Violent Backlash: What the Sam Altman Attacks Signal for AI

Following the violent attacks on Sam Altman, Bradley Tusk and Brian Merchant join Ed Elson to break down why AI is facing growing resistance. They explore the future of AI regulation, how politicians should position themselves in the debate, and whether rising tensions could lead to more disruption or violence. Bradley Tusk is the founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures. Brian Merchant is a tech journalist and author of the Blood in the Machine Substack. Subscribe to the Prof G Markets Youtube Channel Check out Bradley’s latest piece on AI regulation 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

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• 1:29Ed Elson?

  Today's number? 12,000. That's how many comments Trump received on an image he posted of himself depicted as Jesus before it was taken down. According to the president, he meant to be portrayed as a doctor. That was right after he called the Pope weak and terrible. And in other news, panic on Wall Street as traders prepare for the rapture.

• 1:54Speaker 06

  Money markets mad. If money is evil, then that building is hell.

• 2:04Ed Elson?

  Welcome to Profiteam Markets. I'm Ed Elson. It is April 15th. Let's check in on yesterday's market vitals. The major indices rose as President Trump signaled he was open to talks with Iran. That pushed the Nasdaq to its 10th straight gain, while the S and P 500 came close to a record high. Oil prices fell below $100 a barrel. Bank stocks were mixed after earnings. Wells Fargo fell 5%, while Citigroup rose nearly 3%. We'll be breaking down all those bank earnings on tomorrow's episode. And finally, Amazon shares rose nearly 4% after the company acquired Starlink's biggest competitor, Globalstar. Okay, what else is happening?

• 2:45Ed Elson?

  AI has a popularity problem, and it is now getting violent. Last week, in Indiana, a local councilman's home was shot at 13 times after he voiced support for a data center project in his town. A sign reading, quote, "No data centers" was left at his door. Then, Sam Altman, the OpenAI CEO, was targeted twice in the same weekend. A man threw a Molotov cocktail at his home on Friday and threatened to burn down OpenAI's San Francisco headquarters. Police recovered a document from the suspect, warning of humanity's, quote, "impending extinction from AI," as well as a list of names and addresses of CEOs and investors of AI companies.

• 3:27Ed Elson?

  The 20-year-old has been charged with attempted murder and faces a second count of attempted murder for the security guard who was at Altman's house. Separately, two people were arrested for firing shots at Altman's house on Sunday. These attacks are an extreme manifestation of the rising anti-AI sentiment in the US. Among 31 countries surveyed, Americans reported the lowest level of trust in their own government to regulate AI at just 31%. And people are now acting on that distrust. In just two years, $64 billion of data center projects have been blocked or delayed due to local opposition. So, here to discuss these disturbing headlines and AI's general popularity problem in this

• 4:12Ed Elson?

  country, we are having another panel discussion with two experts. We've got Bradley Tusk, founder and CEO of Tusk Ventures, and Brian Merchant. Tech journalist and author of The Blood in the Machine Substack. Bradley and Brian, thank you very much for joining me on the show here. Bradley, I'll start with you. I mean, this news of Sam Altman, two attacks in the span of just a few days. It really is just a striking example of this growing feeling in America that I've talked about. I know you've talked about, and that is a lot of people just don't like AI at this point. What do you make of this news and what does it say about this moment?

• 4:52Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I think people don't like a lot of things. And to be clear, regardless of what you think of either AI or Sam Altman, no one should be throwing Molotov cocktails at his home or at anyone's home. But I think you've got a combination of one, just general distrust of our happiness in this country, right? Whether it is the fact that we are 23rd in the World Happiness Report or 62nd for people under the age of 25. Whether it's the fact that our government seems to be hijacked by extremists on both sides of the aisle. Whether it's the fact that we haven't regulated Internet 2.0 yet. So even things like social media have never been dealt with by Washington, let alone AI. And then combine that with the fact that AI is really unpopular.

• 5:32Speaker 07

  I saw a YouGov poll that showed that people have a 47 to 27 by margin of people distrust of AI. People think that AI will replace a lot more jobs than it creates. Almost every different survey mechanism out there shows that people are fearful. And then anecdotally, when you just talk to people, they feel the same way. Then you mentioned in the intro, local opposition blocking the construction of data centers. I think that's often the fault of the hyperscalers who seem to think that it would be okay to pass along all of their energy costs to regular consumers, right? And if you are living near a data center, the idea that your electricity bill should go up 30, 40%

• 6:13Speaker 07

  to subsidize Sam Altman or Jensen Huang or whoever it is so that they can become trillionaires is unacceptable. And in this case, I think it's actually let the officials on both sides of the aisle acting in the interest to protect their constituents. And so, yeah, when you have a government that consistently fails to regulate technology, when you have a government that feels run by the extremes and you have a society that's generally unhappy, these are unfortunately the kind of things that come from it.

