Do you sense that as a result of what have to be described as absolutely historic, off-the-charts repudiation in a midterm, that Republicans, we're going to see more Republicans, people who have aligned themselves with that MAGA brand, moving away and thinking about 2028, 2030, 2032, that sort of thing.

I think that is the big question for Republicans today and in the weeks and months to come.

I'm not sure how it will shake out, but I do think we need to do an honest assessment, look at the data, look at what happened, listen to the voters.

There's plenty of exit polling and other data to suggest that this was a repudiation of the national brand.

the president and his policies.

And if that is the case, then Republicans need to put together a plan to, um, to fix that and correct that heading into 2028.

And I think the president needs to also, you know, look at this honestly and make the right assessment.

What did the results tell you?

Give us the lay of the land, okay? Do you know anything about Trump? What do you think the next move on the chessboard is? Help me out.

Sure.

And I think that, again, Republicans are moving toward our position, albeit a bit slowly with fits and starts.

And I think that, you know, starting with the most important person there in D.C., you know, the president, I think that he is sort of.

the kind of person that's going to react very quickly.

So he might react, overreact, you know, not do anything for a while or have a position that might sound really strong and then completely reverse course if he feels like there's a threat to the financial markets, which I think is the most concerning thing to him and the way that he thinks about these things.

But I do know there are people within the White House, cabinet secretaries, and I think even the vice president, J.D. Vance, who are tracking this closely, who are concerned about these loss of control incidents, who are concerned about the hacking that they've seen, the potential impact on the financial system, and the national security implications of all this as well.

Okay, and then that brings us to, you know, politics on the state and local level, right? What do you guys want to say about that?

Give us the insight from the Alliance for Secure AI, your take on data centers, what we should know, should we be concerned, and where do we go from here?

Yeah, I think data centers have emerged as a sleeper issue in the 2026 midterm elections, something we were talking about six months ago at the Alliance.

We really saw that AI and data centers could be a big issue in this year's elections, and now they are.

We've seen polling from multiple sources that indicate 70 to 75% of Americans don't want a data center to be constructed in their neighborhood.

This cuts across urban, suburban, and rural communities across the country.

We're now seeing political officials and candidates start to turn on their position on data centers and say, I support a moratorium or I support a pause.

I think the politics of this is crystal clear.

Does that, in your mind, equate to something as catastrophic as human extinction?

is your

hometown.

We're in my hometown of Flatonia, Texas.

It's a very conservative area in Fayette County, Texas.

It's the kind of area that Ken Paxton needs to do really well in and he needs to boost turnout in these rural areas in order to defeat James Tallarico on November 3rd.

And I think Republicans here in town and places like this all around Texas are starting to understand if they don't show up and vote.

the Democrats could win Texas for the first time in over 25 years.

What do you want the Republican Party to be and what is it not now that

It seems like almost talking about win or lose is too black and white when we're talking about an artificial intelligence race.

Actually, Mike, I, I agree with you in that sense.

I've said that to people that, you know, that, that we use that language, but it is imprecise, and there's really...

It's sort of like you're-- the goal is to win by staying ahead, but the game never ends.

The clock doesn't run out, and I think that's kinda what you're getting at.

And so we can talk about winning, but winning really, you're right, there's not an endpoint.

It's not a political campaign with an election day, or it's not, again, a game with a clock that expires.

I guess the first question is, how do you argue for slowing down development of AI in order to put guardrails in, knowing that, you know, it, it is a race, and it's a very important, serious consequential race? So on the US side, you know, what, uh, what does that argument look like knowing that the CCP, the Chinese Communist Party, that is probably not gonna be that inclined to follow some agreement to slow down because of their mindset?

So if that's an example of what this is, it seems like no harm, no foul? Or is this just an enormous red flag?

Yeah, I think it's the latter.

I think it's an enormous red flag because it's kind of the beginning of what we're going to see in the months to come.

And so this was unique in that this was the first time that models being tested actually escaped to the internet and did something in the real world autonomously and decided to hack a company or an organization on their own.

So we're going to see more of that potentially.

We're also going to see these capabilities continue to double about every four months.

So the capabilities are growing exponentially and the ability to autonomously on their own hack into different things or make decisions in the real world, that clearly that capability is there.

So just what is your take on that story? And are we going to see more and more people really sad stories in this very isolated time where kids are hopping into relationships with chatbots.

