Raging Moderates with Scott Galloway and Jessica Tarlov - Keeping Kids Off Social Media & Betting on AI for Climate Action (feat. Sen. Brian Schatz)

Episode Date: April 4, 2025

Jessica Tarlov sits down with Senator Brian Schatz to discuss how Democrats are pushing back against Trump’s dismantling of USAID and leading the fight to protect Social Security. They also dive into his unexpected bipartisan work with Ted Cruz on the Kids Off Social Media Act and why he believes AI could be a game-changer in tackling climate change. Plus, they talk about the impact of Cory Booker’s marathon Senate speech calling out the dangers of the Trump administration. Follow Jessica Tarlov, @JessicaTarlov.  Follow Sen. Schatz, @SenBrianSchatz . Follow Prof G, @profgalloway. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Determined to feel everything she can before she can't feel anything, she decides to leave her unhappy marriage to explore her sexuality with some encouragement from her best friend, Nikki. FX is Dying for Sex, streaming April 4th only on Disney+. Sign up now at DisneyPlus.com. Welcome to Raging Moderates. I'm Jessica Tarlov, and today we've got Hawaii Senator Brian Schatz with us. He's been pushing back against the Trump administration's shutdown of USAID, opposing the executive order to dismantle the Department of Education and blocking some of Trump's diplomatic nominees. But at the same time, he's teamed up with Ted Cruz, yes, Ted Cruz,

I'm reading that right, you're hearing it right, on the Kids Off Social Media Act, and he's also advocating for AI-driven solutions to tackle climate change. A lot to dig into. Senator Schatz, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. I'm a New Yorker, so I have to say it's my favorite state, but Hawaii is probably my favorite state, and I grew up spending tons of time on Maui, and we were just back last year, I guess. It was the beginning of 2025.

But you're from the best place. I am from the best place. How do you go to D.C.? Don't you just say, like, call me? Angrily. But I do feel like I have one of the best place. How do you go to DC? Don't you just say like, call me? Angrily. But I do feel like I have one of the best jobs in the world, but I truly represent one of the best places on the planet in one of the best jobs in the world. So I count my blessings constantly.

Yeah. It's a pretty good gig though. The flights must be totally heinous. I'm at 2.8 million miles in the last 13. You're George Clooney. You're up in the air but less sad. And hopefully your home life is better than whatever was going on for him. Anyway, I digress.

There's a lot to get into. I wanted to start with, so we're recording this on Tuesday, April 1st. Cory Booker has been on the Senate floor for 15 hours at this point. It's not a filibuster. It's just a speech and he's going for a record, right? I mean, we'll see whether he can do it. But I'll just say that Strom Thurman's record, and it was a filibuster against civil rights, was 24 hours and 18 minutes. That's the longest that anyone has ever spoken consecutively on the Senate floor. So he removed his own chair from the Senate floor, so he wasn't tempted to sit down.

And he's got a little, you know, he's got a little array of chocolate covered espresso beans and something to settle his stomach, and I think Tylenol and ibuprofen. And he's been rocking and rolling all night. So I think his goal was to manage expectations just in case his knees gave out. Yeah, sorry, I think that was wrong of me.

If he doesn't make the record, no big deal. I should not have said that. He definitely wanted to take the floor and to indicate to the public that he understands, that we understand, that we are not in normal times, that there are lots of things that we ought to be able to do on a bipartisan basis, but the bones of democracy are being tested and he wanted to make that

case. And, you know, there's this kind of argument within the Democratic coalition, which I think is absurd, which is, do we argue about, do we talk about the threats to democracy or do we talk about economic fairness and economic opportunity? And I think the answer is like quite plainly, we do it all. First of all, people are capable of keeping a couple of things in their head at the same time. But second of all, what's happening is the same story, right? It's a different aspect of the same story, which is that we have these rich billionaires, these oligarchs who are

