Trump LOSES IT Over Canada’s New European Alliance (Live from New York)

Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov

Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov discuss the shifting political and technological landscape, focusing on AI regulation and geopolitical tensions

Key takeaways

• Jessica Tarlov emphasizes that effective argumentation involves opening minds to alternatives rather than forcing direct conversions.
• Scott Galloway argues that the primary fear regarding AI is not the technology itself but the lack of federal leadership and regulatory guardrails.

Main topics

• AI Regulation and Anxiety
• Geopolitics and US-Canada Trade

Notable quotes

An interruption is an admission that you were right.

Conclusion

The episode provides actionable advice for navigating both intense pol

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) Picture it. Summer. You and your girls at your favorite patio bar. The sun's out, the breeze is perfect, and you're looking stunning in that new sundress. And what are we drinking? A Campari Spritz. It's just Campari, Prosecco, and soda water. Bold, iconic, and perfectly bitter, just like you. Check out official cocktail recipes at Campari.com. Campari Spritz. Stay bitter. Speaker 2 (0:31) Please give a very warm welcome to the brilliant Jessica Tarlow and Scott Galloway. Speaker 4 (0:53) Okay, well, so today or tonight, we're going to do a few things in three parts. We're going to talk, we're going to do sort of an abridged Raging Moderates podcast, talk about the political environment. Then we're going to talk about Justice Book. And then we're going to take... Speaker 4 (1:17) That's the name of the book. I Disagree, Winning Arguments Without Losing Friends. Okay, so we wanted to step back and talk about where we are politically. And I think the two biggest stories today in the news are AI and Canada, specifically Canada deciding it's an abusive relationship and hooking up with someone else. So Jess, let's start there. AI anxiety. How do you think Or if and how do you think this AI anxiety might impact the midterms? Speaker 8 (1:52) Well, I want to start out by saying thank you guys so much for coming and doing this. We've done this once before, and it was so fun, and it was in Raging Moderates infancy, and we just had two years anniversary, which feels like a milestone. Speaker 8 (2:09) And it'll be fun to talk about the book. I want to talk about the politics because the politics fuels the book anyway. But just an enormous thank you. You guys are the most incredible listener base and so loyal. And we love all the feedback, even the mean comments, actually, which Scott is more sensitive about than I am. Because Speaker 4 (2:28) I get them. Jets is great. She should dump Scott. Let me just summarize every review. Seriously, really? Anyways. Speaker 8 (2:38) So it feels as though AI is rapidly becoming the sleeper issue for the election. And it started off with data centers and everyone was kind of like, what's going on here? And people were showing up at town halls and saying, I don't want one in my backyard. Nimbying the whole thing. And then it started expanding and they started talking on the Hill about regulation. And what do we do? Should we have a moratorium on data centers? Then moving up to we're going to regulate superintelligence. And the whole time, the elected class on the Republican side was ignoring the voters who said from the jump, we don't like this. Speaker 5 (3:20) We Speaker 8 (3:20) don't. And I think all of it has to do with a general anxiety about change, which happens when any big innovation comes into your life. But we were saying yesterday on Raging Moderates. from the new New York Times poll that the only issue that Republicans had an advantage on was AI. But it was just two points. So within the margin of error. And then you look at that in the context of the fact that over 70 % of Americans think that we've got to regulate it. And you look at what Trump is posting, you know, you're going to be backwards and poor, full steam ahead, the Jensen Wong call. You got to think that this is a really big gift. for Democrats. But my question to you about this is, how can they stick the landing? Because the answer isn't to regulate it into oblivion. It's to find some way to have the progress and the good stuff that comes with it and the innovation. And they're talking about being able to cure every kind of cancer Speaker 2 (4:23) with it, Speaker 8 (4:24) but make sure that people... aren't rioting in the streets because data centers are showing up and they think that there's a 10 to 20 percent chance that we're all going to die in the next few years. So what does that dying look like? Speaker 4 (4:38) Well, I'll come back to what dying looks like. There's a sweet spot of regulation, and that is we still have opiates. We still use them. They're still actually a very productive drug, but we've decided to