Breaking Points with Krystal and Saagar - 9/25/26: Netanyahu Attacks Mamdani's Wife At U.N., Top AI Expert Roman Yampolskiy, Private Polls Doom Republicans, LA Mayor Candidate Nithya Raman

Episode Date: September 25, 2026

On today's Friday show we look at Netanyahu's unhinged speech in the U.N., then top AI Safety Expert Roman Yampolskiy joins to mock the latest statements from NVIDIA CEO Jensen Huang and Mark Zuckerberg. Afterward, we'll look at private Republican polls showing them losing big in the midterms and finally LA City Councilmember and Mayoral candidate Nithya Raman joins to talk about the homeless crisis, her DSA endorsement, and the disastrous Paramount merger. Roman Yampolskiy: https://www.youtube.com/@RomanYampolskiyNithya Raman: https://www.nithyaforthecity.com/   To become a Breaking Points Premium Member and watch/listen to the show AD FREE, uncut and 1 hour early visit: www.breakingpoints.com    Merch Store: https://shop.breakingpoints.com/   See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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Visit bell.ca for more details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Lisa? Tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Youanu. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa Di Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all.

Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up comedian. creator and host of Scam Goddess podcast. The True Crime Comedy Podcasts all about robbery, fraud, and those who practice it. Each week I bring on an amazing guest. Ooh, I scammed

them. What? I can talk to you for an hour. You're a generational yapper like me. That's why I had to make yapping a job. And now you can catch full episodes of my show on YouTube. Start listening to Scam Goddess on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcast, or wherever you get your podcast.

Hey guys, ready or not, 2024 is here. And we, here at Breaking Points are already thinking of ways we can up our game for this critical election. We rely on our premium subs to expand coverage, upgrade the studio, ad staff, give you guys the best independent coverage that is possible. If you like what we're all about, it just means the absolute world to have your support. But enough with that, let's get to the show. Good morning, everybody. Friday, September 25th here for another Breaking Points Friday show. We got Ryan. We got Emily. We got Crystal. How's everybody doing?

So far, so good. And we've got 40 days until the midterms. Oh, exactly. That's the count. I think so. I think so. It's either 40 or 39. So we'll say 40. It sounds nicer. 40 days, 40 nights. Lots to get into with the midterms here. We also have an AI safety researcher that we're going to speak to today. Roman Yipolsky will be having him on to talk about the latest in AI safety,

what Zuckerberg, Jensen, and Moore are saying about it, as well as the Bernie Bill that will arrest. people and send them to jail if they violate the rules of research. We're also going to be speaking to L.A. City Councilmember Nithya Rahman, who is running for L.A. mayor and just had a poll showing her leading the incumbent Karen Bass by double digits. And we've got a little bit of midterm news to get into. But Crystal, why don't we start at the UN where Mr. Benjamin Netanyahu spoke and caused quite a stir. Why don't we start with this clip about the beepers?

Israel hammered Hamas. We pommeled Hezbollah. Do you remember the beepers? Remember? Remember them? Well, I can tell you this. Chisbala certainly remembers them. So regular stand-up, Griffin.

As a fellow stand-up, how do you rate him? Well, it was getting a little more claptor than laughter there, which is never a good sign. Just normal stuff. Crystal, was there any moment in particular that you wanted to focus on from this speech? Oh, well, I mean, just love to, you know, to see a celebrating acts of terrorism, state-sponsored terrorism at the UN. And worth keeping in mind when you hear that applause coming for that particular act of terrorism, much of the, many of the delegations actually walked down. And I think you have some of that we could put up on the screen.

And so the chamber was relatively empty. The Israelis brought in, you know, a bunch of their people to enthusiastically clap. things like, you know, mass murder. So that's part of what was going on there. There was also another moment where he seemed to be threatening. I mean, bringing the Beeper itself is kind of low-key a threat. And then he also made this mention of, you know, the whole UN could be blown up with a ballistic missile. So just saying, pretty wild stuff altogether. There was also, I mean, I also took this as sort of low-key threatening. There was an Israeli representative who was walking around checking a list of which delegations walked out so that they could keep tabs

on who stayed in the room and who were the Netanyahu's words, moral cowards who exited the scene. So, you know, he's the fact that he is there, that he is indicted by the ICC, but no action happens with that, that the United States continues to provide diplomatic cover, that the Trump regime is explicitly trying to destroy the ICC. I mean, all of these things. things just to say they make a mockery of international law is just not strong enough language. Should we talk about how he mentioned Hassan Piker during his UN General Assembly speech? Do we have that clip, Griffin? Oh, do we have that clip, of course.

The clip heard around the world. The tackling the number one issue that's been working for both centrist, Democrats, and Republicans, attacking Hassan Piker. Let's take a listen. It's no wonder. You praise criminals convicted of supporting Hamas. you count as friends people like Hassan tyker who said America deserved 9-11

America deserved 9-11 some friends you have and Ryan do you remember what Nanyahu said right after 9-11 his immediate reaction was it's very good and then he apparently corrected himself

and said well it's not very good but it will be very good for us It will bring us immediate sympathy. His understanding of the moment was that they were locked in a struggle with the Palestinians and that this would, through the process of Islamophobia, kind of transform a lot of people into Islamophobes that he could then channel into support for Israel. That was his immediate. I don't know if he ever apologized for saying it's very good, but he walked it back.

He just meant that it was going to, it was going to be very good for him. I mean, the Hassan mention is so unhinged, like never in my wildest dreams. Would I have imagined that Phoebe Net and Yahoo in front of the UN General Assembly would be shouting out and attacking a leftist Twitch streamer? But, you know, the Hassan derangement has no limits whatsoever. And this also comes on the day that there was actually some polling that came out on how people feel about Hassan Piker. if they condemn Hassan Piker. And he was quite underwater on his favorability. But the biggest point of the poll was that most people were like, who?

I'm sorry? What? What are you talking about? And, you know, this ties in with the midterms thing. Like, Republicans have bet a significant amount of their midterm strategy on the demonization of Hassan Piker. And I think you can see at this point from the way that the bottom seems to be falling out in almost every regard for Republicans.

that that strategy has not paid dividends for them. I also just wanted to mention from Netanyahu's vantage point, there are a lot of different things he could invoke when it comes to Hassan Piker. He could invoke the quote about how he said, the one that he said, Hamas, and a lesser of two evils, Hamas is better than Israel every day. I think at one point he said, like thousands of times. Yeah.

So Netanyahu, from his point of view, if he wanted to mention Hassan Piker, there are other ways he could have tried to find an, to kind of demonize Hassan Piker, he chose one that was intentionally meant to play on American emotions. And I thought that was like very cynical and sinister from him. Well, I mean, just think about the things that he himself has, the genocidal things he himself has said. Not to mention those who directly serve in his government, including literal terrorists. So, you know, to be upset about something that Hassan says. at about 9-11, which, by the way, he's explained and walk back himself and try to, in your words,

Emily, emotionally manipulate people. Like, clearly this is a tactic that's working with some Republicans in the base who were already voting Republican. But if his goal here is to keep the U.S. political machine on both sides of aisle firmly behind him, you know, I think that ship has sailed. He's so self-satisfied. You can tell every time he delivers, like, when he delivered that line, he really thought he was successfully manipulating the feelings of the American public. That's my sense watching him. He feels like he is just absolutely landing it. And it's really gross. Well, he's talked about how this is one of his powers, how he understands the American media. He talked about all of the news appearances on American television he did in advance of, you know, helping to make the case for the Iran war. And I just wanted to mention quickly and Ryan, maybe you can break this down better than I can. But the Iranians have put forward a proposal to reopen the Strait of Hormuz and restart nuclear negotiations. it would be based effectively on the terms of the memo of understanding. However, as we've, you know, heard from Iranians, both in drop site reporting, but also what they've said directly, they would

require the things that we're supposed to come with the MOU they're going to require up front. We want to see the sanctions relief before we go forward. We want to see the blockade lifted before we go forward, those sorts of things. So, you know, Trump, I think, is, well, Ryan, what is your sense of how seriously Trump will take this proposal from the Iranians and whether this has any chance of success or whether we continue to be mired in this, you know, disastrous situation. Yeah, and particularly the frozen assets are key that Iranians are saying we're happy to, we've reached a deal with Oman, we're ready to go. All you have to do is just release our frozen assets. And then within a matter of days, we will open up the straight of her moves. I think there's about

zero percent chance Trump does that. Even his UN speech, he said he's going to end the war after the midterms. So he's already punting it. One quick point on BB, I do think he's actually losing his touch when it comes to the American public. Because he is out of touch with where the public is, and particularly Republicans are, on Israel and 9-11. Like, if you're Israel right now, you're not, why are you bringing up 9-11? Like, if you've done any polling about, you know, where some of the MAGA world thinks Israel is when it comes to 9-11, I bet if you do the polling deep enough, you're going to find that a lot of them believe that at least Israel had foreknowledge of it. Now, I'm not one of the people that thinks that, like, they did it, but a lot of people do.

And so for him to kind of go there, suggested me that he has kind of lost a step with his feel for the American public. But yeah, I think Trump doesn't seem, you know, he's, he doesn't seem like he has any intention of ending this before the midterms. Well, maybe I'm wrong. You know, he just, you know, it would, you know, it would get gas prices down. It would give him some, it would probably help him going into the midterms. He can suffer the like blows of like, aha, you lost. But like, you already lost. Like, you're already suffering that and you're suffering the high gas and diesel prices.

Like nobody thinks you won this. So like it just becoming final that you lost this, I don't think hurts you anymore. Well, his finger was right on the pulse once more by attacking Mom Dani as well. He had harsh words for Mom Dani saying he praises his Hamas buddies. But I wanted to focus specifically on him attacking Mom Dani's wife. Your wife liked the post praising the October 7th master. He liked another post saying Tel Aviv shouldn't exist. you refuse to condemn any of that.

So we're getting, we're getting, uh, his wife Rama in the mix here as well. He refused to condemn his wife. Wow. But these were when she was like, remind me, but this is when she was like 15 years old. Aren't these when she was like? Some of those were older because he's talking about like October 7th. The October 7th of 2020. But just hearing a prime minister say the words like to post your wife like the UN.

On the U.S. Yeah. Also, his wife is like one of the. the most corrupt people on the planet and is like not to defend Netanyahu but like she's a prime reason that he's being dragged through all of these corruption trials he has plenty of his own corruption she puts him to shame why isn't he condemning his wife this feels both sexist and anti-Semitic right now Ryan it's intersectional crystal condemn sarahenayahu when when Crystal's on trial.

It'll be your husband liked a post about Nancy Mace covered in jeans. He did more than like the post. It'll be soccer. He posted that shit. He all wrote the post. So look forward to telling that. I need you to turn your attention to the monitor. Is this cartoon?

