The Prof G Pod with Scott Galloway - No Mercy / No Malice: Oppenheimer, Inc.

Episode Date: September 19, 2026

As read by George Hahn. https://profgmedia.substack.com/p/oppenheimer-inc Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

When WestJet first took flight in 1996, the vibes were a bit different. People thought denim on denim was peak fashion, inline skates were everywhere, and two out of three women rocked, the Rachel. While those things stayed in the 90s, one thing that hasn't is that fuzzy feeling you get when WestJet welcomes you on board. Here's to WestJetting since 96. Travel back in time with us and actually travel with us at westjet.com slash 30 years. I'm George Hahn, and this is no mercy, no malice. AI researchers believe superintelligence is an inevitability

and that there's a non-zero chance its arrival could trigger an extinction-level event for humanity. We're at a fork in the road, and the window for choosing which path to take is closing at an unknown rate. In fact, one of the few certainties here is that nobody knows what happens next. Oppenheimer, Inc. A 27-year-old resigns from a firm he spent four months at, triggers a global panic, drawing comments from a former president

and calls from the leaders of Frontier Labs for a slowdown. In 1946, would we have let Robert Oppenheimer raise money from Sequoia Capital and begin selling nukes to the UAE and Procter & Gamble? I'm going on Smirkanis tomorrow, where I'll be asked, what the fuck is going on? The honest answer is, I don't know. What I am certain of? This is another example of a small number of players

capturing staggering economic upside while outsourcing the downside or harms to the broader public. In 2024, a year after Dr. Jeffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, quit Google in order to speak freely about the risks of AI, he won the Nobel Prize in physics. In an interview for the Nobel website, Hinton described two kinds of AI risks.

There's relatively short-term risks, which are very important and very urgent. They're mainly to do with people misusing AI. Examples include a job apocalypse, bullshit in my opinion, productivity gains, accelerating wealth inequality, deep fakes, destabilizing democracy, cybercriminals picking up a dangerous new tool, bias getting embedded in criminal justice, health care, and hiring, and the proliferation of more powerful biological weapons that can be produced more easily by middle powers and

non-state actors. There's also longer-term problems of these things taking over, Hinton continued. The question is what's going to happen when we've created beings that are more intelligent than us. We've never been in that situation before. Anybody who says it's all going to be fine is crazy. Anybody who says they're inevitably going to take over, they're crazy too. Humanity is at a fork in the road. But the choice isn't whether to develop AI superintelligence. It's how to proceed in the face of a technology we cannot fully comprehend or control. One path is to regulate AI. such that we mitigate the risks but reap the rewards.

The other path is to continue full speed ahead, despite a widespread belief among researchers, including Hinton, that there's a non-zero chance that AI superintelligence could present an extinction-level event for humanity in the near future. If the right thing seems obvious, remember that the right thing and the hard thing are usually the same thing. Increasingly, the AI narrative

resembles a Terminator reboot nobody asked for. We've gone from AI will take your job to AI will spike your power bill and devour your water supply to AI will kill everyone. Inspiring stuff, if you're looking to inspire a mob with pitchforks. Technology writer Jasmine Sun

described AI populism as a worldview that regards AI as a thing, manufactured by out-of-touch billionaires and pushed onto an unwilling public to achieve sinister aims like capitalist efficiency, layoffs, and population management, surveillance. This year, voters in seven states will decide on at least 16 local ballot measures related to data centers. Senator Ted Cruz called for substantially more regulation, but stopped short of a moratorium, telling Politico, If they're going to be killer robots, I'd rather they be American killer robots than Chinese killer robots.

Senator Bernie Sanders has proposed a ban on superintelligence and threatened 20-year prison sentences for developers who violate it. Interestingly, Sanders and Steve Bannon both appeared at the pro-human assembly this week. AI politics is manufacturing the strangest bedfellows. As populist anger bubbles up, anthropic CEO Dario Amodi, who briefly held adult-in-the-room status, and other less well-known AI founders, are becoming honorary members of the algorithmic oligarchy.

They're joining Sam Altman, who equated the resources needed to raise children to training AI, and Elon Musk, who slashed aid to the world's most vulnerable people. That AI founders are suddenly concerned about the peril they've created after vesting their way to billionaire status is obnoxious and unhelpful, akin to Dr. Frankenstein begging us to rein in his monster while creating new self-replicating monsters. The robber barons left behind libraries and kind of,

concert halls. The broligarchs will leave behind server farms, a bot infestation, and conviction that we should have been more grateful for everything they did. We're watching the fourth game in the Fuck Around and Find Out World Series. Before we're swept up in the populist moment, we should ask what's going right with AI? Answer? Plenty. Recently, I interviewed journalist Josh Turingale on my podcast. Researching his book AI for Good took Terengel to the Cleveland Clinic, where doctors deployed an AI model to better detect sepsis. It's the leading cause of death in hospitals, killing about 350,000 Americans each year. If caught early, it can be treated with antibiotics. The challenge is detection. This is a perfect problem for AI and machine learning, because sepsis masks

