The Bulwark Podcast - Andrew Egger: Donald, You’re Rattled

Episode Date: September 21, 2026

As Trump’s war of choice continues to expand in the Middle East, it’s clear that the president is desperate not to show how weak he really is. The administration is out of time and out of both strategic and rhetorical options in Iran. Another sign that he is flailing: Trump is trying to ban CNN, MS NOW, and Politico from the White House press pool. But other TV outlets are pushing back in solidarity, forcing Trump to choose between two of his favorite things: punishing his critics and dominating the airwaves. Plus why the triumphal arch would be the silliest possible place for a military installation, Trump’s American Idol-style vote on what to call AI, and the unaddressed, ongoing education crisis.Sitting in for Bill Kristol, Andrew Egger joins Tim Miller on the Monday pod.show notes: Tim’s conversation about the latest AI news with Stephen Witt Tim and JVL’s 2023 conversation with Reid Hoffman Andrew in today’s “Morning Shots” on AI Dan Selsam’s statement Nikole Hannah-Jones on her daughter’s public school education The Bulwark’s campaign to help the Haitian community of Springfield The Bulwark Store Song of the Day: MJ Lenderman - “She’s Leaving You” For a limited time, get 60% off your first order, plus free shipping, when you head to Smalls.com/THEBULWARK.

Welcome to the Buller Daily. I'm your host, Tim Miller. It is Monday. It is Yom Kippur. So Bill Crystal is off. We have his younger, handsomer, Christian Gentile replacement on the Morning Shots newsletter in this morning. The great replacement. Not exactly. Also, quasi White House correspondent, but most importantly, author of the Morning Shots newsletter. It's Andrew Agger. What's up, buddy? Hey, Tim. I'm doing well. How are you? I'm doing pretty good. I'm going to talk about my week. on tomorrow's podcast. So we're doing, we're doing as good as we can. Something about the Chiefs playing overtime game on Sunday night football into Yom Kippur, where I'm the, you know, the Bill Crystal replacement writing morning shots by myself coming on the pod with you. It's a lot. It's a lot. It is definitely a Monday. Okay, here we go. Let's get into news of, you know, war and peace in the state and the economy.

We've got so much to talk about today. I was mostly struck by the spin coming out of the White House this weekend. I feel there's been. a little bit of a shift as we get into the home stretch here of the midterms about kind of how to handle the rising prices, particularly at the pump. Kevin Hassett is the gift that keeps on giving the White House Economic Advisor. He was on Fox. You wouldn't think that you'd struggle with your talking points on Fox with Peter Ducey, but I think it shows you how dire of straits they're in that Hassett couldn't handle that. Let's watch him and Peter together. Price is down like a rocket ship in reverse, when?

Well, one of the things you've seen, first of all, is that how, I guess, out of control, the Iranians and now the Houthis are. And again, this whole thing started because the Iranians told us, like, we don't have to talk to you anymore because we're two weeks from having a nuclear weapon. And you see that they're, like, shooting ships like crazy in the straits and everything, the president had to act. Hmm. We don't play Trump's voice on here, but the lead end was Peter playing Trump over the

in talking about how, you know, we have to pay a little bit higher prices because what we're doing with in Iran, it's totally worth it. But as soon as we resolve this, they're going to go down like a rocket ship. He also bleated over the weekend gas prices. We're higher under Biden and under Trump, all caps, so we're almost all other prices. And Hassas going, what are we going to do, these crazy Iranians, the crazy Houthis? What are we going to do? How do you feel that's going to land? I think that first and foremost, they need to revisit this image of a rocket ship in reverse. typically a rocket ship that is like pointing downward is not something that anybody actually wants

it's not going to go well for anyone. But I do think that, I do think that... Like the Palo 13 vibe. Yeah, exactly. Or one of Elon's sort of like misfires, right? We have seen so much hopium for so long among these guys that like some way, somehow Donald Trump is going to land this plane

of the Iran war such that even if prices have not recovered, at the very least, they'll be able to spike the football on that. they'll be able to say, you know, mission accomplished, and we're heading in the right direction, and you just need to have a little bit more patience until we kind of get back on the economic trajectory or on before, which was not that good of an economic trajectory either, by the way. But, you know, that is the argument they have wanted to make and they've been dying to make for months and months.

And I think what we are seeing right now is that they are finally waking up to the fact that they are out of time. There's no more room for this to happen. In fact, the conflict is moving the opposite direction, right? I mean, the conflict is metastisizing. It's getting worse. The supply shock, the energy shock. with the Red Sea now also being a hot combat zone that the president's trying to figure out

whether or not to get involved with. You know, no arrows are pointing in the right direction. No arrows seem likely to be pointing in the right direction ahead of the midterms. And so they're just kind of stuck. Instead of getting this pivot that they have desperately wanted, that the president has desperately wanted, the only card that they have left to play is this,

well, you know, if you squint, you got to trust that the president's doing these things for the right reasons. And, you know, look on the bright. side. There have been worse economic times in world history. Back in the day, we didn't even have fossil fuels at all to be mad about the price of them going up, you know, that kind of thing. So it's really, really dire. And they have to go on the shows. They have to keep talking about it. They have to keep saying something. Do they? It's strange that they feel like they have to.

I don't know. The idea that it's like, oh, it's the crazy Houthis. You were a young man after 9-11, so I'll have a more clear memory of this. But it'd be one thing, you know, if this, was George W. Bush going into the 2006 midterm when like an attack on the country was fresh in everybody's memory. And it's like, guys, you know, that we've had this energy shock, price a little high, but we're on the right path. We have the surge. That didn't really work for him in 2006. We've discussed. But like, that's at least you're trying to offer, you know, something that resonates with some people. Who in the country is this for? This idea that it's like, oh, the Iranians and the Houthis are crazy. And, you know, I mean, they weren't even going to

negotiate. It was like they were two weeks away from a bomb. And it's like literally who believes this besides people that are just deep, deep, deep in the cults and just are like not willing to even contemplate the idea that Chairman Trump could do anything wrong. You know, I mean, we've talked about this before. Like even like people in our lives who are Maga listen to the focus groups. It's like nobody thought this was a real threat. You know? And so like now to fall back on that and be like, you know, the pain that you're feeling right now with these prices is really the fault of these crazy. Iranians in the caves who are going to nuke us any minute,

it's just, it doesn't pass the smell tests or even close. To me, the Rosetta Stone maybe of this entire war is just remembering that never in a million years did Donald Trump think that this was going to be and become the defining crisis of his second term, right? Coming out of year one, he thought this was going to be exactly the same. Yeah, he thought this was going to be exactly the same. of thing as bombing the boats off the coast of Venezuela or, you know, kidnapping the president of Venezuela or going and attacking Iran's nuclear program. It's like just keeping up this drumbeat of

