AI is the Inflection Point for Humanity

Transcript begins below (lightly edited for clarity; may contain minor errors).

STEVE BANNON (HOST): “The Secretary of Treasury Scott Bessent went on Morning Joe, and I would like you to compare Morning Joe’s interview, four or five on one, versus what we did last week. We asked probing questions, but we let the Secretary of Treasury explain himself and explained what the Trump program is, and particularly in this critical element of, because it is a massive undertaking that is underway. And that is to rejuvenate and to bring back America to be a manufacturing superpower.

And there’s been a lot of talk about it and a lot of talk about the resprout happened. This is actually an action plan that has many aspect of, but the two converging forces are a tax cut that rewarded capital investment, and at the same time a Liberation Day talking about not just tariffs and protectionism and economic nationalism, but really redoing the world’s commercial relationships that at the centerpiece said, we are the best consumer market in the world. And if you want to get access to this, number one, we would like you to manufacture here and create high value-added jobs of which American citizens would get. But if you’re not going to do that, then you’re going to pay some tolling fee to come into here. That’s now before the Supreme Court.

As this is going on about turning us to a manufacturer superpower, you have the entire situation with artificial intelligence. And now we are told by our betters that we’re in an arms race, that this is a Cold War arms race, just like we had against the Chinese Communist Party, because lo and behold, we can’t let them win the AI race, that we’re going to need government support, just like the defense industry needs government support. We need government support now to the tune of hundreds of billions of dollars, not simply on the data centers, but to power the data centers.

And of course, the leaders of the climate change movement, all these progressives in the tech area, the tech bros, the oligarchs, have now all got old time religion and you can burn anything, do anything, just as long as they get power. And this in ZeroHedge, and you’ve seen this from the CFO of Open AI and others in the industry that are sitting there talking about, well, you know, we can’t lose this, so the government’s got to get involved, including now not just AI itself, not simply the data centers, but now the energy supply, the data centers. No one has taken the time to walk the American people through this.

This has to stop. It has to stop. We kind of need a presentation on a, whoa, exactly what this is going. You don’t want any regulation. It takes more, you have more regulation on a nail salon on Capitol Hill than you have on the entire, you know, a technology that could end the world. And that’s according to the guys that run these frontier labs, not Stephen K. Bannon.

So now we’re told that it’s not simply the data centers, which are going to suck every ounce of water out of places like Arizona and Texas, but that the energy needs are so vast. And I’ve got to get Dave Walsh on here tomorrow; we still got Dave Walsh to explain this to us. But it’s going to take, according to, and it’s a really great classic Zero Hedge piece where they’re knitting together about five or different news sources to really make a really powerful article. It’s up on my Getter right now, which Getter is totally free.

To hundreds of billions of dollars of just going to have to have government financing for it, that the AI companies don’t have it, even though they have trillion-dollar market caps. So my only, my point here is that, well, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, whoa, we got to stop the madness.

Number one, we’ve got to figure out a regulatory apparatus. Yes, I’m not, I’m a deconstruct the administrative state, but I’m not a techno anarchist. This has to have some sort of regulatory framework. I’m sorry, AI industry. You can cry and whine all you want. Call us deceleration. Call us what you want. We do not care, particularly coming from you guys, who we don’t give a tinkers damn what you think about anything.

Number one, then we’ve got to talk about the economics of it. If the basic schmendricks are going to be the guarantor, and now they’re talking about loans. If you’re the guarantor or a loan, that means U.S. taxpayer is in the deal. If you’re in the deal, then you’ve got to get a piece of the ups.

Right now, they’re treating you like a fool. They’re just running around. The David Sacks of the world just run around. Elon Musk will run around, or a concept, I should say. This is the discussion I used to have with Elon all the time. He comes in the West Wing. He wants all these guarantees on the budget. I said, dude, you don’t understand. You’re asking people that make 42,000 dollars a year to essentially get all these tax breaks. They’re financing what the venture capitalist should finance.

