DOAC: They Are Lying To Us About AI – Kevin O’Leary x Cenk Uygur (Transcript)

So first off, there’s a lot of things Kevin and I share. I’m also an entrepreneur. I’m a capitalist and went to Wharton Business School. So I love America. I love the opportunity that America provides. I wanted to provide opportunity for all sorts of new businesses. So that’s not remotely the issue.

Okay, so the question is, are we going to pay our own costs? So now on the AI data centers, in the beginning I started reading these stories about how the data centers are driving up the energy costs for everybody in that community that they’re based in, and I couldn’t believe it. But then I thought, okay, since we have basically legalized bribery in America, that probably is true. They’ve probably given enough campaign contributions to make this happen, and it turns out they have.

No, if you’re going to do a data center, you have to pay for it and you have to pay for all of its costs. None of this subsidizing your costs to the average taxpayer who’s not getting anything out of it. So we have to be absolutely meticulous about who’s paying for the cost of the data centers, and it should be the businesses that profit from it. Unless you’d like to have the American people take some equity in your business, because if we’re going to pay your costs, well, obviously we should have equity in it.

When we bailed out the bankers back in 2008, it was an absolute crime. We should have taken equity in those companies and then sold it later for a profit. I don’t want the government to run banks, but I do want us to not be suckers. We constantly pay for the research of the drug companies and never get any equity. So if you’re going to be capitalist, let’s be capitalist.

Now, the real reason why people are most angry about AI is not even the data centers, and they have every right to be livid about their energy costs being higher so somebody else can make a buck. But the bigger issue is the unemployment that we’re all worried is coming, and it most definitely is.

So there’s a lot of happy talk about, oh, 10 years from now, 20 years from now, robots are going to be cooking our salmon, or 2 years from now. I don’t really care. I don’t need my salmon cooked by a robot. What I care about is, are we going to have massive unemployment?

And right now, and I’m curious what Kevin’s going to say about this because it’s kind of indisputable if you’re in the business community, everybody is in a rush to fire 10 to 25% of their workforce. And whoever gets there first gets a competitive advantage and the market’s rewarded and their stock price goes up. Well, if everybody goes to fire 10 to 25% of their employees, we are going to have not just a recession, but a depression like we’ve never seen in our lives.

And everybody’s whistling past the graveyard here. So do we have a plan? Does the government have a plan? The only guy I’ve ever heard of working on a plan to deal with this tsunami of unemployment is Ro Khanna. Other than him, it’s crickets. And I think we’re going to hit the iceberg really hard.

The Unemployment Wave — Is an AI Apocalypse Coming?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Interestingly, Cenk, the other person that I’ve heard talk about the unemployment wave coming has actually been some of the big AI CEOs. And if you go back and look at their quotes through time, people like Sam Altman predicted that there will need to be some kind of UBI scheme. And I think Worldcoin, which is his other startup that uses retina scanning to be able to distribute value to people to check they’re humans, one of the principles of the foundation of that company was to distribute UBI, Universal Basic Income, to everybody.

So on this point, Kevin, do you disagree that there will be a widespread unemployment apocalypse, as Cenk has called it on his Twitter feed?

The Energy Problem and AI Development

KEVIN O’LEARY: So let’s go through Jack’s shopping list of disaster. I think it’s fair to address them one at a time. Let’s talk with the energy. I totally agree with him. You can’t build a data center anywhere and tap into the grid because he’s right. The price of energy would go up at the library, the church, and the community center by 30%. And that’s what happened in Virginia. So that is no longer a possibility.

In Utah, for example, I have to bring my own power. But the idea would be, if we produce this energy, because there’s no data centers without energy, we’ll put it back into the grid, not just for Utah, but for the whole country. Because I think he’s right. Anybody that’s building a new data center should have the responsibility to provide the power and put some of it back into the grid. That would solve two problems at once. The grid is tapped out, the library has no more power. We’ll solve that problem for Utah and the country.

So that’s the first falsehood I run into, fueled by the Chinese propaganda that came into Utah, or whoever they are at Arabella, the CPP, or the, you know, whoever this agency is, ’cause you have to follow it through all these nefarious holdings. But at the end of the day, that’s number one.

Jobs, Robots, and the Fear Factor

Number two, the idea that everybody gets replaced by robots and then they eat the children. I don’t buy that at all. Every new technology in American history for over 200 years has created vast opportunity, productivity, and fueled the economy to lead all economies on Earth by 20%, which is still the case today.

Now, it’s an uncomfortable reality. The market hit new highs today, and that is an index of how great American companies are, and the smaller companies that are 5 to 500 employees also hitting on all cylinders now using AI tools for productivity, customer acquisition, maintenance. So the scare factor of saying that everybody loses their job and the robots eat the children, I just don’t buy it. And so I think we should have that debate, but you don’t know yet what opportunities there are in the economy driven by this new technology.

I know there’s fear and loathing, and I think it’s important to have that narrative. I think it’s great to debate it, but I think we should deal with fact. It’s very, very uncomfortable when change hits anywhere. And yet it’s proven itself within the context of the American economy to rise it above all challenges and still lead the world.

The China Threat and the AI Arms Race

Unfortunately, there’s the issue of defense and the economy against China. They’re our big adversary. In this last conflict in the Middle East, where very few boots hit the ground, it was the technology that provided the ordnance precision that’s been used. In the future, wars will be conducted using AI, and unfortunately, the country with the best AI technology will win those wars. I would certainly not want China to be ahead of us.

Yet I think they’re the ones that would like to stop us building power and developing our AI platforms because they have something called DeepSeek. I just want to put a fact out there because we’re talking about this. While we were stymied in building any new power, forget about data centers, just new power, the Chinese in the last 19 months built 400 gigawatts of power off burning coal. They don’t care about the environment. They don’t have any policy about that. They have a Supreme Leader who points his finger at the ground and says, “Build a coal-burning plant here, put a data center behind it, or you’ll disappear in 18 months.” And the people involved say, “Chop chop, Supreme Leader, we will make it happen.”

We can’t do that in America, and he knows that. So he’s spending as much money as he can making sure he stymies the efforts of every entrepreneur in every state to do the same. So that’s what I think is happening, and I’m happy to provide the data, as I mentioned earlier, and let the government and their special agents in all of these different departments I’m working with now. I’m proud to be providing this information. I think I’ve kicked the door open on something very, very nasty.

What the AI CEOs Are Actually Saying

STEVEN BARTLETT: Kevin, I would like to take a look at that information as well. So I’ll pick up with you about that off camera. What I wanted to ask you is a lot of this sort of doomerism around unemployment that we’re talking about comes from the CEOs building the AI companies. And this is something that’s always caused me a bit of cognitive dissonance.

I think if you go back to — I’ve got some quotes here from March 2021. Sam Altman said, and he’s the — for anyone that doesn’t know, the CEO co-founder of OpenAI, which is the maker of ChatGPT — “AI will probably replace most of the jobs people do today. Entire job categories will be totally, totally gone.”

And then Elon Musk said in May ’24, “Probably none of us will have a job. If you want to do a job, that job, it’s kind of like a hobby. You can do a job, but otherwise AI and robots will provide any goods and services that you want.”

And Dario, who’s the founder of Claude, which is the other major leading AI model, said — this was in 2025 — “AI could eliminate half of all entry-level white jobs within 5 years, a shift that could push unemployment up to 20%. The public is being sugarcoated on what is coming.”

These are the people that are most well-placed and arguably, I mean, it depends how you look at it, have the least incentive to say that their companies are going to cause societal harm. And they’re saying that their companies are going to cause massive, massive unemployment. Do we assume that they’re not telling the truth or that they don’t know what they’re talking about?

Selective Soundbites and the Bigger Picture

KEVIN O’LEARY: I think that’s a very selective bunch of soundbites. Dario also said, the CEO of Anthropic, “If we don’t build more compute capacity in the next 6 months, the Chinese will catch up with us with DeepSeek.” That’s an ominous warning because, let’s say you decide, look, it’s too scary, let’s shut down the US’s ability to advance compute. Let’s just shut it all down as the Chinese want, and let’s all sit around the campfire and go kumbaya. Do you think the Chinese are going to stop? I don’t think so.

I think they’re going to continue to do this, and they’ll invade Taiwan using no boots. They’ll just use AI to shut down their power. Can two things be true? I mean, I’m just telling you that the kumbaya stuff, I totally agree with. I love it. But it’s not reality.

Should we compete? Should we advance our technology? Should we be the best in the world advancing research on AI to solve for cancer? Yes. Or do you want the Chinese to do that for you? And in 20 years, they’ll tell your children what to eat when they’re sitting at their table in New York City for breakfast.

I’m in the camp that says we know who our adversary is. We know why they want to stop us. And Dario himself said, “Hey, everybody, we better build some data centers real fast, or in 6 months, DeepSeek is now number 1 on Earth.” I don’t want that outcome.

The Global Race and Its Consequences

STEVEN BARTLETT: Cenk, it appears to me that the CEOs are acknowledging that there could be a mass wave of unemployment that’s going to cause a bunch of problems that I don’t think people are thinking about. But also what Kevin’s saying about there being this sort of global race between countries also appears to me to be true, that if we just sit back and relax and put our fingers in our ear, then there’s going to be a huge competitive advantage with this transformational technology that falls into the hands of China, and we’ll miss out as the West. What’s your perspective?

