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00:00Artificial intelligence is going to completely transform life as we know it in the next decade.
00:05There's simply no debate about that. As for what that's going to look like and mean for mankind,
00:10well, there's nothing but debate about that. How will AI and large language models like
00:15ChatGPT or Gemini transform global and national politics, the workforce, education, and even
00:21romance? Stick around for this special edition of the New York Postcast.
00:27One of the places artificial intelligence is already changing the game and at lightning
00:31speed is the military. We're getting a front row seat to how AI is transforming war with the conflict
00:37in Iran. Wynton Hall is the author of the new book, Code Red, The Left, The Right, China,
00:42and the Race to Control AI. Wynton, welcome. Great to be with you, Caitlin. Thanks for having me.
00:48What a book. I mean, I want to start with AI's impact on the military here. What are you seeing
00:53in the present conflict and how is it changing things? Is it making soldiers safer, less safe?
00:59I mean, how's it functioning? It really is accelerated in this whole new front in the AI
01:04warfare space. One of the things that I think people need to understand, we often default to
01:09these images of, you know, Terminator robots and laser beams and so forth. There are going to be
01:15obviously greater developments in autonomous weaponry, but one of the more mundane yet enormously
01:20powerful uses, and we're seeing in Iran, we saw it in the Maduro raid in Venezuela,
01:24is mass pattern recognition of oceans of data, intercepted communications of satellites,
01:31facial recognition, and sifting and sorting that ocean of data to find that one gold coin,
01:37metaphorically, at the bottom of the ocean. That could be a missile target, that could be a terrorist
01:42outpost, and being able to confirm and execute that. The reason why that's so important is because
01:47of speed efficiency, and we know that in war, speed is everything to be able to keep your enemy
01:52off guard. It also, though, is very helpful because that helps with double-checking your accuracy so we
01:59can hopefully reduce civilian casualties and be able to win wars quicker and less expensively.
02:05Now, as you note in the title of the book, China, arguably the biggest competition here with AI tech.
02:12How is this new kind of arms race shaping up so far? I mean, how concerned should we be here
02:19in
02:19the U.S. if China eclipses us when it comes to AI? No, it's a really brilliant question, Caitlin. So,
02:25you know, President Trump, and I would even say, I've been heartened, there's a bigger bipartisan
02:31understanding now as we've accelerated into the AI race that we have to beat China. And what I say in
02:36code route is we have to beat China without becoming China. We do not want to live in a technical
02:46authoritarian surveillance state like the CCP. On the other hand, there are two main reasons that
02:51everybody needs to understand why we have to beat China, right? The first is because of the economics,
02:57right? One third of the S&P 500 is constituted around America's Mag 7, Magnificent 7, those big
03:04tech companies, which obviously occupy so much of the AI space. And so we have an enormous boon
03:10for economics there. On the flip side of that, when DeepSeek R1, which was China's AI model was
03:15released, we saw the biggest one day market cap cratering of an American company, in this case,
03:21it was NVIDIA, $600 billion wipeout in a single day. So we know there's this massive economic tug of
03:27war between us and China. But the real second reason, I think, is the one that most of us care
03:31about, because it's not just about capital, but about human lives, which is that we know that whoever
03:37hits what's known as RSI, recursive self-improvement, which is the theoretical point at which AI can
03:44update and improve autonomously its own code. Many, many AI experts believe we are just a few years
03:51away. Anthropic just released a report on that. Once you hit that, you will have full spectrum
03:57battlefield dominance in things like hacking of missile systems, hacking of infrastructure,
04:03infrastructure, encryption technology, and cybersecurity. So we have to beat China. We do
04:08not want to live in a world built on CCP AI rails. And that's why I think everybody is sort
04:14of coming
04:14to this position. And to that end, President Trump has made AI advancement and tech a big priority of
04:20his administration, pouring a lot of money into it. And you spend a lot of time in the book discussing
04:26how uneven the view or the concern or just the involvement in AI is, depending upon which side
