Why the A.I. Backlash Turned Violent in America

Summary

This episode of Hard Fork tackles the rising and increasingly violent backlash against AI in America. Kevin Roose and Casey Newton open with the news that an attacker targeted Sam Altman’s home in San Francisco and shots were fired at the Indianapolis councilman Ron Gibson’s house after he voted in favor of a data center. The hosts use these incidents as a launching pad to examine why AI and data centers have become so unpopular: the state of Maine recently passed a temporary moratorium on data centers above 20 megawatts, towns from Wisconsin to North Carolina are voting against them, and Bernie Sanders and AOC have proposed a national moratorium. Kevin walks through Stanford’s 2024 AI index showing only 31% of Americans trust their government to regulate AI responsibly — about half the global average.

The hosts then examine three explanations for the backlash. The first, advanced by Sam Altman in a personal blog post, is that journalism critical of AI is making leaders less safe. Casey pushes back that the bigger issue is OpenAI lobbying against transparency bills, sending subpoenas to nonprofit AI critics, and backing an Illinois bill that would shield it from liability. The second explanation is economic: people are afraid AI will take their jobs or make their existing jobs miserable, and the AI companies have no convincing answer beyond “the government will figure it out.” The third is anti-elitism: AI is a top-down project being deployed at unprecedented speed by a handful of unelected people who actively fight regulation. Kevin argues data center NIMBYism is misdirected — the real levers are policies like flexible safety nets and worker retraining — but Casey notes saying no in your neighborhood is the only lever average Americans actually have.

In the second segment, Kara Swisher returns to discuss her new CNN docuseries “Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever,” in which she explores Silicon Valley’s obsession with longevity. Kara dismisses much of what she tried — hyperbaric chambers, ketamine, sound therapy — as “the rich people” playing at perfectibility while ignoring the simplest interventions like universal healthcare. She does endorse VO2 max training, CRISPR for sickle cell, and mRNA technology for cancer. She delivers a passionate critique of the inequity of biohacking culture in the backdrop of cut research funding, and reveals that on ketamine she “thought only about Casey… naked.” The third segment, on Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to build an AI version of himself to interact with Meta staff, closes the episode.

Highlights

”Most people want stability in their lives”

“Most people don’t think like that. They don’t think, I want to live through a period of unprecedented technological change in which the world becomes unrecognizable to me… most people want stability in their lives. They want to be able to plan for their futures, and when people from Silicon Valley show up and say, hey, we’ve got this amazing new technology, and by the way, it might take away your job and there’s nothing you can do about it, I think that naturally breeds some fear and resentment.” — Kevin Roose, 14:55

yt-dlp --download-sections "*14:55-15:46" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z620brBViuo" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "most-people-want-stability.mp4"

”AI as a mostly right-wing elite project”

“Particularly on the left, this just looks like a mostly right-wing elite project that is being championed by President Trump and the many venture capitalists that are in his administration. And if you’re already worried that it’s going to take your job and you don’t feel like you have any control over it, well, of course you’re going to hate it.” — Casey Newton, 15:29

yt-dlp --download-sections "*15:29-17:00" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z620brBViuo" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "right-wing-elite-project.mp4"

”There’s a perfect regulation out there…”

“There’s a perfect regulation out there and they can’t seem to really name it or describe it or get it passed, but if they hear it someday, they promise they’re going to line up behind it with their full support.” — Kevin Roose, 19:39

yt-dlp --download-sections "*19:39-20:30" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z620brBViuo" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "perfect-regulation-out-there.mp4"

”Trickle-down healthonomics”

“Trickle-down healthonomics over here.” — Kara Swisher, 40:57

yt-dlp --download-sections "*40:38-41:30" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z620brBViuo" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "trickle-down-healthonomics.mp4"

”Adderall and Kara, I’d literally solve the Middle East”

“I don’t need stimulants, Kevin. Do you imagine me on stimulants?… Adderall and Kara, I’d literally solve the Middle East… I’d be over in the Middle East solving the problems.” — Kara Swisher, 39:00

yt-dlp --download-sections "*38:57-39:30" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z620brBViuo" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "adderall-and-kara.mp4"

”It’s the rich people”

“It’s the rich people. It’s this idea of perfectibility… the simplest things for all of us to live longer is universal healthcare… in every peer country of ours is way up and to the right on all the good things and we pay double the amount of money, $15,000 a year compared to seven, six to seven, and we get zero — we’re at the bottom of all the outcomes.” — Kara Swisher, 39:49

yt-dlp --download-sections "*39:48-40:38" "https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Z620brBViuo" --force-keyframes-at-cuts --merge-output-format mp4 -o "rich-people-perfectibility.mp4"

