A ~month ago I left from Chicago to bike (and amtrak) to plzdontkillus in Berkeley. I've been street interviewing/conversing with a wide variety of people I ran into about AI futures and philosophy. I also have been live streaming since I got to PDKU, leaning more talking to young founders but a variety overall.

I'll try to share what I've learned about the American public, persuasion, social media and the EA movement.

1. Almost no one in "Normal America" has any idea what is going on.

They don't have a paid account, they don't know what Claude code is, they especially haven't heard the recent evals/metr graphs or even a vague sense of how cheap SWE has gotten/ how powerful these recent models with good harness/ context eng can be. This makes sense; most people don't know any coding, they don't know much math, they don't know what an api is, etc. So having a high fidelity understanding of AI might require months of pre understanding of math/stem/digital infra fundamentals. This interview is with the city clerk of Danville Iowa, a town of ~900. Presumably this is approximately the most tech savvy person in the [...]

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Outline:

(00:38) 1. Almost no one in "Normal America" has any idea what is going on.

(01:52) 2. Almost everyone is directionally concerned or becomes concerned be once thinking about it a little bit.

(03:19) 3. Belief that this might cause human extinction actually isn't that uncommon, mostly coming from sci-fi movies, but people are still most concerned about jobs and especially loss of meaning.

(04:40) 4. The EA movement was pretty useless to me, the other community (Torchbearer community) I was in was significantly more supportive, helpful, etc. despite having been in it for a few months and having been in the EA movement for ~8 years. This has basically solidified that I won't be broadly participating in EA anymore at least relating to AI safety stuff.

(06:47) 5. Social media is hard, Social media is bad, I'm bad at social media

(08:57) 6. I'm not sure what my theory of change is or should be

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First published:
July 15th, 2026

Source:
https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/Czob95kjXPEpKYTsJ/recap-of-bike-trip-street-interviews-across-america

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Narrated by TYPE III AUDIO.

“Recap of bike trip/street interviews across America” by cguth7

LessWrong (30+ Karma)

“Recap of bike trip/street interviews across America” by cguth7