Unemployment, UBI, and the Coming Crisis

CENK UYGUR: First, to address a lot of things that have been said. First of all, I don’t know anyone saying that the robots are going to eat the children, so I want to thank Kevin for educating me on a talking point there. I’m less concerned about that, a lot less concerned, but I am concerned about some level of death with AI, and that has already begun to happen. There are reports that we use AI in targeting that girls’ school in Tehran where we killed over 160 innocent schoolgirls. So if that’s what AI is going to bring us in precision, as Kevin called it, no thank you. I’m not interested in that kind of non-precision. And I would much rather have human beings involved in life and death decisions. And I’m super worried that AI is going to be used more in the military. And no, I do not trust Palantir.

So now in terms of universal basic income, I mean, think about it, guys. If a coder is making $120,000 — I don’t know where salary that puts him in 2 years in, 7 years in — it’s a healthy salary. It’s not the world’s greatest salary, but it’s a good, good salary for a middle-class person in America. Then you switch to UBI, you’d be lucky to get $3,000 a month. That’s $36,000 a year. You’re going to go from $120,000 to $36,000. That is going to be devastating. Even if you magically got universal basic income passed in America immediately as the wave of unemployment hit, but I don’t think that’s going to happen either.

So is the wave of unemployment going to hit? Well, if you notice, Steven actually didn’t address that at all because there’s no question that it’s going to happen. That is why literally every CEO of the AI companies is saying, well, our product is great and you should value us at a trillion dollars or so, but yeah, you’re all going to be fired. And that’s inescapable.

It’s already begun. The coders have already started getting fired, especially young coders. They feel totally betrayed. They have to find a new line of work. Maybe that’s a little bit easier for them because they’re young and they’re smart and they’re professionals, et cetera. And there’s a lot of smart folks, but getting a new profession at the age of 58, 62, what if you’re a truck driver? And so I’m not saying that the Waymos don’t work better. I actually would trust a Waymo more than I would trust a human driver. But nevertheless, that car no longer has a driver that it did when it was a taxi or an Uber or a Lyft.

Middle-Out Economics and Wall Street’s Blind Spot

And I understand that change happens. And look, I’m a progressive. I’m for change politically. I’m for massive change. I thought Obama did comically little change, but we have to be careful with change. So which direction is it going to go and how are we going to handle it?

Right now, I think Wall Street has lost its mind. How could we be at record numbers? Who do you think’s going to buy your products? So this guy named Nick Hanauer — there’s a lot of folks who believe in this, but he’s a big advocate of it. A really smart guy up in Seattle, also an entrepreneur, also sold his business and has done well. And he talks about middle-out economics. You give more advantages to the middle class, they immediately spend their money. If you give it to the rich, which is what we’ve done all our lives with this neoliberal nonsense that we’ve been doing and trickle-down economics, well, they barely spend any of it. So giving to the middle is a much better way to go.

And of course the question is, how are you going to do that? And you don’t just want to give away money. On the other hand, we give away money to oil companies and big drug companies and everyone who’s got an excellent army of lobbyists in DC, but we’re not ready.

And no one on earth has given me a plan for, “Oh, Cenk, don’t worry. When 10% unemployment hits” — which is at this point almost baked in, completely inevitable — “what are we going to do?” 10% unemployment would be worse than anything that’s ever happened in our lifetimes, let alone if you get to 25%. Zero plans for it. None. When we hit the iceberg, we’re not going to be ready and it is going to be an epic disaster. There isn’t going to be anyone to buy your goods. Because the employees are also customers, and you’re going to lose a massive amount of customers, and it is going to absolutely torpedo our economy. I can’t believe how short-sighted Wall Street is.

Can We Race Responsibly?

Now, does that mean we stop AI in its tracks and we stop change? No, we can’t stop because it’s true that China is also going, Russia is, North Korea is, Israel is. Now the problem is if we get it first, then very, very likely the Israelis will also have it. And God help the world if that’s true. They have not been restrained in how they use their power, and I wouldn’t want them anywhere near that kind of power.

But nevertheless, there is a race, so we can’t just stop. So can we do the race in a way that is responsible and actually serves the American voters and citizens instead of just serving the executives of the AI companies and the shareholders of the AI companies? I hope we can, but we’ve taken absolutely zero steps in that direction.

Defining What “Responsible” Actually Means

STEVEN BARTLETT: So let’s get specific, Cenk. What might that look like to continue developing this technology, but do it in a way that’s responsible and benefits everybody? Because this is kind of what I hear a lot of. I hear from one side people saying we need to carry on going, or, you know, the robots and the kids thing. On the other hand, I hear we need to be responsible. But either side don’t tend to be very specific about what their definition of responsible or what a responsible race might look like. So does anyone have any specifics? Cenk?

The Pitchforks Are Coming: AI, Unemployment, and the Future of the American Economy

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, so look, it’s a tough industry to regulate. I get it. You have to move fast and regulation usually involves some degree of bureaucracy. But if you have no regulation at all, you will have it run amok. That’s pretty much guaranteed. And all the leaders of the AI companies say likewise.

We’ve got to— the problem here in America is that it’s nearly unsolvable in the window of time that we’re talking about because we’ve lost our democracy in America. We’ve legalized bribery. That happened back in Supreme Court decisions in 1976, ’78, and then of course Citizens United. And so since we have legalized bribery in this country, there’s no way they’re going to serve the voters. So whichever AI companies are giving them more money, they’re going to serve them. And that’s already begun to happen. And the AI companies have already started getting involved in primaries and eliminating their opponents through money in politics.

So our politicians are deeply, deeply corrupt in America, Republicans and Democrats. They almost all serve the donor class. So we won’t make it. I’m telling you right now, we’re going to run into the iceberg and it’s going to be an epic disaster. The only hope is electing a smart person who’s prepared in 2028 that can begin to get us on the road.

So now when the disaster hits, the AI shareholders and executives aren’t going to like it either because the reaction will likely be tremendous anger. And then someone like me is going to say, hey, you know what? Why do they get to keep all the money and you’re all broke and out of a job? They created this cost, which is unemployment. Why don’t they pay for it?

So why don’t we take some of the billions and billions and billions of dollars that these AI companies have made and put it towards their costs, which is the unemployment of the American people, so they could at a minimum fund unemployment insurance and we could make sure that that’s very healthy. And they could begin to on other things that might actually help other human beings. I know, heaven forfend, that a millionaire or a billionaire should ever help another human being. But if you don’t, the pitchforks are coming.

I’m not a pitchfork guy. I believe in nonviolence and I always will, but I don’t think people get the level of anger that’s happening. I’ll try to stop it, but the pitchforks will be significant. And this whole thing of, “No, I get all the money and you get nothing,” will not play well. You can try it, but it will end in disaster.

Kevin O’Leary Pushes Back: Optimism, Entrepreneurship, and the Limits of Taxation

STEVEN BARTLETT: Kevin, the pitchforks are coming. We’re going to hit an iceberg. And it also sounded like AI is going to ultimately lead to a rise in what sounded like socialism.

KEVIN O’LEARY: Wow, Cenk’s a real Debbie Downer today. You know, this has been forecast in the American economy every 20 years. It’s the end of the free world as we know it, and that’s not what happens. Let’s go back and do a little fact-checking on Cenk here.

First of all, AI companies lose billions. They don’t make any money right now. They’re in a race, as we talked about earlier, against China primarily. They’re raising a ton of capital and losing billions every year. We don’t know yet how they’re going to monetize it, but the market’s willing to provide it because they see the productivity opportunity and the cure for cancer and the democracy around education and productivity for the nation already been proven by record earnings in the S&P, of which all 11 sectors have adopted the first wave of AI to enhance productivity and reduce costs.

We don’t know yet what new jobs are going to be created. I’ll just talk about the ones I’m creating in Utah. 4,000 construction jobs for about 9.5 years, high paying, and another 2,000 engineering support jobs, extremely high paying, because what’s now a desert will be a data center, not near anybody’s backyard, not replacing farmland, not using any of the water. The way that people have been talking about not taking any energy from Utah, but in fact contributing to it, not polluting the air because we can’t do that without air permits. All of this stuff is a falsehood.

So what we don’t know, and Cenk’s right about this, is no one ever predicts with a new technology what the outcome is. So I’m not a doomer on this stuff. My job here is to maintain a direct focus on entrepreneurship, hire as many people as I can because that’s what I do. And I take a lot of flak. I mean, Cenk’s hitting me hard today and I appreciate he’s an intelligent guy and he’s got an opinion. And I’m glad we’re in this narrative and having this discourse. It’s important. But let’s deal with fact, not rhetoric, and not hysteria.

Because I still go back to the robots eating the babies because that’s all I listen to every day. It’s just ludicrous. And I don’t think robots are actually going to do as much as people think or look the way they think. They’re not going to be humanoid walking around, taking out your garbage. That’s not how it’s going to work. Robots have been building cars for decades now and doing other things in medical research. And robotics have been used in all kinds of technologies and chipmaking and everything else, but they don’t look like people walking around.

So, you know, I say to myself, we don’t know what we don’t know, and that’s fair. But to say that all of these AI companies are making billions of dollars — and something else, and Cenk knows this — most of the taxes in America are paid by the rich people. They pay their fair share now. So if you take it past 50%, like California, like New York, like New Jersey, like Massachusetts, in the Constitution of America with the forethought of the founding fathers, they believed in the competition of states. And so you have people moving — Schultz to Florida, the Google guys to Florida, some have gone to Texas.

