Trump Threatened to End Iranian Civilization — What Comes Next?

Ed Elson and Ian Bremmer break down Donald Trump’s latest threats toward Iran and what they mean for the state of geopolitics and global markets. Then, Ronan Farrow joins the show to discuss the findings from his 18-month investigation into OpenAI CEO Sam Altman. Finally, Ed shares his thoughts on Trump's escalating rhetoric on Iran. Ian Bremer is the President and founder of Eurasia Group. Ronan Farrow is an investigative reporter and a contributing writer for The New Yorker. Subscribe to the Prof G Markets Youtube Channel Check out our latest Prof G Markets newsletter Follow Prof G Markets on Instagram Follow Ed on Instagram, X and Substack Follow Scott on Instagram Send us your questions or comments by emailing [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

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• 1:15Ed Elson?

  Today's number, 80. That's how many years have passed since a nuclear bomb was last dropped on Earth. And here's to hoping that by the time you hear this, that will still be true.

• 1:39Ed Elson?

  Welcome to Prof you Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is April 8th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The major indices declined through the day, but ended the session flat. Oil climbed and Treasury yields were flat.

• 1:56Ed Elson?

  What else is happening? President Trump has threatened to completely wipe out Iran. Trump set an 8:00 PM Eastern deadline on Tuesday for Iran to fully reopen the Strait or face strikes on civilian infrastructure. Trump posted on Truth Social, quote, "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." As of Tuesday evening at the time of this recording, Iran had ended direct contact with the administration, though talks with mediators were ongoing. Pakistan's prime minister called on Trump to extend the deadline by two weeks and for the Strait of Hormuz to open during that time. Trump then said he was in, quote, "heated negotiations."

• 2:37Ed Elson?

  The S and P and the Nasdaq and the Dow all fell as much as 1% through the day as hopes for a ceasefire dimmed but closed roughly flat. So, here to help us break down the situation, we're speaking with Ian Bremmer, president and founder of Eurasia Group. Ian, so much to get into here. We're obviously recording before the deadline, so by the time people listen to this, things might have gone either way, and we'll get into that. But first, I would just love your reactions to what Trump has written here. Quote, "A whole civilization will die tonight, never to be brought back again." Have you ever seen anything like this? And what do you make of it?

• 3:14Speaker 05

  No, no, I haven't. I mean, if you were to take it at face value, it's threatening genocide. And it's, it's an unhinged post. It shows that Trump is increasingly really angry about how badly this war is going for him, about the fact that the Iranians have not capitulated despite his superior military capabilities. And he has no one to blame but himself. So he is, in a sense, painting himself in a corner. But I also, and again, I'm saying this only a few hours before the deadline, and at this point, the Iranians have given no reason to believe that they're engaging constructively

• 3:57Speaker 05

  whatsoever with Trump's ultimatum. And yet, I firmly believe... That Trump will not make good on his threat. Um, and there are a couple of obvious reasons for that. Uh, one, uh, is that if he did, the United States would be seen as a rogue state by countries all over the world. And it would, it would devastate, uh, America's standing, influence and power. Uh, not least with core allies who would not sit back and tolerate, uh, that sort of behavior. Uh, it would have a, a very dramatic impact on the ability of the United States to continue to count on,

• 4:39Speaker 05

  rely on, coordinate with, share intelligence with allies. That's number one. Number two, uh, it would have enormous impact on the global economy. Because the Iranians would hit back. They'd hit back in a big way. Uh, we've already seen that the Iranians continue to have capabilities, uh, to use both ballistic missiles and, uh, large numbers of drones, uh, which they can hit critical infrastructure targets across the Gulf states, which can cause a lot of damage. The big thing they've hit so far that they've really made a difference with is the LNG capacity of Qatar.

• 5:20Speaker 05

  Twenty, twenty billion dollars of damage with their strikes, three to five years, um, to repair it. Uh, but we could see a lot more of that. If the desalination plants were destroyed, for example, in Gulf countries, you would have mass exodus from those countries. You would not have the viability economically, um, to continue to support the livelihood of the people that live there. So this is a huge thing. And, uh, ultimately, as much as Trump is angry and narcissistic and short-term oriented and focusing on himself as opposed to the country, you can say all those things. But, but this is still way beyond.