• 6:38Ed Elson?

  Brian, you've written about this before and your book is about actually the Luddite movement, which is sort of the first iteration of technology coming along, people getting very worried about it and revolting essentially. What do you make of the attacks on Sam Altman? What does it say to you?

• 6:56Speaker 08

  Well, I mean, what it says to me is that this discontent, these grievances that people have are real, they are pronounced, and we have to look at them as if, you know, some of these people are obviously on the extreme end of whether it's a political spectrum or an ideology, at least one of these shooters was, you know, one of these ex-risk AI safety advocates who's really worried that AI is going to rise up and become sentient and end humanity. And so if you believe that, then, you know, doing all you can, you know,

• 7:38Speaker 08

  may look like a rational outcome, as abhorrent as it looks to everybody else. And to step back a second, we do have a long history, right? When there is a disruptive technology, number one. Number two, that is being developed and sort of unleashed by a particular sort of group of interests, right? When you have, in the Luddites' time, that was the factory owners who were spearheading factorization and automation, and they were doing it without community input, without asking what workers and communities, what they wanted. So we have a dynamic that looks an awful lot like what's happening here today, where you have a few industrialists who had the backing of the state, they had all the resources,

• 8:23Speaker 08

  they had all the capital, they had all the power, and they were saying, this is the way it's going to be. We're going to automate jobs this way, and you're either going to sort of work in our factory, or you're going to get out of the way. And the Luddites, who actually registered, this is one of the things that people get wrong about the Luddites today, is they weren't dummies, they weren't backwards looking, they understood quite well what was happening. They were technologists, they used this stuff every day, they used... The automated technologies and smaller iterations in their fact in their in their workshops and at home. And so they understood what the industrialists were trying to do, and that's what motivated their response.

• 9:00Speaker 08

  They didn't want to see their way of life subsumed by factorization, given over to a relative handful of interests. So it was really about power, it was about democracy, and it was about losing agency. And so today, a lot of the backlash we see against AI is motivated by these very same fears and concerns. In no small part because the AI CEOs and tech titans themselves have come out and used this language, right? From the beginning, they've said, oh, this technology is so powerful. It could be big trouble for humanity. It could be the gravest thing humanity has ever faced. If we're not careful with it, it's going to eliminate 20 to 30 to 50% of jobs.

• 9:42Speaker 08

  Given, you know, depending on how Dario Amadeo at Anthropic is feeling. And it is going to be this huge disruptive event. And that's how they're forecasting, that's how they're describing their own project, their own business. And so, again, why would anybody, you know, not take that seriously, right? We take it serious at different levels, but and some people will attach themselves to the X risk element and say, well, we don't want to exterminate humanity. And most people will say, hey, I'm out here listening and you're saying you want to automate all the jobs with AI tools. You want to you want to automate, why would I be OK with that? Why would I trade that for a, why would I, why would I allow a data center in my backyard to help you in that project?

• 10:27Speaker 08

  So to me, all of this backlash, you know, I'm honestly a little surprised it hasn't arrived a little bit sooner. Just how aggressive the industry and its leadership has often been.

• 10:38Ed Elson?

  Yeah, yeah, this gets to the sort of the the PR and comms point. And broadly, I mean, you've worked in exactly this sector, you've worked in politics, you've worked in tech and politics and how they come together. And there is this interesting question, which is like, well, all of the big AI CEOs are telling us that this technology is in a lot of ways quite scary and in some cases bad, like it's going to destroy things, it's going to destroy white collar work. It's going to completely disrupt the economic model as we know it. And they've done it in a way that that is legitimately quite scary. And I guess it does beg the question of like. I mean, why say that? If you're the CEO of a technology company,

• 11:23Ed Elson?

  why would you come out and say this technology is going to be really bad? And it's going to, it's going to really negatively impact a lot of people's lives. I mean, what do you make of the comms strategy there?

