From AI Girlfriends to Brain Implants, How the AI Revolution Is Radically Reshaping Our World | Wynton Hall

[RUSH TRANSCRIPT BELOW] Artificial intelligence is radically reshaping the workplace, the digital ecosystem, the way we interact with each other, and the future of crime, surveillance, and warfare.

But conservatives in particular, argues Wynton Hall, risk falling dangerously behind in navigating this new world. Nobody will get to opt out of the AI revolution—whether conservatives like it or not, Hall said.

Hall is the social media director at Breitbart News and author of the new New York Times bestselling book “Code Red: The Left, the Right, China, and the Race to Control AI.”

He’s spent two years researching what drives America’s tech elite to build ever more powerful, faster AI systems. The questions he wanted to answer, he told me, are: “What is their ultimate goal? What is the world that they foresee their technology creating?”

In our in-depth interview, we dive into the impact that this supersonic AI transformation will have on pretty much every facet of our lives: Will white-collar jobs disappear over the next few years? Will blue-collar jobs be lost to billions of robots? Will people live on Universal Basic Income? And, if so, how does that affect the structure and meaning of people’s lives?

Could AI companions replace humans as friends, partners, family? How and what will children learn—or will they only learn to cheat? Will AI-powered brain implants or chips become widespread?

And what are the national security implications of ever more powerful AI?

“Whoever achieves superiority in AI is going to have full-spectrum battlefield dominance in things like encryption, cybersecurity, hacking of missile systems, and hacking of infrastructure,” Hall said.

When it comes to the U.S.–China AI race, the problem that Americans have to figure out is “how to beat China without becoming China,” Hall said.

“We do not want to emulate a techno authoritarian CCP surveillance state,” he added.

Views expressed in this video are opinions of the host and the guest, and do not necessarily reflect the views of The Epoch Times.

RUSH TRANSCRIPT

Jan Jekielek:

Wynton Hall, such a pleasure to have you on American Thought Leaders.

Wynton Hall:

Oh, it’s great to be with you, Jan.

Mr. Jekielek:

So first of all, massive congratulations on making the New York Times bestseller list. Absolutely astonishing with Code Red.

Mr. Hall:

Oh, thank you. And congrats to you as well. I was very excited when I saw both of us together on the list, and we had just been together not too long ago. So it’s a great blessing.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s astonishing. And you’ve actually written an absolutely incredible book, trying to help us understand AI and frankly, China’s role in all this. Let’s start with this. Elon Musk has called AI a supersonic tsunami. Now, you have a lot of thoughts on this. Explain to me what that actually means for us.

Mr. Hall:

Yes, I think that what we realize is that 99 percent of people use AI, even though 64 percent of us in America don’t realize when we’re using AI. And you think, like, how is that even possible?It’s because it’s baked into the algorithms of our daily life, from our weather apps to our streaming services. The point  is that if we’re already using AI, we want to learn how to use it to the best of our ability to gain the upside, but also avert all the landmines. I think there are a lot of political landmines.

What I wanted to do with Code Red was give this double meaning: one Code Red, an alert, an alarm, a siren, if you will. And then also a set of principles, a code for people right of center, the red political worldview, so that we would all know how to navigate this world. Because so many in Silicon Valley are not conservative or Right-leaning. And so we’re out of that conversation. So I want to give people a way to be able to know how to navigate it.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, so, on this point, I actually pulled an excerpt from your book exactly around this. Okay, I want to read it. It’s important. AI’s architects are building systems capable of muzzling dissent, manipulating narratives, disrupting economies, displacing jobs, evangelizing Leftist ideologies, unleashing new national security threats, warping human relationships, cementing educational indoctrination, maximizing surveillance capitalism, and controlling media and information on an unprecedented scale. Yet here’s the paradox. For conservatives, AI is both a threat and a solution. Okay, big statement. Tell me more.

Mr. Hall:

Yes, so one of the I think the worst mistakes we could make as conservatives is to go the way of the Luddites and retreat from battle. I think that there’s nothing that Big Tech elites and also just leftists would love more than for conservatives to unilaterally disarm in the age of AI is going to be enormously important and enormously powerful; it already is, and I think certainly that’s in the national security space. But I would also argue that within our own jobs, education, and all of those factors.

So every chapter basically takes you through how AI is going to transform each of the policy dimensions that the conservative movement has, for decades, been part of trying to shape and mold. And so what I wanted to do was to, what I call, show the roses of possibility, but also the landmines that we have to avert, and there are many. To really look at the architects of AI I took two years. This book has 80 pages of endnotes. I know you’re a deep researcher as well. I really spent two years going through and really taking seriously their views, where they put their money politically, and what their ideology is.

What is their ultimate goal? What is the world that they foresee their technology creating? And what you find is a lot of them want a great economic reset. They also want to completely upend the national security order and balance of power toward a globalist, supranational type of control. And then when it comes to education, they really view that as an ability to indoctrinate more with left-leaning values and beliefs. And so there’s going to be a lot of change coming very rapidly, and we’ve got to get coached up, and we’ve got to do it fast.