• 6:01Speaker 05

  Uh, what one could plausibly imagine that he would do. So that's, that's the constraint side. That, that's why, um, there may be, uh, there are lots of ways he can, he can find to get out of this. He can say that the Iranians are actually being more constructive and more tankers are going through. So he's going to give them more time. He can say, uh, I'm hitting this one additional bridge or one power plant. I'm not actually going through with my full threat from eight to 12 o'clock, but I'm giving you one final offer. And now you've got until Friday or next week or two weeks or whatever it is, right? So lots of ways he can do it, but the actual threats that have been articulated as they have, he's not going through with those.

• 6:44Speaker 05

  I, I mean, I would stake my reputation on that, right? Yeah. Even though I have no knowledge of that, it is, in my view, utterly implausible. Now, having said that, two things I would want to really caution you about. And then wherever you want to go is fine. Yeah. One thing to caution you about is that the Israelis have engaged in strikes up against at least 10 railroad targets in Iran today. Those are infrastructure targets. Um, they can be used by the military. They are used for civilian purposes too.

• 7:23Speaker 05

  Um, the Israelis yesterday blew up a major petrochemical facility in Iran. Second time they've hit such a facility, causing billions of dollars of long-term damage to Iran's economy. So, I mean, if you're Iran, this is even before the deadline. I understand that Israel is the one doing the bombing, not the United States. But from Iran's perspective, those bombs kind of feel the same, right? So the reality is they're fighting against the United States and Israel. And Israel is continuing to engage in this level of destruction irrespective of the timing and the deadlines

• 8:08Speaker 05

  that the Americans are putting forward to Iran. And, and then the final point I would raise, the final cautionary point. Which is, even though I think it is ludicrous to imagine that the US would use a nuclear weapon in this environment tonight, the civilizational destruction, I think it's ludicrous to imagine that, even though I think it is absolutely the case that they will not follow through with bombing them into the Stone Age from 8 to 12 o'clock and that tomorrow we wake up and there's no, there's no Iran to speak of, it's been Gazified, I don't believe that for a second. But, but I also understand that we are seeing mission

• 8:50Speaker 05

  creep. I understand that every day this war goes on, it becomes a little easier to get a little deeper in, to do more damage, to have more people killed, to risk more American servicemen and women, to send more troops. I mean, Trump gave his big speech last week, he was saying two to three weeks, but privately he was saying four weeks. And then a few days later, he was saying, but if we were just a little more patient than those four weeks, we could take the oil. And then we've got all of these opportunities, right? And this was after the first week of the war, he had a G7 meeting, and he told the G7 heads

• 9:31Speaker 05

  of state that this war is going to be over within days, a matter of a few days, and it is just a question of how they surrender, they are preparing to surrender completely. So, we are watching these continued expansion, incremental expansion of America's engagement in this war, in a way that if it continues, will not only cause unheard of economic damage, could make this war comparable to or worse than the damage that we saw and experienced

• 10:14Speaker 05

  all of us during the pandemic, but we also could see human damage, consequences in Iran and across the region. That could have enormous consequence. And, and those things, I don't think that Trump is thinking about that today. I don't think those are the decisions he is considering taking today. But I absolutely see the knock on consequences of a few months of this. Getting you into an environment where you're well over your head.

• 10:46Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 10:47Speaker 05

  The tide is dragging you in and you can't swim anymore. So, I mean, we should not, despite the fact that I feel very confident about what we're gonna see this evening. I, I don't feel confident at all about where I think we're heading in the medium to long term.

• 11:04Ed Elson?

  Part of why you believe, and by the way, I agree with you that, that he won't drop a bomb in the next several hours. Is the idea that he hasn't completely lost his mind. Like, he, he, he understands a little bit, there is a semblance of an understanding of the implications of dropping a nuclear bomb, which I think makes sense. But I think there would be others who would say, well, this tweet, this Truth Social, this statement is proof that he is now completely unhinged and he actually has lost his mind, which means all bets are off. I, I don't personally think that instinctively.

