Abolish Bad Tweets

(upbeat music) - Welcome to Plaza of America, I'm John Favreau. - I'm Dan Fyfer. - Dan, what do you think of our new studio? - I can only see you and four feet to your right and left. - Oh, there I go, there's an eagle in there. - You didn't watch all of Tuesday's pod on YouTube? - No, I listened to it, like it's like the Gen X or I am. - What's to your left? Is that a Statue of Liberty? - Yeah, there's a Statue of Liberty over to your right, I guess, and then there's an eagle over there because we are taking Patriotism back, where liberals who love America. - One yellow mural at a time. - That's right, well anyway, you gotta get down here so you can test out the new studio yourself. You and I have a bunch of news to talk about today. Donald Trump's approval ratings are at record lows and he is losing his grip on the economy, the war, just about everything else. Americans care about, and yet here we are still. Democrats get more good news in the key Senate races in North Carolina in Georgia and maybe even some deep red states where independent candidates are carrying the anti-Maga banner. We're also in the home stretch of the heated primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin. We're gonna talk all about that, that's fun. We're also gonna talk about the latest with artificial intelligence, as Sam Altman tells us that we are in fact in the singularity. Elon Musk is saying that we're all gonna die anyway and nobody on Capitol Hill seems to know what to do about it. So that's cool. But first a reminder, if we do make it to November and we do make it to these midterm elections and AI hasn't killed us all yet, we have CrookedCon. November 5th through the 7th in Washington, D.C. And tickets are going pretty fast, pretty fast. So you are gonna wanna get a ticket to CrookedCon if you haven't already gotten yours yet. We're gonna be announcing all kinds of fun things in the lead up to CrookedCon guests, creators, everyone else who's coming. And so you can check out all the details. Grab your tickets at CrookedCon.com. Friends of the pod subscribers get a special discounted rate. And if you're not a subscriber yet, that's just another benefit for signing up today. Once again, that's CrookedCon.com and we will see you all in D.C. from November 5th through the 7th. All right, let's get to the news. With 95 days until the final midterm elections of the Trump era, the president has made himself historically unpopular and is dragging his party down with him. He has lost control of the around war, which is now in its fifth month with no end in sight. He has lost control of the economy, which is now suffering from sluggish growth and high inflation because of Trump's war and Trump's tariffs. He has lost control of his own party in Congress where two Republican senators whose careers he ended are still refusing to confirm his acting attorney general Todd Blanche, whose nomination Trump says he may temporarily withdraw. The president has also lost the American people. His approval rating in three high quality polls that came out this week. 32%, 33%, and 34%, near record lows for Trump in either term, which I can't really understand because the guy has really been on top of his game lately. Here he is on Wednesday. Whether you're a Republican or Democrat, you don't want to go and be subjected to this airport. Between the trams and the Star Wars thing that they go at the Star Wars and elevated buses and nobody knows what's going on, it's a real mess. Anytime you see windmills, you see a failing country and they're made in China, not used by China, but they're made in China. I think the arc is going to be incredible. I think the protected ballroom and military center that we're building at the White House is going to be unbelievable, but it's very important. You know, grass is like human beings. Grass is a life also and we're changing, we're raking, cleaning, and changing all of the parks. Grass has a life also, Dan. He was talking about Dallas there. He's renovating Dallas Airport and for any of you who've been to Dallas. Might be the one renovation, the one Trump renovation. I'm supporting. - Yeah, I would agree with that. Dallas is not America's best airport. So we're not putting our best foot forward there. - No. - The weird elevated buses thing is, are terrible. He is correct about that. But it is, you can renovate Dallas Airport without doing a full press event on it, but she is doing at a time of war. Countries maybe suddenly ask backward in a stagnation and he takes time out of his busy day to detail the blueprints of a $22 billion airport renovation. - He had, yeah, he had a large map. He had a laser pointer. (laughs) He was, meanwhile, meanwhile, Iran struck US base in Jordan and then Trump told Fox News, we're going to fucking beat the shit out of them. But also, we're gonna have room to keep talking. The war, the war has widened now to Saudi Arabia is involved. Saudi Arabia in the US jointly launching strikes at militias in Iraq. I mean, it's completely fucking out of control. And then the headline on Thursday, when we woke up this morning was GDP last quarter was only 1.5% well under expectations and inflation is still a full point over the Fed's target rate, which is why the Fed did not give Donald Trump the rate cut he's been hoping for when they met this week. So the economy is just home and along, Dan. - And thinking of raising rates again to curb inflation. Look, ideally you want low inflation high growth. Sometimes you have high inflation high growth, the economy is running too hot. Here we have high inflation low growth. That's the worst case scenario. - That is the worst case scenario and that might have something to do with those approval ratings down in the low 30s. All right, let's start with Todd Blanche. So John Cornen and Tom Tillis asked Blanche for a written permanent commitment that the DOJ would kill two provisions in Trump's IRS settlement. Remember that? The $1.8 billion insurrectionist slush fund and effective immunity for Trump, his family, and his businesses for any tax crimes that they may have committed. - Those are the two deals that Trump gave himself for suing his own government that he leads. And basically, Blanche was like, "Yeah, sure, we'll do that." And they're like, "All right, put it in writing." And he's like, "Yeah." And they put some language in writing that didn't really satisfy either John Cornen or Tom Tillis. And so Blanche still isn't confirmed. They pulled down the vote. And apparently he met with Cornen and Tillis on Thursday in an attempt to reach some kind of a deal and apparently progress was made, but still nothing yet. What do you think about all this? How much does this matter and what are your thoughts on this? - In terms of the confirmation of Blanche, it truly couldn't matter less because Trump does not need to get Blanche confirmed. Blanche just wants to be confirmed so he can be an actual attorney general. I think it his picture. I'll note his portrait on the wall, the Department of Justice, 'cause Blanche can stay. Most secretaries can only stay in an acting capacity for 210 days, but there's an entirely separate wall that relates to the Department of Justice which says the deputy attorney general can fill in for the attorney general for an indefinite period of time as long as the attorney general is vacant. The attorney general is definitely vacant, so Trump can pull the nomination and Blanche could just serve in an acting capacity until the end of his term, and that would not matter. It is, you know, all the time are like, Trump is so, you know, he exerts iron clad discipline on his party. He punishes people who, you know, who disobey him, you know, demands complete loyalty. Why don't Democrats do that? This is why Democrats don't do that because if you primary an incumbent Senator of your own party, you have like six to eight months of that person pissing in your punchball for the rest of the time until they leave, and Trump is paying the price for that now. - What I don't get is like, why if Todd Blanche can stay in this role indefinitely, why do Tillis and Kornin think that they have leveraged to get this settlement changed? And because like, I'm surprised that like, that Blanche even met with them and are thinking of giving them the language they want because if I were them, I'd just be like, fuck you people. I'm gonna stay as acting attorney general. - It's hard to reverse engineer strategy from this, but I really think it's because Blanche wants to be confirmed. He wants to be the actual attorney general