doing a smash and grab on the federal government. And that means that people are going to be hurt. But the whole purpose here from the Republican side is to generate enough savings to finance the biggest tax cuts in American history and to double the national debt, not the deficit, not the annual operating deficit, but double the national debt. And so, look, we've got a case to make, and I think we need to do less of talking to each other about how exactly to say the thing and how exactly to do our emphasis and which lane is best and which moderate or liberal or progressive or center-right person has the right approach. And all of us just need to, this is rhetorical now, pick up whatever rock we

can find and start whipping it at the opposition because the fight is on now. Well, thank you for stipulating that it was rhetorical because I will be talking about that on the five later when this comes out and we talk about violent Democrats. I was reviewing your interview with the New Yorker from early February, which feels like 47. I didn't mean to pick that. That is his number, 47 president. But it feels like a million years ago. And there was this line that stuck out to me where you said, we are not cooked.

The roots of democracy are still strong. And I'm curious as to how you feel about the roots of democracy today. Because I'm usually not a sky is falling Democrat but Trump post 2020 talking about a third term feels a little sky is falling to me and just how quickly they've been breaking so many things that are staples and important to the functioning of American democracy has made me a little chicken little. Yeah, I think everybody should be a little freaked out,

but the challenge right now is to remain. Look, I think of President Zelensky, right? And when you interact with him, it's not that he doesn't understand that his country is under siege. It's not that he doesn't understand the death toll, the economic challenges, the suffering, but he also remains calm.

And so there is a real threat to the American system of government right now. And it is personified in Donald Trump and his movement. That is real. But that doesn't mean that the most effective way to fight it is to look like you've lost your damn mind. And so I think what people want to see is a level of alarm that matches the facts on the ground. And I think Democrats have done only an okay job of conveying that level of alarm. On the other hand, we do need to remain calm and strategic and work

collectively because this is serious business. So, but you're I mean, every day I'm trying to assess two things. There are kind of two lines that may intersect. One is in a normal, traditional political context, everything that Donald Trump and the MAGA Republicans are doing is diminishing their popularity and positions as well for elections upcoming. At the same time, some of the things they're doing are seizing the reigns of the organs of democracy, the organs of power in ways that feel a little more durable than like, oh great, we won the House in the midterms, now what? And so are these things related? Yeah,

we can push back better when Donald Trump is in the 30s or low 40s than if he's in the 50s and 60s. So these things are related, but they are not the same. And it is important to kind of treat those two enterprises as related, but not the exact same thing. I fight on the kind of democracy front as much as I can, but I also understand that the winning issues for us are going to be protecting social security,

reversing all the layoffs of the veterans, frankly, protecting national parks and the national park service, the FAA. All of those things are the kinds of things that are going to move voters back into our column and let them know that we are not. Part of the problem is from COVID to Trump and then Trump again, we've been saying that the sky is falling for quite a long time. And there's a pretty good argument that the truth was it was a global pandemic and the truth was Donald Trump is a unique threat. But it doesn't matter. If you do that for 10 years, people stop listening.

What will move voters is a recognition that they are currently suffering economically from what's going on and that doesn't mean I don't understand the threats to the rule of law the fact that they're just putting on masks and sending people to foreign prisons without Justification is a terrifying thing, but it's also true that if we want to win a swing voter back, it's probably going to be on tariffs and not that question. Yeah, it's been interesting to see the movement in every category but immigration for him

where he's still 55 to 60% approval, even without due process and some innocence in a labor camp being tortured. So I've kind of taken it as an L and I'm trying to move past it, at least in when I'm discussing these things. How are you finding a way to keep focusing on what matters? And can you talk a bit about the reconciliation bill, so your running point for the Democrats there? Sure. They have to go through a multi-step process, which is super boring, but the point is they

are going to, at least currently, their plan is to literally double the deficit to do something called current policy baseline. You don't need to know why they call it that, but essentially to say that whatever the current policy is in the 11th year and beyond doesn't cost a penny. So from an accounting standpoint standpoint like that sounds awesome. My mortgage is only a liability on my books for the next nine and a half years and then after that it's pretty much free. Well that's not actually true but if my accountant told me I could do that I might make some very very bad decisions for the national fiscal situation. So that's what they're gonna

