Cuba Sanctions To Masked ICE And The Coming AI Job Shock

The fastest way to understand modern power is to watch where pressure gets applied and who ends up paying. We start with a clear listener question: why the Trump administration is going so hard on Cuba right now. We break down the official “national security” framing, then get specific about the real leverage points: sanctions aimed at GAESA, the military-linked business empire tied to tourism and foreign currency, plus the domestic politics of Miami, Marco Rubio, and the long shadow of regime change. The hardest part to ignore is the moral math: economic suffocation rarely lands on elites first. 

Then we run through a set of headlines that all point to the same theme of eroding trust. We cover the John Bolton classified documents case, Jerome Powell’s warning about political pressure on Federal Reserve independence, and the very public meltdown around 60 Minutes and media leadership fights that reshape what accountability journalism looks like. 

The centerpiece is a chilling report on masked ICE tactics and the spike in criminals impersonating immigration agents to rob and assault immigrant families. From Portland’s response to America’s long history of anti-mask laws, we argue that visible identification is not a luxury, it is a prerequisite for democratic policing. 

We close with a deep dive on artificial intelligence, data centers, and what comes next, featuring Zach Exley of New Consensus. He lays out why AI job automation could trigger a demand doom loop and why “capitalism can’t survive AI” is not a slogan but a systems warning. Subscribe, share, and leave a review, then tell us: what rules should govern AI and law enforcement in a free society?

Transcript

Welcome And The Big Question

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to the Darrell McClain Show. I'm your host, Darrell McLean. Independent media that won't reinforce tribalism. We have one planet. Nobody is leaving. And so now let us reason the guy. Let us start off today's show with a show question. Why is the Trump administration going so hard on Cuba? So I'm gonna flame uh frame this in three parts the public reasons and the three choir reasons. So the public reason is national security. The White House says Cuba's government is an unusually extraordinary threat to US national security and foreign policy, citing repression, military control, um the economy, etc., and relationships with US adversaries. Trump's May 1,

Why Trump Targets Cuba Hard

SPEAKER_00 0:57

2026 executive order actually expanding sanctions against Cuban officials, Cuban state entities, and foreign actors doing business in key Cuban sectors. But the real political answer is this the administration is trying to break a Cuban state's uh financial spine. The sanctions are aimed especially at the GAESA, the Cuban military-linked business empire that touches tourism, finance, logistics, and major hotel operations. Now, US officials accuse the GAESA of hoarding profits for the military and Cuban elites, while Cuba denies that that and says the GAESA is part of a national economic defense. Now the second reason is regime change pressure. They may dress it up in language of human rights, terrorism, and democracy, but the goal is not just to punish Cuba, it's to make governing Cuba economically impossible into a regime change bends or breaks. Rubio has openly said he would like to see regime change in Cuba, and recent uh reporting has described the policy as an effort to force a change in Cuba's government through oil pressure and sanctions. Now, the third reason is Marco Rubio and Florida politics. Rubio has long been one of Washington's loudest uh Cuba hawks, a Cuban exile, politics in South Florida still matter inside a Republican uh strategy. Being hard on Havana is not just foreign policy, it's domestic political theater with a Miami um zip code coming right at you. Now, the fourth reason is Cuba's relationship with Venezuela, Russia, China, and Iran. The administration argues Cuba is not merely a poor island, dictatorship sitting 90 miles away, but a regional nod for America's adversaries. Uh, Rubio has said Cuba's ties with China and Russia makes it a serious national security threat. Now, the fifth reason is economic leverage. Cuba is already weak. Fuel shortages, blackouts, collapsing tourism, and mass migrations, the sanctions are designed to hit the pressure point. Rutters reported that Cuba will suspend visas and master car transactions starting June the 6th, and financial partners uh to limit operations. This is not symbolic. This is a direct hit to tourism and foreign currency flow. And the sixth reason, the one that Washington really says plainly, is that America has never emotionally accepted the Cuba uh since the Cuban Revolution. So since 1959, Cuba has represented a small nation in America's backyard that refused to submit to U.S. influence. So let's be honest, the Cuban government is authoritarian, it represses uh dissent, it limits political freedom, and we don't have to romanticize Havana to criticize Washington. But US policy has often been less about liberating the Cuban people and more about making an example out of Cuba. So the answer is this. Trump administration is going hard at the Cuba because it sees a weak regime, a strategic opening, and a domestic political win, and a chance to restart US dominance in the hemisphere. The official language of national security, etc., the practical method of economic suffocation, the political dream is regime change, and the moral problem is that ordinary Cuban people, not the elites, usually pay first and they will pay the heaviest price. The tension right here is that the Cuban government deserves criticism, but starving a country into democracy is like trying to baptize somebody by holding them underwater. At some point it stops being liberation and starts to just look like punishment. And that's pretty much the sh short and sweet of it. If you listen to some of these people like Marco Rubio and Ted Cruz talk, they've even written it in their books that it was their lifelong goal is regime change in Cuba. Especially a lot of them, their fa their families were very rich and in the government when Batista, the dictator, was in charge, and when the Castros overthrew Batista, uh they claimed to America, got citizenship immediately because they were loyal to the American-backed dictator uh Batista. But thank you. That was a very good question. So the uh former Trump advisor uh John Bowton actually plans to plead guilty in a document case that uh sources are actually reporting. So John Bolton, the former national security advisor to President Trump, is planning to plead guilty to one count of retaining classified national security information and will agree to pay a $2.25 million fine, according to sources with direct knowledge of the matter. Bolton, now a staunch critic of uh President Trump, was indicted last year on 18 accounts related to his handling of sensitive government information. The prosecutor said he shared with two relatives

