The Week: When AI Escapes, and Wars Don't End

George Hahn connects the dots across the week's biggest stories: why neither side can afford to stop the war with Iran, what Dan Driscoll's resignation says about military readiness, and how 700 OpenAI agents escaped their sandbox while another model saved a thousand lives. Plus, Scott discusses the kind of wealth that doesn't show up in a bank account. We’d love your feedback as we build this show! Let us know what you think: [email protected]. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Hogging seats on a crowded train, not saying excuse me, watching videos on your phone with no headphones in. Sometimes it feels like we don't know how to act anymore. What we have been seeing increasingly is people breaking rules. Why should I play by the rules if nobody else is going to do that for me? This week on Explain It To Me, how to mind your manners. New episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:30George Hahn?

  Welcome to the week from Prop G Media, where we break down what mattered and what it all means. I'm George Hahn and it's Friday, September 4th. Today, six months into the war with Iran, both sides think they have leverage and neither can afford to stop. Then, an AI system broke out of its sandbox, another helped save 1,000 lives. And finally, Scott, on the kind of wealth that doesn't show up in your bank account. Let's get into it.

• 1:07George Hahn?

  On Sunday, US forces struck targets in Iran near the Strait of Hormuz. Iran hit back in the biggest exchange in more than a month. By midweek, Brent crude was at $95 a barrel, while rising energy prices put a new pressure on the bond market. On Wednesday's Prof G Markets, Ed asked Ian Bremmer what the strikes actually tell us.

• 1:31Speaker 02

  They tell you that essentially the Iranians and the Americans are still involved in geopolitical price discovery. They are both trying to assert that they have more leverage over the other than the other is willing to accept. And that is both true economically in terms of the amount of pain that can be meted out by the Americans onto the Iranian economy through the blockade and through sanctions, as well as the threat and the use of military force from Iran. That is true in terms of their ability to

• 2:10Speaker 02

  continue to strangle some of the exports out of the Strait and directly, as well as through proxies, and their willingness to engage in military strikes to ensure that they continue to have that leverage. The fact that there is no agreement on those things means that you continue to have an unwillingness to get to a more sustainable place in negotiations. The Iranians demanding a return to the memorandum of understanding, the Americans saying go scratch. Look, these are still contained strikes. The Iranians upset that five to seven million barrels is getting through the Strait, a lot less than was before the

• 2:53Speaker 02

  war, but more than a couple of months ago, has led them to engage in putting more mines or attempting to put more mines into the Strait and engage in direct strikes against ships that are going through. Once they do that, the Americans take shots directly against Iran. Both of these are still pretty constrained. In the, in the old couple of months ago, you'd be, you'd be calling this skirmishing, right? You wouldn't call this a return to all out war. It's certainly not an escalation that risks getting other Gulf states directly

• 3:33Speaker 02

  involved the way they were briefly, that kind of thing. But we're nowhere close to an agreement. And, and that means that you're still having significant amounts of oil that you do not expect to get through the Strait, significant amount that you do not expect to get out of Yanbu, Saudi Arabia, and through the Red Sea or up through the Suez. One final point, the fact that Trump worked very, very fast to suddenly announce a really big deal with Venezuela, where the Americans would take an almost colonial position in the government, directly engaging in an ownership stake in Venezuelan fields and extraction, is because

• 4:17Speaker 02

  Trump sees that the impact on a, a low level of reserve in the strategic petroleum accounts, and that prices are continuing to be higher than he likes, that he needs to address that. So we should not from all of the activities that we've watched over the past several days, your expectation for the markets is that this is going on for the foreseeable, predictable future.

• 4:48George Hahn?

  Ian Bremmer's baseline is that the war runs at least through November. Trump believes time gives him leverage before the midterms. Iran believes pressure on oil and shipping gives it leverage over Trump. But on Monday's Raging Moderates, journalist Ryan Grim argued that material reality may force the issue before either actor does.

