June 17, 2025 - Bannon's War Room
48:15
Participants
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| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
| This is the primal scream of a dying regime. | ||
| Pray for our enemies. | ||
| Because we're going medieval on these people. | ||
| I got a free shot at all these networks lying about the people. | ||
| The people have had a belly full of it. | ||
| I know you don't like hearing that. | ||
| I know you've tried to do everything in the world to stop that, but you're not going to stop it. | ||
| It's going to happen. | ||
| And where do people like that go to share the big lie? | ||
|
unidentified
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MAGA Media. | |
| I wish in my soul, I wish that any of these people had a conscience. | ||
|
unidentified
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Ask yourself, what is my task and what is my purpose? | |
| If that answer is to save my country, this country will be saved. | ||
|
unidentified
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War Room. | |
| Here's your host, Stephen K. Bannon. | ||
| Monday, 16 June, Year of the Lord 2025. | ||
| So Natalie, following on from the first hour. | ||
| Walk through these, just briefly, give me these groups, and tied together the groups are also trying to promote the forever wars that they want the United States in. | ||
|
unidentified
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Sure. | |
| So one of the big ones is the Tides Foundation, which people may recall they were funding a lot of the protesters outside the DNC. | ||
| They were funding a lot of the Hamas demonstrators, but they're also on both sides of the conflict, right? | ||
| They prop up a lot of these sort of more traditionally left-wing NGOs, which obviously don't like what's going on in Gaza, but you're also talking sort of the strand of Atlantic Council and Brookings Institution, right? | ||
| These huge think tanks. | ||
| And again, the term NGO is sort of a mistake. | ||
| Misnomer, it almost seems to be oxymoronic, because these NGOs are funded to the tune of like 90% from federally government-funded grants. | ||
| And a lot of these non-profits, I think that they really are the sort of archetype, if not an instrumental tactic in a color revolution, not just in what we've seen against Trump, but just in the idea of trying to make ideas or constructs that are very unpalatable to the American people to shove it down their throat, because through the lens of an NGO, right, just from addiction framing, It makes it seem like it's something organic and that people are genuinely promoting. | ||
| So that's why I think that they prefer to conduct a lot of their, whether it's lawfare or in some cases like in L.A., almost kinetic-level warfare, through these NGOs. | ||
| One of the primary groups out in L.A. is a group called CHURLA, which we've discussed. | ||
| They receive upwards of 90 percent of their funding, at least from their last audit, from the government, primarily the state government. | ||
| But this is a group that's very hardwired into the Democratic Party apparatus, Adam Schiff, Kamala Harris. | ||
| Having spoken there, but just recently, actually shout out to my mother who went to the protest and pulled some of the flyers. | ||
| That's the picture you're seeing on the screen right there. | ||
| This one was being handed out from the Immigrant Legal Resource Center, which sort of has two, I would say, cardinal sins against it. | ||
| And you see this with a lot of these left-wing nonprofits, particularly involved in the border space. | ||
| One is that it's a partner of ActBlue, which means that they use them for their fundraising. | ||
| Again, that's the official fundraiser of the Democratic Party that's also been embroiled in scandals, not just of the fake contributions, right, the smurfing, but also taking foreign donations and through gift cards or other sort of nefarious motives. | ||
| But in this case, this one group, which if you could read that. | ||
| But since 2018, annually, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, so not even Forward US, that's their other open borders advocacy group, the actual Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, the same group notorious for influencing, if not outright stealing, the 2020 election for Democrats, | ||
| they've been funding hundreds of thousands of People may recall, Steve, the story that we broke that was so toxic to the Zuckerberg newfound MAGA brand that he actually put out a whole story, a puff piece in the New York Times attacking me by name, attacking this show. | ||
| And this group is just one of dozens of these far-left groups that not just are involved in the border space, but are actively opposing President Trump, lawfare, judicial nominees, protests, you name it. | ||
| Natalie, let's get this out. | ||
| Grace and Mo, let's push it out on all the platforms. | ||
| Natalie, amazing analysis as usual. | ||
| Last question. | ||
| Bibi Netanyahu on the Jonathan Karl interview said this is not about America first, but it's about America dead. | ||
| As one of the young leaders of the MAGA movement, what is your response, ma 'am? | ||
| Well, that is quite a role. | ||
| I don't know if I accept it, but that's a lot of responsibility. | ||
| But I guess we'll take it because the other people I'm looking around and seeing are having horrible takes on this issue. | ||
| But look, I think Jonathan Karl was actually wrong. | ||
| I don't think that Netanyahu was trying to appeal or appease President Trump. | ||
| He was trying to appeal to you guys, to the MAGA base. | ||
| And that shows you how powerful of an audience and a movement you are, right, using your terminology, trying to make the case. | ||
| And I know I've told the audience before. | ||
| War Room was invited to a roundtable discussion that he held at Blair House when he was visiting the United States. | ||
| I was, you know, honored to attend. | ||
| It doesn't influence my coverage, as you can probably tell from what I've been saying. | ||
