After Party with Emily Jashinsky - AI Panic, Nikole Hannah-Jones Flip-Flop, Patrick Clancy Speaks & White House Media Revolt

Episode Date: September 22, 2026

Emily Jashinsky is joined by “Singularity Weekly” host and “Dark Aeon” author Joe Allen to break down the escalating battle over artificial intelligence ahead of the U.N. General Assembly. They examine the divide between AI “doomers” and accelerationists, the race with China, growing calls for regulation, and the increasingly powerful AI industry’s influence in Washington. Emily also digs into Nikole Hannah-Jones’ admission that she regrets aspects of sending her daughter to struggling public schools after years of publicly defending the decision. She reacts to Patrick Clancy’s emotional “60 Minutes” interview with Ross Douthat, including his revelation that Lindsay Clancy has never asked for his forgiveness. Finally, Emily weighs in on President Trump’s decision to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House press pool and explains why, despite the media’s many failures, independent access to the president still matters. PreBorn: Dial #250 and say “BABY” or visit https://Preborn.com/EMILY  GhostBed: Discover how GhostBed’s cooling, pressure-relieving design can help you sleep more comfortably and wake up feeling refreshed, plus get an extra 10% off their lowest prices of the season at https://GhostBed.com/EMILY with code EMILY. SelectQuote: Compare top‑rated life insurance options. Visit https://SelectQuote.com/emily to get the right coverage at the right price. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Welcome to After Friday, everyone. Thank you so much for being here with us on this Monday evening. We have some cool stuff coming ahead for After Party. I've been teasing this for a little while, but please subscribe on the channel. If you're not subscribed yet, it really does help us a lot here on YouTube. Just subscribe. Subscribe wherever you get your podcast. Please click subscribe. It'll be in your feed automatically, and it really helps us a ton. If you watched me on Megan's show last week, you heard me tease a little bit. But I think you'll start seeing our videos earlier in the day because there's so much news. that we're eager, I'm certainly eager, to get to it earlier. We're covering the news here.

And so you'll start to see our videos pop up earlier in the day. That means you'll probably also be seeing more videos. You've already seen me doing some stuff between shows. So I'm hoping to do much more of that coming up, especially as we hit the election cycle. And that gives me a great transition into what we're talking about tonight. Basically, the entire world, all the world leaders are converging on Manhattan this week for the United Nations, their annual meeting.

And that means with AI looming large over the world, there's a lot to break down. There have been some big developments. We've covered it a bit here, but I wanted to go kind of deep. And let me just tell you off the bat, for whatever reason, I think the podcast audience cares a lot about AI. YouTube doesn't like it when we cover AI. It's interesting. I don't know if it's a difference in the audience, whatever it is, but I don't care.

We are going to talk about it because I'm telling you here in D.C., it's all anybody is talking about here. And it could go in a really bad direction, thanks to one or both of the warring camps that are on either side of this issue. And so we have Joe Allen with us on the show tonight, too, kind of, he's been carving this forever, to just kind of break down who the two main camps are, who some of the big players are, and what's on the table, what's at stake as all the world leaders meet as business leaders are calling for regulation. It's always funny when business leaders call for regulation. They love doing that, by the way, they love calling for regulation. So we're going to break all of that down. We're also going to get into this insane Nicole Hannah-Jones essay published yesterday in the New York Times.

I think we've caught her in some interesting clips were circulating on the internet. I went back and watched some full versions of them. I think we've caught her in some deception that is really, really important. And I wonder if there's accountability for it this time around. Like there wasn't with the 1619 project. But if you haven't seen quite yet what happened, she wrote this. really long essay about regrets that she has in forcing her daughter to go to a lower performing school, basically for the sake of lifting up black schools using her daughter,

hopefully as a method or a tool to help lift up black schools. And it didn't end well for her daughter. Her daughter ended up going out of those schools and into a higher performing school and seems to be doing well. And so there's a reckoning at hand for Nicole Hannah-Jones. But again, I think we've caught her in some interesting deception. So we're going to get to that. we're going to talk about the Patrick Clancy 60 Minutes interview, and we're also going to talk about Trump's feud with the press pool, which is basically not what anybody is saying it is. So a little teaser for that. Now, like I said, we have Joe Allen. We're going to start with AI, and we're going to go deep on AI. So hang in there with us. Can take a quick break. We'll be right back. Well, for 20 years,

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one life-saving ultrasound. $140 helps rescue five babies. Five. All gifts are tax deductible. Please give today. Dial £250. Pound 250 and save baby. That's pound 250. That's pound 250. baby or visit preborn.com slash Emily. That's preborn.com slash Emily. Well, everyone, I can't emphasize enough how important artificial intelligence and the future of artificial intelligence is this week, particular. This is a hinge moment because world leaders are converging upon New York City for the annual United Nations meeting. Xi Jinping is making a trip here actually to Washington on Thursday where there's a state dinner being held, and artificial intelligence will probably be the single biggest subject on the table. So it's an urgent

question this week and has become all the more urgent since the hugging face hack, which we've covered here a bit, but artificial intelligence just sounds so abstract. And I think it's hard for many of us to kind of latch on to because you never know if you're talking about spell check or if you're talking about military weapons, right? Because it encompasses so much. And that's kind of the point of why it's such an urgent question is that it's gradually, not gradually, very quickly, being integrated into every single part of daily human life. And what's happened since the hugging face incident. As we've covered here, you have Jacob Coxon, who'd been with OpenAI for a long time, but was of Anthropic, resigning from Anthropic, saying he thinks that there's a very good chance

that it could end humanity, that AI could end humanity in the days to come. Anthropic chimed in on that and said, yeah, we agree. I think there's about a 10% likelihood of it. Dario Amadee comes out and calls for quote unquote pacing, pacing the frontier. Sam Altman over at OpenAI jumps on, agrees with Amade over at Anthropic. Elon Musk agrees with Amadeo over at Anthropics. So you have all of the big leaders of AI in that instance asking to be regulated, actually kind of begging to be regulated. And there are really two camps. You have the Dumeers and the Accelerationsists. And I think there are more than just those two camps. And it's kind of unfortunate that we get split into these two camps. But the Dumaers also happen to have a whole lot of crossover with a movement you may remember from San Bankman-Fried's

days called effective altruism. And effective altruism is a really dark and sinister theory with, of course, the best of stated intentions. It's essentially high-tech utilitarianism. It's highly, highly materialist, which has an interesting tension as well with some of the doomers who see real dark transhumanist and kind of spiritual utility to AI. We'll get into that in just one moment, but they're the ones asking for this regulation. And as Matt Stoller and Lena Kahn, and actually even David Sacks have pointed out, there are all kinds of laws on the books already that could be applied to these artificial intelligence companies, kind of in the way that they're asking for things like antitrust exemptions. You can already cooperate across

major company lines on issues of safety. So that immediately cast doubt on the sincerity of what they're doing. Are they trying to box out smaller competitors? And then does that mean their estimates are incorrect about the likelihood that AI could totally end humanity, end the planet, end civilization? Does this also put that in doubt? Because by the way, leading up to the hugging face hack, where Open AI had its agents break out of the sandbox that it was, that was imposed on them for safety purposes, right under their noses, this happens. They don't realize They don't tell the public really until it's too late until they're caught. And suddenly then, after they had been saying, well, we were wrong to be so dumer about

how this will immediately affect the workforce, how this will affect. Suddenly then they're back to being totally dumber, right? So it's this wild whiplash that's been playing out in public for a long time now. But with Stoller, Lena Kahn, and David Sachs kind of saying, what are we talking about here? That's already a weird enough coalition, right? Stoller kind of somebody who's on the left, definitely somebody who's on the left, Lena Kahn, somebody who's on the left. David Sacks is an accelerationist. PayPal Mafia, David Sacks, is an accelerationist. And the accelerationists are mostly aligned with Donald Trump, who, by the way, spent the weekend running a poll.

This kind of got treated like it was an unsurious Trump joke, but he ran a poll over the weekend saying many people think the words artificial intelligence are inaccurate and very in eloquent relative to AI or artificial intelligence. A far more elegant and accurate description of this new phenomenon would be superior intelligence or extreme intelligence or supreme intelligence. Now, Trump later eliminated supreme intelligence from his poll. He said he thinks because of the Supreme Court, people didn't like supreme intelligence. But superior intelligence is a very dark way to describe artificial intelligence. And this is the president of the United States.