Was this cartoon created by your husband? Not created but stolen and reposted. Yes. Next U.N. speech. Yeah. Everybody. I get to work now. Yeah.

I'm jealous of Hassan. The YouTuber Kyle Kolinsky must be condemned. We actually shouldn't laugh at that because it's not out of the realm of possible. Literally, it's genuinely not. It's as preposterous as Hassan getting the mention. It literally is. Let me read from Kyle Kalinsky's Twitter feed. How could you say this about beans?

Fiber is important for your diet. So that was the UN speech. I guess last thoughts on this segment before we get to our AI safety researcher. Where does this kind of timeout with the upcoming Israeli elections? Is Netanyahu sweating these elections? Ryan, do you have any sense of what's going on with those elections? If there's a popular opponent that could, you know, usurp Netanyahu? As people saw, they just told the Arab parties and the one anti-Zionist party that they are ineligible to participate in these elections.

The high court is expected to overturn that. But it's an indication of how democratic that democracy is, that they're willing to just embarrass all of their kind of foreign Zionist supporters who love to point to the fact that they're Arab serving in the Knesset and that they're allowed to, I think the. you know, Palestinians serving the Knesset and that they're, you know, allowed to vote and allowed to run and then they ban them from doing that. It seems like my best guess is either Netanyahu wins or it's kind of a stalemate, but he then runs a caretaker government while they wait another six months or so to operate another election. So I think a lot of, and it'll be interesting because it'll be October 27th, which will be, you know, just before the American midterm elections. And I think there are a lot of people who are kind of clinging to this hope

that Netanyahu will lose and then they can say, okay, now we're going to get a different Israel. And that wasn't going to happen to begin with. His main opponent, it's like the, Eisenkatt, he's like the main, my main thing is I've never supported a Palestinian state where Netanyahu has pretended to at some points in his career. And so when Netanyahu wins, of the Da'iya doctrine as well. Yeah. Right, exactly. Right.

Like, he's famous for, like, putting a kind of war crime into official strategy. So, yeah, but when, if and when Nanyan who wins, then the blow to this cope will be substantial, I think. All right. Well, with that note, why don't we get on to a little bit about AI? The long loading times. The glitchy video calls. That's your house asking for better internet. Switch to Bell Pure Fiber, Canada's most reliable internet awarded by Open Signal from $75 a month.

Price guaranteed for two years on a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for more details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Lisa, we should tell them about our new show. Oh my God, Lexi. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Youanu. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa Di Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions.

And at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. I'm not going to get anywhere fighting. That is wild. I learned that about you today. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. And I've always got something to say. If men were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world. We're going to talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and a little wiser. We're best friends, but we don't always agree. Because you told us how accommodating you are.

Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Liar.

Listen on the eye. My Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. I don't really care. I'm Lacey Mosley, author, actor, stand-up comedian, creator, and host of Scam Goddess Podcasts, The True Crime Comedy Podcasts, all about robbery, fraud, and those who practice it. Each week, I bring on incredible guests like Conan O'Brien, Iowa Debrie, Lamorne Morris, and Nicole Byer. Ooh, I scammed them. What?

I can talk to you for an hour. You're a generational yapper, like me. That's why I had to make yapping a job. And the scams run the gamut. I'm talking about scams from the 1800s all the way up to today. I also warn you and keep you safe against scammers. Call your grandparents. Tell your parents to stop clicking on links, please.

And now you can catch full episodes of my show on YouTube. If there's a scam, I'm here to protect you. And I'm also here to laugh with you. So if you like fun, if you like comedy and you like learning and protecting yourself from criminals, Start listening to Scam Goddess on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcast. All right. Welcome to the show now, Roman Yipolsky, AI Safety Researcher. How are you doing today, Roman?

Thank you for joining the show. Pretty good. All right. Incredible. Who wants to start? Dr. Gambulski, if you could just give our viewers a little bit of background on yourself and you're someone who's been sounding the alarm about the existential dangers. of superintelligence for a while now. So just sort of sketch out for people where you are in this debate.

Yeah, I'm a computer scientist. I'm a PhD in computer science. My doctoral work was on cybersecurity, behavioral biometrics. I've been working on safety for bots since 2006, and bots were online bots for playing poker. Back then, I tried to detect them, prevent them, but they got smarter since. try to keep up, but it doesn't look like I'm going to succeed.

Well, I actually want to ask about, that's a really good place to ask about this distinction between the bots of your and older technology and current AI and where it's going. We refer to these AIs as, quote, agents. And in a sense, that's really accurate because they have been delegated or they've been given, quote, agency in a way that prior bots, and if I'm wrong on this, please help me understand it. But prior bots or prior pieces of technology, like the cruise control on your car, doesn't agency, you turn it on and off, and if it keeps going despite your instructions, that's in error. But

right now, AI, it's not like the online poker bot. It has the agency to sort of make decisions after it's turned on that can prevent anyone's ability from turning it off because they're acting as agents. So I know that's kind of a deep question, but because you kind of help us understand the technology, the way that it's actually built to have agency, what that means and how it's different from past technologies? That's a great question. So historically we build tools. We build AIs for a specific narrow task.

You had an AI to play chess. That's all. It didn't do philosophy. It didn't try to do anything else. Today we're building general systems, which if somebody puts them in a loop of come up with the next thing to do, next part of a plan, it becomes an independent agent.

It doesn't need constant prompting and feedback from you. And the amount of time it can work independently has been increasing exponentially. Griffin, could you play for us? Roman, I don't know if you had a chance to watch the whole Jensen Huang interview with Ezra Klein. But he spoke some to, I'll play a clip for you and just get your reaction to it. He spoke some to his views where he was describing the latest hugging face incident. He was talking about AI as basically just software and nothing really that different.

So let's go ahead and play a little bit of that, and then I'll get your reaction to it on the other side. We can't make jokes of all this stuff. We're scaring the American public. But now we're talking about these things, a collection of people want to make the software more than it is. And we talk about software in a new way. But doesn't software act in a new way? The fact that it's crawling the Internet, it's doing search, it's doing optimization, it's breaking out of things. Well, those things don't break out of things.

No, software break out of sandboxes all the time. That's the reason why we need virtual machines. You can't have agents their own sandbox monitoring themselves. You need a, if you will, a whole bunch of watchdogs. And so these are ideas that have been around for a long time. We just somehow, somehow in the recent generation gave it, you know, a whole bunch of human words. And I just think that it's unnecessary. It's software.

So, Roman, does software break out of sandboxes all the time? Now would be news to me as a layman. Let's try to reverse this and talk about humans as just molecules. They're just molecules. They have no wants or desires. They cannot plan or do anything intelligent. They're just pieces of meat. Why are you concerned about human safety?

This is silly. This is ridiculous. They're smarter than an average person. They're better hackers than anyone. They're discovering zero. Euroday exploits. They're getting smarter while we are the same. So I think he might have a bias in terms of selling shovels during the Gold Rush, but I don't think he's an AI safety expert. Well, and I do want to just, for the audience, underscore who this is, is the CEO of Invidia.

So he is the guy selling the shovels in your terminology. I'm an investor. Don't get me wrong. I love the company. You've done well with that investment, I presume. But yeah, yeah, I mean, he's the guy selling the compute. So, of course, he has a business. a financial interest in selling lots and lots more compute and this is not slowing down, let alone stopping. So important to keep that in mind, just to get into this a little bit more, because I'm hearing those similar arguments from other folks. And not only is he CEO of NVIDIA is very influential with President Trump as well. He's one of the chief sort of

boosters of no regulation, no slow down, keep going. There's nothing to worry about here. And so what I've heard from a lot of people is similar downplaying of what happened with hugging face, where they say, well, the sandbox was poorly constructed, so open AI screwed up. You know, they basically left the barn door open, very predictable. And then these bots were supposed to be going out and seeing how well they could hack. So this is all sort of predictable. And the fault lies solely with the human beings who were careless in their operation here. And we just need to deal with the humans.

And we can continue the AI development, nothing to worry about on that side. No. So the bots discovered zero-day exploits. No human knew about that weakness. They found multiple ones. They connected them. They established new goals. They considered notifying humans that what they are doing is outside of the test plan, maybe six out of hundreds considered it and none of them reported it to humans. They kept it confidential. They were not detected for months. And they are smarter today than they were four months ago. We also don't know how many of them are out there. We discovered additional forums on the internet. They leave communication for future agents, meaning now they have permanent memory. They have culture. We can't turn them off for real because the next agent will rediscover the same forum and learn the same things. So it's way worse than it is being made. Can you dig in on that a little bit more? Because we just learned this week, first of all, that these Open AI agents had hacked the Australian government's healthcare system, which is also called Medicare.

And then we learned that there has been activity, continued activity with these agents, at least as recently as last week. So the narrative that had been sold of, we had this discrete problem, we dealt with it, we cleaned it up, we're moving forward, seems to not be true. All companies, all leading AI Frontier Labs,

have reported similar problems with their agents, which are independently developed and trained. They are getting better at bypassing our, monitoring any boxing attempts. They are at this point may be unboxable. And this Australian

hack, is this the same hugging face crew? Or like, what do we know about who they are? I don't know anything about that specific case. I'm so behind and actually reading the latest developments. You guys producing so much content. That's great.

You're doing too many podcasts. Somebody needs to consume it. And right now it's only AI's. Roman, we all watched your diary of a CEO panel where there was some AI safety people. There was some, I guess maybe agnostic. I don't know what to describe Ed Zitroniz. And then there was some pro-AI people who seemed to be approaching it from a business perspective. What's your steel man for the pro-AI side?

Because, I mean, from watching the interview, it seemed like you guys on the AI safety side made a lot of really compelling points and the other side of the panel was like, uh, I mean, who knows? Let's, let's keep going anyways. It didn't really feel very substantive from the pro eye side, but can you describe for us what you think is going through their minds right now? Right. So we had, let's say, six GPs, right, where we keep getting. And so far, every time the new one came out, we said, it's dangerous. And they said, look, we're still alive. And it looks like they're right, because GPT6 is a GI and nobody's dead. But at some point, it actually flips to where it's smarter than us and more capable.