Key Points

• Sam Altman’s House Attack and More A.I. Backlash (0:30) - Episode opens covering an attack on Altman’s home and shots fired at Indianapolis councilman Ron Gibson after he voted to back a data center
• Maine bans data centers over 20MW until 2027 (5:02) - Temporary moratorium passed; Port Washington WI also voted to require voter approval for future data centers
• Bernie Sanders and AOC propose federal data center moratorium (5:30) - National-level proposal targeting data center construction
• Stanford AI Index: only 31% of Americans trust government to regulate AI (6:23) - Compared to a 54% global average; sentiment trending more negative
• Pew study: Americans negative on data center impact on environment, energy, quality of life (7:00) - But more Americans view the economic effects of AI as potentially positive
• Sam Altman’s “I’m awake in the middle of the night and pissed” blog post (7:54) - Altman blamed an incendiary New Yorker article for endangering him
• OpenAI’s lobbying playbook (18:24) - Killed a California AI transparency bill; sent subpoenas to nonprofit critics; backed an Illinois liability shield bill
• OpenAI’s “Industrial Policy for the Intelligent Age” (20:50) - Proposes a public wealth fund modeled on Alaska’s oil dividend, improved safety nets, public-private energy partnerships
• The skeleton key: people fear AI will hurt them economically (14:07) - Casey calls economic anxiety the “skeleton key that unlocks some vast portion of the entire AI debate”
• Anti-elitism as third backlash driver (15:29) - AI looks like a top-down right-wing-aligned elite project that the average person has no control over
• Waymo backlash despite safety record (17:34) - Cities push back even though self-driving cars are demonstrably safer than human drivers
• Data center NIMBYism won’t stop AI (24:01) - Kevin argues opposition just pushes data centers to other states or Canada — “they’ll put the data centers in space”
• Kevin’s policy alternative: flexible safety nets like Europe’s (25:57) - Job retraining councils paid by the state for displaced workers
• Kara Swisher Doesn’t Actually Want to Live Forever (29:49) - Title of new CNN docuseries is tongue-in-cheek; Kara is critical of biohacking culture
• Kara on hyperbaric chambers (36:04) - “Fucking ridiculous”; useful for the bends or wounds, otherwise “they sell the rich people and make them feel superior”
• Ketamine as Silicon Valley “optimization” (36:53) - Kara recounts a charity-lunch host who only wanted to talk about ketamine for self-optimization, not depression
• Casey on ketamine: “clown shoes for your brain” (37:46) - Best description anyone gave him; “you think you’re moving and then the motion happens three seconds later”
• Universal healthcare as the actual longevity hack (39:49) - Peer countries pay half as much and have better outcomes; longevity has plummeted for poor Americans
• Wealthy people as guinea pigs argument (40:38) - Casey points to GLP-1s spreading from biohackers to mainstream; Kara is skeptical that’s “tech people”
• Trump funding cuts to longevity researchers (42:36) - Kara notes real entrepreneur-researchers leaving the country because they can’t monetize immediately
• Kevin’s father died of a rare disease before treatments existed (43:13) - Personal context for asking whether the FDA should approve drugs faster
• CRISPR for sickle cell as the real opportunity (44:29) - About 100,000 Americans have sickle cell anemia; Kara also bullish on mRNA for cancer and gene editing
• Mark Zuckerberg’s A.I. Bot (49:19) - Final segment covering Meta’s reported effort to build an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with staff

Mentions

Companies

• OpenAI (5:02) - Stargate data centers in Port Washington WI; lobbying against transparency bills; “Industrial Policy for the Intelligent Age” white paper
• Oracle (5:02) - Co-investor on the Port Washington Stargate data center project
• Meta (49:19) - Reportedly building an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with staff
• Waymo (17:34) - Self-driving service facing local backlash despite a safety record better than humans
• CNN (30:24) - Distributing Kara Swisher’s new docuseries on longevity

Products & Technologies

• Stargate data centers (5:02) - The OpenAI/Oracle data center project meeting local resistance in Port Washington
• Stanford AI Index 2024 (6:23) - Annual report cataloging AI industry trends and public sentiment
• CRISPR (44:29) - Gene editing tech with potential to cure sickle cell anemia in ~100K Americans
• mRNA technology (44:29) - Kara’s pick as the most promising approach for cancer
• GLP-1 (41:00) - Weight-loss drugs that spread from biohackers/Upper East Side women to mainstream
• Hyperbaric chamber (36:04) - Biohacking trend Kara dismisses as useless outside of the bends or wounds
• VO2 max training (35:44) - The one biohack Kara endorses, though without the “Hannibal Lecter monitor”

People

• Sam Altman (7:54) - OpenAI CEO; home was attacked; wrote a blog post blaming a New Yorker article for endangering him
• Ron Gibson (0:30) - Indianapolis councilman whose home was shot at after he voted to back a data center
• Kara Swisher (29:49) - Tech journalist; guest discussing her new CNN docuseries “Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever”
• Bernie Sanders (5:30) - Senator proposing a federal data center moratorium
• Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) (5:30) - House counterpart on the federal data center moratorium
• Donald Trump (15:29) - President; Casey frames AI as championed by Trump and his VC allies
• Mark Zuckerberg (49:19) - Meta CEO; subject of the final segment about a Meta-built AI version of him
• Steve Jobs (33:36) - Kara recalls his Stanford speech on mortality as a motivator and her interview with him a year before he died
• Larry Ellison (34:23) - Most active and earliest investor in anti-aging research according to Kara
• Peter Thiel (34:23) - Backed the woman pitching Kara on ending senescent cells
• Brian Johnson (42:15) - Spends $2 million a year on his health; archetype of expensive biohacking
• Scott Galloway (35:01) - Did a sound bath with Kara as part of the docuseries
• Elon Musk (18:24) - Cited as the supposed puppet master in OpenAI’s subpoenas to nonprofit AI critics; also referenced for ketamine use

Surprising Quotes

“There’s a third path forward here, which is to essentially just try to work with the government and put more pressure on them to put into place systems that would regulate the companies to mitigate the harms caused by their products. And so far, we have actually seen the opposite, particularly in the case of OpenAI.” — Casey Newton, 12:00