If you want to steal rich people’s money, go ahead. They’ll just move. And if you really make it difficult for them in every state in America, they’ll do what they did in England. They’ll find a new America. That’s what made America great over 200 years ago. Taxation, it doesn’t work. The thing about socialism and communism is you run out of other people’s money very quickly because they simply leave. The French figured that out. That’s what happened in England when they raised 90% tax rates. Monaco, I mean, it only exists because the French screwed the rich French guys and they all moved 4 miles across the border.

It’s very simple. You want to support entrepreneurship and job creation. Only one-third of the population in America can be entrepreneurs and they employ the other two-thirds. That’s the way it’s been for 200 years and it’s a great thing. And I don’t see anybody else investing money anywhere else except America, 52% of the time. 52 cents of every dollar on earth from sovereign wealth comes to America because it has the opportunity. No other country.

I don’t see a lot of people saying, “Boy, would I like to invest in North Korea.” “Hey, can you get me into Russia?” Is there a Russian fund I can invest in? Oh, can I invest in Cuba? I don’t think so. I don’t want to put my money there for retirement. That’s why I’m talking about this. The facts are the facts. Get over it. Inhale, everybody. Chillax. And let’s keep the American dream going.

Cenk Responds: Protecting the Middle Class and the Real Threat of Mass Unemployment

STEVEN BARTLETT: Cenk, I’ll get your response to that. Many things said there. I mean, the core argument there is if you try and tax rich people, they’re going to leave and go somewhere else. And we might end up like Cuba.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah. So did I miss this meme about the robots eating the kids? Because I don’t know why they keep going there. I love that.

KEVIN O’LEARY: I love the robots eating the kids. I just don’t think it’s going to happen.

CENK UYGUR: I don’t think anybody thinks it’s going to happen. It sounds like it was made up. Okay, so there’s some fearmongering about robots eating kids and how America’s going to turn communist or something. No, no, no. Look, as I said, we’re capitalists. We’re just trying to figure out what’s the best way to do this. Capitalism isn’t supposed to be, “Let’s crush the average guy and make sure the corporate CEOs get everything.” I’m a corporate CEO, but it’s not right and it’s not balanced and it’s not American. The American way is to make sure that we build a super strong middle class that are great productive citizens, voters, and by the way, consumers, right? And so if we lose track of that, then we’re all going to be doomed.

Kevin’s so worried that somebody’s going to take his money. And it’s not just Kevin. They always threaten us like, “Oh yeah, we’ll leave.” I mean, don’t threaten me with a good time. But beyond that, Kevin, that’s not going to be your main problem. When you don’t have any consumers, that’s going to be your main problem. You have to protect the American middle class — you could argue that’s the goose that lays the golden eggs. And you guys keep chipping away and chipping away at that middle class.

And so right now, Steven, this late into the conversation, still no plans on what to do with inevitable massive unemployment. And what I’m telling you is we’re not going to go necessarily to communism, but we are going to wonder, “Wait, why is everyone unemployed and only a couple of people have reaped billions or trillions of dollars?”

And come on, Kevin, you know how the economy works and the markets work. Yes, you invest into it in the beginning, and that’s why right now they’re theoretically losing billions of dollars. Exact thing that happened to Amazon. And then later you make billions and maybe even trillions. That’s why their stock prices are so high. And so they’re powered by that investment, and later they reap the rewards. And when they reap those rewards, it’s fair to ask, who got you those rewards? It’s not to say that the entrepreneurs didn’t, and the employees and the shareholders of those companies didn’t, but there were other factors involved, including all of the American government and American people that supported the infrastructure that made that happen.

That conversation is going to be inevitable when we have tens of millions of people unemployed. And guys, there’s one other factor that’s involved there. When you have a lot of unemployed young men sitting around, usually what happens is nothing good. Wars happen, crime goes up. We have to be prepared. And all I’m hearing from the AI industry is, as Kevin said, “Chillax, don’t sweat it, bro. Don’t worry, we’re going to have all the money, and then you guys, I don’t know, you’ll figure it out, and I’ll be in Monaco.”

Monaco, that was hilarious. Monaco. So maybe that’s where the child-eating robots are. So Kevin, be careful.

AI and the Future of Hiring: Are Entry-Level Jobs Already Disappearing?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Kevin, your thoughts on that? You know, saying there’s no answers and we’re being asked to just chillax. I think, Kevin, you do acknowledge that there will be a change in the occupation mix in America, right?

Even as a founder and CEO myself and as a business owner that employs hundreds of people, I am thinking differently about especially entry-level positions in a way that I wasn’t honestly 6 months ago before some of the models got more advanced, especially as it relates to things like coding. But I’m thinking very, very differently about who to hire.

And actually, one of the things I find myself naturally doing — the person that still is on the cold face of hiring in my company — is when I see entry-level positions, the first thing I’m looking for is if they have an AI proficiency. And there are candidates now, even for me, at entry-level positions that I’m not selecting for because I realize that someone with an AI proficiency in that exact same role is now like a 5 or 10x person. And so I’m just experiencing myself making different hiring decisions as a founder, and I’m sure you are as well.

KEVIN O’LEARY: People think that engineers are going to be replaced by AI code writing. Claude is one of the tools being used right now, but actually most engineers aren’t hired to write code. They’re hired to solve problems. They use code to try and solve those problems.

So, you know, companies that have been firing people — everybody’s attributing it to AI. It’s not true. There’s been a lot of fat in a lot of these companies that hired trying to assume what would happen next. They got it wrong. So I don’t think we’ve yet seen what the outcome’s going to be. I tend to be the optimist, as I talked about other technologies in the past being loathed for the fact that they cause disruption. There is no question AI is disruptive.

The Future of Humanoid Robots and the Jobs Debate

STEVEN BARTLETT: Kevin, did you see this week Figure AI, which is one of the humanoid robot companies, did a livestream for, I think it was 4 days where they just showed a robot on a sort of factory floor sorting out parcels for 4 straight days. And it did it better and faster than humans doing it. This was a humanoid robot.

And so one of the things I think about is if you listen to someone like Elon Musk who’s made a prediction— this is a direct quote from him— “My prediction is that there’ll be far, far more robots, like intelligent robots, in the world than there will be people. Long term, I think the ratio of humanoid robots will be more like 2 to 1. There might be 2 humanoid robots or more for every 1 human.”

And when you think about Elon Musk’s predictions over time, to his credit, sometimes his time frames are wrong. But when he says the rocket is going to land on the chopsticks, the rocket eventually lands on the chopsticks. When he says my car in LA, my Tesla, will eventually drive itself without me interfering, the car eventually drives itself. So with Elon’s track record in predicting what he’ll be able to do with technology, I think he’s got a pretty solid track record.

So when he says these humanoid robots are going to be better at surgery or cleaning or whatever than humans in short order, sometimes predicting timeframes of 2027, 2028, I tend to believe him. Is he lying? Because if he’s telling the truth, what we’re seeing is both the disruption of intelligence, but also one could say the disruption of our muscles at the same time. And I can’t think of a comparable — like the Industrial Revolution — where humans, like two real sort of professional productivity driving forces of their brains and then their physicality are being disrupted at the same time.

And just to give you another story to overlay onto this, my co-founder in my company called Third Web, big company, we’ve raised $30-odd million, it’s out in San Francisco. I went down to his entrepreneurship accelerator. I’ve not been there in 2 years. And I arrived and I was like, why is everyone building robotics? And he said to me, “Stephen, the robot pieces have been here for decades. We’ve always had them. What we’ve been missing, and the expensive part, was the intelligence.”

And he toured me through this 40,000 square feet building called Ethinc down in San Francisco. And I saw a robot cooking with a robot arm making food. I saw a robot making perfume for you, whatever perfume you wanted, this big machine that just makes it for you. And he says, because we’ve got intelligence and we’ve always had the machinery, there’s going to be this huge explosion of robotics that we’ve always been waiting for. Intelligence was the missing piece. And now he says it costs pennies. And everyone there is building not software anymore, they’re all building robotics.

And so for me, I was like, wow, the future’s going to look very, very different, I think, in short order than the past. And I’m just a realist. I’m not trying to be pessimistic or optimistic. I think there’s truth on both sides. But Kevin, do you acknowledge that the jobs that we have today in large part are going to go away?

KEVIN O’LEARY: Yeah, I don’t think shaking a perfume bottle is a great job for anybody, but I do think — and I’ll give you two examples — maybe you’re right about Elon Musk. Elon, he doesn’t get a big chunk of his stock unless he populates Mars with a million people. NASA announced 6 hours ago that they’re going to put a permanent plant there on the moon, an established base on the moon. Can you imagine the hundreds of thousands of jobs just those two activities are going to create to actually execute on that? High-paying jobs, engineers, analysts, motors, everything, the manufacturing of facilities to take to Mars, to take to the moon.

I mean, everybody wants to talk about the guy shaking perfume bottles losing his job when you’re talking about millions of jobs on new opportunities for mankind that no one even could think about 24 months ago that have been announced today. So you either have to be a doomsayer, like it’s the end of the free world as we know it and we’re all going to be eaten by robots, or you’re in my camp saying the opportunity is so bright, I gotta wear shades. I gotta buy more sunglasses for how bright the future is.