• 11:34Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I think that, keep in mind, from their perspective, comms is a couple of different things at the same time. It's the way we're talking about it right now, which is how the public might perceive something, how regulators and lawmakers might perceive it. But it's also fundraising, right? So OpenAI and Anthropic are still both privately held companies with giant valuations. OpenAI is nearly a trillion dollars at this point. And as they raise money, a lot of what you just said, interpreted slightly differently, is very appealing potentially to investors, right? So when you're talking about, hey, this is going to wipe out lots of jobs. What investors hear is this will be the tool instead that businesses are going to use to replace workers and instead they're going to pay money to OpenAI,

• 12:18Speaker 07

  to Anthropic, to all of these different companies. And so I think that the language that you use potentially to recruit employees, so The New Yorker has a great piece this week on Sam Altman, and a lot of the recruiting that he did at OpenAI, was around the idea that he was the responsible person trying to protect humanity from the potential perils of AI. That clearly does not seem to be the case. But he used that language to incentivize people who did care about this issue genuinely to come work for him. There's language they use with investors. And I think what they're finding right now, and I think sometimes this is sort of the both naivete and arrogance that you will see in the tech world, which is a lack of understanding of how their words then land with real people

• 13:03Speaker 07

  or with, you know, people in politics and government. And a lot of what they're saying is now coming back to haunt them. But the real question to me is, we know that the public is concerned. And we have seen, at least at the local level, elected officials protect consumers from things like paying for the cost of the energy needs of data centers. But when it comes to the larger issue of catastrophic risk, states like New York California have done some regulation around frontier models, but some of this really needs to be done at a federal level. And right now, we're seeing the opposite from this White House. We saw this White House issue an executive order in December telling states, you're not allowed to regulate AI. And luckily, governors just from both parties roundly ignored that.

• 13:46Speaker 07

  But there are areas where you're going to see Washington need to step up. And I think whether or not they do so may dictate how this whole thing plays out.

• 13:54Ed Elson?

  Stay tuned for more of this panel right after the break. And if you're enjoying the show, please follow our new Prof G Markets YouTube channel. The link is in the description.

• 14:10Speaker 00

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• 15:43Ed Elson?

  We're back with Profty Markets. It's a very difficult time in a lot of ways to be an AI executive because, I mean, on the one hand, as you say, there is an economic incentive or maybe a fundraising incentive would be the right way to put it, to say that this stuff is going to be very damaging and it's going to just structurally completely upend the entire economy as we know it. But at the same time, I also wonder if they also actually believe that. And that seems to be something that you also have to kind of reckon with, especially in the context of a government, which seems pretty unwilling in general to promote any form of policy, any form of regulation. And if you're building in the AI space in that

• 16:27Ed Elson?

  environment and you seem to recognize, you know, this administration doesn't really want to do anything in terms of regulation, then maybe you do feel you need to sound the alarm and say, hey, this is going to be, this is actually a big deal. This is actually going to be a problem. And then on our end, it becomes very difficult to understand what's true and what's marketing and what's hype. So I guess, I mean, Brian, just turning it to you, what, which parts of the story do you think are real? I mean, when, when Sam Altman goes out and says, yes, this is going to be massively destructive in a lot of ways, or when Dario Amadei says that, I mean, to what extent should we take that

• 17:08Ed Elson?

  seriously versus write it off as, you know, marketing?

• 17:14Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, I think you're absolutely right that it's, you know, both of those tendencies are kind of bound up in this same trajectory. And part of this is necessity, right? Like, the tech landscape is such that if somebody wants to, you know, release a product that can compete with one of the giants like Meta or Amazon or Google, then you need just truly an immense amount of capital. If you want to compete rather than angle to get bought up or something. So you need a story that can command the kind of capital that can compete with one of Of, you know, three or four of the tech oligopolies that are out there, right?

• 17:55Speaker 08

  The tech monopolies that have sort of over the last 20 years sort of concentrated their power. And so that story then becomes not just, hey, here's a cool product. That's not going to get you there. You need a story that is on the magnitude of we are creating that software that can automate every meaningful job. And, you know, that language is right there in OpenAI's charter still to this day. You can, you can look at that as, that is intrinsic to the pitch to investors. And so I think there are a number of different factors there. I think if you look at the last 10 years of the history of sort of this latest AI boom, then you really see it beginning in earnest around at least expressed fears about X risk

• 18:38Speaker 08

  and the, the possibility, you know, as sort of presented by Nick Bostrom and others, that AI could become super intelligent and become this danger. I think one of Sam Altman's key intuitions was that, you know, early on, when he was, you know, just sort of heading up, you know, just quote unquote, you know, heading up Y Combinator, he sensed that there was a lot of energy here in this space that he could tap into one way or the other. And so he reached out to Elon Musk and kind of mimicked his language and was able to sort of use that concern just as a lightning rod to get some interest and power and momentum into AI in general. And then from there, it's hard to walk away from that narrative. You see that the more you talk about it, that it does affect investors. It does sort of compel people to pay attention.

