Why the A.I. Backlash Turned Violent in America

I'm Kevin Roose, a tech columnist at the New York Times.

I'm Casey Newton from Platformer, and this is Hard Fork. This week, the AI backlash has turned violent. We'll debate what's making it so unpopular. Then, Kara Swisher returns to the show to discuss her new documentary on Silicon Valley's obsession with living longer. And finally, can CEOs replace themselves with AI? Mark Zuckerberg may be giving it a shot, and we wish him the best.

All right, Kevin. Well, some very serious news to start. I think you and I both, over the past few months, have seen public sentiment really begin to turn against AI. And this week, unfortunately, we saw that sentiment spill over into violence.

Yeah. So, most of our listeners have probably heard by now that late last week, there was an attempted attack on Sam Altman at his house in San Francisco. A 20-year-old man allegedly threw a Molotov cocktail at the gate of Sam's home. No one was hurt, but according to the criminal complaint against the suspect, this was someone who had a document that identified views opposed to artificial intelligence, and also had a list of names and addresses of other AI executives, investors, and board members. This is someone who was very clearly concerned about the existential risk that AI posed, in his opinion, and so decided to take matters into his own hands and go try to attack Sam Altman, and then from there made his way over to OpenAI headquarters to try to commit some violence there as well. And as you say, fortunately, no one there was hurt. This incident came just a few days after another really worrisome incident in Indiana.

Yeah. So, in that incident, an Indianapolis city councilman named Ron Gibson and his son woke up to more than a dozen gunshots being fired at their front door and a note tucked under their doormat that read, "No data centers." This was someone who had been a supporter of a proposed data center in his district in Indiana and had voted to approve rezoning for the project the week before. And I think this is just part of what I am worried is a growing trend of anti-AI radicalization and violence. We should just say, like, upfront that we are not fans of violence. We do not encourage violence. No one should be doing this. This is very bad for society and even for the sort of proposed policy outcomes of the groups that are most worried about AI.

Yeah. I mean, in addition to just the moral reasons why it is bad to try to hurt people to achieve a political objective, it also is just very ineffective. No one is going to stop the march of AI with a few stray bullets. So before we talk about the AI backlash, let's make our AI disclosures. I work for the New York Times, which is suing OpenAI, Microsoft, and Perplexity, and my fiancée works at Anthropic. You bring up the data center connection in the Indiana case, and I want you to lay out some of this backlash that we're seeing to data centers around the country. Data centers are necessary for AI companies to deliver the services that they are building. Now, some of the companies right now have a big sort of crunch in trying to deliver, you know, as much service as there is currently demand for, but increasingly we are just seeing people across the country rise up and say, literally, not in my backyard.

Yeah. So I think the data centers and the violence or attempted violence against AI executives share sort of a common fury and outrage. They are obviously very different tactics. I think data centers are kind of the most visible symbol of the AI boom, and I think there are a lot of fears and worries and concerns about data center construction out there. Some of them based on more sound reasons than others. But we have seen not just sort of 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 neighborhoods.

So describe some of this resistance.

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.

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. 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 2026 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 cost, 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.

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 the industry at large is being driven by investigative journalism?

Well, I don't think that it is the New Yorker's fault that someone showed up at Sam Altman's house and threw a Molotov cocktail at it. This person, the suspect, appears to have had a longer history of engaging with these sort of anti-AI communities on the internet. And I don't think we should stop scrutinizing these powerful people and companies. That said, I do worry that this is going to get worse before it gets better. I mean, one thing that I've been thinking about over the past few days is like this is happening at a time when unemployment is below 5%. And the S&P 500 is near a record high. And so if all of this is starting to happen when things are relatively good economically speaking in this country, I think the fear and the expectation among the leaders of these companies is that it will get much worse if and when AI does actually start to cause like mass disruption to the labor market.

Absolutely. And they have essentially all but promised us that for the past several years. I read Sam's post and thought this is sort of right and wrong at the same time. I think that he is right that the rhetoric around AI is really extreme and that some people do take it seriously, and one of the people who took it seriously appears to have been the suspect in this case. Right. Where I think it's wrong, though, is that it was the CEOs themselves who have been inflaming the rhetoric. Right? There's a 2015 blog post where Sam writes, "Development of superhuman machine intelligence is probably the greatest threat to the continued existence of humanity." And the other AI CEOs have said things along very similar lines. So I think to come along now at a moment where the systems are more powerful than ever and the CEOs themselves are telling us that superintelligence is imminent, and to say, well, now we need to tamp down the rhetoric, that just seems sort of crazy to me because it's like at this point we're not even really talking about the rhetoric. We're talking about the actual technology and the material effects it's already starting to have on people's lives.

Yeah. Casey, I want to 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, you know, 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 know, what you are suggesting maybe they should have done and like try to sort of de-escalate the rhetoric or sketch a more positive vision, they would have been accused of sugarcoating. But if they talk 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. And I just like, how do you think they should square that circle?