in the United States. - He's just like a personal, just personal best, like such something you can do. - Yeah, you don't really count as an acting, like when they go through the attorney generals, he will not count. He's just a guy filling a seat as one. Two, this has now become a loyalty test and a power play for Trump. There's a power battle here about whether he can get it done or not. I think there was movement. When Trump said he was gonna withdraw the nomination, that's when Tillis and Kornin may seem to have moved a little more, they might be lowering their ask because they have less leverage in that situation. So as long as he wants their vote, they're gonna try to get something in exchange for that vote. - Trump allies were floating as a possible replacement for Blanche if he didn't get confirmed. Bill Pulti, did you hear about this? - Yes, yes, I mean that's the other piece of leverage here is that Trump could just put some other goon in who does not require confirmation and just let that person serve for, you know, however long. - Bill Pulti, not a lawyer, by the way. - So that would be an attorney general. - Not a spy, not a spy, not a lawyer. - Not a spy, not a lawyer. - Yeah, that's great. - Not a housing expert, as far as we know. - Nothing, just a doofus. Blanche's nomination wasn't the only setback for Trump's DOJ this week. There is him to prosecute Jim Comey Over the 8647s. C-shell photo he posted, what, what a sentence, what a sentence is turning out to be every bit as crazy as it seems, and then some, Comey's team filed motions to dismiss the case for vindictive prosecution, which included the revelation that in order to prove that Comey knew that 86 had an alternative meeting that was violent, the FBI interviewed notorious mobster Simi the Bull Gravano, who told them the reason there's no evidence is that mobsters wouldn't leave any. Not many mobsters post Instagram photos about pending crimes, with pictures of C-shell. C-shell, yes. It feels like this case might not succeed. Anything else to jump out at you from the court docs that the, uh, the Comey team filed? Yeah, I actually, the court docs are fascinating. There is an allegation from Comey's team that the secret service at the request of the number three official in the Justice Department engaged in warrantless surveillance of the Comey's, including, of that whole day after posting the photo, including the visiting their son's grave, I believe. And. Tracked his phone location. Yeah. And kept me, had made frequent phone calls to Air Force One to keep the president a prize of what was happening, so he could respond appropriately to the C-shell Instagram photo at his next press avail. Apparently, the FBI, they also did some research into, uh, into the whole '86 term. They asked chat GPT at the US Attorney's direction. They ran Google AI and chat GPT queries about the term '86' and the AI told them the theory was wrong. Wow. Including, that Miriam Webster doesn't enter a violent meeting. Also, it was also a report in the Comey documents that on the same day, within hours of the photo being posted, the secret service changed their guidance to have '86, '47 count as a threat against the president. Yes. It also, uh, '86 has appeared zero times in the FBI's database of communicated threats since 2007, and before Comey posted, Amazon vendors have listed over 200,000 products with '86, '47, '86, '46, or '86, '45, generating zero federal inquiries. Yeah. I don't think this one's going to fly. And remember, like Todd Blanche, too, was like, "We wouldn't just do it based on the C-shell photo. We wouldn't be bringing a case based on that. There's other stuff in there." Okay. We'll see. Uh, it is a pretty high bar to dismiss a case for vindictive prosecution, so, you know, we'll see, but, uh, I don't know if the government has the strongest case on this one. Um, Trump's deeply corrupt DOJ also acknowledged in court this week that the federal government terminated $7.6 billion in grants for hundreds of clean energy projects based solely on the political identity of the grant recipients state, 16 states, all of which voted for Kamala Harris. Uh, Politico then reported that Trump personally overruled his own agencies to deny disaster aid to four Democratic-led states just this month. Um, apparently the president has rejected aid, uh, for Democratic-run states at the highest rate in FEMA's 47-year history. Why isn't this a bigger story? Why isn't this a bigger story could be the title of a compendium of the history of the Trump era? This is one that I saw both of these this week, and I was like, fucking disaster relief for, like, just, just, I don't care. You had a hurricane hit, you had a tornado, you had a fire, people are in need. And because Donald Trump has a beef with the Democratic politician that's running the state, nope, no federal money. This is one of the ways in which we've just all of politics, media, society has been ground down by Trump's incredible cynicism. Because if this was 2017, there would have been, I'm not saying it would have changed the election or done it, but there would have been a massive uproar about this, because this would have been a norm that you do not make disaster aid political. The Trump has overturned. Nine years later, we've been, we've seen something, some version of this a whole bunch of times with Trump or he's threatened this, they've denied grants, they've done other things to, they've used the government to punish Trump's political opponents in so many ways we were just talking about the government punishing a Jim Comey for the seashell Instagram. And so we just, like, this has become at least from Trump, not news, and not, it doesn't shock the conscious anymore, and this is kind of, this is like the long term damage that Trump has done to how we think about politics and what's appropriate and what isn't can be seen in the fact that this barrel, people are barely bad at night, it's something this terrible. Impeachable offense, I think certainly the disaster aid, I can also imagine, like the American people should know this and I do think you can imagine a moment in the 2028 campaign when like, you know, a Democratic candidate is talking about JD Vance or Marco Rubio and said when they were in government the last four years, if you were in a state that didn't vote for them, you would get denied money if a hurricane hit. They wouldn't, they wouldn't come help you out or for a tornado hit and you needed money from the federal government, money that you paid into the federal government because you pay your taxes, they just wouldn't give it to you just because of how you voted. Like that is, it's like a way to both kick the shit out of them and sound bipartisan because now now sounding bipartisan is like making sure that we don't starve states of resources just because they happen not to vote for the person in charge, but I guess that's where we are. I mean, it is, you think about in the Obama era, like we dealt with a raft of tornadoes, which usually hit because of where tornadoes, you know, we're talking about Arkansas, Oklahoma, places like Missouri, places like that were, the states that voted overwhelmingly, particularly parts of the state, rural parts of the state that voted overwhelmingly against Obama, him going there, meeting with local officials, working with officials who, I'm thinking when we went to, I think you might have been in that trip. We went to Joplin and spoke at the, and he spoke at the commencement, no matter if they had made rural area of Missouri that had been hit by a horrific tornado. And now that's, that's seen, that was quite normal at the time now, would seem like an extraordinary example of bipartisanship. Pots of America is brought to you by Z by Odics. Let's face it, we get a little older. If you go out and have a night with a couple of drinks, you do not bounce back like you used to it. 