The World of AI Regulation with Brian Merchant
Better Offline
Cool Zone Media and iHeartPodcasts
4.6 • 687 Ratings
🗓️ 10 October 2025
⏱️ 30 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In this episode, Ed Zitron is joined by writer Brian Merchant to talk about US AI regulation, and how governments never seem to make the effort to understand technology.
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/
https://www.bloodinthemachine.com/p/were-about-to-find-out-if-silicon
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is an I-Heart podcast. |
| 0:02.5 | Guaranteed human. |
| 0:06.7 | Cozo Media. |
| 0:09.3 | Oink, welcome to the monologue this week, except it's a duologue. |
| 0:12.6 | There's two of us. |
| 0:13.5 | Better Offline. |
| 0:14.3 | I'm your host at Zetron. |
| 0:31.1 | Better Offline. And today I'm joined by Brian Merchant, the author and writer of the book and newsletter Blood in the Machine. |
| 0:32.5 | Brian, thank you so much for joining me. |
| 0:34.9 | Thanks for having me. |
| 0:36.1 | Good to be back. |
| 0:36.6 | So today we're talking about AI |
| 0:39.2 | regulation, the current state of, well, California's regulatory moves, and indeed the very |
| 0:44.7 | confusing situation. And I think we can start with this, actually, this AI safety bill that was |
| 0:48.8 | vetoed and then just got signed. What happened there? Yeah. I mean, the long story short is that, you know, the people who were actually worried about |
| 0:59.9 | catastrophic risk, right? Like the AI Dumer crowd, the people who think that like this is |
| 1:05.1 | the number one thing to worry about with AI. They all got together last year and wrote this bill. |
| 1:14.0 | Last year it was 1047. |
| 1:18.1 | And it was, you know, again, assuming that you are worried about that kind of thing, |
| 1:22.9 | like this was like a legitimate stab at trying to keep the companies honest. It did things like mandated |
| 1:30.2 | like third party audits of the systems to make sure that they weren't, you know, they |
| 1:36.6 | weren't too risky or that they weren't, you know, including information about biological |
... |
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