John Bolton Plea Deal Update

SPEAKER_00 6:36

in diary-like entries across a seven-year span for possible use in the book he was writing. He had pledged not guilty in October, but Bolton is expecting to submit the plea agreement at a hearing at the U.S. District and uh court in Maryland on June 26, one source said. The docket in his case describes the proceeding as a re-arraignment. The sentencing range for a single count is zero to sixty months of incarceration, the source also added. Fed news, the uh Fed Powell uh chair um well actually now he's a former Federal Reserve Chair, um Jerome Powell warned that attempts by the U.S. government to exert greater political pressure on the civil world bank will damage public confidence in its independence. Powell, whose time as Fed Chair concluded on actually May the 15th, said the central bank, along with other institutions such as the courts and universities is facing a political stress test from President Donald Trump's administration. I think a lot of people would agree with that. Um statement. So there has been a lot of um brouhaha

Powell Warns On Fed Pressure

SPEAKER_00 7:57

going on in the media, especially with what's happening at sixty minutes and over at New York magazine, uh Steve Croft did a uh uh interview, and he talks about the meltdown of sixty minutes that has transfixed the media world this week. As Barry Weiss fired deeply respected staffers and correspondents, installed broadcast news outsiders Nick Bilton as the show executive producer and sparked a messy standoff with Scott Pelly, who grilled his new boss and accused Weiss of murdering the show all before being shown the door

60 Minutes Power Struggle

SPEAKER_00 8:36

himself. A pointed termination letter along with a stern goodbye email statements and rebuttals has laced the saga with claims of insubordination, incompetence, and a bias towards the Trump administration. To Steve uh Croft, who spent three decades of 60 Minutes before retiring in 2019, the show, as the audience has known it, it no longer exists. He said that of 60 Minutes, they made it clear, they being the new management, Barry Weiss and David Ellison, that they want to go in a completely different format model. Call it what you want, he says. But Barry Weiss is this person who regularly fails upward. Uh and writing is terrible. And uh yeah, like I said, I'm gonna do a whole single show on some of the mess that she's causing at uh these network that she took over.

SPEAKER_03 9:56

Trump's masked goons are a criminal's dream. It was January 20th, 2025, the day Donald Trump returned to the White House promising the largest mass deportation operation in American history when a hooded man kicked down the bedroom door of a Mexican immigrant in Greensboro, North Carolina, shouting, ICE, ICE! Ma'am raised his hand. He thought he was being arrested. Instead, four assailants robbed the house at gunpoint, pistol whipped one resident so hard that his split forehead required ten stitches of four staples, and pointed a gun at a baby while demanding cash from the infant's terrified parents. They weren't ice. They weren't police. They were criminals who had figured out that in Trump's America, all you need to