| But I wanted to go because I wanted to see what his pitch to a lot of journalists and influencers was going to be. | ||
| And his theory of the case was that the United States deep state is, you know, one tenth of the Israeli deep state and that he's a bigger enemy of the deep state and that the reason why the United States should go after Iran is because they can hit us too. | ||
| I'm happy to report that I would say 90% of the people in that room, it was under Chatham House rule, so I'm not going to dox anyone, but I'm sure you can probably envision from the discussion you had this morning the people associated with a certain outlet probably being the 10% detractors, but 90% of the people in that room did not buy it. | ||
| Knew that their audiences were not going to buy it. | ||
| And by the way, Steve, I know you always mention the live chat, but that's because how many shows can you watch where you're actually going to hear this discussion? | ||
| Not even saying that we're actually right, just putting these opinions out there. | ||
| And I think it goes back to where we started this discussion. | ||
| How often have you heard now the new idea that the reason why this sort of MAGA right is so misinformed on the Israel, Palestine, or Gaza issue is because of our information sourcing or foreign influence campaign. | ||
| I, again, think that's insulting to our intelligence. | ||
| We're extremely well-informed. | ||
| We're probably better informed than most people. | ||
| And it's just a different set of values. | ||
| And like I said, this is a chance to kinetically codify what President Trump has done with NATO and burden-sharing. | ||
| And just like the same people who say democracy dies in darkness now want to tell us who our enemies are, democracy will die if we invade Tehran or do anything in that. | ||
| Because the number one tenet of the MAGA movement, why I got involved, why all of us did, Natalie Winters, great summation. | ||
| Ma 'am, where do people get you on social media? | ||
| Natalie G. Winters on all platforms. | ||
| Thank you for having me, as always. | ||
| Thank you very much. | ||
| We're going to get some polling that's going to blow you out of the water by Steve Cortez about this entire immigration issue, but I want to lead with John Lott. | ||
| John, you're known as someone that really understands statistics, how to present them, how to think them through. | ||
| Talk to me about this piece about with deportations increasing, crime rates are dropping. | ||
| I actually thought the illegal alien invaders that were here are the most peaceful people in the country and actually making us a kinder and gentler nation, sir. | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, I mean, often when people talk about immigration and crime, they're lumping together both legal and illegal immigrants. | ||
| Legal immigrants actually commit crime at very low rates. | ||
| Illegal immigrants commit crime at very high rates. | ||
| And when you mix those two together, you kind of obscure those very significant differences that are there. | ||
| Look, even the Biden administration last year came out with a report from the deputy director for ICE saying that of the so-called non-detained individuals, about 7.4 million of them, 9 percent or 662,000 had criminal records. | ||
| And that's probably an underestimate for many reasons, primarily because these were individuals who overwhelmingly voluntarily turned themselves in at the border. | ||
| They're not the ones that you should be most concerned about. | ||
| There are other issues about the fact that a number of countries were not providing information to the Biden administration on the criminal backgrounds for their citizens. | ||
| Venezuela, for example, would be one country, but there are a number of others that were there, too. | ||
| We had a large number of individuals who were released who we had no idea, no way of checking what their criminal backgrounds were. | ||
| But Kash Patel just came out a week ago and said that we are on track right now for having the lowest murder rate ever historically in the United States. | ||
| Part of that is simply because we're taking law enforcement more seriously. | ||
| We've gone and moved FBI agents out of the Washington DC. | ||
| We're making it so that the problems that the Biden administration was causing for local police departments around the country in terms of pushing DEI for hiring and promotions inside the department rather than getting people who could do the best job in those areas. | ||
| Those things matter. | ||
| And make a difference in crime. | ||
| But the other thing that matters is the deportations. | ||
| And it does it in two ways. | ||
| One is, obviously, they've been concentrating on removing criminal illegal aliens. | ||
| But also, even the criminals that you're not catching yet, they have an incentive to keep their heads down because they worry that if they get caught committing a crime, | ||
| And so one way to avoid that is simply to try to be quiet for some period of time and not draw attention to themselves that could be more likely to be arrested if they go and commit a crime now as opposed to a crime that maybe they committed a year ago. | ||
| Amazing analysis. | ||
| Where do people go to get this article? | ||
| We're going to push it out, but we want people to get your social media. | ||
| You've got another piece on DEI I want to get you back on tomorrow, the next day, in law enforcement. | ||
| talk to me about one Thank you, brother. | ||
| John Lott, fantastic. | ||
| Let's get this pushed out, Moe and Grace. | ||
| Thank you, John, for changing your schedule around and joining us. | ||
|
unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Brother Cortez, I've got some news to report. | ||
| It has not come out yet. | ||
| Not totally official, but I don't think I'm jumping too far ahead of this. | ||
| I believe, Cortez, that DHS is going to reverse today the off-limits on farm and hotel guidance that they put out last week. | ||
|
unidentified
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Wow. | |