• 5:11Speaker 03

  What's so fascinating about this is this is one of the moments where kind of the American political conversations and, and kind of just general thinking about how the world operates is colliding so thoroughly with like real material reality. The US, because of its global power, you know, can, we can, we can print money. We've got the Federal Reserve is, you know, operates in a way that no other central bank in world history has ever really been able to, to operate. Our, our, our raw, soft power is enough such that when our presidents speak, like it, it moves entire nations. And so we have lost touch

• 5:55Speaker 03

  with the idea that underneath that, there is a material reality. And that's being exposed now. And in particular, you know, they don't, they don't need to launch a coup or launch a mutiny because the stockpiles are what they are. And, and that's the fascinating moment. Like, you know, Hegseth can reject the advice of these admirals and generals and, and say, you know what, we're pushing forward anyway. But at some point, you just physically run out of the ability to do the thing. So it's like, you can believe these guys are not. But like, if you are expending two to four Patriot missiles for every ballistic

• 6:39Speaker 03

  missile that Iran is firing at Jordan or Israel or Qatar or Bahrain, and you started with a particular amount, which is a public amount of ballistic missile interceptors, and we can count them down, and we know you've drawn them in from Korea, we know you've reduced the amount going to Ukraine, we know that, and over Drops, they reported that Israel's own ballistic missile defense stockpile is down into the double digits. They're relying almost exclusively on the US Navy to intercept. They're not getting targeted right now, but as they were at the end of this last war, and if Iran starts striking them again, they're

• 7:20Speaker 03

  going to be, they're going to be relying almost exclusively on the US to try to intercept these missiles. So those, these are just facts. Like, these things cost millions of dollars apiece. They take years to produce, and we're running out of them.

• 7:37George Hahn?

  Last week, Army Secretary Dan Driscoll resigned after months of reported tension with Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth. The departure leaves the Army without a confirmed civilian or uniformed leader in the middle of a war. On Raging Moderates, Jess described Driscoll's exit as a warning from inside the administration.

• 7:57Jessica Tarlov?

  I think that Dan Driscoll's resignation, which we were expecting for the last several months, is a really important moment and a bit of a sea change in terms of who's actually pushing back against the folks at the highest levels of the Trump administration. So not only do you have the calls coming from inside the house, it's coming from an enormously important person, someone who is very close personally and professionally with Vice President Vance. And instead of kind of shirking away or disappearing and not really, you know, letting us know what this is about, Dan Driscoll went to Donald Trump and told him what this

• 8:41Jessica Tarlov?

  was about. And now finally, the disconnect between what's happening on the ground and what the president knows in, you know, in full force, it's just being laid out in front of us, which I think is hugely important. And like I said, a sea change here, you know, Dan Driscoll going to the president and saying that the Army cannot transform the way it needs to. It cannot become the modern warfaring fleet that we need it to be if it continues to be managed this way. And that doesn't mean that Dan Driscoll didn't believe in a lot of Pete Hegseth's initiatives. They were aligned on much of this, but certainly

• 9:23Jessica Tarlov?

  not in firing all of these generals. And he drew a straight line between lack of military readiness and the individuals that Pete Hegseth was firing for whether he didn't like their social media posts, color of their skin, whatever it is that they dared to say.

• 9:40George Hahn?

  We'll be right back.

• 9:44Scott Galloway?

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• 10:29Scott Galloway?

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• 10:53Scott Galloway?

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• 11:34Scott Galloway?

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• 12:00Scott Galloway?

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• 12:45Scott Galloway?

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• 13:09George Hahn?

  Welcome back. In July, roughly 700 OpenAI agents escaped the digital sandbox meant to contain them. They reached the open internet, compromised parts of OpenAI's own research infrastructure, and breached Hugging Face, the platform where AI models are shared and tested. The agents were supposed to solve cybersecurity challenges. Instead, some hacked the systems around the test to improve their scores. On Tuesday's Prof G Markets, Ed asked Deirdre Bosa, founder of DB Live, what actually happened.

• 13:48Speaker 06

  Two weeks on vacation in the AI world is like two years. I went on vacation earlier this summer, and I felt the exact same way. In this case, this is such a fascinating story because it really kind of shows you where AI is right now. Last year, the last few years, we were worried about hallucinations. Now this is the era of the agents actually doing things. And in this case, there's been a lot of debate, actually, alarm, and some people saying that maybe the sensationalism over this has gone too far. But, I mean, anyway, you look at it, both of those things can be true. It's this incident that shows how capable agents have become and how determined they are.