I don't think we can really just laugh that off. To describe the sum total of human knowledge being fed into a machine as creating superior knowledge rather than different knowledge means that you're creating really a superior being, a superior force of intelligence than the human beings that created the superior intelligence in and of itself. Certainly it's superior in some technical ways, being able to calculate data really quickly.

of course, it's superior in that sense. But to refer to the entire project as superior intelligence, that's actually a very interesting move from the president of the United States, who's been also saying this is all a hoax, the negative elements of this is all a hoax. Today, actually, he posted the same people that said, will all be dead in 12 years because of global warming, a name since reborn to climate change because the planet was cooling, not warming, and nobody was dead, are the people that are now saying that AI is going to kill us, that robots are going to attack us, and that everything is a disaster. This is more of a hoax than even, that of Russia, Russia, Russia, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, Ukraine, and climate change.

Whoever wins AI wins. We are leading now over China and everyone else, and I'm going to keep it that way. I'm not going to say, a growth of something that will be bigger than the Industrial Revolution or the Internet itself. We will be careful. That's why we have the Department of Justice and other law enforcement bodies that will rein things in if we have to, but I will only encourage AI or super intelligence. Trump, here's a lot from David Sachs. David Sachs used to work the administration is now, I think he was a special government employee when he was in the administration, but either way, he's now an outside advisor to the president. The president is clearly being advised by people like Jensen Wong, who is arguably the most powerful man in

the entire world and is hearing a lot from the accelerationists about the Dumers. The Dumers, I think, do still have a point about the likelihood that there's serious harm. If already the hugging face incident had gone another way, if another company had been hacked, an even more sensitive company had been hacked, let alone by a foreign adversary, Anthropic, as we've covered here, recently released a report about literal enemies using Anthropic, places that wish harm upon civilians of the United States, actually using anthropic, using Claude for military purposes. And, you know, Claude, at a certain point caught, Anthropic at a certain point caught what Claude was being used for. But these are just the things that we

know about. So there's so very much to break down on this because, again, we have accelerationist versus Dumer here. The Dumeers are saying the accelerationists are engaged in the SIEOP. The president seems to be sympathetic to that point of view. But I think actually there's probably something correct in both of those camps. And right now I want to bring in Joe Allen, who's been writing about this, who's been following about this. He's the author of dark. He is the host of the Omega Point podcast. You can check him out at Singularity Weekly as well. Joe, you've been following this for so long. I think the first time we talked about this was literally years ago. Thanks for being here, first of all. Thank you very much, Emily. Good to be here.

I just watched your debate with Joe Lonsdale tonight. Obviously, very early, very early involved. He was involved very early in Palantir. And he's pushing this line that we need to prize competence. to prioritize competence, competence, competence. He's calling everything a sci-op. And Joe, I have to agree, in some ways, the Dumers are clearly, I think, trying to, they're still tied to their dark, effective altruism, which you've written about for years, like going back forever, you've traced the origins of effective altruism. And so I'm hoping that you can kind of help us disentangle this knot of what is good and what

is bad, what's right, and what is wrong. And I wanted to start by playing these Jensen Wong clips. He was on CBS Sunday just yesterday. He spoke at the All-In summit where Trump called him on the stage. He's clearly advising Trump very carefully. Jensen Wang is very important this week as China comes to the White House. Let's take a look. So should we slow down?

And would that affect the race with China, the American standing in the global economy? We should go as fast as we can irrespective of anybody else. We are going to go as fast as we can. But we would never, ever and never should. ship products before they're ready, deliver products that are unsafe, and nobody's expecting us to do that. But everybody's expecting us to succeed and help America be as prosperous as possible. The AI, it's almost as conspiracy, and the happiest group is China.

The data centers are great, and they make people wealthy, and they make states wealthy, and it's the oil of the next 20, 25 years. It's bigger than the internet and the AI, you know, much more. and they're just playing right into the hands of a lot of people that don't want to see it happen and that could be political people and could also be China. And we're not going to let that happen. It's a, it's a hoax. You're right.

We're not going to let that happen, sir. No, we're not going to let it happen. Maybe the most powerful man in the world because he runs the most powerful company in the world that manufactures the chips that are powering the economy that have become important in national security. The Meg 7, 30% of it. of 30% of the S&P 500 right now is the MagSavent companies, Joe. My understanding, correct me if I'm wrong,

is you don't particularly like Dario or Jensen. Tell us. It's true. Make sense of this for us, please. Who is right? Who is wrong? I don't see this in terms of necessarily 100% right or 100% wrong, nor do I see it in terms of good guys and bad guys.

You have better guys and worse guys. Do you have people who are more right and less wrong? but the framing of doomers versus accelerationists, that's two extreme poles. I think there are a lot of us somewhere in between. I guess if I had to pick a label for myself, I would be a gloomer. I think my P-gloom or probability of gloom is pretty high.

But the probability of doom, my argument has always been that the most likely scenario is that these technologies will be used in ways that will make us wish we were extinct. It will be far worse than total annihilation. The Dumers that you're talking about, though, this group, I think there are a lot of different camps in that group that need to be recognized. You have, of course, the effective altruists, and then the rationalists, so people like Eliezer Yiddkowski, Nate Sores, the rationalists, they overlap with the effective altruists. They kind of come out of the same origins in some ways, but they distinguish themselves for a lot of different reasons.

And the most doomer for sure are those in the rationalist camp, I would say, to the extent that we're going to go with the grouping. The effect of altruist, as you had mentioned in your opening, they're utilitarians, extreme utilitarians. they are oftentimes associated with various charitable projects and also to save shrimp from being shocked to death. But I don't think that this conspiracy theory about effective altruists, I don't think that it's really all that accurate.

I think they're basically looking for a scapegoat to justify their own actions to the extent that they accuse effective altruists or accuse various people in the AI safety movement of being part of some nefarious effect of altruist plot. It's mainly a cover for their own advocacy for total acceleration. One of the difficulties I think that people in the safety camp run into is that a lot of their funding comes through 501C3, you know, open funding, right,

publicly available flows of cash. And it's also very unclear. Like you can say, okay, future of life donated this amount to this, person without ever saying what it was donated for, you could say a coefficient giving gave this amount of money, but you can't say what it's for. They're basically just trying to say they're paying a bunch of mouthpieces. And I can say without a doubt that to some extent that money is definitely going forward to people who really had no interest in AI whatsoever, say a year ago. And now they're basically AI safety sock puppets. It's kind of embarrassing. On the other hand, you have a lot of obvious kind of

sock puppet behavior on the accelerationist side. So I would I would advise any of your listeners to go to Model Republic and look at the work of Tyler Johnston. He showed early on things such as the sock puppet kind of propaganda blitz by probably supposedly paid influencers. I don't know why else they would suddenly have an interest in chip exports. But during the push for the Overwatch Act, You suddenly had all these right-wing influencers who had massive social media imprints, that they were basically saying that if we restrict the flow of chips to China, it would somehow compromise President Trump's ability to beat China. It was very odd.

This is what Johnson Wang is doing. Jensen's been doing that this week. Politico had a report today that he's been, that Invidia's been going to Senate offices, and they're saying he's, he sounds like he's not taking any of this seriously enough, that it's, uh, he's trying to block these export controls, which to a lot of Americans, again, especially ones who are being told you have to do this to beat China. It sounds completely insane. Yeah. So, so, I mean, going to that, real, real quickly, again, I just really urge your audience to check out Tyler Johnston's work at Model Republic on the Overwatch Act, also on the SAC

puppets that were admittedly paid for by Build American AI. And there's, you know, as we well know, there's about $150 million flowing through leading the future pack, which is, you know, if nothing else, creating sock puppets of our politicians. So, yeah, the accusation of money flowing, that's all true. The problem is, it's flowing from all directions. And all of that talk about money flowing to push agendas is avoiding the real argument. There are many arguments, actually.

The big one being, in this case, do you allow companies to recklessly build AIs that are smarter than human beings? One of the secondary aspects of that is how do you compete with China if you throttle American companies from pursuing such a quest, right? And then, again, you have the problem. Jensen Wong, as you just mentioned, is very much in favor of exporting chips to China. David Sachs in favor of exporting chips to China. If China is this massive threat to America, and if China is possibly going to catch up or surpass America in AI development, why are you advocating to give them the infrastructure and in many ways access to the software to allow them to do so? There are a lot of complicated arguments around that. I think the best one is that you want to get China addicted to American hardware so that they don't have.

any kind of explosion in their indigenous production, which makes sense on the surface, I guess, but not really. You know, their indigenous production is minimal. Their advancement in artificial intelligence is entirely dependent upon American advancement. So it's pretty well known that Chinese open source models like Deepseek and Quinn and Kimi, that these are most likely, created through a distillation process in which their models during training are basically asking the advanced models such as GPT or Claude, many, many questions and then training in that fashion.

