Bernie vs. the Robots

Welcome to Ponce of America, I'm John Lovett. Today on the show I had a great conversation with Senator Bernie Sanders on AI SuperPacks and his journey from a kid on a kaboots in Israel to a senator trying to prevent weapon sales to Netanyahu and trying to save humanity from robots at the same time. And then you'll hear my conversation with our friend and journalist Peter Hamby, founding partner of Puck News and host of the Powers That Be podcast on the Democratic Shakeup in Maine, the governor's race in California, some news on the DNC, and how the left ought to confront political violence. But first, here's my conversation with Bernie. Senator Sanders, welcome back to the show. Good to be with you, John. So I watched your panel last night on the existential risks of AI. You had researchers from North America and China. It was a bracing experience. There's a, just for people that may not have caught it, MIT's Max Tegmark says, we'll be like animals in a zoo. And then another researcher named David Kruger says, zoos, most of us won't be so lucky. What did you take away? How did you want to do this conversation? Thank you, John, for asking me about that. I am not a tech guy, but I'm sitting around and I read and I listen to people. And it is clear to me that AI and robotics are the most revolutionary technologies in the history of humanity. They are going to transform life for every man, woman, and child, certainly in our country and around the world. How the hell do we ignore that reality? Why is there not massive discussion about the impact of AI? For example, all right, who is pushing AI right now? Who's pushing AI and robotics? The richest guys in the world, Musk, Bezos, Ellison, Zuckerberg, what do you think they want? Do you think they're staying up nights worrying about your family? I doubt it. Number two, there are economists all over the place who estimate, no one knows exactly, tens and tens of millions of jobs are going to be lost. What happens to the people who lose the jobs? Think to automatically go out and get another job? That does not appear to be the case. We got kids hooked to AI bots for emotional support becoming increasingly isolated. Should we worry about that? Yeah, we should. Politically, I won't get into what it will mean to our democracy and politics in America. It's a big deal. But what last night was about is having very knowledgeable people talking about the real possibility that AI will escape human control, become independent, do its own thing, and the likelihood that that could lead to catastrophic implications, including extinction. So my job is not to fear manga, but it's to say, wait a second, you got Nobel Prize winners, Jeffrey Hinton saying this. Do you think we might want to take a deep breath and think about where we go from here? Yeah, there's this strange fatalism about it. And I think about when we've gone through other big technological changes. It wasn't assembly lines that put kids in factories. It was people that owned the factories that made that decision. It's not the technology itself that's being unleashed and hitting our kids and affecting our media. It's the people who own those tools that are distributing them and profiting off of them and how do we... There's this way in which the technology, it seems like magic and we kind of lose our senses. And one of the things that came out of your discussion last night is treat these... Treat what this company's product like you would a Toyota or a Toyota or a tortilla chip. So what kind of regulations would you like to see if we sort of got our heads out of our asses here? Well, Tecmar, Dr. Tecmar from MIT said, look, you go to a sandwich shop, right? You know what? It is regulated. The health department comes in to make sure the food you're eating is edible and the non-shop is clean. And yet the AI guys want to go forward with this revolutionary technology with no regulation. There is an enormous amount of work that has to be done. But John, the first thing that has to be done is that we have got to say, slow it down. Let us get our hands around it. The AI safety element about AI becoming independent of human control. You jigger, what do you do? Well, clearly you bring people from all over the world. Last night, as you know, we had scientists from China bring them together to sit down, to advise governments around the world about how we slow this down so we don't lose control of the technology. In terms of economics, if millions and millions of workers lose their jobs, what do we do? Well, you know what? Extending unemployment ain't going to be good enough. We're going to have to be thinking about a whole new social contract, et cetera, et cetera. All that I'm saying here, this is a big, big deal. Congress is way behind where it should be. We need some serious discussion. So you had Chinese voices as part of this conversation. Scott Best and the Treasury Secretary posted a criticism of you saying that the real threat is letting any nation other than the United States set the global standard. What's your response to that criticism? Right. Mr. Best at the billionaire and the Trump administration, billionaires working with Elon Musk, Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Ellison, and a host of other billionaires who dominate AI. They're not a threat. Hey, we should all trust them because they have the betterment of the American people at all. Well, forgive me. I don't accept that at all. So I think in China, they are smart enough. Look, this gets me thinking about the nuclear arms race. You know, you had a conservative Republican named Ronald Reagan sitting down with Gorbachev, then the premier of the Soviet Union talking about the reality that a nuclear war would not be good for the Soviet Union, not be good for the United States. They work together on a nuclear arms treaty. You know what? The world, human race losing control over AI ain't good for China, ain't good for America, ain't good for the world. Of course, we've got to work together. So as part of this, you put forward, you propose a moratorium on new data centers until we have these kinds of safeguards in place. Your colleague, Senator Mark Warner, who's a pretty, I think, a mild-mannered guy called it idiocy because he's worried about losing this race to China. And I don't think he is, you know, he's not Trump. He's not Zuckerberg. What do you say to that criticism for people who both agree there might need to, that there do need to be safeguards, but also as much as we worry about these billionaires having so much sway, it would be worse if control of this technology by China surpassed us? This is not a race with China. This is a question of scientists sitting down and figuring out how we can prevent this technology from escaping human control with calamitous impact. I cannot believe that any sane person would be against that. That's my view. So this is not, you know, we've got to compete with China all you want, but we have got to do everything that we can to prevent what some scientists think is a very dangerous situation. Yeah. I agree with that, but it's almost like these are two separate questions, right? If we were to slow down and China didn't slow down, it's not preventing this. The moratorium is not the end. All that I want from the moratorium is to give up. You know, maybe I'm crazy, John. Maybe I am. I know one or two people have told me about, including my wife, if scientists who are Nobel Prize winners, guys who've gotten the Turing Award, which is the major award given to people in computer science, if they say to you that humanity is in danger, do you think you might want to do something about it? Or am I missing something? You tell me. So, no, I, the percentages are also someone's, oh, there's only a 10% chance humanity is destroyed. I don't like those odds. Only a 10% chance. John, I know. I'm with you. This is the point. The point is that, well, again, either I'm nuts or a 10% chance. Yeah. That the whole world might be destroyed. Yeah, I think we might want to get to work to prevent that. And this is preventable, by the way. It's nothing to do with competing against China. It's coming together to prevent what might be a catastrophe. Right. It seems like that, like, you mentioned this in the past and last night, you know, President Trump and the leader of China, Xi, they're going to meet and AI may be part of what they're discussing. What do you hope would come out of that kind of conversation? I was glad to see that. The Wall Street Journal reported that that will be part of their agenda. And that's a very positive thing. And I hope that they sit down and say, look, your scientists in the United States, scientists in China agree. This is a danger. It works to nobody's advantage to allow this to happen. Okay. Now China, not the United States, bring together the scientific community, develop some protocols to prevent that. We don't want a technology that can escape human control. Can we bring that about? We can. But you're going to have to have people from China, the United States, other countries working on something which would eventually then, I suspect, and a little bit over my head here, you know, become something like an international treaty. Right. And then in between that, right, there's, so there's the kind of broader threat of this technology escaping our control. But in between there and now, there's