Mr. Jekielek:

What would you say is the policy area where this is most acute? I wanted you to give me a very concrete example where there is this supersonic transformation happening. The policymakers are not keeping up. There’s a very hard, let’s say a hard left agenda that is coming in. Do you have an example that you could describe?

Mr. Hall:

It’s definitely in jobs. So we hear the following: Dario Amodei at Anthropic has said just two months ago, Jan, he said that we’re looking at 50 percent of white-collar entry-level job replacement in the next 12 months to five years. Not 12 years away, but 12 months from where you or I are sitting. The other thing is that the Microsoft AI CEO, Mustafa Suleyman, says that we’re looking in the next 12 to 18 months at 100 percent of white-collar job task replacement. Now, to be clear, he’s not saying all jobs are going to go away in 12 months. I want to be clear on that.

Mr. Jekielek:

You’re just going to have new jobs.

Mr. Hall:

What he’s saying is that the tasks can be automated because of agentic AI. And agentic AI, real simply, is text to action. You tell the computer what to do, and it autonomously takes over your cursor and starts opening up your browser, opening up your banking account, and so forth. Now, why is that so important?

Well, one, obviously, our kids, our grandkids, our jobs. But when you really study where Silicon Valley has been on this whole issue of job replacement, what you find is that their real goal is universal basic income. And so pushing for global, and specifically in America, wealth redistribution. And how do I know that?

In 2016, a young man went on a blog, and he was in his early 30s, and he said, I want to do a study, the biggest study ever in American history, and I want to give $1,000 away every month to low-income people and just see what happens, no strings attached. And he did, no strings attached. Okay. And he did. To his credit, he funded the biggest, most well-funded $60 million longitudinal study. I remember this. That young man’s name was Sam Altman at OpenAI.

Now, in 2016, when did ChatGPT make its public-facing arrival? November of 2022. Why is Sam Altman doing deep dive $60 million longitudinal studies on universal basic income six years before he unleashes ChatGPT? It’s because within Silicon Valley, he’s not alone.

There is a whole group of these elites who have said, look, we’ve got to have universal basic income, and we’re going to get people used to it. And part of it is explaining to them that it’s inevitable. And the other part is making sure that the pitchforks and torches, meaning the average everyday person, don’t turn on us when this job apocalypse comes.

Now, as conservatives, we listen to this and we go, come on. I mean, we went through the Industrial Revolution. Jobs get destroyed, but new jobs are going to get created. The difference, say the AI architects, is that that was a replacement of jobs that required the moving of atoms. In other words, physical labor. What’s different this time, they argue, is that you’re scaling cognition. And when you do that, yes, you’ll create new jobs, but those too will be able to be replaced by agentic autonomous AI.

And so I think the most important thing for the conservative movement to understand, if you believe it’s hype, if you believe it’s real, or if you believe it’s scaremongering, it almost doesn’t matter, Jan, because it builds public support for wealth redistribution and universal basic income. And so what I do is I show how in every one of these policy areas, there are very, very well-funded political networks.

Final example: Anthropic. Since 2020, they have given $200 million to Democratic candidates. So we have a very, very clear line here. Peter Thiel famously said, Silicon Valley is a one-party state. And yes, there are some courageous people in Silicon Valley who are libertarian, free market-minded, or right of center, but they are very outweighed.

Mr. Jekielek:

But on this UBI [universal basic income] side, even people like Elon Musk, who have been insanely important champions of free speech—and there’s a dearth of that viewpoint—are also pro-UBI, from what I can tell.

Mr. Hall:

He calls it universal high income. He doesn’t quite explain how that’s going to actually happen.

Mr. Jekielek:

Oh, it’s not basic. It’s high.

Mr. Hall:

Right. We’re going to have more than we want.

Mr. Jekielek:

But that term is highly relative, isn’t it?

Mr. Hall:

It is. And that’s a great point. We know that if you raise everybody’s bar, then their desires just move up a notch. He doesn’t really quite explain how universal high incomes work.

Mr. Jekielek:

But is it inevitable? This is a really interesting question because the argument is that it’s kind of a Star Trek world, right? Where everyone can kind of do what they want because all the jobs are being done by computers, I guess. I guess that’s the world that Gene Rodenberry envisioned. I’m not 100 percent sure, and just people get to self-actualize, you know, around the things that they find edifying. But so is that, it doesn’t sound bad on the surface, somehow, right? But is it inevitable?

Mr. Hall:

So what Elon would say is when we get to humanoid robots combined with agentic AI, which he’s putting around 2040 for there being a robot for every human being on the planet. So that’s $8 billion roughly now, if you’re using today. That’s the vision he envisions. That’s the future he envisions.