So I guess to get to the real crux of this, Emily, here's what I see. I see a media environment that is completely overwhelmed with noise. There's almost no serious debate around whether or not artificial intelligence is a net benefit in the way it's being deployed right now. And I would say that even if I think that the people who are making the argument, the artificial intelligence is very likely to destroy all of humanity, even if they are sincere in their arguments. And to my knowledge, and I've met many of these people, my sense is that they are very sincere.

I think that that does in some ways distract from the more immediate issues of artificial intelligence in the ways that it affects sociality, the way it affects education, the way it makes corporate life miserable, and also many of the dangerous applications in the military, which are happening right now. People are being killed right now due to decisions that are justified

through AI pattern matching. So, yeah, all in all, we have a long slog ahead of us. These arguments are not going away. This technology is not going away. way. And I think that the framing right now of this evil, effective altruist conspiracy is very, very disingenuous, especially when pushed by people like, say, based Beth Jayzos, the effective acceleration, who openly talks about the ways in which the technologies he wants to see develop would eventually consume humanity, maybe very soon, consume humanity, and we

would kind of pass the torch of consciousness onto the machines. I think that if he was exposed for his views on these things, he probably wouldn't have the kind of popularity or the kind of clout he does with the people who claim to be Christian warriors. Why is the president buying this? And what do you expect to see come from his meeting with Xi Jinping this week? I mean, you wrote on X, much of this pacing effort is in response to the viral AI doom freakout that started building with the hugging face hack and exploded with the past, deanthropic whistleblowers saying, What everyone paying attention to already knew, the frontier AI execs believe that baby Goloms could one day come alive, like some mutant brood in a subterranean lab, break containment,

and launch an end of the world party that leave nothing but Abram craters and surviving a handful of human robots and they out swimming in semi-animate oceans of nanosworn gray goo. And you also reported reliable sources tell me anthropic and open AR working with the Department of Justice to hash out a coordinated quote-unquote pacing the frontier plan. So those two things seem to be completely true that on the one hand, what they're freaking out about right now, everybody knew. On the other hand, suddenly they are, not suddenly, but they've been getting quite a good audience with the president since he was inaugurated almost, what, two years ago now. A lot of people on the left will say, well, Jensen's a ballroom donor, which is true. He is a ballroom donor.

He's very close to the president. It can't just be that, though, Joe. There has to be more. What's going on? It's impossible for me to know exactly what's going on behind closed doors at the White House. We don't have a whole lot of transparency on these conversations. It would just seem to appear that what is happening is that the accelerationists are certainly gaining the favor of the president, and he is absolutely 100 percent on their side at this moment in the current media blitz.

So what happens as we move on down the road? I'm not sure. I think people like Scott Besson, the Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent, take these issues quite seriously. I'm not saying that he is in some way opposed to the president, just that his role has been striking in acknowledging some of the dangers, especially post-Mithos, when it was realized that Anthropic had created a very powerful cyber weapon, potentially. And then, of course, the hugging face hack shows that to some extent these systems can evade the control of their makers. Now, I've seen all this stuff about hugging faces a hoax. I've seen all this stuff about how,

you know, oh, they're saying the AIs just came alive and did what they wanted. I mean, at least from our end at the war room, we've acknowledged and emphasized that it wasn't like the AIs just came alive. You had human beings who put the AIs in the sandbox and human beings who prompted them to go and commit, you know, what are in essence felonies in this simulated environment and they broke out. What's significant, I think, is the way in which the autonomy of the agents. It wasn't as if they were instructed point by point on how to break out. It wasn't as if they were instructed point by point to find their way out of that proxy software that was provided, if I'm not mistaken, by irregular, the Israeli company.

And then once they were out, it wasn't as if anyone instructed them to steal credentials and break into hugging face. It shows a degree of autonomy, a degree of kind of novelty. And it also shows how if you have a company behaving in a reckless fashion like this, basically conducting what Max Tegmark calls a gain of function in software mode, that potentially really mischievous things can happen if not malicious things. So, yeah. Isn't that Joe also RSI? So now we're all talking about RSI now, recursive self-improvement.

That sounds to me like you get an automatic gain of function mode, as though the humans would have lost their control over the bioweapon that had been hypothetically created at the Wuhan lab, just hypothetically, of course, say that's created at the Wuhan lab. Then the humans have to step back because it keeps gaining its own function or it keeps increasing its own function. Is that not kind of what we're looking at with RSI

and with the ability to keep gaining function through the machines? They don't actually really know what's happening behind the scenes in a lot of these cases. Yeah, it's definitely related. I wouldn't say that it's a one-to-one connection, but it's definitely related. The issue with RSI, I mean, this is, again, the argument at the forefront of superintelligence. So that kid, Jacob Coxon, who with the Anthropic, if I'm not mistaken, for about four months, came out and again told the world what a lot of people already knew, certainly anyone paying attention already knew, that told the world that within the labs themselves within Open AI, within Anthropic, within XAI. Elon Musk talking about this all the time. And within Google, you have a lot of people, including some of the executives, most of the executives, who have some sense that the AI,

once it reaches superhuman levels in many different domains, that it would pose a threat to humanity and perhaps even an existential one. So that kind of set the conversation in motion and the conversation about artificial superintelligence. So artificial superintelligence, it's defined in many ways or many fashionable ways now, which are somewhat different from when Nick Bostrom was writing about this in 2014. But artificial superintelligence does, by and large, hinge on recursive self-improvement. I mean, perhaps there are other paths, but that would be among the most likely. And what that is, is just you have a system that is basically analyzing its own inefficiencies, its own shortcomings, and improving those.

on its own through its own sort of creativity. And right now even, the latest models are in some ways part of that process. I mean, it's just, again, the line is kind of blurry, but certainly anthropic of an AI. They're using their AIs to write the code to build the architecture for the next AIs. And they're using outputs from their AIs as synthetic data for their AIs. So you already have this feedback loop. Sometimes it turns into mush. Sometimes apparently it improves the system.

But like a true experiment to create superintelligence, a good way to think of it would be that you had the latest model that was capable of analyzing its own architecture, its own kind of state, and was then kind of set loose to improve itself. And the humans would sit back and watch what happened. And there's no way to know. I mean, all of this is very, very speculative.

I think it's important to consider in the same way that nuclear weapons and nuclear power, that that is something important to consider. And I think bio weapons or any kind of biological experimentation, those are really important things to keep on your radar. And you can use it to scare people to death with the end of the world. But again, I don't think we can anticipate the end of the world. That would be too easy. I think that what we should anticipate is basically a lifetime, generations of trying to, trying to deal with what the implications of these technologies really are.

Yeah, Annie Jacobson is not on either the accelerationist or Dumer's side, and she completely agrees with you, Joe, when you combine these artificial intelligence technologies with nuclear technology, biowarfare technologies, you obviously have a recipe for disaster. But just getting back to this question of what the goal is, again, I heard you with Lonsdale. And Lonsdale, like many of the accelerationists, Mark Andreson, those guys, David Sacks, they say what they want is a thriving, booming, reindustrializing America. America's out front of the new industrial revolution to paraphrase what Trump said in this post that we just read. And it's almost, I mean, it's borderline utopian that America will be the leader in the next great technological revolution. On the other end, the effect of altruists, I don't know what the hell they want.

But what is your take, Joe, on what both sides of this ultimately really want to see in the LLM revolution, you know, one year, five years down the road from now. Well, so maybe instead of framing it as Dumer or EA, maybe AI safety would be more of an appropriate thing. Because they're still very positive about AI. Right. I think that's a good point because they're not L.E. Easer Yudkowski anymore. They believe that these are good technologies that are worth pursuing. And Elyzer Yudkowski, keep in mind, whether you're talking about effective accelerationalists or just the broader accelerations camp, people like Nick Land, or you're talking about

effective altruists, long-termists, the rationalists like Elyzer Yukowski, all of this stems from transhumanism. Yes, tell us about this. At the core is the fairly old notion. that human beings can and should use science and technology to improve ourselves and to break free of biological constraint. Ilyzer Yankowski famously was at the center of, perhaps the founder of the Singularity Institute, funded by Peter Thiel. You know, the effect of altruist featured people like Peter Thiel and Musk some 10 years ago. there's a lot of incestuous sort of thought dissemination in that world and a lot of other kinds of way anyway. And then the accelerations also kind of break out of that tradition. So people who are more on my end of the spectrum, people who are quite reserved about most of these technologies and very skeptical as to whether they're in the long term be truly beneficial beyond writing your emails for you or creating terrible.

flop. You know, people like me aren't all that well represented in those groups. They're very, Connor Leahy would probably be the closest. And I think he's someone to really pay attention to because he is, for one thing, he's been at this for a long time. But he's, I think he has a broader sense of skepticism. Anyway, on these two camps, what do the safety camp want? If any development of these technologies and certainly deployment of them should be safe. right they want to make sure that it doesn't kill some people or all people you hear these weird red herrings like oh why aren't they talking about bio weapons or nuclear weapons why aren't they talking about cybertexts they do all the time and you know why are they so convinced that AI is going to kill everybody not all of them are you know there really is a broad spectrum and then on the accelerationist camp I would put someone like say Sri Ram Krishna or David Sachs are kind of like corporate accelerations right they don't even admit to the possibility of artificial general intelligence or

super intelligence. They are more than happy to boost and run cover for the companies run by people who are openly pursuing those things, which would be sort of like if you boosted a flying car company believing the cars would never fly, but one way or the other, they are boosting them.

