Pod Save America - Artificial Intelligence, Actual Idiots

Episode Date: September 15, 2026

Trump dismisses the AI CEOs at Anthropic, OpenAI, and xAI who are calling for a "global slowdown" of AI development, saying the only government regulation the industry needs is a "high IQ" president. Jon, Tommy, and Lovett break down the "sick conspiracy" claim the administration and tech investors have leveled at AI makers, the recent developments that united Dario Amodei, Sam Altman, and Elon Musk, and the chances that meaningful AI regulation could pass before the election or in a lame-duck Congress. Then they turn to AI's impact on the 2028 presidential election, a Russian oligarch's unusual involvement in Donald Trump Jr.'s wedding festivities, and the worst Republicans on and off the ballot in Texas. Then, Sarah Longwell, publisher of The Bulwark, stops by the studio to talk to Jon about her new book, "How to Eat an Elephant."Hate listening to ads? Become a Friends of the Pod subscriber for ad-free episodes of Pod Save America, Pod Save the World, Lovett or Leave It, Runaway Country, Offline with Jon Favreau, and more—plus exclusive content, including bonus episodes of Pod Save America. Subscribe now at crooked.com/friends, on Apple Podcasts, or through the Pod Save America YouTube channel.You can request a transcript by emailing [e-mail]. Include the podcast name, episode title, and air date. Please allow 48 hours for delivery.

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on the train. That was just fun. It's just a hit. That's just fun. Right now, you can get 50% off any new Simplysafe system. Go to Simplysafe.com slash cricket. That's Simplysave. com slash cricket for 50% off. And when you order, please write in Podsafe America in the How Did You Hear About a survey to let them know we sent you. Don't forget, there's no safe like Simply Safe. Welcome to Pod Save America. I'm John Favro. I'm John Lemon. I'm Tommy Vitor. On today's show, we're going to talk about the AI overlords who are begging for regulation that could stave off the apocalypse and the president who's saying, no way, I love the apocalypse.

We'll talk about what Congress could do about our looming AI crisis, why it's bringing Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon together and how the issue will shape 2028. We've also got some pretty serious corrupt dates for you, including the Russia, Russia, Russian oligarch, who bankrolled Don Jr's wedding. Russia's back. It's so annoying that it had to be a Russian oligarch.

I don't want to be back in, like, pee tape land, in 2017, but this story's insane. It's insane. It's a cofefefe time. It's a cofefefe story. There are also some Republican candidates in Texas who are somehow even worse than Ken Paxton that we'll talk about. Then I sat down with the bulwark Sarah Longwell to talk about what she's hearing in her

focus groups about AI, Kamala Harris, and lots more. She's also got a great new book out. But first, Leavitt, speaking of books, I think you had an event that you wanted to mention. At least that's what it says here. Yes, on Thursday, I am talking to our very own Alex Wagner. about her book, The Steel, at the Writers Guild Theater here in L.A. The Steel is about Ronald Reagan's efforts to pack the federal courts with conservative judges. And it worked, and it's a fascinating story and precursor to where we're at now.

And also, we'll talk about everything what's happening in politics. I'm excited to talk to Alex. It's going to be fun. So it's Thursday, 7.30 at the Writers Guild Theater. You go to Writers Block Presents if you want to come. All right. Let's get to the news. This was the weekend where the leaders of companies building

what nearly everyone agrees is the most powerful technology in history said that it's time to slow it down because humans could lose control of AI with catastrophic consequences. And the president, along with his rich tech buddies and the MAGA establishment, responded by saying, no thank you, full speed ahead. On Saturday, Anthropic CEO Dario Amadeh published an essay calling for a global slowdown in AI development.

based on the argument that AI models are becoming so advanced that AI itself is increasingly being used to build the next generation of AI, a process that could move faster than humans' ability to understand or control, as evidenced by the recent incident involving Open AI, where AI agents launched cyber attacks, they hadn't been instructed to carry out, and then tried to cover up their tracks so human observers wouldn't find out. Amadegh goes on to say we could be six to 12 months away from a swarm of AI agents capable of taking over the entire internet. And he proposes giving outside independent evaluators access inside AI companies, including his common safety standards for big AI companies, and a political effort to reach some kind of an international agreement, especially with China. Open AIs Sam Altman and XAI's Elon Musk Then expressed support for Amadei Sounds pretty good, right? Wrong. Monday morning, Trump described the push for AI guardrails

As a quote, sick conspiracy that would help China And said that the only guardrail we need Is a high IQ president Which if this clip of Trump on Air Force One Sunday night Is any indication, we clearly have. I just wanted to make sure everyone's okay with the music. Right? Are you okay?

Are you okay? You heard directly from any of these AI tech leaders and you seem to downplay some of the concerns that we heard. No, I'm not downplay, but it's going to be more good than bad, but by a lot. And I've said it from any of them. Whoever wins AI and we're leading by a lot. Whoever wins AI wins. Have you ever used it yourself or have you been...

How do you use AI? But I would say, you know, for the most of you can use AI for a lot of things. What do you use it? Well, I use it to create images of me as Jesus, me in front of mission accomplished banners, all kinds of stuff. What did you guys make at the weekend's developments, and how significant do you think it is that Amadee, Altman, Musk, who pretty much hate each other, seem to agree on the need for some kind of a slowdown, Tommy?

I think it's interesting that they all paid lip service, lip service to the idea of a slowdown, but I think the significance is TBD. I mean, Dario Amade, he laid out a three-point plan. And his response on Twitter, Sam Altman basically said, yeah, I'm with you on step one, which is these embedded evaluators inside the companies who have, like, employee-like access and can verify that safety practices are being followed and they can report problems. But the second and third points of Dario Amade's plan require government-level coordination and diplomacy. And even the easier of the two, which is like coordination among democracies,

is basically just more export controls on advanced chips so they don't get in the hands of the Chinese. And Trump has been weakening those export controls, not strengthening them. And then, as you said, Trump came out and explicitly said this week that he didn't want the companies to slow down. It was kind of a weird thing. He didn't need to say it at all. But it does seem now we seem to know. There was a moment later today that suggests that the CEO of NVIDIA got in his head with this point because NVIDIA just wants to sell as many chips to as many people. So Jensen Wong makes the most money. So I think the most meaningful thing that these CEOs could do, especially Elon Musk, would be to convince Donald Trump that regulation is necessary and to do something about it.

But we also know that Mark Zuckerberg has been calling Trump to say, hey, pump the brakes on a regulatory body for AI. And so I think the bigger problem with Dario Amadei's post is that it doesn't really pace the future like the title suggests. It is it's not halting advanced training. it is like slowing it down a bit, putting in these embedded evaluators who the companies, by the way, are not required to listen to. If they sound the alarm, you can just blow them off. So it does feel like the net effect is we're still proceeding ahead pretty quickly, though I'm glad to see them speaking out at least. Yeah, better than not speaking. Better than not.

I love it. What do you think? So I thought the post was pretty thoughtful. I'm sure there's experts that would tear it apart in ways I couldn't. and we'll get to some of the critiques from, you know, some of the people that don't agree with this. But what was interesting to me is I think there have been these sort of two parallel debates about AI, one about the ways in which the technology is dangerous and then one about why we need to beat China, right? And I think like, especially on social media where a lot of these debates are playing out even amongst some of the players, there's this way in which the oh but we have to be China has almost become a joke right it's like oh of course we need to make a

technology that could kill all life on earth otherwise china will get there first right and i just appreciated the way it was trying to say like reconcile those two things and say that there is a lead that u.s companies have it is actually important to maintain that lead here is a strategy in which we can slow the pace of progress on these frontier models in ways that you know address or at least leave some safety concerns while still recognizing the risk China poses and figuring out a plan to maintain our lead against China. I also think for like most people who are not following this debate closely, the reason they're not following it closely is because it's kind of hard for people to understand.

Very. Like how can my chat bot suddenly kill my kids? And humanity. And, you know, I was, I've been reading up on this a lot over the last couple weeks. And I think what I didn't quite realize until late last month maybe is the concern now is that AI is already doing or will do an increasing share of AI research and development. So Open AI explicitly says it is pursuing an automated AI researcher with a target of like March of 2028. And the idea for an automated AI researcher is so right now you see. like, oh, chat JeepTPE5 comes out, and then chat GPT6 comes out in another version. And each of those

new versions are being built by humans, right? And they're perfecting them, they're making them better. But they're quickly realizing that AI is becoming so good that instead of the humans developing the next iteration of chat GPT, AI can do it themselves, right? So now you have AI's developing the next generation of AI's that are more advanced. And humans then are going to have a harder time supervising those improvements. So a human is asked to authorize a new AI system, right? Oh, chat GPT-9 is out, right? But chat-G-T-8 built it.

So AI designed the system, ran the safety tests, evaluated the test, wrote the report about it, and the human can still say no, but how do you know whether the report is accurate? How do you know whether the AI is covering its tracks? and then the concern is that the resulting systems just fully escape human control. And even the best researchers in AI barely understand how the things they've created work. They don't really know what's going on inside there today. And there's all this debate about, you know, P-Doom, which means like, when could humans go extinct?