• 11:45Ed Elson?

  But what would you say to someone who would say that to you, that, you know, the guy is insane?

• 11:52Speaker 05

  Well, it depends on the tenor of the person who is saying it to me. Because many of the people that are saying those things are folks that are already so far gone in the idea that this guy is Hitler reincarnate. And the idea that there are no checks and balances on, on him, right? So that everything he wants to do, he can just do as if he were an actual dictator.

• 12:15Ed Elson?

  How, is that not true? I mean, I mean.

• 12:18Speaker 05

  Of course, that's not true.

• 12:19Ed Elson?

  In what sense is

• 12:20Speaker 05

  There are people around him that are, they are kissing his ass constantly and they're telling him things are going better than they actually are and that is part of the problem. But, but there are still constraints, there are still restraining mechanisms, there is congress, there is a media that actually reports on him, there are polls, there are markets, there are all these things that don't exist in North Korea, right? There are all these things that do not constrain an actual dictator that constrain Trump. Remember, you know, the United States, we've saw through a significant investigation, very well done forensically, is responsible for targeting and blowing up a girls' school.

• 13:05Speaker 05

  And well over a hundred Iranian civilians killed. This was not intentional, it was a mis-targeting, the, the, the data had not been updated, it wasn't an AI mistake, but it was a mistake. But Trump's response was to blame the Iranians, it wasn't him. Why? I mean, if he doesn't care, and if they're just animals, they're not humans, and if it's all the responsibility of the Islamic Republic, well then, then just own it. Because they don't have human rights at that point. Like, if you're, if you're really going down that route, if you think that, that Trump no longer, he's unhinged, he doesn't care at all about human life, then many of the things that he would have done, he would have done differently already.

• 13:48Ed Elson?

  But either way, they still got killed. I mean, I think this would be, the response is that, that there's a, there's a little bit of a check insofar as he doesn't want to admit, or not admit, but he would say that it wasn't our intention, or that it was the Iranians' fault. But either way, I mean, congress exists, but he's still willing to blow past and make decisions without their approval. The media still exists and he's still willing to do completely outrageous things despite getting pilloried by people like, I don't know, me.

• 14:16Speaker 05

  Oh, he's doing outrageous things.

• 14:17Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 14:18Speaker 05

  Just, again, I, I, I am pushing back against genocide.

• 14:24Ed Elson?

  Right.

• 14:25Speaker 05

  I'm pushing back against a nuclear weapon. I'm also pushing back against The intentional targeting of a girl's school, which he did not do. Again, the, the, the investigations from the New York Times and other sources were very clear. This was not an order of shock and awe, let's blow up an Iranian girl's school. Yeah. They did not intend to do that. They don't, they, they, they are not trying to maximize civilian casualties. They're just enormously angry that, that the Iranian regime is not capitulating, despite all of their bravado and all of their superior military strength. And, you know, it's kind of funny.

• 15:07Speaker 05

  In the sense that what Trump has been saying to the Iranians, again, if you take him at face value, he's been saying, this is not our problem. And that other countries need to deal with this. This is their problem, right? Well, other countries have been dealing with it. They're, they're, they're worried that they can't get their oil through. And so they are paying the Iranians $2 million a ship to get their oil through. Trump is dealing with it. You know, he's worried about oil and gas prices, so he has suspended sanctions on Iranian oil. Iranian oil. That's money that's going to the Islamic Republic.

• 15:47Speaker 05

  Why? Because Trump's revealed preference is I hate these guys, I want them to lose, but I don't hate them so much that I'm willing to take even higher costs for my own gas prices in the United States that I'm going to be punished for. So, again, at every step, he is showing that he is constrained. He's not showing that he has a value, that he values human life. Right. He's not showing that he cares about people other than himself. He's not showing that. But he's showing he's constrained. And that is the core, you know, rational conclusion Uh huh. from people that are watching what he is doing and not just focusing on his tweets

• 16:29Speaker 05

  as if they are somehow a reflection of actual reality. Now, I mean, look, it's hard because we've never had, usually presidents don't say very much in their real-time public statements, and Trump obviously says far too much. And he's frequently incoherent. He's frequently self-contradictory. And he, he allows his impulses, his id, to act in a completely unrestrained way.

