The Dispatch Podcast - Sen. Schmitt’s Failed Attack on Jack Smith

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Mike Warren is joined by Jonah Goldberg and Kevin Williamson to discuss Missouri Sen. Eric Schmitt’s failed attempt at setting a perjury trap and the Trump administration’s AI luncheon. The Agenda: —Schmitt vs. Smith —What happened to Capitol Hill staff? —The GOP’s victory lap —The superintelligence rebrand —Trump’s AI luncheon —“Unites States” —NWYT: Hosting dinner parties The Dispatch Podcast is a production of ⁠The Dispatch⁠, a digital media company covering politics, policy, and culture from a nonpartisan perspective. To access all of The Dispatch’s offerings—including audio versions of all our articles and newsletters—⁠click here⁠. If you’d like to remove all ads from your podcast experience, consider becoming a premium Dispatch member ⁠by clicking here⁠. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

In communities across Canada, hourly Amazon employees can grow their skills and their paycheck by enrolling in free skills training programs for in-demand fields. Learn more at aboutamazon.ca. This family is on the brink of Civil War. Mobland, the hit original series is now streaming on Paramount Plus. We are the Hurricanes. Don't know them yet? In Google us. From the underworld of Guy Ritchie.

Do you want to step up the ladder? I want common dead. Starring Tom Hardy, Pierce Brosnan, and Helen Mirren. Do I have to do everything myself? You want to want! Mopland. New season is now streaming on Paramount Plus. Welcome to the Dispatch podcast. I'm Mike Warren. On today's roundtable, we discuss Senator Eric Schmidt's attempt

to catch former special counsel Jack Smith in a perjury trap during Capitol Hill testimony this week and President Trump's meeting with artificial, sorry, super intelligence business leaders, and they're packed with the administration to, quote, self-regulate, unquote. And then, not worth your time, dinner parties? I'm joined today by dispatch editor-in-chief, Jonah Goldberg, and national correspondent Kevin Williamson. Let's dive in.

Okay, gentlemen, well, it feels like it's been a long time since we've had a congressional hearing that has turned into some kind of, I don't know, sensation, internet meme. I mean, when I have normy friends of mine who have nothing to do with politics, who have actual real jobs where they can't just pay attention to the conversation of what's going on every day in Washington on Capitol Hill, when I'm getting texts from them saying, have you seen this congressional hearing? You know it's a good one. Of course, I'm talking about the Senate Judiciary hearing earlier this week, which was intended to be a kind of Republican

Grilling of Jack Smith, the former special counsel who was leading the investigations into Donald Trump during the Biden administration. And this was, I think, a lot of ways set up to give Republicans something to crow about, to be able to go on cable news and say, see, we really stuck it to, you know, enemy number one at this point for Donald Trump. And I think that's what Eric Schmidt, the Republican senator from Missouri, thought he was doing when he, was in his line of questioning of Jack Smith. I think he was hoping for something viral. I don't know if he was going for virality in this way.

Can we roll the clip of what exactly happened and then we'll explain a little bit more if it needs explaining? Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3rd, 2024? No. Okay. So your testimony today is that you did not go to a Hawks game on February 3, 2024.

Is that correct? I have no recollection. Okay. Is it your testimony that you were not in Atlanta on February 3rd, 2024? Let me just give you a little context. The day before Fannie Willis came clean with her affair with the prosecutor. You know the Atlanta prosecutor that was also trying to get Trump. The next day were you in Atlanta?

I do not believe so. Okay. Did you ever go to Atlanta during your time as special counsel? I really don't think so. It's possible I flew through the Atlanta airport on the way to Florida. I do not have a recollection of going to Atlanta. I definitely did not go to a hawks game. I'm sure that.

Did you ever meet Nathan Wade or Fannie Willis in your time in special counsel? No. What would you say if I had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in Atlanta at a Warrior Hawks game on February 3, 2024, the day after Willis and Wade announced their affair? I don't think you know that we have this stuff. So I'll give you a second to process it so you don't, you know, perjure yourself. You just took it down really quick. If I could look at that again? Mr. Chairman, can you give the witness a copy so he can see what's being read to him?

Mr. Smith, please address it. Just very briefly. And this can, if this is the correct basketball game, I recall going to a University of Maryland basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing. right around that time and the Marshal Service was there with me you could check if that was the exact date it was Maryland playing Iowa I think February of

2024 but again that's you could check that out if that's what we're talking about could it then be that University of Iowa is the Hawkeyes could that be it and maybe before we show this kind of thing I know

but if he was at an Iowa a game. Is that correct? It was because Caitlin Clark was coming to Maryland to play. Uh-huh. I know, but that might be the confusion over the names of the team, but perhaps you should have looked at it more carefully. All right. Okay. So those of you who were watching on YouTube, you saw the clip. I think we all started laughing at the point where the poor aid to Eric Schmidt put up and then immediately put down the supposedly damning images of these textmen. messages, which, by the way, did not demonstrate what Eric Schmidt said, oh, hold on, let me back up a little bit, just to give some context here, because I think so much of listening

to this and watching this, you have to understand the soap opera drama. He said, she said, he was in this place and all those accusations to kind of understand what Schmidt was saying, right? We have the special counsel, Jack Smith, who's testifying, the theory, as far as I can tell that Eric Schmidt was trying to get at in this line of questioning was that at some point, the Fulton County District Attorney, right, Fonnie Willis, who was prosecuting a separate criminal case against Donald Trump from Jack Smith's federal cases had a scandal of her own. She was sleeping with a prosecutor in her office. She admitted to this in February of 2024. And then the next day, Eric Schmidt was trying to claim, Jack Smith was in Atlanta in order to, I'm not exactly sure because the accusation.