the ways in which kids are getting sucked into this technology. There's the ways it's affecting our media. And it does seem as though the industry would benefit from a set of regulations that allow them to compete on non-evil aspects of the technology and continue to develop and grow and improve the technology in ways that are beneficial to people rather than these sort of toxic and parasitic implications. Let's get to another issue and to ask, you know, this is not because members of Congress are dumb or don't know what's going on. This has a lot to do with the power and the financial resources of AI and their superpacks. We're talking about many, many, many hundreds of millions of dollars coming into the midterm elections right now. So you're running for Congress, okay? And you're out of kid and you're worried about the impact of AI. You think you're going to stand up and say, well, you know, I think we need some sensible regulations here. And then the AI industry says, really? Well, I guess what? I got a $10 million check going into negative ads against you, which takes us, John, from the dangers of AI to a corrupt campaign finance system, which is undermining American democracy. So I talked to Senator Chris Murphy about this recently, and he's worried about this too, that Democrats won't draw an effective contrast with Republicans. So Trump and the Republicans, they forget sensible regulations. They even try to prevent state regulations. So they try to take us in the other direction. But what Murphy was worried about is because there's this sort of damocles of all this cash hanging over Democrats' heads that people will not take a strong stand. What do you say to Democrats who worried about that? Well, Chris told you was right. But it speaks to the need for us to be honest about where we are as a country. Look, all of us are concerned about Trump's pathological lying, his attempt to undermine democracy in so many ways. I think every Democrat, an independent caucuses with the Democrats agrees with that. But there is another threat to democracy, and that is the power of big money over the political process. That's why I circulated a letter with a number of my colleagues saying that while we work, we must work to overturn this disastrous Citizens United Supreme Court decision, which allows billionaires to spend as much money as they want to buy elections, at the very least Democrats within Democratic primaries, their presidential primaries, as well as Congressional and other primaries, got to get super PAC money out of those primaries. Yeah, no, you sent that letter this week. It actually follows a letter you sent about a year ago. This was to Senator Schumer, to Ken Martin ahead of the DNC. Basically, let's first wear super PACs inside of our own primaries. Ken Martin responded by saying he's in spirit behind it, but that his hands seem to be tied. What is the reluctance, do you think, of just fully embracing this kind of smiling? All right, John, let me throw it. What's happening? Tell me. This is not a very hard question to answer. What do you think the answer is? What do you think the establishment, Democratic establishment is doing right now as we speak? The hustling this money. Oh, they're right. That's right. Okay. You know, they're hustling money from AI industry. They're hustling money from APAC, the hustling money from crypto, and from other special interests. All right, they got that money and they use what they do with it. But this is really insidious. And I think progressives increasingly understand that that money, which comes by the way from Trumpers, Republicans, is going to be used against progressives and decent people who are running in primaries. This podcast is sponsored by Squarespace. Squarespace is the all-in-one website platform designed to elevate your online presence and drive your success. Squarespace provides all the tools you need to promote and get paid for your services in one platform. Whether you offer consultations, events, or other experiences, Squarespace can help you grow your business. Squarespace offers a complete library of professionally designed and award-winning website templates with options for every use and category. No matter where you start, the website is flexible to what you need with intuitive drag-and-drop editing, beautiful styling options, unrivaled visual design effects, on-brand AI content, and more ways to list what you offer no experience required. Every dream needs a domain. Squarespace domains make it easy to find the best name for your business at one fair, all-inclusive price, no hidden fees, or add-ons required. Every Squarespace domain comes with advanced privacy and security tools included to ensure your domain remains online and protected. Plus, Squarespace provides everything you need to bring more of your dream to life, whether that means building a website or adding a professional email service. Don't wait to claim your name, invest in your dream domain today. Head to squarespace.com for a free trial, and when you're ready to launch, go to squarespace.com slash crooked to save 10% off your first purchase of a website or domain. That's squarespace.com slash crooked. Pots of America is brought to you by Chime. Chime is changing the way people bank. They offer the most rewarding fee-free banking built for you, not the 1%. They're not like traditional old banks that charge you overdraft and monthly fees. They have thousands of fee-free ATMs because why pay to get your own money? Chime members can benefit from up to $1,150 in annual rewards, fee-free. Get 5% back on the Chime card in a category of your choice, like gas or groceries. You get savings that grow fast with a 3.75% APY. That's nine times higher than the national average. Plus, you get premium travel perks like airport lounge access and 24-7 travel concierge, which is included with your Chime card. They also have spot me, which lets you overdraft up to $200 fee-free. Chime is rated five stars by USA Today for customer service real humans 24-7. Chime is not just smarter banking. It's the most rewarding way to bank. Join the millions who are already banking fee-free today. Head to chime.com slash crooked. That's chime.com slash crooked. It only takes a few minutes to sign up. Chime is a fintech, not a bank banking services for my pay and Chime card provided by Chime's bank partners. Optional products and services may have fees or charges, stated annual percentage yield and cash back for Chime Prime only. No minimum balance required. Checking accounts ranking based on a JD Power survey published October 20, 2025. For more information on APY rates, my pay, spot me in travel perks, go to chime.com slash disclosures. I wanted to go back to just ... I'm glad we talked about the SuperPak money from AIP. I do want to talk about the economic implications because that's the other part of this existential threat. We talked about attacks on companies that get rid of jobs for automation or for robots, but to the point of the scale of this problem, if really 100 million jobs could potentially be at risk, to your point, we'd have to think about a much different social compact. Right now, if a company hires a worker, they pay payroll taxes. They are charged money for every worker on the books. We've actually shifted the burden of taxes towards income and towards labor and away from corporate income. If a company buys a machine to do that job, according to our tax code, you can not only pay no taxes on it, you get a depreciation, get a credit. The proposal you have is a mitigation, but the whole code is tilted against human beings. Look, I think we have not yet ... Our main thrust right now is to say, slow it down so we can get our hands around all of this. I just had a meeting today with my staff to start working on what a sensible solution would be. It ain't easy stuff because what we're dealing with is unprecedented problems. To your point, this, in my view, goes beyond saying, oh, we've got to extend unemployment benefits. Fine. Yeah, we need what's called a trade adjustment assistance. If you lose your job to AI, we'll retrain you. Fine. It goes a lot deeper than that because this technological revolution is so sweeping that what we need to be talking about is a new social contract. It's not saying, hey, you lose your job, you can get unemployment. Great. We need to go a lot deeper than that because you may never get another job. You're a 50-year-old truck driver today and you're replaced by a driverless vehicle. Where are you going to go? Get a job. It's not like you can walk down the street and get another job. That job may not be there. We need to think really in new ways as to how we address these crises. Yeah. I'm talking to you in California. We live in a signal example of this because we are in the fifth-fourth largest economy in the world driven primarily from half-dozen companies in Silicon Valley that are growing exponentially but don't hire. They're not hiring at a rate to match the scale of their growth. If we have a tax code in which we've lowered the corporate rate, we basically have said, our tax code says we would rather a company be gigantic and employ no one than be kind of profitable while employing hundreds of thousands of people. That is what our tax code currently prefers. Let me throw something else out to you here. And again, the truth is nobody knows exactly what is going to