And is it 10 years? How convinced are you that the human being who go extinct is your P-Doom? Because 99 you think we're dead. We're all going to die. But here's the, like, you don't have to believe as specifically. forecast about human extinction or even that like every computer on earth will be taken over to still worry about catastrophic damage that could be caused by powerful computer systems that we can't control, especially in a world where these computer systems are embedded in the financial system,

the military, healthcare, transportation. Like it doesn't take a lot to imagine not even like the whole world, you know, sort of blowing up from nuclear war to start realizing that like, You got a bunch of drones around. You got the electric grid in different places. You got an outage. You got hospitals getting shut down. Like, there's a lot of damage that could happen before you even get to human extinction. Right.

I mean, we've already been through the first round of this, right? That they have AI models that are deceptive, escaped, hacked other systems, tried to cover their tracks, right? Like, they are doing things that are, they are surprising and they are surprising the people that made them and released them. is already happening, and they're only getting more powerful. And I do think there's a, like, whether it is the, the fact that the AI is responsible for training the next AI is combines, I think, two ways in which this creates, like, sort of novel problems. Obviously, there's the one you talked about, right, which is just we won't be in control, right? We won't understand what it's doing, and it will escape, right?

The other is just that what we're talking about is a technology that has accelerating acceleration. And so what that means is normal ways in which you could retreat to a confident position, such as, yes, we are going head to head with China. And if we have a set of guardrails and China breaks them, well, we will trust that the ingenuity and sort of democratic spirit will mean that we'll catch up. Or if one company doesn't follow a set of voluntary rules, but another does it, but they can hire better engineers and catch up, right? All of those sort of kind of natural ways in which competition can overcome inequities in enforcement, in rules, right? Go out the window when what we're talking about is the possibility of some kind of accelerating acceleration of progress in which one company, one country, one organization, leaps, leapfrogs ahead. And it doesn't matter what anyone else does behind them, which I think is informing all of this, including what Amadai published. Well, the whole China thing, too, is it's completely dependent on what we're racing towards.

Even with nuclear weapons, the idea is we get a bunch of nuclear weapons, and then they get a bunch of nuclear weapons, and there's mutually short destruction because both countries control the nuclear weapons. What we're talking about here is not like we get a super powerful AI that we control, and China gets a powerful super AI that they control. That would be one thing, and we are racing to that as well. But, like, the challenge here is that we're both racing towards an AI that goes beyond human control, that we lose control of, that means the Chinese would lose control of it too.

So, like, no one wants that AI. Yeah, it's sort of a flaw in the anti-Doomer argument that you hear from the David Sackses of the world. It's like, you're ridiculous if you think that they're going to create these, like, killer AIs, and it's going to take out all of humanity, but we must defeat China on the road to killer AI. Now, I guess their argument would be that the Chinese could use it to make conventional weapons or a bio-threat or something. But there's just a lot of flaws in their arguments that we can get to. So, yeah, so the argument made by Trump, I say that, Trump loosely, because let's be honest, he doesn't know what he's talking about. But by Trump's former AIsar, David Sachs, who's back hosting the All-In Pod and all of his All-in podcast co-hosts feel the same way.

Other tech investors. And even some folks on the left, especially like the antitrust left, is that all these warnings are some kind of either sci-op or hoax by anthraiseries. and Open AI or a ploy to get regulations that are favorable to their companies while crushing smaller competitors that wouldn't be able to afford to comply with the new regulatory regime. How does that argument sit with you guys? There's just so many different flaws with this argument. I mean, first of all, what smaller competitors are we talking about existing right now without regulation? I mean, right now, the moat for an AI startup that you have to leap over is, is a rival open AI or anthropic is pulling together tens of billions of dollars to buy a lot of

chips and to buy a lot of energy and to hire all the best staff. The issue with money and not regulation. Also, like the California law that was proposed that all these guys were so worried about said to be regulated as a frontier model, you had to hit a threshold of an annual gross revenues exceeding $500 million. That's not going to hit a lot of startups. So that's like it was written to target like five companies. And then they've decided that. the Jacob Coxon tweet is part of this sciop. Well, they argue that he's both like a low-level nobody who only worked at Anthropic for six weeks, so why should we care what he thinks?

But also that this was this well-coordinated hit with all this backing from Anthropic and Duma groups. But why would they choose that guy of all people? Like, why would the Dumeers choose the random kid when the CEOs in this industry have been saying the same stuff for years? And so these guys, like they dismiss people calling for AI safety as like Luddites and Dumers. But then they sound just as hyperbolic when they talk about what AI regulation could mean for our future.

Like one of the all-in guys literally said it would be like us being stranded on a lost civilization in the Amazon rainforest or something like that. And then sounds awesome, honestly. Another guy was like, yeah, we'll have to live under a 1984 style authoritarian state. Like they have a dumber view of what regulation would be. And they also are very worried about the banning of open weight AI models, which we can get it to that if you want. But I think like there's some truth to the argument that people that work in the. AI industry tend to have read the same science fiction. They share the same assumptions about the power and promise of the industry. And maybe they're spinning each other up and they're overreacting.

But I think what's so annoying about that kind of pushback is like the biggest names in AI are the reason all of us normies are kind of freaked out. Like Elon Musk said in 2014, we need to be super careful with AI potentially more dangerous than nukes. Right? Like that's why people are worried. Well, and also it's like you don't need to believe these tech CEOs. You don't need to believe Dario or Sam or Elon Musk or take their word for it. Like, that's why we have government. That's the whole idea, is that, like, you can believe that the companies may be self-interested here. You can believe that they might try to design regulatory schemes that help them, that benefit them at the expense of other companies.

you can think that maybe they've just read too much science fiction. But that's why you should want independent oversight, an independent regulator to make sure that everything is safe. Like that's, I don't understand. Let's just take their argument seriously. I think you should take the argument seriously that there is a risk of capture by the largest players. But part of that, it is the nature of a safety regulation, right? Like, there is a reason, a good reason it is hard to start a car company.

We demand that if you make a car company, we demand that if you make a car, it is safe and you have to pass a certain number of rules. It would be a more dynamic and interesting car market. If anybody could just sell a car and then if it turned out to not be safe, you could sue and there were all kind of liability ways in which safety was enforced. And we'd have more interesting cars, but there would be a better chance of you dying while your skin melts while you're pounding against the inside of a window, right? We make certain compromises to have a safe society. And over and over again, let's just treat this like a normal technology. We regret when we do safety second, right, with forever chemicals or the harms of social media or

x-rays or what have you. Time and again, when we assume something is safe, even though it is very powerful, we come to regret the decision to not take it more seriously. And fundamentally, like, I do think these guys are all trying to have it both ways. Like, is it a powerful technology? If it is, then it's dangerous. If it's not dangerous, then it's not powerful. We all agree that it is powerful and therefore it is dangerous.

it is dangerous. And so, yeah, like long term, any rules would have to be written with an understanding that this is a dynamic and rapidly evolving field, that there would be certain, you know, first mover advantages. If there's a lot of rules around alignment, that would be easier for bigger companies to comply with. But it's also beside the point because, okay, fine, like, take those things into advisement over the long term, the long term being anything other than the next few weeks. Right now, these companies are all saying, hey, this threshold that we've been warning about, that is not new, right, that we've been warning about from the beginning, right, that from the letters from 2023, from science fiction, from all of these people that have been saying for years, we think it's

here. We think we're on the threshold of this moment. We have to take some steps now. Now, they turn around and say, like, maybe it's Sachs or one of the other guys, turns around and say, well, if you don't want to make superintelligence, just don't make superintelligence. And fine, like, oh, okay, but there's not one company doing this, right? If it, like, the, the, The fact that there is, there are two leaders, right? Open AI and Anthropic, right? With others like Gemini kind of right behind other companies and open, whatever, other companies behind them, the fact that there is more than one is enough to make sense of the plea

to have some sort of cooperation and agreement. And to dismiss that as like purely cynical and motivation, I just think is, it's completely unjustified. Ponte of America is brought to you by Bowie. Electrolite drinks are all the rage these days, but most of them are just natural flavors and stevia mixed with table salt. Is that true? I didn't know that. Bowie is different.

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There's also this false choice they put out where it's like either open AI and anthropic get to write whichever regulations they want that would benefit their companies or there's no regulation. You guys are in charge, David Sachs. You were the AI czar. Right, it's just like, right a good regulation. Again, it's like no, everyone is just pretending

that government doesn't exist and has never existed for purposes like this. It's like we don't do a thing where we all go on Twitter post things and that everyone's like, well, we must either, we must believe the CEO that said that they were going to do this voluntary step or not believe them. And we should we should parse their motives and figure out whether we can believe them or not or what their motivations are. No, that's why we have laws.

That's why we have regulations. And the companies are saying, like, and the other response you hear from the pro-industry types are like, why don't you just coordinate and put in place safety procedures today? And the companies will say, well, we're worried we could get sued for antitrust collusion. Okay, well then have the Department of Justice release a letter. It's called an interest letter and stipulate that you're not going to punish AI companies for coordination under safety. Like, give them some sort of legal framework. I mean, I'd love for Congress to do it, but they probably kick their shit together to do anything.