USA flexes its muscles around the world and beats up some bad guys as a way of just kind of keeping the base, you know, jonesed up and patriotic while he pursued the agenda he really cares about at home, right, which is going after the domestic enemies and the immigration stuff and all of these sorts of things. And instead, because Iran did not immediately buckle like he expected it to, he's just, I mean, he's been stuck since February. He's been stuck since like the first week of March with no way out of this thing. And it just keeps getting worse. It keeps deteriorating further. And there's no off ramp for it. And so like I was saying before, like that is why they're just left with this unbelievably paltry bag of like plausible arguments they can go out there and make. And they just have to

keep their fingers crossed that like tomorrow Iran will buckle when Iran hasn't buckled so far. And again, They're still on that. I know the opposites. I mean, yeah, they're running prime minister over the weekend saying, you know, we're not going to change until all of our demands are met. And then you have on the other side, as you mentioned, you know, the Houthis are continuing to expand attacks on Saudi Arabia and in the Red Sea. This is what's happening last week.

This is for the New York Times. On Thursday of last week, we discussed this a little bit, Trump had decided to strike the Houthi targets and, like, engage in that expanded theater of the war that he started. I was after MBS called him and urged him to step in. But by Sunday, it changed his mind and decided not to do that. We had approved target lists. Troops were loading bombs onto U.S. warplanes.

And Trump was like, eh, nah, I don't want to get involved. So, and the thing is expanding, not contracting. If you're MBS, you're like, man, what does $2 billion buy a guy? Not even a couple bombs anymore. Yeah, it really is. I mean, they are so far up a creek on this stuff. It is amazing. And like, it's not going to get better.

It's not going to get better. We're setting new records in, like, diesel prices, basically every single day now. I mean, it's just, it's astonishing how completely hosed they are in terms of just, like, any strategic or even, like, rhetorical options for selling people on this anymore. Just for fun. Because there is worse spin out there than Kevin Hass. It's just, like, to do a little bit of Schadenfreude, just, you know, a little treat for all of us on a Monday morning.

I was looking through a collection of posts by MAGA influencers talking about this topic. Is they're kind of working around how to do it? There is Hunter Eagelman related to Gunther Eagleman. They're very popular. Hunter was talking about how people are walking around with $2,000 foldable phones, $800 shoes, and a $14 pumpkin spice latte. Who's paying $14 for pumpkin spice latte? And then they're saying they can't vote for Trump because of gas prices, whatever. Bill Mitchell, like the OG Trump influencer.

People complain about being broke as they watch. one of their three flat screen TVs or decide which of their two cars they want to drive to buy their overpriced Starbucks coffee. And then this is the best one that you find for me this morning. I guess a memo went out. And there were several people that posted the same extremely long essay. Too long to read all of, but I'm going to read just a little bit for people. These are a series of MAG influencers all posting the same thing.

I keep hearing people complain that gasoline is over four bucks a gallon. And yes, I'd love to see it at two bucks a gallon again. But before we declare gasoline, the most outrageously expensive liquid on earth, let's put things in perspective. For $4,000, I get a gallon of gasoline, all caps. I poured into a 4,000 pound machine, turn a key, and that gallon will haul me, my wife, the groceries, the golf clubs, and half the junk in my trunk, almost 30 miles down the highway.

That's pretty impressive days work for $4. Now, let's prepare. A restaurant sells me five-ounce glass of wine for $9. That's about $230 a gallon. How far does that transport me just from the dinner table to the men's room? Buy one of those little two-ounce bottles of energy shots at the gas station. That's $192 a gallon. At that price, it shouldn't give me energy.

It should mow my lawn. Vanilla extracts six bucks for two ounces. That's $384 a gallon. For $384, I expect the vanilla bean to come to my house and bake the cookies. Goes on and on. Checkmate libs. Total victory there. I'm sure that there are a lot of people reading that going,

you know what? That's true. That's true. I am paying too much for my vanilla extract. Yeah, I mean, obviously this is just stupid on its face. They're grasping. They're ridiculous. These are crazy people.

It's very funny that like nine people posted this, you know, pretty much verbatim with like little tweaks here and there. But also all that other stuff gets more expensive too when the price of gas goes up. The entire economy runs on the price of gas. gas and diesel. That's like the biggest part of the problem beyond just what you pay at the pump. You know, that stuff has to get to the grocery store. Everybody has to like pay to transport everything around. You don't want to monkey with the cost of energy when you are trying to get inflation under control. That's just one of the very basic problems about this war, which again

has been one of the basic problems we've now been talking about for like, what, seven months since early March, since the Strait of Hormuz became a problem in the first place. And like, they weren't making this argument back in March. And the reason they weren't making this argument back in March is because they thought they were going to have better ones to make. And all those better ones have been systematically squashed by events since then. And this is what they're left with. And it is kind of amazing. You're right, Andrew.

We have been talking about this for seven months. Let's move on to a new item than the news. The war abroad is moving back home. You know, we also have to prepare ourselves for attacks on the homeland, particularly our nation's capital. And Donald Trump made a pronouncement this weekend about the proposed glorious arch. that is going to go above Arlington Bridge. He wrote this. At the strong request of the United States military

and for national security purposes, I've agreed to convert the magnificent Triumphal Arch planned since the Civil War era many years ago at the receptive circle into a top grade military complex slash Triumphal Arch to house store and have the rapid ability to use large number of drones plus snipers both on the roof and plaza areas. and additionally have and hold large quantities of sniper ammunition in storage.

