If these pauses are coming, what is the pivot that they're talking about? Are they just running blind towards a cliff? Are we all running blind towards a cliff with them?

It spells bad news for their businesses.

Like the most... uh kind of constrained and vital resource in the technology industry right now is what they call compute computing power which is like do you have enough chips to perform all the math that you need in the data center that you own or rent and that data center doesn't exist you cannot move to the next model your investors say you are behind they don't give you any more money so like in that way It could hamstring a lot of the AI businesses.

The smaller ones have a lot more to lose, like OpenAI or Anthropic versus the Microsofts of the world.

So Democrats might lead the US economy to very slow growth.

if they totally hamstring like all the tech companies from building data centers, it does like pose real problems.

There is not some sort of, for many years, we've all kind of felt like, oh, tech's power is like unlimited and they can just pivot to anything and keep encroaching on our lives, keep growing bigger.

Do you think that there is appetite from Democratic leadership in particular, as it's currently constituted, so like Chuck Schumer, Hakeem Jeffries, to actually restrain tech to do the things that you're talking about? I

But how did they get away with it for so long?

She adopted, especially in like the mid-2010s, she adopted kind of the ethos, the look of a technology company founder, of a software company founder.

She wore the black turtleneck, the trademark black turtleneck, and said she had adopted it from Steve Jobs.

He's very clearly borrowing from the mythology of...

Silicon Valley, and saying, you gotta fake it till you make it, you move fast and you break things.

Those are mantras that hold in software.

The consequences are not so dire.

Do you think that the case of Theranos has taught Silicon Valley any lessons and that maybe people are a little bit more careful around that line between faking it till you're making it and actual fraud? I

Just explain to us how we get from, you know, jumping out of a sandbox into the end of humanity.

So the idea that an AI agent could hack into one of these pieces of critical infrastructure is where that begins.

So hacks into the scariest piece of infrastructure you can imagine, like a nuclear reactor or a power plant, a very sensitive government website, a hospital's kind of internal systems, computer systems.

And then more of that, the agent like gains capabilities and takes over more and more.

Also, what I will say is to throw a bit of cold water on their warnings is they're not laying out these scenarios in great detail of saying this is exactly what will happen.

And that is why we as normal people should take this with a grain of salt of like, how would this actually happen? Well, I don't know.

It would just be so advanced and they're kind of, enraptured with their own imaginations of what these bots can do.

Or is it something just on a different level from that?

Also, as you pointed out, 2008, anybody who lived through that, it, it is terrifying to hear because it sounds like you're saying it's too big to fail.

Yeah.

It's like if it's half the US stock market, AI does kind of become too big to fail, and we have seen the US government kind of flirt with too big to fail, discussing taking stakes in these AI companies, which be kind of a continuation, like Trump administration has taken a stake in Intel, shocking, like, very different economic move for the US government.

But then that become the, begets the question of do you bail out OpenAI if it's not doing well on, like if it really, really, really doesn't do well? Doing, not doing well in the US stock market, I don't think they would, the government or someone would bail it out.

It would just be like this is sort of a market correction from an overvaluation.

Happens all the time.

Does it happen at that scale? No.

Are they in a, in some sort of shift right now in terms of how much they, how unapologetically they wanna dominate the world, I guess? I mean, it sounds ridiculous when I say it out loud, but just all of a sudden it feels like they have so much more power than they even had a year ago.

How has the company dealt with that or is dealing with questions about it and around how its products are made?

Apple has denied these accusations, and it's honestly not a scandal that has dogged Tim Cook for very long.

It does play into something he kind of did with Donald Trump.

The company has invested in rare earths mining in the US, and tried to move its mining out of China.

Tough.

China has almost a monopoly on rare earths minerals that are vital for making phones and advanced electronics and stuff.

That's also part of Tim Cook has moved a lot of Apple's manufacturing out of China, partly for fear of copying and intellectual property theft, partly also out of regulatory uncertainty.

So Blake, at this point, 15 years of leadership under his helm, where does Apple fit in the wider tech conversation when all the headlines are about AI, about Elon Musk, about Sam Altman?