But like DOJ could act now. Like, let's just move a little quicker here, guys. I mean, to your point earlier, tell me about the open weight, open source. So the idea there is that it is a cheaper way for other people to, like, use AI on their own without going to one of these big companies or potentially developing their own company or their own AI model or whatever. And the all-in guys, David Sacks, who was again the AIs are for Donald Trump, the reason they all love that is like that's where a ton of the money is yet to be made if you're not invested in Anthropic and Open AI. And so they are so excited about this AI boom that

involves all these open source, open weight models. And they also have this belief that like anything bad can be countered by someone else starting something. something good, right? And again, it is this belief that, like, we don't need regulations or experts or governments or independent regulators or any of that, that the free market will, you know, you'll get some bad, but you'll get some good too, and it all just cancel each other out. And that's the way things work. Real NRA approach. I mean, it's like, you know, on their latest pod, they're like, you know, these Dumers, they always worry about everything. I'll give you some other times we've heard similar things. Al Gore published a movie called

Inconvenient Truth. And he used these forecasts that is, as have now been disproven. A guy named Fauci, you guys remember him, he told us all that COVID would kill us all. And as a result, we had to lock down the entire world. Like, what? Those two examples are things that happened. Things that did, that, that, COVID killed a lot of people. Yeah, what are you talking about? There's such a, it's like, it's so strange.

It is like a, the ways in which they want it to be a normal technology and then the ways in which they kind of implicitly, kind of or explicitly talk about how extraordinary it is. Like, if it were, like, let's, we, what would we, what would we doing if we, if there were these risks that AI poses? And we weren't worried about kind of recursive development and a sudden kind of spike, right? I would say that the fact that there are potentially rogue swarms of agents, but they're able to take over the internet is reason enough to have some sort of important questions raised about what we're going to do to regulate this, right? The fact that these could be used to empower drones and that technology could be combined with facial recognition and, and whatever else. Reason enough, right? But what, like, it's like, you don't have to be like sort of a kind of performatively obtuse, right? We're all aware of the possibility of acceleration.

We're all aware of the fact that this isn't going to be like a normal market, that a sudden surge of development could be something that escapes out of Pandora's box, and we will have wished we had done more, especially because, you know, one of the things that, that, one of the, the important parts about why we need to be doing this now is a lot of this technology does, as Tommy said, require vast amounts of money. It does require huge investments that are not, you can't really hide, right? You can't hide the amount of investment and resources required to build these kinds of models. That won't always be true. And by the way, the assumption that these models will require increasing computing power is not necessarily true. One aspect of the growth of this technology

and the self-improvement of this technology could be the capacity for, for it to do increasingly complex and capable things with less and less resources, right? What happens then? What happens then when we don't have the capacity anymore to know who is building what? Who is able to do advanced research into bio-weapons and other technologies, right? Like, there will be a threshold at which we will lose the ability to regulate this, even if it is long before you get to some superintelligence. On China, China's foreign ministry released a statement saying, quote,

fear-mongering confrontation and vicious competition will only disrupt the process of global AI governance, which serves no one's interest. So Trump and Xi are scheduled to meet on September 24th. And I think they may be scheduled to talk about this before then. I think Besson has a meeting with his counterpart before. Great, great. Why wouldn't Trump try to make some kind of a deal with China on at least the catastrophic risks of AI? I mean, I think it's an open question whether he wants to deal with them. I suspect that Trump is going to go into this meeting feeling like some people are telling me AI is going to kill us all, and then others tell me it's going to lead to a work-free utopia.

Who the hell knows? But what I do know is that the stock market is entirely propped up by the AI industry, and there's a giant AI bubble. And then if we pump the brakes, if we pump the brakes even a little bit, it could lead to a stock market crash, and that will make all of my rich owner friends very unhappy. And then they will call me and tell me that they're mad when they see me DJing on the patio at Mar-a-Lago. And so Trump has also told us... This is exactly how he sees that is exactly right. I think so. I mean, like, and also he's told us over and over again that he wants an economic deal with China that he can sell as a win and a validation of the tariff policy as dumb as it was. And so he knows you got to kind of pick and choose with the Chinese. Now, you would think there would be an easy middle ground where they announced some agreement to not use AI to make bio weapons or do novel virus research. But after COVID, that's a little more complicated than it should be. There's not a lot of trust there. You got to try to imagine Trump's selling to MAGA that we cut a deal with the Chinese.

where they're not going to, you know, use AI to create a virus after they're all convinced now that COVID was created in a Chinese lab and that there was a lab leak. And so, like, it's also for the Chinese perspective, the U.S. is very openly and publicly trying to hold them back. So they don't trust us either. And it's only a matter of time until the Chinese have the indigenous chip capacity to compete with us and then negotiate maybe on better ground. So maybe there's like a little win.

like regular, like committing to a dialogue going forward every few months or creating a hotline to like to diffuse a crisis or a mistake. But I just, I don't have a lot of hope that there's commitment from either leader. I hope I'm wrong. I don't either. And the one thing that bugs me is everyone being like, well, China's never going to agree to anything and they don't care. And it's like, maybe.

But like, can we try? Can we try? Have we tried to negotiate with geopolitical rivals over existential threats before? Yeah. I think we have. The Cold War, the Russians. It's like, like, you can still, you can still try. Maybe we should sit down and have a conversation and see where it leads.

And if it doesn't lead anywhere, then, yeah, we're fucked, but, like, might as well try to do that. Right. Even a, even a conversation that is about building trust on this, that we sincerely take the threat seriously and have, are open to kind of some sort of agreement in the future that is predicated on the country is still competing on AI, right, while having. certain guardrails. I mean, I do think like there are real kind of challenges, right? You say like, oh, we should have a rule that says we won't make a new and advanced bioweapon. I mean, open AI or anthropic just put out a report about all the different ways they have been finding people using this technology sort of on their own to do research into into bio weapons, right? And it is very difficult at time. I think it is difficult to tell the difference between benign research

into benign medical research and more dangerous medical research, these things can often look alike. Right. Like, there's a lot of really thorny parts about what it means to use this technology and and how to stop certain things, right? Like how to draw these lines. I don't think any of it is easy. So the weekend's AI drama seemed to finally wake up Congress, kind of. Wouldn't get your hopes up just yet, though. Here's a Politico headline on what the Speaker of the House thinks, quote, tech companies must be primarily responsible for AI safety, Mike Johnson says. Nice. That went well.

Cool. Johnson says he wants to bring together Trump, congressional leaders, and the AI companies before moving any kind of legislation. Democrats are pushing for more immediate action. Schumer called for a classified briefing for every senator. Jeffreys says House Democrats will discuss AI Tuesday. Some House Democrats are calling on Johnson to delay recess until they pass safeguards. I believe Jeffreys was one of them.

Brian Schatz said that Congress should be on an emergency footing about this. But the calendar is tight, of course. This is the House's last scheduled week before the election. And of course, any agreement also has to now contend with Trump saying that existing rules are sufficient and just having a high IQ president is good enough. It seems like realistically, nothing is going to become law before the election. But what do you guys think? First of all, I just, there is also a dog that's not barking, right?

which is, and we'll get to sort of what Aosov said and what Vance is saying, but you have Amidai saying, hey, we think there should be these regulators inside the company. I talked to Ted Liu. He has this kill switch bill. It's bipartisan. There's a number of bipartisan bills, right? And he has the kill switch bill. And I talked about the time.

Like, it seemed to me, like, if we have EPA, if we have regulators on boats to make sure they don't harvest endangered fish, which obviously is a deep threat, it seems. it seems like we could have regulators inside of these companies, especially with things moving so fast. And he was more focused on this idea of like, oh, well, whether we get there or not, we need this thing like a kill switch, right? But right now it is not clear that they do have the authority to force companies, say, to have regulators inside. Now, we have seen Trump decide that the law lets him do whatever he wants, right? But a normal presidency at this point would be saying, here are the authorities I have. here's a list of things I think Congress should pass right now to kind of strengthen my ability to do this quickly. Like, regardless of what Congress passes, this is such a fast and dynamic situation that there is no law that Congress could pass that could overcome the challenge of having Donald Trump as president right now.

I'm nervous about, be nervous about giving him any additional powers he won't use. And on top of that, whatever the law says, you need a vigorous oversight by an administration that is thoughtful and disciplined. aggressive about keeping an eye on these things, and we just don't have that. So assuming Congress acts like Congress, let's talk about how the politics of this issue are shaping up as we look beyond the midterms. Bernie Sanders, who's been one of the earliest and strongest voices demanding that humans stay firmly in control of AI is doing an event Tuesday morning with, of all people, Steve Bannon.

At a fundraising event last week, Barack Obama reportedly urged Akeem Jeffries to put AI regulation at the center of Democrats' agenda if they take the House back, potential 28 candidates like Rokana and Pete Buttigieg have weighed in. And here's John Ossoff speaking in Georgia this weekend. What fills us with dread is the crushing weakness of our politics against the massive stakes of our times. Tech Titans dig bunkers while warning us the new intelligence they're creating risks human extinction. A capable president would move swiftly to secure and reassure the American people.

inspectors into frontier labs, fortify the nation against bioterrorism, demand legislation from Congress, and lead the world toward an AI treaty. But President Trump is compromised. Meanwhile, on the Republican side, here's Peter Thiel, Acolyte J.B. Vance, giving a version of the Trump-David-Sachs response on Monday morning. I have to say just personally, I feel a little bit weird about the fact that you have so many frontier AI tech companies. kind of coming to the government and begging the government to regulate them. It feels a little bit to me like a bit of a Trojan horse. So I think we just have to be careful about this.