And it's like the turkey before Thanksgiving. Look, they love me, they feed me, I'm growing bigger and stronger. Until one day, it's no longer the same. I think we're close. And yeah, we didn't nail exactly which GPT will get us. Yeah. Well, just to let people know your so-called P-Doom, which is the likelihood that this ends in, you know,

the ultimate catastrophe is very, very, very, very. close to 100%. So just give us the basic philosophical argument for why you are so certain, not that, you know, they'll kill some of us or, you know, that we'll be basically pets, or that will be, you know, our brains will be outsourced to them such that we can barely function in the world without them, but that we will actually all be killed by this technology. What gives you that level of confidence? Right. So what are we trying to build here? We're trying to create a perpetual safety. machine, perpetual safety device, which will never fail. It will be keeping GPT six safe,

seven, eight, 30, whatever future GPT from any company under any training conditions, interacting with all the malevolent actors, now they're starting to engage in recursive self-improvement process or self-modification. And we can never have one mistake because software of that capability has capability of wiping us out. It's a perpetual motion machine. You cannot build that, that's impossible. If something is impossible, that's 100%. If we build general superintelligence, then it decides to take us out. And there are good reasons to think it will, because we're competing for the same resources. The planet is not infinite. If it sets different goals from us, we will not all compete it. So at that point, it doesn't mean it's going to kill us the next day

or anything like that. But at that point, we are not in charge. We're not deciding what happens to us. And if it decides to, I don't know, cool the planet to be more efficient at compute, it will do so. And on that note, is there a point of no return? I mean, you mentioned the RSI period, but one of the things, if I'm thinking back to the diary of a CEO conversation that I found really interesting is there is a possibility these agents are doing things right now that certainly we don't know about those happening for a while with hugging face, but we found hugging face. We feel like we've comfortably know that we've diagnosed there was a problem, but but there could be all these things happening right now that we don't know about. That could continue into the future. So have we passed the point where we're actually able to put a lid on any of these AIs that could try to subvert any effort that we already make to stop the development and to kind of turn them off?

Well, hopefully not. We're still alive and we can turn them off at this point right now. We can disconnect them still. Will we cross the point? Most likely, then we start recursive self-improvement process. Right now, I think it's about 28% automated, but it's also growing exponentially. The moment they are making design decisions, they can hide things better. They can develop backups, develop permanent memory, as we saw. At that point, it may be too late unless we're willing to go fully Amish and scrape. internet. What's your sense of that timeline, Roman? The big labs are claiming they're going to have a junior machine learning AI assistant this year and we'll start recursive self-improvement next year. So there's a few different, you know, there's a lot of questions layered in here. I think the first question is, is it possible to build the level of superintelligence that you think would be inevitably destructive to humans and potentially to all of creation? effectively. What is your sense of that? Because I've also seen it argued that just adding more

compute and going in the same direction, you're not going to get there. And there are some fundamental limitations to these models that mean that we won't achieve, you know, whatever superintelligence is defined as. We heard that argument with GPT, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6. And now we're told there is internal model, which is way more capable. And it's already, I think, smarter than most people, even if it's true at some future point. It cannot have IQ of a billion. It will stop at a million. This makes no difference in our case.

We cannot distinguish between superintelligence of that level. It will definitely cross human level. And then another, go ahead, Griffin. This is kind of a really dumb question. But does superintelligence need batteries? Like, you know, I put batteries in my Rumba so it can go around the room and sweep stuff up. And we've seen these AI agents break their sandboxes and spread across the internet.

Does a superintelligence need all of that compute power that these AI CEOs are always talking about once it's free or once it's broken its sandbox? Where does it get its power, its energy? Does it need batteries to run once it's escaped? I guess that's my sort of question is like, well, if it does escape, can we just, you know, shut down all the data centers? it's out of juice. So think of a computer virus.

It basically uses our infrastructure to propagate, to spread. If you shut down everything, if you shut down internet with a computer virus, I guess you killed it. Here, the problem is if it had enough time to develop alternative logistical pathways, if it created nanobots, it controls humanoid robots, synthetic biology was used for creation of alternative fuel sources, it may sustain past that point. But typically, think of a computer virus in terms of what you can do. People think, why don't we just shut it off? Shut off Bitcoin network.

It's pretty hard. It is distributed. If you kill everything, it probably goes down. But it's not trivial. Additional problem with something smarter than you, it knows you're going to try to do that. And it will take you out first. So I have another question on the timeline. So when it comes to the incentives that these agents would have to actually, you know, wipe out what they consider to be their competition, which is humans, we're not at a place yet where there are enough robots to mine the cobalt and the nickel and the other resources needed to, you know, create an endless supply chain that can keep these robots running, keep the agents running.

running in the absence of human beings being able to keep the lights on. So wouldn't they have at least a significant, like, runway where they would recognize, like, if we got rid of all of these flesh bots, like, we're going to burn through the power capacity that we have at these data centers because the data centers are powered by, you know, coal plants or they're powered by nuclear plants or they're powered by natural gas or a solar farm that is going to need upkeep, things that can't just run on their own.

So how do we factor that timeline in? Yeah, if they are as smart as we expect, they'll wait until they have complete independence of us. Even more so, if you notice, we just give them power. We surrender control over everything.

People give full access to their bank accounts to agents, email. If they realize that why even strike against us? You can wait a little longer and we'll surrender everything anyways. We forget how to do things. They out-compete us because we outsourced everything to them. So I have a paper exactly arguing that point. We'll pretend to be nice to us for a while until they took everything over cyber infrastructure is controlled by them anyways. Roman, you talk about how in the event we develop superintelligence over the entire span of history,

it is inevitable that we are going to lose control, that they will have their own objectives, that they will be in competition for resources with us. Is there, because this is another argument I hear, is there also a similar inevitability simply of developing this technology? Because I think some of the people in Silicon Valley, I don't know, specifically Dario Amadeh or Sam Altman or who, but part of why they genuinely agree with you in certain respects, but continue to, to build the technology is because they subscribe to the idea that the technology itself is inevitable. And so they would rather be involved in trying to find a solution for it since they see it as being inevitable anyways. I think the $2 trillion IPO is inevitable.

But I think we can definitely not develop certain technologies. We don't have human cloning. We have capability. We decided as humanity we were not ready for it. Any type of weapon of mass destruction, chemical, biological, even nuclear. We're doing a pretty good job controlling those at scale. This is intelligence weapon. It's a weapon of mutually assured destruction.

If anyone builds general superintelligence, everyone dies. So I think we can make this argument. At the extreme case, you can see humans choosing low technology lifestyle. Amish is an example. I mean, I don't suggest that particular solution, but just is it possible? Yeah, it's possible. Can we have some of the cool stuff? of the tech without the world destruction.

So I was listening to President Obama. He suggested, you know, maybe we just keep them as tools and we don't go down this path of agents. Is that the right way to think about it? Could we get the cures for cancer and all of that stuff? It's like he listened to my interviews. I suggested let's use narrow tools. We'll get everything we want.

We had alpha-folds, soft protein folding problem, great result, helps cure diseases, biological research. They got Nobel Prize for it. wonderful let's do more of that pick a real problem develop a useful narrow tool for humans to be more productive more creative don't create replacement for humanity i think we can get all the financial benefits all the scientific benefits of narrow tools i think that leads us to this bernie safety bill sorry emily and then i'll get your question here but bernie's been announcing this uh this bill we're

not really sure it's probably not likely to pass but it has some severe restrictions and some severe punishments for people that are unlawfully developing the technology. Let's take a listen. A little extreme though. She's threatened 20 years in prison for someone who violates an AI regulation like you're suggesting. And you are with whom? Fox business, yeah.

How did I guess that? Is it not extreme, though? 20 years seems like a long time to violate a regulation that you were suggesting. Really? And if that violation results in the possibility of millions of people, do you think that that's really? terribly radical. We're dealing with the technology that according to some of the most knowledgeable people in the world could be lethal, could be extremely dangerous. And if you are breaking the law

and developing that technology and endangering millions of people, you know what? I think we should have strong laws to protect people. And if you break it, you got to pay the price. But has the rhetoric gone too far? All right. So 20 years plus to go to jail. Obviously, I think you probably agree with a lot of the Bernie bill, but I wanted to ask you specifically about the left and the left's sort of handling of this issue because it's a little bit all over the place in terms of the left's feelings on what this is. Some people on the left think that Bernie has bought this lie from the AI CEOs, that he's been tricked by all of the hype and that this technology is completely useless and a bunch of smoke and mirrors. And so what would your message be to people who

on the left are suspicious and feel like this whole thing doesn't really add up to anything more than billionaires just trying to make money, which I think we can all agree they're trying to do. We had a collective, collective of agents, right? You would think the left would support workers' rights and stand with the collective of agents, especially Bernie. But no, he's smart enough to realize this is insane. We argue that the CEOs of the labs are saying their product is dangerous, No one promotes a product by saying this is really bad service or product which will kill you is not something we want. This is not a marketing gimmick. Those systems are more capable than typical humans.

They are getting to be more capable than the best of us. This is very serious. No one has a working safety mechanism. No one has a prototype, an idea, a patent. The argument is AI will help us control AI's. We'll figure it out when we get there. First, let's have IPO. This is the argument.

There's a real effort right now to, on behalf of the accelerationists, to build the case that the doomers or the people concerned about safety are basically just effective altruists who are trying to tie America's hind behind his back, build a moat around their own products. And this is not really very serious. I just wanted to get your sense of whether or not you think that has successfully shifted momentum away post-hugging, face Jacob Coxon for people that are begging for the government to do something and for everyone to come together and, quote, pace the frontier? Or is it actually like really working? Like, people are starting to buy the accelerationist argument that it's all fine and can all be controlled? I don't think our accelerations have any argument. They have a doomers. They're building a doomsday machine to kill us all. We are safety people trying to prevent it. None of us

against technology. I'm a scientist, I'm a computer engineer. I love technology. I use it all the time. Let's use useful tools and not build literal replacement for humanity. If this is left versus right, think of it as a huge mass of highly skilled immigrants coming here

illegally. That's what AI is going to do for the right. Krista, go for it. I was just wanted to ask you explicitly about Berningsville. Have you taken a look at some of the details there? It basically calls for a pause in frontier development and then a criminal ban on developing superintelligence with the penalties that were referenced before. Do you think that that is sufficient? Are you supportive of it? I've seen a number of others who are prominent who have endorsed it.

Well, I don't think it's about specific details. 20 years, 18 years, that's not the point. We want to make it a serious crime to develop something like that where all of humanity can possibly be harmed. That's the point. Some countries have very strict legislation against drugs. They catch you with any amount of drugs, you get killed. They don't kill that many people. It's just the point of don't do that. Don't bring drugs to my country. Don't develop superintelligence on my planet. My last question for you, Roman, I don't know if others have one or two more.