There'll be no facility like this anywhere in the world. I don't quite understand why we need a big arch with snipers on it. And it is for people who haven't spent any time in D.C. lately, the memorial bridge goes from the Arlington Cemetery to the Lincoln Memorial. So we already have a memorial there with a high roof where we could put snipers if we needed snipers. It's also quite near to the Pentagon, which I would assume has. very good sniper ammunition storage possibilities. I don't know, well, we'd need to put it inside the triumphal arch, but maybe there's another

reason he might be doing this. Andrew, what do you think? Yeah, so this is one of those ones where you almost have to, like, be familiar with the layout of D.C. to really understand how insane this is. Like, if you live in Northern Virginia, like I do, this circle that is right in front of Arlington National Cemetery, as you say, it's a big giant traffic circle. It's important. It is a part of basically everybody's commute who's coming in from Northern Virginia into D.C. The idea that, first of all, that you would put anything in the middle of there other than just like something decorative, the idea that, you know, a military installation, it's like the silliest possible place that you could imagine to put a military

installation that in theory would need checkpoints and, you know, security. And like, you cannot imagine that continuing to serve its very crucial current traffic-related role under these circumstances at all. But as you say, there is a secondary explanation here. It's exactly the same reason why the president started talking about how important the drone port on the roof of his East Wing ballroom was going to be, even though what he really cares about is the ballroom, what he really cares about is the arch. He believes, or he has been told, or he thinks he has this one weird trick to prevent the courts from snaring up, from, from, you know, monkeying with his plans to unilaterally build all this stuff without any congressional approval. He thinks that the courts will give him a lot

more deference if he claims that there is a national security rationale for this, and it's not just beautification. It's not just a memorial. He thinks that they're going to steer much clearer of, you know, the executives, authorities in terms of shoring up America's national security. And again, he has done that now both places, even though it is obviously nakedly pretextual. There is zero reason why national security or military security or even just like any sane purpose would be served by putting a bunch of snipers up on a roof to you know overwatch on everybody's commute yeah like it's it's really really really crazy but that's that is the thought process here such as it is you do wonder i kind of as an academic exercise yeah if it wasn't representative of

you're kind of the fall of our republic and kind of this idiocracy catastocracy i i've kind of curious how it would play out in the courts. Because, like, sure, it's pretextual in both cases. You can imagine a legitimate argument for why, you know, the White House would need additional security. I mean, we're a quarter century after 9-11, but there wasn't a potential attack there at the White House. I mean, it's the same category.

But, like, there's a difference in how preposterous the argument needs to be between the ballroom, also being a military installation. and having to put like bullets inside of the arch. And it's like there's a million places in D.C. where you can have sniper storage. There's obviously no need for this. And you do wonder how that would go through. The other thing, this is an incredibly congested airspace for traffic,

you know, passenger planes coming into and leaving DCA, which is also just snuggled right up there on the Virginia side of the river. There was very famously, infamously, that crash that happened, you know, just a year ago. where it was a military helicopter that collided with a passenger jet. The idea that we are now going to treat that exact corridor as a launching point for drones is crazy. I mean, it's just not going to happen. It's never going to happen. There's no point for it to happen there.

But again, the president wants the arch there. And so the post hoc military explanation needs to come into. When I was at GW, my apartment was right there senior year. It was great. We could sit on the back in a balcony, occasionally with a marijuana cigarette, and you'd watch the planes come in. And it was just constant, like a constant, you know, plane traffic coming in right there.

So I don't think it's going to happen. JVL's hot take is he wants Trump to tear down the Kennedy Center. I'm not there, but there is something about, it would be nice for, you know, Trump to do some structural damage to the Kennedy Center so that, you know, we can just move forward with tearing down the triumphal arch without any concern. Because I do think that they're going to build it, don't you?

They do seem to be trying very hard to move toward building it. They don't seem to think that their case is bulletproof. Their legal case, really, Trump has continued to say, we're going to do the groundbreaking. It's right around the corner. It's happening. And then when they file documents in the court, they're like, don't worry, Judge, this is just, you know, some, some like pre, pre, pre-construction survey work that we're doing. It is not at all clear that he has nearly as much authority to do this as he did to do the East Wing.

So I do still think that there's a chance that this really does get bottled up in the courts. That said, if they do put it up, it will be fun to tear it down. And they should do that absolutely immediately no matter what happens to the Kennedy Center, which I do hope survives. It's easy for JVL to say. He's off in New York now. I want to take my kids to the Kennedy Center. They should keep that one up in my view. That's a good point.

This might be a job for like to know Kings people and our listeners. You know, it's kind of like the old days. Remember when the hippies used to kind of like create circles and stand around trees. So like the businesses couldn't tear down the trees. Maybe we're just going to need that, like a permanent running human chain, which will also be really great for traffic there on a circle. So good luck with that. It's just an idea.

I'm just spitballing. We'll keep working on it. And now a message from our sponsor, the Reading Room. As of this week, Todd Blanche has been Trump's Attorney General for over a month in the full Epstein files. Well, they're still not public. You know that. So instead of waiting on the government to stop its cover up,

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you can learn more and chip in to fund the tour at Trump-Ebstein readingroom.com slash bulwark or check out our Morningshots newsletter. The other big news of the weekend, Donald Trump decided to ban three outlets from the White House press corps, Politico, CNN, and MS now. According to a Wall Street Journal report, the brains behind this was none other than Natalie Harp, the human printer, mash note writer. The general report says Trump's frustrations with the press reached a fever pitch on Friday when one of his closest age, Natalie Harp showed him clips of anchors on MS now criticizing his administration,

according to people familiar with the matter. Hours later, Trump banned the network and two other news organizations from the White House, reporters that go to the White House press briefings, reporters that are part of the pool that covers Trump when he has events. They had their key cards, you know, revoked basically blocks that could not get into the facility. This morning, the other TV networks in solidarity with CNN and MS. now have said that they won't be providing video footage for Trump's pool events. So that kind of brings us to a head somewhat, though. Maybe he'll just make OAN and Newsmax, the permanent TV video, you know, poolers. We'll see how that goes. What do you make about this? Yeah, that is essentially

the move that Pete Hegseth went with when he pulled a similar stunt at the Pentagon last year. He basically said, we're just getting rid of all normal press. It's just going to be, you know, the podcasters and the right-wing sites from now on in the press pool. I do not think that Donald Trump will consider that a durable solution that he likes. I think that in fact, if this embargo proceeds, and there's reason to think that it will, you know, that the TV pool in particular refuses to carry his events for as long as he keeps this up. I think he could very well blink. I do not think that Trump wants to be the kind of guy you can only find on One American News and, you know, Breitbart.com. I think that he likes the adulation he gets from those places, but he wants to be McDonald's.

You know, he wants to be Coca-Cola. He wants to be everywhere. He gets very upset when the news networks do not cover his rallies, his speeches, these sorts of things, like in prime time, just broadcast out there on his shows. He's a TV media guy. He is a, he's a mass media guy. He sees it as important. Who knows exactly the way this will shake out? Because, you know, he is so far off of his ordinary moves in so many different ways here. He's taking. taking more erratic steps than he's taken before across a whole bunch of different things. So maybe now is different. Maybe he does dig in his heels and just in a total fit of peak says, fuck you, everybody. You know, I'm just going to ban more people. I'm going to keep throwing out more and more and more outlets. But I really do think that he is likely to be rattled by the different organizations of the White House Correspondents Association sort of linking arms around these people,

but he has unconstitutionally thrown out of the pool. And we may see a resolution on account of that. Yeah, he's definitely rattled. I mean, it's just like MS now was mean to me. And so now I'm going to start banning people. And like that is not like Trump had a lot of hubris in the first year. You know, there was a lot of football spiking, a lot of confidence. Like this is not the action of somebody that's confident. Like confident Trump wants would then call MS now into the White House and berate them and say, you know, call the reporter a piggy or whatever.