happen. Honest people have differences of opinion as to the nature of the job loss, how quickly it will occur, et cetera. But if, underlined if, tens of millions of people lose their jobs, they're not paying any taxes at all, are they? How are you going to sustain programs like Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, et cetera, et cetera? How are you going to sustain government? So these are profound questions that we've got to adjust. But bottom line is I think we're talking about a new social compact. How do we make sure this revolutionary technology improves human life economically, socially, psychologically, and of course prevents any kind of catastrophe? Switching gears. In April of last year, only 15 Democrats voted with your resolution to block weapons sales to Israel. Now, two weeks ago, 40 Democrats joined you. There's a profound shift happening. Obviously that is driven by the ways in which Israel has conducted its military campaign in Gaza, the way it has been expanding settlements, its incursion into Lebanon. What are you observing about this shift in democratic politics among your colleagues, and what does it tell you about where we're heading? What it tells me, and by the way, it is not just Democrats, it's Republicans as well. And I think you're going to see movement in the direction you described them on Republicans and the not too distant future. We have an economy in which 60% of people live in paycheck to paycheck. People are hurting, can't afford healthcare, housing, educating their kids, childcare, et cetera. Then they look up and they see that President Trump wants to provide billions of dollars of military aid to the extremist Netanyahu government in Israel. And they look and they say, really, well, what has this government done? We all know the Hamas is a terrorist organization that attacked Israel in a horrible way, killing 1,200 people. Israel had a right to respond. But they did not have a right to go to war against the entire Palestinian people. 2.2 million people in the area killed 72,000 of them, mostly women, children, and the elderly, injured something like 170,000. More than 10% of the population killed or wounded wiped out almost the entire infrastructure. And what people, including myself, I think have concluded, this is a genocidal attack. So people are looking, then they say, well, that's bad. Why are we giving money to a government that does that? And then we wake up a few months ago and Israel has gotten Netanyahu after 40 years of effort, Netanyahu who finally found a president who is willing to go to war against Iran, tax Iran in the middle of the night. Great. We're off in another war. Price of gas is now going up. We're killing schoolchildren in Iran. Israel now is in Lebanon, displacing over a million people, killing bombing civilian neighborhoods. As you indicated in the West Bank, like vigilantes now killing Palestinians, destroying farms, destroying homes. Who in their right mind wants to continue to fund a government that does that? And the polls tell us that. And Democrats look at the polls and they say, I go home. I hold the town meeting. Everybody says, why the hell are you funding Netanyahu's government? So they're beginning to catch on. As you indicated, war and war. Now we have 40 out of 47 members of the caucus who are saying no more. Yeah. I mean, this has been an issue in primaries across the country right now that are playing out today. Janet Mills suspended her campaign, which means that Graham Platner will be the nominee, somebody that's been outspoken about this. What? What is your reaction to what happened in Maine? Yeah, I do. And I got to tell you, John, you know, I've been all over the country and you have to trust me on this. But whenever I talk about what was going on in Gaza, just people would stand up and, you know, really express their feelings. This is a very emotional issue for people all over this country who do not want to be complicit in killing women and children and destroying all of Gaza. So I think, you know, what Platner is doing, he has run a brilliant campaign to my mind, not dissimilar. Maine is obviously a very rural state, but not radically dissimilar from what Mamdani did in New York City, which is clearly the largest city in America. What do they do? They both have taken, brought forth an agenda that is prepared to take on the oligarchs and the big money interest. Nobody, or very few people in America think that it's okay that the top 1% now owns more wealth than the bottom 93% or that Elon Musk himself owns more wealth than the bottom 53% of American households. So I think that makes sense. So Mamdani talked about it. That's what Platner is talking about. And they have an agenda that speaks to the needs of working people, health care for all, education for all, et cetera, et cetera. So I see that happening, not just in New York City in Maine. I see it happening in communities all over this country. Tomorrow, as a matter of fact, tomorrow night, I will be in Ohio. Then I'll be in Minnesota. Then I'll be in Detroit with Abdul El-Sayed in Detroit, Peggy Flanagan in Minnesota, Mr. Point Dexter, Brian Point Dexter in Ohio. People now are raising these issues. Working class people are sick and tired of the greed of the big money interest they want a government that represents all of us, not just the few. So you spent time in Israel as a young man on a conbutz. You've talked about being part of the Jewish tradition of social justice. A few years ago, you wrote about this. You said your pride and admiration for Israel lives alongside your support for Palestinian freedom and independence. What do you say to people, especially younger Jewish people, who find it impossible to feel any pride or admiration for an Israel that does not uphold Jewish values? Well, look, right now you have, you know, when you talk about what I don't like, and Netanyahu pushes this all of the time, that if you are critical of the horrific policies of the Netanyahu government, you are somehow an anti-Semite. And that is totally absurd. Because it happens, my father's family was kind of wiped out in Poland by Hitler. I am not an anti-Semite. And in fact, anti-Semitism is a growing and serious problem all over the world. What has gone on for whatever reason that I am not the most knowledgeable guy in the world on, Israel over the last number of years has become gone from being a moderate liberal type country to a right wing extremist country, in which, by the way, Netanyahu is not even the worst. I mean, you're talking about guys, they are really kind of racist guys who really want expansionism. So we have got to oppose that government. And hopefully the day will come when Israel will elect people who understand that they need to be working with their neighbors and not just simply trying to dominate them in terrible ways. What do you say to younger people, especially younger Jews who now feel, you know, they grew up seeing an Israel led by Netanyahu. They've watched these atrocities unfold over the last few years, and it's led them to believe the problem just isn't Benjamin Netanyahu, that there's something fundamentally wrong about the project of Israel. I don't have a magical answer to that right now. But right now what I am trying to do is to make sure that the United States government is not complicit in the horrific acts of the Netanyahu government. We can talk about where we go from there, but that's where I am right now. What do you think if you saw that 20-something Bernie Sanders on a kebuts and you said, hey, 60 years from now, I'm going to be fighting in the Senate against the robots? Well, it's kind of... And by the way, I would tell you when I was... I don't know how much you know about the history of the kebuts seem formed by Jews who left the anti-Semitism of Europe. I was... These were very, very progressive entities. Women... You know, it was democratically owned and controlled. Women had rights that they didn't have in the United States. Were leaders in a way that was not true. All the people were playing an active role. It was an interesting and novel model, which I happen to believe in. But obviously that is not what Israel is about today. And going from where I was as a kid to being a United States Senator dealing with these issues, it's been a long journey to say the least. Yeah. Senator Sanders, thanks for your time. Good to talk to you. Thank you, John. Thanks to Senator Sanders for joining us. When we come back, I talk to Peter Hamby. Pase of America is brought to you by Willys Remedy. How does Willys make you feel? Love Willys makes me feel great. It's actually very well dosed. It's the best. Portioned. You take... It's like a little shot glass. It's all you take. Take a shot of it. Take a shot of it. Even less, or a little bit less. Have a nice time. You know what I've been doing? I've been pouring it into like a little fizzy drink. It's great. They even have sodas too that are great. It's awesome. I'm a huge fan of Willys. They have kind of like a mocktail of Willys' recipes on the back. I'm gonna have it at the wedding. It tastes good. It's delicious. That's real. And guess what? You don't wake up hungover. Not a bit. I had a good night's sleep last night. You may have a little braid on the back of your hair. A little blood and rest. You might be good at guitar all of a sudden. You might have written a hit song. Now you can