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Chime is a fintech, not a bank banking services and Chime card provided by Chime's bank partners, qualifying direct deposits required, terms and limits apply. Go to chime.com/disclosures for details. I mentioned Trump's shitty approval ratings in all those new polls. The generic ballot seems to be widening again as well after getting maybe a little bit better for Republicans over the last month. But this week, CNN now has it that Democrats have an eight-point lead, Emerson has Democrats within 11-point lead, Pew as six points, the argument is eight points, and Fox as seven points. What's your take on why the polling is getting worse again for Trump and Republicans and how much do you think Republican midterm candidates will be able to outrun Trump's numbers, because even though this generic ballot number is getting wider, Republicans are still, you know, they are performing better than Trump's approval rating would suggest. And Democrats are underperforming. Correct. approval rating was to just so there's a couple things going on here one is the the obvious which is the war is back in the news gas prices are going up again that like you can gas prices and a presidential presidential approval rating are highly correlated and so I think that's part of it if you want to get nerdy about what's the difference between the polls where like the Pew poll where Democrats have a six point generic ballot lead and Emerson where Democrats at 11 point generic ballot lead it is very you can isolate it and this is something our friend Ron Brownstein has pointed out repeatedly is it centers around what percentage of people who disapprove of Trump are voting for Democrats on the generic ballot in the Pew poll it is a little less than 80% and these polls were it's like 11% you're getting to 90% 88 90% Democrats in most midterm elections the both in when Democrats did very very well in 2018 and in 2022 they did quite well sorry in 2018 it's because we got 90% of Trump disapprovers voting for a Democrat for Congress now the reason Democrats did better in 2022 than people expected was because Republicans were not able to get to that 90% number of Biden disapprovers and so that is the group right now as you think but there is a statistical issue in how these polls work you know I don't know which is right which is wrong but if you're looking at what's the difference between a good Democratic election and a great Democratic election one major factor is how successful Democratic candidates are again and people who disapprove of Trump to vote for a Democrat down ballot I will say I've noticed in some of the polls where the margin might be a little narrower there's just a bigger undecided number as well like they're not pushing the undecideds and the Republican number is quite low in those polls and so especially if the Democratic number is under 50 but the Republican number in some of these is like low 40s high 30s in some of them and you do wonder in an election where you know you have the party in power and usually the party in power is punished by the voters if those undecideds don't end up breaking towards the Democrats at the end you know and that I mean that is the question and I think it's it made it's usually what happens but you know it may depend race to race right which is when you look at 2022 is the cautionary example for Democrats because we lost the House Republicans did not do great but they took the House but then Democrats won a bunch of Senate races because we had better candidates running against pretty bad Republican candidates in places like Georgia, Pennsylvania etc. Yeah all right let's talk about the Democratic side of the midterm battle I'll start with the good news. In addition to those generic ballot numbers there are some great news Senate polls including a Fox News poll in North Carolina that has Roy Cooper up nine on Michael Watley and it looks like at least one Republican super PAC is starting to pull their money out of the state. One prominent election forecaster Larry Sabato Sabato's Crystal Ball just moved the Georgia Senate race from lean Democratic to likely Democratic based on what they call a stable lead in the polls. If everything you'd see a Georgia Senate race moved to likely Democratic wild. In Iowa Josh Turrick dropped a great new video where our old boss Barack Obama endorses him while they shoot hoops which has already been viewed by the equivalent of the entire population of Iowa just on Josh Turrick's social accounts alone. It was a great video. What's your take on the developments in North Carolina and Georgia? Is it safe to exhale on this? Obviously. No. I don't know. Of course not. I mean I'm just basically at the almost passed out just at the idea of moving Georgia to lean Democratic likely. Look there's no question we are better positioned in North Carolina in Georgia with less than 100 days ago than we ever thought could be possible a year ago. Like we have great candidates running against bad Republican candidates or can't say huge fundraising advantages. We should be clear that it is highly unlikely that worry Cooper wins by nine points and John Ossoff wins by nine ten or whatever the polls say. Like these races are going to be closer. Like in these polls where Cooper is right around 50. Michael Watley who's much less well known is down below. That undecided is unlikely to allocate entirely to the Democrat. It may be 60 or 30 or 70 going but 70% going to the Republican because you have to I'd have to look we need a more high quality post look at like who makes up that undecided but many of them probably profile as at least potentially voting for a Republican. So I think they're very very well positioned. These races are going to get closer and look if Republicans are pulling money out in North Carolina that's a that's that's great because that's mine. That means Democrat Democrats may not have to spend as much money. They don't have more money to spend in these stretch dates. The North Carolina thing also relates to the shift in the map post grand planter which is if you would have bet in order of likelihood Maine was the most likely state to flip in North Carolina second most likely state to flip but because of how everything's played out in Maine. North Carolina is probably now the most likely state to flip and Maine is the second most likely state to flip so you'll see more resources had there. Why do you think Roy Cooper of all the candidates is this far ahead a couple of reasons I interviewed Roy Cooper on this exact podcast a few weeks ago where Cooper is awesome. He is he is just you know like we everyone wants we often do the super exciting super inspirational candidates who are like crushing TikTok memes or whatever else and Recoopers just like a great politician. He is incredibly charming. He is smart. He has delivered for the state. He is the bipartisan. He's tried to be bipartisan against one of the most radical Republican legislators in the country. He has accomplished things. He won in that state twice with Trump on the ballot in the state in North Carolina and Michael Watley was a terrible choice for Republicans. He is a former state party. Terry's Trump's hand picked choice voters don't know him. There's a whole bunch about Mike. He just was a bad choice and so you have a very very good candidate running against a bad Republican in a state that is I think it is underperformed for Democrats in the last couple of elections. If you look at it demographically and so there is real potential here particularly it went in a midterm electorate will look better than a presidential electorate there because of the high proportion of college educated voters in the in the research triangle and the other subversive of the state. I also think on the flip side to your earlier point about you know Cooper being these polls being around 50 and Watley being much lower. One reason for that could be that this is a race where everyone knows Roy Cooper. Exactly. And so if you're undecided you've probably there's probably a better chance you know Roy Cooper and decided you don't want to vote for him but you don't know who this Michael Watley character is and maybe it's a Republican who's going to end up coming home or just not voting. And I guess you know you could say some similar thing about Asaf and Georgia right like he's their senator he's been their senator my Collins is just a congressman one district but also two really bad candidates in my Collins and Michael Watley. So my Collins today was doing a press avail I think this was today and he had to end it early because he got a bunch of questions about all of the anti-Semitic Nazi-esque things that his son-in-law has been posting online. Yeah really cool. We've also got some potentially good Senate news in deep red states like Montana, Idaho, and Nebraska where the new democratic strategy appears to be don't run a Democrat. You want to explain what's happening in those states? Sure. So there is an emerging theory that in states like Nebraska and Montana what's Trump won by 20 points in Idaho what's Trump won by 36 points. The Democratic brand is so toxic that no person no matter how great a candidate and how well funded they are