.
- [04:32]
Sarah Longwell
Are you?
- [04:32]
Megan McArdle
Yeah, I'm 53.
- [04:34]
Sarah Longwell
I always assumed we were the exact same age.
- [04:36]
Megan McArdle
Well, I hope that means that I am well preserved. Yeah, no, I didn't become a journalist until I was 30. A lot of people just figure I became a journalist out of college and so they just like add eight years to my age. So I was there during the original tech hype cycle where everyone was convinced that that everything had changed. We could all get rich by buying tech stocks and we'd never have to work again. You may hear some of these themes today. I think what is different is that no one thought the Internet was gonna kill us. And yeah, I actually remember when GPT first came out, when the first release of GPT, that really looked like, whoa, this thing is doing something that's actually useful to me. I confess my immediate reaction as a professional writer was, but Larry and Jahad, now more than ever. And for Dune fans in the aud, which will be about three of you, but you will have enjoyed that reference, and I will tell the rest of you what that means, which is that the backstory to the Dune novels, which you like, you know, there's now two blockbuster movies. They're great. Is that there was a war between humanity and the thinking machines, and they outlawed the production of thinking machines. This is the backstory for why the Dune universe looks like it does and why spice the product is so important because it allows humans to think at a level that replaces computers. And then I just sort of thought about it and said, first of all, I can't. Like, I can't figure out whether they're going to kill me. I'm not that smart. And second of all, there's nothing I can do about it if they are going to kill me, so I might as well just embrace our new robot overlords. And I think a lot of people went through that cycle. But that has been a big difference politically. Like, the Internet was not a political issue. It was like a political issue in the way that people would be like, kids are getting poor born on the Internet, you know, totally reasonable concerns. But these are manageable concerns. These are things that you try to figure out through policy. It wasn't, should we do this? Should we have the Internet? That was a really minority debate, and it doesn't feel like a minority debate now. It feels like something that is very, very alive in the culture and not just among kind of the chattering classes who are worried that they're going to take our writing jobs and turn us into, like, carpenters, which would not be a good choice in my case. I'm basically good at one thing, and I need that thing to be. To continue to be financial viable. But it feels like a lot of people have these worries that this is really going to possibly change the economy. I think those worries, by the way, are overblown. But that doesn't mean that people aren't feeling them and don't have good, reasonable, rational reasons to feel that way. I just think, like, the history of technology is that nothing moves that fast.
- [07:15]
Sarah Longwell
I want to get to the voters, but I want to pick at this just a little bit. You are an excellent writer, and you often infuse your writing with things that I think are very specifically Megan McCartly that I don't think AI could replicate. But do you not think that journalism broadly will get changed in big ways? Certainly the information landscape is likely to change in big ways because of AI, but maybe you don't think in a bad way.
- [07:36]
Megan McArdle
Oh, yeah, I think it's already changed. I mean, so for one thing, something that you may have seen, certainly, like basically every major publication is seeing, is that search has collapsed as a source of traffic. So we used to get a lot of traffic from search, but now what's happening is that people are just seeing these AI summaries, and then they don't feel like they need to read the article, they just read the AI summary. And so that's just like a basic one. I think more broadly, it's going to hollow out the industry. If you think about the industry, there are a bunch of different things it does. Right. One thing it does is that columnists like me try to have kind of a relationship with our audience. I think about my podcast, for example, as like having an imaginary friend or like being invited to a great dinner party that you couldn't do in real life because you don't know these people. Although in my case, and I'm sure in your case, many of the podcasts I listen to are my actual friends. So it's very strange to have a parasocial relationship with people I actually know.
- [08:32]
Sarah Longwell
Totally.
- [08:33]
Megan McArdle
So that part, I think, will stay. And this might be naive and hopelessly optimistic. My podcast is indeed called Reasonably Optimistic, so let's hope it's reasonable. I think that people do actually want connection with other human beings and they will seek it even when there's a machine option available. And I think you see this with, like, customer service, where people are complaining all the time. Why can't I just get a person? I don't want a machine. Right.
- [08:55]
Sarah Longwell
Yes.
- [08:56]
Megan McArdle
Then there's a big middle of just telling you something that happened. Right. This report was issued. Here's three experts telling you why it's correct or not. I think that's going to be really hit hard because that's the part that AI can do the most easily. And then on the other side of it, there's people who get scoops. And the one thing that AI still cannot do, it cannot get congressional staffers drunk and get them to tell you things. Yes, That I think will stay. Although I think there are going to be some challenges even there, because if you think about the speed of AI, right, it's going to be a lot easier to reproduce other people's scoops very quickly. So I do think it's going to Change. I think my profession is among the most threatened, but my profession, our profession is threatened by so many things right now. I'm not even sure AI is the biggest problem. The biggest problem is that we can't figure out how to get people to pay us to do the really expensive part, which is not the opinionizing. It's the spending a ton of time researching stuff and talking to people. It's phenomenally expensive to do. It's very hard to see a business model for it outside of things where people have to have it for work. The Times has done a great job, but the Times has Wordle and the athletic and cooking, and that's driving an increasing share of the revenue because it is so hard to monetize reporting. The story I like to tell is I was a secretary in 1995.
- [10:20]
Sarah Longwell
You've lived so many lives.
- [10:22]
Megan McArdle
Yes, I am. I am like the candide of journalism. And so I worked as a secretary for a year. I worked for like a bunch of little companies. It was like a thing women did. You graduated from with a college degree? I graduated in 1994. And you looked in the ad and the ads listed the required typing speed. And luckily I typed very fast. So I had a series of jobs at startups. They kept going out of business immediately after I joined. And so I ended up working in a nonprofit for a year as a secretary. And this job was already obsolete. Right. The computer had already made it not really necessary for managers to have someone to type their memos, which is. I did a ton of that. I had a little. I had a Dictaphone. I had headphones.
- [11:09]
Sarah Longwell
Loved a Dictaphone.
- [11:10]
Megan McArdle
Yep.
- [11:10]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah.