was never actually sort of fully spelled out, but somehow colluding or meeting with Fannie Willis, and the smoking gun was apparently that Jack Smith was at an Atlanta Hawks game, an NBA game at this time. The evidence, however, wasn't actually there. The text messages that were supposedly demonstrated this were something about a seat at a basketball game, that people associates of Jack Smith were saying,

we've saved this for him. It was a seat that doesn't exist. in State Farm Arena, where the Atlanta Hawks play in Atlanta. And then, of course, as you saw at the end of the clip or you heard at the end of the clip, it seems that Jack Smith was at a basketball game on that particular day. But in College Park, Maryland, 600 miles away, watching a college basketball game, the University of Iowa Hawkeyes, not the Atlanta Hawks. So long and short of it is that Eric Schmidt had a gotcha that wasn't a gotcha at all

and really kind of embarrassed himself. If you watch that clip or you're watching on YouTube, you can see the aid behind Amy Klobuchar, who sort of squares the circle here, almost giggling as Amy Klobuchar is explaining how Eric Schmidt may have made the mix up. All right, Jonah, let me start with you. What did you make of this? I mean, the memes are out there. You can see there's a different shot of Katie Britt, Senator from Alabama, who's sitting next to Eric Schmidt with a look of horror on her face as this whole line of questioning is falling apart. I mean, at least this is great for the memes, right? This is a good moment for the Internet, if not.

for self-government and Congress, right? Yeah, so like when you said Schmidt was hoping for a moment of virality, but maybe this isn't what he had in mind. I was, I instinctively just tried to go to chat GPT and have it draw me a picture of Senator Schmidt making a wish with a monkey paw for a viral moment. Because he got it. I have to say, like, even though this is caught on with, you know, you would say you're normie friends, you know, in the wider public.

I think the reason why it's such an obsession inside sort of the Beltway and in the political class is most of us can remember a time when, like, even the most partisan jackasses in the Senate had good staffs. They did their homework, right? I mean, like when Jesse Helms brought the hammer and tongs, he did his homework beforehand, right? You know, and you could argue with him about why he was doing what he was doing or what his positions were or Henry Waxman. I know he was in the house, but, you know, those kinds of people, they just brought it. They had the receipts.

And the fact that, keep in mind, Schmidt is the former attorney general of Missouri. Right? So, like, he has some idea or supposed to have some idea of evidence change. and like vetting whatever. And already it's being leaked that the DOJ, which gave, you know, gave this stuff to Schmidt's office, told them this is unvetted. But like the staffers got it,

it's not obvious to me they even know what unvetted means, right? And so then you have to go, you have to go, widen out the lens a little bit. We are, was it, two weeks from most early voting going? that isn't, you know, like, there's probably already some already voting some places, right? Yeah. We are watching the bottom drop out in the Republican Party's polling. The generic ballot is so bad that, you know, like religious people are crossing themselves

as they look at it. You know, it's, it is, the House had to go home because a Republican introduced a bill of impeachment against Chester McBrosef, the Secretary of War. and since they couldn't belay that, the only thing they'd do is just run out of town, right? And the Senate,

at a time where everyone's freaking out about whether or not AI will destroy the planet or wipe out all of humanity, which I think is dumb, but like, and freaking out about affordability and there's a war on,

the Senate thinks, we're going to prove that we have our finger on the pulse of what the voters want by going after Jack Smith about what he did to prosecute Trump during the Biden administration.

And then we're going to do it really, really, really badly in an embarrassing way, right? And so it just shows you, like, I think the institutional, like, I think Thune gets something of a bad rap compared to the rest of a lot of other prominent Republicans these days. But even so, it just shows you that in the MAGA orbit, to me, I know we're going to talk about this a little bit, it's of a piece with them misspelling the United States of America. on the document that they're signing about, you know, ushering in the new era of super intelligence, and they're misspelling their own country's name. They didn't misspell it, Joan. It's been renamed.

It's like the party's been taken over by Brick Tamlin from the Ron Burgundy movies, you know? And that's all I got. And then when you, just last thing, I guess, it shows you how the stupidity is metastasizing, right? Or like the fecal blood poisoning is broken the blood-brain barrier, and everyone, you know,

is come, as we would say, as everyone is punning these days, Schmidt heads. And so you have the entire, not the entire, but a big chunk of the MAGA infotainment industrial complex was clearly coordinated and set up

to celebrate Schmidt as this hero, as this, you know, the brave guy who owned Jack Smith, bolstering his chances. I mean, these guys, apparently they told Axios that, like, there's a buzz about us as for VP pick for Vance, right? So, like, this was all set up to be Schmidt's moment.

And so you had a bunch of MAGA influencer types. You had Sean Hannity all set to go with the storyline that Schmidt had nailed Smith on this and had the goods. And no one turned off their scheduled tweeting functions, right? The stupidity of this is, it's like a runaway fire hose just spraying stupidity all over the place. And I think it speaks of the culture that a lot of the GOP has become. I want to go back to the sort of the way that the media ecosystem tried to make this a thing at Schmidt's request. But Kevin, I want to go back to just Schmidt himself because Jonah mentioned,

his former attorney general, former top prosecutor in the state of Missouri. He's a prosecutor, right? Missouri. I mean, easy. Missouri, I like North Oklahoma. We have readers and listeners. Okay, this is Texas bigotry here. All right, but every prosecutor knows, right?

You know the answer on cross-examination. You know the answer to every question that you ask, right? That is sort of prosecution 101, cross-examination 101. The thing that I can't get out of my head is it's very obvious. that literally the only piece of evidence that Schmidt and his team had were text messages that didn't say what he said that they said.

Right. They did not say, hey, I'm at the Atlanta Hawks game or hey, Mr. Smith is at the Atlanta Hawks game. Right, right, with Fannie. Or after I met with Fanny in our secret rendezvous point, I went to the Hawks game.