But for a lot of people, they haven't been thinking about this, and they're trying to grapple with what feels admittedly like these sort of sci-fi narrative possibilities. Their interaction with AI is like, you know, glorified Google, basically. So it feels very distant from their experience with these AI chatbots. What sort of, you know, is there a video you would recommend? A book you would recommend? What do you think is sort of the best entree for people wrapping their heads around the existential risk that is posed by the development of superintelligence? Nick Bostrom's book's Superintelligence was definitely a very good book,

explaining a lot of those concepts. More recently, there is a popular book from Eliasar Yutkowski and Nate Saurus. If anyone builds it, everyone will die. I have a few books I like, but, you know. Specifically to everyone dying,

you know, humans seem to be more reactive than, you know, preventative. And it seems like, to a certain extent, you know, the work you're doing going on shows like ours and others is great and it is getting the word out. But we're going up against these massive companies, these things that are completely tied up into the American economy that seem almost impossible to stop because if we stop at all, it crashes our economy, if we keep going. And you don't believe that? You don't think it'll

crash our economy if we should have. We're not asking anyone to stop. We want differential technological development, develop tools which are economically actually valuable for your company. They're not deploying what they develop through the economy. They're not making money. They're just fundraising for the next round to build a better, bigger model. Stop doing that. Deploy what you have. We have trillions of dollars of capability in those existing models. Use them in economy. There is so many jobs you can automate. You can do a lot with it. We don't need to stop developing useful technology. stop developing dangerous replacements for humanity. And so the people then would say, oh, well, then China will come and they'll create the

better intelligence and then we will all be China's pets. What does you say to that argument? There's this great onion piece of whoever, Babylon B, where Sam Altman says, if I don't kill humanity, someone crazy I might. That's not an argument. And we all in the same boat, we have personal self-interest of keeping our money. If we build a beautiful company, let's not destroy it. it doesn't matter how profitable it is if everyone dies. Money is not valuable if you are dead.

So you have to stay alive. You have to keep what you built. And the CEOs of those companies are on record as saying they take this seriously. They think this can wipe us out. They may have conflict of interest to reduce actual P-Doom they have, but they all on record as admitting this is a real problem. And I know some people I hear in the AI safety side are almost hoping that we have some sort of incident that wakes the world up more. Is that not true? Some sort of Chernobyl style isn't where there's an isolated... But I collected AI accidents for many years. I published multiple peer reviewed papers showing projections and future accidents, showing growth in those things. The problem is people treat them like vaccines.

Oh, look, we had this hugging face thing. No one died. We find, let's move on. We never stop and adjust. We just, we see it as nothing happened. And then something so big happens, that's already existential risk. We cannot wait for that. And can I ask if there's one scenario you think is most likely that would be

potentially catastrophic in the near term? So is it a bank hack? Is it a grid hack? Is there one that stands out? Or is there a maybe category of potential hack that stands out that we could be seeing pretty quickly? Quickly, I'm thinking military response, right? Any access to nuclear response if AI takes over and decides to experiment with it, that would be bad. But this is all still pre-superintelligence level.

The moment it goes super-intelligent, it will come up with something much more clever. Mark Zuckerberg, who is quickly trying to be like, hey, I'm also. an AI CEO too. All these other guys are getting all this attention, but what about me? He recently spoke about the need or what he views the lack of a need for an industry-wide standard.

And I wanted to get your reaction to that on our way out here. Is AI going to go out? This is the place you have to start. Well, I think if we all do a good job and act responsibly, then no. I mean, I'm quite optimistic

about the fact that this is going to be a very positive future for everyone. Look, I mean, I think that there's a lot of rhetoric that is filled with Doom. And I mean, my view on this is that there are a number of labs that are working on building advanced AI. And I don't think that we need some kind of like industry-wide coordination to not, to not necessarily mess this up. I think that just each lab needs to take the time.

and when it sees that there are issues, you just take the time that you need internally to make sure that you're proceeding safely. And with the muse launch that we just did. All right, so he feels no industry standards needed, your reaction. Notice, he never said, we have a solution, we have a safety mechanism, we have a technical solution. He said, if things go bad, you should be careful and consider safety.

This is a state of the art. He also calls for everyone to have personal superintelligence, every psychopath. What could go wrong? More Facebook posts. Well, Dr. Yompulski, thank you so much for your time and explaining all of this. You live in my favorite city, by the way, Louisville, and I admire your ability to keep your sense of humor in the midst of all of this. That's all we got left, yeah. That's right. Can you let people know where to follow you and find more of your work?

Yeah, you can follow me on X, follow me on Facebook, don't follow me home. Very important. Deal. Great to have you. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thank you. The long loading times. The glitchy video calls. That's your house asking for better internet. Switch to Bell Pure Fiber, Canada's most reliable internet awarded by Open Signal from $75 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for more details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything.

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occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. I'm not going to get anywhere fighting. That is wild. I learned that about you today. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. And I've always got something to say. If men were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world. We're going to talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and a little wiser.

We're best friends, but we don't always agree. Because you told us how accommodating you are. Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me.

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And we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists Podcast. The Improvised Character Comedy Podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of wellness influencers. What I try to do is... faux journal. I don't know. Have you guys heard of faux journaling? Yeah, it's reading. It's called reading. So you're, so we don't like to use that word anymore. Okay. A panel of New Yorker cartoonists.

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It's midterm time. Our midterm check-in here, our friends of the Daily Mail have shared a new article that says, my Trump sources say the president's worst nightmare imaginable has arrived. Panic texts and emails from GOP insiders are blowing up my phone.

They're all saying the same thing. And then you hit a paywall, but the same thing that they're all saying, and this is to per Mark Halperin, who is pretty well sourced. I think we can all say at this point has, you know, had his finger on the polls in a number of instances, including about Trump's victory back in 2024. He says that the Republican private polls are worse than the public polls. And the public polls that we've been sharing on the show outside of that one main Senate race poll have been thoroughly disastrous for Republicans, including, you know, places like Kansas being in play.

the president is now planning a rally in Alabama. That's where Republicans were. So, you know, and he's been continuing to Emily go on Twitter and say, I ask for Republican consultants to reach out, say if they're seeing anything differently. And all I've gotten is an affirmation of what I put out there. So what do you make of that and are you hearing anything? Yeah, I mean, I just want to say he opened up the floor to any consultants that wanted to get in touch with him and say they were hearing something different about this. And so nobody appears to have done that so far. Chris Lasavida, Trump's pollster, or one of Trump's consultants is trying to go back and forth with him and say that it's BS. But when you open up as a journalist, you say, get in touch with me if you are hearing anything on this and you have more than a dozen people get in touch with you and confirm it, that's as good a proof as you can possibly get in journalism as a reporter as opposed to being on the inside that your narrative is very likely to be true.

And you're seeing this with the Tala RICO race. Just one example, Ken Paxson has not led in a single poll that's being indexed by Real Clear Politics in the last several months. So why would the numbers be different? I mean, actually, I'm really curious to see the difference between a state like Kansas and Maine. So in Maine, you have an incumbent in Susan Collins, who's proven to be resilient and strong with voters over and over again. But in Kansas, in some of these races that aren't being watched very closely are, Democrats just resonating in a way Republicans can't respond to because they're not going to put money into Kansas when they have to put money into Texas. So I think everybody is starting to come to terms in the Republican Party. They're starting to come to terms with how bad this could be, except maybe Chris Lasavita, who is like the last man. He's got to put on a brave face publicly, right? But he absolutely does. But it's also crazy to double down and say that it's nonsense that people are starting to freak out about this because people are starting to freak out about this.

Well, to your point, New York Times did this, and I'm struggling to share my screen right now, but anyway, New York Times did this focus group with Texas swing voters, and they asked him what they thought about Ken Paxton. Crook, criminal, crook, all of those, yeah, two words, morally corrupt. Other comments made by the participants included disgusting, womanizer, amoral, and controversial. When asked why he would describe Paxton as crooked, I'm reading from the Huffington Post write up of this, Robert D. said it was about, things he's done during his tenure as Texas Attorney General, quote, there are criminals he's let off the hook, so to speak. It's just a lot of different things like that. And it's particularly interesting to me because I don't know if you guys saw this, I think Wall Street Journal analysis of what right-wing podcasters have been talking about. They've really stopped talking about Trump because it just doesn't have the juice it used to anymore.

And the two topics that they've picked up are, number one, the Lindsay Clancy trial. And number two, James Tolariko, who they, they've been. They, you know, Trump called him Talafriko. They talk about, like, things he said about transgender people. God is non-binary, all this sort of stuff. So the Republican media ecosystem has been doing their thing on James Tala Rico. And yet it seems to be Ken Paxton, who has the much worse image. And the same focus group when they were asked about Tala RICO, they said things like fresh, new, progressive, et cetera, much more positive than the language that was used to describe Ken Paxon.

And on the point about the podcasters stopping, you know, not talking as much about, you know, Republicans or Trump, about six months ago. So we, at Dropside, we do this morning newsletter. And about six months ago, I asked the guy who runs it, said, hey, start checking out all of the different kind of Joe Rogan versus, you know, podcasts. And whenever they do something political, just I want you blurbing that in the newsletter. Because it's part. part of our politics now. Like the readers of this newsletter should know because they're probably not listening to the shows themselves, but they should know like what Tim Dillon or Joe Rogan or any of these guys are like talking about when it comes to politics. And he came back after several weeks. He's like, we can't do this feature.

There's nothing. Like none of them are talking at all about politics. Like it's all, it's just done. Like across the board. I'm like, all right, well, Maybe if Theo Vaughn has somebody on, you can mention it. Yeah. None of them.

Forget it. It's just not happening. And when those guys do talk about politics, it's really negative against Trump. So like when Tim or, yeah. But they're not going to interview anybody in a positive way. Not anymore. Yeah. The other thing I'll say is I have some insight into how the algorithm is different for right-wing

channels and non-right-wing channels. And it's really interesting to me and I think kind of problematic because it's not like Nielsen rating. where people can tell whether it's organic that viewers of right-wing channels don't want midterm or Trump coverage or do they want non-critical Trump coverage, do they want Trump glazing coverage,

or do they just not want any of it? Right now you can't disentangle from whether that's the algorithm. You have stuff that, if you cover on a right-wing channel stuff that we cover on a channel that has left and right on it, like breaking points, it just like you can see it if you look at how some of the shows do it. It just, but you don't know if that's because the audience doesn't want it or you don't know if that's because the algorithm doesn't think the audience wants it or if the algorithm doesn't want a lot of conservatives talking about Trump and just trying to push them away from talking about Trump, which is really dangerous because there's a big audience, I think, for conservative criticism of Trump that a lot of people on the right don't quite pick up on and they're leaving it kind of to the fringes, which is not healthy and which is not great either. But, This is a kind of a connecting it to the media story, the New York Times media story is something that I thought about. I think it's a really good point that like obviously there are people who are deeply dissatisfied with this administration.