You know what I mean? Like not to say that's better. But I just think that like analyzing Trump, like this is a move of somebody that is frustrated with the state of play. And just totally flailing, right? I mean, like, Donald, MS now viewers are not the people you need to worry about in the upcoming midterms. They are lost to you. They have not been Trump voters ever since, you know, at any point, since you came down the escalator, MSNBC, now MSN now viewers were not Trump people.

You have a lot more to worry about when it comes to Fox News viewers and Joe Rogan experience listeners and, you know, people who turn on their local, you know, Sinclair affiliate. Like, these are, these are the people in the middle who are just tuning out from the Trump show in droves. And I think that you should not accelerate their, you know, trip away from you by cutting off your last access to them. But what do I know? I like when you call him Donald.

It's very dismissive. I like when you, you like to address them. I don't know. Yeah, that felt kind of weird. I don't usually do that kind of thing. Donald, you're rattle. Like a George Conway move. Yeah.

I don't know. The walls are closing in on you, Donald. Donald, you're rattled right now. Donald, you're showing no confidence. It's true. Here's the depressing part of this for me, though. Some of these things are unfixable. We talk about this sometimes from time to time.

Like, you know, that having him go back in the second time, you know, created a change in the way that business is done that I think is going to be hard to unravel across a bunch of different verticals. But in this case, I just think we permanently, moved to more partisan press being around the president in both parties. I mean, I saw Medea San posting over the weekend about how the next Democrats should kick Fox out of the pool. It's interesting that head of the White House Correspondent Association right now, Jackie Eindrick, is a Fox reporter. So that's kind of an interesting pickle that she's in because she knows that,

depending on who the Democratic president is, there would be pressure to come for Fox in a future term in their access. And they've been leading the charge on this, by the way. I mean, it's the Fox Fox News is currently, you know, helming the TV pool, and they are the ones who led the decision to say, we're not going to cover Trump's events while CNN and MS Now and Politico have been kicked out. So it's interesting from that point of view as well. Yeah, for sure.

So maybe I'm wrong about this, but I don't know. I just worry that, like, you know, we've already seen this at the Pentagon. People get used to it. Like, we have these crazy pools now with Trump where people ask, like, dear leader-style questions. You know, it's just like we've moved to something that is more. like what you see in soft authoritarian and hard authoritarian countries and the way the press

covers the president. It's been kind of mixed, but like there's been this gradual move to having more propaganda press around. And I don't know like who is going to be the person that tries to pull it back, especially if you think that the other side will just go, will just go back to the Trump precedent as soon as possible. I can already imagine the, you know, the stupid circular arguments in the future when some, when, you know, whatever, President J.B. Pritzker says, I'm not going to have Breitbart in the White House. It's like, well, what, how is that different than Trump kicking out MS now, you know? And so I don't know how you unravel that. Am I too pessimistic about that, do you think? On this specific side of things, on the cutting people's access outside,

I think we are unlikely to see other people follow the same strategy as Trump, at least in the, in the near-term. I mean, this is already kind of blowing up in his face a little bit in the same way that it would sort of blow up for anybody's, for anybody, because it lets all these other networks, you know, sort of link arms and solidarity and, and refuse to give the president what he wants. I think what we are likely to see a lot more of is the stuff we've been seeing all along, where you just, you add more and more just sort of like silly, grotesquely partisan elements to the pool, to the, to the press rotation, all these sorts of things. You prioritize them in briefings. you let them, you know, you give them priority access because they're going to give you the best

gloss and because the sort of big independent hitters just don't have the power that they used to to punish you for that and make you look silly for that. And I think that is likely to be a bipartisan problem, you know, for as long as the current sort of media structures and incentives persist. But I do think, I mean, depending how this one shakes out, I think there's a chance that Trump ends up feeling stung by this and that future presidents see this particular thing, they're making martyrs of some of these institutions instead of just letting them sort of slip into further irrelevance and inside the pool,

I think that might be a decision that they realized was foolish for the president to go down now. I don't know. You just kind of see this from the top down now, like just a lack of, there's kind of no incentive for politicians to deal with just regular mainstream media or adversarial media anymore.

And, you know, influencers mixed in with the press pool. And a lot of this is kind of navel-gazing stuff. And sometimes, like, I cringe a little bit when the, when media members are like, it's not like the old days with R.W. Apple from the New York Times going by and the boys on the bus. And so there is some like eye rolling part of this. But I just, I don't know. I mean, a lot of the attention on both sides has now moved to much more partisan media. And it's kind of like, okay, well, why should, you know, it's about the asymmetry that we talk about. Like the Democrats start to be like, why should we put ourselves in situations where we're dealing with challenging media when these guys just have like North Korean scribes covering them constantly?

And I think it's a problem that's tough to untangle. All right, guess who our next sponsor is? I'll give you a hint. Meow. They want me to meow. They literally, they're asking me on the script to meow. Meow, meow. We can use that on a blipper reel or something at the end of the year.

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Absolutely. Your newsletter this morning is on artificial intelligence. Trump's AI hubris. And you talk about all the ways where you think that Trump's position on AI is going to hurt him politically, and he doesn't see it coming. I want you just give us the big picture pitch, and then we'll kind of go through the various elements of it. So Donald Trump has carried himself as a pro-AI president, basically since his second inauguration, he's much closer to tech, oligarchs of various stripes than he was in his first term. He's laid out this sort of regulatory framework where he does not want states to be hemming in or fencing in AI in various different ways. He certainly doesn't want the federal government doing that.

This has been a very secondary or even tertiary political issue for a lot of his term so far. A lot of it has been, you know, this sort of secondary issue of data centers and whether they should be constructed and whether they have these environmental impacts. And Trump has been very pro-data center construction. But just in the last couple of weeks, as we have sort of turned as a nation, or at least as a commentariat, into this conversation that a lot of these AI people have been having all along about, like, wait a minute, what if the robots, what if it's not a bubble? What if, in fact, they're too good? What if they're too smart?