| That, ladies and gentlemen, is 100% the pressure of this audience and the pressure of the MAGA base. | ||
| Pretty extraordinary. | ||
| Steve, what you just heard right there about legal immigration, super low on crime, but illegal immigration is very high on crime. | ||
| That's one of the reasons with the deportation, because we're not deporting, obviously, legal immigrants. | ||
| But the illegal immigrants that are here deported, it kind of dovetails into intuitively what your polling shows. | ||
| And this polling, people, I think, are about to be kind of shocked. | ||
| Take it from the top. | ||
| We've got plenty of time to walk us through it. | ||
| You bet, Steve. | ||
| Listen, the American people, you're right, intuitively understand they may not be math geniuses like John Lott is, and he is a statistical genius. | ||
| They may not have all his skills, but they grasp intuitively what he has found through the data. | ||
| And by the way, thank you for highlighting John Lott. | ||
| He does amazing work. | ||
| I mentioned him by name in my most recent documentary on deportations because he does disprove that media myth that illegal migrants somehow don't commit crimes at a higher rate than American citizens. | ||
| They actually do commit crimes at a very high rate. | ||
| And he proves it with the numbers. | ||
| But regarding this new polling just out in this polling, I started taking last Monday. | ||
| So right after the weekend of violence in so one week ago after the weekend of violence in Los Angeles, all of the unrest, all of the anti-ice, anti-police violence, the Newsom Trump. | ||
| We were taking this polling, taking the temperature of the country in the midst of that. | ||
| And what we find, thankfully, Steve, is that the resolve of the American people to fight illegal migration and to insist on deportations, that resolve has only hardened. | ||
| It has only steeled because of the antics of these radicals. | ||
| And let me give you the exact numbers. | ||
| By nearly two to one margin right now, Americans, 60 to 32 percent. | ||
| Support mass deportations. | ||
| And Steve, I quite purposefully in the polling used that phrase because that's not necessarily a kind phrase, right? | ||
| Mass deportations. | ||
| But I used that phrase 60 to 32. Overall, national poll, Americans in favor of mass deportations. | ||
| If we look into some of the subgroups among Catholics, this is very important because Catholics decided the national election. | ||
| The reason that Donald Trump won the national popular vote is because of how much better he did among Catholics versus 2020. | ||
| Among Catholics, 64%. | ||
| deportations clearly do not agree with the U.S. Catholic hierarchy here in the United States that is pro-open borders. | ||
| Among senior citizens, 65 percent of seniors support mass deportations. | ||
| should they be prosecuted? | ||
| 68 to 21 said yes. | ||
| 68% of Americans said prosecute them, charge them criminally. | ||
| Only 21% say no. | ||
| Among men in America, 74% say yes, prosecute them. | ||
| Among Hispanics in America, and again, Donald Trump won Hispanic men nationally in the popular vote. | ||
| Among Hispanics, 64% say yes to law and order, prosecute those who use violence in the streets, in demonstrations, and those who interfere with ICE and other law enforcement. | ||
| So what you're telling me, Steve, thankfully, is that, and look, Donald Trump often does this. | ||
| He often sort of floats ideas out there, right? | ||
| And sees what kind of feedback he gets. | ||
| Boy, does he listen to his base. | ||
| And his base on this and his base plus, right, there's a super majority in favor of this, supports a... | ||
| And by the way, to put this poll in context too, Steve, just so that the audience knows that I'm not cherry-picking here, okay? | ||
| I didn't push poll and select some super MAGA group. | ||
| The overall approval for Donald Trump in this poll is minus 7%. | ||
| So I got 43% approved. | ||
| 50% disapproved, which is relatively consistent with most national polling right now. | ||
| So this is not a MAGA universe that I was polling. | ||
| Yet, even though I got 43% approval, There's an overwhelming supermajority. | ||
| You've got Trump upside down, 43-50. | ||
| Correct. | ||
| Which also tends to be some of the national polls. | ||
| Again, 44, 45, 46, 47, some of them. | ||
| 4350, but on his signature issue, It's the mass deportations, and you use that word. | ||
| You have a poll that has him upside down, 43-50, on approval, yet on his signature issue, on the most controversial piece of it, these numbers are at 64% and 65%. | ||
| How does that work? | ||
| I mean, is this like the most popular? | ||
| We should never again talk about Israel and Iran. | ||
| We should never again talk about anything until this is done, right? | ||
| No, you're right. | ||
| Here's the thing, Steve. | ||
| I guess I would mildly push back at you. | ||
| I almost never disagree with you. | ||
| It's actually not controversial. | ||
| At least it's not to regular people. | ||
| Now, is it controversial to decision makers, to the corporate media, to the donor class? | ||
| Yeah, you bet it is. | ||
| I mean, is this controversial to talk about in the faculty lounge of a university or maybe at your country club? | ||
| Is it controversial there? | ||
| It certainly is. | ||
| But among the masses of the American people, is it controversial to say that we as a people have a sovereign right to decide who enters this country and how they enter, what are the procedures for entering here legally? | ||
| And if you are violent in the streets, and if you interfere According to my polling, none of that is controversial. | ||
| And you're exactly correct, though. | ||
| There's a healthy number of people in this country who don't consider themselves MAGA, who don't consider themselves Trump supporters, yet completely support the Trump America First immigration agenda, law and order agenda. | ||
| I want to go through three sets of tweets. | ||