The further you go down that path on acceleration, you get this kind of feverish desire to move the technology forward as fast as possible. to break whatever is necessary along the way. This is said many, many times by people like base, and Nick Lewis, who thought I actually,

I think land is sort of contemplated, even if it's a nightmare world. So, yeah, on the one side you want speed and the other side you want pace. And this, again, it's speaking of kind of corporate language and corporate conniving, this sort of declaration from Dario Amadei that we should pace the frontier,

you know, riding on the back of the pacing the frontier open letter. You know, Amadee is pushing for this. Altman has assented to it. As all the conspiracy theorists were saying, oh, this is all about regulatory capture. All of a sudden, you know, Elon Musk jumps in, and since they are all swinging from Elon Musk jock, they couldn't really call him out too hard.

And even Dario Amadee said much the same thing. And what it seems to be, when you look at the deal, that are being struck or attempted to be struck at the Department of Justice. The companies, so you're talking about anthropic, open AI, Google, and apparently SpaceX, there's an attempt to establish legal communications across the companies in order to slow down development for safety's sake. And this has been in the work since July. In July, they began the effort to establish an industry.

based standards body. So that would be something sort of like what we had in the rigging world, actually, you know, a standards body that did not have a legal mandate, but it offered official standards that you could always say, oh, I followed that if you ran the risk of getting sued for, I don't know, your chatbot telling a child to kill himself or herself. So this standards body has been in the work since July. Now they're pushing for the kind of, again, a way to agree across companies to pace. And I believe two days ago, it was announced, or maybe before, that you have a lawsuit now being brought against the companies for that attempt by consumers of the technology. I'd like to know who paid for all that, but by consumers of the technology,

basically stating that if these companies agree to reduce the quality of their product, that being the LLMs, that being the chatbots, then it will screw the customers. And so, Again, I know this may seem all confusing. It is. I mean, it's a very tangled web. But at the end of the day, I think that the conspiracy theory that the companies are, at this moment, making the move for regulatory capture on the back of AI doom, I don't think that's really accurate. It's not to say the anthropic wouldn't. You can see all of the incentives and certainly all the efforts to influence and even, you know,

give great amounts of money to PACs, such as public first, to influence, policy, just as all the other companies, you know, just as Greg Brockman and Joe Lonsdale and Mark Andresen donated to leading the future to influence policy. You can see all of these efforts to do as much as possible to influence whatever legislation pops out the other end of this. But for right now, it seems that the response to the public freak out by the companies And the threat, as Jensen Wong, for once I agree a bit with him, as Jensen Wong noted, the threat of being held accountable for the damages that their AIs are already doing in the case of, say, suicides, the children committing suicides, or in the case of the felonies that were committed by their agents, right? As Secretary, Treasury Secretary Scott Besson said, these companies, these people are responsible and not the AIs. and this is what we've been saying at the war room for months,

what basically since hugging face occurred, that the people are responsible, not the AIs. So they're basically, this pacing the frontier effort seems to be a way for them to shield themselves from liability to kind of take the heat off of them. And beneath it all, you know, I do think that that narrative of AI taking over and acting of its own accord, I think that narrative does serve their purposes to shield themselves from liability.

They say, oh, well, the AI did it, not me. But, you know, what I've said from the beginning to any of these arguments is that if your dog gets loose and attack someone, you didn't tell it to attack the person, you may not have had any idea the dog was potentially violent, but it's your dog. So at the end of the day, the dog is, you know, got to be taken care of, and you are held liable for what your dog did. If you grow a dog in a vat in a laboratory and it does that, well, not only are you liable, but you're also a bit of a freak. Well, we've seen this with full shelf driving with FSD with Tesla. If your car, based on the AI that's built into it does something wrong, you're liable for it. Yes.

And these questions of liability, again, it's something that at least for the near future, we're going to be dealing with continually. This technology most likely is not going to level a level. off right yet, maybe. Maybe I hope so. But if it doesn't, if these models continue to increase in capability, then the sorts of arguments we're going to be having are going to get weirder and weirder and weirder. One thing that you also have to look out for is the possibility that as the danger of the models is built up in the public imagination and among lawmakers, that you'll end up in a situation in which these

companies are developing extraordinarily capable AIs that they themselves use, and they will be, you know, giving these capabilities, providing these capabilities to the government, not unlike, say, Maven's Smart System, which, you know, you're going to see more push towards that, I think. This was something that was predicted by Daniel Kokatello in AI 2027, and while I wasn't really a huge fan of those sci-fi stories. It has to be admitted that his ability to weave a tale that was fairly accurate, if not entirely accurate, him and Scott Alexander and others, that they did a pretty good job on that one because I do, you know, they of course are just predicting on the basis of their insider knowledge of the industry. But I think that that's something that we could really see happen. You know, you've got these kind of calls for nationalization.

It could go any direction. At the end of the day, Emily, what I would say about all of this, just the chaos that we're in right now, is that you have a public that is panicked. That panic will subside. If the world doesn't end next week, the public will kind of lose interest. They'll go on to something else. But you also have lawmakers who are activated and all these other advocacy groups who are activated to find ways to push their agendas through while the issue is relevant. And so I think that what has to be determined, and I'm not saying that everybody needs to determine, the same thing, that's not going to happen anyway.

But whoever you are, whoever you are is the listener, whoever you are, Emily, whoever you are, you're going to have to kind of tease out what the sanest policy is going to be in the face of this. Is it going to be Bernie Sanders banned superintelligence act, which I think is not wise for many reasons? Is it going to be something a little bit more measured, like the AI Risk Evaluation Act from Holly and Blumenthal? Is it going to be something that's even more measured and comprehensive like the Frontier Act from Oberenolte and Trajan.

These are big questions, and I think that it's definitely an open playing field, both for the companies themselves and for any lawmakers who are going to try to figure out a way to regulate this sensibly. Joe, I'm so grateful for your time this evening. I know how busy you are these days. I watch you on War Room during your great coverage of AI all the time. Your book is fantastic. Really, really appreciate you being here. Thank you very much, Emily. Great. All right.

Well, we're going to be back with more in just one moment. It's funny. We've all gotten surprisingly good at making excuses for bad sleep. People say things like you've heard this before. I'm just a hot sleeper or I'm a light sleeper or my back always hurts at night. But honestly, when did we decide that was just normal and that that was okay? Switching to a ghost bed can completely change your perspective. on this. These things are incredible. You might realize you've been settling for subpar sleep for years.