What if they're going to start getting smarter too fast and start being able to do too many things too well and get hard to control? There has been a lot of new energy around that conversation, especially after, you know, at least one high-profile, you know, exodus from Anthropic, a safety researcher who quit and sounded the alarm. We've talked about all of that. Bernie Sanders, a lot of these guys have been using the opportunity to flog their own packages to say, slow down AI development, you know, let's put a ban, a permanent ban on super intelligent AI. We do not want these things to ever get smarter than us, you know, no matter how possible that is, we want to just say, let's not go there.

Trump has taken a completely different tack on all of this. And I have even been surprised. I mean, when he posted last month, you know, you should let people build data centers in all your communities. And he said, let data rain. I thought that was kind of a funny way to put it. But it's actually kind of turning out to be the thesis statement of his entire AI buildout. He says he had a post over the weekend where he seems to think that, you know, the problem for AI is just bad branding. He doesn't like the term artificial intelligence. He thinks we should we should call it superior intelligence or perhaps supreme. Let's pause on that for a second. I think it's pretty interesting. because, and it shows you where he's at right now. It's like he's not reflecting at all on whether, you know, going full speed ahead on AI is bad politics for him. He's bought in on that, as you say. So as Trump, as is Trump's want, he thinks, well, maybe this is just a branding issue,

you know, maybe I just need to put it, get a new hat, you know, get some new words that people can resonate this. So he posts first and he starts with a poll offering three options for renaming for his followers on truth social. He offers Supreme Intelligence, Superior Intelligence, and Extreme Intelligence. He did a follow-up bleat. See what you want about the guy? He knows how to do content engagement strategies.

The follow-up beat read this. Supreme Intelligence, probably because of its relationship to the Supreme Court, is losing badly to both superior and extreme intelligence. Therefore, we are going to take Supreme Intelligence out, deleting it as a qualifier, and let you vote for the final two. Superior intelligence or extreme intelligence. A fresh vote begins now. Isn't that just such a beautiful little window into this singular mind

that we all have to pay so much attention to now? He brings up the possibility, what if we build this machine? And it's called supreme intelligence. And we let it run everything from now on. But don't worry, because I will be president and I will keep it under control. So that's the future that I'm promising you. And we'll decide how to name it using kind of like an American Idol style voting system. It's fully reality show.

When people are like, actually, that sounds terrible. I don't like that at all. That sounds like it would suck a lot to live under, you know, Donald Trump's joint rulership with supreme intelligence. The place his mind jumps to, just by complete sort of like broken brain word association is, they must have not like that one so much because it makes them think of the Supreme Court, which has been so mean to me this year. You know, I mean, it's like, he's a maniac. He's a lunatic. But he actually does have a lot of control over all of these different policy things. And he's not farming it out to the people whose brains work, whatever, there are other deficiencies to have to have, like, you know, come up and flourished and thrived in Trump land. He is just word associating his way to policy about these extremely consequential things. And he is all for, you know, our new robot overlords. He thinks that's going to be great. superior intelligence, an extreme and extreme.

These do feel like words, like something they would come up with in a kind of a low-rent, futuristic dystopia sci-fi movie, maybe even, you know, kind of like a spoof movie. It's like they're not even serious, like a spaceballs movie about dystopia. They'd come up with this. But Trump is like, yeah, people love that. Extreme. And if we just change it from AI to E.I. then all of the other problems where people are concerned about, you know, the probability of doom or losing their jobs,

the fact that their kids won't be able to read or they won't be able to know the difference between truth and fiction. Like all of those concerns will wash away once it's just called extreme intelligence. It's got electrolytes. You pointed out a poll that I hadn't seen. The gap when it comes to like what people's priorities are on AI development versus whether they want a priority. safety or rapid innovation was 76 to 12 that wanted to prioritize safety. The pollsters, I think, are still just trying to figure out how to phrase these questions to get people's real opinions because it is confusing.

A lot of people don't really understand it, you know, and people have mixed views about various things. And so you see some, like, there was that one poll like last week or something where it was like, who do you trust more the Republicans or the Democrats? Everybody's like, shrug, you know? But I think so this gets added it much more clearly, which is like, Like, do you want politicians to prioritize safety or development and just a total blowout on the safety side of things? And Trump is on the 12% side.

Yeah, and it's a really well-tuned question because it actually does get at the current political split on this. Like this issue is so much in its infancy. Obviously, there's going to be a lot of, you know, further sorting and further, you know, different politicians of different parties, staking out different territories. staking out different territory here. But right now, the two main political polls for this issue are Bernie Sanders on the one side saying stop development, give us a moratorium on further improvements of these models for a while, and also a hard cap of we can never let them be smarter than us. Now, you can quibble with a bunch of different things about that proposal. I would quibble with a bunch of different things about that proposal, but that's one poll here. The other

poll is Donald Trump who says, let it rip, it's going to be great, we have to beat China, and you don't have to worry about any of this stuff because I'm in charge and no super intelligent AI would dare cross me while I'm president. I mean, that's basically the case that he is making. And if those are the two political polls, the public is dramatically in favor of the Bernie side rather than the Trump side because they say safety is more important in this moment than innovation is. And the whole Trump argument is based on we have to innovate absolutely as fast as humanly possible because otherwise China will leave us in the dust. I loved your sentence describing Trump's economic views.

It's contrary. And like, depending on the topic, you know, sometimes I'm railing against Trump for, like, him acting like a communist or socialist in the way that he handles the economy. Then there are other times with like total laissez-faire capitalism. And you sum it up this way. Trump's view is let business leaders do whatever they want so long as they're willing to bend the need personally to me. And like, that's basically it. And these guys have bent the need personally to him, unlike whatever, Disney or CBS. when they didn't want to change the way they edited a television program.

And so these guys get to do whatever they want. When it comes to AI specifically, the weird wrinkle here is that Trump, he is very close to the tech industry, but he is not close to these actual leading AI labs. He does not trust the guys who run OpenAI. He does not trust the guys who run Anthropic. He thinks they're a bunch of liberal, wacko eggheads who maybe have this psychosexual fetish thing for their own AI chatbots. He does not like Dario or Sam Altman at all.