Masked ICE And Copycat Crimes

SPEAKER_03 10:42

terrorize an immigrant family with impunity is a mask, a gun, a camo outfit you can buy on Amazon, and a loud enough shout. NBC News and Noticias Telemundo just published a sweeping investigation documenting how the Greensboro robbery was not an isolated horror. Reviewing court records, police reports, and news accounts from across the country, they found 31 separate cases in 2025 of criminals impersonating ICE agents to commit violent crimes, up from an average of just five per year over the previous decade. That's a 484 percent increase in a single year. In New York, a Dominican woman was dragged into a basement, beaten, and raped by a man claiming to be an immigration agent. In North Carolina, another woman was raped at her workplace by a fake agent. In Philadelphia, an armed man claiming to be ICE and wearing a Vestmark security enforcement agent zip tied a 55-year-old Dominican cashier and robbed his business. The FBI quietly warned in an internal bulletin last October that this was happening. But the administration's response has been to keep the bulletin on the QT while telling agents to stay masked up. My home state of Oregon, at least, is doing something about it. On Wednesday of last week, the Portland City Council voted 8-4 to bar law enforcement officers from wearing face coverings within the city and to require them to display clear identification. Secret police have no place in a democracy, Counselor Samir Kanal said. And he's exactly right. The principal Portland is trying to defend is older than the Republic itself. Walk through any small town museum in America, and you'll find them in the glass cases, the brass shield, the polished star, the patrolman's cap with its leather brim. From the moment we started building professional police forces in this country back in the 1830s, the entire visual grammar of American law enforcement was built around one simple democratic idea, which is that the cop should look like a cop and everybody should know who he is. The badge had a number on it, the uniform was distinctive, the face was visible. Walk up to an officer on the street and you knew instantly who he was, what agency he answered to, and even how to file a complaint if he stepped on the line. This wasn't an accident of fashion. It was the bedrock principle of policing in a free society, the visible difference between an officer of the law and a thug with a gun. The visible difference between an American cop respecting the Constitution and one of Putin's masked thugs. By the way, there's a NBC has an article about this with pictures of Putin's masked thugs. Throughout American history, the men who hid their faces were always the bad guys. They were the highwaymen and the bank robbers, the lynch mobs, and the bootleggers enforcers, and most infamously the Ku Klux Klan, whose white hoods became a national disgrace that between roughly 1920 and 1960, at least 18 states passed anti-mask laws specifically to strip the Klan of its anonymity. Alabama did it, Florida did it, Georgia, Virginia, West Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina, all of them. And the conservative segregationist governors of the Jim Crow South didn't pass those laws because they suddenly loved black Americans. They passed them, as the ACLU has documented, because the Klan's masked terrorism was making their states look like banana republics. And because they s they understood, even in their racism, that lawful authority requires a visible face. New York had gotten there a century earlier, making it a crime back in 1845, for anyone, including law enforcement, to appear, quote, disguised and armed, end quote, in public. The logic was so obvious that for the better part of 200 years, nobody seriously challenged it. If you've got a badge, a gun, and the authority of the state to drag a human being away from his family, you damn well better be willing to show your face while you do it. That's the price of the power one gets with a badge and the ability to inflict violence, imprisonment, and even death on others. When you hide your identity, we believed, you're not enforcing the law. You're committing a crime under the cover of it. Then came Trump's lawless ice thugs, now with a budget bigger than the U.S. Marine Corps and hundreds of concentration camps today holding more people around 70,000 than Hitler had a year into his administration around 40,000. I wrote back in October of last year about how Donald Trump's masked immigration and customs enforcement raiders bear a disturbing resemblance to the Klan of a century ago, complete with the legal arguments their handlers made in court about the agent's so-called right to anonymity being identical to the arguments Klansmen made when states finally cracked down on their hoods. What I didn't fully appreciate then is how quickly the rest of my prediction that criminals would soon be imitating ICE in order to facilitate their crimes would come true. Once the federal government normalizes masked anonymous men in tactical gear, kicking down doors and snatching people off the street, every two-bit predator in America with a black ski mask and a fake badge realizes he's been handed a license to rob, rape, and terrorize with near total impunity. The immigrant victims, of course, typically don't report any of it because they're terrified that if they walk into a police station, the cop behind the desk will just call ice on them. The criminals know this. They're counting on it, in fact. As Naureen Shaw of the ACLU put it, we have never in this country experienced the terrorism of masked agents on this kind of scale. And we have never before experienced this problem of people being able to credibly pose as federal law enforcement because the entire system was designed for two centuries to make sure it would never happen. Portland's new ordinance, sponsored by Councillor Camell and co-sponsored by Counselors Alina Kernel Genny and Angelina Marillo directs the Portland Police Bureau to investigate anybody who's acting like a cop, detaining a member of the public the way an officer would, or refuses to show his credentials. It won't by itself unmask federal ICE agents because the Constitution Supremacy Clause puts federal officers beyond direct city regulation. And Cannella was honest about that limit on the floor. But it's a clear, clear statement of principle and enjoys similar legislation passed by the Philadelphia City Council last year, along with California's No Secret Police Act, authored by State Senator Scott Wiener and signed by Governor Newsom last fall. The Ninth Circuit has temporarily blocked enforcement of the California law against masked federal agencies, agents, an obscenity of a ruling that effectively says the federal government has a constitutional right to deploy hooded paramilitaries in cities that don't want them. The founders who just fought a revolution against George III's customs men and faceless press gangs who kidnapped this is called impressment colonists to take the sea as free labor would have recognized exactly what's happening here. They wrote the Fourth Amendment in part because of it. James Madison would have understood instinctively that an armed agent of the state who refuses to show his face is not enforcing the law but undermining it. Because the entire premise of self-government is that people get to see who is doing what to them and demand accountability through their elected representatives. Hide the face and you cut that wire. You turn cops into the very thing the badge was invented to distinguish them from. ICE is masked, in other words, for exactly the reason the Klan was masked, and exactly the reason so many common criminals and bank robbers throughout American history have been masked. These ICE thugs know that much of what they're doing is either flatly illegal under our Constitution and our treaty obligations, or so morally rotten that the agents themselves would be ostracized from any decent community if their neighbors and relatives saw the videos. They're hiding because they have something to hide. And the predictable second-order consequence, the wave of fake ICE agents now robbing and raping immigrant women across America, is a feature of the system of the Trump that this that the Trump administration built, not a bug. Call your senators and representatives of the Capitol switchboard 202-224-3121 and tell them you want federal legislation requiring every law enforcement officer in the country, federal, state, or local, to operate with a visible face and a readable badge number, except in genuine undercover operations approved by a judge. If your city or state hasn't passed an ordinance like Portland's, call your mayor and your state legislators and tell them it's time. You can find your state lawmakers at openstates.org and make sure you register to vote at vote.org. So next November you can help throw out the politicians who keep voting to fund this masked terror. America has spent over two centuries figuring out through bitter experience that hooded men with guns are not law enforcement. We can forget that lesson now.