do is they're gonna increase the the debt, not the deficit, by about double. They're going to cut taxes for trillionaires, and they still need to find more revenue, more savings in order to enact all of that stuff. And they're looking very, very hard at Medicaid cuts. And so this is an opportunity for Democrats to be clear from, you know, John Federman to Bernie Sanders and everyone in between, we all agree that cutting Medicaid and using that savings to kind of shovel it

to the wealthiest billionaire corporations that have ever existed on the planet is a very bad idea politically and policy wise. So we're going to fight like hell this week. The problem is this is like step two in a three-step process So they're going the Republicans are going to claim Hey, this is just a framework or the the cuts are not in there and blah blah blah And what we have to do is say yeah, yeah, that's all bullshit We all know where this is landing you want the tariff revenue

Which is another way of saying money regular people pay when they go to the grocery store or the Home Depot or the Best Buy or to the car dealership, extra money that they pay gets counted as revenue and that revenue is going to be the reason that they claim that their tax cuts for the wealthy are so-called deficit neutral. And I think it's a really important point to make because it's one of those things where Democrats are, you know, so everyone is prone to rhetorical excess. And so you would forgive a regular listener for thinking, well, that's probably not exactly what they're doing. They're not actually going to take the money that I pay when I have to pay more for an avocado or a bottle of tequila or a flat-screen TV.

They're not actually going to give it to the wealthy, are they? And they literally are. That's their budget plan. And I think if we can't make hay of that, that we should probably dissolve the party and reconstitute ourselves someplace else. Yeah. I think that people generally feel that way, that it's a make or break moment having lost this election again. You know, having painted him, as you said, at 10 years as a unique threat to democracy, and people who usually vote for us said, sign me up for the chaos agent versus what the Democrats were selling.

A crucial component of the case that Democrats are trying to make is that they're also coming to dismantle Social Security. And this is where Elon Musk comes into play. And I saw that the Senate Democrats are launching a Social Security war room. Can you tell our listeners a bit about what's going on there? Yeah, I'm excited to be a part of this. You know, when I ran for my first election in the United States Senate, I made Social Security my signature issue and it's, you know, for two reasons. First, 300,000 people in Hawaii depend on Social Security and the vast majority of those people, it's either their only source

of income or their primary source of income. The amount of Social Security that people receive in Hawaii, the average amount is just under $2,000. That is less than a two-bedroom apartment costs in the city of Honolulu. So it's just literally not enough. And the idea that the way we're going to find a balanced budget is on the backs of seniors who have paid into this program is preposterous to me. So we're actually rolling this out in a couple of hours with Elizabeth Warren and Ron Wyden

and others to not just fight back on the kind of communications level, which I think is very important, but also to troubleshoot what they're doing as a kind of first step as a trial balloon to try to eviscerate the program. And that is to make the service delivery suck, right? Closing down offices, reducing the number of people available to answer the phone, requiring that you, but first of all, closing down offices and then requiring that you physically show up in those offices means that people like my father-in-law, he's in his 80s, he's got COPD, he was actually Social Security disability before he was Social Security for the elderly.

He's legally blind, although functional around the house. He can't go to a Social Security office, right? And I'm home whenever I'm home, I could take him, but not everybody has those resources and then you have language access problems and all the rest of it. So if people can't access the Social Security program, then Social Security is being cut, even without actually enacting those cuts. But I do think, honestly, I think that's where they want to land. I think they want to cut Social Security, but the first step to cutting Social Security is to get everybody to believe two things.

First, that it sucks, right? You can't get your program, you know, you can't get on the phone and start to have people think of it like the DMV where it's a big pain, it's a big bureaucracy, it doesn't work. And then second, and they do this especially to young people, to get people to believe that Social Security will not exist in the future. That is bullshit. Does it have some fiscal challenges like in the 2030 range? Sure.

