#459 — More From Sam: Corruption, Immigration, The End of White-Collar Work, and More
Sam Harris highlights a live Bulwark crossover event with Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller, former Republicans critiquing Trump’s corruption—like selling $500M of World Liberty Financial to UAE royals before his 2017 inauguration—while progressives ignore it. AI expert Mustafa Suleyman predicts AGI will replace white-collar roles (lawyers, accountants) in 12–18 months, accelerating shifts already seen in software engineering. Harris warns this could destabilize professions tied to student debt, questioning how societies adapt when cognitive labor’s value collapses. The episode underscores systemic risks from both political hypocrisy and AI-driven job displacement. [Automatically generated summary]
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Welcome back to another episode of More from Sam.
Hey, Sam.
It was nice seeing you a few minutes ago and seeing you again here.
Long time OC.
Yeah, we just did a Substack Live.
I thought that was really good.
Yeah, yeah.
It actually kind of surprised me that live still feels like something different, right?
I mean, obviously the experience of looking at a camera and talking is identical, but just the knowledge that it's live and that you can't take any of your words back is somehow thrilling or gets your attention.
So I like it.
We didn't give subscribers much heads up at all.
We will do that in the future, but we just had thought of it at the last minute.
And anyone who would like to join us for one of those in the future, you can become a subscriber and join us over there.
We will give you more time.
And I thought it was really cool that we were able to take some questions from the audience and do that in real time.
It's a different experience being live than recording, but we'll do more of those and we'll see where we can learn and figure out how to improve those.
Yeah, it was fun.
And I think we can record them.
I don't know.
In this case, I think it was just if you were in the room, you were in the room, you know, which is frankly kind of nice, you know, to treat it like a live event as opposed to yet another podcast, you know, piece of content that we're just going to record and put out there.
So, you know, I think we should give people a heads up so that they can be there if they want to be.
All right.
So I woke up this morning thinking about your conversation with Sarah Longwell and Tim Miller from the Bulwark, that media empire they have, and just thinking why it was so well received by your audience.
You know, I don't even know what their positions are on most issues, but I'm sure they're more conservative than yours.
They're conservatives, correct?
You know, I don't even know where there's daylight between us in interviews.
I mean, yes, you would expect there to be differences because they're both formerly Republicans, right?
So they're coming from the other side.
They're both gay.
So I don't know how conservative they could be socially.
My point is it doesn't even matter.
It seems like it didn't even matter anymore.
There was such a sense of relief hearing you guys speak together.
It's almost like we never really cared about some of those other differences.
And we've realized that now we just care about decency, decorum, sanity, having somebody on the other side just see, at least see everything the same way that you see things.
Yeah, yeah.
And also they're much closer to the political history there.
I mean, they're just obviously having spent all their time right of center, they see how Trump and Trumpism bent everything into this awful shape.
And they, you know, they have relationships.
Many more relationships than I had.
They got distorted by these changes.
So yeah, it's great to talk to them.
I'm just a huge fan of both of those guys.
They're just very fun.
And they're so trustworthy and likable.
They just feel like, you know, listening to the three of you talk, it just felt like, you know, three of my friends were getting together.
And I'm certain the audience felt the same way, that there was this FOMO.
Like I just, I wish I could have been in there with you guys.
I saw a comment on YouTube and thought this was a nice note from them.
It says, as a progressive, I probably don't agree on many policy issues with Sarah and Tim, but I have come to trust them to tell it straight over almost anyone else, including most of the progressive podcasters I listen to.
So I don't know.
I mean, it just seems that everybody liked hearing you guys speak.
I can't help my mind thinking that perhaps we should make this a quarterly podcast crossover event where it appears on both podcasts.
I think the audiences would enjoy it.
And then even putting maybe a few live dates together.
I'm getting ahead of myself, but I definitely think people would like to see the three of you guys.
I think they're touring.
I think they're touring right now.
They're going to Minneapolis to do a live event there.
I think I noticed.
Yeah, so people should check them.
I mean, they're taking their podcast on the road to some degree.