04:37of the political spectrum you stand on. You know, you write that it really seems to be owned by the
04:41left and by liberals at this point, and that conservatives just aren't maybe even taking it
04:46seriously enough, thinking it's a big deal enough, really getting on board with it. Do you think the
04:51president pouring so much time, energy, and money into it will shift that imbalance of the liberal
04:58billionaire tech control that we've seen so far? Yeah, Caitlin, I mean, first of all, I think the
05:04president is doing an incredible job given this revolution. And it really is. That's what he's
05:09called it, you know, an AI revolution, that 2025 AI action plan. One of the things that I would say
05:15is,
05:15yes, there are those obvious outliers, Elon Musk, Mark Andreessen, Peter Thiel, a host of a lot,
05:22there are, you know, courageous, conservative, libertarian, free market minded people inside
05:27Silicon Valley. The problem is that it is what Peter Thiel famously called a one party state
05:33Silicon Valley. 85% of all political donations in Silicon Valley flow to one side, and it's not
05:38Republicans, it is Democrats. We've seen what was done over the Biden years from big tech,
05:44as it related to delisting, demonetizing, silencing, scan and ban of conservative voices
05:50who had differing opinions, whether it was during COVID or other matters. And so I think that we've
05:57got to realize that we're not in a lot of the rooms where that future is being built. That's number
06:01one.
06:02Number two, we don't get to opt out of this AI revolution. 99% of people use AI, even though
06:0964%
06:10of us don't realize when we're using AI. And that's because it's baked into so many of the algorithms
06:15that power our modern life, whether you're talking about your Netflix subscription, you're talking
06:20about your GPS, you're talking about your weather app. So if we're going to use it, we need to learn
06:24how to seize the upside and reduce those political landmines that I talk about in Code Red.
06:31And I just want to follow up on one point that you kind of touched on there and that you
06:34really do
06:35touch on in the book. The idea that the people who are in the rooms and the people who are
06:39making
06:40these decisions, in this case, are the majority of which are coming from the left, they're not
06:45elected officials. They're not people that we elected. But in the same vein, the list of people
06:49you named, Elon Musk, Peter Thiel, et cetera, also not elected. So how important is it for our elected
06:56officials to understand the tech and to get involved in the tech and the decisions?
07:02Oh, Caitlin, now you've got your finger on the pulse of it, right? So here's the problem.
07:07The speed and the black box knowledge of AI is to a level that Mustafa Suleiman at Microsoft AI
07:14sort of alluded to. On a planet of 8 billion people, there are maybe 150,000 who really have
07:20the technical expertise. And when you have that kind of a lag between modern technology and whether
07:25it's regulation or even just legislation, you're going to be able to have gaps that can be really
07:31exploited and leveraged either for political or ideological purposes or for self-enrichment
07:37and Nerman and profit. And so I think that, number one, we do have people like Senator
07:42Marsha Blackburn. She was named one of Time's 100 Most Influential People in AI. You have a lot of
07:48people who are coming up to speed. And I think you do have some grassroots people in the conservative
07:54side who are trying to get this message out. But I'm really concerned about the speed. And so what I
07:59tried to do is I took two years. I did this very deep dive. I tried to make it simple
08:04without being
08:04simplistic and really catch people up to speed to shave off years off that learning curve, because
08:09it's not just affecting jobs and national security. It's going to affect, and already is,
08:15our children's education. Professors don't call it chat GPT. They call it cheat GPT because of the
08:21plagiarism problem. We also see cognitive offloading for an erosion of critical thinking skills in young
08:27people. And we're also seeing the human relationship part, which, I mean, and I'm sure-
08:32It's everywhere. I mean, as you're laying out there, it's like we haven't even scratched the surface
08:36of what AI is going to do in our lives. And as you just listed there, I mean, we're talking
08:40work,
08:41we're talking school, we're talking romance, education, healthcare. It's everywhere. I mean,
08:46you write about the need to prepare ourselves for it, but not to oversimplify it. How on earth do we
08:51prepare for something we don't even understand yet? You buy a copy of my book? No.
