Higher Learning with Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay - The Cornell 7 Case, Eric Schmitt’s Basketball Blunder, and Dr. Abdul El-Sayed Joins the Show

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

Thought Warriors! We have a good one for you today! Dr. Abdul El-Sayed joins us in-studio to discuss his run for U.S. Senate and then some. But first, Rachel and Van discuss the latest in the Cornell 7 case, Senator Eric Schmitt tries to set a trap for former special counsel Jack Smith (and fails miserably), plus the hottest AI trend out there right now: Quavo and Takeoff's 'Hotel Lobby' video. (00:00) Welcome to Higher Learning (16:57) More updates in the Cornell 7 case (53:49) Schmitt hits the fan (1:04:44) Sampson wants kids from his homegirls (1:11:29) ‘Hotel Lobby’ AI going viral (1:24:49) Dr. Abdul El-Sayed joins us in-studio Hosts: Van Lathan and Rachel Lindsay Guest: Dr. Abdul El-Sayed Producer: Marco Escalante and Jade Whaley Social Producer: Bernard Moore Video Supervision: Chris Thomas Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

all thought lawyers. What is up? High Learning is on. It is I Van Lathen Jr. And it's me, Rachel and Do you feel like I'm mansworth? Where some see heroes and other see egos. Bloomberg sees the era of billionaire athletes. A fad

to some, the future of money to others. We see crypto's trillion dollar swings. The end of jobs or the end of human struggle. We see the endless funds fueling the AI hype. While others follow the noise, we follow the money.

Learn more at Bloomberg.com. What does a sunny getaway with Air Canada sound like? Sunny Jamaica moves to its own rhythm. Rio comes alive long after the sun goes down. Philippines slows everything down. And just when you think you've heard it all, there's Sunny Lima. However you imagine your sunny escape, Air Canada can take you there.

Book hot fairs and vacation packages today. Nice travels. Spread on this podcast, man spreading. Have you guys seen this? I've heard of man. Oh, you're talking about your legs open? Yeah, because sometimes I'm like this. No, not sometimes.

You do that. Two feet every show. Is it too much? Two feet is. Two feet is too much. Okay. I'm here to be corrected. So, like, the reality of me doing that is like, you know,

sometimes I try to get my posture correct and I try to do it. Hold on for a second. Hold on. Let me introduce you out somebody real quick. Harriet Tubman, nigger. You guys thought I was going to leave Harriet behind the shirt. She's closer to my heart then.

But look at that. That's freedom. Harry Tubman for you guys right there. Everybody be like, who's on your chain? Who's on your chain? When you ask me that, I judge you because you're supposed to know. Okay.

Now, look. You just have to get closer to see it. I didn't want to cover up Harriet, man. Look at her. to him real quick. Talk to them real quick, Moses. You feel me? Um, so look, the man's spreading, is it off-putting to you guys? You guys like, is it off-pudding? Hmm? Not really. What's off-putting? Is the man spreading off-putting? Two legs is, I don't watch the podcast from that angle. I'm here, so it's fine for me. But I can imagine the spread ego might be a little bit much for others.

It's upsetting. I bet you guys can tell what I did this morning. Look, let me tell you guys something. I've decided what level of attractive I want to be. What are we measuring this with? I'm measuring it for myself. No, I mean like what are the measures of like, are you doing this on a number basis? No, I don't believe in the numbers. Okay.

Okay. Because nobody can really put a number on what God did. God didn't put a number on it. God has never made a four. That's not the way God works. God didn't look at nobody and go, here, you know what? The world's got a bunch of tens. Let me make a four. What God did and what God does is take souls and craft them uniquely to add to the earth.

God never said, here's a seven, here's an eight, here's a nine, here's a four, here's a three. And so since he didn't do that, I'm not going to do that. Either we're all tens or we're all zeros, but I would say we're all a hundreds because we're all made in the image of a perfect being. So if God didn't give you a number, I'm not going to give you one. I don't believe in a number. But I do believe in the fact that sometimes I look at myself on this podcast and I don't like what I see. So the only thing that I'm looking for right now is consistency. Okay.

Consistency of the way. I don't want to watch myself and go, hey, van, you look great today. And then watch myself again and be like, hey, van, titty time. Okay. So that's the only thing I want. I want to either be always titty time. or to be never titty time. But I will say this.

Sometimes on this podcast, it's titty time. Like, I watched us talk to Roe Kana. Shout out to Ro. I think Roe feels a little bit weird about how that last podcast went because maybe Roe feels like we were a little too aggressive with him. Remember Roe asses? Shout out to Roe. I fuck with Ro. Roe's great. But remember,

I want you guys to go back and maybe we could put it in this spot. Go back and look at the moment in that podcast where Roe goes, are you guys Democratic Socialists? Yeah, he does. Remember the part where Role was like, Roe kind of who we love, by the way,

I would like look into supporting Roe for president. I definitely would. Like, I love Roe. I'm in a mode right now. We can do the capitalism thing. Are you a Democratic socialist or no? Yeah.

You are. Yeah. I'm actually, I'm almost past that. But I think Roe was a little caught off guard. Are you guys? Democratic socialists? What did they think you are? I'm not sure so sure.

I think that. People just hear left and just think. Yeah. Like, I think I'm a little bit, I don't think Roe knew how fast it's progressing. Yeah, like, because you're past that. It's getting weird. It's getting weird.

It's getting weird to where people don't want to be around me as much. I don't think that's true. I'm being 100% serious. Really? Yeah, it's getting to the point. Are you talking about it like that? I think I, I think I'm going too far.

Okay, I will say this. I have noticed, because not everybody's is like tapped in in my friend group because we do this, we do this twice a week, which means we're really doing it every day because we're paying attention to stuff. We're locked in. We'll be talking about, I don't know, shopping or something, and then somehow I'll talk about capitalism. This is your fault. And then I realized I just took the fun out of it. Yeah, nobody wants it. I just made it serious.

Yeah, nobody likes it. And I'm like, I've got to get, I don't know what the word is. I don't want to say like, it's not dumbing myself, but it's like, but my brain is thinking about this all the time because this is what we do. Yeah. We're going to end up only talking to each other. It's tough. See, the foundation of this was always there, right? The foundation of this has always existed because the traditions of the people that I've looked up to was always here.

I just think I've never recognized it in society as clearly as I see it now. I've never ever seen all of the dysfunction that was described to me in my. formative years, I've just never seen it expressed in society as clearly as I see it now, and it's difficult for me to look away. So sometimes, like, you know, we'll be somewhere and they'll be like, man, Chipotle don't hit like it used to when it first came out, and I'll be like, you know why, right? And everybody, oh, man, fuck, we're trying to watch the game. Hey, my bad, bro.

I'm with you. I'm not like, I'm like, my bad, my bad, bro. my bad. It's like, man, watching college football is just, it really used to be different. The game was different.

I'll be like, you know why, right? Because ESPN and the SEC have clicked up together and these, actually these conferences represent cartels that are seeking to depress the wages.

The players don't have a seat at the table, the Protect College Sports Act, is trying to take their agency away. It's really not collective bargaining. The nigga, what? The game about to kick. Chill. I got to chill. much come across self-righteous come across as a drag I don't want to be that

yeah you don't want to be the say my brother no so this means that well you know when they take tough the this the basketball and they put it in the hoop you know the hoop really represents the circle of life what we're doing that's that's where we're taking brothers and taking them taking their worlds and plunging their worlds through a basket what is a basket a waste basket what is a waste basket trash what is the NBA trash because it is a capitalistic endeavor to enslave the black man. See, you can't do it. People just going to get mad and not going to listen. So it's like, I don't want to be that. I don't want that for you either. I think Roe got called up in that. I think Roe was, and so, you know, we've been doing,

talking about it, having great conversations. We got Abdul El Saeed on a podcast later on. I kind of did it with him. But we also have to address one thing before we get into the show today because it's a lot of depressing shit to talk about. I did not think, that the L.A. mayor's race, oh, there's the spreading, that the L.A. mayor's race would animate you guys the way that it did. Well, because it didn't when we had Karen Bass on.

We had Karen Bass on in April. A lot of people are like, y'all aren't going to bring on Karen? I guess because it was before, I mean, it was before the primaries and not the general. Not even that so much has happened other than the story really was just,

you know, between Spencer and Nithia and, like, delayed counting the votes and her creeping up to eventually take over. But I feel like there hasn't been that much until our conversation. No, it's funny. A lot of people out at themselves. A lot of you guys are thought warriors

and we love you guys. But a lot of you guys are clip cucks. A lot of you guys are clip cucks. No, they're not clip farming. We're doing that. But like a lot of these guys, a lot of y'all are clip cucks. You only really support through the clips.

Cool, no problem. We love a clique. We love so. They work on social. So we love it when you watch the social stuff. However, you out yourself as a clip cuck when you see Nithia Raman on the podcast and you go, so y'all not going to have Karen on? We had Karen on first.

We had Karen on a long time ago. April. Karen, it was actually, Karen was the one that jumped to it. Nithia's team was the one that took a little bit wrong. Yeah, we tried. Yeah. So we had Karen on a long time ago. I give you guys something else.

we kicked about the idea of having Spencer Prano. Yeah, I would have had them on. Right. So, like, we were looking to discuss the L.A. mayoral race. So a lot of people out at themselves as clippy cookies by not knowing that we had had the mayor on a long time ago. We put those clips up. It was the whole deal.

But now I see, if I'm going to there now on Instagram, people are still fighting going crazy. Can't believe this, can't believe that. I have had some good conversations with people, though, around like the mayor, the support for the mayor, everything else and like what they think of Nathia Rahman and all of that. What we do here on higher learning is this. We try to conduct interviews with people that we feel like

are seeking power. We try to interrogate that power, interrogate that person to the best of our ability for our audience and you guys can decide. It's for you. But you can't platform somebody that's like running for L.A. mayor. It's running for Ellen Mayor. We're not platforming them.

And I think the questions we ask are the questions people want to know. I think at this point the higher learning brand is, we're not platforming anybody. We don't show favoritism. We are trying to seek all candidates to come in and talk. I mean, whether it's conservative or liberal, we just can't get a lot of conservatives to come on here. But I just was surprised that so many people had something to say. I loved it, though, because I loved the fact that this is a contagious mayoral race because it means that people are involved in the process.

This is for whatever reason with the cohort that follows us, so people that are not content to just let this play out and act like they have no say in local politics. They are passionate. They are involved either for Nithia Raman or for Karen Bass. We'll see how things shake up in some weeks. But like I like the fact that there was so much talk around it, but I'm going to be real with you.

I was surprised. surprised at just how toxic it got and how quick. Comment section was going crazy. It was MSNBC versus Sam Cedars the majority report. It was the FD Signifier crew versus the left, the black left. You ain't really black. You're not black.

Black people must support Mayor Bass. Black people must support progressive policies. I like that type of shit. But don't come in to us talking about weak platforms. somebody's mayor or candidate we're interviewing mayoral candidates well who's it's a name somebody that we wouldn't put on the podcast if they were running for mayor if they would come on the podcast it's not like you know well you know my one who candace oh can no can't no can't so it's okay no candace for you i mean i said i would even have spencer pratt on here spencer what happened

to him where's he i don't know i guess he ran out of it's he was making empty promises all the just wait i'm going to expose he was going to come out with some big thing with karen and or nis and nothing. Did he leave? No. He said he was going to leave. Be gone. Still here. You want him out? Get out? I mean, I'm indifferent. I don't care. Look in the camera. Get the fuck out. I said. I was not talking about him. And I don't know how long. When was the hills on last time? It's the last time we were talking about. He was good on the hills. I'm not going to fuck around. The hills was a good show. Yeah. Nobody said he's not a good reality TV star, but stay in your lane. I'm sticking people playing politics. Oh, wow. I mean, actually, I take that back. The last time we talked about him was when he was our coworker. Oh, yeah, he was here. I went on the pot.

I have a phone on the pot. I mean, I'm not going for that done-ass shit that nuggers do. I don't go to that. I'm not loyal to that either. I don't give a, like, I personally. I don't even know how to be like. See? I'll say this.

For me, once again, I think the essence of American political participation is, hey, I'm a citizen and I'm going to, I see something wrong. I'm going to get involved. But what happened with Spencer is, he was a test case, a test case in either who you really are showing when you attain where you try to go for power, right? Like you hide all of your putrid, racist, xenophobic beliefs until you have a chorus of people that you are free to express those beliefs around that want to empower you.

And now it's mask off. That and or you transform in. to something disgusting to become powerful. And I hope that people pay attention to things like that when they see it because that shit happens all the time. And sometimes it happens to people that you have more in common with than you might have in common with Spencer Pratt. And if you call it out with him, make sure you call it out with them.

Because somebody becoming the caricature of themselves to grab political power or corporate power or whatever type of power is something that is disintegrating and distinctions. to community. So, I mean, I never thought that Spencer Pratt was like a serious person, right? He was a funny guy on reality TV. But it was funny how many people saw him and thought that they could use him seriously. Use him for their own benefit, not taking his word or even his platform or his race is serious. He was a tool for them to get what he wanted.

Anybody ever told you for what they wanted? Anybody ever told you you you have an L.A. accent? What that mean? I don't think I know what you're talking about I don't think it's right to say The way to tell If it's hit you is the way You say the word

T-I-M-E What I say? Time Nah, I don't have no L-A accent Man shout out to all my people from L.A. I actually don't have any type of accent Time You said it depends on what kind of time

You're time, time, time, you lost the time That's how we say it was South time I never really had it before Like people always go, you know, Van, we know niggas from Baton Rouge. But do you feel like Ian Ryan, any of the player proof really had, Gino from Memphis? No, because y'all don't have New Orleans accent. That's not, I'm not talking about New Orleans.