I think what a lot of conservatives are concerned about is once you remove that Judeo-Christian work ethic of striving, when people don’t have as part of their identity that I help to work every day so I can feed my wife or my children or provide for my family. Where does that motivation go? Where does that sense of identity go? And a lot of scholars have talked about there becoming a crisis of meaning because so much of our identity is tied up.

When we go to a party, what’s the first thing that people ask you? So what do you do for a living, right? It’s part of who we are. And when you have all the striving for expertise, you’ve gone, played by the rules, you’ve gotten a degree, maybe a master’s, maybe a PhD, and you’ve spent all this time building an expertise. Once the cost of intelligence goes to zero, once unmetered intelligence is one AI prompt away, all those fancy credentials that people had, all of those Princeton PhDs and Harvard University degrees start to really not have the sway or certainly the market power they used to. Because somebody says, look, a 10-year-old with an AI can find these answers, right? And so there’s going to be a huge shift in that.

Now, I also think that we know what happens when people lose those jobs, right? We know that, especially with men, they get very self-destructive. Addiction rates can go up. Self-harm rates can go up. Suicidal ideation goes up. So there is that whole sort of existential element to this that’s very, very concerning. But even just in the more practical things, it doesn’t mean that we have to have this dystopian fear of AI.

This book is not a doomer book. I tried to show there are going to be a lot of positives and a lot of things we have to dominate, like, for example, the race against China. But I’m very concerned if you’re not prepared with the information, you’re not going to know how to navigate through landmines and roses, as I said.

Mr. Jekielek:

So the thing I’m thinking about, so I kind of, I discovered this kind of a bit later in life, but I’m not what you call a financially motivated person. It doesn’t mean that money isn’t important to me. It means that it’s less important to me than other things. But I’ve discovered that a lot of people are actually quite financially motivated. And the idea of having to earn that, of being motivated by earning that is really significant. Whether that’s constructed as making a better life for your family or for other reasons, right? I mean, really, we’re talking about getting rid of that as a concept, right?

And that’s so, I mean, I think someone like me would probably do very well in a society where, you know, because I’m just not, I’m motivated by other things, basically, right? It’s like, oh my God, I could do anything. This is wild. Okay, let’s try this. Let’s try this. Let’s see what we can make happen, right? But I think for a lot of people, they might have this existential situation. What are you even going to do? Really, it’s an ideological position to believe that it’s inevitable, and that’s where we’re heading. And we’re going to program people to believe that because we want it. Flesh this out a little for me.

Mr. Hall:

To put it in simple terms, if you think of AI as a socialism machine, it has this ability. If leaders were to go policy-wise down that road, you could make this inevitability argument that we’re going to have to completely rethink the social contract. And they do say that out loud. They very plainly say that.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, it sounds like there are going to be massive shifts, whatever happens at this point.

Mr. Hall:

Number two, they say we’re going to have to have a whole new post-capitalist, post-labor mindset for our economic order. And when you think also of what the implications are for national engagement and national security in that, we’ll talk about that in a minute. I think that you’re right. There are people like yourself who may say my motivations may not be a financially driven thing. But for a lot of people, work is a form of discipline and structure, right?

Mr. Jekielek:

And it is. It is for both of us too, to be frank.

Mr. Hall:

And so people, especially those who have a predilection toward addiction or things where, if I just said, instead of 40 hours every week being get up, get shaved, get to work, make your lunch, you know, have a routine, you just get to do whatever feels right. That leisure society could be very positive for people if they wanted to go and volunteer or if they had a philanthropic heart. But that has to be in the culture. But that is exactly right. And then there are also all these other temptations.

One of the big issues that I talk about in the book is this whole issue of AI girlfriends and companions. AI is very, very good at persuasion and manipulation because a large language model [LLM], your average chatbot, has been trained on literally trillions of words. It has sucked up all of the art and music and literature. I hope your book was under copyright protection. And it has learned how to be a master persuader.

Now, that helps if you’re doing a marketing campaign and you need some marketing copy quickly. But when you’re talking about this issue of AI girlfriends in campaigns, first of all, number one, there are millions of paid AI girlfriend subscribers right now, okay? So this isn’t like some strange backwater of a handful of people, and that’s number one.

Number two, with the COVID generation of young people who didn’t get to go to their farms, had to wear masks, and didn’t get to be part of their extracurricular activities, they’re banned from their extracurriculars. There was that huge upsurge in this loneliness epidemic. That isolation, that digital isolation, they are a two-screen generation. They’re used to watching TV and being on a phone at the same time.

And so that feels a lot more normal for them to be able to interact with a machine. And so we think of these as like, you know, sci-fi movies like Her and other kinds of movies. But it’s really happening. The dangers, of course, are for minors. We’re seeing extremely explicit content aimed at minors. And so some systems are guardrailed and have more safety measures. Others are not.

