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More just absolute horrific atrocities to your point about we can put these images that prepare yourself because this is just unbelievable. This is a young girl who is wandering through the flames on the wreckage after a school turned shelter was bombed by Israel in a mass casualty murder slaughterhouse event in Gaza. Dozens were killed in this school strike. I believe thirty six were killed here and at least fifty two people overall in the Gaza strip were killed
on Monday alone, just on Monday. You can see people grabbing buckets of water here and trying to put out the flames. I will tell you that little girl did escape. I saw on an interview with her she escaped, but her mom and all of her sisters, I think five sisters were killed and her dad is in the ICU. So that's the fallout of just this one horrific strike
on the school turned shelter. At the same time, I don't know if you've watched, Emma, some of the coverage of tree yngst Over on Fox News, which appears to be he's he's always been a little bit critical, and he's been very courageous in speaking out on behalf of Palestinian journalists, which I've really appreciated. But he's now produced multiple reports on of Gaza that are quite searing and you know, quite significant given the audience that they are
going out to there. On Fox News, he in particular did a piece on this uh doctor, female doctor whose children were all except one and there were nine of them who were killed in an airstrike. And you know, so he brought this piece to the Fox News audience. Let's go ahead and take a listen to a little bit of that.
Inside Gaza, the death toll is mounting. Over the weekend, a single Israeli strike killed nine children from the Almazard family. New video shows first responders at the sight of the strike in the city of han Yunis. Many of the images too graphic to show. As the charred bodies of young Palestinians are pulled from the rubble at Naser Hospital, their mother, a doctor, received the remains, identifying each child.
As she wept, she said, this is rival. Give her to me. Look at her instinct as a mother, as if her daughter was still alive. She asked to hold her in her arms. She's a pediatrician. See the subconscious reaction. She wanted to embrace her daughter, forgetting that her daughter was burnt in front of her eyes.
With the war grinding on, we do know mediators in both Doha and Cairo are going to still try and reach a ceasefire agreement, but with those ground operations ongoing, it may be difficult.
It's just absolutely unimaginable, Like it's literally unimaginable. You're there at a hospital trying to do your job, and the bodies of your nine children are brought to you and her one remaining child, a son is in serious condition after the strike.
Yeah, it's unimaginable. Credit to Yins, who's done other good segments over at Fox. I think we played one where that covered the killing of the medical personnel by Israel, that's right, right, which was when there were i think over a dozen first responders who were zip tied hands behind their back and basically shot and then covered in mass graves and the Israelis initially tried to deny it.
Then there was footage that came out that Yanks put to the four in that in that report, which contradicted it as to other outlets. And I mean, it's it's amazing to me that they even kind of bother with the excuses at this point, right, they've almost moved away from it entirely, Like you have Bengevier basically openly saying, we're targeting civilians. This is the purpose of what we're doing here.
It it. These are the.
Kinds of things that it's just a new atrossity every day, and and last week I'm sure you covered this a little bit too, Crystal, the reaction to Miss Rachel having that that girl with that double amputeue girl on her show and showing yeah uh rah, showing her the joy that she had on her face when Miss Rachel was singing and she got to meet her in person. Was so deeply moving to me and heartbreaking because you see
that little girl engulfed in fire. Thankfully she's okay, but her whole family is dead, and you think about the level of trauma that that child has to endure. And then you see that video with Miss Rachel and how that for a moment she smiles and laughs even though she can't really stand up anymore because she's still getting
used to her prosthetic legs. How many tens of thousands of Palestinian children who don't know any better or their lives are being completely destroyed, whether it be by trauma or whether it be by maiming, because this genocide can continues unabated, and because the United States is complicit in it. And so back to the Trump policy on this, Yes, I'm happy that they had been speaking directly to Hamas and they got and they conducted these negotiations around the Israelis.
But does that mean that they're also going to restrict arms to Israel. We have not seen that happen, and that is the number one thing that needs to happen to stop this slaughter. We had this under the Biden administration, we have to say it under the Trump administration.
That's right, and we can put D four up on the screen. To your point, Emma, that you know there was direct talks between US delegation and Tamas, Jeremy Scale and Dropsite. I really could cannot recommend their reporting more. They're always ahead and always more accurate than the mainstream sources.
And basically the tld R here.
Is that Hamas and US had some level of under standing agreement on a ceasefire deal, and then Israel came in and said no, and you know, they don't want the word to end. And then rather than the Trump administration calling out Israel as the obstacle to some sort of a ceasefire deal here, instead they threw Hamas. You know, they said Hamas was the obstacle and took Israel side
once again. So it's like, okay, well, then, you know, we're just seeing the same patterns play out as we did under the Biden administration of these secret leaks about oh they're really frustrated and oh we had a tough conversation with bb and oh they're really upset blah blah blah, and oh Trump wants the word to end. If you are still sending the bombs, you don't want the war to end. It's really that simple. Like, until I see you say and do okay, we're cutting off all weapons,
we are not supporting and funding this anymore. And by the way, if an American president, whether it was Biden or now Trump called bebe and said we're cutting off the weapons, that's it. You're done. Guess what they would be done. Yes, we do have that level of power and control. That is the reality of the situation. And so until that happens, then we are still funding, supporting, providing diplomatic cover for the most horrific atrocity of our time.