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 like the way that we like solve problems caused by companies in a democracy is that we regulate them. And when the companies themselves are out there saying, "Well, we want regulation, but no, no, no, no, no, not like that. Like you'll harm innovation. You'll prevent us from defeating China," you're just sort of like creating a double bind, and that is just going to make voters more and more infuriated.

Yeah. 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?

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 come 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, you know, retire comfortably? Like I think people have a lot of fears about this stuff, and that is I think a bigger part of the sort of 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?"

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, you know, keep them up late at night and have one of these like 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, you know, all of your meals will be 3D printed for you and it won't cost you a thing. And I think that just seems so implausible to people that it's impossible to build any kind of political constituency around it. And I wonder if we will see AI companies trying to sell that case a little bit harder in the future. Right.

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, you know, many of the people I talked 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, you know, 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.

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're 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 gonna hate it. So I don't think this is some like 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 like 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, you know, in a lot of places where they're trying to expand, people are saying, "No, no, no, no, no. We think of all the jobs we'll lose if this technology comes in." Now, I think in the tech industry, 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.

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. You know, 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 publish 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 to me, that 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.

Yeah, 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, you know, they just want there to be smart people making smart policies.

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.

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... So, OpenAI last week released this document called Industrial Policy for the Intelligence Age. It's sort of 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 like I would be happy if one member of Congress was reading this and thinking this stuff looks like a good idea.

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 call 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 there 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.

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 like 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, like I think they are trying to kind of spread the bets a little bit.

Yeah. And look, I will be the first to stipulate that like for the most part it should not be the job of the private corporations to like 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 that 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.

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. When I hear you talk about this, my sense is that your real objection to the sort of like 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.

No, that is not what I'm saying at all. Like 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. Like 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 is what you said is basically like 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 like throw up a bunch of environmental reviews. Like 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 sort of data center NIMBYism that we're seeing will have some unforeseen consequences down the road.

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? 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 this kind of, you know, these 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 know, 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. Like that kind of thing feels like a better answer to me than just saying no data centers.

It also seems to require all like 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 going to be a project that they have to just push through regardless of public opposition.

So, I really struggle here because I could tell you a bunch of messaging changes that they could make that might, you know, 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 are 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 like unelected AI leaders, it is ultimately the governments who are going to have to give us an answer to these questions.

Well, that's a punt, but...

Is it though? It's a punt, but it feels like the only honest answer. Like what am I supposed to say? Like, well, you know, GPT-6 should like come on.

Yeah. I mean, I guess I agree that the ball's in government's court on this one, but I've just become like 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 like 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.

Yeah. Well, I like what you just said because I do think this feels like a wide open lane in American politics, which is like I am extremely nervous about AI and if it is going to advance at this pace, I am determined to make sure that it like 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 like that is where glory lies. Like if you can figure that out, they will write your name in history and I want to believe that there are some, you know, solid American politicians there who are up for the challenge.

Yeah, they will put you on Mount Rushmore if you figure out how to make this go well.

That is and that is our promise to you. And at Hard Fork, we will do everything we can to get you on Mount Rushmore.

So, we'll make some calls.

Yeah.

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. 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.

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. 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. 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 for sure.

I think you'll find that she is rather skeptical about many of the things that she tried, but we do try to sort of press her on what you might do if you were interested in maybe extending your life for a few years.

I have a secret theory, which is that Kara Swisher actually really likes tech and it's just kind of like a negging thing that's going on.

I think it's a very complicated relationship as they used to say on Facebook.

All right, let's bring her in. Kara Swisher. Kara Swisher, welcome back to Hard Fork.

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, welcome back. We're delighted to have you.

Yeah. Wonderful.

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.

Yes. Well, so tell us a bit how you got into this. You know, 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. 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?

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.

Of course. 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?

What's supposed to be happening to you while you're in a hyperbaric chamber?

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 not a life extension thing, we should say. It's like a depression thing, and people...

And did you have a lot of new ideas on ketamine when you tried it?

Thank you. That's very sweet.

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, you think you're moving and then the motion happens three seconds later.

I think they call that a k-hole. I think you might have been in a k-hole.

I mean, aloneness is a very difficult emotion for a podcaster, is what I found.

It's interesting. I feel like the sort of psychedelic...

On the advice of counsel, I'm going to respectfully decline to answer.

Yes.

It's interesting. I feel like there's been a shift in Silicon Valley in the last couple of years where like everyone used to be doing psychedelics and now everyone has just hopped up on stimulants because like we have to work more. We have to like work harder. We have to like escape the permanent underclass. We have to grind. So did you try any stimulants as a...

They confused you with another powerful lesbian that was also going to school at the same time, I guess. Yeah. Now, Kara, 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?

Trickle-down health, anonymous. 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?

What are you talking about? GLP-1s have only been around since like 2022?

Yeah, I mean, I think a point that you make in the show that is really important is just that like being rich is a great way to stay healthy in general and then to live longer. A lot of the technologies you explore are sort of fringy things, but like ultimately, you know, Brian Johnson is healthy because he spends $2 million a year on his health.

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 like, you know, one area where my own views have changed considerably over the last few years is on the area of like 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, you know, now there exist treatments for that are FDA approved, but when he was sick, they hadn't been approved yet.