• 16:58Speaker 05

  And the people around him facilitate that. So it makes it harder to to analyze and assess.

• 17:06Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Speaker 05

  This guy.

• 17:08Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 17:08Speaker 05

  And it also makes it harder because if you're on one side or the other politically in the US or globally. Uh, uh, and you don't get any benefits from having a nuanced perspective. You know, everybody wants you to say that this guy is either America first and no one has ever been a president like him. No one's ever accomplished much, or he is evil incarnate. He is literally Hitler. Um, which I mean, uh, the neither of those two things in my view are true or useful. And so I don't take them as my as my starting off point. I take my starting off point is I'm going to do analysis. I've spent my entire career trying to understand international relations.

• 17:51Speaker 05

  By the way, frequent not that much on the United States. So I look at the US in the context of how other countries act in similar scenarios and how might I apply that to my own country? The Americans, right? Um, but and then I tell people what I think.

• 18:09Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 18:09Speaker 05

  I I'm just, it it's just honest analysis. And if people push back, I'm like, well, OK, I could be wrong, but at least I'm not lying to you.

• 18:17Ed Elson?

  So so let's say, let's say you're right. Uh, people will be listening to this in the morning. Let's say Trump doesn't bomb Iran tonight. How will the story play out then? I mean, what will have changed?

• 18:30Speaker 05

  A bit. I mean, again, the US continues to bomb, but he's not, he is not going to make good on the eight to 12 o'clock end of civilization. All the bridges, all the power plants are getting hit. He will not do that. People watching this now know he has not done that, right?

• 18:44Ed Elson?

  Right. So let's say he doesn't do that. Uh, let's say he doesn't end the civilization, go fully nuclear, go totally insane. How will things play out from then on? Because it still seems like something has changed here. He's threatened it. I can't tell whether that means something geopolitically. I have a feeling it does. But what does that mean for the Iran situation going forward? How do you think that it will play out?

• 19:09Speaker 05

  Well, look, I mean, the Iranians have called his bluff insofar as after this post. And remember, the end of the post was the whole God bless the Iranian people. So even in the unhinged post, he's trying to make a distinction between the Islamic Republic and the Iranian people. And I can promise you, everyone that's asked me about this post, no one's brought up the last sentence because the last sentence doesn't serve the narrative. The first sentence does. So not that I care that much because if the whole thing is unhinged, but if we're really digging into it, we should recognize that he wrote the whole thing. He didn't just write the first sentence.

• 19:46Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 19:47Speaker 05

  What do I think? I think that when the Iranians saw that, they said, great, okay, we're just, we're done. We're not talking. We're breaking off the conversations with the Pakistanis for today. So let's assume that he finds a bit of an off ramp. He gives them some time or he doesn't go fully ballistic, nuclear. And now the Iranians have the ability to come back. They have the ability to engage again. And then you can have some more talks in this slightly more escalated environment. You know, let's keep in mind that the Iranians just let go these French prisoners that they had. So they are engaging with the French. They are engaging with the Pakistanis. They are engaging with the Chinese.

• 20:30Speaker 05

  The Iranians are negotiating with lots of countries right now for different things, but not with the Americans. So the one big question for tomorrow or today, when people are now watching this, is

• 20:44Speaker 05

  Are the Iranians now having gone through the deadline and lived to see another day? Are they now engaging with the Americans directly or indirectly again? And is the United States prepared to engage in that process? I suspect the answer is yes, but we don't know that.

• 21:04Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 21:05Speaker 05

  Absent that, Trump has also said this war is going to be over in two to three weeks. Now that means one to two weeks. Again, I expect that he's going to continue. So I expect that he's, you know, he's pulling back on his maximalist rhetoric, but he's pushing forward on all of the constraints on his time. The problem is that when you tell the Iranians two to three weeks and then I'm done, they're thinking, if we just survive two to three weeks.