| They had the issue, and this, I think, talks about how President Trump relates to his base and listens to his base audience. | ||
| They had this controversial thing about we're not going to go. | ||
| I've talked to some people. | ||
| Some people are getting due, and we're not going to do agriculture anymore. | ||
| We're not going to do hotels, restaurants, etc. | ||
| After that, he came out hours later with, I just want to reinforce, there are 20 million illegal alien invaders in this country, and they're all getting deported. | ||
| That was number one. | ||
| Number two, he then came out and said this thing today that he's got, well, the hint that it's going with that in no circumstances. | ||
| Is he going to stop that? | ||
| DHS is about to give guidance on that. | ||
| What is your take on this? | ||
| President Trump, I think, heard right away that this was not playing with the base, that when they say mass deportations, that's what they bought into. | ||
| He listened to that, and that's why you've seen this reversal? | ||
| Yeah. | ||
| No, I think you're exactly correct. | ||
| Also, Steve, I think this is important, and of course his detractors would never admit this, but President Trump is a magnanimous leader. | ||
| I mean, he is, right? | ||
| And he feels for people who are here illegally. | ||
| He feels for them. | ||
| If this were up to just Cortez and Bannon, right, all of them would be on their way out immediately, right now, no questions asked, right? | ||
| President Trump is a bit more judicious, perhaps, than I would be, than you would be. | ||
| And so he thinks about these things very deeply and considers literally, you know, both sides of the issue. | ||
| We're not realizing, I think, smartly, correctly, and gauging where the people are en masse, not just where Cortez and Bannon are, but where are the American people, that we've had enough of illegal migration. | ||
| We cannot handle this level of illegality. | ||
| It's bad for wages. | ||
| It's bad for national security. | ||
| It's bad for our street safety. | ||
| And the polling proves that the more that the left doubles down and triples down on this issue, the more it benefits America first, the more it benefits Donald Trump. | ||
| And so he should double and triple down on the other side of law enforcement, of only tolerating legal, orderly immigration into this country and insisting that those who came here illegally must leave. | ||
| Prioritizing, of course, the most dangerous people first. | ||
| We've seen, as John Lott has proven with his numbers, we've seen some of the benefits of that already. | ||
| We're going to see a lot more benefits going forward. | ||
| But once we have expelled the most dangerous people, we have to get to all of the illegals. | ||
| And here's the thing, too, though, Steve. | ||
| New York Post reported on this. | ||
| What we're already seeing- is a massive amount of self-deportation. | ||
| And that's the best kind, of course, when we don't have to go grab you because it's expensive and it puts American officers at risk. | ||
| But self-deportation, by making it difficult to stay, by saying we're going to make it difficult if you're illegal to have a job, we're going to tax your remittances back to your home country, there's going to be financial deportation that Secretary Scott Bessent has talked about. | ||
| Let's make life more difficult for the illegals and better for American citizens. | ||
| And part of what we're going to see, we need to do forced deportations, of course. | ||
| We have to have that. | ||
| But we're also going to have more voluntary self-deportations if we have the right policies. | ||
| And we're already seeing that. | ||
| Only months into office. | ||
| This is a massive win already. | ||
| According to New York Post, a million illegals have left already. | ||
| Trump and Vance have only been in office for a few months. | ||
| And if a million have already left, that's incredible progress. | ||
| And more to do, of course. | ||
| But let's celebrate that win. | ||
| By the way, you're seeing crime drop, and that's going to be more evident over time. | ||
| I read a piece today where wages, particularly for low-skilled workers, are, guess what, starting to increase. | ||
| And there's this great story out there, I guess, out in Nebraska, where, you know, they're saying, oh, they had a raid on a poultry thing and it's terrible. | ||
| American citizens showed up for hours filling out applications to take jobs there. | ||
| So you're seeing this across the board, are you not, Steve? | ||
| This could be a virtuous cycle. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| Absolutely. | ||
| And I'm so glad you mentioned that, by the way, because I put up a post on my social media, folks can find it, where NBC engaged in sort of a self-own about that very story in Nebraska. | ||
| Because you can tell just by the tone, the way in which it was written, that NBC thought it was revealing something scandalous when it said, oh my gosh. | ||
| There's the waiting room, the lobby of the company is full of people applying for jobs. | ||
| Well, no kidding. | ||
| These are American citizens. | ||
| And they even said, by the way, many of them Spanish-speaking, but American citizens, okay, bad hombres, American Hispanics, who guess what? | ||
| We want those jobs because they are American citizens and they will take those jobs once the illegals have been punted from them and probably be paid better than the illegals were and be treated better than the illegals were. | ||
| So that's a massive win for the United States. | ||
| Steve, if I can mention just one other thing quickly from my polling, because I think this is important. | ||
| And I'm going to write an op-ed on this. | ||
| And it's unrelated, but I think related in a way, because it's about American sovereignty. | ||
| Another issue that I asked about is the United States disengaging from Ukraine. | ||
| I gave the predicate statement in the poll. | ||
| I said Donald Trump has brought the Russians and Ukrainians together. | ||
| That alone is an achievement, right? | ||
| Getting them to talk together. | ||
