10/29/26: Ealy Vote Doom For GOP, Shock Polls In SC & KS, Bill Gates Dire AI Warning

This is an "I Heart" podcast. Guaranteed Human. It's all just a joke. What is the value of these women? I'm Bridget Armstrong, back with season two of the podcast, Curse of Miss America. We're talking to participants, whistleblowers, and people who say Miss America didn't live up to their promises. He looks at me and goes, "You don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder." I never received scholarship many to pay for my student loans. Maybe this is the meta question for the podcast. What is Miss America at this point? Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. I'm Hamza. And I'm Martin. And we're the hosts of Out of Character, the best podcast in the world, is what they said. Wait, they said that? Yeah, yeah, they said that. The best podcast with two best friends who jabber and talk about topical, trendy, funny stuff, give our input on it. That's what you've needed, I think, up until now, listener. Listen, Out of Character on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Sometimes I just feel like a burden. You're a bird. You fly. You're a morn. We are. Out of character. Out of character. Dude, you messed up the clip. There are thousands of podcasts that can tell you how to better yourself. Get worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making you better getting closure, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. If you're interested in blackmail, love, and cloning yourself or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the "I Heart" radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. How did busy day? You don't have time to listen to the show? Catch up on "Breaking Points" with our free daily newsletter. You get our breakdown of every daily story. And lots of links in your inbox every day. So head over, breakingpoints.com. You can sign up for the newsletter at the top for free today. Join us now to break down all things midterms, the early vote, how the votes are going to come in. What the polls look like is Zachary Deneany. Someone I've been really looking forward to speaking with. He is with VOTE Hub and his analysis on Twitter and elsewhere has been invaluable, certainly to me. So Zachary, welcome. Thank you very much for having me on. Yeah, of course. So we were just talking to Abdul Al-Sahid. So I thought we would start with this because you just posted a long piece on how the votes are likely to come in in Michigan. And so for all of the people who are anticipating these results on election night, how is this going to unfold? Where are the votes going to come from? Initially, what do you expect here? Yeah, so I'll zoom out a little. The US doesn't make it easy on us, right? Because each state kind of conducts their own elections. Obviously, there are federal laws and regulations they need to stick to, but how ballots are cast, how they're counted up to the states. Within each state, usually it's counties counting the specific ballots. Then even within Michigan, within counties, you have towns, cities, townships, counting in different ways. So this makes it for a pretty chaotic process that we study up on a lot before a big night like next Tuesday. And how Michigan works is there is a bit of preprocessing of absentee ballots. But these mail-in ballots that come in late on Monday on Tuesday-- so not late as an after the election, I mean, but just later-- are often counted right at the end in these major cities-- Flint, Saginaw, Detroit, Ann Arbor. And these are very blue areas. And these are very blue ballots. So what this means, just altogether, is after 3am, when we have almost, I don't know, 15, 20% of the vote left in Michigan, those last 15 or 20% of the votes are going to be very good for L-Scied. And he could come back if he's losing my vote. Was this similar Zachary to what happened in 2024? I know Mike Rogers and others, it's like this in the past. Go ahead. Yeah, so in 2020, we saw across the country these absentee ballots getting counted last. And that was the whole thing that happened with January 6th, then the fraud claims, et cetera. So a lot of states were like, OK, we need to fix this basically after 2020. So now in states like Pennsylvania, Georgia, those ballots are counted first. Michigan, Wisconsin, are the two states still. And we saw the sum in 2024, where you get still these late drops of tranches of blue ballots from places like Milwaukee, Detroit, that can shift toward Democrats. And we saw this with SOC in closing really well in 2024. Gotcha. So everybody can go ahead and drop your nightmare scenarios. The Senate is coming down to Michigan. And it goes late into the night. And then there's a big Detroit mail drop. And you can imagine how much chaos Trump is going to pull if that ends up being the scenario. But Zachary, I wanted to get your overall take on what you're seeing in the early vote. And perhaps you could just start with what we can and can't learn from the early vote, because those caveats are important. But also if there are any particular trends that are sticking out to you that you have found noteworthy thus far. Yeah, so of course caveats with early voting. We don't know who people are voting for. We know many of the people who are voting. We don't even know everyone who's voting yet. But in some states, like Florida, Georgia, North Carolina, Texas, we're talking about over 2/3 of the votes being cast before election day. And what we like to do isn't just look at the overall number and say, oh, more Democrats are voting than Republicans. That's great. Or something for Democrats, because that always happens. Election day is always going to be more red. But what we really like to do is look at people who don't often vote in the