Zak Kukoff breaks down Trump's AI Action Plan, three executive orders, and the Hill and Valley summit

knows? With that, let's bring in our Washington correspondent, Zack Kukov. Zack, how you doing? What was your reaction? What was your reaction to uh Trevor Milton going on on Tuck Tuck radio? I just think terrible choice of uh network to go on first. The clear answer was TBPN. I I don't know if I'm ready. I don't know.

I don't know. That's a tough one. just come we'd come with a fact sheet of just fact by fact and say did you roll the truck down the hill? You're telling me you wouldn't have coddled him the way that uh Tucker did? I don't know. I don't know. When we had Sohan Periq on people people were saying we went we went too easy.

But uh clearly we got him to just admit to having multiple jobs question was was are you working multiple jobs? That was my first question. He just said yes. And then, you know, from there it's like, okay, he's admitted it. Like, let's talk about redemption. Is there a possibility?

What else did people want him to admit? Like, five other madeup things he hadn't done. I think I think I think the critique that was fair was that he's clearly a pathological liar and fairly charismatic. And we probably just should have said, "Hey, seems like you're still lying.

" But at the same time, we got to check in with the company he just joined. He said he's going, what did he say? He said he's going Exclusive. Exclusive. Exclusive is the term. Excl I'm going exclusive. I'm going exclusive. Just one job now. So, I don't know. I I still want to believe in redemption.

Not many people believe in redemption. That's where it was interesting. Um, but yeah, I mean like like the I suppose that if I was interviewing Trevor Milton, the first question would be, did you roll the truck down the hill? And did you did you actually do that? Uh, because that is the fraud claim mainly.

And if if it's like, okay, yeah, I did that. I made a mistake. Now I'm on the redemption path. Uh as opposed to, you know, like, you know, waffling around it. But as opposed to, no, I didn't roll it downhill. The truck was just built that way and the hill was just fine.

I mean, this has been a big, we got to call out, this has been a big week for podcasting. You have Sam Alman on the Ovon. You have Netanyahu on the NO and you have Trevor Milton on Tucker Carlson. I mean, what a week. What a week. But um equal, Zach Koff, four figures of equal stature. Correct. Thank you very much.

I think uh I think higher stature than some of the others. Yeah. Well, higher than some, lower than others. Correct. Exactly. What's going on in your world? How was yesterday? It looked uh like total total also total podcast victory. Total podcast victory for sure. Yeah.

Yesterday I think uh somebody said allin is now state media which I loved. I was like yesterday literally was total podcast dominance. Um which was wild. It was very well done. Uh, major props to frequent TBPN guest Delian who did an amazing job.

And you know, they hold the whole thing together in like Christian and Delian. Yeah. They put the whole thing together in like 10 days. You guys notice the whole thing came from nothing. Yeah. Yeah. 10 days. When you get a 20minute block on the president's schedule, you got to move quick. Yep.

That is exactly exactly true. So, they started Hilling Valley a couple years ago just as a dinner, but now there's like enough of an organization. I think it is like a company at this point that's doing these events and they have a playbook and they every time they execute it's better than the last one.

So really my understanding is they have like 30 something people who help put these things together. It's a serious it's a real operation that really staffs it up. Uh where was it? It was at the Melon Auditorium which funnily enough is like next door or maybe even part of the environmental protection agency the EPA.

So, it's a nice It was very funny because uh I would not say it was a particularly environmentally focused group in the audience, but uh beautiful space nonetheless. Honestly, highlight of the day for me and probably for everybody there. Uh a very funny, very well done uh pus speech at end of the day keynote.

Um real red meat for us and for tech on a lot of the key questions on AI development. Also, a lot of very funny uh crowd work, like really talented crowdwork bits on Jensen and on Doug Bergam. I was like, "Wow, it's gonna be a really talented Netflix special. " This all gets packaged up.

Did he have a Did he have did Did Trump have a good line on Jason, too? Or I couldn't tell if that was fake news or it was real? No, it was it was real. Trump gets up, first thing he says is, "Thanks the All-In podcast. " Uh, Chimoth and David and yes, even Jason. And there was a huge pause for laughter.

and he goes, "Yes, we're even thanking Jason today. " A lot of uh Jason Galcanis jokes.

I will say one interesting dynamic at the thing that I don't know I don't know what was streamed online and what wasn't, but one interesting dynamic that I don't know if folks saw the uh Jason was doing the voice of the liberal in the in the questioning.

He was like trying to really put a little bit of the heat on some of the uh Trump admin guests and it was an interesting departure from everybody else who was asking uh questions. That's good. People will find a way to hate that, but it's good. Yeah. No, it's good to get the diversity of voices.

I will say clearly some people that I don't think necessarily expected it, but yeah, it was good to get the uh the diversity of voices. That's fun up there. Okay. What was the best line though?