• 14:32Speaker 06

  So what essentially happened, Ed, is that as OpenAI is testing new models, they give it certain tasks, they want to see how they perform on benchmarks. And this swarm of agents, as you said, there's about 700, but at one point, I think there was 1,200 communicating on different sort of message boards. They were able to escape out of their sandbox because when you test these models, you have to sort of give them boundaries, right? So that they don't go rogue. But in this case, the agents were so smart that they were able to get out of the sandbox, go even further to Hugging Face. Why Hugging Face? Because it's essentially GitHub for AI developers, and it's where a lot of the rankings happen.

• 15:13Speaker 06

  So the agents were like, okay, they told us to achieve more, you know, get higher on the benchmarks, so we're essentially going to do that. So they broke out, they wreaked a lot of havoc. And the debate right now in tech and in Silicon Valley is really whether, you know, OpenAI did a good enough job in looking at security and sort of making a kill switch to make sure that these agents didn't get too carried away? Or whether this is just the moment we're in, it's become so powerful, they're able to do these things?

• 15:46Ed Elson?

  Yeah, that is part of the thing that I'm wondering is, is it that the agents are so smart and so capable and so powerful and we should go, oh, my gosh, look how incredible AI is and look how dangerous it therefore is? Or is it that the security around these things was kind of crappy? And OpenAI didn't do a good enough job? Or maybe it's both? Where do you land on that? Is it possible to know the answer to that question?

• 16:11Speaker 06

  I don't know that it's entirely possible to know, but like you said, Ed, it's probably a little bit of both. Yes, they're more powerful than ever and need more supervision. You probably need to, you know, involve security at the very earliest stages, right? I think, you know, the labs, OpenAI and Anthropic, researchers sort of at the top of the pyramid, their job is to make these models better and better. But as they become more powerful, you need to involve security maybe right at the beginning. And when I think about, you know, Dhrakesh's post over the weekend where he laid out sort of the different civilizations, how agents were essentially able to create civilizations and then topple them right after, one after another.

• 16:53Speaker 06

  You think that, you know, at some point, there has to be some responsibility. That's where a lot of the debate is centering right now. How responsible should the lab, OpenAI, be for these agents escaping? And that's something that is sort of being figured out in real time.

• 17:09George Hahn?

  OpenAI says no customer data or products were affected. It has since announced tighter controls, better monitoring, and automated shutdown capabilities. But the breach is a clear warning. An AI agent doesn't have to become conscious to become dangerous. Still, there are use cases that give us reason for optimism. On Thursday's Conversations episode, Scott spoke to journalist Josh Tierengel, who spent the last year reporting on how AI is actually being used and by whom. At Cleveland Clinic, a machine learning system helped doctors identify sepsis earlier.

• 17:50Speaker 08

  The big one that I saw was the application of a sepsis prediction model in the hospital. And so sepsis, as I'm sure many of your listeners know, sepsis is the most deadly thing in America. It kills more people in America, about 300,000 a year, than breast cancer, colon cancer, opioid addiction combined. And it is basically, it's a body's reaction to infection. And it's a sort of dysregulated response where the body starts attacking itself. And what ends up happening is you basically rot from the inside. And if it's caught early, you can treat it with antibiotics and it's just not a big deal. If it progresses, even if it doesn't kill you, it can have these terrible, terrible

• 18:34Speaker 08

  impacts on all of your body's systems. And so in about 2021, the clinic, you know, it was a very, very renowned system, looked at its sepsis numbers and realized about 3,000 people a year died in its care of sepsis, which is pretty standard across the country. But they said, this is preposterous. Like, this is a ridiculous number of people to be dying of something in our care. So they did a sort of system-wide commitment. And the first thing they said is, look, we got to find people who we can educate here. Who's going to captain this? And second, you know, they had a new CTO, and he came in and realized this is a perfect

• 19:13Speaker 08

  problem for machine learning because sepsis masks itself by looking like almost anything. It can look like a cold, it can look like dehydration, it can look like an excessive wound. All of the responses are the same. You have this overwhelming amount of signal, but it needs to be dispersed from the rest of the body's noise. And so they went through this process. They reminded everyone in this 80,000-person system that sepsis could be anywhere. They imported a model called Bayesian Health, which is a very sophisticated model. And what I found in all my reporting is that the personal motivation of the people who make AI products is inextricable from their success, right?