This is an unbelievable opportunity we’re talking about. And we’re not wiping out jobs. We’re creating new jobs that are very high paying and really interesting for people to do. Imagine somebody working on the Mars project or putting data centers in space or expanding landing the telecommunications on Starlink. I mean, these are the future jobs. I think the person that was born to shake perfume would rather have a job getting people onto the moon.

Can Kevin O’Leary Be Wrong?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Just on this point, you mentioned Elon’s pay packet. Part of that is he gets that big payout if there are a million humanoid robots in very short order. And when we think about who you might want to send to Mars, a super intelligent humanoid robot is probably much easier to send than a biological human being for various reasons to do with atmospheric pressure. But if he’s right on both counts, on both this journey to Mars and humanoid robots, presumably it’ll be the humanoid robots going.

Kevin, can you tell me how you might be wrong? I think that’s quite important because I think it shows your ability to see both sides of the argument. Is there a case where you could be wrong about this, about this unemployment issue?

KEVIN O’LEARY: No. How about that for an answer?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Cenk. Yeah.

The Interregnum: The Unaccounted-For Gap

CENK UYGUR: So look, I shouldn’t laugh too hard because I’m trying to answer that same question in my head. And Stephen, it’s hard to answer it from my perspective because the interregnum is just unaccounted for. So here’s what I mean by that.

So even if we have Kevin’s beautiful sunshine scenario, none of the robots ever eat the children — I don’t know why that keeps coming back in, but anyway — and we create all these wonderful jobs in some distant future. Well, okay, yes, but nevertheless, the truck driver and the assembly line guy and all those folks already lost their jobs. And the guy who lost his job on an assembly line in Cleveland is not going to be able to become the engineer who figures out how to get on Mars. So it’s not that he’s not capable of it, he’s just 61 years old and he can’t learn a whole new profession. So this is an unrealistic conversation.

So even if all of the wonderful scenarios about AI are true, it would take minimum 20 years to get to this place where the robots are running everything, we all have leisure time, and we just can’t figure out what to do with ourselves. And we decide how to get to Venus and Uranus and wherever else you want to go. Okay. But in the meanwhile, in those 20 years, we had massive waves of unemployment. It is indisputable.

Even as Kevin explains it, he says, well, you’re not going to be doing the perfume shaking. You’re not doing the assembly line. You’re not doing the driver. You’re not doing this. You’re not doing that. All those jobs are going to go. In fact, if you actually just listen to folks on Wall Street, they brag about it nonstop. “Oh, we’re going to cut 25%. We’re going to have synergies. We’re going to have cost cutting.” And then when people say that, the analysts get excited and they’re like, “Oh, buy, buy. They’re going to fire all their employees.” And then the other guy goes, “No, no, no, I’m going to fire them even quicker.” And then, “Buy, buy, buy.” And not once have they thought who’s going to buy the actual products. And they just don’t have an answer for that.

So in the interregnum, there is going to be upheaval. Massive upheaval. And I’m not a doomsday guy. My God, we have a thing called Operation Hope on The Young Turks. Our slogan is “get caught trying.” I’m an enormously optimistic guy, and I think we can solve these issues, but we got to try to solve them. And I don’t see anyone even trying to solve them now, again, outside of Ro Khanna.

Tech Executives Are Not Being Transparent About AI

STEVEN BARTLETT: Kevin, I spoke to Dara, the CEO of Uber, and I think I’m right in saying that driving is the biggest employer in the world. And when I asked Dara, who’s the CEO of Uber, if they’re going to create autonomous vehicles very, very quickly to automate the 9.4 million driver jobs that they have, he said that they are. And then I asked him the question, what will those 9.4 million people do? And his response to me, the direct quote, is he said, “I don’t know,” which is pretty shocking.

He also noted that privately, he said, “I have to be honest, AI will replace 9.4 million jobs at Uber.” Tech executives are not being transparent about AI. They talk behind closed doors about the sheer amount of disruption they anticipate, but they don’t talk about it publicly. Look, I don’t think we’re going to make any more progress on this issue. So because—

KEVIN O’LEARY: Well, I think you’re bringing a great point, but the fact is we don’t know. We don’t know what comes next.

Trump’s Approval Ratings and the Middle East

STEVEN BARTLETT: One of the things that’s probably going to be a disruptor to America’s ability to pursue these technologies is what’s going on with President approval ratings at the moment. I’ve got this graph here in front of me, which shows that President Trump’s approval rating is declining rapidly, in part because of what’s going on in the Middle East.

I wanted to get, Cenk, your opinion on what all of this stuff is. As someone like me, I don’t really know much about politics. I know that there’s these midterms coming up in November time in the US, which is going to be consequential. But from a 30,000-foot perspective, how do I parse out the truth of this war? Because Trump seems to be saying different things every day. There’s a ceasefire with Iran, and then they’re bombing again. I think 2 days ago they started bombing again, which they call defensive strikes. And then there’s a ceasefire and he says there’s a deal about to be done. And then there’s some bombing again. The Strait of Hormuz is open, then it’s closed. I just don’t know what the truth is. Cenk, in your opinion, what is the truth? What’s going on?

The Cost of War: American vs. Israeli Interests

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, so first let’s start with the president’s polling numbers. They’ve been decimated by this war. They were already in trouble because of the Epstein files and he didn’t do anything about affordability, just gave massive tax cuts for the rich as usual, did whatever Israel wants as usual. And so now he’s eaten into his own base.

So he’s barely hanging on to a majority of non-MAGA Republicans that voted for him. Only 53% still support him. He’s lost about 20% of hardcore MAGA. His disapproval numbers are at record numbers now. 68% of the country thinks we’re going in the wrong direction. About 76% of the country is dissatisfied with how the economy’s going. And a lot of that is because of the war.

And so the war is obviously driving up gas prices, which is then leading to inflation in other areas. Of course, a lot of things use not just oil and gas, but fertilizer, which has also been blocked through the Strait of Hormuz. So we’re having an energy crisis actually mainly in Asia and Europe more so than even America. That’s why the South Koreans are livid at the Israelis — they’re having to conserve gas and go through lean times because Israel wanted this war and literally no one else on planet Earth did. And so shortages in India, and this is all before we reengage and restart the war, which is what I’m afraid is going to come next.

So now some folks have a hard time believing this, but we have to go back to a conversation we had earlier. Remember, in America we legalize bribery. So one corporation can give an infinite amount to a super PAC, corporate interests, lobbyists, individuals. To give you a sense of the scale of the problem, one family alone, the Adelson family, Miriam and Sheldon Adelson, have given Donald Trump over $317 million in campaign contributions. We used to have a word for that. It was called bribe.

And Trump is so accidentally honest on this stuff, he just can’t keep anything in his head from going outside his mouth. So he has said, “Oh, Miriam, she cares more about Israel than America.” I’m like, no, that’s super awkward. And then he says, “Oh, Sheldon Adelson used to come in here and tell me what to do all the time, and then I did it,” and, “I moved the embassy for the Adelsons, our embassy in Israel.” He’s just basically selling off our foreign policy.

To be fair to him, almost all of our politicians in America do that. Israel gives to 94% of Congress. So Israel is not some unique lobbyist community that is unseen in the world. No, all the lobbyists do this. That’s why we give $35 billion in oil subsidies to companies that are profitable. That makes no sense. Why does an average person have to give money to ExxonMobil? That’s insanity. Because Big Pharma’s lobby is so strong, we can’t negotiate prices.

Now, when it comes to Israel, that’s when people lose their minds and mainstream media goes, “Okay, you’re right about Big Pharma, you’re right about Big Oil and defense contractors and every other lobby. But if you say the same exact thing about Israel, we’ll call you an antisemite and cancel you and you’re never going to ever get another job again.” No criticism of Israel is allowed without us doing massive oppression inside this country.

So we’ve now got Israel that is totally empowered to go rogue. They don’t follow any laws. They don’t follow the laws of war crime. They’ve now invaded Lebanon. They say they’re going to take all the way to the Litani River. They’re going to own southern Lebanon. They’ve already ethnically cleansed southern Lebanon, moved out a million people. They ethnically cleansed Gaza. Netanyahu on tape bragged about, “Oh, we used to have 53% of Gaza after the war. Now we have over 60%.” So it was to steal land. That’s what it was about. It wasn’t self-defense. Lebanon’s not self-defense. Israel invaded them. Iran’s not self-defense. We invaded Iran.

KEVIN O’LEARY: Iran.

CENK UYGUR: This war was utterly pointless, especially from an American perspective. Let me tell you what American interests are and what Israeli interests are, and they’re very, very different.

In America right now, because we started this war, we need the Strait of Hormuz open. That’s what’s hurting our gas prices and all of our other prices and affordability, inflation. All of that is connected to the Strait of Hormuz. We didn’t have that problem before the war, but now we have it. We’ve got to open it back up. In order to do that, Iran has an enormous amount of leverage. We’ve got to make a reasonable peace deal.

Good news, we are about to have one over this weekend. And all we want theoretically is for them to not make nuclear weapons. And they’ve already promised 18 different times that they wouldn’t do that. They did it under the Obama deal. They’ve offered it before the war, they’ve offered it during the war. So that is not an issue. And them promising it doesn’t mean anything. It has to be verified. So what they’re saying is, “Yes, we will have international monitors verify that we will not have a weapon.”

So that’s the only thing that America said they cared about before the war. So then we’re done, and we just killed 49 of their top regime leaders. Trump says we destroyed their Navy, their Air Force, and everything else. We’re done. We have no American interest in there. The only interest left is leave, open up the Strait of Hormuz so we can get our economy back on track.