past, people who it's a feat and achievement to mobilize them. Get them off the couch and have them cast a ballot. And overwhelmingly, when we're looking at people who didn't vote in 2022, maybe didn't even vote in 2024. But are coming out in the last few weeks, they are disproportionately democratic, which is good for Democrats because it means you're reaching deeper into the base. And we especially see this with two groups. First, young voters. In 2024, in North Carolina, Gen Z, turn out between registered Democrats and registered Republicans was similar. This year, it's five to one. Republican youth turnout has fallen off of a cliff. Second, Hispanic voters. Hispanic turnout is very, very high. Whether it's in Texas, or even North Carolina, Louisiana, Georgia places where you don't think they're being as many Hispanics, Hispanic turnout is just very, very strong. So what's interesting, and I saw this specifically in Florida and in North Carolina, how much Zachary can we extrapolate, state-by-state data to nationwide? Or is that just a fools attitude? So what I was talking about is those four states of Florida, North Carolina, Texas, Georgia, and then also all toss a kind of Louisiana in there, where we get really, really, really high quality early vote data. Or a specific region of the US, kind of the Southeast. But North Carolina and Texas aren't super similar states. Texas is kind of a sun belt, heavy Hispanic state. North Carolina is kind of mixed white and black and almost closer to the mid-Atlantic region now. And Florida, of course, is just its own thing. But the reality is that consistently, the last two election cycles, these states did have some red flags for Democrats. And now they have red flags for Republicans. And even in other states, where we don't feel we have as high quality data to work with, but it's still something. So that would be Arizona, Nevada, Iowa, Kansas. It's still worth, we're seeing the similar trends kind of come out there as well, even if it's not what I'd lead a conversation with. So Zachary, if the two groups that are really turning up for Democrats in significant ways, are young voters and Hispanic voters, where are the states, the sort of key battleground states, where you would expect those groups to be most impactful? - So I think Texas leads the list. In the sense it's a very Hispanic state. We'll expect about one in four voters on November 3rd in Texas to be Hispanic. And then the Democratic base in states like Texas, Arizona, Florida is more of kind of a young diverse vote. On the other hand, states like Ohio, Wisconsin, Iowa, the base for Democrats is very highly educated, high engagement white voters and often in college towns, like Madison or Columbus, basically. So I don't wanna overtly say that, that just because, for instance, North Carolina, we're seeing a situation where the electorate just by registration, again, we don't know who they're voting for, but these people when you register to vote in North Carolina, you say I'm a Democrat, I'm a Republican, and correlates heavily with vote choice. We're seeing a situation where the electorate in North Carolina could be up to 10 points more blue alone, just on who's turning out that would be Harris winning the people who turn out in 2026 in North Carolina by seven. And wow, that is a North Carolina specific thing. We are not seeing this anywhere else so far. But when you're just seeing that type of environment in a state, obviously states will be different, but still just the overall picture, states just range from mediocre to horrific for Republicans so far and what we're seeing in talks. - Yeah. - Okay. - Can we put C6 up on the screen? This is interesting. This is from Signal, it's a GOP pollster, and they say among those who have already voted, 6% of Republicans have voted for the Democratic candidate while 0% Democrats have voted for Republicans, among independents, Democrats are winning by 37 points, almost all Republican crossover comes from voters who identify as mostly Republican, rather than strongly Republican. So if that does hold, how would you see that and extrapolate it to some of the data that we've seen so far? - Yeah, so the early voting stuff, a lot of what we just talked about is turnout, right? There are two ingredients in the recipe to win elections. One is good turnout. People who are more likely to vote for you than not, you want them to come out and vote. Second is persuasion, which is, there are people who are pretty high engagement, but they switch, cycle to cycle. It might not be too many people, it might be five or seven percent of the electorate, but that's the big swings we see from election to election. And so far, you know, its Democrats turn out, looks quite good for them. We're seeing that in this early voting data. And persuasion looks quite good for Democrats. We're seeing these polls where Trump is 20 points under water. I mean, it shouldn't be a surprise when we're looking at then these national generic ballot polls. And we see a lot of people who said they voted for Trump in 2024 are now supporting Democrats. So let's slow down here. All right. Everything sounds great for Democrats. Zachary, right? Why is the Senate not a lock? Why would you also say the Senate's very competitive answers because Democrats are fighting this battle on red turf. They have to win two states out of Iowa, Ohio, Texas, Alaska. Trump won all four of those states by double digits in 2024. Things are going very well for Democrats and they better be going very well for Democrats. If they want a chance to win Texas, chance to win Alaska, these are not states that Democrats normally contend in. A Tallarico one point loss in Texas would be the best performance for a Democrat in the state in 32 years. And at this point, it would