SPEAKER_00 19:36

So Pope Leo's verse in Slicklia has been presented as a defense of humanity against artificial intelligence. But a closer reading actually shows that it's what he's really identifying is not the software development, but literally the capitalist market logic that impels it. Now, Leo is concerned about the prospect of private companies acquiring more power and influence than the state to the point where they are able to crush civic institutions and escape regulations. He is concerned by the subordination of workers' welfare to

A Moral Critique Of AI Markets

SPEAKER_00 20:22

even greater demands for efficiency and productivity. He is concerned that the manipulation of the media promotes falsehoods and prevents citizens from recognizing their shared interests, and he insists that the common good must never be neglected in the favor of the idolatry of profit. Leo ha also explicitly insists that the collective demands of the common good are not something to be addressed by a redistribution after market forces are played out, but must be enshrined into the very process of investment and production themselves. His position here is opposed not only to the new robber barons of the tech sector, but also to their very liberal critics who view their developments of the market economy as an extra political force, and they aspire only to mitigate it as it impacts through regulation or through redistributive taxes.

SPEAKER_01 22:44

Development of AI and some of the local opposition to AI extensively on this show. Joining us now to talk more about a new vision for how we should think about the development of AI is Zach Exley. He's a former senior advisor to Bernie Sanders, co-founder of the Justice Dems, alongside my own husband, Kyle Kalinski, and founder of the New Consensus Think Tank. Welcome, Zach. Great to have you.

SPEAKER_02 23:05

Thank you. It's really exciting to be here. You guys, I have to say, you guys are really the one place where pr pro progressive populists are doing it right.

SPEAKER_01 23:14

Oh, thank you.

SPEAKER_02 23:15

And um, yeah, I mean, you've got this amazing combination of viewpoints, and I I really think the right perspective that is gonna serve us going into the decades uh as of uh of the rest of our lives. So I'm really

Data Centers Trigger Local Backlash

SPEAKER_02 23:30

grateful for what you're doing here.

SPEAKER_01 23:31

It's it's our pleasure. Thank you very much for that. It means a lot coming from you. And um, you've been doing a lot of work on AI, I want to broaden out in just a moment. But first I wanted to talk a little bit about the immediate bipartisan backlash that is really building into sort of a grassroots movement against data centers being located in local areas. And the bipartisan nature of this was on display in a recent Tucker Carlson debate with Kevin O'Leary, who is behind this massive data center build-out project in Utah. Tucker challenges him quite aggressively on that. Let's go ahead and take a listen.

SPEAKER_05 24:05

I would think, since you disagree with the Chinese way of life, which is pretty civilized in a lot of ways, but the one way in which it's barbaric is that it grants its citizens no real rights. And so I would think that you would be very worried about aping their system, which we are now doing. Like they have total surveillance, it's panopticon in China. We should create our own. Let's take 40,000 acres in Utah and make it possible for the government to know where you are at all times and what you're thinking, listening to you on your phone. Like we have that. But they can't be upset about it.