I'm talking about Baton Rouge. That's right. Like, there's nothing. Webby, Boosy, Kevin Gates. Oh, no, they sound country. See what I'm saying? Like, there's definitely a Baton Rouge accent for sure. It sounds like Northern.

That's how Northern Louisiana folks are. They don't do that with us. We're not. Dallas for sure has an accent. I don't really have one. Except when, like, I'll have a draw when I get loud. Sometimes, like, I say duceit time, nine, five, sometimes like that. I used to shout out to Allison McKenzie.

She was my roommate for a little while. She was one of the peak ladies. And it was funny because Allison was Jamaican. Was Jamaican? She is Jamaican. And she would sound like a regular LSU girl until her mama would call. And then all of a sudden, it was straight near the beach. You know what I'm saying?

Yeah, it happened. I love when people talk from people back home. Pick up the phone, her mom on the phone. It was like a fucking red stripe commercial. You know what I'm saying? Like, like, wow, love. All right, the joyfulness is over because the things that we have to talk about now,

trigger warning to the people that are listening to our show that have been affected, which is far too many people, involve sexual assault, involved one out of three women who have endured this. I realize and hold space for the fact, that being constantly triggered with this subject matter must be just unconscionable, right? So we want you to, if you need to make space for your own mental and spiritual peace, we understand it.

On the other side of this break, though, we're going to talk about Sonny Hosten and her comments on the Cornell sexual assault case. Okay. Now, we talked a little bit about the Cornell sexual assault case on the past podcast. Since then, a lot of opinions have come out surrounding two things. One, just fraternity culture in and of itself, right, with a couple of different prominent cases around the country around fraternity culture, not just sexual assault, but also hazing deaths, right? But another thing has come out, which are what people are calling inconsistencies

between the accuser's account of what happened in this particular case when she first made the accusation in 2024 to what was in her lawsuit today. And one person who was at the center of this now is Sunny Hosten because she was on the view talking about this and she offered an opinion that kind of pissed some people off, Jay. Sunny Hosten is facing backlash after discussing the Cornell University sexual assault allegations on the view. Hosten, a former federal prosecutor who handled sex crime cases, argued that coverage of the case has been inaccurate and unfair, particularly toward the seven former or current fraternity members who have not been criminally charged. Let's take a look at what she said. And I will say that under current New York state law, voluntary intoxication or drug use, and she voluntarily

drank a lot. She voluntarily took snorted ketamine off of one of the boys's body parts. Even though she was highly intoxicated when she arrived at the frat house. She was highly intoxicated but had made plans to meet one of the young men.

She allowed other boys and consented to other boys snorting ketamine off of her body. And under New York law, voluntary intoxication or drug use that merely impaired judgment does not legally constitute an inability to consent to sexual activity, right? So that means if you voluntarily ingest drugs, you voluntarily take alcohol, you can agree

to have threesomes, which in her statement she agreed to have two separate threesomes. One boy did walk in, one young man did walk in and say, everybody out. So there was one person that did that. And according to her statement, three of the young men, men did not touch her. And so I say all, I think I wonder Sunny is, but I say all that to say the pictures of these young men who have not been charged, not been adjudicated, are being plastered all over the internet. I think people are reporting this story inaccurately. I think they're reporting it unfairly. And while this is something that we have to take very seriously,

there is no way, according to her statement in 2024, that any prosecutor would have brought forth the case. But she was intoxicated. How did she... Under New York law, again, under New York law, voluntary intoxication, if you voluntarily drink 10 beers, and you voluntarily ingest ketamine, but that intoxication... That doesn't have anything to do with the fact that the guys attacked her, whether she's drunk or not. No, no. According to her statement, she says she did, they did not attack her.

Her statement in 2024, she... My issue is with this New York law, though. She consented to the sexual activity. She consented to it according to her own statement in 2024. Now, I prosecuted sex crimes for 10 years. I believe women. I am not saying that we shouldn't believe her. But in 2024, she said one thing.

And now in 2020, she said she's saying another thing. Okay. So before we even get into some new information regarding the account from 2024, new information that appeared, apparently appeared, I guess the DA didn't see it, which is breathtaking. Yeah. Yeah. Breathaking.

Either didn't see it or told an intellectual lie when they came out a little while ago. Either way, just gobsmacked by that. Yep. Before we even getting to the nuts and bolts here, what's your knee jerk from what Sunny said and how she said it? I mean, she's getting eaten up online. and I understand both sides of it. If you listen to the full conversation that they're having on the view, Sunny doesn't speak first.

It's the other women speaking at the table, and they're speaking from their reaction to it. It's, I won't say personal. Well, it is personal because they talk about having children and raising sons and raising daughters. It's emotional. They're speaking from that perspective of the reporting that's coming out, the information that we're learning,

and they're asking certain questions as to why, something like this would happen and what this does to create a certain culture, not just in school, but now for these men who leave this school and the woman who leave this school and have to go out into the world. Like, what are we doing? What are we teaching our young kids? There's a lot of that conversation. But there wasn't the legal aspect of it. So Sunny butts in and says, hey, because in that segment, they play the DA's comments. So she's like, I just want to comment on from the DA's perspective. Also, I'm not sure if everybody's aware, but Sonny Hosten was a sex crimes prosecutor. So she gives the perspective of understanding why the DA would not prosecute with the information

that he had in 2024. I understand that. And I think that also is Sunny's job to do on the panel. She is the legal expert. However, having been a prosecutor that works in sex crimes, being the legal expert, you also know how difficult these cases are. You also know that none of them are the same. And you know how this black and white letter law is so hard to apply to a situation like this. It's why family law and sex crimes law are so difficult because you're also dealing with post-traumatic stress. You're dealing with people in shock. Like, no, like, if you talk to a sex, like somebody in a special victims unit or an advocate for those of sexual assault, they will tell you this.

Like, it's never the same. Every case is different. You cannot apply objective law to these subjective situations. It's so hard to do. So I expected Sunny to give a little bit of that. And that's, to me, where the criticism comes in and what was missing. There should have been more of, I understand why he didn't do it. However, these cases are so tricky.

So tricky. And she didn't give that side of it. And I think that the criticism for that is warranted because, yes, you can give the legal side, but you can get even more insight having specifically worked on these type of cases. And that insight would go to... No, like, to quote Hassan Piker.

Oh, wow. In these cases, a lot of times people expect a perfect victim. Okay. And they expect it to be very victim. very cut and dry of this person was attacked, from somebody they didn't know, or they knew, whatever, they were attacked, they reported it, bam. A lot of times there is alcohol or drugs or the person's in shock and they remember things later, or they block things out of their mind, or there's a power dynamic, or they just

don't want to embarrass themselves. They want to forget that it even happened. I was talking to somebody like this. Like, I don't know how I would react in a situation. Would I say, oh, I don't want to be, I don't want everybody to talk about this, I don't want to be the face of this, I don't want, I just want to like get on with my life. Every situation is different. So that's what I guess I mean about every case. It's subjective, but you're having to apply objective law to this situation.

It's almost an impossible task. And because there is no such thing as a perfect victim and every situation is different, sometimes I feel like that gets lost in how we handle these cases. Because people start questioning, it's a mental look at. this up and I forgot. It's why they had to change the law of not allowing a woman's sexual history to be considered as evidence. That used to be against her. Oh, well, she's done this, she's done this, she's done this. That has nothing, no bearing on the situation that happened. It almost became a shaming of it all, almost a bullying of it all, where the victim is on the defense of having to protect themselves rather than it being, hey, I'm making this accusation,

go, like, focus on that. I'm over here having to defend my character and the person that I am. I wish there was a little, and again, this is a short segment, but that was void of Sunny's opinion, and I would have wanted to hear more of that. If I was going to give a criticism, that would be it. So I'm going to shoot some bail to Sunny Hosten here, and I'm going to be honest with the audience, the audience of the higher learning podcast,

which people are listening to right now, Spotify, YouTube, wherever they're getting it. So when Sunny said what she said, I started to look into the case. Can I ask a question? the account that's six pages, is that an account that she gave to the DA or is that an account that she gave to the school? That's the account that she gave to the DA. We will talk separately about the differences just to clarify. In the standard between what Title IX has to say about

rape and sexual assault and the way it's like dealt with in a law. Okay. So I was completely prepared because I watched a great video from I'm not a lawyer but who he asked to be a shout out to her, Melanie, who does great stuff, straight up legal reading of the case, just giving the information. I'm like, there are differences here, their differences. Then there was more reporting on this. And the more reporting is this. So it doesn't even make any sense for us to go through the six-page account that the accuser gave in 2024. Because it's undercut by the new reporting.

The new reporting says that she told campus police, she was at that time that she was 100% confident she had been raped. The DA never saw it. Van Halen, who is the DA, said that his original decision not to prosecute was based on that six-page witness statement that she had signed, not the full interview transcript. When pressed by CBS and asked and told what she'd said, he said that information hadn't been given to him and that prosecutors would have wanted to look into it further. that proves that they didn't want to look into it further to me.

Seriously, that proves that what people suspected about this case is that the DA's department was less than vigilant, way less than vigilant about looking into this. It's true. They went based upon the six-page statement. I think what people are looking for, and Sonny's comments aside, was, yes, you have a six-page statement,

from her about what went on. There was also nobody with a specific expertise in talking to victims that spoke with her. Yeah. It seemed as if this was hand-waved pretty easily. And the proof of that is that there was more information that was available to them, but then they did not see it.

So the reason why I'm shooting Sonny's Sunbell is because that reporting was after she said what she said, so she didn't even know that. So if you were just going off 2024 to now, there is a methodology of thought that says, hey, this case based upon the account from the accuser does not rise to the standard of rape or sexual assault under New York law. I think what people were saying was, did they do enough to go far enough with taking this seriously enough to make that claim was that six pages enough? that they use X-S-S pages as an excuse not to investigate this.

And now with the new information, that suspicion is clearly validated. Because how in the fuck does the DA, the person whose job is to regulate society through establishing harmony using justice as a tool, how could there be other information that they don't see. Even if they see that information,

then come back and ask her, well, how does this jive with what you told us? Is there a reason why you told us this? Did you not feel comfortable to express yourself to authorities? Like, what is the truth here? How can we get to the center

of this potentially heinous crime that's reflective of a culture on campuses and a contagion that exists deeply inside a fraternity culture as we've seen all over the country. Like, do you care enough to do the work that you need to do? And the answer is clearly no. And she couldn't have even known that

because that reporting hadn't happened yet. So, like, whereas I completely agree, I'm not just has actually less to do with Sunny, then it just does with the fact that almost everybody whose knee jerk was to be like the DA didn't do enough, they're right. And there's like no way around that. Like, they are correct.

there's also the possibility because there's as we talked about last time there is a culture that exists at Cornell there are a couple of people I follow women that went to Cornell who say it is widespread knowledge that there is this type of culture there one girl I was listening to said she went to a party a fraternity party and somebody told her very quickly do not put your drink down do not leave that should be also noted that sunny Austin's daughter goes to Cornell this is like a thing And it's also mentioned in her lawsuit that she was unaware of some of this, the Jane Doe, she was unaware of some of this information that existed out there. And I say that to say, it's not just that a culture of this is happening.

It's also a culture of these students being protected, these fraternities being protected in the name of power, money, donors, rankings, whatever it may be. Cornell is an Ivy League school. So when I look at this and at CBS News is the one who is reporting that there was an extensive transcript with Cornell campus police. I know we want to point fingers at the DA, but how do we know that this wasn't hidden by the Cornell police? The Cornell claims that they gave the transcript to the DA. So we don't know. Oh, wow. Well, it was interesting for the DA to be put in that position.

What must it feel like? A school that protects these type of situation. I know, but Cornell says they turned it over to the DA. And the DA says they never got it. The DA, now it's Cornell versus the DA. Wow, I wonder how it feels when your whole fucking reputation is based around being believed. I wonder how that fucking feels, right? I wonder how you're going to make out in that situation where your integrity, your reputation,

everything about you is summed up and whether or not somebody believes the account that you gave. How does that feel? Yeah. So Cornell claims that they turned it over. They turned over this interview to the DA's office. The DA is saying they never saw it. It doesn't really feel like they looked like it like in a crazy, aggressive way. It was out there.

Now we'll see who's right. And maybe we'll get to some systemic answer about what has to do to protect people on campus, protect young women on campus. Let me be specific about that moving forward. Also, I've learned a lot about New York law and the difference between New York law and Title IX statute. So the law here is a problem. The law in New York states that if you voluntarily take drugs, like if I give you, if I say,

hey, take this drug, right? Like, you want to take the drug, you take the drug. You take the drug, you get all kind of fucked up. Anything that basically happens after that, your consent is golden. Like, normally you get so drunk and you get to a point where you can't consent. That consent is impaired by the fact that you're impaired. Apparently, and anybody can fact check me on this, that's not how it is in New York. New York, if you voluntarily take the drug or alcohol, I believe.

Or alcohol, that doesn't put, you, consent is good after that. Let me say it more directly. A yes is not a yes if you either an affirmative yes or an implied yes, most of the time in consent. I wish we had Toronto on the show today. like after you've drunk or compared you can't consent. In New York, apparently you can. New York treats voluntary intoxication as mental incapacitation only if the person was drugged or given alcohol

without her knowledge or consent. So to your point, if you say, I want to take alcohol and there's no like, you know, coercion or I didn't put like rum in a book. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. If none of that is put in it and you just take it And like, I don't know, maybe you didn't eat that day and you get a little tipsy.

Anything after that is like... Well, you still have to consent, but normally, normally, so normally, normally this is the way. Normally, a yes is not a yes or... Okay, forget about a yes, because that's in the front of your brain. It's not considered mental incapacitation. Mental incapacitation. So there's also... So you can't use that to say, that's why I didn't consent.

You can't say I was so drunk or I took this or I took the ketamine. I didn't know what I was doing. If you voluntarily took it, that can't be your reason. as to why you didn't consent. That's what the law says. And then there's another complication here. I want you to play the clip from the DA in the interview right now. Now, the DA is going to talk about a couple of things.