But like these are absolutely from a numerical standpoint not difficult to solve. But the right wing has gone out of its way to cause everybody probably under 40 to think this program will not be here for me in the future. That's bullshit. That's a question of political will. And as long as I'm around, we're gonna fight to keep Social Security. Whether you own a bustling hair salon,

a painting company that just landed a big job, or the hottest new bakery in town. You need business insurance that can keep up with your evolving needs. With flexible coverage options from TD Insurance, you only pay for what you need. Get a quote in minutes from TD Insurance today. TD. Ready for you. Last week we at Today Explained brought you an episode titled, The Joe Rogan of the Left. The Joe Rogan of the Left was in quotations,

it was mostly about a guy named Hassan Piker, who some say is the Joe Rogan of the Left. But enough about Joe, we made an episode about Hassan because the Democrats are really courting this dude. So Hassan Piker is really the only major prominent leftist on Twitch, at least the only one who talks about politics all day. What's going on everybody? I hope everyone's having a fantastic evening, afternoon, pre-noon, no matter where you are.

They want his cosign, they want his endorsement because he's young and he reaches millions of young people streaming on YouTube, TikTok, and especially Twitch. But last week he was streaming us. Yeah, I was listening on stream and you guys were like, hey, you should come on the show if you're listening. I was like, oops, caught. You're a listener. Yeah. Oh, yeah, I am. Yeah. Thank you for listening.

Head over to the Today Explained feed to hear Hassan Piker explain himself. Do you think that political will involves being open to some kind of means testing at some point? I know that there are Democrats who have said, fine by me, right? If we get to the point where there are seniors who definitely don't need it, that we can push them out of the program so that people like your father-in-law can make sure that they are able to get their payments. I think a better way to do this is to just make sure that the that every dollar of income is taxed for social security purposes, right?

There's currently a cap above which you you pay no social security tax. So if you're doing well, but not that well, you know If you make 80 grand or something and you're a firefighter or a teacher All of that money is taxed for Social Security purposes. If you make eight hundred thousand dollars Then most of that money is not taxed for Social Security purposes So there's a relatively easy I think equitable and fair way to do this which say, hey, every dollar of income is taxed for social security purposes, and fair is fair. I'd also point out that means testing doesn't really save you enough money to impact the fiscal future of the program.

It sort of sounds good. And I used to be, earlier in my career, more interested in means testing. But the thing that I have figured out is you usually end up spending more money and creating more administrative friction and turning a program into a bigger pain in the ass that has less political support if it's not just available to everybody. It's like if we had free public libraries unless your income was 180 grand and then you got to go to the remaining Barnes and Noble or go on Amazon. Like, free public service that's broad-based

and available to everybody ends up meaning that the politics are better because everybody benefits from it, including people who have done well in their lives. They still care about their Social Security income. I would worry if we turned it into a program only for the poor, that it would be more vulnerable to a tax.

I think that's right. Scott Galloway was also making the case when we were talking about it last week, using similar examples about how can these two people have the same level of their income tax like this. It's the Warren Buffett rule also about his secretary, right, paying higher taxes than him. I want to shift gears and talk a little bit about Signalgate and what's going on there in terms of, you know, the Trump administration, it seems like they're just going to keep saying it's no problem, it's no problem. There wasn't any classified information and there are going to be no resignations, even though there have been calls for Secretary Hegseth

to have to leave. Where do you stand on all of this? And do you think that this is going to be an endemic problem for the administration? Well, first of all, it's a total outrage. And it's not just some sort of like, you know, Trump taking some papers back to Mar-a-Lago or Biden taking some papers back to his residence, like both of those are improper. And frankly, I was gobsmacked by it. Like when I go into a classified session,

I just go in, you know, sort of hands free so that I don't accidentally walk out with anything. The idea that you need to take stuff back to your personal residence. I get it if you're a president, it may be different, but you should still have an assistant who like handles that material. But this is different stuff.

These were operational plans and people could have died. Our people could have died. So it's really, really serious matter. And I think we're also learning that they're just using signal to circumvent the presidential records act, the freedom of information act, and you know, just not at all respecting the need to protect, not confidentiality, right?

People are like, well, it's encrypted. That's not the point. I am told, and listen, I'm on the Foreign Relations Committee and the Defense Committee, and I'm a member of Senate leadership, but I'm not under any illusions that I'm like the Secretary of Defense in terms of how interesting my content is. But I still operate under the assumption that the whole phone is compromised, right? And sure, do I use Signal for not classified, but sensitive conversations?