The people that he talks to are the people who are the big investors in the AI buildout. It's the David Sachs of the world. And Jensen, you know, the people that are building the plants because that's another thing that he cares about to the chip makers, you know, the manufacturers, right. And so these are all the people who are heavily incentivized to like whatever, even though the labs themselves are now kind of like sounding the alarm, like these chatbots are getting kind of freaking out of control and scary. and we're having second thoughts about how fast we're developing them. It's all the people who are invested in the build-out more than the chatbods themselves

where they're like, wait a minute, we can't stop now. We can't slow things down now. We've got a trillion dollars in CAPEX tied up and keeping the pedal push all the way down to the floor. And those are the people who are in trumpsier on all of this stuff, more than either the people, the populist types,

who are like, we don't like this, or even the people who are in the biggest position to know who are actually developing these advanced AIs in the labs. the opportunity for Democrats you get into this year. I saw a story over the weekend where there were some Democratic consultants, basically advising Democratic candidates, like not to lean in on this. The AI guys have so much money. They'll dump a bunch of money into your race.

It's just not worth it. Like keep your head down, focus on kitchen table issues. To me, that's like classic terrible, cautious consultant advice. I would say that. But you keep mentioning Bernie, on data centers, we've seen some Democrats lean in. I think I was talking to somebody in Ohio who was like all of Sherrod Brown's ads basically are about the data center build out and how we need to slow it down. So you've seen some of that. Democrats have been pretty cautious overall on, you know, kind of wanting to take a AI safety, like an aggressive AI safety position into the campaign.

And it seems like you think that's a mistake. Yeah. And I don't want to give people the wrong idea. I mean, it's a target-rich environment, right? I mean, this guy has a lot of weaknesses. He is, you know, taking on water at every level, basically. And I do think that, that, you know, there's an argument to be made that some of this stuff is so sort of sci-fi inflected, that when it comes to the midterms in particular, you know, Democrats are better off with, you know,

focusing on some of the stuff that's hitting people more directly, harder, closer to home. I do think, though, that as we're looking ahead at 2028, this issue is going to be more and more and more and more salient. and whether Democrats are really able to slam the door on Republicans over some of this stuff, while also, by the way, hopefully rolling out a policy package that lets us keep some of the good things about AI, right? I mean, it's not necessarily the case that just slamming the door on this industry is a good thing for the country, for the world. I mean, there are a lot of unknown unknowns here. And I think that, but I do think that the position that Trump is staking out is so extreme. It's so far out over his skis.

It's so completely disconnected from where any real people actually are on. this, that he has given Democrats an enormous opportunity to carve out more and more space going forward because the super intelligence stuff, that's only going to get more salient. It's only the possible future risk of this that has people so freaked out right now. There's a very plausible pathway to that becoming a realistic, like, present tense problem for politicians to have to deal with before, you know, we're even nominating people in the primaries for 2028. So it's only going to get more fraud. If you've been listening to the show for a while,

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I don't think he's eligible anymore. that you might have heard of him. Barack H. Obama. Let's listen to him. The models are going to get smarter and smarter and better and better at a much faster pace, at an exponential pace. What are the risks of that? There's the big science fiction risk of, wow, these models get smarter than us, and they decide humans are fine, but not necessary.

they start setting their own goals, and the killer robots kill us, or we bow down to them. I do not want to exaggerate that particular risk, but I will say there is a non-zero risk of, non-zero chance of that happening. But that's not actually the risk that I'm most concerned about, although it's the risk that gets most attention. and the reason that's a risk is not because the computer models are conscious necessarily. It doesn't mean that they are necessarily feel malice towards humans. It's just that if they start setting their own agendas, you may get a misalignment between what they want to do and what we want them to do, and that gap can be dangerous.

That's problem number one. The more serious problem is these models are getting powerful enough that if they get in the hands of bad humans, they can do bad things. They can be weaponized in certain ways. They can do a lot of mischief. I guess, like, he has the benefit, right, of not being in the middle of a campaign.

Sometimes when it's in a campaign, that doesn't really serve you to kind of like talk about the potential worst case scenarios and kind of like hash out your thinking in real time. On the other hand, I think that like there are a lot of people who care about this stuff right now. They're looking for somebody that, you know, is offering, you know, some kind of like comfort and security about like what would be a smart way to move forward. Might be a model for some 20-28ers.

I don't know. What do you think about Obama? Yeah, yeah. let's, you know, it's not a super high bar to clear to read the articles, to read six or seven articles about where we're at. I mean, the way you and I have been, have been, you know, belatedly getting up to speed on a lot of the AI safety stuff that people have been talking about for a while. But, you know, you would much rather have that. You'd much rather have a guy who's able to converse on it at a very basic level than what we have now. I mean, it's just crazy.

It's crazy that the level of policy work that is happening on the, this issue at this moment where we're not at superintelligence, but we are at this moment where maybe if we take three or four more steps forward, we'll be stepping onto a treadmill towards superintelligence, right, with these recursively self-improving models and things like that. And the visible policy action that is coming out of the White House is a truth social poll on whether or not we ought to rename the concept to make people more comfortable with it. I mean, like, that's insane. That's insane. That's insane. That's insane. That's insane. And I think it would be better if it weren't that way.

I want to talk about the Stephen Witt episode from last week because I got a bunch of pushback from it. I did my best to read all of the emails that people sent, particularly people because I asked for them who are like smart on this stuff and in either the AI industry or computer science or cybersecurity. And like there were two critiques basically that were being offered. Like one was on the more optimistic perspective that like we were giving too much credence to the P-Dome, probability of doom, arguments. and like there are all this potential good stuff that's happening. I just kind of want to dispense with that side of it really quickly because I actually think Stephen Witt did talk about that some. And I had, it's been a while now, but I'd read Hoffman on where he talked about that.

I do think that there are some positive. I mean, obviously, particularly in health and a bunch of areas, like there's huge potential positive opportunity here. So the question is just more about how to balance that with the risks. But the pushback that I really wanted to focus on was the much more common pushback, which was that we're overhyping this. AI's a bubble. These guys are all lying for profit.

The quote unquote effective altruists or the rationalists, whatever you call them that are the most concerned about this are kind of like a cult of their own. And it's a little bit of like a super intelligent Q&I. That's like kind of a summary of the pushback I got. And a lot of those who are asking me, like we have one of those people on, and I'm working on trying to have somebody smart on who's on the other side of this.