Like, literally there was just a vague... We are about to do crimes. There was nothing like that. Well, there's just so much you appreciate about. this. Like, I mean, for instance, I mean, let's just start with Jack Smith's awesome comic timing. Because like, he suddenly, like, he turns into Sean Penn in Fast Times at Richmond High doing Jess Piccoli, like, hey man, like he took that down really fast. I couldn't see it. And just really heightens the humor of it. This whole thing is like watching the climactic courtroom

scene in sleepers in reverse, right, where she's trying to previews at the game instead of trying to prove he's not at the game. And so, like, you would think that a prosecutor, even in Missouri, would have seen sleepers, right, and make sure that when you're dealing with basketball games, that you've got, you know, literally the ticket steps to prove what's going on. The other thing that I thought was really interesting about this, and to speak to your point here, is that, is it Skyfall, the James Bond movie where the Evil Council of Evil is meeting by having a head butt, an earbud conversation at an opera?

And he interrupts him and says, I think, I know what you're talking about, yeah, yeah, yeah. And he, or maybe it's Spector, and he says, I think you should find a better place to have your meetings. Like, only the evil counsel of evil in movies like that goes to a public event to plot. You know, this is not something people do. So if Jack Smith, who is in the news quite a bit around that time, is coming down to have a secret meeting with people in Atlanta, you know what we should do? Let's go to the one place in Atlanta where every media company in the world, or in the United States anyway, has a camera right now. NBA games are very highly covered events. And celebrity spotting is kind of a thing.

Like you can, you know, they always do the little thing. Look who's at the game today. And you had to figure they would have had good seats too, right? They probably would have been like, you know, I mean, maybe not courtside. They were in Section 101, which doesn't exist at the arena. Yeah, not bad, not bad. So they're going to be on camera if they're there, but they're not because that's not what people do.

And that's just it's, that's just bonkers. Not to steal from, you know, too much from Nick Cotogio, who wrote a great news letter about this from which I'm taking some of these points. But the real kind of screw up in this, I think, though, is something that Jonah was mentioning earlier, which is at this point, at this late in the game, you're like, hey, do you, does anyone remember Jack Smith, that dude with the beard who was a prosecutor? Because, like, that was, that's a long time ago in political terms, right? Like, some of these staffers hadn't been born, I think, probably was months ago. And, you know, they're just the ephebic hill staff.

they have these days just popping out. Kind of an odd thing to do. So this really does look like that Schmidt was trying to set himself up to like become like the big sensation, right? This was his big path forward. So I'm going to put out this BS story, probably BS story, about how J.D. Vance is already thinking about vice presidential candidates. You know who doesn't think about vice presidential candidates?

Vice presidents. They know how unimportant it is. They don't think about it at all. But like here's his moment. And to really go to the mat like this. for something that's basically a pet peeve of Donald Trump and the people who are really close to him at the moment when Donald Trump is at the nadir

of his popularity and influence is it's a choice, as they say. It seems like an odd, odd choice to me. But this is what the Schmidt character apparently was going to do. But man, it's just too much fun to watch. Yeah, I mean, like that's sort of what I was trying to get at is just simply that Trump has so Trumpified the party.

Yeah. that there are people in the party who think, if we can make the conversation about how Trump was treated unfairly, we win. Yeah. Right. And that's what that hearing was trying to do.

Yeah. And I just think that's old, like, like stipulated. Okay, Fannie Wells was wrong. Who cares? That's season one. I've written and spoken a great deal about, you know,

what I referred to as the plague of cleverness in politics. And you can just like, in your mind, kind of imagine the conversations about this. like, hey, here's what we're going to do, guys. Here's the plot. Here's the thing we're going to do. Here's how we're going to get ourselves to have a big moment and catapult ourselves to the top

instead of just actually doing the job of a senator. And, you know, oversight's a perfectly fine thing for a senator to do. And investigations are perfectly fine things for senators to do. I'm not sure they had much to go on on this with Jack Smith and all that. But just the three-studges, wily coyote level of imagination that goes into something like this. and then just to watch it, you know, explode so spectacularly as it's going to, because these people are not clever. They have their whole, like, sort of personality invested in this kind of cheap form of cleverness. And the irony is they aren't any good at it.

It's like that one guy who's like four foot 11 who cares about basketball more than anything else in life and is convinced that he's going to go to the NBA. And he's like, buddy, you're not. You know, you just, you don't have it. You don't have the endowment. These people, they're good at lots of things. I bet Schmidt's a pretty good lawyer. I bet he was a pretty good prosecutor.

But this sort of, you know, backwoods, Missouri, Machiavelli and Horsepucky is not the skill set they've really got. And I really do think this is, not to take this all into Glob territory, but I think that a lot of these guys grew up watching or came, spent a lot of time watching House of Cards

and, you know, television shows like that and reading books about it. And these things were, you know, Washington is this great sort of scheming, conspiratorily, if you really knew what was going on kind of story, when everyone who's been around it very much knows that the real story of Washington, the real tragedy of Washington is that there aren't any secrets. Like, this is just how things work. And this is a whole bunch of people who are, you know, mediocrities, and some of them better than mediocrities, mostly doing their best, mostly honest. And this is the best they can do. But these guys,

you know, they want to make everything into a soap opera. And then they make it into a soap opera. and then they're shocked when it turns out that it doesn't make them look good. Well, it doesn't make them look good to us and certainly to people who are paying close attention. But I do think to go back to the kind of pro-Republican media ecosystem that Schmidt was clearly trying to manipulate for it. And it started, yes, with the Axios little item. But you had, as Jonah mentioned, Sean Hannity, Benny Johnson sort of immediately tweeting this out, wow, you know, Senator Schmidt really nailed Jack Smith. you have Schmidt going on a podcast, the Charlie Kirk podcast, which bears his name still, but is run by his former producer, hosted by his former producer and another producer in which they, at one point the host said, by this point, it was already well known that Schmidt had Schmidt the bed, as it were, or screwed this up. And the host says to Schmidt, I got to give you flowers for this, for the way that you nailed Jack Smith on this. And Schmidt doesn't say,

