Fruitfly Hard Takeoff, Washington on AI Risk, 𝕏 Timeline Reactions | Thijs Simonian, Alex Heath & Guy Oseary, Mitesh Agrawal

**Jordi Hays** (0:00)
You're watching TBPN.

**John Coogan** (0:02)
Today is Friday, September 11th, 2026
Wall to wall coverage in the Wall Street Journal, remembering 25 years ago, the cover of the Wall Street Journal, every single article, except for one was about, of course, the World Trade Center.
The headline that day was, Terrorists Destroy World Trade Center, Hit Pentagon in Raid with Hijacked Jets.
Bin Laden is on here. The only story that attacks raise fear of a recession, very interesting time capsule, highly recommend picking up a copy of the journal today and taking a trip down in memory of the tragedy. The one piece of news that broke through this day that was not related to the terrorist attack was Xerox reached an equipment financing agreement with GE Capital that will let Xerox erase about five billion of debt. Very, very, every other story, I mean, the market was closed. Actually, the Internet got a very interesting shout out here. It says, telecom systems were strained as terrorist attacks in New York and Washington knocked out telephone wireless services across the Northeast. The Internet proved the most reliable way to communicate following the attacks as the phone system sagged from severed lines and an extraordinary volume of calls. Corporate executives used email to find employees across town or across the country. So interesting to see, but there's so much to go into and lots of interesting retrospectives across all the different media organizations. I don't know that I have a particular anything to dive into there, but it's interesting for you to go and dig into. Anyway, moving on, let me tell you about ramp.com. Time is money, save both, easy to use corporate cards, bill pay, and accounting, and a whole lot more, all in one place, now with musicals. Anyway, what are the AI do-mers actually proposing? That's the question I was trying to answer this morning. For a while-

**Jordi Hays** (2:02)
20-year sentences.

**John Coogan** (2:04)
That's one.
So yeah, there will be this weird translation layer between the thought leaders and the people that are writing policy papers effectively, and then what actually gets implemented. What gets votes basically can be wildly different because to get the populace to actually support something, you need to wrap it in a different structure potentially. AI 2027 predicted that this month, late in 2026, Congress would wake up and that is in the journal. Congress is suddenly waking up to the AI doomsday threat. So this is happening all over the place. Was it Matt Damon who was caught on TMZ being interrogated about his thoughts on AI risk? There's now protests. I believe AI 2027 predicts a 10,000 person anti-AI protest by the end of the year. I was trying to figure out how big this protest in Chapel Hill, North Carolina earlier this month was. I think it came in sub 10K, but certainly tracking to it.
It was about 150 people at this protest in Chapel Hill, but just two ooms away from a prediction from AI 2027
AI 2027 and the SQL AI 2040, frustratingly vague about impacts outside of the AI industry. There's a lot of really amazing predictions about agentic capabilities and the amount of compute that will be marshaled and even lab revenue. But there's not as much predictive stats and calls around like, what will it do to GDP? What will it do to employment? What will, how often will people actually be using this? What will it actually be good at? The diffusion question is still sort of left unanswered. But they're clearly taking it very seriously. There's a huge press cycle around this. And the journal says that Congress is suddenly waking up. So I wanted to dig into what the actual proposal is, cuz the joke for a while has been just like everyone when they're pressed on this, they just say we gotta talk about it. We gotta talk about this.
AI 2040, Daniel.

**Jordi Hays** (4:23)
One thing that stands out, it's interesting to me that there's been so much more seemingly grassroots mobilization around the anti-flock movement, deflock, when you compare that. And you don't see videos of people with 100,000 likes saying, like, here's how to cut power to your local data center.

**John Coogan** (4:49)
Not for X-risk reasons, but you will see a post that's just like, I don't like AI image generation because I'm an artist. And that will get a lot. So there is a lot of anti-AI sentiment.

**Jordi Hays** (4:58)
But what I'm saying is that the sentiment, the anti-flock sentiment converted into actual physical actions by a bunch of just otherwise normal people. I'm saying we haven't seen that yet.
With data centers, maybe we don't, but it's notable.