Mr. Jekielek:

And so the tech bros, so to speak, it’s almost like the idea is that the parents really need to take care of this. But I feel like this is where it really is a supersonic tsunami, because what parent is ready for this? I learned, for example, that a lot of the executives that sell in Silicon Valley don’t let their kids on social media.

Mr. Hall:

What does that tell you?

Mr. Jekielek:

That’s even before AI, right? Before it’s all juiced up with AI, because they kind of knew that there was something bad. Exactly, right? They do. And they, because they kind of knew that there was something bad, right?

Mr. Hall:

They do. And they understand the power of what they’re creating. And they understand that you should not allow a minor to have access to an AI companion. Every chapter in Code Red, I give specific solutions, you know, personal but also political and what we have to do.

Mr. Jekielek:

I just remembered something. You know, I remember seeing this very interesting short video. I don’t know why this popped up for me. But basically, it was about why men cheat, okay? Why men cheat. And the premise of the video was that it’s not because men are looking for another girlfriend or to have sex or something like this. It’s because they get very strongly validated by the person, and the person that they’re with is not providing that or maybe they just got a little bit bored of it or something. So it’s this validation.

And this is the thing about AI. I mean, it goes to wild lengths to validate. You talked about that a little while ago. So as you were talking about these AI girlfriends, I wasn’t fully aware of the scale of the phenomenon, but it makes perfect sense because especially if you’re a young man who isn’t as attractive or if all the girls aren’t quite interested. Suddenly you have this female companion that knows how to emulate a female and validates you in this very deep way. Wow, this sounds really, really problematic to me.

Mr. Hall:

You just nailed it in a very important way. There’s almost a self-worship. It is the sycophantic, everything is amazing about you. And look, we know that human relationships are messy. Friction is how we grow in our relationships. But what’s happening is, and I actually excerpt quotes specifically from people.

There was one woman who said, I will never go back to a human boyfriend. My AI boyfriend is amazing. He always validates everything I say. I don’t have to deal with drama from his ex, his family, or anything. There was one man who told the Washington Post he’s married to a human woman, but he said, I love my AI girlfriend more than I love my wife.

When you start to realize these deep, deep emotional bonds, it goes to the heart of what you’re saying. If you don’t feel that you have either the confidence or, you know, maybe an insecurity or maybe, you know, you’ve just never been lucky in love, and now somehow, some way, or maybe you’ve just never been lucky in love. And now somehow, some way, there’s this customized, dream bot kind of entity who’s telling you you’re the most handsome, dashing, brilliant, strong, and successful man. That’s very, very alluring for certain people.

This is really going to affect the psychology of the way that people interact. It already is for a segment of people. And then the other thing is that you can customize these AI companions and girlfriends in every possible dimension. The other thing is, if it’s true machine learning, it remembers that you’re a Dodgers fan and you love Godfather movies. All the better to manipulate you. All the better. And it remembers what your birthday is and your favorite color.

Mr. Jekielek:

Okay, now I’m getting completely freaked out because we haven’t even started talking about China. And one of the things that you and I both know is how incredibly effective, say, on LinkedIn and other places, and of course, you know, in person even more so, but also on LinkedIn, these honeypot traps launched by the CCP. You know how this works. How many people have been captured? I mean, this is, you’re putting the fear of God into me here now. So tell me about China. Let’s start with this, but just tell me about the broader China piece here.

Mr. Hall:

Yes, so let’s talk about that. So President Trump is exactly right. We have to beat China. And the way I say it in Code Red is I say, we have to beat China without becoming China. That is not the goal at all. But there are two main core reasons we have to beat China in the AI race. It’s not hype. I’m very heartened that there’s more of a bipartisan understanding once senators and congressmen on both sides of the aisle have been briefed by the military, tech defense, all those people. Let’s talk about them.

Number one is obviously economics, right? The magnificent seven, the seven biggest American tech companies, Amazon, Meta, and so forth, constitute one third of the S&P 500. Okay, so they are the tentpole for economic growth. On the other hand, we remember what happened when China’s DeepSeek R1 model, its leader in AI, was released. And it rocked America’s NVIDIA, the richest company that’s ever existed in human history, $600 billion in just one day. It was the biggest market cap loss we’ve ever seen in a single day by an American company. That’s literally almost two-thirds of a trillion dollars.

Mr. Jekielek:

But also based on hype.

Mr. Hall:

Hype, totally.

Mr. Jekielek:

Wild, right?

Mr. Hall:

Completely. And this is your point about CCP manipulation and misinformation. They had seeded this narrative that they had done all this, you know, what took major AI enterprise labs billions, hundreds of billions, you know, for $6 million, total bunk, completely bogus, but it worked long enough and got media traction long enough to rock NVIDIA. And of course, our market.