Sure, I think everybody should use an encrypted app if they can, but that's not what this is. They decided to put specific attack plans into a Signal string, and there's no way he typed that up himself. So the other question, I think, sort of of forensically is where did he get that thing? Who typed it up? Is that from one of the component commanders? How did that end up in his phone?

Did he copy it and paste it into the string? So that's number one. Number two is this is an opportunity for Democrats to not outsmart themselves, to not outsmart themselves. We are causing some real political bleeding here. They are on their heels. They have no excuse for this. This also has a resonance with some of the voters that we've lost over the last decade or two. So it's not just that this kind of like scratches the itch of the suburban progressives who we want to be enthused and we do, right? We really do want them to be enthused. This also makes national security folks, veterans, anyone who's ever been adjacent to any of

this stuff go, well, that seems terrible. And what I worry about, and I haven't seen it happen yet, so I don't want to get too much into trashing fellow Democrats, but I do worry about someone coming to us and going like, you know, we have this poll and this doesn't do as well as the Social Security attack. And my view is, are you kidding me? This thing has stickiness. This thing is interesting. And this goes to one of the fundamental critiques of this presidency, which is that these dudes are incompetent. They actually don't know how to govern at all.

What we're seeing now in terms of polling dropping is mostly people observing what's happening, but they haven't quite experienced what's happening because that stuff kind of lags. All of that incompetence is going to come home to roost in terms of people's personal safety and security and hope in the future. And so I think this is not dissimilar to the Afghanistan withdrawal, which I'm sure if you had told the Republicans to take a poll, that thing wasn't going to poll very high until they made it an issue. And I'm really sort of proud of the Democratic coalition for sort of like, you know, not letting this go

and saying, hey, did you know that we should probably talk about ACA subsidies? Of course we should talk about that. But they screwed up in an enormous way. They won't even admit that they were on the string. It's a catastrophe for them and we shouldn't let go. The Afghanistan withdrawal was the moment, right? Where Biden's approval rating went down

and then it never recovered from there. And it does feel like the comp isn't even relevant because that was a poorly executed decision and everybody agrees with that across the aisle. But this is actually the sharing of classified information on an insecure channel, which I feel like should compute to people in a different kind of way. Sure. But I think there's two, the similarity to me is at the kind of presidential level. It was the moment at which people decided fairly or unfairly that maybe Joe Biden wasn't on the ball, right? And again, I don't want to relitigate the last election, but it was a moment where people said like, shouldn't we have a more engaged

commander in chief? And I think this is the moment where people are saying, hey, all this chaos that he was sort of nodding towards, tweeting about, yammering about, you know, on television or at one of his rallies, like it is actually starting to happen. And as you know, there are probably, I don't know, 10 to 15% of the voters who voted for Donald Trump saying, he's just gonna say stuff, but it's worth it. And I think what's different about this term

than the first Trump term is he's going through with it. He's gonna do the tariffs. He has illegally laid off people from the National Park Service and the Federal Aviation Administration and the Department of Education. He is having his agents arrest people without due process. He is aligning with Putin and North Korea.

That's actually happening. This is no longer some theoretical thing where someone on Fox or some center left pundit can tell me, oh, you always say that and he always pivots back to the center. This dude is going through with all the crazy things and I think Signalgate is an indicator that oh God, they weren't kidding. They don't believe that they are responsible for following the law. Is that why you voted for the continuing resolution? The reason I voted for the continuing resolution is pretty straightforward.