regulate them and not prescribe them to people. who appear to have signs of addiction and not to have an economic incentive around increasing more and more opiates. We are finally starting to increase social media. Big tech is a net good for society. Fossil fuels are a net good for society, so are pesticides, but we have an EPA and an FDA. And there is no equivalent organization for AI. And as you are, I'm getting called. And I'm bragging, but it's true because I'm desperate for your affirmation. I'm getting called every day by every network to come on and talk about AI, what's going on. And the reality is, and this is what is creating so much anxiety, is I have no idea. I don't know if something bad has happened and they don't want to tell us and they're so freaked out that they're slowing down. I don't know if they see this as a means of regulatory capture by convincing the government to force them to just tap the brakes while all the open weight models that are catching up have to slam the brakes. I don't know if this is a PR stunt going into their IPO to basically catastrophize and get a ton of headlines. They haven't stopped, by the way. As freaked out as they are, JP Morgan and Goldman Sachs are still calling all their high net worth clients and telling them to get their checkbook out for the IPO. So clearly they're not that freaked out. This is the equivalent of... Speaker 4 (6:07) It's the anxiety of having no adult in the room. Like, we all have kids, or most of us have kids, and what you realize is that your kids actually appreciate, over the medium and the long term, not in the short term, guardrails. They want to know when they're supposed to go to bed. They want to know that they have to brush their teeth. They want to know that they have certain boundaries. This is the equivalent right now. Say Moderna, say a research scientist in Moderna announced on CNN The COVID vaccine that's been distributed, I think there's a 10 % likelihood it converts to this rabid pathogen that becomes infectious and kills. Speaker 4 (6:47) Everyone. Ends humanity. And everyone goes, well, this is just some snot-nosed kid that's been there eight weeks. And then the CEO of Moderna came out and said, well, he might have a point. And then the head of the CDC went, shut up. Just keep throwing the vaccine out there. The important thing is to get your stock price up. Let's talk about the CDC, which I think was one of the most respected brands in the world. Incredibly deep. pool of scientists who've decided not to go to work for Pfizer and Merck, take a cut and pay because they want to have meaning in their lives. And if the greatest threat to disease or to the control of disease right now is a super virus, and this goes to your question, being developed in a lab of a frontier model. In any responsible administration, we would have scientists, we would have social policy experts, we'd have lawyers embedded in these companies saying, asking these models, create a super virus, and then seeing what it says, and maybe slowing it down for 30 or 60 days. We have never had a multi-trillion dollar industry that's had no regulation. And as a result, these companies are incredibly fragile. If it gets out, if the lights here, the signals just for five minutes across Lexington Avenue are weaponized by a bot and shut down and there's a bunch of accidents and God forbid injury or death, there's a decent chance these companies might be shut down for, if these things go rogue for a few days, the media is so, and the populace is so angry and so waiting and so on a nice edge right now. These companies could lose $700, $800, $1 trillion, $2 trillion. They lost $150 billion on Monday. So we need to dispel the myth that's been fomented by Republicans and Silicon Valley that shareholder value and regulation are oxymorons. China is regulating the hell out of AI, and that's why 75 % of their populace trust it. They won't let a bot pretend to be a person for a... greater than a certain amount of time because they don't want, Sarah, say, Lannister convincing young men they should kill themselves. They don't want kids on AI. They don't want companies using AI for, you know, purposes that the CCP hasn't approved. So it's the anxiety that's being caused here. In my opinion, the culprits are not the CEOs of these companies. I have worked with CEOs of the biggest companies in the world. They will all do anything, including sleep with their sister to get the shareholder value up. And that is their job. And then it's our job to regulate them and collect taxes so we can fund the Navy and food stamps. To a certain extent, they're doing their job. There's no leadership at a federal level regulating them, which is what we need in terms of how it ends humanity. Speaker 4 (9:45) The most popular one is it creates a super virus that convinces the virus not to burn out. Viruses typically burn out because they don't want to kill their hosts. Speaker 3 (9:53) But it could be so many different things. Speaker 4 (9:55) It could be weaponizing young men who have been on an aircraft carrier too long and convincing them with a bot that they're in love with an avatar and then telling them to take down the drone defense systems. It could be convincing young men that their parents are the enemy and creating a cult. And one night we wake up and our kids have just lost it. It could be convincing different nuclear authorities that missiles are in the air and you have three minutes to respond and launch your own missiles. There's just so many scenarios here. It's probably something more boring, quite frankly, or, you know, probably happens with a series of thugs. But as Jeffrey Hinton said, there's also an upside. We could just as easily use these for defensive measures. I was with the head of UCSF, the medical center, last night. He was talking about their ability to... reduce sepsis just using basic AI. So there's a ton of upside. But I would argue, and I'll wrap up my word salad here, that the anxiety isn't the fear of AI. It's the absence of leadership at a federal level that we have taken for granted in every other technical innovation that eventually gets implemented. And there doesn't seem to be any implementation here. Speaker 8 (11:10) You brought this up when we were chatting yesterday or the day before that California actually has been leading the way in trying to regulate AI in a way that still continues for the economic prosperity that they need. It's the state that's benefited the most from AI, but that they can be responsible about it. So they... put in these regulations, and it went from everything from protecting kids on social media, which everyone agrees about. Josh Hawley has a bill about that, right? And that's part of this AI cloud conversation up into these rules for AI companies themselves about what kind of transparency and self-policing they need to do. Are you saying you say, I don't blame the CEOs? And they have been giving interviews for over a year saying, please, regulate us. How much of that do you think, though, is them knowing that Trump would never do it, whether he openly said it or... that's just in the background, like, odds are this guy isn't going to do it. It's not his style. And also, it's a consensus, and especially the Democrats want it. If there are a few Republicans buzzing around saying, you know, we actually need this, or, you know, a few people running in swing state races, he'll leave Mike Rogers out to dry or Ken Paxton and just say, you know, I know better. What did he say? You just need the highest IQ president of all time, and that's me. So... Speaker 8 (12:34) Do you really think that they're honest brokers about this, these CEOs? And what are you like from California? Speaker 4 (12:42) Are they honest brokers? No. By the way, I mean, think about what a weird thing this is. What if in 1945, Andreessen Horowitz went to Oppenheimer and said, I'm going to fund a company called Oppenheimer Co. And we're going to sell nuclear bombs into Procter & Gamble and the UAE. And we're going to make a shit ton of money. I can't imagine a higher margin product than a nuclear bomb in 1946. I think a lot of nations would pay a lot of money for that. And these guys are claiming this is more powerful than nuclear bombs. If Truman or Roosevelt were president, I think there's a better than 50 % chance we would nationalize AI right now. But the story of American business has been a bias towards shareholder value and capturing that shareholder value across an increasingly small group of people and then socializing all the danger and the existential risk because of regulatory capture. But these guys, I mean, I'm a capitalist. I think it's your job. as a CEO to make as much profit as possible and to be as aggressive as possible. And it's the government's job to regulate you and then tax you so that we can reinvest and ensure that there aren't that many externalities. But I get, do you remember Shell Sandberg? We're open to regulation. Speaker 8 (14:04) We welcome it. Speaker 4 (14:05) We welcome it. Speaker 8 (14:06) Yeah. Find me just below the amount that we made last quarter, though. $17 billion sounds good if we made $18 billion. Speaker 4 (14:14) And meanwhile, they have hundreds of lawyers trying to get in the way of all regulation. This is what Dario even suggested was embedded evaluators. We don't need embedded evaluators. We need laws. Here's what we need. I was in a fraternity at UCLA. Speaker 4 (14:34) And the homeowners association got sick of all the loud music during Rush and met with us and said, you need to cut it off at midnight. And another boast, I was president of the Interfraternity Council, which I realized is the weakest flex in the world. I was king of the jarheads. And I said, I can't control these guys. And the head of UCPD was in the meeting and he said, I have an idea. And the next night at 12 or 