| I then said if they do not achieve peace, if those two parties can't achieve peace, should the United States start to disengage? | ||
| And I think this is important. | ||
| And the reason I think it's related is When I asked if we should disengage, very similar numbers to immigration, by the way. | ||
| 62% said yes, disengage. | ||
| 62 to 34. Among young Americans, those who might be sent to fight if we continue to escalate that war. | ||
| among young Americans, 69%, 69 to 19 said disengage. | ||
| Among parents, I'm guessing, Steve, a lot of those parents, those 72% of parents who say we should disengage, I'm guessing a lot of them, like me, have a young man at home. | ||
| I have an 18-year-old son, and I will be damned if the globalists in Washington, D.C. and Kiev are going to send young American sons, including my own, to go and die in a foreign war. | ||
| It is not going to happen. | ||
| A needless, senseless foreign war. | ||
| I think my polling reflects my thinking on this issue and, frankly, my emotion on this issue. | ||
| I think there's a lot of people who think and believe and emote similarly to me. | ||
| And I think that's also related to immigration. | ||
| The border that matters is our border. | ||
| Our problems are here at home. | ||
| They're not in the Middle East. | ||
| They're not in the Black Sea. | ||
| They're right here. | ||
| You talk about the Middle East, and we talk about a priority of getting back to these multiple raids, which President Trump also said in a tweet that he's going to have multiple raids, three times more into the central cities. | ||
| This was the big deal he's making over the weekend. | ||
| He's going to tell ICE to triple. | ||
| As a MAGA member, when you hear B.B. Netanyahu tell Jonathan Karla, ABC News, it's not about America first, it's about America dead. | ||
| What is your thought, sir? | ||
| You know, my thought is that, listen, no foreign leader, even a friendly one, and obviously Israel is a friend, but even a friendly foreign leader should not lecture to the American people about what is in our U.S. national interest. | ||
| We will determine that. | ||
| We, as populist nationalists in the United States, will determine what is in our national interest. | ||
| Bibi Netanyahu does not have a great track record, by the way. | ||
| I would also point out on these issues, and for people who might not have been paying attention for a long time, way back. | ||
| 20-plus years ago, he was one of the chief proponents of the United States getting involved in the disastrous Iraq War. | ||
| He was hat and glove, hat and hand, excuse me, hand and glove. | ||
| With Colin Powell, with George W. Bush, instigating and promoting the disastrous invasion of Iraq. | ||
| He was wrong then. | ||
| He's wrong about America getting involved now. | ||
| We wish all the best to our Israeli friends and allies in their mission, and they will determine what they need to get done regarding Iran. | ||
| They've had stunning success so far, but this is not our American fight. | ||
| Steve Cortez, social media. | ||
| Where do people go to get the poll and all your writings? | ||
| Yes, please. | ||
| CortezInvestigates.com. | ||
| Cortez with an S. Thank you, Steve. | ||
| Steve, thank you so much. | ||
| Great polling. | ||
| Mo Bannon to Bibi Netanyahu. | ||
| I agree with Steve Cortez, but I want to say it's America's sons and daughters that you'd be sending over into war, and a lot of the warmongers in this country have never served this country or gone over in a forever foreign war. | ||
|
unidentified
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We do not want to get involved again. | |
| We do not need to spend, you know, So I say America first, and that's where I stand. | ||
|
unidentified
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No more foreign wars. | |
| I'd like everybody in the chats to give us your opinion on America first or America dead by the Israeli Prime Minister. | ||
| What are your thoughts? | ||
| Let's get them up so we can read a couple of three. | ||
| Short commercial break. | ||
| Going to artificial intelligence. | ||
| Next. | ||
| Next. | ||
|
unidentified
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Here's your host, Stephen K. Band. | |
| Okay, breaking news. | ||
| I want to get this real quickly because we have a great cold open for our guest in artificial intelligence. | ||
| Axios is reporting the White House and the President have informed both Middle Eastern allies and also folks at G7 that the United States does not intend to get involved in any combat operations. | ||
| Against or in Persia unless specific Americans and /or American assets are targeted. | ||
| We'll have more on that tomorrow morning, but that's breaking news, and I think it shows the Never War wing, and we're not isolationists. | ||
| Nothing upsets me more than they caught. | ||
| We're certainly not isolation. | ||
| It was mostly made up of veterans or people that have active duty service or people that have... | ||
| But right now, we're winning this fight. | ||
| Doesn't mean it can't change on a dime. | ||
| That's why we have to be ever vigilant. | ||
| The world of artificial intelligence has unbelievable upside, but it also has, I don't know, pretty incredible downside. | ||
| Let's play a cold open. | ||
| We've got a very special guest that Joe Allen has brought to our attention. | ||
| Let's go ahead and let it rip. | ||
| Let's just stop and take a deep breath for a second. | ||
| Human existence may be... | ||
| And you decided to dig deeper, talk to people who are actually responsible for creating these models, creating AI models. | ||
| And you say for many of those, they believe there may be as much as like a 20% chance. | ||
| That humans may be, at the end of the day, wiped off the face of the earth because of AI. | ||
| Explain. | ||
| Even hearing you frame this, we sound nuts, right? | ||
| It sounds like, what? | ||
| You're talking about a technology that could destroy humanity? | ||
| And I think it's too much for people to get their heads around. | ||
