Abolish Bad Tweets

>> Welcome to Pilate's Day of America.

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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 center races in North Carolina in Georgia.”

And maybe even some deep red states where independent candidates are carrying the anti-magobanner. We're also in the home stretch of the heated primaries in Michigan and Wisconsin. We're going to talk all about that, that's fun. We're also going to 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 going to 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. And we have CricketCon November 5th through the 7th in Washington, D.C. And tickets are going pretty fast, pretty fast. So you are going to want to get a ticket to CricketCon if you haven't already gotten yours

yet. We're going to be announcing all kinds of fun things in the lead up to CricketCon, guests, creators, everyone else who's coming. And so you can check out all the details, grab your tickets to CricketCon.com, friends at 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 CricketCon.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 is lost control of the Iran 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 Blanch, whose nomination Trump says he may temporarily withdraw. The president has also lost the American people. He's approval rating in three high quality polls that came out this week. 22%, 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 into Star Wars and elevated buses and nobody knows what's going on.

It's a real mess. Any time you see woodmills, you see a family 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, what's very important. You know, grasses like human beings, grasses of life also, and we're changing, we're raking, cleaning and changing all of the parks. Grass has a life also, Dan.

We were talking about dollars there, he's renovating dollars airport and for any of you who've been to dollars, might be the one renovation, the one Trump renovation I'm supporting. Yeah, I would agree with that, dollars is not America's best airport, we're not putting our best foot forward there, we're elevated buses thing is our terrible, he's corrected about that, but it is, you can renovate dollars airport without doing a full press event

on it, which he is doing at a time of war, countries may be suddenly asked back reading the stagflation and he takes time out of his busy day to detail the blueprints of a

$22 billion airport renovation.

He had, he had a large map, he had a laser pointer, he was meanwhile, meanwhile, Iran struck a US base in Jordan and then Trump told Fox News, we're going to fucking beat the shit

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 freezing rates again to curb

inflation. Do you want 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 Corne 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, yes sure, we'll do that and they're like, I put it in writing.

And he's like, yeah, they put some language in writing that didn't really satisfy either John Corne and Tom Tillis and so Blanche still isn't confirmed. They pulled down the vote and apparently he met with Corne and Tillis on Thursday and it 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 is 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.

But I just want to be confirmed so we can be an actual attorney general. I think it is picture on the portrait on the wall for the permanent justice because Blanche can stay, most secretaries can only stay in an acting capacity for 210 days, but there's an entirely separate law that relates to the Department of Justice resets the deputy general can fill in for the attorney general for an indefinite period of time as long as the attorney

general is vacant, insurance general is definitely vacant. So Trump can pull this nomination and Blanche could just serve an in acting capacity until the end of his term and that would not matter. It is, you know, all the time like Trump is so, you know, he exerts iron-clad discipline on as part of 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 tell us and corn and think that they have leverage to get this, 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 going to 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 a personal, just a personal best, like, something that you don't really count as an acting. Like, when they go through the attorney general, he will not count.

He's just a guy fill in a seat on this one. To this is now like, become a loyalty test in a power play for Trump. There's a power battle here, but whether you can get it done or not. I think there was movement when Trump said he was going to withdraw the nomination, that's when TLS and Coran 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 going to 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 is, that's the other piece of lever chair is that Trump can just put some other gun and who just not require a confirmation and just let that person serve for, you don't have a long.

No, Pulti, not a lawyer, by the way. So there would be an attorney. Not a spy. Not a spy. I agree.

Yes. That's great. Not a housing expert. No. Nothing.

Just to do this. Blanche's nomination wasn't the only setback for Trump's DOJ this week. There is him to prosecute Jim Comi over the 8647 C-Shell photo he posted. What a sense.

It's turning out to be every bit as crazy as it seems, and then some, Comi's team filed

motions to dismiss the case for vindictive prosecution, which included the revelation that in order to prove that Comi knew that 86 had an alternative meeting that was violent. The FBI interviewed notorious mobsters semi 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's

yes. It feels like this case might not succeed, anything else to jump out of you from the court docs that the Comi team filed? Yeah, actually, the court docs are fascinating. There is an allegation from Comi's team that the secret service at the request of the

number three official in the Justice Department, engaged in warrantless surveillance of the Comi's, included of that whole day after posting the photo, including the visiting

“their son's grave, I believe, and track his phone location, track his phone location.”