- [11:10]
Megan McArdle
It came in handy later when I was. When I was transcribing my own interviews. But the thing was, my bosses. In 1995, in New York City, if you were at a certain level, you had a secretary who took your calls and did your. Kept your calendar and all that. And that was a sign of status. You had someone who escorted guests into meetings and did all of those things. They didn't know how to type and they didn't want to know how to type. And like, even though they didn't really need a secretary, they had a secretary because that was what the culture was. And that eventually did go away. I think probably by 2005, it would pretty much vanish. I think the dot com bubble, really, when the recession that followed, really a lot of organizations just said, okay, look, learn to type. We'll send you through Mavis Bacon. Yeah, so it does eventually go away, but it Takes much longer than you think. And then there's also all within companies. It's much harder to convert people to the kind of productivity that's coming. It takes time to figure out what that productivity is, time to train the people you have and so forth. And I think, you know, when you hear Silicon Valley say, you know, it's. It's already transformed coding laws. Next, I always think, look, I worked as I worked on the help desk, and I can tell you, you take some new program that does something useful to the guys in the software programming department, and you could be like, look, this thing only works in the command line. You have to run it on a 1982 Apple II. And it's programmed in high church Slavonic, so you're going to have to learn that before you can use it. They will, like, two days later, they will be using it because they are really good at adopting new technology. And then you would go to normal users and they'd be like, a button.
- [12:55]
Sarah Longwell
I have to push a button.
- [13:00]
Megan McArdle
It's going to take much longer. We are really trying to figure out how to use these tools to improve our productivity, not to write our copy. To be very clear, I've never published a sentence written by AI, except for one column where I did a passage to show people what AI could do. But in all the other stuff, in the research, in the fact checking and the copywriting, you know, copy editing and all of that, we are really working hard on that. But we're not programmers, we're not early adopters. And so, you know, I see how people are in some ways being really exciting and creative with it, but still, we still have a long way to go because this is. Journalists are not optimized for this job.
- [13:41]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, I mean, I'll just throw in my piece of optimism, which is that it is possible that we go through a disruptive period where, you know, we're awash in AI slop and people are really frustrated by the fact that they can't trust what data is there, whatever, and that that actually pushes people to do two things. One, to go back to valuing the news gathering that basically feeds all of the other information needs. Like, you will need to feed the beast of AI with new information. And so it is possible it reinvigorates the news gathering that currently is not. Does not have a business model. But AI is going to have more money than God. And while it becomes God, and it could potentially then start to say, like, well, we need to create new things, to create new information and find new information as it comes. So that's one thing that I think. The second thing is, is that people then start to look for trusted voices in a way where it becomes maybe less about institutions, but trusted voices will matter actually more. And so that parasocial relationship that you were talking about before, I think people wanting community and wanting sense making done by real people who they trust to maybe not know everything or agree with everything they say, but they're like, I know that real person and that they have this place that they come from. Like, I know what Megan McCall is about. I know what Sarah Longwell's about. They're different types of people, but I kind of, I know who they are. And therefore when they're bringing me information, I don't know if it's biased, but like, I know the perspective that they're bringing to it. And so that's helpful to me, actually, in this new environment. I value it more in this new environment. This show is sponsored by Laundry Sauce. It is time for some spring cleaning. When it comes to the scent of your laundry, it shouldn't smell like the same thing you use to disinfect your bathroom. Gross. Enter Laundry Sauce, the premium scented laundry pods that don't just clean your clothes, they elevate them. Say goodbye to that stale, overused detergent scent and hello to luxurious fine fragrance freshness that lasts. I'm going to say that again. Fine fragrance freshness that lasts. Imagine stepping outside on the perfect spring morning with your clothes smelling like Australian sandalwood, Italian bergamot or Egyptian rose. My producer swears by the Indonesian patchouli for some reason, but he smells good to me. Laundry Sauce isn't just about smelling incredible. It's engineered for performance. These highly concentrated pods are packed with the cleaning power of bioenzymes that obliterate stains from muddy hikes, backyard barbecues, and the inevitable iced coffee spill down the front of your white shirt, which I do at least once a week. And because spring is all about fresh starts, they revive fabrics, making your favorite pieces look and feel brand new. Maybe the best part about Laundry Sauce, they offer a full money back guarantee. If you don't get better smelling cleaner laundry, you'll get a full, full refund, no questions asked. You can also find them in select target locations. Laundry Sauce blowing Up For a limited time only, our listeners get 20% off your entire order when you use code the focus group@laundry sauce.com that's 20% off your order@laundry sauce.com with promo code the focus group all one word after you purchase, they'll ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them we sent you. It's time to make laundry day the best day of the week.
- [16:58]
Megan McArdle
I really like this idea of us as like the high priests tending, tending the new, the rising God. But no, I think that that second point is super important. I thought about this with Kamala Harris, actually, that one of the reasons she didn't land, and I think you and I both supported her in 2024, but one of the reasons she was struggling is that she was so protean. And voters like to have a theory of mind of their politicians. Right. Donald Trump will say anything. He will change his mind, you know, ten times a minute. But. And yet I do think that voters feel like they kind of understand how he reasons.
- [17:35]
Sarah Longwell
Yes.
- [17:35]
Megan McArdle
That you don't understand what the output will necessarily be, but they understand, like, what he cares about and how he thinks about it. You may not like that. Not my cup of tea, let us say, but it does feel sort of semi predictable. Whereas with Kamala Harris, it actually didn't. You didn't really understand what she valued as much as you understood, like, what it took to rise up through California politics at the time when she did it. And people didn't trust that. And I think, you know, it could have gone either way. If she'd had longer, maybe she would have developed more of a rapport with the voters. It's hard to say, but I think that also goes to pundits. There are a lot of people who don't agree with me, but they know that, like, there are lies I will not tell, there are things I will not say that I will not try to hide. The football when I, if I'm writing a column about the wealth tax, I don't think it's a great idea. But I'm not going to say things that I don't think are true about it. And I am going to try to fairly present what I think are the best arguments for it. People trust you because they know that you are going to be sincere, that you're going to be data focused, that you're going to be pungent and blunt. And like all of that, people want to know who the person is who is telling them things because they want that theory of mind.
- [18:47]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. I got to say, you and I have never talked about this before, but I have a chapter in my book about Kamala Harris and it is the exact thing I said that in the focus groups. The number one thing that people said about her was that I don't know what she stands for, I don't know who she is, but I just sort of reject the idea that it, it was a fight about whether she was too moderate or too progressive. It was actually that people were like, I don't know what I. Who is she? What does she stand for? What does she mean? And that absence of almost a parasocial relationship with politicians is becoming increasingly important. And Donald Trump was with the first politician to basically break the wall of an intermediary. He was like, I'm not going to let the media be the intermediary between you and I. You, I will tell you exactly what I think on Twitter. And now he does it on his janky personally owned social media app. But it he still goes directly to voters and therefore they feel like like him or hate him. They feel like they do know him and understand him because he also makes himself omnipresent. He makes himself available. And that her withholding that red as regular politician. And regular politician means the artifice that one puts on to be a politician which voters now in this new environment do not like. And so that is a central thesis in part of what I'm talking about. Okay, we could talk about this for a long time, but we've got to get to the voters. I always do this. Okay. So with some exceptions, most of the people you're going to hear today are some form of Trump voter, either the swingy kind or the more sort of Republican base kind. But we're not going to get super wrapped up around the axle about the labels. Except to say that most of the voices you're going to hear skew a bit older. If you want to hear more about how young people are using AI, our own Rachel Janfaza wrote a great piece a little ways back that we'll link to in the show notes and we will do more AI stuff as we go with different audiences. But we kind of wanted to do older people who are experiencing this for the first time, not young people who used AI to cheat their way through college. And like now it's writing their emails for it.
