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This week, politics, memes, and protest movements kept colliding with the economy, turning everything from Black Friday shopping to stock charts into a referendum on power and attention. Investors who spent the last couple of years riding AI and crypto gains are getting a reminder that gravity is still in charge, as once-screaming-up charts now introduce terms like death cross and profit-taking. Retailers are heading into the holidays knowing that some shoppers are planning not to spend at all, on purpose. And on the cultural front, a single insult from the president is now ricocheting around social networks, while a local New York election is being framed as a national story about socialism, faith, and economic justice. Here is what actually moved the week in business. Housings long plateau: Moodys maps a decade of flat real home prices Moodys Analytics chief economist Mark Zandi expects the U.S. housing market to spend the next decade slowly working off the excesses of the pandemic era, with prices rising roughly in line with inflation and no real gains once you adjust for it. After the massive run-up in prices and the mortgage rate shock, he sees existing home sales staying frozen for years as affordability gradually improves. Moodys projects nominal home prices will climb about 23.5% between December 2025 and December 2035, with modest declines likely in parts of the South and West and more stability in the Northeast and Midwest. Zandi also points to long-term headwinds like restrictive immigration that could limit construction labor, and to higher Treasury yields that may keep mortgage rates closer to 6%. Quiet, Piggy turns into a meme war the president cannot control A clip of President Donald Trump saying Quiet, Piggy to Bloomberg reporter Catherine Lucey aboard Air Force One went viral and quickly turned into a memetic insult aimed right back at him. Users on Bluesky and X are now quote-posting Trump and his allies with the phrase, often pairing it with unflattering photos or AI-generated images of Trump as Miss Piggy or yelling at Miss Piggy. The reaction taps into Trumps long record of calling women pigs, dogs, and slobs, and his years of attacking journalists in order to discredit negative coverage. That history makes this latest jab feel especially juvenile and very on brand, fueling frustration that fellow reporters did not push him harder in the moment. XRP sinks as profit-taking and macro fears hit crypto again XRP, the token tied to Ripples XRP Ledger, has dropped to around $2.13, more than 26% below where it was three months ago and well off its July peak of $3.65. The decline comes even after the launch of three XRP exchange-traded funds, including Canary Capitals XRPC, which has already fallen about 11% as large holders reportedly sold 200 million XRP within two days. Analysts say the pullback is part of a broader risk-off mood as investors worry about a possible tech and AI bubble, economic uncertainty, and the odds of future rate cuts. Bitcoin is under similar pressure, recently flashing a death cross that has reinforced bearish sentiment and wiped out its gains for 2025. Epsteins Bubba email becomes NSFW merch and a headache for platforms The release of more than 23,000 pages of Jeffrey Epstein’s estate documents has spawned a wave of NSFW Trump-and-Clinton-themed merchandise on Etsy and Amazon. Sellers are zeroing in on a 2018 email in which Epsteins brother jokes about photos of Trump blowing Bubba, a line that has sparked online speculation about the two former presidents, even as both deny any wrongdoing and the documents do not explicitly implicate them. The email has become fodder for T-shirts, mugs, bumper stickers, and other items built around suggestive slogans and winks at Big, Beautiful Bill. A few designers have pushed into more creative or graphic territory, including artwork styled after the film Brokeback Mountain. Netflixs 10-for-1 stock split shocks casual chart watchers, not investors Netflix shares appear to have fallen more than 90% on some charts, dropping from over $1,100 to around $111. But the move comes from a 10-for-1 stock split rather than an actual collapse in value. For existing shareholders, nothing fundamental has changed, since each old share was simply divided into 10, and holders received nine additional shares for every one they already owned. Netflix says the goal is to make shares more accessible to employees in stock purchase and option programs, where a four-digit price can be a psychological and financial barrier. Lower nominal prices can also make the stock more approachable to smaller retail investors who balk at four-figure tickets. Holiday boycotts aim to turn non-spending into a political weapon Two overlapping campaigns, Mass Blackout and We Aint Buying It, are calling on Americans to sit out Black Friday and the surrounding shopping days to protest Trump-era policies and corporate alignment with them. The Mass Blackout boycott urges people to stop shopping, streaming, and even working, if they can, from the Wednesday before Thanksgiving through the day after Cyber Mondaywhile still supporting small, local businesses with cash. The We Aint Buying It boycott focuses on Target, Home Depot, and Amazon, citing everything from DEI rollbacks to alleged cooperation with ICE and tax cut lobbying. Organizers frame the actions as economic noncooperation in an economy where the