have fun and relax without any of the regrets where Sherpiedegshead has on a daily basis if you use Willys THC-infused social tonic. Willys is a premium THC-infused social tonic created by the legendary Willie Nelson. It's a low calorie, low sugar, alcohol alternative that actually works delivering a fast acting, euphoric, social buzz without the regrets that come with alcohol. These social tonics come in 5 milligram and 10 milligram doses with a best in class flavor experience so smooth and balanced you barely realize you're drinking a THC product at all. You could enjoy the tonic as a shot, sipped over ice, or mixed into your favorite mocktail. Willys is not that feared edible you ate too much of in college. Each bottle of Willys is third party lab tested for accurate dosage so you can trust and customize your experience. Willys' unique blend of THC, CBD, CBG, and L-theanine delivers a feeling of calm, clarity, euphoria, and relaxation. One shot of Willys helps you relax, unwind, and de-stress. Perfect for taking the edge off at the end of a long day or socializing with friends. Willys offers the kind of feeling that makes good company even better. Willys sold out three times in the last six months with over 50,000 happy customers and they just restocked. Willys ships directly to your doorstep in over 40 states. Order now at drinkwillys.com and use code CROCKED for 20% off your first order plus free shipping on orders over $95 and enjoy life in the high country. POTSET America is brought to you by Mint Mobile. I don't know about you, but I like keeping my money where I can see it. Unfortunately, traditional big wireless carriers also seem to like keeping your money too. If you're fed up with crazy high wireless bills, bogus fees, and free perks that actually cost more in the long run than switched to Mint Mobile, stop overpaying for wireless just because that's how it's always been. Mint exists to fix that. Mint Mobile is here to rescue you with premium wireless plans starting at $15 a month. All plants come with high speed data and unlimited talk and text delivered on the nation's largest 5G network. Turn your own phone and number activate with eSIM in minutes and start saving immediately no long-term contracts, no hassle, ditch overpriced wireless, and get three months of premium wireless service from Mint Mobile for $15 a month. How great is that? So much better than the more expensive ones. Oh, god, yeah. Who likes their wireless provider? Nobody. Get a better deal. You like your money, Mint Mobile is here for you. Shop plans at mintmobile.com slash CROCKED. That's mintmobile.com slash CROCKED. Compayment of $45 for three month 5Gb plan required equivalent to $15 per month. New customer offer for first three months only. Then full price plan options available. Taxes and fees extra. See Mint Mobile for details. Peter, welcome back to the pod. Good to see you. Good to see you, John. All right. So I want to start with your piece on political violence. You wrote, Democratic elected and other party leaders vehemently condemn political violence all the time, but many on the left have become too comfortable celebrating violence or bad luck that befalls their Trumpian enemies. They are too loose with their language, too cozy with conspiracies that can lead to a dark place. Now you're very clear in this piece, which you wrote after the assassination attempt at the White House Correspondent's Center, very clear about the ways in which the right looks past Trump's calls to violence, exploits tragedies to target the left. Thank you for saying that. But even still, I am sure there are people hearing this and thinking the most powerful person on the earth, encouraged in insurrection, seeks to jail as enemies, celebrates the deaths of people like Robert Mueller and Rob Reiner, and you're talking about random people on the internet. So what are you seeing and why do you think it's important? I think the phrase random people on the internet actually matters, first of all. And I do want to say thank you for saying that, acknowledging that part of the piece, because I felt like I wrote 10 paragraphs about Caroline Levitt mischaracterizing or lying about how various people, Hakeem Jeffries, use terms like warfare, quote, unquote, to refer to redistricting. They're redistricting wars. I mean, we've both been in politics for a long time. People use terms like combat or murder, suicide or just violent martial terms. This comes up in sports commentary all the time. Shakespeare was familiar with metaphor as well. Yes. And I consider Hakeem Jeffries the Shakespeare of people who do the alphabet. Yeah, I do too. I consider him an awesome people who do the alphabet. He would like that reference. I think that the random people on the internet thing matters. And I thought about this with John, Favreau, other John, who after Charlie Kirk was killed, noticed, yes, random people on the internet, random tick-tockers celebrating his death. And even as I was walking in here, Taylor Lorenz posted a tweet, or maybe not a tweet, maybe a blue sky or a thread, that people are using the sound of Charlie Kirk getting shot, the gunshot, to do quick cut edits of outfit changes. And that just again diminishes, I think. I didn't know that was happening. What happened? And you don't have to like Charlie Kirk. This is our thing, John. I know coming in here, this is a founding principle of crooked media. And I feel like this came from John Love It Brain, which is the DC media's tendency to both sides thing. That is not me. And for the people listening, I'm not that journalist. But I was there in the ballroom. And part of it too is I've read polls. In the first Trump term, obviously in the Obama years, people blamed Trump and Republicans for the crazy, for the conspiracy theories. Voters did. NPR had a poll, I think, in 2017 saying 70% of voters blamed Trump and Republicans for the toxicity in our politics. And there was a moral and intellectual high ground, I think, in the Democratic Party. There hasn't been widespread political violence coming from the left since the 70s with the Weather Underground, Black Panthers, et cetera. There's obviously been anti-government violence. You've got like Black Block, Antifa types and whatever. But there has been an uptick in partisan motivated, not just violence, but plots. There was somebody who showed up at the Capitol last year wanting to kill Pete Hexeth. That person was arrested. There's obviously two of the three assassins, attempted assassins on Donald Trump sounded like they had left-leaning political views. And again, back to the random people on the internet thing, it's not coming from Democratic politicians. It's not. It's really not. Now, there's like Jasmine Crockett post a conspiracy theory the other day that the attack on the Washington Hilton might have been a false flag or whatever. The problem is the diminishing power of people like me and the mainstream press and the diminishing ability of normie politicians to get out there in the information ecosystem and have people hear them. That stuff is being replaced just by noise and slop on the internet. And it does seem like to me, and I think the evidence in the polling bears this out, that liberals and progressives, and by the way, some of these people might just be fake bots. They might be, you know, JD Vance likes to totally, in the right, completely exploit even the fringiest thing that you found on the internet and pretend it's like the mainstream view of the Democratic Party. And I make clear in the piece, as you read, Democrats aren't the one saying this. It is though kind of ambient on the internet. And I think I actually wanted to ask you about this. The Michelle Obama, they, you know, when they go low, we go high thing. That feels dead and gone and like millennial cringe at this point. In the second Trump term, there has, it has been celebrated that like, we're going to fight dirty. It's, and I'm not, I'm just trying to be civility police either, dude. Yeah. At all. No, no. We're going to play on their terms, get in their sandbox, we're going to throw punches, call names, and then, you know, then maybe, maybe you end up with a guy who's got a screw loose who hears all the stuff on the internet and thinks, I've got to go kill the rapist, fascist pedophile in the White House. I just think that it's easier to hear the crazy stuff that the algorithms have poured gasoline on than it ever was. And you just hear it more on the left than I think you used to. Yeah. It's like, there's so many parts that you have to tease out, right? And there's an, like a big distinction. You, it isn't coming from the vast majority of democratic politicians, right? And there is just a distinction between how responsible elected Republicans are, including the president versus how responsible elected Democrats are. Even this week, we saw what is obviously a ridiculous prosecution of James Comey, the number of Republicans refusing to criticize that or openly embracing that. People go, members of Congress saying, well, look at all the other bad things Jim Comey did, right? It is not, it is distinct from political violence, but embracing the jailing of your political enemies on specious reasons is adjacent to a politics in which people can celebrate political violence. But the challenge is most Americans deplore political violence. All the mainstream politicians on the left can deplore political violence. 