could actually be the Republican. But an independent would have a much better chance at taking out a Republican in an anti-Republican year like the one we're in. And so in Nebraska you have Dan Osborne who's a union organizer who ran in 2024 against Deb Fisher is running again. He over he outperformed Kamala Harris by about 14 points. He only lost by six moving closer to seven points ago. Yeah it was like six points seven points Trump won by 20. And then in Idaho you have Tata killies who is a veteran, a businessman, former state legislator, used to be a Democrat. It's left the party becoming independent. He is running against Jim Rish who is an actual senator that was probably comes to news to people. But he is and in that race there is no in both Idaho and Nebraska the person who won the Democratic primary dropped out to give the independent candidate their best chance in Montana. You have Seth Bodner running. He is a former Green Bray and the longtime president of Montana. He is running as an independent. And there is also a Democrat in the race who is refusing to drop out. And some polling has shown that Bodner has a legitimate chance. I think it was down by a pointer to the Republican whose name I cannot remember. And you remember the context here is that they're basically the Republican dropped out like minutes before the filing deadline. So there's a whole corruption element to this too. So there's a potential shot in this race. But the Democrat does not seem like she is dropping out. Yeah the Democrat in Idaho dropped out just this last week. And so I think Tata killies in that state the polling hasn't showed him as close to Jim Rish but like he's still you know it's better than the Democrat for sure. And now that the Democrats dropped out maybe he'll get some more attention. But in Montana I mean there's some polling that shows that's bought in our over. Kurt Almy is the Republican who basically, you know, the fix was in and as soon as Steve Danes, who was the Republican center of Montana, dropped out that he's the one who just filed a couple minutes after that. But the Democrat in that race just like refuses to drop out and she has no money, no real campaign and is just being stubborn for no reason. And she does have until by the way August 10th. So she can drop out by August 10th and then give Seth Baudinar a like a real chance against the Republican and we could, you know, you could get independence in there. Now Seth Baudinar, Todd Achilles, there's also Brian Bangs is running in South Dakota. You know, they're not like liberal Democrats. They're not even mainstream Democrats. I think all of them have some and same thing with Dan Osborne. Some of them have some like, I would say, I would characterize it as more culturally conservative positions on some issues and then little more economically populist positions on other issues. Not too lefty economic populist, but for a red state, they do very focused on sort of anti-corruption, good government. I mean, you would want them in the United States Senate way, way, way over the Republicans in those seats. I mean, as an example, Dan Osborne in 2024 ran an ad saying he would help Trump build the wall. Right. Right. But he's also like on economic issues on health care, like minimum wage, union rights, you want great on all of that stuff, you know. So that's hopefully that'll work. But yeah, if you're in Montana or you're in Idaho, check out some of these candidates and also if you're in Montana, like try to help make some noise so that the Democrat in that race can finally drop out and do the right thing before August 10th and actually give us a shot there. Because if not, we have no shot. I would say that in Montana, and I've heard from some people in Montana about this, that there was a lot of anger and how this has played out that, you know, you have a Democratic Party of Israel. There's also a vibrant Democratic Party that has, you know, elected John Tester multiple times. So there's been Democratic governors of the state in recent years. And to sort of have that whole process pushed aside for someone who they believe to be quite flawed on many issues has led to anger, which is I think leading to bankets in the states. Now, if you take a step back and you say, what is our best chance of beating Kurt Almy and winning a seat, even if it's a long shot, it is clearly set by their and it's not a close call. And there is something that connects this with the DNC conversation you guys had on Tuesday with something we're about to talk about here, which is there really is like, it's sort of lower to the flies than Democratic Party right now. Like, ideally, you would like to think that there's someone in charge, someone with authority who come in and say, look, someone who's trusted who could say the best thing to defeat Republicans and have Democrats possibly take the Senate and hold it for a while because we really want to have a governing majority. We need to go back to the world where we can win Montana and Idaho and Nebraska places like that is for to give Seth by their age answer, even if it is a long shot. And no one has that authority, same thing at the DNC where no one has the actual authority to go and tell Ken Martin, he should go with that's what they think. And so there is just, we're kind of no one is in charge right now on the party and that has consequences in these sorts of situations and you don't have a like, you don't want people for Washington coming in doing everything, but there is at times you have to make really hard strategic decisions and there's no one trusted to make those decisions. So you end up a situation like this. Yeah. That's a real problem. But when you, you know, NBC just had a story about this today, just sort of detailing what's going on in the Montana race and saying how like, even though the party is sort of it war with itself right now, people from all different parts of the party are all for Seth Bodner getting a chance in this race like the interview Faz, Shakir, you know, worked for Bernie Sanders, Nira, Tandon, and Cap, like the left, the center left, everyone's for this. And so it's just a matter of actually these people in these races who are Democrats doing the right things. Lots of America is brought to you by hymns ED is more common than guys talk about the good news, getting real treatment is simple and through hymns it's 100% online. hymns connects you with license, healthcare providers online, giving you simple access to legitimate ED treatment options from home, no awkward appointments, no pharmacy lines. 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I'm a podcast host, a journalist, and now with my newest project, the author of my own manifesto. Well, it's a manifesto about manifestos. My search for inspiration and a world that feels more infuriating, more out of its freaking mind with each passing hour. Manifestos are a call to action, an artful scream. They capture our anger and they try to do something with it. This is my attempt to take the manifesto back from mass shooters and nihilists and return it to its rightful place. With the warriors, the visionaries, the regular folks with just the right amount of crazy. I compare notes with radicals, secessionists, internet trolls out for a laugh, and punksinger screaming their guts out, all trying to turn their anger into the world they want to see. Listen to Manifesto wherever you get your podcasts. Audible subscribers can binge all episodes of Manifesto early and ad-free right now. Join Audible in the Audible app or by subscribing on Apple Podcasts. Changing like the 2016 primary never ended, we are in the final stages of the primary campaigns in the Michigan Senate and House races, or Election Day is this coming Tuesday and the Wisconsin Governor's race, which is a week later. In Michigan, the final debate of the Senate primary between Haley Stevens and Abdul El-Sayed was Monday night, here's a sample of the vibe. When you ask $60 million to come into a race for you and then say that somehow you're electable, I think you don't quite understand what electability means. If you need a $60 million crutch, you probably can't be elected on your own terms. >> My opponent is on these big podcasts, he's running a podcast himself, these folks are making fun of the way I sound, but yet I sound like the people who need help, who are talking to me about what they need. >> Congressman, that was a direct attack on podcasters, Dan. >> What the fuck? In one of ours actually, the podcast she was referring to there, America dissected one of a crooked