wealth gap keeps widening and the system works for the wealthy by design. Bitcoin’s death cross deepens anxiety, makes token roughly flat for 2025 Bitcoin has fallen from October highs above $124,000 to around $94,000, giving back its year-to-date gains and putting the token firmly in bear market territory. The slide has been accompanied by a classic technical warning sign known as a death cross, when short-term moving averages drop below longer-term ones on a chart. That pattern has added to fears that the current downturn could deepen, even as some analysts note that previous death crosses have lined up with local bottoms rather than full-scale collapses. Other cryptocurrencies are followingsuit, with a major market index down in line with Bitcoin over the past week. The broader backdrop is a mix of profit-taking by long-term holders, institutional outflows, and macro worries that make speculative assets a tougher sell. Zohran Mamdani becomes conservative medias new favorite villain New York City Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdani has not taken office yet, but conservative media has already cast him as its latest symbol of everything wrong with the left. Commentators on Fox News, Newsmax, and elsewhere have called him a communist, a Marxist, and a jihadist sympathizer, often blurring the line between socialism and communism while attacking his membership in the Democratic Socialists of America and his Muslim faith. The New York Post ran a string of attention-grabbing covers about him ahead of the election and is now monetizing those images as merch, further cementing his role as a polarizing figure. Right-leaning outlets describe Mamdani’s agenda as fundamentally at odds with American values, while progressive watchdogs say he is being used much like Nancy Pelosi or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez were before him, as a stand-in for the entire Democratic Party. Verizon cuts 13,000 jobs to reorient around customers Verizon is laying off more than 13,000 employees, roughly 20 percent of its non-union management workforce, as part of a major push to streamline operations and free up money to invest in customer experience. In a memo to staff, new CEO Dan Schulman said the companys cost structure has become a drag, creating friction that slows Verizon down and frustrates customers. The carrier reported about $33.8 billion in third-quarter revenue and continued growth in prepaid wireless subscribers, but it is losing higher-value postpaid lines and facing intense competition from AT&T, T-Mobile, and others. Alongside the layoffs, Verizon plans to sharply reduce outsourced labor and has created a $20 million Reskilling and Career Transition Fund to support affected workers. Techs roller-coaster week leaves investors dizzy Thursday turned into a full roller coaster for tech investors. Nvidias blowout earnings pushed its stock up nearly 5% early in the day and briefly lifted the entire Magnificent Seven, thanks to better-than-expected revenue, strong profit, and a bullish fourth-quarter forecast. But fears of an AI bubble and fading confidence in a December Fed rate cut quickly erased those gains, sending the major tech names and the Nasdaq composite into sharp intraday swings. By Friday morning, rate-cut odds had risen again, and several of the big players were inching back into positive territory, even as Nvidia slipped.
Category:
E-Commerce
Want more housing market stories from Lance Lamberts ResiClub in your inbox? Subscribe to the ResiClub newsletter. John Rogers, the chief data and analytics officer of Cotality (formerly known as CoreLogic), returned to ResiDay this year to give a two-part presentation: first, how riskinsurance, climate, construction costis reshaping the housing market, and second, how AI is about to turn property professionals into superheroes. In 2011, the firm was predominantly a U.S. mortgage-data company. Today, Cotality is a multicountry, multi-industry analytics platform that supports more than 1 million real estate agents, touches more than 8 out of every 10 U.S. mortgages, and interacts with a similar share of property insurance policies. Across those businesses, Cotality collects data from 22,000 unique sourcesfrom county recorders to satellite imagery to lidar scans on smartphones. Im fortunate to look after this 21st-century data and AI manufacturing plant, Rogers told the audience. He manages a team of about 200 data scientists and meteorologists. Insurance premiums reach a record share of monthly payments Insurance now accounts for 9% of the typical U.S. homeowners paymentthe highest share on record, according to Cotality. Several states have seen double-digit premium increases in just the past year. Looking ahead, Cotality expects average annual U.S. homeowner insurance premiums to rise another 8% in 2026, followed by an additional 8% increase in 2027. According to Cotality, three forces are putting upward pressure on home insurance. First, there’s rising construction and material costs. Cotality tracks the exact reconstruction cost for every property in the countryevery nail and two-by-four. During the Pandemic Housing Boom, there was historic overheating in both home prices and material prices, which has led to higher replacement costs. Thats still feeding into higher home insurance premiums. Second, more homes are facing climate-related hazards. Roughly 12% of todays U.S. housing stock sits in high-risk hazard zones (wildfire, winter storm, hail, and flooding) representing $4.3 trillion in hypothetical reconstruction costs. By 2050, that share rises to 20%, or $7.2 trillion. Cotality models the financial impact of each hazard on every property, giving insurersand, increasingly, homeownersrisk scores that account for both current and future conditions. Third, there’s migration into high-risk areas. The densification of the U.S. housing stock mirrors the growth of homes in hazard-prone regions. One in six Americans now lives in a high-wildfire-risk area, Rogers noted. Florida and Georgia, which experienced rapid population growth, are among the states most exposed. After outlining why home insurance premiums are rising, Rogers turned to how science and data can reduce lossesand premiums. Urban conflagration drove the Los Angeles losses, he said. Despite relatively low wildfire-risk scores, neighborhoods in the Palisades burned because of building-to-building ignition. Cotality is now modeling this urban conflagration risk at the individual-property level, giving insurers a clearer view of how fires spread across aging housing stock. Rogers added that rebuilding communities like Palisades for a safer future can help contain premiums. He said that following the 2018 Palisades fire, Cotality helped design a rebuilding blueprint that could reduce wildfire risk by up to 75%, and cut insurance premiums by more than 50%. The blueprint included IBHS-standard hardened homes, redesigned lower-density layouts with fire breaks, and risk-mitigation strategies around community perimeters. Finally, Rogers said that premiums can be lowered through home-level resilience assessments. Cotality worked with the California Department of Insurance to evaluate every home using aerial imagery and AI. Attributes such as roof materials, closed eaves, setbacks, and nonflammable defensible space feed into resilience scores that insurers use to cut premiums by 20% or more. These resilience assessments are now being deployed beyond California, he said. One striking example: Seminole County, Georgiafar from coastal hazardshas six times the risk level of hardened-home counties in Florida, underscoring the power of building codes.
Category:
E-Commerce
Jon Armstrong never intended to create the booming live-commerce platform Stacked Golf. All he wanted was to join the local golf club, but his wife, Ashley, gave him an ultimatum: Yes, he could join, but only if he could find a way to pay for it himself. His solution? Start a YouTube channel reviewing golf balls. The problem was that he didnt even have the money to buy balls to review, so he scoured the woods at his Daytona Beach golf club for lost balls and started making videos comparing the Titleist Pro V1 balls he plays to whatever he found in the rough. Zero budget. Zero business plan. Just a guy with a phone and a hunch that people might search for golf ball reviews. That was in 2019. Within two months, his channel garnered enough traffic to monetize. Within six months, it became the Armstrongs full-time income. Today, the Stacked Golf YouTube channel has 325,000 subscribers, and earlier this year, the Armstrongs launched a multi-seller marketplace by the same name, which generates $150,000 in weekly sales and is approaching $3 million in total sales after just six months. With a community of 26,000 members and more than 1,000 active sellers, the Armstrongs have accidentally built a case study for the booming live shopping economya market projected to explode from $128 billion in 2024 to $2.5 trillion by 2033. “We got super lucky, Armstrong says. With everything we were doingfilming the golf ball reviews and thrifting golf clubswe were basically filming ourselves making money. American Pickers, but for golf The channel’s real trajectory shift came when Armstrong’s wife, Ashley, added her passion and expertise in thrifting to the equation. What emerged, by their own description, was “American Pickers, but for golf clubs,” which entails them driving for hours through Central Florida hoping to find a $400 putter sitting in a Goodwill for $3. The polished videos hide an unglamorous reality. “For every one thrift store we show you in a video, we’ve probably been to like 15,” Armstrong admits. “There were a lot of days where we wore the same clothes back to back to try and figure out how to fill out one 10-minute video.” They occasionally sold items on eBay and other platforms, but tired quickly of the tedious product-by-product selling process and fees that ate into profits. Mostly, they hoarded inventory, waiting for a better solution. Meanwhile, over the next three years, their community grew organically. “We really wanted to create a platform where we make buying golf clubs online as exciting as it is in our videos,” Armstrong explains. “It’s kind of a soulless transaction when you’re buying from eBay. The thrill of the hunt didn’t really exist.” A million-dollar tech shortcut The technical breakthrough came throughof all thingsa golf game. Armstrong played a round with Commonwealth Picker, another YouTuber who had built a marketplace on District, a platform that provides the infrastructure for custom shopping platforms with livestreaming and multi-seller marketplaces. Armstrong, who previously ran an app development company, recognized the value of District immediately. “The technology stack that they give you is millions of dollars,” he says. “So it was kind of a no-brainer. They