95% of people say the right thing. Then the next day, 100% of people spend the day talking about what the 5% said and how heinous it is and how it's actually justified and all the rest. You know, we at Kirk and Media, I feel like we take some flack from all directions for this, but we obviously denounce Republicans when they try to exploit political violence. We also try to go after what we see people, when we see people justifying it. John, as you mentioned, did that as well in the piece. But if everybody but a few are doing the right thing, but we end up talking about what the wrong thing is, like I don't know what the right thing, how do you respond in a media environment like that in which we try to model best behavior. Because the Democrats say the right thing, but you have Republicans that are going to pull out the worst comments from the internet. You have an algorithm that's going to elevate the most exciting and morally depraved comments. Like, what do we do? Okay, I agree. There's a problem. What do we do? Yeah, well, that's getting you to say that. I know, I mean, you're a sophisticated thinker about this stuff. So it is important to say that there was a problem. And I want to say this isn't just my feelings. This is me being a hack political journalist. I should point out also in the piece, the Center for Strategic and International Studies, which has measured this and has kept track of incidents. 2025 was the first year ever that left wing violence and plots and or plots surpass right wing violence and or plots say, that's only eight plots. That's only a plot. And this is another thing I need to say. Again, like the left was, there was no violence, no plots for like 30 years. Most of the actual deaths from political violence in this country over the last 30 years have come from right wing political violence. And we're talking like in the hundreds. Okay. And so, yes, the baseline for Democrats in the left, whatever the coalition is, was very low. It just has ticked up. And I think you're though right, John, I remember when I worked at CNN back when you were in the White House in the 2010s, there was this like, do you remember watching like cable news in that era and CNN where I worked or whatever? Like a random Republican state legislator in Missouri would say something loony about abortion or something racist about Obama. And we would all elevate it. We'd be like, this is an example of the Republican party being nuts. And while the Republican party does have a tendency to accommodate, and by the way, this is just history, you know, the birchers and the conspiracy theorists and whatever, you would hear from someone on Capitol Hill, like someone from like John Thune's office, like, why the fuck are you talking about this random guy in Missouri? And so that is a absolute attentional problem that the press has and kind of always has. By the way, since then, that random state senator in Missouri is now like probably on Capitol Hill in the mainstream of the Republican party. I just think it is what you guys do. You have to call it out and say there's no room for it. And the other thing we're talking about isn't just violence. It is the conspiracy theorizing. And those two are not the same, but they are connected. You know, the people who I think tend to commit acts of violence in the name of politics like sees on conspiracy theories, they do. And I noticed this on Snapchat when I put I work at Snap and like posted on Snap, I had a bunch of people in my comments being like fake stage, whatever. But it's not, we don't know that those people are even Democrats. They could just be some teenager like sitting in their basement somewhere. But this has been happening. Again, this gets to the higher intellectual standard that I think Democrats use to hold themselves to. In Obama's term at some point, some press conference in the Tansuit era, it might have been like Ed Henry. It was like in the White House briefing room. And there was the latest outrage of the day. Whenever somebody wanted Obama to be outraged about, I think it was Ed Henry said, you know, Mr. President, why are you more outraged? And I tried to look this up before coming in. I couldn't find it. Someone listening, please find it. It's probably in Favreau's encyclopedic brain. But Obama looks at him and goes, because I haven't read the briefs. And that was Obama being a lawyer, but it was also just a smart person who hewed closely to facts and didn't want to like spout off on something where he didn't like know the baseline information. And we've come a long way on the internet since then. Like social media has rampantly changed how people's instincts when it comes to responding, gathering facts. And, you know, I think that's hurt everybody. It's hurt everybody across the board. And, you know, I just think that you see it more now on the left than you used to. I sting out that article with a quote from Isaac Asimov, who became a big Democrat later in his life, hated Nixon, like just a raging Democrat. And he said like the anti-intellectual strain in this country was always on the right. And liberals would fight ignorance with knowledge. And conservatives would fight knowledge with ignorance. There's a lot more ignorance out there, man, on the left now. I'm sorry. There just is. And like maybe I'm just being idealistic about, you know, the great thinkers of the American left and what they cared about compared to the right. But it just feels like the fever swamps of the internet are just grabbing otherwise normal people and yanking them in. And it's depressing to me. Yeah, I don't know. It's hard not, you know, to be nostalgic for how we used to have information. I do, look, I see it too. And I do think it's more than just a few random people. There is something that has happened and it isn't coming from the politicians. I do think there's a bigger shift. And I think it's important, as you pointed out, that political violence in our country still is very, very rare. And so I feel like there's these two ideas you have to have in your mind at the same time, one being that we can't allow acts of violence by individuals who are united regardless of ideology by a willingness to do violence, right? That's the most important thing about a mass shooter about the person that shot Charlie Kirk, this person, the person that shot at Gabby Giffords, right? That they are willing to go to this extreme and do violence and sometimes their rationales are cogent. Sometimes their rationales are nonsense. It's the act of violence that unites them and there's something rising, whether it's people willing to shoot up a school, people wanting to go out a blaze of glory. And we cannot arrange our society around that. We can't allow that to warp our politics too much because it is so rare in our society, but at the same time, it does seem to be an emergent property of the amount of vitriol hate, lack of empathy, cruelty on the internet and beyond. I think that Trump is both a cause of and a symptom of. And I struggle with how you think about those two things, but the comfort that people have, right? Whether it's the shooting of the United Healthcare CEO or the killing of Charlie Kirk, that is morally wrong before you even get to whether it will encourage future violence. It said something really ugly about our politics and our culture and I do think that that is real. So that's the thing I struggle with. There's something else interesting. This is an obvious thought, but I just thought about it. When you think about Luigi, you think about the Butler shooter, we don't know his politics, and the guy from the Hilton. All these people and the Charlie Kirk shooter are young. And obviously, there's the idea of the school shooter and the serial killer and the lone wolf killer out there. You tend to be white men, but all of these examples are people who grew up online. We grew up online, but in middle school and high school, I just had AOL. These people grew up with phones in their pockets and so they have so many more touchpoints to dark places on the internet. But in dark places, that's sort of what I'm talking about. It's that Jennifer Welch on the I've Had a podcast the other day was entertaining these conspiracy theories about how Trump was like this was a false flag so that he could develop the ballroom. I'm not saying she's spreading hate speech, but that's one of the ascendant podcasters on the left. There aren't any real epistemological boundaries, I feel like, at this point. You can be a liberal in this and Jennifer Welch or this or go on a Twitch stream or whatever, but all of those young people, like you said, I'm not going to be a liberal. I'm not being nostalgic for an old media time necessarily. I call myself a student of media history, but they don't know a time of monoculture, Walter Cronkite, anything. There's no shared facts. That just impresses me. The conspiracy theory embrace that we see across the board, I do think there's something about- Some people think it's just fun, by the way. I had friends who were like conspiracy theories are fun. There's something about the way in which the internet encourages you that we are all being encouraged to embrace easy and quick comfort across our lives. Social media does that. You don't have to have any discipline of attention whatsoever. You can just get a jolt of something fun, something funny, something