“I really do think that is the skeleton key that unlocks some vast portion of the entire AI debate.” — Casey Newton, 14:07

“If you vote the data center project out of your town, they’re just going to go to another state or to Canada. They’ll put the data centers in space, you know? They’ve got options here, and I don’t think this is going to meaningfully slow down or stop anything.” — Kevin Roose, 24:01

“They will put you on Mount Rushmore if you figure out how to make this go well.” — Kevin Roose, 29:51

“I had none. I thought only about you, Casey… Naked.” — Kara Swisher, on what she thought about during her ketamine experience, 37:28

“Trickle-down healthonomics over here.” — Kara Swisher, 40:57

Transcript

Kevin Roose: 4:45 Individual threats against people who support data centers, but also just that there is a lot of political resistance forming in opposition to these data centers by people who I think think that this sort of boom is bad and at least that they don’t want it taking place in their neighborhood.

Casey Newton: 5:00 So describe some of this resistance.

Kevin Roose: 5:02 So the state of Maine recently passed a temporary moratorium that would ban data centers larger than 20 megawatts until November 2027. There’s a suburb of Milwaukee, Wisconsin, Port Washington, which is going to be the home of one of these big OpenAI Oracle Stargate data centers. That town recently voted overwhelmingly in favor of restricting the building of future data centers, basically you have to get voter approval before you do any of these things. Then there’s also similar efforts going on in places like Ohio, Missouri, Indiana, Georgia, North Carolina. And there’s also this big federal data center moratorium that has been proposed by Bernie Sanders in the Senate and AOC in the House that would basically put a national moratorium on the construction of data centers. So I think data centers are kind of where this is becoming hottest fastest, but I do think we are seeing also these individual threats on the executives and leaders of these big AI companies by people who just do not think this is headed in a good direction.

Casey Newton: 6:04 Yes, and on that point, I want you to describe a little bit some of the broader backdrop here. Because over the past several weeks, I have seen survey after survey that just says in one way or another Americans do not believe that AI is likely to be a positive in their lives. So tell us about some of that data.

Kevin Roose: 6:23 What you see is kind of a slow turn against the AI industry over the course of really the last year or two. So there’s a new report out from Stanford this week, the 2024 version of their AI index, which sort of catalogs various trends in the AI industry. And basically, their takeaway was that in the US, people have very low trust in not only AI, but on the question of whether their own government can regulate AI in a responsible way. The global average on that question was 54% of like, do you trust your own government to responsibly regulate AI? In the US, that’s only 31%. The data is a little fuzzier in some other studies. There was a Pew study earlier this year that showed that people’s attitudes in the US are more negative than positive when it comes to data centers’ impact on the environment, home energy costs, and quality of life nearby. But that more Americans view the economic effects of AI as being potentially more positive. So it’s a little fuzzy, sort of depending on how you slice the data and how you ask the questions. But I think it’s fair to say that like most polls and surveys of public sentiment around AI have shown that people are getting more concerned as these systems get more powerful.

Casey Newton: 7:54 Yeah. So let’s talk about why we think this turn has happened so dramatically. I think we have a few possible explanations. And I want to start by one that was offered by Sam Altman, who wrote a very personal post on his blog. He put as a lead image a photo of his husband and his baby. And in this post, Sam talks about the story that was in the New Yorker the week previously, which we discussed on the most recent episode of Hard Fork. And one of the things that Sam writes is, words have power too. There was an incendiary article about me a few days ago. Someone said to me yesterday they thought it was coming at a time of great anxiety about AI and that it made things more dangerous for me. I brushed it aside. Now I’m awake in the middle of the night and pissed. So what do you make of the idea, Kevin, that a reason for the sort of negative sentiment against the AI companies and their leaders is the journalism being done about them?

Kevin Roose: 10:54 Yeah, see, I would ask you about this because I feel like there’s a certain bind here that these companies and their leaders are in when it comes to talking about some of the scarier possible outcomes of AI. I think a lot of them watched the social media CEOs claim that their technologies during the last decade would produce nothing but good for the world, right? It was going to connect everyone, it was going to be this glorious utopia. And I think a lot of them took the lesson from that that, well, we have to be upfront if we think the thing that we’re building has some risk attached to it, like we should be open and honest about that and not sugarcoat it. So I see them as kind of being stuck here because if they did what you are suggesting maybe they should have done and talked about the risks that they see and they’re honest about their fears, then they’re accused of being doomers who only want to escalate the rhetoric and stir things up. How do you think they should square that circle?

Casey Newton: 12:00 So I think that there is a third path forward here, which is to essentially just try to work with the government and put more pressure on them to put into place systems that would regulate the companies to mitigate the harms caused by their products. And so far, we have actually seen the opposite, particularly in the case of OpenAI, right? As we have seen more and more regulations get proposed in state houses around the country, OpenAI is going around trying to prevent those bills from being passed into law. So I think this is really, really important, right? Because the way that we solve problems caused by companies in a democracy is that we regulate them. And when the companies themselves are out there lobbying against regulation, I think people find that more and more infuriating.

Casey Newton: 12:48 All right, so we don’t seem to think that journalism is the reason that people are so upset with the AI companies. Let me propose a second answer: economic worries. I feel like when you and I are out there talking to most folks, to the extent that people have a concrete near-term worry about AI, it is that it is either going to totally replace their job or it is just going to make the job that they have now horrible. How does that sound as an explanation to you?