still be a big disappointment for Democrats. All right. Zachary, you had to quick move locations because there was a meeting about to start there, although I kind of like this new background better. But you were saying 2022, tail of two candidates pick up where you left off. Yes. So tail of two candidates and two races in 2022. So first of all, let's go to New York three. This is a seat that Biden won by double digits on Long Island. And there were some negative things for Democrats going on. Kathy Hocal did not perform very well in that gubernatorial election. There was some general fatigue with for reput from New York voters in general against democratic leadership and Republicans flipped the seat, even though Biden won it by double digits. We'll go to Washington three. Republicans nominated Joe Kent there. This is a seat that Trump won. And in a red year, you'd think this would be a lock for Republicans. Just forecasters, race raters had it as a seat that Republicans should win. But Joe Kent who had some ties to fringe right groups turned out to be a terrible candidate and ended up losing a district, he should have won. And this is something we see happen more in midterm years like 2022 was 2026 is because there's no national race that's tying everything together, different states and different candidates are going to see bigger or smaller shifts usually toward or away from Democrats. And in the case of Susan Collins in Maine, even a shift toward Republicans in a blue year, just because she's such a strong candidate in the past. Well, Zachary, we really appreciate your time, man. Thank you for all of this breakdown. And for bearing with us as you had to change rooms, but the excellent analysis will have a link to your Twitter in our description. We recommend everybody go and follow him. Thank you. Thank you, Zachary. Thank you, Zachary. Take care. I'm Hamza. And I'm Martin. And we're the hosts of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know. There's a lot of them to listen to these days. How are you going to get to us? Well, there's a specific reason why you should listen to us. We are the best podcast in the entire world. I swear. I know. Bold. But why don't we list some of the things we might talk about on a regular episode? So sometimes we'll talk about, I don't know, the Uber driver we just had. And how nice they were or if we tip them or not, come and find out. Sometimes we'll talk about that weird news story from last week. It's the one you're thinking about. Trust me. You will talk about music and what's happening in the underground or drama and music or TV shows or the Med Gala and what the actors wore. What we're saying is we're not afraid to talk about everything under the sun. And if you want to see what that's like, come join us. It's a place where everyone can hang out, anyone, wherever you're from, whatever you're like, you're welcome. Listen Out of Character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Pods or wherever you get your podcasts. For more than a century, Miss America sold the country of fantasy. But over the past decade, the crown's been slipping. They said, goodbye to swimsuits, now, hello to lawsuits. I'm Bridget Armstrong. Last season, we took you inside the world of America's next top model. Now I'm back with season two of this podcast, Curse of Miss America, investigating the rise, fall, an uncertain future of one of America's most iconic institutions. The Miss America Patent. I never received scholarship, I need to pay for my student loans. Can you look at me and go, you don't look like you suffered an eating disorder. It's great, but looks too ethnic. It's a story the Miss America organization really doesn't want us to tell. The exploitation of our Miss America is treated by the Miss America organization as an attack on Miss America itself. Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast or wherever you get your podcasts. That worse with Kyle Pru is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better getting closer, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. But if you're interested in blackmail, love bombing, cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something-something for a dastardly individual like you. Take a listen to some of the incredible advice we've given so far. Fake a back injury, get the spray tan, up your alcohol consumption. Only women should be allowed to have guns. Kill 'em. Kill 'em with a gun. Listen, it's already over. I'm all about lying if it's something that really happened. The next time a bear is running at you, you just calmly stop what you're doing, you look the bear in the eye, and you say this isn't you. Do not preserve relationships. You don't need them. You only need one thing, and that's the Get Worse podcast. Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the iHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Turning now to polls, well, what we have is some very interesting ones from the New York Times. Absolute shocker. Let's put it up here on the screen, D1, where we have the Senate race that is in the state of South Carolina officially a toss-up according to them, 48, 48, Dr. Annie Andrews tied with Lindsey Graham's sister, Darlene Graham. In Florida, they find a much tighter race than originally expected with Ashley Moody at some 50% Angie Nixon at 44. Another big headline out of this, which is a crazy, crazy finding, is Flanagan at 54. And Tafoya only at 40. Previous polls out of the state of Minnesota had this to be a three or a four point race. Obviously, we had seen some tightening in the state of South Carolina, Crystal, and we knew also that South Carolina had been visited by Donald Trump that they were putting $5 million in that Darlene Graham's campaign significantly seemed in