Israel, on the other hand, has said they would like — and again, this is on tape, Netanyahu said it — they would like to be the only regional superpower in the Middle East. In order to do that, they have to destroy every other power in the Middle East. Now, good news for them, they completely control our Congress and our presidents. So they got us to — they literally gave us a list after 9/11 of 7 countries they wanted us to attack on their behalf. We have attacked all 7. Iran was the last one on that list.

So they want them destroyed so that they can’t fight back when Israel takes more land, as they are doing. They don’t want anyone to be able to defend themselves. They’re going to kill and take land as much as humanly possible, and they want us Americans to pay the bill. They say, “You owe us a genocide. You owe us an endless string of wars. You owe us a global war on terror.” No, that was a global war on Israel’s neighbors. That cost us $8 trillion. We gave $320 billion to Israel so far already, lifetime.

KEVIN O’LEARY: Why?

CENK UYGUR: Why? Why don’t they give us the money back? No, they say, “You owe us, you owe us, you owe us.” That’s why we’re in this war. And by the way, last thing, Steven, is while we’re all distracted in Iran, Israel has taken southern Lebanon, and now they’re saying they’re going to keep it forever. So that was the point of this war. 100% Israeli interest, 0% American interest. Let’s get out of there. Let’s stop fighting Israel’s wars for them and come back home.

The Nuclear Weapons Question

STEVEN BARTLETT: What about nuclear weapons? One of the pretenses is that they were weeks away from enriching uranium to a point where that weapon could be used.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, so that’s what Netanyahu’s been saying for the last 30 years. Back in the 1990s, it’s like, “Oh, they’re weeks away, they’re weeks away.” And you probably don’t know this because American media pretty much works for Israel. And now when I say that, guys, those are not hyperbole.

The Israeli lobby donates — I would say legally bribes, like the other lobbies do — 94% of Congress. The number one lifetime donor to Donald Trump is Israel. Number one lifetime donor to Joe Biden. Number one lifetime donor to Hakeem Jeffries, Chuck Schumer, Mike Johnson — all of our leaders. Their number one lifetime donor is AIPAC and the Israeli lobby. They completely control our government. And then our media comes and lies to us and says, “Oh, they’re the victims.” Well, we have eyes. We saw Gaza. Gaza’s utterly destroyed. And Israel did that with our money. That’s insane.

So no, look, I don’t even think Israel’s an ally. I don’t know why in the world we would ever serve a foreign nation. They’re treading all over us. They’ve taken our sovereignty away, they’ve taken our freedom away, and all we have is these dupes in mainstream media telling us about how they’re doing self-defense. What part of self-defense is “I take your land”?

Currently they’re taping themselves going into — IDF soldiers are going into Lebanese homes, Muslims and Christians, stealing all their property. Then they put it online and go, “Ha, look, we stole other things.” Then they destroy the homes and they say, “Now this is Israeli territory.” That’s not self-defense. That’s terrorism. We are supporting a terrorist nation and we’re giving them hundreds of billions of dollars.

And this isn’t even helping Israel. We’re enabling their worst instincts and they’re getting the whole world to hate them. How does that help Israel to have the whole world despise you? Because you’re so selfishly driving up everyone’s prices and creating endless wars. Literally no other country on earth wants this war in Iran to continue other than Israel.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Kevin, you have a different perspective on the effectiveness and purpose of the original strikes that Trump did. Are you supportive of this military operation at large?

The Middle East: Iran, Israel, and the Strait of Hormuz

KEVIN O’LEARY: Well, I’m not a shill for any politician. I focus on policy because that’s ultimately what survives. Politicians come and go, policy lingers. I’ve always said that. And that’s as an investor what you have to worry about.

So let’s talk about the situation in the Middle East. For about 49 years, some people would say 60, it depends what you believed in the early years, the Persians were a very advanced society in mathematics, poetry, art, you name it. They’re very famous. And then you have this small — I’m going to call it bad management. I don’t know what else to call it. That took this society, brutalized the people there, created a million-man army run by 150,000 people, a super militia that caused a lot of chaos in that region with proxies, as people have been talking about.

And this militia is paid with cash that’s gotten from the sales of energy. And they would stop killing their own people if they didn’t get paid. So that the 150,000 that run that country that brutalize the almost 100 million others — I mean, it’s a really strange platform that hasn’t worked for the people there for 60 years. But it was tolerated by all the neighbors until 6 months ago. The United Arab Emirates, Bahrain, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, they wanted to stay out of it. It was relatively calm. Every 6 months, the Houthis or one of the Iranian proxies would blow up an oil ship, kept the insurance premiums 30% higher. And then the proverbial poo-poo hit the fan.

Now, China — let’s get down to business — gets 48% of its energy through that strait, as does many other Asian countries. So they, as Jack pointed out, basically are underwater. They don’t have energy. So at the end of the day here, there’s a problem.

So what’s going to happen when this is over? Look, you can’t let a society where 150 people say, “Let’s kill everybody.” I mean, they’re on a different kind of mandate. They’re a little strange. You don’t want to give those people a nuclear bomb. I don’t care who you are. They’re just offside and they’re happy to kill their own people, but I don’t want them killing everybody else with intercontinental ballistic missiles. So no, they can’t have 90 pounds of enriched uranium and they’re not going to get it. And they’re going to keep getting bombed until they give it up.

And at some point somebody in there is going to say, “Whoa, we’re really getting tenderized in here and we got to stop this and we got to get the best deal we can. We want to stay in power to keep killing our people as long as we can because we’re the 150,000 guys that live very well and everybody else lives like crap.” And that’s just the way that society works. And if the people want to rise up and kill the 150 that are killing them, they will one day. I don’t know.

But here’s what I think. I think the actual countries around there are going to end up in the same boat that we have in the Suez and Panama Canals where there’s a fee to go through, but it’s managed so that no country, including China, gets to run it. And so that has already found peace, and all the shipping lanes are open, and the insurance rates are normal there.

So if you’re Saudi Arabia — let’s say it costs $5 billion a month to police the Strait, okay? And that’s a good number because I’m probably pretty close to it. That’s nothing for the UAE and for Saudi Arabia and Qatar, Bahrain. They’re going to need it open. So if they have to be like the United Nations for that region and keep it open, that’s great.

Now, I’m staying long the UAE because I’ve invested there in ADGM. I have a company there, I’ve got employees there, I talk to them every day. I think this is going to end soon, but I would like to see it in a way that Iran is isolated. Maybe they can’t control the Strait and they can’t have the nukes. Those are the two things that I think have to be resolved. And then if they want to brutalize their people forever, okay, they’re going to do that. It’s a horrible outcome for those people. I feel terrible for them. But this outcome is a good one if we resolve those two things.

New policing of the strait — that would be great because the Chinese need that. They want that. And at some point they’re going to squeeze the heads of these Iranian leaders, whoever they are. They keep getting killed and a new one pops up like whack-a-mole, but that’s just the way that regime works. And nobody’s willing to say, “Look, I want to take them over,” because you got the army still being paid.

But by blocking that strait for the last 60 days, the amount of money they’re losing is $210 million US dollars per 24 hours. So at some point, whoever’s running the show there is going to say, “If we can’t pay our soldiers to kill our people, we’re going to be screwed. They’re going to come up to the top of the castle and take Frankenstein out. So we got to make sure we cut a deal.”

That’s why I’m optimistic. The price of oil is down almost 16%. It’ll get back near $70. I don’t know what that’s going to do for the midterms because the numbers are terrible, but every incumbent gets screwed in the midterms. It’s just the nature of how it works. Now, whether they lose the Senate, I don’t know. Are they going to lose the House? Who knows? But if gasoline’s back to $70, we won’t be having this narrative about unaffordability around energy in the United States.

And you just don’t know. But I do know that the status quo — because the UAE and Qatar and Bahrain left those Iranians alone until they rained missiles on them — now they’re pissed. And so it’s not business as usual. And so I think the winds of change are going to blow through there. And maybe the upside is the great Persian people get better leadership because, boy, their leaders suck.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Cenk, it sounds like an optimistic outcome is being forecasted by Kevin, and I can see you shaking your head there in disagreement.

Cenk Uygur’s Counter: Iran, Israel, and American Media

CENK UYGUR: Yeah. So look, again, I’m normally an optimist here, but we’ve gotten ourselves in some significant ruts here. So first of all, this whole idea the Iranian regime is bad — okay, yeah, it is. It’s Muslim fundamentalist. I don’t like fundamentalists of any religion. I’m an atheist. They abuse their people and they’re corrupt. No question about it.

Netanyahu is corrupt. He’s up on corruption charges that seem to never come. The Israeli settlers are religious fundamentalists, biggest lunatics on earth. They think that God said to kill the Palestinians and take their land, and we fund them. We give them billions of dollars. So I’m not in favor of any of these fundamentalists no matter what religion they’re from.

Now, on the issue of nukes that you asked about earlier, Steven — you know that the reason I brought up American media is because they pretty much do nothing but Israeli propaganda. They never clarified to anyone that Iran doesn’t have a missile that can deliver any warhead to America. It just doesn’t. It’s never had it. It didn’t have it 30 years ago when Netanyahu started saying it, it doesn’t have it today. And they never enriched uranium up to 90%, which is where you would have to get it for weapons grade. They get up to about 60% and then we destroy their nuclear facilities and Trump bragged about it and now all that’s buried underneath.