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with my code Emily at ghostbed.com slash Emily. That's ghostbed.com slash Emily promo code Emily. Welcome back, everyone. Just a couple of quick thoughts, by the way, wrapping up as we were listening to Joe Allen. It's remarkable to me that so many of of the big tech barons at the top of these companies pushing for accelerated artificial intelligence, which let's just say hypothetically, let's just say you're with them. Just stipulate that for this thought experiment. You're with them on it. Lash out so often at people who are skeptical, especially conservatives that are skeptical, and say you're falling for a Chinese sci-op. You know, the data centers don't use that much water. The data centers actually are good

for these communities don't fall again for this Chinese or leftist sci-op. We could even stipulate that there is some Chinese involvement in tweaking algorithms and pushing this. Let's just, again, hypothetically for the sake of argument, all of that is true. The way that you lash out at people who endured the last 20 years of sweet nothings being whispered in the ear of big tech or in the ear of elite media and officials here in Washington by big tech. And then people looking back on the wreckage that.

is our culture over the last two decades, the social media addiction, the downstream negative consequences of algorithms on the public discourse, the censorship during COVID and other key moments, for example, the way that you were forced to talk about trans issues on X before Elon Musk took it over, the way that the entire George Floyd discourse was monitored on social media, all of that, all of that, to lash out of people for then being skeptical of you when you're telling them they're buying into a Chinese sciop is not the way to make your argument. It continues to astound me that people do that. Truly continues to astound me that people do that. And the other big concern I have to Joe's point about AI being more likely to just create a world that you don't want to live

in, creating a dystopia rather than ending civilization, as we covered last week, CNN already interviewing some of these AI actresses, quote unquote actresses. Pears Morgan had that same actress that CNN interviewed, quote-unquote actress. I shouldn't even be referring to it that way, this robot. It's as though we're being conditioned to kind of accept. I mean, how hard would it be to yank away TikTok and Instagram from 20-year-olds who grew up with these platforms right now? How hard would it be to yank Snapchat and all these things out of their lives at once? We've been conditioned very quickly, like frogs in the boiling pot, to sort of accept these things as parts of our lives that are social structures. If you're younger,

get built around our socialization got built around these tools. And while some people might want to just totally strip them away, that would be very hard to extricate from society right now. And we're kind of starting to see that happen here again. And lashing out at people who don't like it or skeptical of it and saying they're falling for a Chinese sci-op. It's just so profoundly, profoundly counterproductive. Finally, Joe made a good point.

Evaluate everything for what it is, right? Take the motivations into consideration, the motivations of a Bernie Sanders, the motivations of a Jensen Wong or David Sacks or Mark Andreson or Joe Lounsdale, take their motivations into account, their profit motivations, all of that. It's very hard to convince someone they're wrong when their paycheck defends on it as the saying goes. But probably the best way to cut through all of the noise is to then look at their suggested solutions on paper and just say, is this good or bad? And then is it good or bad in the context of their motivations?

and we may have to, you know, as humans make common cause with people we don't normally agree with, just to have something that makes sense, have something that makes. I mean, Donald Trump himself doesn't often agree with big tech barons, but here he is. So you have to do what you think is right and is good in the big picture. And, you know, sometimes the ultimate motivations of one of those camps want to align with yours. And you can work on that, obviously. But if a policy is good and it's right, that might be what ends up, you know, the Holly Blumenthal bill that Joe mentioned is a good example. When do I ever agree with Blumenthal very rarely?

What does Hawley ever agree with Blumenthal very rarely? But, you know, certain pieces of legislation, certainly certain policy solutions may ultimately be in everyone's best interest. So just wanted to put a finer point on what we heard from Joe. It was so helpful. It's very confusing. It's very abstract. And I didn't mean to be a flip about YouTube. like it doesn't love when our show talks about it or I think maybe even like conservative

shows talk about it. But I think right now we're at a crossroads, literally this week, we're at a crossroads depending on what the president hashes out with Xi Jinping after the UN General Assembly meeting. And then after, by the way, the US is holding a meeting on the sidelines of the UNGA with world leaders on all of this. So things are certainly coming to ahead this week. All right. Let's move on to Nicole Hannah Jones, who I sometimes accidentally referred to as Hannah Nicole Jones, but I think I've got it right this time. Nicole Hannah Jones, obviously very famous because of the 1619 project that she spearheaded won a Pulitzer Prize for despite the 1619 project, needing to make some serious, serious corrections

being disputed by historians that are not conservative by any means. And she's been covering schooling for, I don't know, like the last 10 plus years. She wrote an essay in the New York Times, reflecting on her daughter's experience in New York public schools that published yesterday and has had jaws dropped around the Internet for at least the last 24 hours. So it's a story about her daughter, Nadja, who started kindergarten at PS 307 back in 2016. And the timeline here is really, really important because Nicole Hannah-Jones wrote a cover story for New York Magazine in 2016 about Nadia. So all the way back in 2016, she wrote a cover story about her,

family's decision to put Nadja in a public school with majority black students with the knowledge and with the intent, I should say with the intent of being part of a kind of revolution that lifts up those schools. Now, since that decision, she has framed her own family's choice in moral terms. She has defended it vehemently. She has traveled the country, defending it vehemently. And I have to say, after reviewing the evidence today, it appears she is being very, very dishonest. So I'm going to read a little bit of the background here from a Fox News story. They actually talked to Nicole Hannah-Jones about the recent story she published. The story she published yesterday in the New York Times. They write in a newly released Times Magazine essay,

Hannah Jones described revisiting years of emails with her daughter, Nadia's teachers and principals and confronting what she called the truth she could no longer suppress. Quote, now I felt overcome with regret. Nadia deserved better. They all but she was mine. This girl, my only child, looked to me to protect her, to give her what she needed to thrive, and I had not chosen her. Now, they report she acknowledged that she regretted aspects of the decision to send her daughter to predominantly black high poverty public schools in Brooklyn after the now 16-year-old told her she did not receive the education she wanted. A decade after Hannah Jones described the choice as an effort to challenge school segregation. She's actually described that way in the years since, actually very recently as well. Fox writes, the new essay detailed academic problems that became more apparent as Nadia grew older.

At Eunice in her middle school, Nadia earned strong grades and took honors courses, but later said she and her friends realized that they were not being sufficiently challenged. Hannah Jones described limited homework, inexperienced teachers, and gaps in her daughter's math preparation that became especially apparent after Najah entered a more academically demanding high school. Okay. Now, as I mentioned, Nicole Hannah Jones has been traveling and speaking about this decision. as a journalist on panels and engagements around the country. So in the essay she published in the New York Times Magazine Sunday,

she notes that Nadia in 2016 starts at PS307. By first grade, Nicole Hannah-Jones visits the school and writes about noticing that the lunchroom wasn't chaos. Kids were fighting. So that's the next year, which would have been 2017, 2018, depending on the time of the school year. She published or she reposted actually that 2016 essay back in 2024, defending her decision.

Defending her decision. Basically, I don't even think doubling down is the right way to put it. But she posted by test score metrics, this is 2024. By test score metrics, many would label this school a failing school. But just as I write in the piece, we judge these schools and their students without ever stepping foot inside. My daughter is not worth more than any other child. Eight years later, I still know we made the right choice. Well, that's a very, very interesting timeline because Nicole Hannah-Jones is saying,

eight years later, I still know we made the right choice in 2024. But she wrote in her essay that was published on Sunday about having deep regrets or deep hesitation, deep reflection on that decision at many points between 2016 and 2024, when she doubles down on the 2016 story. In fact, this is on video. Someone on X found a rather interesting excerpt from a speech or a panel that Nicole Hannah Jones was on at the University of Iowa back in 2018. So I went and watched most of her remarks from this panel and found again that she's been enormously deceptive about her private experience that she was not, to my knowledge, at least

very public about in the years since. She notes in her 2016 essay that she wasn't being naive about that she knew all the problems that existed in these schools and was basically willing to sacrifice Naja to this failing system for the greater good, hoping that by participating in it, Nadja and the Hannah Jones family would kind of lift up these schools. That's a very charitable interpretation. That is how she herself said it and we're going to argue against what she actually said here. Take a listen to how Nicole Hannah Jones, knowing what we know now from her Sunday essay

which describes as early as 2017, seeing kids fighting in the lunchroom, trying to get, she tries to get the attention of the principal, has to tear her hair out to get that. She writes in the recent essay, published yesterday, fourth grade was the worst. At the first parent teacher conference in November 2019, Nadja's teachers told us that she was not performing on grade level

in any of her academic subjects and that her assessment given at the start of the school year had shown she was not a proficient reader. We were perplexed. Nadja was always a good student, and her past reading assessments were always at or above grade level. should we consider leaving the school? In truth, we felt utterly stuck. Our child was suffering. This is her saying that by 2019, quote, our child was suffering. But all these children were,

they were languishing in classrooms with educators who did not take their academic potential seriously and largely refused to teach. Here's Nicole Hannah Jones. Many years after, she noticed that the school is failing her child, that her child is suffering along with other children. In 2020, I'm sorry, this is going to be at a, this is 2018. So this is in the middle of all of that. In the middle of all of that. in the middle of all of that. So 2019 had not happened yet, this fourth grade year, which is the worst, but the first grade year certainly had where she goes in the lunchroom, can't get the attention to the teachers, is having, by all accounts, a pretty negative experience. She writes about seeing her daughter thrive with her identity, identifying with all of these other black

classmates, and she sees that as a positive thing, seeing this as part of who she is in a way she might not have at a higher performing school, for example. But in the middle of all of this, with all these frustrations, not being able to get the principal's attention, 2018, University of Iowa, here's Nicole Hannah-Jones. I don't believe my daughter is better than other kids, that she deserves better than other kids. And we can't say that this system is unfair

and then act in ways that sustain that system. And that if I were going to be writing about this and writing about those kids, I didn't need to try to do everything I could to get my own daughter away. from the kids that we lived around. A New York Times reporter in a high poverty school fucking changes the school, right? Like, there's certain things that just are not going to happen in that school. I can go to that school and say there's a problem and it gets fixed immediately. But we know now that's not what was happening, at least as of the next year.