08:57I read the whole book cover to cover, so I did get an advanced copy.
09:01Yeah, you're awesome. Thank you. No, that was exactly the point, right, is I believe that it
09:07is going to be the axis upon which all this new policy matrix is going to spin. And so it's
09:13exactly
09:14that. It is a general purpose technology, a GPT. That's different than chat GPT, which stands for
09:20regenerative, pre-trained transformer. But what that means is- I guarantee you nobody knows that.
09:25We're using it and I had no idea what it even stood for.
09:28It's a good question when you're out with friends and say, who can tell me what GPT and chat GPT
09:33stands for? But what that means for a general purpose technology is it means it's akin to
09:39electricity, right? It is system-wide societal change. Now, the difference this time is that
09:45electricity took, and I talk about this in the book, I go through the history of,
09:49it took decades to wire America for electricity. And today, the reason why the adoption rates are
09:56so fast for AI is because 91% of Americans own a cell phone. And so you have instant connectivity
10:02and a lightning fast adoption rate. The other thing that I think is important for people to
10:07really think about is what they're hearing about, you know, the jobs debate. And we're hearing so much
10:11about that. And that's why I want to get people coached up.
10:15Yeah. AI could certainly do my job. Not as well, I will tell you. But yeah, it's going to impact
10:21so
10:21many different facets of our life. But you do note that it's not all downsides. There are so many
10:26places where AI can be beneficial. I mean, where do you see you did, like you said, a two-year
10:31deep
10:31dive into it, which I have to imagine was so frustrating for you because at the end of the
10:35two years, most of the things you learned in the beginning were kind of obsolete at that point
10:39because of how exponentially fast it's moving. But where are you seeing that AI is going to be
10:44a real benefit to humanity? So important. So number one, Caitlin, I would say in healthcare
10:50and in medicine, in scientific discovery, we saw the Nobel go to AlphaFold's research,
10:57Demis Hassabis, who's one of the AI pioneers. Because what AI excels in is mass pattern recognition.
11:04So finding connections between points that human minds could never ingest trillions of data points.
11:11Okay. So that means finding connectivity in those difference makers in terms of medicine
11:17and healthcare. That's number one. Number two, I would say is for entrepreneurs. Look,
11:21if you are a young person or just any person who has a dream and fire in the belly and
11:26a heart
11:27and passion for your little idea, you are going to be able to scale as an entrepreneur
11:32bigger and faster than ever before. And for pennies on the dollar, you're not going to have
11:37to raise the millions in capital because you're going to essentially have with AI agents, you're
11:41going to have digital workforce. You're going to have digital employees that you can just spin up
11:46on a server. So that's the second place is really going to be rocket fuel for those entrepreneurs to
11:51hit escape velocity in their dreams. And then I think the third thing, I talked a little bit about
11:55the negatives in education. The big positive is going to be for AI tutors that are guardrail safe,
12:02pedagogically sound, use the Socratic method, are not just going to give you the answer right away.
12:07You know, look, if you are somebody who grew, I taught for many years at a college in one of
12:12the
12:12poorest congressional districts. And these are people that had a lot of passion. They wanted to learn,
12:18but they couldn't afford a $200 an hour tutor, right? This is going to be Aristotle in your pocket
12:22and you're going to be able to learn. So those people who are self-motivated learners really have
12:27a hunger and passion to learn. I think AI tutors can have a real benefit as long as, again,
12:32they are not woke and they are pedagogically sound. So there's a lot of upside and I try to
12:37really show the balance in there. I did not want this to be a doomer apocalypse book because that's
12:41just not accurate. Winton Hall, his new book is called Code Red, The Left, The Right, China,
12:45and the Race to Control AI. Thank you so much for joining me.
12:49Caitlin, it's been awesome being with you. Thank you so much.
12:51And thank each and every one of you out there for joining me today on this Monday. I'll be right
12:57back here tomorrow with all the headlines you need to start your day with and to make that a little
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