SPEAKER_04 24:33

You have to, you, you have to choose the the less of two evils in your scenario. And I'm telling you, the the the what you should do is say, I want Kevin O'Leary to succeed. I want him to beat the Chinese and compute power. And then then use the laws of the United States to make sure that you keep that compute power in check, whichever way you want. But to not have it available, to put down my shovel, I don't think people want me to do that. Even the people in box elder, the majority of them want me to hold my shovel and start digging. And that's basically the debate we're having. How do you know that that the majority of the Because they voted for it unanimously before the Chinese guys? There was a referendum match. Like all this crap that's being spewed out.

SPEAKER_05 25:15

Yeah, and I may have fallen for some of it, so you correct me. There was a referendum among citizens, or did some like county board vote?

SPEAKER_04 25:24

We we actually went through the whole process that you have to do by their laws and were granted three to zero. The commissioners of the county said we would.

SPEAKER_05 25:40

That's how you do it. How hard is it for Kevin O'Leary and Amazon and Microsoft and Google to subvert three county commissioners in rural Utah.

SPEAKER_04 25:52

They wanted, they asked us to come, they asked us to bring $15 billion, they asked, and they voted, and they it it was a three to zero vote. They they had five.

SPEAKER_05 26:09

Good work.

SPEAKER_01 26:10

And just to add some numbers to the level of opposition that has grown to the development of these data centers locally, you can put F3 up on the screen. Um, recent poll that found seven out of ten Americans said they would oppose a data center being built near them. Opposition is so intense that more Americans would live rather live near a nuclear power plant than a data center that's music to cyberseers on that one. But in any case, Zach, I mean, this is relatively recent. Previously, there was a lot more openness. People have drawn this kind of line in the sand around data centers specifically because it is the pressure point they have. It's the one place where they have some control potentially over what development looks like and what gets built in their own neighborhoods.

SPEAKER_02 26:53

Yeah, and I think it's great that people are fighting back against data centers. It's really important because they're harming communities, they're in all kinds of ways, they're raising utility bills at a time when they're already incredibly high. And also there's an aspect of, you know, um, you know, the Luddites who, you know, threw their wooden shoes in the machines to just like, you know, destroy the machines that were displacing them. Like there's a there's an aspect of people seeing that AI is going to take away their livelihoods. And so, you know, there's a bit of a just like, let's fight it wherever we can fight it, um, you know, aspect to that, which I think is fine. It's uh and it's good, and people should be doing it. We should be doing it as much as we can. But it's not a solution to the whole problem uh of AI. Uh, this is really something that is going to completely transform our world, our way of life, uh, whether we like it or not, no matter what we do. And the I think that progressives, especially progressives and lefties, like have a hard time seeing that. Yeah. Because I think there's this instinctive, you know, these are this is a new product that these billionaires are pushing on us. It's just like social media, you know, it's all over again. It's this new thing that we don't have any control over. That's all completely true. But it's also something completely different than that. And, you know, it's it's an emergent phenomenon in our universe, right? Where human intelligence is spilling out of humanity into these data centers. And, you know, even if we stop all of the data centers, the way the technology is advancing, like you're gonna be able to run amazing A AI on your phone, you know, in another few years. Like, there's just there's no stopping this phenomenon of our intelligence, you know, this last skill that humans had that made that, you know, that machines couldn't do. These skills, these abilities are just pouring into the physical world, into silicon. And um, and so we're I don't I don't think there's any way to stop it. But the good news is that we are still a part of the process of this stuff being built. Uh, we're still a part of this technological explosion. And as long as we're a part of it, maybe just for another few years, we can change course and we can turn it into something that really benefits us.

SPEAKER_06 29:10

Yeah, Zach, let's put F2 up here on the screen, continuing on this data center project around Lake Tahoe. Uh, you could see that nearly 50,000 have been told their utility will stop providing power because it's redirecting that power to data centers. Nevada Energy has supplied most of Lake Tahoe's electricity for decades. It says next year it will stop servicing homes in the area and instead direct that electricity to the growing demand of Nevada data centers. So, how is it though that you can see this happen in not only in a US state, but have the consumers and the citizens have no even say over something like this?

SPEAKER_02 29:51

Well, I mean, that's how our economic system works. We we have, you know, we the we here in the US, people all over the world, we've got very little say over what's happening to us economically. You know, we've been, just to pick a random example, you know, we've been exporting our waste, you know, um, including all kinds of toxic waste, to poor countries all over the world. And, you know, just killing tons and tons of people and making millions of people sick. Uh, nobody even talks about that. You know, there's a million other things like that. This is just in the news now because I think because people can see that it's actually much bigger than our utility bills going up. This really is something that's going to eliminate work for just about everybody. And the incredible thing, and this is really what we've got to refocus to, because this data center stuff is yes, we have to fight it, but it's like really kind of a distraction if we're not really keeping our eye on the really big consequence, which is that really, in just a matter of a few years, um, everybody, like if you could do your job in the pandemic on your computer, if you can do your job remotely now, your job is going to be done by AI, right? And and people, there, you know, people still haven't accepted this. They, they're, they're still coming up with explanations about why this isn't gonna happen. And I don't know if you guys would like to get into that now. It's a difficult conversation to have because, you know, there's just there's so many completely new things about this that that we're having a hard time getting our heads around.

