The David Pakman Show - Trump is gambling with our lives on AI

Episode Date: September 20, 2026

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Donald Trump is dismissing a rare call from the AI CEOs of Anthropic Open AI and XAI to slow AI down. Trump basically saying, look, we've got to lead China. That is it. Now, I think that there is a really big and interesting story here, but it is not really the part that Trump is weighing in on. And what I mean by that, Pat, is as we looked at on the podcast today, Trump doesn't really understand AI. He was asked on Air Force One last night.

Oh, do you use AI? And he's like, yeah. And it's like, oh, what do you use? it for and Trump goes, oh, you can, you can use it for so many different things. And he didn't actually tell us a single thing he uses it for. So I don't think Trump has any idea how these technologies work. What I think is the more interesting part is that when the CEOs of these companies, including especially the CEO of Anthropic, Dario Amadeh, talk about slowing things down, I kind of don't buy it. And what I mean by that is the following. If I had to dig deep and say,

what is the real motivation here of Dario. I almost think that it's to scare others into slowing down. So Anthropic can just surge ahead. Like, I don't know why I'm so cynical, but I'm not convinced that this is all being done out of the goodness of their hearts. Well, also last week there was this whistleblower who came forward. He formerly worked for Anthropic and Open AI. And he said that these companies were gambling with our lives.

And that was a huge story. It blew up. He was everywhere talking about it, Jacob Coxon. And so I feel like these companies had to respond in some form. They have to make it seem like they're doing something to prevent what he was warning about. They have to make it look like they're being responsible even if they aren't. So I understand the hesitation. I understand why you think that maybe they're not approaching this in good faith.

Yeah, for sure. And the other aspect to this that I think is important is that when we think about what should happen in the United States, All of this talk about like end this, slow that down, et cetera. It is true. Like the China, Trump has sort of stumbled across something that is true, which is, listen, China's doing X, Y, Z. And that's true. China doing X, Y, Z isn't the reason I think we need to be continuing with AI development,

but in some kind of careful way. It's that it's pointless to simply talk about suppression. Like Trump's concern is this we can't let China blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. blah, my concern is because you can't control what other countries are going to do, any moratoria that you put in place in the United States are basically going to be a waste of time because who knows how many other countries, but certainly dozens, if not more, are going to continue proceeding forward and Americans are going to be able to access that. So for me, it's more about the futility of focusing on, let's do the moratorium, rather than Trump's instincts about, well,

China wants this and China wants that. That's interesting because I think it's easy to look at this through the lens of what is more risky, right, to continue developing the AI ourselves and not totally being sure of what that's going to lead to or to put a pause on it and let China and other foreign countries continue to develop at the same pace. There are some who say, well, that first option seems a lot more dangerous. And there are some who say that that second option seems a lot more dangerous. But what you're pointing out, I think, is that that's not even really the question that we have. It's not even something that we can fully control and that this is going to continue developing regardless.

We are also, I mean, I'm very interested in seeing further reports about these specific instances where AI has jumped the rails, so to speak. What I really want to understand is, you know, when people go, I'm worried AI is just going to kill us all or something like that. I don't think that many people necessarily have a grasp of exactly what it would take for that to happen. And to be honest, like, I have some ideas. of things that could take place, but I don't really know how plausible they are.

Like, for example, one of the things that's being floated is, you know, one of the things that AI could do is it could take control of water treatment plants and basically like reverse them and run the raw sewage into the water that we get out of our out of our sinks. Like, okay, first of all, could AI really do that? And I know that people will say, David, you're being so naive. It might not be able to do that now, but it learns and it could be certainly able to do that six months from now. I don't know physically what would be required for, quote, AI to reverse water treatment and send raw sewage into our houses as drinking water. But the other aspect to it is everybody seems to be assuming that AI quote, by the way, what do we mean by AI in general?