He's going to talk about the difference. But I want you guys to pay attention here to the difference in the standard between Title IX law. Title IX is a law that exists on college campuses to ensure gender equality. And so under Title IX is what you are basically, what you say, like a disciplined under around cases in sexual assault and sexual harassment and stuff like that. Because Title IX is supposed to ensure equality between the genders on college campuses. Right. It's a federal law. So if your school receives federal money, then it's subjected to Title IX oversight.

So like, but there are a set of steps and procedures that go along with. Title IX. But there's a difference between that and criminal law in New York. Run that clip real quick. What's changed since November of 2024. We want to sit down with her and talk through what she knows now and what she has processed over that time so that we can put all the evidence before the grand jury and let the grand jury decide. Is that common that victims remember something more clearly later that was a crime? Definitely. And we're all humans. We all process information differently.

We all process trauma differently. So we definitely acknowledge that she may have different recollections, may have different interpretations of what happened to her in October of 2024. Do you have any regrets? Do you have any thoughts of something that could have been done differently from your offices standpoint?

We made a decision based upon the evidence And it wasn't evidence that was collected in a cursory manner. That the statement was very detailed, and it was six pages single spaced. That's a very specific account of the events of that evening. We have to go on that. Was just the statement enough? I understand that there's a Snapchat group text image that was part of the investigation. Was the office provided with that or any other evidence beyond the statement?

So the Snapchat was disgusting, vulgar, but it had nothing to do with the issue of consent, which is the legal issue that was the crux of our legal analysis. So in that sense, it's disgusting, and certainly it will be presented to the grand jury, but it doesn't affect, as we analyzed the evidence in 2024, our determination. At least two of the students were expelled, so there was some finding of wrongdoing. Could that have led your office to pursue this investigation further at the time? What happens in an administrative campus proceeding is very different. The standard of proof is very different.

Listen to here. For example, the issue of consent on university is affirmative consent. You have to say yes, affirmatively, whereas the penal law definition of consent is that you have to say no explicitly. If you expressly or even impliedly acquiesce to someone's sexual contact, that's that's. considered consent in New York State. So the standards. So you have two different standards that are working against each other.

One standard, yes is more important. The other standard, no is more important. It's a cluster fuck. Particularly like when you are dealing with raucous environments,

we can get to the culture of like college campuses where people are snorting ketamine, going crazy. like look guys I was in college and we was gone off the smearing off ISIS but I don't know you know we was we was drinking the cheapest shit that you could get

right taka bottles everywhere all the ever clear together drinking the trash can punch trash can punch everybody's drinking the shit you go there you take one sip you're like yeah I'm fucked down right like all of this shit was but I don't but we hadn't

we hadn't graduated now I never saw anybody like, yo man, you want to go for a K-hole? It's different, okay? Nobody says that. What do they say? They say, you don't go for a K-home? Oh, you know what they say.

And it is very common. We live in L.A. It is very... Okay, I'm not at there. Oh, hold on for a second. Hold on, nigga. Wait a minute. I want to say this, because we're talking about a serious subject.

I want to say this. I just want to say real quick. We are in L.A. I'm not... I'm not... I'm not in the K-Zone. I see a lot. I'm not in the K-Zone.

I'm not in Circle K. I'm not either because I've had to take care of somebody who went in a K-hole. And that's why I say nobody is trying to do that. It is very different, which is why this law is so problematic. First off, obviously, you kind of stated it's a minority state that has this specific type of restriction. The burden of proof becomes so high for the prosecutor to prove that someone did not consent because of this law that says if you choose to drink alcohol or take drugs, Like the prosecutor has to prove that the victim was mentally incapacitated or physically helpless during that assault.

That is such a high burden because so much can happen. People are naive, especially in college. This girl already said she was underage. I don't know where she's from. Like you don't know, even if you're green, you're like, oh, I'll do everything. You don't know the ramifications of mixing something or like what you did that day that might have like a different reaction than before. It's incredible that this is a law that exists. And it totally excuses the perpetrator from being responsible in any way.

Oh, she had a drink. Oh, she can't say she was mentally incapacitated. Oh, she smoked weed. Oh, she took mushrooms. Oh, she did K. Kay, I think she was snoring it off somebody. You can do it like a nose, like a nasal spray. People are doing it all the time.

You might think somebody's doing a nasal spray clearing out their nose was flowing that's ketamine. A K-hole, that is something, you're not striving for that because you are literally... You're fucked up. It's beyond.

It's like you're dead, you're lifeless. It's like the people you see on the streets when they talk about, like that I guess are on thin or whatever. It's like, they might be able to respond to you, but like they're like, it's like they're completely lifeless. Like they're dead.

It's like they're going to know. Like it's not a place that you want to be in. For all we know, That's what she went into. And they're trying to say that she was still, like this took away her ability. Like she's not mentally incapacitated under the law, under a K-hole. Right. So like the problem, which is what you're pointing out, is the law on both sides.

On both sides, yeah. I want people to be prepared for the fact that when this, I personally believe now that the DA will take this case up, I think that they'll probably have to. They've already sent it to the grand jury, right? What does this mean? Listen to me. Yeah, they're going to. They're opening up the investigation, so they'll send it. They didn't do it the first time.

Right. They will do it this time. And when this happens, this is just the beginning because the deeper I look into this, there are, I mean, the defense is going to use text messages from the accuser to the accused in this that the text messages basically are like, you know, I think there was a text message that she sent to one of the accused. to one of the accused to where he said to her, people are treating me like an assaulter,

and then she says, yeah, but people are changing the narrative and all of that stuff like that. There's gonna be a lot of stuff that's discussed here. I think the important thing is, when you take the preponderance of the evidence here, consider the circumstances that existed in this. This would have had to been a perfect situation for there to be no assault here.

Like, for there to have been no assault here, here, this would have had to, you almost would have, this would almost have to have been like at a controlled swingers event somewhere with people experience in groups for there. I'm just, I'm just, I'm, like passing out the drum. Like with after play instructions, aftercare instructions and all kinds of stuff like this. It is, this situation is rife for assault. Like this is the breeding ground of assault, right? And something else I got to just ask, and I know people be upset when I say this. But like, so we're dealing with cases like this in the fraternity house, this type of

carrying on and conduct and assault. We're dealing with a case back where I'm from about a hazing case that ended up in the death of a young man. Then there is another case that I just saw where there was a death and a hazing case of a young man. I'm going to be just straight up honest. and I saw somebody else posit this question and I think it's a fair one.

They gotta go. Do fraternities contribute enough to society to where every once in a while somebody gets raped and somebody dies? They gotta go. Do you get enough from fraternities? Do we get enough as a society to every once in a while

serve up a woman or man to sexual assault and then have somebody die from it? Is this culture that valuable to where that trade-off makes a lot of sense? Undergraduate chapters, which has been the conversation. We talked about this when we talked about the Young Omega Sci-Fi. Yeah.

Undergraduate chapters, I think, even though, yeah, we did a lot of community service and stuff, I would make the argument take away the undergraduate chapters. Graduate chapters, it's like definitely more involved in the community, totally different process, totally different, the peer pressure, all of that stuff, the, oh, we did this, we had this. Oh, my big brother did this to me. Oh, you got to, all that's gone. Like, all that's gone. It's really about the principles and what these organizations stand for

and what they represent and their ideals and about them being effective in the community to make change, literally within, like, policy, education, community service, all of that. Undergraduate chapters, I would very much show, as somebody who pledge would make an argument, it's not getting better. And I don't know if they could. tribute. Now, obviously, you said that's, I'm generalizing. There are absolutely chapters across the country because there's so many of them that do. But this is happening too much. I think the other conversation that needs to be had is we can't keep litigating this specific incident. We're litigating the woman who is front facing and coming out because LSU, something happened to her.

They agreed that she was assaulted. Yeah. And he was suspended. No criminal charges. They literally found that he forcibly raped her. Not named him, still in a football team. Not named him. What they gave him, the punishment at first, was reduced. And he's allowed to play football, and there is no criminal investigation. Now that she's come out, now they are opening up a case on it.

We have to talk about these laws. Women or anybody who's a victim of sexual assault is not being protected on these campuses. there are too many loopholes. The law is not working to make sure the women are protected. They don't coincide. As you already pointed out, they're different. And it's like if Title IX exists and it's supposed to be

there to protect, what are we doing? Right. That is what happens. Like we should be so upset and disappointed that this is continuing to happen. Happen and the cover up is happening. That things have to change. Right. And

they were trying to do this on the Cornell campus and they were being ignored. Hmm. Hmm. Coming back to the LSU thing, I love LSU football. You guys know how big of a part of my life it is. I don't love LSU football enough to have, in this particular situation, a young black girl walk around Baton Rouge feeling unsafe and her community, her humanity ripped from her because of what happened to her on the field.

nothing beat the Alabama ain't worth that no when in the SEC ain't worth that okay there's a responsibility that that university and all universities have to the communities that send their fucking kids there and that comes first and there is no institution organization or structure that is worth like getting rid of that responsibility or subverting it facts done over everybody needs to to investigate it all to the letter of the law, due process for fucking everyone, all of it,

whatever the things, all of this stuff that you got to say, but at the same time, take these life-altering accusations as what they are, which is life-altering accusations. It's as serious for these ladies as it is for anything else,

and their futures are just as valuable as the futures of the football players or the frat brothers. And if you don't do that, you're going to get your fucking asses kicked by anybody who gives the fuck into perpetuity. Like, we're not letting that shit go. Right.

So, like, I'm so glad that we were able to talk about that. A lot of people might think that I wouldn't talk about that. And I'm glad to hear a man talk about it. Because even what you just did with LSU, I need more of these LSU alums, fans, former athletes, current athletes, to not want something that they love so much. I'd say this all the time. Because if this

was Texas, I love Texas. I believe burnt orange. But it's like something that is so, I feel like a part of my identity as well, that when you love something deeply, you want it to be its best because it's a representative of you. So you're going to hold it accountable. You're going to call it out because you want

it to be great. I need to see more of that. And so like, I applaud you too as a man for speaking out on it because a lot of times we just don't see that. There's no applaud though. Like you got to be base level human being. I'm a bad person. You're correct. I have my moments.

You're not, no. No, no, no, no, I'm a bad person. No, no, no. I was not saying you were correct. I'm a bad. I'm a bad. I was saying being a human being, you know it's true. You know it's true. Base level of human being just to call out sexual assault. I don't think anybody deserves any kudos for it. I love the love from my sister, but I won't accept it. I'm a bad person that can be right about these issues every now and again. I also want you to see the doctor about this condition that you just described about bleeding orange. That's not burnt orange. Burnt orange.

That's even worse. Because as we played Tennessee, we had to make, we have to let people know there is Tennessee orange and there's Texas orange. And there's also the orange that comes from the piss. And it burnt that ass last week. Yeah, the orange that comes from the piss from Colin Simmons. You y'all see that? He pissed on the people after he sacked them. Look, you guys, we're getting out of this with a little levity.

I thought it was just a new dance move. I don't think that's what that was. Look, we're getting out of this with a little levity because I don't have very much in the realm of. I don't know hope to give you. These systems are deeply entrenched on these campuses and in these societies, right? Yeah. To where the only thing that's going to change them

is our continuous discussion of them, criticism of them. But I want you guys, before I leave this, to remember how the Me Too movement has been recontextualized. And what happened to Tarana and what happened to a lot of the principal players in that, the Me Too movement was contextualized as a feminist overreach and a witch hunt that became nonproductive after a while.

It has been looked back on with in the least charitable, non-good faith way to what it was really trying to accomplish. Right. I want you guys to take that movement and put it next to BLM, right, Black Lives Matter and how that's used as a pejorative on the right. Put that next to LGBTQ plus rights. Put that next to anything that involves a people that have been traditionally and historically oppressed going, maybe we shouldn't do that anymore. Then take all of those movements, roll them up and what people have described as woke. and then taken an anvil directly to it

and ask if you either through language or through action have been participatory in excoriating things like that. And just the ways that they accept your own oppression into your mind by making something uncool, it's uncool, it's annoying to say that these things are microaggressions or they lead to this.

You're annoying us. You're, like we talked about earlier, you're stopping a party, you're doing all it is, right? And what does that lead to? That leads to a culture where the future of young men is put in front of the woman that they may have raped. So while we're talking about consent, I'm asking that you guys and us, I'm asking that we don't consent to that. Yeah. I'm asking that we say no, an affirmative no, to consenting to our own demise and take. the language and the energy of the people that want the status quo to continue to lord over us forever.

And that's why we discuss things like this. And you don't get any, you shouldn't get any kudos for it. Everybody's saying all the men should, no, you're just like, this is a part of what you are as a person. So, you know, no kudos. All right, we're going to let the audience calm down a little bit. We know that that was a lot. Okay. We're going to let you guys come down a little bit.

So we're going to take a break. We're going to come back on the other side of this break. This one's talking about being a goddamn beta cuck. Fuck these guys. Go ahead and do it, Jay. Missouri Republican Senator Eric Schmidt went viral during former special counsel Jack Smith's Senate Judiciary Committee testimony after accusing Smith of lying under oath about attending an Atlanta Hawks game in February 2024.

Let's take a look. Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and Atlanta Hawks on February 3rd, 2024? I'm sorry, could you say that again? Did you go to an NBA game between the Golden State Warriors and the Atlanta Hawks on February 3rd, 2024? What city would that be in? Atlanta. No.

Okay. So your testimony today is that you did not go to a hawks game on February 3rd. He thinks he got one. This nigga acting like Perry Mason. I have no... Jack Smith is like, what are you talking about? I wasn't thinking. Is your testimony that you were not in Atlanta on February 3rd, 2024?