And it's not even close. I mean this, it truly is. It's a moral issue of our time. And you're right at this point, if like, if you are an American taxpayers even semi aware of what's going on, and you aren't thinking about this every day and speaking so doing something like it's it is a moral failing at this point. It is a moral failing at this point given the children. Just thinking about the children alone, that have been murdered, starved, bombed, amputees, maimed, traumatized.
None of these kids will ever be the same after living through this.
And and there's been polling that has showed this overwhelming majority of Israelis support Donald Trump's plant to purely ethnically cleanse the Gaza strip and move the However, many Palestinians remain. You know, you hear Trump and other people kind of sometimes slip up and say figures that indicate what is likely that hundreds of thousands of Palestinians have actually been killed.
The figure that's being circulated in the mainstream press, I think almost borders on lies and misinformation, So I don't even like to use it because of how inadequate it is. But you when you see that kind of polling, this is just an indication that this is not going to come from inside Israel.
This has to be like in South Africa.
Sorry, it has to be imposed by imposed exactly I mean, and it's more an even more extreme situation, given the level of slaughter of the genocide that we're seeing that in South Africa, it has to be imposed upon them by the international community.
And right now the world's superpower a waning one is decided that the best opportunity for us to hold our grip on power is to maintain our dominant military presence via hard power in the Middle East because we're concerned about China, China's incursion into that area and its increasing
sphere of influence. But they're doing it by things like, okay, helping build infrastructure in the continent of Africa, or by negotiating setting up a brokering a deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia to stop the blockade and slaughter in Yemen, which I still think gets not discussed enough because that was actually a positive diplomatic negotiation that was brokered by China around the United States, and so the US is most That's how I think foreign policy has to be
viewed in the Middle East right now, which is they're trying to create a bulwark against China, and they're doing it by supporting a wholesale slaughter of an indigenous population.
I'm a vigilant. Thank you so much for hanging out with me this morning. It's always a pleasure to see you and hear you're really so much Crystal. Yeah, and tell anything you want to plug, Tell people where they can go and watch the show and all that good stuff.
Sure, I'm the co host of a show called The Majority Report. We're live every weekday noon Eastern. You can find us on the Majority Report YouTube dot com, slash sam Cedar and check us out today if you have the time.
I'm there.
Just mentioned the extremism that has become pervasive throughout Israeli society, and I've got two particular examples. I'm also going to show you the poll that she referenced as well of
where you might see just outright genocidal sentiments expressed. We have a woman here speaking about how you must destroy the offspring of Palestinians, and you also have a mob of a thousand far right Israeli's storming through Jerusalem channing death to Arabs and also so harassing and assaulting any random Palestinians that they happen to encounter.
Let's go ahead and take a look at both of those things.
When there is a war, it doesn't matter who your enemy is, you need to destroy their offspring to prevent them from creating more offspring.
And by the way, that is an annual event. The racist mob, violent assault march through Jerusalem and you know, maybe you think, oh, maybe these are just the maybe this is just the fringe of Israeli society. First of all, note whether you saw any Israeli politicians condemning these genocidal chants and violent actions. Second of all, take a look at this poll that just came out asking Israelis, specifically Israeli Jews, how they feel about various actions views of
the Palestine. So you've got eighty two percent, according to this Penn State University poll, eighty two percent who support ethnic cleansing of Gozzens.
That would be the.
Trump plan, solid majority. Fifty six percent support ethnic cleansing of what they call Israeli Arabs, which are Palestinians who live within Israel, and nearly half forty seven percent support killing all Gosens in cities captured by the IDF. So when Emma was saying, you know, this is not going to come organically from within Israel, even though I really want to praise, you know, there were some brave Israelis who were putting themselves between the racist mob in Jerusalem
and Palestinians. There was also a march that said Palestinian lives matter. Recently to the Gaza border. I want to praise those courageous individuals, but we have to acknowledge that the majority of this society, majority of the citizens, especially Israeli Jews, of this society, have been gripped by a
you know, genocidal fever. And the only way this war comes to an end is from the US taking action and imposing some sort of peace and ultimately some sort of political settlement, you know, on Israelis and you know, to uphold the rights of Palestinians. Could put this next piece up on the screen. There have been some indications that most of the world is starting to realize the way that the genocide in Gaza is going to be viewed by history. And this came from a very surprising place.