• 21:35Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 21:35Speaker 05

  You know, we're golden. You know, now we've got the influence over the straits and everything else. So, I mean, Trump's, he is his own worst enemy in so many ways on this conflict. And then, and meanwhile, for the markets, every day we keep talking about this. Are weeks that the global economy is going to be experiencing the knock on damage of what's happening?

• 22:02Ed Elson?

  Yeah. I could ask you questions for hours, but I have to let you go. I guess my final question here, given what has happened now, would you say that this? It sounds like you believe that this actually extends the timeline. I was wondering, maybe we're at the, we're approaching the end game here. He's now threatening what amounts to pretty much a nuke. Maybe the story's coming to a close, or maybe it's just beginning. And maybe this actually, to your point, we wake up, we're still alive, let's keep fighting.

• 22:35Speaker 05

  Again, we've heard explosions on Carg Island. That seems to me relevant. That seems to me, it looks like it came from the United States. If that is true, and I don't have full visibility on that. But if that's true, that's softening military targets. While the American troops are getting in place. The one thing we haven't talked about at all in this conversation is the most real thing here. Actual, physical, real thing, which is that the Americans have a third aircraft strike force. And thousands of additional troops that they have deployed to the region. But they're not all there yet, and they won't be until around April 16th.

• 23:20Speaker 05

  And so it seems to me, what I see are American military engagement. That is meant to set the table for eventually Trump considering using those ground forces. I mean, he has used the ground forces to rescue an American airman.

• 23:40Speaker 05

  Successfully from that F-15 this weekend. But he hasn't used them in any significant way. That could easily change in two weeks.

• 23:49Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 23:49Speaker 05

  And that's, again, so for me, I don't think we're close to the end game. In part because we haven't yet got to that point in the conflict. The point we're in, the conflict we're in right now is just all of this continued escalation in geopolitics by tweet. That is where the 21st century is right now, and it's sad and dystopian. But it doesn't really relate that closely to what's happening in the war.

• 24:16Ed Elson?

  All right. Ian Bremmer, president and founder of Eurasia Group. Ian, always appreciate your time. Thank you so much.

• 24:22Speaker 05

  Good talk.

• 24:24Ed Elson?

  After the break, an inside look at the most damning Sam Altman investigation yet. And if you're enjoying the show, please follow our new Prof you Markets YouTube channel. The link is in the description.

• 24:43Speaker 00

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• 26:01Ed Elson?

  We're back with Prof G Markets. One of the most powerful people in tech might also be the least trustworthy. That is the finding of an 18-month New Yorker investigation into OpenAI CEO, reported by Ronan Farrow and Andrew Morantz. They interviewed more than 100 people, reviewed hundreds of pages of previously undisclosed documents, and sat down with Altman himself more than a dozen times. The central question they pose is simple. Can Sam Altman be trusted? One former board member's answer echoes throughout the piece, quote, "He is unconstrained by truth." Here to discuss this investigation, we are speaking with the author himself, Ronan Farrow. Ronan, thank you so much for joining us. You spent over a year and a half on this piece.

• 26:46Ed Elson?

  You interviewed over 100 people. I guess let's just start with what were your biggest takeaways from this investigation?

• 26:54Speaker 07

  Well, I think that my interest in this, and I was coming off of a body of reporting about Elon Musk and Musk essentially having acquired in a lot of arenas, supragovernmental power, was that sources around that story, including Sam Altman, who was on the record in it, were talking about AI in a way that, you know, had some substantive consequential promise and then also included a lot of hype. Now, of course, it's Silicon Valley, the entire foundational story, the creation myth, is hype, building companies on hype and promise, and often that cart coming before the horse of actual functional value added in America.