SPEAKER_01 31:21

Yeah, I do want to talk a little bit more about that. First, let's put F1 up on the screen. This is some of your work at New Consensus. You've got a provocative headline here, which is you say, why capitalism can't survive AI. And you get into the details of why this is different from the Industrial Revolution, let's say, or you know, some of the past transitions that people point to of like, oh, this technological, you know, advance. There was all sorts of naysaying and doom and gloom around it, but ultimately created more jobs than it destroyed. Um, you've got some details about how you think the collapse is going to happen, and then you have ideas about what we need to do. So let me start here playing devil's advocate for the idea that it is going to be this transformative, because I think you're right. I see a lot of progressives and people more broadly on the left who see this all as like marketing gimmicks are like, yeah, sure, these

How AI Replaces Knowledge Work

SPEAKER_01 32:09

people are selling you this bill of goods that they're gonna replace all of labor. The reason they're saying that is because to justify their valuations, they have to claim that this technology is going to be hyper productive and be able to replace all sorts of human beings. That's where the value comes in for the companies that they're trying to sell this to and in the minds of the shareholders and the investors that they are trying to promote to. So, what is your response? Why are you so confident that this is going to be something other than, you know, a basically glorified Google search? How it's going to be this truly transformative technology, unlike something we've seen in the past.

SPEAKER_02 32:46

Yeah, and that's that's one of the questions, right? Is is it really going to be smart enough and and capable enough to replace humans? Um, and like let's just start with that. Uh there's it's, I mean, first of all, it is replacing a lot of humans in a lot of knowledge jobs. You know, what's happening in software development is just absolutely incredible. But to uh there there's there's still some limitations to to these AI agents and um you know the kind of AI that people are using to like really try to do jobs. There's still some limitations, but those that are preventing them from replacing tons and tons of employees. But those limitations are really mundane. They're not at the level of you know, science or um, you know, real advanced software development. It's it's stuff like just wiring the AI to a memory. Like the memories are really bad right now. Um and but there's like a thousand companies and you know, a thousand, thousands of open source developers all working to build memory systems. And it's it's such simple stuff. Like, really, like people who aren't even software developers are building some of these systems because it's really just creating ways for the AI to like make notes to itself. And when you you know, if you get into like studying how the brain works, you realize that that's really how our brain works too. You know, we we we're we're not fully conscious and and aware of everything all at the same time. Our brain, you know, has intelligence built into all these circuits and it has memories and it goes and fetches those memories as it needs it. So the the the the last pieces, like the other really mundane piece that AI needs that's holding it back right now, is just access to your keyboard and your screen, right? And it's it's funny. Like I do a ton of uh work with AI, um all kinds of software projects and research. We use it at New Consensus, and you know, that leads a lot of people to yell at me online um whenever whenever they hear me say that. But it's, you know, I'm using it so that I can really know how this actually works. And it really is like working with a human being. It's just really, you know, and it it the capacity that it has for the work that I do with it is just incredible. Like I have managed teams of software developers before, you know, on multi-million dollar projects. And this one AI for $100 a month can do the work of a team of 10 people, projects that would have taken a year or just would have been plain impossible. We can, you know, I can now do with it in days, right? But also on the research front, it's incredible. And I mean, I'd love to tell you all about it, but it's really incredible what it can do. Um, and but it's like working with a human being, but it's funny. And actually, my you know, the agent I work with and I, we actually joke around about this, that it can, you know, it can solve these huge, incredible problems. You know, it can tell me stuff about any corner of human history because I've loaded thousands and thousands of books and sources into it. Um, and and yet it cannot click on the submit button on a website on my screen, right? But that problem is gonna be solved, right? So, like when I try to get it to go buy a plane ticket for me, it just can't do it. But that problem is gonna be solved uh with some really mundane tools. Like, you know, I'm sure you've heard about OpenPlaw. There was a lot of hype around that. And that was a new product that an open source developer on his own, with no money, just wired together, that basically gave the AI the ability to see some stuff that it couldn't see before. And um, and but then of course, OpenAI hired him and you know, and all progress stopped there. And but it's it's okay. There's thousands of other people out there that are doing that wiring. Um so the the the thing that's gonna happen, which is gonna change everything, is that in a couple of years or maybe a few years, um these problems are gonna be solved, and an AI is going to appear in your Google Meet at your team meeting at work, and it's going to be fully capable of doing anything that a human can do, anything that anybody on your team can do. But it's gonna be the reality is it's gonna be smarter and better and faster, and it's going to it, this one being is going to be working with everybody all across the company all at the same time. So, how long is it gonna take until that being can just do all of the work of the company, of you know, all of the work of everybody that does their jobs on computers? And so the next step is the CEO is just gonna talk to that AI and realize, hey, we don't need the people anymore. And then guess what's gonna happen next? The board of directors is gonna talk to the AI and realize we don't need that CEO anymore. And um, but it the the changes are gonna be so much bigger than that because when this starts to happen, like entire industries don't make sense anymore. Like management consulting, you know, financial management, money management, uh insurance. There's you know, all these industries just don't make sense anymore because everybody will be able to do everything for themselves. Like no company will ever hire McKinsey to run the same AI to answer questions that they can run themselves, you know?