So therefore, you’re going to own less of Tesla. Their returns are going to take longer and maybe be lower, so they’re going to want even more. But that’s the nature of venture capital in early stage private equity. Capitalism, it’s pretty straightforward. It’s not quantum mechanics.

But every venture capitalist, every private equity, every management team, of course you want the suckers to come in, the people don’t run anything, to socialize the risk. Because remember, I said all of this is about risk mitigation, to socialize the risk, and you guys keep all the upside. That has to stop.

This is why young people don’t believe in capitalism. Because you know what, that is not capitalism. That’s corporatism. So what young people in this country, being logical, have looked around, they haven’t actually seen capitalism at work. They’ve seen crony capitalism, or they’ve seen corporatism with the devil take the hindmost approach.

It has to stop. And it has to stop about artificial intelligence. If they’re going to have, and we need somebody to sit there and go, hey, this is what the capital requirements are. This is how it rolls out over the next. We’re just understanding that every projection we ever is never hits it exactly right. Of course there’s going to be perturbations. There’s going to be changes. There are going to be sometimes misses, sometimes you’re wrong by years. But at least you have a general direction of the action you’re taking today and how that and your thinking manifests itself in the future.

So we just thought, well, there’s hundreds of billions of dollars now, not just for data centers, but to power the data centers. And who’s supposed to finance that? You.

Do you own a warrant package. Do you have equity package. Do you have a package of options. Do you have anything. No. You know what you got. You got the sweat on your fricking brow and you’re the full faith and credit. Always remember that. You, this audience, these great patriots that have delivered victory after victory against all odds. You got the sweat on your brow and the tax man all over you to pay your taxes. And those taxes now to go to either government guarantees or outright loans to these guys, hundreds of billions of dollars.

Well, how did that happen. And of course, now they’re saying, for guys that didn’t want, the same crowd in Silicon Valley that didn’t want to build a nuclear power plant and shut them all down in California, now they want to have a little nuclear reactor. Just, just bolt it up there in Scarsboro. Let’s build a data center out in El Paso, Texas. Let’s just bolt a little nuclear reactor. What do we do with the waste. I don’t know. We’ll figure that out.

No. No. This has got to be thought through, and people have to have buy in. This is outrageous. And they’re just dropping it. Of course, they’re the new masters of the universe. They got it all.

And I’m saying this, and the Wall Street Journal reported on Friday, they’ve already reached human level intelligence. That’s not a small hurdle. And some of the things going on, this lapse, is quite extraordinary. I’m the first to admit that. But you also have quite extraordinary with, you know, you talk about mitigating risk. Here, we’re going forward at the Mach 2 with the devil catch the hindmost on the risk. And these are the type of risk, if these things happen, it’s like biological warfare. You can’t put the genie back in the bottle.

More on that, we’re going to be hammering this every day because this is one of the central issues of our time. Of everything else that is going on, all the other stuff we talk about, all the efforts you put in for politics and culture and turning things around. This will probably be known as the inflection point for the species, homo sapiens. And you can see it coming right now.

They talked the other day, a huge piece about this young generation. A guy to start thinking about, do you chip the kid to play sports or to just be smarter. The moral dilemma of people say, hey, last time I looked, we’re made in the image and likeness. You know, chip yourself and then head out.

You know, Elon, besides telling everybody we’re going to get on a rocket and go to Mars because you want to build a new civilization, hey, how about let’s sort this one out. Always love heading for the stars, stuff like that, but I think we’ve got enough to sort out here.

Of course, he’s talking about you’ve got robots all over the place. Everybody’s going to have a robot. That’s the new thing. Of course, the one he’s working on, according to the Street Journal. You know, it looks like an 11 year old girl, and they’re all focused on, you know, getting all the anime. I don’t know. I don’t know. I just don’t know. But we certainly don’t want people like that making decisions that the rest of the country in this republic, in the citizens in this republic, will have to live with forever.”