So the one is the economic, but I think the one for most people, and especially as you were saying, you know, money’s fine, but what really matters is humans. So when we think of our soldiers, sailors, airmen, Marines, our special forces, the national security implications of this AI race are as follows. Whoever achieves superiority in AI is going to have full-spectrum battlefield dominance in things like encryption, cybersecurity, hacking of missile systems, hacking of infrastructure. And there is a theoretical construct in AI we have not reached yet, known as RSI [recursive self-improvement].

What is that? It’s when an AI, theoretically, will hit the point when it can fix its own errors, update its own code autonomously. If and when we hit RSI, that exponential curve is going to just go through the roof like a rocket, and whoever hits RSI first is going to just go through the roof like a rocket. And whoever hits RSI first, this is what experts will tell you, they are going to rule the national security space globally. So when people say we have to beat China in AI, some say, well, that just sounds like a bunch of, you know, hype to get investors to give me money. Oh, our technology is essential. I’m sure it is. You know, two things can be true at the same time, right?

Mr. Jekielek:

Correct. They’re capitalists.

Mr. Hall:

They’re trying to raise money for their business. Fine, we don’t begrudge that. But it’s also true that from a national security perspective, whether you’re talking about autonomous weapons or even what we see right now in the current AI warfare use in the Maduro raid in Venezuela or currently in Iran, it is not just the future of warfare, it’s the current. And we do not want to face, we do not want to live in a world built on AI, Chinese AI rails. We do not want to live in that world.

Mr. Jekielek:

So in this vein, it’s confusing to me that this administration is allowing pretty high-level chips to be sold to China. And it’s confusing to me, frankly, that NVIDIA is arguing they should be able to do it, right? Given everything you just told me, explain this to me.

Mr. Hall:

I’m with you on that. I talked very specifically about choke points, which is what you’re talking about, export chip controls. And for people that are just new to the conversation, what we’re saying is that they’re really, it’s kind of like your water hose. If you squeeze the middle and you stop the flow of that water moving through, that’s a choke point. Economically, what we’re talking about, as you know, is limiting the more advanced chips that NVIDIA makes. NVIDIA is the world leader. Thank God they’re an American company. We’re very grateful. But the debate has been, should we export and allow China to buy their H200 chips?

Now, the administration’s view is we should not allow them to buy the advanced chips, the Blackwell chips, and the Vera Rubin, which is the newest generation of chips. And Jensen Huang, the head of NVIDIA, has said, you know, we should have the effort to try to make the world built on American AI. So I want to democratize our chips. He’s also obviously a very good businessman. He is leading the richest company that’s ever existed. So he’s got a very clear financial motive.

I very much agree with you. And I’m very concerned. We’ve got to keep that advantage. It depends on who you’re talking to and what metrics you’re using. We’re between six months and three years ahead of China in the AI race. Why give them any help, right? I mean, even if an H200 chip is not nearly the Ferrari version of a Vera Rubin or a Blackwell chip, why would we even give them any? The argument from some has said, again, economics, vitality for America, and also that we want them to not be incentivized to build their own chips so that then they can spread those chips.

I make it really clear in Code Red, I am for using those choke points. I do hold out and understand that yes, I’m sure Jensen Huang is thinking in his mind, an H200 is like a Honda compared to the Bugatti that I’ve got in the lab working on right now, and it’s not gonna affect us. But I still feel like a lot of people would say, why help them?

Mr. Jekielek:

Of course, I have my own book on my mind lately as I’m trying to do a lot of media to promote it and so forth. But one of the punchlines in the book is that the Chinese Communist Party has a very cold calculus of power around all of its decision-making. And it even instrumentalizes bodies, which is this forced organ harvesting. But it’s not just, it’s just an expression of its general outlook on the world, on people. All these things are just tools to power. A lot of these technologies are, as we’ve been discussing, highly manipulative.

And that’s something they’ve already been unbelievably good at, taking advantage of our gullibility, taking advantage of our greed, to be honest, taking advantage of all sorts of things, our free system. I mean, that’s the centerpiece of what they take advantage of through lawfare, through leveraging the WTO [World Trade Organization]. It goes on and on and on. But now juiced up with AI that’s with that mentality built in, baked into the core of their language models, right?

Mr. Hall:

What your book shows is that brutal, sterile, just raw power vision. That humans are just grist for the mill, right? That we are going to just use people for power. And that anything that gets in the way of the communist regime’s goals, vision for global domination and so forth, is just a means to an end. Let’s just steamroll through, okay? What you just touched on was that they understand our psychology and how to use our freedom as a noose around our own neck. And part of that is playing into our vanity, our desire for attention and validation. And that’s why the TikTok debate and now the DeepSeek debate become so important.

So DeepSeek is a data vacuum. It is nothing more than a CCP surveillance app. How many people even read their terms of service? First of all, they’re all in legalese, and very few people actually read terms of service, but even they will admit in their terms of service two things. One, all your data goes back to servers in China, which falls under China’s law, which states that every citizen is responsible for national security and that if the CCP wants data or information that it deems useful for national security, you have to hand it over.

Mr. Jekielek:

And you’re not allowed to say you did so.