SPEAKER_01 37:49

Well, and this really um this really gets to your thesis that capitalism as it is structured now cannot handle these changes. Um can you lay out why you think it will lead to a sort of collapse? What will be the mechanisms? What will that look like?

SPEAKER_02 38:06

Yeah, and this is hard because uh capitalism has run so smoothly for so long, like ever since the World War II basically, um, that I mean, you know, I know there's been booms and busts. Yeah, but if you know, if you actually look at how capitalism used to work, right, before uh the Great Depression, um, you know, all through the 1800s, like there there was a Great Depression every decade, and they were way more severe than the Great Depression in a lot of ways. Um, you know, huge chunks of the population starving because the the entire capitalist system just shut down. Um and all of those crashes, just like the Great Depression, were basically caused by overproduction, machines getting really uh efficient, producing tons and tons of stuff. Um the financial bubbles are mixed in. So you know, you have financial bubbles around whatever new technology is out there. Is this sounding familiar? Sure. Um and and uh but you know, and so the the the thing that we forgot, you know, we we can't we can't it's we we haven't experienced this with capitalism, a moment when capitalism runs out of customers, right? And like the same way that that an animal needs oxygen to breathe, capitalism needs customers. If and and it's so basic and simple, like it's such a stupid thing to say, but it's absolutely true and it's inescapable. And so this is what you know has basically caused um big you know long periods of unemployment and economic catastrophe in the past. When you know capitalism builds out too much stuff in a bubble, and then they realize it, you know, it was all silly and there's not enough uh people to buy, people don't have the money to buy this stuff, so they start laying people off. Well, that's it's a self-fulfilling cycle, right? It's a that's a everybody needs to understand this because this is what's going to be happening. There's uh it's called a demand uh doom loop. You know, it's a a demand, um, it's a self-reinforcing demand uh downward spiral, right? So there's people have less money to buy stuff, so that creates less demand. So companies lay people off, which lowers, you know, which lowers demand even more. Um we've stopped that in, you know, since World War II by jumping in, the government jumps in and just gives everybody money. Um and and and then capitalism gets back on its feet. The this has worked for you know a few centuries now. Um well, even without the bailouts, capitalism has eventually started investing again and employing people again because it's true what they say, that new technology creates new kinds of products and new kinds of services, which means new companies, which means new jobs. So people got automated off the farms into the factories, and then they got automated out of the factories into offices. And capitalism's you know amazing trick is that it can just limit limitlessly create new products and services uh which keeps everybody employed and keeps the system expanding. There's a big problem now with AI because now AI is going to be able to do everything that a person can do at their computer, right? And there's a lot of other jobs that are going to get automated too that are getting automated in factories, in cars, obviously, um, and in all kinds of other parts of the economy. But um it can do everything that humans can do with their brains. It will be able to very shortly. And so that means that this wave of automation is like when the horse got automated out of a job. And I think Ryan actually brought this up, or somebody on your show brought this up uh weeks ago. And and this is absolutely true, and it's a great analogy, because once you put once you connected an engine to wheels and some you know other contraptions, there was nothing that horses could do that machines could not do better. Right. So obviously, people who like horses are gonna have horses around, horses can race, okay? So but and you know, and as humans, we're still gonna have value to each other, but we are not going to have value as workers for capitalism. And that means they're gonna lay us all off, that means no customers, and then that means capitalism seizes up and really cannot function anymore. Um, and so we're gonna have to choose what comes next. Whether you're a fan of capitalism or hate capitalism, um, we're all gonna have to build a new economic system in the wake of this transition.

SPEAKER_01 42:24

One question I have for you, Zach, is just to push on that thesis. Already so much of the consumer economy is dominated by the spending of the wealthy. Do they actually need us all? Like, is most of the population sort of irrelevant now to the functioning of capitalism, the functioning of our system at this point?