But like there was not a single person that emailed me or I can't find a single person even online pushing back on this that is arguing that this is a bubble and these guys are lying for profit. You know, AOC put out something about this this weekend. It's like, these guys want to convince you, you know, that they have a super robot that's going to kill everybody because that's how they increase their, you know, whatever, market share. And that's how they protect, you know, put a mode around themselves

and protect their profits. And like, maybe there's some motivation there among Sam Altman. I don't know. But like that doesn't deal with the fact that they're like a lot of extremely smart people who are at the frontier, to use a word, of this type of research, who are not in the effective altruist cults who have like changed their mind recently based on what happened with hugging face, etc. And I brought this guy up in several podcasts now, but I just want to say it one more time. He was Dan Selzum. He was a top researcher at OpenAI working on all this stuff. He was one of the people that had working on the alignment problem, which is like this question of making.

sure that the, you know, AI is aligned with what humans want. And he wrote a very long Twitter thread. I'll put it in the show notes again. It ends with this. I want the glorious Renaissance future as much as anyone. I've worked for it. Torturously, my whole career. It breaks my heart to see the potential in sight and forego it. But the argument that if we get there by growing models rather than engineering them, we'll lose everything in the end. Seems very strong to me. I'm wrestling with it and it's staggering implications. Like, I've not dealt with, I've not heard from anybody who has dealt seriously with like this, this person's critique. who was somebody that, like, wanted AI, thought that AI was going to lead to a great future for humanity

and, like, is not, you know, doing some sort of, you know, whatever financial spin for the company, like, is an engineer who, like, thought this was going to be great and has looked at what has happened late in the last few months and has said, guys, I'm freaked out now. We need to change course. and I haven't heard from anybody who has like compellingly like dealt with that person and there are others like him but I'm just going to use Dan

like that person's concern yeah yeah no I absolutely think it's fair and true that we should all keep in the back of our minds that one possible motivator for motivation for for some of these executives to speak in this way could be a profit motive like of course

of course everybody's self-interested these people want to make a lot of money They have more money than Kreis already, and maybe there are diminishing returns there. But of course, that's plausible and a possible thing. But I just, when I see people make this argument, I have not really seen anybody account for the number of people to whom it could not apply who are also raising these same concerns. You know, people who are quitting these companies. I mean, that was the big significance of the Jacob Coxon quitting Anthropic that kind of kicked

off this whole conversation, is that he was a guy who left Open AI. over some of these concerns, who went to Anthropic, because Anthropic was supposed to be and builds itself as and is in some significant ways, the more AI safety focused of these companies, he's like, I'm going to go help them build their thing. He gets there, he's like, whoa, they don't know what's going on either. These concerns have not gone away at all. He quits to, you know, blow the whistle on this stuff. He loses his economic exposure to Anthropic. His shares do not vest, what else could you ask a person to do to specifically push against that exact argument than what this guy did? And still people make the argument. And that's to say nothing of

people who have never had any exposure to any of these companies who are not involved in Anthropic or OpenAI or XII at all, who are just outside researchers who are crunching the numbers on this stuff and trying to figure out the implications for the future of humanity, same as everybody else. Like I just cannot get my head around seeing that argument, treating it as dispositive to the whole question, and like letting it just sort of reassure me so totally that I don't have to pay attention to this issue anymore. And I do think that is kind of the main draw for it. I don't mean to say that people are just sort of diluting themselves to give themselves a false sense of security. But look, again, I don't want to impugnobes. It's like some people don't want to update their priors.

Like I've changed my view on this literally two weeks ago. Right? Like I started paying more attention to the concerns being offered by people that I felt seemed credible for a variety of reasons. So, and I think that some people, it's like there were reasons, I think to have a counterview. And who knows, by the way? Like, dance also might be wrong. Like, these people might be wrong. Yeah.

But I just think that it's important to deal with it seriously. So people have pushed back on that in particular fired away. I'll listen to it. And can I just say one other thing, which is that, like, I totally recognize, too, that, like, we're layman here. Like, we are generalists. we are coming in to this conversation that is ongoing for a long time. Like, I've had a lot of people in the Morning Shots comments who are much closer to this industry than I am who disagree with the things I've written in various ways.

I have very much appreciated, like, getting their pushback on various things. It's helpful. And like I don't want to, I feel like I was kind of inching toward impugning motives a minute there in a way that I should not be, because I have not earned that at all. So like, just to say that part of it as well. Okay. Final topic that was in the discourse over the weekend. Nicole Hannah Jones is the writer for the New York Times.

You excited about this? Oh, yeah. She wrote a column about 10 years ago about how she was going to put her daughter as a very prominent column in the New York Times. She's got a lot of attention about how she was going to put her daughter in the neighborhood school rather than giving her a chance to go to a better school. You know, because she thought that was important, you know, for commitment to the community. She talks about her and her husband are black, their daughter's black, about how, like, people had made sacrifice. their parents and generations before have made sacrifices in order to help desegregate schools and give more opportunities. And like they should do the same and like they should use their power and influence and privilege to like make the neighborhood school better and be advocates in with the principal and on this PTA for the school.

So that was a decision that she'd made 10 years ago. She wrote a column this weekend saying that her daughter is now, I believe, in eighth grade and is pissed at her and basically said, mom, I can't believe you did this. Like this school has been terrible. And I just want to say the beginning, I actually wanted to engage with you on like the substance what was happening in the school rather than Nicole Anna Jones. Like she's really hard on herself. And so kind of props for anybody that writes something that's really hard on themselves. And I want to talk about this in particular because like, well, I myself am obviously white, breaking news, white guy. But like, I thought about this with Toulouse and like what school to put her into.

And we're living in Oakland. We put her into the neighborhood preschool because we thought it would be good to kind of like be part of the community and for it. meet other kids that look like her. And, you know, we met the preschool teacher. She seemed like way overqualified, frankly. She's a really awesome woman. And she was in a class. And like, her entire class was black girls.

And we're like, this is so cool. We're in the neighborhood school. And like, this is great rather than putting her in the private school with the rich tachshbag's kids, right? And preschool ends. And the teacher calls us in. And she's like, hey, I want to meet with you guys. And we're like, great.

We came in. We sat down with her in the classroom. And I'm like sitting in a little kid's chair. So you always feel like you're a little that brings you back to like being a kid and having a teacher lecture you when you're in trouble. And the teacher looks at me and she's like, you have to take her out of the school next year. Just like totally blunt. Like appreciate what you're trying to do. I see what you're trying to do.

But like she's like, this isn't going to serve her for her to be in here. And like that was like a real rude wake up call for me. And I appreciate that she did that. And obviously, you know, we ended up moving to New Orleans. So it ended up becoming not material about Oakland anymore. But like, I understand that point. So on that part of it, I'm kind of sympathetic to her. The part that I'm not is where you get into where she starts talking about what's happening at the schools.

