Congressman Ro Khanna on AI job displacement, Epstein transparency, and why he's a YIMBY who opposes AI preemption of state regulation

investing for those who take it seriously. They got multiasset investing and they're trusted by millions. Uh we have Ro Kana in the reream waiting room. Let's bring him in to the TVP Ultradome. Ro, good to meet you. Welcome to the show. How are you doing?

I'm doing well. You guys have become quite the celebrities in my district. Everyone is tuning in to your podcast.

I'm glad to hear it. I'm glad to hear it and we're and we're happy to have you on the show. Thank you so much for the time.

What was that?

Are the all-in guys are the all-in guys jealous or do they do they respect you?

I think that they have left they have they're in the stratosphere. They have left the you know the the scraps.

Yeah, we're picking up the scraps compared to them. I think I I think like any great Silicon Valley startup, you're nipping at their at their heels. I

It's funny. We we we had we had a New York Times piece around us. It was a very nice uh you know, just like here's what TBPN is doing. Just kind of an explainer piece. Uh David Sax, of course, uh got a little bit more of the investigative journalism treatment. Got five reporters. We only got one. And so I think that tells you about the relative importance of the shows. Um but anyway, I'm sure we'll get into that. I would love for you just to kind of set

normally normally when our guest joins join and they're wearing a suit, we we say thank you. But I think this is I'm assuming it's one of your daily drivers. So yeah. Uh

well, you know, I I'm not back in my district. They it'd be the only way I'd lose my seat is if I started to show up with a suit to like the place was there. But in DC with the uniform,

it's the uniform in DC. But I was hoping you could you could sort of uh take us through a little bit of the prehistory since it's the first time on the show. Just explain uh how you wound up in this position, a little bit of your backstory, and then um obviously there's so many hot topics that I want to talk about in uh artificial intelligence and tech broadly. And I want I want your opinion on on everything that's going on, but I'd love to kick it off with a little bit of like how you wound up in Congress.

Sure. Well, I uh am the son of immigrants. My parents came from India in the late 1960s. My grandfather spent four years in jail alongside Gandhi as part of the Indian independence movement. And that really inspired my love of public service. Uh when I came out to Silicon Valley, I I had a professor, Larry Leesig. He said, "If you care about policy, go go out to to to Silicon Valley. That's where the interesting things are happening. That's where the big things are happening." So I went out uh and I ran when I was 27 against the Iraq war and I got killed. I got crushed 71 to 19 but came to the attention of uh folks as someone willing to stand up for uh against the war. And then I uh worked uh as a as a tech lawyer. I supported President Obama. I got to go work for President Obama. And then I wrote a book about uh what we needed to do to build new manufacturing across this country in 2012. What we needed to do to uh really have the modern economy in different parts of the country.

You're one of the the the first American uh beginning of the American dynamism movement. Would you would you say

Yeah. I I I was going to say to President Trump, he stole all my ideas in terms of manufacturing, but you know, he

Well, that's good. That's good though. That's good though then, right? We uh just want

No, no. Look, I I I support the American dynamism movement. I I'm a fan of sort of what Mark Andre wrote in a Wall Street oped about like how do we not make masks in America? How do we not make basic things in America? Uh when my parents came to this country in the 60s, we were the place to be. We were humming. We were brimming with confidence. Kennedy said to go to the moon. Uh and and uh you know, my first book was about why manufacturing still matters. I think it was a colossal mistake to let China eat our lunch on so many key industries, especially now with rare earth metals and magnets. I mean, we should have a Manhattan project to do that in the United States or New Zealand, Australia, Chile. But, you know, so I after my time in the Obama administration, after I wrote this book, I said technology is is going to shape so much of the future of this country. I have a vision of how we can make sure that it uh helps everyone in my district and around the country. and maybe I have something to offer to to Congress. So, I ran against an incumbent again, lost again. California is a machine dominated state. It's very hard to break in and I persisted and won on my third try.

There you go.

Third times a charm.