It's like there's these different models that AI would want to send raw sewage in order to kill everybody and take away drinking water because it would serve its ultimate goals of taking over the world. I don't even think that's been demonstrated to my satisfaction. I think the issue is there are plenty of things that AI has learned to do that we never anticipated it would be able to. I mean, if you think about all the things AI can do right now, they were things that were inconceivable even just a few years ago. And then when you think about all the different ways that it could potentially kill us or go after us or even like affect our banking system or something like that where it doesn't lead directly to our demise as a human species, but it could really mess things up in our economy for a while. When there are all those different things that could lead to calamity, that could lead to chaos, it's easy to, I think, be concerned about the big picture.

Yeah, I agree with that. And I think that the big picture is really where we should be focusing. And I think moratoria are just a waste of time to even talk about. Texas Republicans are denouncing a Republican statewide candidate over a xenophobic post. The guy's name is Bo French. and he is a Republican nominee to join the state's Railroad Commission. He made xenophobic comments describing a group of Asian American students going to the University of Texas football game as a problem.

He said, it's a picture of students celebrating. And in the picture, you can see that there are individuals of various races, including Asian, as I guess Asian including Indian, right, which sometimes is what's used as a, as a, as a all south they i don't know there's a variety of races in the picture there there's so many people in the photo i'm sure there are a variety of races that's right and he said i heard u t graduation this year looked like this i didn't believe it the problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined and senator john cornan and other republicans denounced it and they said that this is absolutely crazy it's racism etc texas governor gregg abbott said this is not my image

This is just people celebrating. This is Texas uniting. We support our teams. Blah, blah, blah. Others said it's an overtly racist post. It's demeaning students on the basis of race or ethnicity. There's nothing Christian about that. There's nothing conservative about that.

I guess more like more than anything as I look at not that it mattered. We're not like trying to evaluate all of the races that are represented. As I look at the picture and you can find it. I see this is I see mostly what I would. would guess are either Indian or Hispanic people, quite frankly. And then I guess there's one Asian guy in the lower left. And I know Indian and Asian are technically the same thing. It's the Asian continent.

In any case, this guy, I guess Beau French saw a lot of people he didn't like in the picture. That's the point. Yep. And, you know, good on the Republicans who are calling him out for this racist comment. But I could see like Trump, for example, saying the exact same thing and not getting too much pushback for it. I agree. the direction of the Republican Party. This is what they've been doing, especially in more recent years, they've been trying to ramp up this anti-immigrant rhetoric and also, you know, talk against

students from other countries coming here to study and they want to make the visa system different so that you can't have as many international students. So for this candidate to make a comment like that, yeah, sure, it's racist, but to me, it sounds pretty in line with what a lot of Republicans are saying these days. And so that's why I was a little surprised to see the blowback. Well, listen, when Tucker Carlson said, immigrants make the country dirtier and poorer, isn't it more or less the same sentiment as looking at a picture of non-white people at a Texas Longhorns game and going, I can't believe that this is what it looks like now? Like, isn't it kind of the same sentiment that we are worse off with people that look like this in the country?

And that we want fewer people from so-called, was it shitty countries? Shit hole. The Trump shit hole countries. Yeah. And we want more people from places like Norway, which of course he had to say with this like elegant flare to it. Yes. The elegance of Norway is what we want.

Certainly not people from Asia or shit hole countries. Anyway, yeah, good for Republicans. And listen, this is very low hanging fruit for the more establishment Republicans of Texas. Like I think they know whether they believe the message or not, they realize that this is not something that they can defend or support. And also, I got to tell you, railroad commission. I don't think that it's worth dying on the hill to defend a racist railroad commission nominee. Not that we don't care about the railroad commission.

We care about the railroad commission. That's absolutely right. And good on John Cornyn, I guess, finding some sliver of integrity the final months he remains in office. Hey, listen to this. The Trump administration is calling bike lanes, DEI. And it's all as crazy as you can imagine. And as some of some people may or may not know, the US has thousands of miles of bike lanes. Now I'm not talking about bike paths here.