So the Israeli has been trying to push forward this quote unquote AID plan, which effectively amounts to using AID as a lure to bait people to be ethnically cleansed down of certain areas of Gaza, forced them to travel to be able to avoid starvation, and then close the door behind them. That the way Jeremy Scahill was describing it. And they hired to implement this AID plan. They hired this group of American mercenaries and set up this what's
called the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. By the way, there's a lot of sketchiness going on of where the funding's coming from. Drop Site is doing some reporting on that as well. But this guy, Jake Wood, who is this you know, ex military effectively like mercenary, who was hired to run this quote unquote aid effort. He has resigned as executive director of the Gaza Humanitarian Foundation. Israeli planned for aid distribution in Gaza that bypasses established NGO and UN channels
Corneia drop Site quote. Wood sites an inability to implement an independent aid delivery plan without violating core humanitarian principles as the reason for his departure. In a statement shared by CNN's Jeremy Diamond, Wood said he was horrified and heartbroken by the hunger crisis in Gaza and had sought to build a neutral, secure mechanism to get food to civilians, but he concluded could not maintain humanity, neutrality, impartiality and
independence under current conditions. He urged Israel to significantly expand the provision of aid into Gaza through all mechanisms, and urged all stakeholders to pursue innovative new methods for the delivery of aid without delay, diversion, or discrimination. So their plan was so unethical that even this American private military contractor mercenary guy was like, I don't want to be associated with this and resigned as executive director. Now the
foundation still exists. Someone else took his slot. They are still moving forward at last. I saw to you, by the way, it doesn't look like aid trucks are getting into Gaza at all. People are still starving to death. The images of emaciated children at the hospital are absolutely horrifying. We know that dozens have already died of hunger starvation
because of this. And you know this is the that they're moving forward with, is using food as a weapon of war to effectuate their ultimate plan of ethnic cleansing. Here's another very noteworthy person who is objecting to the war crimes that are being committed by Israel. So Ahud Olmer, who is a former Israeli Prime minister, put this next
one up on the screen. He wrote a not ed accusing Israel war crimes, saying, in part, what we are doing in Gaza is a war of extermination, indiscriminate, unrestrained, brutal and criminal killing of civilians, a policy dictated knowingly, intentionally, viciously, and maliciously by the government. Yes, we are committing war crimes. And you know this guy is a war criminal himself. By the way, he was Israeli Prime minister during brutal Operation cast Led.
So this is no like lib hippie squish.
This is also a war criminal who even for him, he's like, Okay, this is just undeniable that It's not a few rogue actions taken by undisciplined I don't know if you guys remember at the beginning of Israel's assault on Gaza, we were told, oh, these are just rogue actions here or there if guidelines aren't followed, these soldiers are just being undisciplined. And there was all sort of media commentary of like, when are they going to tell that take the phones and make sure they stop posting
these things on Instagram. No, this is not rogue actions of this or that idea of soldier. This is a government policy of extermination and war crimes. And even a former Israeli Prime minister can no longer deny that fact. This one is also wild to put this last one up on the screen. So the Chancellor of Germany mers blast Israeli offensive in Gaza. Frankly speaking, I no longer understand what the goal of the Israeli army in the Gaza strip is, he said in an interview aired on
public television. To harm the civilian population to such an extent, as has increasingly been the case in recent days, can no longer be justified as a fight against Haman's terrorism. So if you have been tracking any of the actions of Germany, they have been brutal and crushing any sort
of pro Palestinian descent within their own country. Germany, because of their own history of perpetrating the Holocaust self agenocide against Jewish people, has been you know, steadfast and wanting to always back up Israel as a sort of atonement. The irony of course now being that Israel is committing
a genocide. So if you want to say never again, that should obviously apply to any group of people, even an ethnic group that was previously themselves subject to the most horrific and barbaric, you know, mass killing that you can possibly imagine. So when even Germany, when even the German Chancellor feels the need to come out and say, you know what this is, This is too far even for me.
That is really pretty wild.
And we've covered before some of the statements from Canada,
from the EU. You know, there seems from Pierce Morgan, from Theofan, there seems to have been a sort of damn that was broken with regard to I wouldn't say with regard to an increase in morality, but I think it's just become undeniable when you see these you know, this collective starvation, when you see the bombing of the rubble, when you hear Israeli politicians just go completely mask off and say, yeah, we you know they're doing my plan
Nowrich says, of bombing civilian infrastructure. When you hear them talking openly about ethnic cleansing, When you hear them saying openly Smotrich in particular saying openly and not Yahoo as well, that the AID is just a cover to allow them to continue their total war and their plans to forcibly relocate the population, it becomes undeniable what the judgment of history is ultimately going to be.
Now.