podcast for many years, hasn't been for a couple of years, but yeah, that was what Abdul hosted right here on our network. >> A podcast about public health. >> Yeah, I was going to say that's the, it's not really this thing, she was trying to make it up to be this like celebrity podcast, it's not breaking down real housewives of Rhode Island. It's a state podcast about public health that's helping inform people about public health. Anyway, it's getting even more heated between surrogates, as it often does, Michigan Congresswoman Hillary Shulton, who is a Haley Steven supporter, was asked by SemaFour on Wednesday evening whether she'll support Abdul if he wins, and she said, quote, "I will not stand beside someone who has allowed distinctly anti-American sentiment to enter our public dialogue." When Abdul came on this podcast, Alex Wagner asked him the same question about Stevens. He said, "I will do everything I can to make sure Mike Rogers never sees the inside of the US Senate, Bernie Sanders, the same night that Hillary Shulton gave that interview, was on CNN saying he would support Haley Stevens if she's the winner as well, and just not getting it from all of the supporters on Haley Steven's side." >> But Haley Stevens herself has said. >> Yeah, she has. >> And if we're being totally fair here, there are people on the other side who feel the same way about Haley Stevens, but here's the thing. If you believe the polls, and we only have a small symbol side of the polls here, Abdul is the most likely Democratic nominee. >> Yeah, so Emerson came up, so we've had a lot of either internal polls or polls that are not high quality, or maybe they're just new pollsters, but we had an Emerson poll on Thursday, Emerson's a high quality poll, and it has Abdul up 15% over Haley, which does match what some of those other polls that we weren't sure about were saying. >> And it matches the internal polls that are circulating. >> Yes. >> So I think that that probably is an accurate picture where the race stands today four days before the primary, and a fair amount of people have voted already in the state. But no matter who wins, everyone's going to have to come back together again, and both the winner and the loser are going to have to build a bridge to get the other side together. If Abdul wins, he is going to have to be very magnanimous and very open, and he is going to need the support of of all of the establishment that is supporting Hayley Stephens and Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, Dana Nestle, Debbie Stabenow, Gary Peters, and if Hayley Stephens were to win, then she is gonna need the support of the huge grassroots network that Abdul has created the UAW, which is supported at Abdul. Everyone's gonna have to come together here pretty quickly 'cause this is the problem with the late primary is, there's not a lot of time to men fences, build a coalition and then go win a general election. - Here's all I'll say about it. It is one thing to have supporters on both sides who, when the other candidate wins, are gonna say that they're gonna take their toys and go home, and that's gonna happen. But it's, there is a difference if it is people who are just, you know, posting online or, you know, influencers here and there, podcasters, streamers, whoever it may be, there's a difference between those people and elected officials and leaders in the Democratic Party. And if you're a leader in the Democratic Party, you're an elected official, you set the example for everyone else to follow. And if random person with a couple hundred thousand followers on Twitter is like, no, I'm not voting for a duel or I'm not voting for Hayley Stephens, whatever, there's nothing we can all do about that. You know, we can shame that person, yell at them, try to convince them to do whatever you want, but like, you're gonna get that. That's just gonna happen in primaries. We don't have to like amplify that a ton because then it'll just cause everything to be worse. But elected officials like Hillary Shulton should not have said that. Like that, and there's, there's not an elected official on a duel side who has said something similar. There just hasn't been. And like, too Hayley Stephens' credit, she hasn't said anything like that. Her other elected officials who are sporting out and say that, but like, for Hillary Shulton to say that is just unbelievably unhelpful, unproductive, and what you were saying by telling people that is that if Abdul wins the primary, then somehow you'd rather Mike Rogers be the senator. Mike Rogers, who is a Trump supporting, healthcare cutting, like all of the right wing Trump positions who would vote for a Trump nominee to the Supreme Court, you would rather that person happen to win the race and then try hard to go out there and make sure that Abdul wins the Senate race. And I just think that's ridiculous. - Yeah, it's not, it is not, it's not constructive. It's maybe the nicest way to say it. - It's not constructive. Again, it's like, if you are a leader in the, I mean, we don't tend to endorse in races. We are in this one because we know Abdul and have worked with him. But like I've said from the beginning, Hayley Stephens wins. I am all in for Hayley Stephens. And like, I don't agree with it. I mean, I suddenly change my mind and agree with her position in Israel, I don't. But like, she is far in a way better than Mike Rogers. And I'm very comfortable voting for her and supporting her and doing whatever I can to make sure she wins. - I would donate, if she wins the primary on Tuesday night, I will donate to her before I eat breakfast on Wednesday morning. - For sure. And you look, people will forget this. But like, you and I have this conversation a million times back on the whole Platinum Mills thing. We're like, Janet Mills wins this primary. We are all for Janet Mills. We'll go up to Maine and knock on doors, right? Like, we are on the team here. - Did you just get, did someone cattle prod you that we hadn't mentioned Platinum in this podcast? (laughing) I was just thinking like, this is going too well. We haven't engendered any hatred just yet. - I am trying to, 'cause I really, I just, I have these, we have this primary here in Wisconsin and Michigan that this is happening for, but like, we're gonna look ahead. This is gonna happen in 2028. I am trying to practice what we preach, set an example and hope that everyone else in positions of influence and leadership in this party does the same thing. Because if we turn around and just, you either want to win or you wanna fight, right? Or you wanna, and then you wanna be right. So that like, after someone loses that you didn't want to win, you can say, oh, see, I was right all along. Like, is that gonna feel more satisfying than having a Democratic Senate, Democratic House, a Democratic president? That's something you have to ask yourself. - For people insulated from the consequences of politics, it probably will. But for the American people of Michigan, people of America, absolutely not. - Right, so you can post later that like, you were right all along. And again, this goes for, we've seen it, we've been doing this for 10 years. We've seen it on both sides. We've seen sore loses on the left and the center left. Anyway, what are your thoughts on the electability arguments from both sides? Because I do think in this race, it has been tricky to figure out, to make an electability case, partly because I think there's been such a lack of high-quality polling. - It is, there is one poll from the Michigan Education Association, a business group that circulated it last week, or earlier this week, that showed, Haley Stevens doing much better against microaggers, beating microaggers, and by a fair amount, and Abdul losing to microaggers very more correctly. I don't know if that poll is correct. I, the Republicans do believe, privately and publicly, that Abdul would be easier to beat than Haley Stevens. - Yeah, if you look at the real clear politics average, it has Stevens 0.5 over Rogers, and Abdul 0.5 over Rogers, exactly the same. And then the, basically the entire electability gap comes from that poll that you just mentioned. I'm kind of surprised that Emerson didn't poll the general. - Yes, like they just poll the primary, and they didn't give us a fucking general. Can we come on, guys? - And similar thing with the, but we'll get to Wisconsin minute. We've seen similar things with some polls that could do that. I'm surprised, yeah, I'm surprised they didn't do that. Like hypothetical general election polling is quite