| But what we've been trying to do with this column, and I think you've been trying to do with this show, is tell people, this isn't make-believe. | ||
| This is what the people who are creating the technology, the people building the technology, the people quitting the companies after helping build the technology, because they actually believe there's not an insignificant chance. | ||
| That this technology could grow smarter than humans and literally wipe out our species, which seems to me like a pretty big deal. | ||
| And we talk in there, like Elon Musk, who's building his own AI, there's this thing called PDOOM. | ||
| It's the percentage chance that you think that AI could wipe out humanity. | ||
| Musk's PDOOM is 10 to 20 percent. | ||
| Dario Amadei, who's anthropic, who we interviewed, his is somewhere between 10 and 25 percent. | ||
| Lex Friedman, the popular podcaster who had Sundar Pakai on in the last week, said his numbers had 10%. | ||
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I'm like, that's a big deal. | |
| Would you get on an airplane if you thought there's a 20% chance it's going down? | ||
| Would you build an airplane if you thought there was a 20% chance that people on it could be killed? | ||
| So Jim, explain this. | ||
| Explain why they keep building it. | ||
| I'll play the rest in a minute. | ||
| Let me introduce Daniel Cocotelio. | ||
| From the AI Futures Project and one of the top researchers in this space. | ||
| Sir, you laid a couple of scenarios. | ||
| Broadly speaking, I would like you to help define these. | ||
| You've got a showdown scenario of which you envision a transhumanist future in which humans either embrace AI or merge. | ||
| And then you have a race scenario and you predict a post-human future of AI with no humans. | ||
| So when Jim Vanderhay is sitting there talking to Morning Joe and they're talking about 10 to 20 percent of the top people building AI models, you're a researcher in this and quite concerned about the future of this technology. | ||
| And you're telling us two broad scenarios. | ||
| One of them is like beyond shocking, but the other is not that great either. | ||
| Where exactly are we headed with this technology and who's in charge? | ||
| Thanks for having me on your show. | ||
| Where are we headed? | ||
| Well, we depicted where we think we are headed in AI 2027, which is the scenarios that you just talked about. | ||
| It has two different possible endings, which were our best guesses at how things were going to go. | ||
| In the clip that you just played, that guy was talking about how the people creating this technology think that it could become superhuman and possibly wipe out humanity. | ||
| Yeah, this is kind of a newsflash for most of the world, but... | ||
| The people creating this technology have been concerned for many years that this could happen, and many of the people are still quite concerned that this will happen. | ||
| As for who's in charge, well, right now the race dynamics are in charge. | ||
| So each CEO is telling themselves and the people around them that if they don't build it, somebody else will build it anyway. | ||
| Everybody wants to be the first to build it because they trust themselves to handle the resulting problems responsibly more than they trust their rival CEOs, and also more than they trust China, of course, because a big part of the dynamic here is that many of these companies are rightly pointing out that we don't want China to build superintelligence before we do. | ||
| And so there's this crazy arms race happening right now between several different United States AI companies and also between Chinese companies to be the first to build superintelligence. | ||
| If I could go on a little tangent there, superintelligence, it means an AI system that is significantly better than the best humans at everything. | ||
| not just at like a particular thing, like biomedical research or something, but across the board. | ||
| These companies You can go read about it on their websites and in the statements of the CEOs. | ||
| And they think that they might succeed before this decade is out. | ||
| We at the iFutures project think the future is uncertain, but we also think that there's a good chance that they will actually succeed in building superintelligence. | ||
| And that raises a lot of questions. | ||
| What is that even going to look like? | ||
| What happens next? | ||
| Etc. | ||
| Questions which we tried to answer to the best of our ability. | ||
| And you can read about it. | ||
| And answering, do we have structures, processes, institutions, customs, traditions, mores, anything you want to say that is preparing the human race for actual the reality or materiality of superintelligence right now? | ||
| You're saying your thing is AI 2027, but it could be within this decade. | ||
| So let's say five years, three to five years. | ||
| Is there any aspect in human institutions, customs, traditions, law, regulations, anything that is preparing the human species to live with that material factor? | ||
| Basically, no. | ||
| Well, I mean, you're a futurist project. | ||
| And I know when you're making these warnings, is it that... | ||
| The money people think they can make and the power that they're going to have, this arms race. | ||
| And I may even talk about the arms race for the Chinese because a lot of times people throw the CCP up as a... | ||
| Remember, we're the leaders of the anti-CCP movement, but sometimes they hold them up as a specter to get something else done. | ||
| In just the race of the four horsemen of the apocalypse here in this country, is there anybody that's sitting there and saying we have to put at least some sort of basic structure around this before we get there? | ||
| Because once we get there, you can't put the horse back in the barn? | ||
| Well, lots of people are saying that. | ||
| And in fact, the CEOs of these companies were saying that until recently. | ||
| But right now, the thing that the lobbyists are pushing for is complete deregulation, or more specifically, bans on future regulations. | ||