And so, for this year, uh, in 2025, how would you frame, you know, your top priorities? There's this weird there's this weird disconnect between, uh, that we've been tracking on like how relevant is AI? It's it's so dominant in tech and yet uh if you talk to somebody at Apple, they'll be like, "We didn't want to focus on AI this year at all. We wanted to focus on battery life because that's what helped us sell phones and AI was actually not a driver of iPhone sales, for example." Uh it's it's a it's a deeply pervasive discussion point. And yet it's not necessarily uh and yet it's it's widely used, but also widely hated. It's such a unique technology, but uh just in terms of political priorities, what's been on the top of the stack for you this year?

I want to answer your question on AI, but obviously in the last few months, what's been a highest priority is getting these Epstein files released. Thomas Massie and I passed the Epstein transparency act. It was my bill passed 427 to one, 100 to zero in the Senate and Donald Trump signed it. Most urgently, it's about justice for these underage girls, over a thousand victims who were raped at Epstein's Island. But it's also about this kind of idea of elite impunity that these rich and powerful people, I call them the Epstein class, don't play by the rules, which you and I have to play by and people are tired of it. And it also is a story of how how in the world you get some things done in Washington. how how did a Bay Area progressive congressperson end up getting Donald Trump to sign his bill and getting 427 uh people in the house to vote for it and 100 senators? So that has been uh the immediate priority. But what I say to folks

So are are you optimistic that uh the American people will ever get a like a truly cohesive narrative on the Epstein story or will it be our generation's JFK assassination? I'm confident we're going to get far more than we've had so far. The release is now mandated by law December 19th or December 20th.

I think more names are going to fall. You've already had some high-profile names uh fall because of their affiliation with Epstein covering up for him or being inappropriate. I there are going to be other names that come out. Now,

do I think that it's going to satisfy everyone? No. There's always going to be some sense that we didn't get a full justice, but it's going to be much better than these women who were denied justice for decades, which was not partisan. I mean, they were shafted by a justice system that didn't work. And there are a lot of rich and powerful people who got away with it.

But look, I what I tell people is that AI is going to matter even more than anything. And and to your point about Apple, it's not AI literally as just AI as Grock or Chat GPT or a technology that detects patterns and can predict the future based on patterns. It's more that AI has become a symbol for a technology revolution that people know is changing everything about their way of life and the economy and where they feel like they don't have control that they don't have a full say uh in what that's going to mean. They don't have a full say in what that's going to mean for their kids in terms of having good paying jobs and they're unsure if their kids are going to have as good a life as their parents had. They don't know what that's going to mean culturally for them as citizens. Are they going to have the same sense or are they just going to be manipulated by algorithms?

And they don't know what that means culturally as their kids are on phones in school and and and becoming uh sort of uh creatures with machines. And so this whole concept of how technology uh is going to uh be uh something that empowers people and that people feel comfortable about as opposed to fearful of. uh is the challenge in my view of our time. Uh, and you know, I've I've gotten attacked from some people in Silicon Valley saying, "Oh, it's kind of a lite." And I was like, "No, I'm not a lit. Of course, I believe AI can do a lot of great things in medicine, in uh coming up with new disease and lowering costs, but uh I I don't think we can be uh oblivious uh to uh people's concerns about keeping jobs and keeping uh social cohesion and making sure their kids are have going to have a good economic future." And so I've tried to be thoughtful about how we adopt AI uh how we adopt technology in a way that keeps the American dream alive and and benefits folks. And I mean that's such a wide remit how we adopt AI technology because you can see it implemented from a chatbot that you know some random person uses or you know kids are using AI all the way down to you know deeper in some the bowels of some enterprise software product that you know no human was ever interacting with to begin with and then it's just streamlined a little bit with uh some some AI dropped in the middle of some big system. Um, how are you thinking about uh creating some sort of taxonomy around AI? Do you do you like a divide between generative AI and more traditional machine learning workloads? Do you see a divide between consumer and B2B applications, self-driving versus what happens in a chatbot? Like how are you thinking about actually breaking apart that problem? because there's so much there when we say AI.

I would say that the key distinction is is AI going to enhance human capability or eliminate human beings.

That is the

the distinction and that we need to figure out as a society how we get more AI that is enhancing human beings as opposed to just eliminating them. Mhm.

Let me share two thoughts on this. Uh both of people who influenced me. Steve Jobs described a computer as a bicycle for the mind.