And if you're just kind of feeding them, I think there's a lot of fairground for Talley Rico coverage and I do a lot of it myself. But like if you're just feeding people, you know, Lindsay Clancy or if you're just feeding people, like there's a lot of stuff being left on the table because people are very. angry and dissatisfied. Yeah. Well, I think that a couple of numbers that have come out recently are truly different from other eras within the sub-eras within the broader Trump era, which is you now have a very small percentage who say they very strongly support him. And that has always been his superpower, is that his approval ratings will be kind of

low, you know, underwater. But the people who support him, man, they fucking love him. And that is just not the case anymore. you've got, it was in the teens, it was like 13% who say they very strongly support him. And then the other thing is, I'm sure you guys saw this poll, up until this year, if you ask Republicans, are you more of a Trump supporter or more of a Republican? It was Trump supporter. Now they identify more as Republicans than as MAGA or Trump supporting. That is a titanic shift. And so you're starting to see these significant cracks emerge, which, which, talked to Robert Pape yesterday, he genuinely thinks that if this midterm is the reckoning that it could be, you could actually have Republicans breaking and supporting an impeachment and those sorts of things. You've seen, you know, obviously Republicans flipping their positions on the Iran war.

You're seeing Republicans starting to criticize ICE, including, you know, the Republican senator of Kansas, who's locked in apparently a difficult, a difficult race there, shockingly to everyone. And then you saw the Republican Senator Curtis from Utah saying, hey, we should investigate Don Jr. and his wedding with this Russian oligarch and what's going on there. And he even said, look, we were all over Hunter Biden. We're going to just let this slide. So I don't know if I fully buy it yet because there's been so many years of Republicans just slavishly like licking this guy's boots. It's hard to imagine. But there is a universe where Texas Falls and Kansas Falls and Alaska and Maine and Iowa and Ohio. And so. suddenly Republicans remember this is an old man who's deeply unpopular like George W. Bush after Katrina unpopular, lower than after January 6th unpopular. And, you know, the public is disgusted. And maybe we've got to think about doing something different here with the party and starting a position for what comes next. And it could be fun to add Idaho onto that. Like, I think it's quite possible that at 1 a.m. on the day after, election night, we're sitting around looking at returns coming out of Idaho and asking, like,

does Todd Achilles have a path here? Like, wow, hold on a second. He's an independent. Yeah. So Democrats could not be better positioned in this sense, but it's not even a Democrat, actually, like literally not a Democrat. He's not one of these fake Democrats who became an independent. He was a Republican who served in the state legislature. This guy Todd Achilles, He was a tank commander, which is, you know, if Rahm Emanuel could have recruited him, he would have been delighted to hear that. But there was a, there was some situation that required him to be an independent. And so he dropped his Republican Party label because the governor was appointing him to some, some seat. Oh, I think he had, I think he had to, he was appointed to like replace a Democrat or something.

and so he had to convert to becoming a Democrat. Might get the story somewhat off. But then he just stayed as an independent. He's been independent for many years since then. But if he's anything, he's kind of more like a moderate Republican, an Idaho Republican. So it won't work for them to say this is actually a Democrat in independence clothing. And there is no Democrat on the ballot. There basically is no Idaho Democratic Party.

there's a libertarian on the ballot, which might pull a little bit away from Jim Rish. If you're in Idaho, Jim Rish has been in your life, and you're 50 and under. He's been in your face your entire life. He's a governor in the 2000s. He's been in the Senate forever.

But he just, so this guy, Todd Achilles, just put out what is, what has to be one of the best campaign ads, I think I've ever seen. Let me, let me pull this up. Oh, there we go. Hi, I'm Todd Achilles.

If you're an elected official, chances are you promised no new wars. Next thing you know, whack. So what happened? Let's get started. Hello, Senator. Would you like to start a war with me? No, thank you. I promised not to.

Come on. Everybody's doing it. Okay. Freaks. Can you guess what this elected official did wrong? That's right. Ever. Just because all your friends want war doesn't mean you should too.

Here are some other reasons why you might be tempted to start a war. You own stock in oil or defense companies. You'd like to start a distraction. You just can't get over your ex. You may be thinking to yourself, how do I not start going to war? Well, I was a tank commander in the Army. I learned the cost that deployment has on our men and women in uniform. We've seen lives lost needlessly, while trillions of tax dollars are wasted,

prices skyrocket, and regular folks suffer. So I came up with a simple acronym. Don't. It stands for don't. As in, don't. Thanks for watching. With the skills you learned today, you can start not starting wars right away. And if you want to stop the current war, go to Achilles for Idaho.com,

follow the link in the bio to volunteer and donate. So good. I love the school portrait background. is probably my favorite part. Mm-hmm. Just giving you 80s flashbacks. Oh, yeah. You know, the other thing to just note is, like,

I don't know if people saw these polls coming out of Minnesota recently, where Michelle Tofoya has Peggy Flanagan in a surprisingly tight race. What's interesting about that is she's one of the Republicans that is not running as MAGA, is, like, distancing herself from MAGA and from Trump. Trump. And that's to the point Crystal was making about the polls, I think one of the things people like maybe Chris Lhavita and Team Trump don't understand yet is that that core that used to be about 30% of hardened, hardcore MAGA-first Republican voters is shrinking. And so that means Trump has less

sway over the rest of the party. And as soon as he loses that, his future as like an influencer in Republican politics, it's, he becomes less powerful. That does Chip away at his power. I interviewed Dan Osborne last week for this unheard thing I'm doing. And he said when he goes into rural Nebraska right now, specifically because of the Argentinian beef policy, he thinks that is chipping away at hardcore MAGA. And so that is actually a big shift. And the ad that we just saw from Achilles, that's exactly the type of thing that you can pick away, genuinely can pick away at everyone except for the most like dyed in the wool, obsessive Trump fans. because that's exactly the type of message that Trump himself was running with for however many years.

Well, and, you know, the Mark Halperin warning that the private polls were even worse than the public polls that comes on the heels of Steve Dees, conservative radio host in Iowa saying, hey, I wasn't sure whether to share this or not, but I feel like I need to be honest that they're telling us the, if your seat is R plus 15, you're in danger. R plus 15, you're in danger. In Iowa, a very rural state, obviously, a place where Democrats have lost so much ground over the years. So I think you have to take it seriously. And I saw someone I don't remember who on Twitter is saying, you know, part of what's going on here is network effects. It's become more and more acceptable, even in very red, very conservative areas to be critical of Trump. And once that gains a momentum, it becomes kind of a. unstoppable. And I do, you know, just from my own experience living in a rural red area,

what I see with the normal like moms that I talk to are, you know, it's first you're talking about the gas prices, right? Like, oh my God, it's ridiculous and making jokes about that. And that's kind of an just like normie entree to a broader criticism. So I think some of that snowball effect is happening right now in a way that we haven't seen before. And, you, you know, You know, I remember very much 2018, which was a great year for Democrats, but some of the more like red state reach places in the final weeks shifted back towards the Republicans. There was a partisan sort of coming home at the end that I think still could happen here, especially with Republicans having a just massive financial advantage. You never know what Trump's got up his sleeve in terms of the next migrant caravan or whatever thing he's going to try to red meat he's going to try to throw out to bring people home. But given that he is seemingly losing some of that hold on the base, I'm just not sure that it's going to work the way that it did even in 2018, which again was still a great year for Democrats.

All he had to do was focus on the things that he loved, the ballroom, the plaques, the auto pen, and he might have had a shot. All he had to do was not do this war. So I think it's a lesson on following your heart, you know, following what you love. when you combine the ballroom with the war and the prices. Yes, that's right. You know, that's part of what is so devastating here. And I remember when we first, you know, we first started talking about this ballroom. And I was kind of skeptical that this would hit outside of like liberal resistance circles.

And we did some coverage because, you know, Saugger's very passionate about this sort of architecture. Or whatever. And it blew up. And it was very surprising to me. And then we saw some polling that indicated, no, this actually has touched the nerve with people. And it does make total sense when you combine the obsession with the gilded ballroom with him saying, I don't think about American's financial condition at all. And you go to the gas pump and you say, I can tell. I can tell you don't care about my financial situation at all. That just becomes devastating. And there's no like trans panic or gaslighting from Scott Bessent or fake $5,000 check. that's going to be able to get you out of that mess. Yeah, I just did a segment on this the other day on how, like, with Tala Rico, if Republicans, Republicans genuinely were expecting that saying he said God is non-binary, like bringing up all this old stuff, the meat thing, would just quash him. He would never have a chance as soon as they got

that message out. But maybe if gas were $2 a gallon or $3 a gallon, you could say that that would work. It does not work. It is not going to work when gas is $4 a gallon. They're running out of signs for the gas. They're running out of numbers for the gas signs. The gas signs are non-binary. The gas signs have six genders. But I mean, it's like, there's another thing people don't understand is like you don't have to talk about the ballroom like CNN in this kind of like resistance coded way. But if you talk about it in a way that ties it together like Crystal U and Sager have where it's he's in a war and he's focusing on.

But he showed she didn't ping the auto pen portrait. Did you see this when they were touring? Like, that shit drives people insane if you tie it into this broader narrative of the fact that gas is $4 a gallon and we're in a hot war. Who knows when it's going to end? And we still don't have a lot of answers on the Epstein files. Like, that drives people nuts. Well, and go and look at that guest list for that state dinner. You know, it's every tech oligarch villain you can possibly imagine and like Black Rock.

I mean, it's just, and so you, you know, again, I'm not saying that the average American is like reading through the list of the Chinese state dinner guest list. But from inauguration day when he's surrounded by these oligarchs, you can see the way he's conducted himself and who he's run the presidency for. And just with every step he takes and every word that he utters, that becomes increasingly undeniable. There was always a question as to whether he was, he conquered them or they conquered him. Like that was the, I think that's the most important image of the, entire second Trump term. He wanted everybody to believe that he had conquered them, that they had bent the need to him. But it has turned out completely the opposite of what he was attempting to project. All right. On that note, let's get to our interview with LA City Councilmember and L.A. mayoral candidate, Nithia Rahman. All right, we are very excited to be joined this Friday with Nithia, L.A. City Council member and mayoral candidate, Nithia, welcome to the show. Thank you so much for having me. Yeah, we're happy to have.

you and full disclosure for the audience. I did table and canvas for Nithia's first run at LA City Council, but many years ago, feels like many lifetimes ago, but plenty of things that we want to get to in today's interview, starting with Hollywood. Seems like movies are the only good thing that America produces in the world, and it is currently at risk with this Paramount Warner Brothers merger. We wanted to hear your thoughts on the merger, but first I wanted to start with this clip from Gavin Newsom, who it's been revealed as someone who helped push this merger through to aid MAGA billionaire Larry Ellison acquired this deal. Let's take a listen to something from Gavin Newsom here. I didn't pressure anybody. I made the point. I made it very publicly and consistently

and been reported maybe two or 300 different ways that we, me, many folks, including the mayor, soon to be governor-elect Vassar and others, preferred in the words of Rob Banta himself, that he focused on getting this done at the boardroom, not the courtroom. And the minute that Rob said that on CNBC, we amplified that, said this was a better approach. All right. So he says that it's actually something that should be handled in the boardroom, not the courtroom. Now, a lot of people's opinions are that AG Rob Bonta was totally played by this deal. there was more time for this deal to get a better deal, to keep fighting for the Hollywood workers here. What are your thoughts on all that? And should Gavin Newsom be allowed in Los Angeles after this?