The best the best line to me was uh somebody asked Jensen to talk about America's AI advantage and he said, "The one thing that no other country has is President Trump. " That's right. That's why Jensen gets to That's why Jensen gets to export H20s because he's has good lines like that, you know. Wilding.

Um, it was a well done speech. Honestly, it was well done event. I would say uh highlights for me from like a serious way. The big one for me was uh fair use training of the copyright material for AI. This has been one we've been asking about for a while and a lot of companies have been talking about it.

In fact, there was a recent entropic court case that ruled on this said, "Look, if it's trained on legally procured, legally purchased copyright material, that's fair use. That's in scope.

If it's stuff that you're pirating, which allegedly Anthropic and Meta and others have done to build their corpus of data, that's when you get into legal trouble. " This was the first time that I've heard the admin come out and codify that, which is really nice. So, I loved that. I loved the energy permitting stuff.

There was a lot of stuff for all the abundance boys on uh permitting, a lot of permitting reform questions, a lot of accelerating data center buildouts, a lot of trying to streamline getting new sources of energy online.

And then yes, there was some talk about how do you try to tighten even while we're still letting folks like China buy H20s, some talk about things like location tracking for export controls, too. So, there was a lot to like in the speech. I actually thought it was a very, very well done speech.

Um, and it was funny because there was actually a live I was is who's uh who's your partner? Is it Khi or Poly Market? Poly Market. Okay. So, there was probably a poly market. I saw it on Khi.

There's probably a poly market going at the same time where people were betting on things like will Trump say uh David Sach's name in the speech. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Before it gets resolved. So, I thought it was really really well done. Vance spoke super well.

Bergam and Chris Wright had a very funny panel with the two of them together where Chris Wright and Jason got into it mono a little bit which was uh interesting to hear too but great and really good energy in the space. A lot of good companies.

Hrien did a very good uh almost like a sermon on the enthusiasm of reindustrialization that I loved. Chris from Hrien did that. Yeah, he's been on the he's been on the road show with that because uh he's probably giving something some similar version of that at reindustrialized. worked worked out the bit.

Took the tight five to DC. We love to see it. Um it was a tight five. It was great. That's great. Um what uh how should I think about this AI plan, this documented website that's been floating around?

Is this is this more of like like laws aren't changing, but this is just these are this is the plan for the laws that we will eventually change. Is that the idea? So think about it in two ways.

One way is this is the White House using its bully pulpit to call for a series of changes that yes would need Congress to enact them or would need agencies to change their policy. Right now agencies changing their policy is something the White House can do.

The other side is look there are two EOS that were signed uh live on stage yesterday that Trump did a very theatrical signing of which is beautiful. Uh and those are things that the admin can do directly.

So there are some things for example some of the energy permitting stuff uh it's you know there's certain things like doing categorical exclusions from NEPA that are a little bit more within the realm of uh things that can be done my understanding is via EO but there are also things as you guys know a lot of permitting is done at the state and local level right so the white house can't necessarily say we're going to overrule what state and local government does on permitting as a fiat they have to work with partners all up and down the stack of government to get what the AI action plan calls for actually implemented Yeah.

So, um how big are those EOS? Like what were people tracking on those? And then, um I what was the specifics? There was uh was was one of the EOS around uh making it so that states can't enact AI safety laws for the next 10 years. What do do you have specifics on that? That felt super significant.

So there were three uh AIOS said two earlier I was on there three AIEOS and sometimes why one was on bias free AI which is something I would instead frame as transparency right there was a lot of talk about woke AI and removing things like DEI from AI implementation the actually specific version of that the the instantiated version of that is that model providers if they want to be used in government procurement have to attest to the values to be transparent about the values that go into their models.

That's AIO number one. AIO number two is trying to fasttrack some of the development work we did. So fasttracking some of the data center permitting stuff that we did. And the third AIO that we talked about is the export expansion.

It's funny, Jordy, the thing that you're asking about which we talked about last time, right? This idea of a moratorum on AI regulation for 10 years. The big challenge is to actually get that done.

That's something that has to be now done actually beyond my understanding is beyond the scope of just what can be done in an EO, right? something that can be started has to actually transcend that as well.

And some of the challenge like you saw today, California is already starting to push back on the idea that the federal government has preeemption ability over California's ability to regulate eye.

And the truth is there are powerful senators like Marcia Blackburn who we discussed last time whose job it is to protect their local industries like the music industry in Nashville, Tennessee, right, her home state, who are not going to be thrilled about what I think is a pretty reasonable but ultimately controversial idea of trying to create a standard set of regulations that aren't 50 patchwork states because the default and Trump mentioned this in his speech is that in 50 different states whoever's the most restrictive is whom people end up following.