Oh, I am certain they are a lot of fun to hang out with.
Good for them.
According to the Wall Street Journal, President Donald Trump's cryptocurrency firm, World Liberty Financial.
Sounds so official.
Sold a $500 million stake to a member of the Emirati royal family shortly before his inauguration last January.
Months later, the Trump administration agreed to supply the UAE with highly coveted American-made AI chips.
Now, we've talked about this before.
Is there anything to add with this latest information?
No, it's just as tawdry and as dangerous and as self-serving and as corrupt as anyone could have imagined, right?
I mean, the crucial detail here is that we're giving chips, our most advanced chips, to the UAE that does military exercises with China.
And these are chips that precisely the chips we don't want China to have.
And we're relaxing those security concerns because Trump and his family managed to get hundreds of millions, arguably billions in the transaction.
So what's wrong with that?
If you pretended to care that Hunter Biden got some money serving on a board in Ukraine that he was not qualified to serve on because of the name association with Joe Biden, and you thought maybe even Joe Biden in the worst case scenario got some of that money and you're looking at those emails and when they say 10% to the big guy, you thought, oh, that's a smoking gun.
How awful.
Let's just destroy this guy's presidency and burn everything down because of how corrupt and unseemly this is.
You're that person who cares about the integrity of our politics to that fine degree.
Hunter Biden and his grifting are intolerable.
And yet now, magically, go look in the mirror, see how much you care about a president who's managed to extract billions of dollars over the course of months by materially undermining the leadership role and military preparedness and actual safety of our country on the world stage.
Right.
I mean, it's just like everything.
Our alliances have eroded all of these tariffs.
Whether you believe that he's earned $1 billion or $4 billion, depending on whose estimate you trust at this point, he has just sold out our country every which way he could so as to profit and to have his family and friends profit.
Professional Tasks AI00:02:43
I know we keep talking about AI, but it seems like the timelines keep moving up daily.
I want you to watch this clip from the CEO of Microsoft AI in a recent interview with the Financial Times.
Let's play that clip for Sam.
You talk about superintelligence.
Most of your rivals talk about HAI, artificial general intelligence.
Explain the difference between HAI and superintelligence.
I prefer the definition that focuses first on what would it take to build a system that could achieve most of the tasks that a regular professional in a workplace goes about on a daily basis.
Think of it as a professional grade AGI.
How close are we?
I think that we're going to have a human level performance on most, if not all, professional tasks.
So white-collar work where you're sitting down at a computer, either being, you know, a lawyer or an accountant or a project manager or a marketing person.
Most of those tasks will be fully automated by an AI within the next 12 to 18 months.
And we can see this in software engineering.
Many software engineers report that they are now using AI-assisted coding for the vast majority of their code production, which means that their role shifted now to this meta function of debugging, scrutinizing, of doing the strategic stuff like architecting of, you know, et cetera, et cetera, putting things into production.
So it's a quite different relationship to the technology.
And that's happened in the last six months.
What do you make of that?
Well, so I know Mustafa a little bit, very nice guy, and obviously he's he's very close to this work.
I mean, he came from DeepMind.
He was one of the founders of DeepMind and moved over to Microsoft.
So I think his prognostications are probably as credible as anybody's at this point.
You know, it's pretty alarming when you think of the societal implications.
If in a year we have the complete cancellation of the need for human cognition of the white-collar type, you know, I mean, that's that's, I don't know how many people that is, but it's a lot of people.
And it's basically certainly most of the high status jobs, right?
I mean, one of the ironies and surprises here is that the robots are coming for the lawyers and doctors and software engineers before they're coming for the janitors and massage therapists and nurses and plumbers.
And so if you went to college and incurred $200,000 in debt and that degree enabled you to get to the rung on the ladder where you're currently standing, it's very likely that part of the ladder is in the process of disappearing, right?
Ladder Evaporating00:00:28
And the entire ladder, I mean, Mustafa is saying that the ladder itself is evaporating.
So what he's saying now is in principle already true of the bottom rung.
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