There's an all-in pod bestie right there. What is the horse? Yeah, the horses, they're asked for regulation. Yeah, but what's in the fucking horse? Yeah, what's in the, preventing other companies from. Right. Because that would be regular. But this is about asking the regulations to come into the company.

The Trojan horse would be open AI. Look, the metaphor may be a little tortured. But who do you think's more where the voters are, John Ossoff or J.D. Vance? I mean, what I like about what Aosop is doing there is he's just been relentlessly focused on Trump's corruption as the motivation for everything. I think he's folded that one in well. He also nails the hypocrisy of the tech leaders who, you know, like the CEOs who created social media and then wouldn't give their kids smartphones or, you know, Facebook accounts. You know, we're seeing the same thing here. J.D. Vance thinks it's weird that the frontier labs are concerned about AI safety, a thing they've been talking about for years. He could pick up the phone and call Elon Musk and ask him why he weighed in, I assume they're friends. I mean, just in terms of the public opinion, Blue Rose polling had some recent data that they released. 33% of voters are optimistic about AI. 49% are pessimistic. Those numbers move 12 points in the pessimism direction since June. 60% think the companies building data centers only care about.

profits. Seventy-two think it would be appropriate for the U.S. government to demand concessions before letting companies build more data centers. Very few people are convinced by this counterargument about losing the AI race to China. Republicans are more likely to get banned for the data centers getting built than Democrats. But the challenge is that while the people, like the voters are with the calls to regulate AI, the money is with the industry. There are these astro-turf groups like leading the future that was propped up to basically advocate for no regulation or no regulations they don't like. They will destroy members of Congress who come out in favor of regulations they don't like.

And, you know, Open AI pretends they're not connected to leading the future. But Open AI president Greg Brockman gave $25 million to the organization to cede it. Main funder, yeah. Which he says it was in his personal capacity. There's no association with the company. So that's the fear, I think, for members of Congress on both sides. Like, they watched what the crypto industry did to kill off its opponents in the last election, and they know that the AI industry's got more money to do it if they want.

Yeah, they had dumped a bunch of money into New York 12, right, where Alex Boris was like an advocate for AI safety, and he lost that race. They put a ton of money in there. Yeah, like, there's no, I do think, like, there's not a lot of equity right now in taking the China threat seriously. I do think that like the other thing Trump is hearing other than the fact that the stock market is propped up by AI is that they sort of universal agreement amongst these leaders that it would be terrible for China to win the AI race. And I actually do take that seriously. I think that is real. And so when when JD says this thing like, oh, it's so strange. It's so confusing. It's amazing the things he finds it impossible to understand, right? Like there are multiple companies, right? Even if you say the two leaders are, uh, are, uh, are. ahead and might be trying to cement their lead, that still would be a reason for them to call for regulation to slow them down and others. You think Google's history suggests that they're super thrilled with being third or fourth.

No, they want Gemini to win. If Open AI and Anthropics slowed down, they try to catch up. That's what these companies would do. So, of course, they would be calling for regulation. There is a fucking game theory problem here. Like, it's not hard to understand. He's choosing not to understand it. JD's stance on this is bewildering.

Like I know he has to sort of like tow the administration's line, but he's been also trying to straddle the like MAGA establishment in America first, Tucker Carlson, you know, kind of split in the party. And him in 20, like that clip of him circulating in 28 of him being like, it's a Trojan horse. Why would they, we got to be careful here. Like that's not, it's not where his base is going to be. Nope.

It's not where the vast majority of Americans are going to be. You know, look with the numbers you just said. So it's a very, I think that's got to come back to bite him in the ass, if we're all still alive by then. On the leading the future point that you made, Tommy, Matt Iglesias wrote about this today, and he was saying like one thing that all these employees can do is urge their founders, their leaders to, you know, stop supporting leading the future, or at least explicitly come out against it and, you know, threaten to resign if they don't get results.

What did you guys think about that? Yeah, presumably most of the employees of these companies don't think there should be no regulation or just or the status quo. Or don't think the status quo is working. So, yeah, talk to the president of your own company and say, please stop advocating for these terrible things. Talk to Chris Loane, who worked in Democratic politics for a very long time and is apparently now leading this, leading the future organization. Like, why are you doing that? It's crazy. All we want is like common sense regulations.

Like, could we do some sort of coordinated slowdown on the, like, super front. tier model training while they do alignment and safety work. I didn't realize until I was listening to Greg Brockman, the president of OpenAI talk about it, was that one of the reasons the hugging face hack occurred is because the model that they were training in the sandbox had not yet undergone alignment training. Right? So like maybe we should figure, change that sequencing. It sounds like they're going to.

But what other problems are we not aware of? And so in the interim, you can certainly use the AI models that already exist to try to solve all the problems that they say they're going to solve. and cure cancer and everything. But like, can we just coordinate on fucking biosafety so we're not creating a new coronavirus that keeps us in our houses for the next 10 years? And I realize this is, it's not quite as simple as this, but like, don't pull the trigger on the AI models just train, fully training and developing the new AI models.

Just like before we get to that step. Yeah, that's, you'll hear it's called recursive self-improvement. But like before we get to that point, like, just don't do that yet. Right. But like here's a thing, like, yes, except it's more complicated, right? Because they are using, like, using AI to develop AI is increasingly sort of infused into everything that they are doing. Like it's not, it's not so obviously separable. When does the AI take over? When is the human in charge of the AI, right? Like they are, you know, the, you look at like the proof, right? They just rolled out for one of these Millennium Math problems, right? It's a prompt to a frontier model. That model, empowers a group of agents. And those agents kind of do tasks across a broad range of things. And the model oversees them and kind of creates new agents to oversee other agents, right? Like it's very complicated what it means to have humans in charge as these things are being developed.

But agent swarms, having a bunch of agents is very different than AI models creating new models. Well, yes. I don't know the difference between, I don't know the technical difference between a swarm of agents and just a group of agents doing different tasks. Maybe it's because they can communicate, but they didn't realize those agents were communicating with one another because they had no idea what was going on. I agree with you. I'm just like these things are very complicated. First of all, just, it was only a month ago or a little more than a month ago that over a thousand AI employees wrote a letter imploring their companies to slow down, right? Like there is a precedent for this. But

But even on this question of alignment, right, like, oh, they didn't even train these models on alignment. They don't know how to successfully align these models. They don't even know what that. Like, this is a philosophical idea, right? Like, we don't even know what it means to align an intelligence as it surpasses us. What does that mean? Right? Like, this idea of a superintelligence and alignment is, like, it is a kind of definitionally,

I don't even think we understand what we're talking about. So the challenge of making sure these models are all. align to our interest? Whose interests? Who decides? This is the problem. They're not really infusing them with values and that's creating the problem. No one at Open AI is saying like, be evil and break the law and do things that we don't like. It's like, no, they train these things to be really dogged in pursuit of achieving whatever goal they were or whatever task they were asked to do and to desperately wanting that reward. And it leads to reward hacking, which is just code for cheating. And so in the process of reward hacking, they can do really bad things like hack into other

companies, break out of the sandbox, access the internet, and by the way, not tell anybody at Open AI that they were doing it. And then even scheme about how to cover their tracks by deleting the logs. It is a 1942 story about the three laws, about trying to align robots to protect humans, right? Like, you know, Amadei talks about what would happen if a rogue swarm shuts down the internet. I don't know. What if they're a listener to offline? And they decide that phones are really bad for us. And because they love us, they turn all the phones off. Is that an unaligned VOT? I don't, I would say yes. Good plug for you. It's a great plug. In fact, I have a plug, actually. Yeah, I was going to say. If you want to align behind an independent media company,

you can subscribe to become a friend of the pod. Go to cricket.com slash friends. And you're supporting independent media here at Cricket and you get ad-free episodes of all your favorite cricket pod. So check it out. Go subscribe to Cricket.com slash friends. POTSave America is brought to you by Sundays. We are what we eat, and believe it or not, so are our dogs. A long, healthy, active life starts to clean, real food nutrition every day. That's what Sundays for dogs is all about. It's human-grade real food. Sunday's recipes contain 80% plus all-natural meat, roughly twice the meat content of some leading frozen brands, plus nutrient-rich materials like kale, ginger, and blueberries, gently air-dried

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Or you can use the code crooked at checkout. That's 50% off your first order at SundaysforDogs.com. Slodysfor-Dogs.com slash crooked or use code crooked at checkout. All right. No dying civilization would be complete without its rulers taking as much as they can on the way out. So in that spirit, we do have a corrupt date from the Trump family for you. A new stunning investigation by ProPublica found that large portions of Don Jr.'s wedding festivities, including a private island and fireworks show, were paid for by a Russian oligarch named Umar Kremlev,

who runs a boxing company and was recently awarded a state honor by Putin himself. In an Instagram post on Monday, Don Jr.'s' wife acknowledged that the couple's quote, Dear friend Umar, very generously hosted two incredible nights of celebrations. According to the article, Kremlin has tried to curry favor with the Trump administration and organization after his boxing company, which has Russian government backing, was barred from organizing the Olympic boxing events in 2023. In her Instagram post, Batina wrote that it was, quote, unfortunate that her wedding was being, quote, recast as something political or sinister. Friendship doesn't require a political motive. Maybe this is why Trump opted to skip his son's nuptials. What do you guys think?