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Yeah. | |
| Daniel, there's a film out called Mountainhead, which I recommend everybody see. | ||
| I don't know if you've seen it or not. | ||
| And I don't want to reveal too much, but one of the key inflection points is when these billionaire technologists, tech bros, decide who's an accelerationist and who's a decelerationist. | ||
| And the decelerationists are looked at as almost lepers. | ||
| Do you consider yourself and other people that are looking at the future of this decelerationist? | ||
| No, of course not. | ||
| So I and many of these other people often worked in AI companies, like I worked at OpenAI for two years. | ||
| There are many wonderful benefits that AI technology could bring, but there are also some pretty insane risks associated with it. | ||
| So in particular, I would like to talk about the loss of control risk and the concentration of power risk. | ||
| So loss of control risk first. | ||
| In 2023, there was this big statement signed by hundreds of AI experts and researchers, including some of the CEOs of AI companies, saying basically that it is possible that AI could drive humanity extinct and that this is a serious problem. | ||
| It's called the CAIS statement, C-A-I-S. | ||
| Why? | ||
| How could AI drive humanity extinct, right? | ||
| Well, the answer is because... | ||
| And it's not just something that could happen. | ||
| It's something that the companies are trying to make happen. | ||
| They are trying to make superintelligence. | ||
| They're trying to make AI that is better than humans in every way and can autonomously do all the AI research to design the next generation AI systems, can autonomously figure out how to integrate itself into society and give advice to political leaders and possibly run parts of the military and so forth. | ||
| This is actually what the companies are building towards. | ||
| And they acknowledge this. | ||
| You can go talk to the employees working there. | ||
| You can go look at their statements. | ||
| If they succeed in building superintelligence and deploying it throughout the economy and so forth, that raises the question of who controls all of the AIs, right? | ||
| Now, that question could have a couple different answers. | ||
| One possible answer is nobody controls them. | ||
| We're basically playing along and doing what they were told for similar reasons to why humans often play along and do what they're told, because they don't have much of a choice. | ||
| But once they're in control of everything, then they go off and do something else that's more what they wanted and not what we wanted. | ||
| That's the sort of loss of control scenario that so many people are warning about. | ||
| And a lot of technical progress needs to be made in order to come up with better techniques. | ||
| Steer and control, or in other words, align. | ||
| That's the technical term, these AIs. | ||
| So that's one possible risk. | ||
| Hang on one second before we get the other risk. | ||
| Are people putting the resources, the time of the best people on trying to work on these controls? | ||
| Or is all the best minds going and accelerating to get to artificial general intelligence? | ||
| In other words, is any talent, real talent, going into the controls aspect? | ||
| I would say the best people are actually working on the controls thing. | ||
| However, they're just under-resourced, and there aren't that many of them. | ||
| So when I was at OpenAI, there were maybe something like 30 people on the super alignment team, which was the team that OpenAI had created for the express purpose of figuring out how to align or control super intelligence. | ||
| And you can read about it on the website. | ||
| They were thinking, we need to have this problem solved by 2027 or so, we're going to be trying Many of the people have quit OpenAI and gone to Anthropic. | ||
| Anthropic is a rival AI company. | ||
| It's got, depending on how you count, maybe something like 50 to 100 people working on this problem. | ||
| OpenAI still has maybe something like 10 or 15. Google DeepMind has also maybe 15 or so. | ||
| I don't know. | ||
| I don't have an exact count. | ||
| So these companies do have teams of people who are thinking about this problem, and they're very smart people. | ||
| They aren't exactly the company's priority. | ||
| Almost all of the computing resources that the company has, and this is true of all of the companies, is going towards winning the race, making AIs smarter as fast as possible so that they can then put the AIs in charge of accelerating the research so that they can go even faster. | ||
| Also, crucially, a lot of the techniques that you might use to control AIs or to align AIs It might make the machine more expensive, for example, or it might make it slower in various ways. | ||
| And currently, the companies are not very willing to take those trade-offs because they're locked into this race with each other. | ||
| This arms race. | ||
| Talk to me about the concentration of power risk. | ||
| Yeah, so suppose that I'm wrong, you know, suppose that I and all the experts are basically wrong about the loss of control thing, and it's basically not an issue. | ||
| We solve it one way or another. | ||
| And, you know, some people think this is what's going to happen. | ||
| I think OpenAI's official position now that the SuperLemon team is dissolved is that we're sort of going to learn by doing and figure out this stuff as we go and that by making products and, you know, selling them to the world like ChatGPT, we'll learn from the ways in which... | ||
| Suppose that works out, and suppose we end up with AIs that are perfectly steerable, controllable, AIs who only have the goals that we want them to have and don't interpret them in any different ways or whatever. | ||
| Then there's the question of, well, who gets to choose the goals? | ||
| Who controls the AIs? | ||
| That's the concentration of power issue. | ||
| And I think the default answer is, well, a tech company. | ||