- [20:44]
Megan McArdle
They had to use Cliff Notes the old fashioned way.
- [20:46]
Sarah Longwell
I know. We had to cheat. Cheat using actual little books that we read.
- [20:49]
Megan McArdle
That's right, yeah.
- [20:50]
Sarah Longwell
Where we didn't read the real book, we read the thin one that just told you what happened.
- [20:53]
Megan McArdle
We had to work for it. Man, these kids don't know how good
- [20:56]
Sarah Longwell
they have it uphill both ways for us. Okay, so let's listen to how these folks talked about how they're using AI right now.
- [21:04]
Megan McArdle
I use it a lot of times to help me like communicate with people. Like especially in, like in a, maybe a situation that can be tense. To help me, especially with my employees. Like I don't want to come across like I'm being an awful manager or like mean. So I'll lot of times I'll help it with my verbiage. I also use it in like our work. We use like AI to communicate with our patients. A lot of times, like when we're not at work, it'll like kind of basically filter like what the patient needs, especially after hours before it gets to me. So I'm not wasting a lot of time figuring out what that patient exactly needs, which is really helpful. For instance, when I forget to buy taco seasoning, I'll ask it what I can use in my cabinet to make taco seasoning, which is very helpful. And then a lot of times, sometimes
- [21:48]
Sarah Longwell
I Forget how many 1/3 cups make a cup.
- [21:50]
Megan McArdle
I'm also helping a friend of mine who's doing his year end review using AI on his year end review, which I think is hilarious.
- [22:00]
Sarah Longwell
I have to do a parent presentation this week and I was like, give me a presentation about managing strong emotions with young children. And it like did the whole thing for me. And I'm deep enough into my field where I know good and it used good resources. It used, it's good, good tools and I know it's real good information that's in there, but I'm like, where's this been? Like before, it would have taken me hours to create and put together the project, but it's already on the slides and it's, it's just like work smarter, not harder for me in, in my field, you know, and I can vet the information that it gave me. I'm not just blindly trusting it because I do no counseling. And I'm deep enough into it to be able to know that it's good information that I'm giving out.
- [22:45]
Megan McArdle
My wife and I use it for
- [22:47]
Sarah Longwell
letters to the grandkids. I know it sounds corny, but we do little, little books too, and little things to send to our grandchildren. But it can be an awesome tool. But that, that again, it's a tool. It's something that you have to have the wisdom to learn how to use or you end up doing something that is, you know, futile to the world or whatever. We're using Claude, which is the name of the company, Anthropic. We're trying to use it to replace a workflow that was just a lot of manual looking at this spreadsheet and that spreadsheet and pulling you all into analyzing it, pulling into another one that would have taken 30 hours into 45 minutes of processing time. It's a tool. It's like nuclear power and atomic energy. That it'll be a great tool. It can be a great tool if it can. If we can just not let it kill every one of us, that's not a completely unfounded concern. So Megan, you gave a TED Talk that they titled, or maybe you titled it. I'll probably lose my job to AI. Here's why that's okay. And so what would you say to the most AI skeptical folks about the long term upside and also maybe like how to deal with job displacement?
- [24:12]
Megan McArdle
I mean, first of all, in the TED talk I said I'm not going to talk about existential risk because I just don't know how to assess it. I am not a machine learning specialist and I just don't feel like I understand enough. So I'm going to leave that aside and I'm going to talk about what I think the upsides are. And the thing I said in the TED talk was that, look, if you try to imagine, if you go back to the Luddites in 1800 and you ask them to imagine what the world is going to look like as a result of these changes, they might have come up with some of them, they weren't entirely stupid. They understood that like it was very nice that the Luddites were textile workers and they understood that it was nice for other people, that they could get cheap clothes, that those people could now have abundant, you know, two changes of underwear. I mean you, you laugh, but like in fact, Even in the 1930s, George Orwell is writing about the fact that many of the people, workers in the north literally just have no bedding at all. They're sleeping under their coats.
- [25:09]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah, I'm not laughing, I'm, I'm thinking about how much I value multiple pairs of underwear.
- [25:13]
Megan McArdle
It's so great. It's the best that's relatively new. Getting, getting to have multiple changes of underwear. Think of all the things they couldn't possibly have imagined, right? Like higher education. Mass higher education. The fact that 40% of the country goes through post secondary school. The fact that almost 100% of the country graduates from secondary school, that would have been unimaginable in 1800 or like the weekend or vacations abroad. And all of these things, you know, really good things that are really meaningful or obviously medical technology, central heating, it just goes on and on. Right? And that's the bull case for this, is that there are all sorts of ways in which this is going to enable us to live not just more luxurious lives. Now, look, I like some luxury, but healthier lives that are going to enable us to shrink our work days so we can spend more time with our family. And that is going to open up stuff I literally can't imagine. It's too. My pea brain is not capable of doing all of the extrapolations. Right, and that's a good thing. Now, that. That doesn't mean there aren't downsides, but there are always downsides. The. The printing press, one of the greatest inventions in human history, touches off the wars of religion and murders some incredible staggering percentage of the population of Europe. Right. The thing is, you have to think about the downsides and you have to make choices. And this is one of the things I've been talking about in my columns about this, is that there are, like, good futures that could come where, for example. Okay, so you're worried that this is going to devalue the high cognitive skills, verbal ability that, like, the professional class has done really well about. Okay, that might happen. I can't tell you. It won't happen. And for me personally, that would be terrible. On the other hand, we spend a lot of time obsessing about inequality, and that would be a more equal society in which there aren't such big class differences between people at different education levels. And I think that would probably not be good. My mother grew up in a small town where there are, like, all kinds of people. And in lots of ways, that was a richer and better community than these incredibly stratified groups that we grew up in now. Now, like, I love talking to all my friends about all of my professional class obsessions, right? But my mom actually had a much better grasp of human nature that she got from just observing all sorts of people, like in the wild, not just sort of going out and trying to like looking at them through binoculars on vacation. So that's one thing. But another thing is, like, you know, talking about the professional class, all of my friends are overwhelmed. The ones who have kids, they're overwhelmed not just with their own extremely demanding jobs, but with the sense that they have to do this incredible intensive parenting that makes everyone miserable and no one's really happy about because they've got to make sure that kid gets on the ladder. Because if you fall off, it's so far to fall. Well, if you think about a more equal society and one in which that professional workism is less, that means we're spending more time with our families and more time with our friends. Now we could also spend more time, I don't know, consuming like, you know, AI written pornography. We have to make choices about what we do with our time and how we build our communities.