well, you know, actually, I don't know if we quite got him on that. I think there is maybe a little confusion on my part. I'm, you know, he just kind of nods his head and says that that's right. We're asking questions here. I mean, is it possible here that you can create your own bubble in which there are a number of people? I don't know how large that is who will not really see that Schmidt be clowned himself in this incident and say, oh, wow, you know, the good fight against Jack Smith and lawfare continues, and Schmidt was doing it. I mean, isn't that a danger in the siloed media environment that we live in,

and he can just get away with it? I think you can do a lot of that on a lot of kinds of stories, but this is just too funny. That's a good point. And something that's actually that funny is going to break through. So the kind of boring stuff that are, you know, matters of contentious interpretation and such things, you really can create silos and bubbles and have them endure in a very kind of meaningful sort of way.

But this is sort of like when someone insists that a joke is in bad taste, you know, that joke is racist or that joke is sexish or something, but everybody laughs. It's because it's funny, right? And the funny thing cuts through all of your sense of propriety and your tribal loyalties and all that kind of stuff because the funny joke's a funny joke. And this is just too damn funny to stay siloed.

It really is. It's just so amusing. But they called him a dirt bag as well. That makes it perfect, right? Because it's so self-righteous and sanctimonious. but also such a like a goober way to say it. Well, also, he said, he said, I think you just perjured yourself. Yes, that's you.

And, you know, like, but I mean, I think Kevin's right that the fact that if this isn't the cold open for Saturday Night Live, I'd be surprised. And you know that the look of horror on Brits' face is going to be a major part of it, right? I mean, because that's actually the funniest bit for the listeners, you know, haven't seen it, go look it up. but like there are 10,000 memes about this. What's her first name? Katie Britt. Katie Britt, the center from Alabama. Yeah.

Like there's one guy, this very funny, very salty account. It goes by Jarvis, Anonymous account on Twitter that described it as my wife, when we go out to dinner with my in-laws, and after three drinks, I start speaking in a flamboyantly gay accent. And, you know, I've been joking about how the look on her face is my wife, when I tell her about all of the eating contests I'm now ashamed of when I was younger. But ashamed because you won or ashamed because you did? I did things. I did things I'm not proud of. And the reason I can't, I don't think it can be completely silent also is there's enough of legacy, like special report. I made sure to watch it, the Brett Baer show,

to see how they handled this story. And, like, would I have cut the piece that way? No. Like, was it the main part, the main news of that hearing? No. Did they call out Schmidt for getting this just completely screwing the pooch? Yes. Hannity that night didn't, right?

So the thing is, is, like, it can only break through in a real way. it can only stay like something everyone knows on the right. If there's a certain amount of backup from responsible people, and they're not getting that. And then there's the problem of, I guarantee you, I'll meet someone in an airport in the next two years who says, why do people talk about Schmidt embarrassing himself? He had the goods, right?

I know those people exist. But however those people were going to vote or not vote is already baked in, like I don't think that this turns out anybody for Trump or against Trump. So it's kind of, it's really what it is back to my earlier point. It's such wasted time for the GOP and so embarrassing for the GOP among the people who are still capable of feeling shame and embarrassment. Here were they? I have a very short list for you. I'll give it to you afterwards.

One fun thing to do is if you know anybody out there, so in their 35 and above, whoever worked as a Senate, staffer. Ask them, what would your old boss do if you did something like this to them? I tried to ask my wife, like, because she was a Senate staffer in the before times, and she just, her response wasn't even, oh, my gosh, you know, she worked for Frank Murkowski. Oh, Frank would be so pissed or anything. She's just like, you might as well ask, you know, what would happen if the top legislative aids all threw their rods on the floor and they turned into serpents and fought, right? It's just not something that would happen. Yes. All right. We're going to take a quick break, but we'll be back soon with more from the

Dispatch podcast. We're back. You're listening to the Dispatch podcast. Let's jump in. My final thought on this story is, I have been thinking a lot about the staff issue here, which is, as you alluded to earlier, Jonah, in an earlier era, and not that long ago, actually, this would be unthinkable because of the traps that would have been run. by staff, who's number one job, I would say, before anything else, before, you know, writing legislation or making sure the schedule is accurate. The number one job for any staff member on Capitol Hill is don't embarrass the boss. Don't make your boss make himself look like an ass. And it's interesting to know his counsel, the young man, the young lawyer who was holding up the sign, along with,

I should say. Soon to be known as Chief Fry guy. Yeah. Exactly. My favorite image was him holding this up with Senator John Kennedy holding the other side. There's something very funny about a U.S. senator, like jumping up to help a staffer hold the sign that didn't prove anything. But yes, this young counsel, apparently, according to Politico, was scheduled just next week to move into the White House counsel's office. And apparently, according to Politico's reporting, the future of that job for this young man is up in the air. So staffers, they used to matter. They used to know what they were doing. And we should be clear, like, a lot of senators were not impressive people back then.

I know someone who worked for one senator who had to, before every relevant hearing, give him a card with the note, Medicare equals old. Medicaid equals poor, because you can never keep them straight, right? And, like, Strom Thurman was essentially just a collection of molecules in the form of a human being for his last few years. But still, staff took it seriously about you don't embarrass the principle. It's like Alec Baldwin being given his lines written out phonetically. I was going to say, I have a memory of watching on C-SPAN, too, Robert Byrd speech given in one of his final years of his dotage. And you could see, first of all, there was a stack of papers standing next to the dais where he was speaking.