No. Let me just give you a little context. The day before Fannie Willis came clean. with her affair with her prosecutor. You know the Atlanta back there, also trying to get Trump the next day where you in Atlanta. He's playing Roblox. He is.

Okay, did you ever go to Atlanta during your time at Special Counsel? Look at moving around. Is John have teeth? Is he doing the older person? Why do they, why does that happen? I think so. It's possible I flew through the Atlanta airport on the way to Florida,

but I do not have a recollection of going to. This is the only time that I thought Jack Smith might have been fucked up because if you flew through the Atlanta, airport you would know because he's being trapped in the purgatory of hell for like he would have known if he was there because they were taking a couple years off his life what would you say if i had a series of text messages from your team that said you were in at a warrior hawks game on february 3rd 24 the day after willis and wait announced their affair look i don't think you know that we have

this stuff look at the poster so i'll give you a second to process it so you don't you know perjure yourself you just took it down really quick if i could look at that again if this is the correct basketball game. I recall going to a University of Maryland basketball game where Caitlin Clark was playing right around that time and the Marshal Service was there with me. You could check if that was the exact date. It was Maryland playing Iowa, I think February of 2024. But again, you can check that out if that's what we're talking about. Could it then be that University of Iowa is the Hawkeyes? Could that be it? Maybe before we show this kind of thing. Look at him behind. He's like, yeah, that's exactly what it is.

If he was at an Iowa game, is that correct? It was because Caitlin Clark was coming to Maryland to play. Okay, I've talked about this before, and I want you guys to know what this is. Shout out to my father, who at least introduced a term to me. I'm not saying that he made it up, but he introduced a term to me. And that term is called dickhead momentum.

That's what he said. My dad called this out. My uncle, he says he's suffering from dickhead momentum. Dickhead momentum is when you know that you are wrong, but you continue anyway. We were having a conversation and my uncle confused uptown Saturday night and let's do it again. two amazing movies Sidney Portier Bill Cosby

okay two of them in the movie like amazing films right Biggie Smalls the whole joint he confused the movies knew that he was wrong

wouldn't stop going because he had built up dickhead momentum I've talked about it before this is one of those things Schmidt has embarrassed himself he had it all his crew was like

Sherlock Holmes they had used deductive reasoning to put together the fact that Jack Smith was in Atlanta with Fannie Willis and the other guy. Maybe he was being their third. Who knows? It's going crazy. But there was no connection. There was no connection. Even if he was, it's like that he was in Atlanta,

so he must have been with her? But it was a reach to begin with. That's a reach. But the evidence pointed to you went to Atlanta to see the hall. He went to see Caitlin Clark. They're saying he went to do the blackest shit when really he went to do the whiteest shit. Going to see the Hawks in Atlanta and going to see Caitlin Clark, Iowa is two polar opposite fucking things.

It's not two different fucking sports, two different fucking cultures. He wasn't there. Couldn't let go of it. I gotta say, kudos to Kloberchard here. She came in like a fucking assassin. Coolcom collected, just fucking bodied him. What a moron. These are the people y'all voted to give the nuclear weapons to.

Thank God, though, that Jack Smith was able to recall where he was, because otherwise it would have just been out there, and he would have been like, I have no idea what you're talking about. Thank goodness he was able to say, around that time, this is what I did. And it just totally obliterated. And even when Schmidt left and he was doing interviews, he was still trying to hold on to what happened.

I would be curious to see him in the next hearing because I guarantee you the two men sitting behind him will not be there because that's who did that research and made him look what state is he from? He is from, what state is Schmidt from? I have no clue. An idiot. You're saying it's an idiot state? No, no, he's an idiot.

He's an idiot. Schmidt is from... And I know people, like I've heard people talk about, like, why do we have these hearings? He's from Missouri. This is such a waste of time. We shouldn't have these hearings. It's a waste of like tax dollars.

This is a waste of like the money being spit. But I will say, obviously, Jack Smith and all of that happened years ago. This is such a deflection. We know all of that. It's taking away. This actually doesn't even make Trump look any better because we have to talk about Trump to even do the Jack Smith of it all. So it's not great.

I don't know what the purpose of it is other than obviously to deflect. And I know people are like, why are we doing this? But man, when something like this comes out of it, it's worth. It's worth it. See, I always call these things the real Housewives of the Senate or the House of Rep or whatever the committee is. I love it of Congress. I love the drama from it. I'm thoroughly entertained by stuff like this.

So this might be a distraction, which I think we all can call a spade a spade a spade, but I want these things to keep happening because some of the stuff is too good. You know, going back to what we were talking about earlier, I love it too. Don't get me wrong. I do. But it also makes me think like dark thoughts, like dark, truly dark thoughts. The just sheer incompetence of the people that have been trusted, entrusted with, shall I say.

Enormous power is like just fucking destructive to me. Because like I see this and this is relatively harmless, right? But then there's going to be something happening and I'm sorry guys that, you know, I'm going to do it again. that's not going to be harmless. Like they're going to hit a school in some war zone. 300 kids dead because they don't know what the fuck they're doing, right? In the war for the wrong reason, you don't have the expertise on the other side.

You got AI doing this shit. These people and their moronic views and reasoning are like running the country. like Pete Hickset is a, I'm sorry guys Pete Hickset is a fucking moron I choose to believe he's drunk

I choose to believe it I choose to believe because he can't he's fucking dumb and I don't give a fuck where he went to school I don't give a fuck how much time on the ground I don't give a fuck about none of it right he's fucking stupid

but he is the Secretary of Defense and all it is dumb ass shit you can't tell the difference between how can you tell the difference between Atlanta Hawks and motherfucking Caitlin Clark how the fuck what you know what I'm saying like on some real shit man you can't tell we are asking you you're a senator dog

like we're asking and by the way you know what else that tells me that tells me that this fucking guy didn't do any of this work for himself nope or maybe he did don't forgive him any bad Well, I'm telling you, what happened is he had a staff put this together. When I say he didn't look into it for himself, you know what happens just for the purposes of this podcast?

I've been wrong on this podcast. Do not get me wrong. But for the purposes of this podcast, I see a clip or a piece of information and then I go look it up and I might even call somebody. This son of a bitch on his own work didn't do the work to actually investigate the information that he had been given. he'd done that he wouldn't have looked like a fool. And the question is, how many times does somebody in a stuff suit get up there or on TV and just regurgitate

what somebody else told them? Right. Like, or with somebody else, their handlers or whoever bought them. Or maybe AI. Maybe AI. Maybe AI. Maybe they got it from Claude. Don't do Claude like that.

You know, it's funny with these AIs, right? You'll use an AI sometimes, guys. I apologize, we're going to talk about AI later. You'll use an AI, and then the AI will say something wrong. Like, you'll put the AI and the AI will be like, It's like the first sidekick of Batman, Robin, whose real name was Damian Wayne. And then I'll be like, wait a minute.

The original Robin is actually Dick Grayson, the current Robin, Batman's son, a really cool version of Robin, is Damian Wayne. He might not even be the current Robin. And then Claude would be like, oh, shit, bro, my bad. Yeah, you're right. Bitch! That's so true.

What the fuck? Like, like, oh, my, hey, my bad big dog, you right. Like, what the bitch? Like, you, what, you not posted? Nah, hell no, bra. Hell no, bra. Hell no, make an invoice, nigga. Like, I'm not asking you shit, idiot.

Like, you use, make an invoice. Or tell me I'm handsome because, you know. I never used it for that. Okay. I've never done that before. Kendrick Samson. I've never done that on the AI guys. So if you say that, you're lying.

You don't have any proof. Kendrick Samson. Actually, I don't care. He's an awesome guy. When I say he's an awesome guy, I mean, that's a great man. That's a awesome guy. I don't know why. I apologize to Jade.

I don't know why we would talk about how he views his personal life. No, I'm shocked that it was such, people were so angry and it was such a big reaction. Right. More of it. Like, we're living in a day and age where traditional marriage isn't something that people even want to do. People want to create, you have lavender marriages, you have open marriages. Like, there's so many different things that people are doing to create the marriage that they want, to create the family that they want, to create the life that they want. Why is it any different that he's like,

I want to have it with one of my home girls. He didn't say he's like out here just impregnating other people. He's like, it would be a conversation. It would be something we discussed. I want it separate for my romantic partner. He's not saying he wouldn't be a certain type of father, that he wouldn't, you know, like be there for the mom. Like it sounds like he's just, that's the type of family life he wants to build.

Cool for him for saying it and being courageous to say it, knowing people were going to have their opinions. But if you don't like it, great. You ain't one of the home girls. They's got to deal with it. I think that there's a belief that traditional family structures represent a more functional society, right? And, you know, if you really, really believe that traditional family structures

are the best thing for functional societies that I can understand why non-traditional families would threaten you. I do not hold that belief. I don't either. I think that love, connection, and community makes great societies. I think caring about the least of us, as much as we care about the so-called best of us makes for great societies. And I think that societies are families in and of themselves. And I look at them in that holistic way, pie in the sky, woo-woo, hippie bullshit, okay? All of it. But to me,

that's the way I look at things. So I don't really care about the way, like, people make families, as long as they care about what they need. I guess we just did the topic without doing it. But like, I think it's like, you know, we don't have to dive into it. Like, this is no critique here other than look away. You don't like it. Look away. I don't even see this as a threat. as a person who doesn't have children. And, you know, like, I don't watch this and think, oh, this is so upsetting. I would say shout out to Shan.

What a podcast. What a podcaster. Have you been on it? What a person. You should do her podcast. Interview Shan. No, you should be on a podcast talking about this kind of stuff. A long time ago, she's a homie.

Great podcaster, great lady, beautiful family. Beautiful family. Like, she's so smart. Life is excellent. And she is such, like, a nuanced way. to approach these conversations. Like I did it with her years ago. I did it with her again recently.

Oh, twice. Yeah, like I fuck with Shan. You should do her podcast. Like she always makes people comfortable enough to really be open about love, sex, partnership, marriage. I think she's like really carved out of space for herself, which is why she has such success.

Canadian! And she's Canadian. She's Canadian from Canada. What are your thoughts about Canada? What's your general vibe? I have no... But I like Canada. Do you?

Why not? Interesting. Which parts? I've only been to Toronto. Oh, very special. Toronto, like, Carabana, getting crazy? Nope. Where'd you go there for?

To visit friends. And for an award thing. Oh, what award thing? It was before... Juno Awards? It was before... Was it before? It was before a bachelorette.

Much music? No, it was a legal thing. There are several things about Toronto that I dig. But nothing more than the show that I've talked about that they don't do anymore. It was a show called Judge Tyco. So it was like a Judge Judy type thing? It was a send-up of that. Okay.

And it was like a send-up of Judge, so I went to Canada years ago, and I went to speak at Humber College in Canada. It was an interesting thing because I fly into Canada. Canada, I'm only there for like one day I got to come back because my first time flying flat seats. Changed my life. So I flew up to Canada because I was still working at TMZ. So in order to go get money speaking and stuff like that, I had to take vacation days.

But I always had to come back. I always had, I couldn't go up there and stay in Canada. Would I go up there, do the talk, make the bread fly right back to Los Angeles, right? Didn't have much time to hang out. That's why I met Matt Babel. Matt Babel interviewed me at Humber County. college, great guy. So I'm up there and I'm in a hotel room. It's cold as shit. I don't want to leave the hotel room. And I see this after this show. It was on, you know, much music or one of the channel stations there. It was like, Judge Tyco, justice on the mandem level. You know, mandem is what the like the Toronto guys, kind of the Toronto slang shit. Oh, no, I don't know. And so I watch it fucking hysterical. You don't even have to know all of the Toronto slang to get the humor that they're going for. hysterical this guy

his brother um Trey and his brother they had to do skits in Toronto and they had their own show I thought the show was fucking crazy fucking funny they only did one season I think

maybe two Judge Tyco watch it's on YouTube look up bring it back maybe bring it here they had they had a production they had one that was about

this guy who was suing this girl because she didn't braid them up in time in time for what He had graduation picks. Oh. And he was suing her for the braids.

And it turned out that Judge Tycho should have ruled in the guy's favor. Mm-hmm. But he ruled, he should have ruled in the girl's favor, but he ruled in the guy's favor because the girl's brother had stolen his bike. Had stolen the judge's bike? Yeah. He didn't realize that Blinkas was her brother. You know, Blinkas, that's my brother.

That's my bro. And then he realized that Blinkas was her brother. So he ruled against her and made her by him a mountain bike. That's why it's off the air. It's funny to me. It does sound funny. That's the kind of shit that I like. Yeah, it's drama.

Like, that's the kind of comedy shit that I like. I've been to a couple of different places in Canada. Okay. Before we get to Abdul El-Said, let's just you're talking about AI already. You want to talk about Cuevo and takeoff? Jait. Cuevo and the late takeoffs,

2022, a color show performance of Hotel Lobby has become one of the internet's biggest AI trends, with users replacing the rappers with celebrities, politicians, fictional characters, and even animals while keeping their movements, lip sync, and original audio. It's a bunch of different ones. I saw one with a couple of pups. I've seen them with preachers. First of all, this made me go back and watch the original. I love that record.

Rest in peace, takeoff. Like when they were together and completely. unison. That was just the two of them. That was just the two of them. That's after, because they put together, they put the album out on their own. What are your thoughts on this? Well, I saw one with you. What are you talking about? I saw

one where somebody used you in one. Me and who? Kanye. You're lying. I am. I was about to say, like, no fucking way. Okay, cool. The first time I saw it, I thought this is so disrespectful. That literally was my first thought.

because if you're a fan of Migos, if you're a fan of Cuevo and you're a fan of takeoff, you know this is, if not the last, one of the last videos before he tragically and passed away too young. And so like the fact that people are using this in such a way that strips really both of them of their humanity and treats them like their, It's animation and like they aren't real people and that one of them didn't die.