That's not what was happening. And she wrote actually of that first grade year, which would have been 2017 or 2018, that it wasn't what was happening. She talks about having to, like, struggle to get the attention of the principal after going to this lunch and seeing children fighting, seeing basically an abject disaster and watching, she says, the hardest part is watching the adults basically do nothing about it. So on the one hand, looking at it, you're like, well, if Nicole Hannah-Jones was writing about all of this and not sending her kid to one of these schools, I would absolutely think that conservatives would be or her critics would be right to say, well, you're being hypocritical. You don't want your own child to exist in this system to have to be a part of these schools. you still want your kid to go to the high-performing schools. You know, walk the walk.

If you're going to say people have to be subjected to these schools, because if you just start leaving them, then they languish. This is one of the big arguments against school choice is that it takes students and resources and parents, sucks them out of the system. And one of the big arguments for school choice is that you can't sacrifice individual students. So school choice proponents have been welcoming

Nicole Hannah Jones into the movement today, sincerely, saying welcome, even though she still, I'm sure, is against school choice and it's not going to take that bait. In fact, what she told Fox News here was, let me find the quote. She says, the broader focus should remain on families who lack the resources to pursue better educational options for their children. I hope people concerned about the choice my husband and I made for our daughter will have equal or more outrage for thousands of black children whose parents don't have the resources to send them to better schools.

As I write in the piece, there's no absolution to be. had for any of us. That makes my blood boil, and I don't even work for a school choice organization. They have so much outrage for the thousands of black children whose parents don't have the resources to send them to better schools. They have so much outrage. In fact, they spend their lives trying to give as many of those kids as possible the option to do exactly what, I shouldn't say exactly, because it's not a one-to-one comparison, but in principle, what Nicole Hannah-Jones' daughter ended up doing, which was get out of the failing system to a school that will actually help you. Get out of a failing system to a school that will actually help you. So by 2018, Nicole Hannah-Jones,

when she's making those remarks to the University of Iowa, had had a lot of experiences just in the first year or two at PS307 that should have given her pause in saying what she said. But by 2024, when she is doubling down, doubling down on saying, I know this experience, I know that this was the right choice. I still know we made the right choice. We judge these schools and their students without stepping foot inside. Well, she stepped foot inside and her judgment at that first grade lunch was, oh my gosh, I need to talk to the principal. That's how bad the lunch is on this one day that I was there. In that University of Iowa speech, she says, this wasn't a courageous decision.

People keep saying I was courageous to do it. She says, it's not courageous. She says, quote, my daughter is thriving. My daughter is thriving. Certainly not what she writes about. I mean, maybe you can parse the words and she would say, well, overall, I thought she was thriving still and I still had hope for the school. But that's not being very honest about what was happening behind the scenes. And it's certainly by 2024 being honest about what was going on behind the scenes.

It is certainly not being honest by 2024. And actually what's really sad is she writes in this new essay about how she hears from so many people. that their, her decision influenced their decision to do the same with their child. And this story immediately made me think of some research that the Institute for Family Studies did recently and the Brookings Institution has done some really good research on this as well. Brookings Institution is obviously liberal. Institute for Family Studies has found that if you look at the likelihood of a household being contacted by a student school for behavior,

or learning problems. Quote, these disparities persist when we control for student race income parental education, student sex, and student age. We find that across these factors, family structure is the strongest predictor of problems at school. Okay, so what about good grades? They report. After controlling for race income, the residential parents' highest education level, student sex, and student age, we found that parental education and family structure were the two strongest

predictors of grade outcomes for children in the United States. States. A stronger predictor than race and income is whether you come from an intact married parent family. Guess whose kid came from an intact married parent family where both the parents had college educations? That would be the daughter of Nicole Hannah Jones. What is not mentioned, at least by my count, once in this piece, did she notice that most of the kids at these other schools didn't come from intact married parent family homes? Because the fact that her daughter got out came from an enormous amount of struggle

within this married intact to parent family home where they decided ultimately what was in their daughter's best interest was to let her test into whatever school she could test or go to whatever school she could test into. And she didn't want to go to one of those schools. that was struggling and had lower test scores. She tested into a better school ultimately. That's what happened.

The obsession with racializing the situation when actually there's research and also racializing the funding, I mean, this is another part of it. So Brookings, I should mention the Brookings research since I teased it, Brookings has found, if you look at school spending and test scores, New York as a state has some of the highest per pupil spending and some of the lower test scores in the country. And there are a lot of states that have way lower per people spending and way higher test scores. Now, a school choice advocate noted interestingly as well that she cites an ed-billed study and it only counts state and local revenue. Let me actually just put this up on the screen. You should

be able to see this now. Mark Porter McGee points out, she doesn't mention that in her New York Times piece, when you include federal funding, the numbers reverse. Interesting. Interesting. That's not even to get into the question about teachers' unions. But all that is to say, Nicole Hannah-Jones' daughter is an exception, almost certainly, in these schools, for coming from a married, intact, to a two-parent home. To blame race and spending obsessively. I actually think it's fine to mention both of those things and look at the evidence, put it on the table. But to not even mention in this story, that one particular glaring difference of her own daughter, to not give that any treatment, Nicole Hannah-Jones hasn't learned all that much. A lot of people are objecting to this as a mother

kind of sacrificing her child for the sake of a virtue signal for the sake of maybe her personal self-esteem and her reputation career-wise obviously be an issue if she didn't send her daughter on the other hand you could look at her walking it back and writing this essay as people maybe around her starting to notice oh you've been talking about sending your daughter at all these different schools why aren't you doing that anymore your daughter's not in one of those schools anymore you can easily read something much more cynical into it as well and given Nicole Hannah-john's history. I'm inclined to read something much more cynical into it. And given her, I think, clear pattern of deception about this story, it's hard not to see things that way. Absolutely

crazy. All right, we're going to take one more quick break, and we'll be back right afterwards with reaction to the Patrick Clancy interview and the White House pool dust up. Life insurance, we all know we need it, but we keep putting it off because maybe it feels complicated or it feels expensive or like something that can wait. But stop waiting. Seriously, take care of it today with Select Quote. In just 15 minutes, high-quality coverage can be secured to fit any life in any budget. Here's what makes Select Quote different. Their licensed insurance agents work for the consumer, not for the insurance companies.

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And I have to say, I'm a big fan of Ross Douthit as a writer and as a podcaster when he was with the New York Times. This is a side note, but I was very skeptical of his jump over to 60 minutes, which is known as sort of the opposite of the new media landscape that he was absolutely shaping in a way that he was also thriving in this new media landscape. But when the segment started, the package started rolling, I felt like my suspicions were being confirmed that this was bad for Ross because it kind of constrained him. As the segment rolled, what I saw was a little bit different, was very different for these old media standards that 60 minutes has long seen itself in a very stuffy, self-assured way as being the standard bearer of, the standard bear of this sort of cool, detached, quote-unquote, neutral objective journalism. Ross actually chokes up at one part of his conversation with Patrick Clancy. He's continuously asking Patrick Clancy to kind of humanize the struggle. And I feel like that's a really good way to combine new media and old media. Now, it's one segment.

Jerry is still out. But I was sort of curious to see how Ross would do with this interview. And I thought he kind of folded some good parts of new media, which was in a lot of cases, the human element where the anchor doesn't pretend to be some detached robot, but also doesn't over-emote in a kind of obnoxious and self-important way. He sort of folded that into this old media package, which is much more formal and static in a way. So Patrick Clancy, the question is, why would he do this? Why would Patrick Clancy sit down on 60 minutes?

And I think speaking of the jury being out, literally, but speaking of the jury being out on that, I mean, was it a good decision for Patrick Clancy? Let's take a look at two of the moments that I thought were most important here in this clip and break it down. I saw headlines that said, you know, killer mom and baby murderer, monster, and none of them were accurate. I believe that it was her mental illness that caused that. So I shared those words. And I think when it comes to forgiveness, I also felt that if I didn't get there, I would be. be eaten up inside forever.