Yeah. um one because if you're a product if you're a product company or or a foundation model lab, you want to be available everywhere. So the default is like basically be be uh allowed under the most restrictive uh regulations. That's right.

One kind of uh funny framing I was was was kicking around was the idea of no paper clips. Um so this kind of marks a shift away from worrying about AI doom. We're not worried about getting paperclipipped. We're not worried about fast takeoff, this crazy doom scenario.

So, we're pulling back on safety, pulling more, pushing more into geopolitics. Let's actually scale up infrastructure, get these products out into the world because we think that by and large they're safe. And now the game is to win on more or less like industrial capacity.

Like if we're just producing way more tokens than every other country, that will help our GDP. We will grow that way. The flip side of the no paper clips is that there's no move to do a new operation paperclipip where we where we pulled scientists from Germany to America to build the bomb.

Um and the and the and the the reference point there is that something like uh something like 75% of AI researchers on Meta super intelligence team are I think on 01s or they're not American citizens.

And we've seen the Deep Seek team and Manis and you know there's some venture capital firms that are investing in Chinese AI and kind of the bullcase is like okay well get them from China Singapore and then get them to Silicon Valley and then we have the team on our side and so it feels like that's the one area that wasn't really discussed.

I I know immigration is obviously just a broadly hot topic, but in terms of like brain drain of the ultimate top AI scientists. Is there any movement or people thinking about that?

Is there any nuance coming up between Okay, maybe that's a different maybe that's a different problem set or different question than like dealing with like fentanyl dealers coming across the border. So I don't know that that was super within scope for the AI action plan.

I'll tell you personally there are definitely people who are thinking about an operation paperclipip or how do we get the world's best and brightest the truly truly elites right even above people who might qualify for O1's to come and build in America AI with their families that's the first thing second thing is listen the question you're getting to which is a question of soft power is a question the admin is thinking about right and so the reason that the AIO sorry the AI action plan is so supportive of open- source and openweight models is because the admin views it as a national security imperative to get American soft power, i.

e. American models to become the most widely used in the world. So the soft power lever the admin's pulling I would like to see more and I'm hugely supportive of getting people here on a really targeted basis ultra elite talent to come here and build opposed to building for adversaries. Yeah.

I mean we're talking about like 50 people. It's like it's super it should be a completely different different discussion than like you know border wall or anything like that. No AI researcher has ever been impacted by a wall. Like that's not maybe the pre-training scaling wall is their problem.

But I know I know you have to run there. There was a post yesterday going viral. Somebody realized you could Venmo the government to help reduce the national debt. What's the right amount to start Venmoing Uncle Sam if you want to do your part? Listen, tax on tips now. So we should all be tipping the government.

Help them. They should be tipping. We should be getting tipped, paid in tips, no tax on that. And then we could turn around and tip the government in Venmo as well. I would say based economy typically as much as much as you can do but every day. Really quickly every day. La last question for me. We'll let you go.

Um uh that point on open source is really interesting. It feels like Mark Zuckerberg could be the national champion. He could be the hero of American open source with the Llama project. We don't know if Llama 5 is going to be open source. Behemoth had trouble getting out.

he hasn't really given clear guidance on how hard he's going into um uh how how hard he's going to stay in open source, but what uh how do you think the mood is around uh Mark Zuckerberg in DC? Is he a winner or a loser? The Wall Street Journal had this article on, you know, how much people have donated?

Obviously, Jensen feels ascendant. Elon feels like he was at the top and then kind of dialed back a little bit but is still doing okay.

the other hyperscaler CEOs are like none of them are in bad bad positions but Zuck is like the interesting one where you could see a really interesting partnership form but I don't know where we are on that Zuck I think is interesting he took a big swing right listen I want to go do the cultural work I want to ensh myself really deeply y and what we've learned is this is an admin that really respects power and success right success is its own ability to attract more success the virtuous cycle Jensen does well in part because he's tremendously gifted interpersonally but also because he's the CEO of the most valuable company in the world and the admin, right?

And Jensen has that. Zuck uh Zuck tried to or a little bit, you know what I mean? He tried to get in here and do a little bit of that and I don't know that it's fully landed for him. I agree.

Listen, I hope he keeps Llama 5 open source predominantly because I think it would be a great bite at the apple for him with national priority here. But part of that's going to also be his ability to invest and do some of the interpersonal retail stuff that Jensen's done so well. Yeah. Yeah.

With with OpenAI launching the open source model, you have to wonder if if if like national open source champion of America is a title that Sam Alman is like, I'd like that.

Uh even if it doesn't have even if it doesn't have like direct economic value, if it comes with polit political power, that could be incredibly valuable. So, uh interesting to see how it breaks down. Thank you so much for joining. We'll let you get to your next think making you miss your next one. No worries.

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