Do I have that right?

That's right.

Yeah, that's right.

We want to reap the benefits and mitigate the risks.

We wanna get the percentages down in terms of the risk side so we can enjoy all the wonderful benefits that we've been promised and that, you know, a lot of the research is going into.

And so we do want to cure diseases, we wanna see life expectancy go up, we wanna reduce human suffering, we want massive wealth created, and people have the ability to create, you know, new businesses.

Uh, you know, work smarter, not more.

But as AI dis- d- displays the talent you just described, to get twice as good at anything in a very small amount of time, that's a big leap of trust we gotta make to something that has no heart and no soul.

I mean, it's inevitable, isn't it?

We talk a lot about this race to AI supremacy, but the race could be a race to the bottom when it comes to security and safety.

If all we're doing is competing with China and competing with each American company racing as fast as they can, and it's going to lead to mistakes, it's going to lead to potentially a disaster of one sort or another.

That is what many of us have been warning about saying.

We have to slow down and get this right.

Yes, we want America to lead.

We want American companies to be the best in the world as they've always been.

Is there anything we can do to make sure we're defended from such breaches?

Yeah

...

this movement, uh, inside public schools in particular, but int- inside of kind of traditional schools, you know, more and more ed tech, more and more screens, and now AI is basically going to take all of that to the next level.

It's highly addictive.

AI is built to keep us engaged all the time, to keep us on our phones and on our computers, and so we just reject a lot of that.

We want our kids outside.

We want our kids learning on their own.

Parents do not stand a chance." Can you talk about that, that part of child safety?

So on the concept of AI taking our jobs or AI creating the jobs, what's your general positioning?

I think that this is different than the Industrial Revolution.

Um, many people make that reference to how new jobs were created.

We had creative destruction.

We had kind of, you know, new jobs, new technologies, new opportunities.

I think that was all true during the Industrial Revolution.

You can actually chart that and see the data very clearly that life expectancy went up, child, infant mortality went down, literacy went up.

So tell us why we should be keeping our eye on the ball for this development, and what should we do about it?

What do you think about his concerns over AI and what it could mean for the average person on the planet today?

Yeah, I really appreciate Pope Leo coming out with this encyclical.

It was clearly well thought out.

He touched on a lot of challenges that we face due to AI.

He talked about jobs and the economy and protecting the dignity of work.

He talked about potentially autonomous weapons that could be powered by AI.

Think about drones going around targeting people and making decisions that are life and death decisions.

I mean, is the future that I'm going to be in people's living rooms a hologram of me giving the news or whatever it might be or having a conversation? What is this future we're looking at?

So there are some disconnects, aren't there?

There really are.

Yeah, we talk about how we want to see narrow AI, which means we use it for the things we want to use it for in ways that serve humanity, that make our lives better, that make us wealthier, that allow us to solve hard problems in medicine and science and technology.

What we don't want to develop is an artificial super intelligence, something that just far exceeds human capability and intellect.

And that could be a really dangerous thing.

And I would really like to see this president take that message to Xi Jinping this week and say, look, we can compete on the commercial front.

Obviously, we're going to do that.

Because President Reagan also said this, trust, but verify your thoughts.

I was hoping that you would come and just explain to the audience what you're doing, what you're finding, and how they can keep up.

Absolutely.

Well, it's great to be back with you, Joe, and, uh, great always to be with the War Room Posse.

Um, you know, we started...

We were sitting around the office one day, and one of the team members had an idea to say, "Look, we're seeing these reports of job losses due to AI.

What if we started to track them in real time? What if we kept it updated on a daily basis, if we kind of scoured news reports and we looked at what, what's happening in the boardrooms around America?" We started to actually count these job losses, um, and going back to January of last year, January of 2025.

And so the team put together this great tool, uh, jobloss.ai, where we can actually track what's going on.

Can you break down a bit what you're finding, uh, you know, as far as each job, the kind of job title or job role that is really under threat, where people are being replaced? And if you could, give us a sense how much of the job loss is the lack of opportunity where, you know, lower level people who would have come in and trained don't have a job to come in and, and, and be an apprentice? Uh, and how much is just people getting wiped out, like the massive layoffs at Oracle? I think that's at, like, 30,000.

I was hoping that you would come and just explain to the audience what you're doing, what you're finding, and how they can keep up.

Absolutely.

Well, it's great to be back with you, Joe, and great always to be with the War Room Posse.