The question, of course, the only question that really matters isn't whether these people will be able to like cover their asses in the judgment of history or not. The only question that really matters is whether or not lives are going to be saved, whether or not there's going to be some sort of ceasefire and political solution that
ends the slaughter and the abuse of Palestinian people. And unfortunately, really only the US president can effectuate that outcome at this point, and what we've seen from Trump has been really a continuation of the Biden bb Bear hug strategy, where occasionally he'll say, oh, you know, oh I'm frustrated to axios is Barock revied, but you know, they still ship the weapons, they still provide the diplomatic cover, they still use this, you know, this onslaught as well as
a justification for stripping our own rights here in the US. We haven't seen anything recently that would be encouraging from the Trump administration. So even as the DAN late breaks worldwide, and even as I feel confident that in the history books when people look back, they'll be horrified.
That this wasn't stopped.
They will want to know who said what and who provided the you know, the propaganda cover for these crimes to be committed. Out in the open, announced to the world, justified and celebrated by many publicly, with all of the means and the methods you know described. Even though I feel confident that will be the judgment of history, it remains to be seen how many Palestinian lives can be saved before that ultimate judgment occurs. All right, guys, the
great guests coming up. I'm really looking forward to speaking with Aaron Bassani, who wrote a book called Fully Automated Luxury Communism, which is very mind expanding, is very like it's this sort of techno optimist take from the left on the possibilities of AI. If we had a society structure to make sure that the benefits of not just AI but all sort of like bleeding edge technological developments, if those benefits were actually widely shared. Of course, we
know we don't live in that society. So I wanted to talk to Erin about what he makes of some of the latest AI developments.
Let's go ahead and get to that.
There have been a bunch of wild developments in AI technology, which seems to be moving extremely rapidly, even more rapidly than some of the most optimistic prognosticators had anticipated, and so to break down what this means for the world going forward. We're lucky to be joined by Aaron Bassani, who's the co founder of Navara Media and wrote an excellent book that I really recommend to everyone. Put this up on the screen titled Fully Automated Luxury Communism. Erin great to have you.
It's a pleasure to be with you, Crystal.
So the reason I wanted to talk to you is because I told you i'd read your book before, and I just reread it now because it felt timely inappropriate given the AI shift, And it really takes a sort of lefty techno optimist perspective arguing effectively that these technologies can be used to transform all of our lives in a way that is fully positive and to use, you know, a term that used in the book and the resultso apparently the term of the moment can create abundance for
really everyone and completely transform the way that we relate to work and undermine the power of these capitalists, et cetera. But obviously that would require a dramatic rethinking of the current social contract, and so I just wanted to get some of your thoughts on you know how you're viewing this rapid AI development, you think it's a hopeful sign
or are you concerned? You know, as many people are that as we're sort of barreling towards the possible cliff of AGI and you know, workforce displacement, et cetera, we really haven't grappled, either in the UK or here in the US with the consequences and what the following is going to be in the way we need to radically reorient our societies if this is going to be beneficial for all but a small handful of people.
So I'll start there with your final point in there, Crystal, which is that right now where we're headed in terms of trajectory is a very good place to be for a tiny portion of people, the best part of a decade ago now. Mark Cuban, of course, own of the Dallas Mavericks, a dude on sharks, and I think your version of dragons don over there in the States.
He speculates that the world's first.
Trillionaire would be in the field of artificial intelligence, as it captures value across white collar industries like accountancy, legal services, medical services, all kinds of support work in things like planning, architecture, database management, payroll, everything everything that you know we would hold. If you study hard, go at university and get a decent degree, you'll have a stable job in that industry. Mark Cuban said, all that value is going to be
captured by AI. First people there with first move advantage, the meta, the alphabet of AI is going to get all that and those people, the Zuckerberg's and the Bezelses of the industry will be trillion as there's a reason why there's a ton of people in this race right now. So that's where we could be headed. A few things that are going back to what you started with and things I got wrong. Firstly, remember this book I think was published in twenty eighteen in England. I was writing
it really from twenty sixteen to twenty eighteen. I did not think we would be where we are now.
You had the.
Research or AI of technological changes.
One.
I didn't think that now, and that's with regards to things like machine learning, the stuff you're seeing with generators of AI. It's also the case with the human like robots you're now seeing, particularly in places like China. I also I didn't think that China's electric vehicle industry would be anything like as powerful as it is.
Obviously, the book isn't just about AI and robotics.
It's about renewable energy, it's about you know, offworld asteroid mining, et cetera, et cetera. Pretty much on every account, I didn't expect us to be this far advanced. And so those questions that I raised in the book are actually far more salient in twenty twenty five than I thought they would be. Finally, and it's against something I overlooked. I kind of regret overlooking it is the role played
Crystal of geopolitics and great power politics. This rivalry between the US and China is clearly what is going to drive forward.