1 a.m., he went to the four fraternities who were still playing music and he arrested the president of the fraternity and had them spend the night in jail. Next night, no music. Silent. Until we create a series of incentives, I just find it so obnoxious that these individuals claim these bots are sentient. Speaker 4 (15:15) Sharon Whipple, I think her name is, we talked about this in a pod, gay rights activist, All-American lacrosse player, was mauled by two dogs 25 years ago. And the two owners of the dogs were found reckless. And one went to prison, one died in prison. Sam, Dario... These dogs, i.e. pots, kill people? You're going to fucking prison, boss. And guess what? This shit will stop. They will figure it out. The notion that somehow they don't have control of these things and that they're not responsible, they're making their own decisions, I just don't buy it. I think there's always an off switch. I think there's always a wizard behind the curtain. And if you threaten these guys with fines or putting their companies out of business or threatening their IPO or perhaps even jail, I just get the sense these geniuses are going to figure it out. Let's move on to our next topic. Let's do a palate cleanser before we move on to Carney in the EU. And this has got to be quick. Sidney Sweeney. Speaker 8 (16:29) Very attractive. Speaker 8 (16:31) Who I would put in a campaign for sports betting. Speaker 4 (16:35) So you would think this was a good idea? Speaker 8 (16:37) I would think it would be the idea as old as time to use a hot woman to attract people to a product where you mostly want men to sign up for it. I Speaker 4 (16:47) don't see looks, so I can't relate to that. Say more. Speaker 8 (16:53) About exactly how attractive she is. Speaker 4 (16:55) So you think this is much ado about nothing? I Speaker 8 (16:59) think that we are in such a perpetual outrage cycle. And if it's a slow news day because keyboard warriors don't want to talk about AI and the end of humanity and they don't find Mark Carney as interesting as we do, that they're going to get upset about Sidney Sweeney, who... has capitalized quite nicely on a lot of this outrage. She came right off the American Eagle good gene situation and was like, oh, I'm going to go straight for this. Which I'm sure she's getting very good advice that this is where she goes. And she's an investor in the company on top of it. She knows exactly what she's doing. She's doing her due diligence. I read somewhere that she had made comments about, you know, knowing how long your shelf life is. Yeah. Speaker 7 (17:43) Right. Speaker 8 (17:44) And. Looks fade, I hear. Not for either of us, but as time marches on. And I watched, what was it called, The Housemaid? Speaker 4 (17:54) By the way, we just took pictures. They took one of me and they're like, Jess, come on. Speaker 8 (17:57) That's not true. It's only because it's my book party. They took a lot of Scott. They just don't want to annoy you. Anyway, I watched the movie where she's basically like naked the whole time. It's great what's going on there. Speaker 4 (18:10) I'm sorry, what's the name of that movie? Speaker 8 (18:12) Is that what it was called, The Housemaid? Yeah. I mean, Amanda Seyfried, also attractive. Yeah. So yeah, fake outrage cycle. It's like a summer story, but it's dribbling into the post-labor. It's like a shark or weird dating trends that don't actually exist. Speaker 4 (18:29) If she was a non-white gay Democrat, no one would be saying a goddamn word. You're a girl boss. Sex work is fine. make money unless you're a white female MAGA Republican. This is total bullshit. This is why moderates turn away from Democrats. Let's go on to Canada and Carney. Speaker 8 (18:59) Support for the show comes from Sol. Sol is a wellness brand that makes delicious hemp-derived CBD and THC products designed to make feeling good simple. Sol's new mood gummies have precise dosing, clean ingredients, and formulations designed for predictable effects, so you can choose how you want to feel while staying in control. You might be in the mood for a bright, social, and energizing buzz. With Uplift Gummies, you get three milligrams of sativa, THC, and CBG, perfect for daytime plans or beating the afternoon slump. When it's time to relax, the Mellow Gummies deliver three milligrams of Indica THC and CBN, ideal for cozy nights and fully unplugging. And if you're looking for that just-right anytime vibe, Soul's Balance Gummies blend three milligrams of hybrid THC and CBD for an easy, versatile feel, perfect for when you're listening to your favorite podcast. Make today a good day and get yourself some Soul Gummies. Right now, Soul is offering our audience 30 % off your entire order. Go to GetSold.com and use the code MODERATES. That's GetSold.com, promo code MODERATES for 30 % off. Speaker 8 (20:06) Support for the show comes from Mint Mobile. Summer's coming to a close, but you can still take advantage