Congressman Ro Khanna warns that unchecked AI development threatens the working class, citing $18 trillion in tech wealth concentrated in his district while criticizing Trump's alignment with Silicon Valley on selling chips to China. He proposes reversing automation tax incentives, mandating "human in the loop" regulations, and ensuring workers share productivity gains. Beyond technology, Khanna addresses immigration, condemning anti-Semitism and advocating for a two-state solution, while distinguishing Venezuelan cocaine from Chinese fentanyl precursors. He further critiques California's homelessness policies under Newsom versus Lurie, urging Democrats to lower healthcare and housing costs to secure midterm victories. Ultimately, the episode frames AI regulation as essential to preserving American dignity against corporate exploitation. [Automatically generated summary]
Apple, Google, NVIDIA, Broadcom, and Tesla, $18 trillion.
And if you want an America, which is just going to put more trillions of dollars in my district, do nothing.
If you want an America that is going to help families and kids where I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where fearless works, steel shut down, which is going to help people in Ohio and Michigan, then we've got to make sure that the AI revolution is pro-American citizen and pro-worker and not just pro-tech billionaires.
The guy from Silicon Valley is saying this.
You've got people like Bannon and Tucker Carlson and all saying this.
And yet my biggest criticism of Trump, my fundamental criticism, is he's just got these tech billionaires that are saying, okay, let's sell chips to China.
Let's have a White House ballroom.
Let's have AI accelerate.
And I don't I don't think that's the forgotten American.
True, but when you look at the swing in the Latino vote, in the Asian American vote, in the suburban vote, a lot of folks have been coming back to the Democrats.
I think it's because of the economy.
You know, the president promised that he would lower prices on day one, and those prices just haven't come down.
People are anxious about AI, you know, about AI taking truck drivers' jobs, warehouse jobs, customer service jobs.
There's a guy from Silicon Valley.
I'll tell you that there's concern.
Even Tucker Carlson or Bannon, they said, what are you doing just hanging out with these tech billionaires in the White House?
But the question is, are you going to be on the side of the tech billionaires?
Are you going to be on the side of ordinary workers?
Like, we should protect truck driving jobs.
There are 3 million or so truck drivers.
I don't want to see 3 million people displaced.
We should have truck drivers on trucks.
We should make sure that we have a vision that says companies need to hire people if they're being displaced in the company itself and bargain with workers.
So if technology is going to innovate and that we can do this cheaper and more efficiently and all of these things, because you simply, I mean, I like truck drivers.
I used to have an AM radio show.
It was truck drivers calling all the time.
I found them to be incredibly thoughtful and smart.
And, you know, they're out there listening all the time.
But no one is actually guaranteed a job.
So if technology is going to make these things more efficient, where does the government come in to force somebody to, oh, you have to have that job, even though this company can do it more efficiently and cheaper and everything else?
Look, I look at it as the Industrial Revolution in Britain.
For 60 years, you had massive wealth generation.
Britain became the richest country in the world.
And yet the working class and middle class were horrendous conditions because technology was simply used for eliminating jobs, no consideration for workers.
Where workers started to build is when the technology was used not just to eliminate jobs, but to make people more productive.
So my view is we need a government incentives that help us use technology in a way that's going to make people more productive, not just to displace labor.
Like in the example of the truck drivers that you used, knowing that we can automate the truck, knowing that there will be drones so that it's not a human that's going to have to literally drop off the package, knowing that these things all exist and are going to continue to exist.
So lay out your version that would be more human-friendly or healthy.
Yeah, well, I would say you still have the truck driver on the truck to do maintenance, to do drop-offs, to make sure that you're dealing with edge cases, that we should have a human in the loop.
And maybe it makes the driving easier.
Maybe it makes things less burdensome.
Or in other cases, if you have a customer service representative, okay, now you're using the AI to be better at your job.
But I don't want to be fighting with my phone every time where I'm calling a customer service agent to get to a human voice.
So right now we have a tax code that incentivizes automation.
You basically get a deduction for depreciation.
But if you hire a person, you've got to pay health care.
You've got to pay payroll taxes.
I would reverse the tax code to make it possible to hire people instead of hiring robots.
So you have an incentive, don't have a disincentive to hire people.
The second thing is I'd have human in the loop regulations.
You want to make sure human beings are there.
If you are going to have some form of automation, workers should share in the productivity gains and the profits.
Those are a few ideas.
But in general, I think that the AI revolution has to be for people, not just for all the money going into my district.
We've got $18 trillion, David, in my district.
$18 trillion.
One-third of the entire U.S. stock market is in the 50-mile radius in my district.
Some of them are moving to where you live towards the tax breaks.
But the companies are still there, right?
Apple, Google, NVIDIA, Broadcom, and Tesla, $18 trillion.
And if you want an America, which is just going to put more trillions of dollars in my district, do nothing.
If you want an America that is going to help families and kids where I grew up in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where fearless works, steel shut down, which is going to help people in Ohio and Michigan, then we've got to make sure that the AI revolution is pro-American citizen and pro-worker and not just pro-tech billionaires.
You've got people like Bannon and Tucker Carlson and all saying this.
And yet my biggest criticism of Trump, my fundamental criticism is he's just got these tech billionaires that are saying, okay, let's sell chips to China.
So when you spoke at that, what was it, the Arab American conference, and they were laughing about October 7th and all that, you condemn those people that you were on stage with?
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Oh, I think, well, Tucker particularly, I think he's gone off the deep end completely.
I mean, he's also saying consistently horrible things about me personally.
But we can let that there.
I don't need to waste time on Tucker with you.
What do you want to see over the next, you know, I've been having mostly Republicans in here where I'm asking them, okay, what do you guys need so that the midterms don't turn into a bloodbath for the Republicans.
So you on the Democrat side of that, what do you want to see so that it goes well for you guys in the midterms?
So a lot of the focus, I think that the two have been conflated in terms of, in my view, of how people are talking about it, because there's fundamental concern is stop giving money to Argentina and currency swaps.
Stop focusing on Madero.
Start focusing on Western Pennsylvania.
Start focusing on war in Ohio.
That, to me, is the essence of America first, right?
That's, I think, where a lot of the criticism comes from.
But as you know, because I know you're very thoughtful about these things, a lot of that's coming from China into Mexico and across into the United States.
Venezuela is the cocaine trade.
It's the narcotics trade.
It's not fentanyl.
And, you know, to the extent we're negotiating with China, we should get them to schedule the precursors to fentanyl as narcotics.
And, you know, I've been critical of the president's deal, but if he can achieve that in getting those precursors scheduled, that would be significant progress.
On the boat strikes, though, look, we are not Russia.
We are not Xi Jinping.
We are Americans.
We have a higher standard.
And when there's a boat and there are two people who are surrendering saying, look, we're done.
Well, what I offer you a little advice for the Democrats then, which is then go ahead and do more to clean up the cities so people see less fentanyl fold, see less drug mayhem.
I mean, Philadelphia is a disaster right now.
Many of these cities are.
If they did more on that and there was less of the obvious video that comes out every day, then people might be more sympathetic to the argument of, oh, we shouldn't kill all the drug dealers who are coming in.
If you're going to say that we have an issue of an open drug culture in some of our cities and the Democrats need to do more to take that on, I say yes.
And look at Dan Lurie, for example, in San Francisco.
I don't know if you followed his career.
He came in.
He's got 70% approval ratings.
He's the first mayor in the last 10, 15 years who said, you know what, we can't just have an open drug culture near the Giant Stadium.
I'm going to crack down on it.
We can't just have people who are unhoused having a drug culture.