handle support, they handle the whole tech side, and all we have to do is focus on growing the user base and selling as much as possible. Founded in 2022 by three former Snapchat product builders (and backed by Andreessen Horowitz, Kindred Ventures, and Greylock Partners), the Los Angelesbased company has 12 employees, a lean operation compared to competitor and live-shopping giant Whatnot. The Armstrongs timing couldn’t have been better. While Whatnot has reached an $11.5 billion valuation, proving massive investor appetite for the category, District is democratizing access. Where Whatnot built a centralized marketplace, District enables creators to build their own branded ecosystems. By using District, Stacked Golf isn’t selling on someone else’s platform, such as eBay or Craigslist: Its more like theyre building their own golf-focused, mini-eBay right on District. They control their own marketplace, set their own rules, and earn commission fees from their 1,000-plus sellers. Stacked Golf’s Timed auctions Here’s how it works: Sellers schedule livestreams that generally last anywhere from 45 minutes to four hours, or longer. They hold up a productsay, a Nike Method Core puttergive a brief pitch, and start the countdown timer, which is typically 10 seconds. Last person to bid wins. It’s simple, fast-paced, and wildly effective. Stacked Golf also features standard marketplace and buy-it-now listings, as well as seven-day auctions, but 98% of sales come from livestreams, with clubs selling from $5 to several hundred dollars. One seller recently hosted a marathon nine-and-a-half-hour livestream, which generated nearly $20,000 in sales, according to Armstrong. Some of the biggest sellers on Stacked Golf ae golf stores, like Play It Again Sports which recently made $17,000 in two hours, more than that seller normally does in a week of non-livestream selling. The format taps into why live commerce conversion rates run up to 10 times higher than conventional e-commerce: urgency, entertainment, and real-time interaction that traditional online shopping lacks. But Armstrong’s secret weapon isn’t the format. It’s curation. Community over commerce Stacked Golf preapproves every seller, verifies product legitimacy, and rejects gambling gimmicks and NSFW content that plague some live-selling competitors. “We really wanted to create an atmosphere where people want to buy and sell on our platform just because it’s the best place to do it,” Armstrong says. The philosophy extends to seller selection. Armstrong prefers passionate collectors over spreadsheet arbitrageurs. “The ones that have the most people in their chats are the ones that know what they’re selling because they like it,” he says, citing sellers who specialize in Nike golf clubsdiscontinued since 2016 but beloved by collectors. The strategy is working. Since launching earlier this year, the marketplace grew from zero to 15,000 members in just three months and has since reached 26,000 after six months. Multiple individual sellers have generated more than $150,000 in personal sales on the platform. The business itself now employs three full-time staff and operates from a 2,500-square-foot Ocala, Florida, warehouse, which it has already outgrown. It has also attracted brand partnerships with golf apparel company Pins & Aces and hosts sellers who have relationships with Adidas North America, Titleist, and Mizuno, among others. But Armstrong is cautious about diluting the community with corporate sellers. “We wanted to create a marketplace that we would both want to buy and sell on and not feel ashamed of marketing it,” he says. “As soon as you start getting too corporate in terms of the sellers on there, you kind of kill the vibe.” Right idea, right time In the U.S., the live commerce market accounts for approximately 5% of e-commerce salesfar less than China’s 60%suggesting an enormous runway for companies like Stacked Golf as American consumers embrace the format. The U.S. market is expected to grow at 37.2% annually through 2033, fueled by platforms like TikTok Shop and stand-alone marketplaces like Whatnot. TikTok Shopwhich blends livestream shopping with traditional product listingshosted over eight million hours of live sessions in the U.S. in 2024. Whatnot, focused on collectibles and resale, recently surpassed $2 billion in annual livestream sales, while Amazon Live and eBay Live are expanding their live commerce offerings. The trend is driven by the urgency and entertainment that Armstrong has built into Stacked Golf’s model. District’s infrastructure democratizes this opportunity. Where building live commerce tech might require millions in investment, creators can now launch sophisticated marketplaces overnight and focus on what, according to Armstrong, matters most: building authentic communities. “It’s still kind of surreal, he says. Just thinking about how we started with finding golf balls in the woods, and now we’re here. The business he built with his wife”the CEO of everything,” as he calls herdemonstrates something fundamental about modern commerce: Authentic community-building trumps traditional business planning. They didn’t start with a pitch deck. They started with a bet, a phone, and a genuine love for the hunt. And that authenticity might be the companys most valuable asset. “It just grew naturally, which I think people appreciated,” Armstrong says. “Even to this day, it’s kind of clear that it ain’t all about the money.”