So where’s the question? They’re not even close. And again, they’ve promised not only to this repeatedly in negotiations, but the former Grand Ayatollah — the one we murdered — had done a fatwa, the most important religious edict in Shia Islam, when he said that we are to never build nukes. So when Hamas has something in their charter, the Israelis say, “Oh, the charter is the most important thing.” Then the Grand Ayatollah does a fatwa — way more important than a charter — and they go, “Ignore that, ignore that.” No, no, don’t ignore that.

And why would Iran ever use a nuke? If they use a nuke, then we — either Israel or us — would strike back and would kill 90 million Iranians. Nobody wants that. They want you to believe that the Iranians are irrational, psychotic terrorists. “Boo, they’re Muslims! Oh, that’s super scary, right?” No, there is an irrational government in the Middle East. It’s Israel.

Iran did not attack a single neighbor. Israel has attacked 7 neighbors. Iran hasn’t asked us for a single dollar. Israel asks us for hundreds of billions of dollars. So there’s one country that is constantly attacking their neighbors and taking land. And by the way, their civilian kill ratio of the IDF is 83%. 83% of the people that they kill are civilians. That is higher than Hamas or Hezbollah or any terrorist group on Earth. And they kill about 100 times the civilians of Hamas. So if Hamas is terrorists, it is absolutely indisputable that Israel is a terrorist government.

And yet we’re forced to fund that when we don’t have any money. They have universal healthcare, they have free college, they have paid family leave. We don’t have any of that. And then our greedy and corrupt politicians and media tell us that we owe the Israelis more war and more genocide.

The reason why I think we’re in a lot of trouble here, and it’s not going to be easy to solve, is every time we get close to peace, Netanyahu calls Trump. Literally happened this weekend. Right after the call, Trump then goes back to warmongering. After the call, we bombed Iran. Israel started heavy bombing of Lebanon. And then Trump came up with 3 new, totally impossible things.

“Give me all the highly enriched uranium on day 1.” Well, it’s buried under the ground. It’s going to take months to take out. Number 2, you all have to join the Abraham Accords. The Abraham Accords — again, American media paints it as, “Oh, this peace plan.” It’s no such thing. It’s to normalize relations with Israel and start doing trade with Israel without getting a promise back that they’re going to end the occupation. It is betraying the Palestinians and saying the Israelis can permanently occupy them.

By the way, again, never talked about in American media. We read a lot of this in the Israeli press and that’s why we get a lot of our information on The Young Turks from them because they actually do pretty good reporting in Israel. And so one of the things is they believe in Greater Israel. They talk about it all the time. Our press never talks about it, but they do. They know they stole our nuclear secrets. They know they stole our nuclear triggers and our uranium. What kind of an ally steals all of our material?

But last thing, Steven — the most important impossible thing was Netanyahu demanded, he made this public, that everyone else stopped fighting except Israel, that they have a right to keep attacking and invading and taking southern Lebanon. Well, that’s not a peace deal. Nobody’s going to sign on to that. And Israel has said no matter what happens, they’re going to keep attacking Lebanon. That means even if Iran and America make a peace deal, Israel will literally ruin it on the first day.

So we can’t ever get to peace as long as we’re allies with Israel. It’s literally impossible. They’re massive warmongers, and they say we need endless wars. And by the way, it makes sense because they’re a settler colony. In order for a settler colony to expand, you need permanent war so they can keep taking more land. We shouldn’t be funding these terrorists.

So we have a way of getting out. This is what you do. You just say, “Hey, we make a peace deal with Iran, we take Israel out of it. Israel, you want peace, you have peace. If you want war, have war with Iran. It’s not our business.”

STEVEN BARTLETT: So what are you predicting, Cenk, is going to happen? What is your prediction?

Predicting Disaster: The Risk of Escalation

CENK UYGUR: Disaster. Positive disaster. So there’s no way we’re going to get to peace because Israel says they’re going to keep attacking Lebanon. As long as they keep attacking Lebanon, Iran is not going to get to a peace deal.

STEVEN BARTLETT: What does disaster mean specifically?

CENK UYGUR: Disaster means we reengage in the bombing. We have 50,000 ground troops on those ships. People forgot that we’re there. Of course, it has to be American ground troops. It can’t be precious Israeli ground troops because Israeli lives are apparently worth more than American lives if you listen to American politicians.

So we have the ground troops there. We’re going to very likely do more disastrous bombing of Iran, and then Iran is going to bomb the oil and gas fields of the Gulf countries. And then not only will gas prices go absolutely through the roof and cause a massive economic recession — perhaps depression worldwide — but on top of that, they’re going to say, “Well, it’s not enough, we want more.” And the infrastructure is already destroyed. It’s going to take 5 to 10 years to rebuild that infrastructure. They’re going to do permanent damage to our economy.

KEVIN O’LEARY: Why?

CENK UYGUR: They want more land. Enough with supporting the terrorists.

The First Tech War

STEVEN BARTLETT: Kevin, is it fair to say, if you look at what Trump said over since the start of this war, that he miscalculated this? Because he gave us a window of time when it would be over, and that window of time is now long gone. And it appears to me like he thought it would be similar to Venezuela, where you could just go in there, boom boom boom, regime change, you control the country. But that’s clearly— I mean, just like a logical impartial person, that’s kind of like it looks.

KEVIN O’LEARY: This is different because this war is what I would call the first tech war, ever. A lot of the ordnance being used is with very advanced GPS systems controlled from space. We’ve learned something else, which is rather interesting.

I learned this from my own employees that are sitting in Abu Dhabi and Dubai. The drones that came over in the first 4 weeks, those waves every morning, were basically carbon fiber wings with lawnmower engines on them and very inexpensive to make, about $35,000. And we shot them down, or at least the UAE did, with American ordnance between $1.2 million and $3 million per missile on a $35,000 homemade drone.

And so it goes back to, wow, I hope the Pentagon has enough compute power because I wouldn’t want that in the hands of the Chinese. Because what I’ve learned from this conflict, and look, people dying is horrible, period, wherever they are, it’s just horrible. But this is not a traditional war. I don’t know if there’s going to be boots on the ground by the time this is over, if there’s another wave of conflict, it’s just going to be more ordnance taking out more infrastructure until the 150,000 people running the show there say, wow, this is really hurting us in terms of maintaining control.

I don’t see a boots on the ground invasion. I just see more tenderizing and more tenderizing. It’s expensive because we are on the wrong side of defense. We need the cheap drones. And I think in 2 years from now, from what I see in the development, because I see these deals all over the place. There’s a whole bunch of new tech being developed around drone blocking technology and very inexpensive versions of what those Iranians built— better than lawnmower engines though.

So it’s going to be pretty interesting in 24 months. I’m not a fan of war, but I have a different view of the outcome here, and I think that part of the world is going to be stabilized and funded by the neighbors there and probably everybody’s better off because the Chinese can’t take the pain much longer. Their oil supplies, both on the water and in storage, are starting to really dwindle.

And if I’m the big supreme leader there, I’m thinking to myself, I’m going to call those guys in Iran and say, okay, big boys, time to settle. We’ve had enough. Because that is actually a different view of that policy over there because every Asian country is hurting. And by the way, in North America, we actually don’t have any problems with energy. We have an abundance of it, including the stuff coming from Canada, the number one import.

The problem we have is the price of oil is determined by world markets. It’s a commodity in US dollars. It was $106, now it’s $97.12, whatever it is trading right now. But we’re not going to run out of energy in America. That’s not going to happen. It’s the rest of the world, to the extent that we care about them. We got to resolve this issue.

Trump’s Approval Ratings and the Art of the Deal

STEVEN BARTLETT: The thing that I think America is at risk of running out of, Kevin, though, is patience and support. And if you think about the sort of existential risk to Trump— if you’re looking at these numbers, so this first line you see is his disapproval going up and his approval going down. If I’m the Supreme Leader of Iran, I go, listen, this guy has got— I mean, there’s an election in 2028 in the United States. This guy has got months.

So in terms of— you talk about the art of the deal and doing a good deal— if you know your counterparty in the deal negotiation literally has months to do a deal, or they are going to be thrown out of power, if I’m one of those 150,000 people or the Supreme Leader, honestly, I’m going to wait it out. I think I have all the cards. If you have almost no— they can survive. Again, you said they oppress their people, they don’t seem to have much morality surrounding that. Could they wait it out a couple of months knowing that Trump can’t because the midterms are coming and then the election’s coming?

KEVIN O’LEARY: I think you’re making a good point on that one. But the one thing I would say, Steven, is that it’s not just Trump you’re waiting out. You got Xi. It’s not just Trump the big guy. You got two supreme leaders. You got whoever is running the show this week in Iran. And you’ve got the Chinese leader, the Supreme Leader. And the only way he gets to stay the Supreme Leader is people eat, people have jobs there, and his economy stays buoyant. That’s the only way he stays in power.

So you’re serving two masters. You’re trying to time the 2028 decision you talked about versus how pissed off the big guy’s going to get in China. He has no choice. 48% of his energy comes through that strait. At some point, I think before November, El Supremo in China squeezes Iranian heads like teenage pimples. That’s what I think is going to happen.

Can a Deal Still Be Made With Iran?