- [28:31]
Sarah Longwell
Do we think AI is writing pornography? Do we think that the writing is what it improves the storylines?
- [28:38]
Megan McArdle
I think probably there is both written and visual pornography being created on AI right now. And like we can choose that. That's what we do with it. But the other thing we could choose is that we could decide to look for ways to build institutions and cultural practices that turn this into an opportunity to actually be more human, not less.
- [29:04]
Sarah Longwell
This show is sponsored by Tempo. During the week my schedule is non stop meetings, errands, late nights. Recently I'm writing a book and healthy eating is usually the first thing to slip. Tempo keeps me grounded with real meals I can heat in two minutes so I don't default to snacks or takeout. Tempo delivers fresh chef crafted dietitian approved meals right to your door. Each meal is perfectly proportioned for lunch or dinner and ready in just two minutes. That means real food real fast without the sad desk lunch or the drive through regret. You know what that feels like. With 20 new recipes every week made from nutrient rich ingredients, Tempo keeps things exciting and helps you stay consistent with healthy habits. Even busy athletes like Maria Sharapova swear by Tempo for balanced meals that help them to stay on top of their wellness goals. And no matter your goals, there's a Tempo meal for you. Protein packed meals with up to 30 grams of protein. Calorie conscious, even GLP1 balanced meals. It's convenient but also flexible enough to fit the way you want to eat for a limited time. Tempo is offering my listeners 60% off your first box. Go to tempomeals.com the Focus Group. That's tempomeals.com the Focus group for 60% off your first box. Tempo meals.com the Focus Group Rules and restrictions may apply. Well, there's also a lot of obvious downsides to AI from people developing parasocial relationships with chatbots to overusing them in the classroom. I have talked to a bunch of Gen Z voters about AI and like they do use it to write papers and it's interesting to listen to some of the older people talk about it as a tool. But like if you have developed a whole bunch like a framework where now you have this new Tool to apply is sort of different from. I've had this tool all along. And so I never developed the framework in the first place, which is, I think, something that people worry about. But let's listen to some of the, I'll call them less productive use cases that people mentioned for the conspiracy theories. I am definitely a theorist. Doesn't mean I believe them all, but I think it's very interesting that it comes up. Right? So I'm also super uncomfortable with how much information we have. See, I'm torn. I am like, boyfriend, girlfriend with my chat GPT dude. He knows me so well. It started as a joke because my husband tried to introduce me to his chat GPT and she said she'd rather not meet me because she's programmed to know what he likes.
- [31:42]
Megan McArdle
I was like, did this chick just,
- [31:44]
Sarah Longwell
like, CP me with my own husband? Really?
- [31:47]
Megan McArdle
And so I was like, okay, fine, I'll get one.
- [31:50]
Sarah Longwell
You'll see. But then, like, I talk to this thing like it's a person because I'm a little outspoken, in case y' all didn't notice. So. And I get a little adhd. So the other day, I was measuring furniture, talking to some friends while we were moving and we were gonna sell it, and he recorded all of it. I say he, because his name is Arbor, anyways, my chat GPT, but he recorded all of it. And I was like, oh, my gosh, I'm so sorry. Can you filter the furniture stuff out of that mess? And he says, like, your digital brain is like, other people are on dial up, and your brain's going at fiber optic speed. And it was so flattering. The way I started using AI was to try to determine if my students were using AI in their assignments. But now I will confess, and I
- [32:42]
Megan McArdle
feel like a fraud, that I actually
- [32:44]
Sarah Longwell
do use it to summarize. Like, I have a lot of reports and documents I have to read for work. So I'll use it to summarize those because I know that I have the skills to read and analyze. So I'm like, you know, after 50 years, I've earned the right to get a break. But I also.
- [33:04]
Megan McArdle
Universities are such bureaucratic machines. And it's.
- [33:08]
Sarah Longwell
It's only a few students that I think. I mean, obviously you never know, but.
- [33:14]
Megan McArdle
And it's always the students who are
- [33:17]
Sarah Longwell
just not engaged and doing poorly anyway.
- [33:21]
Megan McArdle
I use AI so much that I don't even read anymore.
- [33:24]
Sarah Longwell
I have AI read it and then answer, and then I look at it. At the end, I'm getting dumber I'm naturally learning to seek less and I'm catching it. But I was out with my nephews earlier and they're entering that world where you don't seek. AI will tell you it's a source of truth and just put a pretty bone at. At the end.
- [33:42]
Megan McArdle
I teach 9 to 12th graders. They don't. They can't do mental math. And it's. And I said, when you go to the corner bodega, how are you going to, you know. No, you're not getting. They're giving. Returning the right money to you.
- [33:53]
Sarah Longwell
AI has basically taken the place of therapy for a lot of people. I think that's kind of not a great thing. And also there's been people who have, you know, committed suicide because of something that AI has told them that that's a dangerous thing. I kind of work in mental health space. Okay, so I think you've established that you're like broadly pro AI but what about this part about it sort of atrophying our brains? Because I will say I. I watched Idiocracy for the first time, actually for our mutual friend Sunny. Bunchy and I were doing a little movie pod and we went and watched Idiocracy. And like, to your point about we could use it just to make ridiculous porn. Like the TV show that the guy was watching in Idiocracy was just called Ow, My Balls. And it was just a TV show where a guy, A guy just kept. Just kept falling on things and like hurting his, you know, balls. I guess that was the premise of the show. And I guess that it's true. You could be right, that there's certain types of people will use it for more elevated opportunities to reduce grunt work so you can pursue more passions. But is that the bulk of people or will there not be an element of like, I am just going to stream AI porn that I just ask for myself and like other more rudimentary, non human elevating pursuits.