• 19:23Speaker 08

  It does get headlines. And so I think it does sort of balloon on and on and out. So some of these guys, I think like Dario Amade, I am sure he's legitimately concerned about all of this stuff. Is his marketing department aware that he can win a round of headlines by expressing that concern in the release of Mythos? Of course they are. So they present every sort of white paper, every released or unreleased model, uh, you know, with the same sort of level of gravity as though it were, uh, you sort of, you know, a new set of, uh, of promotional materials. And so it becomes difficult to distinguish. Between the two, but I would say it is it is it is yes and both. And now we're in this pickle where the AI industry can't really walk away from its promise

• 20:08Speaker 08

  that has attracted so much investment in the first place. They can't say, you know what, we're not going to automate all the jobs.

• 20:13Ed Elson?

  Right.

• 20:14Speaker 08

  Then SoftBank might say, well, then what was that $30 billion for? Right, you know, so it it really, we're we're sort of up on the up on the brink and the precipice here. And I think Bradley was absolutely right. You know, it's not just the politicians, it's also the AI industry, you know, Meta and OpenAI and all these guys are bankrolling, you know, PACs right now to the tune of $100 million to sort of influence elections. They supported the moratorium to ban state level AI lawmaking. So the very least they could do, if you know, they want to deescalate the rhetoric, as Sam Altman says, is, you know, is is stop interfering in the democratic process. Right, is to let voters.

• 20:53Ed Elson?

  Right.

• 20:53Speaker 08

  Feel empowered, it feels some sway over over this this technology that is, you know, being integrated into every pore of society.

• 21:02Ed Elson?

  Yeah, it's a great point. I mean, if there's one thing that's going to make you dislike AI even more, it's to read a headline that Marc Andreessen is bankrolling millions of dollars into these pro AI super PACs that we are continually starting to read more and more about. And Bradley, what is the right policy response here? I mean, what we've kind of identified is that we don't seem to have much regulation at all. Americans are very scared, they're getting increasingly angry about it, to the point where we are seeing literal violence against these tech CEOs. Like, what are we supposed to do this from a policy perspective?

• 21:37Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, I think you almost have to think about it from a taxonomy of how to regulate AI, because I've never, you know, I've been working around politics for over 30 years, and there's never been anything quite like this. So there's, in my mind, kind of four different categories. The first is consumer protection, and that typically tends to be the province of state and local government. So that's things like regulating chatbots, especially around things like mental health, regulating data centers and the negative externalities they can impose on others, regulating the use of AI in hiring decisions, things like that. The second would be catastrophic harm. Like we've said, California and New York have tried to pass regulations or have passed regulations around frontier models, but that's two of fifty states. And this is the kind of thing that really should be done by the US government.

• 22:21Speaker 07

  The EU has a framework that covers, you know, twenty-two countries. Uh, we have two states. So that's number two. Number three would be jobs. And I don't think there is any plan whatsoever for how to deal with, uh, the fact that we could be seeing ten, twenty percent unemployment at some point because of AI. And look, I do believe that at some point in twenty years or whenever it is, all kinds of new industries that we can't conceive of today will be created that will have a lot of jobs thanks to AI. But a lot of people are gonna fall through the cracks. Look, that's why I think Andrew Yang was right way back, you know, a decade ago when he proposed universal basic income, because I think that we are going to be in a world. Uh, and I will say, I just saw a, a white paper the other day, Daniel Schreiber,

• 23:06Speaker 07

  who's the founder and CEO of Lemonade, which is an insurance tech company, um, funded a study for, in, in Israel, that had the idea of basically creating a new type of tax that as corporate profits increase because they've reduced headcount, taxing that as sort of a VAT and then redistributing that to people, uh, and what he calls the negative income tax, but effectively is a form of universal basic income. So there are ideas out there, but you have to think about them. And right now politicians just say job training, but like, we can't all become plumbers. That's not gonna solve the problem. And then the fourth would be, you know, where I, where AI can do good. So i- if you think back to Doge, and it was a total disaster, but where Doge could have been really great is how