Mr. Hall:

And you’re not allowed.

Mr. Jekielek:

As a bonus. That’s right.

Mr. Hall:

As an icing on the cake, you don’t say. The second thing that was amazing, very few people when DeepSeek arrived noticed the obfuscated code linking back to China. The other thing that was interesting is they say that they pick up and are able to take as part of your data profile, your keystroke rhythms. Now you might go, well, who cares how, if a tech company knows how I type or how I text my friends? Security experts will tell you that is particular to you, how fast, which way…

Mr. Jekielek:

Oh, wow. They have a digital fingerprint of you from it.

Mr. Hall:

It is a digital fingerprint, Jan. And here’s why that matters. I don’t need your password anymore if I can identify you by your keystroke rhythm. I just have to have a backdoor into that platform, in this case, DeepSeek. And as you just rightly pointed out, DeepSeek falls under the auspices of the CCP’s national security law and national security implications. So they will be able to know any and every conversation.

The way it was sold was, hey, look at this, you know, low cost, high performance LLM. You can build your dreams of capitalist companies or talk to your friends or learn more, right? What it is, is a Trojan horse. And it’s a CCP Trojan horse. We saw with the TikTok debate how long that went. It took forever—the ban, all of that, the transfer. They realized very early on after that disastrous congressional hearing, you know, when TikTok had to come before Congress, that horse was hobbled and getting ready to be put out to pasture, and they needed a new horse.

Welcome to the DeepSeek moment. And it’s only going to continue to grow because they made the decision to make that open source, so it will spread far and wide. The sad part is there are also going to be, and already are, dozens of other China-based LLM models and AI models, reasoning models, and agentic models that have normal sounding names. They don’t announce themselves as products of the CCP or under CCP surveillance. People just go and download these things, and they don’t realize they’re giving away all their data.

Mr. Jekielek:

But the thing is, it’s in both directions, right? Because imagine, let’s make a bet, right? How many AI super-intelligent AI girlfriends are CCP built? I would say a heck of a lot. Why? Because you’re telling everything to those girlfriends, all sorts of stuff.

Mr. Hall:

Yes, a digital honeypot.

Mr. Jekielek:

And you feel safe because it’s in your phone. You don’t even—it’s not even an actual person, right? What do we do? This is a very dark future you’re painting, potentially.

Mr. Hall:

I think there are going to be a lot of hopeful upsides. Okay, and I want to be clear about that. One, I will tell you, for young entrepreneurs who have fire in their belly, you are going to be able to scale and build your dreams faster than any other generation before you. Sam Altman says that there’s a private betting pool that he and his billionaire pals have guessing when we will see the first one-person, one-billion-dollar company powered by AI. So entrepreneurs do have an upside.

I do actually think that well-built AI tutors for students—classical education, homeschool students, private school students, or even just public school students with proper guardrails and the Socratic method baked in, not woke AI. I think that can be a real benefit. I used to teach at a very, very low-income rural community college, one of the lowest congressional districts. And it was a great joy because these were people that really wanted to learn. They were grateful to learn. They didn’t have any real resources.

Those people that have a heart to learn and they don’t have a lot of money and they’re not going to be able to afford a hundred or two hundred or three hundred dollar fancy tutor. You’re going to have Aristotle in your pocket to teach you calculus, to teach you physics and so forth. Things that are not about woke; it’s just information. So I want to paint those.

And I do, and I walk you through in Code Red, but the things you’ve got to do for the darker things that we’re talking about, number one, parents have to, and grandparents, they have to understand this is a whole new world. This is a completely different chessboard that we’re going to be navigating. And so what I try to do is give you, be simple without being simplistic. Here are the basic principles. Here’s how it works. Here are the roses and the landmines in each of these areas.

Number two, we’ve got to make sure that our leaders are really understanding the national security implications. I feel heartened by that as we’re talking about the China threat. But I’m also very concerned about non-state actors and terrorists. Why?

Mr. Jekielek:

They have the same access.

Mr. Hall:

Yes. For pennies on the dollar, they have PhD-level biotech and chemical warfare information. As Dario Amodei says, AI is going to be a country of geniuses in a data center.

Mr. Jekielek:

It’s national, basically, it’s also redefining the national security space completely. So there was this amazing Netflix series called The Three-Body Problem. Are you familiar?

Mr. Hall:

No, I am not familiar with it.

Mr. Jekielek:

So the reason I became aware of it, I’m not a big TV watcher, but they have this unbelievable enactment of the Cultural Revolution. It’s a science fiction series. Basically, this man who is a scientist, a professor, is being struggled against by Red Guards. And honestly, like it’s, you have to go watch it. You’ll understand how important it is, because we don’t have a lot of that level of detail, people understanding what was done during the Cultural Revolution in communist China. A young girl, his daughter, is watching. Everybody is basically being sort of peer pressured and saying, yes, give up your—he’s a scientist. He doesn’t want to admit the sky is green. I forget exactly what it is that they were demanding he admit. But this is how these struggle sessions go. And he just refuses. So they kill him in front of her.