He didn't say computers would eliminate the mind. He just said it would make the mind go really faster and better. Yeah.

Right. And my view is how does AI do that?

Yeah.

And then Darren A. Smogloo won the Nobel Prize at at MIT uh has this idea of total factor productivity. Sure. Let me try to explain it simply. If you just had AI replacing human beings and those human beings then becoming uh not productive, not only would you have frustration in our society, right? I mean, who wants to just get a check without contributing? People have pride, but you also wouldn't actually maximize total production because you have all these people who could be doing things who are not productive and or not being able to earn a living and spend money. And so what he says is that there is some savings of that for consumers and for shareholders if a technology just eliminates uh labor. But the best technologies like electricity, like automobiles don't just uh eliminate people. What they actually do is they increase people workers ability to produce that they are technologies that increase human capability. And so you have the benefit of the synthesis of the technology and the worker and that that is actually what transforms lives and he calls it total factor productivity. And so my uh ideas around this has been how do we do that? How do we make sure we just don't eliminate four million commercial drivers? How do we make sure that the adoption of things is actually uh making us more productive and that it's being done in with respect to to to to workers and and and and capability.

Okay. But so so let's let's make it more uh specific because I I agree at a high level with a lot of that. Uh but let's talk about like a specific role uh or job like truck driving. Uh you've generally come out against uh uh uh or or have concerns around AI based job displacement with uh and with long haul trucking and truck drivers. On the other side of that, if I'm a uh if if I'm running a trucking company and uh I want to deliver deliver the best possible service for my customers, it's possible that uh AI uh would be able to support that. How how what kind of like policy do you think is uh uh right in order to create uh you want some guard rails around around the industry how AI should be used in in trucking? I'd love to kind of understand more.

Yeah, I would say have a human in the loop. And so, uh, what does that mean? Uh, when I on a plane, you know, a lot of it is automated, but we still have a pilot there. And I'm glad we have a pilot. I I wouldn't want to just fly in an automated plane. And so, does this mean that a truck driver's job may become uh more appealing? Because right now, as you know, we have a shortage actually of truck drivers and more demand. But if they have a a assist from a technology that maybe allows them to rest more, that's less taxing. They're there for the edge cases if something is possibly going wrong. They're there uh to deal with maintenance. They're there uh to make sure that you have loading and unloading happening. We can reimagine what the role uh of a truck driver uh is going to be. And we can certainly have a temporary uh view that for the next five years that you should have the driver there. Now that doesn't mean that at some point uh there may not be uh jobs or certain parts of things that don't require a driver, but it doesn't seem unreasonable for five years to say you want a driver in the loop and let's rethink the the types of of of jobs that that that will be. And if we need the government to be helping invest in in uh in in these in the developing of this technology, fine, but do it in a way that's going to be complimentary with drivers.