Category:
E-Commerce
Sometimes, a simple summary is all you need. Me? Im a man of many words. (Understatement of the century, I know.) I appreciate interesting writing, where language matters and a persons personality shines through in the prose. But lets be real: 99% of the articles you encounter on this musty ol web of ours arent exactly awe-inspiring. Theyre a means to an end. The same is true for most videos, too. And in any such scenario, you arent in it for the pleasure of reading or viewing and being entertained. You just want to get the gist of whats happening without wasting any time wading your way through unimaginative drivel. The next time you find yourself facing that predicament, todays Cool Tools discovery will be exactly the advantage you never knew you needed. This tip originally appeared in the free Cool Tools newsletter from The Intelligence. Get the next issue in your inbox and get ready to discover all sorts of awesome tech treasures! Simple summaries, served up swiftly So, first things first: In this day and age, theres no shortage of supposedly smart AI-powered systems offering to summarize stuff for you. Such systems are built into almost every browser at this point, not to mention most AI chatbots and an awful lot of regular ol apps as well. But a free stand-alone service called Kagi Summarize is a cut above the rest in some pretty significant ways, both practical and philosophical. And youll need less than a minute to get it going. Choose your own adventure: On any device, you can simply head over to the Kagi Summarize websiteand then paste any article or YouTube link (or even a block of plain text!) into the box on that page. Note that you will need to sign in with an email address or a Google, Microsoft, Apple, or GitHub account in order to use this web versionbut its completely free once you do, and the service never spams you or sells your info. Better yet: On a phone or tablet, you can install the free Kagi Summarize Android app or Kagi Summarize iOS appand then save yourself a step by sharing any article or video there directly from another app, using the standard system-level sharing option. This is also free and doesnt require any kind of sign-in or account to use. Summoning Kagi Summarize is as simple as sharing anything into the app, on mobile. Either way you go, youll end up with a quick n simple bulleted breakdown of your items key points for easy skimming. Kagi Summarize can give you bulleted breakdowns for easy skimmingand that’s just the start. And thats just the tip of the iceberg. On the desktop front, you can switch between that default Key Moments view and a more narrative Summary option, and you can use a Discuss Further command to interactively ask specific questions about the material and get instant answers. And on mobile, you can move between those same setups along with a super-simplified Explain Like Im 5 approachand you can change the length of your summaries to get more or less detail. You’ve got all sorts of options for how your summaries turn out. Kagi Summarizes mobile version also has some interesting options for customizing the appearance of your summaries to make em easier on the eyes, in whatever style you prefer. You can even control the appearance of your summaries to make ’em as pleasant as possible for your personal preferences. So why is this better than other summarizing tools, you might be wondering? Id point to three specific reasons: It works with anything, anywherewithout tethering you down to one specific browser or program you have to use to access it. It offers some genuinely nice extras in the way of customization and control, which makes the summaries much more useful in returnsince you can experience em in whatever form, length, and visual appearance you find most appealing. And its focused fiercely on privacy. The underlying organization, if you arent familiar, is a Google search alternative thats all about (a) quality of experience and (b) avoiding any collection of any personal info. Kagi Summarize follows that same philosophy and promises to keep all your activity anonymous. The mobile apps dont even ask for a single permissionwhich is pretty darn rare in this day and age. Privacy is a key part of the Kagi Summarize setup. To summarize: Its useful, its customizable, its free, and it doesnt do anything with your data. If you think youll ever find a scenario where itd be helpful to have something summarized, this one is well worth keeping around. Kagi Summarize is available on the web as well as in a more fully featured Android app and iOS app, for mobile use. Its completely free to use. And its creator is adamant about the fact that it doesnt collect or share any significant data. The desktop site requires you to sign in, while the mobile apps dontbut neither requires any privacy compromises. Treat yourself to all sorts of brain-boosting goodies like this with the free Cool Tools newsletterstarting with an instant introduction to an incredible audio app thatll tune up your days in truly delightful ways.