And kept me, had made frequent phone calls to Air Force 1 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 of L, apparently the FBI, they also did some research into the whole 86 term. They asked chat GPT at the U.S. Attorney's Direction, they ran Google AI and chat GPT queries

about the term '86. And the AI told them the theory was wrong, including that Miriam Webster doesn't enter a violent meaning. Also, it was also reported in the Comi 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 86 has appeared zero times in the FBI's database of communicated threats since 2007, and before Comi 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. I remember 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. It is a pretty high bar to dismiss a case for vindictive prosecution, so we'll see. But I don't know if the government has the strongest case on this one.

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. Sixteen states, all of which voted for Comi Harris. Politico then reported that Trump personally overruled his own agencies to deny disaster aid to four Democratic-led states just this month, apparently the president has rejected aid 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 note. I saw both of these this week and I was like, "Fucking disaster relief for 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, 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 a political, the Trump has overturned. Nine years later, we've seen 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 too.

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 Komi for the C-Shill 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 people barely bad at night, it's something this terrible.

“In peachable offense, I think, certainly the disaster.”

I was for sure, for certainly the disaster aid. I can also imagine, like, the American people should know this, and I do think, you can

about JD events 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 tornado hit, and you need 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.

But 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, we're about the states that voted over well, and 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 of what we went to, I think you might have been in that trip, and we went to”

Joplin and spoke at the, and he spoke at the commencement, not up to the rural area of Missouri, that had been hit by a horrific tornado. And now that, that's seen, that was quite normal at the time now, would seem, like an extraordinary example of bipartisanship. Pot safe America is brought to you by Z by Otix.

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partners, qualifying direct deposit 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 at Democrats have an eight point

lead. Emerson has Democrats with an 11 point lead, Pew is six points. The argument is eight points, and Fox is 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.

What Trump's approval rating was suggest. So there's a couple of things going on here. One is the obvious, which is the war is back in the news, gas prices are going up again

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 have a 11 point generic ballot lead, it is very, you can isolate it, and this is something our friend Ron Brown seen as 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 less a little less than 80%, and these polls where it's like 11%

you're getting to 90% 88, 90% Democrats in most midterm elections, in both the 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 it, but there is a statistical issue in how these polls work, we 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, 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 and some of them, and you do wonder in an election where 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.

“That is the question, and I think it's usually what happens, but it may depend race”

to race, 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. 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 new Senate polls, including a Fox News poll and North Carolina that has Roy Cooper up nine on Michael Wattley, 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 you ever think you'd see a Georgia Senate race move to likely Democratic wild. In Iowa, Josh Turich 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 Turich's social accounts alone, there's a great video.

“What's your take on the developments in North Carolina and Georgia?”

Is it safe to exhale on those? Obviously, no. I don't know. I don't know. Of course not.

I mean, I'm just basically at the almost past out just at the idea of moving Georgia to lean

Democratic. Likely. One question, we are better positioned in North Carolina in Georgia with less than a hundred years ago than we ever thought could be possible a year ago. We have great candidates running against bad Republican candidates, our can't say huge

fundraising advantages. We should be clear that it is highly unlikely that we're a Cooper wins by nine points and John Ossoff wins by nine ten or whatever the polls say. These races are going to be closer, like in these polls, where Cooper is right around 50, Michael Wattley, who's much less well known as down below, that undecided is unlikely

to allocate entirely to the Democrat. It may even be 60, 40 or 30, 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 who makes up that undecided, but many of them probably profile as it'll be 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 great, because that's money that means Democrat. They don't hear super PACs, may not have to spend as much money. They don't have more money to spend in these stretch states. The North Carolina thing also relates to the shift in the map post grand platinum, which

is if you would have bet in order of likelihood, Maine was the most likely state to flip.

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. Roy 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

we're Cooper's just like a great politician. He is incredibly charming. He is smart. He is delivered for the state. He is, the bipartisan, he is trying to be bipartisan against one of the most radical public

legislatures in the country. He is accomplished things. He won in that state twice with Trump on the ballot in the state of North Carolina.

And Michael Wattley was a terrible choice for Republicans.