• 27:39Speaker 07

  It was striking to me as I started looking just writ large at like, what is it in the AI gold rush that is the most in need of additional interrogation? How even above and beyond that baseline expectation of some dissembling from tech CEOs, there was this particular phenomenon around Sam Altman, where across his career, there have been these claims that he deceives, lies, manipulates, are the allegations, to an extent that eclipses even those norms. And so what I set out to examine with my co-author Andrew Morantz

• 28:18Speaker 07

  is what are the particulars? Does it actually rise to that level? Or is this just criticism from, you know, sour grapes competitors? And if it's true, to what extent should we care about it? Right. And we really did obtain a huge density of, you know, interviews with more than 100 people in this piece, documents, many hundreds of pages of documents, and did a forensic look at this. You know, we obtained and reviewed these sort of fabled Ilya Sutskever memos, which was some 70 pages of Slack messages and HR documents and explanatory text from him that was sent to board members before an episode where Sam was actually fired

• 29:02Speaker 07

  a couple of years ago, people in tech. Probably most of the followers of this podcast will remember that episode. The answers really didn't emerge at the time as to what the basis was. But what is documented in that memo is the phenomenon I was just referring to. There's a line that says Sam exhibits a consistent pattern of. And then the first item is lying. Yeah. We obtained 200 plus pages of records related to Dario Amade, including a lot of notes that he kept. You know, and he writes, the problem with OpenAI is Sam himself. And there's a really personal chronicle that we lay out in the piece of how the rift deepened between them and ultimately led to the creation of Anthropic.

• 29:45Speaker 07

  Some of the supposed lies documented here are significant. One of the episodes that precipitated the board's firing, you know, was a case in which Sam had assured board members that the most controversial features of a model had been safety tested. And then they went out and looked and they hadn't been. There was a major breach that was playing out that he didn't mention to them over many hours of briefing with them. Some of them are interpersonal, you know, over the course of the deepening mistrust between him and Dario Amade. There's an episode we describe where, you know, he calls Amade and his sister Daniela,

• 30:25Speaker 07

  who is also working at the company into a room and said, you know, I believe you're plotting a coup against me. I have this on good authority from a senior executive at the company. And they called in the senior executive who said, I never said that. And then Sam, right there in the room, as this account goes from the documents and other people around this, said, oh, I never said that myself. I didn't make the allegation in the first place. And Daniela Amade said, you just said it. So it's something that becomes so pervasive that, look, there's a split of opinions on how much we should care about the safety stakes of AI. There's people who say, we're all doomed. You know, AI may kill us all. There could be a Terminator, Skynet scenario.

• 31:08Speaker 07

  And therefore, the person with their finger on the button needs to have a lot of integrity. But it's not just that. There are just really nuts and bolts pragmatic investors that we talked to in this piece, board members we talked to, who said, this is just too much lying for a senior executive at a major company of this size.

• 31:27Ed Elson?

  Right. Yeah, some of the, some of the quotes that you had there, we, we mentioned that what we heard about his consistent pattern of lying, also he's unconstrained by the truth. You also wrote that a board, the board member was not the only person who unprompted used the word sociopathic. You also said that one of his batchmates at Y Combinator said, quote, "You need to understand that Sam can never be trusted. He is a sociopath. He would do anything." And then a senior executive at Microsoft, you wrote, said, quote, "There's a small but real chance he's eventually remembered as a Bernie Madoff or a Sam Bankman-Fried level scammer." I mean, the evidence that he is somewhat sociopathic in his tendencies to lie are, I mean,

• 32:08Ed Elson?

  it's very substantial here. And I think it raises the question, like, why should we care? Who does this affect? I get the sense that it kind of affects all of us because he is the leader of the most important technology AI company in the world right now, a company that's going to go public at, at least a trillion dollars. At least that's the plan right now. I mean, what are your takeaways on, on what this means for us? For regular Americans, for people who perhaps interact with AI? I mean, what does this mean for a listener perhaps? Why does this affect them?

• 32:45Speaker 07

  Well, listen, first of all, I just want to point out, this piece very carefully filters for its competitors like Amade making a criticism.

• 32:54Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 32:54Speaker 07

  It's people with personal sour grapes. This isn't a hit piece that carries water for any of Sam's opponents. In fact, it's really strenuously generous to him wherever it can be. And as in any large scale piece like this, there's a lot that, you know, isn't included that we learned. Because we really just wanted to convey the essential things and stay away from sensationalism.

• 33:18Ed Elson?

  Yes.