And in this process, she looks at this and sees the darkness. Then later, this is the science fiction part; she becomes a person who is very interested in signals from space and so forth. She captures an alien signal in one of their radio telescopes and realizes that there’s malintent. She says, but because she’s become this nihilist, because she saw the darkness humanity can reach through, she says, well, come then. I welcome you. So why am I mentioning this? It’s because this nihilism is in our society today. I see it manifest in all sorts of different forms. I mean, just people believing that we can somehow share power with China. I mean, it’s really dark. They don’t share power. Maybe for a while, but only as an instrument of power, right?

And there are so many people, some of them quite brilliant, like this young girl who decides to invite the aliens to want to kill us all, or potentially want to kill us all, that they’re ready to participate in creating an AI overlord, right, like we can’t be trusted to rule ourselves, so let’s get the AI to do it. I don’t think that’s going to work out well, by the way. Or, yes, let’s go work for China if they want to build something. You know, actually, America is horrible and evil. We keep being indoctrinated that way. Look at all the bad things we’ve done. So let’s go work for China and even things out a bit, or whatever it is, right? There’s just so much of this nihilism. And now, is this being baked into our AI, right?

Mr. Hall:

It certainly is in AI that’s aimed at us through China. Disintegration warfare is real. They did that. They understood how to sow social chaos in and through a host of means, digital and otherwise. They are masters of this. Peter Schweizer, who I’ve worked with for 27 years, one of my dearest friends, is the expert on this and has shown how the CCP has done this in a very coordinated and specific way. Are there organic street movements, anti-America movements in America? Yes. But a lot of them are completely…

Mr. Jekielek:

Right now, the amazing Fox Digital expose on the Singham network and just like hundreds of millions of dollars being pumped to basically astroturf these things.

Mr. Hall:

Peter was one of the first to put him on the cover of a book and introduce people to who this person is that we don’t know. I also think, though, going back to what you’re talking about, I talk in the book about faith. Gary Tan, who’s a billionaire, is a Christian. He is the head of Y Combinator. He said there are so many people in Silicon Valley ready to make AGI into an actual deity and God. Now he’s not saying that’s a good thing. He’s a person of faith, a Christian. He does not at all advocate that.

But what he’s saying is there is this belief that humans have had their run, you know, and we’re just on the way of evolution and we’ve got to evolve into a transhuman species, and the singularity, as it’s known, this point at which human and machine will fuse, is not only inevitable but preferable. And that’s where it gets scary because these people have been talking about this for a very long time.

Ray Kurzweil has been talking about the singularity for half of my life, and when I was a young person. So they’re very determined in this. Here’s where it’ll get very interesting and very, very scary. If you look at things like, you know, brain chips and augmenting people with AI so that, first of all, we already have our phone.

Think about this, Jan. We already live like cyborgs. If you were on a trip with your family or your friends or whoever, and you left your phone at home, and you were going to drive for five hours, and in 30 minutes you realize, I don’t have my phone. You would turn your car around. You start patting yourself. Where is it? Where is my phone? You get a little panicked.

The difference is that there’s an air gap right now. There’s an air gap between us and the phone. We can actually put it in a box and lock it. And people do this. And it’s probably a very good thing. Now it’s getting ready to end because of wearables.

So the next step is now we have the AI glasses, the Meta glasses. Okay, now it’s a little closer. We’re going to have a listening device that will be able to feed the information in. Next though, and we already have with Neuralink, is the chip. And so now you’re able to have superhuman accessibility. I want you to think about this.

There will be a point in the future, and I do think it is the future. I don’t think it’s happening tomorrow. I want to be clear. But parents are going to have to decide, do I chip my child, so they’re competitive in the workplace and school, or are they a natural human who has no way to cognitively zoom through billions of tokens of information?

Mr. Jekielek:

And if you think it’s only moving in one direction, i.e., you’re getting all the benefit from the… it just has never worked like that.

Mr. Hall:

That’s right. The backdoor is always there. And who’s on the other side of that?

Mr. Jekielek:

Who’s on the other side? And this is what the CCP is basically going for.

Mr. Hall:

The other thing is, you don’t have to even telescope out that far. I even think about this. So right now there are, and I don’t really want to say the names of them because I don’t want to enable fraudsters or cyber criminals or AI criminals, there are now consumer-facing free facial recognition APIs [application programming interface]. That is a fancy way of saying you and I can drag and drop a photo of any person we want and then look up and know their name, their address, and every other thing.

Now, we know that we did that with our Facebook. At first, it was like, oh, yay, we get to post pictures. Why do you think it knows how to auto-tag your name, right? It’s facial recognition. But what’s happening is if you have AI glasses with that type of facial recognition, fraudsters can walk up to a random woman on the street.