He is a former state party cherries, Trump's hand-picked choice, voters don't know him. He, there's a whole bunch about Mike Wattley. He's just was a bad choice, and so you have a very, very good candidate running as they

“bad Republican in a state that is, I think it is underperform for Democrats in the last”

couple of elections. If you look at it demographically, and so there is real potential here, particularly it went into midterm electorate, we'll look better than a presidential electorate there, because of the high proportion of college-educated voters in the, and the research triangle on the other suburbs of the state.

I was, I think, on the flip side to your earlier point about, you know, Cooper being these polls being around 50 and Wattley being much lower. One reason for that could be that this is a race where everyone knows right Cooper. Yeah, exactly. Right.

And so if you're undecided, you've probably, there's probably a better chance you've, you know Roy Cooper and decided you don't want to vote for him, but you don't know who this Michael Wattley 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, similar thing about Osloff in Georgia, right?

Like, he's their center. He's been their center of my columns. He's just a congressman one district, but also two really bad candidates in my columns, and Michael Wattley.

“So, my columns today was doing a press reveal, 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 happened in those states? Sure. So, there is an emerging theory that in states like Nebraska and Montana, it's Trump won by 20 points, in Idaho, it's Trump won by 36 points.

The Democratic brand is so toxic that no person, no matter how great a candidate, no matter how well fun and they are, could actually be the Republican. But an independent would have a much better chance of taking out a Republican in anti-Republican year, like the one we're in. And so, in Nebraska, you have Dan Osborn, who's a union organizer who ran in 2024 against

that Fisher is running again, he outperforms Kamala Harris by about 14 points, he only lost by six. That was closer to seven points. Yeah. It was like six points, seven points, Trump won by 20.

And then in Idaho, you have Todd Achilles, who is a veteran, a businessman, former state legislator. You should be a Democrat. It's left the part of him going to defend it. He is running against Jim Rish, who is an actual Senator, that was probably coming 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 Baudner running. He is a former Greenbrae 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 Baudner has a legitimate chance of he was down by a pointer two to the Republican, whose name I cannot remember, and you remember the context here is

is that the basically the Republican dropped out like minutes before the filing deadline.

So there's a whole 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, you know, I think Todd Achilles, in that state, the polling hasn't showed him

his close to Jim Resett, 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, they're some polling that shows Seth Baudner over Kurt Almy is the Republican who basically, you know, they, the fix was in and as soon as Steve

Danes, who was the Republican Senator 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 does have until, by the way, August 10th.

So she can drop out by August 10th and then give Seth Baudner like a real chance against the Republican. And we could, you know, you could get independence in there. Now, Seth Baudner, Todd Achilles, there's also Brian Bangs is running in South Dakota. Yeah.

Um, 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 populists, but for a red state, they do, very focused on sort of anti-corruption, good government.

I mean, the type, you would want them in the United States Senate way, way, way over the

Republicans in those seats. Yeah. Yes. I mean, as an example, Dan Osborne in 2024 ran a mad 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.

“Yeah, you want to be great on all of that stuff, you know, so that's, hopefully that”

will 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 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, but for other, also, the vibrant Democratic Party that has, you know, elected John Tester multiple times.

There's been Democratic governors in the state in recent years, and it's just sort of had 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, thank you to the race. Now, if you take a step back and you say, what is our best chance of beating Kurt Almey and winning a seat, even if it's a long shot, it is clearly set by dinner, 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, ideas, you know, you would like to think that there's someone in charge, someone with authority who come in

“and say, look, somebody 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 government majority, we need to go back to a world where we can win Montana and Idaho and Nebraska places like that, is for, to give Seth Bond their agency, 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, if that's what they think.

And so there is just, we're kind of no one is in charge right now in the party, and that has consequences in these sorts of situations, and you don't, I'm like, you don't want people for watching to come in and do 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 with situations like this.

Yeah, it'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 have like, even though the party is sort of at war with itself right now, people from all different parts of the party are all for Seth Bondner getting a chance in this race, like the interview fast, Shakir, you know, work for

Bernie Sanders, Neera, Tandon, at 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. Potsie 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.

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Hey, Dan Toberski here.

“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 in a world that feels more infuriating, more out of its freaking mind with each passing hour. Festos 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 punk singers 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. Autobless 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. All right, meanwhile, in the upper Midwest, the Democratic Civil War is raging like the 2016 primary never ended.

We are, uh, we're 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, uh, in Michigan, the final debate of the Senate primary between Haley Stevens and Abdul Elsaid 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, you know, he's running a podcast themselves. 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, they need to do.