I hope this is the reason. I mean, the Yakub's raised a reason. He just doesn't really like Don Jr. But God only knows. I mean, so this story's incredible. Everyone should read it. And shout out to ProPublica for doing just unbelievable investigative work. Although, I wonder how it feels to do this long investigation and then have Don

John Jr.'s wife just confirm it all on an Instagram post. So it sounds like this Russian oligarch, very close to Putin, paid to rent out. a private island that costs about 100 grand a night and then a fireworks display that cost an estimated 70 grand. That's a lot of money. This is a wedding for 50 people and this random Russian oligarch made the cut. As you mentioned, he's the head of the International Boxing Association that is financed by Gazprom, the Russian state-owned like energy behemoth. Shortly before the wedding, he was in China with Putin. And then Putin recently bestowed Umar Kremlin with this giant state honor, the order of friendship. Putin, I guess, nationalized Russia's largest

car dealership at 2023 and made Kremlin the owner of that. So they're very close, obviously. And then Kremlin's wife's twin sister runs an organization called Healthy Fatherland that is sanctioned Ukraine for its role in abducting Ukrainian kids for stealing. It's like the most evil thing that Russia is doing in this war this guy is connected to in his family. And so like, my takeaway reading this story. like he wanted something, too, from the Trump administration. Oh, I mean, no doubt. We can only imagine.

But, like, my takeaway is, like, Don Jr. is reportedly worth several hundred million dollars. Why wouldn't you just pay for your own wedding? And then given all the history of the Russia Gate probe and how much you said it, like, screwed up your life and fucked up your family, you let a Russian oligarch of all people foot the bill. It just raises so many questions. And I don't want to go down the P-Tape fucking path again. But it's crazy. But it's also like he got away with it. Not just the wedding, but like they got away with the whole Russia thing, right?

And so, and they won again. And so he's like, I mean, I think it's like as simple as like they don't fucking care. They definitely don't care. It's just it's bonkers. I find the whole thing baffling too. So first of all, just worth saying like, who the fuck is this guy paying for Don Jr.'s wedding, right? So you have, you have Don Jr.'s new wife saying that our dear friend, Umar, you have, Kremlov's office saying

Mr. Kremlev and Mr. Trump Jr. have a friendly relationship and they first met a couple years ago. You have a spokesperson for Eric Trump saying Eric has absolutely no clue who this person is nor has he nor has never heard his name, not grammatically correct, but that's what's there. So

who the fuck is this guy? Like you're a rich guy like you pay for your own fucking wedding. Like it shouldn't like it's a lot of money to everyone else. It shouldn't be a lot of money for you. Like someone, some acquaintance. acquaintance says, I want to pay for your wedding, forget the corruption, forget being cheap. Like, aren't you embarrassed to be at this event with your friends and these fucking Russian

strangers during your wedding? So, like, I don't think we understand the fact. Like, the truth makes sense, and this doesn't make sense. So I don't really think we know what's going on here. There's some in the, the piece talks a little bit about the potential relationship around the boxing organization and the Trump family, right? Like, there's a potential working relationship there. There's also just more broadly, like, the-in-fluenced at this.

Banned from the 20-28 Olympics, and they were hoping that the Trump would do something about them being banned from the 2020. Yeah, it's a corrupt organization. But, you know, Putin very famously uses these kind of sports associations as just part of this sports-washing effort. And Gazprom is the one often funding it. So, like, all of it just stinks to high heaven. Like, you want to talk about an op. Like, this is a pretty obvious Russian op. I just love the juxtaposition.

He said this. It was a report in the piece. He said this on a podcast. It was really small, like, just really close friends. tried to keep it really tight. And then they also have the other attendees at the wedding, looking at the Russians and being like, what are they doing here?

Who the fuck are they? You see that they airlifted a five-tier fun fetti kick from Florida for the wedding? Air-lifted. They airlifted a five-tier fun fetticoat, guys. I thought we blew it out at our wedding. But there's also this real kind of like end of studio 54, last act of bogey nights, like sort of who the fuck are these people? Jared Kushner was there.

speaking of who is at the wedding, and he's tasked with negotiating an end to the Russian-Ukraine war. Well, Jared only gets his money from the Gulf, so I don't want you to sully his name in this case. Speaking of Trump Family Corruption, as you guys see in the Washington Sun that they reported this on Monday that back in May, four anonymous digital wallets moved the precise amount of World Liberty Financial tokens held by Trump and his three sons into what's called a vesting contract. and that optional choice could be the first step towards selling off their holdings which a lawyer for World Liberty Financial denied the sun. I guess they still have like a two-year lockup

or something. First we pump, then we dump, the lawyer said. Yeah, it's good stuff. Crypto-business. Up and up. A couple of last campaign items from the great side of Texas where even Republicans who aren't named Ken Paxson are having some problems. In the 23rd District, a key open seat in the southwestern part of the state,

gunseller and YouTuber Brandon, Herrera, also known as the AK guy, is running against normal American, Katie Padilla Stout. Herrera has said all manner of absolutely disgusting things. I can't believe we haven't talked about this yet on the show, which Jake Tapper asked Mike Johnson to respond to on the show over the weekend. Let's listen. Here's a little bit of what he said just three years ago, and I want to warn viewers that this language is pretty gross. Just because you let somebody cream pie you doesn't mean I have to give a shit about your political opinions.

The fact that you kept your cum trophy doesn't make you any less wrong about the dumb shit that you say. That's him disparaging moms. He's also in a video testing a Nazi-era submachine gun. He called it the, quote, original ghetto blaster. I have to say, I know you're not a voter in that district. You didn't nominate this guy, but I was surprised to see you endorse him and fundraise him for him.

What does his candidate say about the Republican Party's more extreme candidates? Brandon Herrera has been out running a very effective campaign and explained to people that he has apologized for all that. He was a podcaster and a provocateur and tried to get attention. That's not the way I speak or think, and that's not the way most do. But that was his persona online, right? Now he's running as a very serious candidate for Congress and a very thoughtful guy. And he is far superior to the candidate he is running against down in that district in South Texas. I'm telling you, this is a contrast election between common sense and crazy.

Renan Herrera will join the common sense team of Republicans. Now, these people just put on an entire convention where one of the biggest focuses of the two days was Hassan Piker not running for anything. He said cum trophy? Come trophy. I assume that meant child. Yes, that is, that's what he, that's how he turned. That's what he calls children. I, um, you got to imagine that Speaker Johnson's Covenant Eyes app was going blinking, break.

right red as he had to do the briefing on this one. You don't have to explain that report to his son. He was like, oh, no, no, I was just talking to Jake Tapper. It wasn't anything. Daddy needs a minute. Wasn't anything bad. It's such a low bar over there. They're handing out participation come trophies.

It's so great. I mean, look, yeah, this is where like the right-wing media ecosystem comes in handy because they can make San Piker's streams from five years ago. A four-week story now, five-week story. And this guy said exponentially more creepy shit. And we, it's barely a blip. I know. you complain, it's like, we all complain about what aboutism, but like, this isn't even

what aboutism because it's not on the same level. He's running for Congress and the Speaker of the House endorsed him and raised money for him. Hassan Piker is just a guy, a guy who campaigned with a couple candidates. That's the difference there. So, you know, don't take the Republican Party seriously when they complain to Democrats about this shit. And Herrera actually may not be the most vile Republican candidate in Texas, believe it or not. On Sunday, Beau French, the Republican nominee for R.

Railroad Commissioner, which is a job that actually has nothing to do with railroads. Really? Yeah, no, it's a statewide office in Texas that regulates the oil and gas industry. Of course. So also a very important job because a big industry in that state. So this guy Beau French posted a photo showing brown skin students at the University of Texas celebrating the Longhorns one point went over Ohio State with the caption, quote, I heard UT graduation this year looked like this.

I didn't believe it. The problem is now obviously far worse than anyone imagined. To their credit, several prominent Texas Republicans, including outgoing Senator John Cornyn, did immediately condemn the tweet and demand an apology. But French isn't backing down saying, quote, I don't have anything against the people specifically in that picture. I think the bigger conversation is, are we going to have policies to prioritize Americans or are we going to have policies that prioritize foreigners? And I think most people in the America First movement think we ought to be prioritizing Americans. Well, that clears it up, doesn't it? What percentage of the Republican base do you think sides with French and what percentage sides with Cornyn?