Mr. Jekielek:

They already know everything. And like your friend.

Mr. Hall:

Oh, Sally, don’t you remember me from high school? Let’s grab a coffee. Parents are getting calls of their daughter in duress. It sounds exactly like her. Oh, Mom, Dad, they’ve got me. They’ve got a gun to my head. If you don’t wire $10,000, they’re going to kill me, and it’s voice cloned with her…

Mr. Jekielek:

And they’re doing this already.

Mr. Hall:

It’s already happening. Law enforcement is already talking about this. The darkest part is the chapter I have on what’s happening with AI-driven child pornography. And this is a horrifying reality because what it means is law enforcement doesn’t even know what real images are of victims that need to be rescued in real time or which ones have been digitally created out of pieces of different images across the internet. It’s becoming a massive problem.

Law enforcement says, look, we’re already so overburdened with this horrific child pornography scourge, child exploitation scourge, and child abuse scourge. Now we have this added dimension of what are even real images and what are not. And so when we do geolocation and try to find these people.

Mr. Jekielek:

And not even mention how this affects people that are actually consuming it.

Mr. Hall:

100 percent. And then also we’re having, thankfully, First Lady Melania Trump helped to champion the Take It Down Act. There are now nudify AI apps that will take and remove the clothes off of any photo you upload. Little girls, you know, boys wanting revenge in middle school were taking classmates’ pictures from their Instagram, uploading them, spreading these, you know, non-consensual, pornographic, underage, child porn images everywhere and wrecking these children’s lives. There have been cases where sextortion has been overlaid onto this type of thing. And people have committed suicide because these young people are so terrified.

Mr. Jekielek:

So it’s a dark world. I mean, I don’t even know what to say. Other than let’s just focus on as we finish up, because we are really entering this brave new world. And it’s almost hard to imagine how we’re going to kind of deal with it at a scale. But just for the individual person, a parent, myself, you know, just give me a few to-dos.

Mr. Hall:

Number one, you have to have a family password for those fraud moments. If you are getting a call, honey, what is the family password? That way I know I’m talking to a robot or a human.

Mr. Jekielek:

OK, so that we know if it’s real, like basically a word that only we know. But a fake person won’t know.

Mr. Hall:

The fake person won’t know. Maybe, you know, something that’s relevant to our family, our dog’s name or something. Number two, you’ve got to have child protections on all devices. And you also need to make the decision: should your child at a certain age not even have a device? Many, as you pointed out, Jan, even the Silicon Valley gurus don’t allow their children to be on social media. And I think there’s a lot of value in that.

In Silicon Valley, the mindset is to move fast and break things. That may work if you’re building a startup company. That doesn’t work for a child’s heart or their soul or their mental abilities. Three, making sure that as AI is integrated into your child’s education, it is not only guardrail safe and non-woke, but also that it is using pedagogically sound principles like the Socratic method, because otherwise it’s going to turn ChatGPT into CheatGPT, and you’re going to have plagiarism, and that’s going to have cognitive erosion on critical thinking skills. So we want to make sure there is good Socratic method-based AI, but you’ve got to really, as a parent, be paying attention because, as you rightly point out, it’s kind of a Wild West right now, and it’s up to parents.

Third, I think it is just understanding where the technology is for your own job. And what I would say is if you think, oh, it’s never going to replace me, I’m special. My industry is different, right? Really keep an eye on what’s called AI agents, okay? Because that’s where the real dam would break if we do see this mass job replacement. It’s actually text to action. It can take over your cursor and do the work. So just keep up in your industry about where agentic AI or AI agents are for your industry or your specialty.

And then I think the final thing would be really having serious conversations with your children about this whole issue of AI companions, AI girlfriends, making sure that they are looking more at the sky than at a screen, into the eyes of people, their communities, whether it’s their church groups or their youth groups or all those kinds of extracurriculars that just teach them how to be a good and decent human being and to care about people and have a heart and really want to serve others as opposed to using things, like you said, purely for manipulation or gaining an advantage. That’s going to be some of the basic building blocks. In the book, I really do try to give very specific things because I didn’t want to kick up a dust cloud of doom and then say, we’re all on our own.

Mr. Jekielek:

No, everything you mentioned is massively important. I can see it. Like massive. These are the basics. There’s a whole lot of stuff we got to deal with. But this is something we can actually deal with. That’s right. So let’s do it.

Mr. Hall:

And I think the final thing is that don’t make the mistake of thinking that AI is so complex technologically that you can’t understand this. You really can. If you understand there’s a way that you can understand it simply without being simplistic. So we don’t get to opt out of this AI revolution. So we got to do for our kids and our grandkids the right thing, and that’s lean in.

Mr. Jekielek:

Well, Wynton Hall, it’s such a pleasure to have had you on.

Mr. Hall:

It’s so great to be with you. Thank you.

 

This interview was partially edited for clarity and brevity.