Category:
E-Commerce
Camps are finally emerging in the big fight over whether and how to regulate AI. President Donald Trump earlier this week declared that he would block local officials who try to regulate the technology; according to a draft executive order leaked on Wednesday, the administration will punish states that try. State lawmakers and members of Congressincluding Georgia Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greeneare now pushing back. This has been a long time coming. Members of Congress have put out myriad proposals for regulating artificial intelligence, but no significant legislative package has come through. The Biden administration issued a major executive order on the technology, but the Trump administration has spent significant capital attacking it, ultimately rescinding much of the measure. The federal government has not taken even the minimal actions despite quite broad bipartisan support, for example, about managing the risks and harms to kids. If there’s one thing we can all agree on, that’s it, Arati Prabhakar, former director of the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA) during the Obama administration and head of the Office of Technology and Science Policy during the Biden administration, tells Fast Company. To say that the states shouldn’t do anything because the federal government should do itand then yet to oppose every action at the federal leveljust makes no sense whatsoever. Fast Company senior writer Rebeccah Heilweil spoke with Prabhakarwho has also filed a major brief defending Congresss ability to support science research amid federal funding squeezesabout where we stand with AI regulation today, and what the technologys continuing rise could mean for the future of American democracy, governance, and well-being. This interview has been edited for clarity and length. The administration has made clear that it doesnt think there should be state-level AI regulation, and is continuing to route this toward the federal government to regulate. Thats obviously in the interest of some AI companies. What do you think about that? States have been very active. Every state has considered, often, multiple bills. Yet, when you look in aggregate, most of what’s been enacted are transparency measures. That’s a start, but it’s a pretty small start. I think we’re very far from wrangling this technology and putting it on the right course. Pretending that the federal government is going to achieve that without the states is ludicrous. The Trump administration rescinded the big Biden executive order on AI. Whats been the impact of that? (Editors note: The Biden executive order on AI, which was signed in October 2023, gave federal agencies a range of new responsibilities related to the tech, as well as guidance on how to use it.) The actions that this administration has taken on many fronts are deeply concerning. They’ve put the country into a national crisis. The AI front is one in which it hasn’t been as dramatic. It’s positioned as this big, dramatic shift, but a lot of the implementation of the executive order under President Biden had already happened. I’ve even seen cases where they’re taking credit for things that departments and agencies were doing better because of their good use of AI. The bigger issue really is that this administration is not stepping up to the two things we need to be doing as a country to get AI fully on the right track. The market is doing all the experimentation to figure out where the business productivity applications are, but there are two public roles that aren’t really being addressed right now in this administration. One is managing risks and harms, and the other is just actively going after AI for public purposes. That’s where we are falling short. In a time when the most powerful technology of our time is just surging, this government is not stepping up. How concerned are you about people developing highly psychologicaleven highly romantic or even sexualrelationships with chatbots? To me, it’s part of this distortion of reality that started in the social media erawhich, by the way, was AI as well, right? It was AI behind the scenes that determined what was being fed to you. Now it’s being exacerbated by AI that’s right in your face with chatbots or image generators. I think it’s very concerning. It’s a whole spectrumfrom the polarization that has been driven by mis- and disinformation, all the way to these parasocial relationships. There have been some really tragic cases, even suicides that were the result of a dialogue that sent someone who was in a really dangerous, fragile state to a terrible end. AI evokes conversations about cognitive offloading. We often cite the calculator, where, yeah, were not as good as doing math in our heads. But in general, automating calculating has been a net good for our overall intelligence. But a lot of people are freaked out by the prospect of outsourcing thinking to these platforms. I think about the calculator example a lot. There’s a difference between relying on a calculator to do calculationswhich all of us doand not understanding what a fraction means. You need to understand what a fraction means to just deal with the world. I think that’s the sorting out that needs to happen with large language models. I saw Gallup did some polling where they included talking to students about their attitudes about AI. I was really surprised to find out how anxious high schoolers, for example, are about AI. Part of their anxiety is a lack of clarity about when they can and can’t use it in school. But part of their anxiety is also their concern about their critical thinking skills. I love the fact that they had good enough critical thinking skills to be worried about that. Is there a risk that focusing too much on the AI race with China is going to prevent us from coming up with better regulations for the technology domestically in the United States? That argument is