AI technological change.
It's one of the reasons now being given by people as why we shouldn't have guardrails. If the US has guardrails, well, then China's going to develop something really powerful and leave us behind, you know. And the exact same conversations are happening in China. So lots of big questions, and you know, I thought we would have maybe twenty twenty five years before they were relevant. But I think before the end
of this decade, Crystal, there's stuff that the left progressives. Basically, anybody who cares about the future society needs to get on top of not just intellectually, but actually with a policy response.
So let's take a look at some of the indications of that rapid development. Focusing in sort of on AI. There have been a bunch of these. There's a new product down I don't remember what it's called that would have been helpful, but it allows you to create these video clips with simple prompts that are indistinguishable from reality, and people have been sharing these around these like fake newscaster clips. Let's go ahead and take a look at a couple of those.
In shocking news, JK.
Rowling's yacht sank with her on board after being attacked by orcas off the coast of Turkey.
Breaking news, a Scottish fold cat named Big White has led an army of felines to seize Buckingham Palace, declaring itself the new King of Britain.
Those are shockingly realistic, even if the content is a little preposterous. You also have a couple of troubling indications, and there's been research to this effect already that some of these chatbots already engage in scheming to try to avoid having their priorities changed or of shutting down. There was this bizarre situation I'm sure you followed with GROCK deciding to talk all about South Africa and white quote unquote white genocide and kill the boar, which was in
some ways, you know, different from what it's humans. In some ways it was consistent with what the humans wanted it to do, but it was in some ways different as well. We can put the E three up on the screen chat GPT ignored an explicit instruction to switch off in some tests that we're being run. We can put the next one up on the screen, which is
really wild. There was a test that was done with the Amazon backed AI model where it, in order to again avoid being shut down, it tried to blackmail an engineer about not a real affair, but they'd given it access to these emails that indicated that an engineer was having an affair and tried to blackmail this person with the affair to try to keep from getting shut down. I mean, it's funny, but it's also terrifying because we're only at this level of development.
It makes you wonder.
It seems like already humans don't have total control over these things. It makes you wonder when we get to that next stage of development, you know how sort of autonomous and out of the hands of the human developers these technologies are going to be.
That's entirely right.
The reporter referred to a few moments ago AI twenty twenty seven.
You know, it speculates the Q three twenty twenty seven.
So a little bit over two years from now, you'll start to see the full automation of research units within big arts fisial intelligence companies, which is to say, AI will be building the AI, at which point we may we may see this is pure speculation, we may see a Jacob with regards to the competational power the problem solving ability of artifacial intelligence. Now, what I've seen in terms of people criticizing that, pushing it back, well that's far too soon.
That won't happen in two years time. Well, even if you think it's going to happen in ten years time.
That's not a particularly good rebuttal you know, even if you think it's twenty years time, I don't think that's a parsticularly good response. But it could happen within two time, and I think we should politically respond in such a manner as to presume that it's very soon, it's very imminent,
and there's a few ways to look at this. So on the one hand, you might get an agi of course, right, you might get something which sounds like the Matrix or sky New Park that for a moment, because I think almost the conversation about an existential threat masks the far more likely and far more pernicious impacts of this stuff.
Park that for a moment. If you do get a business, a private corporate entity with AI that can you know, augment its own intelligence to such an extent that all of a sudden you have just overwhelming superiority in pretty much every field of affairs, every industry, imagine the value capture that's available to that company. It would be like a business discovering, you know, the steam engine and having
patent rights so nobody else can get it. Of course, that happened in the nineteenth eighteenth century other with Watton.
Bolton, but it was a very different.
There wasn't a global market, there wasn't patent law like there is now. Necessarily, you would see something like the steam engine competing against the horse and cart in every major global industry really quickly. You would not want a single firm to have that kind of that kind of monopoly. You wouldn't want that kind of oligopoly either. And I think the far more pernicious threat rather than an AGI is basically what we've seen with big tech over the last twenty twenty five years.
Look what Amazon's done to your high street.
Okay, Look what Meta and and alphabet have done to kids' attention spans. Look what it's done to report it self farm with regards to teenage, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
All these social.
Harms from big tech, the negative fixsonalities, you know, high streets in this country, crist All, they're destroyed because all that value has been captured by these really powerful global corporations. In the United States, I would say five extra, right, and that's the best case scenario. That's not the AGI scenario.
That's the better case scenario. And I almost feel that people like Sam Mortman Elon Musk want to talk about AGI, so we don't talk about the wealth inequality, the regional inequality, the global inequality. Because the only two countries in this rice to China in the US the only two countries. The European Union is not the races, not the Global South is at the rices. And so that to me is the big conversation. Even if you think HI is not plausible, this is still a massive political challenge.