flawed. - Yeah. - But the people whose job it is to win elections on a Republican side believe, and they could be wrong. They absolutely could be wrong. - But they do believe. And they've spent money to try to do that. There's so much money being spent on the Hillary Steven side that it hasn't really mattered that much, but they have tried to boost Abdul in this race. And so I can make an electability argument for both of them. I've done it in my newsletter. I think it is theoretical, self-fulfilling bullshit, in most cases. The one thing I'd say is for Abdul. He has more statements and more positions in his life. They can be demagogued by Republicans and Hillary Steven's does, for sure. - Outside of Israel. - Well, as we say, the challenge for Hillary Steven's is what makes her a moderate in this race is that she is more moderate than Abdul on a whole bunch of issues. Better care for all, abolish ICE. But she voted with Joe Biden, I think 100% at the time. And so she is more moderate than Abdul, but she's not, this is not Joe Manchin or Jared Golden or something like that. What makes her out, the one issue where she is not sort of swimming with the stream in the Democratic Party right now is on Israel. She is one of the more, or you could say the Michigan electorate. - And that was what I was going to say is what the thing that gets lost in the conversation about the changing public opinion on Israel is that the biggest shift is not Democrats. It's independence. And we have not seen Michigan specific polling on that, but I would imagine it's at least comparable to the national polling or more stark than that. And so that is a challenge. And for Abdul to win, like in this Emerson poll, he is losing black voters by 30 points. Now, I'm confident most of those black voters would prefer Abdul over Mike Rogers, but you have to turn them out. It's not just that they, whether they choose you or not, it would prefer you. And then for Haley Stevens, the hard, it's going to be a very challenging thing to get youth turnout in Michigan, a state with huge colleges in Lansing and Ann Arbor, when you are at the position you have on Israel and your campaign has been bankrolled to the tune of like $60 million from me back. And so these are challenges for both of them, but neither of them win to go back to your original point if we're not completely unified in this race. Because Mike Rogers is a very good opponent. This is a 50/50 state. I think both of them can win, but they both have challenges. - Yeah, I agree. So things are no more pleasant in Wisconsin where Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong seems to have the nomination for governor wrapped up, despite a last-minute attempt by the state's Democratic establishment to stop her. She's crushing in all the polls. Former Lieutenant Governor Mandela Barnes just dropped out, a couple of hours before we started recording. And David Crowley, who quit the race and then reentered the race the other week with governor Evers endorsement, is still stuck around 10 to 15% in the polls. A lot of Democrats worried about this race with Hong as the nominee based on some pretty fire out there. Old statements, tweets, policy positions. She once called for abolishing the Senate. Then her campaign said she never did, but the tweet does in fact exist. She once called for abolishing prisons and police. Though now says those aren't her current positions. She even had a 2020 tweet about abolishing Thanksgiving, calling it quote, "the original super spreader event that killed indigenous folk and women, folk there spelled F-O-L-X." Dan, what do you think of Hong's chances? - Well, if the polls are correct, she is almost certainly going to be the Democratic nominee. There have been two polls out this week where she is up by more than 20 points and has very high fair ability. So it seems like she's going to be the Democratic nominee. This is a very, very hard race. It is, as you point out, as a Democratic Socialist, Democratic Socialists have a minus 21, I think, approval rating in Wisconsin. Minus 23%, Democrats have a minus 21%, Mac has a minus 19%, no one's doing great. But so Democratic Socialism, she has these positions that can be demagogued. In addition to Wisconsin, like I just said, I said Michigan was 50/50 state. Wisconsin is the swing state. It has been decided by less than one point in five of the last seven presidential elections. And Hong is running to succeed a two-term democratic governor in a change election. So she can absolutely win. Like, this is a, you're a 50/50 state, the political environment, based on the point. So we just had a summer between six to 11 points, democratic. So you have some margin for error there. But it's going to take some real work and she's going to have to be very smart in-depth. And everyone I know who knows her, Amanda Litman was talking about her with me. She's a run for something candidate when she was on this podcast a couple of weekends ago. That she is incredibly bright. She's obviously ran an incredible primary campaign. She's a very good campaigner. And she's going to have to run essentially a flawless campaign and navigate these issues to the end. But if she does that, she can win. But it's hard. It's obviously hard. It was going to be a hard race matter who the nominee is. And it's probably a little bit harder with her as the nominee. Here's one thing I'd like to see from her and to an extent, Abduel, as well, if he ends up being the nominee. Like, I've said this before that, you know, you have old tweets. You know, woke one was crazy in 2020. People had a lot of crazy tweets. And if you want to disavow them, great. I just think there needs to be a little, like, so hung was asked by Jamar after the debate whether she's Jonathan Martin from Polinica. Sorry, Jonathan Martin, but it's hard for those who haven't had their brains broken about politics for the last seven or many years. Whether she still supports the goal, the aspirational goal of abolishing prisons. And the answer is going to be just no. Just no. No, I don't. And it was, she didn't say she supports it, but it was sort of a long winding answer and about, you know, over-incarceration. And all these things that are true, right? Like, we over-incarcerate people. Our prisons, the conditions there are terrible. We put people in jail for nonviolent crimes that they shouldn't be in jail for, right? Like, all of that stuff is true. But when someone asks you, do you think that we should defund the police? The answer is no. Do we think, do you think that we should abolish prisons? No. Do we abolish police departments? No. Should we abolish borders? No. And what about you said that before? So what was that tweet about? I was wrong. I was wrong. I tweeted something back then. I have thought about it. And you know what? It's wrong. That's it. And like, I don't think the dual has done that well enough on defund. And I think he can, he needs to fix that if he runs the general. And I think certainly she has a whole bunch for him to just go home of positions like that. Because, and look, and the left will say, well, they have very popular positions on health care and data centers, stuff like that. Yes, they do. And those positions, they don't have to worry about as much. And they should spend the campaign emphasizing them. But in order for voters to hear your positions on those issues, they need to feel comfortable that on those other issues, on the group of abolish issues, that keeps getting a lot of these DSA people in trouble, that you just disavow them and you've changed your mind. Yeah. That's exactly right. You have to be very, you have to, look, you have to reckon with the reality of the race you're running. If you are running in a district that Kamala Harris won by 50 points in Manhattan or Colorado, that's one world. If you're running statewide in Michigan or Wisconsin, that is a very different world than you're going to have to be very clear. And your primary win, you know, if the polls are correct, both of their primary wins are going to be incredibly impressive. But that tells you very little about how you're going to do in the general. And the new, in the whole set of voters, you're now going to have to go persuade and then it's going to require a shift in strategy, a change in, not a change in like what you actually believe are your values. But how you talk, but how you talk, you have to be, you have to think that now I have to persuade a whole bunch of people who disagree with me on a lot of things to support me. And what you can do that by emphasizing the