trouble. This Darlene Graham situation seems very emblematic of the whole Kim Paxton problem, where if he was a normal John Corden Republican, I think they would probably win. Maybe not by a lot, but maybe one or two points, which shouldn't be that close in the first place. Democratic wave and energized democratic base in addition to an absolute joke of a candidate here with a woman who literally said something like foreign policies, not my expertise. I mean, that's completely insane, considering that's the, quote, legacy of your dead brother, who for some reason that makes you qualified to be in the United States Senate. Remember, not just appointed to fill out the rest of his term, but for a full six year term to the United States Senate to represent South Carolina in the Senate. And so regardless of whether Darlene Graham, you know, pulls this off and we'll see the humiliating display now so far is just enough of problem for Republicans who don't need to be spending money and spending Donald Trump's time in the state if they want to try and hang on here. It's just, it's humiliating for them. It absolutely is. I mean, we'll give that, we'll just give the caveat. So in your times, one poll, it could be totally wrong and we'll get to that in a second. Yeah. Yeah. And focusing on South Carolina first to begin with, even though the Minnesota poll is in some ways just as striking and more of an outlier actually from what the South Carolina poll shows because other polls have shown very similar dynamic. One of the things that seems to be impacting some of these races in the South is extraordinary black turnout. And some of the analysis I've seen is this has a lot to do with the Supreme Court ruling on majority black districts that that has really motivated people. You're seeing a particularly striking turnout in Louisiana, which is the state that was the focus of that Supreme Court ruling. So any of the states that have significant black populations, that may end up being a very critical factor. South Carolina is one of those states that has a, you know, relatively significant black population. Another issue is, I don't really understand all of the intro party beef here, but Darleen Graham's opponent in the primary comes from the western part of the state, Greenville Spartanburg area. I know well, because I went to Clemson University for a while. And they apparently don't are not feeling Darleen Graham and the polling reflex are really underperforming with Republicans in that part of the state. That being said, I've been watching a lot of Nate Silver podcast lately and he basically put it like, it's possible for Annie Andrews to win, but it's going to have to be like a parlay. Like all of these things are going to have to hit the black turnout has to be crazy. The underperformance in the western part of the state, Republicans stay home, Democrats come out. Like, that's the way it's going to have to be. And white college educated voters in South Carolina. line are much more conservative than in a lot of other parts of the country and there are much less of a sort of swing between the parties kind of demographic. So that makes the landscape very difficult. I think, you know, I do think any interest is in the hunt. I think it is possible for her, but it's still just, for me, it's still hard to imagine she's going to be able to fully pull it off. If she does, we are in really wild territory. On the Minnesota piece, if we could talk about that for a minute. So this result, to me, is actually less crazy than it seems on its face simply because Minnesota is a state that if the generic ballot nationwide truly is D plus 11, you would expect the Democratic candidate to win by double digits, whether it's 10 or 14 or less somewhere in there. Now you might say on the other hand, okay, well, Peggy Flanagan is associated. She's, you know, part of the Tim Wallace government. It's unpopular. They've had all these issues with fraud. It's dragging her down true. On the other hand, Minnesota is also the focus of these, you know, Minnesota miniapolis with all of this, you know, insane ice activity that really inflamed Democratic voters and independence, by the way, in the state. So if you kind of take those as a wash and bring it back to just neutral terrain, it will not shock me at all. If we end up with that race not being closed at all. And the thing that Nate Cohen points out is that neither party is spending in that race like it's close, neither the Republicans are not acting like this is a battleground. And like, there are just a few points down and they can pull it over the line with a dump truck of money. They're not acting like that whatsoever. And so I think that's a really important tell to in terms of whether they think that race is actually in range or not. And picking up on that, I do think that this interesting clip from Nate Silver about that whether this is the end of the Trump error or not is very relevant. Let's take a listen. So what feels momentous? If the election goes roughly as the polls say it will go, then in some ways it would mark the end of the Trump era, I think he'll still be president for two more years. But the minute the 2028 election campaign begins and if Trump has a bad night as polls show, then he's a super lame doc, right? You might run analogy to Bush after 2006. I mean, I think that's undoubtedly correct. And I watched this whole podcast with Azerbaijan, I've mentioned before I've been listening to a lot of Nate Silver. He has a podcast now with some of the old 538 friends. And you have to give him credit for the fact that he has been pretty directionally correct basically every cycle, you know, even going back to 2016. He was one of the few that was like, yeah, Trump could still win this thing. You know, yeah, I know