If I knew take off, I would be so triggered by seeing this and taking this and then just like playing around with it and putting animals or public figures or even themselves within this, to me, it's one, like I said, it's disrespectful. But it also just like speaks to how desensitized we are in the name of something going viral, of likes, of views, of engagement, whatever it may be. I'm on TikTok, I see, I get advertised of the type of AI that does this and it's like, create it, this can be you, you can use this too. And I'm like, why would I wanna do this? AI can be useful, we are wasting our time,

our attention span, and really for all the other things I said before, this is so wrong, this is not what AI should be used for in any kind of way. I thought this was extremely, problematic when I saw it. Maybe people think I'm overreacting. Maybe because I'm a fan. But I just thought, this man passed away. So, okay, so that's actually interesting. I don't know that it first registered to me as disrespectful to takeoff's memory. I don't know that I could say that. To me, I don't know that it registered to me that way. I actually looked at it in a different way. Okay,

a couple of things. Number one, you know, I don't have too big of a response to it. How much AI you can use ethically is a slippery slope, right? Like I talked about making an invoice. I legitimately had to make an invoice for something. I asked Claude if Claude can make the invoice. Claude went, yes, give me the information.

Invoice made, very easy, right? It's difficult to say in a world where AI seems to be taken over both economically and culturally, what's okay and what's not okay. I don't know if I'm qualified to make that determination for everyone. What I will say, though,

is that I saw a lot of creatives do this, like creative people, like people in the creative arts, right? Use AI to make this. That is by design. The use of AI as a creative tool to make a whole movie, to make a whole song,

we are speeding towards that as being something that happens all the time. And manufacturing consent for that is what trends like this do. They, to your point, they desensitize us, but not just desensitization. Because being desensitized to something is like seeing it and not recoiling it. This requires active participation. This requires you consenting to your image and the images of people that. you really fuck with, whether it's your spouse or somebody else or whomever, whoever you doing it with, both of you guys are going to participate in this trend fully powered by AI.

This is actually something different than what I've seen before because I've seen other AIs go viral, but I don't know if I've seen using AI to participate in rendering your likeness go viral before. I don't know if I've seen that before. Like this seems like something that kind of broke new ground. and now the people that participate in this trend, they know how to do it. They're going to want to do it again because the dopamine hit that you got from everybody going,

oh shit, look at you, is going to stick with you. And now you're going to look for updates for this as to how you do it better. Congratulations, you're a part of it. That is kind of how this like need to jump on a trend or whatever kind of affects it. I'm not going to look down my name. knows at anybody because it's just like not my way.

But what I will say is that like they know what they're doing. Yeah. So like. I thought it was weird. I mean, I get. I just, I think at this point, anything that everybody does is kind of starting to irk me a little bit just because we're so deeply invested and involved in that. Yeah.

But like I'm not going to be the one to be like under somebody says like you shouldn't be doing that, right? Because now I'm seeing it more. I'm seeing more AI fly. liars than I ever saw before. I'm seeing AI ads. I'm seeing people, AI movies. I'm hearing people that, like,

I really respect as creatives going, we have to embrace this technology. This is where things going. But what I don't really hear is a lot of clarity on how or if you can do it ethically and what that entails. I don't really hear that from a lot of people. The serious discussions that should be around a technology

that is this transformative don't seem to be happening. What you hear on one side is Altman and the rest of these guys say that, oh, my God, we're losing control of it, which I believe is propaganda in order to push their idea of God in the box forward, right? Because AI can't be dangerous if it's not real. So if, in fact, AGI artificial general intelligence is possible, then that means, oh, my God, we got to fucking do it, right? We need more compute. We need more data centers. We need more oversight. We need more investment because we might have already lost control.

It's no coincidence to me that they all started saying that at the same time. And on that front, you have them talking to the money people going, and we have to slow down, but really we need more investment. Data centers are going crazy. All of that type of thing. You have that there. And then on the cultural side, just the opiate for the masses is, hey, you can be takeoff and quave up. Look how cool that is.

then everybody gets trained. You train yourself on how to use the AI because the trend demands it. It should be noted, Quavo reposted it and said, reposted his, I guess, his original and was like, A, take, we're viral again. So he didn't condemn the trend. I mean, I don't think why would you condemn it?

Look, you know, it's like, once again, man, like we're not going to be able to rely on the artist here. Like, you know, we're not. I know. Because anything that makes them hot, they're going to be on it. I know, I know. Like, we're not going to be able to rely on the artist here. Just like everybody's singing that song,

I'm sure you guys have seen it. That whole lot of cheese song. A whole lot of cheese. If I hear one more girl starts girls guys, y'all haven't heard that song? I don't know. We're just like, how do they say it? Drop that body off, girl.

Let's get our nails done. Oh, yeah. And I'm like, is it cool for everybody to make their video singing this one lyric of the song when they're talking about like killing somebody. It's just so, I guess that we're... I don't know this one. This is me being auntie, I guess.

I'm just like, I'll watch it and I'm like, would I have done this? Maybe, I don't know. It's just so weird. Oh, this, we like this song where she talks about hiding a body in the attic or in the closet and then she's like, let's go get our nails done.

Let's get friendship bracelets. Shots to the face, white girl wasted, whatever it is. I've seen it so much. Because every, did you do it? Absolutely. I mean, I don't know. Hey, do whatever.

You know what I want to. We're younger. That's why I'm like, if I'm younger, would I have done this? You know what I was? It's just weird to me when I see like 500,000 people doing this one thing. Interesting. The same thing. Is she mentality?

Do you know what I like? I like that one that go bumba clot, rotat ta ta ta ta. You want to do it right now? No, I don't want to do it. I don't want to do it. We put our backs to each other and we sing the song. She's from Dallas. I've seen her.

Shout out of it. It came from Sheen. I love that song. I got to be honest with you. That's a song, though. That's like it's the other ones of a song too. But I like, I like when they do the boom-blokat rot-tat-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. I don't want to do the boom-a-ta-ta-ta-ta-tah.

I don't want to do the boom-a-ta-ta-ta-tah. We can start making some real. I don't want to do it, God. That's not my name. For that poo-na-na-a-na-a-tah. I just like it. I just like the circle in the boom-caught-ta-ta-a. I like that shit.

I don't like your version of the song. I don't like that remix. I don't like that remix. I saw her, she was performing it. I'm happy for her. Boy, I'm happy for these sisters, man. I love when Dallas. I love to see Dallas doing their thing. Can a nigga make a song that I like?

All the last five hip-hop songs that I like, well, women kicking nigg's asses as far as rap is concerned right now. It's a lot of great rap that's out there right now. Shout out to JID. I've been listening to him a lot lately. Is it J-I-D or J-I-D? It's J-I-D? Is it JID?

I always thought it was Jid. Is it JID or J-I-D? Which one is it? I think it's, I mean, it does have the... I called him J-D. I don't want to say J-D too. I thought it was J-D. I don't want to sell old, but I say J-I-D.

He's got the period, so it is J-I-D. He does have the period. So shout out to him. Cut my heart out. Shout out to all of the young whippersnappers that I've been listening to Young WIPP. Every time I see J-D, they're literally... Is J-I-D?

There are no... Period. That nigg is correct. I don't know. I don't know. That's a rapping-ass nigg. Oh, it's both. It's both.

It's both. It's both Jid and J-I-D. Okay, cool. Other than that, the music, I like that raw-tah-tah-tah-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. That shit is, I like that shit. You get an uncle point for that. Raw-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta. That's what she said.

They want to let that boom back out that raw-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ta-ha. That's what he want to do. That's what the nigger want. she knows it he's done it before he'll do it again okay that's enough um i also don't care about uh Savannah james and flying private or whatever let's just get to the to the interview to the interview great interview coming what she's supposed to do what she's supposed to do she's supposed to pay for it listen you know that was a you know i didn't even pay for my i wouldn't pay for my ex you would fly we've talked about this on the podcast you

I fly. Back of the plane? I was covering the house bills. That nigga going to write. That nigga book gonna be crazy. When he, when he go fully MAGA, because it's happening.

When we see him on Fox News now, he's gonna talk about... I tell you something. I don't care. I don't care. So I gotta fight you first class too and pay for our hotels and do all this.

Like, I feel you. Can't wait. And you want me to fly back there? I work too hard. Why I went back how black betrayed me by Brian. No, why I'm not coming back. That's the name of the book. Not coming back.

Not going back how black portrayed me. My struggle with the swirl. My time in the African prison. Or I know black. I know black. I Colombian. I know black. Dot, dot, dot. I, Colombian. My five years in the wilderness.

Shit, this was the promise land for you. You're back in the wilderness now. Okay, nigga. Let's go. All right. We got it. If you win a $3,000 a month payday for life, what would you feel free to do? Maybe take a long weekend, every weekend, or try a bunch of new hobbies. Would you feel free to upgrade and listen ad free? Don't worry. We get it. Every $20 ticket could win you $3,000. a month for life and supports life-saving cancer research at the

Princess Margaret. Feel free to buy your payday for life ticket today. Raffle number RAF-157-3916. Please play responsibly. All right, on the other side of this break, Abdul L. Syed. Okay, we're back with apparently a friend of the podcast.

I try to be multifaceted. Try to be multifaceted. So, obviously, you guys see him sitting here. Abdul El-Sayette. joins us today on higher learning. He is running for Senate in Michigan, and we didn't realize that we'd had you on the show before. It was during the pandemic to talk about COVID and health care. Wow. Yeah. Those are, and that's kind of my thing, right? Like, I'm a doctor, rebuilt health departments, Ledwayne County's health department, and yeah, so I came on. We talked about the pandemic.

We talked about guaranteed health care. And it was a really good conversations. But that being said it was not in person because of COVID. And so, you know, I don't, I don't know. Things just jump out of your head during that whole COVID time. Yeah, no, seriously. Well, it all congeals into like one big COVID time. You know what I mean? Yeah.

So after you did our show, you were like, I think that I need to do more. And I think that I need to run for Senate. Is that what happened? That's kind of what happened. Look, I was leading Wayne County's Department of Health Human Veterans. So you're all, you're doing a hell of a lot. So look, I'm taking care of the public health needs about a fifth of our state. And this administration led by that guy froze federal funds.

And I'm sitting here trying to get one more round of WIC checks out, trying to make sure that our kids keep getting vaccines when they need them, trying to keep our federally qualified health centers open. And that was literally the day that our current U.S. senator announced he wasn't seeking re-election. And so I'd ask myself, you know, where's the fight for our public's health? now. And, you know, it's pretty crazy. I'd be the first Democratic doctor elected to the U.S. Senate in nearly 50 years. First ever public health official elected to the U.S. Senate. I don't know about you all, but like, I don't like dodging shit lettuce in the United States

of America. Right. It sucks. Yeah. And that's what happens when you appoint a guy who works out in jeans, health director. Literally go swimming in Schitt's Creek and stuff. It takes his grandkids. Let's start with your background as a doctor up there in Wayne County. I would assume that a large portion of the people that you care for and you oversaw their care were black. Yeah. Okay. Being that that's the tradition that you come from, the background that you come from, how does it feel that there are so many black voters out there that are wondering if you can care for them as a senator?

Yeah, there's a couple pieces of that. So I came out a really tough primary. They spent $70 million to beat me. That's a record amount of money spent against any candidate in a statewide race for any statewide office in American history. 32 alone from APEC. And their ads were designed specifically to cleave a relationship

that I had built for a long time with Black Sisters and Brothers in Michigan, built on work. Like I didn't show up just to start asking for votes. A lot of folks go to the community, like, I'd like your vote. I like, well, we never seen you before. Yeah.

I came back home to the city of Detroit. I was a professor at Columbia at the time just after grad school. Came back home to the area to rebuild Detroit's Health Department after it had been shut down. So I've been working with and alongside and for

predominantly black communities my entire career in public service now those ads right they were designed specifically to cleave our relationship so like going into the July 4th week so our primary day was August 4th going into July 4th weekend they I had I was up 20 points

among black voters by the time they finished within the the hit job that they'd done on us to the tune of about $20 million I was down 20 points why do you think they were so successful? What do you think resonated? So two things number one they insinuated that my opponent had been endorsed by President Obama because he had endorsed her for a different race in 2018 for Congress.

And they used the clip of him and then they just plastered it everywhere. So a lot of folks are just like, well, if Obama endorses her, then that's that. The other thing is they made this ad saying I was, quote, disrespectful to women because I had written an op-ed 15 years earlier about First Lady Obama's last. Let's Move campaign, saying that there are a lot of things about it that are really great, but also there are parts of it that are going to make it less effectual. And so they took that op-ed to say that I have a history of disrespect to women, but the fact that they had mentioned her name, right?

Black women, yeah, that's tough. So, I mean, and they ran tens of millions of dollars of that ad. Like, you literally would turn on the TV, and in a commercial break, it'd be an ad against me, ad for my opponent, ad against me, with one other ad for, like, you know, Viagra. And that was the commercial break. Like, you got to be sincere because you must have never thought that you was going to be in politics needing the black vote. If you, in halfway, said something critical about Michelle Obama.

I mean, the thing about it is I've tried to be, anybody who knows me knows. Like, I say the same thing everybody. Yeah. I got no business running for office. My name is Abdur Rahman, Mohammed, Sadd, it's like all throat. Right? People like me don't get to heart for office. All throat is crazy.

Man, move on. Like, I just want to. I don't want it. Bro, hold on for a second. No, let's keep going. Anyway, like all throat.

Look at your man over here. All throat is crazy, bro. I mean, look, it's got Abdura. Man, it's a lot of, you know, like, most people are like, I didn't know my throat could do that. Whoa! What? What is he doing?

I keep walking into that. All right, stepping back out. We were talking. We got to stop this. So because you say you should never be, you should never have run. Because of that reason. What was the moment?