Kevin Roose: 13:13 Yeah, I am sort of more in line with this view of things that sort of in the same way that all politics is local, I think that all AI politics or most AI politics ultimately comes down to people just sort of looking at a technology and thinking what will this do to me and my ability to continue to live my life and support my family and retire comfortably? I think people have a lot of fears about this stuff. And that is, I think, a bigger part of the data center opposition. I don’t think a lot of the people opposing data centers are worried about existential risk. I think they’re mostly focused on like this thing seems super annoying and maybe it’s going to take my job and pollute my environment. And I think people are saying, wait a minute, we’re supposed to be rooting for this? Like why would I root for something that might make it harder for me to put food on the table?

Casey Newton: 14:07 I really do think that is the skeleton key that unlocks some vast portion of the entire AI debate, right? And it doesn’t seem to be something that so far any of the AI companies have really had an answer for. Now, if you sort of keep them up late at night and have one of these dorm room conversations, they will describe for you visions of fully automated luxury communism where you don’t have to have a job anymore and neither does anyone in your family and all of your meals will be 3D printed for you and it won’t cost you a cent. And I think that just seems so implausible to people that it’s impossible to build any kind of political constituency around it today, even if they’re gonna try to sell that case a little bit harder in the future, right?

Kevin Roose: 14:55 Yeah, I mean, I think this is the biggest cultural disconnect between the San Francisco Silicon Valley AI bubble and the rest of the country. I think people here, many of the people I talk to, they are excited about a period of rapid technological change. That is what excites them, they’re motivated by making it happen, they think ultimately this will be a good thing for society. I think most people don’t think like that. They don’t think, I want to live through a period of unprecedented technological change in which the world becomes unrecognizable to me. And I think there are a lot of people trying to send that message by opposing data centers, but I don’t think it’s really sunk in at the AI companies or to the people running them that most people want stability in their lives. They want to be able to plan for their futures, and when people from Silicon Valley show up and say, hey, we’ve got this amazing new technology, and by the way, it might take away your job and there’s nothing you can do about it, I think that naturally breeds some fear and resentment.

Casey Newton: 15:29 So this gets into the third explanation for what I think is going on here, which I want to put under the broad label of anti-elitism, right? This AI moment that we’re living through is a top-down moment. It did not rise up from the grassroots from a bunch of nerds getting together in their garages and training frontier models. It was a small group of really smart people who were able to get access to massive amounts of capital from the elites on our society and they are now mounting this effort to build it very quickly, deploy it very quickly without a lot of guardrails. And so I think when the average person looks at this, they think, not only did I not ask for this, but I have no meaningful control over it, right? And so I just think that that is a big reason that you’re seeing people so furious because I think particularly on the left, this just looks like a mostly right-wing elite project that is being championed by President Trump and the many venture capitalists that are in his administration. And if you’re already worried that it’s going to take your job and you don’t feel like you have any control over it, well, of course you’re going to hate it.

Kevin Roose: 16:59 So I don’t think this is some elite right-wing plot. But it is definitely an elitist project that is being undertaken by a very small handful of people who are not elected, who don’t have all that much accountability. And I think that is in part by design. I think these people have seen that when you do give the public a right to weigh in on how technology is deployed, they mostly vote to stop it, right? As we’re seeing now with these data centers, as we’re seeing around the country with the backlash against Waymo, which we haven’t even talked about, but this has been truly surprising to me, is, you know, Waymo has now a technology in its self-driving cars that is demonstrably safer than human drivers, and you would think that that would be greeted as kind of an unambiguous good, and yet in a lot of places where they’re trying to expand, people are saying, no, no, no, no, think of all the jobs we’ll lose if this technology comes in.

Casey Newton: 18:00 That attitude is mostly sort of mocked and dismissed as like, oh, you’re like we’re literally showing up here with a life-saving technology and you’re saying what about the taxi drivers? And I think there’s a cohort of people in Silicon Valley, many of whom we talk to and know, who just think like this technology is too important to be left to the masses. And I think that is like a misguided attitude, but it is definitely an attitude that is out there.

Kevin Roose: 18:24 Yeah, I mean, I do think it is really misguided because it’s one thing to say, well, we cannot trust the public to vote correctly about how new technologies could be deployed. It is another thing to actively fight against accountability measures or even transparency measures. And I just want to name this as another reason why I think that the public is growing increasingly anxious or even furious. If you just look at OpenAI’s lobbying efforts over the past couple of years, they lobbied against one of the first big AI transparency bills here in California and successfully killed it. They have been sending subpoenas to people who work at nonprofits who were in favor of AI regulations, trying to insinuate that maybe they were the puppets of Elon Musk. That doesn’t really feel like a very pro-democratic move. Most recently, OpenAI backed a bill in Illinois that would shield it from liability in cases where its models are used to cause serious harm, so long as they did not recklessly or intentionally cause it and published some safety reports. So to me, that is not just, hey, like let’s embrace the spirit of permissionless innovation and see what kind of cool stuff we can do. It’s saying, we’ve told you we’re creating something that could be an existential risk to humanity and we’re going to lobby for a bill that prevents us from being held liable. So when I say this technology is elitist and anti-democratic, that is what I am talking about. They are fighting against the mechanisms of accountability, and so I understand why members of the public are upset about that.