what the polls look like, but there's still a chance that, you know, that he pulls this. And to a fight. Do you remember that? Yeah. Right. And got into a fight with him. Oh, really? No, I don't. But, you know, last cycle with Trump, he basically said, I remember this very well, it's kind of a jump ball. But if I had to go with my guy, I'd say Trump's going to win and he was right. And now he is looking at the polling, he's looking at, I think maybe even more significantly those, quote unquote, fundamentals, and he's saying it would be crazy to think that Democrats are not going to have a very good night and potentially like a really crazy night. And it is possible that the polls are actually underestimating Democrats. And the way that he explained it, which to me made a lot of intuitive sense, as he said, compared to 2018, you know, it's another midterm with Trump where you've got tremendous Democratic energy and enthusiasm. And Democrats had a good night. They won the house, they didn't take the Senate because they had a similarly difficult landscape. But it was overall, you know, Democrats, I think won the popular vote by like eight points. It was a good night for Democrats. But Trump was still popular on the economy then. His approval rating was not nearly as low. We were not mired in a deeply unpopular war. Gas prices were not $4.30. Diesel was not at record breaking levels. So if you think of 2018, plus you layer on top of that deep disapproval of Trump, horrific economic numbers and pain and a Republican party that really has no response on the issues that are most critical to people right now, then it becomes not hard to imagine how the bottom really falls out for them. Yeah. I agree. I mean, his Bush 2006 comparison is important because what people need to remember about '07 '08 is that Bush really was a side character. And that sounds very strange to say. But that was at the time of the Barack Obama and the Hillary Clinton dramatic primary. To the extent Bush was relevant, it was about what he was doing in Iraq. During the entire financial crisis, the story of the financial crisis was always more about Hank Paulson than about what Bush himself was going to do. Bush, remember, you know, famously tried to even push tarp over the line and it didn't work. First, because so many Republicans were like, yeah, I'm not going along with you. I mean, people really don't remember how much power he lost entirely in our system. That's really when the Obama era began. So that's what's the interesting about the Trump era because the Trump era has lasted longer than any politician in the United States since FDR. And that is because he did not serve in the middle of Joe Biden's term. And yet, even though Biden was president, he was a side character to all of the forces that were happening behind the scenes, really, since Trump came down the escalator and Trump's grip on the GOP never broke. So that's what the substantive question of this is, is if you lose multiple red states, which you love, oh, one by double digits, then your hold is dead, actually, entirely as a national political figure. There really is no coming back from it. And I think what the problem, though, and this is the one issue, which is different than Bush, is that Bush, he would still give Republicans permission to break with him because he was a political pragmatist. Trump will never do that. And there is still a mega fateful who love Donald Trump or who have a lot of trust in Donald Trump. And he and his brittle and narcissistic ego will never allow a JD Vance to criticize him. I mean, Chris, I mean, neither of us probably remember it, but I'm sure you've read a little bit about the 2000 election, Bill Clinton was very personally hurt that Al Gore distanced himself from Bill Clinton. And retrospect was actually a bad idea. But at the time, Al thought he was making the right decision. But it's not like Clinton was demanding that Al Gore take him on the campaign trail. He was hurt by it, but he didn't say anything. Trump doesn't have that in him. And so that is the last part of this, which is, I'm reluctant to say that we can fully move on from where he's a main character. And that's because of Trump himself. Yeah. I mean, it's going to be a sort of death rattle where Republicans are going to be screwed because they will pay a price for breaking with him and they will pay a price for not breaking with him. And you're getting preview of that in a way with the midterm elections right now because Trump has decided to put himself at the center of all of these races, you know, going to Michigan where Mike Rogers has tried to be like, I'm not really on board with this Iran war. Well, now there you are on stage, hugging President Trump. And he is a deeply unpopular figure in the state of Michigan. And so he is midterm convention down in Texas. Ken Paxton admitted on that leaked audio that that was a disaster for him numbers wise. And the polling bore out that it was actually bad for all Republican candidates took a hit in the polls because of the way he wanted to put himself at the center of the show and tell people vote as if I'm on the ballot. Well, guess what? You're under water in literally every single state in the entire nation. So people are voting like you're the one on the ballot, you're going to wipe down. And so that is the dynamic that I think you're right is going to continue to play out where Republicans will kind of be damned if they do, damned if they don't. But in terms of his dominance of the entire political conversation and the level of sway that he's had, I do think we are coming to an end of an era here, especially if the midterms go the way that they're sort of trending at this point. Yeah. If it is an abject blowout, I mean, the real question is whether