STEVEN BARTLETT: The other thing, just to give you the other thought that’s been spiraling in my head since I’ve interviewed all these people on this subject, is that Trump and JD Vance repeatedly say they don’t even know who they’re negotiating with because they’ve knocked out every layer, it seems, of leadership. They on one hand brag about that, but then I would also suggest that that makes negotiation hard.

I think JD Vance actually talked about— or Marco Rubio talked about the fact that they can’t get the carrier pigeon to the Iranian soldiers that are still shooting the missiles. And this speaks to the lack of organization in Iran because you’ve wiped out all the leadership. So I even wonder if you can really do a deal at this point with Iran. Cenk?

CENK UYGUR: No, we can. Remember, we almost had a deal this weekend, and the deal is actually kind of obvious. Open up the Strait of Hormuz, we lift the blockade, Iran says we’ll find the highly enriched uranium and hand it over, we won’t have a weapons program, and we’ll have international monitors for the uranium that we enrich to just energy levels, not weapons levels. Boom, done, easy. Though, but as I explained before, we can’t get it done because Israel says, no, I want permanent war.

STEVEN BARTLETT: How do you know it’s Israel? How do you know it’s Israel, Cenk?

The Middle East, Energy, and American Interests

CENK UYGUR: Yeah, there’s no question. So first of all, before the invasion, New York Times — with a rare good article — explained that Netanyahu and the head of Mossad came into the Situation Room, Netanyahu physically and the head of Mossad through a teleconference, and they told Trump, “You got to attack, you got to attack now.” And they took, at least as the New York Times describes it, they convinced him. Whether they actually convinced him through language or through money or through blackmail is a whole different question.

But another thing that’s absolutely clear is that after every call with Netanyahu, Trump goes from saying “we’re going to have peace” to saying “we’re not going to have peace and we’re going to have these new impossible standards.” This happened about half a dozen times so far. It’s super clear that Israel’s driving the bus.

Plus, you could see it based on the facts on the ground. We have no interest there. We have a deal ready to make for American interests. Israel says, “No, we’re not done because we need southern Lebanon and we need Iran to be completely decimated.”

This idea that Kevin’s talking about — to be fair to Kevin, almost everybody in America thinks in this — well, now to be unfair to Kevin — this fantasy world where the regime in Iran is just going to give up. It’s never going to happen. We already tried regime change. It didn’t work at all. They have an enormous infrastructure set up, so it doesn’t really matter how many people you knock off at the top. Somebody else rises up out of that 150,000 people that Kevin’s talking about.

Now China — he’s got a theory that maybe China puts pressure on them. That’s not a crazy theory, I get it. At the same time, China’s looking at Russia and America and going, “Look at these schmucks. Russia is wasting their entire military and resources in Ukraine, and now America’s totally wasting their military and resources in Iran. And these two other knuckleheads keep punching themselves in the face.”

Meanwhile, we haven’t started any wars if you’re China, and so we haven’t had any of those costs, we haven’t had any of those troubles, we don’t have that PR problem. So when we go into Africa or Latin America and we say, “Hey, we’re going to build roads and bridges for you guys, and America is going to come and bomb you — so which one do you want to do a deal with?” Now a lot of them are saying, “No, we want to do a deal with China because they don’t do war, instead they build infrastructure.”

Look, it just is a business strategy, an economic strategy that is much, much smarter. But we can’t go into a smart strategy because Israel won’t let us. Every time we go towards peace, Israel blocks it. And today, this weekend, we had both Republicans and Democrats go out and say we shouldn’t do the peace deal. You want to know what the one connective tissue is? Every one of those politicians had over $1 million given to them by the Israeli lobby. So that’s just the stone-cold reality of it.

Energy Independence and the Oil Market

And so in terms of energy here at home — Kevin says we’re not going to run out, but he also acknowledged that oil goes into a world market and it is controlled by world prices. So the fact that we are so-called energy independent means nothing. That’s not even our oil or gas, it’s ExxonMobil’s and Chevron’s. So they could sell it anywhere they want, and they do sell it anywhere they want.

The only way to get them to sell it exclusively in America is to socialize it and say you’re not allowed to sell that oil anywhere else. I don’t think Kevin wants that. So that means we are definitely not energy independent. We are definitely tied to global oil prices. And that means, again, more disaster.

AI, Surveillance, and the Future of Technology in Warfare

When you get to tech — oh my God, the Israelis used AI in Gaza. They did this program called “Where’s Daddy.” AI would pick a target that was maybe connected to someone in Hamas at some point — “but he called this guy and the other guy called the other guy and that lady now has a cell phone, good enough.” But they would wait till their target went home so they would bomb the house and kill their entire family.

If that’s the future of tech in the military, we’re all doomed. So they’ve been testing all of this stuff in Gaza and now they’re doing it in Iran. What I’m worried about is what Larry Ellison said. He said, “We can now track all citizens anywhere, and we’re going to bring that technology to America.” I don’t want their surveillance state. I don’t want anything to do with the Israelis. Let’s just come home and serve American interests. That’s what I keep saying.

But the good news, Steven, is almost all the voters agree. 80% of Democrats now have a negative view of Israel and say, “No, take care of American voters first.” When you get to under 50 years old in all parties, Israel now has a -45 rating. The only people left in this country who still want to serve Israel are our politicians and our media. That’s it. The rest of us can’t stand them anymore and the endless wars they drag us into and all the money they take from us.

And Kevin, as a businessman — what are we doing? Why are we letting this country — their population is the equivalent of Papua New Guinea — lead us around by the nose and get us into endless wars? This war in Iran isn’t helping us. And if they continue and they bomb the infrastructure in Iran and the Gulf countries, it’s going to take 5 to 10 years to rebuild and it is going to be a global economic disaster.

What are we doing? We got to get rid of the Israelis — I don’t mean that in a physical way. Just get them out of our government and make decisions based on what’s good for America. We’ll be 10,000 times better off and then we could end the war.

The Case for Peace as an Economic Opportunity

KEVIN O’LEARY: I think if there was a path to peace in the Middle East, it’s one of the largest consumer markets on earth — just Iran itself has 100 million people. They buy stuff. And I think about the future of a global economy if there was stability there, including peace with Israel and their neighbors. That would be an amazing market, a huge market.

And one of the reasons that people like me keep a foothold or a footprint in the UAE — it is and was the capital of capital until 9 weeks ago. And I think it’ll return at some point. The size of the market in Egypt, Jordan, Sudan, Saudi Arabia, and Iran — they’re just huge. And those people want stuff that we make. It’s that pragmatic.

So if you could have peace and stabilize and you want to sell stuff, that’s a massive market. And that’s why I remain an optimist on how this gets resolved, because at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter what religion you are or what country you’re in or what geography you came from. Most people — and I would say 99% — want to raise a family, have a job, and enjoy life. They don’t want to get blown up.

So I’m kind of an optimist that it’s in everybody’s interest to solve this. It’s kind of like the human condition is: “I’d like to form a family unit and I’d like to live a peaceful life and I’d like to buy stuff. I want to be a consumer.”

So I’m in the camp that says, look, I don’t know how this thing gets resolved. Nobody does. I’m disappointed that there’s no peace deal this weekend, but hopefully there’ll be one soon. But in the end, most people want peace, period. Unless you’re a crazed leader and you just want to kill everybody — those people don’t last that long. They’re certainly not lasting that long in Iran right now, but you’re right, they keep popping up. At some point, I think peace is a better deal for everybody.

The Rise of Socialism in Western Markets

STEVEN BARTLETT: Kevin, based on that — based on both our conversation on AI and also how unpopular this war is — what we’re seeing across the world at the moment is this rise in socialism in Western markets. We’re seeing it in the UK, we’re seeing it around Europe, and we’re also seeing it in the United States.

Positive views of capitalism amongst all Americans has dropped to an all-time low according to a poll done by Gallup. Almost 70% of Democrats now view socialism positively, with only roughly 40% viewing capitalism favorably. And again, this was at the end of last year, so these stats aren’t even factoring in the war. And a staggering 62% of young Americans hold a favorable view of socialism as well.

So as we head towards the midterms, but also the elections — which aren’t actually that far away now — it’s quite clear to me, as someone who is an entrepreneur in the United States, I live in Los Angeles, as you know, I build businesses — it’s quite clear to me that we’re on the verge of a very different type of America. And we’ve seen Zohran Mondani be elected in New York, and we’re seeing this sort of socialistic narrative spread like wildfire, I think heavily fueled by both wars but also by technology, AI, and wealth inequality.

Do you agree that if things continue on this trajectory, we’re heading towards a more socialist America?

KEVIN O’LEARY: No. What I agree on is I’m a history buff. You can go back into the ’40s and ’50s. It seems every 17 to 20 years we take a dip back into socialism — and back in those days, communism — even in New York and in Brooklyn, longing for what the Soviet Union had or Cuba had in its heyday. And then the outcome is always the same. It doesn’t work.

And so you have all these different ideas about how a country should run and what works best. And for all the faults that the US has now and the debates we have — AOC and Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren and all this rhetoric — I mean, they’re very successful politicians. I love AOC. She just spews out stuff and raises $5 at a time. It’s smart. It’s a great social media strategy. And same with Bernie.

But will she be president of the United States? I don’t think so. And will Bernie get there? No. Why does everybody leave Massachusetts, including my son? Because you can’t raise any money there to start a company. The supertax is stupid.