• 33:18Speaker 07

  So it's very fair. It's very forensic. It's very measured. I think even with all of that said, you're exactly right. Right, that there is a pattern here that emerges that is consequential even above and beyond Silicon Valley norms. Now, there's the argument that this is just dysfunctional from a business standpoint that I mentioned. And then, as you're alluding to, there are the stakes for all of us. You don't have to buy into the over the top AI will go rogue and kill us all argument. Although, for what it's worth, that is a scenario that Sam Altman and the co-founders of OpenAI fundraised off of and formed the company around, that this was a technology as dangerous as nukes. But you can look more immediately for the ways this affects us.

• 34:01Speaker 07

  Every credible economic projection has millions and millions of jobs exposed to disruption from this and potentially elimination from this. You have a growing number of economists warning of the risk of a recession if the AI bubble bursts. You know, this is something that you guys have talked about and covered. AI is now propping up US economic growth. Yeah. The markets are highly dependent on a few companies that are, in the view of many people, even within them, over leveraged. You know, we have a board member in this piece saying of OpenAI right now, we're levered up in a way that is scary. There is an ecosystem around OpenAI to sustain the massive spend.

• 34:44Speaker 07

  You know, this is one of the fastest cash burn rates of any startup ever. Building AGI and racing to build AGI in the way that these AI labs are now is monumentally expensive. And the way that's being sustained is partners borrowing from each other. And there's analysts in this piece saying, you know, there is circularity here and someone's going to have to pay the piper. Sam Altman himself has said at various points, someone's going to lose a lot of money. So there's these economic stakes and then there's all of the other stakes. There's the fact that this is being deployed on battlefields already. The concerns about autonomous weapons firing without human oversight, that's not a fantasy. That's there's already what appears to be a documented instance of that. Yeah.

• 35:28Speaker 07

  It is being used to identify chemical weapons at a rate never before seen. It is being used for political dis- Information. There's the whole separate conversation about suicides and in one case a murder that a lawsuit alleges was a result of chat GPT encouragement. So the stakes are real and we have a scenario where we're in this late stage capitalist moment where the individuals and companies who have their fingers on the button here really don't have outside guardrails that are nearly as meaningful as any credible safety activist or advocate says they should be.

• 36:05Ed Elson?

  Right.

• 36:06Speaker 07

  And those same companies, the ones best positioned to track the dangers and often the ones warning about the dangers have every incentive financially to downplay those dangers and rush past them and ask forgiveness rather than permission. While the regulatory infrastructure that would be needed to hold them accountable simply doesn't exist.

• 36:26Ed Elson?

  One of the biggest questions, and then we'll let you go. I know you have other appearances. One of the biggest questions in the markets right now is this question of is AI a bubble? I mean, that is the trillion dollar question that everyone is trying to figure out right now. And some people are bulls, some people are bears. And a lot of the show is trying to figure out what is the answer to that question. Do you think that your findings from this investigation shed any light on the answer to that question? Is there anything in there that you think perhaps can lead us to an answer?

• 36:58Speaker 07

  Well, look, the piece is sober on this front too, and very even. It acknowledges the ways in which AI is not just vaporous. It already has consequential and life-saving applications. Medical diagnostics are transformed already by AI. Drug research is transformed already by AI. There are some applications like emergency weather warning systems that are transformed by AI. These are real, not just hype.

• 37:26Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 37:26Speaker 07

  That said, if you look at Sam Altman's language over recent years, and in fact, even on the day that we put this piece out, there was a concerted round of press. There were a lot of moves within this company right around this piece coming out. And one of the things that you see out there from Sam of late is a renewed Of his sort of utopian projections, right? That this is technology that's going to, I'm using his own phrases from various blog posts and also recent comments, you know, put us on other planets, cure all forms of cancer, lead to a kind of utopian scenario where all problems are solved by everyone being empowered to make their own startups. This was the same answer he provided in our conversations when I talked about the

• 38:11Speaker 07

  jobs exposed to elimination, the less sunny economic projections. He, his main answer was, well, you know, we'll have a foundation that does good work on that. And also, you know, chat G P T is going to allow everyone to make startups. I don't know that that is going to be terribly comforting to people whose jobs are eliminated as a part of this and who need serious government investment into reskilling and into oversight in this industry, you know, not just the promise of these private companies saying it's all going to be fine. I think on the question of whether it's a bubble, one telling thing is that some of

• 38:50Speaker 07

  the most serious technologists in this field are in this piece and are people we had long conversations with in the course of this reporting and say, even if you believe some of Altman's more bullish projections, some of the things he's saying have arrived. And this is a guy who we talk about him telling government officials, you know, five years ago or so that by 2026, you know, there'd be nuclear fusion power across the United States. He often overpromises.