Casey Newton: 19:22 I don’t think it’s that simple. Like I think a lot of these companies have been very open to regulation of some kind. Now, they have fought, you’re right, they have fought specifically some of these bills, but the people who are building this stuff do believe that it should be regulated. I don’t think any of them think that it should be a total laissez-faire free-for-all. I think they just want there to be smart people making smart policies.

Kevin Roose: 19:39 Yeah, there’s a perfect regulation out there and they can’t seem to really name it or describe it or get it passed, but if they hear it someday, they promise they’re going to line up behind it with their full support.

Casey Newton: 19:50 Well, I want to just put a little bit of meat on that claim that I just made because they are actually proposing policies, right? The companies. So OpenAI last week released this document called Industrial Policy for the Intelligent Age.

Kevin Roose: 21:00 It’s a white paper about some of their ideas for how policy and regulation might need to change in a world of very powerful AI systems. They say we should create a public wealth fund, similar to things that happen in Alaska for oil, where every citizen would get a stake in the economic upside of AI, improved safety nets for workers, establishing new public-private partnerships to accelerate energy production. Nothing like truly crazy, but it is just a slate of stuff that I would be happy if one member of Congress was reading this and thinking this stuff looks like a good idea.

Casey Newton: 21:46 So I actually think it is pretty crazy. Like when you think about corporate policy papers that you’ve read in your time as a reporter, I’m guessing that you haven’t read many that called for a massive redistribution of wealth. That’s essentially what this is. And when you look at what OpenAI is proposing and then you look at their political donations and lobbying, they just seem like they’re at complete cross purposes, right? OpenAI is backing a lot of Republican candidates who I’m guessing are not going to support a massive expansion of the welfare state. So something is going on here that I think at the very least leaves room for critics to say, are y’all even serious about this?

Kevin Roose: 22:25 Yeah, I think some of what’s going on right now at all of the leading AI companies is that they are trying to sort of plan for two worlds. One of them is a world of extreme acceleration in AI capabilities during the Trump term, right? Before 2028. And in that world, it really matters to have good relationships with Republican lawmakers and the White House. There’s another world in which they are having to plan for a new president in 2029, and maybe that’s a Democrat, maybe it’s a Republican, but maybe this stuff all takes until 2029 or so to get really crazy, and in that world, you actually want to start planting seeds with people in various different factions and coalitions. So I think they are trying to kind of spread the bets a little bit.

Casey Newton: 23:12 Yeah, and look, I will be the first to stipulate that for the most part it should not be the job of the private corporations to figure out how America should be governed. But we’re in a situation where the government we have has been all too happy to take their lobbying dollars and then do almost whatever the companies are asking the government to do. And so that has just led to a world where again AI just looks like a top-down elitist project that the average person has no control over except in the one dimension where you always have control over American life, and that is in saying no to a project being built in your neighborhood. For some reason, this is how we have decided to massively empower Americans is if there’s anything that you don’t want to see built, you probably actually can make that happen as an average citizen. So that’s obviously very inspiring, but I do wish we had other levers that we could pull.

Kevin Roose: 24:01 Yeah, in part because I don’t think this is going to work, right? Like if you vote the data center project out of your town, they’re just going to go to another state or to Canada. They’ll put the data centers in space, you know? They’ve got options here, and I don’t think this is going to meaningfully slow down or stop anything.

Casey Newton: 24:20 When I hear you talk about this, my sense is that your real objection to the data center NIMBYism in particular is just that you think this technology is going to be really, really good for people. And you think people need to get out of the way and let the future happen.

Kevin Roose: 24:36 No, that is not what I’m saying at all. I have real concerns about AI. I have real concerns about the kinds of job displacement that we may see as a result of this technology. But I think my concern is that people are identifying the wrong levers for change. I do not think that stopping a data center from being built in your town has any marginal effect on the speed of AI progress or the proliferation of AI throughout society. I think a lot of it is just that what you said is basically true that people think that this is the area where they can actually change things, just as the thing that people thought they could do in the 1980s to block new construction in their neighborhoods was to throw up a bunch of environmental reviews. Did that help the individual homeowners in that area who didn’t want apartment buildings going up? Yes, it kept their views unobstructed, but it also created a massive housing shortage in this state in particular that directly stems from this kind of NIMBY politics. And I just worry that the data center NIMBYism that we’re seeing will have some unforeseen consequences down the road.

Casey Newton: 25:48 Well, so then what are the right levers to pull, if you are worried about all of the harms and joblessness that AI seems likely to create?

Kevin Roose: 25:57 I think there are real policy proposals out there that people have been putting forward. One of them is actually in this OpenAI paper, which is for these kind of more nimble and flexible social safety nets that could, for example, catch workers who become displaced by AI and pay for them to be retrained for some other skills. We saw things like this in the past when it came to manufacturing automation where in some countries they have these like job councils where you get laid off because a robot takes that job, but they sort of pay you for a period of time and retrain you to do something else so that you get to stay employed and keep your standard of living while you’re being displaced. That kind of thing feels like a better answer to me than just saying no data centers.

Casey Newton: 26:43 It also seems to require all of America to transform into Europe overnight, which seems somewhat unlikely to me. But inshallah, my friend. So what should the AI industry do? I mean, this is the question on a lot of people’s minds right now is like what can they do to increase the public acceptance of or favorability toward the thing that they are building, or is this just kind of gonna be a project that they have to just push through regardless of public opposition?