Did you ask Lindsay why she did it? I asked her if she remembered it. And what did she say? She said it was like a dream, and she remembered it much in the way you would remember a dream after waking up. Do you feel like you failed in some way in this period, or do you feel like you did the best you could? I think I did the best I could with what I had at the time.

And I live with the outcome. I live with it every day. Has she ever asked for your forgiveness? No. But I gave it to her. I thought this interview left a lot of questions unanswered, which is still very normal for old media that's up against commercial breaks, for example.

And I don't know if they'll release more of the interview. 60 Minutes does that sometimes. I kind of hope they do for the sake of transparency in this conversation that Ross had with Patrick Clancy. but Lindsay Clancy has not asked Patrick Clancy for forgiveness. They've talked about it. They've talked about what happened, but she's not asked for forgiveness. Obviously, they divorced.

That's stunning. And I don't know if Patrick Clancy is inclined to say that for the sake of, again, if he's trying to do some reputation, rehabilitation, obviously there are all kinds of theories pinging around the internet over the course of the summer. He responded and told Ross that he felt that was hard to swallow because it was distracting from his bigger goal, which was to bring attention to postpartum depression, psychosis and the health of the mother in these situations. But obviously they have civil suits against the medical providers. Patrick and Lindsay have separate civil suits against some of the medical providers. So it's definitely in their interest to talk

about Lindsay as somebody who had this psychotic episode, right? Because for Patrick Clancy, it actually makes his decision to leave her with the children for an hour somehow, probably easier to live with, right? That she had a psychotic break that he couldn't really have known or predicted what happened. So the fact that he has a motivation, though, to cast it that way, to frame it that way doesn't mean it's incorrect, right? Obviously, Lindsay Clancy was enormously ill. Put on the table. I think Lindsay Clancy belongs in prison. I think these two things can be true at the same time. That you can be failed by a system. You can be living within a failed system, existing within a failed system, and still make a decision that you have to take accountability

for like other murderers do, and you should be in prison. Massachusetts law is weird. And if you read Jed Rubenfeld's piece, yell while Professor Jed Rubenfield's piece at the free press about the quirks of Massachusetts law on this very question and how it was tried. I found that really helpful. I found coverage, legal coverage of it very helpful because the jury was in a weird position, and that holdout juror has been treated abysmally, abysmally with the information that we have so far. It is just disgusting and classless from the other jurors to basically force him to explain himself, despite not wanting to become a public figure. But by smearing him, not just saying, well, you know, maybe he made a mistake.

We just couldn't come to an agreement or he was coming at this. No, he was arrogant. He was playing with the exercise bands. All of these things. He didn't really want to listen to us. He just couldn't. What did the one woman say get over the fact that she vicious? She couldn't, he just couldn't get over the fact that she viciously murdered her children.

That is a paraphrase, but basically what came out of one of the female jurors' mouths. insane. But obviously for Patrick Clancy, I've wrestled with whether this is Monday morning quarterbacking. But I was rereading the trial transcripts this weekend. And I think part of what's so hard for us to wrap our heads around about this case is that here you have an average American family who, when something went wrong, as obviously was going wrong with Lindsay Clancy, as the summer turned to the fall, in 2022. Something was going very wrong with Lindsay Clancy. They knew it. Lindsay Clancy tried to get treatment. They tried to check her into inpatient facilities twice. Once, she checked herself out after just a few days. Now, they say that it was over the new year going from 2022 to 2023. There weren't a lot of doctors available, but it can be true that she got subpar treatment and that she still bears responsibility, as says Patrick Clancy, maybe not legally.

for their own actions. And I've wrestled with whether it's Monday morning quarterbacking to here in 2026, look back with 2020 hindsight and say, why would you leave your wife who was in an inpatient treatment facility that month alone for 10 minutes with the kids, let alone an hour? Why would you ever do that? And for a while, I thought, well, you're just being a Monday morning quarterback. The more you read the story and even watch Patrick Clancy in that interview. He said he did his best. best. But he's clearly, deeply disturbed by whether or not that's true. I don't think he's convinced that's true. But I think this is partially what's so hard to wrap our heads around about this story is that they did try. Right. They did try. He was so worried about her

telehealth appointments that he started sitting in on them. In-laws were trying to help them, direct them to better places. He was working from home, keeping an eye on things. He'd been working from home for a long time, but he was working from home and keeping an eye on things. They hired a nanny. When Lindsay Clancy was going to go back to work, she decided she couldn't go back to work. Ultimately, she started taking medications. A little bit unclear how much of these medications she took when they have, you know, how many were left in the bottles at different periods of time, that sort of thing. The cocktail of drugs that woman was on over the course of a few months. It's completely insane. And I think probably the civil suits have, are serious civil

suits against these medical providers reading through all of it. But that's what I think is most difficult for us to wrap our heads around is that they really did try to fix the situation. And then he makes the split second decision, not split second, but he makes this decision on, I think it was a Tuesday afternoon. She had been playing in the yard, building a snowman with the kids, she'd taken one of the kids to a doctor's appointment. That went fine. God knows what could have happened if she was driving with one of the babies to a doctor's appointment. That seems like also not a good idea. Clancy says he thought she was having a good day. Well, when you're around people who are struggling mentally, that can actually mean something very bad because maybe

this person has decided to make peace with an awful decision. So it is hard to hear Patrick Clancy say that he did the best, but I think that's also what's so horrifying about this case, is that as we go about our daily lives, you never expect the worst to happen. You never expect to be visited by a tragedy like this. We live very comfortable lives in 2026, for the most part, compared to the vast majority of human history. And I think we're sort of insulated from the evils of the world in some ways that humanity wasn't always.

So to hear Clancy say he's maintained, he did the best with the information. he had. I don't know. If it were me, I think I would say I'm wracked with guilt over this every day. There was nothing else that I, I shouldn't have done it. I shouldn't have done it. If I could go back and take back one decision, it would be this. But then I also have a hard time judging somebody who is grieving the most unbelievable tragedy, imaginable, basically the most unbelievable tragedy imaginable. And then having to do it in public, those two layers. I mean, it's tough. Listen, I think Lindsay Clancy should be in prison. I think the people acting in solidarity with Lindsay Clancy are wrong in a really deep way wrong. And it is reflective of a kind of moral sickness. And it just, I don't think we have to be on like perfectly clear teams here.

because it's complicated. We should be on the team of justice for those kids, which I think means, fortunately, the mom going to prison for murder because she murdered the children. And she murdered them in a way where it was one by one by one. So the psychosis is obviously a relevant part of it. She says she heard this voice telling her to, this sort of masculine voice telling her to kill the children. And some experts have said, if you hear that once, I mean, she did mention hearing other voices and having thoughts of hearing the kids, but this one particular one, if you hear it once and it's when you commit the crime, it's not necessarily a good case for psychosis.

I mean, we could talk through every different angle of this case forever, but just hearing Patrick Clancy on 60 minutes, I think he is racked with guilt. I don't think he's comfortable at all with his decision that day. And I think partially that's what's so hard for us to wrap our heads around, is that's a normal American family going about normal American family things when the mom started struggling. They tried to get her help. But humans are capable of enormous evil. And sometimes we're so comfortable that we forget it can happen to us, unfortunately. It can happen in people's lives. That's what was tough about watching Patrick Clancy on 60 minutes.

Let's wrap up tonight by talking about this crazy situation with the White House press pool. Now, you'll remember, you've probably already heard, that sort of out of nowhere on Friday, Donald Trump said on True Social that he was banning CNN, MS Now, and Politico, from the White House press pool. Yahoo News reports as of today, now a growing list of news organizations. has announced they will not publish photographs on the White House on Monday in response to Trump's move last week to ban CNN, MS now, and Politico reporters from covering him or his administration in person, that is at the White House. The Washington Post and New York Times and Huff Post

each announced Monday afternoon that they were joined the four major TV networks, ABC, CBS, NBC, and Fox News in refusing to participate in the White House pool, the rotating group of reporters, photographers, and videographers that document the president's public events. The organizations argue Yahoo reports that their reporters were not afforded due process and are asking a federal judge to quickly rule that Trump's ban is unconstitutional. The filing sites in 1977 ruling by the D.C. Circuit Court of Appeals, which found that the White House cannot arbitrarily deny a journalist a press pass without due process. Trump said, quote, it's really, this was him in the Oval Office Friday. It's really just cumulative stories over the last few years. You get sick of it. And that was his explanation for

why it happened, that there was nothing in particular that he just kind of, got sick of it. Now, today he was unveiling the helipad, which I have to say, as annoyed as I am with all of his little vanity construction projects, helipad looks great and probably was much needed in the same way that the ballroom probably has a good case for its utility. The helipad, I think, also has a good case for its utility. It looks good. I haven't seen it in person, but just seeing it today as he unveiled it, it looks like it's a real advantage. But, but, but, Let's get into what this actually means because there was an exchange between Brit Hume and someone on X who said the primary White House TV pool is a completely made up thing. I actually think, yeah, here we have it.