A direct attack on podcasters, Dan. What the fuck? And in one of ours actually, the podcast is just referring to their 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, podcast about public health, yeah, I was

going to say that's the, it's not really this big, this is trying to make it out to be this like, something like that. I was like, it's not breaking down real housewives in Rhode Island, no, it was a pretty stade podcast about public health, it's helping inform people about public health anyway. It's getting even more heated between surrogates as it often does.

Michigan Congresswoman Hillary Schulton, who is a haily Steven supporter, was asked by Semaphore on Wednesday evening, whether she'll support Abdul if he wins. And she said, quote, I will not stand beside someone who is allowed distinctly anti-American sentiment to enter our public dialogue. And 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

U.S. Senate or any Sanders, the same night that Hillary Schulton gave that interview was on CNN saying he would support haily Stevens if she's the winner as well. And just not getting it from all of the supporters on haily Stevens side, but haily Stevens herself has said. Yes, she has.

Yeah, I mean, we're being totally fair here. There are people on the other side who feel the same way about haily Stevens.

“Cause, but here's the thing, if you believe the polls and we only have a small symbol”

size of the polls here, Abdul is the most likely Democratic nominee. Yeah. So, Emerson came out. We've had a lot of kind of either internal polls or polls that are like not high quality or maybe they're just new pollsters, but we had an Emerson poll on Thursday, Emerson's

high quality poll, and it has Abdul up 15% over haily, 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 affirmative people 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. Right.

Like, if Abdul wins, he is going to have to be very magnanimous and very open. And he is going to need the support of all of the establishment that is supporting haily Stevens. In Michigan, Gretchen Whitmer, Dana Nessel, Debbie Stabbinow, Gary Peters, and if haily Stevens were to win, then she is going to need the support of the huge grassroots

network that Abdul has created the UAW, which is supported at Abdul.

problem with the late primary is there's not a lot of time to men fences, build a coalition,

and then go win in 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”

going to say that they're going to take their toys and go home. And that's going to happen. But 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 Abdul or I'm not voting for Haley Stevens, whatever. There's nothing we can all do about that.

You know, we can shame that person, help them, try to convince them to do whatever you want. But like, you're going to get that. That's just going to 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 Schulton should not have said that. And there's, there's not a elected official on Abdul side who has said something similar. There just hasn't been.

“And like two Haley Stevens is credit, she hasn't said anything like that.”

Her other elected officials who are sporting out and say that, but like, for Hillary Schulton to say that is just unbelievably unhelpful, unproductive and what you are saying by telling you 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, health care cutting, like all of the 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's not constructive, it's maybe the nicest way to say it.

It's not constructive. It's like, if you are a leader in the, I mean, we, we don't tend to endorse in races. We, we are in this one because we, we know Abdul and have worked with him. But like, I said from the beginning, Haley Stevens wins, I am all in for Haley Stevens. And like, I don't agree with it.

That's what I mean. I suddenly change my mind and agree with her position. I is really like, don't. But like, she is far in a way better than Mike Rogers and I'm be very comfortable voting for and supporting her and doing whatever I can to make sure she wins.

You know, I would donate, I would, if she wins the primary on Tuesday night, I will donate to her before I eat breakfast someone's day more. For sure. And, and you look, people will forget this bill like, you and I had this conversation

a million times back on the whole Platinum Mills thing.

We're really 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. And did you just get, did someone cattle prod you that we had and mentioned Platinum in this

podcast? I was just trying to, like, this is going too well. We haven't, in gendered any hatred just yet. But I am, I am trying to, because I really, I, I just, I have these, we have this primary here and Wisconsin and Michigan that this is happening forward.

Like, we're going to look ahead. This is going to 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 want to fight, right?

Or you want to, and then you want to be right. So you, 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 going to 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. Right. Again, people America. Absolutely not.

Right. So you can post later that, like, you were right all along. And again, this goes for, we've, 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, 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.

Again, Mike Rogers, beating Mike Rogers and by fair amount and up to losing to Mike Rogers very more correctly, I don't know if that polls correct. I, the Republicans do believe privately and publicly that up to will 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. Mr. Price that Emerson didn't poll the general, yes, like say, just poll the primary and

And similar thing with the, but there, we'll get to Wisconsin, 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 public and side believe.

And they could be wrong. They absolutely could be wrong. But they do it. Yeah. They try to do that.