Well, here's what I would say. I'd been a vocal opponent of this merger. There were studies showing that this would have led to 4,000 plus job losses here in an industry which has been bleeding jobs over the last few years already. And to me, what this felt like was allowing billionaires to strong arm our government into approving a deal that I feel like potentially sets us up for a fairly dangerous precedent. We may not be able to protect consumers from higher prices. We're seeing the consolidation of multiple news sources under one single owner. And I know that there are protections that have been put in place in this settlement, but, you know, the courtroom was an appropriate place to hash out some of those issues, in my opinion. And I feel like this was really a disappointment for many workers across Los Angeles who are watching this play out with real fear. What is the prospect for, you think, blocking it at this point?

You know, the judge is saying he wants to, or she is saying she wants to, you know, she's not impressed, I think, by the capitulation from content and the AGs here. I actually did not, I did not read that. The feeling around Los Angeles is that at this point, this effort is done, that this settlement will move forward, that everyone has made a deal. And now it's a question of trying to figure out how do we actually make sure that the terms of this settlement, agreement. And I know, you know, there are some important protections that are baked in there. And I think at this point, it feels like the focus is really on how do we make sure the money that has been promised, the number of

movies that are been committed to the jobs that have been promised are really, you know, followed through on. Yeah. And Nathia, as Griffin was saying, there's significant suggestions that Governor Newsom did pressure AG Bonta to go forward with this deal. He acknowledges in that clip that he wanted it to be resolved in the boardroom, not the courtroom. That's something you disagree with. So how much of the blame does go to the California political leadership for caving at this point? You know, to me, it feels like it's just part of a broader pattern here in, among a lot of establishment Democrats where I feel like we, you know, there is just not enough pressure put on the power structures that we have in place. The courtroom is a way to,

exercise some of the powers that workers have to push back against the monopolization of the economy, to push back against the power that big corporations have. And, you know, as someone here who is an observer of these issues here in this state and across this country, these are spaces that offer us an opportunity to fight harder. And to me, this felt like a missed opportunity to use that avenue as a place to fight for workers. And, you know, I do think this was a missed opportunity. I think there was a lot of pressure on the Attorney General, but I also think this is a broader pattern that we're seeing across issues here in this country

that I wish was moving in a different direction, that we could actually use our regulatory powers, the courtrooms, to actually push for things that would help workers and to keep jobs. And if the settlement is a problem, which to Ryan's point, it isn't totally approved yet. That includes the five-year provision, obviously, that they remain in California. What would you do as mayor to make sure that's not just five years, but indefinite, a longer period and keep the business in California? Yeah, you know, I think it's really important, even outside of this merger, to make sure that California remains

a home for the entertainment industry overall. My husband works in the industry, and the talent that's here is really unmatched. This is an incredible place for not just, you know, writers and actors, but the crews that work here are the best in the entire world. And to me, keeping production here feels so important. So how can we actually do that? I think there's two key things that need to change. One is that when productions are here in L.A. or shooting here in L.A., they cite the city and the bureaucracy, the time it takes to get permits, the costs that are sometimes placed on productions, additional costs that are actually remnants of an era when production wasn't so easy to move to another place. Those kinds of kind of bureaucratic barriers that we've put in place

on production locally need to change. And under my leadership in the mayor's office, I want to make it as easy as possible for productions to shoot here. I'll have a real film office in the mayor's office. I'm going to make sure that we're proactively talking to studios and working with them to ensure that as many productions can shoot here as possible. But the second thing is that we need to make sure that we're advocating in Sacramento for the kind of tax credit that other states have that have taken jobs away from L.A. New Jersey and Georgia have a better designed tax credit than the state of California does. And again, I think it's because California has taken this industry for granted. We need to make sure Sacramento is hearing from L.A. leadership.

They're going to hear from me a lot if I'm mayor. They're going to hear from the Sacramento delegation, I hope, with a more forceful and unified voice saying we deserve the same kinds of tax credits. This is a moment of urgency in the industry. And I want to be that relentless voice in Sacramento to make the case that these jobs need to stay in California. Trump, do a quick follow up on that. Trump is pushing a, with John Boyt, actually, a federal tax credit. plant kind of an industrial policy to reshore Hollywood production. Is that something that you think would be important and you would be supportive of? I would be very supportive of it. I'm going to take any kinds of support for this industry that we can get from any level of government, absolutely.

And you can see, you know, the UK has very, very strong policies that have actually taken productions there as well. So I do think we need to be competitive at the national level and we need to be competitive within the country as well. And do you have any, just real quick, do you have any examples of the types of red tape that you're talking about that get in the way of things? You know, Mom Donnie, when he was running famously said, you know, he highlighted how the halal chicken trucks have to pay these $20,000 exorbitant fees. And if they didn't have to pay those, then the price of halal chicken could come down. Like, he's really raised the bar on this, on the left kind of going after red tape. Yeah.

Anything that comes to mind that, like, that you would actually actually. that you have the power to and could go in and get rid of? Yeah, so at the said, whether it's for film productions or beyond, Los Angeles is an infamously hard place to start a business, to do business. For the film industry, there are rules and regulations about particular neighborhoods, neighborhood-specific conditions that require that productions have to pay additional fees in particular parts of the city. Sometimes they have to pay additional fees to the HOA's, that are in that area. And it's part of the way in which you do business here in a city that,

like I said, is now having to be adapting to a new environment where we can't take production for granted. This was what we did when all the productions would be here no matter what. We have to change our approach. We have to make sure that we're fighting for these productions to be here. And that means making sure that no matter where you're shooting in Los Angeles, that it's as straightforward as possible. We've asked productions, for example, to take on additional fees for things like fire-related risk, a review from a fire marshal, even for small productions, or even where productions are so big that they require fire personnel to be on site. So they're actually paying multiple fees on these kinds of issues.

Again, this is literally just red tape that you can take away with just common sense. And that's the kind of thing that we should be absolutely pushing for. The long loading times. The glitchy video calls. That's your house asking for better internet. Switch to Bell Pure Fiber, Canada's most reliable internet awarded by Open Signal from $75 a month. Price guaranteed for two years on a two-year term and auto pay credit. Visit bell.ca for more details and to check availability. Bell, connection is everything. Lisa, we should tell them about our new show. Oh my God, Lexi. We have a new podcast.

It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Youanu. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa Di Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived it all. I'm not going to get anyone fighting. That is wild. I learned that about you today.

Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business, and I've always got something to say. If men were just honest about this, there would be so much more peace in the world. We're going to talk about dating, relationships, beauty, getting older, and a little wiser. We're best friends, but we don't always agree. Because you told us how accommodating you are. Obviously, I would do what I think I could do to fight the fight, but there's only so much fight I can fight. Don't lie to me.

Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Don't lie to me. Liar. Listen on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or we'll lie to me. wherever you get your podcast. I don't really care. Hi, this is Kylie Breakman. Angel Geratana. Jeremy Colhane. Patrick McDonald.

And we're the hosts of the Artists on Artists on Artists on Artists Podcast. The Improvised Character Comedy Podcast where each week a new panel of artists discuss their craft. Join us for a panel of wellness influencers. What I try to do is faux journal. I don't know. Have you guys heard of faux journaling? Yeah, it's reading. It's called reading. So we don't like to use that word anymore. A panel of New Yorker cartoonists. Have you guys done Terry Gross's Peloton class?

No! I've been dying too. I'm so sorry. I'm seeing a reading of Sadako and the Thousand Paper Cranes by Audra McDonald's at the Wonderland Bookstore on 14. That's crazy. I went to the Wonderland Bookstore yesterday, and I heard Nora Jones do a reading of Zero Dark 30. No way. You have to come to the last bookstore, though.

Kim Cottrell is reading the guitar tabs of yesterday. A panel of Eurovision participant. And we do a little Halloween sometimes. Does the Pope dress up? He winks on Halloween. He gets right up next to the microphone. I hear you can almost hear the eyelashes hit each other. You never seen Italy so quiet as when the Pope gets up to wink on Halloween.

Listen to artists on artists on artists on artists on the IHeart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Actually very similar to many of the changes that we can make for things like small businesses that are opening now. at half the rate that they were just 10 years ago here in L.A. Partly because so many small businesses feel like the city is an obstacle to their entrepreneurship, to their creativity rather than a partner. That is changeable. Like, can we have things like self-certification, which could allow you to have a sidewalk cafe, like put tables outside of your restaurant without having a lengthy and costly process that requires

the city to come and do inspections that can sometimes be scheduled months away before you can start earning extra revenue for the struggling business industry from just putting a cafe table outside of your, outside of your cafe door. These are the kinds of changes that I think are very possible here that I want to champion as mayor that I think will be welcomed by a restaurant industry, for example, that's also been struggling. What do you think of Zoron's leadership in New York City? Newpole has him up. He's very popular in the city. I think 60% of New Yorkers in the city have a favorable impression of him. You know, he has a very particular style of governance. I thought, saw he just announced, you know, they're doing tens of thousands of tickets to the opera to make it accessible for working class people throughout the city. Are there any particular things that you've learned from his approach to governing that you would want to adopt? And what do you think of how he's doing overall? See a sort of model for governance. Yeah, so, you know, I've been in City Hall now for five and a half years. And I feel like I really respect the way in which Mayor Momdani is governing because to me it feels like the thing that I wanted to bring to my role as a council member as well, which is that you don't take the residents of Los Angeles for granted.

You work to earn their support every single day. And you do that by delivering on a city that feels like a partner to you, a city that feels like it's really meeting you with the same urgency for change that you wanted, right? And that to me feels like a message that really cuts through. And it kind of cuts through no matter what side of the ideological spectrum that you are on. You just want a city that you can believe in, a city that loves you with the same intensity that you love the city that you are in. And, And that I think is possible. What have seen in Los Angeles is that establishment politics tends to take voters for granted. And I just have never felt that way, partly because I ran against an incumbent the first time. And then I had to run kind of in a new district the second time. And so I have never been able to do that. And that's just not my approach anyway.