outrageous, whatever. Get a quick hit of an endorphin or an emotion. You don't have to leave the house to see a movie. You can just stay in bed, whatever. You can have food come to your house. We're easy to satisfy, uncomfortable with any kind of discomfort. When there's something horrible that happens like the killing of Charlie Kirk, in which you, I think, morally are called to denounce the killing of someone you found reprehensible, that tiny bit of friction, that tiny bit of discomfort, there's a whole algorithm that's telling you, you don't have to feel that anymore. The same thing with someone trying to assassinate Donald Trump because of views you might agree with. Wouldn't it be nice if there were a way you didn't have to sit with that for even a moment? Well, guess what there is? Because it turns out maybe it was staged. We live in a crazy world in which there were legitimate news stories that in Hungary, Trump's ally, there was a plan to stage an assassination attempt to help Viktor Orban in the final days of the election. That is real reporting about something real that very well could have happened in the world. There's also conspiracy theory that Trump wouldn't leave office if he lost. Of course. Of course. And there was a conspiracy theory that a powerful cabal of abusers were protecting Jeffrey Epstein. A lot of people have come to believe that conspiracy theories had some merit. And the truth is, the great conspiracies series always do begin with a kernel of truth in them or a lot of the great ones do. So I understand where that impulse comes from and I understand how the internet feeds it. I just think that it is incumbent upon democratic politicians to try so hard to keep the... What was Ernie in the trash can? Just push it down. Markelly came out with the... Oscar was the great one. Oscar. Ernie's... We're just a happy gay couple. Oscar was the grouch. Yeah, Oscar. Sorry. No offense to the happy gay couple. No. Markelly put out... Who cares what Markelly thinks, but like a sub-stack. I care. Sure. I care what Markelly thinks. I care. And I think you said the other day on this podcast, referencing Chris Murphy talking after the United Health Care murder, I forget the anecdote. Why did this come up? I think Nate Silver wrote about it that he sort of said, I acknowledged why people hate insurance companies. But what did Chris Murphy say? I don't... I don't... I was referencing people who had... I was referencing that someone, I think like a prominent conservative had said that the shooter at the White House Correspondent's Dinner, his rhetoric is indistinguishable from that of Chris Murphy as if that's an indictment of Chris Murphy. Got it. That's what I was referring to, I believe. Got it. I think... I don't want to miscast what Chris Murphy said. He's probably listening. But again, the press certainly has less power than we used to. And maybe wrongly, the press was the arbiter of common decency for many decades in this country. But politicians are akin to where people get a lot of news now, influencers, creators. They're famous people on the internet. That's who they are. And they have a responsibility to call it out when it happens. It's just really hard. Again, this is in a leaderless party. Like attention matters, getting attention matters. This is one of my beats. Ro Connick can call it out. Chuck Schumer can call it out. Alissa Slokkin can call it out. But which random normie in Ohio is listening to any of those people? Well, look, I think sometimes in our politics, we treat Democrats like the protagonist with agency and Republicans are the villains who will do what villains do. I sometimes think we do the same thing with people on the internet now that, of course, Democratic politicians are going to say the same thing. But there's nothing we can do about the influencers. But influencers have responsibility. And I think part of this is, I think, as... There are some insane YouTube tiles out there, man. There are some wacky doodle ones. But I don't know. I think sometimes we have to... If the people who are going to be helping to shape what people view as the kind of bounds of appropriate political discourse, if that's not going to be coming from politicians or mainstream media, if it's going to become from people on the internet, then that comes with responsibility. Like in 2024, I think a lot of people felt like you had people in the kind of manosphere, the kind of independent, kind of right adjacent podcast world embracing their power but not their responsibility. Right? They're power to influence. They're power to get big people on. They're power to reach tens of millions of people but not their responsibility to... Yeah. They're just an unfrozen K-man lawyer. They don't know what's going on. I'm just a big chicken. I'm just a big chicken. But it's funny about that. I have some data on this this week. The AP came out of the poll about media habits. And it's a really interesting poll because they also poll teenagers. But all the elite sort of things that we do as former DCers and political junkies listen to podcasts, subscribe to newsletters, try to think of some other ones. Oh, pay for news. Subscribe to news. The vast majority of Americans don't do those things. They really don't. And by the way, podcasts are a little different because they'll also watch it on YouTube or whatever. But the one thing that has really popped is influencers and creators. For a long time in these polls, it could be Pew, it could be AP, they'd ask people how they get their news. Social media was just sort of an umbrella term that could be Snap, it could be YouTube, it could be Meta, whatever. Could be clips of mainstream content by the way as well. Totally. They actually asked specifically about influencers and creators. And near majorities of Americans say they get news from influencers and creators now. And that's a huge shift in just a few years. And so that gets to what you're saying about responsibility. Influencers and creators are now on par with, according to this poll, local TV news, radio, terrestrial radio still matters. Search engines still matter. Way more than like AI. And like television. And so that's just really, really taken off. And I agree with you. And you've seen that with the Ovan and Andrew Schultz after the election when they're deporting, rounding up and deporting people and separating mothers from their children or whatever. Doge. I didn't vote for this because I was just playing the humble, unfrozen caveman lawyer. But they have to, I think they're becoming more responsible actually, at least in terms of acknowledging their power. Because people are at the inauguration for the president of the United States. And I do think that we're due for a similar turn on the left of people with big platforms who reach a big audience viewing a responsibility. And like, you know, we're here and we try to have honest conversations. But part of being having, I think part of what being responsible is, is you try to be honest, critical where you think it's helpful. Maybe we think it's unhelpful, but needs to be said at times. But view what you're trying to do is as more than just saying what you happen to think or feel in that moment, right? That's what I think the difference is between what Obama did in that press conference you're talking about and what a lot of members of Congress do every time a camera comes in front of their faces, which is just take a moment and say, you know what? I'm going to take a beat and make sure that I'm sharing good information or like interrogating a bias for one moment. Or knowing that even if I feel something in the moment that I believe is true, I know that I have a responsibility to my audience to not become a tool of the right. Yeah. I also think I really want to pay you guys a sincere compliment. And I'm friends with you. We live in the same city. We socialize. I get that. I still listen to this podcast, spite of knowing how personally annoying each and every one of you is because you are willing to interrogate collective assumptions on the left. You are willing to tangle with those ideas. We saw it this week with the Ken Martin interview, but you guys frequently will have people on. And I think the slide about a variety of left-leaning media, you don't just tell people what they want to hear. You tell people sometimes, sometimes, maybe not as much as other news organizations, what they need to hear. And I think that's really important because I do think that maybe this is the Obama example, but wrestling with ideas is really good. It's really good and healthy. There's just such blind partisanship now. This is where I will say on both sides that the battle for ideas is hard. It's hard to inhabit not the middle, but it's hard to present nuance to people. That's why I wrote 10 paragraphs in that fricking puck article before I could get to the point because I had to say over and over again, Trump inspired January 6th, Trump inspired male bombers. The Trump Republican Party welcomed Nazis and liars and mainstreamed this poison. But social media has taken it to another level and other people are getting yanked into it. I think what we're talking about, and that's very nice of you to say, it is not my experience that there's a lot of blind partisanship on the left. My view of where we're at right now is actually... Sorry, blind negative partisanship. Negative