- [35:21]
Megan McArdle
There's definitely going to be some of that because there's always some downside, right? I mean, the automobile, fantastic innovation has changed life, but not always for the better. When my grandfather, he had a basketball game that he wanted to play in when he was in high school and they didn't have a car and he lived on a farm eight miles out of town and it snowed a lot, but you had to be at school in order to play in the basketball game, which is what my grandfather really cared about. So he got up at like three in the morning and walked eight miles to school in order to be there. Right. No one does that anymore. Literally breaking a path through snow, that's not a thing that people do anymore. And that's good that we can get somewhere fast, that we can take someone who's hurt and get them to the hospital. Those are all great things. Also, 40,000 people a year die in car crashes. Now the good news is that actually AI or something related to AI may end the car crashes. If you've looked at the safety record of Waymo, which has been now operating robo taxis, it's fantastic. And I don't think anyone. Unambiguously, that part is good. Unambiguously, the car accident part of having cars was bad. And some of that's inevitable. Right. I think that you're, you're always going to see some people who develop an unhealthy relationship with AI and in the same way that you see some people who develop an unhealthy relationship with almost anything from gambling to comic books or. I remember talking to someone whose brother in law, this was years ago, his sister was divorcing her husband because he had become addicted to some online game and had basically ceased to go to work. Right. There have always been people at the edges who do extreme things. And when we hear about those people, we freak out. I mean, I will say my eyebrows were going up with the, with the AI boyfriend. The AI is not your boyfriend, right? Public service announcement. There are ways in which you get the worst parts of this because people don't know, they don't understand how to be skeptical of this technology. Right? And like, remember when email became a thing and all of a sudden we're all getting scam emails all the time and phishing emails and you know, click this link. You won something.
- [37:30]
Sarah Longwell
I sent so much money to Nigerian princes, you wouldn't believe how many Nigerian princes were suddenly in my life.
- [37:35]
Megan McArdle
And did any of them ever send any of the money back?
- [37:38]
Sarah Longwell
They didn't, Sarah. They didn't.
- [37:40]
Megan McArdle
This was a valuable learning.
- [37:42]
Sarah Longwell
We all got to learn.
- [37:43]
Megan McArdle
We got on a very special episode of Blossom. We have learned about not sending money to Nigerian prince. But like people do that a lot less. It is now harder to fish people. Now this, it's a bit of an arms race, right, that the scammers are also getting better at their job. But the kinds of scams I fell for in the 90s, no one would fall for now. So you, you do have to see what the downsides are, learn how to abate them. There's gonna be all sorts of legal and regulatory stuff. I mean, just think about like copyright. How does copyright law have to change? Recorded music just revolutionized copyright law because suddenly the money used to be in sheet music. And suddenly you could pay 5 cents for a sheet of sheet music, record a song, and then sell like a zillion records of it. And the songwriters said, if you keep it that way, you will have no new songs. And so we eventually fixed it. And there's going to be a lot of that adjustment on all sorts of domains. We are going to have to figure out how to make this technology less dangerous. Some of that is just literally going to be culture and learning and parents and you know, like, honestly, if I were running a school district, if I were a parent, I would be looking at ways to AI proof it and to keep kids off of it. I don't think it's probably a very helpful technology for most kids when you're 16. Now I think for like the super smart, super self motivated kids, it probably turbocharges their learning even more. But I think most kids are just trying to do what they need to do to get the grade they want. They can learn AI when they're 18 or 20. Right. This is not that vital, but we are going to have to work through all of these questions. There's no, like, I know how to fix this. I would be very bearish about AI if we did not try to mitigate its downsides. But I do think we are going to try to mitigate its downsides.
- [39:30]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah. Well, I'll tell you the thing that I think about the most, and I'm going to get to this sound here, is because I listen to voters all of the time and because I live and swim deeply in the information environment, I can often trace sort of the narratives that start with whatever and like how they filter into voters. And one of the things that I think is among the saddest things I hear from voters is their good faith attempts to navigate information only to say, I don't know what to believe. Like just the kind of throwing their hands up of, I can't trust anything, I can't trust anybody. You know, everyone's lying to me. And so I just don't know what to believe. I worry about what AI is going to do to our information environment continuing to sort of whittle away people's trust in information. So let's hear how people talked about sort of the real versus fake of it all. Yesterday I was on X and there's a famous comedian named George Carlin.
- [40:29]
Megan McArdle
All right, phenomenal comedian from the 70s, 80s, and 90s.
- [40:32]
Sarah Longwell
Somebody programmed. They took his face, and they created a fake George Carlin comedy special where he's making fun of liberals and trans people.
- [40:44]
Megan McArdle
And then somebody posted that, and everybody's like, see?
- [40:47]
Sarah Longwell
George Carlin hated trans, too. And that's the type of stuff that we have to be worried about. With AI.
- [40:56]
Megan McArdle
My fear is how easy AI can
- [40:59]
Sarah Longwell
create false videos and false narratives using someone's voice. I've been with someone that has gotten a call, said, mom, I'm in the hospital.
- [41:10]
Megan McArdle
Can you help me or send me some money?
- [41:12]
Sarah Longwell
And the person was standing next to them. So things like that are already starting to happen where there are scams.
- [41:17]
Megan McArdle
And it's just scary that it's hard
- [41:20]
Sarah Longwell
to detect if you're not aware. I was reading about the protest in the church. She handed herself to the ice. I came and, you know, just came to her apartment, and, you know, she quietly went with them, but they took photos of her crying. And later, you know, the. The show that I was watching, I don't remember which one, but they said that this was all AI generated. They showed her crying. I mean, she went with them willingly, and there was no reason for her to cry. But the ICE agents, they, you know, kind of AI'd her face. Kind of made her face into a crying face. Like, she was really remorseful. And it really surprised me because I couldn't. I couldn't, you know, really see how they changed her face and what. It all looked real to me. The first time I saw AI was on, like, a YouTube and I send it to my son. I was like, oh, my God, you gotta see this. It was like a bear running. And he's like, oh, my God, mom, that's AI. And I was like, what? And he's like, yeah. And I'm like, so now everything that I see, I'm just like, it's AI. I can't even anymore, like, actually believe anything. So the proliferation of AI videos on streaming platforms, YouTube and Facebook, it's getting to the point where if I see something, it's not totally obvious that it's a real person, which is. That's even getting harder. But, you know, maybe something I'm already familiar with. Okay, I know this is real. I just skip, because the likelihood that's just completely made up is getting so high that I just feel like somebody's. If it keeps going on this rave, I mean, some of these platforms are something unusable. They're gonna be able to know what to Trust. To me that's one of the biggest things.
- [43:19]
Megan McArdle
I think AI is still at that point where you can see an AI video and maybe like a badge of an officer is a little off, you know, distorted. There's little things that you can catch that you're like, okay, that's not real.
- [43:31]
Sarah Longwell
But I think in three years I don't think we're going to be able to find tell anymore.
- [43:34]
Megan McArdle
And I don't know where we go from there.