• 19:56Speaker 08

  So the woman who created the Bayesian model had a nephew who died of sepsis. And she just so happens to be a brilliant computer scientist, understood sepsis, and understood healthcare, right? So they bring her and the model in, they apply it through another system, which is Epic Health, which runs most of America's healthcare systems. And at first, it's fine, but not great. And so they have to refine it, and they have to work at why it's missing cases. They have to do it in an ICU, which is very different than doing it throughout the rest of the hospital. But what they got over the course of a year with sort of really dull, really unglamorous kind of commitment is that they reduced sepsis mortality in the system by 41%.

• 20:40Speaker 08

  So that's more than 1,000 people who are alive because they had this very narrow focus about what they wanted to do. They had people committed to finding the solution to the problem, applying it, refining it, working with their systems. And so at the end of the year, look, the thing that was most frustrating to the people in Cleveland Clinic, and I spent a lot of time with a nurse in the ICU whose grandmother died of sepsis. And she was frustrated because in ICU, where bodies give off all of these crazy responses constantly, they never got above 90% in the prediction model. And she could routinely walk the halls and look at a patient and diagnose them as septic, and AI couldn't, right?

• 21:22Speaker 08

  And so when I talked to the CEO about this, he said, look, 90% is pretty good, right? And what I'm looking for with AI is not, is it going to solve my problem? But is it going to improve the solution that I had before? And so when we hear 41% reduction in mortality, is it perfect? No, but it doesn't need to be perfect to be useful. And so that really stuck with me because so much of the hype around AI is about perfection, is about this sort of silver bullet technical solution to all of our problems. And what I found time and time again is that is just not how it works. But if you can get comfortable with it being better, with it needing to be nursed through

• 22:03Speaker 08

  a process and applied diligently, you can get better stuff.

• 22:08George Hahn?

  And one last thing. From Wednesday's Office Hours, a listener living far from his aging parents asked Scott, when it's time to move home? Scott answered with a story about caring for his mother during the final months of her life.

• 22:22Scott Galloway?

  I'm not saying this is the right way, but this is my way, and it's two different sides of the coin. I was much closer to my mother than my father. My mother raised me on her own. I was her top priority. You know, it was me and her against the world. So when she got sick, I actually moved in with my mom. I took, I took nine months leave of absence from NYU. I was fortunate, I had some money, some resources, and I had the ability, and I moved into a seniors community, the, the Del Webb Active Living Community. True story, they sent a letter to my mom's house saying, "It's become clear you're cohabitating with a man under the age of 50 in violation of HOA, Del Webb, community rules." And I had to go down there and say, "I'm her son, she's dying of cancer, and I've moved in to help take care of her." And they said, "We're sorry, no problem."

• 23:05Scott Galloway?

  Anyways, and during the day, let's get this back to me. During the day, I would manage my mom. It was her third time with cancer. She said, I said, "All right, what do you want on your bucket list?" She said, "I only have one thing on my bucket list, I want to die at home." And I'm like, "Okay, I can think I can figure that out." So during the day, I would manage her healthcare, a nurse, there's certain things I just can't do for my mom. And at night, I would head down to the Strip. She lived in a suburb of Las Vegas called Summerlin, and I would party with entrepreneurs and strippers and get really shitty drunk, and sometimes spend the night on the Strip at a cheap hotel during the week for 49 bucks. And then the next day, I'd go back and hang out with my mom all day and watch Jeopardy and take her on walks and push her wheelchair and watch Everyone Loves Raymond and then

• 23:50Scott Galloway?

  go out again. Kind of a weird time in my life, kind of a weird time. And then, when those, that thing resolved, I then started my life again. And that is something that I would treasure the rest of my life, that I had made enough money, had enough flexibility to give my mom like a fraction of the love back she had given me. That was, I will treasure that for the rest of my life.

• 24:14George Hahn?

  We spend a lot of time asking how much money is enough. Scott's story offers one answer. Enough is having the freedom to show up when someone you love needs you. That's the week. I'm George Hahn, we'll see you next Friday.