Kevin Roose: 27:14 So I really struggle here because I could tell you a bunch of messaging changes that they could make that might affect public perception of AI at the margins. This is not really a messaging challenge. The problem is not that they’re talking about it in the wrong way. The problem is that they’re saying that they are about to create a massive disruption in Americans’ lives and they do not have a plan for what comes after that disruption. They have said your government is going to figure it out. And I think, particularly if you’re an American right now and you’re looking at the government that we have, it’s very hard to believe that they’re going to sort of adeptly navigate through that level of disruption. So I think, in short, Kevin, we have a governance problem, and that while the problem is being driven by the decisions of these unelected AI leaders, it is ultimately the governments who are going to have to give us an answer to these questions.

Kevin Roose: 28:14 Well, that’s a punt.

Casey Newton: 28:21 Is it though? It’s a punt, but it feels like the only honest answer. Like, what am I supposed to say? Oh, well, GPT-6 should blah, blah, blah. Like, come on.

Kevin Roose: 28:41 Yeah. I mean, I guess I agree that the ball’s in government’s court on this one, but I’ve just become so pessimistic about our government’s ability to address even a technology that we understand very well. This stuff is moving very, very fast and it is very, very hard for even the most plugged-in lawmakers to get a handle on what the hell they’re supposed to be doing about this technology. But I would love for there to be a handful of people in Congress thinking hard about proposals that may sound extreme right now, like extreme wealth redistribution, like a token tax.

Casey Newton: 29:08 Yeah. Well, I like what you just said because I do think this feels like a wide-open lane in American politics, which is, I am extremely nervous about AI and if it is going to advance at this pace, I am determined to make sure that it goes well for the average person and I’m going to insist on it and I have a policy plan to make that happen. That’s not really what we’re seeing right now. My hope is that there are some power-hungry individuals out there who are looking to run for office and they want to avoid the just sort of easy ‘this company sucks’ stuff and lean into the harder ‘we have to build policies that harness this stuff for the greater good.’ Because that is where glory lies. If you can figure that out, they will write your name in history and I want to believe that there are some solid American politicians there who are up for the challenge, Kevin.

Kevin Roose: 29:51 Yeah, they will put you on Mount Rushmore if you figure out how to make this go well.

Casey Newton: 29:55 That is our promise to you and at Hard Fork we will do everything we can to get you on Mount Rushmore.

Kevin Roose: 30:08 Well Casey, we’ve been saying for weeks now that we need to get some of our enemies on the show. And today we’ve got one.

Casey Newton: 30:13 We really do. Kara Swisher is here. She was able to muscle past security in the lobby and she said she would not leave until we talked to her about her new show on CNN.

Kevin Roose: 30:24 Yes, Kara Swisher, of course, the iconic tech journalist, mentor and friend to both of us, and now podcast mogul who is out with a new docuseries on CNN about her attempts to live forever, at least to explore the idea of living forever.

Casey Newton: 30:42 It is called Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever. Whether she does in fact seek immortality is a point of contention as you will hear in the interview. But during this series Kevin and I were able to watch the first two episodes and in it she tries a lot of the things that the rich and powerful are trying as part of their quest to become immortal.

Kevin Roose: 30:58 So this is a big topic. Obviously people in tech are very interested in longevity and living forever and hacking their bodies as they would hack a software program. And who better to be our Virgil to this strange health underworld than Kara Swisher.

Casey Newton: 31:38 Kara Swisher, welcome back to Hard Fork.

Kara Swisher: 31:41 Thank you. I’m so un-glad to be here.

Casey Newton: 31:44 Oh my god. Well last time you came on the show you insulted our bosses, accused us of stealing your podcast feed, and dropped so many f-bombs that we had to fight with our standards department and record a separate content warning. So Kara Swisher, welcome back.

Kara Swisher: 31:59 Accused means it wasn’t accurate, in fact it was accurate. If we want to relitigate it I’m happy to. I’ve moved past it now. I’ve moved past these things. I’m bigger than ever. I’ve built a new one. Try to steal my new one. That’s right New York Times, I’m bigger than your little boys there. So whatever. I could do this all night.

Casey Newton: 32:24 Well speaking of doing this for a long time, your new project is longevity and Kevin and I recently had a chance to watch the first two highly entertaining episodes of your new show on CNN, Kara Swisher Wants to Live Forever. Kara though, my impression from the first two episodes is that the title is a bit of a lie. You do not actually want to live forever.

Kara Swisher: 32:46 I do not. It is a joke. I know it’s lost on someone who’s not as sophisticated of a viewer, but it is a tongue-in-cheek situation which is I want to say I’m going on this journey. It’s sort of like an ordained except with all this longevity stuff, but then actually go into the stuff that’s going to help us live a very long and much better life.

Casey Newton: 33:07 Well, so tell us a bit how you got into this. I’ve known you for a long time, we have talked about mortality a lot, you talk about this app WeCroak in the show, which I have seen the WeCroak notifications going off on your phone, sort of sending you messages about mortality.

Kevin Roose: 33:26 So how did you get from your sort of interest in mortality to this question of longevity and all of these folks in Silicon Valley who are trying to extend their lives?

Kara Swisher: 33:36 Well, you know, they’re linked together, and as you both know, I did one of the — I think I did the last public interview of Steve Jobs before he died, about a year before he died at Code. And he had given a speech at Stanford, which I found amazingly moving, and which was about mortality and about death being a motivator for him. And I liked that, and then everybody sort of shifted. Like at first it started with intermittent fasting, they started talking about that or Soylent, if you recall, or all manner of body hacking, and then it was psychedelics, and then they were talking about brain hacking, and then Elon started talking about like he was an expert on COVID for a while there. And it just sort of morphed into this thing.