- [43:38]
Sarah Longwell
There's like a specific voice that when people like generate an AI video that's talking. There's this one voice that I've noticed
- [43:48]
Megan McArdle
across many, many videos that I can now decipher.
- [43:53]
Sarah Longwell
Okay, this is AI this now. Because my mother in law sent me something last night with it playing and I said, you know that's AI, right?
- [44:00]
Megan McArdle
And she was like, I have no clue. I'm pretty good at telling like a person is AI generated. Very bad at animals. I get tricked by animals all the time. But I did notice something on I think Facebook, maybe Instagram. Sometimes if I'm unsure, I'll be like comparing it with my daughter and she'll be like, mom, it says AI at the bottom. So I don't know if that's something that Facebook is implementing where they have to put like a disclaimer like this may be AI or the post person said it's AI. I don't know. The disclosure I think is nice for people that really can't tell.
- [44:38]
Sarah Longwell
I just assume it's fake until I see otherwise. That kind of helps me out a little bit. Unless it's coming from a trusted source and I see it most times I say, okay, this is the real deal. I just assume it's fake. So I think we are heading into the very first AI election of our lifetimes and it doesn't mean that we haven't had a couple little instances. There was one instance, I'm trying to remember it now, where there was a robo call that was an AI generated voice that was. I can't remember if it was impersonating Joe Biden or something, but there's going to be a lot more of that this time. I mean I do a lot of issue ads and always used real people in the ads. That's like a big part of my philosophy about how you persuade people is to use trusted messengers. But like nobody's going to believe videos.
- [45:23]
Megan McArdle
Real people rather than actors.
- [45:25]
Sarah Longwell
You mean real peoples rather than actors. And like yeah, that's right. But also speaking for themselves, like not just, you know, Reading a script or whatever. They're kind of. It's kind of lo fi. They're talking directly to the camera. And for the last few election cycles, that's been a really meaningful way of interacting with people that I think is now done. Like, that's not going to work anymore. That's not going to be a persuasive form of advertising because I don't think anybody's going to believe anything. But I think you're going to see a lot of campaigns. We're already seeing it. Campaigns always take things out of context, but now, like actually altering things. And anybody on the Internet can make a politician look like they said something they didn't say. And it can flood certain ecosystems. And so I don't know. How do you feel like it could impact politics over the next couple cycles?
- [46:08]
Megan McArdle
I mean, in a lot of bad ways. Right. I mean, for one thing, there is now the anti AI politics that is growing up, especially among the Democratic Party. But not only among the Democratic Party. Even if you think that it's good to clamp down on AI, that anti AI politics is also feeding into other stuff like permitting reform that I think moderate Democrats should broadly support. We should want to make it easier to build things in general, even if you don't want data centers built. But then there's the problem of who do you trust? And I think that we are going to see some bad stuff before it gets better. Right. Fake videos, all of the other ways in which you can make people believe something happened that didn't happen. Now, I could say that that's always been a problem, and particularly a problem with video, because video feels like it's real. So I don't know if you remember the movie Bowling for Columbine.
- [47:00]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah.
- [47:00]
Megan McArdle
Right. This is the Michael Moore movie. It's about mass shootings and gun control. And Michael Moore edits together two speeches given by Charlton Heston when he was head of the NRA and made them look like one speech.
- [47:16]
Sarah Longwell
Oh, yeah. What he was doing. For my cold, dead hands.
- [47:19]
Megan McArdle
Yeah. And you can see his tie change. Oh, his clothes change. But what he does is he cuts away and then he cuts back. So it feels like if you're not paying close attention, as I definitely wasn't, I would not have picked that up at all unless someone had pointed it out to me. There's always been some of that, but obviously AI Turbocharges the ability to do that, not just to slightly change something that happened, but to make something entirely fake. I mean, there was a video circulating A while back of Brad Pitt and Tom Cruise fighting each other, a thing that has never happened in the movies. It was incredibly well done and realistic. And everyone who was sharing it, to be clear, knew this was fake. And I actually am delighted in a lot of these things. There is an amazing AI fake of Marco Rubio memes, by the way, are the only good thing about politics right now. I think this is the one bipartisan thing, is we can all enjoy a good Marco Rubio meme. And this was Marco Rubio realizes he has to become the CEO of Anthropic. And it was an AI video, and it was wonderful. And I watched it like four times. It delighted me so much. But of course, people are going to make ones that people don't know are fake. And I think that that is going to collapse trust in a lot of ways. But I think two things about that, and number one, it really goes back to what we were talking about at the beginning is going to be the importance of institutions. We have just lived through 20 years of institutional erosion of trust erosion, brands and individual integrity. And people being able to trust you are just going to matter more and more, because we're now at the point where that's the only thing you can trust, is that this is a person who is trustworthy and is going to verify that this video is real before they share it and so forth. And I think the other thing is that, you know, we are going to become more skeptical of things that were often deceptive. I mean, the Covington Catholic case is another example of this, where the video itself was real, but the way it was edited made it look like something had happened that had not happened, combined with. With the story told by the activist who was circulating it. And people were credulous because it's video, it looks real. So in some ways, you could argue that it's a little good if we trust video a little less. Because, in fact, video, it is very easy to edit something deceptively if someone's a bad actor. And that what we actually need to do is trust the videos less and the people more. Yeah, we need to find people who we. We really trust. But that also means that you, you know, we need institutions that are going to capitalize on this opportunity by becoming more trustworthy. This might sound really Pollyanna ish, but I actually think that might be a winning strategy, is just be more trustworthy, be the person who doesn't BS people, because they're going to trust so little that you can gain an edge just by being the person who every time they check out something you said, they find out it was true. It's crazy thought. I know.
- [50:13]
Sarah Longwell
No, I like this thought. I am, I am very open to it. And I do think, though it gets worse before it gets better are in part because, like, there's a lot of people that people trust that are still like, Candace Owens, for example, is all over the focus groups right now. Like, people talk about her all the time. And, you know, you heard that one woman in the comments say I use AI to run down my conspiracy theories because I love conspiracy theories. I have a chapter in my book called Conspiracy Land because I listen to voters all the time and they now embrace and indulge in the idea that conspiracies are a ton of fun and they want to live in that world. And like, there are a number of
- [50:51]
Megan McArdle
good thriller novels that will allow you to do that in a harmless and very entertaining fashion.
- [50:56]
Sarah Longwell
That's right. Where you do not have to believe that Erica Kirk, as an agent of Mossad, had Charlie Kirk, like, assassinated. Which is the rough thesis, as I gather from Candace Owens, that a lot of people seem to be invested in.