Yeah, no, that's absolutely right. And to your point, you know, some of the consequences may already be here. We can put E five up on the screen. There was an article in New York Times. I'm a LinkedIn executive. I see the bottom rung of the career ladder breaking. And you know, it makes sense that the type of work that new college grads tend to do, sort of like entry level office, white collar jobs, that that would be
the first place that you really spot an impact. So in particular, college grad unemployment is at thirty percent here in the US, which is quite high. We also see a huge spike in applications to law school, which is also it tends to be a recession indicator because people feel like, oh, you know, I want to go out in the job market now, so let me just continue
my schooling. But it also could be an indicator here of you know, people realizing those entry level desk jobs where you're doing spreadsheet analysis, or you're you know, when you're coming out of law school the first year, you know, first year out and you're doing all of this kind
of grunt, relatively routine work. For the more senior level partners, those will be the first things to go where maybe instead of hiring twenty new fresh on a law school students, maybe you hire five and give them chat GPT to do your first right of you know, whatever you're drafting. So in some ways it seems that the pernicious effects
are already starting to show up. You know, Arin, what are what are some of the areas where you think we should be sort of most if we're thinking about triaging this situation, what are some of the areas that you think we should focus on most immediately?
Well, I think you've hit the nail on the head there.
So with the emergence of general purpose robotics in manufacturing, you know, we saw white collar communities be destroyed basically over the last thirty five forty years, particularly in the UK, also the US, much of Western Europe. Many of those jobs went abroad, as people like Donald Trump likes to
talk about, but many, many, many more were automated. I think We're going to see something similar with regards to machine learning and white collar jobs that you say they won't be replaced, just like you know, we still manufacture cars here in the UK with a half fire, far higher rather productivity per person per our works as far fewer people doing the work. I think something similar is going to happen to these kinds of jobs. And I think the first implication that you should draw out of
that is a political one. Peter Turchin did a great book a few years ago and he talked about this idea of elite overproduction. And I do think that when automation deprives lots of ambitious, you know, often moderate to highly intelligent young people of a career that they expected,
they've put themselves in a ton of debt. They feel that they've played by the rules and everything that was asked of them, and then and then they're still back at square one, and you have that elite overproduction and they think, well, I should be a part of the body politic, I should be playing a role. I should have an impact on public life like anybody else. These are people who believe in the idea of citizenship and shaping politics and having agency you know, that's generally how
the middle class conceive of themselves. If you see those people all of a sudden being annihilated by the jobs market, I think that's going to create all kinds of really weird political outgrowths. And I think actually, if you look at for instance, Europe right now, with the growth of the far right, there's a cliche in places like England that older people tended to vote for Brexit, which is true. Older people tend to be more right wing in this country,
that's true. But if you look at Italy, the Netherlands, France, these countries whore actually the young.
You are, the more likely you are to vote for the far right.
I wonder if within that set of circumstances, immigration, stagnating living standards, you know, all the things that are already there, Like if you throw into that job losses for middle class people who may just have had otherwise moderate politics, I wonder what happens, And it feels like a bit of a it feels like a bit of a tinderbox. Over the next ten to fifteen years, I think you'll have many of those people go to the radical left.
I think you'll also have many of those people go to the radical right identity politics of white supremacism and white nationalism, you know, euroinationalism, et cetera. And so that to me is the big thing that happens next to Crystal, because we're in the game of politics and analysis but
also persuasion. And that's something I'm really worried about is that, you know, the young guys today who are going to go work for McKinsey or for Deloitte or you know, a magic circle law firm, that's all taken away from them and they get highly politicized, they become proletarianized, downwardly mobile, and they break to the right. I think that's politically very very concerning over the next decade or two.
And so as a leftist, how do you think about that and how do you think about the program that should be offered to about that? Because I think it's abundantly clear that neoliberalism does not offer anything approaching an adequate solution to the problems of today, let alone the problems of tomorrow.
Yeah, well, I.
Think you know, we're going to have the right analysis on this, and like you say, the next question is, well, what's the propositional response right now? The nativist right will say, to these young people who've just lost everything, maybe I'm being a bit dramatic, because they still have wealthy parents that still inherit some wealth, but they certainly won't be
as wealthy as their parents were. Generally speaking, the response should be if you want a future, if you want to be part of a constructive political project, if you want to be somebody, if you want to be part something.
Bigger than you, then only the left can provide that.
And I do think that's going to be tied up with a word that's now on vogue in the US, Crystal, which is abundance. I do think that's going to be tied up by that agenda. You can have a future of scarcity, or you can have a future of abundance scarcity.
And this doesn't mean.
You have to open borders as a left if I'm not saying that, but the emphasis on excluding others only constructing a society where we all look and sound the same, I think if you look at the political economy of that project on the nativist, white supremacist right, I think, going hand in hand with that, it is no real political technological answer to the stuff we've just talked about AI, machine learning, etc. Who owns these, who benefits from these?