partisanship. That's for sure. No, I agree with that. But what I was going to say only is that I think what we're circling, which I think relates to the conspiracy theories, the willingness to celebrate or tolerate or minimize political violence, it's forbearance, which is just the idea of restraint and being willing to lose and willing to take a shot to your ego at times in politics. This is why us old millennials are the best generation. We are the best generation because... We were vaccinated against Republicans by George W. Bush. Continue. We had debates in our dorms at Georgetown. We had something called Red Square, which was a free speech zone. I know that sounds anathema now, but you could have debates and interrogate things. You didn't have social media poisoning it. I don't know. Maybe that's an elite view. Baby boomers went to the right. Gen X is the last readout of Donald Trump right now. Boomers, by the way, boomers are... I wrote about this last year. Boomers are driven to the left because boomers now are hippies. Boomers are our parents. They still hold onto some pluralistic values. Gen X is the bad one because they were Alex P. Keaton. The thing that happens is your politics in your 20s, that's what it generally is later in life. The Gen X folks put aside all the rock music and pop culture. Those were the Alex P. Keaton. So the Gen X has really moved to the right, but then also some of the Gen Z has moved a bit to the right. Millennials are actually not moving to the right at the same degree over time as previous generations have. The millennials are holding out greatest generation. Thank you. You hear that bro call? Yeah. Whatever. What happened to him? All right. Before we go to break, I want to thank everybody who has become a friend of the Pod subscriber. If you haven't subscribed yet, please, please, please become a friend of the Pod. Join this community. You get our special episode Pod Save America only friends. That's where we really let loose with our Pod Save America episode. That's just for subscribers. You get Polar Coaster. That's Dan's show where he breaks down all the latest polling. You get OpenTabs, the behind the scenes newsletter from PSA editor Reed Chirlen. There's ad free breaking news from Pod Save America. And not only do you get all of that great content and ad free episodes, you help support independent pro democracy media. It is one of the most important ways you can help support what we're building here at Crooked. So go to Crooked.com slash friends to sign up now. It is genuinely how we help get more good information to more people. So thank you very much. Pod Save America is brought to you by Helix. Sleep is everything. If you sleep well, it'll set you up for a great day. You're better able to work out. You think better, you're in a better mood. So everything goes great. If you got a bad night's sleep, it sucks. I think everyone's dealt with those nights. You had the night sweats, you had back pain, you were up peeing all the time. Helix won't solve all those problems, but it can solve a lot of those problems. A comfortable mattress is a precondition, a prerequisite to sleeping well. That's why I love Helix mattresses. Helix makes buying a mattress easy. Take a Helix sweep quiz and it'll match you with the perfect mattress based on your personal preferences and sleep needs. Get free shipping and seamless delivery. Helix delivers your mattress right to your door with free shipping in the US. The happy with Helix guarantee offers a risk-free customer first experience designed to ensure you're completely satisfied with your new mattress. So you can rest easy with seamless returns and exchanges. Plus Helix offers a 120 night sleep trial and limited lifetime warranty. Because we have a Helix mattress at our place. It is so, so comfortable. Everyone who sleeps on that bed loves it. And also it's just, it's so easy. It comes to your house, it shows up in a box. You literally just take it out, it's set up, it's there, it's easy, it's a great price. Give it a shot. I've had ours for years. Go to helixsleep.com slash crooked for 27% offsite wide. That's helixsleep.com slash crooked for 27% offsite wide. This offer is exclusive to our listeners. Make sure you enter our show name after checkouts so they know we sent you helixsleep.com slash crooked. Rural Britain. Gigaclear goes further to bring you fast, reliable, whole home coverage. 100% full fiber, affirmative. Free Wi-Fi installation. Engineers ready to go. Amazon Eero RUNER next level. All from only 16 pounds a month. Cosmic Quasars. Switch to Gigaclear. Faster broadband for Rural Britain. 18 month contract prices may vary. Verify at gigaclear.com. What do you do with your Applewood Smokey Cheddar? Maybe it's melted into mash when comfort calls. Or cheesy chips when the temperature falls. Perhaps it's a well-earned mac and cheese on a Friday night. Or piled on crackers for a lunchtime bite. Creamy, dreamy, irresistibly smoky. Applewood Cheddar. Now in a handy bar format. Making it easy to nibble it, slice it, grate it, dice it. Created to enjoy just the way you like it. New Applewood Smokey Cheddar bar. Now available in all major supermarkets. Alright, let's hit some more topics. Platner, Janet Mills out. Political reported yesterday and calls from Democrats for Schumer to drop his involvement in the Iowa and Michigan primaries. What was your reaction to the Mills news and the general state of play in these primaries? Surprise but not surprise. I think Mills got in late. Platner got in what last August, September. Went super vile, raised a lot of money. Great vibes for the moment. Nationally for Democrats, you know, raging against the establishment. I am more looking forward than thinking about the surprise because he was up 33, 40 points in the most recent. I think Emerson had him up 33 at the end of April. This is a jump ball race. Like it's going to be very hard and they are. Grand Platner does have baggage. It's not even the Totencombe tattoo or whatever. It's the Reddit post. I think we saw an article in the Free Beacon today, which is an oppo dump for Republicans, showing that Platner paid for his house with a loan from his wealthy father, not the VA, like he said. I just think there's lots of stuff there. And by the way, all this is to say, he can still win. Trump's at like 33, 34 percent approval. I think Maine is tougher than certain states and here's why. And again, he can win. A lot of times you win with a pure contrast. And she's unpopular, Susan Collins. I think her own faves are like 57 percent. They got to win there. They got to win Alaska. They got to win Ohio and Iowa and all these places. Maine is the oldest electorate in the country. So it's also not very partisan. You've got a third of the state is independent, John. So, you know, that helps someone like Platner, I think, like I'm not from the system that could appeal. You've got that Maine second congressional district, which was represented by Jared Golden for a while. He was a moderate and differently like Platner's a lib. Golden was a moderate. Both have tattoos, but he won in Maine too, which is a district Trump has won in the last two presidential elections by being just a purebred moderate, Jared Golden. So, you know, putting on Reddit that black people don't tip that women shouldn't get so drunk that they get sexually assaulted. Honestly, I love this episode that I forget which content it was from cricket media, but Pfeiffer and Alex Wagner did a piece on this a couple of weeks ago and it was really interesting listening to Alex. And I thought she was very sharp because I think a lot of the initial commentary supporting Platner when jumped in the race was coming from men. And when these posts came out, not that Alex Wagner wouldn't vote for Grand Platner versus Collins, but like I think women might be a little squeamish about this, about him in a race against a woman that, you know, has successfully won over and over and over again. Also brought some reporting to the show. I learned from some Republican pollsters that they had 12 to 13 percent of Susan, past Susan Collins voters going for Janet Mills in this election. So that plays to what Schumer was probably thinking about. Like this is an independent older state and we need someone safe to run against someone who's been reliably reelected. So Platner's got some work to do, I think, to re-issue. He's a young millennial of tattoos, a history of inflammatory reddit posts. We don't clearly, I think Republicans are sitting on more stuff. That's why I brought up the Free Beacon example. And he's got to convince voters in a state. It's like an old state and that's it's going to be tough for him. But in this environment, Trump's approval rings are absolute dog shit. That's why we're talking about Alaska. That's why we're talking about Maine. That's why we're talking about even Ohio and Iowa. We're in the home stretch here of the California governor's race. Two highest vote getters will move on to the general post small. We've seen polls that show Becerra rising. CBS poll this week had Steve Hilton leading with 16. Then Steyer at 15. Becerra at 13. Other polls have Becerra higher. Where's your head at on this on this race right now? I think if someone smartly framed it this way to me and look nationally, like you might not care about a governor's race, it California matters. Like Gavin Newsom will set a tailpipe