And so it’s a mixing pot of ideas and competition. But in the end — and I always say this to my students — what I find so interesting about a cohort of 23-year-olds that I teach in business classes and engineering classes: they’re all socialists, all of them, until they get their first paycheck. Then they become capitalists when they see something called tax. And they wonder, “Wait a second, where’d half my salary go? What’s this?” And I say, “That’s tax. Now, if you want it to be 80% tax, you follow that trail that you had before I started teaching you. You were a socialist — and now what are you?” “Well, I can’t pay 50% tax.” “No kidding. Well, move to Austin, move to Tennessee, move to Florida like everybody else is doing, and you’ll pay 16%.”

And so I love the fact that everybody’s an idealist socialist until they get their first paycheck. And that’s how America works. It’s a wonderful thing. Everybody has a vote. We continue to believe in that. And I think the debate rages on, and it’s great. Everybody has an opinion. I have mine, others have theirs.

And I love to be part of this. One of the reasons I keep doing what I do is I love to get into the thick of it. I like to say the things I say because I really believe them and I’ve been there before. I’m wise. I’ve seen this movie before. That’s what I tell my students and it freaks them out.

Who Will Win in 2028?

STEVEN BARTLETT: Just a yes or no answer on this question. So in 2028, do you think another capitalistically focused candidate will win the election? Or do you think a Democrat or a socialist will?

KEVIN O’LEARY: I don’t think socialism is going to make it in America in the office of the White House. I think the pendulum always swings. The Biden administration went way too far in one direction, it snapped back. Now you might argue it went too far the other way and it snaps back. The whole idea of the midterm gives you the smell test of the direction, which is coming up just months away. And then you’ll see who emerges. I don’t think we know who the next president of the United States is going to be, him or her. We don’t know who’s going to emerge.

STEVEN BARTLETT: It’s kind of a mind— What’s your sense there, Kevin? You’re a man that makes predictions. Is it Democrat or is it Republican? Republican, in your view? Got to give me a straight answer here.

The Future of American Politics

KEVIN O’LEARY: I wouldn’t even make that guess. It’s so difficult. I really don’t know. I really think that, in my view, the Democrats have lost their way. I would like to see them find a new leader that’s more moderate. I don’t think you can spew socialism and get elected. You got to find somebody that is in the middle, that is more pragmatic about providing jobs.

I mean, look at California, what a mess that place is. They may actually hire a Republican mayor out there. I mean, that’s going to be a shocker for LA, but it’s gotten pretty bad. I work out there. You can’t even wear your watch at daytime anymore. I mean, it’s a mess. It’s a lawless wasteland. It has poor management, no executional skills with the politicians. You’re lucky to be— you work there, you know what I’m talking about.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Cenk, what’s your point of view on that? Socialism, is it coming to America? Midterms 2028.

CENK UYGUR: It’s a lot to talk about there. So look, I’m not a fan of Karen Bass. I voted against her before, probably vote against her again in this mayor’s race. And so I think that sometimes Democrats like to get mired in their bureaucracy and not push for enough change. So I’m not a person who just supports Democrats no matter what. In fact, I criticize Democrats a lot on The Young Turks.

But no, you’re not going to get your watch stolen in LA. I have a family, we go out all the time, it’s perfectly safe. So for a little while between 2019 and 2023, crime really did rise in some of the big cities. We talked about it on the air, we were very honest about it. It took some heat from the left on it, but crime’s gone down significantly in ’24 and ’25. So I don’t think those are real issues anymore.

In terms of our economic model, we need a couple of clarifications here. So as I said earlier, we really do corporatism in America, and another word for that or phrase for it is crony capitalism. Phony capitalism. So we’d be lucky to get back to capitalism, let alone going all the way to socialism, because right now we don’t have capitalism, we don’t have free markets. Every industry has captured the government. They’ve bribed all of our politicians. We can’t negotiate prices. I mean, that is the most socialist thing I’ve ever heard, except it’s socialism for corporations. It’s mind-bending.

And that’s what corporatism is. It’s totally amok now. And why is that? Because of money in politics. So in order to fix all of these problems and to get back to real free markets and capitalism, you have got to get the money out of politics. If you don’t do that, you’re just on a treadmill of corruption and it never ends. And you get guys like Biden and Trump who come in and tell you that they’re going to drain the swamp and then they fill it up even more and even more, and they serve all their donors.

So in terms of socialism, we never define what it means. The reality is most governments are mixed economies— not most governments, almost all governments are mixed economies. So when we say socialism, are we talking about Cuba or are we talking about the Netherlands? Because you could argue that Northern Europe does socialism, they have a lot more things that are public rather than private, but do they have private businesses? Of course they do, right?

So I would argue that democratic capitalism is the right way to go, where we have capitalism but it is checked by democracy. The CEOs and the shareholders look out for the companies, and the legislators and the president and the prime ministers are supposed to look out for the citizens and check the corporations so they don’t run amok. I think Northern Europe’s probably pretty close to that.

In terms of candidates here in America, again, I’d have to say Ro Khanna is probably the closest one to that. And so if you go too far left, I get it that that’s hardest especially on identity politics, which again, we’re not a fan of on The Young Turks, and we don’t think that’s the right direction to go in, and it just divides our country. So I don’t think that that type of far-left candidate can win a national election.

But after what Trump does to this country, what he’s already done to this country, Republicans, I have one thing to tell you. There’s no way. The midterms are gone. Nobody’s showing up to vote. Their voter enthusiasm is gone, obliterated. And by 2028, we’re going to have the disaster from the war and disaster from AI unemployment.

So they only have one guy who could win, and I’m worried about it, and that’s Tucker Carlson. If Tucker runs in the Republican primary, he definitely wins that primary. You can quote me on it. And then you could have Kevin laughing and you could rerun that tape. It’ll be great.

In fact, back in 2016, I was on ABC’s This Week with Stephanopoulos. They asked the whole panel who’s going to win. At that point, they had just done the Democratic National Convention and Hillary Clinton had a 10-point lead. I was the only one on the panel to say Donald Trump was going to win, and they all laughed out loud. Populists win.

The people chasing after the donors, whether it’s Israel or Big Pharma or any of the other donors, nobody likes those people. Kamala Harris lost because she was bragging about how she had 90 corporate CEOs on her side. I got bad news for her. Nobody likes corporate CEOs. Sorry, Kevin. Sorry, me. But the reality is that’s what every poll shows. It is deeply, deeply unpopular. And these days it’s pretty merited. So if you’ve got someone in the right lane, which is democratic capitalism, I think they win.

Tucker Carlson and the Road to 2028

STEVEN BARTLETT: We just got 2 minutes left. Kevin, you laughed there at the suggestion that Tucker Carlson might win.

KEVIN O’LEARY: I know Tucker. I just did a thing with him this week. It was really interesting because he’s taken a very controversial view about AI, and that’s the debate we had. And he has obviously shifted his focus from being pro-Trump to something else. But I have to admit, when I think about it, that is a possibility if he would align himself. I’m not sure what party he represents anymore. I think he is a self-proclaimed Republican, but that’s an interesting idea the more I think about it. I can’t— I know I laughed at it, but I’ve been thinking about it for the last couple of minutes.

Yeah, I mean, the guy has a massive base. He has his own network now, which is something you kind of need these days. You need a really strong social media base to play in politics and to fight the fights in the 7 states. You really got to have a good organization on social.

I think it’s going to be fascinating. I think we’ll get a pretty good indication of what the themes will be in November. Affordability obviously remains a big one. Border remains a big one in the US, but AI could emerge as a big one too. I always look at these big— AI kind of burst on the theme, but it’s not really about data centers and power. It’s about jobs, I think. That’s where it’s going. And I don’t know if that gets resolved by— you can always be a fearmonger about the robots eating the babies, and maybe that is an election issue. I don’t know. We’ll see. It’s going to be interesting though, because it wasn’t an issue until 6 months ago.

STEVEN BARTLETT: Cenk, last word before we close out.

CENK UYGUR: Yeah. So look, I don’t think that a pro-Israel candidate can win. But all of our politicians are trained to be pro-Israel, and apparently they have trouble reading polls. So I think that a populist right versus populist left would in a sense be a dream because either way you hope that they— the key has to be that they have to be real. I mean, we’re so tired of these fake politicians in America. They never do what they say they’re going to do. They always back the donors.

But if you got two honest guys, and by the way, maybe it’s Khanna versus Massey, and that would be amazing, or maybe it’s Khanna, O’Connor and Massey, but there’s two guys who are clearly honest in Congress. And I can name Bernie as my third. I’m going to struggle on the fourth one. So there aren’t that many choices. So maybe we go populist, we go independent, and we go in a new direction because God knows that America needs a new direction.

Closing Thoughts

STEVEN BARTLETT: Kevin, Cenk, thank you so much for the time. I’ve been a fan of both of you for many, many, many years. I was saying to Cenk before we started recording that I think I’ve watched The Young Turks since I was 19. And when I say watched, I mean really, really watched, not casually saw it, but I would watch it almost daily when I was going through building my businesses and sort of coming into the professional world. So thank you so much, Cenk. It’s a pleasure to have spent this time with you. And Kevin, again, you’ve been my favorite shark for I think 15 years now, for many, many, many reasons. Thank you to both of you. I really, really appreciate it. And hopefully we’ll have this discussion again soon once all of this plays out. Because the answer to a lot of these questions has been “I don’t know, and we shall see.” So we shall see. Thank you.

CENK UYGUR: Thank you.

KEVIN O’LEARY: Thanks a lot.

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