Because ultimately these are extraordinary tools. They have the ability to either create the world's first trillionaire, as I said, predicted by Mark Cuban, or you know, we can have three publicly available universal access to high speed rail and buses within ten to fifteen years.
Why not, you know? And I think that has to be the agenda that we offer.
But I think what's interesting for me and against something I got wrong, is I feel like the future.
Will have aspects of the past.
And I didn't really understand this when I wrote the book, but I feel like we're going to see a emergence of nineteenth century politics, territorial annexation, ethnic identity politics, et cetera. That's going to go hand in hand with some really advanced, hyper advanced technologies. And that's that that's what makes the situation so hard to read, you know, and a good you'll kind of have to sort of invite me here because you read my book, a good book, a good novel.
To think of this all through as the is the book June, I think, which offers a really interesting prism.
On the one hand, you have hyper.
Advanced technologies accompanying effectively a quasi feudal political order. And you know, we always presume that technological advance will go hand in hand with you know, social political advance, or at least be linear progression. Right, I suspect we may we may start to see that sort of disconnecting. You know, we might see societies moving away from a quality end of the law back towards feudal kind of feudal social
ties combined with out special intelligence. I know I might send a bit crazy here, but I think.
No, I mean, I.
Think anyone who's really paying attention already sees the signs of that. You know, Naomi Kline who actually came up earlier in the show, and I was talking to Emma Vigeland. She talks about this prepper mentality. But at the nation state level where you're you know, and you see it in the US with Trump. You know, we're going to take Greenland, We're going to take Gaza, We're going to
take Panama. You know, we're going to do this exploitative like colonial style minerals deal with Ukraine where it's you know, okay, we're not pretending that we care about democracy and human rights anymore, except when it comes apparently to white people in South Africa, that's all out the window. But we are going to do old school territorial acquisition and imperialism. I mean, he models himself after William McKinley, who's like a turn of the century president and who was the
first to sort of expand the US empire. Talks about manifest destiny and it really is this like Prepper mentality,
except applied to an entire nation. And then of course Curtis Yarvin, who's been intellectually influential with this administration, especially with like the tech but Peter Til's and those people and Jade Vance Elon Musk within the administration, you know, they he explicitly argues for a techno feudalist future, and Peter Tile has funded some of these techno feudalist societies as little you know, trial runs on what that could look like.
So I don't think it.
I think if you're paying attention to those things, you already see the signs of the direction that you're that you're predicting here.
Well, I'm glad you I'm glad you agree, But you know, if you listen to people in legacy media, most mainstream analysis, although that's slightly changing. They think that that stuff is for the birds. But I couldn't agree more. Take Trump for since, with this his enthusiasm to have africaner migrants refugees come to the United States, you can almost see and look, I don't know, I don't know Donal Trump and has never met the man. I'm certainly not. I'm
not in the habit of ventriloquizing. White people are doing things and what they might say to excuse their actions. But you can almost see Trump and the people around them saying, well, look, it's good European Africana stock. You know. I don't know if you watch Rugby a crystal, but you know South Africatia they have lots of big Africanas six foot ten, you know, two hundred and thirty kilos.
That's what they have.
Environment of good white European stock comes to the US, and like you say, it's a mindset that sounds like something from one hundred and fifty two hundred years ago. But I feel like that's the world where we're moving towards. And you have right now, and who knows right it's
a very volatile political coalition that Trump has. But you have this extraordinary political coalition that includes people like that, and at the same time, you know people like Teal, multi billionaires, very very powerful people who are at the
front of technological innovation in the United States. But of course the big question is is the United States it's going to remain at the forefront of global techological innovation because the other player in this whole story is the Chinese Communist Party, and for better or worse, they have a very different model with regards to politics. Implicitly, I think has a critique of capitalism. It's a market society, but the politics of that society is not determined by big C capital.
It's very different.
It actually has a national interest in its heart and a people's interest it's heart that I think is fundamentally different to the United States and some European countries. So that to me is that is the intriguing conflict of the next several decades as we move I think towards AGI is what is that technology going to be programmed with? What's the social software that's going to accompany it? A company it I don't think it's going to be the sort of liberal mores of the twentieth century.
I just don't think that's going to happen.
I think we're seeing the end of the post Second World War social liberal order over and the question is what's it going to be replaced by. I think the left has hindered itself by repeatedly, for well for at least fifteen years, by repeatedly tying itself to a failing, collapsing liberal social order. We have to understand that if we continue to do that in the West, at least certainly in the anglophone countries, there'll only be one game in town, which is the right. And again that might sound,
you know, hyperbolic. You're seeing signals of it now, you know. I think, particularly with young men, this is what really alarms me. I think if the next five years are like the last five years, you're almost looking at hegemonic politics of extremism amongst younger men, and that should really worry people.