people have their permission to break from Trump. And I just, I don't see that yet. I know you think you see that. I still don't see it. Here's what I, he's never going to give them permission. But what you are going to see is people who, some Republicans who calculate exactly what Nate Silver is saying here, this guy's old and he's on the way out. And the next part, what comes after there's going to be a scramble and there's going to be people positioning themselves in different ways, making different bets about where the smart place to land is ultimately going to be. So there will be some who believe that the smart bet is to now find some principles. Especially on something like the Iran war, which is deeply unpopular, right? Or on his incredible earth shattering level of corruption. They may find that, you know what, this is a place where perhaps I should say something perhaps I should take a stand. So there's going to be a lot of jockeying and you're going to have some people who make the bet that no, I'm just going to continue to time myself to Trump. But I do think if you have this massive shellacking, including in shocking red states that you will have some who calculate, you know what, now's the time actually to position myself differently for the future. You know when we'll really find out is impeachment time is Trump is going to be impeached. We all know it. Is whether any Republicans will vote that will be the actual test of of whether. This is actually going to happen. I don't know. I mean, I'm excited to find out. I certainly am. I'm Hamza and I'm Martin and we're the hosts of Out of Character. It's a podcast. I know there's a lot of them going around, but why should you listen hours? Well, we're only the best podcast in the entire world and we talk about pretty much everything under the Sun. For example, music we're listening to, underground music, trending music, drama in music worlds. Yes, sometimes we even talk about just everyday mundane situations in our lives, like the cool Uber driver we just had, or the food we just say that is surprisingly delicious. Or we'll talk about the Med Gala and the looks that they wore. Are they awesome? Are they trendy? Come find out. Because our opinion matters. And so does yours. And this is a place where all of our minds can come together and connect. So what are you waiting for? Come connect with us. Listen Out of Character from Will Ferrell's Big Money Players Network. On the iHeartRadio app, Apple Pods, or wherever you get your podcasts. Well, are you ready, ladies? Okay, here we go. They said, "Goodbye to swimsuits. Now, hello to lawsuits." I'm Bridget Armstrong. Now I'm back with season two of this podcast, Curse of Miss America. Investigating the rise, fall, and uncertain future of one of America's most iconic institutions. I never received scholarship. I need to pay for my student loans. He looks at me and goes, "You don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder." It's great, but looks too ethnic. An exploitation of our Miss Americas is treated by the Miss America organization as an attack on Miss America itself. Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Fake a back injury. Get the spray tan, up your alcohol consumption. Kill 'em. Kill 'em. Kill 'em with a gun. The next time a bear is running at you, you just calmly stop what you're doing. You look the bear in the eye, and you say this isn't you. You don't need them. Listen to Get Worse with Kyle Pru on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. All right, I also wanted to keep our focus today on what is going on in the world of AI Bill Gates, sounding increasingly alarmed about the era that we are entering into, saying that he predicts it will be the most chaotic 20 years in human history. Let's take a listen. My big concern is this 20-year transition period, where they'll have winners and losers, and a lot of disruption. And we have to get through that in order to get to that period of abundance. You think it's 20 years for now? You know, I picked that as a reasonably safe number. There's a variety of milestones, for example, humanoid robots. You know, are those two or three years away, as some would say, or more like eight years away as other people would say? There's not that many people saying that given the amount of capital and number of companies, particularly in China, that are working on that. There's no notion that it's unsolvable to have a hand in fingers and be able to deliver physical labor at very, very low cost. And so I could be wrong about that number. It could be slightly less or slightly more. But on that order of magnitude, yes, if we don't choose to massively slow down or stop, then we will have robots that can build houses, grow food, do surgery. And none of the things that human labor provides to the economy will be necessary. None of the things human labor provide will be necessary 20 chaotic years. I think it's worth noting about Bill Gates. How have you feel about him? Got a lot of thoughts about him myself. This is someone who's obviously not a Luddite. Number one, number two, he's also someone who was initially quite skeptical of the technology itself. The folks at OpenAI had brought him some early versions of chat GPT and he was like, I'm not really that impressed. He thought there would really be a limit to it. And then they got to a point where it thoroughly impressed him. And then he was excited about the technology. And now he's become quite fearful of where we're going, how quickly we're going there, and how poorly prepared we are. So add it to the list of voices of people who know something about the space who are saying that we are about to enter into a period unlike any we have faced in human history. And you always make this point. So I think it's