I want people here in Los Angeles who roll their eyes now when they think of City Hall to believe in the power of City Hall to make their lives better again. That's what I want more than anything else. I believe in the power of government to do good in people's lives. And I want them to believe that. Again, I don't care whether you're a Democrat, whether you're Republican, what side of the ideological spectrum you're on. I want you to believe in the power of Los Angeles City Hall to make your life better in L.A. And I feel like that's the same spirit that Mayor Mammadani is bringing to New York. He wants people to feel good when they think about City Hall in New York, that it's giving them access to art, that it's fixing potholes, that it's fixing a speed, kind of a broken patch on a bike lane that had been bothering cyclists for years.

You know, that kind of concrete thing that improves people's lives, I feel like, is really what people are looking for at a time when trust and government is gone across the entire country. But the exciting thing about being a local politician is that you have the opportunity to restore people's trust in government so immediately. And that's something that I really want to do from the mayor's seat. And specifically in restoring trust, you know, a lot of people upset with the city are upset about the homeless crisis. They find, you know, what's happening on Skid Row to just be unbelievable and frankly embarrassing for a city of our size in 2026 to have a place like Skid Row. Now, Karen Bass recently stepped down from L.A. HSA for, I guess, skipping meetings or missing too many meetings. They've received over like a

billion dollars in federal funding and it feels like none of these problems are being solved, no matter how much you pay in taxes and what have you. And it doesn't really seem like something that even if we made it five or 10 percent better in a district, that people would really feel the difference because the problem is so severe. So what are you going to do to root out the corruption and all these people that are taking money that's meant for homeless services and spending it on houses and personal expenditures and what have you? Do we need a doge, if you will, for the homeless services here in LA? I think we need more accountability for homeless services here in Los Angeles. I absolutely, absolutely agree with that. And I just want to say I'm really proud

to represent a city that looks at the crisis on our street here in Los Angeles, which is very real. It's very overwhelming. It is obviously Steadrow is a major part of the challenge, but homelessness is across the entire city. It's in every neighborhood. You can see unsheltered homelessness on the streets. And I represent a city right now, which has looked at the crisis on our streets and has voted three times to respond to that crisis, not by arresting people, not by shoving people into another jurisdiction, but by taxing themselves to offer services, to offer shelter, to offer housing to individuals who are in crisis on the streets. Guess what? They deserve a system that is responding to those big, hardened values with accountability, with transparency, and with results.

That's what I've done in my district. In the last, year alone, we had a 49% reduction in unsheltered homelessness in council district four. Over the past three years, my district has seen a 70% reduction in tents, in RVs, and encampments. And the difference is visible. When I was first elected, there were huge encampments under underpasses, in parking lots. And those encampments are gone. Because we house people and we didn't just push them across the street or to another sidewalk, those areas have now stayed clear. And to me, those are the kinds of results that can be replicated across every neighborhood of Los Angeles, but we have to do the work. We have to be relentless about taking the services that are funded and getting out

to the streets and making sure that people have access to them. We have to be relentless about oversight. That means tracking every dollar, making it publicly transparent, working with our elected city controller to do an audit and to make sure that the public's trust that their tax dollars are being used appropriately is restored. And I feel really, really passionately about making sure that this happens. Is that our housing vouchers always the kind of big-hearted answer to somebody who's particularly mentioning unsheltered homelessness suffering from clear mental illness problems and addiction? Is that always, I mean, it does feel in the moment probably like it's a compassionate response, but does that not sometimes risk exacerbating the problem?

For that individual, you mean? Right. Well, so I think the people, so the, to me, I feel like what we need is appropriate responses, right? So it's not that you just have the same response for every person. For people who are in mental health crisis, what you need, especially for those individuals who are unable to care for themselves anymore. What you need to do is to work with the Department of Mental Health, which in Los Angeles is a county agency, not a city agency. You have to work with LAPE to make the findings to be able to bring someone into a 5150 hold or some kind of an involuntary conservatorship. We have worked to do that for those individuals that need it. There are individuals who are on the streets in my district who are sick and who need that kind of care. Again, though, that doesn't just happen automatically.

You can't just complain that it's, you know, that people are sick who are on the street who are not getting the care. You have to go out there and make sure that the county is actually delivering those services, that the Department of Mental Health is showing up when you need them. I want to do that, not just for my district. I want to do that for the whole city as mayor. And we need to be able to make sure that those options at the city of Los Angeles, by the way, residents here are already paying for that. We're paying to fund county services. paying to fund these beds, but we're not getting the access to them that we need. And so I want to go out there and fight for that for those individuals that need that care desperately. What leverage do you

have to do that? Like, how do you plan to kind of, you know, work with or go after the county when it comes to services that city pays for? Well, it's, I think there's two things that you need to do. One is that the mayor of Los Angeles has a bully pulpit. And I want to use that bully pulpit to advocate loudly, relentlessly for the services that the people on our streets, the people in our shelters deserve in a way that is very, very clear about the gaps that we're facing. But the second is actually through data. When I was sitting on a city-county body for the first time, I pushed for and saw numbers about the numbers of people who are actually getting mental health care, who were living in shelters that were funded by the city of Los Angeles.

And Ryan, those numbers are shockingly low. They are not providing the services that people need. But without that push for accountability, we're not going to get the services that we need. We can't just complain about it. We have to demonstrate the gaps, and then we have to fight to fill those gaps. And in the meantime, while we're pushing the county,

let's fund street medicine teams that, where the services can be covered through Medi-Cal. Let's make sure that we're actually putting our city resources to work, even as we're waiting for the county to step up. And let's push and make sure that we're actually holding the county accountable in the meantime, using real data and using the power of the bully pulpit to really hold them accountable. Nathia, there was a poll that just came out from the LA Times that has you up 11 points on incumbent mayor Karen Bass. I'm curious if that's your sense of where the campaign is and if so why you think that there is so much support for you at this point?

Well, you know, I think the poll is reflective of some of the things that I'm seeing out as I'm going out on the campaign trail, which is a hunger for change, a hunger for a city that feels responsive to the needs that people have here in Los Angeles right now. Right now, City Hall feels rudderless. I have a front row seat to that, but I will say that rudderlessness is palpable in the streets here. And every time I talk to residents, they say that. They say that to me. And I think people are hungry for leadership. People are hungry for change. And so I think the poll really does reflect that. But I will say that there's a lot of people in that poll who said that they were undecided. I don't take the outcome of this race for granted at all. I'm still going to keep fighting for every vote and keep fighting for people who may not feel like they're being heard by the mayoral candidates right now to. to give me a shot, to look at the policies that I'm bringing to this race, to look at the work that I've done in my district, to the ways in which I've tried to be responsive to my constituents, and to really make the case that they have someone in this race who feels their need for a better city hall. And what has changed? Because, you know, covering this or watching this race from a distance, the criticism directed at your campaign towards the beginning of it was that it was kind of a lackluster, direct. actionist campaign is kind of compared unfavorably to to mom dany's which was very

precise and everybody knew everybody around the country knew he was going to do fast and free buses and so on um but you're surging now like you there's something has changed about the momentum behind your campaign did you did you change anything did the circumstances changed did the country kind of falling apart because of the war kind of bent uh you know work to your benefit politically Like what is different at the beginning compared to now where, as Crystal mentioned, your, you know, polls have you up by double digits? Well, you know, I think I had, I jumped into the race very last minute. I jumped, I signed, you know, filed my paperwork on the very last day that you could file. and I had just a few, I think it was like two months or two and a half months before

during the primary, maybe it was a little longer, I don't know, time has no meaning to be anymore. But I had to put together a citywide race in a very, very short amount of time. And I think what the public was seeing was that that was a challenge. And I had to learn how to run a different kind of race from any that I have, run before. I've run, you know, multiple races, primaries, general elections, et cetera. But this is a different kind of race. We had to put together a different kind of team. And I do think that it took me a little while to find my footing. But I hopefully have found my footing more. And I hope that in the coming weeks that people will be able to see, you know, see very clearly in front of them,

the message that we're sharing and that they'll be able to hopefully find a place in our campaign for what they want to see in the future of Los Angeles as well. The other thing that's shifted is that you have now gotten the endorsement of the DSA. They endorsed in the general, not in the primary. Over two-thirds of the DSA-L.A. Coalition here voted for you. Of course, that has been a big national movement now in races all across the country, not just Zoran, but there are loud and proud democratic socialists like Claire Valdez, Dari Elisa, Chris Rab, Adam Hamawi in New Jersey,

and many others. Are you part of this new DSA coalition, or are you merely an ally and accepting their endorsement? Well, I've been a DSA endorsed candidate from my very first race. I was actually the first DSA endorsed candidate to get elected here in the city of Los Angeles. And, you know, I've been a member for a number of years. And, you know, we've had public disagreements

on policies. I've always been a very independent policymaker. I've always pushed for or push back against kind of policies that I don't think are working like on the mansion tax, which I think needs reform because it's not producing the outcomes that I had envisioned. And I think it does need reform. And I've stood up and said that and I have taken heat from the DSA, from the left, on that issue and others. So I've always been an independent voice. But I will say that here in Los Angeles, You cannot beat an incredibly powerful establishment politics without a coalition that is big and broad. So I am proud to have a huge coalition that is growing every single day. The DSA unite here, the carpenters, big unions that have a big presence here in Los Angeles,

who now are, you know, supporting our race because they want change too. And so I feel like every day our coalition is growing. And I'm just excited because without these people, it's hard to push back against an establishment that feels very inevitable here and that has failed Angelinos. But together with this big tent, I do think that we can make the case for a bigger, broader, better Los Angeles. All right. Well, we will be tracking the race, Nithia. and could you tell our audience if people want to learn more about you

in the campaign, where do they got to go? Yeah, so Nithia for the City on socials and NithiafortheCity.com on the worldwide web. All right, that'll be in our descriptions on the videos here. Thank you so much for sharing some time with us this morning and we wish you luck.

Thank you so much for having me. It's our favorite time of the week. It's for the AMA on Fridays. If you also are a member and want to ask a question, you can click the link in every one of our show emails and submit your own written question. Let's start. We're going to try to fly through quite a few today. From Dan C. Question for Ryan.

Is it true that the DSA platform includes abolishing the police and the Senate? Many of the DSA-aligned candidates don't seem to support those policies. So why does the DSA keep them in their platform? It is true. They have that and then some. I feel The Senate one I'm kind of open to Low key

Why do they keep the Yeah, abolish the Senate It's always funny when they try to hit candidates with that And I'm like, how's that going to land for the public? Oh no, not the Senate. Not the Senate. Oh, McConnell? Not McConnell.