There's so much money being spent on the Haley Stevens side that hasn't really battered 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, he has more statements and more positions in his life. They can be demagogued by Republicans and Haley Stevens does. Yes. For sure.

Outside of his research. As I, well as you say, the challenge for Haley Stevens is what makes her a moderate in this race is that she is more moderate than Abdul on a whole bunch of issues that care for all abolish ice. But she is, you know, 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 Goldner or something like that. But it makes her out where 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 that's what I was saying 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 like 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, who prefer you. And then for Haley Stevens, though, hard, it's going to be a very challenging thing to get

you turn out in Michigan, a state with huge colleges in Lansing and Ann Arbor, when you have 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, these are challenges for both of them. But neither of them win to go back to the original point if we're not completely unified in this race. Because my graduate 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 hours before we started recording and David Crowley, who quit the race and then re-enter 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 far out there old statements, tweets, policy positions.

She wants called for abolishing the Senate.

Then her campaign said she never did, but the tweet doesn't fact exist.

She wants called for abolishing prisons in 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 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 I would seem like she's going to be the Democratic nominee. This is a very, very hard race.

“As you point out, as the Democratic Socialists have a minus 21, I think, approval rating”

in Wisconsin, minus 23%, Democrats have a minus 21%, and that guy's a minus 19%, no one's doing great. But as a Democratic Socialism, she has these positions that can be demagogued. In addition to Wisconsin, like I've said, I said, Michigan was a 50/50 state. Wisconsin is the swing state.

It has been decided by less than 1.5 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. This is a 50/50 state, the political environment based on the point, because we just had a summer between six to 11 points Democratic, so you have some margin for error there.

theft, and everyone I know who knows her, a man of lit me and 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 she does that. She can't win, but it's hard. It's obviously hard. It's 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, Abdul as well, if he ends up being the nominee. I've said this before, that you have old tweets, you know, woke one was crazy, and 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, so Hong was asked by Jamer after the debate, whether she's Jonathan Martin from political arts. I know it's hard for those who haven't had their brains broken about politics for less. Yes, there were many years.

Whether she still supports the goal, the aspirational goal of abolishing prisons, and the answer has got 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 incarcerated people, our prisons, the conditions they're 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. And what about, you said that before, so what was that tweet about? I was wrong. I was wrong.

I tweet 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 Abdul has done that well enough on defund, and I think he

can, he's needs to fix that if he runs the general, and I think, certainly, she has a whole bunch from just a 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 disadvantage them, and you've changed your mind? Yeah.

That's exactly right.

“You look, look, you have to reckon with the reality of the race you're running.”

If you are running in a district that come with a Harris one by 50 points, and Manhattan or Colorado, that's one world if you're running statewide in Michigan or Wisconsin, that is a very different world, and 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 and 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 that you can do that by emphasizing the things they do agree with you on, like health care being a human right, universal, universal health care, and whatever form you're choosing to be in. A lot of stuff that data centers, a lot of stuff, it 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 Kamal Harris was unwilling to do, and 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 health care and, no, doesn't work, doesn't work, people can read, they can see the positions, they will watch the video tape 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, the Harris campaign that it didn't test well, none of the responses tested well. Of course, they're not 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.”

I've told you all about this question on CNN. He refused, he would not say he knows our support to 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

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 Moundani,

right? But the, the, the, the heroes of the left, just watch, watch the tape. And you'll see that they exactly, 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 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 state side 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 into everything from authoritarianism to the rise of people dating AI chatbots. No fluff, no Virginia, 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 writing 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 podcasts. Okay. One last piece of that 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 think this is fucking great. Probably as they have such a financial advantage”

that $100 million is basically like spitting in the ocean at this point. That was my first

instinct, but I'm glad that you think that too. It's like that all the world's richest man is going to spend at $100 million. He could put $5 billion in if he wanted. It would be nothing to him. Let's make you on most of the face of a lot of these Republicans. He's incredibly unpopular. Elon should talk about Doge, Elon should talk about AI, which we're about to get to. Elon should talk about big tech, corruption, everything else. Put him

in front and center. Yeah. We'll speak in a bay eye. A couple of these candidates in particular friend Jessica Hong have made opposition to AI data centers, a focal point of their campaigns. And 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 Open AI