I read the Anti-Deficiency Act. The Anti-Deficiency Act only kicks in when there's a lapse in appropriations. When there's a lapse in appropriations, then the executive branch basically has total control over what parts of the government are able to open and not open. And the only criteria is life saving. And Russ Vogt had a series of plans to essentially riff, reductions in force, lay off the entire federal workforce minus whomever he decided was life saving, which presumably

would have been like ICE. Nobody. Or well, ICE board objection. You know, his sort of the law enforcement arm of the Office of Management and Budget. And so for me, it was not like a tough call in terms of the policy of it. But I also think that we, we Democrats,

did a very bad job of communicating amongst ourselves, right, between the House and the Senate. We were not on the same page. And then maybe more importantly, one of the things that gives me the most hope is this pluralistic people power movement out there for America and it's a little different than resistance 1.0 in the sense that it doesn't have quite the progressive I'm an un-reconstructed progressive but I think the thing that's happening now is like veterans and federal workers and retirees and just regular folks are like I guess I'm a Democrat or I've never been a Democrat or whatever

But it's not this kind of like left-leaning movement it's like a what the hell is happening to our country movement and What I regret the most about what happened with the CR was that? Disconnection between the electeds and the grassroots. So we've got to do better at our additional points of leverage throughout the Congress. We will have them and we just have to be on the same page with ourselves, right?

If we're going to be an effective opposition party, and it's been a minute, right? We were in power and enacting really important legislation, but now we're in the minority, which means it's even more important to be a unified opposition. And that just takes practice and work and a recognition that if something didn't go well, there's no spinning it. You just say, look, that was, we didn't execute well.

It's a good thing that happened in February of this year and not August of next year. But we got to get better because we got to learn how to be a more effective opposition party Do you think that the leadership is up to the task? Yes, I do I just think we got to talk more think more and be willing to do things that sort of match both in intensity and in unusualness Sort of like widen the array of tactics that we're willing to use. And I think one of the things, the most powerful tactics that I am observing is people, Democrats, going into Republican U.S. House districts and holding town halls where they won't, right? And that one is an absolute political killer.

And so I'm happy to see, I saw Maxwell Frost and Chris Murphy doing it. Chuck did it in some New York House districts. I think this can cause real political pain more so than social media posts. But social media posts are important too. Yeah, never forget the posts. Gotta have the posts to go with it. But I've been enjoying the town halls too and kind of seeing Republicans have to retreat from it or at least argue that it's all George Soros' plans.

And I'm fine with that. If you want to go into the midterms thinking that these were all stunts, you'll see people show up at the ballot box and the fact that they were ignored for two years certainly won't be helping you. I want to make sure that we talk about your bill with Ted Cruz about banning social media for kids under 13 and to limit the algorithm driven content for teens. Can you tell us about that and how did you end up legislative pals with Ted Cruz? Well, you know, this is important to most parents across the country.

And this is something that unites, you know, the sort of apolitical, the right-wing, the left-wing, the moderates. I cannot find a parent who is in favor of permitting a kid, a nine-year-old, to be on TikTok or Instagram or anything else. It is directly correlated to being anxious. it is directly correlated to being sedentary, it is directly correlated to the polarization, you know, both socially and politically of our country. And there's no real First Amendment right when you're talking about protecting a nine-year-old from these adverse outcomes. And then for 13 through adulthood, it's those algorithms that are capturing kids who don't have a fully developed brain and don't have a fully

developed sense of themselves and causing them to have eating disorders or violent tendencies or otherwise unhealthy relationships with their peers or with their parents or with their teachers. And so I think the use case for social media for the very young child is, you know, pretty close to zero. And, you know, I sat with my staff, we came up with this bill and we started shopping it around with Republicans and Ted and Katie Britt and Dan Sullivan and other Republicans are on board. And so I think we can enact this thing

because there is broad bipartisan support for something like this. And I'm not gonna try to trash my fellow senators other legislative proposals, but I will say it this way. This thing is simple and easy to understand, right? And there are lots of things in the AI space and the kids' privacy space gets really complicated. There are lots of edge cases to AI space and the kids privacy space gets really complicated There are lots of edge cases to consider and all the rest of it

But can't we just agree that there's no real use case for an eight-year-old staring at Instagram? Like can't we just get that one done? And so I'm relatively hopeful we can get that done in this Congress Have you seen pushback from big tech or they not really getting involved? Oh, I've seen pushback. Absolutely You know, they do a lot of well we're already doing this and then I go back to them and say well if you're already doing this it shouldn't be a Problem should it and oh, this is impossible to administer. That's also bullshit And so I would be a little worried if I weren't getting any pushback because I'd be thinking well