I think last question for you, Aeron before I let you go. I really appreciate you taking the time. You're you know, very insightful to get your thoughts on this. If you were advising a presidential candidate in twenty twenty eight and you know put aside actually like what the polls would say, But just think in terms of the right policy. Would you advocate for freeze on a development, would you advocate for the government basically like buying and
nationalizing these technologies? Like what do you think is the correct direction at this point?
I suppose if you had something of a freeze on it, the American deep state would get rid of you quite sharpish, right.
If I don't know, I don't really believe in American deep state anymore. I feel like they would have taken up for long ago if at the bomb market, that's the real deep state, I think true.
No, you are right, that's true.
But you know, I think there's a very real possibility that China if you did put the guard right, and this is this is this is something which people I don't like politically. This is something they're saying which is probably true that if you didn't put guardrails on this stuff. Sorry, if you did put guardrails and stuff in the United States and the Chinese development, you are at a massive disadvantage.
I think that's true.
So you have a couple of options, right, you work together to put guard rails on it. That would be My priority is contract rails. Yeah, sure of that. And if China's you know, sure of that. My policy would be that the US government should have equity shares in any major company with a market cap above a certain amount developing AI. The United States government, federal government has to have a five percent equity stake in that business. We have to have people on your board. Sorry, it's
just too important. That might sound quite radical, quite extreme. That's still a market economy, right, you still got private businesses. But the point is people representing the body politic, the American citizen large, that they'll be reflecting the kinds of decisions that those companies make.
I mean, that's something I would do anyway.
The French do that, by the way, all their all their big successful companies. The French government has a nice equity share in them, and it means they're involved. Yeah, so they're involved in those decisions. Now, you can have stupid people in those organizations and they screw those businesses up.
That's not good.
But you know, the States seem to do pretty well, right that. The Norwegian seems to do pretty well. Their sovereign wealth fund is managed by government officials that they're doing a great job.
So I mean that would be my one thing would be you.
Know what, the United States government ship a five secuity share in Apple, Nvidia, Tesla, you know, Meta, et cetera, et cetera.
That's probably what I would do.
And I'd also say, you want you want domestically produced microprocesses, which is probably something that Trump gets right, but the policy would be rather different. And again the business that's doing that, which would be a little bit like what the Taiwanese have done over the last thirty years with TSMC, that would I think have to benefit from public funding, and so it should probably be publicly owned.
Yeah, I agree with all of that.
I mean, it should not be left to like Elon Musk, Sam Altman and Jeff Bezos to decide the future of society, which at least get to have a little bit of a democratic say in what happens, because otherwise we know we know the end the end of the story, like tremendous, unfathomable amounts of wealth and power accumulating in just a handful of individuals who you know, regardless of whether you
like them or not. No one person should have that level of power, and we know who it would come at the expense of as well, Aaron, tell people where they can find you and anything else that you want
to plug and share with them. And again I really recommend to people your book because I think it is very I think it's very thought provoking, and I also think sometimes on the left we can think sort of small ball in a sense, and so just to read something that was you know, expansive in its vision was also very mind opening for me.
That's very kind. I mean, I do agree with you there. And the people that think big right now are the right. You know, people like you do to Mask Jeff Bezils, they think big logistically, but also in terms of their vision.
They're thinking really big big.
You know, they're very serious about their project's Pete the tail is thinking big. You know, this guy funds journals for really your you know, minor French intellectuals because in his mind he's trying to build something which outlasts him. And I think we on the left should be doing something similar. You know, in Virmedia, we've been going for
more than ten years now, we're close to fifteen. You know, I want this organization to be here for long after I'm gone, and whether or not that happens is another question, and I think that's what the Left needs to do is think big, think long term. You know we are we are people within history with people within a movement which was around a long long time before us and hopefully long time afterwards, and we need to leave it in a much better stay than we found it sitting
in the English speaking world. In terms of where people can find me, I'm on x at arab Bustani and on Instagram. That's mostly my family and my dog. In terms of Naviro Media, you can find us on Instagram, x TikTok everywhere, YouTube of course, just in Environ media. We're closing on a million subscribers on YouTube. We're trying our best to imitate you guys over there, so if people can subscribe to us as well, then you know that's good, might help help us get over the million monk.
Amazing.
Well, you guys do fantastic work, so I know you will reach that milestone in no time at all. Erin thank you so much. I hope you come back all right, guys. That does it for us. Thank you so much for watching today. Ryan and Emily will be in tomorrow. Thank you for bearing with whatever's going on with my face. I also if my brain seemed a little bit out of it today. My cat was missing for a while. She is now returned, but I was very freaked out and worried about that. But kitty is back, my face
will be fine. Thank you guys for watching, and I will see you on Thursday.