“There has not been a president who has been more beneficial for China than Donald Trump.” - @cafreeland

The most revealing part of this conversation between Jon Stewart and Jacob Coxon wasn't Coxon's warning about A.I. doom, but his description of A.I. utopia, and Stewart's incredulous response. I wrote about it — and Francis Fukuyama's "Last Man," and A.I. easily solving the problems that bedeviled my father's field of mathematics for decades — here: nytimes.com/2026/10/18/opini…

David Robinson tells me why he quit OpenAI: "I didn’t think that we were going to be able to create something fundamentally smarter than we were...when it became clear to me that we were on track to build something that could think circles around us — and we were this far from being ready for that at a safety and alignment level — it just became apparent to me that my time helping build it was over." We talk about this in the episode, but is the "good" outcome here...actually good?

Tomorrow on the podcast. David Robinson quit his job on Open AI's safety team. In his first interview since leaving OpenAI, he tells me why.

Bill Gates on why we should tax A.I. work: “If you’ve let go of a worker and hired a robot to do that job, why are you so incentivizing the trade-off against the human labor that you don’t ask the robot to also pay into the pension fund? What is it? Is it that the pro-robot union has gotten the tax laws to say: No, if you’re not flesh, then let pensions go bankrupt?”

Tomorrow on the show: @JensenHuang, the CEO of NVIDIA, who thinks A.I. fear is getting way out of hand.

Annie Galvin, one of the producers on this episode, tried to reach you through DM, email and a text to the number our research dept found for you. Not sure which wires crossed, but we very much wanted to speak with you beforehand.

Enough people have asked me about the Peter Thiel-Dialog story that I think it's worth saying what it is, or at least what I saw it to be. So: –Dialog is a conference. I went once in 2018 and once in 2022. No one ever asked me to keep it or my presence a secret. –My understanding was Thiel was one of its founders but no longer involved by the time I went. I never saw or talked to him in connection with Dialog. –Nor did I see the other names I’ve heard mentioned, like Ted Cruz or Elon Musk or Joseph Gordon-Levitt or Jared Kushner. Dialog was not sold to me as a bunch of big names, which is part of why I went. I don’t need to go to a conference to hear what Ted Cruz thinks. –You could be a Dialog member, but I wasn’t. I don’t think joining got you much except guaranteed invitations to future Dialogs. There were occasional dinners and webinars, but I never went to one. I would not have described it as a secret or a society. –The panels were largely self-organized, so people would propose panels and hold them. I went to one on being a working parent and another on whether crypto had any real use cases and another on how to accelerate scientific breakthroughs. You’d usually have 8 or 10 people in a room. It was all very TED-talk adjacent. –In 2018, I found it very optimistic, with an idealistic hacker-ish vibe. In 2022, I found the conversations and vibe more curdled and resentful. I didn’t enjoy it, and I didn’t go back. (That did prove a pretty good signal of where tech’s politics were going though, maybe I should’ve paid more attention.) –That said, Dialog was a pretty ideologically diverse crowd. I met some people there who were *extremely* far left and far right. I met some real eccentrics and weirdos. I appreciated that about it. – I’m a journalist, I go to lots of things in the hopes of getting to know people, hearing new ideas, finding podcast guests, etc. –Being at something does not mean I endorse it, or everyone at it, or everyone who organized or founded it. I try to go to things where I don’t share the politics and perspectives of the crowd, for obvious reasons. –I am surprised how credulous some people have been on this story. You have to believe some weird things about the world to believe Julián Castro and Peter Thiel are somehow engaged in a common project. Secret societies, I imagine, need a lot of trust to function, but the people being named here do not trust each other and do not have aligned agendas. So that’s what I saw at Dialog. I’ll just end by saying it’s a weird experience to have a conference you haven’t thought about for years become the center of a new conspiracy theory. wired.com/story/leak-exposes…

On Friday, I hosted a forum with the top 5 Democrats running for governor of California on how they'd fix the state's housing crisis. Some really interesting moments, including this one, from @katieporterca, on California Forever and master-planned communities. Full forum on podcast apps/Youtube.

Lovely riff from Naomi Klein on what it means to “build a more welcoming left” - and where you can see it already happening.