Yeah, this is kind of happening already with Whimo where there is a human in the loop and it's but you know the ratio of TA operators to cars on the road is potentially higher than one one right now you know according to some reports. Uh but over time I think the Whimo team expects there to be fewer and fewer humans in the loop over time. The question is how fast does that happen? Um and you're sort of proposing um maybe try and make that as gradual as as a as a process as possible because I mean you go back to like the elevator operator used to be a human now we use buttons and no one's really missing those jobs. They phased out over time. Um, I think the main thing is everyone is concerned about rapid job displacement. Not necessarily the if if I told you your grandson can't uh can't be a truck driver, you'd say, "Oh, you know, he'll find a different job." Uh, but if it's like every truck driver out of out of the job next year, that's obviously much more dis uh dis like disengaging to the US economy. Is that how you think about it in terms of just timelines more than strict rules forever? I think that's thoughtful. There's a famous economist who once said in a gender time, jobs for the father, not for the son. And by that, uh, he meant, look, we've got to make sure that people in their 30s, 40s, 50s, 60s have have jobs. That doesn't mean that, uh, that's exactly what their kids are going to do or their grandkids are going to do. But a lot of these human in the loop legislation, we're talking about five years. We're not talking about 15 years. Uh, and we're talking about uh, roles uh, evolving, right? Right. I mean, it may be that there these evolve and then there's less of a need to to to hire folks uh down the line and you you have a natural uh transition of folks, but you're taking people who are workers and making sure that they're productive and they have a good life. Let me explain why I think this matters. Phone operators, which people often give an example, and Alex uh Alexis, who's at Chicago, had a great point about this. That was 2% of the workforce. Commercial drivers are 10% of the workforce. You already have an anger in the country of so many people displaced by globalization, displaced by the concentration of wealth in some areas. And you really want to throw into this mix a rapid uh mass job loss displacement of and then what? Just compensate them and and have people stay at home and just get a check. Like is that the society that we think is going to be productive or do we rather uh figure out how they have uh some role and some say in the transition be managed in in a way that is uh uh that considers their their uh their interests as well. And that's, you know, and I get that this it's a good nature debate and people say, "Okay, Connor, you're adding uh some uh costs to to to the issue." And if all you cared about was shareholder profits and minimizing consumer costs as your only holy grail and you didn't care about jobs and you didn't care about communities, then people have a legitimate uh critique of me. But I would argue that that was the mentality during globalization and it's what's led to so much of the polarization not just of our politics in the United States but in the western world led to things like Brexit led to anti-immigrant sentiment and maybe we should consider jobs and communities not as dispositive but as a factor just like we consider consumer costs and shareholder profits.

Yeah. What's your what's your look back on how the Uber story played out? Because that was a weird moment where there was a big push back from the taxi cab drivers. Those jobs still exist, but they're just way less profitable because the medallion system has kind of been undone. But if you want to make a if you want to make money uh driving someone, you can, but it's you're making less money. Like do you think that we should have handled that differently if we could run back the time or do you think it happened slowly enough that it was actually okay and delivered enough value to the consumer? Because Uber is one of those weird examples where the amount of, you know, taxi cab like activity, ride sharing activity, it 10xed and and more people take these these rides than ever before um in the taxi era. And yet it did have remarkable uh impact on the market structure of that industry.

Well, I'd be hypocritical for saying I'm against Uber. I take Ubers all the time.

I'm the same way.

A expose, you know, next time I get into an Uber. The uh but but I I'll say this, we we should have done more for the medallion owners, right? I I tried actually in New York. I this is beca before Zoran Mandani became Zoran Mandani when he was an assembly member he was really focused on a lot of these taxi drivers who had lost their medallion value yeah and were underwater and what could we do to to compensate them and I had actually reached out to Jamie Dman who tried to do something uh to his credit uh through uh through through JP Morgan and it ended up not working out but you know we should have as a government done more to help those folks who who had medallions who lost all their value. And that's an example of something where we could have been more proactive. And then there's a huge debate about Uber drivers and whether they're getting enough value and have enough say over uh their their lives. I I would argue that that we need that. And I'd argue we need national health insurance. This is the biggest uh biggest area where if you're not going to be employed at a as a traditional employee, it would really help if people didn't have to buy healthcare on an exchange that has soaring premiums. So, there are better things we need to be doing to help that Uber driver. But do I do am I glad that there is a technology like Uber? Yes, I am. I think it has uh created jobs and it has uh made life easier for many people. uh you brought up uh mom Donnie. He made a post I think it was yesterday or the day before that a bunch of Silicon Valley types were agreeing with which was uh you don't you don't you haven't seen that very often. It was around basically around SMB deregulation making it easier to get a small business off the ground. Is that should that be a more important conversation at in in in every state and region? I feel like I growing up in California, uh I've seen so many businesses like try to get off the ground and you end up seeing like a finished uh like a finished restaurant that's just has its door closed because they're waiting on some some permit or something like that and it's obviously hard enough to start a restaurant uh and it seems like oftent times local governments uh can get in the way. uh do you think that needs to be just a bigger part of the conversation as you know given that uh starting a business is a great way to insulate yourself from uh at least some job displacement risk with with AI?