itself by looking like almost anything else, Turingale told me. The Cleveland Clinic AI helped reduce the hospital's sepsis mortality rate by 41%. Deployed across American health care, that model could save more than 140,000 lives every year. Speaking of saving lives, AI is helping to design antibiotics to kill drug-resistant

bacteria and accelerating the timeline for detecting pancreatic cancer by up to three years. Pancreatic cancer kills 52,000 Americans per year. 85% of patients receive a diagnosis after the disease has already spread, and the five-year survival rate remains below 15%. AI is also aiding in the early detection of wildfires, improving hurricane forecasting, and helping archaeologists decipher previously.

unreadable ancient scrolls. Banning AI research or slowing the pace of the frontier, whatever that means, will spill over into areas where AI is rapidly improving our lives. That's why in 2023, climate scientists opposed halting generative AI research, saying that might throttle the development of tools needed to advance knowledge on complex problems with hidden interactions such as climate change. In other words, we risk throwing the baby out with the bathwater. AI founders are alarmed by the non-zero possibility of extinction, but they've still lined up bankers for an IPO. I'm looking forward to the risks section of the S-1s that cast

risking an extinction event as the price for progress. Cybersecurity is also on the front line of the short-term risks. According to recent data from IBM, one in four data breaches so far this year were AI-enabled, a 56% increase year-on-year. When I spoke with cybersecurity expert Alex Stamos on my podcast, he likened AI's democratizing impact on cybercrime to Premier League teams moving up a division. All of the hacking teams are getting promoted up to the next level. Small countries now have the power of big countries.

From a hacking perspective, you're going to see people stand-up capabilities that used to be the kind only intelligence agencies could do. Sophos, a cybersecurity company, puts the average current cost to recover from a ransomware attack, excluding the ransom, at $1.7 million, up 11% year on year. In the aggregate, cyber attacks cost the global economy $10.5 trillion last year. If cybercrime were a country, it would be the world's third largest economy. Meanwhile, the cost of entry for mass harm has gone from a nation-state's budget to a laptop and a grudge.

One of the blind spots in Silicon Valley's Milton Friedman mindset is the belief that all regulation exists in opposition to shareholder value. After Upton Sinclair's The Jungle exposed unsanitary conditions in the meatpacking industry, regulatory compliance in the form of a USDA stamp certified quality. Likewise, SEC and FDIC regulations created in the aftermath of the 1929 crash restored investor and customer confidence. The absence of regulation makes AI so fragile that valuations soar on wild speculation and collapse under clickbait. That fragility extends to the whole market, since the MAG7 stocks register 1,000. third of the S&P 500's value, and to the broader economy as the AI buildout has driven a 32% increase in S&P earnings growth this year. Put simply, if AI sneezes, the market gets walking pneumonia, i.e. a recession. Regulation is the bulwark that keeps a tragedy from becoming a

catastrophe. Mark Zuckerberg. The poster boy for negative externalities run amok says every AI lab has the responsibility and incentive to move at the pace required to train its models safely. We should trust, Zuck, as social media is going great. Donald Trump believes a smart president is the only regulator AI needs. Unfortunately, we can't wait until 2029.

Altman, Emody, and Musk aren't clowns like Trump, but their regulatory ideas, employee-like access to external evaluators and vague promises to welcome a federal safety framework, are reminiscent of Cheryl Sandberg's calls for regulation, performative bullshit. It's time for an international artificial intelligence agency, IAIA, model. after the International Atomic Energy Agency. We could start with a U.S. regulator similar to the Department of Energy that records incidents, approves new models, promulgates safety rules, and has subpoena powers. The key, as Farid Zakaria wrote in June, is to combine private expertise with public authority. Ultimately, that regulator should share bilateral authority with a counterpart in China, where AI is already heavily regulated. As Alice Hahn, director at Greenmantle,

told my markets co-host Ed Elson, sentiment around AI is largely positive in China, but leaders there worry that the absence of a global AI governance authority could set us up for potentially catastrophic AI-related risks. The AI race isn't a reason to delay regulatory. it's a reason to speed it up. That's the lesson of the Cold War, when adversaries cooperated to build real safeguards that have limited weapons proliferation to nine countries, even as they facilitated nuclear power plants in 31 countries.

Mutually assured destruction worked because everyone was terrified. A crisis is a terrible thing to waste, and we have one on our hands. People are terrified again. Every apocalypse needs a villain who insists he's the hero. We have ours, and they believe they can sound the alarm while ringing the NASDAQ bell. History disagrees. Life is so rich.