• 39:24Ed Elson?

  Yeah.

• 39:24Speaker 07

  And even these serious technologists saying, maybe we believe some of this, very often also sound to the note of caution of that could be years, maybe even decades away. So I think people who are watching how this evolves, I'm not going to get into prediction. But I, I do think they should be aware of that split of expert opinions and a lot of people saying, hey, let's tap the brakes. This is going to take time.

• 39:49Ed Elson?

  Yeah, I think this should honestly be required reading for anyone who's thinking about investing in this company. I mean, if you want to invest in a company, you need to know the management. This, this article is it. Ronan Farrow, we really appreciate your time. You can read the article in the New Yorker. It is out now. Thank you so much for joining us.

• 40:07Speaker 07

  Thank you, Ed. Appreciate it.

• 40:12Ed Elson?

  Well, I'm currently recording this on Tuesday evening, which means that in a few hours, when this episode is published, it's possible that the world will have fundamentally changed. Just a few hours ago, the president said that if a deal with Iran isn't reached by 8 p.m., then their, quote, "whole civilization will die." This essentially sounds like a threat to drop nuclear bombs on Iran, but if it isn't that, then it's certainly a threat to commit war crimes against Iran. He is essentially saying, "If you don't do what I say, I will kill millions of innocent civilians," which is the kind of statement that would be made by a Marvel supervillain, which kind of forces us to consider the possibility that maybe he actually is one.

• 40:56Ed Elson?

  Now, again, I don't know what will happen in the next few hours, nor does anyone, but my instinct tells me that he won't go through with these threats. Ian Bremmer agrees. "I think we will wake up in the morning and the conflict will remain violent, but it won't be nuclear." Either way, though, the stakes have now changed. Because as Katie Martin once told us, "You can't unsay the things that have now been said." And we are now living in a world where the president of the United States is willing to make threats of genocide out loud. In fact, he just has done. And that is an entirely new kind of world.

• 41:39Ed Elson?

  And so the question for us is, how do we react to this new world? Does this mean that we should also change in some capacity? Should we think differently about the world? Should we behave in a different manner? The more pertinent question for this show would be, should we invest differently? And I don't know, but I think the answer to those questions is probably. We probably should change something. But then the next question is, of course, even harder, and that is, what exactly should you change? What should you do? And my answer is, I have no idea.

• 42:20Ed Elson?

  And so far, that has been the market's answer as well. Stocks were remarkably unreactive yesterday, and I don't think that's because investors are downplaying the situation. I think it's because they simply don't know what to do. We have never seen a situation like this. We've never seen a president like this. And so to presume that you know what's coming next is kind of to be crazy. In other words, we're all about to learn about this whole thing together. There are practically no authorities on the matter, no one on Wall Street or in Silicon Valley, or even in Washington, who knows more about what's going on in Trump's head than you do.

• 43:03Ed Elson?

  We all really know nothing. But it would be my hope that over the next few weeks, regardless of what happens here, that this podcast will help us to at least begin to understand this new world and this new frontier. Yes, we cannot predict the future, but we can always try to understand it, and we can perhaps try to prepare for it just a little bit more. Okay, that's it for today. This episode is produced by Claire Miller and Alison Weiss, edited by Joel Patterson and engineered by Benjamin Spencer. Our video editor is Brad Williams. Our research team is Dan Shalane, Isabella Kinsel, Chris Nodine, Hugh and Mia Silverio.

• 43:47Ed Elson?

  And our social producer is Jake McPherson. Thank you for listening to Prof G Markets from Prof G Media. If you liked what you heard, give us a follow. I'm Ed Elson. I will see you tomorrow.

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