I'm talking about bike lanes, which are on roads. And the idea is it's safer than just riding in the middle of the street. And there have been bike lanes being developed and pushed for since the 1960s. The idea is make a better alternative to commute on a bike to ride a bike. You can choose to ride the bike instead of a car. And if you do that, you're spewing less pollution and congestion and all of that stuff. So it all sounds good. And the Trump administration has made it a point to freeze or cancel what they call DEI

bike lanes saying it is not workable in the United States. Existing bike lanes should be removed. And their logic is bike lanes take space away from cars. They create traffic. they lead to more chaotic roads. And therefore, I guess they are some form of diversity, equity, and inclusion. I don't really get it. Now, now there's a couple things here.

I don't, do you understand how it's DEI? Well, I think the argument that they're trying to make is that Biden, with his infrastructure legislation, allowed it so that areas with more diverse populations could have access to more funding because they were trying to diversify or distribute the money equitably. And so those areas got more money for things like bike lanes. And also in more diverse communities, you're more likely to maybe see bike lanes because they tend to be in like cities versus rural places that don't need the bike lanes so much. So I think that's what they were trying to get at there.

But it's all very confusing. It's all extremely confusing. For me, the funniest part of this is there are a lot of, I guess Republicans, but probably people in general who still are on this thing of like the bikes create traffic. And there's this funny thing where sometimes people like, listen, I've been stuck behind city buses when driving and they can't completely get out of the way when they're picking people up. So it feels like they are slowing me down. The city bus is slowing me down. And then you have to think for yourself and go, hold on a second. If there's 40 people on the bus, imagine if we replace the bus with 40 cars. Obviously, the bus is not

creating traffic, it's reducing traffic. If you are right behind the bus and it takes you a couple blocks to find an opportunity to pass it, you might feel like you're being slowed down, but you're only dealing with one bus instead of 40 cars. It's kind of the same thing where a lot of these people don't seem to understand that well designed bike lanes, including bike lanes that have that cross intersections in ways that are thoughtfully designed. They are also taking cars off the road. And think about the compact amount of space that 20 people on bikes take up on a bike path relative to whether you had 20 people on cars that you were competing with. Like, there's a counterintuitive thing when you're waiting for a bike, a cyclist to cross

or sitting behind a bus. But it shouldn't be that difficult to understand how this reduces traffic. That's absolutely right. Because with most of the cars, there may just be one person in them. And you can't get too many cars through the intersection when the light's green. but you can get a whole lot more bikes through the intersection. Yeah. Of course, the counterpoint is that you need to have a bunch of people who are willing to ride their bikes because if they're not actually riding their place and the bikes in lieu of driving a car, then are you actually cutting down on the amount of traffic?

Right. So there's this like build it and they will come field of dreams mentality that I think urban planners have where they figure, okay, if we invest into bike lanes, if we make the infrastructure better, if we make the roads safer for bicyclists, then it's going to leave. lead to more people wanting to ride their bikes. And that's going to down the line lead to less congestion. But I think because it is a big change for people in one of these cultural things and certainly something that maybe makes people angry about because they think, oh, we're going down from two lanes to one lane. That's going to make my commute longer. It makes a lot of Trump

supporters in particular really upset. The other thing is that the opposite is a concept called induced demand where people go, listen, this highway only has three lanes. We should really add two more lanes and then traffic would flow freely. But one of the things that we found out is that when you make a highway wider or increase the perception of being able to carry more traffic, you induce more people to say, oh, now that we have a wider highway, I am going to drive instead of taking the bus or whatever. And by the time you open the wider highway, it's basically just as congested for the people that are choosing to go on it because more people, you've induced more demand. So anyway, some of this gets into like urban planning stuff. But as usual, bike lanes or DEI,

There's something very wrong with these people. Yeah, I don't think you need a master's degree in urban planning to understand that bike lanes are not DEI, but I guess the Trump administration would disagree. All right. I have a bunch of events coming up for the book. We are now linking to all in-person events at David Pakman.com slash attention. So we've got the event in New York City. We've got the event in Springfield, Massachusetts. I will soon be announcing an event in Austin, Texas as well, but no info on that yet.

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