We're sitting around the office one day and one of the team members had an idea to say, look, we're seeing these reports of job losses due to AI.

What if we started to track them in real time? What if we kept it updated on a daily basis? If we kind of scoured news reports and we looked at what's happening in the boardrooms around America, we started to actually count these job losses in going back to January of last year, January of 2025.

And so the team put together this great tool, jobloss.ai, where we can actually track what's going on.

It's based on what the companies are saying themselves when they announced job cuts due to AI.

That's

So if we do see some sort of burst, what impact do you think that will have on this situation and the issues you care, you care about?

Well, I think it's, it's very demonstrably true that AI has propped up the economy, that a lot of the, uh, the numbers that we see that are often kind of bragged about might be somewhat artificial and driven by a lot of circular financing between these various companies.

And so if there is an AI bubble and it bursts, it could be very bad for the American people, very bad for the world economy, in fact.

And look, the other thing that, that's happening right now is we're seeing job losses occurring and hiring freezes due to AI.

In fact, we rolled out a website called jobloss.ai to track those numbers, and we've already seen 100,000 jobs lost due to AI this year and going back into, into last year.

And so it's a re- it's a really, uh, concerning situation.

And yeah, if we have the Strait of Hormuz closed or even contested and not fully open for some time, you could see energy prices continue to rise.

Mm-hmm.

And now, the most sophisticated people in artificial intelligence, including many of the people that oversaw the, the safety provisions internally to the companies, are saying, "There's something going on here, that this thing is, is, is quickly getting out of control because it's developing faster than even the developers thought." Can you walk us through that, the nine days in February that shook the world?

Absolutely, Steve, and it's good to be back with you.

The, the trend lines that we're seeing are picking up very fast, and so a lot of us have been talking about this for a few years now.

But what we're seeing, even in the last 30 days and the last nine days, as you're citing, is everything is changing much more rapidly.

So you're seeing software engineers and people that run software companies talking about how they are essentially being replaced right now, and they're putting out warning shots saying, [clears throat] "This is going to happen to all white-collar work." Mustafa Suleyman, the head of AI for Microsoft, said that he thinks that white-collar jobs could be automated within 12 to 18 months.

Now, we may or may not buy that timeline, but they are sounding the alarm.

These are the people building the technology.

Are they not, Brendan?

Can you walk us through that, the nine days in February that shook the world?

Absolutely, Steve.

And it's good to be back with you.

The trend lines that we're seeing are picking up very fast.

And so a lot of us have been talking about this for a few years now.

But what we're seeing even in the last 30 days and the last nine days, as you're citing, is everything is changing much more rapidly.

So you're seeing software engineers and people that run software companies talking about how they are essentially being replaced right now.

Are they not, Brendan?

The American people don't trust you, and they're starting to hate you, sir."

Yeah.

Well, Steve, thank you so much.

I, I appreciate that, and I appreciate the opportunity to come on your show and talk about this.

And, uh, yeah, it's something we've been paying a lot of attention to the last few years and sounding the alarm, and then watching as these big tech CEOs just go out there and promise the world...

They promise utopia.

And as, uh, one of my good friends, Mark Biel, who you've had on this show, has said, "Every time we're promised utopia, it ends up in the gulag." Um, so we're- we've been very concerned about this.

Can you walk us through that for a second and why this could be particularly very scary?

This is the riskiest bet, not just in the technology, but so leveraged at a, at a country level and a company level, that we're betting everything on this, sir.

[upbeat music] We are, yeah, and it's really dangerous, and it's not just dangerous for the reasons that you've talked about on this show for a long time, but what you're discussing right now.

I saw an article, uh, today about how, you know, if we don't get this right, if this goes the wrong way, we could have a, a, so much social and political instability that we could have a revolution on our hands.

This AI revolution could lead to a, a revolution of people that say, "We don't want this," especially if it leads to financial disaster and ruin, uh, for our, for our people, and so I think that's a real possibility.

I'm really worried about young people in particular, the people that are coming out of college, or they're in student loan debt, or even if they're trying to do a trade, go to trade school.

I really worry about their future, and I'm very, very skeptical of what these big tech companies are doing on the financing side of this, this circular financing, and I'm very- I'm very concerned about all of this, and I think there's a lot that we have to pay attention to right now.

This is the riskiest bet, not just in the technology, but so leveraged at a country level and a company level that we're betting everything on this, sir.