such a good one too. He talks about the theoretical abundance. Once you, you know, if you can survive this gauntlet of the 20 years of chaos that were being plunged into against all of our wills, and what he describes also is a sort of dystopia that in their minds is a utopian outcome. So even the good version sounds terrifying. Even the, okay, you survived the 20 years and you get to the other side and we have quote unquote abundance also sounds very disturbing and I think will be uncomfortable for a lot of people. I totally agree and I think if that's this is where the whole like probability of doom, like this is what's important. And you know, like, oh, AI will kill us. It may not kill your body, but it'll kill your spirit. It'll kill what makes, you know, being human even remotely important. You know, the robotics piece is actually the one where I was speaking with some people very knowledgeable kind of on the frontier. They were telling me on the robotics front, we're about a year away from complex like household and/or labor tasks. And specifically, the bottleneck is not software. The software exists. Remember, we've showed everybody that video of that robot, which was hooked up to the latest chat GPT model. But what would it really exist is the production pipeline to be able to build this stuff, economy at scale, then be able to self-regulate. If you take a look at some household items, the leaps in technology are stunning. I'm talking about fridges. You know, there are now fridges that are on the market, which can scan the item of food as it goes into your fridge and tells you whenever it expires. This is readily available. You can go and you can buy it at Home Depot. Vacuums, a few other household appliances have new AI interfaces that are built in, which are dramatically better than anything you could buy even two or three years ago, not to mention television. But the actual humanoid type robots, which will immediately be put into place at manual labor, is actually not that far away. And right now, we're talking about the white collar workforce reduction. And I don't want to minimize that. Let's put, for example, E3 guys, please up on the screen. Microsoft Bill Gates' former company is now literally going to lay off some 60,000 employees, 60,000 in terms of letting them go and offering buyouts. And now, remember what we're already watching, let's put E4, is Goldman Sachs' latest estimate. Quote, "We are starting to see clear signs that AI impact a spreading beyond the technology sector, across non-man factoring industries, the share of US firms that have adopted AI and regular business, now shows statistically significant negative correlation with employment growth, and statistically significant positive correlation with unemployment." But I actually think there is a hidden jobs crisis, which is not even remotely measurable. And that is the reduction of entry-level jobs. Entry-level jobs, we can measure a little bit through youth unemployment, but what we can't necessarily measure are all the jobs that would exist if they hadn't had all of this new technology. AI, work from home, a lot of these things, are boons for people who are middle management and upper with some career experience. But getting your foot in the door, a lot of that, even though the labor itself you were doing was quite menial, what you were really doing is you're learning how to be an adult in the world. You're learning how to socialize. A lot of people meet their spouses at work, a lot of people do stuff like this, right? Or, and so what the problem overall of what we're watching is that the reduction in that will create a genuine crisis. Yeah, I mean, what we're being sold from the gents and hoings of the world and whatever is number one, the story about employment that's like, well, every other technological revolution humans have found other things to do. And number two, when you're asked, okay, well, what sort of things he'll go to like, well, maybe you'll work at like a high-end spa or you'll make artisanal cheese or something like that. I don't think that's going to be enough. I'm not sure about that. If you look at the trends throughout. like the modern era of human labor. Most humans worked as farmers, and then you have industrial revolution, then you have most people going into manual labor, and then when you start to have technological automation there, then people go into knowledge work, and you've seen the decline. And this is globally of manufacturing labeled labor, that's obviously still a lot of people that do that, but by and large, the growth has all been in the knowledge sector. There is nowhere else to go, right? The last bastion of things that humans do better than machines is to think. That's it. That's the last frontier. And so once that's gone, no, there isn't anywhere really to turn. Now, maybe, and I have socialist friends who think this and communist friends who think this, maybe it will be better. Maybe it is a better world that we can aspire to, where you have fully automated luxury communism, and people can focus on things that are deeper meaning actually, than just being able, having to, you know, go in and clock in, and most people hate their jobs, and earn a paycheck in a sort of soul-sucking way. There probably is a world that exists that would be superior to that, and would have better and deeper meaning. But the way we're barreling towards it with no breaks and no safety net is utterly terrifying, because no one has any answers for what people will do with their time. And sogar, you rightly point out that on the current trajectory, the answers about what we're likely to do with our time are quite disturbing, are really quite disturbing indeed. And especially on the track where we're, that we're on, where all of