Because this wasn't the first race that you participated. What was the moment that you said, okay, public health isn't enough? I want to throw my hat in the ring into politics. Honestly, Donald Trump gets elected the first time. I was serving the city of Detroit and my whole life, all of my mentors had told me, like, someday you're going to run for office. I'm like, no, I'm not. Well, didn't Bill Clinton's?

Yeah, so like my college graduation, right? I'm the valedictorian of my class at Michigan. And I get to give the student commencement speech except for like, you know, if you're You're a child of immigrants. Your parents always like, they deflex you every time. So literally they were like, we're not going to listen to you. We're going to listen because Bill Clinton is the speaker. I was like, got it, understood.

So I give my speech. President Clinton gives his speech. He calls me out in his speech. That's some really nice things about me in his speech. And then after the speech, he comes up to me. My son, why are you going to medical school? Which nobody asks you when you're going to med school, right? I was like, I'm brown to Muslims.

So what we do. But also I love people and I love science. And this is how I want to serve. He said, that's great. But you've got a gift for communicating. Maybe someday you run for office. And I literally laughed in his face. I was like, Mr. President, it was really nice to say.

I don't know if you saw my name. It's got 11 letters in it. That's just the first one. Sounds that come out of parts of people's throats. They don't know they have. So I don't get to run for office. And he like, he like thinks about it for a second. And then he chuckles and walks away.

He's right. He's like, man, he probably, right. He's a jet for you, fire up the jet. But like the next year I get to watch Barack Hussein Obama run for him in the presidency. I mean, I'll be honest with you. Look, it was the first time I ever saw myself in politics. I mean, I remember watching that 2000. and four DNC speech.

Y'all remember that speech? It was a speech to put them on the map, right? Yeah, of course. And, you know, I was doing dishes when it happened. And I literally stopped.

Like, suds falling from my hands. We're just watching this man. Show me something in our politics I never saw. His dad immigrated from Africa. My dad immigrated from Egypt. Another part of Africa. He had mixed parents. I was raised by my dad

and my stepmom, Jackie. Daughter of the American Revolution in the middle of state of Michigan. He got a funny name. He's tall and skinny. This is where it ends on 580. Yeah. But look, you know, so I filed out of way.

I wanted to be a doctor. When I graduated in medical school, I really wanted to work on the problems that I saw, which had less to do with what we could do in a clinic, a lot more to do with why people got there. The air we breathe, the water we drink, whether or not you can walk in your community without being the victim of somebody's violence,

whether it's a neighbor or the state itself, whether or not you can see a doctor when you get sick. So I decided, you know, when I graduated, I'm going to be the kind of doctor who works on the system, not in the system. So when all my classmates went and did residencies, I went into public health. That's when I got to rebuild the health department in the city of Detroit.

And then Trump gets elected like just two years later. And I'm like, oh, well, okay, listen, if that man with literally no skills, no discernible skills except for being born rich can get elected to presidency, maybe I got to think about all these folks had told me I needed to do. And that was the first time I ran for governor. I was like, you know, go bigger, go home. I went big, went home.

But I learned a lot about it. And I didn't know if I was going to run again, but I did say something I think is only matured, which is that Donald Trump is not himself the disease. He's the worst symptom of the disease in our politics. Disease is the way big corporations and special interests and billionaires can buy politicians. And they use it to rig the system against us. Why we end up paying so much more for all the stuff we've got to buy, get paid less for the work we do, watch our tax dollars get spent to drop bombs on kids somewhere else instead of build schools for kids here at home.

What a losing teach you because you went big again? Then you go for Senate. U.S. Senate. So, number one, people are less focused on the big comprehensive argument for what you want to do. They really just want to know that you're going to show up a fight for them. That's number one. Number two, there's something about consistency and having done it once. So I did go big again, but last time, eight years ago, people saw me get shellacked.

I was saying the same things, right? I tell people what I believe, for better or worse. And so people remember that run. And the funny thing about being named Abdul is like, people don't soon forget your name. All right. So when they see you, they're like, hey, we know what you're about. So what did I do in the eight years between? I went back to public service.

Went back to the work that I care about doing. I think for a lot of people, they're like, hey, this man really, really just wants to serve. And then when this U.S. Senate seat race came up, I'm not going to be honest with you guys. Like every time, you know, in Wayne County, we did things like putting Narcan and vending machines for free. We put up air quality monitors. You know, when I was in the city of Detroit, we provided glasses to every kid at school free after the vision test if they needed one. We built programs to eliminate medical debt, so up to $700 million of medical debt for 300,000 families.

Every time you propose a program like that, people look at you and say, well, doctor, how you going to pay for it? I was in here watching our government pay for a genocide with our tax dollars. How come nobody ever shows up? ask the general, general, you want to pay for that? Right. And so I'm just looking at this and I'm like, you know what, we could build a campaign just on the notion that your government should be doing good things for you, not bad things to other people, money out of politics, money in your pocket,

Medicare for all. And when we kicked off that campaign, we knew we were going to get out spent. We knew like billionaire, special interests and corporations. If you come at them, they're going to come back at you. We thought they were going to spend like $20 million. They spent $70 million. But because I had said it before, because I had said it before, because I had, had done it before.

People remember they're like, this guy just comes and says, he says the same thing. So much so I was at a church. This lovely lady in a nice hat, she comes up to me. She's like, keep saying the same thing.

I was like, man, like, well, the problems aren't solved yet. Right. I'm not a comedian. Like I don't need a new bit. Like once we solve these problems, we'll talk about other things. But right now, it's just gotten worse.

Right? If you think about it in the last eight years, things have gotten way more expensive. We're watching as whole industries are getting shut down by big tech. You look at your, circumstances like why they doing that war on Iran tariff war in Canada why how is this helping me and so look I want us to understand that like it's not enough as a democratic

party to just be like well we're not him okay so what are you right and I think we have an opportunity to be like all right we are the folks who're going to show up make sure you got a union you got health care you got opportunities you breathe clean air drink clean water I won't take on take on anyone who stands in your way because that's what you want your politician to do and I think people understood coming eight years on that like all right He really is about that business. You know, the other thing that changed, I had kids.

And there's something about having kids where, either you guys have kids? No. Okay. So there's this thing that happens when you have kids, okay? There's going, just, I'm going to get there. So you just van? Yeah, I'm with it.

Easy, okay? I'm with it. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Your kid at like one or two, when as soon as they start to walk, like, you know, you give them their own crib, you're supposed to let them sleep, but they find their way back in your bed.

They just do. And then, at some point, you roll over, and you realize your bed is well. because your kid has come into your bed and wet your bed. And then when this happens, you're like, all right, what we're going to do now? It's like 3 a.m. So you've got to clean the kid, clean yourself, clean your bed.

And meanwhile, your kid is, of course, tantruming because they're awake in the middle of the night. And any rational response to the situation is like, you came to my bed. And you have the audacity to have a tantrum while I clean you, clean my bed. And the whole time, all you're thinking is, it's okay, it's okay. It's okay, it's okay, let's just get you back to bed,

it's okay. And these things happen. So there's something about kids that put like a, they put like a patina on your soul. And you learn something about patients that I think just makes you a much better public servant. So last time, you know, when I ran out, I was 32 years old, I was pretty young,

I'd never run for office before. I took all the slights personally. This time around, you know, I got these two little girls, eight and three. I'm like, you know what, at the end of day, like sometimes life's just unfair like that. And your job is to show up and take care of the folks in front of you,

Anyway. You know, you described some things earlier, the increasing price of things. You talk a lot about dysfunction and health care. All those things to me seem to be criticisms of late stage capitalism. Yet you describe yourself as a capitalist. I have been in my definite and blistering anti-capitalist phase here as I continue to pull apart this system and educate the people. You describe yourself as a capitalist, though.

is it you trying to have it both ways left this without crossing the bridge let me let me step back what is capitalism right the guy who coined capitalism guy named adam smith yeah wrote this book called the wealth of nations okay and when you read about capitalism it's the idea that capital should be allocated in accordance with market demands supply demand so when people want you name whatever the product is right then money's going to flow to make more product so you sell more stuff and and people make money off that. Adam Smith himself said that the biggest risk to capitalism

wasn't government regulation. The biggest risk to capitalism is monopoly. At some point, you get one company to rule all companies, right? And that's where this thing is headed toward. So he understood that you needed government regulation to take the engine of this thing

and actually put it in a direction that goes. He also said there's no market without morals. So you got a bunch of corporations that you're right are at this late stage capitalism. But I don't want you to think about that. Something you've ever seen like an abandoned building? You've got all these plants growing out of it. It doesn't mean that plant growth is bad. It means that if you don't cut the plant growth off the building, you're going to get plant growth in places you don't want.

And we have a situation right now where the folks who are supposed to go trim the lawn and cut all the ivy aren't doing it. And so you got ivy growing up all on the on the building and wondering why. Well, yes, it has a tendency to do this thing, but that's where government is supposed to step in. Now, you've got to ask yourself, why is the government not doing that? Well, we allowed our corporations to get so big and we allowed them to start stepping into the political process, wherein they now get to buy access to politicians. We're going to turn their head and let them grow even bigger. So is the problem capitalism, or is the problem the way that we've allowed big corporations

to eat the system that's supposed to regulate capitalism? The other metaphor I like to use is think about an engine block, right, in a car. What an engine does is it is a controlled space for an explosion. You literally are using these little explosions between gas and oxygen to push to fire a piston. If you build a good engine block, you can use that thing to go really fast on the highway. If the engine block is not well built, you don't have a good steering column. You don't have a good chassis for the car, that thing's going to catch fire. See what I mean?

And so what I'm saying is it's not the controlled sort of, explosion, right, that moves money, that is not the essential issue. The essential issue is what we've allowed that to do, what we've pulled out from being able to regulate it that's made it not productive. So I'm just saying that like you don't have to be a socialist to believe you need good schools. In fact, if you are a real capitalist, you want good schools because you want an educated workforce. You don't have to be a socialist to believe that we deserve guaranteed health care. Why? Because it's the biggest albatross sitting on every business that exists. You're talking to any small business owner and they'd be like, why do I got to spend half my time?

I'm thinking about health insurance. You don't have to be a socialist to believe we need good infrastructure. Those are all the substrate for a functioning capitalist system. We just don't have capitalism here. What we have is corporatism. I'm not a corporatist. I don't believe in corporatism. I would like to regulate and undo corporatism,

meaning break up big corporations, make sure that they can't buy politicians, make sure that they can't dominate and grow across every field. and then I believe in small businesses. I believe in the idea that like if you got a great idea and you're willing to work hard and you got a little bit of capital that you should be able to build a cool business, right? Employ a whole bunch of people and move your money around the local community.

Like I think all of us kind of agree with that. That is essentially what capitalism is supposed to do, but we've allowed the big guys to destroy that for everybody. Your definition is interesting insofar as it is at cross purposes with what American capitalism has taught us and has become. And really the religious belief that we have in capitalism is in endless growth. It is in brutal competition. It's in meritocracy to the point to where we kind of disguise legacy wealth transfer as meritocracy.

Right. So you describe this sort of pure form of capitalist with government. with just enough government control that can exist. It's impossible because any true capitalist would tell you that it needs growth no matter what. And that growth equates, it equals or that growth ends up in degradation of people's lives. Well, Van, let's step back and ask, yeah, you do need growth. But like, what is the optimal growth? is like, is the growth of the tallest trees better than the growth of new trees?

And I'll tell you that I think right now what corporatism is, is you've got a couple of really tall trees. And we give them all the resources to the exclusion of any other trees. All right. That's not what capitalism is supposed to do. What capitalism is supposed to do, really, to your point. Competition is supposed to exist. The problem, though, is that when you have a few really big corporations, nobody can compete with them. that's not capitalism.

That's anti-capitalism, right? That's anti-capitalistic. If you don't have choices in a market, that is not capitalism. So I'm just saying that, like, yes, what you're describing is functionally the corporatism in which we live. And I agree with you that we've allowed America

to become this post-Ronald Reagan. But there was a moment back in the 60s, 50s, right, where you had a lot more regulation. It's just that what we've enabled the legacy folks to do is to buy access. and power enough that they can actually squelch competition because now they just got legacy and they say, well, we already won. And my point is, look, at the end of day, it's like, you know, think

about like the NFL, right? You win one championship and then you play again next year. In our system, once you win, you win everything. That's not capitalism. That's not how it's supposed to work. Because if you can't be competed with, you're anti-capitalist. I just want to put it out there. Competition is the essence of the system, the best, the allocation of supply and demand, right, of capital via supply to demand. You need to be able to have new entry and exit in the market. If you don't have that because you have one monopolist, you don't have capitalism.

You have corporatism. Last thing I'll say about this, we can move on because Rachel knows I can do this all day. I'd say that while, of course, we recognize a time where American capitalism, capitalism in the Western world increased productivity, life and sympathies and all of this, stuff like that. I'd actually caution a framing of the good old days of capitalism

because American capitalism is born on the backs of African slavery. Right. So from the beginning of it, the beginning of it, there was a group of people who are going through what the rest of Americans find themselves going through right now, which is their humanity and their worth and their labor was extracted by a capitalist organization, political system known as slavery, so that people can make money and that they could toil and perpetuity. So the beginning of American capitalism, the jumpstart of wealth that the country got is rotten. You would agree with that. I'd agree with that 100%. And I would argue that let's separate. And you asked me about you call yourself a capitalist. Certainly. I gave you the definition of capitalism. I would just argue that America has never actually had a pure form of capitalism. We had closer to purity. But even then, when I talked about the 50s and 60s, That was the exclusion of black folk, you know, by way of Jim Crow and segregation and all the redlining, everything.