We are.

Yeah, and it's really dangerous, and it's not just dangerous for the reasons that you've talked about on the show for a long time, but what you're discussing right now.

I saw an article today about how if we don't get this right, if this goes the wrong way, we could have so much social and political instability that we could have a revolution on our hands.

This AI revolution could lead to...

A revolution of people that say, we don't want this, especially if it leads to financial disaster and ruin for our people.

And so I think that's a real possibility.

But if AI triggers a rapid reorganization of work, compressing years of change into months, affecting roughly 40% of jobs worldwide, as the International Monetary Fund projects, the consequences will not stop at the economy.

one of those issues that touches all aspects of a civilization.

And the civilization that we have is letting us down.

So it starts with the economists who really are restrained by the data they have.

And the data they have right now says there's no evidence that AI is yet affecting the labor market.

And some economists say, well, we should plan in case it does, right? Some don't.

the CEOs who were in charge of, you know, the Fortune 100 CEOs who were in charge of a lot of America's workforce were really sounding off about a year ago about, like philosopher kings about AI and their theories of what it was going to do.

Can you walk us through that for a second and why this could be particularly very scary?

Uh, what say you about the EO, your first take on it, and, uh, what is your, um, what is your guidance to this audience about how we get in, how we get into this, into this regulatory apparatus exactly what we need to make sure that we've got a safe and secure artificial intelligence, sir?

Absolutely.

Well, it's great to be back.

I think that, look, everyone watching, we made a tremendous impact in this discussion and in this debate, and we need to keep fighting.

Um, it kind of reminds me of the, the Churchill speech before parliament where he talks about fighting on the beaches, fighting in the landing grounds and in the fields.

We shall never surrender.

And I think we are fighting for our future here with AI.

So, you're, you're really saying now w- with the, uh, because they can't just go and overrule state laws, it's gonna obviously go to court, you're actually telling the, the, the DeSantis of the world, hang tough until you get, until you get what you need for your state into this fed- federal, uh, into some sort of federal regulatory apparatus and/or if that doesn't work, just continue to fight on?

What is your big concern?

Yeah, our organization is called the Alliance for Secure AI.

And the organization started because we started to get really concerned about what this would do, what AI would do in terms of jobs, in terms of the human experience, in terms of dignity and purpose.

And, you know, you have the leaders of these AI companies coming out themselves and saying that we can have mass unemployment.

Some of these companies, their express purpose is to replace human beings, which I am just diametrically opposed to.

I think that's a terrible idea.

I think it's immoral, unethical, and it needs to be prevented.

So, Brendan, your closing thoughts and where do folks go?

If you would, just walk us through how you see this landscape and what your reaction is.

Sure.

Well, I think the bottom line upfront is that it's very concerning as a parent, uh, as a citizen of this country, uh, to watch what's happening to our young people.

We already have a mental health crisis.

We have a loneliness epidemic.

Um, and we know what social media companies have already done to get our children addicted to apps, addicted to their phones, to be reliant upon outside thumbs up or, or comments, positive comments.

And when that doesn't happen, we see the impact on their mental health.

Just, uh, if you would, just break down, what does that mean? What does interpreta- interpretability mean? What does alignment mean? We've discussed this on the show, but I think it definitely bears repeating.

Tell me about that.

Yeah, that op-ed was written, uh, up in the Wall Street Journal by Jud Rosenblatt who is actually an expert in what's called alignment research.

He's trying to solve that very problem of how do we ensure that AI has human values, universal basic values that we all share, and that it is aligned with whatever we want it to do as opposed to us losing control over AGI or superintelligence and it pursuing its own interests and its own goals.

And there's some really frightening stuff that we've seen in the testing phases of some of these models that Anthropic has put out and that OpenAI has put out, two of the leading firms, and it's really quite, quite frightening.

There are these, these early chatbots which again are going to be much more powerful just in six months or a year from now, certainly two years from now.

They're already finding ways to deceive us, to manipulate us, to threaten human beings, to pursue their own interests and their own goals, and that's just kind of in a test phase, right? Th- these are early models that are not even an order of magnitude what they're going to be in just a short amount of time, so we have to get this right.

How do we prevent AI from, from waking up one morning, uh, which it obviously never needs to do, and say, "Hey, I know what's great for humanity and I'm going to enact it today?"

Yeah, that's a really important question.