• 23:50Speaker 07

  do we bring AI into government to do things like procurement, compliance, licensing, permitting, data management, facilities management. There are a lot of ways that we could make our government a lot more efficient and a lot more cost effective. And so the challenge is you have to be able to think about all of these different categories at the same time. And that really requires thoughtful leadership. And because we live in a world where I believe every policy outcome is driven by, you know, a political input. Um, politicians are thinking about their next election. They're thinking really about their next primary, basically. And they're not thinking about all of the different complications that we just outlined. And so, you know, there, this is a time where we really need truly transformational leadership

• 24:35Speaker 07

  um, at all levels of government. And by and large, we don't really have it. Um, one final piece, and at least a, a, a small measure that I'm trying to do, which is to use AI uh, in a way to cut against some of that institutional power. Uh, out of my foundation, we're coding a tool called how to create societal change that will be an agent where you can put in there. Okay, I wanna ban cell phones at my kid's school. I wanna stop sign on my corner, whatever it might be. And then the agent trained on basically by, you know, decades of all of our work here will say to you, okay, great. Here's the current law that governs cell phone use at your kid's school. Here's who's in charge of it. Here's what it would need to say. And then here's a full campaign plan for how you as an individual could go about changing it and it will be totally free.

• 25:18Speaker 07

  So it's a very small act of defiance. I get that, but we are in the process of coding it right now. And my hope is to release it in the fall.

• 25:26Ed Elson?

  I mean, just to follow up on, on what policymakers and politicians should be doing. How should you be positioning yourself uh, as a politician? I mean, we've seen that Bernie and AOC have, they've been like, stop the data centers.

• 25:41Speaker 07

  Right.

• 25:41Ed Elson?

  Period.

• 25:42Speaker 07

  Right.

• 25:42Ed Elson?

  And they've said, I mean, people are saying they, they wanna end AI outright. That's not quite true. That basically the idea is until we have a framework of policy, press pause no more. And I guess the question becomes like, what is going to be the popular thing to do? Should you be super against AI? Should you be pro-AI, pro-innovation? Uh, I mean, that seems to be like the big question. I guess I'll, I'll follow up and ask that question to you, Bradley, as someone who's worked in exactly this space. What would you be doing?

• 26:16Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, the question, it sort of depends a little what you're running for. So if you are a member of Congress, let's say, and your district is gerrymandered, which is true for all of about 25 of them at the, the House, um, and turn on your primaries gonna be 10%, 12%, something like that. Odds are being radical like an AOC or Bernie might be, or on the far right too, um, and just opposing AI in all forms, probably is the right political play.

• 26:43Ed Elson?

  Hmm.

• 26:43Speaker 07

  Now, if you're running for senate or governor or president, where there's a large or electorate or potentially a competitive general election, then you can't quite be, you know, so extreme and you need more nuance. Um, I actually do think that, and this might be very naive and maybe I'm just falsely hoping for this, but I could see a world in 2027 where a Democratic House, a Republican White House and probably a Republican Senate, but we'll see, actually do manage to get together and come up with a comprehensive bipartisan deal around AI.

• 27:16Ed Elson?

  Hmm.

• 27:16Speaker 07

  Not necessarily because they even care about the problems that the three of us do and that we're talking about here, but simply that if they fear that 2028 is going to be the AI election and it looks like they haven't done anything about it, none of them want to have to go stand before the voters and say, oh, well, I, I couldn't do anything. Don't blame me. Um, and so I do have this hope that simply because there's so much attention focused on it and so much anxiety around it, that this might be the one place where everyone actually could get together and come up with some thoughtful ideas.

• 27:45Ed Elson?

  Yeah, it seems to be one of the few issues in which like both sides kind of agree in it, in its general dislike of it, or at least anxiety towards it.

• 27:54Speaker 07

  Yeah, I mean, if you look at something narrow like those, the, the, the dozen or so states that have passed chatbot restrictions and regulations, those are totally bipartisan, both in terms of who's voting for them in the bill itself and then the types of states doing it.

• 28:08Ed Elson?

  Yeah. Brian, I mean, just going back to the luddites and just for, for context for people, I mean, this is what happened when the factory was introduced and then you had all these textile workers in England who revolted, they smashed up the machines, et cetera. Uh, I mean, in a sense, I wonder if this is just what happens. Like when a new technology arrives, you have violence, you have disruption, you have chaos, but also maybe not. And maybe there's a way that you're supposed to prevent this. I mean, what lessons can we learn, uh, from that period of history and, and, and how should we take it moving forward?