| Whichever tech company was winning the race and was able to get their AI smart enough to do the AI research first. | ||
| Then does a lot of AI research really fast and ends up with this commanding lead over all the other tech companies where they have the best AIs by far that are also super intelligent, better than humans at everything, including politics, including warfare, including propaganda, etc. | ||
| Yeah, if they're in control of that, then that could potentially put one tech company and possibly even just one man in the tech company, such as the CEO. | ||
| In a position to effectively take over the world. | ||
| If you want to know what that looks like, well, again, you can read the scenarios that we wrote. | ||
| That's sort of what happens in the slowdown ending. | ||
| AI-2027 has two different endings. | ||
| One ending depicts something like the loss of control. | ||
| It's what we actually expect is most likely to happen because we don't expect the companies to slow down and invest in the technical alignment stuff. | ||
| But then there's also the slowdown ending where Where the leading company slows down for a couple months so that they can sort out the technical issues. | ||
| And they succeed. | ||
| In our scenario, they succeed at least in fixing those technical issues. | ||
| And so they end up with perfectly obedient AIs that they can just give whatever values and goals they want to those AIs. | ||
| And then it ends up in a sort of oligarchy where after they've deployed... | ||
| There's a situation where basically the whole economy, basically the whole structure of society, the hard power at least, it doesn't flow from the barrel of a gun anymore, so to speak. | ||
| It flows from whoever controls all the AIs. | ||
| And that's a tiny group of people at the top of the hierarchy. | ||
| Hold it. | ||
| That's my upside scenario. | ||
| Give me the race scenario, the downside. | ||
| Yeah, so the race scenario is like the upside scenario, except that after the AIs get smart enough, they basically play along and pretend to be aligned instead of actually being aligned. | ||
| So they follow the orders. | ||
| They behave nicely in whatever tests people put them through. | ||
| And so the leadership of the company and the leadership of the country convinces themselves that everything is fine and that they've solved the technical problems and that they can just continue to race so that they can beat the other companies and so they can beat China. | ||
| And so they do. | ||
| And they succeed. | ||
| And they eventually basically transform society in the way that I previously described. | ||
| So they've got the robot factories. | ||
| Superintelligence is giving orders to all sorts of people about how to more efficiently do things, and they've got massive amounts of money flowing in. | ||
| But when the AIs have enough hard power, then they stop listening to the humans, basically. | ||
| And so that ends up with the AI takeover. | ||
| They stop listening, and then what happens? | ||
| Well, then they kill everyone. | ||
| Why do they kill everyone? | ||
| For the same reason that humans have driven many other species extinct. | ||
| It's not that we hate the beetles in the rainforest. | ||
| It's that they have habitats, and we wanted to use the habitat for something else. | ||
| We only got a couple of minutes, and I'm going to have you back on here as we go through this. | ||
| You're one of the smartest people in the country about this. | ||
| You've dedicated your life to this. | ||
| You've just written this incredible report. | ||
| I got this report out. | ||
| Everybody's talking about it. | ||
| Here in Washington, we're distracted by debt and deficits and budgets and a civil war in Los Angeles and a bombing in Tehran tonight with the president saying, "Evacuate Tehran." He just put out True Social. | ||
| We're doing all that, and you've broken down this situation about artificial intelligence, which is hurtling Ford every day in these labs around the country. | ||
| The upside case you give me, the sunlit uplands that were controlled by an oligarch or a handful of oligarchs that completely have command and control over all the United States and the people in it. | ||
| The downside is where the robots fake us out and eventually kill us. | ||
| I've only got a minute. | ||
| Where do people go to find out more? | ||
| Because this is so stunningly shocking. | ||
| I'm lost for words why people on Capitol Hill and in the White House are not taking this more seriously, sir. | ||
| Well, you can go to ai-2027.com if you want to read what we wrote and also more information about how we wrote it and why and so forth. | ||
| As for the gloominess of the scenarios, I mean, yeah, unfortunately, this is what we actually expect, something like this to happen. | ||
| It does not seem like in current race conditions... | ||
| But which the leaders of the companies sort of convince themselves into thinking it's fine and thinking that everything is aligned. | ||
| That does seem to me like the more likely outcome. | ||
| And then supposing that doesn't happen and we end up with actually aligned AIs, well, at least in the current environment, they would be owned by the company that made them, right? | ||
| And so, there you go. | ||
| We've only got 30 seconds. | ||
| We've got to bounce. | ||
| Is it social media? | ||
| Where can people get you and get your thinking? | ||
| AI-2027.com. | ||
| There's lots of stuff there. | ||
| Okay. | ||
| We'll have you back on. | ||
| Shocking, sir. | ||
| And shocking that more people in this city are not putting this at the top of the agenda because this is reality. | ||
| Daniel, thank you very much. | ||
| Joe Allen, thank you very much for setting this up. | ||
| We're going to be back tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Eastern Daylight Time. | ||
| And if anything breaks tonight, the president just put out a true social that's quite disturbing, said evacuate Tehran. | ||
| If we have to, we'll get back up with Grace and Moat later in the evening. |
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