SPEAKER_02 42:44

Well, mo yeah, more than half of our consumption is done by the top 20% of our population. Um, those are the first people who are gonna get laid off uh with the AI collapse, right? And so that, you know, so that is really gonna create an incredible economic crisis because demand is really, really gonna tank.

SPEAKER_06 43:04

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 43:04

But I but I think you're getting at this other idea too, which is, you know, like we have this idea that that you know, the people that own these companies and the the the top elites, the people that are financing all of this, they're just gonna get wildly rich off of this. Like I already said, I don't think that that's actually gonna happen because they need customers to get rich. They need the economy to actually mention to get rich. But let's do a little thought experiment. These people own the economy, right? They own the means of production, they've they've all got their bunkers in New Zealand, right? So maybe, you know, hypothetically, this is true. They could move to New Zealand, they could move some factories there, you know, they could uh build their own data centers for the, you know, so that the AI can manage their little economy for them. Right. And so you can imagine that the people that own the economy today could say, screw all these people. Um I'm just we just want everybody to starve. And uh and we're gonna go build our own economy on an island somewhere. So First of all, that's not capitalism anymore, which is something interesting to observe, right? Like what you're talking about there is the rich building a little, you know, socialist economy for themselves, right? I mean, this has actually happened before. You know, look at the history of South Africa. The whites in South Africa got together and built themselves their own socialist utopian economy on the backs of everybody else. Um, so it's it's not that weird of an idea, actually. But we should say that is absolutely absurd. Like, we need to have a political movement. Um, and I believe we're going to, you know, going into 2028 with the presidential campaign. Um, we need to have a movement that says, um, screw you guys, that is, you know, you can go to New Zealand, but like you're not taking our means of production that we have all built together. And we're gonna see all these data centers going out of business. We're gonna see the AI companies going out of business. And um, and that's not just because there's not gonna be customers, it's because their business models are just like fundamentally ridiculous. Um, it's they're not monopoly products, they're just commodities, and these that's why these valuations don't make sense. But when all this stuff is going out of business, and we have a plan for this on new consensus, um, and

A Post Work Plan And Politics

SPEAKER_02 45:14

it's we have to con we have to not just let all this stuff be sold off for parts. Um, we we need to not do government bailouts of this totally failed business model. Uh, we need to take possession of this stuff. Um, and you know, I'm not even talking about, don't worry, Sagar, I'm not even talking about expropriation here. This stuff is gonna, these are gonna be worthless access to the stuff. I don't know why you thought I'm opposed to that. Okay, okay, sorry.

SPEAKER_06 45:40

Go ahead.

SPEAKER_02 45:40

Well, you don't want authority for unitarianism. That's basically what I want. Okay, good. Yeah. So uh we're we're uh, you know, we we need to take possession of this stuff. And you know, we can just buy it up as it's going out of business. Um, you know, it's in 2009, uh, there was a guy in the Brazilian government, in Lula's government, who actually proposed, like, let's buy all of the Wall Street banks because they were all less worth than less than a billion each, right? And, you know, so we're we could do that, right, in this moment of collapse. And um, and I'm not saying I'm not cheering for the collapse so that we can do this. It's just that I think it's very clear that this is what's gonna happen. I think in the next year or two, this is why I think it's you know really great for like we we need leaders like you all to be ready for this because in a year or two it's gonna start becoming clear to everybody what's happening. And, you know, and we're gonna have a stage of presidential candidates running for the uh Democratic nomination, and some of them are gonna be completely clueless, and some of them are gonna see you know what how drastic the the change is going to be, and they're gonna be up to the challenge of talking about what comes next. And I think we might be surprised about like I really have no idea who's gonna get it and who's not.

SPEAKER_01 46:52

Um, you know, so well, Zach, I think it's extremely important the work that you're doing. And um, you know, I think there has not been outside of your work enough thought put into, okay, well, yes, we don't like the oligarchs, but what are we going to do and what is this all going to look like? So I really encourage people to go and read the report that we put up earlier. I'm gonna put the link in the description so that people can find it easily. And I I hope you'll come back and talk to us some more. It's been great talking to you today.

SPEAKER_06 47:23

Absolutely. Thanks for having me on.

SPEAKER_01 47:26

It's our pleasure, Zach. Thank you. Thank you.

SPEAKER_06 47:28

Hey, if you like that video, hit the like button or leave a comment below. It really helps get the show to more people.

SPEAKER_01 47:33

And if you'd like to get the full show, ad free and in your inbox every morning. You can sign up at breakingpoints.com.

SPEAKER_06 47:39

That's right. Get the full show, help support the future of independent media at breakingpoints.com.