being used to avoid regulation. But I think we need to be really clear that what’s happening right now is that every country around the world is racing to use AI as a tool to build a future that reflects their values. I do not want to live in a future defined by this Chinese authoritarian government’s values. If you look at their human rights abuses, the way they have used AI to create a deep surveillance state . . . if you look at their military aggression and the potential for using AI in aggressive ways in the military context . . . that’s not a world that I think most people want to live in. It’s certainly not one that reflects long-held American values. Of course, its very concerning that we see some of those tactics being adopted here by our Department of Homeland Security. That’s a huge red flag about what’s happening with this authoritarian push in our government. But, again, the core question is: How do we bring AI to life to serve people and to build the kind of future that reflects the values we havecentered on people and their creaivity and our ability to chart a course for ourselves, rather than letting that be driven by a king or a dictator? That’s what I want to be using AI for. It strikes me that the Biden administration and the Trump administration both at least said they really care about government use of artificial intelligence. But at the same time, you’re saying there are concerns about that being used by the federal government to inch more toward authoritarian approaches. It’s all about how you use it. In the Biden administration, the Department of Homeland Security rolled up its sleeves and did the work, for example, to use facial recognition at TSA PreCheck or for Global Entry. These are places where there’s a very narrowly defined function, and you’re comparing a fresh camera image with a database that you have a legitimate reason to have. And if you’ve gone through TSA PreCheck or Global Entry, you can see how that has sped up and made those processes much better by using technology appropriately and respectfully. This is in stark contrast to the horror stories of police forces around the country who were using off-the-shelf facial recognition technology that purported to make matches from grainy video, for example, in a convenience store that had been held up. Really poor, completely inappropriate use of flawed facial recognition technology led to wrongful arrests of Black menin one case for a crime committed in a state that this man had never stepped foot in. That’s completely unacceptable. So the difference between using these technologies wisely and appropriately and with respect for our core values, and then just using it flagrantly without really thinking through what it means for the society that we want to live inthat’s all the difference in the world. I’m wondering what you make of the rise of firms like Anduril and Palantir that are really interested in selling AI and automated platforms for use on the battlefield and for defense purposes. How should we be thinking about that? I want to broaden your question to say it’s not just on a battlefield. These are technologies that are being deployed against Americans here at home. So it’s an incredibly important question. And the core issues are: Do we have democratic control over how the technology is used? These technologies, again, if misused, can violate Americans privacy in dangerous and horrific ways. We’re seeing that right now with some of the things that are happening. And that’s just unacceptable. And the companies tend to take the position of I’m just providing the technology. But the implementations that they are doing are contributing to this really dangerous misuse. That’s one example of a loss of democratic control over these very powerful new capabilities. We hear a lot about the AI race. I think about the space race. There was the race to get someone into space. Then there was the race to get someone into orbit. And then there was the race to get someone to the moon. And now it’s to have people live on the moon. When will the AI race be over? When we say we need to be first in the AI race, Im wondering: First to what? That is the whole ball gamefirst to what? What I keep thinking about, and what I really think we have to get focused on, is what AI can do for the things that fundamentally change people’s lives. We ran a conference called “AI Aspirations” in 2024, when I was still at the White House, and we highlighted seven different huge ambitions for AI. They ranged from closing educational gaps for our kids to getting better drugs faster, to better weather forecasts, to new materials for the advanced generations of semiconductor technology, to changing transportation infrastructure, to making it much more safe. Right now, the conversation about AI is really just about LLMs and maybe image generators. But what we’re talking about is the more general power of training AI models on very different kinds of data. We live in such a data-rich world, so it’s not just language. It’s sensor data, scientific data, it’s administrative data, financial data. It’s already every bit of data you generate when you’re clicking or navigating around on the web. The other key point to me is that it won’t simply happen by companies commercializing products. There’s deep research that’s required. There are datasets that are required to build the weather models or the transportation models that we need. Those are public responsibilities. Ultimately, we need regulatory advances so that we don’t just invent things faster, but our regulatory process can sort out what is safe and effectivefor example, for drugs. We’re at a point where this powerful technology is breaking loose. There’s no more important time for our federal government to be stepping up. And instead, it’s pulling back from so many other things that will determine who really succeeds at AI.
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