I mean, it was several feet tall. And a staffer would help him grab the piece of paper that he would be. turn as he gave his speech. And you could see in large print one or two words on each papers so that he could see the word and continue with the speech. And I just watched that stack very slowly get down as he finished his speech. Kevin, sorry, I'll give you the last word. I was just thinking, there was a guy named Arlen Roth, who was a guitarist who very famously played with Simon and Garfunkel. And they were going to do Scarborough Fair. And I guess Paul Simon was in poor voice. And so they decided.

to move the song down a half a step. So he's the guitarist, he moves the capo down. So instead of playing it in A minor, they're playing it in A flat minor. But he forgets to tell the rest of the band. And so the flutes and everything come in. And so a half-step interval is literally the most dissonant interval you can get music, right? But they don't know that Arlenin is the ones you screwed it up, right? Because it starts off with the guitar solo, so everyone has just adapted to it.

And he describes Paul Simon as giving the flautist, quote, a look that'll get you fired three times. And I imagine that once Schmidt's face recovered and he's able to move it again, that was the look that he was trying to suppress. Well, I think that's a good place as any to transition to our conversation about super intelligence. This is, of course, the newly dubbed term for what we all call artificial intelligence. And that comes... And we will continue to.

Yes. Have we had an editorial meeting about this? I am like Secretary of War, Gulf of America crap, like I'm not calling it super intelligence henceforth. I just want to be clear about that. And if Steve disagrees, it sucks for him. Well, he's not here, is he, Jonah? So. I love it when Jonah picks a low-stakes fight.

Really? I've been so torn about something that matters so little. That's our editor. I'm not, I absolutely am not going to do this thing no one's ever going to ask me to do. I will not, I will not dance in the bullshoy. Whatever you do, I will not dance in the bullshoy. Well, but super intelligence, you're right, Jonah, is very much like Department of War, like Lake America, like Gulf of America.

It is a redubbing of something. Dumbocrat. Yes, there's another. A lot of people don't know this. Dumb has a B in it. I'm sorry, go on. Yeah, people don't know that. But some people are just learning.

Some people are just learning. But this is an attempt by Trump. And I would say on something that's a little more substantive, right? This is an issue, AI, which is, of course, you know, dominating discussion. I know this is your favorite topic to discuss. Justin, is AI. But we have to talk about it, not just because of this executive order where the president's trying to rename AI as AI's, the general opinion on AI is going down, which is, I think, where Trump is coming from by renaming it something else, super intelligence. But this is all coming as

this week, there was a summit, there was a luncheon of sort of all the top tech leaders in, you know, across the country coming to Washington to have this meeting. An accord was signed. as we mentioned earlier in which the president signed his name, and then underneath printed that he was the president of the United States or the United States. I don't know how you exactly pronounce it, but it misspelled the term United States super intelligence. It's, I mean, you know, it would be a detail in a Christopher Buckley novel.

You'd say that's a little on the nose. But let's first talk about this, this name. I mean, is this name. Brony has the electrolytes you need. I'm sorry, gone. Rondo. Rondo. Brondo.

Rondo. Yeah, sorry. It gives what plans need. All right. So maybe we should talk about. We should move on from the name itself and talk a little more about this accord that was signed at this luncheon. It's called the Joint Commitment on Frontier Responsibilities. And it's a one-page document that's got four parts.

I'm not going to read the whole thing or even part of the thing. Suffice it to say the point of it is an agreement that isn't binding or anything on. these AI and technology companies to essentially regulate themselves, to agree on certain industry standards. This seems to be the extent to which Trump, as president, wants to regulate AI, wants to have any kind of government involvement in AI development. Kevin, I'll start with you. Is this a big moment?

They were all there. I mean, you had Mark Zuckerberg, you had Dario Amadei of Anthropic, you had Elon Musk. You had Bill Gates. I mean, there was sort of a cavalcade of these tech giants at the White House. Was this a big deal this week? Does this matter? Or is this kind of toothless window dressing and sort of a Potemkin meeting here to try to get something going on AI regulation?

Yeah, I'm suddenly wishing I hadn't already used Evil Council of Evil and the James Bond Specter stuff earlier in the conversation. You can use it again. Because these guys sort of are Spector in some ways. I mean, they kind of make you feel that way. on a more serious point, I do not have a great deal of faith in self-regulation per se for these kinds of companies. But on the other hand, there is the practical question of whether this business is in fact able to be regulated, whether it's something that the government actually has the capacity to get on top of and keep its foot on in a way.

So, you know, when you're manufacturing automobiles and you can say, We have a rule now that says everyone has to have seatbelts in the front seats and the back seats. Well, you can send somebody to go check, right? And it's a pretty, you know, discrete understandable process that doesn't require a great deal of, you know, higher mathematics to figure out whether these regulations are being complied with or not. AI is not like that. It's not even like regulating pharmaceuticals where you've got tests and trials and things like that. So it's one of those things where it's a bit like what people do with 3D printing or what people do with other sorts of, you know, technologies that are just hard to get sure. your hands on top of that you can pass laws about things.

You can say, we're going to do this, we're going to do that. Of course, this isn't even that. This is just a private sector, you know, agreement to you. Was it Googles that their motto used to be don't be evil, right? Yes. Used to be. Kind of, kind of didn't work out exactly the way that everybody thought it would be. But I don't think that this is going to be the thing that keeps AI from being a problem.