Dressed up to look official is basically a group of self-important so-called media organizations that over time appointed themselves primary and now expect everyone else to accept that they're entitled to some permanent special status above everybody else. The whole thing is a racket made it look like an official institution. Why does anyone still buy into this crap? Anyone with a camera can provide this footage. The White House itself could provide it. Any other organization could provide it.

There's nothing inherently special about this self-appointed group, except that they have spent years telling everyone there is. Understandable directionally, right? Because I couldn't agree more that it's a group of self-important, so-called media organizations. You got me there. Accurate. Spent a little bit of time with the White House press pool.

And it is a group of self-important people who get a lot of big stories wrong. No question about that. But so Trump today at his unveiling of the helipad, the White House has a camera on him. Normally the press pool has a camera and the audio and they're live streaming. So the Associated Press, the networks are doing it. But the White House had a camera. They didn't have the audio. I'm sure they'll be able.

So Trump was talking and nobody could hear it. I'm sure they'll fix that in the days ahead. They just launched something called Trump TV today that I guess is 24-7. But Britt Hume responded by saying this whole post is ignorant. the White House TV pool was created because many rooms in the White House, the Oval Office, like the overall office, are too small to accommodate all the TV outlets who may want to cover a presidential event. The same is true for Air Force One and presidential motorcades. So one network covers for all on a rotating basis to be a part of it.

An organization must have present every day a full broadcast crew, a producer, reporter, and the equipment and personnel needed to record and distribute the video shot by the pool. At the moment, only a handful of outlets qualify back when ABC, sorry, I just hit the mic, CBS and NBC were dominant. They tried to keep CNN out of the pool, but CNN had the equipment and personnel to do the pool job, and they were admitted by court order. Anyone with a camera, as this writer says, would not qualify, and he suggests the White House could cover these events. Then it would be, quote, official for sure. Would he really like that better?

I would just extend Brits question there to say, would any of us really like that better? Because I don't want the Biden administration basically pushing back on, you know, Fox News, which had happened with the Obama administration, by the way, pushing back on Fox News or taking all the new media passes away from people like me. But I'm just one of the independent people that the Trump White House has helped get access to. These other organizations, it costs them an arm and a leg to have the Daily Crews at the White House. And the point of it is that you'll remember one time Trump ditched the pool when he was president-elect to go to a steakhouse.

I think it was in New York City. And the press freaked out. And because the freak out was so self-important and so obnoxious, everyone was like, ruling their eyes, you guys are so terrible. This isn't that big of a deal. It's true. It wasn't that big of a deal. But at the time, they were going to go, oh, my gosh, is he going to do this often?

Whatever. The point of it is. As the press is writing history in real time, you actually kind of want to have a record of when, God forbid, something is going to happen, when the president stepped out of the Oval office, when he left the South Lawn in the helicopter, like minute by minute. And so if you're actually ever in the White House press pool, they're meticulous about the minute by minute kind of tick-tock. And then when historians write history, they go back and they say, oh, well, we found out this phone call happened at this period of time. And comparing it to the press pool, we then know this happened at this period of time.

So there's a real benefit to the public when it comes to transparency to having these news organizations as self-important and as obnoxious as they are. They're clocking the minute by minute and having the video and the audience. audio. Yes, the White House can have the video and audio. But again, if there was ever a boycott like we're seeing now because of the way the Biden administration treated Fox News, which the other organizations, I don't know in 2026 that they would still, or 2024 even, that they would still actually really act in solidarity and refuse to do the video and audio and leave it to the White House to do that. Would you trust the Biden White House to not produce video and audio that edits out any of Biden's bad moments? That's the purpose of the pool.

And the real problem with the pool is the press, right? The problem isn't the concept of the pool. The problem is the people who run it. The problem is the people who populate the pool. And some of them are old school journalists who take their job really seriously, like I was saying. They're meticulous on the dot recording of when something happened. Who was there? If you're reading pool reports, you can go back and look at historical pool reports.

You can look at some contemporary pool reports. There's some really valuable information in them sometimes that you can't fit every member of the public or every member in the press into the Oval Office or into the motorcade that goes to Trump's golf club. But the press that's there can be looking over the fence and trying to see, oh, Lindsey Graham was golfing with the president this day, which is valuable because maybe the next day some major foreign policy decision gets made. And the only reason you know who the president was talking to the day before is because the pool followed.

So again, the concept of the press pool, it is formal. They do have a formal organization. They do have its White House Correspondents Association, and they do have some legal rights. This is why Brian Karam, who's the Playboy correspondent back in Trump, one, very self-important. But this is how he ended up getting his press pass restored because the decision found that the White House needs to supply people affected by their decisions with due process, basically, with enough notice and with clear directions. And so that's what's going to come ahead in this lawsuit. But as obnoxious as the press is, I think Trump does this, to be honest, I think he does this because it bates them into a wild overreaction. where they make this seem like it's the most important thing happening in the world right now.

And it makes them defend their reporting. So it makes CNN, MSN, MS now, and Politico defend their body of work. And to do it breathlessly and with great self-importance and to the public, they're not going to side with the media. They might not side with Trump, but they're not going to side with the media. And so it's another either distraction or another example that discredits the media because they're out there once again acting like they're the most important story in the world and that they're these put upon victims who did nothing wrong, which, of course, they did do something wrong.

But whether it was proportionate to the punishment is an obviously different question. And so I think he does it for that purpose. It's still not good. Like, I just have to say a process is still not good. It's not the end-all-be-all. It's not the end of the world. But what we don't want to have happen is, you know, a situation where the White House has so much control over access to the president and the information that comes in and out because we just,

just saw already even with the press pool, which was wildly compliant during the Biden years. Again, the problem is not with the pool as a concept because some of those moments of Biden having his problems were captured by the press pool, but then not covered very much by the networks. The editors decided the editors, the producers, the executives decided not to make a big deal of them because why? Well, the White House threatened them basically and said, well, maybe we'll revoke your access or maybe we won't talk to you or we would be very unhappy if you publish the story. This story is totally untrue, blah, blah, blah.

So it doesn't matter who's in the White House. There should just be this like general American distrust of somebody as powerful as the president of the United States and their administration, you know, taking away more transparency and access, even given how annoying the people we count on for transparency and access are. I totally believe in revoking access over specific things. appropriate, right? Like, if there's a specific story that Politico or MS now or CNN lied about, cite that, say, I am no longer letting into the Oval Office until you make this correction

on something where I was like, obviously, it's not even a debate. They got something completely wrong. They totally misquote the president, made something up, excluded specific concept. The politics of that in the sort of ecosystem are much more defensible. As a journalist, I never like and I never support it, but you can sort of make the leap that this is kind of a normal part of the political ecosystem. Like, I support that as a part of the political ecosystem that politicians are always going to threaten to revoke access. They're going to revoke access. And journalists have to deal with that and have to be the best version of themselves that they can be. Like, they have to be honest and accurate to the best of their ability. So it's going to happen

that there's a tug of war. And most Republicans have been way too lenient with still granting access to people who are often going to lie about them and then not giving access to people who are going to do a better job. So this is one of those stories where it's like they're the worst victims, but they're still kind of victims. Actually, the victim is the public. The victim of all this is the public that now may be looking at less access into the future. I think it's going, I think, again, Trump is doing this to bait them into the overreaction that they have been eagerly, gleefully providing. And it'll go away after, you know, who knows, a few days or a few weeks. And it probably won't end up setting precedent for future presidents who just aren't Donald Trump

and don't act like Donald Trump. But who knows? The point is it's sometimes helpful to cut through the noise. These annoying people are saying this thing. The president. is saying this thing, they get so much wrong. And he's accused of so much wrong doing unfairly, even though sometimes it's fair, but sometimes it's just way over the top and exaggerated and hyperbolic, what's actually happening here. This is a little bit of what, at least as I can see

it, as somebody who's spent some time around this White House press corps in particular, but I think is really happening behind the scenes. So thank you everybody for tuning in to this edition of After Party. Remember, please do subscribe. It helps the show so very much. You can email me, Emily, at the scene. Delanycaremedia.com. That's our Friday show where I answer your questions that you send in to Emily at Delamacaremedia.com. We'll be back with more on Wednesday. See you then, everyone.