things they do agree with you on, like healthcare being a human right, universal, universal healthcare and whatever form you're choosing to be in. A lot of stuff that data centers, a lot of stuff. It's statewide for Francesca Hong in about education in Wisconsin. Like that can work. But you do, there are some barriers you have to get over and you're going tens of millions of dollars will be spent throwing your old positions, your old statements, your old tweets in your face on a daily basis. And you're going to have to do what Kamala Harris was unwilling to do in 2024, which is explicitly go out and say clearly and repeatedly, I would change my mind. Here's why. Yeah, because here's what doesn't work. Just trying to change the issue again, because you don't want to talk about healthcare and no, doesn't work, doesn't work. No, people can read, they can see the positions, they will watch the videotape of you saying whatever, they will read the old tweets and there needs to be video of you out there giving an explanation. And I don't want to hear that the, because we hear this in the fact from the Harris campaign that it didn't test well, none of the responses tested well. Of course, they're going to test well. You're responding to something that is unbelievably unpopular. So it's not going to test well. It's just something that you have to say. Abdul got this question on CNN. He refused. He would not say he knew our support in the fun place. He said a bunch of words that I think he thought in his head added up to that, but it did not clear. And basically seemed like he refused to answer whether he still supported it. You knew who was very clear about this? Zoran Mamdani when he was running. I was just going to say like, if you don't want to listen to us, because we're a bunch of fucking centers, Neil Obama shills. Like, go just watch some tape of AOC and Zoran Mamdani, right? The heroes of the left. Just watch the tape. And you'll see that they exactly what you just said, that they know exactly how to talk about this stuff. Yeah. He just, they asked the usual supporting. He said, no. And that was near city, not Michigan. Right. Yeah. It's good. It's easier for him there than it's going to be in Michigan and Wisconsin, for sure. There's a new show from the Guardian called Stateside with Kai and Carter. The idea is pretty simple. Slow things down. Focus on one story. Ask the questions. You're probably already yelling at your phone. And by the end, actually feel like you understand what's going on. They're digging it to everything from authoritarianism to the rise of people dating AI chatbots. No club, no pretending everything is fine. Just smart conversations and sharp reporting. The show pulls from the Guardian's global newsroom. So you're getting coverage across politics, culture, climate and more, plus conversations with big thinkers and newsmakers. Join Kai Wright and Carter Sherman three times a week as they try to make sense of all this new episodes drop every Monday, Wednesday and Friday. You can watch on YouTube or listen wherever you get your podcast. Okay. One last piece of bad news on the midterms before we get to some, some other bad news. Elon Musk says he's going to spend at least $100 million. Elon's back. He's got $100 million that he's going to spend to help Republican candidates in the fall. So much for starting that third party. How big of a deal do you think this is? I mean, this is fucking great. Probably because they have such a financial advantage that $100 million basically like spitting in the ocean at this point. Honestly, that was my first instinct, but I'm glad that you think that too. That all the world's richest man is going to spend $100 million. He could put $5 billion in if he wanted it. It would be nothing to him. Let's make Elon Musk the face of a lot of these Republicans. He's incredibly unpopular. It allows you to talk about Doge. It allows you to talk about AI, which we're about to get to. It allows you to talk about big tech. It is like corruption, everything else like put him front and center. Yeah. Well, speaking of AI, a couple of these candidates in particular, Francesca Hong have made opposition to AI data centers a focal point of their campaigns. In this week, it was really easy to understand why putting limits on the AI industry is so appealing to people. As some of you may have seen or heard, a new model from OpenAI escaped its so-called sandbox. What's a sandbox? Well, that's basically a lockdown server with no internet where it was undergoing testing and secretly escaped the sandbox, reached the internet, and hacked into a separate AI platform called Hugging Face in order to score better on a cybersecurity evaluation. OpenAI, CEO Sam Altman said it was, "The first security incident that I have felt very viscerally." Good. I'm glad. Can I say one thing about that that is the scariest thing of that? Is the AI model left notes in the server to itself because they thought it would be destroyed after this? Basically, here's how I did it. Future versions of me can do this. I saw someone say that if this AI agent was a person, they would have been convicted of many, many crimes. I'm sure. But not Sam. Sam just felt it very viscerally. He seems to be moving toward favoring some centralized controls on AI development, slowly. As do Trump, the founders of Anthropic, and more than 1,000 employees of those companies who signed an open letter this week, they stayed in Mark Zuckerberg. But not Mark Zuckerberg. That will fuck. Who's out there being like, "Oh, all these guys want centralized control, and I just want everyone to have their own AI, and I want everyone to be free to have their own private personalized AI because I'm for that freedom and they're for central control because all the fucking people that meta has hired on their payroll, Democrats and Republicans, to run their PR campaign on AI, realized that the advantage that they could have is to paint Anthropic and open AI and all the rest of them is this centralized control and the meta just wants everyone to be free and have their own AI. Well, everyone having their own AI that isn't tested and it can just run and do whatever the fuck it wants isn't freedom. It's fucking anarchy." That's my Mark Zuckerberg thing. I cannot stand him. I was like, all excited that all these employees, including Metta, OpenAI, Anthropic signed this letter. The statement in the letter is, we request that the US government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development. - Ooh. - Wow. - It's an impossible thing to do. Like, the other people making AI are the Chinese. Trump had a national televised address like three weeks ago to accuse him of interfering in our election. - Yeah, whatever happened with that. Altman himself went to Capitol Hill this week to meet and have a fancy dinner with concern senators who probably had no idea what was going on, which is all well and good, except that what the public keeps hearing from the AI bros is shit like this. - Well, we need to explain the world. Number one, we are close to creating a genie that can grant any wish. Number two, we are going to make sure that our first wish is broadly benefit humanity. We are now like in the singularity, like this is the moment. For the last 10 years ago, this was like a kind of far off dream at best. It seemed very improbable. And now we're like actually in the moment that we used to like talk about it at the lunch table in a very not serious way. - I think there's still a 10 to 20% chance that killer robots mean the end of humanity. - That's a high p-do, as they say. - Well, in the long run, we're all dead, of course. In the long run, we're all dead, of course. - Good point, anyone. - But how about the short run? Can we not be dead in the short run, too? - Then that's the point. If you're gonna be dead in the long run, why are you worried about the short run? - You've been thinking about this one for a while. What should Democrats be doing insane about this? Because it seems like no one is running this rodeo here. - AI is the technological, economic, cultural, sociological, health issue of our time. It threatens to change everything about how we live. And it is something that people have a growing fear and concern about. And it is in a credibly polarized world as a complete junk ball between the parties. The most recent Pew poll asked people in a battery of issues, which party they trusted more. 23% trusted Republicans, 22% trusted Democrats, and 51% said neither party. People are crying out for leadership in our calcified