But I also don't think that a new body of things. federal regulation would do a lot of good for it. I think this is one of those times when you're getting up against, you know, Thomas Sol's Maxim that problems that don't have solutions aren't problems. They're just facts of life. And I think AI is going to end up being one of those things because whatever we do in the United States is not going to certainly be replicated in China and elsewhere. It's also something where you don't need state level actors to create all sorts of, you know, havoc and trouble. In fact, it's not state level actors. It's private firms. And in some case is just individuals can cook up some of this stuff as well. So I don't think it's a problem

with the solution. But if it were a problem with the solution, I don't think that this is what the solution would look like. Although it is always fun to watch them run Zuckerberg's software updates in public, and he's getting very convincing. Almost like a real human being. Surprisingly lifelike. Yes. I am a real boy. I am a real boy. The nose is growing. But Kevin brings up something that I've been thinking about with AI regulation, which is, when you think about any of those other industries, he mentioned pharmaceuticals or manufacturing automobiles. You have experts, you have lobbyists who meet with executive branch folks,

or maybe CEOs end up meeting with the president. And of course, those lobbyists and other execs are meeting with lawmakers to develop these things. And they explain, well, this is how we make this. This is how this works. You know, we've developed this catalytic converter thing, which can improve gas mileage or it can improve emissions. And so this is how the technology works, and this is what we could do.

This is what it would cost to implement this in our upcoming cars. It's clear, Jonah, that, again, they say this out loud. A lot of these AI companies, their executives don't even understand their own product, right? They don't understand what is happening or how it's evolving. It does seem like there is a lot of just people fumbling around in the dark, even the people who created this. And, I mean, on the one hand, it makes you kind of nervous to hear industry. industry leaders say, no, no, don't worry, we'll regulate ourselves.

But to Kevin's point, what other option is there? I certainly don't trust members of Congress or the executive branch to know anything about this product if the creators don't know much more than we do. Maybe this is the only solution to, as Kevin says, a problem that doesn't really exist. So here's the thing I think about. I say it all the time on here about other subjects about how Trump wants the headline more than he wants the substance, right? He wants the press release.

Tell them that there's corrupt, you know, issue of press release saying they're investigating corruption, I'll do the rest. You know, he did that with Zelensky, he did that with Barr, he did that with January 6th. That's his sort of MO, right? That's my problem. Like, I take Kevin's points about self-regulation.

I trust that. I take, Mike, your points about not trusting Congress right now. Like, I certainly don't want, like, Senator Schmidt's team to take point on regulating AI right now. But at the same time, like, it is so clear that this calling it superintelligence, right, declaring that everyone has to call it superintelligence, this slap dash, you know, AI constitution, I'm sorry, S-I constitution that they didn't proof enough or even have S-I right so that it would spell the name of our own country correctly, right? it is sort of like, you know, if you've ever done like high school theater in particular,

but our theater in general, sets don't have to look realistic. They just have to look suggestive, right? I mean, like the Potemkin facades can be two-dimensional, right? No one expects you to actually have a full coffee pot of hot coffee on stage, right? I mean, there's just these things that you need to sort of help the imagination along, but the audience will bring a lot of the suspended disbelief, right?

the way Trump has gotten so lazy and the Trump world has gotten so lazy with this stuff, there isn't a pretense to substance. The idea that these, I like when Trump was asked, well, is this agreement binding? He says, well, you know, I think it's morally binding. Now, I mean, like Kevin could probably do 10 columns in a row about Trump's concept of what morally binding might mean.

But the simple fact is, he thinks artificial, I mean, I looked it up because I was trying to figure why is he even changing this. And like I kept trying to find like a serious explanation. And I think I had to take Trump at his own word. The reason why he changed the name is because he says artificial means fake. And this isn't fake. This is real.

And it's not like fake news. It's real. It's real intelligence. It's super intelligence. And super is the best word out there. So let's go with super. Like, he said all of this. The one thing Trump hates, it's anything artificial.

That's right. Skin tone, hair color, sweeteners. Wastelines. Videos. And so I think it really doesn't get very complicated. He likes his fingerprints on everything. He likes to say he created this and he created that and put his name on things and, you know, all that. So there's a little of the Space Force thing in this.

But at the end of the day, if you take the AI-related companies out of the Dow, out of the stock market, the stock market is actually down. And that's all he cares more about the stock market than most presidents. All presidents care about the stock market. He cares more than most. He likes being able to say all-time high. And also, it's one of the last indicators that he, I wouldn't say it's the last indicator that he has. they can point to the economy is doing better than people think. But it's the last one that he can talk about and seem intelligent about.

And, you know, he said in the press conference yesterday, we've done a fantastic job on every front. The economy is going fantastically well. Where we've been really bad is on the messaging and explaining it to people. This is very normal politics. Presidents in general hate to admit that they did anything substantively bad or wrong. and they think it's all about messaging. Trump believes in the messaging stuff more than anybody else

because he thinks that you can will into reality, the reality that you want, if you say it the right way. And so, just to get back to Kevin's point, I agree that self-regulation isn't all that reliable or good and that the government is not well positioned to do it well. but we're in a situation where, let's put it this way. If the government was being run by serious people, they would have come up with something more serious than this.

But this is pure St. Elmo's fire. It's pure, you know, just messaging headline facade stuff and no substance whatsoever to it, as far as I can tell. Yeah, some years ago, Jared Kushner was dealing with immigration, I guess, and he was talking about the need for a merit-based immigration system. And I spent just a week laughing at hearing him use the words merit-based. And Donald Trump's saying morally binding is even better than that. Before we take an ad break, consider becoming a member of the dispatch.

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two free gift memberships to give away, exclusive town halls with the founders, and more. Okay, we'll be right back. Welcome back. Let's return to our discussion. Well, one final thought on this subject before we move on to Not Worth Your Time. One thing that has been nagging at me is what I have been picking up, and a lot of it's on the left, but I think some of it's increasingly on the right as well, which is a kind of populist, like rejection is maybe too strong a word, but a populist skepticism of AI. And maybe in some cases it is rejecting AI or revolting against AI.