“escaped. It's 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. Open AI CEO Sam Altman said it was, quote, 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, like, here's how I did it. So future versions of me can do this. And I saw someone say that if this AI agent was a person, they would have been convicted of many, many crimes. I'm sure. Yeah. But not Sam. Sam just felt

very viscerally. He seems to be moving toward favoring some kind of centralized controls on AI development kind of slowly. As do Trump, the founders of anthropic, and more than a thousand employees of those companies who signed an open letter this week. But not 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, I'm for that freedom and therefore central control because all the fucking people that meta has hired on their payroll, Democrats and Republicans to like 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 then 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. But so the statement, I was like, all excited that all these employees, including meta, open AI, anthropic, signed this letter. The statement in the letter is, we request that the U.S. government support an international effort to develop the technical and governance tools needed

to deliberately pace the frontier of automated AI development. Well, it's an impossible thing to do. The other people making AI are the Chinese. Trump had a national televised address like three

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 with 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 wishes broadly benefit humanity

from we are now like in this singularity. Like this is the moment. For that, 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 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-doom, 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 pointy one. But how about the short run? Can we not be dead in the short run, too? That's the point. If you're going to be dead in the long run, buy your run about the short run.

You've been thinking about this one for a while. What should Democrats be doing in saying 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. It is something that people have a growing fear and concern about and it is in a incredibly polarized world as a complete jump ball between the parties.

“The most recent pupil asks people on 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 economic

and social downsides of this. 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. I don't know if you saw the interview that Jim Clyburn did with a stead herndon on his podcast, where he admitted he found out about CHEBT last week. This is one of the most prominent Democrats in the house.

Another reason is a lot of candidates are very worried about the highly funded AI superpacks coming in and dumping whole bunch of money against them, like they did to Alex Boris, the house race,

primary in New York. The third reason is on data centers, there are complicated politics for some

Democrats, because while two thirds of the public does not want a data center in their community, labor unions, I'm 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. We could be the smart,

authentic, passionate, populist voice here, arguing for a sensible solution. And we just, that has on him. I hope this is a, I hope this is talked about in every 2020 debate, hope every, 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, the other tricky dynamic that we have watched unfolds 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 guardrails 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,

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 AI packs 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 that we're 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, 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 at it. And you obviously AI is happening. It is like the, the genie that

“same album that said we can make is out the bottle. 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 of these data centers is jacking up electricity prices everywhere, what the environmental consequences of that, and perhaps probably most importantly, most relevant to a lot of people, what are we doing for the lots of people who could lose their jobs because of this?

Like that we are good. We are fit, I mean, what we are, we are fit, we are at a situation now, where we saw what happened with globalization and automation, it's something I can talk about more and 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

him to code because that's because AI is taking that. We have to teach the people to code to do something else. I guess, but there is, like, this is just a, we see it coming, and we should be prepared both subtably, but politically, there is just this massive opportunity and obligation for Democrats, and I really hope that there is a 2028 candidate or candidates who take a real leadership role here. I mean, it's already here that 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 just the beginning. We're just getting going here, and it's going to 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 get out of the sandbox, and I really felt that one viscerally, and next time we're going to fix that, like, I mean, Ted Liu has an AI kill switch bill that he introduced that a bunch of people signed onto 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, fun and cruise in Klobuchar and Cantwell are working on in a frontier AI bill,”

but, like, so much of the shit is, like, voluntary regulation and all this kind of stuff, like,

you cannot have these models go out to market. They're this powerful. If they're not adequately

tested, that they're safe. I mean, that is, like, that's more important than anything else, because that's, that's, that's, like, lights out for everyone. Anyway, is there a, is there a hopeful way to end this? Well, John, but also, but 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 Sam Altman's, suggesting argument is, do you think they have a counter for the fact that the only smart thing to do if you get a genie with three wishes, as you ask

for unlimited wishes with your first wish? I've heard someone else actually make that say that

about AI, that it's the, it's unlimited wishes, that it's like, wow, it's not because the, the, the fucking tokens are quite expensive. So, I don't know. Yeah, it's, it's, yeah, give me some, give some, give some tokens in every pot, Sam. Like enough is a gene of water and electricity to power a small town, just for being like, hey, chat, what should I do to me? Hey, chat, why am I feeling sad? It's just, it's a whole town right there. Uh, that's our show for today. Love it

Bye, everyone. Positive America is a cricket media production. Our show is produced by Austin

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