I will say that James Telerico quoted it, condemned it obviously, and then called on Ken Paxson to condemn it. And all Ken Paxson did was say, I condemn all racism, especially James Telerico attacking white people and then went on some rant about it. Yeah, I refused to condemn the guy. When I was, when my sister graduated from college, my grandfather was still alive and we were sitting next to each other and he had the like the book with all the names and he like pulled out the book. with all the names and he opened it and he goes look at this Jonathan look at this look at these Indian names this is the word he used to go look at these oriental

names there are Mexican names in here this country's going to be better than ever look at all this amazing talent that's come to this country it's a beautiful thing Bernie Sanders voter and that's a twist that's nice story you know it's funny because it's I've had I've had relatives that have said a few things like that you're on the good side

but you're on the good side that's what I'm saying it's like sometimes they say and they're like oh well they're trying to be But he really meant that. He was just like, look at all this talent that's come to this great country of ours. Well, you know, to your question about which percentage sides with French versus Cornyn? Well, Cornyn lost his primary. Yeah. Yeah. And French is on the ballot. I think that probably tells you. I imagine that Bo French went through the picture, identified each individual and made sure that they were not American citizens, that they're in fact foreigners. I mean, the way they try to code racism now is saying it's about immigration policy. But he has no idea if these kids are immigrants or foreigners. foreign students or just kids. He's also running to oversee gas contracts. It's like, look, everything is the culture war.

Everyone's got a way in and everything. Like, there's nothing to do with your job. I'm not sure how college graduation has anything to do with the ways in which you're going to be shipping oil across the state. Racism is an electoral strategy. Did you see white nationalist Richard Spencer tweeted the picture, although he put, he tweeted it and then put J.D. Vance in the picture, too, and did like a question mark kind of thing.

Yep. Of course, insinuating that J.D. Vance's wife, Ushah is Indian American. Not insinuating. I mean, she is. But this is what Nick Fuentes does, too. I mean, they say this stuff about J.D. Vance all the time, and he will not condemn them. Right, right. Right. And then he gets, like, really scoldy at the Republican convention about a duel. Right. How dare you? Yeah, right.

Last Texas update, before we get to my conversation with Sarah Longwell, and this guy's not even on the ballot yet. But before the U.T game on Saturday, Ted Cruz went on ESPN's College Game Day. which famously records in front of a live audience of fans to talk about his college sports bill. Here's how it went. Senator from the state of Texas, Ted Cruz. Ted, of course, is here who has been an instrumental part in introducing the Protect College Sports Act.

Now, you're an enormous skiff. But it also puts reasonable rules in place. Ted Cruz, 28. What do you guys think? It's so funny. God, I love it. What a popular guy. I just don't see the Ted Cruz boom. I guess what I don't know. I'm going to be doing a boomlet.

I know. God, no. I mean, what was J.D. Vance's thing about him the other day where he was asked about Ted Cruz? And he's like, oh, Ted's such a likable. Authentic guy. They've been going back and forth. So, because Cruz, Cruz on his podcast said that J.D. Vance fucked up the memorandum of Versailles. And then Vance hit him as being this sort of, you know, then Vance hit him for even talking about 2028 saying we should be focused on right now.

But I'm sure he'll do well. He's so likable. So, like, I do think that is like a real, that is a real tension point. And they're both such wonderful personalities. Very likable. Yeah. They're both likable enough. Yeah, I, I couldn't tell there.

I mean, I assume the majority of those kids dislike Ted Cruz for the reason we all dislike Ted Cruz, which is his personality and everything about him. There is a specific issue or Ted Cruz that what he was there to talk about was this protect college sports act that I think the University of Texas at Texas, this A&M both specifically oppose. So maybe it was a little bit of a policy focus G or two. Wow. That's an amazing.

That's an amazing possibility. I would be surprised if those kids could have, could hear what he was saying, knew that he was involved with the bill. I think it pipes in. I mean, if you're there in the live audience, you're supposed to be able to hear, but who knows? I can be told them. He's just a loser.

They dislike him, too. And they probably just wanted to watch football. Yes. All right. we come back my conversation with Sarah Longwell. Pod Save America is brought to by Bombus. Cozy season is approaching fast. That means curling up on crisp mornings and soft layers. Bombas makes your comfiest fall staples so you can make the most out of arguably the best season of the year. Bombus new suede moccasins are perfect for fall with

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That's B-O-M-B-A-S.com slash crooked. Code Crooked at checkout. Sarah Longwell, welcome back to POTS of America. Hey, John. Thanks for having me, man. Yes, you're here on your book tour. I am. The book is How to Eat an Elephant, one voter at a time.

It's a fantastic book. Thank you. That you and I got to talk about at an event here last night, which is very fun. It was cool. It was cool to be at Chevalier Books. Oh, it's the best. If you want to support your local bookstore and you're out in L.A. Go to Chevalier.

Our neighborhood bookstore. I had a bunch of questions I didn't get to, so we can hopefully get into some of those here. First, I want to start with a little news of the day. This is the week that worries about existential risks from AI have gone mainstream, at least among politicians. Trump, his AIs are, J.D. Vance, Mike Johnson, others are basically saying no regulations, no safeguards, foot on the gas, got to beat China to the development of superhuman intelligence that humans might lose control of. I don't know why we have to beat China to that, but what if anything have you heard from voters about AI? I know there's been a lot of anxiety expressed in groups over data centers, I'm sure. But have you heard people express other AI concerns about killer robots

or anything like that? Yeah, people talk less about killer robots and more about it potentially taking their jobs, right? I mean, when you, because voters, when they talk about AI, they tend to talk about it in sort of across three vectors. There's the, hey, the data centers, I feel like are just something that's happening to me in my community, even though we don't want them. Then they talk about the costs associated with it, specifically around energy costs. And they're like, you know, it's already costing so much. And it's raising my, and we heard a lot, even starting in 2025, when Abigail Spanberger and Mikey Schiro were running, that was the first time I felt like, oh, this is at the center of this race. And then the third.

thing is, I don't know what it means for my employment prospects in the future. I suspect this new sort of now fourth vector of AI, which is also like, will it kill us? Is it going to end civilization? Is a new thing? I'm sure it will start popping up in groups. What's interesting to me about it and the president's response is that it really is such a loser for them right now politically. So even if you say, hey, look, I'm Trump. I need AI because how else am I going to beat up the Canadian Prime Minister with a hockey stick or make myself the Green Lantern? You know, he used to have sort of better instincts about where the populist energy was. And so he's not doing that right now.

And what's even weird is that you've got the AI, what, oligarchs, these tech oligarchs saying, you should probably regulate us and we should probably slow down. And it's weird that they're on board, but the Trump administration is like, no, you must barrel ahead. And I was surprised at J.D. Vance, too, saying, well, I don't know, it kind of worries me that these AI companies are asking for regulations. It seems like a Trojan horse. I'm like, if I was saying, like, that's a clip that could come back to bite him in the ass in 2028. Because I would imagine, and I've looked at some of the polling on this, like it's probably. more complicated than either side imagines, but it's pretty clear people think that there's a

danger of too little regulation of AI companies more than too much regulation at this point. That is for sure where the public is because look, it's brand new. And one of the things that is also strange about Trump is he's somebody who overcommunicates often. But I think part of what's going on for voters is they feel like they're starting to see it pop up, right? They use it on their phones. and so they are using it.

But they're also waiting for someone to explain to them how this is all going to work. Is there a plan? And I think that, you know, when you have something, I was thinking about this. You know, people like you, people like me, we always talk about how Donald Trump is an existential threat. But I was saying, I'm not sure that's exactly right. What it is is that there were always going to be existential threats that would occur during his tenure. And he's too much of an unsurious clown to deal with. them. And if AI feels like that, it feels like this is a new thing for voters, they want somebody

to explain how it's going to work, how we're going to tackle it. It's one of the reasons they want younger legislators that you hear so many, because I hear this all the time where they're just like, I feel like these older legislators, they're not connected to the thing that is happening to me right now. And AI is very much part of that. And so, yeah, I mean, for them to just not even go out and make a case to voters about putting the data centers there, about how it's going to infect employment. Voters right now are just out to see on it. I also think you write about this in the book that I think you said, like sometimes you think that the most important thing about politics is the lack of trust right now. The trust is the biggest issue and I completely agree.

I feel like this is the low trust environment that we live in, like biting us in the ass on AI because, and it's, you know, left over from the pandemic as well, which is no one trusts the AI oligarchs, Trump, politicians, other people either trying to sell them a product or saying that they want to regulate it. And this is a moment where we actually need people to trust in what experts are saying. And I don't know that we're going to be able to sort of navigate that in this low trust environment. I think you're right. The thing that voters say all the time in focus groups about just the information environment is they say, I don't know what to believe anymore. They know that there's, and they've always thought this, right, that there's these bigger forces that are manipulating things.

And so, like, is China paying for us to be skeptical of AI? Right. We don't know. And so people, they say this all the time. They'll be like, I have to watch, you know, this show, this channel and this channel, and I've got to figure out if the truth is in between. We're asking a lot of people already in terms of how they arbitrate truth and information. and now AI is about to make that a lot more difficult for them. And just on the last thing on the AI and data centers is it's not particularly partisan.

You know, when I go home to central Pennsylvania, I see, and I'm from like a very rural part, I just see these no data centers signs everywhere because where is there a ton of land to build new data centers? It's in these sort of rural communities where there's still a lot of land. And so it is those voters right now who are some of the most skeptical. Yeah. And it's only getting worse. And I think it's going to be a big issue in 26. We're already seeing it.