And it's not just the debate over data centers, which I think is a part of it. But I do think that there is a populist energy that is suspicially. of these new titans of this brand new industry in which the leaders like to say, in 10 years, your job won't exist anymore because of our product. And it is interesting to me that I think, Jonah, you're right, that at the end of the day, Trump sees this

as propping up the stock market, that's what he cares about. But for a guy who has sort of been able to ride the populist wave on a lot of issues and harness that energy, he does seem to be missing AI populist critiques as a way to kind of harness popular energy and popular support for him. I don't know. Am I sort of reading too much into this? Are we going to see a kind of populist backlash that is looking for pretty, you know,

draconian government regulation on these companies? And Trump is just because of where he is in his career. He's just kind of behind the curve on this. This will be the next, you know, populist crusade that comes through in Washington. What do you guys think? Well, you know, he got on the wrong side of the cooks when it came to vaccines. And, you know, the vaccine thing was something he was sort of felt stuck with, I think, because, you know, it was his administration's deal, you know, Operation Warp Speed and all that,

and was something I got to talk about and be very proud of. And then when the sort of, you know, RFK junior whack job into the Republican Party, which is now just known as the Republican Party, went a different way on that stuff, Trump was never really able to get on that side. He's made some gestures in that direction from time to time. And certainly, I think that the appointment of RFK Jr. to his current post for which he is grossly unqualified was a SOP to make up for that stuff.

I think it specifically had to do with vaccines. If it weren't for RFK being a Kuk vaccine denier, he probably wouldn't have the job. Yeah. And I think Trump, in a similar way, sees AI as being kind of his thing. in the sense that it's just something that's happening during his administration. He's trying to take credit for it, at least as a stock market thing. And Trump's attention to the stock market is a very kind of 1980s, very early 1990s sort of way looking at the world.

I mean, we remember the early days of COVID when he was just all talking about the stock market all the time. And a lot of those stocks are looking pretty good to me. Time of gotten by stocks, buy stocks, buy stocks, buy stocks, buy stocks, by stocks. And that is kind of one of his ways of looking at the world that I think is just a bit out of touch with where both political and economic reality is at the moment. So I don't think he's going to be able to switch gears on this. Not that he has much time left to switch gears anyway. He's quickly becoming not a non-entity,

but his relevance declines every day. And short of a second and more successful coup, his relevance will be zero very soon. So I agree with all that. I think the only thing that's missing is he is also more prone than, let's just say most, to be swayed by the people he listened to last, to be swayed by the people who meet and greet him at Marilago.

If you look at the things where he has switched positions from his first term that relate to business and technology, it's TikTok, it's crypto, right? And I can't say AI because AI wasn't a really big on the horizon back then, but the vaccine stuff, right? And we could probably come up with a few others. Those guys, you know, the credit to Kevin, Uday and Huse and Kusei, you know, are knee-deep in these technologies and these businesses.

So is Kutner, so is Lutnik, right? And Trump is getting rich. He's trading on these things. And he's surrounded by people who have all figured out, just like all those European heads of state and whatever, they all figured out that. Trump is really easy to manipulate once you know how to do it. And so they're telling them, you'll go down in history as the president who ushered in the superintelligence age and you're this and you're that and you're brilliant and owned by

the way, here's your taste. And so the corrupt, I just think like, Trump, I will say this flat out. Like, Trump is the first president in my lifetime where I actually thought personal financial corruption was an actual issue. like Bill Clinton, I think there was a lot of corruption there, but it was all about like raising money to get reelected. Right. Right.

It wasn't about personal enrichment, right? That came after his presidency. That came after, and it came before, too. And he knew it would. Right. So there's no point in doing that. But Trump is just different. Trump is like financially motivated.

And so you add it to the other stuff that Kevin is talking about. And I think it just gets very uncomplicated very quickly. Just to dwell on that point for a second of the perceived need to be corrupt while in office, when you're in an office that's going to leave you in a position to make a whole lot of money when you leave it. You know, like Barack Obama left office knowing he was going to be a rich guy. Like he took off the Vulcan watch, put the Rolex back on, and he put in a drawer when he started running for president, and went out and signed his $100 million contract because that's what you do.

And he knew he had a lot of earning years left in him as well. He did, yeah. It's the benefit of running for president when you're young. All right, well, let's leave that aside. I feel like that's not the last time. Unfortunately, we're going to be talking about AI on this podcast. And now a little not worth your time. The writer Derek Thompson has a piece at his substack about the death of the American host.

You are no longer invited to dinner is the headline of his piece. We'll put it in the show notes. I'll read just a little bit of what he has to say. He sort of leans into updated data and analysis of the, essentially the Robert Putnam Book Bowling alone, that, you know, we are socializing less and less with other people as Americans. Derek Thompson writes,

in the last 30 years, Americans have seen double-digit declines in practically every measure of socializing. They are less likely to play cards, attend a sporting event, go to a bar, volunteer, or work on a community project. When it comes to hosting people at home, the declines are particularly stark. Since 1995, the share of Americans who say they've hosted guests

or attended a dinner party has declined by about 20 percent, and that's in addition to the whopping declines that Putnam bemoaned a quarter century ago. Combining the two surveys, we get this astonishing fact, Thompson writes, the share of Americans who say they host friends or family at their home at least monthly has fallen from 42% in 1975 to 12% in 2026, a 70% collapse in a half century. You can read Thompson's piece to see his analysis of why this happens and what it means and all those sort of thing.