I just want to read a couple of parts. She talks about she's an elementary school. She decided just to visit during the lunch period. Her class and other classes were sitting at their tables in the cafeteria with no lunch and no adult supervision. Children were running wild, chasing, hitting and pushing each other, all the teachers' aides and cafeteria workers stood by looking bored. was during elementary school. Also during elementary school,

a few days before school let out for winter break, I got a folder in her backpack with the math assignments I had been requesting since our conference. I sat at my dining table, scanned one page, then another and another. None of them were graded. I started checking her work

and discovered most of her answers were wrong. She believed herself to be good at math. It was her favorite subject. But now I understood that she thought she was correctly solving all her problems because her teacher wasn't checking the work. This is an elementary school. She goes on,

it happens again in middle school with algebra, where she thought her daughter thought she really knew algebra and was good at it, but it turned out she knew nothing and then she ends up going to a better school. Actually, I'm going to correct myself. Now she's in high school, I think. But she ends up going to a different school for high school and goes into algebra class. And all of a sudden she thinks she's good at the subject and she's not. She hasn't learned anything.

And I just like, you look at these stories and it's like I'm kind of gobsmacked that I do feel like both parties at the national level. It's different in some states and cities. But like at the national level have just like kind of abandoned this and like decided that like no child left behind was the failure and standards are failure and teaching to the test and blah, blah, blah. And so now it's like not even talking about this anymore. This is a huge subject of conversation in the 90s and 2000s. And it's like now nobody even talks about this. And it's like fucking crazy that like schools like this exist at all.

And to me like reading the article, I was like more riled up by that than I was by like the personal kind of issues of the author. Yeah. Yeah. And it's hard when an article like this blows up like on Twitter and that's how you kind of. experience it as like a Twitter fight first and foremost because everybody has, you know, lots of like pre-existing baggage baked in about Nicole Hannah-Jones. And I don't, I do not care about that stuff at all. I thought that it was an extremely bracing read about the total lose-lose situation that a parent

in this position is placed into, right? where the only option that you're given for your own kid is bail out on the public school system that's there because the public school system that's there is so completely dysfunctional and broken. Just abandon that with all of the sort of corollary stuff that she struggles with with that because she's like, I don't want to abandon all of those kids to that just because I have the ability to kind of like pluck my kid out of there and put her in a more sheltered, privileged environment. You can totally understand where she's coming from with that. She's like, I think I have the ability not just to sort of like cocoon my kid off,

but actually make a difference in this school because the school has been failed by all of the other people who are supposed to be making it like a workable place to get an education. And the whole article is so compelling because it's her struggling so hard against that and actually trying very hard to make that happen and make that work and failing. And then grappling with, okay, I was not able to exert this kind of like, positive influence on these institutions like I thought I would be able to. And maybe all that I did was failed my own kid because I was not only unwilling to sort of cocoon her off from this dysfunction early and just put her in a different school where she would thrive,

but also I didn't really make things better for anybody else either. And so like I really do encourage people to go and read the thing. You're absolutely right about the sort of main problem on a political level being, you know, Republicans who have given up on this system altogether and just want to, you know, give people more and more pathways to opt out of public schools and Democrats who, you know, have, have, you know, reverse polarized into saying, you know, fuck you guys for wanting to opt out of the public schools. The public schools are great. The public schools are fine. The public schools are doing well. They just need more money. There's need more funding. I mean, like, it is such a

dysfunctional, horrible mess. And like, I, you almost struggle to really know what to say other than, like, what a shame. What a mess. What a tragedy. Yeah. I don't actually. I have more to stay. This is where my old, sometimes my old Jeb Bush muscles start firing because this school that she went to, the kid, there's $52,300 per student at this school. Like this school is getting funded in New York. Like New York has plenty of funding. This is not, she's not in rural Louisiana or whatever where the school is not getting enough funding. Louisiana schools are doing pretty well. Well, it's really Mississippi.

Louisiana, we're copying now. We're trying to catch back up. But the Mississippi Miracle, it's done better. D.C. is actually, D.C. schools are trying to do better. because they made changes. We talked to this with Nick Christoph a couple episodes ago. He's like, he's in Oregon. And he's like, the Mississippi schools are now doing better than Oregon schools.

And he's like, this is crazy. And it's like, what is it? It's accountability. It's like standards. It's making sure that the kids actually learn and not just moving them along. And so like you said about the reverse polarization, this stuff gets like all wrapped up and like these arguments from fucking 30 years ago about like, oh, teaching to the test and no child left behind and like, or whatever.

common core and all this stuff. And it's like, my recommendation to a 2028 Democrat is to pick up this issue and be like, we should pay teachers very well and we should have high fucking standards for the students. And like, we should be really serious about this and committed to it again. And like, I'm sorry if some teachers don't like that or if some schools don't like that or administrations don't like the standards that we're setting. But like, we are failing these kids. And certainly some schools need more funding. Like I'm not saying that that's, not nothing. But like the kids are, if you look at where school districts are doing better or worst, like a lot of it is just, are you committed to actually serving these kids and making

sure that that they learn what they need to learn? And like, to me, the most damning part of this story is like it's, like, makes you want to cry. Like this girl who like thinks she's good at math and isn't because they're not even grading the papers because like whatever. I don't either because Steve's was lazy or because they've decided that grading and testing is, you know, some, whatever, like is unfair. There's that doesn't include, it's not equitable. And it's just like, no, like kids have to fucking learn. And I don't know.

You look at this and it's pretty, pretty dispiriting. So there's my, there's my final. And sometimes people ask me, you know, if I've gone fully native. And every once in a while I like to bring back my, my kind of Jeb Bush education reform type. This doesn't mean, I'm not even fully on board with all that stuff. In New Orleans, we have full school choice, which I think is also a huge. It's a problem in itself because it's like, all it does then is really helpful. helps the poor kids that have very active parents because they are on the ball enough to like sign up at the right time.

And so anyway, I'm not, you know, like there's challenges to every system. But the standards part is, it's not negotiable. I don't think. All right. That's Andrew Eager. What else? Do you have any other final thoughts for us? No, man.

Here to that stuff. My oldest kid is four and it's terrifying. Yeah. No, man. The kids fucking deserve better. The kids deserve better. So we'll see how it is. appreciate your brother. We'll be back here with Bill Crystal next Monday.

For those of you that miss Bill Crystal, and we'll be back tomorrow with another edition of the show with a Mississippian who's going to get to rub my nose in the outcome for the football game this weekend, but we'll get to do some fun politics as well. We'll see you all there. The Bullwark Daily is brought to you thanks for the work of lead producer Katie Cooper, Associate producer Ansley Skipper, and with video editing by Dante DeChico and audio engineering and editing by Jason

Brown.