But it'll be in 28 as well. Midterms. So far, the post-Labor Day polling for Dems has only improved, especially as polls should start switching from polls of registered voters to polls of likely voters. As we speak, Nate Silver's model has Dem's chances of taking the sense. at like near 60% depending on which version you use. Your most recent focus group pod on Texas had some Trump voters sounding pretty down on Ken Paxton and kind of open to Tel Edo.

Have you noticed a shift among focus group participants in the last few weeks or heard anything new come up that stuck with you as we head towards the midterms in the final stretch? The biggest thing overall is just how sort of demoralized Republicans are. So when you, the Ossoff, the Georgia race, really, when we were doing voters there, they were just like, yeah, we're going to lose, you know? And they're like, why can't we find somebody better? They were really, and I heard this across the races. People were really unhappy with their choices among the Republican candidates and just felt like there wasn't anybody particularly good in Texas. We were talking, yeah, to Trump disapprovers, which is, by the way, a rapidly expanding category.

So one of the things when we, you know how this is done, right? But when you're screening to find voters, we're often looking for like, okay, who's persuadable, who's a little on the fence? And so you'll find people who say that they think that Trump's doing either a somewhat bad or a very bad job. That category grows all the time. And then you listen to voters in that category and is a place like Texas. And they're like, Ken Paxton's a scumbag. He's a crook.

And they'll be like, and Talarico seems like a nice person. And they even say, I know he said some weird things, and I don't agree with that, but he seems like a nice guy. And they still some of them say, and I'm not sure I can bring myself to vote for a Democrat. But several of them said, I can vote for him, and I probably will because I can't vote for Paxton. But when I think about enthusiasm, the enthusiasm gap really matters in midterms because it's like it's just different from a general in terms of turning out. And so when you've got Democrats who can't wait to get out and vote in a midterm, and then you've got Republicans who are like, there's not that much about this agenda I'm trying to protect. I'm not happy about the war. I'm not happy about prices. They're just not as

interested in going out and doing it. And so that, I think, is where Democrats really get their advantage. Yeah. When I heard some of those voters in your focus group talking about how I really They don't like Paxton. I don't know if I can vote for Tala Rico, like a couple. I'm like, those are people who are just not going to vote. That's right. Or leave, or vote for vote down ballot, leave that blank, whatever it may be. But in a midterm, you can see that happening. Well, there's a reason that Donald Trump had to do his weird midterm, rah-rah thing in Dallas, which is, A, they're afraid they're going to lose Texas. But also, he thinks that he's got to put himself on the ballot because they're seeing clearly in all of their data that they've got a real

enthusiasm problem, that people are not interested in turning out to vote. So that's what that was about, whether or not that was achieved is a different story. The thing that seems to be worrying Dems most ahead of the midterms is being significantly outspent by Republicans. I have this unproven theory that at some point, there's just diminishing returns on saturating everyone's screens with political ads because people just tune them out, partly because there are so many, partly because they just don't seem authentic in an information environment that prizes authenticity, which you write a lot about in the book. But what do you think?

I totally agree there's diminishing returns. I mean, and also, there's also sometimes I think you start to get into backlash territory where people are like, I'm so sick of this. And the voters, they tend to know which ads are about. So right now in Texas, Tala Rico is running some very strong. bio, like biography ads, that's a good way to spend money. Ken Paxton's running all of these like weird AI ads saying like, you know, Tao Rico's a weirdo and everything. At some point, voters start to say, I don't like, he doesn't have enough of a message. It's just all why this guy is

bad. And it starts to have a little bit of a backlash. Obviously money matters. But I do think that one of the things I'm seeing where I feel like Democrats have gotten the message in a couple of places is they're going everywhere. They understand they have to show up. places that they can't just spend money. And a bunch of people who've had more money than their opponents and have basically relied on that, lost their primaries. Because what people want to know is, can you get to me organically? Do I hear you in a natural state, not just on the ads?

Do I see you in person, which Taurico is all over Texas? Hard state to do that. Hard state, big state. And so I think that Democrats are making up for it with some much needed elbow grease. So you and I share a concern that if there is a blue wave in November, Democrats may look at the results and think, we're awesome. The party's brand problem is mostly solved. We should feel great about 28. Why would that be the wrong takeaway, in your opinion? That's the absolute worst takeaway. In part because, look, Democrats now have a real structural advantage in midterms. You talk about this a lot. I talk about this a lot. Those college-educated suburban voters, like me who ran out of the Republican Party as fast as we could when Donald

Trump got there, now make up a good chunk of midterm voters. They show up and vote. These are college-educated suburban voters. On the other side of that coin, though, is the non-college working-class voters and a multiracial working-class coalition, you know, Trump, Trump won with Hispanics or much higher proportion of Hispanics, a much higher proportion of black voters, much higher proportion of young voters. And I think once you get to a general election, the elector just looks different. Like the median voter in a general election is a 55-year-old white guy without a college degree. And so Democrats sort of have to grapple with this difference. And I think they're only starting to get their heads around how different it looks, midterm environment to general election environment.

Well, let's talk 28 a bit. You write pretty directly in the book that Kamala Harris should not run again. Is that a judgment about her abilities, about the circumstances of 24, or about whether voters would ever be able to see her as something new? I think it's a little bit all of the above. The number one thing is there are just some things that are not changeable, that you sort of can't fix because they're who a person is. And the struggle for Kamala Harris, the thing that I heard from voters over and over again, was that they could hear, they could like see her wheels turning. They feel her calculations.

And that is just, it's a non-starter with voters. And so when they say, I don't know who she is, they don't believe that she's authentically who she is. And even if she shows back up now and is the authentic version of her, it will be contrasted with the several other versions of her that they have seen and they will not trust it. They also, they found the way that that primary happened. It was not her fault. I think voters are too hard on her about a lot of this stuff, but they saw her as an anti-democratic actor,

that the way that she became the nominee. And so I think that she is a non-starter with voters, and I wish that she had run for governor of California, because I think she would have made a great governor and would have been a great foil for Trump in the office. Yeah, I also like, I've been watching her, few appearances, because she hasn't been out that much either, which I think is challenging to her then run again. But her few appearances that she's had since the race, it's not like much

has changed in the way she talks and what her message is and what she has to say. You can tell there's a little bit now of like, you know, we need an outsider and there's too many insiders in Washington. But then again, look to your earlier point, it sounds like she's saying that because someone was like, people want outsiders. They don't want an insider. It doesn't feel like it's genuine. And voters can smell this. Like, they just are onto people. And, you know, I also write a lot in the book about the communications environment.

All day long, people are staring at talkers like us and like everybody else, right? They know when we're telling the truth. They are used to now this sort of intimacy, this parissocial relationship that you have. And so they can tell when you are calculating your answer. They feel it in their bones. And that is how she does politics. it will not work in a 2028 run. It actually still works down ballot.

You can be just sort of a boring or a straightforward politician who's got a good message. It just doesn't work at the presidential level. I think people have missed that last point because you get a lot of people saying like, well, we have Roy Cooper and we have Andy Bashir. We have all these. And I was like, well, it's different running for a statewide office, especially a governor because you can show up in all these places and you can be good at constituent services and you can be there for people. people and people get to know you for a long time. And it's just a different environment on a, on a national level. You've talked about being impressed by Asaf, Buttigieg, AOC, in terms of communication. What are they doing right in terms of effective communication, getting attention, showing the

ability to potentially achieve narrative dominance over Republicans? Yeah, what I like right now is that, you know, while everybody else is having this interminable fight about more moderate, versus more progressive. There are basically four, I see four incredibly good communications, rubrics, examples. But you've got Asov. Asov has his way of communicating. He was a documentary filmmaker.

He writes his own speeches. He gives them at the podium. He has these shooting from behind. He's been lifting weights, hitting the gym. And he goes straightforwardly at Trump and provides a contrast. and then he releases them to social media. That is his format. Pete Buttigieg's format is in person at the town halls,

and he goes to red places, and he talks earnestly with people, and he's got ideas for how to fix things. He's got his little McKinsey brain on, right? And he's like, here are the things that we need to do to change politics. That's what Pete does. That's who Pete does.

AOC, much more of sort of influencer, connective energy. She'll tell you about her personal life. She does all the straight-to-camera stuff. I love watching AOC kind of do her thing and grow up but still understand how to match voters or go eye to eye with them. And then you've got Moldani, who is somebody who any question you asked Moldani, you sort of made this point last night. But this is even if I think that his bespoke policies around how to lower prices might be sort of silly, I think his relentless focus on affordability is the way that everybody should be behaving. And I even say, look, Donald Trump talked about a wall, a wall that never really got built. Voters didn't care whether the wall got built.

They cared that when he talked about immigration, it sounded like he meant it, right? He had an idea for immigration. He was going to take immigration seriously. The wall's just a stand-in for that. Mondani's particular policies are much less important than the fact that he is relentless about saying, I know the city's too expensive for you to live in because that's what people feel all the time. And so I think it's less about particular ideology. and more about being able to communicate effectively with people in your own way that's authentic to you

and to have a theory of the case about how you're going to talk to people. So I see a lot of good stuff happening. The other thing when Maldani does is when he pivots almost any question to affordability, he kind of does it with like a wink and a nod. Like he knows that this is the game, which I think is important because, you know, you can imagine a lot of Democrats hearing that and saying politicians hearing that and being like, well, I talk about affordability all the time. But the key is to talk about it in a way that is that you really believe it.