What are they know that I don't? If they're fine with your bill passing your bill is probably not going to accomplish much to change the sort of equation here. But look, we've got a public health crisis, we've got a mental health crisis, and it's almost beyond that. It's a societal crisis that we are creating. And it's not like it'll instantly go away. But if we can just delay the onset of the

kind of maniacal phone use, we can allow kids to have some semblance of a childhood. And I just don't see how that's a progressive view or a conservative view. It's just a kind of common sense. If you're a parent, you kind of run up to me at the airport or in the Safeway in Honolulu and go, oh my God, thank you so much for this. Right? Yeah, I've been hearing a lot about how much the kids actually like it when their phones get taken away.

Like the schools that have the little pouches where when you walk in, you just leave your phone there and they go and they learn and they talk to each other. I need a pouch, the front door of my house. Yeah, no, I'm definitely in a bad social media use. That's a feature also of Trump being in office that I become a doom scroller at a level that's embarrassing and sending a bad example for my toddler even who thinks that my phone is the most important thing

in the world to me, which breaks my heart and yet I change nothing. I wanted to ask you about your thoughts on using AI to combat climate change, because that's something that I feel like we're not talking about in the use cases for AI. So could you tell us a bit more? I think there are tremendous opportunities with AI. I mean, I sort of have to do the throat clearing talking about how big the electricity needs

are going to be for AI, right? So they are going to need lots of new generation. It's unclear in the short run whether or not we're going to be able to provide that generation with clean energy. So that's that. But you're right that so much of what happens as we try to integrate, you know,

increasing percentages of clean energy, which is sometimes intermittent onto the grid, is that it's sorting, right? I've been in the Hawaiian electric control room, and yeah, they have some good technology, but they're still like dudes with switches and communicating on the phone, and they're using increasingly high quality tech,

including AI, but eventually we should just know where the electrons are and have it automated where it goes. That's what people meant by a smart grid. Those are the kinds of things that can be automated. We can generate tons and tons and tons of savings. The other thing we can do, they always talk about megawatts of clean energy. The lowest hanging fruit economically is what they call the megawatt. It's energy not consumed, right?

And AI can find where you're wasting energy and help you to not waste that energy without any diminishment of the kind of service that you're getting. And so AI has got lots of potential. I think we've got to be vigilant about what it's going to do to employment in particular and the creative arts and the creative acts in particular. But the use cases, I think, in making government work better for people so you don't have to be on the phone for four or five hours, the use case for smart grid and clean energy implementation, I think are really, really exciting. And obviously, healthcare and the ability to find new discoveries if and when the NIH is still standing. Yeah well that's a big if on that one but I'm glad to have people like you

fighting for it. Last question and I ask this at the end all the time, what's one issue that makes you rage and what's one thing that you think we should all calm down about? I'm still in just I can barely contain myself about what's happening to USAID. And I'm still pissed at Democratic pundits who said, well, don't focus on USAID. It's not not the most popular program. Listen, the reason I'm focusing on USAID is because I happen to be the top Democrat on the committee that does the funding for this. And also because people are dying. Thousands of kids every week are

getting HIV AIDS from their mom because we've basically turned off the spigot on the program called PEPFAR. Like that is pain that the United States government is causing and I don't give a shit what a pundit says. I'm gonna keep talking about it until we resolve that. So I'm still in that fight every day, morning, noon, and night. What I think people need to chill about is the third term talk. Not everything that Trump does is a distraction. But I do think when he's eating shit politically with tariffs and the stock market and polling numbers and presumably like suboptimal data coming from Florida and elsewhere,

and maybe even the Wisconsin race, I don't know. But when the vibes are bad, he usually does something provocative just to kind of push something weird into the headlines. And so on that one, I think we should not take the bait. Obviously be vigilant and don't have a failure of imagination. But on that one, that actually did feel like a trap.

I fell in it. I hung out in there for a long time yesterday. That's great to hear though. I'll trust you on it going forward. And thank you so much for your time, Senator. It was great to get to talk to you. Thank you. It's a pleasure.

Thank you. Yeah.