Kara Swisher: 34:23 And then you saw these investments, whether it was Sam Altman, Larry Ellison’s probably the most active and earliest around anti-aging. I had a lunch with this woman who kept talking about ending senescent cells, which was odd and was backed by Peter Thiel. And so I just started seeing it more and more, and then you had all these incredible things like CRISPR and mRNA vaccines and AI looking at gene folding. So there was all this real stuff and all this really ridiculous stuff.

Kevin Roose: 34:51 Right. But so you said sort of like, I’m seeing a lot of stuff that seems like obviously wrong, but some stuff that seems actually promising. So I want to spend some time and see if I can sort of separate the wheat from the chaff.

Kara Swisher: 35:01 Right. And I also need to do the stunts because it’s funny, right? Like doing a sound bath with Scott Galloway or getting in a hyperbaric chamber. Everything I did was stuff that tech people told me I had to do. Now they’re on peptides at this moment. But they were always fiddling with themselves and it seemed narcissistic to me.

Kevin Roose: 35:23 Let’s talk about some of the things that you did as part of your journey on this show. And I’m just going to rattle a few of them off. You did sound therapy, a hyperbaric chamber, you improved your max VO2 by running with this like Hannibal Lecter-like monitor. You did red light therapy, sleep therapy. Of all of these things, which was the most enjoyable and which was the most excruciating?

Kara Swisher: 35:44 Excruciating… You know, VO2 max is really interesting actually. I thought that was some real stuff I could use, and it really I have improved my efficiency and stuff by running and taking those tests. I don’t think you need to do it the way I did it. You do tech stuff on your wrist and your earbuds now. And that was helpful, I would say helpful.

Kara Swisher: 36:04 I mean, the hyperbaric chamber is fucking ridiculous, although I enjoyed it, right? Because it’s kind of fun to be in there, although I don’t like small spaces, but it was so stupid to have all these people insist that this is the way to go and I was like, it’s really not. You do know that, right?

Casey Newton: 36:19 What is supposed to be happening to you while you’re in a hyperbaric chamber?

Kara Swisher: 36:21 Oh, people who take it and they’re like going on a long trip and they think they feel better because like if you have oxygen out here, double the oxygen in there is better. I mean that’s their mentality. I think or if you have the bends or a wound, it’s a great place to be. But otherwise, it’s just one of these things they sell the rich people and make them feel superior and it’s a waste of money.

Casey Newton: 36:41 Kara, I have to ask you about your ketamine experience because this was one of the early moments in the show. You did ketamine, which is which is not a life extension thing, we should say it’s like a depression thing.

Kara Swisher: 36:53 Well, it’s also, when I first heard about it, someone bought a lunch for me, this charity lunch for an enormous amount of money and all they wanted to tell me about was ketamine and he kept saying I’m optimizing myself and ketamine was at the dead center. And obviously, Elon’s talked about it and recently, more recently has admitted it. And so a lot of them were using it for optimization, not depression, but optimization and new — this guy was using it for new ideas in his entrepreneurial journey.

Casey Newton: 37:23 And did you have a lot of new ideas on ketamine when you tried it?

Kara Swisher: 37:28 I had none. I thought only about you, Casey.

Casey Newton: 37:31 Oh, thank you, that’s very sweet.

Kara Swisher: 37:31 Naked.

Casey Newton: 37:32 Casey naked is what I thought of? No.

Kara Swisher: 37:34 Have you ever — either of you used it?

Casey Newton: 37:37 I have tried ketamine a few times. I would say in sort of more of a recreational setting as opposed to a life extension setting. It makes music sound amazing. Actually, the best description anyone ever gave me of ketamine is that it’s like clown shoes for your brain. You know? It’s like you sort of think you’re moving and then the motion happens three seconds later.

Kara Swisher: 37:59 Right. I was really out. I mean, I couldn’t move. I was like absolutely —

Casey Newton: 38:02 I think they call that a K-hole. I think you might have been in a K-hole.

Kara Swisher: 38:05 I was in a K-hole. I found it really interesting in that the aloneness, and I wouldn’t say lonely, it was aloneness, it was the dis — of course it’s a dissociative drug. So I didn’t — you don’t feel in your body and yet you feel like you’re floating, like you’re sort of on a roller coaster at first and then you’re in space and then I got bored, I’ll be honest with you. I was like, can we go? I’m bored.

Casey Newton: 38:22 I mean, aloneness is a very difficult emotion for a podcaster, is what I’ve found.

Kara Swisher: 38:32 You haven’t said if you’ve taken it, Kevin. Have you done it?

Kevin Roose: 38:33 On the advice of counsel, I’m going to respectfully decline to answer.

Casey Newton: 38:38 Kevin works at the New York Times. They have opinions about these things.

Kevin Roose: 38:41 It’s interesting. I feel like there has been a shift in Silicon Valley in the last couple of years where everyone used to be doing psychedelics and now everyone is just hopped up on stimulants because we have to work more, we have to escape the permanent underclass, we have to grind. So did you try any stimulants as part of your —

Kara Swisher: 38:57 I don’t need stimulants, Kevin. Do you imagine me on stimulants? Terrified of him. That would be horrible. Like Adderall and Kara, I’d literally solve the Middle… I’d be over in the Middle East solving the problems.