Yes, it does. And look, Zoron became famous in part with his halal video where he was basically saying it takes too much regulation to have a halal stall and we need to streamline that. And so, uh, I believe yes, we need to make it easier for people to to start a small business, to be their own business owner. That's not just making the permitting easier, it's also making sure people have access to capital. A lot of times that's a barrier. But I'll tell you one thing that I think is often a a blind spot for uh, folks in my district. I love small businesses. I love entrepreneurs. I think that there's a lot of people who want to build wealth.

Completely agree. Completely agree. We love small businesses here, too.

But here's the butt.

Okay.

Most Americans, most Americans are not going to go just start a small business. Like this this idea that every person in Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, or Western Pennsylvania, should start a startup or build a business. Like my dad never did that. He had a middle- class life. He worked for the same company for 30 years. And there are a lot of people who just want a decent job. and they just want a job that can support a family. And there's nothing wrong with that if they want to be in manufacturing or they want to be a nurse or they want to be a child care provider. And so sometimes our rhetoric becomes like why can't everyone become an entrepreneur? It's like why can't every become a politician? Now maybe an entrepreur is a better life, but like a lot of people just don't want to do that and they still want to have the American dream. And so all I'm saying is let's think about how to help small business owners, but let's also think about the four million people who are drivers and like what is their life going to look like? Uh and uh and it's important to have that balance.

Yeah.

Give me some lessons from the recent trip to China. I'm fascinated by how they're dealing with AI. Um are they doing anything right? Are they moving even faster? Do they have a solution to the job displacement uh problems? Uh, is there anything good or maybe risky that you found going out there? What were your takeaways?

Three takeaways. One, one-third of the AI talent is in China.

What does that mean? Uh, that means it it would be totally counterproductive to ban Chinese students from coming to the United States or Chinese entrepreneurs for coming to the United States. We want to have uh that talent come to the United States because we still have a better uh ecosystem for capital and for investment.

Second, uh we need to make sure that we're developing the talent in uh in in AI here in the United States and investing in STEM and making sure that we're uh encouraging uh the the local development of that. A third and this is the most important important. Guess how much uh youth unemployment is in China?

It's nearly 20%. It's really high.

You guys are you guys are too smart on this stuff.

It's really high.

20%.

That's crazy. How is that possible? I feel like can't they just go build more bridges and create more jobs? I thought I thought it was a command and control economy. I don't know. It's always

enough. They have enough to empty skyrises. I think

maybe. I don't know. Yeah. What was what was your take away from that? And as I describe it to people, you can't build dating apps in China, right? Like so, you know, the people who have these degrees.

Is it banned?

Yeah. I mean, they they it's such a directed economy. They want everyone to like make stuff, manufacture stuff, not do not do things that they would consider frivolous, right?

Sure. Sports app, a music app, all the cultural stuff that we do that improves consumer life or thinks about consumer needs. uh and uh you know so you're a someone who gets this fancy education in college and then they're like okay go uh work uh at a factory and just like we've undervalued people who want to work at factories in America we should be having more trade schools and more respect for factory workers they've undervalued people who don't want to work at a factory and the reality is like you should have both choices so these people they they they're there and they don't want to go necessarily to build a bridge or necessarily to uh build a next uh factory of robotics. And the it was hilarious because I would talk to the premier Lee Chang or others and they'd say, "Well, it's a voluntary unemployment problem. These are just folks they they should be getting doing these jobs." But what if in America we said, "Okay, you know, as as one of the news rooms when when they're they were being laid off said to someone, go become a an electrician." Well, that's as offensive as telling a steel worker to become a coder. like you know people do things and they want to do what they aspire to do and China is a command directed economy that has overvalued manufacturing doesn't have that diversity we do our problem has been the opposite that we undervalued making things we undervalued the trades and so what we need is sort of a balance for America to have manufacturing but also this incredible ecosystem of the service economy uh which can employ people where China can't and that's ultimately why I bet on America. I'm also one pointer sick of this argument that let's just go be like China. They're where they're going to eat our lunch. Really? You know, the Chinese model is a crony communism. Like, okay, Gigi Ping gets rich and a bunch of people who are running these companies get rich and the rest and then you have 20% unemployment and you have consumer welfare declining and and look at how most people live. They don't live in nice houses with, you know, two cars. So like I don't want China as a model and I'm not going to compromise every American having economic security just because we're chasing China. China is not the model. America needs to be more like America of how we built America in the 1940s50s and

I completely agree.