So, you know, if you're black in America, you've never actually had access to real capitalism. You had your labor extracted from you via like the most fundamentally unethical, immoral act of placing somebody in, in slavery. And then we've excluded black folk in different ways. We still exclude black folk in different ways. from full participation in capitalism via access to capital, via access to good schools, via access to health care, via access to all these things. But I want us to just separate our path dependent and our history

from the thing. Because when I'm in the community, what people ask me is I just want to have access to it. That's it. I want to be able to know that if I've got a good idea, I can go get a loan. I want to be able to know that I can give good jobs to folks in our communities because they've had good educations here

and they can be a part of building new businesses here. The fact that our system has excluded people from this thing, that's the problem. So I'm just saying like the notion where you start breaking up the biggest folks, where you stop them from buying politicians to rig the system, where you enable access to capital, whether it's full unlocking of your human capital through a good school, a great set of infrastructure for everybody, not, you know, if you go to the hood, there's a bunch of potholes

and you go to the burbs and the roads are beautiful. the idea that things like healthcare that they're going to be there for you and you actually gave everybody equal access to this thing and the government was there to make sure that nobody got too big to fail or too big

to be able to overgrow or stop competition I think you'd start getting far better outcomes and the only thing I'm gonna finish out here is the idea that capitalism is an American idea that's just not true it's not even a European idea if you were to go back to you know the places

where our ancestors come from, whether you are in a souk in Egypt, right, or in the souk in Timbuktu, right? What you had is folks selling their wares and exchanging, and some folks would do better business and some folks would otherwise. Commerce, but what I'm saying is...

Not necessarily capitalism. Right, but the essence, right, the essence of capitalism is commerce. When you start getting away from commerce and into corporate capture, that's when the system starts to fail. And I'm saying that government needs to step in there and do something about it.

See what I mean? That's what I'm saying. And that's calling for an activist government that's going to step in, A, to hold the biggest corporations accountable. B, not to let them be captured, right? Or let the government be captured by those corporations. And then C, give everybody the means

of being able to participate through health care, good infrastructure, and good schools. But it's also for calling for something that has never really existed. If it was rotten at the root, then it never really, so you're almost creating something new, because that's never existed within America, what you just described. You're right, you're right. It's a new word.

We need, yeah, we do. And what I'm saying is, I think all of us, like when I describe these things, I could be in a church in Detroit, I could be in a living room in Lansing, I could be up north in Escanaba. And I'm like, this is how the economy should work. Most people are like, man, that's fair. And yeah, that's fair is really what we're after. You know what I mean? Yeah, that's fair. And I think people, especially in my statement, like, Michiganers are, we're like this amazing combination of being earnest. Like, people expect the best

in Michigan. Like, they expect the best from you. They expect to be treated well. And they're going to treat you well. But they're gritty and they're willing to work hard. And all we really want is, yeah, that's fair. You know? And right now we should be like, no, that's not fair. And so in all the ways that it's not fair, you're too big so you can muscle me out. You bought off the politician, right? You're raising my rates and I can't do anything about it. I don't have these basic things and I'm working extra hard to get half as far. All of these, yeah, that's not fair. Government is supposed to be able to step in and be like, no, it needs to be fair. And here are some ways for us to do that. That's really fundamentally what we want to build. And like the

easiest way to understand it is forget adults. Just start with kids. What would we build if we treated all our kids like all our kids? If we just said, I don't care if you're a black child in the city of Detroit or a brown child growing up in Dearborn or a white child growing up in Escanaba, deserve is to get an amazing education. What you deserve is to breathe clean air, drink clean water. What you deserve is that you get time with your family and they get to see you and they get to be a part of your life. What you deserve is to know that whatever your skill set is, you're going to be able to build it and be able to do something with it. And that should be true for you no matter who you are. If we built that place, what would it look like? It looked a lot different than this.

But I do think that folks want to have a chance to be able to be like, I got an idea. I want to build something. Go do it, right? The thing is you can't build the thing to end all things. You know what I mean? Not Elon Musk over here. Yeah, yeah. I want to go back to the black vote because I don't feel like we finished out that conversation, but you talked about all this money that was spent and you were 20 points up and then it completely changed. Now that you've won the primary, what are you doing to resonate with black voters? How is that going? And have you received any support? Because I know Clyburn came out there. He obviously supported your opponent. She's not here right now. You're You're the one who want. Have you talked to the establishment? Have you heard from him?

What's going on right there? Because I know that you're going to need that to really move things forward. Yeah. So a couple of things. I've been having great conversations with a lot of folks who've been fighting this fight for a very long time for the black community. Representative Clyburn is one of them. Not a great meeting with him in his office a couple weeks back. And he's endorsing our campaign. He supported us. The Congressional Black Caucus Pack has endorsed our race. you know, Vice President Harris came out to Michigan to campaign. We did a roundtable on maternal and infant mortality inequities, which is an area I've worked a lot on in my career. But there's also something more, and it's sort of addressing the elephant in the room.

It's too often, you know, when folks meet somebody who looks like me, it's not a good experience. Too often they're seeing them from behind bulletproof glass in a liquor store or in a gas station. They're being cat-called. if they're a woman, their kid is being sold to Lucy out the back. If they buy food, it's beyond its expiration date. And I've been tried to be on the right side of that issue for a long time.

I remember my first year's health director in the city of Detroit, walking into a store where people who know me know I like to drink Gatorade Zero, the White Cherry. And so I buy my Gatorade Zero, White Cherry. and this shopkeeper, Arab guy, he's like, you're Muslim? I'm like, Habibu, you know I'm Muslim. He was like, well, why's your beard so short? I was like, oh, I forgot something.

So I go and I pick up a fifth of vodka, I'm like, I forgot this. And he's like, you can't buy that. I was like, Habibu, you can't sell it? So how are you going to bring a difference out of morals to a conversation with me? first a conversation with your neighbors. And I think we've got to get right about that issue. And I'll tell you, for me, you know,

there's a reason I've focused so much in my career on disparities in health among black folk. I remember sitting in my junior year in my classroom when the second plane hit the Twin Towers. And I went from being a brown kid with a funny name to being a very particular kind of Broncos. It was a very particular kind of funny name. And I had this, one of the three black teachers in my high school pulls me aside,

you've got to read your history. And he takes me to the library in the school, talking about W.E.B. Du Bois. And Sojourner Truth and Frederick Douglass and Alex Haley and Jim Baldwin and Malcolm X and Dr. Martin Luther King, the stuff he wrote, not just the things that people say about him. and you know I read the canon of civil rights leadership and thought leadership and I learned a lot about what it meant to be a person of color in America both the incredible debt of gratitude I owe to black folks and the fact that even as a person of color who faces my fair share of discrimination it pales in comparison to what black folks face every day because I don't carry

the long-range consequences of slavery in Jim Crow, et cetera. So the question I had to ask myself is, what do I owe? And I'll just be honest with you. We all know about the Civil Rights Act and the Voting Rights Act. Everybody talks about that all the time. There's a third act that happened in 1965. It was the Immigration Act. Immigration Act lifts quotas from people immigrating from countries like my dad.

13 years later, my dad gets to move here. I get to be born. Which are activism? Yes, exactly. That's what I'm saying. My existence in the United States of America was paid for by the effort and the organizing and the blood, sweat, and tears of folks organizing

in church pews in the 1960s. I don't take that lightly. And so, you know, I left a tenure track academic job at Columbia University, right? I was on pace to be tenured before I turned 30. Everybody was like, what are you doing? I was like, I, oh, I'm sitting here and write papers about this stuff, let me go do something about this.

So my job is to continue to have the conversation in the community, both the hard conversation and the honest conversation, which is to say, listen, there has been a rift that is built because too many people who look like me don't understand their history in the context of yours. And also, we need to address that. And also, I want you to ask me about the content of my character because I've tried to be a part of building and leading alongside and with the black community and just. judge me by my work, right? Let me ask you with that. As someone who has been stereotyped because of their religion or because of their name or because of their background, how does that make you feel then that people try to accuse you of discriminating against or being anti-Semitic or being discriminating against another group of people when

you know firsthand what that is? I mean, it's painful. But also, one of the things that you have to... submit to when you step into the political arena is that people are going to typecast you. And you can be mad about it. You can hate it. You can be frustrated about it, but it is. It just is.

And, you know, I think about somebody like President Obama. And I think about, like, the closest way I can think about him is like the way I think about my own dad, which is I don't get to have a life. without you. My life was, you know, you studied my life into existence on the top floor of a building in Alexandria, Egypt by the light of a lamp. So, you know, I can have as many opinions as I want,

but like you walked so I could run. And at the same time, anybody who's ever, like, contended with the legacy of your own parent, there's always this thing of like, there's some things about you that I want to be just like. There's a bunch of things about you. I don't want to be just like, right? That's just how we are.

And so I think about President Obama, the thing that I only know, deeply appreciate is how careful he had to walk. You know what I mean? And in a lot of ways, I get to run around in my, you know, my, that dress away I want to dress, saying the things I say because he did what he did and he created a permission structure for somebody like me. So yeah, people are going to say, oh, by definition, because you're Arab, you think.

And my job is just to understand that that exists in the world and to try my best to show a different face. And if I succeed. God willing, some other kid who looks different in however way gets the opportunity to run as they are without having to carry so much of the burden that hopefully we carried and made a little bit easier, just like President Obama carried for me. Are you surprised at the attacks or the conversations that you're having within the warm blanket of the Democratic Party? Like I've watched you on different hits on MS Now.

I watched your opinions on raging moderates, which was a... Hey, it is a raging moderate show. Raging moderate show. Jessica and Galloway, man, don't look at the comments, man. Don't read the comments on that one. But some of your most striding opponents come from within the cohort. and they seem to be more skeptical of you than anyone else. Does that surprise you?

Are left candidates across the country getting the support from the center of the Democratic Party that they should? I got me honest with you. The party has been very supportive of my race in the general because, frankly, you can't control the U.S. Senate without me. Do you feel like they're extending that same hand

to Angie Nixon, people like that? Not necessarily. and my hope is that we can have a conversation in our party about where we need to go as a party because there's a reason that folks have skepticism about me because I ran headlong against a lot of the orthodoxy of the Democratic Party in my primary. You're part of the non-committed. Yeah. And I was saying during the 2024 election season, look, we cannot be.

proponents of human rights and be sending our money to drop bombs on children and backstopping a genocide. We can't do that. And then when Vice President Harris was the nominee, I endorsed her the next day. Why? Because I understood whether you saw this from the eyes of a child in Detroit, who I was responsible for as health director or you saw it from the eyes of a child in Gaza, Trump would be worse. That being said, as I launched this campaign, I told you, Donald Trump's not the disease. He's the worst symptom. The disease is the way billionaires, corporations, buy and sell politicians. And guess what? It's not just Republicans. Right. I mean, where did all that money come from? 32 million of it came from APEC. But the other 38 million, Big Pharma,

big tech, DTE, our local utility, Blue Cross Blue Shield, the 70% of the insurance market in Michigan. Guess who's running against me now? Big Pharma, Big Tech, A PAC, DTE, Blue Cross Blue Shield. And here's the thing about it. We spend all these election seasons talking about how young people don't show up. Young people are like hyper rational about their time. They know they're only going to be young once. They always my time was shit that doesn't matter. So they look at this and be like, so Democrat or Republican win, guess who wins? Big Pharma, big tech, DTE, bluecross. And so they're like, why should I even rock with that? And I want to give folks an opportunity to be like, no, we can think differently and we can do it differently. And so we had that debate inside the party.

I don't take corporate money. I never have. I never will. It's why I took 70 million my face. But we came out victorious because people really want a politics of the people by the people and for the people. They want to believe that their vote really matters for something. And the thing you get with me is like, I don't mince my words. I don't say different things to different people. You're going to hear me say the same thing on raging moderates as I come on on higher learning as I go on Ezra Klein or whatever. I'm going to say the same thing because it's what I believe. I'm not worrying about talking points that I told this corporation to get their pack check and then told this group of voters to get their vote. And then and then and then, you know,

you go to DC and you're caught between 15 different lies. I don't want to be caught between lies. And part of what I'm trying to do is demonstrate that our party really can be the party of working people if we put working people first. And in Michigan, you know, they've always said, ah, ideas like that can work in L.A. or it can work in New York, but not in Michigan. Yes, they can. Michiganers need health care.

Michiganers are sick and tired of a stupid-ass tariff war that's raising our rates. They're tired of gas. They're tired of watching utilities, buy off politicians, and then have to pay more for those same utilities, more than 46 other states. They're sick and tired of being told what they can't have from the health care they already paid for. They're tired of all of it. And so the difference in our politics isn't right versus left.

I mean, that's the thing. It's like what's moderate? What's a center? You understand center implies a certain left-right narrative that doesn't really exist in real life. I don't know. You know, if you ever talked to somebody to be like, hmm, I was sitting and pondering where I sit on the left-right spectrum. Most people are like, I don't know how I'm going to pay my right next month.

I don't know how I'm going to be able to afford, you know, my kids baseball. I talked to a guy moderate He's like look I don't agree with you on everything But my kid is a baseball like prodigy All the coaches have said He's an incredible player I won't be able to afford for him to play this year

Right Just baseball man talking about an American dream Kid just wants to play baseball That's the issue And so the point that I'm making to our party And anyone else will listen Is that politics should not be But politics should be what people want

And so yeah A lot of Democrats are going to look at me and be like, well, I don't think he can win because, I don't think, I don't think, and part of me says, yes, you're right, you're right. I am going to upset the gravey train by which corporate money comes into our politics.

I don't want that to happen anymore. But guess what, then you might be free to actually do things that service people because none of us got in this business thinking, man, I just really want to do like DTE a favor. Do you think that that's really resonating with the establishment? I mean, I know that you're working with them now because you are the one going to the general,

but, you know, Van brought up Angie Nixon, and it doesn't seem like that same support it's not behind her. So do you think that that message is actually getting through so the party can work together? Well, look, you know, Angie Nixon ran a campaign against the establishment. She beat a candidate who had way more money.