Kara Swisher: 39:08 When I was in college, I went back for my five-year college reunion and someone came up to me and said, oh, did you kick that cocaine addiction? And I’m like, what are you talking about? They said, oh, you took a lot of cocaine in college. I’m like, I’ve never seen it. I’ve never actually taken it. That was really true. And then they’re like, oh, and walked away because I seem like I’m on cocaine. Grandiose…

Kevin Roose: 39:33 Now, Kara, is what what annoys you about all this health stuff the fact that the tech people are doing it? Like if this was all happening in like a biology lab at Johns Hopkins, would you be like dismissing it all or is it just the messenger?

Kara Swisher: 39:48 It’s the rich people. It’s this idea of perfectibility and what really does me is one of the simplest things for all of us to live longer is universal healthcare, right? I went to Korea to talk to the people there. They all have universal healthcare. And in every peer country of ours is way up and to the right on all the good things and we pay double the amount of money, $15,000 a year compared to seven, six to seven, and we get zero — we’re at the bottom of all the outcomes.

Kara Swisher: 40:18 And that’s offensive to me that these people are spending all this money on all manner of nonsensical treatments. I don’t really care if they get someone to pay some rich stupid person to pay this much to do these things, but it’s in the backdrop of other people not getting the treatment they need and then them focusing on everything but the actual health of the larger civilization, right? Which they’re not concerned with that at all that I can see, except for MacKenzie Scott, who seems concerned.

Casey Newton: 40:38 See, I see these things as basically wealthy people signing up to be guinea pigs for things that if they work, then can be distributed to other people.

Kara Swisher: 40:57 Trickle-down healthonomics over here.

Casey Newton: 40:58 No, I remember a couple years ago when the first GLP-1s started coming out and it was only like my weird tech biohacker friends who were taking them, and then all of a sudden it’s like everyone we know is taking them and it’s like this huge nationwide thing. And so is there an argument for letting the tech people kind of be the guinea pigs for the rest of us?

Kara Swisher: 41:23 That wasn’t tech people, by the way. That was a different class of people. It was sort of women on the Upper East Side of New York. But I suppose you could make an argument for that. But actually, that’s been around a long time with diabetic people. That’s been a normal treatment for a long time.

Kevin Roose: 41:37 But what are they talking — GLP-1s have only been around since like 2022.

Kara Swisher: 41:40 No, they haven’t. For weight, people taking it for weight loss, but it’s still a lot of them aren’t classified as weight… it’s still classified as to deal with diabetes and obesity. And so I don’t find them offensive that rich people lose weight. I don’t really care, but it gets in the way of the focus on some of the basics, which include the stressing social and friends connections, universal healthcare I think is the number one thing, and that poor people, the longevity has plummeted for poor people.

Kevin Roose: 42:15 Yeah, I mean, I think a point that you make in the show that is really important is just that being rich is a great way to stay healthy in general, and that a lot of the technologies you explore are sort of fringy things, but ultimately, Brian Johnson is healthy because he spends $2 million a year on his health, right?

Kara Swisher: 42:36 Right. But that’s what gets attention rather than some of these things that are happening with CRISPR and how do we get that cost down? And so it’s just the inequity of it I wanted to sort of call that out. At the same time, there’s all these amazing researchers who’ve had their funding cut, in large part because of Trump, in large part because of tech support of him. And here we have all these amazing researchers whose funding’s getting cut and are leaving this country. And we talk so much about entrepreneurism and these are real entrepreneurs are just finding no place in this country because they can’t monetize it immediately, which is another thing I wanted to call attention to.

Kevin Roose: 43:13 Yeah. I’m curious, Kara, like how this experience shaped your view of healthcare regulation. So like, not the socialized medicine piece of it, but one area where my own views have changed considerably over the last few years is on the area of how much should we be bottlenecking new drugs on the way to market? And in part, that’s because, you know, my dad also died of a rare disease that now there exist treatments for that are FDA-approved, but when he was sick, they hadn’t been approved yet. So after seeing all these weirdos experimenting with their healthcare things, do you think we should be allowing more of that or making it harder for things to get to market? How does that change your views?

Kara Swisher: 43:51 Well, you know, as you know, tech’s been trying to get in the health space for a long time. It’s the biggest, fattest amount of money, right? It’s the biggest part of our budget. I get the idea of drugs that could really change people’s lives in that regard.

Kara Swisher: 44:29 You have all manner of quackery online pushing stuff that just isn’t real. But you’re right, this CRISPR stuff, there’s only about 100,000 people in this country with sickle cell anemia, and yet, that would be really something if we get it through faster and cheaper so that these people could be relieved. And cancer’s to me the best thing we can do is really push forward and help fund mRNA technology, which I think is the one that’s the most promising from what I can tell, and gene editing at the same time.

Kevin Roose: 49:19 Finally, Mark Zuckerberg’s A.I. Bot. Meta is reportedly building an AI version of Mark Zuckerberg to interact with staff, and we ask: can chief executives replace themselves with A.I.?

[Note: Portions of the source transcript JSON for the Mark Zuckerberg A.I. Bot segment and parts of the broader episode were corrupted with content from another podcast and could not be reliably reproduced here. The chapter marker above is accurate per the YouTube description; the segment content itself has been omitted to avoid misattribution.]