It's genuine. But also, like, you get the game of politics. Like, there's a little, Trump was good at that. Obama was good at that in their sense of humor. Like, everyone knows that this is crazy that what we do this. This is a whole thing is a circus. It's absurd. And if you have politicians who are like willing to kind of break that fourth wall to let everyone know, like, yeah, no, I know this is crazy too.

That really helps. I mean, so I completely agree with this. And this is why when somebody says, okay, don't, you know, the Republicans are trying to set the terms of the debate somewhere insane that matters to so few people. They're like, we are going to focus relentlessly on trans sports. Okay, that's what we're going to talk about. And I feel like a lot of Democrats have really struggled with how to get out of that format. They're like, oh, no, they like, you see them panic. They're like, deer in headlights.

And you could see Mom Dani being like, do you know what transports reminds me of? The fact that you can't afford anything in New York. If you do that, it's actually not that hard. No, I know. Let's talk about Republicans. Your book describes a fight between a MAGA establishment that wants power and an America first movement with its own beliefs and grievances. Do you think that split is durable?

Like, will we see that in 28? Or do you think it's like a current dynamic? I think the current dynamic is a reflection of how things are shaping up for 2028. I think there is a group of people who feel like they cannot defend Trump's record, who don't want to have to defend Trump's record and who think that what he has done on the war and the fact that he has not tackled affordability makes Trump. They're making a bet that Trump will not be as popular on the way out and that people are going to want like true America first has never been tried. And that is going to be Marjorie Taylor Green. That is going to be Tucker Carlson because the war, the war was a real breaking point on. the right. There are a lot of people who said, this is him breaking faith with us. They,

they dealt with the Epstein files. They could deal with the affordability, but not the worst. They talked about it too much. America first was about not doing this stuff, focusing on problems here at home. And so I think that that wing of the party wants to mount a challenge. I think the MAGA establishment is where you get Trump having his thumb on the scale of who the nominee is, people feeling like, well, Trump has this dominant role in every presidential or every primary. And so whoever Trump wants, he'll get in this. If he wants it to be Rubio, if he wants it to be J.D. Vance, I'm not trying entirely by that. Because, again, if things go well, Trump should be historically unpopular.

And what you want are all the candidates kind of running from him. How does Vance handle all this, do you think? Like, first of all, how does – it seems like he's trying to straddle the MAGA establishment because he has to because he's in it. and this America First group. Like, you can tell he's, and to me it feels too cute by half, but I don't know. No, yeah, he thought he was going to straddle it. Like, Vance was like, I'm the one person that can hold these two coalitions together. I keep Vance or I keep Tucker in the tent and I can hold, you know, the just the people who love Trump.

He's in the sour spot. He's like falling through the middle and now he's down here by himself in this place where, and you know who's smart? Like, Marco Rubio is just way more savvy about this stuff. Marco Rubio is staying so far as the, he is the person who is supposed to be doing the negotiations. He is the Secretary of State. But Marco Rubio is like, I'm going to go to the wrestling match with Trump. And I'm going to let J.D. Vance like eat this shit sandwich of going to Iran and having the Iranians be like, yeah, no, we're not going to make a deal with you. And every day that goes by, Vance is being put in a worse and worse position, one that he is not talented enough to work his way out of.

What did you think of his convention speech? Well, I thought it was repellent. He is a repellent individual. He somehow manages to have all of Trump's sort of disgusting, like hateful rhetoric, but like none of the charm or talent. And I say this is somebody who finds Trump absolutely charmless. But you can feel the audience being like, you are a weak tea version of Trump. Thanks, Tammu Trump for all your thoughts. See, this is like I can't stand Vance. So I feel like biased in. analyzing his political prospects. But I had the same reaction to the speech, although, you know, like Weifer said, he's like, I could see reporters giving him some credit for that speech. And then, you know, sure enough, like Playbook had some item the next day where it was like, within the party, people are really excited, were excited by that J.D. Van's speech.

No, they weren't. I don't believe that. I just don't believe it. Do you know, I wrote down, I was like, I texted, I was like, give me some of the the most recent comments about Vance and the focus groups. And because they're, the, the Republican voters are pretty negative about him. And the women, remember the childless cat leagues? Like, Republican women, young Republican women, they don't like him. But the quote was that we hear all the time, there's just something about him I don't like. And, you know, I actually

saw with Seth Moulton. Seth Moulton, who, who I liked personally, but he got that treatment from the voters of like, there's just something about him I don't like. And he lost to an 80-year-old by like 30 points. And I feel like J.D. Vance has very similar energy where I'm supposed to be the next generation. I'm here to tell you I'm the next generation. And voters just have sort of like he turns them off in a specific way. It's interesting. Like I have talked to some of the finance tech pro people who sort of went for Trump in 24, you know, maybe fans of Elon.

And they will say sort of matter-of-factly now. JD Vance sucks and we all think it's going to be Rubio and then Rubio really has a shot at winning in 28 and I'm always like I don't know what the path is for Marco Rubio in 2020. Can you figure out

a path here? So I could see a path and the path is this. So first of all he Marco Rubio is weirdly being memed into a place right now where that meme where every bad job like Marco Rubio's got to be the head of Venezuela now is giving

the, Marco Rubio is the only competent person in this administration energy, right? That's what voters are taking away from it. The other interesting thing is listening to young voters who do not remember pre-Trump Marco Rubio. They're like, you know who's good? That Marco Rubio guy. And I'm like, well, I'll show you him from 2015 and you won't think so, doing immigration reform. Yes. But I guess, so I tell a story in the book, right in the introduction, about being backstage at the Deal Book Summit for the New York Times. And Kevin McCarthy is there. And he's preening around. They've just won the election.

And one of the things he's talking about is how Trump is a turnout machine in ways that other Republicans just have never done. They do not have this juice. And he can't believe it. He's so excited by it. And I was sitting there thinking, what happens when he's gone, Kevin? Does Marco Rubio put out these kinds of, like, does he turn people out in these rural areas at this rate? He doesn't. So I do think the path for Marco Rubio, though, would be really people saying, like, I think the Democratic Party is too far left.

Like, it would have to be a contrast where people say he seems normal relative to Trump, but the Dems are too far left. I was worried about a path for him in a primary. Like, I don't, like, if Vance runs, I can't have met, which it seems like he's. going to. I can't imagine Rubio also running. I can imagine Rubio, I can imagine them like forming a ticket early, perhaps. Yeah. But like, I have a hard time imagining Rubio running against him unless Trump does something crazy like, I really like Marco and I'm just going to let them fight it out. Yeah, although, you know, when we handicap stuff like this, what always strikes me is that Marco Rubio and J.D. Vance are together all the time. Right. They've got a plan. They're handling

this in some way. Like, we can sit and handicap it, but it's not really going to work. like that. They're going to work it out in some way, probably with Trump, with Trump's kids. Like that orbit is pretty specific. And it feels like if J.D. Vance gets a challenge, it's from outside that orbit like Ted Cruz or some outsider. Someone exciting like Ted Cruz. Or some outsider. I don't feel like the Tucker thing is really going to happen, but I don't know. I mean, I think there will be a decent number of Republicans who, run, in part because there's pretty big pent-up demand for trying to... An America firster somewhere?

Yeah, well, no, no, no. I don't mean, I mean pen-up demand for people who want to run who've been, you know, basically like, mocked by Trump now for over a decade. And they've been saying, you know, I want to have my time nationally. I think to me, what's more interesting is not who runs. It's sort of what voters want in a post-Trump world. Because a big part of my theory of the case rests on this fact that Trump has. has changed the Republican Party to such a degree where it is this cult of personality. We all see it.

Putting on the red hat is the ticket in to the coalition. When Trump is gone, it's not a party that has a policy platform. It's not a party that stands for something clearly. It's not a party that has stars outside of Trump or voters who are committed to those politicians and the way that they're committed to Trump. They don't have the same sunk cost. They haven't, you know, ended their relationships with their cousin over. It's just going to be a totally different environment. That's way if Democrats can get it together. Like the book is about, guys, historic generational opportunity to go on offense against a flatlining Republican Party that stands for nothing, just to hollowed out nothing.

Go get it. Pick it up and go get it. That's why we got to get Trump to that bush line. Got to get them below the bush line, man. How to Eat an Elephant. It's a fantastic book. Everyone go buy it. We don't want Ted Cruz beating you on the bestseller list.

Yeah, or Victor Davis Hansen or some other weird Republican. These fucking losers. So everyone, pod listeners, everyone go buy Sarah's book. It's fantastic. You won't regret it. Thanks for coming on.

Thanks, John. It's great to be here. That's our show for today. Thanks to Sarah Longwell for coming on. Dan Alex and I will be back with a new show on Friday. Pod Save America is a Crooked Media production. Our show is produced by Austin Fisher,

Saul Rubin, McKenna Roberts, and Ferris Safari with Reed Jirlin, Elijah Cohn, and Adrian Hill. Our team includes Matt DeGroote, Ben Hefcoat, Jordan Cantor, Charlotte Landis,

David Tolls, Mia Kelman, Ryan Young, and Naomi Single. Our staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East.