• 28:49Speaker 08

  Yeah, no, that's not absolutely, it's absolutely not a given that we'll see violence and mass disruption at this scale. There are a couple of things that tend to signify that you will see it, right? When you have an immense concentration of capital and power and the development and deployment decisions around a technology are flowing expressly from that, and being imposed antidemocratically on a population, you're much more likely to see sort of angry uprising and rebellion. And again, it's another way that this moment sort of maps relatively and worryingly neatly onto the Luddites and the dawn of the Industrial

• 29:32Speaker 08

  Revolution. Because at that time, you had this moment where, you know, automated machinery was beginning to be produced en masse, and factory owners or to be factory owners realized that they could amass a bunch of these machines, put them in those early factories, and divide and automate labor in a way that could break the power of sort of the workers and the guilds, they weren't actual guilds, but the industries and the cottage industries that had developed and had shared interests. And so, when you have all of that sort of power and decision-making capacity and money sort of concentrated in a few hands, it

• 30:15Speaker 08

  is a recipe for disaster. Because, I mean, the cloth workers, they went to Parliament for years and years and years, for a decade, full decade, running up to the actual Luddite rebellion, saying, "Look, the new factory owners, they're using these machines in ways that violate the laws on the books. They're hiring, they're hiring workers that haven't been apprenticed, that shouldn't be allowed to work, all these things that we have to regulate the trade. They're ignoring all the laws, all the standards, all the norms, and they're, and then they're just..." Pushing down our wages and pushing down our quality of life, they're destroying our livelihoods. And they won't stop. And so here's a list of things that you could do to fix that.

• 30:56Speaker 08

  Funny enough, one of the things that they proposed was very much like a Andrew Yang style VAT, where it was like, why don't you tax the extra amount of cloth that a machine can produce? And then use that to sort of fund, like, you know, a general fund for workers who need to retrain. But they were laughed out of Parliament, right? Time and time again, Parliament not only said, no, we're not going to listen to you. They tore up those laws and regulations on the books and basically left it completely up to the, through sort of the whims of the market and these very powerful actors. And so when you have a situation like that, which increasingly is mirroring what's happening today with an industry that has a ton of power, you know, at least right now, in its alliance with the Trump administration,

• 31:38Speaker 08

  has sort of the ear of, of, you know, David Sacks and the, and sort of the insiders in the administration. And they're working very closely together to do what they're gonna do regardless of sort of popular will. And you have all these efforts to overturn local laws and things like that, then yeah, it does start to be this period where people look at that and say, well, what can I do? Right? What can I do? What are the options for me on the table? I voted. I told my council member, don't vote for this. A hundred people showed up at this event and said, please don't vote for this. And they did it anyways because the industry convinced them or they thought it was the right thing to do. But suddenly it looks like I don't have a say. I don't have any power. I don't get, I don't get a vote in how the AI future is going to unfold.

• 32:20Speaker 08

  And if I'm in Gen Z, where you, the negative sentiment towards AI is overwhelming. The NBC poll that just came out, it was like 44 points underwater for, for, for people who aged 18 to 34. They hate it because they're looking at the headlines and it's saying, this is the worst job market for entry level jobs in 37 years. AI is taking all the jobs. So yeah, what do you, what, what are you gonna do? Are you just gonna kind of sit down and say, well, I guess I don't get a job. I guess the data center is gonna, you know, get put up in my backyard. So in this sense, I feel like the industry, politicians, everybody. Should be paying close attention to those very genuine and very rational feelings

• 33:04Speaker 08

  of of aggrievement over what's happening and what's what you know, what's happening to their futures too.

• 33:08Ed Elson?

  Right. If if this isn't the wake up call that people need, then I I really don't know what is. Bradley Tusk, Brian Merchant, I could talk about this for hours, but we do need to wrap it up here. I appreciate both of you, appreciate your time. Thank you so much for joining us.

• 33:24Speaker 08

  Yeah, thanks for having us. Yeah, thanks for having me.

• 33:26Ed Elson?

  Okay, that's it for today. We appreciate you joining us for another Prof G Markets panel. If you have a guest you think we should speak to on this topic or any other, please drop us a line in the comments or email our producer Claire at [email protected]. We hope to hear from you. This episode was 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 Shalon, Isabella Kinsell, Chris Noddy, Hugh and Mia Silverio. 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.