omission regulation and the rest of the country will follow. Like that's that's what California is. So yes, these candidates are underwhelming. Someone compared to the 2020 presidential primary where you've got not just Tom Steyer once again, spending a lot of money, but you've got all these candidates who fail to catch fire. They pop in certain moments and fade. Javier Becerra is just sort of emerging. The last four polls, two independent, I think, and two sort of partisan have showed him climbing and having clear momentum. Steyer and Katie Porter having a very hard time connecting with high information voters. There's their negatives are very high for all the money that Tom Steyer is spending. He's they kind of are hating a ceiling. The Sarah has kind of come from behind to go to the front. I didn't quite get it either. It kind of came out of nowhere organically. He's not hasn't spent a lot of money on television. I believe he spent he spent the money he has. I think he spent. Yeah, he went up on TV like three or four weeks ago at a key moment when he had a drop. He right. Well, I think as Swallow was dropping before Swallow dropped, he's up on the air. Yes. And so he's up on the air at a moment where all of a sudden there's all these swallow voters saying, whoops. Yes. And Javier Becerra is a boring person. Javier Becerra, I talked to someone in the by administration about this Saturday, kind of aloof as HHS secretary, not incompetent, but just sort of like he's not lighting the world on fire. OK, but he does have two things going for him right now in this governor's race, and which is by the primaries in June. He there's a lot of confusion among voters. People don't like the choices and they're just kind of falling back on him, which is sort of similar to the Biden experience in 2020. Right. He just you can win the primary 23 percent of the vote, 25 percent of the vote. I'm not saying it's totally the same. And he's Latino. I mean, a third of the state is Latino. And I think the first part of that spot that went on TV about a month ago, it wasn't like Prop 50. It wasn't like Adam Schiff versus Katie Porter, like, we got to stop Donald Trump. It wasn't like Swalwell. It was my parents were immigrants. And it leads with bio and then it gets into, you know, working class, affordability issues, health care, prescription drugs. And so for all of the forget my term, Lib Slop that you see in some of these TV ads and campaigns, like just raging against Trump and trying to go after the hardcore college educated white MSNBC viewer voter, you know, he can reach as a different kind of voter than just that. And that's the thing, like Porter, Steyer, Swalwell, there was no, no data suggesting they had any numbers of people of color in this state. And so Becerra is just emerging as like a safe choice right now. Steyer is going after him already. He's not a great debater. There's two debates coming up this coming week. I think CNN and NBC. So we'll see if he can make it all the way to June. But he is the one with momentum right now, but it's sort of like boring momentum. I don't know the word for it. Yeah, no, I watched the last debate and what there was another debate this week. Oh, it's terrible. The first debate. And there is a moment where they were all asked if they would support a per mile tax for electric vehicles because California has a very high gas tax. I think it's like 60 or someone sets a gallon, maybe a little more now. And so there's this idea that while we switched to electric vehicles, then no one's going to be paying for the roads, even though California has the worst roads in the country and we pay the highest gas tax in the country. And so the question is, would you support a per mile tax for electric vehicles? And it got to Becerra and Becerra said, well, it's definitely something we ought to perhaps take a look at. If that's something the voters are interested in, then I could get behind it. And then you go to, I think it was one of the Republicans and they're like, you're going to make everybody log all their miles? Hell, fucking no. And I was like, that makes it like there's a like the passion on that stage. I was I talked to Katie Porter about this in my conversation with her that California is in an emergency. Yes, we are losing people. We are losing our industries and the only people up there that seemed to have fire about it where the Republicans. The right wing sheriff guy was like talking about the the humanitarian crisis of homeless people. And like, again, his ideas are probably not great, but like he had passion and you nailed it. I was meant to say this about Becerra actually. None of these people have big ideas. Steyer's like, we'll break up the utilities, pass a billionaires tax, whatever. Like there was a question. This was a moderator issue actually in the CBS debate where they said, what are the first things you would do in the event of an earthquake? Like as governor, you're governor, you're in that seat. What are the three things you're going to do? You know, the thoughtful political leader would have said, well, like, let's think bigger, like how do we not get in that position in the first place? Whatever. But they were all very content to be like Becerra included. Well, we'll call in the first responders and I'll call the federal government and then we'll figure it out. You know, like just that's our thing beyond all the charisma and the horse race stuff that has characterized this race. Nothing exciting. Like big ideas are powerful. I mean, I know Bernie's on this episode too. Like there's, Steyer's trying to sort of be in that lane a little bit, but everyone else is just sort of like, Katie Porter is a bit too... We'll figure it out. Well, this is where I press Katie Porter on as well because she's talking about this plan to exempt $100,000 from, or people making up to $100,000 from the state income tax. And she has a way to pay for it. But, and fine, like help people, California is very unaffordable, but like the problems are so kind of upriver from that. Like we're, like the reason California is unaffordable when it has like the income tax rate hasn't gone up with what's gone up is the cost of housing. What's gone up is the cost of living in our state. What's gone up is, and what's gone down is the availability of jobs for in Hollywood and other industries. And, and, you know, I talked to Bernie. By the way, the housing conversation, at least in the CBS debate I watched was infuriating. I mean, Matt Mayhan at least was like, here's what I didn't say. I want to build this many units. Tom Steyer said the same thing to people housing. But like, people just say, like, we need to build more housing. No shit. Yeah. Like, I don't know. There's just not, there just weren't a lot of compelling ideas there. Yeah. It's, it's been pretty frustrating, but I had a good conversation with Porter. I hope we get to talk to Becerra. And so I think I'm going to talk to Steyer next week. So we're going to talk to all those candidates. Last question. Why, hey, why'd they call it Puck? Um, is it after, is it after the mid-summer night's dream? Yes. Yeah. So it's a Puckish, it's a Puckish organization. It's a Puckish organization. It's a Puckish literary inspiration. Okay. Um, but I think John Kelly who, who created Puck, very literate man and, uh, thought Puck would be an inspiration. Um, because we like to be a little mischievous, I guess, and what we do. You're Puckish. Please subscribe. Thank you. You as a person, I would have called you. How would you describe Puckish the adjective? What, how'd you define that? Uh, um, a Puck, a, a mischievous is a very, this is a very good word for it. I would say, um, mischievous with a joyful quality. Oh. Is what I would say. I like that. My wife liked that. Thanks. Uh, you're in, you know, a little stinker, you know, kind of energy. Uh, uh, Peter Hanby, thank you so much. Good to talk to you. Good to see you, man. And that's our show. Thank you to Senator Sanders. Thank you to Peter Hanby. We will see you with a new episode on Tuesday. If you want to listen to Pied Save America ad free and get access to exclusive podcasts, go to cricket.com slash friends to subscribe on supercast, sub stack, YouTube or Apple podcasts. Also, please consider leaving us a review that helps boost this episode and everything we do here at cricket. Pied Save America is a cricket media production. Our producer is Saul Rubin. Our associate producer is Farah Safari. Austin Fisher is our senior producer. Reed Cherlan is our executive editor. Adrian Hill is our head of news and politics. Jordan Cantor is our sound engineer with audio support from Kyle Seglin and Charlotte Landis. Matt DeGroote is our head of production. Naomi Sengel is our executive assistant. Thanks to our digital team, Elijah Cone, Haley Jones, Ben Hefkoat, Mia Kelman, Carol Pelleve, David Tolles and Ryan Young. Our production staff is proudly unionized with the Writers Guild of America East. With WOOP, you can focus on living better for longer, understand your sleep, optimize your training and build habits that support your well-being. WOOP gives you personalized insights into your sleep, your recovery, your strain and the patterns that may influence how you feel. With more clarity and consistency, you can create routines that support you throughout the year. Add more life to every moment. Discover WOOP at WOOP.com.