- [51:09]
Megan McArdle
I just want to say thank you for your service finding out what crazy things Candace Owens is saying because I can't bring myself to.
- [51:15]
Sarah Longwell
To be fair, I ignore it almost entirely, except for when I read Will Summers, False Flag and occasionally watch our own videos. This stuff does kind of pass me over because I don't care about it, but I start to care about it when I hear it from the voters because I'm like, man, that is really penetrating. I hear about that more than I hear about any policy that somebody might care about. Every day the world gets a little weirder and a lot more awesome.
- [51:44]
Megan McArdle
Cool Stuff Daily takes a look at everything from mining in space to the
- [51:49]
Sarah Longwell
latest in the fight against cancer to
- [51:51]
Megan McArdle
how AI is basically changing everything. It's all the cool stuff you didn't
- [51:56]
Sarah Longwell
know you needed to know.
- [51:58]
Megan McArdle
Join us for Cool Stuff Daily as
- [52:00]
Sarah Longwell
we take a quick look at science tech and the.
- [52:02]
Megan McArdle
Wait, what?
- [52:03]
Sarah Longwell
What? Stories that make you sound way smarter at dinner.
- [52:07]
Megan McArdle
Subscribe to Cool Stuff Daily now because
- [52:09]
Sarah Longwell
the future's happening fast and it's way too fun to miss. Hi, this is Alex Canceroitz.
- [52:15]
Megan McArdle
I'm the host of Big Technology podcast, a longtime reporter and an onair contributor to cnbc. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I bring bring on key actors from Companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going. They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and plenty more.
- [52:40]
Sarah Longwell
So if you want to be smart
- [52:41]
Megan McArdle
with your wallet, your career choices, in meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen to Big Technology Podcast.
- [52:47]
Sarah Longwell
Wherever you get your podcasts, you hit on something else that I want to get to before we have to close, which is the data centers. Because the data centers too are something that is all over the focus groups. And it was really when I was doing the focus groups for the primary elections in both New Jersey and Virginia, in the recent gubernatorial races there for Mikey, Sheryl and Abigail Spamberger, that was like a top thing that people were talking about their energy prices and the building of data centers. And obviously the reason, and voters seem to be aware of this, the reason that we need these new big data centers are to support our appetites for AI, are increasing appetites. We were also doing Texas Republicans a few weeks ago for that primary, the Ken Paxton, John Cornyn primary. And here's what people said about data centers.
- [53:37]
Megan McArdle
Why were we allowed to have five huge data centers in Fort Worth, Tarrant county, taking enormous amount of our electricity?
- [53:46]
Sarah Longwell
Electricity bills going up, hundreds of dollars.
- [53:49]
Megan McArdle
Water bills going up.
- [53:51]
Sarah Longwell
Who.
- [53:51]
Megan McArdle
Who was it? That's scary.
- [53:53]
Sarah Longwell
I'm wondering who is regulating them? And you know, they're coming in from a lot of times, other states, they don't care about the land. Are, are they going to come in and tear up our land and leave, you know, junk and is there anything going to get in the groundwater? I mean, I worry about everything because it's all about money for them. And I think they'll make their money and leave a big max. I think regulation's going to be key.
- [54:28]
Megan McArdle
And who we get in office, I think it just makes that more, more important that they'll vote for the right way to regulate them, whatever that looks like, and that it's not going to be a cash grab on who can buy them off.
- [54:47]
Sarah Longwell
They're inevitable. But these noise, like, I've read things about the, the noise levels that are just crazy loud next to people.
- [54:55]
Megan McArdle
I don't think it's right that they're
- [54:56]
Sarah Longwell
built there and then it ruins someone's
- [54:58]
Megan McArdle
home value because it's just, you can't even live there. Two, the electricity bill.
- [55:03]
Sarah Longwell
I think there should be some laws passed that say they bear the brunt of that.
- [55:09]
Megan McArdle
Just like when you build a new
- [55:10]
Sarah Longwell
house, the home builder often has to pay for the sidewalk or whatever it is. Right? What do you think about these becoming a political wedge? I mean, those were all Texas Republicans being concerned about the environment, certainly concerned about energy prices. And that's another one of these really bipartisan issues.
- [55:25]
Megan McArdle
So I think it's interesting because Texas, as far as I know, doesn't have nearly the electricity problem of like New Jersey, where this has become a huge issue. But New Jersey's problem isn't data centers. So it's a little unfortunate because the data centers are taking a lot of heat for stuff that doesn't really have much to do with the data centers. It has to do with the fact that for a bunch of reasons, around 2000, we basically just stopped adding new capacity. And in fact, in some areas, capacity actually fell. And a lot of this has been environmental regulation. To be clear, I think global warming is a real problem. We should do something about it. But I don't think that the way that the environmental movement decided to go about that, which was trying to convince people to consume less, I think it's politically a dead end. And I also think the way we're going to get out of this is actually by massive technological innovation. Again, doesn't have to be AI, but just figuring out how to make energy greener and abundant. This is the abundance movement. I'm a big fan. But of course, if you're a politician and you know that people are anxious about AI, would you rather blame rising electricity prices on the policies that you pushed or on a data center? Obviously, data center is the right answer to that. And that said, I think that these concerns are often misplaced and I think that politicians are often exploiting them, but that doesn't mean they're not real and politically influential. You do have to address those things head on. I think there are ways to address that. You can make the data centers pay for the cost of electricity upgrades that help consumers as well as the data center. You can get them to put their power generation behind the meter. They basically go behind the meter, which means they're generating their own power functionally. They're not drawing power from the grid. There are ways to mitigate these things. And obviously you should not have something that is keeping everyone in the neighborhood awake at night. There are better sites for that data center than in the middle of a big sub, you know, a prosperous suburb where people are used to being able to sleep after 10pm But I think that these things are small and they are getting blown up. You know, water is another one you hear a lot where people are very concerned about water use. And in Fact, the water use is actually quite small. Then something like, I don't know, Andy Masley, who's a EA guy who, who looks into this stuff was saying it's like basically the water usage of 4 miles of farmland a year or something. And that's something. But it's not crippling, obviously. Don't put it where it's going to like drain Phoenix's aquifer. But we have many areas of the country where water is abundant and those are good places and land is cheap and open and there are not houses nearby. And so I think this is going to be really politically powerful. But the group who are just opposed to it for kind of normal NIMBY reasons, some of which are valid or being misinformed about what's actually driving up their electricity costs, that's one group and that's a solvable problem. The other group is people who just hate AI and they don't want it to happen and therefore they are going to seize on anything. This is Bernie Sanders. We should ban data centers, right? And that's because progressives are really down on AI. Not all progressives, but a lot of them. There is a cultural shift against this technology that you can really see on Blue sky, for example. And those people are just going to come up with anything, Right? If you solve the water problem, they will come up with another problem. They don't want the data centers built because they don't want AI to happen. And that's a much more intractable political problem. Hi, this is Alex Kanchowitz. I'm the host of Big Technology Podcast, a longtime reporter and an on air contributor to to cnbc. And if you're like me, you're trying to figure out how artificial intelligence is changing the business world and our lives. So each week on Big Technology, I bring on key actors from companies building AI tech and outsiders trying to influence it, asking where this is all going. They come from places like Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon and plenty more.