Quick couple uh want your takes on a couple things. Uh housing affordability. I think a lot of people agree right now that uh housing affordability is is sort of like upstream of a of a lot of the problems that that we're facing as a country. How what what's your current stance on on how we can impro improve affordability at at kind of the local level and at the federal level?

I'm a Yimi. I'm an abundance guy on housing.

We got to build far more housing in California. You know, I I I don't endorse people who are sort of zero housing people in in in my district. We got to realize that aesthetics matter, but economic uh equality of opportunity matters more. And you can't have five trillion dollar companies in my district and expect to live live like where the valley of the hearts delight. Like if you got that many companies, you got to have housing near transit and dense housing uh to make sure that people can live there and that it's not just a place where wealthy people can live and that the working and middle class is getting shafted. We also need to stop private equity from buying up single family homes. People say, "Oh, this is a red herring." No, it's not a red herring. In some places, uh they have bought up too much single family homes. So probuilding uh pro- streamlining making it easier to build and uh having zoning reform uh and and stop private equity from buying up these single family homes.

What about international?

Will will we will we make progress at least in California on those issues in the next 10 years?

Yes. Because I I I think people realize we didn't make enough progress over the last 10 years that this is a failure of California policy. uh and whoever is elected the next governor, I can't imagine it won't be on a abundance agenda when it comes to housing. And it's not going to be, okay, let me do it at the last year. Try to do something of of an eight-year term. It's going to be day one. How do we start to do things that it's going to build more housing? So, I I I think it's been a wakeup call for uh for California.

That makes sense. Uh any quick comments on the current state versus federal AI regulation? We didn't get to touch on that earlier. Uh and and you had some comments uh recently on um SB 1047, the the bill in California, but what's your updated view on on uh where regulation should be happening?

Well, look, ultimately we need a federal regulatory framework, but the way you get good federal legislation is having legislation in the states. That's federalism. And uh I don't understand how you would have a moratorum on having state legislation when federal legislation right now looks bleak. The prospects of it are bleak. Uh it is such an unpopular position even among Republicans. So my view is uh build a consensus that you can have thoughtful uh regulations at the federal level uh and work on that. Don't stop states uh from uh from regulating. And this idea that okay, you're going to stop all the growth. I mean, my district is $18 trillion of value. We've got five companies over a trillion dollars. East of the Mississippi, there's not a singleion.

You know, California's undefeated. It's so good.

You talk to folks in like Bucks County, Pennsylvania, where I grew up, and they're like, "Come on. Come on. They producing more wealth than ever before." Like what we want to know is how is how are our kids going to fit into this? Yeah.

And I I just think that that I wish more tech leaders, you know, who sometimes gets it is a Jensen Wong has talked about this. I'm like, yeah, I mean about how do we create economic development opportunities in places that have been left out? How do we make sure that everyone comes along on the AI revolution? I I just think it would it's in tech companies interest to embrace this in in a similar way as uh the economic royalist embrace the New Deal eventually. I mean you can't have just a capitalism that is only working uh for some with with large chunks of the country suspicious and and left out.

Yeah. I I just worry that we don't know the shape of what we're regulating yet. like the unintended consequences of social media took 5 10 years to develop. I mean, two years ago, we were reflecting on this. People were worried about AI killing everyone and creating the Terminator. And then what wound up happening? Well, it wasn't really political misinformation. It was much more people chatting with it for a really long time, going crazy, uh, you know, maybe overbuilding, maybe risk in the debt markets. Like, the risks were very hard to predict. there were risks, but it wasn't exactly what we thought. And so I'm always I I'm I'm a little bit like hesitant about like, you know, maybe there should be regulations, but how when will we be confident that we know how to regulate it? Is it right? Is now the right time? Do we have clarity? Because a lot of the stuff it stands on, you know, we already have fair use. We already have copyright protections. And so a lot of it can be enforced through the courts, I would imagine. Um, but of course if if new problems come up, they need to be resolved and that's the way we resolve them in in a democratic society.

I think that's fair. The places I focus on are jobs.

Yeah.