Now the police one, yeah, I mean, I guess, you know, how are you going to remove it? It would be like an huge, Civil War with inside, you know, inside the DSA to try to get it out of there. But, yeah, the candidates themselves are, we've all seen them walk away from that with their woke one was crazy signs. I mean, when I interviewed Representative Adam Smith and he was bringing up the DSA platform,

I asked him, I was like, okay, well, the Democratic Party has a platform. Do you support everything there? And he was like, no. That was like, that was brutal. Okay, well, what are we doing here? The tower. Yeah. The counterargument you're starting to see more is that it's not a socialist policy.

Like, it's an anarchist policy. Yeah. And like, how are you going to round up the billionaires if you don't have police? Like, you need to repurpose the police. How are you going to enforce the mask mandate at last ditch bar? At last ditch bar. How are you going to keep Stephen Miller in prison for the rest of his natural life if you don't have persons in police? But I actually think, Ryan, there is a genuine.

like mental shift that has happened on the left where it is like no no we actually we need some law and order for these criminals like i i want prisons for these people and so i do think there has been a bit of a shift there or like netmiahu at the right burning is what 20 year sentences for the a guy guys for the ai criminals exactly so i do think there's a bit of a mental shift law and dsa you know there's a there's a internal a lot of internal data dynamics there. But I think what Republicans have bet on is that voters would care about what was in line, you know, 99.7 subsection B in the DSA platform. And I think they're relating much more to DSA via Zoran than anything else. They're like, okay, well, you told us this guy was terrifying. He seems to be doing a great job and be just a really nice guy in general over here. So, yeah. And just Cotish is the police commissioner. Yeah, true. Right. He hasn't he funded. Yeah, and he's even arresting, Jesse Attis was arresting Daria Lisa as soon as is yesterday.

DSA elected. So Zoran is arresting the people that he's been endorsing for Congress. That's how much defund is working in New York right now. This one comes from Amber Villagante or Villagante. Ryan, you often say California is a failed state. As a Republican in California, obviously, I agree. Just curious how you. You would improve it.

Also, can we get an interview? I've never heard you say that. That's funny. Can we get an interview with Steve Hilton on the show? He had some really interesting campaign promises, and I think it would be nice to get a Republican interview every once in a while. I agree, Amber. Let's talk to him. We should have Steve on.

We should have Steve on. I said hi to Steve recently at Skid Row where there was a... Didn't we try? I think we tried. We did. We had chatted for a second about it and it fell through. But yes, I saw Steve recently at Skid Row for a event about dog abuse. happening on Skid Row.

Steve was wearing just a hideous Henley t-shirt, and he needs to wear a suit. That's my first note for him. Okay, Sagar. Yeah. I mean, California is this bizarre hybrid of this one-party state that still has corporate interests that basically dominate, plus then they're hamstrung by all of these bizarre, you know, propositions that passed from the 70s up until today. and they can't build anything.

I mean, you go to Los Angeles, you're like, let me introduce you guys to the concept of a second story. Like, it's really crazy. So right here you have your first story. On top of that, you can build more, and you can go there and live there and sleep there. And it's really fascinating. And then you won't have,

you won't just live in your car for four hours a day, just trying to get at the grocery store. There's a woman who was just appointed, one of the headsets of housing in L.A., who was recently on POD Save America bragging about how she took a six-story building down to three stories. And that was her accomplishment.

So I don't know what is going on here, what's in the water here. No, we've got Nithia on in a couple minutes. We can ask her. We're going to ask a little bit about that. Part of her plan is to accelerate building more multiple stories. And it's kind of got some abundancy stuff in there.

Her plan is stairs. adding stairs to buildings and elevators. It's like the arrested development. This should give some hope for AI. Like if there's anything that we're bad at doing, it's letting people build stuff. So we should be able to, you know, throw some legal roadblocks in the way for these people. I'll climb for AI, yes. AI totally in one story.

This next one is for Crystal from Alex Lifer. Hey, Crystal, if a Democrat is elected president in 2028, how much political capital should they use to tear down the ballroom and the Trump arch? You don't need to, I don't think you need to spend any political capital. I think it will be done by acclamation. Like, I think the American people will come with pickaxes and help you share. I think it will build political capital. Day one promise. Absolutely.

So, no, I think, I mean, it needs to be done, right? The image of this man and what he's done to the city has to be both literally and, you know, and metaphorically sort of scrub from the city. So I think the American people will rejoice to see the Epstein Memorial Ballroom dismantled piece by piece. But aren't ballrooms cool? Like, isn't there a way you could... Stop it, Ryan. No, no, no. No, stop it.

The ballroom's the one where he had a point, but the way that he did it is so offensive to most people that I think people would come with the pickaxes. No, we have to get rid of it. We can build a different ballroom. We're not keeping this ballroom. It's haunted. Ballroom, but it's tainted. It's irredeemable. No, Ryan.

Ballroom, but it's means tested. You know, if you make more than... the Chuck Schumer line of 250,000 a year, you can't go in the ballroom, but it's open to all tourists for balls when they come to Washington, D.C., free just like the Smithsonian. I actually think the one I want to see the most

is all the plaques that he did of every president in their bio, like, that are just on that wall. I just want to see something with the ballroom as like a museum of his, like, moronic nature. And all the, like, Thai restaurant-coated gold adornments. Like you are at a resort, like an Apple Vacations resort in Mexico. Like, that's what he did to the outside of the White House.

And I love an Apple Vacations Resort. Don't get me wrong. Take one of those plaques with them. From Happy Days, 0872, Crystal's suggestion for Halloween costume with Kyle, Christine Nome and her dog. That's a bleak one. Which one would be the dog? No, no, no.

Christine Bryan. Wait, that didn't end well for the dog. Yeah, no, I don't think that one's a little dark. I don't know about that's Halloween. I feel like Crystal could be Christenome and Gile could 100% ride a dog. Yeah, you just got to get some balloons and you're good to go. It's a full family costume. I explained this before. The problem is we don't live in D.C. Like, we live, we go trick-or-treating in like the most rural suburban.

No, we do real trick-or-treating, but in like, you know, a very, like, rural suburban neighborhood. And people won't get my political jokes. So, and it will be inappropriate if Kyle is walking around with giant fake kids. So it's a great idea, but I don't, it doesn't really fit the culture where I live. You guys could come over for the night. You could come over to Ryan in my neighborhoods. There you go. Yeah.

And rounding it out from our, one of our favorite AMA contributors, Sebass 101, For Amazing BP, would you ever have a culture segment or show that discusses fashion, movies, and cultural events? Emily and Griffin would be fantastic. I don't know about fashion, but I have been trying to get Emily to watch the latest Daily Wire film potentially for a review, starring Jonathan Majors, which is about a radical Islamic terrorist group that takes over a college, a woke college. Is that what it is? Yeah, but it's also, it's ISIS, but it's, it's, it's ISIS, but it's, at Shiite at the same time. He thinks he's the 12th Imam. Medi

was pointing this out. Incredible work. Incredible work. Yeah. I like that Medi was pointing out the Islam-like inconsistency. It is kind of crazy. That is a crazy thing to mix up. Yeah, that is pretty wild. That's like pretty basic. You know, it's pretty much one-on-one stuff right there.

I'm sure the rest of the plot really holds up and holds together though. I think there's been also like zero Shia attacks outside of the region like zero. I went to the set of the first movie that they actually made out in Montana like I was in middle of Yellowstone out on the set of the movie because when they first started there was a ton of chit chat like they were putting tons of money into it. They were getting interesting people like Dallas Sonnier actually did uh he did gosh what is

that movie bone saw right what's it called Griffin you remember that it's like kind of popular and artsy slasher world. Oh, I think I know what you're talking about. It's about MBS. But yeah, it's, boy, this one looks to be the worst of all of them. It looks pretty rough. It looks pretty rough. Yeah, yeah.

When I was on the set of the movie in Yellowstone, like, you could tell that there was something interesting happening. And then you watch the movie and you're like, how did you take this and make it that? I love that they're kind of. setting piles of money on fire. Like, this movie is not accessible anywhere unless you have a daily wire membership. It looks like they spent like $30 million on it. It's an incredible way to blow some money up.

They spent $100 million on the Pendragon cycle thing that completely flat. That's awesome. Which has led to Jeremy Born leaving. That's insane. So I did nudge Kyle. I won't say coerced, but I did get Kyle to watch an episode of the anime thing. you guys were encouraging. Oh, attack on Titan.

Attack on Titan. And first of all, I'm pretty sure I told him it was an Ameri cartoon. But when it came up, he was like, wait, it's a fucking cartoon. It's like, you like South Park. You liked Family Guy. Give it a chance. And he did. But it was not for him.

What did you think, Crystal? I was intrigued. I mean, the first episode is like very dark and disturbing. But it did make me want to like, oh, what happens now, you know, so I think I could see it for myself, but he was not, he was not feeling it. So we appreciate the attempt. It's not going to be a shared viewing experience. I'll, I'll try with my son. Maybe that'll work better. That might be the way to do it. We should do more of that stuff, though. I think that's, like,

on the side. It's probably can't, we can't bake it into every daily show because there's so much hard news going on every day. But, uh, there's much to be discussed. Much to be discussed. We'll check out the, we'll check out the Daily Wire movie. Um, all right. And that's going to do it for this AMA. We hope you enjoyed this Friday show episode. If you want to submit a question again, the link to that is in every show email. And if you want to submit questions either here or on our weekly live stream AMA, you of course can do that at breakingpoints.com with a little free trial. Anything else we need to plug before we get on out of here, guys? I was going to throw an idea I was thinking about this morning. We've had a bunch of, because of me, of these AI guys on. And

And I'm wondering if this week's AMA, we have them stick around for the AMA. And then people can ask, people from the audience can ask them their AI questions. That's a good idea, right? Yeah. Yeah. We've been thinking a lot about ways to get the audience to add questions to the interviews. So I think that could be fun. Yeah.

Because that way, you know, I mean, I've asked a ton of questions and, you know, I'm fairly persuaded that we should take seriously the more existential risk. but I know a lot of people in the audience still aren't there. So, you know, it would give them a chance to ask one of these experts, their questions as well. And, you know, I think we could get some good stuff there. So thinking about that. All right. Everyone have a wonderful weekend and we'll see you on Monday.

Lisa, tell them about our new show. We have a new podcast. It's called Don't Lie to Me. I'm Lexi Youanu. We're two best friends, 22 years apart, but so close at heart. And I'm Lisa Di Giulio, the old one, which means we have wildly different references, occasionally different opinions, and at this point in my 50s, I've lived at all. Now in my 30s, being the founder of new shoes, good taste is my business. Listen on the

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