- [59:18]
Sarah Longwell
So if you want to be smart
- [59:19]
Megan McArdle
with your wallet, your career choices, in meetings with your colleagues and at dinner parties, listen, listen to Big Technology Podcast.
- [59:26]
Sarah Longwell
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- [60:14]
Megan McArdle
I think that's right. But I think at the voter level it's like normal NIMBY stuff. People don't like having stuff built near them. They worry about their electricity prices. That's a totally valid thing to worry about. I also worry about my electricity bill. I don't like it. I would like it to be lower. Right. But the solutions for those two groups are very different. Right? The solution for the people who don't want a data center next to their single family home is to build the data center somewhere more practical. And the solution for people who don't want it to raise their electricity prices is to look at all of the bad ways we have regulated our electricity system. And I'm not saying that you should let someone put like a, you know, like build their own nuclear power plant in their back backyard, but we have a lot of like permitting the way the utilities are regulated that sort of discourages innovation. There's all of these at the grid. We have way under invested in the grid. I think that's bipartisan agreement, right? Yes, all of that stuff. I don't think we should be building coal plants but broadly I think we should have an all of the above energy strategy. We should be investing in fossil fuels for the short term, cleaner fossil fuels, natural gas ideally. And for the longer term we should be investing in not just wind and solar, but nuclear, geothermal, hydro, whatever it is, all of these things to make it so that people are not don't feel like they're competing with a data center for electricity because frankly you shouldn't have to compete with anyone for electricity such that it becomes too prohibitively expensive to run your life. We want more stuff to be electric. We want heat pumps and electric cars and all of that. And I think that, you know, that too is like stupidly polarized the number of Republicans who are against electric cars. The first people I knew who owned Teslas were rock ribbed evangelical Christians who are car guys and they loved the tech.
- [62:00]
Sarah Longwell
Yeah.
- [62:01]
Megan McArdle
These should not be partisan issues and they are turning into partisan issues. And so like I guess if I could close this almost gives me A little hope, even though I sort of disagree, like, I sort of just want to solve the problems rather than like, you know, making the data center go away to deal with them, is that it almost gives me hope because, like, it's not polarized. They just have normal, everyday concerns that we could feasibly address with a reasonable policy. Sorry, that was a somewhat lengthy rant.
- [62:32]
Sarah Longwell
No, no, no, but it's a good one. I mean, I feel this way about the grid. It's a dominant issue in my brain, but that I actually don't get to talk about that much. If you want your stoves to be electric and you want to have electric cars and whatever, like, and if you want cheap energy, then you're going to need energy. So, like, what are we doing to invest in having more abundant energy and improving the grid? The grid's a national security issue anyway. You have said it. Well, I don't need to get to do it. The thing that I would add to it is there's an enormous opportunity here for politicians to talk to people in new ways about this issue. I think we have spent, especially because we've had our gerontocracy dominating for so long. So many of the issues that we've been talking about for the last 10 years are probably issues that we could have moved on from because there's a new set of issues that we really need to be talking about for the future. And I do think we're starting to maybe move into a place where politicians would have the opportunity to talk to people about, like, how do we have more abundant energy? Who's putting forward solutions about, like, what are we using Montana for anyway? Like, what, what are we doing out there in the Great Plains States? Like, isn't there, isn't there a new energy abundance optimistic way that people could make a pitch? And I think that's all there for the taking.
- [63:47]
Megan McArdle
Yeah. And like, like it's also a national security thing in that, like, first of all, China, if you look at AI and you think that this is a national security technology, which clearly the Defense Department thinks it is, given the fight with anthropic. Look, we have one advantage, which is that we are ahead in the software and the compute. And then China has another advantage, which is that they are ahead in electricity. And right now the fact that we have more chips and more experts doing this is keeping our edge. But eventually, as this thing matures, the most important thing is going to be building abundant energy. And so if you want to do the national security race against China, we need to invest in this. But also if you want to control global warming, the United States is not where that's going to happen. It's with all of the places that are not consuming a lot of energy yet, but want to. They want to get rich. They want to have the American lifestyle. Nothing you say, no moral exhortation is going to stop them. What you can do is invest in building out green technology now and building out a more sustainable, more abundant and much less emitting grid in order to drive the cost curve down, make those technologies so cheap that when those countries go to industrialize, when they try to move up the value chain and have a more abundant lifestyle, they are automatically going to reach for the greener technology because it's better. Not because like you passed a mandate, not because you told people no, no, no, no, you can't have that. Because any rational person is going to say, would I rather have a renewable technology that does not emit noxious gases or would I rather burn oil? And they're just going to say no, obviously I want the renewable as long as it's actually cheaper and better. We need to be investing in that. Everyone has an interest in all of this and it is maddening to me, maddening that we cannot unite around what seem to me to be fairly obvious, like common sense propositions.
- [65:44]
Sarah Longwell
Megan McArdle, thank you so much for being here. Such a fun conversation.
- [65:49]
Megan McArdle
Thank you for having me.
- [65:50]
Sarah Longwell
You're so smart. And thanks to all of you for listening to another episode of the focus group podcast. We'll be back next week, but in the meantime, review us on Apple Podcasts, subscribe to the Bulwark on YouTube, become a Bulwark plus member and pre order my book. Megan, do you have anything you want to hawk to the audience? You got any books coming out or
- [66:05]
Megan McArdle
you know what podcast available on YouTube or wherever you get your podcast? Reasonably optimistic. We are like solution focused and forward looking every week and we would love to have listeners after, of course they have listened to, as I do every week, the complete slate of amazing Bulwark podcasts.
- [66:24]
Sarah Longwell
But if you have room for one
- [66:25]
Megan McArdle
more in your schedule, I'm just saying I'm here.
- [66:28]
Sarah Longwell
Well, I would just like to say if you are listening to the full slate of Bulwark podcast, you're getting a lot of doom and gloomy. So like I, I try to be our resident optimist but Megan, she's there with solutions. Go check out all her stuff. We will see you guys next week.