And uh American citizenship

and I agree with you on the jobs part, but it just feels like the jobs we haven't seen a collapse and and even people building the AI technology are like this is going to put everyone out of jobs and that's good. And then the people that hate the technology are saying it's going to put everyone out of a job and that's bad. And it's kind of crazy because they all agree that the jobs are going away. And yet what do you get when you actually look at the jobs figures? It seems like we still have jobs. Like it seems like we we actually can't delegate to the AI and I can't just say, "Hey, you know, trucker, like I I want the AI to handle this one." It just it's just the technology is not there yet. And will it be a year? Will it be 5 years, 10 years, 100 years? There's a whole bunch of incentives to say it's coming right now. uh and it's hard to get a read on and predicting predicting when things will happen is is you know fortunes are one and lost on that on that alone.

Totally agree with you. John Maynard Kane said we'd all be working 15 hour work weeks and he was on more about economics than any of us. So, you know, it's hard to predict, but I think what we can do is when you look at Darren A. Smoggler who says, "Well, why don't we have a neutral tax code so we're not uh incentivizing depreciation of investment and technology and automation over hiring people?" I mean, there are things we can do that make it that we we we prioritize having people in the loop. And then there are things we can do in our social media environment that protect us as citizens and kids. Two things are like, let's eliminate bots, right? Elon Musk talked about doing this on X and there's still a ton of bots, but a lot of the bots that use AI are in my view uh hurting our democracy and then let's protect kids from some of the harms on social media. Yeah. you know, so yeah, I guess I you know, I'd love I love sparring with folks and I appreciate sort of the criticism I've gotten from the tech folks for the the the tweets on on AI and and and drivers, but I guess what I would hope for tech people listening to this is don't resist uh uh every form of of of of regulation and and sort of dismiss people's anxieties. instead be part of how we get smart regulations and how we answer people's concerns because if 70% of the American people believe the American dream is dead and have a concern about AI. Like the answer to that uh for anyone who's been like in a relationship is not to dismiss it and say they're dumb. It's to say, okay, how do I address that anxiety so that we can move forward? And I guess I I I guess my hope would be that uh there'll be more tech leaders uh like that. Victor Pang is one who was the former leader at AMD. I mean, there's some people who are thinking in that way and I I I I think it's in Silicon Valley's interest to have that kind of view.

No, that makes sense.

I think you really you really freaked people out with there should be a tax on mass job displacement.

Well, there is a tax on the profits, right? Like we we tax profits. So, I mean it there there's a question of like maybe we adjust that, but it's it's all these are all dials that already exist. We're just discussing how we turn them, I would imagine. Yeah. I don't know. Well, a lot of times, you know, this is one thing different for me than other politicians is I I toss ideas out there. If I think there's good push back, then I adjust my views and I I'm like a politician like this. I just talk like I talk to someone someone over a drink over at a bar, you know, I and everyone else is like so scripted. Oh, you can't put out an idea because, you know, maybe it'll come back 10 two years later on Face the Nation. I just don't think that's what our politics are. I It's like put your ideas out there. What human being doesn't have some ideas that are dumb? Like maybe maybe Einstein didn't or something. Most of us, yeah, we put up good ideas, we put up bad ideas. We think

I love I love that. I love that approach and it and it's and it uh certainly sparks a conversation

and it certainly fits with what we've done here today. This was really fun. We really appreciate you coming on the show and just like going all over the place and just talking through all this stuff. It's fascinating. I'm learning a ton and uh we really appreciate you taking the time to come talk to us.

Yes. Thank you so much for coming on.

Well, you guys are doing great. Seriously, you're you're elevating the conversation in Silicon Valley and it's an honor to be on and I look forward to being

Yeah. Yeah. We'd love to have you back on the show and and go way deeper on all of these and I'm sure uh by the time the next time you're on uh all the data points will be different and and we'll be looking at and we'll be staring at new problems and they will require new solutions and new discussions. And so, thank you so much for taking the time to come talk to us.

I appreciate your approach.

Thank you.

Have a great day. We'll talk to you soon.

Bye. Uh before we bring in our next guest, let me tell you about numeral.com. Let numeral worry about sales tax and VAT