She was able to organize, and she was consistent. Now, look, I'm campaigning in Michigan, my focus is Michigan. But I do think that the party, like there's, we're putting points on the board, right? I'm putting points on the board. And my point to the party is, and this is the thing about the party, there is the party TM,

but a lot of it is just the party's a vehicle. And a lot of folks who think, like we think, about what our politics should be, we're like, man, I don't need this vehicle. Yes, you do. Put your hand on the wheel and steer it where you want it to go. Yes, has the car gone to the wrong place? Sure.

But if you don't like where the car is going, what do you do? Let me drive. I'm going to take this car somewhere else. So my point is to say, look, I don't mean any individual or anybody, any harm. But I do mean the people of the state of Michigan a lot of benefit. And insofar as our party has been on the wrong side of utility rates being higher, gas prices being higher, our air and water being not as clean as they could be, people not being able to see health care,

I want us to be the party who can stand up, 10 toes down, full chest, be like, hey, I'm not bought off by those folks. We're going to be out here fighting. We might not win every fight, but we are for damn sure going to be fighting, and you don't have to second guess whether or not we're working for those folks

because we don't take our money from them. We ask you to support us to fight for you. And we're showing that even with my foreign-ass name, okay, even with all the headwind against me, that if you're willing to show up and be consistent and be honest, you actually can win elections. So I'm hoping that folks watching say, hey, we really can do this.

There's a pathway here. Sometimes you just got to prove it out. See what I mean? And prove it out lovingly. That's the problem. I think people get so focused on like, well, those folks, you know, like, I mean, no harm to anybody.

You know what I mean? Am I annoyed? Do I disagree with the way you, like politics have been done? Yes. But my job at the end of the day is not to win some fight inside a Democratic Party.

I could care less about that fight inside the Democratic Party. My job is for that gentleman who told me about his kid, I want that kid to be able to play baseball. For those folks who go to schools that look like they did 50 years ago, I want them have good schools. For the folks with asthma exacerbations because they're breathing on the other side of a smokestack,

I want them to breathe easy. For the folks who are like, I can't get sick because I won't be able to pay for my health care. I want you to be able to see the doctor. That's the work. You just focus on that. Everything else gets a lot easier. I mean, I've studied complicated stuff. This is not that complicated.

I got to ask you this just out of curiosity. What was the conversation between you and Vice President Harris like before you guys formed like Voltron, what issues had to be discussed, how much work had to be done for you guys to be on the same. Look, I'll be honest with you that 107 days of her campaign

were some of the most frustrating on my political life. I understood that Donald Trump would be existentially risky. Now, a lot of folks in my community looked at me, be like, bro, what are you doing? I was like, guys, you don't remember what the first thing he did when he got elected?

Yeah. The Muslim ban. You remember that? Yeah. And we got to be in the business of saving babies. Saving babies in Detroit, saving babies in Gaza, saving babies everywhere. That's my business. I want to show up for babies. So sometimes you don't agree with the situation.

So I was on the phone with the Harris campaign being like, all right, y'all, you got to give me something. Give me something. Show me how you're going to change. There's no change. On the phone with the Arab Muslim media would be like, guys, like this man is coming for everything that you care about and your rights. and in the end, nothing moved. We lost that race. And Donald Trump is president

and Donald Trump as decimated so many of the programs that I care about. I told you, you know, why did I run for Senate? Because you put a freeze on the funds I was making sure babies had food to eat. So coming out of it, obviously, this is a moment for us to learn as a party, right? I haven't moved at all on my positions

when it comes to the fact that I don't want our tax dollars being spent to subsidize foreign militaries. I don't want our tax dollars buying $2.8 billion worth of 2,000 pound bombs. I believe in Palestinian self-determination equal rights to peace dignity and self-determination for Palestinians and Jewish Israelis alike.

I have not moved. And at the same time, if we want the opportunity to make policy, we have to win this race. And so the vice president and I shared a number of conversations about what it looks like to make sure we can win. Now, you know, we talked a bit about

how frustrating that that 2020-24 campaign was. have any frustration with you? Honestly, she understood where I stood. Because at the end of the day, right? I was trying to be pragmatic about how we save babies. Because the best shot at being able to save babies in Gaza

and to be able to fund the programs that saved babies in Wayne County was going to be organizing against a Harris administration rather than organizing against a Trump administration. And so I endorsed her because I understood that. And you know, I was trying to get that

campaign to see what I saw on the ground and about what it was going to cost. And, you know, obviously campaigns are big things. You know what I mean? And I never got to talk to her in the context of the campaign. But she, you know, she appreciated that I supported her. I didn't have to. I could have easily just been like, look, I'm sending this one out. But I thought it was the right thing to do. See what I mean? It was. And she, she appreciated that. And I also told her why I believe that that policy was so off and where we need to go from here. And notice, you know, her message to voters in Michigan isn't rehashing the past. It's about asking people to come together on the future.

And that's the thing about it. A vote is not about the past. A vote is about what you want in the future. And so I appreciated her being willing to have that conversation with voters. And at the same time, I'm asking a lot of folks who are very upset about her participation in the administration. The administration funding a genocide. Funding the genocide. Yeah. To be like, okay, and what would you, where do we go from here? If our approach, if you think that you're going to end a genocide by condemning rather than inviting, I just don't think that theory of change in politics works.

I'm going to be one of six new senators in the U.S. Senate. The other 94 are in the U.S. Senate. If I am hoping to stop our funding from going to genocide, I need them to come to me. I need them to see it my way. If I go out and just be like, well, I can't possibly ask for your vote because you voted wrong in the rut last time. Is that going to actually stop the problem? I think too often we think that these issues are about words. Words are great.

Actions matter more. Actions matter more. And you don't run for U.S. Senate to just say words. You run for U.S. Senate because you want to take actions. I want bombs to stop. I want kids in the city of Detroit to have good schools. And how we get there. We're going to have to move some folks, which means you got to take them from where they were.

to where you need them to be. How you do that? You prove there's a possible way. You make the money that APEC spends toxic because it's about taking our money to drop bombs on other kids. You stand clear on your principle. You force the conversation.

But you also invite people to come to where you are. You create more space where you are. Rather than condemning them and you're like, no, you're stuck where you are because you weren't there the first time. I wish you would have been there with me last time. But if I have an opportunity, do I choose to indict you for your power?

or invite you to a better future. Last question for me. How many losing seasons from the Pistons would you trade for one Lion's Super Bowl? Bro, that's a tough question. I know it is. That's what we do. How many Pistons...

Do we win that Super Bowl? Yeah, you win the Super Bowl. So the Lions win the Super Bowl. I'm sorry, man. You trade 10 losing seasons from the Pistons. Yeah, because the Pistons are going to be able to rebuild. Kay, Cah, my God. I'm going to do that to Kate, all right?

Well, I'm just saying they got... It's a theoretical... Does it start right now? It starts now. It starts with Kaye, Jayland, J-Land-A-Ladies, guys. It starts with this team. It starts with this team. So how many...

So you're condemning a good team? How many seasons of losing Pistons basketball would you trade for one Lions Super Bowl victory? Do we get to have the Super Bowl this year? You can take the Super Bowl this year. You can take the Super Bowl for the same year that you decide to vote for president. Let me just give...

You draft off of that. Like, you can... You can take this for a Super Bowl to be named later. Okay, Kate, first of all, Kate Cunningham is a scholar and a gentleman. Let me just tell you. He's an amazing player. He's not just he's an amazing player. He's an amazing man.

I just tell you why. One of the things I had to do when I was in Wayne County was rebuild the operations of the juvenile detention facility. It was awful. And Cade Cunningham came to talk to the kids. But he didn't just come and talk. Like, you know, you could have done, he could have phoned it in. He came. You could have done like 20 minutes walked out.

Everybody would be like, Kate Cunningham, that's amazing. The brother spends. Two hours, door to door, talking to every kid and having a personal conversation with every single one. I was just, because his older brother was there with him. I was like, whatever your family did to raise this young man. Because look, the guy's a multimillionaire. He doesn't need to be here. He can do whatever he wants.

But he just decided to have this conversation, like a real heartfelt conversation with every kid. I will forever be a Cade Cunningham fan. Cade, if you're listening, I will forever be a Cade Cunningham man because you showed me character that day. He didn't have to be there. So the fact This is a compliment sandwich Because you're about to No no

Hear me out So let me just Let me just say The fact that Cade Cunningham Has a good A good seven years left I'm going to say three years Three years

We win a Super Bowl This year, okay Okay And then off the draft of that We're like all right We got two more bad seasons For the Pistons But after that

I know Cade is going to continue to mature Right And then Cade's going to be at his prime And we're going to have A couple of rebuilding seasons Right We're going to keep building

the team around Cade and then Cade is going to go and win the NBA championship and life will be good in Detroit. So three straight losing seasons, even with this roster for one Super Bowl. Can I just tell you, the last Pistons game that I actually was at, was one of the games in that brutal streak. Terrible.

It was brutal. I mean, just brutal. So I just think that the Pist, I mean, there's a problem. Lions have never. Yeah. We've never had. Because of different eras.

But different losing eras. No, the Pistons have different errors. The Pistons had the bad boys. and then they had the Larry Brown pissies. Every 15 years, the pistons are going to be good. Right. So we're kind of still got like another like three years left in that, right? So that's what I'm saying.

Three losing seasons, then the piston's going to be good again. But I'm just saying, man, like I was a child who watched Barry Sanders. I got to watch Barry Sanders in my prime. Barry Sanders is Megatron. Like, all these guys. Yes, in my middle school and high school years, I got to turn on the television. And watch because that's the moment sports is like, it's magic to you at that age, right? And I got to watch Barry Sanders play on Sundays.

And then I watched them. retire a year before he set the rushing record. Left the Applebee's and was like, I hanged right. I'm just done. Walked out of Applebee's and it was like no more football. Yes. And so we still all really, he was just like,

and then Megatron did the same thing. And then Megatron. I think this makes to the greatest. They can't. But like, we just, we ended up like wasting, not wasting. Look, these are beautiful careers. I was so grateful for them.

But like, we couldn't deliver for two of the best position players to ever play the game. Yeah. Two. Yeah. And I just won a Lions Super Bowl, man. Well, we'll see.

We'll see what comes first. Alliance Super Bowl or you in D.C. in either row. Because we know you're going to do it. Well, either. No, no, I'm just trying to be you a center. Don't you wish to. They'll know.

Look, I just got to say, so Michigan sports. I mean, look, we take our sports extremely seriously. Of course. We take our sports extremely seriously. And I'm a Michigan fan. and the other thing I want you didn't put this on the table I just want an uncomplicated Michigan season

where we went a lot of games National champions three years ago I know but it's still scandalous man fuck that hey I love that he's right I don't care yeah no man no asterisk

hang the banner y'all just get caught it's all scandal hang the banner it is what it is um Abdul thank you for joining us on high-mark thank you for having me

thank you having me look we got 35 days left for folks out there want to get involved we're knocking door So come in Michigan, we got a beautiful fall in Michigan. But you can just check us out on Abdul for Senate.com, sign up to volunteer, give us up $5, 10 bucks. I don't take corporate money, so your money goes much longer away.

We're getting outspent two to one by, you know, Donald Trump's chosen sock puppet, a guy named Mike Rogers. And we need you out there. And then, you know, for folks out there just to share this clip. Honestly, like, it's dollars doors and I had a third to one with digital impressions. Yeah. So if you like somebody still here, share this clip. Be good for you guys, good for us. Good for everybody.

All right. Thank you so much. All right. That was Abdul Sayed. I'm glad we got him on. It's fantastic. Yeah. He's fun.

Young breed. Young breed of politician pushing the line. You know what I mean? Well, look, you know what I want to talk about on the next podcast? I want to talk about beefs in the left. I don't know if you guys are seeing this. But there's a beef brewing right now. Now, Emma Viglin is in town.

And we should say that normally when we get EVs, in town, we get EV on the podcast, but we couldn't make it happen this time. You know what I mean? I think the Bituation Room Live is happening this Sunday. Shout out to Francesca. Are you doing it again? I'm not doing it. I'm going to show up though. So if you guys can go search the Bituation Room Live,

if there's still tickets, I think Francesca is there. Also, do me a favor and support black leftists. Support the black left. Support people like Sabby Sabs and FD Signifier,

Brianna, support the black left. Whether you agree with them all the time or not, support the black left. And I'm not asking you to interview me, but interview black leftists and platform them. And we should do a better job of that, by the way. Because we've had black leftists on. We've had Mark Lamont Hill. We've had Summer Lee. If some accounts as a black leftist, I'm sure she does.

We've had Jamal Bowman. But just of the thought leaders, we're going to do a better job here of, of like platforming black leftists. Love to have Dr. Jared Ball on the podcast so that I can, you guys can see what a real leftist looks like and what actually power politics looks like in action. And so that criticisms could be lobbed at my sort of milk toast version of this. And you guys can actually get a feel of what real intellectual revolution is.

Okay. All right. So you guys need that. Push us all a little bit. So shout out to that. Shout out to all of that stuff. But there's beef in the white left as covered by the vanguard. And right now it's up.

There's two crews fighting. Who are the crews? The crews are the majority report with Sam Cedar. Okay. And they straight banging on the bulwark, bullwark, Tim Miller in them. They say, y'all not hardcore enough for us. Like, we over here on the East Coast and we banging on Tim and Sarah. Like the Montague's and the Capulets.

Whatever. Brad, like I'm talking the way I talk, but you're right. We shouldn't do that. Let them be that. Let them be that. So it's like, I love to watch the little dramas going on. The Pawsave guys in the middle of it, all of this shit. As children drink dirty water.

Okay. Let's go. Take your thing caps off, but do not stop learning. Thank you guys for enduring the conversation at the top of this podcast. I know it wasn't an easy listen for a lot of people out there. I'm Van Lathan Jr. I'm Rachel and Lindsay. Bye, guys.