the tech is owned in the hands of a handful of people. This is going to result not in some luxury communism. It's going to result in digital feudalism. That is the trajectory that we are very, very clearly on right now. I also just wanted to highlight another troubling incident, as we continue to stumble through what has been called Black October because of all of the mass cybersecurity incidents that we've had around the world and have been, you know, impacting people more and more, put E2 up on the screen. Now, I want to be clear, it is not 100% clear whether or not this cybersecurity breach was AI driven. However, experts in the field say you should just assume at this point that any hack you're seeing is being at least partially enabled by AI. So we have a cybersecurity issue that forced a major New Mexico hospital to divert patients and close clinics. They had to race to fix a cybersecurity issue on Monday that forced it to send ambulances to other hospitals, left the state without an emergency department capable of treating the most serious injuries. The University of New Mexico health system told people not to show up at its main hospital and Albuquerque and canceled appointments at its more than 30 clinics said it was working to resolve the issue, the extent and nature of which was not immediately clear. That network conducts about 900,000 outpatient visits, receives 100,000 emergency room visits each year. It operates the states only level one trauma center. And this hack took them offline completely for some period of time where they had to completely divert everyone to other systems. This is a glimpse of the world we live in now and what may be coming at us more and more frequently. And it's just your reminder of how vulnerable we are, whether it's the hospital system, whether it's the banking system, whether it's the electrical grid, whether it's public utilities, you know, we just went, well, not us, but these oligarchs in combination with the Trump government decided just to barrel forward with these models, knowing, knowing to some extent, the risk, understanding the cyber security risk and basically put superhuman cyber hacking capabilities in the hands of anyone who cares to have them around the globe. So that is the world we're living in and we are playing with fire. I think it's the best way you can say it. I totally agree. My last thought on this, what you were saying about, you know, to great respect to those socialists and communists, I think that reading history, the industrial revolution is easily informing us about what's going to happen. You know, we just go, oh well, the industrial revolution happened and it was all fine. Yeah, there was about a 40 or 50 year period of deaths and mass labor strikes and of social strife of great depressions, of silver panics, of mass suicide. And that's as you live in the developed world. Yes. If you live in the developing world, a lot of ways you're still living in that realm. Yeah, you are still living that realm. You're exactly right. And so let's think about that. What it was like for the people who lived through that 40 or 50 year transition. It was one of the most extraordinary transitions of their lifetime. Many of them saw it as some of the hardest and most difficult fights that they ever had. And in our US education system, we learn nothing about the labor movement or the fight for a, you know, for a four hour or for a 12 hour workday. I mean, just to make you know, to get lunch breaks was a Titanic Titanic effort to make sure that there was unionization and worker protection was one of the greatest struggles of the age in which thousands of people died, tens of thousands of people, if you count people who died from bad working conditions, disease, they lived in hovels. I'm not saying that's going to happen to us, but I'm saying that is a very instructive path about how difficult it was to live through that. It's even worse than that because at least at that point in time, they needed our labor. I know. So we had some leverage. We had some power. If you're talking about a technology that eliminates that need entirely, then what leverage and power do we have left in the system? And that to me, that dynamic is what is truly terrifying. That's right. All right. Thank you guys so much for watching. We appreciate it. The Friday show for tomorrow and don't forget next week. It's the big one election day. We'll see you then. I'm Bridget Armstrong back with season two of the podcast Curse of Miss America. We're talking to participants whistleblowers and people who say Miss America didn't live up to their promises. He looks at me goes, you don't look like you suffered in the eating disorder. Maybe this is the medical question for the podcast. Listen to the Curse of Miss America on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. The funniest podcast in the entire world. I like that. It's a good way to promote ourselves. We are two funny guys having fun and enjoying ourselves and we just know how to have fun unlike anyone else. If you guys like fun conversations, hot takes, what else? Not too hot. Just kind of lukewarm takes to get your mind thinking a little bit. Listen to Out of Character on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast. Get worse with Kyle Prue is not one of those podcasts. So if you're interested in getting thinner, going to therapy, starting peptide, setting boundaries, taking supplements, making your better, getting closer, then I would humbly recommend other podcasts. If you're interested in blackmail, love, bomb, and cloning yourself, or getting revenge, then we've got a little something, something for a dastardly individual like you. Listen to get worse with Kyle Prue on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed Human.