I just have a question, and I'm wondering for both of the panelists here, are dinner parties that you host at home or go to at someone else's home? Are dinner parties worth our time? Kevin, I will start with you. When's the last time you hosted a dinner party and was it worth your time and are these things worth your time? We love having people over for dinner because we have four toddlers and the bedtime routine starts around, you know, 645. So the more people around to help, that's great. You grab this one, you grab that one, and we put them to bed. So we haven't been hosting as much as we had before for all the kids and we'll look forward to going back to that again sometime soon.

I really like having people at home. And it was something we did a lot when we were living in Dallas. And we now live in a fairly small town where there's not a lot to do in. the evening anyway and there's like three restaurants so dinner party is kind of what people do here and we do attend a fair number of those and we've had people over for dinner a few times and what we usually do is kind of have people over for like a post bedtime drink or something on the back porch is kind of our current thing because we've got a little one sleeping from from seven o'clock on so that's sort of where we are i am a big believer in the superiority of private life to like public

things. And I think like staying with friends rather than hotels, even though I like a really nice hotel, is almost always better. Having dinner at home with friends is almost always better than going to a restaurant, including really good restaurants. There's that sort of weird, performative aspect that people slip into when they're in these public settings that they often, they don't do as much when they're at home or at someone else's home, although some people are worse about it when they're in more intimate settings like a house. But in general, I think people kind of behave better in that way. It's easier to have a conversation at a dinner party at someone's home than it is to do that at a restaurant because our restaurants are so

loud because Americans are terrified of having to talk to each other or hearing one another think so they keep the public spaces very, very loud and very cold for some reason, which I don't really quite understand. But yeah, so I'm pro-dunner party. If you would like to invite me, I can tell you what kind of stakes I like and we're ready to go. Noted, Kevin. I'm coming down there. there and I'll let you know and I'll, I know there's a dinner party waiting for me. Jonah, you, uh, I will be. Your thought, thank you.

Your thoughts on dinner parties and I've been to dinner parties with you, Jonah. I've been to a dinner party or two at your house. What do you think? Well, we, um, we've sold that house. And right now, my wife and I live in a veal pen with two aged dogs. So there will be no dinner parties until we move into our new place. But then part of the reason we got the place that we got and, is because we want to do more of that and as empty nesters and whatnot.

It's weird. I like doing it. So one of things, it's, so I am more introverted than one would think given my persona on these podcasts and in my writing. And I have, I have the capacity to be very, very, very, very social.

And then I need to be away from the human. for a while. And I think that applies to my attitude about dinner parties is I think it's great to do. I want to do more of it. But after I've done one, I am like, I never want to do this again. Even though I think that was great, just because I find it exhausting. Like, sort of psychologically, I miss going out to bars with friends. Part of that is just you hit a certain age and, like, scheduling that kind of stuff is hard, although I'm worse at it than most because several of my belong to some of these, you know, like Metropolitan Club kind of places in D.C. And they meet for drinks a lot.

And I'm just, I'm working too much. But I think the broader point is, I think the Derek Thompson argument, the Putnamar, it's real. I blame screens for a big part of it. There's something about having to maintain eye contact for a lot of people that has gotten harder in the era of iPhones and tablets and whatnot. And I think it's one of these things that I think were going to be. going to have to teach a new generation to have more muscle memory, to build up muscle memory,

to do these kinds of things more conscientiously rather than just to have to come to them naturally. I will say, I will not get anybody in trouble or out them. But a young person recently told us in Slack that they, along with other young people we know, or at least some of us know, recently on their own organized a staged reading of like midsummer night's dream which i i read that sentence like four times trying to say what am i what am i missing it cannot mean i know what of these words mean but they cannot mean what they mean in that order and i think that's that said i think it's a great sign of nature's healing it just i was just i was just stunned by it and it's healing in ways we could never have predicted, Jonah.

For sure, yes. Jonah, I got to tell you, I'm a little worried about you from what you're saying of not meeting your friends and stuff enough. And I think that you should really do a self-inventory and really make a real effort in your life to make more time for drinking. Well, the drinking part, that's not the issue, really. It's the social part. Yeah, it's the social part. I mean, there's that Finnish word, Krasnalgna-Kart, which means staying home alone in your underwear while drinking. and it's one of my favorite words.

One of your favorite activities. Cramming more. Jared doesn't wear underwear, we all know. I go home, I put on my spaghetti strainer codpiece, and I relax. That's the jarna we know. Can't wait to go to a dinner party at your house. Cod piece optional. All right.

Well, I will just say, for my part, we are ambitious about wanting to have and host dinner parties. but emphasis on the ambition and not on the execution of it. I think we keep making the excuse in my house that is just not our season of life for hosting dinner parties. But of course, we go to friends' houses for dinner parties who have kids younger than ours and in a different points of life. It's just there's a lot of things going on and sports and school activities, band concerts and that sort of thing where, you know, the idea of having people over on a Saturday. night after we've just played, you know, two baseball games and baseball practice the night before. And it's exhausting just thinking about it. But the rare times that we do, it's always a great time. So I think we need to embrace it. But you guys, it sounds like to me, you guys are bringing up that 12% and contributing a lot to that 12% of people who have hosted friends or gone to a dinner party at a house in 2026.

So good on you and good for you. And maybe there's hope for the future. 27 at the Goldbergs will be a grand time. I promise you that. Excellent, excellent. I can't wait. All right. Well, that is all the time we're going to spend on this. Thank you so much for joining. And we will talk to you all next time. If you want to support what we're doing here, you can rate review and subscribe to the show on your podcast player of choice to help new listeners find us. As always, if you've got questions, comments, concerns, or corrections, you can email us at Roundtable at The Dispatch. dot com. That's going to do it for today's show. Thanks so much for tuning in. And thank you to the folks behind the scenes who made this episode possible, Noah Hickey and Peter Bonaventure. Thanks again for listening. Please join us next time.