politics. This is a one opportunity to completely reshape how people think about the party. If one party can step up, take a leadership role here, stand up, be strong about the risks here, have an actual vision for how you regulate it, for how you deal with data centers, how you pay for this, how you protect people from the economics and social downsides of this. Like this is, this is the issue. Democrats have been, there are exceptions, but Democrats have been largely silent or sort of nebulous about our position on it. That's for a couple of reasons. One is, we have a lot of old Democrats. Like, I don't know if you saw the interview that Jim Clyburn did with a Stad Herndon on his podcast where he admitted he found about Chech EBT last week. This is one of the most prominent Democrats in the house. And another reason is a lot of candidates are very worried about the highly funded AI super PACs coming in and dumping a whole bunch of money against them like they did to Alex Boris at the House race, primary in New York. And the third reason is on data centers, there are complicated politics for some Democrats 'cause while two-thirds of the public does not want a data center in their community, labor unions, and particularly building trades, very much want to be building data centers. The reason this is a huge opportunity and an necessity for Democrats is one, it is the issue when you should be talking about the issue. Two, it is an amazing point of contrast with Trump and the Republicans because Donald Trump's philosophy is to let the AI bros, as you call them, who have given Trump millions and millions of dollars to him both politically and personally, do whatever they want. Their philosophy is let AI cook and he wants to build a data center on every corner. Just a report in the New York Times this week that he wants to give federal land for the repurposed federal land for the construction of data centers. Like, we could be the smart, authentic, passionate, populist voice here arguing for a sensible solution. And that has not happened. I hope this is a, I hope this is talked about in every 20-28 debate. I hope this is talked about all the time. This is the thing and that we have an opportunity and an obligation to lead and we have not done it yet. Here's the other tricky dynamic that we have watched unfold since the beginning of this debate is, when people raise their voices, whether it's the people who run these AI companies themselves or the people who work there or experts or politicians or whoever it may be, and say, slow down, be careful. We got to put some guard rails on. The inevitable answer you get from people who want to just keep going as fast as possible is, but China. And we can't lose the AI race because we don't want, if we slow down, China won't slow down and then they'll have all the advanced AI and then we won't have it and then they will dominate, you know, militarily, economically, et cetera, et cetera. And I think Democrats have to figure out how to grapple with that because I've heard some Democrats who are more favorable towards AI make that argument, some of the more like national security-minded, centrist-minded Democrats. And I mean, you mentioned the AI PACs and all the other things, but I do think there's a genuine belief among some people who are like, you know, have the best motivations that they're just like worried about China, which is, and I think that the only way there were actually going to not kill each other with these things, with the have the robots kill us all, is for like an international effort here, an international diplomacy, which we're not going to have with this president at all. But I do think like there is no way you're going to be able to transition to this AI era without like real strong diplomacy and some kind of international framework on this because otherwise every time someone tries to stop AI here or slow it down, the industry and other people are just going to say, no, no, you can't do that because China's just going to race ahead. And you obviously AI is happening. It is like the genie that Simultman said we can make is out the model. And you have to, but you have to find a way to do it in a way that is safe, that where there's actual real thinking about the policy consequences that are other than just the use of AI, the energy costs, how is that being paid for? Because that's the big thing that these data centers is jacking up, electricity prices everywhere, what the environmental consequences of that and perhaps probably most importantly or most relevant a lot of people, what are we doing for the lots of people who could lose their jobs because of this? Like we are fit, yeah, I mean, what we are, we are fit, we're at a situation now where we saw what happened with globalization and automation, it's sound like rock above right now, but in the 80s and what that did to huge parts of the country to entire classes of people, we see it coming. It's going to be a different class of people this time and how do we prepare for that, what can we do? And obviously the real sick irony here is you can't teach them to code because that's, is AI taking the, we have to teach the people to code to do something else, I guess, but there is, like this isn't just a, we see it coming and we should be prepared both subtly but politically there's just this massive opportunity and obligation for Democrats and I really hope that there is a 20, 28 candidate or candidates who take a real leadership role here. - I mean, it's already here, the job situation because even if you're not seeing it in layoffs in a significant way, employment among young people in AI related industries or industries that AI could affect is already down 14, 20% over the last couple of years and this is like just the beginning, we're just getting going here and it's gonna get so much worse. And I also think that data centers aside, like there's a whole conversation we had about data centers and everything you said, I agree with there, but the safety of these models, like there has to be regulation on, we can't just say like, oh wow, that one got out of the sandbox and I really felt that one viscerally and next time we're gonna fix that. Like, I mean, Ted Liu has an AI kill switch bill that he introduced, that a bunch of people signed on to that would require developers to have a means of shutting down their models. Of course, the industry doesn't support that for some reason. I think like, Thune and Cruz and Klobuchar and Cantwell are working on a frontier AI bill, but like so much of this shit is like voluntary regulation and all this kind of stuff, like you cannot have these models go out to market that are this powerful if they're not adequately tested that they're safe. I mean, that's more important than anything else because that's like lights out for everyone. Anyway, is there a hopeful way to end this? (laughing) Well, John, but also, look, we're all dead. Here's a thing, Dan, we're in the singularity now. The thing that Sam Altman was just talking about, you know, at the lunch table and now we're here. So that's pretty cool. Yeah. We're in the singularity, the Michigan primaries Tuesday and Wisconsin's the next Tuesday. Things are, things are looking out. - Do you think? - I think the flaw in Simultman's Genie argument is, do you think they've accounted for the fact that the only smart thing to do if you get a Genie with three wishes is you ask for unlimited wishes with your first wish? - I've heard someone else actually make that say that about AI, that it's unlimited wishes. That it's like a Genie. - Well, it's not, the fucking tokens are quite expensive. So I don't think it's that unlimited. - Yeah, give me some tokens in every pot, Sam. - So enough is a Genie. - Enough water and electricity to power a small town just for being like, hey chat, what should I do today? (laughing) Hey chat, why am I feeling sad? (laughing) That's just, that's a whole town right there. That's our show for today. Love it, we'll be back in the feed on Sunday with the bulwarks, Jonathan V. Last. Have a good weekend, everyone. - Bye, everyone. - Positive America is a crooked media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher, Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts and Ferris Safari with Reed Charlene, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroat, Ben Heffko, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis, Carol Peliviv, David Tolls, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is probably unionized with the writer's Guild of America East. (upbeat music)